WoW Classic Era/vanilla 1-60 leveling tips

WoW Classic brings back all of the familiar and nostalgic gameplay mechanics that many of us love, like talent trees that allowed detailed class customization to unforgiving (and sometimes downright punishing) dungeons and raids. There is however one gameplay aspect that is almost universally agreed upon as more difficult from the new World of Warcraft version, and that is the leveling process.

Classic WoW was groundbreaking and fundamental in the MMO genre in many regards, and this can be seen even in the direction that leveling was designed. Quests would guide a player along a leveling path from low level enemies to progressively harder zones in a way that felt natural and allowed the player to explore the vast world of Azeroth. But also many of these quests required substantial running around and were spread out in a counter-intuitive way.

So here are some tips and tricks to leveling faster in WoW Classic that can help you along your journey.

Addons

Addons can make a big difference when it comes to leveling fast. Especially addons that show you step-by-step how to complete all the worthwhile quests in a streamlined manner.

Azeroth Auto Pilot

For a free alternative, which is good, there is Azeroth Auto Pilot. Azeroth Auto Pilot (AAP) has a version for WoW Classic as well that can assist you in finding a fast leveling route. It can tell you which quests to ignore because they are inefficient (either due to low experience rewards, travel time, or poor drop rates) and can streamline you through a good and efficient route through the game. With an easy to follow user interface there is so much positive with this addon. With WoW Classic, quests do not give directions, tips, highlighted quest mobs/items, or any of the modern conveniences. So Azeroth Auto Pilot steps in and does just this to make questing feel more streamlined and less of a confusing grind.

TomTom addon

TomTom is an addon that helps with navigation inside WoW. There are separate versions of TomTom for retail/new World of Warcraft, WoW Classic, and WoW WotLK Classic, respectively.

In a nutshell, TomTom allows you to create waypoints on the world map and mini map by using a chat command or your mouse cursor. The waypoint will then be visible as a dot on your maps. You can also use TomTom’s navigation arrow to set the waypoint as a target, and be guided there with the arrow that shows you the direction to go to get there.

If your character dies (it happens to all of us), TomTom can guide you back to the corpse by automatically setting a waypoint there and activating the waypoint arrow. TomTom has many other features too, making it a versatile navigation system for WoW.

XToLevel Classic

XToLevel Classic is another great tool for your toolbox. This addon will display a wide array of information in a very clean user interface. Data such as how many more mobs you would need to grind to level up, or the number of quests to complete, as well as how fast you are gaining experience and when you should expect to level given that speed. For those people that cannot get enough data analysis in their game, this is certainly the addon for you.

Questie addon

Questie is an addon that adds numerous features that make questing and leveling easier in WoW Classic and WotLK Classic. For example, Questie can show you available quests in a zone on your Minimap and World Map, including their level, XP reward and objectives. You can also download TomTom (another addon) that you can use with Questie to give you a navigational arrow inside WoW that shows you where to go in order to complete objectives, turn in quests etc. Questie also allows you to search its database and find quests, NPCs, objectives and mobs, making it easier to complete quests. When a quest giver is moving along certain paths, Questie can show you those paths on the World Map so that you can locate them easier.

Limit downtime

The entire leveling process in WoW Classic requires substantial killing of mobs. This is why many of the kill quests are actually after mob drops and not to kill a specific number of those mobs. Ever wonder why you don’t always get 2 basilisk eyes from the mob you just killed that clearly has 2 eyes, but instead you only get 1 eye every three to five kills? Well, the reason is so that you grind on those mobs for longer. So instead of saying “Kill 30 Basilisks” it will say “Bring me 10 Basilisk eyes” in an attempt to make you think that it’s less of a grind than it is. So, we need to lean into this as a playstyle and kill every mob you come across. If you are running to a quest location make sure to down every mob you pass along the way there and on the way back. It does not matter if they do not count for the quest since the mob XP is what we are after. By simply doing this you will increase your experience per hour substantially.

Green quests are your friends

Contrary to the belief that green quests are worthless because you outleveled them, they should be focused on because they are your bread and butter of leveling. While yes, they will give less XP than a yellow quest, they are also significantly easier to complete because of your higher level in relation to them. The mobs will die faster and do less damage to you in return, increasing your uptime and increasing your XP gain. To put it simply, it’s better to finish 2 green quests for 100 XP each when together they take the same time to do one yellow quest for 150 XP.

Learn First Aid

To keep downtime to a minimum you need to make sure your health is always topped off between fights. The best way to do this is using first aid bandages. Remember, if you die then you have to do a corpse run and you miss out on a lot of XP you could have gained in that time.

While out in the world you will always have plenty of cloth from humanoid mobs that you’re killing, so turn them into bandages to help you grind faster. You can also use your bandages in combat if the need arises and you are low on health. Try to time your bandage to start right after the mob’s attack and you should easily get off 2 or 3 ticks of healing before the next attack interrupts you.

Consumables

To tie into minimizing downtime, consumables are your best friend. Always have a stack of food and water in your bag to help you top off whenever you can. It might take a while to know how much health and mana you are comfortable taking on mobs with, but once you get into that warning level take a seat and have a bite to eat. It’s better to spend 10 seconds eating than running back to your corpse.

Potions are also a valuable resource as many people often forget how hard classic mobs can sometimes hit you. Accidentally aggro a yellow mob? I hope you are ready for a fight. Being caught off guard even by a single mob can be disastrous so having the safety net of potions can make all the difference.

Premade dungeon farming

Between certain level brackets, farming mobs in dungeons can be a good choice for gaining experience fast. If you are able to, try to form a group with other players that are interested in farming a specific dungeon for a few hours. Most of the time these groups will try to form with a specific group composition to maximize damage and speed so keep that in mind.

These groups are often referred to as Cleave Groups. They often take on two kinds; Melee Cleave or Spell Cleave. With Melee Cleave, warriors will stack and slash down mobs with terrifying efficiency. The perfect group composition for this is 4 warriors and a shaman healer for the Windfury Totem. You don’t even need a tank as the plate warriors will all share the damage while burning mobs down super fast.

Next is the Spell Cleave group which focuses on the mages and their overpowered Blizzard spell. With 4 mages casting Improved Blizzard, mobs will be almost permanently frozen in place while getting pelted by massive damage. Once again you do not even need a tank because these mobs won’t even touch you. Don’t worry if you are not a mage or warrior though, because any good premade group can farm dungeons with high efficiency, just at a slightly less optimized way.

Remember to check for dungeon quests before going into one as well. Unlike retail (new World of Warcraft) where quests are located right inside the dungeon entrance, WoW Classic quests are all kinds of spread out. So do a quick google search before jumping in and make sure to pick up all the quests that you can for that extra bonus.

Open world farming

Just like running dungeons is great for some level brackets, so too is open world mob farming. At certain levels it’s easy to grind mobs. While it can be a little tedious, it can also be relaxing to get into a groove doing this. For a few levels you can turn your brain off and just slaughter mobs. Mages and hunters are amazing at this with their crowd control and utility abilities, but it can be an option for other classes, too.

A key point to remember though is to play at your skill level. Depending on how well you play, your gear, and the class you are playing, the difficulty of your grind can vary. Just like questing, yellow mobs are not always the best option to farm. When a mob is yellow, they have an increased chance to hit and crit you while simultaneously your chance to hit and crit them is reduced. With green mobs this is reversed, allowing you to kill them much faster and with much less of a threat of dying. So keep that in mind because grinding green mobs is often much faster than having to try hard on harder mobs.

How to find quests

I sometimes get emails asking where to level up or where to find quests that are appropriate for a certain level.

You may have asked yourself this too…

Have you ever gone into a new zone and been stuck because you don’t know where all the quest givers and quest hubs are? Ever felt like you lacked quests so you had to grind?

Well, here’s the solution to all that.

Go to the WoW Classic version of www.wowhead.com/classic and mouse over “Database” then “Zones” then either click on “Eastern Kingdoms”, “Kalimdor”.

Then just select the zone that is appropriate to your level, then choose Horde or Alliance to bring up an interactive map with all the quest givers (and even items that start quests). You can also see if the quests are first in a chain or have a pre-requisite, and what the level requirement is.

How neat is that?

If you run out of quests in one zone, check for other zones that are your level and you’ll easily find more.

Questing or grinding to level 60?

Grinding or questing or dungeons or groups? Which of these activities should you focus on if you want to level faster in WoW Classic?

There are basically two major ways ways to gain experience in WoW. You can either:

1. Complete quests
2. Kill monsters (mobs)

So that leaves us with questing and grinding (killing mobs). Grinding, again, is the process of staying in a small area and killing mobs over and over again for experience and / or gold and loot.

I used to belive that grinding was faster than questing, and it can be under certain circumstances. If you have no idea where to pick up quests, where to complete them and where to turn them in, then grinding may look like a better way to level up.

Additionally, once you find a quest giver, the quests might be too hard (red or orange color in your quest log) and almost impossible to solo, or too trivial (green or gray in the quest log) and reward only minor experience.

After running around and exploring for hours you may find that you haven’t gained much experience at all, and you would’ve been better off just staying in the same spot and grinding mobs your level.

That was my experience as well, and therefore I thought questing was a waste of time. Yet I somehow thought questing could be faster, if you knew what to do and didn’t have to look everything up all the time.

Then I found some leveling guides and they confirmed my thoughts. Questing is a LOT faster than grinding, if you know where to go and what to do.

I’ve come to the following conclusions about grinding vs. questing:

As you can see, the main benefits of grinding is gold making, but that’s it.

I once grinded non-stop (no dungeons, no battlegrounds, no quests) from level 25 to 60 and the amount of gold I earned by selling loot on the auction house was very good. I could easily afford to buy blue items on the auction house, get my level 40 mount instantly and get my epic riding mount within days of hitting level 60.

However, I also didn’t make any friends on the realm that way, and got no experience of grouping or PvP (except getting owned occasionally in world PvP) when I hit level 60.

So what do I suggest?

If you’re leveling your first character, definitely try to level up by doing quests, not by grinding. You might want to get into groups, too, when you can. If you feel like it, get into a leveling guild and join some dungeons for fun, loot, experience and exploring the game. You’ll learn your class better and have a lot of fun.

I don’t recommend you grind much on your first character, since you’ll miss so much of the game. If you need help questing, you can follow a leveling guide. There are incredible guides now that tell you exactly what to do step-by-step so you never have to look things up and can focus on the fun stuff.

You’ll also be leveling so fast it will blow your mind.

I like having the choice of leveling solo so I’m not dependant on anyone else being logged on, and joining groups when I want to.

You don’t have to purchase a leveling guide, there are free alternatives. One of the free ones is called Jame’s Leveling Guide and he has one for Horde and one for Alliance.

I haven’t tried it myself, but he has obviously put a lot of effort into it with pictures, maps and coordinates.

If you want the best there is, buying a good leveling guide can be better for the following reasons:

• Faster, more frequent updates. For example, when The Burning Crusade expansion came out, many guides for sale were already updated, whereas free guides were typically not, so you’d get no help in Outland with a free guide. Same with WotLK.
• In-game map mods/addons. Since late 2006, more and more leveling guides have been starting to put their content partially or completely IN-GAME, as addons. To see an example of this, check out Zygor Guides and Joana’s leveling guides. This is an incredibly powerful feature that just makes everything that much easier.But it’s not something you’d always get in a free leveling guide.

• More streamlined leveling routes. The authors of guides you can buy have more time to improve their guides since it’s their job, whereas a free guide author doesn’t. The result is that guides for sale will take you to level 60 (and beyond) much faster.
• More links. In some leveling guides that you can buy, quests and mobs and NPC’s are linked to database sites like wowhead.com so you can look them up easily.
• All races. Good leveling guides cover the different starting areas for all races.

Overall, I think the prices are are reasonable for a quality leveling guide considering it can more than likely save you hundreds of hours of leveling time.

Using WoWHead to look up quests

Okay, this is a really simple tip, but essential none the less. If you’re ever having problems completing a quest, go to www.wowhead.com and search for the name of the quest and you’ll find lots of helpful comments on where to go and what to do to complete it.

Look for highly rated comments, indicating that they contain useful and accurate information.

You can also sort comments by patch, which allows you to filter them by expansion pack. For example, any comments from patch 2.x is from the first WoW expansion, namely The Burning Crusade (TBC). Any comments from patch 3.x is from the 2nd expansion, which was Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) and so on.

Alternating two characters with rested XP

Here’s another easy leveling tip that will cut down your /played time to max level. You can see how long you’ve played a character by typing /played in the chat box.

Create two (or more) characters instead of one and take turns leveling them. While you’re leveling one of them, the other one(s) stays in an inn or major city to get lots of “rested experience” so when you start playing them again you will get double experience for any mobs you kill.

Sure, it will take longer to get a character to max level, but the total time measured over all your characters will be much less, and you probably have more fun when you gain faster XP.

Dungeons

Leveling through dungeons can actually be extremely fast and rewarding if you know what you’re doing. Since Blizzard introduced the dungeon looking for group tool you no longer have to travel across the whole world to get to the dungeons, making dungeons that much better.

However, to really get the benefit of dungeon leveling, you want to do dungeon quests, i.e. quests that you complete inside the dungeons. There are many such quests available in WoW. The problem is finding them and knowing how to complete them in the often time pressured situation of a dungeon run.

Since some quests require a quest line to be completed before you can pick up the actual dungeon quests, things can get a bit complicated.

However, leveling this way can be one of the fastest and most rewarding ways to max level. You’ll learn a ton from playing in groups, get killer experience from the ultra-rewarding dungeon quests, and have superior gear from the dungeons.

If it’s your first character you may also want to run most dungeons at least once just for the thrill of experiencing them.

Leveling professions

While leveling you need gold. The best professions for making gold while leveling are gathering professions, i.e. skinning, mining and herbalism (and fishing to an extent).

If you’re really concerned about leveling fast, then don’t bother with any professions at all (except first aid). You’ll just be wasting precious time and bag space on herbs, ore and skins.

For most players, though, taking skinning and either mining or herbalism is a good idea. Herbalism is easier to level than mining in my experience, so if you want to speed level, choose herbalism. Sell everything you gather on the auction house.

Remember to be consistent with gathering resources and skinning beasts or you’ll find your trade skills lacking so you can’t use them when you go into higher level areas.

Get a Skinning Knife and Mining Pick early on if you choose this route.

Leveling gear

If you choose to level by completing quests you won’t need to purchase any gear at all. Not from vendors and not on the auction house either. You’ll be getting good enough replacements as quest rewards.

However, if you choose to grind you may need to buy gear upgrades. Look on the auction house, but remember that you don’t need the very best gear all the time. It also depends on your class. Melee classes tend to be more gear dependent, whereas casters rely more on their spells, so if you play a melee class then it’s more useful to buy better gear.

You’ll probably make enough gold from grinding to purchase a few BoE (bind on equip) blue items from the auction house. Just check the average auction house price for the item on www.wowhead.com before you purchase it so you don’t overpay.