With both the late-expansion doldrums kicking in and all of us being cooped up in our homes while a horrific virus spread across the world, Blizzard gave everyone a 100% bonus experience buff, which, while intended to be just until the end of April, is now going to last until the Shadowlands pre-patch.
More recently, they introduced a reputation buff for everything in Legion and BFA (except, sadly, the slow-going Rajani and Uldum Accord), likely to help people unlock Allied Races. The latter buff is going to be redundant when 9.0 comes out, though, as allied races will no longer require exalted reputations.
The thing is, I wonder if this experience buff is actually going to be similarly redundant.
Shadowlands will profoundly change leveling in WoW by squishing things down to a cap of 60 again, after the many expansions that came out since launch had doubled it to 120 by BFA.
120 characters will wake up on 9.0 day at level 50, with ten levels to go through Shadowlands (I wonder if they will plan more squishes, or if they're pretty happy to have bought themselves another 16 years). Characters who aren't at the cap yet, I believe, will be at a proportionate level. If you've got a character at level 60 now, they'll be (I think) level 25.
Next, level scaling is going to change.
Brand new players - as in a new account that hasn't played WoW before - will spend the first 10 levels in a new starting experience called Exile's Reach. Then, those brand-new players will be sent into BFA content to go from 10-50.
Veteran players will be able to choose whether to start in Exile's Reach or their old racial starting zone, and when they hit 10, they can choose any pre-Shadowlands path to take - such as Northrend or Draenor or Cataclysm's revamped vanilla zones, etc., which will take them to 50.
Allied races and hero classes will start at 10.
Here's the thing:
If we assume that the entire 10-50 climb can be achieved all in BFA leveling zones, that suggests strongly that leveling is going to be a hell of a lot faster. Consider that today, when you hit 110, you're expected to go to Zandalar/Kul Tiras for your last ten levels before hitting the cap. In 9.0, that will be the vast majority of your entire leveling experience pre-Shadowlands.
Playing through most of the quests in a zone, maybe hitting each of the level-up dungeons, is going to take less than 24 hours of play, I'd think. It can't take longer, because if it does, players will just run out of things to do in Kul Tiras/Zandalar. So my assumption is, instead, that you'll be dinging like crazy while going through Drustvar or Vol'dun.
I'd assume that the same will be true if you pick earlier expansions' content - I, for one, still love leveling in the Broken Isles, and I assume that if you can do all of 10-50 in BFA's continents, you should be able to do the same in Legion's.
Of course, I'd assume that Shadowlands' leveling zones will have roughly the same required time commitment to get through as previous expansions' 10-level range have had, which means, then, that a character who levels up entirely in Shadowlands will zoom from 10 to 50 (I assume 1-10 won't be super long either) and will then makes Shadowlands' zones feel like molasses in comparison.
Still: right now, with the buff, leveling feels really fast and fluid, but if Shadowlands leveling works like I think it's going to, it's going to make this buff feel like nothing.
I finally decided to take my Kul Tiran Druid up from 110-120 (establishing himself as my primary Druid!) and with just an hour or two of questing in Drustvar, if that, he's already 113 and halfway to 114 - with more than half the zone left to do.
Now, admittedly, with the buff, he's chopping through this content at twice the speed. We could assume that without the buff he'd finish Drustvar at around 113ish, forcing him to hit all three Kul Tiras zones.
But with a legion of allied race alts very gradually climbing the leveling latter (my Highmountain Tauren and Vulpera Rogue are now in the Pandaria/Cataclysm range, while my Mechagnome, Zandalari Troll, and Mag'har Orc are in the Northrend/Outland stretch, which I think is the slowest currently) I'm aware that even with this 100% XP buff and the 50% (I think) you get with a full set of heirlooms, it still takes a long time to level up. Even as scaling has allowed you to pick between the pairs of the game's first four expansions, it's still a ton of content to get through.
The whole point of the level squish is that Blizzard has recognized that as a problem. Yes, there's a ton to the World of Warcraft, and if Classic has taught us anything, it's that people want to be able to access that old stuff even when it is very old. But given that the life of the game really is at the level cap, it's a good idea to let players get there in a reasonable amount of time.
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