f13.net

So, after leaving WAR, I picked up LotrO, and while it's fun, WoW has been calling to me in my sleep.  I had a level 70 warlock, and I was considering resubbing to get her to level 80 and try out the death knight class.  I know PvP is borked right now, but I am wondering, with those new crafted PvP "sets", can a person do well in BGs and ilk?  Also, I had a hard time finding a decent guild in the game, one that ran the 5 man instances and did premade PvP.  Do the daily quests and such offer good rewards on par with instance stuff?

If you ever intend to ever pvp in any way, shape, or form, here is what you should do.

Step 1: Roll a DK.
Step 2: Delete your warlock so you never succumb to temptation and accidentally level her to 80.
Step 3: Enjoy.

Warlocks are the jokiest of joke classes in pvp and this shows no signs of changing.  I am telling you right here, right now: TURN BACK WHILE YOU STILL CAN.

---

If BGs are the primary metric by which you judge PVP success, you can get the gear you need to feel good from 5 man's, the auction house, and vendors, maybe losing some matches every week to fill in some gaps.  You will occassionally find yourself bitching about "That fucking rogue in raid gear", but you will roll most of the people in BGs by playing dot-dot-goose.

Eh, it's not that BG are the pinnacle of PvP for me, it's that I can't find anyone to do the Arena with, since my friends are all playing WAR(!), LotrO, or not playing at all.

Basically, I am wondering if going Destruction spec, wearing the crafted armor worth resilience on it, and doing pretty much BG will give me enough of a PvP fix when I log on, since I am reducing the amount of time I spend online...

Definitely not the way Blizzard wants you to play the game.  Wow isn't a game for a person with limited time and access to good gear.  You'll be miserable in pvp.  Save yourself the trouble and aggravation.  Just pretend like you're playing for ~20 days and say you quit, because that's pretty much exactly what will happen. If you quit before and haven't missed it, there's nothing in the game now that you haven't really seen before.

I'll echo this as well.  WoW severely penalizes those players wanting a casual pvp experience.  If you want to pvp you really need to have the gear to make it enjoyable.  That takes time. 

As long as you're not playIf you intend to do arenas, you need to raid to compete.  Sorry.

I continue to advise in the strongest of terms against ever playing a warlock in any PVP situation if you have any choice in the matter.  Any other class and spec except maybe shadow priest would be better.  If you have no other 70's, roll a DK and be happy.  You'll have fun leveling it and have fun PVPing with it even in just quest reward blues.

What did they do warlocks?  The class was always really weak in PvP, but that weakness was masked in the Fear and DoT mechanics and the infamous SL/SL spec. I assume the changes to Fear as well as the reduction of SL finally showed just weak the damn class is?

Most classes and specs do so much damage that your siphon life and drain life have a lot in common with pissing in the ocean.  It's not unusual for a rogue or warrior to take you from 100-0 in literally 5 seconds.  Still no escapes from stuns.  You don't have much more stamina than you had at 70 in pvp gear.

So, neither Destruction nor Demonology offer better survivability and damage over Affliction in PvP?

I don't see how without an aggro mechanic for demons to take some of the damage.  (Though that's speculation as I avoid PvP in WoW.)

I just can't see playing WoW for PVP.  Take it for what it is, an entertaining diversion where you whack foozles and watch your progress bar grow.  Shit, I mostly play solo because other people make me itch.

BG has basically been neutered in favor of arena, as far as I can tell. I meant to get into BG at 80, but blowing 60k honor per piece for blue junk didn't appeal to me.

WoW PvP is pretty seriously uninteresting atm

Bleagh. I had hope to level to 80, make some armor, grind out a medallion and then not give a fuck, but it looks like Blizzard doesn't want me to do that...  I guess LotrO is the best game on the market atm.

Are you guys dismissing crafted gear because you've looked at it and found it to not have enough resilience or just out of ignorance about the quality of the top level crafted pvp sets? Just curious.

Their point is that you'll always be a second class citizen unless you're putting in the time to arena and win.  To do that you can't be a casual PVPer.   Then, as the seasons drag on, don't expect Blizzard to move the old seasons to honor again like before as it seems they felt that was a 'mistake'  So, you'll be in 'top level crafted' (which is below S5) getting raped by guys in S6 or S7.

http://www.wowhead.com/?search=frostsavage

The Frost Savage gear isn't too bad, from what I can tell.  It's far better than the blue set that you get from reputation vendors in the Outlands.  I was thinking with this gear and this spec: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZbxczsZE00qrhuAoAcct  I could have some form of decent PvP in the BGs.

You can make a DK if you have a level 55 or higher character.  I'd suggest forgetting the lock unless and until they fix locks, and just level up the DK.

The starting zone is very very well done.  The xp gain has been increased through Outlands, and then you can go to Northrend.

I have not enjoyed battlegrounds in WOTLK much, and don't see the point in playing for crappy blue gear.  I hate arenas - I just don't play at that level, and don't want to be the sheep for the wolves.

I really wish that Blizz would go back to focusing on the battlegrounds more and arenas less.  I mean, they could make an arena server that is just for that - insta 80s, and then arena people are separated from the rest of us who don't want the sport pvp thing.  But that would mean even fewer sheep for the wolves, I guess.

It's not enough resilience/hp to matter. It's stuck between not having enough resilience to survive and not having enough raw DPS output to kill.


The Full Grind your ass out in the BG honor set is barley enough resilience/HP to matter. If you picked up every single PvP item you could from 'casual' PvPing, got every enchant and gem slot filled with max resilience, it would only THEN begin to approach the levels of survivability required currently.


Most folks are probably better off just wearing their max pve dps suits from Naxx if all they want to do is dick around in AV or WinterGrasp. At least then you'll have the chance to actually kill/heal someone. Plus we always need a tank for the elite NPC's  :grin:

So the only place for the casual PvPer/raider is under the heels of the hardc0re?

Pretty much, but let me say that you can have a lot of fun nevertheless in Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients, because a lot of the key activity in those revolves around vehicles and some degree of strategic common sense. You can be highly effective in those while still being in pure raiding gear. But if you want go arenas (which I hate), yeah, you gotta go all the way.

The Casual raider is fine, we have our own progression timetable that is independent of anything else, finally. Patchwerk doesn't get harder if someone else killed him first.


But yea, your fucked for the most part in PvP.

Hmm, what the definition of casual for WoW?  And is there a guild of F13 players that might want an ud warlock?

Casual: doesn't min/max and plays under 10 hours a week.

The (sorta) f13 guild is alliance. Also, roll orc warlock. Far better.

I think I can handle less than 10 hours/week.  As for undead vs orc, she's already 70, but I like WotF better than 5% stun resist....

Blood fury and the increased pet damage, actually. Hardiness was also changed to decrease the duration of stuns by 15%.

PVP racials, psh.

There's also the level 70 versus level 1 racial!

add feral druids and boomkins to that as well. 

Same as it has ever been.

The biggest  :tantrum: for me when i resubbed after nearly a year of not playing was:  my pvp gear is 11 months old, Oh hey, this is charming, there is new pvp gear, I can't get any* of it unless I meat the minimum arena team ranking... for every single god damn item.


*- the crappy blues and other epic stuff simply does not equate with this seasons arena gear.

I could have sworn that at one time, crafting and reputation items were supposed to be the means by which people who couldn't commit to the srs bee-knees of raiding and PvP coluld have some form of being on par with the end game.  Not the top of line, but maybe a level below.  Did that get thrown away when all the srs bitness whined?

The crafted and rep stuff is good for PvE, it's just PvP that's fucked up. Which is part of the reason I don't bother anymore.

True enough. Even the later quest blue gear is pretty damn good and should leave you close to in shape for the easier heroics. I'm quite impressed with their PvE design changes this expansion. Only pvp'd for fun and to get my rogue alt some decent weapons when it was possible but this go around he hit 80 pretty well geared to tag along on guild heroic runs and loot some decent stuff so I'm not missing pvp in  the slightest.

The only thing that bugged me about gear was crafter, where I can make a full set of pvp gear no one wants but the last ilevel blue and pve purple pieces I can make are pretty limited, but then you can fill those in with rep gear so it's not a huge deal.

When I left WoW, part of my frustration was related to the fact that my playtimes is limited.  I can only usually log 1 to 2 hours a night, from 9 pm to 11 pm EST.  Many of the guilds I tryied to join were either mostly offline or were raiding at the time, which meant that to try and do regular or Heroic dungeons, I'd need to rely on PUGs.  I ran into the common circumstance that it was hard to find a tank or healer, and by the time a half decent group was pulled together, I'd have to log off.

For the heck of it, I looked at the full bonus of the Frost Savage set when compared to the Hateful set for warlocks seem comparable.  There is the fact that the Hateful set has sockets and has less pieces, but comparison of the base stats on the set shows they are fairly close...

yep.  I don't expect to be the gand master ninja-porn PVP Arena Epic Noodler of Wang Extension.  My arena teams have never gotten that high in rankings, I am okay with that.  I have excepted the fact that an 18 year old loaded on Mountain Dew is going to hand me my 30 something ass a lot.   But to be also told that I can never even access the gear that would help me put myself on a slightly more even footing is a "fuck you" of the first order.

Resilience is with set bonus.

	Frostsavage	Hateful
Resilience	300	290
Crit	300	195
Spell Power	527	397
Stamina	458	450
Intellect	300	201

Fill in the missing pieces with Frostsavage blues and gem (no meta) the gear with regular green gems (Spell Power + Resilience + Resilience/Stamina) and you get:

	Frostsavage	Hateful
Resilience	300	428
Crit	300	289
Spell Power	527	615
Stamina	458	632
Intellect	300	295

128 more resilience
88 more spell power
174 more stamina
1 meta gem

5 less intellect
11 less crit

That's a pretty significant lead.

Those stats are completely off, you can not get ALL of those from gem slots. You can have any one of those stats maybe or a blending of them but even the epic resilience gem is +20 so the only way you are getting 128resil is by making every gem slot resil and thereby sacrifcing other stats.

it should read

128 more resilience OR
88 more spell power OR
174 more stamina

And that's not enough of a difference, frankly.

The 174 stamina is pretty big, but still, it looks as difference between the crafted gear and the current season's gear isn't' very big..

No, the numbers are right. The difference isn't only from gems, it is in that you are still wearing frost savage stuff in the slots that don't have hateful pieces.

Well it's hard to compare since they don't have all the same pieces, hateful for example can include rings. Also it's worth noting that hateful bracers/boots/rings/trinket/neck/cape epics can all be bought with honor and no arena rating required.

That's the hateful set, not the set + non-set pieces.  So the first table is eight pieces (head, chest, shoulders, legs, gloves, bracer, boots, belt) versus five (head, chest, shoulders, legs, gloves), the second table I filled in the blanks (gems, unfilled gear slots) so that it was eight pieces of gear versus eight pieces of gear.  Swapping the non-arena pieces in would result in an equal increase in both categories  Since you mised it the first time:

Fill in the missing pieces with Frostsavage blues

Well, against all common sense and reason, I am getting the 10 day trial.  I am planning on seeing how high I can get my warlock on Andorhal, and also trying out the death knight class.  Maybe I'll resub and struggle again without a good guild, or maybe the 10 day trial will be enough to scratch the itch.

Sticking to the trial is totally sensible! You're being too hard on yourself.  :heart:

If I can find someone on the server who's willing to be a healer, I can do some 2 man Arenas for gear.  I know I can't play the game solo as I did last time, so hopefully I can find some good people.

Wow, someone else here plays on Andorfail! You horde or alliance?

Horde warlock.

I'm Aryx, horde DK. Hit me up if you ever need anything.

Thanks!  I will be sure to be in contact with you provide I get through the 94885843579843 updates.

I'm succumbing.  The draw of getting my warlock to 80 and playing a death knight is too much.  Damn you Blizzard, damn you to hell.

i think you can play a dk if any char is level 60...unless you meant you wanna do both

Even better, it's level 55 and then DK city.  :grin:

I meant I want to do both.  The only question is for Death knights - BS/Mining or Inscription/Herbalism?

Mining is WAY more profitable than herbalism right now.

Skinning/mining is more profitable than either of the above.

I know about the skinning/mining strategy, I was just wondering which was better suited for the endgame since BS lets me make my own start gear, and Inscription is one of those professions that is useful no matter what.

Go herb/min with a macro to switch between them, while in undeath presence. Walk around spamming that thing.

According to EJ, JC/BS is currently the best in terms of profession. This is actually true for most classes. This is due to the synergy - two extra gem slots, 2 better gems to put in the slots. Keep in mind, "best" is a fairly relative term - I would say it is no more than 10-20% better, equating to ~2% character overall improvement  Both are insanely expensive to level and you will get ZERO money trying to sell stuff on the AH until prof 400+. If you can pair with an enchanter, you can level BS much much cheaper than JC - If you craft gear then trade to a DEr, then sell the dust+shards on the AH, you can level up for 1g-2g/point or so from 250-400.

Most other professions are 10-20g/point in that range. End game JC is currently the big moneymaker on the AH if you like to play that game, if you're willing to put in time to get exalted faction and do dailies every day. BS is almost worthless for making money, even end game. Inscription used to be a big money maker due to decks but is becoming less so.

Skinning doesn't make nearly as much as mining or herbalism as far as gathering goes, but all three will keep you liquid if you are a moderate spender. Don't go herb/mining, spamming a switch macro is annoying as fuck and you'll just end up hating life.

Everything is up in the air for 3.0.10, as new patterns have not been released yet.

My only concern with doing BS/JC is the mining.  Enchanting is not a problem, Delily (my warlock) is a 325 enchanter.  However, I've got no toons that have high mining, are you calculations assuming I am buying the ore needed?

How you get the ore is irrelevant. Some people like to think of gathered materials as 'free' that they can put right into tradeskills, but that's simply not the case. All ore, mined or bought, has the exact same value. If you weren't using it to level a tradeskill, you'd sell it on the AH. I can tell you that even if you were to take a gathering profession, you will still have to supplement bars/ore from the AH - you cannot level a tradeskill to 450 solely on the profits from your gathering profession - you MIGHT make it to 400, if you're lucky. Of course, you'll have to powerlevel it up in any case, starting as a level 50 DK, and your tradeskills starting at 0.

Not to mention the cost of time spent when skilling up that gathering tradeskill and then farming mats, that could be spent farming gold instead.  That's a lot of time wandering looking for nodes for skillups, and even more time when going after the current nodes.  That equates into lots of daily quests, instance runs or straight mob grinding that help you improve your character other ways.

Inscription is a dead end profession. Once people have the glyphs they need they never need to replace them unless they respec, and the dual spec option in the works supposedly will preserve glyphs. Inscription is for seldom played alts, IMO, who can feed your other chars glyphs, though that's hardly worth it anymore as all glyphs sell for pocket change now.

Inscription is great if you want to make money by selling nobles cards.

The resource farming is only a issue if you "must have that item crafted NOW", you'll find plenty to go around just from doing daily quests and the like.

Be very careful taking this statement at face value.

Profit on nobles and/or decks have many variables that vary widely between servers. What is profitable on one may not even be close on another. Right now, I would not recommend inscription as a tradeskill. Things may change in the new patch.

When dual spec comes you will need a Lexicon of Power to switch between your specs and Inscriptionists will be able to craft a portable Lexicon similar to a repair bot only it requires multiple people to summon.  These portable Lexicons will be purchaseable and useable by anyone.  The extra income they can make from these will presumably offset the decrease in demand for glyphs since people won't be respec'ing and re-glyphing as often.

Inscriptionists (Scribes sounds funny) will always be able to make steady income from things like Darkmoon cards, Tomes to rename hunter pets, and Vellums for enchanters to sell their wares on the AH.

The main draw for Inscription is the super nice shoulder enchants that are cheap and let you ignore the horrible grind that is Sons of Hodir, although it is somewhat less painful since 3.0.8.

Another nice benefit of inscription is you get to skip an entire faction grind as you get your own shoulder enchants (which are better than the other ones besides.)

It doesn't work out to a larger financial benefit or power benefit than JC/smithing which is well ahead of anything else, but it does remove a time sink, which can be beneficial in other ways.

Aaaand here's another misconception.

Inscription, like almost every other tradeskill, cannot turn a profit until you get to L450. This means that you're going to be powerleveling it and taking a loss until you reach max rank. That gold has to come from somewhere. Generally, people farm for gold either through collecting raw mats (ore, herbs), doing dailies, or raiding and DEing the crystals (VH is good for this - one lucky winner gets 150g from 30m of work). Considering the cost to get it to 450 in gold, which can be easily translated to hours spent, you're looking at many many MANY farming hours to max out inscription.

The hodir rep grind nets you ~50g for 1 hrs worth of work. Doing it for about 20 days straight gets you exalted rank. It's essentially farming "plus". If you want to be lazy/slow, you can get an easy 16.5g and 500 rep for the spear quest alone - it takes longer to fly there than it does to do the actual quest.

I would suggest that the time it takes to powerlevel inscription is about the same as the hodir rep grind in terms of hours spent. Only, with the hodir grind, you're positive about a thousand gold that you can use elsewhere - possibly even to level a more useful tradeskill that fully stacks with rep gain enchants (instead of just being slightly better) - blacksmithing, jewlcrafting, or enchanting.

If we're talking about powerleveling inscription, sure, but I thought we were talking about someone picking something to level as they go. The cost of picking the herbs you see as you run around doing quests is pretty low.

But think of the opportunity cost, man!  THE OPPORTUNITY COST!! (http://www.intercot.com/discussion/images/smilies/jawdrop.gif)

As a DK, I would do BS/mining, although I fucking hate leveling mining (my DK is a skinner/miner). I have an inscription person, and if I had to do it again, I would not have leveled it on my paladin, but instead on some sort of cloth caster (my priest, I guess, since I hate DPS clothies for some reason). They make some nice offhands that are BoP, so useless to anyone who doesn't USE offhand caster shit (I seriously think they need to at least add some green offhand shit to craft for inscription).

Minor glyphs, on my server, are where the money's at.


EDIT: Also, for some reason Ingmar has a really irrational hatred of the Hodir rep grind. I KNOW it's irrational because I suck at rep grinding, yet I am exalted with them and Thorgrim, who spent time grinding up his Kurenai rep the other day, is not.

I really feel like I'm repeating myself at this point. Here, I'll make a list. Maybe it'll be easier to understand my thought process.

1. As a DK, you start at 50, your tradeskills start at 0. Thus, you are forced to farm at least into the 200s for any gathering profession.
2. If one of your skills is a gatherer skill, you can either gather and sell them or gather and use the mats to fund the tradeskill. Either way, you have X income from your gatherer profession (I would estimate about 2000 gold income from level 50-80).
3. Even if you put money from your gather skill into your tradeskill, it will not get you to 450. It MIGHT get you to 400. You will still have to additional farming to get it to 450.
4. Can the gold investment to get your tradeskill to 450 be recouped through AH sales once it's maxed? Some research will tell, but this varies by server.
5. Inscription's personal utility can be substituted by an alternate farming method, hodir rep.
6. If you're looking for personal utility only (and can't or won't plan on recouping any losses through AH sales) hodir rep is far superior to inscription due to not taking a tradeskill and providing actual income rather than a gold investment.

Well, yes, I did say that it didn't have the same overall financial benefit? You're right in that I was forgetting the DK grind from 0 to ~300 on gathering, although you can level herbalism really fast; I did it in an evening when I switched my ret pally.

In any case, saving yourself a grind at 80 is different than saving yourself a little extra time on the way up. Once you are at level 80 you have a lot of other things pulling at your time. That time you're not spending grinding Hodir you spend on other dailies that come with their own benefits, or other activities. It is a smaller amount of extra time while leveling vs. getting a step ahead of the gearing curve when you hit cap. That is not without value.

I've decided to more or less say "Fuck it!" to how I'm supposed to be playing the game. Fuck heroics, fuck PVE entirely outside of dailies for money, and fuck the arena. I threw on my crafted blue PVP set, slapped all the enchants onto it that Azaroth mentioned in that one paladin thread, respecced for PVP, and I'm just gonna do battlegrounds until I get bored and quit. If I get any of the 60k honor pieces, cool. But I'm not rat-racing for gear.

There are enough slobs and retards running around in quest greens and shit that I hand out way more assbeating than I take, even in my mere crafted set, so what the hell.

Does any know the estimated cost of getting both Tailoring and Enchanting to 450?  My warlock has both of those at 375, and when I reactivate once the trial is over (and get wife approval!), those are 2 of my goals.   

Additionally, given my low finances at the moment, the skinning and mining route on the death knight might be the way to go for now.

Tailoring is about 1.5k to get to 375 and probably 2k to get from 375-450. Use this tailoring guide (http://www.wowwiki.com/Tailoring_Leveling_Guide).
Enchanting is more expensive; I would say 2k gold to get to 375 and 3k gold to get from 375-450. Leveling guide (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102789457&sid=1&pageNo=1).

The bonus of extra cloth drops from mobs are included. If you aren't leveling 50-80 or 1-80 and are just looking at taking and pleveling tailoring at 80, it's even more expensive than enchanting. Tailoring requires an ungodly amount of cloth and frostweave is probably ~20g/stack on your local AH. It's so bad they gave people an additional 'more free cloth' skill. Downside: tailoring 325 required, so you can't just take tailoring on your DK and give all that extra cloth to your warlock. Sorry.

All these costs are assuming powerleveling. If you want to sit in Dalaran all day begging people to enchant their stuff, obviously it is more free. Keep in mind neither of those professions are particularly profitable, and only enchanting is really good for end-game bonuses.

You get full end game bonuses at level 400, so you may want to just stop there. It's about 1/4 - 1/3 the price to get to 400 and 2/3 - 3/4 to get the rest of the way to 450. The last 25 levels are the real killer.

Tailoring doesn't have anything better than what you can get doing heroics and most people won't pay the retarded price for the crafted items. Enchanting I would get to 400 for the ring enchants but I wouldn't bother with 450 unless you're doing your entire guild's enchants - even when you get 450 it's another 2k gold to buy all the recipes. You might as well get tailoring to 400 as well if you're already at 375.

I had Tailoring from TBC when the Frozen Shadoweave set was the best set, and the only reasons I want to advance it is because of the embroidering  and the blue PvP set.  I suppose I could drop it and pick up herbalism instead and just buy the stuff I want.  Enchanting I want to max anyways so I can disenchant and sell stuff on the AH.  At one point I was heading in the direction of becoming a guild's enchanter, but in the year or so since I've been gone, my guild dissolved and I have no idea if it's worth trying to find giving my odd playtimes.

The offhands were changed to BoE a patch ago. Inscription is a pretty nice profession all-over at the moment. It's also one of the cheapest to level for the most part, even easier if you have herbalism too.

Tailoring sucks to level, you need not only a crapton of cloth, you also need a crap ton of dust to get past 425. Realistically though, there's little of use past 420 for the embroideries (which are ok, not amazing). The cheap leg enchants are nice, but they don't provide anything extra over what you can buy. I've been levelling tailoring with what I can find since November and I'm still only at 440ish, mainly limited by a lack of enthusiasm to get it to 450 (there's no point) and a shortage of dust. I dread to think how much it would cost to powerlevel it. If you already have 375 tailoring I'd say you have a choice between ditching it for something awesome like JC, Alchemy or Inscription (you'd probably want to pick up the associated gathering prof though, only problem). The main reason I'm holding onto tailoring at the moment is a lack of a clear profession to re-roll to, and the hope/expectation that Ulduar will drop some interesting crafting patterns.

Enchanting I have ~445 now, again without buying stuff. Getting the 435+ patterns isn't too bad really. If you're de-eing Icecrown/Storm Peaks group quest rewards, plus dungeon drops you'll have enough to get the useful ones (half the buyable enchants aren't worth getting until you have surplus shards and nothing better to do with them). The addition of vellums makes Enchanting much more bearable to level, and you can maintain a small net profit or break even on skilling up by selling enchants on the AH. There are a bunch of highly useful enchants that are also low on mats cost which makes for some nice skilling up. The ring enchants are nice, but nothing you cannot get from other professions if you so choose. The main reason I stick with enchanting is for the sake of my guildmates and for personal convenience. Plus I do actually make a small but steady income off it.

I would get both to 400 and then re-evaluate. You'll get self-embroidering and enchant ring and be able to DE all blues and some non-endgame epics. I would hesitate to drop tailoring since it's already at 375 and it might get some new stuff in the next patch.

The BoP inscription shoulder enchants are far superior to the Sons enchants. The benefit is equivalent to the benefit gained from most other profession-bonuses.

Greater Inscription of the Storm - 24 SP, 15 Crit
Master's Inscription of the Storm - 61 SP, 15 Crit

That is a benefit of 35 Spellpower, compare this to Enchanting (2x19SP = 38 spellpower).

Also I forgot to add that the profit potential from the crafted Darkmoon Cards is HUGE. Nobles cards are going for 1.5K gold apiece easily on my server atm, and you can churn the cards out fairly cheaply.

True, it does give you almost what other tradeskills do. With the exception of JC/BS synergy. And Nobles cards vary wildly by server, as I warned.

JC/BS isn't better than JC/(insert other crafting profession here)  for a lot of classes and specs, it's just marginally better than things like JC/Echanting for Strength based mele dps because when you factor in blessing of kings 2 extra 16 str gems is slightly better than 64 ap from 2x 32 AP ring enchants, although with a 10% AP buff from MM hunters, mele shamans, or blood DK's they are almost dead even for everyone but Ret paladins who have the strength bonus talent.

The main reason people(theorycrafters) *think* JC/BS will become way better than other combinations is the assumption that epic BoE gems and cuts will become available similar to how they did for T6 conent in TBC.  If and when that happens those 2 extra gem slots will pull away from things like BoP ring chants, BoP shoulder chants, and BoP LW bracer enchants.

There is no doubt that JC is far and away the best though, the 3 dragon eye gems you can use with JC are just flat out awesome.  They are equal to other tradeskill bonuses in just stats alone but the fact that they count for any color lets you fill crappy color sockets with pure dps stats and still get the socket bonus and lets you meet metagem requirements w/o sacrificing certain stats.

The 60k honor for a piece of blue PVP gear isn't very high after all. I'm doing 10k honor a night easy.

6 nights for a single piece of gear is too much.

Especially with a 75k cap.  That's just really silly.

Think I am going to do JC/Mining on my DK, BS/Mining on my paladin, Inscription/Herbalism on my druid, and Tailoring/Enh on my warlocks.  Seems to be an excellent way to make money throw gold in the crapper.

I'm not even playing that long. I got 2k honor out of one "horde tries to turtle and we beat them all down" AV game alone.

That was the question I had in the back of my mind: how long does it take to get 10k honor?  How many hours would you have to play to get a blue PvP item?

Note that the prices are kind of weird. A blue chestpiece is 60, but you can get epic cloaks, rings, etc., for like 38k.

Not so much 'weird' as they are the item level mechanics laid bare.  Every item has an ilevel which determines how many 'points' it can have.  The blue set pieces and epic off-set pieces actually have the same ilevel (200), just epic items get slightly more itemization points per ilevel.  Chests, helms, legs, and two-handed weapons get full itemization point value while rings, wrists, cloaks, and shields only get about half as many points.  This is why the end boss of the instance is always the one that drops helm tokens and why the easiest bosses drop bracers (e.g. Winterchill).

I'm having a blast just doing Icecrown dailies for beer money and spending the majority of my WoW time in battlegrounds. I made that "Gee honor comes fast!" post 2 days ago when I went from 20k to 30k honor in one night, and I expect to buy my first 60k piece tonight. It's fun, I can do it whenever I want, there's gear to get, and I don't have to pretend to like any guild full of dipshits.

EDIT:  Ok, timed it, and I made 5k honor in 30 minutes.

Wintergrasp is actually really good honor as well and is about as social as you want to be.

Doesn't that only start once every 3 hours? As it is, I can just sit in the war room in IF or SW and cycle through the BGs one after another and every few matches pick up the 900 bonus honor for turning in marks.

EDIT:  It might have been 5k honor in an hour. I fail at timing. Maybe. I dunno. Anyway, I'm hardly a poopsock for WoW gear and the rate of gain feels good to me.

5k honor in an hour?  That's significantly better than from what I remember it was when I left during TBC.  Enough to get me to resubscribe.

Not sure about alliance but in dalaran there's a war room complete with mark turn-in and bg daily questgiver. in addition there is the portal to wintergrasp when the battle is up and a mage that will tell you when the next battle is. Only reason you need to leave is to portal out to buy honor items and then hearth back to dalaran.

Both sides have similar war rooms in Dalaran, yes.

Wintergrasp is every two hours.

Sorry to derail the thread, but now that I've resubbed to join a work mate with a(nother) death knight on a new server.

What gathering professions should I take as a bankroll?

Is it worth going back and mining copper/skinning/gathering so that when I hit Outland and 70-80 I'm not losing out on available nodes?

Which one should I take?

I'm leaning towards mining, skinner but if mining/herbs are more profitable why not.

I'm on an established server if that helps (Tichrondrius).

Mining/Herb imo.

It doesn't matter.  You can, of course, check your AH to see server variations, but I just made a FUCKLOAD on my DK Miner/Skinner and I haven't even hit the good stuff yet.

Light leather selling like a bomb totally caught me by surprise.

If you take skinning don't bother levelling it until you get Death & Decay, which should be around level 60.  Then AoE farm worgen or something.

You can shoot skinning right up by going to Shadowfang on your own.

Get all the mobs to follow you (Yes, ALL OF THEM) then hit death and decay.

150 points right there.

Low level instances just make you feel like a tiny god, don't they.

Well, you'd think so.  But I took my lvl 70 frost mage to Shadowfang and got a surprise;  Cold Immune Mobs at lvl 18.  What's all that about ?

It's the thick, luxurious fur.

Really? That's got to really fucking suck running it at appropriate level. How weird.

Still, it's almost as funny as the time a Rat gave a full resist to my mage friend's fireblast to imagine a level 70 mage going "aaghh, I died level 18 elites!"

I leveled up my mining before going to Outlands and I'm glad I did, because it meant my mining was high enough for Northrend while I was leveling there, and that I didn't have to go back to Outlands ever again if I didn't want to (I am OVER Outlands).

You're both wrong.  It is every 2.5 hours.

I hope this isnt too late, but if you take mining, beg, borrow or steal the +5 mining enchant. Mithril and Thorium are still totally painful to level, at least on my server, where one other person can seriously depress the spawns available in a zone. The crappy way that mithril and thorium are spread through zones mixed with other ore makes 2 people mining a very frustrating affair.

I wouldn't mix mining and herbing, myself. Switching tracking is a huge pita, IMO. Mining/skinning is a lot less of a hassle.

I just leveled up my dk's skills at 69 to go along with my move to Northrend. I will never level another miner again, unless for some bizarre reason I am starting a character from L1. I took a brief break to hit 70 in northrend so I could grab a flying mount for outland mining which helped a ton with leveling through there and even there the +5 mining gloves meant I didnt have to skip all those khorium veins.

Has anyone ever figured out what changed between old world mining and outland, because I find it way easier to mine in outlands, even with a bunch of active miners in the zone? Is the spawn time faster or is their just way more nodes?

way more nodes coupled with far less ore diversity.

Exactly.  When you are stuck at iron on green and barely able to find mithril and gold nodes, it's so painful it hurts.  Also, most ore spawns in most zones out in Outlands even when not near mountains, so you aren't stuck camping the Charred Glade or running around EPL\WPL looking for nodes.

I have become demotivated again and haven't logged in for a few weeks.  This always happens.  This time, though, I've made it to level 49 and three quarters!  Go me!

I was thinking of checking out the WotLK trial, until I heard they fucked up PVP.  Again.

They need to get away from Arena being the focus of player vs player, post haste.

It's been gone over but it's still completely right, I don't think the developers over at Blizzard are in touch with this. Arena is fun, yes, but not when it's the only way to get decent PvP gear. The rating requirements are so high right now that unless you're a hardcore arena player you've probably just got arena points piling up and nothing to do with them. The game isn't designed to be an e-sport, it's designed to be fun and accessible.. I'm all in favor of keeping arena around for people who want to do some controlled environment PvP, but of the three forms of PvP right now the one that makes the most sense to prioritize is battlegrounds. There are so many untapped battleground formats they could design a map around that I have no idea why we still have only five total battlegrounds after nearly five years.

We covered this in another thread, but since you're new I'll recap for you.  The problem is Kalgan. PVP is his domain and he loves arenas. They're his baby and he likes them as they are and the reward structure and hates Battlegrounds. Until he's gone try to enjoy or ignore the crappy, flawed e-sport.

Somebody should start a petition for Blizzard to 'promote' Kalgan to the new MMO development team.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't know if that's true.  I mean, they do keep saying they want to reward battlegrounds better, if they could come up with an effective metric of determining personal ability and success.  Unless you think they know how to determine that and just aren't implementing it.  Or unless you think they should reward everyone, whether they completely suck and don't do a damn thing toward victory or not.

Personally I agree that battlegrounds need such a metric, because I hate the idea of doing my best to win, and having the useless turds that are being carried by those of us who do put in the effort get the same reward.  Especially since almost nobody does preformed, so I can't form a battleground team if I wanted to, since there basically aren't enough opponents in the preform queue.

Oh God, for the first time in 2 years I got to play again. It was my friends lvl 80 DK. It just felt so...so right. Specially when compared to my last Diku, Warhammer Online. GOT-DAM YOU BLIZZARD!

If by useless turds, you mean the people who /afk in battlegrounds, then I would agree with this, which is why Blizzard should implement something where if you do 0 damage and/or 0 healing in a BG, you shouldn't get honor and token.  However, so long as the reward for BG are ultimately gear, your statements about skill and metrics are meaningless.  The only way Blizzard can implement some form of metric is to normalize gear.

It's not just that, it's the ones that "fight" but don't do anything that actually contributes to victory.  Warsong Gulch mid-field battler types, that go out and fight enemies on midfield but don't focus on key targets and so on.  If three people stop midfield to kill one enemy, that's not just useless but detrimental, since it means one enemy has effectively incapacitated 3 people, by removing them from any useful task whatsoever.

The afk reporting thing is only somewhat effective, too.  I know I'm too damn busy fighting and trying to win, sometimes, to try to figure out who's standing around AFK.

It's really not all that hard.  They track most if not all of the stuff you'd use to do it already. Flag caps/ returns, defense within radius of a node, kills: deaths, healing done, # of flag-carriers killed or people interrupted in the middle of capping.  You reward honor and marks based on these stats and goals of the individual BG not on "your side won/ lost  with 'bonus' honor based on the number of HKs you farmed.   Reward nothing to people who have done nothing in the game, not even a "hey at least you showed up" mark.  It's not hard to get at least some HKs, return a flag, tag a node or do a little dam/ healing even if you completely suck and run around naked and unarmed.

Hell you could even determine individual rankings from that, then perhaps display them on a scoreboard at the end of a match.  :oh_i_see:

They talk a good game, about wanting it to matter but refuse to implement based on what they're already doing.

That whole "0 damage and 0 healed, omg they're AFK" guideline is not always true.  In AV, for example, I'm often in a mood to be that rogue who sticks around IWB or SH.  And I'll usually let the Horde cap it, and I sit, and wait.  And wait. 

Why do I wait?  A good percentage of the time, they'll just wander off and leave it unguarded, and I take it.  Sometimes only one or two people will remain behind, and I'll take them out (if I think I can take 'em) and recap it.  And sometimes a whole squad of people remain behind, and what do I do then?  I leave.  That's suicide to take on that many.

So let's say it was that latter case, it was 5 people who stayed back to guard the tower, here we are, 7 minutes into an AV, and I have 0 on my stats.  Am I AFK?  No.  My plan just didn't work out, I'll be at RH in a bit guys, hope you're not done by the time I get there.

Fortunately, I've never actually been flagged by my side as AFK, because you can plainly see on the battlemap what I am doing, but if you just blindly go "omg 0 stats, AFK" without looking at stuff in context, that's too simplistic to actually work.

You missed the part about capping things.  You completed an objective by capping the GY, you get honor and a mark for that.

Do you get as much as someone running around, killing, capping and doing other shit? No; but then you're not being as useful as them, are you.

Healers throw a wrench in that.  Sure, you can give rewards by amount healed, but that can be easily exploited (find a non-fatal place to jump off of, get a healer partner, jump off of it and heal each other).

Defending things gives HK's, but that's no different than fighting midfield in WSG, for example.  If you base it on HK's, the best way to get rewarded will be to ignore defending the flag and fight midfield to get HK's.  If you defend the flag in WSG, often you won't get many kills.  But you'll tend to weaken and slow the enemy, which can give time for the rest of your team to come along and kill them as they try to escape with the flag.

I've come up with some ideas on how to properly reward defense, but even those are probably flawed in one way or another.  Accurately judging contribution toward goals other than 'kill x' is difficult.  Very often the person with the most damage done/hk's is one of the least useful people on the battleground, because they've been chasing kills, not focusing on battleground goals.

I would argue that in AV he is. The end game honor reward is in part controlled by tower control, so that guy who rides down, caps a tower, guards it til it burns and then doesn't make it in time for the end boss fight is personally responsible for a noticeable chunk of endgame honor for all 39 other players, and was probably overall more important to victory than that mage who won the damage charts by AEing the bridge.

Here's the thing.. all systems are flawed and those flaws show upon first encounter with real people. They're going to have ways to game them and they will be exploited.  The current system is flawed and is just as exploited and was even worse when it was introduced.  If you'd rather keep shit "no gear for BGs" than try to change it and then work on a fix for that, awesome.  I'd rather they move in the direction of rewarding actual work done in the BGs and implement a system then fix it as they go along.  Like they've been "fixing" the arena system.


As I said, you eliminate the end game honor reward.  You're rewarding work done in the BG itself, reinforcements determine the length of a game, so he is providing a goal but it is not the most valuable one until late in the game when reinforcements are low.  Then you can give bonus honor for that capture.  Until that point in the game, however, he could have been running around doing other shit.  He's a stealther, it's not like he'd have a hard time moving around the map and coming back later.

No, I'm saying sometimes I DON'T cap the thing because six yahoos stick around until the tower burns.  Sometimes the plan goes bad.  On AVERAGE, it's been a good plan, I retake towers, screws up their offense, go team go.  But sometimes it doesn't.  Am I supposed to be penalized on a random BG-to-BG basis on this?

Can somebody give me a stat as to the amount of people (in %) who have a 2000+ arena rating? I'm okay with having a very top tier of gear have arena requirements but they've gone way too far with it. I personally don't even care if they have a battleground 'skill' measurement or not. There's a middle ground where you can reward the best players without punishing everyone else.

Of the % of characters that participate in 2v2 and 3v3 brackets, 2.5% of those characters have a 2k+ rating.

Rating requirements on Arena gear definitely seem too high, as there's very few people able to get the best gear.  It should be weighted so that the top 10-20% of people get the best gear, the second-best gear goes to the next 30% or so, and the rest get the lowest type of gear.  That'd mean the upper 40-50% get decent rewards, rather than whatever much smaller percentage it is now.  Leave the vanity rewards like titles and mounts for the top tiny percentage.

Or maybe, just maybe, equalize gear in the arena minigame completely. This has been hashed out in some other thread, though...  :why_so_serious:


-- Z.

There's no way to automate rewards for playing towards the objective in an intelligent manner. There just isn't: think of a metric and someone will game it, while someone who fails on the metric might be the person whose quick tactical thinking is actually key to overall success. It's like the difference between roto baseball and actual baseball: someone you might not want on your roto team because of mediocre offensive stats can be the guy who catalyzes great play from teammates on the field simply by knowing what to do and when to do it. The guy who snares or slows the flag carrier in WSG just long enough for everyone else to catch that person is way more important than the guy who actually kills the carrier, but there's almost no metric I can think of that will show you that difference.

To say nothing of the fact that AFKers already often smack and/or heal someone ( and would DEFINITELY do this if it became mandatory), like, twice, then afk the rest of the time. Hell, in AV, you wouldn't even have to find a player to do damage/take damage (and then heal yourself), etc.

I've seen bots with basic pvp combat routines.  Was pretty funny actually, you could wand it once and train it halfway across the zone, and get it to auto-attack you in front of town guards.  The only problem is it tended to move in single step intervals and would get hung up on trees.

A lot of alliance AFKers these days use the crystal of zin malor (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=13347) and spam self heal skills via an out-of-game macro, then they eventually die, auto-rez at the gy and repeat.

Lets them rack up high healing points too...  :awesome_for_real:

(thankfully, the trinket is getting reverted to a normal quest item in 3.1)


-- Z.

Fuck, they have to break every goddamn cool thing in the game.  Every alliance character I have gets that trinket and never finishes the quest (except warlocks).  I like an on-demand suicide stone for a variety of purposes.

It's bad enough tying quest items to the quests so they HAVE to be destroyed when you delete the quest from your log.

Meh, I miss the old EQ days where once you obtained a thing, it was really really rare for it to be changed, since existing items were in most cases kept as they were and only future drops were removed/nerfed/whatever.  Except the Moss-Covered Twig.  Only thing that sticks in my mind which was nerfed retroactively.

I was griping about that in /guild with the Rod of Dartol last night.

I was sad to learn that they stripped all the effects off of Savory Deviate Delight except for the ninja and pirate effects (which are canceled by Druid forms).  :sad:

My rod of furblog transformation is still intact! I'm going to be bitter as hell if they actually make it usable only in ashenvale.

I don't even see why there needs to be a system to measure skill in place. Would the populace revolt if you could get almost-the-best (or even the best) gear from battlegrounds? Didn't we already have this in TBC? Did anyone really hate that enough to say 'screw this, I'm quitting' ?

(Gogo equalized arena gear)

Um... uh...  :|

Because no one cares, I did actually resub, and have been working on leveling my warlock and getting her tradeskills up.  Additionally, a friend and I have been working through the lower content with a druid and shaman combination, and like everyone else, I've got an UInholy Deathknight.  So far it's been enjoyable.

I read they were fixing the tooltip to remove the 'only usable in ashenvale' thing, not that they were breaking it's use.

I hope not since I turned that quest in two days ago because it wouldn't work outside of Ashenvale.

The tooltip says it won't, but it does. I'm using it right now.

Also, you can have the rod with no quest, just don't accept the final 'go back' quest from the shrine.

Nooooooooooooooooooo! :cry2:

Frankly yes, it would piss me off, and it's not just because they're getting good gear they don't deserve.  It's because they'd be going into battlegrounds to gain the honor/marks needed for the gear, but not participating or doing anything useful.  And yes, the better the gear you could get from battlegrounds in burning crusade, the more of these jackasses kept joining, and the harder it was to join a BG where people were actually using effective strategies to try to win.  I eventually gave up on the battlegrounds entirely because of that.

I want a system that measures battleground contribution because it would mean people have to actually do things to WIN the damn battleground instead of screwing around and being stupid.  Maybe, just maybe, if they got no rewards when they did that, they might start to catch on that what they're doing isn't useful, and start being useful.  Or they'd quit joining battlegrounds.  Win/win either way.  So yeah, really really hard, maybe impossible to implement, but if such a system could really be designed and added I would be happy.

:uhrr:
There's a catch.

Bad idea. If there's no rewards for doing BGs, most folks won't do battlegrounds.

I did a lot of BGs in the TBC era. Iniitally, it was just because I wanted my axes, since TBC shaman weapon itemization was so piss poor. After I got my first axe (and Prince finally coughed up a Decapitator--the miserable bastard), then I decided I actually (usually) enjoyed them and wanted to do better, so I farmed up my entire set, along with another axe. After that, I had the staying power (since shamans aren't particularly well suited to PvP either now or then) I could just run them and generally have a pretty good time, especially with guildies.

Nowadays, there's no--and I mean none whatsoever-- reason for me to engage in PvP at all, much less BGs. Arenas are a complete waste of time. There's no way I'll get any kind of significant rating for the totems (fuck you Blizzard) or even the weapons (which fortunately I don't need--but fuck you anyway Blizzard for not even putting in one PvE axe). There's even less reason for BGs. Why the hell should I do these if I get nothing, and I mean zilch, zero, nada for doing them? As a shaman, I'm overal dependent on my teammates. I don't contribute that much (unless someone is stupid enough to let me get close). Essentially, there's not loot carrot to make up for a suckass experience.

So if you BGs to be a wasteland barely populated by nothing but rogues, DKs, and ret/holy pallies, well, I guess that's what you have.  It used to be Rampage had 30+ AV queues on primetime. Now it's like 6. Yeah, this BG thing is going places--down the drain.

No matter what gear undeserved people get, would it really matter to you? There will always be bad/stupid players in BGs, that will never change, because a lot of people that play just aren't that good or just don't care.

And now they're in Naxx-25, getting epics.

And the game is clearly dying because of it.

While I'm all for fucking BG AFK'ers to death with a hot poker, the "You shouldn't get any points for fighting midfield, Warsong Gulch is SERIOUS BZNS!!1!" people can go get fucked too.

For me, the real question is, why the hell is gear the reward?  Gear has always been a means to end.   Making it the end itself was always a bad idea imho.

Miss the rest of it?  That part doesn't matter to me much, but the fact that the gear encourages those people to join battlegrounds in sufficient numbers that it is clear idiot and afker participation massively increases when good gear is available through that method means that giving out undeserved gear causes me to have to deal with more idiots just to do battlegrounds.

Sure, there will always be some, but the numbers go up drastically when there's good gear on the line.

And you're not running a premade because...?

I've gathered together enough people to try a couple times after the patch that made groups larger than 5 go into a completely separate queue.  15+ minute queue times stopped most of them from ever trying again.  Premades fighting only premades seems to mean very few people queue as one.

So you're still playing in groups of 5, right?

Yes, so the only fix is to cockblock the fuck out of all content.

Totally missing the point, dude.



Say what you like about him, HRose has a gift for finding relevant quotes.


If they weren't there you would spend your time getting rolled by good teams half the time rather than spending half the time arguing with bads on your team and rolling others solo.  Neither way is significantly easier.

Too late sadly.  :heartbreak:

But still greatly appreciated Phred!  :heart:

Switching back and forth between herb and minerals isn't so painful. It's more leveling mining. My herbalism is 322 while my mining is 275 and I've been actively looking for metal nodes and just picking up random pre-BC herbs.  :ye_gods:

My next DK alt is definitely going herbs and skinning. They money from old minerals is very very solid though.

Thorium is 50ish gold per stack, Mithril high 30s. Iron and Tin were 15-20ish gold. Pretty awesome.  :awesome_for_real:

back to the old topic of afkers in BGs. -- Arena should go back to having welfare epics to allow part timers get some upgrades.

Catasses Duelists will always get their full set of Gladiator gear as soon as they humanely can, so why not offer a carrot to the casuals.

Sure don't give us the full set, but 2/3 pieces would go a long way to letting us stay within shouting distance.

But carry on.  :why_so_serious:

Edit: for readability

Kalgan is only half right.  I am fine with people doing the Arena for a purple, I am not fine with letting them use those purples in the Arena.  I tend to think of it along the lines of a sponsoried sporting even or league.  Teams are allowed to bring their own equipment so long as it falls within the regulation, and any gear that offers a significant advantage is not allowed.  The Arena enforce only half of that.  I'd rather they offer people a choice from a set of predetermined sets to use at the start of a match.

I've always been partial to the idea that everyone chooses from predefined sets of gear when entering the arena/bg/whatevs, and, as they gain points, they buy the right to use those sets outside of the arena.

That really would make more sense.

I really don't understand why it would be so hard.  It's quite a simple idea that I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

You're not to see gear from BGs be as good as what you from arenas or raiding, much less have all gear and character progression removed, until they find some satisfactory way to get you to develop an emotional connection to the other players in BGs.  If all you do is log in, do some dailies, queue up by yourself for BGs, and log out, it's very easy for any setback in the game (like a nerf to your class) to make you cancel because there's no feeling that you're abandoning your friends because you have never had a reason to make any.

There is some logic in there if people were machines.  People that have to be forced to socialize aren't going to do so just because you make the game suck if they don't.  Playing for awhile and getting bored then quitting later seems like a better business model to me versus quitting right away.  I mean, I join guilds/groups for the social aspect.  If I did it just to get foozle xmz, I'd find something else to do with my time.