Leveling in older content needs a whole lot of work put into it to make it a better experience for everyone involved.
Ignored is very much an understatment from my perspective when it comes to how and when older content get bug fixes, nevermind the fact weâve never had proper scaling. When it comes to older expansion content my default assumption is the bug never gets fixed or it takes an incredibly long time to be fixed. I understand that obviously newer content will take priority, but at some point you have to be able to sit down and go through fixing the older content as well.
For example of a quest thatâs been bugged for a long time, the mine cart quest in the goblin starting area. Whenever you ride down to the bottom it often doesnât trigger and you get stuck moving the mine cart (Which you arenât supposed to be controlling) until you hop out, reset the quest and try again. What causes the trigger to fail is not certain to me, sometimes wiggling the minecart forward makes it trigger the bomb explosion, sometimes itâs doesnât. Itâs very delayed and itâs not the only quest bug in the zone that causes some pain either.
Scaling continues to be a major issue with leveling right now with how it works. Mobs become health sponges very quickly when leveling 1-60. Once you get to about 20 is when it really starts setting in. 30+ It becomes a slog at times. Mobs take so much longer to kill than before for absolutely no good reason, this is noticed right away in Dungeons where the entire dungeon group is above this level threshold. Either the player power needs to go up, or ideally mob health needs to go down by a good order of magnitude.
If someone is spamming dungeons with a friend and wants the experience to go quickly, the trick is to just have one person make level 10 allied race characters who will blast through mobs like nothing until they hit 18/19, delete them and then start again instead of dealing with the alternative of having a group of higher levelâd characters.
There are some mobs who abilities and damage seem to far outscale your own for little reason, some of which have had that issue for a long time. This is documented often on these forums and in third party major sites such as WoWhead where you can see that people have a problem. When the initial level squish happened and when scaling was first implemented, there were some unfortunate issues that have just continued to hold on and exist where items donât scale properly and where mobs werenât squished right.
Leveling zones are not scaled correctly either. Different eras have enemies with different health bars. Itâs miniscule when itâs normal npcs, but Rare Spawn and Boss enemies break this egregiously. A rare spawn/boss mob in an Eastern Kingdom zone is going to have a lot less health than a Mists of Pandaria one. This is something that just doesnât make sense to me, why the scaling is not equalized and the lower health values are not the default for all rare spawn and boss enemies. These higher health mobs also often have issues with damange scaling, making it so itâs harder to kill them when you are leveling, something that should be able to be done. Actually funnily enough the easiest way to see this is to go look at a normal rare spawn in Redridge, such as Ribchaser vs Gnollfeaster (also in Redridge) but the latter was added in BFA and has a different health scaling point. (A scaling point also lower than MOP Mobs.)
When it comes to item scaling there are some issues. This applies to normal and especially crafted items. Some items that drop (usually low level greens) donât scale at all. Normal items that get the upgrade to ârare/epicâ from quests do not have the same ilvl value as a rare item that drops in a dungeon. Not sure why that is, but it just is.
When it comes to old world professions and crafts, the items really need some assitance. Right now they are entirely useless for leveling, yes even with the âmarkâ system, they just do not scale to the new ilvl curve we got when Dragonflight hit and before then they were already underpowered. This whole system should just go away and items you should simply scale to your 1-59 Chromie time level once you craft them.
Any form of plant part or missing out on more ore when it comes to gathering the old world profession nodes should also be removed, this really dampens the idea of being able to level anywhere when you find yourself picking up useless materials for craft or needing a lot more of them to be equaled out.
IN general old world professions could use a passover so they can be leveled more quickly. Material reductions, more skill points being awarded at certain breakpoints, etc.
Then there are some general fixes I think would be massively useful. Make Heirlooms Scale 1-60 by Default, the upgrade system is very archaic and an extremely outdated goldsink that provides little value to invest in comparatively. You do not get out what you put into the system. Itâs so much stark contrast to WOTLK Classic where items automatically scale to 80 with no hassle. Either that or drop the prices down to where you spend no more than 1000 g/equal currency value in total to get the item there so itâs a lot more manageable.
Increase default swim speed. Thereâs no reason for it to continue be this slow in the game, itâs much faster to skip any quests in water than it is to take the time to do them and get experience for it.
Healing Potions and Mana Potions should scale by a default flat percentage no matter your level because right now they just simply donât scale at all or do so incorrectly and if you are questing in Stranglthorn a Healing potion that gives you 167 HP when you are level 40 is useless. These items just need to function better.
Similar to quest items, uncommon/rare/epic items on vendors also should just scale to your level when you buy them in Chromie Time. They are also pretty useless outside of buying apperances for transmog right now.
I havenât done it yet, but Iâm trusting by the hotfix notes saying the health was âsignificantlyâ reduced, itâll be easier to handle.