Leveling a new character from scratch has been made easier than ever. Personally, I can’t account for what it was like in Vanilla WoW or even most of BC, since I started playing WoW through a RL friend, who dragged me through levels 1-60 with recruit-a-friend. I suppose the actual leveling experience of my very first toon started in Outlands at level 60. Now, with a total of three 80s and several alts in various level ranges I have come to terms with the grind that is called leveling. This is the following procedure before I start a new toon:
- Do I have all Heirlooms for the respective class I want to level?
Yes? Moving on.
No? Do I have enough spare badges to buy at least chest and shoulders for the XP bonus?
Yes? Moving on.
No? Gotta wait until I got them to start the character
- create character
- make bags and send them
- send gold
We are so spoiled by all the extras that Blizzard has added to make leveling easier. Mounts at lvl. 20 and yet I still find myself moaning about the fact that I will have to walk around for 20 levels. In fact, that is clearly the worst part of leveling. The seemingly endless traveling, killing mobs, picking flowers, errand runs, etc. And that brings me to the actual point of my post:
What does the average person do to kill the time/boredom?
I for myself am a huge of music in general. I sometimes think that I wouldn’t be able to function without music. Be it to make music myself (go go Guitar Hero, Rock Band…) or listen to some as well. My taste ranges from trance/house to 80s and 90s rock, from hip hop to classic. To sum it up: anything but Country music. It’s just not in me. So when leveling, I often find myself going to one particular website: http://www.letsmix.com/. It is meant as a showcase for up and coming DJ’s and one can browse through the world of electronics. Especially House is great to have a constant beat in the background that is not too obnoxious. Also, every now and then the in-game music of Blizzard in raids, as epic as it is sometimes, just won’t cut it. That’s when I fall back on my collection of Orchestra Movie Soundtracks, most notably that of Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. Vent is toned down in hopes that I down miss anything of particular importance. I usually don’t. At least that’s what keep telling myself 
I have similar habits when starting a new alt – I prefer to have at least the chest and shoulder heirlooms, some gold and bags. Then I´m good to go!
While levelling I will listen to music or be on vent chatting to guild mates, depending on my mood. If I´m at a really boring time in the levelling process I try to wrangle an instance boost out of some friend
I used the instance boost with refer-a-friend. Quite fun to level 2-3 times in a single instance. I haven’t used that ever since tho. Especially now with the Random Dungeon system it is almost more beneficial to just queue up for that.
I go the whole hog with my alts; not just bags/gold, but enchants, pots, food, scrolls etc. I used to listen to rock/metal on the radio when levelling, so much so that certain songs now remind me of certain zones in Northrend :S
wow, that’s quite the extensive ritual. I am constantly broke on my main because I don’t really care much for professions and the only income I have is through dailies/weeklies and what’s left from questing.
I don’t really have time for dailies currently so 90% of my income is from auction house or professions. Also as I was working on multiple alts I could stockpile the things from levelling professions to benefit the others. Super handy really, as Outlands for the 7th time is kinda boring