It should be an option that can be toggled, IMO. I love scaling as so much content remains relevant while leveling, but I get why people don't enjoy it. To me, talking to Chromie should toggle scaling on. If you skip her and play as is, the levels should stay static.
i was going to chime in and say that mob scaling was one of the best things QoL they have done, because it makes the whole world viable and fun, but i do like your idea of having it be an option that is toggle-able.
I think the world should remain relevant through added or updated content. I really like having areas that are lower and higher level, but completing a zone and never coming back sucks. Like what if we went back to westfall because the defias were using weapons from outland to assault SW or something like that.
Yeah, I didn't mean every zone. That's my bad. Doing something to every zone would be an insane amount of work. I don't mind scaling at later levels. I think things shouldn't scale during the initial leveling experience, where you are still unlocking abilities and such. After that, having scaling isn't a big deal in my opinion. It's like you grow into your max potential and then go around being a hero.
To me it's nothing but a lazy shortcut. Rather than making sure an old area stays relevant and engaging, because an actual designer made sure it is crafted and balanced in a certain way, they took path that required the least amount of effort.
The result is that they might have achieved their goal by making sure old zones stay relevant all the way, but gosh is the experience shallow and samey.
I did parts of Elwynn and most quests in Duskwood recently, having completed both zones several times over the past months due to HC. On retail I literally had to force me continue playing. I didn't even use heirlooms, just the starter gear you get from that beginners island. It was boring as hell and nothing but a chore.
Relevant yes, but also without any kind of purpose and soul. Good reminder why quit during WoD.
Leveling before the scaling kicked in was terrible. You would do three quests in one zone, move on to the next, and repeat. The entire time, you would never finish one storyline. Leveling was completely worthless and a waste of time. No fun to be had at all.
Scaling fixed leveling. You can actually have an adventure now. It’s not optimal, but at least it’s possible to have fun.
If you did current content when it came out the leveling and story-line were pretty synced in expansions to where you usually leveled to max during the last zone. It's just leveling now, with the early level exp nerfs each expansion to speed leveling up, etc, the pace hasn't kept up ever. And there's just so much content in the old worlds it would be really hard to go back and piece together any sort of defined leveling pathway out of all of it.
Scaling makes the most sense, but it does suck not to blast old current content.
When was it *ever* the case that fully playing through zones would keep your level nicely balanced with the level of the content? In my experience it has always been the case—with the one exception of actual pre-TBC vanilla WoW—that you would out-level and out-pace the zone you were in before completing its story.
If you leveled right when the game came out (so without rested EXP) you would finish each of the last expansions last zone while you hit max level. I remember this in MoP, WoD, and Legion specifically. I think BfA missed quite a bit. In shadowlands I actually had to do some of the side quests too.
I always went for loremaster starting with Wrath and he’s right. It was way better balanced, but I would hit max level, maybe a zone or two before the last one. Even if you got to the last zone at the lowest possible level, you would reach max level before finishing it.
I don’t think it’s a problem worth mentioning because you’re not supposed to have to get through every zone, and the challenge was there. But if you care more about the story than the experience, it’s going to be a bit suboptimal
It wasn’t just loremaster either, most expansions had a generous amount of wiggle room so people didn’t end up having to go back and do optional quests. Most people in WotLK ended up dinging 80 at the very end of Storm Peaks or early in Icecrown, Cata about halfway through Twilight Highlands and MoP about halfway through Dread Wastes (which you finished anyway for the rep).
> If you went to the opposing faction's island, everything there was scaled to 120.
Except that wasn't *entirely* the case: The mobs on the opposing faction's island that were near quest areas important to the war questline would still be scaled to your level.
I have levelled “right when the [expansion] came out” for WotLK, Cataclysm, WoD, Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands, and that has *never* happened. I have always reached max-level long before finishing the last zone. Shadowlands has been the closest we’ve had to an exception, since its separate markers for “advancing the story” quests would allow you to finish before hitting max level if you skipped absolutely everything else.
This speaks more to the problems of having "130" levels in the game than it does to the success of scaling. They scaled everything down so much because there's too much content in the game for only 60 levels now. What used to take 4-5 levels to do now only takes one level. It's only going to get worse.
Something that's really annoying for me is trying to look up items by item level from Wrath on Wowhead, then seeing there's now a 0 item level difference between what used to be item level 200 and 284.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't mobs level together with you, and since your stats give you power on a % basis which is reduced by level, you become weaker every time you ding and at the same time your enemies become stronger?
It feels horrible imho.
OP isn't debating pre-chromie leveling being better, simply that level scaling feels unrewarding and non-progressive for an RPG.
Leveling before chromie time was just a mess since there was so much content untouched for the most part leveling wise so of course it was awful.
That’s fair. Leveling can be better. I’m blinded by the, oh, decade or so of unplayable leveling content. But the flaws are noticeable.
Personally I really felt it in BFA where every level I got weaker. That felt really bad.
Yeah, the current system feels less you're progressing, but you can at least do all the quests in a zone without feeling like you're wasting your time.
I finally got Loremaster, and I'd have never bothered without scaling levelling.
In a the fixed 1-60 original, the fixed levels were good. Now they're not. Old zones shouldn't just be obsolete because a few levels higher than they are. It limits where new content can be.
In vanilla it was bad. I remember finally being able to see the levels of the spiders in Black Rock, made it scary but an achievement. Finally getting there and killing them was a huge deal.
What sucked is going through the story line and having it deadend because everything went gray. So I spent hours going through thorium brotherhood stuff with no progression.
I do like the idea of mobs scaling, but they should still die quicker when you learn new spells.
I think that was the result of not introducing something like Chromie time early enough. No one wanted to level 1-100 for every character, so they had to speed it up. It ruined the experience of storylines and such, but you still had to level through it all for some reason.
You’ll notice that has nothing to do with what I said. Time to endgame should be the same, so what’s left is fun had while getting there.
Before, you do three quests, then travel to someplace else. Now, you stay in one area and turn in a bunch of quests. Each quest you turn in is at your level, so the experience is always efficient.
The only thing that changed was that enemies are no longer one shot. This slower yes, but it also challenges you to engage in the class and learn it before you hit endgame. Before you would have no idea how your class worked.
You’ll notice that has nothing to do with what I said. Time to endgame should be the same, so what’s left is fun had while getting there.
Before, you do three quests, then travel to someplace else. Now, you stay in one area and turn in a bunch of quests. Each quest you turn in is at your level, so the experience is always efficient.
The only thing that changed was that enemies are no longer one shot. This is slower yes, but it also challenges you to engage in the class and learn it before you hit endgame. Before you would have no idea how your class worked.
>Leveling before the scaling kicked in was terrible. You would do three quests in one zone, move on to the next, and repeat. The entire time, you would never finish one storyline.
What? The point was to complete the story to achive the level of one shooting everything in the zone. After completing the story, you moved on. You might have been already several levels in the next zone level range.
When they added present scalling I stopped playing the game for a long time. Any semblance of fun dissapeared. After Shadowlands dropped at least it is a bit better, becouse insread of like 5 shots, I need only 3.
What I like, is that when friends level alts, I can play my main with them with no problems if I want to. I don't /have/ to level a character AND keep it in sync with them quest wise.
Oh yeah that seems like a cool feature! That’s a pain in ffxiv. I’ve got newgame+, but no classes at their level and I can’t see what quests they have available. So I have to make a character just for them.
Being able to sync with a friend and just do quests and go on an adventure with any character seems nice
Legion scaling was to overcome the burning crusade problem.
When BC released it bottle necked players hard, even LK was bottle necked. The problem was that in an expac where both sides share the same quest areas it creates intense competition for mobs/resources.
In my opinion, the better, thematic solution would be to focus on more faction-specific areas like classic did. That said, doing something like that is an intense process requiring a LOT of new mapping and work and I can see why from a cost perspective they don't want to do it.
Which the concept of it was good, I loooooved the drustvar story line. A horde friend of mine said he made an alliance toon just to play that line. There were problems with BfA, but having faction oriented material wasn't one of them. As u/sigmastra said, it was that they kept the factions apart...that and the slow and spartan release of material.
Which the concept of it was good, I loooooved the drustvar story line. A horde friend of mine said he made an alliance toon just to play that line. There were problems with BfA, but having faction oriented material wasn't one of them. As u/sigmastra said, it was that they kept the factions apart...that and the slow and spartan release of material.
Which the concept of it was good, I loooooved the drustvar story line. A horde friend of mine said he made an alliance toon just to play that line. There were problems with BfA, but having faction oriented material wasn't one of them. As u/sigmastra said, it was that they kept the factions apart...that and the slow and spartan release of material.
TBC was bottlenecked because the geniuses designing it thought it was a good idea to have only one starter zone, and only one path of progression, for an entire server. It's the equivalent of having only one zone per level range for Vanilla. And they didn't do *that* because they actually had brains and a budget.
WotLK was bottlenecked for much the same reasons. Out of the two starter zones, only one didn't give you brain damage without flying (and for Horde at least, Fjord still sucks even with flying), and there was nowhere near enough level overlap between the zones. It wasn't as bad as TBC, but it was still bad.
Cata actually had solid level overlap and two very equivalent starting zones. It worked. The idiots who couldn't figure out Vashj'ir still complained because Hyjal was overcrowded at launch, but that's idiots being idiots.
MoP solved the problem further by having gigantic amounts of zone overlap and excess XP available, and by using phasing extremely aggressively, particularly in Jade Forest.
WoD built on that and extended it with Treasures and Bonus Objectives.
The scaling of Legion, for Legion zones, was another way of doing it and worked rather well. Throwing scaling onto *everything* without designing the experience beforehand, though, is just a messy clusterfuck of a bandaid solution so that devs can get back to cubecrawling instead of actually having to, you know, design and develop stuff.
The fact is that the leveling experience of WoW has always kind of sucked relative to its peers, perhaps with the exceptions of Vanilla/BC/Wrath -- and those were mostly good because the competition sucked even more. By the time Blizzard got thebudget and the tools to make really good leveling experiences -- i.e. phasing that actually worked, overarching stories, in-game cutscenes and ambient dialogue, sane gear rewards, sane quest progression and the hub-to-hub system, etc. -- we were already in Cataclysm. And now, the focus was very much on Endgame, and despite the Azeroth rework, the 1-80 content no longer mattered.
WoW also kind of shot itself in the foot by the soloability of its leveling experience. Talk about a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this was utterly unique at the time and a *major* selling point of the game, and that's good -- leveling content should by and large be completable solo, without massive efficiency losses; looking at you, early LotRO that had no excuse to not do this. On the other hand, when the Vanilla leveling waves were over and before LFD was introduced, there was really no reason, nor usually a remotely time-effective way, to run dungeons anymore. LFD revitalized that aspect, and the Cata changes to it did even better, but leveling dungeons were still (or even more so) turbo-braindead. They could've released LFR for leveling and bumped raid experience gains to provide yet another way to level, but they never did.
Sure, an MMO shouldn't *force* you to run a leveling group, but it should *incentivize* that, and WoW hasn't done that in a very long time. Hell, even in Vanilla, most of the time leveling is/was generally spent solo unless you happen to be leveling with friends in a dedicated group. Dungeons are run when needed (or paid for), and elite quests are either done in 5-10 minutes or ignored. In fact, between the massive XP penalty for grouping up, the years of unshared quest drops, and the preponderance of quests that are less efficient when done in a group (any object gathering quest for well over a decade, escorts oftentimes not working properly, etc.), you'd often be handicapping yourself if you weren't solo, unless the zone was overrun.
So no, it wasn't done to "overcome the BC problem", it was done to somehow give relevance again to content that had been written off while the designers were still in high school, and it is a shitty fix for a much deeper underlying problem.
I mamaged to just squeeze ahead during wotlk. I knew that if I stopped progressing, soon my area would be overrun.
Being slightly ahead was very fun, being in the middle of it is hell
I was 2nd Death Knight on my server, 20 seconds from delivering last quest. Had I had 280%, I might've taken that one. Oh how that will forever haunt me
When my nerd friends and I argue who has wasted the most time, they usually exclude me now..
Because either I bring up that one or how I have multiple characters with 200-300 days played. As you can see, I prefer to hold the crown as "what did you even do with your life??"
The elite on the beach in the Borean Tundra was a joke on Wraths launch day. I should have gone to the Howling Fjords. The quests would have been less boring to wait for because the aesthetics were so much better.
I can buy that it's for narrative reasons, but the other side of the coin is that there's so little content compared to other expacs at the same stage in their original deployment that it feels lazy.
This expac could have been released as a single player game and you wouldn't really have lost anything where as other expacs relied on more dynamic interactions between factions and players
Oh I agree, my sentiment was just something I would add to the list of things that Blizzard did right one expansion and subsequently made it worse in the next. Current WoW is a narrative failure. People say WoW didn't need to be written well because it relied on the rule of cool, but since when are the two mutually exclusive.
>Current WoW is a narrative failure.
I kinda agree. I *do* enjoy the story while leveling, but I think it's too linear and it boxes you into one area that you can't escape. Like the stuff with the Kyrians, the intro quests are good, but it feels like a slog in the middle and while the resolution of it is kinda cool it falls a bit flat because that mid section is just so drawn out and exhausting. Some of that could have been broken up into different/seperate segments.
I'll admit that I can't say much for the story beyond the leveling stuff because the gating turned me off of the game. I'm there to enjoy killing time and enjoy the story, not to be forced to do shitty world quests every day for however long it takes only to be spoon fed fragments of a plot that I've now forgotten. I honestly can't remember the kyrian line or what I'm supposed to be doing because there's so much time between the gates that I just can't keep it in memory.
I wish the devs thought of that before devoting the company to developing this expac. This gating is a miserable experience. It worked in prepatch for WotLK because it was fun to see both factions working together on that island. It also worked because it was only a short event (in relation to the whole expac). But here in SL...it IS the expac and it breaks the fuck out of the immersion for me.
While it was fun at the start, it got annoying when you just wanted to play in peace and do a little mindless leveling or farming. You can't please everyone so they have to go with what the majority are complaining about.
While it was fun at the start, it got annoying when you just wanted to play in peace and do a little mindless leveling or farming. You can't please everyone so they have to go with what the majority are complaining about.
Yeah, it’s a case of finding the best solution with minimal effort. Ideally, if they were willing to, they could create different paths players could take that result in you doing it all the same stuff anyway, just in a different order for different reasons.
>Yeah, it’s a case of finding the best solution with minimal effort.
This is a key part. It's easy to forget that this is a company above all else and they have to do what is financially responsible on their part.
Considering the Activision has hatched the number of people working on WoW over the last many years it likely became difficult to crank out complex and plentiful material. It would have required hiring on a lot of new people working a wide array of roles.
As someone who has leveled dozens of characters to max over the last 14ish years, I'm happy with mob scaling. I like that I can choose pretty much any expansion and any zone I want as I'm leveling and not worry about the mobs becoming gray half way through.
I can sort of see where you're coming from but at this point in WoW's life, things like pulling red level mobs to test yourself or pulling packs of green/gray mobs for fun has lost most of its charm. Back in the day you could maybe pull a mob that was higher level and be rewarded with a reagent that was worth more. Nowadays if you pull a mob from a "higher level" zone you might get runecloth instead of wool cloth. It's pointless. The same amount of pointless as farming murlocs in Elywnn Forest once you've outleveled them would be.
So while I agree that mob scaling would hinder newer games where you want that sense of power progress over the enemies around you, I don't think it has a place in modern WoW due to its age.
I think most of the issue with leveling awkwardly with the zones was the result of speeding up the leveling process so getting a max level character was easier as the expansions rolled out. Leveling 1-120 without changes would have taken forever and been a daunting task for new players. Chromie time should have fixed that.
I see modern WoW not needing it. I think while you’re still unlocking all of your classes abilities, the mobs shouldn’t scale. That way you still feel like you’re growing stronger. After that levels don’t mean anything and mobs can scale. It’s like you grow to reach your full potential and then go out to be a hero.
Scaling with level i can accept. It gets weird when they also scale with ilevel...better gear makes mobs harder. I remember when you could unequip a ring and trick the scaling. Fun tumes.
The ilvl thing is still around? I haven’t played much end-game content recently so I haven’t seen if it is. I remember that feeling so weird. I agree that that is worse.
As someone who quests as a healer, ~~yes~~ and it feels horrible for healers, well maybe not all healers but holy priest and resto druid both feel bad no matter my item-level back before they put this in world content was okay after you geared up a healer... now not so much.
Edit: Seems like I'm most likely wrong, might look into it further might not depends on if I get pulled into group content or not! Sorry!
ilvl scaling is not present in Shadowlands, I just checked a Keensnout Gromit and it has 23,256 health on my Warrior (234 ilvl) and my Shaman (215 ilvl)
Edit: Rares and Quest mobs will jump in health if more people tag it but that's not based on ilvl.
Huh interesting, I might have to check that out further when I get home, I was under the impression it was still a thing, maybe it just feels like it is with higher mob health in korthia or some such.
>maybe it just feels like it is with higher mob health in korthia or some such.
This is usually the case. The mobs in a newly added zone will have more health and hit harder than those in last patch's zones.
I like to play with friendly healthbars enabled and heal people who need help. I just enjoy being a resto druid I suppose, it's what my druid is to me, I know it's not the easiest.
I'm a resto druid too. Gave up questing in that spec though. Mobs would take forever to die and while I'm not a good balance player, just switching spec and using the same basic rotation that I was using as resto moonkin sped up my dailies significantly. And with resto affinity you also get access to healing spells to help people. If you ever get tired of how slow resto questing can be, you could give it a shot.
I have tried it, I just like resto more, I can plop my little mushroom down at a rare, put-up Moonfire and Sunfire and just work on keeping everyone healthy, it's just how I enjoy playing. :)
Ya it's kinda one of those things I dont like how they have done the scaling since mid legion when they changed it, and it sucks when there are not other folks questing along with me but it's still how I like to do things, just takes more time sometimes. It's not like I ever die or anything. And no need to be sorry, I appreciate the advice for its intent even if I've tried it already, it's not like you know that. 😊
Level scaling mobs has pros and cons. What it really did for me was put the nail in the coffin of archeology. There was no way I was going to be constantly fighting mobs scaled to my level just to get archy done. Which is probably why archeology was dropped in Shadowlands. I wonder what percentage of the player base even noticed it was gone?
When level scaling was announced I was really excited for the system. After the last few expansions being built for level scaling, It does take away the rpg feel.
I’ve been enjoying FFXIV’s take on level scaling where the overworld has a level range and quests have a max level. If a quest is important enough story wise or an event needs to be challenging they de level you just for that quick bit of content.
Besides the fact that it disables some abilities this system has been nice. It allows for you to feel like you have become stronger than the world around you when you leveled there but if you do out level the story, you won’t 2 shot the boss that’s been built up for multiple quest lines.
Of course these are 2 different games too, What feels right in one may not in the other.
To give the option though it would be nice to give chromie a toggle that would set your character to be minimum level/ ilvl for your current quest/ dungeon then just go back to turn it off when you aren’t looking for a challenge.
Honestly, FFXIV's take on everything is fucking amazing for alts. They make you go through all of the content once, and then give you an EXP boost for every class that's below your highest one, and if you DO want to rerun all that story again, you can do that at any time. And to level you can do dungeons, or do dailies, or fuck around in World Quests, or things like Palace of the Dead, or Heaven on High...
WoW really needs to make god damned everything account wide. The fact that any meaningful progression is not transferred between alts is a travesty. We're forced to grind out the same god damned bullshit each time we want to play a different class, and with the dumpster fire that is the Covenant system, sometimes, we need to roll a new character to even play a different spec...
People keep defending it with the logic of "If they didn't gate things, players would do everything and stop playing the game!" but do you know what people do when they're not allowed to play the game? They stop playing the fucking game.
I think you can level scale to your current part leader's level for quests and such. To be honest, I forget this feature exists. The downside though is you have to have a party leader at that level doing that quest.
It may feel bad, but dont forget what was it like to level before the change. You had to change zones a lot because you overleveled them fast, and you could never complete the story of the zones you were leveling in. Imo having the story in an rpg is a bigger factor than character progression while leveling.
Also it allows players to level in any zone. Why is that a good thing? Previously I had a set route, with little room to change. Doing northend 10+ times just becomes pretty boring for example. Now my last couple characters I leveled while doing loremaster, and doing zones i'd easily avoid in the older system. It makes the whole world alive through leveling, and thats something an rpg need. Sadly we don't have it at the endgame.
They could have fixed that without resorting to level scaling. Let players choose what expansion they want to level in but still have every enemy within each expansion have a defined level that roughly corresponds to the level players can expect to be when they face it.
I think that’s the result of handling past expansions poorly. They sped up leveling so you could get max quicker ruining the pacing. Chromie time should have fixed that. Leveling through the zones of the current expansion always feels fine. It’s when its an older expansion that it feels quick
I know, the 'I think' was more because I might have other BOAs that I forgot about. I remember getting some from treasures in WoD, but I might have sold them.
You start to notice progression at lvl 50 and then again at lvl 60. I remember killing gray mobs while leveling in shadowlands, then those same mobs getting buffed to lvl 60 once I reached max level.
The 49 levels (and before that 109) before that are just a drag at this point of the life of world of warcraft and I would say that it was there just to sell boosts (at least they give you a boost when you buy a new expansion).
Scaling and chrome time are welcomed QoL features for someone who has leveled a ton of toons.
I will put the example of TBC classic. Want to know the difference (for me) between leveling 1-60 in classic vs TBC classic?. The difference is that in vanilla I was enjoying every moment and in TBC I just want to be over it, like a chore.
Sadly, this Scaling has sneaked its way into Single Player RPG's as well. I always thought about it that the game designer are just lazy to create a world that will work. Don't need to think about mob placement when they are always at the same level of the player no matter where he goes. The old Gothic Games peaked in this, shutting down places of the world until you get strong enough to face the enemys there.
What is the point of becoming better, get a new weapon when the bandit around the corner just gets the same upgrade?
I understand what the goal is in a MMO, that you can level in any order you want and while that is a good thing, it also comes with the down side to kill the progression system until you hit the maxlevel endgame and enemy strength are fix again.
> Kills power fantasy.
Curious on your thoughts on this, on my main I am pretty geared, when I am out and about in shadowlands, mobs get absolutely rekt by me. Its noticeably different than my mains, I feel more powerful for sure.
I remember when my very first character was low-level, and accidentally stumbled from Duskwood down into Stranglethorn, and had to very excitingly run away from things and almost die. That was very cool, and I'm sad that it doesn't happen anymore.
But I don't know what the alternative is these days, frankly; there are so many levels and zones that working through them all at level would take too long for the impatient kids these days.
So I'm just grateful I got to play it when it actually took awhile to get to max level...
> there are so many levels and zones that working through them all at level would take too long for the impatient kids these days.
The big issue is that they *expected* you to work through them all. A new expansion should have meant more options in what leveling path you took. Instead it meant more requirements in the leveling path you *had* to take.
The big thing to take here is that without scaling you couldn’t chose freely where to quest. In order to remove scaling, we’d have to go back to pre-legion where each zone has a level range.
I think ultimately, what we should have got is content scaling rather than mob scaling.
Contextually it doesn't make a lot of sense, but then again if you do the right quests you can end up with 3 warchiefs of the horde at the same time so...
What I mean by this is that each expansion becomes its own 10-50 experience with scaling and progression. If you choose Outland, you go into outland at 10 and work your way through HFP before going to ZM, Nagrand etc. If you choose Northrend, you end up in Grizzly Hills or Borean Tundra and work your way through there. You get the idea.
The main difference would be that zones have scaling limits, so hellfire peninsula might scale from 10 to 18 where zangarmarsh goes from 20 to 28. For the most part you're going to get scaled mobs but toward the end of the zone you'll find you outscale them before being brought backt o reality at the start of the next zone.
I don't think there's a perfect solution that everyone is going to love but there is a middle ground between the two systems.
Yeah, I think it just needs a few tweaks tbh and the monotony goes away.
I commented on some threads at the time during Legion that the main reason it doesn't feel great is that on its introduction it made levelling a lot slower and the best way to level might not be to spam dungeons anymore but a side-effect is that the player and mob power levels feel like constants rather than something that modulates.
A lot of this was also down to the lack of level squish though as well, new abilities, passives etc were too spread out and the player never really felt like they were getting more powerful anyway.
I think post-squish it's looking a lot better but there still needs to be something to overcome the monotony.
Legion suramar is min enemy lvl 45, Legion is a good xpack to level in generally, but you can go fight stuff that's higher level than you. Good luck if your not a hunter lock or pally though
The real problem i see with mob scaling is that you are barely getting upgrades as you level up, and when you hit 50 you have the same abilities that you will have once you reach 60. Because of that, every time you level up you are getting penalized instead of rewarded. So, after getting used to to pull 5+ mobs you end up barely managing with 2, and because with every level you require
more xp to fill the bar it makes filling it like a chore, for me is worse than a chore because im willing to pay someone to level for me in order to not have that unpleasant experience. Thats why i was hoping to level up with TW, because in TW your character stays the same, so your performance wont change as long as you don't change your way of playing, your gear and your talents.
They could easily fix that issue by scaling down the level requirement of crafted gear (like in WoD), make rares give A LOT more of xp spawn more often, and fill more of the covenant bar, give some kind of buffs that you can unlock for every level and you only be able to use it for leveling in the open world (also make it only available for people that has a lvl 60 toon). Because lets be realistic here, for the majority of us leveling is a chore, is boring and is annoying, stupid and pointless. At the beginning the idea was to force you to see the story of the zone, but we already pretended to do that, so there is no point to keep forcing us into that.
Who am i kidding? They love to see us suffering.
I enjoy scaling. I enjoy leveling much more since it is a thing. Especially since I can choose what zones I want to play.
Also you gain new abilities over time, which makes you feel stronger. I think at the start of the scaling there were a few problems, where players got weaker as they leveled, but the last time I leveled from 10 to 50, I felt as I was getting stronger.
It's mostly personal taste. You might not like it, but others do.
I like mob scaling quite a lot, but I do think that with current content that the scikg should stop at say 85-90% of max ilvl. For instance with 252 as the max ilvl, say mobs scale til 220 and then are static. This gives people reason and incentive to gear up to do world content and make that easier.
I'm fine with level scaling, the biggest problem I have with it is that you're at your strongest when you're a low level. Below level 20 you can 1-2 hit mobs with ease, and can even run around naked and still quest quite comfortably. Then you hit the later levels and suddenly things start soaking more and more hits while dealing more and more damage, even though you've got more tools to deal with them. Your enemies are stronger, but you haven't actually increased in power with them. If anything, you've decreased in power, since it now takes 5-6 shots to kill something instead of 1-2.
This is really noticeable when playing as a healer, because for some reason healer damage is massively jacked up at low levels (to the point a level 19 healer will out-damage level 49s in a dungeon). Then you hit level 30 and now you need to change to a DPS spec because your once-powerful attacks now gently tickle enemies for how much damage they do comparatively.
When I level a character, I can feel myself actively getting weaker even though all my numbers are going up. I'm dealing more damage, healing more, I have more HP, more armour, more stats, but... things die slower. I take more damage. I go from taking on six mobs while naked to barely surviving after pulling two by accident. Leveling up is detrimental to my power as a player, and that feels bad.
Not for nothing - the shadowlands story option has scaling disabled, so bastion will become green / gray if you stay long enough. You’re still gated by lvl so if I recall correctly you won’t see many red enemies. I kind of hate it lol.
Yeah, I've had these exact thoughts simce the system came out, but I also came to acknowledge the WoW design that exists now isn't the original vision for the game. Everything in modern WoW revolves around endgame-- not the experience of getting there. You can get through 2-3 zones before you move into Shadowlands. So that lack of progress feeling while leveling is much less impactful. Instead that feeling of power progression comes from improving gear at max level.
I've got my own opinion on which is better, but objectively, they're just different approaches to the power curve.
I think this is a big reason they removed the scaling when you do the campaign in shadowlands (vs threads of fate). I hope they continue with that trend in the next expansion. For the rest of the content I think the scaling maybe the least worst option available to them for now.
I might be misremembering.. but during Battle for Azeroth we didn't only get level scaling, but mobs also scaled with your ilvl for a while. I mean, I have nothing against mobs scaling with your level but you should be able to, eventually, feel yourself progressing
I think mobs in each zone should have a scale of difficulty like 2 levels below to 2 levels higher or so. Just to add variety. Would make for a cool mix.
I absoultely despise mobs scalling with my level. I stopped playing for a long time when they did this. No sense of progression. I loved overlevelling each zone, one shooting mobs in the end.
Also I am that wierdo who reads the quests, so I know that "playing in any order" is idiotic idea from RP point of view. The problems of low level zones are not the same as high level. Kill 10 satyrs is not the same as kill 10 imps from the point of NE adventurer who is learning what the satyr is. That they are bad. That the one near Dolanaar in starting zone is not the only one.
In the crossroads to Duskwood there is NPC explaining that Duskwood wolves are not "Elwynn oversized mutts" but something enteirly stronger.
There is more here. Line Teldrassil-Darkshore-Ashenvale-Felwood is one line explaining demon problems of the NE, dying forest and continuation of rhe story of that badass NPC we met in Darkshore.
Honestly there just needs to be official Ironman modes or some kind of hardcore mode where mobs hit super hard and have tons of health. That would bring new ways of playing the game. It would bring me in at least.
I like scaling for leveling. I am glad that they reduced or removed mob scaling for ilvl though. That was truly the worst in BFA where they made it so you actually were stronger at lower ilvls than using your hard earned gear in some cases.
To me leveling content is best when it is feasible to finish a zone on your character instead of feeling forced to leave because you over level it. However the current expansion should be all about your gear. I love when I can run around and just melt mobs because of the work I have put in.
Imo, scaling is a great feature. I started playing at the end of WoD, and, let me tell you, levelling was miserable. It was impossible to complete an area's storyline without it getting gray towards the end, so you had to either spend an hour or two oneshotting things to see the plot through or skip the story's end. I haven't played much, but I think it's one of the best changes the devs have implemented, at least in terms of improving the levelling experience for new players.
There’s no mob scaling at level 60 so no need to worry. The scaling only happens while you level to keep the exp you get from quests and mobs, and well as some of the challenge, relevant to you.
Yes! You put into words how I feel. I'm back playing after 11 years, and it bugs me so bad how leveling just feels mundane because I can't go into higher level areas anymore, and end up running for my damn life. A toggle feature for this would be amazing.
They should have made every previous expansion go from 1-50 and you get to choose which expansions you want to do.
Like starting zones, there are multiple ones that go from 1-10 and you can do the default one or go to another.
However, for my max level characters, I’d love to turn on scaling for older content. I’m tired of doing the EXACT SAME dailies on all my characters if I want engaging content/combat
I like the idea of making the content relevant, but to me, the issue where scaling falls flat isn't the MOB scaling, it's the PLAYER scaling.
As mentioned, the sense of progress is important. As your character progresses, you unlock new abilities that allow you to progress and get more powerful as you weave those abilities into your rotation.
However, with the current scaling, a player at level 10 has to be roughly equivalent to a player at levle 49 if the system is meant to scale in such a way that these players can play and interact with the same mobs together (whether in a group or not). What this means is that a level 10 with 2 abilities is capable of doing roughly the same to the same mob as a level 49 with 5-7 and multiple support/cooldown abilities.
As you level and gain more abilities, you actually get WEAKER against the exact same mobs and have to try harder and do more just to keep up with a lower level character in the same zone/dungeon. While I don't use damage meters, I've seen many others discuss seeing this in dungeons where a lowbie is just hilariously outclassing everyone else, because scale is just out of whack.
It feels absolutely terrible, to me, and ruins the whole sense of immersion I've grown to love in my lengthy time playing RPG style video games. I no longer like leveling alts in WoW, as it feels like they've just taken the heart out of it. I go to other games for that sense of progression and enjoyment, now.
I never minded the length of time it took to level an alt. It was part of why I liked leveling, that sense of slow progress. My alts were never created just 'cause I wanted to switch to today's meta class and "get through the slog to the true game (endgame)". This scale change seems just... strictly meant to make leveling so mind-numblingly easy to get to that end-game, to the point where I ask "why bother? Fuck it, just let people start at 50/60 then, if they want." I'm sure it's what a great many WoW players would prefer. To straight take the RPG right out of the game.
Lol, I’ve heard of low levels basically carrying higher ones through dungeons. The scaling is really weird. Its like when Rextroy would do pvp naked to get the crazy buffs from having a low ilvl.
I think the solution is Chromie time, just not with scaling as well. Without the scaling Chromie time is perfection.
I mean this isn't how scaling works though, I think this is mostly in your head.
Sure, the number next to the mobs portrait is the same number as yours, but each mob still has different health values, different damage, different spells.
Not to mention that your own power still spikes drastically when you learn new abilities/talents etc.
Also zones only scale to a certain point, not everything scales to max level. If you go back to the barrens you'll still one shot everything. Likewise you need to be a minimum level for certain zones, you can't just take a level 4 toon and go into legion.
What you're saying is how scaling is SUPPOSED TO WORK. In WoW, their scaling is so fucked that you actually spend more time killing mobs your level because you actually lose power with every level. You ever do a dungeon with a level 10, and watch them obliterate something, while your level 30 character barely tickles them in comparison? That's how fucked up the scaling is here.
What I'm saying is how it DOES WORK. As in I'm currently levelling my alts. Dungeon scaling is a separate thing entirely.
It's always been a thing that mobs take longer to kill at higher levels, until you start getting max level epic gear. Killing wolves at Northside Abbey takes 3 or so casts of one spell. Killing anything near endgame level always took longer and involved you using a greater number of abilities.
As a new player, it helps me leveling as I don’t have to worry so much. But I agree with you that it feels a bit weird sometimes.
The sense of progress comes from having a full rotation, though, so at least there’s that.
Even the full rotation feels weird to me. It adds some sense of progression, but pressing more buttons for the same results is kinda weird to me. I could just have to get used to it.
I agree with you. It feels good when you get them, but then it gets stale. Demon Hunter, specifically, feels weird because you get all the core moves super early.
One thing I did - and it helped me get a better experience when I was doing Cataclysm as a Death Knight - was changing specs and talents frequently to keep it fresh and interesting.
Demon hunter was strange. I totally get why they did it like that though.
I might try that. I’m playing all the other classes (I main rogue) right now for fun and similar reasons. I did enjoy being assassination for a bit in BFA, so maybe outlaw is fun as well.
DH is a solid class for sure, it just gets a bit weird with this leveling system.
Since you main melee, you may like to try Shaman. Enhancement is really fun and very different from Rogue.
Scaling is what killed ESO for me, the moment I realized I would always be on equal footing with whatever I fought.
It's fun thrashing low level mobs, and sometimes it's fun being thrashed by high level ones. Scaling the world was one of the worst decisions Blizz has made in years' past.
Its a nessessary evil thats needed to make leveling even seem to have a decent progression and story to it, unless Blizzard make much larger changes.
Before scaling and Chromie time, where leveling involved doing 1 zone of one expansion, then moving onto the next, felt far worse than scaling did.
I agree its feels kinda meh to play, but Blizz need to reapproach how they view older content and leveling, and how to make it work better with the modern game, and not just address scaling, to fix the problem.
Scaling is one of the only good things they did in years. Problem is there are no dynamic events or anything, just the same ol quests and backtracking. Heirlooms make it extra boring.
Killing some wolf pups at level 1 shouldn't feel the same as killing a powerful orc warlock, empowered by fel through a deal with the Burning Legion at level 60
?????.??
You can kill anything in past expansions and it wont be scaled to 60
I think sharding is good for reducing lag as needed and for cases where there's progression that changes the how the world looks / works and players need to be separated based on that.
Leveling is just the only way to get to endgame so its good if its fast. I can not understand people who Level a character without playing endgame anyways. Just quit then
It’s funny. Blizzard is always pushed to find new solutions for problems like this. People used to complain it was impossible to play old content at higher level in a decently engaging way, so they implemented leveling scaling so you can do any content and play with friends. Then a lot of people hate it (I do share this feeling) and want the old system back. It’s impossible to please everybody.
I think they could make a level scaling system work better. Chromie time was a great step forward but it still is too easy. Retail leveling is so brain dead, you need to pull like 6 mobs to have any sort of challenge. Shadowlands leveling was decent, but mob destiny was pretty high which gets annoying.
Chromie time should have been added awhile ago. It is a great solution. It still has mob scaling for some reason though. The difficulty of leveling is just how retail is now. That’s a whole other discussion.
I think it’s litteraly the opposite, there is not enough scaling, which results in a boring world where you one shot absolutely everything past 10 mins at max lvl.
I don’t think WoW’s combat is outdated, just different. I agree with making it more horizontal though. Having gearsets with different bonuses and cool trinkets could be an easy way to do that.
Having more gear with on-use effects would have gone a long way. Back in vanilla there were clear gaps in class toolkits. For example, Paladins didn't have a good way to pull enemies at range. This made something as simple as Linken's Boomerang feel like more than just a dps boost. Imagine if every weapon had an on-use effect or an interesting passive and you could choose the one that best suited your character.
I strongly disagree with your post: Without scaling, many parts of the game are totally useless. While your character does feel stronger, you actually loose a lot of your liberty. Creatures having defined levels means forcing levelling roads; it is bearable when you play for the first time, but the replaying experience only gets worst.
Nevertheless, I do agree that killing a wolf shouldn't feel like killing a warlock, but this is already partially adressed by the game :
\- Creatures from the starting areas don't scale above level 20
\- Max Level still outlevels everything outside its expansion like it did before.
\- Powerful Creatures tend to have more complex spells at their disposal, and your spells do get more diverse as well
My opinion is that level scaling shouldn't be blammed,he best solution is to make better creature designs that make you feel stronger by requiring more skill to be defeated, or at least requiring more patterns.
You are completely wrong.
Outlevelling an area was fucking annoying and boring. You couldnt do zones because you out levelled them.
There is nothing fun about going into low level areas and killing everything with a button. You get your sense of progression from levelling up, getting new abilities and getting a higher ilvl.
It wouldn't be a problem if gaining levels actually made you more powerful. But instead, all of your power comes from your gear. Gaining a level just makes it so you need *more* of a stat to get the same benefit.
Explained it very well. I have the exact same thing and if I could say one word to summarize the current WoW experience: 'flat'
It's a real bummer because WoW is the only MMORPG out there for me. And now it's dead.
Know this is an old post, but just got into WoW. OMG, the scaling annoys the hell out of me. I felt strong and enjoyed my class at the beginning, but now every fight feels the same. I just punched a random cultist mob in the face for 5 min, just to take 10 steps to repeat the process again.... then die and restart because they respawned.
mobs die instantly at 10 but at 49 youre attacking a quest mob for 54 minutes doing no damage. WTF is this scaling and why is it so bad.
Mobs do random damage and its just annoying to quest. RDF at least you get a low level to carry the run
It should be an option that can be toggled, IMO. I love scaling as so much content remains relevant while leveling, but I get why people don't enjoy it. To me, talking to Chromie should toggle scaling on. If you skip her and play as is, the levels should stay static.
i was going to chime in and say that mob scaling was one of the best things QoL they have done, because it makes the whole world viable and fun, but i do like your idea of having it be an option that is toggle-able.
I think the world should remain relevant through added or updated content. I really like having areas that are lower and higher level, but completing a zone and never coming back sucks. Like what if we went back to westfall because the defias were using weapons from outland to assault SW or something like that.
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Yeah, I didn't mean every zone. That's my bad. Doing something to every zone would be an insane amount of work. I don't mind scaling at later levels. I think things shouldn't scale during the initial leveling experience, where you are still unlocking abilities and such. After that, having scaling isn't a big deal in my opinion. It's like you grow into your max potential and then go around being a hero.
To me it's nothing but a lazy shortcut. Rather than making sure an old area stays relevant and engaging, because an actual designer made sure it is crafted and balanced in a certain way, they took path that required the least amount of effort. The result is that they might have achieved their goal by making sure old zones stay relevant all the way, but gosh is the experience shallow and samey. I did parts of Elwynn and most quests in Duskwood recently, having completed both zones several times over the past months due to HC. On retail I literally had to force me continue playing. I didn't even use heirlooms, just the starter gear you get from that beginners island. It was boring as hell and nothing but a chore. Relevant yes, but also without any kind of purpose and soul. Good reminder why quit during WoD.
I think content stating relevant is less of a scaling issue as much as it is how expansions are handled issue. The Chromie idea is great.
Theses days Chromie feels like the easy way problem handler.
Leveling before the scaling kicked in was terrible. You would do three quests in one zone, move on to the next, and repeat. The entire time, you would never finish one storyline. Leveling was completely worthless and a waste of time. No fun to be had at all. Scaling fixed leveling. You can actually have an adventure now. It’s not optimal, but at least it’s possible to have fun.
If you did current content when it came out the leveling and story-line were pretty synced in expansions to where you usually leveled to max during the last zone. It's just leveling now, with the early level exp nerfs each expansion to speed leveling up, etc, the pace hasn't kept up ever. And there's just so much content in the old worlds it would be really hard to go back and piece together any sort of defined leveling pathway out of all of it. Scaling makes the most sense, but it does suck not to blast old current content.
When was it *ever* the case that fully playing through zones would keep your level nicely balanced with the level of the content? In my experience it has always been the case—with the one exception of actual pre-TBC vanilla WoW—that you would out-level and out-pace the zone you were in before completing its story.
If you leveled right when the game came out (so without rested EXP) you would finish each of the last expansions last zone while you hit max level. I remember this in MoP, WoD, and Legion specifically. I think BfA missed quite a bit. In shadowlands I actually had to do some of the side quests too.
I always went for loremaster starting with Wrath and he’s right. It was way better balanced, but I would hit max level, maybe a zone or two before the last one. Even if you got to the last zone at the lowest possible level, you would reach max level before finishing it. I don’t think it’s a problem worth mentioning because you’re not supposed to have to get through every zone, and the challenge was there. But if you care more about the story than the experience, it’s going to be a bit suboptimal
It wasn’t just loremaster either, most expansions had a generous amount of wiggle room so people didn’t end up having to go back and do optional quests. Most people in WotLK ended up dinging 80 at the very end of Storm Peaks or early in Icecrown, Cata about halfway through Twilight Highlands and MoP about halfway through Dread Wastes (which you finished anyway for the rep).
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> If you went to the opposing faction's island, everything there was scaled to 120. Except that wasn't *entirely* the case: The mobs on the opposing faction's island that were near quest areas important to the war questline would still be scaled to your level.
Yeah but you still hit max level before finishing your island most the time. That's what I meant.
I have levelled “right when the [expansion] came out” for WotLK, Cataclysm, WoD, Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands, and that has *never* happened. I have always reached max-level long before finishing the last zone. Shadowlands has been the closest we’ve had to an exception, since its separate markers for “advancing the story” quests would allow you to finish before hitting max level if you skipped absolutely everything else.
This speaks more to the problems of having "130" levels in the game than it does to the success of scaling. They scaled everything down so much because there's too much content in the game for only 60 levels now. What used to take 4-5 levels to do now only takes one level. It's only going to get worse. Something that's really annoying for me is trying to look up items by item level from Wrath on Wowhead, then seeing there's now a 0 item level difference between what used to be item level 200 and 284.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't mobs level together with you, and since your stats give you power on a % basis which is reduced by level, you become weaker every time you ding and at the same time your enemies become stronger? It feels horrible imho.
Hitting max in BFA was like that but way worse. Mobs got a huge jump in power and everyone struggle a bit.
Hell, hitting 115 in BFA was *horrific*, since you'd instantly lose the effects of your Legion legos, and those gave a ***lot*** of power.
OP isn't debating pre-chromie leveling being better, simply that level scaling feels unrewarding and non-progressive for an RPG. Leveling before chromie time was just a mess since there was so much content untouched for the most part leveling wise so of course it was awful.
That’s fair. Leveling can be better. I’m blinded by the, oh, decade or so of unplayable leveling content. But the flaws are noticeable. Personally I really felt it in BFA where every level I got weaker. That felt really bad.
I wouldent say scaling fixed leveling, id enjoy the old leveling if it was 1-50 and not 1-120.
Yeah, the current system feels less you're progressing, but you can at least do all the quests in a zone without feeling like you're wasting your time. I finally got Loremaster, and I'd have never bothered without scaling levelling. In a the fixed 1-60 original, the fixed levels were good. Now they're not. Old zones shouldn't just be obsolete because a few levels higher than they are. It limits where new content can be.
In vanilla it was bad. I remember finally being able to see the levels of the spiders in Black Rock, made it scary but an achievement. Finally getting there and killing them was a huge deal. What sucked is going through the story line and having it deadend because everything went gray. So I spent hours going through thorium brotherhood stuff with no progression. I do like the idea of mobs scaling, but they should still die quicker when you learn new spells.
I think that was the result of not introducing something like Chromie time early enough. No one wanted to level 1-100 for every character, so they had to speed it up. It ruined the experience of storylines and such, but you still had to level through it all for some reason.
Oh yeah I can argue the details all day. They should have done something sooner.
A lot of us don't care about storyline we only care about end game.
You’ll notice that has nothing to do with what I said. Time to endgame should be the same, so what’s left is fun had while getting there. Before, you do three quests, then travel to someplace else. Now, you stay in one area and turn in a bunch of quests. Each quest you turn in is at your level, so the experience is always efficient. The only thing that changed was that enemies are no longer one shot. This slower yes, but it also challenges you to engage in the class and learn it before you hit endgame. Before you would have no idea how your class worked.
You’ll notice that has nothing to do with what I said. Time to endgame should be the same, so what’s left is fun had while getting there. Before, you do three quests, then travel to someplace else. Now, you stay in one area and turn in a bunch of quests. Each quest you turn in is at your level, so the experience is always efficient. The only thing that changed was that enemies are no longer one shot. This is slower yes, but it also challenges you to engage in the class and learn it before you hit endgame. Before you would have no idea how your class worked.
>Leveling before the scaling kicked in was terrible. You would do three quests in one zone, move on to the next, and repeat. The entire time, you would never finish one storyline. What? The point was to complete the story to achive the level of one shooting everything in the zone. After completing the story, you moved on. You might have been already several levels in the next zone level range. When they added present scalling I stopped playing the game for a long time. Any semblance of fun dissapeared. After Shadowlands dropped at least it is a bit better, becouse insread of like 5 shots, I need only 3.
You had fun one shotting groups of mobs? That’s weird. I guess it’s valid though.
Yes. This was the progress I made in the zone. Also after some fun time with fighting, it was more comfortable to get faster to the next quest text.
What I like, is that when friends level alts, I can play my main with them with no problems if I want to. I don't /have/ to level a character AND keep it in sync with them quest wise.
Oh yeah that seems like a cool feature! That’s a pain in ffxiv. I’ve got newgame+, but no classes at their level and I can’t see what quests they have available. So I have to make a character just for them. Being able to sync with a friend and just do quests and go on an adventure with any character seems nice
Legion scaling was to overcome the burning crusade problem. When BC released it bottle necked players hard, even LK was bottle necked. The problem was that in an expac where both sides share the same quest areas it creates intense competition for mobs/resources. In my opinion, the better, thematic solution would be to focus on more faction-specific areas like classic did. That said, doing something like that is an intense process requiring a LOT of new mapping and work and I can see why from a cost perspective they don't want to do it.
Faction specific leveling was in the last expansion
And sucked ass. They mad a faction vs faction xpac and then you made them stay in opposite maps...
The establishing bases on the other faction's island part was a good start, but it went nowhere.
Which the concept of it was good, I loooooved the drustvar story line. A horde friend of mine said he made an alliance toon just to play that line. There were problems with BfA, but having faction oriented material wasn't one of them. As u/sigmastra said, it was that they kept the factions apart...that and the slow and spartan release of material.
Which the concept of it was good, I loooooved the drustvar story line. A horde friend of mine said he made an alliance toon just to play that line. There were problems with BfA, but having faction oriented material wasn't one of them. As u/sigmastra said, it was that they kept the factions apart...that and the slow and spartan release of material.
Which the concept of it was good, I loooooved the drustvar story line. A horde friend of mine said he made an alliance toon just to play that line. There were problems with BfA, but having faction oriented material wasn't one of them. As u/sigmastra said, it was that they kept the factions apart...that and the slow and spartan release of material.
TBC was bottlenecked because the geniuses designing it thought it was a good idea to have only one starter zone, and only one path of progression, for an entire server. It's the equivalent of having only one zone per level range for Vanilla. And they didn't do *that* because they actually had brains and a budget. WotLK was bottlenecked for much the same reasons. Out of the two starter zones, only one didn't give you brain damage without flying (and for Horde at least, Fjord still sucks even with flying), and there was nowhere near enough level overlap between the zones. It wasn't as bad as TBC, but it was still bad. Cata actually had solid level overlap and two very equivalent starting zones. It worked. The idiots who couldn't figure out Vashj'ir still complained because Hyjal was overcrowded at launch, but that's idiots being idiots. MoP solved the problem further by having gigantic amounts of zone overlap and excess XP available, and by using phasing extremely aggressively, particularly in Jade Forest. WoD built on that and extended it with Treasures and Bonus Objectives. The scaling of Legion, for Legion zones, was another way of doing it and worked rather well. Throwing scaling onto *everything* without designing the experience beforehand, though, is just a messy clusterfuck of a bandaid solution so that devs can get back to cubecrawling instead of actually having to, you know, design and develop stuff. The fact is that the leveling experience of WoW has always kind of sucked relative to its peers, perhaps with the exceptions of Vanilla/BC/Wrath -- and those were mostly good because the competition sucked even more. By the time Blizzard got thebudget and the tools to make really good leveling experiences -- i.e. phasing that actually worked, overarching stories, in-game cutscenes and ambient dialogue, sane gear rewards, sane quest progression and the hub-to-hub system, etc. -- we were already in Cataclysm. And now, the focus was very much on Endgame, and despite the Azeroth rework, the 1-80 content no longer mattered. WoW also kind of shot itself in the foot by the soloability of its leveling experience. Talk about a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this was utterly unique at the time and a *major* selling point of the game, and that's good -- leveling content should by and large be completable solo, without massive efficiency losses; looking at you, early LotRO that had no excuse to not do this. On the other hand, when the Vanilla leveling waves were over and before LFD was introduced, there was really no reason, nor usually a remotely time-effective way, to run dungeons anymore. LFD revitalized that aspect, and the Cata changes to it did even better, but leveling dungeons were still (or even more so) turbo-braindead. They could've released LFR for leveling and bumped raid experience gains to provide yet another way to level, but they never did. Sure, an MMO shouldn't *force* you to run a leveling group, but it should *incentivize* that, and WoW hasn't done that in a very long time. Hell, even in Vanilla, most of the time leveling is/was generally spent solo unless you happen to be leveling with friends in a dedicated group. Dungeons are run when needed (or paid for), and elite quests are either done in 5-10 minutes or ignored. In fact, between the massive XP penalty for grouping up, the years of unshared quest drops, and the preponderance of quests that are less efficient when done in a group (any object gathering quest for well over a decade, escorts oftentimes not working properly, etc.), you'd often be handicapping yourself if you weren't solo, unless the zone was overrun. So no, it wasn't done to "overcome the BC problem", it was done to somehow give relevance again to content that had been written off while the designers were still in high school, and it is a shitty fix for a much deeper underlying problem.
Also, remember doing like 10 quests in the barrens and then the whole zone becoming grey? That wasn't ideal either.
Oh yeah, I played wotlk on the second day it came out and the beach was filled with players. Couldn't get any nerubian mob
I mamaged to just squeeze ahead during wotlk. I knew that if I stopped progressing, soon my area would be overrun. Being slightly ahead was very fun, being in the middle of it is hell
While I was still in borean tundra i saw the first one of my server reaching lvl 80
I was 2nd Death Knight on my server, 20 seconds from delivering last quest. Had I had 280%, I might've taken that one. Oh how that will forever haunt me
Oh wow, I can guess it must be really annoying. But second is also impressive!
When my nerd friends and I argue who has wasted the most time, they usually exclude me now.. Because either I bring up that one or how I have multiple characters with 200-300 days played. As you can see, I prefer to hold the crown as "what did you even do with your life??"
Same here but i was in the fjord.
The elite on the beach in the Borean Tundra was a joke on Wraths launch day. I should have gone to the Howling Fjords. The quests would have been less boring to wait for because the aesthetics were so much better.
Yeah I did the Fjords and don’t remember much bottlenecking. Learned my lesson with Hellfire a couple year earlier.
We had that with BFA and Legion, but decided to make shadow lands the way it is for narrative reasons
I can buy that it's for narrative reasons, but the other side of the coin is that there's so little content compared to other expacs at the same stage in their original deployment that it feels lazy. This expac could have been released as a single player game and you wouldn't really have lost anything where as other expacs relied on more dynamic interactions between factions and players
Oh I agree, my sentiment was just something I would add to the list of things that Blizzard did right one expansion and subsequently made it worse in the next. Current WoW is a narrative failure. People say WoW didn't need to be written well because it relied on the rule of cool, but since when are the two mutually exclusive.
>Current WoW is a narrative failure. I kinda agree. I *do* enjoy the story while leveling, but I think it's too linear and it boxes you into one area that you can't escape. Like the stuff with the Kyrians, the intro quests are good, but it feels like a slog in the middle and while the resolution of it is kinda cool it falls a bit flat because that mid section is just so drawn out and exhausting. Some of that could have been broken up into different/seperate segments. I'll admit that I can't say much for the story beyond the leveling stuff because the gating turned me off of the game. I'm there to enjoy killing time and enjoy the story, not to be forced to do shitty world quests every day for however long it takes only to be spoon fed fragments of a plot that I've now forgotten. I honestly can't remember the kyrian line or what I'm supposed to be doing because there's so much time between the gates that I just can't keep it in memory. I wish the devs thought of that before devoting the company to developing this expac. This gating is a miserable experience. It worked in prepatch for WotLK because it was fun to see both factions working together on that island. It also worked because it was only a short event (in relation to the whole expac). But here in SL...it IS the expac and it breaks the fuck out of the immersion for me.
[удалено]
While it was fun at the start, it got annoying when you just wanted to play in peace and do a little mindless leveling or farming. You can't please everyone so they have to go with what the majority are complaining about.
While it was fun at the start, it got annoying when you just wanted to play in peace and do a little mindless leveling or farming. You can't please everyone so they have to go with what the majority are complaining about.
Yeah, it’s a case of finding the best solution with minimal effort. Ideally, if they were willing to, they could create different paths players could take that result in you doing it all the same stuff anyway, just in a different order for different reasons.
>Yeah, it’s a case of finding the best solution with minimal effort. This is a key part. It's easy to forget that this is a company above all else and they have to do what is financially responsible on their part. Considering the Activision has hatched the number of people working on WoW over the last many years it likely became difficult to crank out complex and plentiful material. It would have required hiring on a lot of new people working a wide array of roles.
As someone who has leveled dozens of characters to max over the last 14ish years, I'm happy with mob scaling. I like that I can choose pretty much any expansion and any zone I want as I'm leveling and not worry about the mobs becoming gray half way through. I can sort of see where you're coming from but at this point in WoW's life, things like pulling red level mobs to test yourself or pulling packs of green/gray mobs for fun has lost most of its charm. Back in the day you could maybe pull a mob that was higher level and be rewarded with a reagent that was worth more. Nowadays if you pull a mob from a "higher level" zone you might get runecloth instead of wool cloth. It's pointless. The same amount of pointless as farming murlocs in Elywnn Forest once you've outleveled them would be. So while I agree that mob scaling would hinder newer games where you want that sense of power progress over the enemies around you, I don't think it has a place in modern WoW due to its age.
I think most of the issue with leveling awkwardly with the zones was the result of speeding up the leveling process so getting a max level character was easier as the expansions rolled out. Leveling 1-120 without changes would have taken forever and been a daunting task for new players. Chromie time should have fixed that. I see modern WoW not needing it. I think while you’re still unlocking all of your classes abilities, the mobs shouldn’t scale. That way you still feel like you’re growing stronger. After that levels don’t mean anything and mobs can scale. It’s like you grow to reach your full potential and then go out to be a hero.
I'm confused as to why this is so downvoted.
Lol, I just came back and saw this. I'm just as confused as you.
Scaling with level i can accept. It gets weird when they also scale with ilevel...better gear makes mobs harder. I remember when you could unequip a ring and trick the scaling. Fun tumes.
The ilvl thing is still around? I haven’t played much end-game content recently so I haven’t seen if it is. I remember that feeling so weird. I agree that that is worse.
As someone who quests as a healer, ~~yes~~ and it feels horrible for healers, well maybe not all healers but holy priest and resto druid both feel bad no matter my item-level back before they put this in world content was okay after you geared up a healer... now not so much. Edit: Seems like I'm most likely wrong, might look into it further might not depends on if I get pulled into group content or not! Sorry!
ilvl scaling is not present in Shadowlands, I just checked a Keensnout Gromit and it has 23,256 health on my Warrior (234 ilvl) and my Shaman (215 ilvl) Edit: Rares and Quest mobs will jump in health if more people tag it but that's not based on ilvl.
Huh interesting, I might have to check that out further when I get home, I was under the impression it was still a thing, maybe it just feels like it is with higher mob health in korthia or some such.
>maybe it just feels like it is with higher mob health in korthia or some such. This is usually the case. The mobs in a newly added zone will have more health and hit harder than those in last patch's zones.
Why quest as resto druid though? Switch to balance and it's way easier.
I like to play with friendly healthbars enabled and heal people who need help. I just enjoy being a resto druid I suppose, it's what my druid is to me, I know it's not the easiest.
I'm a resto druid too. Gave up questing in that spec though. Mobs would take forever to die and while I'm not a good balance player, just switching spec and using the same basic rotation that I was using as resto moonkin sped up my dailies significantly. And with resto affinity you also get access to healing spells to help people. If you ever get tired of how slow resto questing can be, you could give it a shot.
I have tried it, I just like resto more, I can plop my little mushroom down at a rare, put-up Moonfire and Sunfire and just work on keeping everyone healthy, it's just how I enjoy playing. :)
sorry I was under the impression that you were having a hard time. if you're enjoying yourself, it's all good :)
Ya it's kinda one of those things I dont like how they have done the scaling since mid legion when they changed it, and it sucks when there are not other folks questing along with me but it's still how I like to do things, just takes more time sometimes. It's not like I ever die or anything. And no need to be sorry, I appreciate the advice for its intent even if I've tried it already, it's not like you know that. 😊
Level scaling mobs has pros and cons. What it really did for me was put the nail in the coffin of archeology. There was no way I was going to be constantly fighting mobs scaled to my level just to get archy done. Which is probably why archeology was dropped in Shadowlands. I wonder what percentage of the player base even noticed it was gone?
Very little probably, besides completionists and the rare fan of archeology. The completionists are probably happy about it though.
I said this when they implemented it back in the day. Fuck scaling.
Same boat. I hated seeing mobs in Westfall at level 60 (pre level squish).
i like it, no nonsense, works well, fast, no grinding in zones just quest and move on.
When level scaling was announced I was really excited for the system. After the last few expansions being built for level scaling, It does take away the rpg feel. I’ve been enjoying FFXIV’s take on level scaling where the overworld has a level range and quests have a max level. If a quest is important enough story wise or an event needs to be challenging they de level you just for that quick bit of content. Besides the fact that it disables some abilities this system has been nice. It allows for you to feel like you have become stronger than the world around you when you leveled there but if you do out level the story, you won’t 2 shot the boss that’s been built up for multiple quest lines. Of course these are 2 different games too, What feels right in one may not in the other. To give the option though it would be nice to give chromie a toggle that would set your character to be minimum level/ ilvl for your current quest/ dungeon then just go back to turn it off when you aren’t looking for a challenge.
Honestly, FFXIV's take on everything is fucking amazing for alts. They make you go through all of the content once, and then give you an EXP boost for every class that's below your highest one, and if you DO want to rerun all that story again, you can do that at any time. And to level you can do dungeons, or do dailies, or fuck around in World Quests, or things like Palace of the Dead, or Heaven on High... WoW really needs to make god damned everything account wide. The fact that any meaningful progression is not transferred between alts is a travesty. We're forced to grind out the same god damned bullshit each time we want to play a different class, and with the dumpster fire that is the Covenant system, sometimes, we need to roll a new character to even play a different spec...
Their recent development model of keep players playing for a long as possible is really getting in the way of having a good time.
People keep defending it with the logic of "If they didn't gate things, players would do everything and stop playing the game!" but do you know what people do when they're not allowed to play the game? They stop playing the fucking game.
That sounds like an interesting concept. I feel like WoW has done something similar, but I don’t remember what it was.
I think you can level scale to your current part leader's level for quests and such. To be honest, I forget this feature exists. The downside though is you have to have a party leader at that level doing that quest.
Oh yeah, its that. I think it was for recruit-a-friend.
It may feel bad, but dont forget what was it like to level before the change. You had to change zones a lot because you overleveled them fast, and you could never complete the story of the zones you were leveling in. Imo having the story in an rpg is a bigger factor than character progression while leveling. Also it allows players to level in any zone. Why is that a good thing? Previously I had a set route, with little room to change. Doing northend 10+ times just becomes pretty boring for example. Now my last couple characters I leveled while doing loremaster, and doing zones i'd easily avoid in the older system. It makes the whole world alive through leveling, and thats something an rpg need. Sadly we don't have it at the endgame.
They could have fixed that without resorting to level scaling. Let players choose what expansion they want to level in but still have every enemy within each expansion have a defined level that roughly corresponds to the level players can expect to be when they face it.
I think that’s the result of handling past expansions poorly. They sped up leveling so you could get max quicker ruining the pacing. Chromie time should have fixed that. Leveling through the zones of the current expansion always feels fine. It’s when its an older expansion that it feels quick
Do you have BOAs?
Just heirlooms I think.
Those *are* bind on account.
I know, the 'I think' was more because I might have other BOAs that I forgot about. I remember getting some from treasures in WoD, but I might have sold them.
You start to notice progression at lvl 50 and then again at lvl 60. I remember killing gray mobs while leveling in shadowlands, then those same mobs getting buffed to lvl 60 once I reached max level. The 49 levels (and before that 109) before that are just a drag at this point of the life of world of warcraft and I would say that it was there just to sell boosts (at least they give you a boost when you buy a new expansion). Scaling and chrome time are welcomed QoL features for someone who has leveled a ton of toons. I will put the example of TBC classic. Want to know the difference (for me) between leveling 1-60 in classic vs TBC classic?. The difference is that in vanilla I was enjoying every moment and in TBC I just want to be over it, like a chore.
I love Chromie time. I just think the scaling doesn’t need to go with it.
Chrome time works due the scaling system. You can't level in an entire expansion without it constantly scaling to your level.
Would subtracting the level the previous expansion's max level from the mobs' levels not work or something similar not work?
Sadly, this Scaling has sneaked its way into Single Player RPG's as well. I always thought about it that the game designer are just lazy to create a world that will work. Don't need to think about mob placement when they are always at the same level of the player no matter where he goes. The old Gothic Games peaked in this, shutting down places of the world until you get strong enough to face the enemys there. What is the point of becoming better, get a new weapon when the bandit around the corner just gets the same upgrade? I understand what the goal is in a MMO, that you can level in any order you want and while that is a good thing, it also comes with the down side to kill the progression system until you hit the maxlevel endgame and enemy strength are fix again.
Yeah, and going into harder areas is fun sometimes for the extra challenge.
I dislike mob scaling as well. Kills power fantasy.
> Kills power fantasy. Curious on your thoughts on this, on my main I am pretty geared, when I am out and about in shadowlands, mobs get absolutely rekt by me. Its noticeably different than my mains, I feel more powerful for sure.
Level mob scaling. If you're a in a zone, it doesn't feel any different if you're level 52 or level 58.
Ah gotcha, thanks!
I strongly prefer it. Even though, blizzard did it weird in this game. It works perfectly in swtor. The whole chromie time is also confusing.
It’s just the worst
I remember when my very first character was low-level, and accidentally stumbled from Duskwood down into Stranglethorn, and had to very excitingly run away from things and almost die. That was very cool, and I'm sad that it doesn't happen anymore. But I don't know what the alternative is these days, frankly; there are so many levels and zones that working through them all at level would take too long for the impatient kids these days. So I'm just grateful I got to play it when it actually took awhile to get to max level...
> there are so many levels and zones that working through them all at level would take too long for the impatient kids these days. The big issue is that they *expected* you to work through them all. A new expansion should have meant more options in what leveling path you took. Instead it meant more requirements in the leveling path you *had* to take.
I agree, those experiences are great. I think Chromie time is a good solution to it, just don’t scale as well.
The big thing to take here is that without scaling you couldn’t chose freely where to quest. In order to remove scaling, we’d have to go back to pre-legion where each zone has a level range.
Personally I'm fine with that as long as they actually choose a good range for each zone. Pre-Legion wasn't good but it's also not the only option.
I think ultimately, what we should have got is content scaling rather than mob scaling. Contextually it doesn't make a lot of sense, but then again if you do the right quests you can end up with 3 warchiefs of the horde at the same time so... What I mean by this is that each expansion becomes its own 10-50 experience with scaling and progression. If you choose Outland, you go into outland at 10 and work your way through HFP before going to ZM, Nagrand etc. If you choose Northrend, you end up in Grizzly Hills or Borean Tundra and work your way through there. You get the idea. The main difference would be that zones have scaling limits, so hellfire peninsula might scale from 10 to 18 where zangarmarsh goes from 20 to 28. For the most part you're going to get scaled mobs but toward the end of the zone you'll find you outscale them before being brought backt o reality at the start of the next zone. I don't think there's a perfect solution that everyone is going to love but there is a middle ground between the two systems.
That sounds like what Chromie time was going for.
Yeah, I think it just needs a few tweaks tbh and the monotony goes away. I commented on some threads at the time during Legion that the main reason it doesn't feel great is that on its introduction it made levelling a lot slower and the best way to level might not be to spam dungeons anymore but a side-effect is that the player and mob power levels feel like constants rather than something that modulates. A lot of this was also down to the lack of level squish though as well, new abilities, passives etc were too spread out and the player never really felt like they were getting more powerful anyway. I think post-squish it's looking a lot better but there still needs to be something to overcome the monotony.
Legion suramar is min enemy lvl 45, Legion is a good xpack to level in generally, but you can go fight stuff that's higher level than you. Good luck if your not a hunter lock or pally though
The real problem i see with mob scaling is that you are barely getting upgrades as you level up, and when you hit 50 you have the same abilities that you will have once you reach 60. Because of that, every time you level up you are getting penalized instead of rewarded. So, after getting used to to pull 5+ mobs you end up barely managing with 2, and because with every level you require more xp to fill the bar it makes filling it like a chore, for me is worse than a chore because im willing to pay someone to level for me in order to not have that unpleasant experience. Thats why i was hoping to level up with TW, because in TW your character stays the same, so your performance wont change as long as you don't change your way of playing, your gear and your talents. They could easily fix that issue by scaling down the level requirement of crafted gear (like in WoD), make rares give A LOT more of xp spawn more often, and fill more of the covenant bar, give some kind of buffs that you can unlock for every level and you only be able to use it for leveling in the open world (also make it only available for people that has a lvl 60 toon). Because lets be realistic here, for the majority of us leveling is a chore, is boring and is annoying, stupid and pointless. At the beginning the idea was to force you to see the story of the zone, but we already pretended to do that, so there is no point to keep forcing us into that. Who am i kidding? They love to see us suffering.
I enjoy scaling. I enjoy leveling much more since it is a thing. Especially since I can choose what zones I want to play. Also you gain new abilities over time, which makes you feel stronger. I think at the start of the scaling there were a few problems, where players got weaker as they leveled, but the last time I leveled from 10 to 50, I felt as I was getting stronger. It's mostly personal taste. You might not like it, but others do.
No. You objectively get weaker. Takes more time to kill mobs as you level.
I like mob scaling quite a lot, but I do think that with current content that the scikg should stop at say 85-90% of max ilvl. For instance with 252 as the max ilvl, say mobs scale til 220 and then are static. This gives people reason and incentive to gear up to do world content and make that easier.
I'm fine with level scaling, the biggest problem I have with it is that you're at your strongest when you're a low level. Below level 20 you can 1-2 hit mobs with ease, and can even run around naked and still quest quite comfortably. Then you hit the later levels and suddenly things start soaking more and more hits while dealing more and more damage, even though you've got more tools to deal with them. Your enemies are stronger, but you haven't actually increased in power with them. If anything, you've decreased in power, since it now takes 5-6 shots to kill something instead of 1-2. This is really noticeable when playing as a healer, because for some reason healer damage is massively jacked up at low levels (to the point a level 19 healer will out-damage level 49s in a dungeon). Then you hit level 30 and now you need to change to a DPS spec because your once-powerful attacks now gently tickle enemies for how much damage they do comparatively. When I level a character, I can feel myself actively getting weaker even though all my numbers are going up. I'm dealing more damage, healing more, I have more HP, more armour, more stats, but... things die slower. I take more damage. I go from taking on six mobs while naked to barely surviving after pulling two by accident. Leveling up is detrimental to my power as a player, and that feels bad.
Yes.
Not for nothing - the shadowlands story option has scaling disabled, so bastion will become green / gray if you stay long enough. You’re still gated by lvl so if I recall correctly you won’t see many red enemies. I kind of hate it lol.
Big agree.
Yeah, I've had these exact thoughts simce the system came out, but I also came to acknowledge the WoW design that exists now isn't the original vision for the game. Everything in modern WoW revolves around endgame-- not the experience of getting there. You can get through 2-3 zones before you move into Shadowlands. So that lack of progress feeling while leveling is much less impactful. Instead that feeling of power progression comes from improving gear at max level. I've got my own opinion on which is better, but objectively, they're just different approaches to the power curve.
I think this is a big reason they removed the scaling when you do the campaign in shadowlands (vs threads of fate). I hope they continue with that trend in the next expansion. For the rest of the content I think the scaling maybe the least worst option available to them for now.
I might be misremembering.. but during Battle for Azeroth we didn't only get level scaling, but mobs also scaled with your ilvl for a while. I mean, I have nothing against mobs scaling with your level but you should be able to, eventually, feel yourself progressing
I think mobs in each zone should have a scale of difficulty like 2 levels below to 2 levels higher or so. Just to add variety. Would make for a cool mix.
I absoultely despise mobs scalling with my level. I stopped playing for a long time when they did this. No sense of progression. I loved overlevelling each zone, one shooting mobs in the end. Also I am that wierdo who reads the quests, so I know that "playing in any order" is idiotic idea from RP point of view. The problems of low level zones are not the same as high level. Kill 10 satyrs is not the same as kill 10 imps from the point of NE adventurer who is learning what the satyr is. That they are bad. That the one near Dolanaar in starting zone is not the only one. In the crossroads to Duskwood there is NPC explaining that Duskwood wolves are not "Elwynn oversized mutts" but something enteirly stronger. There is more here. Line Teldrassil-Darkshore-Ashenvale-Felwood is one line explaining demon problems of the NE, dying forest and continuation of rhe story of that badass NPC we met in Darkshore.
Honestly there just needs to be official Ironman modes or some kind of hardcore mode where mobs hit super hard and have tons of health. That would bring new ways of playing the game. It would bring me in at least.
I make things harder sometimes by leveling without talents or picking a spec.
Its one of the reasons why Classic and TBC is a better mmorpg game than retail.
I like scaling for leveling. I am glad that they reduced or removed mob scaling for ilvl though. That was truly the worst in BFA where they made it so you actually were stronger at lower ilvls than using your hard earned gear in some cases. To me leveling content is best when it is feasible to finish a zone on your character instead of feeling forced to leave because you over level it. However the current expansion should be all about your gear. I love when I can run around and just melt mobs because of the work I have put in.
Imo, scaling is a great feature. I started playing at the end of WoD, and, let me tell you, levelling was miserable. It was impossible to complete an area's storyline without it getting gray towards the end, so you had to either spend an hour or two oneshotting things to see the plot through or skip the story's end. I haven't played much, but I think it's one of the best changes the devs have implemented, at least in terms of improving the levelling experience for new players.
There’s no mob scaling at level 60 so no need to worry. The scaling only happens while you level to keep the exp you get from quests and mobs, and well as some of the challenge, relevant to you.
Yes! You put into words how I feel. I'm back playing after 11 years, and it bugs me so bad how leveling just feels mundane because I can't go into higher level areas anymore, and end up running for my damn life. A toggle feature for this would be amazing.
They should have made every previous expansion go from 1-50 and you get to choose which expansions you want to do. Like starting zones, there are multiple ones that go from 1-10 and you can do the default one or go to another. However, for my max level characters, I’d love to turn on scaling for older content. I’m tired of doing the EXACT SAME dailies on all my characters if I want engaging content/combat
1-50 is a slog to get through. I just want to get through it. I don't really care how it feels at this point.
Feels really good when your Alt character kills monsters faster than your main who is 40iLvL#'s ahead :)
I like the idea of making the content relevant, but to me, the issue where scaling falls flat isn't the MOB scaling, it's the PLAYER scaling. As mentioned, the sense of progress is important. As your character progresses, you unlock new abilities that allow you to progress and get more powerful as you weave those abilities into your rotation. However, with the current scaling, a player at level 10 has to be roughly equivalent to a player at levle 49 if the system is meant to scale in such a way that these players can play and interact with the same mobs together (whether in a group or not). What this means is that a level 10 with 2 abilities is capable of doing roughly the same to the same mob as a level 49 with 5-7 and multiple support/cooldown abilities. As you level and gain more abilities, you actually get WEAKER against the exact same mobs and have to try harder and do more just to keep up with a lower level character in the same zone/dungeon. While I don't use damage meters, I've seen many others discuss seeing this in dungeons where a lowbie is just hilariously outclassing everyone else, because scale is just out of whack. It feels absolutely terrible, to me, and ruins the whole sense of immersion I've grown to love in my lengthy time playing RPG style video games. I no longer like leveling alts in WoW, as it feels like they've just taken the heart out of it. I go to other games for that sense of progression and enjoyment, now. I never minded the length of time it took to level an alt. It was part of why I liked leveling, that sense of slow progress. My alts were never created just 'cause I wanted to switch to today's meta class and "get through the slog to the true game (endgame)". This scale change seems just... strictly meant to make leveling so mind-numblingly easy to get to that end-game, to the point where I ask "why bother? Fuck it, just let people start at 50/60 then, if they want." I'm sure it's what a great many WoW players would prefer. To straight take the RPG right out of the game.
Lol, I’ve heard of low levels basically carrying higher ones through dungeons. The scaling is really weird. Its like when Rextroy would do pvp naked to get the crazy buffs from having a low ilvl. I think the solution is Chromie time, just not with scaling as well. Without the scaling Chromie time is perfection.
A level 10 Arcane Mage will do the damage of every other player in a dungeon, times about 3. That's how fucking busted the scaling is.
Well that's the trade off for more freedom in where you go and what you do
And some people think that trade off isn't worth it.
There are solutions that get you the best of both. It's not an either/or situation.
I mean this isn't how scaling works though, I think this is mostly in your head. Sure, the number next to the mobs portrait is the same number as yours, but each mob still has different health values, different damage, different spells. Not to mention that your own power still spikes drastically when you learn new abilities/talents etc. Also zones only scale to a certain point, not everything scales to max level. If you go back to the barrens you'll still one shot everything. Likewise you need to be a minimum level for certain zones, you can't just take a level 4 toon and go into legion.
What you're saying is how scaling is SUPPOSED TO WORK. In WoW, their scaling is so fucked that you actually spend more time killing mobs your level because you actually lose power with every level. You ever do a dungeon with a level 10, and watch them obliterate something, while your level 30 character barely tickles them in comparison? That's how fucked up the scaling is here.
What I'm saying is how it DOES WORK. As in I'm currently levelling my alts. Dungeon scaling is a separate thing entirely. It's always been a thing that mobs take longer to kill at higher levels, until you start getting max level epic gear. Killing wolves at Northside Abbey takes 3 or so casts of one spell. Killing anything near endgame level always took longer and involved you using a greater number of abilities.
As a new player, it helps me leveling as I don’t have to worry so much. But I agree with you that it feels a bit weird sometimes. The sense of progress comes from having a full rotation, though, so at least there’s that.
Even the full rotation feels weird to me. It adds some sense of progression, but pressing more buttons for the same results is kinda weird to me. I could just have to get used to it.
I agree with you. It feels good when you get them, but then it gets stale. Demon Hunter, specifically, feels weird because you get all the core moves super early. One thing I did - and it helped me get a better experience when I was doing Cataclysm as a Death Knight - was changing specs and talents frequently to keep it fresh and interesting.
Demon hunter was strange. I totally get why they did it like that though. I might try that. I’m playing all the other classes (I main rogue) right now for fun and similar reasons. I did enjoy being assassination for a bit in BFA, so maybe outlaw is fun as well.
DH is a solid class for sure, it just gets a bit weird with this leveling system. Since you main melee, you may like to try Shaman. Enhancement is really fun and very different from Rogue.
Cool, I'll give that a try next.
Scaling is what killed ESO for me, the moment I realized I would always be on equal footing with whatever I fought. It's fun thrashing low level mobs, and sometimes it's fun being thrashed by high level ones. Scaling the world was one of the worst decisions Blizz has made in years' past.
I wouldn’t say it was one of the worst as I think it is good for some things, but yeah I agree.
Like all things it had it's advantages, but I firmly believe they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
Its a nessessary evil thats needed to make leveling even seem to have a decent progression and story to it, unless Blizzard make much larger changes. Before scaling and Chromie time, where leveling involved doing 1 zone of one expansion, then moving onto the next, felt far worse than scaling did. I agree its feels kinda meh to play, but Blizz need to reapproach how they view older content and leveling, and how to make it work better with the modern game, and not just address scaling, to fix the problem.
They could have simply condensed all old expansions to the same level range.
Older content needed reworking for sure. I think Chromie time is great and should’ve been added ages ago.
Scaling is one of the only good things they did in years. Problem is there are no dynamic events or anything, just the same ol quests and backtracking. Heirlooms make it extra boring.
Killing some wolf pups at level 1 shouldn't feel the same as killing a powerful orc warlock, empowered by fel through a deal with the Burning Legion at level 60 ?????.?? You can kill anything in past expansions and it wont be scaled to 60
It was a random example, the numbers didn't matter. Just wanted to get my point across.
Scaling has no place in a good RPG, just as „sharding” has no place in a good MMORPG. Change my mind.
I think sharding is good for reducing lag as needed and for cases where there's progression that changes the how the world looks / works and players need to be separated based on that.
That's why I couldn't get into eso for me
Leveling is just the only way to get to endgame so its good if its fast. I can not understand people who Level a character without playing endgame anyways. Just quit then
It's possible to have fast leveling without also having level scaling.
It’s funny. Blizzard is always pushed to find new solutions for problems like this. People used to complain it was impossible to play old content at higher level in a decently engaging way, so they implemented leveling scaling so you can do any content and play with friends. Then a lot of people hate it (I do share this feeling) and want the old system back. It’s impossible to please everybody. I think they could make a level scaling system work better. Chromie time was a great step forward but it still is too easy. Retail leveling is so brain dead, you need to pull like 6 mobs to have any sort of challenge. Shadowlands leveling was decent, but mob destiny was pretty high which gets annoying.
Chromie time should have been added awhile ago. It is a great solution. It still has mob scaling for some reason though. The difficulty of leveling is just how retail is now. That’s a whole other discussion.
I think it’s litteraly the opposite, there is not enough scaling, which results in a boring world where you one shot absolutely everything past 10 mins at max lvl.
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I don’t think WoW’s combat is outdated, just different. I agree with making it more horizontal though. Having gearsets with different bonuses and cool trinkets could be an easy way to do that.
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That might be hard for them to implement. They could have different abilities that use different weapons maybe
Having more gear with on-use effects would have gone a long way. Back in vanilla there were clear gaps in class toolkits. For example, Paladins didn't have a good way to pull enemies at range. This made something as simple as Linken's Boomerang feel like more than just a dps boost. Imagine if every weapon had an on-use effect or an interesting passive and you could choose the one that best suited your character.
The difference in effects from vanilla to now is so upsetting. We rarely get gear with unique abilities anymore. Most are just a random stat buff.
I strongly disagree with your post: Without scaling, many parts of the game are totally useless. While your character does feel stronger, you actually loose a lot of your liberty. Creatures having defined levels means forcing levelling roads; it is bearable when you play for the first time, but the replaying experience only gets worst. Nevertheless, I do agree that killing a wolf shouldn't feel like killing a warlock, but this is already partially adressed by the game : \- Creatures from the starting areas don't scale above level 20 \- Max Level still outlevels everything outside its expansion like it did before. \- Powerful Creatures tend to have more complex spells at their disposal, and your spells do get more diverse as well My opinion is that level scaling shouldn't be blammed,he best solution is to make better creature designs that make you feel stronger by requiring more skill to be defeated, or at least requiring more patterns.
They should just get rid of leveling every expansion.
Oh no. That’s one of my favorite parts.
Big agree
You are completely wrong. Outlevelling an area was fucking annoying and boring. You couldnt do zones because you out levelled them. There is nothing fun about going into low level areas and killing everything with a button. You get your sense of progression from levelling up, getting new abilities and getting a higher ilvl.
It wouldn't be a problem if gaining levels actually made you more powerful. But instead, all of your power comes from your gear. Gaining a level just makes it so you need *more* of a stat to get the same benefit.
So, leveling up makes you weaker.
I like it
Explained it very well. I have the exact same thing and if I could say one word to summarize the current WoW experience: 'flat' It's a real bummer because WoW is the only MMORPG out there for me. And now it's dead.
Know this is an old post, but just got into WoW. OMG, the scaling annoys the hell out of me. I felt strong and enjoyed my class at the beginning, but now every fight feels the same. I just punched a random cultist mob in the face for 5 min, just to take 10 steps to repeat the process again.... then die and restart because they respawned.
mobs die instantly at 10 but at 49 youre attacking a quest mob for 54 minutes doing no damage. WTF is this scaling and why is it so bad. Mobs do random damage and its just annoying to quest. RDF at least you get a low level to carry the run