The alt rut

[Snydelee]

Nice tip Mid. Found this video which had all of the forms except Boomkin which is not in the game yet? Looks like a boney/spikey undead druid, and seems like it is rooted in the spooky eerie Drustvar theme. I will definitely hold off on leveling the druid up until that is in the game then.

I have been paying attention to the Hivemind stuff. Not sure how much hokey-pokey goes on in that run, and I sort of pulled out of the raid mindset for a good several months now. Would be fun to do that sort of thing with guildies, I have just been fringe-ish doing lectures and Spotify stuff while gaming, or even watching shows like Letterkenny. What sort of time block is involved? Can you herb on the hivemind mount, or does it dismount you? Looks like a fun one for a group picture.

I started grinding out my artifact fishing poles on my alts. Now have 5 120s with fishing poles. Updated the fishing guide for how to streamline that.

[Mid]

Im not sure if the Hivemind dismounts when herbing. It’s not a mount per se, but an altered state for the player. When you open the character sheet when mounted on the Hivemind, you are actually the Hivemind. Maybe like travel form for the Druid. I’ll try it today and let you know.

We have made 3 guild runs (requires 5 people) for the Hivemind. The 4th (already full) runs this weekend (always Saturday, 3:00p server). The run takes, typically, an hour to an hour and a half. The only reason I wanted to do it was because of the puzzles, even though I haven’t had to figure anything out since I use the hacks. Still, it’s been a lot of fun especially since I’m running with guild mates. Let me know if you wanna go.

I’m going to try the Kul Tiran Druid. It’ll probably take me 100 years to get her up and running.

[Snydelee]

If it is like travel form, then this mount is must have as it is the only other competitor for the Sky Golem. My main issue with the Sky Golem is it has a hard time going through doorways.

[Splutty]

And it makes people sick from all the weaving around. lol

[Mid]

I did the test. It dismounts you while herbing.

[Snydelee]

Too bad on the non-herb option for Hivemind. Wish there was more functionality across mounts…sure sucks having one option for herbing, and one option for walking on water.

Did the grind thing on the fishing pole for most of the alts this weekend. Talk about boring. Ugh. Went through a season of GLOW, and 3 seasons of Schitt’s Creek getting 8 artifact poles for my alts. Have one left to do. Seems like I made some gold doing this, and surprisingly the fish seem to sell OK on the AH for the cooking stuff. Perhaps it is that Chef’s hat grind that is supporting that fish price.

[Snydelee]

Update 13May2019

At this point my Alliance toons are done. I have qty=13 level 120s with full garrisons, level cap, and item level in the 320-360 range. Alliance toons are now in the passive gold making operation, which goes like this.

1. Log in to toon
2. If GR is close to 1000 cap, buy fur from trading post vendor. Try to buy it on a day with a good exchange rate (16GR/1fur is best, worst is around 40).
3. If I have a tailoring transmute, do that. Click any token item to generate a soulbound item and vendor it for gold.
4. Load up the profession structures if I am doing that. Typically I do tailoring, and alchemy to get the transmute components to earth from the other elemental varieties that come from missions.
5. If it is post Tuesday and I have a lot of time, recruit out a new Extreme Scavenger, and decide if it is worth deactivating another. Also add armor/weapon upgrade tokens. Also use AHK spammer to open all the salvage, and send off the mats to whoever is using them in profession structures.
6. Mail stuff that sells to AH toon who posts it. If I have less than 12 bags on the AH, mass produce bags and send them over.
7. If I don’t have a lot of time like it is a weeknight or the morning before I drive to work, I just control click both the mission table and ship table to collect all and send out stuff. That takes about 1min per toon, mostly due to the fact that I have too many addons slowing load time.
8. Repeat for other toons
9. Post items on AH toon

Gold Alliance side is now 1.5M. In February I was sitting at 1.1M. SO that is about 400K gold in 2 months, and mostly those are passive. So I am pretty close to a wow token a month with this setup alliance side. Fur is exploading with my extreme scavenger/ trading post strategy, and I may start selling that too. Have close to 30 stacks of it on one tailor…

I did in completing alliance get all classes, all new allied races. I should probably buy a WoW token and flip one of my races to Pandaren Alliance side for completion.

So I moved onto Horde side. Here are my strats there.

I had 8 toons in the 80+ range. As of last night 5 of those are 120, and 3 of them are in the 118-119 range with rest bonus the rest of the way out. I did grind out garrison stuff there too, and that only took a couple weeks to get all of them with ship tables in the garrison hall. I am running with non optimum followers, and it will take a few weeks to recruit/retrain what I have into something close to the killer teams I have alliance side, but the extreme scavengers are flowing. Ships are near ideal crews now (you want undead and murlocs on horde side, with a unsinkable and a balance of ship gear to cover everything, and you want 3 battle ships, 3 subs, 2 carriers, 2 destroyers with at least one being Murloc). Right now I am dumping GR into fast ship completion scrolls, and will likely have that done next weekend.

I did make alts for each of the allied races on the Horde side, and I did make a Pandaren monk there, so all classes and races are covered Horde side. Mostly they are all level 20 with guild invites, heirloom gear, some kind of functioning macro, and just sitting in inns building rest bonus while I get the 120s up and running.

I do missions in Zandalar first. I go for Gonk (the run speed bonus). If you focus and do his quest line first, you can get the shrine that you can click a few flights down from the temple, and it gives you a 20 min buff where raptors will come to your aid. So the aim when levelling is zone through temple, grab buff, fly to point. I have the ship buff with 5min of fast running after taking a flight path.

If Darkmoon faire is up, I merry-go-round for the 1hr buff, and park the buffed toon for later. If you do not log on much, you will have that next time you run. If an invasion is up, I will try to run them through the invasion to get that 1hr XP buff as well. Those two buffs with rest bonus and full heirloom gear equals a couple levels per hour game time questing, which is close to as fast as possible. When the buff ends, I park it until the next invasion/faire. I swap between toons in this manner, and have been able to pretty much get near 8x120s.

The portal hub is your friend now. I bind in the inn near the ship, and use garrison stones + dalaran stones to go to Orgrimmar and then to Zandalar. If you want to do the Faire, go to the Ogrimmar portal hub, go to Zandalar, and click the Thunder Bluff portal. Every time I port I try to use the Garrison and control click the 2 mission tables to keep those out. To access the hub portal, fly from your garrison to the tower top, port to Warspear, turn around go into the hut, and port to Ogrimmar. If I am hitting Kul Tiras, I will use the ship bind to get to the ship quick.

Zandalar is a hateful zone which you need gliders for. WOrse, it is pretty easy to jump off the cliff on your mount, hit your glider, then bump into a tree limb, dismount from your glider, and fall to your death. Jump into clear air. That legacy map you can buy with your main and send to your alts works horde side too. Gives you plenty of FPs. I do Zandalar first because it is shorter flying time from the temple, so you can get a lot of progression with little travel. There are a lot of cutscenes and lore, some of which can not be skipped. But when you do the same stupid zone over 8 alts, you start to get into a rhythm where you can rapidly clear stuff.

Enchanters disenchant everything they get. Everyone else scraps everything they get. I then pile up resources on whoever needs it next, and once you have all professions covered, you can double up on gatherers. So toons 9-13 all will just generate more resources as they climb up. There seems to be on WoWprofessions a point where you are generating end game resources restricted by some rare good (eg Anchorweed for alchemy), and if you can get to that, you can just crank out the resources you need. My enchanter sends scrolls to alts for heirloom enchants. My cook sends them buff food. My alchemist sends them a healing pot stack. And so I tend to try and get those guys up first so the alt train after that runs along. I am trying to make spurs from Blacksmithing to facilitate gatherers.

Horde side gold started around 900K and is still around there. Revenue neutral. This is good since I had a lot of heirloom upgrade costs, flight training, garrison building, and a 340-350 weapon to buy for each toon at 120. So gold has been flowing out, but I have been staying neutral. Once they are more or less parked at a decent item level and passively generating gold via garrisons, I expect Horde side to start generating money.

I am thinking about converting gold to WoW tokens for a buy and hold strategy. I need to look more at that market. I was going to use a few tokens to rename, change races etc.

I did the whole story Horde side. It was good and worth doing. One toon (my druid) did it all in bear form. RAWR. I am exalted on the Horde factions, and revered on champs and turtles for that druid, good enough. I have a mountain of war resources from that daily grind, and am dumping them into rep tokens by the ship missions, which yield bags which net you more gold. So druid and everyone else runs rep token missions. This also helps with a passive grind to get revered for crafting factions. Not sure how much of that I am doing Horde side.

Whatever spec I did on a class Alliance side, I flipped to a different spec Horde side. This is fun and fresh, and gives me a better feel for more specs.

So once those 8 x 120s are done, I am going to work on my Nightborne demonology Warlock, Mag’Har Marksman hunter, Highmountain Tauren fisher extreme and Moonkin, Pandaren Windwalker Monk, and one other. They will be a welcome change from the intense 110-120 push on the legacy toons.

[Hyoto]

You always amaze me at how you play the game, I am so casual. I wish I could get that much gold rolling in, I just usually buy WoW tokens and sell them for gold. Yup I legally cheat LOL.

I have been toying around with low level alliance alts, because I don’t really raid or do dungeons, I sort of get to a point gear wise where it is either just hoping for a titanforge or doing the darkshore warfront for an upgrade and that only happens like every 3 weeks and that is if I am around.

I may have to look into this garrison stuff and see about things, I never did the ship missions.

Thanks for posting good info!!!

[Mid]

Yea. I think I log in to the forums just to see if Snydelee has posted anything. Always good stuff.

Thanks Snydelee!!

[Snydelee]

Well, technically I think you can make more gold by just questing with a double gatherer person, AH all the stuff you can, scrap/DE what you can not. Direct adventure is pretty profitable.

I am sort of a completionist nut on some of this stuff, and doing garrisons to the level I do is something most people hate, hence there is profit in doing it. What I like about it is it is nearly passive. Just log on, control click to gather and send via Garrison commander, and log off, and periodically do maintenance and move sell worthy stuff to alts.

I also like the convenience of garrisons for all my toons. It is nice having 2 portal methods to the garrison, which then accesses the capital city portal hub. I like being able to run through the garrison as I am running the character, and as I ‘drive by’ send people out again. I also like being able to do the pet dailies…guys who are not 120 yet get a daily or 2 at the menagerie, which can yield pet crates for gold sales, and because the whole zone is a rest area, I am not burning rest bonus by doing it.

Repairs and banks are also a big plus. Layouts in Boralus and Zandalar are not as easy as the Garrison, and you can fly in your garrison. If you have the blacksmith, you can get the no repair cost buff which works in some content and saves you repair bills (until you die and lose the buff).

If I do not really have a block of time to do anything substantive on a character, I can just cycle through the toons and generate the passive income.

I do think that if they let up on the bag market and make BFA bags more cost effective, the bottom might drop out of the bag market from garrisons, and much of the profit would go. Indirect markets like direct fur sales and earth would also dry up as bag makers buy that. The way I see it, I can make passive gold in the meantime, and even if it becomes not worth it in the future, the functionality of the garrison will still be relevant later.

Another big strategy for making gold is to park your army of high level alts at a spot for expensive battle pets. For instance I farmed the imp in the cave for Argus with about 12 toons for a week. Those rebellious imps go for around 100K gold each if you can move them, and I got 3 in a week. It was pretty tedious, but here you take advantage of the fact that you have a lot of toons for whom the small chance adds up across your alt army to a real chance of getting it.

My main idea now is to push for one of each class and race on both OTG servers, and accomplish that before I burnout on WoW. That way when I come back I can just dust off the latest FOTM class and have fun with it.

I was looking up farm guides, and strangely they do point to Tanaan/Draenor as one of the hotspots. I tend to agree…you can blow through that stuff with 120s, as I have done so many times as I grind out the revered rep needed for unsinkable and oil rig. The stuff you get there vendors for 10s of gold each, and you volume kill this stuff fast, and there are treasures to pick up for free, and there are numerous bosses that you can drop for drops as well. I just hate grinding like that. If I am grinding and accomplishing some goal like rep for garrison, fine. But just camping a spawn…that gets old.

I think running old instances/raids is also a fun thing. You can do that and not piss anyone off because it is your instance. Working that properly means you need a decent transmog app of some kind. I found this mod that I downloaded from WoWInterface (and Twich will update it) called ‘The Undermine Journal’. What it does is give you a tooltip that the website will update periodically. No need to scan the market or set up resource hog stuff like TSM, and transmogs appear as things that have a decent sale value. One problem I have noticed here is you can generate a false market. For instance before I had this addon, I would just throw up an unknown BoE for 1234g. And I have noticed that because I have posted stuff nobody else does, this has established a false market of things worth 1000ish gold that never sell. That was me. Ugh.

[Snydelee]

Just another realization here. The whole extreme scavenger army/trading post thing is useful for any Draenor resource you need.

Typically resources are not that much of a problem because with all of those salvage boxes over so many alts you generate nice stacks of it. This seems to keep up with things like work orders for leatherworking, engineering, blacksmithing, jewelcrafting, inscription. You do not need to do as much of this because the things you make from them are not high volume.

But in the case of tailoring where you are dumping lots of bags on the market, or alchemy where you are transmuting thousands of elemental fire, air, water into earth, you run dry.

So if you have say 10 alts, and every 3 days or so their extreme scavengers let you buy a 200 stack of fur or say frostweed, then that is 2000 of that thing every 3 days, and that kind of magnitude is hard to get by salvage boxes or even daily harvesting of your garden and mine.

So if fur is running low, GR dump into fur by the TP. If Frostweed is low, GR dump to that by the TP. Since price varies among them, you can likely find a good trade deal on one of them on any given day.

The next thing I had more to say on is getting that extreme scavenger army. The retrain scrolls are not that hot. There are 3 kinds (1) abilities, (2) traits, and (3) abilities and traits. Kind (1) that reroll abilities are a useful way to take an extreme scavenger follower that has abilities you have too many of and get a shot at something you do not have that much at. Kind (2) are a useful way to take a follower with decent traits and roll the dice to see if you get extreme scavenger. Note that it will not re-roll Blook’s combat success rate, or the apexis crystal ability, or bodyguard…those are unique traits that do not get re-rolled. So do not waste trait rerolls trying to get rid of bodyguard. The last kind (3) for abilities and traits is dangerous to use on armor/weapon capped followers. Use these on deactivated followers and maybe you get lucky.

I recruit extreme scavengers by noting what their abilities are (eg massive strike). I write it down on notepad, then I open up the garrison report and see which abilities I lack. With 25 followers, 4 or less of an ability is ‘short’ and 6 or more of an ability is ‘long’. In general I want to recruit into the short category, and de-activate a long category. I typically de-activate bodyguards first. Then I will de-activate double longs (guys who have 2 abilities I have too much of). I will then de-activate unused professions. You can re-roll those with retrain tokens like hearthstone pro, mechanical affictionato, the bird friend one etc. The most useful of these re-roll ones is the greasemonkey one, which will help on oil generation, athough on any mature garrison I have the oil is in multiple thousands, and I only usually have oil issues when I am recruiting out lots of ships with a new shipyard.

The basic idea though is you want that one extreme scavenger a week from the inn, and there is a headache in deciding who to let go via deactivation to hit your 25 follower cap.