Testing Joana's Horde Leveling Guide

Here's my experience in leveling up with Joana's Horde Leveling Guide.

This was done as a blood elf warlock from 1-60 and an undead mage from 60-70 on a PvP server. The 60-70 part was done before Blizzard added leveling speed improvements (30% less EXP required for level 60-70).

Keep in mind this was with an earlier version of Joana's Horde Guide, so it's not really a fair comparison with the current version. But it was good then, and it is even better now.

Since I leveled my mage from 60-70 first, I'll start with that.

Doing 60-70 with Joana's Horde Leveling Guide 

Here we go! Standing on the Azeroth side of the Dark Portal. Notice the /played time: 46 days, 1 hour, 30 min.

I started out with full rested EXP (1½ bars), but didn't use any rested after that. I even took care to log out in the wilderness to accumulate as little rested as possible.

By the way, I leveled as FIRE!

Here we are, three levels higher after 11 hours 40 minutes. The full rested EXP lasted me all the way to level 63, since Joana's guide is based on quests.

Everything is going by with the speed of light. Half the time I don’t even know what I’m doing, just following the steps and trusting that the guide is correct, which it has been so far.

I’ve also skipped all the optional (group) quests since I had a lot of rested XP and didn’t need the extra experience from them.

Now I’m doing this with a mage, as opposed to a hunter that Joana played. But it works just as well. The hunter is faster of course, but I’m not having any difficulty completing any quests.

I’ve done three more levels now in 19 hours with Joana’s Horde Leveling Guide. That comes out to 6 hours and 20 minutes per level. And this was without any rested XP.

I find it stressful to speedrun. I don’t think I’m cut out for it. I’d like to slow down and smell the roses, but for this review I do my best to complete all instructions as fast as possible.

Here I am at level 70, 53 hours and 50 minutes after starting at level 60.

Overall I’m very impressed with Joana’s Horde Leveling Guide. The path he takes you on is very streamlined, and you can solo almost everything. (There were a few 2 and 3 man quests that he tells you to do, which he soloed, but I had to skip those with my mage. A hunter could have done them solo though.)

Despite skipping most of the group quests and optional quests, I turned 70 with quite a few quests left in the guide. So even if you’re not using rested XP you should be able to quest the entire way to 70 using this guide.

I think the guide is a great help for leveling as evidenced by my 54 hour run.

Doing 1-60 with Joana's Horde Leveling Guide

This is my experience of leveling up a warlock from level 1-60 with Joana’s Horde Leveling Guide.

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 or look things up on wowhead.com. But I’ve done many of the quests before so I guess I have an advantage there.

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

Less than 1 hour per level to level 30.

From level 40 to 50 in 20 hours with no rested EXP.

3 days 20 hours to level 60 in patch 2.3 on a PvP server with little rested EXP!

Back to the review of Joana's guide