How to Level to 80 Quickly in World of Warcraft

Don’t do what I’m doing. Seriously. OK, I’ll admit it. The title was a cheap trick to see how much search engine traffic I could grab from people too lazy to download QuestHelper or Carbonite, which is technically lazy to begin with. By now, I’m sure most of those poor misled individuals have stopped reading, so back to my small group of dedicated readers.

Devv is only halfway through level 71. Predatore is still stuck at 58. And Arpeggio is up to level 10 now. Wait. Who? Yeah. I know. Of all the things I could have done to make best use of the forty bucks I dropped on Wrath, I’m leveling a new alt; a Dwarf Hunter, to be exact. Arpeggio has been stuck at level 5 ever since Kaddisfly prompted me to create a Hunter to level. I knocked out the quick quests to get from level 1 to 5, then let him sit in Coldridge Valley for several weeks.

The Hunter class is at its most boring from levels 5 to 10. Up to level 5, you almost level just from walking into a new zone. After level 10, you have a pet to keep you company and to do most of the grunt work for you. But the grind from 5 to 10 is unbearably slow and boring. For starters, you’re knee-deep in melee combat. Beyond level 10, a Hunter should never be getting involved in melee combat unless they’re getting themselves out of a bad situation. Oh sure, you can open with a Viper Sting, throw in an Arcane Shot and try to kite Auto-Shot until the mob drops. But the sad reality is that at some point, you’ll be face-to-face with any mob that’s within a level or two of your own. Even Raptor Strike seems to be more about Blizzard showcasing a cool little animation than the damage it actually deals. It’s not until you acquire Concussive Shot that you can finish an entire one-on-one fight ranged. But the key words here are “one-on-one” If you get adds, you’re still playing Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots with the cuddly critters and humanoids of *Insert Starting Zone Name Here*.

But I digress. Actually, this entire blog is a digression. Never mind the man behind the curtain. The point to be made here is that I’m really not getting my money’s worth out of the expansion. If I spent a lot of time with Devv out in Northrend, my investment would be justified. Death Knights can’t be created without purchasing the add-on. Leveling Predatore would make sense. What am I doing? Leveling a character who I could be playing even if I didn’t own Burning Crusade. That makes sense. So what started this whole mess? I decided that I was… wait! It seems like I should start a new paragraph.

Cool. I decided that I wanted to level Ellyza so I could get her Enchanting up to the point where I could disenchant the drops that Devv was picking up right before Northrend. Enchantress (bank alt #2) is sitting on full bank tab and two 16-slot bags full of goodies that require Enchanting level 275 to DE. When I logged into the old girl, she had 11 talent points free and a clean slate. I decided to ditch my Disc leveling idea and throw all of the points into Shadow. I took her out to Redridge Mountains to finish up the quests that she still had open before sending her off to Auberdine. It took me all of about five minutes for me to realize that leveling a Priest sucks. Sure, they can melt faces later on in life. And if you manage your health and mana accordingly, you can survive long fights. But at level 20, Priests just seem like underpowered Mages with the ability to Rez and Heal. I really hope I didn’t offend any Priests out there. It’s not that the class sucks. It’s that I suck at playing the class. I think I’m gonna need some advice from Pugnacious Priest on this one.

So, back to Arpeggio. I quickly got frustrated with Ellyza, had no interest in enduring low framerates in Northrend, and wanted nothing to do with jockeying for position for my turn to kill mobs in Eastern Plaguelands. So I logged out to the character select screen and noticed my old pal Arpeggio chillin’ at cinco. It took me just shy of two hours to get to level 10. After the pet taming questline, I decided to pick my first pet. I made the conscious decision to pick a pet that appealed to me personally. At the highest levels, pet selection can make a massive difference. In PvP, your pet can make or break you. But as a “just for fun” leveling alt, I decided to bypass the Petopia research and just go with something fun. With that in mind, I tamed a wolf just north of Kharanos. Sticking with the musical theme, I named him Allegro. OK, OK. Here’s the story. Shot rotation is half the fun of being a Hunter. The distinction between the different flavors of shots is much like an arpeggiated chord. Allegro, on the other hand, likes to go rushing in to whup some ace.

When I went to bed last night, Arpeggio and Allegro were nestled snugly in their beds in Ironforge. The former learned a little Mining and Engineering before calling it a night. His pet made it clear that he is notgonna eat bread before getting some shuteye himself. So, yet another distraction enters the fold. If I can stay focused enough to actually level Arpeggio beyond 20, I’m sure I’ll become even more addicted to reading Pike‘s thoughts than I already am. Even if you’re not a Hunter, her blog is one of the better ones out there. Do yourself a favor and check it out. As for me, I’ll get the Armory listings for Arpeggio and Predatore added when I get home later tonight. If anybody on my roster makes it to 80, it’s gonna be a frickin’ miracle!

Argent Dawn Goodies

On the urging of WoW Insider, I decided that I needed to get my butt in gear and start grinding some Necrotic Runes. If PvP gear is considered to be welfare epics, then the purples that the Argent Dawn are offering up are like soup kitchen epics. At 15 Necrotic Runes a piece, any newly-minted level 70 with an hour or two of free time can upgrade their green and blue shoulders and gloves to purples. Granted, I would not recommend using these bad boys as general purpose armor pieces. This isn’t PvP gear and it’s certainly not raid quality. But it’s not bad stuff for dailies. At any rate, I racked up enough Necrotic Runes to get the shoulders, the gloves, the tabard, and two trinkets. The first trinket that I grabbed set me back 40 Runes. But with it came my very own Argent Crusader, complete with mount. He/she fights by your side for some arbitrary amount of time. At the end of that time, they bubble-hearth away. Freakin’… awesome! Honestly, if the price had been 200 Runes, I would have grinded it out. Granted, your defender is only level 60, but I can’t wait to take her out to farm Runecloth.

Along the way, I picked up another Feats of Strength achievement for grabbing the Argent Dawn tabard. And speaking of tabards, my guild tabard is yet again more colorful than blank gray. While I was grinding out said Runes, I partied up with a nearby Pally who, noticing my lack of guild, invited me to his. Since I had nothing to lose, I accepted the invitation and scoped out the roster. With about 15-20 level 70’s of varied classes on a 75-man roster, I definitely took a step up from my previous guild. But like Cool Kids, The Sunset Raiders generally don’t have a large percentage of their members online at any given time. They’re not a raiding guild. They’re not quite a leveling guild. Really, they appear to be 75 guys and girls wearing the same tabard and shooting the breeze in gchat. That’s not a bad place for me to be right now. Later on down the line, I’d like to get into a more serious raiding guild. But for now, it’s nice to grab party members for quests and world events in gchat rather than having to PUG everything

On a completely different note, I had to create a second bank alt this morning. Benjamins is pretty particular about only keeping cloth in his tabs. So, Enchantress was born and assigned the task of keeing an eye on all of the armor and weapons that Ellyza can’t disenchant yet. Devv is racking up pieces that require Enchanting level 275 to DE, but Ellyza is level-capped at 225. When she gets to 275, she’ll be dropping Arcane Dust and Lesser Planar Essence like it ain’t no thing. What cracks me up is that I actually spend time to choose the race, class, look, and name of my bank alts. I could just grab the first character that pops up and name them randomly for all it matters. But I careful crafted a female Human Priest with just the right hair and named her something ridiculously cliche before sending her into Ironforge to be neglected for the rest of her life. At least Benjamins has a tuxedo. Enchantress is in her starting zone clothes. I even stripped her of her mace so she didn’t poke an eye out. Jesus, this blog has gone downhill in a hurry. I’m just gonna stop while I’m only a little bit behind. Please go check out the newest post at Critical QQ if you feel dumber for having read my entry. It deals with the Arcane tree and it’s 100% less retarded than this post.

The Grind

Since my last post, Ellyza did, indeed, ding 20. I bought her enough mats to get her enchanting to 225. Consequently, Devv is building up a stockpile of Arcane Dust. For the first time since the old girl hit Outlands, Netherweave Cloth is now the bottleneck for creating Bolts of Imbued Netherweave. With a few stacks of Arcane Dust in the bank, she’s making the bolts as quickly as she can farm the cloth. Also in the bank tab are three stacks of Netherweb Spider Silk. As I mentioned earlier, Devv’s rested XP this time around was reserved for grinding rep and profession drops.

When Ellyza made it to 20, Devv was sitting on just shy of enough rested XP to make it to 67. Her actual progress was only about 6% of the way into 66. The three things that I wanted to accomplish before dinging 70 were getting Honored with Lower City and The Scryers and gathering enough Netherweb Spider Silk to make all of my tailoring specialization patterns. The beautiful thing about Terokkar Forest is the proximity of grinding areas for Sunfury Signets, Arakkoa Feathers, and Netherweb Spider Silk.

While gathering the silk, I noticed that the Spirit Towers were about to become capturable. General chat started filling up with talk of capping them. I quickly grabbed the repeatable quest and headed out into the open, flagging myself for PvP on the way. I started whispering people to see if they wanted to group for the capture of the towers. Moments later, I was the group leader of five level 70’s who had all done it before. There were some pretty intense moments, but we took the five towers without ever encountering the Horde. We would get to four towers and they would cap one that we had all strayed from. In the end, we left guys at each of the towers and never wound up fighting anyone to keep them.

Hours later, when the towers were up for grabs again, I got my first taste of world PvP. I rode up to the East tower and found a level 65 Blood Elf Mage nestled into the rear doorway. She was wearing about the same gear that I had equipped, including the Lupine helm that completely conceals the face. Because of this, she did not respond to me in any way. I opened with Dragon’s Breath and a quick Fire Blast. She finally moved, but was slow to start casting. She opened with Arcane Missiles as I prepped a Fireball with the added punch of Combustion. As I dropped a Blast Wave, I failed to notice what my nemesis was casting. I glanced at our respective healths and saw that I was at about 75% while she was down to about 25%. When I glanced back at Devv, she was a sheep. The Blood Elf blinked away and I was sure that she would either make a run for it, grab some potions, or use a Mana Ruby. She appeared to be doing nothing. When the Polymorph wore off, I was back to full health and all of my cooldowns were up. Oddly, my suspicions were correct. She had done nothing. Sitting on about 28% health, she started casting a Frostbolt. My next Dragon’s Breath stunned her and interrupted the cast. The Fire Blast that followed also stunned her. This bought me enough time to get most of a Fireball cast, which proved to be the fatal blow. And with it came my first HK from world PvP. Seconds later, the tower was mine. And there was much rejoice.

A bit later, Kotasky from the guild popped online. As a newly-minted 60, she was working her way through the mountain of quests in Hellfire Penninsula. I wrapped up in Terokkar and flew out to meet her near Honor Hold. It had been 10 or 15 levels since we had last grouped. We knocked out a couple quests before Horgath popped online. He was all hyped up for an instance. We decided to hit Blood Furnace for some quick goodies. With two Mages and a Hunter, we’d have to be pretty selective about who filled the last two slots. We determined that to be effective, we’d have to hold out for a tank and a healer. Instead, we took another Hunter and a Warrior who had never tanked. Yeah. That will be the subject of my next post.

Two Down, Two to Go

Last night, Ellyza dinged 18. She now has points spread across all three trees. Something that occurred to me as I was distributing them last night is that Disc Priests get very little press. Shadow and Holy are the rock stars of the class. But I’ll be damned if Discipline doesn’t have some interesting talents. I may have to re-think my leveling spec for her.

Last night was kind of fun for me. Despite the fact that I hate Auberdine, I wound up enjoying my questing quite a bit. I quickly discovered that I wouldn’t have to do as many quests to get to 18 as I had originally planned. So I wound up getting pretty selective, abandoning any quest that I found to be cumbersome. I shot through the forests and hills of Auberdine, ending the misery of Rabid Thistle Bears and stalking Moonstalkers. I racked up some nice rep with Darnassus in the process. I’ll follow the same process as Devv, getting Exalted with Darnassus before I reach 60 so my first Epic will be a Stormsaber. Draenei just look so much cooler on those cats than dumpy Elekks.

As I wandered about Darnassus, I came across several Night Elves in their mid teens. With a ton of low level mats at my disposal, I offered to do some enchants on just about every toon I came near. Many were quite appreciative of my efforts, one even tipping me 1G. Now I know that doesn’t sound like much, but 1G is a nice chunk of change for a level 18 on a separate account from my main. It easily paid for all of her level 18 training and repairs with about 50S left to bank.

I wound up going to bed relatively early last night. I figured that if I could get Ellyza through two-and-a-half levels in an evening, I could easily get her to 20 tonight. Then the chills set in. A little while later, I felt some congestion building up and dripping into my throat. Booooo! So, I might not get Ellyza to her magic number this evening, but I’m sure it will be soon. The family is moving into a new house on Friday, so I need to kick this thing in the next five days. That said, my WoW time will probably give way to naps if this thing takes hold of me like the last cold did. If my next update is a few days off, you’ll know that the Zicam didn’t quite cut it.