When you first begin playing, it’s fine to go it alone. But you are going to miss out on most of the game if you only ever play by yourself. And since trying to do instances with just pick-up groups can be a real drag, let’s talk just a bit about guilds and why you might want to join one as opposed to merely building a friends list.

Guilds are groups of players who have joined a permanent “team.” You can create your own guild by visiting the guild master in any major city to buy a charter. You then have to get 9 other players to sign your charter, and now you’ve got a guild. It costs 10 silver for a charter and once you’ve got a guild, you can create a crest for 10 gold. Having a crest is a bit of fluff that shows up on your guild tabard. Not necessary, but it can be a sort of calling card.

People form guilds for a lot of reasons. Some guilds are more social than others. The main purpose of social guilds is having all their friends chat in the guild chat instead of whispering them individually. Other guilds are built for raids and end-game content. Guys in these guilds are often quite serious about the game and can be a little rough on newbies, or even just decide they don’t like certain play styles. Still other guilds will be built around things like PVP, or even more specifically Twinking, all the way down to “level 19 twink guilds.” I’ts really pretty amazing how specific they can get.

If you choose to form your own guild, get ready to do a lot of recruiting. Building and maintaining a guild roster can chew up a good portion of your time unless you grab a few guys with big friends lists. Now that WoW has been out a few years, it can be harder to recruit than ever. I recently created a fresh set of characters on the very newest server with the lowest population. It already had more than 50 guilds, and the top ten guilds were 95%+ lvl 70 and above. Everyone looking to do end-game content will be looking to join a top-end guild, so it might be a big chore building a roster in these situations.

You best bet when forming a guild is to catch a server when it first opens, like the first couple of weeks. Experienced guild masters won’t have trouble building a guild even if they move to an older server and start from scratch 2 years late. But if you’re new to the GM world, getting an early bird bonus will help you a lot. Even if you do form your guild early in the life of the server, you better run pretty quickly to 70. It won’t look all that great for the guild master to be lvl 20 in a guild full of 70’s. Or you can choose to make a lot of friends and just do a more social guild. It can be tough to get to the really interesting high level instances this way, but possibly more fun if you’re a people person.

If forming a guild and recruiting constantly sound like no fun, then you seriously need to consider joining a guild. Guilds will normally fall into the social or power categories, with a few somewhere in between. If you want to make a serious run at every ounce of game content you need to join a power guild.

If you want to find out about guilds on your server you can use www.warcraftrealms.com to do so. Just go to the realm data button at the top of the page and select US realm stats from the list. Choose the first server in the list Aegwynn and click the hyperlink. The main page for this server will tell you quite a bit about the server. Aegwynn has 11,688 toons, and of those 68% are horde and 32% are Alliance. (The really interesting thing is that this article was originally drafted several months ago and the ratio at that time was 56% Alliance and 44% Horde). Additionally, 1/3 of the players on this realm are either hunters 18%, rogues 13%. So your best bet at some really good gear and the most group or guild invite possibilities probably come from playing a priest 8%, or a shaman 7%.

Now if you click the name for the first guild in the list: Continuum, you will get to see the same data for this one guild. We see this is an alliance guild with 161 members. Of these, 149 are level 70. With that many level seventies and virtually no characters below level 45, this is more than likely a power guild. Since they are also at the top of the guild ranks, they are the guild with the most level 70 characters on this server - might be hard to get an invite to this one.

Choose another guild further down on the list – Raided R. This guild is also Alliance with 42 members. But in this guild the character levels are a lot more spread out, with 12, or more than 1/4 below level 65. They only have 30 level 70’s, so they are probably running some end-game content, but that’s not nearly enough toons to make a run at SSC or the bigger raids so this might be a spot you could find a home. You would just have to talk to some of the members and see what their goals are.

Somewhere in the listing of these guilds on your server will be a group that would love to have you and will help you out a lot. One of the reasons you might want to start in a guild with more low-level toons is that it makes running the low and mid level instances so much easier. Don’t worry about that if you plan on rushing past them to 70 and worry about instances in Outlands. I only recommend that for people who have been around the block a few dozen times though. When you first start out, don’t even worry about high level content until you get there. Join a guild with about 20-60 characters your level and work your way into Outlands, refining your solo and group play technique along the way.

Just like I don’t like skipping instances, I don’t like doing them out of my guild. I also don’t like not being in a guild. I’m a people person and guild chat is fun for me. It doesn’t keep me from playing hard, but I like talking to people I have become friends with through my guild affiliations. Being in a guild makes instance running much easier. As a matter of fact; the higher you go, the harder it will be to find pick up teams for instances. So find a guild with people that suit you, and if it doesn’t work out, just find another guild. However; don’t give up on guilds altogether just because one group doesn’t act right. Once you find a group of guys and gals that you enjoy playing with, it makes the game just that much more fun.

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2 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

We’re going to combine a bit of economic theory with a bit of aggressiveness and show you how to work the auction house no matter what level you are. If you learn to play in the World of Warcraft sand box, you’ll be able to do it forever because even the pros work the same way on all the realms. The complexity increases a bit, along with the gold piles.

The WoW auction house is a closed economy. There is never an influx of completely new product to throw things into a loop except when there is a major patch or expansion release. Even when those events occur, you should be able to flow into the new items with ease. So the things that work today are probably going to work a year from now. Items will rise and fall a bit in value, but rarely completely fall out of favor.

There are three ways to make extra gold in the WoW economy just by using the AH and trade channels properly. Those three avenues are expertise, wholesale, and speculation. Expertise is the least risky, and speculation the most.

Expertise means you know something about a small variety (or a large segment) of items and what they should be worth right now. Here’s how we use it. I used to go farm small brilliant shards from Herod in SM armory. At level 65 I could run all the way to his room and hardly ever draw aggro. Before the 5 instances an hour nerf, I could do this about every 6-8 minutes. I would go a couple of times a week for a few hours.

It’s how I bought my first epic mount - small brilliant shards. I knew that every single one I got would sell for 6 gold 75 silver. I was in the chat channel one day and some dude was advertising small brilliant shards. I asked him how many he had - he said how many do you want? I told him - all of them - at the right price. I ended up buying 48 of them for 200 gold, that’s just a touch over 4 gold 11 silver each. I sold every single one of them that week for 324 gold, a profit of 125 gold for basically nothing.

The last example had a bit of a wholesale touch to it. If you know what something should be worth, but can buy a whole big bunch of it cheaper and then trickle it into the market with some patience, you can make a decent profit at it. I’ve got a few guys who send me every scrap of cloth they farm because I will buy every single piece for a set price that’s about 80% of market value. I get a 20% profit, they never have to work the ah.

Speculation can be risky because it can take some serious dough, and it might not work at all. If you are going to speculate on green items or above, I highly recommend being an enchanter as well, so at least you can cover most of your losses by disenchanting and selling the mats. Speculation involves situations where you suspect demand is going to rise, and beating the market to the price increase by buying something while the price is still low, and then releasing it when the price goes up. A great example of this was when Shaman got dual-wielding. When this news came out, I spent a few weeks buying up all the one handed axes lvl 40 and above at the ah and held them all until patch day. Prices went up like nuts as all the Shaman went to the AH to get shiny new one-handed axes and I made a killing.

The chances that will present themselves for serious speculation are few and far between in a closed economy. Also note that because the economy is closed, the market will correct itself pretty rapidly. I tend to go more with the expertise end of the scale and stick with what I know.

There is one thing you absolutely must do when it comes to the ah. I had heard it before, but stubbornly refused to put hundreds of gold in my pocket by ignoring this one point. Buy during the week, sell on weekends. Prices on many realms rise by as much as 25% from Friday noon to Sunday late night. But gold farmers work all week long. They hedge themselves by dealing mainly in bulk. You can normally buy the simplest things like silk cloth on Tuesday for as low as 40 silver a stack and then turn around and sell the same stack on Saturday for 70 silver or more. That’s almost 100% profit in 4 days. If Wall Street had anything like this they would be falling all over themselves to get to it.

So start small, and get to know a few things very well. Buy low, sell high, when in doubt disenchant and sell the mats. That’s the AH in a nutshell. I highly recommend having one toon that does nothing but banking and AH for you - that way you can concentrate on the AH when you are there, and on questing when you are questing. Watch how the prices rise and fall on your server for a few weeks for a few consumables, and then test those trends yourself for a week or two. Then you can get busy making some real gold. Of course, all of this is much easier if you use auctioneer, but that’s a topic for another time.

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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

I hate to admit it, but the horde racial bonuses are better than alliance; especially for PVP. That’s why Horde seems to win AV like 80-90% of the time. They are just a little harder to kill than alliance. Alliance makes up for lack of individual strength in sheer numbers. I guess they just reproduce faster (have you seen the troll females – kinda scary).

The Horde racial bonuses only whiff a couple of times, and even then, not too terribly badly. If you can get over the rough edges, horde characters are a little stronger than their alliance counterparts. The one and only exception to this is that it’s a little hard to beat a night elf rogue. Other than that, Horde usually has a better stat setup on one race or another. Let’s check it out.

Orcs - Orcs have the best base attribute points so you can really hardly go wrong with them for any of the five choices. Combine that with the fact that these four bonuses have something for all five class choices and it boils down to this: when in doubt - you won’t be wrong choosing an orc.

> Enrage - increases damage while lowering healing taken. If you get in a bind or want to get a leg up, enrage is nice to use. Combine this with increased pet damage and beastial wrath and orc hunters have the biggest, maddest kitties around.
> Resistant to stun affects. Great against those pesky night elf rogues.
> Pet damage increased - +5% for both hunters and warlocks. This can turn into a serious dps buff if you spec to take full advantage of it.
> Axe skill increased - nice little bonus for those who like those cleaver type weapons.

Undead - can be a little gross, but completely annoying to alliance players. Let’s see why:

> Will of the Forsaken – makes the undead immune to sleep, charm and fear affects. You can even use this after you’ve been affected. I really stinks to not be able to fear or sleep these guys, or have them wake up ½ second after you do.
> Consume corpses to regain health. They don’t even need to carry around food – just eat what you kill.
> Underwater breathing increased 300% - now that’s a big increase, can save you quite a bit in underwater breathing potions.
> Shadow resist – minor, but not a total waste.

Tauren - These brutes lend themselves to tank duty and are just the best at close range melee fighting.

> Stomp - stuns nearby opponents. All warriors have a skill similar to this in Thunder Clap, but a Tauren gets another skill that works just as well. It can be really hard to overcome.
> Maximum health increased - 5% can be a gob of hit points in the right gear and the right buffs. Tank city.
> Herbalism skill +15 - at last a decent increase to a non-combat skill.
> +10 Nature resistance – not too shabby.

Troll - these fellows have two really good bonuses, and excel at both PVP and PVE.

> Berserk - 10%-30% increased attack and casting speed. 10% speed increase if you are above 50% or so life, 30% increase below 25%, this can make all the difference in a PVP battle. It stinks to be just ahead of a troll shaman and then he goes berserk and waxes you.
> Increased regeneration - life regained at 10% faster rate than other races. This even happens in battle. So it’s almost as good as the Tauren bonus to maximum health. For prot warriors, go Tauren, DPS guys may consider a Troll.
> Increased damage vs. beasts – Nice buff for PVE grinding and questing.
> Throwing and bow weapons +5 - again, not horrid for a hunter.

Blood elves - I’m not too sure about the blood elf bonuses. They are either pretty good, or the worst in the Horde. I’m leaning toward worst – but let’s look at them and you can judge for yourself.

> +10 to enchanting – again with the profession increase, not as good as tauren, better than most.
> Mana Tap - Drain mana from opponents – it would be great if it added the mana to your pool (it doesn’t) or if it drained enough mana to hinder the other person’s casting (not even close). This does set up a way to get some emergency mana when used with the silence skill arcane torrent.
> Arcane Torrent – The silence skill stops casting for a whopping 2 seconds. That’s not very long. If you have built up charges from drain mana, it returns some to you when you use this skill. This is what I mean – this is either a really great couple of sills, or not worth much. Seems to become less valuable as you level. Can provide you with one strategic spell interrupt per PVP battle however.
> +5 to all magic resistances – now we’re talking. Not a big resistance pool, but at least it’s resist all.

So now you can see why some people say that Horde are just better characters. They have better racial bonuses. When you get into comparing them according to attributes, it widens the gap even further. By taking both bonuses and attributes into account you can see why I choose an orc hunter for BM spec and a troll hunter for anything else. Trolls have 5 more base points in agility than Orcs.

Granted, the attribute stuff will sort of even itself out in the end, but things like +5% are much bigger – things like the Tauren max life pool. At the end of the day, if you really know what you are doing, you can play any class from any race and do well with them. But by the same token, someone who really knows what they are doing can be brutal with the right class and race combined.

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17 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

This may not be a great article for those of you out there who prefer style over functionality. If you really just build your toons to look cool, then this is completely worthless information to you. Me, I’m a total geek. I like to study up on things and see what really works. Well, to a degree, I’m not an UBER geek that has to have only the best. I am also pretty practical when it comes to the bird in the hand is better than the two in the bush stuff. That may be a touch archaic for some of you so let’s just move on.

Each race in WoW has a small set of bonus traits that lend themselves to a greater or lesser degree of usefulness during game play. We’re going to look at each race and the bonuses involved and draw a few conclusions.

Some bonuses lend themselves to certain classes, and others help in play style. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice. Like if you want to be a horde druid – you’re getting a Tauren and that’s all there is to it. But in the cases where you do have a choice, it can actually make a fair amount of difference in your character in the earlier parts of the game.

Racial bunuses have a tendency to balance out for the most part by level 70. You’re still going to see mostly Tauren Main Tanks, but most races can do a great job of playing the classes available to them.

Certain classes match up well with certain racial bonuses. Undead have the highest base spirit in the game, just like night elves have the highest agility. That’s why you see so many night elf rogues. Every race but the Dranei can make rogues, but you will see more night elf and gnome rogues than human and dwarf. Why? The bonuses to agility for night elves and the escape artist bonus for gnomes lends itself to playing a rogue. That’s also why you see so many gnome casters – gnomes get a boost to intellect higher than any other race.

So let’s look at the useful, and sometimes NOT so useful racial attributes for the different races and how they might match your particular play style preferences when it comes time to try out a shiny new toon.

Humans – We’ll start there since I happen to be one. Humans have one racial trait that makes them great priests, increased spirit, the rest are just ok.

> Humans have increased stealth detection. The vast majority of WoW players consider this completely worthless, because it basically is.
> Humans have higher stats for spirit than the other alliance races, therefore a lot of human priests.
> Humans get an extra 25% reputation when turning in quests – kinda cool but it still won’t get you exalted with gnomeregan that much faster so you can ride the giant turbo chicken mounts.
> +5 to sword and mace skill – not too bad if you plan to specialize in one of those

Dwarves – these poor guys don’t seem to have a single bonus that’s truly useful, unless you consider being a paladin a bonus.

> Stone form - greatly increases defense for a short period of time. It’s ok, but won’t save your life very often.
> +5 gun skill - not bad for a hunter if you don’t mind the loss of agility from being a dwarf in the first place.
> Frost resistance - not a big enough bonus to count for much in PVP and very few mobs use frost attacks in PVE
> Treasure finding - I never really got anything “leet” out of a chest anyway, plus most chests aren’t exactly hidden. Not very useful.

Night elves - may have the second-best racial bonuses on the Alliance side, but they are still mostly best for hunters and rogues.
> Shadow meld - a bit like stealth, only you can’t move. If you stealth and shadow meld you are virtually undetectable.
> Dodge bonus - very helpful for hunters and rogues who have attacks that come after dodges and a good bit of their defense rating is based on not getting hit in the first place.
> Wisp form when dead - increases movement speed when you die. It can be nice to have a little reduction in your corpse run time, but dieing still stinks.
> Nature resistance - again, not enough resistance to be a big deal.

Gnomes - gnomes come in behind night elves for helpful bonuses, but I just can’t get used to having to swim where others walk; -10 points for pure shortness.

> Escape artist - can avoid speed altering affects. This is great for melee classes, but with their relatively high agility, is probably best suited for rogues of this race.
> +5 intelligence - nice for the mage or warlock
> Arcane resistance - same story, third chapter.
> +5 engineering skill - was a complete waste before expansion and it’s not a big deal now, but can help a tiny amount when leveling engineering skills.

Dranei - this race really doesn’t have a completely useless bonus, even though the resistance to shadow is small. Best bonuses on the alliance side.

> Jewel crafting skill increased +5 – ok so this isn’t great.
> Gift of the Naaru – heal yourself or others. This heal-over-time spell is a great little life saver for anyone. Best Alliance bonus by far
> Increase chance to hit – this also affects party members with both melee and spells. It’s not a huge increase, but it is one more buff and every little bit counts.
> Shadow resistance - maybe the most useful resist, but not enough to save your bacon.

This is just the racial bonuses, and does not take into account the stats each race starts with. For a list of racial stats you can check out http://www.wowwiki.com/Race Next time – Horde race analysis.

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9 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

We introduced you to the basics of using Thottbot, now let’s look at another resource that has great information you might not have heard of. Wowhead is another database site for WoW that I have come to use more and more. The interface is not as easy to browse for trade skills, but when it comes to looking up things for instances and quests, it wins hands-down.

Let’s look at two ways I would use wowhead. The first is to find out more about an instance boss or quest such as Shattered Halls. The second will lead us into something more advanced with talent tree research.

I’m about to go into Shattered Halls for the first time. Some guildies are afk, and so it’s a pick-up game. As it turns out, only one member of the group has ever been there before, and didn’t finish. Now what do we do? I hit wowhead right away and type shattered halls into the search box. Up pops a screen that lists 1 item associated with this keyword, and 1 zone. Let’s click into the zone tab.

The zone tab gives me the hyperlink to exactly what I was looking for, the instance itself. Once I go to the page for the zone, I am probably looking at everything I need to know to complete this instance (considering my team works well together).

The first page will start with a description and general information about Shattered Halls and lists reputation gained from running the instance as well as the requirements to enter and even open heroic mode. Under this description are 8 more tabs full of information. It defaults to the drops for the normal version of the instance where I can browse through the killer loot. Let’s look at the bosses tab now.

The bosses tab shows me four boss names for this instance, and I want to know about the first one - Blood Guard Porung. Borung’s page also opens to his own loot list tab, but what I want to do is check out the comments from other players about this guy. Well, we have nothing to worry about. This boss only spawns in heroic mode, so I’ll go back one page and check out Grand Warlock Nethekurse.

On his comments page we see that he uses two abilities, death coil and void zones. He also has a shadow bolt volley at 20% life. In order to beat him it says to run out of the little void zones and really go hard at DPS once he hits 20% or the shadow bolt spam volleys are a certain wipe. There is even a link to a video tutorial on this guy.

This technique of looking for information about zones, drops and bosses etc. are available at wowhead for virtually anything. I find the comments segments at wowhead to be more useful than those at Thottbot, since arguments over silly things are rare at wowhead.

Now lets go to the browse button in the top left of the screen. We get a pop-down list - let’s go spells>talents>druid>feral combat. Now click on the link for predatory strikes rank 3.

The next page will list all the ranks in this talent, as well as a comments and screenshots tab. Let’s see what folks say about predatory strikes. Looks like it’s not a real popular choice, but necessary for Heart of the Wild, so if you’re thinking of going feral combat, this is probably a necessary talent to choose.

I just love wowhead for that kind of information. There is also a clone of blizzard’s talent tree calculator, but it loads a lot faster on this site.

For those of you who were dissapointed when I did the article on Thottbot, you now know we like wowhead as well. There are really quite a few good places to find information for WoW, and no single one of them does everything well. Wowhead is another one of the sites we use a LOT.

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2 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

In a previous article we talked about how to make a little gold by using fishing and cooking together. One of the reasons this is effective is because of the decent buffs you can get from cooked foods. Food buffs may very well be one of the more overlooked resources in the game for lower level characters. Although a few alchemy potions have some really major buffs, the materials required to make those potions are about 10 times more expensive.

When you get to the higher level content in the game, every little bit counts. Every buff you get from party members helps, and when you stack those buffs it can really increase your survival chances. So why not throw in a food buff? The materials (spices and such) for cooking are super cheap and you can get them in every major city, as well as a good portion of the smaller ones. Almost every town that has an inn has a vendor for trade supplies where you can get spices.

And unlike a lot of trades, the materials needed for each cooking recipe seem to diminish the higher you go. As a matter of fact, of the 32 recipes available after cooking level 300 only 13 require anything other than the meat or fish you’re using.

Most of the cooking recipes will give you a buff to stamina and spirit, but there are others that have more specific buffs to some classes. For the hunter or rogue, you can spend well over 150 gold for enchants to your weapons to add 25-35 agility. Why not keep a stack of grilled mudfish or warp burgers in your pack? Both of these foods add 20 agility and spirit for 30 minutes. That means a single stack will last for 10 hours of play time. Since you can get enough fish or meat for these in about 20 minutes I would say that’s a pretty good trade-off.

Here’s a list of all the foods that have buffs other than the standard +stamina/+spirit formula. The complete list of cooked foods can be found here: http://thottbot.com/?t=Cooking if you want to see all of the things you can make with cooking.

> Sagefish delight - restores 6 mana per 5 seconds for 15 minutes
> Cooked Glossy Mightfish - +10 Stamina for 10 Minutes
> Grilled squid - +10 agility for 10 minutes
> Hot smoked bass - +10 Spirit for 10 minutes
> Nightfin soup - +8 mana P5S for 10 minutes
> Poached Sunscale Salmon - +6 health every 5 seconds for 10 minutes
> Charred Bear Kabobs - +24 Attack Power for 15 Minutes
> Juicy Bear Burger - +14 Damage and Healing from spells for 125 minutes
> Mightfish steak - +10 Stamina for 10 minutes
> Runn Tum tuber surprise - +10 intellect for 10 minutes
> Ravager dog - +40 attack power and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Broiled Bloodfin - +8 Resistance to all Schools of magic for 30 minutes
> Dirge’s kickin’ Chimaerok chops - +25 Stamina for 15 minutes
> Blackened sporefish - +20 Stamina and +8 mana every 5 seconds for 30 minutes
> Blackened Basilisk +23 spell damage and +20 Spirit for 30 minutes
> Skullfish Soup - +20 Spell critical strike rating for 30 minutes
> Spicy Hot Talbuk - +20 Hit Rating and Spirit for 30 Minutes
> Grilled Mudfish - +20 agility and +20 Spirit for 30 minutes
> Poached Bluefish - +23 spell damage and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Roasted Clefthoof - +20 strength and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Warp Burger - +20 agility and spirit for 30 minutes
> Golden Fish Sticks - +44 healing and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Crunchy Serpent - +23 spell damage and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Spicy Crawdad - +30 stamina and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Fisherman’s Feast - +30 stamina and +20 spirit for 30 minutes
> Smoked Desert Dumplings - +20 strength for 15 minutes

Some odd recipe buffs are:
> Dragonbreath Chili - belch flame occasionally
> Savory Deviate Delight - transform into a pirate or ninja
> Stormchops - Zap Enemies occasionally

I always keep a stack or two of buff foods on all my toons. You get the mats everywhere you go, and they are cheap to make. Plus, they give you a little extra oomph while you’re out questing. Train up cooking on your toon if you just play one character, or give one of your alts the cooking skill and send them all the mats you pick up on your adventures. I usually only keep one character with the cooking skill, but that toon keeps everyone else supplied with all we can eat, and even make some coin selling the rest at the AH. Next up - information overload.

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3 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Instances are brilliant, and I love them. I know they are not the most popular thing for mid-level characters, and some people avoid them like nuts, but they are only hurting themselves. Once you get to level 70, that’s about all that’s left besides serious PVP, so you better start now enjoying yourself.

Instances are important because they teach you how to play as a member of a team. The best gear always drops in instances, and when it boils down to it, the experience is excellent if you are there at the right levels. Now, I understand that it can be tough to find a good group, and we’ll discuss that a little later in an article on guilds, but you should really just suck it up and do them all.

Starting at level 20 I’ll run through the deadmines, Stockades and Blackfathom Deeps on all my alliance toons. Those three runs are good for usually 4-6 levels and 4 or five blue gear items. Since my guild’s power players all have alts, we go do runs like that a few times a week so they are super fast. We’ll usually get through all three of those runs in about 4 hours. You could probably level almost as fast going it solo in Ashenvale at that level, but you sure wouldn’t get the gear.

But the real reason to do instances is the same reason you simply must spend some time in battlegrounds and dueling. If you don’t ever do them, you won’t be any good at them when you really need to be.

You may be able to pull mobs great in the wild when you need to separate one or two from a congested area, but that won’t work in an instance a lot of the time. Normally in an instance if you pull one you’re going to get them all. So you are forced to work as a team where a mage sheeps right after a rogue saps, and then you pull whatever is left. If your hunter is any good they can trap another one and now your tank and healer only have to worry about 1 poor little dead elite walking with the fury of a rogue coming in from behind and a nice fat fireball in his face, oh - and a ravager tearing his eyes out.

You can really crush through an instance run with a good team. Some difficult mobs at low levels (assuming you don’t have a great group) include the Princess in Maraudon - I hate that woman - and Archaedes in Uldamann. For some reason those guys at that level can be really tough to handle. But it is a very satisfying feeling when they hit the ground with a big thud.

Instance tips to live by.
1. Spend some time as a lowbie toon making a few friends and playing together as much as possible. If you can build a decent friends list, you can normally have a party of three before you ever launch the “Looking for Group” function.
2. Always try to play in a balanced group. Instances are much harder with more than one kind of any particular class - the possible exception to this being two druids or paladins where one is a healer and the other a tank. (if the players are very experienced this doesn’t matter nearly as much until Outlands)
3. If things are not going well, don’t flame people, just ride it out: BE NICE! I have had groups where one guy quit on the run; we picked up another pretty easy because we already had 4, and for some reason it went twice as fast with a non-complainer.
4. Don’t get in a tizzy over who wins loot drops. You’re likely going to replace the item in a few levels anyway. So it’s not worth getting upset about. It’s a GAME folks.
5. Try to balance your play time to include at least 25% of your time in instances. This will give you the very best gear when you are solo, and plenty of time to refine your play style and talent build.
6. Play with authority and practice the really hard moves; doing this will ensure that by the time you get to heroic level dungeons, you’re not upsetting runs by playing poorly. Lower level instances are the very best place to practice using multiple skills on tough mobs.
7. Have fun. IT’s A GAME!

Probably not anything you haven’t heard before; no real mind-blowing information here. But you might have needed a little kick in the pants to get in there and do every instance in the game as you level up your next toon. And if you skip all this stuff you’ll never know how much fun the whole thing really is. For years the old world instances were all that people had to play through, and the game still grew. There’s a lot of good content you will miss if you just rush through to level 70 before you start hitting the dungeons.

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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

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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10 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

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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14 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

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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