The 10% Pole!

What on earth are people doing spinning on those poles?

I asked myself that a few times before jumping on myself, just for a laugh, only to find that I actually get 10% increased experience bonus!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Right click the Fire Festival pole – they should be easy to find… people are spinning around on them!

2. Stay spinning for as long as you need to, to get the 10% experience bonus for 1 hour.

3. You can check the length of time you have available at the top right of your screen, it looks like a little pair of up arrows, or a bit like a military badge.

Then level like crazy!

The other cool thing about the Fire Festival is that you’ve also got a buff on you that helps you do damage, or gives you extra stamina — great for leveling just a little faster!

So if you haven’t been out spinning on the poles, hurry! You’ve only got till July 5th!

Today my girlfriend and I reached level 49 with our two Alliance toons, a Night elf Hunter, and a Draenei Shaman. We leveled them from level 1 using Zygor’s guide and with the recruit a friend bonus active.

Not that interesting right? Well, I thought the same till I checked our /played time, and then compared it to another character of mine at level 50.

Here’s the difference:

Sorry about the huge image sizes when you click them, I just grabbed them straight from my screen… hopefully your browser will show them at a normal size anyhow…

So this is also interesting to me, because I haven’t used any leveling guides this far yet with recruit a friend active. The best I’ve done is about level 20 I think, so I didn’t have any other characters to compare to.

When you think about whether 3 days /played is good, also consider this:

1. We were using one of the best leveling guides available
2. We skipped large portions of the guides instructions as best we could (we out-leveled it VERY fast)
3. We’ve played 27 battlegrounds games as our Alliance characters
4. We’ve stopped power leveling long enough to keep our professions and skills high (ish).
5. We generally screwed around quite a lot and weren’t pushing ourselves (we’re trying to have fun here, right!?)

Here’s a few stats of PvP & Professions info to give you an idea of how much time we spent doing other non-leveling stuff.

Haelus:

• 27 battleground games
• Herbalism 267/300
• Inscription 184/225
• Fishing 139/225

Anguine:

• 10 battleground games
• Skinning 300/300
• Mining 30/75
• Fishing 148/150

Want to get the most out of recruit a friend? Maybe hit level 60, 70 or 80 faster than should be legal?

We’re doing it with Zygors leveling guide, and we think you should too!

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!