a couple in azeroth

I finally got my second character ever to level 70, and my first Druid to the level cap! I’m so excited

Josh got Decode to 70 on Saturday, so he’s been hitting up the Isle for a few days already, and Museli was lagging behind a little, so she only just got there yesterday. I wasn’t thinking when I handed in a quest, so I wasn’t ready with the “Ding” screenshot.

Took this after Josh got his flying training and made his [Flying Machine Control] and whilst I was still level 69

So apart from that news, there isn’t really much else to tell. I don’t know how much I will be able to play from now until Wrath comes out, as my final term of my course has started up this week, so you will probably hear more from Josh and myself. I’m hoping I can still jump on and get Museli and Destination ready for the expansion, but I need to focus on my uni work so I don’t waste the last two years of my life

Okay, so Josh and I want to keep this blog alive, but what we’re doing in WoW would be so boring to read, that we aren’t sure what to write about.
So I thought I might post some thoughts I have about up coming things within Wrath of the Lich King, and problems I’m trying to figure out.

So as you all know, my main currently is Flow, the level 70 Holy Priest. Since the recruit-a-friend came out, I have made 3 Tauren characters: Museli the Druid (67 Balance), Destination the Hunter (61 Beast Master) and Fleur the Shaman (54 Elemental).
I hadn’t played Hunter or Shaman much before these two characters, and I am really enjoying them. I have always loved the Druid class, and I’m glad I put my differences aside and tried leveling as Balance, as it is quite fun.

I have a problem though. I’m enjoying these three new higher-level characters that I have started to worry about what to do once Wrath comes out. Flow was my first 60, let alone 70 character, so I’m fond of her. I enjoy healing through instances and PVP and she is pretty well decked out with +heal and mp5 (without having hit Kara).
But now that it looks like I will finally get a maxxed level Druid, I’m excited about Museli. Healing as Druid is a whole lot more fun with heals-over-time (HoT) and I haven’t tried it out, but Tree of Life form is so cute looking, that I might make Museli my main as a healer. And I mean come on, I know her name is mispelt, but what an awesome name
So where would that leave Flow? I am not going to abandon her, but I’m considering her as being a Shadow Priest for leveling and end game. Shadow Priests are currently wanted (not as much as healers), but I would worry that they might get nurfed too much.

So what about Destination and Fleur?
Well Des is always going to be a farming alt. She is currently catching up with skills and leveling both a Wolf and Gorilla as pets (Yes, a Gorilla for Thunderstomp tanking) and her professions are Skinning and Mining - to both help Josh and I with our tradeskills, but also to make money.
But Fleur? Well, I really did enjoy Shaman, but out of my 4 character now, I think she is at the bottom of the list. Which sucks. Elemental Shaman is quite fun, but with the other three characters sitting in positions they are now, it doesn’t seem plausible. Fleur was going to do Inscription, but for something so new, interesting and hopefully money-making, I want one of my mains to have this.

So I’ve been considering dropping Tailoring with Flow (I know! I only just took it up!) and taking Inscription with her. Some of the things you can make with inscription are BOP, which are quite good
Also, one of the big reasons I took up Tailoring in the first place, was to get the fantastic [Primal Mooncloth Set], and if Museli becomes my healer, this becomes obsolete. Ah! I’m a thinker!

Ack! So many decisions. At least we still have 5 weeks before the expansion comes out. But I’m sure there is only 2 weeks tops before patch 3.0.2 comes out - and I’ll have to decide which character will be taking up Inscription.
Which reminds me - I need to go and stockpile old-world herbs.

What are your thoughts? Do you have problems similar to mine? What will you do when WotLK comes out? Share your thoughts as a comment!

I had my first taste of instancing with a rogue when I ran Hellfire Ramparts and Underbog yesterday with Decode. Both runs saw me top the DPS meters (by a large margin) and taught me a lot about the usefulness of a rogue in PvE. One trick I mastered quite quickly was using distract to pause patrollers, giving the tank time to execute each pull.

The Underbog run was quite extraordinary: Warrior, Resto Shaman, Warlock, Hunter, Rogue (me). That’s right, no Power Word: Fortitude, no Arcane Intellect, no Mark of the Wild. It was quite a new experience for me to run with a group like that. We executed the dungeon perfectly (we were all level 64-67) and had a great time improvising pulls. Sap, Trap, Blind, Evasion tanking… although it may sound chaotic, we executed it very well.

Decode and Museli are progressing nicely. Decode is one bubble away from 65, happily questing in Terrokar Forest. As of right now, I’m strongly considering making Decode my main for WotLK, but I will defer my decision as long as possible. I’m fairly certain that the choice will be between Source (Mage) and Decode (Rogue). Kate still can’t decide between Flow (Priest) and Museli (Druid), though I’m trying to convince her that Museli will be the way to go… Druid heals in WotLK just look to be so much more fun!

The current plan is for Decode & Museli to hit 70 by the end of this month and then spend 6 weeks preparing for WotLK (getting epic flyer, farming honour points) on whichever characters we decide to make our mains. I can’t wait!

Kate and I have had great success levering the recruit-a-friend bonus into level 54 56 toons. It has been so ridiculously easy that we hit 54 with Museli and Decode in 9 days (real time) in around 30 hours /played. We originally planned to just level a Pally/Shaman combination and maybe a Rogue/Druid, but with the absurd ease, we’re probably going to level some more combinations before our bonus expires (mid-november).

I intend to update this post with more detail soon.

What you’ll need:

• A decent, aoe-tanking capable level 70 character on a non-linked account. (Druid, Paladin, Warrior recommended. Mage/Priest will work up to Sunken Temple; I recommend PVP gear!)
• A decent PC, capable of running 2-3 WoW clients at a time. Please note: while minimized, WoW consumes minimal CPU & GPU resources, but RAM is a problem. Also, you could use a second PC/laptop instead.
• Two (other) accounts; the second linked to the first via recruit-a-friend.

Here’s how we did (we’re doing) it.

• Account One: Josh, not linked. Druid & Mage 70.
• Account Two: Kate. Referred Account Three via Recruit-a-Friend.
• Account Three: New, linked to Kate.

The Guide:
Some useful tips:

• Keep your characters’ XP as close to each other as possible.
• Keep your characters’ as close to each other as possible (physically).
• Use the Friend summon judiciously! If you need to gather quests in Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff & Undercity (e.g., for Ragefire Chasm) have one character grab the Undercity quest while the other gets the Thunder Bluff quest. Use Summons, hearthstones and quest sharing to cut all travel times in half!
• Ignore the periphery! No tradeskills, no auctioning, no time-wasting!
• Except! Get skinning on one character; you’ll get heaps of leather in dungeons! (Enchanting may work too)
• Mail all greens to an enchanter for DE.
• Keep all cloth for First Aid.
• Have an alt buy all first aid books (From Brackenwall Village in Dustwallow Marsh) and mail to your new characters
• Set your hearthstone to Shattrath ASAP.
• Buy your mount the minute you ding level 30!
• All instances are run 3-man; your 70 one-mans it while your other two /follow and soak XP

Level 1-12:
Level 8 will come easily by doing your race’s initial quests. What used to get you to level 5 should push you to 8 quite easily with the XP bonus. By doing a couple of run-around quests and your class’ Level 10 quest you should hit level 12 without a problem. We hit Level 12 in ~ 1.5 hours.

Level 12-15: Ragefire Chasm
Gather all Ragefire Chasm Quests, hit up that bad-boy. It should take you about 15-20 minutes and ding you to ~15.

Level 15-18: Wailing Caverns (Quests)
Pretty obvious. You need to do some pre-questing in the Barrens if you want to get EVERY quest, but it’s not necessary. Just make sure you’re level 18 to grab the SFK quests…

Level 18-24: Shadowfang Keep (run 2-3 times for leather, loot, xp. Quests)
Self-explanatory. If you hate SFK, I’d recommend Blackfathom Deeps (BFD), though it is a pain to get to.

Level 24-27: Razorfen Kraul (Quests)
You could mix this up w/ BFD as well.

Level 27-37: Scarlet Monastery (Quests)
You will run SM (Lib, Arm & Cath) 3-4 times to level up. The quests help here too, but make sure you ignore Graveyard. Because Graveyard has so many non-elites, the XP/hour rate here is terrible.

Level 37-39: Uldaman (Quests)
These quests can take a fair bit of effort to do (the necklace recovery, for example). I would suggest simply running RFD/SM a couple of extra times instead; but Uldaman is a nice break from the monotony…

Level 39-41: Razorfen Downs (Quests)
A great instance. Make sure you do the escort quest for a massive XP bonus.

Level 41-46: Zul’Farrak (2-4 times, Quests)
The real meat of the guide. ZF (with quests) provides an insane amount of experience. As boring as it is, the executioner event generates a large amount of XP. Run, reset, repeat.

Level 46-49: Maraudon (Quests)
Maraudon is such a nice instance, I strongly recommend running it. Although the pace of the dungeon is shocking, running ZF from 41-49 would make anyone absolutely nuts.

Level 49-51: Sunken Temple Pre-quests (including class quests)
Work on getting all of your Sunken Temple Quests in order. This involves a lot of travelling, but the quests alone get you ~ 1.25 levels!

This is also a great chance to let your combat skills catch up to your level (defense, swords, etc.).

Level 51-54: Sunken Temple (Quests)
Yep, one run will get you there. Ridiculous!

Our plans for 54-58 are as follows:

Level 54-56: Felwood & Winterspring Quests
At this point, you can earn almost 200,000 XP/hour by doing the quests in Felwood and Winterspring. I recommend the following quests:

• Felwood:
  • Timbermaw Ally - as well as the ‘Speak to …’ quests
  • A Husband’s Last Battle
  • Cleansing Felwood
  • Collection of the Corrupt Water
  • Forces of Jaedenar
  • Verifying the Corruption
  • Well of Corruption
  • Corrupted Sabers
• Winterspring:
  • Wild Guardians (from Felwood)
  • Trouble in Winterspring! - and follow-up
  • Winterfall Firewater Chain
  • Are We There, Yeti? Chain - Part 2 - Part 3 (Part 3 will give ~ 34,000xp, well worth the travel!)
  • The Everlook Report - Take to WPL (heading there soon)
  • Duke Nicholas Zverenhoff - Take to EPL (heading there soon also)

Level 56-58: Stratholme (Quests)
Stratholme will be a challenge, depending on your Level 70’s gear and spec. However, this is a great chance to stock up on greens, runecloth and XP. Simply running the living side should get you to 58, but the undead side has some great loot and, more importantly, is a heck of a lot of fun.

Hi all. Again, just a quick update of where Josh and I are up to with the refer-a-friend stuff. We haven’t given much love to Flow and Source, as (I speak on behalf of Josh) we’re pretty excited to get these two characters to 60, and then to 70

Museli and Decode at level 42

You may or may not know how much I love Druid class, and I was crushed that after trying countless times (probably 6-7 times?) of trying to level a druid to the cap and failing, to have Josh beat me to 60 and then 70 with a druid was tough on me for awhile.
I got over it though

So now that I currently have my third highest druid ever (close to second) I’m excited to get these two characters into outland I might finally get to have my own ‘lil druid
Dr00d = happy-kate

Destination kickin’ butt

So soon, we will have enough levels to grant Destination up to 58, which I’m also excited about. Apart from the weapon/tradeskill grind, it will hopefully make money/item/material farming SO much easier. Despite how cool Flow is, she is so useless alone. Plus, I never knew how cool hunter was. Its quite fun

Anyway, homework is awaiting. Unfortunately, it won’t complete itself. Hopefully, Josh and I will have something more interesting to share soon. I hope everyone is enjoying the little updates though!