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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38 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

Yesterday I started a little argument with one of our faithful readers and posters James M.  Don’t take it personally James, and I certainly appreciate your feedback, it makes me really research hard to back up my points.

The original statement I made is that most of your gear from tBC is already obsolete since WotLK will be out in a few months and you’ll be replacing almost all of your gear in a few levels anyway.  That certainly was the case in tBC, and I expected nothing different from the next expansion.

To make myself perfectly clear, I probably should restate the position a little more carefully (again, thanks to James).  It’s not that you will NEED to replace T5 gear with greens because the greens in the 71-73 zones are better, but you probably shouldn’t START trying to get geared up for the expansion if you aren’t already because the gear you will get in Northrend will be ALMOST as good anyway.  If you already have 4 out of five of your T5 set, and a guild running the right stuff to get the last bit, then go for it.  But if you have several toons at 70 that aren’t in high-end raid gear, now is certainly too late to worry about the grind of getting top end gear.

Now, Blizzard has certainly made every effort to make the gear from tBC raids more viable in WotLK than pre-BC gear was in tBC, but there is also a bigger difference between level 75 and level 70 toons and gear than there is between level 60 and 55.  The reason is that as you rise in levels, the gains from gear contribute a more significant percentage of your base skills than at lower levels.  I don’t have time in this article to go into a lot of detail on that, but every level gain is a more significant leap than the last one.  By the time you get to 75 you will be fighting mobs that will just be a LOT stronger and tougher.  Therefore, the gear has to scale faster to keep the game playable solo without having to go back and do 25 man raids from the previous patch.

Just so you all know I’m not pulling this idea out of some mental dork zone, let me give you a good example of what I mean.  The following picture is of the T5 hunter shoulders from the Rift Stalker set.  To get these shoulders you have to be able to go to Tempest Keep, a 25 man raid dungeon.  These are a 54%  drop and in a 25 man raid you can reasonably expect at least 3-5 folks to be rolling for these.  That reduces YOUR chance of getting the roll to below 10% per run, meaning you may need to make 5 full runs to have a reasonable shot at them.  Sound hard yet?

I would imagine that no more than 5% of the nearly 40,000 people who read DYS on a regular basis (or only about 2,000) have even sniffed the prospect of getting into a run on TK.  I would wager that the real number of people at DYS who have had a legitimate shot at these is in the low hundreds.  So saying that T5 will be ok until level 78 is making a HUGE assumption that there are just lots of people who have been able to build their complete T5 sets.  If you look at the guild progressions on any given server, there are normally less than 5 guilds from each faction that have even made it to TK even today.  That means it’s a pretty safe bet that only a few dozen guys on each server have completed even the T5 set, much less the T6 stuff.  It’s that rare.

(Uber Dominate Your Server congratulations to those of you who have completed full sets!  If you’re one of those guys you might pop your armory link into the comments)

Here they are:

Now, my original intent was to show that you will be able to get almost similar gear SOLO in Northrend fairly quickly and easily, so if you’re just beginning to collect T5 stuff, you probably just don’t have time and it might be a waste of time unless you already almost have all the set bits.

For one little quest in the Dragonblight zone at level 72 you can choose these green shoulders as a reward:

Ok, so no sockets, no intellect, and no hit rating, but if you CAN’T get your T5 shoulders before WotLK, these should do you just fine.  Going solo, the extra 19 stamina, 4 agility and 10 AP will almost make up for the loss of Intellect - especially for BM hunters.

Let’s look at a couple of others a little higher up the level ladder at level 73 and 74:

Besides that, these choices would also be a decent fit for a Shaman depending on spec.  If you have multiple toons, you probably have not had time to get a whole pile of epics for all of them.

Not good enough to show you what I mean yet?  Ok let’s try weapons, those are a different type of thing, so let’s stick with hunter weapons and look at some good bows from tBC compared to some simple solo quest rewards from WotLK.  I’m just going to assume you all know or can find out how difficult it is to get the epic bows I’m showing here, the greens and blues that follow each tBC bow is from WotLK level 75 or lower solo quest reward.

So I think you’re beginning to catch on to what I mean.  You can certainly go to Northrend in your T5 gear and not worry about having to completely replace everything in two or three levels, but if you’re not uber geared there’s no need to worry about it much.  In many cases, even good epic weapons will be replaced pretty quick.  Armor seems to have a bigger gap but there’s one more thing we haven’t talked about yet that may make the armor argument completely disappear.

We have not yet seen the gear drops for Northrend instances!  If they are as good as tBC instance drops, you may certainly expect to find gear that rivals T5 and T6 at level 72-73 Boss loot tables, we just don’t have a way of looking at those yet on wowhead.  I could probably have made even better cases for T5 armor vs. Northrend early instance drops if there was more information on WotLK items, but there simply is not enough to choose from as of yet.

One interesting thing about WotLK drops is that there are a lot of items that come with random enchantments.  Not that that is any different from the other two sections of the game so far, it’s just that we haven’t seen all the random enchantment drops yet so the names for all those possibilities don’t yet exist.  All of those Booger Beater Longbow (of the bandit, of the fletcher, of the whale and that sort of thing) all we have is the pre-name without all the suffixes yet.  The random chant stuff may be the best fit for many specialty builds.

So if you don’t like the armor comparisons above (I admit I wish I had more to choose from but it made the point anyway - triple stat greens are not really going to happen) just wait until you see the boss drops from the first few Northrend instances.  If a couple of level 73 greens have decent stats you can bet that the blues from Boss drops will be even sweeter.

The whole point of the original discussion with James was not to bust your hump to try to finish up tBC raids for gear (and certainly not for rep) since you will be able to find comparable gear in WotLK relatively easily and quickly, and you are certainly going to want to save the rep grind for the new factions unless you are REALLY close to hitting exhalted with someone.  It may not always be BETTER than tBC epics, but it will be close, and for leveling that’s good enough.

Besides, just like we’ve been saying all along with tBC, the really fun stuff will be the NEXT end-game content, so go quick to 80 and then start collecting your gear for the serious raids at the end of the WotLK.  If you think the T5 and T6 stuff is good, you will be beside yourself looking at T7 and T8.  When that stuff starts popping up we’ll certainly let you know.

The nice thing is that you’re not going to have to wait long for a final verdict on this topic.  Gavin and I both got our Beta keys last night, so we’re about to find out how fast we both replace all our gear during testing.  We’ll be sure to keep you posted about our progress.

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48 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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37 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

I like a good laugh.  We all know that there are times during the grind of the time-sink that is playing WoW that frustration sets in.  Despite all the nerfs and buffs to leveling it still takes a while.  So it’s nice that the folks at Blizzard have a good sense of humor in designing certain quests to give you a decent chuckle from time to time.

Actually, a lot of the quests and NPC’s have names that invoke something from pop culture.  These are good for a snicker or two.  There’s Spraggle Frock in Un’Goro, Haris Pilton in Shattrath, and quests like ‘Message in a Battle’ that always make me grin a bit.  But there are two quests in Outlands that really take the cake.

The first one is in Hellfire Peninsula.  Foreman Razzlecraz just outside of Thrallmar has this little chain quest with the task “Shizz Work.”  You’ve helped him get parts for his broken down shredder in the quest “Outland Sucks!”  Which is a little funny to me since by the time Gavin and I were getting to this chain Outland was sucking wind a bit already.

So, once you bring Razzlecraz his shredder bits, he claims that one of his felhound pets ate his key.  In his own words:

I finally got my shredder working but I seem to have lost the keys. I keep a pack of felhounds to protect my camp. They don’t do a very good job and they like to bite me a lot. They also like shiny things. I think this one felhound I have may have eaten my shredder keys. I’ll pay you if you’ll take my felhound on a walk. Kill some hellboars and let him eat. He’ll do his business. When he’s done, see if you can’t find the keys in his “leavings.’

This is a prime example of why you should read the quest text.  Pretty funny so far, but the sheer ickiness of this quest only gets better.  So you go start whacking hellboars nearby.  When you kill one, you blow this whistle and the felhound goes to “work.”  There’s this horrid ’splut’ when the felhound eats the pig, and then a big steamy felhound fart and PLOP!.  Now you’ve got a nice big pile of poo to root through.

What’s worse is that now all quest items sparkle.  Sparkling, fresh felhound mess!  Digging through this juicy treasure chest is no picnic either.  It yields a couple of things you really wouldn’t want to find - like gnawed bones and acidic slime.  You even get the “Stanky” debuff from the adventure (I’m not making this up) which you can see below.

In the second shot you can see that the debuff even occupies the “Dummy” slot, meaning it does nothing, but you might be a little dumb for rooting through demon poop.  The only thing it really does is give you a green “stank” aura.

If you have a mod that shows spell casts on your screen you will also notice that Blizz is very thorough when they do anything.   When the felhound drops his load, the spell he casts to make it happen is called “Create Poodad,”  here’s a pic of this wonderful talent - too bad they don’t give out cards for vanity spells like this at Blizzcon eh?

The next bit of fecal fun comes in Nagrand.  Elementalist Lo’Ap wants you to root through piles of poo to find digested Caracoli beans.  While I was working on this quest I came across a pile of poo that was quite different from the rest - see for yourself:

How did THAT get there?  I don’t see how any of the Talbuks in the area could do the deed up in that bush, but there it was - a curly, sparkling load of Talbuk treasure.  At least we can assume that these piles are not as fresh as the Shizz Work turds, since there is no stanky debuff after sorting through them.

Once you get all the beans you need from the curly-que poo, you get a stack of Nagrand Cherries.  Lo’Ap responds like this:

Please do not wash yourself in the sacred waters of the Throne.

<Elementalist Lo’ap holds a prepared caracoli tablet up.>

You place this under your tongue and allow it ample time to dissolve. Once it has dissolved, you will be able to breathe water as if it were air.

I have to eat these?  He knows where they’ve been!  These guys are just sick.  Actually there is something like this in real life.  If you’ve seen the movie “The Bucket List,” you know that one of the big jokes in the movie is that Jack Nicholson’s character likes a certain kind of coffee called Kopi Luwak.  The reason it is the “rarest beverage on the planet,” is that the people who make it get the coffee beans from the dung of the Asian Palm Civet, a cat sized mammal.  Again - I’m not making this stuff up, people really drink this stuff.  You can see the Wiki for yourself here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak

So in WoW instead of making coffee from our latrine beans, we get some sort of timed release, under the tongue tablet that lets us breath under water - you think it’s from the gas?  Before Blizz made all the quest objects sparkle for us, the Rare Bean quest was actually a little difficult.  One comment at thottbot read something like “so now I have to find these piles of crap that are the exact same color as the background, just what I needed to make my day - a quest to find camo poo.”

I know this wasn’t a big tip that you can use, but it might serve as a nice little reminder that there are a lot of silly and whimsical (ok - sometimes doodie jokes) fun things in WoW.  So take your time and enjoy a laugh or too, even if it means sorting a little poo.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

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11 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

There is a real void in the marketplace for high quality gaming headsets.  You can count the number of decent sets on one hand.  You can find great audio headsets in the hundreds.  You can get single ear headsets with terrific microphones all over the place as well.  We’re not sure why it’s so hard to find a headset with 5.1 stereo sound AND a good noise canceling mic at the same time, but that’s just the way it is right now.

There are certainly a big pile of products out there that CLAIM to be both of these things, but you know someone is lying to you  if they are trying to tell you that their headphones have great sound and uber features for $29.95, that’s ridiculous.  I guess some companies have not quite figured out that lying to their customers just doesn’t = win in the long run.

If you’re cheap, just stop reading this right now.  Stick with your Wal-Mart Logitech earbuds and forget you ever saw this post.  (Logitech makes great mice, but the headphones - not so much).  I’m not cheap, and I’ll tell you why.

There are certain things you should spend really good money on.  We (should) spend 25% of our lives in bed sleeping, you should spend some serious dough on a really good bed.  You spend a good majority of your time wearing shoes, those should be very comfortable and high quality (this applies to all clothing really, but especially to shoes in my book).  Life is too short to eat yucky food, and so forth.  So I typically default to “you get what you pay for.”  Spend a little more on most things and you will be much happier with the results.

I mean, how many times have you gone to a restaurant like Village Inn or some huge chain thing and gotten horrid food with really bad service?  Go down the street to the more expensive place and the food will be spectacular and the waitress will be awesome - it’s worth it to me.

It’s the same thing for me with headphones.  If I’m going to be wearing something for 8 hours every night they are going to have to be comfortable and sound good.  And since I use Skype and Vent a lot the mic needs to be out of the way and work well.

I’ve had headphones that sound great but hurt my ears.  Microphone booms that rub on my face and I can’t get into a position that feels right where people can still hear me.  Comfortable headphones with crummy quality sound, headphones with bad connectors, you name it.  There was always something majorly wrong with every single combo headset I ever used or reviewed.

I finally had enough with all of it and went on a major search for a real quality gaming headset.  I even looked at aviation headsets, although the sound quality and connection to computer seemed iffy on those (as well as costing up to $750.00) .  I just wanted something good, and I wasn’t too worried about what it cost.

Some of the gaming headsets seemed a bit gadgety to me.  The rumble feature doesn’t seem to be as important as really clear sound and comfort.  So I looked at the offerings from one of the most trusted names in quality audio headphones - Sennheiser.

Sennheiser has always been a good choice for the audiophile.  Not the very best, but certainly always mentioned with the best.  It’s hard to beat Sennheiser for quality as well.  Everything they make is solid, both in performance and construction.

Enter the PC 350 gaming Headset.  These babies were only recently released, or I would have been using them for months already.  From the moment you pull them out of the box, you can just tell you’re ears are going to thank you for them.

Everything about the PC 350’s is just right.  They are probably the most comfortable headphones you will ever own at this price, and you can wear them forever.  The sound is great, even if you have to tweak your levels a bit through your sound card interface.  Some reviewers have complained about the bass level, but honestly, when have ANY headphones been able to really thump?  If you have a decent sound card you can add some nice sounding bass boost to the sound and I actually had to turn the bass boost down for the PC 350’s.  In other words, they can handle whatever you throw at them.

The mic is out of the way, doesn’t pick up ambient sounds, and yet still gives great voice clarity in every situation I’ve used it.  It’s not all up in my face either (you can tell I have personal space issues).  In other words, everything about these headphones is what you’ve always wanted. I mean, the cord is even 9 feet long!  The picture above does not do them nearly enough justice.

These are going to set you back a bit more than $150.00, but when you are ready for a serious upgrade in your sound and voice environment, go grab a set of PC 350’s, you’ll never settle for a lesser gaming headpiece again.  All you need to do is click the picture to get your own pair from Amazon.

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24 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

(You guys loves her so much during the screenshot contest for midsummer festival that we convinced her to bring a few of her other skills to DYS - our first entry from Fran Molina!)

Herbalism is usually an over-looked profession. People usually pick up Mining to make money, because of the synergy mining has with various professions in the game.

What many people don’t know is that Herbalism has a huge market too, because of the always high demand on Alchemist Potions. Although Herbalism doesn’t have as many synergies as Mining does, you can make a good amount of gold from it as well.

In this guide I’ll teach you how to farm Terokkar Forest, and the trees from Skettis. Terokkar Forest may be considered the zone with the highest potential for making money with Herbalism in the entire game, because of the huge variety of herbs.

We always start with a route, right? Routes are the easiest way to farm herbs. It’s much better to follow a path you know to get your nodes easily than just going around at random.

So, this is the route I use to farm my herbs. You can get the Gatherer Add-On (http://www.gathereraddon.com/) to help you track your herbs, but once you’re accustomed  to your route, it’s no longer needed.

There are herbs that spawn in Cenarion Thicket, Veil Shienor, Veil Reskk, and Firewing Point. The fact is, I don’t find as many herbs in these places as in the places I pointed out on my route. If you are luckier than me, then props to you! This is an example of a basic route, feel free to use it and change to suit your needs.

Quick description on the herbs you can pick up in Terokkar:

• Felweed is a common herb in Outland, and can be found in every zone. It usually spawns out in the open, or near other small plants. You use Felweed for the basic Super Mana/Healing Potions, and popular Elixirs like Adept’s Elixir or Elixir or Major Agility. You need a skill of 300 Herbalism to pick it up.

• Dreaming Glory is usually found at the feet of mountains. They’re used for Super Mana Potions, and Elixirs related to Regenerating Health or Mana. Because of those properties, when you pick a Dreaming Glory you’ll gain a buff that regenerates 30 Health every 5 seconds for 15 minutes. 315 Herbalism is required to pick this herb.

• Terocone is a kind of a rare herb. It spawns only in Terokkar Forest and on Arakkoa settlements in Shadowmoon Valley, making it a nice money-maker. They usually spawn on the feet of the big Olemba Trees. You use it for the really useful Haste Potion, and various Elixirs that are always in demand; requires 325 Herbalism.

• Mana Thistle is a plant that used to spawn only in places accessible by flying. This plant is used for most of the flasks in TBC and all the Resistance Cauldrons. They aren’t called “Mana” Thistle just for nothing; upon picking a Mana Thistle, you gain up to 3500 mana!

What you will need:

• At least 360 Herbalism, to be able to herb the Skettis Trees that are lv72, although I do recommend 375 so you will never fail a pick-up. If you can wear leather, you can ask for a Leatherworker to craft a pair of Herbalist’s Gloves (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=7349) to help you.

• 300 Riding Skill and a Flying Mount.

I usually start in Allerian Stronghold, then go to Bonechewer Ruins and fly my way to Skettis. In Skettis, I usually do 2 laps to look for Skettis Trees (hoping to make some more cash!), then fly down to Veil Shalas and continue on my way following my usual route.

Pick every herb you see. Even if they aren’t worth a lot (like Mana Thistle), it’s still money, and there’s a chance of getting a Fel Lotus on every herb you pick up. Fel Lotus is a rare herb that grows along with Outland Herbs, and can be gathered when you gather any other herb. You use them as a reagent for all the flasks that were added with The Burning Crusade.

What are those “Skettis Trees”?

Those famous trees are mobs called Talonsworn Forest-Rager http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=23029 which wander around Skettis. They don’t drop great loot when killed, but an Herbalist can really get full benefit from them! They drop 2-5 Motes of Life every kill, and 4-8 herbs of many kinds, except for Netherbloom and Nightmare Vine.

They have 4 different spawn points, and there’s a maximum of 2 trees spawned at a time. Here is a basic map with the approximate spawn points and their initial patrolling path.

Although they are lv71-72 Elites, they’re pretty easy to solo with any class. The only thing that would make things hard is their Thunderclap ability, which slows attack and movement speed, and that can make a melee toon’s life hard.

Here’s a small video I made on how to kill it as a BM Hunter, also demonstrating the loot quality of the trees:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyuOowmef6E

On highly populated servers, the Talonsworn Forest-Ragers can be pretty hard to find, so I’d recommend you to alternate between killing those and picking herbs from Terokkar. But if you’re virtually alone (which usually happens during off-peak times, or on low population server), you can stay around Skettis and farm only those, picking the Dreaming Glories and Mana Thistles on the way.

And now, with this small guide, you’re ready to start dominating the herbalism market on your server.

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