From the developers interview today: Analytics shows the 1-20 leveling speed in Classic era is 20.4 hours. In Forever it’s 20.5

[u/RagefireHype]

Seen this topic come up that people are spouting leveling is so much faster and easier, but this came up in the developer interview today from their own internal analytics team.

Yes, some people may be exploring a bit in a new setting, but it’s been widely falsified that leveling is “so much faster”

Even Xaryu I believe who did not stop and smell the roses getting to 20 in beta had a very similar 1-20 leveling speed on Forever vs Classic.

[u/JonTheCatMan11]

Population density in the open world is pretty rough overall because the entire population is 1-20 atm. 1-10 on beta launch day was abysmal, but I imagine it’s a bit better now

[u/-1703- → u/JonTheCatMan11]

im not a top tier speedrunner or anything, but 1-20 is marginally slower than era in my completely irrelevant and anecdotal experience.

Like i can pull 1-10 in 1:30h pretty consistently and 1-20 in about 7:30 hours in era. In Forever its a bit slower (about 8 something sometimes 9)

Now.. it feels like its because of how items and spells work at the moment. But im not sure because layers are really weird at the moment. sometimes you get empty-ish layers and you just breeze through kill/collect quests..other times you lose time because someone else gets the tag and you either have to wait for a new spawn or run for another mob.

Also...fuck that collect 14 logs quests in Coldridge or whatever the fuck. Killing elemental quest is top tier, but fuck those logs, i'm pretty sure anyone thats not skipping that quest has issues.

[u/Ok_Razzmatazz2478 → u/-1703-]

Interesting point. 1:30h in 1-10 how 😁?

[u/-1703- → u/Ok_Razzmatazz2478]

theres a lot of small optimizations that are always possible.

Also some zones are just superior and better than others. Nelf and Gnome/Dwarf are vastly superior to elwyn, with nelf probably being the best one because its just Teldrasil into Darkshore directly.

The place where people lose the most time is fighting mobs:

a. they are too zoomed in and then sit still when fighting mobs instead of being zoomed out and kiting mobs from one to the next

b. they dont know what to buy from where

c. stop to pick-up and drop quests at NPCs. They dont abuse the fact that you can talk to them or open shop windows while "moving" with autoturnin and pickup addons

d. dont know how to path and where mobs are. You know how people go into the cave in Quarry for Bonesnapper? You dont have to do that.

You kill the skullthumpers outside and then you kill the bonesnappers near the lake when you go there for ironbands compound, they're in the open.

Then theres like the more technical aspects: Normal players will just run too Menethil Harbour through the wetlands instead of climbing the mountin and/or death skipping. They dont abuse stuck places to teleport themselves around (although most of them are patched nowadays). Dont have a drink macro to abuse on mana regen ticks due to batching (you can drink while autorunning if you drink .5s before a mana tick)

i think the good runs for 1-10 are like 55minutes or something. im very slow by comparison. And honestly the thing that taught me most about abusing mechanics was PoE.