5 Chars Dungeon Powerleveling Multibox

[dalo199]

I was the 2nd shaman to 60 world wide (I had a bunch of world firsts in beta as well, and from about 1999 to 2011, I was often involved in level races in various MMOs in other words I was a full re level grinder ). I can assure you people will aoe grind. The first people to cap on any given server will almost certainly being aoe grinding to some extent. Be it a hunter spamming multishot etc, or a warrior using their AOEs, or a mage aoe grinding down 20 mobs at a time with frost nova and blizzard.

There are also solid aoe grind spots off the beaten path, I will agree that, solo grinding (aoe grinding if possible) is not going to be very viable if you're caught up with the rush. However, a month or so in, if that's what you want to do, it will be viable, like for a Paladin. Paladins can aoe grind like CRAZY once there is a mature economy to provide the tools they need.

Anyways, my ranking of leveling speed was just to give a general overview, this is about MBing after all isn't it? I actually considered the group you're considering. 3 Warriors 1 Mage 1 Priest. It will be fine. You'd play either the mage or the priest. The mage brings a lot to the group, and while you're a mana sloot, you will make up for having to drink now and then, with things like, summoned water/food and portals. Which will ease your ability to move your group around tremendously. Not only that, but a mage brings a TON of aoe damage to the group, as well as control.

You're right about how vanilla private servers overtuned dungeons. People forget that dungeons in WoW classic were largely completely faceroll until Diremaul. Diremaul WAS hard, and until you out geared it, it pretty much required a lot of very careful CC management.

It's been so long since I was level racing in WoW that I couldn't tell you XP per hour numbers. Just rough /played numbers. I've posted in another thread my intended dungeon path, I haven't settled on alliance vs horde yet, but it will be basically stockades/rfc->sfk->sm-BRD /fin. I might throw uldaman in for a few levels to bridge from SM to BRD. I might also go to LBRS at 58 for a change of pace.

Very interesting... with your 3 warriors are you going to have one of them prot spec or 3x fury? Going to be interesting to track your progress when Classic finally arrives are you going to be racing to 60 in a few days? I remember Strat and Scholo being reasonably difficult back in the day but might have been due to us all being bad/new.


FYI everyone the latest 5 man dungeon leveling video is up from Hakurai.. this kind of AoE farming takes a lot of movement would take a very skilled boxer to pull stuff like this off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPZNzfKKv9s

[Apatheist]

this kind of AoE farming takes a lot of movement would take a very skilled boxer to pull stuff like this off.

You wouldn't need to play the same way as a boxer. Blizzard is actually relatively low DPS compared to arcane explosion. Cycling cone of cold to keep everything slowed while spamming arcane explosion is faster. I think the only reason those guys are using blizzard is because it's a guaranteed slow and it's difficult to coordinate every CoC/nova between different players. That's not a problem for boxers.

The problem with spellcleave comps is once you get to 55+ and start doing dungeons like Dire Maul and Scholomance. I'm not sure how effective it will be. The mobs hit a lot harder, have a lot more health and use a lot more special attacks like AE silences, etc. You'll be able to CC some packs but how would you handle bosses like Kromkrush or Rattlegore that can't be CC'd?

Personally I'd take warlocks over mages for dungeon grinding (without a tank.) Voidwalkers make great dungeon tanks for killing bosses you can't kite and gathering up multiple packs with your pets and then mashing hellfire is faster/easier than kiting. The only issue with 4 SL warlocks and a priest, as I've said before, is the lack of /focus so we have no way to assign pet targets.

[boneapetight]

With all these warrior teams, I have to ask what everyone believes is the best spec for dungeon grinding with a 3/4 warrior team?

Sweeping strikes makes the most sense, but then you are stance dancing in Battle/Zerker for rend/overpower. Fury would potentially be able to to survive in Zerker stance the entire time and simplify the rotations.

I would not want to stance dance across characters like that.

[Mercbeast]

Very interesting... with your 3 warriors are you going to have one of them prot spec or 3x fury? Going to be interesting to track your progress when Classic finally arrives are you going to be racing to 60 in a few days? I remember Strat and Scholo being reasonably difficult back in the day but might have been due to us all being bad/new.


FYI everyone the latest 5 man dungeon leveling video is up from Hakurai.. this kind of AoE farming takes a lot of movement would take a very skilled boxer to pull stuff like this off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPZNzfKKv9s

I doubt you will need a protection warrior. When I leveled my shaman at launch, I often ended up main tanking with my warrior duo partner, simply because he couldn't out threat rockbiter which was often my best raw DPS boost as an enhance style shaman.

That said, I think if you ran 4 warriors, 1 going protection might be wise since you have so much extra AOE flying around. With just 2 warriors carrying the bulk of your AoE, I'm not sure if its worth it to go protection, but at the same time, a prot warrior might just give you that extra bit of control on bigger pulls that allow your fury warriors to do their thing rather than die.

I'd just experiment as you go. Respecing once or twice won't be the end of the world while you figure out if one prot is worth it or not!

I definitely would not recommend a spell cleave dungeon grind group, if that spell cleave is mages. Shadowpriests? Yes. Druids? Maybe. Elemental shamans? Yes. Warlocks? Yes. Mages? They have the greatest potential, but also require the most actual skill input to make it work. With shadowpriests, you can just run around with beyond plate level mitigation, SWP everything, cycle fears and shields and heals and dot packs to death. With druids you can kind of do the same. With elemental shamans, CL ftw. With locks, who needs a tank, you've got 4, or maybe 5! With mages, you need to manage frost nova, AE, and blizzard, all the while moving around. Just not a very viable boxing setup IMO, but people might find that it works fine, you just need to be a little more conservative on when you move into a new dungeon. Underleveled it might be suicidal, but equal leveled it might be easy. Who knows! I will say this though, I'd certainly run a tank the first time I did a 3x mage cleave group. Having the tank would give you a bit of a safety net, and if you ever decided to push on to 4x mages, you'd better know what you could get away with!

[Jwoz]

I was skimming Reddit today and I stumbled across this post and I figured I'd toss it over here in case anyone missed it.

Basically the TLDR is this guy has done a decent amount of research around the viability of a 4 warrior/melee cleave comp. Based on his findings it may be the fastest way to clear dungeons; and level in general (even compared to solo questing at least for warriors). There's some good discussion back and forth in the comments and the link to a powerpoint he put together explaining his theory crafting in further detail.

I've been on the fence about what to play because I wanted to stick to 4 or 5 of the same class, but was worried about viability and clear speeds. This is making me lean heavily towards 4 warrior priest.

[Dawkinz]

I was skimming Reddit today and I stumbled across this post and I figured I'd toss it over here in case anyone missed it.

Basically the TLDR is this guy has done a decent amount of research around the viability of a 4 warrior/melee cleave comp. Based on his findings it may be the fastest way to clear dungeons; and level in general (even compared to solo questing at least for warriors). There's some good discussion back and forth in the comments and the link to a powerpoint he put together explaining his theory crafting in further detail.

I've been on the fence about what to play because I wanted to stick to 4 or 5 of the same class, but was worried about viability and clear speeds. This is making me lean heavily towards 4 warrior priest.

The issue with warriors will be stance dancing to take advantage of overpowers and rage management. Otherwise they are excellent choices for multiboxing. I considered 4 warrior 1 priest but decided 3 war 1 pally 1 priest is a little better since it has 2 rezes and DI for better wipe recovery and good buffs + free mount.

[Apatheist]

I would not want to stance dance across characters like that.

You macro stances into abilities so you don't really have to actively manage stances.

#showtooltip Overpower
/cast battle stance
/cast Overpower

As for spec, I've gone back and forth between 2H fury and arms and settled on arms. It's just easier. Bigger cleaves with a 2H and only having to keep one weapon per warrior up to date is much easier to do while leveling. At 60 with enough hit rating I'll switch to DW fury.

The difficult part with warriors will be figuring out a system to manage rage efficiently.

I definitely would not recommend a spell cleave dungeon grind group, if that spell cleave is mages. Shadowpriests? Yes. Druids? Maybe. Elemental shamans? Yes. Warlocks? Yes. Mages? They have the greatest potential, but also require the most actual skill input to make it work.

My experience is the exact opposite of this. Mages are literally the easiest DPS class to box in classic. Both their single target and AE rotations are 1 button and very mana efficient. With a good AE tank (see: paladin) you run in, pull 10-20 mobs, drop consecrate and then spam arcane explosion. It's dead fast and easy. Then later on in 55+ dungeons where you can no longer pull a ton, you get polymorph and frost nova which are great tools for reducing incoming damage on your tank.

The primary reason I decided on warriors rather than mages is because I PvP a lot. Mages are great solo but require too much micro to PvP efficiently while boxed.

[boneapetight]

You macro stances into abilities so you don't really have to actively manage stances.

• Each warrior will proc overpower individually, you need to manage each one or you switch them all into battle stance unnecessarily.
• You then need to get them back into zerker stance which are more hotkeys to manage.
• If you then macro zerker into say, whirlwind, then you pull a warrior who has overpower out of battle.

I was all in on the melee cleave warrior team but when I start breaking down my macros, even using Gnomesequencer for advanced macros, the inefficiencies in the warrior make me lean towards a team centered around mages for their simplicity vs. maximizing capabilities.

[Mooni]

Seeing a lot of questions about AoE and managing warrior tanks, and I'm reminded of one of the quirkier specs someone posted here back in the early 2000s:

1x Prot warrior 11/0/35
- The arms part: Get Deep Wounds and Improved Thunder Clap
- The prot part is just basic bare-bones prot stuff, up to and including Shield Slam

4x priest 32/11/5
- QUAD HOLY NOVA

It's kind of a cheese because Holy Nova draws no aggro so you can just let thunder clap & deep wounds handle that part. The constant heals are usually enough to keep the tank full, and you can always macro in 4x flash heals if things get dicey (or 4x wands when you have less than 3 enemies left)

////////

If you like some cheese sauce to dip your cheese in, why not play alliance and swap in a pally with consecrate instead? The priests would love the blessing of wisdom too, I'm sure.

One-button your way to glory! Never break autofollow!

[xandorz]

4x priest 32/11/5
- QUAD HOLY NOVA

Does that actually work or does it run out of mana before killing things?
Holy Nova has a 7.14% spell power coefficiency. Costs 675 mana with mental agility. Deals ~200 damage per target.
Enough mana for ~7 Holy Nova at lvl 60. 7 * 200 * 4 = 5600 damage, before considering crit and spell power.
Looking at some random mobs in BRD it says they have 6-8.2k hp (on classicdb).

Would deal some more damage with Power Infusion and Inner Focus, but both have a 3 min cd.

Feels like it might be really tight on mana on such a team.