The latest and greatest innovation in easy leveling you can thank Blizzard for is the heirloom system. Your main character, presumably level 80 and with a nice stockpile of Badges of Heroism and Stone Keeper's Shards, can spend these tokens of currency on items that "Bind to Account." What this means is that these pieces of gear can be freely traded using the mail system to any character you have on the same server. These items scale with the level of the character using them, so presumably, you'll never need to upgrade those slots until after that alt hits level 80. And at that point, they can mail those items off to the next character you decide to level.
I've never played a Rogue past level 60, so I decided to deck one out with these heirloom items and see the results. My Orc Hunter already had a large stockpile of Heroism badges and Stone Keeper's Shards, so I went on a shopping spree. I picked up Venerable Dal'Rend's Sacred Charge, and slapped a Fiery enchant on it, since you're limited to enchants that existed in Vanilla WoW. I picked up a trinket, the Swift Hand of Justice, which would increase my Rogue's haste rating. You normally don't get trinkets until the mid 20s at the earliest (with Engineering), though most get them in the 40s.
You'll end up with a character that's way too powerful for their level. This can be fun.
The most important piece came next. I headed to Lake Wintergrasp and bought the Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders for the tidy sum of 200 Stone Keeper's Shards. These shoulders not only provided agility, stamina, resilience and attack power, but after putting the Greater Inscription of the Gladiator on it, my little level six Rogue had an extra 30 stamina and 15 resilience. An extra 30 stamina is a sizable boost at level 80; at level six it's just overpowered. The real reason to pick these up, though? The passive 10% boost to experience gained from killing monsters. That, my friends, is leveling made easy.
/faceroll
At level six my character had more than triple the health of a normal rogue of his level, and dealt more than four times the damage, not counting when the fiery enchant on his sword would go off. Just for fun, I dueled some level 11 and 12 characters who were going at it in Brill, and it wasn't even close. I was killing characters twice my level in seconds, while barely getting scratched. No need to stealth. Just walk up to them and Sinister Strike until they're dead.
Any challenge that I may have encountered while leveling this Rogue through the starting areas was completely taken out of the equation. I don't even bother with stealth anymore, instead focusing on the delicious ham sandwich I'm eating as I cruise through the levels. The effect is most assuredly more dramatic at the lower levels, since I have those higher-level enchants working in my favor, but from what I've seen, the gear all scales rather nicely until level 80.
