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.

Making money on the Auction House

Getting the best return for your trade skills

I’ve found myself spending more and more time recently pratting about with professions, and seeing what I can do on the Auction house, with a fair bit of success.  In my post earlier this month, I talked about my brief investigation into the best methods of collecting ore and herbs, I’ve currently got five crafting professions maxed out on my characters, along with mining and herbing.  Added to this there’s all that ‘junk’ that you collect throughout instances that’s of no use to you but is required by others for whatever crafting they’re doing.  In this post I’ll take a look at what I’ve done over the past few weeks to make money on the Auction House with my hard earned spoils.

My crafting professions are enchanting, alchemy, gemcraft, inscription and black smithing; I’ve been an enchanter on my mage since day 1 of wow it’s something I’ve always done and always will do, both for disenchanting the green crap you pick up along the way and providing enchants to my characters and other guildies.  Alchemy came a bit later on my priest, for some bizarre reason the early (official) WOW guide recommended herbing to go with enchanting, so my mage ended up with millions of herbs and no spare bank space.  I started alchemy on the priest to deal with this and get a few mana pots to boot.  Gemcrafting came along later, I dropped tailoring in TBC for it, not sure why so lets just say ‘because’.  I started inscribing on my mage recently for two reasons, I made the druid so could drop herbing, and I was getting hacked off with paying 100g per glyph on the AH.  Black smithing I’ve levelled recently just to ‘have a look’.  I’ve got all of the others in the pipe line, but I need to chose one and make a concerted effort to level it next, which will probably coincide with levelling another alt once I get bored of ZA and ZG.

I’m going to ignore enchanting on the whole, with four lvl 85 toons to keep in enchants I never seem to have enough dust or shards to look to sell much.  I will however mention that since vellums came into play, its far less costly to level enchanting, simply enchant scrolls and stick them on the AH, you cover a lot of the ‘cost’ of not vendoring green rubbish.

Alchemy and Inscription are two competing professions to some extent, both use herbs as their main source of materials, alchemy specific herbs for specific pots, inscription isn’t fussed, it just needs lots of herbs to mill.  Look to use the cheaper herbs (probably Cinderbloom) on your server for inscription and use the rest for alchemy.  Gemcraft and Blacksmithing suffer a similar dilemma; do you prospect the ore or make something? I’ve tended to prospect stuff, mainly using it for my own gems but I'm starting to build up a stock of gems which is allowing me to look at selling some.

So you’ve got a million and one items you can craft, you’ve probably got as much of the raw materials you’ve collected, you’ve also got the intermediary states of these materials (herbs milled to ink, ore refined to uncut gems or smelted to bars etc.) do you look to sell just finished items or is there more money to be made with the component materials.  Well the answer, as with so many of my blog posts, is ‘it depends’.  It depends on the time of day or week, it depends on the prevailing economy of your server (it’s quite fascinating how they develop differently but that’s another post), and it depends on your competition on the auction house.  I’m going to concentrate on inscription for this post, as that’s the craft I’m currently focusing on making money with, but first lets take a step back and talk about addons. 

Addons are there to make your life easier, there are a number of addons which can significantly reduce the time taken to craft items and even decide which items to craft.  I’m assuming you, like me, utilise a collecting alt to do your collecting of raw materials, so the first addon you’re going to need is altoholic which collects detailed inventories of all of your alts and allows you to see who has raw components which you may need for a recipe simply by hovering the cursor over it.

Next up, you’ll want the advanced trade skills window,  this allows you to custom sort your trade skills, perform text searches, and queue multiple items to be crafted.  It’ll even work out which crafted items can be made from raw materials and queue intermediary stuff, e.g. if a glyph needs 2x lion ink, and you don’t have any, but you do have 2 of the Golden Pigment needed to make the ink, it’ll queue the ink first, and then the glyph for you, genius.  Sadly Blizzard removed the ability for ATSW to process multiple queued items automatically some time ago, so once you’ve finished making a particular type of item, you have to manually click on ‘process queue’ for it to move to the next item which is a bit of a bind but not the end of the world.

Last, and probably most important, is Auctionator, Auctionator lets you scan the Auction House in its entirety and record prices for every item on there.  It also modifies the buying and selling functions, when buying it’ll automatically list similar items by price, lets say you’re looking for Ink of the Sea as shown, it’ll group all of the same priced stacks together and allow you to buy them quickly, once you exhaust that price it’ll move on to the next.  Most importantly from a selling point of view, it can be automatically configured to beat the price of the same items already listed, and allows you to list multiple stacks, or break stacks down into smaller numbers extremely quickly.

All sounds very complicated doesn’t it? I suppose it is a bit when taken as a chunk, but as you work your way into selling you’ll build up your confidence with the adds and look to find more and more ways of saving time and automating stuff.  There’s one final tool, which a guildie introduced me to over the weekend (the same guildie who introduced me to GTFO) it’s not an addon this time though, its a webpage http://wowpopular.com/ which lets you see what are the most popular enchants, glyphs, gems, talents and a whole host of other things across all of the WOW realms, not only that, but it does it by class and even by spec.

You now have the supply, and you have a bloody good idea of what the demand will be; each class and spec has a list of pseudo-mandatory glyphs, this site allows you to quickly see which these are for every class and make them, since I started using it I’ve more than tripled my sales! and this is how:

I’m assuming you have a stock of raw materials, if not, go read this post.  First of all go to the AH and perform an Auctionator scan, this will make sure your database of prices is up to date and correct.  Next load up http://wowpopular.com/ on a companion PC (or alt tab) and list off the first specs of the first class’ glyphs.  Open up your trade skill window and hover over the glyph.  My first question is: is it sold on the AH for more than 85g? if not, forget it and move on to the next glyph.  The most used glyphs tend to go for about 100g on my server, some of the ‘levelling’ glyphs go for as little as 2g which doesn’t cover the materials, some for far more; this is a figure that I’ve chosen which means I’m making a reasonable profit on all the materials, it depends on your servers economy, pick a figure and stick by it (although you may want to adjust this over time).  Assuming the value is fine, have a quick look at the component prices by hovering over them  do all of the materials (if sold individually) come to less than glyphs auction price? does it allow for a reasonable profit? if so you can craft away, with one final check – do you already have any of the said glyph, hover over it again and have a look, I tend to only ever have 1 or 2 of any particular item on the AH at any one time, keep the perception of supply down to keep the prices and profits high!  Rinse and repeat for all of the glyphs applicable to all of the classes, by the end of it you’ll find you have between 80 and 120 glyphs.

Now its time to head over to the AH and list them, this is key, you need to beat the prices of competitors on there, but you also want to stay competitive for the duration of the auction, accept that you will be undercut sometimes, but try and do what you can ot avoid it.  Chose your timeframe, I always go for 48 hours, as I can’t gaurentee to be on daily, if you’re on every day you may want to go for 24 hours.  As a rule, any glyph priced at or below the 100g mark I use the auto undercut function in Auctionator and list the item for 5s less.  For anything for anything 100-125 I list at 99g, for anything 125-200g its 125g, and for anything 200g+ I’ll go for 150g.  for any items where there are no competition I go between 100 and 125 depending on historic sale success.  This may sound a bit silly, why not simply beat the higher prices by 5s too and make more profit? From my experience, if you do this, somoene will simply come along and undercut you with a sensible price, you often see auction lists with one glyph at ~250g, a couple more in the two-hundreds a few more in the hundreds and then one in the 99g area, the higher priced items will never sell, so it’s a wasted auction. 

It’s then just a simple matter of collecting your winnings and restocking those glyphs that have sold, use altoholic to check if you have glyphs still as per the process listed above.  It takes me about 20 minutes to do a full sweep of http://wowpopular.com/ craft, and list them, I’ve quite often sold two or three glyphs by the time I’ve finished listing and I reckon on a steady 1-2000g ish profit per set of listings, this goes up a little at weekends as there are more people online.

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.

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.

SimulationCraft: What does it all mean??

It's been a pretty busy week on my blog, the busiest one traffic wise since I started spewing my ramblings onto paper (well electronic paper). My post on SimulationCraft seems to have struck a few chords so in an attempt to aimlessly chase ratings expand on my success I thought I'd have a stab at explaining what the actual results mean in plain English.

So you've read the idiots guide, you've ballsed up at least 5 attempts at simulating your characters DPS, you've gone back and read the guide again, read the official help files a bit, scratched your head a bit, and finally got some figures that look like what you've been reading on the interweb. Brilliant! You've got a page of completely incomprehensible maths, statistics and pretty graphs that'd look more at home on a PowerPoint at that next dull management meeting you were trying to avoid…

There are some figures that (may) make sense to you instantly; there are others that are best when compared to an average, or a target of where you want to be. If you're comparing something you need a baseline, for this example that's you! (or me as the case may be). For the record, I've run 5 different simulations; one with the ultimate tier 11, 25 man gear, with all the raid buffs and trimmings; one with the equivalent 10 man gear and the same buffs; one with my crappy heroic gear with all the same buffs and trimmings; one with (a slightly unrealistic) all the buffs and trimmings but with the target_level override set to 87 (i.e. a heroic boss), you'd NEVER get this amount of buffs in a 5 man as you simply wouldn't have the classes there required (you're pushing it for a 10 man); and then finally, a far more realistic 5 man scenario with just plain old Fort, Int, and MOTW (a reasonable assembly of buffs in my view), oh and replenishment as you'll be keeping that up at all times (WONT YOU?!?) as it's one of your main sources of DPS. The baseline scenario will be the final, and probably worst DPS(it's chugging away as we speak, so we'll see if my prediction shows me up to be the eejit you suspect me to be).

I'm setting the fight length to 350 seconds (nearly 6 minutes), 2 adds, Patchwerk style fight, and assuming you're the best of the best when it comes to mashing keys and given you (well me) an elite skill level – the trick is to only change one variable (or set of variables) at a time so the comparison has some meaning. As homework, I'll leave you to run your own simulation, with your gear, with a realistic skill level and fight scenario, I can't stress highly enough that stat weightings will vary massively depending on your ability (or lack of it), your gear, the number of adds, the type of fight, and a whole host of other variables, what is certain is the figures are a model (a model, by definition is an approximation, and only an approximation) of reality. Go read about statistical modelling in a text book or here on Wikipedia or somewhere else where stats geeks lurk.

Lecture over, and here we are, remember I'm using me as the baseline, the links to the full reports are at the end, I'll reference sections only, for comparison in the main text to keep my ramblings to sub War and Peace word count.

First of all, and the thing you're almost all certainally here for, the scale factors, or stat weighting s as they're sometimes known. You'll notice two values, a scale factor and a normalised value; the latter is the one you want, it simply skews everything so that it's a direct comparison to your best stat (Int) to make it easy(er) to compare one stat to another when you come to chosing your gear. I'll be posting some specific analysis on stat weights in my next blog so if you're still confused check back and I'll endeavour to confuse you more.

Int will always be best, if haste comes in at 0.5 and Crit at 0.25 it means that Int is twice as good as Haste, and Haste is twice as good as Crit (and thus Int is 4 times better than Crit). Put simply, if given those weights, you have a simple choice of a tunic with 100 Int and 150 Haste, you'd always chose the first one (but it's never that simple is it?).

Next you're at the charts, the damage per execute is a telling chart, if interpreted correctly; it's basically saying for the amount of time you spend casting these are the spells which do the most damage – i.e. devouring plague is an instant cast spell so does the most damage per cast.

Next is the damage source pie chart, you'll notice that mind flay is near the top in all, which seems counter intuitive given the last statement. But think about it for a second, mind flay is your filler when all of the other spells are on cooldown or waiting for procs, you're casting it for the most time, so it does lots of DPS, but bang for buck its lower than the others.

The other thing to note in these early graphs is the mana timeline graph, if you're going oom regularly, you're doing something wrong (or something right, i.e. emergency healing which is saving the wipe), I've heard a few Shadow Priests complain about mana issues, this should never be the case with any level of gear.

The most important graph in my opinion is the DPS scaling at the end, this basically says if you add 100(for the sake of argument, you could use any figure) of any given stat, what is the expected DPS increase? You'll notice for me Haste Crit and Mastery all look pretty much the same, crossing once or twice; for the best spec there's a far bigger difference as you follow the graph up with Haste becoming the worst and then the best and then the worst etc. as you go up. This is because of a whole heap of internal metrics (some of which we know about or can approximate, some which Blizzard keep close to their chests).

Notice on the t11 graph, Hit and Spirit have a scale factor up to 0 (i.e. if your gear was worse) and then abruptly stop giving a dps boost – this is the hit cap. Also notice for me, it's pretty much horizontal (at target_level 87) which means I'm over my hit cap for heroics (naughty me, I'll be remedying this immediately).You'll also notice, if you look at the 3rd scenario that my dps drops, even though I've got massive buffs, this is purely because of the hit cap dynamic, and is a good reminder to follow the basic principles that have been with us for all (well almost if you forget the last 3 months) of WOW - get hit capped first!

That's it for the basics, there's loads (and loads and loads) more, have a read, if there's anything you want me to explain (or make up on the spot) leave a comment, or email, tweet, or send a carrier pigeon. I'll be posting an additional blog on the differences of the stat weightings specifically tomorrow.



Report Download

Scenario 1 – best T11 25 man gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 2 – T11 10 man gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 3 – my crappy gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 4 - my crappy gear, all buffs, heroic boss

Scenario 5 - my crappy gear, sensible buffs, heroic boss



 

Dispersing the Pain

After 4 days on the beer in Amsterdam my liver's about to give up and I'm sat on the ferry home feeling slightly worse for wear trying to pass the time with another blog entry to post when I get home and struggling for inspiration... dispersion would seem topical as I'd quite like the alcohol content still in my blood to do the same.

Dispersion is a funny kind of talent which is almost unique in the game, I say almost because there are a few others which have some similar uses; the mage ice block springs to mind, however, for me the ice block isn't anywhere near as versatile. Ice block is a pure 'oh shit' spell; you're about to die, or take some serious damage, and you hit it. Dispersion has this ability, and whilst it doesn't quite absorb all damage (only 90%) and doesn't remove DoTs, I'm struggling to think of a time when using it as a last resort hasn't worked. You might still take damage or have DoTs active but by the time its finished you should have been able to move to relative safety, something a frozen mage can't do, and got ready to heal or shield yourself if the party healer is otherwise engaged (assuming you're not healing).

The main drawback to dispersion is that you are almost entirely inactive for its duration, I say almost because you can do some useful things; as mentioned you can move to safety, or into position to continue DPSing or healing once the effect ends, you can also click a lightwell, or drink potions which may be the thing that keeps you alive.

One of the secondary benefits, after staying alive is the mana regen. Now as you can't heal or DPS, it's not your primary mana regen tool, but if you're in a fight where you know you're going to be scraping the bottom of the mana barrel and there's a phase where you'll need to move or you can't DPS, then it's the perfect opportunity to utilise it. If you think you might need it as a life saver then it's probably best to forget the mana regen and save it just in case; a dead priest is less use than an OOM priest.

The cooldown is pretty forgiving, so on longer fights you may get the chance to use it twice, in which case you're into the Dark Evangelism type dilemma of whether to use it early; I really doubt there's any place in the 5 man content where you should need to do this.

The final use, which I have to say is my most used, is mana regen between trash. It's a great way of minimalising downtime between trash, IF you're not within the cooldown timer of the next boss, and IF you're not struggling on the trash (if you need a full mana bar, or have been slapped by trash in previous pulls I'd keep it I'm reserve), and IF the other mana drinkers aren't sitting down to drink (no point using the cooldown if you're then stood waiting for others). If you chose to glyph dispersion you'll reduce the cooldown yet further and increase its potential use – as a shadow priest you definitely don't want to glyph this as it'll remove one of your dps increasing glyphs, as a healer you may want to consider it depending on your playing style.

As with almost every other spell in the priests armoury, it's all down to judgement, get it right and you'll improve your total DPS or healing, get it wrong and you'll lose DPS, or worse if you're healing let others die. On that note it might me an idea to announce via a macro that people won't be getting healed for 6 seconds if you are the designated healer so they can start thinking about keeping themselves up for the duration you're dispersed.

And there you have it, dispersion; from a ferry in the middle of the Channel, written on a HTC Desire (although edited at my desk before work), with a hangover.

Cool(downs) and the gang

I've been putting together a compendium of all things shadoo over the last few days for a standalone page on the blog, which has taken far more time than I thought so rather than neglect the blog, I thought I'd plagiarise a section from it on proper use of cooldowns. There is no absolute answer here, use your common sense, for some fights where there is an enrage or similar, but for 'normal' circumstances this is the general guidance:

Dark Archangel gives a dps boost as well as mana, the timing of its use is entirely situation dependant. If there is no danger of you running out of mana, pop it as soon as you have five stacks of Dark Evangelism and reuse it immediately it comes off cooldown. If you are in danger of mana depletion, use this at around 80%

Shadow Fiend similarly to Dark Evangelism, this gives a reasonable DPS boost, and should be used as soon as possible providing you do not need the mana, should you need to extend your mana casting it at around 80% (not at the same time as Dark Evangelism)will ensure you don't waste any regen.

Mind Blast has been relegated to a buffing spell since 4.0 it doesn't do enough pure DPS to warrant normal rotational use, it does however provide you with a nice buff, Empowered Shadow, giving you 15% extra shadow damage, you should use MB whenever you have one or more shadow orbs up and the buss has, or is about to expire.

Dispersion is primarily a panic button spell, use it to stay alive. It also returns mana with the drawback of rendering you incapable of doing any damage for its duration, if you have to use it for mana, try and make sure all of your DoTs are renewed before casting it.

Shadow Word: Death makes it into this section because it has an artificial cooldown of sorts, you should only use it in normal rotation if you're running low on mana and its glyphed (it should be). Else it should only be used on a mob under 25% health, and not if it'll kill you.

Hymn of Hope & Divine Hymn should be used sparingly, if at all, they have long cooldowns and are purely situational, have them on the cast bar, but only use them if your party is in dire straits on the health or mana front

Class specific cooldowns (beserking for trolls) give a big boost, in my case haste and should not be ignored, usual rules apply on the situation, else it's as early as possible, try to combine beserking with other damage buffs as the increased haste gives a good multiplier.

WARNING ahead be beasties!

A funny thing happened to me last night, I decided pratting around on a low level alt was preferable to grinding herbs while watching the footy, and after a few quests I found myself in the dungeon finder for a low level dungeon. After about three seconds I was healing in Gnomeragon; my low level equivalent to Grim Batol, I remember many an evening wasted in this horrible place. As with all the low level dungeons it's a damn site easier than it used to be and we set of killing things.

About 5 minutes in we were jumping down to ground level to get to the first boss, if you know the place you'll know where I mean, when the shadow priest in our group hurtled past me and face planted into the ground. We pressed on to the first boss, without her as it's so easy, midway through the fight I noticed the same happened again. Third time lucky with the boss dead and we set off on trash towards the next boss where I noticed a funny noise… it was the sound of a wand being fired!! Looking round in amazement I saw a shadow priest with full mana waving their wand about! I have to admit, my mouse cursor hovered over the vote kick button momentarily, but then I stopped, and I'm glad I did; it's not like me to be quite so trigger happy so after having a word with myself I politely whispered the priest "can I ask why you're using your wand?" I was half expecting a "BECAUSE I R L33T" type answer followed by a torrent of abuse, but to my surprise her response was along the lines of "because I have one, is it wrong?" so a brief conversation later and she was sticking DoTs up properly and Mind Flaying away. We ended up chatting all the way through the instance where I found she was new to WoW (to the tune of 2 or 3 days), having moved from another MMO with her husband, both seemed to be struggling to get to grips with the deluge of information and things to learn.

This struck a few cords with me having recently returning to the game after a long absence, I felt overwhelmed at times, even finding where my mounts had gone, or where the guild roster had gone was a problem (why the hell was that ever moved of the social panel??? Nonsensical!). I still remember wandering round Silverpine Forest after I followed a friend to my first instance, not having a clue where I was or how to get home(no it wasn't last month).

We ended up staying in the same party (she was from a different server) and chatting some more and, I hopefully, gave her some pointers to getting to grips with the game, and I said I'd post a few pointers here as it'll help her out, and double my readership in one swoop, everybody's happy! I'm going to focus on priests, but I guess most of what I write will be applicable to all, here goes:

Starting Areas

When you first create your character you'll find yourself in a starting zone, this is a 'safe' area with low level mobs where you'll be drip fed your first few spells and abilities to help you learn the ropes. Depending on the race you choose you'll start in different areas so if you want to start with a fellow 'Newbie' from the very start make sure you choose players from the same race; if you're the same faction you'll be able to meet up later, but if one choses horde and one alliance you'll never be able to play together.

Zones

As a troll priest (hadn't you guessed by now?) I started in Durotar which has Orgrimmar, the main Horde city in the game to the North, if you start here you'll quickly progress to the Northern Barrens where the main town is the Cross Roads you will generally meet other Taurens. If you chose one of the other races, undead for example, you'll find yourself on another continent, it used to be the case that the quest chains naturally took you to the Cross Roads, but nowadays you'll get so much experience so quickly it'll be possible to skip the Northern Barrens all together.

Travel

You can get about the world in a number of ways, it's improved vastly from Vanilla Wow back in the old days, you can walk (clearly) or at level 20 (it used to be level 40) buy a mount to speed things along. Pretty much every outpost also now has a windrider which, once discovered, allows you to fly from point to point more quickly. There's also a Zeppelin (and sometimes boat) system at most of the major cities and ports which will let you move between the continents, generally the questing system will introduce you to these gradually, but I've found my level getting so far ahead of the quests I'm having to skip whole zones.

Levelling

You can gain experience (XP) to increase your level in a number of ways, the two main ones are questing and in instances (you'll also get quests to go to instances which give you additional benefit). You'll also get an XP boost from things like herb gathering, mining, exploring new zones and a number of other things, but I'd stick to questing and instances.

For quests stick to stuff which appear as green or yellow in your log, anything that's grey is too easy and will glean too little XP, anything which is red will be far too difficult. As a rule of thumb, if you can't kill three mobs simultaneously (from full mana and health) then you're probably in a zone which is too hard. If you're finding most of the quests are grey, look to move on to a harder zone.

Talent Spec

Specs have got a bit easier in my opinion since WoW, once you stick one point in one of the three trees available you're locked to that tree until you've spent 31 points. You'll get a new point every other level, or there abouts for the first few levels then you'll start picking up a point every level, you'll nicely get told of the new spells and talents available to you as you hit each new level.

The only real choice for levelling is shadow (you're not suck with this, and you can change at any time, plus you'll get dual specs which allow you to easily change between roles at later levels but we won't worry about that now).

There are a few mandatory choices in shadow, (actually there's a lot of mandatory talents), as a rule go for things which will improve the amount of damage you're going to do, some are obvious, some are not.

The main thing to aim for is shadow form, but before you can get that you need to open up the higher tiers by picking lower ranked talents.

I'd go for improved shadow word pain 2/2,

then Darkness 3/3, this will open the second tier,

next Twisted faith 2/2 this increases your damage and also converts spirit to hit. I won't go into the full reasons for needing hit here, but basically if you don't hit you don't do damage, there's little or no hit gear at low levels hence this is an excellent levelling talent.

Then improved devouring plague 2/2, this is a big source of damage and is important to have

You'll now have 1 point left to open shadow form, I'd go for improved mind blast
1/1, it's not a great damage spell any more, but it's useful for a buff it gives you when combined with shadow orbs (again more advanced than we really need to be going here)

This will give you shadow form with your next point, and you should have a tree something like this http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bZZG0Rd I'll leave the rest to you, the 'cookie cutter' DPS build for all shadow priests is http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bcZZGbGdMzrd0fo and if you follow this you won't go far wrong for levelling. There's a good guide to levelling builds and other stuff here http://www.wowwiki.com/Priest_builds if you want to read more

Spells and how to use them.

Make sure you always have Power Word: Fortitude and Inner Fire cast on yourself, for damage your main go-to spells for levelling at low levels should be Shadow Word: Pain, then Mind Flay – just repeat Mind Flay till the mob dies. At level 28 you'll get Devouring Plague, use this as your second spell in addition to the two above. You'll then get Shadow Word: Death at 31, use this to 'execute' mobs when they're low on health – be careful, if you use this and it doesn't kill the mob it will damage you too! When you get to 20 points in the shadow tree, you'll also be able to get Vampiric Touch, get it! This is another DoT and should be cast before Mind Flay as it does a lot of damage.

Stats

You'll notice the gear you pick up has different stats on it, some stats are better than others and some are no use to you what so ever, this differs from class to class, and spec to spec. As a Shadow Priest aim to get gear with intelligence, spell power (there isn't many items with spell power on any more), haste, crit and then spirit (in order of priority). Intellect is roughly twice as important as haste and crit.

You may notice that on your character pane you can expand the tab to till you your hit crit and haste percentages along with a whole host of other stats. You'll also notice that if you find an item at level 1 (for example here) with +10 crit on it it will make a huge difference to your crit percentage, the same item at level 85 would hardly be noticeable. This is called scalling as you go up through the levels you'll need more and more of a particular stat to keep the same percentage – don't worry to much about this for the moment, just try and get as much Int and Haste as you can

Tank? Healer? DPS? WHAT???

If you've ventured into an instance by now, chances are you'll know the difference, if not, you may not have a clue. Basically, there are three broad types of role for characters to play in WoW, all classes can be DPS foucssed, some can heal as well, some can 'tank' as well, some (Druids and Paladins) can do all three. This all depends on your choice of talents, and as a priest you have a choice of DPS or Healing. Now you've obviously been paying attention and have specced shadow haven't you? Good. This means you're DPS, at low levels you can still heal (yourself and in instances) but this will become less and less viable as you move up the levels. Tanks are there to stop us cloth wearers being squashed, if you're in an instance and you keep getting squashed, you either need to google "aggro management" or your tank is crap (or both). The healer is there to apply the magic ointment and tell you you're a brave soldier.

Monsters (mobs) and Elites

there are loads of mobs across WoW, keep an eye on their level (the number next to their picture which appears when you click them), in the same way as quests grey is too easy, and gleans no xp, green and yellow are killable, red is hard, a skull means you'll get murdered.

Look out for a metallic dragon round the picture, this means they're elite (much harder) there are different breeds of elite, bronze, silver and gold, each being harder to kill.

Guilds

Guilds are like minded group of people generally set up with a purpose in mind, some are real life friends, others objective is high end raiding, others levelling or more casual. Look on your realm forums, find one with an ethos which suits your objectives and apply to join, you'll get a wealth of information and knowledge from other players

Other Players

Thankfully I can say the majority of the WoW population are nice, friendly, people. Some however are, how shall we put this? well, arseholes. Because WoW is quite a mature game, most players know it inside out and true 'Newbies' are rare on established realms, this is one of the reasons Blizzard sets up new realms occasionally for new players, the dungeon finder circumvents this so you'll come across players on their sixth alt who expect everyone to be the same and won be very forgiving of mistakes. Generally if you explain you're new to the game, and need a little guidance they'll be fine and help out, occasionally you'll encounter idiots who'll be abusive. Remind them, they were there once, it's just like learning to drive…. It's easy once you know how. Forget about them and move on.

Trade Skills

You can do a whole host of secondary 'stuff' in WoW, if you're out to get involved in everything then trade skills are the thing for you (you can have two primary proffessions), some go well together like herbalism and alchemy, others like enchanting are stand alone. You can level without these and pick them up later, or you can start early. Read up on them before making the choice, some of the assumptions you might make about certain skills will be incorrect. http://www.wowwiki.com/Profession is a good place to start.

Addons

Addons are a big part of WoW, Blizzard has now incorporated most of the good functionality into its standard UI, given how much you need to learn, I'd ignore addons completely until you reach a higher level. Curse gaming (wow.curse.com) and wowinterface (wowinterface.com are the two main sites.



Further reading and searching

http://www.wowwiki.com/Newbie_guide

http://www.wowwiki.com/Starting_a_priest

are both good links to read

WoW Insider is an excellent blog site for everything WoW http://wow.joystiq.com

www.shadowpriest.com is for higher levels and is very in depth

www.elitistjerks.com is another good one for all classes

if you're struggling just head over to google and stick in a search, be careful of the crap from previous releases which are out of date, I tend to start all of my searches "wow cata 4.0" and then whatever I'm searching for, for this reason.



And that's it, I've intentionally skirted over lots of stuff so as not to (overly) confuse, there's lots more to learn than I could ever hope to write here, use your initiative and take time to read around areas and ask friendly players who you've met on the way – they don't bite. If you've found this useful, have questions, or would like to see more detail on anything please leave a comment or tweet me @wow_PFtT. Above all, Have Fun!

It’s Grim in Batol

I've had a quiet weekend on WoW front, excessive amounts of alcohol and trying to avoid removing extremities with a circular saw have taken priority (not both at the same time I might add). I've managed a total of two instances this weekend, both of them in bleeding Grim Batol. Let me state up front, Grim Batol is a horrible place, it is my Stonecore… I don't mind doing it providing it's with reasonably geared guildies or friends, but as a PUG, unless you get very lucky it's not going to get finished.

The first boss, General Umbriss, isn't too bad, providing you have the gumption to keep an eye on your deadly boss mods warning and move when he decides to pick on you and you have someone capable of either crowd controlling or killing the purple trogg. My first run was in shadow form, with a guild healer but the rest PUGed saw not one, but two wipes mainly because the tank was under-geared and didn't have a clue (I know tanks get a hard time, but having some idea of how to tank with your class, before pressing the LFG button and clicking the shield icon is desirable). In is customary for PUGs wiping in such fashion the tank blamed the healer, everyone else in the group, physics, and pretty much everything else possible before quitting, as did one of the DPS only not quite as dramatically. Reformed with a reasonable tank, Umbriss was despatched pretty quickly, and we were off to Forgemaster Throngus.

Now Frongus has been my least favourite boss as a healer, since I got bored of queuing and added my holy spec, that was until I realised dispelling the nasty debuff on the tank makes things simpler. Amazingly both as dps and healing this weekend we saw him off first time. I can't ever remember two fights going so smoothly with him. I suppose the source of my dislike for this boss is the fact that being unlucky makes it infintately harder; if you get more than one shield, or get unlucky with cave-ins with a shield and then get swords it becomes very difficult for the healer through no real fault of his own, just random chance. I'm all for encounters being variable and challenging, providing they don't become impossible randomly.

Drahga Shadowburner is the real group killer for me, it's the one where I've seen the most PUGs fall apart and although it's skippable, if you have to skip it you're probably not going to do the last boss either. It is also for me, since I figured out how thick I was being on Throngus, the boss which I'm currently finding the most difficult. There's just so much going on! Generally the tank takes a battering and so is needing big heals, there's adds running around like loons just waiting for you get your spell book out so they have an excuse to aggro you. The little exploding git add which needs to be kited or it'll pretty much one-shot whoever it's got targeted. And then there's the flames, I just can't seem to reliably keep myself outside of them, either I avoid them and the tank dies, or I completely miss the warning because of the anarchy which is ensuing and cop it straight in the face. It has to be said, it's easier with people you know and much easier if people are on vent communicating, but with PUGs it's an almost guaranteed fail. Not wanting to break with tradition, my first trek did exactly this, with a fair stab at it, but sadly a couple of the group just weren't up to it and neither were their replacements as in turn people quit.

The second group, with me healing, decided to skip it all together and head for Erudax, I quite like this boss, as bosses go in Grim Batol, but today was a different story. The first tank, who wasn't bad to be fair to him, had other commitments, made his apologies and left before we had our first stab. The second tank TALKED ONLY IN CAPITALS, said FFS in every sentence, and insisted his strategy which was "the way tankspot say you have to do it" (I checked, it doesn't) lasted all of two attempts before doing us all a favour. Another short wait and an unsuspecting tank later the DPS decided the adds weren't all that important, the idiot healer, ignoring my own rule, decided to stand outside of the crap and promptly died. At which point the hour and a half I'd set aside for a 'quick random' was up and I had to do something I hate and make my apologies. I hope they went on to kill Erudax at the next pull, it's not a particularly difficult boss, but people's minds just seemed to be elsewhere so I suspect it would have been called pretty soon after my departure.

Boss	General	Healing	DPS
General Umbriss	Move on charge Stay at range to avoid ground seige/ move when he turns to face you	Fade to avoid adds	Kill purple add if no CC Kill other adds if being overwhelmed
Forgemaster Throngus	Shield (flames) – get in close, move behind boss Sword – big DPS on tank Mace – Kite, stay out of path Avoid cave in	Dispell tank big AOE heals on shield, use chakra floor heal if neccesary Sword – big single target heals – use guardian spirit if needed Mace – small AOE heals
Drahga Shadowburner	Kite add if targeted Move on flame warning Avoid crap on floor	Conserve mana where poss Small aoe heals	Disperse if caught in flame
Erudax	Move into circle to avoid shadow gale	AOE chakra heal in circle if needed Keep players topped up in case of stun	DPS add immediately after gale