There's nothing like hitting the "Create New Character" button in WoW. Pick your race, class, name, face and start your leveling. Except of course the familiar "ding" and glow every time you level up. It feeds my addiction and I love it, I can't lie. Back in Cataclysm 4.3, when DS was at its glorious 35% nerf, I found myself having literally nothing left to do in the game. So I decided to level a toon just for fun. My first pick was a gnome rogue named Tronzo, affectionately referred to as Tron for his short life. I leveled him up to 85 and then hearthed to SW, sold all his gear, sent the gold to my main, logged out and deleted him. I made pretty good time, but I wanted to do better... so I made a gnome warrior and did the same thing. It was all pretty fun, trying to go as fast as I could and beat my old record.

Then CRZ happened, and leveling as I knew changed forever. Pre-CRZ, there was nobody around and you could loot and kill whatever you wanted as fast as possible to finish your quest. Post-CRZ... every zone is like playing after launch, there is always someone doing your quest killing your mobs. It can be infuriating at times having to sit around waiting for respawns while your record time goes down the drain. At times I wanted to give up (I'm looking at you, Nagrand, with 5 people trying to kill 12 beasts and 5 groups doing ring of blood separately!), but the need to level is too strong to resist.

My goal is to provide guides for quest leveling in the new age of CRZ. I might also compare quest leveling to pure dungeoning and see the difference in timesl. All of what I do is solo, the only times I group up is for a boss quest mob and 5 people are waiting for the respawn to get the tag... might as well, right? My preferred method of lvling uses the Hat/Shoulder/Cape/Chest/Pants for the lvling bonus. I don't use the lvling pots or RAF bonus. When I get around to fishing for the BoA ring, I'll end up using that too :)

If you've made it this far, here are my first few tips for quest-leveling in WoW:

• Drag quest mobs close together for the kills so you only have to loot once
• If someone else is questing near you go to the other side and try to get to ones before they do (don't directly compete for the tags)
• Keep your eyes opened for Chests and Rares, they're effectively worth one quest of experience
• From BC on, try to stay with a zone to the end... lots of people just do the starting quests, lvl up, and move on so if you stick around there's less people to compete with and faster lvling
• If you're going for fastest /played time:
• don't idle online--log out for a break or wait for a FP or a lengthy quest dialogue
• if too many people are around and you're near the end of the zone, just move on
• empty bags frequently so you never get the dreaded "Inventory is full" message for a quest item(quests sometimes leave useless crap in your bags or useless vanity items)
• I don't know if this even needs to be said, but BoAs... get them.

My current fastest time from 1-85 is 1 day 17 hours 53 minutes with a hunter, which was 8hrs faster than my last lvl(thanks, cata exp nerf!). It can be frustrating in CRZ with so many people around, you need to find the right balance between being a total jerk and friendly competition.

Stay tuned for some detailed leveling guides!