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Watch out Northern Alabama
I’m here.
I’ve had a few days to settle in. Get used to the commute to and from work (1/5 the distance of my old commute in Florida). Check out the local mall. Sample the local cuisine. Etc.
I’ve been back and forth to Florida so much over the past couple of weeks that I’ve only officially spent like four whole days here in Alabama. It’s hard to make the judgement call this early so I won’t. I’m just here for now taking it all in. We shall see.
Recruit-A-Friend Team 1 (Horrible/Strange) has completed their run to 60. I ran to Outland immediately upon hitting 58 in Eastern Plaguelands. Well, honestly I was about 40-50% into level 58 from extra quests I had completed. Anyway. It only took 6 quests in Outland to get the team to 60 from that point. Crazy. This also means that my lowbie Warlock, Overtime is now level 60 as well. And since he was already 33 before I granted him any levels, and you can grant a total of 29 levels, that leaves 2 extra levels to grant to someone else.
What’s that you say? What am I planning next?
How about Rogue/Priest?
Yep. Recruit-A-Friend Team 2 consists of Rapid the Undead Rogue, and Important the Undead Priest. And when they have reached level 60 I’ll take a short break to level my Blood Elf Mage, Asplode to 29. Then grant him the 2 spare levels from my Shaman and the other 29 from my new Priest.
At this point I’ll have 2 level 60s that I barely know how to play, 2 that I only vaguely understand and 2 more that I should know fairly well.
The 2 that get the free levels to 60 (Warlock/Mage) will be a mystery to me when I start playing them again. I’ll take them to a trainer and spend 100g or so training all of those new spells, then try and figure out the most logical place for them on my hotbars. Then I have to scrape together some gear for them (I already vendored off all of the warlocks level 30 gear and haven’t even begun to start shopping for level 60 gear to put on him).
The Shaman and Priest (the two secondary ‘healbot’ type characters who follow the Hunter and Rogue respectively) I will only have a moderate understanding of. I will have played them to some extent all the way from 1 to 60 so I won’t be as lost as with the Warlock and Mage. However, with triple experience you only get 1/3 of the practice time with a character to begin with. Add on top of that the fact that they are on auto-follow the whole time with some macros to help out their travelling companions with healing and a tiny extra bit of damage, and you can see why I won’t really know how to play them.
The Hunter and the Rogue I should be able to more or less play like a typical newb who just hit 60. I’ll be a bit behind the curve with the whole ‘1/3 of the usual played time’ thing, but I think I can manage.
And when that is all said and done. If there is enough time left on the 90 day Recruit-A-Friend period. I may. JUST may. level a Warrior/Paladin combo.
But that is REALLY pushing it. I mean, I do need to eat/sleep/socialize/go outside once in a while. Plus I have that whole day job that pays for my two WoW accounts and internet connection and such.
Tags: Leveling, Multiboxing, Real Life
Recruit-a-Friend? Recruit-a-Myself!
A few months back, someone in our guild had invited a friend (a fully experienced raider) to roll a character on our server and join us in our raiding escapades. This friend had two accounts, rolled a Shaman and a Priest, and leveled them simultaneously in our guild.
It was neat to see his two characters progressing at the same time. I imagined how satisfying it must have been when he finally dinged 70, to have more or less leveled a Shaman and gotten a free 70 Priest out of the deal.
I had been pondering the fun and challenge of opening a second account and dual-boxing with some new toons for a good while. Whenever I could I pestered him for advice. I wanted to know what sort of setup he used to play two characters, how he handled looting quest items for both of them, how much extra work it was to have a character constantly on follow behind you, etc.
Then BAMF! Blizzard drops the Recruit-a-Friend promotion on us. Invite a friend to start a trial account and if they upgrade to a full-access account, you get cool stuff. When they pay for their first month, you get a month of game time free. When they pay for their second month, you get an exclusive Zhevra Mount.
But even better in my opinion, and regardless of how much game time the recruited friend pays for, is that you get triple experience when grouped with them. AND for every two levels that a recruited character earns, they can grant a free level to a lower level character on the account that recruited them! How the hell can I say no to that!?
I did some digging around to see if I was allowed to refer myself or if I had to do it covertly. Well, along with the official Blizzard FAQ, I found this amazing Recruit-a-Friend - Ultimate FAQ on the forums from Vrakthris. I read every detail and decided that everything looked to be in my favor and I had nothing to lose but time.
I sent out the invite to myself (the same email address that my primary account was already setup with) and opened the trial account under the same exact name and billing details. I purchased my WoW key online, then upgraded my account to The Burning Crusade. I then copied my entire “World of Warcraft” install folder to “World of Warcraft Two” and made a start menu shortcut to the copied executable.
I already had a level 10 Hunter that I had started under my primary account a few days earlier. I decided that I would stick with him and roll a (Resto) Shaman to cruise around with him and his pet and keep everyone’s health topped off and free from poisons and diseases. Of course the totems are nice to have around as well.
I loaded up my two instances of WoW, one on each of my monitors in windowed mode, pointed Firefox at Jame’s Horde Leveling Guide (free, not a paid link) and got to work. It took me a good three days to really get the hang of it. And I’m still tweaking things as I go.
So that was 8 days ago I guess and my Hunter and Shaman are now level 35 and moving fast. Factoring in the time it took me to get my macros/keyclone software/system crashes all ironed out, I probably realistically have about 20 hours of played time in them. And that is with me maintaining the primary professions on both characters and stopping to buy greens from the auction house. And don’t forget about the ridiculous quest chains that Shamans must do to get their totems. And of course my hunter has to have just the right pet.
I’ve had to skip huge chunks of my leveling guide because of the bonus experience. I bought a blue polearm for my hunter at level 20 and two hours later it was replaced by superior green gear.
Anyway, when those two hit level 60 and the Refer-a-Friend bonus no longer applies, I’m going to grant my Shaman’s levels to my level 33 Warlock. So I’ll have a 60 Hunter, 60 Shaman and 60 Warlock.
And then?
After that’s done I’m going to roll a Priest to tag along with my level 9 Rogue and level them to 60. Then I’ll get my 21 Mage up to 30 on his own and use the “Grant a level” program to make him 60 as well.
By that time, WotLK should be mere weeks away and I’ll have several options to look forward to leveling to 80. Along with my Druid as my main of course.
Unless I still have time to spare. In which case I still need a Paladin and a Warrior…
Tags: Leveling, Multiboxing
Hello World …of Warcraft
Hello. My name is Megalis. And I’m a Druid.
I started playing World of Warcraft on December 15th, 2007 on a 10-day trial account. Some new friends had invited Vishyna and I to a LAN party. They were all playing WoW, and we were playing Tabula Rasa, a game we had picked up about a month earlier.
Now don’t get me wrong here. I already new what WoW was. I had spent the last three years continuously making fun of the people I knew who played WoW. I also used to make fun of people who played Everquest. Until I started playing it myself that is.
Vishyna and I had played EQ2 together for about a year before we decided it would be best for us and our relationship if we quit. Two years later, I came home from work one day and find that Vishyna had bought herself a copy of WoW. She broke the news to me by offering me the 10-day trial card that comes with the game. I respectfully declined and she started playing it by herself. She didn’t play for very long though. I think she got to level 20. Then she heard about Tabula Rasa at work and started playing that instead. A week later I started playing Tabula as well. Until the LAN party.
So at this LAN party, seeing all these people playing WoW was nothing new. It wasn’t the excitement of seeing a game completely new to me that made me decide to start playing. That was what did it for me with Tabula Rasa. With WoW, it was just out of pure curiosity that I finally decided to give it a shot.
Without saying a word to anyone, I went to the official site and signed up for a 10-day trial. I downloaded the game launcher and started playing the streaming version. I rolled a Dwarf Paladin (yeah, the “easy class to play“). Vishyna rolled a Warlock and another friend (who caught me downloading the game) rolled a Gnome Rogue to come level with us. We got to level 12 that weekend and I had a really good time. On Monday I went to GameStop on my lunch break and bought the Battle Chest.
Now one of the reasons I didn’t want to play WoW was because I knew I would enjoy it and I knew I would become addicted to it. Alas, that is exactly what happened. I never played that Paladin again though. I rolled a Draenei Warrior instead. I leveled him into the 40’s as Fury, then swapped over to Arms. Vishyna and I had joined the guild that the people from the LAN party were in and they needed tanks. It had been my intention to try and fill that roll. So in the low 60’s I changed to Protection.
I had barely dinged 70 when I was whisked away to off-tank Karazhan. There was a Feral Druid in the guild who would be main-tanking the trash pulls, then I would main-tank the bosses. It worked out very well. We had a really solid group of players in that guild and we were doing things that everyone says you can’t do, in gear that isn’t supposed to be good enough for what we were doing, with classes that aren’t supposed to be there and without some that are.
A few weeks after I hit 70, Vishyna and I had to leave that server. We started playing on another server with some people that she works with. They needed another bear tank. So I rolled a Druid. Vishyna rolled a Priest. We started out doing our own thing. Just grinding out the levels however we could. That went on until about level 25 when I found Jame’s Horde Leveling Guide. Vishyna and I picked it up from the beginning (even though we were already halfway through our 20’s) and we haven’t looked back.
As of today we are level 62 and gaining fast.
As for this website. Vishyna had mentioned this “big bear butt blogger” to me a couple weeks back and suggested maybe we start our own WoW blog. I read that blog and found many others as a result. I really liked the idea and started looking for some good domain names right away. We came up with a solid list of interesting domain names related to WoW in some way, but we still haven’t officially settled on one. We’ll let you know when we do.