The WoW Street Journal

Glyphing in Cataclysm - So much for that idea.

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:09:00 +0000

I know it's been a very long time since I posted something here, but that will change as we get closer to the launch of Cataclysm. There really isn't much to write about in the current Lich King game world. Epics are dropping from the sky from badges, ICC 5 man dungeons and a nice 30% buff in the Icecrown Citadel raids. Essentially anyone who cares to pay attention for a few hours a week can get fairly well geared and as we all know, most people raid for the gear.

As I wait for Cataclysm, I keep up with the beta patch notes a few times a week. I'm not in the beta because I don't want to spoil too much and game mechanics are changing so frequently that it wouldn't be too much fun for me. One thing I noticed today from MMO Champion is this blue post:

"All glyphs are now found in the spellbook of each class on beta servers. Ultimately, classes will learn glyphs as "spells" and will only have to buy the glyph once to definitely learn it and swap it at any time."

This certainly does not bode well for scribes in Cataclysm. I'm sure there will be other interesting ways to make money in Cataclysm other than farming. Well, I hope there is because farming makes me mental. I guess it's just part of the "dumbing down" that Blizzard is doing with their general game design.

Until we see more of the changes to Inscription, I suggest you make as much money from it as you can before Cataclysm ships.

The sky is falling!

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:04:00 +0000

If it's one thing bloggers know how to do, it's bitch. I've read plenty of blogs talking about the "death of 25 man raids" and from a raiding perspective, I really don't care. Here's how it will play out. If your guild is big enough, you'll probably do 25's unless you have several strong raid leaders that want to fight over who's going to come to their 10 mans. I think the logistics of gettign 2 10 man raids going every week will be more complicated than having 1 25 man. Of course this all depends on the size of the guild in question.

Personally, I love the change and I think a lot of people like me will too. See, Blizzard doesn't really cater to the hard core raiders anymore. Those of us like me, who don't want to raid 4+ nights a week are all cheering the fact that we won't feel pressured to PUG a 25 man raid to augment our 10 man progression gear. That's a huge change for those of us who have other stuff to do on weeknights, like maintain our house and deal with adult responsibilities.

But what will this do with the economy? Well, having one less version of a raid to do every week means less potential gear up grades for players every week. That means fewer gems, enchants and their raw materials being purchased. It also means fewer glyphs purchased when specs are switched. So in general, a lot of crafting professions will have fewer sales once everyone hits the level cap and gets settled into raiding for a month or so. The time before that should be ripe with opportunity to make a LOT of money, so capitalize on it while you can!

Gevlon's Ganking Guild

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:15:00 +0000

So, I read the Greedy Goblin this morning and the more I read about this ganking guild, the more I like it. Here's the article in question. He found that the supplier of 90% of herbs for Horde was a player that he thinks is a bot. His ganking guild is alliance. His goal is to deathgrip/kill the bot to a point where the computer program can’t get away and will just run into walls. They will then get the guild to report it as a bot and get the account banned. This will cause real players to farm, or they won’t get any materials cheaply. This will cause more people to be vulnerable to the ganking guild and thus the hilarity will insue :) By ganking and camping farmers, prices should skyrocket as people get fed up and stop farming or can’t farm. It should be interesting!

How to buy your way into a raid.

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:11:00 +0000

No, this isn't about how you can literally buy a raid slot, much like Gevlon did many months ago. This is more about how to spend your money to get great gear. It may seem a little obvious, but it's a lot easier to learn how to make money on the auction house and then buy epics than to run hundreds of heroic dungeons to get geared up. Ideally you should be doing both but making money will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend in the dungeon finder queue. I recently (with a lot of help questing from my wife) leveled a hunter alt to 80. A mere 3 days after I hit 80, most of my gear was at least an iLvL 200 epic. There's a ton of great crafted gear out there for new 80's to buy. Before I even hit 80, I had the Crusader's Dragonscale chest and wrists for a total of around 6k gold and those are iLvL 245 pieces. Just spend a few days shopping around and eventually you can get a good deal on enough epics to get you into ToC 10 man raids.

On a related note, I recently came into possession of Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets, which is a tanking gun that drops off of trash in Icecrown raids. I was reluctant to take it at first, because other than Hit, it has NO hunter dps stats. But, one of the hunters in the raid made a very good point. He suggested I take it anyway and use a hunter dps spread sheet, like the one from http://www.femaledwarf.com/ to see if it would be an upgrade. So, I did and I was shocked. My hunter had been using the True-Aim Long Rifle from ToC 5 non-heroic. It's a good starter hunter weapon and better yet, it's a gun and no self respecting dwarf would be caught dead with a bow. I plugged the Rowan's Rifle into the spreadsheet and found that it was a 311 dps increase! I then wanted to compare it to other ranged weapons and found that it was higher dps than the iLvL 232 crossbow that drops off of Ick in Pit of Saron heroic. Compared against the BRK-1000, Rowan's Rifle is only 11 dps lower (unbuffed).

So, for all you fresh level 80 hunters, if you can find a good deal on Rowan's Rifle, pick it up and you'll be using it for a long time. Just be prepared to defend yourself if someone inspects you and sees you using a gun with tanking stats. Better yet, prove them wrong by showing them your dps in Recount.

It's been a long time...

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:45:00 +0000

No, I'm not going to quote Led Zeppelin songs here. I just wanted to do something I haven't done in quite a while, which is post a blog. I haven't been writing for a number of reasons, mostly because I've had a lack of things to write about that would be different from what the other WoW economy blogs are covering. Plus, there had been some guild drama that was bumming me out. I'll be writing more often now, as I've found a new guild and I'm making a lot of money in something that I've wrote a bit about in the past - inscription. More on that later.

Ti

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:13:00 +0000

This little tidbit caught my eye on MMO-Champion yesterday:

Alchemy
Transmute: Titanium no longer has a cooldown!

I thought it was interesting because it should drop the price of titanium ore, titanium bars, titansteel and possibly crafted gear that uses titanium bars. Another thing I think it will do is increase the price of saronite ore and bars. It may also make Transmutation specialization a bit more profitable. On Bleeding Hollow, the price of a stack of saronite ore usually bounces between 15 and 20 gold. Find a reliable miner to smelt your stack of ore that you purchased for 15 gold and your cost per transmuted titanium bar is (1.5g/bar * 8 bars) a whopping 12 gold. I'd say there's room for some profit by selling individual bars to the masses.

I have a feeling Blizzard is doing this because they are going to introduce a few new high end alloys that will be used to craft Icecrown level gear, similar to Felsteel or Hardened Adamantite back in the Burning Crusade. If they do, I'd bet that these alloys will require titanium bars. I've already read that there will be something called Primordial Saronite, but haven't seen any details of how to make or buy it.

For those who have a stockpile of titanium bars, it may be a good idea to start liquidating your stock before 3.3 hits and you end up taking a big loss. I'm not quite sure what will happen to titanium ore. It will most likely take a slight drop in price as miners won't need to buy as much (or any) of it to make titansteel, leaving it to the jewelcrafters, which will most likely keep buying as much as they can to prospect for epic gems and powder to buy jewelcrafting tokens with.

Mountain o' Mounts

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:35:00 +0000

When my wife wants a big blue dragon/butterfly crossbreed, well I help her get it. It's been a long and difficult process, but it's finally hers. As of October 11th, 2009, Tamaril of Bleeding Hollow is one of the very few with 101 mounts. It was a combination of time, luck and money to get to 100 mounts.

For those of you who want to try for 100 mounts, here are a few tips. First, make yourself a spreadsheet of every mount available and group them by their source, e.g. purchased with PvP tokens, gold, random drop, etc. Do the Argent Tournament dailies every day. This will get you to exalted with all 5 city factions so you can buy all the faction land mounts and also get you Champion's Seals to buy the Argent mounts. That alone, with the "no rep required" purchasable mounts will get you to 58 mounts.

When you are getting close to 100, be sure to farm the first 4 Anubisath Sentinels in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj for the four Battle Tank mounts. Once my wife got to 96 mounts, she dropped Skinning to power level Tailoring and then Engineering so she could craft the 2 mounts from each profession. You can level one up, craft the mounts, add them to your mount inventory and then drop the profession to level another one. They will still count as mounts in your inventory for the achievement even if you can't actually ride them because you lack the skill in the appropriate profession.

I'm glad it's over so my wife can focus her energies (and mine) on gearing her death knight tank for Icecrown Citadel.

Skipping Content

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:28:00 +0000

The guild that I'm in, Aculeus Upon Ordeum, is NOT a "hardcore" progression raiding guild but we do raid on occasion and last spring even managed to do Naxx 25 twice a week on a regular basis. Since then, those who enjoy raiding in the guild (which excludes me for the most part) have suffered from a lack of key members (tanks and healers) and lack of desire to formally organize raids on a weekly basis.

A few days ago, I was part of a heated debate with some members of our guild about raiding and someone mentioned that we can’t skip content and that we should start trying to clear Ulduar. Well, that got me thinking, why the hell not? We’ve already done it by downing Onyxia 10 and many of the better raiders have pugged Trial of the Crusader with no issues. So, why is it important to do all the raids in order? It’s not. I personally would like to skip every raid up to Icecrown Citadel. I’ve never been into WoW lore until Lich King and since the main focus of the expansion is the constant battle against the forces of Arthas, I really could care less about seeing anything except Icecrown. Well, I liked defeating Onyxia, but that’s more because it was a redone Classic WoW raid that drops awesome loot.

So, since the new Icecrown 5 man heroic will drop iLvL 232 loot and badge loot from other heroic 5 mans is ilvl 226, why would anyone even bother with doing Ulduar 10 after patch 3.3? Even now for a new 80, the gear you can get from normal Trial of the Champion, heroic badge gear and heroic Trial of the Champion is easily good enough to get started on 10 man Trial of the Crusader and Onyxia. If Gevlon and his old guild could do Ulduar 10 in BLUES, then it should be easily possible to do both of those raids in iLvL 219 and 226 gear. Isn’t that how the progression should be anyway if you were to only do 10 man raids? At this point, the only real reason anyone should have for doing Ulduar 10 is because they want to, not because they have to.

To me, Ulduar and to a certain extent Trial of the Crusader are just side stories to the main conflict in Lich King. Since Blizzard is making it possible to “skip to the good part” of the story, why bother with the side plot if you don’t care to see it?

Small business loans

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:10:00 +0000

A few posts back, I mentioned a broke guildie who had plenty of crafting professions but no cash. Since then, I’ve only really managed to do one mining trip of 1 hour to see how much I could gather and I forgot to write down what I did gather. So much for good note taking. I’ll be continuing that experiment this weekend, but I do have an update on the broke guildie. Since I have more than enough money to buy gems/enchants/repairs, I decided to take a risk and send all the materials to craft 10 eternal belt buckles to our financially challenged guild mate. I normally wouldn’t do something like that, but I had a lot of confidence in his ability to take the small loan of materials and turn it into something productive. This small business loan seemed to have worked, because he not only paid me back for my materials, he managed to turn it into 1600 gold in his pocket in the span of ONE WEEK. That’s right, in one week he was able to take his crafting profession and make enough gold for him to pay for repairs and gem/enchant his gear upgrades. This was done without farming for materials or grinding dailies. He would post a few items on the auction house, go do a battleground or heroic and come back and post a few more if he had a few sales. Now that he has some cash in his pockets, he can start branching out into his other crafting professions and grow his business.

To all you out there who are scratching your heads as to how to make money without spending hours and hours grinding for materials or doing dailies, try this:

Find a Goblin and present him or her with a business plan on how you can take a small starter loan of materials and turn it into a crafting business.

The benefits of farming

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:23:00 +0000

So, it's been tough lately to get some quality mining time in so I can get accurate numbers for my mining experiment. Between leveling my hunter alt (the most fun I've ever had leveling a character), raiding and helping the guild with brewfest stuff, I haven't had an uninterrupted hour of farming time. A side note, I was part of the first successful AUO 10 man Onyxia raid on Saturday and it felt gooood. We got her on the 7th attempt. She truely is a loot pinata, dropping about 5 or 6 items (I can't remember exactly) which is awesome for a 10 man raid. I won the spellpower sword because I was the only one that could use it. I love winning loot by default! I don't need no stinking /roll.

On to the heart of the subject here. Mining does have it's benefits. I was doing a few laps around Icecrown and decided to head into Sholozar Basin. I had hit 3 titanium nodes in less than 10 minutes and was feeling lucky. I normally head into the Basin and turn left, flying clockwise mining as I go. I decided this time to turn right and go counter clockwise. Good thing I did. As I land to mine a saronite node, I notice the star on my mini map marking one of the spawn points of Loque'nahak, the spirit beast. My wife's hunter has all 3 spirit beasts, so I normally don't pay much attention to these spots any more, but this time I decided to take a look behind me after I mined the ore. Sure enough Loque was there! I quickly did a /gchat shout out for all hunters interested to head to my location asap. Darallun (of afkautoshot) quickly replied and hauled ass out to Sholozar. Luckily, no one else showed up and he had an easy time taming the beast. So now, Darallun has his second spirit beast! It was like the stars had all aligned that night. Darallun usually raids as Survival, but I think he needs to start going Beast Master and bringing out his new kitteh.

So, as we can see, sometimes farming has benefits that transcend the accumulation of gold.

Gone farming

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:37:00 +0000

It's been a sad few weeks for me. The wild price variations on crafted ammo has all but wrecked my income generation for a while now and sales of everything else I do have also been sporadic at best, so I'm going to run a short experiment over the next week or two. I'm going to start farming again. I'll be fishing and mining in 1 hour increments to see how much I can gather and convert into gold.

Farming is an important activity because in order to fund just about any tradeskill that you want to use for profit, you need a bankroll to buy materials. Yes, it is true, you need to have money to make money. Well, I'd like to amend that old cliche. You need to have money in order for your money to make money for you.

This experiment was really spurred on by a guildmate who is just about broke (in game). He has all these fancy professions on his two level 80's, but no cash to buy materials. So, I want to try to put a number on how much time it should take someone with a few basic gathering professions to get enough capital to start a crafting business.

Let the experiment begin!

More on inscription

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:46:00 +0000

I had a lot of comments on my last post regarding Inscription, so I figured I'd follow up with a new post instead of posting a reply that would get lost or not seen.

For the power leveling question, I'd say it's up to you if you want to wait and do it all at once. I know it's how power leveling professions has been done for years, but it does miss the point of my last article.

The main point of my article was that Inscription is a great profession to level while you level your character because it is useful. If you wanted Engineering as a profession, I'd say wait until you hit level 70 at the very least and power level like crazy. It would give you more time to bargain hunt on the auction house for materials as a side benefit. Engineering has very little benefit to a leveling character, so why bother taking time away from questing?

Inscription is a great profession and it was designed well. The money making part of it is great, but if I wanted to play a game to just make money, I'd be a day trader in real life and not waste my time on making fake money in a game. I play games to have fun and Inscription helps in that regard a lot. I use it while I'm leveling. It helps enhance my character's performance, if you know what I mean ;)

So, in my opinion, if you have a low level alt and want to take up Inscription, start to level it now. I think you'll really enjoy it.

If you did chose to power level Inscription, I'd say just buy the herbs from the auction house, unless they are grossly overpriced or in short supply. You can also buy Ink of the Sea (if it's cheaper than the herbs) and trade it to Jessica Sellers for the inks you need for leveling. For advice on what addons to use, I'd say check out the Greedy Goblin's articles on inscription or Just My Two Copper's forums.

Inscription, the perfect profession.

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:31:00 +0000

Since I’ve been burned out on all the level 80 stuff out there, I decided to spend all my saved up shards and badges to get the hunter heirloom chest and shoulders and create an alt hunter named Grimsprocket. Grimsprocket was a name I came up with for a Warhammer dwarf Engineer. Engineers in Warhammer are a race/class combo and about as close to a dwarf hunter as you can get, except they don’t have animals as pets, they have gun turrets. So, the WoW version of Grimsprocket would obviously have to have Engineering as one profession and when deciding on his second profession, I decided to give Inscription a try since all the cool kids are doing it and making tens of thousands with a little effort. Now I know what all the fuss is about.

The first thing I noticed about Inscription is that it’s fairly cheap to level. Just buy cheap herbs or get someone to farm some for you (thank you Millie!) and start milling away. The second thing I noticed is that the stuff you make to level Inscription is actually useful as you level your character. I could imagine that an freshly created level 1 alt could pick up Inscription/Herbalism when it became available and actually have fun creating and discovering new glyphs, decks and buff scrolls because they are (as shocking as it may seem) useful! So much of the crap we have to make when leveling a profession has no value and just gets sold to a vendor.

It reminds me of when I was watching development blog videos from Mythic Studios when they were still in the Beta for Warhammer. Mark Jacobs talked about how in many MMO’s, professions are very grindy and pretty much useless until you got near the skill cap and even then, there are only a few things worth creating. His vision for Warhammer’s crafting system was basically what Inscription is - easy to level, complex but not overly so and useful from low levels to max level. He didn’t really get it right in his own game, but we’ll ignore that little oversight for now.

Another thing I’m finding out with Inscription is that once you get a few profitable glyphs, you can pretty much level Inscription to 400+ with the profits from glyph sales. I was shocked when for my first Minor Inscription Research at skill level 75, I got a glyph that sells on average for 15 gold. Now at skill level 133, I have several glyphs that sell for 15+ gold each. With a little work and time, Inscription is the ONLY profession that I know of that won’t cost you a dime, er…I mean silver.

It would be awesome if Blizzard redid the older professions and made them as useful and fun to level and PROFITABELE as Inscription. We’ll see what happens with Cataclysm.

If you know of any other professions that are fun, useful and make money as you level them, please post a comment and let us know.

Cataclysmic thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:09:00 +0000

Blizzcon is over and there’s a mountain of new information out on the newly announced expansion. Here are some of the highlights of the announced changes that will come along with Cataclysm.

- New races: goblin and worgen
- New class mechanics: no more hunter mana, healer mana regen reworked
- New gear itemization: getting rid of attack power, MP5, defense, spellpower, block, haste and armor penetration.
- Redone continents of Azeroth
- Guilds will be able to gain levels.

I’m fairly “meh” about the new races. The class mechanic changes seem interesting and coupled with new gear itemization, it should make it easier for players to pick the proper gear upgrade.

The redo of Azeroth is very appealing to me. I’ve been incredibly bored with WoW lately and I decided to start leveling a dwarf hunter. Going through all the old content give me mixed feelings. One the one hand, I feel nostalgia as I remember doing the quests on my Paladin for the first time. On the other hand, I did all this stuff already and sometimes I have done it multiple times when I helped my wife and other guildmates level their alts. Having the old world go through a cataclysm and change the terrain and quests would be awesome for leveling a new character and it’s tempting for me to stop leveling the hunter and wait until the new stuff.

Then there’s guild levels. I don’t know if Mythic was the first to do it, but Warhammer had guild levels from launch last year. The idea is a great one and I’m glad Blizzard is taking the idea and putting it into WoW. I know from experience that guild leveling is a great way to get guild members to do more stuff together. I have fond memories of organizing guild Public Quest nights in Warhammer where we’d watch the guild experience meter to see how close we were coming to the next guild level. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we’re told what the guild level rewards are.

On an economic note, new expansions also bring new money making opportunities. One of these will be from selling materials to all the players that will level new Goblins and Worgen. All those new characters will be leveling professions so when we get close to launch, start stocking up on low level ore, herbs, leather, etc.

Alchemy - Gevlon agrees with me

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Back in May, I wrote this post about Alchemy and how to try to make it profitable. It seems that Gevlon has come to the same general conclusion. Alchemy won't make you rich like other professions can for the same amount of time and research put into it. It's good to see that the heavy hitter of WoW economics came to the same conclusion.

To sum thing up neatly for those who don't care to read those two posts linked above:

- The cost of materials is nearly identical to the price of flasks created by said materials.
- Alchemy can make you some money if you aren't a herbalist, but be prepared to do your homework.
- If you want to sell flasks, be sure to have Elixir specialization and be prepared to camp the auction house on raid nights.
- If you're not taking advantage of the perks of being an Alchemist like longer flask duration and you want to make money, then you'd probably be better off dropping the profession for something else.

Epic gems post 3.2

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:48:00 +0000

All this talk of PvP and Arena leads me back to something more on topic for this blog, which is a big money making opportunity. In a few weeks, Arena Season 6 will come to an end. A week will pass to calculate who the big title winners are and then Season 7 will begin. New Arena seasons mean new gear and new gear needs to be enchanted and gemmed. When 3.2 hit, Jewelcrafters were prospecting for the new epic gems and the rest of us were using Emblems of Heroism, transmutes and honor to buy our epic gems. When Season 7 begins, the Emblems will have already been spent, transmutes are on a 20 hour cooldown and Honor will be saved to buy gear. This means that there should be a major shortage of epic gems to buy. Players with less money will likely resort to the old rare/blue quality gems for their new gear.

So, how should we enterprising players prepare? Spend all your honor on epic gems immediately and start grinding battlegrounds. Don't forget to queue for Wintergrasp when you can for the huge chunk of honor for 20 minutes of "work". Lastly, look for good deals on Saronite and either prospect it or have someone else prospect it. Basically, do everything you can to stock up on epic and rare quality gems. If you happen to be a Jewelcrafter/Enchanter, use the junk gems that are left over and start making rings to disenchant.

Or should you? At 10,000 honor per gem, it would take about 3 hours to grind battlegrounds for one gem, not counting the badge trade in for honor. In 3 hours of grinding with any gathering profession, you may end up with more gold than you would from the sale of one cut epic gem, even if the gem prices go up from their average of 200-250 gold. On top of that, you won't have any honor left to buy your own PvP gear, if that kind of thing is your bag, baby. I suppose it all comes down to what you consider fun while playing the game. My wife loves farming while some detest it. If you love battlegrounds more than picking flowers, then this may be a golden opportunity for you to make money and have fun playing at the same time, especially if the price of gems goes up due to the increased demand.

Paladin nerfs, part deux!

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:46:00 +0000

The patch notes for 3.2.2 are up and Prot/Holy definitely got nerfed.

Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.

How does this all play out? It means the stun (Hammer of Justice) now has a 30 second cooldown (up from 20 seconds) and spell power went down by about 450-500 depending on gear. A deep Holy paladin should now be able to out Flash of Light a Prot paladin. The question now is: do the benefits of being deep holy (instant heal, bigger heals, haste buff) outweigh the benefits of a 30 second stun cooldown, long lasting/undispellable Divine Plea and a 3 second silence? I suspect for 2v2, Prot/Holy will still be the preferred talent spec. In 3v3, the reduced healing and lack of an instant heal may not cut it. Since 2v2 ratings won’t count for the new top tier of PvP gear, I suspect the vast majority of top level Arena paladins will go back to a deep holy build.

Paladins weren’t the only ones getting a nerf next patch. Rogues got some too, which should make a lot of people happy. And by a lot of people, I mean everyone but rogues.

Fan of Knives: The damage done by this ability has been reduced by 30%.
Combat
Throwing Specialization: This talent no longer causes Fan of Knives to interrupt spellcasting.

Blizzard hates Paladins...again

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:37:00 +0000

Ghostcrawler recently announced that they will be doing something to "fix" the problem with deep Protection spec'ed paladins in healing gear. This one hits close to home because I found that the prot/holy spec was much better than any other Holy spec for 2v2 and possibly 3v3 arena. The main problem for Blizzard is the deep Protection talent Touched by the Light which when used with full PvP healing gear, can put a paladin's spellpower well over 2200 and I've had Flash of Light crits for 8000+. It's such a major problem for Blizzard that apparently they won't start the next season of Arena until they fix it.

I haven't done any serious Arena games in a while, but I was planning on getting back into it once things settled down post 3.2. Since I'm pretty much forced to heal in Arena because of the many problems I have with Retribution, I found the Prot/Holy spec to be incredibly fun. Lots of stuns and throwing shields meant I was doing more other than standing there casting Flash of Light over and over and over again, with Holy Shock thrown in every now and then. It was the perfect Arena healing spec for me and MANY others and now they're going to gut it. This, right after they gutted Retribution by giving it a completely lame Seal of Command. Some dedicated Ret players have figured out that a specialized Seal of Righteousness build gives better burst than the lame Seal of Command that Blizz force fed to us as the PvP seal. If the Righteousness build becomes popular, expect to see the nerf bat smash it "to the ground" just like everything else that was good for paladins.

I'm really getting sick of the constant nerfs to paladins. I don't know why they are in the cross hairs so often. I have a feeling that the top 100 teams next season will be nearly paladin free just like they have been for so long now (excluding this season). These kinds of changes aren't really doing much to motivate me to play the game and given my recent lack of motivation I'm not sure I'll be doing much in game other than trying to sell yetis and ammo. Oh yea, they nerfed ammo sales too....

For those who care to read, here's the source Blue posts:

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/19110155361-cannot-kill-self-healing-prot-pallys.html

Quick impressions on 3.2 and the economy

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 04:08:00 +0000

3.2 hit faster than I thought it would. Had I known, I would have dumped my 4 boxes of arrows very quickly. Luckily I had just bought about 30 stacks of saronite ore for 16 per stack and not done much with it, so I was ready to change my strategy if things got tough in the ammo business.

It only took a few days for the price of 1000 stacks of Saronite Razorheads to take a huge nosedive due to the new reduced materials cost. It used to take about 15 gold to make 1000 Razorheads. Now it takes 2 bars or about 4 gold. So, the cost of arrows is now 1/4 of what they used to be and the demand is probably about the same. I don't know if the lowered cost will cause more hunters to buy Razorheads over the vendor Terrorshaft arrows but my gut tells me they won't. So, I fully expect to make less than 50 gold per week on Razorheads now, which is pathetic. Sure, I could play the deep undercut game, but without a larger customer base, I don't think it would be worth it. Maybe I will just as an experiment.

Mammoth Cutters haven't dropped in price much at all. I attribute this to the fact that they are a little more complex to make since they require Volatile Blast Triggers. Since most people are lazy and don't want to bother with the extra materials, they aren't flooding the auction house with thousands of super cheap bullets.

This coming week will give me a better idea of how ammo sales will go. There's a lot of new stuff to do so I'm hoping that hunters will be using lots of ammo this week.

On other fronts, I'm taking it easy with epic gems for now. There seems to be a lot of undercutting at the moment and I really don't want to spend all day camping the auction house. Once the majority of jewelcrafters have exhausted their supply of epic gems from honor and badge purchases, I'll start selling my epics slowly and steadily. It will also give players more time to get deeper into the new Argent raids so they can get new gear to gem.

I was also able to get the plans and create Jeeves the mechanical butler. He is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in the game. Having a permanent repair bot that I can also use to access my bank is full of awesome. Along with Jeeves I created the Wormhole generator. The first time I used it, it teleported me about 500 feet above the big lake in Borean Tundra. Take the warning on the device seriously and make sure you have your parachute cloak tinker! The other times I've used it, it put me right on the doorstep of Ulduar and Utgarde Keep. It seems the Gnomes know that wormholes should open right in front of instances, which is very convenient. Who needs to fly between points A and B when we can just fold space-time so that point A IS point B!

Warhammer - the game that could have been

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:59:00 +0000

Please forgive me as I indulge myself a little more than usual today. In my last post, I wrote about how another game has (temporarily?) broke the stranglehold that WoW has had on me off and on since January of 2007. It was nearly one year ago that another game almost kept me away from WoW for good. That game was Warhammer Online.

I had been following Warhammer for a little while back then and was anxiously awaiting another MMO that would have the stuff to take me away from WoW. Last spring/early summer, I was getting frustrated with WoW PvP and really wanted something different. I remember vividly having nothing to do one day other than to level my fishing in Stormwind while I read Tradechat for hours. Yea, I was that bored. I had applied to the Warhammer closed beta and had hope that they would pick me soon. Months went by after that initial application and nothing happened. Then, in late July/early August of 2008, I decided to upgrade my PC to prepare for the open beta. Soon after upgrading my motherboard/processor/memory and video, I decided to upload my new DXDiag file to the Warhammer beta site, since my system components had drastically changed. Sure enough, I got a beta invite days after. I figure it was my new beefy computer that got me in since Warhammer is much more graphics intense than WoW is or was.

One of the things I wanted to do in Warhammer was start a guild. I had been a member of AUO since the early spring and since I loved the guild so much, I asked our GM if it was OK to use the Aculeus Upon Ordeum name and start a “Warhammer” chapter of AUO. She was cool with it and even gave me a sub forum on the main AUO guild forum site. My wife and I put a lot of time into getting things in place for when the game went live. We had a killer application and the forums were fairly well organized. We were set to recruit as soon as we could.

Playing in the beta was a really cool experience for me. I didn’t play too much because I didn’t want the thrill of starting off fresh in a game to not be there when things went live. Soon, the semi-closed beta turned into a full open beta for anyone who wanted to download the beta files and then, things went live. One of the coolest things about the game is that the game studio, Mythic Entertainment, is in Fairfax, Virginia and about a 15 minute drive from my house and from work. I read on one of the forums that the head guys from Mythic were going to do a game signing at a local GameStop. I took a long lunch that day and got my game box and my wife’s game box signed by the top 4 game producers (Paul Barnett, Mark Jacobs, Jeff Hickman and Josh Drescher) and got a few extra goodies signed as well. I think that was the highlight of my Warhammer experience.

Once the game went live, things started going well. The guild was growing and at one point I think we had about 25 dedicated members. They were a great crowd and I miss playing with them, no matter what the game is. As the weeks went on and we got past the first 20 levels, things started to really stagnate. The game launched smoothly enough but Mythic made a few key errors that lead to a huge drop off in subscribers after about mid November of 2008. That’s about the time that my wife made the transition back to Warcraft as she was called back by the temptation of the Lich King. Shortly after she stopped playing Warhammer, I hung up my mantle and hammer and wrote the guild that I was calling it quits. The game really lacked a few key fun elements and it became painful to log on and play.

So, what did Mythic do wrong? There have been many articles written by other much more popular bloggers like Keen and Grave and Syp at BioBreak. I think they all missed the point though. Most of those writers were out of Warcraft for a while and as much as they claim to love MMO’s, I don’t think they are die hard dedicated junkies like the ones who play Warcraft. In fact, I think they were part of a vocal minority that helped to guide Mythic to making Warhammer a game that was destined to fail. So, what did Mythic do wrong? Here’s my list.

Too many servers. Mythic’s launch went well because the servers were relatively stable. The only problem was that they did a special pre launch for those of us who had a collector’s edition key. I happened to have one, though I didn’t have an actual collector’s edition. I forget how I got it. It wasn’t anything nefarious, I was just given the wrong kind of key from GameStop I think. That special key let me play the game a few days before all of my friends so whatever server I picked was going to be the server they picked and that server came from a small list of servers that would be up for the pre launch. This is what happened for a lot of players and a lot of the preformed guilds. This lead to all of the pre launch servers to get packed very quickly and then the log on queues started and thus the forum whining started. Mythic overreacted by opening up a LOT of servers. Too many actually. So, what they ended up with was a chaotic situation where whole guilds who wanted to play on one particular server would have to up and leave that server for a less populated one. I know Chaos is one of the playable factions, but having chaos in your server infrastructure is a bad thing. Once things settled down, the player base was spread way too thin and once players got out of Tier 1 and left the casuals behind, it started to become hard to find opponents to fight. I think this is one of the main reasons that players started to abandon the game. It’s hard to fight a war if the enemy doesn’t show up. Well, it’s not hard, it’s just really really boring.

Lag. So, if you managed to put up with a low population server and managed to find a fight with a decent number of opponents, than the ugly Lag monster came out. As we have seen in Wintergrasp, you simply can’t have large scale PvP in an MMO without having a lot of lag. So, once you managed to find a battle, it was pretty much unplayable if there were more than 20 or so players in the same area. I think this pushed a lot of the die hard players that were able to put up with low populations out of the game.

Not enough to do. My guild was on one of those low population servers (Grimnir I believe) and we’d have to come up with stuff to do when the PvP areas were empty. This is where WAR was really weak compared to WoW. Now, it’s a bit unfair for me to compare the two at this stage because I started getting seriously bored way before I hit the level cap and it’s at the level cap that half of WoW opens up. But, I know that even at the level cap there isn’t much to do in WAR other than grind their version of battlegrounds or scour the countryside for some world PvP in the form of a keep siege or the like. WoW has a TON of things to do at the level cap, like work on reputation, non combat pets, mounts, crafting, making money, achievements, etc. WAR didn’t have 1/3 of those things. It kind of had a reputation system called Influence which could get you gear, but since the crafting system was so bad and they had no special mounts, etc, Influence wasn’t that important. WAR does have something called the Tome of Knowledge which is jammed full of achievements and other fun unlocks, like titles, special abilities and trinket type stuff, but it was a closed system. You never really knew where to go to unlock something unless someone else told you about it. If WAR had an open Tome of Knowledge like WoW has an open achievement system, I think things could have been a lot more fun.

Graphics/models. One main gripe I have about the overall look and feel of the game is that the character models can be very goofy and the armor models can be just downright silly. The bad guys get all the cool looking armor and character models and the good guys end up looking like anemic frail aristocrats dressed more for a cold November day than for war. The two best examples of this are high elves and warrior priests. There was only one armor set for the warrior priest that looked cool. All the rest either make you look like a penniless monk on his way to the brewery or an English grandmother dressed in her house coat. The elves are just downright odd looking and not in any way attractive or intimidating. It’s hard to log on when you character looks like he’s ready to make a pot of tea and mend his socks.

Horrible questing. It extends also to the dungeon/raid environment too. The quests are boring, repetitive and unimaginative. I used to think the same of WoW’s quests until I played Warhammer. Lich King absolutely crushes WAR in this department. It’s a good thing you can level by doing nothing but PvP.

It’s a shame that Mythic made so many mistakes and bad calls in Warhammer. The background world created by Games Workshop so many years ago is full of life and inspiration. I really wanted the game to be good and succeed. I think Blizzard definitely picked up on a few of the more interesting and cool game mechanics that Mythic used, like battleground queuing from anywhere. Maybe one day if they fix the things I mentioned above, the game will be good enough to hold my attention and I’ll once again pick up my mantle and continue to play as Rorik the Warrior Priest of Sigmar.

Nicotine patch for WoW

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:18:00 +0000

It's been a while since I've posted something. I usually try for 2 posts per week. My last was 12 days ago. WoW has become extremely boring lately. I would post raids on the calendar and get plenty of sign ups but half wouldn't show. Luckily for me, a coworker wanted to sell his XBox 360 racing wheel. To test it out, I borrowed another coworker's copy of Forza Motorsport 2, took the wheel home for a few days and found something very interesting happened. Forza 2 held my attention for longer than an hour. That hasn't happened in a really long time for me. I've played a few PC games off and on since I started playing WoW, but nothing really has thrilled me since Lich King. I think part of that has been the "WoW Addict" mentality of always having something to do.

Now Forza 2 seems to be my nicotine patch for WoW. I've always been a lover of sports cars of all kinds and Forza really has struck a chord deep inside me. The fact that I have 5 coworkers who have the game also helps, as we can race multiplayer for hours and talk about it the next day at work. Being able to tune and paint cars in game is the icing on the cake. I've also already pre ordered Forza 3, due out late October.

It'll be interesting once patch 3.2 come out for WoW to see which game really holds my attention. I have a feeling it won't take long for me to accomplish all my 3.2 goals fairly quickly and then I won't be able to resist the call of the racing wheel.

The casual/hardcore paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:44:00 +0000

I was reading Gevlon’s post about “the tank problem” and there were a lot of comments regarding his definition of hardcore vs. casual. I really liked his post and agree with it. I think when people talk about hardcore vs. casual, they tend to categorize players like a lot of people categorize Democrats vs. Republicans. To a lot of people, Democrats are all bleeding heart liberals and Republicans are evil cold hearted conservatives. What they all DON’T realize is that those generalizations are very unfair and often completely wrong. I won’t get into the many facets of political ideology, but I will make the comparison between the Democrat/Republican and the hardcore/casual spectrum. Just as there are more than two dimensions to someone’s political beliefs, there are more than two dimensions to WoW players. In the case of WoW, the dimensions are Play Style and Time. One can be hardcore in both, one or none of those dimensions. Imagine Play Style as the X axis on a graph and Time Spent Playing as the Y axis. Hardcore is on the right side of X and the top of Y. Casual is left of X and bottom of Y. Is it making more sense now? Here are some examples:

Me (Rorik) – I’d classify myself as hardcore both in Time and in Play Style. I usually play more than 14 hours a week which I’d say is hardcore in time playing the game. I do exhaustive research on my class (paladin), both talent specs that I have (healing and dps) and I research the same for all 3 of my wife’s level 80 characters and their class roles. I’m pretty good with navigating the ElitistJerks.com forums ;) I think that makes me a Hardcore Play Style player. That makes me Hardcore/Hardcore or if plotted on the X Y graph, I’d be in the upper right quadrant.

Real Life Friend – I have several high school friends who play WoW. I’ll pick on the one who was the best man at my wedding/I was best man at his wedding. He is definitely Casual in Time as he played less than 5 hours a week and definitely Casual in Play Style as he didn’t have a clue when it came to how to play his character. He’s in the bottom left quadrant, way, way in the corner.

Alt-o-holics and farmers – There’s at least one alt-o-holic in every guild. The guy/girl who is always playing and always leveling a new alt. This player would be Hardcore in Time as he/she plays more than 14 hours/week but casual in Play Style as he/she has never focused enough on one character to figure out what all those spells really did. The farmer is similar in that they play all the time but usually on the same character but they just don’t really know how to play their character very well, so they are casual in Play Style. This would put them in the top left quadrant.

I think expanding the definition of hardcore and casual like this can lead to a better play experience all around. I’ve seen too many guild recruitment threads say things like “hardcore raiding guild” or “casual guild with relaxed atmosphere”. What does that mean? Does it mean you spend 20 hours a week in a raid? Does it mean you do nothing but farm while talking in gchat? Describing your guild as casual in time spent but hardcore in play style could really help potential recruits to figure out if they would be a good fit with your guild and vice versa. I know if I saw a guild recruitment post that read “casual play time/hardcore play style guild looking for raiders for Wednesday nights” I’d know that these guys don’t have the time to spend raiding 3 nights a week, but when they do raid, they know what they are doing and get it done.

Where do you fall on the hardcore/casual graph?

A Little Advice for a Penniless Noob

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:10:00 +0000

A fellow guild member who has been absent until very recently has a dilemma. We found out about this dilemma when doing a Naxx 10 run on Tuesday night where he was playing his shaman alt. We wiped on the Dance and I noticed that he hadn’t released and was waiting to be resurrected when we got back into Heigan’s room. When we asked why he didn’t release and fly back (as Krys would say “Don’t be that guy”) he said he can’t fly back because he couldn’t afford a flying mount. That’s right, he quested to level 80 and somehow didn’t manage to have enough money for regular flying training. How this is possible, I don’t know. I know I must have made several thousand gold just questing between level 70 and 80. I’m sure if I think about it for too long, it will make me angry, so I’ll move on to the more important thing, which is giving this guy a little advice on how to make enough money to buy basic flying skill + a cheap gryphon.

First things first. To protect the identity of the guilty, I’ll call him Noob. Fitting, huh?

OK. So, Noob is this player’s alt. His main has…wait for it…450 herbalism and 450 alchemy. That’s right, maxxed out in 2 major money making professions. Clearly Noob is poor because he is clueless.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s what Noob should do:

1) Farm herbs on your main! Our GM, Krys, has offered to buy every stack of Northrend herbs that Noob can muster. That’s one hell of a deal, having a guaranteed buyer.
2) Save all the Frost Lotus that you get while farming for regular herbs. These are a primary component to all of the flasks used by core raiders. You can either use them to craft flasks to sell, or sell them in stack of 5 or 10.
3) Change your alchemy specialization to Elixir Mastery. This way, if you choose to make flasks with Frost Lotus you have a chance to create additional flasks which means free money.
4) Do not try for achievements, do not play any battlegrounds, no world pvp, no heroics, no standing around Dalaran looking pretty. Just get out there and farm.
5) Look up the recipes for Flask of Endless Rage and Flask of the Frost Wyrm. Save enough materials to make these flasks using the Frost Lotus you have saved from your farming. Don’t worry, it won’t be too much to have to save. Craft the flasks and sell them on major raid nights, which are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Those are some pretty basic guidelines for Noob to follow. He could probably get enough money for his basic flying skill and mount in less than 2 weeks. It’s up to him to put in the effort. There is no magic formula for making money. It just takes a little brain power and some time. Once he gets the basics down, then he can start working on more advanced techniques and branching out beyond selling flasks and herbs.

What does a butler do?

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:55:00 +0000

Wadsworth: I'm merely a humble butler.
Col. Mustard: What exactly do you do?
Wadsworth: I buttle, sir.
Col. Mustard: Which means what?
Wadsworth: The butler is in charge of the kitchen and dining room. I keep everything tidy.
- from the movie Clue

Apparently butlers are expensive. At least, the ones in WoW will be. I guess it’s because they will do more than run the kitchen and dining room. Our butlers will buy our junk, fetch our clothes, mend our armor and sell us reagents. Here’s the list of materials, if you happen to be lucky enough to find the plans by salvaging a mechanical in Northrend.

Field Repair Bot 74A x 2, Field Repair Bot 110G x 10, Scrapbot Construction Kit x 20, Titansteel Bar x 8, King's Amber x 2, Handful of Cobalt Bolts x 30.

Phew! That’s a lotta cash for a butler! First, to my knowledge the Field Repair Bot 74A plans drop in Blackrock Depths and I don’t have them. So, the guild will have to forgive me for pilfering one of the bots from the bank. Hopefully I’ll find another one for a reasonable amount on the auction house. The rest of the materials I can craft myself, though the farming time for khorium ore alone could take a while and Jeeves will require 30 bars. The sad part is that I had a lot of khorium and primal fire left over from the Burning Crusade days that I sold last spring. If I had only been a pack rat and saved all that junk! A rough estimate of the cost for parts will be about 2000 to 2500 gold.

From a money making prospective, if you don’t care about Jeeves and you are an engineer…well, if that’s the case than you don’t deserve to be an engineer! But anyway, for those who are unworthy or those who make their Jeeves and want to provide parts, you can make a lot of money off your brethren in patch 3.2 just by crafting repair bots and selling them at ridiculous prices.

So, when 3.2 is released, you’ll find me in the Storm Peaks farming mechanicals for my butler.

Solicitation

noreply@blogger.com (Rorik) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:05:00 +0000

There have been a few comments lately that have to do with trying to get me to add advertising to this site or trying to advertise someone else's site. Please don't do that. If I think a comment is soliciting a for-profit site then I will delete it. If you leave an appropriate comment and your profile links to your own blog or you link to another site with revelant information, great. Otherwise, "I love my vacuum, I've found God and I gave at the office" so please leave.