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 :)

Right now I’ve got four toons I’m working with, plus a bank toon or two for extra storage.

I spent some time with my 21 Troll Mage since he’s got a full bar of rest experience, and finished up some quests around Crossroads yesterday. I took some time to practice the fine art of “sheeping” when I had multiple opponents, and found that kept (squishy) me alive for much longer much more reliably!

Then, today I was on my 16 Undead Priest poking around doing Xroads quests when I saw a healer on General trying to get together a Wailing Caverns group. My level 21 Troll Mage had 6 WC quests, so I hopped over to that toon (my only male toon) and joined the party with this level 21 Troll Priest, knowing it’s a good bet to join a party when there’s guaranteed to be a Priest present.

As I got my inventory cleared out and visited the Auction House to upgrade any equipment I could upgrade, a few more people joined our group coming from the LFG tool. A Blood Elf Pally and a BE Hunter. Then a few seconds later, a Warrior joined. Everyone was over level 18 and it seems like everyone was quite experienced with the whole “running an instance” thing as well. We had no problems with ninja’ing or inappropriate rolls, etc. It was great.

The five of us blew through WC with one death in the entire thing, and I levelled twice, using up all of my rest bonus experience.

I got a chance to work on the whole “sheeping” deal some more while in the dungeon. Whenever we had extra mobs being triggered, I tried to sheep them and keep them entertained. For the most part our team didn’t break sheep in purpose, and I don’t think the one guy who died could have been saved by a sheeping exercise… so I guess we did okay overall :)

Unfortunately my inventory was full when I came up to loot one of the Fang Lords and I didn’t notice it and ended up missing one gem, so I got 4 of 6 quests done and have to go back for the 99 year old stout and that one gem. Not sure if I’ll go back for that one gem or not, but the 99 year old stout might be something I can handle on my own now that I’ve levelled up to 23.

I was pleased to see that I didn’t “steal aggro” hardly at all while in the party, even when I started to cast fireball right when the warrior started wailing on the mob. Mages are known for stealing aggro and then getting themselves killed. I know the Priest healed me periodically however, so perhaps I would have died had they been a noob Priest doing their first instance :)

I don’t generally get much time to run instances, so it was nice that this one came up when I had time to do it and a toon that would get a lot of benefit out of completing the circuit. Now I’ll leave my mage to rest up. Coincidentally, I have stuff to do over the next few days, and all of my toons will be taking rests, aside from good ol’ bank toon, who rarely stops her twice-a-day full auction house scan, mailbox checks and re-listing of things to sell. :)

Today’s play started before patch 2.0.5 was released, for me. Unfortunately, I was only on early because I had been woken up by my cat, who was quite demanding in getting me out of bed, so I went back to bed after a bit of playing, and then was hit with the 2.0.5 update and the subsequent disconnects when trying to get back into the game.

I ventured over to the Official Forums (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com) and saw that everyone else and their dog was having the same problem connecting, so while I was hoping to get a few hours of play in before starting into the chores I had mentally assigned myself for the day, it didn’t work out that way.

Laundry, dishes, unpacking (new apartment)… checking periodically on the status of the game. I got about half of my self-alloted work done during this down-time, which made the day a lot easier to manage.

When I got back online, I did my standard alt-checks on various toons I had used to sell things in the Auction House with the day before, and then settled on my bank toon to let Auctioneer do a full scan. I found a beta-release update on the AuctioneerAddon.com website that corrected some recently-introduced problem with the scan (Bliz changed something, 3rd party Addon maker responds) while the game was down, and was happy to see it worked like a charm.

I set up a new Bank toon last night - an Undead, because running to UC from Deathknell is faster than running a Troll or Orc. Tauren might be okay, but they take up so much screen space… I had been using a 21 Troll Mage toon as a temporary bank character, but wanted to dust him off (my only male toon), turn him into an alchemist and burn off his rest bonus. Now I have a level 1 bank toon, loaded with bags, 5g and a whole whack of recipes to be re-sold over the next week or so.

Bank toons are great - if you haven’t set one up, all you need to do is start up a new toon and run it to a major city. Park it by the mailbox or the Auction House, and use it to Auction off things from the rest of your toons, while also keeping a look out for good equipment to send to the rest of your toons as well. One day I’ll write an entry entitled “Ode to my bank toon” :)

So, I’ve freed up my 21 Troll Mage, and I brought him out for a test drive, completing the Egg Hunt quest in The Barrens. I had dusted him off last night after setting up the bank toon and dropped the Skinning profession and trained in Alchemy, since I didn’t have an Alchemy toon going yet. I’m only up to 50 or so Alchemy so far, but I’m feeding the herbs from my 16 Undead Priest who is a Skinner and a Herbalism major.

Right at this moment I’m doing some Badlands quests with my 40 Undead Warrior, and mining iron whenever it appears. As a Blacksmith/Miner, I’ve decided to become an Armorsmith, which means I need to collect some 140 iron ore and some other various materials in order to create the bits and pieces the Armorsmith trainer calls for in order to allow me access to his recipes. Lots of work, I’ve decided to ignore it for now and just focus on mining and questing, and I know the rest will come.

I think I’ll go back to mining and questing. Pop me a note if you are a “lowbie” player, especially if you have a blog. I’d love to exchange links.