Truly Dominating your server has a lot to do with doing a lot of things just right.  None of them are particularly complicated, but miss a few of them and you leave a big fat hole in your game or just flat run out of time to do it all.

That’s where efficiency comes in.  You may not have ever really thought about how much time you are wasting in WoW, since the whole thing is a relative waste compared to a lot of other things anyway.  But so is television, so don’t get me wrong for a moment.  We all waste absolute heaps of time on useless activities, and WoW is just another one in the list that some people choose.

However, within “hobbies,” there are ways to get the maximum enjoyment out of them and not have them become the central preoccupation of your time expenditure.  We all need a certain amount of interaction with the real humans around us – friends, siblings, parents, wives, children, girlfriends ect.  As a matter of fact, for most of us an 8 hour day in WoW would just be silly.

With all that being said, you could also argue that if you do not structure your playing time it’s pretty easy to blow 10 hours and get virtually nothing accomplished.  It’s the tarnished side of the coin.  WoW can be the most fun thing you do all day, but it can also chew up an entire day, and that’s not good.

So let’s talk for just a moment about how to structure your gaming time to get the most out of everything the game has to offer, and still have a life.  And, maybe more importantly, still completely dominate every aspect of the game without killing your real life doing so.

We’re going to present you with a 3 hour formula today and then run through the details next time.  That’s right, you can reasonably play about 2 hours a day and still get just about everything you ever wanted in the game and do so with a fair degree of authority over everyone else.

For those of you who use WoW trade chennel as a sort of chat thing, this isn’t for you.  Honestly I have absolutely zero time for discussing ancestry or politics with brain dead gamers posturing about this and that.  It’s a waste of time, truly, go get some real human interaction and leave trade chat alone.

For the relatively serious minded, what you want to do is sandwich your play time between two episodes of Wintergrasp.  Yes, I realize that’s really 3 1/2 hours, but oh well.  If you do your best to fit everything you need to do into that 3 (and 1/2) hour window, you should do very well in almost every aspect of the game.

So here’s how it works, Log in a little before Wintergrasp starts and hop on your banker to do your AH scans and any kind of investment gold-making you normally do.  Let’s say that’s 10-15 minutes worth while you wait for the WG battle.

Then log that main just in time for the BG and go have some fun blowing stuff up.  As soon as WG is over, hit your dungeon runs for the day.  Perhaps VoA, OS and a couple of heroics for emblems and shards (assuming you hold WG of course).  Then, as you well know, you’re done with VoA and OS for the week.  So no more worries about those two runs.

Plus, you probably still have a good hour and a half before that second WG.  So now go do a little farming for about 30 minutes (we’ve given you a couple of decent spots the last week, or you can just go mining or herbing in Sholazar).

With that last hour, hit a few dailies, such as JC, Cooking or Rep, and then fill up the rest of the time with a couple more heroics, or work on alts for around an hour, or arena if you’re geared already until the next WG.  Hop into that second WG and pwn, then log out for the night and let’s see what you’ve gotten done.

You probably made yourself around 750 to 1,000 gold depending on how good you are at working the AH and farming.  All we can say is we’ve done everything we possibly can to make that 45 min. worth more to you as a DYS reader than 3 hours of work from anyone else.

You should have been able to pick up 9-15 emblems of heroism, and 9-20+ Stone Keeper’s Shards.  Add to that somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 honor.  You’ve also garnered a bit of cash from the dailies, certainly enough for any repairs you might need, along with the dungeon rep, faction rep and other dailies rewards.  Or you might have gotten another half level on that druid you’ve been working on.

So at the end of a mere month, you could have earned in the neighborhood of 30,000 gold, 180,000 honor, 270 emblems of valor, 300 shards, pretty close to every recipe from either cooking or JC dailies, hit exhalted with 2 new factions, and taken your druid from level 65 to 80.

In just a little over 3 hours.  Not bad, and the really cool thing is that if you squeeze all that in almost every day, you’ll still have plenty of time to raid 3-5 nights a week if you want.  The only key is being a member of a disciplined guild that moves raids along fairly quickly.  Or just decide that rapid raiding is not necessary and you’re willing to put in the time after your regular schedule for raids a few nights a week.

I actually prefer to put in the few hours before scheduled raids, and then just make the raids my social times.  But don’t annoy me when I’m working, I’ve got a server to Dominate.  You can too, with a little time management.  We’ll talk more about this soon, but this should certainly give you something to think about.