On a tear now ain’t I?

Post brought to you buy a WoW Dev tweet.

We’ve just updated our hotfixes blog post with today’s hotfixes, including the reduction in experience required to level for levels 40-100:https://t.co/0t7nSI6Prh

— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) July 31, 2018

Recall the internet furor that 8.0 brought in terms of leveling speed? No?  Internet furor is hard to measure.  Anyhow, the devs made a booboo when they crunched all the numbers for 8.0 and either monsters had too many hit points, or were hitting too hard.  I found a few of those within 10 minutes on my Warlock and just decided to wait it out.  That aside from the fact that from 60+ I gained no skills, and gear improvements are non-existent.  It’s the same gameplay from 60-100.

Previous to this, Legion made some leveling zone changes as well. The issue was covered in 2 main points.

1. People were outleveling zones in a half dozen quests and unable to complete the story lines.
2. Time to Kill (TTK) was too low.  Anyone with a cast time could barely hit anything before it died, and no one really knew how their class played until level 100+

To address the first item, the applied scaling to all the zones, just like in Legion proper.  I would say that was a successful change.  Similar issues to 8.0, but generally pretty small.  You could level pretty much wherever you wanted.  Neat!

To address the second item, they boosted all enemy HP so that the TTK went from something near 3 seconds to closer to 10.  That in itself is not a bad change, but it was isolated and, in my opinion, short sighted.

Leveling has 1 main goal, and that’s to get to the top.  Measuring that goal is done through two facets – the time it takes to get there (objective) and the fun had along the route (subjective).  Since pretty much Cataclysm, the time to level from 1-X was fairly stable.  Sure, heirlooms had an impact, but general time to level was pretty stable.  The tripling of TTK increases the amount of time to level.  It wasn’t massive, since the majority of experience is from quest completion, but it was certainly noticeable.

The fun along the way measure split a few players.  Some had fun rounding up 10-20 enemies and then AEing them to the ground.  Others wanted to explore more of the zone.  Others wanted to see more of their favorite quest chains.  It is impossible to please everyone under subjective measure.  Still, it’s somewhat fair to say that most people were pleased with the world-scaling changes.

Progress

The above noted XP change reduces the amount required to level by ~14% for 60-80, and a bit less for the other levels.  That covers the BC/WoTLK era (10-13 year old quest design) and is (subjectively) my least favorite part of the leveling experience.  With so many people re-rolling allied races, those who have clearly demonstrated they know how to level, it makes sense to have a leveling normalcy applied.

Maybe I will end up leveling my warlock.