Yes, a fresh max level will obviously do less than a fully geared toon. That is not a problem.
PVP works better with pvp gear, which is gathered by playing the game. Also what “higher difficulties in pugland” are you referring to? Heroic LFD?
Remix is a self contained mode meant to be overpowered. It’s the entire point of it.
Most RPGs also still have levels. Few don’t.
If anything…they should have never scaled it back. They have made leveling too easy .
/Thinks to self: “Geezz, I’m a casual player and can see this”
This is not the problem. The fresh level cap character doing 40 dps while the full geared one does 400 is the problem. At most we should have a 100% difference, ideally, a 50% one. And that at the final patch of the expansion.
This disparity in power due to gearing isn’t healthy for the game for a few reasons at least.
1 - The gap between players encourages segregating the player base by item level.
2 - The exponential increases lead to a “number problem” down the line, forcing another squish. With a squish comes another load of (re)balancing issues for older content.
3 - PvP becomes a miserable experience for anyone just starting, like it has always been.
And even more when you factor in scaling and ilvl scaling, which are problematic by themselves.
This design is clearly just trying to eek out more play time from the players.
“Since the gameplay loop is not that great, let’s make power increases slower and more impactful to make the gear treadmill be the goal instead of the gameplay” - Blizzard, I guess.
On their own admission, back in Wrath, they decided that the “sweet spot” between raid tiers was 13 item levels. I wish I could find that quote again, because we now have seemingly 52 IIRC.
And while some of that is due to the added difficulty options, most of it is sheer bad long term planning (“meh let’s just keep squishing every now and then. Who needs consistent damage?”), which they have also acknowledged that is due to not expecting the game to live that long.
In some aspects, Blizzard has been “winging it” for a while when it comes to systems design.
I’ll give you an example on why leveling should remain and continue to exist.
I recently played " The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria and the only sense of progression you have is with gear. There is no leveling.
It is really bad.
yes get rid of leveling and all new players must do the turtle made it the water quest 300 times for training.
Yes. That’s what I just said. A fresh max level will do less damage than a fully geared toon, which is normal, because they just got to the part of the game where they gear up for more adventures.
There should be a big difference between new and fully geared, and there is one.
It seems to me you are both advocating for removing XP and gearing. I think your problems are more perceived than they are actually problematic.
It’s exactly like WoW at cap.
You might have some reading comprehension issues:
That was me, right in my first post in this topic.
Hard disagree. The difference shouldn’t be that stupid.
Gear having this much power makes no sense at all in the context of WoW and how the supporting lore works.
You are in favor of ludicrous power deltas, I’m against it.
I’m in favor of leveling, but with NO scaling.
Every RPG with scaling on leveling has kinda sucked, either overall or on the leveling experience.
In fact, WoW should have no scaling at all except for party sync for dungeons/raids, like we have in Remix, MAYBE, if well tuned and implemented to account for skill power gains, which takes some serious time to do right.
That’s it.
No. I get a thrill out of leveling and progressing my character. It’s a huge part of my motivation when playing them.
Borderlands, Division 2. Just off the top of my head. Both have leveling, gear, scaling and it works.
We’ll have to agree on disagreeing because gearing is the fun part of the game. Making everything slow and stale would ruin the game.
I have exhaustively played BL2, and what kills it in the long run (post-game reruns) is just that scaling.
Yup. To each their own.
That said, hope you’re having fun with whatever you like (and not hurting yourself or anyone else in the process XD).
Leveling should be capped at some point. 60 would have been fine. There are other ways to ‘progress’ without endless character levels.
Yes, leveling should go away. It actually should have a long time ago. Had WoW went the route of FF14 or GW2 there would be unparalleled content in the game.
Wrath should have been the end of leveling and main story. Expansions should have been more story oriented than focusing on coming up with a way to keep adding levels each time.
Well, the issue isn’t so much the presence of certain facets, but the fact they’ve been chronically devalued and overlooked to the point of becoming functionally irrelevant.
While the post was intended to rattle the cages a bit, the root of the question posed is that the premise of this thread is actually a good point given the direction WoW has been going in for close to the past decade.
To look at it more granularly:
Of the three traits mentioned, arguably only one is really being met by the game - combat.
Character development (in the narrative sense), role playing and story are pretty much looked upon as being meaningless right now. Part of the issue is that what little WoW has on the narrative front is mediocre at best, and all too often in the “outright bad” territory; so both players and developers don’t place much stock in it, making it’s value
Mechanical character progression is a very different thing, as that’s often separate and distinct from narrative character development. How powerful the player is and how they grow can either complement the story or run separately alongside it… but given WoW’s history of lackluster-at-best storytelling, it’s functionally a separate element.
Exploration is a dicey one, but WoW really doesn’t do much to support that aspect despite it having a large & expansive world for players to explore. They build it, then they throw in incomplete and/or terrible stories within it, and all-but-abandon it upon reaching the endgame content (the “only stuff that matters” in the eyes of many players and the developers) as WoW is a borderline “lobby game”.
WoW could do a lot more with it’s world, but it doesn’t seem like they want to actually do that a lot of the time. It’s pretty much at the point that removing leveling is being viewed as “trimming the fat” by many.
It’s only barely hanging on to being an RPG on the grounds of technicalities at this point, but WoW lost the spirit and essence of what RPGs are a long time ago.
Removing leveling at this point is now what I’d want from WoW, but there are plenty of times I end up asking myself that such a change be putting the aspects of the game I once enjoyed out of their misery?
I would quit immediately if they removed leveling.
I honestly don’t get it. If people want to play a lobby game then why not play a lobby game where leveling isn’t part of it.
Why play an mmorpg where one of the core aspects is to level?
I used to raid mainly during Vanilla and BC. Even then I never even thought how nice it would be to not have to level. Leveling has always been one of my favorite aspects of mmo’s.
No. Because it wouldn’t be a real RPG other wise and game would be kind of boring without Talents, classes, levels, and etc.
WoW has never been an RPG, not even in Vanilla.
Guess the branding for the last 20 years has been a lie!
Yeah leveling is meaningless and you can get it done in a day even when the new expansion comes out. Just busy work to get to the part of the game that matters.
I… ??? Are you okay?