73 5x Shaman - Sick of leveling... How did you do it?

[Filon]

Hi,

so my 5 shamans are 80% of 73 now. it is my very first mb team, so it took quite a while (8,5 days played) since i had to figure out everything and just didn't bother to hurry (man, it was awesome to to my first instances on my own!).

but now im getting tired of leveling. it takes me about 8-9 hours of playing to get a lvl-up. i have to do A LOT of collect-quest mainly to start chains and such. and also there are simply not enogh kill quests, so i cant just leave the collect-quests.
instance farming is getting quite difficult in nordrend since i dont have a tank. i can clear nexus and uk, but its really difficult and not quit good xp/hour (since im pretty slow clearing them).

so my question is, how did you level in nordrend? how long did it take you to get a lvl-up?

i still have some hardware issues, which cause my pc to crash once in a while. in bg's it crashes in the first fight 8 out of 10 times. so pvp leveling is not an option jet (first got to fix it. its weird anyways, since instances and such run smooth at 60 fps...)

the last hour i kept killing ursoc the bear god in grizzly hills over and over for 10k per kill... which got me to like 250k xp/hour. that was still awefull.


i hope you got some good advices, else i just have to go through the pain -.-

lg
Filon

[zenga]

I went through that about a month ago with my first wow accounts ever. It was indeed bloody slow. Now just started doing it with my 2nd team and it goes way faster, is less boring, .. a couple of things that work for me;

- it's o so worth it to have a tank, if you have raf/granted levels left, make a pally and boost it to 70. The 1-2 days boosting is well spent.
- i've spent a day to make myself a db, for every zone in northrend, basically copy/paste from thotbott and then check each quest / chain ... is it collection, is it kill, ... skipped as much collections as possible.
- i queue for AV all the time, it's entertaining and gives decent xp. at lvl 73 you start to be valuable in this bracket as a mb
- i run instances a bit below my level, gives good xp and it's pretty fast
- so far average played time per level is about 4-5 hours
- the mix of av, fast questing & instances works very well for me
- my goal is to reach 77 as fast as possible to reach northrend, the last levels are very fast

gl

[heyaz]

70-80 was painful. I ended up grinding UK a ton to make up for not doing all the quests. Often I would get stuck, having done all the quests I could but being too low of a level for the next zone. I'd usually just let rest xp accumulate for a few days and then grind instances. My gear was terrible, being a fresh 70 boxer right before the expansion so instance grinding wasn't that fast.

My plan this time around (new team almost 70) is to mix in AV and instance grinding and hope for 4-5 levels worth right there, allowing more control of what quests and zones I want to do.

[Zal]

70-80 is an AV grind with kill quests while your not in BGs, i was leveling about 1 lv per 5-6 hours. maybe.... might have been shorter can't remember.

[Emo?]

Was playing 4, but still i also noticed the problem with quests. Did as much AV as i could just to compensate, but since that isnt an option for you id say instances. If you enjoy playing them. My AV experince wasnt good Xp/h ither, but i enjoyed playing it, and thats the most important!

Gl

[Toonarmy]

Grizzly Hills dailies before work.

I just bit the bullet and decided that I would do the 8 dailies before work. Nothing else significant (the odd quest on the weekend but no long sessions). In the end the idea of 25 minutes per day and 10 days per level (8 with the heirlooms) was just too sweet to pass up (and it let me get a bunch of crap done around the house too)

[Acidburning]

70-80 is an AV grind with kill quests while your not in BGs, i was leveling about 1 lv per 5-6 hours. maybe.... might have been shorter can't remember.

I also just completed my shammy quad box team last week.

I suggest ^ too. I had almost 70k honor when I hit 80. I would que for AV during questing. You get 14k xp per balinda/ towers. I forget about winning, might have been 30k. Also, check the battlemaster for the daily bg quest, sometimes you can snag the AV one, gives XP too.

Worse case, que AV, get in, kill balinda get 14k xp, afk out :D, wait for debuff to wear off while questing, etc.

Also, I have a buddy with a lvl 80 tank. So we would just go into instances when I had quests. Never needed to setup a dedicated healer. I just had lesser and chainheals macroed for the tank, and did some spot heals. You could make friends with a tank, or pay (since you make like 2-4k gold per toon during leveling).

GL, keep it up, it's well worth it :D

cheers

[Starbuck_Jones]

Im running my second group to 80 now. I just hit 40% into 75 this afternoon. its not near as bad as the first time around when I did every quest I came upon.

Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord are very MB friendly at least for alliance it is. I ran every quest in the starter area of Borean Tundra and it resulted in 92 quests completed. Only a small handful were collection quests. There were a few to unlock the quests for Nexus and I did the DETHA achievment. I only gave BT the finger at the gnome place and the murloc camp as they were all collections.

Howling Fjords quest chain resulted 55 quests and I dont recall doing any collection quests at all other than the UK one. It has a very long quest chain that goes from the starter area to killing Yimmerons wife and none were collection.

Grizzley hills I did the long quest chain for the betrayer that ends in Draktharon Keep and continues in Zul'Drak. This did have several collection quests, but they were tolerable because the mojo drops are not soulbound, so it was just kill till you had 40 of them and trade them out.

I also cleared out Old Kingdom and its sister dungeon and completed their quests and moved on to do the wrath gate quest chain and battle for under city as well as the arena in Zul Drak. I recall only one of these quests being collection.

So far out of thoes zones im 215 quests into it and less than 10 were collection quests. Now I do run 5 daily quests a day (nexus, 2 in the Fjord, 2 in Grizzley Hills) and it looks like my counter is at 36 of them so far. So 251 quests to get to where im at and im at 4days 14h played time. I would guess maybe 10h of that was afk at various times.

I also used the dungeon finder tool to farm the first boss in UK for 4 sets of the helm and caster dagger. Looks like I killed him 14 times to get thoes 8 drops.


While I feel your pain, its really not bad and you can skip 90% of thoes collection crap quests and still level.

[Catamer]

WoLK questing bites... there is no doubt about it long quest chains that FORCE you to do some really awful collection quests.

anyway... for a while you could do AV and get huge amounts of XP but they nerfed it. I think it's still pretty good XP and can be fun, nothing like stench of lightning fried horde and should give a nice break from boring quests.

[d0z3rr]

71-74 definitely sucks. AV is pretty much your only option after you've done all the non-collection quests. Once you get enough gear and levels you can fly through UK and Nexus, then on to Azjol.

I guess I didn't do much AV, I only wound up with 15000 honor at 80 and 40 AV marks.

[Ualaa]

I pretty much followed a one-boxing quest stacking guide, for my first team.
At about 73 or 74, I subbed out one of my shammies, did an account transfer and subbed in an 80 shammy in Naxx25 gear.
That was one toon who could skip all of the remaining collections.
Leveling was a bit of a pain, but the 80 helped kill things.

Second team, again didn't seem quite as painful.
And only the tank had an experience boosting heirloom.
I really should grind two per toon, the heroic and the wintergrasp.
I had a bunch of computer issues for this team, upgraded to the i7 build but had my ATI card start to freeze slaves, so this bunch took forever, even if it was less time played.
I did a fair bit of AV with this team.

I'm in the process of bouncing back and forth between 5x Druids (64) and 4x Warlock + 1x Priest (13).
The druids dinged 64th in Hellfire (sure they had full rested, but had only done one ramparts and one furnace run for the quests, and nothing yet in Zangarmash), 64 prior to Zangarmarsh seems to be very high; looks like the experience has changed a bit.
I like druids, in that you can auto follow, on the slow flyers, 5 feet off of the ground amidst hostile mobs and do collections without aggro.
The warlocks will be a bit slower, I'm really enjoying flyers on the druids and think Northrend will be a lot faster because of it; unless we can mail BoA cold flying books, the warlock team will be afoot in Northrend...

[Drommon]

Well i tried to skip as many collection quest as possible in NR. I did AV, instances and kill quests. When I got bored of that I leveled gathering skills. When I got bored of that I leveled an alt team. I try to mix it up as much as I can.

Maybe you can solo for a while. Make a DK tank and level it up to 75 then start the instance grind again. I hear that DK + 4x shammys is easy instance mode.

[-silencer-]

Although I had a paladin tank with my 4x elemental shammies, I didn't AV at all and only ran a few instances to get to lvl 77. UK 3-4 times was it. I quested entire BT, HF, and DB.. all on rest xp. That got me to around lvl 75. Then I did some GH (especially the dailies!) and a decent chunk of SB to get to 77, and once you get cold weather flying at 77, it's a cakewalk to 80.
Once you hit 77, do this:
- Get cold weather flying.
- Do Sons of Hodir quest chain to unlock Hodir dailies. (a couple of quests in the chain are a pain in the ass, but they're worth it.)
- Do Argent Tournament quest chain to open up dailies. (these are quick!)

Each day you can do this list of dailies, which provide a bunch of quick XP, gold, and something specific you'll need:
- GH PvP dailies. (I do all except the ones requiring fetching the bomb). XP, gold, and venture co currency for totems/cloaks/trinkets.
- Sons of Hodir dailies. (I do all except the anvil quest - that one sucks) XP, gold, and Hodir rep for shoulder enchants.
- Argent Tourney dailies. (I do them all. The weapon one can suck if you have different races in your group.) XP, gold, champion seals, faction rep.

That's roughly 13-15 dailies at 20+k xp, 7+gold each, and they won't take more than an hour or two max. Once you champion a faction at Argent Tourney and open up Hodir revered quests, you'll be able to do nearly 20 dailies very quickly, provide some easy epics and heirloom gear through champion seals, and get at least 400k XP and 140+g (per character) per day for around 2 hours of work.

70-77 was a long grind. 77-80 was EASY. My next group, I'll skip all collection quests in BT/HF/DB/GH/SB that I can, and go purely for quick quests in *all* zones while focusing on quick dailies first.

Edit:
The jousting dailies are easy once you figure out that you can dps your opponent on foot from your alts while your main does the jousting. You still have to do 3/3 and 4/4 for each character, but at least you can dps from the others. I save these dailies for last if I have some extra time since they are a bit more tedious than the others.

[cmeche]

Im currently at 74-75 on my 4 druids.
Make sure you do GH dailies every day. They are super easy, and majority of the quest objectives stack.
I would also get your guys rested(or not) and go over and grind on the human mobs in the camp a little north of Naxx. Make sure at least one shaman tags all the mobs with thunderstorm and then drop your magmas. Super easy. Plus they drop a decent amount of silver and vendor trash.

AV is not always good for me. During the day, Ally like to turtle it up and we loose with me getting 50k xp over 20 min. I find its way better just to grind unrested on aoe mobs then to keep running AV when it pops. Now if you are in a winnning AV, then obviously you get good xp along with honor.

[wonz]

I did instances with my pala team. As often as possible. No battlegrounds at all.

Currently i am leveling a warrior and 4 shamans, they are 71 now, thats the "bad" part of wotlk leveling. Still i enjoy it, due do the fact i love leveling.

Doing instances as well with them. The warrior is a prot warrior, i always hated my pally tank for being a heavy drinker. The prot warrior does not drink, but lacks of rage sometimes.. Hes a little bit overgeared for the lower 7x instances, bacause it was my main a long time ago.

Up to 69 i leveled 5 shamans, but switched over to the warrior at 70. Funny and interesting. I spent much time in tuning the warrior tank macros. Still it needs much work.

Currently i priorize shield slam > thunderclap > shock wave > shouts > revenge > devastate > heroic strike.. but heroic strike still seems to be used more often as i wish.

[remanz]

All you guys' advances are good and all. But it is mainly for solving the leveling problem in game. Gotta motivate the person himself. I suggest watching heyaz (http://www.dual-boxing.com/member.php?u=9124) 's arena boxing video more. Motivate the mind. Imagine what you can be once you hit level 80.

Think about what you can be, your current grind is step towards that.

[merujo]

Back in the day there was no BG XP, so it wasn't an option. U also need to have in mind that most already had their teams at 80 when WotlK hit, so we were fresh to start leveling again.
I bet ur tired from a long way leveling, even if u had RAF, leveling is always a bit boring.

Watch some vids of people multiboxing, try to get some sort of inspiration, put some music on and continue the grind.
Also, don't be a maniac about it and take it easy, playing relaxed is the key :D