Late last year, Zygor Guides release an update to their famed Zygor Leveling Guides. After hours upon hours of testing and leveling, I formed some pretty strong opinions about the guide. Does it live up to it's promises? Full review after the break...

Before I start with the review, you can find a free trial of Zygor's guide here. So, we'll start with a summary:

I was a little irritated before I even downloaded the guide to start reviewing it. This was, in large part, because I feel that Zygor Leveling Guides was not completely honest on their product page. On it, they claim that their guide is the only one that complies with Blizzard's addon guidelines. This is false. Dugi's Ultimate WoW Guide also complies with the addon policy. Scare tactics are a pretty low way to try to get someone to buy something. Despite all of that, how does the guide actually work?

The download and installation of the guide were completely pain-free. I fired up WoW with the guide installed and created a new character. As soon as the intro video went away, I immediately noticed the guide. In addition to an arrow pointing you in the direction you need to go, it has a very slick looking interface that surrounds the current quest that you are working on. Leveling was easy with Zygor's Leveling Guide. All you have to do is follow the arrow. Generally the guide has you pick up several quests at a quest hub before it sends you out to start doing the quests. Next you go out and start completing the quests one-by-one. One thing that I noticed about this guide is that the paths that the arrow sends you on are very efficient, so you do very little backtracking. This was nice when compared to Dugi's Guide where sometimes you would walk right by one quest objective only to come back to it later on.

Zygor's Leveling Guide is, however, not without it's problems. In fact, had I written this review a couple of weeks earlier, I would have given it a much, much lower score. It was using Cartographer 2 for waypoints, and, for one reason or another, Zygor's Addon and Cartographer 2 did not get along. This was really frustrating because the game would throw errors every 15 to 20 minutes, and I would have to /camp and log back in. Thankfully, though, Zygor switched to a different waypoint technology that works much more smoothly. Also, I feel that even though the interface looks cool, it is too big and can get in the way of things if you like to have a clean interface. Sure, you can hide it during combat and scale it so that it's smaller, but for me, it was big and distracting. The look of it is more of an issue with personal taste than it is anything else.

Another issue that I have with the guide is that starting a character who is not level one can be a little on the confusing side - or at least it was for me. You have to actually click a next button to scroll through all of the quests that come before the one that you need to be on. This is only a minor irritation, and once you get to where you need to be in the guide, it keeps up with you extremely well.

The bottom line is that Zygor's Leveling Guides (both the Alliance and Horde versions) are not without their faults; however, most of the issues that I did raise are relatively minor or they come down to personal taste. The guide is in some ways superior to Dugi's guide, and in some ways, it is inferior. Zygor's Guide is a really solid guide and will definitely make leveling an easy process. I recommend it for both new and experienced players as it is very likely to speed up your leveling time. You can check out of video of the guide in action here.