Greg

Faster WoW Leveling – Two Cool Tips

 Leveling  Comments Off on Faster WoW Leveling – Two Cool Tips
Jul 312008
 

I wish I could claim credit for these, but they’re both from the people at Dominate Your Server. Cool site, great tips, and their emailings are full of good stuff.

1) Never quest out of rest.

Questing is faster than grinding, but only if you have your quests somewhat organized. This is why I like leveling guides. Many players don’t really need them, especially after leveling several characters all the way.

Always stop in an inn when done and always make sure you have rest XP available when playing your toon. When you run out of the rest XP then you hand in whatever quests and log out in an inn to recharge.

If you run out of Rest XP and just have to keep playing then go for it, or farm for items or gold or rep or go kill other players. Heck, log into your auction house banker and do some buying and selling.

If you stick to the rest XP and you have your quests organized you should find yourself leveling very quickly.

1b) Roll several toons and run …

Have lots of playing time? Roll several toons and combine playing them with the rest xp. So when toon #1 is out of the rest xp you log her ouit and log in the net toon. So you’ll have two more characters leveling at pretty much the same rate, you’ll be able to stay in the rest xp zone for 100% of your playing time, and you’ll have those characters all hitting 70 arouind the same time.

2) Never play alone.

If you always pair with someone to do your leveling you’ll find that the levels go by significantly faster.

You’ll get less XP per kill, sure, but you’ll kill things alot faster. You’ll also have less downtime, even if the extent of your healing capability is your first aid skill.

You’ll be able to take on tougher mobs, those silver elites will be much easier, the gold elites will become something to sneeze at, team quests will be a lot easier, and your chances of getting ganked on the PvP server are a little less. Conversely, your chances of successfully ganking others is that much better.

My wife and I play together alot. She’s pretty new, but is coming along quickly. One pair is my Hunter and her Rogue, the other is my Pally and her Hunter.

It works out very well. We truly suck at the PvP part on these toons, but we’ll get there.

Now get back to work.

I Have a Cunning Plan…

 Rogues  Comments Off on I Have a Cunning Plan…
Jul 292008
 

Actually, it’s a Cunning Blade and I’ll skip further Black Adder references.

[tag-tec]Rogues[/tag-tec] at level 10 can do a quest chain to get this Cunning Blade as a quest reward. This quest chain is entirely optional and if you browse the Auction House regularly you’re likely to find better weapons for not much gold. (And you twinks can stop laughing now.) 🙂

Still, it’s a fun little quest chain and it can be quite challenging for your average level 10 Rogue. Each race has a different quest, in its own area, but the quest rewards are the same.

Gwynne’s done a complete walk-thorugh of all of these level 10 quest chains. So if you have an up and coming Rogue, here you go:

  1. Level 10 Rogue Quests for Horde
  2. Level 10 Rogue Quests for Alliance

New WoW Battlegound – Northrend Battleground

 Battlegrounds  Comments Off on New WoW Battlegound – Northrend Battleground
Jul 242008
 

From TenTonHammer:

The new battleground being added in Wrath of the Lich King looks to be something completely new and unique. Instead of a battleground where you have to adapt between attack and defense, this one puts you on one side and then the other. That’s right, you play a game as the attacker, and then the teams switch sides and you play it again! Whoever does better in a combined score, wins.

Sneak Peek – New Wrath of the Lich King Battleground

According to the article this is a Normandy Beach Assault, WoW style, and it even comes with seige vehicles! Send in the ninjas and man the tanks.

Now will those vehicles be driven by Taurens or lobbing Taurens? M1 Abrams Tauren Lobber? Or pour in a pile of Gnomes and lob them all?

Ok, that’s not very likely, but it’s fun to think about.

Honor awarded, marks, allowable levels (I’m guessing over 70) and what you buy with those marks seems to be an open question for now.

Naturally the losers in the crowd will try to figure out how to surrender and die to their opponents as quickly as possible and I wonder where the AFKers will hide. Maybe we can lob gnomes at them?

The whole thing looks like great fun to me.

edit: TenTonHammer also has info on the arenas and a video of the WoW devs discussing the new PvP areas. WoW PvP Preview: Dalaran / Orgrimmar Arenas and Northrend Battleground

edit:From WoWwiki – Full Northrend Map, Beta

Wow Talents – Now to Level 80!

 wow news  Comments Off on Wow Talents – Now to Level 80!
Jul 242008
 

Via MMORPG.com

Blizzard has posted a Wrath of the Lich King talent calculator, which helps players explore the talent changes that are coming to WoW with the next expansion.

Bliz has the preliminary level 80 talents up on their talent calculator. All of these are subject to change, and likely will be changed, as [tag-tec]Wrath of the Lich King[/tag-tec] moves through beta.

I suppose that since Bliz has posted these talents that they must be reasonably close to the final version, but we’ll see.

Still, they’re fun to explore now. Check out the new talents here.

Fast Leveling Tips for WoW

 Videos  Comments Off on Fast Leveling Tips for WoW
Jul 232008
 

Leveling and gold gathering are two topics of interest to pretty much all WoW players. Well, here’s a fellow who’ll show you how to do both.

Some extracted tips:

  1. Always stay in the center of your screen
  2. Call out your abilities as you use them
  3. Say “For the Horde” alot, even if Alliance
  4. This guy’s going to beat WoW in a few days. Can you do that?

Warning – Major silliness follows:

World of Warcraft Achievements

 wow news  Comments Off on World of Warcraft Achievements
Jul 212008
 

From the offical World of Warcraft Site:

While Wrath of the Lich King will improve many of [tag-tec]World of Warcraft[/tag-tec]’s existing features, it will also introduce plenty of brand-new ones to keep the game fresh and interesting. One of these new features is sure to suit a wide range of play styles: achievements. These self-contained goals will offer new challenges, satisfy goal-oriented players, allow others to see your accomplishments in World of Warcraft — and are just plain fun.

Achievements, of course, are a big thing on the Xbox system and they’ve been done in other MMOs, such as City of Heroes’ Badges.

Personally, I like the idea of adding achievements to WoW and I think it’ll spark some new interest in re-doing some old stuff, as well some other things that aren’t necessarily along the lines of leveling of making more gold. .

It looks like their Feats of Strength achievments will retroactively take care of some past glories, so older players won’t have to re-do everything again. Bliz even says that some of these will be impossible to achieve in Wrath of the Lich King.

For new glories there will be achievements for getting a shave (Ok, let’s load those Dwarves onto the cart!) and there’s even one for people prone to falling off of high towers.

Anything to further the WoW addiction, right? 😉

So what do you think should be some of the new [tag-tec]WoW achievements[/tag-tec]?

Patch 2.4.3 Is Live

 wow news  Comments Off on Patch 2.4.3 Is Live
Jul 152008
 

It looks like patch 2.4.3 is going live, since it just downloaded today.  Patch notes haven’t made it to the main page, though. They’re still on the test side.

Here they are: Public Test Realm Patch Notes

I’ll be buying a couple of those level 30 mounts ASAP.

 Posted by at 7:33 am
Jul 092008
 

From the G4 site: Bushnell Predicts End of ‘Warcraft’

In an interview with Gamasutra, [tag-tec]Bushnell[/tag-tec] said:

[tag-tec]World of Warcraft[/tag-tec] just passed what I call the Bushnell Threshold. The Bushnell Threshold is… I watch my sons, and because they’re my sons, they tend to start things at the beginning, or sometimes a little bit before. So they play and play and play and play, and all of a sudden, they don’t play anymore. They stayed with World of Warcraft for a long time. My older son all of a sudden got Mage 72 or whatever it is and quit. All at once. Cold turkey. I didn’t think it was going to happen. And my 14-year-old is getting close to there, which is surprising.”

Well, my kids showed a similiar pattern, and then they keep coming back when something in the game sparks new interest. When [tag-tec]Wrath of the Lich King[/tag-tec] come out I expect they’ll be spending long hours exploring every last inch of the thing.

When you’ve leveled everything and raided everything and done every BG many many times the game gets a bit old.

Given the continuing growth of WoW and the fact that the #2 game is so far back that you have to use a telescope to see it… well, I don’t think WoW is ending anytime soon.

It’s also kind of funny to see an Atari guy saying this. Atari has had a record of sharp to brilliant ideas shot down with unbelievably bad follow through.

No, I don’t think the End is Near.

How about you?

Activision and Vivendi Tie the Knot

 wow news  Comments Off on Activision and Vivendi Tie the Knot
Jul 092008
 

From the Washington Post blog:

This afternoon (July 8,) game publisher Activision announced that its shareholders have voted to approve a merger with Vivendi Games.

The proposed merger between the two video game giants was announced in December, but required the blessing of Activision shareholders. The game publisher said that 92 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which is expected to close tomorrow.

One analyst has predicted that the merged company would make $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, enough to make [tag-tec]Activision Blizzard[/tag-tec] the world’s largest game publisher

This could mean interesting things for the World of Warcraft, or maybe that the new company will have the resources to come up with similarly successful games.

But I don’t think I’ll be calling them Activision Blizzard very much…

More on Blizzard Activision:

Source: Activision’s ‘DJ Hero’ Was A Vivendi Game, Now A … – We now know that “DJ Hero” was in development under publisher Vivendi before they merged with Activision to become Activision Blizzard. The now-called “DJ Hero” was one of the few unannounced projects that the new mega-publisher decided …

More layoffs at Blizzard Activision – Vivendi, Blizzard’s owner, officially combined its interactive entertainment business with Activision, a publisher of mostly console games, in July and renamed the group Activision Blizzard. Layoffs have been reported at other locations …

Could Activision Enter The Console War? – Take a look at your game collection, and see how many of your games either have Activision, Blizzard, or Vivendi on them, and then think back to the Atari 2600, and how many quality games over the last 29 years have been released by …

Activision tried to buy Blizzard before merging with Vivendi Games – Merging with Vivendi Games was not Bobby Kotick’s first thought. While talking about the deal today, the Activision (and now Activision Blizzard) CEO admitted that in his first conversations with Vivendi Games CEO Bruce Hack, …

 Posted by at 7:34 am
Jul 082008
 

 Update 7/15/2012: I did a speed run, using these methods, sometime back. Brand new characters, brand new server, no friends, guilds, transfers, gold buying, etc. I made over 6k gold in 30 days without trying too hard. Since the entire guide is in video format it should be easy for anyone to learn the techniques and do the same. Or better. Currently I’m doing over 5k gold per day. That’s mostly through crafting, but I still use these techniques and when starting on a new server I still use them extensively.

The Massive WoW Gold Blueprint, by Jon Kenins, is probably the best guide on the market to making a ton of gold in the World of Warcraft.

Well so what?? There are a number of them out there, aren’t there? Yes, there are, but there are a couple of very interesting differences with the Gold Blueprint:

  1. Most guides tell you to farm this, and grind that. The Blueprint does zero farming, and zero grinding. You will never have to visit the Elemental Plateau again (unless youi want to, for some reason) and, in fact, you will never have to use your high level characters to farm anything. Everything in the Blueprint is done with characters under level 10.
  2. Most guides are either printed up on websites (such as the forums) or as Adobe PDFs. The Massive Gold Blueprint is done entirely with video and the videos are better than what you will find on YouTube.)

Jon is confident enough in what he is teaching that he states, right up front,  I’ll show you how to get 1,000 Gold in 30 days (starting from 0 on a new server.) No 70s, no buying gold, no begging, no borrowing from the guild. From scratch with brand new, level 1 characters.

So How Does This Work?

First, some background: Typically one line of advice given (and I’ve given it) to get the gold is to get the skinning, mining, or herbalism) skills and work them as you level up. Skins and ores, and especially herbs right now, of pretty much any level, sell quite nicely. Ok, yawn, you’ve heard those before. That’s my point.

Of course, there’s also a number of good farming opportunities in the Outlands which can yield upwards of 1-200 gold per hour. Of course most of us would rather be raiding, PvPing, or having fun rather than mindless grinding.

Additionally the level 70 crowd can do the various daily quests, each of which which pays 5 to 20 gold, plus some quest rewards and whatever items are collected on the way. If you’re efficient with your dailies you can easily make over 100 gold per hour. Heroic dungeons, open only to 70s, are also good sources of loot.

But wouldn’t it be nice to use your mains for the fun stuff and not have to use them for farming? Wouldn’t it be better to use your low level “alts” for the gold making instead?

I think so. Far beyond a PDF collection of tips on grinding locations, The Massive WoW Gold Blueprint is a set of videos and audios that takes you on a step by step route from getting started to Auction House Mastery.

Every tip is covered with a video that shows you exactly how it’s done. Even if you’re brand new, with no character over level 1, on a new server, and don’t know Stormwind from Karazhan. In fact, here are some example videos.

This quote from Jon on the Blueprint Home Page nicely sums up the whole Blueprint system:

Here’s what I discovered (referring to gold gathering.) Once you have a good handle on playing the Auction House, you can make TWICE AS MUCH Gold per hour by simply sitting in the Auction House buying and selling goods, compared to any other activity you can think of in WoW. Twice as much!

That was an eye opener for me. But that’s not all. I also discovered that the most efficient way to play the Auction House is to dedicate a team of characters specifically to auction activities. You actually LOSE money by trying to work your established higher-level toons into the mix.

I’m not talking about a single “mule” character that you park in Ironforge or Orgrimmar. I’ve tested and tweaked my way to an optimal set-up of six alt characters, stationed in specific locations where they become the backbone of a system of “Profit Pipelines” . . . an underground system that works like crazy

And the punchline:

Nowadays, I spend 1 – 2 hours per day on Gold-making activities in the Auction Houses on the two servers I play regularly. I make a comfortable 5,000 Gold per week. I know I could make five times as much if I were willing to put in 8 hours a day at the Auction House. But what would be the point?

5,000 Gold a Week for 1 to 2 Hours per Day

So is this really possible? Absolutely. I’ve been using these techniques to great effect and when you read the Blueprint forums you’ll find lots more people also getting great results. You’ll also find additional tips.

Most people will find 1-2,000 gold a week to be easy, 5k a week will take a bit of practice, and some, who put in the time, will do quite a bit more.

The weak spot? Well, the one weak spot, if you could call it that, is that there’s a bit of a learning curve. There’s no grind here, looking for that magic bullet that will make you rich. You won’t be given the secret location to the special item which sells for 5k gold (it’d be nice if there was such a thing, wouldn’t it?) You’ll have to spend the time to watch the videos and run some characters around. Hard work, right? 😉

You’ll also have to use a couple of character slots to build your network, but do you really have that many main characters?

Now some people, who haven’t a clue, will tell you that to make gold you need to do your dailies (decent gold, but you need a 70) or, if you’re low level, to gather this or that (eg: linen cloth) and sell it. That works, but it should only be a start. The Blueprint will end the need for using your mains to dig for rocks.

Sacking Stormwind/Orgrimmar

The problem with using your mains for endless gathering is that you’re not using them for the fun stuff, ie: PvP, Raids, sacking Stormwind/Orgrimmar, etc.

Blueprint step 1 is easy enough (none of the steps are as hard as farming primals.) You’re going to make a level 1 toon and run it straight the closest capital city. This character will not level and will, in fact, do nothing except handle all the buying and selling chores for your mains and your network.

Step two is to get a cash flow started, so you’ll make a second character who will do the gathering. Gather up a few stacks of ores, skins, or herbs (or even fish) and send them to your mule to sell.

Nest, you’ll dive into buying, trading, cross-factions, and obtain expertise with the Auction House. You’ll spin those first few coins into enough gold to buy your Epic Flying Mount (6,000 gold with the training) out of petty cash.

WoW Gold StashHere’s a screenshot of my Alliance Stormwind mule (Auction House Banker.) I don’t have any characters over 35 (as of this writing) on that server and the only grinding I do is incidental skinning and mining.

Not a bad total. All from using only some of the techniques of the blueprint. No cross-faction trading and not much of a network. So if a person can do this using only a few techniques, what could one do by following the whole blueprint?

And yes, that Epic Flying Mount will be petty cash (when I get that character to 70) along with some pretty decent twinkage (getting the hot gear and enchants to extract every last bit of power from a character.)

Here’s What You Get

Once you have your Blueprint you’ll login to the site and access four modules, each intended to take a week (about an hour or two a day of game time,) but it’ll be a lot less if you have more time and/or are already clued into how the game works. Dozens of videos are broken up into the following sections:

Update: In preparation for the Wrath of the Lich King Jon has updated the Blueprint to cover Cashing in on Herbs and Inscription.

  1. Week one – The basics are covered. You’ll get your characters and network up and running, you’ll learn how to use the auction house, and you’ll get started with your initial gold generation.
  2. Week two – You’ll move into higher gear with the Auction House. You’ll learn about buying and selling specific items and you’ll learn about certain market niches, in-depth. Also covered are AH Best Practices and common AH mistakes.
  3. Week Three – Now that you’ve got some real gold flowing you’ll be working with higher-priced items and get the in-depth scoop on working with those items. Plus more best practices and worst mistakes, finding cross-faction trading opportunities, as swell as keeping notes and lists.
  4. Week Four – You will start realizing the full potential of the Massive Gold Blueprint method. You will establish a set of lucrative Profit Pipelines that you can work through fast when you log in each day to make even more gold. In-depth on more expensive and exotic items. You will achieve full Auction House mastery.

Yeah, Right…

Of course, the first thing some people will say is something like this, “Bah, that’s easy. I can do 1k gold in a day or two.”

Sure you can. But can you do that when none of your toons is over level 10? When you don’t have a guild or high level character donating cash to your characters? In other words, starting from scratch on a new server? Can you earn 1000 gold in 30 days, starting from zero?

How’s this? To prove it’s possible, Jon came up with the “30 Day Speed Run to 1,000 Gold.” He gives every last detail, including what good he obtained and how he sold them. By the way, he made a lot more than 1,000 gold and you get all the notes from that speed run when you grab the Blueprint.

This is what it looks like when you log in:

Massive WoW Gold Members Area

Note that I am a full member. The video is a guide to using the site and getting the most out of it, also available as a PDF. Tthe items in the menu at the top of the page will let you bring up any of the over one hundred of the videos on the site (and the site is constantly updated with new stuff.)

There’s also a forum with a lot of additional info and tips.

Ok, This Looks Good

  • Over 68 videos covering every aspect of the system plus bonus videos (such as Inscription gold) as they are created.
  • 7+ hours of audio with more info and questions answered (questions that were submitted by Blueprint users.)
  • Blow by blow detail of the 30 day run to 1,000 gold
  • A system that will work for you even if you’re brand new to the game, are starting over on a new server and have no levels and no connections, and that will even work if you have several level 70s.
  • Full money back guarantee, but if you follow the system it’ll be hard not to make lots of gold. This means that there’s no risk for you.

To sum it up – If you’re the player who’d like to have a lot more WoW gold and either doesn’t have high level characters or would like to use them for something other than farming gold, then hop over to the Massive WoW Gold Blueprint and join us on the inside, right now.