Leveling a Paladin for fun and gold

From AJS.COM

A work in progress...

Bluefassa is my World of Warcraft Paladin that I've been working on since the the 2.3 patch landed. He's now 69 and has 30% of a level to go before he's 70, so I wanted to start writing down his story. This isn't an RP story, this is what I've done to level him, and why. It's not quite a leveling guide, but it could certainly be used that way.

Starting out

My primary goal with Blue was to complete every zone I started and level him up with the smallest number of total zones necessary. This increased his leveling rate, as there was less running around. I lost focus only twice: once in the high 30s / early 40s and once in the high 50s as old-world quests started to become scarcer.

When I started, therefore, I stuck to the Draenei starting zones (which were added in The Burning Crusade expansion). These zones have much better quest rewards than their equivalents in the old starting areas so - post level 6 - I'd recommend them to anyone. This is, in fact, the advice that I give (with more detailed directions) in my leveling guide.

There's not a lot to tell, other than the fact that Bluefassa had no starting wealth at all. This is very important. Many people will tell you how trivial it is to level, but they leave out the fact that their level 10 caster has the armor rating of a level 40 tank and pluses to spell damage that cost them 1000g in materials. I did not do this. I was on a new server with my second character, my first being a level 6 banker who does nothing but sells my stuff on the auction house.

Time taken

So far, Blue has 11+ played days and he's very nearly level 70. This isn't terribly fast, but it's par for the course, post-2.3, I think. You can make it to 60 in 4-5 played days (or perhaps 3 if you're an AoE grinder), but the 60-70 grind is considerably slower. In fact, it makes me wonder if Blizzard's approach to speeding up leveling was a mistake. Certainly the shock of going from 60 to 61 is quite large. It feels as if you hit a brick wall.