What is WOW Endgame & WHY is it so special?

Community General Discussion
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WOW is becoming more and more like a 3rd person action game rather than an RPG.

Somebody said to me yesterday that leveling is just a process of learning your class and WOW is all about the “end-game”. I’ve heard this many times.

I like grinding (within reason). Spending time to ever so slowly increase my power really immerses me. I dislike that Blizzard is speeding up leveling by 70% – when people can already BUY characters, gold or heirlooms.

I believe it will make the crafting system even more worthless. The faster one levels, the less likely one is to spend gold on anything – especially gear.
The cost of death in WOW is already essentially nothing.

70-80% of people seem to disagree with me.

In most RPGs, it takes time and effort to be max level. In the past, (80’s, 90’s, 00’s) it took months or years. Nowadays, the standard seems to be 1-2 months. (E.G) Fallout, Skyrim, Final Fantasy. In WOW – it’s literally a few days.

In real life, “end-game” has been a term used for human relationships and sports.

In every OTHER gaming experience i’ve had, “end-game” is a term for a path or process you take so that your character can do “x” better or easier to END the game. You know – and move on.

I’ve rarely heard Halo, Gears, Civilization, Mario or Fallout, etc players talk about “the endgame” – really much at all.

Is “end-game” for:
People who want to be as powerful as possible for PVP?
Or people who want to flex their skills in the latest Raids?

I hit #1 on the Leaderboard of a version of Civilization several times – and that was “end-game” for me. I go back to play here and there, but I was already #1 – I could only go down.
I spent 4 years trying to get from 33 to 50 in Halo 2 & 3. I never got there. I made it to 49 – which was as good as my skill will ever be. I’m just not a 50.
I made it to level 50 on over a dozen maps of Coop Gears of War Horde. That was end-game for me.
I did almost every non PVP achievement for Starcraft 1&2 – that was end-game. (I don’t enjoy pvp RTS, humans can be really annoying in them). The one exception for me is Warcraft 3 – as it’s a very slow and balanced game.

What is so great about WOW endgame?
I’m not trying to offend. I’m looking for opinions of people who are passionate about WOW. Blizzard is literally altering the pacing and structure of WOW due to what appears to be popular vote.

Without being rude and acting like your better than me because you’ve been playing for 15 years. Thanks :slight_smile:

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Problem is the first few times through it is ok. By the time you hit your 30th alt you want to pull your eyes out.

Personally I like the speed up because I can take my little ones and put them through 2 vanilla zones and then pick and chose for the remainder.

I am also looking forward to Chromie time because then maybe I can finally finish all of the Panda Land zones instead of caping out in Halfhill like I have so many times before.

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Leveling is incredibly boring for me and for many people. I see it as a barrier to actually having fun. Here’s why:
Since scaling has been a thing leveling feels so flat. You gain a minuscule amount of power but then it doesn’t even matter because everything levels with you. I hate it so much. When you hit max level you can actually start to gain power. Gaining power is fun for me. Leveling used to be fun for me when you actually gained power.

If scaling stays leveling will NEVER get better.

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… well, there are times that the writing is on the wall. Good luck there, buddy.

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To me it’s just that that’s where everyone is. I’ve been leveling a lot of alts during the exp bonus event and it’s fun, but man is it lonely. My favorite activity is raiding (specifically, raiding current content that’s still challenging) so if I want to do that, endgame is my only real option.

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Leveling matters when you can lose progress in levels. When that doesn’t happen, it just becomes a metric before you can gain full power of your character.

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WoW use to be all about the journey. the journey from level 1 to max and beyond. The world became so big and changed so much from expac to expac that the journey was lost. They are squishing levels to try and bring the journey back to some degree, I hope it works.

I miss that journey, I can’t bring myself to level anything anymore. It’s takes so long and it’s not rewarding anymore, they gave stuff to use baseline that we use to have to stop and do quest to do and took a lot of rewards away. Here’s hoping they can get back to their roots without losing the QoL changes they made.

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For me leveling hasn’t been enjoyable since wrath. Only interesting part is journeying through the zones for the quests. And even then when I reached max level, I still did all the intro quests (cause I like quests and for exp->gold conversion).

I did not mind the legion level scaling, however what really ticked me off was the ilvl scaling they put in with patch 7.2, and later pvp scaling (evolved from legion stat templates) in patch 8.0. Those 2 things are the underlying disease of the situation imo. Not scaling as a whole. Although we will see how people receive all prior content being in the 10-50 bracket.

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I do agree that ilvl scaling is 10x worse, I still think leveling feels bad because of scaling.

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for BFA.

level 1-120 is the tutorial.

when you hit 120, your HP is 60k.

Leveling your HP from 60k to 500k, is the real “leveling” “experience”

here is the grinding “power gain” experience you are looking for.

2 Likes
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Part of the issue is WoW made the end the “real” game, with the focus on raiding (and later PVP, M+ etc.). When you look at a game like EverQuest, the journey was the end; it wasn’t a mad dash to max level to start gearing up to raid so you can raid for better gear, that was just a bonus at the high end.

Somewhere along the line, maybe even from the very beginning, WoW took the opposite approach and while Vanilla had a journey by virtue of being new (something Classic really failed to capture but that’s another story), their goal from the beginning was that the game should be endgame focused rather than have things at the end be a bonus.

As to what’s great about it? That’s completely subjective. Some people like the thrill of facing down giant bosses. Some people like speedrunning dungeons. I find though the older you get the less you feel the need to skip everything and only look at your destination.

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A long tutorial that should have the option to be skipped then. It’s a boring and way too long for a tutorial

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If you look at it AP is the return of leveling to the game. Higher levels always confer increase in player strength and greater selection of powerful traits/talents. Much like level 60 in vanilla (more talent points to spend).

Get a higher AP level on your legion artifact you get more traits.

  • unlock old level 54, to get 14.5% more damage
  • get level 75 for full netherlight crucible

For heart of azeroth

  • get neck level 50 (and then later 70) and you get to start working on gold for extra AP gained
  • get 84 so you get full benefit of vision of perfection
  • continue leveling neck for increase in power of essences, secondaries, etc
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I have been playing video games since 1999. When I hear “Endgame” I think of the latest content that is either difficult, and/or a way to become more powerful by some means. (Such as Raids, Mythic+, and so on).

While I am not a veteran WoW wise and WoW being the only MMO I have only really liked playing, (tried Final Fantasy XIV and ESO, didn’t like either of them though that is just my opinion) I would not say the current endgame is all that interesting, at least not to me. However Raids and Mythic+ being the main kinds of endgame in WoW (from my perspective) loses interest to me since I have done Raids before, and Mythic+ before and I rather have some new kind of content that goes into further expansions.

What I prefer to do is either work on some kind of customization piece of content (Garrisons lasted a while for me), do group content with my friends and/or Guildies, work on new characters, try new story quest I still have not done yet or something else.

Right now I am working on my Horde characters as I finally started one about a week ago to see what its like on the other side, and so far it has been nice. While I like the new perspective and everything, I’ll still remain a Alliance main.

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Oh absolutely. Yeeeah you can pay to skip that but thats not a real solution. thats also why the 100% bonus xp is so popular. also why shadowland is shortening the leveling experience.

Getting there.

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Nothing. There is absolutely nothing special about WoW’s endgame. I stopped doing WoW’s endgame at the end of Cata.

I play the new expansions, follow the story as best I can without the patches and enjoy what I can of the game.

WoW was best when it focused on world building and leveling. Remember MC (first raid) was built in a week because it wasn’t that important.

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The reason many people (not all people) accelerate to the end game is that this is where the most challenging and detailed content is. Sure there are quests and dungeons and so forth as you level, some of it even pushes the story of an expansion along - but the guts of the expansion nearly always waits for you to finish leveling.

Whether it’s grinding out reputations, raiding or doing heroic and mythic dungeons… you cannot do this stuff until you have leveled.

For me personally, I get the most from WoW when I play with others, especially those I know pretty well, so the end game content is where I get the most enjoyment. Whether this is true for you, only you can say.

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Outside of Classic (and even then there was a bunch of end game) WoW has always been about the end game.

Thats where people stop leveling. Thats where it becomes easier to play with friends due to challenges being max level challenges. A game built around leveling only works if the game is built around creating alts.

Games without an end game tend to sputter out. Games like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan were lauded for its leveling. Had great open world PVP/realm pvp. Had a ton going for it. But no worthwhile endgame. You ran out of things to do at max level.

People quit.

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I did notice that in BFA you are 300-400% more powerful than you were in Legion.
Yet with all the other expansions one seemed to only get 10-20-30% of a power boost.

I feel a 70 could beat an 80 in PVP.
A 110 seems to have like no chance of killing a 120.

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I don’t really understand why they started making the power go up like that, the way it was was fine.