Don’t Fear the Mutant posted a dissection of levelling vs endgame, where he came to a surprising conclusion: max level = freedom. Surprising because that’s almost the reverse of how I felt on reaching 70 & 80. In fact I was temporarily paralysed: now what?

Whilst reaching max level meant that the on rails levelling was over, and despite a myriad of playing options becoming available, it actually felt like there was suddenly less scope to just play around:

  • Need to grind factions to Exalted;
  • Professions must be maxed;
  • Farm mats for crafted epics;
  • Accumulate badges for welfare epics;
  • Stay current with your gear;
  • etc.

Pike recently expressed a similar sentiment, staying gear capped becomes more restrictive than levelling an alt. There can be great pressure to keep up, which in turn limits your choices of what to do when you’re online.

My much beloved ex guild leader used to insist on rep grinds (thank goodness the Hodir enchants are BoA now), min-maxing professions, dailies, the works, before his Guildies could have the freedom to… go fishing. It felt like wagging school to go in search of Old Crafty.

Of course the pressure to get to the level cap can mean just as little freedom. But unless you’re power levelling, you can drift around doing different things, exploring the world, doing instances just for the fun of it. As Janis Joplin put it, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”, and you really do have nothing to lose when levelling, but there’s a lot to lose once you fall behind the end game.