World of Warcraft Addict’s Blog

As many of you know Derek from Derek’s Gold Mastery Guide has created a new WoW speed leveling guide to help players level to 70 in about 6 days.  With all the buzz around this guide I figured it would be worth it to my visitors for me to review it so you will know what you will be getting into if/when you decide to purchase this guide.

The most impressing point about Derek’s Speed Leveling Guide is the fact that the guide is completely in-game so you won’t get annoyed by having to alt+tab in and out of the game.  (Don’t know if that annoys the crap outta you but it really does me.)  The guide itself is an addon that Derek had a team of programmers to make.  It really is extremely simple to use and breaks down everything in a step-by-step fashion as well as the ability to mark the steps complete or even hide some of them if needed.  Not only does it do that, it also saves your toon’s progress as well.  Very handy especially if you are leveling more than 1 toon to 70.  I know in the past using the other “alt+tab” guides after a week of not playing my leveling toon I would completely forget where I was and would have to spend valuable leveling time just finding my spot in the guide, talk about another very annoying thing.

There also is a notes section of the in-game speed leveling guide which gives coordinates of some valuable NPC quest givers and turn-ins.  The only thing that I have found that would help make this guide even better is possibly the ability to have coordinates and/or arrows that point out mob locations.  Derek said that this guide will be updated a lot so his team of programmers might already be doing this, but anyway that is my only complaint about this great guide.

Overall this guide is a great addition to my toon leveling and I don’t see myself using any of the other leveling guides out there again.  This one is just so easy to use and is always right there in the game where it is needed the most.  If you haven’t checked it out yet I highly recommend you take the time to check it out.

Derek’s Speed Leveling Guide

Yes, I know.  We have all read tons and tons of blog posts that explores the casual vs hardcore player before.  I’m going to look at it a bit differently for this post.  The question that I have in my mind right now is when does a WoW player decide to go from casual to hardcore?

This has really hit home to me this past weekend as I feel I am to a point where I could cross the line (once again) to go from casual player to hardcore.  I have been getting more and more raid time in my guild and I’m just starting to realize how much more time I will have to put in to be able to perform at 110% for raids.  Not only that but I am also chasing after a 2000 rating in the arena on my 2v2 team.

Farming honor for more arena gear, doing arenas, farming gold to respec back and forth from PvE build to PvP, farming gold for item repairs, along with farming mats for buff food and flasks for raids, and then raiding are all of the tasks that I will have to chase after each and every week if I want to compete with the top raiders in my guild and the top arena teams on my battlegroup.  It was up until today that I just kinda made the slide to hardcore player without even realizing what I was doing.  I have since slid back to reality.

Do most hardcore players just slide into being hardcore and consider themselves to still be casual players?

Deep thoughts, I know.  I think that is the way it really happens to most hardcore players is that they become hardcore “accidentally” while trying to keep up with the top players.  You really have to if you want to really be competitive is this game.

If I still want to maintain being a casual player (around 20 hours a week) I am going to have to decide to drop my raiding to zero that way I can still be competitive in the arenas or I will have to plan out every hour I spend to complete certain tasks.  Isn’t that the point where it becomes like a job?

Anyway, I would be glad to here what some of you have done in order to limit play time down but yet still find time to raid and do arenas.

So much news going on around Blizzard this month. I know I am no where near the first or last blogger to blog about this merger between Activision and Blizzard. I really had to take some time to get my head around this merger.

Of course, everyone is like it’s no big deal…nothing will change. I really don’t believe that at all because nothing can’t stay the same forever and anytime you put two companies together changes are going to happen. The good, the bad, and the ugly will happen from this. I might be overreacting a little bit which I hope I am. When I first read the news I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, you know that feeling that happens right before you are in a car accident…yeah, that kind of feeling.

I’ve been playing (addicted) to Blizzard games since the good old Warcraft 2 days and haven’t stopped since. Some say that’s good, others say that’s bad but that’s for a different post. I just feel like the end of a great era of Blizzard is coming, who knows. I just don’t see this merger as good…what do you think?

If you have ever had one of your blogs go down and lost all it’s data you know how much it sucks.  Luckily, I was able to go back and find some of my old posts and re-add them to the blog now.  I believe I got most of them back into action now.  Here’s the moral of the story:  Remember to make blog backups often!

There I said it!    Anyway, I was able to get the posts back but in order to get the comments back I would have to add those back one by one which isn’t going to happen.  Way too many comments to do that with!  The bad part of that is this blog looks like a ghost town with zero comments.  Oh well… I’m just glad that I’m back up and running.  Possibly will even start blogging more than before as well.

I have been experimenting with different ways to create WoW gold with the Auction House and either I am extremely slow or smart.  It’s pretty sad that I don’t really know which one just yet. (No, this is NOT an open invitation to flame me if you think I’m slow.  )

Anyway, I just setup a single person guild so I could use the guild bank.  I am always running out of room on my bank toon and this really has helped out with space a whole lot.  It did take some work getting some signatures for the guild but, hey it was worth every penny.

I had tons and tons of cloth like most people and not really knowing what I should do with it except it is a must sell to make more room (sometimes I feel like a pack rat).  After investigating the cloth market in the AH and running a few numbers I realized that turning the cloth into heavy bandages really was the way to go.  I could sell each piece of cloth for AH prices but without the AH fee or worrying about it not selling.

Next, obviously, I took it to the next level and realized how dumb some people are. I found tons of auctions running that were being sold way cheap and I could actually buy out the auction turn the cloth into bandages and sell them to a vendor for a profit.

This should give you a warning to make sure that the AH price you are selling stuff for isn’t less than what the vendor would give you.  Also, if you are farming cloth it might be easier and more profitable to turn it into bandages and sell it.

Hey everyone,

It has been a few weeks (maybe longer), but we are now officially back up and running!  The only bad part about this whole thing is the fact that the database that held all my previous World of Warcraft posts was deleted.  So in a way, we are back starting at the beginning.  I’m going to see if at all possible I can find rough drafts of my posts on my computer.

Anyway, World of Warcraft Addict’s Blog is back in action! 

During my usual couple hour long internet search for the newest and greatest things to do with World of Warcraft I have actually came across a couple of extremely helpful WoW sites.  Both of these sites are great and will give you awesome tips that can and will help out your gold making abilities and can help prepare you for the next raid boss your guild is getting ready to go after.

First, i’ll talk a little bit about BossKillers.com .  This site really just has strategies and tips to use for fighting different raid bosses and can really help out your first time to fight a certain WoW raid boss.  This site gives a text guide, a video guide, offers tons of links to other strat guides that can be useful when fighting a certain boss.  This site really is a must use if you are a guild leader, that is for sure.

Their own guide covers each phase of the fight, specific class roles during each fight, recommended buffs, and even shows specific player placements during the fight.  Not to mention they are looking for people to write guides for them for certain fights and are paying from $75 - $100 per guide.  The bad part about that is they only have 3 bosses left to get guides for until the new dungeons come out.

The design of the site seems to bother me a bit, but that no means says that I have a good design with this blog.   It really seems cluttered up a little bit and there really is a lot to choose from when trying to decide on what to click.  For you that don’t like all the advertisements on other sites I counted only 2 places on this site that has ads on it and they are small and out of the way.

Overall, it is very well put together.

The other can’t live without site is WoWEcon.com .  This site collects auction house data by using an addon and reports the information back to their website.  You can then check on the price of items through all the different servers and even see which days and times of day items sell for the most.  It really is a great addition and helps a lot when you are trying to buy low and sell high on the auction house.

You can access all that information for free but they do offer a premium account so you can get more reports, in-game tools, email as well as cell phone text reports if you wish.  The good part is the premium is only $3.33 a month which is really just a drop in the bucket for something like this that can make you tons of in-game gold.

The only part about this is whenever I was checking on my server there really wasn’t a whole lot of data just yet since a lot of people on my server hasn’t downloaded the addon yet.  I would like to see more data for my server but I bet if this really takes off huge then that will not be a problem…..just look at Allakhazam and Thottbot which both use data from players that use an addon to retrieve it.

Anyway, those are 2 sites that I have found to be very valuable to your everyday play time and can help out tremedously with more gold and less raid wipes!    If you know of any other sites that are really cool and helpful like that please let me know.

NOTE TO GOLD SELLERS AND COMMENT SPAMMERS:  Oh and please don’t post spam links to your gold sites, they will not show up here, we want actually useful sites!

Hey guys and gals! Long time since I did my last post and a whole lot has happened since then as well.

Great news for all you WoW addicts out there, the new expansion World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is well on it’s way! Now we all have a great reason to keep on playing (as if we really needed it)!

The expansion will bring a whole lot of new stuff into the game such as the first hero class, Death Knight. From what I understand about this once you hit level 80 you will be able to do a quest (about as hard as the warlock epic mount quest) in order to unlock the hero class. Once it is unlocked you can make Death Knight characters from your account which will start at a high level of experience. Not really sure if it will start at 60, 70, or even 80….i’m just glad I won’t have to start over from the beginning with a level 1 Death Knight! The bad part is I already have hit my character limit on my server and i’ll have to delete one of my alts in order to make room for the Death Knight. Oh well, prolly wasn’t ever going to play that level 5 mage again anyway!

Other great things about the expansion includes the new siege weapons in battlegrounds which will allow you to destroy buildings! That will really be cool as i’ve always thought that was something that was missing from the PvP battlegrounds experience. New hairstyles, dances, new monsters, weapons, items, and tons of more things are being worked on as we speak. Blizzard still hasn’t released a release date yet but many places are estimating it will be released either at the end of May 2008 or even November 2008. Either way, we still have a while before beginning the grind to level 80 so it is still safe to raid and enjoy all the gear before replacing it with green items again!