Blizzard Nerfs Power Leveling
Posted 25 May 2012 by RushsterThe very common and popular power leveling trick we reported on earlier is now nerfed by Blizzard in a hotfix. Before you could take a brand new character to level 20 in about an hour without it ever leaving town. What you did was load up the quest to kill The Act III Boss and kill him and when that was done you got a new quest in town to hand in and got the same amount of quest reward XP as prior quest.
What Blizzard has done is cut the quest reward xp for the Boss down to a fourth of what it used to be and completely removed the second quest reward.
As I write this it is only affecting Americas Region but it is only a matter of time before this hits the European Region as well.
So what do you guys and gals think about this? Is it something that they should not have changed at all or do you welcome the change?
bad they reduced xp … good they stopped powerleveling! May be another way to stop this exploit?
Leveling is boring.
This isn’t good. Not all of us have all day to grind for experiance. Using this method it took me almost 2 weeks to get my gold find wizard to level 59. I made the wizard to raise enough gold to buy a windforce and other gear for a demon hunter, then I was going to use this method to level the dh to 60. Now I’m screwed. I have a job and I life. I don’t have 2 months to grind to level 60.
This is why I don’t play wow. It’s a game for hardcore nerds. Diablo was a game for casual gamers like myself, but making players invest long hours of their time to level up makes it very difficult for casual gamers to get to the end-game. This is BS.
What you mean you’ll actually have to play the game now?
Gimme a break
I did play the game. I did normal slowly and enjoyed the storyline. Now I want to play the game my may, what’s fun for me. That’s inferno with level 60 characters. Not everyone wants to get there at a snails pace. What’s messed up is that how I play the game is inconsequential to how you play the game. My leveling fast doesn’t affect you in the slightest yet you get angry about it… why? You whine and force me to play the game your way… why? YOU give ME a break.
If you use the AH it breaks MY economy. Go twink those low lvl character instead, will go quite fast anyway.
Rather than cutting the quest bonus to 1/4, they should have just set it up so you only get the quest experience once for each quest, on each difficulty level. Seems like a band-aid kind of fix to reduce the quest experience for 1 particular boss to 1/4… as people can still ‘cheese’ level at 1/4 the speed.
Not really, since they took out the second quest reward completely.
So instead of getting 44k + 44k per run maximum, people are now getting 11k per run. So it’s 1/8 the speed.
Actually it’s 1/8 of the speed as there was initially two rewards in short order. Now the 2nd part is not awarded at all
I agree that at this rate 8 hour to reach level 20 is not worth it anymore
You mean 1 hour to level 20.
Reading comprehension fail? Bad at math?
He means what he wrote. It was 1 hour to 20 before the hotfix; now you get 1/8th the experience, so it would take 8 times as long, i.e. 8 hours.
Ah, read it wrong. You’re totally right.
Too busy leveling!
I don’t think that only getting quest rewards once is a good idea, since there are a number of legitimate uses for repeated quest rewards in the game. There’s nothing wrong with re-running content if you want to level up a bit, and often the only experience you get for a boss is with a quest XP reward. The way it is now, if a friend comes back to help me with a quest that I’m on to catch up to him, he still gets rewarded for his time; by changing that my friend would get virtually no reward for his time spent.
I welcome the change with open arms, and it feels good that they sometimes work quite fast!
I don’t like the loss of exp for new characters….I wish the fix was more elegant.
This might just be a quick nerf hotfix that’ll be improved upon in a patch. Like how they just turned off the Monk rune effect in a hotfix and plan to replace it completely in the future.
Kinda expected really..
the whole point of the game is to get to lvl 60 and farm stuff
I’m all for anything that let’s me get to lvl 60 faster
I’m all for power leveling
If you can’t be bothered to level your own character, you probably can’t be bothered to farm for your own gear either.
So stand in town and PL your character to 60, then buy all your gear off the AH. Woo-hoo, you won! And you never even had to play the game! Yay MMO-land!
Yeah. I jsut can’t wrap my head around the mentality of the people who are complaining that they’ll actually have to play the game now. Why did you buy it in the first place if you were just gonna skip 3/4 of the game and stand around in town?
Also, Spider Jerusalem for the win.
Except in most MMOs you actually have to play the game to get the best gear, due to item “binding”. Sometimes you can get an upgrade or two by trading or buying items, but never the best stuff.
You’ve just described the RMAH, available to all.
There are still places that give similar exp/min. Just that the item rewards are pretty horrible.
Though I wouldn’t power-level myself, I don’t really have a problem with other people doing that if that’s what they want. I think this particular quest reward situation was a little broken, but I don’t really think it’s a big deal in the long run. People aren’t ruining the in-game economy, or really affecting my fun at all, if they choose to skip the first 20 levels of the game.
You’ll be happy to know that Blizzard is (or at least was) seriously considering letting you buy characters on the RMAH.
The exploit should not have existed in the first place, and the fix is asinine. The fix should not be nerfing the XP, the fix should be not handing out the quest reward more than once in each difficulty setting.
I think part of the reason is the quest reward for beating Azmodan wasn’t balanced in the first place.
The 2-part reward was a lot more than what you could get defeating Diablo (which only has a one reward).
Agreed. They hit this problem with a big, huge maul. They could have just twisted a screwdriver instead by limiting full XP to just once per difficulty per char.
Could they not also do it this way? where you get the full XP reward the first time, and then any run afterwards you get the nerfed xp? but perhaps not so large a nerf.
What about not allowing people sitting in town to earn XP/quest completion if they’re not in the same zone as the quest itself?
I’m sitting in town, my buddy is kicking the Act boss’s skull in. He gets XP/reward/quest completion, I get a steaming pile of nothing because I’m a slacker who’s trying to get something for nothing.
Wouldn’t that be a better fix, or is there some component I’m missing?
Agreed, go to the heart of the problem.
Also, can we discuss: Why does it take Blizzard months (years?) to test and perfect a game and then release it and the community finds the ‘run’ bug/exploit in not even a week… who are these people working at Blizzard, honestly?
six million people playing for even 10 hours each are bound to find stuff that the several hundred internal testers couldn’t find in a few years.
Are you kidding me? It’s a boss and a run associated with killing said boss. One of only four act bosses. It’s like amateur hour with this company…
Yes, clearly this multi-billion dollar company is in full swing of amateur hour. They’ve only produced a large game that several million play–a game that has thousands of things to look at, fix, balance, and create–yet they are clearly lazy and amateurs for overlooking something they didn’t initially think people would exploit.
Let’s see your even multi-million dollar company do anything even resembling this scale. Hell, I’ve taken my car to a car washing service–a place where teams of 5-6 people wash, dry, polish, and detail the vehicle–and still found that they neglect to clean my steering wheel, only the item in the car people touch the most. Some times simple things get overlooked. You are only showing how completely ignorant you are by belittling them.
I think you’re really clueless about how much in-house testing can actually uncover. You want to find the big bugaboos, but six million monkeys are going to do a much more efficient job uncovering all the other stuff. That’s just the way development goes.
Probably difficult for them to distinguish who’s been in town this whole time, or if some ppl either just died and res using checkpoint, or TP back just to sell some stuff.
What you’re missing is that there are a lot of quest rewards that happen in odd places. For example: you kill the boss, then go back to town and click someone to talk to, and then you get the reward. In a situation like that, maybe a couple of people are still picking up their boss loot while a third goes to town and completes the quest. If a system like you suggest was implemented, the two people still looking at their boss loot would miss out on quest rewards.
I think you missed my suggestion.
I’m fully aware of the progression of quests like this. What I was suggesting was that in order for that “talk to so-n-so back in town” component to even show up for you, you should have to at least be in the boss level when he’s killed.
In other words, if I’m hanging out in town and my buddy slays the dragon, I should never even get the quest reward prompt in town since I wasn’t in the right place during the actual quest event.
Whether people from your group stay behind to pick up/inspect their loot while you head back to town would be irrelevant. They were actually standing in the room with the boss when he was slain, so who cares how long they take to get back to town? They should get credit because they were actually there. But me, standing by Adria, chatting up the local drunk while my 3 horde-murdering besties are taking down the Lord of Malcontent, should not ever get the prompt to complete the quest when said unhappy lord is slain. I wasn’t in the room, I shouldn’t get a shot at the door prize.
What if you died and rezzed right before the kill? No cookies for you?
Well I think they wanted to stop it as soon as possible, then worry about the elegance of the fix later. For every day they stall, hundreds will abuse this.
Agreed.
elite packs in azmodan hell went down from 3 to 1 too. Not as profitable anymore =/