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Okay, so in amongst the changes to ret in 3.1.0 this is the one that stood out the most to me:
- Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
I'm feeling neither here nor there about it to be honest. I mean, I liked bringing Kings to raids, it sure helped in securing a raid spot by default. I even liked seeing in trade chat 'LF1M for Naxx prefer ret pally'.
So with an extra five points it opens up some possibilities! Well, lets call it seven considering that the standard ret pve build already has two talent points leftover 'to do what you please'. Hmm.... but the question is, where are the points going to go?
If you put those points back into ret the build will definitely have more PvP tools with talents like Vindication, Eye for an Eye and Divine Purpose to choose from. Although, none of these will directly increase your damage output. I guess to help out the tanks you could go with Improved Retribution Aura, but I dunno, an extra 56 reflective damage from two talent points is pretty meh.
What about the holy tree? Sigh, nothing good there either.
So that leaves prot. Blizz are making big changes to the Prot tree to streamline it, which makes you wonder how that's going to look. Also, something has to replace the gaping Tier 1 talent hole that Kings (and Improved Kings) leaves behind in the tree. It would be cool if they moved Divine Guardian within reach of Ret, I wouldn't mind dumping two spare talent points in that talent for raiding!
Okay Elders, enough is enough. Please be less irritating and stop spamming me! I'm sick of having to keep clearing out those pesky red envelopes out of my mailbox. I should slap a 'no junk mail' sticker. Thanks but no thanks, you can keep your crappy fireworks and yellow orbs.
Seriously though, I visited all 75 elders and scored my Elder title! Along the way, I also picked up another three titles which I had deliberately held off on completing so I could consolidate the achievements with the Lunar Festival.
The titles I picked up were:
Argent Champion
Explorer
Ambassador
That's four titles in three days. Not too shabby at all.
Explorer
Well this was easy enough. While I was scouring the continents for the Elders, I decided to visit all those brown areas on my map. Made the whole journey much longer, but seriously, who really wants to go back to Azshara more than once?!
Argent Champion
I saw that I had to go in Stratholme to see Elder Farwhisper, so I packed my trusty Argent Dawn Commission trinket and headed off to wade through the scourge and have a crack at the Rivendare mount (no luck!). It was nice timing on Blizzards part to let players have the full rep bonus before the Lunar Festival began. Amid the max rep gain, scourgestones dropping and finishing a couple of grey quests, I hit exalted with the Argent Dawn and babam, Argent Champion Title.
Ambassador
I had picked up quite a few stacks of Runecloth from the Strat run, and decided to hand them into the Draenei cloth quartermaster for rep which brought me within a couple of bars of exalted. I picked up the rest of the rep from the handy quest turn ins from each of the elders, 82.5 rep each across the alliance factions (since Rexkicker is a human).
Get your rep up!
I highly recommend that you take the time to visit your Elders. If you're a non-Human, consider this:
75 Elders x 75 rep each = 5,625 rep
Now the kicker is that the rep is for all the alliance factions:
Ironforge, Stormwind, Exodar, Darnassus and Gnomeragen Exiles
You get five times as much rep! If you aren't already exalted with any of the factions, this is worth 28,125 rep in total (30,937.5 rep for Humans) or 375 Runecloth turn-ins.
So go on, mount up and take your tour of Azeroth.
Cheers,
Rex
New JC Recipes!
Woo... these two recipes came up for sale on Dreadmaul! Since they're BoE, they are being listed for sale for a hefty sum. As such, the recipes provide a high barrier to entry, keeping the average run of the mill undercutter out of the market. I think there are only two others that have the Sovereign recipe (paid 1k gold) and I'm pretty sure that I'm the sole owner for the Purified one. I bought two advertised Purified Recipes for 85g and 220g respectively to prevent myself from being undercut. These two cuts have been very profitable, and I have been selling the cut gems for about 100g each!
Since twilight opals are generally a bit unloved, I have bought up a heap at about 20-30g each and I'm looking at a markup of about 60-70g. I have already recouped my costs for the recipes and hopefully can hold onto the monopoly for awhile yet. Like I said previously in my goldmaking guide, don't use your main to list or advertise in trade or people will ask you to cut the gem for them. If you told them that the fee for the cut is 60-70g, they'll tell you to 'die in a fire'. Its much easier to say that you just got your gems cut from a JC that was advertising in trade... but you can't remember who.
I had another JC pst me asking to have the gem cut, but I just gave him my cover story. It felt a bit cruel to watch him then spam trade for the next three days looking for the unknown JC, but in the end he gave up and bought it. Why did I not cut the gem for him? Well, its not because I'm being a downright bastard. Its to prevent a conflict of interest where the very person that you just cut your gem for may be the person that undercuts you for far more than a 5g cutting fee!
How not to fail at Frogger
I don't understand why people keep dying on Frogger. I have a habit of hanging out at the back of raids and watching people try and traverse the slimes. If they die, I res them at the start of the slimes and watch as they have to run the gauntlet again! It is pretty funny when they die multiple times. Anyway, it is with great pleasure to present my 'How not to fail at Frogger', raid strat!
In the top half of the picture below, you can see a common mistake, players think that the safest path is to move in the middle of the slimes (or to try and squeeze in front). What they don't take into consideration is the lag on servers so even though you look like you are in the clear when you move between slimes, you are in fact heading straight into it!
The bottom half of the picture is the correct way to do Frogger. You should aim to be as close to, but behind the slime as possible. After lag is taken into account, you are more towards the middle when crossing.
Hope this help prevent some wipes in your raids!
Cheers,
Rex
Hey all, I'm just going to get something off my chest about looting distribution with tier gear.
Now in my guild, we have a loot priority system for gear in that loot priority goes: Tanks > Healers > Dps
At first glance this seems fair enough, firstly without adequately geared tanks and healers you cannot clear the content (or at least comfortably). For tier gear, paladins share their token with priests and locks. As a result of this system, I've waited patiently at the back of the line as our two-three paladin tanks get geared, followed by our holy paladins and priests.
So in Naxx 25, my shoulder token dropped and as everyone else had their T7 shoulders, I expected to be next in line. A holy paladin however, that already had the T7.10 shoulders was given the loot under the healer priority system. I was absolutely stunned and was a hairs breadth close to rage quitting. Now I don't normally qq over gear, but this dual tier system in wotlk is screwing with loot distribution!
Yes T7.25 is slightly better than T7.10, but in my view, for loot distribution purposes it needs to be viewed as T7. For example, if you already had T7.10 and a T7.25 piece drops, as a general rule that loot should go to the person without the T7 piece. To treat it separately would simply take too long to gear the raid, and the upgrade from T7.10 is marginal.
This system is made more difficult since some tier gear can also be bought with badges. So, if I farm heaps of heroics and buy my T7.10 hands and chest, using the above loot system, I would automatically be bypassed if my T7.25 hands or chest drop. I'm actually gimping myself in the long run for getting T7.10, and may end up passing the T7.25 to someone in blues. So its actually a disincentive, and sends out the wrong message to the guild.
You could remove tier gear from being bought with badges to resolve this issue, however badges provide a means for casual raiders, players with low loot priority or dkp, and alts to obtain their tier gear. Additionally, you also cannot make the T7.10 reward the same as T7.25 either as there would be no incentive to raid the harder 25 man content.
So what is the answer? Well as irritating as it sounds, maybe Blizzard should significantly inflate the stats on the T7.25 gear to become T8. At least that way it is crystal clear that there is a major benefit to prioritising the gear to tanks and healers. Anyway, that's my rant. Oh wait, I just realised that this would still leave me without my shoulders... damn it!
Before I start writing this chapter for Jewelcrafting, I just want to talk briefly about risk. JC is expensive to level but I find it very rewarding. I see JC being divided into three levels of risk, conservative, moderate and high. Just like in the sharemarket, the more risk you take on, the greater your potential reward as well as the greater the chance you'll make a loss.
When I started out with JC, I only had a small amount of gold. As I got used to what sells and what doesn't and had more gold to play with, my appetite for risk grew over time. I highly recommend that if you pursue JC you do the same, start out small and work your way up.
Conservative
The conservative method I would apply if you would like to sleep easy at night, and you are happy with about 200+ gold a day from your profession. In that case you should simply do the JC daily quest in Dalaran, pocket the gold and use your Dalaran Jewelcrafting Token to buy a Dragon's Eye (worth about 250g on Dreadmaul).
Moderate
Now, the second method is to obtain Saronite Ore (mining or AH), prospect it and sell the gems. This is what you generally hear from JCs moneymaking guides and can be combined with the conservative strategy to increase your income.
What they don't usually mention is that you don't know what you're gonna get. I'm not sure what the proc rate for rare gems is in Wrath, but my gut feel is that it is higher than in TBC. This is because in Wrath you can actually proc more than one blue gem per prospect.
Using a TBC rare gem proc rate of 3% for each kind of rare gem, you have an 18% (i.e. 3% x 6) chance. So you should expect a rare gem every one and a bit stacks you go through. Now since the chance of proccing gems is random, don't be disheartened if you get a string of no procs (or even worse about 6 forest emeralds in a row!). You are playing the law of averages here, so I recommend prospecting a minimum of 12 stacks at a time to avoid disappointment.
Now with the gems, you can sell them uncut on the AH at a reasonable profit. Your target market are other JCs that buy the gems and relist them cut, players that can't find the right cut on the AH, or players that simply prefer to find a JC to do the cut for them.
High Risk
What follows is my method. My apologies up front if it's a bit convoluted, but it's a modified strategy to the one I used throughout TBC and seems to be doing just fine in Wrath. This also draws upon the Alchemy and Enchanting strategies I outlined in the earlier parts and combines them into one big gold making machine. Feel free to use some or all of the strategy depending on what you have access to.
Firstly, you do the purchase Saronite Ore and prospect thing. Then you take any rare gems you prospect and get them cut (even pay another JC if you have to!).
I use the following main cuts:
Sky Sapphire: Solid
Autumn's Glow: Smooth, Rigid, Quick, Mystic, Thick
Scarlet Ruby: Delicate, Bold, Runed
Twilight Opal: Glowing, Royal, Balanced, Regal
Monarch Topaz: Luminous, Potent, Veiled, Glinting, Reckless
Forest Emerald: Enduring, Seer's, Dazzling
After you've gone through your ore, you will also be left with bloodstones, sun crystals, chalcedonys, dark jades, huge citrines and shadow crystals. The question is what to do with them?!
Firstly you can make green rings and necklaces to DE. Bloodstones (Bloodstone Band), Chalcedonys (Crystal Chalcedony Amulet), Sun Crystals (Sun Rock Ring) and Huge Citrines (Crystal Citrine Necklace) can be combined with two crystallised earths. Eternal earths are already dirt cheap and the fact that you can get five greens out of a single eternal earth really is a no brainer.
If prices on the AH for runed bloodstones are good, you can just cut them and sell them. These low end gems are an economical choice for poor casters and healers given the scarlet ruby version goes for over 100g.
Metagems are another way if you have surplus so get friendly with a transmute spec alchemist (that will let you keep the procs!) if you can. An eternal fire, dark jade and a huge citrine combine to make an earthsiege diamond. For skyflare diamonds, transmute an eternal air, chalcedony and bloodstone.
With these gems, I usually cut the following:
Earthsiege Diamond: Relentless Earthsiege Diamond
Skyflare Diamond: Chaotic Skyflare Diamond or Ember Skyflare Diamond.
Unfortunately there isn't anything really useful with the shadow crystals, so you might as well just vendor them or list on the AH uncut. Other JC's might buy them in case they need more shadow crystals to finish their jewelcrafting dailies. I tried cutting them and listing them for sale, but its not really worth the time spent.
There you have it! Well that brings me to the end of my goldmaking series of posts. I hope you found it valuable in some way.
Cheers!
Rex
On enchanting...
My apologies up front as I'm a bit of a novice at the enchanting game. I only recently took up enchanting in Wrath as I wanted to know more about the profession. It seemed like everyone I came across said that enchanting was a massive gold sink, and it would be a waste to level the profession just for the ring enchants. I pressed on, reasoning that at least this way, any raids or heroics I run, I can just shard the blues or epics.
My thoughts turned to making money from the profession when I met a certain Boomkin enchanter, one of the richest players on Dreadmaul, and he told me that it was easy to make money as an enchanter, you just need to work the AH.
This could mean many things, firstly what it told me was that everything I needed to make money as an enchanter was already there I just had to figure out how to make the most of it. Secondly, the gold from enchanting was not in trying to selling enchants for tips, but for the disenchanted materials. I'll say this again, do not work for tips!
Naturally, I tried to find some guides for tips from making money by disenchanting. Most of it is crap however! The guides recommended that I scan the auction house for greens, however most of these were overpriced and there was no way this method could provide a large enough income to 'get rich quick'. The next step was to research what goods I can craft cheaply specifically for disenchanting (see Part 3 for blacksmithing greens that can be crafted and DE for a profit). This is the key, and I have done very well since then. With patch 3.0.8 looming on the horzion however, the profession will be undergoing a major change.
BC Enchants still of value?
There are a couple of enchants from BC that I see people spamming trade for, many of them wanting either the Mongoose weapon enchant or the Major Defence (+12 def) to bracers. I farmed Netherstorm for the bracer enchant for three hours but it was worth it in the end.
I've started to use the Vellums to enchant these onto so I can sell the scrolls through my level 12 bank alt at high prices without copping abuse on my main. Players might scoff at the price you ask but with the enchants having such a high barrier to entry (i.e hard to get), people have little choice to pay more for it. I've sold the bracer enchants for 80g each, but I might jack it up for more.
I've even received whispers asking me to log onto my main to do the enchant, but I just pass them off and tell them someone else enchanted the scroll. This in a way forces them to buy the enchant without them getting p*ssed at you if they really want it. ;)
Enchanting in 3.0.8
The boffins at Blizzard are shaking up enchanting in the next patch, which to be honest had to happen. Current Wrath enchants are asking for huge amounts of infinite dusts and greater cosmic essences, and few recipes need dream shards. This has led to high prices for greater cosmic essences (35g) however on the reverse side, dream shards are almost worthless (6-8g). To put it into perspective, several guildies prefer to just vendor blues from boss drops for more gold instead of getting a dream shard.
MMO Champion has a neat list of the changes which includes the introduction of two new recipes. So where to from here? Well with the recipes in 3.0.8 requiring far less greater cosmics and dusts and being replaced by dream shards, this should reverse the trend. I'm thinking that the price of greater cosmics will collapse simply because of the huge number of supply that will accumulate on the AH. To offset this, dream shards will now be in high demand especially since the new Titanguard Guard weapon enchant will require 12 dream shards! I'm thinking that dream shards will spike quite high initially while tanks buy up dream shards to enchant their new weapons (since there really is a lack of a decent weapon enchant on offer at the moment). After that, shards might settle in at about 30g.
Coming up, my personal favourite... jewelcrafting!
Ah professions, the meat and potatoes part of making gold. Using the trends we pointed out in the Part 2, we'll have a look at three of the professions Blacksmithing, Tailoring and Alchemy in this part of the guide. What we won't cover are the gathering professions such as Skinning, Mining and Herbalism as these require farming.
I don't have any experience on Inscription so I can't really comment. My gut feeling though is that as a profession, there's little ongoing demand or repeat business. Once players get their set of glyphs, they are done and there are no real incentives to change glyphs.
The making of Darkmoon cards is interesting although random. The Nobles Deck seems like the deck of choice and people are willing to pay big bucks for it, I've seen prices advertised for about 14k gold for a deck and the Ace for about 5k. Until competition drives the prices down, in the short term at least, Inscribers lucky enough to proc a Nobles Card will hit the jackpot.
I don't know about Vellums, perhaps they can provide a nice income stream as enchanters use these more and more to list enchants on the AH.
Tailoring
Its all about bags! However its not about the Frostweave Bag... yet. Currently, it costs 90 pieces of frostweave cloth (about 22g a stack) and 12 infinite dusts (~36g) and 2 eternium threads. On Dreadmaul, bags are selling for about 100g each, so you're making a loss if you're buying mats to sell. In the short term, it will continue to be expensive, however once the 3.0.8 patch comes in, Frostweave Bags should become cheaper to make as the bag will need less frostweave cloth.
In the meantime though, the 16 slot Netherweave Bag is still popular due to the hideously expensive price of frostweave bags and the mats for the 18 slot version being tricky to get. In fact, the demand for the Netherweave Bags has more than tripled the price, and I have made a nice amount selling bags in the 15-25g range (up from the BC price of about 4g). Not bad when you consider that the bag is made from a single stack of netherweave cloth (and a rune thread).
Whats driving demand for Netherweave Bags? Well the bags are still an upgrade from the 12 slot versions DK's start out with as well as an economical choice for fitting out any alts or bank alts that players have.
Making bags still has falling demands over time though since you don't replace bags very often at all. Typically you get you invest in a good set of bags at the start that will last.
Alchemy
I've often heard that Alchemy isn't profitable, and that the real money made is actually in Herbalism. Through BC, I took up alchemy and herbalism on my shaman to make buffs for raiding. I hardly made money out of alchemy alone. As pot spec, I could only sell extra pots I procced which is really nickle and dime stuff really, a couple gold here and there. I came across a few transmute spec Alchemists, and they all complained saying it was the worst decision they made. The long cooldown to make metagems meant it was hardly worth it.
In Wrath however, its a different story. Transmute spec alchemists aren't restricted to a daily cooldown anymore! This alone made me dump pot spec and take up transmute spec. I then bought up a stack of Eternal Airs and Eternal Fires, took some scrub gems from my jewelcrafter and proceeded to produce a stack of skyflare and earthsiege diamonds.
Now the procs here are awesome! From a stack of about 20 transmutes, I usually pick up about 3-5 extra diamonds. if you want you can sell them uncut for about 40-50g each (already in profit) plus the bonus profit on the extra procced gems. Alternatively, you can take them along to your local JC and with the right cut, turn it into a gem worth about 70-100g!
Blacksmithing
Blacksmithing is in a really nice place now with all of its gear being BoE and the introduction of the Eternal Belt Buckle. For long term profit, I love the belt buckle! Everyone level 70 and up needs (not wants) one. I make heaps of these (about 20 at a time), and they sell like hot cakes on the AH.
I've stayed away from making epic BoE gear. I'm just not comfortable putting a lot of gold into a single item hoping it will sell. This is especially the case when the BS epic designs are all trainer taught and as such don't have any barrier to entry. This I believe leaves you wide open to undercutting and a high risk of having to sell the crafted items at a loss. I'm a bit more conservative in that way but that's just personal preference.
In terms of making items to DE, I stumbled across the plans for Reinforced Cobalt Shoulders which dropped off the Onslaught Mason in Dragonblight while I was levelling. With the mats to make it being four cobalt bars, this is an awesome, as you can make five level 73 greens from one stack of cobalt! Whats weird is that the DE table is a bit off. Install of DEing into lesser cosmic essences or 1-2 infinite dust, it DEs into greater cosmics and a number of infinite dusts. There are other world drop recipes for the other pieces of the 'Reinforced Cobalt' set, but you only need one pattern as they all use only four cobalt bars.
For dream shards, if you have both enchanting and blacksmithing skilled up. Armoursmiths can make Legplates of Conquest for the cost of 3 saronite bars and a fifth of an Eternal Earth. Hopefully these should be worth a bit after the 3.0.8 patch. The legplates are bop though so you can't make these on your blacksmith and send them to another toon to DE.
So that's Tailoring, Blacksmithing and Alchemy coming, in part four, I'll have a look at Enchanting and the demands at present and in 3.0.8, and then finally the big daddy of moneymakers... jewelcrafting. :D
Cheers!
Rex
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