Last Minute Wrath: Glory of the Hero

In the category of 'things I'd kinda forgotten to finish' is Glory of the Hero. I knocked it off today with an 11 minute stint on Gal'darah for Share the Love.

I think I've still got some questing in Icecrown to finish off... little dungeons to do... and if I think to long about it I'm sure my list will no longer afford me that 'break' before Cataclysm hits.

Crafting: Maximising your AFK time

Milling herbs can sometimes be tedious... but aside from minimusing WoW and doing something else while you facroll your mailling macro, you can't escape that one keypress per action limitation that's been imposed.

Creating Inks from pigments can be equally tedious... but you can be AFK! So make sure you really fill up those 4 inscribing bags I know you all keep on your inscriptionists (and some more for the bank) and just let it roll.

Kingslayer Wrathborg

Today was finally the day I got the Lich King down without raid leading or putting the group together, and Wrathborg walked away with a Lich King kill.

The raid started off well enough, with 6 bosses on heroic mode going down with only a couple of missteps. I was pleased enough with my Saurfang DPS of just shy of 14k, but unfortunately a hunter's distracting shot messed up that last little push under 10%.

I walked away with a ton of uncontested loot, but was pleased with the [Precious's Putrid Collar] to upgrade the Onyxia neck. I also picked up a 264 Axe, 264 Fist Weapon and 251 Sword to give me plenty of weapon options for leveling in Cataclysm. I even grabbed the bow from the Lich King, 'cause it looks kinda awesome.

After the initial slaughter, the raid lead had to leave... and it took a very long time to reorganise the group and get going again. Unfortunately there's still some misconceptions about the "flexible" raid lockout system, and the group (despite at least two of us protesting (and explaining that it works like this by design)) spent at least 45 minutes trying to incorporate another toon who had done heroic mode bosses with a different group, and continue on with heroic Putricide. Once they came to their senses (or just gave up trying to circumvent the raid lockout design) we decided to soldier on with some achievements.

Nausea and Portal Jockey later, we had a couple of goes at All You Can Eat, but even with three tanks (I hadn't even considered this strategy before we had twice baked a Sindragosa souffle) it wasn't going anywhere.

So to the rescue game a delightful enhancement Shaman, Jorgie (Jondy's shaman) and we beat the dragon into submission and had our way with the Lich King. Jorgie defiantly pumps her fist and celebrates the Fall of the Lich King!

King Dred: 455 skinning?

Oh come on!

Milling Goldclover

Yesterday, Goldclover hit 65s on Dath'Remar in bulk, and I hadn't seen the price even close to that since pre-4.0.1. A fantastic chance to not only make some coin, but get a decent sample size for determining yield.

Ink of the Sea / Mill : 1.24 (1.48 for Adder's Tongue)
Snowfall Ink / Mill : 0.14 (0.25 for Adder's Tongue)

Absolutely awful for Snowfall Ink... which is usually the bane of an Inscriptionist's workshop, however I'm trying to stockpile it, since I have an ink exchange program happening as well as churning out those cards for some reason. /winkyface

Sticking with the assumption that Ink of the Sea's market value is half of Snowfall Ink... You want to make sure you are picking up Goldclover at 3/4 of the price of Adder's tongue to get the same value from milling it.

Base Price of Glyphs

I thought I'd a post out there for all the struggling Inscriptionists trying to make a living since another golden era of coin making has tapered off as the glyph market becomes stable after patch 4.0.1. Also, for my friend Moordenar, who is resistant to the idea of glyphs costing more than 10g.

First some basic assumptions from the current economy on Dath'Remar.

Market Prices:

Ink of the Sea (IotS): 4g50s
Snowfall Ink (SI): 9g
Adder's Tongue: 1g - 1g50s

Finally herb prices are dropping significantly enough to really start cranking out some inks.

Yield from millling Adder's Tongue

 I have tested the results of milling Adder's Tongue over 382 mills (yes, that's 1910 herbs and about 2k gold worth at the time) have have:
IotS/Mill: 1.48
SI/Mill: .25

Remember, that is ink per mill, not pigment.

Total Market Value of one Mill

Using the current market values, 6g68s worth of IotS and 2g27s worth of SI for a total of 8g95. So the markup on the 5g of herbs (at 1g/ea) from milling is 79%.

If you've ever annoyed your wife by continuously hitting a key (with the edge of the WoW window barely visible in the corner of the screen) while you are watching some TV together... that's really not a whole lot. However, this morning there was only 40 IotS at or below that market price, and I could plonk down over 2k gold for Adder's Tongue that would net me over 640 IotS, you just gotta mill those herbs.

Getting to the cost of Ink of the Sea

Now that I have the value of a single mill, and the relative value of both products, I can jam that back into the total cost of a single mill (5g @ 1g/ea for herbs) and divide by the yield to get:
Cost of IotS: 2g51s
Cost of SI: 5g03s

So milling herbs is generally significantly cheaper than the current market price of inks. Good news. Now how about those glyphs?

The mark up on Glyphs

A glyph costs at most 1 Resilient Parchment (40s) and 3 IotS (2g51s) for a total of 7g94s. So what's a reasonable markup based on getting those herbs at 1g/ea? I'm going to propose that if you buy a glyph for less than 16g, please send your Inscriptionist a lovely thankyou note.

Time is Money, Friend! Purchasing herbs, milling them, creating the inks, scanning the AH, selecting which glyphs to make, making those glyphs, listing them on the AH, getting the 90% of your glyphs that don't sell out of the mail and relisting those glyphs takes a lot of time. Even with with a slick set up, lots of delightful addons and maximising your AFK time for parts of the process, it's reasonably involved.

So it's only recently that the herb prices have dropped this low on Dath'Remar, and now that many toons have their glyph requirements sorted, things have certainly stabilised. I currently have over 500 glyphs on the AH, and aside from Glyph of the Wild.... my most expensive glyph is only 31g42s with the majority sitting squarely in that 15 - 25g range, which is what I'd like to call a modest mark up for much needed service to all of Azeroth.

Heroic DF$#@%ingO

Twitchie has been enjoying destruction since the patch, while straddling the affliction and destruction trees is a little awkward (especially with such little legs). Along with destruction, I've revamped my UI, and started using NeedToKnow as my timer mod, which handles all of buffs, debuffs and spell cooldowns. Conflagrating with confidence is the key to gnomish destruction.

I'm also enjoying the change in flavour between the specs. What attracted me to affliction was that as a master of shadow damage and dots, I was kin to the shadow priest. I would destroy my enemies from the inside out with crippling damage over time, while brutally assaulting them with my nukes.

Destruction is kinda different. It's like I'MA SET SOME $#@% ON FIRE! So that's fun too. I think Demo is a little Emo, but it's fun to sing, "look at my demon, my demon's amazing!" Turning INTO a demon is also pretty freakin' awesome and I've never had so much fun farming leather. Dismount. Meta. Immolation Aura. Hellfire. Big numbers. All dead.

So I found a run in ICC 25 that was doing some hard modes. I checked the loot rules, after which I declined and logged back to Borg. A pst later assuring me there will be no loot too awesome that I wouldn't be able to roll on (and there'd be no drama)... I was back in.

Even as affliction, the DPS was rocking, and despite a death to a bone spike during Heroic Marrowgar, spirits were high. I don't think it quite dawned on me until halfway through the fight, that Heroic Rotface would mean Heroic DFO... so when it dropped, I thanked Elune and prepared myself for the roll. 83 =O. Kablam, it's in my bag. [Dislodged Foreign Object].

The screenshot above is from a Champion of Ulduar run in 10 man Ulduar. I decided to go on Twitchie, since it's reasonably unlikely that a pug would burn through the place Undying style, even if we had a couple of hiccups, he'd only been in for weekly bosses and it was a good chance to hang out in a good group. A good group it was, so not only did I get in a tidy full clear of Ulduar, but we blasted Algalon as well. Starcaller Twitchie. It has a nice ring to it I think. I have a post in the works about our guild run of Algalon, so maybe Twitchie's romp through Ulduar will revive that. Ulduar 10 was a great place to test out destruction without having to worry much about DPS. Having said that of course, we absolutely flattened some of the bosses. Surprisingly, we didn't lose anyone on Yogg-Saron which was great. However, accidental pulls for Hodir and Freya (we one shot her with 2 Guardians AND two packs of trash shortly after killing the first guardian (Con-speed-atory was a nice side effect)) saw toons die. On Mimiron we lost someone to basic raid awareness (being our of range for heals) and just silliness (getting hit by slow moving core boss mechanics) saw someone on die on Vezax.

Speaking of Vezax, getting a 101k Conflagrate crit was pretty awesome. Next time my fellow casters will be aware of the fight mechanics and won't go oom so quickly. ;)

Glory of the Icecrown Raider

 

Last week (after a week twiddling our thumbs thanks to a heroic lockout bug (this itself may warrant another post)) we finished off Heroic Sindragosa for the Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

 

It was a great effort by all the gang, and when she finally went down our trusty engineers whipped out the mailbox for our drakes.

 

Oddox and I were decked out in full frost resist gear, which was made a lot more attractive with the removal of defense rating. With epic stamina gems, they offered almost the same amount of health, a ton of frost resist at the cost of reduced armor and avoidance. Reforging into mastery as a warrior tank worked well in this set up as the improved physical damage mitigation though the reworked blocking mechanic helped smooth out the incoming damage.

RNG still plays a large role in this fight, since often two of your healers can be out of action with unchained magic or ice blocked. However after successfully completing the achievement for Sindragosa, the tank taunt rotation and speed of breaking the ice blocks was very good leaving us to concentrate on the additional mechanics and more brutal damage output.

So for our first Heroic Sindragosa kill last Friday, we ended up with 4 drakes, and followed up on the Sunday with another pummeling of Heroic Putricide for another two. This week we are back in there again, and have blasted through 7 hard modes, and toppled the PP achievement for toons that were unable to attend in previous weeks. While some members of the team are a least another week away, we should complete some more drakes tonight, including one for a new friend from Greenstone who has been a regular part of the team of late.

Big thanks for everyone who has been a part of our 10 man progression team, and The Ancients for all your support.