I didn't really start seriously leveling alts until Wrath of the Lich King. During Burning Crusade, I was mostly just leveling my warlock and playing around a little bit with a druid and an Alliance hunter. I may have gotten the druid to max level by the time Wrath rolled around, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
The other thing that I noticed that was really interesting to me is that the first 5 characters that I got to max level in Wrath - my warlock, hunter, druid, paladin, and death knight, are the same 5 characters that I have leveled first in every expansion since.
Going back through old posts, just for nostalgia's sake, it really amazed me how long the leveling process used to take. The aforementioned hunter, which was my 4th character to hit max level during Wrath, took 8 days and 10 hours of played time to get there. It definitely highlights the changes that have been made, allowing you to do the same thing now in about 10 hours total.
See, back then, in order to get a character to max level, you had to level through all of the previous expansions. I'm not entirely sure when that changed. By Warlords of Draenor, that was still the general process, but the leveling speed had been improved to the point that stuff was generally only taking me around 2 1/2 days of played time.
It looks like in Legion, they gave you the ability to choose between Outland and Northrend for a portion of it, and then chose between Cataclysm and Pandaria for the 80-90 portion. You then had to do Draenor for 90 to 100 before starting on the Legion content. But it still looks like it was taking around 2 days played to level a character from the beginning.
In Battle for Azeroth, you still had to go back through most of the previous zones, although you still had the choices that you had in Legion. I was leveling a bunch of Allied Race toons at the time, and there are definitely references to working them through the whole process. I leveled a ton of characters to max level towards the end of Battle for Azeroth when there was an anniversary bonus active that included a one-time event in Alterac Valley called Korrak's Revenge, which let you level extremely quickly. From the beginning of August 2019 until the end of December, I managed to get 20 characters to max level during that period.
The new characters were taking under two days at that point, but a lot of that could have been due to the anniversary event.
It's harder to tell what happened during Shadowlands because I stopped playing World of Warcraft a few months into that expansion. I didn't even manage to get all 5 of my original toons to max level during the early part of that expansion. I believe Shadowlands was when Chromie time was introduced, allowing you to pick just one zone to level in, up to the current expansions' content.
I'm not sure it's been helpful for players new to the game to be able to skip all of that legacy content. Of course, even back in the Mists of Pandaria days, you might have been able to say the same thing about being able to do the classic leveling experience in just a couple of zones in either Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. There's a ton of great content and storylines in both of those areas that I'm sure most players have never experienced. To say nothing of Outland, Northrend, Cataclysm, etc.
I haven't leveled a character all the way to max level from scratch since Battle for Azeroth, but as I work through a few of my existing characters, I'm guessing that's not going to be the case much longer. It will be exciting to see what the leveling times look like now.
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