World of Warcraft Shadowlandsis due to release sometime before the end of 2020, but some players have already been lucky enough to gain beta access to the upcoming expansion. Blizzard is still doing a lot of balance testing and making weekly tweaks to the testing environment, but the community has already been able to learn a lot about Shadowlands thanks to the beta (including some spoilers about the death of an important character).
One of the biggest changes arriving inWoW Shadowlandsis the level squish. Rather than increasing the level cap to 125 or 130, Shadowlands bumps all max players down to level 50 and makes level 60 the max once again, just like the old days. The grind from 1-50 for new characters is going to greatly decrease the amount of time it currently takes to reach the latest expansion content, but someWorld of Warcraftplayers seem to be finding exploits that reduce the leveling time a lot more than Blizzard intended…
RELATED:World of Warcraft: Should You Play Classic or Shadowlands?
Most recently, a streamer (MrGM) speed leveled from 1-50 in under three hours by using a level boosting exploit. Thismethod for speed levelingtakes advantage of the way that dungeon scaling works by taking a max level player along for the ride, but only having the low level player use Chromie Time. The current setup allows the dungeon to continue to scale for the lower level player, but stay at a static level 30 for the higher level player.
Using that method MrGM hit level 50 in 2 hours and 53 minutes, which is likely a new record for the test realms. This definitely feels like an unintentional exploit on Blizzard’s part and now that it is being shared publicly it seems very likely that the developers will patch in a fix sometime in the near future.
Although leveling from 1-50 should go a lot more quickly than leveling from 1-110, Blizzard does still want the experience to take something in the 10-15 hour ballpark. The developersrecently killed experience bonuses on Heirloom gear and got rid of some of the more powerful old experience potionsto try and ensure the updated leveling experience can’t be bypassed too easily. Once the new expansion launches sometime later this year, it will be very interesting to see what methods the speedrunners come up with to shave time off of the experience.
Be sure to check back in the coming weeks as more details aboutShadowlandsemerge. Until then, For the Horde!
World of Warcraftis available now for PC. At this point,World of Warcraft Shadowlandsdoes not have a confirmed release date.
MORE:World of Warcraft: Did Blizzard Just Tease The Return of Teldrassil?
