WoW: Level 40 in under 36 hours and how!

November 6, 2007

That’s right! About a month ago I started up a warrior alt since our guild at the time was lacking a committed tank. However, pretty much all of my alts are around level 20, that’s point in the game where I just get bored. Levels start to feel like they are taking forever and I’ve been through the zones a few times now so its just doing the same old quests over and over again. This trick to leveling has been around forever but I never thought it would work as well as it did for me and my group. First off, you need to understand how the group experience in the game works. For a 5 player group, you get ~40% more experience per kill as a group bonus. For example, if your group kills something that gives you 300 experience, a full group (assuming they are all the same level) will split a total of 420 experience. It seems if you take a group of lower level players and put them with a 70 the xp is reduced by about half, which in most cases hurts the group pretty bad but keep in mind it does not affect the group bonus at all. So heres how we did it…

The first step is to get to level 20 as fast as possible, this should take an average player around 17-18 hours, or at least thats the average of my friends. Ideally you want a group of 4 between you and your friends to be right around level 20 at the same time. If you don’t have 4 people don’t worry, you can pick up people very easily when they see how fast you are leveling.

Next, you are going to need a high level mage, we used a friends level 70 mage in dungeon blues to do this with and it worked fine, if you can find a better one it will only make things faster.

Take your group to Scarlet Monastery at level 20 and group up with the 70 mage, all your friends are now officially loot machines, all they do the entire time is loot the mess that the mage makes out of the instances. Based on our experience it seems best to take the group through library and armory then reset and repeat until they are around level 28 or so. Once they are 28 you can start running library, armory, and cathedral until about 32 when it becomes inefficient to run library due to the level of the players in the group.

During the leveling process, if the group is full and the mage is killing stuff at a good pace, it will take about 30-40 minutes per level from 20-28. After that it goes up obviously as you are nearing the level of the stuff you are killing and it requires more and more experience each level. 28-35 is about 40-50 minutes a level and 35-40 can be up to an hour each level until it starts to go up drastically at level 40+ as everything becomes yellow/green to the group. Also, everyone in the group had enough cash to buy their mount right at 40, and that was before selling any of the blues that dropped (and there were a ton!) Had something like 19 bind on equip blue items after all the runs.

This is a screenshot of my warrior at 30 with only 23 hours of /played time. Unfortunately I didn’t snap one at level 40 as I didn’t plan on writing this up but I assure you its very easy to do this in 36 hours.

Tips to remember!

• Caster NPC’s in the library don’t usually follow you for more than 30 yards before the leash back. This can wipe your group and waste time if they are running back and killing the low level members of your group. Plan your pulls accordingly.
• Herod is a waste of time. Only kill him if you need his loot or if its just your friends in the group and they know to move away from the door. Each time we brought a new person into the group they would die to the spawns at the door when you engage Herod. We found it easier and faster to just skip him.
• Make sure group members are close but not too close! There is a range for the xp so members need to be close but not so close they are getting agro.
• It is easiest to run with the same people, your group will soon develop a routine and things will move faster. If you avoid picking up random and switching people out often it will save time in the end.

I may try this again in 2.3 with an even better geared mage. With less xp required for each level after 20 and faster killing, on top of knowing exactly what works best this time, I wouldn’t be surprised to do it in 30 hours.

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Posted in Powerleveling