I mentioned a while back that my rogue, Chadwicke, or Chad for short, had finally made it out of vanilla content in Wrath Classic and to Outland. He had even just cleared level 65 out there and was on his way to Nagrand soon.
And then, for whatever reason, Blizzard turned of the Joyous Journeys xp buff and launched WoW Classic Season of Discovery while the Winter Nexus was going on in EVE Online and I became a bit obsessed with games like Valheim during the Steam Winter Sale.
Basically, I was distracted… though the lack of Joyous Journeys was the big hit for me when it came to progress.
Can be turned off by your local inn keeper
I am not even sure why they turned it off. Once the Fall of the Lich King update had launched we were well and truly into the endgame of Wrath Classic. Almost anybody who wanted to play the expansion seriously had done so, and for those who did not want the xp buff, it could be turned off at any inn keeper.
But the turned it off all the same, at which point my enthusiasm for getting through Outland faded. Chad was left hanging out in Zangarmarsh, once more forgotten as we followed the crowd over to Season of Discovery.
And then, this past weekend, I logged into Wrath Classic to check on something and noticed that Joyous Journeys had been turned back on. I don’t know why or when… and I have a Feedly+ extra subscription that lets me convert the WoW News page into an RSS feed, so I see and read the This Week in WoW post every Monday and they never mention this… and it seems like something worth mentioning… maybe it is in the patch notes, so I’ll look into turning that into a feed… but once I saw it was back I dropped my focus on Season of Discovery and headed back into Wrath Classic.
Chad was back in action. I hit 66 with him in Zangarmarsh, then dropped all of the incomplete quests and headed to Nagrand to get in the last two levels before I could make the jump to Northrend.
I figured that with Joyous Journeys, two pieces of xp bonus heirloom gear, and a full measure of blue bar xp, I could get to 68 without having to visit one of my least favorite zones in Outland, the Blades Edge Mountains. I was all in on Nagrand.
Nagrand Map
I started with the Hemet Nesingwary quests and then checked in over at Telaar to get myself loaded up for this final run. With flying… even slow flying… I was able to zip around the zone and get things done.
Flying across Nagrand
Also, being a rogue helped too. No need to stop and slay every mob on your way to get that one named boss, just stealth your way in and hope you don’t find yourself in over your head when you break stealth.
And he almost made it. When he had finished up the bulk of the solo quests in the zone he was 25% of a level away from 68. So I called on Potshot to get out a couple of level 80 helpers to run Chad through the big group quests, the four for Hemet and Durn the Hungerer (remember him) and Gurrok up on top of the ogre base.
With Potshot’s help we were able to knock out those six quests, which were just enough to get Chad to level 68. Then he recalled to Dalaran… because Ula had previously sent him there via portal so he could set his hearthstone there, it being a good travel hub and his eventual destination… where I found he didn’t have the flight points needed to fly to Borean Tundra. Details.
(Also, as an aside, Dalaran is pretty sparsely populated these days, Season of Discovery having pulled so many people off into a new adventure.)
So he took the portal to Stormwind and went out and took the boat to Borean Tundra.
Welcome to Valliance Keep
There I kept going. I still had blue bar xp and who knows when Joyous Journeys will get yanked again. Also, those first two levels, 68 and 69, are very fast. The level curve for Wrath is steeper than Outland, and those two levels were tuned for the old expansion, so I was very quickly making my way to another level, visiting all the initial quest points in Borean Tundra.
One for the mist shrouded beach please
I made it as far as the excavation in the middle of the zone and the first pair of quests for that when bang, I hit level 70.
And he made it
This is where things start to slow down a bit. Not only is Chad now in the Wrath level curve, but he had just exhausted his blue bar getting there. But he made it past Outland, which was my initial goal. We’ll see if I end up with a sixth character at level 80 before Cataclysm Classic arrives.
I suspect that will largely depend on what the Joyous Journeys plan is from Blizz. As I noted previously, I don’t know why they would bother turning it off before Cataclysm Classic shows up. It helps with alts and anybody who doesn’t want it can turn it off. But they have their own ideas.