Hello!
I decided to give wow a go a couple of weeks ago and so far I am enjoying it and it gives me something to do during Corona times. I have a question about questing while leveling and when you reach the lvl caps for old expansions. For example I was first suggested to choose between Wrath of Lich king and BC, when I hit 80 I could choose between MoP and Cata.
Now at 90 I got a starter quest for WoD and my question is:
Is there any benefit of going to the new expansions xp efficiency wise or do the world and quest rewards scale to my level?
Will I loose out on leveling gear if I decide to stay in the expansion I’m currently in?
I’m currently playin MoP and enjoying it, but I barely managed to complete the Jade Forest zone before hitting 90 and I feel like I would like to play it a bit more, but I don’t want to loose out on efficient leveling and in that case just return at 120 or on an alt in the future.
Once you are above the level cap for an expansion, you’ll start getting an XP penalty. For most expansions, it starts of slowly at cap+1 (you’ll still get like 80% of the quest XP) but rapidly drops from there to where you’re only getting 10% or less a few levels later. (Legion XP falls off a cliff as soon as you ding 111, though.) Any gear rewards will stop scaling at the expansion cap. (Although with the stat squish, that won’t matter much until the Legion cap at 110.)
So, you’ll still get full XP in MoP until you ding 91, and even at 91 the XP isn’t too bad. So, from an efficiency standpoint, you’ll probably be able to wrap up any quest lines your currently working on before you hit the XP penalty, but you should think about getting ready to move on.
Now, there can be some exceptions when a particular expansion is super fast to level through. As an example, Gorgrond, generally the second zone you’ll do in WoD has a lot of high XP quests, and so it’s not uncommon for people to stay in the zone even if they start pushing into the low 100s as it’s still good XP even with a penalty.
If you are enjoying a particular zone, you can also pay 10g to turn off xp and later on another 10g will turn it on.
There are stealthed npc’s located in the Stormwind and Orgrimmar battle rooms, for horde: Slahtz, for alliance: Behsten will do it for you.
One issue with doing expansions out of their original order is crafting professions. Items you make assume you are the old required level range for the expansion. For example, crafted Outland gear is appropriate for levels 57-70 and crafted Northrend Gear is for levels 68-80. You could start Northrend at level 58 but you would need to be at leat level 68-70 before you could equip anything you made with a Northrend profession.
Thank you! Had no idea I could turn off xp, will do that and continue to play through the expansions, I like the lore and story of games so that is awesome 