The trick to leveling an iksar is making a bank alt in a zone like EC to handle all your 'vendor' needs such as putting money in the bank, buying food etc. Most people use bank alts sooner or later anyways but it can be a slight inconvenience if you are new.

On the other end of things, the starting zones and surrounding areas for iksar are great so you can do a good bit of leveling without having to really travel far while other races generally move around a lot. You could level 1-60 without leaving kunark.

Iksar have a 40% exp penalty so take that for what it is worth, exp penalty also stack with class penalty so an iksar SK gets hit with both 40% racial and 40% class penalty which can get really tedious.

Bleh, Shadowknight and Iskar seem to fit my playstyle perfectly. That kinda sucks, I'll have to maybe rethink this because while having a xp penalty doesn't bother me too much, 80% is quite a bit! I do like a challenge though and I'm sure there aren't many Iskar SK's running around, I love being that special snowflake lol.

Thanks for the advice guys :)

I believe Velious eliminates class EXP penalties. I don't know if this applies to Race penalties too, but Hybrids will have it much easier in Velious if the information is accurate.

Iksars are actually 120% and shadowknights 140% and the penalties are multiplicative so it ends up being 168%

1.2 x 1.4 = 1.68 modifier

Well if you really want to take the boat/look for ports constantly this would work, but for a new player grouping is going to be much easier if he sticks to the normal spots to learn the game like ec, oasis, unrest, cb...

Field of bone, kurns, lake of ill omen, frontier mountains, overthere, dreadlands, karnors, sebilis/hs... lvl 1-60 without leaving kunark.

What kind of play style are you looking for?

Tanky Magician's are usually my play of choice.

I know that you could level from 1-60 without leaving Kunark but I think you are missing my point... EC is the central hub of EQ, if you avoid this area you aren't really getting access to a lot of things that really make the game easier to get into for new players.

Plus finding a group on Kunark only isn't the easiest thing, sure if you wanted to solo you could do it but the bulk of the server population centrals around the EC area.

If you want to tank/magic try a Pally. Less XP penalty, which goes away whenever Velious comes out, and most NPC's won't be KOS to you.