Boosting /played time /w recruit-a-friend

[Stabface]

EDIT : Boosting + Recruit A Friend is not intended to be working by Blizzard, unfortunately. So this method either no longer works or will be shortly be removed from the game.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...65628748&sid=1

Q: How does the bonus experience work?

Let's say we have Account A with a level 70 character, Account B with a level 1 character and Account C with another level 1 character, all three characters are grouped. Account B and Account C are linked, will they receive triple experience?


A: Bonus experience should only be granted if the experience is not trivial to anyone in the group. Our Quality Assurance Team is looking into reports that some of these restrictions are not consistent and hope to resolve the issue soon.

I think it will be interesting to see now the difference in /played times for boosted characters with the RAF 3x XP bonus. It will really show how much time is actively spent getting XP vs other things (looting and travel being the biggest sinks on your /played time). Previously I made L35 in 12 hours /played and I'm aiming to cut this in half.

Tonight I did 1->10 in 1H 15M played... which is fast! But it's not 3x as fast as I've previously done these levels... more like 2 or 2.5x as fast.
I'm guessing 10-15 in Deadmines will take ~ 1 to 1.5 hour since it's an awful lot of running around. But 15-24 in Stockades should be super fast, possibly ~1.5 hours not including time spent waiting on instance reset. Then 24-35 in SM, should definitely be under 3 and I hope more in the range of 2-2.5 hours.

I'll keep updating as I level with /played time if folks are interested, but I know I'm not the only person boosting a new group - it would be great to have some other #'s from people to pace myself against.


Here is my /played times so far and what I did to accomplish it. I use summons to each instance to cut down on travel, and I only loot blues+ off corpses -- you can do this by setting master loot, threshold rare, and pass-on-loot yes. Then any corpse that sparkles has a blue+ on it.

1->10 : 1H 15M, grinding/mob tagging in starting zones.
10->15 : 55M, boosting in Deadmines.
15->23 : 55M, boosting in Stockades.
23->40 : 1H 55M, boosting in Scarlet Monastery.
Spent 30M at L40 running around training and buying mounts.
40->45 : 2H 25M, boosting in ZF. My /played total is 7H 55M here.
45->50 : 3H 20M, boosting in Stratholme. My /played total is 11H 20M.
50->55 : 4H 10M, boosting in Stratholme, /played total 15H 30M.
55->60 : 3H 9M, /played is 18H 39M total. I did quests, including cloth quests in the capital cities and the Argent Dawn repeatable quests, along with the Shaman totem line.

Now the real grind starts.

[Dominian]

and you just boost yourself with a prot paladin??

I use about 50 mins per level in SM cath now that my shamans are 32 and im pretty sure its slow. I do it in 3 pulls due to that my paladin doesnt realy have any prot gear at all but S3 gear.

[zanthor]

In a duo it is 1.5x the normal XP you would get solo for kill XP. Since the quest XP is multiplied as well that is where you will see the most benefit. I can see being able to 5 box to 60 in well under the normal time it would take a talented leveler to get there since blasting through quests is quite easy for boxers.

[Stabface]

Zanthor, due to the way group XP works with boosting you actually get more XP in a group of 4 lowbies + L70 than you would in a group of 2 + L70 (or 1 or 3 lowbies + L70 even). And at any rate it's simply triple XP per kill while boosting vs not having recruit-a-friend. I guess you're comparing solo kill XP to duo'd kill XP w/ RAF bonus which is true, though why you'd boost just 1 character I don't know.

[Bradster]

As a reference I’m level 40 x5. 2 days played, no boosting. I haven’t taken any time to PVP, sure there’s some afk time in there but it’s not a great deal. World PVP is dead so no time used chasing down gnomes.

[Vyndree]

Account "Main" -- 70 prot pally
Account "Veteran 1" -- new level 1
Account "Veteran 1's referral" -- new level 1
Account "Veteran 2" -- new level 1
Account "Veteran 2's referral" -- new level 1

Veteran 1 and Veteran 1's referral are Suvega's. He summoned his veteran to Dun Morogh and reached level 10 in approximately 1 hour 45 minutes.
Veteran 2 and Veteran 2's referral are mine. I summoned my veteran to Teldrassil and reached level 10 in approximately 1 hour 30 minutes.
Personal Note: the longest part about 1-10 is that quests are LINEAR and you out-level the quests very quickly. We left the 1-5 starter zone at level 7. Collection quests also hurt when they are a prerequisite to the quest chain. Both of us slowed down in XP when the mobs started becoming green and collection quests made things longer.

Lowbies were summoned to Westfall flightpath and walked into Deadmines after setting their hearth at Westfall. Leveled 10-15 with about 2 levels per instance.
Veteran 1 (controlled by Suvega) is the /follow leader for all lowbies, while Vyndree controlled the prot paladin "booster".
Personal note: killing the pats that occur after each boss slowed things down, and there were a few wipes thanks to the lowbies proximity-aggro'ing mobs. Be careful.

Lowbies were summoned to Stormwind and hearthed there. Entered Stockades. Leveled 15-20 with about 1 level per instance. Time spent from 15-20 was ~50 minutes.

~100k experience per hour total from level 1-20.

Lowbies were summoned to the entry of SM: Cathedral. One run was done before we went to bed, pushing them from 20-21 in a single run.
SM: Cathedral Times:

• Time /played (1 run 20-21): 4 hours 30 minutes at level 21
• Time /played at level 30: 6 hours
• Time /played at level 35: 7.5 hours

This was my pull system (I do not have the figurine of the colossus, but I do this with no healers and just take it easy on the pulls... Besides, it gives me time to watch a movie while I boost. )

http://dual-boxing.com/forums/index....&threadID=4895

ZF took a while and was the most inefficient part of the run. Yes, we did it with a prot pally. Yes, the healers suck. Yes, we wiped during some unlucky frog hexes. 35-45 was spent in ZF with about 1 level per full run.
This was my pull system -- the more you pull the easier it gets, oddly enough. Chase down the healers when they run to kill them, otherwise they'll just heal to full and come back.


Strat was much easier and more efficient. The lowbies had to help heal this one because I do NOT have the Figurine of the Colossus.

I used this guide for pulls:


EDIT: Well, Suvega and I had our lowbies hit 60 yesterday with about 1 day, 4 hours /played (this includes about 4-5 full wipes as we were figuring out ZF/Strat and some afk time).

For reference, here are the armories for the boosted characters--
Vyndree's Referral: Vÿndree, 60 NE Druid (resto)
Vyndree's Veteran: Snuggleßunny, 60 Gnome Warrior (fury, might as well be unspecced)
Suvega's Veteran: Kamehamehaa, 60 Draenei Pally (holy)
Suvega's Referral: Nyzel, 60 Gnome Rogue (unspecced -- didn't even train stealth until 60)

They're all revered with AD, which is nice. I dumped about 100g into each of my lowbies and just BARELY managed to train all of my abilities and get level 40 mounts (minimal looting done until Strat). So it's not exactly cost effective compared to questing, but at least when they're 70 they'll make it up in dailies.




EDIT:
I didn't realize this until I just read the FAQ again, but for sure the XP we're gaining now from boosting is NOT INTENDED and WILL BE FIXED. If I had known this when I started, I would not have done it. At the time, I boosted ONLY because a blue had stated that this was the current implementation (a non-RAF account wouldn't deny the RAF'ed lowbies of triple XP)

If it's fixed today, I don't know since I'm at work, but keep in mind this is an unintended bug. It's starting to reach into the gray-area of exploitation now that Blizzard has admitted that it's not intentional and any inconsistencies will be fixed. I will not be boosting using this method any longer due to the circumstances -- exploiting bugs in blizzard design for the purpose of gaining a competitive advantage (i.e. leveling speed) is against the terms of use and MAY (depending on severity and whether or not the GM is feeling lenient and/or had their coffee that morning) get you banned. I'm not willing to risk my accounts.


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...65628748&sid=1

Q: How does the bonus experience work?

Let's say we have Account A with a level 70 character, Account B with a level 1 character and Account C with another level 1 character, all three characters are grouped. Account B and Account C are linked, will they receive triple experience?


A: Bonus experience should only be granted if the experience is not trivial to anyone in the group. Our Quality Assurance Team is looking into reports that some of these restrictions are not consistent and hope to resolve the issue soon.

[Rodskii]

I got to 23 in just over 4 hours played time on all 4 of my shamans.

I leveled all 4 to level 8. Had my buddy powerlevel with his mage in RFC from 8 - 19. Then proceeded to RFK to 23. Spent a lot of wasted time running around so this can definitely be severely improved on. Going to SM tonight. I will see what speeds I can get in there.

Ohh and a little relation to quest bonus. The Willy export quest in RFK yielded all 4 characters 10950 xp at level 22. Ganns reclamation (completed while running to RFK) at level 19 yielded 9850 xp. It is definitely insane....

Relation for mob kills. In RFK killing mid 25 elite mobs I was yielding 234 xp per kill. 8o

[valtrex]

I just bought 3 accounts with invite a friend about 3 weeks ago, so I just wanted to add "I hate you". 8o

[Stabface]

Thank you for the numbers, Vyndree. And the colors are just lovely too!

You basically have the exact same setup that I do:
L70 Prot Paladin on account 1. New L1 "veteran" alts on accounts 2 and 3. New L1 "referral" alts on accounts 4 and 5. (Accounts 2 -> 4, and 3 -> 5 are linked.)

Curious, what technique did you use to level 1-10? I did straight XP grind with the alts to L4 then mob tagged using Earth Shock / Moonfire and an ungrouped L70 Shaman doing the killing w/ Earthbind & Magma Totem (gives full XP since it counts as a pet).

[Vyndree]

Curious, what technique did you use to level 1-10? I did straight XP grind with the alts to L4 then mob tagged using Earth Shock / Moonfire and an ungrouped L70 Shaman doing the killing w/ Earthbind & Magma Totem (gives full XP since it counts as a pet).

I quested same as you would with a solo character. I did all quests, including collections. In hindsight, I would leave the "starter newbie zone" at level 5 like you are supposed to, because 5-7 slowed down considerably once the mobs you were killing turned green. I would also skip any collection quest that doesn't require you to kill mobs.

Quest XP is phenomenal. Try to do as many as you can, prioritizing kill quests, loot-one-item quests, and then kill-to-collect quests. Skip collect-multiple-item quests that do not require you to kill yellow/orange mobs. Take "delivery" quests only if you're headed there already.

I hit level 10 by doing TWO quests in the level 5-10 zone. So there was really no need for me to be a completist about the 1-5 zone and finish everything there. Leave 1-5 zone at level 5, it's not worth your time.


Another thing that may have slowed us down is that we didn't have $$$ to buy all of our skills. I trained at levels 2, 6, and 8 but I was dumb and ran out of $$$ before I could buy the important dps skills. I didn't reach a mailbox to get my bags/money until level 7. Buy your primary dps skills only, skip skills like rend, thunderclap, thorns, etc. On my warrior, all I should've trained was heroic strike and charge.



BTW, I fully expect that this is going to get nerfed in the future, although comparing to 3x experience questing it's still somewhat unbelievable the amount of benefit Blizz is allowing new refer-a-friend accounts to get, boosting or not. If someone were to tell me about this without showing proof on the Blizz website I would've told them they're nuts, so...

In any case, Blizz has confirmed that boosting this way is the expected behavior. I will be shocked if they don't nerf it, but hey... I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.