Poll: how do you feel about level squish

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

So with a squish, you would instead just have 2 big levels. The squish wouldn't change the lack of progression, it would just make that feeling of 100-120 being 2 levels, a reality. What they need is a new form of progression, like the artifacts in legion, that is specific to leveling up in new expansions, but not tied to AP.

It also is an issue of leveling sucks, and Ion even admitted it finally. Honestly I think the fact you can do any zone in any order really broke the immersion and story progression element of leveling.

[Ungeir]

They won't but the can add ability enhancements, expanding on the scrapped wod system (one of the few things that worked in that expansion, though it shouldn't have been random), you can easily expand out things to 120 levels+

They removed so many abilities that they could return to space it out, but that's not the game anymore, they don't want that, so we get left with a shell.

I would also like the addition of more meaningful progression. Absolutely. I also think that will eventually happen (but probably not until a MAJOR class/spec overhaul - basically WoW 3.0).

However until then wouldn't you rather they are honest about progression. The current progress is only about 10 levels. Yes, that would be weird in an RPG. But it also makes it perfectly clear to players just how toned-down many of the RPG elements have become. Assassin's Creed has more level and ability progression than WoW at this point.

[Hadriker]

You are pretty much mentioning what Guild Wars 2 has more or less. While you don't upgrade any combat skills necessarily, their mastery system is alternate progression each content patch or expansion. Max level is always 80 since the beginning of the game. When you visit old world content or things, you are scaled down to the max level of the zone. You are overpowered generally because of runes, stats on gear etc when doing so.

That is cool. I never played GW2. didn't know they did that. I love the point buy systems in tabletop RPGs like GURPS.

[crono14]

That is cool. I never played GW2. didn't know they did that. I love the point buy systems in tabletop RPGs like GURPS.

Yeah like for instance when they introduced gliding with their first expansion, you put mastery points into gliding longer, or different abilities while gliding. Other points in that expansion allowed you to attune with different factions and you could open chests in the world or become immune to areas that had poison. Mounting in a similar fashion might allow you to jump further with your mount or unlock different abilities with your mount.

Combat wise at least, they release new spec and talent trees for existing classes and you do have to unlock every ability with Hero points in your class. So each expansion does add a lot of new things, but gear is also fairly normalized in the game meaning if a new expansion releases, your gear is never invalidated. Progression in the game is mostly cosmetic in nature, so some people don't like that and some people do. But to the topic on point, work on your character is never wasted and doing old content is also always relevant to gain XP or for doing events etc.

[mergulhao21]

Positive! How about:

Vanilla: 1-60
TBC: 60-61 (Vanilla content gets 1/10 xp)
WotLK: 61-62 (TBC content gets 1/10 xp - Vanilla gets no XP)
Cataclysm: 62-63 (WotLK content gets 1/10 xp - TBC gets no XP)

... and so on, till

BoA 66-67 (Legion content gets 1/10 xp - WoD gets no XP)

So there would be super hard/long levels though, but since contents of the current exp scales according to your level, it wouldn't make much difference.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Positive! How about:

Vanilla: 1-60
TBC: 60-61 (Vanilla content gets 1/10 xp)
WotLK: 61-62 (TBC content gets 1/10 xp - Vanilla gets no XP)
Cataclysm: 62-63 (WotLK content gets 1/10 xp - TBC gets no XP)

... and so on, till

BoA 66-67 (Legion content gets 1/10 xp - WoD gets no XP)

So there would be super hard/long levels though, but since contents of the current exp scales according to your level, it wouldn't make much difference.

I'd argue you should do the inverse. Shorten up Vanilla, keep the expansions their current length.

Posted it I think back on page 1, but make Classic go 1-60, BC/Wrath 40-60 (which makes these ancient, out of timeline expansions optional now), MoP/Cata 60-70, WoD 70-80, Legion 80-90, BFA 90-100.

[Alexeht]

ilvl squish was needed, but problem is that they now want to ilvl squish every two expansions because they have to have like 40ilvl (probably more, I don't bother to check) difference each tier and it will make leveling experience worse and worse, which means new players will bounce from the game even faster than normal (yeah I know that there is free character boost, but still).

---edit---

ups you were talking about level squish - it is really bad idea, I don't appreciate it...
I agree with OP that leveling is a issue, not number of max levels

[mergulhao21]

I'd argue you should do the inverse. Shorten up Vanilla, keep the expansions their current length.

Posted it I think back on page 1, but make Classic go 1-60, BC/Wrath 40-60 (which makes these ancient, out of timeline expansions optional now), MoP/Cata 60-70, WoD 70-80, Legion 80-90, BFA 90-100.

Yeah, I read it, but that way, they would need another lvl squish again in a near future.

Maybe reducing Vanilla to 1-40 and earning 5 lvls per exp.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Yeah, I read it, but that way, they would need another lvl squish again in a near future.

Maybe reducing Vanilla to 1-40 and earning 5 lvls per exp.

You could maybe cut the expansion sets to 5, yeah.

Honestly if I were looking at the expansion squish I'd look at what expansions people most dislike and make them optional.

Which sounds like it's BC and Wrath right now.

[Aresk]

The goal was to keep the same amount of time for the same gain (so getting to max level wouldn't change in terms of time investment). In that instance, I think that it largely doesn't matter (and thus voted don't care). It would accomplish reducing numbers but at the same time would make rewards feel even further away. I feel like the greater issue isn't the number of levels but the distribution of abilities and the lack of rewards in later expansion's level experience, and they could do that with or without a level squish.

[Th3Scourge]

So with a squish, you would instead just have 2 big levels. The squish wouldn't change the lack of progression, it would just make that feeling of 100-120 being 2 levels, a reality. What they need is a new form of progression, like the artifacts in legion, that is specific to leveling up in new expansions, but not tied to AP, just XP.

It's not like we'll ever really feel the same progression leveling up in a new expansion anyways. You basically get nerfed every level with stat scaling.

It would but needs to be implemented with a raft of changes, specifically to the talent and skill system to have the feeling that you progress your character with each level.

An example of this would be to have a levelling talent system that would earn you a talent point/skill point each level and goes all the way to max level. Upon reaching max level your character would 'unlock' a new talent system similar to what we have now which would supersede the levelling system. Levelling and max level are two completely different games right now, so this could just take advantage of that.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Most of the expansion levels actually mean you get weaker anyway than stronger. I think even if we agree that most levels are largely useless, there is still a need for some minmum amount per expansion (probably between 5 and 10), since each of them reduce your previous expansion's powers slightly, if we condensed it to 2-3 the decline would probably be too steep. I think the largest potential for getting rid of levels is classic, there is no reason that half of the curent levels are gained in content that amounts to <20% of your characters story and power progression.

One of the most likely constellations I've seen is reducing classic down to 20-30 levels and then 5 for each expansion. I think that leaves enough room for gradual scaling down of secondary stats while also allowing for some content unlocks like in BfA wich happen every 2 levels.

- - - Updated - - -

You could maybe cut the expansion sets to 5, yeah.

Honestly if I were looking at the expansion squish I'd look at what expansions people most dislike and make them optional.

Which sounds like it's BC and Wrath right now.

BC and Wrath have just the worst questing quality by today's standard. Wrath quests are mostly boring, but they are at least grouped nice enough already where BC quests still suffer from some of the classic quest problems. Cata is where they start to slowly get better and tell a proper story at least that you can follow. When I leveled my last characters in legion for the mage towers I dreaded the BC/Wrath segment the most. I wish I could have stayed in EK/Kalimdor tbh, but sadly Blizzard was really conservative with their scaling here and only allows them to scale up to 60.

That being said, there is also an issue with scaling everything infinitely, as it affects the solo capability at max level, which is a rather annoying thing.

[Gavll]

Or you know, just take a page out of WoD and XIV's book and interspace abilities with ability enhancements so that you get something every few levels. WoD's "Avenger's Shield hits 2 more targets" is just as good as a new ability in terms of leveling. Plus, they could add more abilities, they've removed so many that they created this mess.

- - - Updated - - -



It works if you're going for sandbox, wow is themepark, it's marketed as themepark. I'm not a sandbox player, I like direction.

It used to more sandboxy though. There wasn't really any direction in Vanilla and very little in TBC. It's only in Wrath they really added story and direction

[Thelxi]

I could care less. Levels are just arbitrary numbers. I'd only be concerned with how long the leveling takes, which has nothing to do with the number of levels.

My real concern is the influence of the level boost that is probably one of their biggest cash cows, and how all changes to leveling over the past couple of years have made the boost more and more attractive.

[Cosmic Janitor]

It used to more sandboxy though. There wasn't really any direction in Vanilla and very little in TBC. It's only in Wrath they really added story and direction

I'm not sure story - or its absence - is indicative of either sandbox or themepark. A sandbox lives by "making your own fun" and a themepark is mostly about doing content that is themed in a way that it gives you the feeling to be part of something. While WoW is definitely mostly a themepark, I'd argue that especially classic was not much of a sandbox, the game was and still is, rather restrictive either way as it never allowed for much creativ expression from the players in the first place. What is different though is that in classic you were hardly part of the world, you were there to do things in a world that was themed after what characters did in warcraft and you could visit the themepark rides, well most of it was more a petting zoo, to see the places and walk on the paths these characters had walked on before. Once you actually add story to a game you leave the demon of themepark though, as now you are no longer just there for the ride, you are the ride now, at least if you can ignore the other twats around you.

Classic and TBC certainly had less direction, but I would still never classify either of the two as sandboxes, even though you certainly had to come up with your own goals.

[andrewjoy]

I'm more for turning it into a system like the new profession system:


Classic: 1-60. Each expansion after that has it's own level ranges.
BC: 1-10 BC levels.
Wrath: 1-10 Wrath levels.
Cata: 1-10 Cata levels.
...

That is a FANTASTIC idea!

They could go far with that. Think of it like this, you get to new60 and you can do classic content and its all at your level , you dont get xp from it but its worth doing for gear transmog etc.

Then you do 1-10 TBC , this does NOT increase your power vs lvl 60 stuff but you can now do the above for TBC , and so on and so forth.

This would solve so many issues with massive ilvl and stat rises every xpac. You could put like TBC mastery on TBC gear and that makes you more powerful in TBC , Wrath mastery on wrath gear that makes you more powerful for that etc etc etc.

They need to do this, it would be an insane amount of work, but just think of all that insane amount of content you have and can still do!

[huth]

Also from a new play perspective telling them to get to 120 can come across as daunting.

Can or does? Do you have any evidence new players view it that way?

[Deleted]

My sugestion for this problem, wich i posted on the official forums before is that we should do away with the concept of infinite leveling.

Sure, a straight up nerf to the number would still be positive, but that would not fix the underlying problem.

My sugestion is to have the level cap be 60, wich is achieved by leveling in the vanilla world (cataclysm now, minus the max level zones).
After that you get expansion levels on each expansion. 10 on each.
This would make it possible to embark directly into the latest expansion without slogging through all the other ones in a gigantic leveling process.

Now, in order to keep balancing progressive, your gear from a later expansion got "worn out" and is less effective in the new expansion (basically nerfing it to level 60 gear in the new land), wich would incentivate you to get new gear to explore the new content.
This means there would still be an order to the expansions, but this number is basically hidden. The point is that the gear from the latest expansion is good for all past ones, but past gear can't be used on the new expansion to it's full effectiveness.

After this theres 2 ways to go about it on how scaling works. We can have expansion levels for the different expansions add up behind the scenes, emulating the current live process, so you can go 2 expansions later and one shot stuff, or not and make all of the content current in a way, but cutting the ammount of population at the latest expansion.

So, to give an example. 60 is the level cap. This allows you to step into expansions. On TBC you will quest to expansion (TBC) level 10, Wrath comes out, you can step on it from level 60, you got in and you need to level to expansion (Wrath) level 10, but behind the scenes you would also increase to expansion (TBC) level 20 (equivalent of live level 80 for TBC).

This means that behind the scenes, things are increasing all the same, but for the player it equates always to 10 expansion levels of the current expansion. The gear "nerf" comes immediatly at the start upon reaching an unkown land and having vanquished powerful foes in the previous one (new players won't experience a nerf coming straight from level 60). From there onwards player power only increases with the new gear. The other thing i'd add is an expansion themed talent row to serve as the reward for leveling. This talent row would only be themed and useable for the expansion you are in and is replaced by a different one on a new expansion (I call it the MAX level talent row). But your previous expansion gear is just as powerful as it was for the previous expansion, just not for the new one. But, the new gear is good for all previous expansions.

Aside from that, i'd just like to see events added to the leveling process (invasions tech) and just have a main storyline quest chain to follow.