Leveling these days

[Perrigrin]

Hi all

I used to 5 box in wotlk - cleared all heroics with a pal+4 shaman team and leveled a mixed team. But, went back to 2 accounts for a few exps (and took breaks) and then just 1 account last expansion and now - But got the itch to 5 box again.

I have a paladin ret main at 120 on main account - so thinking putting a prot pally tank as main is a good start (I do want my main in the comp).

But I need to level 4 toons, maybe from 1, but there are some scattered alts at 40-100 on my accounts.

Is the best way to do it to just slap on heirlooms and instance? Maybe with the 120 tank leading the charge? I found questing with 5 boxing tedious back in the day, but is that significantly faster?

Any advice appreciated!

[JohnGabriel]

You'll get free level 110 boosts when you buy BfA, don't forget about that.

[RedSorc]

One of the problems with leveling through open world content pre-WoD is that any quest that involves collecting something you have to click on disappears when one character clicks on it. So quests like "Collect 8 mushrooms" become "Collect 40 mushrooms" and, even worse, your characters are all competing with each other for spawns. However, if you can pull it off with the right chain in the right zone, questing can be faster than dungeon running, slightly dependent on which dungeons you end up running.

With this in mind, my current strategy is:

1-20: Quests, rare spawns. Tirisfal Glades is the best zone if horde, not sure for alliance.

20-40: Dungeon spam. Tip: If you are only leveling four characters, have one character stop experience at level 15. This means that the only two dungeons you can get on the group finder are RFC and Deadmines. Deadmines is okay, RFC is excellent. If you stop at 20, you include Stockades (great!), but you include SFK (meh) and Wailing Caverns (Argh!). If you do this, you can do this all the way to 60 as you don't have to deal with the very long, slow and often challenging dungeons that pop up from 40-60.

40-60: Questing. Northern Stranglethorn -> Felwood -> Winterspring. Particularly on the horde side, Northern Stranglethorn has no collect quests where you click objects and the beautiful Nesingwary chain. For Felwood, you skip the quests associated with the Nightelf town in the north. You don't skip a collect quest to pick up a bunch of weeds before Shadow Hold, as Shadow Hold is very lucrative. Winterspring is the second best questing zone in the game, though I skip the yeti chain.

60-90: Dungeons. I'm unaware of any tricks or any decent zones in this level range. Running BC Heroics used to be excellent, but when they changed the way dungeons award XP it became awful. This level range is not any where near as bad, dungeon running, as the outrage a month ago suggested it was, but its still the biggest slog in the leveling process. Seriously, if anybody has any ideas, I'm all ears.

90-100: Treasures and Bonus objectives. Much faster with flying, but still probably the fastest strategy if not. Spend garrison resources on the XP pots. Make sure that, when you loot treasures, you do it one at a time and fully let the character looting the treasure pick up the item and close the loot window before the next character loots, otherwise the second character does NOT get XP, but the treasure is still permanently looted. Just questing is also not slow, as collection spawns now begin spawning per character.

100-110: If you are patient, invasions. Invasions give roughly one and a bit levels for doing all 6 quests. Also, even if you are patient its worth doing Val'sharah which is the best levelling zone in the game if you have flying. Dungeon running is not slow if you are set up for it, particularly if you can get a hold of a useful legendary through the BtA Wakening Essence random legendary from an alt or other twink gear. As I'm doing invasions/Val'sharah, I queue into random dungeons and complete them if I end up rolling something quick, and leaving and going on cooldown for 15 minutes if I roll something slow (Halls of Valor!). Otherwise, questing is reasonably quick, as long as you stay well away from Stormheim.

110-120: Early days, and some folks probably have better ideas than me. I seem to average about 300000 - 400000 XP/hr doing dungeons and 400000-600000 XP/hr doing quests, though that slows down considerably at certain points. Certainly feels like a bit of a slog at the moment, but that might just be because of no heirlooms.

[Sservis]

I wanted to add that Mirai is currently farming gold -> bnet -> boosts to get from 90-110 rather than leveling his teams. If that's a good strategy for just 20 levels, it's probably a good idea for all of 1-110.

110-120
I'd suggest that the best way of doing 110-120 is by doing things that you will want to do anyway. For instance, if you will want to do the story line quests in the zones for rep or whatever reason (pathfinder/eventual flying), then level through zones as you get two tasks accomplished at the same time. Also of note is that gathering gives xp and good gold and is uniquely good when dones as team.

[Perrigrin]

I wanted to add that Mirai is currently farming gold -> bnet -> boosts to get from 90-110 rather than leveling his teams. If that's a good strategy for just 20 levels, it's probably a good idea for all of 1-110.

Thanks, any idea how to best go about that (1-110)?

I think my first 5 team will be 5x prot as that seems to be the easiest to do m+ with - I have one 135-140 120 pally, then there will be 4x boosted to 110.
Is it too much phasing to try and quest with 5 when the master is maxed and have done all quests?

[Sservis]

Thanks, any idea how to best go about that (1-110)?

It's a time/value equation. 4 tokens = 1 boost. So if it takes less time to farm 4 tokens than to level to 110, farming for tokens (gathering or some sort of BoE farming as a multiboxer) is the more efficient way to level. Since it's possible to tap a gathering node up to 10 times and requires next to no special coordination it scales quite well.

US math if you can farm 150 nodes/hour (every 24 seconds?) at 5 units/node it's 30k/hour minimum per account (estimated 40 g/herb). I think this is a conservative guess at the rate. Someone could improve the quality of those estimates as I'm not doing it currently. That rate is a token (around 110k gold currently) under 4 hours, or 16 hours per boost. However it scales up to 10 accounts. Even at 80% efficiency due to extra overhead, it's right at 2 hours per boost.

The comparison point is how long does it take to level a team. Boosting you need to get 4 accounts to 110 in 8 hours or less to match the rate. Leveling as a team of 5, you have 10 hours to get there since you end up with 5 characters at 110 (equivalent of 20 tokens).

PS- it's also a great part time job, even at first world wages. The estimates yield $30/hr in battle.net balance. Maybe I messed up my estimates of the rate.

[Kojiiko]

I have to agree the the leveling grind is so bad these days u would be actually loosing money so to speak. Boost them toons!!!, and within ur first week or 2 u be able to generate enough gold rather than grind all the way from 1 to 110

[Meathead]

20-40: Dungeon spam. Tip: If you are only leveling four characters, have one character stop experience at level 15. This means that the only two dungeons you can get on the group finder are RFC and Deadmines. Deadmines is okay, RFC is excellent. If you stop at 20, you include Stockades (great!), but you include SFK (meh) and Wailing Caverns (Argh!). If you do this, you can do this all the way to 60 as you don't have to deal with the very long, slow and often challenging dungeons that pop up from 40-60.

I had just tried this and if you stop XP from one character the rest get a huge debuff for their XP.

The only good thing would be the end dungeon experience. Is this what you are saying is good about it?

Edit: Just noticed this was from 2018 and even the end dungeon XP is nerfed.