So what's the fastest leveling path now?

[SirCowdog]

A full AoE clear of the trash in Serpentshire is decent xp at 80. The individual mob xp ain't great, but when you're pulling 8-10 mob packs it's decent. After Serpentshire do Sunwell and (for fun :-) ) Magtheridon's Lair, similarly concentrating on trash. The gold is decent too. Unfortunately as soon as you hit 83 it's all gone, so I never got to testing other TBC raids beyond these. I would assume any trash large pack heavy instance like Black Temple would be similar, assuming you can deal with the first boss's encounter mechanics at 80.

At 83-84, heroic WotLK dungeons should be the next step, I would assume.

[--Code--]

The fastest way is getting boosted by a high level. I'm doing it with a second account with a level 101 druid.
Get boosted or boost yourself through stockades 15-60, then hellfire ramparts 60-80, then any cata/mop dungeon 80-90.
I've gone 20-80 in just under 10 hours on my second nightborne character. There is no faster way to level that I know of.

[Deleted]

The optimal path seems to be:

20-58

Sequentially quest the zones (as Alliance) Loch Modan, Westfall, Redridge, Darkshore and Bloodmyst Isle - These are all "starter" questing zones with tightly packed together easy quests which have you generally doing very little for quest completion.

At the same time you should exclusively queue for Ragefire Chasm and Stormwind Stockades. These are two of the quickest completed dungeons and the completion xp alone is a solid addition to your leveling. If you are a leveling healer or tanking class this will be a sizable portion of your leveling, and you'll be getting to know these two instances well.

58-73

Do either Northrend or Burning Crusade questing while queuing for both Utgarde Keep, Ramparts and Blood Furnace.

74-81

This is the rocket fuel segment of your leveling. Switch your settings to do heroic dungeons, and go and sequentially solo every single Burning Crusade Heroic Dungeon. They give outstanding xp/gold and you will be one-shotting your way through the dungeons.

81-82

Most of the Heroic Burning Crusade Dungeons will stop giving you xp at this point, so go and do some of the raids. Serpentshire Cavern has level 72 10 mob pulls which you can AoE in seconds and give massive amounts of xp.

83-87

Unfortunately this is back to questing and queuing yourself for dungeons. These levels can seem like a bit of a grind after coming off the rocket fuel of 74-82. At 84-87 you can solo heroic Northrend dunegons, but I'm unconvinced that this is faster xp than questing. It is however a very good moneymaker.

88-90

Heroic Zul'Gurub is your friend. Solo the dungeon in a big circle avoiding all the bosses and killing all mini-bosses. Get back to the start, exit, reset, and do again. 5 circles and resets should be enough xp to go from 88-90.

90-110

Exactly the same as prior to 7.3.5



All of the above is obviously class and spec dependent in terms of how easy it is to do. Certainly if your class has a tanking spec or healing spec, particularly a tanking spec, you'll see a lot of the insides of stockades and ragefire the first 40 or so levels, but blast through the completion xp.

Whether the above is fun is a different question entirely.

Just to update this, I hit 98 and went and grabbed my artifact weapon just now.

90-91

Was simply the intro quests to WoD.

91-98

Go grab a 630 weapon from a friendly guildie (best) or AH (worst) and you'll OP everything you hit. You're literally doing 2x the similar heirloom weapon damage I found. For me 91-98 was actually one of the funnest parts of the leveling. I grabbed engineering and made myself a ton of Mecha-Rockets which are hideously OP in random battlegounds at this level. I play on a server/battlegroup on which the 91-99 random Battlegrounds were popping approx every 7 minutes. So I simply Battlegrounded most of my way through the levels, I hit 98 having barely done 1/4 of the quests in the starting zone. Winning in 91-99 battlegrounds gives a ton of xp, with some BG's giving me half a level for 15 mins of good fun. A string of wins clearly helps here, but armed with your OP mecha-rockets I found my win/loss ratio was more than OK and it was great fun too.

I'm guessing the above is only useful to you of course if your BG queue times are as low as those I had, and you enjoy random pvp.

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At 83-84, heroic WotLK dungeons should be the next step, I would assume.

I found Heroic WoTLK dungeons tough at 83, and noticeably easier at 84. I found I had to grind out 83-84 by questing/LFG & BG's, basically any way I could.

As I mentioned, I'm unconvinced 84-88 using WotLK Heroics is actually faster than questing. It's certainly profitable, I had a string of epics drop which people bought for silly prices on the AH, and the trash alone made me a number of thousand. It's decent xp, but I faster is up for debate.

Doing loops of Zul'Gurub as I mention 88-90 killing just the mini-bosses and resetting is definately faster however (and again, profitable). I powered through those levels in no time at all.

[SirCowdog]

I found Heroic WoTLK dungeons tough at 83, and noticeably easier at 84. I found I had to grind out 83-84 by questing/LFG & BG's, basically any way I could.

As I mentioned, I'm unconvinced 84-88 using WotLK Heroics is actually faster than questing. It's certainly profitable, I had a string of epics drop which people bought for silly prices on the AH, and the trash alone made me a number of thousand. It's decent xp, but I faster is up for debate.

Doing loops of Zul'Gurub as I mention 88-90 killing just the mini-bosses and resetting is definately faster however (and again, profitable). I powered through those levels in no time at all.

As long as it's faster than 30 minutes per level, it's beating my normal questing speed through Pandaria/Cata. And if there's decent gold to boot, that makes it hands down better in my book.

But honestly, it seems like Method 0: Ramparts is still faster from 80-84.

[Jastall]

At 83-84, heroic WotLK dungeons should be the next step, I would assume.

I tried that at 84 and mobs died quite slowly, giving about 500-600xp per when BC mobs gave 900-1k per and died faster at comparable (74+) levels. I'm not sure if Blizzard hotfixed dungeon experience, but it would just be another low blow if they did.

EDIT: yeah, it's not worth running Wrath heroics at all. At 87 I ran Drak'tharon Keep, it was easy but the mobs usually gave about 400 xp each, and a full run gave me all of 11% of an exp bar.

[Lime]

SSC trash was giving terrible XP at 80/81.

[Nefarious Tea]

The fastest way is getting boosted by a high level. I'm doing it with a second account with a level 101 druid.
Get boosted or boost yourself through stockades 15-60, then hellfire ramparts 60-80, then any cata/mop dungeon 80-90.
I've gone 20-80 in just under 10 hours on my second nightborne character. There is no faster way to level that I know of.

Boosting has been hotfixed: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20761996118

RIP actually being able to level in a reasonable timeframe.

[Corroc]

The optimal path seems to be:
20-58

Sequentially quest the zones (as Alliance) Loch Modan, Westfall, Redridge, Darkshore and Bloodmyst Isle - These are all "starter" questing zones with tightly packed together easy quests which have you generally doing very little for quest completion.

At the same time you should exclusively queue for Ragefire Chasm and Stormwind Stockades. These are two of the quickest completed dungeons and the completion xp alone is a solid addition to your leveling. If you are a leveling healer or tanking class this will be a sizable portion of your leveling, and you'll be getting to know these two instances well.

Queueing for certain dungeons because you get good exp from mobs is not really good strategy for two reasons. You are missing out good 10-20% exp from the random completion and two you are missing solid 2-3 dungeon quests which gave better exp than mobs.

58-73

Do either Northrend or Burning Crusade questing while queuing for both Utgarde Keep, Ramparts and Blood Furnace.

Dont go at 58 because the zones are alot bigger than classic zones, which means more running than your average classic zone. Go at 60 because you will have flying mount to make some trips faster. And stay away from burning crusade zones. Compared to WOTLK the zones have alot more running and you will be spending more time running around instead of questing. Blizzard learned a thing or two from earlier expansions and you can see it from quest design.
For example I went to borean tundra at lvl60 and did around half of the wotlk and bc dungeons with random group finder and I ended up at 72 before finishing the zone.

Now I was at 80 around 1day and 10hours played but I skipped the heroic dungeons completely.

[SirCowdog]

I tried that at 84 and mobs died quite slowly, giving about 500-600xp per when BC mobs gave 900-1k per and died faster at comparable (74+) levels. I'm not sure if Blizzard hotfixed dungeon experience, but it would just be another low blow if they did.

EDIT: yeah, it's not worth running Wrath heroics at all. At 87 I ran Drak'tharon Keep, it was easy but the mobs usually gave about 400 xp each, and a full run gave me all of 11% of an exp bar.

I think it's more a case of them just not really putting a lot of attention to detail into the implementation of scaling. There are a bunch of different spots where it feels really sloppy, and the power curve of your character doesn't match that of the zone. The transition between vanilla zones(1-60) to TBC/WotLK is pretty bad until 61. Same with MoP/Cata at 80, where the scaling doesn't feel like it kicks in until 81. And again at 90 going into WoD.

I mean...the simply fact that heroic dungeons CLEARLY weren't even included in the scaling shows how little they really looked into things. It's not at all surprising to me that some spots are worth more than others.

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SSC trash was giving terrible XP at 80/81.

Agreed. I went back to powerleveling in Ramparts. :/ Although it doesn't seem any faster than focused leveling in MoP/Cata. ~20-30 min per level.

- - - Updated - - -

Boosting has been hotfixed:

Hi all,

From WoW’s earliest days, we’ve always had to take steps to limit experience gains for characters when grouped with someone of a drastically higher level. We recently became aware of a bug introduced in 7.3.5: a side-effect of the vastly expanded creature scaling was causing the logic to break when awarding XP in some situations. Earlier today, we applied a hotfix to creature experience that corrects this issue.

At the same time, we have significantly increased the experience awarded through queuing for random Normal dungeons from Classic through Draenor content. Running dungeons at the appropriate should feel rewarding, whether as a complement to or even an complete alternative to questing.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and will continue to keep a close eye on the pacing of the leveling experience in 7.3.5 and beyond.

RIP actually being able to level in a reasonable timeframe.

BOOOOO!!!! BOOO!!!!!!

Well, at least the bumped up exp from LFD. I guess when I get back from work I'll test tank-spamming dungeons again.

[ydraw]

SSC trash was giving terrible XP at 80/81.

The SSC raid, or the dungeons?

Raid mobs have always given terrible XP.

[SirCowdog]

Amazing all of you children feel you must cheat and/or exploit to level your toons fast enough to suit you. I'm also glad they closed many of the glaring exploits/loopholes in the last week. At no time is exploiting/cheating justified. If you can't stand to level another toon, then buy a boost, or quit WoW and play something more to your liking.

Next time you want to skip a pull of trash in a dungeon, I'm going to call you out for abusing a loophole. Clearly that monster is there because Blizz intends you to fight it.

The simple truth of the matter is that Blizzard half-assed the scaling for leveling content. And because of that people are looking to avoid or speed up a part of the game that wasn't done well. Powerleveling dungeons was a direct result of Blizzard screwing up dungeons experience for normal groups.

We'll see what new ways people come up with to get around the nonsense this time.

[Deleted]

Next time you want to skip a pull of trash in a dungeon, I'm going to call you out for abusing a loophole. Clearly that monster is there because Blizz intends you to fight it.

The simple truth of the matter is that Blizzard half-assed the scaling for leveling content. And because of that people are looking to avoid or speed up a part of the game that wasn't done well. Powerleveling dungeons was a direct result of Blizzard screwing up dungeons experience for normal groups.

We'll see what new ways people come up with to get around the nonsense this time.

I'm not sure we'll find new ways to level that are better than this. Unless we get some sort of invasions like we did before Legion launched, but i don't think they'd be so generous again.

[bzeebee]

15-90 - Do gathering/pet battles between dungeon queues
90-100 - Bonus objectives and treasure hunting
100-110 - The old fashioned way of questing.

[Doffen]

Hope the new xp in dungeons makes dungen-spamming viable again. Then I MIGHT level another or two for heritage set(void elf and Zandalari) Did level a Nightborne, so fucking slow. But because of Heritage Armor its deffo worth it. Think I stirred at the character with the set for at least 1 hour after.

Anyone already tried dungeons with the buffed XP? How is it like?(not home for a week myself).

[chiddie]

I just self-boost in stockades.

Open 2 WoW's and just relog from your boostie to main and your boostie will dc out, but still get the XP.

Stockades can be run in 40 secs with Bear tartare.

50%+ per run.

Sorry, could you explain this a little bit more in details?

I don’t know what dc means and I didn’t understood the procedure at all.

Thanks.

[Lynkeus]

Sorry, could you explain this a little bit more in details?

I don’t know what dc means and I didn’t understood the procedure at all.

Thanks.

dc: disconnect

[kamuimac]

After 7.3.5 and come world level scaling, which is the best and fastest way to level an alt? I'll be purchasing BfA soon and level Velf warlock so I wanted to know what would be solid choice between: questing > dungeon or quest + queue in dungeon (doing dungeon quests once etc.)?

Please advice, thank u.

first you will have to grind pointless dailies for weeks on argus before you will level it

have fun

[Deleted]

I am a bit confused on how the heroic dungeons work while leveling. At the moment i am 75 and when i queue for normal dungeon, the content scales to my level. A guy a page before said that soloing TBC heroic at 75-81 is the best method, but i am asking how can this be done if the content scales to your level (or doesn't it?)

[Deleted]

Cata zones seem to be very fast as well, I went from 80-86 just by doing Vash and 2 dungeons. I imagine Draenor with the xp flask will be even faster.

[Tyron]

Cata zones seem to be very fast as well, I went from 80-86 just by doing Vash and 2 dungeons. I imagine Draenor with the xp flask will be even faster.

Draenor takes roughly 2 hours once you complete the dark portal intro. Go gorgrond at 92 with the garrison flask.