In the Defence of Rogues.

Now before I even start typing I can hear the protests about rogues, but are they really that bad? Warlocks generally chain fear, paladins stun and bubble, Druids hope in out of HOT's, and so on. But the rogue takes the most flak even though they are the melee equal of a mage.

Now what is the problem people have with rogues? Well in certain specs they can open on you with a massive crit, but after that a subtlety spec is useless for damage. They can stun lock to death, is this any different to being feared to death? A stun lock rogue is generally going to try to keep the rotation going as long as they can and if they miss there basically in the s**t and so have to re-stealth in combat which is a 2minute - 3 minute cooldown depending on spec. A combat rogue has the greatest chance out of stealth to survive while doing good damage, however they lack the stun lock prowess of the assassination tree, and the stealth prowess of subtlety.

While a rogue of any spec will mess up your day and while you level they can and will be a BG problem, just remember anyone can kill anyone, you all have the counters to do it. I can drop warlocks on my mage with ease, and on my rogue, but I have yet to master the demise of the paladin, my rogue however stands a better chance. While everyone cries and complains about rogues and curses there existence in pvp, they are not as bad as everyone wants you to believe and a fight with a rogue is essential focused on the opening in most specs. If you see a rogue before he gets you most will run away once there stealth is broken, others will try to salvage the fight, and most classes, would agree that getting the first shot in is generally a match decider.

So are rogues the Anti-Christ? Should we complain and winge about there stuns, and yet do nothing about warlock fear, paladin bubbles, frost mage snares, shadow priests DOT's fear and mindflaying deathmaker? There has to be a line, each class has its own strategy, and each class has a way to fight back, so less crying about that rogue that spills your blood, and instead work on a way to counteract them. Long cooldowns, stealth dependent glass cannons, warriors would drop a rogue without them using there cooldowns, frost mages aswell, preist etc etc.

In closing, Rogues are not EVIL! BAD! OVERPOWERED! and really they are in leather, they just have and use there tools more class dependently then my mage either will, and that is what makes them deadly in the right hands, or just really annoying.

Healthy Competition

On my server there is another gold-crafting blogger (breevok), that sometimes we work co-operatively, and sometimes competitively.  We had a discussion earlier tonight about arrows , a low markup, high volume area.  At the moment, the prices of arrows are 5g per stack, where midweek they were 1g50.  As I don't have an arrow manufacturer, I often just buy his arrows, and re-sell them.  I pointed out that his main competition was offline, and that he was selling above market.  He asked if I was going to undercut him, and my response was,  "I couldn't be stuffed".  This is especially true as (a) he was online so could immediately re-undercut me, and (b) my arrows were on another toon.

While I was on my next bank alt, I was posting my bits and peices, and noticed that someone had moved into 'My' market for Rituals of the new moon.  Last time I looked, I had no real competition, now I had stacks of it.  My main competition is Puraa, one of breevok's alts. 

There is nothing personal about this competition, it is just business.  I am going to try maximise my gold/hour.  Sometimes, this will mean that I will undercut (in this instance - it means selling an offhand for a profit - at market value).  Other times it means not playing in a highly competitive market and moving somewhere else (I've just picked up the recipee for bag of jewels - where there appears to only be a few sellers).  In any case, if it wasn't an associate (in the form of puraa/breevok), it would have been someone else (pandapanda for example), as offhands are a good way to consume snowfall inks.  I fully expect Breevok - and others, to do exactly the same thing.


If you want to make money by selling things, keep an eye on your markets.  If someone else starts playing in your corner, that's OK.  You may decide to keep playing with the newcomer. But explore other possibilities.

P.s. Congratulations to Breevok for his gold cap. I did call him a cow, but it's only because I am jealous.

Achievements? really?

I myself could care less about a lot of the in game achievements, such as holiday events, quests, first aid! and pretty much all others.

Now, I do not know why I loathe them so much but hey, I cannot stay focused enough to run around and grind rep so I just don't. My Fiance' however is what I call and achievement W***E. She will spend hours rep grinding, quest grinding, any achievement she can do she can and will, she completes holiday achievements the day its available and you cannot move her till she has that title to boot.

So, why is it some people can farm achievements, where others farm there brethren? Personally I can handle PVP achi's, Dungeon achi's and leveling proffs to max, but for my life, rep grinds and quest grinds just make me wanna log off. So, is there anyone who even aims at them all? Do you try for some to keep you interested? or like myself, when your bored do you decide to hand some Tauren his flank?

Whatever your goals may be, its good to have them, the nature of wow at 80 is a killer, you raid you farm, you get bored to tears and push through it. Having a goal to get, will make you much happier than 2 hours flying around northrend for ore. Try to get kill limits in BG's, rep grind in azeroth, or even see what your 80 can solo these days.

Have fun and try not to get bored.

More important than GearScore

PVE Raiding - Player versus Environment

GTFOOF ^ (get the f out of fire). (This will come up often).

You need to answer 2 questions.  Are you prepared to Tank?  Are you prepared to Heal?  If not, you will be a DPS.  Sometimes even if you are willing to tank or heal you will be DPS - but not often.


If you have not yet done so:
* have a look at  www.wowwiki.com/classes, specifically the What do want you to know about your class.
* have a look at Wow.Com Resources.  If you are going to tank or heal, have a look at the suggested sites.  Regardless of role, have a look at your class.


The advice in this article is general.  If you are after specific strategy for specific classes or bosses, look elsewhere.

Basic strategy
As a tank, your priorities are:

• Keep yourself alive.  This means GTFOOF and use defensive cooldowns when needed.
• Keep your healers alive.  Do a basic amount of threat and ensuring ranged mobs don't target your healer.
• Keep your fellow tank(s) alive.
• Keep the DPS alive.  DPS do stupid things.  If you have a spare taunt and are not going to sacrifice either of the above, feel free to use it to get the attention of a stray mob.
• If in doubt, face the boss or mob away from the raid.  This helps with all of the above.
• Allow the DPS to do damage.  It's what DPS do.  Unfortuneatly the are not so good at doing damage when being hit by various nasty things.  This means that you need to do have more threat than they do.

As a healer, your priorities are:

• Keep the tank(s) alive.
• Keep yourself alive.  GTFOOF.  Physician - heal thyself.  Most classes (but not all) don't do very much while taking a dirt nap.  Dont stand in front of a boss, dont stand behind a dragon.
• Keep your fellow healers alive.
• Keep the DPS alive.
• Keep your mana up.  Sometimes this means you need to stop casting, or use mana replenishment  (water shields & mana totems for shamans, ask for replenishment etc).
• You can do more than heal.  Sometimes you dispel. Sometimes you sheild. Use a wand.  Hurt something.

As a DPS, your priorities are:

• Keep the healer(s) alive.  One time you are allowed to grab threat is when the healer is being beat up.
• Keep yourself alive. GTFOOF.  Let the tank keep threat.  Don't stand in front of bosses.  Don't stand behind dragons.
• Hurt things.  Generally this means ensure you dont steal threat off the tank.  If you are a caster, AOE groups, and DOT then Nuke.  If you are melee, bleed them then hurt them (note: I am yet to play melee DPS).

Stat priorities - DPSYou need to get to your hit cap.  It changes by group composition, talent composition and self buffs.  Use a hit calculator.
If you are a caster - spellpower is king.  Some classes benefit from haste, crit, or even spirit.
If you are melee or a hunter - I only have limited advice.  Strength or Agility, Attack Power, Expertise and Armor Penetration may be good. 

Stat priorities - Healer

Spellpower, enough MP5 to last a fight, Haste, Crit.

Stat priorities - Tank
Defence (unless you are a bear) : 535 for heroics, 540 for raids.
Stamina (health), dodge, parry, block (unless you are a DK).

Stats to avoid for PVE
Resiliance.  Anything with resilliance is for PVP, and has no place in a competant PVE set.


Talents
Once you are level 80, and have even very basic gear, you don't need to spec your talents for solo work.  So that leaves PVP (see below), or PVE instance and raids. Most classes have a preferred tree for their role (Shadow priest healing isnt great).  Most tree's have a beneficial 51 point talent, some do not (Blood DK Tanks for example).


For each and every point you spend, does it meet your priorities (above).  Things that affect pushback, run speed are PVP talents.  Things that affect your health are generally Tank or PVP talents (or both).  For DPS things that directly increase damage are better than things that increase regeneration etc.


For your chosen tree, spend 51 (or 50points), getting to the bottom of the tree.  Generally better talents are near the bottom.  Then go spend 10 points in a different tree with the same priorities.  Finally spend your remaining points as you see fit.

Gear selection
DPS : You need to get to your hit cap.  It changes by group composition, talent composition and self buffs.  Use a hit calculator.

Gear Maintenance

• All gems slots should be filled, even if only with cheap gems.  If you can afford repairs, you can afford basic gems.  If you can't afford repairs, make gold (play the AH, craft, gather, do dailies untill you can).
• Get a belt buckle, and gem it.
• Enchant your gear - even with only basic enchants.
• Give your gear a check.  I don't use gearscore, but quite like ElitistGroups.  Examine yourself on wow-heroes choosing 'live'.

PVP - Player versus player

All I know about PVP can be summed up with 3 simple rules:

• Can't do that while stunned.
• Can't do that while dead.
• This link will help.

In summary
As always, I am not the fountain of all knowledge.  There are pages written on how to best set up for any given class/role.  Reading in game descriptions & websites, watching videos are all valuable learning methods.  If you have general advice that helps (especially with melee/hunter DPS), please leave a comment. If you disagree, please say so.

And Get the F out of the fire

Notes:
^GTFOOF is also a blog worth reading

The cost of Alts?

Have you ever sent gold to an alt? Bags, potions, materials for professions? Do you consistently find your alts are taking all the gold off your main, as you swear that leveling your first toon didn't cost this much?

Well, it didn't, you simply have the ability now to make your alts life "easy" and it's costing you. You can level an alt without any help, like gold or bags, and its easy to do, hell how did you get there the first time? Can't remember a time before you had bags of gold? Before you where striding around in epics? Me either, and to be honest I cannot work out how I managed to level with no 80 to supply me, but I did and now my alts are Dependant on that 80.

So what I ask is, how come we can no longer survive on alts without an 80 to power feed gold, and other goodies to us, and yet we have done it before perfectly fine. When you make an alt, who starts with a 100gold care package and a stack of bags? Most of you will send bags and cash in some amount, whether its enough to afford the start area training in the form of 50silver (which is still excessive) or you pay there way to 80 we all do it.

Yet, when we started we had to work our tiny leveling buts off to make ends meat and now, we quest, we spend, we buy Auctions like there going out of fashion and when the well runs dry, we log over and top it off. Our dependency is now firmly in place, but has anyone thought what the cost to level that toon up is going be? what proffs? Whether or not they can pay there own way?

I reckon that is a firm "NO" and the reason is we have done that grind before and now we can make it somewhat less of a burden on ourselves, and why shouldn't we? Have we not earned this from the countless hours of raiding, farming, swearing at the stupid rogue that keeps ganking my mage!! Anyway, regardless of how you spent your time you still have paved the way for your alts, and they level being pampered, but remember to pamper them you have to first make that money to hand down, or farm for them to level proffs.

So next time you level an alt, remember its upwards of 6k for flying alone, 1k-4k per proff (depends on server and proff, specifically crafting) then talents, gear, enchants, mounts, FP, repairs etc etc etc. You cannot pamper them all there life's, but at least through the Azeroth grind, and in Outland they can look after them selves.

I don't know who I am anymore, to many alts.

Raiding, A 101 on being prepared

Once again something has annoyed me, a shock to you all I'm sure.

Raiding, why is this a problem for me? It's not really except when the scheduled start is say 8 and you don't begin grouping till 10 passed 8, or your about to start and the raid leader has not brought the flasks for the run (In my guild thats what happens, the raid leader hands out the flasks).

So whats my issue? Well, if you are organizing a run to start at 8, start it at 8, especially a full guild run. Have everyone there on time, flasks ready, feasts stacked, scrolls, drums and anything else you need to bring such as mats for buffs, or shaman self rez etc. Why has this gotten to me so much? Well it is recurring, not a one off event, but pretty much every raid day, I'm using an alt of mine that isn't in the guild to make flasks right before raid is due to start, I've had an hour wait past due start to form up, 3 hours to wait to form up, and other various things that are unnecessary.

Now, It seems like I am carrying on without a leg to stand on so here is my side. I have my own stock of the flasks, stoneblood, mojo, wyrm, rage, nearly all at a full stack, that I take for myself to every raid. Drums of kings and wild, and then I still carry Runescrolls (for priest buff) and a scroll for the Intellect buff and recently (2 weeks) picked up on fish feasts stocking as well. If I choose to play an alt leading up to raid time, I have my raiding toon outside the raid entrance all raid buffs, ready to go, while I play my alts, and make sure to log over 15minutes before "start".

I'm not sure if anyone else has this problem, but to me it's a bit off putting, having myself there and ready on time only to wait another half hour or more.

Interested to here other peoples points of view about this as well.

Guide to Tanking

Ok, it's Egamad again except this time no shaman nonsense, no gem dribble, and no stat to stat on stats.

This is my opinion of tanking, from 15-20 (so far).

Is tanking easy? Well tanking never was hard, get things to hit you by attacking them, seems simple enough. Keep them off the healer, also should never be an issue. Keep them off the DPS, now we get down to the problem I dare to say most tanks will have.

Now I'm not an expert, and this shouldn't be seen as gospel, but I HATE DPS. Yes, yes a bit harsh I know, however in my level range most of them are content to GOGOGO (as Foo says) even when healer is OOM. I have had a pally 4 levels lower start tanking, I've had warlocks and hunters chain pulling mobs, even though healers and other mana users are OOM. Now the dungeons are easy enough, there not hard lets be honest, and with the BOA gear scaling a lot of DPS think they can effectively chain pull to go at there pace and that healers and tanks should work around them.

As Foo mentioned in a gloriously high number of posts, the DPS, the guys on your team are the ones that make the run harder more times than the actual mobs in the dungeon. Now I can hold aggro, its easy enough being a warrior tank, and I have some survival talents already at 20, but for the love of Warcraft I'm not a paladin, I don't start with full resources I need to build them or use a minute cooldown to get them after each OOM healer break. I would love to chain pull and have RAGE in the bank at all times, but alas I have to wait, and the DPS should respect this.

My concern right now, is the fact that these DPS, have limited or no AOE attacks yet, so when the inevitable "I would rather AOE that group than burn a single target" happens, my life will be a blur of panicked button mashing. My point although lost now in the mess of typo's and grammatical errors is that despite the relative ease of the lower dungeons, Dead mines/Ragefire chasm, is that I'M THE TANK! Aggro is mine, leave it alone. I decide what to pull next, and the healer determines the pace/amount per pull. The DPS are there to make there death faster, THAT'S ALL, all DPS should do is kill the targets I have aggro on, and stop when they catch up or take over my Aggro count. You do not need to pull the next mob, or scream to hurry up, the healer needs mana we will wait, its much faster to do it smoothly than make the healer OOM every pull, the tank struggle to pick up the extras you wanted to invite, and then call us "Noobs" because you effectively wiped us.

Now, please guys remember we are not 80, not geared to the teeth, do not have all our magical talents, and have high cost low return spells, and a lack of resources at low levels. I like to tank and I like to heal, I am good at, I can DPS effectively to but rarely get the option. We have our roles, Tank takes the damage and uses aggro to manage mobs, the healer makes sure the tank survives long enough for the DPS to kill the mobs, can we please stick to this method. On that note pets from warlocks and hunters that have Taunt set on are just...Annoying really.

My hope is that my experience from 20 on, is much more focused on the tank being just that a tank, not being a taunt machine from the DPS that pull.

Egamad, now a warrior tank, a shaman healer, and a very bored PVP mage

What are the differences between boys and girls?

Seriously.

I'm doing Noblegarden as part of what a long strange trip.  As I write this, I am doing Shake Your Bunny-Maker.  As many of you know, I have to find female toons of every race, lvl 18+.  The problem is I hardly PVP, and even when I do - I pay no attention to the different models for the different genders.

I have discovered I have no idea for some races what is a boy and what is a girl.  This is made worse by many helms and armor - to my eye at least - disguising any differences.  I am sure that players of those races can tell, but I cant. With semi-random brute force I have got 3/5 horde races, and I am sure I will get the rest.

It just feels weird not knowing the difference between a boy and a girl.

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.