Blizzard raised the XP from dungeon kills in WoW: Forever by 50% on November 8, four days after launch. “At about 11:05 PST today, we deployed a hotfix that increased kill experience in dungeons by 50%, so it feels better to go back in for more runs,” community manager Kaivax wrote on the official forums. “Happy dungeon crawling, and good luck with those Deviate Hides!”
Watch the short YouTubeThe change is live, and it is the only one that post lists. Blizzard has not tied the hotfix to player feedback, but the stated goal, making repeat runs feel better, matches what its dungeon designers said they had been hearing in October, when dungeon XP was the big topic of the beta. “We’ve heard this feedback,” one said on Blizzard’s podcast. “We don’t necessarily want you to just run it once and be done with it.”
Blizzard raised dungeon kills twice and cut quest bonus XP once
November 8 is the third dungeon XP change Blizzard has written up since October: one cut and two raises. All of them are in Kaivax’s beta development notes or the hotfix post.
- October 1, the quest cut. Dungeon quests “now reward 50% less extra experience beyond normal quest values.” That is half of the bonus above a normal quest, not half of the quest’s total XP. Blizzard’s note said it came from “feedback on leveling speed.”
- October 8, kills up, party penalty gone. Dungeon kill XP was “increased by approximately 20%.” The same build fixed a bug that penalized kill XP based on a party’s highest-level member. Now “only the individual’s level matters,” with one exception: if a party member is “at a vastly higher level than the enemy being killed,” nobody in the party gets XP.
- November 8, kills up again. The 50% hotfix, four days into live play.
Developer Aggrend set the target on October 8: “XP gain is not going to be what it was in era,” he wrote, and dungeons should be “very close, if not equal to the speed you can level with optimal questing play,” with perfect play. That was before this hotfix. Blizzard hasn’t said whether a 50% raise moves dungeons ahead of questing, and its designers have said they don’t want dungeon grinding to be the best way to level.
The November 8 hotfix changes kills, and the quest cut still stands
Kaivax’s post mentions only kill experience in dungeons. It doesn’t touch quest XP, so the October 1 cut to dungeon quest bonuses stays in place, and no Blizzard post since has reversed it. Open-world XP isn’t mentioned either.
The post also doesn’t say what the 50% is measured against. The plain reading is the live value at the time, and we found no Blizzard figure for how far dungeon kill XP sits below Classic Era. As of late on November 8, Kaivax has not added to the thread, and we found no follow-up from Blizzard. The latest full hotfix list is still the November 6 one, and class tuning, including Hunter pets, Warlock Voidwalkers and Enhancement Shamans, is planned separately for November 10.
Players disagree on whether 50% is enough, using their own numbers
One level 32 Warrior tank on r/classicwow timed a post-hotfix Razorfen Kraul run without quests: about 3.5 bars of XP in just under an hour, which they called “pretty low and absolutely not worth it.” A reply pointed out that the dungeon is level 25 to 30, and said half the mobs were nearly grey for a level 32.
Another player reported about one bar every 5 minutes in a second Wailing Caverns run, and wrote that “it seems that Blizzard was indeed listening.” On r/wowforever, the top replies under the hotfix announcement split the same way, with one player calling the 50% “reasonable” and another saying the average player still gets punished.
Estimates of where kills now sit against Classic Era vary from about 36% to about 45% in the threads we read. Those are players’ numbers, not Blizzard’s, and they disagree because Blizzard hasn’t published the baseline. For where each new dungeon sits, see our dungeon and raid list.
Dungeon XP Post-Buff RFK
byu/Namibian_Sabiniana inclassicwow
