Reaching 60
Getting to the final level… 60. Every little boy’s dream! And so begins part 5 of the sub series of First Steps in World of Warcraft.
This one will hopefully be shorter than the previous ones, all we have to talk about is getting the max level and the life after… should be just fine.
In the previous article we talked about the PVP aspect of the game. Not what it is now, but what it was like in the World of Warcraft that is now known as Vanilla or more recently Classic. You can read all about that here[Link].
So as mentioned before in several articles, getting to level 60 was the ultimate goal for everyone, for some reason we all thought that there is some hidden thing behind that numbered gate. The effort was of course massive to get there. I mentioned that just to get your mount you had to reach level 40 which is well beyond the halfway point of the leveling experience. That in of itself took months for me. I did enjoy the leveling experience until 40 and a little bit past it. But at some point you get bored of the same “do this quest get an experience type of reward” and move on to the next “same thing different name”. You start thinking of getting through it as quickly as possible to get to that max level so that you don’t have to worry about that experience bar filling up. So you start rushing there, through whatever means necessary.
At the time there were two main ideas about getting to 60, one was to grind on mobs until you finally got there, or do dungeons which provided experience as well as some loot. You could also mix those up and try to be as effecient with it as possible. This was before the time of the get to 60 in 2 days types of guides on the internet. Most people didn’t know how to get there quickly, but some were quicker than others and they didn’t want to share how they did it.
The way I remember I leveled to 60 is until about 55 I went through dungeons/instances and at 55 is when I got really tired of looking for groups to get into for those instances. Remember this is before the Looking for Group(LFG) mechanic, this was during the LFG channel time. Where you sat for hours sometimes spamming “LFG for Strat – Need Healer”. Sometimes it would work out and you would get a group, other times you would seem to have gotten a group and someone would drop right out midway and you have to start all over with the group finder. It was a really unpleasant experience. So for about 10 levels I did that, and then decided it would be more consistent to just find a good area and start grinding the experience.
The area I picked was Winterspring. The reason I picked it was because one, as I mentioned before, I needed a level 60 area, and two I love snowy areas, we also talked about that. The advantage of being a paladin was that although you were incredibly slow at bringing mobs down, you could fight mobs that were much higher level than you. Self healing was incredibly helpful here. So I went to Winterspring, took me about a week and half from what I remember of just mindlessly killing the mobs there. This style of play wasn’t new to me, I played this way Lineage 2, that was actually the only way to play Lineage 2. So I killed and killed and killed, and finally got to level 60! I was so excited and felt like I accomplished something incredible. There was no more experience bar fear. I didn’t need to log out at an Inn anymore to get the double experience for being rested. I could do whatever I wanted.
The only problem with that, is there wasn’t a whole lot to do after 60. You could do the same instances get better gear, or your other option was to try and find a guild that did end game instances, There were very few guilds that had the gear and the man power to do that. It took 40 well geared people to do Onyxia for example. To get into one of those you had to do what was called “getting keyed”, which unlike what happens to you car when someone doesn’t like you, you have to go through and extremely long processes of completing quests, some of which would take you to the instances I mentioned, finding ingredients and then making the key and only then were you allowed to participate in End Game content. You did all that once again to get better gear, but if that was the end game what was your gear for? It was at that point that I quit the game for a while, until Burning Crusade expansion came out. Which made all the gear you got in End Game content obsolete. The quest rewards were better than what you and 39 of your guildmates struggled night after night to get. So that was the really it for level 60 experience. Once the expansion came out the level limit was raised to 70 I believe and you just kept on grinding.
Next time we meet we will talk about the first expansion to World of Warcraft – The Burning Crusade! And all the joy that brought with it.
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