Boost - Glucosetastic

*Edit 01/03/09* – I’ve just completed up to the Hellfire Ramparts stage, and have updated this post with some new tips I’ve also updated the level ranges, and added in Stratholme.

It’s been some time since my original instance boosting  that resulted in my Priest, Warlock and Paladin getting to 60 the first time round. The Priest and Paladin happened to go on to be the first two characters I levelled to 80 as well.

I became fairly proficient in running three accounts at once and boosting the linked characters in instances, my original guide was fairly hazy, and had a couple of steps that aren’t really necessary.

Project: Alliance

It’s fairly irrelevant what faction you play on, my original guide did take into account the fact that Horde can hop into RFC at level 8, however anyone can get into Shadowfang Keep at level 10 anyway, and those two levels will take about 20 minutes by just running around doing the quests.

Things to remember

The 12.5 minute rule – This one kicks in both early on, and nearer the end. You can’t clear an instance in 5 minutes and reset it and go again, because after 25 minutes you’ll be stood around twiddling your thumbs. Likewise you don’t want to spend an hour in an instance, because you will have invariably wasted time on packs of mobs you don’t need to.

The experience gained from mobs curves – When you start out in an instance you will be significantly lower level than them, often skulls. The experience will curve upwards as your babies approach the level of the mobs, and the drop off when they surpass them. This works in your favour as a booster, because often the experience will curve roughly the same rate as the levels increase in length – making it fairly easy to work out how many more runs until you’ll be dinging.

Paladins or Death Knights – Use a plate wearing tank class with awesome AoE to boost if you want the maximum exp/hr. Warriors are fine to a point, as are Druids. Neither come close to a Paladin or DK however. Paladin does win here due to it’s rez ability.

On with the guide…

So you’ve got your accounts setup, and it’s time to head into the instances to boost some mad experience points. Your first mission will be to get one of those characters to Shadowfang Keep. I do not advise running both characters there at this level – just concentrate on getting one there alive and then use the Refer-a-Friend summoning feature to get the other character right along as well. This will save you time, as you will invariably die along the way.

Shadowfang Keep – 10 til 20

A Boosters Dream

The final level you switch from SFK to SM is up to you, but you can enter SM at level 20, so remember that if the experience points seem to be getting too lame for the effort.

You can pull SFK in 2 pulls, but remember that you need to do an instance in an average of 12.5 minutes in order to stay away from the reset timer restrictions. So if you don’t want to be standing around, you may as well chill a little and loot some mobs, might get some lucky blue drops to sell to the twinks.

You can kill most the instance while leaving the two characters being boosted by the metal grid at the front, the nice design in here makes it virtually perfect for boosting in this way.

Scarlet Monastery – 20 to 40

Scarlet Monastery

The idea here is to complete the Cathedral and Armoury as often as possible without hitting the 12.5 minute timer. You can pull the Cathedral in three pulls, and the Armoury in two. Feel free to spend a little bit of time looting after that, as the cloth will sell fairly well.

Armoury – Pull everything up to the first set of stairs inside that go up, right back to the entrance. Then run everyone through to the foot of those stairs, and pull everything through from Herods door back.

Cathedral – Pull everything in the lower courtyard back to just inside the door to it. Then pull everything from the upper courtyard to the foot of the stairs. Next just pull the final boss and everything inside the Cathedral will come too.

Once you have the timings down this will be an immense amount of experience, very very quickly.

Blackrock Depths – 40 to 50

Blackrock Depths

This is an interesting boosting location. Okay, I lied. This is where it gets boring. The levels are longer, the mobs take longer to kill, and you stick to the 12.5 minute rule.

The idea is to enter the instance, head straight ahead into the circular area, and kill as many mobs in that area as you physically can in 12 minutes. Hop outside, reset, and do it again. It’s not pretty. It is however, strangely efficient.

Stratholme – 50 to 55

Baron runs. You will be getting a level per run, so you’ll only need five, it’s worth killing everything on the dead side, but don’t bother looting.

Be extra careful to watch for gargoyles and those annoying shades that yell that the living are here, I had a couple of baby deaths due to these before being wary… Luckily the corpse run is fairly small anyway. If you’re near the end and don’t fancy a massive run, providing only one of the babies died, hop into the living portal and summon it across using the alive ones summon. Much quicker than running!

Hellfire Ramparts – 55 to 60

The home straight, congratulations on making it this far. You’ll need to get a mage to portal you, or a summon at level 55 as you can’t get through the Dark Portal, however it shouldn’t be hard to find one on even a remotely populated server these days.

Once you get there, I find it worthwhile to spend a little time here. Kill everything. You will invariably be grossly undergeared at this point, so you may as well try and get some green armour to get yourself going into Outlands.

Job Done

If you made it this far, it’s time to go and get all your characters training, level up some trade skills… Level your weapon skill if you are melee, and then finally head out into the big wide world.

Hopefully someone will find this remotely useful, it’s really the most efficient route I found of levelling using Refer-a-Friend.

Patchtastic

Ahhh, got you there. You thought I was going to blog about how awesome the 3.1 changes are, and how the PTR is up.

No. I refuse!

Everyone is blogging about it. WoW Insider even managed to spam their front page with stuff while I was eating my breakfast this morning. They even managed to pull someone out of bed to write about the Druid changes, because apparently 15 other new posts relating to a patch isn’t enough.

Previous patches…

Looking back to TBC for a brief moment. The release for the expansion was 16th January 2007, I can’t really remember the entirity of what was available, but I do recall both SSC and TK were accessible providing you had done the attunements.

Black Temple was not released until patch 2.1, which came along on the 22nd May 2007. A good 5 months to reach level 70, and progress through two tiers of raiding (not really…) – Black Temple was then the pinnacle of raiding for quite some time, allowing people to collect up all their shiny T6.

I’m not counting the Zul’Aman Patch in here, as it wasn’t really raid progression, more helping people plug the gaps in their gear before hitting up Black Temple.

After T6 was the Sunwell gear, which was 25th March 2008. Ten months after Black Temple got released.

Total shelf life of TBC for raiders: One year Six months, give or take.

In comparison…

Well, WotLK was released on 13th November 2008, and I’ve predicted a March 18th release for patch 3.1, so that’ll be about four months, and we’ll have access to the second tier of raiding in WotLK.

So what is there to come? Blizzard seem to have changed their patch methodology somewhat since TBC, which is fine. They went to release with less tiers of raid content, no objections from me.

My problem is, we have (probably) over 18 months left WotLK, and only one more “official” tier of raiding, and then maybe a token raid or two after that. I’m just not sure what other content they have to put into this patch, and having not gone digging for it, I can’t even take any wild gue…

Wild Guesses!

I can actually make some wild guesses. Now we have swimming mounts, I want to see Azshara. In all her tentacled freaky glory.

Going foward…

I hope Blizzard stick more to their short and sharp development program, trickle feeding people content is definately an improvement. I just hope they have enough up their sleeve to last until the next expansion without people getting bored. That or they need to announce their “next-gen” MMO!

Image borrowed from Penny Arcade, please don’t sue me.

Ulduar Concept

It’s fairly widely known now that patch 3.1 is on the PTRs. This patch finds itself being hyped up for a whole bunch of reasons.

Raiding might not be a joke anymore!

Raiding is easy at the moment. Naxxramas is pretty much a joke, anyone who thinks otherwise needs a big dose of l2p. The only challenges come in the form of the hard modes… Or should I say, hard mode, singular. Sartharion 3D is about the most challenging thing out there, and the 10 man version is being pugged on our realm, so it really doesn’t say a lot for that does it?

Ulduar is being promised as, and really, it has to be, the turn around for raiding. They gave us the warm and cosy introduction, entirely bastardising the most menacing raid zone in the history of the game, and now it’s time for them to turn that around and present us with some challenges.

You can have more than one spec!

The new multi-spec system should be a nice new introduction really. They’ve been trying to be open enough about how it will work, which is nice. Hopefully for the cost of a reagent we’ll be able to switch talent specs outside of comabt. Win!

Will this save the lack of healer/tank issues? I highly doubt it. Will it cause a nice bunch of drama in some guilds? Probably. Will the trainer cost of this make people emotastic? We’ll see soon enough.

Mounts can swim!

Okay, now your mount won’t have a freakin’ Gremlinesque spaz if you get it in water. About freakin’ time.

Nerf Death Knights

Not sure if that’s happening, but I know there are a whole lot of class changes incoming which will hopefully pull a few classes into line with others… There’s no real firm decisions just yet, and it’s too early to try and guess how they’ll actually end up when they go live.

Not that it really matters yet!

Having re-rolled, we’re not even back into Naxx yet, so I doubt we’ll be at a position to hop right into Ulduar when the patch comes out. Hopefully this will work to our advantage, we’ll have to take alts in our PUG spots, which means their mains should have done the content to death and will therefore know it as well as us.