Leveling in Cataclysm - The Race to 85
 

When Cataclysm is released there will be two different groups of people. Those who will take on all the new content, questing to their hearts desire, and enjoying all the hard work Blizzard put into new quests and zones. On the other hand there will those who hecticly and blindy do whatever gives the most XP/Hour in order to make it to 85 in an extremely timely fashion.

My first character will be in the race to 85. I have all the heirloom gear, most importantly the ones with 10% experience gained, luckily two brothers to race along with me, and quite a few cold ones. The question now becomes... Is it fastest to complete quest after quest using add-ons to show you where to go or is it quicker to queue and re-queue for dungeons repeatedly?

In my experience queueing for random dungeons over and over is the easiest for me but I have always leveled a healer or tank. This makes it much easier to do, but when Cata comes out even the DPS should be able to match up with a guild tank or healer. Do I just like the random dungeons because they are mindless and easy? Or is it actually quicker to complete quest after quest racing along solo?

I would love to hear other's plans.

Forget your heirlooms: Blizzard has stated many times and again that heirloom items will work exactly like stated in their tooltip, i.e. from lvl 1 to lvl 80. If Blizzard had wanted people to get a +20% boost, they would just have shortened the leveling process by 20%.

As for the actual grind, I'd say that questing - provided you know what you're doing thanks to beta testing (or reading what beta players did) - is the way to go. In WotLK, if you know what you're doing, the 70-80 grind is very quick with questing.


Also, this could be a nice thread to discuss the quickest way to level profs. I suspect that you can get a decent head start by hoarding up mats for Cat (as most high-level crafts stay yellow/orange for a bit), but I'm completely in the dark for the rest.

Whichever method provides more XP/hr is the faster one.

We don't have XP/hr values because levels 83-85 aren't implemented on the Alpha.