Northrend leveling guide

My feeling in the future (if i ever level another toon) is to skip the known slow areas, could speed up leveling by 50% i think. And above all, avoid instances like the plague. They are horrible time investments for the XP return.

Some good quest hubs (off the top of my head).

Borean Tundra:
Warsong Hold
DETA
Taukale Village
Borgorok outpost

Dragonblight:
Actually all the quest hubs are pretty non-parallel. Agmar's hammer has a few parallel quests, as does Venomspite (the New heathglen quests are good xp/time)

Grizzly hills:
Conquest hold has a few parallel (or easy) quests. If you do all of the quests from the hub you can get the gladiator quest series (Conquest Pit), which is yet another arena quest series. THese are so good for xp/time if you can get a group. Avoid the troll mojo quests like the plague.

ZulDrak:

Skip Ebon Watch. Do Light's Breach, and Argent Stand. Also the small group of guys just northeast of Ebon Watch has a good quest hub. Do ZimTorga, and def. Ampitheatre of Anguish. The 4 mini quests for Argent stand (Troll Patrol) has an achivement if you can do it within 20 minutes, and rewards supposedly 60-80kXP.

Scholozar Basin:

Do all of Nesingway quests. Do Rivers Heart. Skip the rest. Most of the quests in this zone are non-parallel.

Storm Peaks:

Do K3, do the Hodir quest line (which opens up a nice quest hub at Brunnhildar village). You can stop when you get to the Hydemeet, or keep pushing to open up Sons of Hodir. Do the crash site (Gromarsh) - this unlocks several quest hubs, one which is good and easy is for the Earthen just NE of the crash site. Quests in this zone are pretty fast IMO.

Icecrown:

Not an expert on this, but do Argent Vanguard to unlock Argent Pinnacle? quest hub. Do the Ebon blade quests which unlock dailies which are quick. Much of the quests here are either dailies or group quests, so this zone isn't all that great for leveling.

Howling Fjord: I never really did this zone in full. I'm sure it's like BT though.

Overall I'd say

Borean Tundra 68-72
Dragonblight 72-73 or 74
Grizzly Hills 74-75 or 76
Zuldrak 76-77
Scholozar (Nessingway quests only) 77-78
Storm Peaks: 78-80.

Once you finish the major quest hubs in Dragonblight go to GH, don't finish the zone. Ditto for GH, ZD, and Scholozar. SP and BT are the only zones that are decent for leveling to do in full.

Big 80

Hit 80 last night, was a mad rush the last two days. Random thoughts.

1) Jeez leveling is time-consuming. I'm the last in the guild to level to 80 I think. I wonder what that says. Yet the guild is 'casual'.
2) I imagine most casuals wont hit 80 until January sometime, like end of January. We're looking at 8-10 hours per level at a casual basis. If you play 20 hours a week (which is alot), that's 5 weeks.
3) Most of the quests are great, but at the end I was really left searching for quests. One quest that unlocks a quest hub was bugged and that whole series of quests was denied to me.
4) If you play with rested XP all the way you will still burn through all but 3 zones, the start zone, and likely two middle zones.
5) The XP required per level doesn't change much at all, but the XP per mob and XP per quest does. So it does go quicker at higher levels.
6) Many of the later quests are single quest extremely long quest chains. At most you'll have two quests in the area with very short quest chains. So get used to flying to do the quest (or running) and coming back, and repeating this 4-5 times.
7) Thus an epic flying mount is almost required for the later zones. It will take much much longer without this. However if you sell your goods on AH, dont try to level professions, sell the greens you get, you should be close to 5000 at the end.
8) Professions: Enchanting becomes awesome, no longer do you have to do endless amounts of dungeons hoping for that rare drop, and every third quest gives a reward green or even a blue (there are much more quest blues now). I calculated last night, i saved almost all enchanting mats and have about 3000g worth, too bad I need 6000g worth of mats to get to 450.
9) This implies that they design it to get you halfway to profession cap while leveling, and the rest you do after cap.
10) quests are the absolute fastest way to level. Don't do an instance more than once, and that after you have several quests leading there (the dps boost from the blues means decreased leveling)
11) Shadowmeld (night elf racial) is a feign death type spell, if you run through an area and do no damage to the mob but attract it, hit shadowmeld and they'll run back to their area. This is insanely useful.