After what seemed like an endless 4-month GRIND, I found something so easy and helpful, it can only be described as “ALL WIN”.
I wanted to document all the dumb things I’ve tried to do to speed up the process of getting to level 80 so you can avoid them.
I also want to tell you about the once smart thing I did, so you can try it too. (If you’d rather skip reading my babblings, then just click the link or watch the video instead.)
Lost In WoW Without A Clue
My friends started playing WoW way before I got into it. When they finally persuaded me to try it, I couldn’t believe I had waited so long to join them… It’s an unbelievably fun game, am I right?
Okay, so for the first 4 months, everything was great. My friends coached me and ran me through a few dungeons.
But because they were all between level 74 and 80, eventually my friends got bored with helping me (can’t really blame them) so I was pretty much left to level on my own.
I’d stay up late, living on Mountain Dew and Cheesy Poofs, wandering all over tarnation trying to kill 57 kinds of boars and 23 trolls or whatever. After 4 months, I was only at level 29. (Dude. Slowest. Level. Ever!)
The WoW grind, it burns… it burns!
The grind. You know what I’m talking about. Stranglethorn Vale, anyone? ZOMG! How many of these flippin’ tigers do I have to kill?? (Geez, I hate that crazy dwarf Nesingwary!)
I kept running back and forth to the same stupid places where I had just been. And, of course, getting ganked like crazy because the Horde would just camp my Gnome’s corpse (mm, smexy!) waiting for me to come back and get more mobs in the same area.
The Game Started To Become Less Fun:
I kept wandering and looking for items and monsters, not knowing where to find them I often had to double back to the same areas where I’d just been I kept checking the quest log, wondering which quest to do next. I’d do these long quest chains, which seemed to take forever, without knowing how much longer they’d go on. I hated doing group quests. I didn’t know which town to go to next to get more quests. I missed some quests that my friends told me about.
I Faced The Facts: I Needed Help Leveling
Of course I’d read things about people trying illegal bots or banned techniques to level up their toons faster.
Or even purchasing pre-made toons that some dude in China already leveled. But that stuff really makes me angry. I don’t believe in cheating.
I’m proud of being the kind of guy who does the right thing and sets a good example.
I want to warn you against trying any of that stuff, not just because it’s wrong (and it is WAY wrong), but also because you can get banned for life doing those things.
So I needed a power-leveling guide that was fast, easy enough for newbies, Blizzard-legal, and not going to cost me an arm and a leg.
I tried WowBlackBook.com… FAIL
I’d been looking up stuff in Wowhead and Wowwiki which, as you probably know, is annoying to do in-game.
At the time, WowBlackBook.com was everywhere I searched online. After speaking to three of my friends who had tried with it, I decided to give it a go.
At first it worked out okay and I did learn some things I hadn’t thought of before. Even though I wasn’t getting me the power-leveling I expected, at least I was advancing a little faster.
The worst part was that there was so much material to READ. Dude. Seriously, I wanted to be playing not reading about playing.
To make matters worse, I think I bought the wrong version and wasted my money — I thought I’d learn more about getting gold and some parts were confusing.
Joana’s Guide? Alt-tab FTL!
Next I spent a lot of money on Joana’s guide ($77).
Because her guide is Horde-only, I had to reroll on the Horde side and try to con my friends into doing the same. But I didn’t know the Horde lands as well as the Alliance zones and I struggled making the shift.
After a couple days of following Joana’s Horde Guide, my impression was that the quest information was detailed enough (sometimes too much detail) but it didn’t have the cool class-specific quest items that I’d heard about.
But by far the worst problem with Joana (who loves ya, baby? uh, not me) was that her guide is an e-book, which means you have to alt-tab back and forth between the game and the PDF… back and forth, back and forth.
I got killed by monsters more times than I can admit while I was reading stuff in the Adobe Reader.
Besides, another downside of the PDF is that when I logged off the game and then came back later, I had to remember where I left off in the PDF and flip-flip-flip to that page.
A giant pain.
Finally, the leveling plan was designed around playing a Hunter and by someone who knows how to use that class well.
For me, as a Paladin, the guide was kind of frustrating in spots, due to her direction to have me fight higher-level mobs. (Don’t argue with me: Hunters are OP!)
An In-Game Quest Help Add-On, What A Concept!
I vowed three strikes and you’re out on this whole guide thing. I can’t remember how I found it (Google, maybe?) but I found one called Zygor Guides.
What seemed to be different with this guide was that major attention was given to automatic quest tracking. After reading some extremely complimentary reviews and learning that the cost was lower than the other things I’d I tried, I decided to give it a shot.
Have you heard about WoW add-ons yet? If you haven’t, they are little (Blizzard-approved) programs that can run inside WoW and can help you do some things that the “vanilla” user interface doesn’t do – things like sort your bags or warn you about aggro and whatnot.
So this guide has an add-on that you install right into the game that:
- follows your progress,
- tells you where to go and what to kill next,
- uses an arrow to point you there, and
- even tells you how long it will take you to run or ride there!
The guide advertises a leveling speed of less than 6 days to go from 1 to 70.
It actually took me a little over 7 days but that was fine with me. The guide is no BS. It doesn’t waste any time with fluff and gets right to fast and efficient power-leveling:
- I knew exactly where to find every item and mob, without reading a book or alt-tabbing to a PDF
- I could efficiently complete most of the quests in one location at one time
- I never had to wonder which quest to do next
- I could see in advance the quests I would do later and know exactly how long quest chains would go on
- I could skip doing group quests
- I knew the directions to every village I needed to go to next
- I didn’t miss any of the major quests or off-the-path quest givers
- The add-on remembers what level I was at and which quests I’d done so I don’t have to reset it every time I log in
Let me explain more about the way it’s set up as an add-on.
The guide is a small, re-sizable window on your primary WoW UI screen (so no more switching back and forth to an e-book). You get this small, in-game screen that tells you exactly what to do and where to go.
It takes you through every step of each quest, in the most time-efficient sequence possible. The pace of leveling is pretty amazing.
You never even have to remember where you are in the guide because it keeps track of everything for you, including graying out stuff you’ve already done.
If you’ve used waypoints before, you don’t have to worry about setting them because Zygor sets them for you. (If you don’t know what a waypoint is, it’s just an arrow that points you to a spot.)
It’s all automatic. When you pull up your map, you can see the dots and the paths were you need to go, automatically laid out for you. No more hunting around! I could see the full quest instructions by scrolling ahead so I knew what was coming up.
BTW, the whole thing works with any class for either Horde or Alliance (it’s not class-specific or faction-specific).
Leveling was so easy that I was at a comparable level with my friends in about a week of playing time.
In my opinion, Zygor Guides is way more superior and far more effective than any of the other options I tried. Although it did take me a day or so longer to level to 70 than it says on the website, I did manage to get to 70 within a week, which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty astonishing. Obviously everyone is different but it has worked extremely well for me.
Anyway, I hope you’ve found this information useful whatever your situation because if I had known about Zygor Guides a few months back, I would have stayed with my friends, and had a blast without wasting my time and money with all these other things. I wish you every success!