Timbui

My friend told me to not do quests in Outlands and just instance grind to 70, then do all the quests and rake in gold. What's the best level I should start instance grinding?

 

Mosh

I'd say save Netherstorm, Shadowmoon Valley and Blade's Edge for quest grinding at 70. Do every other zone for quests, which should take you to at least 67.

 

◊ Bryne

58.

 

◊ Praetorian

I like how you reported the OP for "stupid post," but then posted this yourself. There is both irony and justice to be found here.

 

◊ Double-Neg

e,fb

Not on IRC?

 

Plea

Quests below 63 will be grey to you, leaving them to 70 doesnt make sense. Shadowmoon valley and netherstorm has some nice quest chains, better save them to enjoy later; rather than doing in a rush to 70.

 

• Tharas

Agreed here.

I hit 69 last night, I completed 100% of HFP, Zangarmarsh, and Terokkar. I did some early quests in Blade's Edge (about a half-dozen to 10), and a similar number in Nagrand. I did modest amounts of repeating instances (typically 1-2 of each while at the appropriate level, a couple extra of Mana Tombs and Underbog, looking for some drops), but was religious about completing -all- quests in a zone, to the point of having a browser open with every quest for the zone pre-opened in a tab and closing the tabs as I completed quests. I simultaneously got to 375 mining, honored with the appropriate zone faction, farmed/bought most of the mats for my first Master Axesmith 1h epic, and will probably accumulate enough gold to buy my flying mount when I ding 70 in 2-3 evenings.

I did 1-2 quests out in Netherstorm for specific rewards that would make tanking easier, and I'm planning to do a handful of other questlines out there with good rewards as a 69 (or new 70), but everything else will be completed for gold at a leisurely pace.

If you plan to do high-end raid instances, instance grinding the level-correct zone for rep, then completing the quests to reach revered/near-revered is the best way to accumulate rep. I didn't do that very well, but this was my first char to take through Outlands.

 

Emeraude

I did instance grinds for 60-64, I was 5999/6000 friendly with Cenarian Expedition/Honor Hold before I did a single quest. After that I went back and did Hellfire/Zangarmarsh, and I did half the quests in Terrokar which got me to 66-67, I then slaughtered the elves over at Firewing for 5999/6000 friendly with Scryers, and I finished up with more instances from whatever I was at after that to 69, I then went to Shadowmoon to kill Blood Elves for Sunfury Singets 69->70(Lots of rep!).

When I went back to do the remaining Terrokar/Nagrand/Blade's Edge/Shadowmoon/Netherstorm quests @70, I was able to very very easily accumulate 5200g for my 280% speed flying mount. It's important to note, that Blizzard normalized Experience/rep on quests, so it doesn't matter what level you do them, you get full exp(gold) for them.

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• Snowy

I am following this for my alts. My warrior is almost 67 and still has the southern part of Terrokar to go, and my Shaman is halfway through 65 and just finished the last quest in Zangarmarsh.

The way I looked at it is I wanted to save BEM, SMV, and NS for 70. So that leaves 4 zones to do, needing to get 2.5 levels before heading to the next. I decided to break it down as:

60-63: HFP
63-65: Zangarmarsh
65-67: Terrokar
67-70: Nagrand

Plus once I hit 69 I can run most instances. All I did on the way up was run each instance 1 or 2 times. Of course, the biggest thing about having 2 alts is I rotate using them so I *always* am working off rested xp. You would have to substitute in more instance runs if you were planning this on a character you were going to play every day.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Mizerok

I quested to 70, faster that way honestly, in my own opinion. That and there's lots of rep and stuff you miss from doing instances alone.

 

Dakous

There was a changenote in a "recent" patch (I believe in the 2.0.x series) where reputation given by quests doesn't scale down based on level (completing a level 1 quest as 70 now gives the same rep as at level 1).

Really, we (the group of pals I leveled with) did a mostly rested-XP less grind of running instances when enough people were on, and clearing zones of quests systematically (although not crazy thoroughly, if that makes sense), and hit 70 without having touched Blade's Edge, Netherstorm, or Shadowmoon Valley. So for the OP, with any amount of rested XP factoring in (which, I suspect if you're asking this question "this late", is probably a significant factor), you could even be done sooner, with four zones worth of quest gold... and that's without having "stopped" to just lather-rinse-repeat instances until your eyes bleed. The premise really seems non-sequitor, in retrospect.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

Miriam

I would suggest to just play the game and not worry about min-maxing some kind of efficiency factor. Levelling from 60 to 70 for the first time was something that, in my opinion, brought the immersion back to the game and it would really be a shame to miss most of it by grinding instances, mobs or whatever. In my case, simple questing without any non-quest related grinding as well as running each levelling instance 2-3 times meant that when hitting 70, I had maybe 2/3 of Netherstorm quests, everything in Shadowmoon and a bunch of Blade's edge quests left to do at level 70 (most of which I still haven't done...).
But I suppose for an alt character you could figure out some amount of optimizing reputations, gold etc., if you feel like it makes sense to you.

 

Shavnir

I did all of Hellfire, Zangamarsh, Terrokar and Nagrand doing some instances along the way. That left me roughly halfways through 68, and I ground the rest of the way (with a couple more instances thrown in). Not the most fun, however the fact is now I've got 1500ish gold, and I've already bought my epic flyer (had the money for it at 70 actually) and I've put probably 500-600g into leveling Tailoring.

I went back and did Blade's Edge and I'm doing Netherstorm now. Haven't touched Shadowmoon yet.

 

◊ Wraithlin

Similar question;
Are there any quests in Zangermarsh or Terrokar that will turn grey at 70 ?
My paladin is currently 67, having done all the quests in HFP, and about half of the zangermarsh quests. I currently plan to finish up anything green to me at 67 and then stop questing, but are there any quests in terrokar I might miss out on if I do not go there before 70 ?

 

Vhex

Questing for gold is fairly inefficient, albeit more entertaining by and large. I agree that you should leave the SMV quests for 70, but only because doing them with a flying mount is almost a necessity if you want to save your sanity.

I skipped most of terrokar on my BE paladin and now that I'm going back and 2-boxing it with my priest, it only amounts to ~5g per quest. Honestly? You might consider putting off group/instance quests until 70 since those usually have the biggest payoff (some worth 24g) but most of the grind quests it's really not worth it.

Really boils down to what keeps you sane. I can't stand grinding for XP, but grinding for gold I don't mind. I spent 8 hours farming arcane tomes, mana thistle and primal air and made ~700 gold. I spent 3 hours just straight up grinding xp to finish off lvl 63 because I didn't want to hit terrokar on my priest until 64 and I almost committed suicide by the end.

But yeah, if you're going to go the grind to 70 route, you might as well do all of hellfire/zangarmarsh anyways. Terrokar is where you start hitting all the lvl 63+ quests. Don't think I had any grey quests there.

 

Trepidati0n

The quests really start giving gold once they are 67+ @ 8-9G a pop. If you can do 3 or 4 per hour, you are earning about 60G per hour with drops/etc. The big money is doing the 70 quests. If you can get a focused group, you can clear upwords of 200G/ hour especially since most group quests revolve around killing a single mob.

 

heel

If you want to grind in the fastest possible way:

60-68: Hellfire Ramparts
69-70: The Blood Furnace

A group Nagrand break at 66 won't hurt your xp/hour that much, if the grinding is really getting to you. Other than that - instances all the way.

 

Fellwraith

I never understood the point of people mindlessly grinding, whether it be in an instance or otherwise. Is it really that much of a difference overall if you wait to do quests vs pounding them out when they're meant to be done? The time you save by leveling from quests + generally running around can easily be used to go farm primals or other items of value at 70.

You can get far more xp per hour doing quests - that means you level faster, get a flying mount faster, and can farm faster. Not to mention the fact that several quests will eventually lead to an instance drop (so you get to hit crypts for 20847 time, but this time you actually need something) and several quest rewards are upgrades that will help you level/farm more efficiently. If a quest goes from 3g to 7g in zangarmarsh, who cares?

The only zones I'd suggest saving are SMV and Netherstorm, because you can hit 70 quite easily just hitting the other zones + 1-2 runs in an instance. Netherstorm is probably worth 1-2k gold, SMV is worth a couple hundred. That's more than enough to get you started on an elite mount.

 

dojke

I'm not going to dispute this, but 60g/hr does not seem like that much. With the current droprates on elemental plateau, getting 5-6 primals/hr are quite doable, and I can't imagine any servers selling them for less than 10g a pop.

The idea behind min/maxing of course is that you do things as efficiently as possible. I'm not sure that saving your quests in this manner actually accomplishes this. Personal experience is showing that while I can do maybe 75k xp/hr while grinding (closer to 60k ish in instances), with quests it varies between 100-160k (generally around 120) depending on the zone. Thus if I'm going to be taking like a 40% hit in xprate, the goldgains for questing at 70 need to be positively massive to make up for that time.

Atm, this doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe once the primal prices become sane again, but not currently.

 

• Snowy

Well grinding quests is usually not nearly as tedious as grinding the same mobs over and over. If you're really min-maxing then you get to 70 and you spend every bit of free time you're on farming primals. I think the general question is more "How do I maximize gold from quests?" Leftover quests from Terrokar might only give 5-6g a pop. Quests in SMV and NS are going to give anywhere from 10-24g a pop -- and if you knock out 20 quests or so in one night in NS, that's a cool 300-400g into your pocket, not counting drops you're getting along the way for even more.

The number one lament I hear from people who don't have their epic flyer right now is: "Damn, I wish I had ran more instances so I saved more quests for 70." They really have no option but to grind mobs for gold now. For most people, it's more fun to quest. It's difficult to conceptualize "I need to farm 127 more primals for my epic" vs "Okay I need to kill 10 mobs for 16g, collect 5 signets for 13g, plant this beacon for 11g" and so on.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

dojke

Well while that argument is fairly common, it doesn't actaully make any sense.

At the same time, you could grind instances for gold (if you're saying "damn i wish i did more instances" for xp, then surely you could grind instances for gold). So really the question is "when do I grind, when I hit 70, or levelling to 70?" Becuase if you're saving your quests until 70, then you're grinding up to 70. If you're questing up to 70, then you're grinding post 70.

You can't make the argument that "grinding is not fun", if you're using it to support the idea that you want to grind from 61->70. That just makes no sense at all, you're just inverting at what time you quest and what time you grind.

So it seems very odd that people are claiming that they should have "saved" their quests. If you quest to 70, then start grinding you both a) get to level 70 faster, and b) get more money/hour by grinding primals. If you grind to 70 then sart questing you a) get to 70 slower, and b) still make less money/hour by doing quests instead of primals.

So I'm not quite sure where the discussion is, except that player's perceptions just aren't rational. The only reason you would want to save quests is for reputation reasons, and in that case you'd grind straight from 58->64 (because hellfire/cenarion reputations are both needed). After that you have the choice of doing consortium/kurenai quests if you wish.

 

• Snowy

The people who rushed to 70 early probably did most of their quests, to level up faster, eschewing instance running for the most part. Now if you substitute in 2 runs of each instance (hardly grinding) you save a hell of a lot more quests for 70, when they convert into a nice sum of gold.

The whole point is to try to earn the most money without having that feeling of grinding. If you mix in enough instances and do every single quest in the first 4 zones, and work off enough rest xp, you can set yourself up to have 3 zones of quests left. Keep in mind a lot of people don't want to sit in one place for several hours each day doing the same thing over and over. Sure, grinding primals is THE best way to make money. That's not what the question was here though.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Magunsson

Having done a mix of grinding and questing for profit, I can say that questing does not always make the 100g per hour that you can easily make from grinding primals (even if you are bad at grinding).

The questing comes in bursts. Some hubs have a heap of quests in similar locations, some hubs are more spread out, and non-soloable group quests will slow you down.

Eg, in Nethestorm I found the Violet Tower and all the quests around there to be ludicriously profitable. Whetheras The Stormspire was less so, although there are some easy "20g in 4 minutes" quests from The Protectorate.

 

Snowcrasher

I don't think people should stop questing by level so much, and rather by area. Shadowmoon, Netherstorm and most of Blade's Edge greatly benefit by having a flying mount. They are also the only zones with quests of a high enough level to benefit from saving them.

I leveled my main to 70 in the first week without any grinding, only a handful of instance runs and still had 90% of Netherstorm left and 100% of Shadowmoon. That translated into about 2000g once I went around and did those quests post 70.

The one thing I did do while leveling was make sure I did every quest in the zones I was in and hit all the discovery points where practical. Discovery points are free and fast XP and Outlands has many, many more DPs then the old world does.

 

Alexmeria2

I would quest the whole way to seventy.

There isn't much of an advantage or disadvantage doing it either way, but it was much more fun for me going through quests and having fun with them rather than powering to seventy.

If that isn't your thing, then, be my guest and I would suggest instance grinding the whole way.