I just dinged lvl 40 yesterday on my blood elf warlock. Getting a free mount is sooo nice.

I’ve been following Joana’s Horde Leveling Guide and recording my leveling times. I didn’t want to feel stressed out all the time so I haven’t been rushing every single step. I’m still trying to go fast and not waste time but, for example, if I have to take some time off from leveling to gank an alliance who’s bothering me I will. (I play on a PvP server as always.)

The guide, together with the in-game addon Meta Map, has been a tremendous help and the instructions in the guide were for the most part enough to complete the quests. Only rarely did I have to read the quest log (hard work indeed) or look things up on wowhead.com (takes all of about 30 seconds). But I’ve done many of the quests before so I guess I have a small advantage there.

This is also the first time I’m leveling up with the new 2.3 patch with the faster leveling changes.

Here are some pics of my progress:

Notice the arrow in the picture above? It’s part of the map addon that comes with Joana’s and Brian Kopp’s guides (as well as some other ones now) that shows you in which direction to go for the next step in the guide. I don’t think I have to tell you how extremely useful that is.

I was using a little rested experience here and there but not too much.

For comparison, when I was leveling up my hunter with Brian Kopp’s Alliance Leveling Guide (before the 2.3 patch) I was level 30 in 1 day 12 hours (8 hours slower) and level 40 in 2 days 17 hours (16 hours slower). And the hunter is a faster class to level than the warlock, so the patch is really a great timesaver!

You might compare these leveling times to your own by typing /played and see how much time you could save by following a leveling guide.