Class feel is also about combat difficulty in solo content

[Dalheim]

Difficulty doesnt have to = slower leveling speed. Why not have challenging but highly rewarding (xp) content available for those that dont want to mindlessly grind reskinned quests

Well, I've never been against options ofc!

If they can add things for both sides, It's all good.

[PaladinBash]

I'd love Wrath leveling where it was fun and engaging and fairly fast but not quite as mindless as it is now. Hurrdurr the babies cry as they cry that leveling at all exists. Let them. They'll never be happy. Same goes with people that will never be happy that leveling is 'hard'. It's never going to be. No matter what Blizzard does with it you people will always complain it's too fast and easy or not fast and easy enough. For me personally, Wrath leveling was the best mix between being fast and easy but that's because Wrath talents and classes were at their highpoint in a lot of cases so it was fun.

[Mirishka]

The mentality that every level/zone/quest should test the full capabilities of your toolkit and utility is idiotic.

I'm sorry but if that's the game you want, go play Dark Souls or one of the thousand games trying desperately to capture what made it special.

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Before they reach a point where they can feel challenged at all, they will already have gotten bored of the game.

And this guy. Who died and made you Grand Authoritarian of how everyone who plays WoW will feel? Not everyone correlates challenge with enjoyment, not everyone needs every pull of that 'bring me 8 bear asses' quest to be a life-and-death struggle. Some people just want to level, some people just want to see the stories, some people are dinking around on alts or trying to catch up to their friends.

This is why Blizzard designs the game and people like you play it. Because some of you take the way you think, the way you like things, and expect-borderline-demand that it be the only way people are allowed to experience and enjoy the game. You might think that's normal, but yeah... it isn't.

And Blizz doesn't listen to that noise because they're not interested in killing their MMO.

[Dorthonion1]

For sure levelling is way too easy, except for draenor

[mojusk]

Because nobody wants difficult solo content when you level.

If I'm leveling I want it to be done as quick as possible.

nobody eh? i like to challange myself by soloing elites and rares etc. sadly retail leveling is has no such thing.
not every mob should be a dark souls boss encounter. there should still be room for relaxed leveling. but ideally there should be room for both.
hard doesnt mean that it just takes more time.

[Flarelaine]

Overwhelming majority of people who play this game are casuals and if you think they want annoyances when leveling, then you are mistaken.

That isn't anything new. I sometimes feel like half the traffic here is in threads complaining about something not handed over on a silver platter, like allied races or flying.

[Reinhart11]

OR

Maybe because as usual the real deal starts in the endgame with raids, challenge mode dungeons and whatever other stuff expansion gives you.

People want to get there, it's not unusual. Or what, you think eating/drinking after every 3 mobs is "engaging and fun" gameplay?

The real deal? I had a good laugh. Thanks for that. The only hard content in this game is mythic raiding and mythic+ 15 and above. Otherwise, the endgame is as much as a joke as leveling is, if not even more because you literally can go eradicating everything around you as a decently and well equipped player. These NPCs in endgame have even less of a chance to kill you than those in leveling zones. Rare mobbs and Elite mobbs are no different. And percentage wise, most people don't even do mythic raiding and high mythic plus.

Apparently, based on numbers, less and less people play Retail these days. So it might be the case, that a majority does not enjoy how leveling, class design and high end content work together, combined with grinds and loads of endless "fuck you" RNG.

People who don't realise that leveling in a RPG should get more attention, options and be challenging, at least if the player wants it, and promote group play, because its also an MMO, have no clue what they are talking about when it comes to these aspects.

And there are certainly ways to spice up leveling. But Blizzard rather presents an endgame, which is completely meaningless, tedious and boring these days.

And if leveling is as mindless and boring as it currently is, Blizzard would at least have to design the endgame properly. Which they don't do either, otherwise way player would play this game. Because this game has the potential to be fun. Older expansions show that, Classic shows it currently.

[d00dles]

They won't get hybrid tax back, because there is nothing positive about it, it will just piss off a shitton of people. Of course as usual you will find some special snowflakes like in this thread claiming like "omuhgad this is how things should be!", but nope.

This hybrid tax crap literally ruined Vanilla for me, I was stack healbotting raids with Paladin good 3/4 of Vanilla, until I rolled this lock as a main.

They specifically said they want to be mostly additive during this expansion and focus less on class redesigns.

All they promised was to bring back certain spells, the panel had nothing about "old" class mechanics like that. Also, I don't see hybrid tax coming back because at this point people would rather reroll than deal with that.

Please don't interrupt with unrelated stuff, adults talking here. Where are your manners?

Please don't be degenerate like that, no one is forcing you to engage with every single post.

[Gaidax]

So it might be the case, that a majority does not enjoy how leveling, class design and high end content work together, combined with grinds and loads of endless "fuck you" RNG.

-OR- it might not. Just sayin'

I know what I want, that's why I mostly do mythic raids in WoW only. That does not mean I have to project my desires on what amounts to game's story mode, which is what leveling is since TBC.

Heck, I myself do not really want leveling to be bloody Dark Souls. If leveling will ever be challenging for me on my lock as a veteran mythic raider, then all the leveling paths will look like path of glory. I don't think people will stick around for that, aside for those special snowflakes who want Dark Soul re-imagined in WoW.

Wrong game, m8.

[Specialka]

They should add avoidable hard hitting attacks on mobs in the openworld. So it is not a good call to pull a large pack.

[Eapoe]

I'm picking this post but could have picked others.... You all are the problem with this game and have been for some time. All you care about is there instanced content, the world is irrelevant to you. But the world is the setting for everything and you want to be a god plowing through everything, never dying, no challenge.

Now, do I want to die as much as you do early in Classic? No. But you're missing two things... If there's no risk, then you don't get the feel of accomplishment either and (to OP's point), there's no reason to give people back abilities like totems etc if the mobs are so easy that you don't need those abilities.

Finally, some of you are doing the "I = everyone" logic which is laughably wrong (I'm not looking at the quoted poster but at Gaidax and others who purport to speak for everyone).

Yet, that is exactly what you are doing. Speaking for everyone and stating that Type C player(s) are what’s wrong with the game.
The person you quoted, and subsequently stated doesn’t care about the world, has directly in their post they care about the story while leveling. That person specifically states they care about something, they just feel the challenge is best kept for instanced situations.
No mob in the world, excluding those specifically designed for groups of players (yes, they exist in Retail as well), requires the use of management of 1/2 of your abilities. This is true even for Classic. People loved to argue how hard Vanilla was, and how hard Classic will be, and how you need to be so super careful and use everything available to you or you die. Well, that got proven wrong by world power levelers. Players that mass pulled and AoE spammed things down. The main difference is when I hit my limit of how many mobs I can handle in Retail I don’t have to sit and drink right after wards. The issue with mob count exists for both, the limit is the only difference, and not having to eat/drink means no slow down. I laugh at the people who talk about how they die constantly while leveling because it’s “hard.” No, you just don’t know your limits. That’s not difficulty, that’s ignorance.

[Sharper13]

I'd like Blizzard to add one-shot mechanics that are easy to avoid.

Standing in AoE, not interrupting a certain spell, standing in frontal cone damage - all leads to death.

You can still zerg, but you just have to perform simple interrupts and do simple mechanics, which will aid players in learning the basics for when they hit end game as well.

[Echocho]

No we don't need to turn "retail" into classic

[Amariw]

The thing that I've really enjoyed about the classic experience again is how dangerous some mobs can be. Pulling 2 casters usually means I'm dead. So you need to re-plan and use some form of decision making. I wish this feeling of danger was added back in. Pulling packs of 10 and just blasting them down isn't really engaging

I agree. But classic achieved that through high melee damage and for casters, high mana costs. It was still fun cuzz you had to use your tools intelligently, but slow paced. Later expacs such as mop achieved it through dangerous but counterable abilities, also achieving engagement and fun while keeping the powerful and fast paced feel of modern wow.

[vitor210]

Because nobody wants difficult solo content when you level.

If I'm leveling I want it to be done as quick as possible.

speak for yourself. Luckly 99% of this comunity doesn't think like that, but as usual its the 1% that jumps up and down screaming at the top of their lungs that casualized WoW.

If you want to be "done as quick as possible" go play mobas or fps games, this is an rpg after all, the jorney is part of the adventure, not the ending

[Shinzai]

Leveling is a school now? A chore? Let people do whatever the fuck they want, dude.

And this is basically how the entire game became a watery, incoherent mess outside of the most difficult raids.

Levelling took effort for a large chunk of WoW's life. It made people think about their abilities, their attacks, made them think about how to approach a difficult pack of mobs and so on and so forth. So yes, it was basically a school. By the time you get to end game, you should actually be at least partially competent at your class.

When it started to become "just aoe the fuck out of everything", it ceased to have any level of engaging gameplay, people that might've read quest text stopped altogether and everyone just jumped on board the idiotic cookie clicker adventure that levelling became.

Then,thr second anyone was faced with an end game challenge, they didn't have a clue what to do. People have been taught to shit spam their way through everything with 0 thought.

It's why LFR is required, for the lowest common denominator, it's why old difficulties have been raised up on pedestals, where "normal difficulty" actually just used to be normal difficulty.

People just doing whatever the fuck they want is why the game has suffered over the last decade. People don't want to play Wow, they want to play their separate, individual interpretation of what WoW should be, compared to what it was.

It's s why people complain about no flying, it's why people complain about having to travel to CoT for the anniversary event, it's why people don't have a clue Wtf is going on lore wise, because ain't nobody got time to read a few sentences of quest or flavour text.

The core gameplay and design of WoW is what made it popular.

The current model and design is what made it much less popular.

Catering for casuals estranged the core audience and left Blizzard with a bunch of inconsistent players who don't really care about the game and essentially treat it like another Candy Crush, to pass their time as conveniently as possible.

The people that enjoy WoW's current levelling are the same types that get hyped over returning to their X Clicker game, to see what upgrades they got that mean nothing, for their treadmill to nowhere, that they don't really care about and will drop without even a thought to move onto a new game.

"Go play Classic if you want a challenge while levelling." some said.

And people did, and it's great. However, Blizzard also picked up on this fact, finally, after having been powerfully shown that a huge player base still exists for the older style of gameplay.

TLDR: You'll never know, because you don't even read quest text.

[Gaidax]

People don't want to play Wow, they want to play their separate, individual interpretation of what WoW should be, compared to what it was.

"Thus let me then write my own individual interpretation of what WoW should be..." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean, if you want classic - play classic is a good answer there, it was a game different in regards to leveling because you had to do 60 levels there as opposed to 10 in every expansion ever since. Classes there were more basic, more stripped down and had more struggle early on, even if after level 30-ish for most it converged on to some one way to do their grind that did not change until level 60.

My paladin in Vanilla basically did one thing only 1-60 - run to some mob and start autoattacking. My warlock did one thing only level 32-60 - run around tab dotting everything. Neither was how you really played these classes endgame. So I am not even sure what I "learned" there.

[CrawlFromThePit]

Because nobody wants difficult solo content when you level.

If I'm leveling I want it to be done as quick as possible.

Difficulty of combat and leveling speed are 2 entirely separated issue designed by completely different people. You can have very quick leveling with challenging combat, you can also have very easy combat with extremely long leveling.

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Why do you want questing to be done as quck as possible? Is it perhaps because it's not fun? Why is it not fun? Maybe because it's a cakewalk and "the real game" is waiting at max level? Don't you think that in itself is a problem?

This is the core issue with WoW's leveling^

The problem is that the answer to those question come down to one thing: reworking every single enemy in the game and ideally remaking the entire combat system.

Tab targetting combat system was outdated BEFORE WoW came out. The team focused on having a variety of enemies instead of quality enemies, which is a good thing for a new game otherwise we would get bored of fighting the same stuff all the time, but the problem is that never evolved.

There's no risk management, no ressource management, just reward for free, everything feels meaningless. Now they choose to make leveling completely trivial instead of reworking it.
On paper I would say this is a retarded decision, but considering the state of the game, it's pretty much what needs to happen. Everyone already has 2 of each class maxed, I have no idea why people still lvl toon, I guess for heritage armor. As for the new players who never played WoW before, why would they want to go through so many hours of LITERALLY THE SAME THING EVERY MINUTE? There is NO DIFFERENCE between each mobs they all do the same thing, if there's something different it's entirely inconsequential and automatically ignored. Blizzard won't make mobs more interesting it's too much work, so the only other option is making lvling as quick and trivial as possible. That's just a sad reality.

[Loeko]

"Needs to be made"? Says who?

Seems like people above you disagree with that. Get through your skull - you are not the only person playing this game, sun and stars don't revolve around you. Overwhelming majority of people who play this game are casuals and if you think they want annoyances when leveling, then you are mistaken.

Then they get the boring BFA classes they deserve. I'm not saying that they're wrong thinking the way they do but it comes at a price and that price is "less fun".

The thing is that, as it's been pointed out by many people here, it creates a vicious cycle : want to go fast, fights become easier, they also become more boring, people want to go even faster, fights become easier and even more boring and before you realize it, you end up with BFA classes and you just press two keys to destroy everything that stands in front of you. You actually only start playing your class when you get to end game instances, which is a shame because it makes 90% of the game content completely tasteless.

And when people ask for it to be harder, they don't necessarily mean tedious like the examples you mention (drink between mobs, etc...). I believe it is possible to find a middle ground where content outside of instances can feel challenging and rewarding without having to be longer (unless you play your class poorly).

I don't know. Is having to play your class for 90% of the content that tedious and do we really have to wait for raids to have to use more than 2 or 3 spells to progress through the world?

[Powerogue]

OR

Maybe because as usual the real deal starts in the endgame with raids, challenge mode dungeons and whatever other stuff expansion gives you.

People want to get there, it's not unusual. Or what, you think eating/drinking after every 3 mobs is "engaging and fun" gameplay?

Classic players do. Why do they love it but retail players hate it now?