Fast leveling Tips (For 1-70)

First off a little infomation about me:
My highest level character is a 67 Paladin, I have a 62 mage and 61 rogue and a load of other alts. Leveling is pretty much my hobby, I find it fun as long as I have the things that I'm going to list off and explain to you below.
I'd like to say one more thing before I go on to the guide, if you get the chance at 60+ to go to the old instances like Zul'Gurub, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ20/40 (Assuming you do the attunements) go to them all at least once, I personally regret not going to my guilds AQ runs because I went in there with some randoms a while ago after we had stopped raiding and enjoyed the encounters. The old instances are still a lot of fun and will always be a challange, though admittedly not as challanging as the newer ones.

But, with all that said and done, onto the guide.

Preface
What is this guide about?
Simply what the title says, fast, effective, and boredom free leveling. I've done a lot of leveling and the things I'm going to share with you here are what I use for really fast leveling, though it does take a logical way of thinking things through.
Acknowledgments
Eriyanna of WoW Radio for the list of grinding music.
Jame for their leveling guide.

Do I have to be a specific faction/class/race for this?
No, you do not, this is not a leveling guide like what James has done, though I do advise his guides for leveling once you reach the levels to start them (Alliance: 30, Horde: 21). Your race and class does not really affect your ability to level. Rogues however may want to pickpocket humanoids to get money whilst leveling, but honestly I leveled my paladin and warrior with the occasional instance where they tanked (high repair costs) and still made a lot of money from questing.
It's worth thinking about what class you are going to play though as some class/race combinations are very nice. Example of this would be human priest, shadow priests get a 5 point talent that doubles their spirit (regen) when dealing the final blow to a target that gives honor or exp. Since human priests get extra spirit they get that extra mana and health regen every fight so less downtime.

Ok, so I can play whatever class/race I want and this guide will help me level faster?
Exactly, the guide doesn't contain race/class specific tricks/tips, just general fast leveling advice.

The Guide
Ok with all that said and done, if you're reading now you want to level, so here is my advice.
Part 1 (AddOns)
Being prepared is vital to being fast at leveling, I started a Blood elf recently and within 45minutes (Including bathroom/food breaks) I went from 1-6 in an area I didn't know. How you might ask, Addons, thats right I'm going to give you a list of the only addons you will ever need for leveling.

• Monkey Quest
• Cartographer

Monkey Quest
Ok the reason this improves your leveling is simple, the mod basically brings up a window that lets you track all the quests in your quest log at the same time, you can do the same with the blizzard one but only up to 5 quests. However thats not what makes this great, on your tooltip (when you mouse over a mob or item in your inventory) if it is a quest item/mob it will say "Quest item x/y". Ontop of that you also get the tracked quest text in the window highlights itself when you're in an area/near an npc mentioned in the quest log. THAT my friends is what makes this mod so great, you can cut down SO much time by using that, I know I have.

Cartographer
Apart from the social aspect of knowing where all your guildies that use the same mod are this mod also marks all quest givers and vendors that you find with a "!", "?" or coin icon, names them, shows what quests they give, if they are completed on your current character, allows you to set a waypoint (Arrow above your character with the distance, direction and how long it will take you to get there) on that npc. This mod is amazing for when you level multiple characters, think about it, you play 1 character from 1 to 70, you have all the quests marked ready for you to do again with your next character and know exactly where to hand each quest in at. It's such a massive time saver.
All these mods can be found on http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/files/addons/ (If this does not take you to the WoW Addons search click World of Warcraft, then load the new page, on the left side click Addons) search for them and download them, install them and love them.
A quick guide for those that don't use addons often, when you download them extract them to your:
J:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
Basically where you installed world of warcraft, go to that folder, interface, AddOns and install them there.
Load up WoW, log in, go to your realm, on the character select screen make sure your addons are all enabled (You may need to update them, the updates are usually put up on Curse-gaming when they are available), if they are "Out of Date" click use out of date addons and it will most likely still work for a patch or two without being updated.

Part 2 (Logical Leveling)
So you've got your Mods, now this is the bit that's near impossible to teach but I'll try, Logical thinking.
If you look and use Jame's Leveling guides you'll see an example of logical thinking for quests. To level fast you want to go to each location for mob killing as few times as possible and get the most done at once. You'll find a lot of the time there are 2+ quests in the same area, be it killing 2 kinds of mobs or finding quest items.
The thing you learn from using Jame's guides is to do circuits of the zone map, completing as many quests as possible in the shortest space of time (complared to doing 1 quest at a time, going back to the npc, getting another quest, doing that, going back etc.), mass quest completion really gives you a massive boost to your exp/hour because you've not done 1 quest at a time.

Part 3 (Eera's philosophy)
"Questing is better than grinding, but grinding whilst questing=good."
This is a saying I've used for a long time now, basically if you compare exp per session of someone that has sat their grinding mobs constantly for 3 hours to someone who is doing a lot of quests that involve killing X mobs or getting item Y from Mob Z you'll find thatthe person that does the quests has a greater amount of exp gain, why, because quests give you exp (Not to mention gold), mobs give you exp also, so combining them gives you the greatest ammount of exp compared to grinding alone. That and it's much less boring.

What you getting bored of all that questing? I better get onto my next section of the guide.
Part 4 (Music)
Ok this is the part that really helps, more than the mods, more than the logical thinking, more than questing. This is what will help you keep your sanity when you play for hours on end, music.
Thats right, it's proven, music helps you level a LOT easier. Not just any music though, music that really gets you going, gets you pumped up, keeps you awake.
A good list was written up by one of the DJs for one of the radio stations I listen to (Which will be mentioned shortly) of decent artists to look into for your grinding needs:
Electronica:

• DJ Tiesto
• Paul Van Dyk
• Ian Van Dahl
• Orbital
• Trance Control
• Infected Mushroom
• Armin Van Buren
• Ayla
• Kimball Collins
• Kraftwerk
• Chemical Brothers
• DJ Oakenfold
• DJ Sasha & Digweed
• SaxionPike

Metal & Things of the Rock or Alternative Persuasion:

• Sonata Arctica
• Tristania
• Black Label Society
• Iced Earth
• Primal Fear
• Symphorce
• Lacuna Coil
• Within Temptation
• Dragonforce
• Nine Inch Nails
• Drowning Pool
• Korpiklaani
• Rhapsody
• Switchblade Symphony
• Type O
• Dimmu Borgir
• Iron Maiden
• Epica
• The Gathering
• After Forever
• Nevermore
• Killswitch Engage
• Rammstein

Ok so if you're not into that kind of music and preffer listening to some radio, look at http://www.wcradio.com, shows every day, good conversations and good music in the preshows and the music breaks, good for people that don't like listening to music all the time.
Ontop of that if you can't a break from music, if you're in a guild or a gaming community that has a Ventrilo or Teamspeak server you might want to go on there and talk with them.
Anything that keeps your mind from all the quests your doing and all the mobs you're killing. It makes the time pass faster and makes it more enjoyable.

Part 5 (Talents)
So you've got your Mods, you've got your music, you've got your philosophy, you (Hopefully) have your logic. What else is there?
Honestly there isn't much left to mention apart from 1 thing that I touched on earlier, talents.
When you reach level 10 you get 1 talent point, the short description of talents is a way to specialise and improve your character in certain things. You get 51 talent points at lvl 60, 61 and lvl 70.
When you are intrested in leveling your character you want to go for the following kind of things, talents that reduce your downtime (ie. reduced mana cost, increased mana regen), improving the survivability of your pets (If you picked a hunter/Warlock), improving damage done by your pets (If you picked a Hunter/warlock), increasing your damage done by your main spells.
Go for talents in that order:

• Reducing your downtime
• Improve pets survivability (Warlock/Hunter Only)
• Improve pets damage (Warlock/Hunter Only)
• Improve your main spells damage

If you have a pet they will take the aggro off of you and do damage so your downtime is a lot lower, you can heal your pets via spells/abilities to reduce their downtime and send them in while you sit and eat/drink if needed.

One final note to be mentioned, while not very important for leveling fast, it's worth mentioning. You'll see items on the AH (Auction house) from time to time that you really want to buy, try to avoid buying them as you'll often find that they are overpriced and are replaced in a few levels with items from quests/instances (Well, blue/purple items anyway, greens tend to be fairly priced).
You might not think it's that important but if you go and spent most of your gold on items you can find that you don't have enough gold for your skills when you level up which hurts your leveling speed.
A good rule of thumb is upgrade items every 5 or so levels, buying low level greens is often a bad idea as a few simple instances will often get you fairly decent gear and in most cases earn you money instead of losing it.
If you don't have The Burning Crusade Expansion pack you may wish to follow the above rules more strickly than those with TBC, mainly because when you get into outlands you will make money so fast from leveling it's untrue, my paladin is on about 800g even after spending about 350-400g on their epic mount quest at 60, so just by being smart you can make about 1.1-1.2k gold easily in 6 levels.

A few final links to Jame's leveling guide for when you hit the required levels, follow them and the infomation in this guide and you'll be 60 in no time, he's also ment to be bringing out a 60-70 guide soon so look forward to that:
For the Alliance: http://www.wow-pro.com/node/599 (Starts at 30)
For the Horde: http://www.wow-pro.com/node/754 (Starts at 21)

Hope you find this guide helpful.
If you would like to get in contact with me .
All updates to this guide will be found on my forum version of this guide and should also be added to this guide (http://www.armleg.com/eera/viewtopic.php?p=7&mforum=eera#7)
~Eera.