Quest Rewards Against Mob Drops Before 60
Two things fund a character before the level cap: the quest log and whatever the mobs leave behind. They are not the same kind of income, they run out in different ways, and most levelling plans only count one of them. This is how the 2 compare and how a grind spot gets picked when one is chosen.
Two income streams, two shapes
A quest turn-in pays once. The coin arrives in a lump, it is the same size for everybody who hands the quest in, and it stops the moment a zone runs out of quests. Mob drops work the other way round: small amounts of coin from humanoids, grey items that only become gold at a vendor, and cloth or hides whose value depends on which profession the character carries. One stream is a schedule, the other is a rate, and the 2 fail for different reasons.
That difference decides how the early levels are funded. A character following the quest log is paid for progress it was going to make anyway, which is why what quest turn-ins pay covers most of the early bills with no route planned around it. A character standing in one camp is paid for time, and that payment is not real until a vendor trip happens, since what vendors pay for greys is the whole value of half the bag on the way back.
Neither stream is only gold, and that is the part a straight comparison loses. Quests hand over experience and reward gear alongside the coin, so the same hour buys levels as well as money. Grinding hands over materials, skill-ups on a gathering trade and nothing else, so the hour has to be judged on what the bags hold at the end of it. Before the cap the two are competing for the same evening rather than for the same purse, and levelling speed against coin earned is the frame worth using.
What picking a grind spot actually costs
What makes a camp worth standing in is mechanical rather than scenic. How close the mobs stand to each other, how quickly they come back, whether they are humanoid, and how far the nearest vendor and mailbox sit from the spot. Humanoids carry coin and cloth; beasts carry skins and little else unless the character can skin them. A dense camp a short ride from a vendor will usually beat a richer one that needs a long trip every time the bags fill.
The camp is also shared with whoever else found it. Respawns get thinner the moment a second farmer arrives, and the whole thing can change without warning when a layer change mid-route drops the character into a different copy of the zone. Some spots are better handled by a pair than alone, which is the argument in splitting a camp with a group, and a few classes pull far more at once, which is a separate calculation set out in pulling packs as a mage.
Two costs sit around the camp rather than inside it. The first is carrying capacity, because a route ends when the bags end and not when the farmer gets tired, which makes how many slots a route needs a question to settle before the first pull. The second is the road itself. Every vendor trip, every flight and every corpse run is unpaid time, and hours spent moving between zones are the quietest deduction from any grinding evening.
What the quest log costs before it pays
Quests are not free either. The log sends a character across a zone and back, collection steps ask for drops that refuse to appear, and escorts fail. Deaths during a quest chain are the same expense as deaths anywhere else, which is why repair bills after a death belong in the levelling budget rather than in the raid one. A quest hub that has been outlevelled pays the same coin for more travel, and that is where the case for standing still gets made.
The offsetting item is the one most comparisons miss. Reward gear is money the character does not have to spend, and a usable weapon handed over at the end of a chain removes a purchase that weapon prices before the cap would otherwise make. The reverse happens too: when a collection step will not finish, buying a quest drop outright turns an evening of killing into a single listing, which is grinding and questing trading places.
Dungeons sit between the 2 and borrow from both. A run pays coin from the mobs, greys for the vendor, quest turn-ins inside the instance and occasional gear, all without the travel that a surface route carries. What that mix returns and where it falls short is handled separately in what a dungeon run returns, and it is the obvious third option when neither the quest log nor a camp is paying.
What we cannot tell you yet
We have no measured figures for any of this on Forever, and we are not going to invent them. Nobody has published quest reward values, vendor sell prices or drop rates for this line, and the numbers posted from the beta describe a build that is still being adjusted ahead of 4 November. Anything presented as gold per hour at this stage is somebody's evening on one character, in one zone, at one level, which is useful as a story and not useful as a plan.
What is testable is your own run. The client already counts kills, deaths and money earned, and the in-game statistics panel turns a guess about a camp into something that can be compared against last week. Do that over a few sessions and the question answers itself for your class and your route. The wider order of operations, bracket by bracket, is laid out in the staged plan from 1 to 60.
Questions
Do quests pay more gold than grinding before 60?
We have no published figures for Forever and will not guess at them. Structurally, quest turn-ins pay a fixed amount for progress the character was making anyway, while grinding pays by the hour and keeps paying after the quest log is empty. Before the cap the quest route usually wins on total value because it also delivers levels and reward gear in the same hour, but that is a statement about shape rather than a measured ratio.
Is it worth stopping to sell greys while levelling?
It depends on where the vendor is. Grey items are only worth anything after a vendor trip, so a camp or quest hub with a vendor nearby converts them cheaply, while a long detour spends more time than the stack is likely to return. The usual compromise is to sell whenever a flight path or a hub is already on the route and to drop the lowest-value items when the bags fill instead of making a special trip.
Should a levelling character grind for profession materials instead of coin?
Often yes, if the character carries a gathering trade and intends to use it. Materials hold value on the auction house in a way that vendor trash does not, and skinning or mining a camp that is being killed anyway costs almost no extra time. The weakness is that it ties income to one market, and a zone full of other gatherers thins both the nodes and the price.
Does any of this still apply at 60?
Only partly. The quest log stops being an income source once the zones are finished, so the comparison collapses into choosing between farming routes, dungeons and crafting. The grind-spot questions carry over unchanged, because density, respawn rate, travel and bag space decide what a camp returns at any level.
Sources
- Official site for the Classic line, used for dates and feature announcements — World of Warcraft official site.
- Player reports and beta threads we read for levelling and farming discussion — Blizzard WoW forums.