Levelling to 100 with just Battle Pets

[GrosBonda]

intereting thread : http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/12618445783

I think i wil give a try , very casual.... with the number of 90 i have would be interesting.

[Echinacea]

i did all the quests in FFR only....and a few quests in other zones and my mage dinged 100 last night. (i had a week AFK for thanksgiving).

my only regret was that i didnt get lumber mill first so now i need a couple thousand gold AND 1500 resources to upgrade the garrison to level 3.

ALL of the other xp i got was from followers and pet battles only

[Iibis]

Lumber Mill is hell (at least with alts)! Trying to find those trees is annoying with a lower level character, especially since there aren't any in FFR and Gorgrond for example is full of aggroing insects. Trading Post would've been so much better, LM also requires upgrading to lvl 3 before you even get the same amount of resources from work orders. I haven't had TP yet though, so the grass may be greener on the other side...

[Kpb321]

I've got the Lumber Mill on my main who's 100 and picked up the Trading post on my second Alt who's currently just level 92. I built the Lumber Mill after hitting 100 and realizing I needed a ton more resources so I can't really comment on it at lower levels. I added it after I got my garrison to level 3 in my second medium plot. He does have the follower with it and I'm going to stick with it for now and it's a pretty decent way to get resources. I could see it being problematic for alts who aren't out leveling and may be lower level limiting where they can harvest lumber. If you can't keep it fed with lumber it really doesn't do anything for you. Once I get all my buildings upgraded and get my followers geared up with the Work orders at the War Mill/Bunker I'm sure I'll end up swapping them both out. I'll probably go with Spirit Lodge/Tavern at that point.

My first alt I leveled up, who is 98 now, went with a barn for the medium plot. He's a tailor and IMO you really need it to get enough fur/leather for those professions. I can tell it's going to take while to get a level 3 garrison when he gets to 100 because of the garrison resources. He spends far too much on follower missions and doesn't have anything generating extra resources.

For my second alt, who is a herbalist/alchemist, I went with the trade post as my first medium building. When I first got it the work order was 5 ore and I was like "great, I've got tons of this from my mines". Then the next day it wanted fur. I had some from my tailor but I also had a pretty good queue so I didn't actually put in any work orders. Then it was an herb, and I was happy again because I had herb gardens on two other characters. Then today it's back to fur and I'm letting the queue go down again hoping for something else tomorrow. I'm looking forward to upgrading it to level 2 so I can load it up even more on the "good" days. This alt is practically rolling in Garrison resources (~1500 right now) so should easily be able to afford upgrades once he gets the levels. Some of that is luck on a epic follower roll and some of the missions I've got. I got a epic follower with the extra resources trait and have gotten several missions that reward resources that the follow can complete. That trait is really good when you can get a mission that rewards resources.

I'd say the TP is great for a second/third/fourth alt where you can supply some of these materials to the alt to do the work orders but I'm not sure it would be very good on your first character. It feels like it would take more effort to make sure that you actually kept the work orders queued up on you first character with out the benefit of other characters who already have the mine/herb garden/barn going.

[Iibis]

Leveling an alt with pet battles would be great to get the garrison monument, too, but is that character specific or account wide?

I mainly got lumber mill on my alt because I wanted to unlock level 3 plans faster for my main. Then I swapped both my main's and my alt's mills for a barn and I'm now trying to get enough work orders to unlock that one. Trading post gets stronger now that mats for work orders will get cheaper and cheaper. But definitely in the beginning it might have been expensive to keep work orders going. I had to buy furs for my tailor alt from the AH for the first couple of weeks, it wasn't too expensive though. I actually had to buy ore too before my mines started to support my JC/BS/engineering profession again, because you can level jewelcrafting with just ore and herbs.

I think if you want to level your alts via pet battling or whatever just somewhere in the future, get them to their garrisons asap just to afk there. That should help with not getting resources from questing. I've got plenty of alts but I've been lazy so I only have 2 other alts now sitting in their lvl 1 garrisons, gathering resources. Sometimes I do some missions with the 1-3 followers they have. They have ~3600 GR now just from sitting there. I can thank the bugginess of the launch for getting 4 characters through the dark portal on day 1 I also noticed that I don't really need to upgrade my alt buildings to level 3 just yet. I have no energy to properly play with alts right now, so I don't really care about how fast I level/gear up followers, my alt or anything. Still it would be great to get another lvl 100 alt for another pet menagerie in the near future...

[Darklynx]

My last two 90 on Pandaria were leveled with pet battles (because I can't stand dwarf dungeons or saving Thrall anymore). It's very casual and you can do it whilst watching a movie. The exp (from 85-90) is about 1~2% per pet battle (when your pet gets xp), so you can grind it really fast. I've used the Exp potion (drops from Nagrand red rares now) and was getting around 15% on my Paladin level 50~60. I think I got 12 levels on that day. It's indeed a very feasible way to level up your character, but I recommend doing the quests up until you open your Garrison so you can wrack up that Garrison Stash.
For the horde, there are a BUNCH of spots with tons of pet battles. One of the best ones is near the upper flight path for the alliance on Frostfire Ridge (There's only two, but It's the one near the ogres dailies, to the left of Magnarok). As for the Alliance, so far the best spot I've seen is the Moonshell Crab beach (Shadowmoon Valley), you can travel up and down the beach battling crabs+beasts. I intend to level my Priest there since I won't be playing Priest this expansion, but when I think about managing more than 2 Garrisons (I have two chars atm), I have headaches.

[Beave]

I have an alt at 93 who's never set foot in Draenor yet. He just flies around and levels pets doing Pandaren dailies and the Celestial Tournament. I know I'm leaving money/gear on the table from the garrison, but I really just can't get into the garrison part of the new expansion. It feels like a chore. I almost dread having to worry about another garrison to keep up every day. Collecting pets has been more fun than anything else about this expansion for me. At the rate he's going my alt will be level 95 before I finally do the Draenor starter quests with him.

[Annieb]

My priest is just about to ding 99 and she has done the starting quests and has her lvl1 garrison done (and a barn, so it would count toward the trap achievement count for my main's level 3 barn)... but otherwise, it's been straight up pet battling, mostly in the open world to try to get the 2000 battle achievement for the statue.

It's entirely possible and very comfortable to level just on running around wild-battling and doing tamer dailies and snagging the occasional treasure chest that you wander past. I recommend Handy Notes and the[url=http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/handynotes_draenortreasures/830779]DraenorTreasures[/url] addon from Curse.com for getting a heads up on clicky treasures/flavour items in draenor also because most of them give some XP boost.

[Kring]

my only regret was that i didnt get lumber mill first so now i need a couple thousand gold AND 1500 resources to upgrade the garrison to level 3.

Get a level 2 inn and use the headhunter to find you a follower with scavenger until you have 3 scavengers. Level them as first priority. Then run every resource mission with your scavengers, even with a less then 100% success chance. When successful they will return 3 times the resources which makes more then up for the failed missions. (A level 100 follower will always have more than 50% chance for these low level resource missions.)

Unless you were lucky and already got followers with scavenger during leveling, the inn is the best building for obtaining resources.