Herding Khats

I haven't spent much time actually playing WoW for the majority of Cataclysm. I think my slave accounts were active for a total of 5 months - 2 at the start and some random time towards the middle when I was hoping all the suckage was removed. So, I never really had any aspirations toward maxing my guild at any point.

But, Blizzard was nice enough to not only remove the daily guild XP cap and the cap on daily quests, but also to make every green+ quest turn in, no matter the toon level, puke out 60,000 guild XP. Can we say "nummy", boys and girls? I know I can.

I did manage to level my guild to about 15 or 16 before 5.0.4 went live, which I guess I should consider pretty impressive since it was just me and I didn't really play. But after a few days of watching the XP pour in from my normal dailies and such, I decided I may as well work it before Blizz nerfs it.

Just in case anyone is interested, I basically did the Undead starter area a bazillion times. I did all the quests up to the bats and wolves, except for the gather corpses off the ground one. I was pumping out about 6% guild XP every 8 minutes. I'd guess that would vary quiet a bit for lower level guilds.

But yeah, 6% or so per 8 minutes. That's from toon deletion to toon deletion, it was about 5 minutes of actual time in game. If you're looking to do it, here's what I found.

1. Keep recreating toons with the same names {this is what I mean by "Deletion to deletion"}. Because most addons autosave settings based on toon name, you'll only need to set most things up once. I just set up bar mods with appropriate keybindings. Then I copied the Jamba profile from my main and renamed it. Deleted the old team, added the new one and changed the quest section to auto accept, choose best reward and auto complete. Also, make sure you aren't auto-declining guild invites.

After the initial setup, the only thing I had to do with other teams was drag their assist macro to the right slot.

2. Make sure any macros you will use are in the shared macro section. It saves time if they're under the shared macros instead of character specific {less clicking}. My follow macro was

Code:

/jamba-team invite
/jamba-follow master all

This way I only needed one macro for each toon instead of setting up follow on all my slaves as well as assist.

3. Create a guild-invite macro for whatever toon you'll use to invite with {duh}. It shaves a lot of time off if you don't have to type out every name over and over and one at a time.

Code:

/ginvite Whowere
/ginvite Takenare
/ginvite Hereto
/ginvite Rocksocks
/gpromote Whowere

I don't allow newbie ranks to do anything in my guild, just as a safety measure, so I make sure to promote one so she can invite my last toon into the guild. I just tacked /ginvite Theten on to her assist macro.

4. Love the mouse broadcasting. I had mouse broadcasting on a lot. Delete Character, confirm delete, creating new characters, bringing up the macro pane, logging in and out, canceling the intro cinematic, accepting guild invite, etc.

5. Use hunters. Hunters were easy because you can kill at range and on the move without breaking follow thanks to arcane shot as the starter ability, and pets will taunt and finish off anything you hit.

6. Kill more than you need as you go. I say this because it allowed me to skip the aforementioned corpse-collecting quest. I'm not saying make it a point to kill everything you see. You may not even need to, but it can allow your quest-flow to be a little more efficient if you don't have to go back and forth an extra time to ding so you can get the next quest. So, just kill a few extra if they're on the way.

7. Don't bother with anything else. Just do the quests. Don't loot, don't equip gear, just plow through, log out, delete and do it again.

8. Turn off any mods you won't need. That includes on the toon you will use to invite the newbs to the guild. Addons slow down the log in/out process.

9. Make a naming key. Any manual typing that you can avoid is a timesaver. I created a key in HotKeyNet that has no purpose other than inputting toon names when I'm creating characters.

Code:

<Hotkey Alt Space>
	<Toggle>
		<SendLabel w1>
			<Text Theten>
	<Toggle>
		<SendLabel w2>
			<Text Whowere>
	<Toggle>
		<SendLabel w3>
			<Text Takenare>
	<Toggle>
		<SendLabel w4>
			<Text Hereto>
	<Toggle>
		<SendLabel w5>
			<Text Rocksocks>

Took me like 60 seconds to set up and saved me tons of time over the course of my guild leveling.

10. Don't log in all the newbs at the same time. Log in 4 newbs and the "guild inviter". Otherwise you need to wait for the logout countdown.

Instead, log in the 4 + the guild inviter at the same time. Once the cinematic starts on the newbs and the inviter is fully logged in, hit ESC. This will bring up the "Are you sure you want to cancel the cinematic" dialogue on the newbs and the main menu on the inviter. Position your mouse cursor outside of the "Macro" button on the bottom left side, you should be able to broadcast your mouse and it'll click the "Yes" to cancel the cinematic.

Hit Esc again once the cinematic is canceled. The main menu will clear on the inviter and pop up on the newbs. This way you can just nudge your mouse up and over a touch, pass the mouse again and the newbs will open their macro panel. Invite/accept/promote and log off the inviter. While that toon is logging out and the last newb is logging in, you can drop the slave macros in place and be ready to go.

Of course, as with all mouse broadcasting, this will require that your resolutions are the same.


Beyond that, be ready for a lot of boredom. It's not exactly fun, but it's a lot faster than trying to grind it out on dailies and dungeon bosses. So it's a good thing to do while catching up on 20 seasons worth of Star Trek or something.