Casual WoW

Leveling in WoW can be tedious, and with the amount of distractions present in the game it can be very easy to get sidetracked. A lot of people are fine with meandering along and leveling slowly, taking time to explore and really learn their class, but once you have done that a couple of times, you start to just want to get to the cap with as little fuss as possible. As someone who plays about 20 characters of all classes and races, I have refined my technique a good bit since starting the game and would like to share some of the tricks I use to limit wasted time while leveling. I will also point you towards a couple of guides that will streamline the whole process and improve your leveling time by as much as 1-2 days /played.

- Consider investing in a leveling guide, especially if you plan on getting multiple characters to 70. Brian Kopp’s 1-70 guide is excellent for Alliance, and Joana’s is the Horde equivalent. They are both very much worth the money, and both have their perks for the respective faction, with Brian’s guide tacking on an in-game coordinates system that shows you exactly where you need to go to complete quests, and Joana adding in a comprehensive video of her leveling 1-60 in 4 days and 20 hours. You can get their guides by clicking on their respective banners below.

- If you are starting fresh on a different server than your main, choose a medium-high population release server. You will have a much easier time keeping any necessary pieces of gear up to date due to wider availability, and you will have the gold to pay the mildly inflated prices if you take a gathering profession since material costs seem to inflate at a higher rate than BoE gear.

- Create an auction house alt. I can’t even count how many hours of my original character’s /played time were wasted on making trips back to the auction house to put up auctions of cloth, greens, leather, and the occasional blue. Make the AH alt, mail it 3-4 gold to cover initial auction fees, and then whenever your bags get full just mail everything worth selling to the alt and vendor the rest. When you finish questing for the day, log on to that character and put up all the auctions, then check them the next day before you log on to the toon you’re leveling.

- Do each instance once. In addition to the drops, instances are very decent xp as long as you have quests for them. Look up all of the quests for a given instance on Wowhead.com and finish any prerequisites, then gather up all of the quests and knock them out in one run. With rest xp and doing a full clear, I have found that I can generally gain a whole level from Ragefire Chasm, Deadmines, Stockades, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep, Scarlet Monastery, Zul’Farrak, Maraudon, and Blackrock Depths. That’s 7 levels taken care of, assuming that neither faction does the other’s starter dungeons. Not too shabby.

- Do not grind. Complete every quest you can, and kill your way to quest objectives. If you are a rogue or a druid, DO NOT stealth your way to objectives unless you are ahead of the curve for quest completion. You will wish you had fought through the quest mobs like a non-stealth class when you hit 53 and have nothing but orange and red quests in your log. Spending 10 minutes on a quest instead of 2 is a lot better than grinding 1000 Firegut Ogres when you run out of quests.

- Keep your most important piece of gear up to date. For warriors, paladins, rogues, and shamans, this is your main hand or 2-handed weapon. Hunters, keep your ranged weapon and ammo up to date. Warlocks and priests, your wand is your number one gear priority. Mages and druids, you guys don’t really have much to worry about until Outland, where both of you will want to prioritize your staves. As long as you keep your primary piece of gear reasonably current, you will level quickly and have much less down time.

- Go to Outland at 58, complete the early Hellfire Peninsula quests to gear up, and then come back to Azeroth and finish off at least Winterspring and Eastern Plaguelands. The increased quest XP with 2.3 has really made this strategy worthwhile. With Outland gear, you will burn through the quest mobs like nothing, and the XP rewards are almost competitive with Hellfire Peninsula quests. By doing this, you can save an extra zone worth of quests in Outland for gold at 70.

- Stray