Saturday, November 17, 2007

So close I can taste it. Or is that just turkey?

Warning...this post comes dangerously close to revealing just how much of a nerd I am in RL. If you're an Alpha Beta, stop reading. Only Tri-Lambs and Moo's are allowed to continue...

Ding 67

And now the personal challenge is on. Pike over at Aspect of the Hare tells the story of a guild competition for members to level up to 70 before xmas. In similar fashion, I've had a very backburner thought of trying to hit 70 by Thanksgiving. Friday morning's ding 67 and Pike's post have solidified it. Its on!

To make this happen, here's the plan. I'm at 67, with about 2% of the XP needed to hit 68. No rested bonus other than what accrues while I'm not playing between now and Thanksgiving, I burned all the excess up friday morning.

I think that hitting 68 this weekend will be reasonable, as I've got the evenings/nights pretty clear once my little 'en goes to sleep.

Without doing any real math of how I'll accomplish this, I do know that the FuBar XP doo-hickey shows it at about 10 hours per level at my normal mildly focused pace. I try to stay moving on XP-generating quests, but I don't go too crazy trying to overlap 3 or 4 quests that make sense to do together. If it happens by concidence, cool, but it stresses me out too much when I read a thottbot writeup that says "and while you're there, make sure you grab this quest and this quest and this quest, and maximize your XP". So to combat that stress, I just avoid the issue and go through my quest list pretty much in order as it appears in my MonkeyQuest display, even if that means sub-optimal XP generation, or if it means running around a zone a bit more than I otherwise would.

Experience has shown that the FuBar (and previously TitanPanel) estimates are a drop high, and I end up levelling a drop sooner than they predict, but let's pretend they're accurate. If I end up ahead of schedule, more the merrier. Especially because, as you'll see by the end of this post, the situation is not that pretty.

10 hours to hit 68. Very do-able by bed time on sunday night. Might happen sooner. So my project plan (no I'm not really putting together a Gantt chart for this, but that would be pretty funny) will say I wake up monday morning in the very early stage of 68 on the way to 69.

RL plans will have me with a little casual time monday and tuesday evening, and pretty much none on wednesday other than perhaps checking auctions and such.

Which reminds me....ding 2500g

Back to the plans. Lets assume that FuBar will predict another 10 hours to hit 69. Although I might get more than 2 hrs in on monday and tuesday, I'll be going AFK a bunch and not really focusing real hard on banging out quests, so I'll assume 2 hrs of effective levelling each night, and none on wednesday.

That will leave me waking up on Thanksgiving about 40% of the way to 69.

Assuming the 10 hours per level remains accurate, that'll mean 6 hours to hit 69, and then 10 more hours to hit 70.

Ummm? This is where my plan gets a tad hairy. Although my RL plans have the day all to myself (loser), 16 hours of plowing my way to 70 is perhaps extreme. I will have a few bars of rested XP due to not logging in on wednesday, but still...ouch.

Motivation will be high, no doubt. I really want to be flying around the skies of Outland before midnight on Thanksgiving. But this schedule sounds a drop intense.

What do you guys think? Will I be flying the friendly skies, or will I wake up on Friday, still getting sore feet running around on the ground? Well, my swift mistsaber is the one who's feet get sore, but you get the idea :-)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I must confess to have skipped the 2nd half of the post as I'm in a hurry now.

One word though: LightHeaded!

Install that one and TomTom, mark all your quest locations and even discover from the comments where to pick up others than can be done in same place/from same mobs, and then look at all those temp markers on the map and draw a route: you'll be doing it at least 50% faster and with very little stress. Try it! You won't regret!

Anonymous said...

Once you hit 69, if you get the LEAST BIT bogged down in Blades Edge Mountains, head directly to Netherstorm. (This assumes your main goal is 70, and not accumulating a lot of gold.) From Area 52 in Netherstorm, you'll get tons of quests that are in a very small radius. Do you have a flying mount? (Can you get that before 70? If not, you'll be at a slight disadvantage.)

But the Netherstorm quests go quickly, once you get seriously bogged down in Blades Edge (i.e., you need to do group quests). But between Blades Edge and Netherstorm, you can easily hit 70. And you haven't even touched Shadowmoon Valley.

Good luck, turkey! I mean, good luck with that Thanksgiving turkey!

Pike said...

*grins* Gotta love those challenges. I say go for it! Even if you don't make it, you'll be very close. Perhaps 70 by next weekend, if not Thanksgiving.

Unknown said...

Go man go! You need to be flying! Land mounts are soooooo Azerothian!