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Gold Capped Ask an Auctioneer: My first mailbag
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 Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I've gotten quite the mail bag of questions emailed to me. I'm going to select a few and answer them approximately whenever I feel like it. Remember when writing your question that if you want to remain anonymous, all you need to do is ask! The first question comes to us from Mahgo, from Dath'Remar (US): I am emailing your for some advice regarding making gold on the auction house. I have most professions at max level. I currently use Auctioneer to undercut when I am selling what I make. Do you have any advice or could you please point me for some help regarding niche markets, or how to tackle the whole market?
Exclusive video diary of the souls of Rift: Planes of Telara
You could be forgiven for not catching it immediately from our E3 hands-on with Rift: Planes of Telara, but there are some unique things going on with the game's class system. It's hardly the first game to allow you to change classes, but the game also goes into combining them, shifting aspects, interplay between multiple class types... it's a maze of inter-relationships. Luckily, we have an exclusive video developer diary from the staff at Trion Worlds that discusses the whole setup at length, giving future players a much clearer overview of how the system works. When players start, they choose one of four Callings -- Warrior, Rogue, Mage, or Cleric -- which determines the player's core playstyle. As they level, they gradually acquire Souls, and it's there that the bulk of a character's abilities come from. It's a fusion of the talent tree system popularized via World of Warcraft with something much more interesting, and the possibilities for mixing the different Souls together can give rise to all sorts of interesting theories. But don't take our word for it -- watch the exclusive developer diary just past the cut.
EVE Evolved: Exploration -- Top tips
Over the past two weeks, I've been giving an in-depth look at EVE Online's exploration profession. Exploration is one of the many PvE elements that players can get involved in right from their first week in EVE. By concentrating on astrometrics skills, a new player can be a more-than-competent prober within a week. Although some sites may require the help of an older player for the first few months, it's still one of the most fun PvE elements a new player can get into. In the first part of this three-part guide, I went over the basic equipment and techniques you'll need to scan down hidden complexes. In last week's second part, I went on to look at the different types of hidden site you can discover, what loot you can expect to find in each of them and what kind of challenge you'll face. Since the exploration system was launched many years ago, I've picked up a few tricks and tips that can help any explorer. In this final part of the EVE Evolved guide to exploration, I run down my four top tips for budding explorers.
Gold Capped: The Undermine Journal
So you want to make gold in WoW? Basil "Euripides" Berntsen is here to help! Auction house PvP is the only true PvP: There are no relevant racials, all classes are equally balanced, and the only differentiators are knowledge and guts. Gold Capped can help with the first one, and if you can make it through a whole article's worth of my typos, bad puns and feral druid jokes every Wednesday, you're guaranteed to have the second one. There's a new tool in my kit. The Undermine Journal, whose alpha was just recently launched, is a site that lets you see data from your auction house live from the internet. My realm was recently added, and when I searched for Eternal Belt Buckles, it showed me a convenient Google Finance-style graph of the price and availability, as well as the mats needed for it, and a list of my competition! Words fail me, so hop past the break for a screengrab.
Breakfast Topic: Take this job and shove it
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. Let's face it, not everyone likes their job. (I can get away with saying that because I don't work for this blog.) And what's true in real life is sometimes true in World of Warcraft, as well. There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to drop one of his or her two primary WoW professions for another. (There might be a reason for dropping a secondary profession, but I can't think of one.) Maybe you were just new to the game and didn't grasp right away that skinning and leatherworking might not be the ideal profession choices for a warrior. Maybe you've just given up hope that a certain profession ever will live up to its potential (*coughengineeringcough*). Or perhaps you got caught up in the min-max-mania that Blizzard is currently trying to eradicate from professions. (At one point in The Burning Crusade, for example, mages with raiding aspirations were very seriously handicapped if they were not Spellfire tailors).
More information on Final Fantasy XIV's crafters and harvesters
With the beta testing in full swing and the release date just around the corner, you might think that Final Fantasy XIV fans would have all the information that they need. Of course, anyone highly anticipating the game would be quick to point out the exact opposite, eagerly looking for any more details about the game, especially with so much left to know about the various Disciplines. A recent article on Famitsu (translated by the helpful team at FFXIVCore) sheds new light on some of the less flashy disciplines -- not those of War or Magic, but the Hand and the Land, gathering and crafting. The new article gives more details on Harvesters (which may be dubbed Botanists in the official translation), Goldsmiths, Armourers (possibly due to lose the British spelling), Woodworkers, and Fishermen. Each class has a small writeup explaining their tasks and talents, such as the rapport that Harvesters enjoy with plants or the equipment-enhancing talents of Goldsmiths. Take a look at the article for a clearer picture of the plethora of non-combat activities that come along with Final Fantasy XIV -- even if many of the noncombatants will be well served by having a few combat-ready escorts.
Gold Capped: Where have all the farmers gone?
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from building a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) (we're recruiting!) 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. Basil is also soliciting questions for an upcoming Gold Capped series, "Ask an auctioneer" via email. This post is best read while imagining me singing the title to the tune of "Where have all the cowboys gone" by Paula Cole. There -- good luck getting that out of your head! Auctioneers rely on farmers for raw materials for various businesses. In fact, we rely very heavily on them, and there are quite a few markets that are only more profitable than farming in terms of gold per hour if we can do them on a very large scale ... much more than any one person can farm. I've been flying circles around Sholazar Basin and boy, are my arms tired! The interesting thing about the markets we work on is that it's almost no more actual work to make, for example, 150 Titansteel Bars than it is to make 20. The only difference is in how annoying it is to find mats, and the number of Dr. Who episodes you get to watch while AFK crafting. The difficulty of finding lots of cheap mats is really the only barrier we worry about. And any experienced auctioneer will tell you that, historically in Wrath of the Lich King, it's been no trouble at all. For some reason, the majority of mornings I'd log in to do my buying, I'd see absolutely dumbfounding amounts of raw mats available for ridiculous prices. Cobalt Ore for under 20g a stack, Saronite Ore for as low as 7g a stack, Adder's Tongue for under 5g a stack and Eternal Shadow for as low as 15g a stack. I have access to unlimited storage and basically unlimited money, so I did what any opportunist with a basement full of toilet paper would do: I bought every last scrap every single time, reasoning that I'd eventually find time to use it.
Auctioneering in Cataclysm
We've all been soaking up all the newly released Cataclysm info from this morning. I was so busy drooling (and hammering) on my keyboard about the hunter changes that I only got around to thinking about the profession and guild changes after my fourth coffee. Here's what we know: All professions seem to have a new cap of 525. You will be able to learn the next level of crafting skills at level 75. Well, alchemy works that way, and I assume that at least the other crafting skills will be the same level. No word on gathering skills yet. Guild perks are programmed into the client and have been data-mined; however, the more complex leveling system has been abandoned. No precise writeup about how guilds gain perks, but I hear they still work for experience.
Cataclysm: Alchemy mount hinted at on EU forums
European community manager Ancilorn posted in the Cataclysm forums that there might be an alchemy mount in the future. There are extremely little details for us to speculate on as this could mean something from a flying broomstick to a potion you drink in order to become a mount yourself. However, one thing that we can be sure of is that there is at least talk of doing this, but nothing is certain. We can probably also expect such perks to pop up in other places as all professions are getting a revamp in the coming expansion. And before your fire burns and cauldron bubbles, just remember that we're not even in beta yet and that a lot of things could change. Ancilorn Quote: Goblins should have a ogre as mount. If you have played WC3 the alchemist is riding on an ogre ( but it is the ogre who attacks and stuff ). You can always dream.blah blah blah You mention Alchemist and a unique mount, eh? ;) We may well have a surprise coming in the future for those who dabble in the Alchemy profession. Watch this space! I cannot promise it will be an ogre, though. :P source
Spiritual Guidance: A shadowy work in progress
The Spiritual Guidance duo, Fox Van Allen and Dawn Moore, haven't always gotten along so well. While some attribute that to the natural way that the shadow abhors the light, the real reason is the time they were on The Price is Right together in 2003. I mean, two hundred dollars for a grandfather clock, Dawn? What were you thinking? Some days, I wish Spiritual Guidance was a TV show. Not only would the world be better able to appreciate my own physical beauty, but I'd be able to do one of those "Last time, on Spiritual Guidance" opening montages, filled with dramatic clips that tell you exactly what happened last week. "Fox, we need to get to level 10, and fast! Before the orphanage explodes!" "But if you're the Priest trainer ... then who's that?" "You're not casting Smite enough! Faster! Faster! More Smite NOW! Hurry, there's not much time!" KABOOM! "The orphans, they're on fire! Quick, cast Renew!" Things are often a lot more awesome in my head than in real life, I'm afraid. Still, last week, we did address the process of starting a new priest, getting him geared up with heirlooms (or heaven forfend, green items) and the basics of the early spells (Smite, lol). This week, we're digging a bit deeper, getting to 20, rocking some instances and doing some PvP -- that's right, life as a priest is finally ready to begin. Follow me after the cut. And don't mind the random explosions and orphan debris -- they're just there for next week's opening montage.
Fishing with explosives
The goblin fishing style is a reality. By way of El's Anglin', we've learned that you can indeed fish with dynamite in the World of Warcraft. EZ-Thro Dynamite to be specific. Watch the video embedded above to see it in action. There are some very strange limitations, however. Only EZ-Thro Dynamite (of both flavors) works for this. Other Engineering explosives do not! You must be between levels 10 and 19 to loot the items blowing up a fishing pool creates, no higher and no lower. Despite this level limitation, some of the items that come out of this are Burning Crusade era items such as Jaggal Pearls. Booze makes up most of the other items. How long has this been in the game? We're not sure. Judging by the quality of the items "dropped" by blowing up fishing pools, we would guess it was a Burning Crusade addition. If that's true, has this gone unnoticed for 2-4 years? That seems unlikely, but it's a definite possibility.
An analysis of all the food and drink in WoW
Not long ago, a friend of mine from college asked me to resurrect his WoW account so he could get back into the game before Cataclysm comes out. The first week that he was back, he messaged me quite frequently with various questions about trends in raiding and PvP at level 80. I answered his questions without much thought until one afternoon, he sent me a different type of message. "Did you notice there is nothing but meat in WoW?" My thoughts stumbled over the question for a moment before he continued. "There is meat, fish and fruit, but no vegetables." (My friend became vegan since the last time he played WoW -- thus his sudden epiphany.) He then proceeded to tell me about a quest in Teldrassil where you gather spider meat for a kabob recipe. He said something along the lines of, "They're on a big freakin' tree, full of plants and they're eating spiders! Spiders!" I'll admit, he had a good point. Curious, I decided to start looking over the types of food in WoW to see just exactly what Azerothians eat.
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: Selling arrows in singles for the price of a stack scam
Got trade skills? Want money? Insider Trader is the column to read. Whenever they let Basil write it, he'll do his best to fill your head full of ideas and your bags full of valuables and gold. I'm going to come right out and say it: Don't do this. I recently wrote about ways engineers can make money, mentioning (among other things) selling epic ammo to hunters. The problem with making the best raiding and PvP ammo in the game only available from players is that it forces hunters to either find an engineer with the recipe who is willing to do all the crafting by mail, or buy it off the auction house. What do I have against the auction house, you ask? Well, overall it's an excellent tool and far superior to the much nastier alternative of being forced to actually use trade chat for, you know, trade. It's not perfect, however. In fact, there's one massive glaring inadequacy that can be found.
Cataclysm profession preview
Blizzard has just released a large preview of the major changes coming to professions in Cataclysm. We already know that there will be new recipes to craft and materials to gather, and that there will be another 75 points of skillups required; however we haven't really seen a clear and concise outline of what's changing until now. Listed below are the major changes to the overall professions, as well as new enchants and gem modifications. Blizzard's full announcement after the break. The highlights: Blacksmithing, Leather working, and Tailoring specializations removed. Blacksmithing, Leather working, and Tailoring will create their starter sets of PvP gear, which will be upgraded with new recipes every season. New elixirs will be about 75% as strong as flasks. An enchanter vanity pet is being added. Engineering is still being designed, but expect new unpredictable gadgets to use on yourself or enemies. Engineering will be able to make powerful bows, crossbows, and guns. Scribes will see a "cleaning up" of minor glyphs. Three new First Aid bandages. New Cataclysm weapon enchantments: Avalanche -- Chance to deal Nature damage on melee hit/spell hit. Elemental Slayer -- As expected, this enchantment helps players deal devastating damage to elemental creatures. Hurricane -- A stacking haste proc. Heartsong -- Mana regeneration through increased Spirit when chain-casting spells. Many more maximum-level enchantments are still in progress. Gem changes: Hit is now Blue. Mastery and dodge are Yellow. Intellect is now Red.
Breakfast Topic: An alternative to tailoring
For people who are starting the game and looking at professions for the very first time, some of the professions are fairly obvious in how they should be combined. If you're going to take leatherworking, you'll likely also be taking skinning so that you have some leather to work with. Mining is matched up with blacksmithing, jewelcrafting, and engineering. You've got alchemy and inscription intended to be with herbalism. Lastly, you've got tailoring and enchanting. All you really need for enchanting is a profession that makes uncommon quality or better equipment. Enchanting doesn't really have to be matched with tailoring, but all of the other crafting professions need a gathering skill, and enchanting works better when you have another profession to disenchant from. The gathering skill for tailoring is just killing humanoids and undead over and over again, and thus it can be matched with any gathering profession just to fill a slot. If you're anything other than a warlock, priest or mage, then taking tailoring is fairly unintuitive if you want enchanting. You could just combine it with a gathering profession like mining or skinning, but that means you need to obtain your enchant materials via the auction house, get really lucky via the dungeon finder or use alts with other professions. What the game needs is an alternative, self-contained profession that could be matched with either. Could it be the woodworking profession idea that they announced had pretty much been scrapped during this past year's BlizzCon? How about merging leatherworking and skinning into a single profession? Or do you take a page out of Final Fantasy XI's book and go with bonecrafting (we just finished an expansion heavy on the bone armor theme)? What's your idea for a single slot crafting profession that would be useful to something other than cloth-wearers?
Gold Capped: Making gold with alchemy
Want to get Gold Capped? This column shows you how. Join author Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast and the Call to Auction podcast. Alchemy is an awesome way to make money in WoW. As we've said before, some businesses are proactive, requiring you to invest time and money in order to make profits. Some are reactive, allowing you to use a cooldown to craft something that's in demand for smallish volume of sales at high profit. Alchemy is unique in the sense that it allows you to both! You can craft and sell potions, flasks and elixirs, and you can transmute an epic gem once a day and Titanium Bars without a cooldown since patch 3.3.
Lost Pages of Taborea: How is crafting holding up?
Runes of Magic's craft system currently lacks a huge fan base. I thinks it's a great system that's very flexible, but the current work vs. rewards as well as limited items doesn't make it terribly appealing. Crafting takes a lot of gathering to yield the most basic of items, which usually don't sell for much -- or at all -- on the auction house. This has raised the incentives for players to seek out better rewards through raiding or bartering highly upgraded drops. Even the crafted items aren't very desirable to upgrade, especially when compared to world and dungeon drops. That's not to say it's worthless. Through the most recent craft improvements, players can take the time to craft quality outfits to aid them on their journey to level cap -- before they start raiding for the better drops. I myself love to gather, raise my profession level, and make some decent gold by selling resources in the auction house. I don't see the system ever needing rebuilt to grow or expand, but just added to. If we take a look at the way it is now, and how it's built to allow for a lot of possibilities, I think you'll agree.
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?
Breakfast Topic: Disenchanting BoEs in dungeon runs
When you have an enchanter in your party, getting drops in a dungeon can be sort of an autopilot thing: you hit the disenchant button and move on. Reader Akwihahlo actually sort of has a beef we this. As he points out, the Dream Shards you get from disenchanting a blue BoE on most servers only go for around 5-10 gold a piece, assuming you can sell them at all. In the meantime, the blue might go for more on the auction house to a player still looking to gear up for dungeon runs, or it might just plain vendor for more than you could get from the dream shard. With the new functionality that automatically shows sell prices in the tool tips of all items, it's even easier to tell when an item is lucrative as "vendor trash." For my part, I tend to be the type to greed lucrative-looking BoEs (or even BoPs with very high vendor values), but I don't sweat it if others do. For some people, it's not so much stretching your gold as getting the run over with so you can get to those 2 extra emblems at the end. What's your method? Do you consider the pros and cons before you hit the disenchant button, or do you prefer to just hit it and get on with the run?
