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Please update your links, bookmarks, etc.
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In Part 3 of our Wotlk Preparation series, we realized that a huge amount of honor is needed for the new level 80 PVP gear and that you should be trying to hit he honor cap of 75,000. In Part 4 we will find some tactics that will give you an edge on leveling to 80. This can include consumables, gear, and even being the right spec.
There are many ways to speed up the leveling process and reduce your downtime once you hit Northrend on launch day. Blizzard has already provided us with two starting zones (Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord) to reduce the lag and competition for quest items. Lets take a look at some of the ways to provide you with an advantage on leveling.
As you can see, there are many ways to give you an extra edge on leveling. Use them to your advantage since you may eventually pull ahead of the pack of levelers. Once you do, the zones you go into will have much less players and thus less competition over quest items and mobs. Also don’t forget the opposing faction will be in the starting areas as well, so moving to a higher level less populated zone is a good thing. Hopefully we will all have some fun with the leveling rush to 80!
In [Part 5] we will attempt to answer the question of how much gold is needed in Wotlk. The amount needed is fairly low, if you just want the basics. As you may know, we at Warcraft Econ want more, from multi-passenger mounts to crazy gold sinks. Stay tuned!
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In Part 2 of our Wotlk Preparation series, we will discussed liquidating your items, organizing, and freeing up bank slots in preparation for all the new items and mats you will be collecting in Wotlk. In Part 3 we will crunch some numbers to see how much Honor Points you should save up in preparation for the new level 80 PVP gear. There are 3 different sets of PVP gear per season!
As you can see, Blizzard is trying to provide everyone with arena gear by providing 3 sets rather than 1 set with rating requirements like in season 4. With previous season, some of us were able to stock up on honor for all the accessories, belt, boots, bracers, etc. which was about 75,000 (honor cap) total. I had logged on to the beta Build 9155, and noticed that this was no longer possible. The honor cap is still 75,000 but the cost of all the PVP has gone up significantly. We all knew that Blizzard had announced that honor points will not be reset, but all the gear would have their prices increased. You bet that they kept their promise, prices are as high as 62,000 honor for a Deadly Gladiator belt! Even for the full 5 piece set of blue quality Savage Gladiator gear, it costs 50,000+ honor along with 1500 arena points. Now add the cost of all the rings, cloak, belt, bracers, trinkets, and weapons. You are looking at 100,000+ honor for a full set of gear! So the only advice I can give is to hit the honor cap, which is 75,000 honor. I did noticed that on the beta you have the option of purchasing Savage Gladiator gear with either a combination of honor/arena points or just honor points. The honor only option however costs about 60,000 honor per piece of armor. I am not sure if this will change once Wotlk goes live, but that much honor for blue quality gear still seems a bit steep.
In the current beta build there is no requirement of battleground marks for any gear. So on live you are can turn in your marks for 314 honor, however there is a new and better trade in system on the beta. You may be thinking right now that it will take forever to get all your PVP gear since some items cost almost as much as the honor cap. Don’t worry, there are plenty of ways to gain honor in Wotlk as well as in increase in honor rewarded. An interesting note here, you are able to do PVE content to get PVP rewards. In the most extreme cases, you can do a 25 man raid for Deadly Gladiator gear which normally requires 1800+ arena ratings. Here are some ways to gain honor that I have found in the current beta build as well as other ways to obtain your PVP gear with out cashing in honor.
With all these different ways of obtaining honor and PVP gear, 60,000 honor for an item doesn’t sound as bad now. So get to it, start working towards that honor cap of 75,000!
In [Part 4] we will find some tactics that will give you an edge on leveling to 80. This can include consumables, gear, and even being the right spec. Stay tuned!
In Part 1 of our Wotlk Preparation series, we talked about hitting level caps and saving materials to get a head start in leveling professions. In Part 2 we will discuss liquidating your items, organizing, and freeing up bank slots in preparation for all the new items and mats you will be collecting in Wotlk
Liquidate your assets: Time to do some spring cleaning in your banks. Many items are going to lose their value when Wotlk launches, like when essences dropped in price when new primals were introduced in Burning Crusade. Lets start by taking a look at what’s taking up your precious bag space first.
This should conclude your inventory cleaning, if you are still unsure about certain items and their use after Wotlk, just hang on to them. After Wotlk gets release, you can free up even more old world junk if you don’t see a need for them. After you have liquidated all your assets, do a quick organization of all your items. In my extra bank slot bags, I usually separate things into categories like gear, consumables, quest items and marks, crafting materials, old trinkets and vanity items, etc. Some of you may prefer to put all the old world items into a few bags, and leave the rest open for new incoming Wotlk items. I wish the very best to all of you in your quest to organize and liquidate your assets, I know this can be a chore for some of you. Suggestions are always welcome and please let me know if I had missed any items.
In [Part 3] we will crunch some numbers to see how much Honor Points you should save up in preparation for the new level 80 PVP gear. There are 3 different sets of PVP gear per season! Stay tuned!
Over the next few weeks before the launch of Wotlk, I will be talking about how I am preparing for Wotlk as well as offer advice to our readers on how to prepare for it. It seems to be a question that keeps coming up as we get closer to launch (November 13th 2008).
Hit level caps: From a profit standpoint, being at level cap with your character, professions, and skills will make you the most money. If you are not level 70 yet, try your best to get there before the expansion. This also goes for your professions, including gathering skills and secondary professions. Bring them up to 375, this includes cooking, fishing, and first aid. The price of some materials have dropped significantly so getting the rest of those skill points shouldn’t be too expensive. Even if you don’t plan on using your secondary professions, it is still a good idea to since it will unlock the daily quests for them. You can always sell the rewards from them like [Northern Spices], which will be in high demand at first. However I still recommend using cooking to turn all that meat you will loot into profit by cooking it.
You may also consider leveling your weapon skills to their cap if there are not there already. Some people still are not at cap with their ranged weapons like wands, or maces for healers. This can mean the difference between killing that totem or finishing off a player when you are out of mana. By doing this, you will save some time later on when you have to level them in Northrend. After all the whole point in preparing for the expansion is to do what you need to do now, while you have the time, rather than later, when you have better things to do.
Save materials for your professions: Once you get to one of the Northrend starting areas, you can train to become a Grand Master in your professions and start leveling past 375. Some of your recipes from Burning Crusade may still be green, yellow, or orange. You can check at www.wowhead.com to see which recipes go grey when. Start to save up some mats to level some of these to get a head start in leveling the profession. Of course some end game recipes would not be reasonable to craft because of the high cost of materials. I would only do that if you really wanted to get that extra edge.
I’ll take cooking for example; [Spicy Crawdad] is still green, [Fisherman’s Feast] and [Hot Buttered Trout]will still be yellow at 375. I have already started saving up a few of the mats for these so I can save my Northrend meat and fish for better recipes. Kaliope over at WoW Crafting Blog has attempted to level cooking in the beta and has reported that it is going to take a lot of mats to get those final skill points to 450.
I don’t know about all the professions, but please leave a comment if you know of any reasonable recipes that you can use to give you those few extra skill points in Wotlk. My only trade skill at the moment is Leatherworking, and the drums are the only reasonable things I can make to get some extra skill points before I start with Northrend mats.
In [Part 2] we will cover liquidating your items, organizing, and freeing up bank slots in preparation for all the new items and mats you will be collecting in Wotlk. Look for it in the next few days.
Whether you are on a PVE or PVP server, there will always be end game raiders. This means there is always a demand for raid food. Although cooking at its’ current state isn’t the biggest money maker, it is a small market with very little competition. Also take into account the low number of people to actually spend the time to level to max cooking, it is down there with leveling fishing as peoples’ least favorite professions. I personally love both. I have been using cooking to my advantage ever since they implemented the cooking daily’s. Your average stack of raid food will sell for 20g, not anything too amazing, but for the time involved for the gold gained is very worth it. It takes 40 seconds to cook a stack of 20 food, add about 20 sec for buying the food and your up to approxamatly one minute spent per stack. If each stack sells for 20g with an investment of 10g, that’s 10g X 60 stacks an hour, which equals 600g per hour. Obviously prices will fluctuate between your servers and which type of food you are making. Below is my process for providing my server with raid food.
Cooking can be a profitable profession, especially if your in the world killing things that drop meat. Some may not like the whole micro management aspect of it, but I don’t mind and it’s a nice consistant market that has items that are always in demand. If anything, the profit I make from cooking offsets all those auction house cuts and fees. If you are a max level cook, you may want to give it a try or add it to your current list of markets you participate in.
Wotlk Beta: Cooking was buffed tremendously in the beta. This is great for cooks who profit off this profession. They have introduced a new semi-rare reagent called [Northern Spices], which a only a few are rewarded from the Wotlk cooking daily quest. In addition, you can also use your daily cooking token, [Dalaran Cooking Award] to purchase 10 of these spices. The tokens are also used to buy some of the higher level recipes so it becomes a balancing act on buying spices vs. recipes. All the high level food require one of these spices to cook one piece of food. So if you wanted to cook a stack of the new raid food, it would take you two days just to get 20 spices to make it. This implies that level 80 raid food prices will be closer to potions and elixirs. These spices are only used for recipes 400-450, however there are some decent buff foods before that. The mats are just standard one meat to one food, so you will still be able to afford that stack of your favorite raid food. For example; [Shoveltusk Steak] has +35 Spell and +30 Stamina, vs the version that uses spices, [Firecracker Salmon] which has +46 Spell and +40 Stamina. Also note that the duration has been increased from 30 minutes to 1 hour. I hope to write more about this when Wotlk ships, I really like where cooking is going now, as well as fishing. Here is a sample of what Wotlk cooking looks like, note the new “tracking” foods. [Wotlk Cooking Screenshot]
One week ago I wrote about stockpiling some herbs right before the Inscription launch in patch 3.0.2. I had saved up 1800 herbs or 90 stacks to sell as a Inscription power leveling kit. I had spent an estimated 1000g on buying out all the herbs, which I had some left over. The night right before the patch (Oct. 14th) I had bought the final remaining herbs I needed at some marked up prices on the auction house. I really should have did this weeks before since I was paying up to 3.5g a piece for herbs. Good thing I didn’t need much.
On patch day servers took forever to get back up, that’s probably why I saw a huge increase in traffic on the site. It was 9PM server by the time I logged on so I started spamming my power leveling kit. There were only a few offers and it was for 3000g (~33g/stack), which wasn’t anything to brag about, but I took it. I had realized just after selling those herbs how much money 350+ scribes were making, thousands within the first few days. The Inscription leveling guide I had linked to my buyer had you make 275+ glyphs by 350. So my buyer would have made all 3000g back if they sold each glyph for approximately 15g each, which is what the scribes on my server was charging for any glyph. Plus extra for the rare minor glyphs you can only learn by doing [Minor Inscription Research] once every 20 hours. Also with 6 minor glyphs per class and 9 classes, that’s about 50 days to learn all of them, pre Wotlk. I had even heard of other servers selling stacks of herbs for 100g+!
With the severe server lag, my buyer wanted me to C.O.D. him all 1800 herbs with 7.5 messages. I really should have waited a bit, but I got impatient and it was getting late. So a few days later I had recieved only 2200g and 2 returned messages which had a C.O.D. of 400g each. Those mailings were returned Outland herbs. My buyer had just picked what herbs they needed and returned the rest which defeats the point of my herb package! I really should have just randomized the herbs I put in each mailing, which holds 12 stacks. So my profit was around 1200g, but the buyer was still paying an average of 33g+ per stack, which included all the lowbie herbs I bought for only a few gold a stack.
This wasn’t a total loss, I still made some money and have herbs to sell at inflated prices on the AH. I didn’t stop my other sources of income, so in the end I still made a profit for the little work of buying out herbs on the auction house. In the past week I made about 5000g, not too bad since I went back to actually play the game rather than standing in front of the AH for hours. As a side note, the icon above is [Glyph of Pick Pocket], which I found to be appropriate for this post of me getting had by my buyer.
[Related Posts]
The question is should you wait until Wotlk for the new 22 slot [Glacial Bag] or buy the current 22 slot [“Gigantique” Bag]? At the moment on the beta, 22 slot universal bags are the biggest ones you can obtain, including raid drops. While the mats for a [Glacial Bag] looks expensive and has a total of 32 days (16 with specialization AND trading) worth of cloth cool downs, speculators seem to think the final cost of the bag will still be less than 1200g. The current materials that are needed for this bag are; 4 [Moonshroud], 4 [Ebonweave], 1 [Eternium Thread].
The materials broken down are:
The cloth will essentially be free plus the 3g for the thread. The eternals can be farmed or bought off the auction house. My prediction is this bag will have to be priced lower than the current 22 slot to remain competitive. At first when there is a huge demand for the specialized cloth, these bags will probably be around 1000g, over time as more and more players hit level cap, they will start to fall. So in the mean time, wait till Wotlk until you buy your new 22 slot bags.
[Related Posts]
I am writing this on Monday afternoon, the day before patch 3.0.2 comes out. Already the prices of herbs on my server have increased. Many herbs of the herbs are in short supply and even non existent on the auction house. I have been saving a bunch of random stacks of herbs to resell for a profit when Inscription drops on Tuesday. I decided to sell them as a entire lot along with a link to a guide. While trying to buyout the remaining herbs needed for my power leveling kit, I had trouble finding the mid level herbs. Low level and Outland herbs still have a fair price. I may try later tonight to see if I can finish up buying the stacks I need. Not sure how much my lot will go for, but I will base it on how much herbs go for tomorrow. If anyone has any suggestions on prices they might be charging, please let me know. According to the guide I am using, to hit max level Inscription that this patch will let you go up to, you will need 1800 herbs or 90 stacks to power level it.
As far as trying to cash in on this herb rush, scan your auction house for cheap herbs and prepare to sell them tomorrow after the patch is implemented. Remember many people plan to power level this profession and are also saving their herbs to sell, prepare for some competition. Check specifically for all the mid level herbs. I have posted 2 Inscription power leveling guides below to help you with the herbs you will need for it, even better for you if you are actually planning to level this profession.
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