Toon update

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

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

Nickel and dime

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outlands!

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

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

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

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

toon updates!

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

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

jewelcrafting notes

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

Here are some of the notes from memory during it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toon updates!

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

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

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

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

Once upon a guild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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