Surprisingly, was going to try my hand at Horde leveling for the first time. Leveling my Blood Elf Warlock, and finding that it was very different from leveling an Alliance character. I have four level 80 Alliance characters in my account, and assumed I knew all there was to know about getting from 1 to 80. How wrong I was.

For most players there are two ways to gain experience. Grinding mobs, or questing. Back in the “bad” old days, grinding mobs seemed the only real way to progress. There simply were not enough quests in the game to keep you occupied for long. You would go to a new area, complete a handful of quests, and then be stuck killing mobs – waiting for re-spawns – killing them again.. This really could have spelt the end for Warcaft if Blizzard hadn’t done the sensible thing and filled the place with a lot more quests.
That, along with increasing the amount of “rested” bonus and the speed it was acquired really speeded up the leveling process, and made it a lot more fun as well.

Now there are so many quests that another smaller problem has arisen. It is sometimes difficult to sort out one quest for another, having and equiping the right piece of quest specific equipment at the right time and making sure you do them in a logical order appropriate to your level.

If you really wanted to be slick you would pick up quests in a very specific order (something questhelper does not help with one little bit). Making sure you had the right items slotted or purchased, then doing the quests in the most logical and time efficient manner.

How many times have you fought two lots of mobs for a quest, only to find later that the second mob type is required for another quest? If only you had had the foresight to have already accepted this second quest you wouldn’t have to go back and re-grind the same mobs again.

Similarly, have you ever been to a quest giver and he asks you for something like a mug of ale, which can only be bought at the place you left about 15 minutes ago? If only something had triggered you to buy this item before you even got the quest. It’s enough to make you scream. Or would be.

The free “Questhelper” does none of these things for you. It’s good, but it would be great to have something that did the job a whole lot better.

I’ve recently been using a new in game tool called “Zygor’s Guide 2.0″ and it claims to do all the things I’ve listed above. Giving the most optimized Alliance and Horde leveling paths. Straight away it’s telling you what quests to pick up. Unlike Questhelper that only guides you through quests you already have, this guide scans the local area and tells you where to go, what quests to pick up, what items if any, then plays you through the quests in detail. No more arriving somewhere only to find that a quest wants you to go all the way back to where you just travelled from and buy some vendor item. With this guide, you get the vendor item…go to the quest giver, “Well Done” you’ve already got the item he’s after in your inventory. Like ESP.

It is worth noting that I used the Horde version of this guide and the differences between the Alliance and Horde paths are quite remarked.

I have a couple of points here. PvP servers will sometimes make quest completing a bit harder. Certain quests that ask you to farm Mobs that have value outside the quest for both factions.This can cause issues. Player killing and Ganking – but that’s PvP for you. If you can’t stand the heat then don’t go in the PvP kitchen.

Luckily you can force the guide to skip quests you can’t do (or don’t want to do) but it’s a point worth making.
So the quests are all in there, and each one is in detail and plays out through an in-game GUI that works seamlessly with the WoW interface – neat!

In pratice I level through level 70-75 in about 3 and a half hours per level rested (and I only level rested).Levels 75-79 take bout 5 and a half hours each, and level 80 about 7.

Now I can knock almost an hour off my 70-74 time. One and a half hours off my 74-79 time, and over 2 hours off my time spent leveling at 79.

At lower level’s (where there is less travelling involved) I now have an even better return percentage wise.
I don’t know about you but I always find 30-45 to be particularly slow. But whizzing through them in almost half the time I used to certainly makes the experience a great deal more enjoyable.

It’s a shame that leveling isn’t seen as more fun in itself. But we live in a world where people want to be level 80 and getting some Icecrown loot as quickly as possible. Ok that’s fine.

The quests are supposed to be fun, and part of that fun is discovering for yourself. If that’s what you want then don’t use this guide at all (or any other guide for that matter). But you might miss some important plot points.
Much of the lore of Warcraft is given out through the questing experience. Not to mention that the BoP quest rewards offer a decent upgrade path for most classes – saving you a lot of gold at the auction house. Leveling in the manner offered by this guide seems to offer the best of both worlds.

If you want any more information about this particular guide then try the links below.

Paul Rone-Clarke, Is an writer and gamesplayer. With particular interest in how the economies of online games work. The idea? Get underneath the “skin” of these games. and understand them in terms of real human experience. Then hopefully, try real world gold/credit/ISK making techniques in game. Find more information for Zygor’s Guide at:

http://www.comparethegameguide.com/zygorguide.html

http://www.comparethegameguide.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Paul_Rone-Clarke

The Warcraft Advanced Gold Guide makes some unusual claims. For a start it claims to be a market driven guide. Warcraft’s markets are pretty tight. The methods of buying and selling are much regimented. We were keen to find out exactly what this claim actually meant. It claims to…

“Be written by people who understand the Warcraft economy!”

Well one look at the landing page and details for this guide leave us in no doubt that whoever “The Gold Consortium” are, they certainly understand the Warcraft economy. Ouch. This is detailed stuff, and perhaps that’s where the small issue with this guide lies..

“Comes with tools to help you analyse your economy”

Yes, spreadsheets. Luckily these work with free to download Openoffice apps (and they bundle it in XLS format as well for those rich enough to afford Microsoft’s ubiquitous number cruncher). It seems to offer a “rationalized and indexed” price history for about 200 common Warcraft items. It includes just about everything that you might use for leveling professions.

But this guide is not all about spreadsheets. It contains an excellent Professions guide, going into detail about which items are worth making for profit, and which would be best to grind for leveling the profession itself. It then goes into some detail on how to make your gold back even though the market is flooded with “profession leveling” items made by other players.

There is an excellent and very comprehensive list or areas to farm for materials from about skill level 125 onwards (we suspect it starts at 125 because you will get to that level pretty easily in your starting zones)

Another section details “The most expensive farmed items in the game” and another on how to maximise profit at the market place be it auction house or trade channel. We are told that a detailed 1-450 profession leveling guide is being added in November (To be sent free to existing guide owners)

“Have real life business success and bring those skill to YOUR Warcraft server.”

Again, this must be the case. phrases like “Portfolio”, “Price Indexing” and “Normalizing” pop up (and are reasonably explained) We had to look some of these up for ourselves. He way they work seems pretty true to life though so what of the biggest claim.

“The Advanced Gold Guide will make you gold with a minimum of Grinding.”

Well, for once this might be true. It might even be possible to make more gold than other guides at a slightly lower level. Without giving the guide away, It revolves around buying and selling, storage and costs etc. It has a good guide for cross market (Alliance/Horde) trading, and shows how this might be possible with some effort.

But this comes at a price. Complexity. The PDF part of this guide runs to over 120 pages, and is full of tables and data. It has a lot of quite sophisticated market details in it which you would need to read and understand to make gold.

Now we spent 10 days on this guide. And make gold it certainly does. But if you are a younger player we cannot recommend this. It’s not a “play” guide to making money… but here is what we found

We tried out the top 5 tips

Are the tips Wikitips?

No not really. We even tried looking into market specific tips – nothing. That’s what we really like about this guide – all the information and advice in it is unique, and, generally VERY good. We did find some detail on cross market trading on Wiki, but not in the way this guide explains. The “Farming and Gathering Guide” is apparently a free extra – only put there because, as Birch from the Gold Consortium put it in the interview; “people expect one”. It’s very good all the same

Do they work?

Yes, after investing some time understanding them, then a week and a half “playing” the market. (With more bag and bank space than we ever though possible thanks to the guide) we made a good sum. It is hard to say how many gold per hour. 300 gold might be close, but we spent a long time “sitting” in titansteel and we “went long cross market” on crafting materials… (No we had little idea what this meant a fortnight ago either). And made a tidy sum, with no farming

Ok, this guide works. It’s a serious guide for people with big foreheads and an understanding of numbers. In other words this guide is not for everyone.

At the moment guide comes with a complete set of Horde and Alliance leveling guides. Each one running to over 300 (well over 600 pages in all) in PDF format. They have the starting area quests for every race included. They are downloaded from the guide itself as they are given away under license (We presume the guys who wrote the Warcraft Advanced Guide pay a royalty to the leveling guide authors for each one sold) But to you, the end customer, these guides are absolutely FREE. This makes a great deal even better. We have reservations recommending this guide because of this, we give it 2 marks as a result For normal players… 88%

For those with good numeracy skills, and who want a different challenge, and as it’s main score – because there are enough “dummies” guides on the market we would rather give it a resounding.. 94%.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Paul_Rone-Clarke