World of Warcraft will soon have level-scaling for all of Azeroth

If you've tried leveling through World of Warcraft recently, you know how imperfect it is. You'll quickly outscale zones, and others you'll leave untouched entirely thanks to more rapid experience point gains. But in the upcoming 7.3.5 patch, Blizzard will be taking a version of Legion's level scaling and applying it to all of Azeroth and Warcraft's previous expansions.

During the World of Warcraft panel at Blizzcon 2017, game director Ion Hazzikostas took the stage to lay out plans for the next expansion, Battle for Azeroth. But these world-wide level scaling will be coming to the Public Test Realm servers in just a few weeks and then officially launch shortly after that.

"The point is player choice, the point is having the experience you want to have while leveling through WoW," Hazzikostas said.

It's important to note that this system doesn't work exactly the same way as it does in Legion, where every zone and monster scales to your level. Instead, each zone will have a minimum and maximum cap of about 20 levels. This will make low-level zones still feel appropriately low level, and high-level zones intimidating. 

The great news is this new feature will also work with WoW's previous expansions. Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, for example, will now scale between level 60 and 80, while Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria will scale between 80 and 90. If you're starting from scratch, you now have a lot more freedom about how to approach of these expansions.

As I said, this new feature will arrive on the PTR in a few weeks and be officially launched sometime later. We'll have a lot more info about Battle for Azeroth as Blizzcon continues.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.

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