Cenarion Labs

Return to WoW for leveling within PvP?

2009-08-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

The repetitive nature of PvE prompted my exodus from WoW. Now, there is the prospect of XP in PvP.... PvP is certainly much more interesting than PvE. Human opponents have the AI thingy down pretty well. I think Turing would be proud.

Is XP in PvE engough to warrant a return to WoW?

Only if:

1) Leveling occurrs about every 3-4 weeks, given a casual player dedication of about 5-8 hours per week.

2) Gear upgrades could be had on a slightly quicker time frame.

With the current honor system, I think the gear upgrades are likely a pipe dream. Perhaps PvP quest objectives would help with that goal. XP would likely be rewarding on discrete BG objectives as well as overall victory.

If this type of thing gets up and running, I think I'd likely return to WoW with a nice cat dps/healer dual spec and enjoy the challenge of leveling against human opponents, which I find vastly more exciting than killing 10 rats.

New Druid Skins

2009-06-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

So Blizzard has decided to reskin druid forms and all they allow are some new, quasi-gnarly tattoos? Please show me what they look like from the rear view- the only druid view that matters.

End Post

2009-02-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

Should I come back to WoW for dual specs?

Nope, still have to kill 10 foozles all the way to 80.....

Exodus of The Kaplan to another game means no third expansion....they are out of lore anyway.

For those wondering if they should stop playing WoW- I would recommend canceling your account for 3 weeks cold turkey. No blogs, no WoWInsider or other web stuff, just get it out of sight. If you miss it so much after 3 weeks, go on back. Otherwise, enjoy a WoW-free life.

I certainly am.

WoW break

2009-01-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

Wow just isn't new or interesting at this point. I don't think the flavor of the added druid abilities or the revamp of the old abilities makes me feel that I've gained anything incrementally fun on my main. While the game has opened-up considerably for casuals, I still find the reward horizon much to long for the benefits.

Ida, go play a Death Knight?

No thanks. It has taken me quite long enough to level to 71. I don't care to repeat any part of Outlands even though progressing into Northrend with a new class would probably keep me interested enough to continue in WoW. Organizing all the add-ons I've come to depend on just to play through zones I have already seen just isn't very compelling.

I feel that the next release of WoW or next Blizz MMO will gather my $15/month. As for now, the only thing in-game I am enjoying is the AH, which probably isn't worth $15 RL dollars per month.

Under what circumstance would I stay?

1) If I could start another class (rogue) at my current level, I'd likely stick around for that.
2) Insta-level my 71 to 80 for $15 to get into raids and PvP.

I really just hate leveling. It is so boring. The plots are so mundane and uninteresting and the process is just too slow. Professions have also become quite useless. I need a game with quicker rewards.

The stick is just too long and the carrot seems to be the same carrot from TBC.

All that being said, I may stick around or come back. But for now, dear readers, I will be investing some time in some other blogs.

Money Sinks of Wrath of the Litch King

2008-12-22T16:43:00.000-08:00

The new Darkmooon Cards would be a fabulous money sink if they were sold by NPCs. Instead they are sold by Inscribers to players. I don't play enough to tell if the word is out about these cards among casual players, but I'm sure the raiding crowd has already snapped up these gems. Casual players are in luck though, as:

Berserker!
Death
Greatness (comes in 4 flavors: Agi, Str, Spr, Int)
Illusion

are BoE and are obtained by collecting the Ace, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8 of the requisite decks from the AH or from a friendly scribe and handing them in to the Darkmoon Faire. Did I mention the requisite cards that compose the decks are made by inscribers? Oh, and they are expensive- appropriately so. The Ace sells for 3-5k on my server with the others going between 300-700g and more.

Why would I spend 5,000g on a multi-player, vendoring mount? Band of the Kirin Tor for 8,500g? Other frills abound, but none of them really have that must-have glow of the the Darkmoon Trinkets. In fact, I don't really see a large money sink in WOTLK. Perhaps some of these lesser frills are the new money sinks? Many impulsive 200-500g purchases may very well be a more sustainable sink than large, single 5000-20,000g purchases?

In addition to these large and medium-priced items, I would also note that the price of taxis have gone up, high-end buff food isn't cheap due to the Northern Spices effect and cloth for frostweave bags isn't cheap right now. Except for taxis, the last two items represent player exchanges in currency and can't really be considered a money sink. In fact, with the majority of nice blue equipment being BoE, there is a much more robust between-player economy in Wrath.

In conclusion, I believe that crafted armor and Darkmoon Cards may create a much more vibrant player-level economy and offer much interesting effect on game play than transportation upgrades. In addition, without compelling reasons to buy into new mounts, perhaps more affordable mounts, toys and taxis are the new gold sinks of WoW.

Back to a dual purpose spec.

2008-12-20T05:18:00.000-08:00

The latest patch notes state:

Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.

Cool! Now I can have my pre-Wrath dual-purpose, one tree spec back! This could either be a correction back to the mean of the last expansion and original game or perhaps a rethinking of switchable talent trees that Blizzard has hinted at in the past. Either way, I can now solo elites at a ridiculously slow pace, tank instances with minor modification to my talent tree (I'm not too impressed with Infected Wounds) and AOE to my heart's content old world rep or lowbie Northrend mobs.

I for one am glad for this.

Casual Weapons

2008-12-16T16:11:00.000-08:00

Well, with the addition of polearms and the application of feral AP to all weapons, I thought we might have some more weapon options for casual cats and bears. And we do. See Think Tank's great post on the subject. However, to-date we aren't getting a craftable polearm or 2H mace.

As for now, no love from the crafting professions for droods.

Feral Attack Power Change

2008-12-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

This change just gives me one more thing to look up. How annoying. I liked the idea that I could easily find the weapons good for ferals DPS and tanks without too much effort. I understand that the change will open up opportunities for many more tanking weapons. If I'm not mistaken, feral DPS staves and maces may be less abundant. I don't know of too many hammers that would fit the bill for feral DPS, though I'm sure there are some out there.

Once again, I'll say the the game is getting too complex. I would much prefer that Blizz do this work for me. Show me a percent improvement or loss for any weapon compared to my current weapon based on my spec. The UI will reportedly change, but there is nothing to tell me how, where and when to uprgrade.

Without all my fellow bloggers, I'd be totally lost in this game.

Death Knights- Casual Considerations

2008-12-06T10:03:00.001-08:00

I'd like to take a moment to consider some issues surrounding Death Knights for casual players.

Should a casual player start a Death Knight? The time commitments of casual players are limited. I play less than 10 hours per week and usually more on the order of 4-6 hours per week. I have my main toon at 71 now, and at this rate would expect to get to 80 in about 1 year.... That's the reality of casual. The possibility of creating a level 55 character of any faction, any server and any server type is an attractive method to gain access to a new flavor of WoW. On the other hand, leveling another character beyond ~60 is going to occur very slowly and at the expense of my main character. Therefore, the risk of starting a DK is missing the lowbie instance action, guild progression and other social aspects of your main character. In my opinion, for a casual player, this is a compelling reason not to start a DK with the intent of quickly leveling another level 80 toon.

However, the benefits and gameplay options for low level DKs abound. Twinking a 59 DK for BGs could be fun and having another toon on the same server in the high 50s or 60s or even 70s with complimentary professions could be very efficient. Against this strategy is the low-level farming and gold that it would take to level a profession to the point where it would be useful to a main toon. Once to level 70 skill levels, getting level 70+ skill levels would mean leveling the alt DK to at least 61, which isn't too bad. However, the gold required for that feat is not trivial and probably on the order of about 2000-3000 depending on the profession- an uncasual amount.

As for PvP versus PvE server, a trial of a few levles on PvP couldn't hurt, but by all accounts things can be brutal there.

As for race and faction, pick a different race, but for most casuals a toon on the same server in the same faction has the potential to enhance game play, while a toon on a foreign server will not have this advantage. If you must choose a separate faction, keep the player on your main's server to get some cross faction swapping if needed.

In summary, there are pros and cons to starting a DK for a casual player. I think that keeping a DK in low levels, same faction, same server and leveling one crafting profession that compliments a main character will be my strategy. Plus or minus 59 twinking.

What are your thoughts?

Initial Wrath Impressions

2008-11-28T18:45:00.001-08:00

I never thought I would write a post about a technical aspect of WoW. However, I have been getting some terrible lag lately.

I have barely been able to walk through Shatt.

I rode the boat back and forth from SW to Valor Point 3 times before the lag reduced enough to allow me to get off of the boat.

Well, so far that is as far as I have “progressed” in Wrath so far. It’s not quite hard core raiding, but certainly presents its own challenges.

I’m imagining what a progression guild beyond the docks of Valor Point would look like in a high lag environment. I can imagine arguments over loot as certain members that get kicked from the servers and others have 15 minutes of keyboard commands resolve after the fight has been over for 30 minutes.

Need. Greed. Lay-away.

Intro to Death Knight: Prelude

2008-11-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

The Sea.

The swells under the life raft didn't cease in the two months I spent adrift. Their incessant, silent pattern haunts my dreams. A rumor of the tireless water passes under my feet occasionally, and I fall to the earth without warning. The salt smell like a partial vomit lingers in the deepest holds of my memory.

The Sun.

She was only deliverance from the hollow night for a few short moments. Taciturn, she tortured me until sundown, when the cold greedy air begged in breezes and my scorched hide cheaply released heat to its pleading. The detritus of the ship was only visible for a day, then the barren landscape of steel- that mental prison- was all that illumination ever did show.

The Sickness.

I knew of gods who the crew offered their blood. I called upon them to take mine more rapidly, but I was dismayed at having enough to continue in a feverish stupor inside the gunwales. Ignoring the skin, blood came seeping through as a sweat and always blackly. It had no temperature. It had no sound. Commonly, I only knew of the hemorrhage vaguely, a stickiness matted through my hair, a crust underneath porous nails upon waking or a ferric spice at my lips. It seems to have passed now, though chronic pain has infested the holes of the liver, the stones in the kidney and the scars on my brain.

Northrend.

Where water is frozen and the sun stays low. Where among drifts of snow I may sleep. The ice is firm there and the sun bounces from its surface into space.

Who sent me to sea to find this disease?

I will know.

Is WoW too complex for fun?

2008-11-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

Wow is a tough game to play. Everything was Candyland for the first 30-40 levels or so. Then, my bags filled up, stats became important and I started to sweat a little just thinking about playing. Along came level 60 and TBC. Stats became even more important, there were more of them and marginal benefit graphs started popping up. I didn't know which gem to buy (still don't). I didn't know which enchants were the best. I did't know that enchants don't proc with weapon strikes when shapeshifted?

My /played vastly underestimates the time I spent gear-searching, theorycrafting and scheming over which rep to get, which dungeon loot to pursue and which attack rotation to use. All this time, I felt that my druid was a calico, clown-car of equipment, clothes, gems and profession junk.

My conclusion.....WoW is hard. What makes WoW hard?
1) too many choices for gear
2) too many spells
3) too many ways to modify gear

As the amount of choices increases, the potential for making errors in choosing gear inceases. Also the potential for making a character incredibly powerful also exists. What if you showed up in PvP without much stamina or resilence? What if you thought attack power was better than Agi for cat dps? The gap between those who can assimilate, crunch and optimize is growing. The result is that the damage output, tanking capacity and healing ability is very high for some and vastly unrealized for others. This is especially evident in PvP, where I am routinely getting 2-3 shotted by rogues after the introduction of glyphs- they must have been given some really good ones. And what is the story with warriors getting the spinning blender ability? Healers stand their ground while I dps and heal until someone arrives to help. I

Impressive. Most impressive.

Hopefully this chasm will be reduced to allow players with less time more access to fun in PvP and more chances of contributing toward PvE goals. Reducing the amount of gear choices available, labeling gear for specific use and labeling enchants, glyphs, inscriptions, potions and other gear for specific use would be very helpful.

To reduce the amount of time it takes to find these objects, it would be very nice to have a class/spec filter at the auction house that would allow one to see (when toggled) only those items that might be improvements for class and spec given existing gear.

Additionally, if we consider instance runs a kind of shopping with a chance of getting the desired drop, a system where a dungeon drops only bracers and main hand weapons or feet and trinkets would be preferable to the current system where all drops for any slot could occur for any class. The result of the current system is that without great gear lists, which there are many, significant amounts of time are required for gear searching before you even get to the instance and have to deal with low probability of your heart's desire actually dropping.

As for the casual approach to all of this, I am lucky to have a class that has great online forums and resources. There are gear lists that are reliably and accurately updated. If I didn't have these lists, I'd hope to find an addon that would compare what I have eqiupped to what I am considering for purchase or loot. The combination of Talented and Dr. Damage will accomplish this.

There, I've said it. I don't enjoy spending hours reading about how to play this game. My attempts to play more efficiently have result in many dry-eyed Firefox sessions, which isn't much fun either. However, after 2 years of playing and reading I have finally found the instruction manuals for my class, professions and so forth in the form of various web pages. I must give credit to the forums, which occasionally have useful information, though I am likely to look there after Wowhead or wowwiki.

However, a bit of direction from Blizz would go a long way toward reducing the amount of crap-wading that must take place in order to have fun in-game.

Expansion Notes: Orienting Self

2008-10-17T09:52:00.001-07:00

So sad to see all my mods broken. I will rebuild! For now, I can’t even play due to Bongos being broken and apparently not even being updated anymore. Dominoes seems to be the replacement, I hope it is as easy to use as Bongos. With all the new abilities, Blizz really needs to build-in a more useful UI or offer a surgery to implant a wire straight from my head into the game.

For Inscription, browse these druid-specifics. The Glyphs of the Red Lynx and White Bear don’t seem to be in the game yet? I really don’t think you are playing your class if you don’t go pick up some glyphs. These things are power incarnate. Take special attention to the effect of glyphs before planning your build. There are some glyphs that are going to stack/multiply with talents making your talent points go even further for specific abilities.

All of your mods probably don’t work. When you do get them up and running, be sure to look for new spells for your race, class and profession.

Respec before fighting. You will be totally untalented unless you re-assign your points. This may be a good time to add your planned leveling build. Also, get ready for an alternate build, as Blizz will probably be adding in the ability to change between at least two specs. I plan on a healing build for raids, 5-mans and PvP. The kitty will probably be for grinding only.

Enchants now work in Druid forms? This should be coming, I just haven’t seen anything definitive about this patch. When they do, check out the weapon enchants here (enter ‘weapon’ in the limits area).

I’m still waiting to understand what stats will be most useful in the expansion. Once players get up to 80 and run simulations, we will have better answers to that.

A laundry list:

- Your mounts, money, PvP marks are not missing. Look under the currency pane in your character panel.

- You can’t level professions above 375 yet.

Feral Leveling Build

2008-10-07T05:18:00.000-07:00

Edit: With new from Blizz con looking very favorable for spec-switching, I altered the build below, to this build with pure cat dps and cat talents.

Time to work on a Feral build for leveling in WotLK.

As a casual player, I am disappointed that the new feral tree does not allow 100% DPS and 100% Tank spec in one build. We got away with that throughout TBC. Now, with a few talents that are bear or cat specific, we have to choose. Alas, Blizz has missed the point that many people don't like to tank and that providing a dual-spec of tank and DPS was actually creating more tanks. Well, we will have more death knight tanks, if people spec that way and perhaps a spec switching ability.

In compiling this build my goals were diffuse, like a Sarah Palin debate. I wanted to have:

High DPS for leveling and PvP use (though I think healing is more fun in PvP)
core tanking functions for 5-mans *not raids* (uncrittable, high armor)
some soloing capability

I haven't been following Beta news too closely, but it seems that things are changing for bear tanks. More threat from damage dealt? Cats seem to have myriad of new talents to increase DPS. Nelfs may have a better Shadowmeld for soloing without having to spend talent points.

There are plenty of builds out there and no hybrid build is going to be perfect. I've included points of my build below, especially where they may deviate from a pure DPS or Tank build.

Feral Aggression - usually a crappy ability, but with Rend and Tear, may stack up some nice crits.

Feral Swiftness- a puzzler. 15% increase is great for PvP in cat form. The dodge is only good for tanking, but very nice for tanking. However, Natural Reaction gives more bang for the buck, if you are willing to sacrifice the cat ability.

Brutal Impact- may be quite nice for kitties. High potential for getting in another Shred from behind can be very effective in PvE and PvP.

Natural Reaction- a clear bear ability and not a necessity for tanking 5-mans. As above, this does give some dodge, which isn't an easy stat to get.

Primal Tenacity- clear PvP ability.

Protector of the Pack- Bears only here and a core ability for tanking in any PvE setting. Nice for PvP too.

Predatory Instincts- wow. Lots of crit damage increase here. With white crits and special crits, this seems like a core cat ability.

Infected Wounds - very cool PvP ability. I probably won't take it for the Feral build, focusing more on the PvE side. This seems like a talent worth putting all three points into or none at all.

King of the Jungle - seems almost like a core threat generating and DPSing talent.

Rend and Tear - Well, taken with Feral Aggression this makes for a very nasty Ferocious Bite.

Furor - Power-shifting isn't going to work anymore for cats. That's OK, it always seemed a little devious to me. I'd rather self-buff with improved MotW. The MotW buff is quite nice in Wrath.

Well, Toskk will have the mathematical answer to the best build over on Druid Wiki soon and we will probably all go with those numbers for PvE. As for me, I'll stick with this until I feel that I'm sand-bagging myself in some way.

The Currencies of Wrath: Good ole Gold

2008-10-04T08:47:00.001-07:00

Gold. Easy to obtain in small quantities, harder to obtain in large quantities and likely to be used in the purchase of a gold sink item to minimize inflation.

The Burning Crusade saw the introduction of Badges of Justice, which markedly diminished the value of gold. Gold no longer had the ability to buy high-end items. One had to brave the heroics and halls of Kara to gear-advance. However, at the end of Burning Crusade, Primal Nether became salable on the open market, restoring some of the value gold had initially lost. Still, the high-quality items made with P. Nether often required an armor or weapon crafting profession, which again put some restraint upon the ability of people to buy gold for gold sellers or grind gold to arrive at a nice purple set of gear.

Still, it is my impression that gold was very useful for picking up gems and enchant materials. Toward the end of TBC, I power leveled engineering, which cost a small fortune in gold. Gold still certainly is the currency for gaining access to the raw mats made by other professions.

In addition to gear for combat, gold also found its way into a big sink….Artisan Riding Skill- 5, 000g for those of you who may have forgotten. That 5kg got you into a flying mount that was 3.6x as fast as walking and allowed one to bypass “ground” content and for those with gathering skills, to gather up more mats to sell quicker.

In Wrath, is gold going to be as valuable? I can tell you that I may not pick up any additional riding skill unless it allows for a really cool mount. I’m thinking a quartz dragon with fire-breathing capability and a stewardess that does damage to other players (give it a long cooldown for balance). I really don’t see the need to carry other players around in a side-car or, for a druid, on my back. Why I would need to fly faster than I already do is also debatable. I already barely catch some of the nodes spawning on my herb radar due to the speed of Swift Flight Form. Perhaps Blizz will implement something in PvP or PvE that will require the fastest form of flight, and passengers, but until I see the need for that, I don’t plan on sinking my gold into a new riding skill.

That being said, if I have no sink, what will I do with all that extra gold? I am confident that I’ll be able to buy the things I need with gold made from questing, fishing, herbing and cooking. Now that inscription will require herbs and less pots will be required from alchemists due to potion sickness, I think herbs will remain a viable gathering profession. For a casual Druid- herbing remains the best profession due to the ability to gather while remaining in Flight Form.

As for inscriptions, enchants and gems, these items will likely still be in high demand and available on the AH for Good Ole Gold as will the new Frozen Orbs.

In conclusion, I don’t see gold leaving the game as a viable currency. Even without a riding skill gold sink, which I have faith Blizz will create somehow, gold will continue to have some value. Compared to TBC and Old World, I would expect that value to be slightly less.

The Currencies of Wrath: Frozen Orbs and Emblems of Heroism

2008-09-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

It's all Beta. It's all speculation, but....

The new equivalent to Primal Nether, which were like trying to acquire water from a stone for casual players, is the the Frozen Orb. Currently, these tickets to purple gear (read: heroics, nice PvP stuff and high-level 10-man raids) are not BoP. If they remain non-BoP, this will create a nice market for upper level players, new opportunities for casual players to gear-up for raid content and more fun for everyone. Currently, these are also purchasable for the BoJ Wrath equivalent- Emblem of Heroism, available from heroics and such. Emblems can also be used to buy the new bind to account items.

The significance of a non-BoP Primal Nether equivalent is enormous for casual players. This will open up access to excellent craftable gear. Some of this gear may only be available to those that have the profession. So, if heroics are easier to enter for the casual player, Frozen Orbs are easier to obtain excellent gear is profession-only, it may well be worth leveling a profession to get in on these goodies for end-game use. Previously, the cost of Primal Nethers was largely prohibitive to casual players and most of the Primal Nether seemed to remain within guilds- as it probably should. If you do decide to change professions, remember that one should keep at least one gathering profession with which to make money (gold)- that is if gold remains important in Wrath.

For a druid, leatherworking + herbalism may be a potent combination now that Nether-like crafting substances are growing on trees (an overstatement). I have recently picked up Engineering and plan to keep it. Herbalism- my other profession- is going to be under the microscope as I enter Wrath. If gold seems less necessary in WotLK, which could be the case if the price of mounts and advanced riding is minimized), I may be switching my primary professions to Leatherworking and Engineering, while keeping fishing and cooking as gold-generating skills.

Update on Power Leveling Engineering

2008-09-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

The easy part of power leveling a profession are the skill-ups. Well, they aren't that easy on the old gold pile, but basically plunk down your gold, find a forge and start hacking away at schematics easily obtained from trainers. For engineering, all of the schematics needed to get to 300 come from Ironforge. Conveniently in proximity to the AH, bank and mailbox. Well, after repeating that for 300+ skill levels, I am now left with the task of obtaining all of the recipes that I actually want- the schematics that make engineering fun.

This list should be a relatively comprehensive list of patterns that a level 70+ power level would be interested in:

Feralas-

Snake Burst Firework

Barrens-

Minor Recombobulator

Winterspring-

Azshara-

Deepdive Helmet

Hinterlands-

Mithril Mechanical Dragonling

Southshore-

Goblin Jumper Cables

STV-

Green Firework

Blackrock (Depths or Spire)-

Stratholme-

Ultra-Flash Shadow Reflector

Dire Maul-

Major Recombobulator

Gnomergan/Thermaplug-

Rare World Drops-

Quested-

Flash Bomb

More to come after I get past 300!

Good luck leveling!

Aggro #1

2008-09-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

The past few weeks I have been super busy, but I'd like to highlight these posts as interesting to the casual player. In addition, I hope to use "Aggro's" to highlight the work of the blogging community.

35 Yards Out comments on World Bosses

Casual Raid Leader comments on the meaning of Casual, Hobbyist and Hardcore players.

World bosses represent a great option for the casual player/guild for the reasons that 35 sets out. In addition:

1) Less trash to kill
2) Less trash to kill
3) Less trash to kill

The reduction of trash mobs can greatly increase the probability of getting to the fun part- the boss, which means more fun with teamwork and class abilities that aren't really necessary during solo play. Killing lots of trash gets boring. The longer the trash-mop, the more likely someone gets called to dinner or someone's baby needs changing. Once the AFKs begin, smart casuals know to get outta Dodge and find something more productive to do.

Regarding Casual Raid Leader's post- I think he is on the right track. One thing that could help give casuals and hobbyists better access to raids would be a much longer reset time on instances. Why have a reset time at all? Perhaps groups should be able to enter a raid and have the raid spawn according to the least progressed player in the raid? This would certainly foster teamwork and an incentive to have an entire guild of players progress simultaneously. Simultaneous progression would likely keep guilds more intact, albeit smaller.

Thanks to the blogs I'm highlighting this week for their thorough coverage of these topics!

(end post)

What is More Druid than Engineering?

2008-09-07T09:27:00.000-07:00

Note: This is a post in progress regarding powerleveling of Engineering. It is currently changing as I finish my leveling experience and may not be chronologically consistent.

Well, I've given up on Alchemy. Thrown in the towel, the vials and flushed all of my reagents down the toilet. Actually, never seen a toilet in WoW. I suppose I will need to trek to Un'Goro to relieve my toon some day.

While alchemy provides nice buffs, the potions are overall quite boring and there really isn't much advantage to the Masteries. The procs are just too rare to bank on and just aren't fun.

So, I've powerleveled engineering, which went very well according to the guide (just remember to go back to the trainer after each step). The entire thing can be done in Ironforge, which is very nice. There is also a guide from Ten Ton Hammer, that helped ease the post-300 skill level.

Currently, I'm 300, which took about 6-7 hours and somewhere in the neighborhood of 800-900g. Overall, the experience was quite doable and I'm looking forward to obtaining some of the rare items with lowbies or as a soloing project. I've always wanted to have a soloing experience, but never could come up with a justification for soloing in BRD or Gnomer. Now, I do.

As such, I think changing a profession is a great way to get out of the pre-Wrath doldrums for a casual player, especially if your class has some soloing potential or you like PvP. For a druid, we can't benefit much from the guns, but everything else is quite usuable indeed. Just remember to keep a gathering profession, this is the casual gamers path to money making.

As for the answer to the post-title question: Gnomish Engineering. Yes, I've gone Gnomish, as I plan to play a healer in end-game and the crowd control options available with gnomish seem quite nice to me. PvP will also be a much bigger part of my play in Wrath, as it takes up much less time. Being an annoyance with the Mind Control Cap against a Grand Master Greifer should be a lot of fun.

Anyway, I'm off to gather up the cool engineering stuff, while taking my time and enjoying the scenery along the way. It appears that I will be taking a tour of the old world.

I had the money making scheme well dialed-in with alchemy (make a transmute every day), so finding the niche and markets for Engi stuff should be fun too. For all you economics lovers, changing professions is a great fun.

On the Gnome State Engineering Curriculum are:

101 Trainer Gizzes
180 Quests
195 Transporters
210 Gnomish Stuff
250 Drops
376 The WotLK Stuff
501 Rep Stuff

I will keep a log here of my success in training and report on the utility of my new gadgets.

Any Engineers out there with suggestions or items I've missed?

The Currencies of Wrath: Badge-like rewards

2008-09-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

Grinding for 5k gold- 60 days.

Honored Faction with Cen. Expedition- 5 mos.

Having generous friends mailing you blue and purple items- priceless.

In lieu of that- choose your friends well- you may have to spend some of your own money and time to progress in WoW. By progress, I mean tricking out your toon for whatever it is that floats you boat or making dead those annoying end game fiends.

Currenlty, the main problem with WoW, from the casual perspective, is that there is only one set of tracks toward progression. These tracks begin on flat ground and slowly begin to climb. Each level of faction, PvP, arena rating and dungeon/raid the tracks get exponentially steeper. The result is that the engines that can't make it up the tracks are stuck without tangible goals, while those that can get to the top with effort asymptotically approaching- well a lot of time are rewarded with sweet gear, lore and bragging rights.

Disclaimer: casual players should not receive the high level of gear that more dedicated players receive, but they shouldn't be left with professions and guild chat either.

Fortunately, Wrath is shaping up to be much more casual-friendly. Blizzard seems to be laying out two newvsets of tracks, one of which has a steeper slope at the end than the other (25 vs 10-man instances). To examine the effects of this trend, I'd like to look at the 'currencies' in Wrath and how a casual player might go about earning them.

First, let's try to define what a casual player is and isn't. None of this is scientific, but I think there are at least 2 types of players out there.

Casual players are likely to participate in few activities that require more than 1.5 hrs of time in one sitting for approximately 2-3x per week. This means that casuals will do the occasional 5-man regular or heroic dungeon, quests, PvP in BGs, world PvP and low-rated arena play. A player in a generous guild of hardcore players or those in a well organized guild may even get the occasional shot at Kara or a 25-man. However, casual players are unlikely to be prominent figures in the bigger commitment 25-mans, , frequent heroics, frequent runs of 10-mans or highly-rated arena play- they simply don't spend enough time in-game to upgrade beyond good blue equipment to have an effect in the 25-man setting.

With that said, let's look into some of the currencies of Wrath:

Raid 'til your glabella hits the keyboard at a medium velocity? You will be rewarded with Badges of Justice.

The Past: Heroic Instances provided ~4 BoJ, while a full clear of Kara gave about 22 of these little buggers. From the perspective of a casual player, a full clear of Kara is rare and having the gear to run a heroic even more rare. Unfortunately, the number of badges needed for gear upgrades followed the same exponential increase in cost that turns away players unable to get ~30 or more badges per month. BoJ rewards were nice, but became the privilege of the dedicated raider.

The Future: With 10-mans, 25-mans, heroics and dailies, I will hope that the BoJ system offers those willing to do daily quests and regular instances a path to 10-mans, which will offer a path to heroics and, finally, a path to some end-game 10-mans. The full system hasn't been described yet, but hopefully badge acquisition will allow some line of gear progression at a rate obtainable by casual players for gear upgrades consistent with the 10-man end-game raids. The dropping of attunements and increases in faction rep acquisition will help lead to better gear and a higher success with upper level content.

While this is all speculation, if Blizz makes a change, I think this will be it: easier or two-tiered (10 vs 25) badge acquistion with rewards allowing progression into the 10-man line of end-game raids.

Next Edition: Repuations/Faction.
Future Editions: honor, arena points, spirit shard like systems, gold, professions.

Work Work

2008-07-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

I have a great new position at work and have been putting in 14 hour days. As such, the blog is taking a break for a while.

Thanks all for reading. More when things slow down.

(end post)

Shared Blog Azeroth Topic: 10 Memories

2008-06-25T06:51:00.001-07:00

1) Level 20: Hello Auction House! Didn't know you existed.

2) Level 11: Hello Twinks! You make PvP much less fun. See you at level 19 for a more fair fight!

3) Level 2: 1 min /played to level 2

4) Level 19: Hello Twinks! You make PvP much less fun.....

5) Level 55ish: Respec from a Resto to Feral. ZOMG DPS!

6) Level 70: Killed a paladin in PvP with my kitty, by myself, after approximately 5 mins of assorted stuns, bubbles, heals and pots. In the rarely unoccupied Alliance WSG tunnell, no less.

7) Level 70: Soloing the Rezza for Orb of Deception in Bear Form (not amazing, just fun).

8) Level 40ish- The Stairs event in Zul'Farrak- I only did it once, but now that I think about it, I'd love to do it again. The Stairs event here is just great. Of all the boss fights I have ever done, this is easily the best. Waves of mobs with time to heal, but no time to really plan. The onslaught just keeps coming. A few NPCs help you out, then turn on you to attack!

9) Level 70: Healing in BGs. Perhaps the best respec and re-focus I have had in WoW. Healing in BGs is great fun, is very effective (i was very in-effective at killing things), doesn't require grouping, honor get rewards fairly quickly and for these reasons is probably my favorite activity.

10) Level 50ish: Silithus. One of the coolest places for a screenshot and only a mother drood could love that stylish gear Ida's got on(a situation which never improved much). Confusion smites the mind of your enemy. They LOL at your choice of armor. My weapon appears to best be used for assistance up steps or scraping gum off of tile floors.

(end post)

Auctioneer Advanced: Snatch is Here!

2008-06-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

Auctioneer Advanced (AA) has been updated (not sure when) with the great feature: Snatch. For those who have not tried AA, it has a dizzying array of features. Many of these features help to set the value of your auctions and determine if items in the AH are over or under priced. Snatch allows the aspiring tradesman or speculator to set the price at which you would like to buy a crafting material, enchant reagent or even the coveted Orb of Deception. When AA finds your specified item at or below the price: Ding! goes the bell and you have the choice to buy or not.

This feature is great for those of you who know the market for a crafting reagent. For example, I can pick up Talbuk Venison at 50s, cook it into Spicy Hot Talbuk and resell for 1.5g without thinking very hard at all.

This is a vast improvement over searching for each individual item and choosing to buy or pass on the AH pricing. So, if you are new to AA take a look at Snatch, if you haven't already and start nest egging your gold for Wrath.

(end post)

Preparing for WotLK: What to take to WotLK from the Old World

2008-06-12T08:39:00.001-07:00

First, I'd like to thank people for reading the blog. I enjoy writing this blog and its great to know that people are reading!

Second, what items from "pre-WotLK" are you hoping to take into WotLK? A quick look at my own equipment and the equipment on my WoWDB wishlist, shows that not much that I have or could obtain now is not going to last into WotLK, but here are some exceptions:

Badge of Tenacity- Despite the gear reset, I think this trinket will continue to have good stats for Druid Tanks. Unless armor values are dramatically increased on gear and the coefficient for the conversion of Agi to Dodge is also dramatically decreased, this piece of gear should get a tank through the level 75, non-heroic 5-mans. Endgame will probably see a better item. If you plan to raid as a tank or cat DPS until Wrath, get this now. As WotLK approaches, the opportunity cost of this item will become more and hence less valuable than obtaining gold or other items for WotLK.

Herbs- High level herbs will likely be required by alchemists to make 376-450 level pots in WotLK. This is more of a speculative activity that will likely make you some money in the AH or help level your profession faster (look at those red level recipes and save up materials now, no matter what your profession).

Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon- this nice little trinket regenerates mana based on a percenatage of your out-of-combat mana regen and is one of few (other suggetions please) items that will retain all of its value in WotLK. I plan to get this for long boss fights and 10-man raiding. Twisting Nether also operates on a percent chance and retains its effect. This card would be much more attractive with a 33% chance of working.

Bags- 20-slotters will probably be standard (read: Cheap!) in WotLK. The current 20-slotter is $$$ with lots of Primal Water required. Sell those P. Water now and get 20-slotters for a much reduced price in WotlK.

Engineering- this profession has lots of great little items that would seem to be a lot of fun AND which retain their functions despite level. If you haven't taken a close look at this profession, you may want to give it another glance before Wrath. Engi has a lot to offer druids too.

Mark of the Alliance- If you don't have this already, you should. Even if you hate PvP, this can also be used in PvE and the effect is golden. There are higher-level versions of this that include some resistence, but the basic version will still perform exactly as described.

Riding Crop- Should work, though something with a 15-20% increase will probably be available.

What items have I missed?

An Opponent Worthy of a Post

2008-06-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

Dearest Fival,

I have never seen survivability until seeing your performance in AV last weekend You chide the Alliance with your blase indestructibility. Are you just getting your exercise as you run around Iceblood Garrison? It won't make for a good porterhouse- running like that. I nuked you repeatedly with Wrath, Starfire and Moonfire with very little decrement in health. Insect Swarm and Faerie Fire do not seem to debuff you.

This is not my first time seeing your fine fillet mignon in action. You camped me in STV once upon a time after a successful Gurabashi Arena run for an Arena Master. This was the first time I saw the bear form multi-sit on my dead corpse. Very creative.

I would name you my rival, but that would suggest the possibility of a kill, of which there is none. Were I not a casual player, perhaps I could gear up, find you at a moment of low health in Outland and cheap-shot your udder immenseness. The probability of this occurring is low.

Rather, magnificent ruminant, you are are more a nemesis to the alliance and an unassailable one at that.

I respect you Fival. Please don't camp me?

end post

Help with PUGs?

2008-06-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

I have recently been changing my build. My previous attempt at a Resto/Balance build lasted only a very short time. Truly hybridized, that build excelled at....nothing. Healing remained my goal, so I have now specced 13/0/48. This build is very nice for healing in BGs.

Once I get out into the world of the 5-man, non-heroic PUG, my equipment begins to fail me. I get way too much aggro when healing. Two Lifeblooms are generally enough to pull the 3 non-CC'd mobs off the tank. The hunters in the group can rarely even drop a trap at my feet after the pull starts to prevent at least one of the mobs from reaching me.

Fortunately, the tank can generally continue to maintain his/her assignment for at least the next 5 minutes, which allows me to move around in Tree Form while healing myself. I find this maneuver to be very effective in attracting the attention of rogues and warlocks, who will generally stop soloing their mobs and try to solo the mob chasing me, which also gives me more time to heal.

Clothies are also generally very considerate in keeping out of range of my heals. While communication is important, vent can be overused. Nothing says "I respect that you are running around to attract the attention of the rogue, so please don't distract yourself by healing me" like getting well out of range of my heals. Thanks clothies, keep that up, you don't hold onto health very well anyway.

We are going to be at the second boss within the next 50-90 minutes and we can't be using up our Battle Rez as druids, so thanks for understanding why I won't be rezzing anyone after a wipe. Nature's Swiftness takes a little while to cooldown as well, so I may not use that much either.

At any rate, these experiences really made me take a close look at my spec and my gear. I did a little search and found some gear and little known spells that I thought could help me in these situations.

And for Unbearabely HoT:

A F K Tank Pull
Trap? O O M Rogue Solo
PUG HoTs No Fix Fix

Anyone else have stories or newfound gear or abilities that can help me PUG better?

Wowitemcreator

Healing and Tanking Talents and Quests

2008-06-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

WoW is such a violent game. Most options to gain experience in this fantastic world involve bringing someone's head or proof of 12 dead wolves to an NPC. This is all fine when your class can mete out hundreds of damage per second, but is much more daunting as a tanking or healing class, designed to produce threat per second and heals per second. Admittedly, most quest mobs certainly can be killed by a tank or healing class, but this occurs at a much slower rate. By the time I have gathered six-thousand enchanted wolf bladders to level from 70-80, I probably will have sunk at least double the time into leveling, as a DPS specced player.

The simplest solution to this problem is to spec into the the DPS tree of your respective class- every class has such a spec. The problem with this approach is that tank, healing and even CC classes are hindered in their ability to L2P (learn to play) in these roles until endgame. Some essential end-game abilities are not even available if they require talent points. While learning skills has a reasonable learning curve, it would be more fun and result in more adept players to have access to all endgame talents while leveling.

To address this deficiency for healers, Blizz has added 1/3 of +heal as +spell damage. However, this really won't get a healing class rapid kills. Rapid kills occur when cast time is reduced, crits are more likely, free spell casts proc and other damage bonuses from the talent trees multiply to produce the respectable damage of the dedicated caster. I can imagine that paladins don't increase their melee, damage reflect or AoE abilities appreciably with the +heal bonus.... Warriors have things are a bit better off as Prot and Feral specced druids do pretty well (more in a minute).

What we really need as healers and tanks are stances or forms that will allow healing/dps abilities to be present. The druid Feral tree is the best example of this need. Bear form and Cat form share talents that increase threat and damage simultaneously. For example: Heart of the Wild combines increases in health for bear and increases in damage for cats. Neither ability can be used at the same time due to its form requirement (Bear or Cat), which prevents an uber-talent. These dual features are available throughout the Feral talent tree and allow druids to tank instances and DPS while questing with only a change in gear required for role optimization in either setting. A close look at the Resto tree shows that damage increases here are assumed to be in the form of mana regen? Defense in the Resto tree is limited as well, confining Tree-of-Life to the endgame.

The other alternative is to offer up some peace tokens to the hardworking tanks and healers:

1) Instead of "kill twelve wolves," how about "heal twelve wolves" or "aggro twelve wolves." This would give healers and tanks something to do with their one-trick pony skillz. These types of quests could be modifications of escort quests where mobs aggro the escortee until killed (DPS), aggroed away from the escort for a certain amount of time (tank) or healed despite attacks (healers).

2) Straight damage increases for tanks and healers specced past a certain point in their respective trees.

3) Discounted respecs for healing/tank classes?

Can I show up at endgame and hope to understand how to alternate targets to keep 3 Lifeblooms rolling, use Swiftmend effectively and Cure Poisons/Remove Curses? Is it realistic to ask a class to spend 100g to respec, re-design the UI for the needed role?

I suppose the introduction of Death Knights will help with tank availability. Healers will remain rare due to difficulties leveling in PvE. I hope Blizzard sees that dual-function talent trees will allow greater hybrid utility in heroic and other end-game content. I hope that we don't have to kill ten wolves for the remainder of the WoW level experiences.

Hating on my HoTs, Lovin my new Bark

2008-06-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

Currently, Death Knights have an absolute Resto Druid killer:

"Degeneration (Rank 3, Level 76) - Instantly attack the target, dealing 60% weapon damage and inflicting a disease dealing 91/154/182 damage over 15 sec. This disease will corrupt an existing heal over time spell, removing it and dramatically increasing the damage dealt. While afflicted by this disease, other heal over time effects on the target will have no effect."

What's up with that? My guess is that this is probably being implemented to nerf resto druid arena power, which (though I don't play arenas) is reportedly quite formidable. This really seems like a talent designed to combat the very specific effects of another class. I suppose a Purification Potion would help fix the problem, but that has a cooldown.... We will see how that pans out.

Additionally:

"Improved Tree of Life- "Increases your Armor while in Tree of Life Form by 120/240/360%, and increases the effect of your Bark's Blessing by 1/3/5%"

Wow! No more sitting duck!....at least against melee. Just give ToL something to remove Silence and Stun effects and ToL will be be alive and healing in PvP.

And:

"Survival of the Fittest's effect has been doubled."

Oh, that can't last into the release.... Too OP, even for the druid in me. We shall see what stays and what goes.

End Post

WoW Databases

2008-06-02T05:23:00.000-07:00

WoWDB.com is a superior site in many ways to Wowhead, Thottbot or Allakazham.
1) Tooltips on mouseover allowing item comparison to what you are wearing in-game
2) Saved wish lists
3) Saved searches
4) Integration for bloggers
5) Less association with gold farmers (?)

Why aren't more people using Wowdb?

By use, I am mainly (soley) referring to the comments for items, quests, etc. Is it possible that Wowdb will remain a relative ghost-site for quest and item info due to the well-stocked Wowhead? I prefer searching for gear in wowdb, but if I want to figure out how to get that gear or find a quest item, well.... it's off to wowhead.

Ten Ton Hammer also makes claims about the absence of Gold ads. I don't use TTH, but that may be reason enough to give it a try.

Although I don't have access to Wowdb's traffic, I can imagine that a lack of player-provided info could be very limiting for this otherwise very robust site. So, give it a try yourself.

PvP Caster Healer 31/0/30 Build- bye bye Feral

2008-05-29T18:40:00.001-07:00

For reasons discussed in previous posts, I am participating in very little PvE. I think my tanking days are over for now. PvP is my new area of interest in WoW, at least until the expansion. In addition, while my ferality isn't completely gone, I'm now playing with a Moonkin/Resto spec.

Why? I was never very good at Feral PvP. IMO, the main strategy for feral druids is to DoT the target then stun. While the DoT is working, heal thyself. Repeat. This quite frantic in the PvP setting. When this strategy doesnt work, I generally try to get into bear form for survivability. But that's just because I don't want to wait to rez.... Not because I'm doing something useful.

Well, there are two solutions to this problem: 1) spend a ton of time learning to play and to get good feral PvP gear, 2) Heal or Cast.

For reasons I hope to cover in a subsequent post, the Feral tank's days may be numbered in Wrath. Deathknights are going to flood the scene with tanks. Healers will likely become the limiting factor on many servers, even after Arch Druids are introduced, because people just don't like healing. Therefore, I think that it may benefit druids to select a new non-feral role to gain some expertise in before the Wrath.

Some initial testing in the BGs quickly demonstrated that even crappy healing, when feral specced and in cloth healing gear, had a large and positive effect for my side in BGs. It was also a bit easier to target friendlies and heal away. Also, quite annoying for the attackers, who 75% of the time just keep attacking while I healed. I found it to be a lot of fun.

Additionally, I'm always jealous of those casters who can just target, nuke and kill. Melee is bit more difficult. Melee have to get into range, get behind in some cases, then hope that we don't get feared or stunned, DoT'd- ya warlocks still OP Blizz....I digress.

All this together- Moonkin/Resto 31/0/30 build, which has been quite nice. I'm usually in the top 5 of healing in Alterac and am having a lot more fun healing. I now feel that I'm actually adding value to the PvP efforts. The whole DPS aspect of the Moonkin is still to be determined.
Anyone else like to share their Resto or Moonkin PvP experiments?

Cycles and being left behind.

2008-05-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

I am very excited that WotLK is coming out. As a player that started only a few weeks before TBC, I missed the flurry of activity that is leveling from 60-70. I plan to be on the scene for the mad fun from level 70-80.

This brings up the topic of what I will call "cycles." I missed the previous cycle of leveling, which means I also missed out on many instances when they were actually popular. I have still yet to get up to heroic gearing, much like my colleague- Surabear. As such, I missed/am missing out on a lot of reputation and on the gear from the rep. In some cases, gear that is necessary for entry into some of the upper content (Alchemist's Stone, Earthwarden, Badge of Tenacity).

Players coming into the game as new players within about 3-4 months of the expansion are likely to experience similar bottlenecks. If an MMO could find a way to reduce the rep costs over time or offer rep as dailies after the initial rep rush has deflated, casual players would have a better shot at arriving geared for endgame. Rep acting as a key to end-game certainly being a subject for a later post. It would certainly keep my interest if I knew I could get some meaningful rep with less than 10 hours per faction. Alternatively, "rested" reputation may be an interesting idea. Pooling rep into guilds and having faction-based guild equipment would also be a nice way to help casual players and give a nidus for guilds to coalesce around.

In the new expansion, casual players already at 70 should have the opportunity to obtain rep in groups easier then in TBC, because grouped-play in regular level instances will be more common that it is now (at least on my server) and if instances are really designed to take about 1 hour, reputation grind time should be reduced.

The expansion effect will once again leave TBC "content" as a relic to be leveled through. I don't find much of the content in WoW to be very interesting, nor the story very compelling, so I hope that leveling XP is reduced and XP granted is increased for TBC content and reduced/increased even more for pre-TBC. How else am I ever going to get my rogue moving toward 70/80?

In order to prepare for high-yield reputation grinding, the casual feral druid should consider where to grind rep mostly based on your Leatherworking status.

1) For non-LWs: To-date there have been very few craftable staves or 2H maces for druids. Obtaining a good tanking weapon has required reputation (with Cen. Exp., which is tough, considering there are no daily quests). Obtaining a good DPS weapon has been even more difficult, and many are available in Karazhan or higher content, PvP, or as a very rare BoE drop. IMO, go for rep that will give you a weapon. If you have to choose, probably choose a tanking weapon.

2) If you are LW- Pick your faction carefully. In TBC, 3 pieces per faction were generally available and were itemized to match DPS melee, DPS cast, heal and tank. Choose early which you will need. That being said, most of the rep required is friendly or honored (when I looked yesterday).

There is a rumor of special BoPs for each profession in WotLK. I will be curious to see what these are for Alch and Herbs, as well as LW. If the Alch/Herbs combo isn't looking exciting and the LW stuff remains rare drops or exalted rep grinds, I may be headed off to engineering school.

Preparing for Wrath of the Litch King: Part 1 Professions

2008-05-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

Before WotLK hits us, sometime before 2009, I predict that the following will occur in regard to professions:

1) All crafted items from most professions will suffer from a loss of demand, due to the gear reset in WotLK. When the testing for WotLK enters Beta would be a reasonable horizon for the start of this devaluation. In preparation for this, sell sell sell pre-WotLK materials and items, while they still have worth. For example, primals are going to plummet, so sell now, while the inflation of 2.4 lasts to have some gold in the bank for your level 77 Northrend flyer.

2) Inscription will be popular- at least early in WotLK. The materials required to level this profession will be in high demand early on, as many players try the new profession. Blizz has stated that Peacebloom will be a component of one of the early recipes. Copper, light leather and all other types of low-grade materials will be required to level Inscription and demand will increase for these mats early in WotLK. Start working those markets now, if you are so inclined.

3) Death Knight= level 55 base for 2 new professions. Casual cats, it doesn't get much easier than this. Even if you have no interest in the concept of the Death Knight, start one to level up a few professions on the server where your main character is located. I plan to take up tailoring and perhaps enchanting to have a pathway for all of my cloth and green drops.

4) Fishing received some love in 2.4. If this trend continues, having your fishing up to par before WotLK starts will make leveling fishing easier. Fishing is that profession you wish you had and is easy to level in small bites (no pun intended).

5) My guess is that the old professions won't see too many interesting changes. Expect one new BoP item for Alchemy that is of value and some changes to the mastery system. I hope Alchemy at least gets a new Alchemy lab, the old versions are ambitiously lame.

Maybe these ideas aren't the product of a brilliant mind, but should hold you well leading up to and during the first part of the new expansion.

Inflation?

2008-05-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

One of my gold earning mainstays is the daily transmute of P. Earth to P. Water. Since 2.4, the price of P. Water has shot up about 10-14g- an increase of about 90% compared to pre-2.4 values. This appears to be the case on my server as well as Alliance-wide. There are concerns that the increased allowance for the number of daily quests will cause inflation. I think this is true and is contributing to inflation. Certainly, the availability of primals has remained stable, though many players seem to be holed -up in the Isle of Quel kill-stealing until their dailies are done, leaving little time for pesky gathering.

Additionally, never count out the power of the casual player. The casual player, once level 70, always has the option of gathering and grinding, which will add gold to the economy.

What does this mean for all of players? Stuff costs more now and stuff in WotLK is going to cost ALOT.

(end post)

Excellent WoW and Druid Sites

2008-05-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

Here are a list of go to sites that will likely have answers to all things druid:

Druid Wiki
Elitist Jerks Feral Druid Megathread
Elitist Jerks Restoration Thread
Wowhead Druid Talent Calculator
Alamo teeches U 2 play Durid!
ALAMO teeches u 2 Burnin Croosaid!

(end post)

Auc Advanced: Pitfalls

2008-04-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

Using Auctioneer is not as simple as it may seem. Great caution must be taken in examining the prices of items. More caution must be taken the greater the rarity of the item. This is because Auctioneer Advanced (AA) lists most of its valuations based on the listed buyout prices. These are not the actual prices the item sold for, but the listing prices. This choice of pricing metric can lead to very misleading information.

Example 1: Insufficient Data- I recently had the Enchant Chest +12 Resilience plan drop. This is a rare world drop. My AA listing for this thing is 2000g. Rare world drop= 2000g, seems almost reasonable. This was based off of 1 data point. I /2'd this item for mnay days, and eventually sold it for 350g, which I believe is a more reasonable price. The AA valuation is clearly false, given the 1 data point of the listed price (not a purchased price).

Example 2: Manipulated Data- The other end of the rarity spectrum would be an item such as Felweed or Small Glimmering Shards. Very common items for which many sales occur on the AH every day. However, daily changes in the market can make the AA valuation very inaccurate. For example, my current AA tooltip for Small Glimmering Shards looks like this:

While AA tells me the worth of Small Glim Shards is 20g, I know that it is impossible. Here, you can clearly see that two players have either intentionally manipulated the market or having some fun. One could set these ridiculously high prices in order to pull most people using AA or other auction addon above the market value that the seller has set, allowing them to control the market (at least vs those mindlessly using AA appraisor pricing).

Here we also see an example of the Std Dev valuation model failing miserably. Standard deviations are sensitive to outliers, and in this case you can clearly see the effect. I would love to see an AH addon that uses a 5-number summary, which is very resistant to outlying values.

Example 3: The Market is what it is. No matter how much AA states as the mean listed buyout value, you should not sell your item if your preferred price is underbid by many others. For example, if the absolute minimum I will accept for Terocones x20 is 15g, and there are 3 other auctions below 15g, I will list only if I think the likelihood of more auctions being created below 15g is low AND the likelihood of my auction being the lowest buyout in the next 24 hours is high. I know that the market for Terocones is fairly high-volume on any given day. Therefore, I will list now, expecting that the 3 low auctions will disappear, leaving my auction the highest. If there were 20 auctions, I would not bother to list my auction, as it is unlikely that all 20 auctions below my price point would be bought and it is likely that in the time it takes to sell those 20 auctions, that someone with a lower price point will come along and underbid or match the auctions below my price point. All scenarios which would lead to wasted money listing the auction.

Lastly, luck can play a role.....

A Truly Interesting Fight

2008-04-16T08:59:00.001-07:00

My raiding experience is not extensive, but I have never encountered a fight in WoW as interesting as Priestess Delrissa and her adds. The mobs that compose this fight appear to lack traditional aggro tables. The result is a very chaotic and fun fight, where you could be alone one minute and double-teamed the next. I have done this fight 3 times without success (probably due to a lack of crowd control classes). For a druid, the challenge here is to offer some meaningful contribution to the group. This is a rare occasion for a druid to perform many roles, none of them well, and save the day.

Feral Druids have some decisions to make before this fight. The strategy of the druid can be to outlive the random attacks (bear form) or help to heal as needed with interspersed DPS, hoping to keep HoTs on oneself or heals from the main healer. Certainly, performing a timely Combat Rez or Innervate can make a big difference. A nice: /cast Barkskin; /cast Tranquility can also be very helpful, so ask your group to keep tight- when they aren't the victim of NPC Fear.

The problem with the Bear Form strategy, is that your bear is not adding meaningful dps or really maintaining aggro. The benefit is that you will likely be last to need heals if you don't get swarmed with casters (my guess is that no single person can aggro more than 2-3 mobs simultaneously). Overall, this seems the worst option to me.

Alternatively, a feral druid can attempt Cat form with emphasis on DoTs being maintained to keep the DPS rolling while feared or otherwise CC'd by the mobs. Either way, a PvP set is very nice for this encounter. The difference between my bear gear and DPS gear is >3000 health and there is no crit protection in Cat form/gear. Cat form with tank gear on will offer some improved survivability, but not as much as burning down mobs with DPS before they can become a problem. DPS in this gear is terrible. I found myself dying in my pure DPS gear VERY quickly.

Unfortunately, we lack good CC in this indoor setting, but that shouldn't cause you to balk at throwing Cyclone around freely and frequently.

This fight is a very nice departure from tank'n'spank, run when (insert voiceover/enrage graphic) fights that typify instances. Hats off to Blizz on this one.

In summary, a Feral Druid's best chance in the Lady D fight is to equip melee pvp gear, stock up on stamina buffs and try to DPS that lady down in cat and if able throw out some heals and cyclone.

Signing off for a bit.

2008-03-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

Based on my last post, you may have gleaned that I have hit a WoW wall. Few options for fun exist in the game for me at the moment. So, I'll be taking a pause from the blog, as I take a pause from the game. I will put up some posts of interest from time-to-time, but regular posting needs to take a break. I hope to come back when we get our new talent trees revealed and when the expansion comes out, I know that I will be in a much better position to progress with my guild during the expansion.

As a last prediction, I will say that the new Sunwell gear looks impressive. So impressive, that I think Wrath of the Litch King is not coming out for some time.

I will be doing the following in-game:

1) Farming the Dire Maul for the Orb of Deception. (done)
2) Getting Swift Flight Form (done)
3) Running Karazahn with my guild
4) Getting my Cenarion Expedition and Sha'tar rep up as much as possible to get Earthwarden and Alchemist's Stone (only so I can get my Assassin's Stone).
5) Helping out the guild and finishing the grind for a Dark Riding Talbuk.

However, I really don't plan to progress much between now and the expansion, unless some more options for daily quests with CE and Sha'tar open up and/or ZA gear becomes more readily available.

Other then that, I'm a bit sad to say that the game isn't better designed to allow casual players to progress beyond Kara. It is my feeling that the time cost of gearing up for ZA is just too intense when compared to other things I could be doing. I'll be posting some thoughts on this very topic on this blog and on the forums in the weeks to come.

Until the Exapansion rolls around, signing off from the Cenarion Labs.

Thanks for reading.

Ida

(end)

Time vs Talent

2008-03-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

The new badge rewards have fanned the flames of the "ease of acquisition" debate. Raiders upset that nice gear is too easy to obtain on one side and players who can "easily" acquire 100s of Badges on the other side. Wait....who can obtain Badges of this quantity?

The old BoJ gear was quite nice and a bit more reasonable in terms of cost. Still a full clear of Karazhan nets 22 badges and takes.....what about 4 hours? (I have never completed this feat myself.) So, to get that nice new Druid tanking Chest: Embrace of Everlasting Prowess, I would have to run Kara 4 times plus another heroic? This isn't easy my friends. In my world, that is about 2 months of time if I were very lucky and my significant other thought that the Embrace of Everlasting Prowess's stats were worth the opportunity cost of having dinner on a whim with friends.

This brings me to my elephant in the room: There are two separate sets of people who play this game- those who are able to make the time commitment and those who are not. I am not able to make this kind of commitment. Recently, upon logging in, my options are:

1) /1 LF Heroic or LFG Heroic

2) Grind for gold to buy....the only two pieces of gear that would be upgrades for me that are crafted BoEs.

3) Grind gold to buy Coilfang Armaments to obtain the rep for Earthwarden. No other non-instance options for CE rep- tks Blizzard.

4) Go to BGs for almost guaranteed loss to obtain about 300 honor or so to put towards PvP gear.

These options are not that great. Grinding just isn't what this Druid wants to do. So, I seem to be hitting a wall. Well, new PvP gear and new Arena season may help with that, as these require much less time commitment, but still give me that good ole WoW fun. Additionally, some forayes into Kara may improve my gear enough to allow me access to ZA.

In summary, after arriving Karazhan-ready, players must choose how much time they want to spend in order to progress. Moving on from this point may require a considerable amount of dedication. Those with a guild running Kara once per week may have a reasonable chance to progress, while those unable to do so will certainly have a much harder time.

If I could have someone at Blizzard hear one request, it would be to make more encounters akin to Magtheridon's Lair, where only a limited amount of trash-clearing is necessary to have access to the real content- the boss fight. If instances could be significantly foreshortened, casual players would have much more chance of access to end-game content. Until then, this game is largely still a matter of time, more than skill.

Swipe Buffed?

2008-03-07T03:12:00.000-08:00

Wow Item Creator!

I agree with Karthis on the change to Swipe:

"Swipe: This ability will no longer strike any secondary targets which are under the effect of crowd-control spells that break on taking damage. i.e. Polymorph, Sap, etc."

I agree with ending attunements requiring numerous steps, but not all attunements. Attunements have been a significant obstacle for my casual cat's entry into Karazhan. A delay of about 2 months. Many "decline" invites clicked due to absence of a key (the place doesn't seem to be very intact anyway, seems like a cat should be able to slip in through one of those crumbling walls). While the guild forms the raid and heads off to Deadwind Pass, I sit in Outlands /1 LFG Black Morass...... again.

However, decreasing attunement requirements is akin to allowing a someone with a low chess ranking to play a match with Bobby Fischer- they can play, but probably won't win. Crowd controlled mobs being immune to swipe is akin to having that match with Bobby Fischer, but instead of having a rook, you are granted a small blowtorch that is usable upon three of your opponent's pieces any time during the game.

I do hope this isn't a slippery slope.

(end)

Item of the Week: Temporary Weapon Stones

2008-03-02T11:03:00.000-08:00

From the official patch notes as of 3/2/08:

"Weightstones and Sharpening Stones: The bonus damage from these temporary enchantments now works while shapeshifted."

I have never really used any temporary enchants, but after seeing this, I have seen the light! For maces and staffs, the two most common types of weapons used by druids, our choices are: Adamantite Weightstone or Elemental Sharpening Stone. The Weightstone is a bar-o-love that, once wrapped onto the end of your stick with two nicely selected pieces of Netherweave, will give:

+0.54% Critical Strike and +12 "unmodified" DPS.

/duck from theorycrafters, who will tell your cat that the true increase in DPS will be higher and dependent on your crit% and hit%. Regardless, make friends with a Blacksmith now!

Elemental Sharpening Stone may actually be better (can't confirm that it works on a druid atm, none on my server for sale) for critty cats than the Adamantite version, if you prefer the pure crit approach, as it gives:

+1.27% Critical Strike.

While the truly wealthy will not balk at the ~2-3g per Elemental Stone, Adamantite stones (~1-1.5g) may be a bit cheaper as they are based on TBC mats. Also keep your radar on for undead-populated encounters in WotLK, something like a Consecrated Sharpening Stone could make another appearance from the nice folks at the Argent Dawn.

(end)

Alchemist's Stones Redesigned!

2008-02-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

Get out your gear for Heroic Arcatraz, Bot and Mechanar! It's time to get an Alchemist's Stone v2.0!

One for Kitties and a Bear Flavor too! One for Everyone! It seems possible that one could have both. These items appear to require the old Alchemist's Stone, which I had decided not to grind out the rep to obtain. No additional stats in abundance and limited utility for Tanks (don't like to be drinking while aggroed oobear form). But the new stone is very much worth it. These babies also require Nether Vortex, which is being changed to a non-soulbound (auctionable, sellable) item that can be purchased with Badge of Justice! No SSC or TK for the casual drood to enjoy this goodie!

Assassin's = 2.75% Crit
Guardian's= 0.87% Crit Resist, 1.73% Avoidance
And dont forget the 40% healing bonus and mana bonus from pots, which come in handy in an off-aggro moment of tanking or an "oops I aggroed again" scenario for cats.

Thanks Blizz! This is an awesome and much needed BoP for the Alchemy community.

The nerf will come in patch 2.5.

Source: World Of Raids (I luv you gusy!)

(end)

Lament of the Fel Lotus: Part II

2008-02-26T10:19:00.000-08:00

Fel Lotus gathering must be generating too much money....

From the patch notes 2/26/08:

Herbalism

* Ancient Lichen now has a chance to drop a Fel Lotus where it used to drop a piece of random green jewelry.
* Black Lotus replaced by Fel Lotus in herbalism skinning tables for Outland creatures.
* Increased the chance that Felweed, Dreaming Glory, Ragveil, and Flame Caps will contain a Fel Lotus.

Gather and sell Fel Lotus while you can! The new Sunwell areas should increase Raid volume and demand for this lovely little Gold maker.

Making Money: Transmutes

2008-02-25T04:27:00.000-08:00

Just like every profession, there are some recipes that are not worth the gold or time required to obtain them. This is especially true of transmutes, because (depending on your server) only transmutes in certain directions will actually increase the value of the initial primal or other reagent.

In this diagram, the transmutes between Life to Earth, Earth to Water and (maybe) Fire to Mana increase the value of the original primal (at least on my server). The biggest difference being Earth to Water. You should take a look at your own server and see where the biggest step-up in transmutes exists. With that information, you can spend your time grinding rep or farming mobs for the transmutes and motes that you really need. The transmute of Earth to Water is cheap, as Primal Earth sells for around 3g each.

A basic rundown of each transmute, potential profit and how to acquire the recipe. Lastly, some alternative methods of gathering primals:

Reagent	Product	Gain (g)	Recipe Acquired
Life	Earth	0-2	Discovery
Earth	Water	17.5	Sporregor
Water	Air	0	Cenarion Expedition
Air	Fire	0	Sha'tar
Water	Shadow	0	Discovery
Shadow	Water	0	Discovery
Fire	Mana	0	Discovery
Mana	Fire	0	Discovery
Fire	Earth	-17.5	Mag'har/Kurenei
Earth	Life	-2	Discovery
E/W/A/F/M	Might	0-125	Vendor
Miner	Earth	4	n/a
Herbalist	Life	4	n/a
Fishing	Water	17.5	n/a
Engineer	M/S/A	17.5	Quest: Zapthrottle

Returns from transmuting Earth to Water are about 270g more than you would receive without mastery for every 100 transmutes.

Math:
0.15 chance of an extra 1, 2, 3, 4 products (unconfirmed)
So, average products per transmute= 0.15 * 1.5 + 1 = 1.225 products/transmute
Where "1.5"= weighted average of multiple products. The usual proc is for 1 extra, I have only seen more than 1 extra occur once- so only 1.5 per extra proc.

This is not an impressive money maker, but if you get a proc on Primal Might, you will make scads of gold. As an alchemist, there are two methods of making money:

1) Offering free Primal Might transmutes and keeping the extra products- which doens't work.

2) Transmuting Primal Earth to Primal Water once per day, which works very nicely.

Offering free transmutes can be time consuming and requires you to be in a major city to obtain a large audience for your: /2 FREE [Transmute: Primal Might] your mats pst. Responses may/will come slowly. Alternatively, tell your guild that you will do all of the P. Might transmutes and send the back to the materials owner. Transmuting P. Earth to P. Water offers the advantage of certainty- never will you wait for others to agree to a free P. Might transmute and the money is yours. With the P. Might strategy, you may never proc and extra.

In summary, transmute mastery is not a particularly good way to make money, while performing a P. EArth to P. Water transmute on a daily basis is a reliable way to make a small amount of money with a minimal time investment. Occasionally, a mastery proc will occur amplifying your profits greatly.

Cats find a new role in patch 2.4

2008-02-21T15:13:00.000-08:00

So, Cat Form and Bear Form are getting a little bit-o-first-aid injected into the feral talent tree. I beleive this is an attempt to allow those druids who are feral spec to offer more off-heals in PvE and better healing in PvP. Let me be clear, this is not a Resto build, but certainly adds some function to what was previously a very bad talent in the feral tree.

Wait, maybe it is still bad..... Ya, still bad. My druid in Tank gear and has 250 agility, unbuffed. My cat dps gear has 409 agility and 2431 attack power. My Cat gear is Kara-ok, while I have been primary Tank in Kara. With this level of gear, I would receive about 125 to 409 +Heal per spell cast in caster form and +486 healing received in cat form.

Not very much utility in a raid situation, as cats shouldn't be drawing aggro so frequently as to require intense healing, but for some extra off-heal potential I suppose this change is an improvement. As for a strategy of taking the two points with the plan to switch your Dire Bear to Cat form to receive the extra healing.... that doesn't sound like a very good idea. I don't like being without my 500% armor when I'm number one on the threat list.

In PvP this will help make a feral spec druid become a bit more difficult to kill, but the time it takes for us to get our good healing spells cast is a bit prohibitive for a major effect.

At least the talent is in-line with the new stat priorities for druids: Agi is better for DPS and AP is available in abundance on nice druid sticks.

In summary, I think PvP druids could enjoy this change, though I really don't see it being more effect than the traditional Feral builds, which almost never include Nurturing Instinct.

The Big 7-0 Question: What to do?

2008-02-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

So, I have reached level 70 and now it time to decide what to do with my in-game time. Fortunately, I was able to save a fair amount of gold and have nice tanking set and fair DPS sets. After enchants and gems my tank set should be good for off-tanking 10-mans, while with some crafted leathers I should be able to get my DPS into more reasonable ranges than it is currently (around 430). Mainly, I want to help out my guild who have done a lot for me by being a contributing member toward our 25-man aspirations. The things I can do for them and for myself include:

1) Farm gold for crafted leather DPS gear. I have considered picking up leatherwokring, but I know people who have the rare recipes I would like crafted, so that doesn't seem like a good casual idea. Flying around in flight form is pretty cool. I should be getting Swift Flight Form soon, and that should be even better for gathering herbs, which also helps my guild.

2) PvP This actually sounds great, but even for Veteran's Leather Boots I would need 14,280 honor, no huge task, AND 40 Eye of the Storm Tokens!!! Alliance never wins on my server, so that would be 40 trips to EotS. Not fun. Does not meet casual criteria number Zero- must have fun. With improvements to Warsong Gulch, marathon sessions should stop and make that BG the fun place it can be:

Warsong Gulch

When both flags are held, the flag carriers will receive 50% increased damage done to them after approximately 10 minutes and 100% increased damage after approximately 15 minutes.
Flag carriers can now be tracked 45 seconds after picking up the flag.

3) Do daily quests, which have never appealed to me. I know I don't have the dedication for the long-haul with the various factions, nor for developing some sort of repetitive motion psychosis. Look, I already live in the midwest, I don't need to do repetitive quests for fun.

4) Farm for Badge of Tenacity. I was reading about this today, and the summoned encounters seem pretty cool. Finding the peeps to do it with is the other issue. However, the Badge is pretty cool.

I will probably farm gold with herbs, grind the badge and help out my guildies until Kara time once per week, which sounds like a good existence at this point.
Along the way, I hope to acquire a Talbuk too. I do have rogue and hunter alts I can work on too. It may be nice to have a horde character at the time Wrath of the Litch King is released.

I guess this is 70?

PvP: Halaa Part II

2008-02-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

Since my last post regarding Halaa, something has become painfully obvious: The drop rate on Oshu’gun Powder Samples is between 6-10%, which is quite low. Unfortunately, I am enamored by the Dark War Talbuk and Talbuks in-general. It is one of my few game-goals to own one of these bad boys.

Along with Battle Tokens obtained from kills in Halaa, one must also obtain Haala Research Tokens by collecting the aforementioned powder. Herein lies the problem. The highest drop rate is about 10% from readily accessible mobs in Nagrand. Twenty powder/Research token. I currently have 5 tokens. That makes 300 more powder required. Assuming 10% drop, that is 3000 more mobs to kill….. This rate of acquisition could only be described as expeditious by a limited few. Kurenai rep may be a better way to get a Talbuk, as the drop rate on Warbeads is about 30%, which is about 1200 kills…..not very casual friends.

If you do choose to play Halaa, which I recommend as a great intro to PvP without all the twinks, here are some tips.

General:

1) World PvP offers a very unique aspect to non-PvP servers, which is the chance to attack the folks whom you share a realm with. This can lead to healthy rivalries and lots of fun on the realm forums. While PvP may pit you against players from the realm, most opponents will come from the larger battlegroup pool.

2) Jumping off the bluffs in Halaa is a great way to get away from attacking enemies, if you are a Druid with Flight Form or a Mage with Slow Fall. If you don’t have one of these abilities or a Sha’tari Skyguard Cape, don’t chase people off the bluff. You will die.

3) Fights in Halaa can last for hours. I likely have not seen a fight that progressed to completion of less than 1 hour in duration.

Defense:

1) Stay indoors when in town. The firebombs dropping take off a percentage of your health. Loss of health is easy to avoid by staying inside when necessary.

2) Watch for the opposing players hiding on nearby floating islands, within Halaa buildings and on top of the center flag (this may have been fixed by now).

3) Wait for opposing players to take off from the Wyvern Perches, destroy the perch, then get out of the landing area. Returning players should be bombing the area where they land to uncover stealthed players and cause damage to those waiting for them to return.

4) If many Wyvern posts are being nearly simultaneously activated, you have a challenge on your hands, as this is a good offensive strategy that is difficult to defend against. Even a small amount of players can scatter a larger defending force and attack the defenders piecemeal to great success.

5) Lure attackers into aggro range of the guards. The guards are very difficult to kill and are impressively tenacious in pursuing attackers when aggroed.

6) Bridges offer a great place for hunters’ traps, while the edges of the bluffs make great places for a warlock’s Fear. If you can concentrate a group of attackers on a bridge, mages will enjoy some nice AoE.

7) Try not to pursue enemies into the ravines, as this leaves your posts undefended (a flying mount helps mitigate this effect of course).

Attacking:

1) Keep the Wyvern Posts active, even if you don’t plan to launch an attack. Active posts demand attention from the defenders and can be used to keep their force running (read divided).

2) Drop a firebomb on the area where you plan to land (see above).

3) Don’t let defenders draw you into the guards (see above).

4) Operate from 1-2 posts (unless you have overwhelming numbers). When the defenders rush your base of operations, scatter and regroup at a designated site. This of course requires formation of a Raid group to keep everyone communicating.

5) To orchestrate the final rush to the center when all of the guards are burned, make sure that it is an orchestrated rush to the center.

a. Healers First!!!

b. Then keep a close eye on doorways for hiding defenders and upon corpses. The graveyard is close to the center and the defenders will need to rez and heal quickly to avoid a total takeover.

Casual WoW

2008-02-09T22:01:00.000-08:00

Do you play WoW less than 2 hours per day?

If so, you are likely a casual WoW player. Many of the casual types are those with families, demanding careers or those who just don't find playing WoW enticing for long periods of time.

The 5000g question on the minds of every casual player is: Can I enjoy the game to the full extent of the 20-hour per week player? I think that the answer to this question is generally "yes". People certainly enjoy the game in different ways. Those playing less than 8 hours a week can level to the cap, run instances, casuals are very effective, healers, tanks or dps, as long as they take hints from other players and maybe troll a blog or two about their class. If any limitations do exist, they include: acquiring reputation and running higher level (25-man) raids. 10-man raids are more difficult, but still doable.

Challenges and Solutions:

Leveling:
Obtain and complete every quest available, with as much rested XP as possible. Quest in areas where frequent stops for drink/food/bandage are necessary or where the mob's name is in Red (most XP per kill). If mobs are dropping like Kleenex in a hurricane, you could probably be gaining more xp (there is a balance of course). Rested XP nets you 2x the XP for every mob you kill. Quests do not award extra XP, based on rested status. Try not to leave an area until all of the quests are complete. Leftover quests are frequently abandoned due to lost items for the quest and the difficulty of traveling back to old areas.

Gear:
Unless gear is something you REALLY enjoy, don't spend a lot of time shopping for gear while you level, just accept the rewards that come from quests. Gear shopping can consume your playtime and while it can add substantial power to your toon, but keep in mind that the time you spend is substantial to have good gear (don't walk around in whites or greys though).
Forturnately, access to high quality green gear is accomplished by completing quests. After arriving at level 70, or a good twinking level, you will then need to think about more specific gear. There are expectations, based on group role, as to what is needed to perform your role in end-game raids, viscous battlegrounds or heroic dungeons. Research the requirements for your character and look for gear lists. on blogs and the forums. Ask other players for suggestions- hardcore players can usually help.

Professions:
Your profession should earn some gold and make your character stronger if possible. Here are some very general observations regarding professions for the casual player:
1) Two gathering professions is likely the most lucrative combination, while you are leveling.
2) Objects made with crafting do not sell well and the good recipes for self use can be difficult to find.
3) Enchanting is expensive and probably best left for end game.
4) Engineering can also be expensive and takes up significant bag space, but seems like fun.
5) Alchemy gives access to some reasonable money making opportunities in the form of transmutes, but overall will not be a big moneymaker.

Mounts and Travel:
Mounts speed up game-play considerably and your goal should be to have a mount the second you hit level 40. Gathering gold for any level of mount is very difficult. The last level of mount (patch 2.3) is Epic Flying, which will certainly help you gather gold much quicker, own people in PvP and look very cool, but is not absolutely necessary. All other mounts are (regular, epic and flying). Additionally, some classes and professions have access to travel options that others do not:

1) Druid- hearth to Moonglade
2) Mage- port to major cities
3) Engineers- can port to Gadget, Toshley, Area 52 or Everlook
4) Hunters have Aspect of the Pack
5) Druids have Feral Swiftness
6) Paladins have Crusader Aura
7) Shaman have Ghostwolf

While there are some challenges to being a casual WoW player, most are easily surmountable.

Druid Profession Choice

2008-02-08T22:10:00.000-08:00

What are the advantages and disadvantages of various professions for Druids?

The two top choices for druid primary professions are probably Alchemy/Herbalism or Leatherworking/Skinning. I will only discuss these two combinations, though certainly other combinations are possible.

Casual players and money farmers should note that the king of moneymaking is probably a combination of two gathering professions. However, gathering is not as much fun as crafting something, hence the remainder of this post.

Features of Alchemy/Herbalism:

1) Druids can gather herbs in any form, which markedly increases the speed that druids can collect herbs. With the use of Hibernate, Entangling Roots and Soothe Beast, druids can incapacitate nearby enemies and beasts, making herb collection simple. Gathering may not be available in Swift Flight Form.

2) Alchemy provides a constant source of buffs at little cost. These pots/buffs will allow you to level faster and spend less money on healing and mana potions, which are necessary and can be expensive.

3) Many herbs can be sold for great profit to other classes for quests and some potions sell well to PvP and raid users. Many herbs sell for more gold than the potions you can make from them.

4) Transmutation allows players to make gold easily (read without grinding extensively), albeit at lower rates, by finding inexpensive reagents (Primals) on the Auction House and turning them into valuable products (more valuable Primals). With Transmute Mastery, multiple products can be made from one set of reagents. Transmute Masters may be able to sell the "chance" of extra products to other players or keep extra products obtained when using other player's reagents. I cannot comment on Potion or Elixir Mastery, but the ability to sell finished products is generally more difficult that selling raw materials.

5) The drawbacks of Alch/Herbs include low rates of "discovery" of new potions and reportedly low rates of extra products from Mastery (despite appx 400-500g cost of Mastery). Though, the probability of extra products is reported to be 20%, which is quite high.

Features of Leatherworking/Skinning:

1) Leatherworking will allow players some freedom from trolling the Auction House for good gear and the time required to find quests that have desirable gear rewards.

2) The high-level leatherworking patterns are probably the best non-raid/non-PvP gear in the game. The patterns are expensive and rare. If your destination is player versus environment (PvE), you do not plan to raid and gear is very important to you, leatherworking should be good for your purposes. You could always buy most of this gear (that are not BoP) from a leatherworker, but the BoP's (which require leatherworking to wear) are the best. If your destination is PvP or a raiding guild, leatherworking will hold less value.

3) If you have friends or alts who are druids, rogues, low-level shaman or low-level hunters and you want to craft gear for them, leatherworking could be fun. Your guild will certainly benefit from having a leatherworker for armor kits.

4) Don't take leatherworking to make money. There are many posts on the official forums about the slow pace of leveling leatherworking and about products selling for less than the cost of their ingredients.

5) Skinning takes very little time, as many mobs that are killed and looted can be skinned. This is an advantage over many other gathering professions that require extra travel-time to a node or herb. Tailoring has its own gathering profession without even having to dedicate a primary skill toward that gathering profession (cloth drops from all humanoids).

In summary: Most Druids should probably take Alchemy/Herbs as this combination will create the most profit and allows for upgrades while leveling and for end-game. Alch/Herbs seems to be much easier to level than Leatherworking due to readily available recipes that allow yellow and red skill-ups. Those players who enjoy crafting their own armor or enjoy crafting for friends, and who do not need to make a profit from a profession, should consider Leatherworking/Skinning. Again, those soley interested in a profession for money making potential should take two gathering professions.

For additional information, see this discussion thread on the Druid Wiki, which has many great perspectives on this issue.

Making Money: Darkmoon Faire

2008-02-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Darkmoon Faire is here! Most of the rewards from Darkmoon Tickets quests are reasonable. However, the Darkmoon Card rewards are quite impressive and the low chance of a high quality Darkmoon Prize doesn't equate to an absence of demand for objects used to obtain Darkmoon Tickets. Here is a collection of the items and events of interest to those looking to make a quick gold at the DMF.

There may be money to be made from acquiring Evil Bat Eyes, Glowing Scorpid Blood, Dense Stone, Thorium Bars, Runecloth and Rugged Leather before the faire begins. These are all items that are used directly for turn-ins or to create items for turn-in.

In addition, the good Professor Thaddeus Paleo and his stallmate Lhara sell some items in limited quantity for rock bottom prices. Maybe he is a chemistry professor and Lhara is a first semester MBA candidate? These two are not going to be in charge of the Azeroth Reserve Bank anytime soon. Demand for the gems and scrolls is sure to remain high well after the fair is over. Though casual players will likely not have time to birdog the Professor and Lhara (the spawn times for their items are reportedly random), a casual trip by the faire may reward you with nice items to resell on the AH or keep for use.

Hording Darkmoon Cards is sure to bring in some profit as well. The two through eight of each deck are random drops, while the Aces are from heroic bosses.

All this and more at the Darkmoon Faire. Check your local calendar for event dates.

New WoW Database

2008-02-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

Feast Your Eyes on This!!!

Curse Gaming World of Warcraft Database

On the surface, wowdb appears to have much of the functionality of my beloved Wowhead. However, this baby allows for saving of searches with complex filters, armory integration with your character, character models and that is just the beginning. Wowhead may be looking for a new lover....

Here is the brief guide from Curse with a few of the flagship features.

Here are some filtered searches:

Quested Cat DPS Leathers
Crafted Cat DPS BoE Leathers

I want to know if there is code to create mouseovers just like wowhead.

More news to come once we all start breaking into the possibilities this site has to offer!

Tank Tips: Avoidance Gems- An update

2008-02-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

Well, after all that calculating, we get a drop from Blue on a change in patch 2.4 that may create some empty gem slots for druids interested in avoidance.

"Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped."

This means that more than one Glistening Fire Opal or Glinting Fire Opal can be socketed, which is much to our advantage. It never seemed quite right that these would be Unique-equipped, given their relative rarity, as it would take a very dedicated player to acquire more than a few of these as they are BoP and the drop rate isn't great.

The probability of getting at least 1 Opal on a run of Mana-tombs is 40% (if the Wowhead estimates are correct).

The probability of getting 4 on one run is =0.1*0.06^3 or 0.00216%.

The probability of getting 4 gems after 4 runs is 3%.

So, the numbers aren't exactly in favor of expeditous acquisition for casual players. The value of stacking these will certainly be attractive to the non-casual druid.

New Druid Abilities: Leave other's Bread and Butter alone

2008-01-31T21:17:00.001-08:00

Resto4Life has a great post regarding a request for a druid ability.

I was thinking about this today, and I agree with Bornakk- sort of. Druids do have a lot of great abilities that other classes have. We shouldn't request changes along the line of "let us have this [insert class] ability. Instead, how about creative, druid-specific abilities that reflect our animal nature:

No borrowed abilities here. Maybe these would get more attention from the Blues? Anyone else have suggestions?

Tank Tips: Gems for Avoidance

2008-01-31T19:34:00.000-08:00

With crafted and quested gear, it is relatively painless to obtain the most important of bear stats- being uncrittable- by obtaining 415 defense skill. After obtaining this goal, I find myself wanting more avoidance (the ability to avoid being hit by a mob or other player). I usually find myself at the top of the threat list and rarely run low on rage, so it is time to increase my avoidance until I hit the avoidance/threat trade off.

To achieve more avoidance, one needs to obtain more dodge% and miss%. The routes to these goals are +Dodge, +Defense and Agility.

Which is better? The numbers:

14.7	Agility	1	Dodge %
15.77	Hit	1	Less Miss%
18.9	Dodge	1	Dodge %
22.1	Critical Strike	1	Crit%
25	Agility	1	Crit%
60	Defense	1	Miss %
60	Defense	2	Dodge + Miss%
60	Defense	1	Crit Prevention%
39.4	Resilience	1	Crit Prevention%
15.6	Expertise	2	Less Dodge + Parry%

+Dodge gives less dodge% than agility (per point) and is the clear loser, as +agility also gives more armor and increased crit%. Unless +dodge was available in large quantities per slot, this represents the worst way to acquire avoidance.
+Defense gives the least avoidance point-for-point, though may be necessary for maintaining 415 defense for 100% crit prevention.
Agility has the best avoidance per point and allows some increase in threat resulting from the increased DPS given by critical strike %, as well as a minimal amount of armor.
Keep in mind that Survival of the Fittest increases agility by 3%, while none of the other stats are increased by this or other talents. Those effects are included in the calculations below.

In terms of gems, this is what Blizzard offers druids for avoidance and some other melee stats (as obtained from easily acquired gems).

As you can see, the stat-per-slot budget is 8 for the avoidance stats of interest. Again, +agility gives the most avoidance, agility provides a balance of avoidance and threat and +dodge is not an efficient use for the budget available per gem.

As for what to do with the Heavy Clefthoof Set:

	Matching Slots w/ Agility to get slot bonus	All Dodge	All Agi	All Stam
Avoidance	3.38%	3.39%	4.48%	--
Health	710	--	--	1420
Hit	1.00%	--	--	--
Crit Resist	--	--	--	--
Crit Chance	0.64%	--	2.72%	--
	Glinting Noble Topaz	Sublte Living Ruby	Delicate Living Ruby	Solid Star of Elune
	Shifting Nightseye

For pure avoidance, a +agility strategy seems the best. In addition, an appreciable amount of crit is gained in this manner. Expertise would be nice, but is not available on gems currently.

In summary, +8 agility gems, Delicate Living Rubies, offer a good amount of avoidance, while allowing an increase in critical hit% to help preserve some threat (though being hit generates the most threat).

Karazhan- Here comes da Hoe!

2008-01-24T05:49:00.001-08:00

I'd like to give a shout to my guild, Calamitous Intent, who completed as flawless an instance run (Black Morass) as I have ever seen, so that I could get my Karazhan key. I hope to be in Kara with you all when I get back from vacation.

I would appreciate any feedback on gems , enchants or other equipment that I could use to off-tank in Kara. I have left the Hoe in Dire Bear on logout.

Currently, I am at 416 defense and plan to acquire more Agility and Stamina for the remainder of my open slots. A meta gem would be nice as well. Probably a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond, though my current gems won't exactly support the slots required for the meta.

Other dilemmas include:
1) Gem my Wastewalker Gloves or go for Verdant Gloves
2) Cloak of the Valiant Defender or Cloak of Eternity
3) How to obtain my Alchemist's Stone
4) Acquisition of the Badge of Tenacity or perhaps a Darkmoon Card.

Thanks again Calamitous Intent!!!

10g Auction House Challenge: Update 1

2008-01-23T17:00:00.000-08:00

First, I'd like to thank everyone who reads this blog. We have gone over 1000 page views, which is excellent. I hope to continue to keep bringing all of you readers interesting content and would appreciate any comments or questions you have about the Blog.

....Now picking up where we started a few weeks ago....

In the beginning of this challenge, I found Auctioneer and Auctioneer Advanced (Auc Adv) to be somewhat daunting. Like many mods made for WoW, the Auctioneer family are very powerful tools that take some quality time truly appreciate. I created a new post about Auc Adv from what I learned in the first few weeks of using it. With your input, we can make this site a great resource for Auc Adv when it is released in its final version.

Well, back to the Challenge- I started with 10gold. At last count I had 53g on my Challenge Alt (Neuro, a human warlock). Slow going to start, but keep in mind that I only spent a maximum of 15 minutes on this alt each day. I even skipped a few days between today (1/23/07) and the start date (1/8/08). The time I did spend included a preponderance of time trying to decipher Auc Adv and learning some new markets that I have never been a part of in the past (mainly the enchanting mats market). For about 150 minutes of total play time, I consider a 400% return worthwhile and plan to continue using this mod.

A short gold tip: The more gold you have the easier it is to make money in the buy/sell plan. If you are saving up for a big purchase, make sure to hang on to some of that gold until you have enough to finance future AH investments after you plunk down the G for Mongoose or a riding skill.

That's all for now. I'm headed to Jackson, WY for some nice skiing. I'll be back in two weeks or so.

Thanks again for reading Cenarion Labs.

Lovely New Abilities for Cat Form: Stock up on Intellect!

2008-01-23T05:50:00.001-08:00

From the forums.

Making Money: Guide to Auctioneer Advanced Part 1

2008-01-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

Are you a casual player looking to make some money in WoW?

Casual players not looking to make money in WoW should stop reading at this point. Maybe you have a few gold making strategies and know the prices and likelihood of sales for a few items at the AH very well. Perhaps you do not(more on strategies in an upcoming post). Regardless, an addon will likely help you make money in WoW.

I started using the addon Auctioneer Advanced a few weeeks ago and would like to offer it as a very powerful tool to the casual WoW player looking to make money.

Auctioneer Advanced (AucAdv) can be downloaded from many sites. WoW Matrix offers many mods, including AucAdv and the older Auctioneer. The alternatives for downloading are either the Curse addon site. Similar AH mods can also be found on the WoW Ace platform. Read and follow the installation instructions carefully and installation should be no problem. Note that AucAdv is currently in Beta testing. The final version should have a feature to allow searches (Auc Classic had this feature).

Before you delete your Classic Auctioneer, note that all of your previous data will be lost and that not all the functions of Classic Auctioneer are present in AucAdv. AucAdv runs on an entirely new database.

DAY ONE: Configure General User Preferences, Appraiser and Bottom Scanner

Bottom Scanner (BtmScn) activates when you are at the AH and have an AH window open. Btm Scn is an AH search that looks for items that you can profit from by vendoring, disenchanting to resell the results, prospecting for gems or reselling as purchased above the price offered in the AH. Just sit in the AH and wait for the doorbell to ding, which is your notification that BtmScn has found a deal for your consideration. Btm Scn can look through the AH much faster than you can for deals, but is not infallible or a 100% improvement upon your own intuition and market knowledge.

Configuring BtmScan sets up parameters that controls the incoming AH sales. For example, AH finds a Braxxis Staff of Slumber priced at 25g. You need to tell BtmScn whether or not this item at this price fits your intended profit model.

Appraiser is used within Btm Scan to find the correct items to purchase and alone in the Appraiser tab to help price and list your auctions.

Having Appraiser set up correctly and having all of the competing modules turned off is the key to using Auc Adv.

Before you get started on changing settings start by reading this for a guide to interpreting the tooltip in Auc Adv.

Here is a synopsis of Auc Adv:

Bottom Scanner-

Core Options:
General-
Display Settings- Activate this option so that you can see the information when you mouse over an item.
Reserve Amount is simply how much money you will allow AucAdv to spend on deals in the AH. This is completely up to you, but I would recommend reserving less of your wealth when you have little money and reserve more when you have large nest egg. As you make more money you will get a better idea of how much return you will get and which items have more risk than others.
Example: Level 1 with 15g- set reserve to 5g (33% of wealth);
Level 70 with 2000g- set reserve to 1800g (90% of wealth)

Maximum Price is a measure of how much risk you are willing to take on any single item. I keep this low at most times, because there are some AH scams that can trick BtmScn into thinking that Ruined Pelt is a great deal at 100g. Again, the amount you set here will depend on your wealth.
Example: Level 1 with 15g- set Maximum to 1g
Level 70 with 2000g- set Maximum to 10g

Allow Bid or Buyout allows setting of the potential.....it's really quite obvious I suppose. Only one point here: Bid will tie up your money from being used in buyout. There are scenarios for using bids, but they are few. Choose buyout to start and consider adding bid later when you are more comfortable with the mod.

Profiles- make a name for your account.

Evaluators:
Appraiser- This is the workhorse of AucAdv. It both tells BtmScn which items are deals and helps set the price for those items in the AH.

Minimum profit- Base this value on your wealth- setting the minimum percent profit lower when you have less money and higher when you have more. This is a measure of how much you want each gold spent to return in AH sales. It will somewhat depend on your maximum price per item, because a min profit of 10% on a 100g item is still 10g, while min profit of 10% on a 1g item is only 10 silver profit. If your are a level 70, 10s doesn't help much. If you are level 1, that is a good profit. There is also a minimum discount, which allows you to set risk again- this time as a percent.
Example: Level 1 with 15g- set minimum profit to 10%
Level 70 with 2000g- set to 25-50%

Level 1 with 15g- set minimum profit amount to 50s
Level 70 with 2000g- set minimum profit to 3g

Q-check simply allows items of a certain quality to be considered. Set this to common, unless you want to speculated on greens or better gear. I will need to confirm if setting quality above white will filter out herbs and materials.

Seen allows filtering of items that show up only rarely in the AH. I have this set to 10 currently. There are other descriptors that allow you to determine the accuracy of price, but this is probably worth setting to avoid the need to evaluate every purchase for its accuracy.

Fees Adjustment allows you to account for fees in the AH. I would reccomend subtracting this for high level weapons and armor and ignoring the AH fees for most other auctions.

Comparable I believe this function looks for gear of the same kind you have. It can be used for gear replacement. I don't use this much, so no other comments.

Disenchant Configure and enable this if you are an enchanter and plan to buy items for the sole purpose of disenchanting and selling the products.

Enchant Mats comments welcome.

Prospect Allows parameters for obtaining gems from ores. Config and enable if you are a miner looking to prospect from ores as a strategy.

Resale This is where you set the parameters for reselling your items. BtmScn will pick them up for you based on these parameters. Disable this if you want to use your Appraiser settings (I would recommend this).

Snatch Disabled in AucAdv, but may be present in a final version of AucAdv.

Vendor Set parameters for buying items from the AH to sell to vendors for profit. This is a great way to make money when you have very little money to spend. Set the margins low- these sales are guaranteed profit. Even 5s will net a lot of money if you repeat the process 10 times in one day.

Filters: This section of options is somewhat confusing, in that it is unclear whether you are filtering against purchasing or for purchasing. When an option says "activate", it is likely blocking items that do not fit the specified criteria (you will not see these items in Bottom Scan).

IgnoreItemPrice-
Enable Price- I believe this enables maximum cost per item and minimum profit settings to take effect. This setting may be redundant with resale and appraiser. I have this option disabled, to allow Appraiser to do the work.

Resale- disabled for the same reason as above.

Appraiser- allows Appraiser settings to be used when listing items in the AH. This is the easiest way to set up and understand both buying and selling on the AH. Enable this option!

Vendor enables the vendor settings, as above.

IgnoreItemQuality- Setting this to ignore poor and common armor, weapons and recipes will probably prevent some savings, as these items may be less likely to sell than their green or higher counterparts.

IgnoreItemType- Filters items by the level at which you can use them. This is most useful when searching for gear for your own personal use.

Appraiser-

Stat Modules:
Classic- this model using a somewhat complex algorithm to arrive at a market price. This involves a moving average of prices over the number of days that you specify.

Purchased- gives value to items base on what your AH scan believes are items purchased for the buyout price. This means the item disappeared from the AH before its listing time had expired.

Simple- averages of the listing prices (not sales) for the last 3, 7, or 14 days.

Std Dev- mean price (as in Simple) and the normalized mean, which is the mean within 1 standard deviation of the simple mean. This is the mean of 67% of the values around the mean and excludes the other 33% of data- basically stating that they are outliers and not important i the analysis. This attempts to minimize the effect of outliers, but can still be fooled if many outliers are present.

Purchased- probably the most useful stat, as the actual sales (not listings) of the auctions are reported.

Filter Modules:
Basic Filters
Quality- select a trash (0), common (1) or better quality for items. This function overlaps somewhat with the ignore filters.

Outlier- disallows very high and very low values from entering your data stream. It is unclear if this effects the Std Dev valuator (or does it make these exclusions on its own). If the Outlier filter is addititve to Std Dev, then Std Dev valuation would be much more accurate than using the Std Dev of all values alone.

Match- is a function for listing your auctions. Simply set the following:
-under market price %
-max over market price %
-undercut- If the value of the item is at market this will undercut the market value. Otherwise, other filters will be used to determine the value. I don't use this function.

Utility Modules:
Appraiser-allows a model to use for pricing your auctions when listing in the AH. I choose Purchased and the alternate is Std Dev, which will be used if model if data is not available for your first choice model.

AskPrice allows other players to send a tell with keywords What Worth [item]?

Well....that being described, there are many things to be learned about the interaction of these various modules and models in Auc Adv. I would appreciate your experience and suggestions to make this guide as accurate as possible.

Macro Changes 1/8/08

2008-01-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

I haven't been playing WoW too much, but I would like to report some changes in macros that have come about- seemingly unannounced in the patch notes- in last Tuesday's patch.

Two Changes have been made:

1) If you are in Cat Form (applies to other forms too) and want to de-snare by shifting into the same form, your macro will need to have a "!" added to it:

/cast !Cat Form

2) We can now shift out of forms to use an item without having to use /cancelform:

/use Super Healing Potion
/cast !Bear Form

So, if you have noticed some macro problems and the "!" doesn't help, take a look on the forums to find some more detailed answers.

Please post any other macro changes you may have noted.

Alchemy Transmutes Fixed

2008-01-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

World of Raids is reporting a Blue post suggesting that the transmute proc is fixed. No word on discoveries yet.

10 gold Auction House Challenge

2008-01-08T09:59:00.000-08:00

As stated previously, I am a casual WoW player. I estimate my play time to be about 6 hours per week. Occasionally more, if I actually get a 5-man together to run an instance.

Acquiring large sums of gold for big ticket items is difficult for casual players. Currently, I am saving up 5,000 gold for my artisan riding skill. This will allow me to get my Swift Flight Form, which is quite the stylin flyin mount.

I am interested to see how much gold I can make by working the AH. I don't like to grind. However, once I have my epic flyer, I think that the combination of gathering herbs, fishing and transmutes is going to net copious amounts of gold.

As a project, I'm going to create an AH alt and send it 10 gold from my main character. Over the next 3 months I plan to use 15-20 minutes of my limited playtime to see how much gold I can generate. I plan to use Auctioneer or a similar addon to assist in this venture. I have never used Auctioneer, so I will also post on my experience with this addon.

If you would like to join me, leave a comment at any time. The rules I follow are below. If I alter any of these rules as the experiment progresses, I will post them here. If you can make more gold than me, I'll post a photo of your toon on my site and ask you to write a guest post with your strategies.

10g Bankh Projhect Rhules:
1) Level 1 Alt
2) 10 Gold from a main character
3) Auctioneer or other AH Addon
4) 20 minutes maximum time per day for playing the AH
5) Main character may pay any amount for AH Alt transportion to a neutral auction house
6) Main character may supply Alt with unlimited number of bags for storage only (not for sales)

Let the Games Begin, void where prohibited.

The Economics of Flying Mounts and Gold Sinks: Druid Edition

2008-01-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

I think the idea of money sinks is very interesting. The biggest money sinks are commonly thought to be mounts and, more so, the training required to ride them.

In theory, money sinks are to prevent inflation from occurring. Inflation is the devaluation of currency. For example, in Zimbawbe a roll of Toilet Paper costs $417. Imagine if a Super Healing Potion cost 40g! (please note that the situation in Zimbabwe is very serious and not equitable to a virtual game in any way).

Why do mounts constitute a sink?
1) everyone wants one
2) the gold spent on mounts leaves the player economy (more later)

1 and 2 can be insidious, like AH fees or prominent like mount fees. In fact the other likely sink in WoW is the AH fee.

Items such as the Mongoose Enchant, are expensive, however only select players have a demand for such damaging enchants and the money for the enchant remains with the player performing the enchant. The demand for mounts is greater, as players can easily see how much faster players with mounts can move. While a glowing enchant is cool, its power is only really apparent when you are on the receiving end of it in a PvP setting.

Other items are popular, but must remain inexpensive in order to maintain reasonable game play. Common items could be made into money sinks, but if a Super Healing Potion cost 40g, MANY players would have to spend huge sums of money just to successfully quest or step outside of a city, which would not be fun.

Soulbound items superficially appear to be a sink. Soulbound items create large pseudo-sinks of money, because the items are sold from player-to-player for high prices and then must be vendored for much lower prices. However, the high purchase price is transferred to another player, so the gold never leaves the economy. In fact, this is likely a source of inflation in the WoW enconomy. If high-value items were sold more commonly from vendors, then this would represent a sink (most high-quality items in WoW that are from vendors are relatively inexpensive- time (rep, badges....) is the currency of these vendors).

Are riding skills and mounts really money sinks?

There is no question that the cost of mounts represents a significant sink for currency in the WoW market. These items remove money from the economy, most players will obtain them and they are among the highest priced single ticket items in the game.

Is it possible that mounts cause inflation by decreasing the amount of time it takes to gather highly profitable materials such as herbs and ores? Well, herbs and mining represent the only two gathering professions that don't involve significant amounts of time (fishing and skinning being the other two which do require significant time). Enchanting could be included in this list, but requires gathering from the AH and is not dependent upon a mount. So, it is hard to imagine significant amount of inflation occurring from rapid gathering. Swift mounts are 5x as fast as walking.

The big question is: Do Druids need Swift Flight Form?

More than any other class, druids need their Swift Flight Form. As per the discussion regarding druid profession choices, every druid should have herbalism or at least mining. The addition of Swift Flight should allows droods to acquire gathered items at a bit less than 4x the speed of a swift ground mount. The instant cast ability allows for a reduced mount time and for quick getaways from mobs. It is hard to imagine that in Wrath of the Litch King that the increases in mount speed will exceed the gap currently seen in the Burning Crusade (hard to imagine mount speed 9x faster than a ground mount). I suppose anything is possible though. Regardless of the time between now and the expansion, every druid should be working on getting Swift Flight, if they arent already.

Alchemy Discoveries Disabled

2008-01-03T17:02:00.001-08:00

It took Blue a long time to accept that Alchemy Transmute Procs are broken. Simultaneously, many players were also reporting very high rates of discovery.

I have had 4 discoveries since patch 2.3, which is highly improbable given the very low rates of discovery previously. Given a supposed rate of 0.1% discovery rate, the probability (using a binomial distribution) of having 4 discoveries out of 40 transmutes is:
8.82 x10^-8 or 0.00000882%. This is very improbable, unless you are Phineas Cage.

Well, Blue has admitted that Discovery is broken and has taken the action of disabling all discoveries.

Numerous complaints have followed, which is predictable and somewhat appropriate:
1) Transmute procs are broken without an apparent plan for an immediate fix.
2) The only "compensation" were a surfeit of Discoveries, which is now being disabled.

I cannot complain too much. I have made a statistically improbable number of discoveries since patch 2.3 was released and will continue to enjoy them while Blizz fixes Alchemy.

Herbalism: Can I get a Green Thumb?

2007-12-31T11:55:00.000-08:00

Herbalism is comparable to fishing in terms of the amount of neurons firing while "engaged" in this profession. I think the time has come for herbalists to do more than gather (right-click).

Herbalism Masteries:

Wow Item Creator!

I think some type of mastery, such as those above would make herbalism a much more interesting profession.

Wrath Watch: Bear Form Abilities (PartII)

2007-12-29T06:42:00.000-08:00

I have already posted on Cat Ability suggestions, as commonly requested from fellow Druids on the Official Blizzard Druid Forums. Today, we will take a look at Bear Form.

Let me emphasize that I am not a raider (c'mon guild, I just need Black Morass and then I'm your tank for Kara!). My comments are from the perspective of a 5-man dungeon runner.

Frenzied Regeneration- This ability offers very little health return for the amount of rage consumed. Even against 4-5 non-instance PvE mobs, FrenzRegen keeps your bear alive a bit longer, but doesn't seem to give you enough health to pop a healing pot or healthstone. In a dungeon, one is more likely to see the health bar lower than where it started and rage at zero after the 10s of "Regeneration." Might we see more HP per rage consumed? Could we get a burst HP for the rage consumed? That criticism delivered, one must keep in mind that druids retain the ability to Barkskin, Healing Potion, INSERT HEALING SPELL. I would hope for a buff to this ability, but wouldn't find it disappointing if Frenzied Regeneration is overlooked.

Feral Faerie Fire It has been said that you can use this ability to pull.... If your druid forgot to train Starfire, I suppose that you could pull with FFF. FFF generates threat, decreases armor and prevents rogues from Vanishing (latter being the best function), but otherwise, FFF doesn't offer much tangible damage increase. Make this a more potent armor debuff and I'd be happy.

Predatory Strikes needs to scale better with level. The addition of 105 AP at level 70 is not worth 2 talent points.

Maul needs to do more damage! A Maul attack occurs on the subsequent bear swing. At one swing every 2.5s, that is too long to wait for Maul to land on the target. By the time I have landed one Maul, I'm looking to use my rage to renew my Lacerate stack or refresh my Mangle. Not that we need to be doing DPS, but please let us generate more threat with a rage efficient ability. After Lacerate and Mangle are up and moving bleeding away my query, I'm likely to use Maul once or never.

Demoralizing Roar this debuff follows the trend of the oft usurped druid buffs. Demoralizing Shout has (at level 70) a 300 AP reduction, while Demo Roar only has 240. Fully talented, Demo Shout has a 420 AP reduction, while Demo Roar only has a 298 AP reduction. Please get this ability at least equal to Demo Shout.

Other abilities mentioned by the Druid community:

Ability to use weapon procs and items while in animal form: I just don't think this really fits the animal form scheme too well. Bears don't chug potions. Though somehow, we can use trinkets? This won't happen (regardless) so please druids, stop asking for it.

New Skins: I really hope this happens. Who wouldn't want new skins or forms?

Bash: still worthless for the amount of points. Increase it to 1s and 2s for the respective points and this might be useful for PvP.

Nurturing Instinct: Please move it out of the Feral tree.

Omen of Clarity: Move this into the Feral tree.

Overall, I think the Feral Bear build is a well constructed build. A few changes might be nice, but I'd take more attention to a new form over any improvements to what we already have.

What are your thoughts?

Alchemy: Transmute Mastery IS broken

2007-12-28T15:11:00.000-08:00

Straight from a Blue:

Nethaera 12/21/07-

As posted by Pavonum in the Customer Service Forum:

As of the 2.3 content patch, there's currently an issue with Transmutation Mastery by which the percentage chance to receive additional results from transmutations — aside from Transmute: Primal Might — is lower than the intended value. This is likely contributing to the dearth of procs you've observed, and I'd like to offer my apologies for any consternation that has arisen as a result of the discrepancy. I'm happy to report that this matter should be resolved in a future patch, but your continued patience in the interim is appreciated. :)

There you have it. I will update my lovely readers when this seems to be fixed.

PvP: Halaa

2007-12-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

If you have not taken part in the defense or takeover of Halaa, you are missing one of the best PvP experiences in WoW.

One important fact about Halaa: You receive no bonus honor or tokens for capturing the city from the opposing faction.

Halaa is an outdoor PvP objective in central Nagrand. The city of Halaa is a small outpost on an plateau-like island that is defended by 15 of the occupying faction's guards. To take Halaa, the attacking faction must kill the 15 guards by firebombing them from the provided Wyverns and then hold the center of Halaa for about 5 minutes.

Why fight in Halaa?
Halaa is a great introduction to PvP. Most of the players at Halaa are not twinked-out and, as a result, players without top-notch PvP gear stand a chance of getting some kills and having some fun. The Shadowstalker Sash and Leggings and the Sublime Mystic Dawnstone are nice items for druid, melee PvP.

When to take part in the fight for Halaa:
If you have the World Defense Channel active, it will tell when Halaa is being attacked. If your faction holds Halaa, a message will be displayed throughout the time Halaa is under attack. If your faction is attacking, a message will appear when Halaa is defenseless- that is when all 15 guards have been killed.

If Halaa is under attack, you will want to consider whether or not to travel to Halaa to participate. Ideally, one would want some resistance from the opposing faction. Without Horde/Alliance to engage, you cannot earn Halaa Battle Tokens, which are used to purchase these nice items (especially the mount). Look at your 'Who' tab under your 'Social' button and whisper someone who is in Halaa to get an idea of the status of the fight. Some scenarios include:

Overwhelming Defense from Opposing Faction: the fight will likely not result in a win, but you may have the chance to gain some tokens. Only go if you can go in a group. A well organized defense will leave little opportunity for you to gain even the occasional token, as the defenders will be in groups.

Overwhelming Attack from Your own Faction: In this situation, the defenders may give-up and leave, which results in very little chance to win tokens. If you see "Halaa is Defenseless" and your faction is waiting in the middle, travel to Halaa is likely useless.

Balanced Horde and Alliance: This is the best case scenario and can make for hours of fun if both sides play well. The only trick here is NOT TO INVITE MORE OF YOUR FACTION THAN YOU NEED. Keep the numbers of defense/offense balanced or a situation of overwhelming power will occur, which encourages the other faction to leave (something you do not want IF you are seeking tokens). I have refused to invite more to the raid and discourage broadcasting the attack, unless the goal is to take down the opposing faction to gain Halaa for some other reason (someone just wants to spend their tokens). Remember, you win NOTHING for actually winning Halaa, all the rewards are generated from PvP fighting.

What Equipment do I need for Halaa?
The usual PvP gear with stamina is nice, but not essential. Flying mounts offer a large advantage to any faction. The Ornate Spyglass can help see what is going on at various points of interest. The Skyguard's Drape can be very useful for jumping off of the plateau if are getting beat upon.

If you haven't given Halaa a try, turn on your World Defense Channel and look for events in Halaa. If you enjoy the fight and haven't been involved in PvP, you may find this a great introduction to the Battle Grounds and World PvP.

Next Post: Attacking Halaa

Broken Transmute Mastery Proc: Confirmed by Blue (EU)

2007-12-17T22:52:00.000-08:00

Since patch 2.3, many players have been reporting very low proc rates on Transmute Mastery and increased rates of discovery.

I had 3 discoveries in one week, but have not had an extra transmute product since 2.3 was released. I perform about 5-6 transmutes per week. That is about 30 days of transmutes with zero products. Using a binomial distribution, the probability of zero procs after 30 tries is: 0.007630759594789478 or about 0.8%, which is low, but possible.

While many Transmute masters exist in WoW who could experience very low rates, it has been obvious that many perceived an error in the proc, albeit without having rigorous numbers:
1
2
3....

Curious to see if there was any truth to this, I conducted a poll based in this blog and off of the Profession forums.

The results were:
Procs: 11
No Procs: 53

Assuming a binomial distribution with a probability of 0.15, that translates to:
17% proc rate
p-value (z; one-sided) of 0.312

That is a 31% chance that 15% is the true proc rate. Most consider 5% to be the threshold below which the original assumption is rejected (that 15% isn't the proc rate and that the proc rate is lower).

I was very much ready to report that the proc wasn't broken (based on my limited sample), when on the US forums a troll finds an EU CM who writes:

/*Translated by Google:*/

"Hello again!

We are too new evidence arrives, the masters of transmutation concern: The "Proc" is currently in fact too rarely triggered. This error will be corrected for the next patch. An appropriate notice will you, when available, in our patch notes: http://www.wow-europe.com/de/patchnotes

I wish you a nice weekend!

Rynundu"

....So, it probably is broken, as people thought. However, the US CMs haven't commented on this to-date. We shall see what becomes of this issue, which went down a bit ugly-like in terms of so many players posting that their T-mute mastery was broken without a Blue response.

I don't want to flame the CMs, but this seemed like a legitimate concern shared by many players. For comparison, follow the link on the blog to see all the other nonsense that the Blues DO address in the forums.

Maybe we'll get some extra Transmutes in the mail for the Feast?

Nightmare Seeds

2007-12-14T07:43:00.000-08:00

Last night was a first in herbalism for me. I picked a Nightmare Vine and ended up with some Nightmare Seeds.

I can see using these similarly to Fel Blossoms. However, these little weeds seem to have the advantage of increasing your health pool considerably, allowing your healer to fill your HP 2000 points above usual HP for a prolonged period of time (30s). In comparison, Fel Blossom absorbs a fixed amount of damage (1250 max) and only lasts for 15s whether damage is absorbed or not.

For druids, our inability to use items while in a form makes these less useful than for a warrior, but with the new changes in 2.3 to macros we can quickly:

/cancelform
/use Nightmare Seed
/cast Dire Bear Form

I can see using this in those special moments of pause that occur after a knockback, but before a nice Feral Charge. When your healer is wondering if they will be the boss's primary target for their last seconds before a corpse run.

Of note, the cooldown is 3 minutes, which would prevent use of healthstone, Fel Blossom, etc. I will have to experiment to see if the timer is the same as healing potions. It also appears that you may get the extra 2000 health in addition to the 2000 HP capacity.

Wowecon.com shows these items as selling for a median 2.25g and having very low volume across all servers. I think these items are likely too rare to make any great amount of money from dedicated gathering. Items like this tend to be in low demand due to their low profile on the supply side.

Anyway else have experiences with Nightmare Seeds?

Wrath Watch: Cat Form Abilities (Part I)

2007-12-12T05:26:00.000-08:00

Many druid abilities are taking a beating on the Official Blizzard Druid Forums, since Eyonix asked for feedback from each class a few days ago.

The majority of players are commenting on Feral and Restoration abilities,while the Balance tree is receiving less criticism (except for the overall functionality of ToL, which shouldn't be minimized).

A few Cat Form abilities are in the firing line of many comments, and rightfully so:

Tiger's Fury- 40 DPS, but only for 6 second, while costing 30 valuable Energy. It is marginally useful for grinding elementals or other bleed-immune targets. I agree with most posts asking to lengthen the duration of this ability and the damage output.

Ferocious Bite- FB is inferior to Rip and Shred and is largely used for bleed-immune targets and may be worth keeping for that reason. After all, we need to grind elementals and there may be a fair amount of Undead that will need re-killing in Northrend. The main complaint about FB is that this ability does not scale with gear. Adding more damage based on Strength or Agility would be great so that FB becomes more powerful with better gear. Decreasing the time it takes to acquire the 100 energy to make good use of the 5 combo points for this ability by adding an Energy generating talent for Cats would also help make FB a more powerful talent.

Feral Faerie Fire- is great against clothies and leathers and prevents stealth in PvP, but seriously, why not put Improved Faerie Fire in the Feral tree? We could trade it for Nurturing Instinct?

And most importantly: Cat Form- please give Cats a new look! Snow Leopard?

In addition to concerns about talent and abilities that don't stack with gear, there are the age-old "poor itemization of high-end leather" comments. This may be true, but I'll be lucky to get through all of Karazahn before the expansion- this is an issue for the high-end raiders.

As for my predictions:
1) Tiger's Fury will be buffed.
2) Ferocious Bite will be made to scale with gear.
3) Improved Faerie Fire will likely remain a Balance talent.
4) I am praying that we get a new form.

Next time on Wrath Watch: Bear Form Abilities.

Ritual of the Beast

Lament of the Fel Lotus

2007-12-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

I am still searching for a great money making plan that (hopefully) doesn't involve a huge amount of farming or grinding, though some of this non-recreational time is necessary to make such sums of money.

Briefly, my history of making gold in WoW involved the following:
Level 10-40: stacks of Firefin Snapper, Oily Blackmouth and level appropriate Elixirs of Agility and Defense.

Level 40-60: Arcanite and Ghost Mushrooms.

Level 60-70: Quests and Primal Earth to Primal Water Transmutes.

I thought that Fel Lotus would be a great item to gather and/or work the margins in the AH for profit. However, my server has had a median price that is about 50-66% lower than game-wide pricing (median 12g, realm-wide 18g). I think one large factor contributed to this devaluation of Fel Lotuses and hope to learn a lesson of market patterns from this endeavor:

Fel Lotus is almost exclusively for raiders and as such is a very sensitive to raid volume. From watching the Nordrassil forums, it is clear that raiding guilds are the thoroughbreds of Warcraft- awesome, powerful beasts capable of spooking at the sight of their own shadow. When guild break-ups on the server started to occur (probably 3 top raiding guilds in the last 2 months) I should have known that prices on Fel Lotus would be reduced. If guilds start coming back and our server raid volume goes up, Fel Lotus may again arrive back at its true value.

In addition, it was also apparent from the AH listings that:

1) Many players don't list things for what they are worth or even close to what they are worth. Despite Fel Lotus being rare (only from herbalism and a random pick from other common and "mapable" herbs) and many AH prices with shorter remaining AH duration (very long>short) being much higher, about half of the players were setting buyouts more than 2g below the next highest auction.

2) Low volume markets are difficult to control. On at least 3 occasions, I bought out ALL of the Fel Lotus stock (at around 10g each) and listed my own Fel Lotus for about 15-18g. NONE of my auctions resulted in buyouts or even had bids. Instead, a few auctions listed at less than 12g as a buyout ruled the market (as they should). I think players bought a small amount of the Fel Lotus stock at low price, while a significant amount of low price stock remained on the market for 48-hours, further perpetuating days of low pricing. This maybe another effect of the 48-hour auction?

3) Guild Banks may be creating a repository for raid consumables that causes demand to be less in the AH. Whereas previously raid items may have been lost on guild-bank alts or just simply not donated to raid guilds (less likely, raiding guilds are highly organized), with the advent of guild bank, I think it is likely that more flasks, cauldrons and their respective materials are being put into guild banks by raiding and non-raiding segments of guilds. Arguments against this theory would include the continued high price of Fel Lotus game-wide.

Lessons Learned:
-Don't try to "industrialize" sales of an item that is required by a small, niche population that has highly variable demand for that item.
-Don't try to monopolize the pricing on an item that is vastly and consistently underpriced, because you can never underestimate other players' ability to ruin pricing on the AH.

I'm going back to herb picking and Primal farming.

The Attack Table

2007-11-26T15:23:00.001-08:00

The attack table is not exactly easy to interpret at first glance, but is very important for understanding your avoidance parameters as a Bear and your hit parameters as a Cat or other melee class.

In order to understand how an attack made upon you is dealt with or how your attacks on others are dealt with, one needs to understand the following:

For WHITE DAMAGE (not special attacks that give yellow damage):

1) Every attack performed by a mob on a player, or a player on a mob, must result in some "outcome" whether that be a block, crushing blow, parry, dodge, ordinary hit, etc.

2) These "outcomes" are determined (in theory) by a randomly generated number between 1 and 100 being compared to ranges of values on an Attack Table. For example: the game rolls a 45 when you attack, which falls into the Critical Hit range, so your attack is a Critical Hit.

3) The higher your skill in a certain "outocome" on the attack table, the greater the size of its range and the higher the probability of that outcome occurring. For example: You have a 35% Crit Chance, which means that a roll between 45 and 80 will result in a Critical Hit. The exact values depend on all other values in the table, but the size of range (35 units) is the important point. If your Crit Chance was 50% a roll between 45-95 would result in a critical hit.

4) All "outcomes" are mutually exclusive, meaning that only one outcome can occur. For defensive skills, this would mean that you cannot Block a Crit from a mob or other player. The roll will designate the attack as either a Block (no damage) or it will land on you as a Crit (2x damage).

5) The table is added from the top to the bottom, once 100% is reached, any occurrence after that point (crushing blow, ordinary hit) will have a 0% probability of occurring and will be "pushed off" the attack table.

Order for attacks received from a mob:

Miss
Dodge
Block
Critical
Crushing Blow
Ordinary Hit

For Example: In order to push Crushing Blows off of the chart, Miss, Dodge, Parry, Block, and Critical Hit must account for all of the possible outcomes in your table, as these are the possible outcomes above Crushing Blow on the Attack Table. Note that Druids cannot Parry or Block.

Additionally, here is the table for players versus mobs and other players:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Glancing Blow
Block
Critical
Ordinary Hit

Druid Bear Tanks Want to Know: Can I become Uncrushable?

One needs a very high block rating to accomplish this. Druids cannot block at all, because we do not have shields. This leaves us with a chance of receiving a crushing blow, which is 150% damage. The Crushing Blow is mitigated by our armor. In theory, if your Miss and Dodge totaled to ~100% it would be unlikely that you would receive a Crushing Blow. This could be done with defensive skills. You would need to obtain a defense skill of appx. 2400 (50% Miss and 46% Dodge (assumes you have feral swiftness, if you dont +100 defense)). This is because the druid attack table looks like this when being attacked by a mob:

Miss
Dodge
Crushing Blow
Critical
Ordinary Hit

Basically, Uncrushability is for warriors, shaman and paladins- not druids. These classes have shields to block with and talents that allow them to Parry and Block.

So, for Druid tanking, have enough armor to absorb the Crushing Blows and enough defense to increase the probability of Dodges and Misses.

Note that Yellow Damage is likely reconciled with a two-roll system, which means that a Shred can be a blocked AND a crit or parried AND an ordinary hit. In this case + hit skills become much more important so that all of your special attacks hit the target to avoid a waste of energy/rage.

Thanks to the folks at these sites for my source data:
http://wow.incgamers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-404153.html
http://www.wowwiki.com/Attack_Table
http://www.wowwiki.com/Crushing_blow

2.3 Druid To-Do's

2007-11-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

Patch 2.3 is great for druids! Thank you Blizzard. Here are some highlights and reminders for the next few days.

Need to test /cast Dire Bear or Cat or ToL while in these forms when polymorphed or trapped. The rumor is that this will break the morph/trap without needing to change form, but costs some mana. CONFIRMED. Natural Shapeshifter has become a much more interesting talent with this change.

Need to check all those macros with /cancelstance as the initial command. Many old macros that allowed the functions such as: Change form>Cast a spell>Use an item- are now obsolete. Now, druids can /cast Regrowth, which will cause you to leave your form and cast Regrowth instantly. Here are some forum insights into new possibilities. Here are some problems with the new macros/stances/forms. Per Blue, druids are not supposed to be able to shift out of form, use a potion and instantly shift back into form.

The effect of these Macro changes will be that we can:
-Reduce the number of macros we currently have dedicated to Change Form + Action macros.

-Initially it was thought that druids would be able to "virtually" use potions and items while in Cat, Bear or ToL, because we could use items and return to form so very quickly (never been a Boomkin, I don't know if we can already use items/pots there) with macros such as:
/cancelform
/use Super Healing Potion
/cast Dire Bear Form

Caveat: you will be stuck in caster if a Global Cooldown is activated with the use of your item.

-Stun for a very long time: Pounce:Maim:Bash:Cyclone with admixed Mangle and Lacerate will be very deadly in PvP.

-Heal very quickly. Try: "/cast Regrowth" while in Dire Bear Form.

Remember to:
-Go get all those Heroic keys. Especially Lower City key for Sethekk Hall so you can do the quests for druid Flight Form without the preceding reputation grind.
-Remap your healing UI to include Abolish Poison if you are a Resto druid or Remove Curse if you are a Moonkin.
-Re-evaluate all those + Attack Power items. They are now more powerful for Cat Form in 2.3.
-Get your Fishing Tracker! Those who know fishing will know how huge this is!

I hope to give you some numbers on the effectiveness of the old Dreamstate build and the Moonkin build as a healing build now that we have improvements to Intensity.

Update: Global Cooldown (GCD) is oh so broken! Check out this post from a highly rated rogue who describes this very nicely from where it first appeared on the PTR.

Tank Tips: Armor

2007-11-12T05:50:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered if getting more armor means that you will live longer?

The answer is that armor has no diminishing returns in the amount of increased time alive you will receive from each incremental increase in armor. In this example, a 2500 AC increase gives you 0.21 seconds of life at a health of 15000.

Graphically:
While this excellent post also arrives at the same conclusion, the method involves some advanced math.

Auction House: 48 Hour Auctions

2007-11-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

Will 48-hour auctions create the illusion of increased supply, which will decrease demand and prices?

Points to consider:

1) Is supply constant with a 48-hour auction time? This should be true as players will not change their play-time based on AH changes to generate more supply from drops, mobs, etc in the realms. However, if everyone chooses a 48 hour auction time, this would, at first glance create the appearance of twice as many Auctions at any given time. A net increase for all players of twice as many auctions would assume players are currently not re-listing their auctions when they expire. This is likely a false assumption, as even moderately casual players and advanced players will list items when their auctions expire. The amount of supply on the AH will increase by half of the lag-time (seen in patch 2.2) between the expiration of auctions and the re-listing of those auctions. For example:

Idahoe has 2 Primal Might and auctions them for 100g each for 24 hours. He creates the auction at 6:00pm. The auction does not sell and the products are sent back to him. Ida has to cook dinner for his friends the next day at 6:00pm, and cannot log on until 11:00pm, when he re-lists the auctions. In this scenario, the amount of time that Ida's P. Might didn't contribute to the perceived realm supply of P. Might was 5 hours/24 hours.

Ida now tries to sell his two P. Might in patch 2.3 using a 48-hour auction at 6:00pm. The auctions don't sell in 48 hours and he has to cook dinner two days after the auction was created (again!). He again logs in and adds his two P. Might for a 48-hour auction at 11:00. In patch 2.3 the time Ida isn't contributing to the world supply is only 2.5 hours/24 hours.

So, supply is artificially and mildly increased due to 48 hour AH times.

2) Demand also remains the same. Players are limited by their respective play-time/gold and will not be able to buy more goods because of the AH changes auction duration.

3) Most people buy things using buyout. I don't see how a 48-hour auction would change that culture. However, products that currently were not listed in the "lag-time," will now be there for an extra few hours, which may increase visibility and the likelihood of bids instead of buyouts, which may lead to more sales more items sold by bid, which would mean lower prices.

The effect on Buyout and Bids will likely increase the number of sales mildly and increase the number of items sold from Bids, which will mildly decrease prices.

OVERALL: the new 48-hour auctions will reduce prices on very casual servers, while having little effect on more hard-core servers (older servers?). The amount total sales will likely increase by a small amount.

Tank Tips: Rage Generation and the Effect of Dodge

2007-10-31T08:50:00.000-07:00

1) Does an increase in Dodge decrease Rage generation to an appreciable amount?

2) At what value does more Dodge begin to decrease DPS due to loss of rage?

3) Does Dodge decrease threat due to loss of rage?

These are the mechanics of rage generation as per Wowwiki.

For Dealing Damage:
Main Hand Normal Hits: Factor=3.5
Main Hand Crits: Factor=5.0
Off Hand Normal Hits: Factor=1.75
Off Hand Crits: Factor=3.5
Rage Conversion Values: Rage Conversion at level 60: 230.6
Rage Conversion at level 70: 274.7

Rage Gained from dealing damage:
= ((Damage Dealt) / (Rage Conversion at Your Level) * 7.5 + (Weapon Speed * Factor))/2

For taking damage (both pre and post expansion):
= (Damage Taken) / (Rage Conversion at Your Level) * 2.5

Damage dealt has a much greater effect than damage taken in regard to rage generation for each point of damage given/taken. However, rage generated from multiple elite instance mobs banging on your bear at the same time will generate considerable if not the majority of your rage.

1) Increases in dodge will not markedly decrease rage generation until very high levels of dodge (probably greater than 50%).

2) In the PvE solo environment most rage is generated from damage dealt by the player, not damage done to the player by the mob.

3) The above are true, except when very large amounts of damage are being taken by the player (for example: Instance Bosses), then more rage is generated from damage taken than from damage dealt.

In conclusion, if you find yourself running out of rage, look for problems in this order:

1) Bear is not taking enough damage from enough mobs (bear doesn't have enough threat/aggro).

2) Bear's Dodge is too high.

3) Bear's DPS is too low.

Druids Need to Know

2007-10-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

1) Weapon damage is irrelevant when in Cat or Bear forms. Only weapons with increased attack power when in Bear, Dire Bear, Cat or Moonkin forms will add to your AP (see Earthwarden). When in Moonkin, swing rate and damage range (min-max) will be more important (still barely important as DPS is from spells not weapons).

2) Weapon enchants that proc when the weapon hits do not work in Feral Forms, but should work in Moonkin form (Restoration effect is unknown). If you are a Feral or Resto druid, don't put these enchants on your weapons.Instead, opt for enchants that increase Strength, Agility or other basic stat. If you are Moonkin, then consider enchants that proc as a last resort. Those that stun may be especially nice, as you are unlikely to do significant damage with your weapon to warrant maximizing actual weapon damage. See this excellent post for information regarding helpful druid enchants.

3) Druids have spells that allow transport to Moonglade in Kalimdor. This transport option allows for easy travel in pre-TBC areas. While most people will set their hearthstone to Shattrath City (and everyone should do this), a hearthstone at Ironforge and the Teleport: Moonglade spell will cut-down on your transport time considerably for pre-Outlands travel, if you cannot get a port or summon to Shattrath for some reason.

4) Druids cannot block or parry, because we do not have shields and cannot learn the skill that allows us to parry (weapons trainer).

5) Druids make very good healers for druid tanks. Druid tanks take damage very evenly, due to crit immunity and high armor. Tree of Life heal-over-time keeps druid tanks healed well. Tanks that take burst damage are better healed by a paladin or priest.

6) Bleed effects are a type of damage that ignores 100% of armor. Bear and Cat forms have bleed effects and these attacks are the best to use against highly armored classes.

7) Rage is only generated by normal melee Bear attacks, not by special attacks.

8) The specific role of the druid tanks is taking lots of melee hits with very little damage taken due to our high armor and NPC crit immunity. We are less effective vs casters.

9) When in Bear or Cat forms, druids can be Hibernated or can be affected by Scare Beast, as druids are considered to be 'beasts,' not humanoid.

10) Tree of Life is considered an elemental form and can be Banished by warlocks.

Guild Group Activities

2007-10-30T08:08:00.001-07:00

I have not ever managed a guild, but one of the most common problems in as a rank-and-file member is the lack of fun activities outside of dungeons and other Blizz initiated group events.

Here is a list of ideas for guild activities that I have either heard of or thought of:

1) Alliance Zephyr Hijack (Horde Boat Mutiny)- travel the Horde Zephyr Routes by fighting into the towers and Hijacking the Zephyrs. The first route may be easy, but wait and see who is there to meet you at your destination.

2) Flight Plan Day- run, port, summon all of your lowbies to each of the flight paths throughout the continents. Break this up with different continents on different weeks.

3) Guild Meet and Sack- once every month, have the entire guild meet in one place. This could also be used as a chance for all the crafters to craft for whoever brings materials. Afterward, time to Raid a city or take a World PvP objective. It's fun to see everyone together, even if for just a few minutes.

4) World Bosses- as long as you can find them, you can try to kill them without all the headache of clearing trash mobs, obtaining quests or keys. Give it a couple of shots then walk away if you don't succeed- no time invested. If you do succeed, your guild just won a great opportunity for a Realm post on official forums and likely a rare craftable or enchant. Anyone up for a Fel Reaver in Hellfire, Ysondre where are you?

5) Kill the dragon at Dire Maul. Have someone see if the Dragon is spawned in this Gurabashi-style event in Dire Maul. If so, gather the guild quickly and take him down. Lowbies may get good loot and someone could get the Orb-of-Deception, which changes you to appear like a member of the opposing faction.

6) Solo Challenge- Find a non-rare elite and have players bid on how little equipment they can use to down the mob. For example: I will take down a Mountain Gruul with only my chest, legs, trinkets and weapon. Go test it out and laugh when the "hero" dies or fireworks if the hero lives. Nagrand has a lot of elites on the Western and Southwestern area that can give a few opportunities for bids and subsequent fights.

Grinding Reputation, Primals or anything in WoW

2007-10-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

Rep is a special thing in WoW.

Everyone should know that the hours spent grinding today for Item X, may become less time consuming tomorrow. In fact, Item X may have the worth of Loosely Knitted Gloves in the next patch or expansion.

For Example in Patch X.3, reputation for A Special Mount and Rare Thing were reduced. As a result, many more players will have A Special Mount and Rare Things. While A Special Mount is interesting, access to Rare Things lets players experience new and difficult content. If they don't succeed at this content, that's ok, their skills will improve. They won't get the rewards that only the most talented players in the most organized guilds can obtain, which they shouldn't.

Things change in this game all the time and what once was cool is old-hat soon:
Hey that's a really cool Epic Ground Mount you have there! How do you like my Legendary Gnomish Chariot with my Mythic Talbuk Sleigh Team?

In the end, grinding rep is largely a matter of time. Downing Boss of the Expansion and clearing Really Hard Dungeon is a matter of skill.

Item X for Heavy Nerfoot Boots won't matter when Really Heavy Nerfoot Boots arrive from the first quest in the next expansion.

So, stop the QQ on time-dependent rewards and go kill Boss of the Expansion and have some fun with your friends. When Blizz nerfs BotE, then you have a real complaint.

In summary: Take a step away from the game if you find yourself grinding for anything, if that grinding isn't fun, because Really Cool Colored Sword won't be so cool in about 6 months and you could have spent that time in the Real World making WoW more fun when you return from a break.

Engineering Goodies for Druids

2007-10-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

I was writing a post as part of a series (what does profession X have to offer for Druids?), when this gem showed up in the official druid forums. There are basically no items other than some of the low level dynamite and the Ornate Spyglass that non-engineering druids can use and my post was off to a very short start. I would put the Ornate Spyglass on my list for PvP, as it will give that extra notice of encroaching opponents, but the real decision is whether to replace or start with Engineering as a profession. Here is the original, excellent post. All credit to the author for a great informative and short communication on this subject:

"The purpose of this post is to acquaint the druid community with the amazing potential that the Engineering trade offers us. Since Engineering is at the height of its popularity right now (thanks to epic headgear and the rofflecopter), I thought this would be a good time to share my meager knowledge with my fellow druids.

The first and single most important statement I must make is that Engineering is NOT a money-making profession. There are a very scant handful of items you can make and sell that non-Engineers will want, and those few items will sell relatively slowly at that. If you're going to be an Engineer, be prepared to make the financial commitment that this decision requires. You will literally be pouring money and materials into your trade, and the final stretch of Engineering is one of the most expensive profession grinds in the game.

If I haven't scared you off yet, then you must also consider this: Engineering is not an I-Win button in ANY scenario. Most of the devices we make have a chance of backfiring and (at best) failing to work, or (at worst) working on US instead of our target. Engineering can be used as an ace in the hole, but it can also cause you many deaths when things go awry. So being an Engineer requires you to not only know what items to use but also when best to use them. And you have to accept that sometimes, things just go badly for Engineers. And that's not to mention the fact that many of the devices you can make become virtually useless the moment you hit level 60. Plus there's the fact that your bags will be in a perpetual state of overflowing, with all the parts and pieces and schematics and trinkets and explosives you'll be carrying. Imagine a class that has to deal with soul shards, ammo pouches, mining bags and dozens of reagents, and you'll start to come close to the logistical nightmare Engineers face.

Still with me? Good. You might just have what it takes to be an Engineer afterall. Now that I've outlined some of the negatives of Engineering, let me tell you this: Engineering is by far the most fun profession in the game. It allows you to do things that simply shouldn't be possible. There's so many fun toys and quirky gadgets in Engineering that you can never get bored. And the first time you manage to pull off something so amazing that your jaw drops, you'll know why we Engineers are addicted to our trade.

So how does Engineering suit a druid? Perhaps better than it does with any other class in the game. One of the main weaknesses of the Druid class is our lack of utility abilities. The WoW gods have decreed that we Druids shouldn't be allowed to have nice things, what with the fact that we can opt to heal, DPS or tank with just our one class. By the devs' thinking, since we can be good at several different roles, we should sacrifice tons of utility to pay for it. Engineering helps get around that by giving us HEAPS of utility to play with. Below is a list of some of the gadgets Engineers can make, and how they benefit our class directly.

Explosives - Druids lack spellcasting interrupts in caster/moonkin form, but explosives can sometimes serve that purpose. Their built-in stuns also suppliment the stuns we already have available from our Feral forms, and they can allow us to get a headstart on a hasty retreat, or buy time to get a crucial heal off.

Seaforium Charges - Although we can stealth and DPS like rogues, one of the things we lack is the ability to open chests, doors and lockboxes. C4 allows us to take the not-so-subtle approach to that problem.

Goggles - At low levels, these give us access to headgear to place into a slot that would normally go empty. And later on, there's even some crafted leather versions that can outdo instance drops. And the ultimate goggles rival anything Tier 5 has to offer.

Jumper Cables - Although our battle rez is mighty, it's also on a long cooldown. Jumper Cables give us access to a second rez for when our Rebirth is on cooldown. Instead of being able to rez once every 30 minutes (or 20 after the patch), we have a chance of being able to rez twice in that time. And with the XL version, the chance is really pretty good.

Pets - The various crafted pets make great ghetto tanks on NPCs to allow us to make a retreat, or they're great at distracting enemies so we can loot a quest item or resource node.

Net-O-Matic Projector - This works like Entangling Roots without having the restriction of being usable only outdoors, and if it backfires we can just shapeshift out of the net, making this an excellent tool. Unlike other classes, we don't have to worry about this one backfiring.

Parachute Cloak - Until we get Flight Form, this is a great way to not worry about long drops. You can safely leap down the Great Lift or into Un'Goro Crater, or jump off the Aldor Rise, and live to land gently on the ground. And nothing is funnier than a flying bear drifting gently in the breeze. Nothing.

Rocket Boots - The various forms of Rocket Boots are a great suppliment to our ability to Dash and our Travel Form, making flag running in Warsong Gulch that much easier. What's more to say?

Deepdive Helmet - Sure, we can already shift into Aquatic Form to breathe underwater, but this allows us to breathe underwater while in other forms as well, making it easy to fight underwater without having to shift in and out of Aquatic to catch our breath.

Recombobulators - Sure, it's extremely situational, but being able to dispel a Polymorph can come in really handy in PvP.

Elemental Reflectors - These may only be useful against enemy players under level 60, but they're useful against NPCs all the time. I can't count the number of times a Reflector has saved my life. We lack spell mitigation, so these can be remarkably useful.

Nigh-Invulnerability Belt - Damage soaking may not be a problem for Feral druids, but Balance and Restoration druids will prize the ability to soak damage until their tank regains aggro. This item can easily save a group wipe!

Transporters - We can already get back to northern Kalimdor easily, so with a pair of transporters you can bounce around Azeroth and Outland at will, saving lots of travel time in some cases.

Gnomish Poultryizer - Oh god I love this trinket. Not only does it give a fantastic boost to Stamina, it also allows you to instantly shut down enemy casters in both PvE and PvP, and even melees will see a massive drop in the damage they can deal while in chicken form. And if it backfires and you get turned into a chicken, you can simply shift out of it since it counts as a Polymorph effect. All the positives and none of the negatives make this trinket fantastic for any Druid.

Goblin Rocket Launcher - If you opt to take Goblin Engineering instead of Gnomish, you'll have this instead of the Poultryizer. A free, easy burst of massive damage helps your DPS and tanking, and it gives the same tremendous Stamina boost.

And of course, that list doesn't even take into account all the fun stuff in Engineering, like the crafted non-combatant pets, or the flares and fireworks, or the Mote Extractor for farming primals, or the Voice Amplification Modulator that helps you get out of Silences and Interrupts faster, or the Targetting Dummies, or the Explosive Sheep (which is so singularly funny the profession is worth it just for this)... Engineering isn't for everyone, but it offers so much added utility to Druids that it should almost be mandatory. It makes up for so many of our weaknesses and boosts so many of our strengths that I don't think I could ever play a Druid without Engineering. It's a slow, painful, expensive grind, but believe me when I say that it's worth it in the end. So if you're considering taking up the path of the Schematic and you're willing to accept the drawbacks of Engineering, I hope you stick with it all the way! You'll have fun! If this is the path for you, I wish you the best of luck. And if you have any Engineering-related questions, feel free to ask and I'll help if I can."

Patch 2.3 thoughts

2007-10-20T15:21:00.002-07:00

Predictions for the effects of Patch 2.3 on the Druid Community:

1) The change to Heart of the Wild (HotW) means that a new calculation of the trade-off between Strength and Agility needs to be performed. Overall, druids are having AP increased, while Strength is nerfed. The biggest increase in AP will come from increasing +AP in Feral Form on weapon, which will also receive an additional 10% increase from HotW. Currently, it is thought that Str = Agi on a point-for-point basis, though the analysis that established this relationship my have underestimated the DPS increase of critical strikes (adding two combo points with Improved Sharpened Claws) and therefore underestimated the value of Agility.

2) The changes to Intensity and +Heal contributing toward +Spell Damage make:
-Tree of Life builds better DPS when solo and PvE
-may allow Moonkin and Dreamstate builds as healing options earlier in the game, as Resto builds are currently unbearably slow.

Here are the changes as reported by Blizzard:

Good for Tree of Life:
-Cure Poison and Abolish Poison are now usable in Tree of Life Form.
-Cure Poison, Abolish Poison and Remove Curse range increased to 40
yards.
-Intensity (Restoration) increased to 10/20/30% mana regeneration.
-Tranquility now gains additional benefit from spell damage and
healing bonuses.

Good for Feral:
- Feral Attack Power: Items that granted bonus attack power in Cat,
Bear, Dire Bear, and Moonkin forms have been re-evaluated. In almost
all cases, the attack power on the item has been increased. This
change corrects an issue where feral weapon damage was not keeping up
with other classes in its rate of increase.
- Heart of the Wild: This talent no longer provides 4/8/12/16/20% bonus Strength in Cat Form. Instead, it provides 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack power.

Good for Moonkin:
-Force of Nature: This ability will no longer automatically break
stealth on victims in its casting area. Nearby stealthed characters
may still be attacked if they are too close to the summoned Treants.
-Intensity (Restoration) increased to 10/20/30% mana regeneration.
-Remove Curse is now usable in Moonkin Form.

Good for All:
- Rebirth cooldown reduced to 20 minutes, from 30 minutes.

Guide to Brewfest- Alliance

2007-10-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Brewfest is an event in early October that allows you to complete quests to receive tickets. Buffs from special drink and food are available and this is the easiest way for a non-Alliance or non-dwarf character to get a Ram mount without grinding huge amounts of reputation.

Quests:

Bark for the Barleybrews
Reset: every 24 hours at an unspecified time (leave comments if you know when)
Reward: 15 Brewfest Tickets (40 in 2007 to account for bugs of Dark Iron Attacks)
Description: Run in a circle around Ironforge. Keep your fatigue in the yellow and a short time in blue and you will have no problem finishing the route.

Pink Elekks on Parade
Reset: once only
Reward: 40 Brewfest Tickets (2007)
Description: Drink a lot of brewfest outside of each major city until you see Pink Elekks. Use a Dispersion Ray to trap them and return to Ironforge to finish the quest.

Catch the Wild Wolpeltinger
Reset: once only
Reward: Wolpeltinger's Tankard (contains a non-combat pet).
Description: Throw a net over wolpeltinger's that you can only see when drunk. This quest is obtained and completed in the Brewfest grounds outside of Ironforge.

Keg Delivery to Kharanos:
Reset: twice daily at unspecified times
Reward: 3 Tickets per successful drop-off
Description: First, obtain Ram Racing Reins from Pol Amberstill. Put the Reins in an empty slot on your user interface. Then get the quest from Neill Ramstein. Once you accept the quest you will be riding on a ram. Click the reins to go faster and note the fatigue bar in the right upper corner. If it gets to 100, you will not move for 15s. Red accumulates points at 5 per tick. Yellow accumulates 1 per tick. Blue decreases by 1 per tick. Eating apples from the barrel takes your fatigue buffs to zero, but will not turn off the 15s halt, if it has occurred.

Run around the lantern next to my cat in this picture:

-for the first leg of the trip, being sure to pass closely by the apple bucket in the middle (you DO NOT have to stop next to them). You will need to go to Yellow fatigue after the barrel pickup in Kharanos, but should be able to Gallup the rest of the way. By rounding this lantern, the barrel will be thrown to you as you run away- don't worry it will arrive and you will see in chat that you have it.

Run around the two posts seen next to my cheetah in this picture:

-which will allow return of the keg and will create your tickets. You will receive 30s extra ram-time every time you return a keg. You should be able to easily do 9-10 runs and up to 15 have been reported.

High-level items and useful buffs:
Increase XP by 10% for 2 hours.

Usually alcohol can be stacked in addition to a well-fed buff. Stock-up on these if you like that extra buff in addition to the usual myriad of buffs.
Increase Strength by 20 for 30 mins
Increase Stamina by 20 for 30 mins

And the best-value item for the event:
Swift Brewfest Ram 600 Tickets

Druids v Casters

2007-10-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

Using Maim, Pounce, Charge and Bash to stop Spellcasting.

At level 62, druids acquire Maim for cat form, which allows incapacitation of targets for a duration based on combo points accumulated. This ability also turns off auto- attack. Bleed effects continue during incapacitation without waking the target, but any new application of damage will return the target to combat. Only one combo point is required for the "silence" effect. Use Maim after using combo points to apply Rip or for an especially bad spell being cast, such as a healing spell. Maim is a great talent to use in a raid to frequently Silence casters. There is no effective cool down for Maim.

Pounce can also be used against casters, but can only be used when Prowling and is therefore only feasible for out-of-combat use (usable on the first DPS mob in an instance pull). Pounce will silence casters and is a stun. Newly applied damage can still occur during the Pounce effect. As a druid fighting casters and not the primary DPS, wait for the caster to start a spell before Pouncing.

Feral Charge requires a minimum and maximum range (8-25 yards) and is best used on targets who are being newly acquiring or those that have cast a knock-back effect. This ability silences the target for 4s. It has a 15s cool down.

Bash is used as a stun, and should be cast when a heal or other spell is about to be cast. It has a 1 minute cool down and should be used judiciously during long fights.

Druids have a modest amount of tools to stop mobs and other players from casting spells. These abilities need to be used intelligently to avoid DPS loss or inability to use the ability due range, out-of-combat requirements and cool down restrictions.

General Disclaimer Post

2007-06-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

Readers,

Please note:

"Always" means most of the time.
"Never" means it could happen.
"I prefer" means that I prefer some thing. Not everyone needs to prefer/like/want it.
All things occur along a spectrum, leaving room for many possibilities.
All means most things, not all things (except when it's a spectrum).

My facts exist along a spectrum. Hopefully, that spectrum involves the truth. I will certainly post any corrections to maintain this site as a place to find accurate information. Sometimes posts are made in humor, like jokes. These posts will not be fact-checked.

Blizzard is a big company with lots of lawyers and copyright symbols and lawyers, which I respect. I did not write the code for WoW and therefore all the images and references you see are the property of the party with the most lawyers and the code writers- Blizzard. I hope I don't offend them in any way.

Otherwise, the stuff on this blog is mine. Please give me and anyone else credit for their work on the internet.

End Post