Worst Leveling Progression Spots
 

lets move away from "efficiency" and move back towards ignorance.

lets abandon the idea of cruising your way on EZ street and embrace getting crushed by a white con monster in an unused dungeon.

If you had to suggest the WORST places to level, in terms of efficiency, danger, least populated (i.e. hard to get a group)... what would you say?

Tower of Frozen Shadow at an appropriate level per floor without gimmicks/twink items

Can't wait!

I've always found lavastorm to be particularly grueling as a levelling newb

Also Dalnir or Kaesora at an appropriate level.. Dalnir has lots of tightly-packed mobs and nearly everything in there is a caster of some sort. Kaesora is slightly more forgiving but is also a 1-way dungeon, so you have to bring a porter or crawl your way out.

I'm an expert at these!

3-9 Butcherblock (going from gfay zoneline towards crossroads)
9-14 Steamfont (near lfay zone)
12-20 Butcherblock chessboard
14-20 Lavastorm
20-24 Lake Rathe (gnolls)
24-30 SK (anything you can pick up)
14-30 Najena (working your way in)
30-37 Iceclad cougars
37-45 Iceclad dire wolves + frost giant scouts + frost giant elites (also in GD)
45-51 EJ by TT zoneline
51-56 I did normal things like kill wyverns in CS, bear pits, etc, so this doesn't count
56-60 (my game plan!) Rat maze in PoM, the two drolvargs outside of KC (ravishing drolvargs), wasps in BW in SW portion of zone, random pick-up raids ( :D ) where I sneak into the exp group AKA have a rogue in group with me

Tower of Frozen Shadow was suggested above, but deserves a second. It looks cool but the xp is just so bad, and frequently you'll be gated by the idiotic key system and have to kill xp greens for awhile to advance. Bonus points if you die on an upper floor where you can't /corpse it and have to waste a lot of time finding a way up to it.

(I liked Dalnir and Kaesora, very good ZEMs and if you have a solid group you can really cruise. They do require you to break past their hard outer shells to get to their delicious chewy centers, so a lot of people don't like these zones.)

Any outdoor non-dungeon zone deserves an honorable mention here. Why xp in a low ZEM outdoor zone when you can go to almost any dungeon and get a better rate of return per mob? Particularly bad is the Gorge of King Xorbb, but hey, if you want to get Runnyeye faction go nuts. All the mobs in the Gorge have a lot of hit points and the evil eye undercons will absolutely ruin your day. The incredibly low rate of xp is just an added "bonus".

I imagine Kithicor is probably the worst zone to XP in in the game, after the Bloody Kithicor event anyway. On green server I desperately want to XP in here before the event ruins it.

And hey, if you want inefficient, City of Mist fits that bill, it just happens to be square on the "optimal" leveling path, for absolutely no reason. I went there twice with my cleric and it crushed my soul with its super slow XP gain. You have a bunch of high 40s full groups competing for xp green mobs, kill six or so and then you're waiting for respawn again. I understand why people come here, but it is probably the least efficient place you could go for the level brackets that go there on this server (high 30s to low 40s would be fine, but that's not how it works here). The Overthere would probably be better.

Yeah Dalnir has the best exp I've ever seen. Dangerous as hell tho. Same for Kedge.

For me, hands down, Karnor's Castle (KC) is the WORST place to level. Sooo overpopulated and you are competing for pulls from hands / captain / LCY / RCY / basement / entrance / moat... my exp bar simulated an old man trying to get out of his recliner.

Very similar to the other poster who mentioned City of Mist. Went there a bit and left early recognizing the competition problem.

Swamp of No Hope deserves an honorable mention here for a 'newbie zone'. Level 18 or so skeletons can roam through the level 5 area and one shot you. Its OK for higher level, some under-utilized camps, but as a noob it is useless.

Disagree with KC. If you're going there LFG or something, then yea, it is horrible. But it can be awesome for solo/duo if you get away from traditional camps. Basement is almost never fully camped. People claim it, and then kill like 50% of the mobs. VS pit is solid too, probably best exp in the zone, but people never camp it cause they dont have a rog, or don't know how to levitate out.

Worst IMO is pretty much anything in velious. Killing mobs with twice the hp and half the exp just doesn't make sense.