The benefits of farming

So, it's been tough lately to get some quality mining time in so I can get accurate numbers for my mining experiment. Between leveling my hunter alt (the most fun I've ever had leveling a character), raiding and helping the guild with brewfest stuff, I haven't had an uninterrupted hour of farming time. A side note, I was part of the first successful AUO 10 man Onyxia raid on Saturday and it felt gooood. We got her on the 7th attempt. She truely is a loot pinata, dropping about 5 or 6 items (I can't remember exactly) which is awesome for a 10 man raid. I won the spellpower sword because I was the only one that could use it. I love winning loot by default! I don't need no stinking /roll.

On to the heart of the subject here. Mining does have it's benefits. I was doing a few laps around Icecrown and decided to head into Sholozar Basin. I had hit 3 titanium nodes in less than 10 minutes and was feeling lucky. I normally head into the Basin and turn left, flying clockwise mining as I go. I decided this time to turn right and go counter clockwise. Good thing I did. As I land to mine a saronite node, I notice the star on my mini map marking one of the spawn points of Loque'nahak, the spirit beast. My wife's hunter has all 3 spirit beasts, so I normally don't pay much attention to these spots any more, but this time I decided to take a look behind me after I mined the ore. Sure enough Loque was there! I quickly did a /gchat shout out for all hunters interested to head to my location asap. Darallun (of afkautoshot) quickly replied and hauled ass out to Sholozar. Luckily, no one else showed up and he had an easy time taming the beast. So now, Darallun has his second spirit beast! It was like the stars had all aligned that night. Darallun usually raids as Survival, but I think he needs to start going Beast Master and bringing out his new kitteh.

So, as we can see, sometimes farming has benefits that transcend the accumulation of gold.

Gone farming

It's been a sad few weeks for me. The wild price variations on crafted ammo has all but wrecked my income generation for a while now and sales of everything else I do have also been sporadic at best, so I'm going to run a short experiment over the next week or two. I'm going to start farming again. I'll be fishing and mining in 1 hour increments to see how much I can gather and convert into gold.

Farming is an important activity because in order to fund just about any tradeskill that you want to use for profit, you need a bankroll to buy materials. Yes, it is true, you need to have money to make money. Well, I'd like to amend that old cliche. You need to have money in order for your money to make money for you.

This experiment was really spurred on by a guildmate who is just about broke (in game). He has all these fancy professions on his two level 80's, but no cash to buy materials. So, I want to try to put a number on how much time it should take someone with a few basic gathering professions to get enough capital to start a crafting business.

Let the experiment begin!

More on inscription

I had a lot of comments on my last post regarding Inscription, so I figured I'd follow up with a new post instead of posting a reply that would get lost or not seen.

For the power leveling question, I'd say it's up to you if you want to wait and do it all at once. I know it's how power leveling professions has been done for years, but it does miss the point of my last article.

The main point of my article was that Inscription is a great profession to level while you level your character because it is useful. If you wanted Engineering as a profession, I'd say wait until you hit level 70 at the very least and power level like crazy. It would give you more time to bargain hunt on the auction house for materials as a side benefit. Engineering has very little benefit to a leveling character, so why bother taking time away from questing?

Inscription is a great profession and it was designed well. The money making part of it is great, but if I wanted to play a game to just make money, I'd be a day trader in real life and not waste my time on making fake money in a game. I play games to have fun and Inscription helps in that regard a lot. I use it while I'm leveling. It helps enhance my character's performance, if you know what I mean ;)

So, in my opinion, if you have a low level alt and want to take up Inscription, start to level it now. I think you'll really enjoy it.

If you did chose to power level Inscription, I'd say just buy the herbs from the auction house, unless they are grossly overpriced or in short supply. You can also buy Ink of the Sea (if it's cheaper than the herbs) and trade it to Jessica Sellers for the inks you need for leveling. For advice on what addons to use, I'd say check out the Greedy Goblin's articles on inscription or Just My Two Copper's forums.

Inscription, the perfect profession.

Since I’ve been burned out on all the level 80 stuff out there, I decided to spend all my saved up shards and badges to get the hunter heirloom chest and shoulders and create an alt hunter named Grimsprocket. Grimsprocket was a name I came up with for a Warhammer dwarf Engineer. Engineers in Warhammer are a race/class combo and about as close to a dwarf hunter as you can get, except they don’t have animals as pets, they have gun turrets. So, the WoW version of Grimsprocket would obviously have to have Engineering as one profession and when deciding on his second profession, I decided to give Inscription a try since all the cool kids are doing it and making tens of thousands with a little effort. Now I know what all the fuss is about.

The first thing I noticed about Inscription is that it’s fairly cheap to level. Just buy cheap herbs or get someone to farm some for you (thank you Millie!) and start milling away. The second thing I noticed is that the stuff you make to level Inscription is actually useful as you level your character. I could imagine that an freshly created level 1 alt could pick up Inscription/Herbalism when it became available and actually have fun creating and discovering new glyphs, decks and buff scrolls because they are (as shocking as it may seem) useful! So much of the crap we have to make when leveling a profession has no value and just gets sold to a vendor.

It reminds me of when I was watching development blog videos from Mythic Studios when they were still in the Beta for Warhammer. Mark Jacobs talked about how in many MMO’s, professions are very grindy and pretty much useless until you got near the skill cap and even then, there are only a few things worth creating. His vision for Warhammer’s crafting system was basically what Inscription is - easy to level, complex but not overly so and useful from low levels to max level. He didn’t really get it right in his own game, but we’ll ignore that little oversight for now.

Another thing I’m finding out with Inscription is that once you get a few profitable glyphs, you can pretty much level Inscription to 400+ with the profits from glyph sales. I was shocked when for my first Minor Inscription Research at skill level 75, I got a glyph that sells on average for 15 gold. Now at skill level 133, I have several glyphs that sell for 15+ gold each. With a little work and time, Inscription is the ONLY profession that I know of that won’t cost you a dime, er…I mean silver.

It would be awesome if Blizzard redid the older professions and made them as useful and fun to level and PROFITABELE as Inscription. We’ll see what happens with Cataclysm.

If you know of any other professions that are fun, useful and make money as you level them, please post a comment and let us know.

Cataclysmic thoughts

Blizzcon is over and there’s a mountain of new information out on the newly announced expansion. Here are some of the highlights of the announced changes that will come along with Cataclysm.

- New races: goblin and worgen
- New class mechanics: no more hunter mana, healer mana regen reworked
- New gear itemization: getting rid of attack power, MP5, defense, spellpower, block, haste and armor penetration.
- Redone continents of Azeroth
- Guilds will be able to gain levels.

I’m fairly “meh” about the new races. The class mechanic changes seem interesting and coupled with new gear itemization, it should make it easier for players to pick the proper gear upgrade.

The redo of Azeroth is very appealing to me. I’ve been incredibly bored with WoW lately and I decided to start leveling a dwarf hunter. Going through all the old content give me mixed feelings. One the one hand, I feel nostalgia as I remember doing the quests on my Paladin for the first time. On the other hand, I did all this stuff already and sometimes I have done it multiple times when I helped my wife and other guildmates level their alts. Having the old world go through a cataclysm and change the terrain and quests would be awesome for leveling a new character and it’s tempting for me to stop leveling the hunter and wait until the new stuff.

Then there’s guild levels. I don’t know if Mythic was the first to do it, but Warhammer had guild levels from launch last year. The idea is a great one and I’m glad Blizzard is taking the idea and putting it into WoW. I know from experience that guild leveling is a great way to get guild members to do more stuff together. I have fond memories of organizing guild Public Quest nights in Warhammer where we’d watch the guild experience meter to see how close we were coming to the next guild level. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we’re told what the guild level rewards are.

On an economic note, new expansions also bring new money making opportunities. One of these will be from selling materials to all the players that will level new Goblins and Worgen. All those new characters will be leveling professions so when we get close to launch, start stocking up on low level ore, herbs, leather, etc.

Alchemy - Gevlon agrees with me

Back in May, I wrote this post about Alchemy and how to try to make it profitable. It seems that Gevlon has come to the same general conclusion. Alchemy won't make you rich like other professions can for the same amount of time and research put into it. It's good to see that the heavy hitter of WoW economics came to the same conclusion.

To sum thing up neatly for those who don't care to read those two posts linked above:

- The cost of materials is nearly identical to the price of flasks created by said materials.
- Alchemy can make you some money if you aren't a herbalist, but be prepared to do your homework.
- If you want to sell flasks, be sure to have Elixir specialization and be prepared to camp the auction house on raid nights.
- If you're not taking advantage of the perks of being an Alchemist like longer flask duration and you want to make money, then you'd probably be better off dropping the profession for something else.

Epic gems post 3.2

All this talk of PvP and Arena leads me back to something more on topic for this blog, which is a big money making opportunity. In a few weeks, Arena Season 6 will come to an end. A week will pass to calculate who the big title winners are and then Season 7 will begin. New Arena seasons mean new gear and new gear needs to be enchanted and gemmed. When 3.2 hit, Jewelcrafters were prospecting for the new epic gems and the rest of us were using Emblems of Heroism, transmutes and honor to buy our epic gems. When Season 7 begins, the Emblems will have already been spent, transmutes are on a 20 hour cooldown and Honor will be saved to buy gear. This means that there should be a major shortage of epic gems to buy. Players with less money will likely resort to the old rare/blue quality gems for their new gear.

So, how should we enterprising players prepare? Spend all your honor on epic gems immediately and start grinding battlegrounds. Don't forget to queue for Wintergrasp when you can for the huge chunk of honor for 20 minutes of "work". Lastly, look for good deals on Saronite and either prospect it or have someone else prospect it. Basically, do everything you can to stock up on epic and rare quality gems. If you happen to be a Jewelcrafter/Enchanter, use the junk gems that are left over and start making rings to disenchant.

Or should you? At 10,000 honor per gem, it would take about 3 hours to grind battlegrounds for one gem, not counting the badge trade in for honor. In 3 hours of grinding with any gathering profession, you may end up with more gold than you would from the sale of one cut epic gem, even if the gem prices go up from their average of 200-250 gold. On top of that, you won't have any honor left to buy your own PvP gear, if that kind of thing is your bag, baby. I suppose it all comes down to what you consider fun while playing the game. My wife loves farming while some detest it. If you love battlegrounds more than picking flowers, then this may be a golden opportunity for you to make money and have fun playing at the same time, especially if the price of gems goes up due to the increased demand.