Need help understanding Prepared's setup

[ShasVa]

Prepared (?) is the player who multiboxed a heap of Shamans, all in an effort to conquer raids by himself. While I will not fault his desires, I do not quite understand how he could take the time to level-up so many characters at once.

In a recent experiment with MBing, I found that even though all accounts were RaF-linked, the XP rate still seemed to divide equally. With 5 toons, the level-up process was slower than with 2 toons. So having all XP rates multipled by 3 and then divided by 32...I'd imagine that would result in very-low gains for all toons concerned.

If someone could clear this bit of Prepared's setup for me, that would be great. Despite quitting WoW for the foreseeable future (quite possibly permanently!), I would like to be able to afford and do what Prepared has done. But alas I don't have the finances for it.

[Tim]

Well quite simply put, the time it takes to level 5 guys at once is far less than leveling one character by itself, 5 times.

[Ualaa]

If you level five toons together, versus one toon at a time in sequence.

If it is a collection quest, with only one loot per character per kill, then you'll need an equal number of loots. But doing five at once, can make you want to pull your hair out; it will seem far worse than doing it once today, once again in a month, once again a month after that, etc.

If it is a kill quest or a quest where everyone in the party gets to loot off of the same creature, then leveling five together is shared credit. While leveling each of the toons separately means you need to kill the mobs five times as many times.

Therefore, from a quest completion point of view, five toons together is easily faster than five toons in sequence, one at a time.

Assuming you had a questing route, which was say 1100 quests... Going one toon at a time, you would receive more experience from mob kills (100% of the experience, one way) than if you were to group five toons and kill the same mobs (or even more mobs for those collections) because the group will get (105% experience total, divided five ways for 21% of the kill experience each). If everything was collections or kill five times as many mobs, they'd come out slightly ahead, but a lot of the stuff is shared credit where a mob is only killed once.



RAF is exceptionally fast for boxers, because you link four accounts (and level new toons on those four) to an existing account, with what we call a booster. Someone who can run you through instances at a very rapid pace. It is quite possible to boost toons from 1st to 60th, in 11-12 hours of played time, assuming you know what you're doing. This will include parking toons at the relevant instances, so you can use the "summon a friend" feature, to never need to run toons from instance A to instance B. You can log the toons out, while instances are on lockdown. Etc. Total leveling time, is probably most of two consecutive days of real time. Repeat the process several times, and for every two times you "boost" a team, you'll get one entire "free" team from the granted levels.

[Tim]

RAF is insane. If you rush 5x accounts RAF style you can hit 60 in around 14 hours. It might even be less with Cataclysm being out.

[Zub]

and now guilds have another 15% xp gain

[Ualaa]

If you have the WotLK heirlooms, they get you two 10% boosts for 1st to 80th level play. With Cataclysm, there are a total of 45% experience boosts if you had everything, which applies from 1st to 85th.

Together, that's 65% of boosts from 1st to 80th, and 45% from 80th to 85th.

While the boosts are not cumulative, but multitive, they do add up.
With no items, you would need 100% experience.
With one item, you need 100-10 = 90% experience.
With two items, you need (100% - 10% = 90%) x (100% - 10% = 90%) = 81% experience.
Add in the 5% (Guild Rank 2) and you need (100% - 10% = 90%) x (100% - 10% = 90%) x (100% - 5% = 95%) = 76.95%.





Anyway, if you want to start doing what he is doing, I'd suggest 5-boxing a team towards 85th.

Depending on your cash flow, you could level/boost several sets on one set of five RAF accounts. And later account transfer the characters.

Or just do five on five accounts, taking them all the way up. And then start another five accounts, and repeat the process from scratch, except you mail gold across and possibly transfer one toon to boost with.

Until you have all your accounts at whatever level you decide to merge them at, you only have the costs of a single set of five toons, at any given one point in time. When you can afford multiple sets of five at once, and when the levels are high enough across your multiple teams, activate several sets of five at once. You'll level them individually (as in, each set of five), not as a swarm of 36 toons (Prepared 36 boxes).