Last night Nathaera (Blizzard poster) made a post previewing some of the changes that will be added in patch 2.3 for leveling in the Azeroth part of WOW. People have been asking for a while for a retuning of the leveling process to 60 and Blizzard finally decided to comply. On the board this has been met with a 99.9% accepted as a good change by… guess who? I’ll give you folks 25 seconds to come up with an answer. Actually it doesn’t take that long to figure out that people with level 65+ characters that are tired of that Outland grind and want to level an alt see this as a good change. But like all Blizzard changes it addresses some of the problems of the game while building new ones. When you really read what the changes are you’ll notice that in reality all they have done is put some training wheels on the way to 60 with little adjustment to the game experience.

Ok let’s start the breakdown of what was posted:

“The first notable change was to simply reduce the amount of experience needed each level by approximately 15% between levels 20 and 60.”

We start of on a sort of a good note? They cut down the time needed to get to the next level a bit. So far this is ok but doesn’t change anything at all for the actual process.

“Questing plays a very large role in World of Warcraft, especially while leveling and we felt that improvements to this front were necessary as well. Experience gained for completing quests (on average) between levels 30 and 60 is being increased. The increase becomes more substantial as you make your way towards 60”

Again, something really not that great, It’s good but its not great. Cutting down the time to level some more.

“Additionally, many outdoor elite mobs will become non-elites, making many quests which were previously too difficult or required a group much easier and offer the same rewards (in some cases better!). A good example of this change would be Stromgarde Keep in Arathi Highlands, which will become a solo friendly environment when patch 2.3 goes live.”

This reads good but in practice it might end up being bad.

Good:
Taking out elites solves the problem of being able to do the open area elite quests in old servers that have most of the population in outland and in empty servers.

Bad:
But when they remove the elite status to the mobs does it mean that they also remove the exp bonus they have as well? Because if they do they just slowed down that little kick you got when you ran those areas, but if they don’t lower the exp then this will end up as an ok change. We will have to wait and see what its really done.

“We've also added approximately 60 new quests in Dustwallow Marsh. This should help players who find themselves lacking quests in the 30-40 range.”

Good:
Finally using one of the many empty areas in Azeroth for something.

Bad:
This is mostly a PvP server problem; If this turn out to be a very good leveling area… welcome to STV part 2. People are going to end up spending more time fighting each other than leveling. In PvE it might be less of a commotion but it still going to have some troubles with people trying to grief and so on. If this turns into a bad leveling area then it will just be ignored.

“We're making other improvements to pre-bc leveling dungeons that players will likely find most agreeable. The level range for most every dungeon is being adjusted so that there is a much smaller range between the level of mobs found early in the dungeon to those found towards the end. For example, Shadowfang Keep is currently designed for levels 18-25 which means that right now, players who are towards the bottom of that range (18) will find it nearly impossible to complete the dungeon, while players towards the top of the range (25) will find most of the dungeon trivial. Using our new model (similar to what you'll notice with Burning Crusade leveling dungeons), Shadowfang Keep is being retuned for levels 18-21.”

Good:
More “casual” friendly.

Bad:
More “casual” friendly.

I don’t know man but running Shadowfang and Deadmines with a group of 18s is a kick ass experience. Of course you need a group of 18s that know what they are doing, but finishing these quests with characters on the lower end of the levels isn’t big trouble. The real “Bad” of lowering the level range is that you now you are going to run this instances only a couple of times before they become useless. And there were plenty of times that while I was questing I flew pass some levels before realizing that I needed to complete some dungeon quests. With this new change you could possibly completely miss some dungeons because of the short range.


“We also want to make running a leveling up dungeon more worth while. In addition to increasing quest experience for dungeon quests, we're also upgrading all pre-bc dungeon boss drops to blue quality items. Some examples are listed below:"

Good: more exp whoo…

Bad: wait… item levels!

So we get more exp which… makes you level a bit faster, again, but this brings the question of items. If they lower the level requirement for the dungeons that means that they are going to have to lower the levels for the drops correct? Cant say because they don’t say, they just provide some info with no context.


All in all I think they didn’t really do that much, the real problem people have with leveling in WOW to 60 is that since this is one of the easiest MMO to level in players head for, of course, path of least resistance. Players end up running the same trip over and over again when they get another character going. In reality People are tired of going through that same path to 60 instead of the time it takes to get to 60. Opening one area is a good start on building a new path to take but you need to follow up and open more. Keep people entertained instead through the trip instead of trying to push them out to Outland faster.

My prediction on this is that about 75% of the people that restart leveling that alt are just going to give up after not actually noticing the "new speed" of leveling.

Here is a link to the post.