Profit With Spice Bread During Pilgrim's Bounty

Here's a good way to make a lot of profit, well, for a short while at least. If you're not a cook feel free to skip this but even then, it's worth learning cooking since this recipe can be learned at level 1. Spice Bread is in very high demand during Pilgrim's Bounty due to the dailies and many people are too lazy to make their own so what do they do? They buy it from the Auction House of course.

What I'm telling you is not new, nor was I the first who discovered this. Chances are you've read about this already on other blogs. Well, here it is again from yours truly.

I admit that I read about this somewhere else, I forget where. I decided to give it a try to see if people really are that lazy. It baffles me that this is true, considering that you can cook this recipe at level 1. Here are some quick stats.

Required mats for 1x Spice Bread:
1x Simple Flour = 25c
1x Mild Spices = 10c

Sell these in stacks of 20 for a total cost of 7 silver a stack. I sold a lot of stacks already for 20 gold a stack! That's a 285x profit!!!

Now if you're a high end cook and also possess a Chef's Hat, your cooking will be lightning quick and you can make hundreds of these in no time. My suggestion: drop everything (for a few minutes at least) these next few days and cook some Spice Bread! Your pockets will thank you for it.

Vanity Pet #83 - Plump Turkey

As I was saying yesterday, I completed Pilgrim's Bounty in 2 days and as a reward from the meta-achievement I got the Plump Turkey pet in the mail.

This is definitely one of the funniest mini-pets in WoW so if you're a pet collector then you need to complete this achievement.

Pilgrim's Bounty Tips

Well folks, in the second day of Pilgrim's Bounty I finished all the achievements, got the Pilgrim title and the Turkey pet as reward. It all happened much sooner than I had anticipated.

I won't go into every detail about how I accomplished all the achievements because Wow.com and MMO Champion have some good guides but I will give some pointers for the trickier achievements.

Starting off with the table achievements, those are really easy. Just follow the two guides above and you should be fine. You just have to repeat them at each of the 4 major cities of your faction. Also complete FOOD FIGHT which simply requires you to throw food at another player at the table. At the end of this you should have Pilgrim's Paunch and Sharing is Caring completed.

If you really want to complete all the achievements you need to have Cooking at around 330 or so. Luckily you can just buy a recipe book from one of the vendors at the holiday grounds and the book will contain about 5 recipes that will easily help you to get to the required skill. So you can view this as a cheap way to power level cooking.

Now We're Cookin' requires you to cook one of every holiday dish. You will obtain this by default, of course, by doing the dailies. Then there's Pilgrim's Progress which is slightly more involving because it requires you to complete each of the available dailies but you should do that anyway if you visit all the major capitals.

From the dailies you should first choose a hat and a chest piece as reward. You will need those later. Once you get these two items, keep picking the Turkey Shooter because you'll need that to shoot rogues. You'll need 8 of these, provided you don't waste any shots. You can easily obtain all the required items (10 in all) in 2 days, if you do all the dailies in all 4 capital cities. Each city gives you 2 dailies so that's a potential of 16 items in 2 days.

Now here come the annoying achievements...

You should do The Turkinator as soon as possible, when you are, say, in Elwynn. That's because you need lots of Wild Turkey for the daily quests. This quest is shitty because it asks you to kill 40 turkeys in a row, without the 30 second buff expiring. Basically after each kill a 30 second timer will reset and that's how long you have to kill the next turkey. While turkeys respawn pretty fast, there are plenty of other people trying to do the same. In Elwynn I would suggest you try the south eastern part. It seems to be less populated. Or, by all means, do this late at night or at weird hours. It took me 3 tries. Thing is, as a Hunter it's easy because in addition to your /target Wild Turkey macro you can throw a Hunter's Mark on the damn turkey and instantly see it on the map. I can't imagine the pain of doing this with another class.

Pilgrim's Peril is a pain in the butt because it implies getting close to the four enemy capitals and sitting at one of their tables. Make sure to wear the holiday chest piece of your choice (that you got as reward from the cooking dailies). The problem here is that while for certain cities you won't get flagged (on a PvE server), for the others you will. Since I'm Alliance, I visited Undercity, Orgrimmar, Thunderbluff and Silvermoon City.

Undercity was the worst. You will get flagged there because you have to step right inside the walls of the city, through the main entrance. Unfortunately for me I was killed about half a dozen times trying to get to a table. The problem was that those damn Hordes were out to play and they killed every single Alliance that stepped close to that place. Hunters' pets were set to aggressive with snares that caught you in place the moment you re-spawned. All I could do was position myself right next to a chair and wait for a moment when they weren't paying attention to jump in the chair. Eventually I did it, even though I died the very next moment. I recovered my body the next morning, early when there weren't people around.

Orgrimmar doesn't flag you but Thunderbluff does. I was an idiot in regards to Thunderbluff because I didn't know where the tables were and I was running around like crazy, while flagged. Eventually I spotted the tables right under the great lift and I sat down at a chair. There weren't many Horde around but then I fumbled and a rogue ganked me. At least this time I managed to fight back but since I'm not much of a PvP player, nor am I geared for it, I died quickly.

After another corpse run I headed to Silvermoon City. That one doesn't flag you either but in any case was totally deserted so I got the achievement easily.

Terrokar Turkey Time can't be solo-ed unless you're 80 and reasonably geared. You need to get inside Sethekk Halls and kill Ikiss (what a dumb name) while wearing a hat and chest piece that you got from the dailies. Sethekk Halls is in Terrokar Forest in Outland. Auchindoun is that round amphitheater-like structure in the middle of the map. When you go inside the entrance just walk into the instance that's straight ahead. Unfortunately you'll have to clear at least half the trash to get to the boss. They are not incredibly hard but I found them pretty challenging even at level 80. Some of those damn bird-men have a nasty habit of throwing a Charm totem which makes you lose control of your character. For me it was bad because my character became hostile towards my pet. Oh well... Just be careful inside, especially as a caster, and don't pull too many mobs or else you're a goner. The boss itself wasn't hard. He has about 80K HP and does some moderate AOE damage but once he starts channeling that, just move behind a column and you should be fine.

Turkey Lurkey is one that I suggest you start doing as soon as you get your first Turkey Shooter. The objective here is to use the shooter on rogues of each race, including the opposite faction. That's 8 in all. While it isn't that hard to find rogues from your own faction (hint: use /who rogue or /who rogue dalaran for example), you won't be able to use the same command for the opposite faction. So you'll have to rely on your good ol' peepers to spot them. Hanging around Dalaran did the trick for me but I also got lucky with an Orc rogue outside of Orgrimmar. In the end I got really lucky because I got 3 of the toughest combinations in a row while spotting for them in Dalaran.

A final tip with this last achievement would be that each time you use the shooter, the item is used up so you will need at the very least 8 of them. Make sure you don't shoot the same race twice or you'll lose a shot. Also, if the person is already a turkey, you will lose the item but not get credit (or so it is said, I haven't experienced that myself).

So there you have it, easy meta-achievement in 2 days. I'm really glad I finished this because now I don't have to worry about doing those dailies anymore and I can concentrate on other things. Good luck to you and if you run into any problems drop me a line in the comments!

Vanity Pet #82 - Onyxian Whelpling

Simply log in during WoW's 5th anniversary and you will get the Onyxian Whelpling in the mail. This is one of the reasons that compelled me to renew my subscription sooner than I had planned. I'm sure I could have waited a few days longer but Pilgrim's Bounty also gives a pet if you complete all the achievements so I thought I should get a head start on that.

This pet is fairly cute, which cannot be said about my face after it's been transformed by the Mohawk Grenade.

Damn WoW pulling me back!

I admit it: I'm weak. I had planned a 2 week break from WoW and here I am, not even a week later, back in the game.

What pulled me back was the Onyxia pet and the Pilgrim's Bounty achievements which also reward you with a pet.

Damned Blizzard sure knows how to pull us fools back!

Flippin' Lichbloom

My latest business venture has been flipping Lichbloom. This is really an ongoing thing with several items that I watch throughout the week. I've been flipping Lichbloom before but only a couple of stacks here and there.

What changed recently, I don't know, but I started seeing stacks of Lichbloom on the AH for much less than the usual rate. Prices oscillate, of course, according to the day of the week. Lichbloom on my server sells normally for upwards of 20 gold a stack. Well, for a couple of weeks I've seen it for 16 gold or less.

I normally pick up everything that's around 17-17.5 gold a stack and re-sell when the price goes back up to > 20 gold a stack. It's a small profit but it only costs me a few seconds of "work" and it's yet another strategy in my gold-making portfolio. Usually I don't see more than 2-3 stacks at this price.

During the past few weeks I kept buying these low-priced stacks of Lichbloom for not more than 16 gold and sometimes 15 gold a stack. I waited a few days for the price to swing back up but it would do that only momentarily, for a day or less, before more cheap stacks appeared on the AH. During this short window I would sell 2-3 stacks and then I would buy back the cheap ones.

Eventually I found myself with around 100 stacks and I kept buying. I didn't stop because from past experience the price eventually goes up. This might be just a fluke where a new farmer or someone who's clearing their bank decided to get rid of stock. However, what I'm betting on is patch 3.3.

The beauty of these major patches is that they usually re-invigorate raiding and many players return to the game and start raiding massively. Lichbloom is the highest-level herb and is used for some very important flasks and potions that are required in raids. As a consequence, I'm positive that the price will spike massively during the first few weeks of patch 3.3.

As is the case in real life, this is not 100% guaranteed but it is very probable. In the worst case scenario I will still be able to sell these stacks for zero profit. Thing is, when you have lots of gold at your disposal, you can take more and higher risks with no worries. New ventures are an experiment to me. For those wondering what the hell is the purpose of having so much gold, here's my take on it: it allows you to experiment with, and discover new ways in which to make yet more gold. It provides a fallback buffer for those failed ventures. And it gets easier to make more money the more money you have, just like in real life.

Your Play Time Expires in X Minutes

I knew today was the last day on my WoW subscription but when I logged in to put my affairs in order before the break, I got this weird message: "Your play time expires in 11 minutes".

I've never seen this before and that's why I find it odd, although I'm sure it is completely normal. Up until now I had the impression that Blizzard secretly allowed you to play during your last login even if you went a little bit over your allotted time. It looks like that's not true. Oh well...

Another thing that I've noticed was that I got the same 11 minute deadline when I logged in on each of my characters. Then, the time would start counting down in the chat window with the same yellow letters that indicate how long we have until the server shuts down for maintenance or reboot.

This is a nice touch because it allowed me to grab some items from the mail and even do a couple of dailies. And one more thing: the WoW patch downloader has started to download the first chunk of patch 3.3. I'm not in a hurry for the patch although it brings some exciting new things. I'm gonna take a break now, perhaps until 3.3 hits. At any rate, for the next 2 weeks or so. Don't go away though, I'm still here and I will continue to blog!