Blizzard nerfs WoW leveling speed right as early access ends

The first-ever World of Warcraft early access for The War Within has backfired on Blizzard Entertainment following a strange leveling speed oversight that’s now left global launch players with nerfs nobody’s happy to see.

Early access WoW: The War Within players began playing on Thursday, Aug. 22, while casual players waited until Aug. 26 for the global launch. Paying extra for early access comes with risk, but those who purchased the Epic bundle avoided any major bugs while leveling to 80 quickly. Many hit level 80 faster than ever before, especially players with characters that had 500-plus gear. In response, Blizzard quickly announced a The War Within hotfix (to be deployed on Aug. 27) that’ll be nerfing leveling speeds.

The most powerful players during TWW early access were those with endgame Dragonflight gear, exceeding what the Blizzard devs call “expected WoW behavior.” An issue with the leveling system quickly became apparent less than two days into early access, with many players starting to level alts to 80. Rather than leave things as is or apply a hotfix before the global launch update, Blizzard is applying a nerf by increasing the power of lower-level enemies; essentially punishing global players less than 24 hours after TWW‘s arrival.

“It’s 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,” said Blizzard alongside the launch day update. “This disparity also caused mixed-level groups to experience skewed results, with lower-level players contributing drastically more than level 80s.”

Enemies a lower levels will have increased power while enemies above level 80 will remain untouched. Community reactions to the announcement are mostly negative, with many global launch players calling out Blizzard for rewarding early access players who spent an extra $40 time to take advantage of the leveling mishap in the WoW forums. And, many early access players aren’t happy about the surprise nerf and its timing either.

That said, the War Within leveling nerf hasn’t dropped yet; it isn’t scheduled to deploy until Aug. 28. At time of writing, this leaves players around 12 hours left to level up quickly.