Well, it’s happening. Watching WoW has the unofficial patch notes for the upcoming 2.3 patch for World of Warcraft, and the changes are amazing.

There are a few things to these notes (not least of which being that there are apparently even more changes here in the works), but here’s the jist of it:

Levels will require less experience to reach, Quests after 20 till 60 will give out bigger rewards (making them more in-line with BC quests), Epic mobs in old Azeroth are going to generally be made non-epic (Dun Garok in Hillsbrad, Stromgarde in Arathi), and pre-BC dungeons will be retuned to have better loot, better experience, and a tighter level range.

The overall result of this should be: faster leveling, more folks running instanced dungeons along the way, but less of a need to group while outside of dungeons. The better loot from instances, btw, is ‘better’ in that they’re adding BC-style bonuses to items, stuff like +hit, +spell crit, +mana regen. In other words, they’re taking steps to make old Azeroth more like the Burning Crusade experience.

And I have to say, while I’ve been wrestling with this for some time, I really like these changes. As I just talked about this past weekend, I’ve been leveling a character quite a bit recently. And, while WoW may be one of the fastest games to level ever it can still take quite some time to get that next ding.

I’ve been especially cognizant of this since cracking the 30 barrier, as it’s common knowledge that 30-45 is sort of a slog. The addition of the town of Mudsprocket to Dustwallow should make that a lot more palatable. Hey Blizz! I really hope you use the Tranquillien model here, and let us earn faction with the town for (level appropriate) neat stuff. I want a Mudsproket tabard! (Actually, I wanted a Tranquillien tabard too, more’s the pity.)

Hilariously, by the time 2.3 goes live on the servers, I’ll be within striking distance of 60 (I hope). I will at the very least be past 40, which is the high end of the Mudsprocket content.

While this may make the folks who have ground multiple characters to 70 a bit ornery at first blush, don’t think of it as cheating you … look at it as helping you. With more players having alts at the high ends, that means ever more useful classes for dungeons and PvP. I know that sometime after my Rogue hits 70 I’m going to want to get my mid-teens Belf Priest up to the top.

Also think of it this way: it’ll be even easier to convince friends to play through the game with you. The more the merrier, right?