This past week has been pretty busy in The Real World, so my play time has been limited. My next three weekends are booked pretty solid as well (two out of town, including the Friday and Monday around the weekend as well), so I guess I’ll be gathering up a lot of rest bonus!

20 Undead Priest

Since I last wrote, I’ve levelled my Priest up 2 times and she’s now level 20.

43 Undead Warrior

Some quest grinding has brought my Warrior up to 43.

24 Troll Mage

Same here. Quest grinding, level up.

Professional endeavors

I realized once I got my Priest to 20 that my Mage also needed some professions work, especially in the Secondary professions area. Now that both toons could max out Cooking, Fishing and First Aid to 225, I wanted to take advantage of that for a while, while everyone regained rest bonus.

I used my 61 to farm cooking materials since the Auction House didn’t have any regular Clam Meat or Tangy Clam Meat, and also did some fishing in Tarren Mills with my 20 Priest to get some Sagefish to cook. Plowing through mid-20s murlocks in TM with my 61 Hunter was pretty fun, nevermind 2-shotting the teen-level crawlers and Wraithheads in Zoram Strand… but avoiding the spiders and bears near the river (lvl 22-25) while fishing with my 20 Priest wasn’t as fun.

20Priest and 24Mage are both up to using silk for First Aid now, but I have been funnelling my silk through the Priest for Small Silk Pack purposes, and never have any “left over” for first aid use. Ah well, my 61 and 43 can supply Mageweave bandages which all my toons are high enough level to use. :)

Auctioning Continuously

While I don’t have a lot of playing time right now, I’m still making sure I spend a few hours keeping the Auction House stocked with my regular sellables, so I’m still earning money while I’m not able to play. Sometimes I need to send some of my toons on “recipe buying excursions” to keep the stocks up with my Banking toon, but that’s nowhere near a daily thing.

I’m selling cooking recipes and Small Silk Packs predominantly, but on occasion I can get out and do some grinding/mining with my Warrior Blacksmith and I am able to create 5-10 smithed items to sell slowly over the week (+sta items mostly). Oh, and I’m selling Thick Leather Ammo Pouches and Quickdraw Quivers, too. The weekend is more lucrative for sure, but throughout the week I make a steady trickle of coin as well, so I never stop the cycle of listing items and picking up the cash or rejects from the mailbox whenever I log in.

THREE Bank Toons

So yah, I bit the bullet recently and turned my 10Pally into another bank toon, so now I have three. One does most of the generalized buying and selling of items from my play toons. The second holds mostly herbs and some low level first aid materials. The third holds potions and various “mined” components.

My theory with all of this is that I’ll make better use of potions that were created as part of the Alchemy Grind, and I’ll be able to quickly generate another batch of low level potions without spending more than mailing fees. Every time my miner and herbalism toons run across a node, I harvest the resource available whether or not I need it for levelling up. I figure if the stuff sits there for too long and is not useful, I can always auction it off.

I’m pondering turning my Pally into a Jewelcrafter since these mats are being sent her way anyway… but haven’t quite committed to that one.

Well, that’s enough writing about it. I don’t have much time to play, so I’d like to get back to it :)

61 Troll Hunter, call me Farmer

After doing another run through SFK and netting another 30g worth of “stuff”, I moved on to the Scarlet Monestary, hoping to find the recipe for Steel Weapon Chain for my blacksmith. I went through all four arms of the SM instances and while I didn’t find the recipe I had hoped for, I got a lot of equipment to auction off, and got about 120 pieces of silk for my future tailoring toon.

18 Undead Priest

I dropped Skinning on this toon, and picked up Tailoring. Now that I’m not focussing my efforts on Blacksmithing, my next goal is to allow my Priest to create Small Silk Packs.

Auction House Good Deals, Selling and Buying

Small Silk Packs are 10 slot bags which sell well (95s each) to new toons and are cheap to make because of the lack of real competition for silk in the general marketplace. While many professions use some silk, none use it excessively for a long time, so the cost of it is reasonable in the Auction House, and since there’s always new toons looking to bulk up on bag space, it’s a great little niche market if it’s not already solidly cornered on your realm.

As for buying, I lucked into some under-1g stacks of Wool cloth last night (this morning full stacks are listing for 3-4g each), so I bought up about 120 Wool cloth and mailed it on to my Priest, along with about 120 Linen cloth (which were extremely cheap, 10s per full stack), so it would be there for me today when I logged in to play.

I’m now at Tailoring 130 and able to make bolts of silk, so the silk I got from the Scarlet Monestary runs last night is now on its way to the tailoring toon. I’ll create a bunch of packs and sell them over time next weekend, and if it’s as lucrative an activity as I expect it to be, I’ll pump out a steady stream of packs even when I get no further skill advancement benefit out of doing so.

But, today there’s a lot of real life and not a lot of gaming time, so now that I’ve finished my Auction House scan and a few Censuses on Most Wanted realms, it’s time to go spend some time outside of Azeroth with friends, eating healthy food. :)

The accumulation of Rest Bonus is another motivation for me to have more than one toon going at any one time.

I picked up a new Addon today to replace my old, broken one from pre-2.0 patch. You can find XPextend here to try it out yourself. It changes your experience bars slightly to give you percentages of how much rest experience you’ve accumulated and how much experience you’ve accumulated towards your next level. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to give me any idea about how much time I need to wait in order for my rest experience to be at 100% like my old addon for rest bonus did, but beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.

18 Undead Priest

I spent all but 5% of my Priest’s rest bonus last night after my evening workout, and got myself up to 18, and trained with my new skills (one of which was New, and two of which were upgrades on existing things). I haven’t really taken much of a look at my talents yet (although of course I’ve spent the talent points), but I’ve been pondering my talent spec. I hear discipline/holy is a good route to go for a soloing-yet-instancing type, and I’ve been collecting +healing equipment now and then when I see it.

I think this weekend I’ll do my first instance with this toon, and see how the whole “healing and cleasing” thing goes. I’ll probably go into Ragefire Chasm (RFC) even though I’m a couple levels above its recommended start level (folks go in there at 12-14). I like to have confidence of strength over my opponents when I’m learning an experience. There’s plenty of chances for insane healing practice later on.

10 Blood Elf Paladin

I toyed around with her this morning and finished a couple of quests and burned off her 25% rest bonus in no time. I’m feeling happy that it takes a long time for rest bonus to build up and not long to burn it off on this toon because learning too many classes at once isn’t fun, and I’m happy to park this toon for a week and a half at a time while I learn the others.

42 Undead Warrior

I’ve spent about 150g on materials to help this toon through her 4-5 Armorcrafting quests, and thankfully they’re all done, and my toon is up to 243 blacksmithing. The “hear ye! hear ye!” shout that the Mithril Order guy did when I was admitted as an official Armorsmith was kinda neat as well, but I guess nobody was around to cheer for me… That’s what I get for playing at 9 AM on a Friday morning when most people are at work or school ;)

Now, I’m heading her back towards STV and Booty Bay area to grind on quests, but first…

61 Troll Hunter farms SFK

It’s time to restock some of my cash supplies. Since it’s the weekend, this is a great time to be selling things in the Auction House, so I decided to plow through a lowbie instance.

Shadowfang Keep has a reputation for having a bunch of low-level Bind on Equip (BoE) blues that can drop, as opposed to having a lot of Bind on Pickup (BoP) items that I’d only be able to disenchant, and not sell instead of being able to decide whether to disenchant for the shards or sell in the Auction House. Low-level is good, because people spend a lot of dough on twinking up their wee toons for PvP in the 10-19 and 20-29 brackets.

I almost wished I had an expert skinner tagging along with me, with all the wolves and the skinnable shadowfang corpses I was leaving about! This is definitely a great low level instance for those in the Skinning profession.

I still say it’s a crappy Hunter dungeon, however. Very tight quarters and tight turns mean a lowbie hunter with a wide aggro radius would have troubles being able to attack from afar without also aggroing other mobs.

Loot from Shadowfang Keep farming run

I ended up getting 4 or so blues, but they were all BoP so I disenchanted them (3 Large Glimmering Shards, 3 Vision dust, 1 Lesser Astral essence, 1 Greater Nether essence and 1 Large Brilliant Shard). Robes of Arugal even dropped, after I dropped Arugal without him blinking even once to another location in the room.

As for other items I could sell on the Auction House, I ended up with 6 BoE items (3 weapons, and 3 pieces of armor) plus a stack of Lean Wolf Flank (low level cooking mat) and nearly a full stack of both Linen and Wool cloth (the cloth I’ve kept for my alts, however).

So, I have calculated that if all of my shards and all of my BoE items sell for their buyout prices, I’ll get 25g from this run.

But wait, there’s more! I picked up about 1.5g in coins on the way through, and brought back approximatetly 1g worth of vendor trash as well. I’ll likely use up this bit of extra cash restocking arrows, however, so we’re back to this run having profitted me 25g.

Not too bad for about 50 min work (including travel time to get back to the AH and time spent listing and comparing current things for sale in AH)!