Some tips on leveling really fast

With M sitting a couple hundred points from 24, here are some things I learned in the past two sessions:

1. Mages can clear lowbie instances a hell of a lot faster than hunters. Just stand back, call out pats, and loot like a maniac.

2. Looting is your friend. You will not have time to do professions (well, I will, but that's because of schedule differences — if you are doing this as a race to 60 thing, it's not gonna happen). Looting and selling what you loot will help you to buy gear at 60.

3. Your gear sucks. It will suck until you stop leveling fast. Breathe and save money to buy AH greens later. (Apparently, BFF's guildmates did this right after they switched servers last week, to start filling in needed roles — and they said that they hit 60 with their character creation pants still on. They didn't loot though — at least BFF and I have a few pieces of gear, though my boots are grey.)

4. Don't forget to train. That way, you can actually survive a roaming mob when your mage is busy taking out 29836872 of them in the next room.

5. The Stockades is the best instance in the game for this. Takes about 10 minutes for a 70 mage to clear (and, as I pranced into Stormwind on Ide yesterday and gave it a shot, about 45 minutes for a hunter, not counting the corpse hopping into the city; of course, I was wearing nothing but a Spider Web Robe). Compared to the similarly-leveled instances available to Horde (namely, BFD) ... ouch. Definitely roll Alliance with this.

6. Go with a high-DPS spec instead of your eventual spec, so that when you hit the 50s and will have to actually help, you can kill things supafast anyway. (This was advice to me — as I'm not in the 50s yet.)

7. Do not do this with a class you are unfamiliar with. Even if you're filling a necessary role, go make a spare toon of the same class and level it to 30 or so to get the basics down, or play this toon alone in your spare time to figure out abilities. If I hadn't gotten Ahami to the 60s already, I would definitely not be doing this — as it stands, elemental shamans play enough differently than resto that leveling from 60-70 (and maybe past that, depending on how far everyone is into Northrend when the BFF and I hit 68 — I'll be respeccing resto when we catch up) is going to be a long "WTF DO I DOOOO" experience for me, I'm sure.

Ideale and Ahami are, of course, my priorities, so once we hit 60, leveling might slow down a bit. But still, this is fun and pretty easy with RAF. M's /played is under 6 hours.