[Survey] Level squish IS coming per Blizzard

[Pony Soldier]

I don't know how I feel about a level squish. On one I think the levels are getting out of hand but then again it's not really something that affects gameplay so why bother with it? Let it go to 200 or 300 who cares? Although I would like the idea of having a max level of 100 and then anything above that would be like a prestige level and it would have some sort of indication on your character portrait and tooltip showing you and other people which prestige level you are.

As for that survey I've never seen anything on the Blizzard launcher or any email saying they're going to send surveys or anything regarding them.

[HulkSmasher]

Not gonna get my hopes up, but I'm cautiously looking forward to this. Having a fun leveling experience would be wonderful.

[vertigo12]

Basically, but smaller and spread out through the leveling process instead of only at or near max.

The ideal system in my opinion would be each class getting class themed cosmetic rewards between power rewards. These can be titles, pets, armor/weapons, and maybe even a mount. At the same time, you've got an "account level" similar to honor level that adds up all of the levels you've earned on your b.net account. Boosted levels grant no progress and lower levels grant less progress (so you can't game the system). Rewards for your account level are generic (not class themed) and would come quickly at first, getting regular rewards through the process of leveling 13 characters to max (one of every class, assuming we get a new class soon). After that, the rewards become much more sparse and are really only there for people that like to level crazy amounts of characters.

I have something like that as suggestion but I'll be saving it for my next post.

Clue it has something to do with modifying UI.
Pointers, frames, action bars.

Expansion themed pointers for finishing expansion type contents.
Scaling UI frames similar to how warfront armors are.

[chaoticcrono]

if you guys think 120 is a lot of levels you should play disgaea... max level is 9999

[Octoberfest99]

youll have to explain that... those would support significantly reduced xp needed to level not the outright remove of levels already earned...

My thinking is that giving out a free 110 and heirlooms are an acknowledgment that the old content is less relevant so they are giving players a way to skip or reduce time spent there. These systems affirm the idea there are really only two effective character levels in game: max level and non max level. In one sense, the only meaningful distinction in power levels of characters come from gear rather than level.

[Zandalariprelate]

I hope the leveling is reduced to 1-60 and take less time to reach max level than the current 120

[Chickat]

If they need it I imagine all levels will be like 5 per expansion
So 60+5+5+5+5+5+5+5=95
They could also cut the original cap to like 30 but they already have to deal with a balancing nightmare this way

I say give us a choice.

1-30 EK and Kalim
30-55 Any zone.
55-60 BFA

[chaoticcrono]

My thinking is that giving out a free 110 and heirlooms are an acknowledgment that the old content is less relevant so they are giving players a way to skip or reduce time spent there. These systems affirm the idea there are really only two effective character levels in game: max level and non max level. In one sense, the only meaningful distinction in power levels of characters come from gear rather than level.

youre right... so instead of a level squish they should just remove levels outright

[Onikaroshi]

In fact, i am going to shoot down this argument right now.

Retribution has spell ranks for both Crusader strike and Judgment.
Holy additionally has it for Blessing of Sacrifice.
Protection has a spell rank on Divine shield.

What is next, are you going to argue that you meant every spec had at least 4? That every spell had a spell rank?

The only one that even matches up is blessing of sacrifice, Crusader gets holy power for ret because that's its damn resource.... and I just looked at divine shield on my 110 pally, its the exact same as the base spell.

And yes, I am arguing that they should be more prevalent, they could take a lot of the boringness out of leveling.

[Yes but actually no]

I wonder if the hypothetical level squish happened and we went down to say 60, what happens to legacy raids? You will have over 25 tiers of raids spaced out over base game and 8 expansions once the new one with the squish releases.

How do you space that out where people can still farm old raids? does molten core become a level 10 raid? Bfa level 50? etc etc
Then there is the gearing side of it, think to vanilla where things like level 49 blackstone ring were actually great at level 60 you could potentially have bis items being from raids that theoretically you should be able to solo now, either the ilvl difference is going to have to be all sorts of crazy to make it not work that way, the items have a max usable level like legiondaries or the raids are just so low level so that they are trivial loot wise. Imagine a level 55 dragonwrath or fangs of the father would probably beat out a good few lvl 60 weapons without measures taken.
There is just too much old content to squeeze into a small level unless they just made every expansion to be the exact same level at say 15-50 with the scaling then the next expansion with the squish was 50-60.
But then you have the issues of old expansions being way less streamlined and linear than the newer ones so absolutely no one would do say TBC,WotLK or Cata vs the streamlined quest hubs of say WoD, Legion and BfA outside of their own personal choice to because its just so much less efficient.
Would making the raids be 5 man dungeons be a thing?

It's a massive clusterfuck that i cannot see them actually doing, on the upside if it were to happen we would have a massive pool of dungeons to spam through during leveling

[Varitok]

Level squish isn't a tool to simplify the game for casuals. It's a tool to make the leveling experience feel more meaningful. The current system is designed to rush you through levels 1 to 110 as fast as possible so you can get to the current content. Most of the time you gain a level the only change is a minor increase to base stats. You may need to gain 10 to 20 levels to even feel a difference in your characters power. If they were to squish the max level from 120 down to 40 each level would roughly feel 3x stronger than it does currently. Imagine if 120 was swished down to 20 and then the new expansion brought characters up to 25. That 1 to 20 experience could feel much more impactful than the current 1 to 120 experience. I'd use level 1 to 2 as a tutorial and then send players to the zone of their choice (from vanilla to BfA) to level 2-20 before hitting the new stuff at 25.

This won't change anything. You will level even slower and half the abilities you get anyways are pretty shitty. There are far more bigger problems with the game and leveling right now than the big number (which doesnt even matter, its basically cosmetic.)

[SirCowdog]

Like a lot of their fixes, a level squish is an illusion of a fix,

Your post covers a lot of things that were already tumbling around in my brain. Some of that has gotten out in my posts about how making a coherent story while leveling is mutually exclusive to condensing the leveling content.

The problem is that every time they add more levels to the cap(which I've been saying is a mistake for a long time now), the leveling process gets worse and worse. This is compounded by the fact that Blizzard is trying to make every new expansion its own encapsulated game by introducing new mechanics. In WoD it was the garrison. In Legion it was the artifact. Now BfA has the Heart of Azeroth and Azerite armor. Each of those systems gets thrown away when a new expansion releases, and since they were designed to be invested and progressed over the course of the entire 2 years of an expansion, it makes ZERO sense to a person leveling through that content in a matter of days or weeks.

I firmly believe that what you and others are saying is 100% true: In order to fix leveling it's going to require a complete cata-style overhaul of all previous zones. And I don't think that's something Blizzard is willing to invest the time and effort in doing.

[Sondrelk]

The only one that even matches up is blessing of sacrifice, Crusader gets holy power for ret because that's its damn resource.... and I just looked at divine shield on my 110 pally, its the exact same as the base spell.

And yes, I am arguing that they should be more prevalent, they could take a lot of the boringness out of leveling.

This is some impressive goalpost moving you have there.
Your base argument was that Spell ranks did not exist. I provedthey did.
You argued only a few specs had them. I proved several did, including the paladin you adamantly claimed did not have them.
Now you argue that you definitely meant that everyone needed more when you said they had none?

All that is needed for me to agree with you here is you accepting you were completely wrong in regards to spell ranks not being a thing.
Secondly, Divine shield is only thrown when you first get it, at spell rank 2 it becomes a silence. You cannot see it when you go on a max level character, you need to create a fresh one t osee all the spell ranks you get while levelling.

[Thetruth1400]

But in vanilla you didn't even have enough quests to get around. Do you want to go back to that? You can't just praise the vanilla leveling stats without taking everything else into account.
The second part is unsolvable imo. You have 15 years of quests to distribute into a leveling experience that shouldn't be the whole 15 years of questing. You will skip zones, it is just what it is.

I don't think you should have to do literally all the zone content the game has to offer before maxing your character, nor be able to actually level your character completely in the zones because you run out of quests, but 12 / 122, or ~10% is way too low. I'd say 25%, or ~30 zones seems sufficient, which can be further cut down by dungeons and the like. At the end of things though, it's not really about how many zones are getting used, just the requirements of XP in terms of leveling.

It doesn't matter where the level cap is, there needs to be a balance between investment and reward. If it takes too long to level, people aren't going to want to do it. If it's just burnt through, what even is the point? It won't feel rewarding.

I'd like to say, for me, the ideal time to max level should be about 96 hours of play time, if the experience is enjoyable and rewarding along the way. If it's just a slog grind with no rewards and a single, weak spell choice every 15 levels (like today) then even a simple 24 hours of play feels like a chore. Without actual change to the leveling experience, the level cap is irrelevant.

[Onikaroshi]

This is some impressive goalpost moving you have there.
Your base argument was that Spell ranks did not exist. I provedthey did.
You argued only a few specs had them. I proved several did, including the paladin you adamantly claimed did not have them.
Now you argue that you definitely meant that everyone needed more when you said they had none?

All that is needed for me to agree with you here is you accepting you were completely wrong in regards to spell ranks not being a thing.
Secondly, Divine shield is only thrown when you first get it, at spell rank 2 it becomes a silence. You cannot see it when you go on a max level character, you need to create a fresh one t osee all the spell ranks you get while levelling.

I didn't move anything, I clearly mentioned the WoD traits from the first post on. You're the one who changed it to Ranks. They haven't continued with that since WoD. Even though it would be an excellent leveling mechanic.

Here's the post even:

He's not wrong... and they don't need to add abilities every level, or even every other level. They had a good thing the started with WoD with the traits that they ditched immediately that could have helped then a lot with leveling feeling more rewarding.

Like when you get Avenger's shield it only hits 3 targets and then you get a trait that lets it hit 5. Things like that could spice up leveling a LOT.

[Splenda]

I am indifferent as long as it is as ok as the ilvl squish.

[tangers58]

Oookay dude. I can't take you serious anymore, sorry.

Not sure why... he is quite correct. Most of my classes only use 5 or so abilities regularly

[Krille]

Not sure why... he is quite correct. Most of my classes only use 5 or so abilities regularly

That's completely irrelevant to whats being discussed.

[Qnubi]

Of course a level squish is coming. We even know when: In August and it's gonna be 60.

[pfbe]

The only thing that matters is the time it takes to level. Since they have a lot of ways of shuffling numbers around while keeping things the same, we should really wait to see the final result before complaining about, or praising, the squish.