Levelling the casual way

Well it's been a while since I made my last post but since I don't have any readers I think all of them will happily forgive the transgression.

Today we will kick of with what I would like to call a very very condensed levelling guide that will simply show the progression of zones as we slowly climb the level ladder.


Premise

The idea of casual levelling is to make decent progress in a short time but without having to constantly look for a group, do a lot of travelling or bite your teeth out on mobs that are too difficult for your level. The idea is to avoid complexity alltogether and as a result we will simply put forth 4 basic ideas to make our life as easy as possible:

1. We kill mobs that con green (i.e. are a certain amount of levels below you)
2. We skip instances, group quests and extensive fetch quests that send you all over the place
3. We download 1 addon and use it (Questhelper)
4. We have lots of bagspace

The above is almost self-explanatory. The idea is to only kill things that are substantially weaker than us because this will reduce the amount that we have to sit around and drink/eat and it will allow us to kill mobs faster which in turn means more loot and more xp.
We also don't want to be bogged down by group quests or instances. It's true that instances give better loot but the risk of failure is also substantially higher. Generally between waiting for an instance / group quest group to assemble and the increased risk of not making it past the first boss you end up wasting more time than you are winning with it (unless you can get a group the second you want one).
This is true until about lvl 60 after which you should definitely consider doing instances in outland as your gear becomes substantially more important than it is from 1 - 60.

The last 2 things you will need is a little addon called questhelper available from cursegaming.com and other mod sites and a significant amount of bagspace. Questhelper is not perfect but it will display all current quest locations on your ingame map making travelling to the location you need to go to to complete the quest a piece of cake.
Bagspace on the other hand is crucial. The more bagspace you have the more you can stay out in the field. A very cost-efficient startup for bagspace is either mageweave bags or runecloth bags. Anything more than that is of course great but substantially more expensive. Runecloth and mageweave bags are relatively cheap and have the advantage that they can be sent to alts once you do get an upgrade. Most other bags are bind on equip making them untransferrable once you get an upgrade.

From 1-60 the only thing really worth buying are bags and banking slots to hold bags. Between that and your skills you will be spending a chunk of gold already and there's really no reason to buy anything from the AH in terms of gear because it will be outdated in mere levels.


Onwards

Oh... this guide will be for horde only. Still starting from about level 20 most areas are accessible to both alliance and horde so even our dear mortal enemies might find some use in the setup below.

Levels 1-10

Stick to your starting areas, each starting area is well thought out and has enough quests to keep you levelling on a nice constant pace. Levels 1-10 will fly by very fast.

Zones in order of difficulty (where applicable):
Durator
Tirisfal Glades
Mulgore
Eversong Woods

Stick to these zones until mobs start conning green or you run out of quests that are easy to do.

Levels 11-19

Nothing special here, for horde the useable zones are somewhat far apart but remember that you can go from undercity to silvermoon via the teleporter in undercity.

Zones in order of difficulty:

Silverpine Forest
Ghostlands
The Barrens

Once again try to stick to the zones until you're out of quests or mobs start conning gray. If you want to skip the barrens in order to preserve braincells you will be forgiven.

Levels 20-29

The barrens should still be usueable well into level 20.

Zones in order of difficulty

The Barrens
Stonetalon Mountans
Ashenvale Forest
Hilsbrad Foothills
Thousand Needles

Hilsbrad foothills and thousand needles will carry you over into the next level segment.

Levels 30-39

Nothing special here but start noting the order of the zones below since the ones at the end of the list will definitely be harder than the ones at the beginning. yes I did say sorted by difficulty :P

Zones in order of difficulty

Hilsbrad Foothills
Thousand Needles
Alterac Mountains
Arathi Highlands
Desolace
Stranglethorn Vale
Swamp of sorrows
Badlands
Dustwallow Marsh

Levels 40-49

Lots of overlap starting as early as stranglethorn vale.

Zones in order of difficulty

Stranglethorn Vale
Swamp of sorrows
Badlands
Dustwallow Marsh
Tanaris
Feralas
The Hinterlands
Searing Gorge
Azshara
Blasted Lands


Levels 50-59

Once again a lot of overlap with previous zones.

Zones in order of difficulty

Tanaris
Feralas
The Hinterlands
Searing Gorge
Azshara
Blasted Lands
Un'goro crater
Felwood
Western Plaguelands
Winterspring
Eastern Plaguelands
Burning steppes
Silithus


Levels 55-65

Note the level overlap here from 55-65.

Winterspring
Eastern Plaguelands
Burning steppes
Silithus
Deadwind Pass (not too much to do here)



The overall idea is to stick to a zone till you either run out of quests or mobs start going gray. If mobs are pre-dominantly yellow then go back one zone and see if you can finish off some more stuff there.

I have used this method for my latest pally and he's levelling very comfortably and gets to do all the pleasant and easy quests in almost every zone.

The level recommendations I have given above are a simple indication of what you should be to consider those zones. Adjust accordingly if you want to fight more greens or more yellows respectively but make sure you leave the zone when 1/3rd of your targets con gray.

I'll leave you to your own devices in outland since the levelling is fairly straight forward there. However if you can put off going to outland till you hit level 60 you will end up with more gold in the bank at the end of the line due to the fact that quests start giving gold at lvl 70.

Outland levelling is also different from the aspect that you should focus on gear and not on getting to 70 but opinions may vary on that so I simply refuse to comment on outland progression.