Is WoW Leveling Really That Fast?

So my WoW mage has Enchanting as a profession, and he’d leveled way past the point where he could disenchant the magic items he picked up at the measely skill level of 15. I had a couple of other characters in the 25-30 range that I could have used to farm items from dungeons, but I didn’t think those items would be any better. So I got the brilliant idea that I would level another character to 15 and just keep doing dungeon instances and send all the excess low-level magic items that I picked up to my mage.

This was not a brilliant idea, as it turns out. Little did I realize that you can also raise your Enchanting skill by, you know, enchanting items, in addition to disenchanting. So I really didn’t need low-level items in the first place. But that’s not really the point of this post.

For my first failure, I made a Tauren Shaman and leveled him all the way up to 11 before I realized that … wah, wah … you can’t mail things from a Horde player to an Alliance player. Bleh. That’s annoying. In Rift, they removed that restriction a long time ago, and I just assumed that WoW would have moved past it as well. My options were to pay $30 for a faction change, or start over.

For my second failure, I went with a Dwarven Hunter so I could power through to 15 as fast as possible. I got to 15 and sent my mage 6 excess magic items and then he was able to get his skill level up over 25, and from there he was able to disenchant items I had in the bank, and then I realized I had tons of material to enchant bracers, so in the end I got my mage’s skill up over 75 so he can disenchant his own items again. End result: Didn’t need the hunter anymore, and he never went into a single dungeon. That’s not really the point of this post either.

The point is: If you didn’t know, hunters in WoW are the ones with the iwin button. My “main” is a level 63 hunter and it’s just embarassing how fast he burns through mobs in BC territory. It’s slightly more difficult starting out with a hunter because you don’t have as much focus, but not much. For the record, it took me about 5 hours and 30 minutes of /played time to get my new hunter up to 15, including some AFK breaks. People say that leveling in WoW is super fast since Cataclysm, but 5:30 doesn’t seem as fast as some other recent MMOs I’ve played. I mean, you can get from 1-15 in Rift in like two hours or less.

I guess that’s the real point of this post: WoW leveling doesn’t seem all that fast to me.