Thoughts - Level Squish?

[Echoherb]

Why am I voting on whether there should be a stat squish instead of a level squish?

[Onikaroshi]

It does. Blizzard talked about it before. It's part of the reason they abandoned the 5 level expansion idea. It's a much bigger psychological barrier than the 120 levels, of which you get to skip 110 on your first character entirely for free.

Yea, didn't people hate how long each level took in cata? Blizzard still had to do it again though to even it out.

[druenos]

I think they are somewhat ambivalent. I'm all for it. We're moving towards 150 levels which just looks fairly awful even if leveling time isn't increased. Make the levels more impactful.

'Course they really might want to do an expansion and call it WoW2: do a gold and level reset and plop us on a new world. We'd still be playing the same characters, we could gate to the old world still, but the new world and our level there would be what's important. That would be the best way to get old players to return since everyone would, in a sense, be back to step one as far as actually gold/power is concerned. Of course, older players would have more pets, mounts, and mogs but still...

Gold cannot be reset. The wow token has given in game gold a real world worth. Take that away and lawsuits would follow something along the lines of " I bought a wow token and now you've taken away the proceeds of it. Resetting gold wouldn't even work. people like me with many millions in gold would just buy lots of expensive items shortly before any gold reset and sell them afterwards, I might not have as much gold afterwards but relative to everybody else I would still be rich.
As for wow2, it aint happening. They have said many times the current game gets tweeks and upgrades in patches slowly over time. The game we play now is basically wow2 with all the upgrades we've had over the last few years.

[MoanaLisa]

New players are unlikely to be intimidated with a 1-120 haul. First off, new players get a boost just for buying the game. That negates a lot of that. If the game feels attractive to a new player then they may well decide that exploring the old world in 1-120 detail may be just the thing.

I would much rather they fix leveling so it makes more sense or at least frame it in such a way so that players get the sense of participating in some history or adventure while going through the area. They also need to fix leveling so that you get real character rewards for advancing instead of this desert of levels where you get nothing.

Whatever the case, leveling could use some love but the problem with it isn't 1-120.

Because I have a flexible mind I could also live with this: Do away with levels altogether in non-current content. Have ranks or something in current expansion and open up the old world for adventuring and XP that does more or less the same with your character but isn't tied to some specific number. That's a more radical idea but if it could be made to work would surely be more flexible and less about reaching to hit a number.

The problem is that the journey from 1-120 is actively bad and confusing. They could squish it all down to 50 or 80 levels and it would still be actively bad.

[Onikaroshi]

New players are unlikely to be intimidated with a 1-120 haul. First off, new players get a boost just for buying the game. For that alone I wish that reasoning would never come up. It's bogus.

I would much rather they fix leveling so it makes more sense or at least frame it in such a way so that players get the sense of participating in some history or adventure while going through the area. They also need to fix leveling so that you get real character rewards for advancing instead of this desert of levels where you get nothing.

Whatever the case, leveling could use some love but the problem with it isn't 1-120.

Yea, the timelines are really freaking screwy and it makes leveling awkward, specially now that level scaling is in.

You can bounce back and forth in the timeline multiple times while leveling.... since Cata negated the old world stuff. And then there's the "story in raid" problem that the big bad throughout the whole expansion you level in dies without your knowledge as you move on to the next one. It's just... awkward.

[Deleted]

Time for level squish was when we hit 100. Now it's mostly time for a different game owned by a different company.

[WskyDK]

Sure, whatever.
There’s only two levels anyways; max level, or not.

[Aurabolt]

Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised most favor a Level Revamp ^_^

Several things would need to be taken into consideration with a Level squish including Starter Edition Accounts (20 is the cap) and minium levels for certain things like Epic Land Mounts (currently 40).

Alot will need to be factored more or less but it would be worth it IMO. And they can just mass email everyone with an active or inactive account explaining the Level Revamp, problem solved.

[Deleted]

Would you mind explaining why no? I’m not questioning your opinion I’m just generally curious to see all sides.

EVERYTHING in the game is pretty much associated with level. A lot more will break than compared to an ilvl squish

[Torto]

Voted no but after reading this thread I've changed my mind. The later levels are meaningless as you learn no new skills and feels unrewarding. My preference would be to go back to the old stat tree system where you get a point to put into whatever you want when you gain a level.

[Bhorin]

I'd be fine with keep 120 but lowering the exp requirement significantly, especially after 60.

[Femininity]

The cap level feels arbitrary.

[Otimus]

I'd rather they just make the entire world scale 10-whatever level the previous expansion was, and just let people quest wherever the hell they want until they get to new expansion content.

I think that'd make leveling more enjoyable more than any squishes or tweaks.

Anything else, they're never going to do because it'd eat into selling boosts too much.


But they seriously do need to do something about leveling feeling so unrewarding unless you just flat out love leveling for a lot of the later levels. They should just add more talents, at least.

[kamuimac]

Hello my fellow MMO-C friends, I had a thought today after sitting back and taking a long long mental stroll through my time in WoW; Is it time for WoW to have a level squish?

Now I can see an argument for no, because people may feel like they regress which is not what a RPG is supposed to be, but I think I have a few pretty solid reasons as to why it could be useful.

First and foremost I believe would be the current situation of spells/talents. If you think about it right now a lot of classes do not gain another ability/spell past level 80/85 and with the new cap going to 120 that’s nearly 1/3rd of your leveling experience without gaining a single new ability. To me personally it just makes the leveling experience a huge grind and I don’t feel my character get stronger after my final ability. Now yes, you do get talents up to level 100, but even then sometimes they’re just passives and don’t actually grant a new button to hit.

Secondly, you can see with this recent changes to some specs talent trees that Blizzard is running out of creative and new ideas (baking old legendaries and artifact traits into talents). Again, just my personal opinion, but I’d rather see a level squish and a reduction in talent rows that could get rid of some of the less then desirable talents and really make choice matter again.

Last, the levels are generally getting a little out of hand. Think about it, we are now DOUBLE the original level cap and leveling alts does take quite a bit of time now even with the changes recently implemented to help improve it. Having numbers such as “Level 120” is almost as crazy as saying you’re doing 1 million DPS (in my opinion at least).

What I could see is making the 1-40 level of the game as vanilla having 50-60 be WOTLK/BC, 60-70 Cata and Mists, 70-80 WoD and Legion and then increasing from there. Obviously these numbers do bring their own level of issues such as flying in zones that could use it prior to being the current level. So these are definitely up for debate.

I’m curious to see what everyone’s opinions are. Do you think WoW could use a Level Squish or are you okay with how it is?

yes - and blizzard knows it too - they are just too afraid how playerbase will react.

i kinda think they will do level squish toghether with itlv squish in 10.0

[Slashnox]

100% yes, the stat squish has revived legion in my opinion, makes it feel more natural to see numbers like 20,000 as hp and not 400M

A level squish would make it even better

[Peacemoon]

I think they really need to look at how the levels flow, and the sense of progression. At the moment, after 60 you don't get many new abilities or talents.

The answer may involve a level squish.

It could also involve something like the artifact ui, whereby each level you get a trait, and can decide the route to take to unlock passive bonuses and 1 or 2 active abilities. This doesn't necessarily need to effect max level power as at max level it could be all baked in and taken for granted towards character power (like how artifacts themselves were balanced).

Maybe instead of getting abilities for free after level 20 or 30 (once you have your core stuff) the rest of it could be learned via a system of unlocks like the artifact system. Then its up to the player if, for example, you want to work towards Barkskin or Demoralising Roar first. By max level you'd have everything unlocked anyway so its more of a discussion about the player's progression journey.

[Dastreus]

WoW 2 more like.

[Demeia]

Gold cannot be reset. The wow token has given in game gold a real world worth. Take that away and lawsuits would follow something along the lines of " I bought a wow token and now you've taken away the proceeds of it. Resetting gold wouldn't even work. people like me with many millions in gold would just buy lots of expensive items shortly before any gold reset and sell them afterwards, I might not have as much gold afterwards but relative to everybody else I would still be rich.
As for wow2, it aint happening. They have said many times the current game gets tweeks and upgrades in patches slowly over time. The game we play now is basically wow2 with all the upgrades we've had over the last few years.

WoW2 might not happen but I find your reasons suspect. Old world gold would exist and continue to exist; there would be old world auction houses and old world places where you could spent it.

However, you could not use it in the new world: you could not sell anything you bought on the old world in the new world: the new world would exclusively have new world items bought with new world gold.

So you would lose nothing and blizzard could give you plenty of notice in advance. And things on the old world--like old world pets--could only be sold/bought on old world auction houses. Old gold would have value just not the same value... I suspect that would solve token problems especially since they would still sell old world tokens--which would be worth titanic amounts of gold as fewer people would play old world content.

[Healing Rain]

They'll never do a level squish. They need to keep some sense of progression in the game. If you're unhappy with the stat squish you can just turn off floating combat text. That option wouldn't exist with a level squish.

[Emaias]

As some have mentioned it’s not generally that people are opposed to having any number of levels since it’s just a relative term, but it’s that in the current level system it doesn’t seem rewarding. Your character doesn’t really gain anything past level 60 and at 80/85 it’s pretty much just a big grind of no character progression.