Saturday 27th February 2021

I’m still a bit knackered from my mammoth walk yesterday.  I feel a bit better for it, and I don’t intend to leave it too long before I go again, but today was very firmly a rest day.

So today, I read a bunch of comics, did some idea work on a writing project and played a bit of World of Warcraft.

The main thrust of Warcraft has slowed down a lot now the campaign is over.  Whilst we still have a couple more weeks of weekly renown to go before we hit the cap of 40, the fact that it’s looking to be May or later for patch 9.1 has resulted in less urgency in the game.  They’ve changed the amount of anima you get from raids and, as a result, World Quests for anima seem more scarce.  Whereas I’d go out and do my 1000 anima in a single day, now I’m struggling to get more than about 400 on a Wednesday.  This week, with raids focused on later bosses, I am genuinely worried I might not get it done.

But do I need to worry when I have until the summer for the next content?

In terms of leveling alts, I’ve gone beyond those characters that are easy to level and into the bank of characters whose classes I really don’t gel with.  Namely:  my priest, my mage and my shaman.

My priest dates all the way back to the launch of Burning Crusade and for that I have a little fondness of them.  But they are one of the last characters I level just because I find them far too squishy.  They die loads and it takes an age to level them up.

Things have improved with the use of GSE or Gnome Sequence Engine.  This is a one button macro to play a class adequately.  This has helped me with those classes I don’t enjoy but have alts for the sake of completion.

I brought all but 3 of my level 50s through to Oribos soon after Shadowlands launch and these characters were part of that.  In the last couple of weeks, I’ve brought a further two through and just have one more to do.  This would make all my alts sit at just under level 51 or under.

I have 8 at level 60 already, but I still have a bunch to do.  I usually pick one and chip away at them for an hour here or there before I go to bed.  However, I’ve found something that’s massively going to help leveling them.

It appears the Silithid in Silithus have bugged XP when in party sync. To do this, it first needs you to have a level 10 on another account.  This can be a free starter account so it doesn’t cost any money.  You launch two instances of WoW, one on your main account with the alt you want to level post level 50, and the other with your level 10.

You party up.  You don’t need to be together to do this, and indeed my level 10 has not left his spot in Ogrimmar despite having done this with a number of alts.

The Alt will then launch their mission list and select Party sync.  Like grouping up, there’s a few dialogue acceptances that need to be completed in both instances of the game, but it’s pretty simple.

The sign it’s worked is that you’ll see the Shadowlands intro quest pop up again.  Ignore this and go to Silithus.  This should be the BFA version with the giant sword in the middle.  If not, speak to the person up in the top right of the map to change the instance.

Then… go to one of the silithid nests and start killing.  You should be getting a ton of XP per kill.  With rested XP it’s something like 2300 – 3000XP.  You can do a level in about 20 minutes.

There’s a small quirk where once you level the XP drops a little, but once you hit 25%+ through a level, if you log out and in and regroup, the XP will then go back up.

I’m only doing this with rested XP.  As soon as that’s spent I stop, but I took my shaman from level 50 to half way through 53 in under an hour last night, and I’ve been dipping into other characters.  Today alone, I think I’ve taken 4 or 5 characters up a couple of levels in the space for a few hours.

The downside to this is that once this is done, I need to rest them for a week or so before taking them back out.  But even if they fix it in the meantime and I have to go back to questing through the zones, I’ve knocked a huge chunk of my leveling off.  It frees the week for other stuff and puts me on course for getting all my alts to level 60 long before 9.1

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Past Years: 2020 – The Year of Being Fearsome | 2019 – The Year of Soldiering Through | 2018 – The Year of Priorities | 2017 – The Year Of The Offensive