Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Alts, and playing the Auction House

In addition to the tanking I was doing a couple of days ago, I'm currently in the process of migrating back to Jubei'Thos, my first server, in order to play with my two brothers.

Jubei'Thos has a much more active (albeit overinflated) auction house economy than Saurfang, as well, which gives me a lot more opportunities for making good money.

Saurfang's AH was so deflated that I had to undercut to the point of barely above vendor price, in order to sell anything, whereas Jubei'Thos overinflation is much better for me. It means that I have room to undercut substantially, while still making good money.

A long held dream of mine within WoW, has been a scenario where, of the ten allowable toons on a single server, I have one or two which I actively play, with the rest being alts that are permanently posted in zones with valuable gathering materials.

My daily WoW routine would then consist of gathering a set quota of each of these materials, and then mailing them back to a single bank alt for sale on the auction house, as well as possibly having each of them do the six relatively simple (Shadow Vault/Death's Rise) Icecrown dailies.

If I was able to somehow achieve the goal of 10 80 characters, this would result in a daily income of 600-800 gold, purely from these dailies, and parallel farming could potentially triple that.

My focus at the moment, then, is attempting to discover the most rapid possible means of levelling characters. I am traditionally one of the slowest levellers around, and so I've been attempting to find information which will help me change that.

The first thing which has helped, is that I remembered yesterday that I had an old copy of Joana's Horde Levelling Guide on the hard drive of my other machine. In addition to following that, I picked up a very interesting tip at another website, as well.

This tip was the suggestion to not only do the earliest starting quests in Durotar, but also to then go to Deathknell in Tirisfal, and the Eversong Woods, and do both of those sets of starting quests as well.

With the alt that I'm currently levelling, I'd already started the character, so I couldn't follow this advice completely, but I was able to follow it partially.

I levelled to 12 in Kalimdor, and then went back and did several Tirisfal Glades quests. Since I was substantially above the usual level range for these quests, I went through them easily, while still amassing a large amount of experience for them. I then returned to the Barrens and continued there at around level 14.

Joana's guide is going to be a particular Godsend for me once I get out of the Barrens as well, because truthfully I've never been entirely sure on what the most rapid path is from there. With Mirsh, I primarily went through Thousand Needles/Mirage Raceway, then Desolace, then Tanaris, then Un'Goro, and then going up through Felwood/Winterspring.

I've been trying to decide which character class, if any, to standardise on for a farming alt, as well. I'm actually levelling a Rogue at the moment, and levelling with it seems to be marginally faster than what I've experienced with a Hunter.

Stealth and backstab makes killing some large mobs easier as well, but I'm finding I need to plan pulls very carefully, because I tend to die if anything goes wrong. I know I should be using a sword, but dual daggers are so much fun that it's difficult to want to change. ;)

I've also had the idea of creating an army of Mages. That would be glorious as well, due to the teleportation capability, but in my own experience, the Mage is among the slowest levelling classes in the game, and is also comparitively poor at soloing instances.

I'd love having a Paladin for AoE farming, as well, but levelling one of those, again seems slow to the point of being painful. So I think I'm probably going to stick with the Rogue for the time being.

If anyone else has advice on any of the topics I've mentioned here, please add it in my comments. You might end up helping someone other than just me. :)

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