Should I box to 80 right away or should I get my main to 80 and come back for my alts?

I've been mulling over what I should do, so I figured I'd bring my dilemma to the forum. First a little context:

I play a tank, and I'm an avid raider. I'm hoping to get started on Naxx with my guild quickly. We've set an a cutoff at 4 weeks for everyone to have their toon levelled to 80 and ready to start hitting Naxx, although there's a few of us that have set personal goals of 2 weeks. It should be relatively easy to meet that goal dual boxing my raid geared warrior and my new pally, but I'm wondering if I can reasonably meet it while 5 boxing. Additionally, I remember what things were like for me as a tank in BC. I would log in, and would instantly receive 3 or 4 requests to hit an instance. With that in mind, I'm concerned that I won't reasonably have a window of time to level my alts for a couple months.

Right now I'm leaning toward just front loading my effort and 5 boxing to 80. At least then I'll be able to solo instance when I'm not swamped with requests to tank.

What do you guys think? Does anyone have a WAG on how much extra time investment there is for every toon you add to a multibox team?

Thanks in advance.

- edit: subject grammar. DUR!

A) if you would rather raid with one toon than multibox then level your tank solo

B) if you would rather multibox than raid with one toon then level your multibox team

C) is there anyway you can encorporate 1 tank and 4 multibox toons. That way you will be doing both.

My multibox team is pve oriented. I'm running the following composition:

Prot Pally
Frost Mage
Demo Warlock
Moonkin
Resto shaman

I guess I'm just looking for some anecdotal suggestions about what seems like the best course of action to you guys. I will likely never raid with any toon other than the pally who is a re-roll to replace my raid geared prot warrior. But it will be nice to have the option to run some instances when there's no one around to do so late at night.

I say mb at first with your tank in the group. See how you are doing in the first couple of days. If you are gaining 1 lvl per day then sick with MB. You could always get your guys to 78 and then solo to 80 (those last lvls are killers). In the lvls 78-80 you can tank instances, which will get you gear to raid to teach you how to do the instances as a boxer. Been hearing that a lot of the bosses are not just tank and spank anymore. It took me about a month to get my team of 5 from lvl 60-70 (before the patch of reduced xp) as a casual gamer, but this was knowing 90% of the quests in outland and playing about 3 hours a day.

My goal is to get to 80 as fast as i can too to get into a good raiding guild, so i will be probably doing this. Create a DK and just get him into the starting area and log out (Doing this is 1, i have a name for the dk, and 2 even though he isn't at an inn he will be getting rest xp. Not going to an inn cause i don't know where one is and don't want to spend time looking for one). Then i will start playing my guys. After about 1-2 weeks i will start playing the dk to just get him to the inn. Once at the inn i will probably switch between him and the team to work off of xp. Once i get him to lvl 60, i will rest him until he is fully rested (15 days) and then just grind out the rest while the team gets there rest xp (by then the team will be 75+ where the rest xp really helps).

You could always shoot your main a few levels ahead and get a jump start from there. At that point reevaluate your timeframe and if youre still looking good for your personal goal, maybe take some time to go back and help your team level some. I think if youre within 4 levels there is no penalty or something like that.

That way if something happens are people are ready to raid sooner then your main isnt lagging behind because of your alts. If thats not the case, then your main will have a bit of an easier time (due to being a couple levels higher and already having done the quests) getting your alts going.

I'm going to do whichever is most fun... I will definitely start out leveling my 5 shamans and if I get a bit sick of leveling them I might bring my 64 mage in and use 4 shamans to power her in outland some, then switch back to my shamans at some point. I just play whatever i sthe most fun at the time whether thats 5 characters or 1, no one can tell you what will be the most fun for you.

I feel that everyone will have more fun with this game (and make it feel less like a second job) if they just do what is fun and stop trying to min/max every single thing they do.

box to 80, only difference between leveling 1 character to leveling 5 is collection quests

If I were you, and I had 6 characters to level to 80, I'd either make the tank play with the 5 man or make a second team of 5. I don't know that I could handle solo boxing anymore :-)

You can reasonably get 5 characters up to level 80 within the 2 week window without a problem. It should only take 120 hours max (if you're instance grinding)... let's run some numbers:

120 Hours = Goal (5 chars at 80)

Total Days to attain the goal = 14 (2 weeks)
Total Hours Available to attain the goal = 336 (14 * 24 hrs/day) [this is our upper limit, unless you know how to get more than 336 hrs out of 14 days :)]

120 Hours / 14 days = 8.57 hours per day

So the question is, will you have that kind of time available to play?

At this point I would argue that instance grinding is going to be the fastest possible way to 80. Quests will be impossible due to the abundance of people doing the same quests as you (remember when TBC came out?)
Quests will probably remain the absolute SLOWEST method for leveling for the next 1-2 months - only because of the over abundance of players trying to do the same quests (good luck doing kill quests with 200 players in the same zone as you/ minimum around the clock).

So back to instance grinding...

Let's go back to your original goal of 4 - 7 day weeks.

so now -> 120 Hours / 28 days ... that's a mere 4.28 hours per day tops.

Also the 120 hour factor doesn't figure in rest experience (which you should have atleast from 70-71.5)


Is it realistic to get level 80 in 2 weeks? Very. Is it likely? Depends on how much time you have. 4 weeks should be the maximum it'll take you to get 80 though...


RIN

I'm going to run the full crew for a few levels and then take a step back and evaluate my progress. That seems to jibe best with my goals and play style.

Thank you everyone for your input. I really appreciate it!