enchants
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Warlords of Draenor: Illusions change your enchant effects
If you're one of those players who enjoys transmog but hates it when an enchant doesn't seem to go with your weapon, the folks at Wowhead have datamined an interesting new wrinkle - the ability to transmog your weapon effects. It seems to be achieved via an item called an illusion, like this one for the old BC era Executioner enchant, that applies only the visual aspect of a specific enchant. In addition, rogues get a special rogue only effect, Illusion - Poison, which does exactly what you'd expect, as well as certain Warlords enchants having a poisonous variant just for rogues with a similar effect. There's also another kind of enchant variant, the hidden variant, that has the same basic effect as the baseline enchant but which has no discernible visible effect. This is all pretty interesting stuff if you're an enchanter, or into transmog, or just don't like a specific enchant effect and want everything to look like it's got fire or butterflies on it. Ooh, fire butterflies.
Watcher on Raid Consumables and Enchants in Warlords
One of the things that people concern themselves with when raiding progression is all the little things you can do to eke out just that extra little bit more. However, with the advent of Warlords of Draenor and its sweeping systems changes, stat squishes and ability pruning, there seems to be some confusion about what players will and won't be able to do to get that extra bit. Yes, reforging is gone, but Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas assures us you will still be able to enchant and gem your gear. And also, raid consumables like food and flasks totally are going to be around in Warlords. What seems to be confusing people is that enchanting and gemming are getting a slim-down. There will be fewer enchant slots and gems on gear, but they're not going to be removed. @Slootbag They're consolidated into fewer slots, so you can wear more gear instantly, but each enchant you do have is more impactful. - Watcher (@WatcherDev) July 8, 2014 It's important to keep in mind that people will still have the ability to tweak and go for incremental performance increases in these ways. Some players may choose to use these on a frequent basis, but for the most part, it's expected that most players will be able to use more gear immediately on getting it with the new system.
Will Warlords of Draenor be alt-friendly?
Here's a bit of truth - while I have a lot of alt warriors, I don't play them much once I get them to max level. I have my main, who raids, whose gear I keep up to date and who I play often, who I indulge my transmog jones on - and everyone else, once I get them to max level and maybe get them some Timeless Isle gear, I stop. My most recent 90 warrior, a draenei woman, I kept up for a month before I finally just stopped wanting to run dungeons on her. My tauren has seen even less play. Why? Is it just that I already have the one warrior, so why play others? No. Because even if that were the case, it doesn't explain why my shaman and my DK are both sitting there, doing nothing. My shaman makes potions and flasks for me, and that's about it. My DK is literally gathering dust. So, why then? Why am I not playing my alts? I thought about it this week while considering what to do with yet another Timeless Isle piece I could send to my tauren, and then I realized that he's off on another server, with no gold to speak of, and in order to get that piece gemmed and enchanted properly I'd have to play him for an hour or two to make the gold to do it - and it hit me. I already maintain my main's gear - doing the same work on my alts just doesn't appeal to me. Having to get all their gear gemmed, all the enchants (I always forget boot enchants until I realize I'm slower than everyone else) - even when you can afford it (which I can for my alts on my main's server) it's just tedious, especially when you find yourself improving gear frequently. What enchants do I put on my shaman's blue weapons? Do I go for the good enchants and then replace them in two days when I get an LFR drop? Ultimately this is what has me thinking about Warlords of Draenor. Gear has been and always will be an impediment to playing an alt - you have to be willing to put in the work to acquire new gear and get them up to the same level as your main if you intend to use them in that fashion. But the removal of the variety of enchants and gems we have now will mean there's less impediment to alt-playing.
Gold Capped: How to make gold as an enchanter
"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Enchanting can be a very good way to make gold. Every time someone gets an upgrade, the first thing they do is see whether there's an enchant they could put on it, and if so, either have someone enchant it in a trade window, or buy a scroll from the AH. The first thing you'll need to know if you're going to get into the scroll market is that it's not a good idea to use the default interface. You will face challenges that it is simply not equipped to handle. Chiefly: Knowing whether a scroll is profitable Knowing whether you already have scrolls made and for sale
Patch 5.1 changes enchants
If you remember, about a month ago now a hotfix changed the way Windsong and Elemental Force enchants work. The changes were an attempt to allow enchants to scale with haste while not benefiting a certain speed of weapon over another. This was called the Real PPM (procs per minute) system. Now, four more enchants have been moved to the Real PPM system, according to Daxxari. Daxxari - Windsong and Elemental Force Information In 5.1, we're migrating four additional procs over to the Real PPM system. Dancing Steel and Jade Spirit are 2 Real PPM, River's Song is 4 Real PPM, and Colossus is 6 Real PPM. source After the break we'll post the complete updated post explaining the changes to these enchants and how they'll function in patch 5.1. It should be noted that Windsong and Elemental Force already use this new system as of last month - the enchants that will switch over to it in patch 5.1 are as above, Dancing Steel, Jade Spirit, River's Song and Colossus.
Blood Pact: Enhancing your evil gear at 90
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is pand-a-ren, every day. All the dailies. All of them. Especially the Golden Lotus ones. What enchants will help me hit hit cap? What will help me reach that haste breakpoint? How can I get more mastery? Should I gem for the socket bonus? What professions are best for warlocks? OK, I might be lazy or otherwise occupied with all the Lorewalkers scrolls to figure out which professions are best before the Elitist Jerks do. But I've put it off long enough and raiding won't wait: it's the consumables, enchants, and profession perks post.
Mists of Pandaria enchants revealed
Dataminers have been hard at work combing through the Mists of Pandaria beta client that became available tonight. The new enchants coming for weapons and armor have names -- and here they are, courtesy of WoWDB. Enchant Weapon - Pandamonium Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes grant 1,000 attack power for 12 seconds. Can only enchant a level 92 weapon. Enchant Weapon - Windsong Permanently enchants a melee weapon to sometimes increase your critical strike, haste, or mastery rating by 1,500 for 12 seconds when dealing damage with spells and melee attacks. Requires a level 384 or higher item. Enchant Weapon - Jade Spirit Permanently enchants a melee weapon to sometimes increase your intellect by 1,650 when healing or dealing damage with spells. If less than 25% of your mana remains when the effect is triggered, your spirit will also increase by 750. Requires a level 384 or higher item.
Spiritual Guidance: 8 reasons why your shadow priest DPS sucks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Every Wednesday, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen rains sheer purple destruction down on all who oppose him (such as those who dress cats in outfits). It's pretty much a known fact that we shadow priests are looked up to the world over. (Especially by Tyler Caraway, but that's mostly just because he's very short.) The reasons behind the admiration are many, but one seems to be more compelling than the rest: Shadow priests are capable of doing stunningly awesome DPS. Big numbers are sexy. There's no denying it. The unfortunate reality, however, is that not every shadow priest gets to realize their true potential. Tiny problems and mistakes hold them back. And though some of these problems are easily fixed, the fact that they're damn near impossible to guess at and diagnose on your own leaves a lot of shadow priests frustrated. Without a doubt, there are an awful lot of potential pitfalls out there. If you follow me after the break, we'll talk about eight of the most common ones. More importantly, though, we'll suggest ways to overcome them and get your priest back on the path to greatness.
Encrypted Text: The rogue guide to gear customization
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Email me with any good screenshots or questions you have! Back in the good old days, rogues were stuck with whatever leather gear that happened to drop. It didn't matter if it had spirit or strength on it, as we really had no other options. We could augment our pieces with a few different enchants, but even those were better suited for warriors. While sometimes it seemed as if there were a random number generator churning out tier loot, we happily scooped it up anyway. The class, and everyone else, was at the mercy of the itemization gods of Blizzard. Times have changed quite a bit since those days. While we're still not able to craft custom pieces of gear tailored to fit our every need, we're not stuck with caster stats anymore. With the number of dungeons and bosses available, combined with the addition of justice points, there are a ton of options for nearly every slot on our character sheet. Enchanting has grown to encompass most of our gear, while reforging and the gem system have taken gear customization even further. Not only is there more gear to be had, but the gear we do get is much more malleable, allowing us to pick the perfect combination.
Lichborne: Glyphs, gems and enchants for the blood tank
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the latest news, tips and strategies for the death knight class. Last week, we went into the basic outlines of what makes a blood tank: your talent choices, your gearing choices, your threat rotations and things such as that. Once you've got all that down, though, the next thing you can do to take your tanking to the next level is to get some decent gems, glyphs and enchantments. They'll separate an adequate 5-man tank from a tank who's ready to step on and start taking on the game in earnest.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection glyphs, enchants and gems
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works. Amazingly, this week I'm not going to talk about Cataclysm. Back during the 101 guides, I promised to go over glyphs, gems and enchants for the various specs. While a lot is in flux, we're still playing Wrath of the Lich King and not Cataclysm right now, so it's fair that I should finally get off of my duff and talk about these things. This week, we'll loot at gemming, enchanting and glyphing for the protection warrior. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these options come down to your own personal gear level and what you're actually doing in game. Tanking heroic Saurfang-25 takes entirely different skills, gear and glyphs than tanking Halls of Reflection, which takes a different setup than tanking Nexus as a fresh early 70s warrior. We'll cover a variety of glyphs of use to a warrior seeking max survivability, AoE threat, or even special case uses and discuss gems and enchants, as well.
Spiritual Guidance: Holy 101
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. There is this priest trial in my guild right now. He applied as a discipline priest but what we were looking for at the time was a holy priest. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to play holy, so I'm exploiting my veteran status and making him learn it. Coincidentally, the big bosses also want all of us here at WoW.com to work on these 101 columns, so this kills two anything-but-birds with one stone. I really like birds, by the way. The following is meant to be an introductory guide to the priest holy tree. It is not going to tell you what to do step by step (at least not until you get to the enchants section) instead it intends to show you some options from which you can get started. If you're already a veteran holy priest, feel free to add anything I left out in the comments so readers who use this column as a resource can get as much help as possible.
Arcane Brilliance: Enchanting your mage
Welcome to another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that firmly believes the frozen throne simply isn't frozen enough. Frankly, we don't think the Lich King was trying hard enough. And so we applaud the efforts of the enterprising young mage pictured above. Way to show Arthas how it's done! Also, we will miss you. So 3.3 has been live for several weeks now, and a great many of us have farmed up more Emblems of Frost and Triumph than we know what to do with. We, as a nation of mages, have bought ourselves a whole set of really nice new gear, possibly far nicer than anything we've ever had before. And what do we like to do when we get something really nice? Why, make it even nicer, right? We get the nice video game system, we want a nice controller, and a selection of top-shelf titles to play on it. We get the HDTV, we want the shiny Blu-Ray player so we can watch Firefly in glorious high definition. We get the new car, we want to get a nice alarm system for it so that nobody can steal it. Unless you're that dork from my high school who bought the high-tech alarm system for his mom's 1976 Volkswagen Rabbit. Oh how we mocked him. Maybe someday you can get a good car to go with that sweet alarm system, we'd say, and laugh as he would hang his head in shame. Somewhere, he probably has all of our names on a list of people to kill, which he stares at while he puts on lipstick, Steve Buscemi-style. But for most of us, this shiny new gear stirs within us the primal urge to trick it out even more. Which of course means that business is booming for Enchanters and Jewelcrafters. We discussed gemming last week, and this week, we're moving on to the fine art of enchanting your mage's already quite magical wardrobe.
Researching virtual economies to learn about real ones
Researchers are apparently using economies in virtual worlds like Everquest, EVE Online, and of course our own World of Warcraft to determine how real-world economies work, according to this article by Reuters. Scientists have, of course, used WoW to model real-world behavior before, but that was specifically for something biological, and thus there were quite a few differences between the virtual model and the real application. In economies, however, it's all just money and numbers, so researchers can easily see real patterns and movements in the data.Unfortunately, the article doesn't go too deeply into their results (and it only talks about their findings from Everquest), but there is one nugget of conclusion: the economists saw inflation spike in one server over 50% in just five months. They say that the population rose on the server, which apparently made some items hard to find, thus raising prices. Economists say they've seen that same thing in the real world before: in developing nations, and in war zones. We can probably see similar effects right around a patch, or even just on weekends. As more people run to the AH to buy certain items, inscriptions or enchants, the price on those is going to rise. Interesting stuff -- it would be cool to hear what other similarities these guys have found between the virtual world and the real.
Phat Loot Phriday: Ancient Hakkari Manslayer
We've had some requests for husky loot lately, and so here's an item that isn't quite phat these days (just a little husky), but used to be quite interesting.Name: Ancient Hakkari Manslayer (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDB)Type: Epic One-hand AxeDamage/Speed: 69 - 130 / 2.00 (49.8 DPS)Attributes: This is how you can tell this weapon is old-school: it has just one bit of green text, and that text is "Steals 48-54 life from target enemy." Which doesn't, on its face, sound quite that nice. But at the time this weapon was current (ye olde patch 1.7), that was a hot proc. Because the proc actually scaled along with spell damage -- if you had 150 spell damage, and this proc hit, you wounded the enemy for 150 shadow damage, while healing yourself with same. %Gallery-33600%
Insider Trader: Profession-specific buffs part 2
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Last week, Insider Trader discussed the profession-only bonuses associated with Inscription, Jewelcrafting and Enchanting. This week, I'm going to walk you through the rest of them, and include a final summary and comparison at the end. Tailoring Perks Tailors have the ability to enchant their own cloaks. Other players can get cloak enchants from Enchanters, although the Tailoring ones are superior in many cases. Darkglow Embroidery: Chance to restore 300 mana on spell cast. There seems to be a 60 second internal cooldown, with a proc rate of 35%, which is equal to 25 mp5. Lightweave Embroidery: Chance on spell cast to increase your spellpower by 250 for 15 seconds. Swordguard Embroidery: Chance for melee and ranged attacks to sometimes increase your attack power by 300 for 15 seconds. There seems to be a 45 second internal cooldown on Lightweave and Swordguard, meaning that for 15 seconds out of every 45 seconds (+, if you don't proc it on the next hit, but they do seem to proc within a hit or three), you have the effect. This averages out to 83 SP, and 100 AP respectively, in ideal conditions. Depending on your luck with procs, the average decreases the longer it takes you to proc it again.For example, after 45 seconds, each spell has a chance to proc the effect. If you managed it at the 50 second mark, the average becomes +75 SP. Casters who are not Tailors can currently choose between Enchant Cloak - Wisdom and Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed. Wisdom grants you a measly 10 spirit, as well as a now obsolete 2% threat reduction. The +23 haste rating is nice, but provides neither mana nor spellpower. Enchant Cloak - Major Agility grants you +22 agility to cloak. Agility is inefficient to everyone except rogues, hunters, shamans and druid cats, who would get +22 AP from it as well as the crit/dodge/armor. In terms of attack power alone, the Swordguard enchant is the clear winner.
Insider Trader: Your guide to profession-specific buffs
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.The World of Warcraft's second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, changed the way that we players, as tradespeople, view professions and altered the reasoning behind our choices to pursue them. The driving factor behind this change was Blizzard's commitment to make each profession seem beneficial and dare I say, fun, to any player, regardless of class. While we did see some changes in this direction in The Burning Crusade, such as an Enchanter's singular ability to enchant his/her own rings, this new vision for trades really hit its stride in Wrath. To accomplish this, Blizzard shifted focus away from bind on pick-up gear and added self-buffs and self-enchants, as well as some other incentives, to give players more choice. It used to be, for example, that PvP characters would take Engineering. Leather and 40+ mail-wearers would take Skinning to feed their Leatherworking. Tailors would take Enchanting because it allowed them to recoup some of the costs of crafting gear, and so on. In essence, we could choose between fun, PvP, gold-making, and the best gear. Now, we can purchase gear from the gear-crafters, and be free to pursue something else, should we wish. Today, Insider Trader is going to break down the incentives offered by each profession to help you choose what is right for you. Rather than focusing on fun items, I will be addressing stat bonuses.The purpose of this guide is not to tell you what you need to take in order to be the best raider, or make the most money, or have an edge in PvP, but rather to gather the information to one place and present it for your consideration. Don't forget to read through the comments section at the end of this article, as there are sure to be tips and stories from our readers!
Insider Trader: Farming recipes in Northrend
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.This week, Insider Trader will be listing the locations and mobs that will drop recipes to help you complete your collection and expand your knowledge to boost sales. Because this list is meant to be a reference for planning out your next farming expedition, I will not be including "world drops" that can drop from nearly any mob in a given zone or from a specific level of mobs across zones. UlduarThere are several epic crafting recipes that will drop in Ulduar. They have a chance to drop from each of the bosses on Heroic mode (25-man), although 10-man groups can also acquire them by downing the bosses on Hard mode. Currently, there are two Enchanting formulas, six Blacksmithing plans, eight Leatherworking patterns and four Tailoring patterns that fall under this category.Given Ulduar's close associations with Engineering, many people have been quite vocal about the lack of schematics in the dungeon, although many of the mobs can be harvested for parts and vendor junk.
Phat Loot Phriday: Black Ice
Today's item comes to us from the wild and strange land of Twitter, where Jezriyah suggested this might be the prettiest item in the game. Maybe -- but only if you don't count characters, as my Night Elf Hunter is pretty hot. Also, if you're not following WoW Insider on Twitter yet, now's the chance to do so -- you get to suggest items like this!Name: Black Ice (Wowhead, Thottbot, Wowdigger)Type: Epic PolearmDamage/Speed: 570 - 856 / 3.50 (203.7 DPS)Attributes: +108 Agility, +88 Stamina 2084 Feral Attack Power, if you're into that sort of thing, and you probably are -- this is one of the best cat DPS weapons for Feral Druids %Gallery-33600%
The state of Engineering in 3.1
In case you missed the memo, the short list of changes to the Engineering profession that have been posted for patch 3.1 are all you are going to get come patch day, like it or not. Bornakk confirmed that Blizzard feels that the "perks work out" compared to what other professions offer, and that they "have no changes planned at this time."The relevant forum thread has grown to over 1300 replies and more than 50,000 views, suggesting that while Blizz might be satisfied, much of the Engineering community is not. In fact, many are threatening to drop the profession and take up Jewelcrafting, which is something I hear about a lot. Of course, if your profession is really, honestly inferior to all others, then why is everyone trading up to the same one? Pass through the break for a list of the upcoming changes, the major gripes, and a comparison of Engineering to other professions in order to put this all into perspective.
