Casual Raid Leader

So I was sitting there this past weekend on Friday or Saturday figuring I’d play a little WoW.  Most people I think kind of skim past the launcher screen, but I thought I’d stop and read it.  My PC isn’t the fastest thing in the world, but hey… it is what it is.  Until my wife wins the lottery, I’m pretty well stuck with what I have. 

So I was sitting there reading and saw that Blizzard had $5 copies of the base game for the weekend…  Ruh Roh Raggy…. um… Well see I’m an altoholic.  And I was just bitching about how I didn’t have enough support structure right?  Well…. see… I kind of made the mistake of mentioning it in Guild chat that I was thinking of picking up a copy and testing out dual boxing as a nice easy way to level some alts quickly to level 60.

Lets face it… I’m bored.  Moving to a new guild came at a price.  The price was…well… everything is on farm.  So our raiding takes 1.5 hours.  Done.. out for the week.  Ulduar is off the table.  And we’re working on TOGC, but only one day a week.  So ok… fine… our raiding take 4 hours a week, but we haven’t been very consistent on TOGC.  Plus I have this desire to get at least ONE support character to a position where they can help my main. 

Little did I know the wave I’d start….

The Good Natured Ribbing

I deserve it.  The first thing mentioned to me by my friends in the guild was…. “Hey dofus… you know… you just transfered servers and your wife hasn’t transfered any.  You know you should really help HER speed level.”

Oh yeah…. Now money doesn’t grow on trees in my house and if yours is anything like mine during the holidays, you’re probably tighter than normal.  I mean you’ve got hundreds of dollars to spend on Christmas (or insert your favorite end of year celebration here…)  So finding a spare $55 to faction and server transfer isn’t exactly easy.  Plus my wife said it to me this way…. “My mage I leveled on Alliance will always be a human mage… she’s happy that way”.

Ok… well then.  That settles that.  My wife WON’T be transfering any characters.  So her highest is currently a whopping 23.  She doesn’t play anywhere near as much as I do.  So our thought was… lets leverage the Refer a Friend (RAF) program to help speed level her character.  At the end of the day, we can easily level her multiple characters to 60 and give her options to choose from.  Hell… I can’t believe how fast it goes.  We only play for like 1.5 hours and we’ve cranked out like 3-5 levels in  session.  While the triple XP on killing mobs is nice (its really only like 1.5 since you still divide it by two), the quest xp gets OBSCENE.  When you’re level 16 and get 3500 XP for turning in ONE quest… um yeah.

Altoholism Gone Rampant

See I blame myself.  It started with me.  I was buying one copy of the game for me to use.  That turned into one copy for me (which I’m delaying using for a while) and one for my wife.  I’m an altoholic and I really like having a solid support structure.  However… that being said, I started a wave. 

The GM of the guild bought a copy to help his fiance level her last couple of characters with the thought that he could use the spare account for his son when he got old enough to play.  Poof!!! Multiple higher level characters as well as slots for lower level ones.  One or two other people started doing the same.  They bought the $5 copy of the game and started helping friends level or dual boxing.  I mean for $5, who can pass that up?

The Pain of RAF

My GM and his Fiance had the chance to play A LOT on Saturday and Sunday and by the time I looked up, they were already up to something like 44 or 45 before they stopped on Sunday.  Bear in mind, that they would have been considerably higher, but Blizzard has this bulk processing thing.  They don’t completely upgrade your “Trial” account to a full account until after they can verify all the payment information.  I know it occurs as some sort of batch process. 

My GM and I spent like a day and a half playing without the ability to:

1. Trade with anyone
2. Mail ourselves anything

Now that may not sound like such a big deal, but for anyone who played vanilla wow, how big of a problem was it to find bags?  How much of a pain was it when you were trying to level and you didn’t have any cash?

Now multiply that by the fact that you are getting 3x xp.  You aren’t killing nearly as many mobs.  You aren’t doing as many quests.  So you aren’t selling useless greens.  You aren’t getting nearly as many greens as you need to equip yourself.  By level 14, I had 12 unbought abilities.  I had 21 copper on my character sheet.  And ONE 16 slot bag (your initial backpack). 

It took me about 40 steps outside of any town before my bags were completely full.  So my wife was picking up all of the stuff (I’d shipped her my 16 slot bags and my cash.)  So she was selling any greens.  She was selling the greys and whites.  I was saving every bag slot for just quest items.

My GM was level 38 before he bought riding skill.  He was just grateful he picked a shaman to play as they have the ability to use a travel form.

RAF Gotcha Learning Points

1. Make sure you’re standing within 100 yards when killing mobs.  This generally won’t be very hard to do.  You’ll be killing stuff in the same area. 
2. If one of you is impatient, make sure your partner is standing with you before you turn in a quest. 

I made the mistake on number two a couple of times.  I hadn’t realized my wife had gone off to train or to do something else.  We all get into our own little patterns while playing.  She went left… I went right.  I turned in my quest and went… oops… No triple XP for me.  Doh!!!  Wasn’t a huge deal, but still… a little annoying.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 10:33 am and is filed under Altoholism, WotLK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.