A sudden update to World of Warcraft: The War Within’s leveling experience has left the community torn, as it drastically impacts the amount of power characters decked out with gear from previous expansions have while making the journey from level 70-80.

The reason for this change is clear. Characters coming in with full sets of high-level gear from old content were absolutely flying through leveling mobs without in a matter of seconds, totally stripping the leveling process of any challenge. This impacted group content too, as higher level characters in a party with lower level characters decked out in old-content gear would find themselves out DPS’d courtesy of power balancing.

Okay so what are the two sides of the arguement here? Why are people not super happy? On the side of the hotfix are those – including developers – who don’t want leveling to be too quick, too easy, and perhaps most crucially too brainless. If you’re blasting through content with old gear, you’re not paying attention to all the nice new content – you’ve got your favourite podcast on and you’re just plugging away. Fun, sure. But not the intended way to experience stuff.

The inbalance for groups is a problem too because, no matter how you cut it, players at higher levels shouldn’t be outperformed by lower level mates. Unless they’re clicking their spells and keyboard turning there’s no excuse for that.

The counter-argument is interesting though. Some of the players that were previously soaring through the leveling process were absolutely laden with high-level gear from raids and whatnot from last expansion. It makes sense that they’d hit the new expansion faster, right? It’s like a nice little reward for their hard work. Add on top of that the fact that these types of players – those with a hunger for high-end swag – usually just want to hit max level and start gearing up ASAP, and you can get a sense for why they’d be against slower leveling.

This may also effect alternative characters (alts) too. A big part of this expansion is encouraging the use of multiple characters at once, so the percieved barriers to fast leveling are rubbing some the wrong way.

Where do you land on this? Are you for super fast leveling with juiced-up older gear? Or do you like to sit back and take in the sights when a new expansion launches? Let us know below!