Dig Through Old Azeroth With Me

The shelf of half-finished characters

Every few months I open the character screen and look at the shelf. Not the main, who is parked in a Pandaria tea garden, but everyone else: a gnome mage frozen at level 31, a tauren druid who never properly left Mulgore, and a death knight whose only trophy is a finished starter chain. Each one began with a good idea. None of them got past the stretch of the game that feels like homework.

This entry is about that stretch, and about the question I keep putting to myself: when is it worth doing the long way, and when is it better to hand that part over so I can reach the content I actually sat down for?

What I lose when I rush

I like the slow route for a reason. Walking through Duskwood at level 20 teaches you where the roads bend. The Deadmines taught me what a pull looks like long before any addon did. Skip a zone and you skip the map it would have drawn in your head, and the old Azeroth I write about depends on that map. So any character I plan to write about gets levelled by hand, with a notebook open beside the keyboard.

Still, a notebook about old places ought to be honest about the other side. Not every alt is a travel diary. Some are tools: a second healer so a friend’s group can fill its last slot, a tailor to keep a guild in bags, a monk I need in a particular raid by a particular week. For those, the levelling stretch is a gate rather than a view.

Where a WoW Boost sits in my planning

This is where a WoW Boost comes into my own thinking. I used to file it under shortcuts for the impatient, and I had the shape of it wrong. It is a way of moving a character past the repeatable part of the game so that your evenings go to dungeons, professions and the group content that no solo quest chain replaces. If you want to see how a service like that is laid out, read its page the way you would read a patch note: for what it changes, and for what it leaves to you.

What it leaves to you is the interesting part. A character that arrives at the endgame door still needs gear choices, a rotation you can actually play and a feel for the dungeon it is about to walk into. Nobody can hand you that last one. It comes from running the place, getting it wrong once, and writing down why.

Three questions before I move any alt

I keep these on a sticky note, and I answer them in order.

1. What should this character be doing in its first week at the top? If the honest answer is “looking at scenery”, I walk it there myself.
2. Who is waiting for it? A real group with a real slot is a reason to save time. A vague plan to “play it someday” is not.
3. What would the long way teach me that I still want to learn? If the answer is a class, a zone or a dungeon I have never seen, the long way wins every time.

The monk who refused to retire

My Pandaria monk is the clearest case for doing it slowly. Every evening of that levelling run went into the notes that became the Mistweaver quick reference: fistweaving, mana tea, and the small timing habits that no tooltip explains. A fast route would have gotten me to the same level and left me with nothing to write down.

The reverse also holds. When I prepared my spare characters for a new patch, the useful work was never the levelling. It was sorting out which currencies and items mattered, which I wrote up in this planning post. That is the sort of job where I am glad to have the alt standing at the door already.

What goes on the shelf next

There is no verdict here, only a habit. Walk what you want to see, and shorten what you only need to use. Then spend the time you saved on something you will remember, like a dungeon at its original pace or a rotation you finally understand.

The current pile is on the Now Unpacking page, and the older entries are in the Back Issues. If you have an alt of your own that has been sitting on the shelf, write to me and tell me which stretch is stopping you. I would like to hear which of the three questions you answered first.