Level 70, or "Dustfire Beat the Game! ... Right? Right?!"

Unfortunately, no. You can't even begin striving for end-game content until 70. So really... Dustfire has just leveled into the role of a Warcraft "adult." She gets to play with the big kids... and probably get squashed by them.

Guild notice: (Manasseh wrote it. I thought it was funny/clever. ^_^)

The biggest perk of hitting 70 is access to a flying mount. If you have 900g. Luckily, I had 1407g because mining rocks (actually, a lot of it was from quests and passing over cheap cloth quest rewards to get the plate, which vendors for several gold more on average).


Also, about the awesome and incredible horde flying mount... well, it's the ugliest thing I've ever seen. I'm not shy about admitting this. I swore I wouldn't get a single flying mount until I could get inside The Eye, but I was being impractical. It's much easier to do things with a flying mount. I just swear off of epic flying mounts until I can get to The Eye. B/c there's no sense spending 1000g and hours and hours of rep grinding on a mount that will just get replaced sometime next year (I hope). The phoenix will be my epic, even if I have to get every damn person on my server one before I get one. I will persevere.

Like I said on my guild forum: "For me, getting a phoenix is winning the game."

Heroics, or "Managing Your Reputation Pre-70"

Non-Gamer's Guide to This Post

Reputation is how the factions around you feel about you. When you do Stranglethorn Vale quests, for example, your rep with Booty Bay goes up and your reputation with Bloodsail Buccaneers goes down. You can, of course, reverse this by killing lots of bruisers in Booty Bay (high rep with the Buccaneers and hated with Booty Bay is how you get an admiral's hat).

You get reputation with factions by doing quests, instances, and repeatable turn-ins.

The largest rep grind you'll see before Outlands will be around level 45-50, trying to get in good with the Timbermaw so you can pass unmolested through their home to get to Winterspring (and to get a few extra quests off them). You must be sure never to kill a Timbermaw, or your rep will plummet, and kill lots of their enemies, who drop feathers you can turn in for extra pops of reputation.

Reputation moves thusly: Hated, Hostile, Unfriendly, Neutral, Friendly, Honored, Revered, Exalted

Exalted with any same side (Alliance v. Horde) faction allows you to purchase that faction's mount (Alliance: Ironforge-Ram, Stormwind-Horse; Horde: Undercity-Skeletal Warhorse, Darkspear Trolls-Raptor).

Minimalist Addon List, or "Don't Clutter My Interface"

I admit it. I'm a minimalist. My side of the freshman dorm room had bare walls, one table lamp, and a cluttered computer desk. My roommate's side had curtains, throw pillows, massive posters of Vin Diesel, rugs, and photographs of herself and friends framed by artistically cut construction paper.

So I'm gonna give you the three addons I can't live without, and that's it. These are all the addons you actually need. (These are popular enough to receive upgrades soon after every new patch.) Can you (and do I?) use others? Yes, of course. But you can survive without others.

Auctioneer: If you plan to ever buy or sell things in the Auction House, you'll need to get auctioneer and run some scans so you'll know what you should charge/pay.

Gatherer: If any of your characters has a gathering profession (mining makes big bucks), gatherer marks the herbs/mines so you can go back to the same spots later and try and get more (nodes respawn in the same area, not necessarily the same node, about every 20-30 minutes). Recently updated with a downloadable database of nodes, so you can have all nodes immediately at your fingertips.

Titan Panel: More than anything else, Titan Panel is necessary for coordinates. Coordinates on the map make it easy for players to tell each other where to find quest goals. (Ie, on Wowhead.)

------------------------

Installing Addons

They ought to have directions, but in case they don't, or the directions are confusing:

1. Download .zip file to desktop.
2. Open My Computer from your Start menu.
3. Go to Local Disk (C:)
4. Go to Program Files (Ignore any warnings about changing/modifying contents -- that's just there to keep people from deleting the whole thing on a confused cleaning binge.)
5. Find World of Warcraft folder, and enter it.
6. Enter the Interface folder. You ought to see an Addons folder inside this one.
   
7. Enter the Addons folder.
8. Drag and drop the .zip files on your desktop into the Addons folder.
9. Right-click on each .zip file and select "Extract here." This ought to place a new folder in your Addons folder. (If you cannot extract or "Unzip," you should download WinRAR.)
   
10. Delete the .zip folders after you have extracted from them.
11. Close and enjoy!
    

Role-Playing Mods, or "I Don't Role-Play, But I Still Want One"

The new, girl-written comic lauded on popular WoWInsider, Hammer of Grammar, used Role-Playing mods in a recent comic. (My favorite comic: Penis Envy.)

I had no idea Role-Playing mods existed. I mean, I don't really want to Role-Play. But I like giving my characters backgrounds and personalities, as evidenced by a previous post, and I think it would be really fun to download one of these.

The comic cites the following three addons:

• FlagRSP (Burning Crusade Version)
• ImmersionRP
• MyRolePlay

I'm going to conduct an experiment where friends and I try these addons and rate them by the following criteria:

Attractiveness
Ease of Use
Shows Info of Other 2 Addons?

We will include screenshots.

---------------------------------------------

FlagRSP BC
tested by Dustfire and Shenoah

Broken, and not in the "this is so awesome, it's broken" way. In the "oops, I stepped on your glasses" way. Nothing shows up when you input info, error messages abound, and the friendslist panel that Shenoah acknowledges might have been cool does not actually allow you to enter friends into it. This is obviously the fault of not being up-to-date and may be corrected some day, but shows an obvious laziness on the part of the creator to keep up with major patches, so it would probably break again as soon as the newest update comes out.

Attractiveness: 7/10
Ease of Use: 5/10
Shows: (coming)

As for the write-a-background feature, which is what I wanted a RP addon for, it doesn't have one. It allows you to enter a last name and nickname and a physical description. There is even a tip pop-up that specifies "This physical description panel is not for background information" and gives examples on what that means. So I thought "okay, the background panel is elsewhere." No, it isn't. Even when I got excited by finding the almost-hidden "Turn Over" button at the top, thinking there were more forms to fill out, I only found "I am/am not roleplaying at the moment" checkboxes.

Honestly, people know what my character looks like. They can see her. She's pretty. Whatever. What they can't see is her backstory, and I wanted to write one. So I'm disappointed.

---------------------------------------------

MyRolePlay
tested by Nevari and Manasseh

Already, this addon seems infinitely easy to navigate. With unobtrusive toggling and simple text boxes, Nevari tells me that it's what I was looking for. In fact, she's going to keep it after the trial run, she likes it so much.

Manasseh, of course, called me a bother and will probably get rid of his asap.

Attractiveness: 9/10
Ease of Use: 9/10
Shows: (coming)

Nevari got screenshots of all of the features. ^_^ Click the images to see full size.


Looking at another's profile:

Mouse-over player:

Edit: Manasseh kept it and changed his profile (what you see in pictures is just what he put in to test it), but I haven't been able to see that new profile, though he swears he changed it. That would be a bug with the system, I guess.