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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Not The Realm First Shaman

After few hours of sleep as the sun rose on Saturday morning I was back on the path to 80, only to hear from my guildmates that the Alliance Shaman I had met earlier had hit 80 while I slept. I kept questing on for a bit more, somewhat depressed by the fact that I had failed. I had played like the no-lifers, but apparently not hard enough. I saluted those with less life and took the loss with pride.

While hacking onwards, I happened to find out that a guildmate had spent time skilling up Alchemy and had just hit 425 skill. This detail was somewhat critical for me - my Shaman is a Jewelcrafter, and the only thing at that point blocking me from hitting maximum skill in Jewelcrafting was the lack of raw meta gems - no other feasible recipe would grant skill past 430. Alchemists could transmute them from uncommon gems. So I asked if he could being the task of transmuting about 30 of them for me, expecting that the transmute had a long cooldown.

"Um, this transmute has no cooldown. How many do you want?" ... "WHAT?!". Okay, I could've researched this tidbit in advance, but it was news to me at that point. It was time to skip questing for a while. I had already skilled up Jewelcrafting a bit - I had grabbed all the horribly overpriced Cobalt and Saronite Ore stacks I could find from the auction house along the way and crafted some horribly overpriced gems to take advantage of the market situation. I immediately went on a mad buying spree, getting every piece of ore I could find, prospecting it to raw gems used to transmute metagems. After about an hour of juggling with the materials and crafting gems I was at the 430 skill level and 8500 gold poorer - but it was all worth it. I was able to unload a ton of materials to my guildmate for enough meta gem transmutes for the final push to 450 Jewelcrafting. Clock was ticking. At any moment someone else, possibly someone from the Alliance side, could be doing the exact same thing. There were already some 80s around who would probably take a look at their tradeskills next.

After a mad dash to push out the last cut meta gems, I hit 450 Jewelcrafting at around 1PM on Saturday - Feat of Strength - Realm First! Grand Master Jewelcrafter - mission accomplished. Everyone on the server got a message whenever someone completed a Realm First and the whispers congratulating on the feat went on for minutes and it felt incredible. No other player would be able to claim that on my server. Ever. Nice consolidation prize to offset the disappointment of losing the prestige of being the first Shaman to 80.

Ding! Realm First! With packs overflowing with fresh meta gems (78)

The side-effect of the realm wide announcement. The congratulations kept going for a while.

My friend ended up just a few points short of 450 after transmuting the metagems, so with a big grin on my face we were off to find him some herbs for high level flasks that would give him the final points needed to hit 450. Time was of the essence as nobody had seen a realm first message for Alchemist yet. Just one small problem - his character was level 73 and the herbs were available only in Storm Peaks and Icecrown. So we were off to the small area of Storm Peaks accessible without a flying mount to pick flowers. I flew around aggroing any monsters that stood in the way of herb nodes while he farmed the last bits needed beyond what the auction house could provide. Ding! Realm First! Grand Master Alchemist! Nice reward for him as well, and proof that even a "casual" gamer could get a Realm First Feat of Strength if he puts some effort to it.

Final Push and Retrospective

As the Realm First Shaman title was long gone, I grabbed some additional sleep. I got back to questing in the Saturday evening. After hitting level 79 the announcements trickled in for Realm Firsts on all classes and races while I soldiered on. A couple of guildmates managed to hit 80 before me, and when I finally hit 80 around 1AM EET Sunday morning, I was fifth player in my guild at level 80 and, if I'm not completely mistaken, second Horde Shaman to reach the level cap.

Total time since the launch of the expansion was about 74 hours, and I actually played about 65 hours out of those 74. I was very tired and I'm not sure I would do it again - it was harder than I thought and I bow to the most serious levelers who got there almost 24 hours faster than I did.

I learned a few potentially interesting things along the way. There is content during the level 70-80 run for almost 100 hours of casual playing - amazing amount for an expansion, and there is absolutely zero need to "grind" anything. There are quests everywhere - about 1000 new quests in the expansion zones in total. More importantly the quests stay fresh and present interesting storylines and varying activities.

Everything along the way is also tuned for the casual gamer - easy, accessible and with hardly any group quests. Each zone had it's small share of them and the final zone, Icecrown, caps it with a special set of about 25 group quests clearly designed to be done at level 80. However, even if you skip every group quest you still hit 80 well before running out of content even without any rested experience as there are so many quests everywhere. Along the way I skipped the early 5-man instances - Nexus, Utgarde Keep and Azjol-Nerub - simply because I was so much ahead the curve that I couldn't find groups for them and still I was nowhere close to running out of content before being high enough level to proceed to the next area.

Later on during my push to 80, as others in my guild who started a bit later but slept a little less started to catch me up, I completed all the late-game instances once to do the related quests. If you spend some additional time with the 5-man instances, you could say that there is almost enough content for leveling up two separate characters without having to re-do hardly any content. Two separate starting areas get you up to level 72 with completely unique things to do and beyond that each zone has more quests than you strictly need to proceed. The sheer volume of interesting and varied content is just staggering. Truly casual players, spending maybe ten hours a week with the game can expect the expansion to last well into the new year before they are even 80 - and that's just the leveling content.

"Okay, so you hit level 80 almost two weeks ago, what took you so long with the review?" one might ask. Well, if you ignore the fact that last week I got sidetracked by the zombie carnage of Left 4 Dead, the answer would be the endgame. You only level in World of Warcraft for a small fraction of the time you play it - raids, heroics, factions, reputation rewards, daily quests... there's much more to the expansion than just the race to 80. But more on that a bit later...

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Road to Level 80 - Part 1Page 3: Road to Level 80 - Part 2Page 4: Road to Level 80 - Part 3Page 5: Gameplay, FeaturesPage 6: Features, cont.Page 7: Raids, EndgamePage 8: Visuals, PerformancePage 9: The Annoying BitsPage 10: Conclusions, Scoring

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