What is the level cap in WoW Shadowlands?

WoW Shadowlands will have a level 60 cap. You read that right. WoW Shadowlands — not WoW Classic — will have a level 60 cap just like the original game. There’s a lot of changes coming to the entire leveling experience in the new expansion, so Blizzard has squished the level cap down. It might sound scary, especially for those worried about soloing old content, but it sounds like everything should roughly work out in the end.

To understand the level squish, you have to understand why Blizzard did it in the first place. Compared to other MMOs, like Final Fantasy XIV, the progression to the endgame in WoW is a little scattered. Sure there’s level scaling and certain sections of the expansion content you can skip, but the story jumps all over. Starting in Shadowlands, when you make a new character you’ll level up to 10 (new accounts will go through a new, unique 1 through 10 experience) and then choose one of the game’s seven expansions. From there, you’ll journey through that content and finish it at level 50. At level 50, you’ll be prepared to enter Shadowlands for the last ten levels to 60.

That means that the entire leveling experience will go faster than it does now. If you think about how many quests are in a given expansion as the bulk of your Shadowlands experience versus what you have to do now to hit level 110, you can start to understand just how much faster it is. The benefits of this change include helping new players properly experience the story if they want to, and the ability to give returning players a choice on what they want to do. It’s unclear how this will affect anyone that wants to solo previous expansions’ endgame content, but it seems likely that it won’t be too messed up. Hopefully Blizzard will comment on this more explicitly in the future.

Anyone that is already level 120 will start the expansion at level 50, so you don’t need to worry about having to do anything before jumping right into Shadowlands. Other than the speed of the leveling experience, it seems like Blizzard hopes the change will be mostly smooth and invisible. We’ll see how that pans out when we eventually get to a beta.