Leveling and Experience

Every character, monster and NPC has a level. For players, each new level raises base stats and brings new abilities and talents, and it opens new areas, quests, dungeons and battlegrounds. Most quests and items also have a minimum level. Level is only a rough guide to strength, though: gear, abilities and skill can make a large difference.

Most characters start at level 1; Death Knights, Demon Hunters and allied races start higher. You cannot pass the current level cap, and your cap can also be lower if you do not own the latest expansion or play a free trial account. At the cap the focus moves to end-game content and better rewards.

Experience (XP) mostly comes from killing monsters and finishing Quests, but there are other sources. In practice you can switch between three ways to level: questing, dungeons and battlegrounds.

• Exploring new places, gathering herbs, mining, collecting Archaeology fragments and opening chests.
• Battleground objectives and other actions that give Honor (honorable kills do not count).
• Random dungeons through the Dungeon Finder, which give extra XP and gold when finished.
• Turning on War Mode gives the Enlisted buff: +10% experience.

In a party, the XP from each monster is shared, so each member gets less per kill; quest XP is not reduced. In a raid group, XP from monsters drops sharply. Monsters too far below your level turn gray and give nothing, and creatures of an expansion you have already out-leveled give only 10% of their normal XP. Characters up to level 69 can switch off XP gain at Behsten (Alliance) or Slahtz (Horde). At the level cap, quests pay money instead of experience.

Logging out in an inn or a capital city lets your character rest. While resting, the portrait glows and the level circle shows zzz. Resting characters build up a rest bonus quickly; characters logged out anywhere else build it at a quarter of the speed. The bonus can reach 150% of your current level, which takes about 10 days of resting.

While rested, the XP bar turns blue and you get double XP from monsters, ore, herbs, Archaeology fragments and chests until the bonus runs out. XP from quests and exploring does not use it up. The bonus is measured against your current level, so it lasts minutes at low levels and much longer at high ones.

Each expansion raised the cap until Battle for Azeroth reached 120. Patch 9.0.1, before Shadowlands, then squished levels: the cap fell from 120 to 50 so that every level would feel more meaningful and new abilities would come more often.

The squish also changed zone scaling: any earlier expansion can now be started at level 10, with later zones rising toward the cap. Hero classes now begin at levels 8 to 10, much like allied races, and can go straight into most expansion stories without the classic starting zones.

Timewalking Campaigns, better known as Chromie Time, let you level any character through the expansion of your choice. Speak to Chromie near the Stormwind Embassy or the Orgrimmar Embassy and pick a campaign; while it is active, every zone scales up to level 80. There are no unlock requirements for new accounts.

• Nine campaigns: Portal to Outland, Fall of the Lich King, The Cataclysm, Wilds of Pandaria, Draenor, The Legion Invasion, Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands and Dragonflight.
• You can start it only up to level 68. At level 81 the campaign ends and you are sent back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar.
• You can swap campaigns at any time, and characters up to level 69 can pause XP to finish a whole expansion's story.
• You can queue for that expansion's dungeons and raids through the finder tools, but you cannot walk into its raids or Mythic dungeons while a campaign is active.