The current standard leveling experience is pretty atrocious, Dragonflight is addressing the progression/power sides of it, but I feel Blizzard need to have a discussion, or atleast see peoples’ thoughts, on the content that players go through while leveling.
We’re all well acquainted with the slog of leveling by now, right? just push through your favourite expansion dungeons, racing to the content you actually want to play, right?
What if they implemented new content as standard for 10-60?
what kind of content would you guys like to play through while leveling? that goes for questing, dungeons, and maybe even leveling raids, too!
To clarify, I’m not suggesting they get rid of chromie time, I’m asking what you would want to see them replace BFA with as the standard new player experience (that we can obviously choose to play through too).
Dragonflight is changing a lot of the ideas of how warcraft is made and how we play it, I think a new 10-60 experience should be made that goes hand in hand with that, as BFA doesn’t. (and it has possibly the worst dungeons they could possibly put new players into)
To me the worst thing about leveling is the SL part. I’m planning to get back in the game in DF and am in the process of leveling healers on a real realm. Most of my toons are like 51 or 52, and at that point I wanna stop because it really feels like a chore, whereas I could choose what content I wanted to play before 50.
I recently came back and I’m doing threads of fate for the first time on my chosen DF character and these 10 levels are worse than leveling to 120 from zero in BFA for some reason.
It’s zapped a fair amount of motivation from me and I didn’t even play SL much when it came out so it should be all new and exciting to me.
Unless they’re going to add new levelling content, agreed.
It’s just a timegate before you can get to the actual game currently.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have the power progression of levelling, but especially with all their scaling tech content shouldn’t be level gated.
My thoughts exactly - except I feel that way about most of the old content, too.
I’m bored of leveling endlessly through content I’ve already done, I’m desperate for NEW content to level my alts through 10-60, sure, that’ll eventually become not-new too, but it’d still be there as a better experience for new players than BFA.
What do you call ‘old’ content, since you only started playing in 2015 so missed original vanilla and the first 4 expansions?
I levelled five alts to 60 during SL, including this one, without ever touching BFA. There’s a ton of levelling choices which you can pick and mix, chop and change.
Do you want to get to end game asap and levelling is just an inconvenience you have to do first?
Do you want to immerse yourself in the story of a whole expansion and go on an epic adventure?
Do you want something in between?
Personally, it’s so quick that it’s broken and pointless. I don’t understand why people pay for level boosts at £49 a time for something so trivial, that’s crazy to me and a lot of money (inb4 some rich guy hurr durrs).
I levelled a mage last week, took a couple of days no sweat, just for an extra toon to do ICC invincible runs. Now if the levelling experience was worth it’s salt, I shouldn’t be able to do that.
When I first played many years ago it was the epic adventure and levelling an alt on a whim like above wasn’t something I remember anyone doing, I certainly didn’t. For how quick it is now, the characters may as well start at the lowest level for the current expansion (50 for SL, 60 for DF) and be done with it.
That’s exactly my point tbh - either they need to provide new levelling content and slow it down, make each level feel meaningful, or just completely remove the necessity for it.
They’re bringing back talent trees so they certainly aren’t going to abolish it, but they also can’t leave it as it currently is.
Some people seem unable to comprehend that a brand new player with 0 MMO experience wouldn’t want to level boost, as they’d obviously want to learn how to play the game, follow the story etc, and the current experience only stands to convince people they shouldn’t play this game.
WE know the levelling content isn’t a representation of the end game product, but they don’t, why would they?
I think there isn’t any solution to be made besides some minor band-aid fixes until they finally revamp the entire game world.
The questing experience is a non-coherent chaotic mess of too many expansions (made for slower leveling) worth of content that you get to pick a limited stretch of based on whatever arbitrary reason you’d like and do random number of quests and finnish none to some lore chapter until you hit a certain exp level and get to do shadowlands. Which is also but not to the same degree also a mess of do just about enough random stuff until you hit cap.
What they should do to fix it currently is just give players full access to all dungeons, bgs while leveling including scaling low level players into max level normal dungeons, bgs and possibly even heroic level ones while also reward less but actual endgame currency for scalable leveling gear and even endgame gear itself.
And just generally speed it up as much as possible.
While leaving chromie time optional for those that want it but really hammer it down as secondary and optional lore content.
Then when they finally decide to do it and I’m a bit miffed they didn’t for DF.
Revamp the entire game world and leveling experience (I know it’s a hell of a lot of work but it should’ve been done a long time ago and they can’t just keep pushing it away with a new expansion every few years).
And when they do Blizz should make questing the main focus again with a coherent story and path where you have to complete the main story for 80% ish of the exp needed for level cap and the remaining 20% can be done through content of choice such as sidequests, dungeons, pvp world quests etc
Then they also must stop raising the level cap with every expansion and stop adding an entire long questing experience each expansion that bloats and ruins that coherent story and questing flow.
They can add more quests in the way of more optional sidequests or world quests for the optional 20% exp needed for cap.
New expansion smaller quest/lore chains that are either to unlock some reward faction or to simply serve as added lore source should not reward exp and count into the main leveling experience and should be done to a minimum to limit quest bloating and be skippable on alts once done.
Main focus of a new expansion should instead be on adding new dungeons, bgs, rewards, races and even classes/specs etc and improving or refreshing existing dungeons, bgs, rewards etc to keep with line and rewarding as the newly added ones and not on adding a new 10 level leveling experience that ruins and neglects original content.
I do think some of this is quite likely tbh.
the game turns 20 when 11.0 would presumably launch, Dragonflight is making monumental shifts in what the game is and how we play it, it almost feels like it’s a “transition” towards a new Wow, with 11.0 being a 2nd overhaul, mainly focusing on the content/leveling etc.
Also Danuser said things like the reclamation of Gilneas etc, any major world events like that wouldn’t be happening off screen like the cataclysm did.
No borrowed power treadmills needing fixing or replacing in patches means they can literally spend content patches doing what content patches should do - adding more content and continuing the story.
Maybe the last content patch of Dragonflight would be us slowly rebuilding places like Gilneas.
Ye I’m hopeful of the future and DF does look promising and I’m hoping it’s pretty much the last “standard” type of expansion and Blizz finally turns the chapter.
The game really need a fresh start with both content and the lore.
Definitely, but I do think after 7 years of crap-ness everyone’s just bereft of any hope the game will actually improve and accepting of the fact that this is World of Warcraft and this is how it always will be.
I hope blizzard proves that mindset wrong.
Unfortunately this is still Actiblizz we’re talking about though lol.
