#level squish

So, holy crap, The World of Warcraft Shadowlands pre-patch seems like a huge change to the game in a lot of ways, some big some small, but all of them pretty damn incredible!  There’s plenty of places you can go to get all the information on this thing in a way that’s far more explanatory and concise than my rantings, so i’ll for the most part just run down the things that excite me the most about it!  Without further ado:

- The Level Squish :

So we all knew the level squish resetting the level cap back to the games original 60 was coming, but did we know it was a part of the pre-patch?  Because I sure as hell didn’t!  I’m absolutely ecstatic, as someone who really loves the leveling process, that leveling a new character will finally be a manageable and semi breezy task.  No more will I have to dread certain outdated expansions being done in a hard line sequential order.  I’ll no longer need to worry that it’ll take me up to 60 hours, even with Heirlooms, just to get my new character up to the games newest content!  The level squish is so long over due that I almost can’t believe it’s actually happening.

- Chromie Time:

Chromie Time, on the other hand, is something I’ve desperately wished for for years now, and the fact it’s actually happening is astounding!  Essentially, instead of a linear path through all the old expansions, often outpacing all of them in very annoying ways, you can just pick to do whichever one you want!  Have a fondess for Cataclysm Era Old World?  Level your whole character there!  Want to relive Legions world ending stakes and excellently paced leveling zones?  You’re free to do so!  No more are expansions just pit stops on the way to cap, now they can finally be experienced and appreciated as the things they are, not just shells of the content they once were!  Hell, this will be the first time I’ve ever actually been able to properly play the Mists of Pandaria content, so that alone is huge for me!

- Plague of Undeath 2.0:

I honestly thought it was insane for Blizzard to do this event again with the whole....you know...actual real life plague going on, but damn if my excitement is proving to me why they probably stuck around with it.  I want to see it happen all again.  I want to see the zombies start out slow, not really a threat.  I want to see Stormwind devolve into a horde of the undead, I want to see it get worse and worse every day!  This was all so badass when it happened in BC that the idea of an updated version, one in which you also actually strike back at the zombies by going to Northrend to cut them out at the roots, just sounds about as cool as possible to me now.

- The Removal of Dreanor (and Legion!) Flight Requirements:

Okay this one is small, especially since I am a crazy person who already got Legion and Battle for Azeroth flying.  You know what I didn’t get though?  Warlords of Dreanor flying....and you know what I've desperately wanted for years now?  You guessed it!  Going back and earning flight in Warlords of Dreanor seemed genuinely crazy in 2020, like so much time wasted for a power that doesn’t really do anything for me now, but hot damn am I excited to hear that i’ll just be getting it for free in the Pre-Patch!  I can finally explore some of the weirder areas in Warlords of Dreanor without needing to be constrained by ground mount movement!  This could even be huge for this blog, I love the design of Dreanor so much but I never really wrote about it because it was such an odd outlier or an expansion for me to ever consider getting Screenshots of!

- Transmog Changes:

@katieskarlette​

Here you go a handy dandy little chart of level conversion following the squish!

There’s been rumors swirling about the next expansion pack for World of Warcraft for a good while now, rumors covering everything from a revamped old world, new classes and who or what the big bad will be, but most are just rampant speculation or clearly fake “leaks”.  There is one, however, that’s more of an open secret and it’s one that’s caused a bit of contention that I’ve seen over how handle the future of this game, a level squish.  Essentially the idea would be to cut the max level of the game in half, back down to 60, in order to make the on-boarding process of the game smoother and less intimidating, and it’s something I think we desperately need. Just think about what a new players future outlook for this game looks like, you start at level 1 and you’re told that the endgame content, where the “real game” starts, is 119 levels away!  With a full set of heirloom gear, something new players won’t have, I’ve clocked 1-120 leveling on one of my characters at about 50 hours, no matter what we want to believe about how quickly we can make it through the process with optimization strategies that is a large time commitment.  Cutting that down is a universal good for all of us, less time spent trudging through old content to get to where we want to be is something a game like this desperately needs when it reaches a point like this. Of course being completely honest, a squish may not even be what we truly need to fix this issue, but it is a big step in the right direction.  Ideally, to me anyway, leveling would be loosened way the hell up like it has been in some other MMO’s like Elder Scrolls Online, with the player deciding what content they want to do on their way to the endgame.  But for now, if we can ease the borderline absurd time burden that leveling has morphed into over WoW’s 15 years for new and old players alike, I think Blizzard could very well attract back a lot of the people it’s lost, and bring in plenty of fresh faces to enjoy the game more on their own terms as well. After all, if we want an agonizing climb up a ladder of pain and wasted time for bizarrely minimal rewards, WoW Classic is right around the corner. 

This post came about from a discussion I had with my daughter of the holidays.  I was playing WoW Classic and she was asking about WoW.  She has given the game a miss, stopping WoW during her senior year of high school and avoided it during college.  That was probably a good thing and I admire her fortitude. Now, as a college senior watching me play, she wondered aloud how long it might take her…

Hitting 50 in a Level Squished Legion

Last week I mentioned that I had rolled up a Demon Hunter to see what the leveling experience was like in the new post-squish Azeroth.

This week I can say that I made it to level 50.  It took me a total of 22 hours and 13 minutes over the course of about a week… I was done by Thursday night… to go from character creation to level cap.

However, I would not necessarily mark that down as a benchmark…

Top Five Rejected WoW Squish Ideas

We know Blizzard isn’t exactly a font of new ideas.  When they find something that works, they like to re-use it, to hone it, and to stick it in completely unexpected and inappropriate situations.  We have had the stats squish twice already, and what essentially adds up to a server squish on retail. (They don’t merge servers like failing games! But suddenly two servers now behave like one.)  At…

#Shadowlands In der kommenden #WoW Erweiterung kommt nicht nur der Level Squish auf Stufe 60. Auch legendäre Gegenstände sollen sich selber schmieden lassen:

Im Rahmen der diesjährigen BlizzCon am 1. und 2. November 2019 hatte Veranstalter Blizzard die ein oder andere Ankündigung im Gepäck. Darunter befand sich auch, wie bereits im Vorfeld erwartet, die nächste Erweiterung für die Retail Fassung des weiterhin beliebten Mmorpgs World of Warcraft. Diese hört auf den Namen “Shadowlands” und beschäftigt sich erneut mit der Geschichte des Lichkönigs, die…