Classic Era Milestones

The other night I hit level 60 for the first time on Classic era. It's not as exciting as it sounds, considering that I already had four 60s from transfers/clones, and this one didn't start era at level one either, but still... the character in question is my tauren druid, who was level 42 when I made the decision to activate her on era, so she "only" had 18 levels left to go, but those did take me quite a while. Considering that I both raid and still want to limit my time spent in Classic to a casual amount of hours, there just aren't that many opportunities to spend time on levelling alts. I'd usually do a bit of questing on an evening here or there, but then I'd go for pretty long periods of time without any progress whatsoever.

What has levelling on Classic era been like compared to OG Classic? Well, in terms of speed it seems to be about the same, as my druid's /played was a bit over nine days, which is about on par with other characters I levelled in Classic. It did feel a lot more... quiet though. The higher-level-but-not-quite-endgame zones are always less populated than the lower-level ones, and with era's lower population that was even more pronounced.

This had both pros and cons: As someone who enjoys gathering, I loved that there were herbs everywhere, and it wasn't unusual that all the yellow dots distracted me from actual questing for a while. Selling some of those spoils on the auction house was a good money-maker too. Competition for quest mobs was never an issue, and I ran into many rares.

The downside of course is that it's much harder to find people to do group quests with, and it's easy for your quest log to become quite cluttered with them. The ones that were important to me I usually managed to get done eventually by asking guildies for help after a while.

Dungeons are in a similar place and I didn't get to run as many of them as I would have liked, though I did heal Zul'Farrak once and tanked both a Sunken Temple and a BRD run. People are running dungeons, at max level too, it's just that on an individual level, the lower population kind of requires the stars to align in just the right way, especially if you have limited time to play. It's not unusual to ask whether anyone's interested in a dungeon in guild or LFG and get no response, or to encounter the even more frustrating opposite: meaning that you finally see a group setting out for a dungeon you need, but you yourself can't join at that particular moment because you need to log off in ten minutes. Basically as I've said before, there's nothing you can't get done in Classic era, but it often requires patience.

I will note that despite the slowness and frequent solitude, I didn't find the fifties to be a drag or struggle at all. I remember mentioning in the past that I used to not be a fan of this level range as I don't particularly love many of the vanilla endgame zones, and when the solo quests start to dry up, everything feels increasingly grindy in general. However, I've also noted in the past that if you do have an interest in grouping and your eye on raiding eventually, it goes a lot easier as there are things like attunements to work towards that provide you with alternative goals to simply gaining XP. For example my guildies let me tag along to an UBRS at level 55 which allowed me to get my BWL attunement done early, and nobody minded me signing up to heal AQ20 at level 58/59 either.

There was a particularly sweet bit of synchronicity to my druid's first raid at level 60 as well. When I joined the Warriors of Sunlight back in July, Garr dropped a Thunderfury binding in one of my first MC runs and I remember that being one of the first really exciting moments I experienced with the guild. Well, this week I decided to switch to my druid for our weekly binding run, and Geddon's binding dropped... meaning that the guy who got the Garr binding back in July could finally complete his Thunderfury.

I've written in the past about how the creation of a Thunderfury is always a special occasion: how it made me feel connected to my first Classic guild even when I didn't really fit in otherwise, and how similar yet different it was when the Forks serendipitously managed to finally get a Thunderfury just in time for the release of Naxx. In the same vein, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy to help with and bear witness to Tefflar of WoS getting his Thunderfury - it's not the guild's first one and it won't be the last, but it was my first with them and felt like a nice way of putting a capstone on my first few months spent with the guild and in Classic era in general.