Do you despise long dungeon queues? Hate questing because you’ve done those quests a bazillion times before because you’re an alt-holic and you just can’t do them ONE MORE BLOODY TIME?
Ok, that was a bit dramatic… but you probably know what I’m talking about, right?
I recently leveled a toon from 20-100 in around 2 weeks, maybe three — and doing it super-casually in my off-time from my mains. How? Well, first, heirlooms. Those are totally important. Even the ring you get in the WoD garrison shipyard quests. After heirlooms, there are two potions you can get to increase leveling. You can now get a potion from the quartermaster near the ship in the harbor (Boralus, Provisoner Stoutforge for Alliance, or Zandalar Provisoner Mukra for Horde) called “Draught of Ten Lands.” To get this potion, you need to have a 120 level toon, and have a few Service medals racked up. These are fairly easy to get by doing warfronts, daily world quests in either Arathi Highlands, or Darkshore (which ever your faction currently controls), and Assaults. It only costs 5 medals (7th Legion for Alliance, Honorbound for Horde) to purchase one.
While you do need to be at least to be at least 120 to get them, they are Blizzard Account Bound once you buy them, so you can send them to any toon, Horde or Alliance, even cross-realm. They don’t seem to have a level requirement, either. I’ve outlined both potions for convenience. I’m not sure if these two potions ‘stack,’ presumably not, since they share a cool-down.
Draught of Ten Lands:
No Level Requirement (?)
10% XP bonus, Increases all stats by 10.
Lasts 1 hour
Cost: 5 Service Medals
Bind on Account
The other potion you can get at level 91 in your garrison from the quartermaster (Seargent Crowler for Alliance, Seargent Grimjaw for Horde) called “Excess Potion of Accelerated Learning,” for 100 garrison resources.
Excess Potion of Accelerated Learning:
Level 91-99 (doesn’t function over 99)
20% Bonus to XP killing monsters and turning in quests
Lasts 1 hour. (1 hr cooldown)
Cost: 100 Garrison Resources
Bind on Pickup (cannot send to other toons)
There’s also the Elixir of the Rapid Mind, however, these are extremely rare, and you can’t obtain them except in the auction house for usually more than 90k gold. So I’m not really gonna go into them.
As you can see, they both have their merits. One gives 20% to xp, the other one gives 10% but with stat bonuses, which as you are leveling a lowbie this bonus could make things a lot easier. There’s also the level requirements on the Garrison one, and you can only use it at levels 91-99.
The next thing you want to look at are add-ons. Since the biggest part of this leveling guide is going to focus on killing rare-spawns, you are absolutely going to want an add-on like Silverdragon, or NPC scan. I personally favor Silverdragon, and this is because you can ‘instruct’ the add-on to create a macro, which you can drag to your action bar and tap it repeatedly when you are near a particular rare’s spawn-point. (type ‘/silverdragon’ in the chat-area, without quotes, then click: -> Scanning -> Macro -> click “Create Macro” button. Then go to your macros ‘/macro’, find the silverdragon macro – it looks like a red-target and is named “SilverDragon”, and drag the newly made macro to your action bar. See Below.). You will also want an add-on called “Handy notes.” This add-on will mark spawn points on your map with little skulls and stuff, so you know where to look. Any other add-ons are up to you. (I’m thinking about reviewing add-ons later on in this blog, so look for that article later on! 😀 )
Now, you’ve got your heirlooms, potions, and add-ons. Now what? I should note that I did this with a void elf fury warrior, but you can feasibly do this with any toon. If you are starting out from total scratch, and by that I mean a level one, I would do the starting level zone quests at least til level 10. With Heirlooms and potions this shouldn’t take but maybe 30 minutes or less. When you get to the point that you can pick professions, I would recommend getting two gathering professions for now. Namely Herbalism and Mining. This is because you can get extra XP by picking flowers and mining ore as you go on your routes to rare-hunting. Not only does this give you some extra XP passively, you can also sell the mats on the auction house to make some pocket-change along the way. Other professions to consider are fishing and archaeology. Archaeology offers some decent XP, and nifty items you can sell for gold, and fish usually sell pretty well at the auction house, especially at higher levels, and even lower levels for people leveling up their cooking and not wanting to go out and fish on their own. By mainly killing rares, you will also end up with a LOT of transmog pieces. Hopefully you will be able to use some of them as upgrades if they are what your spec needs for stats, otherwise you can vendor them, or if you have an enchanter you can send them to that toon to disenchant and keep the mats to use, or auction them off. Sometimes you get a rare piece that may bring in some dough at the auction house, but with transmog pieces these days it’s really hit and miss. You’re better off vendoring or disenchanting them.
Your map should resemble this, red skulls are the rares.
Another thing worth mentioning, speaking of gold, is using a bit of gold to get enchants for your heirlooms. It’s also SUPER important to not have your heirlooms past the second tier (2 out of 3, for the moment) because when most of your heirlooms are past a certain item level you can’t enchant them. I believe the limit is item level 136, and at tier 2 I believe they ‘stop’ at 135. This is especially true of the shoulders. This brings me to another nifty point, unless this is hot-fixed at a later time, you can use the level 90 pandaria inscriptions (made by scribes with inscription) for shoulders on a 90+ level toon and mail them back to your lowbie. They are: Tiger Fang Inscription, Tiger Claw Inscription, Crane Wing Inscription, and Ox Horn Inscription. Make the heirloom on a higher toon above 90, apply the inscription to the heirloom, and send to your lowbie. They do scale, so don’t be shocked when it doesn’t show the max numbers to stats when you open your mail and slap ’em on your toon. You can also get ring enchants, weapon enchants, chest, and cloak. I don’t really recommend enchanting gloves, wrists, and boots unless they are cheap since you will hopefully be replacing these fairly quickly as you level. There are also leg armor kits, too. Eventually at 70 there are also belt-sockets for gems, and then again at 80, blacksmiths make them.
Now, you’ve got everything enchanted, add-ons up and running, and you’re at least level 10 and you’ve picked up herbalism and mining. Hopefully, your handy notes have already out-lined your skulls on the map, and you can begin working out a path and going to each skull on the map and killing the rare. Scaling has GREATLY increased the experience-profit for rare-killing. You can stick to your starting zones until level 20, like Elwynn forest for example for Alliance, or Tirisfall Glades for Horde (any 1-20 level zone on your map). It does require a little strategic map-reading to know what zone you can go to for your level, as some zones start at say level 40 and go up to level 60, you wouldn’t want to take a level 25 there, but you could take a level 55 there and still get good XP (at least, until you hit level 60). So basically at this point – rinse, and repeat until level 60. Some of my favorite zones are Arathi Highlands, Hillsbrad Foothills, The Hinterlands, and East and West Plaguelands. They’re pretty rich in rares, don’t often have a lot of people running around (if you’re lucky) and not a lot of space in-between rares. Most of the time, you can get one full level out of each zone providing all rares are active, and it doesn’t take a lot of time at all. You can also start at one, and go to the next, and the next. Make sure you keep up on your riding skills for mount speed, at levels 20 and 40, flying at 60, then 70, and 80.
–via wowhead
Of course, you can always queue up for dungeons while doing the rares, but you want to be quick so you don’t miss any spawns, or lose out to another player. Nothing is more frustrating than coming across the dead body of a rare you were just minutes from killing!
At level 60, you sadly have to go to either Outlands or Northrend. I’ve never been a HUGE fan of Outlands, so I prefer Northrend. Once you get to Northrend, you will probably have to do a few minimal quests. Do enough to get to the bits with the Kalu’ak, or as I fondly call them: The Diabeetus Walrus People, because they look like Wilford Brimley, of Oatmeal and Liberty Medical commercials fame. You may also wish to get exalted with the Kalu’ak for that fancy fishing pole, which lets you breathe underwater when it’s equipped. Dailies are now the bread and butter of leveling since rares have become a little harder to come by. Also I prefer to NOT kill most rares in Northrend unless they are not beasts. Beast-rares in Northrend should be left for hunters who might tame them. Do any related quests with the Kalu’ak, most of them are pretty fun, and the dailies are also fun, especially the one where you get to make two seals fall in love. ❤
Once you get to 80, you will want to head to Mount Hyjal. This is where you will have to do quests again, but fear not, it will eventually lead to opening the molten front dailies, and Tol Barad Dailies. Plus you can get some decent greens from the quartermaster at Mt. Hyjal, inside the Nordrassil Inn, where you come out at the portal from Stormwind or Orgrimmar (at the stone-circle with the Earthen Ring peeps).
/me points at Hyjal Portal haha
You’ll want to grind these dailies at Hyjal and Tol Barad for a while, they seem to offer some decent XP for quite some time. So do them until they don’t offer as much or you get super bored with them. By this time you should be able to move on to Pandaria, so get over to Halfhill and open up your farm by talking to good ol’ Farmer Yoon. Do his quests to get your farm up and running until the dailies open up. You probably could still make use of the dailies at Tol Barad and Mt Hyjal at this point, but they probably won’t be offering as much XP. Dailies are monotonous, and mostly repetitive, but they still offer minimal questing-time, and for the most part are fairly centralized, instead of having to run all over hell’s half acre. Keep chugging your potions to get those bonuses!
Holidays are another great thing to peruse while leveling, if you have that luxury. As of this writing we are coming to a close with the Lunar Festival. If you haven’t completed the meta achievement “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” you’ll be one step closer to the Violet Proto Drake, also some neat titles. As far as other World Events go, don’t forget the carousel at the Dark Moon Faire as well, which overs an hour 10% bonus to XP and Reputation, plus the Dark Moon Fair top hats, which do the same. The Carousel and Hat do not stack (according to a forum post at the Blizzard Forums). I’m not sure if they stack with the potions, as I’ve not thought to try it.
I had the most time with 95-98, but much of that was spent visiting the Elders with the Lunar Festival. Once you hit 98 though, you can FINALLY go to Legion. Hopefully, you have already opened up Legion’s world quests, and you can do the legion invasions for nice bonuses to XP. You don’t get as much as you used to, because it was sadly nerfed, however, they did make it so you need less XP to level. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. I’ll probably be doing the invasions passively which means I’ll be spending less time on that toon until I get to BFA. If you hopefully have a 120 already, this means you have opened up world quests, so your lowbies can now do the assaults when they come up. There are two more addons to help with figuring out the times for legion invasions and BFA assaults. Legion Invasion Timer, and BFA Assault timer. Basically they just put a little heads-up display of the next invasion or assault, so you don’t need to sit and figure out when the next one will happen.
Well, with all that, I hope it helps you level up quicker. There are probably even faster ways of leveling, these are just what I prefer. I like this way because I can kind of zone-out and do my thing, make a little scratch on the side, and still have a little fun doing it.
Happy Hunting!
Thanks for joining me!
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