I gotta say, the news that this was planned at all came from waaayyy out of left field for me. I hadn’t heard a whisper.

Going in search of more info at first took me to here, where there are some blue posts that make it clear that this is coming, if not in the next patch.

Rooting around the European forums reveals this, more informative, description….

Yes, Blizzard will introduce changes that will make levelling easier. This change will be implemented prior to the expansion. The experience required each level will be reduced from level 20 until level 60. Along side that, quest XP will be rewarding around 30% more experience (again between level 20 and level 60). If that isn’t enough, various elite quests will turn into non-elite quests.

Finally, we will be able to dust off those alts that we love so much… but dropped because we just can’t take one more slow-ass grind through 58 levels before we finally hit some useful (to our friends) level ranges. And for me personally, this means that I’ll get my Priest alt up to 60 range much sooner than I expected… or at least with less grinding.

But we can speculate that this also means that the marketplace will change too. I think we can reasonably expect that, if it becomes easier to level an alt to 60, then there will be more characters with gathering professions running around Outlands. And that means more competitive farming.

I expect that about a month before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion release, we’ll see the accelerated leveling patch come out so that more casual players that have never gotten their main to level 70 (or even 60) will be able to get up to a point where buying the level 70+ content expansion becomes a desirable thing.

I am greatly looking forward to a day where my friends and I can get together to run a 5 man instance, and we can talk about who will bring the healer, and who will tank, and who will melee DPS or crowd control…. and those options are all available to some extent, because each of us has a couple level 70s that we know and love.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.