Quick impressions on 3.2 and the economy

3.2 hit faster than I thought it would. Had I known, I would have dumped my 4 boxes of arrows very quickly. Luckily I had just bought about 30 stacks of saronite ore for 16 per stack and not done much with it, so I was ready to change my strategy if things got tough in the ammo business.

It only took a few days for the price of 1000 stacks of Saronite Razorheads to take a huge nosedive due to the new reduced materials cost. It used to take about 15 gold to make 1000 Razorheads. Now it takes 2 bars or about 4 gold. So, the cost of arrows is now 1/4 of what they used to be and the demand is probably about the same. I don't know if the lowered cost will cause more hunters to buy Razorheads over the vendor Terrorshaft arrows but my gut tells me they won't. So, I fully expect to make less than 50 gold per week on Razorheads now, which is pathetic. Sure, I could play the deep undercut game, but without a larger customer base, I don't think it would be worth it. Maybe I will just as an experiment.

Mammoth Cutters haven't dropped in price much at all. I attribute this to the fact that they are a little more complex to make since they require Volatile Blast Triggers. Since most people are lazy and don't want to bother with the extra materials, they aren't flooding the auction house with thousands of super cheap bullets.

This coming week will give me a better idea of how ammo sales will go. There's a lot of new stuff to do so I'm hoping that hunters will be using lots of ammo this week.

On other fronts, I'm taking it easy with epic gems for now. There seems to be a lot of undercutting at the moment and I really don't want to spend all day camping the auction house. Once the majority of jewelcrafters have exhausted their supply of epic gems from honor and badge purchases, I'll start selling my epics slowly and steadily. It will also give players more time to get deeper into the new Argent raids so they can get new gear to gem.

I was also able to get the plans and create Jeeves the mechanical butler. He is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in the game. Having a permanent repair bot that I can also use to access my bank is full of awesome. Along with Jeeves I created the Wormhole generator. The first time I used it, it teleported me about 500 feet above the big lake in Borean Tundra. Take the warning on the device seriously and make sure you have your parachute cloak tinker! The other times I've used it, it put me right on the doorstep of Ulduar and Utgarde Keep. It seems the Gnomes know that wormholes should open right in front of instances, which is very convenient. Who needs to fly between points A and B when we can just fold space-time so that point A IS point B!

More on hunter ammo

I was a little shocked to hear how much ammo hunters use in raids. I had always assumed it was maybe 1000 arrows/bullets for a full clear on Naxx. Once I read the comments on how much hunters are spending on ammo, I decided to do a little math to support their assertion.

Assuming that 1 shot of ammo is used every time a player clicks an ability that causes something to fly out of the end of their bow/gun and (for the sake of simplicity) an auto shot speed of 3 seconds, we can calculate the burn rate of ammo as (t/1.5) + (t/3), where the first number is ammo used by hunter spells and the second is ammo used by auto shots. That also conveniently works out to be 1 round of ammo per second as we can reduce the formula to Burn Rate = (.66t + .33t). Math is fun! And you thought algebra was dumb and you’d never have to use it after high school.

Let’s assume also that it takes 5 minutes to down a boss in Naxx and since some bosses have an enrage timer of 5 or 6 minutes, your hunter won’t be using ammo face down in the dirt after an enrage wipe anyway. Sure, a well geared raid can burn a boss down in less than 4 minutes, but we’ll just use 5 minutes as a hypothetical median. There are 18 bosses in Naxx and sometimes there are wipes and always trash to clear, so we’ll go with 20 bosses worth of ammo consumed.

Here are the numbers:

300 seconds per boss = 300 units of ammo used * 20 bosses = 6000 units of ammo used in a full clear of Naxx.

That’s 3 crates of ammo for one raid.

I was shocked that my original assumption of how much ammo a hunter uses was so low. Some of the commenter’s numbers are probably a little conservative too. Even if the hunter were to buy stacks of ore to give to a miner/engineer to make ammo, he’d still be spending about 90 gold on saronite ore to make 3 crates of ammo. Add on top of that the costs of repairs, flasks and buff food and it can be very expensive to be a dedicated raiding hunter.

It almost makes me feel bad about making money from ammo sales. Almost, because I’m sure Blizzard will nerf engineering/change hunter ammo soon and I’ll lose a major source of income. Because Blizzard hates Paladins AND Engineers.

Interesting blue post on ammo

Ghostcrawler responded to a post from a hunter on a range of subjects. You can find it here. There are a few interesting comments made.

But we did design the hunter around having potent CC, and we don't think their CC feels scary any longer. Traps are probably in most need of some attention here. We'll try and go into more detail in the class Q&A if it isn't too far away.

First, it seems the developers are really getting the point that hunters in PvP aren't anywhere near what they used to be or should be. I can only hope they made some changes soon so my arena partner Krys and I can get our 2's back to a more respectable rating.

The more interesting comment is this one:
We agree with the comments that ammo costs have gotten too high. It was acceptable when hunters realistically did not die as often, and thus didn't have high repair bills. But it has gotten too high now.

I certainly hope Ghostcrawler is talking about vendor ammo and not crafted ammo. I know they have plans on redoing how hunter ammo works. This plus the comment above doesn't bode well for us Engineers who make a living from ammo sales. I really have no idea how much ammo a hunter goes through in a week but I'd guess that a raiding hunter that does some light questing/skinning on the side doesn't spend as much on repairs and ammo as a tank that does the same. I'll have to gather some data from the guild hunters to see how expensive things have become.

It's On!

That’s right, it’s on! I can only speculate that it’s because of this post on Just My 2 Copper.

What’s happening? Well I used to be the sole provider of ammo in stacks of 200 on Bleeding Hollow. There were others selling ammo, but in stacks of 1000. I’m assuming they sold their 1000 stack ammo when it was listed, but it was listed at about half of what I listed my 200 stack per arrow/bullet so I was making huge profits compared to the others who sold ammo. So, I log on yesterday afternoon and what do I find? Someone listed 10 stacks of 200 arrows undercutting me by 1 copper. So, I posted a bunch more ammo and undercut him.

It was nice being the sole provider of ammo in the small stack category on my server. Every few days I’d sell a ton of it and it’s been my main source of income since the decline of buff food sales. If this keeps up, I’m gonna have to get ugly and pull a Gevlon, which is to say, undercut my competitors by so much that they go away.

So, not only will I Bring It, it’s already been “Broughten”!