I've got about 3 weeks left to finish my gold challenge. How am I doing?
Well, let's consider that question in two different ways:
How am I progressing towards my goal?
vs.
Am I enjoying progressing towards my goal?
A few quick notes for reference:
My goal is to reach 40,000 gold on one character before my time card ends on February 25th.
I am focusing on three characters on this secondary account: a warlock and a shaman that had reached 90 before the original trial account time
ended and a warrior that was boosted to 90 when I got WoD. All
three are on different servers so I can't pool their gold. The
warlock and the warrior are DPS and the Shaman is healing but I was planning to pick up the DPS off-spec.
How am I progressing towards my goal?
Tackling the success angle first, allow me to present you with this high-quality, totally worthwhile graph.
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| Half-assed Nerdery |
The sudden drops in gold are when I hit 100 and had to pay for the level 3 garrison.
Okay, so when I play for more than a few minutes at a time I can make a fair amount of money. Despite the advice people gave, I haven't been consistent in gold generation from my garrison. The suggestions were good, I just haven't taken the time (or really had the time) to set everything up and get it rolling. The large gain for the gnome had been a day when I had been able to run something like 8-10 LFRs with DPS goodie bags, plus some old raids and other such. That was a good day.
Real life has intruded some, so I haven't been able to get on every night to play. Sometimes I can get on and do garrison chores, but sometimes I can't even do that. That's to say nothing of the 12 or so other garrisons I have on my main account, so that if I do get time to get on, managing the other garrisons and these can take up a lot of my time.
But what I have gained out of this experiment so far is that IF I focused on one character and IF I could put in some consistent, reasonable amount of time to playing, I could almost certainly make gold each month. I'm not declaring my challenge over but I think I can rule definitively that I could make the gold necessary to purchase WoW tokens.
Yes, I would still need to make double what I do now, since this challenge is over 60 days and not 30, but looking at how things are going, when I do play for sustained amounts of time, I could probably do it.
With that in mind, I'm continuing the challenge for my own satisfaction and because there is another part of it. Not just the generation of gold, but how I have to change my playstyle to do it.
Which brings me to the second question
Am I enjoying progressing towards my goal?
As you can likely surmise, not so much.
The biggest issue is that I feel compelled to play each day and to focus on activities that generate gold. And not just play each day, but restrict myself to characters that can make the most gold. So if a character is better at soloing old raids or knocking out dailies or whatever, they get to take priority over the sub-30 alt I've been itching to play or the slow characters that I just like to do whatever on.
Another issue is that LFR goodie bags referenced above are probably my best daily source of gold. I can run old raids once a week for gold and do the weekly LFR 150whatever gold reward, but that's once per week. The 500+ gold that comes from the LFR baggies alone is a nice bump. The catch is, that the DPS goodie bag is not reliable. It's happening a LOT now but still not every time. It is one of the reasons why I'm thinking of switching to my shaman for the remainder of the challenge. I do see the baggie come up a lot more often on the healer role. But, I'm not sure I'm good enough to be someone the raid needs to depend upon so much. Yes, there will be other healers and the raid likely won't fail, but I already dislike how much I get carried as a DPS, I'd prefer not to be carried as a healer too.
Even if I was top of the charts with healing or DPS, it still means I have to do LFR, which means grinding the same fights over and over and over again, in that unpredictable atmosphere that is LFR. Where you can have good raiders in for their weekly valor or just fun or you can have the people who seem to be playing World of Abusecraft and I am their content.
What's next?
I had been reading Fussypants' post about healing and it made me remember how much I can enjoy playing a good support character. The Shaman is sitting at 92 with a level 2 garrison, so it'd be a bit of work to get her to 100, with as little of time as I've had to play lately. But I think it might be fun and perhaps worthwhile. If nothing else, if I get her to 100 I get a level 25 pet stone and can get some more heirloom upgrades pretty easily.
I do still like my gnome warrior although I feel pretty clumsy with her. She's fun and I love her attitude, but I haven't gotten a hang of the warrior mechanics yet, so I'm pretty weak there.
I'll also need to figure out what to do with the gold when this challenge is over, since I'm pretty sure I won't be using it for a WoW token. The guild the shaman is in could use any and all gold it can get. The other two, well, it's not like those guilds couldn't use the influx but it might be an opportunity to get the garrison mounts and pets I haven't bought yet. We'll see.
