The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.
A question I often see asked in chat channels is whether it's better to focus on completing quests or kill monsters if you are trying to gain levels and experience points (XP). In this case, the common answer is generally the right one, which is that questing will probably yield more XP than simple farming of mobs. However, that's a rather simplistic answer to a more complicated question.
As with many of these kinds of recurring questions, the correct and complete answer is that it depends on several factors.
One of the most important factors to consider is the type of quests you're working on and the level those quests are designed for. For instance, if you are a level 20 character working on a quest designed for level 10 characters, you might be wasting your time. The amount of XP you're going to gain for completing that quest is going to be relatively low. If that quest involves killing lots of level 10-11 mobs, you're not going to be getting any XP for those either. So unless the quest involves a reward you particularly want (like lots of gold) or you are just having fun with it, you're probably wasting your time.
Similarly, even if the quest is of a level that provides sufficient reward, if it's the sort of quest that has you going lots of traveling and very little fighting, it's probably not the best use of your time.
To determine whether questing or farming (where by "farming" I mean just staying in an area killing all the monsters you can) is a better option for you, you can do a simple estimation in your head. Estimate how long the quest will take to complete. Let's say it's one hour, and it's a quest where there is little or no killing involved. After looking on sites like thottbot.com or allakhazam.com, you learn that this quest usually rewards 8000 XP when complete. That means you're going to be earning around 8000 XP in an hour, or about 133 XP per minute.
Suppose that your alternative is to stay in an area and farm a particular kind of monster. If you're getting 200 XP from each kill and you can kill one about every 30 seconds, you're earning 400XP per minute. That means you'd earn 3x the XP farming that you would completing the quest. Thus, in that example, you're better off farming.
But the numbers can work the other way, too. Suppose your quest has a reward of 5000XP and requires you to collect a number of items that drop off a certain mob. After killing a few, you estimate that 1 in 10 mobs drops the item, and you're getting 150XP per mob. You can kill the mob about every 45 seconds, resulting in around 80 kills in an hour, for a total of 12,000 XP (150x80=12000). Thus, completing this quest would earn you around 17000XP in an hour, estimated. You're better off in this case doing the quest since you will get XP from completing it, in addition to the XP from the mobs.
Fortunately, it's not necessary to do all this math yourself. There is an add-on called Titan Panel which can be configured to display your current "XP per Hour" and "Time to Level". Using this tool, you can gauge how quickly you're REALLY earning XP and how quickly you can expect to reach your next level. I found that the Titan Panel interface started to annoy me after a while, but it did help me to get a sort of "gut feel" for whether I was better off doing one thing than another.
For me personally, I tend to alternate between questing and farming depending on my mood. If I want to scare up a bunch of money and XP, I tend to go farming mobs somewhere I feel relatively safe. If I'm more interested in traveling or seeing some places I haven't seen before (or haven't seen in a while) I'll tend to quest. This openendedness is one of the nicer things about WoW.