Two glyphs new scribes may be missing

If you have only taken up inscription since Cataclysm, you may be missing two glyph 'techniques' : Mana Sheild and Lash of Pain.

They are purchased as a BOE 'technique' from Larana Drome in Dalaran.  They are not quite what I would call 'must have' glyphs from a sales perspective, but they are at least profitable.

These glyphs are sold in "limited quantities", if you call 4+ technique's on a 15 minute respawn timer limited.

If you are a scribe, you should probably get these.  Even if you are not a scribe, and are passing through Dalaran, it would be worth stopping in at the scribe's satchel - facing away from the magus commerce exchange in dalaran, to purchase a few techniques to put on the AH.

Blue post coy on Epic Gems 4.3

I'm harping on a theme - but I've just seen a Blizzard post coy on epic gems in 4.3 here .

My theory has been that the purpose of Epic gems is to nerf older content. There is a possibility that a very slow release of Epic gems may be used to gate access to deeper 4.3 raid content.  Note: Having JC's with thousands of tokens, stockpiled pyrite ore, capped Justice/Valor/Honor points ready to pounce does not count as a slow release.

Player 1 : If they don't release epic gems in 4.3 i will be mad
Player 2 : Protip: they won't.  Sometime mid 4.3, maybe, as an indirect nerf to the content. But not at the start.
Player 1 : i mad



Blizzard : A more useful reply would contain details of why, in your opinion, epic gems should be added sooner, how it would benefit the game as a whole, the knock-on effect to progression, something like that. You being mad wouldn't be a solid reason I can pass on to the devs :(

As JC's we are salivating at the possibility of gemmas (myself included).  My advice is to be rational instead of emotional.  Just because you want it, does not mean you get it.

LFM 2Tank+3Heal BWD Must know fight WTF

I really don't understand DPS organisers of raids - not when they advertise for the hardest to fill roles, and put this kind of barrier up.

Sure, if you get 2 experienced tanks, 3 healers that know the fights, chances are you will get a full clear.   That's a pretty big if.  No tanks, no healers mean no raids.  However, I complain if I have to wait 3 minutes for DPS to respond.


I do prefer a certain level of experience in firelands raiding, and would certainly prefer any toon I took to have some raiding experience, but for Tier 11?  If you are so short of tanks or healers that you are pugging, it's time to recruit new tanks and healers - at whatever level of skill or gear.

I want to pug exactly those players that want to run as tank or healer - those looking for a new challange, or simply are prepared to take on the responsibility.

Glyph predictions 4.3

I've been looking at my crystal ball, and I think I see a few things. 

I expect that there will be new tanking glyphs.  New glyphs give players additional choice, and will 'allow' tanks some options for mitigation.  These 'choices' are in reality likely to be mandatory.
Scribes will be able to learn all research major and prime glyphs from either Books of glyph mastery (no cooldown), or via "northrend" research (or a similarly named skill).  While this has already been flagged as something that will happen, I expect it to occur in patch 4.3.

If the combinations of the above two items are true, then there should be a short term increase in demand for Books of glyph mastery, followed by a sustained and significant fall in demand.

I think there is a possibility that "northrend" research will be renamed, and will require inferno ink instead of snowfall ink.  If this occurs, the price of snowfall ink will plumet, and inferno ink will rise temporarily.  This in turn will lead to a shortage of 'cheap' crafted trinkets, and possibly a fall in the value of volatile life.

Crystal balls are interesting things, and are generally subject to interpretation. This community has only middling luck with predicting future pricing; and even when we do guess things correctly - we tend to over stockpile, causing the opposite effect of what was forseen.


Caveat Emptor

OT: In praise of Steam's customer service

My previous experience with internet ordering has been cheap prices but shocking customer service. 

The story starts out with a young boy, a credit card tied to a steam account, and a 'free to play co-op game' .  Free to play games sometimes have expensive addons.  Buying with someone else's money was so much fun, he thought he would buy gifts for other friends too.  And look at all these other games to buy. 

This happened over a month. Think of a dollar amount you would hit the roof with.  Add a zero.

Sob Sob.

Yes, as a parent I am responsible - if for nothing else than allowing the credit card to be linked to the account.  However, talk to other teenagers, or their parents, and my story is not at all uncommon (though many of these stories involve phone bills).  Let the parent beware.




Steam have an established procedure to handle unauthorised purchases.  They also let you know that while they might be able to help, they will terminate the account involved, and block any further access to that particular credit card.

Not a problem.  We had already cancelled the credit card, and gave them the full history; including that it was our son, and the details of the unauthorised transactions, and would be very happy for the account to be terminated.

Steam reset my hopes of customer service - in a very good way.

As requested, we have processed the refunds and enabled account.

Your bank or credit card issuer will return the funds to your account - please allow 3-5 business days for the funds to be posted.

Please note in the future that Steam purchases, per the Steam Subscriber Agreement, are not refundable - this refund was issued as a one-time customer service gesture.
Today the funds were returned to my bank account.  As a bonus - if only for the child involved, they allowed him to keep his account as well - which I was not expecting.

Now my only 'problem' is working out which month or year my son is allowed near a computer again.

Glyph demand - this is as bad as it gets

Today I'm talking about demand instead of supply. 

Back in the final days of Northrend, (other) bloggers were worried that the end was comming.  Way back then, players would need 6 glyphs (if I recall correctly) per spec - so a total of 12 glyphs.  Your average players changed glyphs ... less often than a 8 year old voluntary showers.

Long time scribes remember glyphmas, where we got to have 9 glyphs per spec, and could permanently learn all glyphs (roughly 30 per class).  This followed by a boom while everone was getting to 85. We know that generally demand has fallen from those wonderful days.  Established, fully glyphed lvl 85 toons simply have no reason to buy new glyphs. But all is not lost. 

This graph from MMO champion shows a steady stream of new level 85 characters, that has essentially been stable for 4 months now.  Spikes over the weekend, and troughs on Mondays (no one likes Monday).  While the graph only shows level 85, to get this level of consistency means that you must have a consistent stream of levelling toons.  They also mention a brief dip when 4.2 came out.


Seriously - from a demand perspective, this is as bad as it will get. 

JC's daily - the other one

I assume that most JC's still doing their Stormwind/Ogrimar JC dailies : to pick up their gem cuts  that they don't already have, get a chimera eye, or stockpiling JC tokens in case 4.3 drops trainable epic cuts.  Assuming we get trainable epic cuts, and assuming they use the existing Cata JC tokens, we will want hundreds of tokens.

However, there are another set of profitable dailies to do in Dalaran providing Northrend JC tokens.  Just like the Cata dailies, these provide either recipes or an eye (in this case Dragon's eye).  The Daily takes 15 minutes, and usually requires 2 green quality northrend gems - prospectable, usually available cheap on the AH.

• 1 daily token can be traded for a Dragon's eye, selling uncut for an average US market price of  Alliance 160g & Horde 185g, even more cut into a nightmare tear.
• 5 4 daily tokens can be traded for an epic northrend gem cut.  I buy uncut northrend epic gems for up to 100g, selling 21 in the last week for 6.5k sales.  Won't make me a WoW millionaire overnight, but I already have a JC, and it is easy gold.

On the note of Epic cuts, most other bloggers I read are sure that 4.3 will drop epic cuts;  just like we had epics from northrend - with prospectable gems - most likely from pyrite ore.  There is nothing so dangerous as 'knowing' something.  Neither BC or Northrend epic gems were first released in this manner at first.  There is every chance this will occur, but you will get little sympathy from me if it doesn't happen.  I will be eagerly following patch notes from the PTR.

There are a couple of options for self powered transport to Dalaran.  First of all you can set your hearth there & portal back to Stormwind/Origmar (yes they put those portals back).  Many guild's now have 'cooperation' cloaks giving you a personal portal ever 4 or 8 hours.  Finally, there is a ring of the Kirin Torr, purchasable for 7k (less rep discount?) that allows you to port back to Dalaran.

Gold sellers now leaving breadcrumb comments on our blogs

Gold sellers are becoming creative.

• There is a site out there that copies my posts onto their site so it looks interesting, changing just enough to remove all references to my site.
• I have now seen a relevant, on topic response on two blogs; mine and and another, where the link was to a gold selling site.

I have not been interested in making the very very few dollars from general advertising or selling gold guides, though I can accept that others are.

Apparently buying a game time card with in-game gold is officially a grey line (citation needed but I did see a blue post on this recently.  Edit: Went looking for the citation and did not find it; but found plenty contradicting it).  Outright buying or selling gold for real life cash is not permitted.  Botting is not permitted.  These are the rules of the game.

I will not knowingly link to gold sellers.  This includes removing comments where either the name or the post links to gold selling websites.

I read the RSS feed on the comments to this blog, and not just for vanity.  Sometimes I get an interesting question (I love those), other times I catch a dodgy post.

Blogger and wordpress (the software that most of the wow goldmaking bloggers use) both allow you to track comments.  This is worth doing.

WoW Midas's top 10 lessons learned

I like the WoW Midas site. He offers an objective measure of WoW inflation/deflation on Vanilla, BC, Northrend and Cata Mats, great reasearch.

He also has a post for the bloggers (and those thinking about blogging) out there : Gold Blogging Top 10 lessons learned

Finally theunderminejournal.com is looking for new blogs to syndicate.  It is the largest driver of traffic to my site.  Please drop them a line via their contact form with the address for your blog suggestion. The blog must:

• Discuss the WoW economy in most articles
• Use correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation and grammar
• Show an effort to provide new ideas
• Provide an RSS or Atom feed with at least the first 5 paragraphs or 1,200 characters

(As a side note: they seem to be content with nearly correct spelling and grammar - I can't pretend that I always succeed on these two items.)

Mix Master again

I am Guild Master of a micro guild - Dark Prophecy, with 7 or 8 casual players.  Sometimes we actually have players online and on friday nights will even have 4 or so players raiding.  Considering our size and activty, being lvl a 12 guild isn't too bad.

We recently picked up a couple of alchemists, so it was worth getting the Cauldron of Battle (my non-raiding alchemist already had it from a stint in another guild).  For this we needed Mix Master (1000 flasks made).  We already had 250 flasks made from ad-hoc crafting, but needed to make another 750.

If you are serious about making a large number of flasks, you want to use an elixir specialist to do so.  Over time, this provides a 15% bonus to the number of flasks or elixirs you make.  I am also very happy to confirm that at the moment the proc's from this do count toward mix master.  And even though I know that the law of averages says I will get 15% bonus, getting a 5x proc still gives a nice buzz.

We made roughly an equal amount of flasks with an eye towards the cauldron: strength, stamina, intellect and agility.  This wasn't so much because I intend to use 185 cauldrons any time soon, but because there will be a consistent demand for these flasks - either directly or as mats for other guild's cauldrons.

I purchased both the herbs and the volatile life over six weeks, and over both auction houses.  To make our 750 flasks (we already had 250), you need 12,000 cinderbloom, Azshara's veil, Twilight Jasmine and Whiptail, and 6,000 volatile life.  That is a lot of mat's to strip off an auction house, with an inevitable price rise associated.  My guestimate of the alliance price rise is about 2g50/life and about 50s/herb.  It didnt help that on the Alliance AH, there was at least one other player also vacuuming all the volatile life of the AH.  Life was the hardest thing to find enough to buy.


I staggered purchases.  I bought off both auction houses.  Horde side volatile life was regularly 3-4g cheaper per volatile than alliance.  I made sure I had something to sell Horde side (glyphs) so I didn't have spend a 15% neutral AH hit just to convert cash.

I staggered my purchases over a month, once every day or so buying any needed 'below average' mats off the auction houses.  Towards the end I had to pick only the best horde sales as I was running out of horde gold.  However just horde glyph sales let me buy almost all the horde volatile life I wanted.

The darkmoon faire is just around the corner, so I expect that volatile life will reman in demand for another week.

I expect to make a profit on the flasks.  I am not convinced that this profit would have been more than simply averaging out the AH prices buying mats when cheap, selling mats when expensive.

PS. If you are looking for a place to park a toon or two on Alliance Caelestrasz, send an in game mail to Foofixit.  If you are willing to provide guild xp (even from doing the odd quest or daily), I am happy to provide guild repairs.  I am also paying 2g/point towards the fishing achievement Thats a lot of bait.