Posts with tag leveling-changes

Patch 5.3 has arrived, and there are a truly staggering number of changes to the game, many of them with significant effects to gameplay. You can check out Blizzard's complete patch notes on their blog, but for the sake of brevity, WoW Insider has compiled a list of the top five changes that are most likely to be of the biggest interest to the average player. If you haven't been paying much attention, this is the stuff you probably really want to know!

1. The experience required to go from level 85 to 90 has been reduced by 33%

Mists of Pandaria has been called very alt-unfriendly, and while this particular change won't entirely fix that, it does help. Along with the changes to reputation factions -- the Shado Pan and August Celestials dailies are no longer hidden behind the gate of "Revered" with the Golden Lotus -- this will make it easier to get your army of alts up to speed to hop into max-level content.

Over the weekend (while I was chowing down on turkey and mashed potatoes), Mania headed into the new PTR, and came back with some great news for Hunters leveling pets-- it's going to be faster.

Pets will require 33% less XP to level up on the PTR, which (I believe) is in addition to the player leveling changes. Pets still, however, don't earn XP from quests (which makes sense, in a strange way, I guess, because you could bring one pet on a quest, and bring another to turn it in), and they don't earn XP on grey kills, either. Mania's testing also shows that pets earn the same XP on both live and test realms, which means pets don't actually earn XP faster-- they just don't need as much of it.

Good stuff. I don't ever plan to actually level up a pet on its own (I have enough trouble leveling up my alts as it is), but it's good to know that the pet I've got coming with my lowbie Hunter will be grabbing XP faster than ever.

Warcry has a super interesting reading of the XP leveling changes that Blizzard is making in 2.3. Their style is a little more, err, informal than ours, but they're right-- Blizzard is basically stealing XP from you in the next patch. Vaneras confirmed the other day that players who have a certain percentage of XP before the patch will keep that same percentage of XP, but not the same amount of XP. So, if, for example, you're halfway through level 59 when the patch hits, you'll lose about 600,000 XP that you've already earned.

But before you get all angry about Blizzard wasting all that time you spent leveling, realize that things will likely even out in the end. Even though you'll lose 600,000 XP from the amount you have, you'll still be halfway through level 59, and you won't need as much XP as you did before to level to 60. So you haven't really "lost" anything, because even though Blizzard has "taken away" some XP, you didn't need what they took anyway.

As we've said before, these leveling improvements are going to be great news, not only for altaholics who are leveling up their third or fourth character by now, but also for guilds eager to see some new 70s to bring into the raiding mix. Folks who are leveling both before and after patch 2.3 are going to experience some strange math, but that happens all the time anyway (did you know that all the stuff you're killing at level 70 now doesn't count towards the experience you'll need to earn in the next expansion?). Blizzard is tweaking the numbers, but the experience will still be faster.