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Many months ago I wrote a post about earning the Loremaster achievement. No doubt I expounded on the wonderful lore and epic quest chains that exist in WoW (to be frank, I can’t honestly remember what I wrote but you can brush up on my past post here.) Only with the passage of time have I learned the real benefits of the Loremaster achievement. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, let me talk about a friend of mine from work. We’ll call him “Stan”. Stan and I work together making video games. What this usually entails is Stan coming up with the concept of a game and me telling Stan what’s possible with the resources that we have. We usually spend at least an hour a day talking about video games: console, PC, casual, hardcore, it doesn’t matter. I love my job.

Anyway, I caught wind that Stan was a recovering WOW addict and I couldn’t resist baiting him into playing again. I convinced him to roll a low level character on my server so that we could play WoW together. Soon enough we were setting up play times (weekend mornings usually work the best) and grinding through some early instances.

Although we made an effort to play together, we found that most of our leveling time was spent apart. I’d walk into the office in the morning and state in a simple voice whatever level I had achieved the night before (this morning was “57”). And each day Stan would shake his head in consternation. How could I be leveling so much faster than him? Was I playing more hours and foregoing sleep or getting high level friends to escort me through instances?

No, the real answer was that my previous Loremaster experience had left me with a mental map of all the quests in the Old World. I knew the secret quest pickups, the most efficient leveling loops, and when it was most effective to level (always with rested XP). I know Azeroth like the back of my hand. What that means at the end of the day is that we’ll play more apart then we will together…which strangely enough, is the way I like to level in an MMORPG.  So I guess, in a roundabout way, this is a thank-you to Blizzard for putting an Achievement in the game that has some lasting functionality.