Professions Review - Alchemy

Well, it took me almost two months, but I finally got around to getting all my toons' fishing to 100. This means most of them would have made good headway into getting to 150 for Cooking. So, time to level Vis's fishing some more to get what I need... Well, maybe after I've gotten her mount...

While on the subject of Professions, just which profession is suitable for your toon?

Most long time players will tell you that to make money, double gathering professions (I prefer to pair either Mining or Herbalism with Skinning so that the node tracking doesn't clash, but if you're ok with that, Mining/Herbalism is cool as well) are the way to go. However, if you have sugar daddies (or mommies) to sponsor your leveling than money making isn't really all that pertinent.

Now, unless you are like me, who is endeavouring to have a toon with at least one of each profession, which ones are actually useful in terms of leveling and end-game?

One thing to keep in mind is to look at what each profession can offer the particular toon with that profession? What are the BOP items that each can offer, that makes it special and desirable?

I had originally wanted to write a whole monster article reviewing all the professions, but I realised that is just not going to work. So, we'll start slow and work our way through the rest...

Alchemy
While leveling, alchemy provides you with a variety of pots to make leveling easier, but doesn't actually do anything for you that money does not solve. Pots (especially Healing and Mana Pots) drop in fairly large numbers from mobs around the world and unless you are a melee class, you'll generally do alright with bandages and food.

The BOP items starts off with the Philisopher's Stone. What used to be a rock taking up space in your backpack is now a trinket with +5 to all stats. At a level where there is a distinct lack of available trinkets, this isn't too bad. Not game breaking, but a useful thing to have around.

At 350 Alchemy, you get to upgrade that to Alchemist's Stone. Depending on how much pots you consume, this could be decent or a bit of a waste, as you should have quite a number of more useful trinkets around, even if you are just looking at quest rewards.

Now, if you keep at your Shattered Suns Offensive reputation, at Exalted, you get to upgrade the Alchemist's Stone (with 375 Alchemy) to one of four versions, depending on which is beneficial to your toon (Assassin's, Guardian's, Redeemer's or Sorceror's). Now, these are quite nice, and might be worth grinding the rep for it, depending on the market for Nether Vortex on your server. Now, take into consideration that these trinkets are rivalling Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau drops, it's certainly worth getting them made.

The one thing is that for Druids, the trinkets are a bit more of a question mark. Part of their great utility is the boost to pots that it gives. Not being able to use pots (because you are in Bear/Cat/Tree/Bird form) means that utility is lost on you. However, the trinkets are still worth considering since the mats are really not that hard to farm/buy and outclass most of what you are able to get at this time.

Unfortunately, that's all the BOP goodness you are going to get.

Finally, Alchemy is also consistently one of the few crafting professions that can generate a healthy income. Even cutting edge raiders need pots and the AH is just so convenient some times. Transmutation of Primal Might is always good for a few gold as it is generally constantly in demand for other crafted goods. If you are lucky enough to 'discover' some of the more eagerly seeked receipes, then your cash reserves should be set.

While it does not offer as many BOP items as the rest, Alchemy is certainly worthwhile as a money-spinner, if nothing else than to save some time doing dailies.

I would like to thank my family...

Wow... I went away for a few days to do house moving and came back to a link from BRK, a link from TeePee, who inspired me to write the lock leveling article in the first place and a whole bunch of nice comments. Thanks a bunch!

Looking back on it, it really does seem to favour the Affliction tree over the rest. I really want to try leveling as a Demonologist, but I guess the Affliction bug has bitten too hard. However, one thing I have noticed is that generally, it seems to level a lot like Hunters. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but since Mathe is also being leveled at the same time, I guess having Vis go Afflict would make more sense at the moment...

I am planning on a follow-on articles, mainly to take your toon from Lvl 18 to whenever is a good point to stop. But, I'm curious if it would be helpful?

In other news, there has been a whole bunch of leaks from the Wrath of the Lich King Friends and Family Alpha. I won't be repeating the info here (it's easy to find online anyway), but so far, there looks to be some neat additions to the talent trees.

One thing that is nice though is that having a level 55 character will unlock the death knight, who can be of any race! Guess the BECs will have a new sister come WotLK... :)

Leveling a Baby Lock

If you're a warlock and have yet to read TapTapPewPew, you really should. It's a nice collection of articles about the uber class that is Warlock. I found the link on BRK's blog and have been working my way through the archive...

One article I came to was a Leveling Guide for Warlocks. While the article had a lot of sound concepts and before my re-roll, I would probably have agreed with most of it, coming from the perspective of actually leveling one at the moment, I have to disagree with a few points. So, here's my take on it.

If you are completely new to WoW in general and warlocks in particular, the thing that affects your leveling speed the most is downtime. While a mage can tear apart the same mob in half the time, a mage will need to sit down to eat/drink every two to three mobs (depending on your gear), while a lock can generally go on forever without needing to stop; once you have gotten a number of key talents and spells.

First, a general tip. If for whatever reason, you rolled Horde but not a Blood Elf, then before you do anything, run. Just run over to Silvermoon City. I know that for Taurens, this might be a bit challenging, The Barrens is not exactly Level 1 friendly but if these guys can do it, so can you... The quests in the new area are much easier to follow and better designed and they reward much better, in terms of both quality and money... Compared to my broke and white/grey geared Tauren Druid who leveled in the Mulgore, my Blood Elves were nicely geared in greens and rolling in cash. Similarly, if you are Alliance, go to the space goat area. You won't regret it.

Now, the first step is Big Blue, aka Blueberry, or in official Wow-speak, your Voidwalker. It's usually maligned at being a useless tank and after level 50 or so, that's very true. Before that, as long as you keep his spells current, he is a more than credible tank. He might not always hold aggro, but usually he'll hold for long enough. He's also able to take a fair amount of damage so he should generally be able to keep pace with you. If not, I tend to use bandages on him as prior to end-game, a lock has little need for bandages but still need to have them made for training First Aid anyway.

The next piece of the puzzle is Life Tap. Trading one easily replenished resource (Health) for one that is not so easily replenished and utterly crucial (mana) is golden and a skill that every other mana using class in WoW will kill to have. However, to pair it with a spell that drains the health from the mob and replenishes your own, is to give you the tools to make your toon the killer energizer bunny.

On a side note, yes, I know there is a Drain Mana spell, which directly replenishes mana. However, this doesn't kill the mob and there are many mobs which don't use mana anyway, so the Life Tap/Drain Life combo is always better to use. In fact, you'll find that in PvE, there are very few situations where Drain Mana is required so much so that I've stopped putting it on my cast bar.

So, now that the basics are clear, how do we spec?

5/5 Improved Corruption - Level 10 to 14
Yes, I agree. It's ridiculous that three years later, we should be giving up talent points for this when spells like Innervate, and Ice Block were given as trainable skills to their respective class...

Until then, first five points into this. No question.

2/2 Improved Drain Soul - Level 15 to 16
This was such a useless talent but after TBC talent revamp, it's a beautiful soloing spell.

15% of your mana pool back when the mob dies. Think about it... Now the beauty of it? This is irregardless of your spell level. It procs just as well of Level 1 Drain Soul, which costs a staggering 55 mana. It's a spell that scales beautifully as you level (& increase your mana pool) and yet always cost 55 mana.

& to sweeten the deal, 10% less threat on your affliction spells means less likelihodd of you grabbing aggro from VeeDub. :)

Take this talent, and drain the soul (Rank 1) off every mob. You'll need to toss out the shards cramming up your bag every now and then, but you'll be peachy for mana.

2/2 Improved Life Tap - Level 17 to 18
This gives us 20% more mana from life tap. At level 16, you'll be using Level 2 Life Tap which gives 65 mana from 65 life. With 2 talent points, you immediately get 8 more mana. As your spell level increase and you start collecting +dmg gear, this gets more and more efficient.

Eventually, it'll be key to achieving the state where you can kill mobs and have a full green and blue bar.

With these in hand, usually, what I do in any encounter is the following (in sequence).
1) Send in Big Blue
2) Slap up the DOTs (Immolate, Corruption, Curse of Agony)
3) Lifetap
4) Drain Life
5) Just before the mob keels over, switch to Drain Soul.

You should end the encounter with two almost full bars.

When you are comfortable with that, stretch yourself by doing this.
1) Send in Big Blue after Target A
2) DOT up Target A
3) Lifetap
4) Send Big Blue after Target B
5) DOT up Target B
6) Lifetap
7) Drain Life on Target B (Target A will usually keel over now)
8) Just before B keels over, switch to Drain Soul

If things go bad, use your Fear to buy you some time to bandage if required. If things go really bad, remember your Big Blue will (after Level 16) have the Sacrifice spell. Use it as your oops button.

At this point, you need to make a decision. To level as Affliction, killing mobs with your DOTs and draining their life away, or to level as Demonology, to be a matched team with your demon. In my opinion, neither are really superior, it's a matter of preference but both will get you to 70 with a minimum amount of fuss (actually, you could probably not spend any talent points and get to 70 with a minimum amount of fuss). With Affliction, you'll really shine in a multi-mob grinding environment; you can literally dot up 2-3 mobs, Lifetap a couple of times for mana, Drain Life the life back, dot up another 3, lifetap, drain, rinse and repeat until the area is cleared of mobs. For Demonology, while you might not be able to keep this up as long as the Affliction lock, you'll definitely have better survivability and a more durable pet.

The talents you choose will be dictated by that decision. While this might be a decidedly Affliction-bent spec, I do believe that it's a lot more efficient as compared to spreading your points out across the three trees as recommended by TeePee.

Edit: Yes, the spell in the cast sequence should be Immolate... I don't know what I was thinking of... Thanks TeePee for the heads-up.

Another Patch

After the server maintenance, 2.4.2 was released. As always, the latest patch notes can be found here.

The nice thing about being in the low levels is that usually, the changes have little to no effect to you. But I like to keep abreast of them, just to know what is taking place.

The big one for me is the reduction in Cooldown times; from 23 hours to 20 hours, from 4 days to 3 days, 20 hours. This is a huge thing. I used to lose days to cooldowns (which was a pain when I was washing Shadowcloth). Basically, the old 4 day CD meant that you had to wash the cloth later and later each time. If you washed at 10pm this time. The next time, you could only do so at 10pm, at which time you were probably in the middle of something or another, so you do it at 11pm. The next round, this invariably gets pushed back again & so on, until it's not possible to catch it prior to bedtime... So you lose a day and wash at 10pm the next night. The cycle then starts again... :p With this slight reduction, at least I'll be able to get round this problem.

Other than that, no real huge buffs or nerfs that I can see... Since I haven't seen any beying for blood in blogs or forums yet, I guess that's true for now...

Ding Ding Ding

Since the last update, Sheanne crept past the 30 line whereas Vis has gotten to 39 before her rested XP ran out... Along the way, she had pretty much skipped all of Thousand Needles (except for that little bit required for her class quest). Frankly, I dislike the place. All those pillars meant that you generally had to navigate your toon around, whereas Desolace (which some really dislike), are nice and flat... Sure, the odd vulture or lizard might try to rip your head off, but that's life, eh? One nice thing about Desolace is that there aren't that many 'run back & forth' quests. You go somewhere, kill a bunch of guys, then move on. If you followed the entire series of quests in Barrens, you'll know what I mean.

After Desolace is a visit to everyone's favourite leveling ground in Stranglethorn Vale. With the enhanced leveling XP, it does make it possible to skip a large number of regions. Thus, to reduce the repetitiveness of leveling, I'm considering skipping STV for regions like Badlands and Arathi Highlands for some of the toons.

This is something to definitely consider for Mathe, as Badlands are a much better Mining spot than STV. But to miss out on the skins in STV... Decisions, decisions...

Children's Week

Finally done with Reservist and back to the normalcy of slacking at work... ;)

This grumpy fella here is the orphan you get to 'adopt' for Children's Week. You sort of have to bring him running around Azeroth, buy him an ice cream and bring him home to get your choice of pets (a rat, pig, or turtle) or 5g.

Well, I didn't really need the money so I got a small pet for all my toons.



Otherwise, my toons are slowly crawling to 40, with a SM run for each scheduled. Can't wait for them to get to 40, as this walking business is really starting to get old...

Busy Busy Busy...

Real life caught up to me in a big way this month, with the roll-out at work and going back to reservist for this week and the next... Still managed some WoW-time, but no blog time... :p

Of course, my PC imploded and while waiting for my WoW installation/patching to complete, I figure it's a good time to update some of the stuff that's happening...

Elainith and Kell both streamed past 30 and just a couple of nights ago, so did Tris. This meant the leopard travel form for her, so at least that's one more toon who don't have to slowly plod along...

For the others, SM beckons and while Vis totally lucked out on drops there, Mathe wasn't as impressed... Here's hoping it'll be good for the rest as well...

Pretty...

A run through Scarlet Monastary netted Vis some nice gear... While the rest of the instance was unkind, two visits to Doan had offered up Mantle of Doan, Robe of Doan and Hypnotic Blade! The best part was that again, Vis had nice matching clothes... Pretty nice...

But what's been making me pretty mad is that I would get 2-3 whispers every night selling gold or leveling services. I used to let these slide, but increasingly I would report spam them. It's getting to the point of EXTREME annoyance... It would be nice if there was a nice and easy way to catch these guys and perma-ban them before they even send their first whispers, but unfortunately, as long as there is a market for it, these jokers are going to be around... Which really begs the question, how much of a loser do you have to be to resort to these services? This is WoW... IT'S NOT EVEN REMOTELY HARD!!! But, we all know the answer, it's not that it's hard; it's that people are lazy... As long as there are people who access to more money than they have brains, and require instant gratification, not much we can do but just keep on right clicking and select 'Report Spam'. It doesn't help at all in the long run, but at least it makes you feel a little better... :p

Looking Good

While this happened a few days back, I didn't have time to get it written down till now... Bad me...

If you look at the screenshot of when my lock got her Felhunter (in this post), one thing you might notice is how nicely co-ordinated her clothes are. It wasn't planned, but just happened along the way...

For the record, if that's the look you want, Robe of the Moccasin, Feline Mantle, and Shredder Operating Gloves are the stuff you need.

However, since she is in her 30s, I went about getting her lock robes done. The first few parts were easy, a trip to the AH to buy an overpriced Robes of Arcana and get a Gold Bar out of the bank. Then, it's a round the world trips to kill some satyrs (which I managed slowly until Naraa came and mopped up the rest) and an inferno (which she one-shotted...) in Desolace... She had to go off, but Nraven was nice to help in AOEing down a bunch of Fire Elementals in Arathi.

So, Vis has new clothes, which were unfortunately, not an improvement (looks wise).

Now, the question is whether we should look into the Robe of Power, or hold out for the Shadoweave Robe?

Die? lol

Weekend was a bit of a grind, as the toons slowly edged closer to Level 30, with Mathe joining Vis across the line. The best thing? Feign Death! The uber Hunter skill! WOOT!!!

While on hunters, I've found that with the new leveling 'buffs' to pet, it hasn't been too stressful to keep two pets leveling at the same pace as the hunter, even with the leveling buff. Both Frostbite and Isis are pacing along just fine.

I've yet to get used to Isis starting her attack with a poison spit at max range but since the deadzone is no longer as unforgiving, there are advantages. Now, my pet could pull mobs out of pack, whereas with Frostbite, I would pull with a low ranked shot and then let Frostie Growl it off me. Because it doesn't need to close against the mob, Dash would also look to be less important. The lack of an AOE attack (like Screech) could prove to be a bother later, but it looks like I'll keep Isis for awhile. Of course, some might suggest a Wind Serpent as a better pet with a ranged ability, but Wind Serpents have become a bit common...

Finally, I wish my Hunter was a Leatherworker so he could eventually craft these... It's not so much how uber they are, but how cool they look... Maybe, there is something similar for my rogue? hmmmmm

Miss Bimbo Meets WoW

Horde players running through Ashenvale would know about the King of the Foulwead quest. It's a nice little quest, which can be solo'ed if you know the trick to it (I only found out after I got Xig to help though... :p). The nice thing though is that the quest item is not on the final boss, but in a basket which spawns on the ground after he dies. Now, anyone can loot that. So, I parked Vis, Mathe, and Elainith in the vicinity, used Kell to watch Xig go on a killing spree and after that had everyone loot the item and complete the quest.

But that's not the big thing about the quest. It's the quest reward. Of course, not too interesting for Vis, but for the rest? Well, the pic below of Elainith (the blue vest) and Kell (the blue undies) tell the story...


OK, we still can't buy breast augmentations for G, maybe WoW is leaving that for the next expansion...

2.4.1

No WoW since Patch 2.4.1 was released. Just a small patch to correct some errors... Frankly, it looks like mainly simple client side fixes, and I'm not sure why it requires an extended downtime... Guess other things needed to be fixed as well.

Guess Kell's assault on the Furborgs in Ashenvale will have to wait till tomorrow.

The Big 3-0

I only managed to get Vis & Elainith's fishing to 100, mainly because I also spent quite a bit of time with Vis, getting her to 30 and finishing up her Felhunter quest.

I've always figured Blizz got a little lazy with this. For the Imp and Voidwalker, there is a different line, depenind on your race. That's pretty much to be expected, since at Lvl 10, all races are understandably still in their starting areas. At lvl 20, with the Succubus, they probably got a bit lazy and made the Blood Elves do the same quest as the Undead, which is fine, since at lvl 20, it's a good chance to start branching out into the 'real world'... (Seems that all the ally locks have the same quest by now... Too bad... But at least it's still different to the Horde version.) By lvl 30, everyone, irregardless of race and faction do the same quest for Felhunter, and the remaining pets... The RPer in me really liked the backstory and lore involved in those earlier quests. The Felhunter questline seems to be run around the world just to get some stuff, then summon one to kill.

For this questline, my lock started at Undercity (since she was at TM questing), went to Barrens (Ratchet), returned to Undercity, then back to Hillsbrad to pop some murlocs. Once that is done, took the balloon to Kalimdor and went down to Thousand Needles, to knock off some centaurs, before returning to Undercity again. From there, it's Wetlands to pop some Orcs, before a return to Ratchet. Finally, summon the bugger and killed it... Including my travelling time, that was about two hours, but about 60%+ of the way to lvl 31... But, at least I got one with a nice name. :)

Fishing

Not the most impressive of professions, and something I'm generally too lazy to do...

But, I do try to get each of my toon's fishing to 100, if nothing else than to use this lovely thing. Previously, fishing was just something to do to waste time as there weren't really much use to it besides being a source of cheap pet food and easy way to level cooking, but now, with the addition of receipes for Grilled Mudfish and Poached Bluefish, the cooked fish are actually becoming an important part to high end 5-mans and raiding. Of course, not forgetting the daily cooking quests as well as fishing quest makes things interesting (the goodies in Bag of Fishing Treasures look amazing!).

Ideally, the completionist in me would like all my toons to be 375 fishing, but realistically, I expect one, at most two to achieve that. So far, I've been VERY slack in getting this done, with all 6 still at 1/75 Fishing. But, I'm hoping that by end of the weekend or so, I can get all their fishing to 100. If nothing else, to get all the fish to train all my toons' cooking up so I clear out all those reward receipes clogging up the bank.

2.4 is a GO!

In case you haven't heard, 2.4 was released. The marquee item is of course, the release of Sunwell Plateau and the Shattered Sun Offensive which allows all to grind more rep for yet more loot.

Of course, for now, all this means little to me since we're still working our way out of the 20s (I mean, improved gains in weapon skill is great, but...), but it's good to see what else is waiting for me at the end of the road.

A complete list of the changes can be found here.

Some thoughts on the changes.

Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.
Sounds good on paper, but from initial blue comments, you are going to need a bucket load of Spell Haste to achieve the 1 second GCD. Might make Spell Haste worth a second look for lock, though.

Resilience: Now reduces the magnitude of mana draining effects by the same amount that it reduces critical strike damage. The Tooltip has been revised to reflect this.
Will severely nerf Mana Draining in Arena. Basically, at 70, every 39.4 Resilience will reduce your amount drained by 2%. With 'welfare epics' providing 300+ Resilience, you are looking at the reduction of upwards of 15% in mana drained.

A very dedicated team of Mana Drainers might still work, but I think the top teams would have moved on from this.

The Daily Quest limit has been increased to 25.
The thing with having so many alts is that I could barely finish the 10 quests on each character. However, for those who are more 'dedicated', and with the introduction of so many more daily quests, this makes perfect sense.

Improved Mend Pet now has a 25/50 chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.
??? Was there a point to only one point in IMP?

Turn Undead(Rank 3):This spell has been reworked and has been renamed to “Turn Evil”. It will now work on Demons in addition to Undead. Turn Evil is subject to diminishing returns, and lasts 10 seconds in PvP.
Useful for PvE at the high levels since there are so many demons in Outlands. In PvP, good against warlock pets. Not game-breakingly good, but better than nothing, I suppose...

Sap mechanic changed from “Incapacitate” to “Sap”. This will allow more humanoids that were previously immune to Sap to be vulnerable to Sap, but still immune to Gouge. Note that anything that removed Sap previously will still remove Sap after the change.
Nice buff for PvE Rogues... As if they needed any... But since I've a Rogue, goodie... :)

Ritual of Summoning can be used to summon players into instances if they meet the instance requirements.
Wow... This is BIG! Unfortunately, it'll bring back the Taxi days for locks... Just when I thought it's safe to remove the spell from my UI...

Diminishing returns on honor for kills is being eliminated.
Honor will now be instantly calculated, and available for player use.
More Honour available NOW = more welfare epics faster! Whoppee...

Alterac Valley
Captain Balinda Stonehearth Stonehearth can no longer be interrupted, silenced, or have her spells slowed. In addition, her water elemental cannot be banished, and does increased damage.
Vanndar Stormpike and Captain Balinda Stonehearth have had their health totals reduced to match the health totals of Drek’Thar and Captain Galvangar...
Warmasters/marshals in Alterac Valley now increase each other’s maximum health and damage by 25%. This is a stacking effect.
Horde players will now start the battle closer to Drek’Thar and Frostwolf Keep.
There is now a Join as Party option
So Balinda is no longer a pushover (or so it seems...). The map is now equalised to what the Ally have been crying for so it remains to be seen if the Horde can up their game to match.

To allow pre-mades, means PUGging AV for honour will be tough. But get a good group together could mean oodles of honour in short work!

A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers.
Depending on whether there is a CD for this, it'll help in getting rid of the huge stores of green gems you will accumulate via drops, mining & freebies from the Consortium.

Increased the skill up potential for most smelting recipes.
This will help in getting 60s to 300 Mining to transit to Outlands, which some reported having problems with. I might be ok, since my two miners will need to be mining overtime to meet the demands of Engineering, Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting...

Dungeon and Group Quest Experience: The amount of experience awarded for dungeon and 5-person group quests in Outland has been increased in almost all cases.
Not so much whooppee to faster leveling, but hopefully being able to hit 70 with even lesser quests completed. This leaves more quests for money grinding purposes...

Elemental creatures are no longer explicitly immune to poison and disease effects. Elementals with nature school immunities will still be immune to nature-based poisons, however.
Good for the Rogue & Hunter (Serpent Sting & Isis' Spit). Not huge, but nice.

Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped.
If the new badge loot doesn't inspire more Heroic farming, this should. Although, badges will also give you access to BT-level gems... Hmmm...

Loot dropped by Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker has been changed to Bind on Equip. In addition, the cash dropped by these bosses has been significantly increased.
This will probably just result in the higher-end guilds treating the two world bosses as money pinata.

Nether Vortex are no longer Bind on Pickup and can now be purchased from G’eras for 15 Badges of Justice!
This will now make available all those BT-level receipes to non-raiders. For my BS pally, if I stay ret, & grind Heroic Dungeons forever, Stormherald is a possibility...

The best part is that even if my druid or my pally is the only one who raids/run heroics, I can buy the Vortex and transfer it another toon.

Players can now only carry 80 Conjured Manna Biscuits at a time.
No more raiding the table!

Primal Nether are no longer Bind on Pickup!
This is nice only because it means even if only one of my toons go for heroics, the nether can be transferred to another who needs it for crafting purposes.

The Ratchet bank now has access to the Guild Vault.
Seeing the amount of time my toons spend in Barrens these days, this is a god-send. It was annoying that to get to the GB, I had to fly to TB or Org... :p

Splintertree Raiders will now respawn with Torek if Duriel Moonfire and her guards are killed while the Raiders are still alive.
Bah... They fixed this after I finished the quests... At least Tris will benefit...

Craft Away...

Last night was mainly about professions as Tris used up some of her store of herbs to level Alchemy and Elainith dropped her Skinning for Jewelcrafting. Shean also used up all the Wool gathered to get her Tailoring to Silk range.

For those who are looking for the cheapest/most efficient means of leveling their professions, this guide will get you there.

It also means that I've moved out from needing the low level mats, like Rough Stones, Copper Bars, and Linen Cloth. All Wool Cloth now will be dedicated to bandages, of which I'm not using up the linen variety fast enough... It also means poor Auk will be listing all the excess stuff in the AH for sale (including her huge backlog of Strange Dust). Well, except for Linen Cloth. Those don't really sell so might as well just vendor them.

The next goal is to get my Blacksmithing up to 150, for crafting a Golden Rod for my Enchanter. These rods are also decent sellers. I made 5 Silver Rods which sold out almost as quick as I could list them in the AH. Not too tough. Just need 150 Heavy Stone...

Wailing Caverns Loot

WoW is such a wonderful game. If you've always wanted to look like the purple teletubby, you can in WoW...

All you need is the Embrace of the Viper set, from Wailing Caverns.

As all the chicks are in the level range, we've been running them with other low level alts of the guild a lot... So much that we are all officially sick of the place. The result though is that N's shammy alt is sporting four pieces of the set (he's missing the belt) but I doubt we'll be farming for that one... But he really does look like the silly purple teletubby... All he needs is a purple hood....

Vis did get the Robes of the Moccasin which is a much nicer (especially in terms of aesthetics) than the ugly Apron.



Kell has also dropped Mining to take up Blacksmithing. Thankfully we had a rather large store of copper bars and rough stone as we managed to just about exhaust it. Of course, we're hoping the Shea will have a nice spot of luck in mining as she tries to get out of Ghostlands. :)

Isis the Snake

I had an epiphany while on the way to work...

Somehow, the name Isis popped into my head while trying to decide on a name for my snake. While the mythology behind Isis (one of the Egyptian Pantheon) doesn't really involve snakes, somehow the connection to them stuck... Maybe a bit of David Eddings' fiction at work here. Besides, Isis had the bit of hiss to it...

So, that's what I ended up naming my snake... Isis.

Name the Pet

Mathe picked up a snake while cruising through Wailing Caverns, a purple little bugger with red trimmings (sounds wrong, somehow...).

Problem is now, I need to name her...

I like names which are representative of the beast in question, eg, my snow leopard is Frostbite and every pet I've ever had with wings were called Zephyr. But, what do I call a purple snake?

She's sitting in the stable at the moment, since Frostbite is trying to catch up level-wise, but I hope to get her a name before her next foray... Having a pet with it's family type as it's name is just a tad bit wrong....

Mix & Match

Disclaimer: No... I don't have Frostmourne (although I wouldn't mind having one). Neither do any of my characters. But since the replica was just announced, and I'm talking about weapons, it sort of fits...

Almost everyone (well, except for Sheanne... She's not quite there yet at lvl 15) managed to hop onto a 'Guided Tour' of an instance over the weekend with everyone sporting some blue or another.

It's also when I hit a little snag in terms of item selection... Elainith now has three blue weapons at her disposal. Firstly, is Dawnblade, from a Ghostlands quest. Then, last night in SFK, she picked up Butcher's Slicer, and Meteor Shard.

First, I considered Meteor Shard in the main hand and Dawnblade in the off-hand, with Butcher's Slicer too slow in the OH, but Meteor Shard seems too fast for the main hand. Butcher's Slicer seems most suited for main hand usage (even if it means the loss of some of those sneaky stab in the back moves). Since their speed is similar but Meteor Shard has a higher DPS, that gave it the edge over Dawnblade for the off-hand. I'll work with this combo for awhile, I suppose.

But the nice thing is that I don't really need Wingblade so Elainith can give Wailing Caverns a miss.

One other thing concerns professions.

Elainith is currently a Skinning/Leatherworker who will drop the Skinning for Blacksmithing. Kellarn (the pally) is to drop Mining from the Mining/Engineering combo for Jewelcrafting.

However, the new patterns in the Shattered Suns Offensive previewed have some nice BOP blacksmithing plate. Also, it looks like Kell would be better able to use more of the BOP gear as compared to Elainith. There are also BOP trinkets that aid stealth which are more useful to the Rogue. So, I've decided that after dropping Skinning (soon), Elainith will take up Jewelcrafter. Similarly, Kell will take up Blacksmithing when she drops Mining.

Mage Speccing

Another problematic class for me to spec as I've never had a mage. Period.

I have no idea which are the useful talents, which rotation, except that from comments being bandied around, I know that Fire is the tree with the best DPS for leveling. So, I looked up a cookie-cutter spec and will be going with it for now.

So far, my mage has been spamming Fireballs with some Nova and sheeping against multiple mobs. Then, sit and eat after every three mobs or so. Honestly, it seems so much slower compared to my lock, who has minimum downtime. Maybe I'm doing something wrong... But, I'm guessing it'll get better.

Druid Speccing

One of the great travesty of justice that I've encountered in my re-roll is that Blood Elves cannot be Druids... That's just ridiculous. So, I could either roll a Night Elf (who looks a little like a Blood Elf), and die in balls of Ally hellfire, or stay Horde, and roll a Tauren ...

In the end, I rolled a Tauren, promised myself to stay in Bear/Cat/anything besides caster form, and pretend I'm a Blood Elf...

Anyway, for a pretty good guide on Feral Druids, I like Big Bear Butt. His write-up on specs can be found here. It's a bit abbreviated (I would have liked a discussion on why those particular talents were picked, but I guess most are fairly obvious) but it's still a good start.

So, using the base 40 Feral Talents and the 11 Resto Talents, which are the remaining 10 to choose?

Basically, the intention is mainly solo grinding, but to step in to tank for my friends when needed (our tanks have a tendency of respeccing out of tanking). So, that makes it a bit easy to pick.

Shredding Attacks

Shred is supposed to be part of the stun and shred DPS moves and Lacerate is a major part of tanking, so this talent can't be wrong.

Savage Fury

Nice boost to the staples of Cat DPS.

Intensity

While the mana re-gen does not come into play so much, the instant rage from Enrage can be a life saver. It is important to note that it is not always a good idea to pop Enrage, but this talent makes it a panic button for some instant rage to get out of some sticky spots while tanking.

There's not much of great interest in the Restoration tree with the last three points, so it's either Balance or Feral. Nature's Grasp is a decent PvP talent (& PvP is an option now for 'welfare epics'), but I feel the following will be more useful, as it comes into play in PvE as well.

Primal Tenacity

While it's not huge, every bit of defense against Stuns and Fears help! Damn the stun-lock Rogues & Fear-bombing Locks... (Wait... Tat's me on both counts...)

So, the spread looks like this. Nothing revoluntionary, but it should work.

Paladin Speccing

My Pally is fairly unique among the gals in the sense that I plan to level her one way, and play in a different manner at the end-game. While leveling, it's tough to imagine any other way besides Ret (Prot is viable, but only after level 45, with both Reckoning and Holy Shield). However, at the end-game, I'll respec to Holy, as healers are always in demand for our guild runs.

A good comprehensive Ret Pally guide which I found was this one on the forums. It's also got a nice gear guide which might come in useful later, except that I would probably respec to Holy for healing support.

In summary, the spec suggested by this guide is basically this, which is a good start for my customisation...

& frankly, I don't know what to change... The issue is that the three trees have such disparate usage and purpose that there's really little reason to pick up too many points in your off-tree. However, I will list down some things to consider along the way.

Blessing of Kings


Generally listed as the best Blessing for Ret because it results in more AP, more crit and a bigger mana pool. Even helps with the Seal of Blood with more health. But, it's in the 'wrong' tree. To get this talent requires the sacrifice of a point from the Ret tree, while still meeting the basic tier requirements.

One possibility if I stay Ret long after lvl 64 is to recover the point on Seal of Command. The Blood Elf's Seal of Blood is a superior DPS spell at that level. Even if I go to Holy, it's something to keep in mind when I re-spec back to Ret for leveling to 80 in WotLK.

(Interestingly, if I get all the Ret talents, before moving to the Prot tree, I'll get Blessing of Kings at level 65, after Seal of Blood is available. If I'm feeling rich, I might just re-spec then!)

Spiritual Focus or Guardian's Favour


If we take the path to Blessing of Kings, then Guardian's Favour is a must.

However, if we leave that, then it's an interesting choice. Guardian's Favour makes one of the bubbles up earlier. But 2/5 Spiritual Focus helps somewhat when casting heals under fire. We can always bubble to heal, but that's not always available when grinding. Both are fairly situational in this regards.

Ultimately, the bottomline is that if I spec to get Blessing of Kings, then it's Guardian's Favor. No BoK, then Spiritual Focus.

So, this is what I'm going to roll with... For now...

Rogue Speccing

This is actually the toughest class for me to spec...

Why?

I've never played a Rogue past level 20... I honestly have little ideas on how the class as a whole work (besides knowing that the class beat things to death from behind with little sharp sticks)...

I've taken a pretty cookie-cutter Combat Swords spec from Wowwiki's writeup on Rogue builds.

However, this spec is really a Level 70 raid/grouping spec and had skipped Deflection and Riposte as logically, Parrying isn't something a Level 70 Rogue in a group should be doing too much of.




But I'm not sure what I should be giving up to get this. One possibility is Improved Slice and Dice, but I've grown to really like it.



I find that Eviscerate doesn't get used too much against non-Elites; I get up to four combo points, and white damage will kill the mob before I get enough energy for Evis. At three combo points, Evis doesn't even finish it off. So, I've been using SnD as a finishing move, especially against multiple mobs, when the speed boost is just nice to help in the next mob.

Now, of course, this spec also means I need to find nice Swords for my Rogue... While Elainith will also be a Blacksmith, the BoP 1-Handed Swords are really tanking swords which makes them unsuitable. The Maces are nice, stats-wise, but look terrible... Somehow, dual-wielding maces just look odd... The PvP swords are the other option, but I'm still not too sure about that... While this is a problem for the future, it's something to keep in mind at level 30 when the Specialisation will be picked. While re-specs are possible, I just hate spending G on something, especially if the cost could have been avoided with more careful planning of talents, as compared to available weapons...

RNG Hates my Lock

Bloody Apron is ugly... Vis got it on the Shaman/Rogue dream-run of SFK...

The joke is that someone (Xig thinks it's Bact, but when Bact came online later, he claimed he just got home... Probably Nraven then) started a shaman alt and he had just hit lvl 14, the minimum required for SFK. We asked him along, but he claimed he was going to bed...

First, Rethilgore dropped Rugged Spaulders (I think he drops that all the time anyhow), which we promptly linked... Then we linked Silverlaine's Family Seal off the Baron... That probably depressed him enough to log off and miss Girdle of the Blindwatcher. Didn't help that Black Wolf Bracers and Wolfmaster's Cape dropped next. You'll figure that Arugal would at least be kind to my lock... Well, it was something she could use... Meteor Shard...

Bloody
Hell
........

Makes me wish Elainith had gone instead...

& I didn't even get the Large Soran'ruk Fragment for my quest... Xig was nice enough to try the run again, and had better luck with drops that time... At least for my lock... But I'm still stuck with the Bloody Apron...

Hunter Speccing

My hunter has also started rolling in the talent points so it's her turn.

I've never had anything besides a BM hunter (even when MM/SV were the rage), and I'm not going to start on anything else now. The other specs have their nice bits but really, BM is great for soloing which is what I'll likely to be doing for awhile, even after I hit 70, for my hunter, that is.

First, a good read on how to spec the BM tree can be found at BigRedKitty's.

However, I did make some changes to suit my playstyle and needs.

Bestial Swiftness

BRK selected this, but I gave it the miss. Frankly, I do question the need for this talent. While running between mobs, the pet will just keep pace with you. When running after mobs, your pet will quickly get Dash, which does put this talent to shame.

If I needed a filler, this might be under consideration. However, too many goodies in this tree to consider.

Ferocious Inspiration

Another of BRK's choices which I left out.

Don't get me wrong. This is a phenomenal talent in groups. The buff is a huge damage boost when this procs, which happens often for a BM hunter.

However, my hunter tends to be the 'farmer', with her dual gathering professions and her grouping sessions are likely to be limited. As such, she will get little out of this talent.

So, with four points to allocate, this is what I did instead.

Animal Handler

This is one which helps the leveling process and her farming career.

Pre-70, there is no Riding Crop, so this helps to boost along the movement while mounted. Also, with no other way to increase a pet's chance to hit, this is a nice little boost to reduce the misses and increase the pet's DPS, as well as tanking ability.

Catlike Reflexes

For farming, I need my pet to survive cos I don't want to melee... This helps.

Again, there isn't any other way to add to a Pet's dodge so every few percent helps. In the time when my hunter will need to melee, this helps as well...

If I do end up raiding/grouping often with my hunter, Catlike Reflexes will go and the points can go back to Ferocious Inspiration, with possibly another point coming from Animal Handler.

The next 20 points will go into MM, which is nicely covered by BRK here.

Gary Gygax (1938-2008)

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax dies
Agence France-Presse

CHICAGO - Gary Gygax, co-creator of the iconic Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game and considered the father of modern role-playing gaming, died in his home Tuesday, his wife said.

Gygax had been suffering from a number of health problems including an incurable heart aneurism, Gail Gygax said. He was 69.

First published in 1974, the Dungeons & Dragons game, in which players create magical and heroic characters and guide them through a series of adventures, soon became a cultural phenomenon.

There was no game board in this interactive, imaginative adventure: just paper, pen, the dungeon master's rule book and a set of multisided dice.

D&D spawned a booming industry and has inspired a generation of writers, video game designers and filmmakers.

Gygax's cult hero status among self-proclaimed geeks is so intense that one fan even named a strain of bacteria after him.

But he faced intense criticism in the 1980s when the game became a target for cultural conservatives who blamed it for causing teen suicides, murder and devil worship.

"That really pushed the sales up," Gygax joked in an interview with GameSpy.

"What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.

"I'm glad that most people have been able to separate the fantasy of the game from the reality of real life - games have nothing to do with real life. There are no real dragons, there's no real magic, no real magic swords, and certainly no real treasure... or I would have retired at home by now."

The popularity of Dungeons and Dragons faded in the 1990s as the video games boom began, but Gygax's influence in the gaming world continued through his columns and the more than 80 games, game products, and books he created.

A voracious reader with an unfettered imagination, Gygax worked intensely until his health deteriorated in 2004.

"He would be in a daze," Gail Gygax said. "Especially when he was creating a new world. One time he was painting a globe for two weeks."

She said that while he used computers to help speed up the designs for his games and the writing of his books, he never really got interested in video games.

"He liked the group environment where you were with people," she said.

"He played all kinds of games ... we would have a game of cribbage on our front porch every night in the summer."

Originally printed here

Before there were computer games, there was D&D. I recall the days where my friends and I would sit around a table and play this, armed with well-worn copies of rulebooks, our own sets of dice (which were variably blessed one way or another), and sheets of paper scribbled with stats, and maps.

While we created the adventure, Gary Gygax created the world we 'lived' in. It provided us with the first real form of escapism. In fact, looking at it, it was the epitome of the ultimate PvE MMORPG. There were no scripted encounters. There was no farming of content. Every time we sat down, we had Heroic encounters which required imagination, (and sometimes luck) to clear. There were no crib sheets, no uber raiding guild to work out the strategies, and in the end, what we did affected the world we were in. When we killed the Dragon, it stayed dead. We were heroes. (& of course, we had a great Dungeon Master).

While it was scorned as a pastime of geeks or even demonic or satanic worship, but more than anything, it taught us important life lessons as the need to work as a team to achieve goals. It taught us leadership qualities. It taught us that our actions have consequences that we needed to deal with and in the end, it really did teach us to be better people.

All this was possible through the imagination of Gary Gygax. I've read a number of his columns, and played some of his other games. While none had the lasting prowess of D&D, they were all fun and one of their kind. He has always professed to have no interest in video games, and I think that was a loss to this industry. Imagine if the D&D MMORPG had his guidance. I believe that would have been something that would have challenged the supremecy of WoW.

As one who still take intense pleasure from this genre, I mourn his passing. We had lost a true visionary.

Warlock Speccing

Since I'm starting over, I had entertained the thought of leveling as a Demo lock. It's something I've never done and the Felguard certainly looks like it's worth a trial...

Then, while leveling to level 10, I realise that unfortunately, I'm an Affliction lock to the core and the thought of having my pet be anything except a mana battery is just counter-intuitive to me... :p

So, do I go for the cookie-cutter 41/0/20 spec? Well, the thing is, the Affliction tree has quite a few lemons in them so the decision isn't hard. But I did make some changes based on my play-style and goals. BTW, anyone looking for a good guide on Warlock talents, nothing beats Maso's guide which can be found here on the Official Warlock's forum.

Suppression

I've considered this talent as 'not bad'. I mean, your DOTs need less spell hit at 70 letting you use gear with higher stats.

But the problem is that a large chunk of your damage are still going to come from Shadow Bolts, which do not benefit from Suppression. Which means, you still need to gather the +spell hit gear anyway. So, the points invested in this talent seems wasted. While leveling, spell hit is also less of a concern. It only becomes an issue while raiding, but again, you need the hit from gear for Shadow Bolt anyway.

Besides, with Improved Corruption in the same tier, it's not like you needed the five points as filler.

Improved Curse of Agony

While this talent is generally overlooked, I tend to like it. For one, it now scales with gear as the bonus is applied after your spell damage is added. Also, I tend to use Curse of Agony a lot more often in 5-mans and solo. Mobs don't stay alive long enough for Curse of Doom and the other curses are not as effective. To spare the points for this, I gave up Amplify Curse and Curse of Exhaustion. Decent talents, but not always as useful.

If I was raiding, it might make sense to change to Amplify Curse to boost Curse of Doom, but until then...

The rest of the talents are pretty cookie-cutterish, so I basically ended up with this.

Rez, please

Well, I've restarted playing and since I'm starting from scratch, I figured I might as well be pretty...

So, with the exception of my druid (Trislath), I've rolled a whole bunch of blood elves. :)

Old habits die hard, so, of course, we have a lock (Visalath). I need to get Frostbite back, so a hunter would be necessary (Matheria). While standing and bashing things from afar is nice, getting up and close and messy is sometimes fun. Since warriors are out of the question, a Rogue would have to take the slot (Elainith). Finally, we need someone to wear all the uber Plate drops, so Pally (Kellarn) rounds out the group.

Of course, my mates, Xig wanted to level a Blood Elf as well, so I rolled a Mage (Sheanne) to level with him and Ara.

So there you have it, my gals :)