Blizzard Addresses Controversial Leveling Changes in World of Warcraft: The War Within

ign.com:

Earlier this week, Blizzard announced changes to how leveling from level 70 to 80 will work in recently-released World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within. And now, after criticism from players, developers are reassuring that the overall impact to leveling time will be "minimal."

The changes were announced yesterday in an official post, with community manager Kaivax sharing that the team had noticed players coming into the new expansion content with endgame gear from the previous expansion, Dragonflight, were "extremely powerful relative to that intential content." The post goes on to say that a hotfix to be pushed today would "adjust the scaling of enemies in War Within leveling content to increase the power of lower-level enemies, bringing the duration of combat more in line with expected WoW behavior. These changes will be most noticeable at level 70, and will have a reduced impact as your level increases."

All of that sounds relatively normal, and as someone who started playing The War Within in full Dragonflight endgame gear, they were desperately needed. Especially in the first half of the new expansion, I found I was easily killing even supposedly difficult enemies in just a few hits, and while it evened out over time, the speed of the experience meant I was blasting through content and levels so quickly I barely had time to blink. In fact, much of the community agreed something needed to be changed. But in the ensuing discussion, it became clear that there was significant frustration as to how Blizzard was handling it.

Players expressed two main concerns. The first, as demonstrated in several of the top comments on this thread, was that players coming into the expansion with terrible gear (perhaps because they skipped playing Dragonflight, or were leveling a new character) would be relatively underpowered and would disproportionately struggle with the content if their power was nerfed.

But a second issue players surfaced was the timing of the changes. The War