Fast leveling Tips (For 1-70)

Member

 

First off a little infomation about me:
My highest level character is a 67 Paladin, I have a 62 mage and 61 rogue and a load of other alts. Leveling is pretty much my hobby, I find it fun as long as I have the things that I'm going to list off and explain to you below.
I'd like to say one more thing before I go on to the guide, if you get the chance at 60+ to go to the old instances like Zul'Gurub, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ20/40 (Assuming you do the attunements) go to them all at least once, I personally regret not going to my guilds AQ runs because I went in there with some randoms a while ago after we had stopped raiding and enjoyed the encounters. The old instances are still a lot of fun and will always be a challange, though admittedly not as challanging as the newer ones.

But, with all that said and done, onto the guide.

Preface
What is this guide about?
Simply what the title says, fast, effective, and boredom free leveling. I've done a lot of leveling and the things I'm going to share with you here are what I use for really fast leveling, though it does take a logical way of thinking things through.
Acknowledgments
Eriyanna of WoW Radio for the list of grinding music.
Jame for their leveling guide.

Do I have to be a specific faction/class/race for this?
No, you do not, this is not a leveling guide like what James has done, though I do advise his guides for leveling once you reach the levels to start them (Alliance: 30, Horde: 21). Your race and class does not really affect your ability to level. Rogues however may want to pickpocket humanoids to get money whilst leveling, but honestly I leveled my paladin and warrior with the occasional instance where they tanked (high repair costs) and still made a lot of money from questing.
It's worth thinking about what class you are going to play though as some class/race combinations are very nice. Example of this would be human priest, shadow priests get a 5 point talent that doubles their spirit (regen) when dealing the final blow to a target that gives honor or exp. Since human priests get extra spirit they get that extra mana and health regen every fight so less downtime.

Ok, so I can play whatever class/race I want and this guide will help me level faster?
Exactly, the guide doesn't contain race/class specific tricks/tips, just general fast leveling advice.

The Guide
Ok with all that said and done, if you're reading now you want to level, so here is my advice.
Part 1 (AddOns)
Being prepared is vital to being fast at leveling, I started a Blood elf recently and within 45minutes (Including bathroom/food breaks) I went from 1-6 in an area I didn't know. How you might ask, Addons, thats right I'm going to give you a list of the only addons you will ever need for leveling.

  1. Monkey Quest
  2. Cartographer

Thats it, 2 addons and you have already improved your leveling.

Monkey Quest
Ok the reason this improves your leveling is simple, the mod basically brings up a window that lets you track all the quests in your quest log at the same time, you can do the same with the blizzard one but only up to 5 quests. However thats not what makes this great, on your tooltip (when you mouse over a mob or item in your inventory) if it is a quest item/mob it will say "Quest item x/y". Ontop of that you also get the tracked quest text in the window highlights itself when you're in an area/near an npc mentioned in the quest log. THAT my friends is what makes this mod so great, you can cut down SO much time by using that, I know I have.

Cartographer
Apart from the social aspect of knowing where all your guildies that use the same mod are this mod also marks all quest givers and vendors that you find with a "!", "?" or coin icon, names them, shows what quests they give, if they are completed on your current character, allows you to set a waypoint (Arrow above your character with the distance, direction and how long it will take you to get there) on that npc. This mod is amazing for when you level multiple characters, think about it, you play 1 character from 1 to 70, you have all the quests marked ready for you to do again with your next character and know exactly where to hand each quest in at. It's such a massive time saver.
All these mods can be found on http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/files/addons/ (If this does not take you to the WoW Addons search click World of Warcraft, then load the new page, on the left side click Addons) search for them and download them, install them and love them.
A quick guide for those that don't use addons often, when you download them extract them to your:
J:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
Basically where you installed world of warcraft, go to that folder, interface, AddOns and install them there.
Load up WoW, log in, go to your realm, on the character select screen make sure your addons are all enabled (You may need to update them, the updates are usually put up on Curse-gaming when they are available), if they are "Out of Date" click use out of date addons and it will most likely still work for a patch or two without being updated.

Part 2 (Logical Leveling)
So you've got your Mods, now this is the bit that's near impossible to teach but I'll try, Logical thinking.
If you look and use Jame's Leveling guides you'll see an example of logical thinking for quests. To level fast you want to go to each location for mob killing as few times as possible and get the most done at once. You'll find a lot of the time there are 2+ quests in the same area, be it killing 2 kinds of mobs or finding quest items.
The thing you learn from using Jame's guides is to do circuits of the zone map, completing as many quests as possible in the shortest space of time (complared to doing 1 quest at a time, going back to the npc, getting another quest, doing that, going back etc.), mass quest completion really gives you a massive boost to your exp/hour because you've not done 1 quest at a time.

Part 3 (Eera's philosophy)
"Questing is better than grinding, but grinding whilst questing=good."
This is a saying I've used for a long time now, basically if you compare exp per session of someone that has sat their grinding mobs constantly for 3 hours to someone who is doing a lot of quests that involve killing X mobs or getting item Y from Mob Z you'll find thatthe person that does the quests has a greater amount of exp gain, why, because quests give you exp (Not to mention gold), mobs give you exp also, so combining them gives you the greatest ammount of exp compared to grinding alone. That and it's much less boring.

What you getting bored of all that questing? I better get onto my next section of the guide.
Part 4 (Music)
Ok this is the part that really helps, more than the mods, more than the logical thinking, more than questing. This is what will help you keep your sanity when you play for hours on end, music.
Thats right, it's proven, music helps you level a LOT easier. Not just any music though, music that really gets you going, gets you pumped up, keeps you awake.
A good list was written up by one of the DJs for one of the radio stations I listen to (Which will be mentioned shortly) of decent artists to look into for your grinding needs:
Electronica:

  1. DJ Tiesto
  2. Paul Van Dyk
  3. Ian Van Dahl
  4. Orbital
  5. Trance Control
  6. Infected Mushroom
  7. Armin Van Buren
  8. Ayla
  9. Kimball Collins
  10. Kraftwerk
  11. Chemical Brothers
  12. DJ Oakenfold
  13. DJ Sasha & Digweed
  14. SaxionPike

Metal & Things of the Rock or Alternative Persuasion:

  1. Sonata Arctica
  2. Tristania
  3. Black Label Society
  4. Iced Earth
  5. Primal Fear
  6. Symphorce
  7. Lacuna Coil
  8. Within Temptation
  9. Dragonforce
  10. Nine Inch Nails
  11. Drowning Pool
  12. Korpiklaani
  13. Rhapsody
  14. Switchblade Symphony
  15. Type O
  16. Dimmu Borgir
  17. Iron Maiden
  18. Epica
  19. The Gathering
  20. After Forever
  21. Nevermore
  22. Killswitch Engage
  23. Rammstein

Ok so if you're not into that kind of music and preffer listening to some radio, look at http://www.wcradio.com, shows every day, good conversations and good music in the preshows and the music breaks, good for people that don't like listening to music all the time.
Ontop of that if you can't a break from music, if you're in a guild or a gaming community that has a Ventrilo or Teamspeak server you might want to go on there and talk with them.
Anything that keeps your mind from all the quests your doing and all the mobs you're killing. It makes the time pass faster and makes it more enjoyable.

Part 5 (Talents)
So you've got your Mods, you've got your music, you've got your philosophy, you (Hopefully) have your logic. What else is there?
Honestly there isn't much left to mention apart from 1 thing that I touched on earlier, talents.
When you reach level 10 you get 1 talent point, the short description of talents is a way to specialise and improve your character in certain things. You get 51 talent points at lvl 60, 61 and lvl 70.
When you are intrested in leveling your character you want to go for the following kind of things, talents that reduce your downtime (ie. reduced mana cost, increased mana regen), improving the survivability of your pets (If you picked a hunter/Warlock), improving damage done by your pets (If you picked a Hunter/warlock), increasing your damage done by your main spells.
Go for talents in that order:

  1. Reducing your downtime
  2. Improve pets survivability (Warlock/Hunter Only)
  3. Improve pets damage (Warlock/Hunter Only)
  4. Improve your main spells damage

If you have a pet they will take the aggro off of you and do damage so your downtime is a lot lower, you can heal your pets via spells/abilities to reduce their downtime and send them in while you sit and eat/drink if needed.

One final note to be mentioned, while not very important for leveling fast, it's worth mentioning. You'll see items on the AH (Auction house) from time to time that you really want to buy, try to avoid buying them as you'll often find that they are overpriced and are replaced in a few levels with items from quests/instances (Well, blue/purple items anyway, greens tend to be fairly priced).
You might not think it's that important but if you go and spent most of your gold on items you can find that you don't have enough gold for your skills when you level up which hurts your leveling speed.
A good rule of thumb is upgrade items every 5 or so levels, buying low level greens is often a bad idea as a few simple instances will often get you fairly decent gear and in most cases earn you money instead of losing it.
If you don't have The Burning Crusade Expansion pack you may wish to follow the above rules more strickly than those with TBC, mainly because when you get into outlands you will make money so fast from leveling it's untrue, my paladin is on about 800g even after spending about 350-400g on their epic mount quest at 60, so just by being smart you can make about 1.1-1.2k gold easily in 6 levels.

A few final links to Jame's leveling guide for when you hit the required levels, follow them and the infomation in this guide and you'll be 60 in no time, he's also ment to be bringing out a 60-70 guide soon so look forward to that:
For the Alliance: http://www.wow-pro.com/node/599 (Starts at 30)
For the Horde: http://www.wow-pro.com/node/754 (Starts at 21)

Hope you find this guide helpful.
If you would like to get in contact with me .
All updates to this guide will be found on my forum version of this guide and should also be added to this guide (http://www.armleg.com/eera/viewtopic.php?p=7&mforum=eera#7)
~Eera.


Member

My response

First of all a thank you to everyone who has posted, and a your welcome to everyone who has thanked me.
I took a year or so break from playing WoW and inturn everything WoW related, because of this the guide, as you can probably guess, is somewhat outdated, I may/may not update it in the future but at the moment I'm having fun for the first 2months I'm back.
In response to the criticism regarding pet classes. At the moment I'm playing on a warlock, I admit I am leveling them with an affliction build, however there are a number of reasons, if I am going to a dungeon and I have my stats put towards a voidwalker tanking spec or something along those lines and my group wants an imps bloodpact then I can't use my spec effectively. If I've gone with demonic sacrifice I can't use my imp either for this reason and if I do use my imp I am losing my builds buff. The affliction spec I am using allows me to use my voidwalker to tank a group of 2-3 close level mobs and quickly gain xp with little downtime, the aim of all specs pre level cap.

Anyway I've drawn this out too long I believe so I'll return to my leveling. For the moment the guide is outdated, so Addons and some sites mentioned may be no longer working etc but the guide is still a help, the theory behind leveling will always remain the same, remember, Quests with a "kill X monsters" or "kill X to get Y" will always be a great addition to your Xp/Hour. Always go looking for things a few levels below you to give good Xp fairly easily and so on.

Jame's picture
Administrator

Welcome back Well, it

Welcome back Eye

Well, it would for sure be nice if you could update your guide, and at the same time make it look nicer (colors, images, better overall presentation, etc).

how manny can i see in my

how manny can i see in my map with Cartographer my log is full but i only see 2 quests

Kirvak

Hi there! Your tips really make sense for me. I've learned many thing, and 'bout the Talents... It helped me out excellent! Smiling So.. Thanks for your Tips!

when you say played 5 day 2

when you say played 5 day 2 hours, does that mean you actually took 122 hours?

Member

nice

the only problem with listening to music... some people are in guilds where they like to talk to friends i.e Ventrillo/Teamspeak, so they kinda got choose between conversations and be lonely
70 Gnome Warlock

Member

xD

Hey man, thanks for all the tips, I am certainly gonna use them in the rest of my playing experience. Just one thing I would like to add, supposedly the song "The Horde Will Rise" from an older warcraft game, just put this in as a macro... /script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\ZoneMusic\\DMF_L70ETC01.mp3")

Member

You guys make good points

You guys make good points about how you play your warlocks. However, don't you see what the point of this guide is? As far as I know, its only TIPS. A tip given here is only meant as a passive help, your more than welcome to use it or or click back to return to the website. Give the guy a break, at least he's among the few to lend his experience out. This was his playing style, and you all have yours. Personally, while leveling up, I can see how closely I had been to the guide, and this is the first time I've been to this website after playing since World of Warcraft hit the stores so long ago.

If you have a problem with this guide, then leave now, don't waste your time typing up something that has no meaning.
Reyath Out!

Member

Warlock

Considering what the other warlock said i totaly agree keeping your pets survivability has nothing to do with it at all, Me ( atm lvl 60 warlock) have ever since lvl 36 been using affliction and my succubus for the extra dps / dark pact and pretty much tank the mobs myself with drain life ive pretty much allways healed myself for double the amount that the mobs hit on me and often use life tap mid combat and before i start a fight to keep a high mana pool, Another tip for you Affliction warlocks when the mobs hp is low ( IF you got the talent for improved drain soul = that gives 15 % mana after the mob dies) use lvl 1 drain soul only costs about 55 mana and gives you way more.. Your other dots should be more than enough to kill the mobs.
that will keep your mana tip top with a few drain life ,siphon life, dark pact and life tap's here and there.

and dont forget to disgard the unwanted Soul shards. unless you like having 50+ something...

btw if you want to know my starting attack order ( unstable affliction , corruption . agony , siphon life , drain life ) i start with unstable so that the pet will have aggro for at least a moment so i can get my dots starting and siphon / drain life before he's got me down on low hp ( a lash of pain in the beginning doesnt hurt at all. for extra pet aggro)

Another thing i would like a comment about myself is the way iam engaging a Horde UD Rogue

I often start dotting the bastard but once he has his stuns on me i often tend to use Howl of terror since they mostly use their racial at that point and are open for longer more powerful fears after that ( depending on the distance he ran and other things a lol coil aint a bad thing) Anyone know another way to get rid of em since i kind of hate em...

hope that was of help long comment and my first as well just became a member... =) With best regards //ZaiT

Member

warlock talents

first of all, let me say you did a great job!

still i have one thing to see. its about the part of the talents. what talents you can get best for lvl-ing. you notice this:

*Reducing your downtime
*Improve pets survivability (Warlock/Hunter Only)
*Improve pets damage (Warlock/Hunter Only)
*Improve your main spells damage

i'm i lvl 67 warlock now. i tested all three talentstree there are (affl/demon/destr) affliction is by far the best tree to lvl. so to all the just started warlocks i would say; skip point 2 & 3. cause if you want to lvl with those 2 point; you should go demon. this will increase your pet amazingly, but dont: you can do this respec on lvl 51; then you can get yr felguard. but imo if you are a warlock and youre going for lvl-ing/grinding. go affliction all the way; you have completely zero downtime, and a very nice dps (damage per second)

so imo improve pet at a warlock isnt a priority at all.

regards,
Ohra

Member

Triton's got right there

I'm reading the guide and I'm wondering, is this a newbies guide?
If so, then why did you put 1-70 and so. I mean, if a guy has reached lvl 60 i bet he knows 10 times more than what you have said in your guide. He would at east know in which talent tree to invest his points, coz you know, if i am a lvl 10 warry (just started playing wow) and i read something like

Go for talents in that order:

1. Reducing your downtime
2. Improve pets survivability (Warlock/Hunter Only)
3. Improve pets damage (Warlock/Hunter Only)
4. Improve your main spells damage

i would immediately "/spit" on the guide and google a new guide.
Except for telling us whats your fav music and that Monkey Quest and Cartographer are very good addons (with that i agree) theres nothing else in your guide.

Member

Music and what else?

I am sorry if I sound negative, but what news comes from this guide? I can sum the whole thing up in one sentence: Follow Jame's guides and listen to some fast paced music whilst playing.
While music (or TV) does help during some longer, not so exciting, leveling stretches, I still don't find this guide very helpful for leveling overall.
Maybe expanding on Jame's guides and including the Outlands in describing quest paths and waypoints would add more value to the guide, than a mere list of grinding music.

PS sorry to sound like a jerk, but this is the 5th guide I have read today, which claims to have leveling tips for 60-70 and did not deliver on that promise. I hope my criticism was at least somewhat constructive.

Member

For Trition

The guide is named "Fast leveling Tips (For 1-70)" not "A leveling guide".
The guide is based entirely around, to quote the preface now, "fast, effective, and boredom free leveling".

The guide suggests Jame's Guide because it is free and myself, the auther, has used it and knows that it works. If you were to level without using that guide and only use this one you would, A) Enjoy the leveling process more, B) Leveling faster than you normally would because of some of the things said in the guide (building circuits for questing etc).

I somehow doubt that you fully read the guide and simply skipped and skimmed through the guide.

Member

Useful guide

Another incredibly useful guide, but one that also forgets to mention logging out in an inn to get rested bonus.

The only thing I didn't find useful was the music tip - I found it distracted me and was therefore generally annoying.

Aside from those, this guid had some really neat tips that'll really decrease /played time from levels 1-70.

Member

Music

Put System Of A Down in the music list. I grind whit Tool, System Of A Down and Rapshody [Dawn Of Victory]

Member

Thanks for all the replys

Thanks for all the replys so far, for those that tried to use my forum link, the forums are now sorted so you can read and reply to the thread there. An e-mail has been sent to anyone that was previously registered there informing them of the update. Any updates to the guide made on the forum will be announced in an announcement thread and a mass mail to users.

I'm considering the addition of songs/artists to the music list so cheek checking if you're intrested.

Member

Really good and helpful

Really good and helpful guide! Cool

Member

Woot!

Great guide/tips!! Well written, nice info, awesome list of music, I've got nearly everything from the Metal list in my playlist!! Cool Anyway, thanks for submitting this!! I think it will be appreciated by everyone! Laughing out loud

Member

GJ

Good guide overall, and nice music[Got music of almost all in the electronic list Laughing out loud ].
Imo put basshunter in your music list too, cause his songs just have.... you know.... a good bass.