Nymh

WoW Diehards Hit Level 80
By Humphrey Cheung, published on November 17, 2008 at 10:30 AM


Blizzard Entertainment released its World of Warcraft expansion pack just a few days ago, but die-hard players have already completed most of the game. A French player reached level 80, the maximum attainable in the game, in just 27 hours and a European guild has already cleared out all the dungeons. However, some players have been banned from the game in their quest for glory.

The November 13th midnight launch of Wrath of the Lich King was a huge spectacle as thousands of players lined up at electronics and game stores throughout the world. Blizzard Entertainment also managed to ship copies of the expansion pack to United States military bases in Europe, Asia and even Iraq. As with previous launches of the game and the first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, hard-core players race to level up their characters and kill dungeon bosses.

“Nymh”, a player on the French server Drek’thar, reached level 80 in just under 28 hours after the launch. He accomplished this inhuman feat by continuously killing monsters in a special area where they would respawn every thirty seconds. A buddy tagged along, just to mindlessly heal Nymh’s character.

Nymh initially had some great competition from another French player “Athene”, but Athene was banned by Blizzard after reaching level 79 in just 13 hours. Athene leveled quickly by entering a dungeon with all of his guild mates and then hitting every monster he could find. He would then leave the party and let his friends finish off all the creatures. Athene contends that there was nothing wrong with this and has even published a YouTube video showing his method. The video also has screenshots of a Blizzard employee assuring him that he would not get banned.

Getting to level 80 is one thing, but clearing out all of the instances/dungeons is an entirely different feat. The guild TwentyFifthNovember on the Magtheridon European server completed Naxxramas and killed Malygos in approximately two and a half days. TwentyFifthNovember is basically a “super guild” that merged members of SK-Gaming and Nihilum, both powerhouse guilds in their own right. The guild has received some flak on the World of Warcraft official forums for possibly cheating or exploiting their way through the content, but most of the guild members had completed the same content in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. Basically, the team is merely completing the content a second time.

As always Blizzard will add more content via patches in the coming weeks/months and the final battle with the Lich King, Arthas, will probably be added in a month or two. This probably won’t come fast enough for the folks at TwentyFifthNovember.