Insight and thoughts from a new player

[Liareth]

I disagree that questing is fast. It's slow compared to the alternatives, at least in my experience. Nereida and I have levelled 4 characters each to 40 now the "vet way" (or so we thought, granted, we've only spoken with a couple vets about it), and this involves a simple but efficient route:

- 1-6 doing newbie quests in town and grinding nearby areas with fire wall scrolls. Takes 1 hour.
- 6-18 grinding in abandoned farm with the bird. (might be more efficient place, but this works for us). This part is mostly afk watching the bird kill things and rehasting it, so it's great for multitasking. While the bird is killing, we usually multibox a character to run to the Fields of War on every server, and then another to run to the Zhents on every server. We also multibox a char to get to each ring location on four servers so we can port there and grab it. We usually port to grab the rings that are ready if the bird dies before grabbing a new bird. Takes 2 hours.
- 18-24 grinding Fields of War with sunburst / undeath to death. Pull everything in the zone, run behind a wall, wreck it all. You get one level per two pulls at 18 and three pulls at 24. Loot every lootable in this zone to gear up for Zhents. Takes 1.5 hours.
- 24-34 Zhents. The first area leading into the Zhent compound. Pull everything from back to front then kill all with weird, using mind fog to kill their saves first. Use wall of fire plus good tank placement to stop the Zhents from wrecking your caster. You get one level per two-four pulls depending on your current level. Takes 2.5 hours.
- 34-40 drag alts through Myco. Probably can be done faster in some other zone like Illithids. Takes 1 hour.

Takes about 9-10 hours with a little wiggle room for slack. The great thing about this route is that there's no travel time, because it's all done during the bird phase. Quests involve too much travelling and handing them in. I suppose if you prepare characters on each server for teleport to quest locations they might hit or maybe even exceed the efficiency of grinding, but that takes much greater mental effort than the above, which can be done easily on the side while you watch television or other such things.

[nereida]

This is probably a minor thing since it only works at early levels, but I find Firewall scrolls vastly superior to Fireballs. You can pre-palce two or three firewalls at some good location within an area and then just run hasted spawning everything and having the train of 30+ mobs run into it to their deaths. You can do that even with enemies that are above your paycheck, such as arctic wolves when you're just level 2-3. This is probably faster than doing the first few town quests, but it does carry some minor risk of you get hit by a couple of AoO's as you run, as at that stage you're really vulnerable.

[fallenwizard]

There's difference in quests and tags. If you ignore tags then quests will majorly be left alone as well. Tags are 5% exp gain, which out of lvl 80 is 7.5mill exp. Tags take about 3-4 hours extra on the way, if my memory serves me well, might be slightly more. Even if being generous and say tags add 5 hours, that'd still be 1.5mil exp/hour which end game runs cant match.

If you have yet another cd-key to play with, dedicating one account on my previously listed helpers speed things up a lot. Basically what it means for future new chars is this: lvl 2 goes to east road (can do 1 lap at farm to end there), lvl 11 goes to zhents, lvl 24 goes BH and lvl 34 goes to trip to immortal. Running 2 servers on zhents (when switching to sorc) and BH is adviced. On a side note, my chars are made with BUR races so that means +2dc which can be significant difference, I dont remember what each zhent need to roll to not die.

That was my pure power level way with no tags. Also ignore rings if just want to level, there's alternatives for them and they can be bought from npc in town later if really needed.