Yes to the lvl squish!

Community General Discussion
21

also even if it would not be faster, it would look way better, due to as you said new skills more often, things would feel more fluid, when you gain something, as it is now the levels between 60 to 80 is just horrid, nothing happens, gear is usless, it just takes time for no apparent reason at all, but if you notice you hit 60 you know you are getting closer to the finish, what would make things look way better, it might be an artificial experience, but it feels that you do getting closer to max level, where not the feeling jsut aint there.

also if the cap the hole world at max level or atleast to legion level, where on only bfa would be higher, there would be more options on what to level and where, heck they could after that put in dailies, incursions/Assults, in everyother zone in game so people would go and visit them, no FP no problem a portal opens for that zone, then you are there, some might even end up in there questing after it, this would most likely be the easiest way to do the item level squish, whitout making to many zones redundant.

22

It allows you to decide for yourself what stats that you want to have. If i want to main Crit, i’d pick the crit talents. If you want less crit but prefer faster attack speed then pick the 5% haste instead.

So yes, you can try to argue that “1% stat increase is insignificant”, but it’s actually not. It’s also much more interesting that any of the abilities currently in my talent tree because my talent tree only gives me abilities that should actually be baseline which means that rather than adding to my class and making me stronger it’s only making me how warrior is just normally supposed to be.

23

The best part about a lvl squish would be that skills would be unlocked faster.
Shamans get their mobility at 80
 FREAKING EIGHTY!! That is so mental.
And even then it’s just a quick snare remove, 1min cd, and you can instantly be rooted or stunned again.

So more important than a lvl squish would be to redesign all class skills so that they would all have some aoe/mobility/cc/anti cc skills as soon as lvl 15-20 when you get into BG/LFD. And than gradually allow players to improve and branch out the skills further, every (on a current scale) 10-15 levels so that you would still look forward to unlocking new properties in augmenting your toolkit further.

But for the love of god, give people those basic mobility/aoe skills SOONER.
Warriors aoe lvl 40 jesus christ


24

I’m somewhat up for a squish if it makes levelling quicker.
If its the same experience but takes twice as long to go up a level and feel any sense of reward then it would be a pointless downgrade.

1 Like
25

Has nothing to do with a level squish.

You get something at 80 now? you would get it at 40 - after having done as many hours and things to get to 40 as you do to get to 80 now.

As I said elsewhere: if you really want a level squish, just write an addon to display all level numbers as half of what they are. Job done.

EVERYTHING ELSE that people are talking about is the kind of unthinking feverish hopefulness that breaks out every time Blizzard pre-announces a change. People get so hyped, because they think their wishes are going to come true. Why? they never have before.

26

Ghost wolf is lv16 thoooough


But yeah for sure.

27

Pretty much that too.

A level squish is a band aid. It will not change the underlying problem

Leveling and the outdoor world will still be boring, empty, without threats and nobody will group up.

Which is why my long post is so important.

It’s about the underlying problems that a level squish won’t even touch.

28

Where exactly was the choice you mention? It was “choose the X worst you don’t take to get to 41/51/61 in main tree” unless you were one of the few classes with working hybrid builds - and even then, you still were skipping the worst on your goal instead of chosing the best.

1 Like
29

Warrior fury talent tree first row: “Cruelty 1/5: Increases your chance to get a critical strike with melee attacks by 1%.”

Also, I did say the following:

I never said to just copy+paste the vanilla/tbc/wrath version back into the game. Ofc that wouldn’t work. It needs to be revamped to fit the current game.

30

What exactly would you want it to be, to avoid being pure ballast like 80%+ of the old talents (all the +1% something talents)? That’s the main issue: it’s either trees with tons of meaningless (in the long term) bonuses or something once a (long) while.

1 Like
31

not at all m ore interesting its mind numbing 

and Ion stated if they feel an ability should be base line then they add it as base line and give you another talent choice


how will old talent work for druid vs demon hunter ? one with 4 trees the other with only 2

realistically speaking whats less devastating? level squish or talent system revamp ?

32

That just depends on your definition of meaningless.

The way I see it there are four different kinds of talents that you can implement:

*-Stat enhancing talents; talents that directly increase stats or damage/healing done.

Example 1: Cruelty - 0/5 - Increases your chance to deal a critical strike with melee weapons by 1/2/3/4/5 %.

Example 2: Divine Strength - 0/5 - Increases your total strength by 3/6/9/12/15 %.

*-Class / Spec enhancing talents; talents that increase the strength of your over-all class or spec. *Not to be confused with Stat-increasing talents.

Example 1: Arcane Focus - 0/3 - Increases your chance to hit and reduces the mana cost of your arcane spells by 1/2/3%.

Example 2: Benediction - 0/5 - Reduces the mana cost of all instant cast spells by 1/2/3/4/5 %.

*-Ability enhancing talents; Talents that change the way that abilities work or increase the power of an already existing effect.

Example 1: Improved Spell Reflection - 0/2 Increases the duration of your Spell Reflection by 1/2 seconds.

Example 2: Warbringer - 0/1 - Your charge, Intercept and Intervene abilities are now usable while in combat and in any stance. In addition, your Intervene ability now removes all movement impairing effects.

*-Talents that grant an ability: Talents that grant you an ability that is not part of your baseline toolkit.

Example 1: A Murder Of Crows - Summons a flock of crows to attack your target, dealing x Physical damage over 15 sec. If the target dies while under attack, A Murder Of Crows’ cooldown is reset.

Example 2: Fel Barrage - Unleash a torrent of Fel energy over 3 sec, inflicting x chaos damage to all enemies within 8 yards.

Players usually tend to call Ability enhancing talents and Talents that grant an ability ‘Major’ talents and the stat/dmg/healing increase talents ‘Minor’ talents.

Talent trees are constructed in such a way that a player has to first fill up a certain amount of talents in to minor talents before they are able to put one or multiple points in to a major talent. This is a path of progression that makes you feel like you are working towards something bigger.

Minor talents are also the ones players tend to call “Boring” without failing to understand that they are actually quite powerful when used in combination with the right gear and enchants set-up.

5% Critical strike chance may sound weak or boring at first until you realize that this would be amazing for say – A Mage or a Rogue, or any player that chooses to wear a lot of gear that has Crit on it.

Personally I always looked forward to putting five points in Cruelty (5% crit chance) as a warrior, or 5 points in Malice (5% crit chance) as a Rogue.

It made me feel more powerful seeing my crit chance go from 12% to 17%.

If you consider 5% to be too little then you could double it up to 2% per point for a total of 10% which would probably be more applicable in the game today.

Numbers are tweekable. They’re not part of this discussion.

Minor talents are supposed to be a progression path towards a Major talent.

Major talents are the talents that everyone gets really excited about. These are the talents that change up your actual rotation and gameplay either by adding an ability to it or by changing how an ability works.

I totally understand why they’re exciting, i’m just saying
 Minor talents deserve some praise as well. They are important in their own way.

It is of course also impossible to fill up a proper talent tree with only Major talents because you would end up with having far too many buttons not to mention that it would be a complete disaster even attempt to balance.

You also end up with a system that we currently have: Baseline Abilities being put in to a system as “talents”, while in reality you should just learn them as a part of your baseline toolkit. You also now do not receive any reward for leveling up at levels where you do not gain a Major Talent.

This is exactly what everyone is complaining about now: Not receiving anything in-between Major Talent Choices and guess what? That’s because they removed Minor Talents.

The best thing to do is to strike a healthy balance between the two; By having 5 or 10 points of minor talents before you get a Major talent.

So to answer your question of

Simple: Strike a healthy balance between Stat Enhancing Talents and Class/Spec Enhancing Talents. They both fall under Minor talents however only Stat Enhancing Talents are the “+_%” stat increase ones.

Being able to customize your character is mind numbing to you?

I’m not even going to get in to that. There have been many threads on the Warrior forums asking for a re-design of the class since Legion began and they seem to be completely ignoring it.

The same as other classes? Just because they have less or more specializations doesn’t mean that they’re stronger or weaker. We all have the same amount of points that we can spend in our trees regardless of how many specializations we have.

A talent system revamp is fĂĄr less devastating.

A level squish is like putting a band-aid with a flower pattern on the body of a person that needs a new kidney. It looks nice, but it does not help to fix the real problem. Or any problem for that matter.

If you squish the levels then gaining a level will take longer – but will still be just as unrewarding as it is now. Still just as boring as it is now. Still just as pointless as it is now.

We need a new talent system - A real path of progression (that we control the direction of) while we are leveling up.
We need more danger out in the out-door world.
We need more reason to visit Cities.
We need more reason to group-up with players.

A level squish will do nothing to change anything.

2 Likes
33

Can you elaborate why would you want a level squish and the old talent tree? I’m looking forward to the analysis so I can burst your bubble.

34

Read my posts.

Edit: oh
 he wants bóth. Yea no, go ahead and burst his bubble.

35

I have nothing against the level squish, I don’t think it’s a bad idea, I’m just not convinced it’s going to improve anything.

3 Likes
36

That’s my main issue. Why make such a massive change when it’s not going to do anything at all.

That’s just making changes for the sake of making changes.

1 Like
37

nope, the old talent tree is mind numbing

warrior is the 4th most popular class in wow according to worldofwargraphs.
“many threads” is not what tips the scales for Blizzard.and a single class redesign does not mean revamp talent system for everyone

why are you linking those “problems” to level squish? level squish is just changing the number next to your name it has nothing to do with those things.

38

First of all, I do agree with you that a level squish will do nothing unless it requires in order to revamp the questing experience as I mentioned in my previous post.

The problem I have with the old talent system is that you have to pick some redundant talents in order to get into the talents that you really want and I don’t think that talent trees scales well and I don’t find them interesting at all so I’d argue that they can actually improve the existing talent system which I personally like, I wouldn’t want to go to the old talent system.

Maybe they can expand the existing talent system to have a way to select spells that are available to other specs, imagine that in addition to PvP talents we would have PvE talents that could allow us to pick spells from our alternative specializations and again are strictly for PvE, I’m not getting into what would be available there but the devs can add a pool of spells that would make sense for each spec without breaking balance and I think that it can be pretty interesting idea, at least in my opinion.

In addition, they could bring back talent points where you spend points in a talent to increase its power.

39

That’s your opinion which you’re entitled to have. Just don’t try to pass it off as fact not to mention that even if some of the old trees are then that doesn’t mean that the entire system can not work. Just figure out the boring part and change it.

Warrior was just one example because it’s my own personal experience. I hear from nearly every player that has played the same class for over a decade that they’re not enjoying their class as much as they used to due to the pruning or core changes to how their class now works.

Forums are for feedback. We gave them feedback and they’re not listening despite it having been multiple years of the same feedback. That’s all i’m saying, make from it what you will.

The question in the Q&A was “Levelling is faster but still dull, due to slow drips of abilities over long periods of time. Are there any intentions to address not just the speed of leveling but also the quality of time spent?”

Ion answered and I quote "Leveling needs help, I think, getting most levels in WoW doesn’t feel great right now. 120 is a very very large number. It’s kind of a crazy number and talk about pruning and everything else not withstanding - There just aren’t a 120 discrete things to give a player, a character and I think the game would be a mess if we tried to come up with 120 different things."

Then Lore adds “If you get 120 of something it doesn’t feel ‘cool’”.

Ion then continues “Yes, like this thing is 0.3% better now and enough of those add up you’ll feel it eventually.” and then he continues further in to wanting to go back to having only 60 levels so that every level gives you something - with some levels having milestones (such as learning to ride mounts).

“It is kind of an empty experience filling that bar, hitting a new level and realizing ‘oh okay my crit and my haste went down a bit and otherwise nothing changed’, why is that exciting? That’s not what leveling should be in an RPG and it’s something that we need to fix.”

“Of course haste and crit need to go down because else once you finish with 50% haste, we can’t start you there - but, if you’re getting new abilities, upgrades to existing abilities, if you’re getting something along the line as you level then that helps often offset that so that again, filling that bar feels exciting.”

He finishes off with saying that they are wondering if it would actually be a good idea to go through with something like this and if they are actually taking something special away if you suddenly go from lv120 back to lv60, despite everything else - your stats, your health, your damage - remaining the exact same as it was at 120.

In the very next question after that he is asked if, by making Classic WoW, if we will be seeing some aspects from Classic return to the main game.

His main answer there was ‘Community’ and meeting players, adventuring together. They want to put more of a focus on that in the main game.

So I started to try and figure out why it is that


  • Leveling up does not feel exciting anymore,
  • If we really need to squish the levels,
  • Players aren’t as interactive with each other anymore and why that is.

The answer jumped to me quite easily:

You could now argue that they said that the old talent system is not interesting enough because ‘we can’t make 120 different things’, but that’s about having 120 points, which you don’t need and just for the record: In Wotlk, one of WoW’s most beloved expansions we had 71 Talent Points to spend and it was great.

I’m not sure if it was in this thread or in another but somebody suggested to have a talent system of around 60 talent points (51 being the original), receiving one point every two levels but receiving a goodie-bag with an interesting Blue Gear piece, some gold and stuff like health potions and bandages in it on the levels that you do not receive a talent point.

This way as you level you gain something every time you level up.

Combine that with the following


(those numbers are without heirlooms equipped btw)

And



And then leveling up will already be way more fun and rewarding than it currently is. No level squish required.

I feel like that’s just a design issue rather than a “flaw” that a point-style Talent tree would always have, since you can specifically design what the Minor talents are.

You would still have the problem of that you do not get anything every time that you level up which is something that they specifically mentioned.

Even if you say ‘Strictly PvE’, I still believe it would be impossible to balance in competitive PvE.

Something like this Druids already have, it’s called “affinities” and in my honest opinion it just feels like lazy game design like “I don’t know what talents we should put here so let’s just give them existing spells of other specializations”.

Don’t forget that the key word is “Specialization”. Using things from other specs would go directly against that entire concept because you wouldn’t be specializing in anything at all.

Class and Specialization uniqueness is already an issue in and of itself right now.

40

You wouldn’t this is the reason I wrote “they could bring back talent points where you spend points in a talent to increase its power.” and you could have a point per level or something like that.

Don’t forget that the key word is “Specialization”. Using things from other specs would go directly against that entire concept because you wouldn’t be specializing in anything at all.

I don’t know about that, I mean, the idea is that not all spells would be available and you couldn’t use more than 3 - 4 spells.

Something like this Druids already have, it’s called “affinities” and in my honest opinion it just feels like lazy game design like “I don’t know what talents we should put here so let’s just give them existing spells of other specializations”.

I don’t know whether it’s a “lazy game design” but I respect your opinion; however, no it wouldn’t work like affinities, it would work similarly to the PvP talents where you would have a pool of spells that exists in other specializations that you could use in your current spec, again, it’s just an idea that in my opinion could be interesting and bring some flavor of the old talent system to the current one.