LEVELS 70-80 (Campaign)

Level 70-80 Campaign Video Guide

My Fastest 70-80 Run: https://youtu.be/jjb3QmA6qdg

My Fastest Campaign Run: https://youtu.be/fjfgLr5M5cM

Note: During your FIRST PLAYTHROUGH of The War Within, YOU MUST COMPLETE THE CAMPAIGN! Even without the presence of borrowed power systems in TWW, you'll still need to finish this questline to unlock endgame content such as meta or world quests. However, this route is still extremely fast just for reaching level 80, and aims to complete the minimum amount of side quests needed to hit Level 80 right around the time the Campaign is finished.

Starting The War Within & Dalaran Intro

Upon logging into the game on a Level 70 character, you should receive a quest fittingly named "The War Within". This quest provides you with a teleportation scroll that goes directly into your bags, and you should right click on this item to use it.
The scroll will teleport you to Silithus, and you'll need to progress through a short questline that will eventually take you to Dalaran. These quests were part of The War Within's pre-launch event, so you may have already completed these quests if you participated in the pre-patch.
The remainder of the Dalaran introduction is fairly straightforward, and the entire thing only takes about 10 minutes, so I won't bother going into further detail.
While I generally recommend enabling War Mode during leveling for the additional 10% experience, you may want to turn it off before you complete this questline and head to Khaz Algar. There's an infamous quest early on that traps you under a pile of rocks and prevents you from using abilities, but you're still attackable to the opposite faction. While the griefing surrounding this quest has likely died down by now, it can't hurt to play it safe and simply disable War Mode until you reach the new major city, Dornogal.

Isle of Dorn (Levels 70-72)

As mentioned above, you'll be trapped under a pile of rocks upon entering Khaz Algar, and you'll need to right click them in order to free yourself. You can then speak to Jaina on the beach to receive the next few quests in the chain.
Upon completing these initial quests, you'll unlock the ability to fly within Khaz Algar. If you've been away from WoW for a while, it's important to note that flying in the game has changed rather drastically. A system called Skyriding, formerly known as Dragonriding, is now the default way to move around the world. Unfortunately, you won't be able to unlock the older version of flying until you reach Level 80.
The next stretch of the campaign will lead you into Dornogal, which is a new major city introduced in The War Within. Down the line this will be your primary hub for endgame content such as crafting and weekly quests, and during this part of the campaign you'll briefly tour the city to learn where all of the important things are located.
When a quest tells you to speak with the Dornogal innkeeper, you should set your Hearthstone to this location. This will be useful to have for multiple future points within the campaign questline.
The rest of the quests within Dornogal are fairly self explanatory, but I will point out that Blizzard has introduced the ability to skip roleplay dialogue on many quests within the campaign. It should go without saying that this is a faster way to complete the quest, but obviously there's nothing wrong with losing a bit of time to enjoy the story.
At the end of the Dornogal quests, you'll be directed to a town called Freywold Village. Before heading there, you should take a short detour south-east of the city to a subzone called Crossroad Plaza. Run around this area and pick up any quests you see, including the ones given by wanted posters. You won't be completing every single quest here, but it's easier to grab all of them now and abandon the ones you don't need later on.

The first notable quest here is called "Delver's Call: Earthcrawl Mines". This is related to a new type of content added this expansion called Delves, and we will discuss this in more detail shortly. You won't be completing this quest right now, but it's important that you have it for later in the campaign.
The other two relevant quests in this area are "The Earthwound" and "Wanted: The Boroughbreaker". Both of these quests require you to kill a single mob, and both of these mobs are located fairly close by. You should complete "The Earthwound" first, and upon killing the mob you should immediately turn in the quest. The Boroughbreaker should be killed as you travel south towards Freywold Village, but you won't actually hand in this quest until later. The turn-in point is within Dornogal, so you'll just finish it the next time you return to the city.

Shortly after arriving in Freywold Village, you'll be directed to speak with Brann Bronzebeard and complete the Earthcrawl Mines, which is the delve that I mentioned just above.

When you complete this delve within the campaign, you'll also get credit for the aforementioned "Delver's Call" quest. This gives you ~90k experience completely for free, which is why it was important to grab that quest earlier.
You're supposed to be able to pick up these Delver's Call quests within the delve itself, but this is currently bugged for the campaign version of Earthcrawl Mines and it doesn't actually show up within the delve.
Now, as for Delves as a system, these are new solo "dungeons" that you'll complete alongside an NPC companion. If you've played past World of Warcraft expansions, you can treat this as the new version of Torghast, Island Expeditions, MoP Scenarios, etc.
Endgame delves have multiple variations and are a bit more open-ended, but the campaign version of Earthcrawl Mines is always exactly the same. This delve variant is very linear, and it serves as a basic tutorial for how to interact with various parts of the system. The game does a fairly good job at holding your hand through this first delve, so I won't bother going into further detail.
This is the only time during the campaign where you'll be REQUIRED to complete a delve, but you have the option to complete additional delves while leveling. Under specific circumstances these can be a viable source of experience, but we'll discuss this towards the end of the guide.

Delves aren't the only system you'll be introduced to within the campaign, as about 15 minutes later you'll be directed to complete a Follower Dungeon. This system was added towards the end of Dragonflight, and it allows you to complete dungeons with a team of up to 4 NPC companions.

As part of the campaign, you'll need to complete the Rookery within a Follower Dungeon. It's worth noting that this quest MUST be done within the Follower version of the dungeon, you can not use the Random Dungeon Finder and complete it with other players.
Like with delves, this is the only time during the campaign where you'll need to complete a Follower Dungeon. Unlike delves, however, there are 0 redeeming qualities to Follower Dungeons when it comes to leveling efficiency. I'll touch upon this towards the end of the video, but if you do decide to try out additional dungeons, they should all be completed with other players in the Random Dungeon Finder.

Upon finishing the follower dungeon, you'll be sent to the far end of the island to defend the Cinderbrew Meadery. Once you finish these quests you'll be told to return to Dornogal, and this is where you should use your Hearthstone. You should also hand in "Wanted: The Boroughbreaker" around this time.
You should now be around Level 72, and the next section of the campaign will direct you to the second zone, The Ringing Deeps. You may have noticed that I've barely recommended any side quests so far, and I want to take a moment to address that before we continue.

When leveling in modern WoW expansions, there are generally two types of leveling. The "Campaign" route is used for your very first character, since completing the story is mandatory for unlocking certain endgame activities. This guide is specifically for that type of leveling (duh). The other type of leveling is "Adventure Mode", which is a fancy term that the game uses to describe flexible leveling where all content scales alongside your character. After unlocking Adventure Mode you can effectively level by doing any activity you want in any order you want. There is still, of course, a most efficient route for this type of leveling, and that's covered in my Adventure Mode guide.
In the past few expansions, unlocking Adventure Mode had two requirements: completing the campaign AND reaching max level. This has changed in The War Within, as you now only need to complete the campaign in order to unlock Adventure Mode.
My routes for previous expansions aimed to complete the perfect amount of side quests alongside the campaign so that you would reach max level and complete the campaign at exactly the same time. Not only is this no longer necessary, but it's actually less efficient than (mostly) rushing through the campaign. Since quests won't actually scale to your level until you unlock Adventure Mode, you'll generally earn less experience during campaign leveling from most side content, be it quests, delves, or dungeons.
I will still recommend a handful of side quests throughout the campaign route, such as "Wanted: The Boroughbreaker" from earlier. When these quests align nearly perfectly with the campaign and require minimal downtime, it becomes more efficient to complete them immediately instead of waiting. Additionally, you'll want to reach Level 77 before entering the final zone, Azj-Kahet, since you'll begin to struggle against the higher level mobs if you fall too far behind.
Unless I mention a side quest directly by name within this guide, you should not complete it during the campaign. By following this route you'll finish the campaign around Level 78, and you'll then have a variety of options for wrapping up the last two levels in Adventure Mode. This also adds a bit of flexibility in case limited time events such as Darkmoon Faire or the Anniversary are active. If you're leveling with the additional XP bonuses from those events, you may end up hitting level 80 simply by completing the campaign.
The end of this guide contains a section dedicated to the final two levels within Adventure Mode.

The Ringing Deeps (Levels 72-74)

The initial quests in this zone aren't very notable, and before long you'll find yourself entering the main quest hub for the Ringing Deeps, which is called Gundargaz. Just as in Dornogal, you should locate the innkeeper in Gundargaz and set your Hearthstone here, as there are multiple points later in the campaign where you'll want to use it.
As you complete the initial quests in this town, there are two side quests which you should pick up: "On Cold Dark Wings". and "Discarded and Broken". You should complete the objectives for both of these quests immediately, but don't actually hand them in until later on.
The next chunk of campaign quests in this zone are pretty self explanatory, and you'll eventually encounter a scenario that tasks you with sneaking around groups of kobolds and putting out candles. The intended way to complete this scenario is by avoiding combat, but it's also just as effective to completely ignore the stealth mechanics and AoE down all of the kobolds.
After finishing the scenario the game will direct you back to Gundargaz, and this is a good spot to use your hearthstone. You should now hand in the side quests from earlier, and you'll get a follow up quest from completing "Discarded and Broken". Like before, you should complete the objective for this quest immediately, but you won't hand it in until later on.
From here you'll be sent towards the bottom of the zone, and after completing all of the quests with Magni and Dagran, you'll once again be told to return to Gundargaz. If you managed to complete this questline extremely quickly, your hearthstone may still be on cooldown, but you can feel free to use it here if it happens to be back up.
The final set of quests within the Ringing Deeps takes place in a subzone called the Earthenworks, and a lot of these quests can be pretty frustrating. During the quest "Battle of the Earthenworks", you need to complete various objectives to fill up a bar, and the fastest way to do this is by clicking on friendly Earthen NPCs standing nearby. Each NPC you clock on rewards a large chunk of percentage for the quest, and you're able to interact with them while mounted, making the process super easy.
Additionally, there's a treasure located just to the left of this area called Discarded Tools, and you can quickly interact with it for a free 5k experience.
One of the final quests in the zone takes you into yet another scenario, and it's pretty lengthy, as you need to wait on Dagran to slowly cut open multiple doorways.

When you reach the room with turrets, you can aim your bombs in a precise location to blow up multiple turrets with a single throw.
Later on you'll reach a gigantic room where you need to defend Dagran as he plays around with a console, but the description of this part of the quest is a bit misleading. It's presented as a time based segment where you fight off waves of enemies, but it begins to speed up as you kill additional mobs. It's actually faster to completely ignore Dagran and run around the room killing anything you find, as eventually the stage will be marked as complete and Dagran will move onto the next doorway.

After this scenario you'll need to wait around for Moira to finish some roleplay dialogue. This is a great opportunity to complete the final side quest in the chain that you started earlier, "INSERT DISCARDED AND BROKEN FOLLOW UP QUEST NAME".
Once you've completed these side quests and the campaign quest, you'll technically be ready to move onto the third zone, Hallowfall. However, there are a few final side quests that you'll want to finish before you move on. Just outside of the entrance to Hallowfall you'll encounter three more side quests.

The first of these quests is "Cinderbrew Reserve", and while this normally requires you to escort a keg of beer through an annoying stealth mission, certain classes such as monks can completely bypass it with creative usage of their abilities. With a well placed trascendence it's possible to teleport directly up a cliff and easily drop the keg of beer off at its destination. If you don't have abilities that can trivialize this quest, I'd recommend skipping it, as the intended method makes it really inefficient.
Nearby you'll find three more sidequests: "An Igneous End", "Magmanagement", and "Sampling Steam". The steam quest takes forever to finish, so you shouldn't bother completing it. However, the two quests to kill elementals and rescue miners are both incredibly fast, so it's worth knocking those two out before you enter Hallowfall.

Hallowfall (Levels 74-77)

The third zone is a bit interesting, as on one hand, the campaign itself is extremely straightforward and I don't have much to say about it; however, this zone is also where you're going to get the vast majority of your side quest XP, so there's a lot to discuss on that front. Hallowfall has a ton of side quest hubs that align well with the campaign, making this a great place to get catch up on XP before heading into the final zone.
After entering the first town in Hallowfall, Dunelle's Kindness, you should grab the quests "For Morale" and "Suspicious Minds". However, you shouldn't complete these quests immediately, as they'll overlap with another set of side quests that you'll receive much later into the zone.
Roughly 15-20 minutes later you should be reaching a town called Lorel's Crossing, and as you pass through here you'll grab a quest called "Light's Out". This will unlock a side quest hub that you'll want to complete later on, but again, you shouldn't go there right away.
Shortly afterwards you'll reach a point in the campaign where you need to kill a bunch of fish monsters. For reference, these campaign quests are called "Tricks of the Dark" and "Fickle Fiendish Fish".

When finishing these quests you should look for a stealthed mob called a Kobyss Shadeshaper, as killing it drops an item that starts a quest. Complete this sidequest chain as you finish the nearby campaign quests.
You should also complete the nearby bonus objective "Release the Beasts", as this gives an additional 30k experience.
Upon finishing the aforementioned campaign quests, you shouldn't rush to hand them in just yet. You should fly to the islands in the northeast and turn in the quest "Light's Out" to start another quest chain in a hub called Velhan's Claim.
Once you've completed all of the quests here, you can fly back to the shoreline and hand in your campaign quests from earlier.

You'll continue along the Hallowfall campaign for quite a while without encountering any side quests, until you reach the main hub named Mereldar. Shortly after entering this city you should set your hearthstone at the local inn, since, as you may already expect, it will save you a bit of time later on.
As you complete quests within the town, you should pick up every single side quest that you come across, as most of them will be worth completing. The only two side quests that I don't recommend doing are called "The Last Mage" and "Fishing is Good for the Soul".
As for other side quests, you should immediately finish anything that is located within the city of Mereldar, but a handful of chains will direct you towards a different section of Hallowfall, and you'll want to finish them after you've progressed a bit further in the campaign.
Upon completing every single campaign quest in the Veneration Grounds, you'll receive a follow-up quest called "The Final Front", which will direct you into the final zone of Khaz Algar, Azj-Kahet. However, you're not quite ready to enter that zone yet, as this is when you'll want to finish all of the recommended Hallowfall side quests.

You'll kick things off with "The Brothers Braunpyke", as this chain starts close by. Eventually you'll receive a quest called "Go to the Priory", but things become extremely inefficient from that point on.
At this stage you should fly east and complete the quests starting with "An Orphan's Request".
Fly further east and complete five different side quests that are all very close together: "Regular Fiber", "Does Anyone Like Wasps?", "A Batty Request", and the two you picked up shortly after entering Hallowfall, "For Morale" and "Suspicious Minds".
Many of these quests will be completed close to the entrance of Hallowfall, so you should use your hearthstone and return to Mereldar once you're finished. From here, you can hand in the quest "A Final Goodbye", and then continue the campaign into Azj-Kahet.

Azj-Kahet (Levels 77-78)

At this point in time you should hopefully be close to hitting Level 77. Most of the mobs in early Azj-Kahet are level 78-79, so you ideally don't want to reach this zone too early, since the mobs may give you a bit of trouble.
Around this time you'll begin the worst quest in the entire War Within campaign, where you have to shoot down nerubians while riding a giant zeppelin. Although this quest is conceptually very cool, for whatever reason Blizzard decided to give the zeppelin the most cursed controls of all time, and they heavily restrict your camera movement, making it extremely difficult to aim your shots properly. Once you've unlocked all three abilities on the zeppelin, I'd actually recommend exiting the vehicle and quickly re-entering it. This will place you back at the start of the quest, but all of the mobs will respawn and you'll still have all three powers unlocked. You'll now be able to quickly blast a bunch of nerubians and complete the quest earlier than intended.
Upon fully entering Azj-Kahet, you'll immediately want to grab a nearby side quest called "The Second Front". Completing this quest alongside the nearby campaign is extremely easy, and it offers two follow-ups that are also both incredibly quick.
From this point I have very little to say about Azj-Kahet as a zone. There are some alright side quests in this area, but you're already super close to unlocking Adventure Mode, and the other zones are significantly better. Additionally, the campaign within Azj-Kahet is notably shorter than every other zone, and most of the quests are self explanatory.
As you reach the end of the zone, you'll receive one final quest which tells you to return to Dornogal. This may seem like a long trip, but worry not, as a nearby teleporter will open up, allowing you to instantly travel between Dornogal and the primary hub in Azj-Kahet.
As previously mentioned, completing this quest will unlock Adventure Mode for your entire account, and this includes the character that you're currently leveling. You can then freely roam around Khaz Algar and level through any activity of your choosing.

Adventure Mode (Levels 78-80)

Assuming you leveled with no experience modifiers (Darkmoon Faire, Anniversary, etc), you should be around Level 78 after finishing the campaign. Now that you aren't constrained by the inefficient campaign quests, the final two levels should be extremely easy to complete.
Obviously you have a ton of options here due to the nature of Adventure Mode, and as I've already stated above, I have an entirely separate guide on this website which explains the best ways to level. It would obviously be silly for me to copy+paste my entire Adventure Mode guide here, but I will take a moment here to summarize the options you have available. If one of these sounds interesting, you can read the relevant section of the Adventure Mode guide to learn more.
Isle of Dorn Side Quests: When I initially developed this route prior to the expansion's launch, side quests within the first zone, Isle of Dorn, were my primary recommendation for players finishing the campaign. Nearly every single quest hub in this zone is efficient for leveling, and since the campaign ends in Dornogal, you're already fairly close to most of them. In particular, you should aim to complete quests in Rambleshire, a hub to the north, Mourning Rise, a hub east of Dornogal, and Freywold Village, which you already visited during the Isle of Dorn campaign. These side quests are still featured heavily in my Adventure Mode route, but a few more options have become viable since the expansion launched.
Crafting Experience: Technically speaking, this is the fastest way to complete the last two levels. The only problem is that it requires you to have an empty profession slot, and you'll need spend a decent amount of gold. Since this guide is aimed at new players who likely haven't farmed much gold, I generally wouldn't recommend doing this. Veteran players likely have no issue with dropping thousands of gold to save ~30 minutes - 1 hour, but it's better to save all of your gold if you're just starting out. If you have a lot of spending money and want to give this method a shot, I have a detailed breakdown in the Adventure Mode guide which includes a material shopping list.
Delves: You may remember earlier in the campaign when I suggested you grab a "Delver's Call" quest before completing the Earthcrawl Mines. These quests give a colossal amount of experience relative to how long most delves take to complete, and this makes delves a very efficient leveling method as a result. Completing these one-time Delve quests is one of the most important parts of my Adventure Mode route, however, not all delves are created equally. If you want to blindly run various delves across Khaz Algar and get your final two levels that way, it will work perfectly fine, but there are many ways you can optimize this process. The Adventure Mode guide goes into more detail on how to be efficient with your delve runs, and I've even included a tier list for every single delve and its story variants.
World Quests: I'm often asked whether or not World Quests are worth completing for leveling, and the short answer is that no, they are not. The long answer is that most world quests give less experience than standard quests AND take longer to complete, making them a waste of time in 90% of cases. However, some world quests will directly overlap a standard quest hub, allowing you to complete them with minimal additional effort. In these specific cases they can be worth completing, but you should never actively go out of your way to search for World Quests.
War Within Dungeons: I'm only mentioning dungeons here since I know many people will ask about it otherwise, but they are generally not worth completing for efficient leveling. If you really enjoy running dungeons and want to finish your last 2 levels by trying out the new expansion dungeons, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's far from being a fast way to level up. You may see guides online which refer to Normal dungeon spamming as the fastest way to level, but this is no longer the case. When the expansion first launched there were scaling issues that allowed players to finish dungeons in ~2-3 minutes, but this has since been fixed. Dungeons now take considerably longer to finish, and the experience they reward is not worth the time investment.
Follower Dungeons: I touched upon this briefly when discussing the mandatory Rookery run that you complete as part of the campaign, but Follower Dungeons should NEVER be used while leveling. For whatever reason, Blizzard doesn't want these dungeons to be a real substitute for running with other players, so they give far less experience than regular dungeons. As things stand, Follower Dungeons are only useful if you're trying to practice your spec before jumping into multiplayer content.
Timewalking Dungeons: Timewalking is a limited time event that rolls around every few weeks, and it allows you to queue for dungeons from older expansions that scale up to your level. Many people seem to believe that Timewalking dungeons are extremely efficient, but I've disproven this with countless test runs over the years. That being said, for people who really enjoy dungeon spamming, Timewalking dungeons ARE considerably faster than normal War Within Dungeons, and spamming them (generally as a tank) isn't that much worse then my standard route.
If something isn't mentioned here, it's probably not even remotely an efficient source of experience, and you shouldn't waste your time with it.