I may get some flak here but, I believe having more game mod options is never a bad thing.
A journey/hard/hardcore mode for leveling would be a neat idea for the folks who might want leveling to be more of a challenge rather than just zipping through it at the rate most folks do atm. (In b4 go play Classic “n00b” comments, I’m aware Classic is somewhat this way). This would bring the focus back on the “journey” again rather than just the endgame. Some ideas off the top of my head would be:
Journey Mode:
Increase experience requirements per level or decrease experienced gained from overall (quests/dungeons/battlegrounds etc).
Hard Mode:
Increase experience requirements per level or decrease experienced gained from overall (quests/dungeons/battlegrounds etc).
Increase damage taken + Decrease damage done (maybe have a debuff on your character that may do this while engaging in enemies with exception of dungeons or engaging in PvP combat).
Hardcore:
Increase experience requirements per level or decrease experienced gained from overall (quests/dungeons/battlegrounds etc).
Increase damage taken + Decrease damage done (maybe have a debuff on your character that may do this while engaging in enemies with exception of dungeons or engaging in PvP combat).
Self Explanatory; if your characters dies it’s done honestly surprised this hasn’t been a mode yet. If you want to fullproof this for endgame content, make the hardcore mode only in effect while leveling and go away at max level).
The idea for “journey” mode would be to experience the journey there again from 1-Max. Might not be some people’s cup of tea, but for the people that might enjoy leveling itself while not caring about the end game content would be fun.
Mythic plus - leveling addition. Every time you level to 60… or whatever the end level will be someday… you start over at level 1. However, the catch is that everything is harder THIS time around. Then you get to 60 and it resets yet again, continuing the cycle. Eventually, you can imagine someone running around southern barrens kiting a raptor around dealing with 5 different affixes!!!
I’ve actually done the iron man challenge or whatever it was back in Warlords of Draenor. I forget the rules that people came up with, but you essentially have a ton of restrictions and you can only stick to questing (no dungeons allowed). The goal is to reach max level with these restrictions and you can even track various things in the achievement log for legitimacy! It was nice to be back out in the world again with a challenge.
What if upon character creation you had to toggle “nightmare mode” when creating them or not and it ended up being totally permanent for that character. Upon logging into this character in nightmare mode, you could only do quests. Dungeons were disabled and the difficulty of the world worked like mythic plus in the sense that there would be affixes and debuffs depending on the zone or something. Upon reaching Max level, you would get an achievement… maybe a mount or cosmetic reward… who knows.
I think it’s neat, though it might be a little too ambitious for Blizzard’s taste atm.
Hell they wouldn’t even have to shard you over to another area, run around and see other players but when you use dungeon finder you will only get other hardcore players.
Honestly at first it would boom, then cool off, then people would rage about it being to hard and a dead game mode, but i honestly think more gamers would participate than not.
