When you run as many auctions and toons as I do, having enough bag slots can become a serious issue.  I will buy out hundreds of auctions every week for resale, as well as having to manage the items for my rolling auctions as they expire every couple of days.

Add to the auction items the little piles of BoE greens, consumables and commodities (cloth, leather, metal) I pick up while leveling and raiding and it can end up being quite a mess if I didn’t use a toon for the sole purpose of asset management.  If you do everything with your main character log on right this minute and create two more characters to help you with your item management.

Even though I want to tell you how to work your trade mule, let’s start with the concept of using a dedicated banking toon.  On every server and every account I will have a single toon who does nothing but go back and forth from the mailbox to the auction house.

For Alliance choose a Gnome or  Dwarf and run them up to Iron Forge.  Horde players should use a Tauren in Thunder Bluff.  Those cities are simply the best places for commerce because the ah and mailbox are very close together.

Instead of taking time out with your main (or any other alt your are leveling) to do your ah business, always use your banking toon.  This will help more than anything to avoid mistakes and confusion.  Simply mail every single item of value to your banker and then you can deal with the whole pile at a time when you can concentrate on what to do with each piece.

Use your banker to post all your auctions and hold your gold.  I also use my banker to buy items for my toons to use as well.  My main rarely visits the ah, I’ve got more important stuff to do with that guy.

Now that you’ve got a banker, create a mule toon.  With a mule, it makes no difference what race you select although I will normally use a human for Alliance and an orc or troll for horde.  Just run this level 1 toon to the nearest inn with a mailbox and there they will stay forever.

The really neat thing about using a mule is that you can take advantage of a little exploit in the way the mail system works.  This tip will make it so much easier for the new player who doesn’t yet have the gold to blow on a full set of big bags for all their toons.  It will also make life easier for you power ah users since I don’t think we’ll ever get 250 slot bags!

When your banker’s mailbox and bags are jammed full and you’re waiting for the weekend to post all of those goodies at the auction house just use the bulk mail system and mail everything to your mule to hold.  Every mail you send can contain up to 12 items.  You can clear hundreds of items out of your mailbox and bags in just a few minutes.  I also recommend mail mods such as “Open All” and “Postman” to help speed up this process even more.

Once your Mule has everything in the mail you can let it sit there for up to 30 days.  I never leave things in there that long, but that’s the max.  After 30 days, those bulk mail items will just get returned to the banker - it doesn’t even cost you the mail fees!

But here’s the cool trick.  When it’s time to send everything back to your banking toon, just log your mule, open the mail and hit “return.”  You can return hundreds of items to your banker in a few clicks and zero postage fees.

Using the mail this way gives you hundreds - even thousands of absolutely free bag slots.  If you use the mail system to it’s maximum advantage, you’ll never have to worry about running out of space or blowing too much gold on bigger bags before you can really afford to.

You will also know exactly how to handle extra items.  Everything just gets mailed to your banker - simple.  When you have time to concentrate on what to do with everything, your banker will either post items on the ah or mail them to the mule to hold until they are ready to be sold or just to hold if you like.  Your banker will almost always mail things exclusively to your mule, and all your other toons will almost always mail everything to your banker, it makes visiting the mailbox short and sweet.

You’ll notice that the screen shot for this article shows my mule in Booty Bay.  On most servers I keep one mule for each faction in Booty Bay so that I can take advantage of moving things back and forth between Alliance and Horde auction houses.  This is a topic for another time, but if you can stand running your mules to booty bay (multiple deaths are often inevitable, especially for ally) then you really set yourself up for some dominating moves between faction auction houses.

It all sounds too simple once you read through it.  But there are so many players I see on their main toon at the auction house day after day that I thought it would be a great tip for those of you who do not use banking toons and mules up until now.  It will make your life a lot simpler and expand your storage space to near infinity.

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18 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

(Spoiler Alert)

In the not too distant future, we plan to release a complete set of guides covering just about everything you guys have ever asked for. The following article is based on a section of our Hunter’s Toolkit. The Hunter Toolkit tells you everything you need to know to completely master playing a hunter in any tree, any instance, any zone you could ever encounter. In short, it contains every tool you could ever need to fine tune your hunter play even if you’ve never played on before!

Just to give you an idea how thorough this guide is we’ve pulled a short excerpt from the pet section. We made sure that we covered virtually every move a hunter could ever want to make, and this little gem is a tiny part of the hunter toolkit, but it’s only a very small part of the complete hunter guide. We call it the Pet Set.

(Spoiler Information Follows)

The Pet Set

In reality, this should really be called: the Cat Attack. It will only work with cats with the prowl ability. Here’s what it looks like:

Pet Prowl / Eyes of the Beast / Stealth to Target / Pet@ (attack)

Oh boy, do people hate this. With your pet in prowl, they are incredibly hard to detect. This works best if you have 3 points in Hawk Eye so you can shoot from further away than almost any class in the game. Once your pet prowls; toggle Eyes of the Beast so that you control your pet. Now you can stealth up to a target from WAY out of range and completely hidden behind a hill, building or forest full of trees.

Once your pet is close enough, just hit pet attack. Your pet will begin to chew their face off. Since they can’t see you, they will often mistake your pet for a mob and begin to fight it - Big mistake! As soon as your pet lands a hit, Eyes of the Beast will fade and you can begin to run toward your opponent. Stop at the very edge of your range and begin a nuclear shot rotation. By the time they figure out what’s going on – they are usually dead.

If you move to a new location after they die and hide in another spot somewhere else it’s golden. While they are on their corpse run, you can just use Eagle Eye to watch their corpse spawn from a mile away. As soon as they res and sit down to eat, just put your pet back in prowl and do the whole thing over again. After being killed a couple of times and never once seeing who is killing them, they will usually give up and leave the zone.

This technique is also particularly useful for attacking players several levels higher than your own. Because your pet will have done some serious damage to them before you even start to fire, they will already be weakened. Combine that with the fact that they will have to try to find and attack you; and they will have to ignore your pet for longer than normal to get you targeted. This gives your pet another 5 seconds or so of tearing the skin off their bodies. While this is going on; you’re burning them to the ground with a virtually uninterrupted Shot Rotation series. If they happen to survive long enough to find you and get started in your direction, you can just twist at max range and keep firing. We’ve seen hunters take down PVP opponents 8-10 levels higher using this technique.

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11 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Did you know you can buff your alts with your main character?

Say you’ve got a mid-level priest, or druid, or mage… something that can cast buffs (the “buffer”). And let’s say you’ve got a low level rogue or hunter alt that you want to give a little help to (the “buffee”)…

Run your buffer and your buffee to the exact same location. Then log into your buffee, and exit the game with alt-F4. This Windows command will terminate your World of Warcraft client without sending a “logging out” message to the server, so your buffee character will remain logged in for another 30 seconds or so.

Then, log in with your buffer character - behold, your alt is right there! Now buff away, and log out.

Log back into your alt (buffee), and you’ve got your buffs…

Is this an exploit? Will it get you banned? Highly doubtful. If anything, you may just get a warning. But I’ve been doing this for a *long* time now, and no one has ever had a problem with it…

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4 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post