Move to Northrend at 68?

[Bigfish]

I'm taking all my teams there at 68 because of better gear, better gold, etc. Does anyone know if the dailies give xp if you are under level 80? I didn't really run many dailies until after I hit 80. If it does give xp then there will be no shortage of quests to do to get you to 80. And you can easily hit 25 dailies each day.

Yes, the quests will give XP if you aren't at cap.

[emesis]

I went to nothrend (solo DK) at 68. I skipped Blades Edge, Terrokar, SMV, NS totally. I hit 70 before getting the "nothing boring about borean" acheivement. If i play it right, I'll finish borean and hit HF, doing everything I can until i can get acheivements on every zone should put me at 80 in zul'drak. RL friend of mine started in Borean at 70, then HF, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, and just went to zul'drak last night, he's 5 bars from 79. The idea of Scholozar, Storm Peaks, Icecrown all being gold is pretty awesome.

This sounds earilly similar to what I'm doing. All those quests spitting out gold sounds nice. Having no idea how many of those are going to be "go collect 10 bear skins" times 10 quests is kinda annoying. Drakuru's grinding my nerves enough by making me collect 50 variable-brand mojos everytime he has a new quest in the chain, but by God, I will get Loremaster of Northrend on all my characters.

Hey, those mojos aren't soul-bound! Still, I gave up on that chain about half-way through.

I went to NR at 68 on my second team and didn't regret it all all. As other posters have noted, you can't really skip all the collection quests in NR if you want to quest at all, since many unlock or are parts of chains. However, it's worth looking up and deciding whether you want to pursue a chain. Grizzly Hills is the worst, I skipped about 1/2 collections stuff and still dinged 80 on my second team 2/3 of the way through Icecrown (which went straight from Sholazar to Icecrown, still need to go back and do Storm Peaks).

[Vyndree]

I am worried about getting out of quests if I skip (the majority of the) collection quests.

I went to northrend at just-barely-dinged-68, less than 1k gold per character, no rest XP, and leveled to 80 using Suvega's guide (which is how I recorded my TourGuide version). I dinged 80 just after hitting Icecrown.

The trick?
Do BOTH starting zones. Seriously. It's good rep.

Money?
I had epic ground mounts, no flyers. By the time I hit cold weather flying I could afford normal flyers + cold weather. By 80 I had around 3k gold per character.

[Bigfish]

Hey, those mojos aren't soul-bound! Still, I gave up on that chain about half-way through.

Oh I know. Still didn't alter the fact that I had to commit Troll Genocide to get 50 of the things. Of course, given that about halfway through the chain, the trolls really start grouping up, and they can be AOEd down in batches of 7-8 at a time, its not as annoying as it could have been. Still seems a bit unimaginative.

[Owltoid]

.......Grizzly Hills is the worst, I skipped about 1/2 collections stuff and still dinged 80 on my second team 2/3 of the way through Icecrown (which went straight from Sholazar to Icecrown, still need to go back and do Storm Peaks).

Sorry to disagree here, but I think one of the best pieces of leveling advice I have received was in Storm Peaks start your Sons of Hodir questline ASAP (lvl 77 I believe). The quest chain is something like 40 quests long and I would curse every minute of that if I wasn't also gaining experience. In other words, if I knew that I was just doing it for rep, then I'd be pissed... since I was doing it for leveling & rep it made it more palatable.

[Souca]

I have to solo leveled two 80s. The first was a DK and went to NR at 68. The second was my geared 70 druid with full rest. I didn't do more than one instance on either when I was leveling.

The DK did Borean, Fjord, Dragonblight, Grizzly, Zul'Drak, and Basin to achievement. She hit 80 with a mix of Storm Peaks and Icecrown.

The druid did Borean, Fjord, Dragonblight, 91/100 Zul'Drak and 38/75 in Basin. He didn't do any quests in any other zones before 80. He never ran out of rest.

Granted, these were solo characters, but when I start working my 5 teams up there I am going to try and stay in Outlands until 70. The sheer amount of XP you get doing both starting zones is mind boggling. It also gives you a huge advantage when you are level 77 in Dragonblight heading into Zul'Drak. You can also skip whole chains if you need to.

There are so many money sinks in Wrath that any quests you can save means more gold in the end.

- Souca -

[glo]

If you can stand it wait until 70. There are so many quest chains in Northrend with collection components being able to pick and choose which you want to do is nice. On the team I am working on now I waited until I ran out of all of the fast XP quests in BC and was about 70.7, that is with starting outland at 58.

The above about the sons of Hodir chains is dead on right. I made the mistake of skipping some of that when I was leveling simply because I was in a hurry to hit the cap, going back to do it later on I really wanted to kick myself in the ass. You are going to end up doing it eventually, you might as well take the extra few hours while you are leveling and at least get the xp.

Yes the above two paragraphs are at odds with each other as far as leveling speed goes but they are both accurate as far as overall time investment to get the characters ready for end game is concerned which is what really matters.

[heffner]

As mentioned, it's probably not the best idea to skip the collection quests in Northrend. Thus, you will end up doing most of the quests anyway. You will definitely not run out of quests before you hit 80 if you don't skip anything.

Reason not to go? Hmmm, well you will have more quests at 80 for gold. Can skip collection quests in Outland. This might work out to be faster to 80, if that is important to you (but, you I don't think you will not get as much quest XP in Outlands, so maybe it wouldn't be faster, I don't know). Regardless, getting from 68 to 70 will take no time in Outland as well.

Personally I had difficulty with the normal Northrend instances. I was a fresh 70 when I went, so I wasn't geared to the max like a lot of folks. So, I actually decided to skip them for the most part until I hit 80. Although, I do need more experience with multiboxing instances, you may be skilled at it so it might work for you.

The daiiles in Northrend (at least the few I did) do give XP when you are not 80.

So, if you're excite to go and see the new zones, then go. Otherwise, leveling to 70 or higher in Outland won't be a mistake. Either way it won't make much difference IMO.

[Gadzooks]

I went to nothrend (solo DK) at 68. I skipped Blades Edge, Terrokar, SMV, NS totally. I hit 70 before getting the "nothing boring about borean" acheivement. If i play it right, I'll finish borean and hit HF, doing everything I can until i can get acheivements on every zone should put me at 80 in zul'drak. RL friend of mine started in Borean at 70, then HF, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, and just went to zul'drak last night, he's 5 bars from 79. The idea of Scholozar, Storm Peaks, Icecrown all being gold is pretty awesome.

That's what I did - I went to Northrend at 70, and took my 3 through Borean, Howling, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, and dinged 80 in the Basin. I did'nt leave a zone until I got the quest achievement. I did all of the collection quests though, as painful as it was. I also did some grinding for leather and meat for cooking.

I did'nt run any dungeons or PvP. With the right balance of dungeons and questing, you should have 3-4 zones untouched, easy.

I'm halfway through Icecrown, it's *easy* money there!

[Bloodcloud]

I was there the other day with my lvl 65-67 team and it was EASY and lots of money on the Vendor trash.

I couldn't get any quests though since I was to low.

Whats the quest starting lvl there ? 68 ?

I am 65 with my Dk and I only did Hellfire (1 quest from Archivement away ).

cheers