Leveling With your Friends

http://wowgrrl.com/ made a post about how her character was leveling with members of her guild and this made me think about how I am leveling and how that's working out. Starting out from level 1-60 I leveled more or less with my friends' Undead Priest right by my side. We were able to go through most of the quests in Azeroth (admittedly we did skip entire zones and some instance quests. Most notably EPL, Silithus, North Barrens, Gnomeregan and all of the 60 instances except for BRD and DM). The experience was fun and effective, our classes were able to synergize pretty well and allowed for firepower, healing, aoe, kiting etc...hell, even magetank ;). At 60, my other friend's warlock finally caught up to us and all of outlands it was 3 of us leveling together in instances and all the quests. Oddly enough, when he joined us and started playing, it all of a sudden felt much much more difficult to do this playstyle. Not only does each mob kill equal less experience to you, but its also much more difficult to coordinate 3 people as opposed to only 2, especially on quests with low drop rates or when you have to pick up x items on the ground. Instances seem to be the easiest, and best, way for us to level. However, because we are going to school on weekdays, we are forced to quest on weekdays (1.5hrs playtime) and zerg the instances on weekends. Although its still fun, and the experience is good for the most part, it seems like blizzard designed the outside Azeroth around two players. Honestly, going from 1-60 with 2 players seemed very very fluid, perhaps much more so than going solo. The group exp system and rest system made it easier to make up shared mob exp and many quests were done faster/easier than they could have been otherwise (mage/priest duo of Araj in WPL when we were 58 :D). Although its still fun, and the experience is good for the most part, it seems like blizzard designed the outside Azeroth around two players.