Talent specializations can be really confusing; especially to the relatively new player. Even for those of us who have been around a while, there doesn’t seem to be any right answer for “what’s the best build for _____?” So we’re going to talk about talents in general terms and then we’ll draw some conclusions.

Every character has three talent tabs. Each one of these tabs has around 20-25 buttons. Each of these buttons represents an active or passive skill for your character. You are given 1 point for every level starting at 2 points for level 10, for a total of 61 points to spend in these talent trees. Where you put those points will make a huge difference in how you should play your character. With virtually unlimited variations to choose from it can be really tough to choose how to spend your talent points. We’ll help shed a little light on that right now.

It all boils down to this: how do you like to play? That one factor should be the ultimate decision-maker for you when it comes to choosing your talent tree, as well as how you allocate the individual points. Do you prefer healing or fighting? Do you like crowd control or a ton of DPS? Ranged attacks or melee? Once you get to know your character and class, you’ll have a much better idea how it all fits together.

In my opinion there are really only two ways to go to get the very most out of any build. This may be a little controversial, but here goes. You should either go all-in on a single tree and super-specialize with 41+ points, or go 30/31 in two trees. It really depends on what the people you play with need you to contribute to regular instance runs, PVP battles, or raid groups. Let’s look at those two options.

In order to really have the best heals or be a fabulous tank, you simply must go at least to 41 points in those trees. If your guild needs an uber tank, you’re going to have to really go for it, or decide to let someone else play that role. For maximum healing, the 41st point is usually a “can’t live without skill.” Do a little looking on wowhead and Thottbot as well as a google search and see what build others are using in that tree. Alakhazam has a list at that shows the breakdowns of what its members use at http://wow.allakhazam.com/dyn/talfreq.html you can see from this list most druids (2.43%) use a 0/0/61 build for restoration. This just proves my point that in order to do one tree well, you’re going to spend nearly all of your points there. This list is terrific because it lets you look at what hundreds of other players are choosing.

Another great resource for looking at builds if you are not an expert already is the WoW Wikki site. On the Class page here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Class there is a window on the right side of the screen where you can get very detailed information and comments on how thousands of other people play that class, the builds they use, and which builds are better suited for PVE, PVP and raids.

Now that you’ve seen the first theory, let’s take a peek at another one that might make you even more valuable overall, primarily for DPS classes and builds. On this page: http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=472 someone was doing an analysis of hunter DPS builds, and the end result was fascinating. In almost every case the builds with a 30/31 allocation did the most damage. This happened because of talent synergies. While those who played Blizzard’s other blockbuster, Diablo 2 are familiar with the term, it’s not used directly in WoW, but that doesn’t keep it from happening.

On this page we see that a 0/21/30 build was almost identical in DPS to a 0/31/20 build (this is a very old post on Allakhazam before the expansion so bear with me). Blizzard does a great job of trying to balance their games so that players never overpower each other, and that no single build ever lasts if it thoroughly outshines all the others. This leads to parity and variety, so that all players become fairly equal, and players can play the same toon in a variety of styles depending on the situation.

So you might experiment with a 31/30 build. From my testing it always turns out that any two trees end up with talent synergies in the 20 point level, meaning they make each other stronger. The hard part about this build is choosing the 61st point. There will be one really great skill in all three trees you’ll have to choose from with that last point. It can be a really tough choice to make, because it will have a great effect on your play style.

Hunters, for example can go with BM/MM with the last point in either bestial wrath (big red kitty) or true shot aura. If he goes MM/Survival he’ll have to choose between true shot aura and Wyvern Sting, and for BM/Surv the choice will be bestial wrath or Wyvern. All three of those skills are useful; it will just depend on how that player wants to play. I’ve said before that very few hunters go survival tree, not even 1%. But I’ve also seen a survival hunter make all the difference in a high level run with great dps because his crit chance was around 29% with lethal shots, mortal shots and lightening reflexes. He would put on rapid fire and crit almost every 1.5 seconds to the tune of 1,400 to 1,800; it was insane. Plus he could chain trap like crazy, and put a mob to sleep before the fight ever began with wyvern sting. That means from one toon you got double the CC.

That’s what you get from a 30/31 build, versatility. You can do three or four things really well for your group and not be pigeonholed into just one thing. A 31/30 build is going to be primarily used for DPS builds, while a 41+ specialization may be more for healers and tanks. A good raid group needs both kinds: the super-specialized and the versatile. I think maybe I’ll do something really weird and go 30 beast mastery/31 survival just for kicks with my next hunter and see how it goes. Put a rogue to sleep for a bit and then let my cat go frenzy on them. No more stealth for you Mr. rogue, and enjoy the dots! Next, we’ll rant about instances.

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This is for you level 70 characters working on getting your tier 4 or 5 dungeon gear who hate farming. There are places to farm that might give you more cash per hour, but they just aren’t as easy. The mobs are a snap for almost any class or build; they drop high value items, and limited junk. The spot is in Netherstorm; at the ruins of Alkron.

This works best if you have enchanting and skinning - two of my favorite end-game professions. On my server almost everybody mines, so you end up rolling for all the nodes in instances. Another good end-game gathering skill is herbalism, but it seems like only the leatherworkers skin. But since leatherworking is a lot like tailoring in the fact that it takes a whole lot of mats to make one recipe, the demand for knothide leathers is just as high as for metal bars in most cases. Especially since the materials are more limited on the ah since most people don’t skin. You can actually make a pretty decent run just cleaning up leftovers in high traffic areas of Nagrand, where nearly everything you kill can be skinned. There will be times when I can skin 20-40 mobs without ever taking a single swing because there are two or three people working on the mastery quests in the northern part of that zone. I just run around making free money off their kills.

(Revision to skinning and AH sales. Prices for skins seems to rise and fall more than most items, particularly compared to other mats. Mat prices tend to stay fairly static for long periods of time. This is not the case with skins. Prices for almost all levels of skins can vary widely on a single server over time. At the time of the writing of this article, Heavy Knothide on Fenris realm was selling for nearly 7.5 gold each. In just a couple of months, those prices fell to 10 gold a stack. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the low supply caused a LOT of players to go train skinning to get in on the profits. Supply soared and prices dropped like a rock. It took nearly nine months for skin prices to rise back to around 60 gold a stack. If your server happens to be in a high supply low demand phase, just hang out, prices will rise again as folks drop skinning because they aren’t making enough money with it.)

But the Alkron ruins are simply the best. In an average hour you can expect to farm something like 130-160 gold worth of items if you have skinning and enchanting. The mobs there are well spaced, so you almost always get them 1-on-1, and they don’t have any really annoying skills or tons of armor or hit points. The worst part may be for casters since the artifact seekers will use mana burn on you from time to time as well as spell lock. I will just assume you know how to deal with that. All the mobs are level 67 or 68 and you can kill more than 100 of them an hour. This should get you about 6 gold in silver dropped from the doomguards, 80-120 knothide leather scraps, 20-30 knothide leather, 30+ marks of Sargeras, 2 or 3 Fel Armaments, 3-5 vendor trash items worth around 5 gold or so, and the odd green item which you can either sell at ah or disenchant for a guaranteed 6-10 gold if the item doesn’t sell for that much.

Prices for the marks of Sargeras and fel armaments will vary from server to server, but they are used for Aldor rep and Aldor enchants. A pretty good average for these is around 15 gold for the armaments; and up to 1 gold each for the marks. Add in the profit from the leather and now you’re making some really serious coin for a very minimal amount of work. I go there quite a bit during trash time while waiting for the guild to get together on a dungeon run. I’ll just fly up there and bust a few heads for 20 minutes or so while everyone else is getting done with their current quests or instances. I am able to keep about 1,500 gold on my alt all the time doing this just 20 minutes here and there every time I log on. I have never liked to farm for hours at a time, but this would be the perfect place to do it if you are strapped for cash, or don’t mind going in circles for hours. Either way, it’s worth it - and quite possibly the easiest money you will make compared to anyplace else you could possibly go.

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Enchanting can be a very lucrative career profession. The only thing I hate about it is standing around in a major city spamming the trade channels with: level 345 ‘chanter LFW can do [some enchant] [another enchant] blah, blah, blah. Only to have to get into a 2 minute conversation with everybody anyway about every one of the 40 or 50 enchants I can or cannot do and what the mat price is and what I charge for it. It can really be a hassle. But you can still make a TON of gold with enchanting and never enchant anything but your own gear.

Just like fishing and cooking are great for new toons and making bags is perfect for the mid-level characters, there’s just no beating enchanting for making the big bucks for your epic and flying mounts. Questing in outlands will land you the most amazing greens, and I would personally swear that they drop twice as often as in Azeroth. Most of these greens are better than the level 60 dungeon gear from before the Burning Crusade patch. However, because of the stats most people need on their items, about 25% of these drops are completely worthless. I mean you can’t sell them in the auction house at all. You can’t even give them away. So the greens in outlands can be pretty hit-or-miss. They will either leave you agonizing over whether to equip it, sell it at the ah, or vendor it away.

Don’t worry about that if you have enchanting. The great thing about this technique is that you don’t have to mess around with maxing out your enchanting skill to make money at it. At skill level 275 you can disenchant nearly anything you would ever want to. The blues which might require a higher level enchanting skill to disenchant you don’t have to worry about either. Almost every party will have at least one other enchanter, if there is a roll everyone passes on, just let the guy who spent 2000 gold getting his enchanting to 375 disenchant it and then everyone can roll on the shard instead of the item.

So you can do this without having to spend a ton of money leveling up your skill. The greatest thing about disenchanting items for money is that there are NO auction deposits for enchanting mats. Which means you can go for the highest price possible and re-list them all 100 times if necessary to get the very maximum price. On top of that, the amount of materials needed to get even one skill point in enchanting past 325 is insane. So the materials are in high demand no matter what your server. Plus, at the level of the people buying these materials, money has usually ceased to be a big deal, because you can easily earn 100 gold just off of trash items in a few hours grinding.

So when you begin dreaming about that flying mount - you might go retrain in enchanting and spend a couple hundred gold getting it leveled up. After about three weeks of casual questing in outlands, I was able to disenchant enough mats to sell the whole pile on AH for well over 1,500 gold, enough for my flying mount and a riding crop to boot on one of my alts. So whether you are farming, questing or raiding, enchanting is one way to make some serious dough without having to advertise. Next, our favorite farming spot.

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19 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Bags can make you quite a bit of gold. Just like fishing and cooking can make you some decent low-level money, using tailoring as your profession and making almost exclusively bags can also be a lucrative career between the levels 20-60.

Tailoring is one of those professions that is just not a fabulous money-maker overall. I know you can find people who say they make a pile of gold every week on it, but honestly, the materials for tailoring are hard to get in the quantities you need unless you are buying them at the AH. The problem with this is that on many servers the price for the materials will be more than the price you can get for the finished product. But there’s a little hope in tailoring, and it’s in making bags.

The very best way to take advantage of this is by using skinning and tailoring. This way, you can get almost all of the materials you need just by doing your regular questing runs with very little farming involved or purchasing from the auction house. The exception to this rule is going to be buying some (or massive amounts of) cloth.

Go get your skinning and tailoring training and save up every scrap of cloth you ever find. Using the Thottbot techniques you learned in a previous article, level up your tailoring to maximum as fast as you can. It will help if you are level 35 or better when you do this, otherwise you’ll cap out before you can make the best bag of all. It also helps if you know a leatherworker who can turn all those stacks of leather scraps into light leather for you, but otherwise just sell them and buy what you need for the bags. You won’t ever need a ton of leather for bag making.

Now you need to get a little more skillful about using the auction house. If you are not using auctioneer I highly recommend it, it will save you a lot of effort in this step. Look at the mats required to make your bags. After you have sold a few of them, you will be able to determine the maximum price at which you can sell every bag you make.

We’re not interested in the real maximum price, but the highest price at which they sell like hotcakes. You have to pay a deposit for every bag you place at auction, and if your price is so high that you have to re-list those bags more than two or three times, you’ve probably lost money instead of making any. Then figure out from that max price what you can afford to spend for a stack of materials and still make a profit from the bag.

For instance, on one server I know that if I buy stacks of 20 runecloth for 1gold 50 silver or less

Stacks of rugged leather for 3 gold or less

I can make 75s on as many runecloth bags as I can possibly make, selling them for 2 gold 95 silver bid, 3 gold 45 silver buyout. You can see that If I post my bags at 2g95s they will sell super fast compared to the other prices.

This may not be true on every server precisely, but you will be able to find this same sweet spot probably somewhere near this range. There are times I will buy 200 gold worth of runecloth and make 90 or 100 bags because I know that I will turn that 200 gold into 450-500 in less than a week for about one hour’s worth of work.

You see, everybody needs four bags (or three anyway for people opting for a quiver or other specialized slot container), and everybody wants bigger bags. You can get more than 400 gold on most servers for a primal mooncloth bag. Too bad the mats will cost you about 395 gold to buy if you don’t farm them yourself. I have found that the very best money-making bag out there is the runecloth bag. It’s the first really serious bag upgrade people do, and the price is reasonable for the amount of money someone usually has by the time they can use this bag.

The other nice thing about bags that makes people spend pretty freely for them is that in most cases for the lower level bags they do not bind on equip. Which means you can turn around and sell them back on the AH later when you get even bigger bags, or a similar size bag drops from a mob. SO people often see it as a push. “I’m not really paying 14 gold for a set of bags, because they will still be worth 14 gold three months from now when they get new bags!”

The neat thing is that they will give YOU their 14 gold! Next up - disenchanting for the big bucks.

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Sometimes, people are just creatures of habit. They get stuck in ruts, and trying new things is not going to be something they will do easily. I’m more of a risk-taker. I look at what other people are doing and what I see a lot of times with wow is that people are taking the easy way out. But it always leaves them under-prepared for the end-game content.

One of the most sought-after members of a raid team is a true tank. That guy who can take all the beating in the world so that the other members don’t have to. Met a warrior the other day with more than 16,000 life! That’s just insane. He was good because he was hyper-specialized. There are other players that are good because they are more diversified. It’s not always easy to figure out which way to be, but let’s look at one way you can be both.

I want you to consider using something that is the least-used for alliance players. Go roll you a new Dranei Paladin or Shaman. Especially if you’ve been Horde all your WoW life and want to really show off how to play a Shaman to us poor Alliance saps. Now, I do not believe that people aren’t using the Dranei race because it’s not as good, it’s just unfamiliar, and the starting area is a little odd. People don’t like to try new things right? So be different and you just might turn out to have a better character in the end.

Dranei have one of the coolest racial skills in the game – Gift of the Naaru. It’s a heal-over-time spell that scales with your character as you level; so it’s almost always good for 25%-50% life rejuvenation. So even if you’re thinking about another warrior or hunter, it’s nice to be able to heal yourself in an emergency when you’re flying solo. It can also be useful in a party when the boss is almost dead and you need that last little bit to take him down before everybody wipes (especially if your healer already bit the dust).

Combine the fact that very few people use the Dranei as a race with the fact that not a lot of people play a Paladin, and even fewer Alliance use the Shaman, and you’ve got yourself a nice little niche to fill, especially if you choose a Shaman. The gift of the Naaru spell gives both of these classes one more heal in their bag of tricks, so it’s like having an extra 500-1000 mana at level 70.

Now, playing a paladin can be almost as complicated as playing a hunter. There are just tons of blessings and healings and auras; it can really make your fingers get tied up. But once you get used to it, it’s not really that bad. Shamans are only slightly less complicated as they have a lot of different totems they can use and have that odd hybrid thing where they are both melee and caster at the same time.

But both classes are a ton of fun to play and incredibly versatile, which makes them especially valuable to raid groups. You might be looking at carrying two or three sets of gear around to be able to fit in either the tanking/DPS role or a healing role, but really, it makes rolling on loot a little more fun in outlands because you really CAN use a lot of different items; much more so than say a rogue or a hunter.

In all reality, as a Shaman you probably have the best chance to get some really nice gear since no other healer/Caster class uses mail armor. So you won’t be competing with anyone for things you really can use. Blizzard put the same amount of gear in for Shamans, and Horde players have been using it for years, but on the alliance side, you’ll be in your own little wonderland.

You might be asked to be the healer more often than not in a group, but considering you’ll be wearing mail and plate armor it can be a lot less painful than being a priest. It will take some practice to heal as well as a priest, and you’ll have to specialize for it, but you will never ever have to worry about getting an invite to a dungeon run. So hop over to Azuremyst Isle and get started on one of these guys, you’ll be glad you did.

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15 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Nanny nanny boo boo -

I don’t know if kids still use the same annoying little chants to taunt each other that we used when I was a nooblet in real life. But the one that sticks out for this lesson is: “I’m rubber; you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!” Boy I hated that one. But it’s very appropriate for the technique we’re going to talk about today. The pull and pass.

Last time we talked about using all of your skills all of the time. But there are certain cases where some skills are just not that useful outside of instances. Even worse, there is not a reason to use them in most instances until you get to the really hard ones. Beginning with Steamvaults, Shattered Halls and Shadow Labyrinth, the mob pulls are beginning to come in groups of 4-6. And those teams are well-balanced just like your group. If one of those elites, or even worse - two or three, get locked on your healer, you can pretty much just start hustling toward the entrance so your corpse run will be shorter.

Most of the time, a healer can do something like bubble (for priests), and run around for a bit and heal himself while the rest of the team goes full DPS on one or two mobs. He can kite guys around and survive for a while. But the elites in the end game instances hit so hard and you simply cannot get them off your back once they lock on, especially as a healer. So the best you can hope for is that you can keep the party healed long enough in spirit form so that they finish off a couple of them and make the next pull easier. But talk about a long night. One or two wipes in an instance is a good run, One or two wipes every one or two pulls blows.

Hunters have gotten a bad rap in groups because many other players think: they don’t (most of the time) do the serious DPS of a mage or Warlock (and locks have off-tank pets too), they can’t tank a murloc, are useless unless they are in range (except those 7 players who went survival spec) so they spend a great deal of time just running around like an idiot, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure you’ve heard these and more. If you have decent skills as a hunter you know that these statements may be true about many hunters, but not AL hunters. But the thing is: 25-30% of the toons on just about every server are hunters. Why? Because they solo so well. For the casual gamer, getting a holy priest to level 70 is about as fun as having your wisdom teeth removed. But hunters can do just about anything without having to have much help.

You can be the exception to the rule for those people who don’t really like hunters on instance runs. You paid attention to me in the last article when I told you to use all of your skills so you have all your hot buttons ready to go. Let’s cover how every priest in the game will be your new best friend when you do this a few times for them. Paladins and Shaman aren’t nearly as squishy as their cloth compatriot, but they will appreciate it just as much.

I call it a pull and pass. It can be a little tricky, but not if you know where all your buttons are and pay attention to what’s going on. We are in a big fight and you see a mob going to take a big chunk out of your healer. Here’s what you do:

1. Fire Distracting Shot - As soon as you see your healer has drawn aggro (btw, this IS hunter duty, to pull agro off of healers and to take down trash add mobs) Nail it with distracting shot to get them locked on you.

2. Use Scatter Shot/Concussive Shot - If you have specialized in Marksmanship and can use scatter shot to slow them down or even stop them altogether - if they disorient, they will drop agro on you and your pet can pick it up. If you are Beast Mastery, concussive shot.

3. By this time one of two things will have happened: the mob is now ready to pick on someone else, or someone else is picking on him.

4. If he has already been drawn to another party member, you can go back to nuking down the mark you were on in the first place - OR - use misdirection.

5. Misdirect - Hit your misdirection hotkey and then click your tank. Blast away at your target with the three biggest damage shots you have and he will go back where he needs to be.

So you pull the agro off of your healer and pass it back to your tank. A different kind of crowd control, with a hunter, you gotta love it. And that’s just one of our hunter crowd control tips. Misdirection may be the most underused skill hunters have, and I have never seen many hunters use distracting shot well because they don’t want the agro either. Most marksman hunters will use scatter shot because it saves their own bacon, but don’t know how to pass agro once they pull it. If all else fails, Feign Death and let the mob naturally wander off to someone else. You and your healer are still standing. Hunters have another great way to manage agro we’ll talk about another time.

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13 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Learning your skills

Use it or lose it, maybe you’ve heard you dad or granddad say that. The same thing is true with the skills for your character. Often times it can be hard to be really prepared for the level 70 dungeon runs unless you and every single member of your team is a really polished player.

Heres why. End game content such as Shattered Halls, Steamvaults, and other instances that require level 70 teams are a lot like trying to solo a level 20 elite at level 18 or 19. It’s not that bad if you know how to counterattack, it can certainly be done, but more often than not it’s going to end in you getting killed and having to spend some coin on repairs.

Before you high-level players begin to flame me for being a total noob, keep in mind that you probably didn’t “pwn” your first deadmines run right after the game came out. You learned to play and are probably playing with friends you’ve made out of mutual respect for their skill. But not everyone is that good. Not everyone has high powered guild mates to help them farm dungeon set gear. Most people who play wow are casual gamers. They don’t play more than an hour or two a few times a week, so they might never see the inside of Kara.

I play WoW quite a lot, but I am humble enough to still know I am a totally clueless about some things. Anyone who thinks they know it all is full of it. But one thing that can really help you as your character grows is learning how to effectively use your skills. The way to do that is deceptively simple. This may sound pretty dumb, but you’ve got to use all your skills all the time or you will forget to use them when you should.

Heres the trap. You’re out questing for something on mobs several levels below you. If you’re smart, you are usually questing only on green level quests or with a friend (more on that another time). You are blowing through mobs with ease, so you ease off on using some of your more powerful skills. After a few levels, you get even more skills. Now the problem gets worse. The skills you were ignoring before have become sort of left out of your repertoire of moves. You begin trying out your other new moves and find a favorite or two and stick with them. Everything is going smoothly – you are cruising your way to 70, rushing through instances with your friends, you begin to think you are invincible. Then you hit Shattered Halls.

Now, instead of pulls with 2-3 mobs, they can be pulls of 5or 6. And the mob groups are as well balanced as your party with a tank, a healer, a caster with Aoe, and sometimes they even spawn non elite adds like pets. Were talking wipe city your first time in. Is it because your character is the wrong spec? Maybe, but most characters who have spent the majority of their points, say 40+ in a single tree can play a valuable role in any group. Is it because your gear is terrible? Probably not, if you can’t do the high level runs because your gear is crap, your gear is always going to be crap. More than likely its because you have about 5-10 skills you have never really used consistently so you are not really that good at using them when they would really come in handy.

The way to avoid this is to go all out on every battle. Even when you are killing chickens do it with authority. By using all of your skills all the time, you never forget to use one buff or another, or change skills when you need to. The second part of this is that you really need to spend some time in the battlegrounds. The better you get at pvp, the better you will be in high level instances because you will know how to counter attack, instead of just attack. In order to counter attack well, you have to learn how to neutralize the attack they are using against you and then attack them at their weakest point. This means knowing your strong and weak points and how they stack up against every other class in the game. Sounds hard to do, but its easier than you might think if you will run the battlegrounds fairly regularly.

If you want to get seriously good, you better play the arena matches. No other place in the game will test your use of skills like going up against real people with points on the line. There are many skills that have a very small impact in PVE situations, but in arena matches may be the difference between winning only one match out of ten or being the team that wins 9 of 10. In arenas, it not only makes a difference which skill you use, but when. Arena matches will not only make you use all your weapons, but you will have to have almost perfect timing.

A good example is the time you got completely ganked over and over again by that 46 paladin when your toon was level 50. It shouldn’t be that way. Two level 50s should be a fair match, but 50 vs. 46 – you should be able to wax the floor with them. So why did you lose so badly? They just had more experience using their skills with great timing to counter everything you threw at them. Everything you tried to do seemed to hit a brick wall for a reason. At the same time, they were damaging you and stopping you from damaging them. It all boils down to skills and timing.

So never go easy on those mobs, pour it on, it will keep you in much better shape for that end-game content. Next lesson, how a hunter learned this the hard way.

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11 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Can anybody tell me where I can find _____________?

You see this constantly in chat. It drives me nuts. I might be having a great conversation with guild mates only to have 47 people alternately flaming or giving 47 different kinds of advice to a guy who asked a very simple question in the general chat channel. Now, I’m not an elitist. I’m not against asking questions in chat. Heck even “pros” can’t know everything about Wow – there’s just too much to it and it changes with every patch. As a matter of fact, jut the other night our guild was doing an instance run that we had never done before, but it turned out fine. Why? Thottbot.

Thottbot is a massive database of World of Warcraft data. Hundreds and thousands of players upload their game statistics to Thottbot every day. Need to know where you can find the recipe for savory deviate delight? Thottbot can tell you that this recipe has dropped 148 times from Greater Plainstriders in the Barrens out of 341,943 times they have been looted. It will also tell you that this recipe will only drop off of mobs in the barrens, and that there is no particular mob that drops it much more than any other. It is a truly random and unique recipe, thus the normally high prices in the AH for this recipe and also for what it produces, savory deviate delight.

But Thotbott can be very confusing to deal with for the first-time user. So we’re going to talk a little bit today about using it for professions, and after that you’ll understand better how to use it for almost everything else. Now Thottbot isn’t the only resource out there, but it does have the biggest and most up-to-date information pool, which makes it the first place I visit when I really need to know something and don’t feel like rooting for it on Google.

Go to Thottbot and you will see five links under the search box. Hover your mouse over professions and then click cooking for our example. It’s under the dark blue header for secondary professions. You are now taken to a page where every cooking recipe in the game is listed in skill level order.

The first recipe listed is Spice Bread. The information is divided into five columns: skill, recipe, components, slot and source. Let’s go through these one at a time so that you know what each column is telling you.

Column one lists three numbers. The first and largest one is black – this is the skill level at which you can use the recipe. For spice bread you can use it at level 1. The second number is smaller and gold. This is the level at which you will stop getting automatic skill-ups for cooking this recipe. Spice Bread goes green (meaning you will only gain a skill-up every few times) at cooking skill level 30. The smallest number at the bottom is in gray and represents the skill level at which you will no longer receive skill-ups for this recipe; in this case 40. So now we know that we can start cooking spice bread as our very first cooking recipe. We also know that we can cook 30 of them to get to skill level 30 and that we will never get our cooking skill higher than 40 using this recipe.

The second column lists the Recipe name and icon as a hyperlink. Clicking this will take us to the Spiced Bread page. At the top is a screen shot of the finished product.

The next box shows what it takes to make it.

The next box down shows items with similar cooldown counts (this is absolutely useless information in this case, but come in handy at other times) And finally, is the comments section; very short in this case with only two comments showing.

We hit the back button on our browser to return to the recipes list for column 3 which will list the components, or materials (mats) required to make this recipe. Hovering over the icons will show the screen tool tip for simple flour and mild spices as well as a hyperlink to go to each of those pages. Let’s go to the page for simple flour.

This page is a little different than the page for spiced bread. It begins the same with the screenshot of the tool tip followed by the recipe that it is used in. But this page has a new information box that lists the vendors from whom you can buy simple flour.

No comments for this item. I might post one just for giggles. Click on the first vendor name “Cookie” Mc Weaksauce (a little WoW humor). This will tell you everything you never thought you wanted to know about Cookie. It starts with his tool tip, then a map of where he is located in the zone, the quests he can give (if any, in this case one) It will also list everything he sells (again, if any, 7 things can be purchased from cookie). It will list what he drops if you kill him and then any comments.

A word on comments, these will become you most valuable asset for things that are hard to find. Players post forum comments on how exactly to get or do or survive whatever is being discussed. Not much to talk about with most of this cooking information, so comments are limited, but some comment lists go on for pages and pages.

Now let’s go back 2 pages to the recipe list. The fourth column is not used here; recipes go IN a bag, they do not have a slot. So the fifth and final column is where to find the recipe, the source. Recently, sources seem to have dissapeared from thottbot, but if you want to know where to get a recipe for something just type it in the search box.

type in “recipe brilliant smallfish” and hit the “> ” This takes you to the page for the Brilliant Smallfish recipe. You can see that there are 12 vendors for this recipe scattered all over Azeroth. Clicking on the name of these folks will, of course show you everything about them specifically if you are having trouble finding them.

Ok, so now you can see that if you will get a little click happy, Thottbot has a TON of information about everything you could ever want to know. Our first article talked about how to make decent money as a lowbie using fishing and cooking. Now let’s see how what we’ve just learned can help us do that.

On the recipes page we now know that there are two different fish we can cook at level 1 cooking. We also know that the first 45 of either one will get us to level 45 cooking and that if we continue to cook these we can level cooking all the way to 85 without cooking anything else. Scroll down a bit to the next fish recipe – longjaw mudsnapper. We can cook this at cooking level 50, all the way to 130, but it goes green at cooking skill 90. Rainbow fin Albacore is exactly the same. Scroll down a bit more to bristle whisker catfish. It requires cooking 100 to cook, and will give points all the way to 180, going green at 140.

So how does this help us? Well, we know we don’t have to cook anything else before we learn brilliant smallfish. Since we checked the fishing page (well I did) we also know we can catch brilliant smallfish right in Stormwind city at fishing level 1. Catching these will level fishing up to 85, this also is true for slitherskin mackerel, although night elves would be fishing it in Auberdine. So by catching either of these fish to skill level 50 cooking, we can then move on to longjaw mudsnapper to level cooking to 100, and then bristle whisker catfish to 150 and so forth. By doing it his way we’ve only had to cook the very minimum of extra fish to get our cooking skill ups (only 15 skill points from green level recipes).

So now you can see how to use Thottbot as a guide to the really mundane stuff. This will save you mountains of time searching for recipes. Just check Thottbot to find out where to go to get it, or even find out if it’s available to find for your faction. Some things simply are not worth the trouble it will take to find them, so this can save you a ton of frustration.

If you will start to use Thottbot to help you with your professions, you will figure out more and more how to use it to find just about anything you need to know, without getting beat up in chat.

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For the new player, your first visit to one of the major cities can be pretty discouraging. You watch the chat roll by with people advertising items for sale with prices like “only 150 gold, cheaper than AH.” And you think to yourself, I only have 22 silver! How in the world do you ever get 150 gold? A couple weeks later you are in your first instance run and have saved up 3 gold and hear a guy in the party say how he’s saving up for his mount, only 70 more gold to go before level 40. It took you until level 20 to get 3 gold so at that rate you imagine should be able to get your mount at level bazillion.

Don’t let it get you down; it’s really not that bad. And what we’re going to show you today can make those first few levels a lot less painful. Anyone can buy their mount, even the epic and flying versions. If you bought all four mounts in the game the cost would be around 6000 gold! But lots of people do it, pretty much everyone has at least their level 40 mount, but there are certainly ways to make gold that are faster than others.

Now, this is not for the guy who has time to play WoW 8-10 hours a day. This will really cut into your raid runs. What this IS, is a great way for someone working on their first toon to make some decent cash without having to know the ins and outs of professions and the auction house. So let’s get to it.

There are several professions in the game that are freebies. Your character can only learn two professions at a time, but you can learn all three of the secondary skills: fishing, cooking and first aid. Personally, I always max out first aid on every toon I make just in case. But I will only max fishing and cooking on one character and leave the other toons to do the main professions without worrying about the secondary skills.

You may know some advanced players who ridicule fishing and cooking as a waste of time, but you will hardly ever find high level players who will go to a major raid without having a stack of crafted food items. This plays right into what we’re about to teach you. Because very few people will ever level cooking all the way to 375, and even fewer will take the time to get fishing to 375, you have a great way to make some extra cash with limited competition.

A great example of this is Spicy Crawdads. A main tank for a raid will need to take 5 or 10 of these into Kara, and they will run right to the AH to buy a few. It’s easy to see why from the +30 stamina buff:

Spicy Crawdad

As a new player, I recommend that you run right now and get fishing and cooking started. Here’s why: everybody has to eat. Even more specifically, hunters have pets to feed. And pets can eat piles of fish. Most pets will eat cooked fish, or at least most hunters will have at least one cat, bear, or pig.

Now you are not going to make a fortune this way, but even my level 70 hunter makes some decent change (about 100 gold every week) selling golden fish sticks. Above all that, there is probably a savings of about 10-15 gold a week from not having to buy food for me or my pets. The other nice thing is that all my characters always have that extra little stamina buff, or other nice things like agility and intelligence from the fish I can cook. So I sell what everybody else wants to eat, and keep the rest for myself and vendor the leftovers. Even though a stack of 5 Spicy Crawdad goes for about 6-8 gold on my server, you don’t have to be at level 65 to make money selling fish in the AH. Even at level 10, there are food issues people have to deal with.

This technique will get you up to skill level 225 very fast in both fishing and cooking with the least amount of time, effort and money for cooking supplies since most fish recipes do not require spices. The other nice thing is that you can level up your cooking all the way to 375 and never cook anything but fish. No running around trying to get mystery meat from buzzards or anything weird like that. Fish it, cook it, sell it - the only running you will do is to get new recipes if you can’t find them on the auction house.

Here’s how this works. Go fishing for an hour or two in your major city. The cool thing about fishing is that you could skill all the way up to 375 and never fish outside of your starter area. I know this isn’t precise, but the point is that you don’t have to fish in higher level ponds to level up. Fishing skill-ups are tied to the number of catches, not the level of fish you catch. It’s a great thing to do while you’re in line for a battleground. If you’re just waiting around with nothing else to do, throw a line a few times and get several skill-ups. Remember to use lures to make sure you never lose a fish.

Next, you can do the first cooking quest and then run straight to the cooking trainer in your major city and get the first fish cooking recipe. You don’t have to do the cooking quests, but if you only plan on having one toon do all of your cooking, it is certainly nice to have every recipe you can get your hands on. I simply mail everything used in cooking that drops from mobs to my cook, and decide later whether to fry it up and put it in the AH.

Just catching and then cooking with the brilliant smallfish and longjaw mudsnapper recipes will get you to over 100 in both fishing and cooking, and the next fish, bristle whisker catfish should easily bring you over 175 skill in cooking. You can catch all three of these fish in most low-level ponds, so you can see how easy this makes leveling up your cooking skill.

After that, take your stacks of cooked fish over to the auction house and put them up for sale. Very rarely will anyone be selling low-level food, so it may be a little tricky to get your pricing right at first (I highly recommend using auctioneer mod to make this MUCH easier). Lather, rinse and repeat all the way through the game into outlands.

You can see here that there are only 4 cooked catfish on the AH on a very well-established server. If you were to post 5 or six full stacks, they would easily be nabbed up in an hour or two by some level 15-25 hunters needing a little kitty food. On this server the catfish go for about 1 silver each, so those six stacks would net you 1 gold. Considering that it’s pretty tough to come by gold at level 5 or 10; that’s a nice bit of change for a lowbie toon to work with, all for about 20-30 minutes worth of just leveling your fishing skill up at the same time.

It would be a rather longer article to go through the specifics of when you need to train, where to fish for certain fish and where to do the fishing and cooking quests and we have guides for that, BUT you don’t really need an extensive guide for any profession, what you need is to learn to use Thottbot effectively. All you need to do for this is browse Thottbot for the recipes or fish that you need under fishing and cooking and you can find out everything you need to know; which is the subject of another article you can look forward to reading very soon at Dominate Your Server.

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4 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post