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Sunday, May 26, 2013

How much gold do we need now?

     I remember Vanilla Wow just like it was yesterday. Gold was very hard to come by. Quite often, if a player spent their gold too freely, as in buying gear or buying up materials to level a trade skill, they just might not have enough gold to buy their mount. This resorted to hour upon hour of farming for trash to make up the difference. In my case, that very thing happened to me and I had to walk around killing stuff at random until I had the funds. It wasn't like now, where I could just ask a guild mate for what I was missing. After all, they were all just as broke as I was.
    But that was then. Now gold is plentiful and gear is pretty easy to get without laying down hardly any money. Today, just as it was long ago, leveling a trade skill is the biggest zap to my economic standing. So now, it would seem that most of the need for gold revolves around vanity items rather than things I absolutely have to have. While it would be nice to have the 100k for that Darkmoon Rabbit I've been wanting I believe I'll just live without it until the price comes back down to earth on my server.
    However, if something ever came up and I wanted a lot of gold I feel comfortable that I could get it with two simple mods and a single website.

The mods


    With auctioneer, it's not like I'm sharing some guarded secret since it's been downloaded 14 million times since 2006 and that number is just from the curse website alone.


    Again, no big secret as it's pushing 10 million dls itself. But I often here questions like "Which one should I use?" My answer is both since I use them both. I personally like the statistics of auctioneer and the ease of creating and buying auctions from auctioneer.



The Website


A picture of the website WowUction


    A guild mate shared this website with me not long ago and I have to say that I was most impressed. Basically, while this website tells you what is hot and cold on the auction house, it also tells you what items and mats I should produce and sell to maximize my profits. There is a mod for that called trade skill master but I never seem to have the time to figure out how to set that up and the tutorials I've seen on it thus far are are a bit lacking, at least to my admittedly limited attention span.
    Overall, a really great alternative for me. Wowuction scans the auction house frequently so the information is usually quite up to date. I've made quite a bit of gold with this little gem. 









 




If anyone knows of a really good, up to date, tutorial for Trade Skill Master or any other economic addons which I have not listed here, I would certainly appreciate that information. Who knows, with a little help I might get that Darkmoon Rabbit and a Reforging Mount some day. : )










Saturday, May 25, 2013

Hunter Weak Auras

This weak Aura String is the first in a series of weak auras for the hunter.

We'll start out with Survival Hunters since this one is the most up to date. You might want to avoid using this aura on trash pulls because you want to keep all your cooldowns available for the boss.

Here is what the aura looks like fully loaded
A picture of hunter weakauras in action

I can pretty much guarantee that with this aura you will be among the top in dps.





And here is an updated version of the above weakaura hunter strings. Thanks goes Kevin Lassing for taking the time to update this aura to make it even better. The version bellow also has a Focus counter and Black arrow timer. Thanks for the hard work.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Tracking Renewing Mist on your Mistweaver Monk

Renewing Mist and Thunder Focus Tea

It is essential, if you want to do well with your Mistweaver Monk that you keep Renewing Mist up at all times. You should have it up on as many targets as possible but never less than 5 in a 10 man. While you might be able to keep track of it by simply looking and counting the number of people who have it in your healing frames, it is certainly better to simply have a separate aura which keeps track of the number of people who have Mist on them. This way, when you have at least 5 people receiving renewing mist you are free to cast Thunder Focus Tea, which will instantly refresh the duration of Renewing mist on everyone the next time you cast uplift. So my point is this. If you are not on the ball with keeping 100% uptime on renewing mist then your Thunder Focus Tea will only benefit a few people.

A picture of Thunder Focus Tea




So I would recommend this priority.

1. Keep an eye on the aura that tells you how many people have renewing mist on them.
2. When you see the number five, cast Thunder Focus Tea
3. You have 30 seconds from the time you cast Thunder Focus tea to uplift all the people with Renewing Mist on them.
4. Once you uplift those people, find someone who doesn't have it on them, if any, and then before you know it, all 10 raid members will have Renewing Mist.

With this strategy, you will have Renewing Mist on everyone and your uplift will aoe heall the entire raid in a 10 man. 

I credit Affinitii with the Aura I'm about to post.


Monday, May 20, 2013

5.3 Cheat Sheet

World of Warcraft Patch 5.3 Cheat Sheet


This cheat sheet is just for the general changes that effect everyone. I figure most people will want to go in depth when it concerns their own class changes. For that reason, class changes are not included to keep this brief.

The full patch notes in all its glory can be read here
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/9135374

                                              A few stand out 5.3 patch changes

- It will take 33% less experience to get from level 85 to 90

- Item upgrades are returning. 250 valor for 4 item levels. 750 justice upgrade provides 8 points ex. 463 item will be 471 but you can only do it once.

- pvp equivalent will be 750 conquest and 1500 honor

- Heirlooms cost to upgrade reduced by 60%

- Heroic Scenarios are coming. Must be item level 480 and you must be in a pre made group.

- Lesser charms will drop off of level 90 mobs out in the world. So top level dailies should give not only the reward amount but you should get some from killing the mobs now.

- All characters have a base resilience of 65% now.

- You can roll on off-spec loot now. Just right click on your character portrait and select the option from the drop down list.

- Bonus rolls can offer a larger than usual amount of gold. Whoopee...I kid

- Protection from bad luck. (They are talking to me here) The more times you don't get squat the better your chances of getting said squat the next time you bonus roll.

- You will now be able to herb and mine in Mist of Pandaria even if you are at low skill level. Not sure if this means you will get little to no ghost iron or if it means you will get a different kind of ore in accordance with your current skill level. The jury is still out on this one.

My own take is that this patch just screams alt play. Heirlooms upgrade price being cut so low means you can upgrade your leveling gear, then once you hit 85, the amount of xp required is cut by a third. Then once you hit 90 just farm dungeons and upgrade the gear you get from them to 471. This should further decrease the current skill level you see from players in lfr considerably since they will have 33 percent less practice with their toons than they would have had. lol. I kid again.

Gold From Sunsong Ranch

A picture of World of Warcraft Sunsong Ranch

Sunsong Ranch is a Cash Cow

If you are one of those people who need or want gold but you go days without planting anything on the Sunsong Ranch you might want to reconsider.

Many players get their gold through daily quests. This is perfectly acceptable because there are many reasons to do daily quests besides the gold you get for doing them. But we are talking about only two things here, those things being time and gold. Let's compare the yield from a single ranch to daily quests shall we?

Inside the numbers

I personally always plant flowers on my ranch and this is quite obviously because of the golden lotus you get from the crop. As you can see from the above pic, I recieved 8 golden lotus. So my crop yielded the following.

8 golden lotus        = 368 gold value
2 life spirits            = 6 gold saved on health pots
2. water spirits       = 8 gold saved on mana pots
8 snow lily             = 17 gold
4 green tea leaves  = 8 gold
6 silk weed            = 12 gold
4 fools cap            = 12 gold
5 rain poppy         = 10 gold

Total Auction house value of that crop? 441 gold
Time to clear and replant farm?             4 minutes 30 seconds

Farm Vs Daily quests

Daily quests give about 20 gold per completed quest, meaning you would have to do 22 daily quests to earn the same amount of gold as the farm earned. At max speed on a well geared toon I can do about 3 daily quests in 11 minutes and about 80 to 90 minutes to do 22, not counting travel time from hub to hub and providing you are not competing with other players for quest mobs and items.Chances are it would take much much longer to do 22 quests.

And the winner is?

Daily quests
22 quests taking a minimum of 80 minutes = 442 gold value

Farming herbs on the ranch
You can do 16 farms in 80 minutes 
For every 80 minutes devoted to farming = 9,724 gold value

I personally have three level 90 toons and I make a minimum of 1200 gold per day just from my farm. My items sell every time even if I get undercut in the auction house. This takes me about 15 minutes maximum. But this can be very valuable, especially on extremely low server like the one I came from, where there are so few people that you are basically only selling to other guild mates. 

Don't forget tip

Remember to save time on your farm that you can mount up to pull those tangled weeds. I'm surprised by the numbers of my friends and guild mates who did not know this was possible. I didn't know this myself until recently.


Sunday, May 19, 2013

Clean Wow Interface

How to clean up your World of Warcraft Interface


Check out my video and see just how much I was able to trim off my interface and remain functional. Without weak auras I wouldn't suggest hiding your main action bars, and even then I wouldn't if you use a mod like Bitten's spell flash or omnicc to track the cooldowns of your spells. 


Mods You will need:
Weak Auras (Optional if you wish to keep your action bars visable)


The Elvui section
1. First off install Elvui and then go through the steps to finish the initial setup that will automatically pop up when you enter the game. After this is done then type /elvui in your chat box to bring up the Elvui User Interface.
2. On the left hand side of the options menu click on the + button on the action bars menu and then go down the list and put a check in every box that you wish to hide until you mouse over it. These bars will only be visible when you hover your mouse over them.
3. Now select the unit frames + to collapse that menu and change the size of your Player frames, Target frames and Pet frames until you are happy with the width and height.
4. Lastly, click on the "Toggle Anchors" and you will see a whole bunch of black boxes. You can drag these around the screen to wherever you would like them. I moved my mini map, player frames, target frames, and pet frames in the video so everything else was in it's default position for the most part. Once you are happy with where everything is then simply click on the "Lock Frames" button in the middle of your screen. And that's all there is to that part.

Weak Auras section
1. After you have found a weak auras string that you want to use copy it from whatever website you got it from so that it will be on your clipboard.
2. Type /wa when you get in game and select new from the upper left menu and then import from the bottom right menu.
3. Once the text window pops up simply click on the text menu and hit Control+V to paste the string from your clipboard. A new window will pop up and you just need to click on import from this new window to finish the process.

I will post the exact weak aura string I used in the video in the next post as soon as I can remove my hotkey labels. If you have any questions just reply and we'll help you get it figured out. 



Saturday, May 18, 2013

Wow Monk Weak Auras String

I have weak auras for all three monk specs and this post will be updated shortly to include Brewmaster and Windwalker. I'll start off with Mistweaver for now however since this is my main spec.


Mistweaver Monk Weak auras string
A picture of World of Warcraft Monk Weakauras




This has about everything you could ever need with the exception of a renewing mist tracker, which I use in a separate area of my screen so I can keep a good close eye on the number of targets I have it on. For that, I use Renewing Mist Tracker which you can download from curse. 

Here's a vid (less than a minute) that will show you how to import weak auras strings.





Friday, May 17, 2013

Staying alive in World of Warcraft

Staying Alive In World of Warcraft



It's quite easy to get so wrapped up in your role as tank, healer or dps that you completely forget to check your health until it's too late. While checking health mainly falls to the healers, there are many times when the healer is helpless to do anything about the fact that you might be about to die. A classic examples of this would be a boss like Blade Lord Ta'yak in Heart of Fear, where everyone is taking extreme damage while making a mad dash through those "stupid" tornadoes. Another good example is the lightning phase in the Jin'rokh the Breaker fight where everyone stacks and takes a butt load of damage for a while. Perhaps there is a boss fight that just dumps a lot of damage on the raid and the healers are busy trying to heal up the other 9 or 24 members of the raid. Perhaps the healers will be able to get around to you or perhaps not and you either have to get a battle rez or lay there all defeated until the boss dies or the raid wipes.

But there is an easy way to remedy this, allowing you to not only live through most encounters which would kill any other player, but often times, you will be the last man/woman standing. These suggestions are as follows.

-Identify every single last "oh crap I'm about to die" spell you have and assign them to a hotkey. Damage mitigation spells and self healing spells would fall under this category. Make a habit of going though your spell book and looking for anything and everything that would allow you to live a bit longer or heal yourself up until your healers can have more time to fill your health back up.
-Also make a hotkey for Warlock health stones and healing potions or even those life spirit things you get from your farm or from picking flowers in Mists of Pandaria
-Once everything is hotkeyed either make sure you can always clearly see your health status by moving your healthframe to the same section of the screen or find a nice health warning mod that makes a terrible racket or your screen flashes once your health drops bellow a certain percentage.
-Then all you have to do is start popping those "oh crap" spells and items until you are safe again.

Personally, I use weak auras for this, as I do any time I need to know anything about my items, cool downs, status...the list goes on and on.

I typically assign an aura to pop up at various stages of my health. My Mistweaver monk for example has the following triggers assigned so that I know not only what is availible to me (off cd) and at the particular stage of my health that I need it the most.

1. at 80% or bellow I have Expell Harm reminder to pop up right on top of my character. I hit the appropriate key and I'm healed up.
2. at 70% Mana tea pops up for a quick 60+k heal
3. at 60% Fortifying Brew pops up and I hit that key
4. 50% is my lock rock and if it's an easy fight to keep mana on a healing potion. If you don't have a lock then put one in your group long enough to get some.

Here is a vid showing how quickly you can do this with weak auras

There you have it. If you would like some help setting up your "oh crap" auras just reply to this post with your request.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Resto Druid Weak Auras

Restoration Druid Weak Aura String


First off, if you don't have weak auras yet here is the link to it.
Weak Auras 
After you have that squared away then copy the text from the text box at the bottom of this post and import it into weak auras. 
If you have no idea how to import a weak aura string here is a very quick vid I made that shows you how. Importing a weak auras string

This aura string has everything but a lifebloom tracker, which I do use a different mod for this called Lifebloom tracker. I like to keep my lifebloom mod in a slightly different place and usually make it pretty big so I know to keep track of it. Here's Lifebloom tracker
 




Here is an example of my Druids weak auras string. 
A picture of World of Warcraft Restoration Druid Weakauras
I personally like to keep all my information in one place, right beside my character. I use healbot, which is right above my weak aura string so that I get all the information I need without having to scan around the screen for this or that. Doing this helps with several important aspects.
1. I can see what spells are available while keeping a close eye on my healing frames.
2. Since everything is pulled up close to my character, I can not only see if I'm standing in some unsavory crap but I can keep a close eye on the boss, adds, and the general movement of the entire raid.


And here is a quick vid on weak auras in action