Tag Archives: mods

Archaeology All the Things!

With my Mage finally 85, my next priority is to work through achievements and collect those last few pets I never quite got. This means hammering the old Archaeology and oh god are there any mods I can grab? I mean of course I already have Archy which makes the life of an Archaeologist so much simpler but is there anything else? I did find a few bits and pieces that actually made me squee a little bit with their usefulness.

For those who don’t know of Archy, it looks a little like this.

It tells you where your next digsites are, what you are working on and how many more fragments you need, when to solve an artifact, you can double click to survey and if you have TomTom as well it uses the waypoint arrow. I’ve been using this one since the start of Cataclysm it is fantastic.

But I’m always having to check between the map and the flight plans to see where I need to go next, which is why I tend to manually fly everywhere and then I bump into Hyjal and start angrily grumbling about this stupid high place in the middle of all the Night Elf digsites. In comes Homing Digeon.

This one highlights the closest flight point to each of your digsites and my word is it helpful! It’s such a great mod for lazy people like me to plop myself on a flight plan and alt tab to check my reader, write a blog post or waddle off to plop a pizza in the oven.

And while I’m in the area, wouldn’t it be wonderful to know where to go to pick up BoE recipes that might sell for a little on the auction house? After all, we all need gold. While installing GatherMate2 to make life easier for my Druid and my future Camel farming, I came across RecipeProfit which tells you where certain NPCs are in the zone you’re in and which recipe they sell. This one is going to make me a lot of on the side gold.

As I’m working on achievements and my pet and mount collections while I’m doing Archaeology, I wanted a mod which would show every artifact for each race, which achievement the artifact might be for and how many times I’ve completed it. Artifact Finder is absolutely perfect for this.

And I also wanted to try out Rarity which takes account of how many times you’ve tried for a certain rare item and thus how lucky you are with that item. I won’t likely keep this one but it’s a bit of fun for now.

I also picked up Steve’s MogIt addon – Highlighter. It pretty much highlights when an item on your MogIt wishlist pops up.

So my Archaeology has become a bit easier to follow now but you still might find me somewhere in Stranglethorn Vale going insane in the middle of a digsite.

Dealing With A Meelion Alts

I found myself with a little downtime between writing my NaNoWriMo novel.. well.. I call it a novel.. It is basically a pile of stinking crap right now but that’s the point isn’t it? Get the words down, form the story and some kind of world, and characters, relationships and so on (mostly words), and then you can re-draft, edit, tear it to shreds and start over. The point is, reach the wordcount, and aside from the forcing myself to reach some kind of daily wordcount and going a little more insane every time I try, it is kind of fun, especially since I discovered word sprints! However, KissMyAlas, the bossy boots that she is, has asked me a question, and I must answer it. And please excuse if the wordcount widget dies, the server it’s hosted on is under a lot of strain at the moment.

You have, like, a meeeelion alts. When it comes to major game changes, whether that’s expansions or big patches like 4.0, what is your strategy for getting the game back in working order as far as addons goes? Do you perfect things on one character before duplicating your work elsewhere? Are there any addons you can’t live without?

I do have, like, a meeeelion alts, don’t I? In fact, I think I’m constantly plotting what to create and level next. However! I am being a good girl. I decided a few months back that I have enough alts around that need to be pushed upto 80 and so creating new alts is all fine and dandy, but I wouldn’t be playing anything new until the world changes. I’m going to want to see those quests and explore a fair bit, and that’s going to require another bunch of alts! I am a bit of an altoholic, I find it nice to be able to keep a main for all of the big things like achievement farming, collecting mounts and pets, and raiding, and to be able to switch to a completely different class on a whim to farm a few heroics or do a few quests, it makes a nice change and keeps the game fresh. Anyway, I’m straying away from the question a bit.

When it comes to major game changes, generally speaking, I will log onto my main first. Here I will sort out any mods that have decided to take a little nap during the changes, run around giddily looking at all the new shinies, spec if necessary, because I do love my main, and I want to see everything first through her eyes, not random alt #3′s.

Admittedly, for the big 4.0.3 patch, I decided to nuke my mods. I haven’t cleared the folder yet, but I disabled everything. This way, I was able to log in and see what it was that I really felt like I needed to keep, and which I could live without. I don’t really know, I’m a bit strange see, previously, I couldn’t use the default UI, but since the patch I have been.

Click to embiggen

I know everything looks a little bit huge, but that’s about as small as I can get it before I start to mourn my minimap and wonder what the heck everything even says. I think at some point I might get myself an action bar mod again, tidy up the place, and perhaps some portrait frames, but for now, I’m keeping default.

The thing is, I can’t live without:

  • NPC Scan & Overlay – These 2 together have made Bloody Rare and Frostbitten a frickin’ cake walk! I still need 2 for Frostbitten, and a few rares for my Hunter to tame, plus, if I’m flying around on an alt and my screen flashes up, it’s around 20g, some cloth and maybe some crystallized something or other. That’s not bad just for running a mod. PLUS the Zul’drak Sentinel drops a pair of legs that have sold for around 200g in the past. I have to turn it off during raids, sure, but that brings me to the next mod I couldn’t live without.
  • Addon Control Panel – This brings up a new button when you press escape (you know, video options, log out, keybindings, etc.) which allows you to tick on and off certain mods and turn off anything you might not need to keep switched on with just a game reload. I have found this not only a little bit handy, but when I was pugging a lot of raids, I had the peace of mind that I wasn’t going to be kicked from the group for relogging for a couple of minutes to switch off some mods.
  • AtlasLoot – I’ve grown so accustomed over the years to being able to just open up the loot tables ingame and check what so and so drops, and what I would look like as a Blood Elf Warrior and other such things that honestly I couldn’t live without AtlasLoot. I like to know what drops where without having to alt tab, and I have burned a heck of a lot of time looking at this thing.. How do you think I’ve basically memorised the loot tables? >.> Perhaps a bit sad, but just a little addiction of mine.
  • BadBoy & CCleaner – My server is so utterly full of gold sellers, trade spammers, and the like that I need a blocker. I used to use SpamMeNot but at one point it broke and I stopped using it. Now I use these 2 and they do the job. Very often, people on my server will spam their “LFM BT NOTHING RESERVED” macros and the like, literally, spam so that it fills up the chat window pretty swiftly, and I’ve found this tool invaluable for things like that. Mind, I’m pretty sure that’s now inbuilt, but hey ho.
  • Bagnon – I can’t function without my all-in-one bag view! This also tells me how much of an item I have on alts on that server, so long as they aren’t in the guild bank, and it’s the bag mod I have been using since TBC. I think I tried another bag mod sometime in early Wrath and I didn’t like it as much. Sometimes, you just grow attached to things.. and I’ve grown attached to Bagnon.
  • Clique & Grid – Though I haven’t updated them yet because I haven’t been raiding or instancing very much. I have tried the new default raid frames but they don’t do it for me, to shrink them to the size I like, I’d have to resort to teeny weeny text, and a minimap I can hardly use. No thanks. Clique I’ve always found useful to quickly dispel if I’m needed to, I don’t tend to dispel otherwise unless I’m healing. I have heard that Grid won’t be updated anymore, though, and I guess I’m a little in denial at the moment. Stupid raid frames.
  • ForteXorcist – MY GOD. I cannot play without this bloody brilliant tool! I’m a Shadow Priest, this DoT timer is very easily configurable, it looks good, and it works amazingly well for any class, really. I like to be able to see there’s only 1.6 seconds left until Vampiric Touch expires, I’ve found it makes DPSing much, much easier, and I loves it. Especially when I was testing the different Warlock specs.. It’s invaluable for every single one.
  • Fubar – And a few attachments. I tell you what, when I first started playing WoW, I was told to install Titan Panel so that I would have access to co-ords, so I did, and for a while I loved that silly little bar. Sometime in TBC, I can’t remember when now, I decided to try out Fubar. This was basically Titan Panel, except you could customise it yourself! My God! And yeah, I’m a little attached to it. Leave me alone, I like it.
  • GupPet – Yeah, this is probably a slightly weird one, after all, how big a necessity can a random mount/pet button be? Well, for starters, it means I don’t have to fiddle around with macros, or extra bar space. It lets me randomise all of my pets, or a select few, which a macro wouldn’t be able to do, you just can’t fit that many pets and mounts in .. 2 or 3 macros. It can also show you which mounts you are missing from your collection which the other day proved invaluable when it came to my attention that I only needed 4 mounts to reach 100, and I didn’t own the Ochre Horse, Black Horse, Black Wolf, or White Kodo.
  • Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text – I’ve tried, I really, really have, but the default battle text doesn’t make any sense to me! This actually lets me know that my 20k crit was from Shadow Word: Death and not, as I suspected, Mind Blast. It separates pet and player damage much better, and it’s really nice when grinding, to tell you how much of something is in your bags. Also, I love that it tells me when something has come off cooldown.
  • OmniCC – Another one I feel like I have used forever. Used it back in the day (ha) in TBC to watch my cooldowns as a Shadow Priest, and I like to be able to see those numbers on my action bars.
  • Postal – I’m a packrat and an auctioneer – I couldn’t live without Postal. Some days I’ll stand there opening 1,000 mails, and there is not a chance I’m going to do that without Postal.
  • Prat – I don’t really know why either, but my entire game looks empty to me unless I have Prat. Something to do with class colours, copy and pasting texting.. I don’t really know.
  • Quartz – See: I’m a Shadow Priest. Quartz has proved invaluable to me for timing my next cast, particularly when using Mind Flay and Mind Sear. Love that latency bar and the lines that show when things have ticked – makes it easier to not clip anything.
  • Rating Buster – When trying to make a snap decision over whether something is an upgrade or not, I really like to have the stats laid out in front of me. This mod lets me compare an item with the item I’m wearing, to compare the stats, very useful in raids if something not on your wishlist drops.
  • Skada – I like to see where my damage is at, all right? Good. As long as we’re clear. The best thing about being a DPS is reaching the big numbers. You can’t reach them if you don’t know how high or low they are, after all. Don’t worry, I’m not a damage whore. I do stay out of the fire, stop DPS, and all that, I just like to do well while I’m keeping alive – doing all of those things at once is the fun of being a DPS.
  • Deadly Boss Mods – Pretty self explanatory. I’ve tried BigWigs, I’ve tried DXE, neither have really done it for me. I’m a DBM girl.
  • Zero Auctions – One of the offspring of QuickAuctions3 when it broke in the patch. This one was created by a member of the JMTC forums, it does the same thing as QA3, but it has molded itself around the confirmation boxes, so if you put up 800 glyphs, you have to press accept 800 times. Honestly? It’s still a pretty huge time saver when you’re doing a lot of auctions.

Some of these I might not use on my alts, for example, Zero Auctions I only need on my bank alt, so I will only keep it ticked on her and none of my other characters. NPC Scan is unecessary on pre-60 alts, I can’t be bothered to input any new id’s, it’s a little pointless, so I just don’t use it. I like to check that all of these are in working order, and once I’ve played around on my Priest, I might pop onto other alts. Usually Soupdragon, my Death Knight, on Terenas, and my Rogue on Argent Dawn, just to make sure everything’s tidy and ready to go. Very often, however, I forget to load out of date addons and spend most of the day relogging. I think 9 times out of 10, I’ll sort everything out on Seithir, and then tidy up my alts as and when I decide to play them. That’s much less tedious, because at the end of the day, I’d rather PvP than sort out my UI – I find it quite a boring part of the game, which is why I love guides that tell you how to set everything up so much.

What about you guys? Are there any mods you couldn’t live without?

Happy blogaversary, Alas, hope you keep going for a few more! <3

The Art Of Gold Making: Setting Up Shop

Okay guys, so you may have read my last gold post and thought, “That’s great and all, Jae, but, where exactly do you expect us to start? What are the most helpful mods? Any quick tips? What are the best professions to use?” Well, don’t worry, I didn’t intend to leave it there. I was in the same position as those of you who are just starting out at some point, not knowing where to start, and I fully intend to help you get to a point where you are able to make enough income to play comfortably, how much you end up making purely depends on how much time and effort you put into it. You can spend an hour here or there and make enough to cover raiding costs, and then some.

I think it’s best if I start from the beginning. If you’re looking for professions, the best ones will be any that you can use to craft things. That would be: Tailoring, Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, Enchanting, Inscription, Engineering. Gathering professions are a nice bonus if you want them. Personally, I like having them, but they aren’t the best way to make gold strictly speaking. However, I really believe it’s down to personal preference. Every profession has its’ own way to make a bit of gold so choose whichever you prefer and I’ll cover how to use them effectively in a later post.

Bank Alts

The first thing I do, regardless of my level, on any server, is to create a bank alt. I give it a name that I might give a character (rather than Jaedialt, or Wgrtdf) or perhaps recycle an alt I don’t play anymore, run it to the nearest city (or maybe I’ll create a Blood Elf and make my way to Undercity or Orgrimmar. I personally think that Undercity is the best for Horde bank alting, and Ironforge for Alliance), and leave it near the auction house. I make sure it has some gold, buy all of the bank slots, and fill them and every bag slot with either 20 slot or 16 slot bags, depending on how much gold I have and then log out.

This character is there to enable you to mail any useful items you might want to keep or sell to stop your bags from clogging up too much while you’re questing or grinding. You can always return the mail later on if need be. If you have a lot of auctions, you might even consider putting a guild together purely so you can have access to the guild bank to store anything you don’t have space for, you can let your friends join to use the guild tag, or keep it purely for guild bank purposes. My personal guild bank currently has 4 tabs, and I’m considering buying a 5th. The extra space is just too awesome.

Auction Mods

After your space is set up and ready to use, you may want to look into getting a few mods. They aren’t a necessity, of course, but they do make auctioning a lot simpler, and make it a bit easier to contend with the people who seem to sit there doing their auctions all day, and all night.

Personally, I like to use Postal, Auctioneer, QuickAuctions, Market WatcherAuction Profit, and Skillet on my crafting characters. I only use these mods (except for Postal, which is useful anyway) on my bank alt as it saves memory on the characters that don’t need them.

Very often, I will have a few hundred mails in my mailbox. You’re only able to open 50 every minute, and Postal really helps with that. With its’ ‘Open All’ function, you can leave it to open those 50 mails while you alt tab or read a book for the minute. It has a countdown as well on the mail symbol so if you choose to watch the mailbox, you’re able to see when it’s ready to be refreshed. Emptying the mailbox is possibly the most tedious part of doing your auctions, thanks to Postal, it’s just a tiny bit less tedious.

Auctioneer has many useful features. One of its’ main uses is of course scanning the auction house, if you scan regularly enough ((every 12 hours is ideal, but whenever you get chance works, you can do a quick scan with the double arrow but if your PC can’t quite take it, the longer scan does the same job, just might need 10 minutes of AFK time)) you will be given an average market price for each item. These average prices are particularly useful when working out how much an item should go for if it’s perhaps too low, or too high, or if there isn’t any of that item up at the time. BeanCounter can be used to search for an item to see your sale history. It can tell you your past sales and buyouts, which you might find useful. This guide will help you to use Auctioneer to check for items selling below the vendor price, and also for items that may be worth buying to resell.

I like to use QuickAuctions3 as well as Auctioneer. Once you’ve set it up, adding different groups and price settings for each of your regular auctions, you can basically use the ‘post’ and ‘cancel’ buttons, and the most work you end up doing is waiting for the mailbox to refresh. The ‘cancel’ button cancels any of the items you’ve added to QA3′s groups which have been undercut, so that you can put them back up as the lowest priced auction. This is particularly great if you’re in the glyph market, but don’t knock it for any others you might dip your toes into. Follow this guide to help you set it up.

AuctionPrice tells you how much gold your current auctions are in total. Of course, if everytime I put up auctions they sold I’d be very very rich ingame, but it’s nice to see roughly how much gold is sitting there, this is purely there for my own curiosity and isn’t really important.

Market Watcher as well is nice to scan for particular items and watch the market trends. I tend to watch for raw materials, mostly uncut gems, cloth, herbs, Frozen Orbs. Anything you might buy a lot of is useful to keep an eye on.

Skillet is basically a change to the default crafting UI. I’m not a huge fan of the way Skillet itself looks, but it’s very useful if you’re crafting a few things. I only really use it on my Inscriptor and my Jewelcrafter, as it allows me to queue up whatever I want to craft, and then make it, which is nice when I’m checking which gems I’m low on, or which glyphs are selling well at that point in time.

Aphroditi’s guide to the auction house, and more auction tips are very decent posts which have been very helpful to me in setting up Auctioneer and Market Watcher, I recommend you take a look.

Starter Cash

We all need to start somewhere, and there are many different ways you can get yourself a bit of starter cash. It all depends on how you’d rather spend your time doing so. If you want to, you can start off by using the vendor and resale options of Auctioneer, but if not, here are a few more options.

Vendor Items

One of the often overlooked methods of gaining a bit of gold, though it’s something people have been doing for years, is to buy vendor items, and resell them on the auction house. A lot of people don’t want to go trekking around looking for everything they need or want, and will pay a little extra to buy them from the auction house instead, saving them a bit of time. My favourite post detailing which vendor items to grab, along with maps for where to find them all, is this one. It is well detailed and easy to follow. People are willing to pay as much as 60g for certain patterns. Take the cooking recipes from the wandering caravan in Desolace, it’s a pain to find, and when you do the recipes are all ‘rare spawn’, only costing a few silver to buy. Don’t forget vendor pets – if you are able to grab pets from the other faction to sell on your faction’s auction house that’s brilliant, if not, don’t worry, same faction pets will sell as well ((Stormspire Netherstorm, Shimmering Flats Thousand Needles, Org, Eversong Woods, UC, TB, Darn, SW, Elwynn Forest, Exodar, Dun Morogh, Tournament)).

Questing

Personally, I like to complete quests. You can gain a fair amount of gold from completing your Northrend quests ((Grizzly Hills, Zul’Drak, Scholazar Basin, Storm Peaks, Icecrown)), and if you have more than one character at max level and a lot of patience, that’s a few thousand gold you can get, guaranteed. While you do those, you can work on opening up a few daily quests, Sons of Hodir and the Argent Tournament ones especially. If you enjoy, or at least can tolerate, questing for money, 25 daily quests per day will get you a few hundred gold per character, it all depends on how much time and patience you have to spare. Don’t forget the weekly raid and Wintergrasp quests, not only do these give a fair bit of gold, but the emblems and honour they give are useful for gold makers (see below).

Gathering Professions

If you use gathering professions, be sure to pick up any materials you see while you’re flying around, even if you don’t have any crafting professions yet, selling these raw can get you a bit of starter gold, or perhaps you’d prefer to save them to use to level your professions or craft into things that will make a little more gold than the raw materials themselves. If you happen to be a miner, Titansteel bars are still profitable as well.

Random Dungeons and PvP

Another reasonable way to get some starter gold is to do a few random dungeons. The first one you do each day at level 80 will give you 2 Emblem of Frost and 26g, after that they grant 2 Emblem of Triumph and 13g. Remember to check the average price of Dream Shards on your server in order to know which blues are worth disenchanting, and which are worth greeding. A lot of the things you’ll pick up while doing the dungeons can sell, and if you don’t need the gear, you can turn 20 Emblem of Triumph into 20 Emblem of Heroism and then into Cardinal Rubies/Majestic Zircons/King’s Ambers. These you can either sell raw for around 100-130g each, or cut them and sell them for a little more. 10,000 honour can be traded in for gems as well. If you have any spare Stone Keeper’s Shards that you don’t need, make sure you turn them into honour (30 shards = 2,000 honour, and the tokens you get are BoA so you can send any from your alts to your main and vice versa), and of course you can do random battlegrounds too, you’re able to queue from anywhere in Azeroth, so perhaps grind a little while you queue (this also counts for random dungeons).

Grinding

If you really want to, there are plenty of good grinding spots, you just have to find the best ones. I find the Fire and Air Elementals on the Elemental Plateau in Nagrand are brilliant, on my server I could sell Motes of Fire for about 6g each, and Primal Air is still going for about 60g each, it’s useful for a few enchants, Cat’s Swiftness is still the best raiding enchant for a lot of physical classes without Engineering. Check other economy blogs for posts giving tips on the best places to farm.

Selling Professions

Finally, while you’re idling in cities chatting to people, reading blog posts, or whatever you do while you idle, remember to offer your professions in trade. Usually a crafting fee will be about 10g per craft, I stick to this for epic gem cuts, however, certain crafts might get you a bit more, so for some professions you might find it a little better to ask for tips, because some people might tip for a little more than you might be expecting. You will get people tipping 5g, but it seems to be quite rare, and therefore worth trusting in people’s generosity. For example, I have the Blood Draining recipe and I tend to get tips of anywhere between 50-250g for it because it’s fairly rare, or at least difficult to find people who actually respond. I still sometimes get 100g tips for crafting the Death Chill Cloak, for which I’d probably ask for about 15g if I put a fee on it. Just make sure you’re polite, people are less likely to tip if you refuse to pop to Orgrimmar/Ironforge (you can politely say that you’re waiting for somebody in Dalaran), if you’re rude and demanding, chances are they won’t be so generous. If they try to trade you without tipping, gently remind them, sometimes they forget, sometimes they’re just testing their luck, most often they will apologise and give you a little gold for your help.

Stay tuned for whenever I get off my arse to write another one!

The Art Of Gold Making: Where To Start

A lot of people have asked me how I go about making gold. They aren’t sure where to start, or where to look for these tips and ideas. This is the method of gold making that I have found works well for me, but of course, there are many different ways you can make gold. Everybody needs to start somewhere so, hopefully this is a nice starting point for you if you need it, or perhaps a couple of ideas you hadn’t come across before. Either way I hope this is helpful.

Getting Started

In the beginning, it’s important to know a few things. Quests will give you money and rewards, often, the rewards won’t be worth using, but you can hover over each reward to check which will vendor for the most. If you’re an enchanter, you can also disenchant any green or blue rewards that you don’t need. Greys vendor for more than white items, and are completely useless. Hold onto them to vendor, and make a habit of keeping on top of your bag space whenever you’re near a vendor. White items can be useful, it may be worth checking the auction house or wowhead to see how useful certain white items are. For example, the Giant Eggs that can drop from level 40-60 ish mobs are used for a cooking quest at 250 cooking skill, these can sell for a little bit on the auction house.

Questing

You might like to start by finishing off a few quest areas if you’re high level. The amount of gold you can gather from clearing Icecrown/Storm Peaks, etc. is fairly high, especially when you include quest rewards, drops, and any gatherables if you have a gathering profession.

Daily quests, as well, are a decent way to make gold. You can do 25 daily quests a day, each one will give roughly 13g each, if you completed 25 every day, that gives 325 gold roughly, give or take. Some will give more, some will give less, it’s probably best to try a few and see which ones you can complete fastest for the most profit.

This guide over at Ten Ton Hammer, whilst a little out of date (quests 8 and 9 are no longer available), is a decent guideline. It’s worth noting that the Argent Tournament is a nice little quest hub, especially once you’re able to do the champion and Crusader dailies. Also, random dungeons for the first one you complete at level 80 give 26g, the next few for the rest of the day will give 13g, these are another good way to earn gold.

The Auction House

There are auction houses in every race’s capital city. There isn’t one in Shattrath, and there isn’t one in Dalaran unless you’re a high level Engineer. There are also neutral auction houses in Gadgetzan (Tanaris), Everlook (Winterspring), and Booty Bay (Stranglethorn Vale), all of these are Goblin towns. Neutral auction houses allow you to trade between Horde and Alliance, which you cannot do with the regular auction house. You can use this to trade between your characters, or perhaps pick up a good deal once in a while.

You can sell just about anything on the auction house, and you can watch your server’s markets for what is going to sell the best. Interesting looking items of clothing, for example, will sell much better on RP servers than on non-RP servers. When you’re getting started, you’ll want to focus on just a few items. Use your professions, choose something that will sell, like Belt Buckles, Netherweave Bags, flasks, things that are in high demand, and only undercut by 1 copper, there is no need to undercut by more, after a few hundred auctions it will add up.

Banking

It’s worthwhile having a bank alt, a character purely used to store items, and auction, though not necessary, however, most auctioneers use a bank alt. Usually a discarded alt, or a specifically created character. I’d recommend giving it a name that you might give to a character, or [name]bank, rather than a keyboard mashing name. Though I don’t have any proof that it makes much difference, I’m sure one or two people might avoid buying from somebody whose bank alt looks very likely to be a gold seller. If you can afford to, fill your bag slots and bank slots with 20 slot bags, if not, use whatever you can get your hands on at first and build up.

Another useful venture, once you start storing more items than your bags and bank can hold, is a guild bank. You can buy a charter, get 10 signatures (even if you pay people 5g, give or take, for a signature), and purchase a guild bank tab to use for storing your items. As space becomes more tight, you can buy more tabs as you feel is necessary.

Addons

Finally, you might find it a bit easier to use a few mods. Personally, I use Auctioneer, Market Watch, Postal, and Auction Profit. I only use these on my bank alt, as they’re a lot of memory to keep activated on my other characters as well. Addon Control Panel is great if you use a character that you play as well as your bank alt. This enable you to activate/deactivate mods by simply reloading, saving you from logging out, which I’ve found very useful when joining pugs. When setting up my mods I followed this guide to install the mods, and this guide on how to make good use from them.

I hope I’ve been of some help, go ahead and find some economy blogs for further tips, the Just My 2 Copper forums can be quite good to browse. Find out what works best for you on your server, test different methods, because everybody has slightly different ways of making gold.

Efficient Alt Levelling

I level quite a few alts, I think I’ve got it down to a tee, can level quite fast when I set my mind to it. Though mostly these days I take it easy. However, there are a few things I use that seriously speed it up. No, not levelling guides, I find half of them slow me down either because I’m trying to decipher what they’re saying, or because they’re saying “do this quest in Azshara, now pop over to Eastern Kingdoms and get the flight plan and hand in some stuff, then go back to Winterspring and kill some yetis, then scare the goblin’s friends with the yetiâ€? and so on..

Anyway, for starters, the heirloom chest and shoulders, I make sure I have both of these before any trinkets, weapons, any of that, because they do stack (have had a few people ask) and the 20% extra experience while levelling is insane. It counts with the experience from quest hand ins as well as killing mobs. So very worth getting. If you have enough emblems you’re willing to spare, or enough Champion’s Seals, go for the weapons and maybe the trinkets if you want.

Next, I make use of my mods, sorry, I like them too much. I have LocationFu for my Fubar, this can tell you which instances are good for your level, which zones are good for your level. It can be a little buggy but nice for those moments where you just can’t decide. QuestGuru gives a nice quest tracker, I found something was blocking me from tracking the quests I wanted to, so having this enables me to track/untrack whichever quests I want in my log. You can also hover over the quest name in the tracker to show a mini tooltip, like that which you’d see if the quest was linked to somebody. I also use QuestHelper, sorry, I got lazy after levelling my Draenei. Used to use a combination of TomTom and Lightheaded, which I’d recommend if you don’t want to use QuestHelper, but I couldn’t be bothered to go through setting waypoints anymore. Without the mods, I make sure I have co ords on my map, and leave WowHead open in the background for easy access if the quest log becomes unhelpful, okay, I leave WowHead open anyway, it’s always useful for something.

Aside from that, after levelling quite a lot, I know where to go and how to level efficiently. I like the pick up a pile of quests, complete them all, especially combining the ones closest together (which is why I like TomTom/Questhelper so much for this) and handing them all in at once. Going back and forth all the time seems a little unnecessary to me. Also, I absolutely love the flying mount changes. Being able to fly around between quests 60-70 in Outlands, and then buy a Tome of Cold Weather Flying (Bind on Account from the Cold Weather Flying trainer, 1000g) which enables you to fly in Northrend as soon as you get there (requires level 68) just makes it a lot faster.

However, if any of these make levelling less enjoyable for you, don’t do them. Simple as. This is just the way I manage to level :)

I got my druid to 65, and then I thought I wouldn’t mind levelling my Death Knight who was 67. I can’t decide which one to level now, think a few friends would prefer the druid, but a part of me is thinking that I’m going to get bored of it, it’s taken me this long to level I know I will, also speccing resto, I don’t think I’ve lasted as a healer yet. Death Knight I know I enjoy, and I prefer the class to Ret Paladin. We’ll see ^^

Updating Mods

The most annoying thing about a new patch for me is updating my mods, I’m a complete addon-whore. Seriously. I have so many. I have about 26. Different ones for Questing, finding rares, remembering to switch tracking.., raid related mods, mods to make my UI look a bit nicer, mods for different alts such as Clique, PallyPower, RuneWatch.. And seeing as I can’t stand the updating mod scanner type software, it’s all done manually. Basically, thought I’d write about the mods I use, might find some of them useful that you might not have :)

_NPCScan: Scans the area for rares, seems to work the same way as a /tar macro so you’d need to be near the rare, but I find it very useful because I very often would miss the rares it finds.

AtlasLoot: Obvious one, lists gear, craftables, items, in easy to navigate categories.

Bagnon: Merges all of your bags and bank slots into one big block. You can see see what you have in your other characters bags/banks. You can check if you have an item in your bank even if you’re nowhere near a bank, of course, you can’t access your bank from it, but still can come in useful.

Bartender4: The first action bar frame I used to replace the standard Blizzard action bars, seeing as I know how it works, I’m quite attached to it. Fairly flexible to move bars aroudn to where you want them, have them any size, change the shapes.

Clique: A nice mod I used to use for paladin healing in TBC, keybound Holy Light, Flash of Light and Cleanse. Still fairly useful, on my shadow priest I keybound Shift-LeftClick, and Shift-RightClick to Dispel Magic and Abolish Disease, which can be configured to grid to simple click dispel, and so on.

Deadly Boss Mods: Another obvious one, prefer it to BigWigs because it tends to be much more accurate and configureable.

Fubar: Similar to Titan Panel but more personaliseable. You can download little extras to go with Fubar to show your Durability, how much gold you have serverwide and on each character, which Locations are good for which levels, and so on.

Grid: Raid Frames. Purely and simply, I use this on my hunter mostly for fast target switching for Misdirects and to see how alive a raid is, judge when it’s worth feigning, if it is. And a very good choice for healers also.

ItemRack: Configure it to make quick switches between different gear sets.

MikScrollingBattleText: A very nice looking Scrollign Combat text, can configure it to move around where it appears, the fonts to use, all sorts of things. can show you outgoing/incoming damage, incoming/outgoing heals, when certain CDs end, how much of an item you have in your bag when you loot.

MiniMapButtonFrame: I use alongside SexyMap, you can configure both so that any extra buttons will go to the Frame, leaving the minimap much tidier.

MiniPet: A button to summon a random non-combat pet.

Omen: Watch your threat.

OmniCC: Shows CDs on your action bars ticking down.

PallyPower: A necessity for paladin buffing, not so useful for hunters.

Prat: A chat mod to change the way your chat box works/looks.

Quartz: Cast bar, nice for timing volleys.

QuestHelper: Quite buggy and a huge memory sponge, but great for the questing lazies.

RatingBuster: Shows the stats relevant to your class on an item tooltip and how much of which stat you will gain/lose if you switch that item.

Recount: Damage Meters.

RuneWatch: A nice rune bar for Death Knights, can change the size, tells you if Horn of Winter isn’t up, how much runic power you have, and of course, your runes.

SexyMap: See MiniMapButtonFrame.

TB Auto-Tracker: A good mod for forgetful hunters like me, especially with herbalism/mining. Will switch to tracking humanoids etc. when you enter an instance to make use of the Improved Tracking talent. Also switches to Track Hidden in Wintergrasp and BGs.

TinyTip: Pretty much a nice looking tooltip when you mouseover people, tells their name, level, guild, class..

TomTom: Type /waypoint 80 80 (example of co ords) to add a dot on the map for a co ordinate you want to remember. Goes well with Lightheaded, especially if you don’t like QuestHelper.

XPerl: Changes the way your UnitFrames look, very nicely configureable.