Holy Brick Wall Batman!

[Shodokan]

Sooner you learn about "ignore" feature (click on fursphere; view profile; user list; add to ignore) the happier you'll be on those forums

And to add something somewhat relevant to the thread: 70-80 is a LOT more pain and effort and a lot less fun and fast than 60-70 which is now a breeze... I know I kind of abandoned 2 teams at 72

I abandoned my mages at 73 myself.

[Mystic]

It is sort of funny how you forget just how difficult the northrend instances were when you tried them at level or just under level (toon level and gear level both), because once you get over the hump (higher level or much better gear), they become quite easy. This is true for the regular and the heroics.

Leveling via northrend instances is good practice and fair XP (overall, not per hour), but honeslty until you outgear/outlevel them, you are asking for troubles (unless you have a solid mixed team and are very talented with controlling them manually or via lots of clever macroing), and your xp/hr will be abysmal. Stick with questing, and if you have heirloom +XP pieces, you will zoom with questing.

If you insist on instances at level, make one of your toons a dedicated healer, gear him for healing specifically, and learn to heal with him.

Prior to northrend, all my box teams I took through any instance had no issues whatsoever doing them at level, and never needed a dedicated healer. Northrend instances at level this is not the case. You need to outlevel the instance, outgear the instance, or run a dedicated healer with on-level healing gear.

I will say that the four shaman and paladin tank were the easiest comp to take instances at level for me, even without making one of the shaman a dedicated healer. I struggled here and there, ended up making one a dedicated healer, but even with good healing reflexes, macros, etc, it still was less fun than just doing double duty dps and heal with all four shaman, so I switched him back to dps. Without a dedicated healer I could take most instances when I was one or two levels above what most non-boxed teams hit them at. They work so well at dual-duty because the dps gear works well as healing gear, since both specs require +sp. This is not the case with other non-mixed teams. You need two sets of gear.

Next team to take the whole way through was DK + 4 Rets. Northrend instances were definitely a brick wall. I tried UK at 70 and just plain took too much damage. It is not melee team friendly at 70 with normal 70 gear. Without a dedicated healer it was plain tough. I could limp through with a couple deaths every other trash pull, and a few wipes on each boss, but it just wasn't worth it. The Rets healed like crap with dps gear. I tried the dedicated healer thing again, but it's just not my style, so I just quested for gear, and went back when I outleveled/outgeared it a couple of levels. Same thing for heroics.

Now I just hit 70 with my 5x druid team. I steamrolled through all pre-NR instances, with all of them feral, 1 bear and 4 cats. I popped 4xrejuv for trash, or for tough trash or bosses I popped 4xrenew, at the start, and hardly ever had to pop back to caster to refresh them before the fight was over.

I tried UK last night with them, all geared on level, and I struggled through with them all feral (bear+4 cats), again with 4xrenew on tank, then pull, the caster/cat toggling to heal. It works well, but again, this place is not so melee friendly, especially without a dedicated healer. Too much AE/splash damage. I tried making the 4 dps into moonkins, with about 50% healing gear and 50% feral since I wanted to see if it was viable and I had no full sets of healing gear collected. My dps doubled, but I went OOM in a near instant, and got clobbered by the trash that was so simple with the 4xcats. OOM means no dps and no heals with oomkins.

It was very apparent that I forgot again just how tough these are at level without a dedicated healer. So, I threw in the towel on doing the intances at level and am just suffering the questing until I outlevel/outgear them. I'm just not going to pain myself with a dedicated healer when I can just quest instead. It's level 80 that matters anyway.

[kate]

Well, I don't know if you need to outgear them - but they are certainly more challenging at level than other instances are. Going through vanilla was easy, going through BC was only a little harder (learning to handle certain gimmicks), but Northrend has the only instances that routinely resulted in a wipe unless I was really on my toes.

Northrend heroics are still a big challenge to me - even the entry level ones can result in a wipe still as I gear up.

[thefunk]

Rather than getting annoyed at some people, look at the context they are saying their point. I agree with fur on this as levelling 70-80 in a weekend is completely unrealistic to a relative newcomer like me. It took me weeks and weeks to level to 80. There seems to be a little showing off to boot which is also not helpful and should be put in context. How did you do it? Did you have heirlooms/bg's/boosting in dungeons etc... So don't get annoyed if you are brought back in line by the experienced boxers here, regardless of their tone of voice.

To the op. I'm dreading hitting northrend, my second team hitting 62 and going really quickly. Good luck

[Shodokan]

Rather than getting annoyed at some people, look at the context they are saying their point. I agree with fur on this as levelling 70-80 in a weekend is completely unrealistic to a relative newcomer like me. It took me weeks and weeks to level to 80. There seems to be a little showing off to boot which is also not helpful and should be put in context. How did you do it? Did you have heirlooms/bg's/boosting in dungeons etc... So don't get annoyed if you are brought back in line by the experienced boxers here, regardless of their tone of voice.

To the op. I'm dreading hitting northrend, my second team hitting 62 and going really quickly. Good luck

Pure questing. Heirloom WG shoulders and weapon along with BOA chest from badges. The amount of EXP from bgs and dungeons isn't close to the EXP per hour you can get from questing, especially if you 1 shot every mob in sight (which you should mostly be doing if you have heirloom gear) It also can depends on group makeup, some quests/dungeons might be annoying for some classes where as for others they are not. An example of this is druids in flight form being able to pick up items like siege bombs for the quest in DB (horde) or the zepplin parts near honor hold etc...

I hit northrend and had no rested whatsoever. Most levels should take between 3 and 4 hours with heirloom gear... some a little longer in places that have annoying collection quests like zuldrak and sholozar basin. But you SHOULD be able to ding 80 before leaving ZD with BOA, and after sholozar otherwise. This was over my 10th time through all these quests though so i knew where to go and what quests to do in what order with no help from guides or addons and whatnot. The major time saver is flight form... without it you can take forever to do some of the areas. My shaman were taking close to twice as long per level as my rets/dk are.

Regarding the "newcomer" part... without having the perks of already having 80s yes boxing to 80 cannot be done in a weekend. There isn't enough time in the day to be able to do that. But with heirlooms and regular flying you should be able to do 10 levels in 30 to 50 hours. So i mean it is very possible to do, but point of fact is that many people who multi-box do it because of the freedom it brings. Most seem to have a family, a job or something else they spend time on. Most people cannot afford to or simply do not wish to put 30 to 40 hours into WoW in a three day period. Not to mention that questing for 30 to 40 hours can give you WoW burnout hardcore.

[kate]

I did a bit of reframing of the idea of what "progress" means in order to not feel like I'm being stupidly slow when leveling up.

My 5x paladin team is the first *real* multiboxing team I've made, and I wanted it to be as much of a learning experience as possible: I rolled on a new server, no heirloom gear or other help, no RAF, and instead of questing to level I primarily (90% or so) did instance runs. They hit level 70 this weekend, are about 2/3rds of the way to 71, and I think my /played is something around 8.5 days (each, of course) when my best time to 80 (with one character) was a little over 4.5 /played.

But what helps me feel like I'm making progress even when I'm going so slowly is:

- Learning dungeons I either hadn't done in a LONG time or never did at all
- Timing my dungeon runs and seeing how I get quicker/survive more easily in fights as I figure them out
- Not using wowhead or other sources to figure out strategies for dealing with bosses, but just learning the fights I didn't already know
- Figuring out novel ways to abuse the fact that I am running 5 perfectly synchronized members of the same class, because in some ways it's VASTLY outperforming teams that are comprised of individual players from different classes

These are the things that I have fun with in WoW - so for me, the fact that my time to level is so long is totally OK because I'm enjoying it. I'll also enjoy my next team - how quickly will I be able to get people to the level cap when I have heirloom gear & funding & also know all the slow spots where I wasted a LOT of time. And the team after that - I'm going to do only questing to level up (including dungeon runs necessary to finish quests, of course).

tl;dr version - enjoy the trip AND the destination, find a way to make the process of leveling fun

[thefunk]

tl;dr version - enjoy the trip AND the destination, find a way to make the process of leveling fun

This. I do often struggle when I hit 80 and therefore reroll and redo all the levelling again with a new team. Just the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again for rep gain/gear would encourage me to have a few days on alternative games (tiger woods '06, any Wii game, boulder dash on pc emulator).

I always felt the time between hitting 80 and having gear to start having fun in raids & bg's was the most painful in my experience in WoW.

[crowdx]

My 2 cents, if you play for about 4 hours a day you should ding 1 level each day (if you quest 90% of the play time ) .
Shodokan is not someone anyone should gauge their own progress by.

[SaraiE]

I just got my first team to 70. Being a newcomer to MB and LK, without BOA items and flight in NR, it can be annoying to lvl esp. if you are on a PVP server. Seems like every 20 minutes or so, a skull horde would land on my team and wiped it while I am doing something. Not knowing where stuffs are and where to go also slow things down.

And yes, work and family is always a priority. I do envy Shokodan (Colin?)!!!!

my two pennies~
SaraiE

[Siaea]

So, I made this post on 3/31, and this morning I dinged 80. I guess it wasn't too bad, I only played a couple hours a day. Now comes the fun part. . .gear