5-box leveling, balancing efficiency and "safety" ?

[Tin]

Problem with all of these guides is that they're designed for single players. Just looking at the first page (1-12 Horde) I see 4 collection quests in the 1-6 section alone. That will take you at least an hour to complete on 5 characters even without competition from other players. You can grind to level 6 in 20 minutes and you'll earn more silver to train with while grinding.

No area looting that mechanism was introduced in Mists of Pandaria - so you have to loot individuel anyway, to get that silver, so questing+grinding will very likely be faster and you get rep too.

[Apatheist]

No area looting that mechanism was introduced in Mists of Pandaria - so you have to loot individuel anyway, to get that silver, so questing+grinding will very likely be faster and you get rep too.

Not AoE looting. Many quest items were changed to be group-lootable by any character in the party that participated in the mob kill during Wrath.

In classic you can only loot one quest item per mob on a single character so you essentially have to do collection quests 5 times.

Once you get a toon to 60, dungeon boosting is another possibility as well.

Another point in favor of paladin tanks over warriors IMO. Paladins are amazing powerlevelers in classic.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

In classic you can only loot one quest item per mob on a single character so you essentially have to do collection quests 5 times.

This is a really good point I'd forgotten. Same goes with those ground-object items you have to right-click on, as the multi-access object changes were also in later builds.

[JohnGabriel]

The OP was actually talking about classic. Questing took hours, dungeons took hours, everything took hours. The casual player is going to take 2 to 3 months to hit level cap, about 6 to 10 days /played time. Thinking back to the demo, 7.5 minutes per quest sounds tough to keep up.

[DasButo]

Once you get a toon to 60, dungeon boosting is another possibility as well.

[DasButo]

I'm still torn between leveling a trinity team from the get-go, or a tank/healer duo and then PLing the rest after I hit 60. I wonder if replacing a mage with a balance druid for the crit aura would be worth it, especially if running a pally tank?

[DasButo]

That damn Hardened Tumor from https://www.wowhead.com/quest=451/a-recipe-for-death damn near broke me...I think I cleared those islands in Lake Lordamere 3+ times before it dropped.

[UFTA]

Ok, thanks again to everyone who has replied.
You have assuaged my concerns about being erroneously banned, so that's very helpful.
I've also been very interested in the questing vs grinding discussion that has occurred in the thread.
That having been said, there's another variable that perhaps I hadn't considered when I posted the OP: mob density.

Now, there are unknowns here as relates to Classic. We don't yet know if Blizzard is going to implement tech such as dynamic respawns or server sharding in order to accommodate high numbers of players in close quarters like starter zones. Both of those things are tech that did not exist in vanilla wow, so they may or may not be used in Classic.

If Blizzard does not implement some kind of tech that makes more mobs available....then both questing and (world) grinding could be negatively impacted if too many players are in a zone. BUT, instance grinding wouldn't be affected at all by low or high server pops. This is another reason I'm keenly interested in the viability of dungeon grinding.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Well, I wouldn't get too far down the rabbit hole yet as we don't even know what rules or patch items they're going to port over to the classic branch. It's probably a safe bet that they'll port some of the updated stability and ease-of-use UI improvements over, as I think they can get away with a lot of that without impacting the "flavor" of classic (e.g. quest progression rates, dungeons, character power, talents, etc.). Time will tell.

[Apatheist]

I'm still torn between leveling a trinity team from the get-go, or a tank/healer duo and then PLing the rest after I hit 60. I wonder if replacing a mage with a balance druid for the crit aura would be worth it, especially if running a pally tank?

If you just want a level 60 druid, swapping a mage out won't prevent you from clearing dungeons. Any tank, healer and 3*DPS combo will be able to clear dungeons. Some comps will take longer and may not be as viable in PvP. If you're doing it in order to gain DPS though, you'll lose more DPS replacing a mage with an oomkin than 3% crit will give you. A warlock would increase party DPS and provide more utility.

As far as efficiency goes -- I'm fairly sure you'll get 5 characters to 60 faster by grinding dungeons together rather than leveling in two separate groups. If you level in dungeons from the start you'll be in pretty much full blues by the time you hit 60 and geared enough to start farming preraid BiS. Here's a preraid BiS list so you can get an idea which pieces to aim for while leveling. As I've said before, the stat difference between rare and epic gear is immense in classic -- much more so than in other expansions. There are some level 40-50 rares and epics that are better than raid tier gear. Warden Staff and Smoking Heart of the Mountain are good examples. Warden Staff is a level 43 item but is better than Naxx tier weapons for a feral tank.

I think they can get away with a lot of that without impacting the "flavor" of classic (e.g. quest progression rates, dungeons, character power, talents, etc.).

I'm one of those vehement "no changes" people but I can't see an issue with them improving back-end stuff, changing the launcher, etc. As long as the gameplay experience remains unchanged I'm fine. The fact that you can trade loot already put me on tilt a little. It shows they're willing to rationalize changes to actual game mechanics which (IMO) probably means we'll see them messing with PvP /follow and other nonsense that doesn't belong in classic.