roddo

Costs $25. The price is the same whether your transfering to another account and staying on the same server, staying on the same acct and swapping servers, or swapping accts and servers. If changing servers you can get a free name change also, just make a level 1 on that server with the name of the character your moving. (Don't have room, refer a friend acct and make a level 1 before you do the transfer). Normal name changes cost $10.

 

mendicant

I leveled several alts by paying (gold not irl money) for fully epic'd paladins to boost me in SM cath. Everyone knows that cath is a good boosting place for 20-40. What most don't know is you'll actually make gold by paying people to boost you through. All you need is enchanting. I paid 30g/run (a price which attracted GOOD players). Make sure you armory them before you accept them.

The ONLY two classes that can do <12 min cath clears are mages and paladins. Do not accept offers from other classes who claim they can. They'll always say they can, and then they get there and they take 15+ minutes for a run. Warlock: "oh yeah I can seed the hell of them... 8 minute runs" -> What he means is that he will die a few times and even if he didn't the run would take 17 minutes. Just don't do it.

Anyway, from cath you'll get 2 radiant shards (12g ea on my server) and some other mats from the side-boss BOP green... those three disenchants alone yields ~30g for me. Silk, boe greens, occational boe BLUES (<- big money maker), and silver will make you plenty every run. In the process of being boosted 20->40 and paying 30g/run I think I made about 1000g.

 

Pyros

Yes, what I meant is you lose a bit of money compared to letting the alt account just die alone, which would have costed you nothing pretty much(assuming you level fast enough). But yeah it's 25$ whatever you do, and as you said you can use it for a free namechange if you named your other char IMWIZSTOOPID.


As for the SM trick, 12g for large radiant shards sound EXTREMLY expensive. What do you even use them for? Small radiants are good for the fire enchants on alts and stuff, people always buy these, but large radiant? Riding skill on gloves? Not sure that'd work on every server due to economy not being the same everywhere. However the other stuff, especially the nether essences, tend to sell pretty good anywhere.

 

jimbo229

thats a by server thing tho, i know on my server radiant shards are like 3g haha. i made a couple hundred gold boosting my warrior from 33-45 in cath tho...

you said pallys can clear in 12 minutes, ive boosted on both my 70 mage (crap gear) and my 70 pally (t5/za/badge gear) and it took about 5 min to clear on pally after i got the pull down, and 10ish on my mage

 

Thessaly

I just went the Protadin route doing this, and had an absolute blast. I found Thorium or even Mithril Shield Spikes to be sufficient, no need to go Felsteel until you hit 60 or so. The shield from Gnomergan, [Thermaplugg's Central Core] was fantastic and lasted from when I got it at 30 until the mid 40s when I picked up a [Blackskull Shield] on the cheap. For extra bonus fun, go Goblin Engineering and supplement your own AoE with explosives. Defense and spell dmg items were actually pretty difficult to find without sacrificing a good bit of armor, as most of them are cloth at lower levels.

Like mentioned previously, you are much better off AoE pulling quest mobs than just grinding. Some places this works out better than others, and Reckoning helped a lot with single mobs when necessary.

Ret seemed very monotonous to me: Seal, Judge, pray for proc, next mob. Prot leveling was constantly testing myself to see how many mobs I could safely pull, and using a variety of seals to keep myself alive.

 

Daigoro

Can anyone comment on this method. My direct interest would be powerleveling a DK once WOTLK hits and getting him up to 70ish so i can level with friends. Any information on why this exactly works and the chances are it will be nerfed?

It was my understanding that this situation works because the mobs in slave pens are still green to lvl 70's, meaning the mobs do not suffer the penalty imposed when a very high player kills a much lower mob. Is the method still effective when the mobs are red to a lvl 55, or does it get much more effective once the 55 gets with Orange level to said mobs.

Thanks for your input.

 

Pyros

It works because the mobs are green to the 70s. It also works out of instances, however you have to NOT use pets. Pets eat half the xp(they act as if they're still grouped with the player or something like that). At least hunter pets, not sure about lock pets. Chances of it getting fixed are slim, it worked preBC, and we used it to level our paladins, and 1year later, it's still not fixed. The method is effective at any level for the lower char, and it's good even up to 70 I guess since the mobs are elites.

As a reminder, that's the tech Millenium used to get the world first 70, he was ungrouped, and the guild pretty much had one group perma powerlvling him by killing everything he tagged. They had to stop a bit when he hit 68 or whatever, because the xp wasn't good enough in terrokar anymore, so his guildies had to level a bit to actually hit stuff in netherstorm, but with elite xp it wouldn't be an issue. The instance part lets you reset and be in your personal instance, but works fine outside too.

 

Daigoro

Is the chance to land tagging blows on the slavepen mobs tiny? Will it be a struggle for say a melee class to land the blows in a timely manner? Obviously this will be short lived because I will level up fast in the beginning but I may not get many weapon skill ups if a T6+ 70 group is blowing up the mobs before i can land any swings.

Do you forsee them nerfing this? or because its been around for basically all of TBC it will surely stay in the game?

 

Pyros

I think you'd have trouble hitting anything at 55 in slave pens, but I know there's a way to tag mobs without being in the level range, probably need to search this thread since this strat isn't new, it's in the thread somewhere.

 

Mideci

This method is an exploit pure and simple. As such, you can be banned for using it. It's likely they'll close the loophole, but regardless of whether they do, it's an exploit.

 

Sorcerer

Somehow i missed those bans for people who used dot & exit leveling. Did i? Definatly a game breaking thing also right?

 

Mideci

Can be banned and will be banned are not the same thing. Seen Athene lately by the way? They took dot and exit out of the game because it was being abused and wasn't in any way justifiable -- why should exiting the instance give full xp when staying in gives greatly reduced xp. "Tag and leave party" is an extreme version of "dot and run". I'm sorry if the language offends you, but it's an exploit. You can be banned for it. It's not game breaking. But then I suspect 99% of what people use Glider for isn't either.

 

Sorcerer

If its exploiting justify whats bad in it.
Just becouse you level up faster isnt exploiting since you do no harm whatsoever to anyone and amount of time that it speeds leveling for you is anyway wasted by other people at level 70 who actually help you. And this time could be easily transfered into gold considering the old good "time is money". Its just a good way of changing time(gold) into faster leveling. However i see it getting fixed soon.

Sorry to disapoint but athene was like months behind with showing the method of dot & exit, he got his few minutes of fame after releasing the video but whole method was known for much longer. It was even posted here in this tread few months ago and somehow i don't see people who used it banned.

 

janodandre

2.4.2 Undocumented changes, Blue posts

 

Valerian

The exploit is not because you are leveling faster its because you're working around a mechanic that is in place to prevent EXACTLY what you are doing. When a higher level character kills something a lower level char tagged or whatever its not supposed to give the lower level char full xp. You're circumventing this with the whole kicking out of party thing and THAT is the exploit. Its clearly not intended to be that way. Whether its "good" or "bad" is irrelevant. Its an exploit.

 

◊ Merple

I'd argue we'll continue to find a way to do this until they fix the problem (absurdly long reroll process, yes still).

But, do it until they fix it, then wait for someone to find the next way to powerlevel a character. At some point, I'd imagine Blizzard will release something akin to the DK system, whereby if you've got a character over 70 (or whatever), you'll be able to create new character at 55 or so of any class.

On Break?

 

djhbrd

Please, no. Please, please, please, please never do this. I know I compare WoW to Dark Age of Camelot a fair amount, but I have to bring up this anecdote. In DAoC they released a system where if you had a level 50 on your account (The level cap was 50 in that game), when you started a new character you could type "/level" and receive enough experience to instantly hit level 20. The starting zones became empty, new players had nobody to learn to play with, and many newer players just quit.

Think about WoW and how many players have level 70s. I would say 60 to 70 percent of players have at least one level 70, even he or she is just geared in welfare S2 and leveling blues and logs on once a week to play AV. If this was implemented (with Wrath or 3.0, let's say), this would really hurt new subscribers. Blizzard should be looking to pick up a lot of new players with the hype from the new expansion, especially since a lot of players on my server at least are running into some serious burnout, and many aren't planning to come back for Wrath. Not only will most people be leveling their 70s again, but people won't even be leveling up Deathknights in Durotar or Dun Morogh. Not only will this make the starting areas into ghostlands, but 80% of Azeroth will become very empty as well.

Yes well, legibility and correct punctuation might not be "street"... but that's how I roll, motherfucker.

 

OrdinAiry

While I can somewhat understand your concern about the starting area's becoming "ghostlands". When was the last time you made an alt and actually looked for same level folks to group with? Most of the alts that I and my wife make end up being solo'd through quests and when grouping is needed we just find a friend or use each other's 70's to run us through.

The starting areas already ARE pretty much a ghostland for new players, try going /lfg at lvl 20-50 and see if you ever get a group.

 

ZeroWashu

Too keep it from getting out of hand I think they can do it this way. Add a character slot for WOTLK. That character slot is an automatic level 55 character of any class. It also is the only slot that can be used for a DK. That character slot cannot be transfered to another server or account unless to the same type of slot.

It already is hard to find players of appropriate level for even some outland content. I have passed through Azeroth content enough times that this thread's advice helps counter the ghostland effect. Many people in some of my previous guilds simply passed over the majority of instances as they planned on getting into BGs or Arena's and getting their gear that way.

 

Macblade

If the problem is that it takes too long to level, thus people look for ways around the system, you don't have to eliminate leveling entirely. You just have to make leveling easy enough that there isn't an incentive to go out and come up with crazy ways to boost your speed, (most of which involve other people or multiple accounts). For example, if you got a level with about an hour of play, then people would laugh at you for having two accounts just to level. Although a better system might be to make it that rate until you get to within 10 levels of whatever the current level cap is, then is goes back to about the same amount of time it takes now.

Personally, I'm a goal oriented player, so I would find leveling actually really fun if the goal of each new level was pretty easy to get, instead of a pain in the ass like it is now.

I also find the argument that leveling gives you time to learn the class a bunch of crap as well. If that were the actually the intent, then why are class defining abilities, e.g. hunter's Steady Shot, given at the very last level? To the extent that it does give you time to learn your class, an hour per level 2 hours for each new set of abilities, should still be plenty of time.

 

fuX

I really long for this in WoW. Recently, I decided to reroll priest and get that little dwarf from ~20 to 70 as fast as I could manage, raiding being my greatest motive to play this game.

It took ~8d /played to get to 70, which is not too bad, taking into account that I had tailoring on 375 with 3/3 PMC and alchemy on 300 as I hit 70. No instances except Gnomeregan and some part of Scarlet Monastery once.

Eight days of pure playing time to get to what I regard as 'the real game' is unacceptable imo. Doing the same really dumb quests (get me 10 yeti hides and I will give you a really, really worthless item and crappy xp!) all over again was boring as hell and I must say that it did not teach me too much about the class.

This is quite true. Try a /who Feralas - 5-10 people if you are lucky. And I would suspect that 30% of them are bots.

 

Calixtus

In the recent thread about Blizzard suing WoWGlider, I believe someone noted that Blizzard claimed that 1-70 took the average player 20 days of /played and approximetely 8 months. Which translated quite neatly into a claim of financial losses based on how fast that could be accomplished using WoWGlider. They want leveling to take time, because that's one fairly effecient way of keeping people paying. Add to that the 2.3 leveling changes as well the changes to 60-70 being made in WotlK, it's pretty clear Blizzard knows how long they want 1-EndGame to take, and when EndGame gets moved, they'll adjust exp rates to maintain the same timeframe.

But I doubt we'll ever see "free lvl 55"s outside of the Hero classes - though I can't say I'd rule out a microtransaction system where you'd pay Blizzard for a character at a specified level, where the amount paid would compensate for the lowered subscription-time required. But that's straying a bit from the topic...

 

Anthion