A rather efficient World of Warcraft player has reached The War Within’s new level cap in just one hour, beating out a rival in mere minutes.

One of the many traditions the MMO sees in launching a new expansion is the race to see who can hit the new level cap of 80 the quickest. While Dragonflight’s race lasted three hours for those who could log in, The War Within has proven a sprint with players achieving the feat in just over an hour.

The win looked closely contested between ‘Monkeylol’ and ‘Shiekrunner,’ though the latter concedes the former has taken the win, so that’s what people largely seem to be rolling with as further details come in. Either way, both completed the feat in just over an hour, which is a lot quicker than Dragonflight. As Icyveins points out, Monkeylol came second in the Dragonflight race, which makes the win especially sweet.

The strategy for completing the deed differs between the two. Monkeylol tells Echo’s Naowh that it essentially came down to efficient questing. Dodging main story quests, they did other missions until level 76 with some prepared pet battle turn-ins for good measure. Then, it was a case of elite farming and dungeon completion.

For Shiekrunner, Icy Veins reports that more exploits were involved as they managed to find a specific quest in the Blood Elf heritage questline that grants hyper spawns you can farm without moving a lot. Work smarter and harder, and all that. It looks like there were only six minutes between each player’s race to the level cap, so it’s not a bad strategy, though one I imagine Blizzard will be fixing quite soon if it hasn’t already.

With the race to The War Within’s level cap reached attention will soon turn to the race to complete the MMO’s new raid before anyone else. In the meantime, I suppose there’s a new expansion of content that might be of interest, hm?

It’s not just the Worldsoul Saga - World of Warcraft lead Chris Metzen says Blizzard is “mapping out” the MMO upwards of patch 17.0.