• Chicken

I'm almost completely certain Blizzard's phasing technology does not work that way. It's how some of the other newer MMOs work, but it's not how WotLK works.

Blizzard's phasing controls what NPCs you can see in an area, and only allows you to see players who have progressed just as far as you have in the overall area if the technology is used. There is no system in place beyond that to spread people out though. Anyone that's done Quest Line A will see Phase B and everyone else that's done Quest Line A.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

• Bluefish

If you intend to level a Death Knight through Outland, I suggest you spend a bit of time on Wowhead familiarizing yourself with the quests for your faction in Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, Terokkar, and Nagrand. Just brush up on what chains into what, which mobs drop which quest items, where certain quest givers are, stuff like that. If you spec Blood, your only downtime will be related to bag space, PvP, or "where the hell was that NPC again?" You can minimize the first and third of those through preparation. Death Knights start with 4x Deathweave Bag.

My Death Knight was 67 when I finished all the soloable stuff in Nagrand; to hit 68, I headed up to Netherstorm and did some Area 52 quests that chained together well. I did not instance at all, and I'm not sure if instancing would bridge the gap completely. Being a 68 DK in Northrend was fine, but I pulled down less xp/hr questing there than in Outland. I might do the Kirin'var chain this time and hope to hit 69 before heading to Northrend.

The DK quest weapon is serviceable until you hit 65. At that point, have someone ready to help with Ring of Blood for your next weapon upgrade. I was told it's bad in a 5-DK group. 4 DKs and a healer (or a 70 tank and 4 DKs) should be fine.

 

Sangius

I got a question which is - I atleast think so - linked to the general topic of this thread:

How much xp does it take to get from 70-71, 71-72, ..., 79-80?

Would be nice to know since I am going to take four days of work and I'd like to know for how much xp/hour I have to aim. And it's nice to have that information in general - haven't found it on the official boards, wowwiki.com, google, etc.




I am planning to level in instances too, btw, with a group of guildies, another bonus concerning that kind of leveling is, that you won't be bothered by pvp-maniacs. Anyone wrote down how much xp he got for one hour of straight farming in instances / powerleveling with quests? Just to compare these two methods.

 

jaske

Probably not super helpful but 72-73 is 1555700 and doing a Nexus run last night was about 30% of my level. Ill record how ever much i need to level from now on.

 

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Sangius

I looked at wowwiki.com....

Thanks to you. Sometimes I think i should get more sleep.

Hm, I thought they raised the xp for level 70-71 to about 2.XXX.XXX xp?

 

Vaccine

A few things I'd suggest:

1) Research zones rare spawns. Rare spawns were changed again in WotLK. Every one I've met on beta has been soloable at similar level. They gave around 20k experience whilst rested for killing a mob barely harder than the ones surrounding it. They still drop a random stat blue but also a bag with gold in, a stack of 20 netherweave and sometimes mote of xxx wotlk equivalents. If you're ahead of the curve in leveling these may be up and unkilled before. If you know where they are you can scan the area whilst questing.

2) Get out of Borean/Howling as soon as possible. I'd completely skip the starting areas. There are other camps you can level at in the same zone more out of the way. For example the Howling Fjord has a Taunka camp in the far north with a nearby dryad quest giver too. These two combined provide a lot of quests in areas not too close to the main group. New agamand may also be an option but the whole lift area annoyed me because of how slow the travel was around the water, waiting for the boats etc... As soon as you hit 71 you should be heading to Dragonblight. Lots of quests and hopefully much less densly populated. Grinding instances to 71 is also an option here, not sure what XP/hour they grant though. If you do go the quest route my advise is Howling Fjord. The fact its more out of the way (menethil and undercity transport links) for a start makes it less populated, and people in threads such as this have constantly been advising it for more quests, better density and better story.

3) Check skill levels to see when you want to get new skills. As a Druid I have it easy, I can teleport: moonglade and hearth back to the zone I was in with new skills in less than 60 seconds. Others have it tougher unless they have a mage to portal them. You can't get into Dalaran till level 74, but once there you get portal links everywhere.

4) Goes without saying but get flying asap. Epic flight in Northrend makes the remaining leveling process so much faster. Zul'Drak especially, great zone but I'd hate to do without it. If you're debating buying epic flight on your main before the expansion, do it! The zones are FAR FAR bigger than even SMV and I'm in tears just thinking about doing a zone like Storm Peaks with 60% flying skill.

5) Try do all instances at least once. Most instances have 2+ quests associated with no pre-quests. Even if you aren't power grinding instances, doing each one at the appropriate level with your guild mates once is a much higher exp/hour than questing as you get 30-40k per quest, so the first run can yield around 100k xp for maybe 20-30 mins work (apart from one particularly obnoxious quest in Ahn'Kahet Funky Fungi - Quest - World of Warcraft which takes around 5 runs to complete).

6) Be aware of dailys in the zone you are in. If you log (or more likely you're still playing at the server daily quest reset) earlier quests will become available again as dailys which give really nice experience for something you already know how, where and what to do.

7) Not a leveling tip as such but plan to get an hour or two in Storm Peaks the day you get your flying mount skill before the dailys reset. The faction we're concerned with is Sons of Hodir as they hold the Shoulder enchants. You need exalted and the daily quests for rep are slow, the earlier the start the better.

8) Know the quests flight paths and quest hubs. If you aren't in beta you may struggle here but you can use Wowhead or something to look up the main ones. Some zones like Dragonblight or Borean Tundra they are all situated in large quest hubs, other zones like Howling Fjord have scattered quest givers all over the place.

9) Sholazaar Basin: There are two factions at war with each other. I got a quest off one faction and thought if I did it I would be locked to that choice so didn't do the chain till 80. It isn't the case and it was quite a long, easy and fruitful questline in terms of XP so don't be scared of this. You only choose your allegiance when you kill a Lich on a group quest at the end, he has one add of each faction, the one you save gives the quest to become allied to his faction. That faction then unlocks a load of dailys which are good xp too, so have an idea of which faction you want to support before you get here (Frenzyheart or Oracles).



Question to you guys, what do you think about skipping the Wrath Gate aftermath quest (trying to not give spoilers here). I spent a long time there and whilst cool I think it could be a big waste of time if racing to 80.

 

jaske

Everything I've heard is the opposite to this. The general consensus(and my experience) seems that Fjord is spread out and slow but you probably wont get ganked as much due to it being spread out more and faction based quest hubs. Borean is the oposite with allot of smaller but quickly completed neutral hubs where you are likely to get ganked.

I'll probably do as you said and just go do Utgarde runs till 71-73 depending on what the xp is like. Does anyone know if its possible to run Nexus without doing the Amber Ledge quests to get the flightpath?

edit: is there a good way to search rare spawns on wowhead?

 

Vaccine

With a summon it is, otherwise no.

For rarespawns look up the Acheivement "Northern Exposure" to list them. Many don't have any info at all on them yet.

 

macbeet

Leveling in instances the first day is definitely a good idea, there is enough time to do questing, when the rest of the server sleeps. I was one the guys that get ahead of the pack the last time, and leveling was a breeze from Terrokar onwards.

Curse Gaming had some awesome quest maps for BC that really helped me leveling: Maps that showed the objective's position for every quest in a zone. That was great for minimizing travel times and maximizing quest synergy on the fly.
Here is an example from BC: Nagrand Quest Location Map - Screenshots - Curse

There are already some for WotLK:WotLK -- More Quest Maps - World of Warcraft - Curse

 

KMad

"Worth the money" can depend on professions too. On my priest/alch, I realized that Flask of Chromatic Wonder was still orange at 375. It stayed yellow until 397 actually, and takes Outland herbs I had tons of and wasn't going to use for inscription. So I made a bunch of those for alchemy skillups when I copied her, before I went out and picked a single flower or killed anything. +18 to all stats might not be the most optimal for some of my alts but it can be handy, and for me the main goal was that it saved me from needing Northrend herbs until that much later.

Other profs may have similar things you can do to help yourself level while you skillup. JC in particular was useful for me. I was cutting gems for skillups anyway, so I replaced the gems in the BC gear I was still wearing on all alts. You're powerleveing fast so you probably won't take time to craft anything but I figured it might be worth a mention.

 

Ambika

Death Knight Leveling or How I plan to level my Death Knight:

Prerequisites done for chose profession:

A. Gathered enough Herbs and Metal/Ore to level to 350 Blacksmithing and Inscription.

All that stuff is sitting in the bank waiting for her to be created. If you plan on leveling a profession, have the required number of mats to punch you through 350 sitting ready to go.

1. Login and create your Death Knight ASAP. Preferably during off hours around 3 or 4 in the morning.
2. Burn through starting zone. Get all the Armor/weapons gear fast. Hit 58 head to Ogrimmar (horde of course) to complete quest then goto Thunderbluff (noone is EVER there)
3. Level up Blacksmithing and Inscriiption to 350
4. Head to Northrend get Grand Master Blacksmithing/Inscription
4. Head to outlands
5. Level to 60
6. Park Character get rested XP.
7. Level during off hours


I'll use my death knight later on but I want to clear out my bank of all the crap that's sitting there (400 bank slots full of crap). Get out of that starting zone quickly. The entire zone won't take more than 2-3hrs at max. You'll hit 58 quickly then get out of ogrimmar and get to TB and do all your profession work if you plan on doing it. Everyone and their mother will be doing Northrend/Outland so If you plan on making your guy a gatherer of any sort, now would be a good time to run around zones picking up stuff.

I remember seeing nothing but paladins leveling with me as I leveled my prot warrior. It'll be the same way with Death Knights.

Question1: "Why not enough mats to 375?"
Answer: Outland materials are easy to gather up until 350. At 350+ the material requirements become steeper for certain professions (alchemy is cake, jewelcrafting is horrible). Northrend professions all start their recipes at 350. At this point you can get cheaper materials to level to 450 and people will be dumping materials like crazy on the AH. Save yourself time/money/headaches and skip Outlands 350-375.

 

Dralmoo

One thing I noticed in beta about skipping quest hubs, if you do so there may be later quest hubs that are unavailable to you due to phasing/chain unlocks. I skipped most of the starter zone and tried to meet my friends in Dragonblight, and hardly any quests were available to me. No gray exclamation points eiher, so I don't think level was the issue.

 

zoombini

I know the end zones get VERY linear in terms of quests - I flew around on my 80 premade in Storm Peaks and couldn't find any quests outside of K3 - presumably because I hadn't unlocked them by finishing the K3 stuff.

 

easttuth

A few questions for those of you that have already leveled a DK solo in outland:

How long did it take to kill a single mob at any given level?

Do you feel that having a SP geared DPS/Healer behind you (think dual-boxing) would have significantly impacted your leveling speed?

If you had the opportunity, would you do it? (Or do you feel it wouldn't be worth the trouble)



For those of you married persons looking to maximize your vacation time at release, are you leveraging your significant other for the process? If so, how? I am looking forward to many yummy sammiches, and maybe a few completed quests during my nap...

 

Qwik

I don't mean to pull the conversation off-topic, however do you know if the changes to the leveling time required to get to 70 be present in this upcoming patch, or will that come when WotLK is released?

 

Ambika

1. No time at all. Spec'd blood and slaughtered everything that came at me. I was taking on 3-4 mobs at once. The gear you get out of the starting zone is amazing.

2. No. Not really. You kill stuff fast enough with little downtime. That they would be be bored as heck. Spec them holy and have them HoT you and goto town.

3. See 2. Spec Holy. Grab 10mobs. AoE kill them, HoT when neccessary.


One thing to note is that I would grab flasks of pure death for shadow damage and have it on me at all times. Any flasks, scrolls, potions, bufffs you can toss on make your leveling experience flow faster.

 

Ambika

XP required has been reduced by 20-30%. Comb through this thread or head to WoWiki for confirmation. It affects 60-70 specifically.

 

Kamaegwyn

I've leveled in BC mainly questing solo, and ran instances only when the opportunity presented itself (i.e., unplanned and on the spot while I was close and / or needed it to complete quests).

Make sure to avoid congested zones (like the Force Camps or whatever they were called in Hellfire Peninsula when BC first came out) and skip quests that can't be easily done solo and come back later with a group or at a higher level. The point is not to lose too much time, and to stay ahead of the leveling crowd to hopefully move on to a less congested area.

On beta I average about 150k XP / hr, and that includes buggy quests, server crashes and writing down everything I did (got started late in beta, should hit lvl 79 tonight). I only ran an instance once (Nexus) when friends asked me to come along, and even though I was already level 76, the XP was pretty good (76 rogue / 76 warr / 73 pally / 73 DK / 71 DK)

 

Nemantopia

BC I never touched an instance until after hitting 70 (which was an interesting situation in regards to getting dungeon groups for rep to unlock heroics). I'm glad to know the leveling curve has been scrunched for the range, because it means I won't have to worry very much about alts through Outland. I'd imagine you could pretty easily hit 80 without instancing once in a relatively short time, but I'd imagine hitting them once for quests [and assumed reputation] would put you in better standing when you do hit 80 then having to go back and run them. Plus, it looks like it's 'official' that running the initial dungeon quests and hitting each instance is very efficient, possibly the best, xp per hour falling back to likely a bit under solo or group questing once there are no more quests. So I'm hoping to hit up on guildies and tank/healers I know to run instances just for the lag avoidance.

I guess the summary here is 'for those that won't be able to get ahead of the leveling core due to time constraints, instancing is the best bet unless you're on at low-pop'. As my work schedule varies each week, this is likely the category I'll end up in, and not on at low-pop.

 

◊ Kaubel

This is a dumb thread.