Levels 1 - 6

Levels one to six were pretty uneventful, with a large number of low level characters in the zone, it certainly felt like a new server. To quote Blizzard,

“Vek'nilash is recently converted from PvP to PvE. It is currently our lowest population PvE realm”

So we do not exactly have that new server smell, more of a refurbished one, this also suits Earle down to the ground as well, old is better.

Generally the players in Coldridge were well behaved and with not too much kill stealing or other acts of asshattery occurring.  Chat was pretty quiet with most players head down levelling like clockwork through the starter quests.

Imp at level 2, thankfully with a half decent random name “Zornik”, it certainly made the sprint to level 5 easier, The biggest shock came at level 4 and the training costs. The cost of 95c per spell was pretty steep and the cash rewards from quests did not cover this, so it was off to grind on some troggs for a few minutes.  I wonder if this was intentional by the Blizzard designers given we get a free mount at 20.

All trained up at level 4 and finishing the last few quests from Coldridge Earle levelled up to 5 so off to Kharanos in my lovely low level white gear I went.  On the run to that  Dwarven metropolis I got talking to the wife and we decided that The Burning Crusade starter areas have better itemisation. There was some thought about levelling in Elwynn Forest given easy access to class trainers but this was offset by the better gear in Azuremyst Isle plus the fact that Stormwind Harbour makes travel back and forth a breeze now. 

Sadly I could not reminisce about yet another Wetlands run, and all of us who played vanilla WoW will remember those, especially any Night Elf players, but some things do change for the better with each expansion.

So with that goal in mind I set off on the long trek to the land of our friendly neighbourhood interdimensional space goats via Ironforge and Stormwind.  It was encouraging to see a lot of lower level characters in these cities, Trade chat was well behaved as well.  As I move further towards the Draenei enclaves the number of players dwindled but I was hopeful that this would change as I got closer to the other starter areas.