It always astounds me when people are so much better at games than I am, and no, that’s not because I think I’m a great gamer (I’m not, ask my League of Legends teammates) but because of how much patience and resilience they seem to have to make their crazy ideas work.
Take, for example, the woman who played Elden Ring using a dance pad – just imagining that level of frustration has me cringing away. But today isn’t anything crazy like using a dance pad to break WoW; instead, we’re talking about the player who reached level 70 in World of Warcraft without even arriving at the tutorial area. Yup.
A player called Cheatcho managed to use WoW’s pet battle mechanic to slowly level up without ever leaving the boat’s confines that takes you to the game’s starting area. If you’re curious about how this is possible, let’s explain.
World of Warcraft has a good number of pet battle quests that, once unlocked, can be completed by any of the characters on your account instead of just the character who collected the quest. Therefore, you can pick up the quests on one character and finish them on another. Technically, players could use this to level up a character that hasn’t even arrived at the starting area yet. And that is precisely what Cheatcho did.
It only took him grinding five quests over a whopping 200 days to pull it off. Cheatcho says this is the ultimate solo-player way to level a character. Cheatcho also has some advice for players wanting to try this at home: Keep separate characters at each of the pet battle trainers so you can get all the quests at the cost of a mere five minutes a day.
This all sounds awful to me, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t impressed and relieved that it wasn’t me.