Alternate characters in retail WoW can feel like homework you can buy your way out of, which is why World of Warcraft: Forever is pitching a different relationship with that second, third, or tenth character through its new Legacy System. The system, which has been testable in the beta since October 8, is subtle and works a bit like talents — only paying out account-wide rewards and points to spend across all of a player’s characters. Already, it’s made rolling an alt in World of Warcraft: Forever feel like more of a continued adventure, even as the seemingly eternal debate about dungeon experience remains seemingly unresolved.
Yet that dungeon XP issue seems inexorably linked to the new Legacy System, at least right now. Re-leveling is the main way to earn most of these Legacy Points, so the routes to level 60 matter as much as the perks. That means the beta’s loudest argument is right at the center of whether Forever‘s alt promise holds up, and though Blizzard already seems to have said its piece, how these systems develop will define alt leveling moving forward.
WoW Forever’s Legacy Points Guarantee Subtle Progress
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Image via Blizzard, Josh Drechsler -
For context, let’s back up a bit: WoW: Forever will launch with 65 Legacy Challenges, each worth points shared across a player’s entire Battle.net account. Each character can then spend the points in that shared pool independently, across three perk trees (Professions, Adventure, and Resourcefulness), so a gathering alt and a raiding main can be built in completely different directions. The biggest single source of points is the Classes category, which awards 27 points for reaching levels 25, 45, and 60 on each class, but exploration points for certain zones also serve to make fresh characters the primary engine of the whole system.
Who’s That Character?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Several perks make leveling alts more comfortable, from gameplay cooldown reductions to XP and profession boosters, but they’re all quite subtle. The rewards are very in line with Forever‘s greater focus on the journey; Profession progress moves noticeably quicker with the right picks, while the rested XP perk is much harder to feel. Having spent some of these points myself in the beta, it feels exactly how it should in a game where both Blizzard and its players are treating leveling as a core part of the experience.
Blizzard’s latest patch to the WoW: Forever beta tempered Legacy Points even further, fixing an issue where the Bartering Legacy perk was discounting training and repairs on top of vendor purchases.
Initial Point Caps and Unanswered Questions
As it stands, Blizzard is capping the number of points any one character can spend at 16 for launch to keep newcomers from falling behind and ensure that alts stay optional. It seems like a smart guardrail, but how fair the system feels on its own will ultimately come down to how much grinding stands between players and points. The beta can’t really answer that question yet, either, as though Blizzard granted every tester 16 points, they were free and without grind so that the trees could be tested properly.
Alts Are (Initially) Only as Fun as the Leveling Process Is
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Image via Blizzard, Josh Drechsler -
Image via Blizzard, Josh Drechsler -
Image via Blizzard, Josh Drechsler
Given that this Legacy System is so alt-and-leveling oriented already, it means that the WoW Forever beta’s biggest snag, dungeon leveling, will also matter to it in the long run. WoW Forever‘s dungeons intentionally hand out far less experience per kill than Classic did, moving that XP into dungeon quests to make the first run feel rewarding and repeat clears less valuable. This has been a controversial change for those who enjoy dungeon leveling, and XP balance has already swung back and forth pretty dramatically throughout the beta so far as a result.
Blizzard’s October 1 update cut the bonus XP on dungeon quests in half; after significant player pushback, an October 8 update raised dungeon kill XP by 20% and fixed a bug that tied group kill XP to the highest-level party member. With that update, senior game designer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield took to X to break down Blizzard’s stance on dungeon leveling:
“We understand that some of you want to dungeon cleave to 60, but this is another one of those things that has to pass muster with our core pillars. That playstyle being the optimal way to level does not pass that muster and we need to hold firm on these balance adjustments. As it stands now after the adjustments, with perfect xp/hr play, the leveling rates in dungeons will be very close, if not equal to the speed you can level with optimal questing play.”
Three days after those fixes, though, one tester posted a detailed breakdown on Blizzard’s official forums estimating that a full Deadmines clear had dropped from roughly 17,000 XP in Classic to about 4,000 in Forever, concluding that “in the current state of the Beta, Questing is at least three times faster than Dungeon Grinding.”
Legacy System Alts Will Feel the XP Changes Hardest
It makes sense that Blizzard would probably prefer players to level through the new zones and quests WoW: Forever brings to the table. But it’s clear that many people don’t find dungeon leveling a viable option for alts because of these XP changes. That’s a big deal, especially when it comes to the Legacy System.
That lack of choice will hit the hardest on alts, the kind of characters Legacy Points seem designed to encourage. Healers and tanks, for example, have long leaned on dungeons as their most reliable way to level. Should that method be so much more demonstrably grueling, the Legacy System’s push toward variety, toward alts that change how a player engages with the game, might feel like drops in the bucket that change very little.
The Legacy System and Leveling Method Variety
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Image via GameRant; Source: Blizzard -
Image via Blizzard -
Image via Blizzard
For the record, I’m in favor of the dungeon nerf in principle; I think straight-up dungeon leveling should be worse, if only marginally, so that the enormous amount of new open-world content Blizzard builds keeps its purpose. But three times faster—even if those results aren’t exactly “lab environment” precise—strikes me as too much. It turns a choice between three playstyles (world questing, dungeon leveling, and the hybrid of the two) into no real choice at all, when the latter should be best, and the two former options should be reasonably equal bets.
I think Legacy Points really do give players even more reason to go in on an alt or two without it feeling like so much of a chore. But the subtlety of the Legacy System means how you level matters most of all. That’s what will actually determine whether alts stop feeling like a second job, and it’s what Blizzard still has to figure out before Forever‘s November 4 launch; if it can’t close the gap between its tenets and player feedback, no amount of additional rested XP will change whether a player bothers rolling a second character or not.
- Released
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November 4, 2026
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
- Number of Players
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Single-player
- PC Release Date
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November 4, 2026
