This expansion is dead

I can't pinpoint the problem but for the past couple of weeks I've lost all interest in playing WoW but it has actually started about a month ago. Not even 2 months into Cataclysm I'm already bored.

I don't feel like leveling any of my characters anymore. My hunter is the only one I've leveled to 85, while my priest remains 82, my paladin 81, my death knight and warlock remain 80, my mage is 79, my druid is 74 and my shaman is 51. I can't even get myself to make that tiny push to 80 with my mage.

Professions are in an even worse state. The only ones I've leveled to max are mining on my hunter and herbalism on my priest. All the other professions are still at WotLK levels and I don't see any incentive for leveling them farther at this point, not with >500K gold in my possession.

I haven't even done a fraction of the quests in the new Cataclysm zones and even though there's ton of new lore and great stories, I can't get myself to level another character through them.

Even flying through Azeroth has lost its charm. I mean, I do appreciate it and IMO it's the single best thing to come out of Cataclysm but I've already got over it.

For me, this expansion is dead and I don't see what Blizzard could possibly do to make it better. In a way I guess it's just burnout after playing WoW (on and off) for so many years. I don't even feel like playing other games and I'm a die-hard gamer dammit! On the flip side, I have much more time to engage in other fun activities and hobbies.

Anyone else feel this way?

BankAlt.com and Cataclysm recipes

Dear friends and readers, I would like to make a quick statement about the state of BankAlt.com.

I have recently received a bunch of questions regarding Cataclysm recipes and when they will become available. Truth be told, and I'm not proud of this at all, I've been neglecting BankAlt.com for a while now. The reasons are many but among them I will mention the launch of Cataclysm and my involvement with the new expansion and posting on the blog. And then there are my other hobbies that I won't even talk about...

Believe me that I have been thinking about those Cataclysm recipes and how I should get my lazy ass into gear and load them up to the database.

To this end, I will attempt to load all the recipes during the next few days. I won't make any promises (in true Blizzard style) but I do realize this has become an issue and it's the first thing on my list of priorities for BankAlt. And yes, there are still a lot of features that I would like to implement at some point. If only I can stop playing this stupid WoW game :)

Please stay tuned for future announcements and thanks for your suggestions and support!

Post-Cataclysm gold tips

This post is a follow-up to My Cataclysm gold strategy and is also written in response to Marcko's (of Justmytwocopper) blogging carnival challenge.

My gold-making tips this time are also restricted to certain professions, namely gathering (mining and herbalism, inscription and jewelcrafting).


For Miners/Herbalists

During the first week or so of Cataclysm I concentrated mostly on mining/herbing in the new areas and simply selling the mats on the auction house, plus some inscription on the side. These alone netted over 100K gold in a little more over a week.

Gathering allowed me to discover and explore the new areas, while at the same time making a lot of gold in the process. The XP from mining/herbing nodes is also nothing to sneeze at.

While prices for the new herbs and bars have stabilized to an extent and are even decreasing, I feel that it is still worth it to farm mats because there's still a long way to go before prices will hit Wrath levels. If you don't find farming boring, then I advise you to keep at it, at least for another couple of weeks. Sell, sell, sell everthing you find and resist the urge to use those mats to level your own professions. Remember, opportunity cost.


For Scribes/Inscriptionists/Inscribers/Inscriptors/...

Personally I have shifted away from farming to an equally (or even more so) profitable endeavor. Namely inscription. I guess I was running out of interesting podcasts to listen to while farming but I think the biggest factor was time. Even if I don't make as much gold in a day from inscription compared to farming, I believe that the gold per hour from crafting glyphs is a lot more than from farming.

Glyphs are still hot-selling items despite the fact that they are now learn-once-use-many. The most expensive seem to be the ones crafted from Ethereal Ink (Outland herbs) and Ink of the Sea (Northrend herbs).

While Ethereal Ink is very expensive (and so are Outland herbs), that's not the case with Wrath herbs and Ink of the Sea. I can still find cheap inks and herbs which I mill and convert to inks.

As for the lower level inks, I like to buy cheap herbs (there's plenty of them now that most new scribes have finished leveling) and just convert them to inks. It is folly to exchange Blackfallow Ink for lower quality inks at the moment due to the fact that this new ink is extremely expensive.

So I won't bother with anything crafted from Blackfallow Ink or Ethereal Ink for now. In a couple of days my worgen druid will reach Outland and he's a herbalist so I will use him to gather some herbs (for both XP and mats) but until then I'm sticking with the other inks.

My strategy is to use Auction Profit Master to scan the AH for glyphs, once a day. I will create a list with just 1 glyph of anything that sells for at least 60G. Then I will craft and post, just once per day with a 12 hour duration. On weekends I'll post/cancel/re-post 2 or 3 times but I won't bother on weekdays. Usually the next day I'll find that about half of my glyphs have sold. The cool thing is that on weekdays I don't have to cancel the glyphs. By posting them at "rush-hour", i.e. in the evening with a 12 hour duration, they will expire on their own some time the next day while I'm at work.

I also keep a list of glyphs that have sold along with the price they sold at. You don't have to do that but it allows me to tell at a glance which glyphs are holding their price and which can be crafted more than once. Speaking of which, I prefer to craft 1 of each because prices are somewhat volatile for certain glyphs and I want to minimize risk as much as possible because mats are now more expensive than they were. Also, posting 1 glyph allows me to work under the radar of the big sellers.

Currently, I make 1000-2000 gold from inscription daily, without trying too hard and just posting once per day. If I get more into it (more frequent scans/posts/re-posts), I can make more. The other night I made almost 4K simply by resetting my crafting queue and creating a new one. Total work: about 30 minutes.

My "secret", if you can call it that, is that most of the inscription work I do is AFK. Look for a future post on the subject but there are too many details to get into and now's not the time. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to do it though.


For Jewelcrafters

If you are a jewelcrafter, these teeny-tiny tips might benefit you. After Cataclysm I've noticed that 2 items are continuing to sell very well and in fact the demand for them seems higher than in Wrath BUT the supply is much lower. I'm talking about Nightmare Tear and Enchanted Pearl.

Nightmare Tear is crafted from 1x Dragon's Eye + 5x Infinite Dust. As a jewelcrafter you should do your daily Dalaran JC quest, unless it's a pain in the ass to get to Dalaran. My JC is posted in Dalaran and I do that quest every day. The green Wrath gems can be bought cheaply from the AH. Infinite Dust on my server is about 2G a piece or less. Dragon's Eyes vary in price but they can be anywhere between 40G-100G.

Simply by buying my mats off the AH, I can create a Nightmare Tear for a cost of around 100G and I can sell it for 200G. They seem to be selling as soon as I post them.

Enchanted Pearls are another under-the-radar item. They too are prismatic gems but they cost much less to craft and are thus less risky than Nightmare Tears. They only require 1x Northsea Pearl ( < 1G on my server) and 1x Infinite Dust. I like to sell them for 15G-30G.

One other tip is this: if you can find someone dumping cheap Enchanted Pearls on the AH, snatch them and re-post at the "correct" price. The other night someone had posted a dozen of them at under 2G a piece. I grabbed them all, then re-posted at 30G apiece. In a couple of hours 4 of them had sold.


For everyone else

For the rest of us, you can try selling Vanishing Powder and Dust of Disappearance which can both be bought from the inscription supplies vendor. There are lots of foolish/lazy/ignorant people out there who buy these for a premium from the AH instead of getting them from the vendor.

As an example, I buy Vanishing Powder for 35 silver for 5 pieces and sell them for 75 silver apiece. Dust of Disappearance is even better, though it is a higher risk item. I buy mine for 10G apiece and sell them for 15-30G apiece. Hefty profits right there.


The End

As you can see, my post-Cataclysm gold-making strategies are mostly based around certain professions but let's face it: having access to a high-level profession opens up your horizons and gold-making opportunities by a lot. Even if it's hard for someone to fully level a crafting profession, there's no excuse not to have at least one gathering skill, if not two. And even then, you can still do some "auction house PvP" and flip a few items around. Bottom line is: with or without professions, to make gold in WoW, some work is involved!

10,000 gold a day in Cataclysm

This is sort of a follow-up to my previous post about my strategy for making gold in Cataclysm. My strategies weren't 100% successful but I still managed to make over 10K gold each day since Cataclysm launched.

In fact, I made 10K the first day, 18K the second, and 14K the third. 99% of that (or even more) was from 2 sources: farming Cata ore/herbs and inscription.

Regarding inscription, some glyphs have held their prices over 100G while others have tanked. Though I tried to craft the most popular glyphs according to wowpopular.com, it turns out that some of those glyphs are crap in terms of gold making.

Because I don't have an unlimited supply of herbs and/or inks, I have to be selective with the glyphs that I wish to replenish. For this, I scan the AH occasionally with Auction Profit Master (the former QA3) and only craft 1 of each glyph that goes for 80G or above. And there are plenty of those.

I'm posting several times a day using APM and canceling once or twice. There's no point in canceling more often because I get undercut almost immediately anyway so that would be a waste of time. Despite having only 1 of each glyph at a time on the AH and despite not canceling often, I'm still selling a lot. My goal for now is to simply clear my stock. At any rate, even if I sell the remainder at a loss, I believe I have more than recovered my costs in crafting the initial stock.

Now mining and herbing are where it's at!

For mining, I'm selling mostly Elementium Bars, in stacks of 20 or singles. Initially they didn't sell very well but I guess demand wasn't very high for them. Now, they sell like hotcakes. I can't farm them quickly enough. Unfortunately, Blizzard has nerfed the spawn rate on nodes in Twilight Highlands where I like to farm for this ore. So now it takes longer to mine the same amount. On the other hand prices seem to have jumped up a little so that makes up for the nerfing.

I've sold Elementium Bars for between 300 to 570 a stack. I don't really care what the price is and I'm not waiting for prices to go up or to stay at a certain level. As long as I'm not undercutting by tens of hundreds of gold per stack, I will post my bars under the lowest seller. Oh and I always post 1 stack or 2 bars/volatiles at a time. It's a good thing not to flood the market.

Volatiles of all types are also selling like crazy. The funny thing is that even though they are the equivalent of Crystallized/Motes and not Eternals/Primals, each one of these volatiles sells for anywhere between 10 to 50 gold each. At one point I even sold one Volatile Air for 225 gold!

Regarding Volatile Air, my miner is also an engineer and the first thing I did in Cataclysm was to craft an Electrostatic Condenser for him. That is a very smart thing to do if you have a miner/herbalist/skinner + engineer. Those Volatile Airs are scarce and they sell for a lot.

Herbalism is a slightly different beast. Initially, herbs were selling much better than bars so I farmed a lot of them. At first, I farmed plenty of Twilight Jasmine in Twilight Highlands. The zone was teeming with that herb. But later I found out that Blizzard nerfed that too. It was good while it lasted.

Then, I realized that Whiptail, which is found mostly in Uldum, sold much better than the higher level herb. So I farmed lots of that. I sold stacks of Whiptail for between 280 to 475 gold.

Now, herbs seem to have slowed down so I've switched my farming more towards ore rather than herbs.

One thing that I've noticed is that these new mats seem to have very low vendor prices. In fact they are lower than Wrath mats which I find very odd. Could it be because Blizzard didn't want people to be able to vendor them and make lots of gold that way? That doesn't make sense because you can make a LOT more by putting them up on the AH.

A consequence of this low vendor price is that the AH deposit cost is also low, meaning that if you are undercut, it doesn't cost you jack to cancel and repost.

My strategy flopped where old mats are concerned. Saronite Bars are still cheap-ish and I can only sell a few bars a day, but at least I'm still making a profit. My only concern is that my banks and bags are overflowing with Saronite Ore.

Adamantium Ore similarly flopped but I don't think it's a bad investment because in the future these mats are bound to become scarcer and I'm not going to panic and sell-sell-sell at any price. I'm just bidding my time, slowly trickling them to the market.

So that's about it. As you can see, my strategy revolved mainly around farming and selling the new Cataclysm mats now, during the first week or two, when demand is high and prices likewise. I haven't made a lot of gold compared to others who might have speculated certain mats or items but on the other hand I don't ever recall making so much gold several days in a row.

Cataclysm the smoothest launch ever!

Color me impressed folks. Blizzard has done it again. I dare you to argue that Cataclysm wasn't the smoothest WoW expansion launch in history!

The proof? 17 minutes after launch I managed to log into the game. It took about 3 tries, true, because for the first couple I got stuck at "Connecting". But then I was stunned to find myself at the character selection screen and then right in the middle of the Cataclysm!

What was a bit worrying is that within 30 minutes of logging in, that's roughly 45 minutes into Cataclysm, I saw the following world-first achievements in the chat window, in quick succession:

- miner
- herbalist
- skinner
- angler

On the other hand it took me between 45 minutes and 1 hour to get my mining to max and I screwed around a lot too.

Something that I wasn't exactly expecting - and it took me by surprise - is that flying has been enabled in Dalaran. Woohoo! This change was long overdue and, come to think of it, not completely out of the bounds of possibility.

I got a rude awakening when I realized how many HP the mobs in the new zones have. 30+K at level 81 is nothing to sneeze at. I managed to get killed on my priest because I was trying to gather a herb in a zone (in Hyjal) which had some quick-spawning mobs and as soon as I killed one, another appeared. On the other hand, I'm also proud to have killed a level 84 mob with my hunter, while almost completely naked, in Twilight Highlands. I was naked because I didn't want to risk the huge costs of dying with my expensive purplez. It's true that it took me about 3 minutes to do it but I proved that it can be done.

What can I say, being able to fly all over the place is a novel and very welcome experience. Stormwind looks amazing from the air and I literally went "wow!" when I first rose above the city.

A strange thing is that XP seems to come fairly briskly, at least at this level. All I did (I played for about 4 hours during the night), was to fly around a couple of zones, mine and do a little bit of archeology. Oh and I also did a quest in Hyjal just for kicks. All this brought me close to halfway to 81. It's crazy. There's some pretty healthy XP from mining and herbing alone.

Now archeology is even crazier. I was gaining about 5500 XP each time I discovered an artifact. Archeology is a mixed bag. It seems cool so far but I'm getting a vibe that it is a VERY grindy profession. Just the thing to get us hooked. Just as well, I doubt I'll be maxing it out on other characters than my main (the hunter).

OK now I'm going back to my grind: farming and farming and more farming. Gotta make that gold while mats are still expensive!

17 minutes in, I'm in baby!

I'm happy to report that 17 minutes after the launch of Cataclysm I've been able to get into the game without any drama at all and I'm now about to head to my nearest flight trainer.

Gosh-darn-it I'm so excited!

Cataclysm zone progression with mining nodes

This should be common knowledge by now but just in case someone might have missed it (and also as a self-reminder), here's a list of Cataclysm new zones, with their level ranges.

Also, I've compiled a list of mining nodes for each zone. I got inspiration for this from Kaliope's Crafting Blog.

80-82
Mount Hyjal or Vashj'ir
425 Obsidium Deposit

82-83
Deepholm
425 Obsidium Deposit
475 Elementium Vein
500 Rich Elementium Vein

83-84
Uldum
475 Elementium Vein
500 Rich Elementium Vein
525 Pyrite Deposit

84-85
Twilight Highlands
475 Elementium Vein
500 Rich Elementium Vein
525 Pyrite Deposit

Personally I think I'm gonna skip Vashj'ir because I will concentrate on farming during the first week. I really don't want to deal with the hassle of 3D combat and I don't want to waste time doing the pre-requisite quests for getting the swimming mount.

I'm also a bit uneasy after hearing that some of these zones are heavily phased and this includes mining/herbing nodes. It would suck if one has to do quests in order to unlock certain nodes.

In addition, it looks like Deepholm is locked down until one hits 82, which is another stupid restriction that I dislike. I really hate it when Blizzard is trying to artificially block certain zones just so people can't get there very quickly.

Cataclysm the smoothest launch ever?

This question will become moot in a week but I can't help and wonder if Cataclysm will be the smoothest expansion launch in the history of WoW.

The signs are all pointing towards this theory.

Patches 4.0.1 and 4.0.3a have brought back a lot of players already.

The Shattering has occurred and Azeroth is now changed forever.

Cataclysm has been available for preorder for a while and many people (myself included) have downloaded most of the content already.

Blizzard has learned from past experiences and should now be more prepared than ever.

I don't know, but I'm pretty optimistic about the Cataclysm launch. There will surely be small issues here and there, server restarts and so on but I feel that most of these will be resolved quickly and people will be able to play properly sooner than ever.

What about you? What do you think?

I dig the new Azeroth

There are many things to like about the new, revamped Azeroth. While it will never be the same as before, this is but a good thing. I really, really enjoy the way they've changed the old continents. Here are some of the things that I particularly like.

Revamped areas
There's no question in my mind that some of the old areas are now much more exciting due to being ravaged by Deathwing. Loch Modan and Stranglethorn come to mind. I love how all the water in the Loch has drained and the dam has broken. I love the maelstrom in the middle of Stranglethorn and they new crevasses in the earth.

Streamlined quests
Quests are more to the point now and a lot of those annoying chains that would have you travel to several continents for some stupid reward are now gone.

More quests
There seem to be a lot of new quests and they are quite intelligently designed in that very often they lead you seamlessly to the next area.

Better quest rewards
Generally I've noticed that quests, especially the brand new ones, give better rewards. That's always a good thing.

More flight points and extra quest hubs
Much more flight points. This is literally a magnificent boon that Blizzard is conferring upon its players. I am so grateful that zones now have new quest hubs and mini-hubs with their own flight masters. Truth be told, this should have been done from the beginning but better late than never.

Flight masters shown on map
I also like the fact that the flight masters are now shown on the big map with their own icon. Easier to spot them.

Dungeon maps!
This is something that I've been dreaming about since vanilla WoW. Finally we won't be lost in those low level dungeons anymore.

Quests inside dungeons
I love how all the dungeon-related quests are now located inside the dungeon itself. Not only that but they give solid XP and some of them also give nice blue rewards.

New Deadmines and other dungeons
The new Deadmines was a blast and so are other revamped low level dungeons. Unfortunately I leveled so fast that I skipped right past Shadowfang Keep.


"Pick-up" quests
The way new quests are triggered just by entering a new zone or a dungeon is just neat. Some chain quests like the Nesingwary kill quests are triggered just by completing a step of the chain.

Nice XP for mining/herbing
It seems to me that previous to The Shattering there wasn't such great XP from mining and herbing. Now I'm getting more XP than killing a mob in the same area. Very cool. What's more, gray nodes still give XP, although to a lesser extent.

Multi-tracking on mini-map
The multi-tracking feature is awesome. My new miner/herbalist dwarf shaman is going nuts in Stranglethorn. I couldn't complete a lot of quests for hours on end because new nodes kept popping up on the mini-map and I was pulled in all directions to get this node and that.

Quests mobs marked on mob portrait and mini-map
This is one of those small-but-nice touches that Blizzard has added in this expansion. Quest mobs have the exclamation mark next to their portrait and they are also marked on the mini-map with a skull once you're close to them.

Dual-spec at level 30??
I was shocked to find out that at level 32 dual-spec was available from the trainer. I seem to recall that they said they would lower the level requirement from 40 to... something but I've been oblivious to this. So is it 30 or actually 20? In any case, it's a good thing.

These are all great new additions but granted, some of them should have probably been in the game from the beginning. One thing that kinda bugs me is that I seem to be leveling too quickly but I hope this will be my only problem.

Oh and two things still suck: Outland and Northrend. I cringe at the thought of leveling through them yet again.

Dwarf invasion!

I just wanted to comment on the fact that there's been a veritable dwarf invasion after patch 4.0.3a hit! The dwarf starting areas and adjacent lower level areas are awash in dwarfs!

The new race-class combinations are obviously the cause of this. I've seen dwarf mages, even a dwarf warlock but by far and wide the most new dwarf characters are shamans. And I am one of them.

I've started a new dwarf shaman yesterday and he's already in his late twenties. I've been wanting an Alliance shaman for so long now but unfortunately I don't really dig draenei males and I don't want to play a female character.

I'm assuming a lot of other people feel the same, considering the deluge of new dwarf shamans. I swear, whenever I see a low level dwarf, in 90% of cases he's a shaman.

I'm sure that there's an equally large influx of night elf mages, gnome priests, troll druids and tauren pallys.

I have to admit, these dwarfs are handsome devils. Just look at this sexy beast of a shaman!

My Cataclysm gold strategy

I'm not one of the big gold-making sharks, nonetheless I have made a few preparations for Cataclysm and hopefully my gold reserves will increase by a decent amount during the first few weeks of the expansion. To be honest I'm not dedicated 100% to making gold because I've got plenty for now and I would also like to actually play the game the way it is meant to be played.

For Cataclysm I would like to try something new. It remains to be seen if my experience and observations will give good results (or not). My strategy is not overly complicated and is made up of several pieces. Here they are.

Glyphs

As always, glyphs remain my main source of income. When patch 4.0.1 was released I made several mistakes mostly due to my not reading the patch notes very carefully. The biggest mistake was that I didn't realize that glyphs would require 3 inks instead of 1. I had a few hundred inks stocked up but it wasn't nearly enough to make lots of gold. In retrospect, I should have crafted the most popular glyphs in advance and stocked them before the patch. Instead, I did all my crafting post-patch which was another big mistake.

This time, I've hopefully wised up and I've been buying cheap herbs off the auction house for a while, milling and converting them into inks whenever I got the chance. By "cheap" I mean anything that goes for 15 gold or less per stack. A stack of herbs produces about 2 glyphs so my costs are around 8G per glyph. For such a major patch I'm expecting glyphs to sell for tens of gold each so my profits should be proportional.

Another strategy that I'm applying here is this. Due to not having enough ink to craft 10 or even 20 of all the glyphs in the game, I've had to narrow things down to just the most popular glyphs. To find out which ones are the most popular I've headed to wowpopular.com and made a list in Excel with the top glyphs for every class.

Even narrowing down the glyphs to the most popular I still don't have enough ink so I've decided to craft only 5 of each. This also serves to spread out the risk because if a glyph drops down a lot in price I should still have a variety of other glyphs to fall back on. Having 5 of each should also help me to clear my stocks quickly. At the moment of writing this I have already crafted 400 glyps (that's 80 different glyphs, 5 of each) and have ink for another 200 or so.

I'm planning to list my glyphs on the auction house the night before Cataclysm is released, with a 24 hour timer. I haven't used this method before so I don't know what will happen but hey, even if I sell all my glyphs at a loss I won't end up on the streets (of Stormwind). Profit comes with risk.

As I write this paragraph, it is now post-patch 4.0.3a. This means The Shattering has happened and new race-class combinations have been enabled. I applied the strategy outlined above and listed all my glyphs with a 24-hour period but unfortunately I haven't sold a lot. What I did sell made me a nice profit. From about a dozen glyphs sold (perhaps even less), I made 1000 gold by selling each glyph for about 80-90 gold each. Not too shabby. On the other hand I'm still left with a lot of stock. The sad truth is that people are still willing to undercut glyphs to the ground, despite glyphs now requiring 3 inks and not being able to buy lower level inks with Ink of the Sea. I will maintain my position though and hope that Cataclysm will bring a lot more customers. At any rate, I don't believe I'll be losing money on this, on the contrary. It's just that this is probably the last time I will be selling glyphs en masse because it is simply not worth the time investment anymore.


Saronite

My next strategy is something that I've been preparing for a very long time. I've been buying cheap Saronite Ore from the AH whenever the price was right. This one is a 100% safe investment because I've purchased the ore below vendor price for the bars. This, for me, is 60 silver a piece, or 12 gold a stack of ore. Converting the ore into bars results in a cost of 1.2 gold per bar and Saronite Bars will vendor for 1.25 gold.

I now have several hundred stacks of ore. I haven't bought this ore to vendor it. Instead, I've stockpiled it in the hopes that people will need lots of Saronite Bars to level Engineering, Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting. You literally need hundreds of bars for these professions.

As I write this, once again, it is post-patch 4.0.3a. Demand for Saronite Bars has suddenly skyrocketed and I'm selling bars for between 2+ gold each up to 7+ gold each. Just a while ago I sold a whole stack of individual bars for over 7 gold a piece. Wait, scratch that. My 7+ bars are selling like crazy so now I've upped the price to 10+ a bar. Compared to how much I paid for the ore, I've made between 500% and 800% profit on these bars.

With Cataclysm, I'm expecting the demand for Saronite Bars to grow because fewer people will be farming it and there will be all these new characters who will want to level their professions. As such, this seems like a very good investment.

Adamantite Ore

I have also been buying some cheap Adamantite Ore so that I can prospect it for Adamantite Powder which can be used to create Mercurial Adamantite which is used by Jewelcrafters to level their profession. Now this has been a bit of a gamble because so far I haven't had much success selling the Mercurial Adamantite. It remains to be seen if Cataclysm will change this.

Farming

My favorite strategy will be farming. It may not be the most efficient in terms of gold per hour but for me farming is fun. I'm talking especially about mining and herbalism. In Cataclysm (if previous expansions are an indicator) there will be huge initial demand for the new types of ore and herbs. I plan to spend most of my time during the first couple of weeks simply flying around the new areas and farming stuff.

Farming is not for everyone. Some people despise it because they claim there are better ways in which to make gold. That may be true but for me farming is exciting. I love flying around and the new areas especially will make this sweeter. I love it when a node pops on my radar and I swoop down to claim it. There's always the thrill of discovery when a node yields a bonus such as a rare gem or herb.

So for me farming is therapeutic. It is also fortunate that my Hunter is a miner and my Priest is a herbalist. These are the 2 characters that I would like to level to 85 first. While farming I will be queuing up for the new dungeons. This way I can both make gold and level at the same time.

I won't be using any of the farmed mats myself to level my own professions unless I need them for some cool new crafted item. Looking back to previous expansions, this seems like the smart thing to do. Initial demand for these mats is incredibly high and supply is scarce because most people are concentrating on leveling and not farming. Later, when things have settled down and everyone has leveled their main, mats will drop down in price a lot. That will be the time to buy cheap mats from the auction house and level my own professions.

Conclusion

As you can see, these aren't extremely complicated strategies and I don't plan to agonize day and night about ways in which to make even more gold. What all these methods do have in common is that they require professions in order to work. There's Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, Mining and Herbalism.

The truth is that although one can make gold without any profession, having one or two of them maxed out helps a great deal. Personally I have all professions maxed and this has helped me a lot because they are all inter-dependent and synergistic. Besides, you can easily swallow the cost of crafting one thing or another, especially if you can do it afk.

My advice is not to lose a lot of sleep over how much gold you will actually make at the start of Cataclysm. The true gurus will undoubtedly make hundreds of thousands of gold each. Personally I'll be content if I can make more than I would on a normal day, while having fun at the same time.

Note: This article was featured on JustMyTwoCopper's blog carnival for November.

Bought my Cataclysm

Just wanted to say that I've pre-ordered my digital copy of Cataclysm. Been meaning to do it for a while but I was too lazy.

I was expecting some kind of background download of Cataclysm data but either I've already downloaded everything that's required or they haven't enabled it yet or I'm not seeing it.

Oh well.

The pre-Cataclysm elemental invasion!

I have to say I'm enjoying the new pre-Cataclysm events. As you all potentially know, Monday started the last stage of these events and culminated with the introduction of 4 new bosses that you can defeat for ilvl 251 items. Pretty sweet.

I jumped right into the madness with my priest because I'm still insisting on gearing him up to heal dungeons in Cataclysm. That is, assuming that I won't get my butt kicked because from what I've been hearing, healing in Cataclysm dungeons will be orders of magnitude harder than currently, even in normal dungeons. However, some high level Wrath gear should still help at least for a couple of levels.

Believing that I could easily heal one of these new bosses, I joined as a healer and had to heal Gahz'rilla. I will readily admit that I was humbled by the experience as it was the hardest healing experience I've ever had. At one point I thought I'd lost it and it would be a wipe. How embarrassing! Lucky for me, the druid in the group decided to help me and we made it.

The cool thing is that I was extremely lucky that first night and won the Need roll for 3 items! I got the Earth Bride's Gown, Sandfury Sandals and Amulet of Evil Winds. On one occasion I even prevailed over 2 other Need rolls.

Since Monday I've been running these bosses with every chance I get. Unfortunately I've been losing rolls ever since so I haven't gotten anything new yet. I'm still looking for the remaining 3 spell dps/healing pieces.

On two occasions I managed to heal the rest of the encounter in shadow spec after the healer died. I feel pretty good with myself when something like this happens. Great morale booster.

Anyway, it feels like Cataclysm is almost here. Next week in fact we should see The Shattering in the form of patch 4.0.3a. Until then, here are a few screenshots of all the chaos that ensued in the capital cities thanks to the elemental invasion.

310 flight for all

Fresh on the heels of my wasting time post, I've decided to get 310 flight for all my level 80s. That's 5 characters (hunter, paladin, warlock, priest, death knight) at 5000 gold each = 25,000 gold. It might seem a lot but I had over 300K gold anyway and it was just gathering dust.

310 speed vs 280 doesn't seem like such a big deal but I can actually feel the difference when flying. Was the 5000 worth it? Yes. When you only have 10K gold, 5000 is obviously a huge amount and it seems like a very bad deal but 325K is almost the same as 300K so I hardly feel the dent in my finances.

On the other hand this increased speed will come in handy in Cataclysm when I will be questing at top speed. When you combine 310 flight speed with things such as the paladin's Crusader Aura, it becomes uber-potent.

The biggest d'oh moment, though, was that I had no idea that 310 speed had been enabled in the last patch. I had the feeling all along that it would be unlocked in Cataclysm. I noticed the trainer had it when I bought 280 flight for my warlock. The moral: keep your eyes open kids and read the patch notes carefully!

Download digitally or buy the box?

Now that Cataclysm has a release date, I'm starting to wonder if people prefer the boxed game or the digital download. In recent years, downloadable games have started to gather steam (forgive the pun) and it's within the realm of possibility that in a few more years most games will only be available through a download.

As a 100% PC gamer, I've always loved the shiny new boxes in which games come. In the digital age though, I don't care about them anymore. I just want to play the game, not stare at the box. The only thing that a box brings to the table is the nice artwork and... that's about it. Game manuals these days are puny and probably obsolete by the time they leave the factory. No one needs a manual anymore, what with all the info on the internet.

The biggest disadvantage of boxes is the space they take. A game collection takes up much more space than a music or movie collection. Not to mention that most people probably don't even play older games anymore. Case in point: I have a Diablo Battlechest (or whatever it's called) that I've never opened. I just keep it for nostalgia sake.

As you can tell, these days I'm a digital download man. Why bother going to a store or ordering the box online when I can just download the game and be ready to play it right the moment it is launched? I do understand the other side though. People like going to the midnight launch, to socialize with like-minded geeks and what-not. I'm just glad that technology makes it easy to skip all that. It's not like I'm a social person anyway.

I'm certainly glad that Blizzard are making the digital download of Cataclysm available from day 1. If I'm not mistaken, Burning Crusade didn't become available for download until a few weeks had passed. In the meantime, Blizzard have come to their senses. After all, what would be the point of delaying the digital version since it costs the same as the boxed version anyway. The only reason I can think of is that digital downloads from day 1 tend to piss off retailers for the boxed version. Oh well, that's progress I guess.

I do have a couple of WoW boxes though. One is vanilla WoW. Back then I don't know if they had digital downloads but in any case I was running on dial-up and would never have dreamed of downloading it. When Burning Crusade came out I tried buying the game from a BestBuy but all the boxes they had seemed to have been tampered with. Knowing that all you actually need to play WoW is the code, I made the smart decision and decided to just buy the downloadable version instead. I don't know why I bought the WotLK box but since I have it, I must have bought it for some reason or other.

For Cataclysm though, it's the digital download all the way for me. While certain geeks will be freezing their butts outside Gamestop, I'll be loading up the game, warm and comfortable with a cup of hot chocolate in my hands. But hey, more power to you geek bros! I still respect you!

A fire mage it is!

That's it boys and girls, I've made my decision as to what spec my future mage will be. You've guessed it: fire!

Whenever I thought of playing a mage, fire was the last spec that appealed to me. Not anymore. Playing with the new talent calculators for Cataclysm, here's what I came up with: 5/33/3. I've also picked a bunch of glyphs which look good to me.

Now you tell me if that spec isn't close to being perfect? I can just imagine my mage chucking fireballs of destruction at his enemies.

My only problem is that I will have to wait until Cataclysm is launched even though the new talents will be available with patch 4.01. That's because I really want to play a worgen mage.

Oh, and I'm really excited that Pyroblast will be available from level 10. The only remaining task is to pick an equally awesome name. Suggestions are welcome.

Nerfs incoming

All the information coming out of the Cataclysm beta has got me excited but also a bit worried. The thing that gets me worried is healer mana. From what I understand, it will be a lot harder for healers in Cataclysm to manage their mana.

Mana conservation will become the new healing game, starting with patch 4.01 in fact, when all the new mechanics come into effect. This comes at a bad time for me personally because I have just gotten used to healing and started enjoying it, after spending most of my WoW career dps-ing. I'm at a point where I am comfortable healing normal dungeons on my discipline priest, even though heroics still give me trouble.

Healing is not easy when you're not sufficiently geared. For example I'm not geared enough for heroics, though I can heal normal dungeons very well. In fact I seldom drop below 75% mana. Right now I'm enjoying healing normals and I try to queue every day for a normal dungeon, just so I can exercise my skills.

Patch 4.01 will apparently change things such that those who weren't uber-healers before (like yours truly) will probably struggle to heal, maybe even to the point of giving up on healing. I might be one of those. Of course, now I'm being over-dramatic but it is certainly a possibility.

I don't quite get this mana regen nerfing. If Blizzard think there are too many healers, well, nerfing their regen will sure weed out the more casual ones. I might be a casualty in this new war. My idea of having fun in a group is not exactly to be stressed out by the game mechanics. I sometimes enjoy a challenge but if the odds are too much against me and if my fun turns into stress, I will quickly abandon that activity and concentrate on something more pleasant. That's the main reason why I almost gave up on healing after holy healing started sucking.

I'm sure there are others like me and unfortunately healers are almost as scarce as tanks. Is there a point in making their life even harder?

And then there's the new thing that healing priests are getting, which is damage dealing. Wait, a dps healer? It seems that if priests want to get some of that drained mana back, they better dps the hell out of those mobs, or else they won't be able to do their job.

I have mixed feelings about this new mechanic. On the one hand, it's something new and it feels interesting. Hell, it's a novel concept, at least as far as WoW is concerned. Just imagine: in order to heal properly you need to deal damage! I can see it being useful in those dead intervals when I'm waiting for the tank to take damage. This happens in normal dungeons for me, since I'm starting to over-gear them.

Heroics, on the other hand, are a whole 'nother story. I've healed a heroic once and it was very tough. Very often, even on trash, I had to constantly spam my healing abilities. Yeah, the tank wasn't great either but still... There was no way in hell I would have had time to cast a single Smite during those times when I was healing like crazy.

Maybe I'm being just a whiny kid right now but we shall see, soon. I'm hoping that patch 4.01 will hit next Tuesday (October 5th) or the following one (October 12th). If healing as a priest becomes too complicated, fine, I'll be happy to switch to shadow 100% of the time and enjoy my lack of responsibility as damage dealer.

Moving on to the other classes and roles, my feelings about the potential nerfs and buffs to them are rather simple.

For dps classes and specs, if I won't enjoy the new mechanics it won't be such a big deal. I just won't play that class. As it is, I have too many characters that I have to juggle. I'll just focus on the ones that are fun to play. As an example, my hunter has been my main but after I re-discovered the joys of retribution, I abandoned him in favor of my paladin. If the new focus mechanic sucks, I'll have the best reason to abandon him for good. I don't know, but at this juncture focus seems to be turning hunters into ranged rogues and that's not what I want to play.

As for tanking, well, I won't be tanking on my level 80 paladin again, that's for sure. My biggest mistake was to spend a lot of gold trying to gear him up for tanking heroics, only to discover that I suck at the job. The changes that are coming with 4.01 will probably make paladin tanking an even more foreign concept to me. On the other hand, I do want to level a new druid in Cataclysm as a bear tank. That's because I'll be starting with a clean slate and no pre-conceived notions of how the class should work. I haven't played a druid before so I won't be jaded.

So these are my (probably flawed) arguments regarding the "incoming nerfs" to healing. Maybe I'm just crying "wolf" or maybe things will become that more complicated for healers (especially priests). We'll find out soon enough. My opinions are those of a casual so they don't weigh a lot but I still think that Blizzard should lay off the nerf bat and make healing more attractive, not less.

Very nice changes to retribution paladins in patch 4.01

Well, if you love retribution paladins and haven't yet seen this article from WoW Insider, now's your chance. I've been keeping up with Cataclysm changes, of course, but this is a very nice write-up of how the new paladin resource, Holy Power, is supposed to work.

I have to say I'm excited. There are some new spells in there which will make rotations more interesting and also give us more options depending on the fight. Patch 4.01 should hit in a couple of weeks or so and this will give everyone the opportunity to try out the new talents and mechanics before Cataclysm. Hopefully there's enough time to get used to them.

Speaking of Cataclysm, I think I'm gonna start yet another paladin on a Horde server just to level up with the new system. It's gonna be a Tauren paladin and I'm gonna spec him retribution/holy. I've long been curious as to how holy paladin healing works.

Retribution changes are looking good so far but I can't say the same about other classes that I play. Healing in particular has me worried. But that's a subject for another post.

Interlude

Well folks as some of you might have noticed, I've been posting less often lately. I would like to say that my posting will be even less frequent in the following weeks due to a number of things. In no particular order:

• I've resumed work on my WoW-themed site after I abandoned it despite procrastinating a long time ago. Don't bother to visit it just yet because there's nothing there, just an "under construction" page. About a month ago I got a new idea for the site and I believe this one is much more useful than my initial idea. And it's easier to implement. The site will be done "when it's done" to steal someone's quote.
  
• I have started a new blog related to a new hobby I have acquired. I know, boo! I'm abandoning WoW Alone and all that. Not quite. The other blog is not time sensitive. If I don't post for weeks that's ok but I just wanted to share my thoughts about the new hobby, somewhere. In time I might reveal what it is exactly.
  
• My WoW subscription is expired so I can't play right now. Nonetheless, I plan to renew it before patch 4.01 goes live because I want to sell some stuff and perhaps get acquainted with the new talents and the revised discipline priest healing mechanics. I could renew it at any time but I'm still busy with the other stuff so I won't even have time to sell stuff on the AH, much less to play my priest.
  
• I've also started my second P90X cycle, after successfully completing the first one a while back. As a result, I'm training daily, cause that's the program.
  
• I'm also kinda going through a lull what with Cataclysm around the corner and all. Now's the perfect time for me to engage in other activities, before the madness starts again.

As you can see, I'm pretty busy but I don't have that much more posting material so I will use this opportunity to take a little break from posting.

Stick around though cause I'll be back!

Mining, herbalism and skinning dailies

Here's an idea I just got after learning that mining and herbalism would give XP in Cataclysm: why not implement mining, herbalism and skinning daily quests? Some tradeskills have dailies so why wouldn't gathering skills?

A big advantage of gathering dailies would be that they could take effect from level 1. I'm guessing the main reason why professions don't generally have dailies from low levels is that they are much harder (and more inconsistent) to level. Not so with gathering professions. If you pick up one or two of them from the beginning you can easily level them while you are leveling your character.

As an example of how this might work, consider the following. The quest giver asks the player for, say, 10 copper bars. In exchange, the player gets 1-2 gold, some nice XP and perhaps a bag with some random stuff in it, with the possibility of containing green or blue items. Something like the random dungeon bag of goodies.

I believe that mining/herbalism/skinning dailies would be advantageous for any player:

• players would be encouraged to pick gathering skills from the get-go.
  
  
• people would also be encouraged to level their gathering skills more and keep them up to date. I still see level 80s with Mining 100 or some such.
  
  
• related to the above it might encourage people to explore more in order to find nodes.
  
  
• it would give people extra XP and gold and even some nice items to help them level up.

I would make these dailies scale with skill level, meaning that at the beginning you'd be required to supply copper bars, later tin bars, later iron bars and so on. I would also add quest givers in each major city and perhaps even in the bigger quest hubs.

Here's to hoping that Blizzard will implement something like this, although I'm not holding my breath.