Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we'll be talking experience of leveling from 70 to 80 in Northrend.

Blizzard recently announced that December 16th would be the official start date of Arena Season 5. At just over 1 month from the launch of WotLK, it sounds like it's their expectation that a large number of players will be at the level cap and ready to PvP when the Season hits. While the numbers may make it seem like a daunting task, leveling in Northrend is easier than ever before.

Rogues have it pretty good when it comes to questing and grinding. We're finely tuned killing machines with the defensive capabilities to prevent unnecessary deaths and the offensive capabilities to turn those Group quests into solo outings. I've been fielding several questions from other Rogues about where to level, questing tips, and gear choices. After the cut, I'll break down the first couple levels of the trek to 80 and share what I've learned so far.

We only have one or two days of Ask a Beta Tester left, ladies and gentlemen. Very soon, it will be no more. Who will care about beta questions? We'll have the expansion in our hot little hands! Forget the beta, we'll have the real deal. We've actually had a lot of fun doing this for you guys though, and we're kind of sad to see it go. I like to think you guys have had fun with it, too. You know, beyond drooling over the Wrath screenshots and information.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask all of you a question: Would you like to see something similar to this continue past Wrath's launch? Obviously it wouldn't be about just Wrath's beta, it would be more about the game in general. Leveling, patches, content. Short questions that can be answered in a paragraph or two. I don't know what we'd call it. Ask a Guy Some Stuff has a ring to it, though.

jared.daniels asked...

I won't be getting the WOTLK expansion for a few days after the launch. What do you suggest I do until I can get the DVD?

This week, Keyra of Farstriders has a question about a group that's been a little left out of the expansion excitement so far: midlevel folks. Here's what she is asking you, our readers:

With all of the focus on Wrath, there seems to be a conspicuous absence toward those who are of lower-to-mid level and it's beginning to become irritating. Not everyone is level 65+! Some of us are still below level 40 and many of us are just starting out. So, here's my question: What can we who are mid-level expect to see from the expansion, if anything? Is it even worth the trouble to purchase since we can't benefit from the higher-level quests, items and what-not? And what would you suggest to speed our leveling so that we may enjoy what Wrath has to offer?

Keyra

The fact is that most of the marquee features in the expansion pack are, yes, aimed at the higher levels. And most of the things that will affect lowbies -- Inscription, the faster leveling, and achievements, are already in the game anyway.

So there are two questions here: if you're pre-60, why should you care about Wrath? Or should you at all? And Keyra also sounds like she wants leveling suggestions. My suggestion? Do quests, and lots of them. Do every quest in your log, in order, and then when you're out, go to the next town over and do all of those. The rewards will be good, it'll go as fast as leveling goes (even faster, now that Blizzard has added more XP to the mix all the way to 70), and you'll always have a clear goal: just do the next quest in your log. You might have to skip over group quests, but just keep doing quests and eventually you'll be 70 before you know it.

What say you to Keyra, readers? And if you have a question you'd like to ask the (frankly, rowdy but loveable) readers of WoW Insider, just send it along ot ask AT wowinsider dot com, and you might see it up here next week.

Previously on Ask WoW Insider...

A minor but important point: do not run the uninstaller to remove the Public Test Realm (PTR) client, just delete the PTR folder. Most people can find the PTR client inside the "WoWTest" folder, which resides in the "World of Warcraft" folder. More specifically, you should be able to locate the WoW Test folder in "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft" or "C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\". If you have MacOS X the "WoWTest" folder is stored in "Macintosh HD::Applications::World of Warcraft".

Other people can find the PTR client inside of the folder "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft Public Test" in Windows Vista and "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft Public Test" in WindowsXP. MacOS X users can find the files in "MacintoshHD::Applications::World of Warcraft Public Test".

This important bit of information came from blue poster Maaven on the official forums today. With Patch 3.0.2 being released tomorrow, the PTR client is useless and came be safely removed. But be sure that you remove it the way Maaven suggests.

WoW Insider will have a lot of 3.0.2 coverage tomorrow. We'll also be keeping the light on tonight and will get you the patch notes as soon as they appear.

According to Tigole, Blizzard will "try to patch" the Wrath of the Lich King beta today. Storm Peaks will open back up and should not crash the sever. No word yet if Naxx will be introduced in this patch. The servers should be up between 4:30 p.m. PDT and 6:30 p.m. PDT.

The XP required to level will also be reduced by 10% this beta patch. Things should go faster for all you playing around with leveling.

Finally, there will be a new beta realm opening up named Murmur. Tigole mentioned that the premade characters should not have been made available on the existing realms. He tells us that "they are being removed." There is no indication as to whether or not current premade characters will be moved to the new realm or just outright deleted.

Shellyw has a good question on the forums: what quests do you always skip? Blizzard is pretty good about the rewards system -- even if a quest is a pain to get through, they'll usually make the reward worth it. But there are quite a few quests in the game that just don't have anything you want, and just aren't worth the time putting into them.

Green Hills of Stranglethorn is mentioned early on in the thread, and I couldn't agree more -- any of those collecting quests I usually just give up on, as it's usually easier to just sell the pages off inside that zone to someone who is actually doing the quest. I often skip a lot of group quests as well, especially while leveling. While the rewards for those are usually very good (and they're often the end of long chains, which means both XP and items that come from them are great), it's often tough to find a group, so they usually sit in my quest log until grey and then get abandoned.

And occasionally, especially when I need space in my quest log for newer quests, I just plain skip anything that doesn't give an item that I need. If there's a choice of quest rewards, and none of them fit my class or spec, I'll just abandon the quest entirely to replace it with a quest that works better for me. What quests do you find skippable? How do you do triage on quests when your log fills up?

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.

In the weeks previous to the release of the Burning Crusade some of my friends were considering saving up a number of quests to turn in once the expansion hit to boost their leveling toward 70. At the time it seemed absurd. You may have a bunch of quests to turn in, but they'd be all over the map, that's what questing was like back in the pre-BC day. I just wanted to get in and get through the Dark Portal.

It may be a viable strategy once Wrath of the Lich King comes out. Taking a look at my alts, some of them still have tons of Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley quests. Since it takes 779,700 experience points to go from level 69 to 70, I suspect it'll be around 850,000 to get from 7o to 71. This meas a log full of 25 shiny, complete quests at 10,000-15,000 XP a pop will take you nearly half the way to the next level.

It's not something I'd do on my main character, but I would consider it with an alt. What's your take on saving up quests for quick WotLK XP?

This forum thread talks about a person who dinged 70 while still back in Nagrand, and while I didn't finish off the run to 70 that early (he probably did lots and lots of instances), it is possible to bend the leveling curve a little bit, especially in Outland, where there are so many quests to go around.

So how far have you bent the leveling curve? Early on, it's pretty clear where to go to level up -- there are only a few areas you can go into at each level, and while there are definitely more quests than you need to do (especially in the newer Dustwallow Marsh content), things are pretty laid out for you. In Outland, though, things get a little squished -- Blizzard really went overboard with quests, and so it's possible now to hit the last level without ever seeing one or two of the zones.

Fortunately, any XP that you would have gotten at 70 is translated back into gold on a quest reward, so even if you've finished early, there's still lots of reason to go back and see what's out there (and there is some must-see stuff later in the game). But how off has your leveling been? Anyone hit 70 even before Nagrand?

Our good friend Boubouille at MMO Champion has news of an XP change in the game, but not where you might expect. Blizzard has secretly changed the amount of XP earned... at level 70.

But wait, you say, we don't earn XP at level 70! Ah, but we do -- after you hit 70, you actually continue to earn XP to level 71, but you never actually ding. And while before the patch, the amount you had to earn to "hit" 71 was about 814,700, now it's up to 1,256,500. Which makes sense -- while some folks are saying this might have been done to just fix a bug, Boubouille says it lines right up to the difference between vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade, which means we'll need to earn about 50% more XP per level in Wrath of the Lich King.

Of course, this affects a few other things in the game -- Mania notes that pet loyalty is based on percentage level XP earned, so Hunters at level 70 will now need to hang out with their pets for longer to earn a higher loyalty level. But Blizzard isn't nerfing anything here -- from what we can tell, they're just lining up level 70 to become the first level of the next expansion instead of the last level in the game.

Gamers on the Street logs into U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.

I'm leveling too fast. My brand, new main character is already in her mid-50s and closing on BC content fast. One night's worth of questing while my husband was offline catapulted me two levels ahead and greened out our next planned instance. It took a week's worth of jostling to get our quest lines and zones back in sync with one another. And money for my mount at 40? Who are you kidding? Even with steady gathering from 1-40 with just that in mind, it took dedicated money-making days to bring in the cash I needed in time (err, relatively in time – I didn't mount up at level 40, that's for sure).

One of patch 2.3's handy-dandy, user-friendly changes was a boost in leveling speed for characters between levels 20 and 60. The XP required per level was reduced by 20 percent, and the amount of XP granted by quests between levels 30 and 60 was increased. Loot in leveling dungeons was improved. Oodles of outdoor elite mobs were changed to non-elites for solo-friendliness.

Fast forward a few months ... Do players like the results? We dropped in on the Ysondre server earlier this week to see what leveling players think about the current state of XP'ing in Azeroth. Read about their XP experience and share your own thoughts on how fast is too fast, after the break.

I've leveled up my share of alts in the past and I tend to be fairly strategic about doing so. The most important rule was to only play them when they had rest XP accumulated. Sometimes I'd enjoy a certain class so much that I'd occasionally break this rule, but I usually stuck to it. I know I'm not the only one that has done this. In all the various guilds I've called home over the last few years, I've often seen messages like "Well, time to switch over. Out of rest experience on this character."

The last patch dramatically increased the rate of character progression between levels twenty and sixty. Over the last week or so, I've popped over to my Shaman alt to check out some of the new content for lower levels. Running around, completing mostly green quests, I got carried away and now find myself at level fifty. I progressed ten levels over the span of a few days with hardly breaking a sweat. This quick leveling has become addicting, but now my rest experience has run dry. I'm tempted to keep playing, but a voice in the back of head is nagging me to log off in an inn and to go play another character for a few days.

What have your experiences with the new experience rate been like? Are you a rest XP fanatic, like me? Or do you just keep plugging away, regardless of your rested state?

Over the weekend (while I was chowing down on turkey and mashed potatoes), Mania headed into the new PTR, and came back with some great news for Hunters leveling pets-- it's going to be faster.

Pets will require 33% less XP to level up on the PTR, which (I believe) is in addition to the player leveling changes. Pets still, however, don't earn XP from quests (which makes sense, in a strange way, I guess, because you could bring one pet on a quest, and bring another to turn it in), and they don't earn XP on grey kills, either. Mania's testing also shows that pets earn the same XP on both live and test realms, which means pets don't actually earn XP faster-- they just don't need as much of it.

Good stuff. I don't ever plan to actually level up a pet on its own (I have enough trouble leveling up my alts as it is), but it's good to know that the pet I've got coming with my lowbie Hunter will be grabbing XP faster than ever.

Warcry has a super interesting reading of the XP leveling changes that Blizzard is making in 2.3. Their style is a little more, err, informal than ours, but they're right-- Blizzard is basically stealing XP from you in the next patch. Vaneras confirmed the other day that players who have a certain percentage of XP before the patch will keep that same percentage of XP, but not the same amount of XP. So, if, for example, you're halfway through level 59 when the patch hits, you'll lose about 600,000 XP that you've already earned.

But before you get all angry about Blizzard wasting all that time you spent leveling, realize that things will likely even out in the end. Even though you'll lose 600,000 XP from the amount you have, you'll still be halfway through level 59, and you won't need as much XP as you did before to level to 60. So you haven't really "lost" anything, because even though Blizzard has "taken away" some XP, you didn't need what they took anyway.

As we've said before, these leveling improvements are going to be great news, not only for altaholics who are leveling up their third or fourth character by now, but also for guilds eager to see some new 70s to bring into the raiding mix. Folks who are leveling both before and after patch 2.3 are going to experience some strange math, but that happens all the time anyway (did you know that all the stuff you're killing at level 70 now doesn't count towards the experience you'll need to earn in the next expansion?). Blizzard is tweaking the numbers, but the experience will still be faster.

If you've ever been ganked by a twink in 10-19 WSG, you might chuckle at poor Neflm's predicament. He accidentally leveled his Witching Stave-wielding Warlock twink to 20. Apparently all it takes to kick a twink out of the battlegrounds... is 200 experience.

Of course, this is exactly what that XP toggle is for, if Blizzard ever chooses to implement it. Or if you want to go the other direction, you could just award experience in the BGs, which would definitely put a stop to twinking forever (and make Neflm's problem much more common).

But he can't be too distraught-- even if he's accidentally leveled his 19 twink to 20, there's always the chance to be a terror at 20-29. As even he says, in the comments, "at least Stonetalon should be a cakewalk."