It will costs 10 gold for a player to shut off experience gain so they won’t gain anymore experience. This is done by talking to a vendor, telling them you wish to stop acquiring experience, and then paying them 10 gold. Your experience will remain locked until you go back to that same vendor and tell them to turn it back on, this also costs 10 gold.
The vendor is called an “Experience Eliminator” and there are currently two located in game, one for each faction.
How To Turn Off Experience If You Are Alliance
If you are alliance you will head to the Stormwind Keep and find Behsten, he is a little hard to find because he is in stealth, but he’s in the war room where the Battleground commander is. If you run into the same room facing the king, it’s the room immediately to the right.
How To Turn Off Experience If You Are Horde
If you are horde you will head to Orgrimmar and find Slahtz. He is located in the Valley of Wisdom at the top of the building that houses the Orc Warrior Trainers. He is also in stealth mode so he can be hard to see.
Why Would You Want To Stop Gaining Experience?
I put the information above on how to shut off your experience first because I assumed you already knew why you’d want to, but for those of you who don’t, I’ll go over some common reasons as to why you’d shut your experience off.
Some people enjoy PvP but they don’t just enjoy it at the high levels, they like to PvP with limited skills and it’s easier to get the best gear at some of the lower levels. The PvP brackets usually end every 5 levels starting at level 14. So at level 14 if you joined Warsong Gulch you would be the highest level player in that battleground, the same would be true for 19, 24, 29, etc.
Some players will get the best gear for that high level and then want to stay that level so they can continue playing in the battlegrounds, therefore, they lock their experience so they can remain at level 14, 19, 24, etc with the best gear and just play battlegrounds for fun.
Let’s be honest, it’s a bit harder to get the best gear at max level, this allows for an easier more simple way to PvP with the best gear so other players don’t have an advantage just because of gear.
Another reason why you’d lock a level is to continue participating in an expansion at the appropriate level. For instance, the max level of original wow was 60, The Burning Crusade 70, Wrath of the Lich King 80, Cataclysm 85, etc. Some players like to experience content at the level it was intended for. You and your friends could have a guild full of locked level 70s and be raiding The Burning Crusade just to see how difficult it was.
Directly related to that may be the fact you’re gaining levels too fast and are too high to play with a friend. If you’re doing dungeons with them, most dungeons have a level cap, for example, almost all of the Wrath of the Lich King dungeons max at level 80. So if you have a friend in the 70s and you hit level 81, you’ll no longer be able to do random dungeons with them.