After many years I’ve come back with a few friends. Initially we started on classic but wanted to give retail ago as there’s bucket loads of new content.
The process of levelling needs some serious attention IMO. I managed to hit 60 before I’d even completed the third zone in the Eastern Kingdoms and that’s with doing maybe 7-10 dungeons. Then I went to Northrend and hit 90 before even completing all the quests in the first zone.
It left me feeling pretty confused and completely disconnected from the story. When I played in the past, levelling was one of my favourite parts, learning the stories and events that are taking place. It really immersed you in the world and created a sense of being. Coming back and levelling has just felt a bit soulless. It feels like I’m levelling for the sake of levelling so that I can quickly get to the end game.
This makes so much of the games content feel useless. Such a huge part of the games items, professions and the general questing experience are completely redundant now. Why even have low level crafting and materials if they literally serve no more purpose other than something you have to sift through looking for the 1% of items that actually are relevant.
I’m curious to know what others think of this. There are so many cool things in this game that have just been totally thrown away so that players can reach the end game faster. Everybody seems to have access to everything so easily and so much of the content plays no role because of the super faster progression. Not only that but the sense of achievement that was once here seems to have really dwindled. You can get what you need so easily with very little need to trade or socialise with other players. Maybe some of this will change when I get to 120 but for the most part it feels like this huge game with tons of players but yet the experience feels so lonely lol.
It feels like WOW needs a real overhaul with the entire character progression / profession / levelling process getting some serious love to make everything relevant again.
Hey, you will start to realise story as you hit current expansion and new zones which is BfA - 110+. If you don’t have heirlooms you will go throught 3 zones where you finish all story lines full of cutscenes and these zones will be visually changing as you go throught story. Right now you are going throught old content which was relevant years and years ago.
Retail is always about current expansion. Old content is basically just about transmog. You cannot relive old expansions, WoW world is simply too huge for it.
Yo, f.k old content. Most of people already done it. And not once, or twice, but much more times.
Stop exp gain for 10 gold, and enjoy whatever u want.
I understand that the current expansion is going to really carry the most weight and relevance, but my point being that so much content exists in this game that could pretty much not be there.
What’s the point of even levelling 1-110 if all the content that exists within this progression phase serves no real purpose other than gating the player. Crafting, story, progression - These things are created a sense of being and achievement. It’s like 90% of the games content is redundant to bypass levelling because some players want everything handed to them on a plate. This might sit well with some existing players who just want have as many high level characters as possible but what about getting new players in? Even for me as a returning player I’ve found the whole experience to be confusing and pretty dull to be honest when you realise how all I’ve really being doing so far is mindless.
IMO levelling should be an immersive and rewarding experience. All zones should matter and character progression should be noticeable from the moment your character starts, not when you hit the latest expansion. There’s character level boosters out there to buy if players really are sick of levelling and if you’ve levelled that many characters you are sick of it then surely you’ve got enough characters by now
It’s a real shame. There’s so much in this game world yet literally 80/90% of it could be cut out as it serves no real purpose with the current formula.
Leveling is immersive and fun but only in current expansion. It always were like this in WoW. Starting with TBC leveling process between 1-60 was accelerated because max level increased. With WOTLK leveling process of 1-70 was accelerated again because max level was 80. And here we are 15 years after release, 7 expansions later.
Do you realise how painful would it be to levelup 120 levels if they didn’t accelerate it? Just imagine how long does it take to level up in Classic and its just 60 levels. And ofc if they accelerate leveling it means you can afford to skip old content. Now you don’t need to do all quests in Vanilla zones and grind to get 60. Imagine you have to do all TBC, Wrath, Cata, MoP, Draenor and Legion zones just to get to current expansion. It would be like 20 days /played even before you reach relevant content.
there is nothing to discuss. leveling is just leveling. you can always stop geting xp and do zones on your level if thats what you wish to clear all zones.
or do those questlines when you hit max level for loremasters achievements.
for majority the leveling process is already too long - thus people asking for level squish because majority wants to get 1-120 in less then 20 hours of playtime.
You talk about levelling like it’s a negative experience.
It only becomes tiresome once you’ve levelled a lot of characters at which point why level anymore? How many frigging characters do people actually need lol?
If you’ve levelled more than 5 characters and start complaining that levelling is boring then at that point just grab a booster to get to or near max level off the blizzard store.
With all that said, I get your point and this doesn’t address a lot of the other things that I’ve mentioned.
It’s not just to levelling process that is the problem but also professions and the general character progression. The game itself or the existing zones could be made relevant again with an overhaul in how crafting works as well as quest rewards and loot. If there was a way to really normalise everything even at high levels that would be a general step in the direction.
Levelling through BfA is in fact the most painful levelling in the game.
BfA was the first time ever I didn’t enjoy levelling my first character. Alts can always feel a little grindy, of course, but BfA levelling is unique in that it sucked right from the start, even when fresh. The horrible, misconveived, miscalculated, backward scaling had a lot to do with that, of course, but the looming requirement to get Loremaster and all round rep wasn’t a miscalculation; it was deliberate. The removal of XP from mobs wasn’t a miscalculation; it was deliberate. The scattershot placement of mobs so that you ended up forever stuck in meaningless, trivial fights wasn’t a miscalculation; it was deliberate.
That is a valid point. We don’t want to spend 8 months levelling. But acceleration is not the problem. 50-120 hours is an acceptable timeframe. But those hours should feel enjoyable and satisfying.
WoW nowadays is about various endgame content, not about leveling. That is why leveling is accelerated. If it wasn’t accelerated, noone would make it to max. level because it would take extreme amount of time and dedication just to get there. And if you wanted alt character, well …
110+ questing is much better, just wait until you get there
No. It’s because we have been playing here all these years and done these things many many times when they were current content. I understand it doesn’t feel right for you, when you are returning player and things are fresh for you, but instead of hinting that current players “want everything handed on the plate” you should recognise we have done those things already when they were current content.
That being said, i do think professions are ruined. Not how they are in leveling but how they are as a whole. Even on max level they are not fun anymore and you cannot make much usefull things (some but not many).
I also do think leveling is ruined, not because of speed but because of scaling. I miss the feeling of dinging and getting new spells and then being able to go quest on new area that was too high for me before. Or poking my nose into too high level area to try get something or get some flight paths and such. I wish scaling would be undone and replaced with voluntary character scaling.
To me, leveling in old zones since the Level scaling is super fun. Finally i can choose if i stay and level in the zone i like.
For example, as alliance, you may like Elwyn, Westfall and duskwood but hate Stranglethorn Vale. So you just do all Quests in Westfall and Duskwood and you will be level well over 40 and can skip the Stranglethorn Vale.
Before you had to go through every zone because one was 0-10 other 10-20 next 20-30 and so on. And you didnt even made all Q in that zone.
So this is waaay better than Classic. Which is anyway mostly about fetch quest. I still dont understand why people are so hyped by the Classic.
as someone who leveled atm 19 alts to 120 and by the end of year shoudl have 24 x 120 i want to ask … wait whaaaat ? -_- i wonder how undergeared you had to be to experience such hardships.
The first two I took through were overgeared … ugh. Was 940? 220 after the squish? something like that. 3 out of 4 BiS Leggos between the two, for as long as they lasted.
And no, I didn’t have any trouble on either of them. It. Just. Wasn’t. Fun.
My banker did genuinely have problems when I brought her up but (a) I started questing at 116 or 117, having picked up XP from levelling pets up to that point and (b) I proudly claim the title of World’s Worst Priest, which is why she’s my banker.
Be thankful that you didn’t start levelling a mag’har orc. The amount of time travelling you get to do is quite something, especially when you reach WOD and get to experience the grandfather paradox first-hand.
In my opinion, levelling should do two things: tell a story, and teach you how to play. And we have far too much story to tell it all as we level, and too few abilities to play with so gameplay can rapidly become stale if we don’t progress quickly. Hopefully Blizzard will address this in the next expansion and give us more options when it comes to levelling. I wouldn’t hold my breath as they seem to have a preference for killing anything other than questing, but it would be great if they embraced all forms of levelling, from dungeon running to pet battles to archaeology. Choice is good.
My personal preference would be to have the option to choose an expansion when you create a character. You would then level from 1 to [latest expansion starting level] by questing through that expansion. That way you get to see all the story, if you choose to, and get spat out into the latest expansion when you’re done.
It’s that fast because its all a mess really. They don’t want to fix it properly and they know most of us won’t take this disjointed storytelling, class balance, professions and rewards at a classic pace of levelling.
We blast through it because it is bad for the most part. It has all to do with how Blizz decided from TBC onward that the best course of action would be to: abandon all content that came before. Which is bad… but that wasn’t enough and they dropped cataclysm. Now we’re stuck with a schizophrenic world smeared over all kinds of different time zones.
At least with party sync and how easy it is to gain levels I can still get some enjoyment out of levelling… but as a game, WoW is in a pretty bad place for anyone new coming in.
But do you not realise how bonkers that statement is you made? You’re basically writing off the vast majority of the games content, literally everything except BFA.
Sacking off as much of 90% of the games content because “nobody cares” is such a bizarre way to look at it.
How about instead making it relevant and actually mean something. Surely if every continent, every zone and all professions served a purpose that would be miles better than just 10%.
I cannot wrap my head around how people think that the current levelling formula, character progression and profession system is working well. The current set-up only works for existing players who only want to engage in end-game action based content and nothing else.
New and returning players are really neglected the way the game is currently set-up. I also suspect a lot of existing player aren’t too keen.
