Anelf’s New Year (World of Warcraft) Resolutions

Best not to ask.

Its always worth setting yourself targets. Otherwise you never know when you’ve failed . So here’s my list of 10 things I’m planning to do in WoW in 2009 (in no particular order). I’ll keep this post up to date with my progress.

1. Obtain the Guardian of Cenarius achievement title for Anelf. This is the must-have title for any Druid. I really should have been grinding for this pre-patch-3 instead of messing around on my alts.

Status: Completed Jan 3th 2009. I used Phaelia’s technique for grinding Cenarion Circle rep, which was really easy (I did it over two days while visiting my in-laws). I was already most of the way through revered with Cenarion Expedition from helping a Warlock friend grind for Quagmirran’s Eye. Tinuviel and I duoed Heroic Slave Pens, and I  then finished off with the 30 Coilfang Armaments we’d been hoarding. (BTW Outland Heroics are embarrassingly easy for Level 80s).

2. Obtain the Ambassador of the Alliance achievement title on at least one alt.

3. Level one of each healer class to 80. I’ve already got the Druid there. My Pally is at level 56, my Priest is 39, my Shammie is 10. I suspect the Priest will be the next in line, as I can’t get very enthusiastic about melee classes (despite the love that Retadin’s have received recently).

4. Roll a Hunter. As I mentioned some time ago, I’ve never rolled a Hunter, because I was always running with Tinuviel (or her other Hunter alts). No promises how long said Hunter will live before I kill her though.

Done – Rolled Shuggie – a Dwarf Hunter – on 1/11/09. I’ll write up my hunting experiences (and Tinuviel’s advice to me) if I enjoy playing him (i.e. if I don’t kill him off).

5. Do some PuGs. After early bad experiences, I’ve always been very PuG averse. I still recall my second PuG, where a Warlock needed on everything that dropped (and I mean everything – even BoP plate). He kept apologizing and claiming he hit the wrong button. Still don’t know why I stayed in the group so long . I’m lucky to have a group of friends I enjoy running instances with, but its time to add a few more people to my friends list (and my ignore list .

6. Be nicer to people who can’t out-DPS the tank. More generally, the thing that irritates me is when someone expects to be invited back on raids time after time, when they are making no effort to improve their gear, talent build or shot rotations to improve their performance in the raid. Sometimes I let my irritation show a little too much .

7. Write a WoW addon. A colleague at work (who thinks I’m a bit weird for playing games in my spare time) pointed me to Addon Studio for World of Warcraft. I just hope it proves to be compatible with WOTLK.

8. Roll a Death Knight. 11 million other players can’t be wrong. I’ve already reserved the name – Anelfknight. (Adeathknight was already taken). The DK starting areas should be reasonably empty by now.

Status: Rolled Anelfknight on January 3rd 2009 – a male Night Elf Death Knight. I’ve done a few of the starting quests and he’s now sitting in Ebon Hold gaining rested XP before I go back to him. (However, I’m not sure I’m going to like him. Melee has never been my thing, and I have a suspicion this melee class will leave me cold as well. At least I’ll be able to use the information Tinuviel has started posting .

9. Don’t die so often. Resto Druids are the raid canaries. (You know the CC has broken when the druid dies). Night Elves can now temporarily remove themselves from the threat table when this happens by hitting Shadowmeld, so I’m looking forward to the person who broke the CC dying instead of me.

Status: Started, ongoing. I’m getting used to Shadowmeld now, and its already showing dividends with my armor bill. I’m avoiding a lot of personal deaths and group wipes by hitting my panic key just before the CC-broken mob gets to me. This is such a fantastic class talent (unless you’re a tank).

10. Spend less time playing WoW. This might be slightly incompatible with everything else on my list, but  few more weekend camping trips IRL would be nice (especially having stumped up the cash for all the camping gear last year).

Status: Not going so well. I’ve probably been spending more time on WoW since the new year than at any other time since I bought it. The main reason is probably the Northrend Heroics, which I find a lot more fun that the Outland Heroics were.

What are your plans for WoW 2009?

200K for Christmas

Apologies for not posting much recently - we’re both on the road paying homage to friends and family over Christmas. Normal service will be resumed in the new year.

Just a quick post now to congratulate Tinuviel on reaching 200,000 hits on this blog over Christmas . Steady Shot is now ticking over at around 7500 hits on a normal week. That’s nowhere near  the levels of Mania and BRK, but plenty enough to make us feel the information we’re posting is of some use to you all.

If you’d like to suggest a topic for this blog, then please either leave a comment or email Tinuviel at shakyshot – at – gmail – dot – com.

Death Knight starting experience – not for the conscientious objector

Kibeth - Tinuviel's Death Knight

There is one player who is never likely to start a Death Knight – Noor the pacifist – the crazy (in a good way) gnome rogue who is leveling through WOW without deliberately killing anything.  I think the Lich King would have weeded Noor out early on as being unsuitable to be a Death Knight.

The Death Knight starting experience is a big win.  Everyone should try out a Death Knight and go through the starting experience, even if you have no intention of taking it further.  There is so much to praise about it and little to fault.

The very best thing about this is how increasingly immersive it is.  It draws you into this story and chain of events, requiring you to do things you are increasingly uncomfortable with doing.  Often you have only one quest in your quest log, you have to complete this part of the chain to get to the next.  I am not sure whether it was possible to find a way out of the starting area before you had completed all the quests, but for my part, I knew that at some point I was going to be given a quest that would allow me to escape my evil life and seek redemption, and so I carried on.  But it engrossed me so much, that I began to hope that each quest would be the one that rescued me from my fate.  This too is deliberate, quests that are part of the continuing chain have titles like A meeting with fate.

Easily the most uncomfortable and saddest quest is A Special Surprise.  You are asked to execute a prisoner in the adjacent prison hut.  It’s only one prisoner, you have just slaughtered a whole army single-handedly (twice).  How hard can it be, right?  You walk into the prison hut, there is a prison of every race in there.  Is it random that you are asked to kill the prison of your own race?  No, it is not.  As you approach, the prisoner begins to speak, and then stops.  They recognize you!  They are horrified at what the dark side has done to you.  The night-elf quest was truly sad.  I was hoping through her speech that I would be able to rescue her instead of killing her.  But no, at the end she instructs me to put her out of her misery.  At this point I wanted to throw down my sword, and join Noor as a conscientious objector.  I didn’t care if the Lich King ripped me into little bitty pieces and fed me to his pet goldfish (Mograine told me it’s called Bubbles) – I’d had enough of being the bad guy.  But there was no way out.  To fulfill whatever destiny I had, I had to swing my sword and kill my childhood carer.

Eventually you do get redemption.  You travel out of the starting area to Light Hope Chapel where you participate in an epic scripted battle – The Light of Dawn – led by Mograine.  This is similar to the Vetran of Wrathgrate questline culmination in Dragonblight and its aftermath.  In terms of epic-ness and an instanced scripted story they are both superb.  Don’t miss out on either.

At the end of this wonderful piece of story, you are sent as an emerssary to herald the newly formed Knights of the Ebon Blade to King Wynn in Stormwind.  As you walk/run through SW, you are pelted with rotten fruit by the guards, who hurl insults at you for your traitorous and evil ways, while the citizens flee from you, wailing in terror.  Finally the King accepts you and you are now redeemed, about level 58, all in blues with one follow on quest in your log.  It has been some ride.

To the dark side – Tin makes a Death Knight

The Dark Side

Having dinged 80, I decided to try out the new Death Knight class.  I thought that the breaking (oops, I mean changes to) feral droods had cured my altitis.  I was happy with my hunter.  But 80 came up a bit too fast, hunter nerfs are rearing their ugly head, and I have felt less than enthusiastic to dive into end game pvp and heroics gear grinding.  

I’ve got a bit disheartened with the big changes and ‘balancing’ to the main classes.  I wanted to level up another DPS and largely melee class, but I was worried that I would put all that effort in, only to find ‘the rug pulled out from under my feet’ at the end of it.  Hence, the attraction of the Death Knight.  Blizzard want their new hero class to work – it doesn’t strike me that a DPSing Death Knight is likely to be a Ret Pally at its lowest ebb.  

There was also another attraction to the Death Knight:  Anyone who has read my About Me page, will know that I have always wanted an engineer, but that my low level engineers have never survived my level 26 cull.  Here was a character I could start at 55 and power level engineering, and hopefully one who could quickly get to the stage of being able to supply Tinuviel with Mammoth Cutter bullets and other goodies.

My Death Knight, Kibeth, has finished the death knight starting area quests, and is now level 58.  The name Kibeth comes from the excellent young adult fantasy, Old Kingdom trilogy, by Garth Nix (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen).  The series includes good and evil necromancers, who bring the dead back from death, or reanimate rotting corpses with the souls of dead creatures.  I thought this quite appropriate for a Death Knight  She is also another Night Elf.  I tried to create another class, I really did.  I kept making new Death Knights, all named Kibeth, on the start up page, and leaving them there for a few days, before deleting them and trying another class.  I was tempted to create a horde Death Knight, or a dwarf, or even a human for the diplomacy bonus to rep.  But in the end, I like the new shadowmeld so much, for both soloing and raiding, that I found it hard to think about passing up on this excellent racial.

I have taken a break from leveling to power level my mining and engineering, so that I can mine in the Outland when I go there.  Look out for a couple of posts coming up on my Death Knight experience and some handy info for Death Knights.  Actually, I have been looking around for a good Death Knight blog.  I haven’t found anything yet, can anyone suggest anything?  I don’t know if others are finding it difficult to find Death Knight information, but compared to hunters and even druids the new class seems to be rather thinly represented by detailed information.  I am thinking of broadening this site to try and fill some of this gap, and also give Anelf a bigger part.

Another Level 80 Ding. And running with a Spirit Beast.

 

Goodbye CritChicken

Another level 80 in the family .

Tinuviel’s pet Druid, Anelf, finally dinged 80 last weekend. This means the end of Anelf’s Boomkin leveling spec, and the return of the mild-mannered Resto Druid. Being a Boomkin again was fun while it lasted. It reminded me of times gone bye - before I gave in to the inevitable and became a healer. But I do prefer raiding as a healer. Its a very different challenge from DPSing. (And it doesn’t hurt that its a lot easier for a healer to get a raid slot ).

The downside is that grinding is like watching paint dry. Its hard to kill a Resto Druid, but its also hard for a Resto Druid to kill. Roll on dual speccing, which I understand is slated for patch 3.1.

After attending her Coming of Age party in Dalaran, Anelf went off to retrain and equip the end-game-raid-ready gear she’s been knitting for herself and buying from the AH. Then it was time to try out all those new Resto Druid spells in her first Northrend instance.

We chose the Culling of Stratholme (normal difficulty) because it has a good range of loot, and our pally tank knows the place like the back of his hand from grinding the original Stratholme instance for a fancy horse. The team was Entrigan (Prot Pally), Carys (Fire Mage), Anelf (Resto Druid), Tinuviel (BM Hunter), and Dollarbill (BM Hunter).

The highlight of the run was that Dollar arrived at the instance with his new pet – a Spirit Beast. He’d been camping in Sholazar for three days before he finally found it to tame. (I suspect that was one of the shorter Spirit Beast camping trips. And he’d kept quiet about it, so it really was a surprise). So this was going to be our first-hand experience of a Spirit Beast in action. Tin is running instances with her level 80 Wolf (called Hamfast) while she levels her cat up to 80.

Stratholme itself was an interesting run. We’ve always enjoyed the Caverns of Time instances and their attention to the ‘historical’ detail (q.v. Herod the Bully in Southshore). But what was remarkable for me was how trivially easy it was. I’d been worried I’d let the group down learning the very different Druid healing rotations (and dealing with my suddenly finite mana pool), but that wasn’t an issue at all. I think it was for the second boss that I ended the fight with 90% mana, having taken no potions and not having to use Innervate. The only problem I had was when I wandered out ot line-of-sight of Entrigan during the third boss fight. (I probably shouldn’t say that since Ent sometimes reads this blog ). And it does help to have a well-geared tank to heal.

 Tin and Dollar are quite similarly specced, so it was interesting to compare the Spirit Beast with Hamfast the Wolf. Unfortunately, Tin didn’t save her Recount scores, but she noticed on the night that the Spirit Beast was destroying the Wolf on DPS for the boss fights. (Total damage output for Tin and Dollar was pretty much the same). Obviously, its not really fair to compare party members’ DPS without considering group buffs. (The Wolf was buffing the whole party with its Furious Howl). Even so, the Spirit Beast looks particularly powerful – and this is before it gets the promised buffing up in patch 3.0.8.

Finally, a tip from a healer for Hunters running CoS. All through the instance, the party gets trash adds as the undead citizens keep wandering into aggro range. These are an irritation for the healers, as they can interrupt heals, so its helpful for a Hunter to lay down an Explosive Trap for the healer to stand on. The Hunter’s ability to quickly switch targets to burn down the trash is also a great help here.

Dalaran celebrates Anelf's Coming of Age

Unusual ghostly pets – sans spirit beast

Not have the patience to hunt the spirit beast, but would like an unusual ghostly pet?  What about these?  The random daily quest from the Oracle faction in Sholazar Basin – Cleansing Song – requires you to summon and kill three ghostly creatures.  One is a giant crocolisk, another looks like a slime and a third a white hydra.  They are all tameable and all count as croclisks under beastlore, having the family skill Bad Attitude.  The other nice thing about them is they are level 80, so for level 80 players there is no pet leveling required.

 

I tamed both the hydra and the slime.  They both shrink significantly when tamed, the slime particularly makes a very small pet, if you like small.  I messed up the hydra tame initially, as Anelf pre-healed me and then whacked in another heal, so the hydra very sensibly decided to take out the healer.  It was also semi-resistant to freeze traps – being frozen successfully by one out of three.  It has a knock-back (untamed), which interrupts the taming, so if you get knocked back you have to begin again.  Both it and the slime also have a poison dot, which did quite a bit of damage while I was taming.  The slime stands at a distance and shoots its poison so it’s harder to pull it into a waiting trap.  Better to drop one on its head to begin the taming.

Not sure if I will keep them, but they make interesting and unusual pets.

Ghostcrawler speaks – huge hunter nerf incoming

Ghsotcrawler speaks: Hunters of all specs, and particularly Beastmaster, are doing too much damage in PvE.        We tested this a lot internally in beta and knew hunters were high but we hoped other classes would be able to catch up in a way they have as yet been unable to do. We want to be careful not to hurt hunter dps too much in PvP, so we’re taking most of the damage out of Steady Shot and Volley. Beastmaster hunters are in addition losing some of their pet dps. We still want BMs to have the best pets, but pet dps numbers are a little high at the moment. We are also still concerned about hunter survivability in PvP and taking the opportunity to jazz up Deterrence into something that looks and plays a little more interesting.  These are not all of the changes we are working on for hunters, but those changes we feel are ready for testing. We hope to get these changes up on the PTR so players will have a chance to test them out and respond before they go live.  1) Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).  2) Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks.  3) Readiness – no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.  4) Deterrence – has been completely overhauled. It now allows you to deflect 100% of incoming melee or spell damage for 5 seconds, but prevents you from attacking while active. You still must be facing the attacker to deflect the damage (this is a limitation we are trying and might end up removing). 60 sec cooldown.  5) Kill Shot – cooldown reduced to 15 sec (from 35 sec).  6) Kindred Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.  7) Serpent’s Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. (EDIT: Still grants the current bonus to the hunter.)  All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.  9) Growl— threat generation increased by 20% (same for Voidwalker Torment).  10) Call of the Wild – now benefits only the hunter and his or her pet.  11) Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.  12) Spirit Strike – reduced the period on the dot so it will work better with Longevity.  Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don’t have to swap around what you are tracking as much.  13) Aspect of the Wild – now raid-wide.  EDIT: The “only” on Serpent’s Swiftness meant 10% pet attack speed instead of 20%. The hunter bonus is unchanged.  [ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ] ————————————————————————————————————————— WOW! This is the biggest news hunters have had in a long time.  Some of these changes are huge, especially for beastmasters.  Not all of them are nerfs, and not all of them may end up on the live realms (they will be tested and adjusted on the PTRs), but it is clear that as WOW insider puts it, ‘The Great Hunter Nerf of 2008′ will soon be upon us (although it is possible this will creep into 2009 by the time the have tested it all). I think most of us will admit our class is very powerful in PVE.  I soloed through much of the content to 80 and duoed the rest, including all the group quests and elites we came across along the way.  I only died once or twice, and then when soloing non-pet friendly quests where I had to melee an elite, or some such.  My gear at 80 is OK but nothing special.  I have a Nessingway 4000 gun, but I am mostly dressed in level 78 LW crafted blues (the swiftarrow pieces) – nice starter pvp gear but not top end dps kit.  Yet in the couple of instances I have participated in so far (Lightning Halls and Heroic Nexus), with a group of similarly or slightly better geared people (mage, enhance shammie, pally dps), I have being putting out around 40% of the damage and clocking around 1800dps to their 1100.  Better geared (and probably played hunters) are talking of dps numbers of 3.5k and 4.5k on a regular basis in raids and instances.  In solo pve, my gorilla and I can regularly top 3k dps on a group of mobs with volley and have recorded 5,0000+ dps on a group of lower level mobs at the top end.  So I am OK with the fact that hunters, and especially maybe beastmaster hunters need toning down a bit in pve.  I don’t like it of course, but I think it’s fair.  What I hope they will do though, is bring it to a sensible level and not nerf us to the ground.  Hunters are a pure dps class.  We should be at the top of the dps charts.  We should be vying for that position with other pure dpsers like mages and rogues.  We should be out-dpsing hybrid classes who bring a wider range of buffs and utility to the party than a hunter, and who now mostly have cc too.  If our dps drops below that of shaman, ret pallies, and others, Blizz have done something wrong. Overall, I hope the nerf to steady shot will be adjusted somewhat.  This affects all hunters, not just BM.  It’s their bread and butter shot.  According to Drotara, over on Less QQ, More Pew Pew, this looks like a 25% nerf to something that accounts for 51% of his damage (i.e. a 13-15% nerf to his overall damage), taking him below the top 10 dpsers in his raid.  And this is just one of the nerfs.  I hope this is not where Blizzard want us to be. Once the changes have been finalized, and the theorycrafting over on elitist jerks and elsewhere has settled, this will change how we play.  Most of the nerfs are aimed at BM hunters.  It maybe that marksman will become the premier raiding spec to maximise dps.  Cats are getting nerfed, but not so devilsaurs (and the elusive spirit beast is getting a buff), so devilsaurs and perhaps spirit beasts should overtake cats as king of the dps jungle.  Readiness not effecting beastial wrath (along with the cat nerf) removes the temptation for a BM hunter spec like 50/21 – it looks like a 51 spec will be more effective if you stay BM.   There are also a few buffs in here.  Improved growl will help tanking hunters, and those with high crits hold aggro with their pets.  Improved tracking over in the survival tree, sounds as if it will give a straight 5% damage buff as long as you are tracking something on the list, and not herbs or the stablemaster.  Looks like abilities such as Intimidation are not going to disrupt your shot rotations anymore, which is nice.  And the new deterrence, sounds like a hunter bubble for pve and BGs  It says you can’t fight for those 5 secs, but presumably you can drink a potion or bandage?  It would be nice it if were a complete bubble to give you time to do this, without interruption and also give you immunity to stuns (otherwise this is useless again rogues, warriors, pallies, etc, who would just stun you for the period.  May also need to consider giving you temporary immunity to any DOTs you have on you, which is not how it reads at the moment (otherwise bandaging will get interrupted).  However, it is unclear how useful this will be in arenas.  Do you really want to standby invulnerable for 5 secs, while the other team kills your healer? All in all this has come at a bad time for me in WOW.  Don’t get me wrong, I think some of the stuff in the expansion is great, but somehow I am not am as obsessed with WOW as I was even a few weeks ago.  I can now go a whole two days without wanting to play!   So over to you guys?  What do you think of the prospective changes?  Constructive clean comments only please (this is a family show).  - Ha ha – I have just re-read this article – it’s very balanced given my first reaction to the news   External Links: Elitist jerks post on the changes – here Adam Holsky at WOWInsider – here Big Red Kitty at WOW insider – here here and here  - I like BRKs ending to part 3 – couldn’t agree more:  “ Now let’s move on to getting some freaking help in arenas, shall we? And the Survivalist tree is still honked up. Heart of the Phoenix, one of the best reasons for getting the Beast Mastery talent, isn’t working properly. There aren’t enough level 80 pets to tame. Why can’t we tame Mammoth? And fix Cower, for Elune’s sake! COWER, people!” Less QQ, More Pew Pew is QQing  - here And for a little optimism I will leave you with Pike on Aspect of the Hare: “So Blizz has the nerf bat and we’re the battered Big Red Piñata this time. Stay positive. I think it will be okay. If we have to work harder for BM DPS now, then that makes it all the more fun and exciting. Not as easy to top DPS now? So be it– maybe we can finally shake the huntard stigma. Hang in there everyone! /group hug”

Who’s the Pet?

Questing in Zul’Drak today, my group portrait screen confirmed what I’d suspected for some time. Tinuviel’s pet is now so powerful that it has become the master and she’s the pet. Here’s a screenshot to prove it …

Behold the power of the BM Pet!

Critter Gitter

One of the more oddball achievements those whacky Blizzard dudes thought up is Critter Gitter. You have to feed Critter Bites to 10 critters in 3 minutes to coerce them into becoming your minions. Just find an area with a high density of critters, and you’re good to go. Anelf did her’s with Zul’Drak Rats and with the help of Tinuviel’s home cooking (Anelf never got much beyond Spiced Wolf Meat).

Sometimes you have to wonder what those guys put in their coffee during their brainstorming sessions.

Anelf's Army

 

Tinuviel:  Good places to try for this achievement include anywhere there are a lot of available critters running around.  When I first tried it with Tin, I was in Grizzly Hills, where there are a lot of wild squirrels and skunks, but not enough to easily round up 10, before the buff wore off the first few enchanted skunks.  I got my achievement in the Wolvar camp in Sholazar Basin.  One of the early quests in the chain to become friendly with either the Wolvar or Oracles, involves rounding up chickens that have got loose.  Other good places include the Turkeys near the Explorer’s League post in Howling Fjord, and Shattrath, where there is a group of chickens near the bread and meat vendors, and rats and sheep elsewhere in lower city.

Anelf’s guide to Alliance-Horde money exchange

Tinuviel and I have made quite a killing recently selling Horde pets on the Alliance AH (and vice versa). With the new pet collecting achievements, demand for pets has rocketed. And where demand outstrips supply, the price goes up .

At its peak, we were getting up to 50g for pets you buy from vendors for around 40s each. Prices are now coming down to 10-15g on our server as other sellers join in. But that first week where we were one of two exclusive Antonidas suppliers was great fun, and made up for a lot of our laziness in not grinding the Quel’Danas dailies pre-expansion.

(We have a weekly Guild lottery as well – run by one of my alts –  where any guild member who has logged in that week is automatically entered in the draw. These pets have proven very popular as Lotto prizes).

Soldiers of Fortune used to have a sister guild on the Horde side – Soldiers of Misfortune. That guild has folded now, but while it was popular I posted a guide to transferring stuff to the Horde using the neutral AH. I was reminded of this as I was standing in Gadgetzan AH buying endless stocks of snakes, dragonhawks and prairie dogs, so I thought it would be fun to post it here as well.

__________________________

You’ve got your high level Alliance main with lots of cash and mats. Now you’re starting up a Horde alt with nothing. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could transfer stuff between factions to do a bit of twinking?

Well here’s how …

First, what you can’t do (with a caveat that things could change at any time with a patch):

• You can’t trade directly between characters of opposing factions,
• You can’t trade on the opposing factions AH, and (most importantly),
• You can’t post an item on a neutral AH and then buy it with your own alt.

This means you’re going to need help from someone you trust.

Let’s say your main is Alliance and your alt is Horde. Take your main to any neutral AH, and ask a friend who also has characters in both factions to also take his Horde character to a neutral AH. (Booty Bay is probably easiest for a low level Horde, as you get there via Ratchet – which is quite low level. And it doesn’t have to be the same neutral AH unless you’re planning to use sign language to communicate).

To transfer items:

Timing is important here. Your low level alt doesn’t have much gold, so you need to post the item at a really low cost. If you post at 1c, then the AH won’t take a cut (15% of 1c is nothing). Your friend then has to quickly buy the item before anyone else notices that Netherweave Bag on sale for a pittance.

• Remember to set the buyout price. You can’t make a quick transaction if there’s no buyout.
• Make sure your friend knows exactly what you’re posting, so he can find it quickly. He can pre-set the auction list to sort on price, so your item appears at the top of the list if there are more than one posted. Alternatively, you can use an addon that allows searching by seller name.
• Post your items one at a time and wait until that item sells before you post the next. The more items you have listed at once, the more chance someone else will buy it out from under you.
• You need good communication with your friend. More on that now …

Remember you can’t speak to the opposing faction in-game, so you can’t just whisper him to tell him what you just posted. Nor can you setup in-game chat between factions. This means you have to setup an out-of-game chat. This could be one of the many internet chat applications (like MSN Messenger). Or, better still, voice communication – like Skype or other VOIP server. Best of all is to have your friend sitting next to you in the same room – that’s how Tin and I do it .

If voice is absolutely out of the question, then you have to setup a signaling system with your friend in advance. Custom emotes come out as ‘X makes strange gestures at Y’ when used cross faction, so you have to agree some code with your friend before he switches to his Horde alt. Maybe a /hug means ‘buy the next item in the list’, and /facepalm means ‘you just screwed up and that level 10 gnome now owns my level 80 purple sword’. I’ve never had to use a non-voice method, and I really wouldn’t recommend it.

There is a risk to transferring. Someone could spot your auction if you’re too slow and start buying your cheap stuff. The neutral AHs aren’t very busy, but you can reduce this risk by choosing a quiet time. Tin and I buy the gear we’re posting within seconds, and have never had anything bought out from under us. But I have occasionally seen items that are obviously being transferred.

BTW The AH will take a deposit from you when you post your auction. This deposit will be returned to you by mail when your item is bought by your Horde friend. The only real problem with this is that you need enough money to pay the deposit when you post the item.

To transfer money:

Transferring money has no risk, but is more costly. Your Horde friend simply auctions a grey item for a stupidly large amount (however much you want to transfer), and your Alliance main buys it.

(And, if you’re really lucky, someone else will buyout the auction at the stupid price .

It’s costly because the neutral AHs charge a big commission (15% for us). This can be slightly lower if you have higher rep, but it still hurts to give gold away. The benefit of money transfers is that timing isn’t so important, so you don’t need voice communication setup with your friend. He can take his time walking to the AH.

An alternative to transferring money is to transfer very sellable items (e.g. enchanting mats or blues) using the item transfer method. But learn the Horde AH first. (Don’t assume things sell for the same prices as the Alliance AH).

And of course, you’ll know you can really trust your friend when he hands over the items or money you transferred to him .

A word of warning about money transfers. I’ve only done it a couple of times (compared to hundreds for the item transfers). It worked for me, but Blizzard are said to watch for transactions like this, as its one indication of a  gold seller at work.