Photography, Games, Wolves, Dogs and other Canines
Nelle from Ravencrest has been in the Wotlk Alpha and is now in closed Beta. You wil have the chance to watch him play as Level 77 Night Elf Hunter in Wrath of the Lich King Beta or you might have the chance to watch Borked Guild Raiding in Sunwell Plateau, Black Temple and Mount Hyjal.
Here is the link to Nelle’s Broadcast.
Enjoy
I have added a recent M’uru Kill to my video section here. It is from an enhancement Shaman’s point of view, basically showing the fight versus the Humanoids in Phase 1 and then versus Entropius in Phase 2.
Again there is only ingame sounds and no fancy editing to give people a chance to experience the encounter as original as possible.
You can also check out the other videos, that show some Thrash Packs, Kalecgos, Brutallus and Eredar Twins.
Enjoy
Finally we have Kil’Jaeden down. The beginning of summer, soccer championship, wwi and not at last the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King thinned out our Guild roster a bit.
So we decided do raid with another Guild on Ravencrest that is in a similar situation and created a joint venture to get Kil’Jaeden down. It was a sunny saturday afternoon when we started to raid and I was prepared for some wiping and learning, but after numerous raiding days the past week, we got him down the second try. I was quite surprised as I hadn’t expected him to go down that fast.
To round up the great kill, Kruf from Kwak Herders got the legendary Bow Thori’Dal, the Stars‘ Fury.
Izriul from Laughing Skull made an interesting post on the official forum, how to kill Gold Sellers with the Shaman Fire Nova Totems (see the original post here). The basic idea is, that totems become neutral for a splitsecond, once their owner logs off just before they disappear. If you time the Fire Nova Explosion for the brief periods where the totem will be neutral it will deal damage to allied players.
Testing it I found out that it works best for me to type /camp, but not to hit enter until yata (yet another totem addon) shows 1.6 seconds remaining. Then I hit enter and will be logged out a few miliseconds later, leaving my neutral totems on the ground. Depending on your latency it should work roughly the same for you.
I put up a short demonstration video (5mb) for you:
With Patch 2.4.2 the crafter only blacksmith weapons like Dragonstrike, Wicked Edge of the Planes and Blazefury become dual wieldable. They will lose their current unique and mainhand only status.
While this might be nice for players pre-Hyjal, blacksmithing is still not an option for Rogues/Shamans who are beyond Tempest Keep. It is quite ironic that most professions got some high end crafter only items with the introduction of Sunwell Plateau with the exception of Weaponsmiths.
Blacksmithing
The most exciting innovation in blacksmithing will be the ability for blacksmith players to make epic quality items that only they can wield. A master swordsmith will be able to forge a special sword for him(or her)self, and a suit of epic armor awaits the master armorsmith. The smith will be able to upgrade these special items, so they will always be a solid item for the smith to wear or wield no matter what stage of the game he or she is in. To allow everyone to take advantage of this, blacksmith specialists will be allowed to change their focus in The Burning Crusade.
Excerpt taken from the official Homepage.
With the introduction of Hyjal and Black Temple 1 year ago these solid choices for a Player have become outdated by far. I’d like to see a new upgrades to these Weapons that include Hearts of Darkness and in the latest Version Sunmotes to craft. At least the dual wielding of crafter weapons is nice for beginner Shamans.
taken from MMO-Champion.com
Edit:
The procs do apparently stack and not refresh each other, including Dragon Spine Trophy. Found this picture here:
NOTE: The stacking haste buffs did not make it into Patch 2.4. Thus I am no longer sure if it is worth it to dual wield 2 outdated weapons over the badge fist weapons. The Dragonstrike was a nice alternative in TK, but with the introduction of Mount Hyjal, Black Temple and especially Sunwell Plateau they have been way outdated.
Generally speaking there are plenty of ways to earn cash, you just have to find the one that fits you best. I will try to show you a couple of ways that worked for me and some advice that I learnt the hard way.
The most obvoius way is all about killing mobs and hope for good drops. Personally I prefer to grind mobs that serve multiple purposes – like giving reputation, dropping special items in addition to normal drops, etc. For example the mobs on the Blades Edge Plateau's Etherum Prison Keys (if you completed the quest), Netherweave Cloth, Greens, Blues, Epics, depleted Items, Motes of Mana, Apexis Crystals, … there are plenty of mobs and fast to kill.
Of course there is also grinding by gathering. Just check AH, which resources are low Mountain Silversage, Terocone, Netherbloom, Nightmare Vine, Adamantite Ore usually sell very high on my realm. Much higher than the Potions and Elixirs you can make of it.
The best farming time seems to be late night and early morning. If someone else is on your route you can easily swap the direction of your route, change the zone or resource you are gathering.
The more professions you have access to via alternate characters or friends the more you can make of the drops you find. For example I have swift flying on a gathering char to get to minerals and herbs as fast as I can. The characters that crawl through instances have enchanting. The Jewelcrafter (prospecting), Tailor, Blacksmith, Engineer, Alchemist do not need to be high level characters since you need only level 50 to get 300+ max skill in these profession and it is enough to max the profit you can do with these professions.
With the exemption of herbs raw materials usually sell for less than the products you can craft from them. Just look at a stack of Runecloth. It sells on this Realm for 2.5g/20, but if you create Runecloth Belts and disenchant them you get 2-5 Dream Dust (3-7g), 1-2 (6.75-13.50) Lesser Eternal Essence or 1 Small Brilliant Shard (9.95g).
Awesome profit comes for example from:
Prospecting Ores is more gambling than a secure way to gain cash. Personally I like the excitement that comes with it and you can have great luck. Here is a nice list of prospecting percentages and which ores to expect.
So how do we gain the most out of the items we grinded? I suggest that you have a basic cache of money that will finance your daily expenses. This way you do not rely on the cash you get from the auctions and do not have to undercut the lowest price and you will gain a steady income after a while.
Even if you are not the cheapest seller, you will still sell plenty of auctions, after the cheaper ones are out, or when you manage to list your auctioned items at the first pages. Even after 2.3 it is still possible to gain money this way, since not all players sort the auctions after prize. There are stilll a few tricks. It seems that the auctions are sorted by the min bid price and not the buy out. If you sell your item for 1.99 bid and 2.50 buy out and someone else for 2.00 and 2.25 buy out your auctions will be listed as cheaper and most players use the buyout function anyhow.
On my Realm you can get Arcane Dust for example as low as 1g per unit and I still manage to sell mine for 2.75 bid 2.85 buy out. do that by listing masses of auctions. Since I can't compete with single sales or with whole stacks I specialized on stacks of 4 Arcane Dusts. Most people do not need 20 Arcane Dusts so they rather buy 4 for 10g than 20 for 20g. You will be listed after the single stacks but in front of the big cheap stacks.
From my experience Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays seem to be the best days and 17:00-20:00 and 23:00-0:30 the best sale times. These are the time frames where your items should be at the first pageof the auction house. If you use this smart you can sell the same items as other sellers with a significantly higher price. I also noticed that you should always include a buyout with a little higher price, this will encourage last minute buy out to "save" some money.
Basically you buy out all products below a certain price and resale them for more. If you decide to try that you have to choose the procduct careful. There should not be too many auctions of the item, it should not be too easy to get and the deposit price should be low. If you try to dominate a large market you will need a lot of money as reserve.
It also helps to have a few friends at your side while trying this. Many players look at the auction before they place their own items and many different characters with the same high prices will raise the overall prices.
For example I tried to dominate the market with Arcane Dusts as it seemed to be a stable market and even if I'd have failed I would not have lost a lot of gold, due to stable prices. I had 9500g when I started to buy all Arcane Dusts that were cheaper than 2.75g each and put it mine up for for 2.75/2.85. People started to dump all their reserves on ah only slightly cheaper than mine. I spent around 8k gold before the first of my auctions started to sell, this nearly killed me. The income was much lower than the amount of dusts that were dumped on the market. But with the Tipps I gave above I was able to make quite some profits there.
Which Item sare good for sale? It is really hard to generalize this for all realms, but from my experience you gain a fortune with mats that others need to level their professions. For Enchanting for Example there is no way around Vision Dust, Dream Dust, Illusion Dust, Eternal Essence. Usually You do not sell a lot of these, especially if You sell them expensive. But players that level up their professions need those in large masses and are willing to pay a steep price.
Auctioneer is an easy to use tool to put up large masses of auctions. It saves the prices you are using for your auctions, stack sizes and shows an overview of competition ont he items you are trying to sell.
Auctioneer includes Btm-scan, a tool that shows auctions which promise a certain amount of profit. The longer you use the tool, the better results it will provide.
Large amount of auctions mean a large amount of mails. A great help dealing with masses of mails is Bulkmail2.
Possessions is an addon, that lists items in inventory, bank and mail for all characters on the account.
I will be updating this post regularly, feel free to ask questions.
Slant (NE Rogue, Ravencrest) is now Level 68, Slanty (Human Rogue, Ravencrest) 70, Pathfinder (NE Druid, Ravencrest) 70, Katya (NE Hunter, Ravencrest) 70 and Myrddin (Draenei Shaman Ravencrest) 70. Guess I am quite a nolife geek atm.
With the Introduction of Patch 2.1 I thought I'd play Slanty a bit more but the Druid love just draws me to playing the Druid all the time. Its just the stupid Badge of Tenacity that is so annyoing to grind. I have been grinding for 7 days in Blades edge now, killed at least 12k Mobs, most likely up to 15k, in the process – but the Badge did not drop, yet.
Its most likely the best Druid Tanking Trinket – so every Druid wants it. It is a drop limited to the Mobs in the 2 Blades Edge Plateau's and every mob has a chance to drop it. However the dropchance is very very very very low. As mentioned above I am on my 7th day of grinding and I really need a break.
A friend found his badge on the 5th kill but I find it kind of hard to be happy for him and think its kind of unfair that a 0.01 drop chance is the only way to get this item. It almost feels like Lineage II, where you had to had to grind thousands of mobs for items. I just wish Blizzard would wake up and introduce a better way to distribute this item.
This posting has been directly copied form the original Blizzard Forum here.
Posted by Ommra:
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about the same subjects – subjects that have been addressed in an upcoming patch – so I wanted to let you guys know where things stood.
The Rogue Situation
We’ve done a tuning pass of many of our dungeons/bosses/encounters to ensure that nothing overly punishing occurs to “melee DPS’ that would lead people to favor ranged DPS over Rogues/DPS Warriors etc.
Also, we’ve changed the NPC cleave mechanic so that it’s now a frontal cone ability rather than a 360 degree chain attack. Sweeping Strikes has been removed from all Burning Crusade NPC’s.
We’re also reducing the Glancing Blow damage penalty for creatures 1-3 levels higher than the player. This will have a significant effect on melee DPS as it relates to endgame melee dps. More details on this at a later time.End Game Itemisation
As we’ve stated before, we made a lot of improvements to endgame gear progression. To put it in perspective, take a look at this Warrior Tanking Breastplate from before and after.
Destroyer Chestguard – Currently
+24 Strength
+22 Agility
+39 Stamina
Blue Socket
Yellow Socket
Red Socket
Socket Bonus +6 Stamina
Equip: Increases Defense Rating by 23
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 16
Equip: Improves hit rating by 18Destroyer Chestguard – Patch 2.1.0
+21 Strength
+22 Agility
+51 Stamina
Blue Socket
Yellow Socket
Red Socket
Socket Bonus +6 Stamina
Equip: Increases Defense Rating by 23
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 20
Equip: Improved hit rating by 20
”Trash” Concerns
Equally interesting yet non-epic-dropping non-bosses (or “Trash” as he community likes to call it) has been of concern lately on these forums. In all of our 25 person raid zones we’ve made a number of bug fixes and tuning adjustments. For example, the trash should be significantly easier to clear in most cases – and take less time. Also, we’ve lengthened the time between respawn on a lot of the trash. Yes, trash will respawn in some cases. It’s a pacing mechanic and one that works well when tuned correctly. For example, the trash before the Prophet Skeram or the trash before Attumen the Huntsmen or the Maiden of Virtue works well. You get a couple of tries on the boss, and if you fail, you spend a short time re-clearing. Yes, there are cases of the trash respawning too fast or the trash being too difficult or too lengthy. Those are the cases we hope to fix. We’ve also fixed some bugs that were allowing the trash to respawn after the boss for a certain area was dead.
Consumables
We’re making substantial changes to the way certain consumables work . In particular, Flasks and Elixirs are going to undergo major changes. More information will be available later on. We want Flasks and Elixirs to be a part of the game. We want alchemy to be a cool, needed profession. But we want to remove the tedium and cost from the massive consumable farming that’s going on for endgame raiding. We’ll provide more information soon – but for now, expect big changes to Flasks and Elixirs.
Boss Tuning
We’re looking at the boss tuning from dungeons to heroics to raids. Your feedback is being listened to.
To Summarise
We’re making big improvements to the game. Whenever possible, we hotfix changes to get them to you as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, there are many changes that require a patch and cannot be hotfixed. Many of these changes are coming in Patch 2.1.0. The patch will be on PTR’s in the upcoming weeks. You’ll be able to see them there and try them out for yourselves. You’ll also be able to test Black Temple. We’re also looking into ways of making Hyjal accessible on the PTR as well to get more testing on that zone.
I can assure you that we’re aware of the issues you guys are discussing on the boards and we’re listening closely. We’re also dedicated fans of the game ourselves. We play it every day =D We will affect change as quickly as we can. Patch 2.1.0 will be on the PTR soon enough and you’ll all have the opportunity to comment and make suggestions on the changes.
As You may have noticed I removed the Borked Links from the Website. I had not been playing the last weeks of WoW 1.0 and with the Start of TBC the connection was just not the same it was before. When I abandonded my old Rogue – to reroll Human – I thought it would change once I turn 70, but it did not.
Then I noticed that it is much easier to find a group as a druid and brought him to 70 and thought it would change once I am well geared for heroics, etc but most of the time it felt like playing solo.
I am quite sure I might regret this step at some point, but I made this decidion and will stick to it. Apart from having a lot of skilled players there are many friendly players! My best wishes to Borked and their future raiding, it has been a great time in one of the best guilds of the world.
The last week I leveled my Druid to Level 70. It is quite hard to get into instances with the Rogue and everybody was looking for a Healer or Tank it seemed like a very good idea to get the Druid to 70. Within the hour of reaching 70 the new Path Notes were published. I am not a good healer, just a decent tank and with the patch Blizzard takes away a lot of threat generation for us. Thus I am not happy at all with the Patch. Also the Rogue changes – there are none.
Test Patch Notes Disclaimer: The test realm patch notes only apply to features that exist on the public test realms. We provide these patch notes to players who wish to know what features and changes exist in the test environment in order to more effectively test these features.
To learn more about the Public Test Realm, visit our Test Realm Page.
World of Warcraft PTR Patch 2.0.10
The latest patch notes can always be found at . http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html