Faction transfer!!!

No big announcement, but I was on my favourite multiboxing website and someone mentioned that faction transfer was live in the EU.  There was a link to the wow forums.

I followed the link - and there it was, a blue post stating that faction transfer was live.

 Basically you log in to your account management page and it is listed in amongst the other types of transfer.

Clicking on it it tells you that you pay and half an hour later you can log in and a button will be next to your character to complete the transfer.  (You need to empty out your mailbox).

In reality, I had to wait 20 minutes after clearing my mailbox for it to realise I was logged out, at which point it took the payment, processed it and shortly after told me my character was playable.

Logging in it has a button next to your character (a mixed horde alliance flag) and clicking it shows you your character as it is now, and the races you can change to are highlighted (all others are greyed).  You can customise and rename your character then click and you are logged in on your new faction.

There is achievement spam galore, and that’s it.

 You are in a city related to your character - and have to make your way back to Northrend, and reset your hearth to Dalaran but apart from that the whole process was painless.

Well done blizzard - And thank you soooooo much for an excellent service.

The route I took to levelling them. 

0-60 boosting through various Azeroth instances.

60-66 a mix of questing and early BC instances. I did Hellfire Ramparts, and blood furnace, slave pens, steamvaults and mana tombs.  Cleared most of the the nagrand quests (apart from the arena event).

66-68 was mainly in Battlegrounds.

68-71 Mostly questing in Northrend to gear up.  Did a chunk of BG’s too.

 From 71 to 80 just blew by. 99% of the time was spent in BG’s with brief forays in questing.  I did break at 77 to do a chunk of quests in Sholazar basin.

The only negative to the whole BG levelling was the lack of income. Only one of my shaman has cold weather flying. The other 3 don’t even have flying yet.  To be fair I had stripped all the gold off of my horde characters a while back to transfer to alliance so i could get an epic flapper on my druid so that didn’t help.

In fact i’ve only just got enough money together to train up all the shaman fully. 

I suppose I could go and do a load of quests.  There are entire areas I haven’t even hit yet so that would bring in a nice quick income.  Then again I believe there are some welfare mounts you can get that fly at walking speed.  They are over in K3, but if it allowed me to open up the dailies on all my guys it might just be worth it.

However, the battlegrounds are still calling to me.  I haven’t bothered doing anything but AV at the moment but perhaps it’s time to hit up arathi, eye of the storm, strand of the ancient.  Not sure if I would do warsong gulch - taking up 4 slots as a multiboxer might not be the best move.

I’m glad that I’ve had a bit of time to think about it.  My initial thought was that I would transfer my alliance druid to the horde side so I have a tank available for my multiboxing shaman team.  Then I thought I would need to transfer my shaman as well so I could do 5 shaman’s in BG’s.

Then i had second thoughts. Firstly, my guild is on the alliance side, and I’ve no contacts on the horde side to speak of.   It would be better to have all my 80’s on the same faction. Pooling the money from dailies, and having access to professiosn.  This way I’ll also still be able to socialise with my guild.

I’ll multibox heavily - but I’m quite happy to drop a couple of characters to allow room for some guildies, if they need run throughs.

So - hurry up blizzard, release faction transfer in the EU now please.

I decided that it really was about time that I got it set up. I’ve known about it’s existence for quite a while but never quite got round to using it.

 Firstly here is what you need to do.

Create 1 macro that assists your main character.

I use focus so i can switch lead characters on the fly so my assist macro consists of

/assist focus

(If you don’t switch main you can always put /assist mainplayername) 

Put that macro on to your bar and make sure you bind a key to it.

Next you need to go in to your keybindings. In the section deailing with targetting you will find an Interact with Target option.  Bind an unusued key to this (and remember it).

The final step is to go to the mouse options and turn on “click to move” on your slave characters. This is vital.

So how do you use this?  Firstly select a target with your main.  This can be an NPC, such as a quest giver, windrider master etc, or it can be a mob or enemy player.

Now hit the key for your assist macro. You will see that all your slaves now have the target selected.  Now hit your ”interact with target” key.  A number of things will happen.  If you are close to the target your characters will turn to face it (how cool is that - I use this when pesky melee are in amongst my characters). If it is friendly your characters will now open the window as if you right clicked on that character.  If it is a mob your characters will start to autoattack it. (This is great for melee group multiboxers).

Now if you are far away from the target, your characters will turn to face it and run towards the point where that target was when you hit your interact with target button.  In the case of enemy/mobs if it moves away your slaves will just go to the spot it was at-  but you can always keep hitting interact with target to keep them on it.

This works for large distances.

The main reason I set this up was for fear recovery, but it’s made my life a lot easier picking quests up, handing them in, looting mobs on my slaves, taking flightpoints.

I should really go over fear recovery.  If my grounding totems aren’t out or don’t pulse in time my team can go running off in random different directions, ending up facing all over the place. Before I would have to take my main and run round trying to gather them up.  Now I can select a target on my main (say an enemy player or an alterac valley ram) and hit the interact with target key.  All my guys are going to head for the same spot (so long as they haven’t got caught up on terrain, objects in between).  When they all get closer I can hit my follow key to pull them back together, and if need be go and pick up one straggler instead of a few.

So if you haven’t got interact with target set up do so now. You wont regret it.

 As a  multiboxer I love enemy pets.

A typical encounter with a warlock or hunter is that they send the pet in and try and harass/kill you from outside your range. (I’ve played both singly and this was pretty much my tactic).

When I’m multiboxing I’ll target the pet if the warlock/hunter are out of range, and if there aren’t any other significant threats near by. 

This looks like i’m a noob to the pet owner (I certainly loved it when folks did that on my lock or hunter).

Sometimes I kill the pet, which isn’t too bad a thing - but in a lot more of the encounters I start hitting the pet and the warlock or hunter see their pet is going down fast and recall it.  This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

I wait till the pet is close enough to the hunter but still within my range, then I whack a chain lightining on it and watch as it jumps straight through to the warlock or hunter (and sometimes leaping from there to other alliance).

3 chain lightnings still hurt after the 1st hop - it’s not enough to kill them, but it softens them up significantly and puts them under pressure.

Even better than that it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Just one of the many reasons I love my shaman multibox crew.

(on a side note, my 3 shamans are fast approaching 71, so hopefully tonight I’ll be able to join them up with my 72 shaman and start fighting in the 71-80 bracket.  It’ll be tougher, I’ll die a lot more. But i think there will be few high levels that will feel the pain )

After trying a bit of battleground levelling on my alliance shadow priest I decided it was time to resurrect my shaman and try them out.

 I picked them up at 66.  They were pretty much penniless and so i had to do a few quests to get the gold together to get them their epic land mounts. The second I had them I started battlegrounding on them. What a blast!!!!

It took a while to get used to playing, and my setup was far from perfect.  Healing wise I just had the shaman cast chain heal on themselves - very inefficient and too long a cast time.  Despite that I had okay survivability and was able to play a very active role in the battlegrounds.   Level 70 melee were pretty much able to rip me apart but that was if they got to me   I learnt to hate bladestorm

I did a mix of battlegrounds and questing to level.  Generally queue times were quite good and i got a fair amount of games.  The problem comes when you lose AV hard.  No tower caps, belinda kills etc really reduces the XP you gain in there - but I wasn’t too concerned with that as regardless of win or loss I was having immense fun in there.

As the levels passed by, things improved. My survivability increased. I learnt strategies to cope with the tougher classes.   Melee still hurt hard, but I was hitting harder in return. 

Then I hit 68 and got my lovely fire elementals. Very situational but great to pop.  I remember I was guarding a bunker. It had just under a minute till it was destroyed and from my vantage point opposite the flag I was able to look out and see multiple alliance heading for me.  So I popped my 3 fire elementals.

One of the alliance got through to me - but he was badly crisped and one volley of lightning bolt had him drop at my feet. The others were easily despatched, and the midst of it all the bunker was destroyed.

The other wonderful thing about 68 was I could now pop over to northrend and start gearing up my gear.

So last night I dinged 70, got blood lust, and I’m still having a blast in Alterac valley.

I’ve setup my healing macros so I can heal individual shaman so my survivability is much better.

Once I get these guys to 71 I’ll join them up with my level 72 shaman (and potentially a 71 warlock) and start in the 71-80 bracket.

I’m expecting a great amount of pain initially, but there will still be fun to be had.

Many months ago (pre Wotlk) I saw a video of a 5 shaman group defending galvanar in alterac valley.  He single handedly wiped the alliance.

Last night - I only had 3, but it was a smaller group of alliance, and they would have been able to down galv.  But I got in there and wiped them.

My team is living up to expectations and once faction transfer becomes available I will be able to field a 5 shaman team.  I can’t wait.

There I was  levelling my 73 shadow priest in AV.  It’s an interesting experience running round in a BG with a massive “Kill me” sign above your head.  Every opposition 80 heads straight for you.

So i’ve learnt to a keep a low profile  - using terrain and abandoned vehicles to hide myself as much as possilbe, and just dotting up the folks I could. (I may not contribute much right now, but I do what I can) 

At somepoint I found myself “guarding” stormpike graveyard all on my lonesome and was quite happy until I noticed a level 80 paladin approaching.

He was galloping at full speed for the main base, and I only had time to whack on a couple of dots as he zipped by.

Next thing I see is him targetting me  - And I can only presume that he’s flipped his view round to look at me (probably with a view to coming back and killing my measly little ass) because he then runs clear off the bridge falling all the way to the valley below.

He manages to survive the fall, but only just.  I have this wonderful imagine of the paladin grinning sheepishly, just relieved to have survived his ordeal.  Preparing to pop a few heals, before coming back to wreak vengeance upon me.  The grin slowly disappears as he notices these two little dots ticking away.  He died, and I got the notification of a killing blow.

I couldn’t play for the next 5 minutes because I was laughing too hard. 

There are a a lot of problems to be solved,  achievements and reputation spring immediately to mind, but I look forard to being able to transfer my 70+ warlock, hunter and shaman to the alliance side. (Okay I already have an 80 alliance shaman, but one more can’t hurt).

The great thing is that all 3 of those characters had 2 sets of professions at 375, which will save a lot of time powerlevelling professions again.

Well done blizzard!!!!

5k gold always seemed unachievable for me. I’d hit about 2k and then see some shiny on the auction house, or decide an alt needed some gear, an epic land mount etc.  I’d decided that it would be a wise investment to powerlevel another professions because that would allow me to make more money to go towards the Epic flapper.

Then I changed factions and started again.

I decided to finally get serious about my epic flapper.  I’ve been herbing on my Druid at my favourite spot.  The lake near Fizzcrank airstrip.  It’s great for tiger lily. You just fly round in a circle gather a load, then wait for respawns (which doesn’t take too long).  If I was the only herbalist in the area it went well.  After a while I would invariably get company - usually a druid with epic flight form (but if it was some other class they would have their epic flying mount). I would then lose out on 90% of the herbs that spawned.  I’d head towards a herb, and whoosh! there goes the other guy.  Herb gone.  Wait, there’s one over there. So off I fly and Whoosh! there’s the other guy at it first.

At this point I would give up and come back later.

I decided enough was enough, and through alchemy and scraping together gold off my other characters (and I’m ashamed to say a loan from a generous guildie) I got the money together.

Oh, what a difference.  I can now compete for herbs with the best of them.  If it’s against any other class than a druid I’m going to win most of the herbs.  If it’s against another druid it’s 50/50.

I start out at the lake.  I pick all the herbs, then rather than wait for respawns I zip on over to Sholazaar basin and pick loads of herbs there. 

The only negative - All my other alts seem so slow now.  But with my herbalsim on steroids funding my Alchemy I’m sure I’ll be able to buy them their epic flying mounts soon.