Leveling in Northrend

[Malekyth]

I dinged 80 after Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, a reasonable number of instance runs, and just a few quests into Grizzly Hills. I wasn't leaving zones 'til I had the quest achievements.

A lot of that was rested and I started at 70, not 68, fyi. Still, 68-70.5 in two full zones sounds broken to me. You've got to be missing some important questlines.

[Tezze]

Yea, turns out the collection quests open up a TON of stuff. Pulling teeth it is

[Fef]

... and don't under estimate the power of the blue bar. My groups are ONLY played rested. It makes a big difference, especially in instance, and when you have to kill 200 mobs for a quest

[Ken]

... and don't under estimate the power of the blue bar. My groups are ONLY played rested. It makes a big difference, especially in instance, and when you have to kill 200 mobs for a quest

Well ... killing mobs doesn't go that fast ... 200% of nothing is still nothing :P
I got about 500xp (including rested) per mob kill at lvl 70+
That's quite terrible with 1.6 million XP per level.
Of course it adds up to a nice 10k experience when you have to kill 20 for a quest ... but still ... 10k/1600k = ugh
It would mean you'd have to kill 3200 mobs for a level. In reality I guess it's more like 1000 mobs + quests per level, but 1000 mobs are still insane.

[Nisch]

... and don't under estimate the power of the blue bar. My groups are ONLY played rested. It makes a big difference, especially in instance, and when you have to kill 200 mobs for a quest

Well ... killing mobs doesn't go that fast ... 200% of nothing is still nothing :P
I got about 500xp (including rested) per mob kill at lvl 70+
That's quite terrible with 1.6 million XP per level.
Of course it adds up to a nice 10k experience when you have to kill 20 for a quest ... but still ... 10k/1600k = ugh
It would mean you'd have to kill 3200 mobs for a level. In reality I guess it's more like 1000 mobs + quests per level, but 1000 mobs are still insane.

It's my belief that when you use mathematics, you can easily talk yourself out of any motivation to level.

I'm just picking up all the quetss, doing the kill quests, then get a feel for the collection quest. I've even found a couple where the drop off the mobs was lootable by all my group members off the same corpse, so it helps when doing collection quetss. Plus, get your "Interact with target" key setup, and that helps a bunch too.

[Ken]

It's my belief that when you use mathematics, you can easily talk yourself out of any motivation to level.

I was demotivated before I did the mathematics ;P
What made it fun was changing from running WotLK quests, then instances, then some old content, professions, etc.

[blast3r]

I usually head to northrend at level 68 and normally don't have any problems until about half way through lvl 72. Sometimes I will go back and do dailies at Isle of Q to catch up a bit. Once you hit 73 you will find no problems at all finding quests. And at lvl 77 you can finish up in Icecrown just getting all the dailies unlocked for the most part.

[Duese]

What is the fixation with going to northrend before level 70? If you are running out of quests after two zones in northrend and you are only lvl 70, perhaps you went to northrend to early and dropped to many quests?

The first quests in Northrend do give a bit more xp, but it was in no way comparable to the 4500 xp vs 13000 xp difference in quest turn ins you were seeing Vanilla->BC. BC -> Wrath was more like 16,000 -> 19,000.

My team stayed in outland until 70, ended up at lvl 74 walking into dragonblight after completing HF and BT. I finished out the achievements for GH and ZD. Dinged 80 across the board in Scholazar Basin, about 35 quests in, leaving me about 2.5 zones worth of quests left for gold.

Also, I spent the entire time from 70-80 on rested xp, despite my best efforts. I literally went from 74 to 80 in 6 days on 4x Shaman and finally saw the end of my rested xp bar when I dinged 79. By the time I turned in more quests, it had moved off the board again. I could see maybe running out of rested if you ran a lot of instances, but just questing? It's pretty hard if you are starting with full rested.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I dinged 77 on all my toons yesterday in Dragonblight. Im about 60% through the quest achievement there so around 70+ quests in and I think its like 130 quests for the achievement. I did notice that once I picked up cold weather flying, its a whole lot quicker to fly to the quest objective, assassinate the target, and fly out and not have to fight my way in/out. I can see it taking more quests now to get to 80 because ill be missing out on a lot of non quest related kills getting from point a to b. But on the same token, ill prolly have a few more daily quests I can farm each day to make up for that. the daily in wyrmrest looks to be mb friendly like the one in Steel gate. Just do all your kills in range of the toons.

[Terraelf]

There's no problem going to northrend pre-70. You can skip one of the two starter zones if you start at 70 so if you start at 68, doing them both should get you up to speed. You MUST get the achievements for those two zones to get back up to pace. Yes the collection quests suck ass, but I've got to tell you that I dinged my first team of 5 to 80 just shortly after a week of release, and within a few days after that I got the Loremaster of Northrend, so I was skipping only dungeon quests. I was about halfway into Storm Peaks when I dinged 80 and I was getting the quest completion achievement in every zone. I ran no dungeons whatsoever.

My second team of 5 took a little more time to level up (they were 70 to begin with) because I was diverting attention to raiding on my first 5.... as a result they had a lot more rested XP. With them, I did Howling Fjrod, Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, I then skipped Zul'Drak and Sholazar Basin and went to Storm Peaks followed by Icecrown. I started the team at 70 and was getting quest completion accomplishments in all the zones I was doing. I was about 10 quests away from the Icecrown quest completion achievement when team 2 dinged to 80... I'm yet to go pick Zul'drak and Scholazar Basin back up, but I need to do that at some point for the rep gains if nothing else.