World of Warcraft Power Leveling Tips and Tricks

Power Leveling services are a no-no. There are companies which offer to power level your character for you, but this practice is against Blizzard's terms of service and can result in account cancellation.

You also run the risk of your account being used in unethical ways, which further increases the risk of having it canceled. This could include anything from running illegal hacks to using your account to spam advertising in game.

Furthermore, these companies aren't doing anything you can't do yourself by playing smart. They use grinding (discussed below), which is an inefficient method, and they sell off any gold in excess of what they promise to deliver with the leveled character.

It's simply not worth the risk of giving your password to a total stranger. (Which if you pay by credit card could cause more problems.)

The key concept to remember when power leveling is efficiency. Your goal is a simple one: Reach maximum level (currently 70) in as short a time as possible. This means maximizing your experience gain per hour.

Here are some of the basic ideas behind power leveling in WoW:

1. Avoid unnecessary travel. Especially at lower levels, travel is a HUGE time killer. This means being efficient in choosing your locations for questing or grinding, as well as being efficient in choosing when and what to vendor and when to train up skills.

2. Maximize your rested experience. Always arrange the end of your session to end at an Inn or in a major city, so that you build rested experience while you're logged off. It adds up!

3. Avoid instancing. Doing instances is fun, and a great way to upgrade your gear. You may think that getting better gear will help you level faster, and you'd be right. However, you waste massive amounts of downtime forming up an instance group, traveling to the instance, and waiting for slackers and AFKers. After all of that, if you're doing a pick up group, your success is not guaranteed. The only time instancing is worthwhile is if you're having a higher level friend run you through a lower level instance quickly.

4. Avoid crafting and professions time sinks. The only skill you should be leveling up is First Aid, because it reduces your downtime. You should always keep it maxed if possible. Other skills simply aren't worth the time. Gathering skills are OK to level if you aren't going out of your way to collect nodes, but if you are leveling as quickly as possible, you will soon move on to areas which only have nodes above your level. Skinning is probably the most forgiving in that regard, since your gathering nodes are also your kills. (Though you will still outpace it in all likelihood.)

5. Don't worry about gear. The fact is, any class can level perfectly well in outdated gear gotten through quests or drops. When your character reaches higher levels and has a bit of cash (or if you have a rich main character), you may want to upgrade any gear that's ten or more levels out of date. When you hit Outlands, the quest rewards are incredible compared to early level gear, and you will not need to spend any time or money upgrading beyond doing quests.

6. Hit Outlands as early as possible. The experience is far better, as are the quest rewards and drops.

7. Do EASY content. Green (lower level) monsters and quests can be churned through much faster than even level (yellow) ones, and therefore reward more experience per hour than harder content. Corpse runs should be avoided at all costs when leveling.

Grinding is a tried and true method for fast leveling. The basic idea is that you get experience for killing monsters (mobs), and by concentrating on killing monsters over other activities, you minimize downtime, as discussed above. In many games, this is also the most experience per hour that you can get.

Grinding is also used somewhat interchangably with farming, meaning killing the same mobs (monsters) over and over again for any reason, usually to get a certain drop or gather materials for crafting.

Benefits of grinding include making a decent amount of money as you level, because your only expense should be training skills, making all drops from mobs pure profit.

The major drawback of grinding is that it's mind numbingly boring and repetitive. You'll also miss out on all of the storyline content of WoW.

WoW has a robust questing system, and if used to its fullest, it is more experience per hour than grinding. This is especially true after patch 2.3, which increased experience rewards for quests between levels 20 and 60. (You'll notice almost all WoW grinding guides state that questing is the fastest possible experience up to level 20!)

A while back, I wrote a blog entry on how to chose a grinding spot, which may be useful, whether you're leveling by grinding or grinding for some other reason.

A good example of an earlier grinding guide is the one written by Proxy way back when, which can be found here.

Quest stacking simply means applying the basic principles of power leveling listed above to questing for experience. The main idea here is to know what the most efficient order to do quests in is, and which quests are the most efficient experience per hour.

The WoWWiki Power Leveling page lists several free quest stacking guides. These are good to study to see how the basics work, though they lack the detail of some of the paid guides.

The first, and most valuable to me, is LightHeaded. This is a UI Mod that provides a slide out tab in your quest log in game, that gives you the WoWHead discussions and summaries for your quests.

The second most important mod is a good map mod, such as Cartographer. Quest guides as well as WoWHead posts will give coordinates on the world map, which is something a good map mod will let you see (among other things!).

While there are a lot of great mods that do the same things as the two above, those are the ones I use, and recommend.

I am not going to tell you what your money's worth. That 35 or 37 dollars for a leveling guide means different things to different people.

I've leveled five characters to level 70 on my own, using different methods, and generally stopping to smell the roses along the way. I did so in a pretty inefficient, but relaxing and fun, manner. Leveling in World of Warcraft is EASY. It's also repetitive after the first two or three times.

So, why use a paid guide? Simply put, the paid guides I have bought are by far the most thorough and efficient guides of their type available. I have both Joana's Horde Leveling Guide and Brian Kopp's Alliance Leveling Guide.

Both guides are kept up to date as new content is released, unlike printed guides. Both offer step by step details on the most efficient quest stacking possible. These were both written by winners of multiple Blizzard leveling contests.

If you have money to spend on guides, these are the best bang for your buck, by far.

BUYING GOLD, POWER LEVELING SERVICES, BOTS, OR OTHER WOW HACKS ARE AGAINST BLIZZARD'S TERMS OF SERVICE.

ANY OF THESE CAN GET YOUR ACCOUNT CANCELED BY BLIZZARD, SO BUYER BEWARE.

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY CONTENT THAT IS NOT PART OF THE USER EDITABLE PORTION OF THIS PAGE.