PsiVen

Not looting is definitely a huge speedup. The real trick, actually, is to bring someone else along to loot everything for you. Works great in Stocks and Strath, but not so much in SM because it all dies right before you reset.

 

koaschten

I'd rather loot all mobs, especially if you plan on pushing skinning while leveling. A mod that lend me a hand was definitely GarbageFu. Shift-Clicking its fubar-icon makes you drop the least valuable grey item from your inventory. And i definitely second the statement that you have to have a full set of 14/16 slot bags.

 

kadgar

It depends on your leveling route, but on later levels ( >30) it's probably better to heartstone in shattrat then in the local inn for faster traveling.

For the bags, I suggest [Mooncloth Bag]s. Unlike [Netherweave Bag]s they are not soulbound and can be used by your next twink when your actual one has got 18 or 20 bags.

If you want to have some reputation with you alt, the grind can be combined with leveling for some factions like Timbermaw/Argent Dawn/Kurenai/Consortium(Gems)/Sporregar/etc.

 

Rane

Hearthstone in Shattrath is absolutely invaluable once you leave the 1-20 areas where'd you normally hearth to the nearest inn or capital.

For casters, you really want to keep an eye out on the AH now, a lot of cloth items have lost their useless stats and have gained spelldamage. I was pleasantly surprised by it, at least. The Shadoweave stuff and several quest rewards are awesome upgrades now, I'm currently running 170 shadowdamage on my lvl 45 warlock, leveling is insanely fast, everything dies from 3 dots. Tag, hit 3 buttons, fear, run to next mob, hit 3 buttons, fear, etc. It's crazy.

I'd love to do instances since the upgraded loot is nice, but I outlevel them before I realise it now and my lvl 70 guildies don't like running old world instances anymore so I generally just skip them.

*edit* Don't forget Dustwallow Marsh. They're good grinding quests and only Jarl's questhub requires a fair amount of running around, all the other stuff is fairly closeby to their questgivers and it's all mob grinds. They also have an awesome pair of spelldamage cloth boots as a quest reward, at least Horde, for the questchain involving the Black Dragonflight in the Stonemaul ruins.

 

Maskirovka

Setting your hearth strategically throughout leveling saves much more time. For example, if you're planning to go to booty bay after finishing Shimmering flats, setting your hearth in XR saves a couple minutes. Especially if you consider taking the elevator from the Shat inn, running to the portal (pre-40), running to the flightmaster, and flying to ratchet. That kind of thing adds up REALLY fast if you use that time-saving philosophy over all 60 levels. I abandoned the shat hearth pretty fast after trying it. I quested with a guildmate for about 5 hours one day, and I gained about 100k more XP just because I was following a guide for those extra "talk to this guy" type quests you forget about, as well as flying to zones faster and killing stuff while he messed around in town, etc.

Always look at which skills you'll be receiving at a certain level and consider that sometimes there's just no point in going back to train. However, with the leveling being so fast now, going back to the trainer to get more DPS happens more often and at different times than before.

Some instances have items you will use until outland, and the quest XP is incredible. Personally, leveling my priest alt recently, I had a group of guildmates with similar-level alts, and we did a few "real" runs as well as ran each other through almost every instance. With the 30-60 changes, just having someone run you through once is enough to get almost a complete level.

I completely agree about Horde Dustwallow. If you head there around level 47, you'll be able to do the entire zone in a couple of hours. There are some new quests there, which is interesting, and nearly every quest is "kill x mobs" or a collection quest for items on the ground, using some item on a dead mob, etc. None of those "collect 4896 feathers" with a .0003% drop rate quests.

Also, with the XP changes, questing in a group (minus collection quests, which you can skip now and still level without grinding) is amazingly fast. You get so much XP for quests, that zerging through them as fast as possible is ideal.

 

sarf

Kinda obvious thing if you want greens/blues/epics at low levels:

Set master looter at the char that you control the most during twoboxing / getting power levelled will make sure you get that extra nifty stuff. For bonus speedup, use a macro that autoassigns items to you (if scripts can still do this).

 

rexas

Touching the line of acceptance here:

Don't know if this have been blocked but i was at least possible to enchant shoulders for low level chars, my hunter:
The World of Warcraft Armory

I don't think I need to say how its done. Timing is all its about.

note: I don't see this as a "overpowered" exploit of the system, sure it give some advantage but i would not start to whine if I saw other using this, you take a big risk (did not always work back when i did it, cost me 2 enchants to get it to work) and its not that cheep (its ~100g for a shoulder enchant).

 

Kir

Glad to see this thread stay on target, thanks everyone Good info all around.

 

Demerzel

Great thread, twinking and exploring game mecanics is the mest part of mmorpgs.

Sad thoug that wow is so shallow in this regard.

 

Duilliath

Blizzard has deemed it an exploit (particularly in reference to twinking), though I can't from the top of my head remember where. I do know that they have deleted such items which should've been soulbound upon enchant and have banned repeat offenders.

 

TheCutlery

As soon as you hit level 51, go queue up for AV and grab all the quests.

When you leave, you'll be level 52.

 

• Lorienne

I make so many alts that I ended up just buying a level 5 white pair of cloth sandals and putting the run speed enchant on them. I wear them all the time until 30 or so (or until the class gets its own speed boost, if it does) and then pass them off to another character. The armor and stats that you lose aren't that big of a deal, especially if the rest of your stuff is pretty good. I've also considered putting a +6 stats enchant on a [Simple Black Dress], since it's wearable at level 1, but has an item level of 47. Obviously, that's a bit expensive, but again, at least it's reusable.

 

nife

Great post. Thanks so much.

 

Metrosexuelf

I've made countless alts and have probably done the low level content as many times as most of the people posting here. That said, I've never seen the utility in bothering with powerleveling or twinking especially now with the leveling changes.

I'm just about to finish leveling a paladin and while it is fairly brutal pre-Outland, once you get it in some of the better Hellfire quest rewards, it can mow down mobs at a fast rate. Other than paladins, though, every other class can level with relative ease pre-Outland without excessive 'twinking.' Ultimately the difference in leveling time between just solo'ing normally with one or two escorted instance runs and full out 'twinking' (getting a 70 to kill non elite same-level mobs, buying a ton of AH blues, etc.) will probably only amount to 24-36 hours of /played time which isn't really that much of a difference for most people who raid in this game.

It all comes down to the individual. I enjoy solo'ing with classes I haven't played before to get a feel for them and how their abilities expand while leveling.

 

Touf

The easiest way to level a paladin is to get someone to level a shaman with you and gawk at how OP WF is. BoW will get you to 32, WF totem will get you to 40, and after that you can just follow along and watch how fast the shaman will kill things with BoW and JoW.

 

magnetic

For melee:
Level 5 dagger +Fiery
Cloth Chest 100 health
Cloth Legs 100 health
Bracers +7 agi

For casteralternate but I always just use my normal set)
Level 5 Staff +20 Spirit
Cloth Chest 100 Mana
Cloth Legs 100 Mana

For both:
Cloth Boots Runspeed
ClothBracers +9 stamina (agi gives heaps of dodge/crit at that level)
Cloak 70 armor
Cloth Gloves +15 agi for either

Always be killing/questing, don't stop moving towards another mob to kill unless you are casting.


I wear this set up into the low 30's where I replace pieces that have better total stats than the enchanted ITEM. But I never replace the runspeed on boots.

 

Starfire

For Melee: the 10 haste rating to gloves is a amazing at low levels. Goes good with the above mentioned Iron Counterweight. Heh, you can also get another 20 or 40 haste rating I believe with Librams. Yes my friends, this can turn your level 19 bear druid into a god. But that's off-topic.

 

Vaccine

Just a note on this. Since the 2.3 changes I've levelled a paladin from 1 to 41 so far. I did all of Dustwallow Marsh last night. The changes to the zone have made it a crazy place to level and I got the best part of two levels from there. Jarl's questline that you mention, if you are referring to the Horde side, is much changed now. It starts asking you to get him some frogs legs, which are from giant frogs very near his hut. As you do this you can complete the ghost quest from the other guy at the manor. Then he asks you for Darkmist Eyes, apart from the long run its another easy quest, 5 minutes tops. The last quest is now on a named NPC just north of his hut rather than having you craft a sword and the whole chain is around 11k xp for under 20 minutes work. Tie it in with other quests in the area and it becomes even better.

The downgrading of elites in the area also allowed me to complete the dragon quest lines for the first time, along with the new ones from Mudsprocket. Apart from being a little disappointed at the final rewards from Mudsprocket the quest lines were pretty good and all very easy. The only thing they forgot to change, or didn't change on purpose, was the final quest where you challenge the boss in the horde village. Hes still a 45 elite that hits like a truck.

 

anathor

I've been trying to level an alt recently in order to drop the gathering skill on my main (herba), as well as powerlevel another alt to 35 to be able to disenchant all BoE items. So I asked myself pretty much the same questions.

The first thing I did was make a list of a few constraints, among others:
- avoid known content as much as possible
- efficiency (class, spec, gear, quest vs grind...)

Following this, here are a few considerations you might want to take into account:
- areas: there are areas that I liked and would like to spend time in no matter what (e.g. 1000 needles, stonetalon, STV, badlands, ungoro...), areas that I hate and wouldn't one minute in (ashenvale, WPL/EPL) and areas where I had not set foot (dustwallow, desolace, winterspring, blood elf starting area, blasted lands...). So I decided to avoid the 2nd category (for obvious reasons), to focus particualrly on the 1st (bread and butter, basically) and fill in the gaps with the 3rd category (it's really refreshing to discover new content, whatever the level)
- class: Hunter. No skill required whatsoever for levelling this class, totally overpowered, no downtime - what's not to like? That's really (and I believe by far) the most efficient levelling class.
- gear: Another aspect I took into account was reliance on gear. Druids are probably the class that relies the less on gear, whereas e.g. mages or warriors won't get far without decent gear. The advantage for hunters is that with a good weapon/ammo and a dps pet, quest gear is more than enough. Plus scopes are cheap compared to enchants and make it very easy to twink weapon damage. Same for ammo. The most important thing is to plan ahead, in particular to keep prices low. For example my hunter is currently level 38, I got him a new weapon at level 37, he will get new ammo at level 40 and I'm already checking the AH regularly for a good deal on a level 45 weapon.
- spec: here it's a bit stating the obvious but spec should be aimed 100% towards efficiency, e.g. feral druid, BM hunter, shadow priest, etc. In particular damage is the most important, since (see below) grinding will be an important part, and grinding is a low risk activity.
- travelling speed: especially at lower levels one of the biggest time sinks is travelling. Any class with early access to faster travels should be favoured (druids with travel form and talented cat form, hunters with talented aspect of the cheetah), and of course the alt should get his mount as soon as possible.

Re: the techniques used, I avoided all the quests which didn't involve killing something. When I levelled my main I was not a big fan of grinding quests in general, but in terms of efficiency they are the best. This is why areas like desolace (gotta love those centaurs), racing flats in 1000 needles, TM, STV, badlands... are the best (well, maybe not on a PvP server). Combined with rested xp it means a lot of xp from killing + increased xp from questing. Also while playing a hunter it's important to kill stuff since questing xp doesn't count towards levelling your pet.

The downgrading of elites has been very useful, I think the best example is the dwarves near TM, there are several quests there (kill some of them, pick up a keg, find the sword...) and they are super easy right now.

 

Maikel

The short answer is that because of the leveling buff it's probably better to just flat out quest in areas from 20-60. I would recommend using a guide for the best questing paths and routes though.

I too have used Jame's leveling guide for nearly all of my characters. The site for it is World of Warcraft Pro | Brings Game Experience to You!. It's very comprehensive and following it to the letter made for fast leveling before the leveling was made easier recently. It's also free!

I leveled a Troll Shaman from 48-58 pretty quickly following that guide, and thanks to the leveling buff and quest experience increase, every level for those ten levels took barely over two hours. The best part was I was constantly two levels ahead of where the guide had me, and as a result it made every quest that much easier.

For me personally, I just looked up what the best spec was for my class and bought the best Blue weapons for level 40, and then again for the 50's, I did not find it necessary to do any enchants save for my gloves having +15 strength. I was able to blender stuff pretty quick though thanks to Windfury.

I think it just comes out to the best leveling spec for your class which is either going to be based on super damage output or super survivability (like AoE grinding as a Protection Paladin from level 50 up).

 

Sou

Enchant white gloves with riding skill and put spurs on some white boots.
All the mount speed enchants stack so along with the carrot, it's 9%. Like riding crop light until 69.
And since they're white you can reuse them.

 

Thiris

I was just going to make that suggestion. I've been doing that for as long as I can remember (and the first time someone actually had the glove enchant) and it's been a set of items that I just pass between characters, as well as a white set of boots with runspeed.

 

Rapid

Great thread. The white riding items is a fantastic idea.....have had the Gloves, Boots, Carrot combo on my toons but never occurred to me to make sure they were on White items so I could re-use them.

Our guild always gives a new players first main toon 4 Netherweave 16 Slot Bags....I'm starting to wonder if any of them realise what a big difference that makes. We are starting to churn out the 14 slot Runecloth bags as well so that they can be re-used.

For Horde players - always try to level 1-20 in the Blood Elf starting Area. Or at least 10-20 in Ghostlands. The area is smaller than the Barrens (and you avoid Barrens chat) making the quests easier to concentrate into circuits. I have levelled a Mage, Undead Rogue and a Druid 10-20 in Ghostlands in less than 10 hours of very casual play style.

Recently took the Mage through Dustwallow and it is a fantastic area to level now. Easily worth 2-3 levels very quickly.

 

Vhex

Tirisfal/Barrens is faster for me for leveling twinks. It may be just due to familiarity, but Barrens after the 8 billion changes is now like one huge Xp circuit. Grab 20 quests from Ratchet/XR, do them all for 1 level, turn them all in for a bonus level. Get the 20 follow ups, do them all for another level, turn them all in for another bonus level. Get all the final quests from the south end, do them + turn them in for one more level. Then head to stonetalon.

 

PsiVen

For me, leveling 58-70 is enough time to get a feel I don't really have time to be leveling alts the normal way, otherwise I probably would with the changes.