The Barbershops in Wrath of the Lich King

Had a chance to check out the barbershops yet? It's a nice place for a little touch-up:

World of Warcraft: Wotlk - Character customization

Horde and Alliance Working Together? Noooo!

Check it out. This movie is from the end of a series of quests in the Dragonblight region of Northrend. Horde and Alliance put aside their differences, but the Forsaken have other thoughts on the subject. By the way, it's pretty damn cool.

Go here to see it on the Bliz site.

Zygor's 1-80 in-game Leveling Guides

Zygor's Guides are totally in-game leveling guides for Horde and Alliance. No switching from game to website or document, no switching back and forth from game to map, just fast leveling with no distractions.

Included with Zygor's guide is an automated waypoint system, TomTom. What this means is that everytime you finish a quest not only does the guide itself update, but the waypoint arrow does also. Just follow the arrow from quest to quest, nothing could be easy.

• Zygor's Guide is 100% in-game, visible in the main window
• Available for Horde and Alliance, all the starting areas are covered.
  
• keep track of what class you are as well as your level and your location, at all times.
  
• Easily scroll through the guide and move from point to point.
  
• Reduce the window to a small size, so it doesn't block as much of your screen, and move it anywhere.
  
• All the necessary quest details are included in the guide detail, you will probably never need to look at your quest log.
  
• The waypoint arrow, and the guide, automatically, 99% of the time, resets with each new quest. You will never have to manually set a waypoint or look up some location.
• Most class quests are included!
• Zygor's Guide will be ready for Wrath of the Lich King, arriving on Nov 13th.
  

Here's a video which will show you how it works. (See the 2nd video, below, for remarks about Wrath of the Lich King and the 1-80 guide. ) This video refers to the launch of the guide back in May, but everything else is the same and the guide is updated for the 3.0+ patches.



Zygor's Guides will be Wrath Ready on Nov 13, so grab it now, start leveling, get the update when it hits, and then run non-stop up to level 80.



Learn more about Zygor's Guides here

Rogue Arena Tips

clipped from wow.zuggaming.com Ideal Strategy, Jump the Druid in Stealth Ideally what we’re going to try and do is find the druid in stealth and immediately open on him. This serves 2 purposes. If everything goes as planned you’ll kill the druid straight up, but for any of you who have played double rogue for any stretch of time you know this is rarely how it happens.

Going for the Gold, WoW Gold

The World of Warcraft (WoW) is a game that is played by some 10,000,000 people and is still growing. One of the things that every one of these people has in common is a need to have a sufficient cash (gold) flow for their characters.

Now, some people are pretty clued in on how to make gold in WoW and some have actually made a business of it. They farm the items that they then sell to vendors or other players, amass large amounts of gold, then sell that gold to players for real cash. Some go insane and hit the wow gold cap. Yes, there really is such a thing.

Blizzard, the Creator of WoW, frowns on buying gold (and items,) by the way, and has been known to ban the accounts of people who do so.

So for the rest of us here's a short guide on how to increase your World of Warcraft Gold account.

Auctioneer is essential

Download the Auctioneer Addon (google it) and install the thing. You want the full suite and you'll want to read the documentation and learn how to use it. Why? You'll find that it's a really big help in learning the market for your server, which is an essential step to making real gold.

Make Your Banker

Make an alternate character as your dedicated banker. You'll take this character to level 5 (class and race don't matter) and take it to the nearest big city. Then pick up the "enchanting" skill, which you'll use to disenchant low level items.

Your banker will never level again (unless you want to buy up that enchanting skill someday.)

All your other characters will use the banker to sell their stuff, buy stuff, and send stuff here and there. Find a stack of ore? Hit the nearest mailbox and send it to the banker to sell. A pile of green items from your last instance run? Off to the banker.

Need gear for your main character? Your banker buys it and mails it off to you. Need more storage space? Use the mailbox. Mail stuff to your banker, the banker returns it, and you let it sit in the mailbox until you need it.

Gathering the gold

Pick up Mining and Skinning as your two professions (make sure you buy a pick and a skinning knife!) Skin everything that's skinnable all the way to level 70. Skins always sell well and some sell for several gold per stack of 20. Some of the Outlands skins sell for several gold each.

Ore is all over the place. Start with copper and mine everything you can. Use your "smelting" skill to smelt the ore into bars which will drive up your mining skill. Ore always sells well, the better stacks going for 30 gold or so each, but those Outland skins are far more valuable.

Gathering Items

The Gatherer Addon is a big help here in that it will mark your map as you find stuff, so you can do efficient gathering routes later on.

As you kill, main, and slaughter your way across Azeroth and the Outlands you will see plenty of item drops in addition to the skins you pick up. The item names will be colored grey, white, green, blue (rare), and purple (really really rare.)

Everything white or better goes to your banker (unless your main can use it) for sale on the Auction House. Many green items won't sell very well so those should be disenchanted into their magical parts and those parts are then sold.

Learn the Auction House.

Use Auctioneer and your own observations to best estimate the best price to sell any particular item, which will vary from time to time. Thursday through Saturday is the best time to sell stuff, Sun eve through Tuesday is the worst.

For example, you collect some "Large Fangs" from StrangleThorn Vale. They're white, but you might be tempted to sell them to the vendor. DON'T!! Looking at your Auctioneer tooltip you might notice that they sell for around 1 gold each (which they really do.)

Ship them to your banker and have that character search the Auction House. Find out what the going price seems to be (which may even be more than 1 gold each) and price those teeth appropriately. Price too high and they don't sell, price too low and I'll buy them and resell them at a (much) higher price.

Keep your eyes open for the prices of items as you gather them and you'll start to learn what to gather, how to best sell it, and how to make some serious gold.

If you really want to learn all the gold making ticks and tricks you'll look at this Warcraft Millionaire dude, who's hit the gold cap on four characters. That's close to 1 million gold.

Wrath of the Lich King Pre Order

Amazon has the Wrath of the Lich King World of Warcaft expansion up for pre-order. Details here: Wrath of the Lich King expansion

Being able to level to 80 will be one of the features of the expansion. The EliteWoW guys will be one of the first to have the 70-80 leveling guides, for both Ally and Horde, with a free upgrade, so you're covered if you grab yours now.

Rogueish Cunning Blade Quests

Rogues in the World of Warcraft have an optional quest, not at all required, which has a nice dagger as a reward, the Cunning Blade. Each race has a very different quest to do in their own native area, so the Blood Elves will never cross paths with the Trolls and neither will ever see a Night Elf.

The quests aren't hard if you remember to sneak up on the target from behind. Also, your Sap ability is your friend.

Here's a complete walk through of each of the Cunning Blade quests for each race, with tips to make the hard parts a little easier:
Level 10 Rogue Cunning Blade quests

Power Leveling Your Characters - Hot or Not?

Power leveling - Loved and hated by many. Passionate believers on both sides advocate for it and curse at it. So what is it?

Once upon a time games game with a variety of cheat codes which would allow a variety of different goodies to be had by one's character. FOr example, Doom: enter a code and you're in God Mode. You'll take no damage. Enter another code and you'll have infinite ammo.

In other game you might enter a code and now your character is much higher level. Of course, since these are single player games no one really cares if you cheat your way to the end. Besides, a little God Mode was great fun from time to time, especially after getting one's butt kicked repeatedly.

Things are a bit different in the modern day MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.) These games require, usually, a monthly fee, have thousands of people playing at any one time, and what you do can easily have some effect on other players.

There aren't, usually, any cheat codes either. Those that pop up are quickly stomped out by the Developers. So a replacement had to be found and one of the replacements is Power Leveling.

Power leveling is the process of getting your character leveled faster, generally much faster, then the normal game system allows. World of Warcraft, for example, has the 70 (soon to be 80) levels. I think they're great fun to blast through, at least the first few times, but some people have other opinions.

Perhaps they have several high levels characters and are tired of the leveling grind. Perhaps they're fairly new to the game, but all their pals are playing the high levels and they want to join in. And maybe they just have a short attention span, little interest in the game, and they just want to jump to the end game and play there (and will usually quit soon after. )

Can you see a need here? Some people did and so the Power Leveling services were born. Basically the service takes your money, plays your level 1 character, and a couple of weeks (real time) later you get a brand spanking new level 70 (if it's for World of Warcraft) character. If you paid even more money that character might even have some killer gear.

Fnding a power leveling service is easy. Go to Google and enter something like this: "WoW Power Leveling" or "Guild Wars Powerleveling" or... Well, you get the idea. Be prepared to spend at least $100 for WoW power leveling, a lot more if you want all the goodies.

An even faster route is to just buy a character/account off of ebay.com. Just hop over to ebay, find an account you like, pay a few hundred bucks, trust the seller, and you have a new character to play.

There are a couple of issues here. One is that if you're new to the game you will find that despite having a brand spanking new level 70, maybe even with nice gear, that you will get your behind handed to you by every monster in the game. Teams also just can't stand players who have no clue about their characters, so you won't last long in teams before being punted. And don't even think about PvP.

The other issue is that Power Leveling and the buying of accounts are both against the Blizzard terms of service, so they are within their rights to ban you from the game. You don't get you money back, either. The odds of it happening are small, but who cares what the odds are if it happens to you?

So the plusses of the two methods above are that you get a high level character (for whichever game,) in far less time than you could do it yourself, at the cost of a few bucks. The downside is that you'll get pwned by everything until you get your character figured out. Oh yes, plus the risk of a ban.

Another method of power leveling (in World of Warcraft,) that’s far safer for your account, requires either two accounts or a helpful high level player who can clear dungeons rapidly. High and low levels team up, the high level kills everything in the dungeon and the low level cleans up on the XP.

It’s tedious, but you’ll level fast. You won’t have a clue as to how to play your higher level character, but you’ll have the gear from the dungeons. Spend some time learning your character and you’ll be ok, with no chance of a ban.

For the average player, who doesn’t have a helpful guild willing to power level him, and isn’t willing to shell out the dough (and risk a ban) there is a very solid alternative.

Grab a copy of a WoW leveling guide, for example and power level yourself. It's not as fast as the dungeon grind, but it's far superior to figuring out a fast leveling path by yourself. A good guide will show you a step by step path to getting leveled fast at a fraction of the cost of buying a power leveling service or a character off ebay. You’ll also have the benefit of having a much better understanding of your character, having played it through all the levels.

There are several of these guides available. Some are Adobe PDFs, so you’ll switch back and forth from the game to the guide, or grab a clipboard and print the guide. Check off the steps as you go.

Other guides are in-game, even to the point of displaying on your main screen and literally pointing to the next place to go.

Check them out, see what works for you, and get leveled fast!

The Elite WoW Leveling Guide

The EliteWoW Guide Review

For Horde and Alliance, this is killer guide. It gives you an easy to follow path that covers every step of the way from level 1 to 70, whether you're Alliance or Horde, and no matter which race your character happens to be.

Biggest minus - It's not a fully in-game guide, so you will have to switch back and forth from the main map to look up coordinates and set waypoints. Not a big thing, but it adds some time if you're speed leveling.

Biggest plus - A good path that will get you leveled as fast as any guide out there fast and the price is lower than the competition, much lower than some.

What you get - The EliteWoW Leveling Guide is an Abobe PDF with the leveling path to take you from level 1 to level 70. It includes the starting areas for each race. Each Horde race will start in its own area, level to 13, then head out to the barrens where they all follow the same path. Personally, I feel that the Blood Elves should go to the Ghostlands for the run up to 21, since the leveling there is faster. The again, I'm not writing the guide. :)

Alliance will all level in their respective areas until 11, then head to Westfall, except for the Draenei who will stick with their own areas until 20, then all Ally will follow the same path for the rest of their leveling.

Each step in the guide is bulleted (see below,) so you'll just go from bullet to bullet and level, do the steps, and level fast.

Every quest is linked to Thottbot.com for more info, if you need it. Click the link and you'll see what Thottbot has to say about that quest and what comments Thottbot users have made (usually quote a few.)

On the (Meta) Map

Every quest that has a coordinate is listed in the MetaMap coordinates, so you can go to your map, scroll down the coordinate list, left click the coordinate in the list and you'll see a glowing dot on the map. Right click the glowing spot and set you waypoint, then off you go.

The MetaMap is an addon to your game and complete, easy to follow, installation instructions are provided.

One quibble: The entire guide is a list which is not broken up by any images or chapter headings. Since it's an Adobe PDF you can search for where you want to go, Shimmering Flats, for example, but chapter or sections headings, linked to from a table of contents would be nice.

Here's a shot from the Elite WoW Guide for the Dwarf/Gnome starting area. Note the list of steps, the links to Thottbot.com, and the coordinates. All the coordinates can be found on the main map if you've installed the MetaMap addon.


This is your main map with the EliteWow MetaMap addon installed. The list of coordinates from the guide is on the right side and you'll note the dots scattered about the map. Right click any of the dots, set a waypoint, and off you go.


The MetaMap "Add/Edit Note" window. You can make your own map markers and you can edit any other market, including the ones that are part of the guide.



Open up the guide and you'll see some leveling tips and then you're right into the guide. Pick your race, click the link, and off you go.

Many people print the guide, put it on a clipboard, and cross off each step as they do it. This lets youi keep track of exactly where you are in the guide and you'll find yourself leveling at a much faster rate that you eve have before. If you take a week-long break youi will be able to pick up right where you left off.

And the price! Zygor's Guide is $50 for either Horde or Alliance. iDemise, Joana, and Brian's Guides are all in the $35 to $38 range for Alliance or Horde, and the Elite WoW Guide is $40 for the combined Horde and Alliance guides.

Wondering about whether the Elite WOW guides will become obsolete with the new patch and the new level 80 cap? Here's what they have to say about that:

We will make sure all our customers receive updates of new guides, this includes the current Elite WoW 1-70 Guides and future 1-80 WoW guides for the next World of Warcraft expansion: Wrath of the Lich King!

A killer guide at a great price. Click here, get yours and get leveld fast.