My second pair, a warlock and a druid, are now at level 80. I got there faster than I thought I was going too. Patch 5.0.4 dropped on Wednesday and I was about 3/4 of the way through level 74 at the time. Anyway, I logged in on Friday morning intending to get it to perhaps level 76. I wanted to tank a dungeon on my paladin, but I hate pure pugging, so I was waiting till some guildmates come online. Anyway I started levelling and before I knew it I was level 76 and so I kept going and by lunchtime I was level 80.

Now I’ve not seen any announcement, or a datamined report, that the Wrath xp has been nerfed but it must have been. I know that the Cata xp was nerfed this patch so maybe they just extended that a little. Either way comparing the two isn’t very fair now. However, I didn’t have Have Group Will Travel which did mean more travelling time, on the other hand I had the benefit of aoe loot.

Anyway the /played time was 1 day and 5 hours. I did make a couple of adjustments to when I hit certain dungeons, and I added a few dungeons in. All told I felt it went a little easier this time round with the benefit of experience. There are certain bosses which killed my boosting characters every single time though.

I have all the enchanting mats up to 425 ready, and some cata mats. I need to work on getting more of those. I also have a lot of cloth left over. I have a fair bit of low level cloth already that I know is excess. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a little on this in Mists with the rerollers. Failing that hopefully I’ll be able to help my friends.

The only question now is now what? I can’t get on with other faction stuff, as I can’t faction change the second paladin until after Mists. Given that the xp nerf was applied in 5.0.4 I could level the warlock to 85. I’m pretty sick of Cata levelling so I might not, it depends what I feel like. I won’t be boosting any more pairs, though I have another seven weeks I think of RaF left. I’m ready for Mists basically. The achievement nut in me doesn’t like that none of my bars are fully green anymore, what’s worse is I can’t even go after all the new achievements yet to make them green. Oh how you torment me blizz. Hopefully the pre-expansion events will be more, than just one scenario in the last week before Mists, so I can get on with that in the month that’s left.

I’m sure I’ve seen that wordpress has something called an aside, where you can post little snippets that aren’t real posts. Anyway, this is just an update of my recruit a friend experiment. I’ve successfully dungeon boosted a shaman and a paladin up to level 80. The /played time is a little over 1 day and 11 hours. This is probably about 12 hours longer than my last RaF experiment took. As the /played time at the end of that was 23 hours and something.

I’ve been thinking about why it took about half as long again to dungeon boost as opposed to running in the LFG with RaF. With the LFG you go in lots of different dungeons and there’s quests in all those dungeons. I went in a fair few, and I learnt while doing it what ones I needed to hit when, but I didn’t go in as many as I would have in the LFG. You also get the bonus xp for completing a LFG dungeon which I didn’t have. Plus I looted everything, and solo looting is going to take more time than group looting.

However, if you divide it up per character it took only 18 hours to get to level 80. I remember seeing adverts for guides which said you could do it in under 5 days. 18 hours isn’t 12 hours per character but it’s still very fast – much faster than regular levelling. Plus I have a guild bank full of cloth and enchanting supplies. When I’m done running my second pair through I’ll see if I have enough enchanting supplies to level enchanting again. I want enchanting on my new monk for disenchanting purposes. If I don’t then I’ll get my tailor to use some of the cloth to make things to disenchant. Any materials I have left over I’ll hopefully be able to sell in early days of Mists as lots of people will be levelling new professions.

That’s another thing, I got a lot more gold this way than running the LFG. All the gold that dropped I got (even though it was split over three characters), I got all the gold from vendoring all the vendor trash. I didn’t need to send any gold from my main character to these new ones and I’ve managed to buy the mount training for level 20 and 40, flight training for Outland, and then cold weather flying for Northrend. I have enough gold on both to get a flight masters licence as well, plus a fair bit left over.

To me the extra gold, the enchanting mats and cloth, plus no gut churning stress of mucking up and wiping the group because playing two characters at once is hard, is worth the extra 12 hours it took. I learnt a fair but about where to go, and when, boosting the shaman/paladin pair. We’ll see how long it takes me to boost the warlock/druid pair.