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.