The First Lesson in Avoiding Temptation

Well, one goal has been accomplished with Operation Spread the Love: my in-game friends are reaching L60 before I have gotten a single toon to L20.

Here's how it looks as of January 2nd, 2025.
I really have to get some better looking pants;
between the green and the yellow, it looks like Cardwyn
plays for the Green Bay Packers.

My Questing Buddy is sitting at L59, and others are at L60 and L55. Still others are in the L40s, while another friend who is taking their time like I am is in the L20s.

At the moment, I'm not feeling any surge of FOMO since they're reaching max level. I think a lot of that is seeing their relief that the leveling is done (or coming to an end), which only adds to my resolve. While I'd like to finally get out of Westfall or Darkshore, I know that once I start pushing I'm going to have a hard time stopping. 

How do I know that? 

Well, if there's one thing that dealing with my health issues has taught me, it's that the easiest way to control my diet is to simply not have temptation in the house. It's not always the most fun thing to do, and given that my wife doesn't have any dietary restrictions that means temptation is always in the house to some extent. However, by minimizing my contact with any temptation I can control my diet. 

What I'm doing on the Anniversary servers is taking the lessons I've learned from my "health journey" and applying them to leveling. That means avoiding dungeon runs from a high level toon, whether a bought boost or just given one by a friend. But that also means avoiding grouping up with friends to do some questing together. From my experience I just don't level as fast as everyone else*, and since I frequently do take my time to read the quest text I find myself holding people back. So, when I have grouped up with people in the past to "level together", I rather conveniently skip doing quests myself and simply am there to make their questing easier.** Since all that's happening is inadvertent pressure put on me to level faster, I've decided to avoid grouping to do quests together entirely.***

I do have one last trick up my sleeve for slowing down my leveling, and that is leveling crafting at the same time.

Anybody who has leveled a non-gathering profession in WoW Classic can tell you that it can take a serious amount of gold to level something such as Blacksmithing or Tailoring, let alone Enchanting. Since my gold is spread thin already, I have to slow down my leveling just to grind out drops from mobs so I can sell for more gold.

I also sell any fish I catch for gold --either to a vendor or on the Auction House-- which also takes time.

So, I have my methods of avoiding temptation. Now I have to stick to it.

*Yes, my powerleveling a Shaman in 2021 is the exception.

**Afterward, I'll go back and do the quests myself at my own pace. In case you're wondering, I starte doing this back in 2009/2010 when I leveled Quintalan, my first L80 toon. I'd be out questing with Soul and his wife and I'd frequently find myself behind on completing quests because they'd done all of this before, so I eventually just gave up and just became a so-called sell-sword.

***This isn't the same as joining up for a group quest, where I'll group up with people nearby who are on the same group quest so we can complete the thing together. Once done, the group is disbanded and that's that.