I Leveled Up, Cupcake!

Ding!

This weekend I managed to ding level 50! After leveling up, however, I went right back to doing exactly what I had been doing all along. That meant questing, exploring, freaking out when the ore I was mining turned into a giant monster and tried to eat me, you know, the normal stuff.

One of the benefits of WildStar being a new game is that there’s no huge pool of people waiting on me to catch up for raiding purposes. I am a raider at heart, and I can’t wait to see what this game brings in its hardcore elder game content, but the truth is I will have to wait. Most of my guild is taking their time and enjoying the leveling process, so there’s only a handful of people at 50 as of today. This is awesome, because it means leveling is fun enough that people don’t want to skip past it.

So what were my favorite parts about leveling to 50 in WildStar for the first time? Here’s a list:

5 – Open world group quests. Every zone had a few bounty board or other 2+ or 5+ quests. Currently, at least, there’s enough people leveling that getting a group never took more than asking in zone chat once or twice. The more complex 5+ ones had a nostalgic feel but with modern design. By that I mean multiple quests had objectives that could be done simultaneously, and that when one person in my group collected a dog tag and I got credit I almost cried tears of joy.

4 – Wilderun. This zone is beautiful, and the lore was incredibly interesting to me. I enjoyed the 3-dimensionality of it also, with questgivers up in the trees and such. Also like many of the zones, there’s a good variety of sub-zones that break it up so it isn’t just “5 levels of non-stop jungle.”

3 – Marshal Yatish. Maybe you’ve met the fan club, maybe you’ve spent time with the Marshal in person. He’s awesome, and shows a side of the lopp that isn’t just all cuddly and shiny-chasing. I ❤ him.

2 – Dungeons. I love their difficulty. I love their lore. I love the scope and feel of them. But most of all I love that you can still keep running them with your friends no matter how much you outlevel them because of the rally-down feature. They weren’t the best source of XP per hour, but they were very high on fun.

1 – The Drusera Content. If you’ve started on these quests (they begin around level 35) you know what I’m talking about. I am not going to go into much detail because the story is great and I don’t want to spoil anything. I will say that it had me leveling eagerly so I could see the next installment every time. Also, the finale in Grimvault was amazing and epic and everything a capstone quest chain should be. It just oozed “you just hit (or are about to hit) the level cap and are hardcore and ready to go save the world.”

Now it is time to start the long raid attunement process. Wish me luck!