WoW Player Reaches Max Level Without Ever Stepping Foot In Starter Zone

A World of Warcraft player has taken the art of leveling to new heights, having reached the game’s recently increased max level of 70 without ever stepping off the tutorial boat that takes players to the Exile’s Reach starter zone.

As spotted by GamesRadar, Reddit user Cheatcho is claiming the title of “world first level 70 on Exile’s Reach starting ship.” At first glance, the feat sounds absurd. There are no enemies or quests to complete on the ship that takes players to the starter zone. There’s not even any herbs to pick or ore to mine, which grant small amounts of experience that have been used by other creative levelers over the years to accomplish “pacifist” leveling runs.

Cheatcho’s not-so-secret-secret is five account-wide pet battle quests. Because these quests are account-wide, they can be done on separate characters, but can be turned in for the rewards on an entirely different character on the same account. By parking five characters at each of the five daily pet battle quest givers, Cheatcho only needs to play for about five minutes a day, completing the quests on each character. Then, all they need to do is log into their boat-bound character to turn the quests in order to earn the maximum experience available while on the boat. As Cheatcho explains, the pet battles themselves are fairly trivial if you have a level 25 Chrominius’s pet on your account, which has an arcane explosion ability that can quickly take out all three of each quest giver’s pets.

The only downside is that the amount of experience needed to level all the way to 70 is quite high compared to the daily pet battle quest rewards, so Cheatcho needed to do this for 200 consecutive days to accomplish the feat. Leveling from level 60 to 70 alone, Cheatcho says, takes about 60 days.

Preemptively answering the question of “why?” in their Reddit post, Cheatcho says the motivation behind the accomplishment was because they found it fun.

“Because it’s the ultimate solo player way to level a character,” Cheatcho says. “You never leave the ship. You never defeat another player, dungeon boss, or even group with anyone else. You never die. And because I consider doing it fun.”

WoW players are no strangers to leveling up in wacky ways. It only took a little over two hours for the first players to hit level 70 with the release of the game’s new Dragonflight expansion, and there is a long history of one particular Pandaren player progressing through each new expansion by sticking to the Pandaren starting zone picking flowers.

For players who actually decide to step off the boat to level, Blizzard is aiming at delivering more frequent content updates for WoW in 2023. The game’s next major update, patch 10.0.7, is slated to arrive this spring and will introduce new story quests, the long-awaited arrival of orc and human Heritage Armor, and a major rework for the game’s Retribution Paladin specialization.