Hello, WoW Community Council!
Note: This topic will be updated with the addition of other topics that are related to this subject.
For some years now, a portion of the WoW Retail community has been expressing concerns that the open-world leveling experience lacks sufficient challenge, feels either too fast or too slow, or requires players to forgo modern graphical improvements and conveniences to find an additional layer of fun in older versions of the game. This topic has generated a lot of discussion on the official WoW forums around the world, and Iâd like to dig deeper and share some suggestions.
A few years ago, a public survey was conducted in this forum to gauge interest in various aspects of the game. One of the highly voted topics was âOutdoor questing/levelingâ, as shown in the image below:
Looking at the 2025 roadmap, we can see a mention of âNew Open World Challengesâ in patch 11.2, as shown in the image below:
Recent expansions have introduced various approaches to questing in open-world content, adding variety and new mechanics. However, the leveling system remains a divisive topic within the Retail community, as it struggles to satisfy all playstyles of players who have experienced different versions of the game throughout their progress and who currently play the latest version of the game.
When developers increase monster health and reduce player power, âGroup Aâ complains that leveling has become slow and tedious. Conversely, when monsters are easier to defeat and experience gains are increased, âGroup Bâ criticizes the lack of challenge and accelerated progression. Thereâs also âGroup Câ, made up of players who appreciate Retailâs visual improvements and systems but prefer a slower pace at times, without any interest in playing older versions of the game.
Itâs hard to please everyone.
Iâm not sure if the following suggestions align with the Retail development teamâs goals, but I believe they could cater to both audiences by allowing players to customize certain aspects (not everything) of their leveling experience. This would preserve each groupâs preferred playstyle without affecting endgame content in instanced areas and would give the development team an opportunity to expand player experiences in new ways in the future.
Note: All the topics I referenced when creating this suggestion are listed at the end. Reading them is optional, and some may require translation assistance, as they are in different languages!
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1-) The first suggestion is relatively simple: allow players who have purchased the current expansion and have an active subscription to start leveling from level 10 directly in the main zone of the new expansion, without having to go through content from previous expansions. Once they complete all the story quests and defeat the final boss in story mode, this option could be made available through Chromie for these players.
Why do you buy a new expansion? Itâs to play the new content.
Videos such as the one shown below, which has 1.1 million views and over 1,270 comments, arenât necessarily made by people interested in speedrunning but by players who want to start leveling in the expansion they purchased.
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2-) The second suggestion is designed for players who prefer a slower leveling experience, individually incorporating features from older versions without giving up the visual improvements and modern systems of Retail. This option allows those who want a personalized leveling experience to do so without having to leave the current version.
This option doesnât interfere with other playersâ leveling experience, doesnât change the way they prefer to play, and doesnât impact the core metagame content.
In Wrath of the Lich King, the development team introduced two NPCs who are still present in Retail: Behsten and Slahtz. They offer a service that applies a debuff to the character, preventing the gain of experience from all sources.
We could consider expanding the options of debuffs that player characters could receive through this NPC without negatively affecting the leveling experience of other players, impacting only the PvE environment of the open-world game for the character that received it. What could these debuffs be?
- Reduction (not a total block) of experience gain from all sources (monsters, quests, and buffs)
Instead of simply blocking experience gain, it could be possible to allow players to adjust different levels of experience reduction. This would enable players to explore all expansion zones without reaching the maximum level too quickly while still maintaining the sense of progression that experience blocking eliminates.
I donât mind other players creating alts (secondary characters) to experience the WORLD of Warcraft at a different pace from others, so allow players to choose, if they wish, to receive only 1%, 10%, 30%, 50%, or other experience reduction values that the development team deems appropriate for the game.
- Reduction of health and mana regeneration rates both in and out of combat
Again, this would only affect the character and not all playersâŠ
Do you want to recreate a WoW Classic-like experience in Retail, where your character needs to eat and drink to recover between battles during leveling? This would be an essential option for those seeking this type of challenge.
Expansions like Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor removed many mechanics that longtime players enjoyed in the classic versions of the game. If heirloom gear already exists that increases health and mana regeneration, why couldnât the opposite be possible?
- Increased damage taken from monsters
Knowing that your character isnât immortal and that the game world can be lethal is an experience many players value. The feeling of âdancing with deathâ during leveling creates a sense of danger and reward at the same timeâsomething that attracts many fans of classic MMOs.
- Reduce your characterâs damage output
Another option would be to allow players to intentionally reduce their characterâs power. In Retail, even when removing almost all equipment (except the weapon), the difficulty of combat against open-world monsters doesnât change significantly due to scaling, which always adjusts the player upward.
It makes no difference continuing to defeat normal and elite enemies during leveling with two or three hits if thereâs no option to change this perception. Moreover, this option would allow max-level players to explore older expansions with a challenge closer to what was originally designedâsomething that currently doesnât happen.
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3-) The third suggestion is designed for players seeking real challenges but with a different approach during leveling. In 2021, the MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online underwent a significant overhaul of its open world, especially in how players can choose the difficulty of leveling for their characters.
This personalized system is called Landscape Difficulty and offers a range of options, from casual players who prefer a more relaxed pace to those seeking a more dangerous and challenging environment, similar to what is found in Classic Hardcore. The main difference is that this system only affects players who have chosen the same difficulty phase.
Open World Difficulty Options (Landscape Difficulty)
These additional difficulties not only increase monster health and damage but also introduce new abilities and effects, similar to affixes, or even player abilities being used by regular and elite monsters. Among these effects are increased attack speed, abilities that detect when a player is about to use a skill on a passive targetâcausing the monster to become aggressive before taking damageâalong with healing debuffs, armor debuffs, and creatures that heal themselves, summon other monsters, or teleport to other areas of the map. Many of these features are already present in Retail.
These modifications make abilities that would normally be rarely used at the beginning of leveling in WoW Retail become relevant from the early levels, such as using ice traps, applying slow effects, and reducing damage taken with defensive abilities.
Nixxiom â Explaining Landscape Difficulty Mode in LOTRO
Applying these leveling customizations individually to a character is reminiscent of modes found in games like Diablo 3, Diablo 4, and Baldurâs Gate 3. However, instead of earning more gold and experience by increasing the difficulty, players would receive tokens that can be exchanged for exclusive cosmetics.
Torments Diablo 3
World Tiers Diablo 4
Custom Mode Baldurâs Gate 3
I strongly believe that adding ways to customize the retail leveling experience could open up more opportunities to implement RPG features that might not always appeal to the retail audience.
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Old Attributes and Mechanics Could Return
Introducing a mode that allows players to customize the difficulty during leveling would create opportunities for some old mechanics to function againârestricted to the difficulty settings chosen by the playerâsince they arenât part of the gameâs core mechanics and wouldnât impact endgame content or players who arenât participating.
For example, in the past, hit chance added an element of uncertainty and strategy to combat, making battles more dynamic and encouraging players to optimize their stats to minimize misses. However, it was removed in patch 6.0.2, released on October 14, 2014, along with the expertise stat.
Developers at the time believed that reaching the hit and expertise caps functioned more as a penalty than an enhancement, leading players to view these stats as mandatory rather than âfun.â Consequently, these stats were removed, and players automatically received the necessary hit and expertise caps passively.
Survival Guide Patch 6.0.2: The Iron Tide
Instead of applying this stat directly to the character, monsters throughout the game, in these difficulty modes, could have auras or abilities that reduce playersâ hit chance without impacting other game content.
The same could be done for elemental resistances that some monsters had in the past, which were removed or modified in Cataclysm, but without the side effect of switching specializations before every encounter. For example, all creatures that have fire resistance would still take fire damage but reduced by 10-20%. However, when using ice or water elemental abilities, their abilities would deal 10-20% more damage.
An old complaint from some player groups is that, over the course of expansions, elite monsters during leveling have become extremely weak, and even elites with abilities barely manage to use them due to how quickly they dieâsometimes not even deserving the elite status they had in the past.
Elite Monsters in Elwynn Forest
In Shadowlands, there is a mechanic that brings a strong RPG aspect around the Eye of the Jailer but divided many opinions at the start of the expansion.
The Eye of the Jailer is one of the core mechanics of the Maw at max level, representing the gaze of the same name. Players were not encouraged to stay in the zone all day, and if they killed too many monsters, âfallen angels/ValâKyrâ would try to chain the player, attempting to throw them into the abyss as a form of punishment.
Eye of the Jailer
This mechanic resembles the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings (movie), as both represent constant surveillance that, upon detecting the playerâs or characterâs presence, results in hostile forces being dispatched â such as the NazgĂ»l in Sauronâs case and the assassins or elites sent by the Jailer â to pursue and attack the intruder.
Eye of Sauron - The Lord of the Rings (Movie)
This mechanic wasnât well received by retail players for making quest completion in this zone more difficult. However, on the other hand, there were player groups who saw it as a good RPG challenge brought by the concept.
What if we had this alternative difficulty mode (it doesnât need to be exactly like LOTRO), where in the normal difficulty phase players could use mounts and take less damage, and in the higher difficulty phase, the characteristics of walking and receiving more damage â used at the launch of Shadowlands â would be applied to this phase? Would the perception of this mechanic be different?
The same happened in Battle for Azeroth (BfA), where in the Uldum region, which was tainted by the Void, the Great Worm From Beyond applied a debuff to flying mount mobility. This annoyed many players who prefer a more simplified experience, with fewer RPG elements impacting their gameplay.
On the other hand, another group perceived it as a valid feature that added an RPG layer to the environment.
A cave that is fully litâŠ
âŠcould require, at a higher difficulty, the use of a specific item to illuminate the area within the same cave, as seen in the Vault of the Wardens dungeon, as shown in the image below:
I donât know what the new Open World Challenges will be in patch 11.2, nor if these challenges will result in greater diversity in leveling pace. I also donât know if the planned system updates for the future might lead to something similar to whatâs proposed in this topic or achieve the same goal in a different way, but thereâs definitely interest in this from the community.
Perhaps we are gradually witnessing a growing interest in the WoW community for certain systems, features, and mechanics that were once exclusive to instanced content now being applied, albeit on a smaller scale, to the open world. An example of this is the difficulty levels for dungeons and the follower system in dungeons, both in a more limited form, as discussed in this other topic.
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** Note: All the topics I used as references for creating this post are listed at the end. Reading them is optional, and some may require translation assistance as they are in different languages!*
Slower Leveling
Americas + Oceania 
New Players Who Donât Feel Challenged During Leveling
Europe 
Brazil 
A new WoW player (a former MMORPG player) details some reasons that made them stop playing WoW Retail, and one of the reasons (not the only one) was that the gameâs leveling didnât provide a challenge from the early levels.
France 
LATAM + Spain 
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Faster Leveling
North America + Oceania
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/is-leveling-boring-because-no-one-is-there/131541/11
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/remove-leveling-as-a-prerequisite/2137437
Europe
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/leveling-is-boring/402324
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/faster-leveling/558716
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/nerf-dungeon-exp-buff-world-leveling/549804
Brazil
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/pt/wow/t/xp-no-leveling-por-quests/39840
France
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/fr/wow/t/nerf-de-lexpérience/105736/3
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/fr/wow/t/stuff-héritage-devenu-obsolÚtes/117457
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/fr/wow/t/pourquoi-le-monde-de-wow-semble-mort/119928
South Korea 
https://kr.forums.blizzard.com/ko/wow/t/ì ë°-ê°ë°ìë€íí -ìììą-ëčìŽëłŽêł -ì¶ë€/8045