A few days ago I posted my new cata bucket list. I posted it a day after I’d written it and the day after that I’d done what I could of it. The rng items and the argent tournament obviously take time and are a daily errand so not those. That left me wondering ‘what now?’ which is precisely what I was thinking when I wrote that list. Now one of my flaws is that I’m a tad impulsive and I’m not terribly patient. Run before you walk syndrome if you want to call it something.

The two months between now and Mists, and my need for a goal, led to me pushing ahead with a plan that I wasn’t supposed to enact till Mists.

RAF experiment Mark 1
Last January I decided to get myself a rocket and some help levelling alts at the same time. I got myself a second account up to wrath (the limit of raf) and rolled a hunter and a disc priest. I just ran in the lfg and experienced no real issues being two people at once. Thinking about it that was more to do with hunters being overpowered than anything, I managed comparable or top dps playing with my left hand. I then tried to repeat the feat with a horde holy paladin and warlock which failed miserably due to warlocks being very hard to play. So at the end of the experiment I wound up with two new level 80 alts, I’d also granted levels to various other alts finishing their journey to 80, and a new two person rocket mount. I thought that was a pretty good deal myself.

Fast forward five months and all eight alts are level 85 leaving just two current classes that I don’t have. A new mount the Obsidian Nightwing has been brought out as a new raf mount and I’m starting to think about repeating the experiment. The glaring fault in the last one was that I was dependant on other people in the lfg. If I have trouble playing two characters at once, well to be honest that’s not very fair on them and I don’t blame anyone the time or two I got kicked while trying the warlock/pally combo. Not long ago there was a sale and so I picked myself up another copy of the game. This way I can raf the second account to the third and then dungeon boost myself to 85, as my main paladin can solo cata normals.

What I was supposed to do …
… was wait until Mists. The advantages for waiting would have been:

• Firm confirmation on whether the Obsidian Nightwing is account wide. Right now I’ve read a blue post that says it isn’t which means if I want it on my main I’m screwed.
• Firm confirmation on what will happen with monks and raf. Personally I’m hoping that it’ll work like normal but just be ineligible for realm firsts to make it fair. Otherwise depending on how long it’s disabled for I may be screwed.
• AOE looting.
• My boosting main being level 90 making the later content easier and quicker to run.

However there were disadvantages:

• When Mists is released I’ll want to be playing the new content not levelling lowbie alts  even if I do want a monk.
• I have two months now where I don’t have anything better to do than dungeon boost/grind these alts.
• I’d like my monk to be an enchanter for the disenchanting capability so gathering mats in advance would be good. I just levelled enchanting for the second time and grinding out the mats took ages.
• I was stuck for something to do, was a little bored and impulsive, and couldn’t wait.

The bump in the road
None of this sounds problematic? Sure I’ll have 29 days of raf in Mists rather than 90, I’ll have to manually loot everything rather than it doing everything in range. That’s not an issue, right? Well, no it’s not. What the problem is, and why I’m such an idiot, is because I don’t think.

I added the battle chest to my new third account before I recruited myself. I realised as soon as I’d done it that I’d been an idiot but the damage was done. I sent in a support ticket asking them to help me, and google suggests it’s a common mistake. Waiting for a response is very nerve wracking. Sure the worst thing that could happen is I have to shell out for another battle chest, a pain and a waste, but it’s not exactly the most auspicious of beginnings.

The point of this post aka the plan
I know, I know, I usually do posts that are a little more general than just about me personally. However, I have just pointed out a pitfall that you can now avoid should you recruit yourself. I also want to outline my plan somewhere other than my head.

The original thinking was that I’d have a paladin on the 2nd account and a shaman on the 3rd. This is still in effect as they both use different armor and weapons so whatever gear I grab from the dungeon crawling won’t have to be split. The other pair was monk and warlock, it didn’t really matter what way round those went. I would then have 80 grantable levels which I was going to grant to another monk. However, what I’m going to do is level a druid instead so I can do it before Mists drops. I’ll then give the grantable levels to the monk. If you can’t grant levels to a monk then hopefully the 300% xp will work and then I’ll level that with something. That leaves a lot of free grantable levels so I’ll use them on something so they’re not wasted.

I’ll faction change the paladin to horde, keep it on the 2nd account long enough to get the Halaa battle tokens on my main, and then transfer it to my main account but on the Argent Dawn server, as I won’t have room on Bronze Dragonflight. I’ll then just straight account transfer the warlock, shaman and (hopefully monk) which means all my slots are used but they’ll fit on BD. I’ll leave the druid and whatever else behind as I don’t need them. However, they’ll be there should I want to ever fork out the pennies to do anything with them.

I just realised that I’m going to have to upgrade my 2nd account to Mists, that hadn’t occurred to me before. I did say I was impulsive and didn’t think things through right? Still there was no other way to do it. I thought about transferring one of my level 85’s over and I was so locked in the mindset that it had to be my main doing the boosting that I missed the obvious. I have a level 85 death knight which doubles as my banker and so the loss of guild rep/affiliation isn’t an issue. Plus with everything going account wide transferring my main seemed stupid as that’s the one with everything on it. I can still do it though as the link isn’t active due to my earlier mistake. Hah typing this all out has had a great benefit. I no longer need to upgrade my 2nd account to Mists which is a relief as that was an expense I’d not factored in.

However, I’m actually cross with blizz for this. I just tried to transfer my death knight over to the second account and got an error message that the 2nd account didn’t have a valid warcraft licence. Given that I was logged into it at the time I knew that was bogus and thought that perhaps the system needed to catch up. I googled it anyway just to be sure and found that you can only transfer characters to ‘equal or greater expansion level’. I was excited and bought the digital deluxe version of Mists as soon as I saw the release message. If I hadn’t done that then they’d both be on cata and I could have done it. Foiled again, now what do I do?

Did I mention that I was impulsive and didn’t think things through?

Up the creek without a paddle
I’ve well and truly screwed myself over today. However, you look at it today has been a disaster. The only saving grace is the awful mistake I made earlier which means that the recruit a friend link isn’t yet active. I’ve put in a support ticket asking if they could please make the character transfer possible but I’m not holding out a lot of hope. I’m basically asking them to take pity on me, given how much cash I’m forking out for this disaster experiment they really should. I always justify it to myself as I don’t smoke, or drink, or go out much due to boring real life issues like my health. This isn’t the most expensive misstep I’ve ever made but ouch. Why did I think this was a good idea? Well it seemed it at the time – doesn’t it always?

Can you sort of tell that I’m writing this in real time? It’s actually the 26th today so the ‘few days ago’ at the start of the post was a bit of a red herring. I’m not going to post this for a few days which is why I started it like that. Makes me even more impulsive given that I didn’t even wait a day right? Yeah I’m an idiot and I really hope that blizz comes through on the support tickets and we get this sorted out. I really hate waiting, as I’m so impatient which is what got me into this mess in the first place.

The light at the end of the tunnel
I went to bed support ticket unanswered. I woke up early due to the racket the birds were making outside and I lasted four hours, till about 10.30am before I cracked and rang support. That proved an exercise in patience itself as I was on hold for about 45 minutes. I then got through to a really, really, really nice support man. My previous experience with blizz support was that their only goal was to get you off the phone, he was lovely and very helpful. He listened to me explain my complicated issue and then fixed it for me, transferring my death knight to the second account, and fixing the raf link and battle chest on the third. He laughed when I said that blizz was making it hard for me to give them money, but in actual fact him solving these issues for me saved me probably £75, as I would have thrown good money after bad salvaging this disaster experiment.

Anyway I then set up ISBoxer and got to it. I created my paladin (will be horde) and shaman first and quested till level 10 in Elwynn Forest. I then brought in my dk and ran Deadmines a few times and then Stormwind Stockade. I got to level 20 on both of them and am now taking a break. It’s too early to say if this is a quick way of doing it. I know that when I did this experiment last time the /played time at level 80 on the hunter and priest was just under 24 hours. We’ll have to see what it is this time.

However, it’s not all about the levelling. I’m looting everything I kill and getting lots of greens and cloths which I’ll use to level enchanting on my new monk, and maybe even sell for good gold at the beginning of Mists. So far the only downside is that when the support man had to do the workaround to transfer my death knight it forced a rename and wouldn’t let me rename it as it was. I’ve put in a support ticket about that and I hope they’ll fix it. Although if they don’t I’ve still saved money anyway so could be worse.

Conclusion
What have we learned? Not to be impulsive and to think things through would be a start. That I was very lucky in that it got sorted how I wanted would be another. That if you preorder games it can confuse the system for character transfers. That you have to upgrade a starter licence, rather than just add a battle chest to the account, if you want raf to work. Above all I’ve learned that patience is a virtue that I really need to work on. This is going to be an interesting experiment. I’ve got a mount, I’ll get some alts, and hopefully some gold, out of it. Roll on the Mists.

We’ll return to your regularly scheduled posts that make sense in the next instalment.