I leveled like 4 or 5 characters in HS on both blue and red. Doing North post 58, in my experience, is painfully slow. West is just a lot faster, exp wise.
The main challenge in West IMO is the pit that separates the wing in two parts. The "easy" first part where you can CR by /corps'ing from the basement, and the "hard" part where you'll have to CR the old fashionned way, which means getting a north + west key, fighting back naked etc, or getting SC or getting someone to CR you (or if you've done your homework, looting a corpsed west key and maybe grabbing some backup gear from the bank).
The west pit alone can be tricky even for experienced players because if you mistime the pathers (and this will happen ever so often even to the best of us) and/or get really unlucky with calms you can end up with a pull of 12+ mobs, half of them harm touching your ass so hard, you won't even leave a corpse when you die. If you do something like 56-60 on a character in west, you'd be really lucky not to have to deal with that kind of situation at least once.
The pussy ass way of doing west is to kill everything up until the pit, then wait for the repops, but that's not really better exp than killing all of north. The good exp in west means you clear it all with your level 50 quadding weaponized pet.
To the above poster who recommends doing north to 60 - have you ever gone through level 59 in north? That would burn anything out of EQ. In west you can go through level 59 in 2-3 days and still remain almost cool and normal.
|