The new Season of Discovery in WoW Classic is in full swing and players discover new features every day. A reddit user has now found an XP exploit that can allow you to skip leveling up to the next cap.
What is the Season of Discovery? The Season of Discovery in WoW Classic is supposed to spice up the content and unify the leveling process for all players unify
. This means that you can find many new contents in the familiar world of World of Warcraft: hidden areas, secret treasures, and also new quests.
Leveling has now been unified in such a way that the original level cap of 60 can no longer be reached immediately. Each phase has its own level cap, currently set at 25. The second phase will raise the maximum level to 40 in winter 2023/2024.
You can no longer grind from level 1 to 60 in just a few days or even hours. This way, all players will have the same starting level at the beginning of the new phase, but can reach it at their own suitable pace.
Season of Discovery has just started and the first XP exploit is known
What kind of XP exploit have players discovered? The XP exploit revolves around honor badges, a PvP reward. For each honor badge, you receive 1,200 experience points.
If you lost one, you can have it restored. You can find it in your mailbox for up to 30 days. However, after the 30 days have passed, the badges are not gone yet. You can rescue
them via Blizzard’s internal restoration procedure.
Theoretically, this allows players to hoard honor badges and level up immediately to the new level cap at the start of the next phase of the Season of Discovery.
What do the players say? Those who don’t want to endure lengthy leveling and grinding are probably happy about the exploit. However, most players have concerns that they express under a reddit post by user Scala2215:
Here is a selection of reactions:
- Hugheswson via reddit: This seems crazy but will obviously be reversed and possibly punished. Blizzard would never allow their current WoW cash cow to be abused like this.
- SameEagle226 via reddit: It’s not an exploit until it happens. People will abuse this, it will be patched, and no one will be suspended.
- d2032 via reddit: Hahaha. I have to say, the ingenuity of the WoW community impresses me every time lmao.
User NickyBoomBop, on the other hand, questions the usefulness of the exploit. In a comment on the post linked above, he does some calculations:
The user assumes that about 941,000 experience points are needed to go from level 25 to 40. For each honor badge submitted, there are 1,200 XP. To get the required points, players would need to submit 2,355 badges – that would be 2,355 lost, or 785 won PvP matches.
If you take about 1,700 matches at around 20 minutes each, a player would have to play around 566 hours to get all the necessary badges. That would be almost 24 full days of gameplay.
NickyBoomBop concludes: That’s a lot of time to farm all those badges to submit quests from 25 to 40. I believe you are overestimating how easy it is to do.
Additionally, the question often arises in the reddit thread of how Blizzard would handle it if players were to bypass their new content like this. The developer wants to ensure that all players level as equally quickly as possible with the Season of Discovery. Users on reddit talk about potential punishments for exploiters or changes to the system.
In principle, one can only advise against using exploits like this on a large scale. However, the artificially slowed leveling apparently does not prevent individual players from defeating powerful bosses: In the Season of Discovery, you are level 25 – but one is already killing bosses at level 60
