Blizzard Nerfs Leveling in World of Warcraft: The War Within

Blizzard has implemented changes to the leveling mechanics in World of Warcraft: The War Within, and the community is not necessarily excited about the timing of the decision.

Earlier this week, the company announced changes to how leveling from level 70 to level 80 would work in the game's newest expansion. Following criticism from players, developers have reassured that the overall impact on leveling time will be "minimal."

World of Warcraft's Leveling Changes

The changes to the leveling system in the MMO's latest The War Within expansion were announced in an official post. Community manager Kaivax shared that the team had noticed that some players were coming into the new expansion with endgame gear from the previous expansion, Dragonflight.

They were "extremely powerful relative to that intentional content" and noted that a hotfix was to be pushed to "adjust the scaling of enemies in The War Within leveling content to increase the power of lower-level enemies, according to IGN.

This change would bring the duration of combat more in line with expected World of Warcraft behavior. These implementations are going to be most noticeable at level 70 and will have a reduced impact as players' levels increase.

Many players believe that the changes to the leveling part of The War Within was completely justified. This was partly due to the first half of the new expansion where some players coming from Dragonflight were easily killing even what were supposedly difficult enemies using only a few hits.

The power gap was apparently so significant that some players were unable to finish a normal ability rotation without killing everything nearby. Blizzard's changes make lower-level enemies more difficult and make grinding take a little bit longer than before, said GamesRadar.

A Significant Power Gap

Based on a datamine, at level 70, enemies received a 123.2% HP buff as well as a 116.2% damage buff. These changes fall off dramatically with each level down to only 5.9% HP and 5.2% damage at level 77. At levels 78 and level 79, it seems that enemies only received minor HP and damage nerfs.

Blizzard previously noted that the intention was that effort put into gearing translates into a significant combat advantage at the start of a new expansion. However, the company said that the values they were seeing were a bit too extreme.

The studio added that this disparity also resulted in mixed-level groups experiencing skewed results where lower-level players contributed drastically more than level 80 players, according to PCGamesN.