Faster Leveling Backlash

Building money at low level isn't viewed as an issue, don't expect any addition of daily quests or anything helping grinding gold at "low" levels. (Blue Source)

Right now my level 37.5 hunter has 9g to her name. Now, I haven't started really trying to make gold, so I have stores of meat, leather, and greens still to sell. But that's a far cry from the 90g for a mount. And with quests giving 45s-50s, the xp seems to be out-pacing my financial gain. Stop! AH time! /male orc dance

It's had me wondering about what monetary side effects the new faster leveling is going to cause, and it seems I'm not the only one to bring it up. Since level 11 I've needed less xp per level, so less grinding/questing has been needed. Level 30 brought higher quest xp rewards, decreasing the stuff I have to do per level even further. This also means I'm killing less mobs and potentially doing less quests, both of which are my primary income sources.

But my question is how much am I getting for free? I'm going to include the explaination below, but for those with TLDR syndrome, here's the summary: From level 1-30, you kill about 355 less mobs. For 30-40, it's about 540 less mobs if that's all you grind. If you do every quest, including the new quest xp bonus, you're looking at about 1,025 less mobs kills. Combining all the mobs, that's roughly 1,380 you didn't have to kill. Assuming each drops 5s (about the worth of 1 leather), that's 69g you didn't get. Um, that's a good junk of the 90g I need for my mount. And the problem will continue as you head towards level 60.

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For those of you that want the long version, here it goes. First stop is Tekknub has a spreadsheet comparing the previous xp per quest versus the new xp per quest. I took that raw data and found the averge amount of bonus xp you get by level (from 30 to 60). There aren't that many data points, but it was the best I could find.

Another stop at WoW Wiki yeiled the old and new xp requirements to reach the next level. That's where the 18% less xp per level reported around comes from, but note it's really less than that below level 30. More importantly, I grabbed the xp/mob forumlae at the top.

Taking these data, I come up with the following analysis. (You can find the Excel calcs here.) From levels 1-29, you'll have to kill about 355 less mobs than before, assuming you only kill those the same level as you.

From 30-60, it's gets a bit trickier since you add in the bonus quest xp. So I'm going to look at it in two sections. If you only grind mobs that are the same level as you, the following graph shows how many less you'd have to kill per level.



The amount from level 30-60 is 2,325 less. From 30-40, it's 541 less. Now, not many people only grind mobs. I prefer juicy quests, personally. The chart is below is from Tekknub's information:



The comparison breaks down at this point, since quests reward different amounts of xp and methods of completing them. Unless you have WoHead and some time... While I love you all, the most I could manage at work was all the Horde available quests for levels 30-39, exculding class specific ones. It was still a lot, ok?

Crunching the numbers, I end up with the following graph of how much bonus xp you'll get if you do every quest.



Here's a version laid out by level:



Combine that with the xp requirements to level, and you end up skipping about 1,380 mobs from 1-40. Assuming each are worth 5 silver, you've missed out on 69 gold. Um, that's kind of a big chunk of my mount, but imagine what you'll have missed by level 60. /boggle