Top speed, world class leveling domination on your mind? Want to obliterate all standing times, tearing through those speeds like a wrecking ball, and show your guild mates what it means to truly level a character? You’d better get an in-game leveling guide then, because true speed is all about efficiency – knocking your times down without stopping.
If any of you can remember back far enough to the times when there were World of Warcraft Leveling guides not presented in-game, you can appreciate just how good Zygor’s Leveling Guides looked when they first appeared. The first set of full World of Warcraft leveling guides – for both Horde and Alliance – to provide in-game leveling help, Zygor’s Guides have been at the tip of most players’ tongues for the last couple of years.

 Today, the best World of Warcraft guides have come a long way, presenting complete, detailed information for your route between Level 1 and 80. The key, it turned out, was for Zygor to include specific information for each quest instead of generalizing everything or telling you to use WoWHead. Rather than throwing countless bits of information your way that are littered with ambiguous directions (Go to Chillmere Coast and complete Quests A, B, and C), Zygor started detailing exactly what you’re supposed to when you reach Chillmere Coast – in this case, kill scourge and loot a Scourge Device.

The Zygor Leveling Experience

As you can probably tell from my review thus far, I like Zygor’s Warcraft Leveling guides quite a bit. They were my first in-game mods and I feel that they capture all of the detail you need to truly pull off getting through to Level 80 without any snags. The experience itself is relatively simple as well.

After signing up for your account and downloading your mods, you simply need to copy and paste the files into your World of Warcraft Add-on folder. Start up your WoW client and the mod should be installed, and will attempt to tell you where you need to be. Upon getting started, it is not always 100% accurate, sometimes choosing areas you’ve already completed or if it is completely unsure of what you are, starting you at the beginning. However, it takes only a moment to calibrate the guide and get it set to where you need to be.

Each section of the game is split up by zone and by levels. For example, as you can see below, the Northrend sections are broken down by levels, with Level 70-72 for Borean Tundra and then 72-74 for Howling Fjord.

Each quest step is laid out with careful detail as well. Instead of throwing you into quest after quest, Zygor’s Warcraft leveling guide just tells you what to do. The quest names are provided, but his philosophy seems to be that you’d rather know what tasks to perform, not what quest you’re on (I tend to agree).

With your mod setup and your character ready to go, all you need to do is follow the directions. They are very specific and the only time I’ve ever found myself skipping a quest is when an area is over populated – something that isn’t very common until you reach Northrend. An arrow will point you to the next quest objective with the distance between you and the objective and coordinates. Follow your arrows, stay clear of high level mobs and cliffs (like any GPS, it’s easy to stop actually looking at where you’re going), and kill whatever you need to move forward.

All the Cool Stuff You Get

The best World of Warcraft Guides aren’t worth their weight in code if they doesn’t come with a few bonus guides and Zygor’s Warcraft Leveling guides tow the line here as well. Along with your purchase of the Warcraft Horde guide or the Warcraft Alliance guide, you get a slew of extras including:

• Talent Guides – A guide for every class to show how to spend your talent points up to 80.
• Nether Drake Mount Guide – Shows you how to get your free Nether Drake Mount
• Death Knight Class Guide – In Depth details on the Death Knight class.
• Inscription Guide – A profession guide for anyone leveling inscription with info on how to make gold as well.
• Free Updates – Zygor’s Warcraft Leveling Guides update as fast and as often as anyone out there, providing regular bouts of new content whenever a change occurs in game.
• Forums – Zygor is the only one I’ve seen provide a full featured forum for customers. Not only that, but the forum is filled with content and discussions about everything from simple questions or leveling content to bragging about top times.

My only main complaint with Zygor’s bonuses is that a couple of them only help a small handful of people. If you’re a Death Knight Inscriptionist, awesome – if you’re not, those bonuses don’t help much. A profession guide or a Level 80 guide of some sort (Ulduar, anyone?) would have been a nice touch.

Zygor’s Guide Review – The Bottom Line

But, who can nitpick about things as silly as bonuses when you have one of the best World of Warcraft guides out there. Zygor’s Warcraft Leveling guides was one of the first to make it work and he’s managed to stay ahead of the curve ever since, showing the world why his Warcraft leveling guides are among the best selling around. Anyone looking for a guide that is updated religiously, has top level content and won’t get you lost, Zygor’s is one of the best places to start.

The route to 80 is fraught with danger, dead-ends and wasted time. Are you read to take that on all by yourself, without any expert help? I would imagine not. But, why settle for a guide that doesn’t offer everything you need in one tidy, easy to use package. There are dozens of guides on the Internet for World of Warcraft – trust me, I’ve seen most of them. But, that doesn’t mean they’re all worth your money. Nyhm’s Warcraft Leveling Guides attempt to capture your attention by offering a little bit of everything, but is it all enough?

To start with, you’ll notice that Nyhm’s World of Warcraft guides are available for pretty much everything. He sells guides for leveling, gold making PvP, and professions. He also offers a reputation guide to go with it all and packages it all into one giant, super guide for an incredibly good price. But, when you’re talking about any kind of all-in-one guide, you have to wonder if the finished product is as good as the sum of its parts. And if you only need one guide, can it stand up on its own?

For the most part, Nyhm’s Warcraft gold and leveling guides pull it off nicely. They are chock full of details about most everything you’d need to know about in the game. The leveling guides are well written, if not quite as detailed as some others, and they do come with an in-game mod that works mostly as well as it claims to. The other guides are about on par, if a bit under updated. The real value comes in the form of the complete package and finished price though.

Using Nyhm’s Guide 

The leveling guide starts you off with a downloadable PDF. Since no one really wants to use these anymore (or print them all out), Nyhm has since upgraded to an in-game mod. The mod itself is not the best in-game mod I’ve seen for a WoW leveling guide, but it gets the job done for the most part. It’d be nice to see on screen transparency and automated step changing so that I don’t have to sort through it all on my own. But, the steps are all quite sound and get you to level 80 at a relatively sharp rate.

The real value in Nyhm’s Warcraft Leveling guides though is that he adds all sorts of nice little tips and side paths you can take to get extra gold, find new items or land extra experience. This is the kind of stuff you always want to find in an all-in-one guide but no one ever does. For example, when you’re running around Westfall completing your 12-15 levels for a Dwarf Paladin, it’d be nice to know that the Linen cloth you’re piling up off of Defias mobs is worth something at the Auction House. Nyhm gives you that info and makes it easy to turn a profit on it.

What’s Included

The complete Nyhm package comes with the leveling guide above, but also a ton of other options you can tack on to make your gameplay experience more complete as one of the best World of Warcraft guides on the market. It includes:

• World of Warcraft Gold guide with over 100 pages of tips and tricks to making gold. He even includes his 7 day route to 10,000 gold (you’ve got to see it to believe it).
• Grinding locations depending on level, gear and class.
• Auction House strategies and gold making tips for low level players
• 125 pages of profession guides to get your professions to level 450 quickly while making good gold.
• PvP Guide with one on one strategies, macros, must have items, and battleground strategies.
• Reputation guide for every faction in Outland and Northrend

Together, this content makes for a heck of a good value, considering how useful it all is when combined into a single package. And Nyhm’s price for all this is well below the competitors – something that is hard to over look.
Nyhm’s Warcraft Guide Review - The Bottom Line

On their own, each of Nyhm’s guides may not be the best World of Warcraft guides for their respective categories. However, they each stand out as very solid, very well written guides that can get you to Level 80 in 7 days, help you land 10,000 gold in another 7 days and then hit a top arena rating in another few days. Taken as a whole, you can’t get much better than Nyhm’s Warcraft guides and that’s saying quite a bit with all the competition out there. If you want to make gold while you speed level, or have something good to do when you hit Level 80, this is the only guide option for you.

Utter dominance of a single faction? Check. Top notch video and image content? Check. One of the oldest and best respected leveling guides on the Internet? Check. Joana’s Warcraft Horde guide is all of these things, providing what is quite arguably one of the best Warcraft Horde Guide experiences around, regardless of your class or your play style.

 What more, you’ve probably all heard of Joana’s Warcraft Horde guide – it’s been around forever. It hit the Internet back  before there were any other guides and for that reason, it’s been showcasing Joana’s leveling speed and dominance for a long time. A lot of people cite this as a reason to look past the guide to some of the other, less dated options on the market. So, I want to take a closer look at what make’s Joana’s Warcraft leveling guide special, what it has improved on and what you might be able to find elsewhere.

Joana’s guide was launched back when Warcraft leveling guides were still all text and you needed to alt-tab your way through them. For that reason, it is still very much formatted in that way, relying heavily upon the web based navigation screens that it comes with. Breaking down each section of the game into small chunks with links to WoWHead and the numerous videos Joana has recorded of his leveling experiences, the interface still fees dated. It’s a bit clunky to get around and it takes forever if you’re trying to get it done in game. A leveling add-on has been tacked on in recent months to make things easier, but it still needs a little work itself.

 The Leveling Experience

 Joana’s guide has long relied upon the route that Joana provides as its number one selling point, long since making it one of the best World of Warcraft guides. The guide may not be the prettiest, but it was long the fastest. That has been somewhat negated with time, but it still provides a heck of a good run through to make it to level 80 without having to slow down. Joana added an in-game leveling mod a while back that makes for a much quicker runthrough to 80 as well.

The mod works like most mods, though you do need to manually press the buttons to move forward between steps (which is a bit frustrating at times). But, the whole guide is there and his paths really are quite fast. Whereas Azeroth and Outland are getting easier by the day to level and the guide only shows you a built-in route to doing so, Northrend really pushes the value of the guide – showing you how to get to Level 80 by not doubling back or missing any part of the complex quest chains located in each zone.

 Like any good leveling guide, Joana’s Warcraft Horde Guide provides you with a bevy of options. The base purchase will get you up to Level 70, along with a complete video of Joana speed leveling from 1-60. Here is a runthrough of everything you can get if you purchase both the 1-70 and 70-80 guides:

 In-Game Mod

• Video Walkthrough
• Quest Links
• Death Knight Strategy Guide

The guides don’t provide a whole lot of extra stuff – but for anyone speed leveling a character to 80, the extra stuff can be a bit cumbersome – it’s generally not necessary. And you do get a full Death Knight leveling and class guide, which is nice for anyone getting started with the brand new hero class.

 Joana’s Warcraft Guide Review – The Bottom Line

 The bottom line is this – if you are interested in leveling a Horde character, you need to take a close look at Joana’s guide. It is the first and still thought by some to be the best option out there. The big issue with this guide is that it is just that – a very straightforward leveling guide with no frills, a basic in-game mod, and no Alliance option as of yet. If you play both factions or would like to get a bit more information, you may be interested in some other guides. If you want the fastest possible leveling times between 1 and 80 for a Horde character, this is the guide for you.

Ever want to know everything about WoW? I’m serious, I mean everything. We’re talking PvP busting, raid smashing, leveling speed dominating, gold crunching knowledge here. I know it sounds ridiculous, but Dugi’s Ultimate WoW Guide has managed to somehow slap it all together into one monstrous package – the kind that is making the other guides on the market look silly by comparison. It’s hard to compete with someone who has everything together in one package. Of course, is that package worth all the hype? That’s the real question and the one we’re going to answer today.

What everyone really wants to know about is the leveling and World of Warcraft gold guide content in Dugi’s Ultimate leveling guides. Just to get started, Dugi offers a complete leveling guide from 1-80 for both Horde and Alliance. You can buy them together for a hefty discount and they are among the top leveling guides on the market. I have to point this out because most people see “all-in-one” guide and think that the content is all watered down to make it better as a whole. Well, the truth is that Dugi is the only guy I’ve seen pull it off – putting together everything you need into a set of guides that work together to make you better at the game, in the process making one of the best World of Warcraft guides, overall.

So, after you finish up with his Warcraft leveling guides, there are full class guides to help you maximize talent points and fighting styles. Then you can move on to work with the World of Warcraft gold guide which is among the best on the market, providing detailed strategies to make around 500 gold an hour consistently. You’ll also be able to benefit from Dugi’s wide array of PvP strategies and Profession strategies, including video tutorials, detailed walkthroughs and more.

Using Dugi’s Guides

The one thing I always liked best about Dugi’s Ultimate WoW Leveling Guide is that because it’s all written by one guy, the content blends into itself nicely, making it easy to figure out what to do as you go along. For example, because Dugi helped you reach Level 80, he knows where you’re at in terms of gold and gear for things like PvP and farming.

The Warcraft leveling guide does come with a complete in-game mod, detailing exactly where you need to go. The guide has automatic step detection so you don’t have to stumble around aimlessly because you forgot to press “next”. It also comes in a printable format for those that don’t like the mod and has every class quest included, with no grinding. You’ll find a leveling talent guide to help you master your route to 80 and even an in-game version of that talent guide (something no one else offers yet). To top it off, there is an instance guide up to Level 80 and a gear guide as you level so you know what kind of gear is best for you as you move forward.

This is just the foundation too – after you hit Level 80, Dugi’s guides really kick into gear, providing the kind of content you need to get rich and dominate in PvP.

All the Cool Stuff you Get

There are a lot of things to check off in this package – it’s a huge guide after all. Here’s a brief runthrough of everything you get from Dugi for your money:

1-80 Leveling Guide (Horde and Alliance)

• In-Game Leveling Mod
• 1-80 Talent Guide
• 1-80 Gear Guide
• 60-80 Instance Guide
• 1-450 Professions Guide
• 20 Minute Auction House Video Tutorial
• Complete World of Warcraft Gold Guide for Level 80s
• Farming Locations for while you level
• PvP Guide with one on one matchups
• PvP Macro Guide
• PvP Mods
• 60 Minutes of PvP Tutorial Videos
• Extensive PvP Strategies

Basically, everything you need to play WoW Better is tossed together into one easy, relatively cheap package.

The Ultimate WoW Guide Review – The Bottom Line

You don’t get better value anywhere on the Internet than from Dugi. Online since 2004 with guides about WoW, Dave Farrell has been writing this stuff for as long as WoW’s been around and he does it mighty well. For the money you’re spending here, you’re going to get at least double the value out of the guides (and I tend to think even more than that, because these guides are better than their competition almost completely across the board). If you need World of Warcraft guides for pretty much anything, I can recommend Dugi’s guides. If you need them for everything, you definitely need to start here because there is no better all-in-one option available.