At a Crossroads

Warning: extremely long post inc. For the summation of the post skip down to The Present, Cataclysm: section

Lets start with a little history.
Pre History: I started playing this game on Easter weekend of 2004. Approximately 5 months after the game went live. My first toon was a dwarf hunter and I got to about level 6 before I realized I hated playing a hunter (still do, that and warlock are not the classes for me).

I quickly found out that rogues were the most OP class ever and that horde hated gnomes with a passion. So was born my first real toon: Oneleaf the gnome rogue. I love that guy. I got him to 60, joined a raiding guild and went on some 40 man raids to MC, ONY, and BWL.

Alas, real life got in the way and I got a job working evenings that got me home at about midnight. My raiding days at 7pm were over. I did a little research and discovered a little thing called an Oceanic server. For those of you who don't know Oceanic is the moniker that is given to the time zones around Australia/New Zealand, japan and eastern Russia/Asia. The good news is that when I got home from work at midnight it was around 6 pm on the oceanic servers. This left me with about an hour to get food in me before normal raid times start. As luck would have it, I found out about this godsend of a timezone 9 days after a brand new server was started. That server was called Jubei'Thos, which leads me to...



History, Vanilla WoW:
I promptly said goodbye to my rogue and the friends I had made on my old server and went to roll on J'T. But, what do I want to play as? There are so many choices. I had plenty of time in the game to understand the basics of every class and had to make a decision. I knew I wanted to be horde this time. The sheer amount of immature people who think "more human looking" means good and "less human looking" means evil was getting to me.

So Horde it is, but what class? Well I figured I want to try all the classes, but I didn't want to put in the work of leveling every type of toon so what better than 3 toons in one. So was born Raawr the druid. Druid was perfect for me. If I wanted to melee dps it was there, if I wanted to heal it was there. If I wanted to be a caster, well in those days I would have to roll another class cause any druid in the balance tree was pointed at and laughed at. Still it was better than being locked into a single class mechanic. The biggest kicker was since I was previously a rogue I could transition to kitty and wonder of wonders! I could heal myself.

Quickly I worked on leveling Raawr and got myself into a guild, who were all leveling to 60 so they could raid. I made 60 about a week after most of them and that was about the time that the officers decided to transfer off the server and disband the guild. Luckily a few people in the guild (Ryder and UD) had some connections with a guild called and more than a few of us jumped ship and were accepted.

was my 2nd raiding guild, but it was my true first home in this game. I have made some great friends who I still keep in touch with even though they have quit the game or moved to other guilds. I have even met a few in real life (/wave Englos, Balindur, and Pirao) which is a big deal since I am in the USA and they live in Australia. When I finally make it down under I have about a dozen people from and my current guild who would literally kick my ass if I didn't come see them and have a beer with em.

In I really fell into and loved the role of resto druid. I liked being able to be an important part of the raid and to hold others fate in my hands. Looking back I was a mediocre healer at best, but I had 2 other resto druids who were plugged in, and helped me not suck too bad.



History, Burning Crusade:
had a great run and were making a bid for a top 10 spot on the server when Karazahan hit. It killed our guild. We went from a solid 40 man team guild with mostly great players (and some scrubs getting carried) to 3 and ½ 10 man teams with the politics and hurt feelings of people being split up. The guild leadership either didn't care enough or weren't able enough to make the transition work. And that's the nicest way I can say that, Englos. So split up A good portion of us split into which was reported for a name change and blizz took our name away. We ended up with (blech) and made a run at 10 man raiding.

My job schedule changed again for the worse and now I was getting home at 2am which was 8 pm server time. Great, now I can't raid with my friends again. Oh well, I always wanted to try being a caster dps and we just got moonkin form so I will do that. Moonkins were still laughed at but not as much because the people in the know understood that blizz made them viable and they could do decent dps.

I found a Singaporean guild, who raided at 3am my time (9pm server time) and with a heavy heart left to go raid with them. I lasted about a month and a half because all of my good friends were in another guild. It sucked balls. Huge stinking, pus infested balls. I decided that if I can't play with my friends I won't put in the huge amount of hours it takes to raid and ill just go casual.

I found some fun things to do, I did boomkin pvp, I made a level 1 twink troll rogue who I took to the alliance starting areas and proceed to 1 kill the new players like I was an elite mob. In fact the guild I made for him is so that the new players thought the were encountering a rare mob. I have very fond memories of being in the gnome/dwarf starting area and having a level 4 gnome mage fireball me until he went oom, all the while I was /dancing with him then I ran up to him and 1 shot him because my firey enchant proc'ed on that hit. I am pretty sure I have that on fraps somewhere too.
My hardcore days were over, or so I thought...



History, Wrath of the Lich King:
I never thought I would give up my druid, but along came the death knight class. I had to try it, it was new and shiny and reports were that the starting area was the best thing yet put in the game. The reports were right and DAMN was leveling a DK fun. The starting area was epic, the class was super overpowered in the early days and you were over-geared for leveling from the start. I especially loved the old talent where when you died you came back as a ghoul. I could easily take on 3 people and kill one get the other 2 down to about 10% before they killed me then I would rez as a ghoul and finish them off. So much fun.

My work schedule had came back to the midnight finish times and wonder of wonders there is a top end raiding guild named with a few people I knew in it. Shadoweaves, Finarfin, Ryder, Tetsukaa, and Recovery I knew from and and as soon as I got to 80 I got an invite for my toon: Bhudda.

Through competition and lots of research my skills as a player went from mediocre to one of the top 3 DK's on the server according to worldoflogs.com. Sometimes I was number 1 sometimes less. I even scored a #1 in the world ranking and held it for 4 weeks.



Then, about halfway through Icecrown Citadel the game did something to me that I never thought it could. It made me lose interest. It did this by letting me reach the pinnacle of what was possible with my toon. My guild was amazingly kind enough to let me craft Shadowmourne. I had a legendary weapon, I eventually got best in slot gear in all my spots (till they added another raid in a patch) and I truly felt I had no where to go. I even made a post about this since I had started up this blog by that time.

I was wrong, there was more to do and I still had some great friends I loved being online with so, I didn't quit the game like I was contemplating. Reaching the peak was a blow though. Because of Shadowmourne I realized how I can still be so enamored with this game after 6 years. Its the idea that there is always more to see and do. There is a stone I haven't uncovered yet. And if that stone is a harder feat to get to than the general populace can accomplish the more better for me when I do it. Killing new raid content and being in the race for server first are a few of the big things I love doing in this game. I have also learned that withought a great group of people to do it with, the accomplishment isn't worth 1/10th as much as it would be with them.
Which brings us to...



The Present, Cataclysm:
All my frustration was washed away on December 7th at midnight when I had new levels, new quests, new dungeons, new raids, new gear, new, new, new....

I did the marathon to 85. I got geared up to be ready for the first raids. I did my professions up and even made a profit while doing so.

But, now, the new has worn off. I am back to the same rut I was in during the end of ICC. I have hit the highest peak my DK will be at ever (or for a long time). Anything I do now on Bhudda will be second best, game wise. I will still get to raid with my friends and really that's a bigger draw than any gear or kills I could get for Bhudda.

There is another issue that has come up. Blizzard has changed the raid lockout system so that 10 man runs and 25 man runs can share their people between the runs. And they get the same gear. It makes it more flexible for guild leaders to actually organize a run and not have to call it and waste 2/3rd of the guild's time when a few don't show up.

What this has done is to let the guilds who are pushing for server firsts or just first week kills get in there with a smaller group because not everyone has the time to get to 85 in the first week. In we have had enough for a single 10 man run per night and we have been crushing it.
Baradin Hold 1 of 1 killed
Blackwing Descent 2 of 6 killed
Throne of the Four winds 1 of 2 killed
Bastion of Twilight 1 of 4 kiled
There is a distinct possibility that more were killed last night when I wasnt online also.


Most of the strats out there for these bosses are out of date and just plain wrong to a certain extent. We go in there and fix the strat and kill bosses. I am extremely proud of how we are doing.

And by we I mean the people in my guild who went in this week. I was not one of those people.

Our first 2 raid nights I got sat because of raid composition. On our second 2 raid nights I am sure I was slated to go, however being that I raid from work on those nights, and I work at an airport, and with the holidays work is super hectic, I wasn't available on my end. I wasn't able to do the thing I enjoy most in the game this week, and it has everything to do with my schedule and blizzard's structure. In no way am I blaming the guild leaders.

From my experiences with Kara killing a guild, and having to leave a group of people I want to raid with for a group of people who just kill stuff, I know that I prefer the structure of a 25 man guild. Thankfully our GM has come out and said we will be pushing for getting back to the 25 man structure and I think this is the right move. We can do 10 mans to gear up and learn the encounter while people are leveling or being recruited. I mostly feel the atmosphere and relationships built is better in a 25 man.

This all brings us to the crossroads I speak of in the post title. I have a decision to make on what I want with this game. As I see it I have 3 choices

1.Go casual staying in the guild but not committing my time to raiding. With work, possibility of raid spots, only being able to achieve 2nd best on Bhudda, this is not as remote a choice as it may seem.
2.Raid with Bhudda. I can excel with him and get the accomplishments I want on the larger scale if not the smaller one like gear and personal perfection for the toon.
3.Bring Raawr out of retirement and become a pro healer again. This one holds some very large promise for me. I don't know if I can hack it as a healer because its a much harder job than dps, but I fully believe in myself and am willing to try. We also need healers bad and instead of feeling like I'm taking a spot that anyone can fill I would feel much more needed. Raawr also never hit that pinnacle that Bhudda did so there is plenty to strive for.

As I type this I automatically rank these choices as to what I would prefer most. That order is 3,1,2. Although I have apprehension about changing toons and roles to something that I haven't done in a while, and back when I did I didn't excel, I really believe I can be great like I would expect out of someone in

Barring that I think I would like to go casual. I would be available on both Bhudda and Raawr for those nights (probably my weekends) where I could devote a full 4 to 6 hours to raiding if they needed me. I just don't relish the thought of committing the time for raids on a character that I feel has peaked.

Regardless of how things turn out in the next few weeks with my WoW time, I will keep updating here and bringing you all things that I think are interesting. And if you too want a trip down memory lane, plug your main's info into this link and see where he/she has been http://www.warcraftrealms.com/charhistory.php

Things are settling down

The first second and third waves of people making it to 85 are done. Casuals and world pvp'ers are dominating the leveling areas. Prices on the auction house are starting to even out. And raids are happening.

I made a solid profit from the first 10 days of Cataclysm. I got Blacksmithing, Engineering, Alchemy, Enchanting, Mining, and First Aid all to 525 across a few toons. I also got Archeology and Cooking leveled to a respectable number. On top of that I put 30k gold in my pocket. All in all I would consider that worth about 150k in gold earned give or take. Speaking of archeology, I solved 3 rare items so far. The fossil raptor pet, the druid/priest statue, and the fossil raptor mount you see at the top of the post. Thx mmo-champion.com for having such good pics for me to steal for my blog.

Most of my profits came from Blacksmithing pvp sets and converting mats to other mats. My miner made the most steady profits making about 5g per item smelting obsidium, elementium, and pyrite to bars. She sold thousands of bars this week all at a profit. I was the only one selling the BS pvp items that have recipes you buy at lvl 84 in twilight highlands. Those items were making me about 1k per and since I was the only one selling 5 of the 8, I was raking it in. Elementium belt buckles are still making me 400g a pop.

The money is still there in all these markets, but we are seeing an equilibrium now where ore is equaling the bar price, crafted items are coming down closer to mats costs, and more and more people are undercutting.

Time to be more cautious about what risks you take with your gold.


On the raiding front, My guild went in and killed the first 3 bosses in blackwing decent, downed the tol barad pvp boss and went on to the grim batol raid and killed the first guy in there. Since we are focusing on 10 man raids, I haven't gotten a spot yet this week, but the officers are working very hard to make sure everyone gets a chance to down content.

More than a few of us are well on our way to glory of the cataclysm hero and our cool stone drakes.


Speaking of dungeons, we are running tons of them to get gear and rep and orbs so we can get more gear. The first few days were great for pugs. The dungeon finder system wouldn't let you into certain dungeons and heroics if your combined ilvl on gear wasn't high enough. you had to have a 329 ilvl to get in heroics. The trick is that the game looked in your bags and bank and chose the highest ilvl item for each slot. I got my 3 last ilvl points for heroics by buying some boe items and putting them in the bank until I got an upgrade. then I resold the items.

Because of this restriction the early days of cata pugging was awesome. Only the dedicated raiders were making the effort to get there fast and early. Tanks knew how to pull, healers knew how to heal and dps weren't brain dead. As more and more people hit 85 and get the gear for heroics, more and more idiots are showing up in pugs. It's getting painful.

Yesterday I had to wait 40 minutes as dps to have my random heroic pop and the group I joined had been wiping on the first boss of grim batol. The get ready and we go and after another wipe (my first) and the tank says screw it and leaves the group. the healer is next and quickly the other 2 dps leave. Great, I just waited 40 minutes to get a repair bill and I didn't even get any rep from trash kills.


To wrap this post up, I have to say, gone are the days of zerging and sub par play. The bar is set by blizzard and if you suck, you wont kill even dungeon bosses. EZ-Mode WLK dead. Long live Cata.

Blacksmithing leveling tip

This is just a quick post, I also posted yesterday so don't miss out on it. Just scroll down.

Right now Blacksmithing is incredibly expensive to level. Especially on the early levels of cata (450-475). There is relief though. ICC patterns stay orange and have guaranteed skillups until 475. Then it turns yellow where you can still get skillups. I used 2 items: boots of kingly upheaval and protectors of life. Both cost 8 titansteel, 12 eternal earth, and 5 primordial saronite.

Using these items will get you completely past the obsidium items. I didn't use one piece of obsidium to get to 525 using this method.

Chaos=gold

Gold in your pocket or gold in another's. Right now the AH is in a great state of fluctuation. The power levelers are done or close to it, the second wave of heavy crafters are getting their fingers in the mix. Many people are trying to eek out that little bit more of profit from gathering professions and undercutting wars are starting.

I hope you have your snatch list set up. If you don't, you need to do it first the next time you log on. Don't know what prices to put up? That easy, you price your snatches at 1g below whatever the lowest price for the item is at when you make the list. The reason for this is that everything is in a steady decline right now. For the next few weeks we will still have people leveling their toons and their professions and due to too much to do, too little time, they are taking the fast route and simply undercutting on the AH.

Scan the AH and run your snatch search every hour or so because new stuff pops up as people visit the city between quests, farming or dungeons. If you start seeing a large amount of one item lower your snatch price to the new bottom end. You really are looking for the best deals.

The most important part? USE THOSE SNATCHES! Flip the items and use the mats to craft RIGHT NOW. Since prices are going down you don't want to stockpile at 50 gold per item when it will be 10 gold per item in 3 weeks. The same goes for the crafted items. Stuff that costs 1000g to make right now will still sell for 5000g. Later the sale price will probably be under 800g but materials will be closer to 500g.

For example: I leveled blacksmithing to 515 tonight. The "bloodied" set (pvp) is costing about 550g per piece to make and the mats are just 20 elementium bar and 10 volatile air. I have been steady selling these for 1600g each simply because mine are the only ones up there and people want gear for pvp. Elementium bars and volatile fires are not hard to get, the prices are just super inflated right now. I expect those pvp pieces to drop to a price of around 300g each with a crafting cost of between 200g and 250g. If I hold on to the elementium and volatiles I get now I will be losing money in the end.



Finally, don't forget its Winterveil coming up so get ready to hit the auction house with all the stuff the lazy people don't want to look for: Milk and Gingerbread cookies, red and green outfits, snowballs, etc.

The final push

I finally made it to 85!

After I posted last, I was in bed and asleep within 20 minutes. I woke up 12 hours later, when my wonderful girlfriend (she reads this blog) left for work. After getting caught up on my internet, I logged in and got back to it. 4 1/2 hours later I hit 85. I must say Twilight highlands has much better xp gains from quests than any other level. Thats a good thing too because you have so much more xp to get.

All in all it took me 18ish hours to get to 85, our guild fastest was Xzlrate at 13 hours and the first person on the server to get it was about 11 hours.

I spent the next few hours running an instance to get my gear ilvl up high enough for the game to let me do heroics, buying and enchanting/gemming/reforging gear, doing a few dailies, and finally getting tabbards for rep.

My guild wants to run our first raid on Sunday so I still have work ahead of me in terms of getting rep up and getting gear to be ready. I also want to do a bunch of archeology cause there are some great things from there. I am seriously thinking of changing professions on my main, but I need to figure out what professions I want on which toon first.

My usual Wednesday night post is supposed to be about making gold, but right now the markets are so in flux, its hard to say what will make you a profit. I do know that if you have the gold, its more than likely you will rake in the profit by power-leveling your profession and selling the items. Gathering professions are gouging incredibly right now with the cheapest Obsidium bars going for over 100g each. Herbs are cheaper, but still selling each at the price of what I expect a stack to be.

My best advice for making gold right now is to sell everything you can now and in a week or two when prices even out, restock.

Cata goes LIVE!

It is 11 minutes to 12 (pacific time) and I have gotten and installed my collectors edition of Cataclysm!

I am now logged in at the flight trainer and the whole server is here. Here is a little tip if you are there and horde.

/tar maztha and bind a key to your "interact with target" button in key bindings. Use this to be able to buy your flight training when there are a million people standing on the npc.

Update: 12:11 and I'm still trying to log in. blarg.

Update: 12:12 just restarted the client and got in. OMW to hyjal.

Update: 12:18 Amazing cutscene from the flight to hyjal

Update: 12:50 and the lag in hyjal is incredible. also pvp but I'm getting stuff done. I hear vashj'ir is just as bad

Update: 2:42 did 2 runs of Black Rock Caverns. got a few boe and shards and got to lvl 81. back to hyjal to quest

Update: 5:10 Ding 82 in 2 hours 28 minutes. off to deepholm. There are 8 level 83s already on the horde side and about 100 82s

Update: 9:00 level 83 in 3 hours and 50 mins. Running through deepholme and the instance there, stonecore. All the gathering professions have had their server first and so has cooking, fishing, enchanting, and alchemy that I have seen. No server first 85s yet but people are very close. 84 1/2 ish for about 6 peopole. time to go to ulduam.

Update: 2:00 and I finally ding 84. It took 4 hours and 54 minutes with a lunch break in there somewhere for about half an hour. The xp needed from 83 to 84 is 5.2 million xp. the xp from 84 to 85 is 9.1 million. OMG at this rate I need to spend another 8 hours questing for that last level. Most of this last level was questing in uldum. Its a great zone very ancient egypt-y. I did one instance of the vortex pinacle to do the quests and get xp. Now I am off to Twilight highlands.

Update: 2:55 after hearthing to org, setting up my breadcrumb quests for twilight highlands, and training skills I decided to take a small break to recharge. Starting fresh at barely 84 an hour later I'm ready to go.

Also of note, Xzlrate our premier dps shaman just got server first shaman at just about 13 hours in. Grats to him :)

And while we are at it I want to shout out to all the hard core of our guild who are still up and running trying to level. Keep in mind that its now like 10 am their time (austrailia) and they started at 7 pm last night.
the hard core players are:
Verity
Flyingmoo
Mikasu (My fellow American)
Zarco
Brynflux
Kaoshin
Percadu
Freeforme
Hustar
Shadowaves
Krellhim
Bawarr
Drmorton, and
Runbeck

Update: 4:20 I have hit the wall. for the last hour and a bit I have been trying to focus and keep going, but my lack of sleep has gotten to me. I have now been up for 35 hours with only about 3 hours of nap in there somewhere.

I only made it 16% past 84, but I will be logging on when I get up and finishing off that last 84% of level 84.

I hope this expansion has started out as good for you as it has for me.

To goblin or to level up, that is the question

EDIT: Welcome to all the people coming from JMTC. The post you are looking for is the next one down. Enjoy the rest of the blog. :)



With less than 2 days left, most people's plan for the first day of Cata is set. Many people will be trying for server first 85s. Some will be camping the AH taking advantage of those early mistakes by the leveling crew. Most WoW'ers will be sleeping, but those people don't know what they are missing.

I have seen some great tips on the gold making blogs on how to take advantage of the early days of the expansion.
These include:
Forgoing leveling and camping the AH
Hitting the Dark Moon Fair and getting low level greens and blues for new goblins and worgen
Gathering herbs, ore and skins for those on the hunt for server first professions
Leveling quickly to get those recipes that will make gear for server first raiders
and selling daily quest materials and rewards

I for one plan on leveling to 85 quickly and then maxing out my blacksmithing and engineering for my own raiding gear and for sales. Even with the outrageous prices on ores and crafting materials I see profits coming for those of us who can get in the market early.

WowInsider.com has a great write up on whats new with professions.
A few notable things I see to keep an eye out for:

There is a lot of recipes only found on a vendor in twilight highlands that is locked behind phased content that you have to be 84 to access.

Inscription and JC not only have their glyphs and gems, but they have blue crafted gear added in the forms of rings and relics. Also, Cut green gems vendor for 9g. Prospecting and vendoring alone will set a minimum vendor value on a stack of ore, depending on the prospecting average yield. For example: If a stack of ore on average gives us six green gems, these gems can be cut and vendored for 9g each, which means you will only ever find ore for less than 54g if a jewelcrafter hasn't logged in since it was posted.

With chaos orbs being bop, the sheer mountain of ore needed for BS, Engineering, and JC, expect prices on crafted goods to be higher than in wrath.

Leatherworking and Tailoring will be cheaper to craft so it they will be better for feeding enchanting for materials.

Alchemy has all their old items like flasks, potions, and transmutes updated and integrated more into the other professions. New things like potion of treasure finding and transmute: truegold will give this profession a little boost.

The way I see it there is 2 strategies to using your crafting professions for making gold: High volume of sales with a low profit margin, or low volume of sales with high profit margin. The way blizzard has set up base crafting materials this expansion really exaggerates this.
High volume/low margin: Inscription, JC, Alchemy, Enchanting, Tailoring*, Cooking, Fishing, and any Gathering profession.
Low volume/High margin: Blacksmithing, Engineering, Leatherworking*
*Tailoring and Leatherworking could be put in either category because they each are about a 60/40 split. I just put each one in their respective 60% category.

Hope this helps, and check back on the 7th for my live update post of my experiences of leveling on live.

Build your snatch list now

In patch 4.0.3a most of the files for cata was patched into the live game. Due to this fact you can use links to items that are not available yet. In most cases having those links are pointless, but as I found out earlier today, you can populate your snatch list to be ready for Cata on minute one of the expansion.

Here's how you do it. First log on and go to the auction house. Go to the search tab and click on the snatch heading.

Next go to wowhead or the mmo-champion item database.





Search for your item and when you find it click on the "link ingame" button. Copy that link (right click/copy or press ctrl C on the keyboard). Next go back ingame and open the text pane like you are going to talk to someone and paste (right click paste or crtl V) in the chat window.



Hit enter and you should now see the item linked in your chat pane.



Finally you click on that link and it will bring a popup on your screen and it will populate the snatch window with the item. Put in the max price that you are willing to pay for the item and hit the "add item" button.




You will have to manually go through and add every item you want to keep an eye on for snatching, but a little work now keeps you from missing out on deals in the first few days of Cata.

One more week

Exactly one week from this moment I will be standing in line outside a game stop waiting to pick up my collectors edition of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

I have been on a big break from the game for a few weeks now. My guild stopped raiding and lately the wi-fi from work has been utter crap. I just logged on for the first time since 4.0.3a hit and emptied the mail on all my toons, deleted and sold most of the stuff in my bank and bags that I wont need, and set up all my toons with new hearths and AH access.

I will be logging on at least once next week on all my toons because tomorrow marks the 6 year anniversary of wow and when you log on during this time you get a feat of strength.

The other big thing I did tonight with WoW was to try out a new AH addon that is in its alpha stages right now. Trade Skill Master is the collaboration of a few addon makers who got sick of having to use bits and pieces of 6 different addons to do all their crafting and AH needs. They took bits and pieces from all the big ones: Auctioneer, QA3, etc, and pulled them into one addon that covers crafting, AH and collaboration between different alts. I didn't get super deep into it tonight, however I can see that for any serious crafter for profit this will be the main addon we use. The interface is smooth, very customizable, and once you get it set up it will be pretty easy to use.

Trade Skill Master will scan the AH, check for items that are above an approved profit margin that you can craft, then populate a queue for you to make them. It will also tell you if you have mats on an alt or in the bank, and if you want, it will only populate the queue from those mats.

It also has a nice posting interface with the back end configuration just like you get in QA3 or Zeroauctions.

It has a few clunky things that make it not super easy to navigate, but it is in alpha and clearly its aimed at high end crafting professionals. If you consider yourself a goblin this will be your go to addon in cata.

Since it is in closed alpha the authors don't have it open to the public. To get access to it you have to email a request to brendon.does.music@gmail.com and request an invite. He is looking for testers who will help get it tweaked for release.

Once I have gone more in depth with the addon and set it up fully I will write up a solid review and a how to on the usage of this great tool.

That's it for the update. This next week should be just that last bit of housekeeping before the expansion.

Direction of the blog in Cata

With less than 2 weeks until Cata is released I thought I would put down my game plan for posting on this blog.

When I started this blog I thought it would be more of a gold making blog with posts about my experiences in a top end raiding guild sprinkled in. I have found that I enjoy posting about my experiences much more than just giving out tips and tricks that can make you gold. I still very much enjoy the gold making side of the game and plan on sharing with you things I find that will help you compete. However, I feel that posts on how to increase your gold are pretty dry and, while they can be great reference posts, they can be pretty boring to read.

Going forward I think I will be posting mostly about my thoughts on the gameplay that come from leveling and raiding, maybe even pvp now that they have rated battlegrounds. I will also sprinkle in post of gold tips as I think of them, or see them on other sites. I noticed that I tend to look at the WoW economy in terms of trends that I can take advantage of. Things like glyphmass and taking advantage of the holiday events. I plan to post on those that I see and think will influence the general populace to spend (or hoard) their gold. Finally I want to still post at least every Monday, but with better content than just an update post. I feel those are more filler and just a reason to post instead of giving you actual quality content. With the end of the expansion I just felt that I could take a break from blogging and the game or keep these weekly posts and just take a break from the game.

In the first week of cata I have a full week and a half off from work and the plan is to level to 85 in the first 15-25 hours then get some sleep then spend the week running instances, leveling professions and taking advantage of everything I can while the masses are running around crazy. I would like to do a twitter like update series on my leveling experience that first day if my sanity can take it.

It should be fun, hope to see ya here, and put in a comment if there is anything you would like to see me post about.

Last prep before Cata.

4.0.3a is dropping this maintenance and with it comes the shattering. Zones change, new quests, Dala and Shatt will be ghost towns, new race/class combos, and more. The majority of what was promised in Cata is added except for some major items like new classes, new zones, and higher level professions.

One of the things I am saddest about is not getting my tiger mount from ZG. I have always loved the tiger mounts the best. I still have my blizzcon 08 bear that is my favorite land mount and I have my headless horseman's mount that I think looks the best under my DK.

As for looking forward, I think it would be a very smart idea to stockpile the high end herbs/ore/skins that professions use in the 425 to 450 range. Get them now while people are still in the areas farming and dump them a week into Cata when people aren't there. At about a week in most people who want to power through the leveling process will then look to powering up their professions. They will be able to jump through about 20 points from northrend items. I give it about 2 weeks of good sales before the prices drop then after about 2 months of everyone dumping their stock the scarcity will drive those prices up again.

If you don't want to stockpile, another good money maker in early Cata will be to have some type of gatherer. Ore/herbs/skins will be at a premium for the first few months until there are the majority of people at max level.

My personal plan is not to gather, but to purchase those mats at an inflated price so that I can make the best learned gear from my professions and sell them to the people, like myself who will be looking to push server firsts (or 5ths he he).

Since I had been moving I didn't get a chance to get to Org and set my hearth. Kinda sucks, but I got more important things going on at the moment.

Its been nice having a break these last couple of months and I will enjoy my next two weeks away from the game. With this I will be ready to go on the 7th when I get my collectors edition of the game at midnight. Luckily for me my time zone is one hour ahead of California so I have time to stand in line, get my game, and get home to change over to the official release by 1 am when it goes live for me.

Moving this week

I am moving to a new house this week so no wow really and not much to post.

I am only logging on every 3 days for about 15 minutes to do my zg run for my tiger mount. I checked out the elemental invasion bosses. They are fun, and a good way to get some justice points for 30 mins. They drop good ilvl 251 loot so if you aren't a raider you can get some upgrades before cata.

I did pick up a disgusting oozling pet for 8k and resold it the same day for 14k (after ah cut)

The week of blah.

I have not been motivated to be on WoW at all this week.

I got on for my ZG resets and still no cat mount. I got on for my Yogg 0 run, but it fell through because of lack of players on and some politics. I got on beta when we got new heroic raid gear premades, but we ended up not trying a raid because much of their stuff was bugged out.

In live I would still like to level a few toons up to 80 to be ready, Stockpile some mats that will help me level my professions right off the bat, and maybe get back to max justice points before the expansion comes out.

Recently one of my guildies asked if its faster to level through questing or dungeons. This expansion is different than any other because of a few things. First, all new dungeons have to be discovered, meaning you actually have to find the door to the place and get within 10 yards of it before you can ever go in it. Second quests are mostly phased, sometimes the area you quest in is too.

Dungeons: yes, you can get a lot of xp from dungeons and really all it takes to get into them is to fly to the dungeon door in an area to open it. Expect to waste an hour or two doing this. The random dungeon finder will keep dungeons locked if you don't meet the minimum ilvl requirement and it shows it right on the tool tip. In the beginning weeks of the expansion don't expect lots of people to be running dungeons till they hit 85. After a few weeks/months it may be feasible to level through dungeons, but at the start stick with questing.

Questing: they way they set up the questing experience in cata is completely different from how its been before. Questing now has what I like to call "nodes". A quest node is where there are 1 or more quest givers standing in one spot. They are linked in that they give you quests that are completable together. Usually its 2 npc's standing next to each other, one says go collect 10 pieces of trash from the ground. the other says go kill 15 litterers. What is different now is that they will give you only these 2 quests until you complete them. When you turn them in the ! pops up over one of their heads and you get another quest or 3. Turn those in and poof! more quests.

There are pros and cons to this.
Cons: The quest "chains" sometimes bottleneck down to one quest and if its broken or undo-able you are stuck. In beta I had a quest to kill 2 named guys. One was stuck under the world so the quest was broken. No more quest chain, no more new quests, I had to fly around and find another starter quest node. They fixed this quest in the last beta build and I completed it. OMG the quests unlocked after this one quest covered half the zone. That one broken quest shut off close to 1/4th of a level's worth of questing.
Pros: The story is more enjoyable since you have to run through it. The areas and quest givers are usually phased to a point so you have less competition for areas/items/kills. Also with the phasing you have to worry less about pvp simply from the fact that the enemy has to be in the same phase as you. The quests flow much better. If you are done at one node you are sent to another area where a node is. Sometimes right to the node of quest givers.

Now that blizz has said that they like the speed of leveling I am going to try again with a fresh transfer and see exactly what it takes.

Engineering in Cata (so far)

In the beta I got to 85 on my transferred dk to see how the leveling process was, and now I have leveled up engineering. I want to take some time to look at all the cool things you can get from engineering.

You can get:
Cogwheels
Goggles
Guns/Bows/Scopes
Belt/Glove/Cloak/Boot Attachments
Explosives
Trinkets
Non Combat Pets
Special Items

First is the new items: Cogwheels.
These are essentially engineering gems and can only go in a cogwheel socket. So far the only cogwheel sockets are on engineering made helms (goggles). While these are excellent helms, they will be obsolete by the time we are into the second tier of content, maybe even heroic first tier. Lets hope they put more cogwheel sockets on things. As of now in the beta cogwheels are bought by turning in a previously made engineering item like the new tackle box or engineering bag.

Now Goggles.
There is always goggles. Lets look at the dps plate ones.

Reinforced Bio-Optic Killshades
Binds when picked up
Head
2784 Armor
+301 Strength
+512 Stamina
Meta Socket
Cogwheel Socket ( 208 haste )
Cogwheel Socket ( 208 crit )
Socket Bonus: +20 Strength

Lets compare that with the best plate helm I could find on Wowhead. Its on par with the Tier 11 helm but has crit instead of expertise and the socket bonus gives haste instead of strength. Slightly better as a single item but will probably be skipped so we can use the tier helm for the bonus.

Helm of Maddening Whispers
Binds when picked up
Head
2784 Armor
+281 Strength
+512 Stamina
Meta Socket
Blue Socket ( 20 str / 20 hit )
Socket Bonus: +30 Haste Rating
Equip: Increases your critical strike rating by 168
Equip: Increases your haste rating by 228

321 str, 208 haste, 208 crit for the goggles vs. 281 str, 258 haste, 168 crit for the helm. With stat weights of 4.47 for str, 4.28 for haste and 2.19 for crit you get a score of 2780.63 for the goggles and 2728.23 for the helm.

This means that the goggles are better than your tier 11 helm and probably all first tier raid helms. Seeing as you can make these fairly easy as soon as you hit 525 engineering, this is a must have item.

Guns/Bows/Scopes
We finally can make bows YAY! These are on par with the goggles in terms of powerfulness. Meaning they will be useful up through entry level raids. Make em early for all those just leveling to 85 and then keep a small stock on the auction house throughout the expansion for those just getting to max level.

Blizzard does have a tradition of adding new scopes so hopefully we get some as the tiers progress. Hell, lets hope they give us more gun and bow recipes too.

Side note, with ammunition gone from ranged weapons we did loose one steady stream of income from engineering.

Attachments
Right now in beta I can only find glove and belt attachments. I expect to see parachute attachments for cloaks and boot attachments, probably rocket boot style ones like in wrath.

Gloves: The only stat boost attachement known right now is for intellect. I expect to see probably strength and agility at least added to that list. What we also have is an on use armor boost, health pot, or mana pot.

Belt: We have an on use dummy that taunts enemies, a damage shield, or an invisibility cloak that can be used out of combat. It works exactly like mage's invisibility and lasts for 10 seconds. Finally a DK with stealth!

Explosives
Right now the only explosives we have are a lock/door pick and a "bolt gun" that uses obsidium bolts engineers make as parts for other constructions. The bolt gun is an on use item that you have in your bags and acts like the saronite bombs in that when used it gives you a circle to click on the ground. It does a certain amount of damage in that area and interrupts casting.

Trinkets
We have the obligatory pet dragonling that will come out and fight for you like a guardian. Usually engineering trinkets are engineer use only and sub par so don't get your hopes up for anything good from this category.

Non Combat Pets
We got 2 great pets right off the bat. They are boe so you will probably get good mileage out of selling these depending on your server. There is a robot bunny and a mini fel reaver. Both will sell well. (Thanks mmo-champion.com for the pictures)




Special Items
This is where engineering hides its soul. Sometimes useful, sometimes weird, mostly items that make it fun to be an engineer.

Loot-a-rang: Use: Retrieves the loot from a nearby corpse. (10 Sec Cool down) Item you keep in your bag and gives you a much larger loot range.

Goblin Barbecue: The new raid feast. Its utterly amazing since it gives stamina and "another useful stat" It seems to give appropriate buffs. I always got strength and the rogue always got agility

Lure Master Tackle box: a 36 slot bag that holds AN-NY-THING related to fishing including the fishing chair, your poles, fish, lures, rings that can be fished up, gems that can be fished up, fishing daily rewards such as bags, items, pets. The list goes on and on. Expect to sell these slowly but steadily to fishermen

Electrostatic Condenser: This is either the crappiest or the best item in all of cataclysm for engineers depending on if you have gathering profession as your second profession or not. What it does is allows you to sometimes get volatile air from mining skinning or herbing. You have to be an engineer to use it.
Did I mention that volatile air is only otherwise dropped from 3 mobs in the game and will be super high priced? Oh and as an engineer you need it to make one of your parts that is used in most high level engineer items? If you can use this you will be rich from farming, if not you will curse those that can.


Looks like engineers got a lot of utility and gold making love this expansion. If utilized right this will probably be the best raiding profession (by a very slight margin). Not to mention it always has been the best PvP profession hands down.

What's the brown brotha?

Just another week getting closer to cataclysm brotha.

This week I fully neglected live WoW for the beta and catching up on tv that I downloaded but haven't seen yet.

A few things on live, the girlfriend got her 98th mount and finished the meta for hallow's eve. She is one step closer to that 100th mount.

I've decided to sell off all my surplus of sellable items and only stockpile things that will help me up my professions at the start of cata. Thinks like primordial saronite and titansteel for the first few levels of blacksmithing or a bank tab of inks for inscription. The idea of going for the insane title is dead. With two of the reputation grinds going away people are inflating prices on those mats to insane highs.

On to TV. I finally got around to watching the first 4 episodes of Lie to Me season 3. Such a great show. If you haven't seen it go check it out. Also the season premiere of Walking dead came out this week. Great acting, great writing, and if they stick to the storyline from the comic it was adapted from it will be a great long running series. Watch it if you like zombie/end of the world stuff.




On to the beta stuff. Don't look if you don't want to know about beta.



Mostly this week I took my main premade DK and leveled mining. I found this horrible bug where the client and the server have trouble talking to each other mostly when you are flying from one area to another and you get a fatal error. It was like the world was pvp'ing me for mining nodes. I did get to 525 mining eventually. The reason for this was to level blacksmithing and engineering so I could see what it takes and what was available for crafted stuff at the top levels.

We have 3 ores that are mineable in cata. Obsidium for hyjal and vashj'ir, elementium for twilight highlands and deepholm, and pyrite for twilight highlands and uldum.
Pyrite is the new rare ore and shares a spawn point with elementium in twilight highlands and uldum. I got about 1 spawn out of every 10 elementium spawns.
Elementium is super easy to get in deepholm and will be super super cheap on the ah after a week.
Obsidium will be the back breaker for all the ore driven professions. There is no great place to get it in bulk, its only in the leveling areas and tons of it is needed to level professions.

Engineering: Good leveling curve, don't need as much obsidium as blacksmithing, and there are some cool things that will make money like a loot-a-rang and a goblin barbeque. That barbeque is probably the best high level feast in the game right now and will be used in raids a ton.
With the obligatory goggles and some other cool flavor items like pets and fishing lures and new bows and guns, expect to be able to make better money off engineering than ever before.

Blacksmithing: OMG obsidium! I spent easily 2 thirds of this week getting obsidium to get to 500 in BS. Not 525 like I did in mining and engineering, but just 500. Even at 500 you still need lots of obsidium to level. Its crazy. Here is an example, almost everything from 475 and up needs 5 folded obsidium. Those 5 items take a full stack of obsidium ore. And thats usually for 1 point in BS. Figure you need a few thousand ore to level BS alone.
On top of that, at 500 you have to go buy your new recipies with either, 1 stack of elementium bars, 2 hardened elementium (equals 1 stack of bars) or 5 pyrium bars. Thats just for recipies not even to make the items.

All in all expect Blacksmithing to be a major pain in the ass to level, but expect the competition to not be super horrible in the first few months. Investing heavily in getting there first will reap you big profits when you do.

First Monday Post!

Ok so its Monday and as promised here is my weekly update post. The plan is to do this every Monday and throw in a bonus post every time I feel like it.

On to what I'm doing. The beginning of last week saw me trying to grind out wrathful pvp gear. I hate arenas (mostly cause I die too much) and I always found better use for my time than going to bg's. With 4.0 I found out that the highest tier of pvp arena gear is buy-able and usable without actually having arena points. I bought 2 pieces of wrathful and then went and spent some of my 7 thousand justice points on getting the rest of the entry badge pvp gear. Got a full set and gemmed and enchanted it. Final resilience rating: 820. I pulled up a blood pvp/random dungeon tank spec and went into some bg's to grind out some more gear.

I have to say bg's, at least, are fun now that I am hard to kill with about 30% pvp damage mitigation and my Shadowmourne that does tons of damage. I still refuse to arena.

I have a weekly, cross-guild Ulduar run where we kill Yogg with 0 keeper up to get the Mimiron's head mount. I still haven't won one but I am hopeful.

I was logging on every day to do the headless horseman daily, but I got the mount! Now I don't care about it so much because the only thing I am missing from that boss is the sword that throws out squashling guardians. It would be a cool sword to have but it would sit in the bank probably. Love the horse though.

I do log on to the AH every day and look for awesome deals. I buy razzashi raptors that are under 4k. I will hold on to these till cata where they wont drop ever again and sell them for 40k each or more. I expect to sell one about every 2 months but the markup is worth it. I also look for any mounts for sale and any recipes that I don't have for my engineering and blacksmithing.

I wanted to get my other gold making professions under control and to start on getting my bloodsail admiral and my insane titles. Those both got put on hold because of one thing.

I GOT IN THE BETA WOOT WOOT!
warning this section will probably contain cata spoilers.




I copied over a premade dk and my main. The first night I went on a guild run of one of the heroics, I forget which but it has dragons you fly and dragons you kill. This run was just me getting used to the play-style with our 81 talent outbreak. No impressions on the instance yet, but playing with outbreak makes it hard to switch to live and play without it.

The next night some of my guildies stopped playing League of Legends long enough to go do another 5 man. This time we did all of the new heroic Shadowfang Keep. It was a really good instance, although its tuned pretty hard. You have to CC a ton, not aoe ever, and make sure you are mitigating damage or self healing or the healer will be overwhelmed. All in all you have to be way more interactive and not just zerg the instance.

The rest of this week consisted of me checking out the leveling for 80 to 85. I have so far done Hyjal and Vashj'ir as much as possible. Each zone has a few key quests bugged which makes it impossible to move on. Cataclysm does this thing where quests don't show up unless you have done the previous ones. Its like the whole leveling experienced is a chain quest with lots of little extra off shoot quests. Its great until you get a bugged quest and have to go to another zone just to try to pick up the thread of the chain.

I am in all best in slot gear from ICC and only have 3 possible upgrades from the wrath expansion. I have not gotten one piece of loot from either of the starting zones that would replace any of my gear. Some of the pieces came close, so if you aren't in BIS gear then you will be getting upgrades in these zones.

I also believe the leveling is under-tuned. I can go in and chain kill mobs and not even worry about my health pool going down significantly let alone dying. I even was able to kill solo mobs with rez sickness. I can't believe they will let it stay this way although its nice to be able to run through the quests so I know what I'm doing when cata goes live.
End of cata spoiler stuff







Writing this post has given me some things I want to expand on, but I don't want to make this post super long. Expect a few bonus posts this week, I would like to write up my thoughts on leveling zones in cata and the Shadowfang Keep instance.

All in all its been a week of beta for me while I log on to try to snatch any super awesome deals on the AH (razzashi raptor anyone?) and farm for my zg mount.

1000 visitors

I just logged on and saw a nice big shiny number of 1000 visits from you guys. Its not 1000 new users, but it is unique log ons. I normally see between 1 and 5 new visitors a week and its nice to see people actually paying some attention to my ramblings.

I will make a full update on Monday (starting my regular posting schedule) but a quick update is that I just got onto the beta and have mostly ignored live this week. Its fun and pretty and all the things you would expect from beta.

Thank you all for lightening up my day just by coming here.

Going forward

Thx for the pics mmochamp. Finally a DK set that looks decent. We get to be diablo III


Looks like 4.0 has settled in. Blizzcon is this week and Cata is right around the corner. My guild has pretty much stopped raiding and most people are just taking it easy till the expansion.

Its time to figure out what I want to get done before December rolls around. For the blog I want to get to a more stable posting schedule so the plan is to start with posting every Monday night during or before maintenance. I would like to run updates of what I am doing ingame and what I see with the philosophy, interactions and attitudes in the game.

As for the game I do know that I want to get that tiger mount out of ZG, so that will keep going every 3 days. I also want that Mimiron's Head mount from Ulduar. I have a weekly run for that so keep your fingers crossed for me on that.

On the professions front, I have blacksmithing and engineering on my main and I have 80s with alchemy, enchanting, mining, and leatherworking all maxed. I have an alt that needs to get to 65 to get his jewelcrafting and inscription up to 450, not sure what level he will need for 525. On that same vein I need to set up my spreadsheets and snatch lists so I can automate the whole mess. Luckily the posting and crafting side of things only took like a day to get back on its feet.

I have never liked organized pvp. In the early days of ranks and bg's it was a super grind just to stay competitive. Then came arenas and dedication to an aspect of play I was just not that interested in. Plus I died a lot so pvp was never fun if I wasn't the one ganking in STV. With the wrathful gear now available without having to have a rating and resiliance changed to counter all damage from other players I am living longer in bg's solo and am pretty unkillable with a pocket healer. Fun times.

The last thing I am contemplating doing is getting the insane title. I already have the darkmoon faire rep up because of making so many greatness trinkets over the last year. After that ravnholdt is the next hardest and I have a rogue who can grind out the junkboxes. I also love the gordok ogre suits that you have to grind to get your goblin rep back and its fun to give em out in raids.

Gold making addons fixed

For those of you who missed out on making glyphs (or any other profession items after the patch) in bulk, good news some of our favorite addons and a few new ones have been updated for the patch. Links at the bottom of the post

After a long hiatus Kevmar who makes KTQ came back to update his addon. This thing is a godsend. It populates your profession interface with a set number of each item and even takes into account pricing, how many you have in your inventory and on alts. Its a must have for any bulk crafter.

Skillet is dead, however Lilsparky has come up with a replacement called gnomeworks and he updated his lilsparky's workshop which tells you at a glance if that item will be a profit if you make it from mats on the ah. Prices are populated by scanning the ah so they are only up to date if you scan regularly. The shopping list is broken right now but he is working hard to fix it. In the meantime you just have to click on the items to find out what mats you need. Its actually not too bad for glyph making.

Altoholic has gotten an update and is a must have if you craft on one toon and post on another. It now works just fine with KTQ and Gnomeworks.

Finally Zerotorescue has come up with a great replacement for QA3 (which is no longer supported) and it does all the same functionality. Expect regular updates from him as he is very active on the JMTC forums.

So all in all get and/or update these addons. KTQ, Gnomeworks, Altoholic, Lilsparky's Workshop for crafting, and Zeroauctions for posting and canceling undercuts. Don't forget Zerotorescue's other great addon Mail Opener. It saves you tons of time getting that mail back.

4.0... Glyph maker's apocalypse

If you do a quick browse through the gold making blogs around the interwebs, you will see two reactions to the 4.0 patch. First is OMG ALL MY ADDONS ARE BROKE / I CANT LOG ON AND MAKE GOLD. Second is Can't talk now too busy making gold hand over fist.

The main difference between the first and the second is how prepared people were for 4.0 to hit. If you were prepared you made gold. If not, well now you get to cry and go back to the grindstone.

I only prepared in one way. I stopped posting for the last two weeks and stockpiled my glyph stacks. On patch day I went to the movies with my girlfriend (the social network, not horrible) and posted when I got back. This was about the times raids were ending. I went to bed and checked my auctions 7 hours later.

13 thousand gold in the mailbox.

I then went and canceled my auctions and reposted what was undercut. I also noticed a few people bought out my entire stock of low priced glyphs so I went through and bought all the glyphs that were under 20g and would have more than a 5g jump if I bought out the lowest priced ones. If there were three sellers at 10g and 11g then the next was at 20g I would buy the low ones out. I spent 5 thousand gold so at this point I am down to 8 thousand.

In the 2 hours it took me to cancel, buy low, and repost I had pulled 3 thousand out of the mailbox. Running total: 16 thousand gained with 5 thousand spent and a new batch of glyphs on the AH. Now its time to go do it again.

Edit: It's slowing down. made 7.7 thousand for a total of almost 24 thousand gold in 2 days, and wonder of wonders, ATSW and KTQ play nicely. time to make some more glyphs.

Are you going to blizzcon?

Well, if you are you will see plenty of these.

I went to blizzcon in 08 and loved it. I seriously thought about going this year, but the money and timing just wasn't right in the 10 minutes that the tickets were on sale.

After my last post where I stated I wanted to keep raiding, my guild lost our 3 main tanks. Many people took this as an indication that it was time to take a break till Cataclysm comes out. I haven't raided in 2 weeks and its surprisingly ok. I still log on to see whats up and to do my ZG every 3 days.

Our guild got 10 beta invites from a contest, but I didn't get one. That probably means even less people showing up for our regular raid nights. I wanted one, but I am fine without it. I will probably enjoy the expansion better when I level through it for the first time in December.

For the next 2 months I think I am going to focus on getting my auction automation fully set. I want to have Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Engineering, Leatherworking, and Enchanting fully set up before the expansion so I can level those and get right into selling by the 2nd week of December.

A fast few months

In just over two months we get our new expansion CATACLYSM! With it comes a fresh start at raiding and accomplishments and grinding gear and all that we love about World of Warcraft.

After I got my Shadowmourne I felt a little defeated by the game. I felt like there was nothing left for me to do. I stuck it out and found out that I was no where near done with the expansion. I filled out my tier 10 set, got my ICC 10 drake, and killed Halion 10 hard mode. I still don't have a complete best in slot gear set, but I'm close. This just means I have a little something still to do until cataclysm.

With all that we are getting added in Cataclysm we are still losing a few things. Some hard mode achievement mounts (Mimiron's Head and Invincable) are changing from a 100% drop to a 1% chance to drop since the encounters are going to be trivialized by the health pools and gear scaling. Like I said in my last post ZG is going away and with it its mounts, pets, and recipies. And tons of the old world and lore is changing. Things will be disappearing and new things taking their places.

As for me, I still want to raid and I have 9 more tries at Mimiron's head and 21 more tries at the tiger mount in ZG. Lastly, I want to get my few high level alt's professions up so that I can get the gold making machine ticking on all cylinders.

Get into Zul'Gurub

With Cataclysm the vanilla raid instance of Zul'Gurub is going away. It's time to get back in there for fun and profit.

Most level 80's can solo the instance and the final boss is one of the easiest to kill if you have any type of self healing at all. If not bring one friend who can heal and you will be golden.

So, why would you want to get in there?

1. Mounts. there are two mounts that drop off two different bosses that will never be seen again. The tiger mount and the raptor mount. Highly coveted (especially if its the one only the other faction has access too otherwise) and actually good looking land mounts.

2. Tome of Polymorph Turtle. The only place to get it in the game is from the optional hydra boss in this instance. Boss goes away and so does the book. Not only that, you get an achievement for fishing up the boss in the first place.

3. Gold. Not only do the mobs and bosses drop a good amount of gold, they drop lots of items that people still use to level professions, like cloth and herbs. Also the raptors have a chance of dropping a razzashi raptor hatchling non combat pet. I guarantee those will skyrocket in price once the instance is gone. Finally bijous and coins drop like rain and they can be sold to people who want to farm the reputation to get exalted with the zandalar tribe before Cataclysm.

3. Feats of Strength. Both the killing of the end boss Hakkar, and getting exalted with the zandalar tribe are achievements now, but when the instance goes away they become Feats of Strength. Get it now or forever QQ your eyes out.

With less and less to do and the old ways of making gold starting to dwindle, Z'G is one of the best places to spend an hour or two. It's fun and profitable and it resets every 3 days.

Every time,

Every time I post something that is like an "end of the world" post, the next day Blizz comes along and fixes it.

Its not like they listen to me, its more like they wait till people like me make some noise then they yell "PSYCHE!" and reverse position.

They are just playing with my emotions I tell ya.

Anyway, the day after my last post Blizz announced a talent in the unholy tree where Runic Empowerment no longer refreshes a random rune, but speeds up your rune regeneration by 100%. Predictable rotations at faster speed for unholy and super fast proc decisions for frost.

Blood tanking still has the random runic empowerment, but it wont affect them so much because most of their runic power goes for rune strikes not death coils. The main thing they need to fix for blood tanks is that so many of their cooldowns rely on runes. The quickest way to get a rune is to throw a death coil, but you still have to hope for the right type of rune. If blizz fixes that aspect of dk's I would be satisfied going into cata.

And by the way, the new system for dks will definitely put a bigger gap between the good ones and the bad ones.

Dk's just got messy

4.0 is on the ptr right now and all the class changes (up to this point) are on there. Glutton for punishment that I am I downloaded all 15 gigs of it and copied over my DK.

I chose my talents and set up my bars and proceeded to barf diarrhea of a "rotation" all over the ebon hold dummy.

First I purposly decided to not train runic empowerment so that I could try to see how close to live the new rune cooldown system plays.

Even with RE not trained the "rotation" is clunky to say the least. With SS only costing one U rune and festering strike (FES) costing B/F runes it becomes a mess to start out your rotation. You have to PS,IT, to get up diseases then you want to SS x2 for damage then you have a FES to use a B/F rune set then you have a B rune left over. OK so you BS ONCE and never touch the button again. How pointless is that?

OH and don't forget that Death Rune Mastery (each spec has its own name for it) is passive so it cant be skipped.

The problem with this is that you will always have a single strike that hits the hardest and want to use your death runes for that strike. That means that any "rotation" you had went from 10 seconds and repeat to about 30 seconds. Try to memorize a rotation that long I dare ya.

Now enter Runic Empowerment. HOLY CRAP! It's like a chimp is behind your computer randomly mashing buttons on a console hoping for a food pellet to drop out of a chute. The only difference is that instead of food pellets for the monkey it makes A RANDOM RUNE reset its cooldown.

So bye bye "rotation" and hello "priority". Even then its crap because you know that the priority would be Diseases up, DC if sudden doom or you're gonna rp cap, SS, FES, DC. What it turns out to be is every time you DC it pocs RE so you hope an U rune shows up so you can SS. God forbid a F or a B rune shows up. You have to see if the other of the B/F pair is up so you can FES. If not is a U up and is it close to time to refresh diseases? Do you wait for the other of the pair to show up to do a FES. Oh and did I mention that FES extends your disease time by 6 seconds? Oh and even better you can have a Death rune pop up. GREAT! so now you got to decide if you want to hold that D for a FES or use it right now for a SS. Choose wrong and you have runes sitting there not being used.

But, don't hesitate! If you take too long to decide its a dps loss. Split second decisions for hours on end, how fun. NOT!

Runic Empowerment is a mess. It was a good idea to give us a way to shorten our rune cool downs, but the randomness of it will make for huge swings of good and bad damage. I hope they address it before it goes live.

In Memorium

Some of you may know that I live in the USA and work for a major airline.

Today is 9/11 and I would like to say that no matter where you stand on the responses from both (many) sides of this tragedy, we should all send out good wishes and sympathy for those who have lost friends and family on that day and since.

Still working on that hard boss

We have been clearing ICC on Wednesdays and Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays are left to try for RS HM or if the composition isn't there then break into 10s.

Well, guess what happens. Farm content is clear and then people have other stuff to do. My totalitarianistic mele section leader decided this week that we will be ignoring ICC until we down RS (I say YAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!)

Mostly we have not been able to get solid tries on the boss because we are lacking in the right composition of tanks to healers to dps.

In other news, I was part of our 2nd or 3rd RS 10 HM kill getting my achieve. After the post about getting burnt out feeling like there was nothing left for me to do I got an ironbound proto, ICC 10 man drake, ICC 10 LK HM kill with bane title, and a RS 10 HM kill. I still have RS 25 and LK 25 HM kills to go and hope to see them before the expansion.

Also with ZG going away I am desperately trying to get my tiger mount. Since I am running that every 3 days I am now running the druid boss in sethekk halls and attumen in kara for those mounts too. If you run ZG make a point of killing the fish boss for tome of polymorph turtle. There is a good chance of that item going away also so I am hoarding all I can for that eventuality. They will only go up in price.

Finally a hard boss

T.o.C. was cake, Icc is nerfed to hell, and even when it wasn't the mechanics were very forgiving for bad play.

Now we have Ruby Sanctum and Halion.

Thank God for a real challenge. The trash needs you to cc and tank correctly, the mini bosses don't just fall over when you fart at them and OMG HALION!

All in all he has some straightforward mechanics. Don't drop void zones on or near the raid. Don't get hit by meteors. Don't get hit by lasers. And since he is a dragon, don't get breathed on or tail whipped. And that is just normal mode.

Realistically an average raiding guild should be able to pull together and kill him in normal mode. Our first kill lost about half the people by 3rd phase but the rest were able to put our chins down and grind the rest out without mistakes.

And not making mistakes is what this boss is all about.

In hard mode you have only 2 extra mechanics. When meteors drop you get some adds that need to be aoe'd and you have 2 lazers instead of 1. The dps needed is less forgiving so you really cant lose anyone. It's all about not screwing up in your individual job.

We have spent about 16 hours on hard mode halion so far. By far our biggest problem is that he parry hastes. We can handle a 30k or 40k hit on our tank. When we get 2 of those hits in less than 1 second we can't keep the tank alive. In normal mode this isn't as much as a problem because all the mele in twilight realm can stay on his back foot and not get hit by the lazer. In hard mode mele has to stand close to his middle and if they move past the mid point they can get parried and then the boss kills the tank.

Blizzard usually waits a few months then does something to nerf the encounter so that more and more guilds can kill it. My best guess is that they will turn off parry haste and then you will see a huge surge in hard mode kills.

In the end hard mode halion is the type of boss who separates an average guild from a top server guild.

It's been a week

I just realized I haven't posted in a week. My attitude has vastly improved. We had 2 full days of wipes on progression last week. We are looking at the same this week. We completed ICC in one day, all HM except for LK.

Oh and I got to do the last 2 achieves for my ICC 10 drake.

More good news is one of the guilds who are in front of us in progression decided to quit "raiding" and only doing gdkp runs. Another guild who was close but behind us in progression has kind of imploded. Because of these things we have gotten some new recruits who can actually perform really well. Not only that we have enough people to sit and sub instead of barely having enough to fill the raid.

Going this way I think its just a matter of time before we kill all the HM's left in wrath and get the rest of the hard to do achieves.

Curse of the Legendary

There is a phenomenon that happens to people who get a legendary item. They get burnt out and quit or take a break from the game.

If you read this blog then you know I recently got a legendary weapon. I swore that I wouldn't be one of those people. I have huge guild loyalty. I have tons of love for the game. In the 5 years I have been playing this game I have never gotten burnt out.

Well, guess what. It's happening to me. I am getting burnt out for the first time since this game was launched.

I find myself frustrated with people who refuse to follow strategies. With people who have negative or selfish attitudes. We have people who refuse to participate when we show the new recruits our strategy on Sindragosa. They go afk, or stand in the wrong place which just adds to the confusion. We have people who say in vent "lets just go already" when we haven't even explained our strat yet. People who cry about getting yelled at for not following the strat that the officers layed down. We even have people who just refuse to follow the strat because they can get better dps and let other people clean up the mess.

I'm frustrated with poor play. In myself and in others. I live log to World of Logs so I can evaluate my performance after every boss. It's been a while since I have ranked in the top 200 and I can't figure out why. My gear isn't perfect best in slot, but my execution is damn close to perfect on most fights (especially easy ones like festergut and DBS) but I still don't get rankings. Usually I do rank in the 80^th or 90^th percentile of the WoL logs, so I know I am an exceptional player. However I see people in our raids who on a regular basis are in the 40^th or less percentile. They don't try to get better either. They are content to just get carried to gear, and by what I have seen we are content to do so.

I'm frustrated with officers who aren't strict with screw ups. We use EPGP loot system and are supposed to give out deductions for things like not posting when people can't make a raid, or when they keep screwing up after being told not to. These deductions are rarely handed out and when they are it's incredibly inconsistent. This week I was hit with a deduction (fully deserved I was screwing around on blood princes) but the people who completely ignored the strat on Lady Deathwisper by not switching to adds didn't even get noticed. We haven't hit someone for a no post/no show in months.

I'm frustrated with the lack of push for progression. We still have hard mode Lich King and hard mode Ruby Sanctum to kill on 25 man progression. Instead of pushing for those we kill LK on normal and split to 10 mans so we can do those hard modes with 25 man gear. We are a 25 man guild and we used to put progression nights first in the week. Now we are lucky if we get a few tries before it goes to normal so we can "get people loot" as I hear in vent.

I used to worry about none of these things. I was a good little dps'er (or healer back in the day). I came in, tried to improve every time, and didn't focus on others play. My focus was on personal improvement, and guild progression.

I wanted to achieve. When things like the rusted/iron-bound drakes come out, Or the undying/immortal titles I want to achieve those. And I want to do it sooner rather than later. I want to show that I have the ability to do something that others can't and do it when its hard.

And this brings me to the root of my problem. There is nothing really I can really achieve anymore. The thrill of the chase is gone.

I raid because I want to do the next thing. I want to kill that boss I haven't killed before. I want to get the perfect gear set for my spec. I want to rank higher. I want to kill those farm bosses more perfectly.

Well, I killed the bosses. I got the gear. I've ranked, even held first in the world for 3 weeks. And its not in my hands to kill bosses better its a group effort and my group isn't putting forth the same type of effort that I feel we should.

Most of my personal reasons to do the most enjoyable thing in the game for me are gone or dwindling. The only strong reasons for me to stick around are social ones. I truly enjoy most of the people I raid with. I feel strong loyalty to the guild and continue to help kill bosses that do nothing for me so that others can get loot and have a good raid night (I need exactly zero gear from ICC other than 2 of the 277 tokens).

I realize that much of what I am frustrated with is par for the course in a server 5^th guild. You should expect this. What a server 5^th guild does is take a group of people who have differing abilities and goals and pulls them together to kill the bosses. It may be a sloppier kill than a server 1^st guild but its still a kill.

So the bottom line is, yes I am a little burnt out. However I enjoy raiding and the people I raid with. If my outlook has changed because I am no longer chasing, but have achieved my goals, then its something I have to come to terms with.