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. 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. Now, with Chromie Time, that isn’t the case. 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. For those who don’t, there are advantages to a few different expansion.
The simple question of speed skews towards the newer expansions. Burning Crusade, Wrath, and Cataclysm should generally be avoided unless you have a specific quest or activity you hope to complete along the way. 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. From there, the question gets a little more complex and you have to consider a few more factors.
Understanding Chromie Time
The new leveling experience, Chromie Time, gives you access to the choice of six ‘timewalking campaigns’ to level through. 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. From there you’ll head to the Shadowlands for the 50-60 bracket. 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. This isn’t too terrible, though, as BFA is still one of the decently quick options. 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. Vanilla isn’t a direct option but is instead included in Cataclysm as Vanilla’s zones were heavily revamped for Cataclysm.
Chromie 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. 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. 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. 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.
Overall Speed – Warlords of Draenor
It’s hard to keep a dense experience down, and despite several nerfs The Iron Horde campaign from Warlords is still the quickest expansion. Except now, instead of spending a fraction of your time at its quick pace, you can do all your 10-50 work there. However, Warlords can be plagued by wide gulfs between zones. 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. Gorgrond has a very natural route, in contrast, and just following the natural flow of the zone works well.
It’s important while you’re in Draenor to take advantage of grabbing any treasures you see and never miss bonus objectives near your path. Going far out of your way for one that doesn’t have any quests associated may not be worth it, but missing bonus objectives that are on your path is a good way to really lower the yield in Draenor. It might be worth installing one of the various addons that mark treasure as treasures take only a few seconds to pick up and offer a decent chunk of experience. Picking up just a few that are close to your path quickly adds up to a quest’s worth of experience and even counting the time to get to them, this will probably take only a minute or two. This is another reason why preexisting knowledge really helps Draenor’s speed, knowing the path to get to the harder treasures can add multiple full quests of experience for very little work. Puzzling them out for the first time or even finding someone else’s solution likely takes long enough to make them no longer worthwhile after the nerf. If you prefer a more basic experience, I would recommend other options.
Overall Best – Legion
If the more attention-demanding runs through Warlords of Draenor zones aren’t your thing, I would suggest choosing The Legion Invasion campaign from Legion. Its absolute speed is only slightly slower but it doesn’t demand as much existing knowledge. The zones are suited well to leveling through and leaving, as well, with stories that are mostly self-contained as you search for items important to the main plot of the expansion. It’s a simple questing experience without the need to keep an eye out for treasure and less, but more impactful bonus zones that usually overlap with questing you were doing anyway, rather than being nearby diversions. You also get desirable artifact appearances to use for transmogrification in Legion as a natural part of leveling through it, at the expense of generic weapon appearances. The biggest downside is that there are a number of quests that may slow your class hall campaign or professions if you choose to use them as they require dungeon completions. However, depending on when you level your character you may get lucky and have a Legion Assault active.
Legion assaults were a feature from one of Legion’s patches, and feature world quests accessible for characters of any level. While the rewards for max level characters aren’t as relevant anymore, for characters leveling through Legion, Legion assaults offer huge bursts of EXP. This could be enough to tip the scale in the favor of this campaign if the current cycle of invasions gets you one or two during your playtime. If one is active while you level through Legion, hitting it before it expires will be well worth your time.