my observations so far leveling a ogre shaman to 7 YMMV
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i didn't care much for going up and down the road to inno. it seemed like there were either never any enemies, or so many enemies i'd get swarmed and have to run back to the guards. instead i found this nice little pocket in the upper right corner of the map. skeletons, broodlings, occasionally some bats. spiderlings are also plentiful but they help their own kind so you have to be careful of the bigger spiders which will destroy you. unlike the roads the land is a little flatter and there aren't quite as many trees so it's easier to keep an eye on the area around you. it's also nice because if you hang near the walls and aren't familiar with the zone it's easy to get to guards, just follow the wall west. the dangers, outlined in yellow, are not running into the camps on accident or pissing off the bigger spiders.
i hung around the Rathe zone too, it got some traffic from higher levels who occasionally would throw me buffs which helped. didn't care much for this area, you can snag some higher level lizards here and there but there's a Dark Assassin mob, level 50 whose route i don't know but someone was nice enough to warn me and i nearly ran into him on my way out of the area.
as far as inno goes that place outside of guk is fantastic. you can guaranteed handle the guards at level 6. they spawn every 7 and a half minutes or so, getting them timed to spawn apart is useful because you can pop out and grab some of the nearby frogloks on the island to the left of the 'cave' the entrance sits on and still have enough hp to tank and mana to use spells. the "DoT" place on the map is a merchant who sells your lvl5 and lvl9 dot spells, i dunno how mana efficient Sicken is but i've been using it because it counteracts natural regen and it's useful for softening up mobs when you have more than one wailing on you. that same merchant is also nice because you don't have to go all the way back into town to offload your junk and you'll probably be getting quite a few weapons fighting frogloks. being by guk is useful too because you can usually get a buff or two. anything is nice but i found AC and mana regen were probably the most useful. mana above all else, it's kind of surprising the blatantly stupid shit you can get away with when resources are no object. i added a caution circle her just to reiterate that good-aligned mob to the right of the guk cave, that guy can be easy to overlook and is on the path to the in-zone merchant so always always always check for that guy.
i'm planning to stick around until i hit level 9 and get sow, after that Norrath kind of becomes your oyster. i saw a post a few pages back mentioning Befallen so i might give that a go. i like the grouping aspect of this game it's more fun than any other MMO but sometimes finding a group or getting into one can be impossible so it's nice to know OT is there if this doesn't pan out.