New Leveling System - Problems

[Kathranis]

I don't think they will be selling many boosts once the changes go live. seems this is finally a move for the players and not one demanded by sales execs

They're also lowering the price of the expansion standard edition to $40. So obviously this is all aimed at lowering the barrier of entry for new / returning / Classic players.

[Kharadin]

[*] basically, I would make leveling more difficult and a little bit longer

Yeah, no. Having alts is nice, having to spending 100hrs getting an alt to cap where it can finally be useful, doing content you've already done, is boring as fuck.
That timesink is also daunting to new players.

Spending less time levelling means more players at cap and that it'll be easier to have alts that are relevant to current content, both of those things are good.

[Anastacy]

Unless they change the way mana works, not a chance. As it is now, a DPS spec can spurt out maybe 10 heals before they're OOM. Adding in one more heal option isn't going to fix that.

If you're talking Healers specifically, having access to 1 more DPS ability (of which we know very little at this point) it's not going to do much. For a priest, they gave the example of having PW:K, an ability that won't even come into play until a mob is already down to 20% health. It's not game changing in the least.

What is this PW:K you speak of?

[Nite92]

....OP....

They said, they want to reduce the leveling time, which is not possible if you have 120, but if you have 50 levels - it is. So same speed per level, but from leaving starting zone to endgame you have 40lvls instead of 120. Seems pretty good to me.

[Casperite]

WoD will probably be faster tho. Just fly around doing the bonus objectives and looking the treasures. 10-50 in just a handfull of hours. They'll probably fix that tho. Gotta get the lvl Boost money and all.

They are literally decreasing leveling time by more than half and you still go on about boost money? If anything they are trying to make level boosts less used. Same for allied races heritage armor. They keep doing things that negate level boosts but your weird blind hatred of Blizzard comes up with these illogical conspiracies.

[Doffen]

Love how fast it's gonna be to level. Gonna wait with leveling the Allied Races I have left until Shadowlands. Its just so fucking boring right now. I want to raid, do dungeons!! Shadowlands looks to be great in that regard.

[Racthoh]

I think it's pretty cool, shorter leveling is good, and only leveling in the xpac of your choice is great. Probably cata will be the shortest experience (hopefully).

[FlasKamel]

Im glad its getting faster for old content. It's a 15 y/o game, and unless they do a revamp no system could make that journey exciting for me again. And with all the classes and allied races its just overwhelming to do all this boring shit over and over. I wouldnt mind them giving people options to do it slower, but that's Classic for you people. Revamp? Slow it down, no problem, but I would LOVE havin at least one expansion to just level up everything quickly.

[razorpax]

oh nooooo getting heritage armor will be easier and the need to drop $60 bucks on a boost will be nonexistant how awwwfuuuulllll

[jzhbee]

I think I took my position very clearly. What about the professions? If you would try to tell me that nobody cares about professions anymore, that would end the discussion immediately. It's funny that so many mechanics of the game became manifestly, let's say "exploted", omitted and absolutely useless. Same happened to profession.

BFA made it so that every profession had an expansion specific tradeskill level up path.
This system doesn't change that.

[Thetruth1400]

What is this PW:K you speak of?

Sorry, Power Word: Death, not Kill.

[bufferunderrun]

Why wouldn’t they? They’ll simply match them to the new squished levels equivalents and they’ve changed the max levels before - used to be 85 for example.

Currently they’re 1-60 base, 1-90, 1-100, 1-110 and 1-120.

So new system would be 1-10 base, 1-20, 1-30, 1-40 and 1-50.

because if they speed the levelling by 50% to be in the 10hr/played and on top of that you put heirloom as they are right now you will ding one level x mob killed.

[SirCowdog]

The scaling is only in effect when you talk to chromie. Its like timewalking. Old raids and dungeons remain unnafected unless you toggle the chromie thing

Wait...I'm confused now. I thought the hard cap for levels was now 60, with no toggling on or off. Normal leveling will be from 1-50, with Shadowlands covering 50-60.

The way current "Legacy Mode" works for farming old dungeons and raids for xmog and gold is that you have to be 11 levels above the dungeon/raid for it to kick in and give you all the loot. Otherwise you're on personal loot and don't get jack shit.

If every zone is 1-50, how does that interact with "Legacy Mode"?

[kamuimac]

Yeah, no. Having alts is nice, having to spending 100hrs getting an alt to cap where it can finally be useful, doing content you've already done, is boring as fuck.
That timesink is also daunting to new players.

Spending less time levelling means more players at cap and that it'll be easier to have alts that are relevant to current content, both of those things are good.

seems like mmorpgs are not for you then .

no wonder blizzard is effectively turning wow into ARPG to cater to lazy people.

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I actually really like the new leveling concept.....on paper.

But the biggest problem I see is that there won't be any reason to level alts anywhere but WoD. Between bonus objectives and treasures and the exp potion from the garrison, I fail to understand how any other expansion is going to be able to compete with the exp/hour. Unless blizzard removes experience from collecting treasures, and heavily nerfs the exp gain from bonus objectives.

Another question I have is how flying will work when leveling alts. What level do we get it? Expansions like Cata are designed to have it from the get-go, while expansions like WoD, Legion, and BfA have pathfinder locking them. If a person hasn't completed pathfinder in those zones, why would they EVER choose them to level up in?

There are a lot of unknowns here.

depends how they tune invasions in legion.

seeing how 1x 10 minute invasion was taking care of 1,5 level aka 15% of leveling process in Legion it would now take care of 15% of leveling 10-50

they have to break it

[Kumorii]

They really do want to make alts feel like a new Diablo 3 season character don't they?

How? There's nothing seasonal afaik...

[LanToaster]

Yeah, this is a very big concern for me. I was extremely confused when they said leveling was too slow, when it's been anything but that. You'll also be shooting yourself in the foot if you choose any other location besides Kul Tiras or Zandalar as they have the fewest number of zones.

I think the Idea is to still be Experience the Story in a decent way that is not "Going around Boring Oneshotting everything"

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Wait...I'm confused now. I thought the hard cap for levels was now 60, with no toggling on or off. Normal leveling will be from 1-50, with Shadowlands covering 50-60.

The way current "Legacy Mode" works for farming old dungeons and raids for xmog and gold is that you have to be 11 levels above the dungeon/raid for it to kick in and give you all the loot. Otherwise you're on personal loot and don't get jack shit.

If every zone is 1-50, how does that interact with "Legacy Mode"?

Dunno if they said anything Specific about that, but they said: "If you dont go to Chromi, you can still do everything you did before, PowerLevel doesnt Change".

Also, they said they just use a simple Formula to determine new Levels, I´d assume Legacy Loot will kick in if you are around 5 levels above the Content.

[Kharadin]

seems like mmorpgs are not for you then .

If a requirement for MMORPGs is boring you to death with content you've already seen several times for zero gain in character progression, then you might be right.

Except it's not. So you're not.

[SirCowdog]

depends how they tune invasions in legion.

seeing how 1x 10 minute invasion was taking care of 1,5 level aka 15% of leveling process in Legion it would now take care of 15% of leveling 10-50

they have to break it

I don't know. I've always thought of leveling in absolute terms of how much real time it takes. I guess if you only logged in to do invasions you could level fast in terms of only time /played. But I think even if invasions give the same 1.5 levels they give now, it would still take quite a bit of time just waiting for them to pop.

I don't see a problem there, tbh, especially when you can sit down in WoD and slam out ~13 levels in the space of like 3-4 hours.

However they do it, it will be super interesting to see how all these systems interact with each other, or which Blizzard nukes out of existence, like grinding lower level dungeons and raids in the past.

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Crazy if true. I remember in a recent thread when I was "What is the point of squishing the numbers by half...it will still take 3-4 days to get to the start lv of the next x-pac. Unless they plan to cut the leveling time, this is just pulling wool over ppls eyes. And a guy replied "Why would they cut the levelling time, that is stupid"

But if you are right, 1-50 could take 1-1,5 days soon? Whoops..here I stop levelling any alt ^^

Ballpark times were between 30-40 hours if you were doing everything optimally. Lower than that if you abused some grey areas.

I think it depends on what they meant by "60-70% faster". Did they mean it would only take 60-70% of the time it takes now? Or did they mean you literally are gaining levels 60-70% faster?

Either way I expect we might be able to see times below 20 hours again, which would be pretty cool.

[Dracullus]

Im pretty sure the average player takes like 4 or 5 days to hit 120 anyways, so for them, at best it will still take 2 days.

I'd say easily 1 day if you dedicate whole day to it. All you need for 10-50 is to max out 3 zones from BfA.

[SirCowdog]

Dunno if they said anything Specific about that, but they said: "If you dont go to Chromi, you can still do everything you did before, PowerLevel doesnt Change".

Also, they said they just use a simple Formula to determine new Levels, I´d assume Legacy Loot will kick in if you are around 5 levels above the Content.

I did a little bit of digging and couldn't find anything. All the level squish info was focused on actually leveling up. There wasn't any mention of legacy mode that I could find, although I swear that question was asked in one of the interviews. I just don't have the time to sit through several multi-hour recordings right now.

Hopefully this is a question that gets answered in future dev blogs or interviews.