Arrowd of the US Cairne server has a question: How do you keep leveling without getting bored, abandoning a character, or rerolling? She says that she's had around 14 characters, and she's never managed to stick with one past about level 45. She always gets bored, and she wonders if there is a way to avoid it.

Now as I've mentioned before, I've leveled a lot of characters myself, and have a few 70s, but even I can sometimes get a little bit tired of the grind, and sometimes even I need to make up goals to keep myself focused. Sometimes I even need it for my level 70s if I'm running low on gold or raiding supplies. In that way, I can definitely feel where she's coming from, but I do (usually) manage to keep myself motivated.

Sometimes, for me, the Motivation is pretty simple. For example, on that Shaman I'm leveling, what keeps me going is the prospect of getting some sweet Dual Wield action going. I'm actually having a lot of fun with her, so I don't need to focus on it too hard, but the idea of imagining her with 2 axes enchanted with Windfury is a mental picture that is too awesome to put into words. I mean, we're talking cover of a Dragonforce album awesome.

So now I turn the question over to the rest of you. Whether it be leveling on a lowbie or grinding on a 70, how do you keep yourself motivation when the going gets tough and you get tired out? Is it the promise of a new skill? A new piece of gear? What keeps you charged up and logged in?

Every Saturday, Arcane Brilliance freezes you in place, then Blinks behind a pillar and turns Invisible. You can look for Arcane Brilliance if you want to, but I can tell you that's a bad idea. You see, while you're looking, Arcane Brilliance is positioning itself behind you, cooking up a giant Pyroblast and aiming it up your tailpipe. You really only have a few options here. You can a.) cry, b.) curl into the fetal position and wait for the sweet embrace of death, or c.) distract Arcane Brilliance by quickly yelling "Spell damage is more important that spell hit rating, discuss!" and then log out while Arcane Brilliance is busy posting on the forums about what you just said. I'd go with c.), personally. Works every time.

Recently, I discovered that there seem to be leveling guides on this site for just about every class but Mages, so it's time I stepped up to the plate. The problem is, Mage was my very first class, on my very first character, on my very first foray into the World of Warcraft, which took place approximately forever ago. Ok, so it's only been about two-and-a-half years, but in WoW years, that's the rough equivalent of a million kajillion years ago. My memories of those first few levels are fuzzy at best, and I can condense what I remember learning into two statements: "Murlocs are evil," and "The only way out of Undercity is to use my Hearthstone." One of those statements eventually stopped being true for me, and the other one is "Murlocs are evil." Needless to say, I didn't feel entirely qualified to write a leveling guide for the first few levels of Magecraft.

To rectify the situation, I decided to roll a brand new Mage, so that I could experience those first few levels all over again. To ensure that the experience was as pure as I could make it, I created my Mage on a new server--the newest actually--Cairne. I knew nobody on that server, and had no alts there, so this Mage, a Human female I named Niwt, would be an entirely virgin Mage. I had never played an Alliance Mage before, and never leveled any character in the Human starting area, so the quests would be new to me, and the landscape foreign. I disabled all of my mods and dove in.

It was horrible.

I learned a lot though, or remembered learning a lot, depending on how you look at it. After the break, more text!

This has been one of the most-requested Know Your Lore subjects over the months we've had this feature, but I've held off because until recently there just wasn't that much information about the Grimtotems. With the new Dustwallow Marsh content in 2.4 and the revelations in the WoW comic book, it's finally time to explore one of the most mysterious factions in the game -- Magatha Grimtotem and her tribe of tauren outcasts.

Who: The Grimtotem Clan.

What: 1,430 members of a powerful Tauren clan.

History: Way, way back before Cairne Bloodhoof met Thrall and created a new tauren homeland in Mulgore, the tauren were organized into clans, each with their own leader. The Grimtotem were NOT one of these clans. Instead, the Grimtotem name passed down through generations of survival in other clans, until the Tauren were unified under Cairne. Then the Grimtotem banded together as, basically, an opposition party, defined by their distrust of Cairne's alliance with the orcs and trolls.

A new server was released earlier this week, and life on Cairne is fresh and unknown. It is amazing not to see any level 70's running around. When most of the population is below level 20, it is really odd actually having to find groups for Dead Mines instead of just having a 70 friend run you through.

As I said on the WoW Insider Show last week, I do have a little green hunter who's 70 and plays in groups with my friends often enough. She's not very powerful, and probably never will be. My warrior and warlock take up most of my end game time, and that's okay. So in hopes that I might convince myself to play a hunter more, I've decided to roll yet another alt on the new server and see where things take me. I really enjoy classes that have pets, so I made another hunter. She's now level 17 after a few hours of play.

One of the first choices I had to make was what kind of pet to get. I used Petopia to browse some of my options, and to make sure that my preconceived notion of a bear was the right answer. It was. With my other hunter, I leveled from 10 to 70 using a cat. Nothing wrong with that, he just wasn't as good at tanking as my bear is turning out to be.

For the first time in a very long time , we are getting a brand-new non-transfer realm, open to create characters on and explore its untouched reaches. As a non-transfer realm, character transfers to it are disabled for six months. I believe this is the first such realm since Burning Crusade launched, though we did get a new transfer realm at the end of last month. The realm is called Cairne, and it's a PvE realm, in Central time, in the Emberstorm battlegroup. Reroll locusts, start your engines.

Do you need a new beginning? It's kind of tempting to go roll on a realm where nobody's been out of the noob zones yet, where the Dark Portal has yet to be traversed by players and everything is ripe for the conquering. But then again, it's also nice to be on a realm with a mature economy and people I know, so I will probably not be rushing out to Cairne myself. I know, however, that many of you have been clamoring for a new realm for some time -- go to it.

Update: Bornakk adds that there are no plans for new PvP realms, "as there are several low population PvP realms you can transfer or re-roll on right now."