World of Warcraft Classic: How To Level Fast

WoW: Classic is a nostalgic blast from the past for a lot of people, but there’s no getting around it: it’s very slow-paced compared to modern MMOs.

In some ways this is refreshing; I remember getting burnt out on trying to catch up to current content on Final Fantasy XIV after a few months. WoW: Classic‘s sedate pace and lack of a reason to rush for endgame is almost soothing.

Still, there are certain things you can do to speed the process up, and it’s always nice to have the option when you’re feeling the grind.

The first thing you need to do is keep in mind precisely what kind of timescale you’re looking at. 168 hours is the average estimate for how long it’s going to take you to hit 60. Unless you make WoW Classic your life, it’s going to take months, and it’s next to impossible to do it in less than a month.

With that in mind, don’t feel the need to push yourself playing the game; for most people, that’s just going to kill your interest fast, for no real benefit in the grand scheme.

Once you’ve made peace with the fact that you’re going to take months slowly chewing your way through, here’s a few quality of life methods to make the grind less frustrating.

Install a Quest Addon

World of Warcraft Classic has a plethora of addons available to smooth your experience. None will do so more than a quest tracker. Questie is a lot of people’s favorite at the moment, but there are others.

Classic lacks a lot of the “hand-holding” modern RPGs tend to have, primarily things like quest and objective markers. These quest trackers add markers showing where new quests are, and where their objectives lie on the map. This add-on is one of the single most significant time savers you can employ, as Classic expects you to read quest dialogue and check out where objectives are from that.

This is often interesting and fun but can get tedious: mainly when the instructions are vague.

Play A Self-Sufficient Character

Pure DPS characters are the way to go. You kill monsters faster and don’t need heals and buffs outside of dungeons, so you can blast through quests with ease.

Most other characters are fine as well; I’m playing a Troll Shaman and making good progress. Hybrid characters deal substantial damage and get some neat other options to interact with the world as well.

Healers and tanks though have a rough time. Your damage is low, making killing monsters a likewise slow process. Going this route means you want to team up with a friend, which comes with issues.

Play Together…Solo

If you’re planning to level up as fast as you can, play solo. Or, at least, don’t form a party under most circumstances. Creating a party splits monster experience between the party members, thus slowing your leveling.

The splitting of experience points isn’t a hard and fast rule; some quests can be completed much faster with a friend (like Gathering Cactus Apples and similar quests, or quest bosses). But anything that requires you to collect monster parts or something similar is going to take forever in a party. You need to gather twice as many pieces, which is often more than twice as many monsters; quest drops have drop rates in WoW Classic.

So you’re getting screwed on both experience and quest progress in a party for quests like that. Your progress is going to slow to a crawl.

Take a Break

Sometimes you’re going to hit bottlenecks. Quest bosses, in particular, respawn slowly and die instantly to the mob of hungry players looking to finish their quests and move on. The reports of orderly queues to complete quests are cute and do happen sometimes. However, don’t bank on it. I got stuck trying to kill Zalazane for about two hours last night as the orderly line devolved into a chaotic mess of players desperately trying to get first hit in for their party.

This option isn’t for solely for your sanity; remember the glory of rested XP. If you log out in a capital city or an inn, you get 200% extra monster experience on logging back in, for a while that scales based on time played. If nothing else you can take a break, come back, and kill some monsters to level while stuck in the bottleneck.

One final piece of relevant advice, for people who want a slight, ruthless edge at low levels:

Play a Tauren

It turns out, a low level, instant cast AoE with the Tauren’s stomp is an excellent way to snipe the first hit on a respawning boss, so there’s that for you merciless sorts out there.