Perk Me Up

When starting out on World of Warcraft, regardless of your end goal, your first goal should be to level. There are a couple of perks WoW has built in to help you level but unless you have already leveled a character or know how to obtain these perks it can be challenging.  Read on past the jump to for easy ways to obtain these.

First and easiest is the guild perk Fast Track. Many level 25 guilds will pick up a new player to just be nice or to profit from their leveling, the guild gets a little experience and gold from every character leveling. This is an essential step in expediting your leveling process.  Also, realize that this perk becomes active at guild level 6.  So your guild doesn’t have to be level 25 for you to get this perk, and there are a lot of level 6 guilds that need or just want new people.

Second are heirlooms. These can be challenging to obtain if you don't know the best ways to obtain them. For the adventurer first starting out, the easiest ways to obtain heirlooms are either through the Darkmoon Faire or through random battlegrounds

First, let's look at the Darkmoon Faire. This can be a long process that takes a couple of months or a lot of money. The heirlooms from DMF cost 110 tickets and you can obtain a maximum of 145 tickets per month through conventional methods (150 if you start at 12:01 when the faire first becomes available). Alternatively, you can obtain more tickets by dropping and learning each of the main professions giving you a max of 186 tickets per month (read my post on the Darkmoon Faire for more details on how to do this). This is not advised for Gold Goblins though because the cost of all of the leveling materials is too high.

So, for you Gold Goblins out there, I recommend doing battlegrounds for your heirlooms.  You can start queuing for BGs at level 19.  If you’re a druid, I highly recommend Warsong Gulch because you have a huge advantage using Travel Form to capture the flag and run it back to your base quickly, and capturing flags awards more honor points.  Realize that if you’re playing BGs at level 19 you’re probably going to face some people who are really well geared as twinks (a twink is a low level character made just for PvP fighting) or just because they have max level alts that can get them the best gear.  Don’t hate these people, they can be some of a Gold Goblin’s best customers.  If you’re not really good at PvP, don’t fret.  Just continue queuing for BGs and earning honor until you have enough to buy your heirlooms.  By the way, you’re earning XP as you play through BGs.  If you have a high level or max level character, you can also buy heirlooms with Champion’s Seals or Justice Points.  There are also heirloom helmets and capes available through the guild vendor once you have a high enough reputation with your guild.  And, lastly, if you have a max level character, you can try to obtain the Dread Pirate Ring through the Kalu’ak Fishing Derby.

The third perk is the bonus recruit-a-friend experience.  If you have a friend you can recruit to WoW or if a friend recruited you, you get 3 times your normal experience.  If you don’t have a friend to recruit, you can Google a forum for people looking to recruit or looking to be recruited.  Alternately, you can spend the money to purchase a second copy of the game and play with two characters at the same time (this is called dual boxing and requires either two computers or one really good computer).  There are also forums, websites and addons dedicated to making dual boxing easier.  If you decide to purchase a second copy of the game, keep an eye out for periodic sales that Blizzard has such as the one leading up to the release of Mists of Pandaria where you could purchase every expansion up through Cataclysm for a total of $20.

Now that you have your extra experience perks, it’s time to level.  Continue to my next post on power leveling.