Lethal Shots

The following exchange is what I imagined happening between the gnolls in the Wetlands yesterday when I strolled into the middle of their camp on my Shaman to pick some Briarthorn while leveling his Herbalism. I was giggling to myself so much I decided it might be worth sharing.

Gnoll 1: Hey, look over there. Some guy just walked into our camp.

Gnoll 2: Huh? Where?

Cnoll 1: Over there, right next to Carl.

Gnoll 2: Oh yeah, I see him now.

Gnoll 1: He looks awful familiar…..

Gnoll 2: That’s the same guy that keeps riding by on an elephant.

Gnoll 1: What’s he doing?

Gnoll 2: Um, it looks like he’s picking a flower.

Gnoll 1: Why isn’t Carl hitting him with a club or something?

Gnoll 2: Well, I think Carl is doing his best to pretend the guy doesn’t exist.

Gnoll 1: Come on, lets beat the guy up.

Gnoll 2: Um, I think Carl has the right idea. The guy is minding his own business, so lets just leave him alone.

Gnoll 1: Leave him alone? But we always beat up people who come in our camp.

Gnoll 2: Look, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.

Gnoll 1: Why not?

Gnoll 2: Cause this guy is not the typical adventurer we see around here. I mean look at him. He’s huge. And one of his daggers is encased in fire! I mean do you really think its smart to mess with a guy walking around with a dagger encased in fire?

Gnoll 1: Well, granted it might be a tougher fight than usual doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Gnoll 2: Try? Sure, go ahead and try. You can end up like that crocolisk over there. He copped a bad attitude with the guy and now I now you can’t even count the pieces.

Gnoll 1: Yeah, but we’re a lot tougher than a crocolisk.

Gnoll 2: Did you not see what happened to Steve when he accidentally bumped into the guy yesterday? The guy’s dagger cut poor Steve in half, and it was just hanging on the guys belt!

Gnoll 1: So why don’t we go get even?

Gnoll 2: Nope. I’m going to do just like Carl and pretend the guy doesn’t even exist.

Gnoll 1: Come on, we can’t do that. Everyone will laugh at us if we don’t try and take him.

Gnoll 2: Fuck that. Let everyone laugh, at least we’ll still be alive. Just let the god damn hippie pick his fucking flower and get out of here. If you really feel like beating some one up after he leaves we’ll just gank that level 20 mage wandering around over there.

Last night I made my first trip into Ulduar. It was a rather short run, but it was still loads of fun. The reason for the shortness of the run was group composition. While we were able to get 10-people together, we were missing tanks and healers. Lucky for us that doesn’t matter in the Flame Leviathan fight.

Since it was my first time in there I was instructed to drive one of the  Siege Engines, which I was told is one of the easier tasks. That was fine by me. Best to learn an encounter from one of the less critical seats. For the trash, my job was basically to tank. It was pretty easy. We proceeded to take out the trash and all four towers. Everything went smooth with no deaths. We did wipe however when we got to the boss. The boss was spawned before everyone was ready (or the fight even explained). We lost a few people quick, so we experimented with him some to get a litle practice and then went ahead and wiped.

Though once we came back in we proceeded to wipe him. I’m calling it a 1-shot since the first pull was not intentional. The fight reminded me a lot of the Little Red Riding Hood encounter in Kara. Hopefully later this week we will be able to go in and clear out a few more bosses.

And another week has passed us by. Got a lot on my mind this time :

• More maintenance today, with more realms getting hardware upgrades. I am retracting my previous guess of 3.1.2 today. I don’t think it will drop until all the hardware upgrades are done.
• It’s been a little slow on the raiding front for me lately, but there is a Ulduar-10 run scheduled for Wednesday. I can’t wait.
• My server went down last night. So I popped over to Ner’zhul to say hi to Amava and Matticus, then started working a DK through their starting area to kill time.
• I really miss Amava’s blog. Hopefully my small prompting will encourage him to revive it.
• I fail at scheduled weekly posting. I promise the next installment of Hunting Tactics will be out soon.
• I’ve been leveling Inscription as my DK’s second profession. So far I have gotten it up to 200. I don’t have an Herbalist, so all herbs have been coming from the AH. I’m just hoping I can at least break even by selling the junk I have to make to level it.
• I did join in on a successful guild run of VoA over the weekend, downing the new boss on the first try. Let me just say the new boss is way more fun than the old one.
• I tried leveling my Paladin, but I’m just not ready to grind through the old world again yet. So I have decided to work on my Death Knight. As of last night he is up to 63 and just started in Zangarmarsh.
• I healed a normal Gun’Drak for my friends in my alt-guild. It went great, and I think I am getting their interest primed for moving up into heroics.
• The biggest problem my friends in my alt-guild have? They under estimate themselves. These guys know their class and are solid players. With a few craftable gear upgrades and a few things from normal level 80 instances, they could be rocking heroics.
• My gem business is holding pretty steady. It’s not making me a millionaire overnight, but the income is pretty steady.

Well, that’s all I got. Now give give me your thoughts.

Earlier this week I decided to participate in yet another aspect of WoW. The Auction House. Of course I have used the AH before. I’ve bought gear, enchants, gems, crafting mats, etc. I’ve auctioned whatever I might have come across while leveling. But I have never actually played the AH.

Now I don’t mean the old “buy low, sell high” scheme (it hardly ever works), I mean the art of Goblinism. This means I am taking raw materials available on the AH, crafting something useful out of them, and re-selling them for a profit. Maximum profit for minimal work. Naturally, this is done with the professions that I have already invested considerable time and money into leveling. Currently I have four professions greater than 400 skill available to me: Mining (on 2 characters), Engineering, Enchanting, and Jewelcrafting.

Mining provides a small, but steady income in the form of Titansteel. With a 20 hour cooldown to smelt and the still relatively high demand, it is almost always a guaranteed sell. I profit about 30g per bar sold, meaning about 60g a day.

Engineering is by no means a cash cow. There are really only a few items that non-engineers have any interest in. The motorcycle requires too high of a initial investment. The two epic guns require a rather large investment to make, and sell for almost no profit at all. And ammunition will often sell for less than the raw mats to make it. I’m still keeping an eye on tings in case the opportunity for profit does come up.

Enchanting is where I see a huge potential for profit. Every time a piece of gear is replaced, it needs enchanted. The problem for me is that my Enchanter (a level 60 Death Knight) is currently unable to learn any enchants other than the standard ones available from the trainer. There is very little profit from there since every Enchanter on the server knows them and the market is flooded. I’m not going to make any profit here until my DK learns more.

That leaves Jewelcrafting. I’ve started out small, putting no more than 30 gems on the market at once, and I am already starting to show a healthy profit. While many gem cuts sell for the same, or less, than the raw gem, there are still several that offer a nice profit. I am also making sure to do the JC daily every day to broaden my range of wares. The epic necklaces are also tempting, though I’ll want to make sure they turn enough profit to justify the hefty token cost for the recipe.

On top of my crafting endeavors, I also scan the AH for any sources of quick cash, such as crystallized to eternal conversions, or buying stuff to vendor. Not a whole lot of coin there, but it takes practically no time to do so why not.

I now just need to decide what profession to pair with Enchanting on my DK. It needs to offer decent profit potential, but getting the mats to level it may be a problem. I am looking at Inscription, but without a Herbalist to gather mats, leveling it could be quite expensive. Another option would be Tailoring. Mats would be easy to obtain, plus I could DE the items I make while leveling it. This would only be viable though if bags and BoE items could be sold for a decent profit.

It is definitely different looking at the game this way, but it is providing me with a challenge that I am already starting to enjoy.

I don’t like heroic raids. I absolutely love running 10-man raids, but I just don’t like 25-mans. Don’t get me wrong, I have fun in them, but I would much rather be in a 10-man. Why you might ask? Well, the first reason may stem from the terrible FPS I get in them. I get good performance in 10-mans, but throw another 15 people in there and it kills my PC.

But even if that wasn’t an issue I still wouldn’t like them. There is just too many people. With a 10-man, runs start close to on time, while it can take up to an hour to get all 25 people together for a heroic. Vent becomes unbearable. Too many people talking at once means you can’t understand a soul. Wipes can take ages to recover from. All this because of the number of people.

Yet I will most likely continue to run them. Heroic raids are what a large number of my guildies are interested in, which means that is what my guild will strive to run, and I want to run with my friends. Also there is the matter of loot. I want a shot at the best loot in the game, and that means I must run heroic raids (I also think this a motivating factor behind many of my guildies). While I find this to be a bad decision on Blizzards part, there is little to be done about it.

So what does this mean? I will continue to run heroic raids, and hope people want to run some 10-mans too.