My level 5 doesn't have to worry about riding training now

Darkmoon Faire was financially awesome for my Dalaran hunter that I am slow-leveling. One thing I've already learned from this process is that things actually look different when I'm not trying to move-through as quickly as possible. There's probably a life lesson in there for me too.

I have also found that playing this way is much like breaking a habit. For example, Noblegarden has begun. In the past I have all but ignored these seasonal world events so I am anxious to devote some time finding out what fun there is to be had - but my habitual thinking is saying "not enough time - only level 5 - need to get to ten so you can..." So I have to stop each time the tape recorder in my head plays this message and say "No, I don't need to get to any level - the more I do at this level the better.

What I've done so far

• I did the first few levels of quests around Anvillmar until sent to Ironforge. That's where I...
• Jumped on the Deeprun Tram and headed for the Darmoon Fair entrance where I...
• Bought a fishing pole, fishing training, and leveled fishing to 75.
• Made a few trips back and forth to Stormwind to auction the goodies from the crates.
• I killed a few wolves for Stringy Wolf Meat 
• Bought a couple Netherweave Bags.

At this point I have 563 gold from all the fishing of crates. That is such a brilliant thing for Blizzard to have put in the game. Its not something one is going to be able to make massive gold-per-hour but its enough to make the difference between broke and enough to afford riding training or a primo upgrade with a little bit of effort.

My tips for Darkmoon fishing

Stay on the move but not too much. You don't want to impatient run past a spawn of crates that just popped. I was on foot plodding along and saw countless riders zoom by, up and down the beach a few times and then they were gone. This was while I did my routine of casting my line in open water a time or two, moving 40 yards or so in one direction, always checking for pops. I started to wonder if the spawns were set up such that some number of casts in open water had to occur before things were reset, but I doubt that's the case. (This is how superstitions develop.) But I acted like it were the case and did pretty well.

563 gold, two Netherweave bags, and I have picked one herb or mined one rock.

I'm off for some Easter... err, uh... Noblegarden fun. Cya next time.

Slow Play leveling has begun

Last month I announced my plans to start a character that I would go out of my way to level slowly. Ok, maybe not go out of my way, but I am taking steps and applying a few rules that'll ensure I take the time to smell the roses.

Today I found the random character sequence generator, generated 3 characters, logged into WoW and found the first U.S. server that isn't PvP that follows the string alphabetically. I ended up on Dalaran.

I chose a Hunter. Why? Basically I just love leveling Hunters. Dwarf was my racial choice as sort of a hat tip to Jim Younkin of Power Word Gold - I believe his main is a Dwarf Hunter as well. In the little bit I've played Alliance characters its also the race I've had the least exposure to.

Another cool thing is that when WoW was launched part of that trailer video featured a Dwarf Hunter. Anyone remember that? That basically sold me on WoW.

I have digressed.

Anyway, Glenliv lives. He's level 1 and has a lot of exploring to do.

One of my goals is to learn something new about the game every time I play this guy. I'll try to do something I've never done before. For example, as soon as I logged in with the new character I went inside and "talked" to all the citizens wondering around. The talk of the town is that Troggs are on the attack and everyone is still shook up from the recent earthquake.

Yeah yeah, I was vaguely aware that story lines would center around the Cataclysm. But I honestly don't think I've ever, in the years of playing this game, ever went around talking to NPC's just to see what they had to say.

I took a little time to soak up some of the artwork that went into this zone. I walked around and examined things.

Not being in a hurry feels good. So does enjoying what's been created for me in this game.

New project: Slow play - a new char on a new server

I have been on a whirlwind effort to squeeze out as many characters with the 90 day refer a friend bonus as possible. That has mean a lot of hard playing and very little stopping to smell the roses. No reading quests, no exploring, no fun stuff. I need a change.

I have also been interested in challenging myself to see how rich I can make a character at lower levels while still playing the game. In other words, I don't mean camping the AH and flipping items for profit, I mean going out into Azeroth and pulling wealth from the environment by playing the game. Gathering, professions, farming, etc are all fair game.

I am going to select a server at random. I'll do this by using a random character string generator to push out three letters, then go into the server list, find where those three letters fit alphabetically, and select the next server that is not PvP and that I have no existing characters on.

This is a race/experiment to see how slowly I can level and how much fun and how many new experiences I can enjoy along the way.

Rules:

• Experience bar will be disabled.
• One char only - no bank alts, no outside support, etc
• No accepting handouts
• No guild*, no heirlooms [that grant xp bonus], no dungeon finder, no battlegrounds
• Must get the zone exploration achievement for each level appropriate zone before moving on to higher level content

My intention is to level all the secondary professions along the way too with the exception of First Aid. Been there done that and its such a useless waste of cloth these days.

I'm going to focus a lot on gaining as many achievements as I can grab without senseless grinding too.

I have been playing this game off and on since Vanilla and I know there are things I still have not fully experienced, stories I haven't heard, places I haven't seen, etc.

My plan is to go Alliance because that's the faction content I've seen the least of. I've primarily played Horde characters. Not sure what class I will pick up - I thought about picking one at random but there are a few classes that would simply not be fun for me to play. This is not a challenge - this is supposed to be fun.

Update 4-3-2012: After further thought I made a few amendments before rolling my char. I decided to allow myself battleground access because that is.... well... just because. If I end up with enough Honor Points to buy an heirloom I'll likely grab it; just not one that grants a bonus to xp.


*Also, I may choose to create my own guild but I won't invite anyone else into it - if I manage to level it to 2 so be it. But I kinda doubt that's possible before I hit 85.

Follow along

If this sounds interesting and worth following please let me know - either here in the comments or on Twitter. @wowglen

Of course I will do some videos on it for my YouTube Channel and maybe even livestream it. Please follow my livestream.

Its not how much I made, but how easy it was to make it

This never ceases to amaze me. And its been amazing me since Vanilla. I remember being completely floored by the fact I could simply fly down to Duskwallow Marsh and buy the First Aid books and then flip them for 1000% profit or better.

A few nights ago I was preparing to do some cross faction stuff and thought I'd throw the line out and see what I could catch. I flew about 15 seconds away from the AH to the Troll area of Orgrimmar and bought some snakes for a few silver each.

I flew back and put them on the AH and went to bed.

The next morning someone had purchased one of them for 20 gold. Not bad for about a minute of work.

Video Mention on WoW Insider

One of my videos (and my YouTube Channel) has been mentioned in a great article in a great column on a cool World of Warcraft site. WoW Insider has an article about Advanced Icon Selector in response to one of my videos.



Or go directly to YouTube and watch it...

As I say in the video I really love this addon.

When I'm the only one selling rubies....

I sell them for what I want....

I guess I'm doing something right.

What am I doing?

I'm new to blogging about World of Warcraft. Deciding what to blog about takes up valuable time when I could be writing.

I have about a month or less of refer-a-friend bonus left so my main focus right now is getting a pair of druids (currently level 40-ish) to 80. Once they are 80, no more RAF so I can hold off leveling them. The plan is moving one of the druids to my home server, Skywall Horde, so I have my choice of a healer, DPS, or tank opposite any of the 10 classes I have on my first account.

Speaking of my first account, as of yesterday, all 10 classes are level 80 and above. Four are 85, one is 84, and the rest are somewhere in between. Reaching this point was my main goal for the RAF bonus.

Having played all 10 classes to 80 and above I can say I honestly do like them all. My favorite is whatever I've had the urge to play. If I had to choose beyond that, if I had to pick one for a desert island where I was limited to only one "main" then my choice would probably be the warrior. Or maybe the druid. Yeah - the druid because of the versatility. But tanking is so much fun on the Warrior... and I really haven't given the DK and Paladin an honest try yet...

See why I have ten?

Once in a while I envy the connection people who stick to one main character have with their "main." There's that familiarity and focus. I just can't do it. Like a father with 10 kids I love 'em all, some maybe more than others at times, but the plan is to keep them all fed and send them to college.

And that's my stream of consciousness for the moment.

Heart of the Aspects Mount Video

I enjoy this mount very much. I'm not interested in doing a lot of the things that have to be done to get the in-game mount awards so I appreciate having access to a little variety.



I made this video hoping I'd be one of the first only to find that it is one of a multitude. All the bases are covered, you can hear the sound it makes, see it swimming, watch the special, catch various angles flying, and see various sized characters riding it.

Confessions of an Addon Junkie

My load times have been sucking badly. I've been dual-boxing for a week and I noticed that my second account's client loads in about 10% of the time it takes my "main" client to load.

I hopped on an unplayed alt and disabled everything. All addons. Typed /reload. The game came back lightening fast of course. I also noticed my frame rate had almost doubled.

That was hopefully the intervention I needed to start my journey towards recovery.

Prioritizing - What do I really need?

Just one more! I'll start on Monday! 

I had to get rid of something. A quick skim through my three pages (yes, three!) of addons in Addon Control Panel (yes, another addon itself) didn't reveal any obvious candidates for the bit bucket.

So I asked myself "what do you like to do most, and what do you need to do it?"

I gots to make goldz!!! Gold-making, crafting, etc is one of the primary ways I enjoy the game, so the auction house addons stay - I use TradeSkillMaster and Auctionator. TSM is pretty big, but provides a lot of utility.

I enabled it, all its sub-addons, and Auctionator and hit reload. Still very fast, no noticiable difference.

Over and over I basically repeated this process checking the load time and then frame rate once I logged in. I also used, eh hem, another addon to check how much memory and CPU each addon is using. (broker_CPU I think its called).

Through this process I determined I probably don't need TellMeWhen, Power Auras, and Watcher all at the same time - not on each of my toons anyway.

Getting rid of the bad guys...

I also learned that my formerly new favorite inventory addon, Baggins, is a huge memory hog and that go looking for a suitable replacement. I found Combuctor which behave much more nicely and does things better actually. It also works better alongside Bankstack.

There are a lot of cool little addons that really don't effect performance at all but do very nifty things when you need them to. For example FasterCamera which changes the speed of the camera zoom. My god did that need fixed. This is an example of an addon I don't really "need" but it basically costs nothing to have enabled. It stays.

I stayed up too late last night repeated turning things back on and checking, sometimes finding replacements. Finally I managed to cut my load time to about 25% of what it was and I'd say I maintained at least 80% of the collective functionality of my former stack of addons.

tl;dr

Lessons learned:

1. Some addons are resource hogs - just because they're popular doesn't mean they aren't bloated

2. Redundancy is not my greatest asset when it comes to addons.

3. Know the difference between need and like. Remember the game is actually playable without any addons installed at all.

For the comments, name three addons you can't live without, and name the first one you have enabled now that you would delete.

TellMeWhen Introductory Tutorial - Setting up a Basic Notification

TellMeWhen is a brilliant addon for World of Warcraft. You customize it yourself to give you notifications or indicators about various things in the game. It can tell you when somthing will be off cooldown, when it is ready, what is happening on your target - the list goes on and on.

In this video I demonstrate a very simple notification. I show you how to create a notification that tells you with a damage over time spell is about to expire so you know its time to cast again.


This is my first try at making a WoW video. I will be creating more similar to it to demonstrate this and other addons.

Refer A Friend Bonus Continues

Using the RAF bonus with a family member, I took my warrior from 65 to 70 in one evening's play.

My third level 85

Yesterday, on new years eve, my Druid Cragganmore reached level cap. I created this character back in Vanilla. When I was new to the game my favorite class types from other games were hybrids and tanks. I've always enjoyed healing too. Anyway, for whatever reason, Druid was the first class I picked all those years ago but I never took the character much above level 13 or so.

Back then Druids only got bear form when they picked Feral. Bear was just too damn slow and inefficient for leveling. I didn't have the patience and the character stagnated. Only since returning to the game within the last year did I ever pay any attention to leveling him.

The cool thing is that all the things I thought I'd like about my Druid in the beginning I can say I like about it now. One thing I enjoy about the class above all else is the versatility.