Competing For Profits

AKA “There ain’t enough glyph sales for the both of us.”  Needless to say, I expect my profit margins to take a hit while I try out my cunning plan to get my share of the market back from some rather insistent competitors.  And I’ve been amusing myself with a resurrection quote addon.

Thanks to a bit too much time spent in Wintergrasp, Fingle’s PvP gear is coming along nicely.  In about 17k more honor, she will be able to pick up the Hateful chest, which will give her the four-piece bonus, and she’s now wearing both the Titan-forged boots and belt.  I’ve been distracted by other things, so the frequency of her PvPing has come down a bit, and I’m seriously considering not putting too much time into it until after 3.2 and the battleground changes that will make them less painful (especially Warsong Gulch – yes please to a 20 minute game limit!).

It looks like my healing with Fingle will be affecting my raiding as well, as I’m going to be changing Mingle’s second spec to discipline to help out with healing Iron Council hard-mode.  We tried it a few times last night, and the raid damage was just flattening us.  I was on primary dispelling of Steelbreaker’s Fusion Punch (with our very talented other shadow priest backing me up), and with all my attention on that I didn’t really have the time to do much dps.

After a couple of wipes I whispered our healing officer and suggested that it might be a good fight for me to do as disc, to help with raid healing (or at least raid shielding) when I’m not dispelling.  The suggestion went down well, so if we go back to that fight tonight I’ll be sporting my shiny new (mostly repurposed) disc gear and a positive attitude.

Last night’s raid actually went surprisingly well, considering how often we’ve been off-form lately.  We started by one-shotting Flame Leviathan with four towers up, followed by one-shots of Kologarn and Mimiron, and two-shots of Auriaya and Thorim.  Iron Council was troublesome, as new hard modes usually are, but we were keeping a pretty good attitude about it all.

I’ve finally reached another milestone on Pringle, and it’s surprising they haven’t made an achievement out of it.

I mean, seriously.  450 fishing isn’t worth at least some kind of achievement spam?  That’s just ridiculous (and kind of disheartening).  They’re failed to recognise when you max out other professions as well, and I think it’s a missed opportunity on Blizzard’s part.

Speaking of professions, I’ll touch on the interesting times I foresee ahead of me thanks to some increasingly persistent competition in the Glyph market.  I noticed over the last few days that my sales have dropped considerably, and when I checked after posting my glyphs on Monday I found that by the time I’d finished listing my second group two people had undercut almost every glyph I’d listed in group one.

Needless to say, I’m not taking this lying down.  (Actually I’m seated, but that’s beside the point.)  I’ve changed my posting system to minimise the effect of being undercut, and lowered the undercut percentage in Auctioneer while I work on regaining a more substantial share of the market – I only started yesterday, and while my net profit has dropped quite a bit, I am still making a profit, plus I think I’m cutting into their sales as well.  I’ll see how things look later in the week, though, and see if further changes need to be made.

For now, though, I have things to do, fish to catch, and other chores to complete.

/wave

But Vacations Don’t Last Forever

Well, maybe I’m not taking as much time off from 25-mans as I expected.  Due to an unexpected reduction in raider numbers (and another unexpected increase in raiding numbers after another Dath’remar raiding guild stopped raiding, and we picked up a few new faces) I’ve decided to get back into the game.

I have to admit, after just a couple of nights off I’m happy to get back to it (and the possibility that the new raiders will stand in the fire less than some of the old ones is appealing as well).  I might take the occasional night off in future (raid numbers willing), but for now the vacation’s over.  (It was kind of novel while it lasted, brief though it may have been)

We had a less than optimal run last night, thanks to low numbers (as well as some undergeared new raiders), but we managed to get Ignis, XT, Kologarn, Iron Council and Auriaya down anyway (even though our lower-than-normal dps meant we actually hit Auriaya’s enrage timer, which was kind of embarrassing).  Still, considering we were also 24-manning a lot of it, we pulled through better than we could have.  Next week’s raiding could be very interesting.

I’ve put a couple more levels onto Snowfall, but she’s just not as enjoyable to level as my dwarf army has been.  I’m not sure if it’s the blood elf aesthetic, or just the complete lack of friendly guild chat (which is to be expected, not having a guild horde-side).  It’s an unusual experience though, to be leveling somewhere completely new (as I haven’t leveled a horde-side character since pre-TBC).  I guess I’ll see it goes.  (I could just go back to my nelf druid, and see if playing her has jelled any more for me, but my enthusiasm is fleeting)

The last couple of days have been largely non-fishing ones, due to the fishing daily being in Wintergrasp – nothing kills the mood quite like PvP getting in the way of your otherwise solitary and enjoyable past-time.

Ah well, time to publish and then pretend to be productive.

/wave

Contemplating Change, Leveling, And A Meme

Well, 25-man raiding is slow and…  not really fun, to be quite honest.  I’ve had a chat with an officer about my dissatisfaction raiding on Mingle, and have decided to take a couple of weeks (while I continue to raid) to think about what I want to do next.  (I’ll be passing on loot in Ulduar as well, as it wouldn’t be right to take loot that other people can use if there’s a chance I may be not raiding on that character)

Unfortunately there’s no openings for another tank, with one of our old guildmates returning his gnome warrior to the game.  (He’s a far better tank than I am, and a nice guy, so I’m not complaining about it)  I’m trying to come up with ways I can get raid time (in some capacity, probably outside of the guild) on my warrior, but options are pretty limited.  I might have to go raid-hunting, and see if there are any guilds who’d be willing to take a tank from outside their guild, and who raid on nights I’m not raiding on Mingle.  Possibly a bit of a reach, but I’ll see what I can find.

Speaking of Dingle, she has ventured into 10-man Ulduar again, and has another boss kill under her belt.  Most of the raid members are from another guild, and we managed to kill FL, Razorscale and XT-002, but Ignis and the Iron Council proved too much for us.  Sadly, Dingle has no shiny tank loot to show for it (although she did pick up a dps helm that would otherwise have been sharded – I really need to gem and enchant it at some stage).

My tanking inexperience showed itself with two bosses during the raid, both bosses we couldn’t get past.  First was Ignis, where I finally realised my taunts were ineffective if I hadn’t first damaged the target – I was on construct duty, and at the start had trouble keeping aggro on the constructs long enough to get them into the scorches.  I also caused one wipe when I wasn’t tanking the construct far enough into the scorch, so it wasn’t picking up the debuff that turned it molten.  By the end, though, I’d worked out what I had to do (and was doing it correctly, as best I can tell).

With both of these issues worked out (to my satisfaction, at least), we were left with issues with dps (we only had one character capable of enough burst damage to kill the molten constructs, who was unfortunately very attractive to Ignis, and kept getting hot-pocketed) and main-tanking (a DK who was having problems getting positioned correctly, and kept getting the scorches positioned either too far from the pools needed when killing the constructs, or positioned too close to the healers/dps who died pretty rapidly when accidentally scorched).  Eventually the raidleader threw his hands up in despair and we moved on to XT (who we one-shot).

I had a brief positioning issue with the Iron Council, where I was tasked with tanking Steelbreaker at the start, and didn’t pull him out of his damage-amplifying rune quick enough on one attempt, but in general the group just didn’t perform well enough get any further (although it was getting pretty late at that stage).

Other than that, I’ve been putting some time (and gold) into leveling Kringle over the last few days.  He’s currently about a third of the way through 79, and should be 80 today if I don’t get distracted (which is pretty likely).

Some time fishing on Kringle yesterday means he’s now officially a fisherman – which by my standards means he has the 200 points of fishing skill required to equip and use his Fishing Pole.  That gives me 6 characters I can do the fishing daily on, which is about the only daily I’m doing regularly currently (apart from the cooking daily for Fingle and Kringle, who are both working towards the 100 Dalaran Cooking Awards achievement – they’ve both passed the 50 awards part, and are on the home stretch now).

But before I get back to my leveling, here’s a meme that caught my eye.  (Snagged from Mend Pet)

The instructions:

1. Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More”
   or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to “Random quotations”
   or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
   or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
   Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

And what did I end up with?

The first album from BNS Turag.  Brought to you by random wikipedia links, a quote from Socrates, and a photo that felt surprisingly appropriate (well, to me it did).  I’m not going to do the ‘name people to continue this meme’ thing, as I’m just not really into that, but if anyone reading this wants to give it a try, put a link to your results in the comments.  (I’d love to see what other people come up with)

Time’s passing, so I guess I should log on and get Kringle to 80.  (That Nesingwary 4000 he has in the bank is waiting to get brought out and equipped)

/wave

So, What’s New With You?

It’s been a quiet few days, with just the usual raids and a couple of nifty new toys for Dingle to play with.

Yup, this is 3 Tournament pets worth of chopper.  And I have to say, the appeal of the tournament dailies wears off quick when you have multiple characters doing them – Fingle, Mingle and Dingle are all champions now, with Mingle and Dingle champions of four of the five alliance factions.

Dingle has also ventured into Ulduar at last, downing Flame Leviathan and tanking Razorscale.  The zone has been nerfed substantially since I first ventured in there – I suspect it’s actually within my ability to tank it now, provided the raid is geared enough (and 10-man Naxx gear may be good enough, if the players know what they’re doing).  Sadly, she didn’t get any gear from those bosses, but hopefully next time will be more profitable.

Anyway, I’ve cut down my playing time lately because it’s currently just so unsatisfying; Mingle is doing 25-man Ulduar, Dingle will be tanking 10-mans (whenever we can scratch up enough players (which has been once since 3.1 went live), and what’s left is basically just the fishing dailies plus whatever other dailies I can be bothered doing.

I’m deliberating whether or not to put together some gear lists from Ulduar – a list of tanking gear from 10-man Ulduar is appealing, albeit mostly out of curiousity about what there is in there for Dingle to work towards.  I’ve also roughed out a quick guide to setting up Power Auras to display on-screen when Mingle’s flask has worn off while I’m raiding. (it’s happened so often that it got quite annoying).

But for now, I have a little fishing to do (and maybe a handful more dailies) before I head out this afternoon for my second viewing of Star Trek.

/wave

Eggs: Spawn-Camp Or Run Circuits?

As someone who spent a couple of hours running in circles while shape-shifted into rabbit-form, picking up eggs around Azure Watch, I’ve been surprised at the number of people who’ve spent their time camping at a spawn-point for several eggs (quite a few I picked up from in front of them as I travelled past at near-supersonic speed).

If I wanted to sit in one place and click on an egg when it spawns after however many minutes, I’d probably be missing the old 30-second duration of fishing.  Actually, even the old fishing system would be more fun than egg-camping, for me at least.  I just don’t get it. 

But I’ve completed the meta-achievement on Mingle, so I don’t have to stress over it any more (until this time next year, maybe).

Mingle’s endeavours with rod in hand have been rewarded with another fishing item, the Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat.  Besides giving her a certain stereotypical-adventurer-chic, the on-use lure ability is very convenient.

In 25-man raiding news, Auriaya came to a sticky end last night (and I was dead for most of the fight, just like I was for the 10-man kill of her I was party to).  We then moved on to wipe all night on Thorim and Hodir – it…  really wasn’t pretty.

Also, I’m the guildmember responsible for logging the fights to put WWS and WMO reports on the forums for the guild after raid, but after replacing the logging addon I’d been using when 3.1 broke LoggerHead (which has been updated, finally) I forgot to enable it for Ulduar.  Thankfully another raider was able to log the fight (thanks Tame), so my poor performance wasn’t lost to the ages.

Last of all for today, I stumbled across a couple of interesting links that I thought I’d share.

• An enlightening article by Matticus entitled “Frustrated by Ulduar? Here’s Why.”  (And I’m certainly frustrated with it lately)
• And on an entertaining, Noblegarden-related note:  Hannelore.

Back to my dailies (and fishing), anyway.

(I’m beginning to wonder if I should rename the blog to “One Of These Fishermen”)

/wave

Fishing Makes Everything Better.

Even Lake Wintergrasp yesterday, where I spent almost 100 minutes fishing in a rather contented manner.

That’s what I caught in that time, thanks to one glow worm and four sharpened fish hooks.  And on top of that, from the clams, I scored 9 northsea pearls and a siren’s tear.  All in all, I’d call that a pretty good haul.  It was actually pretty enjoyable (other than being killed twice by horde players who obviously don’t fish); I just put on some good music (first was the self-titled album by Genesis from 1983, and after that was a collection of Crowded House tracks) and kicked back (in a manner of speaking).  All I needed was a floppy hat and a beer.

I’ve now got 5 fishing toons, having brought Pringle back into the fold (it was fun getting him to the central flight path in Sholazar Basin), and Kringle might join in the fun today if I have the time (I checked and found I’d done some fishing on both characters, so it’s not quite the grind of starting from 0).  I also scored a Porcelain Bell from Mingle’s fishing reward yesterday, which has the virtue of vendoring for 100g.  Still no fishing rods (or Sea Turtle), but there’s always tomorrow.

We didn’t have the numbers for either guild 10-man Ulduar last night – the main group didn’t get enough healers, and the secondary group just didn’t get enough sign-ups.  Disappointing.

Fingle has started doing the Tournament dailies, with an eye towards getting a replacement to the BoA mace she’s still wielding at level 80.  Kringle’s still waiting to be levelled.  And re-talented.

I’m also finding my aggregate gold total going up, thanks to multiple characters doing dailies – much more of this and I might find myself getting around to giving one of my characters dual-specs.  It might actually be interesting to do it with Fingle, and see how hard it is to gear up a second shadow-priest (mostly) from scratch, with a backup set of gear for disc.

Lastly, I’ve been reading this fascinating article on WoWInsider that delves into the differences between 10-man and 25-man loot in Wrath, and why the difference may be necessary to keep 25-man raiding viable.  Have a look here if you’re interested.

(Oh, and I might finally be able to remember how to correctly use an apostrophe, thanks to this)

For now?  Addons are updated (again), so it’s time to be endailyfied.

/wave

Yawn. No, Really.

I couldn’t get back to sleep (woke up at about 6am, after going to bed at 2am), so I figured I might as well get some dailies out of the way.  And guess what?  The fourth day of Blood Is Thicker in a row.

Ah well, you get that sometimes.  (But it would be nice to get something else for a change – I’ve done the dailies every day since 3.1 went live, and I’ve still only seen two of them)  I’ve started leveling fishing on Fingle as well, which gives me four characters to fish with.  Fortunately you’re able to do the fishing daily in Shattrath in addition to the Dalaran one, so I can keep myself in Sharpened Fish Hooks.

Ulduar-25 went better last night; after defeating the loot piñata that is Flame Leviathan (well, we downed him despite all the raiders who still don’t know how to do that fight – apparently we’re going to be organised when we do it next week), we then downed Razorscale (eventually – it took a few attempts), and I sat out for XT-002 Deconstructor.  We finished with Ignis (barely downing him before we over-ran our scheduled raid times).  Razorscale was generous, and gave me the Collar of the Wyrmhunter, which has allowed me to drop Haunting Call in favour of The Impossible Dream – the new +hit pieces are making it a lot easier to juggle that particular stat.  (The stats on it are nice, but some of these helms make me really glad I can set them to not display on my characters)

I’m hoping to get Dingle into the second guild 10-man group for Ulduar this week, but her comparative lack of gear may put her out of the running – Ulduar is really quite demanding of raiders, in that they need to be pretty solidly geared before it’s worth taking them in.  While she’s geared enough for Naxx25, Ulduar10 may be beyond her – or at least, her lack of gear may make her impossible to keep up.  I’ll have to see what happens come Friday.

For now, though, I’m going to finish the fishing dailies and see if I can get another couple of hours sleep – raiding and sleep deprivation aren’t a very successful combination.

/wave

No raid tonight? What to do?

So far I’m enjoying 3.1.  Ulduar is great, fishing is fun, new dailies are something different to do.  They’ve even added a direct flight route from Dalaran to Sholazar Basin.

I’ve had a play with the new boss in the 10-man Vault of Archavon on Dingle, and I’m sure it’s more fun to dps than it was to tank - I was designated add-tank, and it really was a tough fight for me; keeping aggro on the mobs I had was easy, but a very restricted camera angle made targeting respawned adds something of a challenge.  But we did manage to down the boss, and one of the druid’s in the group became the first in the guild to pick up a piece of T8.

We had another bash at Razorscale last night, and between the hotfixes (increasing the enrage timer to 10 minutes, and making the iron dwarf casters only do their chain lightning when stationary) and our increasing competence, we managed to get the boss down to 9% on our best attempt.  Admittedly we were caught off-guard by the enrage several times, as it’s not in the Deadly Boss Mods timers just yet, but it’s nice to be able to consistently get that far.

Out of curiosity I decided to put the fishing changes to the test, and picked up the fishing daily on Dingle, who was a fishing virgin at the time (with 0 points of fishing skill).  It took about 50 minutes (not including travel time back to Dalaran to train), but she caught the Ghostfish and had leveled to 142 fishing in the process.

The changes to the tailoring mount, the flying carpet, have made it as useful as a traditional mount now (they’ve removed the mount and dismount animations), so it’s been set as Mingle’s default mount – I’ve been waiting for this change, as I loved the look of it but the delay in mounting/dismounting grew very annoying, very quickly.  On a related note, if I can ever save up enough I’d love to get the Chopper for Dingle – what better mount for an engineer, after all?

One change that has disappointed me is that the Dalaran cooking dailies are now only available for level 80 characters; bankrogue Pringle and hunter Kringle will have to finish leveling before they can continue doing them.  (Curiously enough, the jewelcrafting dailies are still available for Pringle, who’s only level 75)

So I guess it’s time to put a little effort into leveling those two – I’ve respecced Kringle (beastmaster again, my favourite spec), and replaced his pet gorilladin with a turtle (now that Thunderstomp, which made the gorilla so useful, has been made available to all Tenacity pets).  I’ll fire up Jame’s Leveling Guide later and see how we do – Kringle is level 74, and is about half-way through Howling Fjord so far.

No more raids until Sunday, so I’ve plenty of time to play with my alts.  Should gain access to the next tier of Tournament quests with Dingle and Mingle today as well, so I’m getting closer to the shiny new mounts.  For now, though?  ‘Tis dailies time!

/wave

Too much of a good thing?

One of the things you get used to, when you have multiple alts at (roughly) the same level of progression, is doing dailies multiple times. The one that comes up as regular as clockwork for me would have to be the cooking daily.

Now, I currently have six characters (I won’t refer to OCD if you won’t) who get to do this each day and (apart from the inevitable issues that ensue from trying to do it when Dalaran is crowded) it's actually not that bad. The only down side would have to be trying to decide what to actually use all the Dalaran Cooking Awards for.

With only two useless cosmetic feasts (the Small Feast and Gigantic Feast respectively) providing skill-ups above 425 cooking, the grind to level high-end cooking is currently pretty awful (although patch 3.1 is going to go a long way towards fixing that, at least in theory). I do try to keep at least a full stack each of Great Feasts and Fish Feasts on Mingle for raiding, but that doesn’t require very many spices (and is easily provided by the contents of the Small Spice Bag from the cooking daily reward).

I also tend to keep a stack (divided into four stacks of 25) listed on the AH, which gives bank alt Pringle an extra 140G or so every few days, but the market doesn’t really support any more than that – at least, not without having the price drop unpleasantly.

Fortunately the awards don’t take up bag space, so it’s safe to just let them accumulate (which they’re doing very effectively – they appear to breed so effectively Tribbles would be jealous).

But when it comes down to it, I think I’m just grumbling about nothing – they don’t take much time, don’t take up bag space, and do provide an additional (small) source of income. Just wait until we get the patch 3.1 fishing changes and new dailies, though. Then I’m sure I’ll have something to really complain about.

Or at least, something to compete with the cooking awards for bag space. I can hardly wait.