A father and son just proved that you don't need any warcraft to reach World of Warcraft: The War Within's new level cap. Exploration alone can boost your character through the leveling process, but it requires bending the MMO's rules a little bit.
Unlike Neutral Agent, WoW's popular pacifist player who routinely climbs to max level by picking flowers and mining rocks, Reddit user Competitive-Hall6922 and their son leveled to 80 with the XP you earn for flying through many of the MMO's old areas.
"So basically my son is under the weather at the moment and we decided to make Earthen [characters], put on some chill music and just fly over the world on a two-seater," Competitive-Hall6922 wrote in a Reddit thread near the start of their adventure.
The Earthen duo puttered around Azeroth in a rocket mount that can hold two players until they hit level 30. WoW has always rewarded you small amounts of XP for entering undiscovered areas, but it's usually nowhere close to the heaps you'd get for finishing quests and running dungeons. To make exploration worth anything at all, you have to target zones where the level range is above yours so you get as much XP as possible.
Now that WoW is 10 expansions (and 20 years) into its life, there are actually enough zones to gain a good chunk of free XP. But to speed things up, the explorers flipped on 'Chromie Time', a feature named after a time-traveling gnome who can make it so older areas scale up to a max of 71.
"We explored Outland and then Northrend," Competitive-Hall6922 said, "it was there we reached level 70 and got a notification from Chromie to go back to the present. Yet the world was still all scaled so we ignored her and just continued flying."
Once they hit the level 71 cap with Chromie Time, they were kicked back to the present with a new problem to solve: How do you gain nine more levels in zones that now properly scale with you, giving pitiful XP? Through a clever use of game mechanics, of course.
A few years ago, in an effort to make grouping up with low level friends a painless process, Blizzard introduced a system called 'Party Sync'. Say you're level 80 and you want to do some quests with your level 30 friend. Party Sync will temporarily drop you to level 30 and let you earn XP when you otherwise wouldn't. You're obviously supposed to do this with friends, but you can also do what Competitive-Hall6922 did and make a character on a free trial account just to stand somewhere as you reap the benefits of Party Sync and the ability to re-enable Chromie Time.
Competitive-Hall6922 and his son got a little impatient at this point and briefly changed plans hoping to shorten the final leg of their journey. "At the very start we decided to kill every rare [enemy] we would meet to speed up the process, but after three rares I felt like that was going against the challenge of only using exploration XP to reach level 80," they said. To "atone" for the bloodshed, the duo decided they'd hit level 80 without even entering Khaz Algar, The War Within's new continent.
This was fun to experience, once.
Competitive-Hall6922
Earlier today, both of them successfully hit max level by (almost) pure exploration, an impressive achievement even with that small caveat. WoW is officially flexible enough that you don't even have to play the new expansion to keep up. The only downside is that they're both effectively wearing cardboard armor compared to everyone else, but hey, that cardboard served them well for the roughly 13 hours it took them to sightsee their way to level 80.
In the Reddit post explaining their method, Competitive-Hall6922 sounds proud of what they pulled off but not exactly eager to do it all again. Questing, it turns out, is a much smoother way to level up.
"Now we are item level 10, no gear, no quests, nothing, but we have reached level cap. This was fun to experience, once." Competitive-Hall6922 wrote.
