Back to the gold making

It's been a while since I concentrated on making gold. I have more than enough gold to be comfortable so I haven't grinded out the ah stuff in a while. At most I have been posting glyphs about once a week for a few months now.

I have only been on the selling side of things for those few months because I had a stockpile of about 10 thousand ink of the sea. Last week I noticed my profit margin was way up. I decided to take a look at why that might be. I found that herb prices were sky high compared to what I was paying when I made my stockpile.

Low level herbs were about 4g a stack, now they are at 17g. High level herbs were at 12g per stack now 24g. And they have been staying that way for weeks now. Something is up.

I only see prices like this for a week or so after blizz hands out mass bans to gold farmers. Usually the prices come down as the farmers get toons up to the level they can farm again.

So what is happening now? Why wont the prices drop back? The answer is Battle.net and Warden 2.0. Now that blizzard has a solid way to identify and ban farmers we are seeing markedly less of them around. Less farmers = less competition. Less competition = higher prices.

Now lots of people see the higher herb prices as a bad thing. They see the cash cow limping along and not making the mountains of gold that it once was. Those of us goblins who see the wind blowing have already adjusted accordingly.

For instance: When I made my stockpile of inks, the mats cost came out to 80s or 2g12s for each ink of the sea depending on what I did with the snowfall inks. At the time I was making a profit off the DMF cards so it was the 80s mark. I could sell a glyph for 1g31s and still make a (miniscule) profit.

If I were to buy herbs now at 17g and 24g a stack my ink price would be about 1g60s or 4g depending on if I could sell DMF cards at a profit for the lower price. I cant so, my new glyph price is 4g per ink and any DMF cards I sell is pure profit.

Add 50s for each parchment and my glyph prices to break even used to be 1g30s (if my DMF cards sold which they did). Now its 4g50s per glyph with any profit from DMF cards as extra free income.

Big hit right? wrong. Since everyone has to pay these herb prices and no one can make a profit over mats costs on DMF cards, we are all in the same boat. Anyone selling under this price will lose money and eventually have to quit. The good thing is that those who haven't figured this out yet are falling by the wayside. Glyph prices are going up and with them the profit margins are too.

The biggest beauty of the whole thing is that I still have about 5 thousand inks in the bank that I bought (as mats) at about 2g each and my new bottom line reflects the current prices at 4g. If a glyph sells at my lowest price I still make 2g profit over what I payed in materials.

Bottom line is I love warden and blizzards efforts to eliminate bots and gold farmers. Sure the cheap mats are gone, but so are the part time competition and the quick buck people who don't want to put the work in. Less people who are trying for a cut means bigger slices for those of us who can still work the market.

It may just be time to reexamine whatever profession you have to see if some items have become profitable again now that less people are in the markets.

Shadowmourne at last

It took 10 weeks, but I finally got my Shadowmourne.

Week 1 of Unholy

As blood, I had my attack priority down. I was about as close to perfect rotation I could be while still being human and having lapses in concentration.

I used to rank in the top 200 on world of logs about every week on a few fights at least. Lately I haven't gotten ranked at all. I have been in the high 90s in percentage of the #200 spot, but I attribute this to not having all bis items and no shadowmourne.

This week as unholy I made it to about 80 or 90 percent of that #200 rank. Since WAY more dk's are unholy I am betting that the top 200 all have shadowmourne and close to bis.

I also am still trying to get the rotation down perfect so that 80-90 percent scores will just go up.

Taking all this into account, I am pulling about 1.5k more dps in unholy than I was in blood. I still think blood is a more fun play-style, but in a world were a 10dps upgrade is worth paying for, you just cant justify not playing uh as a 2h spec.

In other news we downed H prof putricide for the first time this week. Sindra is all that is left before we hit our heads on the steel reinforced brick wall that is H lich king.

Yes, we're all individuals! ... I'm not.

I used to be an individual. Now I am a follower. Not because I want to be but because my mele section leader made me.

See, I'm a DK. I was blood and loving it. I am now Unholy. Boo hoo, woe is me. I was made to spec into the higher dps tree. I could go into the reasons why blood is a good spec, but when you raid it comes down to min/max and the numbers are just showing that Unholy is way better than Blood.

I was great as blood. A big fish in a little pond. I looked around at wws and wol and couldn't find another blood dk that pulled as much dps as me on my server. I used to rank in the top 200 in the world until those ranks got populated with Shadowmourne wielding DK's. In fact I was the #1 Blood DK in the world for a bit on festergut 10. the tank and spank fight in ICC. This was when the ICC buff was only at 5%



None of that matters. With the change to Scourge Strike and the ICC buff gone above 15% Unholy is pulling farther and farther away. It is the best 2h dps a DK can run. Frost DW is a close second if you don't have SM.

Well, I am getting SM next week (most likely, only a few shards left) so UH is my lot in life.

Might as well get used to it though. In Cataclysm blood is the tanking tree and there will be no such thing as blood dps.

Oh by the way, in the video, verity is played by the woman who pulls Brian out of the window at the end.

Beta opened, NDA lifted

I will not be posting the same stuff you can find everywhere else. Its everywhere else I don't need to copy paste it here.

I will however be posting anything that I feel is going to be relevant to raiding guilds as I see it and get a feel for it.

On another note, I haven't posted anything on making gold in a while, because I have been happily plugging along with my gold mine that is inscription. Just about every day I go and cancel/repost my glyphs about 2 hours before most raids start, then I restock the ones that are sold. Then I go and raid or if its an off day I watch tv or something outside the game. From this I have been pulling about 3 to 5k gold out of the mailbox every day and with the amount of mats I have stocked up I can keep going for about another 40 days before restocking mats.

I had spent about 35k on bags so I would have all 24 slotters and am about halfway to replacing that

Much less fail this week (so far)

Tonight was the first night that Ruby Sanctum was available. Of course we went in to try and kill the new dragon.

We downed him and got the server 7th kill. Kind of sweet irony that it was 7th and not 5th.

Then we went to ICC and killed the first 4 bosses on heroic. That's right, the boss that deserved her own post last week was downed with only one wipe and that wipe was at 1%. We did use a new (to us) strat. We kept her in the middle of the room instead of on the stairs you come in on. That may have helped but what was the deciding factor was the ability of people to dodge ghosts this week.

Hell we even did so good on dodging ghosts that on the kill we only had one person die.

Back to Ruby Sanctum. This raid is at the same time, the easiest boss out there and the hardest. It is a gift to raiders and a bane to pugs. Hell it is so easy for raiders that we killed him with 1/3 of our raid dead for half the fight.

Ruby Sanctum is an obvious gift to raiders as an incentive to not quit raiding until Cataclysm comes out. It is what I call a Retard-Check boss. If you are being a retard then you will not kill the boss. If you can do 3 or 4 easy things and dps/heal/tank as a secondary job then you will down the boss.

How is it a gift to raiders? Well, its one hell of an easy boss if you have people who can stay out of void zones, dodge fire and lasers, and communicate on when to slow down or stop dps in 2 separate "rooms" in the instance at the appropriate time. Do this and you get loot. And not just any loot. As a dps dk there is 3 pieces of loot that is by far Best In Slot. And the trinkets are amazing for all classes.

The other less obvious boon to raiders is that this instance really shines a spotlight on the people in your raids who are holding you back. If you see the same person die over and over again in this instance you can bet they are the same ones who keep causing wipes in the other raids. This instance is easy if you do your job. I can't say it enough.

Why raiders and not pugs? Because to kill Hallion you need to have a group of non retards. When you pug you get a few good players and the rest are mostly retards. Ruby Sanctum 25 will not be able to be pugged by many many groups on the server you are on. There is just too many things where a person can fail.

So all in all we left enough of the fail at the door to kill the new boss and put an old boss on the farm status she should have been on a long time ago. Hope the rest of the week goes as well.

Heroic Lady Deathwhisper = Pac Man

There is 1 rule to this boss. 1 rule only.

Rule 1. RUN AWAY FROM GHOSTS!!!

We call her the pac man boss cause you need to always be running from ghosts. Everything comes secondary to that.

Kill adds? Run from ghosts first!

Interrupt the boss when she casts frostbolt volley? Run from ghosts first!

Move the boss to a safe place? Run from ghosts first!

Put crowd control on the Mind Controled raid members? Ok do this while you are runing from ghosts!

Pick your nose? Run from ghosts first!

We have killed her before in heroic. It was always a mess. Last night we tried to kill her on heroic but we seemed to keep forgetting rule #1. We tried 6 times to kill her on heroic before changing to normal and still failing at Rule #1 but since it was normal she got dead.

WoL conveniently has a death log that logs the last 50 actions on each death. That usually equates to between 5 and 10 seconds of play. Out of those 6 tries here is the breakdown of how many times people died where not runing from ghosts was a contributing factor.

DK 1, Tank on adds. 2 out of 5 deaths

DK 2, DPS. (this is me) 2 out of 5 deaths

DK 3, DPS. 2 out of 6 deaths

DRUID 1, Healer. 7 out of 11 deaths

DRUID 2, Mele DPS. 1 out of 7 deaths

HUNTER 1. 0 out of 2 deaths

HUNTER 2. 2 out of 4 deaths

MAGE 1. 2 out of 4 deaths

MAGE 2. 2 out of 3 deaths

PALADIN 1. Healer. 4 out of 7 deaths

PALADIN 2. Healer. 3 out of 9 deaths

PALADIN 3. Ret. 1 out of 6 deaths

PALADIN 4. Ret 3 out of 5 deaths

PRIEST 1. Healer. 2 out of 7 deaths

ROGUE 1. 1 out of 5 deaths

ROGUE 2. 1 out of 6 deaths

SHAMAN 1. Healer. 3 out of 8 deaths

SHAMAN 2. Mele DPS. 3 out of 5 deaths

WARLOCK 1. 2 out of 4 deaths

WARLOCK 2. 4 out of 6 deaths

WARLOCK 3. 2 out of 4 deaths

WARRIOR 1. Mele DPS. 2 out of 5 deaths

WARRIOR 2. Tank on boss. 2 out of 6 deaths

WARRIOR 3. Tank on boss. 1 out of 6 deaths (got hit on 4 tries but healed to full before death on 3)

That is a grand total of 54 out of 136 deaths that had a ghost contributing, from 6 wipes. 40% of the deaths came from being hit by the ghosts. If we could have avoided these ghost deaths then I know we could have killed her and gotten me some shiny new boots.

If you ever get in, or in now, a top end guild who tries Lady Deathwhisper on 25 man hard mode and want to be considered a good player...

REMEMBER RULE 1. RUN AWAY FROM GHOSTS!!!