New WoW: Burning Crusade Classic Changes Make Dungeon Boosting A Thing Of The Past

An issue World of Warcraft Classic players have complained about for years has finally been addressed by Blizzard, with the ability to have higher level characters "boost" lower level ones inside dungeons having essentially been patched out with the latest update to Burning Crusade Classic.

Boosting became popular within the "Classic" version of Blizzard's longrunning MMORPG back in 2019, as classes with powerful area-of-effect abilities learned they could group up an entire dungeon's worth of enemies and kill them in one go. Mages, with their strong AOE and crowd control abilities that slow or freeze enemies in place, for example, could easily do this. That led to max-level Mages and Paladins to begin selling their "services" to lower-level characters, who could join the higher-level character in a dungeon group, stand at the entrance, and reap the rewards as the Mage or Paladin killed the entire dungeon in one go.

As reported by Wowhead, players have discovered that a number of dungeons in Burning Crusade Classic have seen changes to enemy behaviors that essentially prevent them from being grouped up or kited around. Enemies will now simply teleport to players who attempt to use ledges and walls to avoid damage. Others are becoming immune to various crowd-control effects like stuns and slows after a certain amount of time. Blizzard has also implemented an XP penalty for lower-level players grouping with higher-level ones, another change to combat boosting.

The changes come just as Blizzard introduced the "Joyous Journeys" event, which grants 50% bonus XP from now until the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic on September 26.

The changes are similar to ones implemented for WoW Classic's Season of Mastery last year, but now also affect Burning Crusade Classic and, according to a Blizzard forum post from several weeks ago, the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Blizzard notes in that same post the gold earned by those offering boosting services is often used for "illicit activities," with much of the gold earned by boosters sold back to players via third-party sites that are against the game's terms of service.

Judging from the reaction on the WoW Classic subreddit, players, for the most part, seem happy with the changes. Boosting became the go-to method for leveling new characters, which resulted in players rapidly leveling far faster than intended. Because so many players used boosting to reach max-level quickly, players leveling the traditional way struggled to find other players out in the world to group with for dungeons or quests, which in turn pushed even more players to resort to boosting.

There are, however, a number of players upset by the changes. Obviously players who performed boosting services and made a lot of gold doing so are upset, but many Mage and Paladin players who didn't offer boosting services but would solo dungeons as a way to make gold feel unfairly punished by Blizzard's updates. Those players have pointed out that it seems hypocritical for Blizzard to eliminate boosting while the company offers paid character boosts in the in-game shop.

It's not the first time Blizzard has made changes to WoW Classic. Blizzard recently outlined its plans for changes to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, and seems far more comfortable making bigger changes in 2022 than when WoW Classic launched 2019, when Blizzard intended the game to be as perfect a recreation of the original version of the MMORPG as possible.