Driving a Few Alliance Toons to 85

So I can only do so much PvP before I start to get tired of it, and with the dungeon / LFR side of the game not really holding my attention either at this point, I've returned to my great love of leveling alts. I'm going to work on pushing a few of my alliance toons to 85 before MoP hits so we'll see how that goes.

The Death Knight is getting pretty close at this point. I've managed to get him to 82 and so he's starting to work his way through Deepholm. I've been doing some PvP while leveling, just because there's really no difference in the content for Alliance once you get past Grizzly Hills in Northrend - at least up until Twilight Highlands. So I'm adding some battleground love just to keep it interesting.

Once the Death Knight is done, I'll likely turn my attention to the hunter next who is sitting at level 60 and just entered Outland. I'm not sure who it will be after that, although I'm leaning towards someone that starts on the Eastern Kingdoms side since I already ran the alliance side of Kalimdor on the hunter.

It was a really strong weekend from a PvP standpoint, managing to rack up 3,000 HK's over the weekend. It's got my total on the Horde side sitting at 64,955.

Eew. Alliance. Weird.

So I did a faction change and server change on my Shadow Priest last week to move him over to Alliance to get a look at what PvP is like from the Alliance point of view. I'd been reading on the forums and hearing frustration in trade chat the Horde wasn't winning any Battlegrounds any more. I'd done some very rough calculations myself over about a two week period of time, and my winning percentage did seem to be running below 50% (although it tended to go in streaks at different times of the day).

So I thought switching to Alliance would be a nice change of pace. Besides, if things were really bad over on the Horde side, it must be non-stop joy, terrific communication and coordination and reveling in the dominance on the Alliance side, right?

So I log on to my new Human Shadow Priest and find myself in the middle of the Trade District in Stormwind. Oh Shit! Run! Hide! Oh wait.

So there are a few things that I notice right off the bat. First, that I don't know where anything is. And why are there no guards in the Trade District. Why are there guards everywhere when I'm trying to stealth in on a Horde toon, but there's not a damn guard to be found when I need directions.

So, after spending a few minutes trying to find the Hall of Legends (no, Champions...) and the various portals, and my trainer, and the reforger, I'm ready to go. On a side note, you Alliance guys probably would have been better off if Deathwing had actually leveled the place. Nothing is conveniently located, especially compared to Orgrimmar. Just saying.

I then queue for my first battleground and immediately zone into the Alliance area of Warsong Gulch. Sweet! Grab the flag and run! Oh wait. Nevermind.

So I start to wonder if there's some truth to the rumors as I win my first three battlegrounds in a row - Warsong Gulch, Isle of Conquest (yep - Horde still doesn't kill the glaives if you're playing Alliance) and Arathi Basin (woo hoo! zerg Lumber Mill!)

Then, the tide starts to turn, and my groups get rocked in Gilneas and a nasty 4 cap loss in Eye of the Storm. The another nasty Eye of the Storm loss.

So after several days of playing on the Alliance side and the Horde side, I've come to another surprising and secret conclusion. There is a mysterious third faction at play in these battlegrounds that is actually winning the majority of the battlegrounds out there!

So with that little experiment ended, I got a little tired of the PvP, so went back to leveling my actual Alliance toons. I've now managed to get my Gnome Death Knight to 77 and will be leaving Zul'Drak for Sholazar soon.

Casual Gold Making

So I've still mostly been focused on PvP for the last week or so, and almost exclusively on my warlock. He's up to 26,217 HK's, which brings my total across all ten of my toons to 61,646.

When I haven't been queueing for battlegrounds, I've mostly been spending a little bit of time focused on gold making. For me, at least so far in Cataclysm, my biggest money makers have been enchanting and jewelcrafting. I'll start my day scanning the Auction House and using TradeSkillMaster to figure out which scrolls are selling profitably. I'll then craft any that I don't already have posted, focusing primarily on those that are used on 300 level gear and better as I find those sell more dependably.

I then hop over to my Jewelcrafter and use the spreadsheet from Consortium.net to do the Ore shuffle for the day, which usually involves buying a bunch of stacks of various ore, prospecting it all, cutting rare gems, making jewelry with the uncommon or transmuting or selling some of them depending on prices. The jewelry then goes back to my warlock for disenchanting, which feeds his scroll making business.

I've also got two transmute spec'd alchemists, so every day on both of them, I'll do a quick living elements transmute. It's usually good for around 150-200g profit per day each for just a couple of minutes of work.

It's not a huge enterprise and it's never going to get me gold capped, but it keeps me at a very comfortable level of gold.

I might do a bit of PvP on the rogue as well as those seem to be wrecking things on the battlegrounds at this point.

Back to PvP

So the downside of accomplishing most of your goals far in advance of a patch is it tends to make you run out of things to do. So I'm back to PvP! I did a few battlegrounds yesterday on my warlock for the first time since 4.3 dropped in September.

I still need to do that one last Dragon Soul run on my warrior, but it's probably a couple weeks away before I really have time to get that done. He's at least geared for it now, so it shouldn't be too much trouble once I actually focus on it.

I'd capped my honor on the warlock before the end of the last season, so he was able to get a couple of pieces of the new season's gear right away.

We'll see how long it takes before I get totally frustrated with battlegrounds again.