Making the most of rest bonus on Warcraft

The accumulation of Rest Bonus is another motivation for me to have more than one toon going at any one time.


I picked up a new Addon today to replace my old, broken one from pre-2.0 patch. You can find XPextend here to try it out yourself. It changes your experience bars slightly to give you percentages of how much rest experience you've accumulated and how much experience you've accumulated towards your next level. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to give me any idea about how much time I need to wait in order for my rest experience to be at 100% like my old addon for rest bonus did, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess.


18 Undead Priest


I spent all but 5% of my Priest's rest bonus last night after my evening workout, and got myself up to 18, and trained with my new skills (one of which was New, and two of which were upgrades on existing things). I haven't really taken much of a look at my talents yet (although of course I've spent the talent points), but I've been pondering my talent spec. I hear discipline/holy is a good route to go for a soloing-yet-instancing type, and I've been collecting +healing equipment now and then when I see it.


I think this weekend I'll do my first instance with this toon, and see how the whole "healing and cleasing" thing goes. I'll probably go into Ragefire Chasm (RFC) even though I'm a couple levels above its recommended start level (folks go in there at 12-14). I like to have confidence of strength over my opponents when I'm learning an experience. There's plenty of chances for insane healing practice later on.


10 Blood Elf Paladin


I toyed around with her this morning and finished a couple of quests and burned off her 25% rest bonus in no time. I'm feeling happy that it takes a long time for rest bonus to build up and not long to burn it off on this toon because learning too many classes at once isn't fun, and I'm happy to park this toon for a week and a half at a time while I learn the others.


42 Undead Warrior


I've spent about 150g on materials to help this toon through her 4-5 Armorcrafting quests, and thankfully they're all done, and my toon is up to 243 blacksmithing. The "hear ye! hear ye!" shout that the Mithril Order guy did when I was admitted as an official Armorsmith was kinda neat as well, but I guess nobody was around to cheer for me... That's what I get for playing at 9 AM on a Friday morning when most people are at work or school ;)


Now, I'm heading her back towards STV and Booty Bay area to grind on quests, but first...


61 Troll Hunter farms SFK


It's time to restock some of my cash supplies. Since it's the weekend, this is a great time to be selling things in the Auction House, so I decided to plow through a lowbie instance.


Shadowfang Keep has a reputation for having a bunch of low-level Bind on Equip (BoE) blues that can drop, as opposed to having a lot of Bind on Pickup (BoP) items that I'd only be able to disenchant, and not sell instead of being able to decide whether to disenchant for the shards or sell in the Auction House. Low-level is good, because people spend a lot of dough on twinking up their wee toons for PvP in the 10-19 and 20-29 brackets.


I almost wished I had an expert skinner tagging along with me, with all the wolves and the skinnable shadowfang corpses I was leaving about! This is definitely a great low level instance for those in the Skinning profession.


I still say it's a crappy Hunter dungeon, however. Very tight quarters and tight turns mean a lowbie hunter with a wide aggro radius would have troubles being able to attack from afar without also aggroing other mobs.



Loot from Shadowfang Keep farming run


I ended up getting 4 or so blues, but they were all BoP so I disenchanted them (3 Large Glimmering Shards, 3 Vision dust, 1 Lesser Astral essence, 1 Greater Nether essence and 1 Large Brilliant Shard). Robes of Arugal even dropped, after I dropped Arugal without him blinking even once to another location in the room.


As for other items I could sell on the Auction House, I ended up with 6 BoE items (3 weapons, and 3 pieces of armor) plus a stack of Lean Wolf Flank (low level cooking mat) and nearly a full stack of both Linen and Wool cloth (the cloth I've kept for my alts, however).


So, I have calculated that if all of my shards and all of my BoE items sell for their buyout prices, I'll get 25g from this run.


But wait, there's more! I picked up about 1.5g in coins on the way through, and brought back approximatetly 1g worth of vendor trash as well. I'll likely use up this bit of extra cash restocking arrows, however, so we're back to this run having profitted me 25g.


Not too bad for about 50 min work (including travel time to get back to the AH and time spent listing and comparing current things for sale in AH)!