All hail the Nightmare Tear

One item on the PTR has peaked my interest, the Nightmare Tear! What is it? Well its the big brother version of the Enchanted Tear. The enchanted tear provides +6 all stats and is a prismatic gem (i.e. counted as a blue, red and yellow gem). The Nightmare Tear packs a bigger punch, and weighs in at a hefty +10 all stats. This beauty has sparked my interest from both a ret dps perspective and an opportunity to make some extra gold.

How do you get one?
Made by a JC using a dragon's eye and five infinite dust.

How many can you have?
These are unique equipped so its 1 per gear set.

Ret view
Currently on live, non-JC pve rets snap an enchanted tear into the blue socket to meet the normal Relentless Earthsiege Diamond's meta requirement (i.e. requires one blue, yellow and red gem). Next patch however, all rets will need one of these to meet their meta requirements especially since JC rets no longer benefit from bold dragon's eyes being prismatic in 3.2.

Still, lets break it down against the other blue socket choice for rets, the sovereign dreadstone.

Sovereign Dreadstone
Gem Colour: Purple
+10 Strength
+15 Stamina

Nightmare Vine
Gem Colour: Prismatic
+10 Strength
+10 Agility
+10 Intellect
+10 Stamina
+10 Spirit (lol)

Its pretty clear, come patch day I'm jamming one of these bad boys into a blue socket.

And on making gold?
My tip is that while everyone has their eyes firmly fixed on the titanium ore market the price of dragon's eyes is going unchecked. It seems a bit out of whack considering that people that buy up titanium ore are doing so in the hope that it procs an epic gem, whereas you can obtain a guaranteed raw epic gem (subject to ptr changes blah blah blah) in the form of a Dragon's Eye. So I reckon that I will snap up as many dragon's eyes as I can get and then drop them on the AH on patch day (some as repriced Dragon's Eyes, some as Nightmare tears).

I'm backing that every JC and his dog will be hoarding their JC tokens for new recipes and the supply of Dragon's Eyes will dry up sooner rather than later.

Yogg downed!

I could sense that Vandelay Industries was close to downing 25 man Yogg from our previous attempts, and we managed to get to phase 3 on Sunday so our hopes were high that this would finally be our night. On Monday though, things didn't begin so great. We were having disconnects, my brother was sick as a dog and so opted not to raid while one of our DK's net got capped (once you reach your broadband download limit, the bandwidth gets reduced to dial up speed). So we were forced to sub out the DK and I pleaded with my bro to log onto his rogue to give us a hand. To which he eventually agreed.

Our luck started to change then and after a couple of attempts, we had Yogg down to 25%. After a slight change in strategy we then took Yogg to 2% before a slight error in judgement cost us the kill and the raid was quickly overwhelmed with adds. At that stage I slumped in my chair and pressed my forehead onto the keyboard. I looked up at my clock, it was 11pm; we had been wiping on Yogg for a solid 3 and a half hours.

Normally we have a tight raiding policy, we call raids at 11pm and start afresh the next night. However, being Monday we needed to get Yogg down and no one wanted to wait another week. We had some of our best dps on and we needed to make sure we took advantage of that opportunity.

'C'mon, one perfect run guys!' was the raid leaders call over Vent. And then it happened, we delivered that run!

So last night we finally cleared Yogg, and its been a freaking long time coming. Our last progression kill was General Vezax on the 8 June, and after five weeks of wiping on Yogg I'm glad to have done it, otherwise I probably would've lost my RL sanity.

Babam!

Changes to Alchemy on the PTR

Yesterday Alchemy was looking pretty sweet, but mmo champion has noted some changes to Alchemy on the PTR.

First of all it looks like the epic gem transmute is on a 20 hour shared cooldown. This seriously ruins the whole thing for Alchs. I mean if you were an alchemist you would focus on the most valuable gem a cardinal ruby transmute (which now requires 1 eternal fire and 1 scarlet ruby).

I liked the former system better it gave a use for the rare gems and would keep epic gem prices pretty sane. Lets hope the devs see it this way and switch it back.

Prospecting 100 stacks of Titanium Ore in 3.2 PTR

Okay so I logged onto the PTR today and decided that I would prospect 100 stacks of Titanium Ore to see what the result would be. 100 stacks is a pretty fair idea as it gives 400 prospects so here are the results:

Cardinal Ruby 19 (4.75%)

Kings Amber 17 (4.25%)

Eye of Zul 10 (2.5%)
Majestic Zircon 20 (5.00%)

Ametrine 21 (5.25%)

Dreadstone 20 (5.00%)

Titanium Dust 266 (66.50%)

Scarlet Ruby 23 (5.75%), Bloodstone 94 (23.50%)

Autumn's Glow 24 (6.00%), Sun Crystal 109 (27.25%)

Forest Emerald 15 (3.75%), Dark Jade 104 (26.00%)

Sky Sapphire 14 (3.50%), Chalcedony 105 (26.25%)

Twilight Opal 16 (4.00%), Shadow Crystal 104 (26.00%)

Monarch Topaz 10 (2.50%), Huge Citrine 83 (20.75%)

Note that the sum of the percentages is greater than 100% as there are multiple procs from one prospect. So it definitely appears that proccing epic gems is in the same ballpark as proccing rare gems in Saronite Ore. Our sample shows that there is a 26.75% chance to proc an epic gem. As a rule of thumb, this is like proccing an epic gem every stack of Titanium Ore.

The dust is also pretty nice, 10 dust is needed for a repeatable hand in quest for a JC token. So 266 dust would yield 26 JC tokens. The epic JC patterns need 5 JC tokens so our sample was enough to earn 5 patterns.

Now lets look at Alchemy which has flown under the radar a bit as alchemists can also make epic gems via transmutes.

**This has changed since the last build on 30/6/09**

3 Sky Sapphire = 1 Majestic Zircon

3 Forest Emerald = 1 Eye of Zul

3 Twilight Opal = 1 Dreadstone

1 Majestic Zircon + 2 Eternal Life = 1 King's Amber

1 Majestic Zircon + 2 Eternal Shadow = 1 Ametrine

3 Eye of Zul = 1 Cardinal Ruby (available through a quest to do five transmutes.)

I tried out the transmutes mainly the Sky Sapphire, Forest Emerald and the Twilight Opal ones (I didn't bring any Eternal Shadows or Lifes with me to the PTR ao I couldn't do those). The result was amazing though, my Alchemist is Level 70 450 transmute spec, and she procced multiple gems (had a two-proc with Eye of Zul twice out of the five transmutes).

Since she has 450 skill, I think that lets her do the Cardinal Ruby transmute as well, so with 17 Eye of Zuls I was able to do five transmutes. Again she procced double Cardinal Rubies twice! Quick tip though, if you are at 450 alchemy, make sure you pick up the quest before you do the transmutes.

Note that there is currently no CD on the gem transmutes on the PTR. To be honest I don't expect there to be otherwise rare gems will be totally worthless again just like in tbc. Looks like Alchs are gonna have a pretty sweet ride this patch.

So after my initial stack of 100 titanium ore, and with some help from my transmute spec alc my total epic gem return was:

Cardinal Ruby 26

Kings Amber 17

Eye of Zul 2
Majestic Zircon 25
Ametrine 21
Dreadstone 25

Bring on the patch!

General Vezzzzzzzzzzzzzz *snore*

General Vezax is by far the most boring fight I have encountered!

To clarify, my guild uses a simple strategy that involves having a DK tank that blows his cooldown whenever General enrages. This removes the need to kite the General in this phase so it becomes a really long tank and spank. I don't even move so I just sit on the boss and play one handed while the other props up my head trying to prevent myself from falling asleep.

The worst thing is this torture goes on for a whole 10 minutes! The fight would be pretty cool if I had something to focus on like being on interrupt duty like the rest of the melee but with Hammer of Justice on a 60 second cooldown, it's really only handy for clutch interrupts. I almost want to slit my wrists if there's a wipe because I cbf sitting through another 10 minutes of that.

In comparison I love the rest of Ulduar (apart from Flame Leviathan). The keepers are all well thought out cool fights, and Mimiron is my personal favourite. Dodging mines, explosions, void zones its all guns blazing non stop action. The General Vezax fight just feels out of place, and it would have been much better to just go straight to Yogg Saron after the keepers. It would just keep the pace of the raid up.

I reckon they should have swapped General with Ignis, it would have been better if General was optional!

Ruby Shades con artist

I was hanging around in IF the other day on my bank alt and I had this guy that wanted to con me out of my Haris Pilton Ruby Shades. It was a bit of a laugh so I just took some screenies of the conversation... Enjoy!

That's just weird...

I originally had something else planned to write about, but that will have to wait for another day. At the moment, all the action is about Ferraro, Paladin Schmaladin and Retpaladin.com.

It turns out that Ferraro was actually seven Ferraros (or is the collective term Ferrari?) where when one writer decided that when they had enough of the stalker/fan mail, a new blogger would takeover the blog and continue to be Ferraro (kind of like the Phantom and how the legend passes from father to son). It seems a pretty strange explanation because I didn't notice any change in the style of the blog. I mean, its pretty hard to write in the same style as someone before no matter how hard you try.

I thought about removing Paladin Schmaladin from my blogroll but its actually more interesting if it stays. So the Ferrari... err yeah that's it, have been great writers and have provided the community with good solid information. I'm talking about the paladin stuff here not the personal or gadget content.

Still it doesn't excuse the identity theft of some girl that had no idea PS ever existed. As if the internet wasn't weird enough! It kinda brings back all that cliches from the late 90's of how anyone you meet on the infoweb is an axe murderer.

What's most disappointing is that Ferraro represented every teenage boy's wet dream. An attractive, intelligent and funny girl that was awesome at video games that turned out to be a... well... guy (well at least two of the Ferrari were guys according to Ferraro No.7's post). Be who you are, for those that mind don't matter and those that matter don't mind. I think that was how Ferrari's sig went, pity they couldn't live up to the first part.

How do I feel? Well it reminds me of when I found out the truth of Santa Claus, sometimes ignorance is bliss.