The leveling experience in World of Warcraft has gotten a great amount of shake ups over the 15 years that the game has been active. One big notable change came with the release of Cataclysm, which radically changed many of the zones of the game and reworked the starting zones for most of the races.
As Shadowlands approaches, Blizzard is working to change the starting level experience again. After so many years of the same starting zones, Blizzard seems set on giving the player base another option for their new characters.
Blizzard will be providing an entirely new place to begin your journey with Shadowlands. Rather than doing the traditional race-specific starting zone that each character starts with, there will now be an all-races-included 1-10 leveling zone.
“An expedition has gone missing, and you have been called to be a part of a new crew of novice adventurers charged with discovering what’s become of them,” Blizzard describes the new experience. “As with many such journeys, you’ll find yourself as part of a crew aboard a ship bound to their last known location. When things take a turn for the worse, you’ll make landfall on the island of Exile’s Reach.”
Players will face the challenges on Exile’s Reach until level 10. As their adventure finishes, they’ll face two boss monsters in a small mini-dungeon designed for 1 to 5 players. The way they word it makes it sound like it’ll be a soloable experience, so it shouldn’t end up gated by player count.
A big part of this change is to allow new players to better learn their classes together. Learning new abilities will be done easily, and the mechanics presented will help highlight what situations your new skills are for. The hope is that having this new leveling experience will allow new players to grasp the game quicker.
Because of this, new players won’t have an alternative and will have to do this new experience. However, veteran players will have the option to avoid this experience and continue with their traditional experience instead. At level 10, veteran players can speak to Chromie to choose the expansion they would like to play through before entering the Shadowlands at level 50.
There’s a radical amount of changes coming to the leveling experience in World of Warcraft. Combined with the leveling squish, which will reduce the maximum level back to 60, leveling will be a completely different experience from what it is now.
