Dire Maul East. Same rant - different actors.

My levelling healer Foostorm (L56) has hooked up with a warrior (L60) who has just become a tank.  As he has just converted from DPS to Tank, he wanted a friendly face to run instances with.  This works for me (queueing with a tank at mid levels is still insta-queue - just like at 80).  He has occasionally tanked before on other toons but has untill now runs as DPS.

As we have a level difference, we need to choose dungeons.  We did BRD (upper levels) and that worked fairly well, but he got no benefit out of it.  So - we insta-queue for Dire Maul East (DiM E).  DPS are two pallies and a mage.  There are 3 things about DiM E:
* The imp to the west as you first start needs to be talked to on several occasions and followed.
* The mobs are packed together, making it far too easy to pull mulitple groups
* There are lots of stealthed mobs


The DPS mage is given might by a DPS pally.  Two DPS have gogogo as a starting greeting.  It's DiM E,  so of course the DPS head east (away from the imp) and pull.  Our tank grabs agro back and all is ok, and I 'start' the imp.  Moving along we pick up too many mobs, with agro flying every where and I have a dirt nap.  Someone asks what went wrong and our tank fesses up that he pulled too much. 

A little later, I call /oom and start am drinking. As we are not gogogo'ing one of the DPS pull.  Annoying, and but tank again picks up agro.  The tank again follows the imp, and I'm following the healer we move on, or most of us do.  The DPS are somewhere off waiting for something I have no idea what.  In fairness, we should have ensured they were with us, but since when does Mr&Mrs Gogogo fall be tank?   The DPS finally catch up, the tank takes a dirt nap, but it's ok.

By now it's been at least 5 minutes and the DPS are starting to get bored.  DPS walking way in front of the tank, while I am drinking, finding stealhed mobs and dying.  DPS pulling groups behind me,  just after the tank pulled in front of me.  This is made worse by my not remembering/seeing where the imp went so we did optional bosses.  The frost mage thought he could solo a frost immune boss, while healer is drinking. 

This is an uncomfortable run, with too many stupid deaths, and our ability to tank/heal is called into question.  Finally we find one of the alternative exits to DiM E, and the 3 DPS leave us.  So the tank asks do we want to try to solo one boss.  Why not?  My confidence is a little low as it has been so difficult, but I like nothing better than a good wipe - it means that I am trying my abilities.

However we don't wipe, dont die, and have no problems.  In the instance which was part cleared with 5 people with great difficulty, it became a cake walk with just 2.  Sure, the mobs took a little longer to kill, and I kept doing stupid things like walking first into stealthed mobs, but I ran back to the tank and all was good.

In conclusion, DiM E - even with a learning tank wasn't hard, the DPS we took with us were. 

Paying attention to your competition.

Or not.

I've been playing on Caestraz for a long time now (with far far too much /played).  I've been playing the gold game for a little while, watching the odd name of particularly aggressive competitors.  I however seem to have a blind spot.  I was scanning the ah by hand (as you do in your spare time), and found a lot of singly posted arrows (and by a lot - I mean 45 pages of them).  There was a blog posting on this by CSAHF a little while ago, that i rememberd reading. 


In the middle was a single page containing reasonable prices by a 'breevok'.
The same 'breevok' who writes CSAHF.  The same breevok who outed himself 2 weeks ago.

It appears I wasnt as observant after all.

Our dependance on addons

There are several types of contributor to the WOW environment.  Some write blogs, others make training videos, and yet others make addons.

Yesterday I was in a panic because one of my 'essential' addons broke. This is largely my cost of running addons in 'alpha' (or early adopters) mode.  My immediate response was to panic, then grumble about addon makers.  However, without that very same addon maker - I wouldnt have my 'wow business' in the first place.

If you do ever have a problem with an addon:
* If it is just after patch day, your addon may be 'out of date', try enabling 'out of date' addons (after you login, before you choose your toon.
* Check the website where you got the addon for updates, and or bugs
* Did you recently change anything?  Try undoing that change - if only to help identify where the problem is.
* Report the error to the creator via the website (or any other method recommended by the author), including : What you did, the exact text of the error message, what it used to do (better), when it broke.


Thankfully in the author released a patch within the day.

In closing, to all the blog writers, and addon makers, thank you.

Cheap Gems Happened

Several bloggers predicted it, a large drop in the raw gem value as 3.3.3 happened due to honor changes (anaaliusgoldhunt, but others too). 

I have noticed a small reduction in prices recently on most gems - with a noticable absence of Eye of Zul.  From this I assume that the majority of gems are coming from a non-random source - which suggests either (A) the number of alchemists have exploded, or (B and more likely) PVP'ers are trading in honor.  I will have to specifically check the cost of PVP cuts.

Now I am not a toon that keeps a lot (by goblin standards) of gold on hand - my primary banker had 15k. 

But tonight - the cost of gems have plummeted.  Cardinal Rubies (normally selling uncut ~185g) have been offered in trade - in bulk - for 130g each.  Similar prices have been offered on other uncut gems - Dreadstone 70g (vs 135g normally)., but still only a few Eye of Zul.  AH prices are still 'depressed' being the 165g for a Cardinal ruby, and only in small quantities , but not the crazy prices in trade.

This makes me regret not having more 'liquid' gold on my bankers.

My first 1000g with unskilled low level toons

For my first lot of gold, where I 'hit it big', it was with cooking recipees.  There are a couple of recipees (listed below) that (a) can be gathered by a level 5 toon, and sell for up to 500 gold each.  Admitidly to get 500g requires patience (it may take 2 weeks to sell), but even a quick sale of 100g is a lot for a new toon.

Why & How?
Cooking recipees sell well because they have an achievement attached to getting 160 recipees. There are only about 165 in the game, some of which are festival linked.



I have found that the 'big' recipees are alliance cooking BOE quest rewards:

• Recipe of the Kaldorei
• The Great Moongraze Hunt
• Costly_Menace (at least according to wowwiki)

For selling these recipees - 100g for a quick sale, 500g if you put them on the horde ah and take your time (via the neutral AH and another account - ask a friend to help).

For the next stage down, there are still a large number of out of the way recipees.  Again alliance has the advantage as some of their recipees are not only out of the way, but also sold by alliance vendors only.  For these recipees, you can often get 4 times your money back.

Some usefull links:

Wowwiki Faction Exclusive Recipee List
WowWiki Cooking recipes

Where are the tailors?

From the 3.3.3 patch notes

• Tailoring
• The cooldown and location requirements have been removed from creating Moonshroud, Spellweave and Ebonweave. If any of these abilities are on cooldown when the patch is applied, players must wait for the cooldowns to expire naturally before they are permanently removed.

I have a spellweave tailor. As such I can get 2 peices of Spellweave per set of mats. The same applies to the other tailor specialies. The reason that spellweave has historically been high (on my server at least) is the lack of specialists combined with a 4 day cooldown.

Last night, I made 20 spellweave, and put most of them up on the ah, at around the cost of mats for a non-specialist. (Being a specialist I still am doubling my money). As a part of an unusual day (not WOW related) I went home at lunch, and quickly checked the AH. All sold. I need to make more. Oh well, for a while at least I will make a nice profit on this line.

If you really would like to make gold, do your reading. Patch times are opportunities, that come only so often. If the patch notes suggest an opportunity, especially if it isnt on the front page of the big sites time and time again, put your gold where your skills are.

Stats, stats, swimming in stats.

I've been healing so long the that the only real DPS I do is on low level alts or my fire elemental.

Having decided to go for a Healing/Melee dual spec as apposed to the easier Ranged/Healer dual spec, I'm finding I don't understand anything about my melee brethren. Now I'm not poorly geared I can pull upwards of 4k DPS once I get into my rotations, and remember every little maelstorm proc and totem refresh. But I feel I've done something wrong and could do more.

I have ridiculous amounts of hit, I'm 19% on spell hit (yes I'm fixing it, changing out hit gems/chants that I used to need) and 15% or so on the melee, I'm not even sure what the expertise I require is (I'm at 9 or 2.5%) and everything I read is so much more confusing than helpful. I have seen sites saying to gem Attack power its worth more DPS, others say Agility is worth more to me, I really do not know what to gem. So I have done what anyone would do, and had a guess. 4K DPS dual wielding Nighttime seems good to me, I am yet to raid with this and that DPS value is just on heroic bosses that die before I actually get into the swing of the battle.

Now I've gemmed 40 attack power In a few slots, I would say it is my most used, other than that I have some Agility gems, some haste/crit, haste/hit etc. My main spec of healing is mostly 10 haste + 5 mana per 5, with around 3 20 intellect gems and a pure 20 haste.

I have found Healing easier to understand stat wise than DPS. DPS is a balance of all these tiny little stats that seem meaning less. Hit rating for example I need to have capped for spells as well as melee, expertise is not worth the materials to chant/gem for it, and the difference Between Attack power and Agility seems to be crit, which also has a cap and to me is not useful past around 30-35% crit chance.

So what do I need to get the highest DPS I can?
Should I even try to get the highest DPS I can?
Should I aim to have mid level DPS In my raids and use my shaman utility to help out?

There is so much thought involved in DPS as apposed to a tank or healer, where Def cap/dodge etc and spell power/haste are your respective priorities, As DPS I have to worry about Hit rating on spells as well as melee, on expertise, on Agi level to generate crit/armor, Attack power to hold my DPS constant between cooldowns and procs, and then my weapon enchants including self chants from shaman.

Stats apon stats, that either provide the same or similar results and there is still no really good site I have found to explain the difference between them on any significant level. Now I need to finish my addon Downloads and get back to the Target dummy and any heroic boss I can sink my axe into.

Egamad of Caelestrasz, Still a better Healer than DPS.

The Gemming Mystery

When you gem, what do you gem for? Do you gem Stamina as a tank only, or attack power for all melee, haste for all healers, or spell power for caster DPS.

Until recently (4 days ago) I was under the impression you had to match the gem to the socket color, whether in a solo color or a mixed color, I believed that you could not gem that socket otherwise.

I have recently through accident while re-gemming a socket found that anything would fit, and that the socket color only required a match to get that little socket bonus. Now you still need to take your meta into account as it has requirements as well to be active. The problem I'm sure for most is what to gem, for what role, and what outcome it gives. For example attack power is a static boost to pure DPS, however agility which provides attack power also gives crit and some armor, so do you add a 40 attack power (epic) gem, or the 20 agility variant. I myself having a melee Off spec to my healing Main spec, am finding it a challenge to gem "correctly" for everything that happens.

Sometimes when I heal I wish I had more mana re-gen, other fights more haste, and have now started to weight up mana re-gen vs mana pool, haste vs mana re-gen... What I need is to make a standard gem set, from random heroics, all the way to two healing TOC10 and then further to progression ICC. I want more haste as I need it, I want mana re-gen as some fights burn me down when I'm healing aggressively to keep everyone up, I want a larger mana pool so I can heal longer, Haste to heal faster. Usually spell power is what a healer wants as that allows them to heal for more but since my trinket/totem/ring, all randomly proc to give increase spell power as I heal Im not gemming for them when I can avoid it.

As it stands I'm looking into 10 haste + 5 mana per 5 epics, to slot, I want around 500 mana per 5 while casting, once I have that with my totem down, It's all Intellect and haste till I find my middle ground.

My advice is look it up on different sites, and then make your own choice, I want the mana re-gen, not much else matters other than haste, so there my goals. My enhancement spec is gemmed for hit/attack power/agility I've added everything, but being a leather worker I can lay off Attack power gems and focus on hit/haste/expertise, etc.

Take into account everything you can, and gem to what you want, if it's not the best it can be, then tweak it, if you think you can get more, change it, but start off where you want, with what works for you. Start with blue gems, there cheaper and easier to get, save the epics until your certain thats what you want to have.

Egamad of Caelestrasz

Gevlon, about that tank shortage.

Dear Mr Goblin,

We take a great deal of interest in your undergeared project, both with your success, and your difficulties. Like many casual guilds, you have a problem - specifically a lack of tanks.  This is the bane of DPS everywhere, from the levelling instance to the progression raid.  Some would even go as far to claim that it takes 4 players to form a 10 man raid; 2 tanks, 2 heals and the rest just come.  The advice we presume to give, you already know. However, there are times that an outside view may prove a usefull reminder.

You have been successfull in recruiting self selected experts in the game, that understand the raids, and have at least a theoretical, but still in depth understanding of their chosen role.  While I don't have in-depth knowledge of your partners, I strongly suspect that they are not first time players.  With the players you have, you are successfully exploiting the training provided by others.

Tanks are a special breed, and are a desirable member of any guild, social, casual or hardcore.  They also are have the biggest need for a community, more than any other role, and especially when first learning.  A DPS may underperform, and in many groups, no one will notice.  An underperforming heals is likely to be matched to overgeared tank - that doesnt need healing, or at least with overgeared DPS - so the tank has little need for healing. In either case, the positive reinforcement from a successfull group will encourage both DPS and heals to continue in their role, and hopefully gain both confidence and skill.  The hardest issue for the learning tank however, is not the need to beat the environment, but to wrest threat from their 'helpful' gogogoing, agro stealing, add pulling, ever so tolerant DPS.


In your project you (rightfully) have high standards.  So do those you seek to recruit.  Your options involve:

• Advertise on your blog.  As far as tanks are concerned, this is prone to chance. (But since when do goblins believe in chance).
• PUG early raids and recruit. If you can't get the tanks to come to you, go to them.
• Train a tank.  I don't suggest that you seek undergraduate tanks on their first toons, but at the same time, informing prospective tanks that you are willing to work with them while they re-skill.  For a training tank, re-run old content.  5 man skills are close, but not the same as raid skills.
• Take a non-traditional tank.  A Felguard or Voidwalker may no longer be the Sarth 3D tank of choice, but they still can tank the odd mob or two.
• Become a tank.  If you wish to guarantee a tank whenever you are online, roll one.
• Financial incentives.  You already provide starter kits - 100g + basic bags, but any one of my banking alts makes more than this a day.  You have proposed a boosting service before, as well as used incentives to join a progression guild.  This method will also guarantee the availablity of a suitable tank.

Regards
Foolich of (Oceanic) Caelestraz.

Caveat Emptor - Power Levelling Guides.

Let the buyer beware.
One of the 'big' wow economic sites has just put up a list of how much it costs to level a proffesion using their power levelling guides.  It ranges from 2k to 8k depending on the profession.

Please remember that different sites have different goals.  Some want to teach you a philosophy and use gold tips to lure you in.  Others sell gold guides for currency.  Still others are paid by gold selling adds.

I read a lot of websites, and find in them good information.  However dont take any website (or any organisation at all) at face value untill you know what their agenda is. (And yes - even I have an agenda).

I have found that Auctioneer, Little Sparky and Ackis Recipee List have been a much cheaper method to level.  My suggestions for power levelling a profession are in levelling crafting on cheap.