Blizzard Addresses Controversial Leveling Changes in World of Warcraft: The War Within

Earlier this week, Blizzard announced changes to how leveling from level 70 to 80 will work in recently-released World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within. And now, after criticism from players, developers are reassuring that the overall impact to leveling time will be "minimal."

The changes were announced yesterday in an official post, with community manager Kaivax sharing that the team had noticed players coming into the new expansion content with endgame gear from the previous expansion, Dragonflight, were "extremely powerful relative to that intential content." The post goes on to say that a hotfix to be pushed today would "adjust the scaling of enemies in War Within leveling content to increase the power of lower-level enemies, bringing the duration of combat more in line with expected WoW behavior. These changes will be most noticeable at level 70, and will have a reduced impact as your level increases."

All of that sounds relatively normal, and as someone who started playing The War Within in full Dragonflight endgame gear, they were desperately needed. Especially in the first half of the new expansion, I found I was easily killing even supposedly difficult enemies in just a few hits, and while it evened out over time, the speed of the experience meant I was blasting through content and levels so quickly I barely had time to blink. In fact, much of the community agreed something needed to be changed. But in the ensuing discussion, it became clear that there was significant frustration as to how Blizzard was handling it.

Players expressed two main concerns. The first, as demonstrated in several of the top comments on this thread, was that players coming into the expansion with terrible gear (perhaps because they skipped playing Dragonflight, or were leveling a new character) would be relatively underpowered and would disproportionately struggle with the content if their power was nerfed.

But a second issue players surfaced was the timing of the changes. The War Within technically launched back on August 22 for people who purchased the Epic Edition of the game. Its global launch was on August 26. That meant that people who paid for the more expensive version for earlier access essentially got four extra days of super speedy, overpowered leveling (including a period over a weekend) while those who didn't shell out the extra cash only experienced roughly a day and a half.

As one Redditor put it: "The time to make that change was almost exactly a week ago. It's absolutely asinine to arbitrarily slow things down for people who are already behind the curve due to the late release. This is a situation where you need to just acknowledge you dropped the ball and leave things the way they are."

In response, Blizzard has issued some clarification on what the changes to leveling actually are in an attempt to assuage at least some of these worries.

We want to provide additional details on today's leveling changes and balance fixes to group content.

• Changes aim to make the difficulty curve more gradual - enemy strength will actually increase by less per level in the mid-to-high 70s than it used to

• Players coming in…— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) August 28, 2024

In a tweet, Blizzard shared that the changes to leveling scaling would make the difficulty curve "more gradual" and that players coming into the expansion with basic leveling gear would find leveling "manageable" and "get powerful gear quickly." Meanwhile, players at level 78 and up should find combat "unchanged."

With the change now live, players are reporting that Blizzard's description of the shift is largely accurate, and is a much-needed balance adjustment. But frustrations about the update's timing still remain, exacerbated by existing irritation about The War Within's early access period in general. The four-day headstart for Epic Edition buyers has been fairly controversial, with top-level players expressing anger that it forced them to pay extra to stay on top of the early expansion competitive scene, and others just aggravated about missing out on what is technically the "launch day."

In Blizzard's favor, perhaps, is the reality that the early access period drastically cut down on server issues and queues on both the 22nd and the 26th, with players barely reporting any of the usual launch day friction in either scenario due to the split playerbase.

Game director Ion Hazzikostas called the early access period a "bit of an experiment" in an interview earlier this year, and it's not clear whether we'll see Blizzard try the same thing for future expansions Midnight and The Last Titan.

We're currently in the process of reviewing The War Within as its launch content slowly rolls out over the next few weeks, but our review-in-progress says that, "There's still a lot of The War Within I haven't seen yet, but I'm thoroughly enjoying myself so far, and that’s just about the highest praise I can give an expansion at launch."

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.