Ion take my levels!

Community General Discussion
21

I do not wish level squish. 120 is lot of levels but after looking how every ilvl squish they have done has been done less than perfectly (especially latests one) i don’t trust them a bit to do same with levels. And this is character levels we are talking about now, not just some items that get old on next expansion. So many things could go wrong there.

Reason we don’t get new things every level is because they already squished everything else: talent trees, our spellbooks etc. If we had proper talent trees with points to put on, proper spell ranks and our full set of spells back they could add something interesting for every ding we do without squishing anything.

I wish they would spend their time making new things for game instead of pulling back and “fixing” things they think they have doing “wrong” before. While there might indeed be things to fix, fixing and changing things afterwards always divides playerbase and causes lot of unhappiness in one group or another.

6 Likes
22

I think it’s time to a prune of the levels.
As Ion said on Q&A, if we have half of the levels we have right now, there would be more possibilities to have rewards once you ding a new level.
In my opinion, a new level should always reward you with something that gives you the feel of progression and every 10 levels there should be always a little quest chain that gives you some new ability, item trasmogrification or particolar thing for the class from the class trainers (for example: like druid forms, types of beasts to tame for hunters).
Class trainers should return meaningful for the leveling progression.
Those things are only possible if you prune the level max for a character. Lvl 120 is too high a number for any attempt to improve the leveling progression.

23

After the last 3 xpacks I really feel like we don’t need a lvl squish, what we need is a totally new direction of the game.
Now, finally they could bring back the game to the good old state and the launch of classic server they could really redo the whole game and correct the mistakes through the years.
Let BFA die and make a wow 2.0

24

Would rather see a short leveling experience where most pve content is tied to max, rather than what we have today with the years of content down the drain because we have outleveled it.

All in all, they need to stop adding more levels. Maybe add something that we can level such as the artefacts and heart without padding on extra player levels.

4 Likes
25

Been leveling a Warlock recently and have blasted 20 levels (58 yesterday, 78 today) in around 10 hours.

Always room for improvement (get incremental upgrades to flight speed at 60-65-70-75-80 perhaps?), But right now that particular bracket seems fine.

26

Bout time we had better reward for our efforts from 1 to 120 that gave us improved damage capabilities and a feeling of real power. So instead of the literal vendor trash we get day in and day out and bits of silver for working so hard, give us the chance of some epics for all levels. I mean what is the problem… ? Its not like you are going to be level 45 for very long. BUT… having that brilliant sword that lets you cut through mobs like butter may just keep your interest up.

I was just in two dungeons… Same gear and same level. The first Zul’farrak I was like pea shooting mobs and it was embarassing. Next up Dire Maul and I was able to crit almost every firebolt and the damage was amazing. I have tried to work out what variable is at play but the scaling just makes the smooth levelling and play a nonsense. I was Level 54.

So give us more reliable stats, better gear at all levels and if you are going to implement scaling then at least get it working properly. How can anyone possibly enjoy themselves when the stats just are so varied from one time to the next. There really is no sense of any progression and feeling of getting stronger and more powerful.

Just saying

27

I support the idea of a level squish, but… It’s not as simple as just cutting levels.

For instance, if they squish levels, but keep the same experience requirements, some of the later levels are going to feel very slow as each quest you complete will barely cause your experience bar to move.

Like… 111-120 take 800k+ experience each, while you get like 20-30k per quest. That’s about 40 quests per level, i.e. each quest grants you about 2,5% of a level. It’s already barely noticeable and you have to complete a handful of quests to actually see the bar move in any meaningful way. Now, imagine you still get the same amount of experience per quest, but instead of 800k+ for a level, you need 1,6 mil, i.e. each quest only grants you like 1-1,5% of a level.

So while technically you will progress at the same pace, it will feel considerably slower and watching that experience bar barely move is going to suck for many people, including myself.

Another thing is - right now you basically get most your abilities by level 60, which is relatively fast to reach. After the squish, the ability aquisition curve is going to be a lot more spread out, meaning that it will effectively take longer to unlock all of your abilities.

What I mean by that is that while there will be less levels that don’t give you anything, unlocking your abilities will take a lot longer than they do now as in the time you would now need to be 60-70 and basically have almost everything, you’ll be 30-35, i.e. just a half way into unlocking your abilities, because a ton of abilities that you would have unlocked in that time would be move to levels 35-60.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a ton of other things that can go wrong or break or whatever, so… I think a simple “level squish” is not going to work out too well.

2 Likes
28

Yes, I support this 100%.

I don’t get the arguments like oh no more pruning. He said that right now it’s absolutely impossible to have meaningful rewards for 120 levels and he’s fully correct.

Personally I think it’s time to go back to level 70, and add back lower level class quests. The vanilla class quests were the highlight of the old era of wow for me. You could replace the rewards with special transmogs or something I don’t know but I miss that feeling of being excited to hit a certain level.

There’s no reason to believe this will affect max level experience in any way. And it makes sense with more and more zones being added to the game.

4 Likes
29

Anyone who votes for a level squish hasn’t thought any of it through.

Consider the following:

2 Likes
30

Here Khelene posted good examples of problems i am worried level squishing would cause. If they just take spells what we get now, squish levels and spread those spells equally on every ding, we will be leveling exactly same time but getting so many skills later than now, making leveling even more tedious. And even they would be spread not to every ding but spread on leveling curve like now, it would not change the fact we level exactly same TIME between every ding. We would be rewarded exactly as often as now.

I am also worrying how they will squish everything else to fit with levels, just to mention dungeons levels, scaling brackets and so on. I worry we end up for example with world where you cannot go back to solo run old dungeons and raids for mogs or just for fun.

I have to stress i am not against such a squish in principal, i am just worried it breaks more than it fixes.

2 Likes
31

Eh, I’m fine with the lvls we have. I’d rather they unsquish the stats to a certain degree or just revert the lvling back to what it was pre-Legion/add a hard-mode for those who WANT the “hard” -read grindy snoozefest- we have now.

32

90 % of these theoretical issues can be solved quite elegantly, just cut everything in half from 120 to 60. Stats are the only problem, but they are going to do the ilvl and stat squishes in the future anyway.

I am for this change. Even though the levelling would take the same amount of time, at least the levels would be more impactful to the game.

1 Like
33

Bigger is better

1 Like
34

Was about to say this. GW2 do similar as well. It doesn’t feel awkward lorewise for me buuut then I am playing it in order. Usually I do that once and then pick my favourite zones in a game for alts.

True zone scaling is what I wanted. Felwood at level 30? Go ahead.
Un’goro at level 15? Why not.
Sure it would make little sense lorewise but at this point we know the lore inside out and new players can be guided by the questlines.

Squish us back to 60, able to do whatever zone we please after level… 10. Give us something every level and then do a talent point system like the CP system in ESO. People can play the most recent stuff a lot faster and I note CP (champion points) in ESO and whatever-it-is in GW2 are account wide. It’s alt friendly. So many alts I would have… so many.

2 Likes
35

You’re clueless as to how game development works if you think it’s thát easy and won’t mess with anything in the process.

3 Likes
36

Squishing the levels is necessary, but it won’t do much good on it’s own. There needs to be a different system in place. if they squish the levels now but don’t change character progression we will just end up at the same place we are now a few expansions later.

I remember someone mentioning another system, where the base game is separate from the expansions. So in wow’s case, base game, vanilla would be 1-60, and then every expansion would have it’s own separate leveling, 1-10 for example. Still not ideal from a lore standpoint, but another option to consider.

I think to keep people from abandoning the old content, they could tie the rewards to completing said content. For example, if I want to unlock the transmog from Pandaria, I have to complete the content for that expansion once per account. Same thing for access to TW for that expansion. Legacy mode for farming old instances could also be tied to finishing the content. That way even if people don’t need to quest in old zones to level, they would still have an incentive to do so.

37

For most of the listed things it would not be a huge problem, there are areas which would be problematic, but since they are thinking about it, they might have something in their head, which would not cause the game to crash.

38

I highly doubt it. I Can name several changes made in the past few years that messed up more things than they fixed.

Also let us not forget that they didn’t have a back-up plan for Cataclysm when they removed literally every zone and replaced it with a lesser version that is now out-dated and whose lore makes no sense in the current game’s timeline.

2 Likes
39

Give me one good reason “Why” without saying “It takes too long to level up”, which can be solved by revamping how Experience gain works?

1 Like
40

It’s not how many levels you have, it’s what you do with them that counts :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Right now most levels are meaningless, you gain nothing as you level, and the situation is only going to get worst the longer the game lives. Devs don’t want over bloated action bars, so they are spacing new spells and talents out by 120 levels. Soon it will be 130, and then more and more.

The time it takes to level is also a factor. WoW, for better or worse, is all about the end game. Pilling on levels means asking people to wait more and more to get to the relevant content, and that is bad for the game.

1 Like