Pre-Cataclysm Goals

So as I've stated before here, my primary goal pre-Cataclysm is to get at least 8 or 9 of my toons to 80 before the expansion hits, leaving me with one or two toons to level as new goblins. I've tried to do a lot of math here before around the number of hours it takes to level in each bracket and how many hours I can play, but I've recently been catching up on another blog http://noobding.blogspot.com/. In that blog, Captain the First lays out his leveling plan with a very simple approach - one level per day.

My initial reaction to that was that one level per day was ridiculously low - particularly at early levels, they can be knocked out in an hour or two. Even in the 70's, it rarely takes more than 4 hours or so. But then I realized that doesn't factor in vacations and other times you just can't play.

So, being a numbers guy, I went and pulled the data for my toons and looked at what my levels per day have been since I first started posting this blog back in June. 0.8. All of a sudden, that one level per day isn't looking so ridiculously low!

Now I have to caveat that by saying that I've been doing a lot more than just leveling alts during that time period - I've been doing some achievement whoring on my main, gearing up two new level 80's for both heroics and PvP (including a def cap heroic set for my DK). Maxing out professions on those new 80's and doing a lot of instance runs and a few raids on my main. Oh, and I also had about four weeks in there where I couldn't play at all either because of vacation or work related travel.

So now I'm wondering if I really focus on leveling, how high can I get that level per day number? We'll see. Based on my calculations for the 5 toons that I still have to get to 80 to reach my magic goal of 8, I've got a total of 223 levels remaining. So at a rate of one level per day, I'll have hit 80 on all of them in July of next year. There's a ton of prognosticating going on out there about when Cataclysm will be release, but mid-Summer seems as good a guess as any. And if it ends up being later, that'll give me time to max out professions on a few more of those toons and I can go ahead and power level that rogue if I've still go time. Or work on Loremaster on Joar.

I've done a little bit of leveling over the last few days, mainly on the priest, but also got a level or so on the mage, shaman and hunter. So here's where we sit with the non-level 80 toons right now (excluding my level 80 warlock, druid and death knight):

Tuvalu - Troll Hunter - level 69
Cador - Blood Elf Paladin - level 38
Mograwn - Tauren Shaman - level 27
Vindoria - Bloood Elf Mage - level 24
Zinjar - Troll Priest - level 19.