WoW & Leveling: Why is it Treated as a Nuisance?

[Deleted]

Blizzard have gone out of their way to completely trivialize leveling content, in order to funnel players into the max level endgame as quickly as possible. Not only have they made characters absurdly strong compared to enemy mobs while leveling, they've also introduced Heirlooms and character boosts to further trivialize this aspect of WoW.

My only question is: Why? Why take a big steaming shit on a part of WoW's content that a lot of people used to love? I remember years ago, and I mean 5+ at least, a majority of players were actually just interested in leveling, and most didn't even have a single max level. Now everyone has several characters at max level, not an insignificant amount even have like 10+ at 110. Are you really invested in all of those characters and care about them as much as you would have, if you had taken the time to level them up and grow with them? Probably not.

#1 new players dont have ANY looms.
#2 I leveled 3 toons in vanilla so I welcome everything that makes it quicker.
#3 yes I love every of my 12 max level toons on my server but ofc my main druid always takes the cake
#4 the difference is in original you hadnt much to do at max level (besides farming) compared to today.
#5 there is still people who prefer leveing over anything else and they do that.
#6 I am glad leveling is not taking so long anymore as it used to.

- - - Updated - - -

We're getting a stat and ilvl squish in 8.0 -- hopefully it'll make mobs last longer.

thankfully i will have 20 toons at 110 by then and have never to do that again....

[Marrilaife]

I started playing in bc. Tedious was the name of the game. Especially when you were in the ungoro/winter spring areas. It was tedious then and it’s tedious now. You can get it over with faster now though

People are complaining about Blizzard artificially stretching content nowadays, then what would they say about the old school experience, the amount of downtime you had due to having to eat / drink / bandage after every couple of mobs, the amount of time wasted by having to walk everywhere on foot until much higher level, less flight paths / flight masters, sparser graveyards in case you died, having to go back to the city to buy spells every few levels (or suck with low rank ones) and hearthstone had much longer cooldown too, I don't remember levelling being "challenging" rather slow, boring and with tons of downtime. You might have had to avoid specific quests involving murlocks, gnolls and other creatures that would always "run away and call for help" at low hp, and ofc elite quests unless you had a group (usually there was no one in vicinity though), but the rest was fairly boring. Few classes that had no self heal at start were more annoying to level (warrior, mage, rogue) so I avoided them like a plague, I made a warrior after looms were implemented in wotlk and rogue & mage I didn't have until wod.

But the experience of "rejuv, moonfire, auto attack" or "shadow word pain, power word shield, wand" was pure resident sleeper.

[Volitar]

Because it is a nuisance. It is an unbalanced unfun trainwreck that most people want to get over with asap because all the meaningfuls things are at endgame. There is also 0 difficulty so it doesn't even 'teach' you how to play your class or spec anymore.

[Molvonos]

I dunno about anyone else, but I came from EQ. I absolutely hated sitting in one spot, grinding out mobs for levels because quests really didn't exist except for Epic weapons. While I enjoyed the quest-themed leveling that WoW introduced, I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it again. And I had two roomies during Vanilla/TBC that allowed us to all play as a group.

2 hunters and a warlock.

It was still a ridiculous grind. Do not miss.

[Aggrophobic]

Blizzard have gone out of their way to completely trivialize leveling content, in order to funnel players into the max level endgame as quickly as possible. Not only have they made characters absurdly strong compared to enemy mobs while leveling, they've also introduced Heirlooms and character boosts to further trivialize this aspect of WoW.

My only question is: Why? Why take a big steaming shit on a part of WoW's content that a lot of people used to love? I remember years ago, and I mean 5+ at least, a majority of players were actually just interested in leveling, and most didn't even have a single max level. Now everyone has several characters at max level, not an insignificant amount even have like 10+ at 110. Are you really invested in all of those characters and care about them as much as you would have, if you had taken the time to level them up and grow with them? Probably not.



I know for me, I'm not nearly as invested in my max level characters as I used to be. They mean almost nothing to me, as I can essentially create a copy of them in a few weeks time at most. The characters have gone down in value a lot since the years have passed by. This feels just wrong.

Leveling was alway boring in WoW.
Max level content was the fun part of vanilla and max level content remains the fun part of WoW today.

[TheFuse]

Because the real game play starts at max level, leveling is just a road block.

[Cwimge]

Leveling needs a hook. The swtor comparison is never getting old, it was a fully voiced, mildly interactive and while the broad beats stayed the same each class archetype had its own little quirks and quests. That and it continues to make sense- you progress through the story. The status quo changes along the same timeline as it did for the game at large, whereas wow can see three versions of org inside 80 levels.

wow's leveling is a pain because it's boring, has zero consistency and is still rooted in the text heavy past. I'm not going to say that pulling an EA and sinking millions into voice acting is the smart way to go, but there has to be a middle ground between reading a block of text and a little cutscene for Every "kill 10 wolves"

[Deleted]

Got to keep the insta gratification crowd occupied before they fly the coop. Making leveling even remotely difficult will result in new people not making it trough the first month.

[McFuu]

When you were leveling in Vanilla, you would go to a new zone that you hadn't been in before and get a new landscape and mobs to look at. And considering that leveling branched you would have 2 to 3 different paths to get to 60.
Leveling is a guided tour now. Which isn't awful, but it takes away from how leveling used to be. Now leveling tells a zone story and every quest works into that story. Which is great the first time you play through, occasionally you still encounter fun and engaging quest hubs, like Farondis, The annoying moonkin things that get blown up by the dragon, or Suramar in general (which is great if you ignore the rep grind). But those are there for you to run into, old questing you would organically encounter side quests, quests not everyone would see because not everyone was down that road. Mankirk's wife, that random Paladin in Wrath, the captain and his treasure in Westfall that was a random drop quest. That kind of stuff is endearing because you mention it to someone and they may have gone through the zone without seeing the quest. So they go back. That doesn't really happen anymore.

[Schattenlied]

I started playing in bc. Tedious was the name of the game. Especially when you were in the ungoro/winter spring areas. It was tedious then and it’s tedious now.

And not everyone agrees with you on that. I used to enjoy leveling alts before, I don't anymore because it's not an engaging experience anymore, and I know more than a few people who feel the same.

It's only tedious if you, for some reason, don't consider leveling to be content... Many of us do consider it to be content and would like to be able to enjoy it again.

You have the option to skip it already, it doesn't also need to be so easy as to bore people out of their fucking minds when they try to do it instead of skipping. If that's not enough for you, they can make heirlooms give a bigger exp boost.

Those of us who want to just level and enjoy it should be able to do so by just not equipping heirlooms, but instead, we can take off literally all our gear and it's still almost like we have godmode on... That is absolutely NOT ok... Leveling should be something capable of being enjoyed for the people who want to, it's currently not, and that needs to change.

[Kovaz]

You wouldn't have to slow it down to make it more engaging. Nerf the stats on heirlooms (keep the xp bonus). Make enemies ~20% stronger, give out ~20% more xp for enemies/quests/dungeons. With level scaling across the entire world, you get a TON of flexibility in terms of tuning the difficulty of the content and the speed of progression.

In my experience trying to bring new people into the game, the level boost isn't appealing. It doesn't spin the game in a good light to tell people "you get to skip the bad parts on your first character!" And the problem with everything being so easy at low levels is a new player never really learns how their character works. An MMO can be overwhelming to someone new to the genre, but if the content is at least challenging enough that they have to use all of their abilities they get a chance to learn. As it stands, you can AFK your way through the dungeon finder most of the way there without even having half of your abilities on your action bars.

For all the worrying about population numbers, there doesn't seem to be a lot of concern from a lot of people about the experience for a new player. WotLK wasn't stable at 12 million players because nobody was quitting the game. It was stable at 12 million because there just as many new players starting as old ones quitting. As much as people complained about "wrath babies", they were a big part of the game's steady population. If the game was more challenging and engaging to someone brand new, I think it'd go a long way towards preventing the population decay everyone is so stressed about.

[xcitng]

Some of us have leveled 10-15-20 characters to max the way it used to be. I don't need nor want it to be some tedious long grind to get a character to max level.

this /10char

[Powerogue]

I think it's a bit of a recursive problem. By trivializing WoW's leveling, you make it less interesting, and make people want to skip over it more.

At the same time, leveling does just plain get repetitive after a while. First time doing a zone: woo! 10th time: Meh.

I am hoping the flexible leveling ranges they're making also involves tuning the leveling experience to be less cripplingly easy. Things like heirlooms and rested experience already help make the speed of it acceptable. I just don't learn anything about how to play my class by just 1-shotting things. If I manage to pull a pack of 10 murlocs I should die.

[Deleted]

I remember years ago, and I mean 5+ at least

Found your answer right there.

If I want to spend 13+ years constantly killing wolves and boars I'll move to Siberia, thankyouverymuch.

[arboachg]

Sure, but that doesn't mean I want vanilla WoW leveling right now. There's this thing called nuance, it doesn't have to be between leveling being dead and being super duper vanilla hard. Vanilla had lots of quirks beyond mobs being challenging. There was a shortage of quests and at least 10 of your 60 levels were gained by pure grinding, which almost no one enjoyed.

This is an exaggeration at best. Was there a level or two that you grinded out? Sure, but I sure as hell didn't grind out "at least 10".

[Myta]

WoW was never harder than today.

Never.

No content in WoW has ever been harder than content today. Not TBC heroics, not Cata heroics. Content has never been harder, more challenging than content made today.

[arboachg]

This is a good reason to make leveling optional. People that just want to play end game can do so and Blizzard aren't tempted to ruin the leveling experience for everyone else.

It's really come to this, ladies and gentlemen.

[Redroniksre]

The quest design is kinda bad compared with other games. I mean if you have played FF14 and other modern MMORPGs you know what I mean. Most WoW quests would be considered optional in FF14. While the cool quests with a lot immersion are the campaign quests (they are enough to level you from 0-max) - which are almost completely missing in WoW or their flow gets disrupted by generic boring quests between.

And it's strange because WoW did it before, they created a very good solution via scenarios. But they scrapped them or use them rarely. Especially the MOP heroic scenarios were cool to explore the story while providing perfect multiplayer game-play experience.

As it stands the most fun thing to do (especially after leveling the first char via quests) is spaming dungeons and even here FF14 has some better tools with the Palace of the dead (random generated multi floor dungeon with different difficulties...).

Odd, i have found it to be the opposite with FF14. Now i hear it gets better in Heavensward, but i gave up doing the pre quests (Patch quests) because they were incredibly boring, just talk to a person, go across the world, talk to another and back again. Only memorable parts involved the Empire or whatever, but they were only relevant the last 10 levels before being beaten.

[InfiniteCharger]

Vanilla leveling was all about introducing the world of "warcraft" to the players. You discovered the different zones, different races, different beasts, different conflicts and different story lines in the world through questing. That form of questing was more old school in that things were out there in the world and you just discovered them as you went along. There were quest chains of course but quests weren't on rails and you could pick them up as you moved through the world in no particular order. Since the world was big the amount of quests was huge because the amount of story to tell was also huge.

But there are a few issues with this kind of story based questing which is strongly tied to a particular place and time. One issue is as the overall story changes, the older quests get stuck in a time warp and become disjointed. So the quests you see leveling through 60 in no way shape or form reflect the current state of the world. Another issue is that in vanilla leveling was important in order to unlock talents and skills. Then you also had quests specific to certain races and classes. Those were the most memorable quests of all, especially the class based quests. This form of leveling was removed from the game as they redesigned talents and skill training. That was a big mistake.

Now that our characters are at max level and will be at max level going into future expansions, redesigning leveling should involve more along the lines of a branching tree of quests that are tied somewhat to story, but more tied to unlocking skills, traits and abilities. Lets take the artifact weapon quest from Legion. Imagine you have a similar form of a quest that starts at level 20 which unlocks an "achievement" that will eventually lead to certain other quests that unlock at say level 40, which in turn unlocks another "achievement" and another series of quests at level 50. These achievements would unlock traits and abilities on the character and not be something you could just pick up any time, if you don't unlock the prerequisite achievements in the series. Having many of these types of quests that are more of a 'branching' tree that actually have an affect on your player progression in terms of skills and abilities would be much more meaningful and replayable. Unfortunately the problem with WOW is that it has always been a theme park MMO and for the most part they have never fully embraced complex skill and talent trees which players could use to chart their own evolution. But something like that is more useful now than ever. The class order hall was a perfect opportunity to add that kind of game play where you could basically have all the knowledge of a class in one place where you could build trees of talents based on your own particular desired form of progression. Unfortunately that was all locked away behind RNG gimmicks on legendaries and artifacts which took away the players ability to choose what skills and traits they wanted. Vanilla first and foremost showed that folks didn't mind playing as long as they had a guaranteed reward at the other end. This form of progression should return in spades in terms of skills, abilities, weapons and even crafting. And instead of having cookie cutter "templates" we should be allowed to enhance those "flavor" abilities or skills that currently are provided by artifacts and legendaries by permanently tying them to the character, not a weapon or trinket.

D&D rulesets don't emphasize massive boosts of player power. D&D rulesets are much more rock, paper, scissor meaning if the encounter features paper, then the player has to bring scissors, but D&D has many more combinations of schools of magic, schools of melee, types of weapons and so forth making these combinations much more interesting and varied. WOW gave up on that a long time ago.

[Alyajna]

Leveling is still one of my favorite things to do, but not until I hit certain zones. The old zones are still my favorites in the game, and I love going to them. When I can get to Felwood (not as happy to go there as pre-cata), winterspring, I loved Azshara before cata even though there wasn't much to do - the zone got me, so I went. Hinterlands, I sorely miss old thousand needles... Since the cata revamp, unfortunately a lot of my favorite zones were changed and I don't like them so much anymore. I hate Ashenvale now. I feel like a broken record but every single time I level, and it's been a LOT since cata, I can't help but say "ughh, why, I miss how this zone used to be"

Anyway... that's one of the big reasons I'm so as fond of leveling as before. It's just become boring and predictable, a little variance would be nice.
Here is a "wish list" of sorts I have for leveling:

-Optional scaling so we can go where we want to (coming, sort of)
-Heirlooms turned into account-wide buffs instead so that gear pieces you get while leveling are exciting again, but you keep the xp
-World-quest added all over the world, just relevant things to do in the zones, a reason to get us into them again. Some can be rare. They can reward pets, toys, transmog gear, fun potions etc. XP rewards like the legion assaults. Maybe they could award a few of the timeless coins or something, too. Just not useless gear that we can't wear due to heirloom. I think the randomized world quest system is something they need to expand everywhere, I love it.
-Add in more 'group' quest that have a nice xp boost/reward, they seemed to all be removed with cata.
-Add more rare mobs to the world that have nicer drops, right now running into a rare isn't exciting really