Hunter's Prowl

So long and thanks for all the fish

2011-03-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Traditional goodbye post. This is likely the last time I will update this blog. I had fun while it lasted, amassed tons of gold, downed every raid/dungeon boss in the game, was in server first guilds, was in casual guilds, raid leader to casual nobody. Now what little time I play in the game I play with my best friend and wife. This game is utterly boring for me now, and honestly I don't see it getting better. I'm just done with it. What is amazing that it took 5 years of pretty insane amounts of time. I think i have 300 days played amassed or something like that. That is a scary amount of time to devote to, well just about anything.

I am playing a bit of Rift and am doing other PC/console games, and working like crazy. So, little time for wow.

Cataclysm impressions

2011-03-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

Decided to do one last post before shutting the blog down. I wrote up my Wrath impressions here. While wrath was very good for advancing the story, after reading part way through the Catalcysm novel and playing to 85 on a toon and doing some end-game content, as well as leveling a few toons through the new zones, I think I am finally qualified to have some weight behind my words.

Cataclcysm is Blizzard's jump the shark moment. The moment where everything went downhill, where people bled off, never to return. Why?

Well lets think about what Cataclysm offered and how it compared to what we had in Wrath.

New zones! Yes, there were 5 new zones. The water zone of Vasjir was very interesting to play through once. The phasing technology allowed the story to drive through, and the fact that the zones were just one big quest line allowed Blizzard to really deliver on telling a very comprehensive story about the zone and your role in the story. So, that's great. Once.

However, the real problem, as everyone knows by now, is that blizzard also simultaneously killed off any interest in leveling again. Its like reading a book or watching a movie. You know exactly what quests you are going to do, exactly what zones, etc. No jumping around like with other expansions or other games. You were on rails, and woe to you if you dropped quests/couldn't find quests. Further, it completely killed group play. My wife and I tried to level in sync, but one twist of fate had us locked on different sides of a phasing system, she could not complete the quest while I could, and we were stuck, and that is that.

Professions. Absolutely uninspiring. Sorry, blizzard failed with this. The only highlight is the daily fishing/cooking quest, which conceivably would allow you to level your fishing without completely going crazy. Otherwise, professions remain unchanged since Wraith. Sure, the 510+ recipes have to be obtained by unlocking twilight highlands at 84, and are obtained through getting various reagents. But otherwise it's the same thing. There are only 2-3 BOE epics, no BOP epics that I am aware of. Engineering got some love by creating special engineering 'gems' and having stackable engineering enchants. This profession still remains quite fun. Also, Alchemy is really powerful now due to the huge demand of truegold (BOE epics are very sought after), and of course the legendary 2 person dragon mount vial of the sands. However this requires a huge archiology grind. (oh, the new secondary profession. I never touched it).

End game. More heroics! This time there are 7 new dungeons, and 2 'retuned' heroics, dreadmines and SFK., down from 12ish in wraith/BC. Heroics are hard like hell in Cata, and the community has essentially destroyed any love casual gamers may have for end-game dungeons. I know i won't touch them with a 10' pole, and many feel the same. It's a shame.

Raids. I would not know, i never got into one. I assume they are equally as difficult as heroics. At least people are not burning through content, it is supposedly quite tough. I do know i could never get a guild team off the ground, partly due to me not caring enough, partly due to the fact that our guild is really not meant to do raids in this expansion. We are far to casual. Whereas in Wraith we could actually do quite a bit of the raids without working too terribly hard.

PVP. Don't know. From what I heard the new battle grounds are the same. I tried to get into the new wintergrasp, and was locked out because of the imbalance. Which sucks for the high-pop side of the server. It was fun to utterly demolish alliance in WG day after day, we would field 50-60 to their 10.

Old zones: This is the best part of the expac. The new quests are fantastic. The goblin zones are superb. I am serious about this, the 1-60 content is really outstanding now. You can do dungeons when you want, you can do these great quest lines. If anything it goes too quickly, i average an hour a level until level 60.

TL;DR. I think Blizz missed the boat here. The huge audience of casual players have found little to occupy their time, given the extereme competition from other games, it's no wonder that blizz is bleeding subs. The main reason is probably boredom, like me.

rogue faq

2010-11-21T20:33:00.000-08:00

Rogue FAQ

This is ripped entirely from the official forum and is created by Jolsen. I'm sticking this here because it's about to be deleted and I want to come back to it.

This was originally posted by Assassinette on Stormrage-EU
And i thank them for all their hard work.

Content:
Part I - Leveling Build and Gear
Part II – Stats ( <-- Hit Rating issues explained)
Part III – Instances & Early Raiding
Part IV - Early 80 Gear
Part V - Other stuff to know & take care of
Part VI – Fake FAQ ( <-- Expose Armor & Tricks of the Trade)
Part VII – Real FAQ & Profession Tips

First of all: This is up to date as of Patch 3.2.
It is intended for new people & PvE, meaning (solo) leveling and your first instances and raids.
If you've seen the TBC version, this is more of the same, with up to date numbers and up to date knowledge. I won’t give or explain a lot of options – however I am trying to provide what you need to know, no matter which tree you prefer; and while there usually is a single best way to do stuff, there are a lot of ways that are good enough. I’m also avoiding Math or Theorycraft, as this isn’t about demonstrating the argument, but instead providing its conclusion; if you want to take a look at those, this is the wrong place to search for them. The whole thing is backed up by the experience and knowledge of a lot of rogues, which usually means doing it wrong and knowing better afterwards, and while I try to include any decent hints or improvements that make sense, as well as weeding out mistakes that are pointed out, and keeping it up-to-date, you’ll need to be argue better than “because I say so” – I’m the only one who gets to do that.

I posted this for reasons of my own, profit from it or not, it's your choice. If you do follow it more or less, make sure you follow the underlined parts. I still don’t care for sticky, so I won’t be ‘cleaning this up’ for that sake or making it more polite. Also note that there invariably is a point where a rogue will grow out of this guide and get a better & more concise idea of what they want to do and how to achieve it - at that point, you're past the scope of the guide. It states "Newbie" in the title for a reason. The guide also isn’t a discussion of class balance or even tree balance - it's here to give an understandable and short(ish) answer to gear/spec/stat and whatever other questions a newcomer commonly has. It's not an encyclopedia, and doesn't want to be one.

Part 0 – Rogue Rules

• Don't Stand In Green !*!!™!
This rule is also commonly known as "PvE is hard, sometimes there's a fire, and you have to move™" or "A dead rogue does 0 DPS™".
It doesn't matter whether it's green, yellow or red; it doesn't matter whether it's a gas cloud, acid on the floor, rain of fire from the heavens, cleaves or whirlwinds.
If you can anticipate it, don't get caught in it; if you can see it, move out. Avoid dying, and don’t wipe the raid because you’re overtaxing healers – both essentially mean you’re wasting the raidslot that was given to you.

• Whatever Works (Best)™
Any other answer is wrong and usually given by people with either no clue, or an active interest to have you perform badly.
The best build is the one that best fulfills what you want it to do; if boss-DPS is what you want to do, then the best build is the one with highest potential DPS, and the best Stat is the one that gives you most DPS; if sailing though heroics is what you want, then shifting your attention to multi-targeting abilities to help clear trash ASAP might be the better choice. There is no single magical answer that covers all situations, and it’s your task to find a way/spec/tactic/gear that works well in the environment you chose to be.
You don’t get to complain about sucky boss-DPS when you go there with a PvP build, unenchanted quest+greens and no consumables; you don’t get to whine if you entered a fight without prior knowledge, and died because of it; you don’t get to #%%*% about being inappropriate, when other – better - choices are available.

_________
Edits: v.3.1 - 2009.08.08.b
*Typos, Formatting; Fixed some numbers as per Furyterras post, Added Enchanted Tear (Kadavret).
*Dec. 11th 2008 - Part 7 updated with lockpicking 350+ advice; Version History started (Nesariel)
*Dec. 13th 2008 - Wyrmscale Leg Armor removed; Nerubian Leg Reinforcements added ( Anarkid, Slicey )
*Dec. 18th 2008 - Clarified HAT bug
*Dec. 25th 2008 - Added Questions Build, Stats and fake FAQ (mutilate leveling marked for review)
*Dec. 28th 2008 - SnD, Rupture, HfB add-on question added to FAQ ( Shyrouken )
*Dec. 30th 2008 - Muti Leveling Build reviewed ( Derathox ), Professions Reviewed ( Kytsla, Kyphosis ), HAT section reviewed (removed rupture suggestion in build/glyph, wording changed)
*Jan. 3rd 2009 - Missrate for Autoattack adjusted to 27% as per recent EJ confirmation, suggestion to not spec while intoxicated added (+considering to add it to the rogue rules in post #0).
*Bantime – Jan 27th 2009 – Intro rewrite, language changes in all sections, formatting/wording reviewed; leveling poison suggestions, how-to for leveling; sub leveling options (Shádowless-US); Riposte in Combat (Satsujinki-US).
*Jan. 28th 2009 - Leveling enchants ( Haitur, Anachronism )
*April 26th 2009 - Update for 3.1
*April 30th 2009 - 18/51/2 added, MP vs. TTT expanded, short EA & ToTT remarks added; HaT teammates reviewed (pets seem broken ><), AP vs. Agi expanded ( Badlady )
*July 27th 2009 - misc small changes (update to best weapon combo & stuff like that)
*August 5th 2009 – Update for 3.2 & professions changed (Aldriana/EJ);
*August 8th 2009 – Energy Pooling detailed (Silentknight); Expertise updated with Dwarf & Orc Racials; formatting changes, Recent Updates added (Waxymud)
*August 10th 2009 - Muti build descriptors changed, TopHat mod for HaT builds,

Thanks to all who point out errors, suggest improvements, ask new questions and to everyone who keeps answering questions (correctly) :P

Part I - Leveling Build and Gear

While leveling you want Agility and Stamina on your gear. That will give you Hit Points (so you don’t die), Attack Power & Critrate (So the mob dies faster). You can also get AP, Hit Rating and Crit Rating directly on gear, although such items are rather rare at low levels. Try to avoid Strength, as it's a fairly weak stat for damage compared to the others. For random “Greens of the XXX” that means “…of the Monkey”, “…of the Tiger”, "...of the Thief" or “…of the Bandit” gear.

Blue quality items are normally better than green ones, and they last some levels before becoming outdated. If you have an easy way to get Blue quality gear, do.
That means for example if you can’t easily get Cruel Barb from Deadmines, take an afternoon of & sit through a couple of WSG matches to get the PvP level 18 sword. For items, search on http://www.wowhead.com on where & when to get them.

First up, a couple of things that should be obvious:
- Daggers are for Ambush, Backstab or Mutilate --- Sinister Striking, Riposte or Hemo with fast weapons such as daggers is incredibly bad damage (as in low damage, not “bad-ass awesome”).
- If you want to use SS, Riposte or Hemo get a sword/mace/fistweapon (preferably with a speed slower than 2.20)
- If you want to use daggers, get a build that at least supports them (that means Opportunity, Puncturing Wounds, Lethality, and maybe even imp. Gouge so you can actually get behind the mob)
- Be advised: at low levels with backstab builds, the playstyle requires you to be behind an untanked mob (which by default faces you), and that means using Cheap Shot, Kidney Shot, Gouge or Blind to get there - some of abilities aren’t available to you at low level. Missing with those, or having them parried or blocked quickly becomes very annoying. The playstyle is not very accessible, requires you to pay attention even in trivial fights, and is slow to level with – there’s virtually no advantage do doing it; in addition to decent non-dagger weapons being easily accessible, while decent daggers are a lot harder to come by.

Weapons you should get: (needs review for axes)
~ 18: Cruel Barb or level 18 WSG (Warsong Gulch) PVP Reward sword
- High 20ies: The Butcher, Zealot Blade, Level 28 WSG Sword – if absolutely not doable: Jade Serpentblade in early 30ies
~ 40: Vanquisher Sword + Sword of Omen / Sword of Serenity
~ 48: Thrash Blade
~ 58: Head to Outlands and find something there, it’s better than whatever you’ve got.
Throughout TBC and Wrath content, keep upgrading with quest rewards or instance drops as you get them. There isn’t any key piece you need to get, although blues of your level will still make your life easier. They’re not as much of a game changer as they were at lower levels, and as opposed to vanilla-WoW instances, TBC/WOTLK dungeons can’t be easily soloed by top level characters so those drops take more time to get. Unless you have a specific reason for staying at a certain level, don’t waste your time getting something that would be replaced soon anyhow.
At this point I’d also like to point out crafted & reputation weapons.
Fang of Truth (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44187 ) is an easily available offhand for level 78, and unless you have better, Savage Cobalt Slicer (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41182 ) at 74 is cheap to make and will last to 80. It’s not so much that you need to have them, but they’re easily available, so there’s little reason for you to wield anything worse once you get to those levels…
… other than being a dagger-rogue, at which point Saronite Ambusher ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41183 ) and Saronite Shiv (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41184 ) are worth looking into.

- Q: OMG, this is hard, I keep dying all the time!
A: The very first few levels (1-20), as well as Hellfire Peninsula will feel a bit harsh, with high incoming damage, reflective damage, no multi-targeting options and/or no escape options. Stick with it, it will be easy outside of that.

- Q: Questing or Grinding?
A: Questing, unless you like techno music.

- Q: +10% Experience Bind-to-Account shoulders worth it?
A: Yes. BtA gear is equivalent to blues of your level up to 80 and saves you from having to replace gear - if you have the BtA weapons, you can skip getting the blues from the list above. You'll have at least 3 decently filled slots and they're bought with Stone Keepers Shards in Wintergrasp, for which there's little use otherwise (PvPish gear & Jewelcrafter patterns). You could also get the Badge BtA items instead which are slightly better, but there’s usually a better use for those badges.
PS: Shoulders first, then the weapons.

- Q: Which enchant for leveling weapons?
A: Crusader or Lifestealing - they're effective, possibly cheap, can be put on BtA weapons, and increase damage as well as healing you on proc.
If you're not using BtA weapons, I'd suggest Fiery (or Greater Potency at later levels) enchant which should be a lot more affordable than Crusader, Lifestealing or Mongoose (which can't be put on BtA weapons)

Leveling Builds

The different links are suggestions, and while there is almost certainly a build better suited at each level, I’m trying to not make you respect every other level.

Combat Leveling:

Combat leveling (non-dagger!) is the sledgehammer of rogue leveling builds: no finesse, but it gets the work done; you essentially face mobs & smack them until they die. You do not have a lot of control or escape options, but you don’t need them – if you’re on a PvE realm, drunk most of the time, watch TV while leveling, need to focus your attention anywhere else, are comatose, lack arms, or all of the above at the same time: level as combat.

You open up by either stealthing up to a mob and garotting/cheapshotting, or just running over and starting to Sinister Strike it; you can use Slice&Dice after the first 1-2 Combopoints, or just keep smacking until you’re at 5 and then use either Kidney Shot (to reduce incoming damage) or Evis (or at any time before that, if you think Evis will kill the mob). Repeat until mob is dead, preferably use the stunning options if it hits hard. Use Riposte whenever it's available.

At certain levels you will acquire new cooldowns:
- Bladeflurry copies the damage you do to your target to another mob closeby. If it’s up, pull two mobs, fire BF & do your thing.
- Adrenaline rush doubles your energy regeneration for 15 seconds, meaning you can spam abilities & finishers a lot more – in conjunction with Evasion & Bladeflurry, this means you can pull a pack of mobs and kill them all.
I suggest you actually use your cooldowns – it’s what they’re here for.

Poisons to use: Dual Instant at the beginning, dual Wound Poison when you get the ability at level 32 (it does more damage due to proccing more than Instant Poison – this remains true unless you spec into Improved Poisons in Assassination).

Here’s your build at level: (self-evident completion as far as I can see)
11: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fZM
13: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMZM
22: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMZMxhz
32: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fMZMxAz0coo
38: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fMZMxAz0cxob
At 40 you respec to: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fZMxAz0cxkrz
47: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fZMxAz0cxqru (Weaponspec points go to the appropriate weaponspec ofc – if you switch weapons a lot, you can skip them unless required to advance to the next tier of talents, or get fillers like endurance or improved sprint instead)
52: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fGZMxAz0cxqru
62: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fGx00xZMxAz0cxqru
73: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fGx00xZMxAz0cxqru0xoZx
80: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fGx00xZMxAz0cxqru0xRpx

Sub Leveling (30+):

Let’s be clear – combat kills more mobs in less time; but Sub leveling is better suited if you PvP every now and then, and may be the better option on a PvP realm with actual world pvp (haha!) happening. It deals less damage, but has improved stealth, mobility, reduced cooldowns on escape options, Prep and stronger openers.
One of the problems the tree has it that it doesn’t have talents backing up a main attack well until you’re quite far in. If you want to level as sub, I’d still recommend following the Combat guide until you’re level 30, and respect then – it won’t take long, and will prove to be much less of a headache then leveling up with improved stealth and stronger garrotte being your only strong points.
Note: the builds are non-dagger build, Hemo replaces Sinister Strike as your main attack.

Poisons to use: Same as Combat.
30: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fZZebbbhh0z
33: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fZZebbbhhzd
38: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fGZZebbbhhzd
45: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fGZZebbdhhzdGz
At 50 respec to: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fZZebrbhhzdAzV0o
55: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMZZebrbhhzdAzVco
61: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMZZebfbhhzdAzVcox
69: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fGZ0xZebfbhhzdAzVcox
74: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fGxZ0xZebfbhhzdAzVcox
79: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fGx00xZ0xZebfbhhzdAzVcox

Assassination Leveling (50+):

At 50, you get to make a choice: Stay with the non-dagger options above, or start using daggers. I specifically did not put up a dagger build earlier than 50, because itemization isn’t good, mob avoidance is highly annoying, and it’s aggravating to play compared to builds that don’t have to stand behind a mob – which by default will face you when soloing.

With mutilate, that changes. Mutilate builds are hard hitting, high DPS, tough poisons, tons of combopoints, neat extra toys, and have the option of heading halfway into subtlety and pick up some of the PvP goodies there. If you want daggers, this is the way to go; if you sometimes PvP, it’s a lot better than combat for that too – it “feels” a bit slower than combat, but exchanges the in-your-face killing of mobs with keeping them from hurting you; it’s weakness is multimob pulls and being more vulnerable when you actually get hit.

The typical way to kill a mob is approaching in stealth, Cheap Shot, Mutilate, Kidneyshot, Mutilate, Evis – for “hard” mobs wait a bit before the Kidneyshot and pool energy so you can Mutilate twice while the mob is KSed (as you get +9% damage from imp. KS). If possible, pay attention that the mob actually is poisoned for the first mutilate, although that will typically happen before Cheapshot runs out.

Poisons to use: Instant and/or Wound
The spec does include 2/2 Deadly Brew, which makes your instant poisons proc crippling on the target, and that counts as poison debuff for the +50% damage bonus Mutilate gets.
If you’re on a PvE Realm, you could put the 2 points from Deadly Brew somewhere else and always use dual Wound, but having your target crippled by default is nice as it stops them from getting away at low health. Either way will work, which poison deals more damage depends on your actual Attack Power. It’s very close either way, but at decent gear Instant should deal more damage, while wound provides the benefit of high procrate and a healing debuff in case PvP happens (everyone knows holy priests scour the landscape looking to pick a fight with a rogue! *cough*).
You can also use Deadly & Envenom: dual deadly is certainly a possibility, but mobs may not live long enough to stack 5 Deadly on them.

50: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMec0egsVMo0z
57: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMec0egsVMo0zZ0xZ0b
62: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMec0egsVMo0zZ0xZxb
67: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMec0egsVMo0zZ0xVZxb
71: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMecoegsVMoczZ0xVZxb
76: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fMecoegsVMoczZ0xV0xZxb
Then get get 4 more fillerspoints (mod, camo…) or Master Poisoner, and we're changing topics.

Note: the above suggestion is leaning towards PvE – if you’re on a PvP realm, I’d suggest only picking up Dual Wield Spec in combat, not going past 41 in Mutilate, and making your way down to Prep & Dirty Deeds in Subtlety (picking up MoD, Camo, DT and Elusiveness).

- Q: Why not imp. Slice & Dice, I heard it’s great?
- Q: Why not Focused Attacks, I heard it’s great?
A: It is, if you’re raiding - they're not that good for leveling however.
Normal mobs die too fast to get decent use out of these talents, as they require time on target to actually do anything. You can use S&D against normal mobs, but that doesn’t require you to have the talent for it. Concerning FA, your Crit Rating is nowhere near what it needs to be to make FA worth it. Both of those are steady DPS talents good for longer fights in decent gear and when buffed – quite the opposite of what you’re likely to experience when leveling.

- Q: Why Remorseless / imp. Evis., I heard they’re crap?
A: They are, unless you’re leveling.
Decent burst can kill normal mobs, or at least hurt them a lot. Having a very decent crit chance on your first Mutilate, or hitting a bit harder with Evis as combat will make a lot of difference in how fast mobs go down. When raiding, the problem is that you need a Killing Blow to activate Remorseless (unlikely in a raid), and that Evis is your 3rd ranked finisher (as combat) so you won't do it all that much.

- Q: Can i take X filler instead of Y?
A: Yes.
Fillers (=every talent that doesn’t directly increase your damage by a significant amount) are at all times your personal choice, and your performance isn’t massively affected by taking one over the other. Some prefer better stealth; some prefer faster sneaking, some like sprint to break a root, while others want their evasion cooldown reduced… There’s really no argument people can make that makes one filler a lot better than another at all times, they all have a niche they fill well. I personally rank Dirty Tricks high because it makes sapping/blinding trivial, Camo above MoD because I’m a movement speed junky and don’t get seen in stealth by mobs in first place, and finally Elusiveness above all of them because I use blind, vanish & CloS a lot.

- Q: Why not deep subtlety with daggers?
A: For leveling you want something reliable and non-positional. Yes, you can literally 2-shot mobs with ambush-cs-ambush (requires Shadow Dance) or ambush-trinketspam-evis at high levels, but it usually requires stealthed approach, and some cooldowns to be up, which slows your leveling down, and forces you to start using shiv/hemo or gouge to get control of a fight again if the mob doesn’t die. You can do it; but it’s not a good way of leveling unless there are other considerations that take priority (most of which are PvP related).

- Q: What spec when I level with another person?
A: 0/0/0 is good enough for that. On a more serious note, I depends who you’re leveling with: if it’s a priest you want him to have the killing blow for Spirit Tap making Remorseless Attacks pointless; if it’s someone who has aggro most of the time, backstab builds become an option (also works with 2 rogues – the mob can only face one of you at the time). I’d suggest getting something that’s mobile (shadowstep/fleet footed) and doesn’t rely on a stealthed approach however.
Part II – Stats

Before we get into early raiding, here's what you need to know about your class: There are 6 Stats that will increase your DPS in one way or another:

- Attack Power (AP),
- Hit Rating,
- Crit Rating,
- Expertise,
- Haste and
- Armor Penetration

Agility provides 1 AP, 0.012% Crit, some armor & dodge (both irrelevant); Strength provides 1 AP per point.

For these stats "higher is better" applies at all times - there is no situation in which having a lower score is better than having a higher score. 2 notes however: Hit Rating & Expertise have a cap, which means that at one point you will stop missing, rendering more Hit Rating useless; and one point at which mobs won't be able to dodge you anymore (mobs *can* dodge from behind, players can't), at which point more expertise is useless. A cap isn't necessarily something to aim for, it's just something to not surpass if you can at all avoid it (as you’d be wasting stats at that point).

The second part is as important: There are no magic numbers.
There is no fixed value in any stat that you have to have. Always take the item which gives you more DPS, no matter what the actual stats on it are (with the footnote that exceeding a hit/expertise cap won't provide more DPS). You do not have to reach any Hit Rating magical cap, and trying to do so while gimping your other stats means you’re being an idiot (that means you could just stop being one any time you wish btw).

Rating conversions can be found at the wowwiki.com page ( http://www.wowwiki.com/Combat_rating_system ), or you can download RatingBuster which will put them into the item tooltip in-game ( http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/rating-buster.aspx ).

•Expertise
Expertise helps against parries and dodges.

Bosses are assumed to have 6.5% chance to dodge your attacks when you attack them from behind. That means you need:
• 26 expertise (214 expertise rating) to cap
• 16 expertise (132 expertise rating) to cap if you have 2/2 Weapon Expertise
• 13 expertise (107 expertise rating) to cap for a Human Rogue with 2/2 Weapon Expertise wielding sword or mace
• 11 expertise (91 expertise rating) to cap with 2/2 Weapon Expertise for Dwarf Rogues wielding maces; and Orcs Rogues wielding Fist Weapons or Axes
• (23 expertise (190 expertise rating) to cap for a Human Rogue wielding sword or mace but with 0/2 Weapon expertise)
• (21 expertise (173 expertise rating) to cap with 0/2 Weapon Expertise for Dwarf Rogues wielding maces; and Orcs Rogues wielding Fist Weapons or Axes)

•Hit Rating
Hit Rating now affects spells as well as melee, that means Hit Rating not only reduces the chances your attacks are missing, but also reduces the chance that your poisons are missing. You're assumed to miss 8% of your special attacks against bosses, 17% of your poison application, and 27% of your melee autoattack while dualwielding (this affects both mainhand and offhand attacks). A Draenei in your party reduces those numbers by 1%.

Following numbers assume 5/5 Precision:
• 722 Hit Rating to cap dual-wield melee autoattack
• 689 Hit Rating to cap dual-wield melee autoattack, in presence of a Dranei
• 315 Hit Rating to cap poisons application
• 237 Hit Rating to cap poisons application, with Improved Fairy Fire or Misery on the target
• 210 Hit Rating to cap poisons application, with Improved Fairy Fire or Misery on the target, and in presence of a Draenei
• 99 Hit Rating to cap Special attacks
• 66 Hit Rating to cap Special attacks, in presence of a Draenei

Rules of thumb:
- Don't drop below special attack hitcap (66 or 99); beyond that stack Whatever Works Best™, which will usually be Agility or straight AP. There is no “1 true list” of stat ranking, technically you could break it down to ~40 primary and secondary/derived stats for the 3 raidbuilds, and they all rank somewhere between ~1 AP and ~2 AP, depending on what exactly your build is, what your other stats are (ie: your gear) and what exactly happens in a fight.

Generally speaking (without considering builds!):
- Strong Stats: Hit Rating (Specials Cap) > AP ~Agility
- Average Stats: Expertise ~ Hit Rating (Poison Cap) > Crit Rating ~ Armor Penetration ~ Haste Rating
- Weak Stat: Hit Rating (above Poison Cap) – yeah, it’s really kind of crappy

There’s deviations depending on which build you actually use however:
• Combat:
- Expertise is weaker (Rank around Crit Rating) due to combat not being prone to cycle or timing disruptions as much as Mutilate or HaT are, but still average
- Armor Penetration is stronger (Rank after Agility as strong Stat) due the proportion of autoattack-related damage which is the backbone of Combat builds. When approaching BiS gear levels, ArP has the potential to become your strongest DPS stat if you build around it (& carefully select your gear).
• Mutilate:
- Hit Rating until Poison Cap is very strong due to the percentage of poison related damage. You really don’t want too many poison resists if you can avoid them
- Armor Penetration is weak for the same reason: Poisons – they don’t have their damage reduced by armor
- Expertise is strong since attacks that don’t connect can mess with timing and cycles – which is A Bad Thing ™
• HaT
- Expertise is very strong – a large portion of your damage comes from Eviscerate, and you need it to connect when you execute it. A Parry or Dodge can lead to wasted Combopoints or a wasted Global Cooldown, something you really want to avoid

Q: How much hit?
A: Past 99, spreadsheet it; Take obvious DPS upgrades - Your stats will be whatever they are.
A: Past 99, spreadsheet it; Take obvious DPS upgrades - Your stats will be whatever they are.
A: Past 99, spreadsheet it; Take obvious DPS upgrades - Your stats will be whatever they are.
For things where you have the choice (enchants, gems) yet again: Find out what your best stat is, and stack that - if you find out your best stat is Hit Rating, then obviously go for it. Chances are, it’s not; if you stack Hit Rating although another stat is better, you’re an idiot.

- Q: What should my Stats be while leveling?
A: Don't worry about them.

- Q: What should my Stats be for Naxx10?
A: Level 80 and Don't spec while drunk.
Again: There are no magic numbers. Higher is better, but please be polite and don't show up in greens when blues and epics are readily available before you ever set foot into a raid. Yes, Naxx is that easy, it’s not a joke. You won’t lead damage meters at the end of the day without decent gear, but 80 & sober is enough to beat it. Knowledge of tactics and communication are a lot more important than gear.

- Q: Ok, so i miss more and get dodged more by bosses... Any other stats that are adversely afffected?
A: Your Crit against bosses is 4.8% below your crit chance against level 80 targets (which is what you see on the character sheet) [Needs a review whether this is still true in 3.1 – for now, assume it is]

- Q: Agility and AP seem to be very strong across the board.
A: Indeed, 2 AP and 1 Agi tend to be very strong stats. AP usually tends to be a midge stronger than Agi at early gear levels, Agi a bit stronger than AP @T7/T8 levels - nowhere near close to be worth re-geming/enchanting, just something to keep in mind when the next upgrade drops.

- Q: Is there a scenario where Hit Rating is the best Stat past 99?
A: Yes. Hit Rating makes a come-back for Mutilate builds at high gear levels (Best in Slot T7 or better)

- Q: Ok, let’s say I’m around 200 Hit Rating – how much DPS would I lose by gemming +16 Hit instead of +16 Agi or +32 AP?
A: Check on your spreadsheet, but at entry-raid gear roughly 0.3-0.5%.
Not much? Now consider 6 sockets & 4 enchants you bungle up in the same manner, having wrong poisons on the wrong weapons and we’re suddenly >5%, more than what we’d gain if glancing blows disappeared overnight; and you’re losing it for no reason whatsoever.

Part III – Instances & Early Raiding

• For all builds: KEEP SLICE AND DICE UP. It's a selfbuff that makes you do ~15-20% more damage; there is no possible way to do decent DPS without Slice & Dice. Start it early (after the first 1-2 Combo Point), and keep it going.
• Your finisher priority for all builds is Slice & Dice > Rupture > Evis/Envenom. You only get to Rupture if S&D is running, you only get to Evis/Envenom if Rupture & S&D are running. Obviously this priority applies to situations where Slice & Dice as well as rupture can run for the full duration.

You can currently take all three trees into Raids, Assassination, Combat and HAT, and do decent damage with them:

• Combat 15/51/5 – http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#f0eb0xZMgVo0cxqru0xRtx - uo to Naxx gear
• Combat 18/51/2 – http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#f0eb0eZMgVo0cxqru0xRtb - Ulduar+ gear levels
- Engage your brain: Combat builds have a filler point (likely to be endurance if you don’t use CQC) & Weaponspecs - obviously pick the spec for the weapons you're using. The two example builds use Hack & Slash, for no other reason than to demonstrate that it's possible to pick deep-tier sword-axe or mace-spec, and not only CQC.
- The spec is solid on bossfights and allows you to switch between most non-dagger MH weapons easily. It's probably the most useful spec for heroics too, due to multi-targetting abilities and being quick to start cycles. Combat is easily handled, solid DPS and provides +4% physical damage to everyone in the raid, which means that one rogue/raid should be combat.
- Weapon loadout is Slow non-dagger Mainhand, Fast offhand.
- Poisons are Wound Mainhand and Deadly Offhand.
- Glyphs: Sinister Strike, Rupture, Killing Spree
- Cycle for 15/51/5: 5s/5r/5e
- Cycle for 18/51/2: 4s/5r/4e
e = more than ~12 seconds left on S&D? Use Evis, else pool energy and use S&D. Start SnD as fast as possible (after the first 2-3 combopoints). The cycle will be tight at starter gear levels and you may not always be able to squeeze in the evis, but it’s a problem that solves itself as gear gets better. The cycle difference 555 vs 454 is obviously due to 3 points less in Relentless Strikes
- PS: Use your cooldowns!

• Mutilate 51/13/7 – http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#f0ef0exoVboIuVo0xV0hZxb - slightly higher DPS
• Mutilate 51/7/13 option – http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#f0ef0exoVboIzAo0xMZxro0h - 3 sub filler points
- Engage your brain: If you’re running Naxx, 2/2 Murder doesn’t do much since everything’s undead. You’re welcome to use the points in FF, QR or Vigor there, but once you face enemies Murder works against, it’s a good DPS talent and shouldn’t be left out.
- Mutilate is competitive in raids, but a tad harder to handle than Combat. If you want to use daggers, this is the way to go however. In Heroics, it’s slower to get started into DPS cycles so you won’t actually be dealing awesome damage with it.
- The important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t want S&D to drop, but keep it going via Cut to the Chase. Don’t let HfB drop either, although that’s much less problematic since you don’t have to stack it up anymore – if it does drop, get it back up as soon as possible.
- HfB Note: Your target needs to be bleeding for you to be able to apply HfB, hwoever it does not need to be your bleed. Another Rogues Rupture will do fine, same as the bleeds from Druids, or Deep Wounds from a warrior.
- Weapon loadout is Slower Dagger Mainhand / Faster Dagger Offhand (DPS beats speed considerations however – slower weapons hit harder on Mutilates, but faster ones get more FA procs more often)
- Poisons are Instant on Mainhand / Deadly on Offhand. Some finishers have a chance to proc the mainhand poison, which is why you want instant there, and with Improved Poisons Instant beats Wound for DPS.
- Glyphs: Hunger for Blood, Mutilate, Rupture
- Cycle: 4+n/4+r
You'll have to improvise a bit. The point is that at 4+ combopoints, you check that everything that needs to run is running and won’t run out soon: if HfB is about to drop, refresh it; if S&D is about to drop refresh it via envenom, if those are doing fine make sure Rupture is running (ie: rupture if it isn’t), otherwise envenom.

• HAT – http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#fhfZ0gc0xcbZxbfbhhddAzVc
- Engage your brai... who am i kidding, just spam Evis ;)
- HAT is highly reliant on your party members critting often; arcane mages, non-resto druids & shammies, holy pallies & fury warriors are good teammates as long as alive and not OOM. When your teammates die, your DPS will be terrible, and you’ll have to provide the Combopoints yourself.
- As every raid has its own "zomgwtfqqb" people, you might want to install TopHAT, a mod that tracks crits/sec of the people actually there. It may very well be that you have an awesome class X player who crits more in relation to others than class averages would suggest he does -- if that is the case, you want him in your group.
- Note about Stats: Evis is your primary form of damage with this build, it *needs* to connect, which means you need to cap special attack hit rating, as well as expertise. Beyond that Agility/AP/Crit seem best.
- Note about the builds: If you have low Hit Rating, you can shift points away from imp. S&D to precision, as mentioned above you want 8% to make sure Evis doesn't miss. When you have that 8%, you can use the points on imp. S&D instead to significantly reduce how often you need to refresh it. For the non-DPS talents in Sub, pick those you want - the suggested ones are the ones i prefer, but a filler remains a filler (rather unimportant for DPS).
- Weapon loadout is Slow Mainhand / Fast Offhand. You will have to Hemo every now and then which means you want your MH to be slow, and you want a quick offhand to stack up deadly poison faster; however DPS considerations are more important than speed IMO.
- Poisons are Wound Mainhand / Deadly Offhand
- Glyphs: Eviscerate (!), Slice and Dice, Rupture
- Cycle: Keep Slice & Dice running, keep Rupture Running, Spam Evis.
- Cycle Notes: Do not waste Energy, do not waste Combopoints.
That means: Do not get so low on energy that you wouldn't be able to evis, you don't want to waste combopoints. You don't want to waste energy either, so if no CPs are being generated by your party, you can bridge that period by using Hemo. This should be rare, and note that a 2-point Evis will actually be better DPS than a Hemo with a dagger. Neither CPs nor Energy should cap out at any time. The short version is: anytime you have 2+ CPs, you can use Evis, but if it’s possible to wait a few seconds without wasting energy & get a higher CP Evis, do that.
- [currently investigating nvHaT, if you've got feedback on it, post :) ]
- Q: What about Fan of Knives?
A: Whenever there are 3 or more targets, use it.

- Q: Master Poisoner vs. Turn the Tables?
A: Master Poisoner is better, but the same debuff is provided by Ret Pallies & Shamans, and they don't stack. However the talent has been changed to provide an additional chance to proc deadly poison after you envenom, which is something you do want.
I’d go for MP, although the two of them are very close from a Raid-DPS point of view. Also be aware that 1 point in TTT might be better theoretical DPS than the 3rd point in MP - whether you follow though on that is your choice, again the difference is very small at best.

- Q: Cycle, 5s/? huh, wait, what???
A: A cycle is the repeating use of some skills, which is calculated to help you do more DPS than just randomly pressing skills.
It indicates which finishers to use with how many combo points, so "5s" would be a 5 combo-point Slice and Dice, "5r" a 5 point Rupture. As an example: 2s/5r means "get 2 combo points, Slice and Dice, get 5 combo points, Rupture; repeat from the beginning".
There are a few considerations that get worked into them, among others time & energy efficiency, DoT uptime, etc... A low point S&D gives you more S&D time/combopoint, but Relentless Strikes 5/5 gives you back 25 energy whenever you use a 5 point finishers making a 5-point S&D energy neutral; 2s/5r gives you better Rupture uptime than 5s/5r/5? but relies on stacking bleed-modifiers (2t7, a feral druid, Blood Spatter and Serrated Blades) to be competitive.
The cycles suggested here work in a majority of situations and are fairly stable - that doesn't mean that you won't have to adapt (bad luck with CP or FA not proccing...), or work around the specifics of some fights; but they are the core of how you’re DPSing.
Captain Obvious Note: You get combo points with your builds main attack, that means Sinister strike for Combat builds, Mutilate for deep Assassination builds, and others critting with HAT.

- Q: That spec isn't the same i ended up with while following the leveling builds!
A: Leveling specs are leveling specs, these are raidspecs. They are by definition not the same.

- Q: What’s with this Energy Pooling?
A: In essence, it’s about delaying an instant attack a bit to take advantage of short-duration buffs or keep a stable cycle; and is most important for Mutilate builds.

• Mutilate builds run with 3 concurrent timers: Hunger for Blood, Slice & Dice (refreshed via Envenom by 5/5 Cut to the Chase) and Rupture (which cannot always be overwritten). If all 3 are running short and need to be refreshed, you may end up in a tight spot and be in danger of having one of the 3 drop, something that is generally considered A Bad Thing™. This is something that could have been avoided if you had delayed refreshing Slice & Dice for 4-5 seconds on the previous cycle, because then you’d only be faced with HfB & Rupture running out now, while having a couple of seconds of grace before you need to worry about S&D.
The very same argument can be made with pooling energy while waiting for rupture to tick out, instead of overwriting it and losing 1,2,3 ticks of one that’s already running, reducing its Damage/energy spend, and again potentially getting you into trouble 1 or 2 cycles down the road.
The general idea is to take decent advantage of running timers, instead of spamming instants just because you happen to have the energy, thus making them more efficient in terms of DPS/ComboPoint and DPS/Energy, and avoiding getting into tight situations where S&D, Rupture or HfB drop.

• The other part is taking advantage of the short term buffs from Envenom and Master Poisoner. When you Envenom you have an increased application rate for Instant and Deadly Poison for a time if 1 second + 1sec/combopoint spent on the envenom. Master Poisoner increases that change by an additional 45%. Let’s say you envenom as soon as you have the energy for it; autoattack will proceed as normal (with increased chance to apply poisons), but it will be 5-5.5 seconds before you can do one mutilate which also has a chance to apply poison. If you had envenomed with a nearly full energy bar, you could have done 2 mutilate attacks and stacked up deadly poison faster,a s well as extra IP procs.
Towards the end of TBC there was a trinket which gave you 145 Crit Rating for 10 seconds after any finisher. The difference e between getting in up to 3 mutilates when you pooled, as opposed to 1-2 when you didn’t, is obvious.
While there’s no WOTLK gear at this time that makes pooling as obvious a necessity as that trinket, it is nevertheless good practice – there’s little reason to not do DPS you could be doing, especially when there’s no extra effort, resources or time needed to make it happen.

Part IV - Early 80 Gear

• MAEP Lists such as http://shadowpanther.net need to be taken with a grain of salt, as the Stat weights he assumes can’t possibly correspond to yours: what a stat is worth, depends on what your spec and stats are at this time – the is no fixed number that is always correct. It is however a decent guideline, and better yet: You can use the list to find out what gear is actually in game & what you can realistically get in first place, and then use a spreadsheet to find out which part is the best for you. You can also download his list, and put in your own stat-weightings which together with the list being very up-to-date is the real strong point of shadowpanther.net. It’s a decent resource for rogues – make use of it.

• Spreadsheets: http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t39136-combat_mutilate_spreadsheets_updated_3_1_a/ and http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t51449-rogue_dps_simulation_spreadsheet/ - use them to find out if an item is an upgrade for you. While it's true that some items are simply better than others, which one exactly is best for you is something you can easily & precisely find out for yourself, instead of relying on general forum opinion which is usually not based upon your gear in first place.

• If you're bored, you can manually input stats into spreadsheet & see how they change DPS, and use that to figure out stat-weighting for your gear; which you can then in turn use to modify the shadowpanther list. Yes, I'm bored a lot.

Personal Opinion:
- If you can get drops easily, do; meanwhile:
- I suggest you first use your Emblems to buy everything other than the T7 pieces, that means ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40684 ), Neck ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40678 ), Trinket & Belt ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40694 ).
- Use Faction/Daily rewards where possible: for chest ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44303 ), Boots ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44297 ) and Wrists ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44203 ), or better yet Argent Tournament stuff.
- Shoulders ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43481 ) & Cloak ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43566 ) are crafted and not too expensive.

- If you go Mutilate, buy a Librarian's Paper Cutter from the AH ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37856 ), and get a Dagger of the Rising Moon/Spinal Destroyer from the Argent Tournament (25 Tokens); a Broken Stalactite from Sons of Hodir (Revered) or a second LPC. Not ideal, but it will do.
- If combat, use the swords from faction reputation until Greed ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37693 ) drops for you, then buy a Librarian's Paper Cutter as offhand & spec accordingly (CQC)
- If you're rich, Krol & "Vulajins" swords are a good combo, that being the Krol Cleaver ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43611 ) and Avool's Sword of Jin ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44311 ).

Q: Why other stuff before Tier armor?
A: Because Tier Tokens drop reliably

Q: Emblem of Conquest gear any good?
A: It’s decent, and it’s not like EoCs are useful for much else… unless you’re OCD about pets and mounts and banners and stuff like that :P

Q: Which badge item first?
A: Whichever gives you most DPS/Badge compared to what you’re currently wearing

Q: Is Item A or Item B better?
Q: Which Weapon should I use?
Q: What gives more DPS?
A: Spreadsheet it.

Q: I can not use the spreadsheet, what should i do?
A: head to http://www.shadowpanther.net

Q: What is the best Weaponcombo in game right now?
A: Mutilate: Gouge of the Frigid Heart / Twin Spike MH + Bladetwister OH; dual Zerker enchants
A: Combat H&S: Hellscream Slicer/Stormpike Cleaver MH + Void Saber OH; dual Zerker enchants
A: Combat CQC: Golden Saronite Dragon MH + Bladetwister OH; dual Zerker enchants

Part V - Other stuff to know & take care of
Buffs:
- You're getting most of them, and buffs in the same category don't stack anymore - party composition is not something you need to worry about at this point.
- A notable exception is the draenei's Heroic Presence (1% Hit) which is limited to party only.

Consumables: (Use your consumables. They don’t help if sitting in your backpack is all they do)
- Buff Food - Whatever gives you the most DPS - Spreadsheet it (most likely an 80 AP food).
- Battle Elixir - Flask of Endless Rage
- Potions - Bring enough Runic Healing Potions (and Potion of Speed if you need an edge)
- Bandages - Heavy Frostweave. Bring enough of them.
- Smoke Flares – For extra cookie points, bring smoke flares to mark stuff, for example safe spots in each of the 4 zones during the Heigan encounter. You'll save lives (except the life of that one guy who lags a lot, and always says weird thing in /g – he’s toast, nevermind him).
- Poisons - bring whatever Poisons you use, and bring enough of them. (You might actually need Anesthetic poison if your hunters are busy (or simply suck, always a possibility))

Doublecheck your spreadsheet & compare enchants and gemming for your gear & weapons; know what drops where, and if it’s an upgrade.

Enchants:
- Weapons: Berserking. If you're too cheap for that, Mongoose.
- Hat: Arcanum of Torment (Ebon Blade Revered)
- Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Axe (Sons of Hodir Exalted); Master's Inscription of the Axe for Inscribers
- Cloak: Major Agility; Swordguard's Embroidery if You're a tailor, Flexweave Underlay if you’re an engineer.
- Chest: Powerful Stats; Super Stats if you’re cheap
- Bracers: Greater Asssault ; Fur Lining if You're a Leatherworker
- Gloves: Crusher or Major Agility; Hyperspeed Accelerators if you’re an Engineer
- Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle, buy it off the AH or a Blacksmith - they add an additional colorless socket
- Pants: Icescale Leg Armor; Nerubian Leg reinforcement if You're a Leatherworker - same stats, but cheaper to make
- Boots: Icewalker; Nitro Boosts if you’re an Engineer
- Rings: Assault (Enchanters only)

Gems:
- Meta: R.E.D. - that's a Relentless Earthsiege Diamond. It requires at least 1 red, 1 blue and 1 yellow gem to activate. Orange gems count as BOTH red+yellow, Purple counts as red+blue, Green counts as yellow+blue, and Prismatics count as all three.
- Red Socket: AP and Agi Gems – there’s an epic +20 agi gem you can get from fishing daily quests, grab one of those.
- Yellow Socket: Agi/Crit, AP/Hit or Agi/Hit orange gems; only use yellow +Hit gems if you're under the special attack hitcap (99)
- Blue Socket: AP/Sta or Agi/Sta or Enchanted Tear (+6 all Stats)
- Small note: If you have very low expertise, consider expertise gems too - getting unlucky with dodges can break your cycle, which costs more DPS than Spreadsheets indicate.

Required Glyphs:
- Combat: Sinister Strike, Rupture, Killing Spree
- Mutilate: Hunger for Blood, Mutilate, Rupture
- HAT: Slice and Dice, Eviscerate, Rupture

Part VI - Questions Answered (with fake questions for now):

- Q: Will Vanish be fixed?
A: No.

- Q: Should i use keybinds?
A: Yes.

- Q: Will Rogues keep getting nerfed?
A: Yes.

- Q: What about my special bastard build?
A: No.

- Q: Combat/dag...
A: No.

- Q: What about x/y/ 0
A: Any build that ends in "/0" is abysmaterribad.

- Q: Where should i be standing?
A: If possible, behind the mob.
Standing in front will make you lose damage via parry & block, critcap your autoattack, and kill your tank faster (a mob instantly attacks again when he parries one of your attacks).

- Q: How much Hit Rating do i need to be hit-capped (ie: never miss)?
A: As a non-human against skull-level bosses, with 5/5 Precision: 755

- Q: How important is being hit-capped?
A: Not at all. If you’re hit-capped or anywhere near it, you gimped other stats for it, which lowers your total DPS.
Additionally, if you're at hitcap vs. bosses, it means you're over the cap for trash, wasting DPS there.

- Q: What about expertise?
A: It's a good DPS stat, try not to go over the cap though, as that's wasting itembudget..

- Q: I thought you always miss 1% of your attacks, no matter what?
A: You thought wrong.

- Q: I thought the misschance for specials was 9%?
A: New evidence suggests it is 8% (again).

- Q: Why was "Because I Can™" removed from Rogue rules?
A: Because people failed to engage their brains while applying it.

- Q: Where should I be on the Damage-meter?
A: #1

- Q: Axes aren’t roguelike!!!
Neither is bad DPS.

- Q: Your own gear/enchants/glyphs don't follow your advice
A: Do as i say, not as i do :P

- Q: Isn't all that stuff pretty much the same as the stuff on Elitist Jerks?
A: Mostly it is, with slight deviations.

- Q: Where can i read up on tactics of fights so i don't die to an ability i could easily have avoided
A: The pages about bosses wowhead.com usually have at least rudimentary tactics; wowwiki.com will usually have a pretty decent description of the fight as well; lastly bosskillers.com has all the tutorials and tactics you need.

- Q: What about Expose Armor?
A: If you're running without someone else doing the major armor debuff (that being a Warrior using Sunder Armor), Expose Armor takes the place of most important finisher, pushing S&D to 2nd, and so on. You'll lose personal DPS (since you now have to provide a debuff, instead of profiting from someone else doing that), but Raid-DPS will be a lot higher with the armor debuff being up. Ideally the task of doing it should fall to warriors (preferably the main tank), but if there aren't any present it goes to HaT Rogues (spam finishers anyway), Combat Rogues (very predictable cycles) and lastly Mutilate Rogues (in that order).

- Q: Tricks of the Trade?
A: Use it on cooldown.
It redirects aggro (and increases damage of whomever it's cast upon), which means you can attack sooner as well as help tanks get aggro on groups (via Fan of Knives), or help them if there are aggro-resets in an encounter. If Tank aggro is not an issue, use it on a DPSer for the damage increase.
Technically Hunters are decent receivers for it due to having a decent aggro dump, however they're often not in range which is why i prefer of TToTing in a circle with the other rogues, which makes it more or less threat neutral and is an decent DPS boost.

Part VII - Questions Answered (Real ones)

- Q: What is a good standard cycle on a mob?
On short fights, it's hard to get into cycle, so you'll have to wing it.
- Keeping SnD running is your first consideration. If that's running, your best finisher if it can run for the full time is Rupture. However on standard mobs (short fights) that's not always possible, so Evis/Envenom might be the better answer.
- Use Stuns (CS/KS) with consideration: if your tank is rage starved to begin with, you might not want to use them - if he's not or the healer has trouble keeping him alive, CS/KS become good openers & finishers.
- My own opener of choice is "SS/Muti -> SnD" most of the time, as i have the luxury of having good tanks which enables me to engage the mob as fast as i can get to it, and sneaking in to get a garotte off takes too much time for my liking.
- On longer fights, DPS cycles change and actually become something you could call 'cycle', see above for details

- Q: Real Rogues use... ?
A: Whatever Works Best™
Having the hots for 2.20 speed daggers doesn't interest anyone if your DPS is subpar. Using swords when the maces you own are twice as good, just because you don't think maces are roguelike, only proves you're not thinking straight. Whatever Works Best is the single correct answer to that question, anyone claiming something else does not have your highest DPS as top priority, and as such can safely be ignored.

- Q: The absolute best thing you can invest money into when leveling is...?
A: First aid; get a higher level character to make you some normal runecloth bandages, level your first aid so you can use them (much lower skill req than making them) and laugh at your health going from 5% to 100% in four ticks. It is extremely cheap and fast, and it means when you are dying on a mob you can gouge/bandage to full and pawn it.
- credited to Mistopheles! :o)

- Q: how do i best level lockpicking from 350-400?
A: The Avalanche, Sholazar basin.

- Q: is there an add-on that shows hfb, snd, rupture ?
A: Lots: Discodice, Cutup, NeedToKnow and ClassTimer all do the above.

Q: What about professions?
A: There is no easy answer to this. Every profession has certain advantages over the others, and you need to pick which one you want most. As most of the game happens at maximum level, here’s the professions during leveling sidenote: a (or two) gathering profession is generally a good idea, Leatherworking can help with gear and Alchemy will provide you with more potions that you can realistically use – the other professions benefits during leveling are minor IMO; unless you can keep your tradeskill level-approriate, something that will generally require outside resources in materials or money. There’s nothing that keeps you from changing professions when you hit 80 however, and getting one better endgame benefit when you get there.

One thing up front: don't mix up gathering & producing professions as income source. If you collect herbs & sell 5 flasks for 450g, you didn't make 450g with alchemy; you made the difference between AH herb prices & AH flask prices with Alchemy, and the rest with herbalism. Chances are, the gathering profession makes you more money than the crafting profession (especially as a lot of crafters are lazy and/or need raw materials in large numbers, such as JCs or Scribblers).
Note: When I say “X more AP”, it may mean AP, or it’s equivalence in other stats.

• Gathering: Herbalism comes with a Heal over Time, Mining with +60 Stamina, and Skinning with 40 Crit Rating. None of those are awesome Raid-Professions, but they're decent moneymakers if used correctly (that means knowing what people want to buy and knowing where to get that).
• Alchemy: Your Pots & Flasks have better effect and longer duration. For Flask of Endless Rage this currently means 260 AP (instead of 180) and double duration; giving you +80 AP & saving ~60g/raid. Convenient, as well as good for your cash flow.
• Blacksmithing: 2 additional BS-only sockets (in addition to the Belt socket everyone can use); worth ~80 AP if you stick epic gems into them (or the equivalent in whichever other stat you chose).
• Leatherworking: LW-only wrist +130 AP enchant (80 AP more than the standard); the LW-only leg enchants are the same Stats as the BoE ones, but a lot cheaper to make. LW also has patterns for gear you can easily make yourself, and which is decent at raid-entry level.
• Enchanting: 2*40 AP Ring Enchants (80 AP more than nothing). Disenchanting is still a decent moneymaker, so is selling enchant-scrolls - if you're smart about it.
• Inscription: 120/15 AP/Crit Shoulder enchant (80 more AP than the standard in slot). I'm told that - contrary to public opinion - you can actually make money with this profession too :p
• Jewelcrafting: You get to use 3 Jeweler’s gems, which are better than standard ones (either 34 Agi or 68 AP epic gems – compared to 20stat or 40AP standard epics gems). Total benefit is 84 AP worth of points/stats. Jewelcrafting is also a very strong moneymaker.
• Engineering: Flexweave Underlay can now compete with agi/cloak enchant (in fact, it’s better, and has a parachute); Nitro Boosts are now close to Icewalker (+built in sprint); and Hyperspeed Accelerators remain the best glove enchant. Overall Engineering remains weaker than the ~80 AP advantage other professions give (unless you start chugging bombs), but it’s not useless anymore, and timing the Hyperspeed Accelerators right can lead to nice DPS spikes.
There are few ways to make money with this profession, most of which have to do with providing engineering mats others need for certain quests – that market is obviously quite limited, but there are few who actually bother exploiting it.
• Tailoring: Swordguard Embroidery procs 400 AP for a duration of 15 seconds, and has an uptime of a bit over 30% - it’s a bit like a berserker enchant for your cloak. The advantage over the standard 22 agi/cloack enchant is worth a bit over 80 AP, which makes tailoring fall in line with most other professions. However beside the enchant, being able to make your own bags (which are cheap to buy), flying carpet and enhanced cloth drops, there is little else tailoring provides.

• The Hardcore Option: At this time Jewelcrafting + Blacksmithing.

What's better than replacing 3 gems with 3 better gems? Replacing 1 gem only, keeping 2 old ones and getting 2 new better ones on top while getting rich off daily quests to buy all the enchants, patches & flasks you need.

New guild, resto stuff

2010-10-20T10:14:00.001-07:00

Resto 4.0.1 stuff

Joined TAO yesterday. Will try to down LK. Not sure after that. See whats better.

DK screenies

2010-03-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

I really like my DK, the gnome playstyle is so fun, and now that she's an engineer, its just a great combo.

Anyway here are some recent screenies.

My Gnome in her roflcopter! Took a while to get that made, not cheap either.

My gnome on a zepplin, how appropriate!

Speaking of gnomes, this is my favorite scene in WOW; its in Trial of Champions raid instance, a gnome summons Lord Jaraxxas, who crushes the gnome "Trifling gnome, your arogance will be your undoing!". Then you have to battle Lord Jarraxas.

And now some non-gnome screenies.

My Aunt Julie running my little priest through deadmines. Thanks Julie!

My guild facing Rotface (Icecrown boss) for the first time.

My guild after a successful gunship encounter (Icecrown Citidal again). This is a very fun and novel fight in which you jump from ship to ship and battle mobs as they come out. Also very easy.

State of professions in Wrath

2010-03-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

Just a brief overview of what I think of the professions.

Inscription. I love this profession, I have it on 3 toons now, 2 of which are maxed. Yes, getting to max level takes a very very long time (as far as doing the NR inscription research, it will take months to learn everything). However, this is such a huge gold maker you make over a thousand gold an hour on both of my servers. Leveling is good too, you get access to buff scrolls and recall scrolls, so you have 2 hearths every 30 min. Overall very fun profession.

Jewelcrafting. Well, this is pretty horrible to level up. I must say I was surprised as the absolute lack of useful items while leveling. There are a handful of leveling rings/necks that are nice, but usually they are too little too late. However, at end game JC really shines, especially with the epic patterns. The dailies are an absolute pain though, this makes this profession far harder to truly master than others.

Engineering. I just leveled this a few days ago. I love it, i think it would be good for leveling. So many fun options, and great recipes abound. In BC/wrath there are some nice leveling items, including an ilvl200 helm available at level 72.

Tailoring. Easy to level, but you burn through gold. You'll get it back with bags though. Pretty good at endgame, esp BC and wrath have some nice leveling gear. I'd like to see even better gear though.

Leatherworking. Pretty much like tailoring, but more painful! If you dont have skinning or access to a skinner, in some spots its very difficult. A few hidden gems in this prof, and generally pretty hard to make money with (although each prof has nice end game items, the markets are obvious and saturated).

Alchemy. Fun again. So fun, after dropping 450 alchemy on one toon (pre-epic gem xmute), i picked it up again on another toon. The xmutes make this an easy 100g a day gold mine, and everything else is good. There is one spot that is a lose leader, but my 2000g investment I recouped most of it within a few days. I love the discovery aspects of it too, and the specialization is not yet worthless. Woot. This can rival JC or inscription for profit.

Enchanting. Its one of those long slogs. In BC it gets good, but before that, this is a huge gold sink, even w/ leveling. There isn't nearly enough greens while leveling for this to be breakeven. The armor/weapon vellums go a long way though, and due to those this can be profitable, but its a ton of work. Still, there are a handful of enchants that always sell (mongoose, +4 chest, etc). Enchanting in BC was horrible because of all the rep requirements and most of the good recipes were rare random drops from instances. Can you say kill me now? Since the 100% drop rates of BC raid bosses, it makese getting mongoose pretty easy. This issue didn't occur in Wrath, and instead almost everything is bought from a vendor using enchanting materials as currency. I think this is a great move and I finally feel that my max level enchanters are useful, if only for equiping alts. Also this was a major source of profit due to the saronite shuffle, before economies were brought to their knees.

Blacksmith
Actually pretty fun and useful. I haven't gotten this past 150 but already I can see some use out of it with the sharpening stones and rods. However this is significantly more expensive to level than other professions in terms of material and time. From 1-75 you need some 200 copper ore, which is not really realistic given the faster leveling times. This costs are going to have to go way down for cataclysm. For end game, I can see it being a money maker. If i had a nickel for every 'need BS for saronite swordbreakers' i'd be a rich man.

Mining/Herbing/Skinning
As a game with 3 gathering professions, all of these are good money makers and I wouldn't change it. If you start in a new realm with nothing but a level 1 and herb/skin, by the time you are level 10 you should have enough to buy 4 netherweave bags, by level 20 easily enough to afford your mount, and by level 60 easily enough to afford your flying mount. In northrend as of now herbing makes 500-1000g per hour (less now bc of the frost lotus prices decrease). This is in line with the top end professions such as inscription. So it's quite lucrative for these professions as it is, and if you thrown in the inate bonuses (stam/healing, etc), these are very solid and very easy to level professions. The one thing I can see is that in the mid-zones ie level 20-60 keeping up the professions can be hard, since you fly through everything so quickly.

Wrath, my initial global thoughts.

2010-03-03T08:05:00.000-08:00

Well, this is an overall review of the expansion.

Professions. Alot of them were reworked to make leveling less challenging/costly. I think the stuff in NR (375-450) was all very good. Engineering finally felt useful, all my professions had great buffs. Now they need to go back and fix 1-300. I also hate the fact that there are basically no recipes, everything is vendor trained. Boring!

Classes. Well, the DK was just awesome, a wonderful, easy to level tank, fun to play with PVP, great for PVE soloing, even replacing the hunter as far as easy. Yet the DK is pretty hard to master, I've played one since it came out and I'm still learning. The other classes feel fine, I only play hunter/dk/druid so far. Hunter changes were definately fun. And the great hunter revamp will probably be as fun.

Druids were just awesome, the preiment raid healer, decent boomkin, challenging cat dps...the bear form just needs a ton of work IMO. Its the hardest yet simpliest to play of all tanks. Aggro generation is just far behind the other three tanks, and you have to massively outgear the dps to avoid getting mobs stripped from you. The other tanks don't really have that issue as much. Either player skill needs to be reinforced, or the other three need AOE threat nerfs, or bears need better AOE threat. Don't get me wrong, its a huge leap forward, but its still far short of what the community expects now.

My expectation is for cat. that the pure role classes like hunters always do more dps than say a druid, and the priest is better than the druid for healing. That doesn't feel like its the case right now, and that's a shame.

Leveling: Really pretty good in wraith, better than BC ,much better than vanilla. I look forward to more.

The LFD thing: Just awesome, its a huge huge boost for blizz to get ppl to do group content easily.

Badge gear: For the most part pretty good, it was nice to get stuff in the beginning to be able to do naxx, and it was nice to not outgear ulduar. Honestly I would like further boosts to trivial content like naxx now. What if the bosses dropped 4-5 badges each, that would make people want to do it again. The weekly raids are a nice step foward, but I like that at the end of BC everyone was still doing kara/ZA then doing their weekly MH/BT raids. That said naxx is way longer than kara, whats up with that?

I'd say much more raids, much shorter. I'd rather have 10 3-4 boss raids than 3 10 boss raids, which is what we have now. The major issue for most players is time. TOC works because its short and if people fail on the first boss, then leave group. But ICC, if you are in the PUG raid you are tempted to go for hours and hours to clear as much as possible. Its just too long to PUG.

Raid releases in general; pretty much everyone agrees that Ulduar was too long in coming and TOC was too soon behind it, which killed it for everyone. I will never see the end of ulduar, i dont have the time right now and only a handful of people are running it for rusted protodrake runs. TOC was nice and short, but the different levels and the long time between that and ICC means that people were sitting on their butts for a long time. ICC is great so far and most people haven't gotten to Arthas. If cat comes in 3 months it would be an appropriate time, but my feeling is that it's not coming until december. How is iCC going to feel in 10 months? Pretty moldy I bet.

PVP server

2010-02-25T18:36:00.001-08:00

Going to xfer my alliance DK to a PVP server. Will be interesting. I am already leveling a human priest. It's a low pop server. I'll bring over alchemy/engineering 450/450, and the priest will be inscription/herb. I'm churning out heroics to get the last BOA items before I xfer. So far I have plate shoulder, plate chest; i need cloth shoulder, cloth chest, and ideally 2 trinkets and 1 weapon.

Long time no post

2010-02-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

So what am I up to? Well I quit raiding entirely now that I am working again. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I got all the way through wraith and 5 bosses into ICC. Its too bad I probably wont see the end ICC, but since I can't raid with the great day raid group, i'd rather not raid at all.

To that end I gave them pretty much all my money Alliance side to keep raiding. Raiding is very expensive, so hopefully that fund will last through Arthas (providing the team doesn't break up).

I then made a little DK, and it's such a blast. I've been storming through Outlands and am almost 68 now. I'll probably level this guy and get some decent gear, then see what the future holds.

JC: Rare vs Epics

2010-01-05T05:49:00.000-08:00

Jewelcrafting is all about volume like anything else. The AH for epic gems usually looks like this:

Uncut:
1 @ 180
1 @ 190
2 @ 200
10 @ >200

Cut:

1 @ 190
10 @ >190

So you can see there is exactly one gem you can cut and make 10g which probably does not even cover the AH fee. This is again a typical setup. Now, you may have every pattern known to man and be able to cut than one or two gems and sell for 250, but those gems move poorly. Since these gems sell for alot the AH cut is high, and margins are razor thin. I still move a few epics but generally they aren't worth your time.

The serious money is in rare gems. Shh. Don't tell anyone I said that.

Rare gems typically look like this.

Uncut: 40 @ 8g
Cut: lowest is 30g.

So post 5-10 at 29g, and reap that 20g profit (1g AH fee, approx). That's each. I typically move 50 gems every day, about 20g profit each, and buy full stacks when I see them cheap. Since I buy in volume I typically can wait until I get a good deal, unlike epics, whose volume is very low. I'm pretty small time, I only have maybe a dozen rare and epic cuts, the more common/popular ones. I would rather have stuff that sells well than stuff that never sells but may give a nice profit for that one that does sell.

Going for the gold cap

2010-01-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

Decided I would try to push for gold cap. Inscription still sells, now on both alliance and horde servers, in around the same quantity and average price. On a good day its 1000g gross. I anticipate things will die down now that the holidays are over. Jewelcrafting is still huge, and the ilvl 245 bracers sell (4 on alliance server (higher pop), 1 on horde server). That's 1000g profit each (but keep in mind the cost of buying the pattern - 1-2k).

Its somewhat amazing the difference that JC brings. My set ups are otherwise identical on both servers, 3 bankers for inscription, some other random junk like patterns. On horde side a month ago I had 20k or 10k or something. I now have 60k. On alliance side I had 10k and now have 25k or something close to that. Epic gems are again mostly a waste of time; they are nice for your personal/guild use, but very little profit due to small volume of affordable cut gems.

Post 3.3

2009-12-10T06:37:00.001-08:00

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.

Enchanting

2009-11-22T12:15:00.000-08:00

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.

Tips for a happy goblin

2009-11-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-17T05:29:00.000-08:00

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.

Coexisting in the inscription market

2009-11-12T14:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Inscription woes continued

2009-11-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

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.

Inscription woes

2009-11-06T20:41:00.000-08:00

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.

Black Temple gear vs Naxx epics

2009-11-03T06:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T06:22:00.001-08:00

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.

Glyphs

2009-10-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

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)

Mage project closed down

2009-10-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Questions to ask while on a pile of gold

2009-10-13T06:30:00.000-07:00

This is from Phase 3 Profit!

How long did you spend on making gold every week?
How much you earn a week ?
Do you really need that much ?
Where are you going to spend your extras ?
Is there anyway can increase the amount you can get ?
Is there anyway can decrease the time you need ?
Will the method you are currently gather gold be obsolete soon ?
What’s the last time you get a new method for profiting ?
Is it fun at all ?
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!

Is it hunter loot?

2009-10-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

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.

A new deathknight tailor

2009-10-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Diversification

2009-10-07T05:40:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-10-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-06T07:57:00.001-07:00

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.

Reboot!

2009-10-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

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.

What I really want.

2009-09-29T13:40:00.001-07:00

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.

Making money

2009-09-28T05:18:00.001-07:00

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.

What's selling

2009-09-24T07:09:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-24T06:57:00.001-07:00

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.

Hating the raid leader part 2

2009-09-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

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.

What to do when you hate your raid leader

2009-08-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Now what?

2009-08-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

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 :(

2009-08-11T06:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-11T05:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Post 3.2 thoughts

2009-08-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-06T05:52:00.000-07:00

Gratz to him!

3.2 - a new direction

2009-07-25T21:32:00.001-07:00

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.

More mount grinding

2009-07-24T09:06:00.001-07:00

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.

Sam Raimi to direct WoW movie

2009-07-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Weekend update!

2009-07-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Must log in...

2009-07-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

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!

Short toon update

2009-07-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

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.

4th of July

2009-07-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Faction change coming 'soon'

2009-06-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Toon update

2009-06-29T07:48:00.001-07:00

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.

Ti ore

2009-06-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Toon update

2009-06-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Nickel and dime

2009-06-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Outlands!

2009-06-15T07:09:00.001-07:00

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.

toon updates!

2009-06-08T11:55:00.001-07:00

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.

jewelcrafting notes

2009-05-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Toon updates!

2009-05-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Once upon a guild

2009-05-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

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.

toon updates

2009-05-21T11:53:00.001-07:00

It's thursday!

Yeah i dont know what that means either.

I've been playing my druid lately; did an awesome run of ZF Monday at level 49 as cat dps (had a tank and a healer surprisingly), and we just tore the place up. We finished in 45 minutes, which is just awesome for that group. The longest thing was the staircase event. They *really* need to accelerate that event, it just got boring after a while. Anyway I was pretty stuck at 49, I did some quests in Feralas; while they were easy, they were green, so I only got maybe 1/4th of a level. There were two quests way up where feralas meets desolace that i finished just before going to work in the morming, and that gave me a nice half-level or so.

With all that and random running around with simple things I dinged 51 this morning, and quickly ran out of rested experience. I'm now in ungoro, i have a few more quests in tanaris to finish up, then I plan to blow through un'goro, maybe go to silithis or felwood, then winterspring if needed, then off to the dark portal! Yea. I'll be thrilled when that happens. I think i will just play through, unrested, for this stretch. It's going so quick that it's hard to keep rested and I dont feel like playing only a few hours a week. At 51 I finally got mangle, and my dps doubled! Was crazy-insane.

My DK is now 75, i haven't played him in a while, not leveling. I've been mining/JC on him, may do that this weekend if there is time. I'm actually pretty busy at work. I have 4600 gold saved up for his epic flyer, need another 1600. After the epic flyer I want to level JC to the max, then I will switch my druid to herb/inscription. I know herb is very easy to level, and I bet inscription is too. I'm making about 500g a week doing all sorts of things; recipes, selling greens, etc. Surprisingly leather is nearly worthless (or i guess not surprisingly). It's 10silver for thick leather, and maybe a silver or two for heavy leather. I was thinking of going LW for the druid but decided the one buff for bracers isn't really worth the loss of an income that LW brings.

I've been reading all the auctioning blogs, haven't come accross any sure fire ways to get rich (there is none), but what strikes me is that the guys who bother to post and check everything they get, the income generation is pretty small. One blogger (name eludes me) has a strategy where you just use the auctioneer batch post, and post in thousands per day. His idea is 1) scan the AH, 2) batch post everything. 3) profit. I did try this for a while but maybe my settings are wrong, the suggested price is always much more than the going price.

All I can say is, find a nitch, exploit it. My nitch is enchanting scrolls and frostweave bags. There is enough profit on those to not go broke. Also I buy dirt cheap from people in trade and resale a few days later. Recently for example I bought 10 flasks for 10g each, and sold them all for 20g on Wednesday. Nice simple profit for me. Also I bought alot of armor vellum 3. Hopefully I'll break even here.

Sucky guilds

2009-05-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been playing my alliance druid lately, just for fun stuff to do in groups. I love being able to get a group easily, and usually will log in enough to try a raid or the daily heroic. Last night I did the daily heroic, hVH, pretty easy, then i was about to log and a raids desparate cry 'need resto shaman or druid for last two bosses in 10naxx'. So, okay, whatever. It was some scrub guild's first naxx clear. Well, first being carried I mean. How do I define scrub?

1) No feast. I mean really, great feast is 30g per stack of 20. It's not that much for a quick raid buff every attempt.
2) No frost resist gear at all. I can see if people were so well geared they dont need it, but for a first attempt? Basically 'we want to be carried by pro healers and are too lazy to get the best stuff we can'.
3) Horrid dps. I mean just horrid. The best guy was 1800 dps. Sar the dragon took 10 minutes, I battle-rezed two people. Standing in the fire, you name it, they did it.
4) Dont run back after wipe. Really, your PUG healer would be glad to rez you (only one guy did this, and got called out).
5) Dont listen to the insanely long strat explanation (like literally 15 minutes for KT or whatever the last bosses name is).
6) Loot. Jesus. Okay, fine, i understand the maly key is for the guild. But when your PUG healer wins stuff which is an upgrade, its not acceptable to say 'can we get this for our sucky guildmate'? And don't go on and on about your stupid pixels. If you are at all competent, you will see that stuff again and again.

See, that doesn't make you any friends, and good luck getting more PUG healers for your fail guild.

Promotions and things

2009-05-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

My best friend and I have long sorta co-managed our guild, and seen it rise in prosperity to heights we never dreamed about. However he's been feeling pretty burned out (like so many of us), and we decided to pass off the reins of leadership to me. So for the first time in 3 years of playing I'm in charge of a real guild. Things haven't changed much, we still have our raid leader doing naxx, and i'm doing the older raids. I still manage the bank. Now i have a bit more flexibility in that regard. So...things haven't changed too much yet. If it does then I will have to delegate more. Unfortunately people still come to the old GL for problems. I'm not sure how to go about that, maybe a MOTD saying 'gibster is the new GL, please see him for any problems'.

Other news. Wife has been studying like crazy, so i'm stuck at home playing wow when not doing chores or other things. Lately i've been getting my DK ready for endgame, getting funds for the epic mount, getting my jewelcrafting up. All of those things take time, and the economy is continuing to collapse. Last night I bought 10 flasks for 10g each on alliance side. Prices are really depressed there. I'm up to 4300g on my bank, and I did a ton of dailies on the hunter, so 600g there or so. I need 6000g for northrend flying and epic mount on DK, and my druid isn't too far distant from 80! Probably the best way is to find a nice quick circuit of dailies to do every da, but they are so boring now!

I'm up to 200 mining and JC, things have gotten better there. Previously I was spending 5 or more gold per point. The leveling guides at wow professions which I usually use are really bad, and many of the recipes are insanely expensive (for example 8 truesilver bars for a green neck). JC is insanely expensive to level. I can't say anything about enginering or blacksmithing, but it's the worst i've leveled (tailor, LW, enchant). The bright point is everything is disenchantable and you can make something off it. Plus the greens tend to sell decently, but at prices so low they are close to the disenchant price.

I think another week or two (probably two) will see me with enough for an epic flyer, and with JC/mine at 300. Then i can go around outlands and level up pretty quickly (hopefully).

The pain of soloing northrend as a lock

2009-05-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

I made no secret of the fact that i hated my warlock. No feign death, the pet can't hold aggro, you wear cloth...but she is the tailor/enchanter of the guild, not to mention my personal cook. So, what to do? Ask WowInsider!

And I got a great bunch of responses.

Here is one:

emerge said...
As for a Northrend leveling spec, starting at Level 72 imho nothing beats http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#Ibxrdh0hoZ0GfhkAdV0sxz . The Felguard is leaps and bounds above the Voidwalker for holding aggro on both single and multiple mobs and after the recent stamina nerf to the VW, the felguard is probably also the better pet for tanking elite group quest mobs, with nearly similar armor mitigation and even better avoidance.

For grinding, you'll send in your Felguard from range, after the FG has unloaded Anguish and Cleave on the mob, you'll dot up with Corruption and CoA, Immolate might not even be needed. Tab to the next mob in range, Ctrl+1 to have the FG attack that target. Let him grab aggro, dot up that mob, rinse and repeat for all mobs that dare to be in your range. By the time your dots pull aggro, the mobs will be almost dead and most of the time not even reach you before the last ticks of CoA finish them of. If they do reach you, either fear-dot them or finish them off with a couple ticks of Drain Life.

For soloing elites, send in FG and pop Demonic Empowerment right away to make him build aggro faster. Spend a couple of seconds watching how much damage he takes and start Health Funneling him while he builds aggro. Do not overheal with Healthfunnel, as to not build surplus aggro. Once the FG has a healthy threat lead, start dotting the elite in between your funnels. Soulshatter as needed, nuke when there is time and enough threat cushion. Voila, dead 5 man group quest mob. Only very few quests where the mechnics of the mob or the fight make this impossible.

As for downtime, there is none. Use Drain Soul finisher for Mana Return and between Fel Armor and Siphon Life you'll be able to apply Lifetap liberally, at the same time filling up your FGs mana (which he'll burn through like crazy) thanks to Mana Feed. Fel Synergy will keep the FG topped off in all but the hardest fights, where a couple of ticks of Health Funnel will bring him back to full in no time.

From pure leveling perspective, no 51 point talent will beat the beauty that is an awesome pet combined with strong instant cast self-healing dots. Deep Affliction is pure overkill, why would you want to apply enough dots to kill a mob 3 times over, wasting mana and GDCs, Meta is fun but situational and on a too long CD to be used efficiently in grinding and Deep Destro is severly limited in multi-mob and elite mob situations.

Here is another:

Cool Story Bro said...
The leveling spec is entirely based on your comfort level with mobs in your face and you being a cloth-wearing class. If you've leveled two hunters than you're probably going to be most comfortable with a felguard spec that dips into the destro tree since a felguard's threat is pretty insane and with the cleave you can actually hang on to more than one mob. I personally preferred leveling affliction. Others really like destro.

I've found that the easiest way to level for people who prefer pets is with a Felguard/SB spec and then (if you like the Felguard) moving over to a more traditional 41/30 spec when you get more comfortable with your demon. A 41/30 spec uses fire instead of shadow spells and only uses Corr/CoA to proc MC but the rotation can get some getting used to. Being able to toss Corr/CoA and then just SB spam is a hell of a lot easier.

Here is an example of a Felguard/SB spec for a level 71: http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=9&tal=000000000000000000000000000000320330113521250013500100005033005220001000000000000

I went with some talents that are normally associated with PvP to increase survivability but there's a lot of leeway and depending on whether or not you're dying all the time you can choose talents that are more dps related.

Once you hit around 75 you should have your pet under control and can then start picking talents up like Decimation where you get to shoot massive fireballs at mobs when they're at or below 35% health or you can grab some more resillience for your pet so he can tank elites for group quests that you feel like solo'ing. Kind of up to you and how much you feel you've gotten the hang of it.

With the nerfs to SL and fear the new affliction spec might be slightly more difficult to level with than the old affliction spec but it's still viable. Even now when I'm doing my JC or cooking daily I just run around casting CoA/Corr on as many mobs as I can until they all die. I don't even lose health. Farming has never been so easy.

As for gear - every spec really likes spellpower. Crit/haste is secondary and a balance of both is fine for leveling. If you prefer quest-grinding rather than instances you don't really have to worry about hit too much but if you see a piece with it pick it up and toss it in your bank. Stamina is nice to have but don't gem for it. If you go demonology you're going to pick up extra stamina from your tree anyway.

And that's basically it. Locks have tons of ways to heal themselves (Drain Life and Fel Armor; SL/Haunt if Affliction) so you have little to no down-time if you're smart about LTing and you can always buy sauteed gobys in the AH for super cheap.

TBH, after leveling a druid (to 80), priest (to 60), lock (to 80), and a shammy (got the shammy to level 25 lawl) the lock was by far the easiest.

Good Luck!

These all seem very fun, i'll have to give it a shot! After i level the DK to 80 probably (who dinged 74 this morning after my daily 'kill the pups' quest in Dragonblight)

Dk progress

2009-05-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

My little DK is now 73 and some change! The boy grows up fast! Looks like I am still averaging 1-2 levels per week. I hope to play him this weekend, but I have alot of work to do.

Random gold tips

2009-05-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

I think with all suggestions it is strongly dependent on your server. On our server for example, dust sells for 5-6g each, and greater cosmic sells for 10g. Heavy borean leather sells for 100g. However, its difficult to move this because it's not used much in high level LW recipes. Nerubian chitin is a different story through.

The two main things that always seem to be true are:

a) fragments will always sell better than wholes (ie motes/primals).

b) Farming up mats, make it into epic stuff that sells regularly is highly likely to be profitable. Nowadays the frozen orb market is crashing pretty fast, those are still used for LW and tailoring enchants.

c) Bidding will work maybe 10% of the time. So what. It usually results in a significant profit for you.

d) Recipes still sell pretty well, its a very steady business.

e) Certain types of cloth are highly profitable. Wool on horde side sells for 10g a stack sometimes. Silk you can't give away. Mageweave is decent. Runecloth is very common (thanks to all the DKs). Netherweave is surprisingly profitable.

You could go to many farming spots at many different levels and grind mobs and make about the same amount of profit, 100-200g per hour.

f) The isle of QS dailies are not to be underestimated, even at 80. An hour or less doing the dailies results in 30-40g from the dailies but more important 3-4 stacks of netherweave, and a bunch of greens.

g) You are always going to do the best with what makes a continual steady profit than looking for that one customer who needs what you can sell for a substatial mark up. For example, some of my enchants that i powerleveled to 450 with still have not been sold, 4 months later. Likewise with the beginner 80 epic pieces. I finally sold my hunter two-piece set. Probably made 600g. But it took a month to sell those things. That cuts into your profit margin substantially.

h) Enchants are a mixed bag. Sometimes you'll get the most money selling the greens. Leveling greens always always sell for 5g if they are useful. Ditch those that have just +spirit or +mp5 or whatever. And sometimes you can DE stuff for profit, like armor at level 74-80 for 10g each. Sometimes you can put those mats on the right enchant scroll and make profit, but many of these scrolls are not valued. Also many of the high end ones need abysal shards. You would be crazy foolish to buy those shards at 100g to put into an enchant ,where the top guilds have stacks and stacks of these in the gbank. You really have to know your customer - top end raiders, to do well in this market.

The broken arena treadmill

2009-05-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

My buddy and i were pretty good PVEers, but never got about 1500 (hunter/druid). It seems there are several glaring issues for arena.

1) Obviously, it should be a separate client/server platform in total (ie a separate game, executable, and code base). this allows the devs to tweak the classes separately. No more would you have spell X doing A in PVE and B in PVP and trying to come up with mechanics to make it so that the item is useful in both cases.

2) Since they really want to separate arena and PVE so much, splitting the code would satisfy both. If they dont have enough forseeable revenue from arena, I would say that's indicative that WoW people are not really interested in arena.

3) The treadmill is broken. In PVE you go from quest gear, dungeon gear, heroic gear, and raid gear, in that order. In BGs only a handful of items are available, and the transitino should be starter set -> battleground set -> arena set. Running arena should not be a prereq to get BG gear.

4) If you set into the arena and get blown away because of crappy gear and a crappy comp, maybe its your fault but its not something you can change easily. Some classes just suck at arena, and they keep changing this all the freaking time. In s2/s3, druids were king, now they are pretty bad. I mean, what are you going to do, reroll another toon and powerlevel to 80 so you wont suck at arena? Is that realistic for anyone who has any sort of life?

5) The treadmill is broken part 2. In PVE you can get away with being undergeared for the encounter providing you are skilled, have someone who is better geared, or have consumables to offset the gear issue.

In arena, you set into the arena with your bad gear and your bad comp, and are probably inexperienced to boot. You lose, alot. You have a 1000 rating. You can get no gear, no loot, no nothing. You can switch teams but that doesn't help much. Not many who are totally geared are going to want to partner with someone who isn't geared. The teams that started early and are at the top are going to remain on the top, and there isn't much you can do, except reroll, get a good comp, and practice hard, and in 2-3 months get good enough gear to start winning more than you are losing.

Gear is such a huge issue that classes who have no business beating others in duals can get totally destroy people who are undergeared. For example, i have no PVP gear. I only have a small chance of criting anyone in PVP gear thanks to resiliance. My dps versus a geared person is much lower than it would be against a target dummy. The geared person has no such problem, and even has better dps than they would normally. The inbalance is two-way.

Anyway TL;DR arena is pretty broken, but i have no qualms against arena people, its just not how i want to spend my time due to it being an extremely unfair system.

Ugh, swamped

2009-04-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

I think all that is keeping me sane now is knowing I can log in and play my DK. This weekend was pretty good as far as not playing much. I was working all saturday, didn't even log in. Friday was our usual 3 man run, this time to ZF. I think this is what I look forward to every week, in game orr out. Sunday, was pretty busy until late afternoon and evening, and I got to play my DK and help guildies out. I am trying to get cooking up to make fish feast, so i can sell it on AH for hopes ofa profit. This may be a forlorn hope.

I ran HOL for the GL's new warrior tank. I organized and ran a gnaked gnome race from start area to booty bay to crossroads. Only 5 people showed up, but i think everyone had fun. I made sure that people didn't get horribly lost or frustrated, and handed out a bunch of nice rewards.

I woke up in the middle of the night. Nowadays when i'm up it takes several hours to go back to sleep. What else to do but play my DK! I dinged 70 at 5am, after about 40 hours played. The leveling from 60 to 70 is just insanely fast now. I did most of the hellfire quests, most of the terrokar quests, and maybe half of the nagard quests, and I was 68. Go over to borean tundra, i've maybe done half (probaly a third), and gained two levels. However, the leveling time is now doubled (from 69 to 70 its 750k xp, from 70 to 71 its 1500k xp). So, its going to take a while, but maybe just 5 hours per level. Need to work on getting an epic mount now!

My goal this week is to login at 9pm for an hour or two of fun, otherwise i am going to go insane.

Day 21

2009-04-20T06:07:00.001-07:00

Hah, 3 weeks and i'm off the bandwagon. Wife and I decided to not do too much this weekend, so that left alot of wow time. However, i did manage to spend most of the daylight hours doing non-WoW stuff (tons of yard work to do, studying, etc) Spent all of Fri, Sat, Sun evenings WoWing though. Did a bunch to help the guild out, but as far as progression didn't seem like much. We did Uldaman, the 3 of us (jen, jim, me), on Fri night, that was tons of fun. Almost feels like we have a cohesive group. We just blew through Uldaman, it was pretty funny. Jim would AOE concencrate, jen and I would AOE dps, and they drop like flys. Drink, rinse, repeat. We blew through in a bit over an hour.

Sat night was supposed to be the naked gnome run, only had like 2 ppl online and ready to do it, so we postponed it. I spent a few hours preping for it and transfered alliance pets over (the profit margin as expected is extremely low). Spent most of sat afternoon running through BC instances (underbog and SP) on the hunter, to get skins to make mining bags (for the gnome race and also my DK).

Sun early morn, Tsu helped me do a few group quests in dragonblight on my accursed warlock. Sun evening I spent alot of time on, playing the DK, then running guildies through sunken temple. God that place is long! Took about 3 hours i think. Not sure. However its good for level 50, our small group should be level 52 I think, at least. There are a ton of quests in there too. Hopefully we can move on to zulfarak next weekend or two. Druid is now41 or 42, DK is now 66. DK is still insanely fun, and the BOA shoulders now give 10% exp for both quests and monsters, so that makes leveling even faster (i kinda don't like leveling) Probably this week i'll be busy studying and the like, so not much time for WoW. But yeah probably spent 20 hours total last week playing. Oh well. Next weekend i imagine we'll be doing other stuff instead.

Day 14

2009-04-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

Settling into a rythm. Played more wow last week, probably 10 hrs. This weekend I played both Fri (day off - played 5 hrs), and Sat night/Sun night, 2 hrs each. Weekend was just insanely busy, with helping friend move for 10 hours, gardening/house work on Sunday, Mon 5am drive friend to airport, today i have class...I am guessing i wont play tonight, wed is iffy, thur is unlikely. Fri hopefully. Sat is the gnaked gnome race. I don't feel like the game is taking over my life like i once did; thats positive. We're eating proper dinners once again, and taking walks and the like. Hopefully we'll get into a 'nightly at 9pm' routine. I'd be happy with that.

Day 10ish

2009-04-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

I lost count, actually. I don't add well.

Its been a hard two weeks. I'm still glad i'm not playing as much, and am hanging with the wife more in the evenings. Monday, i broke down and played. I felt really bad. Tue, Wed, nothing. This morning at 5am my wife wakes me up, and i couldn't get back to sleep. I went to play my DK. Forgot how fun he is, DKs are so insanely easy. Gained a level at 72 in two hours. Blizz really nerfed the crap out of outlands. It's all good, now its just one long grind. Funny how i'm totally stuck at 38 on my druid; i think mostly due to gear.

Tomorrow is off, i need to do some real work. However i'm pretty much exhausted, we'll see how it goes.

Relapse

2009-04-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

Sorta. I played for 2-3 hours last night. I finally got done everything I could possibly do and was mentally exhausted by the time i got home. So i played my druid, leveled until out of rested (god that was quick), then switched to my alliance druid. Things sure are quiet nowadays! I finally got into a heroic VH run (after 30 min of sitting around dalaran - an eterinity for a healer) , and what do you know, i got an achievement for doing all the bosses in VH.

Then I decided to try and do wintergrasp, and of course alliance won. It was close though, the horde made 3 separate breeches. I ended up with the top healing for the raid group i was in. All i do is spam heals. Managed to get 3 WG dailies done, that's 40g easy.

Finally tried to do naxx, got into a group with the last two bosses left. Okay,fine. The usual sitting around and waiting for the group to form, then one shotted the dragon sarth, what do you know, nobody had frost resist gear. In fact the top dps was 2200, and the next was 1500 dps. Anyway got the 100 club achievement. We tried KT but the pug dps were idiots, and after one wipe I knew it wasn't going to happen. The healers were going OOM, two of us were very well geared, the other not so much.

To add insult to injury, i hearthed back to dalaran to repair (never did the dragonblight quests), asked for a summon, and the screechy girl said something about people being fat and lazy. I called it quits then and there, at 11pm. There were two warlocks in the raid, not to mention the summoning stone. I was one of maybe two or three people who were geared appropriately. So, at least i wasn't up past my bedtime playing wow. I felt really bad about leaving, but the girl just killed the game for me. Oh well. I want to do a naxx clear this week so i may do that on my druid.

Day 7?

2009-04-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

I lose track!

Friday: Ran home, went to Sears, got some toys; A tool chest, and a lawnmower, and a grill, at long last!!! They are delivering next saturday, i can't wait. The garage will be clean finally, and we can get to work on the lawn finally.

Was supposed to play with Jim, it was unclear so I didn't log in until late (sorry!). Once i got on the guild was doing a heroic HOL. The tank and healer were undergeared I guess. It was a wipe fest, but hopefully people got something out of it. I enjoyed hanging with my friends, and i guess it doesn't matter if we wipe a zillion times or not. Yeah its frustrating, but what can i say. The tank isn't all that great but she's a good person. Would rather play with a good person but bad tank vs a tank with attitude (20 million of those running around). Spent about 2 hours then finally bailed at midnight!

Weekend was just jam-packed with non-wow stuff. I was at work all saturday, doing some needed experiments. Then ran to our friends house for a 'finale' dinner.

Then home, and finally WoW! Jim was on, so we tore through STV. Thank god, i really think i would have given up on the game if he wasn't there to help me level. Its pretty bad at that level, just takes alot of time and patience, neither of which I have. I think we spent about 2 hrs on sat night, i got a whole level out of it when all said and done.

Sunday, insanely busy. Friends came over, dropped off their cats (they are showing their house alot, which means alot of work to get the cats to a safe place. We stick them in the garage). We went to lunch (Jimmy Johns, which we decided was pretty bland), then Home depot, spent a small fortune on plants (hopefully they will last through the unexpected freeze tomorrow night). Then, hair cut, and grocery store. Got home, put in the plants, raked some more (it's a never ending cycle, but at least all the dead leaves are finally off the oaks out front). Then homework (did this alot over the weekend), wife made cookies, i made soup for lunches, NCIS with dinner, and more homework until 11 and bed. Whew!

Oh, and i totally forgot the bike ride! Sat evening around 6, after repairing the garage door again, and finally getting the front derailor on my wonderful carbon bike fixed, i took it out for a 10 mi ride. The longest in a year! I'm so excited, because I missed the big ride of the season on saturday apparently (i didn't know about it, and was working). Felt really good to be back on the bike, and my muscles are telling me i got a good workout out of it. I rode down the only street with a bike lane in durham (as far as i can tell). Was a major 6 lane road, lots of traffic, but at least a bike lane).

Tonight probably dinner, NCIS, more homework. Tomorrow, class, wed maybe raid? Who knows!

So far this week, about 6 hours spent on WoW. Much better than previous weeks.

12 steps of wow recovery

2009-04-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

I think there are two types of people in this world; addicts and non-addicts. For addicts, you can get addicted to just about anything. For me, my drug of choice is WoW. Here is a twelve step program from the Wiki. This twelve step program originally started from Alcoholics Anonymous.

These are the original Twelve Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:^[11]

We admitted we were powerless over WoW—that our lives had become unmanageable.

What is unmanageable? It means (to me) that your life has been put on hold, relationships and health jeopardized. We are powerless over people, places, and things. That includes the people who play and the game itself. We can't control if others want to spend their lives playing the game, and not participate in the game of life.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Once you realize you have no power over anything but yourself, you realize that if you are going to break the addiction it's up to you. If you believe in a higher power, fine. I don't, not really. I believe in myself though, and I believe I can stop destructive behavior through shear force of will.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

To me, this means that I'm tired of answering to the game. Want to do something in real life? Consult with the guild,make sure it doesn't conflict, or let down the raid team down.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

I think this means recognizing that I have an addictive personality, and with the recognition seeking to do a better job safeguarding myself, so I don't get into something too deep.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

I think this means apologizing to the family members and friends who you let down, while being addicted to WoW. That, plus a plan of action to rectify the wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

I don't believe higher powers have the capacity of modification. I believe this power must come from you . Regardless, the knowledge that you are an addict is a powerful recognition.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Maybe this means destroying the game and the media (CD/DVD)? I think if you are a serious addict the only way to give it up is to give up your broadband access or your computer. Not sure if most addicts are ready or need this step. I plan to taper off, i'm not sure it can be done. But i'm going to give it a shot.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Pretty self-explainatory.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Pretty self-explainatory.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

I think this means that your road to recovery is never complete and you could relapse at any time.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.

I'm not sure what this means to an atheist. I think focusing on constructive things builds your will-power and self-esteem. So maybe that is the message here.

13. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to WoW addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

You gotta preach it IMO. Its so easy to log in, discover twenty things you 'need' to do, then you're emeshed all over again. You can't blame the company (blizzard) as i've seen many do, its like blaming alcohol manufacturers for alcoholism.

Day 4

2009-04-03T08:53:00.001-07:00

Day 4 of not much WoW.

Mon, Tue: Got in fairly late Tue, we made dinner on Mon and Tue and actually sat at the dining room table (2nd and 3rd time we used it). Then watched TV, read, went to sleep. No WoW.

Wed: Made dinner again I think (memory hazy), watched NCIS. After that I did a Naxx raid, showing up 1.25 hrs late (i forgot they moved the time). We did alright, got the last two bosses on spider down. My dps inproved to 2500 on boss fights.

Thur night i got in so late i was eating dinner, watching NCIS, then bed.

Tonight i hope to play with my wife and Jim. If that doesn't happen i probably wont play.

Sat night we're hanging with our friends, should be fun. Sun night, maybe wow, maybe not.

So far just one hour of wow since monday! I'm hoping to spend less than 5 hours a week playing.

WoW Addiction

2009-04-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote about this before on here (somewhere, gotta find). Anyway here is a interesting site about wow addicts after they break the addiction.

So...after Phalea and BRK left the game to spend more time with family, and visiting that site, it was time for a wake-up call. Recently things have been rough; both of us are extremely stressed, but whereas I saw WoW as a stress relief, it actually made my wife more stressed. So...I'm going to try hard to scale down WoW time. That means no more going home, heating up something, and eating in front of the computer. No more playing on weekends all day or during the day at all. I'm going to try to limit my WoW time to 5 hours a week.

Am I an addict? Well, life would be better for us if we didn't play, but it would be hard for me because the only friends I have are online. However I dont sit in front of the computer for 12+ hours a day, I haven't lost anyone (yet) due to playing, haven't lost my job due to playing. Certainly it hasn't helped my career, but my career is of the type where if you are going to get ahead you need to be both talented and willing to invest 60-80 hours a week. 40 hours a week gets you nothing but a paycheck.

I think the game is a symptom but not the problem per se. It's like alcohol, if you are abusing alcohol you are doing so to mask other problems. But I can see it developing into the problem. You can't meet friends because you are online all the time. You can't have normal relationships because that would take up all your wow time. And it doesn't really matter that all your friends (people you know in real life) are WoW addicts. It just means there is more people on the sinking ship.

However, I find myself asking continually what is better? Is it better to go out with buddies and drink instead of get online and play with them? You are still socializing the same amount. Is it better to sit in front of the TV with your spouse instead of playing with them? I think for us the answer is yes because we can have normal conversations and its a limited time frame, whereas when we play we are focused on the game at first and its hard to have real conversations.

People say WoW is cheaper and healthier than drinking. Yeah, but again it's all the missed opportunities in life. You give up healthy meals, working out, and relationships. You miss out on career and life development, for an endless circle of pixel satisfaction, which is completely virtual and lacking.

Anyway i'll attempt to chronicle my recovery here in the hope it helps someone.

Confessions from a Server First ex-guildee

2009-03-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

This is in response to the excellent article on Snarkcraft about getting into a top guild.

Factors for successful applications.

I was in a raid guild for a year and we all saw every app that came in. 90% didn't get through the door. It has as much to do with the app's attitude as it does gear and what the guild needs.

If the guild doesn't need anyone, you are probably SOL. We denied dozens of great people just because we had full rosters. So do your homework there.

If you have a bad attitide, forget it (this shows up when people ask questions about your spec and gear. Always say "I did X because I think Y, but I'll try what you said and see if that works better" (and then do that)).

Networking

If its a guild on-server, you are best off doing PUGs, forming friends, getting to know people in good guilds. What really stands out is when a guildie said "i puged X with them and they were pretty good". If you had an off-night, they are going to use that judgement and say "don't take this guy".

The more I get into the real world the more i see how getting into a guild is alot like getting a job, its a relationship with the guild but you also get in 80% of the time through knowing someone.

Fit

Most importantly, make sure you and the guild are a good fit. That's a huge part of the application. In my guild, we tend to make off-color jokes (not racist or anything, just dirty i guess you could say). That's how the guild is, and if you are easily offended, you just not going to fit in.

Make sure you can raid when they say they are raiding. If you can't do the 3 nights a week they are raiding, why are you bothering to apply?

Gear

Also if you are looking for a top guild, make sure like Seri said that your gear matches their progression. People who are doing T8 raids are not going to want to have you come in heroic gear, your dps will be half of what it should be. Run Naxx PUGs, even if they are painful, get that gear. Run Vault when you can. Run the daily heroic. As dps it's hard to get gear, but its doable.

Consumables Expectations / Time Commitment

If you are in a point of your life where you can't devote all this time to raid, don't apply to a hard-core progression guild. They are going to want 3-4 hours 3-4 nights a week, un-interrupted. Sure, stuff happens but generally if you are in the raid team but not raiding, then you are taking up a slot for people who can raid and are willing to do all of that.

Top guilds make you burn through money like crazy. You are expected to flask on everything, even naxx10. Bring consumables, etc, basically everything you can to increase your performance. Everyone else is doing int, why shouldn't you. Don't expect the guild to fund anything for you. In my old guild we had 30k in funds, but it was deemed that the raiders needed to farm for their own consumables.

Sacrifices/Attitude

Know what you are getting into. Top guilds run 3, 4 raids a week, 3-4 hours each. That's all that plus your dailies to bring in enough revenue to cover repairs and consumables. When you get a piece of gear, people are gonna want to see you get it gemmed and enchanted with the best enchant asap. Don't be stingy on epic gear, it really shows your attitude.

If you want into a guild which is the best on the server, expect sacrifices. Yes, everyone has lives outside of the game, but, just to give an example. In my guild, almost all the raid team took 4-5 days off work and leveled to 80 within a week (within a week, just to emphasis). Within two weeks they were in naxx10. Within 3 weeks they cleared naxx10 and were in naxx25. Within 4 weeks they cleared naxx25. This is on a 3 night/4 hour each schedule. You can guess that during the first month they played 80 hours a week. This is insane, but what a top guild does. It was at this point I decided this guild was way too much for me (so did about 25% of the previous raid team). I fully expect when Ulduar hits, if they don't have server firsts on all the bosses, they will be neck and neck with one or two guilds.

Attitude

Speaking of attitude, lastly don't be intimidated by the guild's attidude. So what if it's the best guild on the server. They have bad nights. The thing about top guilds is that they are willing to spend weeks in game and out learning strats, memorizing, gearing up their char as much as possible, so that you get to the raid, everyone is on top of their game, and your performance is maximal.

The Gkick

We never used to kick people because they couldn't show up, but often people were alted if they only make 1 raid in 5 (for example if 26 people showed up, the alt would have less priority). We only kicked people on the spot if they were a poor match for the guild ideals and doing asshat behavior. If they turned out to be true idiots then they were benched. This happens alot. I heard it over and over 'players who don't perform will be benched'. This has as much to do with not dying than what your dps actually is.

The Heroic/Raid Trial

Almost every guild will make you do trials before you can roll on loot. This is to make sure that their investment isn't wasted. For your trial run, absolutely do not slack off. Do it when you are ready. My trial occured right after i transfered server, everything was a mess, i couldn't get on vent (didn't have it set up - relax, it takes 5 minutes to download and config it). I don't know how i got in (it was a new guild). I ended up ninjaing the first piece of loot from the heroic (They didn't bother to explain their loot rule of passing on everything then rolling). I got alot better, but I wouldn't have been accepted as the guild is now (they are much more hardcore now).

Main thing, be sure you are ready for the heroic. Your gear enchanted, gemed. Your consumables. Everything repaired (this is extremely important)

End is nigh?

2009-01-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

I'm bored with WoW. I've been pulled into too many things in WoW. 4 different sets of friends started characters on 4 different servers, half horde and half alliance. I have 4 active mains, have leveled them all to 70+, i've done borean tundra now 4x.

To me the game always seems like a rush rush rush mentality. At first I started a few weeks behind my hardcore guild because i was busy doing RL stuff. When I got back, the hardcore raiders were all 80, and I got to grind to 80 while they were getting guild and server first achievements. (were #1 or #2 in alliance progression). Then I got to 80, did a total of 4 raids, decided I hated raiding now with my life the way it is.

Then! My horde guild decides it wants to do Naxx too, and I am the raid leader. So rush rush rush to 80. I'm now 75 and they are doing Naxx10 without me this weekend (sounds great to me).

Anyway main point is that I see several flaws in blizz and especially Wraith, and i predict that this is the last great expansion of the game.

1) The leveling time is far too long for a person to pick up and enjoy. The game has been out 4 years, but instead of doing horizontal content, they do vertical content. Granted it's shorter now, but we're still looking at 6+ months for a newbie to pick up and hit 80 in (as a first time, i could probably hit 80 in a month if i put my mind to it).

2) Wraith zones are far too narrow. We have quest ranges within zones that are only valid for characters in the back half of the zone requirement. For example, in ZD at level 75, you can only do half of the quests. You need to be 76 for the rest. Shol. basin? Need to be 76. What this means is that friends cant play together readily, unless they are the same exact level.

3) Problem with the game as a whole. Given that players are char levels 1 to 80, the likelyhood of your friends being at a similiar level are quite low, and in general unless you work very hard at it, its impossible to level together. The only way to actually play with your friends is only play that toon in the others presence.

Yes, recruit a friend helps, but that requires starting a new account. And sorry, not retroactive either. A friend recently picked up the game but didn't ask me about it, and thus didn't know about recruit a friend. By the time he told me he was already entrenched and didn't want to throw away a month of play time to start up with the recruit a friend method. This is a serious flaw and makes playing with friends that much harder.

4) Wraith is far too easy. Everyone just facerolls the content, and multiple wipes on bosses is rare unless people are truely clueless. Then people hit 80 and think they can stroll into 80. This is a mindset problem that blizz encouraged by totally lifting the rep requirements for heroics. Further, the attunements have been almost totally lifted in wraith (and they have no plan to bring them back). Yes attunements were a pain, but it was a roadblock meant to slow progression.

Now many guilds are done with all content and are focusing on achievements such as 3 drakes. This is far worse than TBC when guilds spent months struggling through kara, then had a whole another tier to look forward to (SSC/TK), and attunements to make sure people were prepared for that content.

Anyway, WoW is the best thing going, but all things end. After playing a game for thousands of hours its quite natural to be bored and want different things. But now the issue becomes how do we get our friends to try new MMOs?

Bad news for B3

2009-01-08T13:20:00.000-08:00

Well the recession seems to strike deeper and deeper. Big Bear Butt got layed off today. I wish his family well and know times are indeed tight.

My guild

2009-01-03T12:57:00.001-08:00

This pretty much sums up my raiding guild.

Big 80

2008-12-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

Hit 80 last night, was a mad rush the last two days. Random thoughts.

1) Jeez leveling is time-consuming. I'm the last in the guild to level to 80 I think. I wonder what that says. Yet the guild is 'casual'.
2) I imagine most casuals wont hit 80 until January sometime, like end of January. We're looking at 8-10 hours per level at a casual basis. If you play 20 hours a week (which is alot), that's 5 weeks.
3) Most of the quests are great, but at the end I was really left searching for quests. One quest that unlocks a quest hub was bugged and that whole series of quests was denied to me.
4) If you play with rested XP all the way you will still burn through all but 3 zones, the start zone, and likely two middle zones.
5) The XP required per level doesn't change much at all, but the XP per mob and XP per quest does. So it does go quicker at higher levels.
6) Many of the later quests are single quest extremely long quest chains. At most you'll have two quests in the area with very short quest chains. So get used to flying to do the quest (or running) and coming back, and repeating this 4-5 times.
7) Thus an epic flying mount is almost required for the later zones. It will take much much longer without this. However if you sell your goods on AH, dont try to level professions, sell the greens you get, you should be close to 5000 at the end.
8) Professions: Enchanting becomes awesome, no longer do you have to do endless amounts of dungeons hoping for that rare drop, and every third quest gives a reward green or even a blue (there are much more quest blues now). I calculated last night, i saved almost all enchanting mats and have about 3000g worth, too bad I need 6000g worth of mats to get to 450.
9) This implies that they design it to get you halfway to profession cap while leveling, and the rest you do after cap.
10) quests are the absolute fastest way to level. Don't do an instance more than once, and that after you have several quests leading there (the dps boost from the blues means decreased leveling)
11) Shadowmeld (night elf racial) is a feign death type spell, if you run through an area and do no damage to the mob but attract it, hit shadowmeld and they'll run back to their area. This is insanely useful.

Done Raiding TBC (really)

2008-11-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

Just announced today that the guild was taking a break from raiding. We didn't have enough to run 25 mans today or yesterday, and there is only a week left. With 5 raiding days to go, and all pre-SW content cleared, it just didn't make sense to raid when people wouldn't be able to use much of the loot (at this point most of us have gotten everything except the upper boss loot). People were very busy doing BGs and other stuff and we generally had a good time, i think everyone is really looking forward to wraith and I have no doubt people are going to come out of the cracks and the guild and server will be a thriving place again in a few weeks.

I managed to get a second piece of T6 set on sunday, now i just need to get into MH to get it. I'm now fully rocking SSO badge gear or T6 drops, so i'm happy I won't be needing to replace that gear, at least on one character.

I also ran the Scourge event and got 2 pieces of T6 equiv loot (seemingly) on my horde hunter.

So now I need to get my lock to 70 or 68, and finish leveling tailoring/enchanting.

Change is good

2008-10-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

What an interesting two weeks it's been. I took a hiatus from raiding a few weeks before the patch came out. Now its out, and raidings been very easy. How easy? We struggled through all of BT, losing people on Gorefiend, Bloodboil, Council...We got up to Council and were thrilled.

Then came patch aka Nerf city, population us.

I've never seen stuff drop so quickly.

Last Sunday we dropped Illidan for the first time. (i say we, i mean the guild, i wasn't there)

Tuesday was bugged, the instances were down. I think we did Gruul, everything else was screwy.

Wed. we (me included) one-shotted everything in BT and did a 2 shot on Illidan due to random DCs.

Sun. we blitzed through MH and downed Archi pretty quickly. He really is freaking easy, you just can't die. Well, easy for us ranged, it sure seemed like healers/melee had their hands full. Then we decided to down Lady vashj. And we one shotted her. And then lurker just for kicks.

So 7 days, 3 end boss kills, i'm exalted with both MH and BT, I need Kael for the vials quest turn in, then i can get the sexy ring.

Raiding is so ridiculusly easy its not funny. We can get through Kael next week, then I bet off to sunwell. I really like the lack of mana pot consumption. I have only used 2 or 3, whereas normally i'd be downing 20 or 30 in a raid. This sort of thing makes it dramatically cheaper to raid.

Plus the leveling, plus the random kara group. yes, busy week WoW wise.

Moving

2008-10-08T12:18:00.001-07:00

For the time being I am moving blogging to Doctors of Philosophy.

DF ending 25 mans

2008-09-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

My raiding guild is giving up 25mans. There was a huge competition with another guild to get Illidan down, and they put in alot of effort and got him down, while we continued to dwindle. They eventually got him down, no surprise, while we can't muster 25 men for the first time in 4 months. So, we are taking a break for the time being.

Options being discussed: Old world raids, 40 man AVs, bear runs (which I don't have the skill for), other light stuff. For me, i'm still taking a break from serious raiding, and maybe am done forever. I'd like to see the Wraith content but i don't want it to become the 20 hour work week that it became.

It's talk like a pirate day!

2008-09-19T03:56:00.001-07:00

I QUIT

2008-09-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, I decided last night to hang up my crossbow until after the expansion. Like most I am just burned out. Since i transfered in March, we progressed through Kara (my previous guild couldn't clear Kara in 20 hour raiding weeks, this guild did it in 3 hours), through Gruul and Mag, on to Serpentshire Cavern, through Tempest Keep, Mount Hyjal, and finally Black Temple. We are currently knocking on the door of the Betrayer himself, but I am not sure the guild will survive long enough to take him down.

Anyway, we did alot of progression, and i think it's natural that I look back and say hey we did great. But anyway this is why I am leaving.

1) Too late. With raid starts at 8:30 now, I'm raiding until 12:30 usually. Not good when I need to get up and go to work.

2) Too much like a job. In the end it's just a job. You log in, you show up, get yelled by your boss routinely, demoralized, etc. If you get your bosses down, ho hum, that's your job, no big deal. The thrill is def. gone.

3) Too much work. In addition to 3 nights a week raiding, I figured out my mats requirements. Most of this you can buy at AH.

2 x Flask of Relentless Assault - you can farm for an hour or so to get these, or buy them, 60g or so of mats each. 120g.
20 x stat food - can easily buy, 20g. Or fish it or whatever.
40 x pet food - buy it from vendor
28 stacks of ammo. about 2g each (1.8g).
25 x fel mana pot - need to get mats from AH, extremely expensive. Probably 100g for those 25, and I'm the guy who makes the pot. If you buy the pot in AH, its..about 30g a stack.
Repair costs for a night of wipes. This isn't bad any more because each boss drops 10g. But if you are doing progression, expect at least 50g in costs.

So total for a typical raid night is 370g. Multiply by 3. That's easily 1000g a week in consumables. You can do dailies every day (another 5 hours of work), and thats 700g. I'll typically have to gather mats for another 2 hours. So if I am raiding 3x a week, I'm easily spending 20 hours, actually playing the char. Then there is the strategy learning, etc.

4) Too many bosses. I get so confused now that we've go through 20 or so bosses, and will face 14 on a given week. It's very hard to remember all the strats.

5) Lack of skill. I just don't have it in me to be one of the best players on the server, which is basically demanded to raid the top instances. Its humbling, but there you go. As it is, I'm in very elite company, maybe 100 people on the server have ever seen Illidan. So...we've come a long way, but now I'm ready to do other things. I look forward to playing on my Horde side guild more esp w the expansion coming up.

Seriously bored

2008-09-02T21:26:00.000-07:00

I guess like everyone else I'm waiting on Wraith. This game has tons to offer, but eventually the content ends. At this point I have:

1) A Black Temple raiding hunter. Unfortunately I'm overgeared for just about everything in the game at this point. For example, I ran Mechinar (normal), with 3 others, a druid, warrior tank, priest healer. Warrior said he was T5, I didn't check, probably true. The others were fresh 70s. We cleaned house, I did my usual damage which ended up being 4x more than the others (which isn't ego boasting, since the others were a tank and feral druid). Point being even with one person missing and the others not well geared I overgeared the instance. I'd like to raid more, and am starting to, but for ex. today i was put on alternate because we have more than 25 people signing up, and Sunday we did MH, not black temple, due to people not showing up. Typical raid BS.

2) A 70 druid. I love this char, or should. She's resto, and respecing seriously sucks. And there isn't much of a point grabbing gear or doing instances that don't lead to anything. I can't do quests or really anything with this char b/c of the very low dps.

3) 61 lock (horde). I'm bored w/ this char, i can't get past hellfire. It's pretty sad, admittedly.

4) 55 hunter (horde). I play this char with my wife.

Anyway to me WoW is a) raiding b) questing c) PVP.

Well, I did a and c on my hunter and b with everything. So... maybe its time to do something else.

Insanely busy

2008-08-13T08:28:00.001-07:00

Since I'm moving in a week (gah), its hard to find time to do much stuff. But anyway i managed to powerlevel Adenosine up to 59.5 now, and Gibster at 51. I swear that 40-58 grind is so insanely painful. Adeno first hit outlands at 58, and got spanked and told to go back to playing in the kiddy pool, so she went back to Silithus for a level. Now she's got a few AH greens and an extra level, she'll come back and finish what she started.

On the third run through I'm actually somewhat impressed about the quest reward tuning. The mobs at 58 are significantly harder than those at 55, and you need to step up your gear quickly. Even the boars will take me out. That said if I can make it through to 60 I'll be in better shape gearwise once i finish those quests and my spells stop resisting so much.

But otherwise, besides Adeno, not much going on. I healed norm. bot on my druid (Gibear), that was fun and very easy for me (the tank had 15k HP, which is hugely helpful). Its somewhat ironic that by the time I'm able to do the instance I don't need the gear from it. I actually look forward to level 80 instances with T4/T5/T6 gear and getting upgrades from a similiarly geared group. Now everyone wants to be overgeared to run the instance, and it's almost not a challenge.

Tameable Devilsaurs

2008-07-29T15:32:00.001-07:00

Oh My. This just increased the Wraith hunter population a million-fold. This is just... I'm so excited, the very first thing i will do when I get Wraith is to get my devilsaur (if it makes it live, but it should I think, its not OP).

Wraith Hunter talents

2008-07-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

Well I kept thinking, what type of Hunter blogger would I be without mention of the talents?

Anyway they are here:

http://wotlkwiki.info/index.php/Hunter

Also see here:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/18/wrath-beta-patch-notes-hunter/

The end talents look very interesting, with the ability to tame an exotic pet at 51 points in BM tree. I dont like the steady shot costing ammo now, since as it is we routinely blow through a bag of arrows per raid. Now we'll need either large arrow stacks or larger bags or both. Plus the cost of arrows will double (for MH arrows they are 2g a stack, that's not cheap when you are buying 24 stacks). Since we're still not in the release portion of the game its somewaht silly to comment too much about talents that may or may not make it, but the hunter changes make me excited about playing a hunter.

The most significant change isn't on the talent tree, but is here:

Hunter pets no longer use skill points to learn abilities, they have been replaced by three Pet talent trees (DPS, Tanking, Utility). (WWI)

So essentially you will have a pet that can either do dps, tank, or utility, or some combo of the 3. So pigs may eventually become good tanks again, and hopefully cats will fall by the wayside.

Update: The new pet trees have been revealed, they are here.

Wow, initial reaction is that i'm disappointed you cant mix and match. Apparently pet families will be in one of three trees, dps, utility, tanking. For example cats are in dps and boars are in tanking. The talents look great, there are alot of tank-like aggro grabbing abilities now. However, there isn't much of a armor/health buff on the pet, so they are still going to be quite squishy. And I don't see much to help for PVP (except one talent in the utility tree that allows the pet to break CC).

Grid for Druids!

2008-07-16T13:01:00.001-07:00

Resto4life has it covered!

Divorce!

2008-07-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

From my starter guild/server anyway. The time finally came last week when I realized I could transfer my druid and have my hunter run dailies in half the time it would take my druid, I wouldn't have to continually respec, I could use the synergy from the druid/hunter (druid has enchant, so can make mana oil and DE stuff for the hunter, hunter can provide alchemy pots for druid), and more importantly tag along to a guild kara run and grab loot.

So I did transfer, leaving my wife, 4 toons, and my long standing association with the Ancient Ones (who never did anything and can't seem to down Gruul despite 100 70s (or more). I'm much happier as far as WoW time, I really consolidated alot, and now I have a goal for running instances/kara again. I'm also not doing serious raiding regularly, so that helps, especially when I'm so busy. Anyway, sad to leave Blackwater Raiders behind, but most of my friends have stopped playing on the server, so it's a moot point.

Hunters without pets?

2008-06-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

A new talent that may or may not be related to hunters in the latest Wraith build is Camouflage. I'm not sure the camo ability really goes with the hunter image. Sure it may be a nice trick for PVP, but there is the obvious pet issue. To me it would be very interesting if they changed the MM tree around to give you about as much dps as the BM tree without the pet, and not allow you to use a pet. Which is really really odd, but there you go. A 'lone ranger' of sorts. It would allow these types of talents more usefulness, for sure.

Loot greed

2008-06-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

My response to this article on Massively

Couple of issues. First regarding the wealth distribution. It is true, in a capitalist society wealth is unequally distributed. However, the richest 1% pay the lion's share of the personal taxes in this country, and that tax rate has been very high in the last few decades. It went down under Bush but not more-so than the middle class. This isn't the place for politics, but people are dead wrong about the 'tax cuts for the rich' that people complain the Bush administration gave.

Second, you are absolutely right that in WoW it's a two tier system. First its character level then its gear leveling. At 70 your abilities double, triple or quadruple depending on your gear. For example, my dps on my hunter has increased 4 fold and can increase another two fold beyond that. That's 8 fold above the normal level 70 in basic equipment. So to get to 70 it is pretty easy, you don't have to do all the quests, you dont have to do the dungeons.

However, at 70 there is a rude shock. To do the heroic version of teh dungeons, you suddenly need much better gear than you'll typically get at 70. So you need to do the battlegrounds, and do the upper-end normal dungeons, and obtain epic crafted gear. There is a huge 'gear gap' between raids and heroics versus normal dungeons, and this gap can take months to overcome. This is pretty annoying and I hope they do a better job at it in the next expansion. Currently the end-game normal dungeons just aren't run, there are very few newly minted 70s. All the older 70s do the heroics for the badge reward. Thus the gear gap is much more challenging to overcome now that it used to be six months or a year ago, due to aging of the player population.

Lastly, while players are greedy, there are systems in place to aleaviate this. For 25 man raids our guild uses a point system like the vast majority of guilds. You put in the time, you get the points. You bid the points on the loot you want. If you are the high bidder, you win. Now, this doesn't prevent warriors from bidding on hunter gear, but its fair in the sense that they earned the points.

As you mentioned the WoW end-game raiding is based on tiers. Its reasonably expected that players need to have much of their gear in the previous tier to be successful in the next tier. For example, to do Kara you really need to have drops from heroics and badge rewards. That's sort of a tier 3.5 for a tier 4 instance. For SSC/TK the whole raid really needs to be in solid tier 4, no blues. For BT, the raid really needs to be in Tier 5/badge gear, with little/no Kara gear. The raids are designed this way, so its not a matter of greed as it is that it's required for all the players to have appropriate levels of gear.

I don't expect people to display common courtesy or ethics in this game. It's too easy to get away with things. If you didn't roll need when you needed to, you should have. If people are ninjaing loot, then the guild needs to have a mechanic in place to deal with it (masterloot). But by and large the death of guilds is due to #1 lack of timely progression, and #2 loot drama.

Flight times?

2008-06-26T04:05:00.001-07:00

Why does it take 10' to get from one end of the continent to another? Why does it take 19 secs to get from IF to the isle of QS yet 10 min to get back?

Ending the addiction?

2008-06-24T14:49:00.001-07:00

Powerful article. I think at least half of the WoW population is addicted. I make efforts to cut back, but right now my life is so messed up and extremely stressful, this is the only thing I know that helps me cope. Anyway I am hoping once life becomes untangled I will be able to destress better.

Hunter's Prowl

So long and thanks for all the fish

Cataclysm impressions

rogue faq

Rogue FAQ

What's better than replacing 3 gems with 3 better gems? Replacing 1 gem only, keeping 2 old ones and getting 2 new better ones on top while getting rich off daily quests to buy all the enchants, patches & flasks you need.

New guild, resto stuff

DK screenies

State of professions in Wrath

Wrath, my initial global thoughts.

PVP server

Long time no post

JC: Rare vs Epics

Going for the gold cap

Post 3.3

Enchanting

Tips for a happy goblin

Life on a new server

Coexisting in the inscription market

Inscription woes continued

Inscription woes

Black Temple gear vs Naxx epics

Glyphs and a new server

Glyphs

Mage project closed down

Questions to ask while on a pile of gold

Is it hunter loot?

A new deathknight tailor

Flipping

Short note

Diversification

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

The mage project day 4

Reboot!

What I really want.

Making money

What's selling

New raids

Hating the raid leader part 2

What to do when you hate your raid leader

Adventures in guild management

Now what?

Patch day :(

Northrend leveling guide

Post 3.2 thoughts

BRK's new gun.

3.2 - a new direction

More mount grinding

Sam Raimi to direct WoW movie

Mount grinding

Weekend update!

Must log in...

Toon update

Short toon update

4th of July

Faction change coming 'soon'

Toon update

Ti ore

Toon update

Nickel and dime

Outlands!

toon updates!

jewelcrafting notes

Toon updates!

Once upon a guild

toon updates

Sucky guilds

Promotions and things

The pain of soloing northrend as a lock

emerge said...

Cool Story Bro said...

Dk progress

Random gold tips

The broken arena treadmill

Ugh, swamped

Blogroll update

Day 21

Day 14

Day 10ish

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