Glyphs are back on the menu, ish.

How did the aggressive under-cutter fair?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the bottom falling out of the Glyph market, this was entirely down to one individual who was selling just about every glyph possible at a knock down price of 25g.  I managed to catch up with him via in game mail and he was kind enough to explain is reasoning; briefly he was trying to force new entrants out of the market by removing the profit for them, thus increasing his profit in the long run by reducing competition, the full post is here. Anyway, it seems the day has come where the glyph embargo has been lifted, and to my surprise it seems to have worked! perhaps not as well as may have been intended, there’s still a fair bit of competition about, but the prices seem to be higher, or at least there seems to be more highly priced (200g+ glyphs) on the market.  I have to admit, I was a little sceptical, mainly based on the fact that people can’t go bust in WOW, so they could simply stop selling for a while and come back to the table when the prices increase (I suspect they still might). 

For the moment the ‘lesser’ Northrend and older glyphs are generally going for around the 100g mark and the newer and more in demand ones for anything up to 300g.  This is far above the prices seen before the undercutting, though there are still the glut of pointless or underused glyphs and the ones that are commonly used to level the skill that skulk around in the sub 30g category.  I suspect the undercutting had some effect, and some of the sellers have taken a break from selling glyphs, as I did, and simply haven’t noticed the prices have gone back up yet;  I also have a sneaking suspicion that the Firelands patch has something to do with the price increase - people suddenly realising, as with flasks, that they need a few glyphs and ‘panic’ buying.  That said, the glyphs don’t seem to be flying off the shelf at the minute, trade is steady, I generally sell 1-2 per listing where as I used to sell 2-5.  It may also be that the sellers prior to the patch had gotten bored of the raiding content and were spending their time crafting and selling, now there's new stuff to do they’ve dropped the crafting to wade into the new content. 

I’ll be mailing my friendly seller to see if I can get his take on proceedings, I’ll also be taking the time to relist all the cheap glyphs I accumulated over the last couple of weeks, having had 2 shots at listing so far, I reckon I’ve made about 1k of the 2-3k I spent having sold only 5 0r 6 of the 80-90 I bought.

A big ‘F’ all in Firelands?

Is there anything in the new content patch for us casuals?

With the much awaited release of the 4.2 patch today, Firelands has opened up a whole host of new content to the raiding level 85s amongst us, but is there anything in there for the casual gamer?  On the face of it, not much, the Firelands is seemingly a raid area aimed at the harder core WOW players with no additions on the 5-man heroic front; whilst the prospect of once again being able to smash Ragnaros in the face is an alluring one, I simply don’t have the time (even less than I used to have) to get my act together and start raiding again.  Pretty short post this then… the F in Firelands does seem to be a big F-all for the casual! Not so at all!

If you skip through the content of the Firelands information pages on the Blizzard website you’ll see a section titled Content for the Casual 85, this links to one of the Dev Blogs where ‘Fargo’ talks about what's in store for the casual at 85.  Clearly there’s a whole host of trade skills, and a good few heroics, but they get a bit stale after a while, there’s only so much trade-skilling one can take in a given session, and with the rise of the, errr, Rise of Zanzilar instances the ‘old’ heroics have very little draw as there’s very little reward in it.

Quest, for me, have never had that much draw, even (especially?) the dailies, they’ve been a functional means to an end over the years, you chop your way through them, either to level up or to grind rep.  Occasionally doing a quest chain to get an item, more so on the latter since the iLvl requirement.  Occasionally there were some particularly enjoyable chains, like the various 5 man crucible type fights, that I’d go back to and do even if I had no reason to, but on the main I don’t quest purely for enjoyment, i don’t know why, it just seems a bit pointless, and repetitive if you breed alts; I suppose there just doesn’t seem to be much ‘questyness’ to it – the fact that every other player on the server is, has, or could do the exact same chain, in the exact same order doesn’t set my world on fire – how many of you went to the cinema and watched some short arsed hobbit wait patiently for three other short arsed hobbits in roughly the same clothes stab a few orcs before handing a ring in to get their reward?  It just doesn’t happen like that outside of (I almost said fantasy) MMOs.

Now once again I’ve wandered off into ramblings, and you might ask what the hell I’m on about, well here it is.  Well here it is, the developers seem to have realised the same thing, and gone some way to try and introduce a little bit of randomness in there so tat there's more of a feel that you’re embarking on your own adventure, which comprise of your own quests, with their own challengers.  And not that you’re just re-treading the footsteps of a thousand people before you the same day:

There's also a story here, a chronicle of a vicious, knock-down, drag-out fight that begins in Hyjal and progresses -- over the course of weeks -- across the mountaintop and then into the Firelands themselves. Along the way, major characters are going to get rocked, you'll meet (and destroy) a few new villains, and you'll earn yourself a small heap of nice rewards. The druids are establishing a beachhead in a hostile world, starting with little more than a pile of rocks and ultimately erecting an enormous otherworldly base.

The progression is personal: you won’t see it happen until you make it happen.

The whole post is linked here, and I’ve got to say I like the sound of it, I suppose at the end of the day, it’s just dailies, but the fact that people will be doing stuff along different ‘routes’ will mean that there’s less contention for particular quest items or mobs, there’s some better differentiation (at least in the early days) between characters and the gear they can achieve, and you’ll have less of a feeling that you’re just slogging through the same linier story in the same way as everyone else on the server.  I’m keen to see how the party dynamic is maintained in this, hopefully it wont be a simple case of you go do your quests and I’ll help, then we’ll do mine.

I’d like to see these principles extended to the daily quests, Jewelcrafting in particular is a  particular bugbear of mine, you have a selection of a handful of quests which may crop up as he daily, everyone else on the server gets the same daily, which simply means either the price of nightstone rockets for a day at a time, or the elementals in Mount Hyjal get beaten up and their dinner money stolen again.  I’m currently on the train home and might get an hour or so this evening to try them out, that is as long as the patch downloader doesn’t take its usual half day to sort its shit out.

Financial Crisis

What do you do when the bubble bursts and someone ruins your fun on the Auction House? – PANIC!

Dealing with a competitive market environment on the Auction House is a topic which comes up a lot in the various blogs and sites which look at how to make gold in WOW.  It’s something which I’ve had to deal with on numerous times over the past few weeks and poses a constant dilemma.  Do you undercut other sellers, if so by how much, at what point is it not worth your while to undercut?  do you undercut aggressively (i.e. by a large margin) or do you stick your items up for a few silver less.  Or as I’ve been doing with potions do you go for the mid price, knowing that unorganised panicking raiders will probably buy them.  Do you just back off and leave it for a few days if there are a lot of low priced items in your area, or do you go on the offensive and actively buy up low priced items and relist them at a higher price?  The trouble with WOW is there’s no real way to differentiate your wares, its a fact that there can only ever be one, and no more than one, lowest cost operator in a (real world) economy, all the other operators operate, for whatever reason, at a higher cost level so, if competing on price alone, would either have to accept lower profit margins or go bust.  What actually happens is people compete on other things, why are Audi’s more desirable than Volkswagens? which in turn are more desirable than Skoda’s – they’re all made by the same company, surely they’d sell for the same price? things like brand perception, value added services, addons which are over and above the basic needs; in WOW the only thing you can compete on is price.  This means you’re valuing your time in terms of gold, how much gold is half an hour of your time worth? What’s the most profitable way of farming gold?  If playing the Auction House becomes so unprofitable that you can make more gold per hour than grinding then why bother at all?

Where am I going with all this I hear you ask? well, a strange thing happened on the AH last night, someone listed a job lot of glyphs for 24g99s, in stacks of 5, I don’t mean just a few of the cheaper levelling Glyphs, I mean pretty much every glyph possible.  Now on my server the median average (i.e the most common) range for the higher end glyphs is 85-100g, the lesser glyphs tend to go for a bit less, some go for upwards of 200g all depending on the current supply.  As a rule I don’t sell for less than 50g, I always undercut by 5s for anything less than 100g and always by 25g for anything over 100g up to 250g – on a rare occasion you’ll see a glyph listed for a silly amount, I won’t just undercut that by 25g because 5 minutes later someone will come along and undercut me.  On a daily basis I sell between 5-10 glyphs and bring in between 500-1000g which isn’t too bad at all, I’d estimate about a 75% mark up if I were to have bought the mats, but as most of them are collected it’s pure profit.  More often than not, the glyphs which don’t sell are the ones which someone has undercut you on, not a problem, you just relist them using the rules you’ve set for yourself when the auction expires.

Now the same guy has listed hundreds of glyphs, all at 24g 99s, some will cost far more in terms of mats, so he or she would have been better off listing the raw mats on the AH and selling them.  So I can only assume that they are farming the mats and listing them, so on the face of it they are making 25g profit per sale, but actually I could make far more from questing than they could possibly make from grinding herbs, milling them, making the glyphs and listing them.  This got me thinking, what are they trying to achieve?  they’ve listed 5 x every glyph at the same price, in a normal (real) economy you might use this tactic to force the competition out of business (assuming your pockets are deeper than theirs) and then once they've gone bust, artificially inflate the price of your goods to make more profit in the long run.  This is WOW, people don’t go bust, so it can’t be it.  This has me puzzled, I can’t for the life of me think what they are trying to achieve.  My only guesses are, they’re a Chinese gold farmer and have far too much time on their hands, but as their aim would be to make as much gold as possible, this doesn’t wash;  they could be setting out in the glyph business and not understood how the market works, but again given they’ve clearly gone to a lot of trouble to build up the profession, used a decent addon to pick all the glyphs priced over 25g and listed their wares this doesn’t make sense to me either.  The only plausible answer that I can think of is they’re happy with a reduced profit level and going for mass sales at a low mark-up rather than profitable sales.  The only two remaining options which are less likely that I can think of are worrying; either it’s a fellow blogger doing an ‘experiment’ like myself and trying to steal my thunder, or they have more gold than sense and they’re just doing it to upset other sellers.

I’m actually planning on mailing the guy tonight and asking what the hell he’s playing at he’s trying to achieve, I’m genuinely curious as to his motives, and it should make for an interesting blog post.  I’ll let you know if I hear back (I suspect I wont) In the mean time, I’ve bought one of every glyph and banked them, I’m going to be largely retired from the glyph selling business for the foreseeable,  until the market returns to normality that is.

Pot luck with flasks

Is there a profit to be had from selling flasks and potions on the AH?

Two weeks into my Auction House experiment and I’m still pulling in the gold on the milling front, I’ve got more Blackfallow ink than I know what to do with, but the Inferno Ink is flying off the shelves.  Whilst I’m selling the more Blackfallow ink by volume, it’s not as profitable as the red stuff and I get far more of it per stack of herbs.  Currently I’ve 334 pots of it sat in my inventory and more on the Auction House.  I’m considering going to the Ink Trader and swapping a load for Inferno Ink; it’s not as profitable as selling it, but gold tied up in stock is dead gold, I’d rather take the hit, and get a reasonable profit from trading it in and then be able to reinvest, I think.  Anyway, enough of that, that's for another blog.  Today we’re talking potions, and a little bit of enchantment, but mainly potions, well flasks actually, but you get my drift.

Where as with Glyphs, your customer base is the whole server, flasks are a little more specialist.  You won’t often see a random in a PUG flasked up, however you’ll invariably see them with a full compliment of glyphs.  This means my target audience is restricted to raiders, and possibly the occasional PVPer.  The introduction of the Guild Cauldrons and double durations, I suspect, has also had a detrimental effect on potion traders, as they have both lead to a reduced need for the vialled goodness.  I also have an creeping suspicion that I chose a bit of a poor time to investigate selling potions on the Auction House on my server, most of the flasks on the, for whatever reason, most of the flasks on the AH were slightly below the 50g mark, some of them far lower and all of them pretty much at cost or selling at what seemed to be a loss.

Not wishing to report back that I took a quick look, decided against it, and went down the pub instead; I decided to take a punt on the two best looking marked up flasks, which were Steelskin and Four Winds.  I bought mats enough for 25 of each, and set my alchemist off crafting.  Very quickly it became obvious that my initial assumption that I was only going to break even was a little flawed, the procs on alchemy basically account for the profit to be made – with 25 casts of each I mustered 27 Flasks of Four Winds and 30 Flasks of Steelskin.  It’s worth noting that I’ve only made 50 flasks in total (plus procs) thus far, I’ll be expanding my range and making more in the coming week, a stag do got in the way of my investigations this weekend which understandably took priority.

So how did I do? well, of the 57 flasks, I’ve sold 50 of them, the Steelskin ones going better.  After a slow start at the beginning of the week, selling only a handful, things suddenly went crazy on Sunday and Monday evening (my auctions had expired on Saturday night and I was in no position or state to relist them..).  As I suspected, it seems that potion sales are hugely raid dependant, I know a good number of the guilds on my server raid on Sunday and Monday evenings.  Here’s the P&L for my efforts

	mats	Ave. cost per mat	total cost of mats	ave. selling price	Net Profit per flask	total profit inc procs
Flask of Steelskin
Volatile Life	8	2g 76s 67c	22g 13s 33c
Cinderbloom	8	0g 85s 91c	6g 87s 30c
Twilight Jasmine	8	3g 59s 00c	28g 72s 00c
			57g 72s 63c	57g 33s 33c	0g 39s 30c	276g 84s 25c
Flask of the Winds
Volatile Life	8	2g 76s 67c	22g 13s 33c
Azshara's Veil	8	0g 98s 85c	7g 90s 77c
Whiptail	8	2g 05s 92c	16g 47s 38c
			46g 51s 48c	48g 65s 00c	-2g 13s 52c	296g 62s 89c

Not a bad return for my efforts, but not great either, I suspect making things in bulk will aid things as I can just set my trade skills mod off creating stuff and click on process queue every now and then.  Clearly from my experience, there’s a little more going on than meets the eye, most of my sales were not one-offs, they were bulk purchases, so people coming into the AH and buying a job lot, whether this be enough for a guild cauldron for a raid, restocking their own flasks for the next weeks raids, or simply just spotting a good price and taking advantage.  I’ve also noticed the number of flasks listed varies vastly, dependant on who’s come along and made a bulk purchase.  This means that it’s not necessarily the best idea to be the cheapest vendor, if the cheapest (say) 50% of flasks listed always tend to sell, you simply need to make sure you’re in the cheapest half, rather than the lowest price.  This is in stark contrast to Glyphs, where unless you’re the lowest priced, you’ll rarely if ever sell your wares.

I suspect there is money to be made from flasks, I further suspect a good knowledge of the raiding times of the guilds on your server may have an influence on their price and sales.  I’d also guess that the impending content introduction in 4.2 will boost the demand and thus price as people rush to do the new content.  I’m not so sure about the Elixirs yet, I’m planning to have a dabble in the current week or two and will let you know, but as they’re low value and even less widely used than flasks, I doubt their viability.  Next up for later this week / next week will be a look at enchanting, if I can work out how to automate the procedure of working out what each vellum will sell for before creating it.

Becoming a wheeler-dealer

My little auction house experiment
You may have noticed my posts over the last few weeks have become more focussed on the economics of the game, this is partly in that nothing much has changed for my primary focus of the priest on the holy healing front or shadow DPS, and partly because I’ve had less ‘session’ time to actually do much in one shot rather than just pottering around and levelling alts.  I’m even struggling to find the time to get 5 man heroics in.

My regular reader will also know that I’ve been making a fair bit of cash from my auction house adventures, primarily as a result of selling glyphs on my mage.  So I’ve decided to have a look at what a true wheeler dealer could do on the Auction House.  I’m not really setting myself any rules for this, other than I’m using an alt that I haven’t played since TBC, I’ve cleared out it’s bags and bank and deposited the sum of 1000g with it.  I considered starting off with a smaller sum of 1g or less, but that's already been done; 1000g strikes me as a reasonable amount you’d have ‘spare’ after levelling to 85 so why not.

I will be allowing myself to use alts trade skills, so for instance, I might buy a job lot of herbs, send them to my priest and convert them into potions (whilst paying for the glass vials of course).  But I wont be using any collection skills, questing or grinding; all the materials will be bought from the auction house or from vendors.  All of my sales will be made on the Auction House, I won’t be ‘advertising’ stuff in trade, though I’ll reserve the right to sell stuff who happen to post a WTB advert in trade while I’m online.
I’ll be posting my results over the coming weeks, I’ll be concentrating on one or two areas at a time, slowly expanding my horizons as I get more familiar.  I’ll also be using this opportunity to investigate the addons available to aid a trader.

I currently use auctionator rather than auctioneer, as it’s simply easier to get to grips with and use.  I’ve just installed bean counter to help me keep track of what’s going on and I’ve got a couple of tooltip type addons to help me assess the value of items quickly, more details in my post here.

So first up, I’m going to stick with what I know, herbs and glyphs.  Glyphs are my normal business, I’m making a steady 2-5k in gold per week depending on how much time I spend messing around making them and playing the AH.  I’ve occasionally ‘gone aggressive’ and bought out glyphs that have been listed for stupidly low values and relisted them, but I haven’t made a habit of it.  My first course of action was to use auctionator to run through all of the glyphs on the auction house, any which I spotted for less than 20g that were either the only one on, or the next lowest was over 100g I promptly bought and relisted, I’ll be doing this from time to time whilst being careful not to ‘eat my own dinner’ and compete with my mage.  I’ll be looking to expand into the other areas of gems enchants and so on once I get a better idea of what sells and what doesn’t.  200g later and I’ve bought myself about 15 glyphs and relisted about 8 (some are duplicates and I figure there’s no point listing them yet).

Next up its herbs; I’ve noticed for sometime that, due to its abundance and relative lack of use to alchemists, Cinderbloom is dirt cheap on my server, often down as low as 50s each generally more around the 75s – 1g25s level.  Now ink goes for a lot more, per stack of 20 (including the guild level procs) I’d expect to get around one pot of Inferno ink and up to 6 pots of Blackfallowink plus any guild level ‘perk’ procs.  Inferno ink is going at 45g or there abouts per pot, and Blackfallowink is listed at 14g (which I think is a bit high to shift in volume, I’ll give it a go undercutting it but I suspect I’ll need to drop it to sub 10g per pot).

After spending around 500g on herbs, mailing them of to my miller and listing them I’ve got a few hundred gold left and payment waiting in my mail box for two of the glyphs that I listed earlier waiting for me.  Not a bad start.  Check back in the next few days and I’ll post my first set of results.

Sounding the Death Knell for ‘Old Heroics’

Are the original Cata heroics dead and buried already?

As my regular reader may have noted, I’ve not written much on here recently; this is due mainly to me sunning myself in various parts of Europe.  Hope you all had fun while I was away… Having had a mini-break from WOW of just under 2 weeks (which I think I needed as I was becoming a little jaded anyways) I waded back into ZG and ZA with my priest.  Oh how I was rusty, it’s amazing how you forget the subtleties of playing your class after a bit of a break.  Anyway, after five minutes of flailing about aimlessly, I remembered how to cast Chakra and all was well.  I completed a few runs on the priest, but as I’m pretty much as well geared on my priest as I’m going to be from the new heroics (although the damn 2h caster staff from ZG still eludes me) I thought I’d dust off the DK tank and the druid and do a few ‘old’ heroic runs.  Now I know that they’re not technically that old, more middle aged, but that seems to be the way everyone seems to refer to all of the 5 man instances apart from ZA & ZG; far be it from me to fly in the face of convention.

Firstly I dusted off the tank, now I haven’t actually done much tanking since the release of the 4.1 patch as I’ve been concentrating on the mage and the priest.  My ilvl was 2 below the requirement for the Zanzilar instances so I’m pretty well geared as the old heroics go, but oh how I was rusty.  I actually took some time to read up and refresh my memory on tanking with the DK before venturing into an instance.  First off it was Grim Batol, oh the joy (my regular reader knows how I love this place, if you’re not him, have a read of this).  Not only was it Grim Batol, it was a half complete Grim Batol, their previous tank had deserted them, give them a chance I though, ‘he may have just disconnected’.  Oh how wrong I was.   We were at General Umbriss the penultimate boss in there, it’s really not that difficult as DPS or healer (especially with a reasonably geared tank), its a simple matter of not getting too far away so the breath can be avoided, not standing in shit, and dpsing the adds which spawn.  The healer, it seems, had a death wish, running at spawned adds, standing in the shit, and generally just jumping off cliffs as much as possible, but that’s not the worst of it, of the three DPS, only one of them managed over 5k, and him only just.  Now I know DPS isn’t everything, but we had a druid, hunter and a mage, regardless of how bad their gear was they should be kicking out at least double that; hell on my fire mage I was getting close to 12k on some boss fights before getting a single piece of heroic gear.

After five failed attempts, five failed attempts that weren’t even close and showed no signs of improvements, I decided enough was enough.  Now I hate dumping groups like this, but it was clear this was really going nowhere.  I took the time to apologise and politely (I hope)explained that I didn’t feel this groups DPS was anywhere near what was needed and left, I suppose I could have pointed out that their positioning sucked, and at least two of them didn't have a clue how to play their class, but I decided against it; to be fair, I’m not the greatest tank in the world and it would have felt a touch hypocritical.

So I queued for another random, after a quick food break, back refreshed, we were off to the Lost City of Tol’vir.  The first pull went badly, partly my fault I suppose, but not helped by someone breaking the crowd control at least twice and the groups inability to attack the marked targets.  Before the fight was over, the mage who’s crowd control had been broken had left.  Replacing the departed mage we cracked on, round to the first boss.  Now this boss, lets face it, is pretty easy.  Don’t stand on mines, avoid the charge (which is telegraphed well in advance of it happening), and blast away.  As I was kiting xxx boss xxx round for about the tenth circuit, it struck me that things weren’t going to well, we finally killed it, and I had a cursory glance at the DPS meters; none of the DPS had more than 4k!! what on earth is going on?? ok, there’s a bit of movement which effects the numbers, but not that much.  At this point I had a quick inspect of peoples gear, it was clear that at least one of the party had cheated the ilvl requirements, the rest of the party was in low to average quality gear, but you’d expect them to be able to manage the instance easily.  Not long after the group fell apart.

I ran a few further instances, both on the tank and the druid healing.  I witnessed it all, tanks who don’t know how to tank (no not me, worse than that), healers who had no clue how to manage their mana pool, DPS who refuse to switch to adds on bosses, and my favourite of all, people who were new to instances (which is fine, we all had L plates once up on a time) who were asked directly “do you know what to do here” only to cause a wipe and say, “sorry this is my first heroic, I didn’t know what to do”.

Not the most enjoyable afternoons play I’ve ever experienced, but it made for a new rant post, it got me thinking, why is it so bad in PUGs for old heroics? and it struck me, they’re basically training areas for people aspiring to the Zanzilar instances and 10 man raids.  People are able to power level to 85 from scratch in a few days, either not touching an instance on the way or being so overpowered, their inability to play their class doesn’t matter.  They hit 85, buy the gear they need to meet the ilvl, and then hack straight into the heroics. 
I’ve met a lot more new players also over the last few days in old heroics, either WOW is undergoing a resurgence in new subscriptions, or there are less experienced players doing the older content; I suspect the latter.  It seems people plough through the old heroics, gathering the gear they need and then jump straight into the new content; why wouldn’t you?  There’s very little reward for hanging around after you’ve met the ilvl, you’ll replace most of the gear in a few runs of the new stuff anyway.

So you’re not going to get too many people hanging around with better than average gear, so those players with poor gear stand out far more, they can no longer expect to be carried by the players doing the better DPS.  Those players who are ‘good’ players tend, in my experience of the last few days, to be far less forgiving, I’ve seen people drop out on inspecting other peoples gear before a shot had been fired, I’ve seen far more abuse from players, who weren’t that good themselves, and generally people treating PUGs as their means of getting to better things as quickly as possible, not really caring about who they trample over on the way.  The one thing I haven’t seen (yet) is ninja looting of gear which is better suited to others in the party.
It strikes me that the new ZA & ZG instances are where it’s at at the moment, and as everyone is clamouring to meet the requirements to get into those they expect to be handed the gear on a plate from the lesser instances, it seems to be fostering the kind of abhorrent behaviour which no one particularly likes to see, and also exposes the newer players to the game to an environment where they’re most certainly not going to learn, and more likely going to get turned off the game quickly.

Now I’m not saying that I don’t want new content, I’m already starting to feel that I’ve done the two new heroics to death, but Blizzard need to be wary of releasing new content which walks all over the existing stuff, are we going to get to a stage where the next lot of dungeons are released, which means that ZA & ZG simply become gearing zergs? With patch 4.2 coming along sometime soon, T11 gear is going to be far more attainable, I suspect so.  Blizzard have already proved they are capable of revitalising old content, in the changes they’ve made to the lower level zones, but as I’ve already mentioned in many of my other posts, the lower level instances, that is, the instances that aren’t the top level heroics, are just a joke.  Without a bit of care, Blizzard could be nullifying most of the content they created for Cataclysm only half a year after it was released.

Is bigger always better?

How to maximise your mining and herbing returns in a troll-eat-troll world

Collecting herb and ore has seen thousands of wow players over the years spending countless hours stooped over their computer into the long hours of the night filling their bags full of crap hard earned bounty.  Whether you’re a hardcore raider, serious casual player or just like dabbling with trade skills, collection of these consumables is vital.  there is an argument to say you could do anything which makes money and then use that money to buy these consumables, or the end products they’re used to craft from the AH, but where's the fun in that? (not apart from the fact that all professions offer their own unique soulbound items or buffs only to the characters which pursue them.    

This post takes a look at the finer art of collecting and I’ve gone to great lengths to research it, further than in any other post, and spent a whopping great eight hours compiling information for it, that’s more than a days work!  why have I done this I hear you ask?  Well firstly, I needed ore to level blacksmithing (just because, ok) and I needed to stock up on herbs to feed my alchemy and inscription habits.  My regular reader will know about my druid herber / miner toon, created solely to pull up weeds and smash lumps of rock (ok, so I’ve since found I quite like healing with her too).

So Why a (Tauren) druid?  well firstly I got hacked off collecting herbs on my mage and being constantly beaten to the weed by some git druid who doesn’t have to dismount / remount to pick the herb, which also allows you to avoid a lot of time consuming combat with local mobs.  Secondly the speed at which Taurens can pick herbs; considerably faster than other races.  Thirdly the instant flight form shape shift, gives a considerable performance improvement (especially when you’re competing with other miners for the same veins who have to mount up). Fourthly, the feral abilities mean you can slap down any inconsiderate mob(s) who happen to pick a fight when you’re mining.

There are a few other classes which I recon would be decent for collecting, mages for their blink & disappear abilities, rogues for vanish, hunters for fein death etc. but the instant cast flight form and not having to shape shift (i.e. dismount) for herbing sold it for me.
I’ve also made a point of learning both collection (discounting skinning and enchanting as they're more killing and collecting), I’ve had individual miners and herbers for a long period, and it always struck me how much time i was wasting doing one at a time, so I bit the bullet and reorganised my professions between alts to accommodate this, and wow has it paid off!

So you’ve got your collector toon up to level 85, and you’re about to set out on your first run, where should you go? good question, there are quite a few questions you need to ask yourself – firstly what is your priority item? are you collecting stuff to sell on the AH? are you looking to feed a fabricating profession (like blacksmithing or alchemy) habit? or are you looking to just collect raw materials for for of the ‘destructive’ professions like inscription or gem crafting where you don't care what the raw material is, you just want to mill or prospect it.

If you don’t care about the type of material you’re collecting, you might be surprised at which areas may be the most profitable for you to use (by profitable I mean in terms of both AH value and item yield), more of that in a moment.  If you’re looking to use specific items, such as Elementium or Pyrite, you’ll be restricted to specific zones.  Items like Twilight Jasmine only grow in one zone, so if you must have that item for a specific potion you must go to the Twilight Highlands. You need to consider both the number of available ‘nodes’ in the zone, and the comparable difficulty (i.e. time) in getting between them, for example, Zone A might have 100 nodes, but be massive, Zone B having 80 nodes but being half the size of A would generally mean that the average distance between nodes is closer, thus you’ll get more reward for your time.

Pick your primary aim(s), and head to the zone which offers the best reward for them, lets say for the sake of argument, my priorities are Obsidium and Cinderbloom, I’ve got a choice between Mount Hyjal and Deepholm, as both zones offer both in abundance.  Ore tends to be harder to come by, in my experience, so I pick myself a route which takes my through the most populous areas for ore, stopping off for any herbs I see, one exception for this is whiptail in Uldum, which only really grows on river banks where there are few ore nodes, so I make a detour on my route to encompass the rivers.  Use gatherer to plan your route, I always also have a secondary screen up with a map of the locations of my primary item type from wowhead.

The last thing to look at is competition, the time of day you collect is key.  If possible look to collect at off peak times when there are few others around to compete with, i tend to do a /who ‘zone name’ before heading out just to check how many other level 85s there are there (or if there are any other names which I recognise as being miners or herbers, or both, from previous outings).  There are two ways to dealing with competition; passively - you either give up and wait till later or go somewhere else.  Or you go on the offensive and beat your opponent forcing them to either give up themselves or accept a reduced reward.  Both will generally lead to a reduced reward for yourself, it depends on how confident you are.  If you are confident you can beat them, stay and fight, if not spend your time elsewhere.

So you’re off collecting, is there anything more you can do to to aid collection?  well yes, of course there is, or I wouldn’t of mentioned it would I? silly.  If you’re a seasoned collector, you may notice that the little yellow dots sometimes appear on the mini map after you’ve passed them with alarming frequency, this isn’t due to you being the luckiest soul alive and seeing multiple node re-spawns, I’m pretty sure this is down to server lag (i.e. you’re moving so fast the map hasn’t updated from the server to your screen in time).  I tend to fly in a slight zig zag, nothing to severe, this has both the effect of slowing your ‘map movement’ down a touch in order to give the nodes time to appear, and it means that you cover more ground in the candidate areas; veins tend to spawn on staggered ridges, simply flying straight along the edge of one of these will generally put you out of range of some of the spawns.  Make sure you use your downtime wisely, you have a couple of seconds when you’re hitting a vein or picking a herb, use this to your advantage and plan your next move, take a look at your map and spin round to face the direction of your next move, you can do this without interrupting the collection.  This is especially important when you can see several yellow dots, you want to get to them as soon as possible else someone else might beat you to them.

If you do see multiple dots on the minimap, I tend to go for the herbs first if I’m not worried about competition, pick the herbs quickly, and then shape shift for the ore.  If there is competition in the area, hit the high value ore targets first, if you have to lose something it should be the less valuable stuff, and from experience there tends to be more miners out there than herbers.  If you do encounter competition, and you decide to ‘stay and fight’ make sure you know your route well, and make sure you know any little short cuts which you might be able to sacrifice in order to get in front of your opponent, who is more than likely on a similar route to you.

So what about this extensive research? Well here it is! basically I spent a couple of days over the bank holiday, when I should have been drinking, but illness had other ideas, running different zones and recording the results to see which would actually be the best.  I did a quick straw poll of my guild:

“where’s the best place to mine?”

“where’s the best place to herb?”

I didn’t qualify either of the questions intentionally, I just wanted to see what peoples initial reaction was, unsurprisingly that Uldum and Deepholm came out on top, and Mount Hyjal got absolutely no votes.  Looking at wowhead, I compiled this table of the number of nodes in each zone:


From this table you can see that Uldum has the most herbs, Deepholm the most ore, and Deepholm again for a combined total.  So it’s simple right? never leave these two zones for mining and herbing right? wrong.  These numbers, expose the problems with statistics, on the face of it they’re best, but these raw figures don’t take into consideration the size of the zone (i.e. the average distance between nodes) or the competition (I'm assuming respawn times are the same from zone to zone as I have no means of gathering evidence to the contrary).

So how do we tell which is the best zone then?  here’s what I did:  I ‘sampled’ each zone, for a few runs of between 15 and 45 minutes and took the average yields of each, I also recorded the population of the zone from a /who before and after each run (this wont take into account alliance toons in the zone, so should be used as an indication only but given the ratio of characters from your server you can take an educated guess (or create a toon on the other faction and do a /who there too, I’m just not that anal… ok, I am, but I’ve only just thought of it). I recorded the contents of my bags at the end of each run, and also made notes of the number of nodes I lost to competition, and the number of times I was forced to kill aggrod mobs when mining.  I actually abandoned an Uldum run after four or five minutes having seen three other miners and two herbers in that time, in hindsight I with I’d carried on to get some figures of how bad it can actually be with sustained competition, but I didn’t, so tough luck…


This is actually a cut down version for display as the full list is too wide to fit on a web page and still be able to read without something in the Hubble range of magnification, a full break down can be found in the spread sheet here.

As you can see from the (full spread sheet) table, my best run was in Deepholm with a massive 13.27 ore & herbs per minute, but surprisingly the next best, and probably most consistently good (if looking at total yield) was Mount Hyjal! this is due in my view, to lack of competition from other collectors who assume its rubbish, the relative small size of the collecting areas, and the ease at which mobs can be dispatched or avoided due to their lower level.  When you dig a little deeper (pun intended) due to the amount of Elementium and Pyrite available, Uldum would seem to be the best, if your primary aim is profit from the AH or Black Smithing. 
So which is actually the best then? well I’m afraid there isn’t an answer any more concrete than ‘it depends’.  It depends on what you’re aiming to achieve, and the competition you’re facing.  For pure blacksmithing, due to the pyrite content, I’d say it's got to be Uldum, if you’re focus is ore for prospecting, then Deepholm has to shade it because you get both Elementium and Obsidium.  If you’re collecting herbs simply to mill (and thus you don’t care what they are) then Deepholm is also the place for you.  If you’re looking to use the herbs for potions, then you need to target the zones which have the best yield of the brand of herb you need, clearly Whiptail and Twilight Jasmine only grow in Uldum and Twilight Highlands respectively, so you’re pretty restricted.  the only zone I’d not bother with is Vashir, the swimming around is too slow, and, although it’s relatively small with absolutely no competition, the nodes are too sparse.  My real top tip, is consider Mount Hyjal, my own assumptions and my quick straw poll completely overlooked it, but the lack of competition means it is actually pretty good.  As a collector who is after stuff for Blacksmithing, Prospecting, Inscription and Alchemy, my general hunting grounds will be Uldum, Deepholm and Mount Hyjal, with an occasional forray into the Twilight Highlands when I need to stock up on Jasmine.  If you’re collecting purely for profit and sticking everything on the AH, then it’s even more dependant on your servers economy, you need to have a look at what’s going for the best prices on the auction house and tailor your runs accordingly.

One thing to note, I think I’ve probably done Uldum a little bit of a disservice on the herbing front, my feeling is that there are far more herbs, but I was primarily following a mining route with occasional trips down the river for whiptail, I pretty much ignored the other herb locations.
Finally, my tips for more effective collecting

• roll a Tauren Druid
  
• have both mining and herbing professions on the same character
  
• invest in the fastest flying skill available
  
• bind your shape shift to flight form to an easily accessibly key (I use the middle mouse button)
  
• avoid combat wherever possible, it slows you down
  
• install gatherer
  
• plan your zones / rough route in advance
  
• do a quick /who to check a zones population and for ‘usual suspects’ who are regular competitors
  
• decide your tactics on competition, stay and compete, or give up / move to another zone
  
• try and collect in off peak times if possible
  
• when you’re actually collecting an item, quickly flick to the map to reorient yourself and plan your next hop
  
• don’t dwell on the occasional nodes which you can’t get to or appear / disappear as you move, there are a few bugged nodes about due to clipping or phasing issues
  
• make sure you have plenty of room in your bags
  
• don’t be afraid to utilise the AH, if you need Cinderbloom and its 20s whilst Elementium is 20g, spend your time collecting Elementium, sell it and buy Cinderbloom

One last note, the ‘druid’ pictured at the top was an Eagle which swooped past my face in the centre of London as I was mid way through writing this post,  I can only assume he was trying to beat me to a node in the centre of Trafalgar Square and sat there mocking me as I walked away empty handed…
It’s also worth noting that the time I’ve spent doing the ‘research’ is by no means statistically significant, do do a proper statistical study I’d probably need to make my own addon and get lots of people to use it over a period of time.

Dispelling

I’ve been having a look back over my posts over the last few weeks and it struck me I’ve not mentioned my primary topic; priests, nothing, nada, not a drop.  Possibly something to do with priestly ways being done to death by the blogsphere until the next patch drops, and possibly something to do with me playing alts more, and being generally slack…. so in an attempt to redress the balance a little, here we go, a post on dispelling for Shadow (and any other) Priests.

Dispelling (and decursing or curing poison etc. I’ve decided I’m going to use dispel from now on to cover every generic kind of ‘remove something’ simply for my sanity, don’t come whining to me ok… deal with it) like interrupts have made a bit of a resurgence since Cata, yes they were used in previous versions of WOW, but I can’t ever remember an occasion when they were needed so heavily.  Yes, back in the days of Molten Core and Lucifron as a mage(which I was at the time) you’d find yourself decursing 40 people.  Back when decursive was ‘legal’ you simply mashed the button 40 times and carried on.  Then it was outlawed and there was uproar; dispelling classes would have to do more than just mash keys, oh the pain!! to placate people (I assume, or perhapse they realised that, actually, selectively dispelling tens of people was quite hard, and actually VERY dull).  Blizzard introduced mass descurse/spell/poison Prior to Cata there was the occasional boss fight which required this, but it was occasional, and it was generally restricted to raids, not 5 mans, and you’d generally have a designated mass dispeller who did nothing but dispel.  In Cata, as a healing priest, I constantly find myself dispelling nasty crap, even on trash, to mitigate healing needs, there’s some quite nasty stuff which gets thrown about.  In Grim Batol, Throngus really needs to be dispelled, the end boss, Asaad, in Vortex Pinacle is one example who requires the use of mass dispel, and a whole host of others.

Gone are the days when dispelling was the sole responsibility of one unfortunate in a raid, and gone are the days when only the healers are responsible for dispelling.  I still occasionally see the ‘we always used to do it that way’ from the DPS, but I’ve found more and more that when I’m shadow, I need to dispel to help my healer out.  It’s quite polarising actually, the good DPS players tend to be those ones who know how to use their classes secondary abilities like interrupt, dispel, and to some extent crowd control (though most classes have had some form of crowd control for years so are generally quite comfortable with it).

I use healbot when I’m healing, binding my most used healing spells to direct mouse clicks, my lesser used spells with a shift-click and my dispel abilities an alt-click.  I replicate this across my alts, so on my druid my most usual heal is the left click, my ‘panic’ heal is shift right click, my dispel mechanic is alt-click and so on, this really helps (I find) with the muscle memory.  I used to disable healbot when I was playing DPS to give me more screen space, but recently I’ve kept it active so I can see when people need dispelling; if the healer is doing it (and not struggling) I’ll ignore them and melt away.  If we’re having problems then theres an easy indication both because the debuffs are highlighted and I can see peoples health bars more clearly. 
I’ve actually since re-skinned healbot so it’s not so big when I’m playing DPS, I still have all of the same keys bound so I can not only dispel, but also drop out of shadow form and start healing if I’m needed.
More generally, I’m not a big fan of mass dispel (in heroics) there’s for the bosses like Asad in Vortex Pinnacle where several classes can get out themselves, and anyone with any nouse is able to jump to avoid the debuff in the first place so dispel is simply used to pick up the stragglers.  In most other scenarios its simply a case of knowing the debufs that mobs dish out on knowing whether they’re worth getting rid of; for instance a melee speed debuf on a caster can be left.  This has got me wondering if there's any intelligence built in to healbot (or any other mod) or any other add to tell you if you really need to dispel someone.  I’ll have to break Google out when I get home.  Clearly in raids it’s a different story, its a case of choosing the most efficient method, be it mass or point dispelling. 

I think my point is, as a class who can dispel, you should always look to dispel, if possible, (and beneficial) whether you’re the healer or DPS; don’t assume someone else will do it, they’re probably assuming you will.  Know your debuffs too! know what might be coming, and be ready to deal with it.  Oh and when some muppet spams the DPS meter at you, spam the interrupt / dispel count back at them.

How I roll

I’ve finally got round to adding a blogroll, to the site (see the right hand menu), something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, but never quite got round to it until I was having a look at my referral stats over the weekend (you know I’m a stats whore..) and had my conscience pricked as I seem to be making it on to the blogrolls of the occasional other blogger (my regular reader need to take note: you’re no longer the only one).

I thought rather than just stick it up unannounced I’d prattle on talk a little about why some of them are on there.  Firstly my main port of call, and probably the initial reason I started reading blogs; WOW Insider, it’s moved about a bit over the years as it’s become bigger and bigger (and possibly a tad more commercial), and is the only blog which I know about which can boast coverage of every class and every spec and a whole host of other regular columns.  Fox Van Allen is the regular Shadow Priest author, Dawn Moore the Holy (and Disc)  and both talk an enormous amount of sense (generally).  Seriously, if you’re regularly reading WOW blogs and haven’t heard of these guys you’re not doing it right.

One of the first blogs I click on when catching up on the rss feed is Divine Aeigis, with two main authors, Lyria and Lilitharien with regular posts focusing on the pro’s and con’s and the use of specific priest abilities, raiding, up and coming developments and patches, its a must read for me.  Next Comes the Stories of O, written by Oestrus,  who until very recently had jumped ships and was authoring for Divine Aegis.  Oestrus is now back on the one blog and covering similar types of topics to Divine Aegis but is often found branching out to druid (branching! geddit?? ), shaman, and paladin healing to take more of a generic look at all things healing.

The Greedy Goblin is a strange sort of blog, Gevlon strikes me as a pretty hardcore player of WOW and his views are often quite extreme, and polarise the blog community; just have a read of some of the comments on his more controversial posts if you don't believe me.  The blog is extremely  ‘elite’ player focussed and Gevlon spends a lot of time ‘helping’ morons and slackers ‘improve’.  I’ve included a commentary on this blog specifically because it stands out as one of the prime reason why people should blog; Whilst his views aren’t always popular, or in line with my own, Gevlon generally makes good, well balanced arguments, comments are (understandably I suppose) pre vetted by Gevlon as I would imagine he gets a fair few abusive comments, but to his enormous credit, he always seem to post critical comments (by critical I mean “I don’t agree, and here’s why…” comments, not “this post is crap…” the latter I would consider abuse).  I’ve seen some excellent debates go on in the comments of the posts here as a result, and I’ve taken inspiration for a number of my own posts as a result of reading posts or comments here.

Moving from the more niche focussed blogs to, well, random, we have Pugnacious Priest, I’m sure some time in the distant past this blog was more focussed around priests, now it’s at best loosely priest focussed, but is still an excellent and entertaining read.  Larissa and her Pink Pigtail Inn is another one of these blogs that I wouldn’t class as having a specific focus, taking a look at wow from the perspective of a raider, gives an enthralling commentary on the thoughts of Larissa on WOW and the Blogsphere.  with the added bonus that Tamarind, who was recently lost to the blogsphere, occasionally stops by with a guest post.

I also couldn’t write a post like this without mentioning two of the blogs and bloggers that have, for whatever reason, stopped blogging.  Misery written by Merlot which was loosely based around his shadow priest but encompassed an excellently articulated commentary on WOW.  And then there was Righteous Orbs, written by Tamarind, an excellent,well thought out, and thoroughly engaging blog.  Both of these guys decided to hang up their pen about the time I stared putting my ramblings down in prose and I do hope both will have a change of heart soon (though as I mentioned above Tam does occasionally pop up else where, but its just not enough).

Well there's a seemingly random sample of the blogs I read, there are loads more, but I think I’ve prattled on for long enough.  My blogroll will contain only  blogs which I genuinely read and wont be an attempt to get more links.  Rather topically I received an email from some random as I was half way through writing this post “I really like your blog ‘pleasefeedthetroll’ would you be willing to exchange blogroll inks….” yada yada yada.  Looking at the ‘blog’ it was clearly nothing to do with WOW, or actually anything in particular and just survived on trading links with other spam blogs.  I almost replied “certainly, if you can tell me one thing about the content of my blog”, but sensibly decided to consign it to the spam trap instead.  Hey ho….

Pulling it out of the fire

Last night something strange happened to me! I started looking, and feeling, like a proper tank for extended periods of time in a heroic. I was milling around waiting for the footy to start (disgraceful refereeing btw) with nothing to do, a couple of guildies wanted a heroic so I asked what classes they wanted. The answer came back "a tank would be nice" the poor, unsuspecting, fools… Out comes the Death Knight and into the queue we go, only 4 of us so we needed to PUG the healer. Blackrock Caverns, brilliant. For some reason I've not randomly been in the place many times before, to the extent that I only just completed it on mystic for the first time over the weekend, I reckon 4 or 5 times in total on all my characters, I've always skipped Beauty and I've certainly never tanked it.

I explained to the healer and the rest of the group that this was my first time tanking the place, and that they'd have to bear with me, whipped wow wiki up on the laptop and had a quick scan of strategies, fortunately one of the guys there has an alt tank and has done it several times before. My admission also prompted the healer (I think) to say it was his first time too… great… on closer inspection it was his first time healing, he'd got a million alts so knew the instance inside out. We had a load of crowd control with two mages, so the trash was relatively straight forward, a couple of cockups here and there but nothing major. That was until we got to Karsh Steelbender, the basic strategy is to kite him in and out of the flame in the middle of the room, he can't be killed without the having debuff it gives him, but too many stacks of the debuff and the part gets overwhelmed with adds, the trick is to try and get his toe in the fire so he gets one debuff at a time, if he gets to 8 then the tank stands him out until the stack drops and it starts over. You get the picture. It's a pretty daunting task for a tank, or possibly just me as a tank, the onus is on you and only you, if you balls it up, everyone dies. More so than normal. Anyway, I checked up on the strategy and began the pull, all way going smoothly, whilst I wasn't managing one debuff at a time, I was keeping it to two, so not all too bad. We got him down to just below 30% when the healer didn't notice he was stood in crap and died. Now normally a dead healer on a boss fight means wipe, but, amazingly, not this time. The damage is pretty low and smooth in this fight, and I was at about 100% health at the time, with all my cooldowns. Blood DK's have 6 damage mitigation cooldowns (if you include Army of the Dead), or at least 6 that I've found… plus I have a click to increase dodge trinket. So I set off slowly popping cooldowns and healing myself as much as possible with Death Strike and Rune Tap. The DPS was pretty high so it wasn't long before we had him down to sub 5%, I was near death with only Army of the Dead left so out it came. Now this was nearly fatal in itself; as I mentioned earlier the boss needs a debuff from the flames to take damage, the whole point of popping Army of the Dead was to take aggro from me to allow me to heal, but unfortunately I popped it just slightly outside the flames so the boss became immune to damage on 1% health. Bugger. Put fear not, I have taunts! On a massive 20% health myself I utilised the DKs two taunt abilities to move the boss just enough to be in the flames before the ghouls took agro again.

Steelbenders death was greeted with calls for DK's to be nerfed and general mocking of my ability and amazement that I managed to pull it off (don't worry, I gave as much as I got…) Now I've been in situations before as a healer, or shadow priest swapping to heals, which have saved raid or party wipes, it's a great feeling to know something you, and only you, did saved the group. More so with a tank I suppose, as a healer you're expected to heal, as a tank you're expected to tank WITH healing. All in all a great confidence booster, and the satisfaction of actually, for the first time, feeling like I'm a reasonable tank, I've still got a long way to go, but I'm getting there on the tanking front. The run also gave me an appreciation for previous tanks bemoaning the aggro magnet mage, with two of the idiots (one extremely well geared) blasting away controlling aggro was a nightmare, still at least they both knew where the sheep button was.

10-man went to Maloriak

So I was milling around last night, minding my own business running a heroic when a little whisper pops up in my chat box from a guildie "have you done BWD this week?" I explained I still don't raid so clearly haven't, to which the reply comes "would you like to?" Now one of the reasons I don't currently do any raid instances is I have commitments on every evening my guild raids. Mondays I'm generally playing badminton, but as (bad) luck would have it I've sprained my wrist so was unable to play last night. As it turns out, this was a 10-man with a different guild, they are a smallish guild and struggle to make up the numbers on some nights so had invited this guildy along on a number of previous occasions (my guild has no issue with alts and casuals running 10-mans with PUGs) so I finished up the heroic and jumped in. There ended up being 3 Camelids in the raid; we started at the 3^rd boss, Maloriak, in BWD, this was their first ever pull of him, I quickly scooted round Org pulling together mats for a few potions and flasks, jumped on their Vent server, and took the summon to the instance. Their guild leader took the time to carefully explain the strategy, from the way he described it he'd clearly been there a few times, but wasn't overly sure of what he was saying for other roles than his own, as he ran through the strategy I had wow wiki up checking off its guide and making my own crib notes. I was one of three healers, a Paladin, my friend another (Disc) priest, and me. It turns out the fight was pretty simple for a healer, or specifically me, I was assigned to AOE healing so most of the usual spells in the kit bag went out of the window – I assigned Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing to alt-mouse clicks in Healbot (I normally use key binds for them in instances as they're not as useful as the direct healing spells).

As I said the healing is pretty straight forward, there's no crap on the floor to avoid, the only complexity in the fight for me was the three vial stages (he throws a vial into a cauldron which initiates different abilities), red blue and green; red meant grouping up in the middle and sticking down a few big AOE heals, occasionally running out of the group if you get a debuff. Blue meant spreading out, basically mana conservation and watching out for characters which got ice blocked in order to sling a few heals their way, and the green stage which was pretty easy healing. The phase struck me as being all about mana conservation later in the fight. The lighwell went down, amazingly it got clicked, lots, and I was struck by how good the raid leader was on vent at communicating what was going on and what people should be doing, typically I copped the first red debuff, untypically I noticed straight away, and was already running when the call came over Vent for me to move out. After the first fight ended, which was a bit of a blur in all, having gone reasonably well (30 something % I think) I had a chat with my other priest who told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to concentrate on AOE heals more and forget the direct heals – I protested explaining that there was very little raid damage and the tank was copping it, hence the skew towards direct heals and muttering something along the lines of "healings not just about the numbers". He was having none of it and politely told me to shut up and do as he said… The next pull my healing output went up, my mana conservation down, and a feeling that my effectiveness was lessened, I also suffered from three consecutive debuffs in the red phase which had me running round doing very little healing. The raid wiped because the main tank went down, I smugly announced over whisper that "I could have saved him, but you told me not to use direct heals…" (Clearly this wasn't true, I'm not that much of a dick, I was out of mana, but I do like winding people up).

We went through the motions a few more times, the raid got progressively better, as did my healing output, and more importantly my own feeling of how I was performing. On the meters I was on a par if slightly behind the Pally and ¾ of that of my fellow priest which was to be expected as my gear is pants in comparison; most importantly I felt m performance improved, to the extent that I was never in danger of going oom, with at least one CD or pot left until something went wrong like a tank dying. Unfortunately I was only able to stay for two hours, the final two pulls were very close and I had the feeling that Maloriak would be downed very soon, but alas I had a stupid-o'clock train to catch, which I'm writing this from now BEFORE 8am, so I had to leave them to it. All in all a great night, a large flasks bill, a large repair bill, and a few new friends, well worth it.

It’s not easy being a priest

I first realised I might have a little bit of an alotoholicism problem last week when I stepped back and had a look at the number of alts I have. I'm in the position now where I have 3 characters at 85, two of which (Priest and Mage) have been through tens of heroics, one which (the DK) is on his way to being reasonably geared, so I can safely say I know quite well. I've the druid which is late 60's and a Hunter Warrior and Warlock all in their 60's that I must confess I haven't played at all (yet!) since returning to WOW, a Rogue and Paladin in the 30's and the Shaman that I created but haven't played purely to make up the numbers. That's nine out of the ten classes I've spent playing, when you consider the different specs too, I reckon it's about 16 different class / spec combinations I've played, clearly some of those experiences are out of date since Cata hit as the play styles on most classes have changed significantly but you get the picture.

I was running a good few heroics over the weekend on my mage and DK as we had guild healers available, and then swapping to the priest with many of the same group. We were taking it easy and chatting as we went, when it struck me how much more involved the Priest is to play; on the mage I play a fire spec, I can easily kick out 12k DPS on regular occasion, with pretty poor gear, all that's needed is Living Bomb and Fireball till your heart's content, with a quick scorch to begin with, and looking out for Pyroblast and Fireblast procs; there's a little bit of complexity in choosing the correct spells for crowd dps, and the cool downs, but nothing overly challenging. Contrast this to the Priest, as DPS you've got three dots to keep up on the mob, your own buff to refresh, providing you have shadow orbs to be able to, Mind Flay to ensure you don't clip, SW:D to bring into the equation when the mob is at 25%, and that's before you take into account the cool down spells and when's best to use them. Cross over from the dark side and take a look at healing and it's even more complicated! There are a massive 12 healing spells which a holy priest may use in general play, another 4 occasional and "oh shit" type spells, and a further 12 situation specific spells, like Dispel Magic, which may or may not be added into the mix for a given encounter, add to this the different usage profiles of these spells, depending on what Chakra state you're in, the very fact you can now cancel Chakra after 30 seconds and recast to another state; it's a nightmare, a great big, fun filled, nightmare! Now don't get me wrong, I love the complexity the priest offers and the learning curve for playing it, anyone can pick up a priest, either healing or DPSing, but it takes a long time to master it.

Now I'm being a bit unfair to Mages in comparing them to healing Priests, I've always said tanking is harder (to master) than healing, and my experiences on the Death Knight over the last week certainly back that up, and healing is harder than straight forward DPS. But just taking the DPS comparison, looking at my first heroic with both classes, the Priest kicked out about 5k, the Mage was touching on 10k. Even on the healing front, I've been running through the old instances on my Druid, and am now getting to the stage where the instances are becoming difficult to heal (i.e. a Rogue with a few bandages and a bottle of magic spray couldn't do it) and I can't believe how simple the choices are, basically it's a hot, and a small heal (read Renew and Heal equivalents), a big heal for when things go wrong, a PoH equivalent and a reverse Holy Word: Serenity type spell (in that it removes a HoT and adds a big heal, plus an AOE healing circle on the ground, as opposed to making the next heals better with a Priest). Admittedly I'm not at 85 yet, so it might get more complex, but looking at the spell list on wowhead I doubt it's going to be that much different.

Actually the most difficult class I've played to pick up is the Death Knight, Tanking especially, but even on the DPS front; you're instantly presented with a million and one different diseases and abilities, with Runes and Runic Power to bring in, and none of the normal early learning curve as you don't start from level 1, fortunately I had a friendly guild DK, who I'll be eternally grateful to, who explained that it was more about priorities of sorts, than a true DPS (or tanking) rotation. Once you get to grips with the DK's abilities it's a lot more straight forward, it's not the face rolling it used to be by any means, but it's not hugely taxing. Of the other classes I've played, Hunters are pretty straight forward, ahem auto shot ahem, Warlocks are just wannabe Mage's with DoTs and a self-harming problem, Rogues just stab things in a similar vein to Cat Form Druids (but with knives I suppose) Paladins have it a bit harder (from memory) and warriors were a set key mashing order. Clearly if you're Tanking (well) on any of the classes which can, it takes a lot of ability, but as healing or DPS goes, I can't think of a harder (or more fun) class to play than a priest. But perhaps I'm biased? Go on tell me I'm wrong!


 

Shadow priest guide up and running

I don't think it'll show up in RSS feeds, so this is a little post to say there's a shadow priest guide page been added to the site, you can access it here or via the links across the top of the page under the banner. I'll be pulling together an equivalent holy post sometime soon, but it took a lot of effort to write and edit so don't expect it too soon. If anyone wants to see anything more over and above these on the site, or has more general comments on the content in the guide please leave a comment or email me.

The reason behind this guide is the abysmal state of information I've seen on the interweb about shadow priests, with incorrect, incomplete, cluttered, and out of date information confusing the hell out of people (including me). I've tried to keep the information minimal and to the point and will be endeavouring to keep it up to date, or at least marking it as out of date if I'm being slack.

Sold! To the gentleman at the back with the green skin and tusks.

One of the things I've never really got into in WOW is the auction house, this isn't due to a lack of interest, in fact the economy in WOW and how massively it varies from server to server fascinates me; I suppose the main reason I haven't bothered is the time it takes to make money, I've always had enough gold to get by, but never been filthy rich in WOW terms, but providing I could get hold of all the stuff I needed for raiding I would stay away. If I needed reagents I'd generally go grind for them, the only occasions I would venture into the Auction House was when I was short of time before a raid, needed a couple of materials to level up a trade skill, or when something was on there which I needed but was on for less than the time it would cost me to grind it myself; for instance, Golden Pearls, back in the days of Vanilla WOW I needed two for the Mooncloth Robe which was the best crafting robe for healing at the time, it required two Golden Pearls which retailed at 80-120g each, so I wouldn't be getting much change from 250g, 250g was a massive amount back then, so of I went to grind, it took about two hours of killing things but I got there, I'd have made about 50-80g in 2 hours of grinding so it made sense to go for the pearls. Now the duckers and divers amongst you will be asking why I didn't simply grind Golden Pearls to make money at 1 pearly an hour it'd average in the region of 100g an hour profit rather than 30 ish, well simple really, these pearls were quite rare, but also quite specialist at the time, they weren't used in too many recipes, so should anyone grind them on mass the bottom of the market would quickly fall out, and by the time I came to need the third pearl, it had. Someone had obviously been grinding, there were loads in the AH, the best price was in the region of 50g which meant it was far more advantageous to simply click buy than go spend hours grinding.

Since coming back to WOW, I've used the AH occasionally for bits and bobs, gold is quite easy to come by these days, so the occasional glyph or reagent, but again, never really selling. That was until this weekend; I've been levelling the druid over the past few weeks, while doing this I've skilled up both mining and herbing (this was my primary reason for levelling this character as I was sick of the flight form druid sweeping in, herbing, and flying off as I'm still stood there trying to dismount and wondering where the hell my herb went) on the way I've banked all of the materials (and the cloth too) gathered rather than selling it. The druid is now in the mid 60's which mean, with the stash of higher level herbs I had on my mage from his herbing, I could pretty much level inscription from 0 to 525 in one shot, there were occasions where I was a few herbs short so a swift trip to the AH filled the gaps, whilst I was being rinsed of my gold for these stacks of low level herbs, I noticed something; how much money there was to be made on the AH these days. As a result of levelling inscription I had loads of glyphs, cards and scrolls, on my server glyphs go for anything between 20-200g 20 for the crap stuff which no one but the people who must have every possible glyph for their class, around 50g for the useful but optional ones, and anything from 100-200g for the 'must have' glyphs. This is a huge amount, and probably a reflection of the 30-50g price for most stacks of herbs (other than the top level ones which are just silly prices). I decided I'd have a punt with some of the glyphs, it seemed a waste to just vendor them, so I stuck about 15 of the hundred or so I had on the AH, choosing the ones which were going for more than 80g, and just slightly undercut the best prices on there. To my surprise I sold 5-6 of them which more than covered the cost of the materials I'd had to buy to fill gaps as I levelled. Smelling a profit, I put another 20 or so on, and got thoroughly hacked off with the amount of time it took to check the prices, and create the auction. It was only a minute or so per auction, if that, but it soon mounted up. Yesterday I decided to do something about it, I decided to have a read up on the addons available for auctions, I'd previously used Auctioneer a little bit, but as I'd never really got into auctions, I'd never really tested it fully, I headed over to the developers page and to my disappointment it hadn't been updated since last October. Undeterred I had a look through wowinterface.com and curse.com, picking the addon which had been downloaded by a good number of people and received some pretty good reviews, this was Auctionator. I can now instantly drag items into the interface giving me a breakdown of the current competing auctions, automatically selecting the best price, and even offering the ability to buyout some of the sillier priced items (I spotted a Glyph of Obliterate on there for 8g, which I instantly relisted for 99g and sold 10 minutes late!). My early success encouraged me to stop slacking on the enchanting front, utilising some of the vellums I'd created for levelling (the mage is also my enchanter) I knocked out a few enchants to the level, to my surprise they sold too! All in all, with no more than an hour spent this weekend (including a good 20 minutes researching and installing the addon), I reckon I've made in the region of 1500g, now this is a bit of a false figure as I already had all of the mats for the items which I sold, but even so, if I was grinding mats purely to sell in the AH there's good money to be had.