World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth has a Major Leveling Problem, Blizzard Responds

The World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth pre-patch is live and came out of the gates swinging like a drunk man. Luckily, Blizzard has deployed several hot fixes since them fixing many of the bugs that the pre-expansion update hosted but there's one problem that still remains: Leveling.

The problem currently is that a previous patch introduced a much smoother paced leveling system, though it was definitely slower. Many actually enjoyed the tweak to the overall progression system but ever since patch 8.0 went live, many MMORPG lovers are reported that is unnecessarily difficult to level through some of the older content drops, which was an unintended side affect according to Blizzard.

The problem breaks down to the fact that now it's taking players 15% longer per level over the course of 20+ levels. On paper that doesn't sound like much but within the format of this MMORPG, it makes the grind less enjoyable - especially as many players are gearing up for the big official release.

According to Game Director Ion Hazzikostas "We are seeing the same sort of discrepancies that folks in this thread and others have pointed out," said Hazzikostas. "But we still have yet to pinpoint the exact aspect of scaling that we failed to account for. We want to understand why the numbers are off and fix the underlying cause: Were stats on gear reduced too much? Some aspect of creature armor or other combat calculations? Are our baseline values accurate, but the shape of the scaling curve wrong such that it's particularly far off the mark in the 60-80 range?

"We would prefer a targeted solution versus just applying a band-aid fix that could mask deeper issues that could cause problems down the line, but at some point it's not fair to give you a degraded experience for the sake of that investigation, so we'll likely go ahead with a blanket health reduction in the near future while we continue to investigate. Either way, the current state is not the game experience we intended, and it's something we will fix."

He then added, "There is another issue tangentially related to this discussion that I also would like to address: Many feel that it takes too long to level in the 60-80 range in particular, and that the combat pacing issues discussed here are just a piece of that larger problem. We agree – currently players are taking about 15% longer per level, on average, in that range as compared to before 60 or after 80. We're in the process of assembling a set of changes that will smooth out the experience curve at level 60 and beyond, reducing the experience requirements for those levels."

So far, we don't have an expected date for when the fix will deploy but we'll keep you posted!

Source: Blizzard