That's a cool idea! I've personally been trying out Orc Warlocks in Mulgore. It goes well.

Leaderboards posted!
@Kurzogg share your times when you get there!

Leaderboard looks sick! Very nice use of the BBcode there jpy :)

So I had exactly about two hours of playtime yesterday and I thought I would try a different class than hunter just to get some variation to the Leaderboard. I went in with no plan on a tauren druid basically improvising my route and got to lvl 9 in about 1h50min, had to stop playing at that time (mothersday), but I would probably have ended up somewhere closer to 3h or something. Not a planned run and kinda pointless posting about it, but I still learned a few things from it and next time it will most likely will be more effective as I will change a bit on the route. I will do legit runs and post about them but I think it's smart to do some testruns to figure out where I could improve. Also I think it would be cool to have records of all classes and startingzones! :D

@Jalapeno not bad at all as Druid has a fairly slow start and really starts picking up speed around 20 from what I understand. If we had tables for each class and each respective starting zone it would be a huge amount of tables. Probably better to keep it as one table per level bracket as there’s a column for faction and class so it’s not hard to figure out who has the best time for each. Perhaps I can add a column for race as well. Curious if your run was done on a server with an active population or a closed personal server?

As for myself, I’ve been pushing the same Hunter that I last posted about to 30, just hit 28 a few moments ago but I’m far too tired to finish now and I have a dentist appointment in the morning. Won’t spoil too much just yet but perhaps I can finish tomorrow. I’ve also been keeping track of all rested and noteworthy mistakes as I go and I’ll post that as well when I hit 30. Really hoping to see more people give this a try, it’s quite addictive trying to improve your times!

Yes that is what I was thinking, don't need to make tables for each class. I just meant doing runs on different classes/races would be cool too and would be very interesting to see how they compare.

Druid is pretty slow in the start indeed and mulgore is big and requires you to run a bit more than the two other startingzones 1-5 I think. Also it gets a bit better once you get moonfire. Yes when you get to 20 and learn catform/runspeed talents it will speed up, but I'm curious how slow it is 10-20, I think it would be pretty slow considering the druid quests is a timesink that rewards rather little xp.

I look forward to your result @Jpy , I will try to do 10-20 and 20-30 sometime too but for now I think ill be focusing on 1-10 runs because those are the most important for me to get down. I will do another druid run to 10 and post a screenshot of my /played so you can add it to the list.

Oh and I followed the rules you set and made the druid on Northdale (I actually have a 60 rogue on the old realm haha).

Level 30 @ 25 hours 9m 55s /played



Just to clarify, I never touched the auction house once.
I really wanted to reach my goal of sub 25 hours. It was close as hell for the entire 29-30 and I thought I could get it up until the very end. I improvised like crazy for that last level (had to skip 100% of escort quests, not once was the NPC there to start the quest and the wait is far too long) with some 90% of it coming from grinding Snapjaw in Hillsbrad Foothills (30-31 Turtles) and Highland Striders (30-31 Raptors) in Arathi Highlands (somewhere around 27-28k/hour for these mobs). A few deaths to higher level Alliance characters in both zones for the final stretch costed me, but such is the life of playing on a PvP server that's been up for quite some time. At this point I'd say I've done somewhere between 5-10 runs to level 10, 3 to level 20, and 2 to level 30 all with the mindset of trying to finish as quickly as possible. I feel like I could've done much better for the 20-30 stretch and rightfully so as its the segment I've practiced the least. I'm not sure I have it in me to do another run past 10 (I'll probably do those until (if) I get a sub 2 hour time) as I want to level this Hunter to 60 and get my feet wet practicing Maraudon farm with no gear.

Rested numbers at various levels:

Notes I made about errors and rough estimate of time loss:

Good job man!

Impressive how you keep track of all these details while trying to speedrun!

I feel like speedrunning starts to become tiresome around mid 20's - 30's and I'm not sure if I will practice a lot that far into the leveling journey myself.
But it sure is interesting following others doing it! I dont think I'll level that competitively anyway, maybe just to get ahead of the bigger mass of noobs in the start, and this can be done before level 20 I believe. After that it doesn't really matter if you're super efficient or not because most of the big wave are not, as long as you play enough you won't have problems of them catching up. The best thing to do would probably be going ham in the start and play for alot of hours -> sleep -> and then go on with a more normal schedule.

Anyway, there's probably a lot to improve on just in the 1-10 and 10-20 bracket and by practicing this who knows what may come up, tips and tricks, little details that could improve the time by a lot and so on. I personally believe warlock could be pretty insane in the start and I have some ideas I wanna test out.

Oh and the Test of faith death must've been funny in hindsight haha!

Drowned Near Zoram Strand while my girlfriend was talking to me - 7 minutes

Still that’s pretty much a 25hr level 30 run which is very impressive. Like you said as well this was the least practised segment and also contested areas start becoming a thing so there’s that to keep in mind. Wouldn’t beat yourself up about it at all and I think what you have achieved here is pretty immense. Thanks also for all the detailed notes!

Nicely done jpy.

On a slightly unrelated note - what is the most efficient use of rested? I realise that for the purposes of the runs it’s a moot subject since in the rules you already stated that (and the fact that rested xp is increased on LH servers). But for actual release how can people make best use of rested efficiently?

@Jalapeno likewise I’m looking forward to using the knowldege and experience to push myself beyond ‘the pack’ on release.

@Jalapeno note keeping isn’t that hard to manage, just keep a notepad document open while running and make small notes whiles auto running or corpse walking (or any time you have downtime) and then you can go back later and add more details. I think without analyzing your mistakes and trying to improve this type of running is near pointless. I was able to improve my run by over 3 hours, and thanks to my notes I can safely assume with more corrections and a little better luck that sub 24 hours for level 30 is definitely within reach, as well as sub 9 hours for 20. I’ve also believed for a while that Warlock can contest Hunter quite well and the fact that they’re not weapon dependent (I bought every vendor Bow upgrade besides the green ones up to level 20) and get free mount at 40, you could invest in potions and things like that to really push your efficiency (I imagine things like swiftness potions being quite cheap early on and this could be fairly impactful on a class with no mobility buffs).

@teebling In regards to rested, I don’t think you should change anything about your approach. Consider it just a bonus that’ll give you more exp for mob kills as you quest, but the times you stop to grind should be unrelated to whether or not you have rested. It’s more about reaching those spots with good mob density at an appropriate level that aren’t taking you far away from your quest progression. It’s also usually leading up to a threshold (specifically intervals of 10 for levels as this is when you get the most out of heading to a capitol to train) where you can get the most out of grinding that last x% you need to hit the next level and grab a quest that requires level y before moving to a new zone etc.

This looks cool! I'll be keepin an eye on it.

Going to transition to focusing my efforts on closed server runs and try to start working on a much much more grind emphasizing route. I will first run the current route with a few changes from my most recent notes to get a time that’s unaffected by spawn contention and PvP so I have a starting point to compare with. I suppose I’ll add a table for closed server times at some point as well.

Time to add an alliance run as well :)

Oof just seconds off of 1st place! Great time Alenya and welcome to BC!

@Alenya Good run, is this one on Northdale or a closed server? Will get you on the leaderboard when I have a moment!

Cheers and thanks for the welcome - on Northdale

Updated leaderboards. Will try to work on screenshot compilation for first post tonight, want to give another run on closed server a try. Had a really good pace and goofed at Kolkars.

E: Goofed second run as well, finished everything up until the last turn in and didn’t set my hearth apparently. Shame shame shame. ~2h 15m pace, still need to improve.

Northdale 20 in 9h 4m

Good run @Alenya very nice level 20 time. People have been telling me that NE to 20 was pretty quick but I haven’t done any alliance runs whatsoever. Will add this to the leaderboard when I get time!

Jpy wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Good run @Alenya very nice level 20 time. People have been telling me that NE to 20 was pretty quick but I haven’t done any alliance runs whatsoever. Will add this to the leaderboard when I get time!

Cheers, there's not a lot of solid alliance side material levelling wise, I wrote my plan a while ago. Had a few issues with Northdale's janky mob mechanics!

@Alenya the fastest run I’ve heard of was kritten/journey who was Northdale’s server first 60 as a NE Hunter in ~3 days 7 hours. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to find much information on his run. :/

E: Updated leaderboards.

Journey had some good strats and it will be fun to go up against him at Classic launch. But you can't have Northdale stats as a comparison as the server has a lot of non Vanilla mechanics. The drop rates on all loot is about 10x higher, quest drop rate is much higher, mob density is maxed out, dynamic respawn is on, mob armour is higher, health and mana/focus regen is higher. I think from memory the quest XP for level 30 and up was adjusted down to the right levels for Northdale though.

@Alenya dynamic respawn is only active when a certain amount of people are within a certain area IIRC, and yea the 30+ quests aren’t with TBC values on Northdale (that was one of it’s big features at launch). Can’t confirm or deny the other points but that’s unfortunate that we don’t have a perfect replica, but that’s the point of classic I suppose (even then, it won’t be 100%). I’m quite sure we’ll see times much faster than Joana’s judging by his route and play style.

@Kup Nice time m8, will get you added when I get a chance. Glad to see some people sharing their times.

E: Updated.

Kup wrote: ↑

5 years ago

sub 2hr time

Awesome!