Cataclysm is coming, Are you lost yet?
Cataclysm is coming, Are you lost yet?
Cataclysm is coming, Are you lost yet?
By now you have probably seen it many times. When the last new expansion came out, The Burning Crusade, several players were up to level 80 in just a few days if not less than a week. And you were probably scouring the net in search of the latest guide that would hold your hand to get you there just as fast. Or, *gasp* torrented* a few just to make sure you "invested" in the right guide. However, no matter what you did, or what guide you used, almost inevitably, after about level 25+ you lost steam and most if not all the guides seem to loose their luster for "speed leveling" feel. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just someone who knew what the hell they were doing, either on the phone or next to you telling you what to do, where to go, and just what quest to take and what ones to just leave alone? Someone to tell you how to get your heirlooms a little easier than you are right now?
Well sorry, keep dreamin'
The first "reputable" guide was written by an individual named "Joana". A Killer Horde guide. I first bought this guide off ebay complete with 3 DVD's of him actually playing from start to finish to level 60 (at the time that was the cap TBC had not come out as of yet). It was a simple bound paper guide that I had sitting next to my desk. Once I got that, I was rockin. While it was good, I still had to check back with the guide, and even when he ported it to pdf, alt tabbing was a pain, especially if you are in full screen mode. Eventually he took it to "in-game" but it was still not quite what I was expecting. In a nutshell, It was just a text file that could be read through an in-game mod. While the Idea was slick, you still had to cycle through quest and manually update as you went along. So if you played more than one toon, it could be more trouble than it was worth. I recently checked his site in 2010. I did not see much change, but then I did not update my copy, however, from the screen shots provided, it looked like it did 2yrs prior. He has now expanded to Ally, and has released a Starcraft 2 guide.
Admist all this, I thought I would take a shot at making a leveling guide. The method was simple. There were tons of internet sites that catered to questing and location. Thottob, Alakhazam, Wowhead to name a few. And how to make mods. The PROCESS was very very time consuming. After some time I was able to make a pretty good guide for the Undead. At that time, Joana's guide only catered to the Orc, and Troll in Durotar. If you wanted any other Horde races AND use the guide, you would have to hike it over to Durotar. I was rather proud of my guide, even though it went to level 20. One could do level 10 in 1hr 20min. It was very stream lined. But, I could tell right away this project is not for the faint of heart. It is a long grueling job. And I was not the patient type to pursue it. But I did save my guide.
Unfortunately for me, Joana's was a Horde guide and most of my friends and family were playing ally. So I set out looking for an Ally guide to help me catch up to them and stumbled upon Brian Kopps infamous ally guide. Now That guide rocked! It was very concise. Had coordinates, and many other niceties that were not found in other "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3" guides. He had a talent suggestion, pet suggestions and countless other pieces of information. It was with his guide I finally cracked the level 60 and up (pre TBC). However, there was still an issue with the alt-tab crap I didn't want to deal with. However, he was quick on the draw and I believe HIS was the first "auot-step" quest design. He incorporated TOM-Tom for pointing the way in game based on the coords, and the quest guide moved to the next step without you having to do anyting. NOW we were getting somewhere. Simply get your quest, where the guide says to go, do it, turn it in, and the ingame-quest viewer will move to the next step for what you are to do next and if need be, the GPS would appear and point you in the right direction. That one got me to my first level 70 and did it, not as fast as the author said, took me 12days (/played) but it was at a speed I would have never achieved on my own that's for sure. But then again, I was doing professions as well.
A short time afterwards several "professional" guides came out. All boasting some heavy claims, Guides like Dugi's, Team Demise, Zygor and more. They all seemed to have all the bells and whistles. And a ridiculous price tag. So out came the credit card and pumped out another $200 plus to see what these guides would do. Only one made me speechless zygor.
While others "claimed" to be professionally designed, Zygor was! The thing that got me first was the bizzar interface design. It was wild looking. But I thought ".. ya so what, but can it level me". They had all kinds of technical terms for their software and rightly so. Terms like "injection". What the hell was that? I come to find out later that this "guide" (in game mind you) is so smart that it can tell by your level where you need to be at in the guide and will auto adjust all the steps up to a point so you don't miss chain quests at your level. No other guide I found could even touch that. So I grabbed one of my level 33 hunter(I leveled him the old fasion way, with a little mix of Kopps), and sure enough, you could see the guide scroll through (FAST!) all the quest automatically "real-time" and finally go to I believe it was level 30, because there was a start of a chain quest that was need when I got to level 33. When I did that quest, it quickly ran through more steps until it reached where I needed to be (level 32 this time to pick up another quest, then it finally got to the level 33 section). I could not even do it that fast with my Joana/Kopps guide sitting at my side as a printed pdf file!! It was just that fast.
Another nice thing I noticed about it, was that I was finally able to get rid of all the other "support" mods for the guide as Zygor had its own built in GPS (cya TOMTOM), had its own mapping system (good by Cartographer) and a whole slew of other goodies. Not to mention its built in talent suggestion. Yes it will even assign your talents for you (based on your suggestions) without you even having to open up your talent tree.
Now THIS was a professional "in-game" guide. To this day, there is no other guide that can match what these guys do. While the price tag is steep, the old saying definitely applies here "you get what you paid for".
In closing, while I am currently quite content with Zygor as my main guide, I became very disappointed at the other guides pricing since they are in no way shape or form able to complete with the features that is offered from Zygor, and yet still charge the same fee. Some of the guides I tested (just to level 20 on some) it was not possible to make level 10 in under 2hrs. Something I know CAN be done based on my experience making guides. So it made me wonder, YES it has a guide all the way to 80, but does it really get you there in the time frame they suggest or it is a selling gimmick. My personal two recommendations would be BK and Zygor, but If you are limited on funds. Zygor is the way to go. The vast amount of features are just too overwhelming to pass up.
On a final note to you torrent lovers. Being a programmer (these are written using lua), I know of several of the guides out there have had some routines altered to pass your info back to its author (no this process does not trigger any adware,spamware or virus programs remember you opened the port and your pc to wow, all the programmer has to do is ride that port and they are safe). With the increasing rise in hacked accounts, I would not be surprised if some of those are coming from the torrent files themselves. I know if I wrote a good guide, I would put a hacked version on torrent sites just to keep everyone on their toes but that's just me.
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