A little late, but I don't frequent the main forums often.

1) Very much still possible.

2) Here's what my husband and I did with our RAF time.

My Main Account
Linked to:
RAF Account

His Main Account Unlinked. He had a paladin who was going to be our booster on his main account.

He would create his RAF alt on the RAF account and I would create one on my account. I would dual box the alts and he would boost.

As long as the high level acct isn't connected- it worked just fine (at least up until mid January. I doubt they've changed it since then though)

We acquired out of it:
60 druid / 60 priest
boosted 61 hunter (I had to get to 32.99)

60 paladin / 60 mage
boosted 58 warlock (boosted 1-28)

55 shaman / 55 rogue
boosted 58 warrior (boosted 1-28)

We ran out of time at the end due to busy holidays. We twisted the boosting on the warlock/warrior. It cost more but cut the time down. My warlock was on the RAF acct and the warrior was on my account. The mage boosted the warrior to 58- then we transferred the warrior off my account to his. Then we transferred my warlock from the RAF acct to my account and the Rogue boosted all the levels it had- at which point the mage boosted the warlock last 2. This kind of twisting probably won't work if you don't share a last name though.

The gifted levels have to be given to the account that invites- in our case that was my main account- hence the twisting.

If you want to gift to both main accounts AND have a booster, it's going to be tricky- you'll need a 5th account (with an appropriately leveled character) to boost... but you'll be able to level 4 characters at once- 2 each.

Does boosting just means having two raf accounts auto follow and partied with a lvl 80, while the lvl80 kills stuff in an instance? If so does that still work with the current state of the game?

More or less, yes.

Yes, it still works.

The typical technique is to park the lower level characters in a safe area, grab most of the instance, and drag it back to the characters to ensure they are in range for the XP; then AOE down all the mobs. The level 80 hurts the XP per kill, but the sheer magnitude of kills + RAF makes it still worthwhile.


Unfortunately, it can make some of the instances really stale because you are clearing and resetting them until the characters are a high enough level to move to the next instance; which is why the RAF TourGuide files are so nice.

Guys, any word on how the change to BtA shoulders affects RaF leveling? I'm guessing it'll shave something like a half day or so off time to 60. Does that sound about right?

I wouldn't use the BoA shoulders. I'm using the same RaF set up as Bekah. We have 3 accounts, one being the "new friend". Since the new friend can't have BoA shoulders, the inviter's alt will level a lot faster. I think we got up to 3 levels ahead, before we decided it's better to just unequip the shoulders to keep the levels more even. We are doing instance boosting, and the main limiter to speed is the 5 instance per hour restriction. I don't think it matters how you actually clear the instance. Instead of pulling everything to the start, my husband plays the two alts, and follows my main around to pick up loot. For reference, we still beat the 5 per hour limit on ZF including doing the pyramid event, even though our pace is fairly relaxed. I simply run up to packs and kill them one by one (adding a whirlwind when it's on CD). Maybe if you are doing a long instance like BRD, it pays to run faster since you won't hit the instance limit.

My only tip is to buy a traveler's mammoth if you can afford one. It can carry two passengers, and you can sell the junk you pick up to the vendors on the mount.

A friend and I did two sets of RAF last week. We used a level 80 frost DK for almost entirely instance-grinding. Our second pair took us 11 hours 18 minutes. We went at a fairly relaxed pace, but did not use a traveler's tundra mammoth and only one warlock summon (to bring us to Thrallmar at lvl 55). We got locked out of instances three times, adding about 20 minutes to our /played time as we waited. We made the 60% mount rides from Orgrimmar to ZF, and Undercity to Light's Hope/Stratholme.

1-9 normal questing (in Durotar for us this time)
9-10 kill stuff along the way to Orgrimmar
10-13 RFC - Pick up the one quest directly outside.
13-20 SFK - Kill everything on the walkway above the courtyard, skipping the last boss, and the lowbies will never have to leave the entrance.
20-24 SM Library and Graveyard - Switch back and forth to avoid lockouts from resets.
24-40 SM Armory and Cathedral, of course - Throw in a Graveyard run once every few resets if you're afraid you'll go over the limit.
40-48 ZF - Pick up the three ZF quests in Gadgetzan. Skip the event after you've gotten your quest item. Turn in the quests at lvl 48.
48-55 Stratholme - start from the side entrance, go west and just clear through all the human stuff. Then run out and reset. We loot everything until we have the 60 bone fragments we need, then we stop bothering.
55-60 Ramparts - finally! 1.8k xp per mob. Loot everything - chances are you'll find some greens you can use.

Like I said, I ran us through using my tanking frost DK. Between the two of us we had access to every likely candidate and that's what we chose. Diseases are very, very, very useful since the vast majority of mobs are humanoids who flee with low hp, and many will attempt to heal. The [Glyph of Howling Blast] is absolutely phenominal here, since the lower-level mobs cannot survive the Icy Touch and Plague Strike needed to spread diseases via Pestilence. Unholy DKs don't do as well for this very reason. Also, while Unholy Blight may seem like a no-brainer for rounding up mobs, it constantly ticks which means that you'll be killing mobs as you go. I simply ran around taunting and death coiling far-off mobs, using Blood Boil every once in a great while to make sure I had more than prox aggro. Once I'd gathered everyone up I'd DnD, HB, BB, ERW, BBx2 and an entire instance would fall over dead. You can use Unholy Presence exclusively for 15% runspeed. Unbreakable Armor and the [Essence of Gossamer] trinket both completely push all damage off the table for their durations, and Death Pact every cd is all the healing you'll ever need.

In many cases it's easiest not to kill mobs as you go - especially if you're multiboxing. SFK, SM Graveyard, SM Armory, and the first half of SM Cathedral can all be cleared easily with the RAF lowbies never leaving the zone-in. This meant that my friend was able to spend a considerable amount of her time tabbed out doing homework, laundry, getting food, etc. without it affecting our pace at all. However for SM Library the lowbies will need to follow and you'll need to kill as you go, and for ZF and Strat they'll have to kind of tag along. In Ramparts I only clear 3-5 groups at once since they still stun and disarm, so again they need to tag along.

If you want to loot in every instance, you'll add a lot of time to your clears but make a considerable amount of profit. The cloth especially can come in handy. You can stagger having one toon hearth at the end of an instance. While Toon A is vendoring BoP blues, and junk, mailing all BoEs to an enchanter, and putting all cloth/trade goods/rep items in the bank, Toon B can be running back, zoning out, and summoning Toon A back.

Doing cloth turn-ins for all 5 factions can give a ton of xp. At level 54 the runecloth turn-in alone was 28750xp, which x5 = 143750xp or about 1k more than the entire level. Doing the cloth turn-ins for two characters for all 5 factions will require 30 stacks each of wool, silk, mageweave, and runecloth. The wool cannot be collected without additional farming (or more likely buying off the AH), but the other three can easily be gathered in half the number of clears you'll be doing. Save all these turn-ins for halfway through level 53 (Runecloth becomes accessible at 50), and have a mage friend port you from one city to the next. Very, very simple.

At 55, one character (or both if your hearths are up) should hearth to Light's Hope Chapel. The Bonescythe Digs and Cryptstalker Armor Doesn't Make Itself quests (which become available at 55) both give 28650xp with RAF bonus. You should have the bone fragments from farming Strat, but if you used my route you'll have to buy the crypt fiend parts. Both quests combined gives you about a third of the level.

One final tip about paladins: If you're making a paladin, continue questing until lvl 12 and then complete the Redemption quest chain. It could very well come in handy. And if you're using two players with one lowbie on follow, it's best if the paladin's the one being controlled. HoP + DS can save a lot of time (and incidentally, their lives) if your lowbies get too close to the action.

I'm confident that if we used every trick at our disposal and pushed hard, we could reach 60 in under 10 hours.

I'd make a few modifications to the strats posted above, but overall it works very well with a frost DK to kill stuff with. First is, no point in questing so much really, I just quested to 8 skipping the annoying stuff, then went to RFC right away. If you have a higher level on one of the RAF account, run him to where you want to go(RFC SFK etc), then summon one of the newbs, then relog the other newb and summon with first newb, works well since most of the time you can't use those damn summon stones due to level difference.

For SFK, run to the NPC who opens the door, kill everything and start the event, wait until it's done, then aggro everything working your way up, until you're on the walls around the courtyard, keep going in the next room(turning stairs going down into the ghost wolf+son of arugal room) and taunt a mob across the room, so he'll come your way aggroing pretty much the whole room. Adds quite a few mobs, then run back to the walls over your newbs at entrance and kill everything. 1level per clear pretty much until 20, takes like 5mins, might as well loot stuff, more on that later.

On SM stuff, you can do library, as well as all the other wings really, in one pull. You just need to skip the mobs near the entrance until you actually can't avoid aggro, go to the end to finish then come back. There's a decent amount of "buggy" mobs in the Library that tends to reset on the way though, but it's good enough.

About Loot, an awesome addon I'm using(albeit it took some time to setup so it actually stopped failing randomly) is Loot Filter. Like the name implies, it lets you filter loot, however the real filter stuff from what I understand was removed from wotlk API, so what it does is delete stuff after you loot it. I set it up to filter everything but cloth, gems, recipes and blues. I do loot boss blues, if you skip them(like I did at first), it pretty much bugs the addon for like 2mins or whatever, until it times out. I made enough space in my bags for the blues, and I tranfser stacks of cloth to the alts every once in a while. Looting lets you skip the waiting due to instance limits, because as a DK, it's not terribly hard to clear all the 5 dungeon runs in under 30mins.

I'm still only 31 on my new alts, so have yet to do the rest, but I'm planning to go respec for a HB/imp Runetap build, Runetap is quite useful in tanking gear to keep yourself up while rounding up mobs, with it I expect to be able to round up some rather big areas. Also strafing instead of running limits the damage taken a lot, if you've tanked Ossirian you probably know what I mean ^^.

Edit: Done with this new char, lvl 61 in 10hours and 7mins played, with a bit of waste but not too much(I was actually logging off when going afk for once). Could definitely cut like 30-40mins from not looting though, I just figured since I'm going tailoring on this new char, might as well loot cloth.

Few notes:
At 40, keep doing SM until 45. Going to ZF wasn't worth it at all, it's way too big, mob density is bad, and everything dismounts you so you can't really group up more than one "area" at a time. Well you can, on foot, but it takes forever. SM was still good at these levels, was getting like 70% of a level from Armory+Cath at 44, and was clearing both in ~10mins, including looting everything.

At 45, I went to Scholo instead of Strat, and while I didn't check Strat, I liked Scholo a lot. When I stopped looting(had like 600runecloth already from my DK and my Paladin), I was doing my clears in 13mins, and they were giving ~1.2 levels each. I'd pull the first room, then go into the summoner room and kill each summoner, round up the rest and kill. Then I'd go in the main room, pull all of it and also the zombie room under the entrance bridge(another set of mobs spawn after you clear the main room). Then the bone guys room for the key as well as the whelps, clear zombies again and use the key, pull all the scholars, then into the last boss area I'd pull all the rooms but the big skeletons one(they knockdown and MS it's annoying, and it's only 2mobs pretty much). Everytime I'd have minimal movement with my alts and could leave them in safe spots yet still in range, which I liked. I figured in strat it'd be harder to do this and extend the pulls.

At 55 did hellfire which was pretty awesome. I was doing the runs in 10mins for more than a level again, so was very quick to do 55-59, could do it all in 3pulls, not counting the 2 final bosses. First pull up to the beastmaster(the guy that calls for wolves), then everything including first boss(not the 2guys at the stairs they're too far), then all of the upper part including the patrols on the paths leading to bosses.

I stopped at 59.9 on the char I wanted, the other was only for RAF bonus, and did the gift trick(get to 59.9 or close enough, then degroup/turn in a quest on the char on the RAF account, he dings 60, gift a lvl to the other, you're now 60.9, turn in/kill a few mobs bam 61).

Have no idea if you can transfer trial account characters, but I am sure that they are limited to level 20 as the max level so you will need to upgrade all 3 trial accounts to full classic accounts if you plan to instance boost them using RaF.

If your main account invites all 3 other trial accounts it will be linked with them and as such the lowbies will only recieve the normal instance xp, as the veteran account character is greater than 3 levels higher than them.

The way you would need to do it is get a friend to send you a trial invite that you will then need to upgrade to classic WoW. Once the account is upgraded use that to send yourself another 2 invites via RaF and upgrade those to classic WoW accounts also. Now those 3 RaF accounts are linked you can boost them through instances with your main account and all 3 lowbie characters will recieve instance xp plus the RaF bonus.

A weird thing about this technique is more low level players within range will actually increase the xp per kill. I believe the game takes the average level of players present, and calculates xp received based on that. Therefore a level 10 with a level 80 will get very poor xp, but four level 40s with a level 80 will get only a slight penalty.

Ah serious? Really good to know, because I'm going to boost 3 characters at the same time, and I wasn't sure that this would go as fast as only boosting 1 or 2 characters.

Thanks mek

You can't grant levels to a character which is a higher level than the one doing the granting. Otherwise, you could simply powerlevel three toons on the same account to 20 and do the same thing.