zone jumping?

[mister_jedi]

can someone answer why the guide will say
ashenvale 20-21
okay now darkshore 21-21
okay ashenvale again 21-22
okay stonetalon 22-23
okay back to darkshore. . .

like isn't it just better to pick a zone and stick to it? that is a lot of running/flying.

[ZG Support 1]

That is done to give you the most quests for your level and reduce mob grinding. If you were to stay in (for example) Darkshore until you have done all of the quests you would have to do a lot of mob grinding for levels. The upper areas of Darkshore could get you from 10-15 area but the bottom areas you would need to be around 17 to safely do questing in there so that would mean a lot of mob grinding to get those couple of levels to keep going. Also by staying in that one zone for all of those levels would mean you've missed doing easy questing in other zones and with the quest chaining in the game that would mean you would be stuck doing grey quests to complete prerequisites or you would have to skip quests that can give you xp later on meaning more mob grinding to make up the difference.

Now in the current retail game yes it is better to stick to one zone but that is because of the zone scaling and Blizzard had changed around all of the quest chaining after Cataclysm so that it wasn't so punishing to stay in one zone. The pre-Cataclysm zones however are terrible with quest chaining and those chains spanning several levels.

[mister_jedi]

I do remember the grind from vanilla, I'm just slightly confused as my ashenvale 20-21 was almost a 3/4 bar of grind.

[mister_jedi]

And of course this is just a question of confusion as i didn't use zygor when i did vanilla originally. To make it clear, you guys make a hell of a stellar product and I am loving having it available.

[ZG Support 1]

In classic there is still a lot of grinding unfortunately. One way to reduce the feel of grinding is to kill a lot of stuff as you're traveling from point A to point B. That essentially breaks up the grinding into little pieces.

You can also skip the grind steps but keep in mind that if you do that there might come a point where you can't accept a quest or doing one is too hard due to being a lower level. At that point you could then run a couple of dungeons for grabbing levels without grinding and then just continue where you were in the guides.