Is boosting much faster than running a 5-man team w/tank & healer slots using dungeon finder? Isn't the dungeon finder XP bonus tripled as well?
What's the boost strategy? 1-main account to boost the 4-linked-RAF accounts?
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Is boosting much faster than running a 5-man team w/tank & healer slots using dungeon finder? Isn't the dungeon finder XP bonus tripled as well?
What's the boost strategy? 1-main account to boost the 4-linked-RAF accounts?
Quote:
Originally Posted by griznip
There is grind boosting and dungeon boosting. Both use a high level main toon with linked RaF accounts.
Dungeon boosting is as described in this post, there are other posts on grind boosting but its basically just parking your alts in a specific place in the world while your high level toon kills everything.
While boosting you can't use the dungeon finder because the main is too high level. Running dungeons using 5 toons of appropiate level is much much much much much slower than boosting.
This is the method I used on my last set:
-Quest to 11
-Boost using a lvl 90 guardian druid up to 80 (dungeon list already in this thread)
-Grind boost in Deepholm trogg area 80-85 (a few hours per level with heirlooms + guild banner). At least 10k gold worth of drops/cloth especially with potion of treasure finding.
-85-90: Quest up to Jade Temple (uninstanced quest hub), grind water elementals that spawn endlessly, 3-5 hours per level, faster than questing and tons of drops. If you loot you'll end up with like 50 spirits of harmony and several bank tabs full of BOE greens.
For the last two phases I recommend bringing a repair bot or jeeves or your bags will fill up and you'll run miss out on a ton of loot. Also use your mobile guild bank if you have one to empty your bags. At the water elemental area your bags will fill about every 1/5 of a level.
Much slower? I did my first 5-accounts using RAF/Dungeon Finder and thought it was fast. I'd be curious to see how fast dungeon boosting is!Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnGabriel
Thanks for the heads up! Anyone have number of hours from 1-80 using this method?
12 - 15-ish at this point I think.Quote:
Originally Posted by griznip
Can be done in about 10 hours I think. 1-80
80-85 in 8 hours
85-90 in 20
Playing with RAF bonuses, but no heirlooms...
Because the five new accounts don't have any, and I don't want the referred accounts to out level the referring accounts over time...
Anyway, my time from 1st to 80th is closer to 30 hours /played.
That is with an 85 booster.
The team quests from 1st to almost 11th.
They reach 11th enroute to Shadowfang Keep.
Level there until 24th; I hearth and train their ground mount, then head to Scarlet Monastery.
They're in SM until 36th, when they relocate to Scholomance.
At 44th, they hearth and train the faster mount and then head to Stratholme (dead side).
From there (at 48th) they head to BRD.
I stay in BRD until 58th, for Outland.
Ramparts from 58th to 62nd, run over to Blood Furnace for 62nd to 64th, then hearth to train flying.
Auch-Crypts 64-65th, Sethekk Halls 65-68; then hearth and train cold weather flying.
Utgarde Keep 68-70th then Nexus 70-72nd (either one, then the other).
Drak'Tharon Keep for a level 72-73.
Gundrak, from 73-76.
Halls of Stone 76-78 and Halls of Lightning 78-80.
I tried doing RoB at 67th and AoA at 75th, but with the whole Cross Realm Zones and opposing faction players interfering... that's a monumental waste of time.
It's much faster to just do 2 extra runs in whatever dungeon who were already doing.
I just did RoB in Nagrand at level 69 and just got 1/2 a level with RAF. Not really worth the effort IMHO. On my way to Nexus or Utgarde Keep.
This seems much more like my recent boosting experience, although I boosted with a lvl 90 and did AoA. Even though I did not time my overall played on the boosted characters and I spent time AFK, it did seem a LOT more than 10 hours.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ualaa
I am currently in the process of a second set and just to get to level 11 took about 2 hours
If you were to log them out, once they reach... cannot enter more instances... that would save time.
This is a warcraft bug, most likely; when five toons do instances together, never alone... and 1-2 cannot enter, yet the rest can... ?
If you had Warlocks (or the old, "Have Group, Will Travel"), that too would save time.
I'm personally leveling teams to 80th.
In as little real time as is possible for me to level them.
I don't want to be 10th level for an extra hour.
But it is real time I care about; logging a toon for an hour, because of the instance bug or leaving them sitting at the zone line and trying to enter every 5 minutes, either way it is the same amount of real time.
I checked the /played time on my monks, which was the first set I RaF boosted since MoP, and they are at 22 hours played time.
This is much higher than the 12 to 15 hour /played time I was getting pre-mop, but the panda start area is very long. I have been blaming that but it could be an overall increase in boosting times.
What class do you find to do the best as your booster? Druid? Pally? Monk?
This round of boosting, I've been using a Frost Death Knight.
Quite a few like to use a Druid or Paladin.
A class that can DPS, can sustain taking damage. and one that you know how to play well.Quote:
Originally Posted by griznip
I love my druids, their swipe kills everything. Now at level 90 HoL is still run in Cat form killing so fast, even the last room before Loken cat form pulled the whole room. Felt a little like cheating :-P
What spec are your druids? Guardian or Feral?Quote:
Originally Posted by crowdx
GuardianQuote:
Originally Posted by griznip
I've been using a level 90 Shaman with ilvl 480. Chain lightning with lowbies in tow.
I prefer Druid also. Guardian spec. Getting out of snares for free (once you get to BRD/LBRS/UBRS you will be snared endlessly), two sprints, skull bash, charge, aoe disorient and pushback. They move through the instance so fast and can swipe it all down at once (switch to cat form and pop berserk). For later instances you'll need to stay in bear form for the bigger pulls but with incarnation you can put out a ton of aoe in bear form as well. My druid is about 461 in mostly pve tanking gear and nothing is a problem 1-80, entire instance pull no problem except maybe 75+ instances but by then I have the alts following so they can complete the quests (50-75% of a level for the quests alone).
I don't do instance boosting beyond 80, in cata instances there are too many stuns, knockbacks, aoe crap to kill your alts, etc. and I know at least a 90 guardian druid cannot handle large pulls, and the xp/hour was terrible. The best method I found 80-85 was the troggs in deepholm. You can pull endlessly and they don't hit hard enough to put a dent in your no matter the size of the pull.
Oh one thing I wanted to mention about the Scarlet Monastery level range.
If you have time to spare, and don't want to deal with instance lockout (which is inevitable when doing resets at that level), in the Graveyard the zombies that spawn forever actually give xp, although just a little. Instead of 2-3 minutes per level for a full instance pull, it's about 15 minutes a level killing those zombies.
Just go and kill the elites but not the zombie piles and then stand at the front of the instance in front of your alts. The zombies aggro by proximity only so as long as you are in front of your alts they will not get aggro. They automatically die after a few minutes so, unfortunately, you can't go afk for awhile and stack up a million of them, you'll need to hit an aoe every minute or two.
I did this for 3 or 4 levels to avoid instance lockout because I didn't feel like logging out for an hour to take a break.
You can also summon them on top of the cloth farming citadel in icecrown for the 30 mins between instance lockouts for 2-3 levels or so.Quote:
Originally Posted by heyaz
I thought I'd give this boosting stuff a try before my RAF time ends. I already ran one 5man team up to 80 just using random LFD's. Now I'm boosting a 4man team using an 81 Guardian Druid.
Silly question, is there a trick to getting your team to these dungeon locations? You can't use LFD and because of the way I sent my RAF invites I can't use summon friend to get them all to a location (30 min cooldown sucks!). Maybe I'm missing something (I hope), because it's really tough getting lowbies to far away dungeons. :(
Awesome thread, btw, thanks!
What I generally do is fly one of the higher level characters I have to the dungeon, then summon one set of lowbies, log out the higher level and log back with the second set of lowbies and have them summoned by the set I already summoned.Quote:
Originally Posted by propagandalf
Obviously this only works if you have higher levels on the accounts you are boosting characters on.
Yeah, that's what I figured, but I guess I messed up my RAF connections, because that didn't work for me unless I deal with the 30min summon friend cooldown. My booster is on an account that isn't RAF linked, and then the other 4 are 1 on a vet account that are linked to 3 on recruit accounts.
Durn, that makes traveling a pain.
Well you would still only need to summon a single toon to the instance entrance,then chain summon the rest. I also use the summoning stone to get my booster there if he is not linked in the RAF chain (which he normally isn't).
1. Use 2-Man flying mount
2. Use summoning stone
3. ???
4. Profit
You can buy a Winged Guardian mount from the Blizzard store for your booster account.
Can you summon, via a summoning stone, with two characters?Quote:
Originally Posted by MiRai
I thought you needed three.
Nope, I have been summoning with 2, Locks need 3 to summon the first portal thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ualaa
Yeah, summoning stone!
it used to be 3 and a level range limit.. not its only 2 needed and they can summon any other level player starting at level 15.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ualaa
Can I use the random dungeon finder if I don't have a perfect group type? say 1 healer / 4 dps and the dps cannot spec anything but dps?
Looking into possibly doing RAF as I want to try out some new classes since everything has changed so much.
Additionally instead of boosting, is this a good method of just burning through the dungeons to grind out the xp? How much slower overall will the leveling be?
Unfortunately, no. You must have a class that can heal and tank.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellay
Edit: or more specifically at least one class that can heal and at least one class that can tank.
You can usually take 3 dps at a time through LFD without hate, especially at lower levels.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellay
But in your case if you're doing the dungeons to break up the boredom of questing, then you are already in the area of the dungeons at your level. You wont need to use LFD you can just take your 1 healer + 4 dps team inside.
Ellay, If your goal is 4 or 5 of each class you want ( hunters..mages..shamies..etc. ) I would recommend making holy trinity teams like this... Say you want 5 paladins in the end..5 hunters..5 mages..5 preists. You can mix and mach the sets on the way up to make tank..healer..3 dps. Just alternate which account has tank and heals each team..so in the end you end up with what you want. Between that and granting levels, you should be able to level entirly via RDF and end up with what you want 8)
I think I just want a specific class to 80 right now on top of my original shamans. I figure the power balance shifts though every patch update like it always has and it's not sometimes how skillful you are but if you picked the flavor of the month class.
Not to derail too much, but the extremely frustrating part is. I have almost a quad pair of every class 70+ but they are scattered throughout 5 different servers and different factions. If they offered a combo server transfer option that was actually a discount it might peak my interest, but it's much cheaper just to generate a new set of accounts especially with the black friday deal and spend a couple days leveling.
Consider a fresh batch of RAF.
Take a booster, whatever the best toon is...
Likely your highest level toon, especially if they're a tank type.
Feral Druid, Frost Death Knight, Paladin in particular.
Transfer that toon, to the server of choice.
Send your heirlooms with the toon, if you have any.
Send as much gold as you're allowed to take.
If you have more gold, buy items you can sell on the destination realm, especially if they're cheaper on the origin realm.
Boost with two RAF chains:
A > B > C
A > D > E
You end up with at least one character on A, for every team you boost.
B and D, each grant half a character to A... assuming A levels to 2nd (39x2 = 78 granted levels).
Because you have two links in each RAF chain, if you want the cascading of granted levels to add up to full toons (boosting from 2nd, not 1st...)...
You need to boost sets of four toons, as in boost 4 or boost 8, etc.
But it's probably good enough, that if you boost five classes on BCDE, A gets at least those five classes via granted levels.
BC and DE have valid RAF chains, even if A is a lot higher and more than 4 levels higher than B/D.
Another great thing about dungeon boosting is that you don't need the booster to be on the same realm as the lowbies, as long as you can manage to bring them into the dungeon and you have a way to invite yourself via realID (one of the account registered under a different battle.net account, or a friend who can temporarily invite your toons)
You should be able to invite yourself via RealID by manually typing /invite character-realm (no spaces in the realm name if they exist).Quote:
Originally Posted by Qebm
You could have the booster do all of the quest work and just drag the boostees around on autofollow. Granted, there are times when you'll need to loot items (Collect 5 Panda Spleens or whatever), but the looting isn't as bad when you have AoE looting.Quote:
Originally Posted by heyaz
As for AoE grinding, I used Deepholm a week ago, on that one spot with the Troggs. Evidently they've shut down XP on the ground-floor guys, but the ones that are way up a cliff still give XP. I'm at work so I can't be more specific than that, but I think I found it by googling "Cata aoe grinding" and "Mop aoe grinding".
Also, remember that the chest/shoulder heirlooms actually work until the moment you ding 81. The pants/hat/cape last until the moment you hit 86 (even though their stats are inferior to quest items by that level)