Level 60 at Last!

It took nearly 365 hours of logged in time, and 29 calendar days of botting, but my priest bot finally did hit Level 60 shortly before noon today. :D

First I'd like to point out the amount of gold pulled in during the past 24 hours. This was despite a several-hour hang-up that cost me some downtime, but disencanting greens into Greater Nether Essence and selling the Living Essence farmed from the Tar Elementals really paid off well! That should afford an epic mount quite easily!

I spent the bulk of the last 1.5 levels in Winterspring since the lower level Tar Elementals in Un'Goro were no longer yielding any XP. I originally attempted Owl Wing Thicket, but a hunter there made grinding impossible. I ended up grinding just north of Everlook in a fairly large loop. With EXP in the 21-22K/hour range, I simply couldn't complain.

I'm absolutely stoked at this point, though this doesn't mean I'm going to be stopping anytime soon. A rogue is next on my list, and I'm looking to create many new profiles with my priest, as well as tweaking a few existing ones. This way the rogue will be able to hit the ground running fast. I'm also looking into other methods to cut down on "dead-time" such as sitting at the AH to scan prices by having a centralized sale character. The goal for the second bot is to hit 60 in no more than 300 hours.

The Week 4 review will be tomorrow.

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 29

Levels Gained: 1.70
Current Level: 60.0
Gold Earned: 362.26
Total Gold: 1053.78

Total Time Played: 15 days, 4 hours, 33 minutes

The Essence of Botting

I've moved now to the Lakkari Tar Pits area of Un'Goro Crater, and am exclusively grinding the Tar Elementals. Although the drop rate for Living Essence is only 2%, it becomes much more significant when you kill 1,000 elementals, including about 700 in a single glide. The same applies for the paltry 5 silver per mob -- it adds up to a noticable amount of gold when you're killing several hundred at a time. My only concern is there are other folks in the area during the day, which may drive my XP/hour low enough to concern me, forcing me to move to somewhere like Winterspring.

Additionally I have to fight outside of Shadowform to use Cure Disease as a Common.PostCombat action, although my DPS is still remaining in the 150 to 160 range. Cool tip -- even a Fire wand can proc "Burning Tar" which is an 8 damage/tick DoT, as well as generate bonus damage from the vulnerability. Or maybe that's a hot tip. ;)

Gold is up substantially, though that number could easily be doubled -- I have quite a bit of goods sitting on the Auction House that are waiting to sell, including nearly a dozen Living Essence.

Yet for right now, all I care is hitting 60 in the next 24 hours.

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 28

Levels Gained: 1.95
Current Level: 58.30
Gold Earned: 153.72
Total Gold: 691.52

My Bot vs. The World

My ability to respond through VNC is limited, regardless of quality and encoding options. The office has a paltry 256kbps of bandwidth (all of our voice/data is off of a T1), so trying to do a manual corpse run over VNC is a bit painful, especially when someone else is surfing. Yesterday it proved to be a bit too painful, so I decided to say to heck with the idea of slowly manueuvering myself back to my corpse to resurrect. We're going to be switching data providers in the near future, so having 20 times the bandwidth should make life easier. That or I'll just QoS VNC -- I am the network admin after all. ;)

So that cost me about 6 hours of gliding time. Then I went to bed early, to only have my follow logoff timer triggered almost immediately as I slept. Ouch. That cost me an entire glide according to the logs. Ugh...

So progress was as you could expect -- very pathetic, though decent I suppose considering I maybe got 6 hours of actual gliding in. Gold reflects this, though to be honest, I also bought a Codex: Prayer of Fortitude (why not?) and my DM trinket book off the AH. It does seem that I'll be able to afford an epic mount at 60, though there are a lot of BoE Molten Core epics on the AH, so I'm actually considering those as well. Hey, why not?! ;)

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 27

Levels Gained: 0.65
Current Level: 56.35
Gold Earned: 60.65
Total Gold: 537.80

Am I Gliding in Ahn'Qiraj? ...

... It's hard to tell with all the bugs.

Even though I've reverted back to 0.6.8, the bug in which it fails to correctly detect death still does occur, albeit less frequently. When I set the bot back off before I went back to work, it died about 50 kills later, and failed to realize it died (eventually timing out the connection). It was 4 hours before I could check in again, so that was probably 3 hours lost. So I set it off again, and before I went to bed, set it off one last time. It apparently died relatively early in, and again, failed to detect it died. Right there was another 7 hours lost.

For me, I probably lost 200,000 EXP and a ton of loot. That's pretty disheartening, and these issues are really destroying my ability to progress at a reasonable pace. With 0.6.8 I still have the hashtable-related bug to contend with as well, which will simply halt the glide. /sigh

Gold is up despite only having Glided about 9 to 10 hours for the entire day. Mostly because I don't really need to buy much else at this point -- half my gear is blue, and all of it is well-enchanted. I must say, there's something nice about getting 186 mana per tick with Spirit tap.

I want to hit 60 before my Week 4 review, though the last 4.2 levels in 2 days is really a push, especially if these bugs continue to halt me overnight. Going to give it a shot and try my damndest.

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 26

Levels Gained: 0.9
Current Level: 55.8
Gold Earned: 138.64
Total Gold: 477.15

Reverting Back to 0.6.8...

0.7.0 had some pretty serious bugs. 0.7.1 is no better. Problems I've found...

• Glider deadlocks when a remote client is connected (still).
  
• Glider occasionally does not target a mob it should.
  
• Glider does not detect that it dies (which may result in thinking it was teleported when it releases).

For me, this has resulted in a lot of Glider crashing (which can result in death), or my bot dying and then not releasing and resurrecting properly. Which means progress screeches to a halt. I've been forced to revert back to 0.6.8 until these issues, amongst others, get worked out.

So I had crap for progress since the bot stopped in its tracks for one reason or another. Bah. I didn't bother with new profiles since I was worried about not being able to debug them properly, so I'm still running on Jageuro Isle, despite sub-par EXP.

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 25

Levels Gained: 1.15
Current Level: 54.9
Gold Earned: -26.02
Total Gold: 338.51

Argh!

Maintenance ran late, so that was a few hours. Then people were being punks, so that hurt my XP/hour as I had to shift spots. Then I was instancing on my legit account so I couldn't step away to resolve those issues, so I went back to Felwood for some pretty gimp EXP since I wouldn't be pestered.

I'm on Jageuro Isle right now, but probably only until I hit 55 which will be later on today. Getting around 19K XP/hour, but it would be higher if there weren't 2 other people here. I think then I'll move to Azshara, Un'goro or Plaguelands where I can hopefully knock out a few good levels.

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 24

Levels Gained: 1.2
Current Level: 53.75
Gold Earned: 53.27
Total Gold: 364.53

More Crash Bugs FTL

In 0.6.8, 0.6.9 RC4, and 0.7.0, it seems that virtually any remote tool can cause Glider to crash, or to deadlock at the very least. I'm now enabling the debug log in Glider since this is destroying my ability to level at my intended pace. This needs to be fixed, and fixed quickly. Otherwise I'm going to have to monitor myself via VNC, which I'd rather not do.

Additionally, today is maintenance day, so there's a huge chunk of time I'm going to lose, again slowing my progress.

To top it off, I fell asleep early last night, so I need to come up with or find a suitable profile during the day today that I can run up to Level 55 or 56 -- I'm slaughtering things in Felwood, but the levels are a bit too low.

Gold is down again because I bought some nice blue bracers that I intend on getting enchanted with +9 Spirit. I'm also starting to investigate if there's a better alternative to my staff, otherwise I think I'll be throwing +20 Spirit on it very soon.

----- ----- ----- -----
Bot 1, Day 23

Levels Gained: 1.15
Current Level: 52.55
Gold Earned: 94.36
Total Gold: 311.26