The Burrow

Ok, my first toon was a dwarf, he remains my main and I see no reason to change unless Blizz do something really really nasty to Paladins making them completely unplayable / unviable for raiding.  If there’s one thing dwarves love more than gold it’s… well nothing actually.  Gold, possibly washed in beer is our reason for living.

So, just how much gold can one player make without too much effort?  Well, the answer as far as I’m concerned is 3,600 in a few days purely from levelling from 76 to 80 (Dragonblight, Stormpeaks & a bit of Icecrown), flogging the greens on the AH and vendoring anything which moves.  I’m expecting to be able to make more from either selling heavy borean leather or the blues I can make from the leather.

Gold falls from the sky in Northrend, levelling is where the easy money between dungeons is to be made for the DPS classes.  Join the queue, do some quests, join the dungeon, romp through, back to questing.

• Keep your packs as empty as possible
• Pick up every single grey possible, the gold adds up, if nothing else it covers your repair bill with zero collection risk
• Run Auctioneer / Enchantrix (or something similar) to compare the raw vendor cost of BoE with the estimated value of the shards.  Drop it on the AH for something which lies between the vendor and shard value.  Easy additional profit (if you have an enchanter then skip the middle man and go straight to the enchanting mats market).
• If your toon is maxed out in badge gear and you’re not worried about running dungeons later to build Justice points at Level 85 then convert to the mixed colour gems and sell uncut for quick gold before they’re effectively worthless.

All of the above are at the minimal effort, minimum risk end of gold making.  Higher profit margins are definitely possible by learning the exact nature of the AH, what’s selling, what isn’t, where the costs are and so on.  There are plenty of places to learn how to make huge amounts of gold from seriously playing the AH (also known as the raid boss which never resets).  If you’re just after a decent pile of gold to set yourself up for Cataclysm then simply paying attention to the junk in your bank, never leaving free gold lying around and assessing whether you need all those justice points on the alts which won’t be levelled to 85 for a year is well worth the effort.

So go forth, make gold, have no worries about wiping for hours and building a repair bill measured in hundreds of gold, chug flasks, eat the finest food Azeroth can offer.

Make gold the least of your worries in the game.

Runeforge Gossip set an interesting little thought going “And this has gotten me thinking about how we think of classes. We tend to see them mostly as what buffs they bring and their DPS. But often other things are important too, and even more so given that Blizzard wants us to pay more attention to things like CC, mana management, that sort of thing (no more simple stand and DPS fights). ”

The topic as set is to focus on what a particular class or classes can bring to the raid, which is an interesting thought but actually since 4.0.1 has a reduced scope due to the changes.  Paladins and Druids share a buff (Mark of the Wild and Blessing of Kings), Blood pact overwrites Fortitude, Hunters can bring heroism to the raid and so on.  So raid make up is going to be less difficult to achieve and I think less interesting.  One of the fun aspects of Team Tincan and Team Pirate is we bring what we want to play, not what is necessarily needed for buffs or balance.

What we are truly bringing is the player, and more importantly the brain and awareness.  For example it doesn’t matter whether a good player is running a dps DK or a Tankadin, they’ll know when to pop army of the dead, death grip in the caster or use Word of Glory as a health cooldown rather than blow it on threat generation as the situation demands.  The warlock who banishes without being instructed to, knows how to drop banish early to save the team from standing around for the extra 20 seconds waiting for it to clear automatically, knows how to use soul shatter, and more importantly when to use it.

Buffs and specific raid utilities brought by the individual classes are simply the toolbox that player is bringing with them, and like any good tradesman they will make the utmost of whatever tool they have to hand and not blame their limitations on the class they’re playing.

With any new encounter half the battle is how quickly the various major components of the team can dial in their part of the puzzle, can the healers quickly get a handle on the flow of the fight, know when they can back off for that critical 20 seconds to conserve mana, will the dps pay attention to the timers and quickly dodge the flubber.  Or will they stand like lemons cooing “ohh.. pretty green thing coming my way, will it be my friend”.  Ok the new priest ability can yank them out of the way, but will the priest have the situational awarenessto spot the problem as it’s happening and have their UI designed to allow a quick save move.

Will the tanks work together as a team, knowing which way to dance out of the fire, talking to each other over venumblespeak, ensuring that they both take an appropriate share of the trash to spread the healing load, thus making the life of the healers so much easier.

In short when designing a raid, are you aiming to bring classes for their designed abilities or players who can make the utmost of the tools they’re presented with by the game?

Well the primary thing is the red drake, there are a few achievements left to get that nailed.

Also there is a project I’m going to start “how much of the wrath 5-man content can Korenwolf solo?”.  I actually reckon that soloing is going to be easier than two or three manning it, with no threat issues holyroguepower isn’t needed for my threat moves and can be used purely for Word of Glory for self-heals (15-20k for three stacks).

I shall report back on how things go.

Beyond that, not sure, can I make another 29k gold in four weeks?

Four weeks today I shall (servers permitting) be sat at home levelling my tankadin with SWMBO back in our tag-team Paladin wrecking ball.

Roll on the arrival of our new firey overlord and I look forward to kicking his arse.

There have been many words written in the period prior to 4.0.1 and since on heirlooms, how they should have been bought before the grand restructuring of the badge currency system.  How many players are going to be dropping them onto their newly minted Gobrgen to get to 85.

I have to admit I’m sat here wondering “why“.

Let’s have a look at this, yes the end game is where the pretties are, the purples, the new raids and so on.  However this expansion also has a different element to both the previous ones.

The Burning Crusade brought us Outland and the two new starter zones, Wrath gave us cold feet, Northrend and the DK starting zone.  Both gave us a pile of new 5-man and raid content, Wrath let a lot more players into the raid content than ever before, this rocked.

Cataclysm is giving us a stack of new zones, dungeons and raids.  The biggie however is the reworking of the Vanilla world, the questlines have been tweaked, left alone or completely ripped up and replaced depending on where you are in the world at any given time.  So I have to ask myself, “why do I want to rush through this?“, to a large extent we’re getting a new game at level 1.

I admit I might slap on the heirlooms as I step through the portal into Outland and keep them on through Northrend, this is content which I can now do in my sleep.

As for the new levelling (80-85), at current tuning for a level 80 stepping into the new zones I’m reckoning on being at 85 halfway through Uldum.  For those of us rocking T10 gear it’s not going to be replaced until we’re well into Deepholm and for those in 264/277 heroic stuff then it’s entirely possible that it’ll be still be good well into Uldum and beyond.

So, enjoy the new quests, it won’t take long to get to 85 on your capped out toons.

Above all, speaking as a tank & healer, please remember where your CC is, the game is no longer about how much AoE you throw out.

As the team is aware numbers are currently an issue, this combined with the arrival of the big dragon in a few weeks means I’m going to re-assess our current plan.

I am going to make the last formal “let’s try and get a raid together” for the 28th of November.  This takes off any pressure as we hit levelling time and removes the whole “everyone is off partying / drinking / being social in the real world” until well into the new year when the credit card bills have landed and we’re all looking for something to do which involves very little spending of extra money.

From there the aim is to resume in 2011, I reckon the 30th of Jan is a decent date.  A certain person will have ten level 85’s by then and I’m sure there will be at least a few more in the guild.  The plan at that point will probably be the new dungeons, possibly heroics if we have enough 85’s and working on Ulduar.  Yes I want to see that dead on my Paladin.

If we have enough people online during the hiatus for the normal slot there’s nothing stopping us going to kick something in the shins.

So, Team Pirate, what say ye?!  Does this look like a plan.

Well it’s starting, the twilight cultists have moved into Stormwind and starting to kick up a fuss.  It’s a nice little quest chain, a decent pile of gold and we’ll all need more of that come Cata with the new flying skills (~4500g combined), levelling our skills up to the new cap and naturally buying new shinies for our mains to get onto the raiding treadmill.

So, we have approximately six weeks of this to go, I’m reckoning four weeks until 4.0.3 drops and the world changes at which point there will no doubt be further chains to set the post shattering scene prior to the launch itself.

In other news we have further proof that all the faction leaders are more epic than our flawed moron of a leader, Varian.  Varian is in Stormwind.  All the others are also in Stormwind, as well as being in their normal prime locations as well.

So, who’s up for hitting Ogrimmar and taking out all the leaders in a single attack?

Let there be fear, let there be ghosts, goblins, ghouls (nice people, they’ve a shop in the undercity), abominations (prejudice I call it).

Let them all run from the terror which is a tank in bunny ears.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq4Y7ztznKc]

Well, not so much crowd control as “player control”, I present the hat of the brain squid.

All hail the Brain Squid!