Leveling in The War Within is now harder for lower level players — but Blizzard insists it won’t be too bad

Apparently leveling in The War Within has just been too easy, and I really want to know which one of you complained and ruined things for all of us. Leveling through Khaz Algar has been pretty unchallenging —except those times I’ve used the new Scalecommander-buffed Deep Breath ability and pulled a dozen mobs, which is every time I’ve used it, but that’s a different problem. Decently geared players, whether raid geared or just in Radiant Echoes event gear, have breezed through new expansion content with few issues, which means we’ve all been leveling faster than Blizzard expected.

To keep us from moving quite so quickly through expansion content, Blizzard rolled out a hotfix that increased scaling on mobs (particularly lower level mobs) to add a bit more challenge. At levels 78 – 80, difficulty should be unaffected, but lower level mobs will be scale a bit higher. That means players coming in at 70 — especially undergeared players — will find it tougher to get through expansion zones.

Because these changes sound frankly terrible, Blizzard has jumped in to clarify that it won’t be that bad:

This update makes it sound more like Blizzard is evening out the leveling curve, which did feel a little spiky in the mid- to late-70s when leveling up seemed to increase scaling on the mobs around you significantly. That’s an excellent change that will make leveling smoother once you get halfway through Khaz Algar, but lower level players are still going to have a tougher time.

Blizzard’s goal with these changes is also unclear. Yesterday a post on the forums said the goal was to increase the power mobs thus “bringing the duration of combat more in line with expected WoW behavior” — i.e. making combat take longer, slowing leveling down. Today a post on Twitter says the changes should have little impact on leveling time. The desired result is rather confusing.

The timing on this is, shall we say, less than ideal, because it turns the slight leveling advantage of early access into a (potentially) huge leveling advantage. Players who hit level 80 during early access — including me, a notoriously slow leveler who stops to read all the quest text — can now take advantage of weekly quests that reward extra renown and gear, and jump right into Heroic dungeons and other late game activities. Though Mythic+ dungeons and raids remain closed until September 10, this gives early access players much more of an edge.

When early access was first announced — to player outcry over it being a potential “pay to win” situation — Ion Hazzikostas assured us that this would give players a chance to start leveling early, without giving a permanent power advantage. And that remains true: in a few weeks, the early gear players get while others keep leveling won’t put them at any significant advantage over others. But right now, it feels pretty bad for players who didn’t pay up and will now struggle that bit more through leveling.

In my mind, this leveling problem either needed to be fixed early — say on Friday, when Blizzard should have already had some data on how quickly players were progressing — or later (if at all), to give players who didn’t have early access the same opportunity to level in a more relaxed experience. Even saying this hotfix would go live with the next reset — giving non early access players a weekend for themselves to level — would have done a lot to even the playing field and allow everyone to have a similar experience during the first week.

It waits to be seen how much more difficult content will be at lower levels, and it’s possible this won’t have as much of an impact as I worry it could. But still, it’s lousy that players will have a more difficult leveling experience only for the difference of a few days… especially when most of those few days were only available for players in early access.

Originally published August 27, 2024; updated August 28, 2024.