Leveling is Faster, But is it Better?

I didn't really start seriously leveling alts until Wrath of the Lich King.  During Burning Crusade, I was mostly just leveling my warlock and playing around a little bit with a druid and an Alliance hunter.  I may have gotten the druid to max level by the time Wrath rolled around, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

The other thing that I noticed that was really interesting to me is that the first 5 characters that I got to max level in Wrath - my warlock, hunter, druid, paladin, and death knight, are the same 5 characters that I have leveled first in every expansion since.

Going back through old posts, just for nostalgia's sake, it really amazed me how long the leveling process used to take.  The aforementioned hunter, which was my 4th character to hit max level during Wrath, took 8 days and 10 hours of played time to get there.  It definitely highlights the changes that have been made, allowing you to do the same thing now in about 10 hours total.

See, back then, in order to get a character to max level, you had to level through all of the previous expansions.  I'm not entirely sure when that changed.  By Warlords of Draenor, that was still the general process, but the leveling speed had been improved to the point that stuff was generally only taking me around 2 1/2 days of played time.

It looks like in Legion, they gave you the ability to choose between Outland and Northrend for a portion of it, and then chose between Cataclysm and Pandaria for the 80-90 portion.  You then had to do Draenor for 90 to 100 before starting on the Legion content.  But it still looks like it was taking around 2 days played to level a character from the beginning.

In Battle for Azeroth, you still had to go back through most of the previous zones, although you still had the choices that you had in Legion.  I was leveling a bunch of Allied Race toons at the time, and there are definitely references to working them through the whole process.  I leveled a ton of characters to max level towards the end of Battle for Azeroth when there was an anniversary bonus active that included a one-time event in Alterac Valley called Korrak's Revenge, which let you level extremely quickly.   From the beginning of August 2019 until the end of December, I managed to get 20 characters to max level during that period.

The new characters were taking under two days at that point, but a lot of that could have been due to the anniversary event.

It's harder to tell what happened during Shadowlands because I stopped playing World of Warcraft a few months into that expansion.  I didn't even manage to get all 5 of my original toons to max level during the early part of that expansion.  I believe Shadowlands was when Chromie time was introduced, allowing you to pick just one zone to level in, up to the current expansions' content. 

I'm not sure it's been helpful for players new to the game to be able to skip all of that legacy content.  Of course, even back in the Mists of Pandaria days, you might have been able to say the same thing about being able to do the classic leveling experience in just a couple of zones in either Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor.  There's a ton of great content and storylines in both of those areas that I'm sure most players have never experienced.  To say nothing of Outland, Northrend, Cataclysm, etc.

I haven't leveled a character all the way to max level from scratch since Battle for Azeroth, but as I work through a few of my existing characters, I'm guessing that's not going to be the case much longer.  It will be exciting to see what the leveling times look like now.

Going Crazy With Timewalking

I've been using the timewalking event to level my alts for the most part for the last few weeks.  I finished up the Death Knight that I mentioned last week and have now moved over to the 2nd Hunter on my main Horde server.  

I came across the mount above while leveling my Death Knight.  I have no idea what it is or where I got it, but it looks pretty cool.  I use an addon called Livestock that just pulls a random mount for me every time I mount up, so I'm occasionally surprised with some that I have no memory of.  With well over 500 mounts, that's not as hard as you might think.

Anyway, I thought this one was interesting, so I figured I'd share.  After this hunter is done, I've got a Priest to do, then another Hunter, then a couple of Shaman.  

We've got a handyman at the house this week doing a whole bunch of projects that my wife wanted done before she'll be comfortable letting a real estate agent into the house to get it ready to sell sometime next spring.  This all assumes that the youngest Joarling actually ends up signing with and going to the college that he committed to last fall, otherwise, we may end up just staying where we are.  Things are so crazy in NCAA sports right now that it's really hard to say.

As a result, I'm working from home all week, so I have a little bit more play time than usual, but the dog isn't a fan of all this work being done, so that's not helping.  And getting interrupted constantly isn't great for timewalking spam.  

So that's the update for this week.

Cheers,

Joar

Good Leveling Progress and June in Review

I hit max level on my latest Horde Druid today.  That's my third Horde druid and my 5th overall, but I also don't think I have any more in queue, which makes it my 2nd most numerous class, after warlocks and hunters, which I have 6 of each.  That's also my 32nd max level character overall, leaving me with only 14 level 50s to go and 4 characters below that, which will finish up all my currently created characters.

I used Timewalking dungeons extensively on this one, so it progressed from 50 to 80 in just 5 hours and 23 minutes.  

I also used the one-button rotation feature extensively with this one to see how it would work.  In general, it seemed to work fine.  For leveling, it's not great at saving big cooldowns, like Convoke, for more challenging mobs, but it did end up ticking off Force of Nature more often than I probably would on my own, which I think definitely helped with the leveling speed.

In timewalking dungeons, however, it tended to try to do a full rotation on big packs of mobs, which didn't make a ton of sense.  And it tended to have the same issue of using big cooldowns whenever they were up, versus just saving them for bosses, but I think if you can manage around those types of problems, it's still a good thing to try.

Up next is another Horde Death Knight as the latest entry on my 2nd Horde realm.

I had a solid playtime block during June, aided by being out of town for a week while it was approximately 8,000 degrees outside.  I had just over 48 hours of total playtime for the month, which breaks down as follows: 8 hours in Elder Scrolls Online, focusing on the new content, 6 hours in Guild Wars 2, completing the Janthir content, and then 34 hours in World of Warcraft.

I'm still on a good pace to finish all 50 characters before the end of the year, but you never know when real life might intervene.