WoW SoD: How does the Discoverer’s Delight XP buff work in Season of Discovery phase 3?

One of the most consequential buffs your World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery character can get is the Discoverer’s Delight buff, which boosts all of the experience you get while leveling.

This buff makes it easier to catch up to relevant content at the current endgame level band, so you can join your friends and guildmates in higher-level dungeons and raids sooner. The Discoverer’s Delight buff was a huge addition to the game in phase two of SoD and it was warmly received by the community at-large. Now, it’s sticking around in phase three in an effort to make the leveling curve a bit less steep as the season increases its level cap from 40 to 50. 

Here’s everything you need to know about the future of the Discoverer’s Delight buff in WoW Classic SoD phase three, including how it’s going to work in comparison to its previous iteration. 

WoW SoD: Discoverer’s Delight buff in phase three, explained

You can expect the Discoverer’s Delight buff to stick around throughout the entire WoW SoD leveling process. It is automatically applied to all new characters and is active as long as you have experience gains turned on. You can turn it off manually at any innkeeper if you want to progress your SoD character through the leveling process at the normal, much-slower rate. 

Between levels one to 39, the Discoverer’s Delight buff will double all experience you gain from every possible source. But when you hit level 40, the buff’s effectiveness is reduced. At this point, you’re no longer doubling your would-be XP gains but simply increasing them by 50 percent. 

Blizzard’s intentions for the Discoverer’s Delight buff in future phases are unclear at this time, although the WoW Classic devs have expressed interest in reworking the ways that some of the leveling mechanics work in Season of Discovery ahead of phase four. 

“Overall we think these buffs are a decent solution, but they aren’t what we’d consider to be ideal,” Josh Greenfield, WoW Classic’s senior game producer said in a dev update. “We’re going to carry a lot of what we learned forward if we do something like this again, and maybe look at other adjustments we can make to help smooth the leveling curve in general.”