The How and Why

Undertaking a project of this magnitude can be quite overwhelming without an overarching plan of attack.  I've spoken before about the merits of planning and goal setting.  I don't obsessively plot out each detail in advance; that would rob playing the game of any joy and spontaneity.  Instead I rough out my plans leaving lots of room for whim and fancy while still providing myself with a framework that fits my goals and playstyle.

When I started this journey in December I considered how best to accomplish the meta-goal of near-total game completion.  While I want to do it all solo, as much as possible, I also want a reasonable chance of completion within the lifespan of the game, and so I need to streamline things and reduce unneccesary repetition.  Maxing out all the professions while remaining self sufficient requires clustering professions intelligently.  Collecting all the available recipes requires dungeon runs and rep grinds and accomplishing that requires grouping the profs intelligently and careful class selection to keep the grinding to the minimum.

What I ended up with was six characters, two Paladins, one Warlock, one Druid and two Hunters.  The profession groupings are Blacksmithing/Mining, Tailoring/Enchanting, Herbalism/Inscription, Alchemy/Jewelcrafting and Engineering/Leatherworking.  One of the characters is leveling through Archaeology and is my Skinner.  I also have two bank alts to assist in item and material collection, sorting and short term storage.

I am leveling the characters in sync and am Loremaster leveling.  This method allows me to level professions as I go along, allows me to acutally make use of what I craft and keeps material management to a minimum as I only have to be concerned with managing one narrow band of mats at any one time.  It also gives me a reasonable shot at finding world drop recipes.  An added benefit is that I never have to be concerned with gold.  I am earning at a decent tick and my expenses never outstrip my revenues.

I work on one zone grouping at a time.  This makes for slow leveling, but keeps everyone more or less together and maximizes xp gains (I am never that far ahead of a zone's questing level to make it utterly trivial).  To streamline this questing method, I work my way across the map in one direction and back again, choosing my direction so as to finish the old world in Blasted Lands instead of Silithus.  See the new page Zones by Level Group.  I will update this page every week to mark the progress of my toons.

The next series of posts will introduce my main leveling crew.