Over the Hump

The thirties were not the most fun of level ranges in Vanilla. You had no mount yet, yet you had to range further and further afield to find quests - particularly painful on classes that don't get some kind of speed boost, like a hunter's Aspect of the Cheetah or a druid's Travel Form (*cough*mypally*cough*). There's also a bit of a dearth of good dungeons in the low thirties... who ever wants to do SM GY? And the only Alliance players who ever want to go to Razorfen Kraul are warriors for their class quest (if I recall correctly).

I've written about questing in Stranglethorn Vale and Thousand Needles, but aside from that I also spent some time in Arathi killing kobolds and Syndicate, and more in Desolace, though I made a point of staying away from anything centaur-related. The quests associated with the goblin caravan turned out to be sadly broken, but from what I hear no private server has got those right yet. Also, Rexxar and his pet bear are jerks. (The latter killed me after chasing me halfway across the map... she just wouldn't let go!)

Either way, I'm proud to say that I'm finally over that hump (thus the title of this post) and hit level 40! There is no ding shot as I was actually in the middle of tanking a Scarlet Monastery run at the time, but I noted down that I hit this milestone after a /played time of four days and about nine and a half hours. So just getting from 30 to 40 took me almost two days of played time, about the same amount of time as 1 to 30! In fairness though, I wasn't trying to be terribly efficient about it (or else I wouldn't be levelling a paladin as prot/holy). I also can't help but wonder how much of that time was spent in combat, compared to running around, sitting on flight paths and idling at the Ironforge auction house. I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than fifty percent.

Of course, hitting level 40 means that I'm finally able to get my first mount! And this is where being a paladin has its perks, because they get their basic mount for free. It counts as a regular paladin ability and doesn't even require you to have had riding training. This is good, because while I've been trying to save up money, I still would have come up a bit short in terms of gold, mostly because ability training is horrifically expensive, and bank space is even more so. (And while the latter is largely optional, I couldn't resist buying some, considering the alternative would have been to *gasp* get rid of some items that I wanted to keep.)

Even though I'm sure that they will take even longer, I'm looking forward to the next couple of levels because a) I finally have a horse, b) they will take me to zones like Tanaris, Feralas and the Hinterlands, some of my favourite Vanilla WoW zones, and c) SM Cathedral and Zul'Farrak are fun and worth re-running more than once if the opportunity arises.