Austerity Measures

After penning a begging letter to my competitor who’s been artificially holding the glyph market so low for a while now that there’s no longer any profit to be made in it, as I set out in my last post, more in hope of a reply than expectation; I received a reply!  I’d like to report that my guess as to what he was up to was spot on, and I called it; but as it happens, I was half right.  The glyph market has been dropping on my server a little recently, nothing substantial (since I got involved, but I can’t really comment on the prices before that) but I’ve noticed (now I think about it) that where glyphs would regularly go for around the 100g mark, I quite often see them slipping down to the 75g level, not all, just some.  This when you consider I have around 100 to 150 glyphs listed at any one time, and (used to) sell up to 10 of those per listing session can equate to quite a drop in revenue.

Now in my mail communication with the seller (I explained that I write a blog, and he’s specifically asked not to be named so I’m assuming he’s a ‘he’ and will be referring to him as ‘the seller’ from this point onwards) he set out the reasons why he’s doing what he’s doing.  The full text of the letter is shown to the right, he talks about the glyph market being “hugely profitable for months” until recently when the “new guys” (do you think he means me?) have come along increasing competition and thus lowering the prices and the profit to be had.  By setting the prices low, he’s trying to price the other sellers out of the market, by taking away the profit margins, hoping that he has deeper pockets (and more patience) than they do.
This sort of competition is quite a common occurrence in real world economics; a new market comes along, lets say selling trolls tusks.  Someone has spotted a niche for tusks, makes an investment in the R&D of developing a trolls tusk for the market, setting up a selling infrastructure and taking the tusks to market.  All is fine, there's lots of profit to be made an no real competition to speak of, everything is going swimmingly.  That is until one day someone else spots that you’re doing nicely for yourself with you big house and new car and decides they’d like a bit of that pie too.  This isn’t a problem initially, yes your sales take a hit at first as customers can now chose your tusks or someone else's, in the long run the added competition has actually helped you as there are actually enough customers to go round, and you’ve taken another look at your operation and realised that you can save money by streamlining some of it, thus making more profit per tusk.  Even though you sell less tusks, you make more profit per tusk.  All is great until, over the months, ten more tusk sellers come into the market all wanting a their own slice of the shared troll tusk-pie; and what's more, they didn’t bother doing their own R&D, they just copied yours so saved on the costs, meaning that they can sell at a cheaper level that you to such an extent that there’s no longer any profit in the market for you because everyone is undercutting you. 

At this point, something called consolidation will normally happen, either companies will aggressively buy out their competitors or merge, chose to move into a different market, or go bust.  This isn’t always enough to reduce the competition to a level to achieve a stable, sustainable, profit level for all involved.  So other avenues need to be taken, either by differentiating yourself some way(adding tassels to your tusks for example) so that people will pay more for them even though they’re a higher price.  The only other option is to compete on price alone, this is generally accepted to not be a nice place to be – someone will eventually fail if more than one seller attempts this as there can only ever be one lowest cost seller.  Very occasionally, dirty or extremely aggressive tactics will be employed; smear campaigns, aggressive undercutting and much much more can happen, the aggressive undercutting is just what we’re seeing on the glyph market.  In real world economies, the undercutting seller will generally sell their wares at an unsustainable level, either at a loss or at such an insignificant profit they may as well not bother.  This is a brinkmanship game, hoping that their competitors go bust, go away, or sell up before they do.  Once the competition is gone, the prices can be artificially inflated to far higher levels and more profit can be made than was previously possible as there is no longer any competition.  The way this is normally stopped is through legislation by governments and regulation, the government specifically stops companies doing things which will harm competition unfairly, and  ultimately raise prices or lower service levels for the end consumer.

Winding our example back to the Auction House and my current predicament, there are a few differences between real world economics and the WOW economy; Primarily, you cant go bust, you can’t buy other peoples business, and there’s no regulation, and you can’t compete on anything else but price.  People can go away, but not for the same reasons as you’d see in business; The only reason that others will stop selling, is that there is so little gold to be made, it’s not worth their time to play in that particular market.  For example if I only make 1g per glyph in profit, but each glyph takes 2 minutes to create (picking herbs, milling, inscribing the scroll), I might chose to go and make potions at 10g profit per pot for a similar effort.  Additionally, different people will have different thresholds, a school kid with an abundance of time on his hands might accept a relatively low profit, someone who has a full time job, family and drinking habit to sustain, on the other hand, may only have a few hours a week to play and decide their fun is better had elsewhere in the game.

My friendly sellers strategy is brave, but I fear may be misplaced for the reasons I’ve set out above, we’ll see, and hopefully he’ll be kind enough to tell me how he thinks his endeavours in artificially revitalising his market have gone.  I suspect some of the competition may disappear, but as soon as the market goes up they, or other new entrants, will reappear.  He also may be creating a rod for his own back, glyphs are now at such a cheap level that it’s more profitable to farm something or quest for gold and buy them, instead of going out and picking herbs to make the glyphs yourself, potential customers may just buy up all of the glyphs they’ll ever need for them and their alts, and never need to buy a glyph again (until the next WOW expansion is released) thus decreasing the demand.  I know this is happening, as it’s exactly what what I’ve done – it’s not worth my time grinding herbs and creating the glyphs at this price, so I’ve filled out all of my empty slots for every character over level 70.  He’s also running the risk that the competition will simply buy the glyphs at 25g, wait it out and undercut him at the higher levels in a few weeks time; I know this is happening already, it’s exactly what I’ve done.

As for my glyph selling antics, I’m pretty much waiting it out, as I say, I’ve bought a good few glyphs at the low levels, about 3k worth at 25g, which equates to 10-20k at previous prices (whether the market will ever recover to quite this level I’m not sure).  I’m absolutely fascinated by the effect on the economy, I’ll be monitoring the sales closely, and I wish him every success in inflating the market, if it works, it’ll benefit my sales massively.  I’ll also be monitoring the related item sales.  I’ve noticed inferno ink sales, which previously sold like hot cakes, have been slow.  I’ve also noticed that the price of potions has increased slightly, this may be coincidental, or it may be that he’s bought herbs for ink from the AH, pushing the price up.  I’ll have to write and ask…

Milling around the Auction House

My first weeks profit and report from playing the WOW economy

A week into my playing the auction house experiment and I can report I’m in profit!  Not just a couple of bronze either, with no more than 2 hours total effort (To quickly recap, I’m buying items on the auction house and reselling them either as they are, or using trade skills of my alts only, no questing or grinding is involved.). I’ve made a 300% return on my initial 1000g stake, and that’s without taking into account the stuff I’ve still listed on the AH and in my inventory which are still to sell.  In addition to my 3000g profit I reckon I’ve another 5000g worth of ‘stock’. 
In my week of playing the market, I’ve primarily stuck to buying Cinderbloom, converting it into ink, and relisting it.  I’ve had a little foray into prospecting ore, and whilst there's a profit to be made there, its more time consuming and I’m not quite sure I’ve fully ‘got’ the most profitable means yet.  I (just last night) had a look at buying herbs to make potions, but as yet haven’t sold any so that’ll be one for the next update, I’m also going to look at enchanting in the near future.

So, for the results; we’ll concentrate on the main trade first up, inks.  In total I bought 2598 Cinderbloom at an average price of 96s 80b, which I milled and turned into ink.  On average (ish) one stack of 20 Cinderbloom will produce materials for half an Inferno Ink and 5 Blackfallow Ink.  In total I’ve sold 33 Inferno Inks at a little over 43g each and 75 Blackfallow Inks at just over 10g each on average.  I’ll also point out that I ‘bought’ quite a lot of the Blackfallow Ink with my mage as I was dry which could be considered as artificially skewing my results – in total I purchased 300 of them at 7.5g each (I chose a value under the average selling price so as not to artificially inflate my profits.
Even when I ignore the stock of ink that is still on the AH unsold from the herbs I bought, I’ve made a healthy profit of just short of 2000g which is a mark up of 77%, a good return for a weeks work in anyone's money.  To put this into context, in the ‘real world’ an economist could reasonably expect a return of around 100% per year on an investment for a commercial venture.  I’ve pasted a breakdown of my P&L table below (note there are a couple of omissions of purchases I made before I installed Beancounter).

With the prospecting, I chose to sell some uncut gems, generally the ones that are used for dailies.  Cut some of the larger gems into various types which were going for a decent price on the AH and then create rings and necks out of the rest, selling the blue ones and disenchanting the green.  As you can see from the table below I haven’t sold that many of the glyphs which I bought, there were a couple of additional sales before the Beancounter install, but for some reason the glyph sales have been quite slow in the past week, and I’ve been careful not to compete with my glyph factory alt, as that would be silly, which has restricted my options.

Selling
Item name	total	number	average price
Inferno Ink	1424g 70s 00c	33	43g 17s 27c
Zephyrite	89g 70s 00c	13	6g 90s 00c
Hypnotic Dust	102g 08s 00c	38	2g 68s 63c
Blackfallow Ink	778g 75s 00c	75	10g 38s 33c
Sovereign Demonseye	94g 00s 00c	1	94g 00s 00c
Brilliant Inferno Ruby	94g 60s 00c	1	94g 60s 00c
Sparkling Ocean Sapphire	38g 70s 00c	1	38g 70s 00c
Glyph of Blade Flurry	475g 00s 00c	3	158g 33s 33c
Carnelian	296g 65s 00c	17	17g 45s 00c
Glinting Demonseye	176g 50s 00c	3	58g 83s 33c
Hessonite	5g 95s 00c	1	5g 95s 00c
				5826g 63s 00c
Purchasing
Item Name	total	number	average price
Whiptail	35g 00s 00c	20	1g 75s 00c
Cinderbloom	2514g 92s 02c	2598	0g 96s 80c
Goldclover	38g 66s 00c	40	0g 96s 65c
Bladefist Sword of the Mercenary	60g 00s 00c	1	60g 00s 00c
Glyph of Death Coil	56g 96s 99c	3	18g 99s 00c
Glyph of Death Grip	18g 99s 00c	1	18g 99s 00c
Elementium Ore	578g 10s 00c	335	1g 72s 57c
Glyph of Stormstrike	17g 95s 00c	1	17g 95s 00c
Glyph of Scourge Strike	20g 00s 00c	1	20g 00s 00c
Glyph of Gouge	40g 00s 00c	4	10g 00s 00c
Glyph of Pounce	36g 60s 00c	2	18g 30s 00c
Glyph of Voidwalker	0g 85s 00c	1	0g 85s 00c
				3418g 04s 01c
	profit with ink purchase			2408g 58s 99c

So what have I learnt with my exploits?  Well quite a lot actually, firstly, automation is key to removing the tedium from making a profit, using the Advanced Trade Skills Window to bulk craft inks is key, unfortunately milling cannot be automated, however if you’re making one type of ink then you can set it off and go do something else.  This means buying in bulk is key I’d recommend creating 300+ Blackfallow inks in one shot and then the associated Inferno Inks.  I’ve used dead time to mill stuff, so waiting in the dungeon queue or while people are afk in dungeons where possible.

The key for me to making profit is to understand the item, its rarity, its uses and its demand.  This will vary from server to server and day to day.  I tend to list items for 48 hours, but ideally you want to aim for 24 hours, or even 12 if you log on daily to ensure you’re always the most competitive.  On the supply and demand front, don’t flood the market, if you’ve just made 300 Blackfallow Ink there's little point listing the lot, this will only serve to give the impression of high supply and you’re almost guaranteed not to sell them.  I tend to list a few stacks of 20 and then another 20 or so singles at a time.  For the Inferno Ink, because of it’s price and relative rarity I tend to only list singles in auction.  On the glyph front they’re pretty slow shifting so I only ever have one of each type listed, the gems often go in spurts, i.e. when someone gets a new item or items with multiple slots and need to gem up.  For the items used for dailies like the lesser gems, I list a few singles and the rest in triples (as you need 3 for the daily).  If the price is crap, don’t list your item, this is especially pertinent for Glyphs on my server, there seems to be a glut of people who level inscription with no idea of the glyphs worth listing them for silly money just to get rid of them; I’ve made several hundred g (pre Beancounter) buying up Glyphs for ~10g and relisting them in the 100s.

I’ve been using Auctionator to help me buy and list items, this has been invaluable in saving me time and making me the most competitively priced vendor of my items.  I can’t stress highly enough how vital the addons have been to my efficiency, without them, I simple wouldn’t bother.

My feeling is the ink is the most profitable, and my figures would back that up, even on the time front, simply due to the variation of items created from jewel crafting ink wins.  That said, I’m kind of hitting my limit for the amount of ink I can sell so if I want to make more money per week then I’m going to be forced to diversify.  I’ve had a brief foray into the gem and jewel crafting markets, but due to the variety involved it’s impossible to automate properly as each time you create a new item type it requires a manual interaction (this is a Blizzard constraint on trade skills).  I suspect Enchanting might be very profitable, however it seems to be extremely difficult to tell how much an item will sell for prior to crafting it as the tooltip addon doesn’t work with enchants (this is because you’re hovering over the enchant, however you sell vellums).

So in summary, I think a very successful week playing the market, I’ve made a few mistakes which have cost me money, but even with the mistakes I’ve made a healthy profit at a far greater rate of return than I could generally expect through grinding or questing.  I’ll aim to stick an update up on my progress as I expand my operations this week however work has gone crazymadbusy so it might be a while.

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.

Levelling trade skills: pure, pure tedium.

I’m sat here, sad as I am, trying to level blacksmithing from zero.  It’s gash, I mean really gash, I’d derive more enjoyment from continually inserting hot needles into my left eye for three hours than the mindless grind it’s taken to level from zero to 250 in blacksmithing.


Ok, rant over, on a serious note, why? WOW is supposed to be a fun game, the endgame is slanted towards various trade skills to maximise tanking / dps / healing output and the ;best’ trade skill for particular roles or classes tends to change now and then as new releases are a made which forces the more hardcore players to drop one skill and level another.  should this really take the best part of 10 hours to do? (if you ignore the time spent gathering the materials).

EDIT: I wrote this post almost a week ago but have been sitting on it as I published the GM interviews, in the mean time the gits insigtful people over at wow insider posted a similar article here which covers some similar topics, I didn't steal their ideas.... honest, I wrote my blog post first... :-)


Added to the fact that with blacksmithing it takes roughly 8 seconds to create and item, you also need to smelt the ore, AND Blizzard in their wisdom removed the ability for addons such as the Advanced Trade Skill Window to queue multiple items (you now have to manually click ‘process queue’ to move to the next item type), so you cant even go away and make a cup of coffee, or do something slightly more interesting like admire the growth rate of your garden while your toon hammers his head against the anvil repeatedly.  Whether it’s blacksmithing, or any other trade skill, the story is pretty much the same.

Is there not an easier way? I think so. First up, I’d like to state that I don’t think trade skills should be given to players on a plate, there should be some effort involved in levelling a skill, but the top level has gotten so far beyond that of the original level that it’s just another tedious grind.  Levelling to the top level in any profession takes an enormous amount of materials see here for blacksmithing as an example; its fair to say that people levelling trade skills support the WOW economy in a number of ways, in increasing demand from purchasing materials from the auction house, in reducing supply, from not offering those materials they have collected for sale on the auction house (or making the herb and mining nodes more sparse).  Now I’ve levelled two characters recently, both of which have been miners and herbalists, and I’ve banked everything I’ve collected for just such levelling as I’m trying to do with blacksmithing; even with all this banked ore, I still found myself buying stacks of the stuff from the auction house, or heading out to low level zones to collect the stuff.  Now I’m not the type of player who can see a yellow dot on my screen and not go collect it, this would indicate the materials requirement is far over and above the amount a single character would collect in the course of levelling, even with the occasional trip out to grind metal veins or herbs.

This may not necessarily be a bad thing, and may be by design; it keeps the the effort required to level a trade skill, and it keeps the older content useful (although barely in my opinion).  However when you consider trade skills were meant to be levelled in the main part with characters, for those of you who started a character back in vanilla WOW who levelled their trades with their character it was a straight forward task of making stuff as you got the material; your trade level stayed roughly in check with your characters, with a little bit of extra effort here and there, and the final 50 points or so taking the additional effort once you hit 60.  The trouble is, this final 50 points or so existed at the end of each expansion, so platos have developed at the headline skill level from each new release which are a complete pain, rather than just the end game final 20% of levels which should be difficult.  Here are a few suggestions for Blizzard on what I’d like to see to improve things:

Re-evaluate the amount of raw material required to level certain trade skills: blacksmithing seems far more difficult than alchemy for instance.

Reinstate the ability to queue trade skill activities with addons such as the advanced trade skill window, I understand the reasoning for removing it, but it simply doesn’t do what it’s intended to, it just makes the task of levelling more arduous.

Add the ability to queue multiple ‘breaking’ activities; disenchanting, milling and prospecting are even worse than crafting skills, at the very least let me mill by stack rather than per 5, but preferably add the ability to queue multiple stacks of material.  I acknowledge this might be dangerous with disenchanting, so how about only allowing it for greens.

Remove the levelling, platos which exist in the last 20% or so where, in previous releases, they where the top end of the trade skill level.

Add more lower level ‘multiple level’ items; most of the crap which is made is simply vendored anyway, why not add more items which cost 5 times more to make, and add 5 levels.  Or even better, taking into account my suggestion above, just up the level boost of a few items and leave the material requirement the same.

Look at the possibility of buffing players ability to level trades from other tradeskills, how about an enchanted blacksmithing hammer which adds an x% chance to double the level gained, a potion of superior tailoring reducing the amount of cloth required to make a bolt for the next hour, or a scroll of mass disenchant which allows you to disenchant every green item in your inventory. etc. etc.

Add the ability to ‘pay’ for bulk levelling at a trainer; rather than going away and self teaching the first (say) 300 levels in a crafting skill, why not turn up on the doorstep of your profession trainer with a set amount of materials, or a bag full of gold equivalent to the value of those materials which it would have taken you 6 hours to churn through and just exchange it for a level boost.  This would still require the materials, or currency value of those materials, so wouldn’t harm the economy (and done right could be used to boost it).  I’m not suggesting that this replace the whole levelling process, just a percentage of it – perhaps only available to accounts who have one character with a trade skill at it’s maximum level?  This is exactly what happens in real world industry today, you can go to a library, read about stuff and practice yourself, you can learn on the job as an apprentice, or you can get a ‘boost’ by going on an intensive training course – the training course accelerates the learning curve for the easier, apprentice level stuff, but the artisan level skills only come with practice.

Whatever is done, do something to make trade skills less tedious and more desirable, WOW is a game, it’s about entertainment, much of the recent development of WOW has been to make the game more accessible to the mass market, take the same principles and apply them to trade skills!

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.

You can never have too many Llamas

My regular follower will have realised by now that I initially had thoughts of remaining semi-anonymous in the blogosphere, not naming my characters or my guild, I suppose you'd have been able to guess it was me from my early posts if you knew me, but the chances of one of my guildies randomly wandering along here are pretty remote. Since I started rambling blogging 3 months ago, I've decided, well kind of stumbled into the decision actually, that this is pretty much unworkable as I've posted screen shots and the like and I can't be bothered to blur things in pictures.

Since I've been outed I thought I'd say a word or 600 on my naming convention and the reasons behind it. I've talked to a few people over my time in WOW about the names they choose, some people have a naming convention which they stick to, others just chose whatever takes their fancy at the time, others need to be beaten to death with the inspiration stick; I've seen some people take inspiration from names from their favourite characters in books or myth, others chose names that are vaguely amusing, Ezzagood the shaman is one that stands out in my mind (don't make me explain why) and Akdov, when asked about his name, the reply came back "because it spells Vodka backwards". Genius. Others, struggled for inspiration upon first logging into the game, and clearly looked around the room they were sat in for inspiration; I give you Bookshelf, Lampshade and Window, some didn't even make it past where they were sitting, Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor, Computer and CPU! Dear god people!?!?!! And then there's the worst of the lot, the type of people who log on and think I'm a mage, I'm I gnome, I KNOW! MAGEGNOME!! Idiots. Anyways, last week Leafshine made a post titled "Oh! Noes! Drama Llama Loose in Blogosphere!" which prompted a flurry of tweets between us which can basically be summarised as me accusing him of false advertising and demanding the inclusion of more llama's in his post. At this point you're probably thinking "he's lost the plot, this has nothing to do with naming conventions" but this was actually the inspiration for this post, in a round-about sort of way. Here's why:

I have a bit of an admiration for llamas. Actually it's not just llama's, it's any kind of camelid, be it camels (one hump or two), llamas, alpaca, vicunas or guanacos, probably more than healthy admiration, possibly more of a fixation. This fixation with camelids came, I think, from a drink fuelled conversation after a particularly messy jaunt to the local while I was on a year's placement from uni, I can't remember exactly what the conversation was about (I was quite drunk, that happens…) but the end result was we (me and my then-housemate) decided that we liked alpacas. A lot. This quickly turned into the fixation with all things camelid, I don't know why, the reason is not important, it just did.

So it all first started on some online game or other, probably Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament or some such, where you have to choose a name for yourself. A simple 'Alpaca' seemed a little dull, it doesn't quite breed the amount of fear and awe I was looking for in the opposition reading my name at the bottom of the kills board. A bit of thinking, and with an obvious constraints which these games tend to impose on the length of your name, and Mightyalapca is born! Mighty stayed with me through a whole host of games on PC and xbox, until I came to WOW, my first mage was created and tradition was maintained, he was called Mightyalpaca. Now again my regular reader will notice, if you've been paying attention, that I no longer play a mage as my main; I quickly migrated to a priest. So what do I do? I can't use Mightyalpaca again. It's got to be something camelid related, do I go for a different camelid, or stick with alpacas? Choices choices. I eventually decided on llama as the one, not an easy choice let me tell you. And then it came to the decision of what to put before (or indeed after) the llama whilst staying within WOWs name length limit. After literally minutes of soul searching, I fixed on mystic, it was a good looking name, and given I was rolling a priest, mystic seemed to fit. Since then my naming convention has stuck with this convention (with one or two exceptions). Chose a camelid, choose a suitable adjunct, the sillier the better, job done. I've had Eminentcamel, my warrior, Divinellama my new druid, Dramallama the DK, Greatguanacco the rogue, Holyhumps, the paladin (a slight move away from the naming rulebook I grant you, but a subtle reference to Camelids, I like subtle), Camelkazi my shaman, Cameltoes the hunter and Splendid the warlock. That's right Splendid, my one slip up, this guy was named thus back in my GM days when I couldn't go 5 minutes without being whispered by some muppet demanding a guild invite who thought he was too good to read the application rules on the forum or one of the raiders asking what their DKP score was etc. etc. I used him as an anonymous way of still playing the game as my normal names tended to give the game away, I should really get round to renaming him to something suitably silly sometime.

And there you have it, my naming convention, but that's not quite it… back in the day when we first created the guild, some idiot left me in charge of collecting signatures for the charter, as no one voiced an opinion on the guild name, and there was no one online to ask at the time, the Marauding Camelids were created, and are still going strong six years later! Incidentally I like to think the Ramkahen camel mounts were created solely in recognition of my naming convention, clearly they weren't, but I like to think they were…

Altoholics anonymous

I'd never really considered myself an altoholic, yes I played alts, but I'd never really got into multiple toons in a big way. Throughout WOW I've generally had 3 characters at the top level, be it 60, 70, 80 or 85, generally one as a gatherer primarily and the others two as my main play-things, one which was my primary raider the other as my alt runner.

I've tended to have a play with other classes in the past, but nothing too serious, I levelled a warrior to level 60 to have a go at tanking, but didn't really like it, then Death Knights came along and he became my tank and gatherer, so the warrior got neglected, stuck in the outlands at level 63. Anyway, I was doing a little house keeping over the weekend, clearing crap out of bags and seeing if I had any spare bank space when I realised I had a character in every class but Shaman! Most were in the 40's or there abouts, those of you who've been reading regularly will know I've been levelling a druid which is now getting on for 65, I remember playing around on a Paladin about the time of TBC getting to 50 odd, and then I spotted my hunter, I didn't even know I had a hunter!?! Its level 63 SIXTY THREE!!! How can I forget levelling a toon through 63 levels?

Quite bizarre really; so it seems I am an altoholic, I even created a level 1 Shammy just to complete the set… there we go, I've admitted it, the first step on the road to recovery is admitting there's a problem after all…

I wonder how many alts the average is and how many of those are 85 or regularly active, I suppose only Blizzard knows the answer. I've found my alts incredibly useful for a number of reasons, primarily, for trade skills, I use one alt to collect stuff, one to enchant and inscribe and my main for alchemy and gem crafting which works well for me. In the past when I've been raiding, and didn't need the gear on my main the primary alt of the moment was my 'fun' player who'd do the 5 mans and alt-raids etc. I've also previously used an alt as a sanity character back when I was actively raiding and a GM, sticking it in the guild so I could keep an eye on guild chat and log over if there was a run I was interested in happening but just kick back and relax a bit more.  As far as most of the guild were aware this was just a casual member so I didn't get the constant questions about DKP, when the next raid was, randoms whispering asking for a guild invite etc. etc. More recently my alts have been my go-to characters when I'm time constrained, you need at least an hour for a random heroic these days, probably more like two if you get one of the longer instances or encounter 'issues' with the PUG… plus the wait time in LFD. So if I can't guarantee I've got at least 90 minutes I tend to either log over and level something or jump into a normal.

I've found alts have been both an important boost to my performance on my main, in terms of positional play and understanding the new dynamics of other classes and other roles (particularly tanking). I've also found they can sometimes be a bit of a hindrance; healing on the druid, especially early instances is about as simple as it gets, little heal, mid-heal, rinse, repeat. With the addition of an occasional panic heal when you've been caught staring out of the window, on a number of occasions I've dropped straight out of a lower level normal into a five man and found myself forgetting about Chakra, refreshing Renews, Prayer of Mending and a whole heap of other stuff. I've also noticed my DPS mashing rotation is similar on my Death Knight to that of the order of mash for my shadow spec, similar, but not quite the same, which has led to me firing off Mind Blasts without Orbs up and refreshing SW:P when there's been no need.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is, more an observational post I suppose, whatever, the sandwiches have been devoured and I've shed loads to do, if I plough through it I might be able to get home early and start levelling the Shammy…


 

Where do you get yours?

Whether you're new to WOW, been milling around Azeroth off and on for years, or a hardcore lunatic, there's one thing that's pretty much certain you'll have in common; at some stage (I'd guess pretty frequently) you'll need someone else's help or advice on something. This could be anything from not knowing there's an auto-run button, to working out where a quest item drops to finding the best in slot piece of gear for your class, and which mob drops it. Back 'in the day' of Vanilla WOW, you got a dauntingly thick 'manual' which was already 3 patches out of date and after a cursory glance was swiftly consigned to the back of the drawer (I know this because I've just binned mine after an office clean-out during a particularly dull conference call). Back when WOW was new there wasn't much in the way of internet information to be had, everyone was still learning the ropes and it was quite common to see questions in general chat asking questions which would have red hot scorn poured all over them nowadays should an unsuspecting newbie be silly enough to ask. The fact that people now (generally) know the game better, there's a lot more information available on the interweb, and the complexity of the questions mean that they're not as simple as the "where's Wailing Caverns?" you'd see in Barrens chat at least twice a minute. Trying to glean the finer points of DPS rotations from general chat is simply impossible.

I've (obviously) come back to the game and been playing for three months (is it really that long??) and am at a stage now where I'm comfortable, but don't claim to know everything that's gone on since I left and the thing that strikes me is the complete dearth of good information that's out there. Now I'm not saying there's no information, in fact, there's loads of it, my issue is that much of it is out of date, and not only out of date, but now completely wrong and misleading due to patch changes, some of it was never right in the first place, either just because it was incomplete, or a completely incorrect interpretation from the original author. It was pretty daunting for me as a priest, who'd kept an eye on developments, returning to the game to work out what was going on, for someone new to the game it must be near impossible, the learning curve is so steep I'd imagine a lot of players give up before getting anywhere near 85. Let me give an example, over the weekend I started mucking around with my Death Knight, I'd already fumbled my way to level 82 with him, in something akin to a spotty teenager fumbling with a bra strap in the dark, in order to do some mining for my priests Jewel Crafting habit. But I'd decided to give it a proper go, so first up I Google for "death knight levelling spec" which brings me to a site which states categorically that unholy is the way forward, I looked around a little more and found nothing to dispel this, so off I went looking for "unholy dps rotation" and various other connotations, which took bleeding ages. After a bit of messing around I decided that I wanted to do a few instances and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the potential 13 hour wait time as DPS so I collared the one of the guilds raiding DK's who'd just logged on and pumped him thoroughly for information. Turns out all three specs are equally as viable for DPS, the Frost spec that I'd read as being 'the only one' for tanking claim was complete arse, and I set off copying his tanking build from the armoury (after a quick lesson on ability priorities, apparently DK tanks don't do rotations, they have priorities – it looks like a rotation to me…I think they just want to be special). It turns out that most of the sites I'd visited were completely out of date, even though some of the (the tykes) had 4.0.6 in the keywords, it looks like these are auto generated to boost traffic.

So my question to you is how do you get your information?

My first point of call for simple information, the type that has a definite answer is friends or guildies, I'm not too bothered about looking like a nub, so I'm happy to ask in guild chat if necessary. That is providing it's not something you can get from wowhead, I'd be first to mock a "where's the Hyjal Guardians Quartermaster" as it's a simple search, but something more along the lines of "where in the interface do I change the contrast" which isn't such an easy question to Google is fine.

I use wowhead extensively for all quest, NPC and related information

Wow wiki for boss strategies, although I've been incredibly disappointed by how out of date, and badly edited / written, some of the pages are, even to the extent of having to edit them myself.

For the more 'fluid' questions of stat priorities playing styles and similar questions which don't have a 'binary' right or wrong answer it's a lot harder. Shadow priest.com used to get a lot of my time, it was always a bit of a jumble, but recently it's been horrendous, trying to work out what's relevant to 4.0.6 and what's now, whilst wading through threads of several hundred replies is painful. Tankspot and elitist jerks have filled a little of the hole left by shadowpriest.com, whilst they're not focussed entirely on Shadow Priests, they're generally pretty tidy and hold good information.

The official forums or right out, they tend to be full of guff; people who don't really know what they're talking about spouting their opinions as if they were fact. When someone who does know what they're talking about comes along they're drowned out by all the drivel.

And then there be blogs, since starting this blog I've got to grips with the blogsphere, I never really read too many WOW blogs before coming out of retirement, other than the trusty WOW Insider which was a daily haunt of mine, it took a little bit of getting used to, and I still don't feel totally 'there' but I'm slowly building up a list of authors who I 'trust' because of the continuing quality of their posts, I'm starting to feel I can take what they say as gospel (not that I ever would totally take something on board without checking, but that's just me). And even with these blogs, if you do a simple web search you can quite easily end up at an old post that is out of date (and now incorrect) with no way of telling whether it's correct or not.

All in all its rather difficult to find concise information which you can have confidence in nowadays, I have to say I've been quite disappointed with the amount of erroneous information that's out there, especially the occasional sites which are pulling nasty tricks with keywords to get hits; as a result I've made sure my tags are all up to date, and the permanent information pages which I'm writing (watch this space) to supplement the blog musings will be kept up to date (or at the very least marked as out of date).

I has healz too!

I was messing around on the druid alt last night and decided to run a few dungeons rather than questing for a bit of a change. I signed up as the usual DPS or Healer roll (which inevitably means healer) and we were off. I had a couple of hours going spare and the footy was on so didn't really fancy doing heroics so when we finished I asked if anyone fancied another, it'd been a reasonable run so a couple of the dps did, we picked up another DPS and a new Paladin tank almost instantly and we were off again. Now on the first run in SM the tank decided he couldn't possibly die and tried to aggro every mob in the instance at the same time, whilst this makes healing a bit more of a challenge, it gets a little too much after a while. I'm happy to push the speed along in these instances, but I'd quite like to enjoy them at the same time.

Something struck me with the second tank, he was pulling at a reasonable (but not silly) rate, which meant we progressed as quick, if not quicker as mobs went down faster, and he could actually tank – I mean really tank, not only did the rest of the party almost never take any damage, he healed himself enough to enable me to stand there and scratch my balls without casting a spell for pretty much the whole instance. Now whilst the first instance was too frantic this was… well, dull; it wasn't long before I was in cat form and wading into the fight, stopping occasionally to band the odd heal about, I was averaging about half the DPS of the others as I was restro spec but I noticed an improvement in kill speed. The whole group did another instance (SM again) and I carried on as a Restro-cat and cast no more than three heals in the whole place.

Come the end of the run, only me and the tank wanted to do another, so we stuck ourselves in dungeon finder and up pops the "select your class" dialogue box. "Bugger this for a game of soldiers" I thought, I whispered my tank asking if he minded me swapping to go DPS spec and still healing, but to shout if he thought I wasn't doing enough healing – he agreed we picked up 3 new DPS and off we went; only one of them was sharp, or confident, enough to point out that I was supposed to be healing and asked why I was doing DPS…. I nearly piped up with "what a healer?" but didn't have the heart, I explained and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. After another run, I decided that whilst my DPS as Balance was reasonable in comparison to others, I was better going Feral (yes yes, I know all of the guide sites say level as Feral, but I just don't get on with melee). So I bit the bullet and respecced, I ended up knocking out as much DPS as pretty much anyone else and doing half as much healing as my Paladin tank over the course of eight or nine instances, some are easier than others, but bugger me they're far too easy, I was averaging around 45 minutes a level and actually went for nearly three instances on the trot without casting a heal.

Over the time we spent in the dungeons I got chatting to the Paladin, it turns out he's a complete alt-o-holic and has pretty much every class under the sun up to level 85. In the time we played together we saw it all; friendly, chatty players who enquired as to the 'healing' setup, the pushy warrior who was obviously better than everyone else and needed to show it through the medium of abuse and CAPITALS. Oh and special mention to the level 38 rogue, wearing predominantly level 20's cloth with spirit and intellect who asked if we minded him rolling on pair of cloth healing trousers because "they're an upgrade to what I've currently got"?!?!?!!! now I'm as forgiving as the next person, but with a comment like this I instantly hit the inspect button – the guy had 2 pieces of leather, the rest cloth, two of which were heirlooms which mean that he's managed to level at least one character to the 80's and run enough instances to be able to buy heirlooms! How can someone possibly get that far through the game and still not have the first clue how to play?

*ahem* eBay *ahem*

Anyways, a thoroughly enjoyable night all round, a new friend made who I hope to play with again sometime soon, a new spec and a football match that I ended up paying very little attention to. I'm definitely of the opinion if you want to power level, all you need to do are instances, over and over again. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that so much so I'm back to questing again with the odd instance when I play the alt.