---
title: 'Blizzard Finally Gets Why Alt Levelling Feels Bad'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=XdAk0s6HKtA'
video_id: 'XdAk0s6HKtA'
date: 2026-08-19
duration_sec: 901
channel: 'Bellular Warcraft'
---

# Blizzard Finally Gets Why Alt Levelling Feels Bad

> Source: [Blizzard Finally Gets Why Alt Levelling Feels Bad](https://youtube.com/watch?v=XdAk0s6HKtA)

## Summary

The video discusses the persistent problem of alt leveling in World of Warcraft, particularly the grueling final 10 levels of each expansion. The creator highlights Blizzard's recent changes in patch 12.0.7 that significantly boost XP from activities like Delver's Call quests and the prey system, offering a more varied and efficient leveling experience. The video also critiques missed opportunities, such as Void Assaults and world tiers, that could further improve the system.

### Key Points

- **The Alt Leveling Problem** [00:03] — Leveling in WoW is special, but the last 10 levels of each expansion are grueling and depressing when repeated on alts, following a formula where the previous expansion's cap is fast but the final stretch is slow.
- **Sponsor: boot.dev** [00:45] — The sponsor, boot.dev, is a structured, self-paced coding program designed like an RPG, teaching Python, TypeScript, Go, and more, with leaderboards, achievements, and quests. It offers 25% off with code 'bellular'.
- **Freedom from 10 to 80** [02:33] — Leveling from 10 to 80 offers freedom to choose any expansion or dungeons, with fast leveling and frequent ability/talent gains, but this freedom is taken away at level 80 when the campaign becomes the only viable path.
- **Blizzard's New Vision** [04:18] — Blizzard has shipped crucial changes in 12.0.7 PTR that significantly increase XP from Delver's Call quests, Midnight Dungeon quests, and the prey system, aiming to make leveling more varied and less repetitive.
- **Prey System Buff** [05:29] — Finishing a hunt now gives almost half a level (including mob and world quest XP) for 7-8 minutes of work, making it a highly efficient leveling method.
- **Delver's Call Buff** [05:57] — Delver's Call quests now give about a quarter of a level each, totaling 3.5 levels (or 3.7 with war mode) for completing all Delves once, making it a significant XP source.
- **Weekly Quest Buffs** [06:26] — Weekly quests like Runestone, Hyjal's legends, Storm Arena assault, and Zalamanzar Dungeons have been massively buffed, now giving about a third of a level each, making them the fastest XP sources.
- **Stacking Rewards** [07:10] — The changes allow players to stack renown progress and XP progress, so leveling alts also advances account-wide rewards like renown and void light marrow, making the process more rewarding.
- **New Speed Leveling Strategy** [08:35] — A new strategy: bank Delver's Call quests at level 80, do prey until level 86 (8-12 hunts, ~2 hours), then turn in all Delver's Calls and craft to level 90, making alt leveling much faster.
- **Dungeon Quest Exception** [10:37] — Dungeon quests only went from 7% to 14% of a level each, suggesting Blizzard doesn't want dungeon leveling to be the primary method, unlike other activities.
- **Missed Opportunities** [11:05] — Void Assaults give pittance XP and no Field Accolades for under-level-90 characters, and world tiers (showdowns) don't offer XP, missing chances to make new content useful for leveling.
- **Remaining Issues** [13:32] — The feeling of getting weaker as you level and unexciting hero/apex talents remain problems, but Blizzard is taking steps in the right direction with 12.0.7 changes.

### Conclusion

Blizzard's 12.0.7 changes significantly improve alt leveling by making activities like prey and Delver's Call highly rewarding, offering more freedom and efficiency. While there are still missed opportunities, these changes prove Blizzard is listening and moving toward solving the leveling problem for good.

## Transcript

matters. Leveling in WoW has always been special. For many of us in the vanilla days, it was basically the entire game. People still often love it today, but there's a major exception, and that is the last 10 levels. Cuz since
followed the same formula. Getting to the previous expansion's level cap is lightning fast, but then the last 10 levels are always grueling, almost depressing, if you have to do them again and again and again and again.
But XP is not the whole story. It's not just the XP. It's also more about what levels. And now, thankfully, years later, Blizzard has an idea to fix the problem. Now, if you don't want to learn about
skip this. But if you're still here, well, the good news is that today's sponsor, boot.dev, was built specifically for us by, of course, a big fellow gamer. And boot is actually more relevant than ever. You see, what they
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if you're not happy, don't worry, they will refund you on the spot. Thanks to them for sponsoring. From 10 to 80, you're free. You can pick any expansion to level in or just zoom through dungeons while your low-level
scaling basically makes the whole thing easy. If you're after just pure speed, you can do Dragonflight questing which allows for insanely fast leveling, but fun bit. You're getting levels every few minutes. It's mad. You're getting new
abilities and new talents. You're seeing so much progress. And if you get bored You can get creative. You can mix and match routes like say following expansions. That freedom is almost too much at
times, but it then gets taken away as soon as you hit level 80. And when you hit 80 in midnight, it's straight into the campaign. And first time round, it's all fairly great. New content, right? But then the problem is every time after
You want to level an alt, but the prospect of it just ends up feeling a bit miserable. It sure is a lot faster cuz you can skip cut scenes. You know mind-numbing. And we're all used to a world where most of the new patch
features are only for max-level characters. And blasting through the main quests ends up always just being the fastest way to level by a country mile. I'm sure there are side quests as one option, but there aren't all that
many compared to all the leveling you can do, and your main will usually do most of the murder on for XP and renown anyway, and that leaves your first alt with not a lot of fresh stuff to do. Now, there's a 5% war band buff, that's
it doesn't change the fact you're doing something that could be profoundly cycle in. Blizzard run turbulent timeways every few months to speed things along, but it doesn't change the fundamental design where leveling in a
new expansion just ends up kind of sucking when you have to do it on alts. a bit easier and less frustrating with Midnight. You can do a combination of routing, and here's where things get interesting. Blizzard have paid
attention to that, and I think they've actually taken it to heart, because in 1207's PTR, they have shipped some crucial changes which will help fix the core of alt leveling. We've tested them, and I can tell you this.
Blizzard are getting close to solving leveling for good. not think that this is a big deal. It's only one little line that no one really drew attention to. It says they've significantly increased experience from
some quests, specifically, Delver's Call, Midnight Dungeon quests, prey, and But when Blizzard says significantly, it's actually a big understatement. significant. So, they clearly have a new vision for a
new style of leveling, and it's a fairly radical one. It's one where you can actually play the content instead of repeating the same boring campaign over biggest change is in the prey system. You see, finishing a hunt used to give
you maybe a few quests worth of XP at most, but now it's very different. When you include the XP from mobs and the prey world quest, it's almost half a level. Half a level for somewhere between 7 and 8 minutes of work, and
this is not Blizzard accidentally overshooting, either. The Delver's Call to level up. 10 are available and right now each gives you about a quarter of a level. So, that's two and a half levels for finishing every Delve once. And it's
going to be very different in 12.0.7 because in 12.0.7, that's now up to about three and a half levels. And with war mode hand-ins, you could get 3.7 levels in total. Now, on top of the Delve mob XP, just clearing all the
Delves once is almost half of your leveling done. Now, the last meaningful each zone, there's a weekly burst of renown. You've got the Runestone quest in Eversong for the Suare, there's
Hyjal's legends, the Storm Arena assault in Void Storm, and Zalamanzar Dunduns abundance stuff. Now, those used to be kind of unofficially max level only were leveling, but it would pretty much be a waste of time because you'd miss
main and you'd get very little in return. Now, they have been massively buffed and finishing them nets you about a third of a level each. And that means that these are now the fastest sources of XP by
And I think Blizzard's vision here is quite realistic because it tickles the part of the brain that well, wants to be tickled by an RPG. And that is being efficient. And it goes beyond just the XP, too. Bear with me here.
Midnight gearing is crazy fast, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but pray and the weeklies very quickly stopped being rewarding enough to bother with unless you say wanted a specific renown reward, they became irrelevant quite
quickly for gear on our mains. What if though, while you were getting that XP bar up, you were also getting all of those other bars up as well? And that's the cool thing. With these changes, you can actually stack renown
progress and XP progress. Now, you can already do some of that with the side things. In 1207, you'll be able to get about a level a week for free by just logging in to a different character to do your renown weeklies. If you include
your, say, four prey to satisfy the rather insatiable Astalor, then that's closer to three whole levels. And in this new world, even if you're not in a big rush to get all your alts maxed up, you'll be able to just play these
elements of the game, progress things that are account-wide like your renown's and getting your void light marrow and all of that. And while you do that, you'll get a stack of level 90s over the course of the season just by doing
things you're probably doing already. Pretty cool. But, if you find yourself in a rush and you need an alt fast, this opens up new strategies for less tedious and even faster leveling.
So, the current speed leveling strategy looks a little bit like this. At level 80, you can go and do all of the Delver's Call quests. You complete them, but you don't yet hand them in. After that, you follow an optimized questing
route. And once you hit a certain breakpoint, which is around level 87, just turn in all your Delver Call quests. That'll basically get you to level 89, and then you use your first craft bonus XP to get the rest of the
way. It's super quick. But with 1207's changes, you can replace the questing part in its entirety. So, the start will be the same. You bank up your Delver's Call quests, but instead of just spamming a bunch of quests, the next
step is to do prey until about level 86. Now, depending on how fast you are, your warband XP bonus, and how much XP that you, you know, acquire while you're doing your hunts, then that should take you between eight and 12 prey hunts at
about, say, 10 minutes each, maybe 15 if you're you're leisurely, or 20, whatever. But if you're going fast, that could be well under 2 hours. And remember, the closer you are to level 90, because of scaling, the weaker you
get. So, pray in the mid-80s are really a total breeze. And then that means that at level 86, you can turn in all your Talfor's Calls, and then you can craft your way up to level 90. It's so goddamn fast. Now,
we'll have to work on final values and do a full test run, because obviously PTR is volatile, things may change. It's might be worth it to fit in some of the weekly quests as well, but some of them do rely on others to be fast, like say
the Runestones. But, so far though, these leveling changes really do bring at least some of that freedom of the level 1 through 80 process back. Where if you just want to go and do a bunch of pray to get some of that the pray
rewards and the anguish currency, well, you can do that while also great. Now, there is a notable exception, and that's the dungeon quests. These have went from 7% of a level each to 14%.
I guess Blizzard don't really want people to level via dungeons, cuz if they did, they would double or even triple that again to make it worth the covered so far. And well,
while there is plenty of good stuff with the pray and the weekly quests, there are things Blizzard are missing, and they're pretty huge opportunities. Blizzard are actually behind. They are two patches behind themselves actually.
And that's because, despite being available for under level 90 characters, Void Assaults only give a pittance of XP. They don't even drop Field Accolades, which are the main currency you'll care about until you're at max
level. So, it's clear then that Blizzard wants you to have freedom to level up how you want, and it's great you can do that with the likes of pray, but why not the Void Assaults? I mean, they're still going to be a relevant feature in
12.0.7. So, Blizzard are doing great work here, but they're leaving so much on the table. And new features like Void Assaults would be perfect for that MMO gamer brain stacking reward thing that they are making great in other aspects
of this patch. And I really do mean that. For so many players who are like raiders or mythic plusers and don't really engage in the world content for say gear, well, they can engage in world content for leveling up new alts. And if
the Void Assaults were to allow them to do that, then the likes of 1205 1207 would feel like they have more content to people who don't do world content as not just the Void Assaults because even the shiny new stuff in 1207 could work.
The showdowns are coming along with world tiers. This is basically the really cool stuff that you do in these two basically distant planets that we last visited in in the Legion expansion. It's really really cool. But the issue
the season, which means that a ton of the gear rewards are completely wasted max level characters. And if you've been playing a ton, they're not much use beyond just some novelty. Now, if you like them, that's one thing and maybe
all the cosmetic rewards. And Blizzard are just so missing out on something that will compound amazingly for them. So, imagine this, right? You're playing the normal world tier and it scales down to level 80, meaning that it should
offer enough XP and you can level. If that's the case, then people will be leveling their characters in it. That will keep those new areas populated with characters. And then at the same time, flicking on the heroic tier, people
characters they've leveled, max them out, and maybe set themselves up for the next season. Basically, it would let us do the new content and cycle in fresh characters at the same time. That's more novelty, it's more progress, and it
would let people play different specs, different classes, things like that quite a bit more. It would be great for novelty. Now, obviously, Blizzard just giving us more XP doesn't solve every leveling problem in the game. Content
we all feel of getting drastically weaker as we level probably needs to change as well. Though, admittedly, that's a really hard problem to solve pretty heavy-handed scaling stuff. And it's been a thorn in our side for years
handle power scaling across an expansion. And that's all to mention hero and apex talents, which aren't necessarily the most exciting level up rewards. But still, Blizzard taking this one step at a time, and 1207's changes
do prove that, well, they are looking in the right place, and I think this will make the game way better for people. And on top of that, Turbulent Timeways is coming back in this patch. Turbulent Timeways does come along with some XP
buff stuff, so you'll be able to have your XP buffs applied to all the stuff that I talked about in this video. Pretty wild. We're going to have a lot of max-level characters. Now, there's another thing going on. Rumors
of the skyborn, of new elves from a different place, out of Northrend. It's all about classic plus. It's becoming unignorable, especially when Blizzard um deleted the evidence. So, yeah. Check all that out in this video next.