I finally had time to grind out level 61 this morning. I decided it would be a good idea to rise at 0500 am and get some grinding done with fewer people competing for the mobs. Since I play on a full server, that can be a real problem.

Brian Kopp’s Alliance Leveling guide calls for either grinding 61.5-62 or doing an instance with a couple of quests. Well, since I’m basically guildless I didn’t want a bad pickup group ruining the potential advantages of doing an instance, so I grinded it out. Boring, not very effective, but safe.

60-62 took me 13.5 hours, of which 60-61 took about 6 hours. The grind from 61.5-62 slowed me down some. I do try to get the least /played time possible for this review, and I try to simulate someone going from 1-70 seamlessly. In other words, I did not replace any gear at level 60, I don’t have an epic mount, and I didn’t turn in 25 completed quests when The Burning Crusade was released for an instant 150k XP.

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How many World of Warcraft expansions do you think Blizzard is working on? At the very least one, probably two, three or more. They have officially said that they want to release a new expansion pack about once every year.

If that’s the case, the next expansion should enter beta later this year.

Personally, I think Blizzard is planning very, very far ahead. Want proof? I give you "Exploration The Movie". If you haven’t seen it, check it out on google video:

Exploration The Movie

It was uploaded to warcraftmovies.com on May 19th 2005, but later taken down at Blizzard’s request. (more…)

I was thinking of giving "first to 70 on my server" a serious shot with Brian Kopp’s alliance leveling guide, as I’m sure many others considered.

Well, for starters, Brian’s server went down due to heavy traffic, so no one has been able to access the guide, which is very unfortunate and regrettable indeed. In fact, it sucks really bad.

I had the fortune of having a working copy on my hard disk (which I cannot share, sorry) since I helped Brian with the 60-70 coordinates. So I entered Outlands at 0200 a.m., after picking up TBC at midnight in a local game store, and started racing ahead. Well, turns out some people got the Burning Crusade delivered already on Monday, so they had it installed and patched right when the portal opened at 00:01 am.

I was two hours behind.

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Did you see the "cinematic intro" for TBC?

If not, check it out here: 
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/movies.html

Cool, wasn’t it?

About "not being prepared"… some are. You can read my guide about preparing for TBC here. But how are players preparing IRL? If you don’t do some of the following things, you are not hard core. Just joking.

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This 59 hunter came up to me on the boat to Theramore today and accused my hunter, Idkfa, of being a farmbot. lol.

Well, I guess he had reason to since my toon:

1. Is a hunter (like most farmbots)
2. Has a nonsensical name (Idkfa. Guess he isn’t old enough to know it’s a Doom2 cheat code. The name, btw, violates Blizzard’s naming policy. I’m such a rebel…)
3. Has green gear (I tried explaining it was because I reached 60 in less than 6 days)
4. Is guildless (What can I say? I don’t have time to be active in a guild on that character)

And I was just on my way to farming for my epic mount, too. It’s all circumstantial anyway, but quite funny.

I hit lvl 60 this morning in 5 days, 21 hours and 2 minutes! I think that’s fantastic, if I may say so myself. All thanks to Brian Kopp’s Alliance Leveling Guide

There was a huge difference in time between grinding and questing the last 10 levels. With questing, the longest time to level was about 5 hours, and I did many levels around 4, some even faster, whereas with grinding it’d take you 5-6 hours per level and likely more because you have to travel to town to resupply, travel to new areas, and you’ll get ganked etc.

The only grinding the guide called for at this stage was from level 59½ - 60, which I chose to do in the cave at 67.42 in Winterspring. It’s full of easy, high-level mobs that you can single pull and it just seems like no one goes there except for a quest sometimes, so you can grind away without interruptions.

In closing, I have to say I followed the guide 99% of the time, but you can’t do everything exactly as it says because some quests start from items that drop, and you may not get them. I also forgot to turn in a quest, and I stupidly destroyed a quest item I had to bring back to complete a quest so I missed out on 8000 XP.

If I’d do it again with a hunter on a PvE server, I’m confident I could cut my time by several hours. But now I’m gonna lay low with this toon and wait for TBC to take it to 70. Gonna see how it goes with green gear…

Oh, I almost forgot, here’s a full review of the guide now.

Just a short update on my progress with Brian Kopp’s Alliance Leveling Guide.

I dinged 54 today in 4 days 19 hours /played time. Amazing how Joana was level 60 in this time…

It means I’ve gone 6 levels in 23 hours. I’ve been to Blasted Lands, Searing Gorge, Un’goro Crater, Azshara, and Felwood, mostly. Un’goro was fantastic XP… there’s nothing like turning in 12 or so quests in 15 minutes and gain half a level from that alone.

Felwood turned into one big gankfest. It’s really quite a small zone with high level players, and 60s farming Timbermaw rep. There was a lot of competition for mobs, and a lot of corpse running. So going from 53 to 54 took five hours.

By the way, Brian just keeps improving his guide. I logged into the members area today and noticed he had added class specific tips for warriors, priests, warlocks and mages. They’re written by someone else, but I don’t think Brian would put anything on his site that isn’t up to par with his guide.

The guides are like ½-1 page of short leveling and combat tips, and there’s a leveling build for each class broken down by levels so you know where to place every talent point. It might at least help you on your way, should you choose one of those classes.

More later.

I finally got some time to level my ally hunter the past few days after a two week break.

As you know, I’m following Brian Kopp’s Alliance Leveling Guide to a T. Everything has been going well except one part where he recommends you take a group to Uldaman and do some quests there, which he doesn’t specify exactly (unlike in the rest of the guide).

I was very skeptical about that, since instance runs often take a long time to organize, and often lead to wipes. But I wanted to do it for review purposes, so I thought I’d look up some quests and buy a boost through it. Bad thinking. I spent 40 g, which was almost all I had, on 2 level 60s clearing Uldaman for me. Little did I know the experience gained was going to be that bad with the lvl 60s in the party… I’ve actually never had anyone boost me before, but I guess it was a 40 g lesson. Oh well, at least I got a nice blue gun.

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This is embarrassing. I forgot to wish you a merry Christmas on my blog. Newsletter subscribers got the holiday greeting, though. That’s what you miss if you’re not subscribed to the WoW Strategy Newsletter. Hehe!

I hope the past year has been good for you, both IRL and in-game.

Just wanted to remind you of a couple of things about WoW that are kind of time sensitive. First off, if you have some time to log on before December 29th you should definitely open your free gifts under the Christmas tree in the major cities. There are five total, make sure you get them all. I think there’s a level requirement to prevent people from rolling a bunch of lvl 1 toons to exploit the goblins’ generosity.

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If you’ve been in an end-game guild lately you’ve probably noticed the changes taking place on the guild scene… guilds quitting raiding, core members leaving for the easier-to-obtain PvP rewards, and guild masters kicking superfluous players in preparation for the smaller instances in TBC.

At least that’s what’s been taking place on my server.

Bummer for the people who had saved a lot of DKP for future rewards. Now all those "contribution points" are worthless. Of course, getting DKP and trading it for gear isn’t the only reason to raid, but it’s not more than right to take your fair share of the loot, either.

I think it was in Killer Guides’ Professional Guild Management Guide where I read that the average player in an mmorpg changes guilds every six months on average. In other words, it may be a good idea to spend DKP regularly on things you want instead of saving it for some elusive loot that may never drop.

Especially so in times of change, like these.

Do you know what your DKP will be worth in TBC? Will you be able to spend it at level 70? What are the rules in your guilds (are there even any)?

Stay on top of that and you may avoid some unpleasant surprises.