Mario Bautista
Just two days after the full launch, Blizzard is patching leveling in World of Warcraft The War Within to make it harder. The MMO developer says the expansion is “not even allowing time for normal combat rotations,” because of the gap between high-end Dragonflight gear and the current challenge on offer in TWW. Naturally, this hasn’t gone down well with players – especially those who skipped early access.
World of Warcraft The War Within has bumped the MMORPG‘s level cap from 70 to 80, bringing the grind with it. Typically, the better gear you have from the last expansion (in this case Dragonflight) the easier you’ll find the next set of content, but Blizzard thinks the gap is too big this time. If you already spent days getting Dragonflight’s best gear, The War Within has been a breeze – but not for long.
Blizzard is making lower-level enemies stronger in a new hotfix on Wednesday August 28, but the change isn’t exactly going down well.
“As players have jumped into The War Within and begun leveling up, we’ve seen data and heard a great deal of feedback that players coming into Khaz Algar with endgame Dragonflight gear were extremely powerful relative to that initial content,” WoW community manager Randy ‘Kaivax’ Jordan writes on the official forums.
“It is entirely intended that effort put into gearing translates into a significant combat advantage at the start of a new expansion, but the values we’ve been seeing are extreme, often not even allowing time for normal combat rotations. This disparity also caused mixed-level groups to experience skewed results, with lower-level players contributing drastically more than level 80s.”
Basically, this means level grinding in The War Within is about to get much harder after players have already found their rhythm in early access or missed out on it entirely. Early The War Within content is being blitzed so fast in fact that some are struggling to even see it. New players and veterans with alt accounts stand to be most impacted, as Blizzard outlines how it aims to rebalance the expansion in a hotfix.
“The hotfixes will adjust the scaling of enemies in War Within leveling content to increase the power of lower-level enemies, bringing the duration of combat more in line with expected WoW behavior,” Kaivax adds. “These changes will be most noticeable at level 70, and will have a reduced impact as your level increases. Enemies at level 80 and above will be unchanged.”
While everyone at level 70 is suffering at the hands of Blizzard’s latest nerf, there’s a growing sentiment that it’s automatically unfair to players who didn’t pay an extra $40 for early access – and have thus had less time to grind before this change comes into play.
“I get that things should be better balanced, but this is something you should have realized before the expansion launched,” ‘Briselody’ says in the comments. “The people that are geared have probably already leveled their mains – this is going to affect primarily new players and alts, and annoy both.”
If you’re looking for even more from the MMO, we’ve got the best WoW addons you need to be using right now, otherwise, there are plenty of other new MMOs to try instead.
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