The expansion lull.

It feels like we've really hit the lull in the expansion. You know, that time when nothing is certain enough to really get too excited and set it in stone, when we're all running around doing the pre-expansion events and quests, when things stop selling on the AH, and your gear starts to look faded and worn because you've been wearing the same tier for far too long. Yup, that would be it. 

I haven't really had much to say, and personally, enjoying the break to sort out where I want to take this blog in Cataclysm. I hardly know what I'm going to eat for lunch today, so it's a bit of a stretch, and since this blog is a bit of a "why not?" project, I think I'm going to let it roam free until I settle into a cozy little niche. But, I'd really like to stick to achievements, and gold-making mostly, but still toss in any interesting tid-bits about end-game, since that's a very important part of the game for me. I'd also like to make my posts about once every 2-3 days, but would prefer not to leave much time between if I can help it.

Until Cataclysm though, I highly doubt my posts will be that frequent, since there really isn't anything to post. MMO-Champion and Wowhead seem to be well on top of the Cataclysmic events, as well as WoW insider, so keep yourself updated with the excitement. Phase 2 began yesterday, and I suspect phase 3 will be approaching us soon, perhaps in about a week. 4.0.3, aka The Cataclysm, should occur about a week (probably during shut down) before the expansion launches. I'm pretty excited to go explore the new Azeroth on my low-level alts who have been patiently waiting to grow up.

Also, speaking of exploring... I was working on a fishing achievement, I know - such a slacker - and ended up starting to explore areas because I only have one or two subzones. Now, I'm nearly done Kalimdor, which will compete the achievement. Now would be an excellent time to work on this if you haven't yet, because it gives you a last chance to really explore Classic WoW how you would have back at level 60. There was a bit of nostalgia and some revenge on a few mobs that gave me trouble back in my noob days, but mostly it was a relaxing break from my hard pushing grind to finish off my goblin reputations and Ravenholt boxes.

It's been a few days, but not overly much is happening. Except a whole lot of achievement whoring. Actually, before I continue, I want to mention that the glyph prices have become really interesting. Some post for 9g, some for 49g. Sometimes even higher. My speculation here is that people are still producing glyphs, but have adjusted their prices to the new mat requirements and herb prices on my server.

So back to achievements. I finally finished off Shen'dralar rep. Woo! I can finally take it easy with the rest of the feat.  Now, I'm working on making back the gold I spent by preparing for the upcoming holidays, as well as cleaning out my character banks and speculating on what to do with things like my epic gem stash. It's not very large, thankfully, but I supply about 6 characters with gear/enchants/gems and I'm debating whether holding on to a small stash will help in the coming expansion. Likely not, and I should just get rid of them now, since I have two JC toons to make money with.

Also, now may be a good time to look at any professions you want to level/ change for Cataclysm. The markets may be in high supply and low prices, or maybe you have an abundance of mats stored. But importantly, many servers are quiet right now. A lot of people have been taking breaks from farming mats, so it's also a good time to go out and do your own scavenging if you notice your server is a bit quiet.

Oh, back to achievements! My guild has been working on Neck Deep in Vile for the past week or so, and we just found the following strat:

       We did it a couple of weeks ago by accident. During 2nd ledge phase have all your ranged dps stay on LK (Remorseless Winter damage is a joke on normal mode, if the ranged even get hit by it). We didn't intentionally set out to do it like this, but we called a swap after the first Raging Spirit in the ledge phase, used lust and came out with LK at around 23-24%, ignored the remaining Ragings and just burned LK. He spawned the first wave of Vile Spirits but died before they became active, and none exploded on our raid. 


If you intend to try this you could even drop healers for ranged dps (the fight is easily healable by 2-3 people on normal mode, however we did this with 5 healers)


From the official WoW forums

We're giving it a go tomorrow night, so hopefully that will be done and dusted and we can all chill out before Cataclysm and enjoy summer (in the Southern Hemisphere) for a few months before raiding gets back into full swing again. Well some of us will be breaking, there's about 13-15 people working on Bane of the Fallen King at the moment (10 man HM LK). I've been there for every attempt/clear to so far, and to be honest, I've actually found enjoyment and fun for the game again. I'm being challenged with learning a new way of doing the fight, everyone is enjoying themselves (aka no one is complaining about the wiping) and it just gets better. We've had about 40 attempts to far, some due to silly mistakes, many from us trying different things out, but we suspect we should get it in no more than 30 more attempts, and that's being pretty modest about our talents. I think if we did this Pre-4.0.1 we would have a higher success rate, but since everyone is adjusting to the changes in class and game mechanics, it's expected.

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.