Archive for the ‘Farming’ Category

Enchanting changes in patch 3.0.8

Jan 5, 2009 Auction House, Crafting, Farming, How-To, Investing, Patches, Professions, Wrath of the Lich King

Dream ShardsAs we covered a few weeks ago, some enchanting recipes are being changed in the upcoming patch. Thanks to well-formatted post at MMO-Champion, we’ve got a much better idea of what’s being changed - nearly all the Wrath enchants!

Many of them are having their dust and essence (especially essence) requirements lowered, some have had Dream Shards added or Dream Shards to replace Abyss Crystals. With the additions of two new tanking enchants, we can definitely expect Dream Shard prices to rise - probably double or triple their current cost. I’ve been stocking up over the last few weeks and I’m already seeing the prices climb from 4-5g each to about 8-9g each. And the increases in price isn’t stopping any time soon.

I have not yet heard if the patch is coming during tomorrow’s maintanence or not, but it has to be soon. You still have a chance to pick up some more dream shards before the auction house is cleared out and inflation sets in.

Winter Veil Inflation

Dec 16, 2008 Auction House, Crafting, Farming, Gathering, Holidays, How-To, Investing, Professions, Wrath of the Lich King

I’m sorry I didn’t get this post up sooner so you guys could start preparing. Wordpress has been giving me some trouble lately. If the most recent updates don’t fix it, I might have to move to a new blogging platform.

Winter Veil is finally here and so is the inflation. Most of us have seen it before - hundreds of gold for stacks of Small Eggs among other things. It brings back memories of WoW’s first Winter Veil and farming the hell out of owls in Teldrassil for eggnog.

With many players going after the Merrymaker title, a few of the player-created items are in very high demand. This demand has caused the materials to skyrocket in price, giving us an opportunity to earn some major cash. Seeing as this post is a little late, we won’t be able to invest in much. But some quick and easy farming, even on low level alts, will prove to be very profitable. Here are some items you should look out for and sell while the demand lasts:

  • Wool Cloth and Bolts of Woolen Cloth
  • Runecloth and Bolts of Runecloth
  • Rugged Leather
  • Copper Ore and Copper Bars
  • Small Eggs
  • Deeprock Salt - this is a big one, going for about 20g each on my server. Deeprock Salt can be turned in with 5g for five Preserved Holly.

The following may be profitable investments as they can be purchased cheaply from vendors. I’ve often started earning funds on new bank alts by selling a few Rune Thread on the auction house for a few hundred percent markup - the markup and demand are likely much more significant at this time of year.

  • Rune Thread
  • Green Dye and Red Dye
  • Holiday Spirits and Holiday Spices
  • Ice Cold Milk

Hopefully there’s still time for you to take advantage of the holiday madness. Let me know how you do!

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Death Knight preparation and investments

Nov 5, 2008 Class Specific, Factions & Reputation, Farming, Investing, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

A few guides and shopping lists are floating around to prepare yourself for rerolling a Death Knight. With the introduction of a brand new class into WoW and the fact that all races start in the same area, the leveling process in the first few weeks is going to be chaotic. That’s where these guides come in.

Scattered around Azeroth and Outland are many repeatable reputation quests. Almost all of these quests offer experience the first time you turn them in and usually some bonus reputation as well. There are a dozen or so of these quests that are well worth doing after your Death Knight escapes the Scarlet Enclave. The major ones being the cloth turn-ins for every city faction and the turn-ins for Outland factions. I’m not going to go into much detail about the quests themselves, but the complete shopping list should give you an idea of what items to start investing in.

  • 300x Wool Cloth
  • 300x Silk Cloth
  • 300x Mageweave Cloth
  • 300x Runecloth
  • 6x Blasted Boar Lung
  • 6x Scorpok Pincer
  • 11x Basilisk Brain
  • 14x Vulture Gizzard
  • 5x Snickerfang Jowl
  • 1x Imperfect Draenethyst Fragment
  • 1x Flawless Draenethyst Sphere (very rare unless you kill Teremus, you can probably skip this one)
  • 30x Core of Elements
  • 30x Crypt Fiend Parts
  • 30x Bone Fragments
  • 30x Savage Frond
  • 30x Dark Iron Scraps
  • 2x Thorium Bar
  • 1x Golden Rod
  • 8x Hi-Explosive Bomb
  • 8x Unstable Trigger
  • 10x Unidentified Plant Parts (or 360x to get you to Honored before you do Zangarmarsh quests, helping you to hit Revered for your head enchant before you leave Zangarmarsh)
  • 6x Bog Lord Tendril
  • 10x Mature Spore Sac
  • 10x Glowcap
  • 6x Fertile Spores
  • 5x Sanguine Hibiscus
  • 30x Arakkoa Feather
  • 10x Oshu’gun Crystal Fragment
  • 3x Pair of Ivory Tusks
  • 10x Mark of Kil’Jaeden (for Aldor)
  • 10x Mark of Sargeras (for Aldor)
  • 1x Fel Armament (for Aldor)
  • 10x Firewing Signet (for Scryer)
  • 10x Sunfury Signet (for Scryer)
  • 1x Arcane Tome (for Scryer)

The Death Knight starting area quests will get you past level 58. Afterwards, you’re forced to roam around Eastern Plaguelands for a while - with dozens, maybe hundreds, of other Death Knights, all competing to complete the same quests. The reputation turn-ins will give you a significant boost (a level or two initially, and a few bars every few levels during Outland leveling) and will allow you to push past the chaos into uninterrupted leveling.

Speedy Scribe: Power level your Inscription in patch 3.0

Oct 10, 2008 Crafting, Farming, Gathering, How-To, Patches, Player Interaction, Professions, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

The inscription powerleveling guide I’ve been working on is finally complete! Naturally, there may be a few mistakes, so I urge you to try the guide on the PTR or once 3.0 goes live. If you find something wrong or you have a better route for a certain portion of the guide, feel free to leave a comment and let me know!

At the moment, it’s pretty pointless to level inscription past 350 as there are no new recipes for 355 and beyond. The only way to learn new recipes after 350 (and the only way to learn minor glyphs) is through Minor Inscription Research, which has a 20 hour cooldown. Below are the materials required to get to 350 inscription. The pigments come from different sets of herbs, which you can see on Wowhead by clicking each pigment’s name. The average return of each herb is about 2.5 pigments per mill (5 herbs), so you’ll need about double the amount of herbs to get the necessary pigments listed below. I plan on having one extra stack of each as a buffer in case of bad luck.

The following uncommon pigments have a chance to be milled from each set of herbs. With the volume of herbs required for the pigments above, you should have no problem getting these pigments.

And finally, the parchment below can be bought from the inscription supplies vendors near every inscription trainer.

  • 60x Light Parchment
  • 121x Common Parchment
  • 155x Heavy Parchment
  • 30x Resilient Parchment

Now that you’ve stuffed your inventory full of materials, let’s plow through this guide. I started out at the Ironforge trainer until 300 Inscription, then moved to Honor Hold to finish up. You’ll need to make a few trips to and from the bank to mill the herbs and use the pigment, but make sure you mill enough Nether Pigment to bring with you to the Outland to get from 300 to 350 inscription.

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Inscription: Help me finish the guide

Oct 7, 2008 Farming, Gathering, Patches, Player Interaction, Professions, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

I need your help! Because of the short supply of certain herbs on my server, I haven’t got very far in writing the inscription guide. I just didn’t have enough herbs to copy over to the public test realm. I’ve been wasting a lot of time farming them manually on the PTR.

So that’s where you come in!

I know you’ve been stockpiling herbs over the last month or two. If you could prepare one character full of a few stacks of each herb, copy it over to the PTR (US PVP realm), and mail me the stacks of herbs, I would greatly appreciate it. You can send the herbs to my PTR character, Frolic (Alliance on the US PVP realm), or whisper me if you catch me online. I should be on the PTR for most of the day. If I can get a few of you to do this, I should have the inscription power leveling guide finished by tonight.

Reputation items: Aldor vs Scryer

May 12, 2008 Factions & Reputation, Farming

It seems that with the popularity of Quel’Danas dailies combined with the relative value of Aldor shoulder enchants and proc requirements on exalted neck pieces, the value of those respective reputation tokens has risen sharply. Indeed, killing blood elves on the new daily quests yields far more Sunfury Signets and Arcane Tomes than Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments. And thus, the laws of supply and demand take hold once again and gift us with an exploitable market opportunity.

So one way to get cash here would be to head on over to Legion Hold and kill every demon in sight. Here are a few other ways:

  • Always choose Aldor reputation items as your reward from daily quests.
  • Buy cheap Scryer reputation items in AH, trade at 1:1 ratio for Aldor equivalent, resell.
  • Buy cheap Aldor reputation items in AH, trade at 1:2 or 1:3 ratio for Scryer equivalent, resell.

Here’s a pristine farming location for Aldor reputation items if you prefer grinding it out:

Buckle up, it’s time to get waisted!

May 5, 2008 Auction House, Crafting, Farming, How-To, Patches, Player Interaction, Professions, Raiding

I’ve recently realized that with the BOEification (copyright, me) of Nether Vortices there may be a very real market opportunity in crafted epic belts. It must be noted that with the lifting of attunements in Hyjal and Black Temple, many raiders are adamant on upgrading every possible slot outside of the actual instance in order to counter bad drops and push through content faster. It should also be noted that some of the upgrades to the waist slot over the following crafted BOEs come well into T6 content and therefore these items are often well worth their while.

Now this might require a lot of free cash (1K+) and several relists but could net you a few hundred gold in profit. Be sure to check the AH to see if there is already a crafter on your server participating in this market… if there are too many, your profit might be too small to justify the risk. If not, I would try listing them for 12 hours around about 5 or 6pm server time… this will catch the attention of players getting ready to raid. You might also want to advertise in trade chat that the item has been placed in the AH.

Blacksmithing:

Tailoring:

Leatherworking

Risk’ometer: 3

A drop rate is a probability, not a guarantee

Apr 29, 2008 Farming, Gathering, Raiding, Resources

WoW Insider has a short but great post on the math behind drop rate percentages. This may not be obvious to some people and the math behind the percentages will make it much clearer.

While Wowhead may tell you the drop rate of a Badge of Justice from Shattered Sun Supplies is 10%, you are not guaranteed a badge in 10 supplies. You actually have a 34.87% chance of not finding a single badge from opening 10 supplies.

Here’s the math:

  • Take the percentage chance of not receiving the item you are after (in this case, 100% - 10% = 90% or 0.9)
  • Raise that to the nth power, where n is the amount of times looted (in this case, 0.9^10 = 0.3487 or 34.87%)
  • The result is your chance to not get the item in the number of times you’re looting (or 100% - 34.87% to get the percent chance you will get the item, 65.13%)

This math applies to items opened, corpses looted, herbs picked, ores mined, gems prospected, and everything else with a drop percentage attached to it.

And speaking of prospecting, we have a great article coming up that will break it down and give you an idea of how profitable it might be to buy up your server’s Adamantite Ore and spend the day prospecting. Stay tuned!