There is a huge divide between classic and retail and i love both, why can’t we have both?
The main appeal for classic is the leveling, and the main appeal for retail is the end game, I don’t get why they are pushing retail leveling in the opposite direction. They removed the cost of riding and flying, They are making you get them at an earlier level, They are giving you a huge xp bonus next expansion for alts, They might as well remove leveling with the path they are taking.
I don’t see why they couldn’t just make the leveling more like the older versions of the game, make it slower paced with random drops mattering, scale the enemies better to where you can’t pull 20 enemies at once on any class with heirlooms, possibly bring back class trainers, have each character feel like a real character with experiences again. move all the movement and big cooldowns down further in the tree and keep everything that makes end game enjoyable, but only receiving them at a higher level.
I feel like they could keep the end game exactly the same, untouched at all but still be able to make leveling matter again, make it a journey again similar to classic, am I wrong?
I think a lot of players in retail are only playing for the endgame and consider leveling to be a chore to get to the endgame. It’s opposite in cata because for most cata players, leveling is the game.
There’s another element I think you’re overlooking. How long is too long to level, and what are the actual draws to leveling? How do you marry the important principles there with the progressive design of classes since leveling was a larger focus?
These class trees are fun to level at pace, IMO, but I don’t think they hold up quite as well on a longer time scale. Also, part of the fun of leveling is experiencing the content you’re doing for it. You can’t make it so grueling that it lasts all of the previous expansions, that’s ridiculous and would only seem like a cash grab on their level boosts. Maybe roughly for one expansion, but not all expansions are made equal…
My guess they don’t do this because it’s too much work for them. It would take longer to push the content out. Although I agree with you, having things feel like it matters to pick it up along the way was nice. At this point in retail, I could delete my account and be back to where I was in like a month if not less depending how much I played.
I feel like that is because in retail there is nothing but the end game, and in classic there is basically nothing but leveling and raid logging though. I tried to level a character as quickly as possible earlier in dragonflight, and got a priest 0-70 in a little over 3 hours, with leveling being that short, I feel like its being pushed to be a chore. It’s supposed to be an mmorpg, but im close to the character limit and only have 3 or 4 characters that i have any attachment to, with at least 25 or so being level 70
The topic has come up, but a lot of retail players see the modern game as something that’s purely there to do endgame content. They don’t want leveling to be like Classic, because leveling is just a hurdle that’s in the way of doing endgame content.
Regardless I think leveling in modern WoW is just irrelevant at this point outside of current expansion. It’s not acting as the tutorial people used to say you needed leveling to do because everything dies before you can even begin to get a feel for your abilities.
but the last time they made even a minor change to reduce the pace a little bit, people complained heavily about it. The only other purpose beyond that it really serves anymore is being a minor time sink to try to encourage a few people to buy level boosts.
I think it’d be worth fixing up, among a few other things, even if primarily just to try to make the game better to get into for new/returning players.
Alternatively the potentially hot take: Get rid of leveling and find some other way to teach new players and give us our talents. Leveling currently serves no purpose otherwise.
I think a large part of that is because WoW questing is just kinda boring. It’s gotten a bit better over the years, but 90% of quests are still go to the quest hub, pick up a bunch of quests that are kill x things, gather x things, and click on x other things. Hand those in, get the next round, rinse and repeat at the next quest hub.
More modern MMOs have much more story depth to their quests. I play both WoW and ESO. WoW is so much better (imo) for combat mechanics, dungeons, raids etc. But ESO just blows WoW out of the water when it comes to questing. Because quests are both fully voice acted, and you do more than just kill things and collect their skins or ears or eyes. And each zone has a big climactic end that feels fulfilling and you actually care about because you’ve gotten to know the characters that played a part.
Also their NPCs feel more like real people. WoW’s NPCs are either larger than life (literally, using models twice our size) characters, or just random nobodies. But in ESO the dude you help in one of the first zones will pop up again and again, and its like you grow in power together and feel like equals. Like the NPC Darien that is just a local guard but will eventually become Meridia’s Chosen and you can actually appreciate his story arc. And though I haven’t played FFXIV I’ve heard that it is even better when it comes to story.
To bring my ramble to a TL:DR end, I don’t think there is really any “fixing” WoW’s leveling without really revamping what they consider quests, and with so much backlog of content, I doubt that’ll ever happen.
They have exp requirements drastically reduced for every expansion starting with BC and the warband bonus is no more aggressive than exp gains were for heirlooms when they first came out.
Which version? because there a huge difference between vanilla, BC, WOTLK, Cata. The leveling experience has been evolving since the first expansion release.
Many people don’t want that
Random drops mattered more in older versions of the game because the quest rewards were so poorly designed.
What does this add to the game? That a person has to return to an NPC to get their new spells every couple of levels. What does that add to the game?
By making the game more boring and tedious?
Yes, you have no idea how to accomplish what you’re describing because your describing feelings not aspects of game design.
fair points, im probably in a very small minority as someone who both loves leveling, has deleted chars to make room for more, and also enjoys both classic and retail. My favorite expansion to quest in was probably tbc, boring and tedious is a fair point, but isn’t wow supposed to be an mmorpg, all of those things made it more of rpg in my opinion.
But seeing a couple of these responses, i see why they don’t do that. The majority of retail players really just dont want to go through that. I mainly just level characters, farm for mounts and tmog, and pvp so in my circle people tend to have the same views as me.