How do you level while Boxing?

Hi,

i came to this site and liked the idea to play with several chars at the same time :) No need more to look for people for quests or instances.

So i decided to setup a 5-Boxing-System up using Keyclone (runs very good at a AMD 3500+ with 2GB and 7800GTX OC, can't wait till next week for my Q6600 and 8800GTX :) ).

My Horde-Group-Setup contains a Warrior (will be Deff-spect), a Priest (Holy spect), a Mage, a Warlok and finaly a Shamane (Elementar spect).

So i setup the Macros, using Focus for the leader and /assist /target ... i have now 6 hours playtime and all chars are at level 7, which seems realy slow. I know, that 2-2 1/2 hours took the configuration, macros writing and need of some time to get done with the keyboard settings :)

But what will the best way to get fast to 70? Grinding looks bad for me, Questing solo is allways better (Alliance Twinks are at 45 in about 3 days playtime, 10 in 2 - 2 1/2 hours). Because i'm not to familiar with the horde quests i use wow-pro.com and Joanas Guide (alliance site i used Brian Kopps Guide). Would you suggest to get in as much of instance when able with Level 15?

Questing should speed it up, but quests that involve looting X ammount of items will not. "Go kill 20 bears" is great as you can plow through em. And grinding instances is apparently good XP, i'm yet to get my group that far :)

I happened to try a quick experiment last night when I rolled up my new shammy's on Mag.

I leveled 1 shaman solo to level 6 in about an hour.

I leveled 2 shamans grouped to level 6 in about an hour and 5 minutes.

My supposition is that anything more than 2 is going to "slow you down" because 2 still lets you do collection quests relatively easy (thus you can follow the guide's to the letter and be on target).

HOWEVER

Keep this in mind. When you are leveling 5 (or even 3 or 4) guys together it does take longer, but you are getting FIVE CHARACTERS leveled up. If I had leveled all 4 of my shammy's solo up to level 6 it would have taken approx. 4 hours. If I had done them in 2 groups of 2 it would have taken 2 hours and 15-30 minutes. I did 1/2/1 and it took 3 hours and 5ish minutes.

I think (and this pertains more to those fast levels early on) that duo'ing may be the way to go early on, but once you get up to 8 or 10 run them all together. Maybe do a duo and trio if you are 5 boxing and see how the times compare. Those first few levels are lots of collection quests that are too easy to pass up.

The other choice is to take the collection quests on all 5, then find the mobs, and pull and chain kill alot of them close to 1 spot, once you have 10-15 dead around you, loot with all toons and repeat it, should speed it up a little.

I am not sure how bad experience is cut when adding one to four other players, but it feels like a 60% ish cut for my priest duo.

I level said duo by questing, because it's effortless to both loot and pick up new quests, and use quest items. If I used three clients or more I would definitely need extra hardware to do it.

I level two mages with a friends mage by almost exclusively grinding, we all hit level 20 at a speed you'd expect solo by questing a character with great dps and low downtime.

I've found that two characters is actually the worst set up for exp.

When you have a group of 3 or more people, you get the exp for the kill, but you also get a 'group bonus'. Just check your combat log. It works very similar to rested exp. The most group experience you get is with 5. Raiding with 6+ will kill your exp.

Basically, with 5 characters, you get less experience per character, but you actually get more total exp per kill (take the sum of all 5 characters).

Plus, with a group you can roll over stuff. Non elites are nearly one shots and elites are possible.

This time around I am questing and a little instancing. Last time was almost all instances. Questing (with Joana's guide) does seem to be faster (even though I skip some of the collection quests) than pure instances - but I think that is due in part to already knowing the 1-60 game and 4 soulstones meaning I never have to run back. With mages, aggro was very tricky and I found myself dying to unexpected effects or abilities as well as simple over pulling when I was learning an instance, which usually meant a 10 minute pause to return to my corpses and rebuff. With the locks, it is more likely that a WV dies while the locks keep going - and soulstones every 8 minutes or so certainly speed things up a lot.

I know about Group Bonus, but i thought about the group setup and questing a little bit yesterday evening and came to this points :)

1) Horde has a very bad start point, just a couple of quests and most of them are collect quests. Sharing Quests are no problem, i have a Macro on each char, bound to a key, with /script AcceptQuest(), so just share it from the leader :)
2) Giving back quests can't be done with a macro or script (didn't find anything), so i use "Turn In", which speeds up and tabing to other WoW Screens is no big deal
3) Killing in a Group of five, containing 4 DDs is very fast (takes one to two shots from each one) :) -> This should easy minimize the less XPs you get in Group than as solo and you get the Group Bonus
4) I think i should not take to much note at the quest guides, which say's if you are level 10, than do this and that, becaus with this group you can even do it with level 8 without problems. 3-Level-above Mobs should be no problem, 4-Levels-above could bring alot of resistance problems from the casters and give much more XPs :)

Will keep a eye on the level times, but i did now level 7-8 in about 30 minutes, which seems much better than before. And if i think i had to play it five times or only double it's much much faster and makes more fun :)

Collection quests are hit and miss. Having gone from 1 to 70 three times (and 1 to 55 two more times), I know "bad" collection quests from "good" ones. There were collection quests that were a pain even when solo.

A bad collection quest would be the one in Hillsbrad where you collect lion blood. It's a rarer drop, and the lions are spread out. Even when soloing, this one is a pain, but it's tolerable because you run back and forth to the farm, and you can kill lions each way. I definitely skipped this one on my group.

A good collection quest would be similar to the "human skulls" one also in Hillsbrad. The drop rate is pretty high, and you can mass kill tons of humans. I did these on my group and it was definately worth it.

There are also quests that require a single item (e.g. cat's eye quest in barrens). When the single item drops, everyone can loot it. Those are worth doing.

Pay attention to the "This item begins a quest" drops. When these drop, everyone can loot it. I originally thought it wasn't worth doing because I'd have to search for these drops five times.