I had an idea last week that perhaps the best way to approach challenge dungeon gearsets would be to stay as close to ilvl 463 as possible. My thinking was based on the way hit/expertise don't scale down, so your rating mix outside of those two will trend towards an even mix. Since some rating is better than another one this has to be bad. But is this actually true? I decided to look up some numbers and see...
The first thing I noticed is even at the same ilvl a piece of gear can have a different rating ratio. The bigger the cap between the two ratings, the smaller the total. I'm sure there's some precise formula but that's something to look up later on. It looks like the biggest split on ilvl 463 gear is 60-40 so I'm going to make some estimates using that split even though it isn't really available in every slot. There's also complications with sockets that I'm going to ignore for now.
All told, assuming primary stat trinkets, you'll have 11116 rating across all your gear with ilvl 463 gear. You need 2550 expertise rating and 2550 hit rating to hit the respective caps. This leaves 6016 rating left, which is actually less than 60% of 11116. So, assuming the gear existed, you could quite feasibly only run with hit, expertise, and your best rating.
Now, assume you have really high ilvl gear. Really, really high level. So you actually have a rating pool of 20000. You still need the same 5100 rating for hit/expertise which leaves 14900 rating to go into other stats. Because the most you can get on any single piece is 60% you're looking at getting at most 12000 of it, leaving 2900 to go into a different rating. Then your gear gets scaled down to having 11116 rating. This means you get only 4845 of your best rating while getting stuck with 1171 of your second best rating. So having significantly higher ilvl gear actually makes you worse!
Showing posts with label Mists of Pandaria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mists of Pandaria. Show all posts
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Pandaren Ambassador Progress
I'm 22 days into my presumed 41 day grind to Pandaren Ambassador. I must say, I'm getting pretty tired with doing dailies. I think it might be best for my sanity to cut back on some of the less needed dailies for a bit... But to do that I need to work out actual ETAs at this point. Hopefully using new information about rep per day since some of the numbers from before seemed a bit off. (Revered with golden lotus took 2 weeks instead of 6 days, for example.)
Lorewalkers - DONE
Tushui - DONE
Tillers - DONE
Cloud Serpent - DONE
Anglers - Need 4688 more rep, get ~1650 per day, exalted in 3 days
Golden Lotus - Need 6168 more rep, get ~1760 per day, exalted in 4 days
Klaxxi - Need 6217 more rep, get ~1700 per day, exalted in 4 days
August Celestials - Need 27975 more rep, and I honestly still don't know how this works. Some days I have 1 quest hub to do. Some I have 2. With 1 hub I get 1210 rep per day which is exalted in 24 days. Possibly half that if I keep getting 2 hubs per day.
Shado-Pan - Need 24642 more rep, 1430 more from quests, 825 per day, exalted in 29 days
Shado-Pan looks to be the only rep that matters. I can take 3 weeks off of most of them (maybe just do them on the weekend or something) and still get done before Shado-Pan. Also, it's going to take more than 41 days! Losing 8 days off of golden lotus due to whatever changed there is a killer. I still have a month to go... Maybe I should just abort entirely.
Lorewalkers - DONE
Tushui - DONE
Tillers - DONE
Cloud Serpent - DONE
Anglers - Need 4688 more rep, get ~1650 per day, exalted in 3 days
Golden Lotus - Need 6168 more rep, get ~1760 per day, exalted in 4 days
Klaxxi - Need 6217 more rep, get ~1700 per day, exalted in 4 days
August Celestials - Need 27975 more rep, and I honestly still don't know how this works. Some days I have 1 quest hub to do. Some I have 2. With 1 hub I get 1210 rep per day which is exalted in 24 days. Possibly half that if I keep getting 2 hubs per day.
Shado-Pan - Need 24642 more rep, 1430 more from quests, 825 per day, exalted in 29 days
Shado-Pan looks to be the only rep that matters. I can take 3 weeks off of most of them (maybe just do them on the weekend or something) and still get done before Shado-Pan. Also, it's going to take more than 41 days! Losing 8 days off of golden lotus due to whatever changed there is a killer. I still have a month to go... Maybe I should just abort entirely.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Revisiting Darkmoon Cards
Blizzard went out and substantially buffed the tanking Darkmoon trinket (all the other trinkets had a passive primary stat and a secondary proc/on use effect) by giving it a huge amount of stamina to go with the underwhelming on use. I really like stamina for tanking so this change shifts the tanking trinket from 'garbage' to 'want to have'. On top of that I now suspect the DPS trinket is actually going to be best in slot for challenge modes. There are a couple other strength trinkets I could use but none of them have strength in the proc/on use slot. And most of them are raid drops anyway...
Put both of those together and it feels like it has to be worth making Darkmoon cards for personal use. I can sell the extras and hopefully fill in the gaps by buying missing cards. They were also supposed to bring in an ink trader on Tuesday to make this a lot cheaper but they couldn't get it done. This is a shame because I have a stupid amount of normal ink and would love to trade it in at 10-to-1 rates. But the fact that they've said it will happen 'soon' means I don't actually have to worry about the price of ink staying astronomical and it can make financial sense to make cards now since I can replenish my ink in the future. I can also revise my 'cost per ink' calculations by assuming I trade all the normal ink in for super ink...
Most herbs - 1.048 good ink
Fool's Cap - 1.69 good ink
This means fool's cap is worth 61% more than the other herbs. I'd been mentally valuing it at double which means I need to revise my buy points a little bit. Assuming I pay 200G per stack of fool's cap that means I'm paying 118G per ink. It also means I should be paying up to 124G for the other herbs. I've only been buying at sub 100G prices, so I have a lot more herbs I can buy. Or, maybe, I should scale back my fool's cap purchases...
Another thing to make note of is I forced a 600G floor on my shoulder enchant prices and they are still selling every now and then. Ink is listed on the AH for 700G each (still way too high but I haven't found any buyers so I don't know that it matters). Assuming I can keep trickling out enchants at 600G then I can set a break even value for ink of 200G. This would let me pay up to 338G for fool's cap and 210G for other herbs. I'm not happy with breaking even (I would like a little profit) but I don't need to do much better than breaking even while making trinkets for myself to be happy. Making a fortune while gearing up would be preferred, of course, and it's what I'm used to with inscription, but maybe that's a thing of the past...
Setting an ink value between current values and the 200G cap set above... How much is a card actually worth? Let's go with 140G as the value of ink and 3K as the value of a SoW... That makes an individual card worth 4400G. Tigers and Oxen cards are both above that right now. So I should definitely make my own...
Time to get milling herbs I guess!
Put both of those together and it feels like it has to be worth making Darkmoon cards for personal use. I can sell the extras and hopefully fill in the gaps by buying missing cards. They were also supposed to bring in an ink trader on Tuesday to make this a lot cheaper but they couldn't get it done. This is a shame because I have a stupid amount of normal ink and would love to trade it in at 10-to-1 rates. But the fact that they've said it will happen 'soon' means I don't actually have to worry about the price of ink staying astronomical and it can make financial sense to make cards now since I can replenish my ink in the future. I can also revise my 'cost per ink' calculations by assuming I trade all the normal ink in for super ink...
Most herbs - 1.048 good ink
Fool's Cap - 1.69 good ink
This means fool's cap is worth 61% more than the other herbs. I'd been mentally valuing it at double which means I need to revise my buy points a little bit. Assuming I pay 200G per stack of fool's cap that means I'm paying 118G per ink. It also means I should be paying up to 124G for the other herbs. I've only been buying at sub 100G prices, so I have a lot more herbs I can buy. Or, maybe, I should scale back my fool's cap purchases...
Another thing to make note of is I forced a 600G floor on my shoulder enchant prices and they are still selling every now and then. Ink is listed on the AH for 700G each (still way too high but I haven't found any buyers so I don't know that it matters). Assuming I can keep trickling out enchants at 600G then I can set a break even value for ink of 200G. This would let me pay up to 338G for fool's cap and 210G for other herbs. I'm not happy with breaking even (I would like a little profit) but I don't need to do much better than breaking even while making trinkets for myself to be happy. Making a fortune while gearing up would be preferred, of course, and it's what I'm used to with inscription, but maybe that's a thing of the past...
Setting an ink value between current values and the 200G cap set above... How much is a card actually worth? Let's go with 140G as the value of ink and 3K as the value of a SoW... That makes an individual card worth 4400G. Tigers and Oxen cards are both above that right now. So I should definitely make my own...
Time to get milling herbs I guess!
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Death Knight Challenge Gear Targets
We gave another shot at a challenge dungeon on Tuesday and just missed the silver time in two tries. My gear, sadly, hadn't gotten any better in the 4 days between tries. Part of that is my focus on rep grinds for the realm first. Part of that is playing/watching some League of Legends recently. Part of that is not leveling engineering yet because I'm irrationally waiting for my ore to bounce back from Robb's mailbox. And part of that is not having precise goals to know what I need to be running. I also want a tanking set since it's entirely plausible that a DK tank with a discipline priest is as nutty now as it was back in Wrath (with full absorbs failing to knock off bone shield charges). I also want to at least consider putting together a second DPS set for trash. Dual-wield frost is the best for AE situations while 2-hander frost is the best for single target situations. Both of those come up in challenge modes and it would be nice to be able to swap between them. Initially I thought maybe that would be as easy as collecting two more weapons but it turns out they have different stat weights that really make the difference. At any rate... What do I want, and where is it found?
2-handed frost - The secondary stat of choice here is haste rating. More auto-attacks and more rune regeneration for more obliterates. The auto-attacks have a chance of making the next obliterate be a guaranteed crit which devalues crit rating. Needs enough hit and expertise to be capped like any other gearset. Mastery is actually worse than crit rating here (frost mastery increases frost damage done and obliterate is physical damage) which is the real differentiator between this gearset and other ones. Mastery tends to be pretty good for most people... Not here!
Tanking - Mastery, mastery, mastery. The tank set also wants to cap hit and expertise to 7.5% each. Death strike can't be parried so I don't need even more expertise than that. Crit is really, really bad. They changed diminishing returns again which makes dodge pretty smelly. Parry is fine. Haste is looked down on by most people. I remember crunching some numbers last expansion and finding haste was sub-par but not awful. It's no crit rating! I suspect for challenge modes where damage done is quite relevant that it'll be fine to have.
Dual-wield frost - Mastery, mastery, mastery. This set-up is all about hitting howling blast as often as possible. Howling blast does a pretty substantial amount of AE damage, and it's all frost. This makes the frost mastery very good. I believe dual-wielding increases the 'auto-crit' procs for obliterate/frost strike which again suppresses the value of crit. Haste is very good since the faster your runes refresh the more times you get to hit the howling blast button. Hit and expertise to cap is again a given, with a focus afterwards on mastery and then haste. Throw crit away!
The first thing I'm realizing here is it's possible I'd want the same gear for tanking as for dual-wielding. Certainly if I'm willing to ignore parry and pick up haste as my stat after mastery, anyway. I worry a bit about enchants but it feels like there might be some overlap allowing only twoish gear-sets instead of a full three?
Another thing to keep in mind is every slot has to be at least 463 but I don't actually need to go any higher. Gear is scaled down on a piece by piece basis (with some fudging on top to keep hit/expertise even) so it's fine to go higher if it'll get me the right stat mix but not mandatory. Unfortunately this means I may well want another set of gear as my 'farming/pug raiding' set. Getting worse secondary stats is fine if I'm picking up an extra 40 ilvls worth of strength! And by another set of gear I may well mean two more sets of gear, since I probably want a tanking set and a DPS set for raiding, even if raiding is only done in the LFR tool?
At any rate, here are the pieces, by slot, without crit/dodge.
Helm
Helm of Rising Flame - tank - heroic SM
Reinforced Retinal Helmet - any - engineering
Malevolent Gladiator's Dreadplate Helm - tank/dual-wield - PvP
Helmet of the Lost Catacomb - tank/dual-wield - LFR
Shoulders
Malevolent Gladiator's Dreadplate Shoulders - 2-hander - PvP
Pauldrons of the Lost Catacomb - 2-hander - LFR
Shoulderguards of the Lost Catacomb - tank - LFR
Chest
Hateshatter Breastplate - tank/dual-wield - heroic Shado-Pan
Durable Plate of the Golden Lotus - tank - quest reward
Wrist
Bonded Soul Bracers - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Armplates of Alacrity - dual-wield - PvP/Sha of Anger
Hands
Hive Protector's Gauntlets - tank/dual-wield - heroic GSS
Starcrusher Gauntlets - 2-hander - LFR
Waist
Malevolent Gladiator's Girdle of Accuracy - 2-hander - PvP/Sha of Anger
Waistplate of Overwhelming Assault - dual-wield - LFR
Legs
Legplates of Durable Dreams - 2-hander - BoE world drop
Jang-xi's Devastating Legplates - 2-hander - LFR
Greaves of the Lost Catacomb - tank/dual-wield - LFR/Sha of Anger
Legguards of the Unscathed - dual-wield - VP
Feet
Spike-Soled Stompers - dual-wield - heroic Shado-Pan
Angerforged Stompers - dual-wield - quest from Sha of Anger
Impaling Treads - 2-hander - LFR
Neck
Whirling Dervish Choker - dual-wield - heroic Mogu'shan
Buc-Zakai Memento - dual-wield - BoE world drop
Helios, Durand's Soul of Purity - 2-hander - heroic SM
Soulgrasp Choker - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Choker of Accuracy - 2-hander - PvP/Sha of Anger
Bloodseeker's Solitaire - dual-wield - VP
Mushan Rider's Collar - dual-wield - Galleon
Back
Drape of the Screeching Swarm - 2-hander - heroic GSS
Hisek's Chrysanthemum Cloak - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Cloak of Prowess - tank/dual-wield - PvP/Sha of Anger
Ring
Firefinger Ring - dual-wield - heroic SM
Jan-Ho's Unwavering Seal - dual-wield - BoE world drop
Ring of the Bladed Tempest - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Signet of Accuracy - tank/dual-wield - PvP/Sha of Anger
Seal of the Bloodseeker - 2-hander - quest @ exalted Klaxxi
2-handed weapon
Lightbreaker Greatsword - tanking - heroic SM
Amber Flammbard of Klaxxi'vess - mediocre, but best option for 2-hander? - exalted Klaxxi vendor
1-handed weapon
Ook's Hozen Slicer - dual-wield - heroic brewery
Inelava, Spirit of Inebriation - dual-wield - heroic brewery
Kilrak, Jaws of Terror - dual-wield - LFR
Scimitar of Seven Stars - dual-wield - LFR
trinket
Carbonic Carbuncle - 2-hander, dual-wield - heroic brewery
Iron Protector Talisman - tanking - heroic Mogu'shan
Lessons of the Darkmaster - all? - heroic Scholo
Jade Charioteer Figurine - 2-hander, dual-wield - LFR
Relic of Niuzao - tanking - Darkmoon cards
Relic of Xuen - 2-hander, dual-wield - Darkmoon cards
Lei Shin's Final Orders - 2-hander, dual-wield - LFR
Jade Warlord Figurine - tanking - LFR
Darkmist Vortex - 2-hander, dual-wield - LFR
Lao-Chin's Liquid Courage - tanking - VP
Iron Belly Wok - 2-hander, dual-wield - VP
2-handed frost - The secondary stat of choice here is haste rating. More auto-attacks and more rune regeneration for more obliterates. The auto-attacks have a chance of making the next obliterate be a guaranteed crit which devalues crit rating. Needs enough hit and expertise to be capped like any other gearset. Mastery is actually worse than crit rating here (frost mastery increases frost damage done and obliterate is physical damage) which is the real differentiator between this gearset and other ones. Mastery tends to be pretty good for most people... Not here!
Tanking - Mastery, mastery, mastery. The tank set also wants to cap hit and expertise to 7.5% each. Death strike can't be parried so I don't need even more expertise than that. Crit is really, really bad. They changed diminishing returns again which makes dodge pretty smelly. Parry is fine. Haste is looked down on by most people. I remember crunching some numbers last expansion and finding haste was sub-par but not awful. It's no crit rating! I suspect for challenge modes where damage done is quite relevant that it'll be fine to have.
Dual-wield frost - Mastery, mastery, mastery. This set-up is all about hitting howling blast as often as possible. Howling blast does a pretty substantial amount of AE damage, and it's all frost. This makes the frost mastery very good. I believe dual-wielding increases the 'auto-crit' procs for obliterate/frost strike which again suppresses the value of crit. Haste is very good since the faster your runes refresh the more times you get to hit the howling blast button. Hit and expertise to cap is again a given, with a focus afterwards on mastery and then haste. Throw crit away!
The first thing I'm realizing here is it's possible I'd want the same gear for tanking as for dual-wielding. Certainly if I'm willing to ignore parry and pick up haste as my stat after mastery, anyway. I worry a bit about enchants but it feels like there might be some overlap allowing only twoish gear-sets instead of a full three?
Another thing to keep in mind is every slot has to be at least 463 but I don't actually need to go any higher. Gear is scaled down on a piece by piece basis (with some fudging on top to keep hit/expertise even) so it's fine to go higher if it'll get me the right stat mix but not mandatory. Unfortunately this means I may well want another set of gear as my 'farming/pug raiding' set. Getting worse secondary stats is fine if I'm picking up an extra 40 ilvls worth of strength! And by another set of gear I may well mean two more sets of gear, since I probably want a tanking set and a DPS set for raiding, even if raiding is only done in the LFR tool?
At any rate, here are the pieces, by slot, without crit/dodge.
Helm
Helm of Rising Flame - tank - heroic SM
Reinforced Retinal Helmet - any - engineering
Malevolent Gladiator's Dreadplate Helm - tank/dual-wield - PvP
Helmet of the Lost Catacomb - tank/dual-wield - LFR
Shoulders
Malevolent Gladiator's Dreadplate Shoulders - 2-hander - PvP
Pauldrons of the Lost Catacomb - 2-hander - LFR
Shoulderguards of the Lost Catacomb - tank - LFR
Chest
Hateshatter Breastplate - tank/dual-wield - heroic Shado-Pan
Durable Plate of the Golden Lotus - tank - quest reward
Wrist
Bonded Soul Bracers - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Armplates of Alacrity - dual-wield - PvP/Sha of Anger
Hands
Hive Protector's Gauntlets - tank/dual-wield - heroic GSS
Starcrusher Gauntlets - 2-hander - LFR
Waist
Malevolent Gladiator's Girdle of Accuracy - 2-hander - PvP/Sha of Anger
Waistplate of Overwhelming Assault - dual-wield - LFR
Legs
Legplates of Durable Dreams - 2-hander - BoE world drop
Jang-xi's Devastating Legplates - 2-hander - LFR
Greaves of the Lost Catacomb - tank/dual-wield - LFR/Sha of Anger
Legguards of the Unscathed - dual-wield - VP
Feet
Spike-Soled Stompers - dual-wield - heroic Shado-Pan
Angerforged Stompers - dual-wield - quest from Sha of Anger
Impaling Treads - 2-hander - LFR
Neck
Whirling Dervish Choker - dual-wield - heroic Mogu'shan
Buc-Zakai Memento - dual-wield - BoE world drop
Helios, Durand's Soul of Purity - 2-hander - heroic SM
Soulgrasp Choker - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Choker of Accuracy - 2-hander - PvP/Sha of Anger
Bloodseeker's Solitaire - dual-wield - VP
Mushan Rider's Collar - dual-wield - Galleon
Back
Drape of the Screeching Swarm - 2-hander - heroic GSS
Hisek's Chrysanthemum Cloak - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Cloak of Prowess - tank/dual-wield - PvP/Sha of Anger
Ring
Firefinger Ring - dual-wield - heroic SM
Jan-Ho's Unwavering Seal - dual-wield - BoE world drop
Ring of the Bladed Tempest - 2-hander - LFR
Malevolent Gladiator's Signet of Accuracy - tank/dual-wield - PvP/Sha of Anger
Seal of the Bloodseeker - 2-hander - quest @ exalted Klaxxi
2-handed weapon
Lightbreaker Greatsword - tanking - heroic SM
Amber Flammbard of Klaxxi'vess - mediocre, but best option for 2-hander? - exalted Klaxxi vendor
1-handed weapon
Ook's Hozen Slicer - dual-wield - heroic brewery
Inelava, Spirit of Inebriation - dual-wield - heroic brewery
Kilrak, Jaws of Terror - dual-wield - LFR
Scimitar of Seven Stars - dual-wield - LFR
trinket
Carbonic Carbuncle - 2-hander, dual-wield - heroic brewery
Iron Protector Talisman - tanking - heroic Mogu'shan
Lessons of the Darkmaster - all? - heroic Scholo
Jade Charioteer Figurine - 2-hander, dual-wield - LFR
Relic of Niuzao - tanking - Darkmoon cards
Relic of Xuen - 2-hander, dual-wield - Darkmoon cards
Lei Shin's Final Orders - 2-hander, dual-wield - LFR
Jade Warlord Figurine - tanking - LFR
Darkmist Vortex - 2-hander, dual-wield - LFR
Lao-Chin's Liquid Courage - tanking - VP
Iron Belly Wok - 2-hander, dual-wield - VP
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Darkmoon Faire Cards
NOTE: I wrote this up on Sunday while investigating details of making Darkmoon Faire cards. Things may have changed in today's update with the addition of a new ink trader. So I'll need to recrunch the numbers before the Faire leaves!
Last expansion I made a lot of money on Darkmoon Faire cards. They make powerful trinkets that are very useful for initial raiding and I was the first man in on the market. Inscription was harder to level and the mats that went into the cards started out quite cheap. I'd bought the market out to make early cards and then the price of cards stabilized at the eventual higher price for volatile life. It was pretty sweet.
This time around there are some substantial differences. Inscription was a lot easier to level. The Faire came out a week later compared to expansion release so there's more time for other people to get in. The biggest difference is you can't make as many cards as you want. There's a daily cooldown to make a Scroll of Wisdom and each card takes one of those scrolls. This means each scribe can make at most one card per day. With 32 different cards the odds of actually making a full deck on your own is really slim at this point. I can make at most 19 cards before the Faire leaves this time around. As such the idea that I could make a full deck myself is pretty laughable. If I want to get involved it would either be as a seller of individual cards or by trying to trade. That would involve talking to people and I hate people...
So, assuming I'm just selling individual cards, the question is... Is this worthwhile? I need to look at other uses of the SoWs and I need to look at the value of the other materials compared to potential sale prices of the cards.
First of all, SoWs are used in only 6 patterns. Darkmoon cards, 2 boe epic offhands, and 3 boa epic staves. I have no use for a level 90 staff. I have no way to tell if the offhands are selling or not, but they look to be worth about 3000G per SoW. They're only ilvl 476 so I don't think they're a real long term use of SoW. So, unless 3000G per SoW is a high mark I doubt I'd be using my SoW on anything except for Darkmoon cards.
What about the other materials? Well, there's a 10 copper vendor item that can be trivially ignored. Then there are 10 starlight inks. These are the new uncommon tier ink from Mists herbs. As of right now there is no ink trader to trade up for them. The only way to get them is by trading a full spirit of harmony for one or by milling. What are these things worth? There are two ways to look at it... Cost of materials or value of alternative items.
Value of alternative items is the easy one. 3 inks go into one of the new boe shoulder enchants. I've been able to sell one for 600G and a few in the 330-400G range. I'm going to go with 300G as a reasonable value for the enchant so 100G per ink. The only other use for the inks are the other SoW items which I'm already ignoring.
What about cost of materials? Milling herbs gets you the normal ink and the uncommon ink. Normal ink is pretty worthless right now because there's no ink trader. I have stacks of the ink that I can't get rid of right now. They're worth about 7G on the AH (and I should probably start selling). Should an ink trader come in they're probably be worth more like 7.5G each as I could start making all my glyphs out of them. My min sell price for a glyph is 30G, they take 3 ink, and I want to get some sort of profit out of them so they have to be worth less than 10G. Lets go with 7G as the current value of this ink and look at what milling 5 herbs gets me:
Green Tea Leaf, Rain Poppy, Silkweed, Snow Lily - 50% chance of 1 normal ink, 50% chance of 1.5 normal ink
Fool's Cap - 33% chance of 1 normal ink, 33% chance of 1.5 normal ink, 33% chance of 2 normal ink
So a stack of most herbs gets me 35G worth of base ink. A stack of the good herbs gets me 42G worth of base ink. Then for the good ink...
Green Tea Leaf, Rain Poppy, Silkweed, Snow Lily - 24% chance of .5 good ink, .8% chance of 1 good ink, .6% chance of 1.5 good ink
Fool's Cap - 48% chance of .5 good ink, 1.6% chance of 1 good ink, 1.2% chance of 1.5 good ink
So a stack of most herbs will get me .548 of an ink. A stack of the good herb will get me 1.096 of an ink. So, how much am I paying for a stack and how much does that make an ink worth?
90G - 100G per ink
100G - 119G per ink
110G - 137G per ink
190G - 283G per ink
200G - 301G per ink
220G - 338G per ink
And the good herb...
225G - 166G per ink
The first thing I'm noticing here is my price for shoulder enchants is really, really low. I need to go adjust my mod. And probably not sell any more of them. With current herb prices it's actually a loss to be making these things right now.
What about the current price of ink on the AH? Looks like around 2k per ink right now... So maybe I should be milling herbs and selling ink!
Last expansion I made a lot of money on Darkmoon Faire cards. They make powerful trinkets that are very useful for initial raiding and I was the first man in on the market. Inscription was harder to level and the mats that went into the cards started out quite cheap. I'd bought the market out to make early cards and then the price of cards stabilized at the eventual higher price for volatile life. It was pretty sweet.
This time around there are some substantial differences. Inscription was a lot easier to level. The Faire came out a week later compared to expansion release so there's more time for other people to get in. The biggest difference is you can't make as many cards as you want. There's a daily cooldown to make a Scroll of Wisdom and each card takes one of those scrolls. This means each scribe can make at most one card per day. With 32 different cards the odds of actually making a full deck on your own is really slim at this point. I can make at most 19 cards before the Faire leaves this time around. As such the idea that I could make a full deck myself is pretty laughable. If I want to get involved it would either be as a seller of individual cards or by trying to trade. That would involve talking to people and I hate people...
So, assuming I'm just selling individual cards, the question is... Is this worthwhile? I need to look at other uses of the SoWs and I need to look at the value of the other materials compared to potential sale prices of the cards.
First of all, SoWs are used in only 6 patterns. Darkmoon cards, 2 boe epic offhands, and 3 boa epic staves. I have no use for a level 90 staff. I have no way to tell if the offhands are selling or not, but they look to be worth about 3000G per SoW. They're only ilvl 476 so I don't think they're a real long term use of SoW. So, unless 3000G per SoW is a high mark I doubt I'd be using my SoW on anything except for Darkmoon cards.
What about the other materials? Well, there's a 10 copper vendor item that can be trivially ignored. Then there are 10 starlight inks. These are the new uncommon tier ink from Mists herbs. As of right now there is no ink trader to trade up for them. The only way to get them is by trading a full spirit of harmony for one or by milling. What are these things worth? There are two ways to look at it... Cost of materials or value of alternative items.
Value of alternative items is the easy one. 3 inks go into one of the new boe shoulder enchants. I've been able to sell one for 600G and a few in the 330-400G range. I'm going to go with 300G as a reasonable value for the enchant so 100G per ink. The only other use for the inks are the other SoW items which I'm already ignoring.
What about cost of materials? Milling herbs gets you the normal ink and the uncommon ink. Normal ink is pretty worthless right now because there's no ink trader. I have stacks of the ink that I can't get rid of right now. They're worth about 7G on the AH (and I should probably start selling). Should an ink trader come in they're probably be worth more like 7.5G each as I could start making all my glyphs out of them. My min sell price for a glyph is 30G, they take 3 ink, and I want to get some sort of profit out of them so they have to be worth less than 10G. Lets go with 7G as the current value of this ink and look at what milling 5 herbs gets me:
Green Tea Leaf, Rain Poppy, Silkweed, Snow Lily - 50% chance of 1 normal ink, 50% chance of 1.5 normal ink
Fool's Cap - 33% chance of 1 normal ink, 33% chance of 1.5 normal ink, 33% chance of 2 normal ink
So a stack of most herbs gets me 35G worth of base ink. A stack of the good herbs gets me 42G worth of base ink. Then for the good ink...
Green Tea Leaf, Rain Poppy, Silkweed, Snow Lily - 24% chance of .5 good ink, .8% chance of 1 good ink, .6% chance of 1.5 good ink
Fool's Cap - 48% chance of .5 good ink, 1.6% chance of 1 good ink, 1.2% chance of 1.5 good ink
So a stack of most herbs will get me .548 of an ink. A stack of the good herb will get me 1.096 of an ink. So, how much am I paying for a stack and how much does that make an ink worth?
90G - 100G per ink
100G - 119G per ink
110G - 137G per ink
190G - 283G per ink
200G - 301G per ink
220G - 338G per ink
And the good herb...
225G - 166G per ink
The first thing I'm noticing here is my price for shoulder enchants is really, really low. I need to go adjust my mod. And probably not sell any more of them. With current herb prices it's actually a loss to be making these things right now.
What about the current price of ink on the AH? Looks like around 2k per ink right now... So maybe I should be milling herbs and selling ink!
Circling back, what about darkmoon cards?
Ox deck - 26k
Oxen cards - 1k-2.5k
Crane deck - unknown
Crane cards - 6k-13k
Serpents deck - unknown
Serpents cards - 4-6k
Tigers deck - unknown
Tigers cards - 7-12k
Ok, average that all out with the lower values for each deck and you're probably getting 4.5k per card. The card takes one SoW (value-3K) and 10 ink (value-1.6k if milling, 20k on the AH). So it's a loss to make the cards even if milling at current herb values assuming you only get the lower bound on the cards.
If I really wanted one of the trinkets maybe it would make sense to work on this. (I do kinda want the strength trinket, and would really want it if I was raiding, but don't really need it for challenge modes.) But as things stand I think I'll try to liquidate my ink and see if prices make sense later on. I can only make one card per day but I can stack up SoW and make the cards in the future should it make sense then.
Monday, October 08, 2012
Initial Challenge Dungeon Run
Friday night we decided to give challenge modes a shot. No one on our server had posted any times for any of the dungeons and we wanted to at least see what was going on. Heroics have been a bit of a joke so I for one was looking forward to potentially being worried about mob abilities...
The 'easiest' of the challenge dungeons, or at least the one completed most frequently, was Temple of the Jade Serpent. There is no group finder for challenge dungeons so you have to fly there. On the way there we hit our first issue... Group composition. Turns out we had two people who only had healing gear. Two people who had predominantly tanking gear. And one DPSer. Eh, run it!
Second issue... Turns out you have to have done the heroic version before you can do the challenge mode. One of us hadn't done Jade Serpent so we'd need to find something else. How about Mogu'shan Palace which was third most completed thus far? We can all zone in! Woo!
The first pull included a mob that whirlwinded for enough damage to kill off the melee. Which is all we had for damage. Memories of TBC heroics! Woo! Turns out the whirlwind is telegraphed so you can either stun it or run away from it. Brutal, but not unfair. Some of the trash pulls were rough, some just had lots of health. But it was all doable. Bosses didn't seem too bad either. We certainly needed to group up for meteor, that sort of thing, but it again didn't seem unfair. The timer for bronze was 45 minutes and we ended up beating the final boss in 43 minutes and 32 seconds. We had tons of deaths, pulled some extra mobs, but learned a bunch. We still had time before bed... So do another one or try for silver? Try for silver! We grabbed some invis pots from the bank and went back for more.
We ended up resetting a couple of times (dying to trash puts a real damper on a speed run) but ultimately ended up getting done in 23 minutes and 33 seconds. With the silver timer being 24 minutes. Just in! But we didn't do all that much wrong, which makes the gold timer of 12 minutes pretty out there...
Now, we weren't all in full 463 gear. We had 2 healers. We botched our invis potions. (I thought they had a 10 minute cooldown for some reason but they only have a 2 minute cooldown. And it turns out speed potions aren't invis potions.) So while I don't think we could possibly have hit gold last week I do think it's possible with a bunch of work. Which is just what I want from challenge dungeons!
It turns out a couple other groups tried challenge dungeons over the weekend because we put a time up in the leaderboards. They both also tried Mogu'shan Palace which makes me think they were following our lead and that we must have picked the easiest one first... Really it was just one we could zone into! Our time still stands as the best so far, with one other bronze run existing and two runs too slow for bronze. I seem to recall a Blizzard post saying just doing the dungeon should get you bronze but I guess not!
The 'easiest' of the challenge dungeons, or at least the one completed most frequently, was Temple of the Jade Serpent. There is no group finder for challenge dungeons so you have to fly there. On the way there we hit our first issue... Group composition. Turns out we had two people who only had healing gear. Two people who had predominantly tanking gear. And one DPSer. Eh, run it!
Second issue... Turns out you have to have done the heroic version before you can do the challenge mode. One of us hadn't done Jade Serpent so we'd need to find something else. How about Mogu'shan Palace which was third most completed thus far? We can all zone in! Woo!
The first pull included a mob that whirlwinded for enough damage to kill off the melee. Which is all we had for damage. Memories of TBC heroics! Woo! Turns out the whirlwind is telegraphed so you can either stun it or run away from it. Brutal, but not unfair. Some of the trash pulls were rough, some just had lots of health. But it was all doable. Bosses didn't seem too bad either. We certainly needed to group up for meteor, that sort of thing, but it again didn't seem unfair. The timer for bronze was 45 minutes and we ended up beating the final boss in 43 minutes and 32 seconds. We had tons of deaths, pulled some extra mobs, but learned a bunch. We still had time before bed... So do another one or try for silver? Try for silver! We grabbed some invis pots from the bank and went back for more.
We ended up resetting a couple of times (dying to trash puts a real damper on a speed run) but ultimately ended up getting done in 23 minutes and 33 seconds. With the silver timer being 24 minutes. Just in! But we didn't do all that much wrong, which makes the gold timer of 12 minutes pretty out there...
Now, we weren't all in full 463 gear. We had 2 healers. We botched our invis potions. (I thought they had a 10 minute cooldown for some reason but they only have a 2 minute cooldown. And it turns out speed potions aren't invis potions.) So while I don't think we could possibly have hit gold last week I do think it's possible with a bunch of work. Which is just what I want from challenge dungeons!
It turns out a couple other groups tried challenge dungeons over the weekend because we put a time up in the leaderboards. They both also tried Mogu'shan Palace which makes me think they were following our lead and that we must have picked the easiest one first... Really it was just one we could zone into! Our time still stands as the best so far, with one other bronze run existing and two runs too slow for bronze. I seem to recall a Blizzard post saying just doing the dungeon should get you bronze but I guess not!
Thursday, October 04, 2012
More on Challenge Dungeons
We're starting to get to the point where we're capped on gear and want to give challenge dungeons a spin. My server still has no times listed for any dungeon so just going in and doing adequately will get our names in the lights for a brief period of time at least! As of last night I didn't have any enchants/reforging done on my gear and didn't really know what I was doing as far as a DPS plan. I just hit some buttons! I decided to do some reading to see what I could be doing differently...
I ended up spending a couple hours reading threads about death knights on elitist jerks. Stat weightings were the primary reason I was there (haste is awesome) but there were some neat tips and tricks I hadn't thought of. In particular it turns out dancing rune weapon has a 30 yard range so a blood DK can use it as an extra ranged interrupt! I don't think it's always been that way but if it has I didn't know about it!
DPS-wise I've been pretty much doing what I need to be doing. The exception is making proper use of the new execute ability. I'm not sure it's really viable in heroics but maybe challenge mode mobs will have enough health that I can start reliably timing 5 seconds before they get into the 35-0% range.
I got home from work today and saw an interview on mmo-champion with one of the guys who currently has gold times in every challenge dungeon (on another server, obviously) and it was very interesting. In order to kill things faster they ran without a healer! They used splash healing from a shadow priest, self healing from a DK tank, and copious raid cooldowns. Generally tanks get really bitter when a DK pops army of the dead but these guys were using it AS their tank a lot of the time! They don't need healing and do tons of damage themselves! The group ran two DKs and a shaman (with earth elemental totem) for lots of 'pet' tanking. They were also all engineers which I suspected might be good. It turns out engineering is the best profession for a frost DK when it comes to damage and isn't terrible for tanking either. So, I'll probably switch to engineering from mining soon. It's a shame Robb has a lot of my ore on his inactive account. 8P
I ended up spending a couple hours reading threads about death knights on elitist jerks. Stat weightings were the primary reason I was there (haste is awesome) but there were some neat tips and tricks I hadn't thought of. In particular it turns out dancing rune weapon has a 30 yard range so a blood DK can use it as an extra ranged interrupt! I don't think it's always been that way but if it has I didn't know about it!
DPS-wise I've been pretty much doing what I need to be doing. The exception is making proper use of the new execute ability. I'm not sure it's really viable in heroics but maybe challenge mode mobs will have enough health that I can start reliably timing 5 seconds before they get into the 35-0% range.
I got home from work today and saw an interview on mmo-champion with one of the guys who currently has gold times in every challenge dungeon (on another server, obviously) and it was very interesting. In order to kill things faster they ran without a healer! They used splash healing from a shadow priest, self healing from a DK tank, and copious raid cooldowns. Generally tanks get really bitter when a DK pops army of the dead but these guys were using it AS their tank a lot of the time! They don't need healing and do tons of damage themselves! The group ran two DKs and a shaman (with earth elemental totem) for lots of 'pet' tanking. They were also all engineers which I suspected might be good. It turns out engineering is the best profession for a frost DK when it comes to damage and isn't terrible for tanking either. So, I'll probably switch to engineering from mining soon. It's a shame Robb has a lot of my ore on his inactive account. 8P
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
World of Warcraft: Scenario Quests
Yesterday I finally got around to doing a couple of the new scenarios. (Sky hit 90 and I had a scenario quest with a weapon upgrade I could share.) I'd only found 2 scenario related quests even though there are 7 scenarios and was curious to see if there were any more of them. If so I should pick them up before doing the rest of them. On a Saturday, hopefully, since for some reason there's an achievement for doing them on Saturday. I went poking around wowhead and turned up the following...
A Brewing Storm - no quests
Brewmoon Festival - 1 quest
Crypt of Forgotten Kings - no quests
Theramore's Fall - no quests
Proving Grounds - 1 quest (This is the arena quest with a weapon reward.)
Greenstone Village - no quests
Unga Ingoo - no quests
Great. The two quests I found are the only two I could find in wowhead. Only one has a tangible reward. *sigh*
I did find lots of people complaining that they had no clue what was going on in the scenarios and why they were even there. That's what I found in the two we did. Random objectives pop up, you do them, and then you get a bag with money in it. Apparently there's a small chance of getting a 463 blue in the bag which means maybe it's worth doing them from a reward standpoint. I still want to do them because there are 27 scenario achievements but I guess it's good to know there's no critical quest rewards I'm missing out on. I guess new level 90s should pick up the arena quest and do that scenario quickly for a decent weapon upgrade but beyond that scenarios just seem like an interesting but lore-light diversion.
A Brewing Storm - no quests
Brewmoon Festival - 1 quest
Crypt of Forgotten Kings - no quests
Theramore's Fall - no quests
Proving Grounds - 1 quest (This is the arena quest with a weapon reward.)
Greenstone Village - no quests
Unga Ingoo - no quests
Great. The two quests I found are the only two I could find in wowhead. Only one has a tangible reward. *sigh*
I did find lots of people complaining that they had no clue what was going on in the scenarios and why they were even there. That's what I found in the two we did. Random objectives pop up, you do them, and then you get a bag with money in it. Apparently there's a small chance of getting a 463 blue in the bag which means maybe it's worth doing them from a reward standpoint. I still want to do them because there are 27 scenario achievements but I guess it's good to know there's no critical quest rewards I'm missing out on. I guess new level 90s should pick up the arena quest and do that scenario quickly for a decent weapon upgrade but beyond that scenarios just seem like an interesting but lore-light diversion.
Friday, September 28, 2012
World of Warcraft: Heroic Difficulty
Back when The Burning Crusade launched I can remember trying the new 'heroic' dungeon mode out. We went in with a couple people at less than max level and got absolutely butchered. Most of the trash had cleaves which hit our melee for more than half their max health. Byung and Tom died on pretty much every pull. We did manage to get one boss down before figuring we should actually get everyone to max level and get some gear before trying again. Some of the BC heroics were truly brutal and were very hard even with awesome gear.
Wrath of the Lich King heroics were locked so you need max level to even try them. They were easier than TBC heroics were at launch but they were still pretty tricky. We died some but I don't remember ever giving up on one of them. They were all doable at max level with reasonable gear.
Cataclysm went way back in the other direction. I can remember giving up on heroic stonecore in the early days of the expansion. The problem here was with healer mana. They'd gone to a new system and healers simply needed a higher gear level to succeed than in Wrath. I'd like to think our healers played quite well and we likely won more than an average group would have but in some cases it was flat out impossible at low gear levels.
Cataclysm may have been a tad too difficult but I actually liked it. Having a chance for failure makes things interesting. It would be better if the chance for failure was skill related but having the outcome be up in the air makes things a little more interesting. Yesterday Tom and I did some Mists of Pandaria heroics and there was no chance for failure. We did 6 heroics and I didn't die a single time. That's unheard of when compared to heroics from previous expansions. Even Wrath had some deaths! To make things even worse we actually pulled the final boss of one of the dungeons with our tank (Tom) dead. No problem. The hunter switched to his turtle pet and we 4-manned the final boss. Of a heroic dungeon. While we were still wearing a lot of leveling greens.
That just shouldn't happen! I want to die! On another boss I didn't understand the mechanics and actually just stood still while trying to read tooltips for most of the fight. Didn't matter. You can easily win down a DPSer.
Now, they did add a difficulty above heroic this time around so maybe they made heroics particularly easy with the thought that people like me who want to lose can go lose in challenge dungeons. Unfortunately i can't play in challenge dungeons right now because there is no 'looking for challenge mode' tool. Tom and I can't just play with random idiots. We need to co-ordinate with 3 other people like back in the old days. In a week or two when Brendan, Pounder, and Sky hit max level this will become an option but for now we're kinda stuck if we want something hard to do. Maybe it would be worth trolling trade chat/the realm forums to find 3 other people that way?
Wrath of the Lich King heroics were locked so you need max level to even try them. They were easier than TBC heroics were at launch but they were still pretty tricky. We died some but I don't remember ever giving up on one of them. They were all doable at max level with reasonable gear.
Cataclysm went way back in the other direction. I can remember giving up on heroic stonecore in the early days of the expansion. The problem here was with healer mana. They'd gone to a new system and healers simply needed a higher gear level to succeed than in Wrath. I'd like to think our healers played quite well and we likely won more than an average group would have but in some cases it was flat out impossible at low gear levels.
Cataclysm may have been a tad too difficult but I actually liked it. Having a chance for failure makes things interesting. It would be better if the chance for failure was skill related but having the outcome be up in the air makes things a little more interesting. Yesterday Tom and I did some Mists of Pandaria heroics and there was no chance for failure. We did 6 heroics and I didn't die a single time. That's unheard of when compared to heroics from previous expansions. Even Wrath had some deaths! To make things even worse we actually pulled the final boss of one of the dungeons with our tank (Tom) dead. No problem. The hunter switched to his turtle pet and we 4-manned the final boss. Of a heroic dungeon. While we were still wearing a lot of leveling greens.
That just shouldn't happen! I want to die! On another boss I didn't understand the mechanics and actually just stood still while trying to read tooltips for most of the fight. Didn't matter. You can easily win down a DPSer.
Now, they did add a difficulty above heroic this time around so maybe they made heroics particularly easy with the thought that people like me who want to lose can go lose in challenge dungeons. Unfortunately i can't play in challenge dungeons right now because there is no 'looking for challenge mode' tool. Tom and I can't just play with random idiots. We need to co-ordinate with 3 other people like back in the old days. In a week or two when Brendan, Pounder, and Sky hit max level this will become an option but for now we're kinda stuck if we want something hard to do. Maybe it would be worth trolling trade chat/the realm forums to find 3 other people that way?
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Spirit of Harmony
Blizzard took out any semblance of elemental crafting materials in this expansion and replaced them all with a single bind on pickup item that drops from practically everything. The idea is to force crafters to go out and kill monsters instead of just buying all the materials for their stuff. Some people are pretty bitter about needing to actually play their alts but I don't much care. What I actually care about is what I can use these things for.
The reason I'm so curious now is I can craft a pretty significant upgrade weapon for 5 SoHs. I've only gather 6.5 total (and spend one getting realm first blacksmithing) so that's a pretty significant number. But if there's not really anything important to spend them on I might as well go for it, right?
The first thing you can do with an SoH is buy crafting materials. Ore, leather, cloth, herbs... All stuff I could spend money on if I needed it. Maybe if I end up with infinite SoH I'll use this to convert them into cash but if this is the best option I will absolutely craft a blue weapon out of them now.
I can buy more blacksmithing recipes. Recipes for PvP gear which might sell well? Again, though, this is converting SoH into cash and I have more than enough cash. On the other hand there are also some ilvl 450 blue recipes that make tanking gear. None of the pieces have hit or expertise which might be a problem. And will also certainly all be replaced in short order since we need ilvl 463 for challenge modes.
I can use it as a reagent for crafting a bunch of different blacksmithing things. Again, I could sell this stuff for money but I could also build it now before it would hit the market and become available otherwise. 2 make a low level weapon. 5 make a ilvl 463 weapon. 8 make ilvl 476 gloves/chests (but also take a large number of living steel, the new alchemy cooldown). 2 make ilvl 496 gloves/chests (but also take a large number of items only obtained by DEing a raid weapon).
Honestly, I look at this list and it really seems like all SoHs are really good for in the long term is making money. In the short term I can give a small boost to a few tanking slots, a medium boost to my weapon, or track down a ton of living steel for a medium boost to my gloves or chest. I think for now making a better weapon for questing just makes sense. Time to spend the rest of my SoHs I guess!
The reason I'm so curious now is I can craft a pretty significant upgrade weapon for 5 SoHs. I've only gather 6.5 total (and spend one getting realm first blacksmithing) so that's a pretty significant number. But if there's not really anything important to spend them on I might as well go for it, right?
The first thing you can do with an SoH is buy crafting materials. Ore, leather, cloth, herbs... All stuff I could spend money on if I needed it. Maybe if I end up with infinite SoH I'll use this to convert them into cash but if this is the best option I will absolutely craft a blue weapon out of them now.
I can buy more blacksmithing recipes. Recipes for PvP gear which might sell well? Again, though, this is converting SoH into cash and I have more than enough cash. On the other hand there are also some ilvl 450 blue recipes that make tanking gear. None of the pieces have hit or expertise which might be a problem. And will also certainly all be replaced in short order since we need ilvl 463 for challenge modes.
I can use it as a reagent for crafting a bunch of different blacksmithing things. Again, I could sell this stuff for money but I could also build it now before it would hit the market and become available otherwise. 2 make a low level weapon. 5 make a ilvl 463 weapon. 8 make ilvl 476 gloves/chests (but also take a large number of living steel, the new alchemy cooldown). 2 make ilvl 496 gloves/chests (but also take a large number of items only obtained by DEing a raid weapon).
Honestly, I look at this list and it really seems like all SoHs are really good for in the long term is making money. In the short term I can give a small boost to a few tanking slots, a medium boost to my weapon, or track down a ton of living steel for a medium boost to my gloves or chest. I think for now making a better weapon for questing just makes sense. Time to spend the rest of my SoHs I guess!
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Realm First Cooking
During the Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft the very first realm first earned was cooking. They'd implemented quests a month beforehand which allowed you to stockpile the materials needed to max out. So all it took was clicking a couple buttons once the servers came up and someone would get it. I got lucky (there were probably a dozen people trying for it on Alliance side alone) and pulled it off last time.
Cooking in Mists of Pandaria is significantly harder than it was in Cataclysm. The number of materials needed to max out was pretty extreme and there's pretty much no way to get them in a short period of time on one character. Someone who was really hardcore about it would level multiple characters to 86 or get friends to help out. On Vek'Nilash it didn't seem like anyone was really hardcore about it at all. It was approaching my bedtime and cooking was the only profession realm first that hadn't been claimed. So I figured I'd try to throw some money at the problem...
You see, all the materials could be purchased with tokens earned via Tiller quests. Anyone just randomly questing in the zone was likely to pick up a few tokens. Ideally they'd save them up to buy interesting items from one of the Tiller vendors but I hoped I could bribe some people to part with them for me. My first request was met with puzzlement. I probably hadn't worded it too well (I'd been up for a long time by this point) and no one was interested at 1k per token. I went fishing for a bit in another zone to earn a couple more tokens myself and then came back to try again. This time I spelled out precisely what I wanted by calling out one specific item I wanted to buy. (100 year soy sauce) I was about to give up when I got a taker. Woo! He sold me 5 which put me within striking distance. I'd have to catch a lot of fish but I could do it. He then asked if I was going for realm first with the soy sauce. I said yes and he opened a second trade and threw some random cooking materials at me. I didn't need any of them for the recipe I was planning on making but it did include 5 carrots which meant I could get 3 more tokens myself. That meant I was a mere 5 fish away! I quickly ran out, found two pools, and caught my fish. Back to town, spend my tokens on 250 pumpkins, and I was set. Victory!
First one done in one expansion. Last one done in the next. But both of them mine! Last time around I got 3 realm firsts. This time I have two, but there's still a couple to go. Pandaren ambassador and all gold challenge dungeons!
Cooking in Mists of Pandaria is significantly harder than it was in Cataclysm. The number of materials needed to max out was pretty extreme and there's pretty much no way to get them in a short period of time on one character. Someone who was really hardcore about it would level multiple characters to 86 or get friends to help out. On Vek'Nilash it didn't seem like anyone was really hardcore about it at all. It was approaching my bedtime and cooking was the only profession realm first that hadn't been claimed. So I figured I'd try to throw some money at the problem...
You see, all the materials could be purchased with tokens earned via Tiller quests. Anyone just randomly questing in the zone was likely to pick up a few tokens. Ideally they'd save them up to buy interesting items from one of the Tiller vendors but I hoped I could bribe some people to part with them for me. My first request was met with puzzlement. I probably hadn't worded it too well (I'd been up for a long time by this point) and no one was interested at 1k per token. I went fishing for a bit in another zone to earn a couple more tokens myself and then came back to try again. This time I spelled out precisely what I wanted by calling out one specific item I wanted to buy. (100 year soy sauce) I was about to give up when I got a taker. Woo! He sold me 5 which put me within striking distance. I'd have to catch a lot of fish but I could do it. He then asked if I was going for realm first with the soy sauce. I said yes and he opened a second trade and threw some random cooking materials at me. I didn't need any of them for the recipe I was planning on making but it did include 5 carrots which meant I could get 3 more tokens myself. That meant I was a mere 5 fish away! I quickly ran out, found two pools, and caught my fish. Back to town, spend my tokens on 250 pumpkins, and I was set. Victory!
First one done in one expansion. Last one done in the next. But both of them mine! Last time around I got 3 realm firsts. This time I have two, but there's still a couple to go. Pandaren ambassador and all gold challenge dungeons!
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
Mists Plans
I'm big on making plans for things and time is rapidly running out on making plans for the Mists of Pandaria launch. Where should I focus to start? What else do I need to do to get ready?
A couple days ago I was messaged by a former OGT shaman from back in the Burning Crusade days. It would seem he's going to start a monk and is shooting for realm first and heard I might be doing the same thing. He did his best to convince me to try for anything else. He thinks he's a lock to get it as long as I don't try but that I might be able to beat him. I still think I'm too easily distracted by other things and likely wouldn't be able to focus long enough to get to 90 first, but the recruit a friend thing is a pretty strong advantage. Especially if I didn't start a Pandaren and could therefore get boosted a lot earlier... Apparently gnomes can be monks! How awesome would that be? I would need Robb to actually get around to playing (or maybe stealing his account and two-boxxing all weekend) but I just might be able to get it done. I'd be giving up on any other realm first by doing it. If I was switching mains I'd be setting myself up for grinding all sorts of things up. 6 professions in particular but also all the mounts/pets and such. Really, I don't think I want to do this. So I won't!
I still like the idea of doing all the dailies and trying for Pandaren Ambassador even though I know I can't win if a human (like Sthenno) tries for it. I'll likely want exalted in those things anyway for mounts/pets/gear so I'm still going to go for it but it can't be my only focus or I'll come away with no realm firsts at all. I'm ok with getting none of them but I'm not ok with not even trying for one!
One thing I've already done is unlearned jewelcrafting and picked up mining on my death knight. It's how I leveled in both Wrath and Cata and it just feels right. Especially if I might ultimately end up an engineer for challenge dungeons. I want to at least consider defending my realm first blacksmithing title. The key to doing that is likely to just go out and do the quest lines in the expansion right at launch. I need to get together a Spirit of Harmony which you get by killing monsters. And find my way to the vendor in the vale of eternal blossoms. An advantage of being a miner is I can gather some of the mats I need along the way. Also I can buy either bars or ore and smelt it myself. Yeah. I like this plan. I definitely need to hit the mining cap by Tuesday.
I also have a minor desire to just jump off the boat and fish for a while. It would give a lot of fodder for cooking as well which is nice. Ultimately though while I'd like to go for many professions I think they're all going to be done so fast that trying for more than one is guaranteed to end in disaster. So I'm going to go for blacksmithing and keep an eye on inscription. If blacksmithing gets done before inscription (by me or someone else) then I might swap over to my rogue and buy up a ton of herbs and go for it. I want to get started making the new glyphs anyway, after all.
The last thing that needs consideration is sleep plans. The expansion launches at 3am and I am taking next week off work. Ideally I'd want to wake up around 2am Tuesday morning so I can eat and get ready for 3. This is not my norm so I have to adjust forward or backward. Backward might be easiest for many people but not really for me. Left to my own devices I tend to run on a 26-28 hour day. Trying to lose 6 hours is rough. Going for that plan I'd probably only get 2 or 3 hours sleep if any at all which would suck. The other option is to swing way forward. Stay up until something like 5am Saturday morning. Sleep until 6pm. Stay up until noon Sunday. Sleep until midnight. Stay up until 3pm Monday. Seems somewhat plausible! At the very least when it goes wrong I'm apt to be awake at 3am no matter what. Maybe I need to go to sleep a few hours later but I should be ready to go for long enough to see some realm firsts get claimed.
Seems like a plan! So tonight, a lot of League of Legends! Or maybe I'll give up on Robb hitting level 80 anytime soon and level my druid so I can eventually level enchanting/alchemy.
A couple days ago I was messaged by a former OGT shaman from back in the Burning Crusade days. It would seem he's going to start a monk and is shooting for realm first and heard I might be doing the same thing. He did his best to convince me to try for anything else. He thinks he's a lock to get it as long as I don't try but that I might be able to beat him. I still think I'm too easily distracted by other things and likely wouldn't be able to focus long enough to get to 90 first, but the recruit a friend thing is a pretty strong advantage. Especially if I didn't start a Pandaren and could therefore get boosted a lot earlier... Apparently gnomes can be monks! How awesome would that be? I would need Robb to actually get around to playing (or maybe stealing his account and two-boxxing all weekend) but I just might be able to get it done. I'd be giving up on any other realm first by doing it. If I was switching mains I'd be setting myself up for grinding all sorts of things up. 6 professions in particular but also all the mounts/pets and such. Really, I don't think I want to do this. So I won't!
I still like the idea of doing all the dailies and trying for Pandaren Ambassador even though I know I can't win if a human (like Sthenno) tries for it. I'll likely want exalted in those things anyway for mounts/pets/gear so I'm still going to go for it but it can't be my only focus or I'll come away with no realm firsts at all. I'm ok with getting none of them but I'm not ok with not even trying for one!
One thing I've already done is unlearned jewelcrafting and picked up mining on my death knight. It's how I leveled in both Wrath and Cata and it just feels right. Especially if I might ultimately end up an engineer for challenge dungeons. I want to at least consider defending my realm first blacksmithing title. The key to doing that is likely to just go out and do the quest lines in the expansion right at launch. I need to get together a Spirit of Harmony which you get by killing monsters. And find my way to the vendor in the vale of eternal blossoms. An advantage of being a miner is I can gather some of the mats I need along the way. Also I can buy either bars or ore and smelt it myself. Yeah. I like this plan. I definitely need to hit the mining cap by Tuesday.
I also have a minor desire to just jump off the boat and fish for a while. It would give a lot of fodder for cooking as well which is nice. Ultimately though while I'd like to go for many professions I think they're all going to be done so fast that trying for more than one is guaranteed to end in disaster. So I'm going to go for blacksmithing and keep an eye on inscription. If blacksmithing gets done before inscription (by me or someone else) then I might swap over to my rogue and buy up a ton of herbs and go for it. I want to get started making the new glyphs anyway, after all.
The last thing that needs consideration is sleep plans. The expansion launches at 3am and I am taking next week off work. Ideally I'd want to wake up around 2am Tuesday morning so I can eat and get ready for 3. This is not my norm so I have to adjust forward or backward. Backward might be easiest for many people but not really for me. Left to my own devices I tend to run on a 26-28 hour day. Trying to lose 6 hours is rough. Going for that plan I'd probably only get 2 or 3 hours sleep if any at all which would suck. The other option is to swing way forward. Stay up until something like 5am Saturday morning. Sleep until 6pm. Stay up until noon Sunday. Sleep until midnight. Stay up until 3pm Monday. Seems somewhat plausible! At the very least when it goes wrong I'm apt to be awake at 3am no matter what. Maybe I need to go to sleep a few hours later but I should be ready to go for long enough to see some realm firsts get claimed.
Seems like a plan! So tonight, a lot of League of Legends! Or maybe I'll give up on Robb hitting level 80 anytime soon and level my druid so I can eventually level enchanting/alchemy.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
World of Pokemon
I've been doing some reading recently in an attempt to figure out what's going on with the new pet battle system launching in World of Warcraft on Tuesday. We can currently see all the possible pets along with their abilities. We can see our current pets and their stats. This has me wanting to know what those stats do! Which abilities are going to be the best? What are the crazy good combos? Do I need to spend money to get the unique pets? I will if I have to!
Check this out, for example... An ability only found on the baneling pet which requires buying the collector's edition of the StarCraft II expansion...
KABOOM! One of the other baneling abilities increases crit chance by 50%. Is that good? Does that mean the burst will hit for 80%? This sounds cool! KABOOM!
Unfortunately information on the subject appears to be pretty limited. I can find lists of pets and abilities but there's no context to what they mean. Some abilities talk about crit and accuracy. Others deal with the impact of weather on combat. But I can't find any baseline information. What is base crit chance? What does critting do? What is base accuracy? Weather? Really?
In the absence of real information to make a decision the first pet I play with is likely to be the Singing Sunflower pet. It has a power of 10 and a speed of 10. What do these numbers mean? As an elemental pet she'll ignore weather effects. This sounds bad on the surface. Maybe weather will be brutal and it will actually be good? Who knows!
Apparently pets are going to have a rarity stat which will impact the stats a pet will have at max level. This sounds fine for pets you catch through battles since you can just fight lots to get a rare one. How will it work for quest rewards like the Sunflower? It sounds like they're going to be uncommon but actual hard pets to get will be rare. So maybe I should plan on using Mr Pinchy instead? Rarity isn't currently listed in game so I can't tell for sure. And I still don't know what power and speed do so I don't know if higher stats even matters. Power supposedly increases damage done in some way. Speed either determines turn order in a given round or how often you go. So either it's mediocre (like agility in Final Fantasy I) or it's awesome (like speed in Final Fantasy V).
There are tons of achievements with the pet battle system. In particular there's an achievement for catching a pet of every single wild animal type in the game. Wow! That'll be 10 achievement points well earned.
Apparently there's going to be a queue you can enter to get matched with a random opponent for a 3v3 pet battle. But they want to minimize trash talk and bad feelings so you don't get to know who you're fighting against and the system will only count wins, not losses. This makes me a little sad but I guess I can understand that they're trying to make pet battles into a more casual friendly system. I have hopes that they'll eventually add in a ladder of some kind since I think pet battles will be easier to balance than actual PvP.
At any rate... I went looking for information but it doesn't exist. I will likely fool around a little with pet battles after the early realm firsts get claimed and try to work some of these things out on my own I guess.
Check this out, for example... An ability only found on the baneling pet which requires buying the collector's edition of the StarCraft II expansion...
KABOOM! One of the other baneling abilities increases crit chance by 50%. Is that good? Does that mean the burst will hit for 80%? This sounds cool! KABOOM!
Unfortunately information on the subject appears to be pretty limited. I can find lists of pets and abilities but there's no context to what they mean. Some abilities talk about crit and accuracy. Others deal with the impact of weather on combat. But I can't find any baseline information. What is base crit chance? What does critting do? What is base accuracy? Weather? Really?
In the absence of real information to make a decision the first pet I play with is likely to be the Singing Sunflower pet. It has a power of 10 and a speed of 10. What do these numbers mean? As an elemental pet she'll ignore weather effects. This sounds bad on the surface. Maybe weather will be brutal and it will actually be good? Who knows!
Apparently pets are going to have a rarity stat which will impact the stats a pet will have at max level. This sounds fine for pets you catch through battles since you can just fight lots to get a rare one. How will it work for quest rewards like the Sunflower? It sounds like they're going to be uncommon but actual hard pets to get will be rare. So maybe I should plan on using Mr Pinchy instead? Rarity isn't currently listed in game so I can't tell for sure. And I still don't know what power and speed do so I don't know if higher stats even matters. Power supposedly increases damage done in some way. Speed either determines turn order in a given round or how often you go. So either it's mediocre (like agility in Final Fantasy I) or it's awesome (like speed in Final Fantasy V).
There are tons of achievements with the pet battle system. In particular there's an achievement for catching a pet of every single wild animal type in the game. Wow! That'll be 10 achievement points well earned.
Apparently there's going to be a queue you can enter to get matched with a random opponent for a 3v3 pet battle. But they want to minimize trash talk and bad feelings so you don't get to know who you're fighting against and the system will only count wins, not losses. This makes me a little sad but I guess I can understand that they're trying to make pet battles into a more casual friendly system. I have hopes that they'll eventually add in a ladder of some kind since I think pet battles will be easier to balance than actual PvP.
At any rate... I went looking for information but it doesn't exist. I will likely fool around a little with pet battles after the early realm firsts get claimed and try to work some of these things out on my own I guess.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
World of Warcraft: Challenge Dungeon Details
Blizzard opened challenge dungeons on the beta for testing recently so a lot more information about them has been funneling out. They're not going to work quite as I expected but they still seem pretty awesome. Here are some interesting tidbits I've picked up that I think will be useful for other people to know...
- All mobs on challenge mode have one more level than the mobs on heroic mode. This brings them in line with raiding mobs. (In particular a heroic boss is level 92, a challenge boss is level 93.)
- Hit and expertise ratings on your gear will _not_ scale down. The reason for this is they didn't want to force raiders to maintain a set of raiding gear and a set of challenge gear. Typically getting to the hit and expertise caps is the best bang for your buck and they didn't want to force people to have to worry about just how much their hit cap would scale down.
- All your other ratings get scaled down more than they should to make up for the above point. Basically any hit or expertise rating that you should lose gets taken away from the other ones instead. Some people (dot/hot classes I think?) might care about a specific amount of haste and this will make their lives more complicated.
- Gear does _not_ scale up. I was under the impression initially that you'd be handed a set of gear when you zoned in that you were forced to use. Instead you just have anything higher than ilvl 463 scaled down. This means you do have to worry about hunting gear from other sources. It means you need to work out stat weights to pick the right gear.
- On the plus side it looks like ilvl 463 isn't raiding gear. 463 looks to be gear that drops from heroic 5-mans. Better stuff is fine (but will get scaled down). Worse stuff is likely crippling. So there's likely a lot of heroic 5-man running in our future.
- Set bonuses are turned off.
- It doesn't sound like they've actually decided how they're going to handle trinket procs/use effects. Will they get scaled down or will raiders get an advantage here?
- Pounder was worried that a stealth team of 2 rogues/3 druids would win by skipping everything but the bosses. Apparently they're adding in mechanisms to prevent skipping trash. I don't know details but it could be doors that don't open until all the trash is dead or true sight trash? Blizzard seems to want everyone to at least have a chance so I'm hoping the stealth group isn't feasible. But the second character I level to 90 will definitely be stealth capable just in case!
- Challenge dungeons don't drop gold or loot. Your gear also doesn't take damage. There are rewards for winning (valor points, and apparently a reasonable number of them?)
- You can reset the dungeon at any time and can run it as many times per day as you want.
- There is no dungeon finder for challenge modes. There is no free teleport to the dungeon. (Well, if you win in a gold medal time you get a spell to teleport there.) You have to have beaten the dungeon on heroic to zone in.
- No restrictions on consumables at all. So food/flasks/potions are going to be mandatory when trying for world records. Swiftness potions in particular are allowed as are engineering speed-boost tinkers. I can't help but worry that everyone's going to need to be an engineer...
- They're taking a lot of randomness out. Some dungeons have bosses that spawn with random abilities. On challenge mode the abilities are fixed. This is good since it means your time is based on how good you do and not if you got the fastest ability combination.
- The claim is they're about as hard as the harder Burning Crusade heroics. I have my doubts but I'll be happy if they are. We were able to eventually get through all of them pre-nerf (by days on Shattered Halls, I think, but we got it) and I'll be really happy if they're that hard.
- All mobs on challenge mode have one more level than the mobs on heroic mode. This brings them in line with raiding mobs. (In particular a heroic boss is level 92, a challenge boss is level 93.)
- Hit and expertise ratings on your gear will _not_ scale down. The reason for this is they didn't want to force raiders to maintain a set of raiding gear and a set of challenge gear. Typically getting to the hit and expertise caps is the best bang for your buck and they didn't want to force people to have to worry about just how much their hit cap would scale down.
- All your other ratings get scaled down more than they should to make up for the above point. Basically any hit or expertise rating that you should lose gets taken away from the other ones instead. Some people (dot/hot classes I think?) might care about a specific amount of haste and this will make their lives more complicated.
- Gear does _not_ scale up. I was under the impression initially that you'd be handed a set of gear when you zoned in that you were forced to use. Instead you just have anything higher than ilvl 463 scaled down. This means you do have to worry about hunting gear from other sources. It means you need to work out stat weights to pick the right gear.
- On the plus side it looks like ilvl 463 isn't raiding gear. 463 looks to be gear that drops from heroic 5-mans. Better stuff is fine (but will get scaled down). Worse stuff is likely crippling. So there's likely a lot of heroic 5-man running in our future.
- Set bonuses are turned off.
- It doesn't sound like they've actually decided how they're going to handle trinket procs/use effects. Will they get scaled down or will raiders get an advantage here?
- Pounder was worried that a stealth team of 2 rogues/3 druids would win by skipping everything but the bosses. Apparently they're adding in mechanisms to prevent skipping trash. I don't know details but it could be doors that don't open until all the trash is dead or true sight trash? Blizzard seems to want everyone to at least have a chance so I'm hoping the stealth group isn't feasible. But the second character I level to 90 will definitely be stealth capable just in case!
- Challenge dungeons don't drop gold or loot. Your gear also doesn't take damage. There are rewards for winning (valor points, and apparently a reasonable number of them?)
- You can reset the dungeon at any time and can run it as many times per day as you want.
- There is no dungeon finder for challenge modes. There is no free teleport to the dungeon. (Well, if you win in a gold medal time you get a spell to teleport there.) You have to have beaten the dungeon on heroic to zone in.
- No restrictions on consumables at all. So food/flasks/potions are going to be mandatory when trying for world records. Swiftness potions in particular are allowed as are engineering speed-boost tinkers. I can't help but worry that everyone's going to need to be an engineer...
- They're taking a lot of randomness out. Some dungeons have bosses that spawn with random abilities. On challenge mode the abilities are fixed. This is good since it means your time is based on how good you do and not if you got the fastest ability combination.
- The claim is they're about as hard as the harder Burning Crusade heroics. I have my doubts but I'll be happy if they are. We were able to eventually get through all of them pre-nerf (by days on Shattered Halls, I think, but we got it) and I'll be really happy if they're that hard.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Realm First: Pandaren Ambassador Conclusions
When I first saw the realm first achievement for Pandaren Ambassador I was thinking that it would take a week or two to do. I thought it would likely not go to the person who was fastest at leveling or the person who was most dedicated to daily quests... I thought it would go to the person who was very good at both things. After looking at things a little more I'm no longer sure that is the case and I don't know that this is a path I really want to throw myself down. There are a few concerns that I have which I want to go over now to sort out some thoughts...
The first problem is the human racial, diplomacy. For some reason I didn't think it stacked with the guild perk mr popularity so I was assuming that pretty much everyone would get a 10% reputation buff. Unfortunately this is not true and they stack additively. So a human in a reasonable guild will get 20% more reputation while I can only get 10% more. This worked out to being about 3182 less rep needed with each faction assuming linear reputation gains. That's a reasonable different but if the grinds are getting done in a week or two it's probably only saving them a day. Pushing a little harder to level faster and making sure to log on at 5am on the final day could be enough to get over that hump.
Which leads us to the second problem. Not all of the grinds are linear. In particular the Golden Lotus faction unlocks more quests as you gain reputation with them. The faster you can get the initial rep with them the more rep you earn per day. The total amount of rep you can earn looks to be enough that on some realms humans will gain an entire day's worth of honoured dailies over non-humans. That's another 1000 rep they get for free. They certainly get revered at least a day earlier. Which is a problem because two more factions (Shado-Pan and August Celestials) only unlock dailies after you're revered with Golden Lotus. This means humans get an extra day of dailies with these guys as well.
Ok, one day isn't such a big deal though. Just level even faster! Sure, but the next problem is how few dailies exist for those factions. Shado-Pan in particular only has 750 rep available per day. Suddenly the ~5000 rep boost that humans have is a lot bigger than a single day. By my calculations a human will finish that grind 34 days after hitting level 90. A non-human will take 40 days. Humans have a 6 day buffer as a result and I simply can't level that much faster. A human that cares about this realm first will beat a non-human that cares about it and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it.
There may be one thing you can do but it may not even make it into the live game. For most of the beta there were rare spawns (same as every expansion) that would drop a boe blue item, a bag with cash/cloth/etc in it, and an interesting item. Shapeshifting items, things like that. One of those interesting items grants 1000 rep with every faction. It is consumed on use but you could use more than one of them if you got your hands on multiples. They aren't bound so they could be sold to other players. In the last beta patch every interesting item was taken out and rares only dropped the bag and the blue. Which raises some questions... Are they gone for good? Why were they in the beta at all? If it does exist how good is it and what should I be willing to pay for it?
Well, for how good it is we need to decide how early we're getting it. Due to the way Golden Lotus scales getting one or two early is actually worth a ton of time. A single pipe knocks 2 days off my total by virtue of knocking off two days of Shado-Pan dailies at the end. The second pipe is worth 1 day at the end or 2 days at the start. 25 pipes is enough to cap Shado-Pan in a day. Knocking 4 days off by starting with 2 pipes is actually a pretty big deal. That cuts the human advantage down to 2 days assuming they don't get any pipes themselves. 2 days I'd like to think I can overcome. I can get to 90 a day earlier and I can log in on the last day sooner. So if these pipes exist I have a shot...
But how much is it worth to buy pipes? The first two are awesome but each extra one is guaranteed to shave at least a day off and could get two days thanks to rounding. Perhaps most importantly I'd need to keep them out of my opponent's hands. Quite possibly the way to go would be to get a second account and write a bot to camp the rare spawn to make sure I get all the pipes! Ignoring that option pipes are probably worth at least 5 digits and maybe 6. If I could guarantee I get the first two pipes and can suppress the remainder of the pipes for a month I would gladly pay 250k. Without those guarantees I'd probably still be paying 30-40k each.
Those guarantees are actually a pretty critical point in their own right. We're talking about an achievement that's going to take more than 6 weeks to pick up and there's no way to track your progress relative to other players. When you're looking at leveling realm firsts it's pretty easy to check on the status of your competition. Maybe you need to swap over to a horde alt but you can easily look to see what level the top players are at. Crafting ones are trickier but tend to be short enough to not really matter. You go pedal to the metal until someone wins and then you move on. 6 weeks is an awfully long time to work at something without knowing if you're ahead, close, or already guaranteed to lose. I hate being guaranteed to lose. Maybe I want to abort if I'm guaranteed to lose but I can't know! Possibly I could look up specific other players in the armory every day to find out if they're keeping pace but I don't know how I'd know who to look up. All human characters that hit level 90? Maybe I could write a spider to search through all known guilds? Hmm...
When working on all the reps at once you're looking at doing 45 dailies each day plus farming 16 plots, hunting down 3 rare fish, and maybe even scooping up some eggs. I've been plowing out dailies in an attempt to level Ogg Gulnath Tago and have been doing maybe 33 dailies each day. It takes a couple hours. I'm stuck flying all over the places to get all these dailies (Stormwind, Ironforge, Mount Hyjal, Tol Barad, Sholazar Basin, Icecrown...) and I'd imagine Pandaria is actually smaller. Of course I'm full of epics and doing pretty old content so I'm mashing the quests now. Pandaria ones I expect will be harder. It's probably 3 or 4 hours worth of quests to stay on top of things. Some of the factions take less time than others so you can afford to skimp every now and then. (Just make sure you never skimp on hitting revered with Golden Lotus and never skip anything related to Shado-Pan or August Celestials.)
I'm not sure if a human who wasn't trying would be able to beat a non-human. 6 days is a big lead but they have over a month to lose those days. Each of the factions has particular rewards (mounts/pets/gear/crafting patterns) and it's entirely plausible that a questing human would start by focusing on a faction with a good reward instead of on the one that will take longest to do. Someone who didn't look ahead wouldn't realize which they have to focus on and the 6 day lead could really slip away.
I do like the idea of getting started on the longest ones first and using armory to keep tabs on potential threats. Especially since there actually isn't anything you can do early on which would be 'wasted' time. You need to hit level 90 fast before you can really do anything else and I'd be leveling to 90 pretty fast regardless. And I do want the exalted rewards... Whatever they are!
I feel like I'm guaranteed to lose to any humans that care. I'm just not sure any of those exist.
The first problem is the human racial, diplomacy. For some reason I didn't think it stacked with the guild perk mr popularity so I was assuming that pretty much everyone would get a 10% reputation buff. Unfortunately this is not true and they stack additively. So a human in a reasonable guild will get 20% more reputation while I can only get 10% more. This worked out to being about 3182 less rep needed with each faction assuming linear reputation gains. That's a reasonable different but if the grinds are getting done in a week or two it's probably only saving them a day. Pushing a little harder to level faster and making sure to log on at 5am on the final day could be enough to get over that hump.
Which leads us to the second problem. Not all of the grinds are linear. In particular the Golden Lotus faction unlocks more quests as you gain reputation with them. The faster you can get the initial rep with them the more rep you earn per day. The total amount of rep you can earn looks to be enough that on some realms humans will gain an entire day's worth of honoured dailies over non-humans. That's another 1000 rep they get for free. They certainly get revered at least a day earlier. Which is a problem because two more factions (Shado-Pan and August Celestials) only unlock dailies after you're revered with Golden Lotus. This means humans get an extra day of dailies with these guys as well.
Ok, one day isn't such a big deal though. Just level even faster! Sure, but the next problem is how few dailies exist for those factions. Shado-Pan in particular only has 750 rep available per day. Suddenly the ~5000 rep boost that humans have is a lot bigger than a single day. By my calculations a human will finish that grind 34 days after hitting level 90. A non-human will take 40 days. Humans have a 6 day buffer as a result and I simply can't level that much faster. A human that cares about this realm first will beat a non-human that cares about it and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it.
There may be one thing you can do but it may not even make it into the live game. For most of the beta there were rare spawns (same as every expansion) that would drop a boe blue item, a bag with cash/cloth/etc in it, and an interesting item. Shapeshifting items, things like that. One of those interesting items grants 1000 rep with every faction. It is consumed on use but you could use more than one of them if you got your hands on multiples. They aren't bound so they could be sold to other players. In the last beta patch every interesting item was taken out and rares only dropped the bag and the blue. Which raises some questions... Are they gone for good? Why were they in the beta at all? If it does exist how good is it and what should I be willing to pay for it?
Well, for how good it is we need to decide how early we're getting it. Due to the way Golden Lotus scales getting one or two early is actually worth a ton of time. A single pipe knocks 2 days off my total by virtue of knocking off two days of Shado-Pan dailies at the end. The second pipe is worth 1 day at the end or 2 days at the start. 25 pipes is enough to cap Shado-Pan in a day. Knocking 4 days off by starting with 2 pipes is actually a pretty big deal. That cuts the human advantage down to 2 days assuming they don't get any pipes themselves. 2 days I'd like to think I can overcome. I can get to 90 a day earlier and I can log in on the last day sooner. So if these pipes exist I have a shot...
But how much is it worth to buy pipes? The first two are awesome but each extra one is guaranteed to shave at least a day off and could get two days thanks to rounding. Perhaps most importantly I'd need to keep them out of my opponent's hands. Quite possibly the way to go would be to get a second account and write a bot to camp the rare spawn to make sure I get all the pipes! Ignoring that option pipes are probably worth at least 5 digits and maybe 6. If I could guarantee I get the first two pipes and can suppress the remainder of the pipes for a month I would gladly pay 250k. Without those guarantees I'd probably still be paying 30-40k each.
Those guarantees are actually a pretty critical point in their own right. We're talking about an achievement that's going to take more than 6 weeks to pick up and there's no way to track your progress relative to other players. When you're looking at leveling realm firsts it's pretty easy to check on the status of your competition. Maybe you need to swap over to a horde alt but you can easily look to see what level the top players are at. Crafting ones are trickier but tend to be short enough to not really matter. You go pedal to the metal until someone wins and then you move on. 6 weeks is an awfully long time to work at something without knowing if you're ahead, close, or already guaranteed to lose. I hate being guaranteed to lose. Maybe I want to abort if I'm guaranteed to lose but I can't know! Possibly I could look up specific other players in the armory every day to find out if they're keeping pace but I don't know how I'd know who to look up. All human characters that hit level 90? Maybe I could write a spider to search through all known guilds? Hmm...
When working on all the reps at once you're looking at doing 45 dailies each day plus farming 16 plots, hunting down 3 rare fish, and maybe even scooping up some eggs. I've been plowing out dailies in an attempt to level Ogg Gulnath Tago and have been doing maybe 33 dailies each day. It takes a couple hours. I'm stuck flying all over the places to get all these dailies (Stormwind, Ironforge, Mount Hyjal, Tol Barad, Sholazar Basin, Icecrown...) and I'd imagine Pandaria is actually smaller. Of course I'm full of epics and doing pretty old content so I'm mashing the quests now. Pandaria ones I expect will be harder. It's probably 3 or 4 hours worth of quests to stay on top of things. Some of the factions take less time than others so you can afford to skimp every now and then. (Just make sure you never skimp on hitting revered with Golden Lotus and never skip anything related to Shado-Pan or August Celestials.)
I'm not sure if a human who wasn't trying would be able to beat a non-human. 6 days is a big lead but they have over a month to lose those days. Each of the factions has particular rewards (mounts/pets/gear/crafting patterns) and it's entirely plausible that a questing human would start by focusing on a faction with a good reward instead of on the one that will take longest to do. Someone who didn't look ahead wouldn't realize which they have to focus on and the 6 day lead could really slip away.
I do like the idea of getting started on the longest ones first and using armory to keep tabs on potential threats. Especially since there actually isn't anything you can do early on which would be 'wasted' time. You need to hit level 90 fast before you can really do anything else and I'd be leveling to 90 pretty fast regardless. And I do want the exalted rewards... Whatever they are!
I feel like I'm guaranteed to lose to any humans that care. I'm just not sure any of those exist.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Pandaren Ambassador Details
Ok, so I was pretty intrigued when I saw the realm first achievement for getting exalted with all the different Pandaren factions. Especially since they removed rep gains from running dungeons! If you want to get this achievement you need to be really into daily quests and maybe some other things too. I wanted to take a look at the different factions to see if I could work out what exactly was going to be needed. Dailies reset at 5am and the expansion launches at 3am so it could be possible to squeeze an extra day of dailies out if any dailies can be reached in less than 2 hours.
I'm operating under the assumption that all of these reps start at neutral and therefore require a total of 42000 rep to hit exalted. These numbers get modified by the human racial bonus diplomacy and the guild perk mr popularity. Rather than multiple the rep gains from each source by 1.1 or 1.2 I'm just going to reduce the rep needed to hit each rep level by the same factor, as follows:
Assuming you have one of the 10% reputation buff from either being human or being in a guild...
Rep for friendly - 2727
Cum rep for honoured - 8182
Cum rep for revered - 19091
Cum rep for exalted - 38182
Assuming you have both diplomacy and mr popularity...
Rep for friendly - 2500
Cum rep for honoured - 7500
Cum rep for revered - 17500
Cum rep for exalted - 35000
Being human cuts off 3182 rep. This is probably going to shave off at least a day towards getting the achievement I would think, but a non-human could theoretically make up that gap with 3 peace pipes if it actually makes it into the game? (A consumable item that drops from a rare monster that gives you 1000 rep with every Pandaren faction.)
After the break will be details for each of the 9 factions. There's some interesting stuff that I need to think through but I should have conclusions up tomorrow.
I'm operating under the assumption that all of these reps start at neutral and therefore require a total of 42000 rep to hit exalted. These numbers get modified by the human racial bonus diplomacy and the guild perk mr popularity. Rather than multiple the rep gains from each source by 1.1 or 1.2 I'm just going to reduce the rep needed to hit each rep level by the same factor, as follows:
Assuming you have one of the 10% reputation buff from either being human or being in a guild...
Rep for friendly - 2727
Cum rep for honoured - 8182
Cum rep for revered - 19091
Cum rep for exalted - 38182
Assuming you have both diplomacy and mr popularity...
Rep for friendly - 2500
Cum rep for honoured - 7500
Cum rep for revered - 17500
Cum rep for exalted - 35000
Being human cuts off 3182 rep. This is probably going to shave off at least a day towards getting the achievement I would think, but a non-human could theoretically make up that gap with 3 peace pipes if it actually makes it into the game? (A consumable item that drops from a rare monster that gives you 1000 rep with every Pandaren faction.)
After the break will be details for each of the 9 factions. There's some interesting stuff that I need to think through but I should have conclusions up tomorrow.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Guild Experience Progress
Last week I talked a bit about outstanding guild perks. We had 20 days before MoP hit and we were 1500 quests away from getting 10% trade skill-up chance and another 850 quests away from getting 15% more stuff from gathering skills. I opined that I could probably get the 1500 quests on my own since that would only be 75 quests per day. 7 days in, how have things been going?
I've managed to get 420 quests done in 7 days. That's not quite 75 per day but it's close enough that I could probably ramp up if I had to. On the downside I've pounded out all the quests in Vash'jir and Uldum on my DK and picked up Loremaster of Cataclysm so I actually don't have many options left. I'm still doing dailies in various places but if they wouldn't be worth experience they aren't worth guild experience. Realistically my only option would be to start leveling an alt to get access to more quests.
Luckily it really doesn't look like that will be needed. I may have completed 420 quests but other people in the guild completed 872 quests. That's enough to make it pretty much guaranteed that we'll get the skill-up perk even if people slow down a fair bit. Heck, even if we quest at half the rate we did this week we'll even get the gathering perk. Maybe I'll have some spare time to play League of Legends...
I've managed to get 420 quests done in 7 days. That's not quite 75 per day but it's close enough that I could probably ramp up if I had to. On the downside I've pounded out all the quests in Vash'jir and Uldum on my DK and picked up Loremaster of Cataclysm so I actually don't have many options left. I'm still doing dailies in various places but if they wouldn't be worth experience they aren't worth guild experience. Realistically my only option would be to start leveling an alt to get access to more quests.
Luckily it really doesn't look like that will be needed. I may have completed 420 quests but other people in the guild completed 872 quests. That's enough to make it pretty much guaranteed that we'll get the skill-up perk even if people slow down a fair bit. Heck, even if we quest at half the rate we did this week we'll even get the gathering perk. Maybe I'll have some spare time to play League of Legends...
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Mists of Pandaria Realm Firsts
It's time for me to ramble on for a while about the potential realm first achievements for the coming World of Warcraft expansion. I got a lot of my information this time around from an awesome blog I've just recently discovered: Kaliope's Crafting Blog. She's gone through all the professions on the beta and given rough ideas for what it will take to max them out quickly. I'm going to throw my own thoughts in there so you're probably better off just going to read her stuff. Now, I did get three realm firsts in Cataclysm (cooking, blacksmithing, inscription) so my thoughts hopefully aren't worthless but they should definitely be taken with a grain of salt since I have no hands on experience with the beta and haven't even really played the game at all in a year and a half. So... What do we have?
Level 90
- Uh... Play a lot more than anyone else?
- I believe Sky had 25 pre-completed quests before Cataclysm launch but I don't know how big of a boost it gave him. Maybe having one quest hub's worth of dailies would be a good idea? I doubt spending a lot of time flying around makes sense but you could cash in a bunch of Molten Front dailies, hearth to Stormwind, and take the airship to Pandaria?
- I thought storing up archaeology fragments would help but it sounds like the old stuff isn't worth any experience at 85. I did it before I looked that up so I'll try and see I guess?
- I guess it makes sense to stock up on things like flasks/food/enchanting scrolls/gems so you can buff up any upgrades you get as you go?
- My gut feeling is doing every dungeon once for the quest experience will help but that spending all your time in dungeons will hurt.
- Herbalism and mining nodes are worth 2/3rds of a monster kill. That's probably good enough to make it optimal to have those two tradeskills? I wouldn't go out of my way to mine or herb but if you run by a node while doing a quest it can only help to pick it up I would think.
- A lot of caffeine or a friend to tag in on your account are pretty much mandatory I think?
Level 90 Death Knight, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior
- All the same as the above except you might be on less of a clock. Maybe a nice consolation prize if you fail at first 90.
Level 90 Monk
- Has to start at level 1 so will take even longer.
- Recruit a friend works, so you can get triple experience until level 80.
- Thinking about it more... The recruitee can actually give free levels to the recruiter. So theoretically if Robb got two characters up to level 80 he could instantly level my monk up to level 80. I'd still have 10 levels to go, of course, but that's a lead that likely can't be beat. It probably takes 20ish hours to get those levels with triple experience and 60ish normally... That's a stupid lead.
- There isn't a level 80 or 85 version. Just the 90.
Challenge Conqueror: Gold
- Be the first person to beat the gold standard time in every challenge dungeon.
- Really not something you can plan on getting quickly since you'd need a group of 5 people to hit max level, get enough gear to do the challenge dungeons, and then practice enough to beat them all in really fast times.
- Since we're focusing on challenge dungeons I really want this (on maybe 5 people at once) but it won't require doing anything differently I don't think.
Pandaren Ambassador
- Get exalted with all 9 of the Panda factions.
- Rep gains from dungeons have been taken out for this expansion so you need to earn all this reputation through quests/daily quests/Farmville.
- I guess the key here is to do every single daily for all the factions every day? They removed the 25 daily quest per day cap so this seems feasible?
- There may or may not be an item (Hozen Peace Pipe) which gives 1000 rep with every faction. You may be able to buy these?
- When I saw this achievement and saw that they took dungeon rep out I immediately thought that this achievement is Sthenno's for the taking if he came back to play.
Alchemist
- Apparently alchemy is going to a random learning system. When you make something you might learn a new recipe. Some recipes are better than others for leveling... So you need to get lucky and randomly learn those ones?
- The last few points either need a bunch of mining bars or a couple SoH.
- You may be able to do this with only like 8 stacks of herbs total if you get the right recipes? And 5 stacks of ghost iron or 3 hours worth of SoH...
Angler
- Fishing can be done anywhere. Average 5.5 casts per level the whole way up. So fish for a couple hours and hope you're the luckiest!
- Can potentially store up a quest worth 2 fishing skill.
- Optimal speed is to fish right beside the trainer in a major city. Taking a few minutes to get to Pandaria will let you get some fish for cooking.
Archaeologist
- All pre-MoP stuff is worth nothing in terms of leveling.
- As you gain skill the dig sites start spawning in harder zones.
- Rogues probably have an advantage because of vanish as a result?
- Feels like you should store up 200 of each token before you start making things in the hopes that you can spawn more things in low level zones?
- Apparently it only took 2.5 hours for Kaliope to get this done on the beta.
Blacksmith
- Requires a SoH to get a recipe to finish it off.
- Can be done entirely with the base ore. 25 stacks of ore. And one Cata shield spike!
- Seems a _ton_ easier than in Cata where you had to hit level 84 to get it done thanks to phasing. Here you just need ore and to farm for a couple hours for a SoH.
Cook
- Wow, did cooking change a ton!
- There are 6 different cooking skills. Your main cooking skill is the highest of these ways.
- Recipes require a ton of ingredients. Especially vegetables. Which you can eventually grow on your farm but will be very tricky for realm first.
- To finish it off you need vendor spices that you get via cooking dailies. You can do one per way, apparently. The spices are not BoP. So whoever gets realm first here will almost certainly be borrowing spices from friends or buying them on the AH should people be selling them.
- Kaliope said it took 20 hours of solid farming to get this... Seems extreme and I bet it goes to someone with cash instead.
Enchanter
- You can convert dust and essences back and forth to streamline things a little.
- Rods are gone.
- It seems like you just need to gather a bunch of mats and then make things. Nothing tricky going on at all.
- Looks like you need a little more than 3 stacks each of dust and essences? I don't know how this compares to Cata but it sounds pretty cheap.
Engineer
- Requires either 2 SoH or a couple rare gems.
- It sounds like engineers get lots of cool things but the leveling is a huge pain.
- Sounds like it needs close to 40 stacks of ore, so a lot more than blacksmithing.
Herbalist
- Just pick a bunch of flowers.
- Make sure you get a +10 skill item (like a gnomish army knife) so you can herb things ASAP.
- Probably involves trying to survive in a high level zone?
Jewelcrafter
- Rare cuts are learned randomly this time, one per day, instead of needing 3 dailies to get one of your choice.
- Jewelcrafter only gems are found when prospecting which is a huge buff compared to needing to spend daily tokens on them!
- You probably need 10 of the same rare gem to hit max. So you need to either get lucky and buy some or prospect enough ore to get them. Maybe this takes 30 stacks of ore. Maybe it takes 50. Who knows!
- Certainly it sounds like you can get this in a short period of time if you buy enough ore.
Leatherworker
- Like blacksmithing it'll take a SoH to buy the last recipe you use.
- Will take like 17 stacks of leather to go with that SoH. Presumably you can skin that up while farming the SoH?
Medic
- Make a lot of bandages.
- Sounds like the trainer teaches everything you need. So you just need your 6 stacks of cloth and a trainer. Sounds pretty easy.
Miner
- Mine a bunch of rocks.
- Same as herbalist. Just jump off the boat, run to a hopefully player-light area and mine a ton.
Scribe
- Also runs on a discovery system. Hopefully the one glyph you learn is orange until near the cap!
- Inscription makes all of the shoulder enchants now (no more rep grind!) so presumably you can level up a bit making stuff that people will actually use.
- Of course, the new glyphs will probably be worth a fortune as well.
- Sounds like you need less than 3 stacks of ink to cap. Which is what, 15 stacks of herbs? So more than alchemy, but you don't need a SoH.
Skinner
- Uh, kill some beasts. Skin them.
Tailor
- Also needs a single SoH to buy a recipe.
- Sounds like it takes 22 stacks of cloth.
- Again has a daily cooldown that requires you to stand in a certain zone. I haven't done tailoring ever so I don't know how annoying that is, but at least it sounds like you don't need that cloth to max out.
There are also a few guild realm first's...
Grand Empress Shek'Zeer, Sha of Fear, Will of the Emperor
- Kill the end boss on heroic of a 10/25 man raid.
- Nothing to prepare for beforehand, really. Just be the best raiding guild on your server.
Guild Level 30
- Recruit every idiot you can find and convince them to do quests?
Working as a Better Team
- Get all the professions maxed out by people in the guild.
- The Cata version of this sucked because it took 3 weeks to get the reputation to get credit. That's gone now, so this should just be a race to who can get all the things first. I feel like we would have had the Cata one if the rep restriction wasn't there (we did get like 5 of the crafting realm firsts, after all).
- Someone is claiming any given character could only count once? So despite having blacksmithing and cooking on Recolada I would only satisfy one of those requirements? I don't know what to think about that.
Some of these sound interesting. I can probably stick with blacksmithing and jewelcrafting if I'm willing to buy 60 stacks of ore. How much is a stack of ore going to go for? I could realistically afford to spend almost 4k a stack, but if it's anywhere near that price I'd rather switch to mining like I did last time. But if we're talking 200g per stack? I'll just be a buyer. I don't remember the prices at Cata launch but I don't think it was much more than 100g?
That said, I do enjoy mining and with no jewelcrafting tokens to start farming immediately I don't know that I want to hold onto jewelcrafting either...
Fishing into cooking is always interesting.
Heck, it's tempting to just play my rogue for a few hours to get inscription up. Getting the daily discovery process started there could be big money! (Though I guess the same is true of jewelcrafting...)
I would like Working as a Better Team but I don't know that enough people are coming back to get that one. Especially if we need 15 distinct people to cover every profession.
And then the daily quest rep grind is intriguing as well... Options, options...
Level 90
- Uh... Play a lot more than anyone else?
- I believe Sky had 25 pre-completed quests before Cataclysm launch but I don't know how big of a boost it gave him. Maybe having one quest hub's worth of dailies would be a good idea? I doubt spending a lot of time flying around makes sense but you could cash in a bunch of Molten Front dailies, hearth to Stormwind, and take the airship to Pandaria?
- I thought storing up archaeology fragments would help but it sounds like the old stuff isn't worth any experience at 85. I did it before I looked that up so I'll try and see I guess?
- I guess it makes sense to stock up on things like flasks/food/enchanting scrolls/gems so you can buff up any upgrades you get as you go?
- My gut feeling is doing every dungeon once for the quest experience will help but that spending all your time in dungeons will hurt.
- Herbalism and mining nodes are worth 2/3rds of a monster kill. That's probably good enough to make it optimal to have those two tradeskills? I wouldn't go out of my way to mine or herb but if you run by a node while doing a quest it can only help to pick it up I would think.
- A lot of caffeine or a friend to tag in on your account are pretty much mandatory I think?
Level 90 Death Knight, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock, Warrior
- All the same as the above except you might be on less of a clock. Maybe a nice consolation prize if you fail at first 90.
Level 90 Monk
- Has to start at level 1 so will take even longer.
- Recruit a friend works, so you can get triple experience until level 80.
- Thinking about it more... The recruitee can actually give free levels to the recruiter. So theoretically if Robb got two characters up to level 80 he could instantly level my monk up to level 80. I'd still have 10 levels to go, of course, but that's a lead that likely can't be beat. It probably takes 20ish hours to get those levels with triple experience and 60ish normally... That's a stupid lead.
- There isn't a level 80 or 85 version. Just the 90.
Challenge Conqueror: Gold
- Be the first person to beat the gold standard time in every challenge dungeon.
- Really not something you can plan on getting quickly since you'd need a group of 5 people to hit max level, get enough gear to do the challenge dungeons, and then practice enough to beat them all in really fast times.
- Since we're focusing on challenge dungeons I really want this (on maybe 5 people at once) but it won't require doing anything differently I don't think.
Pandaren Ambassador
- Get exalted with all 9 of the Panda factions.
- Rep gains from dungeons have been taken out for this expansion so you need to earn all this reputation through quests/daily quests/Farmville.
- I guess the key here is to do every single daily for all the factions every day? They removed the 25 daily quest per day cap so this seems feasible?
- There may or may not be an item (Hozen Peace Pipe) which gives 1000 rep with every faction. You may be able to buy these?
- When I saw this achievement and saw that they took dungeon rep out I immediately thought that this achievement is Sthenno's for the taking if he came back to play.
Alchemist
- Apparently alchemy is going to a random learning system. When you make something you might learn a new recipe. Some recipes are better than others for leveling... So you need to get lucky and randomly learn those ones?
- The last few points either need a bunch of mining bars or a couple SoH.
- You may be able to do this with only like 8 stacks of herbs total if you get the right recipes? And 5 stacks of ghost iron or 3 hours worth of SoH...
Angler
- Fishing can be done anywhere. Average 5.5 casts per level the whole way up. So fish for a couple hours and hope you're the luckiest!
- Can potentially store up a quest worth 2 fishing skill.
- Optimal speed is to fish right beside the trainer in a major city. Taking a few minutes to get to Pandaria will let you get some fish for cooking.
Archaeologist
- All pre-MoP stuff is worth nothing in terms of leveling.
- As you gain skill the dig sites start spawning in harder zones.
- Rogues probably have an advantage because of vanish as a result?
- Feels like you should store up 200 of each token before you start making things in the hopes that you can spawn more things in low level zones?
- Apparently it only took 2.5 hours for Kaliope to get this done on the beta.
Blacksmith
- Requires a SoH to get a recipe to finish it off.
- Can be done entirely with the base ore. 25 stacks of ore. And one Cata shield spike!
- Seems a _ton_ easier than in Cata where you had to hit level 84 to get it done thanks to phasing. Here you just need ore and to farm for a couple hours for a SoH.
Cook
- Wow, did cooking change a ton!
- There are 6 different cooking skills. Your main cooking skill is the highest of these ways.
- Recipes require a ton of ingredients. Especially vegetables. Which you can eventually grow on your farm but will be very tricky for realm first.
- To finish it off you need vendor spices that you get via cooking dailies. You can do one per way, apparently. The spices are not BoP. So whoever gets realm first here will almost certainly be borrowing spices from friends or buying them on the AH should people be selling them.
- Kaliope said it took 20 hours of solid farming to get this... Seems extreme and I bet it goes to someone with cash instead.
Enchanter
- You can convert dust and essences back and forth to streamline things a little.
- Rods are gone.
- It seems like you just need to gather a bunch of mats and then make things. Nothing tricky going on at all.
- Looks like you need a little more than 3 stacks each of dust and essences? I don't know how this compares to Cata but it sounds pretty cheap.
Engineer
- Requires either 2 SoH or a couple rare gems.
- It sounds like engineers get lots of cool things but the leveling is a huge pain.
- Sounds like it needs close to 40 stacks of ore, so a lot more than blacksmithing.
Herbalist
- Just pick a bunch of flowers.
- Make sure you get a +10 skill item (like a gnomish army knife) so you can herb things ASAP.
- Probably involves trying to survive in a high level zone?
Jewelcrafter
- Rare cuts are learned randomly this time, one per day, instead of needing 3 dailies to get one of your choice.
- Jewelcrafter only gems are found when prospecting which is a huge buff compared to needing to spend daily tokens on them!
- You probably need 10 of the same rare gem to hit max. So you need to either get lucky and buy some or prospect enough ore to get them. Maybe this takes 30 stacks of ore. Maybe it takes 50. Who knows!
- Certainly it sounds like you can get this in a short period of time if you buy enough ore.
Leatherworker
- Like blacksmithing it'll take a SoH to buy the last recipe you use.
- Will take like 17 stacks of leather to go with that SoH. Presumably you can skin that up while farming the SoH?
Medic
- Make a lot of bandages.
- Sounds like the trainer teaches everything you need. So you just need your 6 stacks of cloth and a trainer. Sounds pretty easy.
Miner
- Mine a bunch of rocks.
- Same as herbalist. Just jump off the boat, run to a hopefully player-light area and mine a ton.
Scribe
- Also runs on a discovery system. Hopefully the one glyph you learn is orange until near the cap!
- Inscription makes all of the shoulder enchants now (no more rep grind!) so presumably you can level up a bit making stuff that people will actually use.
- Of course, the new glyphs will probably be worth a fortune as well.
- Sounds like you need less than 3 stacks of ink to cap. Which is what, 15 stacks of herbs? So more than alchemy, but you don't need a SoH.
Skinner
- Uh, kill some beasts. Skin them.
Tailor
- Also needs a single SoH to buy a recipe.
- Sounds like it takes 22 stacks of cloth.
- Again has a daily cooldown that requires you to stand in a certain zone. I haven't done tailoring ever so I don't know how annoying that is, but at least it sounds like you don't need that cloth to max out.
There are also a few guild realm first's...
Grand Empress Shek'Zeer, Sha of Fear, Will of the Emperor
- Kill the end boss on heroic of a 10/25 man raid.
- Nothing to prepare for beforehand, really. Just be the best raiding guild on your server.
Guild Level 30
- Recruit every idiot you can find and convince them to do quests?
Working as a Better Team
- Get all the professions maxed out by people in the guild.
- The Cata version of this sucked because it took 3 weeks to get the reputation to get credit. That's gone now, so this should just be a race to who can get all the things first. I feel like we would have had the Cata one if the rep restriction wasn't there (we did get like 5 of the crafting realm firsts, after all).
- Someone is claiming any given character could only count once? So despite having blacksmithing and cooking on Recolada I would only satisfy one of those requirements? I don't know what to think about that.
Some of these sound interesting. I can probably stick with blacksmithing and jewelcrafting if I'm willing to buy 60 stacks of ore. How much is a stack of ore going to go for? I could realistically afford to spend almost 4k a stack, but if it's anywhere near that price I'd rather switch to mining like I did last time. But if we're talking 200g per stack? I'll just be a buyer. I don't remember the prices at Cata launch but I don't think it was much more than 100g?
That said, I do enjoy mining and with no jewelcrafting tokens to start farming immediately I don't know that I want to hold onto jewelcrafting either...
Fishing into cooking is always interesting.
Heck, it's tempting to just play my rogue for a few hours to get inscription up. Getting the daily discovery process started there could be big money! (Though I guess the same is true of jewelcrafting...)
I would like Working as a Better Team but I don't know that enough people are coming back to get that one. Especially if we need 15 distinct people to cover every profession.
And then the daily quest rep grind is intriguing as well... Options, options...
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
World of Farmville
I used to play Farmville on Facebook back when it was a relatively new thing. It gets (justifiably) trashed by most gamers but I actually liked it while I was playing it. It didn't have a ton of depth or breadth in terms of strategy but there was a little bit in working out the optimal things to plant at what times (pretty much everything had different costs, rewards, and time to bloom) and I did like visiting other people's farms to see what they were doing. I also am not put off by repetitive tasks for irrelevant rewards... They don't call me 'the Insane' for nothing! I ended up quitting for a few reasons: the novelty wore off, they shifted even more heavily into a 'spam your friends' model, and they removed pigs as a gift option. I used to give everyone a pig every day and was very amused when I'd visit some people who didn't get many gifts... Their farm was full of pigs!
World of Warcraft is adding a farming minigame in Mists of Pandaria that has me pretty excited. Each player gets their own little instanced farm with a house so the demand for player housing has finally been at least partially met. You get to start off planting 4 seeds per day and can get up to planting 16 per day. There are tons of different seeds (19) and you can grow many types of vegetables for cooking along with any crafting materials. (cloth/leather/ore/herbs/motes of harmony) Each day a different thing grows best so there's the potential for planning out the 'right' seed to plant each day. Apparently you can grow trees to plant in the game world ala Glitch (though they only last 3 minutes instead of until killed). There are 10 different NPCs that deal with the farm and you get individual reputation bars with all of them. Including the generic 'Tillers' reputation that gives 11 different things to grind up on the farm! Each of the friends will upgrade your farm in some way when you reach max friendship with them. The only downside I see here is everyone will ultimately get the same upgrades. I think it would be better if individual farms were customized with furniture based on the player choices like in FFXI and I bet that comes down the pipe in a future patch.
It's hard to tell from beta stories but it sounds like farming might actually be a really good way of generating spirits of harmony which are the new BoP crafting item which is used in all sorts of ways and replaces the elemental ingredients from previous expansions. It also sounds like you need a stupidly large number of vegetables for cooking various things so just growing those might make sense too. The ore/herbs can apparently give you a fair number of the rare drops from those as well... I guess the prices of the different things is something to keep an eye on once it all goes live.
You need to be level 90 to really work the farm (Tillers rep only starts being earned from harvesting when you're level 90 for some reason) but you can get started with planting vegetables right at 85. I wonder if it would be worth running farms on alts? I'm guessing no but I guess that remains to be seen as well. I just worry that some of the tedium will creep into it if done on too many characters every day and I really want to max everything on my main (there are achievements!)
World of Warcraft is adding a farming minigame in Mists of Pandaria that has me pretty excited. Each player gets their own little instanced farm with a house so the demand for player housing has finally been at least partially met. You get to start off planting 4 seeds per day and can get up to planting 16 per day. There are tons of different seeds (19) and you can grow many types of vegetables for cooking along with any crafting materials. (cloth/leather/ore/herbs/motes of harmony) Each day a different thing grows best so there's the potential for planning out the 'right' seed to plant each day. Apparently you can grow trees to plant in the game world ala Glitch (though they only last 3 minutes instead of until killed). There are 10 different NPCs that deal with the farm and you get individual reputation bars with all of them. Including the generic 'Tillers' reputation that gives 11 different things to grind up on the farm! Each of the friends will upgrade your farm in some way when you reach max friendship with them. The only downside I see here is everyone will ultimately get the same upgrades. I think it would be better if individual farms were customized with furniture based on the player choices like in FFXI and I bet that comes down the pipe in a future patch.
It's hard to tell from beta stories but it sounds like farming might actually be a really good way of generating spirits of harmony which are the new BoP crafting item which is used in all sorts of ways and replaces the elemental ingredients from previous expansions. It also sounds like you need a stupidly large number of vegetables for cooking various things so just growing those might make sense too. The ore/herbs can apparently give you a fair number of the rare drops from those as well... I guess the prices of the different things is something to keep an eye on once it all goes live.
You need to be level 90 to really work the farm (Tillers rep only starts being earned from harvesting when you're level 90 for some reason) but you can get started with planting vegetables right at 85. I wonder if it would be worth running farms on alts? I'm guessing no but I guess that remains to be seen as well. I just worry that some of the tedium will creep into it if done on too many characters every day and I really want to max everything on my main (there are achievements!)
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