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Patch 3.2 Released Live Today (05/08/09)

Dion — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:03:29 +0000

It was revealed a few days ago that Patch 3.2 Crusader’s Coliseum would go live today and here we are in a period of extended maintainence, the European servers should be up at 15:00 server time (14:00 BST), so what are the most significant changes?

Well, there’s a huge amount, but here are the ones I think are the most significant, with a little analysis:

Trial of the Crusader

This is the new 10/25 man raid instance, this can be done on normal and heroic mode, offering loot from ilevel 232 (10 man normal) up to 258 (25 man heroic), you can find a full loot list here. It’s interesting that this is the first instance that has 10 man heroic mode and 25 man normal mode as well as the standard 10 man normal and 25 man heroic, it will be interesting to see how this shapes up, and if as I suspect the normal modes will correspond to previous instances and the heroic modes will be basically set up as hard mode always on, instead of having to set up hard modes through various means as in Ulduar.

Isle of Conquest

A brand new 40v40 battleground! This appears to be a cross between Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin and Wintergrasp. I’m excited to try this out, but I’m almost equally excited about the general battleground changes that they have made…

Battleground Changes

Experience gains in battlegrounds! This is an interesting change and though I can only imagine so far that the experience is token it will be interesting to see how viable levelling via battlegrounds is on alts. There are tweaks to every battleground to make them shorter, with the points to win for Eye of the Storm and Arathi Basin reduced to 1600 as well as flag pickup/capture time reduced to 8 seconds from 10 (Sap+cap yay!). Warsong Gulch has a maximum duration of 20 minutes now, this is definitely a good thing from a playability point of view, but makes me feel a little nostalgic about those epic 3 hour hard fought games with double premades. Strand of the Ancients has also had the start randomised, I play alliance so it’s not so great for me when we were winning but really it’s a long overdue fix. Wintergrasp has now got a 240 player limit which should supposedly reduce lag, I hope that this is the case and seems like a good change!

Emblem Changes

Emblems of Conquest are dropped in all Heroics! This will make getting alt’s geared up in T8 pretty simple, farm heroics and naxx and you could get this done in a week! The daily heroic awards Emblems of Triumph which are the new top level badges which seems a little odd, but I guess everyone will be running daily’s again.

I’m sure there is plenty more to write about too, but for now I have to disenchant 90 stacks of Titanium Ore, I’ll no doubt be posting more about 3.2 soon!

I eBayed a Rogue…

Dion — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:10:04 +0000

Why? After realising I just wasn’t having any fun playing my Paladin I felt I should try a pure DPS class for once. Unfortunately the state of Ret really is as bad as they say. I just feel it’s way too simple a class; it lacks any real depth and hence the skill cap is so terribly low. I feel that the 3.2 changes do not go nearly far enough to address the spec, but I guess that’s a whole other post to be made. Playing RMP for such a long time with my mage and always having problems finding a good rogue, I found myself thinking I could do a better job and thought it was about time to prove it…

So yes, I purchased a level 80 rogue from eBay for a pretty reasonable sum, it’s fairly poorly geared, some crappy naxx10 gear and some craftables, but this is fine, gives me plenty of time to learn the class as I’m farming 600k or so honor! There’s nothing wrong with eBaying really, the quickest I could have got a rogue to 80 myself is probably 7 days played. Even if I worked a crappy job in McDonalds on £5 an hour that would be 168 hours or £840, and I don’t so I couldn’t afford not to buy it!

Even with the terrible gear I’m still having fun in the 4 hours I’ve played so far, I reckon it’ll take 10 hours for me to reach a reasonable standard (1800) and another 20 or so to be what I’d consider OK, around 2100 2v2. Currently on a pretty ridiculous Battlegroup, from playing Misery which is fairly balanced and fairly decent skill level to playing Cataclysm where the standard is terrible. It’s the first time I’ve changed Battlegroup as I’ve never really been disappointed with Misery, and I may well have to move back after I’ve learned the class, I’ll be posting rating updates and perhaps a short rogue guide once I have a bit of gear and start omgserious PVP!

Q. Who’s doing all the farming now WoW servers are down in china?

Dion — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:24:38 +0000

A. Precisely the same people that were doing it before!

I just noticed this article on TechDirt, to me it doesn’t make any sense, perhaps they misunderstand how gold farming works.

Here is there article: But Who’s Doing All That World Of Warcraft Gold Farming While WoW Is Down In China?

The topic basically says it all, but the fact is that chinese gold farmers aren’t making their money from farming gold on chinese servers. The reason that gold farming is profitable for them is not due to it making a lot of money, but just due to it making more money than some of the average jobs around there. By selling the gold to Europeans and Americans for prices they are prepared to pay (a quick google suggests around $10/1000gold) it gives these gold selling businesses a cut and passes some of this on to the farmers. They will only make a few dollars an hour, but citing this 2006 article which points to “An average Chinese wage of $0.57 per hour” this doesn’t hold up that badly.

Obviously this means that these gold selling companies exist to sell to WoW players in other regions, people in China don’t earn enough to pay these prices and domestic gold farming would not be profitable due to the much lower wages.

So in summary, the Chinese WoW servers being down makes zero difference to the gold farmers, they aren’t farming on Chinese servers anyway!

Finding Arena Partners…

Dion — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:02:12 +0000

RMP LF Rogue, 2200+.

That’s been my mission lately, I wonder if others have found themselves in this situation. We’re a pretty capable Priest/Mage that have been playing together for a few seasons now, playing RMP with various rogues along the way. We’ve always found ourselves in the same position though, the Rogue ends up vanishing! Not sure why this is, it seems at times like it’s impossible to find a reliable rogue. Most of them seem to be school age and either end up screaming down vent or getting chastised by their parents, always worth a chuckle. It’s depressing though, even after we migrated to a pretty decent EU PvP server and joined the top 2200+ guild. *Sigh*

If there are any european rogues looking for a new RMP and potentially a RP/RM 2v2 too feel free to mail dion@thisdomain, I’ll be quite specific, we are really looking for a rogue with experience of RMP, that has experience at the very least 2100+ (we’re thinking 2400 will be very achievable with the right rogue, we’ve beaten 2450 MMR teams a few times), is 20+ and mature, and has decent communication skills do let us know.

Making Money from 3.2 with Prospecting

Dion — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:05:44 +0000

Personally I’m banking on Epic gems being a good money maker, so I’ve made a pretty big investment in Titanium Ore (currently sitting on around 80 stacks) which has taken up most of my liquidity. I’m buying this for around 110g/stack according to my auctioneer stats, and I think there should be a nice profit to be had here based on disenchanting stats which have been found on the PTR. The most accurate stats I have seen so far for prospect %’s are as follows:

Epic gems: 28%
Blue gems: 25%
Green gems: 150%
Titanium powder: 67%

This makes an estimate per stack of ore as:

Epic gems: 1.12
Blue gems: 1
Green gems: 6
Titanium powder: 2.68

The value I’m putting on these (erring on what I feel is the conservative side) would be

Epic gems: 1.12 * 150g = 168g
Blue gems: 1 * 15g = 15g
Green gems: 6 * 1g = 6g
Titanium powder: 2.68 * 8g = 21.44g

So the total we have is 210.44g a stack. The Titanium Powder value is based on a minimum value of Dragon’s Eye being 80g, probably conservative with the amount of people spending Jewelcrafting tokens on new patterns, and with the new gear influx they should be in a fairly high demand. Also I imagine some people will be buying this up in bulk from the AH to try and get the new recipe’s first, so this may well be worth more just to sell straight up. My estimate of 150g for epic gems I think is also fair, erring on the side of conservative. Whilst the supply is likely to be quite high due to the various methods of acquiring them I think the demand will be huge and outstrip supply. With the advent of dual spec this means people have twice the amount of gear they used to, I’d imagine it would be fair to say that people will be looking for at least 10 epic gem’s each. I wouldn’t be surprised if the demand for red epic gem’s on release pushed the price to 300g+ each.

My only apprehension here is that it is hard to know precisely how much titanium ore other Jewelcrafters on my server have. I believe there are a large amount of gold farmers operating as Titanium Ore is still available on the AH for around 110g/stack, but I know on other servers prices are closer to 250g/stack.

Welcome to my blog!

Dion — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:38:03 +0000

Nearly 6 months after I purchased the domain and I’m finally starting a little something here!

This is going to contain my general musings on my WoW experiences, as well as I hope some lively debate on Arena issues, perhaps what I am experiencing (Currently playing Disc priest in Priest/Mage 2v2 @ 2k, RMP 3v3 @ 2.2k and Paladin, spec as yet undecided but either Ret or Prot of some flavour, Ret/Mage 2v2 @ 1850) and my general thoughts on Auction House trading. I’ll probably post my recommendations here for making gold in relation to this, I’ll let you know what I’m doing and how it’s going anyway. For the record I have an Enchanter and a Jewelcrafter so some recommendations will be related to these professions.

I’m going to kick this off with a post about making gold from 3.2 I think, a little tired right now but this should be coming tomorrow!