So, as many of you may have heard, or known about the Earthen when reading their race traits, is that the earthen get 100% bonus to discovering locations.
I really didn’t feel like leveling a character, but I did want to create an earthen, so I decided to see if it could actually be done and whether it’s viable.
TLDR: Yes, it’s viable. However, it’s worth mentioning I have the 25% experience bonus to leveling due to have several 80 chars. (not sure if this applies tho)
The Darkmoon faire buff didn’t affect bonus XP like I thought it would. In fact, I’m questioning whether the 25% bonus even applies to this situation.
Is it viable? well, it works. I mean, it’s not the greatest gameplay, to fly around, discovering locations and all that. You need to swerve in a S pattern all throughout the zones, because without the micro XP you get from discovering important locations you won’t be getting a whole lot of XP from just discovering the map alone.
At times, I would level by flying over a chain of locations in about 2-3 minutes. And that’s at level 50, not exactly low. But the XP did try out near the end of level 72, Blizzard did seem to recognize and cap this.
With that being said, you can in fact level an earthen, reasonably fast, by just flying around undiscovered zones across all the expansions. Some zones require an unlock, so you may run into barriers, but it’s fairly seamless without much issues.
Would I recommend it? Not for classes you have never played. I think it’s worth getting familiar with a new class while leveling as the spells and talents trickle in. Otherwise, I don’t know, that’s up to you. Feel like sky riding, listening to something in the background for about 5-7 hours (I’d estimate) to level a char up?
The other positive caveat is that it’s nostalgic seeing old zones and some of these look pretty cool from a birds eye view.