


Gorgrond has a very natural route, in contrast, and just following the natural flow of the zone works well. Nagrand features lots of downtime as you cross its sweeping landscape, for instance, which can really make it take much, much longer if your route through it isn’t optimized to minimize the number of back-and-forth trips you take. However, Warlords can be plagued by wide gulfs between zones. Except now, instead of spending a fraction of your time at its quick pace, you can do all your 10-50 work there. It’s hard to keep a dense experience down, and despite several nerfs The Iron Horde campaign from Warlords is still the quickest expansion. Some zones are improved far more by using these speedrun strategies than others, so it’s best to keep the rankings in mind and focus on minimizing your downtime more than quibbling over estimates the time you spend worrying your choice might not have been perfect is probably enough to cover the difference between them.

For the average player, this sort of play isn’t exactly desirable, and estimates extrapolated from applying a raw multiplier to what PTR speedruns aren’t accurate. While pretty much any route now is likely faster than before there can be quite a lot of difference between the options available, and a lot of information available cites time based on optimized routes with little downtime and lots of preplanning or estimates purely based on just multiplying these speedrun times. Vanilla isn’t a direct option but is instead included in Cataclysm as Vanilla’s zones were heavily revamped for Cataclysm.Ĭhromie Time at its basis saves you some leveling time by removing the necessity for lengthy swap time between various expansions and having to go through all of their generally experience-light cinematic openers. If you don’t make a selection, only the BFA zones will scale, and the others will retain level brackets such that you will have to swap between them if you want to mix zones. This isn’t too terrible, though, as BFA is still one of the decently quick options. To access it, you must be playing on your second character, as the first will be required to go through the non-timewalking campaign, Battle for Azeroth. From there you’ll head to the Shadowlands for the 50-60 bracket. These will cover all of your levels from exiting Exile’s Reach or your racial starting zone all the way to the new BFA level cap of 50. The new leveling experience, Chromie Time, gives you access to the choice of six ‘timewalking campaigns’ to level through. From there, the question gets a little more complex and you have to consider a few more factors. Modern quest design began to take shape in Cataclysm but was ironed out in the following expansions, so from there forward, you tend to see much better speed, though Mists of Pandaria is still a bit slower partially thanks to its wide zones that increase downtime as you travel from place to place. Burning Crusade, Wrath, and Cataclysm should generally be avoided unless you have a specific quest or activity you hope to complete along the way. The simple question of speed skews towards the newer expansions. For those who don’t, there are advantages to a few different expansion.

For many players, this is a good excuse to revisit content from the past that used to be outleveled quickly and hard to actually experience in any meaningful way. Now, with Chromie Time, that isn’t the case. Just where should you level them? Before there were some questions along the way, as Burning Crusade and Wrath shared a bracket as did Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, but you still largely had your path decided by the release order. Once you’ve decided on a new main for the coming expansion, or possibly alts you’d like to have around, a second question arises.
