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.

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