Borg Tanks

Glory of the Cataclysm Hero

2011-11-26T14:12:00.001+11:00

I picked up my long overdue [Reins of the Volcanic Stone Drake] by completing Glory of the Cataclysm Hero this week, as the silver lining on a cancelled raid. Finding guests when we are a couple down for heroic mode content is proving to be very difficult this close to patch 4.3. The following raid night I even had trouble finding a single ranged DPS that was up to the task, so with a third of our week already down we had a romp through four normal bosses, leaving a heroic Beth'tilac this week for a full strength guild group.

If I may digress further, the silver lining on the romp through normal mode bosses was Kalus was able to complete his [Branch of Nordrassil]! You can barely see the shadow tree of life, but he's there, kicking some ass. [Remind me to update with a gallery link to the action shots here]

Meta achievements can be a little painful, as it is difficult enough to schedule 9 hours of raiding per week for 10 or so people... when it comes to a ton of achievements across a bnuch of heroic dungeons, it tends to get a little messy. Fortunately, after a few guildies smashed through a bunch of achievements together quite a while ago, we were able to put together a group to help Jondy and I finish off our missing ones.

500k Gold Milestone and Interview

2011-11-23T22:43:00.002+11:00

I finally submitted my interview for the Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame, so head on over and check it out! In the mean time, I've been flipping cubs and managed to move another 100k across to horde while maintaning my 500k balance on Alliance.

I've also given my glyph operation a major overhaul, since the guild bank interface has gone from clumsy to unruly... a great feature for guild masters would be to allow turning off logging of transactions from guild bank tabs. It's not like the armory can provide an out of game interface for that anymore, and the amount of data kept for display in game isn't worth the hassle.

The picture above is from when I first introduced Twitchie the Gnome Warlock, but because he was a glypher, I couldn't show you his face.

Guardian Cubs on Dath'Remar

2011-11-05T16:41:00.001+11:00

The [Guardian Cub] is here, and the prices are already plummetting on Dath'Remar.

The cub started off at a modest 25k and fell to 15k almost immediately. The next morning it had hit 11k with a total of 13 cubs available. On day 3, it had hit 7.5k and has slid down to just over 7k.

At this point, I'll be waiting until it is under 5k to pick mine up... How long do you think that will take? Do you think it will even get there?

Update: The Undermine Journal is now updated with data over the last day or so, with the price dipping just under 6k.

October Glyph Sales

2011-11-05T16:28:00.001+11:00

Stats:

Total Glyph Sales: 53,937
Total Glyphs Sold: 1410
Average Price: 38g25s

So a very similar haul to last month as I go in to maintenance mode. I'm coming up to 25,000 glyphs since the start of Cataclysm, and have been putting my interview together for the Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame since I recently hit the 500k milestone. Yes, I snuck that in there... 500k, woo! More on that when the interview is up.

Jondayla wins the Booty Bay fishing contest!

2011-10-09T14:30:00.000+11:00

Just a few minutes ago, Jondayla won the Boot Bay fishing competition for the achievement Master Angler of Azeroth, leaving only catching that elusive fish for Accomplished Angler and the Salty title.

Since Jondy started down the path of fishing milestones, she has taken the Azerothian fishing community by storm.

I remember my days of trying to fish up [Old Ironjaw], with no luck at all. Jondy on the other hand scooted on down to Orgrimmar just to be diplomatic, and after getting the achievement... decided to cast half a dozen times since she hadn't been ganked yet... and BAM! Wasn't even looking at the screen when [Old Crafty] landed in her bags and the achievement emblazoned her screen! We're not sure... but we estimate about 7 casts... TOTAL.

Jondy has also been running around all over Azeroth completing the newly introduced cooking and fishing dailies in Ironforge and Darnassus. After conclusion of this story, you'll understand why I'm puzzled at her bemoaning RNG for her missing out on the last of her cooking dailies. Jondy announced that her fishing daily in Ironforge was to put Young Ironjaw up on display. We both thought that was kinda cute after my efforts to fish up the old bastard. You guessed it, BAM! [Old Ironjaw] fished up in the same cast as [Young Ironjaw]!

So all but Salty, Jondy has been relaxing of late fishing for a [Dark Herring],

September Glyph Sales

2011-10-03T22:30:00.000+11:00

Starting with the stats:

Total Glyph Sales: 59,204
Total Glyphs Sold: 1518
Average Price: 39g

The average price continues to climb, potentially in no small part to a conversation I had with a fellow glypher. As I have mentioned before, a lot of my low priced glyphs are bought by competitors in the glyph market. I make a profit, they attempt to reset the market price, and I make even more coin undercutting the inflated new listing.

Recently I was online when my competitor started to buy up glyphs, so I initiated a chat thanking him for the sales. He immediately recognised me, and asked why I post my glyphs at such low prices. We had a quick chat, and in a lull in the conversation I was naturally AFK milling and missed the conversation resuming. It turns out that my competitor is a fellow blogger, and writes about gold making and glyphs specifically, so was particularly interested in my methodology. He also asked me to refrain from posting in his newly reset market for at least a couple of hours.

I was delighted. I thought, "this stranger is just a friend I haven't met yet". A kindred spirit in the gold making community. So I wrote him a mail explaining, yes, I'd leave reposting until later in the afternoon. I also mentioned that I had a blog myself (that since most of my raiding is now covered in the guild blog) that deals with gold making, and I'd love to swap sites and chat about glyph strategies.

I didn't hear back from my fellow glypher, but it did give me some things to think about. He is willing to buy out cheapish glyphs, just to reset the market for a couple of hours at most. When I say cheapish, based on my costs he sometimes buys glyphs at 5x the cost price. His maximum price is over 300g, so I started to think about how many he would have to sell to make a profit on his initial investment. At less than 10%, I figured that buying out cheap glyphs might just be a reasonably time efficient way of collecting a stockpile of glyphs. No milling, no turning pigments into inks... just browsing for underpriced glyphs for purchase and resale. Certainly the margins are lower, and frustrating if the market doesn't stay reset for long, but finding cheap herbs and milling isn't for everyone.

It's a shame that I didn't get to catch up with my fellow glypher, as I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have guessed my main motivation for approach to glyph selling. I'm very comfortable with the amount of gold I generate in game, and I've accumulated more gold than I could reasonably game. Aside from making enough coin so I can by my 6th 85 alt another pair (or two (yey for dual spec)) of Valor bracers at 5k, my income is far greater than my expenses. Yes, originally I was into glyphs to make a whole bunch of coin, but since Cataclysm...

... I'M ALL ABOUT VOLUME.

Devotees will recall that my goal from the start of Cataclysm was to make 25,000 glyphs inside a year. I was so keen on doing this all by myself, that I expelled all the other inscribers from Twitchie's guild so I could more easily track my progress. Of course, I was devestated when Blizzard dropped the guild achievement down to 2,500 glyphs... but a quick tweak to my processes meant I could easily track my progress myself.

So my pricing really has very little to do with maximising my profits, and all todo with moving large volumes of glyphs. I realised quite early on in glyphing, if you just hit every single profitable glyph, regardless of how fierce the competition the coin just comes flowing in.

The volume is also my motivation for never cancelling glyphs in order to repost. If I want to have the cheapest glyph of each time right now... I just make them all and post new glyphs. The side effect of this approach is that I make glyphs in reasonably large batches, which makes tracking my progress towards the achievement more efficient.

One thing did change after my conversation with my fellow glypher. I raised my ceiling price for posting glyphs from 96g to 296g. If someone can by glyphs at 500% profit to me, and then reliably sell enough at 10 times that price to make it worth their while... why not see how much of that psychotically priced glyph market I can capture? Well in the last month I had 77 glyphs (or 5% of my volume) sell at between 96g and 296g, which I'm going to call bonus monies.

Now into October, I'm back to a 48 hour post cycle since I'm not as active with my daily gold making routine. I've also had the supply of everything aside from whiptail and cinderbloom pretty much dry up, so potions and flasks have taken a dive as well. Fortunately, I've been able to find a reasonable amount of volatile life, and I have plenty of Darkmoon Cards for this months faire... and I'm secretly hoping they distinguish between the reputation earned with the current faire with the new and approved 4.3 faire... that was a lot of epic decks to get two toons over the line to exalted. Finally, the savage leather has all but dried up, so my killing on epic leg patches has too for the time being.

August Glyph Sales

2011-09-01T07:53:00.001+10:00

It's that time again, starting with the stats.

Total Glyph Sales: 110,199
Total Glyphs Sold: 3737
Average Price: 29g49s

An absolutely massive month of sales. Excited to be back over 100 glyphs a day and breaking the 100k gold mark for sales. The average price is still climbing, and I'm guessing that is just due to demand since there is an increasing number of significant entities in the market. Yes, that's right... I called them entities. Fellow sentient beings just seems too touchy feely.

The alarming thing about the stats is the volume of gold I'm getting through. Since I'm not yet at the 500k gold mark, I must be spending a whole bunch of extra coin on my alts for 4.2. Which reminds me, introductions to a couple of newly 85 toons is in order. I also had 31.5k sales for [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle] so other sources of income aren't insignificant.

20,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

2011-08-17T16:51:00.005+10:00

A full 2,500 glyphs ahead of schedule comes the 20,000 milestone on the road to 25,000 glyphs in a year since Cataclysm launched.

One of the pleasant surprises from milling sooo many herbs is just how long the Darkmoon Cards are remaining profitable. I have just ticked over 400,000 gold in Darkmoon Card sales since the launch of Cataclysm, and on average I'm still able to get at least 100% markup on the cost of creating decks. [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] is still BiS for most casters in the game, and [Darkmoon Card: Tsunami] is a delightfull healing trinket and sells for even more coin. I generally just aim to offload the, "only useful for grabbing an extra hit in Chimaeron" [Darkmoon Card: Earthquake] at cost. The hurricane cards aren't particularly good sellers, with quite variable prices but still a money maker. The cards do make good presents too, and I'm up to over a dozen used for alts, friends and guildies.

Twitchie's Workshop

2011-08-14T09:48:00.002+10:00

Rather than explain my workshop as I have done in previous posts, I thought I'd post some screenshots of Twitchie's newly upgraded setup. Firstly, it's all about the satchels. There are 344 unique glyphs in the game, so while all of them aren't profitable to make regularly, the more space the better.

More space! I have a guild bank tab for spill over glyphs. When I relist expired glyphs, I generally only put up two of each profitable glyph, so depending on the volume of sales and fluctuations in price, I will have a lot that go into storage for posting another time.

My second guild bank has recently been converted to ink storage. Despite the complete lack of midnight ink in the picture, it really helps to know what I've got on hand. Right now, the tab is almost empty, as I can't keep up with the current glyph demand. The good news is, prices are going up!

The last tab is for general storage, particularly Darkmoon Cards and spare rare inks and pigments. Anything else BoE is fair game here too, since I have very little space not devoted to glyphs in the bank.

July Glyph Sales

2011-08-04T14:58:00.005+10:00

Starting with the stats from July:

Total Glyph Sales: 51692
Total Glyphs Sold: 2319
Average Price: 22g29s

So last month I had a good week off 'active' warcraft. We had friends stay and both Jondy and I took an entire week off raiding. The timing was a little interesting given that it was the second week of patch 4.2, but it was planned far enough in advance that it was worth dipping under our regular 100% attendence.

The average price has remained steady, and I got back into the routine towards the end of the month for some more consistent sales.

I've upgraded my workshop since patch 4.2. Helly kindly made me 10x [Royal Scribe's Satchel] which has given me an extra 40 slots for glyphs. I've also started using the Restock queue in TSM, which adds an extra level of automation for creating high demand glyphs. With both of these improvements, I've decided I'll only need one bank tab for spill over glyphs, converting a second bank tab for ink storage. With the TSM Gathering module, having inks in a guild bank rather than the mail give me better visiblity of my stockpile, leading to fewer restocking errors.

For the first time, I've also been buying herbs direct from a herbalist. I had been cautious about doing this as I really don't enjoy the bargaining process... however after I bought a TON of herbs direct from their trade ad, I thought I have nothing to lose (particularly when they said, "if you need more I can go and farm some"). So I sent my price via in game mail, and was delighted to have several mails chock full of [Whiptail]. So the convenience was worth it, but the added bonus was it was 10% lower than the minimum price I'd seen through the AH in the last few weeks.

For August, I'm back to a 24 hour posting cycle. While I don't like to babysit auctions, I think a 48 cycle was getting a little too long, particularly when TSM Crafting can't tell if my currently listed glyphs are actually the cheapest. I've put in a ticket on Curseforge and with any luck that won't be too hard to implement.

After I heard a chat about collusion in the gem market, I was tempted to whitelist (rather than blacklist) my biggest glyph competitor, but haven't implemented that yet. When you whitelist someone, you never undercut them, but post items at the same price. The theoretical advantage behind doing this to a competitor is that when they cancel and repost (which I never do with glyphs, but many do) they won't cancel the auctions that you have price-matched, because they haven't been undercut, giving you longer exposure in the market at the lowest price. If anyone has any experience with this tactic, let me know in the comments.

June Glyph Sales

2011-07-03T16:26:00.001+10:00

Starting with the stats from June:

Total Glyph Sales: 72624
Total Glyphs Sold: 3331
Average Price: 21g80s

The average price of a glyph continues to plummet on Dath'Remar, but I continue to sell more and more glyphs as my process is refined. I'm rarely using more than my bank and one guild bank tab for the stockpile, and usually have around 30k stock on the AH, with a coverage of around 2 of each profitable glyph posted each time I post.

Since patch 4.2, I've been making a killing with leatherworking and jewelcrafting, dwarfing my glyph sales, but I'm looking forward to persisting in the market at least until I've created 25,000 glyphs since Cata.

Cross Faction Frost Biting

2011-06-20T18:20:00.001+10:00

I snagged Perobas the Bloodthirster for my third rare towards Frostbitten, thanks to a helpful horde hunter, and his faithful crab.

May Glyph Sales

2011-06-04T12:12:00.001+10:00

Starting with the stats from May:

Total Glyph Sales: 77375g
Total Glyphs Sold: 2450
Average Price: 31g58s

The average price of glyphs has taken a drastic hit, with the number of competitors increasing and at least one that has set a maximum value for glyphs at 40g. Volume is up, but it's taken an extra 25% in sales to still fall short of the 81.8k revenue from April.

Another factor in falling glyph prices is the reduced cost of herbs, with stacks of cinderbloom and stormvine both available at around 20g. Whiptail is still worth milling since it can be found occassionally at around 34g a stack (which is about equivalent for milling purposes).

Finally, a large factor in the average price of glyphs I sell is the volume of glyphs I'm deliberately pumping out. I'm currently still on track to produce 25,000 glyphs in a year, which changes my threshold for how much profit for each glyph I'm prepared to make. Listening to the Power World: Gold podcast the other day Nev from Auction House Addict commented that she concentrates on glyphs that sell for over 100g. When Cataclysm first came out, I too enjoyed a Merry Glyphmass but even then I would pump out glyphs down to the 50g mark just to push as many as possible out.

At this point, I think I've conquered a great strategy for getting a great volume of sales (considering the competition) in the least amount of time. However, I'm wondering if my 48 hr, no cancellations strategy is pushing the price lower than I'd like.

Justice Point purchases for the toon who has everything

2011-06-02T11:59:00.006+10:00

So you've been running heroics on many a toon, and very quickly you've run out of gear to spend Justice Points on. If you're anything like me, you now have every conceivable heirloom, even ones that you don't see using in the foreseeable future. What next?

Coin. Twitchie is all about the coin. In the true spirit of, "Time is money, friend" I have broken down the options to the coin value per boss kill. The calculation uses 77 Justice Points per boss (from the guild perk, For Great Justice at level 18).

I wasn't surprised at just how little extra value you get, but I was surprised at just how bad [Maelstrom Crystal]s were.

Naturally the mileage on your server may vary, and these Dath'remar prices are the mean prices for the realm from the Undermine Journal. For the herbs, I nominally guessed the average value of a herb based on middle ground between Cinderbloom and Twilight Jasmine.

Item	JPs	#	Value	Total	$ / Boss
[Greater Celestial Essence]	400	1.00	41.82	41.82	8.05
[Heavenly Shard]	600	1.00	53.47	53.47	6.86
[Maelstrom Crystal]	3750	1.00	236.00	236	4.85
[Savage Leather]	375	5.00	3.36	16.8	3.45
[Elementium Ore]	1000	20.00	1.89	37.8	2.91
[Hypnotic Dust]	100	1.00	2.51	2.51	1.93
[Embersilk Cloth]	1250	20.00	1.46	29.2	1.80
[Satchel of Freshly-Picked Herbs]	1500	20.00	1.40	28	1.44

Deathcharger's Reins

2011-05-28T15:24:00.000+10:00

I found something exciting in my Satchel, the other day. [Deathcharger's Reins]! To my surprise one of the few times I solo queued for a random heroic on Zenborg as a healer, I hit the jackpot. Borgthor rarely tanks outside of guild activities, but my newly dinged 85 DK tank Borgelmir has been doing a bunch. It has still been worthwhile, since he's had at least 3 free flasks and some gems in addition to the extra coin.

I also just realised that outside of Twitchie's exploits and the odd piece of mount news, I've posted very little else. Guild raiding is covered on our forum and blog, so feel free to head on over and check it out. At 12/12 and 3 hard modes, we're traveling very well as we hurtle towards patch 4.2 and firelands.

April Glyph Sales

2011-05-28T11:45:00.002+10:00

Starting with the stats from April:

Total Glyph Sales: 81897g
Total Glyphs Sold: 2030
Average Price: 40g34s

A 1/3 rise in number sold which was pretty huge. I'm seeing a decline in the average price, with some new competition. While I like to reset the price down to 125g, I have a competitor that thinks 40g is even more reasonable, which could actually be a positive thing for volume.

The most fun looking at the data is the while the addon only picks up the name of the buyer less than half the time, the number of glyphs bought by my competitors is AWESOME. If I make a glyph for 10g, my competitor buys it for 30g (and all the others at that price point), re-lists it at 300g and I undercut and sell more of the same at 125g... it's win, win, win... there just aren't enough wins for that.

Looking ahead to May, things are getting even more cut-throat, and I finally get the TSM gatherer module to tell me what's stored in my guild bank in the crafting window.

10,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

2011-04-20T15:14:00.000+10:00

10,057 Glyphs done... and 7,807 to burn in order to satisfy the first guild glyph making achievement come 4.1. Now that Blizzard has decided to reduce the achievement from 25,000 to 2,500 glyphs I'm hoping they have a progressive list of achievements so I can continue on my way to 25,000 glyphs in a year since Cata launched.

I'm pretty happy with my new system, and how easy it is to churn out the glyphs. I have 6 [Bag of Endless Pockets] in my bank, which leaves enough space for a few BoP items and PvP gear (although doubtful I'll ever commit to that grind on a second (let alone third) toon). I have 4 inscribing bags on my toon, one of which stores inks and parchment ready for glyph production. That leaves at least 3 huge bags and the backpack for processing glyphs from the mail box. I also have two guild bank tabs reserved for glyph stock as well.

The beauty of all this storage is that it allows me to produce glyphs very efficiently. Regardless of what I have on the AH, or in storage I can create an entire batch of all the profitable glyphs and get complete coverage of the glyph market. Since I cover the entire market, even after the first few rounds of undercutting (which is pretty brutal with glyphs) I still have a reasonable coverage at the lowest price.

When I re-list glyphs, I just set a maximum number of glyphs to post at the lowest price and anything over that I just whack back in my glyph storage. I will often do a 'top up', and create the extra high demand glyphs that have sold out at this point, and save the mass production for later.

Creating glyphs faster than I can sell them is great for high demand periods. On weekends, I take three trips to the AH, each time taking 3 inscribing bags worth of glyphs, 2 from my bank and one from the guild bank. I can take advantage of the increased demand and post more glyphs without having to make them at the time. At my peak, I've had almost 2000 glyphs listed for a total of over 100,000g worth of glyphs for sale at one time.

The next question is... what to do if there isn't a 25,000 glyph achievement to shoot for? Do I complete the goal I set for myself, or do I scale back production for absolute maximum gold per hour and get reacquainted with some other markets?

March Gylph Sales

2011-04-04T19:40:00.000+10:00

Starting with the stats from March:

Total Glyph Sales: 71404g
Total Glyphs Sold: 1563
Average Price: 45g68s

The number sold was up, particularly due to some better results during high demand times. Pulling down 8k gold on a Sunday was a fantastic result. The ability to post more glyphs for the weekend is due to my new processes for handling glyphs, which I'll be posting about for my 10k / 25k milestone for the guild inscribing achievement.

February Glyph Sales

2011-03-05T16:40:00.000+11:00

I finally got around to exporting data from MySales and it was great to finally have some hard numbers on my sales in the AH. I finally installed MySales when I started trying to reduce my addon footprint. The behemoth Auctioneer was on the way out, replaced by Auctionator and the precursors to Trade Skill Master. I finally decided to remove beancounter, and loaded up MySales instead.

There are a couple of little limitations for MySales, which don't impact the data too much. Firstly, the date for the sale is always when the coin is collected. For glyphs, that isn't much of an issue, as I tend to collect mail at least once per day if not twice. Enchants that I sell on Zenborg, or the rubbish I try and offload on my little storage toon is a different story. Secondly, the addon doesn't always do a great job of recording the name of the buyer. It is really fun to tally up how much other toons spend on your stuff... particularly your competitors (but that is a story for another post).

So here's some numbers to go with the graph for February.

Total Glyph Sales: 59302g
Total Glyphs Sold: 1267
Average Price: 46g80s

So at over 2k per day, the glyph market is quite healthy. I think the slump in sales (and subsequent rise) in early February was due to my decision on how to tackle the 25,000 glyph guild achievement inside a year. At this stage the numbers indicate that I'm only selling 60% of the glyphs I'm churning out for the achievement, which is actually a little better than I had anticipated. The best part of the new system is that while I'm creating an excess of glyphs, I'm spending less time doing it and making more gold per hour.

I'm happy with the average price being under 50g. I refuse to sell glyphs for more than 125g, and am often undercutting my competition by as much as 50g (on the rare occasion more). There's just something about going above a 900% markup that doesn't sit well for me. Yes, the glyph market has a stupendous number of items to keep a track of. Yes, at times it can be a little labour intensive (windowed mode woodpecker milling is awesome). Yes, competitors can be ruthless. Yes, glyphs are a one time investment now (and a couple of hundred gold is but a drop in the ocean)... but providing quality glyphs at a reasonable price, is just not that difficult.

I'm pretty excited to look at some of my other markets and have another look at glyphs for March.

Cross-faction Arbitrage Never Looked So Good

2011-03-01T13:56:00.004+11:00

A big shout out to all my Hordies who have been supplying the Alliance with Volatile Life and Twilight Jasmine at 66% and 35% of their (Alliance) market value respectively.

Initially I was completely disinterested in stepping over to the Horde side to help make coin purely because it seemed messy, risky and time consuming. The first few times I moved coin across to Horde, I used the neutral auction house and just soaked up the 15% cut, moving very very expensive linen cloth.

Once I had a decent amount of capital, I realised that I could actually sell my Darkmoon Cards for more on Horde than on Alliance, and the adventure began. The desire to complete the Mix Master achievement for the guild, the awful flask market on Dath'Remar, saw me sinking large amounts of coin into Volatile Life on Horde and since then I haven't looked back.

Volatile Life is very easy to move, since it stacks in 200, which is worth over 1k per stack. Even though it's a little messier, I couldn't resist snapping up Twilight Jasmine this morning at around 3g50s each... so much so I blinked and 10k had disappeared in a flash. With any luck, I'll be able to make flasks at less than the combined cost of the materials again.

Thanks again to my underlings at <Antithesis> for helping to move the coin around.

250k

2011-03-01T12:53:00.004+11:00

Another gold milestone crept up on me the other day; 250k on the server. I had originally intended to get all the gold on alliance, but I have started to get into cross-faction arbitrage, with a fantastic avenue to pursue it. As soon as I had hit 250k, another Darkmoon card sold, and Twitchie finally got to equip a well deserved [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] of his own. I still have a deck up my sleeve for Zenborg in about a weeks time.

Now that I'm at 250k gold, I'm not sure more coin is any more useful. Since I'm not likely to spend more than 50k gold on a single item, as long as I'm over 200k I'll be on the lookout for the most attractive of money sinks.

Image by: tao_zhyn

Exalted with

2011-02-20T14:41:00.028+11:00

I'm excited to have finally reached exalted with Fidelity! I have mixed feelings about the restrictions on the ways you can increase guild reputation, but once I figured out the various reputation and guild experience caps I hit the daily circuit pretty hard. I'm pleased that Blizzard are also increasing the amount of guild reputation rewarded for raid bosses, and I'll continue to try and round up guildies for guild heroics which is much more entertaining than dailies.

My dailies of choice were the Tol Barad, and it just so happened that hitting exalted coincided with enough commendations to purchase: [Reins of the Drake of the West Wind].

5,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

2011-02-18T11:57:00.004+11:00

A big milestone yesterday for Twitchie, hitting the 5000 glyph mark since Cataclysm hit. Since Twitchie is in a 'quiet time' guild, he's the only scribe in his guild, making glyph output very easy to track.

So at the moment, I'm just a touch behind the goal of 25,000 glyphs in a year. Initially when I started this quest, I was dominating the glyph market, and increased production of glyphs just lead to more and more coin. There were a few 'glyphmas' moments after cataclysm hit where I just could not keep up with demand and the coin was flowing in. However, recently there has been a surge in competition on the glyph market, so both sales and profit are falling.

Which leads me to the question, "Do I really want to achieve my 25,000 glyphs in a year goal?"

On the positive, I think producing an average of almost 70 glyphs per day over the course of a year is pretty awesome. And even with the increased competition, it is still an excellent way to make coin in game.

On the negative, as my competition increases, my sales decrease, profit margins falls and inventory management gets more difficult as I have trouble offloading glyphs as fast as I produce them. The bottom line is my gold per hour suffers, and while I love the gold making game withing World of Warcraft, there's a lot of other things I like to do in game.

So... I'd love to get your thoughts. Firstly, what do you think of the goal itself? Are you into setting yourself an extremely arbitrary target and going for it? Or do you prefer to reach your gold goals as efficiently as possible?

Secondly, what is your strategy for the glyph market? Do you have multiple posting alts divided by class (or by volume like this consortium poster)? What addons do you use to manage your inventory?

I'm resistant to multiple posting alts, and would prefer to use any or all of: Twitchie's bags, bank or guild bank to manage glyph inventory. I'm keen to find an addon that can not just shuffle stuff between bags and bank, but follow a set of logic about how it does it (e.g., make up stacks of 2 glyphs for posting from my bank). I haven't found this addon yet, but I'll keep looking. The major limitation of using one toon is simply that even with four scribbling bags, there isn't enough space to post all of the profitable glyphs in one sitting, but keeping inventory management manageable without resorting to posting alts would be a nice compromise.

Drake fixed!

2011-02-16T09:04:00.001+11:00

=O I'm actually riding!

PUG Horror Stories #1: Ah $#@% it!

2011-02-15T19:12:00.003+11:00

By way of introduction, my shadow priest Zenborg will be covering all things related to pick up groups. I to a lot of 'pugging' on my alts, and will share some of my experiences (both good and bad here). On with the story...

Today on Twitchie, I had a random heroic dungeon group disband in record time, and it inspired what will probably be a long series of posts describing some horror stories, as well as my own advice on how they could be prevented.

The Death Knight tank asked at the start of our Heroic Throne of Tides run, "Any CCs?". I was only a few words into my sentence describing my fear / succubus combination, our Ret Paladin’s repent (and the group disbanded so quickly I can’t even remember the third DPSs class) when he followed up with, "Ah $#@% it" and pulled the first pack which is notable for it contains not just one, but two healers.

The tank also didn’t specify a primary target, so we all merrily opened up our AOE and set in for what turned out to be quite a long haul. Eventually, the tank marked a skull target, but with virtually non-existant interrupts it just wouldn’t go down, since two healers far out paced the DPS. I did my best to time fears and a death coil, but to no avail and the healer left... then a DPS, and another... and after a final expletive declaration, the tank as well.

So my plea to tanks (especially for a pick up group) is firstly, mark a skull target! If nothing else, a single skull means a mob burned down quickly, reducing the healing load. It also gives melee a definitive target that their white damage lands on, and should help substantially with knowing which mob will have the majority of aggro pumped into it.

Secondly, in a pick up group, use some CC at least on the first pull. As we all just experienced, a 15% buff to damage and healing can’t overcome completely ignoring the basic abilities of the mobs you’re trying to kill. If you EVER have to wait for the healer to regain some mana, use MORE CC. It is completely false economy to avoid using CC and burn the group as a whole down faster, if you then have to wait around for healer mana. Be nice to your healer, use CC, and the run will go smoother and faster than if you didn’t. If after the first pack, your healer announces they are bored... then by all means ramp it up a little bit.

Lastly, a plea for all tanks and melee DPS... interrupts are awesome.

I love bags!

2011-02-15T18:46:00.002+11:00

I just can’t get enough bag space, so finally after kitting out Zenborg and Twtichie in their BoE tailoring epics, I had enough [Dreamcloth] left over to make Jossamine (Jondy’s warlock) a pair of [Breeches of Mended Nightmares] AND make Borgthor a [Illusionary Bag]!

The tough decision was which bag in my bank to replace, as the smallest is now 20 slots. [Tattered Hexcloth Sack] won out over [Papa's New Bag].

STOP PRESS!

While I got the wowhead link for [Papa's New Bag], I realised there's ANOTHER bag that is 22 slots called [Papa's Brand New Bag] which also had a chance of dropping from Bronjahm <Godfather of Souls> in The Forge of Souls. I hope it was just bad RNG, and not passing on the bag because I thought I had it.

So back to the bags I actually do have... In the screenshot above, you can see my other favourites. Right to left, they are: [Mammoth Mining Bag] which I keep on me full time now that I am crafting a LOT of [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle]s and just pop a few on the AH each time I log on. Perhaps it's time I put it back in the bank and craft them in bulk and let my AH toons do the posting... but I'm getting distracted.

Next up are the Haris Pilton bags, [Portable Hole] and ["Gigantique" Bag]. I was a little surprised that there wasn't an achievement for equipping her hole after they acknowledged my sack. Oh well.

I have chronic bag space issues on Borgthor, who keeps a lot of BoP stuff with largely sentimental value. I'm not sure if I'm mentioned my shield collection on the blog before, which I sometimes am tempted to prune. Jondy won't let me throw away my imperial plate set (which dresses me up like a Stormwind guard), and the festival stuff... oh the festival stuff. Then of course, there's tons and tons and tons of gear. I'm adverse to throwing anything away that I could possibly need in the future... although with the constant gear resets and reforging, it is much less of an issue these days.

So to the sad news, Blizzard took away one of my favourite bags, the [Supply Bag], which was associated with the Argent Dawn (revered if I recall correctly). I remember so vividly, leveling my first toon and deciding that I just had to have this huge massive bag. I had assumed that I vendored it until I looked it up and realised that it probably disappeared when classic quests were redesigned for Cataclysm.

DOUBLE STOP PRESS.

What can only be described as a completely rambling post... I'm coming full circle. The [Supply Bag] is no longer available, but I still have mine! I equipped it in the bank when I decided that a mining bag for the bank AND my bags was overkill. I sent all more old ore / bars to alts to streamline my storage and threw my PvP gear in this bag in the bank. /Phew.

Rounding out my collection are [Enlarged Onyxia Hide Backpack], [Dragon Hide Bag], and more [Glacial Bag] and [Embersilk Bag]s than you can poke a stick at. I think I vendored the [Halaani Bag] quite early on since for some reason I wasn't too attached to it. Oh, and don't forget the ubiqutous [Abyssal Bag] that is a mainstay of my alts since soulshards were removed from the game.

Well, that's quite a trip down memory lane. Bags are awesome.

Working as a Team

2011-02-14T19:02:00.002+11:00

<Fidelity> recently completed Working as a Team, with inscription being last cab off the rank. I leveled Zenborg's enchanting to 525 reasonably quickly, and then realised that I didn't have the reputation required to contribute to the achievement. Shortly after that followed at least a week of ranting to my guild mates, real ID friends and IRL loved ones about how, "GAH! I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO QUEST ON MY ALTS". So after drowning my sorrows at the conveniently located Dwarven pub (so close to the auction house!), I got Zenborg into the Deepholm series of quests, Therazane dailies and finally just blowing through Mt. Hyjal for kicks (and the head glyph). After all that, I'd bagged us a tick for Enchanting (Blacksmithing and Mining were no-brainers) and manged to secure the shoulder and helm enhancements while I was at it.

I like the design of the [Banner of Cooperation], and how different it is to the battle standard for completing the Heroic dungeons as a guild. I'm wondering when Bliz will add a carpenter profession.

While the guild roster has been in a state of flux, we've got some momentum going for raiding and are at 5/12 and having a blast. As always for guild news, check out the blog.

Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake

2011-01-28T22:15:00.005+11:00

Hi, my name is Twitchie and I'll be taking over the Time is Money segments of this blog. I'm the glyph making powerhouse that revs up the coin generating machinery of the Borgthor empire.

No, I haven't (yet) had a psychotic break, but I thought I'd let some of my toons speak for themselves, since they have various different interests, and it's a nice way to organise the posts for the blog.

More on the coin front later, but first up... Mounts! I was lucky enough to have the [Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake] drop in normal Stonecore the other day and snap it up.

Twilight Highlands was the ideal place to get a great picture of where you 'dangle' as opposed to 'riding' the mount. I decided to open up the Twilight Highlands portal, since my favourite place to farm leather is from the Untamed Gryphon, who also drop [Delicate Wing], a key ingredient for [Broiled Dragon Feast]. The graphic alone is a great reason to make this feast for your friends.

It was very satisfying to win the mount shortly after upgrading to Master Riding on my first toon to pay for the privilege, and I'm looking forward to collecting many more of the new mounts on other toons.

New Expansion, New Beginning.

2011-01-16T11:11:00.002+11:00

New Year! I’ve been having a ball with Cataclysm, but the last month has been completely flat out for work, so a few things have taken a back seat. With the new expansion and new year, it’s a great time to write about a new beginning.

For Cataclysm I founded a new guild called <Fidelity>, and left <The Ancients> where I had been GM for a couple of years. It was a very difficult decision, but the move was an important one to make, at the right time.

<The Ancients> is a fantastic guild, but as a large, social, raiding guild I could not see myself keeping up the commitment to the schedule I had been running. Also, with the change to the flexible raid lockout system, the niche of running a normal mode 25 man team and a hard mode 10 man team wasn’t going to exist even if I did have the time to continue running it. So we left the guild in good hands, and still keep in touch with many of the players we had enjoyed both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King with.

<Fidelity> is designed as a small guild, raiding less nights per week, with only a single 10 man team. In order to focus on many of the other things life has to offer, we have reduced our scheduled game time so we can have some more flexibility, and avoid burnout from a sense of obligation and time pressure.

I was a little overwhelmed with the support I got for the decision to create a new guild with a different focus, and pleasantly surprised that a lot of my close in game friends shared a similar vision for Cataclysm. So with a number of keen raiders, and some friends and family in game, the guild has grown to a total of 13 players, and we’re having a fantastic time. Rather than repeat the tales, I’ll let the guild speak for itself... so if you’re interested head over to our blog, forum and website and take a peek.

<Fidelity> is shortly due to begin our raid schedule, as the holiday period winds down. We’re still looking for our last healer, and a couple of people to fill our locum rank so we’re excited to meet some new people from Dath’remar and beyond. If you’re interested in joining <Fidelity>, please check out our recruitment page.

Tear them from the Sky!

2010-12-18T16:24:00.000+11:00

Tear them from the Sky! is a quest so awesome, I stopped in the middle just to post these screenshots. Not a complicated quest, by all means. But then again, I'm not a complicated guy. Give me a BIG gun, and some dragons, and I'm there.

Ready!

Aim!

FIRE!!!!

Finished!

Inscription: Herb Comparison

2010-12-18T12:56:00.003+11:00

Here's my guide to the relative herb prices you should be looking at when milling cataclysm herbs.

Unfortunately, on Dath'Remar at least, the party is over as far as cheap cataclysm herbs goes. The base price of the lower quality herbs seems to have settled around 3g50 up from 2 - 2g50 quite soon after the expansion hit.

Here's a guide to the table.

Blackfallow Ink - The average yield of Blackfallow Ink from each mill.
Inferno Ink - The average yield of Inferno Ink from each mill. I'm now valuing Inferno Ink at 10 times the price of Backfallow, since there is such a huge demand for the rare ink, many people are using the Dalaran vendor to convert them.
Weight - Using Cinderbloom as the base herb, the weight indicates how much 'product' you get in comparison to this baseline.
Price Eq. - An example of the equivalent price for each herb based on the baseline of Cinderbloom at 3g50s. If Cinderbloom is at 3g50s, and I see Twilight Jasmine at under 5g98s, I'll buy the Twilight Jasmine and know I'm getting more 'product' for my coin.
Sample - The number of mills that I've used to derive my numbers. Naturally the more expensive herbs have a much lower figure, but it looks like the average product scales with the herbs item level pretty much as you'd expect.

	Blackfallow Ink	Inferno Ink	Weight	Price Eq.	Sample
[Cinderbloom]	1.21	0.12	1.00	3.50	165
[Heartblossom]	1.23	0.13	1.06	3.72	310
[Stormvine]	1.25	0.13	1.05	3.68	256
[Azshara's Veil]	1.29	0.17	1.25	4.39	35
[Whiptail]	1.43	0.26	1.70	5.96	34
[Twilight Jasmine]	1.51	0.26	1.71	5.98	72

Protection Warrior Gear Enhancements for Cataclysm

2010-12-14T23:52:00.002+11:00

Here are a selection of available enhancements for the protection warrior.

I'm looking forward to trying out Windwalker and see how that movement speed boost works out. I'm a big fan of run speed enchants, so I've put those above the straight master enchant for boots.

Slot	Enchant	Source
Head	[Arcanum of the Earthen Ring]	Revered - Earthen Ring
Shoulder	[Greater Inscription of Unbreakable Quartz]	Exalted - Therazane
	[Lesser Inscription of Unbreakable Quartz]	Honored - Therazane
Cloak	Protection	Enchant
Chest	Greater Stamina	Enchant
	Stamina	Enchant
Wrists	Dodge	Enchant
	Precision	Enchant
	Expertise	Enchant
Hands	Greater Mastery	Enchant
	Heavy Savage Armor Kit	Leatherworking - Materials
Belt	[Ebonsteel Belt Buckle]	Blacksmith - Materials
Legs	[Charscale Leg Armor]	Leatherworking - Materials
	[Twilight Leg Armor]	Leatherworking - Materials
Feet	Lavawalker	Enchant
	Earthen Vitality	Enchant
	Mastery	Enchant
Weapon	Mending	Enchant
	Windwalk	Enchant

Protection Warrior Starter Gear for Heroics

2010-12-14T17:01:00.008+11:00

Here's my guide to gearing up your Protection Warrior for heroic Dungeons as efficiently as possible. There's no drops on the list (aside from a trinket), so as you are gearing up, this guide should help you spend your time and energy outside of those dungeons for maximum return.

Some of the craftable items are extremely expensive. Some are clearly worth the cost, and others are extortionate (where running a normal or heroic dungeon for an equivalent drop is a better use of your time). Items with an asterisk (*) have at least one [Chaos Orb] and at the time of writing these are BoP. I'm not sure why the Devs chose to do this as it seems to be arbitrarily punishing players without armor crafting professions at a time when they tell us they want to even things out.

Items marked with two asterisks (**) are PvP gear. I have included these items where they are generally much better than any alternatives which are easier to get than the items higher up on the list.

On the trinket front, unfortunately the best Darkmoon Card for tanking is Volcano because mastery is just that much better than dodge. The use of Earthquake, with Last Stand could provide a pretty large health pool for a while, so time will tell.

Any questions comments, item suggestions are most welcome so do leave a comment!

Slot	Item	Source
Head	[Crown of Wings]	Revered - Wildhammer Clan
	[Helm of the Proud]	2200 Justice Points
Shoulders	[Pauldrons of Edward the Odd]	BoE
	[Sunburnt Pauldrons]	1650 Justice Points
	[Pharoah's Burial Spaulders]	Quest - Uldum
Neck	[The Lustrous Eye]	1250 Justice Points
	[Elementium Guardian]	Jewelcrafting - Materials
	[Mountain's Mouth]	Honored - Guardians of Hyjal
Back	[Wrap of the Great Turtle]	Exalted - Guardians of Hyjal
	[Twilight Dragonscale Cloak]	Leatherworking - Materials*
	[Cloak of War]	Leatherworking - Materials
Chest	[Hardened Elementium Hauberk]	Blacksmithing - Materials*
	[Chestplate of the Steadfast]	2200 Justice Points
	[Breastplate of the Witness]	Quest - Grim Batol
Wrist	[Sandguard Bracers]	Exalted - Ramkahen
	[Terborus's Rotating Bands]	BoE - Rare Elite Deepholm
	[Bloodied Pyrium Bracers]**	Blacksmithing - Materials
Hands	[Numbing Handguards]	1650 Justice Points
	[Gloves of Gnomebliteration]	Quest - Uldum
Belt	[Hardened Elementium Girdle]	Blacksmithing - Materials
	[Girdle of the Mountains]	1650 Justice Points
	[Belt of Guardianship]	BOE - World Drop
	[Bloodied Pyrium Belt]**	Blacksmithing - Materials
Leg	[Greaves of Splendor]	2200 Justice Points
	[Stone-Wrapped Greaves]	Honored - Earthen Ring
Boots	[Gryphon Rider's Boots]	Exalted - Wildhammer Clan
	[Ramkahen Front Boots]	Quest - Lost City of the Tol'vir
Ring	[Elementium Moebius Band]	Jewelcrafting - Materials
	[Felsen's Ring of Resolve]	Revered - Therazane
	[Red Rock Band]	Revered - Ramkahen
	[Temple Band]	BOE
Trinket	Stamina
	[Za'brok's Lucky Tooth]	Quest - Twilight Highlands
	[Leaden Despair]	Dungeon - The Stonecore
	Mastery
	[Darkmoon Card: Volcano]	Inscription - Materials + RNG!
	[Impatience of Youth]	Exalted - Baradin's Wardens
	[Baradin Footman's Tags]	Honored - Baradin's Wardens
	[Impetuous Query]	BoE - Lost City of the Tol'vir
	Avoidance
	[Darkmoon Card: Earthquake]	Inscription - Materials + RNG!
	[Insignia of Diplomacy]	Quest - Deepholm
	[Binding Promise]	BoE
Shield	[Elementium Earthguard]*	Blacksmithing - Materials*
	[Shield of the Four Grey Towers]	950 Justice Points
	[Truthbreaker Shield]	Quest - Entry to Highlands chain
Ranged	[Sky Piercer]	Revered - Baradin's Wardens
	[Kickback 5000]	Engineering - Materials
	[Volatile Thunderstick]	Engineering - Materials
	[Abatement Cannon]	BoE
Weapon	[Ravening Slicer]	Revered - Baradin's Wardens
	[Dragonscorn Mace]	Quest - Twilight Higlands

Prospecting in Cataclysm

2010-12-13T12:52:00.079+11:00

Here are my numbers for prospecting so far in Cataclysm. So far, aside from helping to level both Alchemy and Jewelcrafting it is looking quite profitable.

Here are my results for [Obsidium Ore] and [Elementium Ore].

The biggest difference is the number of rare gems gained from Elementium, but both sets of prospecting have a similar total yield of gems. Early on in the expansion, uncommon gems have been used for leveling and transmuting and are actually more expensive in a lot of cases than rare gems. So when Obsidium ore is cheap, it's a great way to help level Alchemy and transmute some meta gems. Cut rare gems are quite profitable if you pick the right pattern, and have as little competition as possible while still picking a highly desired cut that sells well.

The "Cost per Gem" figure is reasonably crude, since the value of gems varies a lot from gem to gem, and is changing fairly quickly. At the time of writing it represented a large markup in selling raw gems, but as the price of gems and ore comes down, transmuting and cutting the gems will help the raw gems retain their profitability.

Obsidiun Ore	550
Number of Prospects	110
Cost Obsidiau Ore	11.4
Cost per Prospect	57
Total Cost	6270

Uncommon Gem		Rare Gem
[Alicite]	34	[Amberjewel]	4
[Jasper]	28	[Dream Emerald]	1
[Zephyrite]	32	[Ocean Sapphire]	0
[Nightstone]	24	[Demonseye]	1
[Carnelian]	23	[Inferno Ruby]	0
[Hessonite]	26	[Ember Topaz]	3
Total	138		37

Yield Common	1.52
Yield Rare	0.08
Cost per Gem	37.54

Elementium Ore	1080
Number of Prospects	216
Cost Elementium Ore	11
Cost per Prospect	55
Total Cost	11880

Uncommon Gem		Rare Gem
[Alicite]	34	[Amberjewel]	6
[Jasper]	44	[Dream Emerald]	13
[Zephyrite]	39	[Ocean Sapphire]	8
[Nightstone]	34	[Demonseye]	9
[Carnelian]	43	[Inferno Ruby]	12
[Hessonite]	47	[Ember Topaz]	14
Total	241		62

Yield Common	1.12
Yield Rare	0.29
Cost per Gem	39.21

WotLK Flashback: Gearscore vs. Blizzards Item Level

2010-12-10T16:04:00.001+11:00

I wrote this piece back in 4.0.1 when the iLvl metric was introduced, so here goes...

TL;DR: GearScore is weighted for the relative total itemisation of gear (chest is worth more than wrists). GearScore’s average item level is a straight average of iLvl across 17 slots. Blizzards item level is freakishly weighted for relative total itemisation of gear (chest outweighs wrists by A LOT), and is also based on your highest iLvl pieces from ALL possible gear you own (not what you are wearing).

I’m a fan of GearScore. It’s kinda like being a fan of guns. Gearscore doesn’t annoy people, people annoy people.

Gearscore is a convenient metric, with a whole ton of limitations (like every $#@%ing metric ever). If you know and understand the limitations, it can be a useful tool. Like most tools, it can be used for evil. I’ve mentioned guns, which can be used for hunting [yes, we don’t need meat now... but if we didn’t hunt at some point our civilisation would already have perished... so stay out of this vegans]. Guns are also used to kill people, via tragic accidents, murder and what have you. However, a big ass wrench has also been used to kill people, but we’re not trying to outlaw those are we?

So my point is, in my hands... gearscore is like a wrench and I’m an awesome plumber and I’m going to fix your plumbing good. Don’t hate gearscore just because some arrogant know it all used it to club your alt to death and keep him out of a raid. Do you really want to raid with a sociopath anyway?

I’m super impressed with the recent version of gearscore for patch 4.0.1, which has an eloquent disclaimer, “This is your raw Gearscore before spec and gem calculations. This value reflects your GS if fully gemmed, enchanted, and wearing appropriate stats”. That pretty much says it all right there. GearScore is directly telling you what it’s NOT telling you. When I look for extra members for a raid (how did PUG become a verb?) I choose to look them all up online (wow-heroes is my current favourite) so I can exclude people that don’t take pride in their toon like my peers do. Missing enchants, missing or rare gems are an excellent way to make obvious exclusions.

So with that brief introduction out the way, we get on to comparing the item level and GearScore, and why I’m bothering with the comparison in the first place.

I have 5 toons at level 80 with which I raid. Borgthor is my main and is guaranteed to raid ICC every week (both 10 and 25 before the patch). However, the others all raid a lot less and are just opportunistic with pugging opportunites. Wrathborg, my beloved rogue was the last to hit 80, and low and behold... has the highest Blizzard item level rating. “WTF!?!?”, I hear you exclaim. With some gaps in his gear (232 pants, 245 wrists and a 264 PvP cloak) he surely couldn’t be rated higher than Borgthor with 264 items across the board (with the only 277 item being the reputation tanking ring).

Alas it was true, so I set out to test both systems with a new upgrade for Wrathborg.

Wrathborg in PVE gear, GearScore: 5890 (GS iLvl 260).
Wrathborg best possible GearScore (includes PvP gear): 5952 (GS iLvl262).
Wrathborg Blizzard item level: 276.

So the Blizzard item level doesn’t change, and it is based on the best possible gear you own for each slot, regardless of which spec it’s for, or if it’s PvP gear. The drawback of this metric is that when people quote this number for when they come into a raid in their offspec (as their main role for the raid) it may be well out of whack with what they are wearing. Of course, many puggers are unethical or just plain sociopaths, relying on them to give you information has it’s downside anway. On top of that, toons in offspecs may be extremely well geared, but just not know how to play their offspec anyway.

In testing the GearScore raiting, its iLvl rating is just a pure average of the item level across the 17 gear slots.

See the TL;DR up the top for the conclusions.

Jumping right back into this post, post-Cataclysm! I was surprised to find the minimum iLvl for the starter dungeons at 272. Surely ICC epics will do the trick, right? Well, a couple of drops later... and some green junk loot and quest rewards littering my Portable Hole, without exchanging a piece of get I was over the iLvl requirement. Maybe here, Blizzard has done the right thing... if you think of the iLvl metric as, “if you bothered to collect the right stuff, you certainly look like you’ve been seeing the right level of content, so go ahead throwdown in this dungeon”, then that fits the bill nicely. After all, GC keeps telling us that the Devs don’t want to preside over a nanny state.

Cataclysm Milling

2010-12-10T14:54:00.004+11:00

I've been doing a lot of milling since the prices of herbs, while not 'cheap' have stabilsed pretty quickly. I'm surprised by just how much people are prepared to pay for Inferno Ink (up to 500% above cost)... but it's great for the bank balance.

Some assumptions for the numbers below.

Inferno Ink is worth 8 times as much as Blackfallow Ink. The exchange rate is 10:1 but I'm being a little conservative, since in WotLK the ratio was at times 1:1, but Inferno Ink is looking to be a lot more useful in Cataclysm than Snowfall Ink was in WotLK.
Prices for herbs are changing dramatically, so expect that to change from day to day and from server to server.

Cinderbloom
Sample: 127 mills
Yield of Blackfallow Ink: 1.2
Yield of Inferno Ink: 0.12
Cost of Herb: 2g
Cost of Blackfallow Ink: 4.59
Cost of Inferno Ink: 36.75

Heartblossom
Sample: 266 mills
Yield of Blackfallow Ink: 1.23
Yield of Inferno Ink: 0.13
Cost of Herb: 2g
Cost of Blackfallow Ink: 4.35
Cost of Inferno Ink: 34.77

Twilight Jasmine
Sample: 36 mills
Yield of Blackfallow Ink: 1.53
Yield of Inferno Ink: 0.26
Cost of Herb: 2.7g
Cost of Blackfallow Ink: 3.71
Cost of Inferno Ink: 29.68

So Twilight Jasmine is currently my herb of choice for milling, since you can pay up to 50% extra over Cinderbloom and Heartblossom to get the same result. I'm not sure if it will pan out (since the sample was only 36 mills) but Twilight Jasmine producing twice as much Inferno Ink is pretty awesome.

I'm really enjoying that I can make a profit from all the products of milling herbs, and it means I can really keep cranking out glyphs for sale at a base price of around 12-15g. Unfortunately Blizzard set the exchange rate of Blackfallow Ink to Ethereal Ink at 10:1, so I have to keep hunting for Outland herbs in order to make many of the (now) most profitable glyphs.

The changes to inscription are fantastic, and I'm looking forward to getting into the darkmoon cards as soon as possible. Today, Twitchie has a trip planned to Stormwind to deliver his Forged Documents.

One last tip: make sure you get your friendly Inscriptionist (or Scribe for you heathens) to craft you a Adventurer's Journal to get a 10% buff to your quest XP. Based on the prices above, you should be able to find them for around 15 - 30g on the AH if there's any kind of scribbling competition on your server.

As prices come down further I'll have a look at milling the other Cataclysm herbs.

Last Minute Wrath: 150k gold

2010-12-05T13:15:00.000+11:00

After I posted that I had reached 100k gold on the server, the coin just kept flowing. The nice thing about automating many of the steps in coin generation, it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep things ticking along. Sure if you have a burning desire to have a ton of gold you can expand to new markets, and find new niches... but if you are comfy with where you're at, you can focus on your highest profit for time markets and participate in the others when you grab those bulk bargains from the AH.

A month or so ago I had 160k at my peak, and then between getting involved and another "Last Minute Wrath" project and transferring 10k horde side.... I was down to 125k.

Fortunately after the doom and gloom about the post Glyphmas slump prediction for Inscription when patch 4.0.1 hit... I found precisely the opposite. Increased materials for glyphs meant a larger mark up for each glyph, and even after the massive demand subsided... demand has been steady and the market humming along nicely.

I was completely caught out by patch 4.0.3a, and had not traded nearly enough Ink of the Sea for alternate inks before the ink trader was 'upgraded'. However, there most be a whole bunch of people leveling alts prior to Cataclysm hitting, since I've found the lower to mid level Herb markets far more accessible in the last couple of weeks. I'm still constantly short of Eternal Ink, but I make hay when the sun is shining.

The picture above has my most recent takings from selling glyphs in a single session, which at 3.8k is a new record for me. With the last taking coming in at 1.8k, hitting 5.6k worth of glyphs sold in 12 hours was a nice present just before Cataclysm.

Nitro Boosts: Now a Liability in Combat

2010-12-04T08:38:00.002+11:00

It's pretty funny to go shooting up into the air in a heroic, when you're desperately trying to get back to a the boss so you can stab him just once before he transitions.... it's somewhat less funny when you're on your DK is tanking Sindragosa (well it was actually pretty hilarious the first time).

Unfortunately since the boost moved from boots to belt, what was a useful tinker for PvE has become more of a liability. If the increased failure rate is because the enchant is over powered, I completely get that. Don't make them fail in combat though silly! That's the worst possible nerf. How about the speed increase is reduced? The time you are boosted is reduced? Put the $#@%ing cool down up to 5 minutes... anything is better than making them a giant liability.

Last Minute Wrath: Glory of the Hero

2010-11-29T16:51:00.000+11:00

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

2010-11-27T11:52:00.001+11:00

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

2010-11-23T18:12:00.002+11:00

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?

2010-11-19T17:13:00.001+11:00

Oh come on!

Milling Goldclover

2010-11-17T07:57:00.001+11:00

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

2010-11-16T13:00:00.003+11:00

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

2010-11-07T18:10:00.004+11:00

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

2010-11-07T16:31:00.000+11:00

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.

4.0.1 Protection Warrior Build at level 80

2010-10-13T10:31:00.002+11:00

Here what I'm currently thinking for 4.0.1 at level 80: 2/3/31.

Firstly, with the new 31 point trees, I only have 5 points to spend outside of the protection tree. Given that the self healing talents are new, I just had to pick up Field Dressing in Arms and Blood Craze in Fury. If threat is more or an issue than survivability, I'll add a second protection spec to test out the threat talents.

In the protection tree, aside from the fairly obvious talents, I chose to spend points in:

Blood and Thunder: even on a single target I think this will be good bang for buck threat wise, and should keep threat ticking on multiple mobs quite nicely.

Hold the Line: While the uptime on this talent is dependent on a successful parry, hopefully it will be a promising threat and mitigation talent, increasing both critical strike and the critical block chance. Of course, once the talent is activated, you just get the extra critical strike, but for the critical block chance, you need to actually block something. It will be interesting to look at the logs for this talent and discover just how many blocks are "landed" while this talent is up. The other big plus is that the wording of the talent makes me feel like a stalwart defender, so the name alone will appeal to warrior tanks everywhere.

I could have moved those points into:

Incite: I keep reading that incite is mediocre with rage normalisation and therefore not needing to spam Heroic Strike. However, if rage is plentiful and threat is an issue, I'll definitely give this talent another look.

Impending Victory: Additional self healing while the boss is under 20% health is appealing, it just doesn't seem worth the points given it is only available for a fifth of the fight. I'll wait and see what feedback this talent gets before getting to excited about it.

Glyphs

Unfortunately the prime glyphs are set in concrete. There are only 3 viable glyphs. Now I know prime glyphs are supposed to be obvious direct improvements... but if I never change them, they might as well be baked into the abilities themselves.

For Major glyphs I have gone for Long Charge, Cleaving and Thunder Clap. It is important to note that the old Glyph of Taunt is no longer.

Shield Wall now reduces damage done by 40% with a 5 minute cooldown [2 minutes when talented], and its glyph actually increases the cooldown as well as the damage reduction. Depending on fight length and particular mechanics, the Glyph of Shield Wall might be an attractive addition.

Glyph of Heroic Throw applies a stack of sunder armor, so it might have some interesting applications at some point as well.

For Minor glyphs I have Demoralizing Shout, Command and Battle. Battle is for pure convenience when Commanding Shout is not required so could easily be replaced with Berserker Rage if rage is an issue.

The nice thing about glyphs from this point forward is that once learned, you can swap them willy nilly. I'm hoping that blizzard have built an API for glyph exchange that allows all glyphs to be changed at once [out of combat, with cast time - I don't mind] so that addons like Outfitter can add a glyph profile to sets of gear. It is easy to think of a set of gear for tanking trash... how about a set of glyphs, too?

Patch Day: BYO Dragon

2010-10-12T18:24:00.001+11:00

Oddox really knows how to spice up a rep grind... BYO Dragon! I was pretty surprised while killing pirates when this Dragon showed up with its very own Oddox.

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 5 - More days!

2010-10-12T18:08:00.006+11:00

Day 2
Twitchie ripped through TotC10, completed the ICC Heroics and grabbed the T10 pants from VoA10 making the extra TotC25 token a little redundant (still worth 50g).

Day 3
Twitchie headed into VoA25, bought himself a Black War Mammoth and grabbed the Epic achievement. I grabbed [Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers] and an emblem wand to hit 5k gearscore.

Day 4
Into ICC10. Oddox rescued us from an early bail, and the spyglass failed to drop. Unfortunately the consensus was to bug the weekly quest [Fester and Rot] so Twitchie reluctantly complies. Abracadaver dropped from Rotface which was a fantastic upgrade. Finally I picked up [Gloves of Broken Fingers] and got up to 1000 haste (including spellstone).

Day 5
Into ICC25 with Kal’s mage Tylendel. We got the Frost Giant weekly this week, so lots of frosties straight away. [Crushing Coldwraith Belt] from Marrowgar saving a whole bunch of frosties. Lewtship was a hoot on another multi-dotter, but unfortunately got my self nuked from over enthusastic seeding. Kal had a ball as fire too (especially since he got brezzed and I didn’t). We fell over horribly on Saurfang which as pretty bad for a ranged heavy group.

So inside his first week, Twitchie had been through all the heroics, Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity and TotC 10 and 25. He’d ventured into both ICC 10 and 25, hit 5.2k gear score and was pumping out some DPS. For Twitchie’s adventures in their abbreviated completeness, head to: http://twitter.com/twitchietgw.

Kingslayers

2010-10-12T12:24:00.001+11:00

Yes, plural. While I’ve been jabbering on about a few other things a couple more of my toons have taken down the Lich King.

Firstly, Zenborg grabbed a Lich King kill in the week following our guild’s first kill. 13th June 2010. For the first night, we were short a healer and we wanted to give one of our regular tanks that missed the first kill at shot at LK so Zenborg plucked up the courage to try some hard modes on for size. The following night, Kalus was able to come, so I breathed a sigh of relief and was able to pew pew.

DPSing the Lich King fight is a lot of fun. I gave myself the task of mowing down the orbs that drift towards the group during phase transitions. Given that devouring plague can one shot an orb, and mind flay ticks so quickly, it was great fun handling the orbs while pumping as much DPS into the raging spirits as possible. Having AoE that works for the vial spirits is awesome fun, and dispersion really comes into its own as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get soul harvested, and still haven’t been on any of my toons to this day.

Next up, Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock). 28th August 2010. For a while there, we were really struggling to put together a 10 man group capable of making progress in ICC hard modes. We had our usual core toons, but some of our favourite people were unavailable both nights, or away on holiday. In particular we had a massive void in the healing department, with Jondayla our only regular healer. So we put together some alts groups and tore normal mode ICC apart, usually leaving Jondayla to keep healing. Eventually, helping numerous people get their Kingslayer titles [and then watching them sail off into the night] I managed to sneak Twitchie in for a kill. Using a lock portal to render the Val’kry impotent was quite satisfying.

Finally (so far), Borgelmir. 3rd October 2010. Despite making his main spec Unholy DPS, and trying to stick to my guns... he has ended up tanking quite a bit. The week Borgelmir got his Kingslayer title, the 10 man progression team extended a lock out to work on the Sindragosa and LK achievements for the Glory of the Icecrown raider. When we managed to finish of both achievements in one night, we had a spare raid night left over. Finally we managed to get Jondy’s warlock Jossamine her Kingslayer title, and Borgelmir was tanking away when it happened. Getting Lich King twice in a week was very satisfying.

So that just leaves Wrathborg, who unless he can sneak in this afternoon, is going to be doing it post Patch 4.0.1. I’ve got ~~about 800~~ 1002 glyphs ready to go, Jondy has scarlet rubies and fire in the mail... and I’m rearing to go.

(Re)Introducing Wrathborg

2010-10-11T18:49:00.002+11:00

Wrathborg is my rogue and first alt (second toon) in WoW. He started out life as a tailor, because I wanted to make my own bags. In fact so much so that his leveling in the early days (before Borg was 70) was centered around breaking that next crafting skill cap. I soon got tired of a weird looking Elven tailor, and as Zenborg took over tailoring he was benched.

Despite Jondy’s many pleas to bring back the rogue (and severe objections to the notion that I might delete him)... he stayed benched while Zenborg, Borgelmir and Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock) all leveled through to 80 in Wrath.

Finally, I decided to ditch Tailoring for skinning, and keep engineering despite Borgelmir also having that profession. I also looked into the specs and decided that an Assasination (mutilate) rogue was right for him. While mutilate rogues get some teasing for being on the faceroll side of the equation, even while leveling I found dual wielding daggers, spending a lot of time in stealth and wreaking havoc with poisons just felt like what I wanted my rogue to be.

Wrathborg hit 80 late August, and in his second ICC 10 man cruised through 11/12 with his favourite companion Jorgie [leveling partner, and Jondy’s enhancement shaman]. Wrath has been extremely lucky with loot, picking up [Rib Spreader] and [Flesh-Carving Scalpel] in his first 25 and 10 man run respectively. I was very surprised to pick up the heroic [Ikfirus’ Sack of Wonder] in ICC 25 shortly after purchasing the regular version.

My DPS highlight thus far has to be in that second ICC10 run, when on Rotface, the combination of heroism, great buffs, great RNG (no infection) and a group that could kill him in 2m27s made for a delightful 11.2k DPS.

Bonus highlight (since I started writing this post): [Deathbringer’s Will] !!!!!!!!!! I was lucky enough to pick up DBW (although I was hoping for [Heartpierce] (for PvP as much as anything)) in a PuG this week. I then put it to great use and hit my stride for 13.8k DPS on Festergut. While there was some room for improvement (like better Hunger for Blood uptime and yelling a fellow rogues for tricks) it was nice to trash Borgthor’s effort the previous week with his newly acquired DBW.

I went out to farm leather while waiting for a PuG to form one day, and despite being not too poorly geared, the memory of how Twitchie would tear mammoths and rhinos apart was just too much to handle... so with the help of Jondy’s secret stash of low level herbs, I power leveled Alchemy in a quick session after breakfast one day (just wait until you see what she got in return). I went Elixir Master partly so I could produce the guild’s flasks myself, but mostly as a potential income stream come cataclysm. I gotta say, the 2 hour flasks and extra AP are pretty nice. An extra regular transmute per day is icing on the cake.

So after a very shaky start, Wrathborg has proved to be a joy to play.

Heroic Professor Putricide 10 man

2010-10-11T18:01:00.003+11:00

Last week we had a lot of fun finishing off the Sindragosa and Lich King achievements so that we could finish off ICC in a single raid lock out. Sindragosa required some precision in order to avoid stacking Mystic Buffet over 5, and once we got the tank rotation together, things started to proceed like clockwork. We would flip the boss from side to side, so that the tanks only had to run straight out to find the next ice block and by the end, the taunting was tight enough that I had to avoid running straight into incoming toons who were Frost Beancon’d. I had to grab a couple of extra toons for the night, and to my surprise advertising for the specific achievements resulted in some pleasant and competent toons; to date my best pugging effort.

The LK achievement took a couple of attempts to get the disease stacking correctly, but once we got it going it was a matter of a clean kill after that to bring the achievement home. We had a couple of hiccups with tank deaths due to a couple of enraged Shamblers, and once we had the plague skip from 29 to 31. It was also a joy to have the regular mechanics of the fight reasonably well known, and it was satisfying to see how fast some of the Val’kyr went down.

This last week our big challenge was the remaining two hard modes before LK, heroic Putricide and heroic Sindragosa. Heroic Putricide takes a bit of getting used to, since the unbound plague mechanic takes a reasonable amount of raid awareness and communication to coordinate. We found (like many groups do) that there is limited value in assigning an infection order, or a location from which to share the plague. Instead, everyone needs to fully understand the mechanic, and focus dealing with it in the most productive way given several variables.

First up, the unbound plague lasts for 60 seconds. After being infected for 10 - 12 seconds you become extremely difficult to heal (the damage increases with every tick) so you need to pass the plague (with the remaining duration) to another toon. The flip side is the the plague is that each time the plague moves, it leaves a stacking debuff (plague sickness) on the original target that increases the damage done by unbound plague by 250% per stack. In the normal course of dealing with the plague you can expect about 5 - 6 people to be infected if all goes well, however the more the plague bounces around, the quicker toons need to pass it off due to increasing stacks of sickness.

So the goals with the sickness are to:

Keep the sickness as long as possible while remaining easy to heal (10 - 12 seconds)
Pass the sickness to someone with as few stacks of sickness as possible (zero is best)
Pass the sickness to someone who can easily identify the next person to pass it to
Deal with strategy that require people to stack or move quickly, which can make it a lot harder to sensibly share the plague
Deal with the regular mechanics at the same time while putting out significantly more healing / DPS / tanking than in normal mode

All that takes a little practise, and it really helps if people are able to communicate over vent to coordinate.

The next major change is for transitions, instead of getting stunned in place, you get to deal with a Green Slime and and an Orange Gas Cloud at the same time. The strategy we landed on was to zerg the green slime (all stacking near the spawn point) and kite the orange gas cloud until we got around to finishing it off. So if the Abom has more than 90 energy, it can slow both and if not, the orange gas cloud is the priority. At best, the tank in the Abom suit can spit on both slimes and everything goes nicely... at worst you can be dealing with a plague, people getting separated when the green slime explodes, and several toons dead in the process of a transition. It is also important to time the transition properly, since if you already have a slime/cloud up, you will end up with 3 which will most likely lead to a wipe. If you are running just a touch late on the transition, don’t worry if you force a transition just as he is starting to cast you can only end up with two. When I say a touch late, I’m not kidding, we forced a transition just as the ooze started to form, and we got three - so don’t try and take advantage of this as part of your strategy, just be glad if you you’re running late and only get two.

We ended up running with four druids, and while learning the fight the extra battle resurrections were valuable, but in our kill we needed none. If you have good enough execution for the last transition, you can have PP under 30% by the time he’s finished drinking his concoction which helps a lot with the soft enrage for the last phase (which aside from everything hurting more, requiring higher DPS and potentially having to deal with unbound plague is essentially the same). Since you aren't frozen, once you've killed both oozes feel free to give PP a whack while he's still drinking his concoction.

Big thanks to Therepoman, who ended up tanking on his druid, Healforreal. I’m still not sure it’s sunk in (for me), but he ended up with a well deserved (heroic) [Unidentifiable Organ]. Many of us would be a little reluctant to switch to an alt being so close the our ICC Drakes, and others oblivious to the opportunity they are getting to say... kill Lich King for the first time AND get Been Waiting for this for a Long Time. However, Repo logged without hesitation and did a great job in the meat suit.

So, speculation is that the patch is looming this week, leaving us just 2 more heroic modes in ICC.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention Moordenar picked up the heroic [Flesh-carving Scapel] just in time to see assassination make a comeback post patch.

Tamed at last!

2010-10-02T00:16:00.001+10:00

After days of camping (lucky he's a Blood Elf), and with the help of a speedy alliance gnome (complete with 310% mount) Jondy finally tamed the Spirit Kitty on her horde hunter!

Best in Show

2010-09-30T23:10:00.001+10:00

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

2010-09-29T18:13:00.000+10:00

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

2010-09-28T18:01:00.001+10:00

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?

2010-09-14T13:17:00.001+10:00

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.

Zenborg heals ICC10 Heroics

2010-07-21T11:40:00.000+10:00

I recently found a good pug for ICC10 on Zenborg, that needed a healer with DPS offspec (although I didn't get to use it). We one shot the first 3, and I even managed to score [Bracers of Dark Blessings] as a healing upgrade. The group as a whole was unfortunately out classed by Saurfang, since even two healing it there were two marks up before 70%.... so there were a combination of mechanics that were being handled poorly. Rotface was a little hit and miss, with some silly deaths, including a couple of DPS getting themselves killed with spectacular rips off the tank at the very start of the fight, leaving us well short of DPS.

Festergut was a little painful with people unable to avoid the goo, but we did manage to get FSS as pictured above.

Heroic Blood Queen was a blast, since there's just so much to heal... unfortunately our resto druid got a little confused with Pact of the Darkfallen, so we needed a few attempts to get it down.

I got my first chance at the portals on VD which was a lot of fun. Unfortunately part way through we lost our resto druid, so I had to pop out and raid heal while our machine of a shaman landed his 125k healing waves to save the dragon.

So all up healing 5/12 heroics was a lot of fun, and now equals Borg's and the guilds progression. Recently we had somewhat of a mass exodus from the guild, leaving our progression stalled while we rebuild. Pre-expansion blues does seem to have set in across the server, with some of my favourite guilds either calling an end to progression raiding or disbanding altogether.

DF$#@%ingO

2010-06-29T18:38:00.004+10:00

Zenborg finally got his hands on [Dislodged Foreign Object] today, and I'm excited. After picking up the heroic spyglass last week, I'm keeping Zenborg a good step ahead of my warlock.

As usual, a PUG is more fun with a friend, and Oddox joined me on his warlock (Parl) and we tore the bosses apart, including our first go at heroic lootship.

I was pretty pleased with over 10k DPS on Rotface, and being able to give the trinket a good home. It was also nice to get some 'well deserved' PSTs as well. Of course, Parl would have given it an equally good home, but in the end he's got to l2roll. ;)

Warlock Art

2010-06-24T13:16:00.000+10:00

The week after our first Lich King kill in 10 man, I needed to use Zenborg in the progression team to fill out the healers, and get a cuople of new guildies in for a LK kill. More about that later of course, but for now, just know that Zenborg is doing a happy dance.

So Borgthor was unsaved, and so we put together an alts run for some fun in ICC10. I didn't want Borgthor's ID to go to waste, and perhaps motivated out of severe jealousy of my priest wanted to at least pick up one heroic boss on my main.

The picture is from Saurfang, which we accidentally 1 healed. Two healers decided to go offspec after the event was started, to Rih (Oddox's shammie) had to suck it up. We had two affliction warlocks, and you can see in the background two boomies too. It was some nice symmetry to capture... just don't tell Rih that I was taking screenshots under 25% health while he was busy healing.

We managed to breeze through 11/12, the beauty was that we had set absolutely no expectations for the run, and everyone put up a good showing on their alts. Our guests were delightful, even if somewhat silent (the Disc Priest missing from vent put a little spanner in the works of continuing with LK). Sindragosa was a pleasant one shot, even though while setting up flares I engaged the boss and had to explain the last phase while we were busy fighting.

Achievements:
1 - Once Bitten, Twice Shy - grats Whip XD
2 - Boned
6 - The Plagueworks
7 - Heroic Lootship
7 - The Orb Whisperer
7 - The Crimson Hall
8 - The Frostwing Halls

10/12 ICC 25 - PP Down

2010-06-22T23:11:00.004+10:00

An important milestone this week. After having some trouble repeating our efforts on the Blood Queen, one $#%^-ton of flares later, we one shot Blood Queen, and got to have a couple of cracks at Putricide.

Putricide went down on our first night of attempts, with the phase transitions being just perfect on our last two attempts. While I may have been over enthusiastic in convincing our guild that I know what I'm talking about, we managed a seamless kill and got our first half dozen tier tokens in a raid lockout.

Most importantly we managed to get 10/12 ICC 25 inside the 20% ICC buff, which... by tomorrow... will be a distant memory as we stomp through the place with an extra quarter of KABLAM.

10/12 25, 5/12 H 10 is a nice place to nestle before the (20%) buff marches steadily on.

Heroic Blood Queen 10 man

2010-06-22T22:58:00.001+10:00

So here's a post about what I would have liked to have known going into heroic Blood Queen. There are plenty of blog entries on the general differences of the fight, but not any accessible (I have good google skills) on the specific milestones you are looking out for.

I had done this fight on an alt before my main (such is the way) and had completed heroic Blood Queen despite my desire (I completely forgot) to finish it off on normal... however I didn't look at the specifics.

Our progression team on paper had pew pew to spare, so I was confident of a kill after pugging the fight on an alt. We also had a smaller issue with tank deaths, so it seemed like a slam dunk. However, it did prove to be a little tricky.

So...

1. Don't die. You just can't fail at any of the basic mechanics. Don't die to swarming shadows, don't delay in eradicating pact of the darkfallen, and get those bites off! (Do delay the first two sets (<5s to go before turning) as not to have to bite during the fear phase).

2. Before the first fear phase, you're aiming for around 60% health left on the boss.

3. Before the second fear phase, you're aiming for under 25% health left on the boss.

Any slower than that, or any deaths will severely impair your chances of defeating the Blood Queen on heroic mode.

Twitchie rewinds

2010-06-11T15:57:00.001+10:00

As the 24h shutdown posts suggests, Twtichie put an end to Sindragosa last week, but still had the Crimson Hall to explore and Dreamwalker to save. I got that done today, so next week I'll try and have a peek at the princes and the queen.

24hr Shutdown: Pugging Malygos 25

2010-06-09T16:55:00.010+10:00

I started this post before Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock) had shown his face, so I tabled it until after the Twitchie Day(tm) saga had unfolded. Now that we're almost out of the 24hr Shutdown, and facing another couple of hours of Authentication Maintenance... this is as good a time as any to post it.

I pugged Malygos 25 today (27th April) on Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock) and it made me mad. Well a combination of mad and angry in amounts far exceeding what might be reasonable, even considering the circumstances. You see, you know going into a 25 man Malygos pug that there is potential for all kinds of issues, dramas and wiping.

From Twitchie's twittter:

Pugging Malygos 25 is like pulling teeth... stay tuned.

It fell apart. I don't get it. How do people actually do fights where they have NO idea of the core mechanic?

It's like walking into your pantry with a paper bag on your head, throwing random things at your oven, and licking the result off the floor.

THAT'S NOT WHAT I CALL DINNER.

Nevertheless, it has inspired a creative maelstrom in my mind about the very nature of pugging... and as a form of therapy I'll write about some of it here. So here it is, my intent, in writing to create some posts about pugging, both putting them together and participating... some tips on etiquette and communication... and finally addressing my major weakness: when to call it.

For those of you that missed the introduction post, my wife plays WoW and her main character is a resto Druid, Jondayla. Jondy doesn't like the swearing, and I like to freestyle swear. Jondy also doesn't have a particularly high tolerance for erm... let's call it "loud and angry".

However, Jondy does like to laugh (and she does like me).

So the challenge for me is to make my loud, angry freestyle swearing funny enough that the vulgarity : anger : volume : comedy ratio is over the threshold of acceptable, and the laughter produced is not nervous laughter (which I've recently learned is not remotely the same thing as regular laughter (I'm still learning the difference)).

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 4 - Champ in a Day(tm) Complete

2010-06-09T15:02:00.001+10:00

Previously on Twitchie Day(tm)...

We moved right along into Obsidian Sanctum at 1630, completing the Less is More achievement with a full guild group. Helly (Moordenar) came along on his priest, Ademar and kindly handed over the satchel of spoils. With the extra emblems of triumph, I was able to use my first trophy for iLvl 245 T9 lock gear.

Finally with a quick tweak to the personnel, we lined up to give Malygos a poke in the eye just after 1700. Boom blam kapow... at 1734, 13.5 hours after beginning Twitchie was Champion of the Frozen Wastes! (and now we can finally show his face)

Special thanks to my wife (who plays Jondayla) who helped hatch the scheme and helped align all the pieces so I could spend the entire day playing WoW. Jondy also found that 24 pack of pepsi max that had a significant dent in it by the end of the day.

Thanks particularly to Oddox and Therepoman, whose enthusiasm for the project spurred me on, and whose tanking and healing powered me through all those heroics. The 4am start was the icing on the cake, and logging on to find them both online is one the highlights of my time in WoW.

Quick thanks to Helly too... filling a full guild group for heroics before 6am gave me a very warm and fuzzy feeling.

Thanks to all the guildies that came to Naxx, Sarth and Mally. Having a core of known toons to help push the momentum of the group helped to run things smoothly. I also got a kick out of seeing so many achievements pile up along the way, including a number of other toons hitting Champion of the Frozen Wastes on the day!

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 3 - Naxxramas

2010-06-09T14:24:00.000+10:00

Previously on Twitchie Day(tm) ...

After some quick lunch I started to put the Naxxramas 10 man group together at about 1300. After a good half an hour we were ready to begin at 1330. We managed to grab some guildies which was fantastic, so the raid makeup looked like:

Tanks: Abernathee (Paladin / Lucah), Healforreal (Druid / Therepoman)
Heals: Jondayla (Druid), Rih (Shaman / (Oddox/Parl)), Guest Priest
DPS: Twitchie (Lock), Wolfkal (DK), Kayir (Arms Warrior), Guest Hunter, Guest Boomchicken

We were off to a clockwork start and by 1400 we had completed Arachnophobia, Momma Said and Razuvious was down (there's something special about a gnome warlock using the mind control orbs).

By 1438 we had downed the four horsemen without any deaths, made quick werk of Patch and I upgraded my neck with [Veiled Amulet of Life]. I was very excited to see some upgrades through the course of Naxxramas, since today's badge system makes so much content obsolete.

We downed Thaddius at 1508, with some very close calls on potential deaths. Everyone managed to make the jump OK (I handed out those wonderful Swiftness Potions beforehand) but some lack of familiarity with the fight gave Jondy and Rih something to heal.

Heigan, Heigan, Heigan... A couple of our guests couldn't dance, so while we weren't explicitly going for Undying... it was abruptly ended on Heigan. Of course, even on my main, Borgthor, I had to 8 man Naxxramas in order to get it done. It did however renew our enthusiasm for a main's Undying run, which has just never managed to find a place in the schedule.

So at 1612 (3 hours 42 minutes later) Kel'Thuzad was defeated and I had myself a new wand. Although it was missed in the screen shot, we also pulled many many Aboms for Just Can't Get Enough.

Next up on Twitchie Day(tm) - Sarth and Maly!

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 2 - GDKP TotC25

2010-06-09T13:43:00.000+10:00

Previously, on Twitchie Day(tm)...

While queued for H PoS in Dalaran, I noticed a GDKP run being advertised in trade, and I thought it's just about time for some bonus material! I sold Twitchie as a brand new 80 alt, with plenty of coin, and a TON of upgrades available. Kaboom, invite at 1049.

Despite my gear, I felt like I performed admirably, with 4k DPS on beasts and 4.8k on Lord Jaraxxus. It was really nice to see the impact of 25 man buffs on performance, and start getting used to raiding from a gnome perspective.

My first pickup of the day was for pure profit, the BoE [Drape of the Untamed Predator] went my way for 2600g, and having previously sold them on the guild's behalf for over 7k I was confident of a quick turn around for a reasonable profit despite its ever declining value.

I had my first experience with squishy lock syndrome in faction champs, but still managed to pick up a [Trophy of the Crusade] for 1400g.

Twins was an absolute delight, and hitting a 36k shadow bolt was a nice surprise. I missed [Chalice of Searing Light] at 1600g which was just more than I was prepared to pay for an offhand, but had fun driving the price up all the same.

We did have a wipe on Anub, with the OTs not working so well together, and the healing a little all over the place in phase 3. Second time around, we smashed it and I was done by 1232. I also picked up a second trophy again at 1400g, so I was pretty ecstatic about that. Due to some other upgrades (later in the story) that second trophy is still sitting in the bank!

So my expenses for GDKP were
2600g - Drape
1400g - Trophy
1400g - Trophy
5400g - Total

My earnings from GDKP were
1064g - GDKP split (very low, since no significant loot / trinkets dropped)
4600g - Drape sale
0050g - Vendor price of on Trophy
5614g - Total; so I came out a little ahead

So next up on the Twtichie Day(tm) saga - Naxxramas!

24hr Shutdown: You need to be this high ...

2010-06-09T00:40:00.001+10:00

... to defeat the Lich King.

Patience Twitchie, your time will come.

24hr Shutdown: Twitchie shall not be contained!!!!!

2010-06-09T00:37:00.000+10:00

Sindy tried to fizzle Twitchie's nightfall proc.

Bad move, Sindy. Bad move.

24hr Shutdown: Lady Deathwhisper...

2010-06-09T00:31:00.000+10:00

... started right. There's nothing like a rogue, rocket boots, parachute and a blood elf dancing transformation to start a 25 LDW off right!

24hr Shutdown: Moordenart

2010-06-08T23:43:00.003+10:00

This art brought to you by the 24 hour shutdown, and a rogue named Moordenar.

Get to the Choppa!

2010-06-07T14:35:00.000+10:00

With the Kingslayer title, comes a sweet new ride. Kalus joined me for a well deserved ride around Dalaran.

Lich King Down!

2010-06-06T22:50:00.003+10:00

We downed the Lich King tonight, after an hour. After a couple of false starts, the final kill was a text book kill, with no deaths and toons wreaking havoc inside Frostmourne.

More later, but for now we're all really excited.

Getting to the weekly in style...

2010-06-06T14:07:00.001+10:00

... is freakin' awesome!

Moordenar took Zenborg to Naxxramas this week for the weekly, on this newly 310% turbo boosted recruit-a-friend mount!

Awesome.

Just awesome.

P.S. Thanks Moordenar for churning out those 100,000 arrows for me too ;)

Glory of the Ulduar Raider

2010-06-01T01:22:00.006+10:00

Tonight, we finally got Glory of the Ulduar Raider, by completing Yogg+1 or One Light in the Darkness. It took many, many attempts to put a solid group together (more on that later) but tonight we got it done!

The Rusted Proto-Drake is a fantastic mount, meaning I can put away my pink (yes, I can call it pink now) Violet Proto-Drake forever. Jondy is also very pleased with the increased speed for her flight form, and Moordenar's new recruit a friend mount, the X-53 Touring Rocket goes really fast now too.

A huge thank you to all the guildies that have helped with all the achievements, starting all the way back in September last year (so there are lots of you!). Of course while we completed the bulk of them in the first two months, it was both challenging and rewarding to find the toons excited to finished them off even after getting stuck into ICC.

A particular thanks to both Jondayla and Moordenar for being there every step of the way. Your mounts are well deserved. I'd also like to thank you for your perseverance and patience in dealing with groups that we all knew were not quite fit for the task at hand, and not doubting too much when I thought my shear enthusiasm and meticulous fight mechanic tutorials could magically teach people how to not clip clouds.

For tonight's effort we ran 1 tank (me, Prot Warrior), 3 heals (druidx2, holy pally), 4 melee (DKx2, rogue, warrior) and 2 ranged (spriest, hunter). You know it's going to be a fun night when in the first few attempts you don't wipe it up in the clouds. Our brain room team of druid, DKx2 and rogue were firing and on the successful attempt were close to pushing phase 3 in one trip into the brain. Our first epic attempt in phase 3 was looong, with people getting picked off and going insane. Thorim was a blessing, as popping off those guardians is fantastic when you have the luxury of entering phase three with over 6 minutes on the enrage timer. Overall it was one of those progression nights I enjoyed as toons executed better and better throughout the night and we scored a kill.

Thanks to Coalesce and friend Arionathe for helping out. I've known Coalesce since BC, and he was there for our first Malygos 25 guild kill and plenty in between.

A quick note to all the guys from the run tonight, and guildies that have missed out on some of the achievements along the way... we'll be doing it all again. Depending on group make up, Borg and Jondy will be tanking and healing through the lot (most of which can be done very quickly) so look for those runs and sign up!

We celebrated with some Champagne, and then a romp through Trial of the Grand Crusader and got that long overdue Tribute to Skill achievement.

The joys of pugging ICC 25

2010-05-25T15:07:00.002+10:00

See that blue flame... gently glowing. Take your time. Finally proof that size really doesn't matter... is the [Frozen Bonespike]. How Zenborg had pined for this weapon... how he had rolled and rolled. Even his hideous protector was starting to develop a complex about how superfluous he was.

Finally today was the day, in a last minute Tuesday ICC 25 pug.

Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I finally produced a decent roll. Today's effort was 8. However, my new druid buddy withdrew his roll hoping to win something else (which unfortunately didn't materialise) and I got my new spike.

Unfortunately, despite what looked like a promising group... even with the 15% buff we were unable to down Festergut since some people were a little new to the concept of spores and some sub-tank DPS efforts. I also learnt a new trick (which /facepalm for not figuring this out already) which was that shadow priests can just ignore the spores, since a dispersion is always available for the pungent blight. So my new /cancelaura Dispersion macro is getting a nice workout recently.

All in all, a fun run though... since it's always a nice surprise to find people from your friends list in the group.

Here's the World of Logs.

Dreamwalker 25 Saved!

2010-05-24T16:27:00.007+10:00

On Saturday night saved Valithria Dreamwalker in 25 man ICC. For about the sixth week in a row Saturday rolled around with an incomplete roster on the sign up sheet. However, the tactic of leaving loot pinatas Festergut and Rotface alive proved itself, and we were able to attract the couple of extra toons required to fill the raid with the promise of farm bosses and a shot at the object.

Suspend reality while I tell you this isn't a catch up post and attempt not to shatter my segue straight into Borgthor DPSing Festergut using [Shadow's Edge]!

So... that's not quite Festergut, but people celebrate getting their brand new perfectly itemised epic weapons in different ways. Shadow's Edge is part slow, part ArP, part crit and all awesome, and has been a huge boost to my offspec since I decided to go the ArP hard cap route. I still have some way to go but 83% isn't a bad start... now for that trinket.

Back to Saturday, Festergut went down comfortably and I was pleased that even doing the same DPS two weeks ago, my offspec was pushed down substantially on the damage ranking. Rotface was good fun as always, and I particularly enjoy kiting the Oozes (and then hearing on my alts pugs about how warriors can't do it).

Dreamwalker was a hectic fight, but we managed to save her on our third attempt for the evening. We ran three tanks which might be a little superfluous, but I had fun running from side to side help out. I think next time I'll either run two (although I would have felt a little guilty consuming all those souls on a progression boss for a first time) or assign two tanks one side and overload the DPS slightly with the single tank to make picking mobs up a little more linear. Our healing team did a great job in the portals, and held us up against a never ending wave of mobs long enough to get the job done.

Blood Queen is our next challenge for the 25 man team (SPREAD OUT!), and hopefully getting two nights of raiding up and a new progression boss will give us some momentum for next week.

Rise of the long lost alt

2010-05-24T15:58:00.007+10:00

My original engineer, Wrathborg finally got some play time recently and put together his very own helicopter. I didn't make one on Borgelmir, because a Death Knight in a helicopter didn't seem quite right to me after splurging on a mount that flew with just bones for wings.

I have really enjoyed my leveling mutilate spec, and after dual speccing into combat I'm not to sure what all the fuss is about. Yes, there's some fantasmal cooldowns and some AoE in combat, but how much quicker can things actually die when you're decked out in heirlooms and specs. Mutilate just feels more like I think a rogue should: shadowy, discrete and a powerful arsenal of poisons. What dual spec does however, is add some extra variety in the leveling experience and getting a chance to get a feel for both specs before 80 is a lot of fun.

Lock picking has proved both fun and frustrating. Today I spent some time in Zangarmarsh hunting for the elusive wicker chest to pick. So a couple of tips for rogues out there... Not everything is a footlocker...

... and some people don't just leave their locked goodies strewn around their camp. From 300 - 325 lock picking there's no better place than Feralfen village.

A Poke in the Eye

2010-04-28T22:40:00.005+10:00

So after another dismal attempt to convince people to come along to 10 man Yogg+1, we settled on the weekly raid, Eye of Eternity.

Since I hadn't got the 8 man achievement, I thought it might be nice to grab that while we were at it. (Spoiler Alert: my secret gnome warlock got this same achievement the day he hit 80 as part of Champ in a Day(tm)).

Pugging was absolutely excruciating. The number of inexperienced toons, the lack of any useful information provided voluntarily to help find a match (my eyes were almost bleeding after looking at so many missing gems and enchants in the armory). In the end I mistook arrogance for competence and took a Ret Pally / Hunter pair that could have been easily replaced by one decent player for a 7 man attempt.

In any case, we managed to have a pick of 3 main spec tanks for our 1 tank spot, so I got to DPS. I bet you can guess what achievement came next!

Twitchie Day(tm) - Part 1 - Northrend Dungeon Hero

2010-04-27T13:55:00.010+10:00

Introducing Twitchie (the Gnome Warlock), my not so secret Warlock, and my latest level 80 toon.

For level 80, I wanted to do something special and tear through content that blizzard had decided to make obsolete. So the idea was hatched for Champ In a Day(tm).

Champ in a Day is all about getting the Champion of the Frozen Wastes achievement and title in the first 24 hours of dinging 80. It consists of all the regular heroic dungeons, Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity. While you only need to defeat the last boss of each instance for the achievement, I was going to do this properly, and clear ALL bosses in any of the content I attempted.

To document this on the fly, I signed up for twitter on Twitchie. You can follow his adventures through teeny 140 character snippets at http://twitter.com/twitchietgw .

Twitchie logged off before maintenance at level 79, with 1797 spell power, 109 Hit, 8.58% Crit and 12.11% haste. Quite reasonable stats, including heirloom items which made flying through normal instances a lot of fun.

When I woke up just before 4am and logged on, I was delighted to find Oddox and Therepoman already online and rearing to go. By 0409 I had dinged, and 0414 had trained up, added talent points, an extra glyph and got the superior achievement. My bank was a marvel of craftables, spare gems and enchant scrolls. Twitchie's fresh 80 wowhead profile gives you an idea of the step up in stats, including the superior achievement.

The oven was on, preheating for Croissants for breakfast... The kettle was boiled for coffee... There was a 24 pack of pepsi max cans in the fridge. Twitchie Day(tm) is declared OPEN!

Phase One - Northrend Dungeon Hero

0416 - Violet Hold - seed of corruption mayhem, but no drain soul ticks since bosses are just getting NUKED.
0430 - The Culling of Stratholme - 13k drain soul tick on Salramm, and from memory I think I picked up the drake for good measure.
0452 - Gundrak - achievements aplenty
0510 - Utgarde Pinnacle
0525 - Halls of Lightning -
0540 - The Nexus - Hellyonz (Moordenar) is up early, on his priest Ademar and joins in the fun. We even did a post nerf Chaos Theory, which was a whole new kind of easy.
0600 - Violet Hold - (again) but I'm joined by my wife Jondy on her baby kitty, so we have a full guild group! Hellyonz is toon switching like mad, soaking up those delicious frosties.
0615 - Gun'drak - (again) but Helly is on Xarik, so more frosties flow. Share the Love took a full five minutes, and Oddox grabbed his last achievement for Glory of the Hero!
0630 - Drak'tharon Keep - between eating croissants (thanks honey!), skinning and tweeting, this instance is a breeze ;)
0652 - after amassing 92 EoTs (some from regular dailies post 70) I upgrade to [Helm of Fiery Aftermath]!
0700 - Azjol-Nerub - I snaffle [Rod of the Fallen Monarch]
0715 - Utgarde Keep - queued for this specifically, since there aren't many left to go
0730 - Halls of Stone - Jondy has started on work while I grab another quick run.
Work time
0938 - Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom - Twitchie turns a little red when his melee swing is dodged by a healthy mushroom.
1000 - The Oculus - lucky last for Northrend Dungeon Hero, and a well earned upgrade: [Pauldrons of Revered Mortality].
1020 - The Forge of Souls - into bonus material already, and starting on dungeons an affliction lock can really sink their teeth into.
1040 - After chaining dungeons all morning, Oddox and Repo head off for a well earned break.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Twitchie Day(tm) where Twitchie will start moving and shaking in his very first raid!

Sindragosa goes down!

2010-04-27T13:36:00.001+10:00

After a fantastic first night in ICC 10, getting 10 bosses in 3 hours... our second night was all about Sindragosa. After some previous attempts where the ground and air phases were cake, but the last phase nightmarish, we added some additional frost resistance gear. FR gear allowed us some slack in execution while we perfected the dance all the way to the enrage timer. With a little less FR and some fine tuning, we downed the dragon on our last attempt of the evening (I'm thinking I should start raids at 10:20pm from this point).

By way of catch up, are 11/12 ICC 10 and 7/12 ICC 25. I was very pleased with our 25 man progress, having gotten Festergut during the 5% buff, one shotting Rotface on the night we got him, and getting down Blood Princes nice and early. However, through some attendance / recruitment issues and a hole in the last 5 DPS positions... we've been struggling for the last few weeks. Adding to the frustration is Rotface's insides being the only thing between me and a new toy.

Revenge and 3.3.3

2010-03-25T10:57:00.000+11:00

Thanks for the buff Blizz, I just wish you hadn't have added a cleave effect. This was from the Anub in H AH, so it could have been anything that I hit, but still first heroic and a 12.9k crit? That's not too bad.

Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets

2010-02-08T17:06:00.004+11:00

Last night in ICC10, things started out great! We one shot the first four bosses, and made our way towards Stinky and Precious.

Then [Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets] dropped from trash! I was very excited. The first thing I thought was, "what an awesome loot policy it is to allow BoEs be given to participating main spec toons". My second (although hard to say, since they came thick and fast at this point) was something about how wonderful it is to tank along side a Paladin. I was also relieved that Parl's warrior Oddox had the thing already when he rolled for it... and that certain rogues just like to make trouble. You'd think after being made to wait (not be me (or on purpose)) to roll on [Death's Verdict] he'd know better.

The main reson for my excitement was really about the gun's looks. It is a relatively small upgrade, since ranged weapons are teeny stat sticks for warriors... but just take a second look at that thing! It effortlessly combines a bayonet, with a mini-gun-esque front barrel, with pointy!

Things got better from there, and after one shotting Festergut, we faced off against Rotface. We two healed the encounter, and things were looking very promising right from word kgo. By the time the first Ooze combined and exploded Rotface was at about 45% health, and we had pretty good slime merges right through the fight, leading to a kill.

I also really enjoyed kiting the slimes as a Warrior tank. Vigilance is a great tool to keep the healer aggro on an even keel, and if you time it just right... Heroic Throw, Shockwave, Thunder Clap and shouts are enough to keep the big slimes rolling your way.

To top things off I hit exalted with Ashen Verdict and picked up [Ashen Band of Endless Courage].

25k Gold Transaction

2010-02-06T13:51:00.004+11:00

My guild recently looted [Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder] and what a wonderous sack it was.

We have a policy of allowing toons in the run to take BoE items as an upgrade for their main spec, but failing that sell the items through our guild bank. The guildie discount for BoE items is around the 65 - 70% mark, which means not only does the toon get a bargain, but everyone else in the run (and the guild as a whole) benefits from the coin (we sell discounted potions / flasks / eternal belt buckles / enchants through the guild bank).

On this occasion, we banked the item after no interest for a main spec upgrade (mostly due to the peculiar itemisation, and us not running a Bear in our raids). When I looked at the auctioneer data for the item, I started to get a little excited. 25k gold seemed... like... a LOT. So I set the guild price at 8k, and went to the AH.

First up, I wanted to list it at an obscene price on the off chance that a guildie wanted it at 8k. 29400 gold would net almost 28k, so I started there. Almost immediately, I received an offer in the mail from someone's bank alt, offering 25k gold. Later in the day I was whispered with offers over 10k, and got the resigned, "some people have too much gold" when I told them our current best offer.

After checking with guildies that could use the upgrade (8k was still a little steep), I met up with our buyer in Dalaran. At this point in the game, the most coin I had amassed across all my toons was 25k gold, so seeing that much in the trade window got my heart beating a little faster. Even my personal throughput of gold through the guild bank of around 20k gold just didn't compare to seeing it all in one lump sum.

My curiosity got the best of me, and I enquired as to who would be wearing the chest... and it turns out it was going to a horde bear tank in one of the more progressed horde guilds on the server. Although I've dabbled in neutral AHs and grabbing the odd recipe or two from the horde AH, I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of monitoring the horde AH for those must have BoE items (and other potential money spinners).

So much to my surprise, we decided to bank the coin to give us a head start in Cataclysm, should the guild changes require any actual gold.

Happy New Year

2010-01-28T23:00:00.001+11:00

So, it's been a while since I posted....having been completely distracted with 3.3 and RL work ramping up... so here it goes with another proverbial catch up post.

Before patch 3.3, we managed to complete all but one of my goals for the guild's progression.

19/11/2009 - 5/5 TotC 25 man
22/11/2009 - 4/5 TotGC 10 man
30/11/2009 - Ulduar 10 hard modes / drake achievements up to and including Hodir
07/12/2009 - Ulduar 10 Thorim hard mode

The only thing missing from that list was Yogg-Saron in 25 man Ulduar. Hopefully we'll be having another crack at him on Saturday night. We did have a great time with Vezax 25, and the interrupts were so good it almost felt like a holiday for me on our successful attempt.

Zenborg kept his streak alive and managed to clear TotC25 before Borgthor, and was suitably rewarded by getting Moonspirit to craft [Merlin's Robes] for him.

Borgthor managed to sneak into a Sarth+3D 25 man zerg, and walk away with the drake!

Borgelmir came out of retirement, and started pwning some content as unholy. The changes in 3.3 have made it the 'in' spec, but I really enjoyed 3.2 unholy and had a lot of fun spreading my diseases. It was also fantastic to win [Justice Bringer] and then turn down offers of unspeakable mountains of coin to trade it.

Zenborg got into GDKP and had a very nice run through 25 man TotC and came out with an extra 3600g, but that experience deserves it's own post, so keep a look out for that.

Onyxia's Lair came along, which wasn't too exciting but both Zen and Borg enjoy their 25 man helms. The warrior DPS helm is very nicely itemised, and was a great pickup while tanking.

I refined my guild bank purchasing system, devoting my level 20-odd mage to herb and flask storage. We ended the year with a stock of almost 1000 flasks which we sell to guildies at about 60% of market value.

The guild had a couple of weeks off progression raiding over Christmas, and now back in the new year, we're 5/12 in ICC 10 and 3/12 in ICC 25.

Ulduar 10 Cleared!

2009-10-23T13:14:00.009+11:00

A long time coming, we two shot Yogg-Saron in Ulduar 10. I think we had up to about 60 attempts on this boss, which makes it by far the hardest boss I've encountered to date, including hard mode bosses. Part of the issue with the number of attempts was the turn over in personnel, I think we ended up having more than 20 toons cycled through our Sunday and Monday night raids before we got the boss down.

Everything came together nicely on the night, and our fantastic brain room team gave us plenty of breathing space upstairs. I really enjoyed solo tanking the encounter, and from the moment we entered phase one, scoring an extra mob early it just felt right.

After he was down, I opened the champagne and we contemplated what to do with the rest of our raid night.

The choice was simple really... Heroic TotC10. After clearing normal TotC10 in under 50 minutes (and the week after in 40), we were all keen to get back into the heroic version. We took a little while to adjust to how quick you need to move out of the fire, the speed at which snobolds should die (I like to think they should be vapourised) and getting the Gormok taunting down. Then we focused on some better execution for the worms, and finally Icehowl was safely pwned in good time before the enrage timer.

We played with a couple of strategies for Jaraxxus before calling it a night. After the all the frustrations with Yogg, it was fantastic to finally get him down. Heroic Northrend Beasts was icing on the cake.

Relegated... to the mobile office

2009-10-19T11:00:00.001+11:00

His only company? A portable mailbox and ever loyal (robotic, programmed) man servant.

I'm going to be upfront. I despise the completely backward changes made to Emblems in Wrath of the Lichking. While I spend a fair bit of time in game, I consider myself a casual, but talented player. Going back to farm content (daily heroic for EoTs, heroic farming for EoCs) regularly in order to gear up has crushed my alts... well at least one of them.

Poor Borgelmir has been relegated to his mobile office. Now that I feel compelled to run the daily heroic on my *cough* important toons, I have been just dreading gearing this guy up. His current schedule? Well, it's just as well he's both a jewel crafter and an engineer...

... so here's a day in the life of Borgelmir:

Get the JC daily, and wormhole to the location (30s)
Kill stuff (30s - 2m)
Hearth (10s)
Grab Jeeves (so I don't have to run all the way to the bank) and get the small gems for the JC daily and hand in (20s)
Scan the auction house in Dalaran (4m)
Grab bargains for the guild bank, post my own auctions (2m)
Cut gems for fellow guildies (0 - 30s)
Logout... no more playtime for you today

10 minutes tops. If he wasn't a 450 JC and 450 engineer, with the capacity to become my primary AH toon... I may have actually ditched him altogether.

of the Nightfall

2009-10-14T09:40:00.000+11:00

The story starts with Borgthor, back on 21st August, having a free moment, and watching trade and looking for group vigilantly to find that exciting PuG opportunity. It came in the form of the following, "LF pro tank for Sarth+3D 10 man zerg". I responded immediately, and got the nod. Naturally we then had to wait a while to find a suitable shaman (isn't that always the way?).

The strategy was quite straightforward.

1 Tank, 1 Healer, 8 DPS
Rogue vanishes to reset Sarth, everyone gets into position
As soon as Sarth appears, pop hero and unload
Tank picks up 1st drake while continuing to pump high threat into Sarth
Just before Sarth is at 25% health (drake enrage), a DPSer taunts the extra drake, and runs like hell
The drake enrages, but Sarth is dead before the drake can 1) kill the DPSer who taunts and 2) make it back to wipe the group

Much to my surprise, everything went like clockwork in this PuG, and we one shot Sarth. I was pleasantly surprised how much threat I was able to generate (given that you need some serious DPS to make it work) and the threat lead I had enabled me to pick up the drake without worrying about slowing the DPSers down (or letting them rip).

I missed out on the drake, but it was such a nice group that we went to do 6 minute Malygos.

We got some momentum behind a guild attempt of Sarth+3D, but it took a little while to fit in the schedule. On 14th September we managed to get a group up and running. Monday nights haven't been easy to organise since we introduced them as an extra 10 man night. Some people have a preference for 25 mans (which we are now running two nights per week) and other people just have a more limited schedule. So... it came as a little bit of a surprise that Zenborg was actually the best available healing option for the fight.

The issue with only needing one tank, one heal and having trouble finding 10 toons up to the challenge was that once we could grab our Pally tank, Borg was no longer required in the tanking department. Next up was the DPS / taunting role. My wife Jondayla has really taken to her kitty offspec, and has been putting out some serious DPS (including in recent hard modes, where a healer go DPS option has given us a great deal of flexibility). So she had the DPS / taunt gig, which left us without a healer. So Zenborg it was. After all, I had recently announced to Jondy, "I finally get priest healing, everything before now was sooo awkward".

By the time we filled out last spot, we had a balance druid, and we decided that the range would give them an advantage in the 'taunt and run' department. In hindsight I could have passed the healing assignment back to Jondy, but I was probably too excited to think of that option.

Our group was

Prot Pally
3x Hunters
Destro Warlock
Balance Druid (+taunt and run)
Feral Druid
Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Holy Priest

We had a lot of fun over our many attempts, and it took a little while to get used to keeping DPS up while dodging waves (particularly from the left side was painful), getting the taunt mechanics down, and learning just how awesome binding heal can be.

When we did get him down, it took just 1m48s. Our dedicated DPS were between 4.5 - 5.5k DPS (or equivalent*), and Zenborg was well and truly dead. Congratulations to Helly, who walked away with the [Reins of the Black Proto-Drake].

If you must take a slightly less than ideal healing option, I highly recommend a priest. Spirit of Redemption was absolutely overpowered for that last 15 seconds of totally uninterrupted healing. In most fights it's not that big a deal, but 15 seconds in a 1m48s fight is pretty huge.

Raiding Roundup - 10 Man - Ulduar Hard Modes

2009-10-08T16:01:00.009+11:00

Our first night of Ulduar hard modes and achievements was a lot of fun, and went really well.

Nuked from Orbit (Flame Leviathan - 3 towers)

We added Freya's tower to the mix, and our gunners expertly dispatched the flowers as they appeared. It required a couple of attempts, and a lot more pyrite... but we defeated FL with 3 towers up. I think adding in Mimiron's tower will take a lot more in the way of execution than our 3 towers effort but I think we're up for the challenge.

Stokin' the Furnace (Ignis - sub 4 minutes)

We went 2 tanks, 2 heals for this encounter, with Jondy swapping into kitty spec. Given our usual strategy is a zerg, I think we'll be doing it this way from now on. The two healers handled it very comfortably, and he was down before any real spike damage could hit the tanks.

Heartbreaker (XT Hard Mode)

Heartbreaker was a lot of fun, and our first true hard mode kill. I got to go Arms for this fight, and give the heart a good pounding which was great fun. Just to ensure that the heart went down, Jondy switched to kitty in healing gear and gave it a bit of a swipe too. Our kill was a fairly long one I think, with me back into defensive stance to taunt / tank the sparks while ranged brought them down. Next time I think we could be a little slicker in dealing with the sparks for a quicker kill. Zeltan got [Aesir's Edge], which is a fitting reward for the the hard mode.

We had a couple of runs at Iron Council hard mode, but ran out of time. The most exciting part was watching Adirix (holy pally) get Fusion Punch himself and hit the ground. Still not sure why it happened... but it was well worth it. ;)

I found tackling the hard modes quite rewarding, and I think everyone on the night had a great time. However, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to fill a group to go into Ulduar 10. My highest priority for 10 man is to down Yogg-Saron, and recently trying to get the right brain room team has been looking a little bleak. Add to that, people's enthusiasm for TotC10 (both gear and EoTs) and you get ... stuck. The last couple of weeks have seen me alternatively running a second TotC10 group with additional guests, or running guild groups on consecutive nights on different toons. While getting 17-20 guildies through TotC10 is great for the experience and gear, it's just not what I look forward to my 10 man nights for.

To quote myself from a recent conversation with one of my favourite hunters:

I don't raid for loot. Loot comes as a side effect of raiding with great group with decent loot rules. I raid for the challenge of difficult encounters.

When it comes to 25 mans, it is all about the guild. I want to expose a greater selection of guildies to raiding, and help them progress. We even had guildies that picked up the Tier 8.5 chest from Hodir, even though it's available from farming heroics. We often take undergeared, and more casual guildies over PuGing, but perform very well for our two nights per week raiding.

10 man on the other hand, I really want to pwn! It's a chance to form a tight knit group of skilled and dedicated raiders and work on some tougher content. Hopefully we'll be back to that for my next 10 man roundup.

Raiding Roundup - 25 Man

2009-10-08T15:04:00.008+11:00

Lots to update since we one shot Anub'arak in 10 man TotC in the first week he was available, but this is the 25 man post.

We've been working our way through the keepers. Since the introduction of TotC, we've had limited opportunities to really sink our teeth into them, but they have been dropping.

Our Hodir kill was a very close call, after a number of frustrating wipes. It was a huge relief to get him down, with a little help from our cold, cold friends. The number of people that got themselves frozen attempt after attempt was pretty funny (in hindsight), and I enjoyed DPSing for this fight. I have developed an ever diverse set of phrasing to describe each of the fight mechanics, including my patented, "off the circles... onto the circles" over vent during the fight. As it was we managed to get the kill with 7 dead, so I'm looking forward to beating the enraged timer by a significant margin with the whole raid alive.

Freya was another fight that took some time to learn on 25 man, despite a solid strategy and good looking team. I think everyone needs to experience how much the detonating lashers hurt when they explode before they will listen to the advice to single target them at low health. Getting the three elementals down at the same time also proved to be a challenge, and it's very tempting just to add an extra 10% health to the instruction 'stop DPS on X'. Maybe it's something that again needs to be experienced before it's handled better. One of the things I think we do well as a guild, is try and explain the fight from first principles, so that there's a better understanding of why we employ the strategy we do. It takes a little extra time, but I think once the fight has been learned, and won, the terse instructions given for a boss that's on farm seem to stick a little better.

Finally, Thorim went down in Ulduar 25, after just a few attempts over two different nights. In the arena, focus fire (and probably too little DPS on the first night) was the biggest issue, but when we got the balance right, and added a 2nd tank to hallway team, it went like clockwork. A couple of people died in the lightning charge... but we got him down convincingly.

The following week, we went for a romp in TotC25, and got 4/5 straight up. I really enjoyed one shotting the faction champions... with more tanking / plate wearing options to distract the melee, more CC options and interrupts galore it was so much easier than we had found in 10 man. Hopefully Anub'Arak will fall this weekend.

What a long, strange trip...

2009-10-08T13:06:00.006+11:00

It all ended with my favourite festival in WoW, Brewfest. I had completed every possible achievement available the year before and logged in early on the first day of Brewfest only to find that Coren Direbrew wasn't due out until the 'start' of the event in 'US time'. I had even disturbed the peace as soon as I could get to Dalaran sans mage port when the expansion came out.

It was well worth the wait, as Brewmaster is the most cherished of all my titles associated with festival events in WoW... which I temporarily forgot about... because I had mail!

I didn't expect the mount to feel a whole lot faster, and it didn't at first. The fact that it's so BIG had me thinking, is this really 310% speed? Then I looked at where I was on the map after my test flight and decided - YES! this is freakin' 310% speed!

The violet protodrake (violet, not pink, Obe) is a great looking beast for starters. Then the speed... oh the speed. I can't describe how good it... oh wait, yes I can. The speed feels awesome. So awesome in fact, that it has made mining FUN again. I even decided to take a lap through Sholozar Basin while putting a guild progression raid together, and by the time everyone had decided to log on... I had 80+ saronite ore, and all the eternals and gems to go with it.

The most exciting part of Brewfest this year, was obtaining my long sought after ram mount! I got the kodo last gear, which I admit after 12 months of use, does suit a tank rather well... but I was still hanging out for the ram. He doesn't disappoint, and is the only land mount I'm using at the moment.

It is such a relief to have the Violet Protodrake, and to look forward to a year, almost festival free. While I thoroughly enjoyed brewfest, I can't say the same for most of the other festivals. In fact the person most happy to see me find a 310% speed mount in my mail was my wife, Jondy... who is hoping that the coming festival season will see WoW related swearing drop by about 50%.

Secret Warlock

2009-10-08T12:52:00.005+11:00

This toon is an inscriber, so I can't show you his face... or tell you his name. What I can reveal to you is that he is a warlock, decked out in heirlooms, with a level appropriate helm from a recent run in Zul'Farak.

My secret warlock was once a mighty coin generating machine, and is now free to level and experience the sights and sounds of Azeroth before it all changes... forever. One day, when people of all races look back fondly on the highs and lows of the gylph market, he'll even be able to show his face.

EoC for 8800g?

2009-09-11T14:11:00.003+10:00

I received nothing but, "are you crazy?" whilst considering [Etched Signet of the Kirin Tor] for 8800g (count on guildies to tell it like it is).

So how many emblems is that at the best possible price? 352. Hmmm, maybe they were right.

Marketwatch(tm) with Borgthor

2009-09-11T11:23:00.009+10:00

Inspired to turn your excess [Emblem of Conquest]s into cold, hard coin? Allow me to guide the way.

	Emblems	MBO		Avg
iLvl 213 Bracers	60	1100	18.33	1500	25.00
Dreadstone	10	169	16.90	179	17.90
Eye of Zul	10	149	14.90	150	15.00
Ametrine	10	135	13.50	145	14.50
Runed Orb	18	235	13.06	270	15.00
King's Amber	20	178	8.90	181	9.05
Cardinal Ruby	20	165	8.25	169	8.45
Majestic Zircon	20	151	7.55	152	7.60
Frozen Orb	10	28	2.80	50	5.00

MBO = minimum buy out today, on the AH
Avg = 7 day average price on Dath'Remar

The iLvl 213 BoE bracers have jumped in price again, now that everyone has better things to do with their higher level emblems. Of course, they are the hardest thing to offload on the list, given competing BoE items (espeically higher level [Combustion Bracers] for cloth... but if you can find a buyer at 1500g, it just can't be beat.

The next tip is to make sure you're getting your primary colour gems (Red, Blue, Yellow) transmuted by an alchemist, or purchased with Honor to free up your emblems for the combo gems (Purple, Green, Orange).

I was a little surprised just how far down the list [Runed Orb]s are, but considering the best in slot craftables are now competing with iLvl 232 items from normal TotC10 and your [Emblem of Triumph] pick list the demand for these has slowed up too.

What to do with 8800g?

2009-09-10T11:01:00.005+10:00

Zenborg often feels a little neglected (unlike my other alts who are completely shunned at this point). He doesn't get borgruns(tm) through heroics, he doesn't get to do progression raiding with the guild... and the memories of pugging sometimes haunt his often Zen-like existence.

So I'm convinced if I throw gold at the problem, he'll feel appreciated (amirite, ladies?).

Here's the plan:

[Signet of the Kirin Tor] - 6800g
[Inscribed Signet of the Kirin Tor] - 1000g
[Etched Signet of the Kirin Tor] - 1000g

Buying happiness? Priceless.

I'm pretty much posting this so I can be talked out of it. 8800g seems to be way too much to spend on a ring. Does anyone know if there are plans to release a iLvl 245 upgrade? In your opinion, what should I be spending 8800g on?

Trial of the Crusader (10) Cleared!

2009-09-08T12:33:00.007+10:00

We cleared Trial of the Crusader on 10 man on the weekend, in the first week that Anub'Arak was available, and best of all we one shot him. Anub'Arak's downfall inspired this new spirit of posting as events unfold rather than as a one liner in a "lets get caught up" post.

We were so excited at the one shot, that even getting severely pwned by the heroic mode couldn't dampen our spirits. It did however, send me the the combat log to come up with the following analysis of the impale mechanic:

can't be avoided or blocked
on impale you get hit hard (17k (also scaling with number of snobolds out))
it ticks every 2 seconds, scaling with the number of stacks (probably also scaling with snobolds), rough numbers below

1 stack - 2k
2 stacks - 5k
3 stacks - 9k

Damage scaling as expected on both tanks (no unusual difference between pally and warrior tanks)
Gormok is immune to Disarm on heroic mode (you're always going to get impaled)

So with our great healers, and a disarm to reduce impale stacks... we could afford to be quite sloppy on how we dealt with it on normal mode... not so on heroic.

This week we also got Auriaya in Ulduar 25, making 3 new bosses over our first two weeks of getting a Ulduar 25 raid up and running for two nights. As usual, I'm caught between making further progress into the keepers, or trying out TotC25 and getting some trophies into the guild.

We also got a new VoA boss, Koralon the Flame Watcher. I really should have made a prediction on which element was next, but I missed the chance. I'm assuming water is next, and predicting that we port down through the crossroads between all three for that one.

I managed to get the boss down in 10 and 25 man on both Borg and Zen, with a pleasing one shot 25 man for Zenborg. It was fantastic to get a guild group for the 10 man, which ensures any useful loot that drops stays in the guild. I missed out on lewt altogether, but Jondy was very excited with [Malfurion's Leggings of Triumph]. Zen's 25 man dropped a total of 0 (yes, zero) PvE pieces, which was met by delightful screams about injustice. Remember people, that luck is just probability taken personally.

There's lots more to talk about and share, but since the frequency of posts seems to be inversely proportional to the effort expended on each post... I'd better stop there. I've convinced myself that I'll do some special "scrapbook from the past" posts to cover those special things I've missed... I guess time will tell.

Raid Buffs and Debuffs

2009-09-08T11:10:00.014+10:00

I couldn't find a resource that was a nice check list of raid buffs/debuffs as a guide for raid leaders who wanted to balance raid groups, so I decided to create one myself. I've tried to keep it very simple, as it's designed to be a usable resource while putting a raid together.

The main function this serves for me, is a guide to what I want to recruit to add that little extra to our 25 man raiding team. I am a huge fan of bring the player, not the class... but if you are going looking for new players, you might as well pick up the buff/debuff you're after at the same time!

Each row in this list should stack with everything else on the list. If there are any corrections, additions or advice, please leave a comment on this post (and remember to tell me who you are if you're leaving an anonymous comment too).

Debuffs

Description	Primary	Details	Secondary
Minor Armor Reduction	(Feral / Moonkin) Druid	%5 Armor Reduction
Major Armor Reduction	Protection Warrior	%20 Armor Reduction	Rogue (Arms / Fury) Warrior
Attack Speed Decrease	Protection Warrior Protection Paladin Death Knight	%20 Attack Speed decrease - improved Icy Talons	Feral Druid (%10)
Attack Power Decrease	(Arms / Fury) Warrior Feral (Bear) Druid	~-410 Attack Power (untalented) ~-574 Attack Power (talented)	Protection Warrior Warlock
Cast Time Increase	Arcane Mage Rogue (MN Poison) Warlock	30% Cast Time Increase
Crit Chance (general)	Retribution Paladin Elemental Shaman	+3% Crit Chance
Crit Chance (spell)	Frost Mage Fire Mage Warlock (imp SB)	+5% Spell Crit Chance
Increase Bleed Damage	Feral Druid Arms Warrior	+30% Bleed Damage
Magic Damage Increase	Unholy Death Knight Balance Druid	+13% Magic Damage	Warlock
Physical Damage Increase	Combat Rogue Arms Warrior	+4% Physical Damage
Healing Decrease	Arms Warrior Fury Warrior Marksmanship Hunter Rogue (Wound Poison)	-50% Healing taken	Shadow Priest (-20%)
Hit Chance Decrease	Hunter Balance Druid	-3% Chance to Hit
Hit Chance Increase	Shadow Priest Balance Druid	+3% Chance to Hit with spells

Buffs

Type	Primary	Details	Secondary
Attack Power %	Hunter Enhancement Shaman Blood Death Knight	10% Attack Power Increase
Attack Power	Paladin	~685 AP (talented)	Warrior
Armor and Stats	Druid	1050 Armor +52 All Stats
Armor	Protection Paladin	1150 - 2008 Armor	Paladin Shaman
Kings	Paladin	+10% all stats
Agility and Strenth	Enhancement Shaman	155 - 178 Str and Agi	Death Knight Shaman
Intellect	Mage	+60 Intelect	Warlock (48)
Spirit	Priest	+80 Spirit	Warlock (64)
Stamina	Priest	+165 Stamina
Physical Crit Chance	Feral Druid Fury Warrior	+5% ranged and melee crit chance
Spell Crit Chance	Balance Druid Elemental Shaman	+5% spell crit chance
Damage Increase	Retribution Paladin	+3% damage increase
Haste Increase	Balance Druid (45yd)	+3% haste	Retribution Paladin (30yd)
Haste, Melee	Frost Death Knight Enhancement Shaman	+20% melee haste	Shaman (16%)
Haste, Spell	Shaman	+5% spell haste
Healing Improvement	Restoration Druid Protection Paladin	+6% healing recieved
Health	Warrior (talented)	+2818 Health	Warrior (2285) Warlock (Imp)
Mp5	Paladin	+109.5 Mp5 (talented)	Shaman
Replenishment	Survival Hunter Frost Mage Retribution Paladin Shadow Priest Destruction Warlock	+1% of maximum mana per 5 sec
Spell Power	Elemental Shaman	+280 Spell Power	Balance Druid (15% spirit) Shaman (144 - 165.6) Demonology Warlock (10% SP on crit)
Hit Chance	Draenei (race)	+1% chance to hit

Best in Slot Unhittable (Warrior)

2009-08-31T18:05:00.004+10:00

It's been a while... a long while. I have been very busy in game, working on beefing up the guild for both 10 and 25 man progression. We have had a fantastic influx of new members, and balancing the raid schedule for a casual guild that wants it all has been a terrific mind puzzle.

In any case, we're 12/14 Ulduar 10, 6/14 Ulduar 25 and 4/4 TotC 10 (with the final boss still to come). Now that we're caught up (not really, but I'm sure there'll be more of that to come) onto the inspiration for this post.

Wowhead. Is there nothing they can't do?

The wowhead profiler should have itself warranted a post, just to promote their aesthetic which blows all other armory tools away... but at least it got a plug on the guild website.

Unhittable. It's a fairly useless concept to a protection warrior, but a fun one none the less. The idea is that any time you are attacked with melee, at worst the mob is going to attempt to break through your shield to get at you.... Block, Dodge, Parry, Miss. That's it. I've been having a look at BiS unhittable lists over at tankspot.com, but what if you want to put a set together that's the best of the stuff from your bag and bank? (Prot warriors don't vendor gear, they just sublet yet another commercial shipping container)

Wowhead's "create a weight scale" tool to the rescue. Plug in weighted values for block, parry, dodge and defense for mitigation (not avoidance) and bam:

Ranked list of best unhittable pieces for a Protection Warrior.

It doesn't take diminishing returns into account, particularly regarding the benefits of dodge vs. parry... but it gives you a fantastic guide to where the best pieces are!

I have the coolest friends...

2009-06-03T11:01:00.006+10:00

No updates for a while, means another super sonic catch up post... going backwards this time.

The I Have the Coolest Friends achievement from keeping all the NPCs up on Hodir 10 man was a nice surprise at the end of our first successful attempt, and really capped off a great night of raiding. We condensed our recent two night forays into Ulduar into a single night, and got a new boss, and saw our first (Hunter) tier token. Add in the achievements for A Quick Shave and Nerf Gravity Bombs, it made for a great night.

Ulduar 10: 8/14

I have the coolest friends also sums up how I'm feeling about my guild of late. We're a social guild, so we're not blazing trails through new content, and there's always more to do than we can fit in the schedule... but I've really enjoyed raid leading recently with some polished performances, and having master looting (and DKP allocation) being taken off my hands. We've settled into the DKP loot system, we've added decay, and toons have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of loot that ends up in the hands of first time raiders and new alts (as was I when only one toon rolled on
Surplus Limb).

Next up, we got Malygos down in 25 man mode on 23rd May on our first night working on the boss. I'm not sure if people actually expected us too, since we had more toons sign up for one Ulduar 10 man group, than our Malygos attempt. The less than stellar attendance was a blessing in disguise however, with some diligant pugging, we picked up some of our top DPS for the evening, including some stellar performers on the drakes. As a nice reward, the massive DKP Helly and I sunk into the Key turned into a fantastic neck piece at the end of the night.

Malygos 25: 1/1

The Ancients defeated Heroic Naxxramas on 25th April, shortly after patch 3.1 was released. Since then we have cleared another couple of times (on a fortnightly schedule) and dished out a lot of nice loot. I have been lucky enough to get [Wall of Terror] and [Last Laugh] already, which with a couple of drops from Ulduar 10 man, has me geared out for tier 7, and I finally got the Epic achievement (I believe I owe a certain fellow tank a new gun). I had great fun with our most recent clear, which saw 11 bosses drop in 3 hours flat on our first night, which left us plenty of time to get into Ulduar 25 on the second night of raiding to beat down Flame Leviathan and have a quick look at Razorscale.

Naxxramas 25: 15/15
Ulduar 25: 1/14

So that catches me up on the raiding of late. Since patch 3.1 I've been regularly pugging Emalon, and even helping to gain control over Wintergrasp, although I'm not sold on this whole PvP thing... I'm told I have enough honor to get 'something good' but it just seems like too much work to make space in my bank to store yet another set of gear. Having said that, it could do with a good clean out! Borgthor is my main, so only he has this problem of keeping sentimental gear, holiday bits and pieces and a massive shield collection. Does anyone else have this problem? To give you an idea how bad it is, I still have the full imperial plate set sitting in there.

Borg's DPS gear is coming along, and to my total surprise picked up two (yes TWO) plate DPS pieces in Naxx25 on the offset roll. I have traded in the [Collosal Skull-Clad Cleaver] for [Relentless Edge] which adds an element of awesome to the set, and while the 3.2 speed isn't optimal for ARMS, it was another welcome upgrade! Today's 4% haste buff to ARMS will be interesting to test out... maybe on something more exciting than a test dummy. /hint hint

While I remember... I have to get this down in writing so someone can hold me to it. Getting [Last Laugh] from KT25 gives me the perfect excuse to try out a UA spec on a a few bosses next time we go into Naxxramas!

My DK, Borgelmir (who I haven't formally introduced) is sitting at 71 just doing JC dailies... but might have some motivation to level with alts of friends, my wife, and with Obe returning for at least a little while all having toons within cooeee of his level. I have maxed out JC, but still need some help deciding on a second profession. I'm leaning towards Engineering (BS would be good too but it's out) and Alchemy looked attractive for a while (see next paragraph for why it's not)... What profession do you think my DK should level next?

I've been going crazy on the AH again (with a secret inscribing toon) which had me in the habit of a project I'd wanted to get underway for a long time. Flasks for All! With the subsidised Abyss Crystal trade from raiding, and some sizable "I'm leaving WoW" donations from guildies, The Ancients guild bank had a healthy bank balance to start the project. So as Jondy puts it, I ... "just went nuts". I've turned over about 10k gold in getting the guild bank stocked with flasks, including herbs, vials and even flasks themselves when they are cheap enough. To start with, I would have sessions with Jondayla at the guild bank to churn out flasks, but had totally overlooked our resident elixir masters in the guild! Now with Helly churning out flasks with an impressive proc rate, we can off flasks to our gulidies at between 10 - 30% less than market price as a sustainable process. I've been excited to see how quickly they disappear, and even more excited by the strike rate of guild bank deposits to match.

Well, I think that's me all caught up, happy now Obe? Yes, Obe's return to WoW was the precursor to this post... but to look at the comments section, you'd think the readership for this blog was just me (and my wife (please direct all editing comments to Jondayla)). So... you want updates? Say so via your comments here! ... and help me decide on a second profession for my DK while you're at it!

Nobel Garden

2009-04-26T11:50:00.000+10:00

Seriously, kid... stay away from my eggs.