Blizzard's revenue

In case you were curious how much gold.... err.. money vivendi games managed to make last year, you'll be happy to know that they produced a revenue of €1 Billion. €1.000.000.000, about $1.48 bln. A staggering amount. And 80% of that is from Blizzard's division, mainly World of Warcraft. Not surprising when there are 10 million subscribers worldwide, each paying an average of €10 per month. I guess we all contributed to that nicely. Original CD 40 + TBC 40 + 3*12*12 : 432. They got about €500 from me so far. Still, it's a cheaper hobby than gambling, collectible card games, or getting drunk every weekend, that's for sure.

Layout update coming

I mentioned earlier that i was planning some layout changes.
Well here you can see that experiment somewhat in progress. I think it beats the dull white on black, sure it's functional but it looks so damn cheap and default.

Anyway, i grabbed the one of the standard templates called "rounders3", then changed the colors somewhat. Turns out not all the colors are customizeable by default, and the template (as they all do) only supports one navigation column.
So, I'll be playing with that a bit.
Leave comments while you can, i'm not likely to do another big layout overhaul for a while once this new one settles in.

The to-do list :
* Add Divs for the second column.
* Assign custom CSS colors to all page elements.
* Make new RSS button.
* Draw an image header.


Links

In case you hadn't noticed earlier, i've recently added a few more links to the navigation bar.
Danesar, a wow comic.
Wow Gem, a nice tool to help you find the gems you need.
Just wow, an image hosting site.

Plus a number of very interesting other blogs.
Which reminds me, check out Blog Azeroth, which seems to be a rapidly growing warcraft blog community.


ps: Anatheron with just 6 healers is a bad idea. We did manage to get him to 50% though. Definitely need to get more healers attuned.

How to make gold - 6

Transmutation In order to make the most out of transmutation, you'll want to have your character learn transmutation mastery. To do this, pick up elixir mastery in lower city, do the quest and then talk to the npc to unlearn it (costs you 150g) Finally, fly to netherstorm and find the npc that teaches you transmutation. No additional quest needed, but that initial 150g is a lot cheaper than giving him 5 primal might. Primal Earth > Primal Life Primal Earth > Primal Water Primal Water > Primal Life Earthstorm diamond Skyfire diamond Primal Might

How to make gold - 5

I know, i know, it's been a while since we had one of these, but this one is extra long to compensate. Enjoy the read, and feel free to leave feedback or point out any spelling / grammar issues. Everything is worth money I've noticed a lot of people tend to ignore gray items when farming, don't completely loot corpses (which makes my skinner angry), or loot it then throw it away. Silly people. You know those Elemental Fragments that you get when farming primal motes? Or most importantly, random 2 handed weapons? hah! Keep in mind, that although you might not need it, the vendors will still gladly pay you loads of cash for these items, and every bit counts when you're short on cash. In 2 hours of farming you may end up with 10 or more stacks of elemental fragments (just as an example). 10x20x 11s85c = 23g 70s That's right, gold !! 2 handed weapons? Gray swords can sell for 1-4 gold "each". 2 handed maces and staves for 3-8 gold each. Random animal meat when cooked can still sell for some cash to other players. It'll vary per server whether people actually buy stat food off the auction house, but anything beats throwing it away. Sure you might be thinking "I don't have room for all that crap when i'm farming for a certain item or resource". Well then just make room. A small 5 minute trip to town every hour is probably worth more than whatever you can farm normally in that same time. Ofcourse getting bigger bags, smart use of alt-banks, personal guild banks, and disenchanting or selling redundant gear will ensure you need to visit town less often. Always make sure you have plenty of inventory space when you go out to "farm" anything specific. Humanoid mobs especially love to give you all manner of gray junk to sell. Green item you don't need? Have a friend disenchant it if you can't do it yourself. Do's and Don'ts for the AH The Auction House is a special place. Some people make their first gold there, while to others it's a constant source of frustration and loss of money. You'll find all the latest crafting recipes here, gems and precious metals, gear for all your characters and more. But, you have to learn to look at it objectively. Every auction that you see, is put up there by a player much like yourself and only for one reason. To make money. Most items on there are priced "way" above what they're worth. If not way above what you should be paying for something. Of course time is money but why pay 3g for a stack of copper bars, if you can pay 50s to some low level player to go and farm you some? Delegating is a nice word. Abuse of low level players for cheap labour is quite another. Now, there's a number of people using the auction house. Let's stick some quick labels on them. Keep in mind, i just made these up. If there's anyone who's got a more official term for these type of players feel free to correct me. * Auctioneer. The guy who looks at everything, buys anything if it's below a certain % for his profit margin and resells it for lots more cash. Some beginning auctioneers will target specific markets such as primals, enchanting materials or green items. * Monopolist. The guy that keeps "all" auctions of a certain type (copper bars for example) and resells them at a price that he wants to sell them. Generally a lot higher than the average. In due time the farmers will pick up on this and start putting up large amounts of auctions for "just a bit" lower than the monopolist is trying to sell his goods, and collapse his market. * Clueless. The people that put up metals, herbs, and greens for the default vendor price. Auctioneers love these people. * AH Value guy. The guy who looks at the AH for determining the value of items. Generally this means he'll be quoting you the price that mr. Auctioneer put up just an hour ago. * Browser. Average player who looks trough the auctions on a day by day basis to see what the value of his bank's contents are. Will occassionally put up several stacks of items when he feels the value is right for him. * Farmer. Some people love nothing more than farm farm farm, which in time will drive the price of a certain item down quite a lot. Farmers are very competitive and will generally try to compete over a price with each other because they want their farmed goods to sell fast. * Flood poster. Annoying creatures who flood the auction house with stacks of "1". I've seen as much as 3 pages (3x50 auctions) from a single person doing this. They tend to overprice their items, but due to the flooding (and blizzard's poor sorting system) all the other auctions get pushed back to the later pages. * You. How do you use the auctions ? How to use the AH So, there's several ways to use the auction house. You can steal the market and manipulate prices, play into the prices of others, sell stuff fast or slow. It's a completely different game with it's own set of rules. Here's some thoughts that should in help you get better results however. If you sell an item, the normal auction house takes 5% off the sale price. If an item doesn't sell the AH keeps your initial deposit. Initial deposit is 15% of the vendor value per 12 hours. (so 60% for 48 hours) The neutral AH takes 15% of the sale price, and 75% per 12 hours as initial deposit fee, pretty ridiculous. So you can see why so few people use the neutral AH. Some items that don't have a vendor value (enchanting materials) don't have an initial deposit fee, so they can be put up for 12 hours or 48 hours with no difference in your initial fees. Before you put items up, check what other people are selling the same item for. Some days an item's average value will be higher or lower than others. Generally it's a good idea to put up auctions on friday evening or early saturday morning. If there's a large number of items already on there, at a pretty low price, it'll generally be a better idea to just leave it for the time being and post it later. Alternatively you could buy-out all the low priced goods and relist them at double price. This is very risky practice however and should not be attempted unless you have a lot of cash to spare and are pretty sure it'll turn out ok. Start with something cheap such as copper or iron. Buying items You see something you like, and want to buy it. Keep a few things in mind however. Is the item priced correctly? Some people try to scam you by putting up 6 items for 99s, then sneak in one for 99g. Be careful ! Also make sure that you're buying full stacks if that's your intention, some people try to sneak in a few stacks of 15-16 items in between full stacks, and still price them the same. When you see certain large and expensive items, keep in mind that it never hurts to try and bargain. If you see a pattern for 200g that you'd like. but you don't want to wait for the auction to end, or buy it from the person for 200g, it never hurts to see if that person is online and give him a quick sale offer. I've gotten several patterns this way for less than 50% of the listed value. It'll save you a lot of money. (money saved = money gained) Before buying something consider if you can farm it yourself, or even craft it yourself. (or ask if somebody can make it with your materials) You'll end up saving a lot of cash this way and avoid buying it from the AH. This way money saved is money gained. If some bunch of herbs, metal or other item would costs you 50g, and you could farm this item yourself then it's generally wise to just farm it yourself. When farming you get lots of gray trash extra, as well as other items which would result in a higher profit / hour than you'd save in time by buying it off the AH while farming something else for cash. Lets say you could farm kingsblood at a speed of 80 herbs per hour. About 20 gold worth on the AH. It might seem expensive for herbs, but in the same time you could be farming primal air or fire, at a speed of 10 primals per hour. about 20g each = 200g in an hour time. So, farming primal air, and selling those, you'd be spending your time a lot more efficient than you would by running around looking for kingsblood. Now, the only problem that comes up is,, limited stock. It's perfectly possible that there aren't more than 1-2 stacks of kingsblood on the auction house. In which case you'd be forced to farm it yourself. You can always look at the AH on a daily basis and get the amount you need 1-2 stacks a day. Spending a bit of money this way can get you more money indirectly. Don't flood the auction house This is a common mistake, and it's a very bad one, especially if the item you are trying to sell has a deposit fee. If you're selling enchanting materials, herbs, ore, leather then try to stick up a full stack at a time (20). When people are trying to raise their crafting skill fast, the first thing they'll look at is full stacks. Also be sure to put up a "buyout" price so people can obtain the item fast. Nobody likes to wait until the end of an auction. Some items, such as blue gems, or primals are less likely to be needed in full stacks so these should be treated with a bit more care. If for example you have 20 primal air in your bank and you want to sell them, then don't put them all on at once. List 3-5. This way any of the ones that don't sell won't cause you to lose the deposit fee, and if others list more items at a cheaper price than yours this is quite likely. Only listing 3-5 at a cheaper price, puts much less pressure on the market. If somebody comes along and sees a small number that are under the majority then you're more likely to sell them than you would if you had stuck all 20 of them up there in individual posts. Also, if the current ones are on there at 30g each, you'll sell ridiculously fast if you put your 2-3 up there for 20g. However, if you put all 20 up for 20g each, then the guy you underpriced will notice his stuff didn't sell and need to underbid you as well. Basically you screwed each other over because neither of you will sell anything now. PlayerA has 5 auctions up at 28-30 (bid-buyout). PlayerB has 5 auctions up at 32-35. PlayerC has 10 auctions up at 27-30. PlayerA's auctions will be listed at the top of the first page. Now, in order to get in front of him, you can do 2 things. * Same buyout, lower bit. * Lower buyout. You want your items to sell, so taking his buyout and taking a few copper or silver off, will ensure that your items are seen as cheapest, and thus most likely to sell. See AH Formulas on wowwiki for the exact fees that each AH charges, or their AH page for more tips. What to farm Finding out what to farm for selling on the AH doesn't take much more than a quick trip to the AH and checking for your regular materials. I recommend making a level 1 alt and walking that one to the nearest AH to look, buy, and sell from. This won't link the auctions to you, prevent people from whispering you unless you want them to, and allow you to use other alts to put up fake auctions for prices "way above" the average price, in order to make your normal auctions seem cheaper. Arcane dust, large prismatic shards, cobra scales, etc etc. are all good places to start with if you plan to sell items. Just try to find a nice spot in the market that has high demand, and a low number of other people farming. See chapter 3 for a list of more items and locations to farm them. Farming dungeons such as BRD(shards and patterns), Molten Core(cores and leather), Onyxia(gold), Stratholme(shards), Scholomance(dark runes and lifestealing enchant), can be quite profitable. At times you'll need a small group of people with which to share the profits though, but on average you should have fun farming something profitable. Back when we just had a few people attuned to SSC (when there still was an attunement) our guild went in with a group of 10-12 people (50% in blues) and cleared all the trash up to hydross. Ofcourse we didn't get the boss down, but the trash is able to drop nether vortexes, patterns, random epics and other junk. If we had wanted or were able to sell these items we'd have been able to make a decent profit by farming the trash in SSC over and over. Much like Molten Core. Now, most of our guild have gotten attuned to Hyjal and Black temple recently. The first few waves in hyjal are killable, but don't really drop all that much that often. Farming Black temple however, provides you with epic gems, patterns, random epics and hearts of darkness which will be needed later on. Lots of profit to be made if/when your guild bank doesn't need those items. Farming an instance such as this is limited only to those people who are likely to already be fairly wealthy however. But it does help in paying for your regular repair bill. Timing Timing is key and lots of money can be made by keeping this in mind. Put enchanting materials or rare gems on the AH early on tuesday / wednesday (depends if you live in the USA or EU) as arena points will be calculated and some people will be buying new gear and need new gems and enchants for this. At the start of a new arena season, hordes of players will be desperate for enchanting and gemming their new gear. The High stamina and resilience gems are in high demand at the start of the new season and prices on stamina gems can be as much as double their regular value. Large prismatic shards as much as triple. Keep that in mind, and have some in stock for some good selling. Even though this doesn't occur very often, at the start of a new expansion cloth will be miles high and expensive because it's still new, as will enchanting materials new metals and leather while crafters are struggling to raise their crafting skill as fast as possible to try and corner their market before others. Sell as much materials as you can from an early date, you can always buy what you need yourself later at probably less than half the cost.

Poll results

So, the results of the little poll "What are you looking forward to" :
* Gold making tips - 46 (60%)
* Patch 2.4 - 17 (22%)
* Wrath of the Lich King - 16 (21%)
* Character planning tips - 7 (9%)
* Arena Season 4 - 7 (9%)
* Improvements to the site - 2 (2%)
* Other... - 2 (2%)

Seems more people are interested in ways to make money than you are in the next expansion !
I guess the poll is a bit biased based on the type of visitors we get here eh?

Curious how more people are interested in the next patch compared to WotLK though, you'd think more were looking forward to such a big thing.

So the new poll is up. How are you doing on gold?
Are you a poor man, or a rich man? Did any of the guides (link on the left) get you more money than you had before?
I'm curious, how about it.


Also, added Ethereal Legacies (Warning: NSFW but damn awesome) to this post about commissions.

Happy birthday me

To me.
Or, well, almost anyway. (28th in case anyone cares)

Most guilds got one of those "when's your birthday" threads on their forums, and Rampage is no different. Some were asked what they were hoping they'd get when it was their day and i remember telling them i wanted just 1 thing.
To get ourselves into Black Temple before that date.

And we made it.
I posted last tuesday that we'd killed Kael'thas, and then Rage winterchill the day after (on our free day even!). This thursday we killed Kael'thas for a second time in order to get another 5-7 people the needed Vial Remnant. Sadly the server decided to throw a fit and kicked half of the server offline shortly after entering Hyjal, so we didn't manage to get much further than that this week. But we'll be working on attunements and guild progress for the next few weeks. Everyone is quite happy we finally got rid of the cheap dressed hooker of Tempest Keep and his hoes and we're really looking forward to seeing some new encounters again.

But, speaking of birthday presents, i got mine a bit early i guess.

It was a pretty cool and unexpected bonus on top of a fun evening.
The main bonus is that it's a 310% increased flight speed mount, instead of the 280% ones i've been using so far. I could be topping the Primal Air farming market in no time !
Ofcourse you have to add the fact that it's only got a 1-2% droprate, and that there's only 2 other horde players so far who got one on our server, and you've suddenly got a pretty cool little package in your inventory. If it was a similar speed like the Tiger from ZA, or the horse from KZ i probably wouldn't even have bothered, but this thing is just plain amazing.

What will i be doing this monday you ask?
Raiding Hyjal ofcourse, with a piece of cake in one hand, a mouse in the other, and a headset on my face, what else would an addict wow player be doing on his birthday?

Your character

Your character is like a mini version of yourself, your avatar, able to do things you'd never be able to do yourself. Slaying dragons, jumping off 40 feer cliffs, ride a raptor, swim trough lava, walk on water and many many more things. It's a very personal thing, and most of us have a strong attachment to our secondary selves. Most of us wouldn't dream of ever selling the account and this part of ourselves to which we worked so hard to get where they are today, even if we some day may quit playing. At any rate, it's not suprising that some people would want to make their characters immortal in some way. I've linked a site called FigurePrints in a previous post. But obviously there are many more sites that offer other character related services. One of such is for example to have your character drawn in 2D rather than 3D. Obsidian, creator of this web comic (which coincidentally is a very nice comic) has come up with a little service that'll cost you $40-$80. This young chinese lady makes clay figures, though i'm not sure if she does commissions. Anya, the creator of Manic Graffiti also does pencil commissions for about $20-$80 depending on whether you want a mount, pets etc drawn. She also performs this service if you pay a certain amount of ingame gold. Wyndforge has some really nice art as well, pricing unknown however. Ethereal Legacies(nsfw) also does commissions, for about ~50$ depending on the size and quality that you need. If you know any others worth mentioning here, feel free to leave a comment and i'll edit it in here.

Some news snippets

CT_Profiles version 2.0 public beta has been released. Check it out, if the server manages to survive. Your old account should still work, but all your characters will be gone. MMOC listed some potential 2.4 sunwell loots. These look pretty sweet. And "Brutal Gladiator" is supposedly the name that Arena season 4 will take. This would be released before WotLK obviously, and have loot on par with the sunwell. Schwick updated his 2.4 thread about known info about the sunwell. World of warcraft now has 10 MILLION active players. Whoa ! (blue linky) 10 million players, that's pretty crazy. You could fill the Amsterdam Arena 195 times with that many people. LFGComic is currently on Issue 115. Dark Legacy is currently on Episode 126. If you're still having trouble with 2.3.3, check wowwiki for a list of mirrors. And, looking at the poll on the right --> It looks like 50% of the people voted so far want the article gold making #5 to be released soon :P It's in progress don't worry, but be sure to add your vote if you agree / disagree. Just sign up for the RSS, or check back frequently, and you might be pleasantly suprised soon (tm) as blizzard would say. Keep in mind i do tend to edit posts a few times after posting something, so if you think the RSS is freaking out, that's why. Also, shinystat is going to cap again today... Ah well, histats.com seems to work quite ok so far.

Tuesday update

2.3.3 is being released in the USA today, so EU tomorrow. The patch is fairly small, but if you do need a mirror for whatever reason however, look at WowWiki for a nice list, or just head straight for a.Wirebrain who have a crazy fast server up and running to serve you. Hopefully this means that 2.4 will be on the PTR next week. General * Some players may notice improved data load times when newly entering the world and after zoning into new areas. * Character/NPC load times have been decreased, and now should appear faster. You’re not hearing voices, there really are people in Shattrath! Bug Fixes * Felspine the Greater in Shadowmoon Valley will no longer evade when engaged. * Guttripper in Nagrand will no longer evade when engaged. * Players will now be correctly credited with their arena points if they purchase an arena item during weekly arena calculations. * Using a castsequence macro on a target moving out of range will no longer cause it to stop working. And.... We killed Kael'thas !!! Wait, What? Who? Kael'thas, that big nasty blood elf who controls Tempest Keep over in Netherstorm and kept us very frustrated for about 5 weeks long. He's dead, and dropped some nice loot for us. Last night was almost to be called scary, nobody died on the first trash pull on the ramp. That's a guild first in itself. And if not for our silly tank running straight trough "7" Nether vapours and getting himself killed... we'd probably have killed Kael on the first try. Second try went smooth as a charm however. All weapons dead before phase 3, all advisors dead before phase 4, and 25 people up at the start of phase 5. We almost couldn't have done any better. At any rate we are recruiting, and will be spending some quality time in Hyjal soon. Edit: And one day later, we killed Rage winterchill. So about 20 people are now BT attuned :)

3D model viewer

Well this is new.
It seems both Wowhead and thottbot have added a 3D model viewer to their tools.





Interesting feature.
Transparency could still use some improvement however. Take the warglaives for example here on thott, and here on wowhead.

Crit or AP

A small post on Crit and AP While it's cool to get 4000 AP, it doesn't so much without crit or hit. And while it's cool to get 50% crit, if you only have 500 AP those crits won't hit very hard. Try to find a good balance in crit and attack power, or spell damage. Let's have a quick example. Your base hit does 500 damage. You have zero crit, and zero AP. Now you could add 26 points worth of gems (remember from earlier?), you could 52 AP, or 26 Crit rating. 26 Crit rating = 1,177 % Crit chance. 52 AP = 52/14 = 3,714 Dps Lets say your base attack speed is 2.5 seconds, nothing unreasonable. This means that your 52 AP adds : 3.714 * 2.5 = 9,29 Damage per hit. While 1.177 % Crit adds : 500 * 0.01177 = 5,885 Damage per hit. So the extra Attack power would benefit you more than the crit would. Now, let's presume your attack speed is 1.5 seconds, like an offhand attack would. 3.714 * 1.5 = 5,57 Damage per hit. The bonus from Crit should be the same as your offhand has the same damage. Interesting! Now it seems the 1.177% Crit would actually add more damage to your weapon. I know, i know, there's also hit rating, glancing blows, parry, dodge, block, poison procs, cooldowns, offhand doing only 50-75% damage and a whole load of other lovely factors that you could add into the calculation. But let's keep it simple for the sake of example shall we? Summary In the end it comes down quite simply to how hard each of your hits are, and how much damage 1 crit adds vs how much 1 DPS adds to your blows. As a rule of thumb you can keep this in the back of your head (though it's not 100% accurate, it works ok most of the time) Assume +1% crit = +1% of your normal hit damage. In the example above that would be If 1 dps * attack speed is less than what the crit bonus would give you, get more crit. Otherwise get more AP. Lets look at the above example again, but this time we presume a normal hit does 1000 damage. (you got better gear, and a lot more attack power) The bonus damage given from +AP will still be exactly the same. 3.714*weapon speed = 9.29 at 2.5 speed, or 5.57 at 1.5 speed. However 1.177% crit gives : 1000*0.01177 = 11,77 bonus damage per hit. You see where it's important to get both stats raised up?

Preciousssss...

The Burning Crusade gave us a new feature to play with for gear optimisation. Gems, and obviously sockets to stick them in. Currently the game counts about : * 16 Meta gems. * 33 Red * 30 Yellow * 17 Blue * 44 Orange * 28 Green * 34 Purple * 2 Prismatic Most crafted from about 4 varying rarities of 6 different colors of gems. Common quality gems are available trough vendors and give +4 stat points, at a price of 2g without reputation discount. Uncommon quality gems are widely available from miners, nagrand, random drops etc. Just bring them to your guild's Jewelcrafter or check the AH. Generally these are cheaper (30-50s) than the common gems from vendors and give +6 stat points. Easy choice yes? Rare quality gems are where things get complicated. The gems can be obtained in a few ways, but the patterns are more difficult, and above all costly as any Jewelcrafter will be able to tell you. Most patterns are only available as World Drops, and a few are available from vendors for reputation. There's also a few of them on limited quantity from public vendors. You can expect to pay between 20-80g for most of the rare gems with +8 stats. Epic quality gems are available in a few ways as well. Some are heroic drops, pvp vendor, bind on pickup JC only patterns, or most interesting from patterns found in Hyjal and Black Temple. +10 stats can make a big difference when you have a lot of sockets in your gear. Some stats are more valuable for their ilvl than others, so expect to see variations. Attack power is about half as valueable as agility for instance, so a blue gem might give you +8 Agi, or +16 AP, and there are other variations. What does it all mean? Well, if i take my own gear as a baseline, then i have a total of 12 sockets and a Metagem. 12 times +8 stats = 96 Stats 12 times +10 stats = 120 Stats A staggering difference of 26 stats. 26 stats = 26 Agi, 33.8 Stamina, 55 Healing, 30 Spell damage or 52 attack power as example. (True values may vary slightly) Now, from a rogue point of view, in terms of hit rating that's 1,65% Hit. Or calculated about 12 DPS. (Varies per spec) Some of you may be aware of using AEP (agility equivalence points) to size up the value of rogue gear. When Agility = 1 point, Hit rating about 1.12, Attack power 0.45, etc depending on spec. On a baseline of 26 stat points the difference between taking Hit rating or Attack power is 0.22 per stat point. (1.12-(2*0.45)) 26 * 0.22 = 5.72 stats. A few dps, which will add up in the long run. I used Rogue Raidcal for getting the base AEP values. I think it's not unlikely that Wrath of the Lich king will also be offering us gems to play with, and Inscription though not much is known about that yet. Will we be seeing common gems with +8 stats as a baseline from vendors? Time will tell, not much point in speculating about that now. Lets just say i'd be VERY suprised if they decide not to add gem sockets in the new gear. Meta Gems Meta gems are a bit more special than normal gems, they are valued as about 20-24 stat points in terms of point calculation. One such example is the "Relentless Earthstorm Diamond", or RED for short. It gives 12 Agi, and increases all critical melee damage by 3% Compared to a meta with only 24 AP, the RED is obviously the clear choice for any physical damage class. Recommendations for PvE Not including heroic gems. Always try to take +Str gems over +AP gems if you're a melee class that gets +2 ap as these will scale a lot better with buffs such as Blessing of Kings. Rogue : Red : Glinting Noble Topaz - Glinting Pyrestone Yellow : Rigid Dawnstone - Rigid Lionseye Blue : Shifting Nightseye - Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst Meta : Relentless Earthstorm Diamond Hunter : Only going to link the rare quality gems here, as the epic versions shouldn't be too hard to find. Red : Delicate Living Ruby Yellow : Smooth Dawnstone / Wicked Noble Topaz Blue : Shifting Nightseye / Infused Nightseye Meta : Relentless Earthstorm Diamond Warrior / Enhancement Shaman / Feral Druid / Retribution Paladin : Same as the hunter bit, these are just the rare gems. Red : Bold Living Ruby Yellow : Smooth Dawnstone / Rigid Dawnstone Blue : Jagged Talasite / Sovereign Nightseye Meta : Relentless Earthstorm Diamond I fear i can't speak much for casters yet and even some of the above suggestions are open for debate or may vary on your talent build, common sense gets you a long way. Most dps casters however tend to simply flood their sockets with +spell damage gems such as Runed living ruby. With the occassional deviation to activate a meta gem. For caster metagems there's Chaotic Skyfire Diamond for DPS, and Bracing Earthstorm Diamond for Healers. Activating a metagem may mean you need to play around with different gems in your gear, but it's generally well worth it. Meta gems that can be obtained from the Terrokar Spirit shards are nice enough for blue levelling gear, but in the end they are plain and simply inferior to any of the crafted ones. There's always Boar's Speed or Cat's Swiftness available if you need the movement speed. Quite tricky to get those recipes though.

2.3.3 incoming

Patch 2.3.3 is now available on the PTR. (Public test realm, in case you wondered) Patch 2.4 should arrive on the PTR in about a week if there are no serious bugs found in 2.3.3 The number of fixes in this patch is rather small, but still highly worthwhile. General * Some players may notice improved data load times when newly entering the world and after zoning into new areas. * Character/NPC load times have been decreased, and now should appear faster. You’re not hearing voices, there really are people in Shattrath! Bug Fixes * Felspine the Greater in Shadowmoon Valley will no longer evade when engaged. * Players will now be correctly credited with their arena points if they purchase an arena item during weekly arena calculations. * Using a castsequence macro on a target moving out of range will no longer cause it to stop working They also fixed gutripper according to MMOC, but that's not listed in the official patch notes (yet). Update 1: Gutripper is fixed in the US version of the PTR notes, but not in the EU version, go figure. How do they manage to continuously have syncing problems between the EU and US.

Immitation is...

The best form of flattery they say.

Well, it seems 2 blogs made by some apparently chinese guy (or who at least has pathetic english skills) who loves to link to goldsellers decided that the 4 chapters on gold making that i've posted so far were interesting enough to copy for his own purpose. And no, i'm not posting their url here, as i have no plans of giving them free traffic to boot. Although it'd allow you guys to spit some acid at them.... hmm.. What should i do? Just leave a comment and let me know. i'll consider it

So yeah, we've been blatantly copied.
I don't know what to think yet. It's funny in a way, they could at least have added a link back to the source. Or write an article about there being an article with helpful tips much like these nice guys have done. /wave
Wish i could read that tbh, it seems an interesting site.

If you find any people performing such acts of copyright violation (if you could call it that) feel free to let me know.

Update : Suprisingly he actually added backlinks after requesting it. Though i'm still not too happy about the guides being on a site that supports goldselling, it was only a matter of time before that occured.

Trojans on popular sites

You might remember i mentioned that i dislike the incgamers site?
Why? Since they get hacked about 4-5 times a year, and give all sorts of nasty trojans to their visitors, plus sucky incompetent admins.

Well, this post on the blizzard forums reports that it's that time of the year again.
This time it's not the advertisements (big suprise there tbh), but somebody has actually managed to upload and replace their uicentral package and infect one of the .exe files in there with a trojan.
That site is subject to trojans so often i'd almost point a finger at the admins themselves.... almost..

In the case of advertisements there's not much you can do other than getting Firefox, disable scripts and ensure you update your virus scanner on a weekly basis.
Or just get a Mac, more than 95% of all trojans and virusses only work on windows based systems.

When downloading executables.. scanning them doesn't always work.
If you got a firewall it should tell you when some random .exe file is trying to access the outside.
Never trust .exe files from any addon sites, curse, incgamers, or any other site. Especially when you find one where it shouldn't be.

Even WowAceUpdater is suspect unless it comes from a trusted source.

Interface Action Failed

Ever seen that message? I know i have. Well, in 2.3.2 they found something to help you trace the root of the issue. Source link. To diagnose this, enter the following into chat "/console taintLog 1" and restart the game and try to reproduce it. If you reproduce it, you can quit the game and search through the file Logs\taint.log for the word "blocked". Once you have done this you can turn off logging by entering the following into chat "/console taintLog 0" You'll only get the "blocked" messages in combat, so the easiest way to test this is to go to a low level zone and let a weak creature attack you while you do things involving targeting, group changes, pet changes, etc. Remember, taint by itself is fine, it only becomes a problem if it results in a "blocked" message. Well there you go, i'll give it a try myself later as well. Also, coming soon : A Blog post about WotLK, and one about socketing Gems. And proper RSS button added.

Linking here

I just realized that I didn't have any collection of banners for people to link to yet. For shame. This post is more intended to move down to the archives, so I can link to it from the menu. But I'll have to make it sometime or other. It's annoying that it shows up blatantly full frontal view as though it's a new post today, but it can't be helped. At least I managed to edit an old unused post for this.


So, here we go. In case, for any reason whatsoever you feel like linking to this blog, here's a few images that you could use.
(It'll probably involve blackmail, I just know it will.) Anyway, right click to save, then upload it to your own host. Hot linking is very much not appreciated.

I suck at CG art, so these are mostly modified versions of the title bar.
Some day I should put some more work into that.





My other mount is a murloc.

The blog itself

So, the blog is coming along decently, average about 0.8 posts per day.

Visitors spike up and down, and the shinystat counter (that thing there all the way at the bottom) can't keep up with the spikes.
I can give google's stats for those spikes if anyone is interested:
* Wdnesday, 9 January 2008 : 1,764
* Thursday, 27 December 2007 : 1,396
* Friday, 7 December 2007 : 924

And page views have finally hit the 10.000 mark last night. Total page visits still has a little way to go for that.

Not bad, the problem however is that shinystat stops recording when it registers 1000 views so it's pretty inaccurate in the long run. Anyone have a good idea on an alternative counter perhaps? Sitemeter could be an option.
I used to have a site that was using Nedstat, but it seems they sold off their free counter division. (I certainly cba to pay 100$ per year for a counter) That site i mentioned is here, current average 1-2 visits per day, quite a sad comparison to the hundreds it used to have. But halflife is in the past, and with the coming of steam and Halflife 2, custom crosshairs just aren't much in demand anymore.
Aside that, i sort of misplaced my login ftp details for the gamespy site.... i know it's silly, just email gamespy, but i don't have the correct address for that either.

I also had an Ultima Online related site hosted at atspace.com, but that one's been banned for unknown reasons and the admins refuse to tell me why, or reopen the account. Strange things, and poor service !! Sure it was a free service but still, that's some bad advertising right there people. Always be nice to your customers, even if they don't pay you.


One interesting feature of blogspot is that you can have multiple people posting in a single blog. Perhaps interesting for the future. I'll keep the option open at any rate, if anyone is interested in helping out feel free to leave me a message with some examples of your work. But why post here if you can make your own blog eh? Not sure about that one yet :P

The white on black layout works ok enough for the moment, but that might change at a later point as well. I think it looks a bit cheap right now. Functional, but cheap.

As for further improvements. The logo. Or lack thereof rather.
I got some ideas to improve the currently plain black and white text that's up there into something a bit more fancy but lack the artistic skills to make it a reality in very short notice. So, it's under consideration for the moment.
I should also (in theory) contact a few other wow related blogs and suggest that they could place a link to this blog if i post a link to theirs, but i want a bit more content before doing so. Still i wouldn't complain if they did

Also looking for some further improvements, maybe some digg.com functionality. But do people seriously use that a lot?

And on the subject of blog content, the two main strings on the blog "Making Gold" and "Char Planning" seem to be the most interesting bits so far. I'm curious how much interest there would be in an article about pvp, or raiding for instance. Perhaps twinking or more theorycraft. Feedback on the subject would be most appreciated obviously. Perhaps an extra writer could take up the part on pvp as i'm not so much dedicated on that subject.
In order to aid in the feedback options, comments have been set to allow anonymous posts as well now, instead of just google account holders. Also, a poll which you can see on the right side. (just as a test)

Labels, still haven't used these, so i'll need to backtrack all the posts so far and stick those on the posts made so far.
If you're subscribed to the RSS feed this means you might get some spam when i do.
Speaking of which, i need to set up a button for that.


At any rate, the blog continues to grow.
Hope ye all enjoy the read so far !

2.3.2 Patch day in Europe

It's patch day. Hopefully all addons remain working... 2.3.2 Patch Notes, Mirror at EJ For a list of download mirrors i'd recommend looking at WowWiki for a nice list of your localisation. Or a very good and crazy fast mirror is a.Wirebrain.de. Some highlights - Boat and zeppelin vendors and NPCs are back on duty. - Reduced network latency by disabling the Nagle algorithm. Classes - Hunter Pet leveling speed has been increased. - Druid Ravage: The damage multiplier on this ability has been increased from 350% to 385%. - Paladin Crusader Strike (Retribution) now causes 110% of weapon damage and no longer gains any bonus from spell damage. - Mage Ice Block (Frost) is now available on the trainer to all mages at level 30. - Mage Icy Veins (NEW Frost Talent) decreases casting time of all spells by 20% and increases the chance your chilling effects will freeze the target by 10%. Lasts 20 sec. 3 min cooldown. It is now in the Cold Snap position in the talent tree. Rogues: - Ambush: The damage multiplier on this ability has been increased from 250% to 275%. - Cheat Death: When multiple attacks land simultaenously, all those resolved after the attack which triggered Cheat Death will now have their damage reduced by 90% as intended. However, the combat log will still report them doing full damage. - Hemorrhage: Rank 4 of this ability no longer has its charges consumed by non-physical attacks and spells. - Hemorrhage weapon damage reduced from 125% to 110%, but the damage debuff has been increased. - Hemorrhage: This ability now correctly does additional damage when its debuff has already been applied. - Preparation now resets the cooldown of Shadowstep and no longer resets the cooldown of Adrenaline Rush. - Shadowstep now adds a 3 second, 70% movement speed increase. - Sinister Calling now also increases the percentage damage bonus of Hemorrhage and Backstab by 2/4/6/8/10%. To find out how much these changes affect your rogue you can look at this spreadsheet, or this thread on the EJ forum. It seems to be a slight nerf, but it looks like it's still better to have at least one Tri-Spec hemo rogue in the raid than two combat ones. It does kill Adrenalin Rush + Preparation builds for Arena though. Items - Hex Shrunken Head: This item now has a 20 second shared cooldown with other similar trinkets. Dungeons - Tempest Keep- The Eye The number of Blood Elves guarding Prince Kael'Thas' room has been reduced. ( Turns out this is 2 Packs ) - Zul’Aman The Amani'shi Warrior's Charge ability now has a minimum range. The melee haste provided by Halazzi's Frenzy has been reduced to 100%.

Character Planning - 3

Ok, so you got your name figured out, and you're pretty sure what professions you'll give your character when he reaches level 5. But, most importantly... What faction are you going to play? What class? How is the faction balance on your server? What server will you even start on? Server & Faction PvE, PvP, RP, RP-PvP. It's known well enough that RP servers are a bit more for eccentric casual players. PvE is supposedly carebear land. PvP servers are an absolute pain in the arse to level up on, and many will give up after being repeatedly ganked for hours on end as soon as you rez. RP-PvP is even worse. On the brighter side however PvP servers are known for having guilds that take endgame raid content more seriously, and have more guilds of such a type. PvE servers have a lot more players joining battlegrounds, and still very respectable raid progress. Server balance is always a problem. Aszune(EU) for instance has about 2 Alliance for every horde. Most outdoor pvp objectives are thus logically in the hands of the alliance most of the time. The type of players vary a lot. The common conception on our server is (though not neccesssarily true) that the alliance holds the most kids, horde is better at pvp and has more mature players. Ofcourse it'll vary a lot per server, and the fact that we have a "lot" more alliance than we got horde adds up as well. It's your pick really, but i recommend joining a lower faction to help improve the balance, and not just join the biggest faction on your server. Class & Race The class you wish to play relates to your race options. Some racials might be in demand for PvP (warstomp, will of the forsaken), while others might be beneficial for PvE (sword specialisation, axe specialisation etc). This article on wowwiki has a list of Racial traits. Again i stress, you "have" to look at what you intend to use your character for. Not just how it looks or whate evryone else does. For example a human warrior would be great for dps and thus fury, but a night elf warrior would have bonus dodge, thus making him a better tank. (Unless your tank needs threat rather than mitigation) The same applies for many other races and classes. It's not a lot, but it might just make the difference on those very sad 1% wipes i'm sure everyone has experienced at least once. Lets extrapolate this knowledge to the rogue class. Rogues. A stealthy, high damage melee based class. Since rogues are a dps class, a race that will boost that dps would be even more efficient in PvE. The following races are able to start as a rogue : * Alliance : Human, Dwarf, Night Elf, Gnome * Horde : Orc, Undead, Troll, Blood Elf Alliance Rogues * Human : Sword and mace specialty. Humans will gain +5 weapon skill making them quite exellent rogues. Their "Perception" skill also makes them exellent vs other rogues in PvP. * Dwarf : For rogues, dwarfes don't give a great lot extra. This is why they are a very rare race to see as a rogue. The bleed immunity may save your life in PvP however. * Gnome : Gnomes have increased Intellect. Which will increase the ratio at which you learn your weapon skills... Quite useful, no really! Ok it's not. The Escape artist talent is quite useful for PvP however. * Night Elf : Night elves are natural rogues, and as such they gain a +1 to their stealth level. The improved stealth is mostly a PvP talent. Can't kill what you can't see right? They also have an additional 1% dodge chance. In the old days they also had 5% agility bonus which is why you'll see a lot of "old" night elf rogues. However, for PvE they're inferior to humans nowadays. Horde Rogues * Orc : Bloodrage, increases attack power great for PvE. Orcs also get a bonus to stun resistance, making them quite feared in PvP. Rogues can't use axes so their weapon bonus is sadly useless. * Troll : Since haste stacks multiplicative Berserking is a great boost to a rogue's damage. An increase of 10-30% attack speed for a short duration. Also throwing weapons gain +1% to crit, which is nice for deadly throw in PvP to slow runners. * Undead : Will of the forsaken, a mostly PvP talent which is much feared by warlocks and priests all around the world. * Blood elf : Mana Tap / Arcane torrent, mostly for PvP. The Arcane torrent also returns a tiny bit of Energy to the rogue making is decent for a quick extra burst of energy. It's on a fairly long cooldown however. I think you see where this could be important yes? Have a look at the Racial Traits page again just in case. Summaries Next i'll make a few summaries to make it easier. If a race isn't listed that doesn't directly mean it's not posible to create one in such a way, just that it doesn't really give you anything "special" to make it worthwhile to do so. Night elf and Dwarf priests for example are a pretty pointless choice as of patch 2.3 A Human priest would receive a lovely 10% to their spirit however. On overall Horde is said to be more favoured toward PvP, while the Alliance would be more favoured toward PvE. In the end it's decently balanced since TBC and patch 2.3 fear ward changes. The Races Alliance Dwarfes are sturdy, make decent tanks, and are good in PvP Gnomes make good casters due to their bonus intellect, and work great in PvP due to their snare dispell Humans are annoying to encounter in PvP as a rogue, but that's about it for their PvP abilities, mostly they excel at PvE. Night Elves make decent tanks, but fairly average casters compared to the others. Draenei are an exellent buff to any party they are in, mostly this is a PvE oriented class. Their Heal makes them have a tiny bit more health to play with for PvP. Horde Undead is the mostly PvP class of the horde, like the night elf on the alliance this is one of the most commonly picked races on the horde side just for the looks. Orc is badass in PvP as well as in PvP Troll is the mostly PvE class of the horde, much like the Draenei are for the alliance. They make great hunters, rogues, and casters. Tauren are aside the only race on the horde able to become a druid, the most obvious class for a tanking warrior due to the 5% health bonus. Blood Elf is mostly a PvE class, but with an AoE silence + regen ability which works wonders in PvP as well. Rogues : For PvP : Undead, Blood Elf, Orc, Night Elf, Gnome, Dwarf, Human. For PvE : Troll, Human, Orc, Blood Elf. Pretty much as from the example further above. Hunters : PvP : Tauren, Orc PvE : Draenei, Dwarf, Orc, Troll Straying off subject for a second, when looking at hunters, i see a LOT of Tauren hunters. Why in name of all that's holy do people roll a tauren hunter if they rarely, if ever do any PvP? Orcs have Bloodrage and +5% pet damage, it's an insane lot extra for a hunter's dps in PvE ! Have pity on your guild and don't roll a Tauren hunter if you're planning to raid in the endgame content. The same goes for night elf hunters. I have to laugh at that, sorry. Night elf Hunters is one of the most common class and race combination choices in the game, and it's near useless in PvP as well as PvE. Most of them were chosen in this way because of the old +5% agility which is no longer given. As you can expect a LOT of people were very unhappy about that change. I wasn't one of them. Druids : PvP : Night Elf, Tauren PvE : Night Elf, Tauren Druids are somewhat of an exception on the regular PvE / PvP choice, as each faction only has a single race that can pick a druid and each of them has both PvP and PvE oriented racials. Priests : PvP : Undead, Blood Elf, Night Elf PvE : Human, Troll, Draenei, Blood Elf It sort of depends if you want to be Holy or Shadow ofcourse. At level 10 and at level 20 priests get some special abilities depending on their race. Most spells are useful in some way, except the Night elf "Starshards". At level 20 Night elves get another buff called "Elune's Grace" which would make a discipline priest quite a harsh target in PvP. Shamans : PvP : Tauren, Orc PvE : Draenei, Troll, Orc Whether you're a healer, enhancement, or elemental the races should be fairly straightforward. As with hunters, taurens are not a dps class and you should avoid levelling one if you are intended to be a dps class in the endgame. Paladins : PvP : Blood Elf, Dwarf PvE : Human, Draenei, Blood Elf, Dwarf The choices for Holy or Retribution should be fairly straightforward. For protection you could take a dwarf, just don't take a dwarf for anything else. Warlocks : PvP : Undead, Orc, Blood Elf PvE : Orc, Gnome, Blood Elf You'll notice humans aren't on the list. Just ask any warlock ingame how much they value spirit. Mages : PvP : Undead, Human PvE : Gnome, Blood Elf, Troll, Draenei Humans could work for Pve, but in all honestly 10% spirit is close to "nothing" compared to 10% intellect that gnomes get, or the increased spell hit% that a Draenei has. Warrior : PvP : Tauren, Undead, Dwarf, Gnome PvE : Tauren, Orc, Human, Draenei, Dwarf, Night Elf, Troll As listed before the Taurens here have a very large advantage in health. Trolls should only be taken for a DPS warrior. Orcs get some stun resistance, but that's pretty useless for a tanking warrior. (Other than Kael'thas i don't really know many bosses that stun the tank) Deathknight : PvP : Unknown as of yet, but for PvP it's mostly the same as with the above racials in mind for warriors. PvE : Depends if you want to do Dps or Tank, much like a warrior would be. There we go for this installment, hopefully you gained some new insights on picking a class for your character.

PC trouble again

Just great, i do a quick reboot at 1930 (15m before raid), and... Fatal blue...

ARE YOU KIDDING ME !?!?

Windows kept crashing, safe mode wouldn't load, booting from the util partition didn't show any errors.
I think I spend about 2,5 hours trying to get into dos or any kind of command prompt on a XP machine. I just couldn't get onto the C:\ drive no matter what i did.
Tried a w95 floppy i had lying around, no go.
Tried booting from USB stick i formatted from the laptop, no go.
Made a w98 flop with my older pc, no go.
Made a wXP flop with the neighbour's pc, no go.

Time for surgery.
I removed the HD from my pc, and put it in the older (p350 eww) pc, in the hopes of getting access to it as a slave drive.
Frantically tried getting that to work for about an hour while switching jumpers around and waiting for the slow piece of crap to load, but no go.
At some point i was about to give up and bring the drive to work the next day, but then I stumbled upon the holy grail hidden away at the bottom of one of my drawers. "Dell restore CD". Ofcourse! It's so simple!
It took a minute of swearing to find out it actually had to go into the DVD drive to boot from it... Dell logic, i dunno. But finally managed to get the darn thing working again.

It's just not my luck this week.

Logged back on at about 22.15 to find the guild happily wiping on Kael'Thas.
I managed to join for one last trash clear + attempt.
We got him to 32% or something. Main Tank died at 51%, of all the luck... /sigh
That damn elf would probably have been dead otherwise.

It's frustrating how close we are to killing him, but we'll get there soon.
Also, we're recruiting. More on that at our guild site, just in case you're interested.
Off the top of my head, I think a 2h DPS warrior with blood frenzy, and a Holy Paladin are currently the most needed.

Of all things...

So i figured i'd run windows updater again for a change, i mean it's been 6 months at least.
Couple updates, fixes, criticals n stuff. No problem.
Also noticed an update available for sound and video. BIG MISTAKE !

So i reboot and.... Blue screen of death.... oh boy.
Panic, when was my last backup of critical files. Ages ago..
Just reboot and hope for the best.

"Windows has failed to start up normally last time, blah blah, do you want to start in safe mode?"
Let's try that.
Logfile scrolls by and... Suprisingly it works.
Reboot again.

640x480 - 16 color mode windows greets you !
Oh boy...
Both the video and sound drivers were indeed fucked by microsoft.
Why the hell do they even offer that update if it doesn't work?

So, in the end i spent about 4 hours of my sunday to download, install, configure, install AGAIN, configure again, uninstall extra junk such as steam (piece of crap software if there ever was one) and finally getting back into wow.
Had to uninstall the AtiCCC because whenever it loaded my screen went "yellow", i kid you not.
And why on earth does windows need to reboot after every single thing i install.. Jeez. Macs don't do that.

Sound works again. Though i didn't find out until during the raid that my sound output was routed to my microphone input, so whever i tried talking on TeamSpeak people could only hear the music i was running instead of me.
The weird hiss in my headset seems to be gone at least. ( About the only good thing this has given me )
New annoying ATI icon in the bottom right of my screen that wasn't there before, but cba to find a way to remove it.

Only problem now is that wow is pretty choppy at times. But it seems to be more related to the pc itself not coping with the drivers.
The entire thing just freezes for 2-3 seconds at times.

Moral of the story? If it ain't broken, don't try to fix it.
And certainly don't trust Microsoft to help you.


So yeah, great weekend, how about you?

How to make gold - 4

With disenchanting In part also covered in this thread at the EJ forums. Firstly, you can obviously farm instances such as BRD for Large Brilliant Shards. These sell for about 6-8g currenly on my server. Check the linked article for more info on that. This post will detail a large part of making money by disenchanting items from crafting. Lets presume you either have a friend who can make and disenchant for you, or you have all the characters and patterns you need to do all this yourself. Note that it "really" helps here if you can do this all by yourself, as you won't have to share your profits. This method involves the combination of trade crafts, and disenchanting the results. We'll aim at the popular high end enchanting materials. Firstly the price list Large prismatic shard, sells for about 30-35g on our AH currently. 3 Small prismatic shards can be converted into 1 Large, thus logically sell for about 1/3 their price. Arcane dust, sells for about 1g - 1g30s at the time of writing this. Greater planar essence, sells for about 8g. 3 Lesser planar essences can be converted into 1 big one, funny enough they sell for about 1g cheaper. Void Crystal about 15g. Before you start, don't try to scrape together cash too much by buying something for 20g, then selling it for 21g. Aside that you'd barely make any profit to begin with, the auction house always takes 5% of your earnings, thus you'd actually make out worse in the end. (Hence i didn't buy out all the lesser planar essences and tried to resell them as large ones) Next, the cost of raw materials Adamantite Powder : Which is a waste product basically. If you're a jewelcrafter you should have loads of these. But if needed can be obtained for about 1g ea on the AH. I recommend talking directly to anyone selling these though as you should be able to make a deal for some cheaper stuff. For the sake of example i'll set it as 25s. Primal Earth : Currently selling for 3g at my auction house. Mercurial Adamantite, sells for 10g on the AH, but can be made for 4-7g if you do it yourself. Eternium bar : Sells for about 1g on our AH Fel iron bar : Sells for about 1g on our AH (Or better, 35-40s per ore) Felsteel bar : About 5g to make (3 fel iron 2 eternium bars) Let's start with Jewelcrafting Braided Eternium Chain and Thick Felsteel Necklace, both have a pretty much guaranteed chance to produce a Large prismatic shard. Henceforth referred to as BEC, and TFN. Cost to craft BEC = 14g 2x Eternium = 2g 3x Mercurial Adamantite = 3*(4 powder + 1 Prinal Earth) = 12g Cost to craft TFN = 20g Same as BEC only requires 6 extra fel iron bars to produce. Disenchanting the BEC / TFN yields you a LPS about 99.5% of the time. Void crystals are only about 15g at the moment. So, even if you get a Void crystal you should still cut about even. If you sell the Large Prismatics at 30g, you'd get between 10-16g profit per item disenchanted. It's a great way to get rid of those useless adamantite powders, or elemental earths. Mind you, if you'd bought the adamantite powder the TFN wouldn't yield you any profits. The BEC would cost you 22g to make vs 30-35g profit however. Brilliant Pearl Band : 4-5g to make 10g return value 8x Jaggal Pearl : 35-50s ea : 3-4g 2x Eternium Bar : 1g ea Green gems Here things get tricky to calculate. Now, if you're an addict prospecter i'm sure you've got a few hundred of each color of green quality gem sitting around in a bank alt somewhere. How would you like to make some easy profit out of them? Sure you could sell them to the vendor for 25s ea, as nobody will buy them off the AH anyway. But there is a better way. Azure Moonstone Ring : Lets say 2g to make. 1x Fel Iron Bar : 1g 2x Azure Moonstone : ~30s*2 1x Deep Peridot : ~30s Disenchanting according to thottbot : Arcane Dust 178.5% : 1.78*1.15 : 2g 04s 7c Lesser Planar Essence 63.5% : 0.635*2.6667 : 1g 69s 33c Small Prismatic Shard 2.0% : 0.02*10 : 20s Total value : 3g 93s 4c Golden Draenite Ring : About 1g 60s to make, expected return value ~3g50s 1x Fel Iron Bar : 1g 2x Golden Draenite : ~30s*2 Fel Iron Blood Ring : About 1g 60s to make, expected return value ~3g50s 1x Fel Iron Bar : 1g 2x Blood Garnet : ~30s*2 Also somewhat interesting, but depends on what you can get for Small Radiant shards on your server. Aquamarine signet : About 2g-4g to make, 6-7g return value. 3xAquamarine : 50s-1g *3 is about 1g50-3g, 2g25 median. 4xFlask of Mojo : 10s-25s, 50s-1g total Tailoring Arcanoweave bracers : 18g 60s to make, 30-35g return 6x Bolt of Netherweave : 5g 60s 12x Arcane Dust : 12g 2x Rune Thread : 1g (Bit less depending on rep) Blacksmithing Not much of interest that i can see at this time. The thread mentioned these 2, but my server's economy doesn't really support it as worthwhile. Perhaps yours is different. Fel Iron Breastplate : 10g to make, about 7g return value, got worth it. Arcane Dust 266.9% : 2.669*1.15 : 3g 6s 93c Greater Planar Essence 33.9% : 2g 71s 2c Large Prismatic Shard 3.7% : 1g 11s Fel iron Chain Coif : 4g to make, about 3g 70s return value, not worth it. Arcane Dust 183.2% : 2.1068 Lesser Planar Essence 63.1% : 1.5775 Small Prismatic Shard 1.5% : 15s Engineering Cogspinner Goggles Cost to make will vary a lot per server and your leather prices. Average cost to make would be about 9g for the dust, 50s for the gems, and anywhere from 4g to 12g for the leather. The item disenchants into a Large Prismatic Shard. Leatherworking Thick Draenic Gloves : about 4g to make, expected return value ~2g so probably not worth it. Not sure on some of the return values yet as thottbot just crashed. Go figure. I'll need to update this article further at a later time. Enjoy the Jewelcrafting part so far.

Elitist Jerks Theorycraft

A little highlight on one of the links you can see on the left. EJ, or Elitist Jerks. It's a WoW guild like many others, who as a guild like quite a few others have killed Illidan in Black Temple, and like many others have a forum where they fool around from time to time. However, unlike many others, their forum receives hundreds of new posts every day. Topics on pvp, theorycrafting, boss tactics, and well, lots more. Now, before you storm off to make a post i'll warn you that they don't like retards. for good reason. So kindly ensure you read the regulations, or just browse for a while and observe proper forum etiquette before making a fool of yourself and get banned. That's right, you won't find any 12 year olds posting keyloggers, any rickroll fake links, any emo kids posting about why their girlfriend deleted their lvl 70 char, silly ninja whines, or any of the other crap that gets posted on the "official" forums quite regularly. Some of the highlights which make this a thriving community can be found in the theorycraft (or class mechanics) forum. Some examples are : * Enhance shaman, collected works of theorycraft Volume 1. With over a million views so far, and more than 6000 posts. It's gigantic ! * Rogue DPS Spearsheet, (related link) Progress on pretty much all rogue theorycraft ongoing. * Working theories of theorycraft, a summary on the most accepted theorycraft facts and findings. * Survival hunter raiding, every raid should have one. * And ofcourse the Quick links to the most prominent class info threads on this forum. Be sure to check it out sometime. If you're even slightly interested in improving the knowledge you have your class, you won't regret it.

And Another Ad

Am i the only one thinking... "who is this guy?"



Mr.T everyone knows him, right? You'd have to be some outback Jack not to know this guy, and even then i'd be suprised if you hadn't heard of him.
Mini Me (V Troyer) is da man ! Dr Evil, Austin powers, etc. Just google it.
JC van Damme is a pretty well known, though somewhat a dated actor.
William Shatner, even though i don't like starwars, i can see that's what this guy is "probably" related to somehow. The whole Jedi thing 'n all.

But seriously, who the fuck is Willy toledo ?
You might as well show me howard and tell me he's a popular comedian from southern spain. I might even believe you.

Ace2 & Addons

Addons, world of warcraft just isn't the same without them. Some well known locations for finding addons include Wow Ace, Curse Gaming, and Wow Interface. There's also Inc Gamers, which used to be ui.worldofwar.net up to some point in recent times, but i'm sort of boycotting that one... They've had a "lot" of curious security issues with their advertisements, and some of the admins are less than helpful. Anyway, use at your own risk. A very big thing lately is using libraries to cut down the memory usage of your addons. Ace2 is the most well known and most used ones currently. Basically it's a package of calls and utilities which offers functionality for all your addons to call. In theory this would reduce the size and memory as mentioned a line ago. But the actual gain is pretty marginal from what i see. Basically it works like this : Ace2 gives you Function A+B+C these functions are each 10K in size (just theoretical numbers here, bear with me) Addon1 gives you Functions D+E Addon2 gives you Functions E+F Addon3 doesn't know how to use Ace2, so it gives you Function B+C+D You'll immediately see that Addon1+2 are (in theory) smaller than Addon3. The first 2 addons would each have to include A+B or B+C, resulting in a total memory usage of 2*20+20 : 80K, but thanks to Ace2, they only use 30+20+20 = 70K If you only had Addon3 however, then perhaps it wouldn't even "need" function A, because it doesn't use that function anywhere, and thus would be using less memory without ace, than it would if it had included Ace. Anyway, since Ace2 is as big and versatile as it is, and there's so many addons out there, you'll eventually end up with an Interface folder filled with dozens and dozens of useful things. The advantages of using a shared library like are soon become quite clear even to the inexpert of mathematicians. Sadly not everyone is aware of it yet, if you are one of those people i recommend you continue reading. Next, there's a thing called "CosmosUI". It's basically the same as Ace2, but much smaller, and supports less addons. Also, since Cosmos and Ace2 are not compatible, you'll want to pick and choose 1 and leave the other. I'm using Ace2 myself as it receives more support, frequent updates, and has a whole huge load of addons available for download. There really isn't much point in getting Cosmos unless you want to upload data to thottbot. And i don't think a great lot of people bother with that anymore. So, that's a whole load of information that you probably didn't find to greatly useful, or better yet, already knew. Let's get to the juice shall we? Previously, there was: CT_RaidAssist, CT_Mailmod, CT_Barmod, CT_whatever. CT_RaidAssist is replaced by oRA2 CT_Timer is replaced by a useful addon to FuBar called, you guessed it Fubar_TimerFu CT_UnitFrames is replaced by either PitBull, or AG_UF CT_BarMod is replaced by Bartender3 CT_Mailmod i stopped using as blizzard added a rightclick to add stuff to mail functionality, and now allows you to add up to 14(?) items. Alternatively there's Gmail or Postal. Also: * Titan, a nice menu bar on the top of your screen is replaced by FuBar, RepairFu, AmmoFu, etc etc. There are more plugins for * Fubar than there are for Titan and they don't all come with the default package so you can pick what you want instead of having it stuffed down your throat each time you want to update. * KHTM Threatmeter, is replaced by Omen. There's a whole load of arguments in favour of 1 or the other, but in the end you'll just want your entire guild using Omen due to compatibility issues. * Gatherer, is replaced by Cartographer * NaturEnemycastbars, is replaced by ClassTimer * DotTimer is the absolute most horrible piece of spammy fucking trash you'll ever find, do your raid a favour and use classtimers. * DeadlyBossmods is replaced by Bigwigs. * Damagemeters can be replaced by half a dozen different things, personally i use Recap. And i'm sure i missed some few. Just look trough the ace2 directory, or ask on their forums. I'd recommend downloading the WAU, or WowAceUpdater for this purpose. Yes it's an external .exe file, but seems to do the job. You'll need to download ace2, and several libraries to go along with your addons and this is the easiest thing to get those with and keep them updated. Mind you, i was content enough with CT before i discovered this whole Ace2 thing. But once you start replacing addons, it's hard to stop. Currently i'm running at an estimate of 100 odd addons (way too many i know) and my addon memory usage is around 22-25 Mb on average. Recap tends to eat quite a bit on long raid nights but that's about the only one. I do use a modified version of CT_RaidTracker for raid tracking purposes, but it's a standalone mod which doesn't require you to keep the bulky CT_Core on your computer. It's a rather memory intensive one, but there aren't any real alternatives that i can recommend instead of it. Now, i mentioned Cartographer a bit ago, there's a nice plugin for it called "Cartographer_Route". Insane. I have no other words for it. Just get it. It was listed and described on this post on Mmo champion, and i've been using it ever since. Insane. go get it. Can't be arsed to click the link? Even though you know you will eventually anyway? Bah! Ok, here's what it does. You've used Cartographer or Gatherer before, and got a nice big database on your worldmap and minimap which contains all your best and secret farming spot for just about every resouce in the game. Adamantite, Black lotus, Gas clouds, Terocone you name it, it's on there. This plugin grabs that map, and then calculates the fastest / shortest path that will take you past every single one of those herbs, metals etc. Sounds cool eh? Indeed it is. But, that's not all ! It actually "draws" that line onto your minimap so you can see where you're going. It works ok if you don't have a flying mount, but in Outland it shines ! I've gone and farmed a whole bunch of primal water, primal shadow, primal air last night. I'm not uninstalling this addon ever. It's great for making money. You going to click that link now? I figure you will. Some More addons Outfitter Can be replaced by ClosetGnome(ace2) supposedly, but i haven't gotten around to trying it yet. It allows you to easily equip / unequip your gear, tank gear, dps gear, naked, etc. RatingBuster Ratings confuse you? Get RatingBuster. This addon will tell you exactly how much % haste, crit, hit etc you receive at each level from all the available ratings. DrDamage This is a replacement for the old TheoryCraft addon, it'll show you DPS, DPM, HPM and much more. Sadly this is mainly a caster addon, but definitely worth getting. Yata Shaman only. It's all your totems combined into 4 easy to access buttons. Not as great as architotem, but still all good. Comes with timers too. Capping Must have addon if you ever do any battlegrounds, shows times left on flags, helps turning in trash in AV and more. Super Inspect(smurfy) Supposedly there's another alternative called Examiner but i haven't had time to try it yet. PingPong Ever wanted to know which retarded spaz keeps pinging the map during raids? Get this addon and you'll be able to kick him in the nuts. BigBrother On the subject of kicking retards, this addon will tell you which of the dps warriors keeps whirlwinding the sheeped, shackled etc adds. eCastingBar One of the few non-ace addons i stil got. It allows you to customize, move, etc all the castbars. I'm well aware there's an alternative (the name escapes me for the moment) but this thing is pretty lightweight. SellValue I'm suprised blizzard hasn't added this by default seriously. It'll remember the value of any item you've ever tried to sell to a vendor. Get it. You'll thank me later. OneBank Merges all your bank slots into 1 easily accesible bank box. OneBag Does the same for your personal bags. Just have a look trough the WowAceUpdater, i'm sure you'll find plenty of other playthings. And if you're really stuck just have a poke at the Ace2 forums.