Now yes, I could've quested, done some battlegrounds or dungeons for XP, but, when you got limited time you got limited time so you gotta make sure you make it as efficient as possible which in this case unfortunately also meant as boring as possible.
I don't think many others would've been able to endure this grind the way I did, but being able to do other things at the same time sure helped. In the beginning this was difficult as my laptop is so crappy it wouldn't even let me watch youtube videos while playing, it kept doing that thing where each few seconds it kept trying to adjust the video quality down from 1080 to 720, then another step down and another until I was back in the year 2000. I figured out how to mitigate this by capping wow's fps to around 60 which lead to youtube and other players not lagging or trying to downgrade my eyesight. :p
So why did I do it this way, easy, the xp/hour couldn't be beat any other way except for maybe efficient questing, knowing everything well and not having a lot of other players compete for quest items and mobs against you, but on a PvP server that is hard to control along with the realm being mainly alliance populated you were at a disadvantage of getting overrun by others and some times annoying them enough for them to bother teaming up against you to kill you, then farm your body for a few minutes until they got bored.
These spots were quite decent, not a lot of competition as there was just one quest it was applied to that people came and did, even though it seemed like it was a daily quest cause I saw a lot of level 80s come in every once in a while to challenge these Vikings into some duels and then fly off.
Another one I switched to later where the mobs did hit a bit harder and some times required me to take a small break in between fights to have a drink. This is also where I finally dinged and the xp/h was a bit higher so I stayed there for the rest of the level. Ignore the beginning part cause those big elites didn't get me any xp which was unfortunate that I pulled 3 of them at once thinking they would. :p These ones also had a few debuffs they applied onto you that made it a bit more annoying to level up, one of them looking like the demoralizing shout debuff which instead lowered your run speed by 50% and then some other ones did a Mortal Strike debuff that lowered your healing by 50%. Luckily I had quite some decent protection gear by now, almost in full WOTLK blues, majority I had bought off of the auction house just to make my leveling faster.
Some things I did to make this faster, was to always log out in an inn to make sure I had some rested experience for the next time I found the time to grind it up. The extra gear sure helped as well and being a tank you could always find a dungeon easily for doing the 1-2 quests some of them had ready at the entrance and didn't require any pre-questing in the zones to get them. Oh and also, don't loot things, especially if you are playing with higher ping like I was it would just add so much extra time on your grind and often mean you'd have to run back and forth between vendors to empty your bags.
I'm not sure how long it actually took to get from 70-80 as I forgot to check how long each level took me, but I reckon it was something like 30 hours which isn't bad but not great either. For my it was manageable as I was able to listen to some podcasts or watch some @3speak videos while grinding it up.
Alright now that I'm 80 the real game/grind can begin! Eheheh, yeah I'm just going to be taking it slow and see what I'll do, will probably buy secondary talent tree to spec into Holy as well as I really enjoyed healing, especially in battlegrounds and for now try to do the daily heroics and battleground for bonus xp at least if I find the time.
How is your WOTLK journey going?
Sending part of post rewards to @hivegc.
