I can see it now, the crying on wowforums that raiders get instant 70s when they finish a raid with 0 wipes.

For the out of group leveling usually there is someone in the guild that has a pvp min-max alt of the level range that can help. Even underleveled a lvl 39 rogue will greatlly speed up things in tanaris until someone can bring the 49 enhshaman. Just having your friends have some pvp alts can be a boon to your re-roll /played.

As for everyone having a 70 alt, of those who raid who doesnt have a 70 alt? While my group is latestarters and lackluster most of the group that raids has another 70 they can bring if we need to swap dps for offtank/heal.

I used my paladin to do the the powerleveling (SM and ST). ST was great, however by 54 the xp was godawful. I then tried doing large pulls in Strat, and maybe I just don't have the right strategy, but the xp was even worse. Something like 3 hours+ per level. I struggled through to 60 and have started questing in Outlands, yet soon as I turned in my first 10 or so quests I found my drive to level 60-70 dwindle. I have a quest leveling guide (joanna's) and still the xp seemed to come very slow. I imagine I will abandon this alt before I hit 70 as this is probably the 6th time I have done 1-70. I just don't have the energy anymore.

My prot paladin is pretty well equipped and I was wondering if it were possible to PL my alt with him faster? I might try some of the suggestions in this thread for AE pulls, of couse being on Mal'Ganis my alt may get ganked too much to make it worthwhile.

Another thought came to mind for people worried about leveling on a pvp server. It will cost real money however. Make alt on your home server, give him a bunch of leveling armor and weapons and then transfer him to a very low population realm. Once you are 70 just transfer him right back.

edit: Im also considering the transfer for my current 60 since he was ganked probably 20 times last night in HFP. I'm not complaining, I understand this is part of pvp, but it sure does slow down leveling to a crawl. Oh and don't bother parking your main in the area, it just encourages more ganking if you retaliate. Hell I had two of my 70s following me and I still had 60s come in to gank my alt, which I admit is kind of amusing.

I think there are a lot of areas that if you desire you can go to at least 2 different paths for leveling, maybe even three.

For me, for example on my last Paladin that took 3 days played to get to 60 (I didn't check when I hit 70, but I am exalted SSO / CE with 375 Alchemy / Skinning @ 9 days played) when I was doing level 30 to 40 or so, I did it pretty much entirely in Stranglethorn Vale. In fact, I erroneously assumed Dustwallow would of been a level 40-50 area and was totally disappointed I had overlevel'd Dustwallow.

But the point is, I am confident that getting from 30 to 40, you can either do it entirely in Stranglethorn or entirely in Dustwallow, and that's not even taking into account the bits and pieces of Arathi or Hillsbrad... and any other Kalmindor area I don't really remember.

And yeah, leveling is totally what you make it. But maybe that's because I am completely happy with my T6 raiding priest, when I make alts I do it for the experience... new class to play, new mechanics to learn, new ways to do the same old quests.

For example: Doing Sorrow Hill on a Prot Paladin is entirely different from doing it on a Rogue... Doing it in three pulls vs. having to walk up and kill 1-2 mobs at a time, even if chaining it very fast.

Different roles to play too, even the 4 healing classes have different styles. The bland Paladin spamming FoL / HL, or going the druid route and using HoTs... you really can do all of this in instances like SM or Uldaman.

I recently lvled my warrior in Strath till level 58 and was making 100k XP an hour roughly. I was doing two pulls on the dead side starting at the back entrance. i would run to the courtyard on the left hand side, pull everything in there, then pull the entire first room and tank them all in a corner right near the gate u came in at (its pretty easy to pull, exor the furthest group and make them run through other groups getting social agro, time bubble + Holy Wrath to pull multiple more groups).

After that go through the courtyard on the left and through the gate u have to open. pull that whole area, kite back to the gate, open it, and then tank them in there (all the mobs will glitch through the gate). Was taking me about 5 minutes a pull for 10-13k xp each pull.

If your going to try this bring multiple shields... 5 runs would burn through 2-4 shields.

Well my original question has somewhat changed. Circumstances are different and I no longer need to level from 0-70.

The new question is the debating about lvl 55+ tap leveling. Obviously most organized guilds or decent friends who want a DK in their questing/instancing party leveling up will probably be considering this, which is why I am interested in the communities opinion.

Currently as I understand it... any player who tags a mob thats green (ie experience giving) to a level 70 player, if the 70 kills it (without the tag) that player will get full Exp for that kill. This is why people utilize Slave pens (because lvl 55 players can zone in, and the mobs inside are all still green to lvl 70s) for the 55 to drop group, tag mobs, have the 70 group kill them, and he gets full xp.

While i realize that tagging a mob and having someone else kill it is not necessarily an exploit out of instance, and in most cases is penalized by certain mechanics, obviously dropping group in a zone is unintended. I don't think they may go to extremes to nerf this, (how can they) but I am still curious to everyone's opinion.

So we discussed this not one page ago in the thread. Of course it is an exploit. How can you not see this?

Normal case: You get assistance from a much higher level player to kill a mob, you get a huge dimunition in experience.

"Tap and ungroup case": You tap an instance mob, one of you is booted from the group in the instance, the high level burns down the mob for you, you get the full experience as if you killed said mob.

They intend for you to suffer an experience penalty when a higher level player kills your instance mob, you are circumventing it. In fact, they don't want you having people not in your group while in an instance. They give you all of 60 seconds to reinvite them to your party before they teleport said persons out of your instance.

The clarity that you are not supposed to be doing this and should not be benefitting from it should be as plain as the proverbial nose on one's head. The fact you need to break the group inside the instance and play games with the 1 minute window should provide an especially powerful clue that something else is wrong. But even without that, you have found a loophole around the experience penalty -- as did the dot-and-runners before that technique was removed from the game.

This is the very definition of what Blizzard would call an exploit. Who cares if they nerf it? It takes about 5 hours to get a lvl 55 to lvl 60 with some clever use of the instance quests in Strat and Scholo (and maybe Dire Maul?). As your folks level past 70 you can continue chaining the DK through Ramparts, Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbog, Mana Tombs, Crypts, Setekk, Shadow Labs, Mechanar, Botanica, Arcatraz, Shattered Halls, Steamvaults getting it a ton of experience along the way -- always picking up the relevant quests. With the nerf to lvl 60-70 experience, the Death Knight will have to spend, what, a day or two questing in Hellfire and Zangarmarsh to hit 70?

Now you are caught up to the rest of your guild and ready for raiding. Given that I was in a semi-hardcore raidiing guild for TBC and we had a guy get a shaman from 0-70 in time for our first raids, I'm seeing a pretty false problem developing here. I've also seen two people I know get banned by Blizzard in the past month for exploiting. So, really, 4 months to go to the expansion, and you want to keep talking about the tap-leveling exploit, have at it. But please don't pretend it isn't an exploit or that it's necessary. Not when Jimbo229 above has descrbed a completely legitimate way to level a character that requires your guild to have one helpful protadin and nothing more.

The ST levelling trick has been fixed as of last nights restart. now getting a grand total of 2xp per skelly kill

"Would you care to elaborate on this clever use of quests?"

Well in Stratholme, if you do the Fording line to get to the step where you have to get the painting, you'll have not only a bonus quest, but also a natural stopping point. Set hearthstone in LHC. When you kill the archivist, hearth. You'll then be able to get the new quest to kill Balnazzar. Kill him, loot his head. Leave party. You'll get hearthed again to LHC. Turn that quest in, you'll get the quest to kill Baron. Get summoned back to your group or meet them at the back gate.

This trick lets you complete the entire Stratholme quest sequence in one mega run (save the quest to kill Ramstein, which requires a portion of the Blightcaller chain -- up to you to do it our not). You will get more than 1 level in <2 hours and can do this between 55 and 60.

Friends that will muck around with you in Scholomance can allow you to do similar things with the Ras Frostwhisper chain which, unfortunately, requires you to run around the Eastern Kingdoms like an idiot. But it does award a ton of XP. The point is this. If you have even one lvl 80 friend -- let alone a couple -- you can use these couple of instances to get a couple of levels in a couple of hours. If you also AoE the place down, more power to you. I'd say it won't take but a few hours to get the DK boosted into the 60s. And from what I understand, you can hit 70 before leaving Terokkar right now just questing.

But that would require you to quest, of course. The insatance value of Strat and Scholo declines rapidly in the 60s hence my recommendation to just run through the Outland instances. I mean, you could stop and AoE down Underbog for quite a while I'd guess once a lvl 80 mage is at your disposal and your DK would get awfully good XP -- remember to put another lowbie in the group if possible. But instance AoE-ing gets awfullly boring. If your hardcore guild is serious, the Outland farewell tour should handle almost the entirety of 60-70.

I should mention that the Stratholme stuff is available at 55, but my understanding is that there is some DK starter stuff that you are just going to want to do, period. If you don't, for whatever reason, you could start the instance chaining immediately. If that's your plan, though, I'd get as many BRD quests as possible and start there. That'll also net you a lvl in the late 50s and the mobs are laughable for 70s to kill, nevermind a lvl 72 or better.

Well it should expected that anything that borders on abusive is going to get noticed. They do read these boards.

I prefer methods which aren't open to debate because when it comes down to playing tricks it probably is a good indication that you found something the developers did not intend. They patched that tag and drop and now skeletons.


Back to the topic, my experiment is progressing nicely. I have to two accounts, the backup account has a hunter for movement and dps assistance and a store equipped holy priest; store equipped means crafted epics and ah +heal gear. There are a few others there but they are not important.

My normal routine is to have the priest out of group renewing and such on whomever I am leveling. I group just long enough to set focus. This has to be done anytime they pass through a portal; even stormwinds mage portal; or taking the birds.

My current experiment is a new priest grouped with the hunter. Yeah, grouped. Level 70 to a now level 38. A little over 1 day played. I am not instance camping. I did do stockades five times one day just to see what it netted and was not impressed. What I am doing is every single quest line I know of. I wanted to see if quest experience alone would suffice. This was important because kills are between 26 and 45xp each. So far Quest experience is providing enough experience to stay within a good progression between zones. It also nets rep which may or may not be useful for some patterns for WOTLK inscription.

Have just completed Desolace which was the precursor to SM. Will now move to the second half of dustwallow. Options after that are to hit the bottom of STV, Feralas, and then Tanaris. I did skip the 2nd half of Ashenvale as its not an area I appreciate.

Thanks for this - I'm about to start using a friend's prot paladin to do Strath, this is useful information. What am I supposed to do spec/gear wise? Just a standard tanking spec and whatever his best tanking gear is? Or do I want to go for specific stats?

Thanks for any advice

I wore just my standard tanking set, but if you had a block value set i think that would be ideal (I didn't so I relied more on dodgeing/parrying). I did not use the Sporegar (sp?) shield because i found myself taking noticeably more damage with it on compared to my s3 shield or my kara shield. I didnt use shield spike but the 18 stam on my shield was pretty useless so that is a possibility. When I did it i had the standard 0/49/12 build w/o reckoning but I think as long as you have Blessing of Sanc, Ardent Defender, and Imp Blessing of Freedom you should be fine. I did not use Holy Shield or shield toss a single time, just because of mana issues on the shield and all the HS charges are gone in under a second. Reckoning is helpful to keep mp/hp up if u feel like specing into it.The gear I ran with was a mix of Badge/ZA/T5 gearr, the only real *must* is the [], if you do not have that then you cant do it without a healer.

Only thing I didnt say in my previous post was make sure u spam cleanse on yourself (they spam a reduce healing, reduce damage, and ice bolts at you). When you get hamstrung hit Blessing of Freedom, the second it wears out get Blessing of Sanc back up.

I was using [Flask of Blinding Light] and spell dam food, but it was not really required (just made it a little bit faster)

Good Luck, if you need help send me a message...

If out of party healing were penalized it would seriously impact the friendliness of the game. As such I cannot see it as an exploit. Can you imagine the screams of protest if you lost experience gains because someone thought to be nice and heal you in passing? The same could be said for putting buffs on another player out of group.

As for being tagged if you heal a pvp player the understanding is that you you voluntarily entered into pvp combat by such action. Since pvp action is between living opponents it would either require that a non-pvp would have no effect on a pvp player or automatically be forced into pvp for taking any action which could affect the outcome.

I was thinking more along the lines of, they'll nerf it so if the person being healed isn't "green" to the healer then they get an XP doc. Just like if I was killing mobs at 30 and a friendly rogue decided to dismount and help me out on his way to Kara or whatever.

Problem is you'll get some idiot standing in the newbie zone spamming hots on the new players if you fix this.

Numbers aren't that accurate. Especially the xp/run ones. Format: XP+GROUPBONUS/RUNXP

Questing: (1 run) -> *45 minutes* *7 levels*

Ragefire Chasm: (23 runs) -> *5 hours* *7 levels* MAGE
lvl08: 16/1800 (3 runs)
lvl09: 18/2300 (3 runs)
lvl10: 20/2500 (3 runs)
lvl11: 22/2800 (3 runs)
lvl12: 24/3000 (3.5 runs)
lvl13: 26/3300 (3.5 runs)
lvl14: 26/3300 (4 runs)

The Stockades: (22 runs) -> *3 hours* *5 levels* MAGE
lvl15: 43+10/4000 (3.5 runs) mostly full group with randoms/guildies
lvl16: 48+12/4400 (3.5 runs)
lvl17: 52+15/4800 (3.5 runs)
lvl18: 53+13/5000 (4 runs)
lvl19: 55+16/5200 (4 runs)
lvl20: 56+17/5300 (4 runs)
[lvl27: 78+18/7200 (4.5 runs)]

Scarlet Monastery - Cathedral (70 runs) -> *14 hours* *15 levels* MAGE
lvl20: 61+8/5600 (3.75 runs) different groups, players had to leave, etc, levels
lvl21: 63+9/5900 (3.75 runs)
lvl22: 72+22/6800 (3.75 runs)
lvl23: 72+10/6800 (3.75 runs)
lvl24: 75+10/6500 (4 runs)
lvl25: 78+10/6500 (4 runs)
lvl26: 78+10/7800 (4 runs)
lvl27: 80+23/7800 (4 runs)
lvl28: 87+25/7800 (4 runs)
lvl29: 91+26/7800 (4 runs)
lvl30: 101+25/9200 (4 runs) *defensive/berserker stance here, cloth handins*
lvl31: 114+27/10500 (4 runs)
lvl32: 105+24/10200 (4 runs)
lvl33: 120+34/11000 (4.5 runs)
lvl34: 120+34/10000 (4.5 runs)
lvl35: 148+20/14000 (?) *just 3 in the group 70/35/26*

Sunken Temple - Zulu (1 run) -> *12h hours* *23 levels* PALADIN
Well, it's nerfed now. But the XP was totally crazy (up to 58!). The best group setup we found was lvl70 + ~lvl35 + ~lvl45 + me, especially at higher levels this gives a very good group bonus. A full group gave less xp, funnily enough. So try 4! Some levels only took around twenty minutes, but with repairs, I wrote down half an hour average. A lock in the group is awesome, to summon you back. Well doesn't matter anymore.

Outland
lvl58: No weapon skills, no gear. Get a 70 to do some quests and craft some Imperial so you get some items, then spend half an hour smashing Hamstring. At 60 you'll have a full plate set and a decent weapon, so it's all uphill from there.

------

I am not really sure if Ragefire Chasm is worth it, the levels seemed a bit slow there. Maybe The Deadmines is an alternative, but I coudn't be arsed to run there. 1d11h to 58 seemed about consistent with my /played. It's a lot more than I expected but was absolutely worth it. I have no idea how anyone could manage to level up a warrior with Heroic Strike. I'm nearly at lvl62 now and getting to 70 will be annoying, but I don't have the feeling that I spent days on it yet so it'll be a lot easier on the mind.

The beauty of it is that the xp is absolutely guaranteed, you can't get ganked, you never have to run anywhere for ten minutes to hand in a quest, don't need to buy any items, lvl20-30 until you get a mount is avoided, no silly drop rates, just pure xp. And you don't get burned out on the class before you even start playing it.

I'm worried that one day [Figurine of the Colossus] is going to get nerfed. It really is so incredibly good for grinding AoE packs on a paladin.

As well as Stratholme as Jimbo mentions, another excellent place to use it are the packs of blood elves over by Manaforge Ara in Netherstorm. Mount up and round up a couple dozen mobs, dismount and start spamming consecrate and holy shield. Once you get to 50%, pop your [Figurine of the Colossus] and watch yourself heal back up to full. It's a good place to grind for [Sunfury Signet] and [Arcane Tome], which is a nice income.

Also grinding like this one of the few times Blessing of Sanctuary is really useful. It takes the 90~100 hits from the mobs down to 20~30 and you can pull even more.

My absolute favorite trick with [Figurine of the Colossus] is clearing the entire mana wrym room in heroic Magisters Terrace. Pull the entire room and pop it while you've got like 100 wyrms beating on you and you'll get thousands and thousands of points of healing back from the blocks. Not too mention making the protection warriors cry, they hate that wrym room.

This is exactly my point. I'm not saying that they should nerf out of party healing, I'm just saying that right now it doesn't seem balanced given that out of party healing is treated differently than out of party DPS. I would be fine if the unnerfed out of party DPS and allowed hunters to tab-kill things for starting area characters.

The only argument that I can see is that out of party DPS makes a bigger difference, but they are both pretty huge bonuses. The actual benefit of out of party healing also has to do with the synergy the low level class has with heals. Warrior's getting rage back and cleave spamming 5 mobs, warlocks being about to life tap indefinitely and dot/drain tank 5 or 10 mobs at a time. Those are pretty big bonuses not just from lack of down time, but also from actually DPSing harder because you have heals.

With the mage, what kind of spec do you use? Frost for ice barrier, fire for blazing speed/blastwave/dragon's breath and arcane for magic absorption would seem the most prominent features.

Either blizzard or arcane explosion would seem viable, though, blizzard leaves you crippled if you get the 1% frost nova resist (which happens quite a lot with groups of 30 mobs).

I was full frost (61 points) in full pvp gear (s3+s4). The +1750 health trinket sometimes saved my ass. Yeah I probably should have respecced but it worked just fine.

I just rerolled a new character so I decided to take a look at that topic. Have a lot of nice tips/tricks. But i think it will be more nice if someone keeps which of them still doable or not. Looks like best way to get lvl 70 after level 55 is boosting yourself in SP. From the replies I understood that Athene's powerleveling method is nerfed. So I wanted to ask what is the fastest available way to get level 55. Hunter's Pet, or AoE'ing with a mage friend or any trick like Sunken Temple ? :P

At the moment the best way is probably to use an out of group that has green mobs to your orange/red mobs. You tag them he kills them. That still gives full exp.

The room is pretty easy to solo as a well geared prot warrior because they can't hit you for any damage, even if you agro it all, you're just pretty likely to lose anyone who tries to aoe, but if you have a shield with a shield spike it's not exactly rocket science.