Leveling in World of Warcraft is too easy because you can’t die. Literally: It was impossible to let your character fall to 0 health points.
“World of Warcraft has become way too easy!” – Such statements are often heard, especially from Classic fans who believe that everything was harder in the past. However, this is not true when looking at the complexity of boss fights, such as in the World First Race. But in other areas, people were right because leveling in World of Warcraft has been easier than ever for several weeks because:
Players could not die at all; they were literally immortal while leveling.
What is happening in World of Warcraft? With The War Within, many new players have entered World of Warcraft. Newcomers are first guided into the “Dragonflight” expansion and must level up to level 70 before they can join the others in Khaz Algar.
However, these new characters realized in the past weeks: Somehow, everything here is strange, as you can’t die. No matter how many enemies you pull together and no matter how threatening your health points drop: You could not go below 1 HP. Dying was literally impossible.
Why was that so? Dragonflight was designed from the ground up as an area for veterans. Everything is a bit more complex, enemies have multiple abilities, and the fights are significantly more challenging than in many other areas. However, this meant that complete newbies in Dragonflight were overwhelmed when they entered these areas at level 10.
Therefore, Blizzard introduced some buffs that are only available to newcomers. They increase the strength of the character and also ensured that you don’t die easily. But something went wrong. Because you simply couldn’t die anymore.
What went wrong? Game Director Ion Hazzikostas explained this to Windows Central:
With The War Within, we introduced some “training wheels” buffs that thematically fit the dragons, intending to help new players during their first playthrough (when they do not yet have a max-level character and have not unlocked Chromie time). One of these buffs was a “Escape Death” that would occasionally trigger. Unfortunately, there was a bug that prevented the cooldown from being triggered.
This mechanic was supposed to trigger only once every few minutes at most. However, for several weeks, it had no cooldown at all. This led to characters simply being unable to die, as they were constantly saved by the mechanic.
If a few grumpy people now want to point at WoW to say: “See, the game is that easy, you can’t lose!” For a few weeks and in some specific areas, that was actually true for a change.
Elsewhere, WoW is currently quite challenging – for example, in the fight against Zekvir.
