Edit: See Redoctober’s excellent point below before you rev up the spreadsheet or take out a character to test!
Specifically, levelling speeds now vs. in Shadowlands.
Many people seem to be assuming that levelling will be much faster, and are delaying levelling until pre-patch. The subject just came up on a Discord, so I decided to do a quick sanity check.
It never seemed right to me that levelling would be that much faster in Shadowlands than it is now, with the Winds of Wisdom buff. Blizzard have said that levelling in future will be 60-70% faster than normal speeds, but it is 100% faster now. While I’ve heard stories of everyone levelling faster than everyone else - at least all the pro speedlevellers - I’m not buying it.
So I took just a couple of minutes. I grabbed a level 62 alt, and did a normal-type quest on Live (with Winds, Looms, Rested) and copied him to PTR and did the same.
The TL;DR from my admittedly tiny sample is that the quest gave 12% LESS experience on the PTR relative to what is required for a level, and sample mobs gave 7% more. From that, my first estimate is that levelling in prepatch will be 5%-10% slower than on live.
My actual numbers were:
LIVE - Needed for a Level: 161890 Quest: 24250 Kill: 1520
PTR - Needed for a Level: 27885 Quest: 3450 Kill: 280
If anyone has better info with actual numbers rather than handwaving and pointing at some dedicated superleveller, I’d be interested.
Hmmm… I think the real idea is to get people levelling within one Xpac’s story line, so the journey will be more immersive.
Imho, greater immersion rather than sheer speed, is a good idea.
I was thinking that when I read the OP post, I was scared of looking silly as I’m not that great at things like this, So I just decided to shut my mouth. Thank god the OP is wrong as I would be annoyed, Been holding off leveling my last alts as I feel the BFA leveling takes to long.
It took me 22 hours to go from 1 to 50. That was all questing in Exile’s Reach and 1.5 BFA zones without trying to rush. The XP from mobs seemed quite low compared to BFA but the quest XP seemed on par or better.
They keep messing with levelling. It was a nice pace on Alpha but then some speed levellers came in and did it in in record time, and Blizzard said it was too fast. I personally have not levelled another character on beta since Alpha. Alpha it took me around 17 hours from what I remember. I can dig through my screenshots.
Obviously that isn’t helping you with any stats and we’ve had a character wipe since then so I can’t even check back.
There are currently also concerns with SL levelling. Initially it worked well, then they made so you didn’t need to do much in the way of side quests, now it’s tweaked so the campaign alone wont bring you to 60 and your’e left short and having to go back.
The reason they are removing the XP bonuses from heirlooms is supposedly because of this faster levelling. So I really do hope it is faster.
Wouldn’t the levelling speed also depend on the expac? Even if it’s faster on live in some zones you can only stay in those zones for so long whereas in shadowlands you can chose the best levelling route for sheer speed and not be constrained by out levelling it.
…regardless what they do, Ion and the development team failed to deliver another good experience.
The best solution would have been to affect the level speed based on how many max level characters and achievements you have (with the main contributions coming from the Loremaster-related ones).
The game tries permanently to encourage you to play alts but at the same time it takes way too long to get to the current expansion.
I’m an Severe Altoholic with 85 Lvl 120’s, with literaly 24 hours in /Played from lvl 1 - 120, so in other words 2 days if you play for 12 hours.
I’m not sure if thats someone of " Speedrunning ", I’ve seen the fastest speed runner do half my time, but with the aid of a friend.
I’m doing 1-120 in 24 hrs /Played without the aid of anyone, or even doing dungeons.
I’d say thats faster than the common player when it comes to levelers.
So as a " Kind " off a Speedrunner, i can say that some quests does feel wierd.
I tried lvling a human pally on the PTR like 2 days ago.
And it’s " Wierd " the least, some quests gave like 500 EXP, while others gave like 50 - 90 exp.
In Live, does it give pretty much the same amount of EXP no matter the quest.
So yes you are doing the right thing not buying what they say, because some quests have clearly been nerfed alot.
It does feel abit slower, but then you have to keep in mind, the lvls were reduced from 120 → 50.
Currently on the ptr the first few levels are quite fast.
Especially Exile’s reach. At level 10 you are the old level of 20.
On live you don’t level to 20 that quickly.
I tried my hand in leveling on the ptr, because i didnt get beta access.
Exile’s reach surely felt fast and seems to be a nice introduction.
Some higher level chars i copied and leveled felt pretty decent.
I can imagine that a part of the “leveling speed increase” is coming from the reduction in traveltime.
Right now, you constantly hop from quest zone to quest zone and they arent exactly right next to each other in many cases.
So if you just pick 1 expansion and start leveling in outland for example, you already need less traveling time.
The weirdest thing to me tho, is the feeling it will give if you lvl in 1 expansion since those experiences were meant for a smaller lvl range back then.
Doing lvl 10-50 in outland, would mean you need to level for 8 levels straight in each zone. (Or thats how i feel it should be)
Which might introduce some part of getting fed up with a current zone.
It was still a bit of a chore (I’ve levelled through BFA too many times now) but I did find it much better than live. As for immersion… Better in that I could just progress through the story without out-levelling anything but I still hit 50 while in the middle of Drustvar. Hopefully XP gains don’t fall off a cliff like they do in the Legion to BFA transition.
What I don’t quite understand though is why new players will have to level through BFA before they can reach Shadowlands content. Blizzard can scale everything, so why not just let everyone level from 10 to 60 in Shadowlands zones if they want to. It’s not like the story you experience while levelling in BFA leads into Shadowlands.
This worries me also. Blizzard also seem to be locking the majority of XP gains behind quests too. It’s not like you could reasonably grind a few extra mobs or gather some resource nodes to make up the difference since they’ve nerfed the amount of XP they give. I guess that I need to remake this, but for questing.
If those 8 levels per zone are quite fast it might feel more gratifying as you will see a lot of dings and with the new heirloom changes a lot of power buffs.
The thing is.
Leveling speed is not the issue,
It never was, kindoff.
In classic Leveling was part of the game. It was part of the adventure.
The same goes for The Burning Crusade, ish,
But after that the game was all about endgame content. Raids dungeons and mythics.
Futhermore your questing experience is now dull and boring, or just and endless dungeon grind.
Its not completely about speed its the adventure and the fun.
I cant do a Classic/vanilla dungeon anymore. They are so bad compared to the rest of the content. I just cant. THe scaling fixed alot of the issues, but not all of them.
I applaud the new system in SL. Without the 100% buff i will lvl 12% faster but atleast i get to experience a zone the way it is suposed to be experienced. Sign me up.
if i KNOW for a fact after doing the outland story line, or Northrend or Pandaria whatever i will be lvl 60(120) then sign me up!.
The only thing i would love to see is a form of raids( lfr style ish, ) to finish the zone. At lvl 48 you enter icecrown you do a small questline there ot lvl 49 and your last level, lvl 60 you get when you kill the lich king.
It does not need skill just a story, just an adventure. Maby like one or two small tactics like, dont stand in the fire, and be done with it.
