Monday, January 26, 2015

Who Doesn't Love a Good Alchemist Army?

Since I gave up on Alchemy being worth a damn, well, most every profession for that matter...

Just kidding, everything is worth having.  Some moreso than others.  My breakdown across my characters right now:

Engineer - 2
Blacksmith -4
Tailor - 4
Leatherworking - 5
Enchanting - 11
Jewelcrafter - 6
Inscription - 2
Double-Gatherer - 1, yes a Tauren Druid

and....

Alchemy - 8

3 of them have been powerleveled since the 6.1 announcement, because cooldowns.  The logic being that if they aren't busy making bloods, they'll be busy transmuting elements, and at the very least crafting catalysts every single day.

Let's do the math here.

Alchemy is by far the easiest profession in the whole damned game to level, regardless of racial.
Alchemy produces 10 catalysts from the daily cooldown.
Alchemy produces 6 catalysts from workorders per day, double that with the follower.
Alchemy's powerleveling produces items that are readily purchased for full market value plus profit every single day of the week (on my server, if not on yours then I'm sorry for your loss).
Since Draenor's removal of the stupid flask procs, the profession is again profitable.
It's the only profession where you could stockpile 3000 of each item and not be considered stupid for doing so.

QED - Alchemy is one of the top professions in the game, again.  Back in Classic, this was THE profession to level because you were stacking every single elixir in raids.  It is nice to see since it's been basically screwed up since Tier 6 of The Burning Crusade.  By screwed, I mean it was only good for one thing.  Now it's essentially coming back to where all 3 disciplines of the profession are actually worth crafting again, just like the good ol' days where you made potions and flasks for raiding, and transmuted items on cooldown.

For those keeping up with the news, we have new transmutes in the works, and I'm happy for it.  Finally, the game is released in it's entirely, and not like some group project that didn't get finished on time.  Sorry Blizzard, but the game's professions felt unfinished.  I know, interns.


We haven't seen the cooldown on this (if there is one), and what makes me a little nervous about plunging head-long into this glorious change is so deep seeded and involves years of getting fucked over by our host.  Reason?  Well two.

1)  Dupers have been screwing this item up for weeks now and Blizzard has done jack and shit about it.  How hard is it to answer a report, then track what the character was doing, or follow the chain of ownership of the items and review the logs and close the loophole?  It must require elite skills to review these logs, better than anything the dipshits managing the show will throw money at.  I would guess they're too busy having meetings about upcoming fart and poop jokes in the next expansion.

How hard is it to spot them?  It must be extremely hard, because they usually sit in Org on level 1's for days spamming SB's in batches of 100.  Sure, I did some business with them because I'm forced to if I don't want my SB's to get screwed in value and these dupe events will usually screw the price of bloods for a week or more.  Raid quality armor crafting has always suffered when these guys make an appearance.

People don't think about this - their costs are zero.  You cannot compete with them.  They can ride the value of an item all the way to zero if they wish.  Of course they won't, but they'll contribute heavily because this is how they eat in whatever backwater country they live in.

And as always, if you don't believe in dupes, then fuck you and the Easter Bunny you rode in on.  Hacked accounts, bots, and overzealous farmers are bullshit lies, these are outright hackers subverting the game's code on throwaway and invisible accounts.   Try /who on a mass seller if you see one and see if they even show up, pretty soon you'll get the drift.

2) Alchemy will allow you to collect a maximum of 154 Cats per week without any rush orders (which are nothing more than another daily CD at max skill).  So someone like me will be making 1,232 per week.  Half of which will go to flasks, the other half probably ending up as bloods.  The cost to make each catalyst will still be attached to the value of Frostweed and Blackrock Ore, both of which will probably get a small bump from all of this.

So let's say everyone dusts off their alchemists or rerolls them after taking Blizzard's name in vain for making them do something other than alchemy (perish the thought), and you'll get thousands of players making catalysts every single day.  Having a rather extensive knowledge of flask crafting this expansion, there's going to be a flood.  It wouldn't surprise me to see flasks either take a huge hit from the glut of catalysts available or rise in value tremendously because the cooldown to make the bloods never goes live.  I'm guessing the latter, because everyone is either going to grow the shit out of frostweed in their gardens putting extreme pressure on the price of other herbs.  If people do not grow it, then they'll have to buy it, which means others will see that selling frostweed will be more profitable than selling catalysts (or waiting around for 50 cats to stack).

The price of bloods versus the price of catalysts is a huge concern of mine.  Part of me hopes the price collapses in these so the hacking gold farming dupers all need to kill themselves, but I know that market pressure will push it to something reasonable.  Neglecting the value of Crescent Oils:

700/50 = 14g
600/50 = 12g
500/50 = 10g
400/50 = 8g
300/50 = 6g
200/50 = 4g

You get the idea I hope.  This is the cost you have to beat to craft one Alchemical Catalyst at a profit given pricing of Savage Blood.  Currently 20 Frostweeds and 10 Blackrock Ore will net you 10 cats, meaning that the cost of Frostweed and Blackrock Ore MUST be proportional, or else people will be operating at a loss.  I know the AH audience is not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, but roll with me here.  If Frostweed today costs 2g per and BRO costs 75s per, then it's 47.5g per 10 Catalysts at 700 skill.  1 Catalyst would cost 4.75 gold to make, which means that there's a floor in this scenario of roughly 250g before AH fees.  Remember that there IS NO TRANSMUTE PROC, can't believe people still believe there are.

Now, how low can we go?  Well, I farmed it so it's free!  Farmers will not do this level of accounting, so as long as their crap is selling and they can make more free herbs and ore from level 3 gardens and mines that cost them over 5000g each to build, then it's all good, right!?  Everybody in the pool!  I'm putting on my stupid hat here to imagine what's going to happen, because this is what usually happens.  What I'm describing here is a total crash in the price of these, regardless of a cooldown.

If Scenario:Stupid comes to fruition, then I can almost guarantee that the next mass duped item will be Temporal Crystals, because those things are still competitive in price with Savage Bloods on my server and they require as many materials to craft weapon enchants which everyone needs.  Upgrading epics at this point is just a luxury, whereas enchanting your weapon with something besides a bleed is required reading if you're doing any sort of serious raiding.

Time will tell, I'm normally an optimist but with professions and the release of Attack of the Interns this expansion, I really have gotten good at playing it by ear.

This is Fun

I used to always post weekly results in my blog showing you my sales volume for the week.  This last week I did some massive spreadsheeting (not a word) and found that my profitability was actually an average of 48% on everything that I've been selling outside of armors, which still carry ROIs in the 1000+% range.  Additionally, I've discovered 2 new markets this last week, still not participating in inScrubption.  Below are my numbers from my primary posting account, my other account sells the armors so it doesn't show here, but they were only 80k.

As always, the top number is the total sales revenue for 7 days and the bottom is the daily from TSM.  If I had a goal to make a million gold per month, that would require 33,333g per day in profit.  If I'm sitting at 48%, just using ballpark numbers here, I'm at 38,196g per day profit.  Sure beats the shit out of dailies.


Having a blast, wish you were here!


Thanks for stopping in!


Thursday, January 15, 2015

The (Un)Fortunate Mechanics of Draenor Goldmaking

How to Make Gold in Draenor

The best part of being one of the best Warcraft goldmakers on the planet is you meet a lot of nice people who usually can call you out on your bullshit.  I hate "yes" people.  Ever been on a date (I know lots of you haven't but go with me here since you might learn something) where you spend the time talking with the person for an hour and you walk away not knowing a thing about them because they just agree with everything you tell them and they basically sit there and can't carry on a conversation?  Some of you would probably say this was the perfect person, I would say this was the last date.  One sided conversations in my world are horrible, when the other person isn't capable of talking on my level, or at least contributing to the conversation, I know they aren't either paying attention, aren't interested or can't comprehend what I'm talking about.

Lately, I've found this to be the case in the WoW gold arena.

The lead up to Draenor release was a thud in retrospect.  Lots of ideas being thrown around, but nobody I knew except for a handful who were in beta so noone could verify anything.  Professions also felt weird at release since they drastically changed them.  Then release happened and everyone was so in love with their garrisons and all the shiny news things to be discovered.  Today, people can't be asked to do more than their cooldowns and their work orders, if they can even keep up with those.  Nobody has the time, and that's reasonable since there's raiding to get done at a breakneck pace.

I heard advice like "Make sure you get Salvage on ALL the toons!" and other extremely time consuming activities.  Do the mine and garden everyday!  Barns are awesome, get one on everyone so you can get Savage Blood!  Ok, this works great if you have like 3 characters.  If you're me (approaching 15 100s) this works like absolute trash.

It looks like transmog of old pieces and flipping recipes is essentially dead in the water.  Of course you could always reprice everything on the auction house to ridiculous prices, but that really is a crappy business model and the last refuge of the non-critically thinking.  The answer is to produce a model for yourself that remains consistent, is immune to crashes and spikes, and is the foundation for successful and stressless revenues.  I run my Warcraft goldmaking like a business because that's my background, so let's get into what I'm doing today and if we might be able to hold a conversation.

Each Character is a Profit Center

You should pay very close attention to your server's overall economy.  Stede remodeled my spreadsheet that Windtraders knew as Godmode.  I called it Godmode because it tells you the health of each profession on your server at a glance.  You should check it out at LNWS.net.

Select those professions that are applicable to your server.  The character is going to maximize two professions, and those two professions should be profitable and independent of the rest of your stable.  You should select these professions based on empirical data and not on a whim or because some Twitter-honey tells you that they make a fortune in glyphs.  Each profession accepted on these characters has to keep up with demand, and the only way to analyze demand is through market activity.

So once a week you craft an armor or a weapon, post it, and it either sits there or it sells immediately.  If it doesn't sell for a week, you should scrap it entirely.  If it sells immediately, you should make MORE of that item, right?  Wrong.  Luck and silly purchases often screw with your numbers.  Further, making an item without checking pricing data ahead of time is foolish as well, this is where TUJ comes in.  Posting the item with TSM and just undercutting is also stupid, because TSM doesn't intuitively recognize variable mods on the equipment, so the vast majority of people are posting items just to be "lowest priced!".  This is where your own hard work and research comes in.

Know the Proficiency

I wouldn't post anything without knowing who it's for.  I took the time to actually research what classes would be looking for and into who it actually works for.  Most of the rolls you're going to get on items are absolute trash.  

Let's look at Blacksmithing for example.  For Ret Paladins you're looking for Feverflare, since it's pure Haste/Mastery and going to be best for them in most cases.  Savage is Critical/Multistrike and going to be regarded as crack for Arms/Fury Warriors.  Do you simply post these with no others like it up because TSM queues it as such?  If you do stop reading and go back to grinding old raids for your gold, you're in the wrong sandbox and I'm inviting you to leave.  Otherwise, absolutely, you do not.  Someone who is buying this item is further going to want to probably upgrade it so they can get BIS for their class in Heroic quality.

"But Zerohour, where would we go to get such information on these classes?!"  Ah yes, I'll spoonfeed the babes out there today.  www.icy-veins.com  Each article is written by game pros, not some scrub with a blog and a vendetta.  Write down what you find there, if I have to tell you where to look for the magic information I'm not talking to you further, consider this our last date.

Know the History

TUJ doesn't break it down.  Wowuction doesn't recognize it either.  Each mod is simply thrown into a big cluster of the same family.  Truesteel Armguards are treated the same across all variations.  You simply have to watch the Auction House personally to find the prices of items.  Is this a pain in the ass?  Absolutely.  Goldmaking just got a little harder.

Know the Needs

It's all great that people are able to make every slot of item nowadays, but which crafted items will people really want since they can only equip three?  And more than likely, they'll upgrade those three slots.  You need to know your customer.

This is where www.AskMrRobot.com comes in.  You should log in and learn how to use the site for classes other than your own raiding characters, unless you know your class dead to rights already and intend to only gear the same class.  What makes MrRobot so good is that a huge percentage of players are going to go here and use the tools to find where their upgrades are going to come from.  The worst thing you can do is preach to people that some helm is a better choice than a chest, they're going to use what's available to them quickly.

What I did was go through over 30 different specs and create generic characters.  Oh yeah, it allows you to do this, it's a good site!  So let's say I am running a Ret Paladin and I'm wanting to find out which slots of armor/BOEs people are generally going to want.  And let's say I'm a Heroic Raider but the gear dropping in these raids is itemized like absolute shit.  (Spoiler: It is for most classes)  I want to get 3 of the best possible pieces to get an upgraded 670 item, and not have to run around with Crit/Versatility or Crit/Something besides what I want.  Smart raiders are going to explore these options, and lo-and-behold within seconds I have my answer - I need to find a chest, gloves, belt, or helm (Not the actual answer, so hold off on making these) with Haste/Mastery on them.  I then buy the items and upgrade them and have my BIS.

If I'm a goldmaker, and I am, I create a generic character and gear it out with all Heroic items.  I then check to see which items that class/spec are going to want to replace with upgraded BOEs.  I can also do the same for Normal mode raiders hoping to be Heroic, since at this point Mythic raiders are equipping the gear they find rather than go with upgraded BOEs.  What 3 items should I craft and what mods would I want on them?  Make those slots and reroll if necessary.  There is no harm in attempting to double the value of a trash item, you may get something good for another class/spec.  One could also farm the AH looking for these particular items to flip, it's not like they're going to be extremely common.  Based on the crafting model we see right now, this is going to be the case for the remainder of the expansion. 

Know your Server

Something I preach is to know your market/server.  In my case, the server's push is entirely towards raiding.  And not that LFR shit, that's not raiding.  By raiding, I mean Heroic and Mythic raids.  Even Normal mode.  At this time, 214 guilds on my server have cleared at minimum 6/7 Heroic mode through 7/7 Mythic mode.  Quick math would tell you I have thousands of potential customers that are not able to craft on their own and have more gold than time.

Let me introduce you to www.Wowprogress.com, in case you've never been there.  Just how shitty is your server?  This site tells you your opportunity.  Next question, when do these people raid?  Your server's forums should tell you if have a mostly Tuesday or Wednesday raiding server.  But the off-nights are the most important.  Most 3 day guilds are going Tuesday through Thursday.  If they start on Wednesday, they go Wednesday, Thursday, and Monday normally.  Find out what times they start, this tells you when you should be posting everything from flasks to enchants/gems.  Prices on busy servers are going to ebb and flow minute by minute, on backwater servers you may only see good prices for an hour before they tank.  This is where you analyze prices hour by hour, or in 30 minute intervals.  TUJ can tell you this information or you can get the data on your own by looking.

There is No One Sized Fits All Solution

I don't have all the answers, that's why I consider myself an entrepreneur in these matters.  You always test things, fail, refine, redo.

If you're looking to get rich quick, I suggest buying gametime tokens and trading them to me in a future patch.  My process is slow and deliberate, methodical and requires patience.  If you want get rich quick, that's fine, I'll pick up your pieces after you give up.

As long as you have the basics down pat, you should be able to build on it.  Go back to the beginning here, every single character with professions you have should be treated as a profit center.  Refine them, research them, understand them, apply them and refine them again.  Greatness stands on the shoulders of giants.

Epilogue

Now that I have dropped a V8 into my 4 banging clunker of a gold machine this expansion, I've produced better results.  I stopped using TSM for the most part because my markets are flat out not TSM friendly and require severe analysis before I post anything.  In fact, I manually post almost everything anymore.  Yeah, Auctioneer for the win!  Here's Tuesday night's results:


I completely sold through everything, making a small fortune in the process.  The week prior I was at half that amount.  The key is to replicate the process and repeat it week in and week out.  Before long I'll be back in GDKP slapping nubs around with their low bids and feasting on tears.

Thanks for stopping in!

Sunday, January 11, 2015

6.1 Dailies and You, and Me, and Why?

One of my favorite features of Warlords of Draenor is that it has a ton of straight forward gameplay that appeals to longtime WoW players, but mostly veterans who haven't been back since TBC/Wrath.

* Quest your way to 100
* Enhance your Garrison and your Followers for high level missions
* No flying.  Unless you're an engineer jumping off a cliff.
* Profession materials and patterns are straight forward and available via CDs
* No required dailies

That last one is important to me. 

Dailies were introduced in The Burning Crusade as a means of adding a way for the broke population to somehow collect some extra gold by means of performing an activity.  Initially, they had a cap of 10 per day.  They offered reputation, vanity items, and a decision element that tasked you with picking only 10.  This cap was great because it governed how much gold input we saw into the game.  Mind you, at this time, raiding was also a 4-5 day per week affair, so doing them was interesting on your days off.

Somewhere along the way the lines got crossed and it went from a simple means of collecting extra gold and vanity items to unlimited dailies and the actual game itself.  Witness MoP if you will - several BIS items became available via dailies for the average raider and if you wanted access to your profession's patterns, you were performing them for several weeks.  In reality, if you were a casual player with no access to anything beyond LFR, this was your "content".  What a horrible design decision and it was one that I heavily disagreed with.  And before you cry "Zero, you just don't like content!" I will tell you to shut up, sit down, and understand that I was one of those that actually did the stupid grinds across all profession alts (in some cases several times) just so I could make your little 28 slot bags, leg enchants, and throw down Dancing Steel and Jade Spirit in the AH for exorbitant prices.  How you think I got rich?  Wishing?

Bashiok assures us dailies are not the devil incarnate, and essentially THIS time they'll get it right.  I've been hearing from Blizzard apologists saying that they are sorely missed.  Additionally, you can group with friends to do them!  /happyhappyjoyjoy  I have friends that quit the game in MoP over the daily situation, should I partner with them?  I bet they're just waiting on me to ask.

People absolutely miss repeating the same low-end, bottom of the barrel content that gives them a reason for waking up everyday.  Sounds like a job, right?  Go to it and do the same thing everyday.  I already have a job, this is Warcraft and I pay to be entertained.


No.




Here's how to get it right and leave the people busy with Garrison CDs, Missions, and maintaining raid schedules alone.

1) No gear item awarded from dailies should exceed the quality of item available in the Normal raids.  This means, everything offered from a daily should be the same quality as that you would receive raiding in Normal.  Additionally, the items offered should NEVER, EVER be a trinket with a proc that benefits some classes.  Mandatory casual play content is trash content.

2) No recipes or profession materials can be accessed with them.  I'm sick to death of performing dailies because I need something to sell to the people that should be doing these dailies to give me their gold in the first place.  I end up doing the dailies and the broke players don't do them anyhow.

3) If you include a reputation with the rewards, the reputation should be available via other methods besides completing quests.  Tabard time.  Give me a choice, too.  Either Daily Dungeon for all my rep or complete the dailies.  Forcing me to log in or miss out on my 1500 rep for the day is crap.

4) In fact, I don't want to see any gear rewards at all.  LFR is your gear reward, dailies should offer nothing beyond tabards, pets, mounts, and titles.

5) Dailies should be another blue ! on my screen that I get to ignore if I want.  I should never, ever feel compelled to have to do them.

Timeless Isle was the perfect example of how daily hubs should work.  Content that appeals to both raiders and casual players alike.  No recipes gated behind 3-4 week grinds.  Oh, let's play example time:

Isle of (QQ) Conquest - Missing a JC recipe that didn't drop in Mount Hyjal?  No problem, grind to exalted and you can have them all.

Molten (Farse) Front - Only 28 days and you can craft these scopes or bags.  Absolute trash that a BIS craftable was gated this far back.

MoP - Pick a faction here outside of Anglers.  Yeah, that one.


Hey, what's missing here?  Wrath of the Lich King!  They actually had it right with the Tournament Dailies.  Zero beneficial items and lots of flavor items.  The other factions were completed via tabards, which was absolutely fair. 

I would prefer they didn't even introduce the recipes rather than gate them behind dailies. Grinds for recipe items outside of dailies are welcomed.  Make me work for it via turn-ins.  Make me have to buy things to boost my way with the rep.  Make me mindlessly run around an island or zone competing for kills?  Screw that.

Now if you're a person that loves dailies, the quest hubs, and grinding the same quests over and over for weeks, I pity you.  But please, comment below and let me know the reason this is the best content 15 bucks a month can provide!  As always, defend your position articulately, especially if you're an apologist.

By the way, dungeon dailies are great, they focus on playing the actual progression game.  I also ignore these.


Thanks for stopping in!

Zerohour is currently rolling around in gold, having completed 11 100s and their garrisons/followers.  He can usually be seen on Tuesdays dancing around with glee.

Friday, January 2, 2015

Powerleveling in Draenor

My screenshot says it all:




This screenshot also shows the order in which they hit 100.  I kept shuffling them as I went, and my priest (my Vanilla/TBC main) ended up being dead last.  Amazing how that works.

I hit my 11th 100 on December 26th, so one month and 13 days while working, raiding, and a little lack of sleep.  These were 100% leveled by hand, no chicanery here.  No dual boxing.  No carries.  I'm presently working on my 2nd account of 100s and am at 97, 95, 94, and the rest being 90/91 and everyone has a garrison opened.

Why would I need 22 garrisons?  Well, why WOULDN'T I want 22?

I didn't buy a guide or anything, I wasn't in beta, and my friends were of almost no help with what to do.  One friend can testify that about the 3rd week I was having a nervous breakdown trying to figure out the best possible path.  It took me about 3 characters before it all started to click, and I mastered every zone's leveling path.

In past expansions, I found the best possible paths that made sense, and this one threw me a curve with all the different options.  I absolutely LOVE to do all the zones entirely my first go-around, and then afterwards, it's all business.  I recommend always seeing the story before doing this, because you're going to miss about half the zone when you're just focused on getting through it.

The Best and the Worst of Draenor

Shortest Zone:  Gorgrond.  This thing was sadly about an hour each time because I spent a ton of time finishing what I needed to do in Frostfire Ridge.

Longest Zone:  Frostfire Ridge.  This place feels like 5 hours but it's only 2.  Go figure.  Maybe it's the layout?

Trickiest Questline Zone:  Nagrand hands down.  There's 2 different paths in the zone that converge.  Best advice, head to Elements as soon as you get business done with the Talbuks/Clefthoofs.  This is my 98-100 path every single time now.  So many treasures and bonus objectives you hit 100 without thinking about it.

Worst Class:  Mage.  I tried frost and arcane.  They hit like wet noodles even WITH gear on!  I know, better in raids, but leveling them made me sad for those who HAD to do them first.  This was the first class I ever leveled in WoW, too, I know what I'm doing.  Unholy DK was a close second.

Best Class:  Outside of my Paladin main?  Frost Death Knight.  These little bastards are back with a vengeance.  2-3 shot everything all the way to 100?  Yes please, I'll take another.  As soon as I swapped from crappy Unholy it was hard for me to stop playing him.

Biggest Rare Bastard:  That shithead strider in Zangarra.  3 of my classes had real trouble on him at level, and for a crappy trinket.  A close followup is Gar'lua in Nagrand.  Nobody died to her but she's pretty strong for a nice trinket.

Best Follower:  Without going out of my way to get one?  I'll nominate Blook.  The quest text is sorta priceless.  Creeperbot 8000 is a good one, too.  Reminds me of some goldmaker personalities out there.

Saddest Quest:  The frostridge pup looking for his parents.  But sorta happy ending.  I don't bother with this one during leveling anymore because it's a side quest but first time through it was sad.

Best Cinematic:  I liked Blackhand, I know everyone else likes Thrall/Garrosh.

Best Zone Perk:  Hands down the corral.  I made the siege machine mistake ONCE. Runner up is the air assault in Talador.

Best Advice for Frostridge Elites:  Call to Arms.  FFS use it, tradechat noobs.  Noone needs help with elites.

Zerohour's Words of Wisdom for Powerleveling Draenor

1) Excess potions cost 100 garrison resources each, and they are best served at full rested.  You will get the resources to buy them every 1000 minutes, which is about 17 hours.  Make sure you empty your garrison cache every 3.5 days before it fills up entirely.  If you are resource starved at 100, see #3.

2) Let the characters get rested.  Being full rested at 90 will burn out entirely at level 96.  Full rested at 96 will burn out halfway between 99 and 100.  Early 97 is the best place to park to be rested for the rest of the journey.  I cycled all characters for maximum rested and efficiency - because 1000xp for a mob kill beats 500 any day of the week.  Rested also counts with treasures.

3) Get the following addons:

* Handynotes, with Draenor treasures
* RestPlus for Titan
* Ovale (yeah, because I really want to research 11 different classes, easier to just phone it in on the ones I never play)

4) Stay on the questline.  The questline is the MAIN story, not the side stories of "get my dog out of the tree" and "Little Jimmy wants his gun back".  You recognize these quests as the ones that have followups and send you to other quest hubs.  Those that are one and done are pretty much irrelevant, although there are some nice bonus onesies in Talador.

5) If there's a bonus objective in your way, complete it.  And always with Excess Potions.

6) Get rid of those stupid Barracks as soon as you can and replace it with War Mill Rank 1.  This gives you stronger quest rewards and in Nagrand you will probably hit close to 615 ilvl if you complete the whole zone.  You can build Barracks again at 100 when you will have a need for missions.

7) Avoid doing missions with the exception of bonus garrison resources (free).  XP missions are sometimes nice, but I tend to only be in my garrison at even levels (92/94/96/98) so not worth keeping track.

8) Try to get out of the zones at even levels.

* Frostfire Ridge - 92, or when you get Garrison Rank 2, whichever comes last.
* Gorgrond - 94,  or when you get Kaz after killing Inyu, whichever comes last.
* Talador - 96, or when you get the follower from the ogre quest, whichever comes last.
* Spires - 98, or when you get Kimzee, whichever comes last.

The reason is that the zone's experience and mob kill rewards are tuned for lesser levels, so you will have a slower climb once you are too high for the zone.  The next zone immediately starts the experience buff again.  Basically, there's nothing cool about questing Talador at 98, this is about speed and not completionist tendencies.

9) I found it took about 1.5 hours per zone to complete them once I figured out my route, therefore bring 2 hours of every buff.  Drums, foods, excess potions, elixirs.  If you have to leave the zone it just slows you down.  When you're ready to move on to the next zone always hearth, don't just run into it.  This gives time to reload mats and get the free flight.

10) Rares are great to kill, but only if they're in the way and not out of the way.  If you can't kill the rare and it wipes you and noone can help, move on.  Some classes really suck against some rares, come back and waste them at 100.

11)  Look for paths that make sense to you time wise.  Example:  Get a quest done while picking up 3-4 treasures and then working into the bonus objective.  Talador is loaded with these opportunities.  Maximize your opportunity in the area.


12) Gear is replaced almost entirely every 4 levels if you start Draenor in trash.  If you have BOAs from SoO use them.  I have every DPS version of BOA in the game (some duplicates for dual wielding) and at about 95 is when they are better than Mythic Warforged weapons.  Don't waste time or money enchanting gear unless they are BOAs.

13) Realize that everything you will be missing in the zones will be waiting for you at 100.  You can always go back and finish things and it will be a little faster than doing it at level.  That's half the fun for me.

14) VERY important, and thanks Stede for reminding me this was my big piece of advice to him - do zones in waves.  Boring sometimes, important yes.  Essentially you want to take the same level characters through zones over and over.  This means taking 92's from Gorgrond through Talador to 96/97 after each other.  This will make the zone fresh in your mind and you can find your way around faster.  Less shifting gears, more finding efficiencies.  Your first character will be difficult to get around with, but by character 4 or 5, you're becoming a pro at it.

I look forward to seeing others with 11 toons at 100, I'll let you know when I finish the back loop.  I deleted a 90 on that account and have to finish that one the hard way.  Stupid dreams of Herald of the Titans, when will I learn!?

Thanks for stopping by!

Zerohour looks like he has too much time on his hands, but the bags under his eyes tell a different story. He should write a guide.