Blizzard basically catered their game around instance grinders at the expense of a lot of other player types.
I think the people here advocating for leveling to stay in it’s current form are being extremely myopic as well as being completely selfish expecting the game to just cater to their play style.
They could make it a shorter grind and still make it better by improving the mobs so they don’t get 2-shot.
I think they’re looking at how the game used to be through rose-tinted glasses. Having to eat/drink between every 3 mobs, accidentally pulling 2 or 3 mobs being instant death, leveling taking months, etc. was cool to us because that’s how gaming used to be.
But as a true new player? Why would I want to toil for half a year, and then start a monumental learning curve to break into actual end game content? And then an enormous grind to get good gear, etc. once I understand everything? I could just play any other game and be on my way in days.
Not really. What happened is that Blizzard kept making more expansions and … ever since TBC, the core gameplay loop has been about the endgame. They realized these issues when they were working on Cataclysm which is why they changed the level difference to max level to be just 5 levels. Those 5 levels meant a huge difference, but they realized that they had a compounding issue.
Where WoW requires expansions to stay alive, but each expansion also create more dead content. The more dead content, the less people play the game in a way that makes players stick around.
In time, they realized they could add more endgame systems that benefitted players and thus we got everything from LFR, to scenarios, to Mythic dungeons, Island expeditions, and so on.
They made this decision because they couldn’t realistically keep making content that would be deadweight for the game. So, they squished the level cap back down, instituted systems to skip to the endgame, and made sure the path to the endgame was easy to follow and get to.
Very little of this had anything to do with folks who participate in the endgame, but rather the ones who didn’t get to that point and dropped out because they couldn’t participate in the endgame.
You learn what your skills do and you learn how they work on a very basic level. That’s the tutorial that Brewa is talking about.
That could be part of it, but in all reality, people like alts. This isn’t like the olden days where most people had 1, maybe 2 characters. Some people have a lot. And with making new races, jobs, having leveling be a long slog will turn people away from it.
You’d think people do. Nothing better than being in a dungeon with a booster.
Tank: Lust plz
Shaman: wtf is that?
All the top games of 2024 were hard games, lol. Your thinking on this is just flat out wrong.
The current design of having MMO leveling be stupid easy is like ideas from over 10 years ago, this is why MMOs can’t gain new players, because the “tutorial” is just flat out boring.
Leveling in retail WoW provides zero resistence, you can litterly level to cap pushing like 2 buttons.
I don’t get why so many instance grinders love to weigh in on this topic, it is painfully obvious that you wouldn’t be the target of reforms to leveling. You probably already have an army of alts anyway, so revamping the “tutorial” would make sense for the sake of the health of the long term game.
The WoW IP is still very strong, and even though WoW is 20 years old, this game still has a lot staying power and it could even get better if BLizzard just spent some of those resources on other areas of the game.
The fact that player housing is being added is proving that the current model of using M+ and raids to keep players interested ain’t working.
Edit: BTW, a well known YTber made a video on this topic, and he brought out a ton of great views as a new player to the game, and he basically surmized that retail WoW’s tutorial is way too boring.
This isn’t a top game and hasn’t been for a very long time.
I’m fine with leveling being not quite as “intense” as it was in the olden days. I’m not a huge fan of it being, as you said, level to cap pushing 2 buttons. That’s where things are idiotic.
Lucky for me, I don’t watch streamers. Not a dig at you, but I prefer to think for myself. I’m absolutely not one of those people who believe everything because a streamer said it or because I saw it on tiktok.
WoW is one of the top live service games in the world.
It has a lot of players because it’s an MMO, but being a “top” game, it hasn’t been for a very long time. The last time it won a lesser award was 6 years ago. It hasn’t won any relevant awards in a decade or longer.
Make leveling super difficult and tedious but give those that want it a free button to push for a max level character.
No you can’t
/thread
You can, the world mobs have almost zero chance of killing you.
Unhinged and insane? You’re being dramatic.
I think I’m the only person who likes leveling in this game 
Looks over at their 30 alts
They made it easy for altoholics to lvl the next toon to play in their LFR careers. Unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t want NEW players to get into this game, they only care about gigageorge and his alt army being lvl 80 so he can lfr 55 times a week and call himself a wow player.
I do wish they made one of the chromie time pathways overtuned so it replicated Classic leveling in some way.
Another change that was made for the sake of vets, without any thought of the impact it would have on new players.
These changes were fine in WoD, but that was over 10 years ago when the game was still had a ton of players.
there’s like 4 versions of the game accessible from the launcher right now where leveling is ‘dangerous’, you can play one of those if you want.
Levelling isn’t the name of the game anymore, that’s just training. It’s all about a race to get to high-level content.
How does 2 shotting mobs all the way to cap training?
I’ve been reading the same sad arguments on this topic for over a decade now. People that want to keep things the way they are just don’t have a clue how boring WoW’s leveling game is to modern gamers.