The World of Warcraft community is well accustomed to its players completing impressive challenges. Recently, we wrote about a player that had completed the Make Love, Not Warcraft challenge to hit max level on Classic killing only boars.
Today, a new speed leveling record was set on the current build of the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands alpha. Popular YouTuber DesMephisto set a new record, breaking his own previous record by a massive margin
The record might seem a bit strange on the surface – level 10 to level 50, rather than 1 to 60. The difference came from the speedrunner beginning as an allied race, which allowed him to start later and skip the 1-10 Shadowlands starting area.
DesMephisto’s previous record, which was previously the fastest, was about seven hours. This new record is five hours and thirty-seven minutes, shaving almost an hour and a half off of his own best attempt.
What’s more, this was far from an optimized, flawless run. DesMephisto ran into quite a few issues with the run, including glitches and a handful of quests that had been blocked on the alpha, slowing him down considerable.
https://twitter.com/DesMephisto/status/1263996415547600896?s=20/embed]
One of the reasons for his drastically improved time was stronger Heirloom scaling that was implemented by Blizzard in the latest build. While this is far from the only reason for the improved time, it was undoubtedly one of the largest, as it gives a significant power buff.
DesMephisto also insists that this is far from the best that could be done, though it was an extremely solid run all in all. As the tweet from the speedrunner above shows, DesMephisto believes that he could complete the challenge in under five hours without using consumables.
There are, of course, other ways to improve his time, if he chose to do them. For example, players could have a higher-level character essentially power-level them to speed up the process, or serve as a taxi by flying characters about with two-person flying mounts.
But given that this was a solo record rather than an instance of being power-leveled, DesMephisto’s time is incredibly impressive and likely to be unbroken until there are a few more tweaks to the Alpha builds.
As far as those tweaks go, we’ll likely see some changes in the next build related to questing and gear. Many of the quests in the alpha still give strangely scaled items and gear, as well as incorrectly scaled financial rewards. As more and more fixes and tweaks come out, times are likely to be improved.
