How long does it take to get to level 60 in WoW Classic

How long does it take to get to level 60 in WoW Classic
  • Author: Furious
  • Date: April 30, 2019
  • Updated: October 11, 2020
  • Expansion: WoW Classic

We’ve all seen this question a thousand times by now; “How long will it take to get to level 60 in WoW Classic”. A question that’s difficult to answer at the best of times and the answers are always filled with anecdotes about “well when I played in Vanilla I was able to get to 60 in…”.

In this article we’re going to look at how long it would take when accounting for the number of hours played per week (on average) by the player. Have a full time job and can only squeeze in 6 hours a week? That’s gonna take a while.

Some players, on certain classes, are able to achieve level 60 in extraordinarily fast times such as Joana, who has the world record fastest time to reach max level in Vanilla WoW at 4 days 20 hours and who is planning to play WoW Classic and smash his existing record.

Joana Vanilla WoW World Record

So what’s the average time to level 60 anyway? The aforementioned Joana stated in 2013 that “The time it takes for the average player to level from 1 to 60 was around 30 days of playing time.” however if you look at replies to the question on various forums such as reddit or the Blizzard forums you’ll see quite a few replies such as:

The most common playtime to 60 I saw on private servers with all my friends was 8 days played. That’s with questing addons. – Eliariath

Average is prob around 9-10 Days played – /u/kingclax

We put quite a bit of stock in Joana’s knowledge, however there’s a lot more information about WoW Classic out there now and more players are intimately familiar with it. So we added two tables, in one we split the difference and went with 20 days as the average total time /played until reaching level 60 and in the other we used 10 days /played, then we went to our WoW Classic Guide to Rested Experience and grabbed the table with all of the XP needed for every level until level 60 and grouped it for every 10 levels and ended up with this:

Level
Total XP
60
4084700
50
2306100
40
1154400
30
499000
20
167200
10
27600

From there it was fairly straightforward to calculate our numbers. We used different numbers for the hours played per week in order to see how long it takes a player to reach level 60 based upon the amount of time they’re able to invest:

Here is the data at 10 days /played

  • HPW – Hours Played Per Week
  • TTM (M) – Time to max level in months (using 30.4 as the average length of a month)
  • TTM (W) – Time to max level in weeks
  • TTM (D) – Time to max level in days
HPW
TTM (M)
TTM (W)
TTM (D)
4
13.8
60
420
6
9.2
40
280
8
6.9
30
210
10
5.5
24
168
12
4.6
20
140
16
3.5
15
105
20
2.8
12
84
30
1.8
8
56
40
1.4
6
42

To summarize some of our favorites:

  • At 10 hours played per week it will take 5 and a half months to reach level 60
  • At 20 hours played per week if will take 2.8 months to reach level 60
  • Even if you play 40 hours per week it will still take you 1.4 months to reach level 60

Here is the data at 20 days /played

  • HPW – Hours Played Per Week
  • TTM (M) – Time to max level in months (using 30.4 as the average length of a month)
  • TTM (W) – Time to max level in weeks
  • TTM (D) – Time to max level in days
HPW
TTM (M)
TTM (W)
TTM (D)
4
27.6
120
840
6
18.4
80
560
8
13.8
60
420
10
11.1
48
336
12
9.2
40
280
16
6.9
30
210
20
5.5
24
168
30
3.7
16
112
40
2.8
12
84

To summarize some of our favorites:

  • If you can only fit 4 hours per week to play in your busy schedule, that’s going to be a whooping 2 years, 3 months, 2 weeks, 4 days (holy shit)
  • If you can play a respectable 10 hours per week it will take you 11 months to reach level 60
  • Even if you play 40 hours per week it will still take you 3 months to reach level 60

Here’s to hoping that Blizzard’s phased rollout has plenty of time between each phase for the “average” playerbase.

Full credit to u/ricco19 for his awesome screenshot that we hope he doesn’t mind us using.

 

About the Author

Furious

If I'm not working or spending time with the family I'm probably gaming. Some of my favorite recent games I've played are Far Cry 5, World of Warcraft Classic, and 7 Days to Die.
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SammyTwoSmokes
SammyTwoSmokes
4 years ago

Great article! Does this take rested bonus into consideration in any way? I fear many people will be deterred from playing if they think it will take them a year to reach 60. Surely RB would reduce the amount of time required if you were playing only 10 hours a week.

Last edited by SammyTwoSmokes
Robert White
Robert White
Reply to  Furious
4 years ago

Hi Both,

Some theorycraft for you.

According to Wowwiki rested XP doubles combat gained experience. Assuming you play 10 hrs a week (1.43 hrs a day) it will be possible to store up 22.57 hrs of rested experience if logged out in an inn or city. One bubble of rested xp is earned for 8 hours of resting, equating to 2.8 bubbles or ~14% of a level.

Note: As higher levels require an exponential increase in exp to obtain, rested exp will become more valuable at higher levels.

Calculating the impact of rested exp becomes significantly complex, due to the increase in exp required at higher levels and the addition of quest based exp. For example, at level 59 and 10 hrs a week, it may be the case that the player is constantly rested, whereas at level 1-10 the rested exp will be used quickly. In addition, if you kill mobs that are higher or lower the amount of exp gained is increased and decreased respectively.

Scenario 1 – Simplest

To simplify this we could create the simplest case scenario. The simplest scenario would be if the player only played when they were rested and only gained exp from combat (yikes). In this case, the impact of rested exp would be to half the number of mobs required to gain the same experience as unrested. Therefore, you would imagine that at a maximum, half the time would be required to reach level 60 as half the time would be required fighting mobs. In reality (if you didn’t lose your mind) travel time and gathering gear, as well doing other stuff would reduce this.

Realistically the player will level with combining questing and mob killing so I’ll try and figure out if there’s a simple way to model that.

Regards

Rob

Last edited by Robert White
Nick Kerr
Nick Kerr
3 years ago

This article is absolutely delusional. It takes only 240 hours to get to level 60

Last edited by Nick Kerr
pepito
pepito(@pepito)
4 years ago

I found this simulator on youtube maybe it can help someone :
https://youtu.be/s_Tigyhjwow

Last edited by pepito
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