A Review of Zygor's Leveling Guide

Zygor’s Leveling Guide for the Win!

It is not perfect, lets get that out there right away. But what guide truly is, especially for an ever changing MMORPG like World of Warcraft. One thing it is though, is awesome. And it definitely delivers and all that it promises.

Want to get leveled to 85? As Fast as possible?

• Improved UI allows more customization
• Improved step detection as you fly through the quests.
• Improved class quests – adds your particular class quests to the guide.
• Internal talent guide and automated talent picker. There are a million ways to build your talent tree, this will offer what we feel is the most effective for you class, for leveling to 85 as fast as possible. You can disable this function at any time, keeping the option up to you - if you wish.

The begging was rough...

When the World of Warcraft launched it was a vast uncharted land. There was no Thottbot, no Wowhead, no ZAM. We couldn't reference anything and leveling took quite a while, not only for the first character but for alts as well. This didn't bode well for people that didn't have much time in the day to play but wanted to reap the same rewards as those who could put in almost 40 hours a week if not more.

The very first guide that started it all

There very first actual guide focused on leveling to 60 as fast as possible was Joana’s Horde Leveling Guide. It was for Horde players only, it promised a lot, and it definitely delivered. It provided a fast path from level 1 to level 60. Later it was updated for the Burning Crusade expansion and offered another fast path to level 70.

Shortly thereafter, Brian’s Alliance Leveling Guide came out. It offered a similar system for Alliance characters.

Both of these excellent guides had a lot of similarities:

• They offered the fastest route to level 70
• Everything was based around the quests which meant little to no grinding.
• They were both built around the Hunter class, which is arguably the fastest leveling class in the World of Warcraft.
• Both guides come with a customized version of the Map Notes addon which greatly modifies the in-game map, adding coordinates for the location of every quest that the guide offered. Get the quest, get the cords from the guide, enter the map, find the point, set your waypoint, and follow the arrow to your destination. It was that easy. These guides made the worry of leveling null and void.
• Both guides are intended for the solo player, so they didn’t require you to group (generally) or enter any instance.
• Both guides also offered extra goodies, such as builds, tips, and user submitted guides for the various classes.
• Because both guides were in a PDF format you could print them out and check off goals of the guide as you went about your leveling.
• Both guides are still pretty relevant, though limited, and will get you to max level at a very decent pace.

There were a couple of noticeable issues, but that is the case with anything. We're human, nothing is perfect:

• Unless you owned two monitors, you had to tab back and forth between the ebook and the game, this could get annoying after a while. 
• Not all the quest detail was included in the guides, which meant you spent a lot of downtime reading quests to learn where to go or tabbing out to thottbot or similar database site to help you out.
• If you went on vacation, or left the game at all you would need to remember where you left off. There wasn't any kind of -save- feature to these guides. This could be tedious to remember, especially if you were focusing on more than one class at a time to get to max level. 
• The guide was built around the Hunter class and expected a great deal of knowledge about the class before any of this should be attempted. This made it very frustrating to level any other class trying to follow the same steps, they just didn't work. If you didn't want to play a Hunter you were basically shit out of luck.

The next group of guides that followed, such as the TeamiDemise Leveling Guide, put the entire guide in-game. Man was this awesome. When you opened the in-game map you saw a listing, like this: step 1, step 2, step 3… Click the step and the marked point on the map glows, making it easy to find and set a waypoint.
Unlike the previous guides, the iDemise guide wasn’t class specific! Play what you want and the guide would get you leveled in a good, efficient manner. Putting the guide as an addon meant that you no longer had the nuisance of tabbing out and back and going all over the web for answers. It was all here, in one simply package.

As always there were a few cons, but not nearly as many as the previous guides:

• There were quite a bit of typos, not huge to what the guide offered but it can be annoying
• There was a need to constantly open up the game map, let me emphasize on this!
• You had to know exactly how to get from zone a to zone b as the guide offered no help in that area.
  

Now we have the latest edition:

Zygor’s Leveling Guides 

 

The guys over at Zygor's Guides have put a lot of effort into making this guide and let me tell ya - it's pretty damn awesome. They advertise being able to get to level 80 in just 7 days! With the help of this guide, some work on the player's part in terms of choosing fast travel routes and focusing on leveling this goal is feasible for ever player in the game.

If you read their forums many players have posted their ability to max out faster than 7 days, using this guide!

Here’s how Zygor’s Guide works:

No more switching from web browsers OR in-game maps:


The entire guide is in a small, resizable window on your main screen. All the detail that you need to complete the quest is included. You’ll never have to switch back to a PDF, a website, or even the in-game main map to see where you have to go or what’s next!

How is this better than the previous guide? While the last guide shows you the destination of your quests it doesn’t show you the best order in which to do them. With Zygor’s guide you'll be shown the most efficient path to take to complete the most quests in the least time, which will save you lots of time over last guide that I reviewed.

One of the very cool things about Zygor’s Guide is that everything is done automatically for you! With Zygor's you don't have to switch from guide to game, etc and you don't even have to open up the map or select a guest. Everything is completely automated to make it easier for you. Complete a quest and the guide will automatically update to the next quest. The guide does it for you. It really is like having someone giving advice over your shoulder. Here’s the next quest, here’s what you need to get…

• No more setting waypoints: All of them are set for you automatically, and include distance and time to target. Better yet, a little dot is placed on both your mini map and main map, if you want to use them. Each time you are on a quest you follow the arrow, and do what you need to do. This system makes it pretty hard not to find your objective.
• No more having to remember where you are: the guide remembers everything. Log out and come back in a week and you can pick right up from where you left off. How amazing is that!?
• Starting off at some mid level? Come into the guide from any level! Start the guide at level 30 and the guide will automatically guide you from then on to get to the max level taking into account the work you have already accomplished! You're not required to start a level 1 to make this guide work!
• The entire path of quests is visible in the guide window. You can scroll forward or back at anytime. Want to skip something? Click the next quest in line and the previous quest is grayed out. You wont be stuck in what the author wants you to do, you can customize your path as you progress to fill your needs.
• By the way, all the quests are grayed out as they are completed, so you can always see where you are at a glance, plus where you’ve been and where you want to go next. Want to skip a quest? Just click the next one and the skipped one will become gray. You can alter to the guide to work for YOU!
• No more Wowhead - Enough detail is included so that you rarely have to look at your quest log or thottbot or any other resource at all for that matter. It’s all in the guide. Previous guides mentioned linked all the quests to Thottbot.com (and related sites,) which is OK, but scanning these database sites will slow your leveling speed way down dramatically.
• The leveling path is not class specific: This guide can be easily run with class and any build. Naturally, classes that are faster at killing things (Hunters, Rogues, etc.) will go faster but everyone should find the leveling path that Zygor presents to be very adequate.

Zygor’s avoids the time wasting quests, as well. Overall, I’ve found it easy to use I can just steamroll through the quests.


Here’s a new feature:
Sometimes you'll out level the guide. Stuff like enhanced XP can get you to level 45, 46 when the guide is actually at level 43. The new feature makes the guide smart. The guide will actually adjust itself to these changes and update where you need to be for your exact level.

The guide has also been update for class quests, a factor that was skipped entirely in previous editions. 

There must be some Cons though, right? Yeah, some but very  very few.

• Sometimes you'll skip a lot of quests with the 'smart' guide function. This can leave you in a bind.
• All classes will arrive in a common zone at level 13 (Westfall for Ally, the Barrens for the Horde.) This can be an issue for Blood Elves and Draenei (Ghostlands and Bloodmyst Isle.) Still, if you like those areas yourself then level there anyway and rejoin the guide later. Same with any other area.
• Every once in awhile the guide doesn’t update automatically. It’s easy to fix, though. Just click the next item manually and you’ll be back on track.  Originally the Northrend quests didn’t all update automatically, but updates have corrected this.
• There are times when you will be fighting things a couple of levels higher than your character. This is easy enough for some, but others might find that they need to be a bit more careful.
• The instances are not covered at all. But keep in mind, this is meant to get you to max level as fast as possible, instances slow you down when trying to obtain this goal.

See, that wasn't so bad, now as it?

In conclusion:

It’s easy for the new player to follow and efficient enough for the experienced player to want to use it. That’s a tough act, but Zygor's Guide definitely pulls it off! It is efficient, convenient, and the UI is not an eye sore. This guide has everything that a player needs for any goal really, even if you're not focused on just reaching the level cap.

Of course, one can argue that it makes the game too easy, but I’m definitely not one of them. I leveled my first character, now I want to play others at max level without bothering with the content I already experienced. This guide helped me do that the best way possibly. It is just that awesome.

If you enjoyed this review and want to give the guide a shot, get your copy of Zygor’s Leveling Guides here.