The Best Ways to Level From 80-90 in Midnight

XP Buffs & General Tips

• The more Level 90s you have in your Warband, the quicker you’ll be able to level up more alts, with the stacking 5% Warband Mentor Buff, up to a total of +25% (from 5 Level 90s).
• While questing, War Mode will grant an additional +15% from killing monsters and handing in quests - this will be very useful for the Delver’s Call quests.
• For Darkmoon Faire, as well as the getting the XP buff from the Carousel and Rollercoaster rides on Darkmoon Island, you can also purchase Darkmoon Top Hats with Darkmoon Prize Tickets, which give the same +10% XP Buff, just that you can activate them from anywhere in the world and don’t need to do the annoying trek back to the faire every hour.
  • With Darkmoon Prize Tickets now being a Warband Currency, you can easily transfer the necessary tokens to your levelling alts and stock up on a few hats before setting off.
    • If your Warband doesn’t have much/any Darkmoon Prize Tickets, then there’s a super quick and easy way to get 100. This requires you to fish up, or in our case, purchase 100 Darkmoon Daggermaw fish from the AH. Then, go to the fishing vendor at the end of the pier on Darkmoon Island and purchase the Faded Treasure Map. This requires you to find 4 clues and then the final stash, but these are all fixed locations.
      • This is per character, meaning you can do it across an army of alts so that you never have to think about farming tickets again.
  • Don’t buy a metric ton of these, though, as they will perish when Darkmoon Faire ends - only buy the amount you think you’ll need on that specific character.
  • You can also buy all the Darkmoon Faire Quest Items from the AH (or if you have a load in your Warband Bank) and hand them in for a bunch of Darkmoon Prize Tickets and around ~90k XP - do this after Level 81, though.
• The Bottle of Mysterious Wisdom (+10% XP) from the Winds of Mysterious Fortune are not locked to the time period of the event, meaning you can keep them and use whenever later. So, if you have a bunch of these leftover from the previous event, you can still use them now.

Depending on the time of the month/year you are levelling in, there may be one or more XP buffs to pickup from ongoing limited-time holidays/events. Here’s a calendar of them all:

“What if my Level 80s I want to level have no gear?”

• At level 81(!), 4x iLvl 180 gear from Renown Quartermasters for only 25 Voidlight Marl each
  • Eversong Woods - Head
  • Zul’Aman - Neck
  • Harandar - Waist
  • Voidstorm - Hands
• Depending on how much gold you have/want to spend, and the AH prices, you can fill the remaining gear slots via the AH. Be sure to filter the results by Current Expansion and Level 80-81 bracket.
• If you didn’t insta sell them, your other Level 90s may have collected a metric ton of BoEs and WuEs while levelling and doing endgame content, and some of this might be usable at 81. Though, outside of occasional gear rewards from quests, you’ll get a load of level-appropriate BoEs if doing the Delve spam method.

1. “Standard” Power-Levelling Route

• Level from 80 to 81 either on the Isle of Dorn by killing elite bees outside the Cinderbrew Meadery dungeon area or on the Siren Isle by grinding elite mobs.
• Skip the Midnight Intro Scenario by choosing the dialogue option from the Image of Liadrin.
• Do all 8 Delves on Tier 1, and be sure to pickup the Delver’s Call quests near the entrances.
  • DON’T hand these in yet, as we’ll be saving them for Level 88-90.

• Grind through Main and Side Quests in the zone(s) of your choice, or just do anything you want that grants XP, from now until Level 87.
  • The most “efficient” ones are Eversong and Zul’Aman, so just pick up every single quest you see and complete them. If any particular quest is taking you a long time to do, skip over it and move on - you can always come back later if necessary.
  • Whenever you get to a point in the campaign that asks you do to a dungeon, skip over it and move onto the next thing, unless you don’t care much about efficiency.
• At Level 87-88 (depending on your Warband XP gains - check the XP Tables below), be sure that War Mode is enabled and then hand in all the Delver’s Call quests you’ve been saving. Outside of the 2 hand-ins at Silvermoon City, the rest will benefit from the +15% XP buff from War Mode as well as your Warband Mentor Bonuses.
• At Level 89, go to Silvermoon City and learn a Midnight Crafting Profession. The most cost efficient ones (currently) to take are Tailoring and Engineering, but you can do this with any Crafting Profession(s), it just might take longer and/or cost more gold.
  • Once you have learned the Midnight Profession of your choice, along with the set of starter recipes from the trainer, filter the recipe list in the profession pane by First Craft Bonus and craft all the items that are listed.
  • For some of the later First Time Crafts, you might need to craft some intermediary items that no longer give a First Time Craft bonus, so be sure to uncheck the First Time Craft filter to find those again.
  • Each time you run out of First Time Crafts, be sure to talk with the trainer again to learn a new set of recipes and repeat until you no longer get XP from First Time Crafts.
  • You will get around ~70% of a Level from doing First Time Crafts. This is hard-capped at 70% of a level, rather than previously being ~30 Crafts.
  • This XP doesn’t scale with Warband or War Mode Bonuses. Unless...

• When Level 90, you should talk to Soridormi to skip the Levelling Campaign. Blizzard doesn’t do a good job at advertising this feature, so you may not even be aware of it.
  • She is in the main inn of the city, sitting on a sofa to the left of the door as you go in.

Step-By-Step Breakdown

Sourced from Zorthas

This method should result in Level 80 → 90 in around ~3-5 hours:

1. Pickup Any XP Buffs First
2. Elite Cinderbrew Bees/Wolves (or Siren Isle) From 80 to 81
3. Skip Midnight Intro
4. First 3 Delves on Tier 1
   1. Collegiate Calamity (Silvermoon City)
   2. Shadowguard Point (Voidstorm)
   3. Sunkiller Sanctum (Voidstorm)
5. Eversong Woods Questing
   1. Top-left Island Side Quests
   2. Full Main Campaign
   3. Facing the Sun Side Quest in the South
   4. Valeera Side Quest at the end
6. Zul’Aman Questing
   1. Main Campaign up to Atal’Aman Delve on Tier 1
   2. Main Campaign up to Amani’Zar Village
   3. All Side Quests + Main Campaign Quests around Amani’Zar Village
   4. Main Campaign up to Twilight Crypts Delve on Tier 1
   5. Skip the Den of Nalorakk Dungeon Quest
7. Harandar Questing
   1. The Grudge Pit Side Quests and Delve on Tier 1
   2. Main Campaign up to Gulf of Memory Delve on Tier 1
   3. Main Campaign up to 80% through Level 87
8. Delver’s Call Quests and First Time Crafts
   1. Turn on War Mode
   2. Hand In all 8 Delver’s Call Quests
   3. Do First Time Midnight Profession Crafts

2. Shadowguard Point Delve Power-Levelling Route

If you want a more mindless or combat-heavy grind, instead questing or dungeon spamming, you can level through doing a particular Tier 1 Delve solo. This being both instanced and solo has many other advantages too; it not only means that you don’t need to rely on other players or waiting on dungeon queues to pop (especially long for DPS), but you also won’t be competing with others on quest mobs/spawns or have to deal with any open world lag.

However, this method is only possible when a specific story variant is active for the Delve, meaning that you can’t just do it any day of the week - it will be active every third day. In order to make this method fully worth it, you’ll also need to be on a class/spec you’re comfortable enough on to do decent damage and self-sustain as you will be doing big pulls.

This takes place in the Shadowguard Point delve in the Voidstorm and requires the Calamitous story variant to be active, NOT the Stolen Mana or Captured Wildlife ones. Though, you can still get somewhat decent XP from farming the others, just nowhere near as much or as fast as Calamitous.

You can do these Delves on Tier 1 or 2 difficulty, as the second tier doesn’t really add all too much more difficulty for 10% more XP gains.

When you instance into the Delve, you need to mount up and then pull all the elite “Shadowguard Steelsoul” mobs you can see - there should be around 7+ of these in amongst other non-Elite mobs. There is an optimal route to follow and end the pull on, so that all the mobs gather up nicely in one small clump with LoS. Once all gathered up, the pull should take between 30-60 seconds to nuke down, depending on your Level and damage output. This should give you around half a bar of XP.

• To help with damage, be sure to click Valeera’s campfire she puts down at the start of the Delve for a nice +5% Main Stat buff.
• There will naturally be tons of stuff to loot from all the mobs we’re grinding, including valuable BoEs amongst the greys, so be sure to loot everything before leaving each time.
  • The Speedy Autoloot addon (or an option in the Plumber addon) can speed up this process, as Blizzard’s Auto Loot is still inconsistent and slow.

To leave the Delve super quickly, you can use this custom macro that just takes one button press instead of having to run back to the Delve entrance or right-clicking your character portrait and then clicking again on “Leave Instance”. One macro’d button press instead of 2 mouse clicks!

/run if C_PartyInfo.IsDelveInProgress()or C_PartyInfo.IsDelveComplete()then C_PartyInfo.DelveTeleportOut()else C_PartyInfo.LeaveParty()end

3. “Follow The Arrow” Power-Levelling Route

This third route to Level 90 is similar to the first, but much more on-the-rails and turn-your-brain-off. It takes away all the agency of which quests to do and in what order, and instead just puts an arrow on the screen and tells you what to do, along with some helpful tips to speed things up, like where to set your hearthstone at certain points, when to use it, etc.

This levelling route is made possible with the brand-new addon called “Follow the Arrow”, developed and maintained by Harldan, who has a long storied history in making levelling guides for WoW, just in written form instead of an addon.

This is similar to the paid RestedXP addon that you’ve probably seen many streamers and content creators promote (and get kickbacks from), but is completely free, with no hidden fees or paid DLC that would go against the ToS.

Currently, there are two modes you can choose to level in; “Midnight Campaign” and “Midnight Alt 80-90”. There will also be a future mode that covers all the zone’s Side Quests (i.e. Sojourner), but that is still in development. For the purpose of this video, we’ll be highlighting the Alt mode.

There’s not all too much to say about this method really, other than to just follow the arrow on the screen and properly read through all the steps in the companion window, checking off any check-boxes you come across (which are usually for important steps that you need to pay attention to before moving on).

As stated before, the general route for this Alt mode is similar to the standard one, whereby you:

• Skip the Midnight intro
• Do all the Delves on Tier 2 once, picking up all the Delver’s Call quests along the way and not handing them in yet
  • This addon will actually warn you about quest hand-in automation too, which is a nice life line if you forget to do it before you begin.
• Do all the Main and Side Quests it directs you to along the way in Eversong and Zul’Aman
• Turn in Delver’s Call quests and do First Time Crafts to finish off

While the addon creator’s video highlights his super-quick ~2 hour Level 80-90 speedrun using this method, as they state in the video, that’s with all their knowledge, prep-work, and gear optimisation, which you won’t have for all your alts. Basically, don’t expect to reach that time in your levelling, but it should still be done relatively quickly.