The Birth of a New Hero

Yay, what a fun, fun weekend!

Eto and I got sucked into the Refer a Friend train.

Yeah, yeah, I have no idea why. Apparently, we were bored and it sounded like fun. We have two new guild members (/wave to Crobin and Saville) that joined us from the WoW_Ladies group over on Live Journal. They responded to my plea for casual raid members and decided to roll toons on our server with their RaF account.

Now, after only a few hours of play (spread across 3 days) they went from level 1 to 24. Total play time is maybe...5 hours? Yes, RaF is crazy!

A few posts back I had mentioned wanting to try out tanking on a Paladin, since secretly, I've always wanted to play one but never leveled one up. So, when Eto and I started talking about this we immediately decided to try out the RaF to see just how fast we do level.

Thus was born, Arialana, a tiny female bloodelf and Aurael, a quirky little undead priest.

Eto and I rolled a mage/shadow priest combo on an European server a few months back and abandoned as the draw to come home, to Shadow Council, proved to be too strong. We had debated transferring those toons over with us but since I plan to roll a mage goblin when Cataclysm hits, he decided to humor me and roll the shadow priest on our RaF account.

Our progress so far? We hit level 16 last night after about 3 (none consistent) hours of play. None consistent in the fact that we spent a lot of time messing with our UIs, logging in and out trying to get Eto's account to report as a normal and not a trial account, toon hopping to get gold and bags, hearthing back for skills and just randomly AFKing for food, drinks, talking etc.

I have found at least 3 issues so far with doing RaF account leveling.
1. You out level your zone before the quests are nearly done. - Example, we were out of the Undead starting area after doing only 4 quests. The quests in our log are yellow when we pick them up and then green or grey by the time we turn them in. We've had to abandon our entire unfinished quest log on several occasions and move onto the next zone just because all the mobs we are killing have gone grey. Yes, you really do level that fast in the beginning. I suppose this will probably start to level itself out as we start getting into the higher levels.

2. You out level your gear faster then you can change it. We're both, for the most part, in the white/grey gear we got from the early starting quests/drops. With the exception of a couple of lowbie greens I had in the bank our gear is horrible. It doesn't exactly make since, at this stage at least, to spend money on getting gear from the AH, since in an hour or less we'd be back buying more.

3. You can't level professions. Not enough time. Looks like we'll have to go back and power level them once our RaF boost is over. And you can't afford to pay for your skills without the help from your other toons. You just don't loot or make enough gold to keep up with them. Thankfully, I can send gold from my other toons for us.

Now the biggest problem we are having is that we can't seem to get Eto's 2nd account to drop the temporary account restrictions. So, as of now we can't add him to the guild, I can't trade with him and he has limited chat functions.

I totally understand why Blizzard does this. It prevents account hackers and gold spammers/sellers from using the free trial accounts to aid in their misadventures. But we've paid the 19.95, which I assume is for us to get the actual game and we've set it up on a monthly subscription, what's the hold up? *sigh* Hopefully, this will be fixed by the time we get back online tonight.

**EDIT** Per Blizzard's forums, it appears that upgrading from a trial account to a standard acccount can (and usually does) take up to 72 hours for the billing department to verify payment and lift restrictions on your trial account. IF you buy the game in a retail store and have the new, unused, key code for the game it is almost an instant lift of restrictions. But since we did everything through Blizzard we are going to have to wait it out to get all but the leveling restrictions lifted. He can, at least, continue to level without the level 10 cap. Just an FYI for anyone thinking of doing RaF.

On to other news:
Spent Saturday morning leveling my city rep with Org and the Trolls. DKs really have a disadvantage when it comes to rep grinding. Having done almost no quests on either of the "Old World" continents, left me with very little in the way of starting rep for any of my factions. But I did manage to get exalted with the Trolls (yay for FINALLY getting a raptor mount on one of my toons!) and nearly exalted with Org.

However, the biggest squee for me came by way of Koltira's Pauldrons of Conquest. I finally ran enough daily heroics to save enough emblems for my T9 shoulders!

So, to feed my gear score junky side for a moment. I am super excited that my Be Imba score has gone up to 534 and my WoW Heros score is 2353. Now to just replace those pesky legs, belt, gloves, ring, trinket and cloak. /facepalm

It's a never ending battle!

-Shameless plug-
If anyone is interested in playing Horde side, rolling new toons, RaF, transferring, etc, Faded Delusions has open doors and we'd love to have you aboard. We're still in need of a few more core raid members for a very casual, very laid back raid group. But if you're just interested in a mature, fun, couple friendly, laid back, place to play and have fun look us up as well. We're dedicated to keeping the game fun and the drama out. Play your toon, your way, we'll make room!