With four new allied races (and apparently four, not two, on the way,) those of us who have the condition this blog is named after have a lot of leveling to do.
While I have tons of alts, I haven't done as much mass-leveling since Cataclysm. These days, my main for each class gets top priority, and the subsequent characters are generally left by the wayside unless I get a real itch.
With heritage armor to unlock, I've naturally been doing my due diligence on a number of alts. My Lightforged Paladin is the farthest along, at level 94, questing through Draenor. The Void Elf is nearly done with the BC/Wrath level range, while the Nightborne and Highmountain characters are still in the old world.
I had initially wanted to unlock loremaster achievements by playing these characters, and while I did finish off Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, and I'm just one Amphitheater of Annihilation away from getting Northrend, I've also learned that: Holy crap, Blizzard has come a very long way in quest design.
Outland is currently the oldest untouched continent, though I also did Silithus on the Lightforged character, which might not have been touched. As a baseline, Outland leaves a lot to be desired. There are tons of quests in basically every zone where you're encouraged to kill basically everything you see. Oftentimes you go into an area, complete all the quests there, and then discover that you're supposed to go back for some other quest chain or simply because the chain you're on expects you to return. Having gotten Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and all by the Ring of Blood in Nagrand done, I think the new strategy for loremastering those is figuring out which of my old characters is closest to getting the achievement and coming back on them.
Northrend, as many remember, was a huge step up in quest design. There's far more narrative flow, and it's much less common for you to get ten quests at a time and then come back for ten more. Quests also have more varied objectives and unique mechanics. That being said, it's not quite there yet. There is a bit of jumbled rhythm, where you're encouraged to return to places you thought you were done with, though it's nowhere near as egregious as in Outland. Likewise, there are also far fewer "kill every thing in the zone that looks like this" quests.
Cataclysm is a mix of good and bad. It's incredibly linear, which does prevent you from getting the old "Christmas Tree" syndrome of showing up in a quest hub and getting a million different things to do, but it plays out more like a linear story than an open game world. Granted, the only Cataclysm stuff I did was about half of Vashj'ir (breaking the cinematic nature of it, they actually cut the whole ship journey out there, taking you directly from Stormwind Harbor to the sunken ship where the quests start, which I'm not happy about.)
Pandaria is, I think, a fair step closer to modern quest design. Jade Forest in particular does have a linear quest chain, but there are side-quest chains that feel substantial and worth your time but do totally split off from the main quest. Again, there's a lot of experimentation in quest types, and there's also a great deal more voice acting to help sell the story.
Which brings us to Draenor. This is, of course, somewhat more recent memory, but aside from a fair bit of busywork to introduce the Garrison concept, Shadowmoon Valley remains a gorgeous and fantastic zone, very much in the Jade Forest model, with side-quests that include a very plot-important murder mystery in the north east. Warlords' big sin was a lack of follow-up, which makes questing through it allow you to put on some rose-colored glasses.
Nearly halfway through Draenor, I'll be curious to level through the Broken Isles again - as it's actually been a fairly long time since I did that (I think my Druid was the last I leveled up, and that might have been as long as a year ago.)
Anyway, the good news is that the farther you go, the smoother leveling starts to feel. By the time I got to Pandaria, I was far less concerned with how soon it would take for me to get through a given level and more interested in the story of the zone I was playing through.
Everyone has different tastes, of course, and there are definitely some things that I felt nostalgic for (I tried doing all of Netherstorm on my Void Elf, but as cool as that zone is in concept and general aesthetics, I got frustrated with 2007-era quest design,) but here are my recommendations:
20-58 (or 60 if you feel like sticking with older zones): Basically anywhere you want. And feel free to double back to certain places: even if you're level 45, you can always go back to places like Hillsbrad or Southern Barrens if you haven't done them yet.)
58-80: I've really got to recommend Northrend here. Outland is based on a far grindier model of MMORPG.
80-90: The Cataclysm stuff is not too bad, but Pandaria's probably a bit more in line with what we've come to expect at this point. (You might notice the pattern here is: do the more recent stuff. Which is actually kind of an endorsement of the direction Blizzard has taken things.)
90-98: You're stuck with Draenor in this range, but that's not too bad, as Warlords' greatest strength was its leveling content. I will say I think Alliance has a better starting zone than Horde, but in either case I recommend leveling to 94 and going straight to Talador rather than Gorgrond, as the latter is definitely the least interesting zone. Personally I'd also head to Spires of Arrak as soon as you can (which I think is now level 95, rather than 96 as it used to be,) but that's just because I really like that zone. You could stick in Nagrand until level 100, but I think it's a better idea to head straight to the Broken Isles at 98.
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