My quest is over. I now have a 60 of each class on Defias Pillager! I’ve started on day 1 of HC, so the whole endeavour took about 13 months.
Here are some stats, for my 60s, in order of their achieving level 60:
hunter no gear help 8 days, 7 hours
paladin minimal gear help 8 days, 14 hours
rogue blues, enchants 5 days, 5 hours
warrior dual crusader on epics 4 days, 10 hours
blue armor, enchants
priest blues, enchants 5 days, 13 hours
mage blues, enchants 4 days, 17 hours
warlock blues, enchants 5 days, 10 hours
druid blues, enchants 5 days, 8 hours
shaman epic weapon/shield 6 days, 13 hours
few blues
Starting with the rogue, all characters were fully elixir’d, with up-to-date elixirs (e.g. Mongoose immediately upon level availability).
Aside from hunter and shaman (first and last), characters were played on rested XP and world buffs - mostly.
I had so many alts that I would get world buffs for each of them, while they waited in town to accumulate rested XP.
I did a lot of grinding, and avoided any dangerous quest lines (e.g. those in EPL). Starting with the third character, they all had quest turn-ins waiting for them, such as: Badlands reagents, EPL LHC parts, Un’Goro crystals/soil/casing, etc.
I avoided most instances. I did DM/VC, RFC, sometimes Gnomer on characters that could escape easier - such as rogue. I did full SM. Next I did ZF, but only once I reached level 50 for petri. I did one or two STs and three-four Mara princesses.
World buff time was allocated for grinding, with questing only if it was a grindy quest, without much travel (e.g. STV). Thus, I avoided instances while I had world buffs.
I always feared DCs. On my first character, I did not once travel by boats, and only accepted warlock summons from an RL friend. I did take mage portals.
Another DC hedge was to add /startattack in my spellcasting macros and range-pull (e.g. rogue, warrior) macros. I figured a DC immediately after pull could be offset by autoattacks until server boot.
I kept my first 60 in EPL, at LHC. He is an herbalist. I would log on every now and then on him, and see if any of the 3 nearby herb nodes had anything. Then I’d log off immediately. There’s a spot in the LHC entryway where you can see the world minimap, yet be considered inside/resting.
On the way, I lost 3 characters:
23 warrior, killed by orcs in RR
22 druid, killed by gnolls in RR
24 shaman, killed by alliance sentinels in Ashenvale
Through most of this journey, I had an alchemist in town creating and sending potions to all characters. I also had a 300/300 lockpicking rogue opening all lockboxes.
I don’t like professions all that much. I really don’t like Engineering, so I had no engineers. Most of my characters had Enchanting, so they could disenchant blues.
I made money during the SOD rush. When SOD first released, concurrent HC population dropped, and prices increased by 100%-200%. At that point I liquidated everything I had gathered (herbs, etc.), to earn money for mounts.
I made good money reselling Gyrochronatoms - ironic given that none of my characters could make them. I noticed that sometimes only 2-3 were on the AH, so I’d buy them for 50s or under, and resell for 3g each.
I also liked to resell low level neck pieces. They often appeared on the AH for 2-3g, yet could fetch even 15g when resold.
My AHing was done manually. The only addons I used were the ones I wrote myself. These were simple addons to help with resources such as rage.
The Searing Gorge bridge gap scared me to the point where I’d hop across each bridge high enough for the drop to kill me.
I joined guilds with each of my characters, while leveling. I name my characters each differently, and each joined a different guild. They are still around in the server’s largest guilds - I just don’t play them much anymore.
I did this because I’ve always liked leveling, and the HC aspect made it even more pleasing. I still don’t have a 60 Self Found, so I’ll do that next.
The worst near-death experience was pulling three Freezing Ghouls by accident in WPL. I was world buffed, but that mattered little when they chain-froze me. I couldn’t even run away because I was CCd continuously. This was on my shaman. I managed to get far enough a way that using a petri reset them.
Another extremely close call was in Mor’Ladim’s catacombs and I accepted a group invite. I was layered in the middle of ghouls and skeletons and my saving luck was that I evaded 2 skeletons by jumping on a sarcophagus, and succeeded in killing the other 2 that aggro’d.