Thursday, October 17, 2013

Level Squish? No Way! A Profession Squish, Though...

With the upcoming item squish, a lot of people have talked about doing some kind of "level squish," which would make the new level cap something like 60, the way it was in Vanilla WoW.

Honestly, I don't really see the point. Sure, 90 levels looks like a lot, but leveling from 1 to 90 today is way faster than leveling from 1 to 60 in Vanilla. I don't know how most newcomers look at the game, as I've been playing for about seven years (almost exactly, actually,) but as someone who likes traditional RPGs, the notion of lots of levels is a positive, rather than a negative.

Anyway, the point is: leveling happens so quickly now (though I'll admit that I probably level faster than the average new player, given that I know the ins and outs of the game) that I really don't see any problem with the levels going arbitrarily high. Each expansion, they do an XP squish anyway, which is pretty much equivalent to what a level squish would be.

However, there's one aspect of all that that does get left out in the cold, and that's professions.

Very little has been done to make profession leveling easier, at least in the old content. On one hand, you do have the Darkmoon Faire monthly quests that give you 5 points (which is a great way to get over some kind of hump, like a point where you can only get your new recipes by making five of some really fancy thing that has expensive materials.)

It's also very difficult to just power-level your professions, because time and gold inflation has made stuff like a stack of Mithril Ore worth hundreds of gold.

So what's the solution? Well, some ideas have been tried in Mists: For gathering professions, you can actually mine ore or gather herbs regardless of your skill level, but you'll get fragmentary pieces until you hit the appropriate proficiency. It's still pretty slow-going, though. They also did something with Blacksmithing, where you could use Ghost Iron to make vendor trash recipes that would give you five skill points a piece and would allow you to level from 1 to 600 with all Pandaria resources.

It's a decent way to at least keep you from having to farm old content, but over all, I think what we ought to have is some kind of profession revamp.

These days, given how much better the quest rewards are in a post-Cataclysm world, the stuff you make with professions tends to be vendor trash. Ultimately, this would be a good opportunity to just go through and re-do the recipes.

I realize nostalgia's a factor, but at the very least they could add in new recipes that give you appropriate gear for every ten-level range. These recipes would give multiple skill points, so you wouldn't have to fill your bags with tons of useless gear. You could simply use the gear models that came with the Cataclysm revamp (and this would be an excellent source for transmog. Some of the new 1-60 gear is really cool-looking,)

On the gathering side of things, first of all, granting more material per gather would help (and hopefully drive prices down on the auction house,) but I also think you could do things like granting multiple skill-ups per gather, or alternatively making respawns on ore and herbs a lot quicker. It's pretty easy these days to fall behind on gathering professions.

Whatever the case, Blizzard needs to create a dial that they can adjust whenever they tune the XP required to level up in the old world (as well as the expansion content.) Professions right now are a little lackluster, and while endgame stuff is working out all right (the research recipes for Tailoring, Leatherworking and Blacksmithing in Mists are slightly problematic but overall pretty good) I think it would be nice to see these feel like meaningful choices.

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