Double experience buff and more coming to World of Warcraft Classic’s Season of Discovery

Some hefty changes are coming to World of Warcraft Classic‘s Season of Discovery mode that aim to improve playability. These changes include a buff to experience gains, making gold, and ideas for the future of raids. It all starts on March 5 after the servers come back up from weekly maintenance.

The most important change is boost in the bonus experience buff, which is raising from 50% to 100%. In its update, Blizzard states that it wants Season of Discovery to be friendly for players who level multiple characters, or “alts.” With the level cap raising from 25 to 40 in the second phase, Blizzard wanted to make it easier to level.

Another update to help players out is sees the cost of normal mounts and training reduced by half. The base gold rewards from all quests will also increase for characters up to level 39. Once you hit level 40, the gold bonuses revert back to normal. (That’s because potential experience automatically converts to gold at level cap.) The studio doesn’t want you to be able to make TOO much money from questing, after all.

These changes center around being friendlier to players making more alts. This has been a focus for the WoW team as a whole lately. One of the major complaints in recent expansions has been about how tedious it’s been to raise alts, especially when it’s required to get the “whole story” of an expansion. Dragonflight has shown a lot of improvement as a result of this feedback. Account-wide reputation bonuses, for example, make it easier to raise alts for fun.

Later in the post by Blizzard, the developer discusses the sizes of Season of Discovery raids. The topic is being hotly debated within the community. Blizzard is running into a lot of technical issues on the backend as well. Right now, its in a data gathering mode before making decisions.

There’s also talk about expanding endgame rewards to allow for more customizable character builds. A lot of the work is still in-development, so Blizzard doesn’t have any specifics to get into. This discussion seems to center around providing rewards that mesh well with the unique builds caused in Season of Discovery. For example, Warlocks currently have a tank specialization that they’ve never had before. They’ll need some new end-game gear to help make this a viable gameplay style.

Finally Blizzard discusses that the raids themselves are going to be “evened out.” This removes the idea of there being a series of “catch-up raids.” Raids normally release one after the other, and the previous ones become less useful to players. The idea here is to keep them all viable so that players have a better offering of choices. What happens here will likely depend on the results of raid sizes and structures.