Blizzard Entertainment has made some of the most drastic changes to World of Warcraft to regain support for the world’s most popular MMO.
The changes are huge and many players have complained that Blizzard has made leveling up too difficult with this new expansion. The statistical crisis has been shown to change the way players solo content, as well as the way dungeons and raids are played, but did they really make the level harder?
The answer to that has more to do with how you prefer to level the characters.
Let’s take a look at some different ways you used to be able to level up:
- Level up via Battleground PVP – While you can still level up toons via PVP, it hasn’t been a viable option for quite some time and is probably the slowest method of getting a character to level cap.
- Leveling through dungeons – This has been the source of most of the pushback towards Battle for Azeroth, as many players love to bring their new characters through the dungeons. Changes to the game have made dungeons much slower. Gone are the days of simply rounding up enemies and taking them down. Most players proceed into dungeons with caution, which has slowed down the ability to level up considerably.
- Level up through missions – While the stat crunch has made killing enemies a bit slower, Blizzard has always preferred players to level up via in-game quest lines. This is where you will follow the various story lines or “lore” of the game. Quests are still the absolute fastest way to level up in World of Warcraft and even more so with the new expansion.
Players are starting to find and install quest guide plugins that haven’t really been needed for some expansions and many have disappeared or just aren’t updated anymore.
While the in-game quest tracking lets you know which quests you need to complete, there’s very little in the way of an efficient method of picking and completing the best quest in the most efficient order.
Quest guides were a big part of World of Warcraft from the very beginning. I can remember the old guides written in PDF format. While these guides were very well written, it was a bit of a pain to constantly have to stop playing to read what to do next and then get back into the game. Somehow it took away the natural flow of the game.
Shortly after the Burning Crusade expansion, addons started bringing live game guides and leveling speed really took off.
This continued for several expansions until Blizzard started making changes to the game to make leveling up easy for a lot of long time players and I think it was a major source of the game losing millions of subscribers.
World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth reverts the game, at least partially, to the glory days of WoW leveling where you had to earn your ranks. It’s certainly not as difficult as it was at the beginning, but they’ve made great strides to put a little more challenge back into the game.
