I couldn't agree more with Mystic Chicanery -- despite the fact that most players consider the "level grind" to be the most boring part of the game, a stodgy run towards the much more interesting endgame, I've found that I tend to invest myself more in my character while actually leveling up, strangely enough, and it seems to me that endgame is the much more boring part of the equation. While leveling, you get a constant meter (literally) of how much your character is progressing, but after 70, progression becomes much more nebulous, and you have to do a lot more poking around for things like enchants and gems.

Of course, the main complaint with the level grind isn't doing it the first time, it's doing it again and again, and thankfully, as Mystic notes, will bring us ten brand new levels to roll through. But maybe I have a bad memory, because even when I do hit 70 with a character, going back to the beginning with a new class or a new faction is a new experience. And Wrathgoing through the same content a second time makes it faster and more interesting to me -- I already know where the hard quest targets are, and I can catch up on lore or secrets that I may have missed.

Each to their own, of course -- maybe you've already leveled all nine classes to 70 and couldn't imagine going back and running through Stranglethorn Vale or Hellfire Peninsula one more time. But I've found that I almost prefer the leveling "grind" -- it seems more core to me, improving the character constantly with an XP meter, than the current method at endgame of raiding your way through the instances for gear upgrades.

Jeff Kaplan, the lead game designer, posted in the forums under his username Tigole that Blizzard will be speeding up leveling in the 60 to 70 bracket just as they sped up the 20 to 60 bracket. This has long been rumored and it's great to see this get implemented.

Initial reports tell us the amount of experience points necessary to progress to each level has been decreased by 30% (for the 60 to 70 range only). Additional posters are reporting that mobs which give 500xp on the live server are now giving 600xp on the beta server. There doesn't seem to be any increase in the XP rewarded by quests yet, but this might be a future change.

Kaplan asks everyone to provide feedback on the change (if you're in the beta), and it looks like they've got his ear for the time being. So if you're in the beta and want to weigh in on the subject, now's the time.

Many thanks to the various users who submitted this news tip.

(Hunting strategies + Hunter tips) love of pets - discombobulating misinformation = Scattered Shots

Shall I compare hunter leveling to a summer's day? It is as long and as sweaty. Oh, how many days ago it was that we began the journey from level one to level seventy. How the weeks and months have passed us by! Do we forget the long stretches of time casting the same repetition of spells over and over? Can we disremember the times we ran out of mana while our pet took all the damage on our behalf? Indeed some of us have gotten bored in this journey across the desert of time, and have charged forth into the enemy to do melee damage.

Dearest hunters, do not despair! Do not raise your two-handed axe in anger at your enemy! Do not give into the temptation that speaks within your heart: "must... charge in... must... use eviscerate!" Hunters are an endurance class, not in the time it takes us to level, but in the way our leveling doesn't change unless we push ourselves to the limits, bend and break the boundaries of space and mana. Take heed, lest ye give into complacency and huntardiness! Beware, lest ye give into your non-hunterly instincts and rush into melee range of your enemy with as much effectiveness as wet noodle!

Consider, on the path from level 30 to level 40, all the new spells which you may add to your arsenal of death and destruction, and decide how you may use them in your quest for ever-more interesting forms of damage-by-distance.

I should be more specific: why is this hard for me? Because for lots of people, leveling a hunter is the easiest thing in the world, to hear them tell it. It's a super easy class that has high DPS and a tanking pet to keep it alive. I should be blowing through the levels.

Instead, I've just recently managed to get my draenei hunter, who I created back when TBC launched, to level twenty eight. In the time since I've created this character I leveled my original warrior to 70, created a new draenei warrior and leveled him to 70, and leveled a draenei shaman to 70, plus went back and leveled two horde (warrior and shaman) to 70 and created a BE paladin and got him to 65. I leveled a paladin to 65 faster than I could level a hunter to 28! What is this, bizarro world? My orc and night elf warriors both hit 70 and I created them more or less as alts to play with RL friends on different servers, which means they get played once a month at most, and yet, here is my hunter, a year into the expansion (over a year, in fact) and I am just now heading into the 30's. And to be honest the only reason I even cared enough to level him this much was because I wanted to get him a mount.

This post isn't going to be about how to "fix" leveling or make it faster or easier or anything like that. Instead, I'm writing in defense of the leveling process. I actually enjoy it even though I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone else I know who doesn't just want to get it over with. I enjoy questing and I enjoy the charge I get when I learn a new spell or add a new talent point. When I hit level 70 I was quite disoriented without the XP bar to cheer me along. I can't get my head around the idea that I no longer need to log out at an inn because the resting bonus doesn't apply any more. In fact, I'm such a quest addict that I'm still doing leftover quests all over Outland.

Everyone seems to want to get to the endgame as soon as possible. An entire dirty business of buying level 70s has sprung up around the idea that power-leveling is king. But for me, it feels a little bit like the endgame is the End of the Game. There is a shade of "now what?" flying through the back of my mind. No more content to experience, no more places to explore that I haven't already wreaked havoc through. One way to replace XP as a motivation tool is to work on gaining faction chits, I guess, and battleground marks. Sigh. What a grind; it doesn't have the zing that dinging a new level does, or even just seeing the blue bars fill up across my screen. On top of that, there are so many dang factions and rewards and things to collect I need an accountant to help me keep track of what items I should be collecting -- or even what gear, for that matter!

I guess gold is my new XP since those epic flying mounts cost so much. Let's say that I decide to measure my success by my gold balance. I can do enough quests and sell enough stuff at the Auction House to get the 5000G eventually. Then what? I have this super-fast flying mount and no reason to do anything with it.

Welcome to today's edition of Ask WoW Insider, in which we publish your questions for dissection by the peanut gallery -- now with extra snark and commentary by one of our writers. This week Houldlum writes in:

I'm wondering if it's possible to hit level 70 before ever heading out to Outland. I've been working through every zone trying to hit every quest, even if it's grey (they do give a bit of XP). So far I've only skipped the dungeon quests and any group quest I can't solo. My goal is to hit 70 before Outland so I can maximize the gold return from those quests... and to see if I can do it.

I have managed to get to 63 on my Alliance Rogue before I hit Outland, but I skipped several Zones.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks,
Houldlum (Falsehould, Fatherhould)

It was a light week on questions, so I'm going to dig down and use this one. Short answer: I'm pretty sure you can't. Long answser: Why the heck would you want to? Even if you got xp from anything in the Azeroth, even Cartman would think that grind was nuts.

So, anything out there -- at all -- that will give him or her xp until 70.

Got questions? Don't wait! Send them to us at ask AT wowinsider DOT com and your query could be up in lights here next week.

Today is the 50th post of Totem Talk on this site. I haven't written all of them... I started out as the warrior columnist for WoW Insider (by the way, if you're wondering, yes the warrior column will be tomorrow, sorry for juggling everything) and only took over the shaman column because Robin Torres, our predecessor and the first person to give you a shaman column here, was unable to continue writing it. I snapped up the chance to take over, because the shaman class was the one that effectively saved World of Warcraft for me. (I promise, next week we'll continue our gear guide series, but this week I'm inclined to wax philosophical about shamans.)

It's not a secret that I play a lot of warriors, and tank a lot. For the longest time, my pattern was fairly simple: start a warrior alt to play with friends on a new server, blaze to 60 ahead of them as I am an expert on leveling a warrior, start getting bored waiting for them to catch up and end up going back to my original warrior because I have a reputation as a tank and get recruited to do it. I would tank for a while (in one notorious case, 'a while' was 'from Molten Core to Naxxramas) while waiting for my RL friends to catch up to max level so we could start running instances.

It got old. I enjoyed the tanking, but I hated the waiting. I'm not terribly patient. In one notorious instance I actually rolled another warrior, caught him up to them as they leveled, then leveled him to 60, meaning that I had two max level warriors rotting on Kilrogg. It got ridiculous. During all this time, I finally met folks who were playing horde side, and started a new toon to hang out with them on Malfurion. Yes, it was a warrior.

But a funny thing happened on the way to 60 on him. On a whim, I started an orc shaman. And I hated it.

Drew sent us a question he wanted us to ask, and I'd like to know the answer to it as well: How many level 70 characters do you have? Blizzard has made changes to the leveling curve to make it easier to get alts up the ladder, but how many players are actually taking multiple characters all the way to 70?

I'd also like to know, in the comments below, whether they're different classes or the same class -- I suspect that of the people who have multiple 70s, there are more folks who take the same class all the way up than we expect. And the other question is whether you're going to take all these 70s to level 80 or not -- will the Death Knight take up most of your time, or do you plan to get everyone at 70 up ten more levels in the future?

I intend to sidestep the question of whether getting mounts at level 30 with upcoming patch 2.4.3 falls on the Dark Side or the Light Side of the Force. For now, I'm going to muse briefly on what impact this change will have on gameplay.

• Speed of leveling: Obviously leveling will be faster with a mount between levels 30 - 40. I doubt it will be 60% faster, though.
  
• Questing: Going through Thousand Needles, Alterac Mountains, Desolace, Arathi Highlands, and Stranglethorn Vale will be much easier. I remember Desolace, in particular, being one long drag after another.
  
• Economy: Lower levels will probably do more farming professions in order to raise the necessary gold for training and a mount sooner. This influx should drive down the cost of materials a bit in the short term. Also, given the low amount of silver rewarded at low levels, expect to see even more begging.
• Guild recruitment: Players who normally would've waited to join a guild before Level 40 (to help with mount costs) will want to join earlier now. On the other hand, guilds may have a tougher time keeping those players through endgame since there will be a longer span between getting the normal mount and getting the epic one at Level 60.

After the jump, read about more gameplay impacts.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

Remember when The Burning Crusade launched and everyone was in a big hurry to ding 70? Apparently some guilds are still leveling up. This week's e-mail doesn't mention whether these are new players or rerolls, but the problem is the same: What should you do when the people you're counting on just aren't leveling up fast enough?

When you decide to roleplay, a whole new world of imagination opens up to you -- soon you realize that all the World of Warcraft is a stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players.

A friend of mine recently complained that lately leveling has been extremely tedious. Even with characters he might feel excited about at first, he eventually gets bored after just a few quests. We talked about this for a little while, and he brought up the fact that if he was going to play WoW by himself he might as well play a single-player game instead.

It got me thinking that, in spite of all the demand people have for more solo and casual content, this is significantly better when we play it together. Even when I play by myself, my eye is always on my friends list to see if someone I know is going to show up and chat with me. Thinking about my friend's problem, I thought maybe it would really help if he and I were to go questing together -- so we found the two characters we had with the smallest level gap between them and we decided to go at it. Rather than just just going through the motions of killing the various enemies listed on our little quest sheets as if we were buying groceries or something, we made it into a neat little roleplay experience.

In fact, there are lots of quests in the game that are very appropriate for roleplaying. When you get together with your friends to level up and quest together, you can focus on the quest that has the deepest possible connection to your own character, or the one with the most intrinsic storyline. Of course there are many other throwaway quests you can do along the way, like "kill 10 Generic Humanoids" or whatever, but it works best to pick one that seems to have some meaning to you or your character and start there.

Scattered Shots = hunter stuff

Two weeks ago we covered some of the new abilities you get from levels 10 to 20 while you progress as a hunter, as well as how to use them to keep your skills sharp. The journey from 20 to 30 is a bit less topsy-turvy. At level 20, of course, you get to start playing with Aspect of the Cheetah and Freezing Trap, which can be a lot of fun, but other than that the new skills you get don't totally change the way you play until you get to level 30 and learn Feign Death. Nonetheless, they deserve a mention.

If you're following the Beast Mastery talent path I laid out last week, then reaching level 20 doesn't give you any super-exciting new abilities either. Your pet will be able to run a bit faster, and will start doing more damage. Once you get the hang of using your Freezing Trap for crowd control, it's pretty much just a straight shot till you reach 30. It may feel a little boring sometimes, but it's really better than a lot of classes have it -- often many classes feel that the 20s are the levels at which the going seems roughest and the class seems weakest because it still lacks a major portion of its abilities. For hunters, it's just more of the same stuff we've been doing up till now.

Arrowd of the US Cairne server has a question: How do you keep leveling without getting bored, abandoning a character, or rerolling? She says that she's had around 14 characters, and she's never managed to stick with one past about level 45. She always gets bored, and she wonders if there is a way to avoid it.

Now as I've mentioned before, I've leveled a lot of characters myself, and have a few 70s, but even I can sometimes get a little bit tired of the grind, and sometimes even I need to make up goals to keep myself focused. Sometimes I even need it for my level 70s if I'm running low on gold or raiding supplies. In that way, I can definitely feel where she's coming from, but I do (usually) manage to keep myself motivated.

Sometimes, for me, the Motivation is pretty simple. For example, on that Shaman I'm leveling, what keeps me going is the prospect of getting some sweet Dual Wield action going. I'm actually having a lot of fun with her, so I don't need to focus on it too hard, but the idea of imagining her with 2 axes enchanted with Windfury is a mental picture that is too awesome to put into words. I mean, we're talking cover of a Dragonforce album awesome.

So now I turn the question over to the rest of you. Whether it be leveling on a lowbie or grinding on a 70, how do you keep yourself motivation when the going gets tough and you get tired out? Is it the promise of a new skill? A new piece of gear? What keeps you charged up and logged in?

Hooray. Outland. Now this is the real home stretch. This, at least for now, is where most of your adventures will happen. After slogging through the first 20 levels, grinding up to the landmark 40, surviving the boring trek to 50, and eventually making it to The Burning Crusade content, the time has finally come to make that final push. You should probably celebrate a little, because from here on forth you will get new trainable abilities at every level so don't forget to pay your trainers a visit. Although odd-numbered levels usually have higher ranks of old, little-used spells, so it's not a huge deal to skip training between levels. Besides, the first few levels in Outland are such a breeze that you can hit a few levels without getting a chance to visit the old world.

By this time, you really should be riding around on your pimpin' new mount. For Horde players, it's extra special because the Blood Knights get a tabard that's second in coolness only to the Tabard of the Shattered Sun, so there's every reason to complete the quest chain. If you entered Outland at level 58, questing in Hellfire Peninsula should get you past 60 in a very short time. The experience gains from quests are vastly superior to the quests in the old world, as well as gives heftier Gold rewards. This is important because you should be saving your money as early as now (if not sooner) in order to afford flight training.

I have four level 70 characters that I've decided to level to 80, my two horde 70's (tauren warrior, orc shaman) and my draenei warrior and shaman. (I may or may not level my human warrior, and if I get my BE paladin to 70 by then, he'll be in the running to go the distance as well.) As a result, I'm playing catch up with them... making sure their professions are maxed, trying to make sure they have if not great gear than the best gear possible (I know it will be replaced, but doing those initial quests in the new zones is always easier with better gear), supplies of netherweave for when the new first aid comes out, that kind of thing. I was caught unaware the last time we had an expansion as far as what was needed to make things easier, I don't intend to be so caught again.