Burning Crusade Levels

Trick question: how many additional levels does the Burning Crusade add to World of Warcraft? Nominally the answer is 10, from 60 to 70. But looking at it a bit closer the expansion levels behave differently than the previous levels. A Burning Crusade level is a curious hybrid between one and two old levels, so in practice the expansion adds between 10 and 20 effective levels to the game. Lets have this closer look:

The first thing you probably notice before you even make it to level 61 is that the leveling curve is much steeper. Getting from level 60 to level 61 takes more than twice the xp that you needed from level 59 to 60. The “length” of each BC level, measured in the number of quests you need to do and monsters you need to kill is more than twice that of the pre-60 WoW levels, This is not just the fact that the higher the level, the longer it is, there is an added factor of about 2 in the xp and time to level.

Once you level up it becomes clear that in the Burning Crusade new spells and abilities become available at every level, while in the pre-60 levels you only got new spells and abilities every 2 levels. But in total from level 60 to 70 you don’t gain as many new spells and abilities as in 20 levels pre-60.

Some effects of levels are linked strictly to the numerical level. From level 60 to 70 you only gain 10 talent points. And your stats only go up 10 times. But your talents and level-based stats are only one part of your total power; another big part is based on your equipment. And with the Burning Crusade gear being significantly better to that what you can gain with the same effort at level 60 in the old zones, your total power to 70 goes up by more than 10 levels.

The final result is that both from a view of effort to get there, and from a view of gain in power and abilities, the Burning Crusade gives more than 10 effective levels. In effect the number is closer to, but lower than, 20. That is good news, because it means that the Burning Crusade adds more than 16% to the World of Warcraft. Blizzard stated that the expansion would add 25% to the game, and looking at the effective levels that number sounds believable.