Months to level? Levelling these days is fast. It doesn’t take MONTHS to level these days. You can follow the story and still level through all the zones without spending gobs of time.
There are far too few abilities as you level. There are far too few rewards for levelling. It has become a means to an end. Beastmaster Hunter is a horrible example. Of the 120 levels, FIFTY of those levels are just “dead”.
And that’s the problem.
Levelling is no longer engaging or fun.
Trying to PUSH players to endgame is part of the problem. Squishing levels won’t solve any problems. Skipping entire expansions isn’t the solution. You keep pushing on the mindset of “all that matters is reaching max level”.
And that is the core problem. Blizzard has created the rampant push for endgame instead of creating a game where the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.
Nice try…I’m open to anything besides the status quo, bc right now leveling is a jumbled mess. That’s literally the opposite of your attitude. But, if you like what we have, everyone is entitled to their opinion. It just seems yours is, “No!”
Just wanted to quote this because it is a very good statement. For me I remember my journey through Vanilla more then almost anything else in WoW from any expansion because it was an impactful and enjoyable journey that wasn’t all about getting any of us to the endgame as fast as possible. Instead it was about each of us carving our own path and becoming the nobody doing heroic things we all wanted to be.
I guess some of my mindset comes from being an old school gamer. Pencil, paper, dice, and smiling as the players come up with a crazy idea and its my job as the GM to figure out how to handle it while progressing the story.
I always tried to focus more on the journey when I ran games as opposed to the final destination. Even if it was obvious they were making their way to kill the Unliving King of the Southern Reaches, I tried to make the journey memorable.
That way, months after the game was over, they’d have awesome memories to look back on.
I’ve also had the pleasure of being a player in games where GMs gave me the same experience.
This reminds me of WoD when we heard we were getting a shipyard and everyone was like “OMG SEA BATTLES” and “YES! WE GET TO SAIL ON OUR OWN SHIPS!!” and even just “PIRATE MOG!”
And then we got a new mission table and left sharks up the wazoo.
So many of you are projecting what you want to happen on this level squish: More fun leveling and reworked zones and less tedium and more choice and so on. You aren’t going to get any of that, guys. You are going to get smaller numbers. That’s it.
Spinster, while you’re probably right … and Blizzard does have a tendency to go for disappointment of late, I’m hoping that we’ll be proven wrong and they have grand plans for the squish.
I’d gladly eat crow if they can pull this off and give levelling the energy boost that it desperately needs.
If it does truly work out that way then Classic is going to end up being far more popular over the long term in my opinion. I say again. Having a 14yr old version of your current product being vastly more popular doesn’t sit well with investors. Why would they keep wanting to dump money into current game development if people are not playing it?
For your amusement I had to choose energy boost. I was going to use a popular medicine for men to describe what they needed. But that word is blocked. Not really surprised. Just something for your amusement.
Classic is that way —> have fun.
Couple things: blizzard has stated they don’t like filler talents like junk that gives +1% crit. Those are the kinds of things you get if you had 60 talents available and they clearly don’t like that.
Visiting class trainers is fine, I can tolerate the return of that RPG element it seems weird I just know new spells anyway.
Weapon skills have zero purpose and need to stay dead. AFK punching crap to raise unarmed for ZZZZ hours was not engaging or interesting. Ever. Create a fun interactive questline if you must but jesus stop asking to bring back wretched systems.
I totally agree with you Gryff in what it could mean for live WoW going forward.
But ultimately I’m not confident that change would happen even if possible.
It’s been quite clear in the design philosophy the direction they want to take the game (as a corporation) going forward, and honestly any of those reversions just don’t match up with their intentions.
It would take a serious shake up by Classic to change anything, with the hope that doesn’t mean that they just continue to push harder in their current direction to target their “intended audience” (which generally isn’t the Classic crowd).
Classic not only needs to do a lot better, but the Blizzard designers need to be able to demonstrate to Blizzard and Activision that it would be more profitable to target that audience rather than the audience they are currently aiming at.
I just don’t see that happening too soon.
From my perspective Blizzard (and it’s employees) are like low level members of parliament, they probably have their own opinions on the how the game should be developed but are unable to push it or speak out on it for fear of being crowded out by the government position.
Not necessarily. I agree that there is no way you can both level within a reasonable amount of time and experience the entirety of WoW’s open world and story content. But they can do a few things to address this issue.
Cutting a lot of quests out is the first piece of the puzzle. Specifically, fetch and kill quests that serve no purpose other than a means to gain experience toward leveling. Get rid of all of them. Quests should drive the story and guide players through the world.
As previously suggested, you can replace fetch/kill quests with open world events. Ideally, these events should tie in to the overall story of the zone and give players something to do besides following the main story quest. As well as providing experience and loot along the way.
Even so, you would hit max level long before you could even come close to completing all of the content WoW has to offer. This is why content needs to scale. In fact, get rid of levels altogether and go by iLvL. Create zone reward tracks and make the main story quest sequential where appropriate so that players can follow whichever thread strikes their fancy and feel rewarded for it no matter what level (or in this case iLvL) they may be.
The story should branch out and allow players to explore the rich lore of WoW at their own pace. It should begin by guiding the player and then gradually offering them choices for where they want the story to take them.
Maybe it’s just that I come from games that are more story-driven, but it strikes me as odd that a game with as much lore as WoW has a leveling experience that doesn’t focus at all on story and seems to be about little more than grinding experience with obnoxious fetch and kill quests. It needs to go!
Keep the Leveling system 1-60, and that’s it. The original zones in EK and Kalimdor should be the only character leveling required. Once you hit 60, then you are ready for End Game. So you go to whatever the current XPac’s new zones are, and you play that XPac. We don’t need more character Levels, we just need a form of progression that the raiding content is locked behind. ie. Garrison Level 3, Artifact Weapon Level x; Heart of Azeroth Lvl x. So Level 60 is max level forever more. The item level of world drop gear will be associated to your progression in that XPac. the more progressed you are, the higher iLvl gear drops. The raid and dungeon gear set has set iLvls that is not tied to character progression.
When you go into a new zone, the gear from the previous XPac is lowered in efficiency, and the new gear you get will be amplified in power comparatively. So for Vanilla, we had gear level 1-150, in BC the gear would be x1 L1-150; Wrath gear would be x2 L1-150; and so on. You don’t need to keep squishing gear or character Levels ever again. So if you are in BFA with an x6 L140 item, you would still be more powerful than a new character with (no-x) L60 item. But as you start collecting gear, the higher level x7 gear would start becoming more powerful than the x6 L140.
In the new zone, the gear from all previous Xpacs and vanilla are normalized. So while x6 L60 (prev XPac) item is weaker than an x7 L60 (current XPac) item, the x6 L60 and x6 L60 are the same power level in the current XPac zone. If you are doing older content, then the power level increases based on the x level. In Wrath content, an x6 L60 would be significantly more powerful than an x5 L60.
The only conversation worth having is with blizzard and they aren’t participating.
You will be disappointed if you expect a squish to do anything more than erase every other “ding!” And display our level divided by 2.
If blizzard changes leveling to be “vanilla > one expansion > last expansion > current”, (making bc, wrath, cata, mop and wod parallel tracks), that would be nice, but scaling can make that work fine without squish.
What we really need, imho, are NEW leveling paths from 1 to {current expansion’s entry level. 110 at the moment}, that use new game graphics.
Put Chromie in all starting areas and let her offer optional leveling paths: which are new and different. Solo or teamed content. A series of class challenges that require skill to pass, but which grant 5 levels of experience when beaten. Content that helps players focus and improve on all the roles of their class.
Honestly if they did it right, they could have leveling and Max level characters combined in the same new zones and find ways for one to be part of the others objectives. “Escort these lowbies though this dangerous gauntlet” kind of things.
The problem isnt the number, it’s what it stands for. Changing 120 to 60 is pointless if it still means the same thing.
“content” can mean anything the developers want it to. I mean, remember Broken Shore and the “story” quests that each took you 30 minutes TOPS (some took less than 1 minute) to complete and they called that “content”.
The problem you have to overcome with any static level system is power scope. It’s easy to say that gear simply gets stronger, similar to how ilvl increases work, however the way that secondary stats work you would eventually hit break points (and sooner rather then later).
One of the big reasons why WoW has had increasing level caps in the past is that it allows them to reset secondary stat values so they don’t scale infinitely. So at level 60, 20 crit might equal 1% crit chance, yet at level 120 you would need 1k crit rating for example to equate to the same 1% crit chance.
With gearing in today’s game it is quite common to expect 30-40% values for secondary stats, even without taking into account actual rating inflation on later gear you could reasonably assume that within 2 expansions worth of content you would cap all secondaries at 100% values.
It would very much create an odd situation for gearing.
It’s why it’s something I don’t expect them to do, because it requires a huge amount of overhauling the games system to implement. Most likely resulting in gearing being limited to working per expansion, or being focused on bonus effects like AP or some BoD/CoS gear.
I agree with everything you say in your post, but there is the mental significance of changing a number to be smaller.
The journey doesn’t look at long if you have a “shorter” way to go.
I’m sure if you introduced someone to WoW and said “Yeah you just have to level up to level 1500 and then you can come raid with us” people would be a lot more intimidated than if you replaced the value with 120, or 80, or 60 for that matter.
Simply having “59 more levels to go” instead of “119 more levels to go” is a real benefit for players who might find it intimidating. Regardless of any actual affect on the levelling time.
They do need to address the entire process in completeness though at some point. What ever they are doing at the moment is only going to be a temporary fix to a much larger problem.