Results tagged “Leveling” from From the Abbey to Outlands

I was reading on Twitter the other day, about several well know WoW Bloggers who have shifts some attention over to other games. These happened not in the months of Wrath beta, but in the week and a half since the expansion launched! One of the reasons given was that the luster had worn off. Another was that the expansion was just not... enough. Yet another said that they were leveling again, and they hated leveling. This last one made me think, and think hard. I have heard a few times the suggestion that blizzard release an expansion that is not 10 more levels, in fact one with no additional levels at all.

That is correct, no new levels to work through, but, somehow, there would be new lands, new dungeons, improved gear, and one would imagine a desire to have progressively better abilities. I am curious if anyone out there has any successful, or even possible ideas for such an expansion. How would new lands work, how would we gauge our progress through them, without additional levels? Gear? Tokens? Quests? What would stop someone from going right to the end game instead of going through all of the content?

I think that is the biggest barrier I see right now to a level free expansion. How do you stop people from bypassing all but the best? So, my readers, fellow bloggers, listeners, and just random folks, I ask you: Educate the unknowing. Explain how this idea would work? Tell me how you would do an expansion without as level grind, and I will be happy to blog your responses. Comment away!

I dinged 72 tonight in Borean Tundra, over a dozen quests still left to go, and wondered to myself. Is there a benefit to doing both of the starter zones, Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord? On beta I did both, and found I was barely halfway through Grizzly Hills before I got the quest in Dalaran to fly out to Sholazar. That was also before I had a 20% jump start in xp from my previously mentioned daily plan. I am almost certain I could get by pretty effectively without having to do the Howling Fjord, and instead moving on to Dragonblight right away. The lore of that zone makes it even more tempting, I assure you.

The flipside to all of that, of course, is gold. Cold, hard cash. If I do all the quests available as I go along, Borean, Howling, Blight, Grizzly, Sholazar, Zul'Drak, Storm Peaks, Icecrown, well I should hit 80 by Sholazar or Zul'Drak, I would think. In Beta I skipped a big chunk of Grizzly Hills to move on to Sholazar, and hit 77 about halfway there. I am pretty sure I would have left Sholazar late 78, or somewhere in 79 if I had stayed in Grizzly. This means it wouldn't have taken much in Zul'Drak, or maybe an instance or two, to hit 80 in that zone, leaving me roughly 2-2.5 zones of pure quest gold plus dailies.

This will be even better on Telaan, who will be leveled third, cause he is doing 2 dailies every day, and is nearing on 71.5. I suspect he will be into 72 before I pick him up to level again. How all of this might hit Ameland or Arita I am not sure, while I am pretty sure Connroe will be hit hard since he has about 22 levels to go and a long road to go. I think I will take him in chunks. In the end, this leveling thing can be tricky. In BC it took me 3 70s before I perfected it for Telaan, and I just do not know how close I can get this time to perfection. I had time between my toons to evaluate, collect, prepare. I do not see any Unidentified Plant Part type items that are tradeable in Wrath, so that might be hard. Time will tell, I suppose. What do you all think?

When Wrath came out, as I have chronicled before, I did a lot of different things. I rolled Connroe, my Death Knight, and worked him through the starting experience, then power leveled his Inscription to 360 or so. I worked on Medros, then Arita, and then Telaan, with a bit of time on Ameland to work on his skinning. In fact the only played toon I have done nothing on in the 9 days since Wrath is my lowbie hunter, whose enchanting I would like to get up so that I can DE all the greens I am making to progress my various skills.

The problem is that while I am 71 on 3 our of 4 prior 70s, I know people with less free time than I have who have gone from 65 to 75 in the same time. I have spent so much time repeating the same quests, the same areas, the same actions that I have slowed my own progress. Therefore I have decided to focus on Medros, much like I did in the early days of Burning Crusade, as my first and primary toon to level, and will level him up to 74. I will then decide if I want to level him to 77 or 80, or swap to Arita for some leveling. After both are up where I want, I will work on Telaan, as two Ret Paladins back to back would be really hard to do. I will still do the proper dailies on all three, but when it comes to questing Medros will be number one. What lessons have the first 10 days or so of Wrath taught you?

My dear friend Jen from the Inside my Head and Hyper nonsense podcasts has begun to play on my home realm, Argent Dawn, in order to get to the level she wants to be at in order to be at the wedding of one of my characters to his in character paramour. I asked her the other day if there was anything I could help her with, and she responded 'a bag'. Being flush with mats and knowing any helpful guildies, I promptly went out and made her level 15 rogue 5 Netherweave Bags.

It was as I was mailing them off today that it hit me. 'Maybe this won't be the most helpful thing for her'. Playing over on the Beta servers, with limited resources and auction house prices that would make any capitalist glow, my little Death Knight has been stuck with mostly the bags he finds and the ones he had at creation. That is to say, 12 slot and 14 slot bags. I thought back to my days of leveling, and I recalled how much I hated to have to choose between items if my bags got full too far from a vendor.

I am beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, helping lowbies excuses them from learning some of the key lessons that any character leveling up needs to learn. How to wipe gracefully. How to conserve bag space. How to manage what you spend on to allow for training and repair. How to find a group for an instance. These and more are things that we all have to learn, but also things that I think we often forget. Back when I was playing the original beta I was a Leatherworking Paladin. Yup, I wore my leather gear proudly until just after the time when a Warrior I had become friends with asked 'why are you wearing a robe?'

To be fair, I was holy at the time, but even then I already disliked group healing as too often people died. Of course I was stacking totally the wrong things and didn't see that I was to be the healer in plate who could survive where the priest might be turned into Night Elf Jam. I was wearing resto druid gear, not Holy Paladin gear. This was the first of many lessons I learned leveling up, and I wonder if far too often these days, as the game is over ten million now and only going to grow as Wrath gets closer; do we spare our friends the lessons we learned at their own detriment? I still sent the bags, and will still help where I can, when I can. I will always wonder, though, how much I really help. 

I have mentioned a few times that I have now four level 70 characters. There is one thing I have noticed in the leveling from 58-60 all the way up to 70. Medros and Arita almost leveled together. Due to the simultaneous leveling, it was really difficult to learn much toon to toon, and therefore the streamlining to improve leveling was non existent. The only improvements where in the 'where's this mob' type of improvements.

With Ameland, my now 70 Hunter, I learned a lot. I knew about the BoE items that could be used to gain rep quickly, and therefore rep was very easy to gain. Unidentified Plant Parts, Pair of Ivory Tusks, Oshu'Gun Crystal Fragment, and more were farmed up by my two 70s for easy gaining of rep. With those controllable rep grinds out of the way, I began to level my Hunter to 70 and did so relatively quickly. Unfortunately I pretty much seem to have stopped there, having done relatively little with my hunter other than a few rep dailies.

Not that I have worked my second Paladin up to level 70, I have applied all of the lessons I learned from the first 3 70s to this one. I was gathering and buying Plant Parts as soon as I hit Outlands. I arranged runs through Ramparts, Blood Furnace, and Underbog early in those zones. I had enough Tusks to get to friendly with the Consortium and even gift a few to an up and coming guild mate. I fully quested in Zangar in order to maximize the gain from the Nagrand quests, and whenever I fly through Nagrand I help out with the Ring of Bloods.

I have waited to do any warbead turn in's until I was done with all of the Netherstorm quests in Netherstorm. I maximized the leveling I did in each zone to ensure I made a full 2 levels per zone including any instances I did. I will point out that even with the massive rep from the Midsummer Fire Festival, I was on the last quests out of Evergrove before I dinged 70. I did all of my SSO dailies on every day I could, and when time allowed I added to my balance by doing the quests in Netherstorm.

Before I was even done in Netherstorm, though after I hit exalted with SSO, I got enough gold saved up for an epic bird and training, which made the last part of the zone go much, much faster. At roughly 500g per landmass in Netherstorm, it was not difficult at all to work my way toward 5000 without even touching the quests in Shadowmoon.

After 4 times running this progression,  I am finally confident that I have maximized the time and resources it takes to hit 70 in the most efficient manner. This, as I am sure some of you realize, is a very important thing looking ahead. With the maximized leveling I have perfected, and the level 55 starting point of the Death Knight, I am fairly sure I can hit 70 on my Death Knight within a few days of the expansion's release. The only big question that remains, though, is whether I will have a chance to master the 70-80 progression.

How are you preparing your skills and resources to maximize the events that follow the launch of Wrath of the Lich King? 

I set forth a goal for myself. My Draenei Paladin Telaan was at about 67.3 at the start of my 4 days off. For those who don't know, I work long shifts(10-12 hours) and therefore have a 4 on, 4 off rotation. Well, on the first day of my 4, I dinged 68. No big, just finished up quests in Nagrand including a bunch of painfully hard to solo group quests and even helped some finish quests I had already completed. I guess that's why they call them group quests.

As I was riding back to Telaar from around the space ship that Durn pats around, I decided to stop and take care of the fire stuff just outside. I had already dinged, which brought me in line with my 2 levels a zone plan, so I wasn't concerned with spoiling it. 6,000 experience later, I was running over to WoW Insider to see if they had a list of how many of these xp rich fires there were to hit up for a good solid chunk of XP.

I ran over to the one at Garadar, and hit up for a grintastic 12.000 experience. It was hovering around 7 or 8 PM, and I decided to see how many I could hit. By the time I logged off at 5 AM, I had hit all of the old world fires, including the well camped ones in the major horder cities to get the Crown of the Fire Festival(45,000 xp from those turned in) and I dragged myself tiredly to bed.

I cleaned up the ones in Outlands except the 2 I am saving for when I ding(Netherstorm and Shadowmoon) and now sit a mere 2 bubbles(or 80,000 xp) from leveling and I have yet to turn in any quests in Blade's Edge Mountains. A couple in my guild dinged twice of the fires bringing their warlocks both up to 58, without doing any other quests for their levels. They got about 1 and a half levels from the Fire Festival. Have you used the new format of the Fire Festival to push a lower level character significantly higher in their leveling? Do you like when they bring such experience heavy quests intot he game? Let me know in the comments!