Getting gold is an integral part of World of Warcraft, and not just for getting cool gear, but for leveling fast, too.

In fact, if you use any of the fast leveling guides I suggest here on this site, its very possible you’ve found yourself out leveling your bank account, and out leveling your profession skill levels.

This can have some nasty side effects, such as:

• Not being able to afford good gear,
• Being unable to gather in zones because your skills won’t let you skin/mine/pick herbs,
• Not being able to afford a mount at level 30 or level 60, and in bad cases
• Not being able to afford skills as you level up (recruit a friend is notorious for this).

So yes, leveling fast can have some side effects.

Most of these side effects thankfully are covered by one of two things; either you have high level alts that can supply gold to your new characters, or, you find out how to make more gold yourself.

And that’s exactly what I intend to help you do – work out some easy ways to make more gold in WoW to support your leveling speeds.

I’m no expert, but I’m going to share the good items I’ve found sell well, and some ideas on using the auction house well!

In the mean time, if you need expert help now on how to cover all of your bases when it comes to leveling fast, check out Dave “Dugi” Farrel’s Ultimate WoW Guide.

Its called Ultimate because it covers the fast leveling requirements — leveling fast with an in-game guide, keeping your bank account up to spec, and the fastest and cheapest way to keep your professions maxed.

Recruit a Friend Plus Zygor’s Leveling Guide – Recorded With Screenshots

The last post I did was a quicky on how fast it took me to go from level 1 to level 7 with a Blood elf rogue I started with my girlfriend.

We went through the first levels pretty quickly, but I thought we’d start a pair of gnomes just for the hilarity value, and to see how fast we’d go in another area.

So the difference this time is that we’re starting in an old world location (the first pair we leveled were both blood elves), and we’re going pretty fast, but especially towards the “later” levels, we slowed down a lot to ensure that we picked up enough herbs and ore.

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion after leveling this pair that leveling is slower in the “old” World of Warcraft zones. I can’t prove it, but it just felt slower, and I think if you look at my level 8 /played time, and compare it with my Rogue’s level 7 /played time you’ll agree something is different here!

I strongly recommend that if you want to level a toons professions while doing recruit a friend that you dedicate a bit of time to stopping and making sure your skill levels are on par with your toon’s level!

So here’s a bunch of screens with /played times all the way up to level 19 where we’re at now.

We used Zygor’s leveling guide the whole way through. Some quick advice if you use his guide (or any guide for that matter) – since you’re getting triple experience, SKIP the quests that ask you to collect loot dropped from monsters IF that quest isn’t part of a chain of quests (those quests give off nice exp and loot!).

The reasoning is that with two of you playing, it can be really hard to collect all those drops efficiently — the best efficiency comes from “kill quests”. Kill 8 boars and 10 bears for example.

Here’s our progress anyway- and remember, if you’re dedicated and don’t want to do PvP or keep profession skills up, you could do faster than this by a long shot, I’m sure!

Click the links to get a full screen shot with /played time, but we ended up doing 19 levels in 15 hours – pretty darn good for some very casual gaming.

Level 4

Level 6

Level 7

Level 8

Level 10

Level 12

Level 13

Level 16

Level 17

Level 18

Level 19

The other day I posted about how you should try and get your girl or boy friend involved in WoW, but just recently I did just that – I’ve used the recruit a friend program to play with my girlfriend in WoW.

I figured since we’re going to be in WoW a lot together I should let everyone know what leveling speeds we’re getting (its ridiculous). But I didn’t want to do just that, I wanted to let more ambitious players know what speeds we’re getting with a leveling guide by John “Zygor” Cook.

I’m a fan of Zygor’s guides because they’re very easy to use, and if you want to know exactly where to go they can save you a lot of time. This is a bit of a special circumstance though, in that we’re earning 300% over what a normal use of one of these guides would have you doing.

Level 1 to 7 Recruit a Friend x Zygor Results:

First up, I sorta came up with this idea AFTER we had done it… so I hadn’t exactly been going power level style without stopping – I’d just been gaming with my girlfriend casually, and then spent a while milling around with her choosing professions.

Here’s the screen shot I took 15 odd minutes into level 7 – click the image to see a bigger version.

Level 1 to 7 /played

As you can see from the screen here, it took me 49 minutes 27 seconds, and thats with at least 10 minutes of stuffing around with professions. We never “power gamed” our way through the levels, but the 300% bonus is CRAZY.

We were turning in quests that usually give 1300 exp at level 7 and getting 4000 exp and more.

One time we were told by the guide to go turn in 3 quests, we went back to town and leveled twice just from the 3 or 4 quests we had built up.

The problem with using a leveling guide for this kind of stuff is that you out level the guide SUPER fast… but on the other hand, constantly turning in green quests doesn’t seem to matter so much, because at triple experience you’re still getting awesome rewards.

My other half leveled up to ten the other day without me, so I had to catch up by dragging “myslave” (an alt I’m using for recruit a friend leveling) around with auto follow set. We’ve now just gone and skipped Zygor’s guide forward 10 or so steps, and are just picking up quests that aren’t parts of chains. Doing that is still netting us tons of exp.

More updates soon, but I hope we can get to 30 in a few weeks of casual game time.

Of course, if you had someone who was a high level to take you through dungeons, I imagine you could pull some truly crazy times with level gifting and the 300% exp bonus.

Dugi from Ultimate WoW Guide actually sells some info on how to do that which comes free with his leveling guide – only thing is you need a level 80 already to use it, and he claims to be able to level 2 characters to 60 in 1 day /played. More info here (just scroll down to the first box with a light yellow background).

Stop back soon and see how we go with our recruit a friend leveling!

Don’t you hate that feeling when you’re playing games, and your other half is watching tv?

You’re in one half of the house, they’re in the other, you’re not talking, and you feel like you should be?

I hate it, and some of you probably have partners who constantly nag at you or make you feel bad for playing games without them.

If you do, you might try what I did, and recruit your girlfriend to play with you.

How are you going to do that? Since your girl probably “hates” (thats too strong a word I’m sure) WoW, and thinks computer games are for nerds?

Here’s my slightly tongue in cheek step by step program for getting your girlfriend (or boyfriend for you lasses out there) into WoW:

Step 1: Lets set a debuff of sorts in play before we do anything. This “debuff” is spending a little more time with that person to start with. Stop playing 24 hours a day and spend some more time with them. This way they’ll be happier with you, and less hostile towards the game. Its probably plain good sense to do this anyway, right?

Step 2: Do your share of the house work, and WHATEVER you do, don’t play games while your other half cleans the house or does something else boring. This is common sense, but us WoW addicts are really good at seeing through common sense ideas.

Step 3: Here’s where you really start. Ask your other half’s opinion on a new character you’re thinking of starting. If you have a girlfriend, tell them you’re toying with the idea of starting a female class just for something different/or because you’re tired of looking at a man’s ass all day while you play.

Make sure if you’re Horde, you’re looking at Blood Elf females. Nothing else. I know my girlfriend thinks Troll females, Orc females and Tauren females just aren’t pretty enough… and I’d wager its the same with a lot of the girls out there.

If you’re Alliance, you’re probably best off with Humans, Night elves or Draenei.

Step 4: Step through a few random combinations, and ask them what they think looks good. Go through all the hair combos, face changes, etc and see if you’re getting a good reaction. If your other half seems to be reacting well and likes the idea of creating a virtual ass-kicking vixen, just ask them right on the spot if they wanna start a character of their own… but lets put a spin on it. Its a truthful spin, by the way.

Step 5: Here’s the spin. You don’t just go, “hey why don’t you start a character, it’d be fun”. See if you can sell your partner on the fact that you can enjoy the game together. You’d start a new character, she’d create a new character, and you’d explore the world together.

It might sound a little demeaning or wrong to say this, but chicks like finding pretty new outfits for their toons, and us guys like finding outfits that make us look ugly, bad ass, and makes us stomp our competition. This is a gross simplification, but you might find if you can just get your other half to have a go with you, then they’d enjoy this aspect of the game.

Step 6: Tell them it’ll be free, too. You can use the recruit a friend program (just go to worldofwarcraft.com) and play together for 10 days for free, and he or she can see if they’ll like it. Tell them again that it’ll be fun to have a bit of light hearted gaming time together, you know a friend that plays with his girlfriend, and they have a great time sharing something in common (its true, you know me! .

Step 7: Other selling points you can use include, IF they like it, its only 15 odd dollars a month. That’s the price of a movie with about 100 times more entertainment and play time attached. 2 hours vs… what? 30 hours? It gets you away from all the negativity on the television. News and current affairs shows are just all horrid news these days, right? Even a year ago when things were rosy, it was still hideous to watch. These days its just unbearable. Despite the together time you get, your other half might actually really, REALLY enjoy it! They might put aside any preconceptions and negative feelings they have, give it ago and get hooked and love it. You never know.

Step 8: Do other things together too, otherwise all your hard work will be wasted.

Go outside, go for walks, go to movies now and again, and see friends.

If you just play WoW together and nothing else, you’ll probably end up losing your WoWing partner who recognises easier than you that you’ve become semi-recluses!

Good luck and if you’ve got any success stories of getting your game on with your other half, I’d love to hear it!