The new WOW Classic SOD is in full swing and players are discovering new features every day. A Reddit user has now found an XP exploit that can let you skip leveling until the next cap.
What is the Season of Discovery?
The Season of Discovery in WoW Classic is intended to spice up the content and standardize
the leveling process for all players . This means that you can find a lot of new content in the well-known world of World of Warcraft: hidden areas, secret treasures and also new quests.
Leveling is now standardized so that the original level cap of 60 can no longer be reached immediately. Each phase has its own level cap, the current one is 25. The second phase will bring the maximum level to 40 in winter 2023/2024.
You can no longer grind from level 1 to 60 in a few days or even hours. This means that all players should always have the same starting level at the start of the new phase, but should reach this level at a pace that suits them.
Season of Discovery has just started and the first XP exploit is known
What kind of XP exploit did players discover?
The XP exploit revolves around the Badges of Honor, a PvP reward. For each Badge of Honor you will receive 1,200 experience points.
If you have lost one, you can have it restored. You can then find it in your mailbox for up to 30 days. Once the 30 days have passed, the marks are not gone yet. You can save
them using Blizzard's internal recovery process .
In theory, this allows players to hoard badges of honor and use them to immediately level up to the new level cap at the start of the next phase of the Season of Discovery.
What do the players say?
If you don't feel like tedious leveling and grinding, you'll probably be happy with the exploit. However, most players have concerns, which they expressed in a reddit post from user Scala2215:
Here is a selection of reactions:
- Hugheswson via reddit: This seems sick, but would obviously be reversed and possibly punished. There is no way Blizzard would allow their current WoW golden child 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, I'm always impressed by the ingenuity of the WoW community lmao.
User NickyBoomBop, on the other hand, questions the usefulness of the exploit. In a comment to the post linked above he makes a calculation:
The user assumes that around 941,000 experience points are needed to get from level 25 to 40. You receive 1,200 XP for each honor badge you give. In order to receive the required points, players would have to give up 2,355 tokens - that would be 2,355 lost or 785 won PvP matches.
If you were to schedule around 1,700 matches lasting around 20 minutes each, a player would have to play around 566 hours to get all the required tokens. That would be almost 24 full game days.
NickyBoomBop concludes: That's a lot of time to farm all those tokens to submit quests from 25 to 40. I think you're overestimating how easy this is to do.
In addition, the question keeps coming up in the reddit thread as to how Blizzard would deal with it if players bypassed their new content in this way. With the Season of Discovery, the developer wants to ensure that all players level up as quickly as possible. On Reddit, users write about possible punishments for exploiters or a change to the system.
Basically, you can only advise against using exploits like this on a large scale. However, the artificially slowed leveling does not seem to stop individual players from defeating powerful bosses: in the Season of Discovery you are level 25 - but one is already killing bosses at level 60