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Patch 4.0.3a kills ink trader, reinstates missing glyphs
Jessica Sellers no longer accepts Ink of the Sea for lower-level inks. If you want to make, say, the Glyph of Mage Armor, you'll need to mill Outland herbs to be able to make Ethereal Ink. Speaking of that glyph, it's been uncraftable since 4.0.1 and is now available on the trainer. It's going to be a pain to collect mats to make it, however. Still, as one of the more desirable glyphs for mages, it's likely to find buyers, even if Outland herbs are expensive and hard to find. So what is Jessica looking for these days? Why, nothing other than Blackfallow Ink! It's not yet available in game from any source, so until Dec. 7 when Cataclysm launches. A word to the wise: if you have an herbalist and want to spend a few weeks making cash hand over fist, farm for old-world herbs. Check the "milled from" tab on the following pigments to get a hit list: Emerald Pigment for Jadefire Ink Golden Pigment for Lion's Ink Silvery Pigment for Shimmering Ink Violet Pigment for Celestial Ink and of course, as I said above, Nether Pigment for Ethereal Ink It's a little unfortunate that all these new players who are coming back are going to have to deal with low supply and weird pricing on the glyphs they probably want to try out; however, it's always possible that Blizzard will revert Jessica to her previous state of accepting Northrend inks.
Gold Capped: Bait and tackle
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! I'm going to start trying to include a link to something I've enjoyed reading in the gold-making blogosphere every week. Our first installment is JMTC's blogging carnival about lessons learned while preparing for Cataclysm. There are 18 submissions, which should keep you busy for a while. We've talked about auction house PvP before, but today we're talking about a glyph PvP method I like to call bait and tackle. Here's the problem: In order to sell glyphs, you need to spend a fair amount of time crafting them, as well as milling. In addition, on most sizable realms, there are a few hard-nosed competitors who are willing to play for longer than reasonable players. There have been times when, day or night, if I posted a batch of glyphs, every single one would get undercut exactly every 10 minutes.
Gold Capped: Patch 4.0.1 fallout for cooldowns, addons and glyphs
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Thursday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone, and we can now use the benefit of hindsight to see how well our predictions did. I'm going to start off with the elephants in the room: alchemy transmutes and addons. I reported that the cooldown for epic gems had been removed in the PTR and that this was likely so that people wouldn't be put into the poorhouse by having to regem. In reality, the datamining that determined this was incorrect, and the cooldowns are now resetting at midnight instead of the old way. There's huge demand for epic and rare cut and raw gems now, and people are tending to go toward rares because the epics are just too expensive.
Insider Trader: Inscription and glyphs in Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped; Insider Trader focuses on specific trade skills. Glyphs and inscription are getting a serious overhaul in Cataclysm. I read an excellent write-up of the new system on my friend Kraklin's blog and realized that I haven't yet posted an Insider Trader on the new system! This will have an impact on people who make their money with inscription, as well as be a nice quality-of-life change for people who find themselves changing their spec and glyphs a lot. As soon as the pre-expansion patch 4.0.1 launches, we're no longer going to have to buy glyphs more than once per character. Once you learn a glyph, you will always see it in your spellbook and will be able to switch between your known glyphs with a Dust of Disappearance, made by scribes from the same ink used to craft glyphs. While this won't mean much if you tend to stick with a single set of glyphs, if you change them around a lot, you will find it easier to manage and less expensive. On the live servers, every time you make the change, you often end up paying enormous markups on glyphs -- there can be sporadic supply due to the massive number of auctions that need watching if someone is selling glyphs. After 4.0.1, assuming we know the glyph already, we'll just have to buy a single dust, and every scribe in the auction house will be competing for that business.
Officers' Quarters: Patch 4.0.1 -- An officer's perspective
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. Most major game patches have a significant impact on guild officers, and in the past I've tried to give an officers' perspective on how the changes to the game will affect the decisions and plans that we make moving forward. Unlike previous patch-perspective columns, however, a reader actually requested this one. Hey Scott, I'm a guild leader for a rather small 10-man raiding guild, and I got to thinking today about the upcoming pre-Cata patch that's going to change everything. See, Wrath was the first expansion of WoW that I, and many members of my guild, were ever really active in (a lot of us swapped over from another MMO, together), so I was wondering -- once the pre-Cata patch hits, should we continue raiding? From the grumblings I've been hearing on the PTR, numbers are all out of whack, and with some of the class changes coming, I was wondering if it'd even be a good idea to keep raiding once 4.0.1 hits. I've never experienced the "conversion" from one expansion to another on the raiding front, so I really have no idea what to expect as far as people's attitudes (not just guildies, but possible PUGs, too). In the other games I'd played, an expansion just meant new zones, storyline, etc., but WoW's expansion features a level cap increase, and in this case, a major overhaul in how we play.
Cataclysm beta: New glyphs for rogues and shaman
Blizzard's been hard at work adjusting a lot of WoW's game systems for Cataclysm, and one of the biggest changes in the pipeline is the overhaul of the inscription profession. You may remember the Path of the Titans alternate advancement system was axed in favor of making inscription, well, better. On top of other changes and a new UI, part of this task is adding a new tier of glyphs -- called prime glyphs -- on top of the already-existing tiers of major and minor. Ghostcrawler recently had this to say about the new glyph system: Ghostcrawler Prime glyphs aren't going to be exciting in a "change up your rotation" style. We want primes to be unambiguous dps (etc.) increases so we figured they might as well be easy to understand rather than something so convoluted that everyone would just go to a fansite to see which 3 to pick. The majors are more interesting, because they are either not dps increases at all, or dps increases in ways that are tricky to math out. We think players will debate and geek out more about which majors to use, and with the new glyph design, swapping them out once in awhile isn't very painful. Minors are basically convenience or fun. source Several classes have had their glyphs worked on and updated as of this beta patch, but only rogues and shaman glyph passes appear to be "done," so we've listed glyphs for those two after the break.
Cataclysm Beta: The new glyph UI
The latest patch to the Cataclysm beta has finally added in the revamped glyph UI, sporting the newly implemented Prime Glyphs, a selection window and awesome new convenience features. The new interface has a search box for quickly finding glyphs, expanding categories of prime, major and minor glyphs, and it even shows you what glyphs you have not yet learned. Personally, I think that the new glyph interface is one of the coolest Cataclysm revamps. The old system of glyphs was an awesome first step, but it has been refined and polished in ways we never could have expected. Check out the gallery of shots below to see what the glyph UI looks like while empty, sporting some glyphs and using the search feature. %Gallery-101308%
Cataclysm Beta: Updates to archaeology and inscription
It's not on the beta servers yet -- which means the facts are still sketchy -- but there's information from a new beta (build 12857) up on MMO-Champion that includes a number of new items for archaeology and inscription. Archaeology item descriptions offer intriguing hints of things that may be, without any solid details on the items. Some examples: Bone Gaming Dice Dwarves love gold and dwarves love drinking, so gaming seemed like a natural fit for both. These dice appear to have been carved from sheep bones. What might be dried blood is still visible on the 5 pip. Cloak Clasp with Antlers This clasp is fashioned of lacquered wood carved to resemble stag antlers. On the reverse is engraved the name "Pyramond" in Darnassian. Fossilized Hatchling When you finished assembling this tiny skeleton through some eldritch magic, the little critter sprang back to life. He's a pretty good pet. Since he's a skeleton he doesn't eat much. Wooden Whistle A small whistle carved from oak. It might have been used to summon a pet or mount or possibly used as a child's toy. It appears to have been chewed on by an animal or young dwarf. While there are just as many nondescript inscription items listed, some have more detail: Cataclysm Reclamation: Blacksmithing Allows you to rewrite blacksmithing plans from once-lost recipe fragments. Cataclysm Reclamation: Enchanting Allows you to rewrite blacksmithing plans from once-lost recipe fragments. Cataclysm Reclamation: Jewelcrafting Allows you to rewrite jewelcrafting plans from once-lost recipe fragments. Cataclysm Reclamation: Leatherworking Allows you to rewrite leatherworking plans from once-lost recipe fragments. Cataclysm Reclamation: Tailoring Allows you to rewrite tailoring plans from once-lost recipe fragments. Felfire Inscription Permanently adds 130 Intellect and 25 haste rating to shoulder armor.Can only be applied to your own armor, and doing so will cause it to become soulbound. Inscription of the Earth Prince Permanently adds 195 Stamina and 25 dodge rating to shoulder armor.Can only be applied to your own armor, and doing so will cause it to become soulbound. Lionsmane Inscription Permanently adds 130 Strength and 25 critical strike rating to shoulder armor.Can only be applied to your own armor, and doing so will cause it to become soulbound. Swiftsteel Inscription Permanently adds 130 Agility and 25 mastery rating to shoulder armor.Can only be applied to your own armor, and doing so will cause it to become soulbound. Check out the full list of updated profession items at MMO-Champion.
Gold Capped: Breaking the glyph wall
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. Almost all auction house tactics revolve around the undercut. It may be a single copper, a few silver or a few gold, or a freefall drop down to the price of materials. Regardless of the amount or the frequency, most undercuts share a common misconception: that you're controlling the market with your undercuts. You're not. Your competitor has the control. By undercutting, you've just let your competitor decide your price. You've let your competitor set a cap on your profits -- and more, you've agreed to accept even less with your undercut. The inscription market sees more than its fair share of this, sometimes on a large scale. The low deposits encourage large number of postings, followed by even larger numbers of cancellations and repostings. Prices fall as each new poster accepts and trumps the previous poster's prices, until the market falls to the cost of materials and the walls go up. The final wall signals a complete loss of market control. Once it's up, it no longer matters who built the wall. If it's your wall, you can't raise prices until the competition perched above you goes away. If it's not your wall, you can't raise prices on your auctions until someone breaks the wall. Stalemate, and out come the piña coladas.
Gold Capped: How to calculate inscription costs and prices
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who's trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he's made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it's left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they're paying for their supplies.
Cataclysm Beta: Professions and trade skills
Step aside, class changes. Back off, world revamp. Now it's time to put what everyone really wants to see into the spotlight: trade skills. MMO-Champion, which is having some difficulty staying up and stable this evening, has what you're looking for amongst its Cataclysm information. Blacksmithing Tailoring Jewelcrafting Alchemy Enchanting Leatherworking First Aid Mining Fishing Herbalism Inscription Engineering Cooking Skinning Okay, trade skills aren't the most exciting thing in the world, but these previews give us a glimpse at what sort of stats we'll be dealing with on our gear in this expansion. Just look at the Elementium Poleaxe, Bio-Optic Killshades and the new gems. If those MMO-Champion pages aren't your style, there's also a good unofficial trade skill compilation on the Cataclysm forums. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgens to mastery and guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.
Gold Capped: The basics of selling glyphs
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from building a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) to write up a guide that will help you make gold. Check out the Call to Auction podcast, and feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Selling glyphs can be very profitable. It requires a lot of addons to work, and the market reacts to competition differently than other markets. However, a lot of auctioneers got their start with it. I know I did! Glyph toolbox To successfully sell glyphs, you need to be able to manage 345 different products, each with their own mix of supply and demand. They also don't share the same mats for creation, and there's no really efficient way to pare down that list without costing yourself money. A lot of people will stick to the "core" glyphs (the proper ones for PvE and PvP for each class), hoping that the increased demand will yield higher profitability, however because there are people who do this, the supply for this subset of all the glyphs in the game is also higher. Long story short, the default UI is not made for managing auctions in this volume. You absolutely need addons. Let's break this down by task, and look at what the addons do for us.
Insider Trader: Profession hints from the press event; no pony, no moose
In case you didn't hear, there was a rather large press event over the weekend. All at once, a seeming floodgate of information spewed forth with Cataclysm goodness onto our waiting ears. Of particularly exciting note for us, the hammer-and-apron crafting crowd, we finally got some hints about what we're going to see -- and, painfully, some definites about what we're not going to see. First, Path of the Titans is out. And while that does mean that Blizzard is going to focus on making other content as high quality as possible, that means that Archaeology is being ditched as a true profession. It will be focused on providing lore benefit instead, which I'll acknowledge is a pretty cool idea. I was hoping to have a Bones-like character ready to to engage in forensic archaeology and absolutely make a killing on the auction house with my squinty goods.
Cataclysm Press Event: Path of Titans scrapped, Inscription overhauled
At BlizzCon 2009, we learned of the Path of the Titans, a new alternate advancement system that would see PCs allying with various titan cults in order to gain various character bonuses apart from simply leveling up. At the recent Cataclysm press event, Blizzard announced that they'll be completely scrapping the system. To offset this, they've chosen instead to work on an overhaul of the glyph system, as they noted they didn't quite get it to where they wanted with Wrath. Here are the basics: There will be a new tier of glyphs, currently called "Medium" glyphs, that will provide "fun alterations" to abilities. Major and minor glyphs will act much as they currently do. You'll have 3 of each glyph type at level 85. You will no longer have to re-buy glyphs when you respec or rearrange them. Rather, you will will learn each glyph like a skill and be able to swap them at will from a list. This list will show all glyphs available to your class, but will only allow you to use the ones you've purchased.
The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing a new level 80 ret paladin
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. As I said last week, I'm looking for action screenshots of retribution and protection paladins. I've gotten a lot of good shots thus far and am always looking for more (especially you retribution paladins out there, as I got a ton of protection ones). They can be any level between 1 and 80. I'll be using these for header graphics like the one above. Please send those as well as any other comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. If you've been following the column recently, you've seen the three-part series we did on gearing up a brand new level 80 protection paladin. We're going to take the same approach now to the retribution tree and work our way through the different types of items. First up, we've got craftables and reputation items. We'll be taking a look at stuff you'll be able to grab in dungeons next week and finish up the week after with a run-through of what all you can buy with the badges you got from all of that time in the random dungeon finder.
Blood Pact: Warlock professions
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest, brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The slightest loss of concentration is all it takes." -- Medivh. Selecting professions for your characters often comes down to a choice of utility; if you have several toons, you may want to make some gather and others be the crafters. If you only have the one character at 80, there is a greater desire to be self-sufficient. Professions are also one of those things that many people feel are a part of their character and help define them almost as much as their class. If you're uncertain which professions your warlock should take up then this is the place for you, as Blood Pact takes a look at all 14 and considers which are of the most use to the 'lock on the go.
Insider Trader: Inscription without grinding glyphs
In meat-space, Insider Traders are shifty Wall Street criminals who endeavor to make personal profits at the expense of retail and institutional investors alike by acting on foreknowledge of events that the public does not share. In World of Warcraft, Insider Traders use their their trade skills, professions, tenacity, bank alts and enormous piles of gold and mammoth mounts to inspire awe around the auction house. Inscription is a great profession for making money. Once the addons for making and selling glyphs efficiently became popular, many people selling glyphs became gold-capped. Selling glyphs these days is not all it's cracked up to be, however. There's now tons of competition, and on a lot of servers, glyphs sell perpetually for the cost of the mats to make them. Assuming you're not interested in going down that road, what can you do with this skill to make money?
Spiritual Guidance: The professional priest
Welcome back to Spiritual Guidance, hosted by the spectacularly dark Fox Van Allen. Though he should be preparing for his final showdown against gnome-sympathizer and lolsmiter Dawn Moore, he has chosen to instead pop a few Flasks of Vodka Tonic (with that sweet Mixology bonus) and spend all night kareoke-ing with Mike Sacco. He's not afraid of those sick 4000 damage crits that a holy priest can score with Smite! What's that? Casting smite *again*? Hard to do when your mind is flayed into pudding. We've bested Sartharion on a three-dragon run. We've looked into Sindragosa's icy maw and laughed. None of that is especially impressive if we're still living in our parents' basement cause we can't find a job. It's time to put that shadow priest of ours to work. The number one rated profession for shadow priests is being the WoW.com columnist, but since that job's already taken, the rest of you will have to settle for standard Azerothian fare. And, ideally, you're going to want the one that makes your pew pew skills look all the more impressive. When I was leveling my shadow priest, I wasn't thinking much about the end game. I grabbed a pair of professions as soon as the game would let me: Tailoring and Enchanting. They served me well through leveling. But a few months into level 80, I got to thinking -- did I make the right choice?
Gold Capped: Automating the grind
Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast. Don't forget to drop by Onyxia-US this Sunday at 7:30 PM eastern time to get ganked by one of the CtA hosts and take the money of the other one! A good time will be had by all, and we'll be sticking around after the event to chat with readers and listeners! Grinding is a pain. Avoiding grinds is why I got into the auction house in the first place. Repetitive and boring tasks are not fun for most people. Unfortunately, while some businesses are relatively grind free, certain tradeskills require us to do something like milling (inscription), prospecting (jewelcrafting), or disenchanting (enchanting). The more volume you want to sell, the more volume you need to process. I know of scribes who sell 1200g a day of glyphs at an average of 8g each. That's 150 glyphs sold, which means 150 Ink of the Sea squeezed out of northrend herbs. You get 5-6 inks per stack of herbs, so this guy mills a minimum of 25 stacks of herbs a day. Each stack of herbs requires at least 4 hardware events (clicks or keypresses).
Milling cast time reduced to one second
There have been reports in the blogosphere that there was an undocumented reduction to the milling cast time in patch 3.3.3. It used to be two very long, agonizing seconds for a scribe to turn herbs into pigments, and is reportedly going twice as fast: a blazing speed of one mill per second. This is a huge deal to anyone who uses inscription to make money. Milling herbs into ink is one of those tasks that limits your production capabilities, and can't legally be done while afk. In fact, the milling grind time (four clicks, and until now, eight seconds per stack of herbs) is one of the reasons I rarely advocate new auctioneers getting into selling glyphs. In addition to generally overcrowded marketplaces and auction house campers, it's a business that requires almost super-human patience. This will probably make the glyph market even more crowded, as the amount of unhealthy AH camping you can do with a finite amount of playtime just went up by a fair bit. [Thanks to Wolfgang Staudt on flickr for the image] Patch 3.3.3 brings about small but noteworthy changes to the World of Warcraft. From a faster CoT, to putting those old Frozen Orbs to better use, to changes to the auction house -- there's several things all WoW players need to know. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3.3 will keep you up to date!
