Summer Doldrums

Not posting as much as... well, as ever. It's hot out, man. Between work, family, and just general life, there's not a whole lot of energy left at the end of the day. Given a limited amount of energy, and a choice between playing WoW, and writing about WoW, which one do you think wins out?

Ah-yep.

Tal hit 60 last night in Hellfire Peninsula. After buying expert riding, his flying mount, and paying for his old-world pilot's license, he was still sitting pretty with 2000 gold in the bank.

Not bad at all!

A friend from work who's a new player asked me how I leveled so fast... I told 'em "If it moves, kill it. When it stops moving, loot it." Well, that, and quests. Quests are definitely key.

Word of advice to any new WoW players, or someone starting anew on a new realm: take two gathering professions, and learn to use the auction house. Between what you farm up while leveling, and the cloth and other items you accumulate, you're sitting on a gold mine. Using the AH lets you have the cash flow you need to keep you funded for the glyphs, enchants, potions, training, and all the other cash sinks you're going to encounter as you level.

I use Auctionator to make buying and selling easier. On the buying side, it makes it easy to identify good deals - excellent for leveling a profession, when you want to find the cheapest stack of ore or herbs without having to wade through all the regular AH listings. On the selling side, I generally set my undercut to about 10%, and just post things for whatever Auctionator says, so long as it looks reasonable. I'd rather sell quickly and make a profit than have to take time away from leveling to manage my auctions.

Over at Kirin Tor, I've been using Auctionator to slowly buy up briarthorn and other herbs that Aretae can use to make Rogues Decks for Aetherna. When Tal hits 80 or so, I'll start using it to buy up stocks of low-level herbs so he can drop mining and start leveling alchemy. On Laenson, my Ironforge bank alt, Auctionator lets him easily manage the sale of stacks of "meh, can't use it, sell it" items that all the rest of my KT toons generate.

TL;DR - learn to use the AH, and get Auctionator, 'cause that add-on makes it easy.

In other news, Aeth is slowly working her way through the Firelands dailies. A couple more days, and she should have her 150 marks of the world tree, which will let her unlock the next stage of dailies. Meanwhile Aretae is thinking that maybe, just maybe, traipsing through BRD to gather junk boxes might be more entertaining than picking yet another stack of whiptail in Uldum...