With Blizzcon we have heard that Bloodsail Pirate rep will no longer be attainable, and also indirect answers to whether Shen'dralar rep will still be available as well. I haven't heard much other than speculation about Ravenholt reputation from beta yet, so hopefully it's obscure enough to stay. Currently, I'm in a mad rush to farm all my librams up, so I'll keep my post short today.

I've caved and have commissioned someone to farm a set amount of boxes for me, because I don't think I'll have the time at this rate, with 37 librams to go still. But, when I farm skin of shadow I take the exrta time to pocket-pick the humanoids and guards in there, and the heavy junk box drop rate is pretty decent. I was getting about 5-10 boxes per run, which helps, and also slows you down enough to not get the annoying "you've entered too many instances lately" notice.

LBRS is definately the best place to farm boxes, and you can find many guides to doing so on the internet, so I won't add to that list here.

So, we have a little more than a month until Cataclysm, but wait, what about 4.0.3? Does this patch bring the actual Cataclysm and the world is changed forever, or is it just more content and events to be unlocked along the way and on Cataclysm launch day? If it's the former, that means I have much less time than I thought and I better hop to it. Hopefully Darkmoon Faire rep will still be attainable (should be considering the cards in Cataclysm). 

Being smart about grinding reputation, and a few other things.

I bet, if you're going to be going back to Classic WoW for achievements, especially the reputation ones, you wouldn't mind getting as many as possible. Well, good. I've finished off the important Outland reputations for the moment (mostly the pet and mount ones) and I've begun working on Timbermaw Hold and Wintersaber Reputation. These two are beautiful together, especially if you're lucky enough to pick a time when no one else is farming the Winterfall mobs you need for both.

Firstly, if you're still below neutral with Timbermaw, you should head down to the South flight point in Felwood and find Grazel. He'll give you a quest Timbermaw Ally which then leads to allowing you to gather Deadwood Headdress Feather and hand those in for reputation, and he will also send you to his friend in the North of Felwood, and you do similar quests to hand in the Deadwood Headdress Feathers to Nafien in the North. Once you're neutral, you can safely pass through Timbermaw Hold into Moonglade or Winterspring. Nafien should give you the quest to speak with Salfa, the Timbermaw NPC on the Winterspring side of the Hold. Salfa will let you hand in Winterfall Spirit Beads for a quest Beads for Salfa, after completing Winterfall Activity, given by Salfa. Just a note, once you get to Revered with Timbermaw, regular mobs no longer give rep, but still drop the rep items needed. The "bosses" of Winterfall and Deadwood give you 40 rep each though.

Ok so now that we're through the set up, you can now collect Winterfall Spirit Beads, which leads us to Wintersaber Trainers rep. If you follow the Northern road in Winterspring up to Frostsaber rock and climb up behind the rock to the top, you'll find a neutral quest giver. You'll pick up a quest called Frostsaber Provisions. You can only loot the number of items required for the quest while the quest log is in your inventory, so don't waste time. You get 250 rep per hand in. At 1500/3000 Neutral, you get another quest: Winterfall Intrusions. This sends you to the Winterfall village just north-east of Everlook. Kill the mobs required, collect beads while tidying up the quest, grab your meats for the provisions quests when travelling between the quest giver and the Winterfall village, and voila! It took me a few hours, and I went from Neutral to Honored with Wintersaber Trainers, and I'm well into Revered with Timbermaw now, although I started with friendly reputation.

This actually made the grind not so bad. I expect Honored to Revered to take one more day, and Revered to Exhalted to take 1.5-2 "days" of grinding at the pace I was working at. I cannot commit myself to 8 hours of grinding a reputation at once. I think it took me 5 hours to get as far as I did, and there was a lot of goofing around in between.\

Goodluck. Hopefully you'll get some epic BoE world drops, Darkmoon Faire cards, and don't forget to save all those bear flanks, they sell for 50g a stack on my server!

Mind-numbing grinding.

I've been working very hard over the past few days towards a few achievements. Yes, I did say a few. I've mentioned I've been working on Insane in the Membrane, and I still am, but I cannot focus on just one at once. So I take an ADHD approach to it, while still being somewhat organized, atleast it makes sense to me. I'm prioritizing mounts and reputation achievements. I log in, farm Headless Horseman on all my alts (takes 15 minutes), then I solo Anzu, grab a H MGT buddy and head over there, use my Argent Crusader's Tabard to teleport to the tournament grounds, bang those off, hearth to Dalaran, and then head out to any of the various places I'm hunting reputation. I should dust off Sha'tari Skyguard reputation in another hour or two of grinding, and then perhaps it's back to alternating between killing pirates with some friends, or farming Timbermaw Hold rep for the final legs of The Diplomat , They Love Me In That Tunnel , and of course towards Insane in the Membrane. Side note: I've chosen to get myself to neutral via means of mass murdering Southseas Pirates in the Barrens near Ratchet. It's just too underwhelming doing dozens of Dire Maul runs and not seeing that reputation go up much, plus I keep scoring libram jack-pots on the AH.

Sounds like a lot of work to balance, but it suits me just fine. Oh, and I also farm Baron Rivendare a bit, but I'm not sure whether the mount is disappearing or not. Stratholme will still be an instance, but Baron Rivendare will be replaced with another NPC. I haven't seen any updates to the loot table, but on Beta the instance is much different.

On Wednesday my guild will be back at our attempts to get Lich King 25 Neck Deep in Vile which is by far the hardest and most annoying achievement, but for most of us, it's the last thing that stands between us and the Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher as well as completing the quest for our guild's second Shadowmourne, and hopefully I get a chance to roll on the Crimson Deathcharger, or any of the many goodies that drops. It would be a perfect way for our 25 man runs to end Wrath of the Lich King, before we take our break until Cataclysm. I may be one of the crazies who decide to push hard for Bane of the Lich King, and possibly grab my 10 man mount, which I only need Sindragosa HM to finish.

A few tips for grinding anything:

1. Music. Seriously, nothing helps the mind-numbing lull of killing the same 100 mobs over and over and over again like some good tunes.

2. Take a break. If you're vision starts to blur, and your butt feels a bit tingly, and your bladder feels like it will burst, that's your sign to get up and take a break. Do some jumping jacks, take a walk, drink some water, etc. There's nothing more refreshing that water on your tongue, a stretch and the feel of blood returning to your behind.

3. Find some friends. It's really handy when you can chat on vent with some friends, or even find some guildies or make friends while grinding to join a group. Farming pirates is by far the worst, or reps that are best earned by running dungeons, to grind alone. Even though you could solo it, it's perfectly beneficial to do these types of grinds with friends. Best part, is you can go afk and someone else can kill pirates for you, and vice versa.

4. This carries over to raiding. When the grind is tough, keep up the focus by having a good laugh, keeping things light-hearted and don't brood when you wipe continuously. People aren't perfect and mistakes happen. Plus studies show, raiding with smiles improves your performance by 78.95612%! Ok, I made that up, but seriously, I think the nights where my guild has gotten down achievements or progression, were the nights when everyone was focused on the task and the general mood over vent was relaxed.

5. Get ready for Cataclysm. Ok, this isn't a step really, but come on. I'm excited, are you?

March towards Cataclysm.

The last few days of raiding have been incredibly underwhelming. My guild has been focusing on keeping the raid team alive, which is probably the smartest thing, but there's also an arguement that there's just a lot of people who show up because they feel obligated to, and aren't actually that interested in raiding; also a very valid point. Personally, I'm pretty happy to do anything, preferably farm achievements, as I still need my ICC drakes 10 and 25, and wouldn't mind some guild runs of BT for a change to perhaps get me a set of glavies.

As far as gold is concerned, my glyph market has been dwindling, most glyphs sell around 10g now, so about normal. I'm currently speculating on what I want to stock up on for Cataclysm.

I've got my eye out for Blood of the Mountain, and cheap pets that will be disappearing in Cataclysm, on the AH. But I've been considering doing some serious WG farming. Ore, herbs and eternals and making a small stock pile of said items. All these will be needed to level, perhaps not as much needed to level, but they are still needed, especially the eternals. With Wintergrasp being the main farming area currently, I've been curious about how the mechanics of the zone will change, and whether we will see the end of such a full market for eternals. This could be an opportunity to make some gold in Cataclysm from people power-leveling new professions, transmuting wrath gems for levelers, and new players leveling their professions a little later on. It would be a game of patience.

Another thing I've been considering is feasts. There's a guild achievement called Dinner Party and it requires the guild to place 5,000 feasts. I'm assuming this is in the required x amount of guild members, and in a raid. If there are no more restrictions than that, a guild could easily get a group, go to ICC and drop 5,000 fish feasts, or any other feast from Wrath, and get this achievement. Part of me feels this is too good to be true, but it might be worth  holding on to some feasts, or the mats to make them.

The glyph market is steadier than the patch.

As expected, the glyph market has stabilized around 20g per glyph for the past two days, but I'm still selling lots of glyphs. I've almost completely emptied out my alt bank and I'm sitting at 120k. So the maths here would be 120k -36k + the 40k I spent on mounts + the 6 or so k on gems and enchants etc = roughly 130k profit made off a very small herb investment back when the market was low. I got more than I had hoped for from this, and it's definitely encouraged me to continue working the AH in game.

On the down side, I'm not overly impressed with this spell queuing thing they've implemented to stop an exploit. I  understand the necessity for it, but it's really interfering with game play, especially for Oceanic users that have high latency and trusted tunnelling services aren't overly available. Playing a rogue as my main has me pretty miffed about changes, but I know things will get worked out eventually and there's always my alts, the AH, and my other addiction: Minecraft. If you haven't checked it out, you should. It's a pretty nifty little sandbox game, done by one guy, and there's a massive community for it that has already developed skin mods for the game to increase game play. It easily runs on my computer while I'm stalking the AH, and keeps me occupied when I want something creative to do.

That's all for today.

After the storm.

Well really, it's not over. To be fair, it has slowed a bit, but I've already rolled in another 14k from yesterday's 30k and I've only been at it for 3ish hours this morning. I expect it to continue like this for a couple more days atleast, but I'll be going until I'm out of glyphs. I haven't had much time for anything else though, with all the undercutting wars happening at the moment, and I even dropped my threshold to 10g instead, but most of the glyphs are still selling for about 35-50g a piece and some 150g+.

The epic gem transmute is still bugged. Which has made a lot of very sad pandas, but oh well, hopefully it will get fixed soon.

On to actual play time, it's look like mages, warlocks and boomkins are pretty powerful at the moment, rolling in numbers over 10k in VoA. But GC made a forum post recently about nerfing casters, buffing melee and also putting a temp fix to resilience since our dps adjustments are too over-powered for any challenging PVP.

Actually, as I've been writing this post, I just hauled in the last few k to bring me up to 100k. Yay!

36k when I started posting yesterday to 100k about 24 hours later. Wow.

Too good to be true.

So I updated as many add ons as I could. I had to grab Postal from Curse.com because whatever add on it is that opens the mail, was only opening one and wouldn't open another. I'm ashamed to say I have no idea what addon wasn't working with that, but Postal is just fine, I actually like it better since it refreshes the mail box for me.

I opened up QA3 and added all the changed glyphs and made sure there were no charred glyphs in my glyphing group. Then, I posted. 15g threshold, and 100g fall back, but some glyphs are posting above fall back. It's a frenzy to buy glyphs under 20g at the moment by the looks, but I have already sold several glyphs so I'll be reposting frequently all day. I expected to get very little done today any way. Oh, by the way, the QA3 fix works brilliantly.

In other news, there's definitely a world event brewing on the horizon. My bank alt in IF experienced some trembling and the roof in the bank seems to be falling apart by the dirty falling. I'm anticipating the moment I log my level 80's and start messing around with specs and the chore of re-gemming and reforging all of them. Oh well, I'm glad there's some spice back in the game again despite all the known and unknown bugs.

Edit: Ok so firstly, the add-on with the mail fail was QA3. The quick fix I had for it, was working, but QA3 was skipping auctions and was having all sorts of bugs with 4.0.1 data. So, I found two addons. Auction Profit Master and ZeroAuction since the original maker of QA3 has stopped and has given a few permission to create updates, but change the name. Both do the job, but I found ZeroAuction (from JMTC) to be the superior verson.

4.0.1 Spec changes, glyph markets and full mailboxes... Oh my!

I'm incredibly excited to see what happens today.

I've got all my bank alts lined up and ready to start posting and rolling in the dough. I slept in this morning, but fortunately, the servers are not up quite yet, and I'll be able to hop on and start posting my glyphs. I really hope this works out well to my advantage, and that I will be able to take an AH hiatus and enjoy the Pre-Cataclysmic events and the beginning of the expansion.

There's a few reasons why I'm seriously considering pulling out of the glyph market once my stock dies, or at least significantly lowering my participation:

Firstly, as you might know already, 4.0.1 is going to shatter many auction house add ons, such as QA3 and Auctioneer. What this will do is force players to manually "click" to post an object. Fortunately, QA3 should still be useful for everything it already does except the auto-post feature, which a few fixes have been developed. I believe JMTC was a major partner in this, and much appreciation goes out to them, and everyone else for their work.

Secondly, glyphs will now cost 3 inks per glyph, up from 1. That means 3x more work for the same out-put and possibly not really worth the profit when you consider that the glyph market will boom for a few weeks at most, and then taper off to a trickle again. At the moment I'll just be watching things, but I'm starting to feel a bit exhausted with the amount of time I spend glyphing when I'm itching to go do other things in game.

So hopefully my strategy and investments will make my bank bountiful yet. The thing about this, is that it's pretty safe to assume you're going to make profit off of something that it's very obvious will be in high demand, especially on my server, which was flagged for new players for the first year of WotLK expansion. Trade has been alight with noobish misconceptions and surprise the past two days, and I'm sure there will be many people scrambling to get themselves organized. It seems cruel counting on people to be ignorant of what's happening, but at the same time, I've worked hard for what I'm about to get. But any way, it's not about whether glyphs will sell or not, but how much they will sell for. And that is the fun part for me.

I've been working for two weeks on stocking up on glyphs, carefully making sure I have a minimal amount of charred glyphs when I log in today. I have about 25-50 of each glyph type at the moment because I sold so much yesterday. In the evening, close to downtime (6pm ST for Oceanic Servers) I posted a last batch for 24 hours, 2 of each, raised my threshold to about 15g, and my fall back to 200g. 200g is far too much, but I thought I might catch some early birds just in case the servers actually went back up in time. Just before shut down, I checked my mail boxes, and I think the highest sale price was about 60g! So I'm going to lower my fall back to about 100g, and see what happens, but I plan to keep a very close eye on the AH.

Good luck to all you other entrepreneurs, and happy Glyph-mas!

So I decided to start a blog...

For a number of reasons. I would like to get back into writing, and I've got far too much time on my hands recently for various, unavoidable reasons.

With all this free time, and with Cataclysm coming up, I've decided to jump on the Insane in the Membrane bandwagon since the glyph market is dying out, and I'm pretty burnt on it. I got my Bloodsail reputation finished off a few days ago, and now I've begun the long grind to get back on the good side with those lovely little goblin cities, and the Shen'dralar faction.

Oh, yes, I did mention glyphs above. For most of the expansion I made a pretty measley income doing dailies, selling everything I looted from mobs, and making batches of flasks or transmuting items. However, I support 2 raiding mains, 3 80's and an army of lower-level toons aspiring to become a max-level hero one day. A couple months ago a guild member left the game and wow econo-blogging world to go start dramatize.org . Upon leaving he doled out a treasure trove of mats to people who were interested. I was one of the lucky recipients of a generous here's-how-to-make-money-with-glyphs starter kit.

Since then I've been making a pretty steady 1-2k gold per day, and have reached a nice cushion to enter Cataclysm with and support my achievement-whoring, as they say. My goals are fairly simple: I wish to continue a steady stream of income with as minimal effort as required. And this is why I love the gold-earning community.

So, I plan to keep this blog updated on my adventures in Dire Maul, picking-pockets, fighting the seas of current events in WoW, 4.0.1 updates, world events, Cataclysm, new raids, and of course professions and my thoughts on making gold.

PS. I like gaming, as in I play games other than just WoW.