For those of you who already know the technical issues surrounding port forwarding this will be old hat.  But we recently had a guy comment that his 1.5 Mb connection was taking days to download patches.  So for you folks who are having serious downloading issues we thought it would be good to cover some basics and give you links to resources that will help you get your download speeds up to par with your connection.

Unless you are on dial-up, you should be able to grab patches and even full downloads in under and hour or two if you have your network ports properly configured.  In other words, if you are on any sort of DSL or Cable connection, problems with your download speed in relation to WoW stuff is not a matter of your connection, but something on your machine.

Now, we’re not going to be able to tell you exactly how to do this for Mac machines since I don’t currently have one to test with, but I may have to grab one and do an update for those later.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what you’re trying to fix.  Most people will get the message “Your computer appears to be behind a firewall.”  If you are getting any other message, just check out the link below to find the specific message you are getting from the Blizz Technical Support FAQ page.

Blizzard FAQ

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21275&categoryId=2316&parentCategoryId=&pageNumber=1

If you are getting this next specific message, you can use the link below for slow download speeds.  Most of the time slow speeds will be due to two factors that you can fix pretty easily once you know what to do.

Slow Download Speeds

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21065

In both of the scenarios we will deal with below, the problem is normally that the Blizz servers are having trouble talking to your system because something is in the way.  The two problem areas are in firewalls and routers.  In order to give Blizzard clean access to your computer you will need to make a path for them by opening some specific ports so that communication between your machine and Blizz doesn’t have something clogging up the process.

A big portion of the time, you windows users will be able to just open up ports on the internal Windows Firewall and that should do the trick.  Now, if you get the message about “it appears you are behind a firewall” don’t make the mistake of thinking that turning the firewall OFF will fix this.  Actually, turning the firewall off will usually make it worse, since it puts your entire internal network into the internet equivalent of safe mode.  Instead of only restricting certain things the way the firewall was designed to do, it will just restrict everything.  So turning it off won’t do you any good.

It’s really simple to open ports for WoW and anything else, you can check out the article at Blizzard here:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=21072

The other place you can get all gummed up is in your router if you are using one.  Routers can be particularly tricky because they are all different, there are thousands of them and some have internal firewalls that will also need to be dealt with.  Even though Blizzard has a little bit about working with routers to get ports open, there is a much better place to get the instructions you need.

Portforward.com is a massive database of highly specific information and guides on opening ports in almost any situation.  They have virtually every router ever made in their list, and if you can follow the links like breadcrumbs they will lead you to a pictorial walk-through of opening ports on YOUR router for WoW (and hundreds of other applications).  Talk about highly specific!  They also will help you deal with firewalls and their list of firewalls includes a much longer list than the Blizz page if you can’t find yours there.

Firewalls

http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/firewalling/routerindex.htm

Routers

http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

By using the tools above you should be able to get the proper ports and port ranges open to allow your downloads to flow much faster.  For those of you who may get Beta invites it’s going to take your downloads from several days to just a few hours.  If you lose your WoW file or something this will save you a ton of download time.  you can see from my download screen I was on pace to be able to download the entire up-to-date game client in about 4 hours (it would probably be less than that, but not bad).

We know this doesn’t have anything to do with playing the game, but you’ll understand why we wanted to cover this in a day or two.  And for everyone who has been living with those 9000 hour downloads this will certainly help you get your patches a ton faster.  The portforward site is a terrific resource - and YES this research site is completly up to date!

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14 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

When I say major changes I mean that more has changed than has stayed the same.  So many changes, in fact, that it’s going to be hard to do more than just hit the highlights in the space we have here.  But since we’ve had so many requests for info from the Beta, we can feel pretty comfortable publishing these since they seem about 95% locked in and will probably stay the same on release day.  So let’s get to it.

First, a LOT of the effort hunters used to have to put into pets is simply gone.  Training new pets and getting them up to speed is merely a matter of taming, and that’s about it.  Here’s a list of the things that just went “poof.”

• Pet training points - these are gone, so you don’t have to worry about where to place those odd points that just don’t fit.

• Pet Loyalty - axed for WotLK.  There may eventually be some sort of system to entice hunters to keep pets, but for now, it’s the equivalent of taming a pet with “Best Friend” status.  When training points disappeared, so did the need for loyalty.

• Pet leveling - mostly gone.  Pets will still have to level to some degree, but it will be a lot more transparent than it is now.  A level 1 beast trained by a level 80 hunter will hop to level 70 instantly.  That way the pet isn’t completely useless while you try to work on levels.  So if you missed that ghost saber at level 22, it’s not such a big deal to go back and get one for the coolness factor.

• Nearly everything associated with training points - you will no longer have to make hard choices (since training points are no more) between things like armor or resistances.  All pets now get base levels of resistance to all 5 schools of magic as they level, although you can still choose to increase these if you like through another method.

• Learning new pet skills - completely gone.  Never again will you have to go train Bellygrub to get Gore 4.  Instead, all pets will know 3 basic abilities (and a number of talent skills, more on those later) and those skills are set in stone.

• Having to keep an open slot at the Stable Master - all we can say is yeehaaw to this one.  Since you don’t have to train a trash pet to learn some skill or other, you will be able to put real pets in all your slots (the beta even shows an additional slot you can buy, which means you can have 5 pets).

• Some of your Current Pet’s skills - sorry, but if your pet knows claw and bite, they are going to lose one for the reason mentioned above.  All pets will have a set number of things they can use, and they will not get more than one “Focus Dump” skill.

• Crummy Pets - there is simply not a single pet in the game that will get you laughed at.  Up until now, there was a set of “caster” pets that had such awful stats that training points just couldn’t make up for how bad they were.  In WotLK if you can tame it, it will make a good pet.  There are even some pets that have surprisingly useful special abilities.  I mean, who would have ever guessed that they could make a moth a decent DPS pet?

That’s a good basic look at what’s gone, now let’s look at what those have been replaced with.  Personally, I like the new system a LOT more.  Pets will now be much more like your own character, and have a special talent point screen where you can select and customize that pet to be exactly what you want it to be.  This new system also has some wicked skills that don’t even exist now.  A level 70 pet in WotLK will be much better than a level 70 pet now.

• Three Pet “Types” - All pets are now divided into three distinct “types.” Cunning, Ferocity, and Tenacity.  These types loosely correspond to Cunning pets normally having some sort of debuff or short duration Crowd Control, Ferocity pets have DPS skills that can buff themselves or even an entire party (or raid, we’re not sure with all the raid buff tweaks yet) and Tenacity pets generally have talents that will help it to tank well.  There is a LOT of mixing and matching in the special skills, so remember that these are merely generalizations.  Each type also gets a specific modifier % to Damage Armor and Health.

• 31 Pet “Families” - All pets are further divided into 31 family groupings that determine the 1 “Special” skill that they will use.  Some of the special skills are simply incredible.  Rhinos get a skill called Stampede that knocks all enemies within 10 yards back 15 yards!  Warp Stalkers no longer warp toward their enemy, but they will instead warp the enemy away from them up to 30 yards.

• Pet Talent Trees - there are so many awesome tricks in the talent trees you’re just going to have to browse through them for yourself.  But basically, not only can you have a decent tanking pet, but that tank pet will can also be given talents that will help it do good damage as well.  The talent trees as a replacement for training points is an incredibly awesome change.

• ALL pets can now get a Speed increase skill - no longer will you be stuck with a pig to get charge.  All Tenacity pets can learn charge, and the other two pet types can all learn dash or dive.

It all boils down to a few really neat points.  Training pets is easier than ever, and you have a lot more control over what your pet can do.  There are more pet choices than ever, and more skills to choose from.  It is certainly going to lead to a lot more variety in the pets running around.  You will be able to customize your pet skills in a way that suits your needs, and do so with a lot less effort than ever.

All these changes will certainly make pets for MM and SV hunters more useful, but it may be even harder to leave BM behind when you see the simply wicked awesome firepower of a BM hunter with a core hound or devilsaur exotic ferocity pet.  The 51st talent point in the BM tree gives the hunter the ability to train pets from the 6 exotic pet families and 4 extra pet skill points to put into pet DPS skills, or other tanking skills for the rhino family.

Here are some convenient links to where you can dig a little deeper into the WotLK pet info for yourself.  But I warn you: don’t look at them if it’s going to make you ruin your keyboard drooling, you still have a rather long wait!

Pet Talent Trees:

• Petopia

Pet Talent Calculators:

• Cunning

• Ferocity

• Tenacity

Pet Types and Families

• Wowhead

Extensive FaQ for nearly all Wotlk Pet changes

• Petopia

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36 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

It really never ceases to amaze me what people will buy on the AH.  Even funnier is what people try to sell (like all the hundreds of stacks of vendor trash grey items you see all the time), but that’s another article for another time.

This is just a quickie today, since I can only embellish so much on this particular tip.  But you should be able to add an extra 50-100 gold every single week doing this, even though it’s only going to take you about 30 seconds.

We’ve done an article or two in the past about some rare limited supply recipes that can make you some pretty good coin.  But just recently I stumbled onto another set of recipes that is neither rare, nor limited, and it makes me more gold now than all of those other ones ever did.

Which seems like the dumbest thing in the world to me.  Why in the world would anyone pay a 400-500% markup when they can just go grab it themselves in about 2 minutes.  When I tell you which ones they are you are simply not going to believe it.

I found these completely by accident.  I was working up tailoring for my Shadow Priest and my Wife’s Warlock a couple of months ago and popped into Shattrath to get the higher end cloth recipes from the vendors in the Lower City.

As I did, I noticed the AADV price tooltip for one of them and it made me think (for one of the first times ever with AADV info) “That just CAN’T be right.”  It told me that the recipe for Imbued Netherweave Bag was worth 29gold on that server.  You have to be kidding me right?  People CAN’T be spending 30g on a 3g item.

But the historical data was just too strong, so I bought a few of those, as well as a couple of each of the “bolt of” recipes from the specialists there at the tailoring cluster to do a little test.  (I know the screenshot above shows my priest tooltip as only seeing 2 of these over 2 days, but the same numbers were true in the hundreds on my banker who has much more accurate data in the tooltip).

So that was 2 each of:

• Imbued Netherweave Bag
• Pattern: Bolt of Imbued Netherweave
• Pattern: Primal Mooncloth
• Pattern: Primal Mooncloth Bag
• Pattern: Spellcloth
• Pattern: Shadowcloth

For a total of 51 gold 60 silver.  I mailed it all to my banker to run at the auction that weekend.  Again, it’s just silly how well these things sold.  All in all, those 12 patterns sold in less than 24 hours for over 165 gold.  An average of 13g 75s each.  Some went for around 7g and the Primal Mooncloth Bag fetched nearly 30.

I just don’t see why a level 65+ toon (who is already in outlands anyway) wouldn’t just pop into Shattrath and grab these things.  Do they not know where to find them?  It certainly couldn’t be any easier.

The really nice thing about these recipes is that you could start selling these as soon as you were able to collect about 10 gold.  For me that is normally around level 10 or so.  Just get a mage to port you to Shatt, set your hearth there and grab as many of these as you can and then reinvest the gold for a few days.  Boom, you could have over 200 g by the time you hit level 20.

That sure would make it easy to get your mount at 30 right?  I checked this out on five different servers, and there always seems to be at least a 100-150% markup for all of these recipes.  That means that this should work on almost any server.

So again, you find all of these recipes in the lower city of Shattrath, in that vendor area in the south part of the city.  There are 4 cloth sellers there; Adrion Darkspinner, Gidge Spellweaver, Nasmara Moonsong, and Eiin at 66.3,68.3  Here they are all standing around just waiting for you to show up.

I have found that I can normally sell about 5-10 of each of these recipes every week.  I certainly would never have guessed that they would be in such high demand considering they are so easy to get.  But you just never know about people - especially the lazy level 70’s out there with more gold than sense.

Oh well, if it wasn’t for silly shoppers, I certainly wouldn’t make nearly as much gold, and so I sure don’t care if they ever find out.  Good luck with these, it’s just one more little tool you can add to your ability to Dominate on the ah.

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36 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

You already know how to play the game.  But you know you could get better.  You picked the PvP server on purpose to give yourself a challenge.  But it’s starting to get old.  I seems like everywhere you go you’re getting sand kicked in your face.  You win some, you lose some, and sometimes - you just get pwnd.

You think it might be just the fact that they have you out-geared.  But then another dude comes along and whips the guy who just ate your lunch, and made it look easy.  You know there’s a secret to it, but you’ve just never figured out what it is.

Well we’re about to tell you a little secret we use to Dominate every area of the game.

Being a great player is all about reaction times. Now, there is something to be said for being proactive, but there are just so many situations that require you to SEE what’s happening in the game and then USE the right spell or action.  When you get so fast you can respond to everything going on around you and have time to spare - that’s when you start making them react to you, and that’s when you begin to dominate.  Sure, you have to know WHAT to do and WHEN to do it, but you have to think fast, recognize fast, and cast fast.

When you get so fast you are waiting on the global cooldown for your next THREE spells, now we’re talking being ahead of the competition.  That’s when you can just yawn while you rip someone’s head off.

Rookie professional athletes talk about having to get used to the “speed of the game.”  Pros are just bigger, better, stronger, and way faster.  But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with being a 100 pound WoW weakling forever.

Now, there is something to the gear issue.  You really WILL get your head knocked off in arena matches if you have vastly inferior gear.  Which brings up an interesting point: how do you get the gear to dominate if you can’t dominate enough to get the gear?

You Need An Edge

A little boost so that you’re not stuck grinding it out in the battlegrounds forever for season 1 welfare epix.  And even though we’re talking about PvP a lot here, it will make an even bigger difference in PvE.  You’ll be the first person people come to to start their groups.  The MVP of your raid and guild.

One of the best ways to get your speed kicked into warp gear is to use macros.  Have you ever looked at the poor schmucks on the forums trying to find a macro?  Unless you’re a whiz at that sort of thing, writing your own toon specific macros is probably going to end in frustration.  It did for me.  There are just way too many variables to give you a set of macros you can put on your 1-9 keys that will cover every situation.

But there is another way, and it’s simpler, easier, and far superior to macros and mods alone.  The Fang gaming pad can put you in the driver’s seat, and turbocharge your play speed.

We process things in the game visually.  We can’t really smell the ganker coming over the hill behind us, and unless you dropped serious bucks on sound cards and headphones you won’t hear them either.  So we rely on what we can see.

The best way to improve your reaction times is practice.  See what your opponent is doing and then counter that move.  It all starts when you’re a poor little level 1 lowbie.  You learn to react to a limited number of things mobs throw at you.  By the time you reach 70 you have a pretty good feel for what to do in a lot of situations, but you’ve just run out of simple ways of using what you know.

That’s where the Fang will become your best friend.  With this little weapon, you can put every single skill in your book at your fingertips.  After just a few hours practicing, your fingers will be hitting all the right keys so much faster than before it will amaze you.

The Fang has 36 programmable keys that you can hotkey to the action bars in WoW.  It also has the traditional movement keys right in the center including the strafe functions, but with bigger, better feeling buttons that really make moving better than it’s ever been.

How does it help?  You’ve probably heard some jerk elitist dork say “get rid of all that clutter on your screen, learn 2 play!”  I guarantee you there was a time (like 3 years ago) when he didn’t play without looking either.  So don’t listen to the turds.  Get you a mod like bartender and put ALL of your spells out where you can see them and then link them to the fang and your 1-0 keys - then get ready to rumble!

Next, just go out and work through some tough situations.  Do things that you have found difficult in the past.  Fight elite mobs, take on 5 mobs, go to a heroic instance, do some battlegrounds - in other words, Practice!

You will find that you will naturally group together certain types of actions on the fang in little clusters.  Now your right thumb becomes a lethal weapon against rogues - your pinky dots folks to death, and your middle finger?  Well you’re starting to see the point.

With the right tool and a little practice, your game will make a quantum leap in speed.  You will be able to see not only what the game is about to do to you, but make the keystroke NOW!  You’ll already have your counter spell in motion and the offensive spell ready before they knew what hit them.

Now, you can choose to spend a couple of hundred hours learning to be the best macro programmer you can be, good luck with that.  For those of you who DO use power macros - imagine having 36 situation specific macros to use!  We’re not knocking macros, but they are only useful if you can trigger them easily.

There is simply no better way to trigger skills and macros faster and with fewer keystrokes than a Fang.

Sure, you can do without it.  You can figure out how to to toggle 4 actions bars worth of buttons with four different keystroke modifiers and just use your right hand to click 2 or three buttons, but WHY?  That’s like walking around the block to get to the store across the street.

The easier you make it on yourself, the faster you will play.  Make it easy on yourself to Dominate and grab a Fang.

Use it for a month and you’ll never be able to live without it.  How much will that set you back?  About 30 cents an hour - and forever after that it’s absolutely free.  So what do you think?  Is it worth three dimes to absolutely spank everything in sight for an hour?  You’ll never miss a few bucks, but once you play with a Fang we guarantee you’ll know what you’ve been missing.

All you have to do is click the picture to check one out or grab one right away.  It’s time for you to Dominate.

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34 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

One of the many ways to maximize your profits at the AH is carefully regulating your stack sizes.  Although it can be tempting to put everything up in maximum lots to save a little time, or to split everything into singles, you could be robbing yourself of some serious cash in the long run.  So I’m going to give you some pointers to use that will really help you know exactly what to do that should cover you in almost any situation, and really boost your gold-making.

There are three classes of things we’re dealing with here.  First are those items that simply stack into lots of 5, 10 or 20.  Next come items that convert, such as motes (from stacks of 10) and essences (from stacks of 3).  And finally are those oddball items that stack up to 250.

For the most part you will hardly ever want to post in maximum stack sizes for several reasons.  The biggest one is that there are still a lot of people who do not use Auctioneer.  I know it’s hard to believe, but because of this, there are a ton of folks playing this game that only see the final price and not the price per unit.  Smaller stacks are going to look cheaper than larger ones to them.  It’s just human nature to want to spend less (even if you are really spending more in the long run).

You can see per item prices in the WoW tooltip, (see posts by Ren and Trevor) but that doesn’t mean everybody will.

Don’t believe me?  Go to the grocery store and see how many things are being sold in smaller and smaller units in real life.  If multi-billion dollar companies use this little trick, then it’s safe to say it’s a good bet in WoW.  You can buy the ginormous bag of chips for 5 bucks, but people still buy gobs of the snack packs for $3.50 - even though the total weight of the the chips in the snack pack bags is less than 25% as much as is in the big bag.

Use this on things like cloth, especially wool.  If you split into stacks of 5, you can actually raise your price a touch over everyone else and still sell a ton of whatever it is you are selling.  People will see the 20 stacks of wool selling for 5g 50s (a price of 27s 50c each) and will often opt for your five stack at 1g 50s (a price of 30s each).  This works best when there are is a lot of price variation among the competition.  Without Auctioneer, it makes it very hard to tell what is really cheaper if the prices are all over the map.

Another area that this really comes in handy is on ore.  You also need to learn this now before WotLK when herbs go through the roof.  By this time you know that if you pay close attention to the AADV stats on metals, you can often make more money selling ore for prospecting than you can smelting the stuff and selling it that way.

Prospecting uses a LOT of ore.  Although most high end Jewelcrafters are not burning through the ore like they were at the beginning of the year, it is still a lucrative part of my weekly AH routine.  It’s not going to be any different with WotLK.

You see, Inscription has a skill called milling that is exactly like prospecting.  So far, it doesn’t seem that Inscription is going to use a lot of herbs directly, but it will be using even MORE herbs in the long run because of the milling process.  Milling uses five of any herb and turns it into a Pomace for the various Inscription recipes.  There are different Pomaces made from different level herbs, so herbs of all types will be in high demand, regardless of how rare they are, unlike alchemy which requires specific herbs.

We’ll do an article on Inscription when we know more.  Lawbringer is working on an Inscription guide, but since there are only about 10 recipes functioning now in the Beta, he hasn’t been able to test past about level 125.  But it is obvious from our initial look at Inscription that herbs are going to be a huge market.

We already told you to buy up all the herbs you can find of all levels.  Initial testing in inscription took us about 10 stacks of level 5 and 10 herbs just to get through the first few recipes.  So those stacks of peacebloom that go for next to nothing now will be worth well over 1g or more when WotLK goes live.  Expect even more profit increases from the higher level stuff.

Here’s how to capitalize on this with stack sizes. Since Milling requires 5 herbs, don’t post your lots in stacks of five, force them to buy more.  Since it’s going to take a LOT of herbs for the milling process, they need stacks of 20 and probably multiple stacks, but don’t give it to them that way.  Then as the power levelers pass you by, there will be stragglers that do only need five just to round out a skill point or two, and you can take advantage of both types of folks by splitting into stacks of 3 or 4.

Stacks of 4 requires them to buy at least 5 stacks from you.  Since milling takes 5, and only 5 will do, a stack of four is not enough.  8 is not enough, neither is 12, and 16 is still a mess.  The only way they can get a multiple of 5 for 4 milling runs is to buy 5 stacks of 4 for 20 herbs.  The other size, a 3 stack, also requires 5 purchases to get to a multiple of 5 at 15, but may be too frustrating for the dude who needs 200 herbs and doesn’t want to hit buyout 67 times.

This example of how to take advantage of stack sizes in this one area should open you mind to a lot of other areas at the AH you can do the exact same thing to really maximize you profits.  Just by splitting to smaller stacks, and raising your unit price a bit, you can still APPEAR to have lower prices, and yet price your stuff over everyone else.

Remember, people have the attention span of gnats.  They want to get in, get what they need and get out fast.  Post your stack items consistently in reasonable stacks and you can take advantage of their rush to get what they need and get on with whatever else it is they would rather be doing.

Next, there are those monster stack items.  I have found that weird stack sizes do best with these.  If you have 100 green power crystals, post a stack of 29, one of 41, and the last one at 24.  Just vary it up a lot, and make the unit price for each stack a little different.  If they need a whole bunch of them, they will be forced to buy your higher priced stack to go with the other two.

Finally, comes the ones I always harp on here at DYS - the enchanting mats.  These have the greatest stack separation potential for making even more gold above what you already do with DE.  Please tell me you buy things with the help of AADV for DE!  Don’t make me lecture you again on this.  OK, off my soapbox now - on with the show.

For enchanting mats as well as the mote conversions there are no real hard and fast rules, but I’ll give you the general things to look for.  With essences, the conversion rate is 3 to 1.  One greater splits to 3 lesser, 3 lesser to 1 greater.  MOST, but not all, of the time, you should be selling lessers.  This is one place you’ll have to check the conversion suggestion in the AADV tooltip to make sure.

When selling Greaters, split to a stack of 2.  Lessers go in a stack of 4.  We sell 2 greaters because not many recipes require an even number of greaters to create, and we don’t want to sell just one.  If they only need one, they have to buy two to get it from me.  As for the lessers, if they need greaters, they have to buy three sets of four to convert them all cleanly, and again, I always want them to buy more than they need.  If they only needed one greater and bought my 4 lessers to make it, they ended up having to buy one more lesser than they needed.

This also applies to motes.  I normally sell motes and hardly ever convert to primals.  This is because if I am selling primals I use a 2 stack (make them buy more than one), but since many primals are pretty steeply priced, it’s tough to buff your unit price on those since it’s going to look a lot more expensive than a single.  Remember, we want them to THINK they are getting a better price, and never KNOW they just got hammered.  For motes, use a stack of 6.  Again, a 6 stack requires 5 to convert cleanly to primals (5 stacks of 6 is 30 for 3 primals).

Finally, also apply the stack of 2 to any large shards.  There’s just no helping this one.  remember, make them buy more from you.  A few things we didn’t mention so far are dusts, which I will normally put in a stack of 5.  That sounds odd, since I’ve been preaching other oddball stack sizes and 5 seems like a nice round number.  This is because I did a survey of the different enchants, and very few enchants use a multiple of five, so the 5 stack maximizes over-purchases the vast majority of the time.

You can see, there are a LOT of little things you can do to boost your sales and gold potential at the AH, and we’re putting every single one of them in our gold guide.  But you’re going to have to wait for that one.  Until then, split your stacks right and Dominate the auction house on your server!

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39 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In a word, “bad.”  These guys are tough, strong, plate wearing, killing machines.  It’s almost unfair to every other class in the game.  You could think of them as Warlock/Mage/Warrior/Rogues.  Warcraft’s first hero class is simply Dominating.

Lawbringer and I both got our beta keys the other night and began our run through the beta.  Now, no WotLK run would be quite the same without at least giving all the other classes a shot.  The new talent tabs are just too tempting and we certainly want to keep everyone up to date on how the traditional classes will fare - but playing a Death Knight is awesome.

Let me just say Blizzard did not disappoint, especially in the starting area.  For those of you who have strong moral biases, you might find the quest line dialogue a bit dark and disturbing at first.  Aligning yourself with the most evil guy in the game, Arthas, and some of the quest objectives are pretty grim.  But there is a bit of redemption in the end.

I don’t want to give too much away, but if you can get past the basic premise of slaughtering people without qualm for a couple of hours, you’re going to have a ton of fun with your first Death Knight.

Let’s start with the bits that relate to game mechanics before we get to the DK’s themselves.  Blizzard did some things with the starting area that are really brilliant.  The quest lines are linked very well, and guide you through the starting zone in a very linear fashion.  You don’t have to run all over the place, so your first three levels go very fast.  You can reasonably do 55-57 in under 3 hours even your first time through.

As you begin, you notice a few things different about quest mechanics for the DK.  Quest tools are quite often placed on a special action bar that takes a little getting used to.  When you do the mount quest, there is a special button you need to press to turn in the quest, which can be confusing for about 15 seconds while you wonder what in the heck you have to do to get the yellow turn in question mark from the NPC.  But once you get conditioned to pay attention to these special action buttons, it actually makes it easier than ever to figure out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

Next, you get to do a whole pile of really nifty quest types.  You loot, kill, strafe, bomb, cannoneer, hide in two different costumes, pillage, crush and steal your way through a wide variety of things that are just plain fun.  Yes, the text is evil and a bit disturbing at times, but the chains are anything but dull.

The biggest change is that all of the quest loops are instanced.  It’s a little hard to describe.  Think of the DK starting area as five different zones, even though they are all in the same place.  Once you complete the first set of quests, everything in the zone changes for you.  The mobs are different, the NPC’s have moved, and the action shifts to the new quest line - but only for you and everyone else who is in that set of quests.  It’s fabulous.  You don’t have to run to a completely new area to do new content, the content just changes depending on your progression.

It’s wierd at first, since the zone chat will have people asking about the first quest line while you are in the exact same spot working on something completely different and you can’t see them even though they may be only a few yards away.  But it’s nice that there aren’t a half a billion other DK’s competing for the same mobs and NPC’s since they can be seperated into five different instances of the same area.

By instancing the quest lines, Blizz solved the problem of congestion, as well as making the story line much more engaging.  There is a terrific flow to the story and it will make the question of “why are we all going to Northrend?” make a lot more sense.

As for the DK, I really don’t even know where to start.  There’s enough new information in just a few hours of play to do 20 articles about these dudes.  And so much of the initial experience raises even more questions than answers about how they fit into the overall scheme of PvE, PVP, and raiding.  But I’ll give you some sweet little observations this time around.

DK’s operate on the Runic Power system instead of mana, rage or energy.  But Runic Power works a bit like all of them.  Like rage, you gain runic power by mele strikes.  Like mana, you use runic power to cast some spells, although certain spells generate runic power.  It is actually difficult to run out of runic power if you are fighting pretty regularly.  That’s where the DK class has an advantage over all the other systems.

If you are low on RP, you aren’t in trouble, and you don’t have to stop using spells.  You can just cast a few spells, which do damage to mobs and even healing to yourself to get more runic power and then it’s back to busting heads.  It’s a little like life tap for a lock, except you gain power without losing anything in the process.  Talk about a dominating advantage.  It’s hard to say anything but WOW once you see it in action for yourself.  You begin to feel invincible.

But runes go beyond the power bar.  You also have two each of blood, frost and unholy runes as well as a fourth proc rune called a death rune.  These runes are seperate from the power system and have a more traditional cooldown system.  Talents in all three trees buff these runes with things like instant cooldowns on critical strikes and other things that will take a lot more play to figure out completely, but I don’t think it will be ferociously complex.

As for the other little tidbits that are completly unique to the DK’s, the starting city is a huge floating ziggurat above the far eastern borders of the Eastern PLagulands, and it is really super cool.  Check out our shot of the Ebon Hold below.

To get you geared and talented up before you leave the starting area, most of the quests have a nice blue item and bonus talent points as rewards.  By the time you finish the starting area, you have a complete set of blues and 49 talent points in your tree of choice, as well as four runeforge spells to put on your weapon/weapons.

It’s too early for me to tell just how well a DK will tank and DPS.  I can see them being very hard to defeat in arenas, but I can’t see them being a true MT based on what we see from the talent trees alone.  I’m not so sure they will be able to out-DPS a well geared lock or mage, and even though many of their diseases heal them, they may still need a healer from time to time.  It’s just too early to tell.

I don’t think they make every other class unnecessary by any means, but so many of their talents point to raid resistances, buffs and damage increases that I can certainly see a 5 man group wanting one DK from each tree for an instance run.  I’m sure the WoW comminuty and DYS will work out all the details for how the DK class really fits into the grand scheme of things soon - I mean, that’s our job right?

So even though I don’t have time, space or all the knowledge yet to tell you everything there is to know about playing a DK you can be certain that you will be impressed.  The starting zone is unique, the game mechanics smooth and entertaining, and the class is nearly ridiculously powered.  You get great gear and talents uber fast, and it doesn’t take forever to get ready to roll in outlands and beyond.

My advice, get WotLK the first day out and we’ll certainly get you ready ahead of time to go out on your deathcharger and Dominate!

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53 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In any good experiment you have to have a control group.  For instance, if you are testing a prescription drug you would give one group the real thing, another group a placebo and yet another group nothing so that you have a baseline.

In our quest to give you the very best leveling guide possible we are using the ultimate control toon - the priest.  It is pretty much the standard line that hunters can level solo faster than any other class.  You could make arguments for a lot of other classes and builds, but when it comes to raw killing power and low downtime it’s just really hard to beat a BM hunter for fast leveling.  No wonder almost everyone who has done a leveling guide has used a hunter to do the speed run.

But to make sure that Gavin’s leveling guide is better than anything else you’ve ever seen, we’ve done something different.  Now, I still use a hunter to test routes and do the final speed run for time, but I wanted to make sure that anyone, with any class, could do everything in the guide with relative ease.  That means everything from beginners and nubs to complete pros; from BM hunters to warriors and priests.

Even though we always recommend you run in a party, that’s not always possible, so we wanted to make build our guide so that you can run through from 1-70 no matter if you’re by yourself or have an entire guild full of buddies.  In other words it has to be able to work for anybody in any class.

It would also be hard to argue that priests can have a tough time with leveling solo. They don’t have a whole lot of firepower, are very squishy, have no AOE and can only crowd control undead.  That means that they pretty much have to try to force mobs into 1 on 1 matchups.  A bad pull usually ends up in a bubble, scream and run.

So while I was jamming through on my hunter I wanted to ensure that I didn’t put anything in the guide that anyone would have major problems with.  So I asked our good buddy Lawbringer to bring a priest through the guide segments as I completed them and since we’re almost to 70 I thought it would be good to report some of the interesting tidbits he has uncovered when it comes to leveling solo as a priest.

1. Toss out everything you think you know about playing a priest when leveling.  Start all over with a clean slate and look at it as though you were playing a mage or lock and not a healer.  Select gear with +Int for a larger mana pool and increased crit rate to help you kill mobs faster.  In other words, kill them before they burn through your bubble.
2. Dump all of your points into the shadow tree and select a build that you certainly wont find on the wiki or anywhere else for that matter.  Here is Lawbringer’s setup: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxZZEMgtMtRhtEo The 5 points in the discipline tree only come after level 65, until then spend them all in the shadow tree.
3. By using spirit tap AND blackout, you reduce your downtime and give you a blackout or two in almost every fight.  95% of the time mobs will never burn through you bubble, meaning you get hit very very seldom.  Blackout will proc quite a bit, and spirit tap gives you enough mana regen to make it through about 10 mobs before you have to drink.
4. When you hit 60, start collecting “of the invoker” gear.  The high intellect, spell damage and critical strike will really speed up your kills.  I know it’s tempting to opt for spirit, but you are killing, not healing.  It sure is nice to have back to back crits of 1700+ from mind blast and shadow word death from all that extra spell damage, crit rate and the shadow power and misery talents. 3,500 Dmg in two seconds is pretty dominating for any class.
5. Dot, rebubble and then take them out one at a time.  If you get vampiric embrace up you can take an extraordinary number of hits in shadow form and never lose much health.  If you are getting hit so much that you can’t cast, you can always wand something to death if you are waiting on a bubble cooldown.  There are several really nice wands as quest rewards in outlands that make this feasible.
6. Don’t be afraid to be a little girl.  Psychic scream, bubble and run if you get in a tight spot.  It’s better to get out of the way than take the corpse run.
7. Don’t forget to hotkey Touch of Weakness.  With the buffs to shadow talents it will often crit for over 250!  When you add in the debuff that reduces the damage they do to you it can be a pretty big help, especially when faced with multiple mele mobs.  Put this skill somewhere as easy as your bubble and make it just as automatic to throw it on again every time it pops.
8. For heaven’s sake level fishing and cooking.  The extra 23 spell damage from poached bluefish makes a difference you can really notice in every fight.  That’s also why the invoker gear can be a make or break selection when running solo in shadow form.  Invoker gear and bluefish can give you +350 bonus damage before level 65 which aint too bad considering we are only talking about stuff you can grab from the AH and quest rewards - just greens in other words (remember it has to be something you can do solo, so don’t laugh if you’re comparing that to instance drop gear).
9. When you get shadow fiend, you can take on up to 4 mobs and come out smiling.  The mana return is great, and he can keep several mobs focused on him while you get everyone their very own set of dots.  By the time he expires one or two of them are dead and the others are in bad shape.
10. If you get in a groove with your fighting and know when to blow your cooldowns, you can fight longer than you would think and make more pulls than you thought possible with a priest without drinking.  You may be giving up mana regen for selecting gear with int instead of spirit, but you can kill so much faster that you’ll never miss it.
11. It’s pretty fun to be able to nearly keep up with a hunter once you understand the process of playng a shadow priest solo.  And heck, if Lawbringer can run to 70 on his first priest nearly as fast as he did on his hunter, then you can do it too.  Part of that is that we have built the guide so that anyone can follow it.

It can be tempting to start collecting healing gear as soon as you get to outlands.  If your ultimate goal is level 70 and heroic dungeons and raids, then don’t mess with the level 61-68 instances.  Just get to 70 as fast as you can and then go blow through all the ones you missed on the way.  It’s so much faster to hit the level cap and then go raiding than to try to do them both together.  That way, you only have to respec once to holy when you hit 70.  You may even find a guild that actually needs a shadow priest in the rotation for 10-25 man raids.  They come in awfully handy in Kara.

Also keep in mind that in a few months everything in TBC is going to be instantly obsolete anyway.  More than likely those guys who have spent months getting all that purple gear will be replacing much of it with greens from Northrend, so don’t kill yourself getting T5 now.

So don’t be afraid of the super squishy priest when it comes to leveling.  If you’ve always wanted to try one, now you have the basics of how to play one without it taking you a year to hit the top.  Of course, a lot of it has to do with the fact that Gavin’s guide is simply better than anything else the WoW world has seen.  You’ll have to wait a little longer to get your hands on it, but it sure proved that with the right system, even a priest can Dominate at leveling.

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35 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

There are times when I am a little bit reluctant to give away one of my best-kept secrets.  I’m certainly not the only one who uses what I’m about to show you, but it makes making gold so foolproof, that somehow it hurts my feelings just a bit to tell 40,000 people about it!  Oh well, you can see how dedicated I am to giving you the very best tidbits without holding anything back for myself.

If you’ve been reading DYS for any length of time you’ll know I’m a big AH power broker.  I typically run hundreds of auctions each week and virtually all of my gold comes from being a merchant (not a farmer).  I don’t do dailies except for rep situations, and I can easily afford anything I could ever want.

What I am about to show you is a big part of that process.  There was a time when this was a lot more guess work and expertise, but this little mod has just blown the doors off of making money from trade skills.

Once upon a time, you had to just know a LOT about how each profession worked, and which recipes were good for what.  You needed to know the cost of all the mats for about a dozen recipes in each profession; which things you could vendor, which to DE, what went on the AH - it was enough to drive you pretty batty.

I’ve done articles here at DYS about bags, using DE to make big gold, some rare recipes - in other words, a little bit of all of this.  Well, that was back in the stone ages as far as I am concerned now.  I found a mod that does everything I ever wanted and even a bit more when it comes to trade skills: Lil’Sparky’s Workshop.

Lil’Sparky’s is gold just waiting to be made.  And for some crazy reason this mod has been around for about a year but only around 3,000 people have downloaded the thing.  That is insanity to me.  More than 15,000 folks have looked at it and had no clue how much gold it was worth to them.  Here’s hoping you are smarter than that.  Take my word for it and go grab Lil’Sparky’s right this second.

You can download the latest version here: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7663-LilSparkysWorkshop.html

Now, what this mod is going to do is tell you what every single recipe you know is worth to vendors, the AH and for DE.  That covers every way you can possibly make money from a crafted item.  You have to use a few other mods to make Lil’Sparky’s do this, just read the requirements in the download screen (I recommend AADV, Informant and ATSW)

Once LS (Lil’SParky’s) is up and running (and assuming you have plenty of AADV data to work with) all you do is open up your profession screen and you are going to see a wealth of new information.

I’m not going to walk you through every single thing in LS, because frankly that would take a fairly long guide, and I figure you’re all big enough to figure it out for yourself.  But the screenshot above illustrates a couple of things I do want to point out.

Whenever you see numbers in bold, bright letters, that means there is money to be made on that item.  On the top you see we can expect to get 116 gold if we sell Soulcloth Gloves at the AH (the little “a” next to 116 means ‘auction,’ a “d” means ‘disenchant,’ and “v” is ‘vendor’).  The number to the right means we can purchase ALL of the mats to make Soulcloth Gloves either at AH or vendors for just 54gold 44 silver - a profit of  61gold 56 silver - so I just pop over to the AH and start buying up everything I can find for these little gems, knowing I will make a hefty profit in no time flat, plus get a few skill-ups to boot!

Even better is the second example.  Remember one thing kids if you hear nothing else in this post:

ENCHANTING WILL MAKE YOU MORE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER PROFESSION PERIOD!

Now we have a mod to help us make even more money from enchanting than ever before possible.  I don’t even have to wait for bottom scanner to pick things up for DE, I can just craft them with the info from LS!  I see here I can make Netherweave Belts for just 7g 19s and then turn right around and DE them and sell the those mats for 21g 11s on average.  Holy cow, that’s about a 200% profit!  I don’t know about the Ah on your server, but I can probably buy 100 stacks of Netherweave at any given time.  That’s a lot of Netherweave Belts - and a LOT of gold about to go in my pocket.

Without LS I would never really know which recipes I can do this with so easily.  Now it’s right in front of me every time I open a trade skill window on ANY of my toons.  Not only that, I can save recipes like this on one toon and it will give me a shopping list like this:

As you can see the shopping list tells me how many of each item I have on alts, in banks, and inventories on all my toons on the server.  Then it will list which things I need to purchase from vendors - it will even auto-buy the exact amount of vendor items I need with the push of a single button at the trade merchants.  Getting excited about this yet?

This shopping list will appear on my banking toon when I log in - my goodness; am I in gold heaven or what?  So I just log all of my toons, pop in a queue for all of the best recipes for each profession, log the banker and go on a serious shopping spree.  As long as I buy the mats for each thing in the queue for at, or below 100% of ah market value, I win big.

Then I just mail all that stuff to the trade skill toons, make everything, send it back to the bank or enchanter for DE, and it’s CHA-CHING, CHA-CHING, CHA-CHING.

Don’t waste another minute - go get this mod and start Dominating with crafted items right away.

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37 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

From time to time I remember Benjamin Buford Blue (Bubba) from the movie “Forest Gump” as he went through all the dozens of ways you could cook shrimp.  It’s one of my all-time favorite movie bits.  While I can’t say that there are hundreds of things you can do with a bear flank, I do “know everything there is to know about cookin” them.

The reason I chose these as a tip is because these two recipes have a very different buff from most cooked foods until you get to the Outlands recipes.  The other reason is that it’s pretty easy to get the bear flanks, so these two recipes make sense for almost every class if stamina, spirit or just a little health regen is not your main concern.  Finally, these recipes were only added in patch 2.4 so many of you may not even know they exist.

There are two reasons for using food from cooking.  One is to regenerate health, although it’s often easier to simply buy food from vendors for that.  The other reason is for the buffs.  A hefty number of the cooking recipes give you a boost to stamina and spirit if you spend 10 seconds eating, but there are others that have different variations on the food buff theme.

Bear Burgers and Bear Kabobs are one of only a few old world recipes that give buffs that are different from stam/spirit.  And these two buffs can be pretty useful.  Combine that with the fact that neither of these recipes require a spice to make, and it’s a winner.

Now, some will argue that the best non SS food buff from old world foods is the recipe for greater Sagefish, Sagefish Delight.  The problem with this is that Raw Greater Sagefish are a pain in the butt to get since they can only be fished from schools.  But bear flanks drop from 11 different mobs in four different zones.

Combine these things with the other fact that bear flanks are normally available in fairly high quantities for really low prices on most servers and it’s certainly something you should consider picking up if you’ve leveled cooking - which I highly recommend.

Part of this phenomenon is because this recipe was only added in patch 2.4, so those guys already in Outlands tend to ignore them; as well as folks who are just rushing through on their way to Outlands.  The recipe was added to help you level cooking from 250-300 without having to fish or cook fish to do so.

I already did a series on fishing and cooking because it’s the best combo to speed up the leveling cooking process, but if you’re one of those people who just refuses to suffer the time sink of fishing you are going to need these recipes - and the nice thing is that the benefits are terrific in every direction.

Here’s what these two recipes look like from wowhead:

I had Lawbringer stir us up a batch of these things while we were leveling through the 50’s, and we still keep some around now that we’re in Outlands until he gets those killer fish recipes.  As a hunter, the +24 attack power is terrific, while Lawbringer’s Shadow Priest get a sweet little +14 to all spells.  That’s the equivalent of wearing another blue item with those stats for each of us.

You can purchase these new recipes in Felwood at the Alliance and Horde General Goods vendors in each faction base.  Malygor is the Alliance vendor and Bale is “FOR THE HORDE!” 

Kudos to Lawbringer for grabbing these and recognizing that they were new as we ran like mad through the Felwood segment.  We picked up enough flanks in Felwood, Winterspring and Western Plaguelands to last us quite some time, and we put that buff on every 15 minutes or so while questing.

All in all, it’s easy to get the mats for these, gives a nifty buff, and will help you non-fishing style folks gain a couple dozen points to your cooking skill = win.  Go Dominate, and may the bear never get YOU.

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5 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

A light went on for me a few days ago as I was feverishly working on my current speed leveling run.  I always run a hunter for speed runs and I don’t take a single second longer than I absolutely have to for anything.  That means I’m not spending precious time at the ah looking for every teeny tiny gear upgrade, or anything else for that matter.

As a result, I can end up having mana issues.  I’m not able to spend the time to get all the exactly right gear and spec MM to make that sort of issue go away, since that would defeat the purpose of trying to break records anyway.  Think about it, if I can save just 5 minutes in every level it will take 5 hours and 45 minutes off the total time.  So spending even 10 minutes running to the nearest AH to get minor gear upgrades is completely out of the question.

But taking 10 seconds between every six to ten fights or so to mana back up is also a time killer.  But if you back off on your skill shots, you don’t mow them down as fast - you can see the dilemma.  Kill fast = more down time to drink.  Slow down a touch = slowing down (I hate that).  But I found a really nice little exploit for this issue.  It doesn’t work for more than 10 levels or so.  But at levels 51-60, when the quests all seem like gathering quests, a little speed boost to down-time is just the ticket.

So whilst I was speeding through Azeroth wondering how to better manage my mana drain, I had to go to Org to turn in a quest in the valley of honor.  And then it hit me: Alterac Manna Biscuits!  I logged out for a minute to check Wowhead for these little nuggets of goodness.  Here’s the tale of the tape:

See that?  4410 health AND 4410 mana on one food.  Well I didn’t waste another second, I logged back in, jumped into an AV and bought 10 stacks of these.  A little pricey, but well worth it.  At level 52 these things will fill up your mana bar in about 5-7 seconds, talk about speeding things up!

You’ll notice that you can’t use these until level 51, so it’s a bummer for you until then.  You can’t join AV before level 51 anyway, so you just have to wait until then.  These are available at Gruunda Wolfheart for horde in Frostwolf Village, and Gaelden Hammersmith in Dun Baldar for Alliance.

A little more research showed that there is not anything to compare to the Alterac Manna Biscuit (AMB’s) until well into outlands and level 60.  So for ten levels I’ve got the very best thing available to fill my mana bar - so fast, in fact, that I can just sit down to munch and send my pet to the next mob.  I can virtually fight non-stop all the way to Hellfire.

Now I was looking at this from the purely mana-regeneration perspective, since I normally don’t have a lot of health damage running on the hunter.  These things are a great boost to all the mana-using classes as we will see below.  But there are also big benefits to the warrior and rogue who have no other way to heal themselves after a tough fight than by using bandages or food if they are running solo.

As a matter of fact, you might think that the only class that might not get a big boost from these is the mage.  Mages get to conjure all their food and water for free, but until they get to train rank 7 of conjure food and water at level 60 (Rank 7 food from a drop tome as well), these things are much better than the rank 6 conjured items.  Past that, rank 6 of conjure food and water only regenerate 2148 health or mana, so AMB’s have twice the punch and give health and mana simultaneously!  So every single class wins with AV Manna Biscuits.

So as you slog through the 50’s on your next toon, be sure to hop an AV match and grab some of these, they will certainly do more than anything else out there to keep you on your feet - dominating!

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18 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post