Unique Ways to Level

I am not a fan of traditional leveling methods in most MMORPG. Since I mainly play World of Warcraft these days, that’s what I’ll be talking about. After running through a story or quest chain once, I’m pretty much done with it and I don’t want to do it again unless I absolutely have to. So over the years I’ve found other ways to level my characters, whether it’s purchasing boosts or through pet battles.

At the moment I have 11 level 80 characters (almost all of them leveled through timewalking, minus my main) and 27 characters at level 70 (almost all of those were leveled up with pet battles). When a legion trainer pops up who is repeatable (especially snail race) I know it’s going to be a great time to level a character (or two).

With the release of The War Within came a new race – the Earthen. This race has a bonus to exploration, and it didn’t take long for people to take advantage of that. The addon above (Dystinct Earthen Skyriding) allows you to level from 10-70 within a few hours time. It does take some time to get used to the method, you do need to use the fancy dragonflight and not just basic flying. You also need to spam a movement key as you fly for a lot of the discovery to actually register. Nothing to do with the addon.

I created a warlock since I don’t currently have one at 80 and I would like one – it took me 15 minutes to do their starter tutorial (I died, was rushing things) and then I was off, flying around Azeroth. After two hours of flying, I was level 42. It took me approx 1-2 minutes per level. I could probably shorten this time significantly as I become more familiar with the addon. For example, it doesn’t warn you before you fly over top of faction cities, and 6x (so far) I was shot out of the air by alliance guards. Not ideal. Instead of trying to get back to my body in a hostile land, I would just talk to the ghost and continue on my way.

It’s a really fun change of pace, and then once I hit 70 I have the option of doing more timewalking (if I’m not sick of it by then) or I can wait for a legion trainer daily and grind out some pet battles. Last night I managed to get from 70-80 on my mage with that method. Sure, she doesn’t have any gear, but that’s not a big deal as I have a lot of warbound stuff or I can just craft her some. Most likely I’ll just leave her at 80 without gear as I don’t really play that class, at all. I just like having an alt army available, if I need one.

I did also set 10 characters aside who are forever parked at their covenants, doing the covenant table twice a day. This is mostly for farming pet tokens and reputation, nothing fancy. These characters don’t really have a purpose, I don’t “need” 65 characters, but it’s nice to have, fun to level, and you just never know.

Have your own unique way of leveling up if you’re not in the mood to quest? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Organizing Things (again)

When life is stressing me out (as it so often does these days) my default mode is ‘go clean and organize something’. That’s how I ground myself, feel productive, and move on from whatever it is in life that I can’t control right then. This morning I decided the cleaning that needed to be done was my Warcraft account.

I’ve multiboxed in Warcraft to some degree since BFA era, through Blizzard’s decision to no longer allow broadcasting, and then no longer allowing any ‘streamlining’ at all. At the end of 2024, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to continue with so many accounts, and so I moved all of my gold making over to my main account. That’s 20 level 10 characters who were not in use besides doing auction house stuff once a day.

Then I took a break from the game for a while, returning just over a month ago. I decided this reduction of accounts was a silly idea, and I wanted my auction house characters over on my 2nd account so that I could continue to do AH stuff while I used my main account. I also wanted them separated again just to give a bit of distance (even just visual distance) between my ‘fun’ characters and the ‘work’ ones. Plus, that would free up 20 character slots – since I was at 60/65, this would be a big deal. Paying for the 2nd account is no trouble at all, though I imagine I’ll only keep a few months of game time up, my main account I tend to do a few years at a time.

At 5am when I got up (the family gets up at 7am and you better believe I enjoy those two hours alone) I decided to shuffle everything over to the second account, after creating 20 new characters over there. Along the way I discovered I have 10 guilds that I’m the owner of. I thought I had about 5. Whoops.

I cleaned out banks, took stock of inventory, and while I didn’t actually set up the items on the AH, they’re at least in the mailboxes of the characters who will post them – tomorrow. I like to do my postings first thing in the morning, and I’d rather just skip a day and do it the next day than post it late.

It was refreshing to do such a deep clean and organization of my characters. I plan on purchasing some bag upgrades for all of them (just the main inventory bags) along with their bank slots (in preparation for the next update where all of that will change) and the reagent bank. I’m hoping this is enough to secure the cost for the level 10 characters but we’ll have to see. I don’t want to have to pay thousands to unlock their banks, and they also won’t be leveling up to 80 any time soon (that’s when you get those slots for free, supposedly). I also went through and deleted any characters who were not level 70, freeing up a few more slots. Why? Well, I wanted to make some earthen and experiment with leveling up through exploration discovery. I figured for any characters who were between 10-70 it would be easier / faster to just start over rather than leveling. Anyone who is 70+ can do pet battles or timewalking to earn their last 10. We’ll see how it goes, for now I haven’t created anyone new on my main account.

The rest of the day I meandered around and found it a bit difficult to focus. The world is in a state, and I’m trying to keep my head down and my family safe. The heat is slowly creeping back (gross) and honestly, gaming is a nice relaxing distraction.

I hope everyone out there is doing OK (well, ‘everyone’ the 3 people who maybe read this blog from time to time) and if you’re not, let’s have a chat. Maybe we can vent to one another. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Achievements

I finally unlocked the Earthen race on my NA account (remember I decided to swap back? Well I did, I just have too much progress to give up) which means I can try out this ‘speed leveling’ addon that I found, where you level up via exploration. I’m thinking I might even make a YouTube video out of it, showing my progress on my first run. It is said that you can level from 10-70 within 1-2 hours just by exploration (Earthen have a 200% bonus, plus there are other xp bonuses going on at the moment) and I’d like to see if it’s true. The addon is called ‘Dystinct Earthen Skyriding‘ and you can find it over on Curseforge.

Of course I’m not the greatest at flying, so we’ll just have to see how it turns out. I’m excited though, I love finding different ways of leveling, my usual is to do pet battles from 10-70, then timewalking 70-80. I always have pets to level.

Have you used this addon before? How did it work out for you? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

Mount #494/495

I decided to splurge a bit and purchased the raven mount pack that was for sale in the bnet shop, since I had converted a bunch of tokens into balance earlier this week. That brings me up to 495 mounts total, and I really just love the way the raven looks. I used to feed a pair of ravens at our post up North, nothing but good things to say about them.

The climb to 500 mounts is within reach, finally.

Gold Making – Week 29 / 2025

Another week of ‘ok’ gold making sales, which I’m happy about considering we’re at the end of a season when people are typically playing less. As normal, the sales come from transmog, recipes, and pets. I don’t deal in current expansion items (or at least, I don’t typically. An exception would be the clickies you get from doing activities as a needed class. Those are current tier and I usually farm them pretty easily and then stuff them all up on the AH.

I didn’t post auctions every day, sometimes I burn out or I just don’t have enough time so I leave them and deal with them the next day. This helps me avoid burn out, and I just need to remind myself sometimes that it’s a game, and I shouldn’t stress too much.

I’m back playing on my NA account (as I mentioned in my previous post) so hopefully I can get a few more goals knocked off my list. We’ll just have to see. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!