[Survey] Level squish IS coming per Blizzard

[Akta]

A level squish it's what wow needs, and with it we should a talents reworks. They can leave talents as they are but instead of waiting for X level to acquire one row they shoul give 1 point each level and when you have a tot of points you unlock a row or single talent. It would be nice if points are just passive abilities and stats.

[pacotaco]

So blizzard takes away all those leveles we worked to earn ...are they compensating us in any way for it?

As I understand, they squish doesn't remove levels, they just group them up to reduce the "milestones".
Let's say that now we need 15million to reach level 15 and get the 1st talent. After the squish you would need 15million to reach level 5 and get that 1st talent. The only difference would be that you dont level up so fast, but the progress/time is the same.

Certainly, it's not that simple, because they'd need to rebalance gea rewards and professions, but I hope you get the gist.

[Zka]

I really hope it's coming and they rethink other aspects of leveling as well: character power rewards for each levelup, heirlooms should not take more than 1-2 slots total (edited for clarity: keep the heirloom bonuses but compress them into 1-2 slots), more flexibility of zone choice and so on.

[Lei]

I support it. It should have come with the scaling system tbh. The whole "uh-oh, leveling is now tedious" -> "okay okay, less tedious" -> "fuck it, even less tedious" idocy we have had since mid Legion or whatever really left a bad taste in my leveling mood/attitude. I didn't level a single character since they fucked it up.

They should really make it right this time around and not accidentally make leveling slower again. Making it right in my book involves one level squish for a long time, not like with itemlevel squish and number squish. That is just hideous, anti climactic, andti RPG, anti immersive, anti everything.

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I really hope it's coming and they rethink other aspects of leveling as well: character power rewards for each levelup, heirlooms should not take more than 1-2 slots total, more flexibility of zone choice and so on.

Yeah please fuck the game up for everyone else because you can't be strong enough mentally to not wear heirlooms. Heirlooms are not an OP thing pretty much since Legion, blue items are usually better. Why do you even care what others wear while levelling?
How do you propose to not be able to wear more than 1-2 heirloom items at once? Players have put millions into them (I'm sure a lot of players even bought tokens to upgrade them, that's real life money right there), or many many hours to farm justice Points/honor points to convert, armor cases to upgrade etc.

[Healing Rain]

Completely against a level squish. The stat squishes made gear completely pointless outside of aesthetics and also made addons like Recount pointless. A level squish would make the time I spent leveling a complete waste of time and would be the last straw for me.

With Pathfinder and now a possible level squish one has to wonder if the devs are intentionally trying to kill WoW.

[vertigo12]

The level squish obviously won't remedy the fractured narrative and old mechanics of a large chunk of the leveling content, BUT: It could enable us more choice. I for one would be thrilled if I could go straight to MoP, WoD, Legion and BfA in leveling to max level.

They still 100% need to revamp 1-60 again, maybe including the 80-85 Cata zones in the content. God knows Uldum deserves better treatment than what it got.

The probably level squish or readjust level bracket they might to would be like:
Vanila Zones to Cataclysm or even MoP - 1 to 60
MoP WoDs and Legion to 61-90 or perhaps 61-80 and even BfA
BfA to 91-95 and perhaps 9.0 be 96-100

[breadisfunny]

i HATE the idea. but of course no one cares what i think.

[Lei]

Completely against a level squish. The stat squishes made gear completely pointless outside of aesthetics and also made addons like Recount pointless. A level squish would make the time I spent leveling a complete waste of time and would be the last straw for me.

With Pathfinder and now a possible level squish one has to wonder if the devs are intentionally trying to kill WoW.

How do you mean it would make the time you spent leveling a complete waste? We always had xp nerfs. The time to reach level 60 was different in vanilla and in bc (I think ther ewas already an xp nerf in 2.3), in wotlk etc.
Level squish would probably not make people to level up to max level in less time, it would just rearrange the xp around to be enough for say 60 level, not 120. If I'm not mistaken. so the time you spent to level from 1 to 2 and 2-3 would become the new level 1-2. So on.

With this, gear could actually become more meaningful, because there would be less ilevel and stat distribution needed per level or bracket.

[kaid]

A level squish was always coming, per Blizzard. I think they said 2(?) expansions ago they were going to have to do it.

They are going to have to do something major along these lines sooner or later. We have had three expansions now where you at most get 1 talent and in the last two no benefit at all to actually leveling. It is levels for the sake of a level now. They either need to have more actual impact on players progress wise or they need to find some other way of doing it. I think legions way of doing it would work as that was basically an expansion specific AAXP system. If you had like 60-90 levels and then after that it is just expansion specific here is your AAXP stuff for this expansion that could maybe work.

Its a really thorny problem and the longer wow lasts the harder it is going to be to do anything about it. One option I guess would be reverting how spells work. So you get your spell level like classic so solar wrath 1-20 or whatever. So you are not gaining new spells but having spells you already have power jumps as you level so your shit noticably hits harder instead of the slow steady progression that is hard to even notice we currently have. Make people have to go back to their trainers make them feel like they are leveling.

[Methodd]

This was inevitable. I think this is a good step towards improving the leveling experience, which Ion even said years ago is lackluster and needs work.

[Trend]

Did you double-check to see if the e-mail of the sender really is from Blizzard?

I'm just having real trouble believing Blizzard would just reveal expansion features so casually through a survey instead of doing it on Blizzcon during the expansion reveal.

News of this survey was posted on wowhead almost 6 hours ago:

https://www.wowhead.com/news=292286/...lizzard-survey

It's real. It's from Blizzard.

[nodlimax]

The current problems WoW has are not fixable by a level squish. Let's say they actually do a level squish from 120 to for example 50 with the new expansion going to 60. We're then in the same weird situation as we are with the various stat squishes. It's just that the numbers are reduced. The content around it doesn't change.

You could split this stuff up then into for example:
1-20 Vanilla
20-30 BC/WotLK
30-40 Cata/MoP
40-50 WoD/Legion/BFA
50+ new expansion

Please note I'm just throwing made up numbers around. Anyway do you think this will fix anything within the content? I just reduced the numbers and shuffled the content around a bit. The level process still remains the same. If you have the same basic principle of being basically overpowered throughout the leveling process then nothing changes. Maybe the time required to get to max level will be reduced again but during that time you will still bored as fuck because anything exciting in the leveling process has been sucked out of the game.

Personally I think Blizzard has put themselves into a corner with retail WoW with how the expansion cycle works. I think to fix this they basically would have to pull something like they did in FF14 with resetting the characters and moving time forward in the world. Let's say they do some cataclysmic event with the old gods where Azeroth gets completely re-shaped and in the process we lose all of our powers and basically have to start over again.....or in other words WoW 2.

Blizzard has jumped the shark way to many times over the course of the expansions and WoW is reaching the limit of what players are willing to deal with. It would also give them the freedom to try new things with the whole faction concept they currently have. You could have 3 or 4 major main factions possibly giving players the option to join an opposing faction even if they belong to a race that usually doesn't fit there.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Don't really give a shit, it's just a number whose value is beyond meaningless at this point and has been for 10 years if you are honest.

There are some benefits to reducing it, like making it seem less insurmountable to new players (without telling them to buy a boost), but then how many new players does wow get these days in the first place? On the other hand the biggest disadvantage is that there is a chance for them messing up scaling again and we will have to deal with broken scaling for a couple of months like everytime they rescale the system. The biggest non argument is RPG progression, since only a simplton couples that to a number that means absolutely nothing other tracking your artifical gating progress.

[vertigo12]

The current problems WoW has are not fixable by a level squish. Let's say they actually do a level squish from 120 to for example 50 with the new expansion going to 60. We're then in the same weird situation as we are with the various stat squishes. It's just that the numbers are reduced. The content around it doesn't change.

You could split this stuff up then into for example:
1-20 Vanilla
20-30 BC/WotLK
30-40 Cata/MoP
40-50 WoD/Legion/BFA
50+ new expansion

Please note I'm just throwing made up numbers around. Anyway do you think this will fix anything within the content? I just reduced the numbers and shuffled the content around a bit. The level process still remains the same. If you have the same basic principle of being basically overpowered throughout the leveling process then nothing changes. Maybe the time required to get to max level will be reduced again but during that time you will still bored as fuck because anything exciting in the leveling process has been sucked out of the game.

Personally I think Blizzard has put themselves into a corner with retail WoW with how the expansion cycle works. I think to fix this they basically would have to pull something like they did in FF14 with resetting the characters and moving time forward in the world. Let's say they do some cataclysmic event with the old gods where Azeroth gets completely re-shaped and in the process we lose all of our powers and basically have to start over again.....or in other words WoW 2.

Blizzard has jumped the shark way to many times over the course of the expansions and WoW is reaching the limit of what players are willing to deal with. It would also give them the freedom to try new things with the whole faction concept they currently have. You could have 3 or 4 major main factions possibly giving players the option to join an opposing faction even if they belong to a race that usually doesn't fit there.

Plus everything on the same level bracket gets trial and basically would be thrown out the way side asap. Imagine 10 levels worth of experiencing 5-7 zones but in a level squish you will just experience about 1-3 zones only then leave everythinf behind.

That of course would result in readjusting the XP required to level up once again and thereby increasing the amount of XP required to compensate for the level squish. So basically it's just back to square one.

Damn,why suddenly am I feeling uneasy with the timing of the release of this survey. Hopefully it didn't mean to coincide with some premonition and it would tie up with the dynamic talent I was suggesting/campaigning for almost a week now. New level experience thus reworking of leveling experience and zone within that bracket and my talent tiers and talent bracket....

[Jastall]

I don't see the point, triple digits seem that complicated to Blizzard to look at? It's not like it's up in the thousands. Like taking away a number changes anything.

The point is less that the numbers are too big and more to make each level meaningful, I'd wager, rather than more than half the levels from 1 to 120 giving you sweet nothing.

I think there would be better ways to implement such a thing, but a level squish could work even if it sounds like it would be quite a complex task to get right in regards to leveling speed, balance, stat scaling, old content, etc.

[Andonais]

The game is fundamentally broken atm IT NEEDS TO BE DONE otherwise its building a house on sand. Revamp Azeroth again and level 1-60 in the old world and move the expansion continents to optional content but new players should level 1-60 on Azeroth for sure its such a mess for new player now its killing the game. Also platinum to squish gold down its absurd to get 4.5k from a bloody paragon chest.

[Orby]

I think WoW as a whole needs to be rebuilt again.

The game is 15 years old, and through that time there have been changes on top of changes and content on top of content and continuity in lore on top of other lore. Outside of the main current content, the content previous is a mess due to overlapping changes. Wow right now is a mess in terms of its unintended lifespan.

This is a problem when a MMO reaches as long in it;s run as WoW.

Honestly I think Blizzard need to just end WoW. and scrap it,.

Or if they plan to keep it, they need to rebuild the game from the ground up. That alone will probably take a long time and will be a huge endeavour.

[Hobbidaggy]

Not 100% opposed to a Level squish if it’s done right.

Cap the levels at 100, then have a post-100 “growth” system, like artefacts or whatever that make you more powerful and an attunement of sorts to get yourself eligible for running the raid content for that expansion etc. that is not a fleshed out idea just a very basic thought. I’m sure more work put into it that it could and would work. Just needs to be done right. They previously had the path of titans progression system and that would have been a great idea. Something like that would be good. A level cap and path of titans style system

[Whitedragon]

Because old Wow has much more than the expansions and just from the trouble they have with number squishes there would be a good chance of hogger one shotting a lvl 60 in the new system

Cut everything in half,

Mob danger level: +3-4 for Red, +2 Orange, +1 and -1 Yellow, -2 - -3 for green, and -4 for gray.
All zone level requirements: Cut them in half (Elwin is 1-5 now not 1-10)
All Dungeons: cut them in half, with odd numbers rounded down, (Deadmines is now 7+ instead of 15)
Mob levels and Item requirements: Cut them in half rounding odd numbers up (a green level 11 required item is now 6, a 54 ghost in winterspring is 27, a level one pig is still level 1)
Moving past the old world: You can go to any expansion at 29
Level up stats: you now get 2 stats worth of levels every time you ding.

How would you handle raids??
What about new abilities?? Would you batch the abilities so say instead of learning abilities between 20-25 you get 5 at lvl 21??

Make old WoW raids level 30, change nothing else.
As for Abilities we Vary rarely get 2 at the same time anyways, in addition we have many MANY levels of nothing new, so if need be just move things around a little bit
so we don't have 3-6 levels of nothing new.
Same with talents, this is the biggest change to balance I would propose, I would honestly say they should give us a point to spend every 5 levels, make the level 5/15/25/ect. talents more minor things like the movement speed boosts, or stuns we get now, and make the 10/20/30/ect. talents more combat rotation things.

Why Nerf the original ones

Why not? as long as we are squishing something why not do it for everything? As I said before even during the 1-60 grind we have many levels that mean nothing now, you don't get anything, why not push it down to 30 but give us something EVERY level. Now from level 1-30 you learn a spell, a passive, a talent, a PvP talent, or a mount speed at every ding.

Not only that but It would make much more sense level bracket wise to balance everything out, other wise it's 1-60 for just old wow then 60-70 or 80 for ALL of the expansions.

Honestly the only "downside" I can see is for the people who highly value the number 120 for some reason, I won't pretend to speak for everyone, but at least for myself my actual level stopped meaning anything to me back when we got stuck at 85 for 2 years... after that 100 and 120 where kind of novel but not really proud moments. Also as someone who has truckloads of alts the thought of having to fill that bar 119 times when ever I want another one starts to become more and more of a deterrent (even if I know it will be about the same time wise in the end).

[rrayy]

Good. About time. There's no need to be level 3,000, it's all just numbers with barely any meaning. Only the current expansion's level bracket REALLY matters, the rest is just leveling chaff. Same as with the damage squish - 3 trillion damage or 3,000 damage, it's all meaningless because it's about relatives not absolutes.

YOu only think it is meaningless because you are scared of big numbers. Blizzard once again caving to whiners that cry about big numbers.

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The point is less that the numbers are too big and more to make each level meaningful, I'd wager, rather than more than half the levels from 1 to 120 giving you sweet nothing.

then offer more rewards or talents. Don't squish levels because they are too lazy to think up new talents or rewards.

I think there would be better ways to implement such a thing, but a level squish could work even if it sounds like it would be quite a complex task to get right in regards to leveling speed, balance, stat scaling, old content, etc.

Ther is no need to squish because they don't need to be wasting time fixing what isn't broken. And, no, people whining because the numbers are too big does not = broken.