How I Raise and Nurture an Alt.

I am not an altoholic. I don't have a stable of toons providing me all my professions. Personally raising another to max level is a dreadful task and one to be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately with the veteran bonus in the new instant-90, I have seriously started leveling a druid alt.

With my leveling anxiety, I am taking advantage of every single shortcut possible. From using heirloom gear so that I can max out my possible XP bonuses and jumping into my guild to get their favor, to making sure I always park in an Inn or major city to get my rested bonus.

Twink it up: I have equipped every piece of heirloom gear that I can locate:
Once I get more Justice points, I'd still like to get the:
  1. Shoulders or the upgraded model
  2. DPS Main hand or the upgraded model
Also, (just found) that I need to run to my Guild vendor in Orgrimmar and pick up these pants! I have the 1750 gold!

With all these items equipped, that's a 45% XP bonus! Every 100 XP is now giving 145 XP!  To reach level 60, that means about 1.7 million XP (using estimated 3.9 million for 0-60 leveling) I didn't earn through killing monsters or turning in quests.. Now add (2X) rested bonus, and as soon as possible Elk's existing level 25 guild for that xp bonus as well. 

Since professions also provide XP, I'll be picking up leatherworking and skinning. Kill a beast, skin it, make a new pair of boots.  

One note, I hadn't realized, but you can enchant heirloom gear with high level enchants and they level down... 
In Patch 5.4, all enchants and profession perks can be applied to items of every level. Previously, only low-level enchants were able to be applied to heirloom items and there was a pretty selective list of what you'd want to put on your gear. With the current system, you can put a Mists of Pandaria enchant on your starter gear. It will have a weak effect that will scale up as you level.
So, I can have my priest enchant some vellums and ship them over for the heirloom gear! Here's the enchants WowPopular suggests for a Feral Druid:
Build it up! Find a source that I like, and start following their talent tree build. At 15, I'll have the run speed increase immediately available. At 30, I'll have a group heals, so when running dungeons, I won't need the healer as much, maybe switch the tanking? Tanking queue = faster queue times!

Fire it up! At 10, I'll pick up the DPS specialization, allowing me to through mow through the quests a lot faster. At 15, I'll add a random dungeon or two into the mix in order to level even quicker. While leveling my priest, I found healing dungeons much more fun than trying to dps (in a healing spec) on the quests. In addition, I could gain about a level with each dungeon that I ran.

Run with it! To date, I've played for about 4 hours. Levels 0-5 where completed with no heirloom gear (10 minutes to level 3). Levels 5-15 with the 6 items listed above (+25% xp). I still need about 400 JP in order to get the heirloom shoulders. As I typed this up, I've been chatting with a guild leader and hope to have a guild invite when I logon tonight. All this planning just to NOT level professions (and maybe learn the class before trying to run LFR!!).

For more posts related to my raising this alt, click on the label "Druid".

/PLAYED
Level: Cumulative Time Played
  • 0-3: 15 minutes - Wow that was FAST! Have three spells before I fight mini-boss in starting area.
  • 3-10: 140 minutes (picked up 3 +xp heirloom items) - mailboxes all over troll starting area.
  • 10-15: 240 minutes
  • 15-17: 300 minutes - (picked up 2 more +xp heirloom items) - included last bosses of Deadmines. Spent time leveling skinning to 30 in area right around Orgrimmar.
  • 18-21: 450 minutes - 2 more dungeons. Quests in Azshara are not relevant, need to find another area. Also quickly out pacing my non-heirloom gear. Still have level 12 bracers on. Mow through Wailing Caverns, tanked most of it as kitty. (Official tank was level 17 monk).
  • 22-23: 525 minutes - one more dungeon, had to jump to Ashenvale to get into level appropriate questing. Have installed Carbonite in order to help organize quests. Decided that I can't keep up profession as already too high for skinning (need to go back to Azshara?) and can't get enough mats for leather working. Reorganized my attack bar to match this..
  • 24-26 : 625 minutes - Tanked Blackfathom Deeps. 2 levels! Considering so many people running heirloom gear, there were 2 other people who could have tanked this one, a warrior and a paladin. In fact, the pally kept pulling. Disabled Carbonite, I thought it would suggest quests, except for listing where the quest givers are, IMHO the in game quest guides are plenty. Passing level 25 means that I can now equip a glyph in one of my slots. Really tempted NOT to get "Glyph of the Stag". Which secretly allows you to equip a Daddle. Nope, not interested. 
  • 27-32: 870 minutes - spent about 15 minutes and respec'd as full fledged druid Tank, (ie Guardian). LOTS of Gnomeregan (6 Thermaplugg kills to-date). In 2 consecutive runs, I went from level 29-31 due to cleaning out a lot of trash. It was fun, the hunter kept jumping down between levels and their pet would aggro the entire ledge; causing 3 out 5 deaths (same hunter and me survived). For 60g I picked up the Mages Deck of the AH. This summons a Darkmoon agent to your current location. You turn in the deck for one of two necklaces (int or agility). The necklace alone was selling for close to 200g. Was able to pickup one Scarlet Halls run in the middle of all that. Hope to start progressing to the 30-35 dungeons!. Scarlet Halls, Scarlet Monastery, Razorfen Kraul. Hmm, looking at the dungeon list, I missed Stockades and Ragefire Chasm completely. Need to start looking at GEAR! Of my non-heirloom items, I have hands, wrist, belt, & boots are getting to be my oldest. For 45 honor, I can pickup some decent PVP boots. RFK has some gloves. Another 45 honor for a pvp belt. Finally SH has a decent wrist
  • 33-36: 972 minutes - 2 SM, 2 RFK, no drops. Still have ilevel 21 boots and 25 belt and 26 wrist equipped. Considering twink gear on AH, but it's all green. bleh. Queue times for one of the three battlegrounds are 30-45 minutes! By the time I could get into a BG, I've ran three dungeons and gained another level. 
  • 37-40:  1140 minutes - Ran 3 Maraudon dungeons - two kills of Princess finally got some decent (i39 boots). Then dropped in as DPS into Warsong Gulch. Fun. Ended up being a full 20 minute sessions, but 0:2 with Alliance winning. I think their flag carrier was just hanging out, because we weren't returning it. Probably should have hunted him down. Now have about 80 honor points that I could spend on the belt. Have to really decide if run from Undercity to Arathi Highlands is worth upgrading my green (AH purchased) belt. At 39, I ran Dire Maul (part 1?). It's another one of those complicated dungeons that you hate dying in because it's 5 minutes to run back... :( Ran dungeon twice, went through 1.5 levels before crashing for night.
  • (not) Actual Uldaman Map shown
    41-43: 1300 minutes - Now up to 21+ hours played on this druid. Ran 2 more dungeons last night, Scholomance and Uldaman. Scholo is odd to play at 40 because it's identical to the heroic edition; can't get lost in here. Uldaman is both fun and an amazingly messy dungeon. It's like running through the tunnels in an ant farm. First time running this week and forgot about the DMF bonus, until after almost done with Uldaman and I see someone grabbing grisly trophies. At 1AM, I ran her to Thunder Bluff and parked her at the bottom of the elevators (as soon as I saw rested).
  • 44-47: 1578 minutes. I've now played this druid for a full 24 hours. While in a run of Dire Maul, I had the healer check and see that I was running with the healer staff, instead of an agility weapon. That got me thinking about my hunter. For a short time, she was running with a dps weapon (not a bow). Yeah, I spent honor on a dagger for my hunter. Checking my bags, I found it in my priest's bank. A quick toon hop over to Elk, and I traded it in for the slightly better Panda edition. Looking at the two now (old vs new), not sure this is really an upgrade. Gain 6 agility, but lose 60-80 melee damage. Wowhead gives the dagger a score of 2.1, and the staff a score of 2.6. I guess if you combine that with my AH purchased offhand, it's a bonus? DMF bonus doesn't appear to have helped that much. Average level time bumped to 33 minutes per level between 43 and 47. At 45, I picked the Faerie Swarm talent.
  • 48-50: 1672 minutes (or 27 hrs, 52 min) - Zul'Farak 3 times to get just to 50 (at last boss).
  • 51-53: 1800 minutes - Spent about 30 minutes with Elkagorasa and completed the last quest to get
    Champion of Horde status and picked up the DPS mace. Sadly it wasn't the 2-handed mace as it would have required 20 more champion seals, or another 2 days grinding dailies. Getting into the 'end game' Vanilla dungeons. BRD with it's 42 bosses is yet another of the complex, easy to get lost in dungeons. Time to level has basically leveled out, staying under 35 minutes each. I am curious what will happen in 4 levels when the first BC dungeon will drop into the mix. Will my heirloom gear be OP there as well? 
  • 54-57: 2002 minutes - fairly certain I typed something up here, but Blogger appears to have lost the content. :(
  • 58: 2100 minutes - see blog post on adventure. 
  • 59 - 61:  2260 minutes or 37 hrs, 40 minutes. One more run through LBRS, then finally got one run through UBRS to finalize quests from inside that dungeon. Lost our healer again, but happily we picked up a druid healer before we got to the first boss. After UBRS, our group re-queued and we started hitting Hellfire Ramparts. At ~1000xp per kill, and a healer who said "group more each kill". So I'd skip one group, and grab the second, so 8-10 mobs per group. At 60, picked up Soul of the Forest, so extra Rage generation. Got some practice playing with my 2 keybinds (button 4 - Charge, button 5 to a mouse over Faerie Swarm.). Click on one target, mouse over and B5, click B4 to charge. I was able to successfully pull off a mid-fight Rebirth, but probably because such a good healer keeping me alive. 
NOW WHAT? Pick professions and boost!! 

Comments

  1. And remember about Darkmoon Fair 10% boost to XP ;)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. oh yeah! I haven't forgot that one after the rep grind last month! Whee! 2 more weeks then what's that? 150% xp rate!?

      Delete

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