Idea: Level Squish

[probert]

Level 120...level 150...level 200. WoW has many years of life in it.

Way too much legacy content now, especially for alts. As it stands, you barely need to do 1-2 zones per expansion to get to the next 10 level bracket, thanks to XP boosts + heirlooms + rested bonus.

What if the next ilvl squish were to be a LEVEL squish for characters.

Thinking something like this:

Vanilla WoW: Levels 1-20
TBC, Wrath: Levels 20-25
Cata, Mop: Levels 25-30
WoD: Level 30-35
Legion: Level 35-40
BFA: Level 40-50
Next expansion; Level 50-60.

The other option, is to allow characters to level from 1-40 in any zone they chose once they get out of the starting zones for their faction/race/class.

Want to roll a Forsaken rogue? Get out of Tirisfal Glades around level 5, and go to any expansion you want. Like Mists of Pandaria? Land in Jade Forest and level from 5->40.

TBC content is very old at this point, and Wrath is getting long in the tooth. I'm not a fan of zone replacement like Cata did to vanilla -- for nostalgia purposes its always nice to have the option to go back. But for next characters, giving them the option on where to go to get to the level cap seems the most expedient option.

Thoughts?

[Deleted]

Hm, I actually really like the idea.

The amount of exp required per level will increase which will make leveling up 1 level give more satisfaction.
Also it will give less of mental burden to people "having" to level 120 levels.

The only problem I could think of right now is marketing wise. On the box of the new expansion it would say "increased level cap to 65!" or something heh..

Besides that, I would already like the idea of leveling anywhere I want (e.g. leveling from 1-120 in tbc/wotlk content).

[Sastank]

Nty. But I'm sure it sounded nice in your head.

[zubaja]

Not quite sure if this is the way to go. But considering that this is a suggestion, I'll take it with a grain of salt.
Granted, levelling to 120 seems like an immense chore, with all the content someone has to push through. But making Vanilla content 1 - 20 isn't the best option; progression would seem slow and unrewarding, especially to long-time players.

Consider the following:
- Player X starts a new alt. Levelling has been squished. Normally, you'd reach lv. 12 (aprox) at the end of the starting zone. This would then be lv. 4, a level usually associated when you're about the leave the sub-zone you start in.

[Dartz1979]

Level 120...level 150...level 200. WoW has many years of life in it.

Way too much legacy content now, especially for alts. As it stands, you barely need to do 1-2 zones per expansion to get to the next 10 level bracket, thanks to XP boosts + heirlooms + rested bonus.

What if the next ilvl squish were to be a LEVEL squish for characters.

Thinking something like this:

Vanilla WoW: Levels 1-20
TBC, Wrath: Levels 20-25
Cata, Mop: Levels 25-30
WoD: Level 30-35
Legion: Level 35-40
BFA: Level 40-50
Next expansion; Level 50-60.

The other option, is to allow characters to level from 1-40 in any zone they chose once they get out of the starting zones for their faction/race/class.

Want to roll a Forsaken rogue? Get out of Tirisfal Glades around level 5, and go to any expansion you want. Like Mists of Pandaria? Land in Jade Forest and level from 5->40.

TBC content is very old at this point, and Wrath is getting long in the tooth. I'm not a fan of zone replacement like Cata did to vanilla -- for nostalgia purposes its always nice to have the option to go back. But for next characters, giving them the option on where to go to get to the level cap seems the most expedient option.

Thoughts?

That idea seems good but they would have redo all the code and make sure nothing is broken mobs hitting you too hard or vice versa

[Vando]

Its a lot easier to sell a level boost when there are 120,150,200 levels instead of 60. Don't see this happening.

[Deleted]

Gotta have that Skinner box

[Deleted]

Not quite sure if this is the way to go. But considering that this is a suggestion, I'll take it with a grain of salt.
Granted, levelling to 120 seems like an immense chore, with all the content someone has to push through. But making Vanilla content 1 - 20 isn't the best option; progression would seem slow and unrewarding, especially to long-time players.

Consider the following:
- Player X starts a new alt. Levelling has been squished. Normally, you'd reach lv. 12 (aprox) at the end of the starting zone. This would then be lv. 4, a level usually associated when you're about the leave the sub-zone you start in.

That's just perception, because for me it would be the opposite. Gaining a level right now seems unrewarding. But he, to each his own right

[Darknessvamp]

Now you see this is the same logic of the few people who wanted leveling to last a bit longer and be more challenging... which they then did and all the same people complained about it.

[Kaeth]

What's the motivation behind a level squish? Unless players also level proportionately faster, all you're advocating for is less frequent congratulatory feedback from the Warcraft Skinner Box, and smaller numbers for the sake of smaller numbers. What's the advantage?

I can think of a lot of disadvantages. Following the last item squish, we're still dealing with broken scaling through dozens of levels of content, mobs with twice the health they should have, tanks in full heirlooms dying in two hits to dungeon trash. With all of the technical problems that would need to be ironed out (as with the currently existing ones, which don't seem to be receiving any developer attention), you need a really compelling reason to perform even more types of scaling squishes. No offense, but I don't see such a reason so far in this thread.

The item squishes happened because health, damage, and healing numbers were rising exponentially faster and faster out of control with the inflated stats on gear. This had already created real mechanical restrictions in design (remember Garrosh's multiple health resets in SoO?), and interface/display issues were on the way not too far down the line (chest piece with 150,000 STR, anyone?). But character levels don't experience power creep. They don't grow exponentially. They rise incrementally by 5 or 10 levels every couple of years. Why risk breaking so much of the game for an arbitrary change?

[Moxal]

No thank you.

IMO, between the stat and item level squishes and the ever present expansion gear resets, some “stat” of our character needs to remain constant, and for me that is the level.

The only way I’d be somewhat OK is if we squished to some convientant level, say 99 or 100 and we had some other number that went up with future content. But that would inevitably have the same problem, so why not just keep it the same?

[AngerFork]

Overall, I like the idea. I'd almost certainly at this point go more towards the 1-40 option as it assists both new classes going through Legion and things like the weird shifting storyline of warchiefs on the Horde side.

Curious, how would you handle Allied Races with this? Would they still start at 20, or something more like 10? What about classes like DK & DH, which currently start at 55 and 98 respectively?

[Dundebuns]

I'm sure Blizzard mentioned this when discussing the recent stat squish, and they threw out the reason that players would feel bad if they logged in and they went from being level 60 to level 40. But that's exactly the same a slogging in one day and having 1000 strength when you had 100,000 yesterday. I personally forsee they will have to do a level squish at some point, or something to that effect.

[crono14]

While it might seem like a good idea, what exactly is it supposed to fix? Older content is irrelevant and abandoned. If Blizzard came out and said we are going to be introducing reasons to go back and venture through older zones, then an easier way would just be to scale your level down to the particular zone you are in to that zone and do whatever that content was. Similar to how GW2 does it.

[Lightforged]

Ion talked about this in a previous Warcraft Q&A. He likes the idea but admits the idea would be hard to implement because many people are attached to that number. It is a part of their character's identity, it represents their journey.

[huth]

I personally forsee they will have to do a level squish at some point, or something to that effect.

They might do one, but there will never be a time where they would have to. Even the second stat squish was pretty pointless, the game would not be any worse of if it hadn't happened.

[Voltsmasher]

I agree with the change of going to any zone. I think it's awful how MoP zones basically get skipped because of the short leveling slot but we still have to deal with wrath or BC

Edited due to nearly failing reading comprehension

[dayne87]

No, my level represents my identity and the journey I have taken along the way. Ilvl doesn't matter so much to me.

I could see them STOP at 120 and instead introduce some new alternate advancement system like EQ games introduced. Perhaps an old-style talent tree where you do new content (or maybe some old world content) to gain AA points that you then put into your alternate tree to gain new skills/stats, etc. Ilvl would increase exponentially with the new content, of course, but they wouldn't be adding character levels for no reason.

I do find it difficult to think that in 1-2 expansions we'll be at 130, so 3-6 (depending whether they go 5 or 10 per xpac) xpacs from now we'll have 150 as the cap.

I believe many games do end up capping at 100 or near that and then introducing alternate systems. I think that is what WoW would have to do.

HOWEVER, most new players get a boost to 110 now if they purchase BFA I think (or maybe a 100 if they purchase base game) and now with Allied Races veteran players can start at 20, which reduces the amount of levels from 120 to 100 that they have to effectively earn.

They could potentially start allowing veteran players to start at lvl 40 or 50 or even 60, however, as the max ilvl rises. Perhaps with each xpact start the Allied Races at another 10 character lvls higher, which rewards veteran players. Then greatly accelerate the baseline content of 1-20, 1-30, 1-whatever the AR starting lvl is so that NEW players aren't unduly burdened while still learning mechanics.

[Rukh]

Level is sort of arbitrary and relative. I don't think it'd matter all that much. With the current tall model, level is going to rise no matter what and depending on how many expansions it could be in the 200s, or if you squish it it'll creep back in to the 100s soon enough.


I did have an idea though:

What if WoW borrowed yet another thing from GW2 and made the vanilla level cap be the level cap. It could be 50 or 100, doesn't really matter. Some nice number.
Then, each expansion has its own set of 10 levels, called mastry levels or something that are relative to the expansion. That way, when you go to the expansion zone, you're the equivalent of level 101 and level until 110 there, becoming strong. (Do away with the crappy level scaling that makes leveling feel so bad. Let people outlevel the start zones and let the end game zones be hard until they level enough).

The biggest goal here is players aren't all pushed in such a narrow slice of content in a game that actually has so much content. Imagine if you made your levels in BFA, yet if you haven't done Legion yet, you could go level 1-10 mastery there and do the endgame stuff there which would now still be relevant. Heck, you could go do burning crusade endgame stuff if you wanted. Another thing this would do is people in BFA 230 level greens wouldn't be astronomically more powerful than say Kil'Jaden in the Sunwell. It would actually be an epic fight again. Second, expansions would have correct leveling. You start out in the early expansion zones and level until you can fight in the later ones, like it used to be. So you actually feel stronger when you level, and yes the start zones for the expansion become easy as you become swole. That should happen. That's why leveling feels like obtaining power.

Problems:
The biggest hurdle to this, and possibly why they never have done anything like this is that obtaining gear is a core feature of WoW. Grinding up that iLevel is a fundamental motivator for many activities, so how can iLevel work if each expansion is relatively the same level? Well there are few answers. One could go the GW2 route, where when you cap your gear, you just don't worry about it anymore. You do content more for the transmogs than anything. Personally I think this does away with too much in a game like WoW. So another idea I had was that you could have an ilevel gem row for each equipment slot. One gem for each expansion. When you get a piece of gear in an expansion zone, you get the transmog, and you can either just equip it, in which case it replaces what you had but it takes all the old gems, or you could turn it in to a gem itself and put in to your current equipment.

In this way, you could have ilevel say, 100 legs in one expansion zone, but only 80 in another, though its the same equipment. If you find an ilevel 90 leg item in the second zone, either you turn it in to an ilevel leg gem and socked it, so your leg armor is now 100 in the first zone and 90 in the second, or you replace your equipment which takes on the old gems, and you still end up with ilevel 100 in the first zone and 90 in the second. The end goal here is in each expansion you could do the ilevel grind - i.e. dungeons and raiding and they would still be relevant to your character progress without making other expansions obsolete.

Second, one might worry that there aren't enough players to spread the game out this much. I'm not especially worried about this if Blizzard can get their sharding to work well. I think there are still enough players. If they are too worried, they could make previous expansion raids mainly raid-finder material so the competitive level raiding scene is still fairly narrow on content since not a ton of people raid competitively. (Though more might if they could choose other raids they liked from other expansions).

Benefits:
This game has been going for over a decade; around 14 years. There is so much content and a lot of it pretty good. Its a shame that its essentially trivial now. This would also take a lot of pressure off the latest expansion, whether it's BFA or whatever comes next, because other expansions would still be relevant and challenging to overcome. (relatively, in a WoW challenging way)

Achievements. Hey guise! I just finished Icecrown (25 heroic)! In 2018! Does anyone care? No. Its a trivial achievement that just takes some time to faceroll now. With only the most recent slice of content being relevant these days, so many more "achievements" are irrelevant than relevant. That feels bad. Achievements are supposed to be one of the big goals that keeps people coming back and currently so much of it is go faceroll this irrelevant thing. Currently more achievements involve ignoring challenge and grinding it out than involve overcoming challenging encounters and combat. Imagine if they moved all the current dungeon and raid achievements to historic (didn't take away any titles or mounts) and you could go work on achieving a significantly challenging ice crown, or black temple, or even Molten Core victory.

Oh yeah, the other main goal is that new expansions can then be added on a horizontal scale, so you don't keep increasing levels and having to deal with re-balancing everything under the sun.

[elgarta]

I'd actually they just remove the level caps on content as you go through them, but that won't happen since it will essentially mean endless scaling on legacy content, and I don't think people want to be fightibg level 150 coyotes in Westfall when they are helping a friend out.