Where to level your Recruit-A-Friend Pair

The above is a screenshot of my /played time on the Sisters Bulimia upon dinging 59.

That's 1 day, 13 hours, and 33 minutes of time spent logged into those characters. Keep in mind that I spent a bit of time logged in but afk doing other stuff. I leveled them over the course of 9 days, starting Friday Oct. 24 and ending Sunday, Nov. 1. That averages out to about 4 hours a day. Usually, I played 2-3 hours a weeknight and 4-5 on weekends. That's a lot of playing, but not much more time than the average person spends watching TV.

So in 37 hours of time spent logged in, I got two characters to level 59. Compare that with this guy: a player who prides himself on speed leveling [warning: guide seller site. I do not endorse the guide, just needed an example of what used to be record-breaking leveling]. His record for 1-60 was 4 days and 20 hours /played before RAF. With triple xp, I just cut that into almost exactly a third. Makes sense.

So, in case you didn't get the message, RAF is LUDICROUS. And that's BEFORE I "gift" a free 29 levels to another one of my characters! I anticipate that in less than 3 days /played total, I will have 4 new level 59s and a 44. It used to take longer than that to get a single 60.

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Last night, I brought my warlock/warrior pair to level 44, making all of my leveling plans complete. Tonight, I'll be giving all of my gift levels, and I'll bring some screenshots tomorrow to wrap up the ludicrousness of RAF.

Because you level so much faster using RAF, you're not going to follow a normal leveling progression. Your going to outlevel zones before you can clear them. You'll never need to stop questing to grind, and in most cases you won't even have to go to some of the zones you'd normally visit to level. Having a friend run you through instances can still be good xp, but remember you don't get the triple bonus when grouped with a 70, so in general it's a wash.

Keeping in mind this newfound freedom of choice, I'd recommend favoring any quest that has you kill x foozles. Both characters will get credit for each kill. Any quest that requires you to gather an item is less desirable, because you have to loot the items twice. The worst quests are those that have you loot a number of low drop rate items from a type of mob. Sometimes it makes sense to do these, but feel free to skip them if you have other quests available.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you have the Recruit a Friend summon available every hour. The summon for each account is on a separate cooldown. This means that your leveling characters should never have to travel to a new town to get a flight path. Simply log into your main character, fly to the location in question, then summon the leveling character from the other account to you. Then log off your main character, log back in the other leveling character, and then summon them. Poof, you never have to travel without a flight path again. I used this strategy to great effect, especially to get my lowbies to Gadgetzan, Dustwallow Marsh, Searing Gorge, and the portal to Outlands.

I also found it easier to organize and plan my trip by using the addons TourGuide, TomTom, and Lightheaded (along with Doublewide). Highly recommended.


Here's how I leveled. I did it from the horde perspective, but most of this is easily translatable for alliance, and where they differ I'll make a note. Don't bother returning to cities to train new spells and stash things in the bank until you have a natural break to switch zones (obviously, this isn't the case from 1-20, where you should be buying new skills constantly).

Levels 1-22: TBC starting area. No matter what your race/class, do the first 22 levels in the Blood Elf or Draenei starting area. They are just so much more well-designed and efficient. If you aren't making a BE or Draenei, then you can still get there quickly by exploiting the once-an-hour RAF summon as I described above by making a throwaway Blood Elf to initiate the summon sequence.

22-30: Horde can best do 22 through 30 in Hilsbrad. Go to Tarren Mill, and do all of the Elixir quests and the Battle of Hilsbrad questline, as well as the final step with the dwarves down south. This will easily get you through that entire level span. For Alliance, you can do the same in Darkshire, one of my favorite zones.

30-32: Don't forget to pick up your mounts! I got a summon to Shimmering Flats for these levels. However, this is optional, as all of the quests here are the inefficient "collect" quests. Skippable if you want to go straight to:

32(30)-38: Stranglethorn Vale. Yes, I know. You don't want to go there. Go there anyway. The questing is good, and you aren't going to be here more than a few hours this time. Horde will get extra quests as Grom'gol, while Alliance has a base camp to the far north. I did all of the quests in the north half, up to step 3 of the masteries, the goblin lumber area, the basilisks, the underwater murlocks, and the collection quests from the trolls (ears, etc.). Easy level 38.

38: After clearing north STV, it's worth it to make detours back to Booty Bay, Ratchet, and Shimmering Flats if necessary to hand in completed quests.

38-44: Dustwallow Marsh. For Horde, stacking the Brackenwall quests with the Muddsprocket quests is ideal (and don't forget Jarl's hut!) Alliance can replace Brackenwall with Theramore, there is some cool new stuff there.

44: Again, you may need to make some quick detours, but the mass quest xp bonus is worth it. Don't forget to keep both characters together for the bonus!

44-46/47: Tanaris. Gadgetzan and the eastern docks have lots of good quests. Please do yourself a favor and skip the one where you have to pick up like 30 artifacts out of the sand. Now worth it with 2 characters.

46-48: Clean up the end of the 40's in Feralas. This is a lot better for Horde than Alliance. I'd actually recommend Hinterlands for Alliance instead. Just do the easy stuff here, to give you a buffer.

48-50: There's some quick and easy questing to be done in Searing Gorge. Just do what's easy and don't get too anal. If you find yourself fighting enemies who are grey to you, don't bother with that quest.

50-52: You're in the home stretch, but these levels are the longest. Pass the time in Felwood, where the mass "Kill x furlbogs" type of quests will serve you well.

52-56: One of my favorite zones, Un'Goro Crater. Tons of meat here for both factions.

56-58: You can pretty much mop this up by doing the Cauldron quest line in Western Plaguelands.


An there you are, you've made it to Outlands! The path should be pretty obvious from here.

Though you do end up visiting some places you might not like, please remember: you never have to set foot in Desolace. That alone is worth the price of the second account.

The Ultimate Recruit-A-Friend Pair

I have now verified that hunter/paladin is by far the best pair of classes to level together using Recruit-A-Friend.

Having gotten my copy of BC and upgrading the trial account fully, I created The Sisters Bulimia (female blood elf hunter and paladin) and plowed through the well-designed BE starting areas. The ludicrous xp inflation was still in effect, and over that first weekend I plowed through 30 levels with only a few hours played per day. Halloween was going on, so every inn offered a nice chunk of free xp, along with a one-time easy boost from putting out the fires the Headless Horseman liked to set in the lowbie towns. I didn't waste any time with professions, except on First Aid for the hunter, who was on my original account and would be doing the vast majority of the fighting.

I found that the biggest stumbling block to leveling was the class quests. The hunter had a lengthly quest line to learn to tame beasts. None of that quest xp went the the paladin, creating a deficit until I did her class quests to learn the resurrection spell. I basically got half the xp for my time doing these quests, but they were necessary to keep leveling.

Hunters were changed drastically in patch 3.02. I'm somewhat notorious for leveling hunters and never finishing them (have one parked at 43, one alliance at 60, and numerous hunters in their 20s), ever since vanilla WoW, so I'm pretty familiar with the torture that was learning pet skills. Clunkily, you had to leave your pet in the stable, venture out to a dangerous area without the pet, tame the right new pet who already had the skill rank you needed, then use that pet to fight until you learned the skill from them. You had to do this for every rank of every skill you wanted the pet to learn. It was needlessly punishing.

Blizzard took it all the way back in the other direction. When you tame a new pet, they come equipped with every non-talented skill that they will ever have (a focus dump, a racial skill or two, and growl), and those skills level up automatically with the pet. That's what's known in the business as a substantial improvement. This made leveling quite a bit less painful. Pets have also been divided into 3 groups, representing dps, tanking, or utility, each with their own pet talent trees full of new and old stuff. Wanting to level super-fast, I picked up the most immediately available dps pet (a lynx), who came equipped with like 5 skills that I would never have to put any work into upgrading.

Since I would be leveling quite fast and not necessarily updating my gear (upon reaching level 60 my Paladin was wearing mostly level 30 gear, for instance), I went with the least gear-reliant spec for the hunter: Beast Mastery. Let the pet do all the work: and work it would. Most of the time I could get off 2 shots at best before the pet had decimated my target. I was mowing things down. Nothing could kill like the hunter while leveling, making it the best dpser for a RAF pair.

This was helped by bringing along the best passive buffer (and therefore absolute best second character for an RAF pair), a paladin. I specced the paladin deep Ret. This had a few minor advantages, like buffing Blessing of Might (on the hunter and pet at all times) and increasing riding/running speed (the hunter took the mount speed talent in BM as well). But it had one major advantage: the newly consolidated Retribution Aura.

Back before the patch, all paladins had a basic Retribution Aura that simple reflected a small amount of holy damage whenever a party member was struck. They also had another aura that increased Holy damage, but could be talented to increase all damage by the party by 2%. Now, those two auras are consolidated, and at least 3 sets of talents in the Ret tree buff the new Retribution aura. So by keeping it up all the time, I buffed my pet's damage by 2% as well as causing him to reflect holy damage on attackers (which made it possible for the pet to hold aggro on multiple targets without attacking them all actively) and later increased the group's haste by 3%. So my hunter and pet were basically walking around with Blessing of Might, reflected holy damage, and a 5% damage increase just for having the paladin tagging along. Add in the fact that the Paladin could heal in a pinch and even bubble and run away from a lost battle to prevent a corpse run for the dead hunter, and you had a winning RAF recipe.

Clearly, by far the best possible pairing.

Oh, and by the way: level 1-59 in about a week, playing only 2-3 hours a day on average. Booyah.

Night of the Living Recruit-A-Friend

In one week, this blog will become All Lich King All The Time. Things have generally cooled down in-game, but we can expect the real pre-xpac event within the next few days, so I'd better get back to recruit-a-friend before there's so much to talk about all at once that I'd have to quit my job to keep up.

As we've already established, RAF is ludicrous. For 34 levels of effort, I will have 4 new level 60's and a level 44.

It was ridiculous from the first moment. While waiting for my new copy of the game to arrive so I could make my Blood Elves, I created a pair of orcs using the instant trial account, dual-boxing on my single laptop. I had already decided the Blood Elves (dubbed, by my girlfriend, "The Sisters Bulimia") would be a hunter/paladin pair. I already have a 70 rogue and druid, would be using my free gift levels on a mage, and my girlfriend already has a 70 priest and shaman. So I went with a warlock/warrior pair for this one.

Both characters loaded into the Valley of Trials. I made the Warlock's window really big, the warrior's window pretty small, grouped them, and hotkeyed "follow" for the warrior. I set it up so I could see the edge of the warrrior's window so I could switch easily between them and also constantly see that she was following the warlock. I set the group's loot to free for all. That way, the lock could handle the vast majority of the looting, minimizing the necessary switches between windows.

Now that they were grouped and in each other's vicinity, I would get triple xp for both of them on mobs and quests. I pick up the first quest on both characters: Kill 10 boars. Normally, you'll get your first level from completing this quest.

I got a level on both characters just for the killing of the boars themselves. Then I got an entire freaking level just for handing in the quest.

This was going to be fun. Normally, one leaves the Valley at around level 5, having completed the entire little questline there. This time, I again left at level 5, this time having completed a grand total of 4 quests.

Then things started to suck. I would not recommend anyone ever try to level a character without first installing The Burning Crusade. The Blood Elf starting areas are so good that trying to level in Durotar again feels akin to shoving a railroad spike through my neck. Every single quest involved ten minutes of travel, and there were barely any quests available in Mulgore anyway. It was a struggle to get the characters to 10 where they could go to the Barrens.

In my opinion, the Barrens are underrated. If you ignore General chat, the quests are reasonably easy to complete efficiently and the area looks beautiful, despite being a largely flat desert. The Barrens still don't come close to matching the ease of the Ghostlands, but at least they compare more favorably to the misery that was Mulgore.

The only hitch was that I arrived in Crossroads, eager to quest, on day 1 of the Scourge Zombie invasion. Every time I walked into town to hand in or pick up quests, I was instantly mauled by an army of level ?? zombies, many of them raised from the corpses of the very quest-givers I was searching for. Nonetheless, I endured the constant (and often repeated) corpse runs for an evening and managed to get close to level 17. I did this over 2 days, with only a few hours played each day.

The warlock and warrior sat at 17 for quite a while after that, because my BC box arrived and I was able to start leveling the Sisters Bulimia in earnest. Unless the Lich King razes Orgrimmar tonight, expect to hear about them tomorrow.

R-A-F: Ludicrously Tasty

I've been 'sploiting the recruit-a-friend system in WoW for about a week now. Remember the rules:

-The recruited account is "linked" to your account.
-A pair of "linked" characters get TRIPLE XP from quests AND mobs while grouped and near each other
-Characters on the recruited account can "gift" free levels to characters on the original linked account, as long as the character receiving the level is lower level than the character giving it.
-Characters on the recruited account can "gift" one level for every two levels they themselves earn, starting at level 3 until level 59. Thus, a level 59 character will have 29 giftable levels.

So last Tuesday, I "recruited" a free trial account under my own name.

At the outset, my full stable of non-70 alts amounted to a lone level 23 mage. My original plan was to level a different pair from 1 to 59, then give all of the gift levels to the mage. Perhaps I would level him to 30 before gifting the levels, making it easier for him to hit 59 himself. After some discussion with my girlfriend (we were going to share the new 3rd account), we decided that I would make myself a hunter on my main account, and make a paladin on the shared account to level together. This worked especially well because horde paladins can only be Blood Elves, and I had already settled on BE for my hunter (my main is a troll, my druid is tauren, the mage is undead, and I didn't want an orc). What can I say, I'm a completionist.

There was some doubt expressed by my girlfriend that I could run two different WoW accounts simultaneously on the same computer. I wasn't entirely sure of this myself, but when I opened up two separate instances of WoW, then logged one in on my main account and one in on the new trial account, it worked! There was just one small hitch: trial accounts can't make Blood Elves, as Burning Crusade content is locked out for them.

Upgrading the account to a regular account would cost $20, and then another $20 for the Burning Crusade upgrade online directly from Blizzard. I decided I was already giving Blizzard enough money, and instead saved myself $10 by ordering the battle chest, which includes both the original game and the xpac from Amazon.com for $30. I have free 2-day shipping, so I was going to have to wait at least 2 days to get started on my Blood Elves.

But, enamored with the idea and eager to begin, I instead rolled two new characters...an Orc warlock and warrior pair, and began to level them while I waited. This experiment was so ridiculously successful, I quickly hatched a new plan to take optimal advantage of the system. I would still level the hunter/pally pair to 59. But I would also level the lock/warrior pair to 44. This would leave the warrior with 21 giftable levels, and the paladin with 29. As it turned out, 21 was exactly the difference between the mage's 23 levels and 44. And 29 was pretty much the difference between having 2 44 characters or instead having a 58 and 59 character. It all came together almost too neatly to be believed!

So, at the end of this 2-week project, I expect to have 4 new level 59 characters: a mage, hunter, paladin, and warlock, as well as a level 44 warrior.

The actual effort I will put in will be equivalent to gaining about 34 levels the regular way (59+44=103/3=34.3).

That's fucking ludicrous.

I pay Blizzard to let me power-level myself

I really can't decide who's the sucker here.

With my rogue and druid both sitting at 70 in full epics, I've basically had nothing to do in WoW for the past few weeks except raid, and even that's been sparse thanks to WAR. Until patch 3.02, my guild hadn't gotten a 25 man raid off the ground for over a month. I had a regular ZA group attempting every reset to get a bear mount (we got one on the Saturday before the patch removed them forever!), but other than that...not much.

So, of course, I started feeling the dreaded alt itch.

"Hunters will be able to tame Silithids!" I thought to myself. "These new mage talents look cool...I've never played a pure caster before..." I tried to resist it, but I couldn't hold out for long, and was soon sending bags and cash to my 23 mage and a new level 1 hunter. I wanted to play them, but the release of the patch and the imminent arrival of the xpac kept me away.

That is, until I stumbled upon a FAQ explaining the Recruit-A-Friend program.

I had previously dismissed the program because it just seemed like cynical attempt by Blizzard to wring more money out of you. At 11 million subs, they really must have exhausted every target demographic they can think of, so now they're targeting the only market that they know is a guaranteed sell: all the people who already have subscriptions. I have a few guildies who were using the system to level alts, and the basic premise is that that you can pay Blizzard $50 for another account and a few months subscription, and in return you get the privilege of manually power-leveling yourself via dual-boxing.

It works like this:
-The recruited account is "linked" to your account.
-A pair of "linked" characters get TRIPLE XP from quests AND mobs while grouped and near each other
-Characters on the recruited account can "gift" free levels to characters on the original linked account, as long as the character receiving the level is lower level than the character giving it.
-This all only works up to level 59.
-ZEBRA MOUNT! 'nuff said. I'm a sucker for novelties.


If I was going to level alts, obviously I was going to have to use this system. I figured that I can make $50 in like 2 hours at my job, and using the system would save me more than 2 hours.

But there's less than 2 weeks left until the xpac releases and when it does I'll be spending all my game time levelling my rogue. After all my calculations (I'll explain in my next post), I have less than 2 weeks to gain about 180 levels across four characters, all the while leading Hyjal/BT raids for my guild and trying to get a Sinister Squashling from the Halloween event. And remember, I have a job, friends (who I can tell you right now are barely going to see me for the next month or two), and live with my girlfriend (who, thanks to luck I can't even fathom, is also an avid WoW player), so it's not like I can catass it either.

Am I crazy? Clearly. Am I a sucker, or is Blizzard? I'm not sure. Can I pull this off? Stay tuned to find out.