Thursday, December 10, 2009

Post 3.3

Just a short update.

I didn't really stockpile much in the way of mats pre 3.3; I have some enchanting mats that are still sitting there, and I have some small amounts of other things. I did unleash all the epic gems i was saving (those I didn't put in the guild bank), and made some nice change on those. I'll try to keep that up, and maybe even start doing the JC daily again.

Inscription. Inscription is huge right now on one server and completely dead on the other. On one I make 1k a day right now, and on the other maybe 100g. Same methods, same posting schedule, just that one server has the idea that 5g for each glyph is cool. Well yeah that's sorta profitable, but not really. I decided to get out of that market, I am not going to waste hours of my day for 100g. So i'll sell off my stock, and turn to other areas which will be more profitable.

Enchanting scrolls. Yeah, they are selling, not in huge numbers but definately 1-2 a day. I'll have to make more. This is probably the best source for revenue right now, that and enchanting mats themselves.

Overall there hasn't been huge movements on the market like i'd expect. For one, as my wife noted, its going to take a while to get upgrades. I ran 3 heroics of the new instances, no drops yet, and 3 normal modes, ditto with lack of drops. So its just going to take time. I know there are great things in those loot tables that my toons need, but just haven't seen it yet.

Update:
A week later and epic gems are getting expensive, but not much profit for most cuts. So the raw materials keep going up in price while the cuts remain just above that. So not a ton of money in that market right now. I think the smart JC would have every pattern and only cut what both is moving and is expensive. Hard to do. I only sell the stuff that moves because I don't have many patterns. Inscription is on fire, I am having a hard time finding enough materials to keep in stock. There aren't alot of farmers on this server, or they dont post on the AH. So supply is a constant problem. If i am not buying every day I would run out of glyphs.

So far I'm only up to 20k after buying a bunch of epic patterns and some orbs. I'm starting to get into selling ulduar and TOC craftables for alts, I think there is a strong market but only if the orbs are cheap. People aren't going to spend 5k per item on alts, but 2k? I would gladly spend that much for a 245 level item which is better than what I can get with any sort of PUGing.

Update 2:

Up to 30k now, I'm not entirely sure how much of that is profit. Epic gems are not really moving fast, but rare gems are with a very nice profit margin. However getting low-cost rare gems is a challenge, with saronite being so high. Those prices will drop though. I justt need to find shufflers who are willing to get rid of their rares for cheap. Epic gems are sky high, but just not moving that quickly. Maybe too rich for most people. I'm sure if I had more cuts I could move them faster. Inscription still doing great, still supply issues. Made 10k from inscription alone so far in about two weeks. Nice steady profit.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Enchanting

I think enchanting is going to be big for 3.3, so I am doing an experiment into the profession as a serious scroll provider. I put 3k in mats into it, so we'll see what happens. More later.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Tips for a happy goblin




Okay, i suppose I should actually offer some useful advice. Well, nobody can really know your market.

So with that in mind.

1) Know what professions you have, get them to max level. For example inscription can make glyphs, cards, vellum, and has two cooldowns. All three areas can be profitable, and make sure to burn your CDs every day.

2) Know your market. I finally figured out what works best for time vs money in my market, which was completely different from my previous market. Every market has a profit for you somewhere.

3) Use tools like QA2, KTQ, etc. QA2 saves me TONS of time when its probably configed, much better than auctioneer for some purposes (but auc does so many things QA2 cant touch).

4) Keep probing! Look for new markets. The tried and true (ie saronite shuffle, glyphs), may or may not work on your server.

5) Know your mat prices! For example. For the longest time I thought, well the heck with snowfall, i'll just buy the stuff like goldclover and tandera's rose. But they dont give many snowfalls, and are about 80% of the cost of lichbloom/icethorn. Now that I actually use the snowfalls I can't keep them in stock long enough to make useful stuff. So icethorn/lichbloom is actually cheaper than the rest of the herbs. But not as plentiful, right. So guess what. Farm the other stuff from scholozar if you want to farm, and sell it on the AH. That's right, sell it. You can get the same amount of money (or very similiar) as the higher herbs, which are actually much more useful to you.

6) Undercutting. Do you need to be the lowest guy? Sometimes yes, but in hot markets you can go a few above, unless the guy at the bottom has 28 stacks.

7) Know your timing of market. Every market is cyclic. I looked at arctic fur prices saturday, they were 120g each. I looked at them again sunday morning, a few at 80g. Enough to make a leg armor and get 80g profit off it. Dont look once and see the market isn't profitable, this is a rookie mistake. Look for a few weeks. Know whos selling.

8) Is it a monopolized market? If so its not as profitable as other markets. You may have your work cut out for you if you want to enter that market. If it's a monopolier, friends that guy on each of your toons. As soon as he logs out, repost all your stuff.

9) Post often. For tight markets you are undercut within the hour. So don't bother listing for more than 12 hours, have a nice stack, just login, post using QA2, log out. It's just a few minutes. I estimate for every time I login and repost I make 100g. It has nothing to do with the length of posting merely the timing. Also definately post before, during, and after the busy period (6pm, 9pm, 12pm)

10) Look in trade, have deep pockets. This is something I learn every day. There is always a soruce of revenue in trade.

a) For example, the same guy who sold me furs for half the going rate is the same guy selling ilvl 200 epics at inflated prices. One is a good deal, the other not so much.

b) Some people sell epic gems by the bulk, or ti ore. I once spent 3000g on ti ore before 3.2 hit, in one blow (or was it less, i can't recall). Make sure you have enough space and deep enough pockets you that you can buy these opportunities. Last night someone was selling red epic gems for 125g x 7. I bought all 7, thats about 1000g. Alot of dough, but you make 50g per cut or so.

c) Mr Enchant leveler. I gave him 10g + vellum per enchant. He gets 15 skill points, I get 20g each in profit. We're both making out on the deal.

There is *always* someone in trade who just wants to get rid of stuff and wants cold hard cash right now. That's your sucker.

11) Speculation/Gambling (don't touch your seed corn). Now alot of goblins do speculating on the next patch,and that's what makes the real PVP game fun (which is the economics). But most of us have no clue what's really going to happen because we dont think like a herd. Somethings are really obvious, for example Ti ore in 3.2. But how many foresaw the glyph explosion in 3.1? And what about 3.3? The saronite - Ti bar CD is being removed. What will that do? This is gambling, folks. Don't spend all your money gambling then bitch that you have no capital. ALWAYS HAVE SEED CAPITAL. Without this, you can't do anything. You cant buy those great deals in trade. You can't buy your mats. For me this level is at least 5k.

12) Farmers. Great goblins have deals with farmers, to get lower prices than AH, and a reliable income stream.

Life on a new server


So after many many tactics, I decided on the best one for my situation. 4g minimum, 20g max, if anything is below 4g, don't post. Sure enough 2/3 of the glyphs are below my minimum profit. I decided I just can't be bothered with the small time. Not when my glyph costs are 3g up to 5g. (excluding snowfall sales). It's much more profit/hour this way, no more making two zillion glyphs and getting no profit for them. There are still a handful of glyphs that sell which allow me a nice market.

Also diversity is really the key. The glyph golbin wasn't everywhere. In fact armor vellum sells just as well as all glyphs and has a good profit margin to boot. Darkmoon cards are a good bet, I've already made my investment back and then some. When DMF comes I'll have a few decks.

What else? Heavy borean armor kits sell like hot cakes, with 5-10g profit from each. I can't keep them in stock enough. Random enchants do well. Some guy was giving away nice enchants for free so I gave him 10g and armor vellum, he made 10 random upper-vanilla enchants for me. Not huge profits but say 20g each. Of course there's the tradition pets and old world recipes. All in all my main banker has 4.5 k and the glyph toons have 1000g total (the one w/ DK, hunter, paly, druid has 900g and the other has 100g). That says that a) Glpyhs are still a huge investment for not much reward, and b) some glyphs with popular classes sell much better than other classes, like 10-fold better.

At this point I'm mostly out of stock so I'll have to take a look to see where I can find a new market. Most people have some profitable way to make DE mats via JC or tailoring. Or have a alchemist for better gold making. I may level a DK to 65 and start grinding out alchemy, which is a huge profit (and I was an idiot to drop I think, but a) its easy as hell to level and b) I was bored with it).

I read all these posts about inscriptionists making 10k gold per week on glyphs, that may be true if a) you have deep pockets, b) you have a means of getting inks (no milling) very cheap, c) if you have all the glyphs, d) most important, you are willing to SIT THERE and camp the AH every single night. For the rest of us, in tight servers, it's not happening. Even Markco is saying that he doesn't make glyphs any more, there isn't a point. The new market for my money has to be flasks, it's a guaranteed profit and you can really do well.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Coexisting in the inscription market

Lets face it, you probably aren't the only person in the market trying to make a living selling glyphs. From what I learned, there are several groups of people in this market.

1) Is the AH stalker. You can't get rid of him. he's been there forever, and camps the AH 5 hours a day. Do your best to undercut whatever he is selling, by using auctioneer - search - general - and type in his bank toons name. This is the worst guy to get rid of. The worst part about this guy is the constant undercutting. You can either crash the market or just go about your business as normal, and look for other avenues of profit. You can crash the market and he'll happily stay there, losing money on every glyph, to try and get rid of you.

2) The casual seller. This guy may post a few times a day for selected markets. Probably doesn't have everything. Not a real threat to your business

3) The QA market dominator. Makes every glyph possible, and blasts out several or dozens of each glyph. The best thing to do is is to undercut with one or two glyphs. Then he'll have to repost hundreds of glyphs, which takes a very long time. Buy up those glyphs that he sells at a loss. Know what glyphs this guy doesnt have and charge 30-50g for them.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Inscription woes continued

Well I did try undercutting to the bone, with a 5g price ceiling and a 1g minimum. Things are picking up, but I noticed my competition has adjusted accordingly. So i am still getting undercut, but things are selling faster. Overall that's more gold in my pocket; at this price point things move alot quicker, and making the glyphs isn't a huge pain (just a small one) . However there is the huge benefit of knowing that the AH campers must decrease their prices to barely profitable to undercut me.

So this will be the reality for a while, i'll revisit in a few weeks and see if I am still getting undercut so much. Up to about 2000g on the bank toons, which while nice is pretty bad considering the time investment. Hopefully with more glyphs learned the profits will increase. I'll probably start farming herbs and doing dailies to get into a safe margin. At this point I am upgrading two toons, a few upgrades a week, so once I run out of honor (for gems) my cash is going to drop like a rock. Plus when 3.3 hits I will need tons of enchants.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Inscription woes

So I discovered a few things.

First, there is a way to make glyphs very very easily. Not totally automated, but pretty dang close. It's called KTQ, and links altoholic and Skillet (and i think some others) into a seamless process. Check it out!

Second, I found that my new server ET is much much more competitive than my old server. I would post every night or twice or three times a day, only to find every single glyph to be undercut. Sales are slow at best, I am only selling 10-20 per day. Hardly enough keep afloat. Still, I managed to buy all books of glyph mastery that I could, now I just need to learn 90 glyphs by research. This is the main problem and will just take diligence, logging in every day.

So what to do. Well, I can continue with a horribly inefficient model as is, or undercut like crazy. So I am trying the new tactic of carpet bombing, reduce prices on everything dramatically. If they want to undercut go ahead, but i am not playing Mr. Nice Guy any more. The glyphs are essentially free from a material point of view, i sell enough other things to cover their costs. We'll see what happens.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Black Temple gear vs Naxx epics

Currently I'm using the glyph market to fund gearing up my hunter with BOE epics/blues, who has all but head, neck, 1 finger and 2 trinkets in ilvl187 blues or better, fully gemmed. (getting a dps toon geared without a huge guild is insanely difficult btw - a major reason why I switched servers). Speaking of the hunter, I ran naxx10 last night (one drop in 5 bosses that was even useful for hunters is FTL), so yeah real crap dps, only 1600 on trash and so forth. I went from being right at the tank's level of dps at the beginning to near the top of the chart at the end. Did I get better? What do you think?

No, in fact people got worse. We had two outstanding dps but people kept leaving and getting 'bored', we were constantly 8 manning it with only one decent dps. Of course anyone who is running naxx10 3 hours before weekly reset is pretty crappily geared, so that was true in this case. Hopefully I can get another run in sometime soon.

The other thing about the hunter is that I'm slowly replacing my BT gear as noted, and by and large the so-called upgrades are not huge. For example, my halbard of desolation from black temple first boss with enchant is as good as two one handed swords ilvl 200 without enchants. Granted w/ enchants that is 100 AP difference, and one of the swords has a wasted stat (expertese). But my point being is that black temple gear is about equiv to ilvl 187 gear BUT has intellect and hit to boot. So for example I know my dps level isn't high, but 1) my mana pools are larger than they should be, and 2) I am hit capped (true I gemmed for all hit to get there). So at patchwerk I was doing 2400 dps with only 3 ilevel 200 epics. I see alot of people in my social guild who couldn't dream of pulling out these numbers because their gear is not raiding gear, its leveling gear.

So what's the point? 1) Most likely the tier 9 stuff we are seeing now is going to last to level 85 again and entry raiding at that point in cataclysm. 2) Don't be fooled by thinking that just because something has more AP and crit means its an upgrade, it's very hard for end-game raiding piece (which typically has 6 stats on it, ie stam, int, agi, AP, ArP, hit) to be upgraded by a leveling piece (which typically only has AP/crit) 3) Don't pay attention to gear score in some cases- my hunter's GS was about half of what you would expect for naxx10 level gear. Look at the person's gear. If you are sporting all T6 and Hand of Adal, that player is pretty damn good.

The other point is that I am going to buy items almost every single slot off the AH. Truely I am burning money to do that, probably 10k when it's all done. But anyone can do this. Why do people show up and insist on guilds carrying them through TOC, heroics, and naxx to gear is beyond me, and frankly pisses me off.

Glyphs and a new server

I transfered my hunter to ET, the alliance server where I do some day raids (1x per week so far), and got started in a serious way to make glyphs. Well I burned through all I made in 10 days (about 2000g), by buying herbs, parchments, and most importantly 30x books of glyph mastery. I think I am pretty close to knowing all the glpyhs. I now have the DK, druid, hunter, priest, paly, and most of rogue markets on two different bank toons (and a third bank toon for misc stuff). So I've been able to track those pretty accurately. So far things are good, about 200g in the first day just due to glpyhs, and probably another 500-600g for vellum, scrolls, offhands.

The offhands are great, they are nearly free (just 2 ink of sea and 1 frozen orb), and sell for 200-300g. That's at least 150g profit from each. The key is the snowfall ink, which is pretty worthless otherwise (useful for NR research also), also I sell about 5 vellums every day with several gold (or more) profit each day. These are huge sellers and if you are not providing vellums I ask why not.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Glyphs

Are glyphs profitable right now? I'd say yes. I ran an experiment. I have a 445 scribe hunter. I transfered the druid off to another server, and took basically all the gold except 100g and whatever goods were still being sold on the bank toon. I then started making glyphs. Lots and lots. At first I did only DK, then DK hunter, now I am doing DK, hunter, mage, and paladine. (First time with the last two). So essentially from 9 days ago I started with almost no gold and only two classes. I'm up to 2200g now, with only two classes and one bank toon. I'll try to get into the rest of the classes later next week and see how it goes.

My thoughts (random as always).

It's pretty time consuming to do glyphs. The profit for each is small. You need to accept that on some you wont make much profit.

You can also sell the two off-hands and scrolls and vellums. Most people ignore that, and these items give you just as much profit as glyphs and sell just as frequently.

Buy 10 stacks of NR herbs a day. The cheapest on our server is tiger lily and deadnettle. Then make glpyhs once a week. Make 5 glpyphs per stack.

Addons: Use QA2, Advanced trade skill window, and altoholic. Config QA; 24 hour post time, undercut 1s fall back 50g, minimum 2g 1 glpyph per posting (or maybe 2).

When you want to make glpyphs. Look to see how many you need by mouse over. Queue everything up. Then buy all the ink and parchment you need (ATSW willl auto-buy parchment but not ink). Burn through your queue. Helps to have 2 scribe bags on your scribe making toon and 4 such bags on your bank toon.

Then post on your bank toon. I post in the morning, 5pm, then as i log out. This ensures a steady flow. You can just post and tab out for 5 minutes (like I'm doing right now)

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Mage project closed down

I decided I didn't really want to level a mage from scratch, they are too slow. Especially on a new server. I'm still selling all of the patterns and pets I bought, and am up to 600g. That's 12x return on investment of 40g. Still its a fun server, i may revisit it someday.

For now I'm doing the halloween event, and dipping into inscription. It pays surprisingly well. I'm already up 1000g after just a few days of posting. I look forward to increasing my volume.

Volume and having the right mods is crucial. Doing it by myself using auctioneer was just horrid.
Even though the market is crowded if you are nimble enough you can get in. I dont AH camp, i just check every day or every 12 hours and see what sold and repost. Basically i'm not trying that hard. I want to use the funds to help my first toon Gibs all geared out as much as possible. Now that I have space for 3 more toons the inscription project becomes more and more practical.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Questions to ask while on a pile of gold

This is from Phase 3 Profit!

  1. How long did you spend on making gold every week?
  2. How much you earn a week ?
  3. Do you really need that much ?
  4. Where are you going to spend your extras ?
  5. Is there anyway can increase the amount you can get ?
  6. Is there anyway can decrease the time you need ?
  7. Will the method you are currently gather gold be obsolete soon ?
  8. What’s the last time you get a new method for profiting ?
  9. Is it fun at all ?
  10. Planning to share what you had learnt ?
1. I spend about 1-2 hours each day making money. Right now my Dawnbringer market has cooled and I'm just not that interested, so I am switching to my little mage.

2. Its quite variable. At the height only 2k or so per week. Most weeks less than 1k. I don't really make money for the sake of making money. At 15k now I dont see much point of making more money.

3. Not really... See #2 But as of now I still can't afford the gold-sinks.

4. I will probably leveling professions in the next xpac and hopefully use this as seed capital. One thing I've learned in WoW, you need money to make money. I spent my entire fortune on crusader orbs to reap a 2000g profit. And who knows how much things will cost in the next xpac (cataclysm).

5. Yeah I have some nice businesses, when they work it works, but its actual work, ie not fun. That takes a few hours of making and a few days of selling for 1-2 k profit.

6. Can I decrease the time. No not to my knowledge, I can't. The game doesn't allow automation.

7. Not really. I don't depend on fad items to make my gold. I stick with tried and true methods.

8. All the time. Last week. There is always something new to be learned. My colleagues are so much better at making money, that's why I peruse econ blogs and forums regularly.

9. I think its fun, but that's just me. At a certain point the rest of the game is somewhat static. I enjoy 'beating' other people with something of tangible value at stake. Yes, you may have ganked me 10x in BGs, but I just took your last cent from your stupid under-cost auctions.

10. I do what i can herein. Although since nobody reads, I guess my secrets are safe!

Monday, October 12, 2009

Is it hunter loot?



Okay, this is just too funny, and I (well almost) never call people out. But there is a polearm that drops in ramparts that every idiot seems to think is their loot. Its got str, sta, and +crit. It's called Hellreaver. It looks cool to boot. So, as a death knight it drops, and I roll. Oh the tears of anguish from the hunters.

Lets review. Stamina. Check. Crit. Check. Strength? I guess if you are a melee hunter this is your loot. But if you are playing the class as it was designed, you pass for someone which its a better upgrade. Ie a DK or a warrior. So, gratz huntards! Oh I didn't quite get the last roll in the screenie, the other hunter rolled and one won. That's right, two hunters rolled on non-hunter loot.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, the othe loot I ninjaed? A plate belt. So, yeah i'm evil for rolling on plate and a melee weapon against hunters.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

A new deathknight tailor

After getting sick with the amount of profit wasted by the idiots who post netherweave stacks, I decided, heck with this, i'll be a major player in this market. I think I could make a small killing either making bags or making tailoring and DEing it (I'm not sure about the later, but possible). Or I could make imbued netherweave bags.

So I rolled a DK, of course a gnome! Got him out of the starter zone, sold everything I collected that could be vendored, sent the rest to the bank (including a BOE blue!). Ended up with 22g. Hmm, not much. I bought what linen cloth I could and powerleveled tailoring until the omg hell wool stage (level 100) I then decided, well now I have alot of random crap on my hands. So I learning enchanting, and decided to push that as far as it'd go. I got to about 90 I think. I then ran stockades to see what the wool drop was. Not bad, was able to make 5 items. I only have to make 20 to get out of wool stage. So a few runs will do it, and give me some more stuff to DE. My plan is to just DE what I can and hope its enough to get past the next stage, not worry about enchanting too much. I want this to be a break even power level, so lots of AOE grinding in instances. Its a damn shame I cant bring the mage!

My plan is to powerlevel the professions, hit 60, push to netherweave bag stage, and just make a ton of them.

Flipping

Flipping is when you speculate that the current lowest price on the AH is much lower than it should be, and you buy it, then (either immediately or later) place the same item back on the AH for a higher price.

The key to flipping just like in real estate is to know your market. You could easily lose all your gold quickly.

I woke up this morning to find 100g on my little mage project banker. So what to do. Well, i could just stop playing the AH, but that's not fun. I looked at my favorite market, the netherweave cloth market. I found many stacks at 2.5g, which is criminally stupid since you can make heavy netherweave bandages and vendor them for 3g each. So, apparently there are alot of morons on this server, and not alot of people caring about this market. So I speculated, given that the price does fluctuate wildly. I bought every single stack I could, and reposted for a copper under whatever the lowest price stack was. I did this several times during the day, since it was a Sunday and tons of people were on.

I just checked my auctions, and I have 170g. That's...what 60% profit margin from maybe half an hour of work. Not bad when your highest toon is level 11.

Recap:

1) Know your market, what the prices are throughout the week.
2) It's a very valid strategy to buy low on the weekends, sell in the middle of the week when prices are high. I've made thousands this way.
3) If it's not a fast moving market, dont' dump everything at once. (although I did ignore this rule and made out okay)

Short note

No real change in strategy. I did manage to sell a rage pot recipe for 20g. Bought NW cloth at 3g a stack and selling for 6g. I'm up to about 100g, gave 40g back to my benefactor. Moths still sell well. I guess I can stop working so hard on the AH for now, i have enough for both mounts I think and am only level 10. Unfortunately there isnt alot I can buy that will help my leveling at this stage. I fully intend to buy deadmines runs, so maybe I'll get some gold for that.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Diversification

Sold some more recipes from SW today, so now up to 38g. Also the random trash skins/herbs. Its only a gold or so per stack but that's huge at my level. Turned around and bought netherweave which was selling for under vendor price for heavy nw bandage (3g/stack). Talk about stupid. Then the bags are selling for 10g! I am going to make a bunch of bags via a tailor and sell most of them on AH. Then I'll go get some more pets and recipes from shat. I'd really like to get to felwood to do that, but it would be an hour of effort. The felwood recipes are bank.

Let me talk a moment about diversification.

The moths from Exodar are a prime example. There are three colors, blue yellow and red I think. It doesn't matter. The blue sells for say 10g, yellow for 4g and red for 3g. These are approximate but the point is they dont sell for the same amount. Even though the vendor price is the same.

So, buy blue right? Well... Think about it this way. Somebody wants all the pets easily for whatever reason (going back to Gevlon's M&S philosophy). So they buy all 3 colors, irregardless of cost (unless its something like 20g each, M&S aren't going to pay that much). So my point is your turnover will be faster if you buy all 3 irregardless of the profit margin. Yes blues sell for more, but buy not buying the yellow and red you are shooting yourself in the foot. I'd rather have 3 sales with 15g profit than 1 sale with 10g profit.

Same thing goes for felwood recipes. Some are worth more than others, but by buying all 3 you can diversify and sell more. What is the limit? The limit is your bag space and thus the opportunitycost. By buying low profit recipes you are limiting your bag space which could be used for high profit recipes. Since I'm a small mage and my bags are small, I am going to buy the high profit recipes from felwood since it's a PITA to go back there, and I dont have alot of bag space.

By no means am I a baron, my friend who also has a mage, I gave him 10g, at level 20 he had 1000 gold or so. Just playing the AH and running around and gathering recipes.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Tailor/herb for money (or monetizing the level grind)

These are my thoughts on how to go about making money from scratch.

Level 1-10

With all the vendor junk, you have *just enough* to train. You need money to train, its critical. So, for your first toon, you need to start picking up stuff from say level 1-10. After that, if you are smart you have two gather profs, and you have a AH alt, and you are selling all your white stuff by sending it to your AH alt. The economization at level 10 is vastly different from 80, where a SINGLE HERB is enough to fund your training for 10 levels. You can go to the herb trainer, look at the herb supplies. They often have single low level herbs, grab them. Go to the AH. Sell them. I made 1.3 g from this. Not enough to get bags, but enough to train and start ignoring the 3cp grey items.

Level 10-20
Once you are level 10 you should have several stacks of herbs. Sell them on AH at the same price as the lowest price. This may or may not be enough to buy a netherweave bag. You can buy a few mageweave bags to hold over. At this point you can start to ignore the vendor trash and focus on herbs and white items.

Buy a magic wand ASAP (also buy the level 13 wand) , and some minor mana potions. These can be had for under 50s total. The magic wand is pretty vital.

Once you have 10-20g you can start buying stacks of netherweave cloth and rune thread, and ask a tailor to make bags for you with 1g tip (if that's cheaper than buying bags).

Level 20-40

At level 20 you should have enough to have 8 bags (4 for you, 4 for your AH mule), and your mount (lol - its what 5g now?). You are pretty much set for life at this stage. Continue to accumulate white and green items, sell them on the AH. Every new town you hit, buy the recipes, sell them. Especially cooking recipes.

Level 40-60

By level 40 using this you will have several hundred gold readily. Buy your epic mount, drop your skinning prof and start to level tailoring. Buy whatever you need from AH slowly, over a period of a week or two. The trick is to buy several stack of linen, wool, silk, etc. every day. You may have to farm for wool in stockades or elsewhere. Linen and silk should be dirt cheap. I think you can start to make mageweave now, so get ready to sell the mageweave bags. Not huge money makers, but 5-10g every day isn't bad at this level.


Level 60-70

By level 60 you can finally make netherweave bags. This is your bread and butter. Know the market, love the market. Buy cloth when it's low, make bags when prices are high. You may have to wait. Cloth is cheap on the weekends, bags are expensive during the week. It never fails. You will make at least 10g a day and up to 100g.

Level 70-80

By level 70 you can start your NR tailoring and make the frostweave bags. This market is competitive right now, but you should be able to make some money. Look for the other bag patterns, and consider rep grinding to get them. For example, nobody sells herb bags any more. THey are pretty useful. (The 28 slot one sells for 600g on our server, I imagine with 100g profit) Same thing with mining bags (although I think LWs make those). Sapphire spellthread is very popular but you need exalted with wyrmrest to make them if I receall. You will burn through tons of cloth in NR, untnil you hit the bag making phase. At that point you can safely make bags until at least 440 (its still green at that level).

Irregardless, if you've been picking flowers the whole time you should have 5000g when you hit 80. Buy your mount and enjoy raiding! (You will have about 2000g from quests alone in NR without factoring in training costs, which can be huge)

The mage project day 4

Well, i got some nice tailors to make me some netherweave bags, and a port to dal. So now I can go anywhere in the world, and I have some bag space.

What's selling? Some of the recipes from Shattrath. Vendor stuff from SW...Ice cold milk for ex. And the low level herbs. Sold one for 1.3 g, bought for 1s. All my skins and herbs (just the garbage 1-50 stuff), still made 5g or so on just that stuff. Pets, can't forget pets. Now that I can go to any capital city I can invest in the pet trade. It's heavily competitive, but I just need to sell a few.

So far I'm up 28 g after a 40g investment (so I'm still down 12g). My plan is just to rush to 20, get the mount and portals, then work more on making money. I anticipate I'll have a bunch of gold from my herb sales.

Life would have been far different if I hadn't gotten a nice druid to give me 40g. The first gold is hard. ALready i've seen many AH possibilities slip by because i didn't have the funding (for ex netherweave cloth was selling for 2.9 gold and the bags were selling for 5-10g. The market fluctuated rapidly.

Anyway the hardest part is the leveling! At 10 i'm a two-hit snack for everyone in my aggro radius. Which is huge. Leveling a mage right now is very challenging, with all grey gear. What i'd like is some heirloom stuff but that's not going to happen.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Reboot!

Our server was down the other day, so I did something really odd for me and rolled a gnome mage on a high population server. A random nice 80 came by and we got to chatting about raid progression, then he gave me 40g! So, emboldened, I ran around the world collecting various recipes from capital cities. I just posted them on the AH so we'll have to see what sells. Very exciting to start from a clean slate though!

So far got about 30g in sales, used the money to buy more pats and 5 netherweave bags. Life as a level 8 mage is hard, lots of drink, lots of dying. Hopefully things will improve. I don't even have a wand. Professions are herb/skin, already made about 5g off herb (which is a ton at this level). I find the first 100g is more useful than the first 10,000g. What i really need beyond bags is buffs; food buffs, scrolls, etc.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

What I really want.


Wraith has been out for a while, and all of us serious players have many 80s (I have 5). All are at least naxx10 geared, and pretty much all I do for group content is heroics with maybe a raid every week if I am lucky. Now, what I mean to say is that I've done alot of group content, and its safe to say 'why bother'. Why bother, because most of my toons will not see TOC or any hard raid. Why bother, because our guild doesn't really do TOC. Why bother, when I can only raid one night a week for specific content. And I'm not alone. Many in the guild have no interest in raids. Why bother doing heroics getting useless tokens when they can clear the heroic just fine with their dps (say its 1500 to 2000). THe point of the game at level cap is to provide enough challenges so that you are continually looking for the next tier of gear. But if you are not raiding, and dont do arena, really why would you bother with this whole progression? The whole end-game falls flat, and you have two choices. Reroll, or quit.

And I totally agree that the gear increase does two things. It encourages sloppy play and allows someone to be fodder for others amusement. 'dear god that guy is doing X with gear score Y'. I would actually like it if Blizz said, you know what, we are going to impliment gear score requirements for raids. You need to have full naxx10 or beyond (average iLvl 200) for Uluduar 10. And so forth. So I could stop hear the pissing and moaning about how person X sucks and and their gear sucks and they must the be spawn of satan and can't do anything good because they are noobs with shitty gear and jesus why are you even playing the game speced like that. You know, you hear this crap all the time. And I'm so tired. Its not the person's fault really, I put the blame on the RL. If they let people in knowing that they are dropping the average dps by 500 points, and thus wiping the raid because of enrage timers...its a problem. But so often, so so often, is that people do have skill and do have what it takes, but nobody will take them, or people will bitch 'it would be so much easier if you were in gear a full tier better'. And yeah it would, but that's not what we have.

Our guild has alot of talented, skilled people, who don't make gear their live's crusade. And we do hTOC all the freaking time with people who would just be laughed out of PUGs, you know the guys with 1500-1800 dps. Totally adequate, if barely, assuming the tank is good and the healer is good, and everyone knows how to play. And we do, and the bosses go down. But that gets to the main point, which is, what do we do when the most challenging level of content is a quick jousting/3 boss pull that everyone has run a zillion times, and thats it. Now I hear that in 3.3 we are getting new dungeons and I bet they will be of an even higher iLvl than hTOC, and that's cool.

But the really problem is that its just not good enough to design 10 and 25 man raid content; no, by and large, the shit that is run every single fraking day a million times, is heroics. We need more dungeons for each tier of content, and the dungeon should be a tier up. If you look at my handy-dandy chart above, you'll see gaping holes above ilvl 219 for 5 mans. For example I expect to see Uld 25 drops in heroic modes of the new dungeon, and stuff dropping in Icecrown to be tier 10, so that there is a upgrade path for guilds that can't get more than a handful of well-geared people together, so we can actually do some other things besides 10% of us doing ulduar every week. That's what I really want.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Making money

Well seemingly I haven't made as much as I thought; I invested heavily in raw materials (eternals -> rings -> enchants + dust), and took a risk on the orb markets. I'm only at 9.5k now, 1.5 k profit in the last few days is really nice but I expected a bit more. What i've been doing is the usual enchants and gems, but I found that people really undervalue the crusader and runed orb market. I made a quick 500g profit off runed orbs in trade and another 1000g profit off crusader orbs in the AH. Big risk, but big payoff. Right now there are only going to be a handful of crusaders floating around because the guilds really need them.

At least everything is still selling well, indicative that people are still interestd in the top end raid content.

I would have thought per WOWeconomics that the new drums would sell...not much luck selling them alliance side, and the potential profit margin is small.

Also the BOE ilvl 200 epics are selling well, as are the inscription offhands. That's 100g profit pretty easily. Honestly I am really surprised that people are still interested in endgame, when I can't get a raid PUG to save my life.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

What's selling

Just a short note.

What's selling. Well horde side I have a scribe, a jewelcrafter, an enchanter, a tailor, and leatherworker. That's alot of maxed professions! I've been trying inscription but in small volumes it just doesn't sell. I think to do Gevlons idea you need to be posting hundreds of glyphs.

What I found nowadays is that there is a huge market for gems and enchanment, but only specific enchants/gems. For example all the red cuts for epic and rare gems have only a 10-20g profit margin, while the yellows have a 50g or so profit margin. And they sell like hotcakes.

Enchants are the same way. Some wont sell ever (boots +spirit, bracers +expertese). These are the sucker enchants that people use to level up and throw away. The good ones are expensive though, and you need to be able to burn through 500g in materials to get a few sold.

Anyway I'm up to about 8000g on the bank char and definately making money. I only do the argent tourney dailies, but I could probably make another 1000g (for 4 hours of work, blah) every day if i wanted to do alot of dailies.

Still need one epic mount. Then there is teh raid gear that I probably wont be getting (5000g for a ilvl 245 item? No thanks).

Inscription.. I honestly dont know if it's selling or not. I still have residual poor selling inscriptions, but I can't be bothered with 1-2g profit per inscription.

Anyway now that the new raids are here it is def. time to be selling all sorts of raid-level items.

Also note that eternals will become oversold for a period as people like me burn through the last 10 points in leatherworking to make the new 3.2.2 items.

New raids

Well the raids are now coming pretty quickly. Just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the opening of TOC, the 3rd tier content of Wraith. Now we have Onyxia back and ready for more DEEP BREATHES.

This creates a challenge for the raid leader. We now finally have a rich assortment of raids to do.

Here they are in order of challenge.

Sarth - Still drops ilvl 200 stuff and T7 shoulders. One drake up is ilvl213 I think. Sarth remains a good investment of time and effort if anyone actually needs T7 gear. You get 4 conquest badges.

Naxx10 - iLvl 200 except KT who is iLvl 219. Naxx is a pretty bad investment unless you have a bunch of newer raiders who want to get geared quickly. A full clear should be enough loot if half of the raid is in BOE/heroic gear. If the full raid is in the state, keep going until you have a full clear or two under your belt. Naxx is a very good introductary raid

Eye of Eternity - a very challenging boss with ilvl of 213 I think. Need to kill KT in naxx to get to her. A very difficult encounter and one most will only do a few times.

Ulduar10 - iLvl 219 - the second tier of raids. Most guilds are still cutting their teeth on Ulduar and it's hard modes. Doable in full naxx10 gear (or even full blues as Gevlon has shown). The key is knowing the fights, knowing how to squeeze the most from your class, and proper consumables and raid mix. Most of the bosses only have a handful of gimmicks, making this an excellent second tier raid.

TOC10 - Third tier of raids. Drops Triumph badges. Dont know much about it, except that the first boss is really a wave of 3 different bosses. I understand the PVP boss is very challenging. Access to Tier 9 tokens. There are two unique modes to this raid instance for each 10 and 25 man.

Onyxia - Tier 9 raid, retuned, same as last time. Drops Tier 9 level goodies. Not sure about the badge type.

Vault - now with tier 7, 8 and 9. This can be worthwhile for the raid to run if you have WG when you are doing raids. Very much a gear dependant fight.

Here's our problem. We've done naxx. Over and over. We're now going into ulduar. Without throwing too many raids into the mix, we now have to prioritize scheduling. Ulduar is and should be first priority. However, everyone wants to see the new Onyxia, and we are starting 25 mans with another guild (just naxx, but still).

So now our schedule looks like this:

Ulduar 2x a week
1x a week 25 mans??
1x a week a random raid. This week it's TOC. Next week maybe onyxia. In this one slot we have to fit in Vault, Sarth, Eye of Eternity, TOC, and onyxia! So...yeah too many choices. Better than just doing naxx10, but we still need to make some decisions.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Hating the raid leader part 2

So.... much drama ensues if the RL and GL don't get along. After a month of hardly playing horde-side, we decided on a compromise. I would along with another officer lead the raids of content which we have on 'farm status', which in my mind means we only wipe maybe once on the content, and we've done it successfully several times before. The other raid leader would do the 'advanced' content.

Saturday was a forey into a virgin naxx10, w/o said antagonist, and I think we all had a good time. Perhaps we should not have wiped so much on the trash, but we got through all spider and plague up to Haigan, at which point we ran out of time. On monday, the antagonist was there, and there was a slightly different group comp. Anyway we had a bunch of healers, actually 4, so one went dps the whole time. We finished up plague and did all of military, and I think only wiped once or twice. Pretty smooth, but was it fun? No way. Vent was like a desert, and people had their "Game faces" on the whole night. Now, I understand when it's time to focus and what not, but when everyone is just going through the motions it strikes me as not fun. My main rule for WoW. If it's not fun, WHY THE HELL AM I PLAYING? I could mow the yard, or rake leaves, or go fishing, or whatever. Something else. But, I choose to have fun with my guildmates.

My feverant hope is that the antagonist will get the picture and not come to the farm content. We don't really need him, he's getting in the way, and the runs are decidedly unfun with him.

I also remembered I can still kick him since i have toons at a higher officer level than his. This fills me with glee.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

What to do when you hate your raid leader

Here was the problem I was stuck with.

I am the guild leader, but I hate the guy who runs the raids. Personality issues really. The problem is that he's pretty skilled at what he does, especially good at explaining the fights.

I was also in the raids he was in for a while, but due to scheduling I could no longer do that.

I was stuck with two choices. Fire him, and take over the raids myself. It would be abrupt, and 9 people would probably feel quite the lurch. And I couldn't be sure I could do the job as well (although I probably could).

Or not replace him and don't raid with the guild I lead and co-founded.

After some thought, I decided to put the guild first and not expose them to a meaningless change in leadership (meaningless in that the only reason I would replace the RL is because I couldn't stand him).

So I may form another raid group within the guild. Or I may go back to my alliance guild and start raiding with them again. I'm not sure. Time will tell. I think running a raid group would be challenging and if successful, would lead to a transition where we could do 25 mans. Although I view this prospect as highly unlikely its still something that is doable.

The point of this post is to put your guild first. I will not and would not ruin the fun of dozens because I couldn't get along with a guy. Although it is so tempting just to drop kick him to the curb that time hasn't come yet.

Adventures in guild management

Been a long time since my last post, and that one looked pretty bad. I was pretty bored at the time, having just leveled my 'last' (haha) toon. Things change. I was laid off 3 weeks ago, and I had alot of time on my hands. So i started playing WoW during the day while waiting for school to start up. At some point, not recently but not so long ago, my best friend stopped playing, got burn out. So he gave me the reins of the guild. However, given the high relapase rate, he came back, just in time! I'm handing the reins back to him.

What did I do? Well, I didn't make any sweeping changes to the guild. We had a pretty solid core and everyone was more or less happy and drama free. I did keep the recruitment thread up to date. I did outline my vision of the guild as far as raids go. I organized some retro-raids as before. I took care of the guild bank but elected some people to take care of it. I promoted some people who were officer material.

What did I learn?

1) Deligate. If you have a large 100+ member guild, you arent going to be able to do everything for everyone. Yes, as an officer I feel i have a duty to help people with heroics and the like, but I will almost never do run-throughs for someone unless they are a friend (and side note - most adult players will never beg or ask for run-throughs). But I added some officers to handle the duties I used to have.

2) Backup. Its not a bad thing to have two people do a task. They can divide the task however they want, but as long as it gets done, it's fine. I gave the bank job to the new, eager officer and an old hand who doesn't play much any more. That way both have a role in the job and it gets done smoothly (sometimes too many people is bad though).

3) Continuity. It's hugely upsetting as a guild member to find your friend the GL has just gquit (effectively). It's not you, its them (well its proably not you). Burnout is natural and expected, nobody likes doing the same thing forever. It helped alot I think that I was pretty involved in teh guild as the GL was stepping down, thus not too much changed. People got used to seeing my face and having me handle the issues that crop up.

4) Vision. For 3.2 I knew we were going to have a huge bolus of people and raiding was going to get alot easier. I implimented a no-brainer vision.

a) Get naxx over and done with, even if it requires extending raid lockouts.
b) Do TOC and hTOC every day until you got most of the gear from that place - naxx25 gear from hTOC is better than any drop we could get.
c) Start doing Ulduar as soon as possible.

I think this vision lead to us (well, the guild's raiding group) going into ulduar and doing flame lev (which is damn easy but big for confidence).

Now I gladly hand the reins back to my friend, who is much more experienced with people management than I am. I'm grateful for the opportunity to gain some experience, and I think did pretty well actually.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Now what?

Well, I have my fourth level 80, and I swore I wouldn't level another one. Already i'm thinking of the next one :) The only toon i have left horde side is my warlock. After being camped in dalaran for so long she might like to see the world again. We'll see. I'll def. try to get the chest piece for 20% more XP, and I think i'll need some shoulders bc I have leather BOA shoulders. May be some time before that happened. Wish you could share badges between toons!

I think the current plans are to max out herb and inscription, get into some raids and get the druid geared up, work on the DK more for heroics. I'd like to get the kirin tor rings (8000g each) but not sure I want to grind up that money. I'll still continue my inscription business and JC, i'm sure there will be stuff to buy in the next expansion, and I need to cover raid expenses.

Maybe I'll do recruit a friend dual-box for a month; should be quite inexpensive if I can buy WoW used or something, maybe do the free trial thing. I could level a paly and a mage or something. From my guildmates, it only takes a month or less to get to 60 using RAF.

Patch day :(

So, another 6 hours until realms up.

What did I do this week? Make a ton of money off JC. Actually much of it were sunk costs, but still looks like the original 2000 investment netted 6000 or more. So what did I do? I bought the last guild tab! Now unless i get one of those money sinks (like the rings, the Hog, the mammoth), I don't have anything to buy.

Most of the week was leveling the druid, about a level a day. Yesterday at 4pm I hit 80. The later levels were indeed short, I only spent about 3.5 hours from 79 to 80. Thank god I had enough rested to get through it.

I found leveling speed depends on the area; some areas only have one linear quest chain. Which is fun for lore purposes and so forth, but is ultimately quite slow. For example in Zuldrak the Knights of the ebon blade have a mostly linear quest line, and was very timeconsuming and unprofitable. The Argent Crusade guys had a bunch of parallel quests, as did the trolls to the east of them (actually this area was excellent for leveling). Scholozar basin - again nessingway had a bunch of parallel quests, for some of the mobs you were doing 3 quests at once. The frenzyheart quest chain is fun, but not parallel. Bad time sink. So is the Freya quest chain.

I noted that once I got the flying costs out of the way, i started 73 at 100g and finished at 80 with 2000g, paying for training along the way, vendoring greys and quest rewards. So pretty much if you start 70 with nothing you can get cold weather flying and slow flight at 77, with just the quest rewards in game, nothing to do with professions or AH or anything. Then you could finish the level 80 quests for another 2000g or so, leaving 2000g to grind for the mount (or 10 days of dailies).

Northrend leveling guide

My feeling in the future (if i ever level another toon) is to skip the known slow areas, could speed up leveling by 50% i think. And above all, avoid instances like the plague. They are horrible time investments for the XP return.

Some good quest hubs (off the top of my head).

Borean Tundra:
Warsong Hold
DETA
Taukale Village
Borgorok outpost

Dragonblight:
Actually all the quest hubs are pretty non-parallel. Agmar's hammer has a few parallel quests, as does Venomspite (the New heathglen quests are good xp/time)

Grizzly hills:
Conquest hold has a few parallel (or easy) quests. If you do all of the quests from the hub you can get the gladiator quest series (Conquest Pit), which is yet another arena quest series. THese are so good for xp/time if you can get a group. Avoid the troll mojo quests like the plague.

ZulDrak:

Skip Ebon Watch. Do Light's Breach, and Argent Stand. Also the small group of guys just northeast of Ebon Watch has a good quest hub. Do ZimTorga, and def. Ampitheatre of Anguish. The 4 mini quests for Argent stand (Troll Patrol) has an achivement if you can do it within 20 minutes, and rewards supposedly 60-80kXP.

Scholozar Basin:

Do all of Nesingway quests. Do Rivers Heart. Skip the rest. Most of the quests in this zone are non-parallel.

Storm Peaks:

Do K3, do the Hodir quest line (which opens up a nice quest hub at Brunnhildar village). You can stop when you get to the Hydemeet, or keep pushing to open up Sons of Hodir. Do the crash site (Gromarsh) - this unlocks several quest hubs, one which is good and easy is for the Earthen just NE of the crash site. Quests in this zone are pretty fast IMO.

Icecrown:

Not an expert on this, but do Argent Vanguard to unlock Argent Pinnacle? quest hub. Do the Ebon blade quests which unlock dailies which are quick. Much of the quests here are either dailies or group quests, so this zone isn't all that great for leveling.

Howling Fjord: I never really did this zone in full. I'm sure it's like BT though.

Overall I'd say

Borean Tundra 68-72
Dragonblight 72-73 or 74
Grizzly Hills 74-75 or 76
Zuldrak 76-77
Scholozar (Nessingway quests only) 77-78
Storm Peaks: 78-80.

Once you finish the major quest hubs in Dragonblight go to GH, don't finish the zone. Ditto for GH, ZD, and Scholozar. SP and BT are the only zones that are decent for leveling to do in full.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Post 3.2 thoughts

Well, the realms are down, and on a Thursday.

How do I like 3.2? I f'ing love it.

Leveling. First thing I did was buy cold weather flying and epic flying for the druid (and swift flight form). That was a cool 6000g. Yeah, i forgot, but unless you've been grinding rep for whatever reason, your average joe 60-79 isn't going to have rep with the factions needed to get the discount. So, epic flight is still damn expensive. I can't be positive leveling is actually faster, but I think it is. Regardless, it's a good deal *easier*, due to all those gather quests I can do in flight form and never touch a mob. However, if you are doing those quests the right way, you get just as much XP from killing the mobs as the quest reward itself. Consequently I've been leveling the druid like mad on Tue/Wed. Started at high 73, now I'm high 75. I blew through borean tundra (finally - ended up ditching a few quests but got most of them done), all of dragonblight (except wraith gate), and started in to zul-drak. Note that scholozar basin is really 76-77, not 75-77 as I thought. So i'm heading there when I hit 76 for sure. Leveling is still slow slow slow but I think its about 4 hours per level now versus 5+ per level with ground mount. That said, I have easily 20 more hours to go (ugh).

Professions. JC is making good money as expected. However, I think selling the rare ore at the right price is more valuable. The prospecting rate is not that great, I didn't keep stats, but it seemed on average to be one epic per stack of ore. Well, the uncut epics are selling for 300g or less now, whereas the ore sells for 300g. Green gems for example (eye of zul) are selling for 80g each and I can just see that number going down. Cut gems are doing decent. I tried for an hour or so to sell cuts in /trade. It was hit or miss. I tip well for things I really need, but for example I had one guy who asked for 10 cuts, i said it was 20g each, so he gave me a cardinal ruby instead. That's nice, but now I have to sell it. And I can suspect he is going to flood the market with his cuts. Would rather have cash. ANother guy gave me 4 cuts to do and tipped 15g. Another guy, i bought the pat for him, and he gave me a nice 40g tip. So, hit or miss. But generally speaking it's not a good way to make money. Best to sell the stuff in AH. From my 14 stacks of ore, I sold 2 of them, prospected 10, sold the cuts on AH. I'm up 1400g and I have over 1000g out on the AH. All in all i should get 1000-2000g profit, which isn't huge. The smart money would be to stockpile the titanium. However the market can only absorb so much. I can predict within a few days the prices are going to plunge back to 100g per stack, where they were before patch.

The new 5 man Trial of the Champion - I love it. I think its quite unique and challenging enough, and the drops are just fantastic. We ran it 2x and out of the 10 epics i dont' think anything was left to rot. Well all need gear badly though, so just gotta keep running it and get everyone geared up. The bosses are a bit challenging but not too hard. Both times we wiped 4-5 times but the run back is so short.

The Future.

For me its running lots of ToC, getting my druid t0 80, and getting geared quickly through ToC. For the guild, I think we are going to run ToC for a few weeks and head back to naxx and finish it. I think we'll end up running it once or twice more, then move on to ulduar. When the gear starts to rot then its time to move on I think.

BRK's new gun.

Gratz to him!

Saturday, July 25, 2009

3.2 - a new direction

Just some initial thoughts on 3.2. We all know that the colloseum 5 man will drop marks of conquest, epics from every boss (ilvl 200 for normal, ilvl 213 for heroic (so naxx10/naxx25 equiv). Seems like the loot tables are pretty large too, so it's possible to gear up most of your toons in naxx gear pretty easily. I would expect within a week the dedicated person will be fully geared in naxx10 gear from greens/blues, and a casual person would be able to replace several pieces. It may be that the challenge level is high like MgT from 2.4; in that case we could expect people in blues/greens not being able to cut the mustard. However in a guild like ours, we have half of us in good gear, and the rest in crap gear. Most of us have 2 or 3 toons at 80, and maybe one is naxx geared. So i can see having well geared people run it first, then switch out, say a good tank and healer and 3 badly geared dps, and run it on normal 5 times.

What does it mean though? It means that guilds like us who are struggling in naxx are going to suddenly have much more firepower. It also means that we don't need to do naxx since we won't have many upgrades from it. Which is too bad, because by the time we'll be able to finish naxx, 3.2 will be out and it will be meh, just like 2.4 when they nerfed the crap out of the raid bosses.

Honestly it means within a month of 3.2, any guild that can put together a few nights of raiding, even a guild like ours, is going to be done with naxx and moving into ulduar for better gear. We can forget about running naxx10 when 3.2 drops, because not only is the gear going to be nearly identical to the colloseum gear, but the marks will be pretty much obsolete. So, i predict we're going to ulduar pretty soon, then 10 man colleseum, well that will take a while but maybe by xmas.

For blizzard, it's an interesting strategy. Its basically saying, okay, if you are going to do icecrown, here is your chance; gear up quickly then push through ulduar and colloseum (which i predict will be a quick, fairly easily mastered instance designed mostly for gearing up). It means that if you hit 80 a week ago and ARE SKILLED (this is key), you could quite conceivably get naxx10 geared in a week, start doing ulduar/colloseum with your guild, and within one-two weeks be ready for icecrown. So, conceivably a month to be pretty well geared and a useful addition to the raid team.

Whereas now. Well my DK hit 80 a month or two ago. I bought the saronite set, bought the tanking epics, and started to run heroics. Well, 5 heroics later, i have exactly one piece of tanking gear. My guild mates have similiar issues. We all badly need gear, but it just doesn't drop. If we can do colloseum in say 30 min, its conceivable to run it on normal a few times a day and get say 6 pieces of naxx10 gear. ANyway enough musing, I think this patch is going to be really useful for guilds who just get get any traction in raiding due to the random drops and not enough time.

Friday, July 24, 2009

More mount grinding

Hit 5k mark this morning, figured i need another 1k for dual spec DK and 1k reserve. So keep grinding!

Things that are going well: glyphs, ore, bags, recipes, dailies!. So far getting about equal profit from dailies and AH, but AH is streaky so hard to tell. Titanisteel is a huge profit margin, I didn't realize. JC isn't selling much at all, plus the nice jewelry requires dragons eye (1 day of JC daily), so alot of investment for not much reward. I really need those tokens!

Going to try and work on DK dps set, and start leveling the druid.

Update:

As of Saturday night I have 7000g. It's just amazing; I have never made so much so quickly. What's selling? Just like usual, recipes, glyphs, ore, titanisteel. I would do an hour of dailies on the hunter, few minutes at AH, then some quests on DK. I'd login to bank char every 4 hrs (on saturday), rescan, repost. I never saw recipes sell so quickly. My feeling is that people are coming out of the woodwork to prep for 3.2, and it's going to be a huge patch for people like me.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Sam Raimi to direct WoW movie

I don't normally reblog stuff from WI, but this is so huge: Sam Raimi (Spiderman, Evil Dead 1-3) is directing the WoW movie. This says two things to me (who hasn't been keeping too much track). 1) Looks like they have enough funding to start production of the movie
2) The WoW fanbase and the Raimi fanbase likely overlap greatly, so pretty much we just have to see it, just to see Ted and Bruce. Bruce should be the main actor, no question. There is no way this movie could be good enough to be taken seriously, thus putting bruce into that role will just asure that it's taken as a light fantesy flick, rather than risk the whole immersion thing (which frankly has never worked for a movie tie in to a video game).

Mount grinding

Also i now realize i need two specs for the DK, so that's more money to burn. However I dont think i will need to buy the druid any more gear. Right now I'm just focusing on getting the druid ready for 3.2 and getting inscription up, which is doing quite well profit-wise. Anyway by this morning I had 3500, 1000 on druid, 1000 on bank already, 1500 on gibster doing dailies. Looks like I could get the mount by the end of the weekend if I do two hours of dailies each day and things continue to sell.

Making slight profits on bags, inscription, some red gems, some ore that i don't prospect, and of course recipes, which i say is half of my sales profit (other say 25% is inscription, 25% is random junk)

Gems - need to be careful there, we don't know how much in value the blue gems will drop. Maybe some, maybe not; but I'm really hestitant to buy into the market right now. However raiding is definately picking up, saw alot of raids formed yesterday. Get ready for inscriptions, gems, and enchants via trade come 3.2 - trade is going to be insanely busy for first few weeks come 3.2.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Weekend update!

Pretty good weekend, all told. Probably should have been more productive. I started the weekend pretty sick & tired. I think it was exhaustion and extreme doses of caffeine. Anyway lets see, my main goal this weekend was to make money and prep for our weekend blackwing lair raid.

Money making: Well, i have several things I am doing. Purpose is to get my epic mount on my druid so she can fly around northrend easily.

1) Stockpile Titanium ore. At this point I have nearly a full bag (20 slots?) of titanium ore, so i am going to stop stockpiling. I am not so rich as to be able to lose this investment completely without consequence, so I am hedging my bets. Profit: zero so far.

2) Buying eternals to make into rings for disenchant. When the dust market was great, this was a safe 100g or so profit. Nowadays? I have 10 stacks of dust awaiting sale because the market continues to crash every day. Hopefully it will pick up in 3.2. Profit: zero so far.

3) Gems: I sold all my blue gems, cut or uncut, expecting the prices to sink even further. Yes I know you can xmute, and that may be useful if I had an alchemist toon. However, I don't. Profit: unknown.

4) Inscription. My inscription is still only 150, it's actually quite expensive to level. I herbed for several hours saturday and got from 100 to 175 or so, so i'm about halfway done with 1-300 stretch. I made every inscription I could make and sold them all at AH. Hopefully I'll get an easy return on investment. I really need to put more effort into inscription as it will be a good money maker. Profit margin unknown

5) Bags - still a good, safe investment. Probably made 50g in bags this weekend, just buying cloth and making bags. Profit margin: 25%

6) Recipes - surprisingly strong investment. I replentished my stocks this weekend and already sold quite a few. Profit margin on this is very high (100% to 1000%). Between patches people get quite bored and start leveling cooking and the like. Probably fish/food is selling pretty well now too.

7) Ore: Surprisingly profitable. Mine cobalt ore, sells for 20g or whatever per stack.

8) Dailies: #1 profit maker right now. I'm doing icecrown and make 200g not including the greens and cloth I get (which go into making bags for me). Unfortunately my hunter doesn't have a gather prof (except skin) so missing out on some dough there. But i love the fact that I can log in for an hour and make 200g guaranteed. I predict in a week or two I'll have enough for the epic mount with just dailies. With all the tradeskills I should be doing well when 3.2 hits.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Must log in...

I wonder if we are all addicted, but still I take nights/weeks off once in a while, and I don't feel a compulsion 'must log in'. I think blizz shares a portion of the blame here for creating such a huge time sink. Gevlon cheerfully ignores the massive effort it took to get to 80 and get geared. Yes, once you are at that point, you could only spend 20 hrs or less raiding, but typically you get bored of doing just raiding and want to see other parts of the game, which requires a larger time sink.

Some things I really hate about blizz is:

1) required dailies (JC, argent tourney), short world events that take a huge amount of effort to get the achievemnt (i was 95% done with flame fest and it was over, so I just wasted 20 hours of my life doing it (not entirely, got half a level and 100s of gold).,

2) gear progression at end game - you need to spend X amount of hours farming Y so you can do instance Z with better loot, so you can do instance A with better loot.

3) Forced obsolescence; yes the instance will be there, but the drake achievements disappear, the effort will become trivialized (== not fun), etc. If you just want to see the instances, well you can, but its trivial. We did ZG last night for the first time; was a total joke. We had only a small idea how the bosses worked, we rounded up entire rooms, etc.

4) Long forced sessions. While leveling: Notice how some (maybe half?) of quest hubs don't have a inn nearby? That's so you can spend yet more time running back and forth to the inn. Thanks blizz!

Notice how you have to clear an hour of trash to get to the boss, and the trash respawns? That's to spend more time/effort to get the phat loot. (I think this adds to skill == fun, but it can get ridiculous; i really love instances with minimal amounts of trash).

And 14 bosses in an instance (= 4 hours typically) - Thanks blizz!

Yeah, you don't have to log in, but the time sink and the idea of wasted time wouldn't be nearly as bad if they took some effort to minimize the amount of time it took to do stuff. WoW is better than most MMOs though, at least you don't have to spend two weeks releveling if you spend a night wiping.

Toon update

Was in Chicago for most of weekend, at a conference. My thought about leveling the druid for a few levels in outland proved to be quite painful. At one point it was 10 hours per level, vs 5 hours per level in NR. After level 71.5 i moved to NR and things are moving decently there now. Still having some trouble with mobs as dps is still low for NR. Druid leveling is just slow! But no downtime, that is a plus. Can't wait until we can get heirloom cold weather flying. I'm saving up for the epic flyer now but I'm very low in funds having bought tons of BOEs for the DK.

On that front, started doing argent tourney, spent about 3000g to make the tanking blue set and 3 BOE epics. Thinking of getting the titanisteel destroyer, but it's really expensive (8 titanisteel, 2 frozen orbs). I tanked hUK for the first time last week, then did hUP and hHOL. For the last two we had to swap out people to get better dps. My tanking dps is very low since all i have is +defense stuff, and that makes tanking a pain in the ass. Further, no upgrades from heroics yet, although now i have 3 under my belt and things should get better all the time.

At this point I have 2500g and the AH market is getting pretty cold, hard to make money nowadays. Still, i'll keep doing the JCing and hopefuly cut blues will sell decently. Currently most of them are only 30g or so each, far cry from 80-100g in TBC. Its actually decent money just to level, about 60g per hour, but training costs are very high. I'm not looking forward to the training costs for the druid; i think it will be about 300g per level. Well, if it's money I need I can now just grind out dailies; two hours of icecrown dailies/quests would yield at least 300g. I really just want to push the druid through and get to 80 as quickly as possible and start doing some heroics and naxx, I really want to raid a bit more than I am, and given that the choices are a dps (hahaha) or a DK (haha right), the druid is the best chance for me to get into PUGs.

Did ZG for the first time last night. I think i won't do that again, it was just pretty boring. Pretty much like ZA but bad gear and every time you loot a corpse it drops some rep crap, but there are like 10 of them, so you end up rolling a zillion times and with a ton of junk in your bag. I finally wised up and just stuck with the lock, brought 10 stones, and got someone to tank. Its ironic i think that we have a bunch of tanks but only the officiers are healers (xiola, Tsu, Asharr). Tanking is fun, but jees guys go resto or holy pls!

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Short toon update

Spent about 3000g? Thereabouts! Getting my DK in decent tanking gear. Got 4 epics now and almost all blues, need to replace my belt. That plus the JC ring should boost me to defense cap. Man that is hard to reach! You pretty much have to have every single piece of gear have some amount of defense on it. Anyway 22k HP unbuffed, pretty decent i guess.

Did hUK with just blues and 470 defense. Was pretty tough with holding aggro, that with my best friends (really solid and skilled group). I surely thank them for their time; spent about 2 hours in there, i think we wiped once.

Did MC with the guild last night. Turned into an hour long 'oh MC, let me come - sure lets stop the raid, switch in my lock, summon, reclear trash, get back to the boss, repeat'. this happened 4x. Eventually we had about 7-8 guys, and i bruoght my hunter for max dps (2500 woot!) Anyway after we got everyone actually in we just steamrolled the place. Was alot of fun. Had two mid-60s guildies so the gear didn't totally rot (but I am almost sure their greens were better, since MC gear is so stacked with resist stats).

Planning to do ZG on sunday.

Monday, July 6, 2009

4th of July

Well the 4th came and went. I think the sad thing for me is that I really wanted the fire festival achievement and pet, and misjudged when the event would end. Well, it ended and i was 5 hops from geting it done. Now i have 600 of the emblems that will just rot i guess. I opened a petition but I dont have much hope. I guess life goes on. If i was that type of player i'd have titles on all my chars, etc.

The good news is that with all that running around my DK went from mid-78 to 80! And just in time to tank Kara on sunday. It went okay, i pulled too much once and we pretty much wiped. Other than that it was smooth sailing, as expected from 8 80s and a 72. All the gear rotted pretty much. But! 4 patterns dropped, everything in kara. 3 enchants, and the gun +hit for engineering. So we're super happy about this. I think there is some incentive for some to run it again. We tried gruuls lair but it was just too much for us. Maybe if we had a paly or warrior, but I couldn't generate enough hate and wasn't geared enough to take the substantial hits. It's designed for 5 tanks. Anyway we'll have to see if we can get it done later.

Also my little druid is no longer little, she's officially 70 (now mid-70), and the last toon i'm leveling (as of now i guess). I still have the lock at 73 and my alliance hunter at 75. So...we'll see. I did most of Borean tundra, ran nexus and got my 2 blues (nothing decent). I'm still at least in half outland gear, which is sad. Leveling in NR is very tough for me, basically healing every pull. If there are two mobs, forget it. So just like hellfire.

Future plans? Well continue leveling the druid; doing isle of QS dailies (great and easy, but not as good as NR stuff - but easy!), then hit SMV and netherstorm. By then i'll be 72 or 73 i guess. Skip over to dragonblight, at 75ish go to scholozar basin, then storm peaks. I'm surprised i'm tanking so much on that toon, now that i'm out of hellfire (and DK starter zone). It's better than DK tanking, but still.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Faction change coming 'soon'

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=69505.0

This is just. WoW. Although I'm somewhat pissed/sad that I wasted many months leveling a tauran druid when i could easily transfer my alliance druid over. This is just wonderful. Maybe my friend who is alliance can join us...hmm. All those problems of wrong server/wrong faction PVP vs PVE...not a big deal any more. Of course game is 4 bloody years old.

Argh.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Toon update

I played somewhat this weekend, maybe 5 hours or so. Was a nice break after work and after errands and yard work. My little DK is 78, mostly from running a few quests in the mornings before work. My druid is now 66.5, due to running zangamarsh stuff all weekend. I'm out of rested as of last night, so i'll probably shelf the druid for a while. Just 1.5 more levels until NR! I may just push through this week and get the last 1.5 levels out. Not sure.

I ran LBRS for the first time ever, and also AQ20. Those were fun and very doable for a guild like ours (the first was a run thruogh by an 80 and the second was a 10 man raid of mostly 80s). There was just a ton of stuff dropping; the rare +15 agi pat dropped in AQ, a bunch of BOE blues dropped in LBRS (plus 5 easily obtainable quests). Also i got my seal for BWL, need to finish that quest line up. Last night I tanked Underbog, for the sporegar quests, and got up to friendly with them. That was fun and different; the pug druid sure was an idiot though. No idea of the proper kill order. I had thought i would be cat-feral and resto as dual spec, now i see i need to invest more in tanking since there are never enough tanks. Tanking is slightly more challenging than healing, which is about as easy as dpsing. All i have to say is 360 degree swipe = win.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Ti ore


Well we are getting some info on prospecting rates of rare gems from Ti ore (see here). Looks to be about one per stack of ore. So you would sink in, right now, 200 gold, for a stack, and get an epic gem, on average. My thoughts are that ore prices are going to go up and up and up until the patch hits, then plateau for a few weeks, the drop down to a steady state.

But who knows! Now that we have some ideas on the prospecting rates we start to know how much we need to accumulate. The other thing that people are overlooking; with all the farmers in icecrown, I find myself competeing with several people all the time. If I am lucky i'll get a node or two in an hour. That's not much reward for time invested.

BUT! There is another way to do this. GO do WG every day, and reap in the honor. Remember gems sells for 10k honor? If you don't care about PVP, just soak up the honor and buy gems. That would be my plan. The time reward is funner, and you wouuld put in the same amoutn of effort to get 10k as it would to farm a stack of Ti ore.

Update: Well, you never know how the market will react. It seems the chinese gold farmers were out in full force mining the crap out of Ti. On sunday morning there were no less than 10 stacks of Ti, selling at 8g/ore and dropping. I bought 5 stacks or so at 130g a stack (6.50g each). My guess is that i'll break even on the investment, since I don't have any JC tokens in stock. My further guess is that when 3.2 hits, the market will be glutted with Ti, and the gems will sell for 100g each uncut, and 120g cut. Rare gems are already not selling, even the scarlet rubys. The others, i really can't give away. So far JC is a giant bust for gold purposes.

Well, not quite. You see those chinese gold farmers? They were selling stacks of eternal earth for 90g each. And i buoght a few, made some rings (hint next time do the ring that is 1 EE and 1 E shadow which is 1/2 the cost of a EE). Anyway I made 300g that night, selling dust/GCE. However when the EE stacks were 150g I didn't make much of a profit.

Right now i'm back to 2000g on hand, maybe that much again in auctions (which are totally not selling). Now is the time for raw materials; sell your dust, sell your ore. Other than, not much is selling.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Toon update

I somewhat collapsed last weekend after working for 2-3 weeks straight. So i played WoW perhaps more than i should have. I leveled the druid to 64.5, and started doing the fire fest. Well, guess i should have completed it, because they reset all of the achievements. So...thanks blizz! Guess i won't be getting that pet after all.

We ran Ahune last night for 4x, and the pet dropped! A guildie got it; i think that's great. Glad to see a guildie getting something. I estimate that the whole event will require 20 hours; not sure if i want to spend that time running around, when i could be leveling my two chars. I started playing the DK again; realizing that doing outlands without rested XP is a kick in the teeth; I went from 1.5 or so hours per level on the DK to 3+ hours per level on the druid. The solution may be just to wait a week and get max rested XP, then get to 68, stop, repeat. I'm really looking forward to doing raids/instances again on the druid though.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Nickel and dime

I make all my money from nickle and dime stuff. I found the big things, maybe they will sell, but it will take a long time to do so. I'd rather sell 100 of an item and make a gold, than wait, repost, wait, repost, and finally get a 100g profit. Just my thinking.

People really need to consider the flow of the item, and if prices will come back. The later is really a gamble; for example now Ti ore is going through the roof. Will it payoff? Who knows. I'm sure the guys who have a ton of it and can prospect/cut it on the first day will make tons.

Another example, I made a bunch of infinite dusts when the market was 5g each. Now it's 4g each. Will it bounce back to 5g in the next patch? Who knows. Generally its best to ditch stuff as soon as you can, because the supply is infinite and eventually prices will get lower. However, 5% of thigns the price may get much higher due to development changes.

Also never forget what you are in the market for. For me, i just want my professions leveled and my last epic mount. Once i get that gold I see no point to waste more time getting worthless gold.

One thing i've discovered is that there are a ton of ways to get gold. For example, I could mine for several hours, and prospect gems and make tons of gold that way. Or i could do dailies. Or i could run around barrens and gather herbs. That stuff goes for 10g a stack on my server; insane! I'd make a killing all ways.

People who say they are broke, maybe they are level 20 and that makes sense; but my good friend had 1000g at level 20ish, and 5000gish at level 40. People who buy stuff from AH are insanely lazy (me too). I'll plop down 10g on a piece of armor that'll i'll use for a level. I'll buy pots, etc. I don't really need gold, so I have it to throw around. I'ts not a big deal to spend 100g on the AH, which is almost pure profit to the guy who sold me the stuff. If you are broke, you just aren't trying, at all.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Outlands!

A few milestones for my toons. Bunnykilla hit 77, hearthed to dalaran, got his mount, and hasn't been seen since. Trypsin sucked it up and powerleveled from 55 to 59.5 over the weekend (with only 6 hours of play or so). The grind from 55 to 58 was just terrible; at one point I was doing a quest in winterspring, running back to felwood, run back to winterspring, turn in, go back to felwood, repeat.

I just have to say that the last 50's quests are horrid; the typical quest is to either kill a ton of rare, spread out mobs, or alot of a rare drop, or run to another zone, do the quest, run back. All in all it was taking 15 to 30 min per quest. I found it just as efficient to get a quest, walk there (no mount), and slaughter everything in your path. Being rested is absolutely critical I think, as are the BOA shoulders.

Anyway, now that my druid is 59 i'll probably play her more. Surprisingly i managed to heal ramparts just fine despite most of that gear coming from the level 40s blues. Resto spec is absolutely key. I could have probably done it feral with all outland gear. Anyway i got a nice feral bracer out of it, and a full level (unrested). Hopefully I can run it again for another level tonight.

Still have not touched the professions, was thinking herb/inscription, but now not sure.

Monday, June 8, 2009

toon updates!

I was at a conference all last week, only playing an hour or so total. Anyway, not much going on. Is this the end? I'm buried in Red Alert 3, an insanely fun command & conquer game; I love it because you can pick it up and play for a few minutes, then tab out and do work or whatever. Can't do that with WoW; 99% of the time I come back to a corpse, and a run back.

Played really briefly (one quest) this morning on the DK; he's now 76.5 - very close to flying again! Money is continuing to roll in from various things, mostly just selling stuff i've accumulated. I'd say its 1000g a week all told. Nowadays I spend very little effort on AH; scan, batch post, logout. Vastly improves the gold per time. Now have 1300g with the druid's land mount paid off. Now just need to pay for yet another epic mount (7000g). Druid will be last toon I level in WoW; I am 99% sure of it. I am surprised I am still playing; but I can tell the game is going downhill fast.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

jewelcrafting notes

Well as mentioned my JC is now 420. What a long painful slog!

Here are some of the notes from memory during it.

The guide from wowprofessions: Not that great. Typically i would make the suggested number of settings items (ie mithril filigri) and have 20 left over, meaning i burned a stack of ore). My suggestion is only make half of what it says, and don't use the recipe once it's green. Also get a glove enchant for gatherer (+5 mining skill), if you can (need to be 60 to use it)

1-300: This is just a horrid horrid grind. Get through it, just get through it. Copper and tin are not so tough, but the common gems from these ore are not really used. Shadowgem was my friend (and apparently everyone elses; sells for several gold each). Expect to pay 5g per skillup up to 15g.

You really should have mining leveling at the same time, its the only way without going flat broke. Silver, gold, truesilver ore is your friend. You can smelt these for mining skillups (along with other ore), making them quite valuable. Silver routinely goes for 4g per ore. You may just decide to skill up mining through just tin/iron ore instead of going the route of silver ore smelting.

Mithril: Once you get to mithril you can get half of your skillups through smelting mithril and truesilver. Do it. I noted that through this I didn't need that much more mithril ore. Or if you want to actually make money, just get mine skillups through mithril nodes, make 30 filigriess then prospect the rest of the ore until you have enough gems to get past this part. Most reliable place for mithril? The bug hives in tanaris

Thorium: Goes pretty quickly. Go grab 3 stacks of ore from AH and when you hit 250 mining, smelt it all. You'll need it or close to it. Then run around winterspring hitting the rich and small nodes. You'll get enough ore to get through this level. Star rubys are more common and somewhat cheaper on AH. Figure out the AH prices of the gems and make the cheapest item you can. For example azerothian diamonds sold for 20g each on AH, but star ruby sells for 12g. Sell the diamonds, buy rubies.

300-375. This was pretty easy. Fly around hellfire for a while to get to 325 mining, gather all the feliron you can. Smelt some for skillups. prospect the rest for common gems. At 325 you can get adamantite ore from nagard (best place) or from zangamarsh (which is a mix of fel iron and adamantite). Don't worry about mining skillups, i went from 300 to 400 in outlands in a few hours. Keep prosepcting until you have enough. I think i used 10 stacks of adamantite. You could just buy it on AH (15g each stack). Oh, big tip: Black diamonds which drops from MC and BRD are extremely cheap on AH, usually. I leveled about 20 levels using them and it cost less than a gold per skillup. Sell all your cut uncommon gems to the vendor. Don't bother with rare gems, you can sell them on AH or give them to a guildie.

375-420. Here I cheated and took stocks of uncommon northend gems from the gbank. After about 3 stacks of gems I got to 420, where I called it quits. I'll skill up more once I can fly around nortrhend and gather ore. Somewhere in here I became eligable for the JC daily quest, so I've been trying to do that.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Toon updates!

Druid is 53.5! I played him a bunch this weekend, well by a bunch i circled ungoro several times and ran part of two huge instances, BRD and ST. The ST run happened last night, it was great. I got 3 of my 4 quests done, including the druid quest. I didn't gain as much as I thought; i'm still only 53.5. I got half a level out, whereas I expected a full level. Anyway I may try to get the other quests and go back in. It was fun to be in a full group of appropriately geared people. Well except the hunter. And the warrior bailed at the first pull, idk why. We didn't even wipe yet. (We only wiped twice).

The hunter was a complete idiot. (linked is his armory profile). Lets look. Survival, okay. Notice the tons of trap talents? Which would be great if he could trap. His method of crowd control was distracting shot! (which is a ranged taunt, really useful for getting mobs off the healer). Never a trap was thrown down. The best part! The best part was when I remarked on his +spell damage shamy gear, and he said he had a alliance warrior at 80, and I asked if the warrior had the shammy gear too, and he said yes! To be fair, he was probably a twelve year old boy playing his first toon (the alliance 80 was either ebayed or probably just as bad). But apparently this guy lives in instances and run throughs. I don't know what his dps was (from now on i am running recount), but it had to be minisicule, due to his constant meleeing.

Anyway. My DK, i blitzed through jewelcrafting/mining (now at 420/397 i think). God that was a pretty tough grind, until outlands with an epic flyer (i sprung for that plus the uber expensive bird). Some kind guildie left a bunch of northend green quality gems in the bank, and i burned through them. Turns out they don't sell for much, only a few gold, cut. Which is a shame I guess. I didn't bother selling the outland green gems, and the blue gems I didn't even cut, uncut they sell for 3g each or so. Worthless. The huge money sink or profit engine occurs at thorium, where a full stack is 60g and the gems are 15g each. I made about 1000g back right there. I don't want to think how much i burned through, probably only 1000 or 2000g.

Oh, and I did ulduar10 (just flame leviathon) on my alliance 80 druid. I joined a new guild, forte. They are a pretty heavy duty raiding guild, but they raid at 9 EST, which is far too late for me (unless i go insane and decide to be up til 2am). That was super fun, going to try to get the horde guild to do it, its pretty simple and good gear drops. Looking forward to playing more with the alliance guild, but so far they just seem to do the raids.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Once upon a guild

This is a bump from Pike, the wonderful hunter blogger.

I think its a sad comment that life only ends in tragedy which is death. So to with guilds. Guilds come and go, and the coming is a glorious thing. I was instrumental in a guild-first KT downing last weekend on my druid; not my guild, someone elses. Still, it was fun to see them get the achievements and the loot.

Anyway, my first guild was Forces of Nature. I joined at level 10 on my first character, and i thought there was some long app process. Nope, just /ginvite. Well, it was a leveling guild and the GL was a nice guy, but a kid. Eventually the kids outnumbered the adults (which were three), and the GL got burned out (that was a key mover), so the guild just kinda dissentigrated.

Then there was Ancient Ones. My adult friend (husband/wife duo) moved over there, and they were a big raiding guild (full of fail, it turns out). But they were raiding! And in Kara! And I got to do kara. Oh did i do kara. Endless, endless runs of kara. This was the guild where it would take 30 hours of raiding a week to get to the last boss. Pulls took 30 minutes. The RL would disappear for 5-10 minutes each pull (he was the GL and MT, another problem). Eventually I got sick of wasting my life in kara (at that point we were raiding nearly every night, until 2 or 3 am)

So I transfered to DoubleFisted! A new guild, just starting up, full of people who knew what they were doing. Kara was cleared in 3 hours! I was rejoicing! We had defined raid times, 3x a week for 4 hours. Raids started and ended on time. That was in February of last year I think. We blew through T5 and beelined into T6, downing bosses every week just about. Still, there was alot of bosses. Then we were in Black Temple! And that was just awesomeness, the best thing there was in the game. You were Someone to be in BT. And we got up to Illidan! But time was against us, the great nerf of 2.4 hit about a week after we got to Illidan. They nerfed him so hard that we one-shotted him. About that time raiding collapsed on pretty much every server. See, raiders love challenge and new content, and we all knew our raid loot was going to be obsolete very soon (actually not so much). Anyway, when the challenge disappeared, the reason for raiding became lost. Still "we must raid". So we did, until wraith hit.

I think somewhere in here my RL best friend started playing horde (why'd it have to be horde?) , and started a guild Doctors of Philosophy in Earthen Ring. Now, I was really busy with the raiding, and leveling up another alliance toon, about fully commited. Yet playing with my best friend was tons of fun, so i joined him, started from nothing, and rolled...another hunter. Yes two, I dont know why. Anyway we formed a guild (actually he did), and i came onboard and eventually did more and more in teh guild. But for quite a while i would only play maybe once a week, while he was actively playing every day.

Wraith hit, and things changed, as I knew they would. The alliance raiding guild changed its nature, to a dark, ugly beast. The GL who quit and was an egomaniac, came back to lead the guild. Suddenly the guild was about server firsts, getting uber geared, and god help you if you are not in the raiding group. I decided at that point that I didn't want to raid like that. I worked extremely hard for 2-3 weeks, playing 40/60 hours a week, just to get to max level so I can raid with them (and i was already several weeks behind them). So i missed the boat, barely, and missed out on all the excitement. Suddenly I was a noob again, and my good friend on the guild took off, one by one. It had gotten too serious for them.

So i played more with the earthen ring guild, and lo and behold, the server just went insane from all the people coming back. 30 minute queues each night became the norm. So when server transfers opened, the hardcore of us jumped ship. At this point it was me, Jim, Jen, Tsu, Pesti, and we all would play together with whatever instance, just to do it. We did strat and scholo and other things. Was alot of fun. Then we reformed in dawnbringer, a new server. And oh lord what have we done?

I login to find a guild full of complete strangers. Dawnbringer in the early days was a melting pot; everyone was guildless. So we advertised and got just a ton of people. With such explosive growth, things happen. The hardcore of our old guild wondered what we had done, and were scared to interact with the new people. Some drifted away. Newbies came, drama occured because some had different ideals for the guild; the guild schismed. Now things are mostly petering out. We have a good group, but it gets harder and harder to run naxx with enough tanks and healers. People leave, but aren't replaced. I imagine we will need to recruit more people or stop running naxx alltogether. Now I find myself as GL, running the show, making the decisions, handling logistics. I'm pretty burned out too but want some escape from my current mad life. So, into the trenches once more.

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