Another Hump I'd Forgotten About

You know how leveling slows down tremendously in Vanilla WoW in the mid 30s and the mid 40s? Well, there's apparently another speed bump in the mid-L50s too.

I have discovered this the past month while I've been leveling the four toons, but especially Joan and Hoots.

Listings as of December 26, 2025.

Going from L54 to L55 took an absurdly long time from my perspective, but once I got over that hump the leveling from L55 to L56 seemed to go more quickly. 

Of all the four toons, Hoots was actually the slowest in leveling from L54 to L55. Part of that I chalk up to bad luck, where respawning mobs caught me multiple times in various zones --apparently quick respawns can also be observed other places than Felwood's Shadow Hold-- but I also didn't have to grind nearly as much to get some of these quests completed. If the RNG rolls go your way when you're looking for XX items, you don't have to kill that many mobs. Which also means less grinding, resulting in less XP per quest overall. I don't know the ratio of XP garnered by killing mobs versus completing quests in Retail, but I've found that in Vanilla Classic you get a lot more XP if you're grinding a lot of mobs just to complete a quest. Sure, it's not "fun" from the standpoint of wanting to get from Point A to Point B quickly, but it is a low stress way to level. You don't have to engage while level at the same depth in Retail --although Retail fans probably would point out that leveling in Retail is so quick it's not deep either-- but Blizzard designed Retail leveling to progress multiple stories. Outside of a few overarching questlines, there are very few newer-style MMO stories in Classic WoW.*

So I can grind while listening to a podcast, chatting with friends, and not really paying too close attention to what I'm doing in-game. Which is good, since I play a game to have fun and relax, not be hyper-focused.

***

My questing buddy is logging on far less often these days. She completed her Atiesh --oh wait, I didn't mention that she got selected for one, didn't I?-- and I think she only really needs one or two more items and her gear will be good throughout most of TBC Classic leveling. Therefore she's been taking a bit of a break, playing games with her husband, and when she's on she's basically pre-loading stuff for when the Dark Portal opens. 

I'm thinking that once the pre-patch drops in mid-January, she'll be leveling a Draenei Priest (basically the same one she used to help me level my Shaman in 2021's TBC Classic and she mained in Wrath Classic), but we'll see how things go.

*Those long burning questlines that are there, however, do tend to be epic in their own way. Everybody knows the Defias questline, but there's also the Marshal Windsor questline and some of the Class Quests (Paladin and Warlock epic mount quests, for example). The biggest difference between Classic and Retail is that as quest design progressed, every single (non-gray) thing you see out in the game world can be traced back to a quest objective, whereas in Classic WoW there's a metric ton of items and mobs out there that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. (Black Diamonds, anybody?) And that's fine. Not everything has to mean anything at all --in real life that is frequently the case-- and a lot of game designers (and fiction editors) seem to have forgotten that simple fact.