WoW's constants Life, death, and bags

Characters live, they die, and you pay a lot for them to have bags to hold stuff.  The basic law of Warcraft or is it?  I think there is a solution for leveling toons as well as boosters to 90.

On the auction house they certainly are.  Netherweave bags are the easiest to farm and make and give you a 16 slot size.  They bind on equip so people price the other 16 slot bags you can trade even higher.

Ding 90 Monk!

In my much slower effort to get my toons all up to 90 my Monk finally made it.

Nightli was my effort to make realm first.  It was plagued with problems form the get go but I still only missed it by a couple of hours.  After that I just stopped playing her for a while because of that.  Then I found out about pet battle exp and just had to try it.

XP, Pet Battles, and You

I've been doing some exploration into the experience given by pet battles after a rather startling experience I had on one of my new hunters - leveling through Cataclysm in 2 days.  Mostly because of Pet Battles.

I didnt have heirlooms or any bonuses besides the basic guild + exp and a couple of days of rested exp.   Now I did do some quests, 41 of them, and all the dungeon quests.  Well Except Grim Batol.  Who can get those quests done in a hurry though?

The more I looked into it  the deeper the rabbit hole went.  In part I think because the code is years old and patched and repatched until its very..interesting.  But here are a few things I found out.

Wandering the Mists

So on 10/29 something strange and wonderful happened.  Well sort of.

RaF work

Edit
the basic logic this post was based upon is false.  The MoP patch changed some things.  Blizzard was made aware of this and apologized not that it did my efforts to get a monk to 90 any good.


Just a quick update on my RAF leveling setup for Mists of Pandaria.
For Hunters/Misc Ive got :10, 14, 5, 10, 12, 10, 7, 10
So 38 levels of Hunters.
An 80th Level DK in Alliance and a 73 Horde Shaman.
So so 48 levels there.

86 levels all told so just 148 levels to go :D

MoP, RaF, and Dual Boxing Part 2

I discussed the Recruit A Friend system Activision-Blizzard is going to let us use to power level our monks.  I've had a few questions and made some discoveries working upon it that are worth sharing.

I suggested pairing your main account with the RAF account to get a bunch of level 10 characters quickly.  Now there is a slight problem with that - a lot of us have full server lists.  In fact some of us are close to the 50 mark.  So, hm, what to do.

MoP Preparations

So, what do you want to have ready when MoP opens up?  Well that's a complex answer almost as complex as the air speed velocity of the unlaiden swallow.

So basically I cant give you all the answers, but I can give you a few tips I follow.

1) Supplies.  Reagents.for spells and food and drink.  Have a stack of buff food but you shouldn't be dying too much so have normal to just get health.

2) Empty Bags.  Its so much easier to quest when you have at least two fully empty bags to look for things in.  Digging through random spaces all over slows you down.

3) Be ready to play with no Mods if need be.  Try turning them off and play around.  Odds are something will break so its good to remember what Warcraft felt ike with no additional toys and have a plan.

4) Here is the big one, fill your extra quest log with daily quests.  Every 85 has space they don't use on a day to day basis so fill that in and when MoP is close fill it up entirely. with top level quests, that are easy to turn in. Not sure exactly what I mean? Here is what quests Id gather.

From Baradin PvE/PvP zpnes you can gather your entire log of quests if your lucky.  You see some of the quests (offered in the Base camp) shift daily and in the PvP area they rotate every time the battle happens.

Their all 85, all can be turned in at the camp.  and there's a tabard to go straight there and a portal back to the main city.  Captain Jake in the Camp will take the turn in for the PvP area quests in the camp.


Now you may be unable to fill out your list there depending on how your server's pvp goes so here are a few additional treats.


The 5 in the Twilight Highlands, level 84 but not a terrible starting place.
Daily Cooking and Fishing in Stormwind.
The end quests in Firelands.  Ill have more detail on what you can save later.

The basic routine is to turn in any random quests you have (like in Firelands).  Tabard travel to Baradin to turn in the quests there.  Zone into your capital city and turn in fishing and cooking then run off to join the Pandas :)

Happy leveling and have fun!

Ding 85, Druid - Whew!

The timer was ticking down.  Quests were fallign to my pew-pew lazer chicken suit as fast as I could make them and then...

I cheered and got ready to take a screen shot when with usual Blizzard accuracy the server shut down at 3:30.  Ah well.  you will have to put up with a shot from her armory.

Ding 85, the Death Knight

Well I finally got it done, my DK hit 85.

So here is what I'm working on now for her gear.

Altaholic Speed Leveling Guide

Greetings and Salutations!

With a new year comes new characters.  To help with that Ive finished the first portion of my  leveling guide.  Ill be testing the 70-80 portion of the guide and get it up in the next week.

The guide can be found in the page index on the left hand side of my blog.  Let me know if you have any questions or additions to it.

Gearing and leveling in 4.3

So I thought Id work up my level 80 rogue into a level 85 rogue, get her geared up and maybe do some raiding.  It took 5 days to move from 80 to 85 moving at a casual pace.

80-82 in Mt Hyjal, far enough to unlock the Shrine of Malorn and thus the Firelands dailies if I feel like doing them.  Also doing 4 Dungeon PuG runs.
82-83 in Deepholm getting my Therezane rep up.  Mixed in some PvP battlegrounds as well as the 4 Dungeon runs.
83-84 in Uldum doing the Tol'vir quests.  Really great story.  Stop when it forces you to go back to Harrison Jones.  4 Dungeon runs, and some random pvp battlegrounds.
84-85 in twilight Highlands.  Well sort of.  50 quests in I hit 85 with my 4 dungeon runs.

Speed Leveling 2

I have some additional thoughts and some clarifications so lets revisit that topic a bit.

3 Additional)  But I wont have the flightpath for the zone?!
This is true.  They don't want you facing a zone when its 'too hard' or 'challenging' so even though you can get the quests you aren't automatically given the flightpath to the area.  You have to weigh the time it will take to walk/ride/fly there then against the gain in better exp.  This really is important at lower levels more than after 20+ since your mount makes moving quite easy.

If spending a few minutes traveling Azeroth is too much work for a big jump in exp/treasure then just be lazy and wait for them to hand you the keys to the door.

Speed Leveling

I've had several people ask me about how to level an Character fast and efficiently.  So here are a few tips.

1)  Don't have one character.

Rested exp effectively doubles your leveling speed.  Its gathered faster in an inn or city (when your level is replaced by 'zzz' by your character portrait).  So having an alt to sell things on the suction house means your main character will gain just that much more bonus exp.

Little things can mean a lot or Quick Honor Tip Pt 3

As I covered in my 'good idea but' post they were letting you just convert points and buy PvP weapons.  I saw a shift in the casual guilds to forcing them as 'required'.

Bliz answered this by making it a requirement that you do PvP  Baiscly you have to earn a number of points in this season before the weapons unlock.  These points are ONLY earned by 'direct PvP actions'*.

*= Thank you GM Suzutoyon for that very easy to understand answer.

Since I had alread bent his ear to ask about the Justice Point to Honor Point swap I bent it some more and ask about the Grizzly hills quests I covered in Quick Honor Tip and Quick Honor Tip 2.  The answer?  "Yes, though they are a much smaller source of Honor, honor earned there does count."

Hit Rating

"I mostly just hurt people!" - Johner

That's what Warcraft gameplay is all about really.  Find what your looking for, hit it till it stops moving, take whatever it had you want and move on.  But you need to do something to make that happen.  You have to hit your target.

So lets look into the numbers a bit to get you the money shot.

Molten Front Griefing

The sad truth if that there is a massive amount of griefing and harassment going on with the Molten Front, Thrall's quest, and the other events relating to the Firelands release.  With no ability to access the raid content and upset about the massive hunter pet nerfs this really is killing my interest in the game.

The sad thing is Activsion-Blizzard chose to do this to us.  After seeing how bad forcing everyone into one city was they thought to force the entire server population into a small quest hub would be better.

"To ensure that friends can play together even if they're not progressing identically, we've avoided separating players through phasing for all but a couple individual quests." - source

Of PvP and leveling

PvP gear is something both well established characters and people new to a realm can take advantage of.

But first heres the basics of how PvP works.

Your level defines what bracket you are in and what map(s) is available for you to fight on.  It starts at 10-14 and continues in 5's (15-19, 20-24, etc).  Fighting and killing someone gives you a few points and winning the match more.  If your contributing to a fight (like healing someone) you share kill credit and you both get the points with someone else.

The Warsong (horde) and the Silverwing (Alliance) are your starting factions.  Both have handy items you may want to snag when you can.

Heirloom Weapons aren't needed

Heirloom weapons used to be really amazing and grand till you hit 75-80 and needed to get 'real' gear for dungeon running and raiding.  But lately Ive noticed the redesign of the old world has left them..lacking.

The only place in fact where heirlooms are just amazing is around starting levels, and their power slowly wanes away.

I'm going to pick on the Bloodied Arcanite Ripper.  Its a Two handed axe costing 3500 Justice Points or 95 Champion's Seals.  Ill compare it with the sorts of weapons a 2-h warrior or paladin would be seeking to gain as they level up (in my opinion).

StateOfWoW

A fellow All Things Azeroth guild member wrote a really nice post on his thoughts of the state fo the game right now.  With his permission I'm going to reply to that post with my own thoughts since were seeing the world very differently.

(( Check out his post at http://stateofwow.tumblr.com/post/5343232063/cataclysm-leveling-alliance  ))

Previous to Cataclysm I leveled roughly 7 characters through the content on each side of the aisle.  I leveled quickly because I found it fun to see how fast I could run through quests and I enjoyed many of the quests in the game.  The basic WoW story arc they open with of you being a common whatever you are needing to step up to the plate and defend the land after the armies were called away worked well.  I only ever got Loremaster on one character though...Id done every quest so many times I couldn't do it more than once.

trying out this blood thing

DK Tanking, a starter guide from 58

This is a post to share my thoughts on relearning to tank on a DK and hopefully share a few tips and tricks I pick up along the way.

My character is a Night Elf Death Knight with a Blood Tank/Blood PvP spec.

after getting out of the starting area I picked up Herbalism.  At 1 skill it gives 5 haste for 20 secconds, I just macro it into my main attack so its up when its off cooldown.