If you thought WoW Forever completely changed levelling speed or experience, Blizzard have given us a rare glimpse into their stats—and the proof says otherwise!
According to yesterday’s WoW Forever Podcast, Senior Game Designer, Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, and Lead Classic Designer, Tim Jones, confirmed that getting from level 1 to 20 takes almost exactly the same amount of time as it does in Classic WoW.
On average, players in Forever are taking 20.5 hours to reach level 20, compared to 20.4 hours in Classic. This is even despite the Forever team making some changes to levelling experience, especially when it comes to dungeons.
Dungeon mobs now award considerably less experience, while dungeon quests give substantially more, making your first run highly rewarding. This also discourages players against spam running dungeons to level, instead encouraging people to go out and interact with the open world.
Of course, Forever is adding over 1000 new quests and new dungeons—so while the journey to 20 may feel different, Blizzard’s stats prove that the overall pace is pretty much identical to the original Classic experience. During a post-BlizzCon interview with The Sun, Principal Designer, Kris Zierhut, even confirmed that for Forever, “The experience curve remains the same. We did not change the experience curve.”
And with Beta’s level cap eventually set to increase beyond 20, it’ll be interesting to see whether that remains true!
