Being your own economy

One of the major advantages of many alts is having access to their professions – with a clearly defined main raiding character (and my restoration/feral Druid to raid with when we need a healer or melee in our 10mans) you can actually create a cycle of industry saving you heaps of money. As an example, outside of my repair bill which I cannot avoid at times, I make money by doing raids.

What have you done for me lately?

Besides being a fun diversion seeing the game from a different perspective, economics 101 says that our alts can also serve our mains. The first contact with this principle arrives when our main finds a BoE item and mails it to an alt, or your leveling alt sends cloth to your main who happens to be a tailor. This seemingly insignificant web of exchanges becomes greater and more complex as you level more alts and have more characters at max level.

One of the things I did when I created my alts is define what they will do for me, and how they will aid my other characters. I gave them specific roles in addition, to make it clear for me what each would be focusing on:

As you can see, everything except leatherworking and jewelcrafting is covered – Blacksmithing is mostly useful for my warrior alt herself, and the belt buckles do not represent an investment so large I feel I should hurry it; also, my guild has plenty jewelcrafters so that’s not the biggest worry. While leatherworking would be useful for my Druid, she gets enough gear without having an alt devote time to that as well.

Classy farming

Engineers (such as my Druid) are awesome for clearing classic dungeons because you can put down a mailbox and/or Jeeves once your bags are full, sell or mail the proceeds, and carry on. That means two times the return on investment over going into a dungeon with my other characters. Of course, BoP stuff you still have to farm yourself, but then you are in there with a mission anyway.

This leads to the following chart displaying the gains Natarumah has from each of my alts; mind you that my warrior is only ickle yet and has to level to at least 69 to be of full usefulness:

At this point, even with my warrior not fully leveled yet, I need very little resources – gems I can get from friends (and the belt buckles as well) but that means taking some time for it, which is rarely an issue. Hence, the only money I spend is for repairs, having stuff made by others when I do not have the pattern, or when I am impatient and need a lot of items which I can make but are on a cooldown (such as Ebonweave, Spellweave and Moonshroud).

One hand washes the other

But the fun does not even stop there; your alts also benefit your alts:

When my Warrior needs gems to level jewelcrafting, my Warlock farms them. When my Druid needs herbs for inks, my Mage farms them. All of my alts can farm Eternals of one type or the other. My alts collect greens while leveling which Natarumah disenchants and turns into enchanting scrolls for my alts (the base scrolls come from my Druid, of course). This creates a situation where my Warlock farms blue quality gems, which my Mage uses to transmute epic gems and sell them on the AH. I sell one gem a day at about 150 gold profit, which I am saving up for letting my Druid make the mekgineer’s chopper. All of this makes life a lot easier.

Day job, take 2

Of some professions it might be an advantage to have 2 alts; a second alchemist can help greatly in transmuting business (limited use though) by making one  an elixir or potion master, and the second a Transmutation master. This guarantees that you never run out of flasks and transmuting procs, and with the prices of Frost Lotus you want to maximize what you get out of one. A second Miner, Skinner or Herbalist always comes in handy, but it’s usually something you do while leveling an alt; most people save spending a lot of money on professions until they are at least level 69, so they can powerlevel it. A second jewelcrafter (while tiresome) gives more daily quests, and twice the speed at obtaining patterns for you or the Dragon’s Eyes for your jewelcrafting needs. Most other professions are not worth having a second alt take if you already have one.

Two other pieces of advice to make this web work smoothly:

• Get a bank alt or two, get some people to sign your charter and make a banking guild (pass them some gold and do warn them in advance you will kick them). That’s a lot of free space and you will need it.
• Devote 1 or 2 bank slots on each of your alts for ” their goods” with the appropriate bag types (Enchanting bag, mining bag, etc.). So my warlock has 2 bank slots with Mining bags filled with ores. That way I always know where to find what I need – the one who farms it also banks it.
• Use your bank alts to store “general items” such as cloth and eternals, as well as Classic/TBC materials (which you will not need daily) and BoE items you may find.

All of these tips are rather basic, and I am sure it can be enlarged even further with multiple accounts and the like, but this is as much accounting as I will do before it starts to take the fun out of playing a game. Just remember that your account is a team, and that you can save yourself a lot of money by not neglecting the potential of your alts!

So tell me, have you shaped up your team yet?

The Cataclysm

It is true – the leaked information that was presented by MMO-Champion turned out to be true after all! This comes as a surprise to me, both pleasant and unpleasant. Sure, there are new quests and zones, an exciting addition in a secondary skill and a continuation of the storyline…but something deep inside me nags that this means the end of the old WoW – that something that was once awesome will be lost and the game seems more…pale. Anyway, here’s a quick list of the things previewed in this video, while I catch my breath:

• Level Cap 85
• Worgen join the Alliance, Goblins join the Horde
• Many new class combos including Gnome Priest, Tauren Paladin, Human Hunter and Troll Rogue
• Archaeology becomes a new secondary profession
• Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep will be updated and have a heroic mode
• Desolace becomes…less desolate
• Darkshore and Ashenvale become heavily contested as the Horde invades
• The barrens is split in twain, Durotar may be lost
• There will be new, rated Battlegrounds
• Deathwing will feature as the main enemy
• There will be a guild leveling and a guild achievement system
• A new character progression system: Path of the Titans

What this all means and how some of these things are implemented, I cannot say. It looks like the classic dungeons will have their old forms as well as a new level 80+ mode. By the things shown in the trailer the “destroyed” locations also neatly miss the quest-important zones, which is good. What the Path of the Titans exactly means is something I am very curious about, as well as what we can do with Archeology.

The Cataclysm just turned profitable! Let’s just hope it erases the bad taste in my mouth. I hope it will be awesome.

Edit: This just in from the Class panel:

Shadow Priests will most likely get a nuke without cooldown in Cataclysm.

Just saying…

Call of the Crusade

Hints are coming down on the next patch, 3.2: Call of the Crusade. Highlights include the expansion of the Argent Tournament into a real colliseum (with corresponding Arena) and a nerf to jewelcrafting. Oh, and some vague promises of class balance.

The Argent Tournament

As the Argent Tournament progresses with its colliseum, it is now available for arena fights to determine to meanest and toughest of heroes. New dailies and new rewards are to be expected. With a bit of luck, these will be designed in such a fashion that they bridge the gap from Naxx-10 to Ulduar-25, allowing people who jumped ship from 10mans to 25mans (like me) to catch up without being forced to PuG Naxx-25 because no progression guild will run it anymore.

The Colliseum itself will feature 5man, 10man and 25man challenges, similar to Ring of Blood and Amphitheatre of Anguish. The idea sounds kind of fun, I have to say. I liked the idea of chain-linked challenges a group overcomes, without tsunamis of trash in between.

This also heralds the start of season 7, and a continuation of Blizzard’s attempts to make PvP gear viable. With an increase in resilience/stamina, which is pretty inevitable, they’ll probably hope to get people to stop stacking the offensive stats and favour defense a bit.

Professions

Jewelcrafting will be nerfed. Blizzard has set a dangerous precendent with their wording of it, though.

“In the next major content patch we will be removing the prismatic quality of the jewelcrafter-only Dragon’s Eye gems. Like other gems, they will have to match the socket color to receive a socket bonus. When this change occurs, players with qualifying jewelcrafting skill will be provided a yet to be determined amount of Dalaran Jewelecrafter Tokens as compensation.”

This is big, no, Huge. I know many, many Jewelcrafters who use these gems to qualify for their Metagem’s sometimes very difficult requirements. Some gems have requirements that are easy to achieve when you are a healer, for instance, but as DPS you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to get it right.

I present to you, the justification:

Q: “Is it really that bad to have a best profession”

A:”Yes, we think so. A key to games being fun is feeling like you have a choice. If you aren’t making decisions then you aren’t really playing a game — you are watching something as a viewer not participating as a player. Game design has proven over many years that when you have choice A and choice B where choice A grants more power and choice B looks cooler or grants almost any other kind of benefit, a vast majority of players will choose A. In their minds there is no choice. It has to be A. Likewise if humans were the most powerful race and mages were the most powerful class then WoW would not be very diverse. We want tradeskills to be a choice. Having a best profession means that choice does not exist.”

What is the danger here?

If Blizzard says that having a best profession is bad, then the conclusion is also that having a worst profession is bad. While the majority of the professions fall in the “viable” league, two things stand out. The combination Blacksmithing/Jewelcrafting is what is overpowered here; the ability to add sockets to items combined with the availability of awesome gems.

The most underpowered profession in the game right now is Engineering. While it has fun trinkets (most of which are useless, replaced or no longer function around Naxx-10 level), a mailbox and repair bots (for which you only need 1 engineer raid-wide, assuming people are too lazy to walk to the repair guy standing in or close by most modern raids), that’s it.

So the moment that Blizzard decides to nerf Jewelcrafting because it is overpowered, then these words obligate them to “fix” Engineering to make it more viable. Because if they don’t, they are not holding true to this new philosophy of “there should be choice”. Let’s face it, the only reason I have Engineering on my Druid is because I like the little trinkets for RP and such, but I am not seriously using them in a raid…

Personal situation

I have been accepted into the Unity raid community on my server. I am greatly appreciating this, but I have to get my butt in gear to continue to meet their expectations. Currently, in mostly 10-man gear, I do 3.5k to 4k DPS in 10mans. However, due to the increased lag, bouts of 3 FPS and the insecurity on what goes on in 25mans, I barely manage to scrape 3k intermittently in Ulduar-25.

I am trying desperately to keep focus, maximize my DPS time and flatten my learning curve, but still I feel like I suck hairy balls. This is a big-time issue for me, so I am trying to remedy that situation. I’ve completely remade my UI (Pictures to follow) and cleaned up my PC for speed. I try to minimze the time my PC runs before a raid, to keep the time until I start flatlining my FPS minimal. I read the guides, watch the vids, and DPS my eyeballs off.

God I hope it’s enough.

The symptoms of my FPS (my worst issue, cuts DPS in half) are as follows: I have 61 FPS when moving around, 30 when fighting mobs. However, now and then during bossfights, my FPS drops to about 3-7 and stays there for a minute or so. Then it picks up again to 30 for a minute, then drops down again.

Main reason to fix this is that I sometimes can’t even move around, and get caught in AoE, and die. This makes me look like a freaking idiot, which I’d like to avoid. If someone has any clue what could cause it and what might fix it I’d be very appreciative, as I’d hate to have to say that I cannot perform at 4K or above DPS due to this. It will be only a matter of time before they say I perform badly and would be asked to leave.

I am currently working on a Shadowpriest-specific guide to the bosses in Ulduar; I am finally getting in a state where I feel I know enough to do it; raiding with Unity has allowed me to see all bosses except for General Vezax and Yogg-Saron (and Algalon, of course), and I am starting to get a feel for what to do and how to do it.

Hail to breadwinners!

The latest updates on the patch notes concern professions, and there are some juicy changes in there. Most are designed to make leveling a profession easier or quicker (removal of books for training fishing, cooking and first aid, no need to do the cooking/first aid/fishing quests, etc.) while others fill gaps in the system (addition of a craftable spell damage dagger, adding bonuses to engineering items that the engineer puts on his own gear). Lastly, they added recipes in Ulduar, to make running the place more beneficial. Also, those recipes are (mostly?) BoE, so they can be traded or sold.

Here’s the full list:

Alchemy

• Elixir of Greater Spellpower now grants spell power to all schools of magic.
• The Crazy Alchemist Potion is now correctly increased by Alchemist Stones.
• You can now sometimes find Alchemist’s Caches from bosses in Ulduar. Only players with an Alchemy skill of 425 or higher can loot these secret caches.

Blacksmithing

• Added a new recipe for the Titansteel Spellblade, an epic one-handed caster dagger, available from trainers.
• Added new recipes for epic gear, found rarely on Ulduar bosses. These recipes are unbound and can be traded.

Cooking

• A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man ‘O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food.
• Flint and Tinder is no longer necessary for creating a campfire. You’re just that resourceful!
• Ingredients such as Spices, Apples, and the like have been removed from most cooking recipes.
• Players no longer need to complete the Clamlette Surprise quest to gain Artisan cooking. The quest now offers the unique recipe, Clamlette Magnifique. If you already completed the quest, you can visit Dirge Quickcleave in Gadgetzan to learn this recipe (for free).
• Several Northrend recipes were given greater skill up ranges to make it easier to reach 450 cooking skill.
• You no longer need to learn cooking from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.

Enchanting

• Greatly increased the drop rate of recipes found in pre-Lich King dungeons and raids.
• Several recipes in the 250-300 skill range have been rebalanced, and the reagent requirements have been reduced.
• Some enchants now have level restrictions. Note: the enchant is never removed from the item to which it’s applied, however, the player no longer receives its benefit until they reach the required level. Any enchants modified in this way have had their tooltips updated.
• The enchanting interface now correctly sorts grey recipes by skill difficulty.

Engineering

• Added a new Reticulated Armor Webbing engineering enchant that increases the armor on plate gloves.
• Added a new Springy Arachnoweave engineering enchant that grants passive spell power in addition to turning your cloak into a parachute.
• Flexweave Underlay now grants passive agility in addition to its normal effect.
• Nitro Boosts now grant passive critical strike rating in addition to their speed boost.
• Nitro Boosts now make you drop PVP flags when used, as well as preventing you from picking them up while the effect is active.

Fishing

• A new (and very rare) special mount can now be caught from Northrend fishing pools.
• A new clam, the Giant Darkwater Clam, can be obtained by fishing in Wintergrasp. This mighty clam has a greatly increased chance to drop pearls, and yields up to five times the regular amount of clam meat.
• New fishing dailies are now offered from Marcia Chase in Dalaran City!
• Players are no longer required to do the Nat Pagle, Angler Extreme quest to gain Artisan fishing. The quest now offers a special superior-quality fishing pole instead. If you already completed the quest, you can visit Nat Pagle in Dustwallow Marsh to receive this new fishing pole.
• The time needed to catch fish has been reduced.
• You can now fish anywhere, regardless of skill. Every catch has the potential for fishing skill gains, but you are likely to catch worthless junk in areas that are too difficult for your skill.
• You can now fish in Wintergrasp, and the fishin’ is good!
• You no longer need to learn fishing from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing.

Gathering Skills

• Toughness, Master of Anatomy, and Lifeblood now have level requirements equal to the level required for the corresponding skill rank: Apprentice (1), Journeyman (1), Expert (10), Artisan (25), Master (40), Grand Master (55).
• You can no longer fail when Mining, Herbing, and Skinning.

Herbalism

• Find Herbs no longer tracks Glowcaps.
• Northrend herbs now yield more herbs on average.
• The herbalism requirement for gathering Tiger Lily has been reduced to 375.
• The time it takes to gather herbs has been reduced.

Inscription

• Added a recipe to trainers for creating a level 70 superior-quality off-hand item.
• Added a recipe for creating a different level 70 superior-quality off-hand item. Scribes will find the recipe is dropped from residents of Silverbrook.
• Added around 50 new glyph recipes. These new recipes can be obtained from Books of Glyph Mastery found as world drops on Northrend monsters. Reading a Book of Glyph Mastery randomly discovers one of the newly-added recipes.
• Glyph icons have been updated so it is easy to distinguish between classes.
• Players will now learn 3 recipes the very first time they perform Northrend Inscription Research. This does not apply to players who have already discovered recipes from Northrend Inscription Research (sorry).

Jewelcrafting

• Added a recipe for Shifting Twilight Opal to the daily jewelcrafting vendor.
• Added recipes for superior-quality PVP rings and necklaces to Northrend jewelcrafting trainers.

Leatherworking

• Added a recipe for combining Borean Leather Scraps into Borean Leather. You can still use Borean Scraps from your inventory to combine them.
• Added new recipes for epic gear, found rarely on Ulduar bosses. These recipes are unbound and can be traded.
• Several lower-level items crafted by leatherworkers have received major changes to make them more appealing.

Mining

• Northrend deposits now despawn 1 minute after mining them. This change was made to speed up respawning when nodes were partially looted.

Tailoring

• Added new recipes for epic gear, found rarely on Ulduar bosses. These recipes are unbound and can be traded.
• Added recipes for superior-quality PVP cloaks to Northrend tailoring trainers.
• The Lightweave tailoring enchant now sometimes grants a temporary spell power bonus instead of dealing direct damage to your target.
• Several lower-level items crafted by tailors have received major changes to make them more appealing.

Spoils of War – Whipping the crafters

Since it is going to take quite a while before I can get even the quest rewards sorted out I would want to obtain while leveling in Northrend, I occupied some of my time with gathering the item enhancements currently known in the Beta. As it looks now, there will not be much change in what we want to enchant our gear with, except with the quantities of return we get from it.

There is more on each enhancement, but percentage-wise we are likely to benefit less from it.

Think about it; although the numbers are not crunched yet, we will need more rating points to achieve a similar percentage number. So, let’s hope they will come out roughly equivalent.

The reason this is done, of course, is to prevent “mudflation”, where an ever-increasing amount of stat points without a filter will eventually mean that players become indestructable. You can see this happen when level 70s start 5-manning Gruul and such in Sunwell gear. As you become higher level, you need more rating points to achieve the same result agains similarly leveled foes, mitigating this in some fashion.

Anyway, without further ado, some of the smexiest item enhancements our pockets need to deepen for:

We are likely to require a bit of help in the +hit rating section, as we require more of it, but blue gear and up seems to be lacking a bit with this. Of course, the second you are over hit capped, see if you can replace this one with:

Even with improved scaling with Critical Strike rating, Spell Power will still be king, and the dominant stat we will be stacking.

Whoa there, what’s this? Yes, I know we would usually just put Stamina or Vitality on our boots, but once our gear is good enough for Twisted Faith, this may be a worthy contender. A slight bit of mana regeneration and the flimsiest amount of increased damage is still better than no damage at all.

The great-old standby of enchantment leftovers, it still is a good foundation for all of our skills. Basically this enchant will give 80 HP, 120 mana, a slight bit of mana regen and a teensy-weensy bit of extra spell damage with Twisted Faith.

Moar! Because

Moar! We stacked it before, we stack it again, and we will stack more in Wrath.

A slight bit of threat reduction and a bit of mana regeneration. With Twisted Faith, we can now see all those little Spirit upgrades count up to a small chunk of Spell Power. Also, it seems the mats are a bit more reasonable than those of the old Subtlety enchant.

And of course, our weapons need a treatment too. Although there’s no way of knowing whether there will be an equivalent to Soulfrost in the works, as there is now only unified Spellpower, this represents at least a tiny upgrade. And, the costs will be relatively lower than Soulfrost.

Revered with the Kirin Tor gives us our new head slot enchant, giving 30 Spell Power and 20 Critical Strike Rating. Wyrmrest Accord gives us a similar one, with 8 MP/5 instead of 20 Critical Strike Rating. Even so, I’d go for this one, as we should not have that great an issue with mana if we play our cards right.

And courtesy of the Sons of Hodir comes our new Shoulder enchant. Mind you that this item is most likely bugged right now, as it gives the same stats at Exalted as the blue version of the glyph, namely 18 Spellpower and 4 MP/5.

The new evolution of Runic Spellthread gives us 20 Spirit as well as 50 Spellpower. There is a version with Stamina available for tailors, but with Twisted Faith (once again) all these bits of Spirit add up to Spellpower again.

When Threat is no longer an issue, and Spirit flows aplenty, Tailors will be able to switch from the Wisdom enchant on cloak to this one; however, it is BoP for the tailor making it. Still, it does wonders in increasing mana efficiency at that level of play.

Conclusion

At the end of the line, assuming you are not a tailor and are hit capped before enchantments:

Spellpower +201, Spirit +56, Crit +20, +4 MP/5 and 2% threat reduction.

It is possible I missed an enchant along the way, or some of this information is already outdated; if so, warn me, and I will update this post!