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.

-----------------



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.

Friday Games That Are Metal: FF7

Fact: Final Fantasy 7 is the most metal game ever made.

Sure, there had been metal games before, and there have been metal games since. But none can compare to this magnum opus of metallity. As Wayne would say, it's intensity in ten cities. It can wail.

While Super Mario 64 brought us into the world of 3-D gameplay, Final Fantasy 7 brought 2-D gameplay into 3-D, and took game appearance and production values into a new, mind-bending realm that we'd never seen before. 3-D full-motion video cutscenes! 3-D battle sequences! WTF is a polygon!?!

The gameplay didn't do anything that couldn't have been pulled off in FF6's 2-D SNES engine. But it just looked so good. And what did Square choose to do with all of that production value? Bring to life the most metal world you've ever seen. Here, in no particular order, is why FF7 is the most metal game ever created:


1) The hero and villain have impossibly large swords. easily twice the size of their own bodies.

2) The hair. Many games have tried, but none have succeeded in creating better hair than Cloud's. It was scientifically formulated out of pure Cool Molecules.

3) Sephiroth looks like he's from a hair metal band, only more androgenous

4) Everyone is wearing tight leather outfits with lots of zippers

5) The game takes place in a dystopian steampunk future where the main villain is an evil corporation that is literally sucking the life force out of the earth. Again, a smaller entity doing the right thing and combating a much larger evil has a totally metal, revolutionist slant to it that I can't help but be charmed by.

5a) The entire setting. Swords and guns coexist. A city made of metal plates. It's just metal.

6) That city is actually a giant gun.

7) The protagonist's best friend has a gatling gun for a hand.

8) The hero uses his giant sword to battle hordes of soldiers while riding a motorcyle at top speed down a highway.

9) He follows this up by demonstrating his prowess as a master Xtreme snowboarder

9) One of the hero's other friends can transform into Frankenstein, a Werewolf, and a Demon.

10) At the end of the game, the villain uses an attack that shoots a giant laser beam through every single planet in the entire solar system, obliterating them.

10a) This planet-vaporaizing laser beam barely hurts your party.

11) And finally and most decisively, the music ROCKS. It sounds like it was written on electric guitar. Battles are conducted to headbanging riffs.



And this is just a partial list I came up with off the top of my head in the past ten minutes.

What, you expect me to put actual work into a post for Friday Laziness?

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.

Don't bother talking about politics in game...

...and certainly, under no circumstances, ever talk about politics on your blog, website, or podcast that is not specifically about politics!

I can't think of anything but American politics today (which is why you are getting this post instead of a gaming post), but I certainly am not going to even begin to give you even a tiny peek at what my positions might be.

Do not talk about politics with your guild. In, fact I would go so far as to warn other people to stop talking about politics if they bring it up.

Why? Because despite the fact that last night each presidential candidate encouraged reconciliation and unity in their respective speeches, it is still an incredibly divisive topic in America. It offers no benefit. You will never convince someone else to change their positions because of something you said in trade chat or even your guild's Ventrillo server. Especially if what you say is a talking point your opponents have already heard and dismissed from a more authoritative source than yourself. You will never make a new friend by expressing your political opinions. Anybody you agree strongly with is likely to already be your friend anyway for other reasons. So there is no actual benefit to making political statements in-game or even on your blog of podcast. It will never help you.

But it can and will hurt you. You immediately alienate those who disagree with you. You make it more difficult for even those that liked you before to stomach you now that they know you have such diametrically opposed beliefs. If you blog or podcast, you are willingly throwing away half of your audience.

And for what? So you can feel good about stating your opinions and pretending they matter to others? Deluding yourself into thinking you will sway them, or do anything other than drive them away?

As a quick example: I used to love listening to the podcast Taverncast. For a long while they were a WoW-focused podcast. But the cast all stopped playing the game, and switched over to a new, more free-floating format after a long hiatus. In the first episode of this new format, they somehow came to the topic of Universal Health Care. One of the members of the cast expressed a strong opinion that was the exact opposite of a very strong opinion I held. Hearing this person spout an opinion clearly based on misinformation and obvious biases rather than facts and logic made me angry. I wanted to argue with them, show them how they were wrong, etc. The opinion was, to me, so downright imbecilic that I couldn't respect that person anymore. I used to find them at least mildly entertaining, but I could no longer listen to content from someone who was so wrong about this issue. I could no longer be entertained by this person. I never listened to their podcast again. I know for a fact that I am not the only person who reacted this way.

For another example, look at the reaction to Tobold's recent post urging people to vote. You would have to try really hard to find anything clearly partisan in his statement. But he was eviscerated none the less.

You can express your opinion if you want. I'm not trying to supress anyone's freedom of speech. All I'm saying is that you may want to look at the pros/cons of expressing your political opinion in a non-political context. You may end up making a decision to keep your mouth shut that ends up benefiting you in the end.

Get over yourself. I understand the impulse to talk about politics. But don't do it. You have nothing to gain, and stand to lose a lot.

Taking the day off

Go vote.

Rogue spec 70-80: follow-up

As you may recall from last week, I'm leaning towards a Subtlety/Assassination spec for leveling my rogue when Wrath hits. It's unquestionable that this build would offer much more utility and survivability than a Combat leveling build. But would I be gimping myself so hard in damage that my leveling would be slowed? Rather than leaving it up to luck, I decided to test it out a bit and see how things shook out in the real world. So I found a group of level 70 mobs, and tried both specs.

All tests were made using the same mobs for roughly 15-20 minutes each. I did not change my glyphs (SS and SnD) at any point.


First, I made a more leveling-focused version of my Combat spec: 5/51/5

The playstyle for this build was to run from mob to mob without stealthing. Upon reaching the target, I would hit Sinister Strike once, then activate Slice and Dice. Then I would either SS them to death, or use an Eviscerate if the time seemed right (the evis would kill them and I had 3 or more combo points). If evis was not worth it, I might use the CPs for SnD instead, so I wouldn't have to reactivate it for a while. I used most of my cooldowns, except I forgot to use Adrenaline Rush. I had Wound Poison on both hands (as it beats IP for Combat builds currently).



905 DPS is pretty respectable while solo and unbuffed. You'll notice none of my SSs were dodged or parried, due to the expertise bonus for Combat spec supplementing my expertise gear.

Caveats: I did not use cooldowns to the maximum effectiveness. I neglected Adrenaline Rush and also neglected to gather up 2 or more foes on every Blade Flurry cooldown to take advantage of the double damage. A better-played session would probably have yielded higher DPS. So let's assume this one actually does around 1000 dps while grinding solo.


Next I tested out a Subtlety/Assassination build (20/0/41) using the same technique: I run from mob to mob unstealthed, spamming Hemo and eviscerate when appropriate. However, I don't use SnD with this build. I'm relying on yellow damage rather than white.



Hm. 782. Only about 100 less, but still a significant decrease in DPS. I was disappointed, so I gave it more though. Even with the Eviscerate Glyph (10% more crit), I wouldn't make up the difference. But I really want the utility of this build. While leveling I'll be competing for the tag on a lot of mobs, and Shadowstep is really my only good tagging tool.

So I thought on it some more, and looking over the talents I realized that I wasn't playing to my strengths. This build had many buffs to stealth, and I could increase my damage coming out of stealth. Cheap Shot was an extremely good investment with it's reduced cost and extra combo point return. If I stealthed, I'd also be safer more of the time from unexpected ambushes, be able to pickpocket, and be able to use premeditiation. I devised a new strategy, which intended to kill all targets during the 6-second window of increased damage provided by Master of Subtlety.

I got back to killing the same mobs, stealthing between each kill. Premed only has a 20 second cooldown, so it was up at least every other mob, if not more often. I could mitigate the slowdown of stealth via shadowstep every other mob, and Cheap Shot kept me from taking much damage at all. Premed followed by CS gave me 5 CPs for an immediate Evis, with energy left for a Hemo. If any of that crit, the mob would die immediately. I found my DPS varied wildly from fight to fight: I'd either do 1100 dps and drop the target within the CS, or I'd do about 850 dps because I had to wait for another Hemo or two. I ended up with a 940 average, which compares favorably to Combat. Keep in mind this was without the Glyph of Evis.



So I did a little bit less average damage than Combat. But I found myself running out of spawns with this new technique...I was moving between mobs so much faster, never having to pause to bandage, that they weren't respawning fast enough to keep up with me now. On top of that, I took almost no damage, could tag more easily, could pickpocket naturally, and piles of survivability via prep.

So happily, with a playstyle adjustment, Hemo comes out the clear winner.