WoW & Leveling: Why is it Treated as a Nuisance?

[Whatever Dude]

Blizzard have gone out of their way to completely trivialize leveling content, in order to funnel players into the max level endgame as quickly as possible. Not only have they made characters absurdly strong compared to enemy mobs while leveling, they've also introduced Heirlooms and character boosts to further trivialize this aspect of WoW.

My only question is: Why? Why take a big steaming shit on a part of WoW's content that a lot of people used to love? I remember years ago, and I mean 5+ at least, a majority of players were actually just interested in leveling, and most didn't even have a single max level. Now everyone has several characters at max level, not an insignificant amount even have like 10+ at 110. Are you really invested in all of those characters and care about them as much as you would have, if you had taken the time to level them up and grow with them? Probably not.



I know for me, I'm not nearly as invested in my max level characters as I used to be. They mean almost nothing to me, as I can essentially create a copy of them in a few weeks time at most. The characters have gone down in value a lot since the years have passed by. This feels just wrong.

[Ragedaug]

Because we've already done it. For some it may have just been "several" times, others have leveled dozens of times. We are leveling the toon so we can participate in end game. So that's the why. For many of the long time players, this isnt' the content we are paying to play, it's just a necessary "evil" to get to where we are going.

[Kelathos]

The leveling journey was fine and cool the first time around. Maybe even the second or third. But I'm above and beyond 30+ times leveling 1-60+. At some point between the first and tenth time you just want to get it over with and "skip to the good part". Blizzard has no idea how to make repeated passes at leveling fresh, exciting, or relevant. Or... even if they could come up with ideas, they have not deemed it a worthy allocation of time and/or resources.

Hell, my solution is to just auto-boost every single new character created to the newest expansion. For Legion that'd be level 100.

[Daedius]

Can you imagine levelling at the pace of Vanilla, all the way towards level 110+ ... ?

[DrIvoRobotnik]

Because it's laughably easy and they removed almost any sense of a learning curve?

[Svisalith]

Can you imagine levelling at the pace of Vanilla, all the way towards level 110+ ... ?

Leveling pace is only part of the issue, it's perfectly possible to level as fast or faster than today while having nontrivial leveling content; mobs that have a time to kill of say 10 seconds instead of 1-2 globals when you're level appropriate for them.

[Whatever Dude]

Can you imagine levelling at the pace of Vanilla, all the way towards level 110+ ... ?

Sure, but that doesn't mean I want vanilla WoW leveling right now. There's this thing called nuance, it doesn't have to be between leveling being dead and being super duper vanilla hard. Vanilla had lots of quirks beyond mobs being challenging. There was a shortage of quests and at least 10 of your 60 levels were gained by pure grinding, which almost no one enjoyed.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Because it is terribly boring. Leveling has been awful since they shat on it with Cataclysm. They took away everything they made it fun and engaging. No training, no skills, no talent point per lvl, no resource management, no sense of danger, no sense of character progression, and you level so fast that it doesn't even feel like an accomplishment when you hit max level.

Leveling used to be a huge part of the game before cataclysm. Since then, leveling is a chore.

[Daedius]

Leveling pace is only part of the issue, it's perfectly possible to level as fast or faster than today while having nontrivial leveling content; mobs that have a time to kill of say 10 seconds instead of 1-2 globals when you're level appropriate for them.

We're getting a stat and ilvl squish in 8.0 -- hopefully it'll make mobs last longer.

[Whatever Dude]

We're getting a stat and ilvl squish in 8.0 -- hopefully it'll make mobs last longer.

That's the other thing I'm pondering - is the leveling scaling combined with a new squish going to help in making leveling feel more meaningful? I sure hope so.

[lanesia24]

Blizzard have gone out of their way to completely trivialize leveling content, in order to funnel players into the max level endgame as quickly as possible. Not only have they made characters absurdly strong compared to enemy mobs while leveling, they've also introduced Heirlooms and character boosts to further trivialize this aspect of WoW.

My only question is: Why? Why take a big steaming shit on a part of WoW's content that a lot of people used to love? I remember years ago, and I mean 5+ at least, a majority of players were actually just interested in leveling, and most didn't even have a single max level. Now everyone has several characters at max level, not an insignificant amount even have like 10+ at 110. Are you really invested in all of those characters and care about them as much as you would have, if you had taken the time to level them up and grow with them? Probably not.



I know for me, I'm not nearly as invested in my max level characters as I used to be. They mean almost nothing to me, as I can essentially create a copy of them in a few weeks time at most. The characters have gone down in value a lot since the years have passed by. This feels just wrong.

Some of us have leveled 10-15-20 characters to max the way it used to be. I don't need nor want it to be some tedious long grind to get a character to max level.

[Fabinas]

Because new content is always end-game content, with every expansion adding more levels. People that are subscribers want to reach that content.

They could make the levelling process before reaching the new max lvl hard and engaging and maybe take 1-2 months to reach max lvl, but they will not.

[Enan1981]

Its not a nuisance. People just want fast results coz they are lazy as hell. That empty feeling of accomplishment.

[Deleted]

Because we've already done it. For some it may have just been "several" times, others have leveled dozens of times. We are leveling the toon so we can participate in end game. So that's the why. For many of the long time players, this isnt' the content we are paying to play, it's just a necessary "evil" to get to where we are going.

This is a good reason to make leveling optional. People that just want to play end game can do so and Blizzard aren't tempted to ruin the leveling experience for everyone else.

[Paperfox]

Perhaps there are just too many levels?

[Deleted]

Leveling pace is only part of the issue, it's perfectly possible to level as fast or faster than today while having nontrivial leveling content; mobs that have a time to kill of say 10 seconds instead of 1-2 globals when you're level appropriate for them.

You're gonna love scaling everywhere then. Problem literally solved in 7.3.5

[ONCHEhap]

Can you imagine levelling at the pace of Vanilla, all the way towards level 110+ ... ?

It doesn't need to be at the pace of Vanilla,it can just be as challenging and engaging,but faster

[Sencha]

When questing will be a bit more interesting than kill x, collect y, I'd love to have a longer leveling process.

[Molvonos]

Most don't know, remember or want to acknowledge that the leveling was changed via QoL as a direct response to the vocal minorities request.

People wanted to play alts, either on the same faction or another and it took way too long to be arsed to do so. Adding the capacity to level faster (heirlooms) and making the leveling experience more streamlined (breadcrumb quests, no elites) facilitated this.

It also helped raiding groups with players who wanted to benefit their guild/community to switch classes if people quit/left/etc.

All Quality of Life changes were added because we, as the players, asked for them.

[Deleted]

The quest design is kinda bad compared with other games. I mean if you have played FF14 and other modern MMORPGs you know what I mean. Most WoW quests would be considered optional in FF14. While the cool quests with a lot immersion are the campaign quests (they are enough to level you from 0-max) - which are almost completely missing in WoW or their flow gets disrupted by generic boring quests between.

And it's strange because WoW did it before, they created a very good solution via scenarios. But they scrapped them or use them rarely. Especially the MOP heroic scenarios were cool to explore the story while providing perfect multiplayer game-play experience.

As it stands the most fun thing to do (especially after leveling the first char via quests) is spaming dungeons and even here FF14 has some better tools with the Palace of the dead (random generated multi floor dungeon with different difficulties...).