Wow's leveling experience

Community General Discussion
1

The Current leveling experience is awful.
Yes, I’m sure with the new talent trees leveling itself will feel better, but the actual content?
New players are forced into BFA, an expansion about a faction war, and then yanked straight out and thrown into SL, or soon to be Dragonflight.

Here is my idea of a solution.

In 10.0, all of us max level players will obviously be headed to the Dragon Isle’s, and the hub city, along with the profession system revamp, really seems to be pushing for social interaction to be part of the game play, and that’s great! That city will feel so alive with players, talking, trading etc.

…So why wait until we’ve all moved on to the 11.0 expansion zone to send new players to the Dragon Isle’s at level 10?

I think it’d be much better to make Dragonflight the default 10-70 leveling experience in 10.1/10.2 some how.
Then after this, section everything SL and before off as “Old Wow” through chromie time, by no means get rid of the content, but going forward don’t force newbies into it, make it so if they queue for a dungeon they can’t queue for old dungeons unless they specifically want to.

Or you could just develop a nice, solid 10-60 leveling experience that’s evergreen and isn’t content from a specific expansion, either way, whether my idea of newbies going to the Dragon Isles, or my idea of a completely new 10-60 experience is silly, there’s a problem with the leveling experience, especially to newbies, and it needs fixing.

The sooner Wow has a “base” leveling experience, that’s solid and feels good, and represents the modern game and the dev team’s modern design philosophies, the sooner it’ll be more attractive to outsiders.

5 Likes
2

It would be difficult, as you’d have to do most quests during 60-70, so you’d be left by a small handful of them for the 10-60 bracket :sweat_smile:

…of course that isn’t the best course of leveling either but, that newbie can level in BfA style, so move zone to zone, continent to continent at certain levels, or can make a trial toon to not be treated as a newbie and have access to Chromie Time. :smile:

1 Like
3

that’s the problem though.

I’ve tried introducing people to Wow, and in BFA they just feel completely lost, then when it’s time for their first dungeon (looking at you, Freehold!) they get a group that just runs past all the bosses to get to the last boss and get out of the dungeon ASAP.

but of course, every expansion purchase comes with a level skip, so the knee jerk reaction is to use it and get to the newest version of the game… where they then get insulted for not knowing how to play the game, and even if they do learn, get good, even climb mythic+, when they go to make an alt they’re met with a rather disappointing, boring experience.

whilst New comers and outsiders are something the game really needs to work towards being more friendly and appealing to, it’s us as well, sure there’s probably a lot of us who DO enjoy leveling via chromie time, and that’s absolutely fine.
But there’s plenty of us who want to level alts, but have no desire to run dungeons and quest lines that were added years and years ago, and I’m certainly in no rush to go through WoD/Legion for the millionth time (as much as I do occasionally enjoy revisiting them and leveling through them).

I think best case scenario, they should make a leveling experience for 10-60 that’s just adventuring around the world, no big story lines, nothing from an expansion that teases what comes next, only to be yanked away from it immediately. Like how the old game and the cataclysm revamp handled it, use the opportunity to show us the state of the wider world etc, and build this leveling experience with the new talents system and Dragonflight’s design philosophies at it’s core.

I just want to enjoy leveling again, and Talent trees alone won’t do that (though they’ll go a long way towards it).

2 Likes
4

The Dragon Isles will have enough content to level 60-70. So how can it also have content to level 10-70? IYou would have to have enough content for 60-70, and you would want that content to cover the zones completely, and you would want enough for enough for 10-60 as welll. I can think of tricks, but all of them have downsides. So how would you actually engineer that?

One problem with the idea of “evergreen” levelling content is that it gets less green every time you go through it.

Now this, I think, is actively bad. The thing I dislike most about Exile’s Reach is that it has all the flavour and nutritional value of boiled cardboard. It tells you nothing about your race, where you came from as a character. It doesn’t connect you with any place or events in the world or the history of the game. It’s an artificial, carefully engineered and controlled tutorial conducted in hermetically sealed conditions.

As I see it, the biggest problem with Chromie Time - apart from the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned scaling - is that it starts new players in BfA, which really is not a good place to start.

Yeah. I grouped with a newcomer who wanted to do a dungeon. We got Atal, and when everybody else zigzagged to avoid the pack, he … didn’t. :stuck_out_tongue: Beginners need Ragefire or Deadmines, not Freehold or Atal’dazar.

Ummm … being sent from one expansion/timeline to another? Ambitious.

2 Likes
5

While I agree that the leveling is terrible nowdays, I dont really believe your solution is gonna fix it. I actually dont believe there is a way to fix leveling. I really used to lovee leveling. I leveled up so many alts just because I loved to level, but nowdays i just find it hard to enjoy leveling. I dont really know why exactly. I guess there isnt a single answer.

I dont really thing DF talents are gonna help make leveling more fun in any way. I actually think it might be annoying as you level up so fast you will be bombarded with new talent points all the time. Some people who level through dungeons will probably even forget to put a new talent point every time they get it. It might actually get a bit annoying that you need to put a new talent every like 10 mins.

6

I only just found out two days ago how to get the old 1-60 dungeons from vanilla. I did not want to do BFA dungeons and was only given that choice on a brand new toon. So i had to figure out how to get them back.

Turns out you talk to chromie and select cata expansion and then the classic dungeons will be back as an option in the LFD. If there were notes on how to get the old dungeons back they were burried a long time ago never to be seen again.

It does seen odd that blizz wants to push people to bfa. I really enjoyed all the old dungeons. Blackfathom ect. I was looking forward to getting them and was perplexed as to why on a new toon i was not given this choice.

Learning a new class as an “older” person, as i say that as i am way older than your avg player, is a bit hard for me. You get so many spells so quickly and hardly any time at all to actually use them. Leveling fast is a double edged sword. On one hand those of us who have been around for a while appreciate not being stuck in the 1-60 for a few days in real time. But on the other hand how much can you learn of your new class when it is all over and dusted in a matter of hours. Especially right now with the winds of wisdom.

I really do think there needs to be some sort of class training just like in exile reach that only briefly touches on the subject. After that you are shoved into the world.

I like levelign new toons. I have 5 at max and another 40 of varying levels. Some of which i cant play since i barely remember how to play them. I have quite a few 50’s in classes that i leveled in BFA for heritage that i dont normally play. I would like to play them but the amount of buttons ect is overwhelming. So i just dont play them. What i do now is start the same class as a new toon and start over. But even that is a bit too fast.

1 Like
7

I started playing mid BFA, so i can relate to the confusion,
Boosted a DH and made my way to sunstrider isle to start from the beginning, met some people leveling who asked me what i was doing there.
They PvP’ed me, i lost as a DH because i had no idea what i was doing and then they made fun of me.
Great times.

WoW could use a more streamlined starting experience though, Exile’s reach is decent. But after you’re done. You’re still thrown into everything.

I had to watch video guides and read up on WoWheads beginners guide to get an idea where to go.

1 Like
8

I believe it is. It’s just to leave the levels as they are. I was actually hoping they would leave the level cap at 60 for DF. I know it sounds bizarre at first glance since it’s something new, but think of it like this:

  • Levelling nowadays means absolutely nothing. It’s just something you have to do.
  • In the past few expansions (I think MOP was the last one, where we actually got something at lvl 87) we didn’t receive a single thing during levelling. All was awarded upon reaching max level.
  • It just makes for a boring chore if you have alts. I have 12 maxed out chars, and I couldn’t bother levelling one more, even if they increased XP by 500% since I dread SL levelling so much. Luckily TW gives nice XP + I don’t have the drake yet, but it’s still worthless and pointless.
  • The oldschool levelling is such an outdated concept. ‘kill 10 of this, collect 5 of this, save 8 of this’. Everyone is sick of this. The SL levelling was abit different as it was more an introduction to the covenants, and while I think it’s not bad, I still felt it was abit too long and too forced. Instead they should just make a campaign sort of thing to get us familiar with the story, and that would be it.
1 Like
9

I know something like this could work but I still dont see how that would fix leveling. I guess it would be a bit faster. Leveling would still end up being this rush we have today. In the end you will still need to do 1-60 in the old content and tha nyou will need to do quests in DF but you will stop earning xp, but just doing quests to complete storyline which usually opens world quests…

10

It would make catching up easier as years & expansions go by. Think of it like this. Now with SL, you can choose 1-50 in any of the old exapsnions, and 50-60 in SL. Now in DF it’s gonna be 1-60 in all expansions + 60-70 in DF. It’s another additional 10 levels. 2 years from now, it’s gonna be 1-70 in all expansions, and 1 to 80 in Expansion after DF.

It’s always extending the time spent for levelling unless they plan on making it as fast as it should be (3-5 hours from 1-50 / 1-60), and max 5 hours from 50-60 / 60-70.

11

levelling is fast these days already .as soon as dragonflight becomes launched .shadowlands boring quests will become less important

12

Leveling feels very very off. Its too fast and everything scaling with you makes the whole proces pointles.

For me, and it may vary with others, the besr leveling was in cata and mop and maybe a little in legion. Because imho it was the last time when it felt like youre leveling up, growing in power, instead of leveling down and just making the same mobs harder to kill.

The best feeling and most fun ever was when you entered cataclysm zones from wrath and starzed looting items that had like 10 times more stats and you became way…waaaaaay steonger. Now when you ding…the mobs just take longer to kill…like i was just levelibg mage in loch modan…and before i went to dungeon it was like 3 ablities to kill stuff…when i came back 2 levels higher from one dungeon run…mobs suddenly took me two hotstreaks to kill…

And im not saying mobs should be joke to kill…im saying that the feeling of growing in power and leveling up is completely deleted from the game with scaling…gear upgrades which gives you +2 haste while they are 15 ilvl higher and stuff like this. Leveling was made just to be this obstacle to get trough as fast as possible.

3 Likes
13

I… actually really really like this idea!

Rather than add new levels every 2 years, which would eventually need to be squished again, just add new expansions as that, expansions, rather than extensions.

Expand the stories and the content you can play through once you’re at level cap, and keep 1-60 as “tutorial” time where it teaches you how to play the game.

but at the same time, I know many people do enjoy leveling up, exploring the world, following the “little” stories dotted around the world, with the 50% exp buff on TBC classic right now I finally gave it another shot, and I’m having the time of my life in a slower paced version of Wow.
Maybe they could make it so Mobs in the world hit harder and have abit more health, so slow down the pace, whilst still keeping the fast combat? I dunno, it’s a tricky one.

The games got a major identity crisis on it’s hands and they need to work out what they want the game to be, I think Dragonflight is certainly taking steps towards that goal.

1 Like
14

There is no levelling “experience” anymore, it’s so fast you can blast it out in a few days no sweat, it’s just a minor inconvenience. For me characters may as well just start at the start level of current content, i.e 50 for SL. No money in that for Blizzard though of course.
I’m a returning player after many years and remember doing every quest in a zone and still sometimes not being ready to move onto the next zone as I was not the right level or under geared. When I returned to WoW, it was a bit strange to do a handful of quests in a zone then move on.
I couldn’t believe this 50% exp buff either, that’s crazy. I levelled a rogue just for the craic while half asleep and it’s 60 already.

15

Yeah I tried introducing one of my friends from FF to Wow, went into BFA, compared the questing experience to be equal to some of the worsts quests from A Realm Reborn, and absolutely despised the dungeon experience he had.

Hasn’t touched the game since.

16

But they are gonna significantly reduce the amount of xp needed from levels 10-60 in DF so it will actually be much much quicker to level from 1-60. It might even be faster to level from 1-70 in DF than it is to level now 1-60

1 Like
17

If that’s the case, it makes it alright. Maybe I skipped this, as I don’t recall this information, although I went through the majority of notes :smiley: Thanks for sharing, I’ll go look it up.

18

I cannot for my life sit down for even 30 minutes in retail to level a character without wanting to alt tab/alt f4 out to do something else but put me in classic and I’ll take weeks happily wasting my time away on professions while leveling. I don’t feel like making leveling faster made it better in any way.
The 50% buff has made it worse for me too, for some reason the quicker leveling becomes the less patience I have until the next level
Maybe it’s the knowledge that there is no game before maxlevel and blizzard is admitting it by making leveling faster

2 Likes
19

if leveling is gonna be even faster than it already is, that just adds to the need for them to implement a solid, new, leveling experience for new players/alts.

I think the core issue with Wow’s leveling right now is that we’re leveling through content that was made with a completely different pace of exp gain in mind (poor player etiquette and lack of compassion for new players in old dungeons is also a major problem).

20

https://gamingsym.in/wow-dragonflight-xp-adjustment-you-need-that-much-experience-for-a-level-up/

Here is a link. For some levels its getting slightly increased (basicly for low levels to even it out). But than from level 32 the reduction is massive. For example experience reduction for level 60 is 75%.

2 Likes