First Things First

Before going too far into looking at the various hardware and software options out there, you'll want to do a bit of prep work so that you can better organize things and assess your leveling performance as you progress. I've taken some screen shots of the Excel workbook I use for tracking...nothing fancy, but I do have a couple of charts that I utilize for analysis - one that looks at the average time to level and one that tracks overall progression. I could break down the data a bit further, but for right now, this is what I'm interested in.

This first chart is one of the most important ones for me as it organizes the groups and tells me a few important things such as:

Group Status - A group is defined as ready if they've had all mods and settings copied down and /assist macros set up for each account.

Group Composition - Defines who's in the group, what class and level they are, etc....

Time to Level - All the columns to the right of the groups show how long it took to reach each level in terms of /played time.

The chart below is a basic keyboard mapping chart. This is mainly used when I sync settings among the accounts after a significant threshold. The sync occurs after the first 20 levels, then again after each 10. During that time, I simply add items manually to hot bars and such. This may be seen as an unnecessary step, but as part of my process, for better or worse, I have a script that pushes settings and addons from the master to all of the client machines so if it's not set on the master when that's run, all settings will be lost.

For some, the overall charting and analysis of leveling performance may be an unecessary step, however I'm someone that strongly prefers crunching numbers and while I know there may be some skewed data in there at times, being able to refer to previous performances to know how well or poorly I'm doing is a good motivator and honestly, interesting. For example, my initial guess was that leveling would be somewhat exponential in terms of time, however it appears to be largely linear (minus a few bumps for some excessive gathering and having to talk to a GM for 45 min to resolve a R-A-F issue).

The bottom line is - don't go into this unprepared - you will likely go insane if you're not reasonably ready and metrics are fun for everyone! ;)