How Many Mains?

The question that plagues everyone! How many characters should you level up to 70 in an never ending quest to get more shit? Well really has to do with how much time you have for playing the game. You should never spend to much time in the game because real life is always more important then a video game. Also you have to ask yourself if you rather be playing a level 19 or 29 Twink. Unlike at level 70 ,where the best gear is always going to be something you are working for, at level 19 you are able to collect items before you become level 19 and you KNOW that those are the best items you could possibly have. No new season of arena gear will come out, no new raid instance will happen... those items are going to be the best for a long time. When you look at level 70s though you have alot of open ended questions that all lead back to "why are you doing this?" If you just simply want to get ready for the wrath of the lich king. Then level up all your characters to level 70 and get your crafting/gathering skills maxed and don't bother with reputation or epics. However, if you want to run around in raids and collect rare items then perhaps you will only be able to play one character. I will tell you that until you get your 3-4 main characters to level 55 in order to max the crafting and gathering skills you will be missing out(especially when WotLK comes out). So just think about what it is you really want and do that. Some people can't stomach leveling up one character in the exact same way they just leveled 2 characters that week. Some people just want one character to play the whole game. Find out what it is you want and hopefully you will be one of those players that has at least a few maxed out level characters before WotLK comes out. (I say that because many players felt cheated that players that showed up to outlands basically nude got the same gear as full epic characters by level 70)

New Characters

You have to pick two gathering professions until you hit 40 in order to pay for your mount. You may also continue gathering professions past this in order to gain gold which will be required for flying mount in outlands which will also be a fair cost to you. The daily quest will however give you a reliable way of gainning gold at 70 so you might wish to instead at 40 pick a crafting profession. Enchanting and Engineering are extremely expensive professions and should be avoided by new players. The main 3 gathering professions are mining/herb/skinning. Skinning and Mining require you to devote one bag space to a tool (mining pick/skinning knife). Skinning is considered to take up the least bank space and is the easiest to level. Skinning also gives a few more advantages by making monster respawn faster and "Clearing the death" from the area you are leveling up in. Herb and mining are quite easy to level but you must make sure to use your mini-map to find the herbs/nodes while questing. Mining requires that you find a new node every time to gain one skill point practically (smelting can increase your skill points greatly but only in some ranges). Herbs are more common then nodes and faster because you gain many herbs in one use where as the miner must use the node many times. Herbs would be considered the most bag space requiring profession. Some quest require a miner to complete. Some quest require you to be a herbalist. Thats pretty much everything I can tell you about gathering professions in order for you to pick 2 of those 3. Check AH prices if you want to get an idea of how much you can expect to be selling things for. All races will have a shipment quest at level 10 to perform however most people will miss this quest if they follow the guide. You must learn your skills at that time and I would suggest that you take the time after arriving at your first town (generally lvl 6) to learn the skills you wish to have as you will be close to the city.

Leather working, tailoring, and blacksmithing crafted armor is generally easier to replace then it is to craft. Because of that reason, I would not suggest taking any of those professions for crafting your armor. However, when you hit 70 and are able to craft some items that are fantastic and last quite a while you may reconsider. Remember what you are looking for and that in PvP the crafted items have no resilience and in PvE they are replaced after clearing a few raid locations. The patterns that are going to be payed well for in leather working, tailoring and blacksmithing are rare or hard to get patterns. Those require guild progression to certain raid areas or have exalted faction requirements for the pattern. Which leads us to the next major problem to face you... How many mains?

Picking Factions

Many people pick a faction because of people they know that play the game. One faction will not be able to interact with another faction so for most the faction they pick to play is the same faction their friend picked to play. If you don't have a friend to play WoW with then don't play WoW. I am serious. Go Get A Friend. (AKA GGAF from now on)


First things first. You are going to have to put in some time and figure out what it is you THINK you want to at level 70. This involves picking a race, a class, 2 professions and talent build(which more or less can be based on what abilities you like to use while playing the class until you hit 15 or so). Most of these things are small changed that don't matter in the long run because skill with the talents you are given will enable you to be effective even if your not "teh bestest". That being said here are some of the best combinations of class/race and a short explaination why.

Orc gives a nice 15% Stun resist, +to spell damage and melle damage but a Horrible 15 seconds (3 min CD), +5% Pet damage for warlock/hunter), and finally +5 skill with axes.
Troll gives 10% HP regen while in combat and out, 10-30% spell and melle haste (depending on current life value), +5% damage vs beast, +1% crit with ranged (bow/thrown).
Undead gives Cannibalize (eat Humanoid/Undead corpse for 35% life), and WotF (Breaks Fear/Charm/Sleep and immune for 5 sec)
Tauren gives Warstomp(0.5 CT for 2 sec stun 5 target max), and +5% max HP(Maybe one second extra life)
Blood Elf gives Mana Tap (-50 mana + Level to enemey) for buff up to 3 times. 30 sec cooldown, Arcane Torrent 8 yards AOE silence (2 sec) you gain 10 energy or (5 + Level) mana for each charge of Mana Tap.

Special Priest Only Racial
http://www.wowwiki.com/Priest_racial_abilities

Warrior
Orc warrior with talents can get 30% resist to stuns. Two handed axe with bloodfury makes a large dent on people.
UD warrior is fear immune and can eat corpses to regen life.

Priest
Trolls gain great PvP racials (UD gives better DoTs).
BEs can gain a great deal of mana in a boss fight during raid.

Warlock
UD warlock. Life tap and eat corpses for grinding, WotF

Paladin
Blood Elf. Yeargh!

Druid
Tauren. Yarrgh!

Mage
BE will add to countering spells and slightly add some mana flexiblity for raids.
UD Wotf.... adds another break for PvP
Troll 10-30% spell haste combined with the new frost talent makes the PeW PeW!

Hunter
Orc +5% pet damage. Nice for BeastMasters!
Tauren warstomp can be some what useful in PvP.
Troll spell haste can be useful for aim shoot and used to be very useful with ment pet (formally a channled spell).
Basically Troll for minor marksman buff Orc for minor Beastmaster buff.

Shaman
Orc useful racials for melle. (Won't get you in raids but PvPs well)
Tauren can warstomp then self heal.
Troll spell hasting then self healing.

Rogue
Orc gives 2 fairly useful racials.
UD gives WotF which is great for breaking fear/charm/sleep in order to get back to stunning.
BE gives a 2 sec silence and 10 energy every 3 min (meh).
Troll haste combined with slice and dice is effective for raid DPS.

Quick Best List
PvPlayer PvEnviorment
Orc Warrior
Troll Priest BE Priest
UD Warlock
BE Paladin
Tauren Druid
Troll/UD Mage BE Mage
Orc Hunter
Orc Shaman Troll Shaman
UD Rogue Troll Rogue

As for alliance. To Be Continued

Patterns

So you say that you need some more money? Not much but just a profit of many 2-3 gold that requires no effort on your part? Well vendor sold patterns can do JUST THAT!
Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Engineering, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking, and Tailoring all have patterns scattered around the world that you can get a character to and just log off at an inn nearby and keep buying patterns from. This strategy is also effective for those of you that wish to purchase "books" used to increase the skill cap for Cooking, First Aid, and Fishing. These are not on a timer and may be purchased by one character for all your characters by using the mail system.

Short post today but the idea can net you some extra gold. =)

Tailoring & Enchanting Combination

As I stated before if you are running many characters as once (using the Talents I posted as well) you should not only have a rouge with (Dis)Enchanting but a caster with tailoring as well (I picked Priest). However you might have chosen another path by giving one character both enchanting and mining (limiting the amount you can mine while leveling but allowing for a slightly less complicated time with the mail).

The basic idea is to use the most of your time. We want to make a great profit as well so lets focus on this one aspect to better understand what will be making the best use of our time while leveling our characters. Lets use a very conservative rate of 4 characters gaining 100 linen before they start only gaining wool.
400 linen=200 Bolts=66 Brown Linen Robe=80 Strange Dust& 20 Lesser Magic Essence
So you just changed roughly 4 gold of linen into 12 gold of enchanter material. (300%)

The great thing is that you level to 60 enchanting by disenchanting. As well you can buy cheap linen from the AH (roughly 6 silver a robe) and disenchant it(roughly 19 silver) for a 3 times profit. This does require a good amount of time crafting but the time it requires can be used to say... watch Comedy Central, chat, or even make a post. ;-)

Wool
Using the same 400 amount as before...
400Wool=133Bolts=44 Gloves=83 Strange Dust& 13 Greater Magic Essence AND a small chance to get Small Glimmering Shard
So roughly 40 gold of wool into 27 gold of enchanting materials
Every 90 silver of wool will net you 60 silver of enchanting material.(-33%)

Enchanting
After hitting 60 by disenchanting level up your enchanting and if you need an enchanting guide here is one as well. I like to use some different enchants to level based on what materials I have on hand.

1 major reason to level up enchanting has historically been that people will pay for you to add a glow to their weapon. Results may vary but n00bs normally pay a good amount for useless enchants. I bought the Minor Beast slaying (90 enchanting req) for 3 gold on Jan-3-08. The enchant can net from 2-3 gold but the more important thing is that the enchant gives you a skill up! *remember most the enchanting leveling will be casting the same spell on your own items eating your profits*

The most effective conversion of silk into an item is Azure Silk Cloak.
The pattern can be purchased from a vender on both alliance and horde side.
Using 400 again.. 400 Silk=100 Bolts=33 Cloaks= 89Soul Dust& 10Lesser Mystic& 2 Glowing Shard

Costing roughly 40 silver in silk to give 1.2 gold in enchanting materials. (300%)
A second run of these numbers as they stand puts our 400 silk at 4 silver a silk= 16 gold. The enchanting materials gave roughly 56 gold at the time of re-editing this. Both days I have tried this the profit margin is near 300%

After learning White bandit mask we can move on to mageweave
400 Mageweave=80 Bolts=80 mask=212 dust & 22 essence & 3 shard
160 gold= 215 g

The Con to this is that the more people that understand the endless amount of cash you can get from this the more people buying the cloth and raising the price. (Something I believe people only Auctioning the cloths would low) This much like all the other choices you have in the auction house is only limited by the lack of knowledge and just plain lazy or stupid people. The other con is you lose money in the wool stage and the time it takes to get the pattern for your tailor.

Reformating

This page is saved for reforming... Also its my lazy way of not updating today

Time is Money, Friend.

Sure we here this from the goblins all the time but was does this mean to us, The World of Wacraft player?

Every moment you spend in game down to the second can be classified as a gain or loss of in game money. In fact this is exactly like real life; except, you have much less in game cost like rent and more in game cost like new clothing. But even with an understand that everything gains money or losses money the game can be confusing... say you just spent 25 gold on a Pattern... lets name the pattern http://thottbot.com/i6661 and at the time you though MAN THIS IS GREAT I can resell for 40 gold... then 7 more post came up at 15 gold each the next day. (This happened to me when I re-rolled Horde from Alliance) Well you could resell that and you would have a loss of 10 gold or you could keep it and use it netting a loss of less (or a gain if your fish sell). The purchasing of items and selling of items only requires a small amount of time. The collecting of raw material or "faction items" requires not only you to of a high level (to see great gains) but for you to invest a great deal of time farming those materials. Depending on your server and character can determine which is the best. I will say that "faction items", raw materials, and high level items gain huge amounts of money when expansions are opened because of the imbalance of supply to demand. I will also say this... Never Never Never buy a single weapon/armor from AH. Go online and check for all the quest for an instance then run that instance till you get all the quest done... then move to the next one. After a full blue set you can focus on quest... hell you can just focus on quest that are your level or low and not have to even instance if you want... I do find that instances are much easier as an experienced player can make a macro to assist (or heal) the main tank and just watch T.V. If you are the rare tank player then you might be able to use some aoe spells and state "if you are not assisting I am not tanking." But the most important thing I can say about playing a character to 70 is to make many characters at once. When you get full reseted exp you can level two times while doing quest before your rested exp is all used. This coupled with the ability to send massive amounts of raw materials to your other characters will easily give you a huge edge on today's playing field. Say you have 5 characters that are leveling from 14-16 this week and every character that levels from 14-16 will gain 100 linen... well thats 500 linen you can send to your tailoring and then THAT is 167 Brown Linen Thinger and THAT is 200 Pixxy Dust and 50 Lesser Magic Essence. As you can see you just made yourself powerlevel enchanting from 1 to 60 only on disenchants and then with your 200 dust and 50 Lesser Magic you can easily get up to 125 enchanting! (In fact 150 enchanting would be a more realistic expectation and 150 enchanting can disenchant up to level 40 items!)

If you level up 4-5 characters at once make sure you pick characters that differ greatly. My suggestions are

Frost Mage (All Frost then arcane) With Mining and Herb (Perhaps your server will pay more for skinning the herb--- sure as heck easier to level *Skin in BM*)
At level 46 my record for AOEing equal or higher level monster is 14 mobs at once at the pirate ships in tarnis during Xmas event. =)
P.S. Talents changing soon =)
You meat and potatoes kind of build. Get a kill quest finish it in 3 pulls. Frost nova an mobs away from a node then mine/herb it for the skill increase. Good money and good items... quick also!

A Healing Priest (Mix both branches while you level) With tailoring and Mining (Mining is needed for Engineering, Gem crafting and Blacksmithing so there is normally a good demand).
Also being a healer you are normally in good demand for instances as well and can generally get messages while sitting in town for groups. BlackFathom Deeps is a MUST for the omgwtflawlpwnwand
The choice of Tailoring and Mining is for two different reasons. Tailoring will enable you to trade the large amounts of spare cloth in for AH goodies like disenchantable items, bags, and BoP cloth items. The mining just goes to promote the cash flow. During The Lich King Drop mining after 2 months and pick up inscription OR read the tester forums in order to know what you need to level to the highest inscription level you can (375?) and collect all the needed items BEFORE Lich king in order to be THAT MUCH RARER as one of the FIRST inscribers on your server. (Inscription will most likely need rep grinding and instance grinding in order to collect rarer patterns much like most professions excluding engineering and gathering professions)
After seeing a paladin attack 8 mobs and live even after 4 more mobs where added because of runners and he wasn't even low on mana or life (much less used his divine shield or lay of hands) I have to suggest them as the next character you make Tankadin. *Note this is based on character Aonite of blackrock I solid choice of professions for this lad would be Mining and Gem Cutting. Recently if you had and Gem cutter and an alchemist you stood to make thousands upon thousands of gold by cutting gems for the New Seasons' arena gear AND the first season to be open to non-arena PvP players (casuals). Even just the profession of cutting gems from AH for profit was well rewarded... however this requires a good deal of FACTION GRINDING AND INSTANCE RUNNING in order to get all the rare aka money making gem cuts. Once you have those cuts however you are able to prospect ores from AH and then cut and resell for profit.

This one is very... interesting
Stealth Rogue With (Dis)Enchanting and Engineering (All Combat then stealth)
The reasoning behind this is the rogue is able to stealth to chest and has many abilities to get himself out of trouble... the engineering helps him with AOE stunning bombs a belt that makes him invis and many many other tricks that add greatly to his ability to get to that impossible to reach chest. The enchanting is more for the ability to "shard" BoP items that drop from end game chest. Recently Blizzard has taken many steps to stop this VERY profitable enterprise by not only making chest un-lootable in combat but by taking away many of the chest that rogues used to reset instances and visit over and over and over. Also the ability to reset instances has been changed as well. Perhaps this combination is now outdated but if blizzard has taught me anything it is that new content is the same as old. So in the lich king there may be many chest to ninja ^.^ The change to unlootable in combat will however greatly effect the ability of this. Worse case... you have to fight some gaurds at a chest before you can loot 2-3 greens ever single time you go to the place... not that bad if you ask me ;-) However the disenchanting also has another effect that you can use to your advantage and this is the ability to buy items from AH very cheap and disenchant them in order to sell the material. In essence you are paying many people silver or gold in order to sell the material and make more silver or gold then you pay them for (or enchant if you want to try that *waste of time most times since people "WTS XXX FREE Your mats"*). That strat is how places like McDonalds spread world wide.... so might be a good one?

A GREAT fifth character to make would have to be the warlock With Herb and alchemy. I have heard from a class mate that he makes a good deal of money by targeting monsters that you "herb skin" in order to collect rarer herbs that drop in the area. In TBC there are many places to not only farm monsters for herbs but in order to mine the corpse as well. If this continues in WotLK is questionable since Blizz has not been very big on mining or herb skinning in the past. With that talent build it is quite easy to grind continuously never stopping to even drink. Here are some tips on how to play a warlock.

After playing one for 3 years I would NOT suggest druid because while you might be able to heal or damage or tank you do NOT get all the nice spells and talents that other classes do. You pretty much fail at everything end game.

Speaking of falling short end-game Paladins and Shamans are fantastic to level up to 70 but once you are 70 you tend to get bunched up in one of two places... Pressing the same button a billion times in raids or playing PvP and getting cheap fast epics. Because of this I would Highly recommend one of these classes for an Alt. Paladins are very good raid healers and Shamans are very good PvPers. (And they both do everything amazingly well at lower levels) A good profession for one of these would be Alchemy and Herbalism. The reason is you can quickly produce yourself gold in moments by buying any needed primals and crafting a Primal might then go and PvP in order to gain epics. Very good casual player strat.

Numismatics--- Time is money as well ;-)
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