ToeJamSamy
Seasoned veteran member
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2020
- RedCents
- 664¢
It's been a while since I powerleveled, but I've done it so many times, it's old hat. My favorite way to do so results in a ton of supplies for tinkering that also just happen to be worth a nice little sum of plat.
First of all, don't ever skip the tutorial. I made that mistake the other day trying to help someone out in CR who was only level 2 or 3- never again. What would only take 1 kill and a few clicks/hails in the tutorial, takes far far longer even in crescent reach, and we're just talking dinging level 2! I went to a TLP last night to mess around too, and quickly realized that even leveling 1-2 in CR on live is 10 times faster than in the old days when the walk was 15 miles up hill both ways in the snow. But, I digress.
I usually will stick to the tutorial for a few levels, only sometimes going all the way to 10+. The charm and early xp is definitely worth it, but the value tapers off around 5 or 6. At that point it is just as easy to pop out to CR and start heading over toward the alligators and gnolls, and getting some DS help etc. I've tried the whole "warrior mercs are so OP it's awesome" thing, I wasn't all that impressed, so I went back to the way I've always done it: mass-tank, cycle and hit (always keeping an audiotrigger for successful hits and sometimes one for misses, so that I know exactly when to cycle to the next mob) drop a mega damage shield on the tank with a druid, and loot. I haven't PL'd since the advanced loot system came out, but I'm sure that makes things much faster in that regard.
I do the above strat in later Crescent Reach, up to level 13ish if you go into the far tunnels to the west, before moving to Blightfire. These 2 zones and base strategy are all pretty familiar to most as it's very common. Once in BFM, i go straight north to the skellies and the banshee/witch and repeat the mass-tank, cycle hits, DS, loot game for a good 15+ levels, I have managed to get well into the 30s before leaving, but sometimes I'll leave early.
This is where my story steers a different direction. Often I will go to the swamp portion of the zone and farm some rotwood treant branches and the like while continuing the PL for a few levels, but if I'm in a rush I go straight to Crypt of Nadox, stopping on the way to kill some mobs around the shipwrecks before entering depending on level when I get there. Taking advantage as I did in BFM in the NW corner of the undead's lack of running, Nadox provides a great place to continue the journey. One can stay here for several levels, or 10+, if I stay in BFM long enough, sometimes I will skip this and go straight to the beginning of the tinkering/plat portion of the process: Plane of Innovation. PoI can be skipped if you have no interest in the supplies or the plat from selling them, and Nadox can be used fairly interchangeably for the same levels, but if plat is a bonus or tinkering supplies are of interest, then I recommend the PoI route (just as I recommend the rotwoods in BFM before leaving if fletching or tribute bows are an interest, not the best bows but pretty good)
PoI can be worked all from the zonein, pulling trains back to your baby, but the clockworks etc tend to be pretty jerky so if you move around the zone in chunks it's a bit faster. The factory is where I'd end, but it can also be useful. You can solo some raidmobs while here if they happen to be up, and hopefully get a useful piece or two for your baby if he'll stay small enough to make use of it, or you just wanna hang it on your wall in housing like I often do.
Once PoI starts slowing down, DoDh is the next step unless you have an sk or similar at a level low enough to group with your baby, but high enough to mass slaughter in Fort Mech, but in today's game, that's not a likely prospect (I keep a raidgeared max aa SK that herself was the result of a powerlevelling race, around level 75 or 80 to do exactly that: swarm as soon as grouping is possible) Corathus Creep is a great spot for more tinkering/plat drops. You don't need to know anything about tinkering or have any interest in tradeskills to benefit from these drops. They all not only sell well to merchants, but if anyone on your server is trying to work up their tinkering (and just about any other TS for the 350 cap) the materials will sell to someone for a lot more. Back in the days of Ambleshifts Amazing Automated Amalgamators or whatever the 4 words were, and later the days of Ambleshifts Automated Opal Amalgamators, when raiding for Last Bloods, Bazu Stones, and later in VoA and RoF with the next iteration of cultural armor, these little boxes that took about 150,000 (I could be off on that number, but it sticks in my head for some reason)different pieces each to make, with hundreds of subcombines that involved Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, tailoring, fletching, brewing, and more, and the other parts needed to make the raid augs once you had the elusive amalgamating container...there were a very large number of recipes involving every different tradeskill, except MAYBE poison or alchemy, but i seem to remember poison and tinkering together being the reason I made my gnome rogue in the first place. Point being, tradeskilling is more lucrative in today's game, and so is gathering the supplies for it, so if you could use a little plat, or are working up your skills, this route is for you.
PoI started to give us pieces, especially the innovative clockwork gears which aren't found elsewhere, tiny clockwork shafts, etc etc. DoDh is where we start picking up the Glowstones, Glowgems, and Glowrocks, which each sell for about 70% of a diamond or blue diamond, and are useful for jewelcraft and tinkering, or just vender trash. These drops strat out in Corathus Creep, where you will also find some of the tinkering quests. Unlike Nadox and Blightfire skellies, the clockworks here and in PoI will start to wander away when they're the last man standing, but it's nothing to take care of, and they don't move fast. In addition to these glowrocks/gems/stones, there will be entrails from the corathus, bile i believe (that may be witherans though, but there is a second corathus drop) more gears and screws and bolts and shafts, and that's all in the southern portion of the zone. Up north you run into other mobtypes which aren't as great for the powerlevel efficiency, but will net some other drops useful for the tradeskilling.
After CC, if we aren't ready to head up to SoF era, we can head out to more DoDh zones and farm some shadowmane pelts while powerlevelling on those they are another part of the elusive amalgamator combines. I will usually head up to Fort Mech after I wear CC out though, because by now I should have a 60something, even a high 50s is fine, and if you have a 2.0'd SK at 75 with decent aas and gear like I do...you can head to DSH to do brownies right at level 50 if you so choose. Now, here is where we change things up. Now that we can group the toons together (if you can't yet, you'll have a bit longer working the DS/masstank route) we put our baby in a nice safe spot, if it happens to be a rogue then yay for SOS, monks, sks, or anyone with a Planar Overdose pot (not usable til 90 though iirc so ignore that one) then FD is an option. But at this point we're gonna start swarming, or maybe headshotting if you have a wellgeared/aad ranger of appropriate level instead, or a rogue to assassinate or a zerker to decap (iirc, decap starts at a higher level than the others though). As soon as you hit that sweet spot where you can group with a much more powerful toon you have and mass kill, it's time to start partying. I would stop at this point, if not earlier, and switch to AAs for just a tiny bit, idk if you have autogrant on, or even which aa's are autogranted when, but buying all runspeed aas, and innate metabolism at this point, and any aa invis or fd/fade as soon as you can will make the whole process easier (metabolism more for comfort, saving of food if you gave baby some statfood, maintaining endurance if you might have to do a lot of jumping or fd etc, and really just saving yourself from the spam of "You are hungry. You are thirsty. You are out of food and drink" Ok, we get it.
But now the fun begins. Other than the above basics, I don't usually mess with AA's on my new baby until I'm in Fort Mech (if i have a swarmer that's good) or ultimately: Kaesora Library. Now, this is the end of the run for the tinkering/plat drops, but new plat drops will begin and normal tradeskill supplies will start being of more value as well. At the beginning, Kaesora will need to be done in the static zone unless you wait til your baby is within 15 levels of your powerleveler. I don't usually wait that long, but it's very rarely, even in that era, been an issue. I do recommend that unless you have a rogue for a baby, you start out in field of bone(that's not the right name, but you know what I mean..the SoD version of field of bone, Field of Scale maybe) and run through quickly the iksar mask quest. It'll give a nice illusion he/she can always keep, give some xp in the process, and make everything much easier when popping in and out of the library later.
Now inside the library, always cast your illusion first. Invis is then not necessary, but it can help when you get to the golems later. If your baby is a rogue, you probably want the illusion anyway, but its not necessary thanks to sos. I always run through all the hallways bypassing the mobs until i get to the big round room in the middle/topright there. The nice 3-4 story circle with about a hundred mobs give or take. I've counted them before as I looted them and it always seemed to range within 3-4 mobs of 100, depending if I lost any in the pull. Before you do ANYTHING in the static zone of course, double check that no one else is in the zone. if they are, you might have to wait, or make sure they are nowhere near you. Not only would it be dangerous if they aren't in ikky illusion and you ran by with your train, but it would be quite upsetting to watch you run by with all the mobs they were about to kill, so keep the peace and double check before you start. Now, it's all about the swarm (headshot works great here too, but you wont be pulling a 100mob train for that, maybe for decap with a riposte disc though) assuming you're not going to try swarming this with an 85 or 90 yourself, with the tweaks done to swarming, this should still be cake, but if you are doing it with an 85-90 toon, try smaller pulls. the sheer volume of mobs can get dicey at those levels when swarming is still as it was originally. I swarmed in this zone myself all the way to the first player to 100 on my server back in the day, but by that point I was past the static zone, and the group instance, and had to request the raid instance to have appropriately levelled mobs to kill. Past level 100, the xp is gonna suck for the top toon, but it will remain pretty good for the baby right up til then. around 95 you may wanna swap to the raid zone, but you need 6 toons in raid format to request it, and a small amount of SoD progression, i think. I would recommend to pop LotD as you're returning to camp with your first train pull(on the baby) and keep it on AA until you max out all the aas for that level (assuming you are gold and have autogrant on, this wont take long) then it should automatically start putting the xp into regular, then once you level you'll be able to spend the banked aas and max those ones out. This process should be very fast with the autogrant process. If you are not gold on your baby, then be sure ahead of time to research what aa's you will and won't get from autogrant, and ONLY buy the ones you wont get, that wat as soon as yo udo go gold and log in, or level one more time, all those missing ones will fill right in there and you won't have wasted any time or xp on aas that were free.
When you are finished with Kaesora library static, group instance, and maybe raid instance, you're mostly at the end of my guide. However, instead of or in addition to the raid instance, you can instead head to Underfoot. You can pick almost any zone there to continue, some of them also providing tinkering drops and plat items, but i usually dropped down into cooling chambers and ran the halls there much like in Kaesora.
After level 100 or so, powerlevelling isn't really a thing in the traditional sense, and is more just a result of game mechanics from some recent expansions, so just start playing from here and have fun. If you want to get your 2.0 because your baby is of a class it's useful (SK for sure) then all that can be sorted at any point along the way as convenient. Don't forget about the 1.5 prequest to save time doing a 1.0, but if you have items already looted because your baby is old (baby doesn't have to be starting at level 1 to use this guide of course) or you have a decent number yourself able to be MQ'd..or you just like the 1.0, maybe just do it all, but it's not something to worry particularly about, until you want to.
Slightly different path to high level, some different reasons and alternatives and methods therein, but really not that different than what you're heard before, if you've ever read a post on powerlevelling before. But, everyone has some tips and tricks and ideas that are jsut a little different , and that's how we all perfect the process. If it hadn't been "nerfed", I might post a how-to swarm to go with it, maybe I still will for those who want to use it on a brand new sk, just to see what all the fuss was ever about.
First of all, don't ever skip the tutorial. I made that mistake the other day trying to help someone out in CR who was only level 2 or 3- never again. What would only take 1 kill and a few clicks/hails in the tutorial, takes far far longer even in crescent reach, and we're just talking dinging level 2! I went to a TLP last night to mess around too, and quickly realized that even leveling 1-2 in CR on live is 10 times faster than in the old days when the walk was 15 miles up hill both ways in the snow. But, I digress.
I usually will stick to the tutorial for a few levels, only sometimes going all the way to 10+. The charm and early xp is definitely worth it, but the value tapers off around 5 or 6. At that point it is just as easy to pop out to CR and start heading over toward the alligators and gnolls, and getting some DS help etc. I've tried the whole "warrior mercs are so OP it's awesome" thing, I wasn't all that impressed, so I went back to the way I've always done it: mass-tank, cycle and hit (always keeping an audiotrigger for successful hits and sometimes one for misses, so that I know exactly when to cycle to the next mob) drop a mega damage shield on the tank with a druid, and loot. I haven't PL'd since the advanced loot system came out, but I'm sure that makes things much faster in that regard.
I do the above strat in later Crescent Reach, up to level 13ish if you go into the far tunnels to the west, before moving to Blightfire. These 2 zones and base strategy are all pretty familiar to most as it's very common. Once in BFM, i go straight north to the skellies and the banshee/witch and repeat the mass-tank, cycle hits, DS, loot game for a good 15+ levels, I have managed to get well into the 30s before leaving, but sometimes I'll leave early.
This is where my story steers a different direction. Often I will go to the swamp portion of the zone and farm some rotwood treant branches and the like while continuing the PL for a few levels, but if I'm in a rush I go straight to Crypt of Nadox, stopping on the way to kill some mobs around the shipwrecks before entering depending on level when I get there. Taking advantage as I did in BFM in the NW corner of the undead's lack of running, Nadox provides a great place to continue the journey. One can stay here for several levels, or 10+, if I stay in BFM long enough, sometimes I will skip this and go straight to the beginning of the tinkering/plat portion of the process: Plane of Innovation. PoI can be skipped if you have no interest in the supplies or the plat from selling them, and Nadox can be used fairly interchangeably for the same levels, but if plat is a bonus or tinkering supplies are of interest, then I recommend the PoI route (just as I recommend the rotwoods in BFM before leaving if fletching or tribute bows are an interest, not the best bows but pretty good)
PoI can be worked all from the zonein, pulling trains back to your baby, but the clockworks etc tend to be pretty jerky so if you move around the zone in chunks it's a bit faster. The factory is where I'd end, but it can also be useful. You can solo some raidmobs while here if they happen to be up, and hopefully get a useful piece or two for your baby if he'll stay small enough to make use of it, or you just wanna hang it on your wall in housing like I often do.
Once PoI starts slowing down, DoDh is the next step unless you have an sk or similar at a level low enough to group with your baby, but high enough to mass slaughter in Fort Mech, but in today's game, that's not a likely prospect (I keep a raidgeared max aa SK that herself was the result of a powerlevelling race, around level 75 or 80 to do exactly that: swarm as soon as grouping is possible) Corathus Creep is a great spot for more tinkering/plat drops. You don't need to know anything about tinkering or have any interest in tradeskills to benefit from these drops. They all not only sell well to merchants, but if anyone on your server is trying to work up their tinkering (and just about any other TS for the 350 cap) the materials will sell to someone for a lot more. Back in the days of Ambleshifts Amazing Automated Amalgamators or whatever the 4 words were, and later the days of Ambleshifts Automated Opal Amalgamators, when raiding for Last Bloods, Bazu Stones, and later in VoA and RoF with the next iteration of cultural armor, these little boxes that took about 150,000 (I could be off on that number, but it sticks in my head for some reason)different pieces each to make, with hundreds of subcombines that involved Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, tailoring, fletching, brewing, and more, and the other parts needed to make the raid augs once you had the elusive amalgamating container...there were a very large number of recipes involving every different tradeskill, except MAYBE poison or alchemy, but i seem to remember poison and tinkering together being the reason I made my gnome rogue in the first place. Point being, tradeskilling is more lucrative in today's game, and so is gathering the supplies for it, so if you could use a little plat, or are working up your skills, this route is for you.
PoI started to give us pieces, especially the innovative clockwork gears which aren't found elsewhere, tiny clockwork shafts, etc etc. DoDh is where we start picking up the Glowstones, Glowgems, and Glowrocks, which each sell for about 70% of a diamond or blue diamond, and are useful for jewelcraft and tinkering, or just vender trash. These drops strat out in Corathus Creep, where you will also find some of the tinkering quests. Unlike Nadox and Blightfire skellies, the clockworks here and in PoI will start to wander away when they're the last man standing, but it's nothing to take care of, and they don't move fast. In addition to these glowrocks/gems/stones, there will be entrails from the corathus, bile i believe (that may be witherans though, but there is a second corathus drop) more gears and screws and bolts and shafts, and that's all in the southern portion of the zone. Up north you run into other mobtypes which aren't as great for the powerlevel efficiency, but will net some other drops useful for the tradeskilling.
After CC, if we aren't ready to head up to SoF era, we can head out to more DoDh zones and farm some shadowmane pelts while powerlevelling on those they are another part of the elusive amalgamator combines. I will usually head up to Fort Mech after I wear CC out though, because by now I should have a 60something, even a high 50s is fine, and if you have a 2.0'd SK at 75 with decent aas and gear like I do...you can head to DSH to do brownies right at level 50 if you so choose. Now, here is where we change things up. Now that we can group the toons together (if you can't yet, you'll have a bit longer working the DS/masstank route) we put our baby in a nice safe spot, if it happens to be a rogue then yay for SOS, monks, sks, or anyone with a Planar Overdose pot (not usable til 90 though iirc so ignore that one) then FD is an option. But at this point we're gonna start swarming, or maybe headshotting if you have a wellgeared/aad ranger of appropriate level instead, or a rogue to assassinate or a zerker to decap (iirc, decap starts at a higher level than the others though). As soon as you hit that sweet spot where you can group with a much more powerful toon you have and mass kill, it's time to start partying. I would stop at this point, if not earlier, and switch to AAs for just a tiny bit, idk if you have autogrant on, or even which aa's are autogranted when, but buying all runspeed aas, and innate metabolism at this point, and any aa invis or fd/fade as soon as you can will make the whole process easier (metabolism more for comfort, saving of food if you gave baby some statfood, maintaining endurance if you might have to do a lot of jumping or fd etc, and really just saving yourself from the spam of "You are hungry. You are thirsty. You are out of food and drink" Ok, we get it.
But now the fun begins. Other than the above basics, I don't usually mess with AA's on my new baby until I'm in Fort Mech (if i have a swarmer that's good) or ultimately: Kaesora Library. Now, this is the end of the run for the tinkering/plat drops, but new plat drops will begin and normal tradeskill supplies will start being of more value as well. At the beginning, Kaesora will need to be done in the static zone unless you wait til your baby is within 15 levels of your powerleveler. I don't usually wait that long, but it's very rarely, even in that era, been an issue. I do recommend that unless you have a rogue for a baby, you start out in field of bone(that's not the right name, but you know what I mean..the SoD version of field of bone, Field of Scale maybe) and run through quickly the iksar mask quest. It'll give a nice illusion he/she can always keep, give some xp in the process, and make everything much easier when popping in and out of the library later.
Now inside the library, always cast your illusion first. Invis is then not necessary, but it can help when you get to the golems later. If your baby is a rogue, you probably want the illusion anyway, but its not necessary thanks to sos. I always run through all the hallways bypassing the mobs until i get to the big round room in the middle/topright there. The nice 3-4 story circle with about a hundred mobs give or take. I've counted them before as I looted them and it always seemed to range within 3-4 mobs of 100, depending if I lost any in the pull. Before you do ANYTHING in the static zone of course, double check that no one else is in the zone. if they are, you might have to wait, or make sure they are nowhere near you. Not only would it be dangerous if they aren't in ikky illusion and you ran by with your train, but it would be quite upsetting to watch you run by with all the mobs they were about to kill, so keep the peace and double check before you start. Now, it's all about the swarm (headshot works great here too, but you wont be pulling a 100mob train for that, maybe for decap with a riposte disc though) assuming you're not going to try swarming this with an 85 or 90 yourself, with the tweaks done to swarming, this should still be cake, but if you are doing it with an 85-90 toon, try smaller pulls. the sheer volume of mobs can get dicey at those levels when swarming is still as it was originally. I swarmed in this zone myself all the way to the first player to 100 on my server back in the day, but by that point I was past the static zone, and the group instance, and had to request the raid instance to have appropriately levelled mobs to kill. Past level 100, the xp is gonna suck for the top toon, but it will remain pretty good for the baby right up til then. around 95 you may wanna swap to the raid zone, but you need 6 toons in raid format to request it, and a small amount of SoD progression, i think. I would recommend to pop LotD as you're returning to camp with your first train pull(on the baby) and keep it on AA until you max out all the aas for that level (assuming you are gold and have autogrant on, this wont take long) then it should automatically start putting the xp into regular, then once you level you'll be able to spend the banked aas and max those ones out. This process should be very fast with the autogrant process. If you are not gold on your baby, then be sure ahead of time to research what aa's you will and won't get from autogrant, and ONLY buy the ones you wont get, that wat as soon as yo udo go gold and log in, or level one more time, all those missing ones will fill right in there and you won't have wasted any time or xp on aas that were free.
When you are finished with Kaesora library static, group instance, and maybe raid instance, you're mostly at the end of my guide. However, instead of or in addition to the raid instance, you can instead head to Underfoot. You can pick almost any zone there to continue, some of them also providing tinkering drops and plat items, but i usually dropped down into cooling chambers and ran the halls there much like in Kaesora.
After level 100 or so, powerlevelling isn't really a thing in the traditional sense, and is more just a result of game mechanics from some recent expansions, so just start playing from here and have fun. If you want to get your 2.0 because your baby is of a class it's useful (SK for sure) then all that can be sorted at any point along the way as convenient. Don't forget about the 1.5 prequest to save time doing a 1.0, but if you have items already looted because your baby is old (baby doesn't have to be starting at level 1 to use this guide of course) or you have a decent number yourself able to be MQ'd..or you just like the 1.0, maybe just do it all, but it's not something to worry particularly about, until you want to.
Slightly different path to high level, some different reasons and alternatives and methods therein, but really not that different than what you're heard before, if you've ever read a post on powerlevelling before. But, everyone has some tips and tricks and ideas that are jsut a little different , and that's how we all perfect the process. If it hadn't been "nerfed", I might post a how-to swarm to go with it, maybe I still will for those who want to use it on a brand new sk, just to see what all the fuss was ever about.