It has been an interesting day with the team progressing slowly from the starting area into Bloodhoof Village. Roughly six hours it took from level 1 to level 10 with the team. Usually you can get from 1 to 10 in ~ 2 hours.
Why does this take so much time? Well, do you remember your first days in the starting areas? Remember, the starting areas mostly consist of kill quests where you need to kill x types of mobs, or pick-up x parts of mobs that usually not drop on every kill. Killing quests not really is an issue. Five shamans throwing a lightning bolt or an earth shock will usually put an end to every mobs’ existence with just one shot. I even tried mobs four or five levels higher than my little family, and it worked out well.
Pick-up quests though… hurt a lot. Grab a big backpack and additional bags, and bring drinks, food, and time. It seems that the drop rates for quest items in groups are only 2/3 of 1/2 of the usual rates. Where it takes one kill when playing solo, it takes four or more in a group for everyone to get the quest item. After a few trials where I was slowly getting sick by the window and character switching for each quest item, I decided to switch loot over to free-for-all mode.
This improved things a lot. At first, the random window switching for looting disappeared, I now could loot for each character step by step, toon by toon. That improved things a lot, less time wasted. After a while I noticed, this also helped with experience gain. Due to the higher amount of mob kills, I was back into the standard experience frame for the quests I did, and did not lag behind by a level or two. So now my quests are not red but all yellow which I think gives just the right amount of experience to level.
I logged off around half past nine in the evening, when the wife demanded my attention, with my experience being half on the road to level 11, and parked Ivida, Ivide, Ividi, Ivido, and Ividu in the Bloodhoof Village inn. Since I’ll take a little break to focus on a few other tasks now, they should get two or three days rested bonus.
Only slightly related… it did not last very long, until my team was discovered. Once I reach level 6 and entered the plains of Mulgore people noticed the five Tauren running around and one shooting things. It did not take long until the General chat was hit by messages like
[1. General:] WTF … how many Ivid… are there?
[1. General:] F*ckin’ multicheaters!
Of course, followed by the usual reactions towards multi-boxing, half being amazed, the other half decided to page a game master.
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