The release of WoW WotLK Classic (Wrath of the Lich King Classic)) means that WoW Classic players can once again play the WotLK version of the game just like when it was first released in 2008. Among all the features is an increase of the level cap from 70 to 80, so there will be a lot of leveling to do. There’s also the new continent Northrend, where you’ll be doing most of the leveling from 70 to 80.
While leveling can be great fun, it can also be frustrating and time-consuming if you don’t know where to go and what to do. Therefore, various leveling guides and addons have been created to help you reach max level faster and easier. Some leveling guides nowadays are viewed inside the game as addons. That means you see all the instructions on your screen inside WoW, so you know exactly where to go and what to do without looking at any other websites or printed guides or PDF’s. Here are some noteworthy leveling addons and guides for WoW Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
Zygor’s leveling guide addon
Zygor Guides is a very popular choice when it comes to leveling guides for World of Warcraft and WoW Classic. Zygor Guides have released leveling guides for WotLK Classic and they also have step-by-step leveling guides for the rest of WoW Classic, including TBC Classic. Zygor’s guides are viewed inside the game, using Zygor’s addon.
Zygor Guides have been making WoW guides and addons for 15 years or so, and always release updates for all new expansion packs, both for WoW Classic and new World of Warcraft. As mentioned, they have released a 1-80 leveling guide for WotLK Classic as well, and also guides for completing dungeons, leveling professions, making gold, doing daily quests, and more in WotLK Classic.
You can become a subscriber to Zygor Guides for a monthly fee, which gives you access to their WotLK guides and ALL their other guides for World of Warcraft and WoW Classic, which includes leveling guides for all content, any class, any race, both Horde and Alliance, and it’s all visible in-game through their addon. On top of that, you also get tons of other guides like dungeons and gear, professions and more. As long as you stay a subscriber, you have access to everything, including all updates and new guides. If you don’t want it anymore, you can simply cancel your subscription.
Here are some of the WotLK guides that Zygor offers:
- 70-80 WotLK leveling guides for 8 zones. You can start either at Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra and level up throughout the continent of Northrend.
- Death Knight Starter Guide (55-58 leveling guide for the Death Knight starting zone which integrates with the Northrend leveling guides)
- Northrend dungeon quest guides
- Profession leveling guides
- Much more that you can read about on Zygor’s website
Zygor have said that they will add even more features and guides for WotLK going forward, such as The Argent Tournament, and 375-450 profession leveling guides. They’ve also updated the 1-60 part of the WoW Classic guides to reflect some of the changes in WotLK.
I have used Zygor Guides for many years, and I am very impressed with their guides and addon, so I think Zygor would be a great choice for a WotLK leveling guide/addon. The guides/addon are also very easy to install thanks to their auto-installer.
Joana’s WoW WotLK Classic leveling guide addon
Joana is the character name of a legendary speed leveler in WoW, who holds the world record for leveling solo to 60 in the shortest time. Joana’s leveling guides were created to help you level ultra-fast in WoW Classic, TBC and WotLK.
Joana has released detailed leveling guides including maps and step-by-step instructions for level 1-80 that you can view online, on Joana’s website. Joana has also released a leveling addon, that shows the leveling guides inside WoW, so you see all the instructions right inside the game. The addon also works with a waypoint arrow that shows you in which direction to go in order to complete the next step in the guide. Once a step is completed, the addon automatically gives you the next step so you know what to do all the time.
Joana’s leveling guides work for both Horde and Alliance, for any class and race. In fact, they have some customizations to the leveling path depending on your class. Joana has also launched a Hardcore mode feature, that allows you to run the guides in Hardcore mode if you want to. Basically, the Hardcore mode gives you a safer leveling journey with an even lower risk of dying. Furthermore, Joana’s guides are designed to auto-adjust themselves if there are XP buffs such as those in Seasons of Mastery or Joyous Journeys. The WotLK guides also show you how to level the Death Knight class.
You can get access to ALL of Joana’s Classic leveling guides, including WotLK, as well as the addon, for a monthly fee. You can use the guides as long as you’re a subscriber. If you don’t need or want the guides anymore, you can simply cancel the monthly subscription. As long as you’re a subscriber, you also get all updates and upgrades. I’ve used earlier versions of Joana’s guides and they were very helpful.
RestedXP WotLK Guides
RestedXP, also known as RXP, is a website that offers various guides for World of Warcraft, including leveling guides for Wrath of the Lich King Classic. According to their website, the guides are made by top WoW Classic speedrunners, in other words players that specialize in leveling extremely fast, and will guide you to level 80 in the fastest way possible. They work for any combination of class and race, including Death Knights. There is a separate leveling guide for Horde and another for Alliance. On their website, you can download and try their leveling addon for free for levels 1-30 in WotLK Classic. If you like how the addon works, you can then purchase the WotLK guides that you view inside the game by using the addon. They have many buying options to choose from when it comes to their guides, such as 1-80 Horde, 1-80 Alliance, 1-80 both factions, or 70-80 guides for either Horde or Alliance or both factions.
According to their site, any updates to the guides you have purchased are free of charge.
Their WotLK guides are also supposed to include a “Gold Assistant Mode” that helps you farm gold, and that you can turn on/off to view gold gathering routes and farming locations, which sounds like a nice extra feature. Visit RestedXP’s website www.restedxp.com
www.ding85.com
If you’re looking for a free, web-based leveling guide for 1-85, you can go to www.ding85.com. They have step-by-step leveling guides for Horde and Alliance that include written instructions and maps, including 70-80 guides. I haven’t tried them personally, but they may be worth using since they are free and don’t require any registration. There is a Death Knight leveling guide, too. However, they don’t seem to offer any addon.
www.Legacy-WoW.com
www.Legacy-wow.com have various free leveling guides on their website, that you can view online. They have a 1-80 Alliance leveling guide and another 1-80 guide for Horde. These include step-by-step instructions on leveling up in Northrend. However, it seems that their 70-80 leveling guides simply link to instructions on another website, namely www.ding80.com, which seems to offer the same guides as www.ding85.com that is mentioned above. Although their leveling guide just seems to consist of links to leveling guides on other sites, i.e. ding80.com, you can still go to www.legacy-wow.com to find class guides for many different specs, profession guides, gear guides, talent calculators, and several other WotLK-related guides. Those guides, although not pure leveling guides, can also potentially help you level faster. They also have a section with addons for WotLK, but I’m not sure if these will actually work with WotLK Classic or will give error messages. All in all, legacy-wow.com seems like a site worth checking out if you’re playing WotLK.
www.wow-pro.com
Wow-pro.com is a website mostly focused on free WoW guides and it has been around for more than 10 years. They still have their old WotLK leveling guides that cover levels 70-80 for Horde and Alliance, respectively. The guides are web-based so you view them online in your browser. They seem to be quite detailed with step-by-step instructions and maps. You can find their WotLK leveling guides here: https://www.wow-pro.com/70-80-wotlk-classic-leveling-guides/
As of this writing, they don’t seem to have a WotLK leveling addon. However, they have a leveling addon for TBC Classic, and for the regular World of Warcraft. I don’t know whether it will be updated for WotLK, though. WoW-pro.com also have many other free WoW guides on their website that you can read for free.
TomTom
TomTom is a navigation addon for WoW Wrath of the Lich King Classic, as well as WoW Classic and new/retail World of Warcraft. With TomTom, you can place waypoints on the world map and mini map and then be guided there with TomTom’s built-in waypoint arrow. You can either set the waypoints on the world map by clicking, or by pasting the coordinates of a location if you know them. This is great if someone mentions the coordinates to some location, for example in a comment, article, video or guide. You can then simply enter the coordinates with a command in the chat box and the location will show up on the world map and mini map, and the waypoint arrow will show you the direction to go.
TomTom can also help you find your way back to your character’s corpse if your character has died. All of these features make questing and leveling easier. So while TomTom isn’t a pure, step-by-step leveling guide addon, it can still be helpful for leveling.
Questie
Questie is a very popular free addon for questing and leveling in WoW Classic and WotLK. Since there are two different versions of Questie, one for WoW Classic and a different for WotLK, make sure you download and install the correct files.
Questie helps you find and complete quests in numerous ways. It can show you available quests in a zone on the world map and minimap and give you additional details like quest level, objectives and turn-in locations. You can also bring up a list of ALL quests in a zone and see which ones you haven’t done, so you can complete those. Great if you’re a completionist who wants to do them all.
Questie can also help with seasonal events such as Feast of Winter Veil (Christmas) in WoW, and will show quests related to those events while the events are active.
What’s more, Questie comes with a database of mobs, NPCs, quests and objects that is searchable so you can find helpful information and locations related to your quests.
You can even combine Questie with another addon, TomTom, to display a navigation arrow inside WoW that shows you the right direction to go for doing the objectives of your quests.
While Questie isn’t a step-by-step leveling guide based on questing, it can still help you find and complete quests and level faster.
Altoholic
Like all WoW players know, you level a lot faster when your character has rested experience, which gives you two times as much XP for killing mobs. This makes a significant difference. One way to take advantage of this is to wait until your character has full rested XP (150% of an experience bar), and then do some leveling with the added experience bonus. This can be done by having two or more alternate characters, so called “alts”, that you alternate between. While one is logged out in a rest area – typically an inn or major city – you can level the other one. You can do this with several alts, only leveling them when they have rested XP to use up.
But how do you know how much rested XP each one of your alts has accumulated? This can get a bit frustrating, because you have to log into each one individually, and even then you can’t see the amount of rested XP between 0-150%. Fortunately, the addon Altoholic solves this, by giving you a new window that shows you all your alts and lots of information about them, including how much rested XP they have saved up. So, regardless which one of your characters you’re playing on, you can quickly pull up a window that shows you the amount of rested XP on all your alts (and a lot of other information), to see if it’s worth doing some leveling with the rested bonus.
Guidelime addon + TUG’s leveling guides
If you’re looking for a free leveling guide, displayed with an addon, for WoW WotLK Classic, that has step-by-step instructions and navigational help inside the game, then Guidelime is an option worth considering. Guidelime itself is an addon that displays leveling guides for WoW Classic and WotLK Classic. The actual leveling guides that can be displayed with Guidelime are separate, and you have to download and install those separately. Fortunately, most leveling guides that work with Guidelime seem to be free. Guidelime also shows a navigational arrow inside WoW that points to the direction to complete the current step of the leveling guide that is loaded, provided that a location has been specified in the leveling guide. Locations also show up on your mini map and world map.
When it comes to leveling guides that you can import and show using Guidelime, one of the most popular ones is TUG’s Alliance and Horde leveling guides, that cover leveling from 1-80 in WoW Classic and WotLK Classic, except the 60-70 part on the Horde side which is being worked on. You can download TUG’s guides for free on CurseForge and show them using Guidelime. TUG is short for TheUnprofessionalGamerTV, which may be helpful when you’re trying to find the guides. To make this work, you also need Guidelime installed and enabled on the character you want to use it on. This may be a setup to look into if you’re interested in a step-by-step leveling guide addon. There are also many other free leveling guides that you can find and import into Guidelime.
Speedy Autoloot
While leveling and questing, you naturally loot a lot of slain mobs, and also gather quest items from objects and so on. This takes time, but with the Speedy Autoloot addon you loot instantly. Basically, Speedy Autoloot hides your loot window while still grabbing all the items. To make this work, you have to enable Auto Loot in the game options.
DialogKey DF addon
DialogKey DF is a quality of life addon that allows you to interact with NPCs by pressing keys instead of clicking with your mouse. For example, most quests can be accepted or completed at NPCs using spacebar (this key can be changed as well). When there are multiple options at an NPC you’re talking to, you can select the option you want by pressing 1, 2, 3 etc. on your keyboard. This is quite convenient when leveling, but also at max level when you interact with NPCs. There are different versions of DialogKey, since it has been abandoned and subsequently continued by other addon authors. The most recent one right now seems to be “DialogKey DF”.
Leatrix Maps (Wrath of the Lich King Classic) addon
Leatrix Maps is an addon that can reveal the entire zone map even if there are unexplored areas, show player and cursor coordinates on the world map, move the map, increase zoom level and remember the zoom level on the world map, remove the map border, and more. You can also show unexplored areas in a different, transparent color so you know which areas you haven’t explored even while seeing what’s there. All features are optional to use. There are different versions of Leatrix Maps, so make sure you get the one for Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
Leatrix Plus (Wrath of the Lich King Classic) addon
Leatrix Plus is a quality-of-life addon that can simplify and improve numerous gameplay related things. For example, it can automatically repair equipment, auto sell junk (grey) items, auto accept quests, auto turn in quests, make the minimap square and resize it, enhance the tooltips and make them appear at your mouse cursor, see your spell cooldowns on the target frame, and tons of other things. Leatrix Plus can also show Wowhead links in the quest log and make them easy to copy and paste into your browser, which is convenient if you’re stuck on a quest. This is a similar feature as the Wowhead Quick Link addon provides. Leatrix Plus even has a faster auto loot feature built-in, similar to the addon Speedy Autoloot. Furthermore, you can make it easier to skip cinematics by removing the confirmation question, make it faster to destroy items (no more typing “delete”), show quest levels in the quest log, make bags searchable, better auction house controls, and numerous other customizations.
Leatrix Plus seriously has too many features to mention here. All of them are optional, so you only have to use the ones you want. There are different versions of Leatrix Plus, so make sure you download and install the one for WotLK, named Leatrix Plus (Wrath of the Lich King Classic).
Auctionator addon
Auctionator is definitely an auction house related addon, not a pure leveling addon per se. However, while leveling you loot all sorts of items that are valuable to other players and can be sold on the auction house. Moreover, gold is often tight during leveling, because you want to save up for your mounts, while also training skills, and ideally buying armor and weapons to make leveling easier, or crafting them with professions that also cost gold. So it’s a good idea to auction all the valuable items you loot while leveling, to get some much-needed gold, and that’s where Auctionator comes in. It makes buying, selling and canceling on the auction house faster and easier, but perhaps the greatest benefit while leveling is that you can see in the tooltip, when mousing over an item, how much that item is currently worth on the auction house. This makes it easy to see if it’s worth putting up for auction, or should just be sold to a vendor.
Wowhead Quick Link addon
As you probably know, Wowhead has a wealth of information on all things WoW. Hints and tips, and even complete walkthroughs on how to complete virtually any quest are usually found in the comments section for each quest. There’s also tons to be learned from Wowhead when it comes to items, NPCs, professions, zones, achievements and more. However, constantly searching on Wowhead gets a bit tedious, and the search results can be confusing because many things can have the same or similar names. Luckily, with the addon Wowhead Quick Link, you can just mouse over any quest name or item name and press Ctrl+C and it will generate a Wowhead link you can just paste into your browser. It also works for things like spells, abilities, buffs, NPCs, and more. You can also change the default Ctrl+C keybind to something else. This addon is great if you find yourself using Wowhead a lot while leveling.
Conclusion
There are many leveling addons and guides for WoW Wrath of the Lich King Classic, from minimalistic addons with a few features, to more ambitious ones that add tons of functions and enhancements.
If you want a comprehensive leveling addon, with a navigation arrow and step-by-step instructions inside WoW, that guide you all the way to level 80, you can check out Joana’s Classic Leveling Guides, Rested XP or Zygor Guides (in alphabetical order).