10 for 10

Been a while since my last blog post and while life has kept me busy there have been so many things I have wanted to write about! Things like how well my guild is doing, how my flex team went from raiding flex modes to raiding regular mods, how my achievement hunting has been going, how much I'm enjoying the Warlords of Draenor beta, and so on. I saw on the twitter verse that there was a blog initiative by @Alternativechat to get people to answer her 10 questions for a project she was working on for the 10th anniversary of WoW. I have decided to participate because damn it I miss blogging.

Cross Realm Boosts

So uhm there is a perfectly good reason why my last post was almost two months ago and that reason is uhm...well.. ya see...HEY LOOK OVER THERE! /Cast Invisibility /Run Away

The real reason is that life in Zurich has kept me rather busy and sometimes I just don't have the time to blog about things and stuff in the World of Warcraft! I am still playing and still raiding in the SoO raid instance(at a really late local time) and over all I've been having a good time. Lot of stuff has happened since the last time I blogged and I figured I might as well make with the yakkity yak blog stuff.

Keep on keeping on

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I think this quote from Ferris Beuller's Day Off kind of sums up what I've been up to the last few weeks. The last time I blogged I wrote about Virtual Realms and Flex raiding and since then we have received more information about both. I am eagerly awaiting both and I wish I could speed up the patch so that it could be 5.4 already! When I started blogging I had so much free time that I could write a lot of posts in between classes but when I got a job I suddenly lost all that free time. Eventually I had the desire to blog but whenever I would sit down to write something I would get writers block. You (the few readers I still have) probably read the few words I write and think to yourselves "how the hell can it take such a long time to write such short, uninteresting, mindless drivel??" 

Well my response is..uhmm..yeah I got nothing. But since you do read my blog regularly, I can safely reason that you:
1) have bad taste since you read my ramblings
or 
2) enjoy punishing yourself by reading my blog 
or 
3)are either used long delays betwen my blog posts 
or 
4) have me on your feedreader by accident and are now wondering who the hell I am.

So like yeah!

I apologize for the above. I blame global warming or something.

Virtual Flexing

A little bit ago I wrote about my low population server and I listed out a few things that I felt that Blizzard could do to help out not just my server but all low pop servers. Included in that list were the suggestions to merge servers and to open the current tier for cross realm raidability. Two weeks ago Blizzard released not just one but TWO things that I feel will help out all low pop servers when they go live in the 5.4 patch. The two things: Virtual Realms and Flexible Raiding. Do Blizzard developers read my blog and think I have great ideas? Probably not but at the very least they are finally doing something to help low pop servers.

What's in a name?

I was reading something in the WoW subreddit(as I often do) and I ran across an interesting question: How do you come up with a name for your characters? This is such an interesting question because everyone has different reasons for why they use a certain name. Some choose names from other games, some just use the in game random name generator until they find a name they like, and some don't care about their character names and pick random things. Each person is different and while some names are completely unoriginal, they probably mean something to the person who rolled that character. As for me, I have a long and weird process I go through when I pick a name for characters.

I once made the joke that you can tell when in my life people met me by what they call me. If you call me by my real name we probably met in high school. If you know me as Jedi Optimus, we most likely met when I was in college and very active on several online message boards and I also played many online FPS games where that was the handle I used. Many a noob cursed that name in anger as I shot them ingame. If you know me as Jedem, we most likely met in 2005 when I first started playing WoW and I used that name for my very first character, a warrior. I eventually changed servers and classes but the first character I rolled on Ursin was a mage named Jedem. If you refer to me as Izak, you probably raided with me in BC when my pally sadly became my raiding main. Now Jed, well if that's what you know me as and you have never been in my guild, you probably met me in Wrath when I first started blogging. Of course if you have ever been in my guild regardless of when, you eventually know me as Jed.

Third times a charm

Apparently I am rather bad at remembering to check my calendar because my third blogaversary was on January 25^th and here I am almost a week later and just now getting around to writing a post for it. What can I say, I’m a horrible slacker and you should all stop reading whatever inane crap I write. Now for some reason, some of you are still reading this so I suppose I should continue this post. I have repeatedly mentioned that I started this blog because I had a lot of time in between courses so I decided to start blogging to keep me from being bored to tears. I have somehow managed to keep writing because it’s an outlet for my thoughts on WoW/leadership/finance/robots. I know my wife is happy that I write this blog because that way I don’t drive her crazy with all the stuff running through my head.

Well anyway, it’s been 3 years. I’ve had a lot of visitors come to my blog and some have even been nice enough to leave me comments. The past year has definitely been a busy one for me; I started a podcast, designed some cool shirts, wrote a short story involving my mage, wrote a class guidefor the best mage spec, and of course wrote blog posts that some of you read.

In game I’ve been working on gearing for raiding and leveling alts that also need gearing for raiding. Stupid vicious cycle of needing to do stuff to get gear so you can raid and get gear. I’ve been slacking and only have 6 level 90 characters. I know, I know, it’s shameful and I feel all of the shame. I’ve got a mage, pally, monk, rogue, death knight, and another mage. I’m currently working on leveling my gnome priest and horde dk so those two will be my next level capped characters. I am not going to lie, I think I might have a problem.

So the question ahead of me other than what alt I will level after the priest/dk is: what do I do to celebrate 3 years of blogging? I thought about my usual celebration event the gnomish death race but while we had a good turn out last time, I think I need something new and different.  So I thought to myself, why not do something pet battle related? I know I have been spending a lot of time leveling pets to 25 and battling pet tamers across the zones. Maybe some other people have also done the same and would like to do a tournament. So maybe in February I’ll post details about when/where the tournament will be held. The beauty of pet battles is that they are shared across all your characters so you can roll a level one on my server and participate or if you are alliance you can be battle tag friended/invited to my server for some battling! If anyone reading this is interested please let me know, I think if we can get a decent amount of people we can have a great time.

In parting, I leave you with a funny story that happened to me in the olden days of the Burning Crusade expansion. At the time if you were a tank you had to grind rep with the Keepers of Time for their helm enchant. This was a very annoying rep grind because there were only 2 instances that gave KoT rep: Old Hillsbrad and the Black Morass. Sadly each gave crap for rep and took forever to find a group for/do because you had to do a super annoying quest that involved walking around the caverns of time listening to some npc yammer on about the timeways and such. If you’ve ever done the Aldor/Scryer quest when you first enter Shattrath, it’s like that but worse because you are walking in such a large circle and you had no choice but to do it if you wanted to do Old Hillsbrad. More often than not you would get a group, everyone would make their way to the instance and someone would NOT be able to zone in because they had never done the stupid quest and couldn’t be bothered to do it then.

Anyway back to the story, a guildee was leveling his paladin and needed to grind rep with the KoT. He asked me if I had any alts around the level 66 range that I could take to the instance with him. Luckily for him I had a spriest that I was working on and had done the walk around attunement on. The two of us get in vent and we get a healer and dps who were also attuned and head to the instance. My guildee and I were the only ones who had done the instance before so we had to explain what to expect to the dps/healer. My guildee decided that since he needed rep he was going to find every single mob in the instance that gave rep and pull it. We cleared all the mobs in the first area including the mobs in the tower to the left of the main building where Thrall was. The poor pugged people must have been wondering why the instance had so much trash that needed to be cleared. We finish the instance and the dps/healer leave so my guildee pulls in another guildee who had a resto shaman and we clear it again with just the three of us. Since I was the only dps this took longer than a normal run and when we finished we reset the instance and went back in.

The three of us start clearing trash and mount up to run to the next part when suddenly the healer got a bad lag spike that caused him to run forward into several mobs and dc’d him. Of course all the mobs kill him and turn to us. Thankfully the two of us were still mounted and I’m not ashamed to say that we turned around and ran for the entrance. As we were running my guildee tells me in vent “Why are we running? We should just kill them!” I hesitate but he tells me that we can do it so I agree to give it a chance. He tells me “Heal me! We can take them!” as he dismounts and runs into the chasing mobs. I pop out of shadow and toss him a shield and a renew when suddenly he gets blinded and they all turn to me and do unspeakable things to me. As soon as I'm dead they proceed to kill my guildee. At this point I’m yelling at him in vent for getting us killed and all he can say is “I didn’t know they cc’ed! I didn't know they cc'ed!!!” I was laughing so hard at this point that I couldn’t seriously be mad at him but I have yet to let him live it down and this happened 5-6 years ago.

It’s become a running joke in my guild between the two of us to yell out “Heal me! We can take them!” whenever we’re in an instance or questing. So yeah, there’s a story about Jed that hopefully made you laugh a little at my death.

Thank you everyone who reads my blog, retweets my blog post tweets, leaves comments on my blog, and subscribes to my post feed. You are all awesome and I am thankful that you are all reading my blog, even if it is just to laugh at me. Here’s to another year of crazy blogging fun!

Have Jed, will travel

Well the last post I had written decided that when I sent it to myself it was NOT going to send and so I lost what I had written so far for this post. I think it is a sign that what I had written was crap and that I shouldn’t force anyone to read what I had written. Point made universe, point made.

Here is the basics of today’s post:

Who: Me, possibly you, maybe you, definitely you, oh and you.

What: I’m a bored 90. I like helping people. I’ve decided to offer my services to the WoW public! This means that if you are a lowbie trying to run instances, I can help you out. If you’re coming back to the game and want to know whats changed, I can help you. If you are a healer and want to run old raids but can’t solo them, I can help you. If you don’t know what to do at level cap, I can help you. In a group with friends and need a tank for something, I can help you. Can’t quite solo a difficult quest mob/rare, I can help you.

Where: Thanks to cross realm zones, it can be on my server or your server or that other server over there.

Why: I like helping people and along the way people have helped me with things so I have decided to pay it forward and help others. I get nothing out of doing this other than the satisfaction of knowing that I have helped someone. You aren’t obligated to help anyone else out along the way but if you did it’d be neat.

The details:

I decided to do this one day after spending a few fun hours in Ulduar with a cool Disco Priest and her husband. They had been trying to solo Ulduar for achievements and the mount but they needed a little boost. Having both the 10 and 25 man achievement mounts from Ulduar, I can say that I know my way around that place so I offered up my dk to help out and we managed to get many of the achievements that they needed. This got me thinking about how many people in game have the desire and drive to do things like old raids or rep grinds but have no knowledge about how to go about them.

My guild raids one night a week and the rest of the week I am usually putzing around on alts either leveling them or working on their professions. This causes me to have a lot of time in game where I am bored and looking for something fun to do. Most things are more fun with friends after all. I tend to run parts of the LFR on 3 different characters and always love having someone I know along with me to make it more interesting.

I have a few alts still at 85 that I wouldn't mind leveling through instances/questing with friends. Currently sitting at 85 I have an enh shaman, resto druid, ele/resto shaman, warlock, warrior, spriest, guardian druid, and windwalker monk. At 90 and looking for gear I have a frost mage, frost dk, brewmaster monk, combat rogue, and fire mage. These are all alliance BUT for my horde readers, I have an 86 frost dk that I'd be up for questing/instancing with along with several lowbies from level 20 to 70.

I know to some of my readers this may seem like an elaborate scheme to do something nefarious...but it isn't. I have amazing people in my guild who will gladly help me with stuff when I ask and I know some people out there don't have access to this level of support. I want to help people in the hopes of bringing balance to the force only without the dismemberment and large scale genocide.

In conclusion if you want some help with stuff in game, add me to your friends list: Jedem#1828 and let me know who you are so I can make a note next to your name. Then as long as I'm not in the middle of an instance or on limited time, I will be more than happy to help out. If you want to just chat about stuff in game, I am also down with that. If this is all for naught and no one friends me, well at least I will know that I have tried to do something good for the community and I guess that'll have to be enough for me.

Thunderous Fury

This is a post that I have wanted to write for two years; in fact it’s something that I’ve been working on for over 5 years. What the hell am I rambling about you may be asking yourselves. Well I’m talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. The very same item that is often linked by trade chat trolls. Now I am not just linking it because I want to troll you all. I am talking about it because a week and a half ago this happened:

Days of Future Past

Today I am going to talk about several different things and hopefully it’ll seem like I have coherent thoughts when I write (I don’t) and it will all blend together to make a good post. (it won’t) So buckle your seat belts boys and girls and prepare for the trip of your life!*

*Trip of your life may not actually be the trip of your life. Mileage may vary. If this is the trip of your life…you may need to have more fun in your life!*

To celebrate WoW’s 8^th anniversary Blizzard released this video that mashed up a lot of the previous game cinematics and to me it is awesome! If you haven’t seen it yet you should open up another tab/window and watch it right now. Go ahead I’ll wait.

Pandarian Things

It’s been a month and a half since the Mists of Pandaria launched and things have been a bit busy in my little corner of the internets. I’ve leveled 2 characters to 90, gotten another to 89, gotten a monk to 86, farmed a lot, and gotten my pally ready for raiding with the guild. Very busy 6 weeks. So what do I think about this expansion now that I’ve had time to spend a good amount of time playing it? I think that Blizzard has done a good job so far with most of the new stuff in Pandaria. I am having a good time playing and as usual I don’t see myself quitting any time soon. Lot of real life stuff going on so I haven’t been able to blog about what I’ve been up to in WoW.

The Good

I LOVE lamp pandas. They are seriously fun to play and just watching them run around is hilarious. Pandaria is a very beautiful place and flying around it and just watching the scenery is a fun time. The storylines in each zone are also pretty awesome and at times you can easily find yourself pulled into the storyline, cheering on the NPC’s or feeling sad when someone dies/succumbs to emotions.

I can’t forget to mention pet battles. Oh man pet battles are so much fun. Stupid awesome pets requiring you to battle to make them even more awesome. DAMN YOU PET BATTLES! DAMN YOU AND YOUR FUN! Must battle one more pet, just one more pet. One more…just one…must be the best, like no one ever was…

The Bad

SO MANY DAILIES! Once you hit 90 there are so many things that you can do that it can be slightly overwhelming. There are Tiller dailies, Anglers dailies, Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, cooking dailies, archeology dailies, Cloud Serpent dailies, AND you have dailies to get rep with individual people like Nat Pagle and the Black Prince. If you want to get VP you do dailies. If you want to get gear because the LFR/raid won’t drop pieces for you, you do dailies because you need to get revered with factions to buy VP gear. It’s a little weak but honestly you don’t NEED to be fully geared out in VP gear to do well in raids.

Pandas are awesome BUT since both factions can have them, you are technically neutral until you pick a faction around level 12 or so. This means that you have to go through the Panda starter zone with no guild chat, no direct whispers, and no mailbox. Kind of a pain but thankfully once you pick a faction and get out into the world you realize that you are a Panda and that you rock. Until that point though, you are isolated and worst of all…you have no bags except for the ones that you can get to drop! The horror of running around with 6 slot bags!!!

The Guild

My guild was able to work hard and pull together and snag the Realm First Working as a Better Team achievement which was really cool. I know that several of my guildees got a few realm first profession achievements which is great for them. We also started raiding and downed the first boss in the Mogushan Vaults, the Stone Guard, and we are making good progress with the second boss, Feng the something or other. Seriously that guy made me want to punch the computer when we wiped at 8%! So close!!!! But I know that we are awesome and we’ll down it the next time we raid. 

Speaking of which, we are looking for more people to start a second raid group on Sundays! Tanks, heals, and dps are needed! It’d be Sundays 5-8 PST on Ursin-US-PVP. Oh and it’s for alliance only in case anyone was wondering. We’re a casual group that happens to raid and our raids are usually full of fun times so if you’re looking for a home check us out! Also if you're just looking for a guild where you can be social and not raid, we would totes love to have ya! =D

Overall I am having a good time. I love my little farm where I can grow veggies or motes of harmony and since I hit exalted with the tillers I finally got the 60 exalted factions achievement. I’ll probably slowly work on getting my mage exalted with the remaining factions that I need and see how far I am from 70 exalted factions and the Beloved title. I might have issues.

To all the lowbie groups

I am going to start this post by announcing that this is a rant. If you have no desire to read my angry rant, please feel free to browse through my other posts until you find something more to your liking. If you’re still with me, hold on to something because this is going to get angry and possibly violent. I’ve been leveling my panda and I LOVE it! They are a fun class to play regardless of spec and I highly recommend leveling one. Now because I am one of those weird people who like to play a class to level cap as the same spec that they are going to be at said level cap, I tend to level some characters as healers or tanks. For my panda I decided to level as a Brewmaster, which is the tank spec. 

This means that I’ve run a lot of dungeons so far. I usually quest for a bit and then queue for a bit so that I don’t end up running the same dungeon a million times in a row. Nothing like running RFD 5 times in a row to make you want to stop playing for the night. Anyway, since I’ve been leveling I end up in a lot of groups with everyone but me wearing all heirlooms. Why don’t I have heirlooms you ask? Well because until this expansion each account could only have 10 character slots per server. I had one of each class at level cap. I had no need to buy heirlooms because I didn’t have a character that could benefit from them and I would rather spend the JP on other stuff like mounts or crafting mats or gnomish hookers. Had I been smart, I would have bought them with the extra JP I had before it got turned into gold in 5.0.4 or whatever patch it was. But since I’m dumb and didn’t remember to do that, I have no heirlooms.

Pandarian Shenanigans

The Mists of Pandaria expansion has been out about a week now and I’ve been very busy in game seeing what it has to offer. I think that after all I’ve seen so, I am loving this expansion. The first day I might have caught a 24 hour type of bug that forced me to stay home…and play a lot of WoW. Damn those strange and random illnesses! (/shifty eyes)The first day I said forget leveling I’m battling my pets and so I ran around leveling up a battle team. I have yet to name my battle team or even the pets in said team but they are around level 10/11. I have collected a lot of new pets and currently I am under 50 pets to the 250 unique pets achievement. Woots.  

After a while I decided to go quest for a bit in Pandaria and see what else the expansion included. I had quested in the Jade forest on the Beta back before they changed the whole zone. Because of this I had seen what the starter quest lines were like and I think that the new starter area is a ton better than the old area. In the old starter area you would find yourself in the Jade Forest under attack from Hozen and you would have to defend yourself. The new zone has you take the fight to the Horde and their base on the island. I much prefer the new quests as they definitely convey the “we are at war” concept that blizzard has been pushing on us for this expansion.

The Seven Year Itch

Once upon a time in WoW, there was a stubborn guy who was abandoned by all his friends on a brand new server. Instead of despairing and following them, this super stubborn fella decided to create a guild and show all his supposed friends that they were wrong for leaving him behind. From this stubbornness something was created that has continued to thrive to this day: the Avengers of Azeroth guild. I’m sure that some of you read that last sentence and probably thought to yourselves “wait all this over some dumb video game guild?” To those people I respond with: YES NOW SHUT UP AND LET ME CONTINUE!

Why am I rambling about my guild yet again? Well because it's the bee's knees duh! Also because we have officially turned 7 years old today July 24th. Our server was opened on July 23, 2005 and my guild came into existence the next day. We would have started that first day but I wasn't able to get enough people to sign my charter until the next day. As it stands now, my guild is the oldest active guild on the server. There is only one older guild on the server but they are not really active and so my guild > theirs.

To celebrate we are going to be holding one of our super awesome traditional events: a Gnomish Death Race! This year its going to be an Outland style race, from Shattrath to Honor Hold. The race will start at 5pm Central Standard Time and will probably go for about an hour or so. We will provide a Ventrilo server for all the racers to join us before the race to facilitate invites and such.

Sounds amazingly awesome right? Want to attend the race? Well all you have to do is roll a level 1 gnome on the Ursin-PvP server and send a whisper to Jedem or anyone online in Avengers of Azeroth. The race is always a fun time and some people go all out with their racers by sending themselves vanity pets and fashionable white gear. No heirlooms are allowed in the race as they provide an unfair advantage since not everyone has easy access to them.

For anyone who can't make the race but would like to watch it, I will be streaming it live: http://www.livestream.com/jedsstream

Its a race...of DEATH! I hope to see you all at the race!

Twanking with a Tink

Or what to do after going from level 1 to max level in 3 days, only it's not a paid account, it's a trial account, and there are many restrictions and so, many considerations.


While I'm on my honeymoon, you my lovely readers get to enjoy the following guest post with the ridiculously long post title by my blogging buddy Revoemag. - Jed

Ok, first thing’s first.  My name is Revoemag, or as most call me, Rev.  While Jed is away, he was kind enough to ask me to write a guest post in his corner. (on his corner?) Anyway, I’ve been an off and on WoW player for a few years. Right now, I’m really an off WoW player.  My main account has been down for nearly a year now. A month or two ago, I was craving to play again and happened to read that trial accounts were free to play up to level 20 indefinitely, or until blizz changes that.  I thought, why not, and created a rogue, a class I was familiar with.  I had known Jed for a while, hanging out in the Blog Azeroth chatroom, and decided I would roll my lowbie on the Ursin server, where Jed and his Avengers were located.  I had also never really played on Alliance side and so I made a frightening little gnome named Plazlo. (as a side note, I’m not really convinced gnomes can be non-frightening despite what Jed might claim) Plaz was a fun little experiment and if you’d like more information on him, you can find it here on my regular/irregular blog.
Now then, this post is not about my scary pedo-looking gnome who Stop and Jed think is better-suited to driving a white van and offering candy to children.  No, this post is about the second and third trial toons that I rolled, Revwyn and Revys.  Rev and.... well.... Rev are both Pallies, one Horde and one Alliance, Revys the prior, Revwyn the latter.  After rogue-ing for a while on my last toon, I was really wanting to learn to tank, and the trial account was a good opportunity to do this.  I also thought it might be fun to play each Rev and compare each faction, so here we are. Anyway, part way through the process Revwyn has become the main toon that I’ve been playing, possibly because she progressed quite a bit faster than Revys.

Plazlo and his big white van, er...ram

Revwyn made it to level 20 probably in about 3 days of playing her.  Really, if one so desired, a new toon could be taken to level 20 in probably 1 day.  She started running dungeons at level 15 and getting into some battlegrounds, some meaning Arathi Basin or Warsong Gulch, the two that are available at by level 20.  After she was maxed out level-wise, I thought I would gear her up, and twink her out as I had done with Plaz.  I really didn’t know what to make of twinks at that point.  I had heard of people paying gold to turn off xp-gain and maxing out their toon at a lower level, or making a twink.  Many people choose to do this at level 19 which puts them at the top of the 15-19, formerly 10-19, battleground bracket.  19 is very common, though there are other common twink levels.  For a trial account, you can turn your xp off any time, just like a regular account, though it does cost 10 gold I believe. You could roll a 19 twink; however, if you are going to do Battlegrounds, you will be placed in the xp off bracket with paid account 19 twinks, which have a huge advantage that I will speak of later.  What most trial twinks seem to do though, is go ahead and let their level cap out at 20.  This puts them in the 20-24 Battleground xp off bracket.  In theory, people could roll a 24 paid account twink and roflstomp level 20 trial account twinks.  In my limited time in Battlegrounds at this point, I’ve seen very few 24s.  By and large, I saw mainly level 20s, and I’m guessing by what I saw and what would make sense, that they were all trial accounts.  Anyway, I thought I would make a sort of trial twink at level 20 out of Revwyn and as I searched around the web, there is a whole community of people doing this.  I found guides and forums dedicated to trial twinking, so apparently I was far from alone.

People twink characters for various reasons, some for battleground competition, some for battleground pwnage (booooo), some for running dungeons, and other reasons.  I suppose I did this for various reasons.  I wanted to spend some time getting familiar with tanking and it worked very well for this.  At level 20, you can queue up for 6 dungeons, RFC, VC, SFK, WC, BFD, and Stocks.  WC and SFK are the fairly level appropriate options at level 20 and once you are geared pretty well, as a tank BFD and Stocks work just fine.  Bosses in the latter two are 5 levels higher than you, but as a tank if you have at least a mediocre amount of hit, have a good health pool, and generate decent threat, they are fine.  If you queue for a random, really you’re going to get put into WC or SFK.  It’s never put me in any of the others once I hit level 20.  I can’t tell you how many time I’ve run those two, but it’s been too many.  You might ask why would you run these over and over, and the main answer to this is rep.  Once I discovered that the Ambassador title/achievement (gaining exalted reputation with the 6 home cities of your faction) was possible, it’s been Donkey Kong on running dungeons.  

Really I think the most efficient way of gaining rep is probably doing the starting zone quests until you reach Honored with each city (city A will gain spillover reputation while you are gaining rep for City B until city A reaches Honored) and then throwing on a particular city’s tabard to gain rep for that city while killing things in dungeons.  Doing the quests in Dun Morogh is particularly rewarding as you get 250 rep for Gnomerregan and Ironforge each for each standard quest and then spillover rep for the other cities.  Once at Honored with the cities, then running 5s is a pretty speedy way of gaining rep.  SFK rewards a little under 3000 rep per run and takes a little less than a half an hour with a decent group.  WC yields a little over 3000 rep per run and takes a little more than a half an hour with a decent group.  Really good groups move a bit quicker. This works well so you don’t feel like getting put in one dungeon gimps your gain by a significant amount.  At least I didn’t feel that way, plus I think I’d go nuts only running WC or SFK.  The variety helps.  The longest stretch of running these dungeons is of course between Revered and Exalted.  It takes about 8 runs to get from one to the other.  As it stands now, Revwyn is exalted with 5 of the 6 cities, with Gilneas being the last city, currently at Honored for her. The downside is that she now hates SFK and WC.

Revwyn

Another bonus of gaining rep as a trial twink is for the bags.  Once you hit Revered rep with a city, you can then buy that city’s 16 slot bag from their quartermaster.  This is a very good idea, as bag space for your character and the bank become necessary.  Why is bag space necessary as a trial twink? The answer is simple, professions and only 3 bag slots in the bank.  Technically, you have the ability for the normal amount of bag slots in the bank, but your gold is capped at 10, so once you need to pay 25g for your fourth bank bag slot, you’re done.  Now, back to professions.  In twinking your little butt-kicker, you are going to eventually (most-likely) want to have some nice buffs for your toon.  These buffs include things like Tasty Lion Steak, Heavy Crocolisk Stew, Course Weightstones, various pots, maybe little stone statues, etc.  Keep in mind, with trial accounts, you cannot trade with other players, use the AH, or receive mail, so anything you want that comes from a profession, you have to make.  

You will change your career path often, so having plenty of room to store various mats, enchants, and buffs is a good idea. Along with this, in choosing a profession, it is good to plan ahead.  Take that statement as far as you can go.  For maximum efficiency, think of what professions you will want to end with.  Mining, Skinning, and Herbalism have very nice benefits in Toughness, Master of Anatomy, and Lifeblood.  This all depends again on what you want to do.  Are you a tank wanting to pull multiple bosses at once in WC, (say for instance someone, somehow “accidentally” pulls Kresh the non-aggressive turtle mini-boss in WC and brings her up to your Lady Anacondra fight. Don’t ask, it hurts too much.)(or say in BFD you want to survive if someone lights all four candles to open the door to Aku’mai)(or when someone pulls Gelihast before clearing any of his room in BFD), are you wanting to pump out big numbers as dps, (OH! or someone pulls Baron Silverlaine and his entire room in SFK), are you wanting to carry the flag in Warsong Gulch? (Did I mention someone, somehow pulled Kresh from the stream in the middle of the instance up to Lady Anacondra?) All of these things factor in to where you want to end up with professions.  On a trial account, all profs are capped at 100, though as it stands, you can take secondary profs above 100 even though it says you have reached the cap.  

Another thing to consider, is racial bonuses to profs.  For instance, blood elves get a 10 skill point bonus to enchanting.  This allows you to get at least a couple more enchants.  For a tank, it would give you an extra stamina enchant to your shield, which Revys is currently flexing.  In Revwyn’s case, she gets a 10 skill point bonus to jewelcrafting, which is good because she likes shiny things and little stone men. *shrugs*  It would allow her some additional shinies and Heavy Stone Statues, which would come in handy for self heals.

Revwyn learning about shinies

There are some key things that most trial twinks, and full account twinks shoot for.  The Lucky Fishing Hat, the Arena Grand Master trinket, and PVP BoA gear.   Most are comfortable enough to state that the LFH is hands down the best headslot item for any twink at low levels.  It’s a little trickier for Alliance though.  The hat has +15 stamina and 84 armor, which in regards to health, makes it the best head slot item over anything.  The nearest Alliance piece is the Rifle Commander’s Eyepatch which has +11 stamina, +8 hit, +8 agility and 110 armor. Most would take the LFH over the RCE, but as with most gearing decisions of twinks, it’s situational. The RCE is a really great piece for a set of +hit gear for times when you’re taking on higher level mobs. Anyway, to get the LFH, one needs to fish up Keefer’s Angelfish, a rare fish, during the Sunday fishing derby.  Revys has tried this once and failed and I’ve yet to have Revwyn try it since she has the eyepatch.  She’ll get there though.  

Now the Arena Grand master trinket is considered by most to be the all around best trinket to get as a lowbie twinkleton.  It has +12 stamina and upon use gives you a bubble which absorbs 1000 damage over 20 seconds. First of all, 1000 damage is huge at level 20 for any purpose.  It’s a fantastic emergency button for any role and either PVP or PVE.  The health bonus alone is also very hefty.  Now for the crappy part.  To get one of these, you need to turn in 12 Arena Master trinkets to Short John Mithril in the Gurubashi Arena.  The Arena Master trinkets are looted from the chest that Short John leaves in the center of the Gurubashi Arena every 3 hours at 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 server time.  Looting the chest takes 8 seconds (I think) and the arena is a free-for-all PVP area.  This can and does suck depending on your server.  Sometimes multiple level 85s show up as getting the AGM is an achievement.  Sometimes other twinks show up.  Sometimes nobody shows up (\o/).  Ursin was very kind to Revwyn as she was able to get 2 Arena Grand Master trinkets in less than 2 weeks.  I would check most mornings before work, most evening slots, and day slots when possible.  She also hit up a couple of the 2:00AM slots. (my actual time is 2 hours ahead of server time)  Most of the time on Ursin, nobody would show up.  So, for any of you thinking of starting a twink either paid or free to play, Ursin is a great place to get going and you could always server transfer later.  PVP BoA gear is really something that I’m not all that familiar with yet, but if you’re on a server where competition for the Arena Grand Master trinket is fierce, then you might want to shoot for getting these first for the stat help, including resilience.

Currently, Revwyn is at a good point of relaxation.  She’s got pretty good pieces in every slot, at least for most situations.  Since her activities are varied, she’s got a few different gear sets she’ll go between.  It depends if she’s carrying a flag, tanking big pulls, taking on high level mobs, it just depends.  That’s one I wish I would have been better at, gear selection.  There were many times where quest rewards wouldn’t really give me a decent mail item with appropriate stats for say tanking.  In retrospect though, there were several times I just randomly picked a quest reward when nothing notable was there and later learned I could’ve picked up say a leather piece with huge stamina.  Now ideally, Revwyn wouldn’t ever wear something like that, but being a twink isn’t always ideal for what gear is available and so wardrobe issues are common.  There might be situations where I would forsake the armor and strength loss and really need to push stamina.  

So, if I started a new twinker, I’d try to be better at thinking about situational circumstances.  Another thing I might try to do is to plan my race better.  The racial abilities that certain races have can really make a difference with your gameplay and gearing.  The big one that comes to mind is the human racial Every Man for Himself. With that, humans can forsake the Insignia of the Alliance and pretty much equip 2 Arena Grand Master trinkets all the time.  With Revwyn, she has a nice HoT racial, but for PvP, she has to equip the Insignia.  Though, once she uses her Insignia, she can then quickly equip her second AGM and have the extra 120 health.  For dungeons at her level though, she just runs with 2 AGMs all the time.  She can still get locked up, but as a pally, she’s got enough ranged abilities that I’ve never had it be a problem.

Well, that’s the long of it.  Is playing on a trial account as fun as a normal paying account? No. Is it fun? Sure.  It really works well for filling in the gaps when you really don’t feel like you’re going to play enough to pay for an account.  Also, it’s free and for free, it’s pretty fun.  The nice thing is, if I feel like not playing for a few weeks, I don’t even have to think about the money side.  It will be there waiting when I do feel like playing.  It wouldn’t be for everybody though, I understand.  Also, when comparing trial twinks to normal twinks at the same level range, normal paying account twinks statwise kick the crap out of trial twinks every time.  With BoA gear and much heftier enchants, paid twinks hit harder and are much healthier.  

Anyway, for the immediate future Revwyn will be running 5s with her Gilneas tabard, fishing for Keefer’s Angelfish on Sundays, queue-ing up for some BGs (not Bee Gees, though Jive Talkin is pretty sweet), enjoying holidays, and finishing up some gear.  Not looking forward to farming for the Diamond Hammer as a world drop or the Foreman’s Leggings from Foreman Thistlenettle.  BTW, Revwyn’s killed that bastard a terrible amount of times, and he will not drop his pants.  One nice thing about horde, they have pretty good pants. (in the form of Kalecgos Pants from a quest chain) The next long term project for her could be getting enough honor points to buy some PvP BoA gear, but I haven’t decided if I wanna take the time.  This was not intended to be a guide, but I know it got a little preachy.  Anyhow, It’s what I’ve been doin.  For more information on twinking and trial twinking, just snoop around on the web.  I particularly like Cynwise’s Green Tinted Goggles, Psynister’s Notebook, and Twinkinfo.com.  Any thoughts or suggestions, just send ‘em my way.  Oh, and if anyone has a lowbie they’re leveling or otherwise and need a twank to run them through some of these instances, feel free to give me a shout.

Guest Post: Life on the Other Side

While I am off getting married and enjoying my honeymoon, I have decided to treat you my loving readers to a few guest posts written by some very nice people that I totally suckered were nice enough to write a post for me.

Today's post was written by Stop of several blogs across the interwebs. So without further ado...




Life on the Other Side

First off, I blame Jed for everything.

Ever since quitting World of Warcraft back in March, I’ve never really gone MMO-less for any period of time. I went from WoW to Rift, then rode the Rift wave until I died of endgame boredom and/or got into the SWTOR beta, then played that gleefully until it went down for a week or so to do a new release and I decided to cut back on my beta-ing - enough to get a good test experience and data for Bioware, but not enough to burn myself out on the game before the game even comes out. So that left an MMO-shaped hole in my life.

Around this time, 4.3 news started leaking out. I can safely say that I feel that for 4.1 and 4.2, Blizzard pretty much phoned it in, but 4.3? 4.3 looks, well, at least better. The new instances aren’t rehashes (although Murozond, really?). The new tier gear looks like some work was actually put into it rather than “take armor, add fire, lather, rinse, repeat.” But the one feature that started to rekindle my interest in the game was Transmogrification, especially time spent in Blog Azeroth Chat with Ratshag trading costuming ideas and coming up with the most horrifying plate costume ever for a Death Knight, to commemorate BC-era clown suits, and that’s when the urge hit to resubscribe, which I accidentally mentioned to Jed.

I’m not sure if it comes across to his usual readers, but Jed is a very persistent person. Once I had mentioned even briefly considering resubscribing, neither rain, nor sleet, not worries about playing on a PvP server would stop him from getting me into his guild, and so, one server transfer later, I found my death knight leveling on Ursin, a member of the Avengers of Azeroth, and me getting used to two big changes:

1. Playing on a PvP server, and
2. Playing an Alliance character.

It’s actually been less of an adjustment than I expected but there are a few big adjustments for a mostly-lifelong Horde PvE-server player.

• I still don’t like Stormwind. I’m not sure I ever will. Say what you will about Orgrimmar’s aesthetic (Neo-Brutalist architecture), but they at least had the sense to put every facility in every part of the city outside of the goblin slums. Stormwind, to the best of my knowledge, has two auction houses, neither of which is terribly easy to find from the air. On the other hand, at least Stormwind color-coded their roofs to make it easier to get around. But seriously - give me Ironforge anyday. I think I might be a dwarf at heart.
• The Alliance NPCs are starting to get more likable. I came up in an era when Thrall was everything the Horde should someday aspire to be - wise, brave, and willing to talk instead of throw down - and our opposition was Varian “The Chin” Wrynn, his weepy sidekick Jaina, and a bunch of pissed-off dwarves who’d stop a father from retrieving his own son’s corpse. Nowadays, with Garrosh leading the Horde to its own inevitable self-destruction via infighting, the complete disappearance of one faction leader, and Sylvanas making deals with devils of all sorts, suddenly The Chin doesn’t seem like such a bad guy, and I definitely have grown to like Anduin and Moira (especially after reading The Shattering - this is my first time interacting with them after reading the book).
• Having to take the credo “if it’s red, it’s dead” seriously. Now, I’m not exactly flying around ganking lowbies or anything. But I have had to get used to the fact that if I see a Horde character in a contested zone, they’re considered hostile to me and I’m considered hostile to them. This is new to me - I kept my flag off at all times on all my old servers, and on Rift I even toggled on the option that disallowed me to accidentally flag myself. But the net change? I’m just a little more wary of that troll druid across the way - I don’t ignore him like I used to, but I don’t go out of my way to smash him into the ground.

There are other changes, of course - accidentally flying into the wrong tent or part of the city when in Northrend areas, for instance - but I’m slowly discovering the side of the game that I never really got around to before.

Well, discovering it until December 20th, anyway.