Leveling World of Warcraft toons can quickly become tedious after the first 40 or so hours of game play. Though World of Warcraft is a highly addictive game, there are some parts of it that even the most dedicated player would love to skip over. There’s only so many times you can kill 40 mobs for 20 claws before you wish there were an easier way to do it. The good news for the newbie WoW player is that there are several add ons you can use to speed the process of leveling and make the process entirely more fun.

Add ons can be installed by downloading them, unzipping them, placing the file in your ‘Addons’ folder which can be found inside the Interface folder of your WoW folder.. make sense? WoW → Interface → Addons

Quest Helper

Essential for anyone who doesn’t want to have to guess where mobs are, Quest Helper is an addon which provides map references to mobs and items related to your quests. Instead of getting a quest and then spending time running around looking for the mob, NPC or location you need to visit, you simply look for the glowing squares or circles on your maps which indicate where these things can be found. Quest Helper isn’t always absolutely perfect, but it is a 99% improvement on the guess-and-test method of leveling.

Download Quest Helper here: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/quest-helper.aspx

Cartographer

Cartographer is an other essential addon which allows you to manipulate the world map for your own convenience. The standard WoW map is chunky, does not provide co-ordinates, takes up the entire screen, does not allow you to view areas you have not visited before and provides little information regarding various zones. Cartographer changes all of that.

Like Quest Helper, Cartographer is produced by Curse, and provides the following additional features:

(From Curse:)

• Battlegrounds : allows viewing of battlegrounds outside of the zone.

• Coordinates : adds coordinates to the bottom of the world map of the player and the cursor.

• Foglight : Shows unexplored areas on the map. replacement for MozzFullWorldMap or Unexplorer. Much more efficient, though.

• Group Colors : turns all your party’s and your raid’s POIs into circles colored based on class, and shows a number on them based on their raid group.

• Instance Maps : shows maps of instances.

• Instance Notes : adds boss notes and such to instance maps.

• Look ‘n’ Feel : allows you to change the transparency, position, and scale of the world map.

• Notes : lets you put notes on the map, similar to MapNotes.

• Zone Info : on hovering over a zone, it will show the levels of the zone, the instances in the zone, their levels, and the group size the instance is made for (e.g. 5-man, 40-man).

Download Cartographer here: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/cartographer.aspx

Lightheaded

Lightheaded provides in game access to Wowhhead, a massive online database containing almost everything a WoW player needs to know. When Quest Helper fails to explain that your mob is lurking in a cave which you cannot find an entrance to, or that you need to use an item to summon an NPC, Lightheaded provides tips and hints from those who have gone before you. Combined with Questhelpher and Cartographer, Lightheaded can cut your leveling time in half.

Download Lightheaded here: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7017-LightHeaded.html