In part 3 of First Steps in World of Warcraft, I want to talk about two main milestones in WoW:
- Leveling to 40
- Leveling to 60
Why these two? Well your life in game changed dramatically once you reached each one of those.
Let’s start with Level 40. When you started in the game, there was a sort of a mini milestone at level 10, you got a couple of your class skills. For example as a hunter at level 10 you got your pet, there are other examples of this. So once you got to 10 and got to experience your first milestone you would look to your next one, which was 40.
The reason you were so excited for your level 40 is twofold from what I remember. One you got to start you class quest for your weapon I believe or some item that was unique to your class. And the second, and this one is the most exciting one, you got your mount!!!
Doesn’t sound like much, but let me tell you WoW was a very different game back then. Your gear didn’t just drop willy nilly, you had to go to instances(more on those later) and fight hard, so when you could get a good piece of gear from a quest you were excited. And again the mount part was so exciting, the game world was and is still very very large, and you spent a lot of time walking. There were two classes, that I can remember, that had a boost to their walking or running speed Hunters and Druids. The rest of us ran at the default pace for 40 levels, and it wasn’t your modern day WoW 40 levels of just zipping through the content either.
There were a lot of benefits to having it be that way, and just as many negative effects, which eventually were reason enough for Blizzard to move the ability to get a mount down to level 20 and increase the speed at which you gained levels. So the effect of it is very different nowadays, but back then, getting to 40 and getting your first mount was such an achievement. You could go 40% faster… listen, not some measly 10 or even 20%…40%. It was amazing.
The other thing for Paladins, the class that I rolled when I started playing, you could get a free mount by completing a quest. It was a long quest and kind of tricky from what I remember but it was free. The only other class that could get a free mount were Warlocks.
Once you got to level 40 your next goal was to “max out” meaning get to level 60. Although mathematically it seems like 20 levels is ⅓ of the journey, in reality it felt and from what I heard was the same amount of time and effort as the previous ⅔ of the leveling experience. So getting a mount and any decent gear through quests or instances helped a lot. But for the most part you went out and did the same thing leveling through quests and if you had enough friends in game or a guild you could go do the group content like instances and level that way too. But most of us didn’t have a 4 other people available at all times to go do some group content so we just solo leveled through the game. I honestly don’t remember much of the content past 40, because it felt like filler on my way to 60, but I do remember one place, Southshore.
Southshore was an alliance town, in a very close vicinity to a horde town of Tarren Mill in the same area. So this was your first real exposure to the two faction gameplay. Horde quested in the same area as the alliance did. If you were on a PVP server you would get into a ton of fights, if not you could way and /dance with them all day or maybe even do an honorable duel battle. That area was not level 40 content but you were on your way and very close. There were Ruins of Alterac up north from Southshore that I was in grinding my last few levels away and it’s that area I remember the most on my way to 60. I don’t know why that spot specifically is stuck in my mind, maybe because it was the last time me and Bob played together at the same level as we used on our way to 40. Or maybe because it was so much tougher than other areas that it just kind of stuck there. I really look forward to heading back there once Classic releases and seeing what it is that caused it to get stuck in my brain for so long.
Let’s talk a little bit about the instances. These were types of group content, in other MMOs they would be called dungeons. The major difference was that each group got their own Instance of the dungeon, so that there wasn’t any overlap with other groups and the content could be tailored towards a specific number of people. At the time it was really revolutionary piece of technology. The other major thing from other MMOs that this helped fix was kill stealing by other groups of people out to troll you. It was a very protected environment for you and your group. Initially these instances would start you out with 5 person content and then at level 60 you got to experience 40 person content. Which was very similar in taste but at a much grander scale. Its these 40 person content that everyone strove towards, it was called THE END GAME. That magic phrase was every little dwarf paladin’s dream. I never got to experience it until well past the the releases of later expansions. Reason being I didn’t have enough time or consistency to dedicate to gearing myself or finding a group to do the content with. It was very similar to having a second job, and I already had a very difficult job and didn’t want any more stress in my life, and let me tell you getting 40 strangers to organize and do something in coherent way was a trip! My hat is off to those guild leaders that were able to do it. Now a days the content is broken up into 5 person, 10 person, 20 person and I don’t think there is any 40 person content out there any more. In the previous article I talked about my first experience in an instance you can read up on that. To summarize it though, it blew… My… Mind!
Once again this has gotten way longer than I expected, we need a part 4! In part 4 I would like to talk about PVP and finally reaching level 60 and what it was like to live in a world where you had no numerical milestone to reach. Until then!
P.S.
Just remembered a story from the leveling days, that I want to add in here. When I was in search of guild I found this one guild I don’t remember the name of it that I joined up with, and it wall was going well until I needed some help and no one would help me. I quit the guild, which is something I did in the past and had no problems. But this time around the guild leader chatted me asking me why I left and I told him/her and they went on berate me. I was called a leach and all other kinds of things, I was in the middle of an instance run with a group so it made it difficult to process what was happening. But I felt terrible, being really young at that time and generally a good person I felt so wronged. For some reason I felt the obligation to prove to that person that I wasn’t a bad person, that it just wasn’t working out and they were having none of it. So I felt terrible, interesting how an opinion of a nobody in a virtual game world can have that affect on you. So I started talking to my group at the time and asked them if they felt that way about me, again random people that I did not know, I wanted their opinion of me to be positive to balance out the negative crap I was getting from that person. And they had the nicest things to say and one person even invited me into their guild! Thank you kind people that kept me from going into depressing because of some loser in the game world that I never saw or met again and don’t even remember the name of.
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