How Close to Half Way in WoW Classic?

WoW Classic will hit the six month mark this week, having gone live back in late August of last year.  I remember that first night.  It was all about queues.

Waiting in line in the snow

At this point in the game my gaggle of characters is starting to clump up around the level 40 mark.  I am taking my time getting to the level cap, though I suspect that had I put all my play time into a single character I might already be level 60.  But that is now how things work for me.

Getting to and past level 40 made me wonder if any of my characters were even half way to level cap, a thought prompted by Pokemon Go.

Sure, in absolute levels I was half way at level 30.  And in Pokemon Go I was half way to its level cap of 40 back when I hit level 20.  But that doesn’t represent the actual half way point of the effort.  In Pokemon Go, the way the experience curve works, you haven’t gotten half way to the xp you need for level 40 until you are a ways into level 37.  So I wanted to know how the curve looked for WoW Classic.

Fortunately we live in the internet age and I was quickly able to find a chart in a Reddit post that had the xp you need for each level.  I transcribed that into a spreadsheet and setup columns to show a cumulative total for each level as well as a percentage.

Assuming the chart is correct (it matches others I have seen) and that I have caught all my transcription errors, you need 4,084,700 xp to hit level 60, which puts the half way point for xp at around level 47.  My highest level character is close to level 42, which puts him past the one third mark, but still well shy of half way.

However, this raw measure is… well… raw.  Unlike Pokemon Go, where the xp you earn for activity is the same at level 1 as it is at level 39, WoW Classic scales up the xp you earn.  Higher level mobs and quests give more xp.

That chart I linked reflects that as it has a second data set, which is how much xp you get from killing at at-level mob at any given level and how many at level mobs you need to kill to get to the next level.  So I transcribed that as well, once again adding a running total and a percentage column.

To get to level 60 by just grinding you need to slay 16,339 at-level mobs, and the half way point, in raw mobs slain, is somewhere around level 44.

But that doesn’t take into account blue bar kills.  When you have that rested experience each kill counts double, and when you rotate through four characters actively, and another two on occasion, almost every kill is a blue bar kill.  And then there is the quest xp on top of that.  Some times it is minor, but there is the occasional big hit of xp from a quest.

So maybe I am pretty close to half way at level 40.  But is xp even the right measuring stick?

One of the goals for WoW Classic is to do all the five person instances.  Looking at the list of instances I came up with this set:

1. Ragefire Chasm*
2. The Deadmines*
3. Wailing Caverns*
4. Shadowfang Keep*
5. Stormwind Stockade*
6. Blackfathom Deeps
7. Gnomeregan*
8. Razorfen Kraul
9. Scarlet Monastery Graveyard*
10. Scarlet Monastery Library*
11. Scarlet Monastery Armory*
12. Scarlet Monastery Cathedral*
13. Razorfen Downs
14. Uldaman
15. Zul’Farrak
16. Maraudon – Purple
17. Maraudon – Orange
18. The Temple of Atal’Hakkar
19. Blackrock Depths
20. Blackrock Spire – Lower
21. Blackrock Spire – Upper
22. Scholomance
23. Stratholme
24. Dire Maul – East
25. Dire Maul – West
26. Dire Maul – North

The instances marked with an asterisk have been run.  That gives us 10 out of 26 run, which is a few shy of the half way mark.  We have also skipped a couple along the way.  I am not sure how we make that up, save with an lower level alt group.

And not all instances are the same.  Gnomeregan and Uldaman should almost count double.  They are equipped with side doors to pick up part way through.  And the Temple of Atal’Hakkar… Sunken Temple… that is a long run in its classic form, also probably suitable for a couple of attempts.  Both sides and the back of Maraudon are probably quicker.  And should I even count UBRS?  That is a 10 person raid.  I am not sure we’re going to get that done with just four of us.

No matter how I stack it up we seem to shy of the half way point six months into the game.  But I am not worried about being too slow.  I doubt we’ll see anything new on the WoW Classic front before the end of 2021.  There is plenty of time.