Level squish survey?

[Piralyn]

The cynical answer is "They haven't thought that far ahead."

Practically, though, I expect it to probably follow the same curve as item level squishes in the past. When BATTLE FOR THE UNIVERSE comes out after Shadowlands, I'd expect it to be 60-70 much like the ilvl squishes get us back to a reasonable 200ish range, and then things ramp up from there again until it gets unwieldy and they squish everything back down again. With all the scaling stuff they've done in the past few years where everything from mobs to quest rewards scale to your level, I wouldn't anticipate that squishing new expansion content to be 10-50 or whatever to be that cumbersome, but I think that constantly getting reset back to 50 or whatever every expansion would just be an even worse version of the "the thing(s) you worked on all last expansion is no longer useful/usable" experience of Legion -> BFA

[Marco]

Taliesin argues in a video that the leveling zones of an expansion tell an incomplete story, and that the new leveling system should give players an abbreviated path through the leveling zones followed by a jaunt through the endgame content, including scenarified versions of maybe two of the most important boss fights.  It's unlikely that anything of that magnitude can be added to the Shadowlands production schedule, but it's an interesting idea.

I personally don't think telling a more neatly packaged story would really make me enjoy leveling an alt more, since I already know those stories.  I'm more interested in less story-intensive leveling alternatives like invasions, islands, and Torghast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EXTrcnTFS4

[**andius]

I rather like the idea, but as you say having done that content when it was current not something I would be that interested in but if I was new to the game it would be.

[Fallowgrey]

For those of us playing for story over supremacy, and in a more casual position, it's the best idea I've heard in a long, long time.  I'm actually not that interested in leveling alts just to have max levels; I've got a group of toons I'm trying to keep up with the wave, and I'm kinda maxed on the number of them I'm willing to do it with (for me).   Catch-up techniques are keeping that going.  And you can keep the dungeon-grinding option for the folks fleshing out a class for max raid play.

But what about new classes?  I want to get connected to that character by playing a story with them.  It's only been when I can connect a story to the new character I've been inspired to put in the time.  And I've been having to make up that story myself, or look up how to make sure I wasn't missing the story beats as I went through.  I've got a mage stuck in Wrath because I want to play it, but I ran out of gumption to keep trying to look up the story links in Wowhead.  And I discovered I'd probably level out of Wrath before I could finish.  So I'm stuck.

I didn't get all the classes through Legion's class stories; I want to see those.  I'm feeling nostalgic for a lot of the story lines from Wrath and Pandaria (because it's been long enough), and I'd be willing to play 15 hours to go through them, if I'd get to see them all.  I mean, at max level, you could run the raids anyway, but the x.2 and x.3 and x.4 story lines wouldn't be there.  And I'd miss them.  Well, some of them; the busy-time currency grinding between raids, no thanks.

It was only Legion's class story that got me trying to expand my roster of max level characters.  Hell, just to complete the class story for every class, I'd probably do Legion a bunch more.  Doing it now, I have to leave, go do something else, max level, and come back to the raids.  And that still misses the zone stories.  I'd much rather know for the time invested that I'd unlocked all the zones, gotten all the flight points, hit all the story beats and phased all the phasing while playing the story.  This is for all us "Loremaster' player types.

My prediction is that Blizz will get to this path, probably not by Shadowlands release, but probably very soon after.