The World of Warcraft (WoW) is a huge place, bigger than most all of the other Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMO.) What this means for you is that you won’t see all of it if you take just one character from level one to the level cap (which will be 85 with the Cataclysm expansion.) With that size comes all kinds of things to do, plus arenas, battlegrounds, raids and dungeons, thousands of quests, and more.
If you want to level up as quickly as possible, maybe to join your higher level friends or get to the end-game content sooner, you might find the number of quests and objectives to be daunting. If you follow a few rules, though, you can greatly speed up your leveling, regardless of class or faction. The fastest way to get leveled, of course, is with a professionally created product, like Zygor’s leveling guide, but that’s only for the people who really need to get to max level ASAP.
Wasting Time
First off, realize what the time wasters are. PvP is great fun (for many of us,) but it doesn’t help you get leveled. Shopping is also fun, especially if you have a full wallet, but it doesn’t get you to 80 any faster. Hanging around town, swapping lies with your pals, spreading insulting rumors about the other faction, won’t get you to 80 or 85 any sooner. Not that you shouldn’t kill them at every opportunity or inform your associates about just how slimey the other side really is, just be aware of how much time you spend doing that.
Multiply Your XP
Next, WoW has a couple of things that multiply your experience gained. The first is “rest XP.” Log out in an Inn and you’ll get bonus XP when you come back to the game. The longer you stay in the Inn then the longer the XP lasts. The other is Blizzard’s Recruit-a-Friend program. Your partner’s and your accounts will be linked and when you fight together you will pick up XP at 3x the normal rate.
Besides the faster XP from Recruit a Friend, teaming will speed your leveling because, even though the basic XP gain is smaller, you will kill things much faster and have a lot less downtime. This gives you a big advantage over going solo. The catch, of course, is that you have to have a compatible partner, which is easier for some to find than for others.
Professions Will Slow You Down
Skip the crafting professions, for now, since they’ll slow you down. If you have enough gold then go ahead and skip the gathering professions. Really, you want to control anything that slows you down. Selling your loot is another time waster, but you have to do it. Make a level 1 character to be your “banker.” This character will live at the Auction House (AH.) When your bags are full of loot you just stop by the nearest mailbox instead of making the trip to the big city. Post your stuff to the AH when you log into the banker. Make sure you always have the biggest bags that you can get your greedy little paws into. You’ll be able to collect a lot more loot before returning to that mailbox.
New Skills?
Be aware of what skills are coming up next (you can go to Thottbot.com for a list) and skip that trip to town to train if there’s nothing interesting coming up. Lots of people buy new gear every time they can, but you don’t need to do this. It’s fine to wait a few levels before upgrading your gear. Certain classes are, of course, a little more gear dependent than others, but even the most dependent can wait three or four levels between upgrades.
Skip the Grind
Do quests instead of just grinding and group your quests. Any time you pick up new quests group them by area. Any quests that are in the same area will be done at the same time. If you’re going to hit a dungeon try to get as many dungeon quests as you can. If you want to go into the big city then save all your city quests for that time. The worst way to go is to do one quest that takes you all over the place, then hand it in and do another which hits the same areas.
Just by following a few easy steps and by organizing your time and how you do things you will greatly improve your leveling speed. An expert leveling guide will really speed things up, but you’ll be a lot faster than most of the competition and you’ll have fun doing it. And isn’t that the point?