Blacksmithing
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Insider Trader: Sock it to me -- a little respec
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. One of the questions you'll generally always come across on the first page or two of the Blizzard profession forums is The Respec Question: How do I respec from X specialty to Y specialty? With drastically varying procedures from profession to profession and scattershot updates and changes from patch to patch, it's hard to know when you've finally come across an accurate, definite answer – yet if you get it wrong, you could be wasting hundreds of gold and hours of skillups. Bindar of Aggramar has compiled a guide covering specialty respecs for all professions. We'll take a look at the basics right here for you. The first thing you need to know about changing your profession specialty is how to drop your current spec, a spot where a surprising number of players run into a brick wall. Don't get your netherweave in a twist – it's just a technical difficulty, easily remedied. If you speak with the appropriate NPC to unlearn your specialty and select that option only to find that nothing happens, it's almost certainly an add-on conflict. Open the World of Warcraft folder on your computer and find your interface folder. Rename the whole folder with a temporary name, which disables all your add-ons. Then hop back into game and try the dialogue again; you should be back in business. (Don't forget to go back and rename your interface folder to its original name when you're done.)
Insider Trader: What the ! -- In-game trade product searches
Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader, your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.How can you pimp that hawt new epic if you don't know what gems and enchants exist to put in it? And once you find out what's available, how can you find a craftsperson who can do it? What used to be an excruciating hunt-and-peck process is easing up, thanks to several mods growing in popularity among crafters. These mods allow customers to whisper a tradesperson and run direct searches for specific types of products -- a direct peek into what that crafter can do for you and your gear.First popularized by jewelcrafters and enchanters, these handy mods are now available for other trades as well. If you like to ponder the possibilities without feeling like you're tying up a crafter's time and attention, you'll love the power of running your own searches. It's all handled via /whisper, so there's no public spam and you won't bother a soul. Rifle through what's available by stats, gem color, enchanting reagents required, gem rarity and more, all via the tradesperson's mod -- you install nothing to be able to use it. It really is that simple!
Insider Trader: When you want what they've got
Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader -- your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Want to make a completist crafter crit in his pants? Give him a good whiff of something he may not even have know existed: Alliance- and Horde-only patterns. "What?!? They've got stuff I don't have?" That's right -- each faction enjoys a variety of profession patterns available only to that side via quests or faction-specific vendors.While most of these patterns are low- to mid-level frills, plenty of entrepreneurial crafters find them meaty (or profitable) enough to be worth jumping through hoops for. Beyond the satisfaction of having literally all of the available patterns in a particular trade, craftspeople may actually carve out a niche crafting items for players on their faction who don't normally have access to them.The neutral Auction Houses are a crafter's bread and butter when it comes to finding these patterns, although having a friend on the other side is even better. Almost all of these patterns (and the items they create) are tradable, although you'll find a pair of Alliance cooking patterns listed that remain stubbornly marked Bind on Pickup. But most are available for cross-faction movement via the neutral auction houses. There aren't many new Burning Crusade-era patterns to track down and agonize over, though -- just one lone Draenei pattern (listed after the jump). It seems that the bitter tears of Horde herbalists pining for Herbalist's Gloves washed the faction-specific pattern trend right down the drain.Read more for a list of faction-specific crafting patterns.
More item tweaking going down on the PTRs
If you thought the item stats tweaking was over, think again. When players were amazed that the new Tankatronic Goggles saw a nice buff (that could actually compete with Tier 6), Kalgan showed up with a firebomb: the current build on the PTRs only has about a third of the item changes coming down. He says "nearly every level 70 epic item in the game is in the process of being updated."Curse has a few of the changes already-- blacksmithing weapons and armor have been boosted, arena weapons saw a buff, and (most exciting for me, since I'm not a blacksmith or a good PvPer), the Badge of Justice stuff has been improved a bit. So expect a lot of changes (for the better, so far) whenever the patch does come out. In fact, with all these buffs, I'm wondering if something is going to give. Hopefully, the devs decided to buff the high end stuff, rather than nerf the more obscure items.Oh, and the look of the Mongoose enchant has changed yet again. I'm glad that whoever's job it is to design that enchant is really taking the time to make sure it's exactly right.
PTR notes: get your epic BoEs crafted now
Wow, I sure am glad I came across this in my internet travels yesterday, since I seem to have missed it in the patch notes. But there it is: when 2.1 goes live, "The Epic bind on equip Blacksmith weapon recipes now require more materials to make." How much more, you ask? The image above (via World of Raids) shows the new recipes. Here's how they compare to the old: Khorium Champion: Four more Primal Nethers Felsteel Reaper: Ten Khorium bars (no Khorium required previously), four more PNs Hand of Eternity: Ten Khorium bars, two more PNs Felsteel Longblade: Ten Khorium bars, four more PNs Eternium Runed Blade: Four Felsteel changed to ten Khorium and four Hardened Adamantite; two more PNs Dirge: Ten Khorium bars, two more PNs Fel Edged Battleaxe: Ten Khorium bars, two more PNs Fel Hardened Maul: Ten Khorium bars, four more PNs Runic Hammer: Ten Khorium bars, two more PNs Guess I better get a move on farming the mights for my Hand of Eternity. The price impact of this change will vary depending on the crafters you know, but based on the rates I've seen should be a few hundred gold. Fortunately, it doesn't look like the patch is going up today, so we have at least a week to get our mats together.
Phat Loot Phriday: Bloodmoon
That's what I'm talkin' bout. We've been messing around lately on PLP, doing all kinds of quirky and strange items. Not this week-- we came here to do some DPS and chew gum, and we're all out of gum.Name: BloodmoonType: Epic Two-hand AxeDamage/Speed: 366 - 549 / 3.70 (123.6 DPS)Abilities: Improves crit rating by 52, and attack power by 106 Requires Master Axesmith (we'll get to that in one second) Since it's a two-hander, it's not great for tanking. But if you're a fury warrior looking to split some skulls in PvP or PvE (extra lovin' for Orcs, who get a bonus to their Axe skill), this thing is about as nice as it gets How to Get It: There's a price for everything cool, and this one is no exception. First of all, you've got to be a blacksmith, and then you've got to do a quest when you've got 200 skill to become a weaponsmith. Then, you've got to check back in with the special blacksmithing trainer at 250 to become an axesmith. Finally, you've got to get into Outland and get your Master Axesmith level all the way up to 375.And that's just to learn the plans. This axe is at the top of the new upgradeable weapons for blacksmiths, which means to make it, you've first got to make an axe called the Lunar Crescent, which will cost you Eternium Bars, plus Primal Air, Primal Earth, and Primal Might (that last one is the kicker, as those are really hard to come by). And once you've made the Crescent, you use a bunch of Primal Nether (which drops from heroic mode bosses in Outland 5mans) and Primal Mana to upgrade it to an axe called the Mooncleaver.And finally, you've got to somehow round up a stack of 20 Nether Vortexes, which drop only from Outland 25man raids, with a fairly low drop rate, especially considering that they are necessary for about 15 different recipes, all at the highest levels of Tailoring, Blacksmithing, and Leatherworking. So unless you've got a whole, well-geared guild behind you who really wants to get this weapon, it's not very likely you're getting it anytime soon.But if you somehow make the Lunar Crescent, and then find the mats to upgrade it, and then get those Vortexes, you can upgrade the Mooncleaver to this, the 123.6 DPS Bloodmoon. Neat, isn't it?Getting Rid of It: Speaking of the guild that helps you make this, they would be pretty angry if you sold it to a vendor. But you'd get 17g 4s 35c for it. It will also disenchant, of course, but considering it's BOP for Blacksmiths, it's extremely unlikely one of these will ever be disenchanted. Ever.
Expansion blacksmithing items
In the most recent professions preview, Blizzard mentioned epic blacksmithing gear that would be upgradable -- it would improve as you progressed through the game rather than being quickly replaced by dungeon drops. Of course, no details were provided at the time. However, the dedicated folks on the World of Raids forums have rounded up some screenshots from the blacksmithing trainer in the beta -- showing what the blacksmith to be can expect from the expansion. There appear to be one-handed and two-handed options for each weapon type, as well as a mail and plate set of armor for the armorsmiths. (My question: where's the gear for a caster style paladin?)
