So… what I get from having read all 140 previous posts in this thread:
Levelling to 120 is okay, if the experience is enjoyable.
Many people feel the lack of rewards per ding could be compensated if the rewards were structured differently, not levels.
People agree that a level squish would be confusing, weird and probably unnecessary.
Pre-MoP talents (‘traditional’ talents) are sorely missed, people miss the high variety and ability to alter slightly, rather than having a direct choice between three.
Another point ‘pro’ traditional talents. Anybody who plays WoW will be able to use google, and search for an ‘optimum’ build, blunt yes, but logging into a game is as simple as completing a search. Adding back in a tree system would satisfy we players who want more variety and control, while not drastically over complicating things - complicated decisions was one of the given reasons for removing the original talent system. PvP ‘talents’ could be maintained, but some put back into the tree like Lichborne for DKs and so on, allowing them to be used in PvE (so many people want Smoke Bomb for PvE… me included, but I am aware rogues would then ever more so be utility kings).
Sorry for the long post ahead, I’m kind of catching up on 60 or so comments.
I could say the exact same about you. You have yet to give me one good reason why we need to remove levels and not just stay at the 120 that we have and just fix the leveling as it is which would include giving more satisfaction to leveling up by re-implementing a proper talent system.
Before this Q&A I have never even once heard of any player, new or not say that they’re intimidated by having to level 119 levels.
A very big one! i was always looking forward to visiting them to learn new abilities. It was one of the cooler things while leveling in my opinion, alongside the old talent system and class quests.
It will. If we have less levels then they’ll take longer to level up. This is actually what people in these threads apparantly want: For it to be worth to say “congratz” or “Ding!” to when someone levels up. For that the leveling will require to take some time.
Yeah see, there we go ^^.
Pretty much this. The exact same result that you are all looking for can be obtained through just implementing a good talent tree, bringing back class quests, trainers, spell ranks
Exactly!
The whole reason why we’re in this current state is because nobody looked ahead years ago, though… I told people way back when they first removed the old talent system that if they keep growing the levels we’d run out of rewards for leveling up.
Same! I wish we had one. We really need it.
But at least you had options. also define ‘viable’, many things that weren’t the meta still worked in practice or specific scenarios – just not competitively, which is fine!
Pretty much that.
I firmly believe that the reason you don’t feel like you’re getting stronger now is simply the absence of a proper Talent system.
Even with the current leveling system if all that changed was us receiving a real Talent system and a point to spend every level then that would already be a gigantic step forward.
I highly doubt that they will ever remove scaling after all, they only just implemented it.
They don’t. The only time i’ve noticed such a thing is at the start of an expansion such as BfA where you lose something as massive as an artifact weapon but that’s just my personal experience.
…what? Just now people stated that the entire reason for wanting to squish level was bécause ‘everyone’ looks up to the 119 levels ahead of them and now you’re saying nobody actually does that?
I firmly believe that we just need to receive a proper talent system first. Maybe even bring back Trainers and Spell ranks so players actually have to go to players to learn new abilities.
Yeahh see… The more comments I read the more it seems obvious that the Talent system is the actual problem there, not the amount of levels.
How I wish we would get that back… you could even go further than 51-points, there’s no reason we should be stuck at only having 51 points.
Same, even if it’s not “convenient” at times it still brought that “Yes! I leveled up and now I can visit my trainer again to learn something new!”-RPG feeling.
They asked why it would or would not be a good idea. If we all come to the conclusion that a level squish wouldn’t be necessary and that the real issue here is the talent system then there you go: Now it’s on the table or rather, it should be on the table.
Kind of off-topic but I highly doubt that people who want to play vanilla are all oblivious to how long the leveling takes. As someone who is going to play a Warrior I am well aware of the struggles ahead of me.
Often enough people agree with me or I with them. This isn’t a battle, It’s a discussion. There’s no reason why we can not constructively explain our points of view to each other.
I’m not, though? I’m agreeing with a lot of things i’m reading.
This is probably the biggest thing that I miss about WoW today: The variety in character customization.
100% agreed. (See? we can totally get along! )
Precisely the conclusion I was hoping people would come to.
I get excited just thinking about even a slight possibility of getting the old talent system back, there’s so many classes that I wouldn’t even consider playing right now that I would if we had it back.
Won’t work
More talents gives more depth and customization for each spec but they can’t be that much of a difference, otherwise the growth won’t be linear.
You’ll end up too weak without some talents and suddenly too powerful with others, unless all those talents provide a minimal benefit.
It used to work really well. No system is perfect, and you’ve stated the downsides, but do you honestly see it to be worse than what we have currently? The game is crying out for more depth, and yet you say more depth won’t work.
I’m starting to see why so many people are of the viewpoint: ‘screw it, I’ll see you in Classic in a few months…’
One question though, how would the old talent system work with their new philosophy for classes and specs? On the last Q&A Ion said “we now have 36 classes” or something to that effect. They want unique specs and they want to keep the number of spells around the same as time goes on.
Even if they add the old talent system, how will they solve the problem of not having leveling feel like a watered down experience if the number of spells is to remain roughly the same going forward? Just add more and more ranks to spells to spend more and more talent points. Not to mention having every spec feel different.
No, I don’t think the old talent system would work with their current design philosophy.
And you have yet to give me a way to fix the levelling system with 120 levels.
That’s the fundamental problem in a nutshell. How do you provide an interesting power up 120 times over, and how do you keep content relevant for a large enough range of levels without having to scale all the content, thereby removing the choice of difficulty (and therefore having to make it very easy to make it doable for literally anyone)?
As far as i know they did not say they would reverse scaling if they squish levels. I would find it surpricing if they did after all the work they just put into it.
I hate the way they did scaling too, the feeling of leveling down on 111-120 is horrid. I see that as example of what can go wrong when you try to fix something and i worry we end up with similar style of problem if they start to mess around with levels. So for me level squish is not showing as something that would fix that but something that would cause more same kind of problems on top of what we got now.
So to wrap up, i want same things than you here, but i think solution you support would not bring it to us, quite opposite. It’s like having a school nurse offer to do you a heart surgery… even if you really need one it might be good idea to step back and think another way to do it.
i will support it if i gives a rewarding xp it doesent mather if Your lvl is 120 or 60 if this means we get more around talents and abillities and feels rewarding i say yess but it raises a lot of questons about how you will do With the old worlds like outland what will the lvl caps be on this diffrent plasses and will it affect old icc transmog Mount runs and simmular i Guess.
It made the difference in Vanilla-Tbc-Wrath, though? It has a track record of being a succesful system so you can’t exactly say that “it won’t work”; It already has worked.
Many talents did grant minimal yet interesting benefits. some directly increased stats such as a 5-point talent that increased your Crit chance by 1% per point spent in it, and others enhanced existing abilities such as increasing the AoE size of your shouts (for warriors).
Yep. that too.
Well like I said talents could give direct stat increases or they can enhance existing spells. Talents don’t need to be giving you straight-up abilities to press to be interesting.
The way I see a talent system work is if it allows you to change your class to what you want you want to do and talents having the ability to slightly alter how your abilities work or increase certain abilities’ effectiveness is a great way to go about that.
They can always add abilities if there are too few, that’s kind of a non-issue imo.
We all just did? A proper talent system would fix it. Class quests would make it more interesting and fun. Actually having to go to trainers every now and then to learn new spells would make it more RPG-like.
I believe that this is more of a scaling issue than a leveling issue.
Difficulty is a touchy subject, many players feel that the current difficulty is far too low but at the same time people are afraid that the difficulty would go back to that of Vanilla and thus leveling would take too long because of said difficulty.
I can’t really give you actual numbers but I do believe that leveling as it currently is should just be made more difficult through increasing the damage that mobs deal as well as slightly increasing their health pool so that you don’t one-shot every mob (which many players do).
This way mobs pose an actual threat, thus increasing the difficulty without actually increasing the time it takes to level up.
If it’s too difficult for some people then there’s always the option to group up to make it easier, this is an MMORPG after all and grouping up in itself is a way to ease the difficulty of the game. Perhaps it is time that we remove the penatly of experience that you receive when you group with people. I recall that exp gain splits between party members e.g. if there’s 3 members in your group and a mob gives 100 xp, you all receive 33 xp. Why not remove the sharing aspect and just give all players present full experience gain of what they slay?
Groupping up and questing together should be more encouraged.
I feel like we’re playing a co-operative form of virtual tennis or something, we make a good team in this kind of discussion
The problem is, with BfA’s dual-continent design, we were never going to get 110-113, 114-116, 117-120 across 3 zones. Scaling was needed so that zones were more dynamic and people didn’t get bored of having to start in Zuldazar or Tiragarde every single time. It’s definitely worked on a less-is-more kind of level for allowing completely freedom of levelling. I level in whatever zone I feel like levelling in on my alts on the day and it’s great.
Yet, obviously as has been mentioned in the past few posts, scaling offers up it’s own problems and difficulties in other ways, especially outside of Legion and BfA content.
Indeed we do! I do fear what conclusion they come to on US forums and I can only hope that they are reading this thread and take our view on the issue just as serious.
These talent systems are desperately needed.
Returning class trainers and class quests as well.
Thats not what i said.
I said that more depth won’t change the small power level increase there is right now between levels.
I’ll be more than happy to have a proper customizable spec instead of this pruned 1 option system.
Still it’s not the solution for levelling.
Wrath capped at 80, 40lvl less than today. It’s a huge difference.
Imagine you can measure the power gap between lv 1 and max level with a number, 10. To have a linear growth, you have to divide 10 for the number of levels. 10/80 is 0,12, 10/120 is 0,8 and each level you gain this a power increase.
The more level you have, the smaller the gain you get, especially after a stat squish that shrink the initial number.
Sure, but in reality of all those talents the one that made you feel a real power growth were really a few in the mix.
Most of them were more playstyle option rather than a bump in power. Very good in terms of class fantasy and customization, but not that changing in terms of damage output.
You already mentioned that class trainers did have a real role but I didn’t know there were class quests as well! They have those, as well as race quests, in Neverwinter and I really enjoyed them.
I’d love to see these in WoW - I’d say again but for me it would be a completely new thing!
I must admit, the more I read these posts that mention larger talent trees, the more I like that idea. If I understand the idea behind this correctly, this would make for better character customisation as well as giving us a reward for every level we achieve. Sounds good to me!
So perhaps you, and the other posters who have said this are correct, it’s not a level squish we need, but more talents!
I do miss the class trainers. Not so much needing to make my own poisons and always having vanishing powder on me, but the fantasy feel and progression you got from visiting a trainer are lacking in the game - especially with the quests for threshold moments in levelling like druid forms, warrior stances, rogue poisons, lock demons etc etc. Not having those is another thing that causes the game to… lack depth.
Don’t get us wrong here, they were VERY different.
The current talents add or completely change an ability, be it passive or active, most are for different play styles and completely change the way in which you play around that tier depending on your choices.
The traditional talent trees offered you simple choices, there’d be a total of 5-7 point selections per level of the tree, and you’d have to spend so many points on one before you could start using your points on the next level, it was a good way to gate abilities behind levels, without actually level gating them. Most of these choices added a small bonus to a certain ability, or your character in general, some were unique and new abilities, passive or active. Most specs top-of-the-tree ability was one of their most important. Because each spec’s tree had a total of about 8 levels, once you unlocked the whole tree (well, at least the top) for your spec, you could then go into other trees and spend your remaining points (it was normally about 10), between all 3.
So Blood DKs were able to have faster attack speed or rune regen from the frost tree, or more potent diseases and death & decays from unholy.
Combat (now outlaw) rogues could have higher poison damage from the assass tree or higher opener damage from stealth and stronger rupture tick damage from the Sub tree…
The level of variety and customisation we had hasn’t been in the game since MoP.
I’m gonna go reminisce about those good times. Y’all got me feeling all nostalgic and homesick.
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