Hymm hit level 20 on Sunday and I thought I’d just recap on how this life has gone in terms of levelling pains…

I TR’d into this life on 19th August after Otto boxing on my previous life. This is Hymms 6th life, my aim now being to try & reach triple completionist with him. This life has been a stick build (I mistakenly called it a Juggernaut build in my previous post. It’s not, sorry) of 8 ranger/6monk/6 rogue.

This life has been myself and Row with her character Nightley. Row decided to try one of my previous Hymm builds of helf cleric dille 10 fighter/9 monk/1 artificer. She had to adapt it slightly with the new enhancement system, but overall she has enjoyed the build. With her build having cleric dille and mine armed with a stack of pots & UMD, we did quite well keeping an eye on each others health, especially at the lower levels.

But mainly I thought I’d talk about levelling. On my previous life I found the levelling from 14-20 could be quite.. painful? Grindy? Especially the last few levels. This life?

No.

Not at all!

I should point out that we both have the Greater Heroic Learning Tome on these characters. As TR’s we have a Voice of the Master and/or Mantle of the Worldshaper. We have access to a 4% XP Shrine on a guild ship and we are both VIP’s (so access to all quests/content). And thanks to the daily dice and previous use of an Otto’s Box, we have quite a few XP pots stashed away.

All the low level quests were done at elite. We even managed to skip a few due to having to level and not bothering to run them as we were above level. Actually on the Adventure Compendium (see below) I’m quite surprised to see that we skipped 3 Level 4 quests that we usually run because they are decent XP (Freshen the Air, Irestone Inlet & Proof is in the Poison).

Levels 1-2	Levels 2-3
<	Levels 4-5
Levels 5-6	Levels 6-7
Levels 7-8	Levels 8-10
Levels 10-11	Levels 11-12
Levels 13-14	Levels 15-16
Levels 16-18	Levels 18-19
Levels 19-22

I really wish we could see how many times each quest had been run on these panels…

If I remember correctly we seemed to start to struggle for XP around level 12 (so we were running level 10 quests on elite). Again I’m surprised, I expected to start struggling around level 14 (level 12 missions are basically the Lordsmarch chain & the Sands). We spent a bit of time maxing out the Ataraxia wilderness area which was a huge boost in XP because, when we ran the Relic of a Sovereign Past mission, the duergar killed in there hit 2 of our Monster Manual kills for dwarves, each of which gave us just under 12000XP.

Just as we reached Gianthold the heroic sagas were introduced in U19 Patch 2. We started running Gianthold – and the sagas were taken away again due to a bug 😦 We switched to the second Lordsmarch chain, cleared the Gianthold wilderness, went back to Gianthold – and the sagas were brought back and the quests we had already run were picked up 🙂 So we finished Gianthold, got the XP from the saga end reward – then ran them all again 😀 Not a big deal, we like Gianthold anyway.

It was at this point I really expected to start hitting XP problems. No more running Litany of the Dead 12 times. But we flagged for it anyway, running Temple of Vol an extra run to get the last sigil piece I needed. And then, bloody hell, we never ran Litany! Once we got to level 17 one of our guildies joined us with his level 17 monk and he didn’t have a full sigil. Somehow we never went back to it.

After that it was back to the Harbour for the Harbinger of Madness chain (except the last one – too long and painful for me to be bothered running that), Vale quests for Shroud flagging as well as Vale explorers and minimum 200 kills for Lammania & Shavarath, Chain of Madness, Lord of Dust chain, a few random Wheloon missions. We ran Inspired Quarter to get the last 2/3 ranks needed to get to 20 (many thanks to Samius & Torrance for helping out with those!).

So it has taken us 9 weeks to get to the old cap level. We’ve not rushed, played at our own pace, and it’s been a really fun de-stressed life 🙂

Why do I blog this? I’m sure nobody is really interested in how I level.. but to be honest it’s the changes to the XP system that bother me. Yes I know it’s a lot of XP to get once you are a 3rd lifer or above – 4,378,500 XP. But as I understand it, Turbine intend to change the current curve so you need to earn more XP at the lower levels, less at the higher. I don’t frequent the forums much so I’ve not really checked if we’ve been given specific details on how the XP curve will change but I really hope they don’t skew it too much. If anything, we now have enough missions from 16-20 to make the last part of the levelling a lot easier than it used to be. I don’t really want to be running the same level 1-6 missions over & over. But I guess we’ll see….

What’s Next?
Hymm is going to stay at epic level for a while. I suppose I should think about getting him a Sireth & a Pinion from CitW. They’ll no doubt come in handy because I don’t think this will be the only stick build I run with him. For now he’ll be back to mostly weekend play for epics & raids.

Tonight (hopefully) I shall be TR’ing Dimachaerii, my dark monk. This will be his second life, so I expect getting him to 20 will be even easier 😛

Have fun, see you around!