You do realize that “building a character” is more than just gaining levels, yes?
You do as much, if not more, “building” post level cap than pre level cap.
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It makes sense when you think about what a wide spectrum of players there are. It’s practically impossible that have one version of WoW that meets everyones wants.
It’s really not though. WoW used to just be 1 game that was extremely successful and good for all types of players.
Look at raiding in classic, it’s beyond easy and more of a social thing where guilds and friends can play together and clear the content while carrying players not up to par in skill and still find success and get loot. Retail you need 99th percentile parsing players playing specific classes and specs for the right comp, while having addons, weak auras, dbm, etc just to even have a chance to clear mythic raids.
There doesn’t need to be 4 different difficulties for raids, go back to 1 difficulty where it’s balanced to where it’s accessible for the majority of players. More friendships will be made, more loyalty to guilds, newer players able to actually do the content and have fun. The top players will still look at ways to min max and compete with each other on parsing against one another.
Raiding is a tough sell as it is to expect a community of 30+ year olds at this point to take 2-3 nights of their week away from family and responsibility to bang their head against a wall progging bosses they probably won’t even kill in a tier anyways and burning out. Weak links need to get cut and replaced, the harder the content, the more cuts need to be made which means it’s accessible to less and less of the playerbase.
M+ is infinite scaling difficulty, that’s where the hardcore players have a mode specifically dedicated to them, while also still being something casuals can play and do whatever level they are comfortable with.
PvP is another high skill mode for competition
Raiding should be purely a social atmosphere with your guild where you go once a week for a chance at loot and killing bosses with friends. Having 4 tiers of difficulty just makes anything outside of the highest difficulty feel meaningless and like a waste of time and takes away from the feeling of defeating a boss if it’s not at the top end.
Levelling should go back to a long grind, make it challenging to where you actually have to use your brain to complete quests and defeat mobs, or get help from other players.
The game can have both competitive and casual aspects where everyone can enjoy it, the problem is retail is too heavy skewed to elitism for the majority of players to enjoy it
It wasn’t though. In vanilla, when you hit level cap, your options were to start raiding or start the honor grind.
Why are you comparing normal raids in classic to mythic raids in retail? You can just do a normal difficulty raid in retail and you can have a more casual, social experience.
Why not? It’s like asking single player games to remove easy/normal/hard options. Some people aren’t good at games but still want to experience them so they play on easy. Some people are really good at games and want the challenge of playing on hard. Some are in-between and play on normal. You can’t design single difficulty encounters that are going to satisfy all these different types of players. Look at the discourse surrounding the elden ring dlc for an example.
I disagree.
I don’t understand why you want raiding to be easier but leveling to be harder. Wouldn’t you just be shifting the elitism from one area of the game to another? The seems to be some cognitive dissonance going on with this train of thought.
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Classic is better for leveling (talking experience, not speed)
Classic is better if you like DnD style dungeon crawling
Retail is better if you like dungeon speed-running
Retail is better for RP since it has more races/transmog/etc.
Classic is better for “hanging out” raiding since you don’t need 50% of the raid.
Retail is better for difficult raids (not counting LFR which is even more braindead than Molten Core somehow)
Classic is better for player interdependence, unless you hate that, then retail is better.
Retail combat is better since you don’t have down time, and I don’t mean mana between pulls sort of thing, I mean being rage/mana/energy-starved and doing nothing but autoing/wanding waiting for something to come off CD.
Classic is more immersive
Retail has more elves
Gaining levels is as much a part of building a character as endgame content, more so if you’ve never played that character type before.
I agree with basically all of this, I still don’t know why everyone is focusing on the amount of time it takes to level, when that was a side point of mine that probably stems from having experience speedrunning leveling, and being able to level in half the time of others.
I know we “do” have both, I was asking for both all in one, classic leveling, and retail end game. The “perfect” wow with the parts of both versions of wow people love.
I can play both, but the progression is split, and every character doing something new=more achievements and tmog is fun to me.
My main points were about how classic feels like an adventure, running around as a nobody fighting for your life against enemies that could actually kill you, not running for 15 minutes to turn in a quest.
^Even though I do enjoy that, as it feels like an actual run back from completing a quest that makes sense to reward me for; Them not wanting to go to the other side of the nelf starting zone that would be a good 1h rp walk avoiding enemies, and also giving both my character and the world an alive feel, it’s like 1% of what I like.
The leveling phase of the game needs to be remade from the ground up.
We kinda have the tools and lore for it right now too.
Make newer players volunteers or helpers of the bronze/time lost dragons that are trying to find meaning on the system again.
Make em run through an on rails version of all of the relevant wow lore since vanilla. Even make it a group scenario or w.e with other players doing the same.
A linear route that will take time to run though so most likely make it an option at the start with fully new players forced to the route unless they really want to just level normally. Just in case a complainer for the sake of complaining appears.
Drop em off at dragon flight/bfa whatever makes more sense. Ready to continue their story.
I feel we need a more structured upbringing when starting an alt/new players
Nah, classic leveling is still trash, it’s just trash for longer. Keep that in classic where it belongs. Making leveling a slower slog of pointless, random quests isn’t an an improvement in the slightest, at best it slows down each quest and makes it reward more experience, mucking up any sort of story pacing. At worst it turns it into a weeks-long crawl each time. Either way classic leveling offers nothing of worth.