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Arcane Brilliance: A poor mage's guide to enchants
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're discussing enchants and the mages who love them. Which would, of course, be all of us. So you've got all kinds of awesome gear now. Your guild is raiding, you've been farming heroics for the better part of the month, and you're exalted with everybody up to and including my mom, a fact which you're more than happy to declare in the trade channel to anyone who hasn't already put you on ignore. Your DPS is what the kids call "phat," or at least they would have called it that if it was still 1998. Oh yes, your gear is fancy. You're the envy of all. Small children look up to you, women swoon in your presence, and warlocks whisper your name fearfully in the dark of night, from the closets where they hide, cutting themselves and adding extra zippers to their clothing so they can look more like a villain from Kingdom Hearts. And now it's time to make that gear even fancier. You flag down your friendly neighborhood enchanter and begin perusing his wares. It's then that you begin to notice something. Maelstrom Crystals are expensive. I'm not even kidding. It's pretty ridiculous right now. Yesterday I traded the title to my car, a dozen years of indentured servitude, and my firstborn child for a weapon enchant, and I still feel like I got a pretty sweet deal. My weapon's all glowy. I'm psyched. So unless your guild is on the bleeding edge of the current raiding scene, or maybe if you have so much extra cash lying around that you sleep in a bed made of money, the majority of us simply can't afford to put the absolute top-end enchants on every upgrade that drops in whatever heroic the dungeon finder chose to give us today (Stonecore). The good news is that we here at Arcane Brilliance understand. We're going to talk enchants today, yes. But instead of simply listing the best enchant for each slot, wherever possible we're also going to include, at no additional charge, an alternative enchant for the more budget-conscious among us.
Insider Trader: Tailoring in Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions. The state of all the professions in Cataclysm is still in a bit of flux, but at least most of the recipes have been added to the beta now. Like most professions, tailoring post-Cataclysm is going to look very similar to the way it looks now. Sure, all the numbers are higher, but the structure of the profession is basically the same. One of the key differences, however, is that while tailoring has historically required mostly cloth and vendor trash for recipes, it is now a serious consumer of "volatile" elementals. Look through the recipes you start doing in Wrath of the Lich King and you'll see mostly bolts of Frostweave. You still need the new type of cloth (Bolt of Embersilk Cloth); however, virtually every single recipe you'll want to train on, as well as most of the actually useful (and valuable) recipes, are going to involve Volatile Water, Volatile Fire, Volatile Life, and Volatile Air. This is also true of the other gear-crafting professions, leatherworking and blacksmithing; however, tailoring had one thing going for it that other professions didn't: Unraveling.
Insider Trader: Assessing the gear-crafting trades
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.In the World of Warcraft, there are three types of craftspeople: those that gather, those that enhance, and those that create gear. They are not mutually exclusive. For example, Scribes can create off-hand weaponry in addition to glyphs and Jewelcrafters can prospect gems from raw materials. Gathering professions are known to be money-makers, and in addition, when asked, many players will also list the enhancement professions as well: Inscription, although it is currently suffering from a lack of demand created by the introduction of dual-specs with patch 3.1. Jewelcrafting is on the list, not because of its ability to create gear such as rings, but mainly because of the Prospecting and gems, cut or raw. Enchanting is often stated, not only because of the enchants that can be created and even auctioned, but also because of the Disenchanting ability. To balance this out, one would assume that the gear-crafting professions of Leatherworking, Tailoring and Blacksmithing must be incredibly useful, if not lucrative. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case. This week, Insider Trader will be discussing the state of these professions. For a similar assessment of Engineering, check out The state of Engineering in 3.1.I am especially interested in reader input and brainstorming, so don't forget to read through the comments section at the end of the article!
Insider Trader: Patch 3.1, profits and preparation
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Patch 3.1 is looming ever closer, and things are about to change in a big way. Today I'll be discussing how the patch is going to affect your professions, and how you can take advantage of this by maximizing your profits on the Auction House. Players have become increasingly bored with raiding because the content that was released with the expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, was too quickly conquered. Across the board, players are showing up to raids on an inconsistent basis, and many people now spend much of their time on the Public Test Realm playing through Ulduar. This has contributed to falling prices on the Auction House for raiding materials and consumables, because not only have many people stopped raiding, many others have decided to save their gold and raid without being buffed to the gills. What should you do in these tight times? Aside from the things for which you are currently saving, the patch will bring with it a 1000g bill to learn how to dual spec, costs to fund raid wipes, bring new consumables, and enchant and gem new gear. By learning what to sell and purchase and when, you can minimize your post-patch costs and make some gold while you're at it.
New tailoring recipes discovered in Wrath Beta files
MMO-Champion has just discovered 3 interesting new tailoring patterns in the Wrath Beta files. Rather than things you can sell, however, these are soulbound cloak embroideries, and at least at first glance, they seem very nice indeed. Lightweave Embroidery: Embroiders a subtle pattern of light into your cloak, giving you a chance to cause an additional 800 to 1000 Holy damage when you damage an enemy with a spell. You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound.
Insider Trader: For the orc with everything
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.LFGear? Insider Trader has tallied up some tidy little tailored items this week for both cloth-wearers and non-clothies alike. Why would you use tailored gear if you're not a cloth wearer? As they say, "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man ..." The stylish man of means has a shirt and suit for every occasion, and tailoring's where it's at. We've also discovered some nifty little utility pieces for the 70 Who Has It All™. (Oh, and if you're a tailor, these items are definite contenders for Auction House action.) Also this week, we'll look into mana loom locations. Sorry, we don't have a long list of little-known locations to pass along -- but at least we can confirm the few known locations and perhaps dispel a few questions about where mana looms are not.For the 70 who has it all While not noteworthy for the most space-pressed or epic-focused of players, these tailored items can be handy conveniences for the PvPer or the level 70 who has it all. Azure Silk Belt Boosts swim speed by 15% -- useful when farming, PvPing near water, or swimming to Onyxia. Spider Belt Removes existing Immobilizing effects and makes you immune to Immobilizing effects for 5 seconds; can be helpful in PvP. Netherweave Net Captures a target up to 25 yards away in a net for 3 seconds. Unreliable and short-duration though it is, can be handy in PvP.
Spellthread bug, not that I'd have noticed...
Like many guilds, my guild has a small bracket of level 19 twinks that are set up specifically to run the Battlegrounds and do nothing else. Now I've seen some of the people in guild really go overboard with their characters, pimping them out in the best blues they can get. I've heard about them running instances in raid format so as to wipe all experience points -- just so they can get certain boss drops. I've heard all manner of things. But this one just makes me go "wha?"According to Haetred on the official forums, since the patch people have been unable to apply the Spellthread enchant to any pair of legs lower than level 35. Now, originally his(her?) post wasn't saying "un-nerf this" - it was simply asking for consistency. If Blizzard was going to remove Spellthread's ability, then you needed to remove everyone's ability to have these in the lowbie brackets so as to avoid any potential imbalance. (We hear that word thrown around a lot in regards to PvP, really.) As opposed to that, Nethaera came back and let the original poster know that this nerf is an unintentional bug, and that Spellthread will once again be available to people of all levels in an upcoming patch. Now I can't speak for anyone else here (and I'm sure I'm about to get torched for this, probably) but it seems to me that Spellthread and Clefthide/Cobra armor kits are becoming the new Crusader/Lifestealing of the Battlegrounds. I can't even fathom using those on a low-level character considering what kind of money I'm going through on consumables. I'd be more inclined to sell a spare one than to use it on a character that eventually will level out of that gear. (Not that I wouldn't happily take the money from someone wanting to use it on a twink, mind.) What do you think about using Spellthread and the high-end Armor kits on Battleground twinks? Does it seem like a crazy expensive thing to do to you too, or am I just not 'l33t' enough to understand? I can't fathom spending that in the face of the cost of raid progression (well, up until now...) but maybe that's just me.
