What the Trainer Costs from 1 to 60
Levelling plans quote the mount and almost never quote the trainer. The 2 November notes gave the second number a value, so it deserves the same treatment as the first: what the total covers, how it is actually paid out, and which parts of it we still cannot account for.
The number in the 2 November notes
The 2 November notes carry a figure that levelling guides have been estimating for years: learning everything a class trainer offers from 1 to 60 comes to a little over 206 gold. That is an official total rather than a community average, which puts it in the same category as the riding purchase. It does not move with the auction house, it does not depend on which realm a character stands on, and nobody has to watch a market to plan for it.
It is worth being precise about what sits inside that total. It is class training: the ranks of spells and abilities a trainer sells as a character levels. It is not the crafting side of the game, which is taught by different teachers and priced on its own schedule, and what a profession costs to raise is a separate bill with separate materials behind it. Treat the 2 figures as parallel costs, not as one line.
The comparison that makes it readable is the obvious one. A character saves for riding as a single lump and knows the day it is spent, while what riding costs at 40 is the number every plan is built around. The trainer total is the same size of commitment paid in pieces small enough that nobody notices them leaving.
The bill arrives in instalments
No character is ever asked for the whole total at once. Trainers sell new ranks every few levels, and the early visits cost coppers rather than gold, which is why the spend disappears into ordinary questing income without anyone writing it down. The sums climb steadily through the middle brackets and the later ranks are where most of the total actually sits, so a character that felt comfortable at 25 can be short at 45 for reasons that have nothing to do with the route it was farming.
That shape matters more than the total does. A levelling budget is a cash flow problem, not a savings problem: the question is whether there is enough coin on hand the next time a trainer is stood in front of, not whether the full amount will be earned eventually. Characters that quest through their brackets tend to stay ahead of it, and quest rewards against mob drops is the choice that decides how comfortable those visits feel.
Few players pay the published total exactly. Ranks for abilities a specification never uses get skipped, some get bought late, and some get bought on the trip after the one where they unlocked. Read the number as the ceiling for a character that learns everything offered, and expect a real purse to fall under it by whatever a given class leaves on the trainer's list.
Where it sits against the rest of the levelling bill
The awkward part is the overlap with 40. Riding is the purchase every plan stops for, and the trainer ranks that matter most are being sold in the same stretch of levels. A character that empties its purse on training in the high 30s pushes the mount back, and a character that hoards for the mount arrives at 40 with a trainer list several ranks behind. Neither is wrong, but the trade has to be made deliberately rather than discovered at a trainer with 3 gold in the bag.
Set against the rest of the outflow, the trainer is a middling sink rather than a dominant one. It competes with bags, travel, repairs and reagents, and where gold leaves the realm gives the fuller list of what a levelling character is paying into. What makes the trainer unusual is that it is predictable: unlike repairs or consumables, the schedule and the total are both known in advance.
For anyone running more than 1 character, the total is also a planning number for the roster rather than for a single purse. Each alt pays its own version of the same bill, and what a new alt costs to start is where that repetition is easiest to see.
What the figure does not settle
We do not know how the total splits between classes. A single published number implies a comparable bill across the roster, but the notes we have seen state a total rather than a per-class breakdown, and classes do not carry identical ability lists. Until something class-by-class is published, treat the figure as an order of magnitude that applies to everyone rather than as a quote for a specific character.
We also cannot confirm the edges of what the total counts. Whether it includes every trainable line a character can learn, or only the core class list, is not spelled out in anything we have read, and the same goes for costs that sit next to training without being training: respecifying is charged on its own schedule, and the fee for changing talents is not part of this number. Beta figures have also been adjusted before, so the total is current until the next set of notes says otherwise.
Nothing here should be read as a per-level table. We are not going to invent a breakdown that has not been published, and anything claiming to list exact costs rank by rank is reconstructing them from an older version of the game rather than from Forever.
Questions
Does the total include professions?
No. The figure covers class training only. Crafting and gathering trades are taught by different trainers and charged separately, along with the materials needed to raise them, so a character that runs 2 professions should budget that spend on top of the trainer total rather than inside it.
Will every character actually pay the full amount?
Most will pay less. The total assumes a character learns every rank on offer, and in practice players skip ranks for abilities they never use or buy them several levels late. Read it as the ceiling for a complete list and expect your own spend to land somewhere under it.
Is the bill the same for every class?
We do not know. The figure published in the 2 November notes is a single total and we have not seen a per-class breakdown anywhere official, so we are not going to guess at which classes sit above or below it. Treat it as a planning figure for any character until something more detailed appears.
Should training wait so the mount can be bought sooner?
That is a judgement call, and it depends on which ranks are involved. Ranks that speed up killing or reduce downtime pay for themselves across the levels before 40, while ranks for abilities a character rarely presses can wait. The trade is worth making on purpose rather than discovering it at a trainer with an empty purse.
Sources
- Official Forever notes, where the trainer total was published on 2 November — World of Warcraft news.
- Blizzard's official forums, where the notes and the follow-up questions are discussed — World of Warcraft forums.