The latest update to the World of Warcraft Season of Mastery beta makes some changes intended to stop powerleveling in the accelerated fresh start approach, as well as raising the level cap, and making some tweaks to raids.
The level cap has been raised to 60 for all test characters looking to progress. Season of Mastery is intended to be an accelerated fresh start, but it's also no surprise that there have been instances of powerleveling going on. The new beta update will reduce the XP gains while battling in groups with other characters that are significantly above the creature's level. Additional changes aimed at making these attempts less rewarding come in the form of tweaks to dungeons. Stratholm Undead will now have immunity to snares 30 seconds after entering combat,then an immunity to roots, 30 seconds later. The same changes will be applied to affect most creatures in Maraudon. Both of these dungeons will see crowd control attempts besides snare and root reset the time-gated immunity.
The team stresses that groups that play together and are not of wildly different levels or gear should see the difficulty and progression run around normal expected levels, but they want to make sure that the powerlevelers can be dissuaded by diminishing returns.
Other raid changes include the removal of world buffs like Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer in raid instances. Also, a series of promised previously cut boss mechanics have been added back in for this special release. Of course, we don't know what they are yet but the beta will let you try to figure out just how to claim victory now.
Blizzard will also be opening up Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair for testing after 2pm Pacific on Thursday and will have level 60 character templates ready to go beforehand.
For the full details on the latest Season of Mastery beta update, see the official notes here.
