Best in Show

 

While we are struggling for numbers for 25 mans, and even with several DPS on fire we're not getting it done in the later bosses. Tonight however, worked out nicely for me, with a couple of long awaited items finally mine!

[Precious's Ribbon]!!!!!! I'm now "Best in Show" along with Jondy of course... and erm... Oddox... and well a few other toons. It was even better to win it in a 25 man, since there's so much competition for the roll.

Next up, THE kablam melee DPS trinket, [Deathbringer's Will] finally dropped (yet again). The first time I won it, I felt I had to give it up to one of our hunters... the second time, Oddox had me beat on DKP. Finally it was mine! It is the perfect compliment to my gear, bringing me to just a hair shy of the ArP cap with ArP food, and even taking my DPS set over the 6k gearscore mark.

Oddox grabbed the slimes for me on Rotface, and on Festergut I was able to put the trinket to good use, only being beaten out by rogues! Happy days.

100,000 gold

 

While I haven’t blogged a lot recently, that day has finally come! I was astounded when I sold [Ikfirus’ Sack of Wonder] on behalf of the guild for 25k, more than I had ever owned between all my toons soon after ICC was released. I had heard about players with over 100k, and after some googling... players who were “gold capped” (214748g36s47c is the maximum gold on a single toon (since gold is stored as an unsigned 32 bit integer)) and even bloggers that have marched onto 1 million gold.

So I started to set my sights a little higher. The first thing I did was to expand my craftables spreadsheet with the usual high volume markets. Leg patches, drums, meta gems, spellthread, vellums and fort scrolls. I also resurrected my inscription trade, thanks to a fantastic addon Quick Auctions 3 which deals with the glyph market very well.

The next job was identifying toons that could cover the professions that I hadn’t leveled yet. Jondayla has a leatherworker, so I immediately put her to work. The volume of regular borean leather she has schmunched into heavy leather over the last few months is epic. Thanks to Moonspirit for her Moonshroud specialty and Therepoman for his Spellweave (Zenborg gets double Ebonweave). Other than that I had all the crafting professions covered (now with a Gnomish AND a Goblin Engineer).

I almost forgot! A special mention to Jondayla for transmuting gems and titanium for me for ages! I forgot about it until I sent the mats for 60 meta gems (edit: which came back as 66 meta gems) just now.

Then I got to work. I had already set up thresholds to watch for flask, potion and belt buckle materials for the guild bank. So it wasn’t a lot extra to add to my morning AH scan to grab the rest. I was already used to spending between 20 - 30k per month for the guild, so I relished the opportunity to start buying in larger volumes for myself as well. I did need to grab a couple of quick macros so that I could buy 4k gold worth  of leather in a single sitting without boring myself too much.

Then the coin came rolling in. The high volume items (including bullets) have just kept on trucking, with the ICC craftables providing some excitement [like when cloth pants sell for 2.5k profit even while prices are deteriorating].

I think my attraction to coin generation is primarily that it is something that I can do on my own. While I have a fantastic group of crafters who help out, I can mail them mats and have stuff crafted whenever it suits them... you can’t mail a raid ID and have someone’s return combo DPS / fire avoidance returned to you later on. I’m not a big quester, I only like to level in bursts... and rep grinds are mostly painful at best. While farming I can’t keep from keeping muttering the mantra, “Time is money, friend”. So while coin making is one of those necessities, it’s the most fun solo aspect of the game for me. The other bonus is that it can be done in small time slices, and I can queue up smelting 10 minutes worth of saronite and just go AFK. Having a spreadsheet to track profitability great fun too!

So now I’m all cashed up for Cataclysm, but I haven’t quite decided on a coin strategy yet. I could blow it all trying for a realm first profession, but if people in the US get to log in hours in advance it might be a no go. The summer months are very busy real life months for me, so Wrath might repeat itself and the coin dwindles away as outside of raiding and the odd daily there isn’t a lot of time for much else.

To celebrate I made Borgelmir a pair of [Boots of Kingly Upheaval] since he is generally tanking these days and ArP on all the T10 Death Knight makes a unholy DK want to cry.

9/12 Heroic ICC 10 man

We finally saved Dreamwalker and killed Princes in heroic ICC. We’ve been moving through the achievements too, which have been a lot of fun (including getting Once Bitten, Twice Shy achievement on heroic Blood Queen for one of our DPSers).

The Putricide achievement benefits from speed, so Kal switched to Body and Soul mode, and I handed out our trademark Potions of Awesome. Everyone did a great job kiting the Gas Cloud, and having a mage and rogue was a great asset for the transitions.

We tried something new with Heroic Dreamwalker going with 4 healers. We turned the screws on the 4 DPS so it was more challenging to keep the ads under control, and the healers had to play extra nice in order to share the orbs in the nightmare amongst 3 toons. Once we got the new strategy together, the stacks for healers were smaller but when you have 3 healers with up to 20 stacks and heroism, Valithria starts feeling better quite quickly.

Heroic Princes seemed like a breeze when we knocked them over. The beach balls were under control and people were relaxed enough to give me grief about positioning that not only punted a mage but Jondy as well. I pleaded “I’m busy gathering purple orbs” but they wouldn’t hear it.

So we are now 4 achievements away from our ICC 10 drakes. PP and Sindy hard modes as well as the Sindragosa and Lich King achievements.

Is a free emblem of frost ever free?

If you haven't answered NO to the above question, go and spend some time with goblins in Booty Bay.

Time is money, friend.

Sister Svalna, or more commonly known as the FREE emblem mini boss, lays in wait just before Valithria Dreamwalker and she does indeed drop an [Emblem of Frost].

In a partially decimated ICC 25 pug, it took 8 1/2 minutes to clear the trash (which drops no loot) and kill Svalna. She rewarded us with 7g35s29c and an EoF.

The first major assumption is that you don't need EoFs for gear. If you do, and you've done your daily, your weekly and both lots of VoA... I highly recommend killing her. The second tiny assumption is that no BoE epic drops when she goes down.

On Dath'Remar at the minute, you can pick up [Primordial Saronite] for around 400g. With 23 frosties per saronite, that makes one frostie worth only 17g40s.

So this one emblem wonder is worth 175g per hour.

Conclusion: Killing Sister Svalna is actually not as horrible as I thought. Apologies all for my previous ranting and cursing.

P.S. That's still no excuse to fold a raid when you could go and kill Princes instead. Don't be a wuss.