Blizzard has had their hands full lately with making sure that things are as tuned as possible for the release of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. With constant updates and patches keeping things going, the work never seems to stop.
The recent release of prepatch was one of the more dominant updates of note, though it certainly raised more than a few problems as well. Bringing in massive changes like a leveling squish and overhaul of the leveling system, Blizzard has been hard at work tuning everything.
Their latest tuning efforts come based on a hotfix to dungeon experience. Players found a way to powerlevel themselves to a ridiculous point, making it so that Blizzard found it necessary to hotfix out the “exploit.”
The new hotfix makes it so that experience granted to players is now standardized, rather than split amongst the party members. This fixes an issue where an experience quantity that would’ve been given to a party of 5 was given to fewer players.
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Players were using this to run dungeons with 3 or 4 players, getting radically more experience by soaking up the quantity that would’ve gone to a fifth player. By doing so, they were drastically increasing the levels gained from running dungeons.
“Going in the prepatch, dungeon experience was tuned around the expectation of full parties,” Blizzard states in their announcement. “However, we saw that taplist loopholes in combination with prepatch changes to dungeon scaling revealed some extreme leveling tactics by fewer than 5 players.”
“We want dungeons to remain lucrative, and to be a valid alternative to question and other experience sources, rather than to overshadow them.”
Blizzard is applying this fix not to discourage dungeons, but to discourage players using only this method of leveling. Instead of allowing players to power level themselves to max level within a matter of hours, they’re pushing players towards doing content as intended.
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While far from an exploit, this loophole in prepatch was an unintended consequence by Blizzard, leading them to patch it away. The same could be said for a previous issue where level-capped players could give high-scaling gear to lower-level characters.
With the new leveling mechanics, leveling is already extremely fast, with an average player more than capable of getting from start to level cap in a single day if they desired such. While this leveling method is removed, there are plenty of extremely fast methods waiting to be explored by players looking for a new, quick method to cap out their players ahead of the launch of the new expansion.