Congratulations to Gypsyster on becoming our 55th Shadowlands Iron Man Challenge champion! Gypsyster’s Iron Man journey took 19 days, 11 hours, and 28 minutes with a /played time of 2 days to complete.

Ster was inspired to create Gypsyster the Night Elf Rogue because he wanted to take a closer look at the new changes implemented by Blizzard. “I created this Rogue the day after Dragonflight’s pre-patch #1 came out on Oct. 27th. Blizzard has been busy making some significant changes to a toon’s spells and talent trees. So I thought, hey, can a NE Rogue with no talents selected get very far? Obviously, the answer is yes, at least to the current max level of 60.”

Ster shared with us the following notable observations: “When you ding level 10, you are presented with a Specialization screen. At least for now, you can close that screen without picking a Spec. With no spec chosen, you have no talents. That’s the good news. The bad news is the Rogue was left with very basic spells. The Rogue’s favorites crowd control spells are missing, so no SAP, no Blind, and no Evasion. You do get Stealth and eventually Vanish, and the only decent attack spell is Cheap Shot. The rest you can only get by picking a Spec and Talents.”

“Now you might be asking, hey, for a severely limited Rogue, how did you get from 1 to 60 in just over 2 weeks? Mostly because I caught the tail-end of the holiday Hollow’s End (candy bucket XP adds up!), and Blizzard granted everyone the 50% bonus XP buff the Winds of Wisdom with the run-up to the next Xpac release. Otherwise, I think the XP would be very slow.”

When we asked Ster if he felt a talentless challenger could make it to 70 he had this to say: “Doubtful. Without talents, this Rogue had to stop attacking regular mobs around level 18 – just couldn’t kill anything. Most of my XP came from non-fighting quests, exploring, treasure chests, etc.”

What’s next for Ster? “Naturally getting the collection of toons ready for the next expansion. I better have a couple of scouts and learn how to tune the Talent Trees for the spells I’m used to for Rogues and Druids. See you on the other side.”

We wish you luck with your challengers in Dragonflight and congratulations once again on Gypsyster becoming our 55th Shadowlands Iron Man Challenge champion.