The challenge here is mainly in the marketing. Why not simply hit the reset button and make the new level cap.60 once again? This all leaves the nuclear option hinted at by Blizzard’s proposed profession changes. The big endgame mount gold-sink was once 16,000 gold eight years ago. My character can crit for over two million damage with one attack, sans buffs. Providing a fun endgame experience requires you to make your players feel more powerful than they were in the previous expansion, but that must always borrow against the experience of neophyte players levelling their first characters.įurthermore, even stat squishing can only forestall mudflation for so long. You need consistency and scale, and continual MMO expansion must eventually sacrifice the latter for the former. You can give players guidelines for scaling levels at their individual gaming table, providing shape to homebrewed rules, but you simply can’t do this for thousands or millions of people at once in an online game. In short, though most MMOs are based on a classic tabletop roleplaying model, the latter simply wasn’t designed for infinite expansion at scale. If it stops feeling meaningful to go from level 10 to 11, say, you might just lose people-especially when you have 110(!) more levels to go before you reach the cap. In most online games the sense that a single level makes all the difference is, perhaps, the single most rewarding feeling to emerge directly from the mechanics. Stat-squishing a la Blizzard is a temporary fix at best because eventually you’ll have to worry about lower levels feeling less rewarding to advance through. "The ever rising experience level cap is a kind of death clock for these games." There’s only so far you can go with scaling player power until you reach a point of absurdity (indeed, level 40 was considered to be on par with a deity in an old D&D campaign). These days, for 5e, even that has been replaced with a feat-based system. Even “epic levels” capped out at level 40 in D&D’s third edition-at least, officially. The ever rising experience level cap is a kind of death clock for these games and constitutes the outermost design limits of the D&D-inspired system on which they’re based. When Battle for Azeroth launches in August, the level cap will rise to a staggering 120, double the original cap at launch fourteen years ago. What if Blizzard decided to squish the biggest stat of all: the experience level? What Blizzard just did with WoW’s professions, however, is a touch bolder. Over time, this has the effect of making the gear progression curve more and more flat, but also preventing too much of a stat explosion. In a bid to combat mudflation, each successive expansion has seen Blizzard re-budgets the statistics on gear such that we’re not dealing with an endgame where a common chestpiece gives +1.5 billion Stamina, say. But for the moment, 200 does appear to be the new endgame cap for professions, taking Blizzard’s “stat squish” strategy to a new level. Bear in mind that this information is, of course, subject to change. At the moment, all crafting professions in the alpha are capped at a maximum of 200 skill points, down from 800.