Is "Renown" here to stay?

[FelPlague]

One class out of 12, and they are a special case due to not having anything to get unrpuned.

What?
you know ALL of the covenent abilities are new right? Not just old spells. its not "one class out of 12" its "all classes"
Also DH are getting some new spells in their base kit, aswell as they did actually get pruned a tiny bit in the past.

[MrLachyG]

Renown has literally nothing to do with levels, idk what the heck you are pretending, its literally just reptuation 2.0

thats like saying "Hey they introduced azerite residium, what if in the next expansion instead of levels titan residium increased!"

Like what are you even talking about.

Renown is literally rep, it was made to remove the massive buffs of bonus rep from events and from being a human, meaning they know how fast everyone can go, instead of feeling forced to balance around those few people, aswell as being able to work on specific ranks instead of being stuck with the 6000/12,000/21,000

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Well i mean that is not true, we have always gained new spells and talents while leveling, while true in BFA and Legion we didnt gain new talents or spells like leveling, in wod we did, and in shadowlands we are getting new spells (not new talents though)

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Yeah, literally 1 day being 60, then being forced to 50, then get back to 60 again in the same day, and do this for every expansion would feel dumb as shit, but every like 4 or 5 expacs, getting reset back down is fine, its not great but its fine, but every expansion would just be annoying and confusing.
"Im 60" "No your not your 50" "yes i am" "no the expansion just came out your 50, gotta level back up to 60"

Same wityh the ilvl squish, fine every few expansions, squishes should happen every few, not EVERY expansion.

I think squishing to 50 every expansion makes sense actually, they aren’t gonna want levels to creep up again. Stat squish is another thing entirely, those aren’t necessary every expansion

[Edward Wu]

What is with people and suggesting to have no more leveling/levels? Do they not understand this is a MMO?? It's bad enough we're reset to level 60 but to be stuck there is just horrible.

Imagine thinking the leveling in this game is anything resembling meaningful anymore. Most of the playerbase does not give a shit anymore, and want to skip the leveling entirely and get right to the endgame.

[Soeroah]

Leveling is supposed to be a soft reset of relative player power. Which is to say, every couple of years everyone has to start from scratch and for a while all the hardcore raiders and the new players are within a relatively smaller range of ilevels than they are at the end of an expansion. If they just did away with leveling ilevel would need to inflate even more so newer players could keep up and have a hope of raiding newer content, which would just make older raids redundant anyway.

It's like in Diablo-style games, where they can have seasons where the point is your character gets wiped every X months and you start over with new mechanics or the like. It's to keep everyone on a somewhat level playing field.

[Schattenlied]

What?
you know ALL of the covenent abilities are new right? Not just old spells..

You know covenant abilities are BORROWED POWERS right?

Not only will we be losing them when the expansion ends, but raising the level cap is not remotely required to justify their being added.

Which, in case you forgot, was how this conversation started... They are not adding new spells to the classes as we level, they are just adding borrowed powers... If they are just adding borrowed powers, why does the level cap need to keep increasing? Why can't it just stay at 60 and we get squished back down to 50 at the start of each expansion? We're losing borrowed powers every expansion, which is by far more jarring than the level squish could ever be, because the level squish is just an abritrary number, while losing borrowed powers actually changes the gameplay, often drastically... Additionally whatever lore justification there is for the borrowed powers being lost can also easily be used to explain any level or stat squishing... So really there's no reason not to squish us to 50 at the start of ever expansion, especially if they keep using borrowed powers.

That being said, IMO the borrowed powers trend needs to stop entirely, or be rarely used, and definitely far before the level and stat squishing should ever be considered a problem, borrowed powers are far more jarring for even the average player, and as the transition from Legion to BFA showed us, it can be disastrous to class design when they inevitably get removed.

DH are a special case because they are the only ones getting new base spells instead of unpruning, because they have nothing to unprune and Blizz don't want them to feel left out.

[Shelly]

Renown is a method of replacing reputation - although reputations still exist - that way they can just add more renown levels with each patch rather than adding an entire faction to gain reputation with - though my guess is that they'll do both.

[Echeyakee]

While leveling up between expansions does invoke traditional RPG vibes, however far wow has strafed from the notion of a traditional RPG, they also provide a seamless transition in terms of stats. Yes, it's hard to make this argument now, as AB screwed up the pacing in legion and made it even worse in BFA, to the point where each level feels like you're getting noticeably weaker, but it is still the main goal.

It allows for a smoother transition form end of expansion state of high secondary stats to fresh slate state in the new expansion. You drop the value of secondary stats with each level, while feeding good amount of primary stats so that player still feels stronger as they level. If you abandon leveling, you either need to let the secondary stats keep growing or force an abrupt reset, where even the thin veiled arguments of stat squish of "doing the same damage, relatively" don't hold up.

The latter option will feel extra shitty, you will just be weaker one day, objectively speaking and with no illusions to make it seem different. And the former has too many issues. Right now we have classes stacking their native crit chance to above 60%. A single expansion with no reset means they will hit a hard cap. And it will also lead to degenerate gameplay. Shadow already can reach haste levels in excess of 200% under certain conditions, do you want it to get to the point where rotation becomes irrelevant and they just spam void bolt? It's possible, with enough haste. Or for holy priests you can reach the levels of mastery where it will heal more than the original spell. Do you want to get to the point where spells you cast don't really matter, just the HoT that they leave does?

[thottstation]

When the game reaches Beta, EVERYTHING is here to stay.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

When the game reaches Beta, EVERYTHING is here to stay.

Did you only read the title of the thread? OP is very clearly talking about after the expansion.

[Baroclinic]

I think the argument is more that leveling hasn't really meant a whole lot the past few expansions other than numbers get bigger. It's much more interesting when you unlock more abilities or character decisions with leveling up, but honestly, with a game as old and expanded-on as WoW, it's no wonder they've run out of new abilities, and if they didn't, we'd just end up with more bloat and homogenization anyways. I don't think we should get rid of levels altogether, but we do need some innovation in this space to keep it interesting.

And this is coming from someone that gets loremaster ASAP every expansion just for the giggles of it, so it's not that I don't want to do leveling content, just that leveling itself seems redundant or useless as a system at this point for new expansions.

It's a joke. Now you get weaker, if not outright punished for leveling, until you get to that last level, from whence you start the whole game over again.

It serves no real purpose except to force you into what little lore is involved in each expansion.

[FelPlague]

You know covenant abilities are BORROWED POWERS right?

Not only will we be losing them when the expansion ends, but raising the level cap is not remotely required to justify their being added.

Which, in case you forgot, was how this conversation started... They are not adding new spells to the classes as we level, they are just adding borrowed powers... If they are just adding borrowed powers, why does the level cap need to keep increasing? Why can't it just stay at 60 and we get squished back down to 50 at the start of each expansion? We're losing borrowed powers every expansion, which is by far more jarring than the level squish could ever be, because the level squish is just an abritrary number, while losing borrowed powers actually changes the gameplay, often drastically... Additionally whatever lore justification there is for the borrowed powers being lost can also easily be used to explain any level or stat squishing... So really there's no reason not to squish us to 50 at the start of ever expansion, especially if they keep using borrowed powers.

That being said, IMO the borrowed powers trend needs to stop entirely, or be rarely used, and definitely far before the level and stat squishing should ever be considered a problem, borrowed powers are far more jarring for even the average player, and as the transition from Legion to BFA showed us, it can be disastrous to class design when they inevitably get removed.

DH are a special case because they are the only ones getting new base spells instead of unpruning, because they have nothing to unprune and Blizz don't want them to feel left out.

I love how you seem to have the memory of a gold fish as you keep forgetting context. Sideways here's new abilities, you say only one class gets them. I point out all 12 classes get them. You then say "no these are only borrowed power" yes. You are right. But you said "only 1 of 12 classes is getting these" which is a bald faced lie.

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When the game reaches Beta, EVERYTHING is here to stay.

Funny. Cuse the game reached beta... Yet they reworked Shadow priest during it... Funny

[iinverse]

We are getting old spells unpruned, plus new ones.

Get 0 new spells as mage. Nice work, blizz.

[Niwes]

It feels like Blizzard has created a new level 60 progression that is here to stay as a replacement to increasing levels when releasing a new expansion.

I think it would make a lot more sense for Renown to be used in 10.0 as opposed to increasing the level cap to 70 AND adding on top of that some kind of a new progression system for max level players. Since leveling itself won't take more than 7 hours, why even bother adding it for expansions after SL.

I think Renown would a be good base progression system for max level on top of which other new systems can be based and tied to, similar to the build-your-own talent tree conduit system. Very "next-gen" like innovative systems IMO. Really hope these two systems can stay in some shape or form beyond SL and for leveling to never increase beyond 60 ever again.

Now if they could just redo the leveling experience of previous expansions to include max level zone stories and end game bosses in a condensed, solo friendly version, similar to the new starting experience, that would be awesome!

And While at it, might as well create a solo queue for old expansion raids for all but mythic difficulty so players don't have to travel to the entrance, it would make farming them for xmog, mounts and pet collection much more convenient, a much needed QOL feature imo.

For new players who just started playing at the release of 10.0, they can be offered the choice to level up from 1 to 60 in 10.0 so both old and new players can play together.

In Lakrin's words in his comment below, he seems to fully understand what I am getting at: " the argument is more that leveling hasn't really meant a whole lot the past few expansions other than numbers get bigger. " THAT plus the fact that they changed it so it doesn't take more than a single evening to level up to max in SL.

i think in a good degree you are right. i have friends talked since years about the same thing. so its in some form of logical/natural evolvement and totally COULD be.

but i personally dont think Blizz will do this. i think they know (because they have data) if/that a lot of ppl steadily come back every xpac to level a toon, look at the story told while leveling, hang around a while and leave until next xpac. they buy the xpac and 2-3 months of playtime. if this number of ppl in Blizzards data is relatively big, its a nice profit for Blizz.

since leveling is used to present the introduction story and a lot of ppl dont like that max level side progress „systems“ i think Blizz is too much feared, to loose money here.

but thats just my assumption. i dont have above mentioned data.

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When the game reaches Beta, EVERYTHING is here to stay.

OP asked for 10.0, like his text shows.

[FelPlague]

Get 0 new spells as mage. Nice work, blizz.

Yeah, sadly not EVERY class is getting new spells, only a few. But all classes are getting some back aswell as some talents becoming baseline. Etc. I did make a post of all the leveling stuff you get (so far) in shadowlands.

[iinverse]

Yeah, sadly not EVERY class is getting new spells, only a few.

Thats not sadly, thats awful. We're talking about new expansion, not patch.

[Azerate]

No, they should instead increase the level cap. It's always been like that and it works fine.

[vitor210]

I like this idea OP, and it's one I've had since they announced we'd be back to lvl 60 for shadowlands. I think it would be cool if they "reinvented" the wheel and think outside the box, something that Blizzard was known for back in the day. How about, instead of giving us the same vertical progression expansion after expansion, give us instead horizontal progression? You would level up to 60 as normal, and every new expansion would just add new content to do at 60? This would mean that we could, in theory, be doing Ulduar if we wanted to, and if you wanted to just run the most recent content you could! This would actually spice things up for high tier guilds, and casual guilds alike! Horizontal progression makes more sense, RPG AND lorewise, than the same boring vertical progression that nullifies all your hard work when a new expansion is released

[kranur]

They've made a mess with the leveling system and the power creep during expansions.

Without a long term plan set in place, this will be a problem almost every expansion.

IMO they could have squished the level to 50-60 and also hit the reset button on stats and gear all the way to classic levels and made the incremental plans of each future tier and expansion.
And thanks to the leveling scaling, they could be nerfing the xp needed to level and add the previous expansion in the mix. For example: 1-50 requires a total of 1 million xp and shadowlands levels 50-60 100k. When next expansion hits, adjust the levels for 1-60 to require 1 million xp and 60-70 content 100k.

Stat wise and power creeps were all fine until cataclysm when they decided to have 4x health points and it all went out of control in pandaria.

If done right they could have no worries about this for 3 expansions.

[RemasteredClassic]

The only reason we're getting "new" spells in Shadowlands is because they are giving us shit back that we used to have and never should have lost to begin with.





I'd wager the overwhelming majority of people don't give a shit about that, because they aren't losing anything in a level or stat squish other than an arbitrary number.

What is actually dumb as shit is borrowed powers, because you are actually losing things - spells, abilities, passives, procs - when those get taken away. If anything needs to be rare, if not stop happening entirely, it's the borrowed powers shit... It's an order of magnitude more jarring when those get stripped away than any level or stat squish could ever be, especially when the borrowed powers are being used by the devs to patch up their shoddy class design work... We all saw how well losing borrowed powers works when Legion ended and all our legendary effects stopped working, and half the specs just fell apart without them.

Build-your-own trees would take care of that. The system itself can stay forever while blizzard changes and evolves the gems in the form of abilities that you can socket into the tree.

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Renown is a method of replacing reputation - although reputations still exist - that way they can just add more renown levels with each patch rather than adding an entire faction to gain reputation with - though my guess is that they'll do both.

Renown is max level leveling. This is the system they can target for soft resets, not the player level itself, going forward. So no more squishing 60 to 50..etc. all other expansions would instead of getting you from 1 to 50, be 1-60 content.

New players starting in 10.0 would level from 1-60 in 9.0.

[FelPlague]

Thats not sadly, thats awful. We're talking about new expansion, not patch.

I mean we haven't gotten new spells right out for awhile now.
We are getting new borrowed powers though like BFA and legion.

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Build-your-own trees would take care of that. The system itself can stay forever while blizzard changes and evolves the gems in the form of abilities that you can socket into the tree.

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Renown is max level leveling. This is the system they can target for soft resets, not the player level itself, going forward. So no more squishing 60 to 50..etc. all other expansions would instead of getting you from 1 to 50, be 1-60 content.

New players starting in 10.0 would level from 1-60 in 9.0.

That is not what renown is at all, you could literally make this thread saying in the future no levels needed. Instead we will gain azerite levels. And it would sit just as well

Renown is literally just rep.