This means that, just like regular epic gems, Dragon's Eyes are a raid consumable of sorts, and will be purchased every time a jewelcrafter upgrades certain pieces of gear.If you are looking for easy money, cooldown style, this is the closest it gets. Each jewelcrafting daily, in addition to the smallish amount of gold you get for doing the quest, rewards you with a highly sought after commodity that you can choose to turn into gold immediately. On many servers, Dragon's Eyes sell for hundreds of gold.That fruit at the top of the treeOf course, the alternative is to not use your tokens for gold, but for those recipes I mentioned before. There are pros and cons for each side. If you "take the money and run", you're guaranteeing yourself a decent return on the 10 minutes you spend flying to and hearthing back from the daily quest. If you buy a recipe, however, you could use it to make more than that over the long run! This is "proactive" profiteering. You have to make a conscious effort to squeeze profits from the ability to cut a gem, but there's no artificial limit on your volume, like there is for selling Dragon's Eyes.If you want to know whether there's a recipe that's worth it, you'll need to do some research. Ideally you'd have a clear idea of what you can realistically buy the uncut gems for, an idea of what the cut gem goes for, and some sort of clue about how much demand there is for a cut. If you had all this info, you could make a very well informed decision about whether those tokens are worth more as gold in your hand now, or as the ability to cut a gem. Unfortunately, this information is probably harder to get than it's worth. I don't know of any easy way to export Auctioneer data to a file, and unless you happen to have Market Watcher installed and are storing the historic prices of all the gem cuts you're interested in (which, by the way, would probably be a ridiculous amount of memory and not nearly as helpful as it sounds), you're going to have to guestimate it.Some very useful data about gems can be found at the WoW Gem Finder, a nifty little site that lets you filter gems by basically any statistic, as well as WoW-Popular list of gems. Assume that the most popular gems will be the lowest margin, but if you look at what they're selling for on a Tuesday night, you'll see whether it's worth the competition. Also, some of the lower volume gems (the annoying off color ones we need to socket to activate our meta gems, for example) can sell at very nice margin when your competition forgets to keep theirs for sale on the auction house.Don't forget to look at the meta gems! These days, everyone is so caught up in the trendy high volume epic cuts market that they forget that every time someone gets a helm upgrade, they need to get a meta gem. If you have access to a friendly alchemist (ideally a transmute specialized one), you can transmute uncut meta gems out of base mats. From there, just look at that WoW-Popular link to see what people use.Working the anglesJewelcrafters all start somewhere. Specifically, at 1 skill. Getting from there to where they want to be is a long and, when done incorrectly, expensive prospect. How to do this profitably is another post, but today we'll talk about a big part of jewelcrafting's biggest money maker: Prospecting. This ability is the cornerstone of jewelcrafting, and is the main way that uncut gems enter the marketplace. Since there are a ton of places when you're on the way to 450 skill that you need uncut gems to level, the demand is quite naturally high. The angle is that regardless of the highest level ore you can prospect, there's money to be made prospecting lower level ores. Try out:Adamantite Ore Fel Iron Ore Thorium Ore Mithril Ore Iron Ore Tin Ore Copper Ore These can all be prospected into gems that may or may not sell for more than the ore you bought to make them. Take a look at the prospect tab on the Wowhead.com pages to get an idea of the yields, and then look up your uncut gem prices. If the yields times the gem prices are more than the ore, you're in the money. Some of these used to be so profitable that a single high demand, uncommon uncut gem would pay for the ore on its own, and the rest was all profit. There's a lot of management overhead in this business, however. You need spreadsheets, research, and constant buying and selling of a large quantity of different types of items.As good as your toolsAs always, your ability to play the AH profitably will depend on your tools. Addons and mods make the auctioneer! For this business, Auctioneer is (of course) very handy in that you can automate mass buying and selling of lots of types of product. Your snatch list should have all these ores on it with the threshold set to lower than what you make by selling the uncut gems. You can use appraiser to automatically mass post and price the gems. Don't forget, the demand for these are sporadic, but heavy. Every time a budding jewelcrafter makes their way through the ranks of old world mats, they will have to buy large quantities of gems. Even if your auctions are not the cheapest on the AH, they can still sell.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Want to get Gold Capped?
This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast.Hi folks, this week we'll be going over jewelcrafting. Making money with jewelcrafting can be a challenge, but it's a rewarding one. In fact, very few professions have as much earning potential as this one does. We'll start with the easy part: if you have a jewelcrafter, where's the low hanging fruit? I like to call this "reactive" profits. Anything where you can get a fixed income sort of profit for minimal effort, but you can't grind falls into this category for me. Alchemy has daily epic gem transmutes, mining used to have a daily Titansteel cooldown, tailoring has a bag cooldown, etc. What does jewelcrafting have?Low hanging fruitAs Michael mentioned in a recent Insider Trader, each and every day, jewelcrafters can do the jewelcrafting daily quest. This will reward them with a Dalaran Jewelcrafter's Token, which can be turned in for a variety of recipes or a Dragon's Eye, which is importantly cut by jewelcrafters into their better than average epic gems. This means that, just like regular epic gems, Dragon's Eyes are a raid consumable of sorts, and will be purchased every time a jewelcrafter upgrades certain pieces of gear.If you are looking for easy money, cooldown style, this is the closest it gets. Each jewelcrafting daily, in addition to the smallish amount of gold you get for doing the quest, rewards you with a highly sought after commodity that you can choose to turn into gold immediately. On many servers, Dragon's Eyes sell for hundreds of gold.That fruit at the top of the treeOf course, the alternative is to not use your tokens for gold, but for those recipes I mentioned before. There are pros and cons for each side. If you "take the money and run", you're guaranteeing yourself a decent return on the 10 minutes you spend flying to and hearthing back from the daily quest. If you buy a recipe, however, you could use it to make more than that over the long run! This is "proactive" profiteering. You have to make a conscious effort to squeeze profits from the ability to cut a gem, but there's no artificial limit on your volume, like there is for selling Dragon's Eyes.If you want to know whether there's a recipe that's worth it, you'll need to do some research. Ideally you'd have a clear idea of what you can realistically buy the uncut gems for, an idea of what the cut gem goes for, and some sort of clue about how much demand there is for a cut. If you had all this info, you could make a very well informed decision about whether those tokens are worth more as gold in your hand now, or as the ability to cut a gem. Unfortunately, this information is probably harder to get than it's worth. I don't know of any easy way to export Auctioneer data to a file, and unless you happen to have Market Watcher installed and are storing the historic prices of all the gem cuts you're interested in (which, by the way, would probably be a ridiculous amount of memory and not nearly as helpful as it sounds), you're going to have to guestimate it.Some very useful data about gems can be found at the WoW Gem Finder, a nifty little site that lets you filter gems by basically any statistic, as well as WoW-Popular list of gems. Assume that the most popular gems will be the lowest margin, but if you look at what they're selling for on a Tuesday night, you'll see whether it's worth the competition. Also, some of the lower volume gems (the annoying off color ones we need to socket to activate our meta gems, for example) can sell at very nice margin when your competition forgets to keep theirs for sale on the auction house.Don't forget to look at the meta gems! These days, everyone is so caught up in the trendy high volume epic cuts market that they forget that every time someone gets a helm upgrade, they need to get a meta gem. If you have access to a friendly alchemist (ideally a transmute specialized one), you can transmute uncut meta gems out of base mats. From there, just look at that WoW-Popular link to see what people use.Working the anglesJewelcrafters all start somewhere. Specifically, at 1 skill. Getting from there to where they want to be is a long and, when done incorrectly, expensive prospect. How to do this profitably is another post, but today we'll talk about a big part of jewelcrafting's biggest money maker: Prospecting. This ability is the cornerstone of jewelcrafting, and is the main way that uncut gems enter the marketplace. Since there are a ton of places when you're on the way to 450 skill that you need uncut gems to level, the demand is quite naturally high. The angle is that regardless of the highest level ore you can prospect, there's money to be made prospecting lower level ores. Try out:Adamantite Ore Fel Iron Ore Thorium Ore Mithril Ore Iron Ore Tin Ore Copper Ore These can all be prospected into gems that may or may not sell for more than the ore you bought to make them. Take a look at the prospect tab on the Wowhead.com pages to get an idea of the yields, and then look up your uncut gem prices. If the yields times the gem prices are more than the ore, you're in the money. Some of these used to be so profitable that a single high demand, uncommon uncut gem would pay for the ore on its own, and the rest was all profit. There's a lot of management overhead in this business, however. You need spreadsheets, research, and constant buying and selling of a large quantity of different types of items.As good as your toolsAs always, your ability to play the AH profitably will depend on your tools. Addons and mods make the auctioneer! For this business, Auctioneer is (of course) very handy in that you can automate mass buying and selling of lots of types of product. Your snatch list should have all these ores on it with the threshold set to lower than what you make by selling the uncut gems. You can use appraiser to automatically mass post and price the gems. Don't forget, the demand for these are sporadic, but heavy. Every time a budding jewelcrafter makes their way through the ranks of old world mats, they will have to buy large quantities of gems. Even if your auctions are not the cheapest on the AH, they can still sell.
This means that, just like regular epic gems, Dragon's Eyes are a raid consumable of sorts, and will be purchased every time a jewelcrafter upgrades certain pieces of gear.If you are looking for easy money, cooldown style, this is the closest it gets. Each jewelcrafting daily, in addition to the smallish amount of gold you get for doing the quest, rewards you with a highly sought after commodity that you can choose to turn into gold immediately. On many servers, Dragon's Eyes sell for hundreds of gold.That fruit at the top of the treeOf course, the alternative is to not use your tokens for gold, but for those recipes I mentioned before. There are pros and cons for each side. If you "take the money and run", you're guaranteeing yourself a decent return on the 10 minutes you spend flying to and hearthing back from the daily quest. If you buy a recipe, however, you could use it to make more than that over the long run! This is "proactive" profiteering. You have to make a conscious effort to squeeze profits from the ability to cut a gem, but there's no artificial limit on your volume, like there is for selling Dragon's Eyes.If you want to know whether there's a recipe that's worth it, you'll need to do some research. Ideally you'd have a clear idea of what you can realistically buy the uncut gems for, an idea of what the cut gem goes for, and some sort of clue about how much demand there is for a cut. If you had all this info, you could make a very well informed decision about whether those tokens are worth more as gold in your hand now, or as the ability to cut a gem. Unfortunately, this information is probably harder to get than it's worth. I don't know of any easy way to export Auctioneer data to a file, and unless you happen to have Market Watcher installed and are storing the historic prices of all the gem cuts you're interested in (which, by the way, would probably be a ridiculous amount of memory and not nearly as helpful as it sounds), you're going to have to guestimate it.Some very useful data about gems can be found at the WoW Gem Finder, a nifty little site that lets you filter gems by basically any statistic, as well as WoW-Popular list of gems. Assume that the most popular gems will be the lowest margin, but if you look at what they're selling for on a Tuesday night, you'll see whether it's worth the competition. Also, some of the lower volume gems (the annoying off color ones we need to socket to activate our meta gems, for example) can sell at very nice margin when your competition forgets to keep theirs for sale on the auction house.Don't forget to look at the meta gems! These days, everyone is so caught up in the trendy high volume epic cuts market that they forget that every time someone gets a helm upgrade, they need to get a meta gem. If you have access to a friendly alchemist (ideally a transmute specialized one), you can transmute uncut meta gems out of base mats. From there, just look at that WoW-Popular link to see what people use.Working the anglesJewelcrafters all start somewhere. Specifically, at 1 skill. Getting from there to where they want to be is a long and, when done incorrectly, expensive prospect. How to do this profitably is another post, but today we'll talk about a big part of jewelcrafting's biggest money maker: Prospecting. This ability is the cornerstone of jewelcrafting, and is the main way that uncut gems enter the marketplace. Since there are a ton of places when you're on the way to 450 skill that you need uncut gems to level, the demand is quite naturally high. The angle is that regardless of the highest level ore you can prospect, there's money to be made prospecting lower level ores. Try out:Adamantite Ore Fel Iron Ore Thorium Ore Mithril Ore Iron Ore Tin Ore Copper Ore These can all be prospected into gems that may or may not sell for more than the ore you bought to make them. Take a look at the prospect tab on the Wowhead.com pages to get an idea of the yields, and then look up your uncut gem prices. If the yields times the gem prices are more than the ore, you're in the money. Some of these used to be so profitable that a single high demand, uncommon uncut gem would pay for the ore on its own, and the rest was all profit. There's a lot of management overhead in this business, however. You need spreadsheets, research, and constant buying and selling of a large quantity of different types of items.As good as your toolsAs always, your ability to play the AH profitably will depend on your tools. Addons and mods make the auctioneer! For this business, Auctioneer is (of course) very handy in that you can automate mass buying and selling of lots of types of product. Your snatch list should have all these ores on it with the threshold set to lower than what you make by selling the uncut gems. You can use appraiser to automatically mass post and price the gems. Don't forget, the demand for these are sporadic, but heavy. Every time a budding jewelcrafter makes their way through the ranks of old world mats, they will have to buy large quantities of gems. Even if your auctions are not the cheapest on the AH, they can still sell.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
what are we actually doing?
Something we may not always think about what our spells and abilities actually do in the setting of the game. Sure, for us, the tooltip tells us the basic information and we go on from there, but what are we actually doing? How does Arcane Shot work? Does the hunter just have a special magic arrow they shoot me with? Do they somehow wave the arrow around and it becomes magic, say a few words in Darnassian or Troll or whatever? Some abilities are pretty obviously spells, like almost everything a mage does, but for other classes the border between magic and skill can get pretty blurry... moves like Cloak of Shadows really beggar the imagination to explain in a non magical way.
A recent discussion on the forums about Thunder Clap and its being suppressed by silence effects (it always has, or at least has for s
o long that I've just accepted it) brings out Ghostcrawler to explain the reasoning. Quite frankly, it's a pretty reasonable explanation: if you're silenced, no one can hear the Thunder Clap going off, and thus, it doesn't do anything.
It's not due to the ability being magical or not, silences prevent spell casting by preventing the spells themselves from being uttered, they're not a dispel, so it makes sense in game that silences also prevent any other ability that needs to be heard from working. I know from tanking Raging Spirits on top of ICC that I also can't taunt when silenced, which makes sense. I can yell all the insulting words I want at the ghost, but he can't hear them. I'm honestly not sure if I can Shockwave in this situation (we have very fast dispellers) but some sources I've checked indicate that yes, Shockwave is also prevented by silence. (I really don't get silenced all that much. I'll run some tests later today.)
I find it very interesting to see the complexities of how abilities and conditions interact in game, and how abilities are changed by in-game world logic. One class obviously uses the Holy Light, while another is just getting by on brute force: the in game distinction creates new complexities.
A recent discussion on the forums about Thunder Clap and its being suppressed by silence effects (it always has, or at least has for s
o long that I've just accepted it) brings out Ghostcrawler to explain the reasoning. Quite frankly, it's a pretty reasonable explanation: if you're silenced, no one can hear the Thunder Clap going off, and thus, it doesn't do anything.It's not due to the ability being magical or not, silences prevent spell casting by preventing the spells themselves from being uttered, they're not a dispel, so it makes sense in game that silences also prevent any other ability that needs to be heard from working. I know from tanking Raging Spirits on top of ICC that I also can't taunt when silenced, which makes sense. I can yell all the insulting words I want at the ghost, but he can't hear them. I'm honestly not sure if I can Shockwave in this situation (we have very fast dispellers) but some sources I've checked indicate that yes, Shockwave is also prevented by silence. (I really don't get silenced all that much. I'll run some tests later today.)
I find it very interesting to see the complexities of how abilities and conditions interact in game, and how abilities are changed by in-game world logic. One class obviously uses the Holy Light, while another is just getting by on brute force: the in game distinction creates new complexities.
Activision quietly restructures senior management
An article from the LA Times reports that Activision Blizzard Inc. has quietly made some internal changes to senior management and internal organization. The company has apparently split itself into four units, one focused on the military game Call of Duty, another handling internally owned properties like Guitar Hero and the Tony Hawk series, and a third handling licensed properties.
Why these changes weren't relayed to investors or the press is still unknown, but it's likely due to the fact that they could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Activision has seen flagging sales for two of its former cash-cow franchises, Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, and a recent very public scuffle with Call of Duty creators Jason West and Vince Zampanella following their ejection from their positions as heads of Activision's Infinity Ward studio painted the studio in a negative light with gamers. This kind of restructuring could point to turmoil within the company, an image that an industry juggernaut like Activision would want to avoid.
So, what do these changes mean for Blizzard, and for World of Warcraft? Apparently nothing, from what can be gathered -- this is Activision's first major change since they merged with Vivendi in 2008 to create Activision Blizzard. While the new departments are interesting developments, Activision states that the fourth unit, Blizzard Entertainment, remains an independent unit, and as such, these changes don't really affect them directly.
Why these changes weren't relayed to investors or the press is still unknown, but it's likely due to the fact that they could be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Activision has seen flagging sales for two of its former cash-cow franchises, Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, and a recent very public scuffle with Call of Duty creators Jason West and Vince Zampanella following their ejection from their positions as heads of Activision's Infinity Ward studio painted the studio in a negative light with gamers. This kind of restructuring could point to turmoil within the company, an image that an industry juggernaut like Activision would want to avoid.
So, what do these changes mean for Blizzard, and for World of Warcraft? Apparently nothing, from what can be gathered -- this is Activision's first major change since they merged with Vivendi in 2008 to create Activision Blizzard. While the new departments are interesting developments, Activision states that the fourth unit, Blizzard Entertainment, remains an independent unit, and as such, these changes don't really affect them directly.
Monday, March 29, 2010
The ghosts of Azeroth
I love ghost stories, and one of the nice things about WoW is that Azeroth is full of them. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that one of the nice things for us is that Azeroth's full of them, because lore-wise it's hard to argue that the existence of any ghost is a happy occurrence. While I could (and probably should) turn this into a giant feature cataloging all the ghosts in the game, I have my personal favorites:Caer DarrowThe inhabitants of Caer Darrow are my favorite ghosts, not least because you can't see them at all until you've done a bit of work on their behalf. The island seems utterly deserted barring the Sarkhoff couple...until you realize that it's not, and that there's an entire town full of people trapped on its "happiest day," going about its business, oblivious to how the world's moved on. That there's a ghostly vendor you can't otherwise talk to without a Spectral Essence is even better.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Guide to The Forge of Souls
The Forge of Souls is the first instance in the group of three that make up the Frozen Halls in Icecrown Citadel. These three new instances were just added in the 3.3 patch that added all of the Icecrown Citadel content to the World of Warcraft. You must complete them in order to open up each of the next two. Once The Forge of Souls has been completed you will be able to move onto the next instance in the Frozen Halls. This is so that you can see and follow the storyline involved in the three instances as it evolves.
The worst of the Devourer of Souls abilities is Mirrored Soul, which is cast quite often, or at least it seems like it. As soon as you see it then all DPS must stop and wait until it expires. A well geared group will kill the affected player in no time flat if they keep DPSing, and no matter how good the healer is they will not have a chance to keep the player alive. Once the effect ends start back in on the boss.
The worst of the Devourer of Souls abilities is Mirrored Soul, which is cast quite often, or at least it seems like it. As soon as you see it then all DPS must stop and wait until it expires. A well geared group will kill the affected player in no time flat if they keep DPSing, and no matter how good the healer is they will not have a chance to keep the player alive. Once the effect ends start back in on the boss.
Icecrown Citadel 5-man Attunement Quest Line Walkthrough
Do you need to the basics on how to down the bosses in the new 5-man instances that came with patch 3.3 in World of Warcraft? Want to know where Jaina or Sylvanas is? Our latest walkthrough takes you through the entire attunement quest line that nets you a nice sum of Emblems of Frost, a hefty pocket full of gold, and access to all three new instances. Don't struggle begging general for what to do. Let Ten Ton Hammer take you to the next level with our latest walkthrough!
Krick and Ick are weird, to say the least. Clear the area around Krick and Ick very well because adds will wander into the boss area frequently if you don’t. When you aggro him the fight will become a tank and spank with a little bit of a dance. He’ll throw poison on the ground which you’ll need to move away from and he’ll throw bombs on the ground (magic bombs) that will get bigger and bigger before they explode. They’ll follow your feet.
Krick and Ick are weird, to say the least. Clear the area around Krick and Ick very well because adds will wander into the boss area frequently if you don’t. When you aggro him the fight will become a tank and spank with a little bit of a dance. He’ll throw poison on the ground which you’ll need to move away from and he’ll throw bombs on the ground (magic bombs) that will get bigger and bigger before they explode. They’ll follow your feet.
Guide to the Pit of Saron
The Pit of Saron is the second of three instances that make up the Frozen Halls in Icecrown Citadel. It was added in the recent patch 3.3 which added all of the Icecrown Citadel content to the game. You must complete the three instances in order and until they are done you can not enter the next in the series which happens to be the Halls of Reflection. This is so that you can see and follow the storyline involved in the three instances as it evolves.
Once he has been defeated Krick will beg for mercy from Jaina Proudmoore (if you are Alliance) or Sylvanas Windrunner (if you are Horde). While it looks like they are about to grant it, the Scourgelord is less than pleased with Krick betrayal and silences the Grome for good.
Once he has been defeated Krick will beg for mercy from Jaina Proudmoore (if you are Alliance) or Sylvanas Windrunner (if you are Horde). While it looks like they are about to grant it, the Scourgelord is less than pleased with Krick betrayal and silences the Grome for good.
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