Whence the blog

A week ago, I was plugging along at 49, not particularly excited about hitting 50. Level 50 is a lot like turning 20: your last big birthday was 18, when you became an adult and gained a lot of rights, and your next one is 21, when you finally don't have to worry about fake IDs and the like, but nothing happens at 20. At 40, as everyone knows, you get a mount, and if you're a warrior like me, you get to wear plate armor. 40 is the level when you really feel like you've finally reached maturity: you've been around long enough that you can hold your own in most places in Azeroth, and you've basically earned the right to a driver's license. 60 is the big time, but what happens at 50? Not much; you enter a new PvP bracket, and you train up a little. That's pretty much it.

Level 60 seems to me sort of like my Taekwondo black belt. I mention this not to brag; my black belt doesn't mean that I'm good at Taekwondo, or even that I'm at all athletic (I am, as my profile says, an amicable lardass). I started practicing Taekwondo in 8th grade, and by 10th grade I was a black belt. At no point along the way was I in good shape, or particularly good at self-defense. My black belt was awarded by the American Taekwondo Association, which is kind of the McDonald's of the martial arts world: it's the largest franchise, it's accessible to pretty much everybody (eg, the ATA regularly awards black belts to people in wheel chairs, which wouldn't be so strange, but Taekwondo is a martial art that focuses heavily on kicking), it's publicly traded, etc. In order to earn an ATA black belt, all you have to do is memorize a bunch of "forms" (which are sort of like choreographed dances, but with kicking and punching) and break a few boards with your hands and feet (this is nowhere near as hard as it seems: you're breaking through one inch of knot-free, straight-grained white pine, which is only slightly tougher than paper). This can be accomplished with minimal effort in two or three years. So my ATA black belt is like level 60 in that pretty much anybody can get there if they're patient, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

What I mean is that both the black belt and level 60 are what people aim for from the time they get started, but once you get there, you discover that it's not the end of the line, but really the beginning. In ATA, you advance through the various color belts until you reach the first-degree black belt, but there are nine degrees of black belt, each exponentially more difficult to achieve than the one below it. It's not hard to get a first-degree black belt, but it requires real skill and dedication to get past the second degree (which is why I stopped at the first degree). Furthermore, black belts can choose specializations, ranging from sparring to board-breaking to weapons use. In the American Taekwondo Association, the color belts are basically money-makers, and the real instruction in martial arts takes place among black belts. Although I'm not yet 60, it seems to me that the real WoW game probably begins at 60: XP no longer matters, so you can focus on what you want to do, whether that's searching out all of your profession's recipes/patterns/schematics (or starting new professions), climbing the PvP rank tree, taking down all of the big end-bosses, assembling top-notch raid gear sets, or whatever. Of course, once the expansion comes out, getting to level 60 will change entirely, and the "real" game will start at level 70.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I suddenly became very interested in getting to 60. So there I was a week ago, puttering along at 49 and not really expecting to hit 60 for another several months, when I stumbled upon the Blasted Lands. At first, I wasn't particularly impressed, but then I picked up a set of five repeatable quests from a couple of blood elves. High-level people already know what I'm talking about, but these quests are great: they call upon you to gather drops from boars, scorpions, hyenas, vultures, and basilisks so you can trade them in for unique consumables that will boost your stats for an hour. The rewards aren't that great, but the pursuit of the quests is fantastic. There are only two hotspots where these creatures walk around in large numbers, so these quests can be really tiresome if a lot of people are around, but since I play mostly in the wee hours of the morning, that hasn't been much of a problem.

The drops are rare enough that you have to kill three or four beasts to get the item you need, but not so rare that you get bored. You can do all five quests at the same time, so you don't waste any time waiting for respawns (you just kill something else for a while). The creatures give you decent XP if you're in the upper 40s or lower 50s, and the quests give a decent amount of reward XP as well. All of this is to say that the Blasted Lands makes for the easiest and fastest grinding I've found. I started Friday evening, and by Saturday afternoon (yes, I did stop to sleep) I had gone from 49 to 51. Suddenly, 60 didn't seem so far away; for months I had been rising in level only once per week, but here I had jumped twice in less than 24 hours.

I did a little more in the Blasted Lands before finally tiring of it, and decided to go to Un'Goro Crater. This is another place that seems to be designed to make the long grind to 60 a little faster and more bearable. There are several quests to do here, and the mobs are packed in pretty densely. Plus, some of the quests that are supposedly for levels 55 and 56 are easily doable at 51. So another evening of questing in Un'Goro left me at 52.

So, having raced from 49 to 52 in less than a week, I'm now thinking I will be able to hit 60 before the end of August. In short, I've switched into hyperactive grinding mode (which has never happened to me before), and this blog will allow me to vent all of the boring news generated by this obsessive behavior without alienating my friends.

OK, now on to the stumble.