Quitting

I am quiting WoW. Most likely not permanently but I think I wont be back before the summer. The reason is mainly that I don't enjoy the game as much as before and it feels like when I'm logged on I either just wait for a raid or sitting in Dalaran doing nothing. Also this spring is quite important to me when it comes to school so I will have to focus a lot more on it than earlier. My game time will expire on January the 15th so I will still play for a few weeks. What I will be working most on during this time is preparing for my return, stocking up on mats that might rise in Cata and sell those that wont. There may or may not be any new posts during this time so this might be my last post. I will still keep an eye on the WoW blogs I'm reading to stay up to date with what's happening.

Nothing more to say really except for good bye.

It Can't Be Stopped!

The last few days gold has been flowing in. From 23-24 000g a week ago I am now up to, as can be seen on the picture (even though the quality is crap) just above 30 000! Normally I would be way over 30k but I've spent a lot this week and bought a whole lot of herbs. You can't refuse a 9g/stack offer for Adder's Tongue.

I still haven't got all my dust sold and sales seems to have slowed down but I can still get a few ones sold for 5g each in diferently sized stacks. I also got some Darkmoon decks I was going to turn in last sunday just to notice the fair had already left. So I'm now sitting with cards up to my neck waiting for the next one.

My next goal will be hitting 50k, something I most likely will be able to do around the release of Cataclysm but we'll see how it goes. And now to something completly diferent. The winter holiday starts tomorrow so I will stay in a mostly sleeping state until January, but I will get time to post more.

Get this dragon off me!

As I have now gotten a bit into tanking some of my posts will be about it. Before I say anything else, here's my tank (if you were paying attention you might have noticed I just showed you my realm, nothing that you couldn't have figured out yourself anyways). As you can see her gear is not perfect but it works pretty good.
I have now been level 80 on her for a week and have now done quite a few heroics. My impression of tanking so far is simply, awesome. Besides getting a group in seconds with the new LFG tool in combination with the lack of tanks I can't help loving the power you get while tanking.

Being the tank of a group is way diferent from being DPS. If you have low damage or overaggro a lot as a DPS you will be kicked while as a tank all you have to do is tell your DPS to watch their threat if you get overaggro'd . The only possibility to be kicked as a tank is if you got ridicously low threat so the boss will enrage before it dies or you die like a fish in a desert which shouldn't happen with decent gear and healer(s) who knows what they're doing.

So I have now praised tanking as if it was the best thing ever, but if it is so great why doesn't everyone do it? There is one reason, a pretty obvious one. Responsibility. Even if you often can blame minor stuff on the DPS most major things as wipes and so on will be blamed on you. Often it wont matter who really caused the wipe, it will still be your fault because you didn't pick up the add. Nobody cares if someone started nuking it before it reached you, everything will still be your fault.

As if that wasn't bad enough tanks are in most cases the ones who will get criticized for their gear. A few days ago I was doing UK heroic, one of the easier heroics in the game at the moment and one of the DPS started complaining about my gear. Well, nothing weird about that, everybody is entitled to their oppinion and if he doesn't consider my gear good enough I wont try to convince him. The thing was that I had about 15-17% parry/dodge, 25k hp self buffed and defense capped at the time. He kept overaggroing and whining and eventually left. We replaced him and cleared the whole instance easily.

So if you want to tank, do it, it's really fun but just remember to never listen to what the DPS tells you. If you think you can tank it, you most likely can.

Patch 3.3, gold and instances

We're now a few days into patch 3.3 and I must say it has been going quite well. I've sold close to all my Heavy Borean Leather for 120-130% of the average market value and they sold incredibly fast so I think I underpriced them. Infinite Dust have been selling for quite a lot too as you can see in the image (as usual, just click it to get better quality), I've managed to sell several stacks for 5g per dust giving me 3g profit per dust sold which will result in about 7100g in sales, or 4300g profit if I sell them all at this price.

Glyphs are also selling quite well, as can be expected when a new patch comes. The same goes for gems which I've been making quite a lot from even though I got way to many autumn's glow cuts, I got about 40 scarlet rubies in my bags and not a single autumn's glow. I also think gems will stay quite strong as people will be getting new gear slowly as ICC is released over the next few months and better gear with emblems of triumph.

I'm right now sitting at about 23 gold liquid qith a sold nobles deck (and a bunch of cards which due to a lot of doubles can't be made into decks for another 1000-2000g) for a little less than 5000g coming in and maybe a thousand more in glyph sales. So I am very close hitting 30k and will most likely do it this week.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead:
In-between my crafting I have also done some of the new instances (on my main, my DK is nowhere near geared for them) and really like them. If you haven't tried them yet, it is as going from python to C, or for you non-programmers, fishing in a lake and then go walehunting. The thrash is comparable to the bosses of an ordinary heroic and the bosses are even worse. It's not too bad in the first 2 instances, Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron but once you get to the third and final one, Halls of Reflection things get nasty. There will be 10 waves of thrash consisting of 4 to 5 mobs I think (in heroic) spawning around a round room. Out of the 4 diferent adds you can get 2 are ranged, in short: A tank's nightmare.

Luckilly I'm DPS and free from the responsibility to make sure that mage is not ripping the healer apart and just have to watch my aggro, which can be quite hard in this instance. After 5 waves the first boss spawns and after 5 more the second. There's not really much to worry about except avoiding stuff on the ground and nuke.

The final boss is an escape from the Lich King where he will summon adds that you will have to kill to move on as there are huge ice walls in your way. If he catches up with you, you're dead. I've yet to sucessfully do it in heroic but managed to do it in normal today but even then it was quite close.

So in conclusion these are not your ordinary "pull and AoE" instances and even on normal they can be quite a challenge. But if you're lucky Battered Hilt will drop (only in heroic) which you can either use yourself to get an iLvL 251 weapon or sell for a nice amount of gold. I've seen people willing to pay over 8k for it on my server.

I hope you enjoy the patch and are doing well with the AH game.

Hitting 80

Yes, I've finally hit 80 on my death knight and started to gear her up, and I'm already having good enough gear for most heroics (except for maybe ToC and some of the harder ones). I haven't focused a lot at making gold for the past few weeks which in combination with buying some enchants and such has brought my total gold down to about 22k. With the patch coming out tomorrow (today for you readers) I've decided to get back in business. I got a lot of stuff stocked up for the patch for example a lot of infinite dusts and heavy borean leathers and also a bunch of snowfalls and eternal lives that I will make into cards once I see how the patch affects the prices, but as I've said before, I'm not worried.

On the other hand I have completly forgot to stock up on glyphs and as I have a test tomorrow I don't have time to recraft them today. So the first thing I'll do tomorrow is to refill my glyph stock to make sure I get as much money as possible out of the patch.

Right now I got about 1500 infinite dust bought for around 2g each, and if I get the price rise to 3-4 or even 5g as I want I can get anywhere from 4500 to 7500 gold for them. With the increased demand for saronite there will most likely be less dust on the market, and combined with the regular demand increase of enchanting mats that comes with every patch I am confident I'll get, at the very least, my money back.

I also got about 1000g of heavy borean leather that I trust will go up once you can buy arctic fur with them. I've also done pretty much none work in the gem market so I still got a lot of raw gems left that I can cut and sell for a good price.

As I have now hit the (level)cap and school is calming down for the holidays I will try to be more active with my posting and goldmaking. I am quite interested in trying out the pure goblin way of glyph selling instead of my weird mutated alternative after Kevmar said he had a lot of sucess with it. Right now I'm trying to find a way to make KTQ use the market value instead of the lowest buyout of the last scan, but as I know nothing about lua it's not going well. With some luck it shouldn't take too long to fix it but if anyone with some knowledge of lua could take a look at it I would be very grateful.

That's what I've been doing the last few weeks and hopefully I'll be able to speed it up a bit in the next few days.

Not Quite Dead

As you may have noticed I haven't been posting anything here for the last week or so. The main reason is that I never had anything to post about, writing about putting a few hundred glyphs up on the AH is not very meaningful. I have nostly focused on getting the pilgrim achievment and leveling my death knight to 80 (she's 77 right now) and get into tanking just because I'm a crazy madman who loves having power over people. Other than that I am doing pretty well. Glyphs are selling and I can manage to pull in about 7-800g in sales every day by posting once of which at least half always is profit, but often a lot more.

I'm sitting at about 27 400g right now, which would be a bit more if I hadn't decided to suddenly buy all nether drakes setting me back 1000g. Luckilly just a few moments after I got Chestguard of the Vanquished Hero and sold it to someone for 500g. Of course, if I hadn't bought those drakes I would have had both the 500g and another 1000g at the same time but lets avoid any kind of logic here. So all in all, not much going on at the moment.

Slow Updates

I've been a bit busy these last few days preventing me from doing any posting so lets just do a quick summary of the last seven days. I revealed my "new revolutionary" posting method which, while proven to be not-so-new have worked out pretty well. I have noticed a decrease in sales but since yesterday stuff has started to work out very good, though I did make my fallback higher.

I also gave engineering a try to see the moneymaking potential. While many low level items seems pretty profitable the time spent finding the mats, crafting all diferent parts and so on is just not worth it. So I went back to mainly work inscription, which is now working out pretty well for me and I make enough gold to don't have to worry about it anymore. So for the time I am going to be a bit casual on the AH and just be using my JC and inscription to make a few hundred gold every day, which really is more than I need.