Zygor Guides vs Rested XP: 1 to 80 Speed Run in WotLK Classic

Warcraft Guru is affiliated with Zygor Guides & Rested XP.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft on and off since The Burning Crusade era, and as such, have leveled numerous characters to max level across the many iterations of the game that have been released. Leveling new characters often feels like a chore, regardless of the expansion, as I just want to get it done quickly so I can enjoy the end-game content.

In retail WoW, this probably involves me sitting in my faction’s capital city spamming dungeons, as it is an easy and efficient way to level up. However, in Wrath of the Lich King Classic , leveling is much harder and dungeon spamming doesn’t quite work due to the lower amount of experience rewarded, and increased difficulty in finding a dungeon group without the dungeon finder.

When I started my main on WotLK, I wanted to follow the most efficient and effective leveling route to reach the max level as easily and fast as possible. I’d leveled up countless characters through other versions of the game, so I wasn’t excited to do it all again. This led me to explore leveling addons, and the most popular premium guides it seemed was Zygor Guides and Rested XP.

For this time around leveling through WotLK, I wanted to try out Zygor Guides and Rested XP for myself and see if they are worth it. I am writing this review based on my experience using them to reach max level. I will explain what I liked and didn’t like about the guides, and overall conclude if I think they are worth it. I will also reveal how long it takes to reach level 80 with and without the addons and compare both guides, but this review will mainly focus on Zygors features in the beginning.

Table of Contents:

Desktop Client
Zygor's UI
Automation Features
Zygor Talent Recommendations
Grinding Chunks of XP
Mob Highlighting
Unrecognized Completed Tasks
Are Zygor & Rested XP Guides Worth it?
How Long to Reach Level 80?
Zygor Guides vs Rested XP
To Conclude...

Desktop Client

The first thing that I liked about the addon is the Desktop Client. The entire process of subscribing and installing the addon was extremely smooth and fast, which I thought was great. Signing up and subscribing on the Zygor Guides website took a few minutes, and afterward, I was able to download the Desktop Client. It is a lightweight UI software that helps locate your installed WoW games, as well as install and update.

Within seconds of launching the client and logging in, it detected my Wrath of the Lich King Classic installation and installed the latest guides. I was impressed that everything was done via the client so fast, as I was expecting to have to login to my account via an in-game window.

When I launched the game, the addon displayed automatically and worked fine as if I had installed it manually, except I didn’t have to do so. The client can also update the addon itself automatically, so I didn’t have to do so myself like with other addons.

Zygor's UI

The in-game UI itself is also very nice and user-friendly. It was very clean and professional, and throughout my experience, I never encountered a UI bug that is present in other UI addons made by independent individuals. All the buttons worked as they should and navigating through the menus felt smooth.

I was also extremely impressed with the functionality that is offered in the addon itself. I downloaded Zygor just for the leveling guides, but was impressed to see guides in the addon for professions, reputation, gold making, and even mounts. As a casual player, these bonus guides that aren’t only focused on leveling are useful. It alleviates the amount of research and preparation I need to do myself before doing a long and engaging activity in the game like farming a faction’s reputation.

Automation Features

The addon itself has many ‘automation features’ that help to automate various aspects of the game. These can all be enabled and disabled as you see fit from the addon’s setting page, however, the ones that I found very useful were the following:

Auto Quest Hand-In and Accept
New Abilities Alert
Gear Upgrades
Recommended Quest Rewards

All four of these features can be found in alternative leveling addons. However, I have personally found the implementations of these features in the Zygor Guides to be the best. These are the sort of features that often cause UI bugs and glitches; but I experienced very few of these whilst using Zygor Guides, unlike other leveling addons.

These features were definitely worth enabling, as they help automate the leveling process. And by that, I mean I had to make fewer decisions and get less involved in the leveling process, which essentially makes it easier and perhaps faster. For instance, I don’t have to carefully consider gear upgrades, or visit a class trainer after each time I level up to check if I have new abilities. Instead, the addon does it all for me, so I can just sit back and focus on following the guide.

Zygor Talent Recommendations

This is another feature of Zygor that I really liked and wasn’t expecting at all. And that is complete talent tree templates for each spec in the game. Talent trees in Wrath of the Lich King are huge, and deciding what spec to build can be very time-consuming. If you are like me and just to level up fast, Zygor features complete template builds that you can have automatically pick your talents each time you level up.

I used this feature particularly, as I was playing a new spec (Frost Mage) and I didn’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time researching builds. So, I set the talent tree recommendation profile within the Zygor Guides UI to Frost Mage, and then every time I leveled up, I just had to click learn on the highlighted talent and it was all done for me.

Also, I am pretty sure this might not necessarily be recommending the ‘best’ talent build for each spec, but I am pretty confident the ones included are much better than something I could come up with without serious thought being put into it.

Grinding Chunks of XP

Occasionally, and particularly in higher levels I found frequently that I would have to grind mobs for large chunks of experience before the guide itself progressed to the next step. The addon intentionally holds you back from passing certain steps if you are below a certain level of experience, so it tells you to grind mobs and gives you recommended location.

This is a feature that has been seen in many classic leveling guides, as sometimes it is faster and more efficient. However, I don’t like to grind mobs and would have liked the option to remove grind steps from the guide. I just want to point out that you can skip steps, but then it sometimes caused issues down the line if I wasn’t at the right level to accept a quest.

Mob Highlighting

I was surprised that Zygor didn’t have any highlighting either on tooltips or on enemy unit frames to display if they are needed for a quest or not. I just went ahead and installed Questie to get around this, but I felt that Zygor should have implemented this feature. I think it would be very useful as then it’s just another element to the game that I don’t have to think about and can leave to the addon.

Unrecognized Completed Tasks

Occasionally, a guide step will not recognize if you have completed a specific task. This can be experienced when performing tasks such as talking to an NPC, purchasing an item, clicking a quest item, etc. Fortunately, there is a way to manually move forward in the guide if it does get stuck and the button to do so is easily found on the UI itself. It would be nice if Zygor could iron out some more of these bugs to make the recognition a bit smoother. Especially considering it is a premium addon that you must pay a monthly subscription for.

Are Zygor & Rested XP Guides Worth it?

Based on my experience leveling up in the Wrath of the Lich King Classic, I do think they are worth it. I mentioned how they automate the leveling process a lot, and by that, I mean I was able to level quickly and efficiently whilst giving the process very minimal attention and thought.

This allowed me to do things like watch Netflix whilst completing quests, as the addons literally highlighted the path to the next step in the quest and clearly highlighted key pieces of information regarding what I needed to do. It also recommended everything to me about what quests to complete, items to choose, talents, etc. All I had to do was control the character’s movement, and it was like the addons did the rest.

This was great for me as I didn’t want to get immersed into the leveling experience, as I’ve done it so many times before, that I just wanted to get to the max level as soon as possible to experience the end-game content. As such, Zygor & Rested XP were extremely useful and helped me achieve this.

How Long to Reach Level 80?

With my Frost Mage it took just over 6 days played time to go from level 1 to 80 in Wrath of the Litch King Classic, which is 2 whole days faster leveling with Zygor Guides. Things did admittedly seem slow from levels 70 to 80, which took more than 2 days played time.

Rested XP seems to come out on top, leveling a Fury Warrior from 1 to 80 in 5 days and 6 hours! Without Zygor Guides or Rested XP I would reach level 80 in about 8 to 9 days played time in total, so thats around 25% to 35% faster leveling with the addons.