As I have locked in on other goals in my gameplay during Season 1 of The War Within, something kind of funny happened, mostly due to the anniversary event.

Namely, that as I type this sentence, I am rank 52 in the world for number of level 80 characters in WoW. I’m also rank 15 in the US, and number 1 on my server, both the base US Cenarius server but also the full connected realm.

Knowing that, seeing myself be that close to a top world rank, kind of unlocked a new goal for me in a weird way, and so most of my WoW gameplay of late, with the 20th anniversary event in full swing, has been spent leveling alts.

Pre-War Within: The Goal

I wrote here months ago that a goal I had in mind prior to TWW launching was to have every spec in the game at level 70 on its own character, which meant 2-4 characters per class. I had the alts rolled and was slowly pushing through a bunch of lowbie alts, aiming to get as many as I could into that range. I ultimately didn’t hit my pre-TWW goal, but thanks to Mists of Pandaria Remix, the time I did invest, and smart cycling of rest experience, I was near enough to my goal, with around 24 level 70 characters and most others of the remaining 15 characters in my goal in the range of level 40+. But over the summer, Dawntrail came out for FFXIV and I had split focus, so I didn’t cross the finish line, but it was also fine by me, given that 11.0 vastly reduced the experience required to level.

The War Within – Main Switching and Speedy Leveling

When TWW launched, my focus was on my protection Warrior, planning to play her as my raid main. I leveled her, only had her at 80 for almost a week, and then started rolling the alts, starting with my stable of prior raid main characters. I got my Demon Hunter, Priest, and Monk all leveled prior to raid, plus my prot Paladin for the full Warband experience bonus, and ended up switching to Monk for raid main, back where I started at the beginning of Dragonflight. I was slow-rolling my alts, pushing one at a time through gathering and Delve leveling in TWW, banking Resonance Crystals for fresh 80 gear and having a splendid time. I got to fifteen level 80s prior to the big patch drop…

20th Anniversary Celebration Breaks My Brain

Once the 20th anniversary patch of 11.0.5 came out, I prepared myself to be thrown to the fires of alt leveling. I had accomplished nearly all of my mainline gameplay goals – I had KSM, was going to be able to push KSH hard once I was mentally in that space again, had finished the normal raid and was making progress towards Heroic and Ahead of the Curve, and my main was geared as could be from the content I was doing – only thing left on her was to push for Gilded Crests and Myth track items. So I set out to level my alts in batches, aiming to increment my character count at max level by 1 per class in each round. I already had most of them at 70 or close enough, so the early journey was easy – pick one at a time to push timewalking, rotate every alt daily through the anniversary trivia quest for easy XP, and ensure I was pushing each character to get the added anniversary XP buff so they could have the 20% total increase, which only requires doing the quest once per character since the counter on the buff doesn’t decrease when logged out. Luckily, trivia and running around the anniversary grounds helps the quest, so I didn’t have to laser focus – the early alts had to pad with TW dungeons, but everyone got their buffs in short order.

Around alt number 20, I noticed something funny, as mentioned above. When updating my account progress on tracking site Data For Azeroth, I noticed how high I was on alt progress – number 1 on the server and in a high position in the US and globally. At my peak, I was 42nd in the world!

A New Goal In Sight

So this ranking information filled my dopamine centers with a new rush I hadn’t felt before. I’m not a world-class WoW player or anything, I know I’m better than I give myself credit for, but in terms of attainment of in-game goals, I’m not where I could be, mostly by choice. Where I really get my joy in game is through goals I can self-achieve, where it is largely my gameplay that dictates how well I do and how I am perceived to do. I like being able to mostly purple-parse a raid tier, push incessantly to get a single-digit days KSM, and on alts, I like being self-sufficient on crafting, gathering, and just being able to then focus on playing the game.

But while I knew I was crazy on alts (39 total characters is a big stable!), I didn’t think it was actually that high in terms of world position. Seeing myself surpass members of RWF guilds on a WoW ranking, even in the most superfluous and asterisk-footnoted way possible, was kind of a rush!

Sure, it is worth noting that Data For Azeroth relies on self-reports, so if there are a couple dozen altoholics not tracking there, my rank could currently be heavily inflated, and I can tell based on the DfA alt score (a composite measure of total levels across account) that I am not quite as high as it would seem from just the number of level 80s. Hell, the top world player on level 80s has over 300 level 80 characters – multi-account and almost certainly multi-boxing based on the restrictions on character count per account alone. I’ll never actually be number 1 in the world on max level characters, hell, not even in the US (that 300+ player is US-based!). But at the same time, there’s something that’s been fun and low-stress about playing the game this way that I kind of like, and having it give me that little rush of being in world-contention for something is quite fun.

In my head going forward, the way I see it is this – prior to the end of the Anniversary event in early January, I want my whole current stable up to level 80 and reasonably geared (580 item level or higher). I’d like to break the world top 25 on DfA for max level alt count, at least just for a moment – and I am not sure if that is even possible, but I want to keep pushing to try for it. Basically, I want to see how high I can peak with my current stable, and then settle in to actually play endgame content with them and keep things rolling so that I have functionally unlimited options for season 2 at the start of the year and I can start building back up my asset stash in game with more gathering, higher gold flow from soloable activities, and just becoming more self-sufficient than ever before – better crossover of professions, a sizeable war chest, and little need to buy supplies from outside.

Will I actually play every one of my current 44 characters? Probably not seriously past leveling and some goofing around. But with Warbands as they are, I can’t help but feel like playing alts gives me a benefit – it pushes my TWW renown reps higher, gives me more gold income that I can centrally accumulate and distribute, and it allows me to have spec-specific gearsets without having to super-farm a single character per class – I can more lazily farm 2-4 per class and build a tailor-made gearset to play my chosen spec per character.

Past that point, being in the world’s top 100 max-level pushers is kind of a fun accolade to have!