Leveling Quick Fixes: Intro

Patch 7.3.5 in World of Warcraft recently came out and with it came some changes to leveling that were alluded to nearly two years ago, where Watcher mentioned how broken the leveling experience was and saw promise in the level scaling tech that Legion was introducing. This was shortly followed by some small changes to improve the leveling experience a little bit in the meantime. As promised, the level scaling tech and additional tweaks are here in full force and while I don't entirely agree with the direction Blizzard has taken, I will admit it resolves one major problem I had with leveling that I brought up a couple years ago.

Specifically, I think Blizzard addressed power creep fairly well by tuning enemies appropriately, which is most apparent in dungeons. Also, level scaling allows for more freedom to explore zones and complete their storylines, which is a direct response to my gripe with outleveling zones even without using heirlooms. Finally, this change comes at a great time since it effectively rejuvenates old content for players to consume while the next expansion is being developed.

My Goals for Improving Leveling Further

However, I am also a little bitter about this change since it almost certainly took a fair amount of time to implement, meaning Blizzard is unlikely to implement any other huge changes (aside from the planned squish) that'll improve the leveling experience further especially in the overworld. Over the last couple of years, I have refined my opinions on the leveling system and, as a result, have a few goals for these further improvements. They are as follows:

Improve upon leveling as a practical tutorial system where adversity is gradually introduced to give players experience with handling it on their own terms.

While this was improved somewhat mostly by adjusting the health of mobs upward, WoW is more than just a numbers game and mechanical complexity is still seriously lacking especially outside of dungeons. It may now be harder to provide a consistent mechanical challenge because of level scaling, especially in the 1-60 bracket, but I think it can still be accomplished.

The ultimate purpose of this goal is to increase the ability of newer players to adapt to the level cap experience where most of the challenge is currently. By improving their skill level more during leveling, players are less likely to be looked down upon by more experienced players which should hopefully result in fewer toxic situations. Furthermore, by introducing challenge that players are intended to overcome by using the tools provided to figure it out, players may be more willing to resolve future challenges in a similar way. To put it another way, player agency in the face of challenge may pave the path for player independence.

Make leveling more immersive by further encouraging exploration and testing a player's awareness.

While the freedom to access more zones to level in helps this goal already, I think there's a few features that could be introduced at lower levels to fulfill the goal further. For example, I personally find lower level zones to be a little barren and it would be nice to dot them with various points of interest like at higher levels to capitalize on the open world design.

Make leveling a journey in itself that's intended to be fun instead of a chore to reach level cap.

Level cap may hold most of the game's features but even if that's the case, I think it's possible to make the leveling itself fun for everyone to a degree even if the player has leveled many characters already. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this goal such as by providing more variety in the type of leveling content available, which improves replayability and justifies slowing down the leveling experience a little bit. With that said, there's no need to make the journey extremely prolonged like in a game like Runescape. I would like to think having more choice in which zones to quest in is only the start of such improvements.

List of Possible Quick Fixes

This brings me to why I titled this article the way I did. Since I suspect that Blizzard won't be so keen to implement huge changes involving the leveling system any time soon, I will propose suggestions that I think won't be as demanding to implement that fulfill my goals. Therefore, I think it's appropriate to call this article series "Leveling Quick Fixes." I'm unsure how long this series will go on unlike with Legion's Gameplay Loop (which is basically finished), but so long as I think the leveling system could use improvement, it's likely I'll publish articles for this series. I may even tie in existing suggestions I've thought of to involve leveling in some sort of way in the hopes of providing elegant solutions.

I may revise or devise goals in the process, but for now, the list of quick fixes I have thought of are as follows:

• Rare Spawns
• Treasure Hunting and Creep Camps
• Proving Grounds Rejuvenation
• Elite Mob Subzones
• Appendix: Mechanical Learning Expectations

Much like with my previous article series, this list will serve as a table of contents for this series, so as I publish articles on this series, I will add a link to them here.