The mooses have arrived in time for christmas.

Kristenveldt, Calaron and Mardah. Innovations Druids.

Legions of Valor Points.

It worked Blizzard, good job!

What worked?  Well..  the effort to make people do dungeons again.

Looking at myself, I did 5 timealkers last week, all the Mythics. and some Heroics. I even strolled into HFC-LFR's last Saturday...although I must say, that some alcohol was involved.

And looking at Innovation, I am not the only one. More people are running dungeons again. Everyone wants their Valor Points, their chance on a Mount, and their chance on trinketssss...prrety trinketssss.

Speaking about trinket. I got the Orb somehwere in the weekend, and last night I got the Tank and the Strength trinkets in one Everbloom run. Which is nice, especially considering that the two I am missing now, agility and healing, are roles I can put my loot specialization on.

But...there is always a but..

What will happen in two to four weeks? All the trinkets have been gained? And all my gear will be upgraded. So I need to do only 2-3 mythics a week max, to keep possible new gear upgraded,

What else can we do with the Valor Points?



And then there is all this news from the Legion Alpha. I will not go to much in spoilers (about the Lore), but I can tell you that Balance gets one of the cooler-named talents:  Starlord.

I am actually waiting on news what the Artifact Weapons will do. The list of Legendaries that dropped this week gives no clue about that. The Legendaries will be rare, although with powerfull effects, but rare...  and grindy I guess?  There are discussions that you need them for worldfirsts. I can see some of them having a small effect on that, but..well...I ain't a world-firster anuway.

....and while writing this, MMO-champion came with the Artifact-Calculator. At first sight, I am not impressed. It seems like ye ole talent-system. A few percent more damage/healing on random spells, and sometimes a Huge Talent. I have no idea if you can get al the talents in the end, or only half. Need more info.

Did Someone Say Dungeons again?

It took me 6 hours on Saturday morning. I started at 7, and was done at 1. SIX hours to completely clean up Argent dawn. I went by all alts, cleaning up banks, sending of stuff to other alts. I also did one full run, if possible, through all the mines and gardens.

So much stuff was lying everywhere, and of course, I was not rushing stuff, but still, 6 hours. And for what?  well..this weeks patch of course.

Basically, with all the valor everywhere, I expect not much alt-ing next few weeks, must get the gear-upgrades.

I WILL HAVE A SCYTHE!

YES..  I am tempted to write this whole blog-post in Capitals, because I will have a scythe as artifact weapon, in honor of Pratchett's character Death...  but I will spare you that my dear readers. Still.. a SCYTHE!

Combine that with 'new' Moon-kin forms and I will continue being Balance in Legion. But wait..there seems to be more.

The bloody Lunar/Solar bar is going away. No more cursing at the PC because you somehow managed to hit the wrong spell (that is Wrath/Starfire) for your current Eclipse..or more likely..when the spell actually goes off.

It is a bit unclear what we get back, but it seems to be a resource system. Like Monks/Paladins I guess. Build up a buff, and unleash it. I approve of this. More control over what you do, then actually having the Eclipse-bar being in control.

And some news about spells from a long time ago. They mentioned Thorns, although that was considering levelling as restoration. And Innervate, for Balance only. So.. I will be the healers favorite  :p

There is also something about attuning to a different spec..to do it better..but that seems unclear..and hazy. And I will loose stampeding roar ( Cat/Bear only). But.. well..  this is planned..let's see what actually survives in 9 months.....  yeah..releasing content faster my....


..and on another note, Innovation has only 1 boss left on Heroic......

Innovation takes down Manny on Heroic

Dragon lair

So...did I miss the memo? Since when does the dragon-shapeshift stick after unequipping the legendary staff?

A Dragon in her lair?

Level 1100

New Feathers!

Finally.

The Token and it's strange quirks?

I have been there.

There was a time in my live, not so long ago actually, where I was doing everything to save money. My monthly standard expenses like gas, electra, mortage where that high, that they almost exceeded my income. That is not a healthy place to be.

I had to really cut back on a lot of things, just be more careful how much you spend on stuff. I can go into detail, but this is not a 'How is my life'-blog, this is a World of Warcraft blog. So what does the above as to do with WoW?

Gold Tokens

Some of my sources reported a strange thing. Players trying to not use their Gold. Every time something cost gold in game, they weigh their options. Is it really worth buying it? What do I need it for? Just like in real life.

And most gold-spending is avoidable. Repair-bills? Join a raiding guild. Flightpath Costs? Just ride your mount. A new coin for gear, enough other options, even with the current need for Garrison Resources, they would opt for that , rather than paying 500 gold.

And for what?

To make sure they have enough gold to buy a token. That can be every month, although you do need a lot of time to make 50k/month I guess. Or to have enough gold, to get them through a rough spot in Real Life, and still be able to play World of Warcraft.

Taking to the skies

Right

Achievements

Achievements to get flying

On all your lvl90+ characters in Draenor

I seem to not have a lot of them.

Only 35 Treasures I have?

And I need to secure Draenor

And a little exploration.

I approve of this

Although I have to do several jumping games..

If I want to play jumping games, I buy a jumping game :(

Oh, and some revered factions later on

And than,

To the sky, my alt-army

State of affairs

I Raid

I am raiding four times a week for about four hours, although most of the time a little less. Three times I am on Mardah, one night on Gwaednerth. And that is what I have been doing last months. I am not even that bothered anymore to do all the garrison-stuff every day. I am swimming in raw materials for gems, enchants, potions and flasks. So I have reduced my WoW-time a lot last 2 months, including the blogging.

But some 'big' things have happened last month, and looking at my blogroll, a lot of it disagrees with 'veteran' players, but let us start where I left off almost two months ago, the token.

I was actually expecting myself to buy one token on the Horde-side. After getting to 100, Gwaednerth was broke. Just enough to get a level 3 garrison. And when the tokens where first announced, I was really thinking I would buy one to get some gold on the Horde. But then the gold-scavengers came along. Even without prioritizing gold-missions, or doing them every day, Gwaednerth now sits on 50k gold, more than enough for him.

Mardah's alliance army is even better of, I breached the 200k-mark not long ago. Most of the gold is coming from missions. either directly from gold-missions, or indirectly from whatever is in the crates I get. I don't even bother to list greenies anymore, just sell them, takes less time. Although having the WoW-app on my phone does make putting stuff on the AH a lot easier.

I do wonder, with gold being this easily obtainable...is Blizzard not making this game free-to-play-through-effort? And won't that actually hurt in the long term, when to many people want to buy game-tokens, but not enough people buy gold-tokens?

And then there is this flying stuff, or actually non-flying stuff. I am firmly in the camp that supports flying for max-levels. I wouldn't mind to the suggestion it should be gated. Either through an achievement for doing enough quests, or by becoming available next patch. In both cases Blizz statement of immersion would have been satisfied.

There is no satisfaction in mindlessy slaying minions just because it takes time..there is no immersion. Most of the time I just get annoyed by them, especially because they can knock me of my mount. After which I shadowmeld to drop aggro..and continue...or kill the poor sod in 10 seconds. It is just time-consuming, I am max-level, have a goal to reach, and want to be there asap. I will not look around.

But ingame at the moment, it does actually not matter that much. I do not have to get out to gather raid-consumables. My army of alts provide that for me with their garrisons. There are some exclusions of course. If I need that bloody stuff for gear upgrades, I have to get out of my garrison. Which means I take a flightpath to a certain goblin, and I am in the middle of the mobs.

Fishing is the same, flightpath to Yrel in Nagrand, walk a few yards, and start fishing. So I actually do not need flying at the moment..well..almost. There are two thing that irk me... one a little bit, another one a lot.

The fact that neither of the raids have a flightpath at their gates annoys me a little bit. It takes a 1-2 minute drive to get there from their closest flight masters. But that's it, a minor annoyance. There are not that many mobs you aggro when driving to the entrance, and you have the speed to outrun them anyway.

The real problem comes when you want to do two of the alternative fun-things to do in WoW. Battle-pets and Archaeology. The amount of times I stood before a steep unclimbable hill, with the pet atop or the survey pointing there was too much. I basically don't do those two things anymore because I do not have flying. It is just not fun to find your way around, it is just annoying.

Blizzard keeps stating they want to immerse us on the ground, but the fact is, that after I reach max-level, I prefer to stay at home, unless I can do something quickly, which makes flying almost mandatory. In all previous expansion, I went outside Shat/Dal/SW/Vale and did stuff, now, I am only sitting in my garriosn, because it annoys me to look for ancient artefacts.

And there is the news about the increasing Ilvl in the next raid. My opinion about this has been written down before, I do not like it. I would actually have no problem with an end-boss dropping higher Ilvl stuff, but the rest of the raid should be the same. It makes all those long-standing DKP-systems very quirky if different Ilvl is dropping all over the place. And I don't think Innovation is ready for a loot-council.

But to top it off....

Apparently warlock pets will be getting updated character models.

Their pets.

All their pets.

Of which only one is out.

Patch 1.8.0 (2005-10-10): Added.

And still not getting an updated model...

Savage Hero

Innovation defeats Blackhand after 126 wipes

Gold-bubble?

I am thinking about a follow up on the gold-thingie..but I am in Europe, so I can only watch from afar how that crazy thing does.

How does it feel, that your 20 dollars lost 20% of its worth in one day?

That seems like a huge dip.

I am so going to ask a collague about that this week, the one that teaches economics.

Soft-nerfing BRF

Blizzard put out a sunday-message giving a stetement about more Ilvl's on BRF-gear. The Idea behind it is that for players coming out of Highmaul, the new gear of BRF is a lot of times not really an upgrade. The extra 5 Ilvl's also extend to the tier4-crafted gear, and the apexis-gear...who even uses that?

There are several things I think about this. First up, I do like this. There some Highmaul gear in my bags, that I do not use, because of Tierpieces. Euipping the 2pT is a very big upgrade for me, even if one of those is Normal, and not heroic. Basically, my Normal Tier-shoulders are better than my Mythic Highmaul shoulders.

Wait...why are you doing Normal BRF, when you did Heroic Highmaul?  Training people. Innovation is doing the Normal versions of bosses before we try them on Heroic. That works best for us. So for Innovation, this is a great change.

The biggest problem what I have with this, is not the extra Ilvl's, but how this happened. 4 different levels of raiding, two different raids that are current, and each of them dropping normal gear, warforged stuff, gemmed stuff.... I can no longer see if a lower-Ilvl piece of gear with a socket, is better or worse than a higher Ilvl piece.

These days I have Mr Robot open during raids to quickly check if a drop is actually worth going for, and most of the time, it is not. If the piece is not WF, or gemmable, it is mostly useless. These 5 Ilvl's may just be enough to make it clear from the outset which is better.

It just feels like this Monstrosity of Item-levels Blizzard has created, and it only looks like it is spiraling out of control. Considering that in the first Tier of raiding, there is a 70 Ilvl gain, at this rate, we are going to need an item-squish every expansion...

The Gold must Flow

My mind is still thinking about the ramifications of the gold-token. Blizzard has stated that they will probably change their policy with the Black Market Auction House prices, I guess they will be higher after the introduction of the wow-token. They have to do that else, who would buy a token for real money in the long run?

The normal AH will probably fluctuate a little after the introduction. There well be some new gold in the market, and some prices of high end drops may go up, but that will not contimue indefiantely. Most of the time, in what I see, price is not really determined by how much people want to pay for it, but mostly by availability. The more of something special there is on the AH, the less it will cost. The tendecy of sellers is to undercut everyone else.

And even IF people have more gold, who knows if they really want to spend it on something they have seen cheaper before? I wouldn't in real life, so I would probably won't in WoW either. But that's on the normal AH, where supply (mostly) and demand is in order. The BMAH is something differently.

On the BMAH, the startprice is set by Blizzard, which will be higher when the token comes. And this is the only place where buying a token for ingame gold makes sense, because the BMAH has a very low supply, of very rare items. And by making the startprice higher, Blizzard actuallly puts in place the part of the system why people would buy a token. The normal AH itself would probably not make enough havoc to make it work, but very rare stuff..well.

But I am still a little 'worried' about the whole system itself. I still think there will be more people wanting to use gold for gametime, then vice-versa. Taking myself as an example, I would probably buy one at the start of patch 6.1.2(or whatever it is going to be called), just to see how it works...and get an achievement probably....

But, in my example of this monday, I used 15 euros for 30k gold. It is actaully not that difficult to get that amount of gold during a month while just playing. Some gold-scavengers with your followers. The income of the salvage yards. Doing an old raid. Gold comes from everywhere.

Finding that treshold where the euros match the gold will be a hard trick to master, and will go upwards. If I buy a token, and get 30k in return. A second 30k will be less worth for me. A third even less, and there comes that point, very fast, where the euro-gold transfer will not be in my satisfaction.

But, it will be nice for people with some gold on their accounts, who haven't played in a while, they can come back for a month with goold from ages past, although I wonder, if there is much 'frozen'gold on defunct accounts.

What will happen according to my non-economic mind?

The first few months it will work nicely, but than the supply of tokens on the AH will become lower, the original sellers now have enough gold, so they are not using their euros anymore. So, to keep the system going, more gold for less euros is needed, but that will mean the gold-price will be to high for some of the people. So, it's waiting on that month, where to few people actually bought a token from the AH, so the supply is high.

The sellers of the tokens will then feel the impact. Not only did their token not sell, and in their mind that is a waste of real money. The next month the euro-gold conversion is lower.  You get less gold for something that may not even sell... so why would I do that? The believe in the system is gone, doubt rises...And you have the beginnings of a real WoW-commerce-crash.

Gold, Gold, Gold everywhere??!

Blizzard is going to sell game-tokens for real cash (euros for me). These can than be sold on the auction house (not traded, only sold). The selling price will be determined by Blizzard. No undercutting.

 A quick google-scan learned me that 1000 gold sells for about a half euro. My current subscription is 12.99 euro/month. Now, I am not sure blizzard is going to sell these for 12 euros. It will probably be a little bi more expensive. Lets go with 15 euros for a game-token.

Question: Would you buy a month of WoW for 30k gold?

No, I have a decent job. I don't feel the need to buy gametime with gold.

Question: Would you buy 30k gold for 15 euros.

No, maybe. The problem here is the need for gold. At the moment I have sufficient funds.

The maybe is because I am not only playing on Argent Dawn. I am also playing on The Sha'Tar, where my funds are considerably lower. So, a one-time infusion of 30k there would not be bad. But that is a onetime-thingy.

For myself, it is the fact that I am not going to buy expensive 100k alliance-bikes. I don't have the gold, and it is just a mount. Would I pay 40 euros for that mount? No way. Now, there are enough people out there who might do that.

My gut-feeling says, there are probably more people with excess gold who might use it for some game-time then there are people who would buy the actual tokens for real money. And then Economy kicks in... but I am a Science-guy, so I am not going to delve into that too much.

Although, more buyers then sellers would probably better for Blizzard, it means tokens will always be sold. The moment it goes vice-versa, more sellers then buyers, the whole system collapses..for a time.

I am not a fan of this new (possible?) token, but also not really against it.

Sometimes it is too much?

I should have played much more last week, I had a vacation. But when I logged on on wednesday, I found out that the new recipes where sold by traders who only spawned sometimes. Even worse, no trader spawned on wednesday itself. I was not amused.

Although I didn't play in Vanilla, the first year of TBC was almost the same looking at recipes. A lot where not always available from the seller, or in faraway places. I remember just sitting in Everlook and clicking the seller every 10 minutes orso, hoping the ecipe was available. There was also this trader in the desolace, which only spwaned after someone did a quest.

I never found that fun, so I actually didn't play that much last wednesday and thursday. It even affected my raidmentality last thursday, I was not really in it. I did my stuff, but that's all. Lucky, on friday it went better again, and I even did some LFR's with some alts.

I suppose I just had a little WoW-overload last week, happens sometimes I guess. After Friday, I went into overdrive. Doing all the stuff again. What I do miss, is a continous guildchat while logging. I sometimes miss parts of conversations due to alting.

A lot of my alts are now using the new heirlooms. I have a full strength-plate and cloth-set for my alts. I did not go for the mail and leather, considering I only have one monk, and another hunter to level. The rest are clothies and plate-wearers.

..and I was reminded that I completely forgot about the new pets somewhere this weekend. Something for next vacation I guess.

Two discussions popped up for me last week, which I may need to delve into a little more in a later post. The first was a guild-discussion about reforging. Some people are seem to hate it so much. The other was about the Holy Paladin weapon in BRF.

Yeah, there is none. Which was a discussion on some boards, with most people just going for the 'is just LFR' or 'join a normal raid' camp. Being a 'free'raider in Wrath, I have objections to those two. Not that I think that every slot should be available in an LFR, but again, later post.

LLAP

Sometimes, I'll step outside of WoW on this blog...

A life is like a Garden.

Perfect moments can be had,

but not preserved,

except in memory.

            -L. Nimoy (last tweet)

Gruul Heroic - the numbers

Yesterday evening, Innovation went Heroic Foundry, and our first target was Gruul. Smashing, ceiling-collapsing, petrifying Gruul. And after a long night of running around, on attempt 15, we did the sacrifice-our-bear-tank-as-often-as-possible-strategy, and he went down. Yes, yes, the healer-rotation also worked.

Innovation beats Heroic Gruul

Now, I wanted to analyse my performance that night. And I normally did that with warcraftlogs, but last night I used the more graphical enhanced tool from Mr. Robot. I needed Microsoft Silverlight for that, and a upload-program. Which was installed fast.

I was actually running it during the raid, which meant I could look at the results after each wipe. That's more for Raidleaders I guess. To look at my own performance I need a little bit more time, although I now know where to look. Let's look at some screenshots I took from the logs.

The above picture gives a quick rundown of the actual kill. There are 6 buttons, with some colors around it. Now, Mr. Robot compares the numbers of your raid with all the other numbers they have. Now the DPS seems low, but that may have to do with other factors than only our performance. If we are compared with Mythic Guilds who ran HC last week, our numbers will be lower.

You also get a direct rundown on how the raid did with damaging abilities. We did well on Avoidable damage, which should make our healers happy, our potion usage..well...   under that line is an interesting line, especially considering Innovation killed Gruul on the 15th attempt.... although we had at least two 90%+ wipes, as in accidental pulls. (Yes, it says 9th attempt, but the first 5 are in another log, I was experimenting).

This picture is more personalized, it does what it says. What is your DPS compared to all the other Balance Druids (for me) that we can find on Mr. Robot. This time taking in account Ilvl though.. which makes me sad. Looking at earlier attempts, I saw myself Hovering around 75%, but I had a petrify less on me, and some luck with crits it seem...and I still had a 655-weapon during the kill, not after that though.

So, I dived a little bit more into the numbers, and here I find the two things I 'dislike/miss' so far. I would like to know what my performance was before a wipe is called. In the logs from the wipes I would like to exclude the part of the fight after a wipe is called. Our 6th attempt had a badly Inferno-slice at 3:10. I would like to know how I performed up to that, especially because I jumped into avoidable damage after that to speed up the wipe.

The second one I found when I looked at my Starfires. As you can see above you get this nice graph with the buffs various Starfires had. However, you cannot see if I was in Lunar or in Solar at the time of the cast. I know for sure I had some casts end up in the wrong cycle, that is not that bad if they are empowered, but an unempowered Starfire in Solar, yeah, I like to know how often that happened.

With this list, and the standard dps-list you get for all spells, I did find out that I probably had casted 8 starsurges while there was already an empowered buff active for that cycle. Now that is probably because I was running and my procs where about to reach 3, or just proc-ed to 3, but I should train myself to use a Starfall at that point. It does a little bit more damage. The rest seemed alright, now I hope my next numbers will be better, with the Gruul-staff

Phase 2

What a week.

First WoWinsider closed shop (see last post), but magically did a Phoenix on us, and transformed into a crowd-funded website called Blizzardwatch, scooping up everything they hoped for and more before most of us actually figured out this transformation. So, the magazine-website is back.

On Wednesday the new phase of Patch 6.0 happened. New raid, and new world-boss, Rukhmar, a fiery bird that flies around Spires of Arak, with a chance to drop a mount, and also some 665-gear. My first kill of it was very smoothly with Gwaednerth, who scooped up some pants. The next three kills where messy, very messy.

There is this spot where all groups I was in pulled it down. It is very close to the graveyard. So it becomes a race in most PuG's to kill the boss before to much people are looking at a res-timer of two minutes. One of the kills had the bird being pulled all the way to the close-by neutral fly-path, and back again. Giving everyone time to res again I guess.

Thursday night, Innovation went into Blackrock, after finding out where they put the entrance, we went in, and cleared the trash with two drops. This was Normal, just to look at it, and how it goes. The first boss stood in his big room, Gruul.

Gruul, the not-so dragonkiller.

Gruul, again... sort of. He still drops ceiling on you, and petrifies a part of the raid, but it wasn't that hard of a fight. First try he went down. For me that is a good thing, he does drop a intellect-mastery staff. I will probably get many chances to get that one...but not last night. My normal-tectus staff has to do the job longer.

Next up was Oregorger. We did one pull before the break, and found out that stacking is really stacking, because the puddles are big. During the break, people hearted to garrisons..  and started to disappear. At the end of the break, a third of our raid was swallowed by the black hole called garrison, not to return. And then one of our tanks decided to do a relog.... not a smart move.

We did continue, but with our force crippled a lot, it was more of a training-run. I found out that starfall hits everything, no LoS on anything. The big middle-puddle was not hindering me. But when we tried to use that, we found out that gnomes are to little, they do have LoS-issues with the dirt-piles. At the end of the night we had a 3% wipe, but it was decided to return there on sunday.

Forak an hour after his level 100 building-spree.

This is the fourth raidingweek for Innovation since the start, we still have people with warforged blues, and some with legendary cloaks (these tend to be better than the 640-cloaks). So, Innovation will do a Highmaul run again this week for the gear, although I doubt Imperator will go down, we already did a almost-full clear on heroic once before.

Tonight, it is Horde-night. I guess Beyond Redemption will also go to Normal Gruul... which brings me to a strange thing. If BR kills another boss tonight, I guess my Horde Guild is further in progression than Innovation...

Should we prepare for this?

Wowinsider

WoWInsider will stop publishing stories this week.

They started in November 2005, so they where around for almost 10 years. This seems a long time for a internet-magazine. That was how I looked at it. They had a lot of stories, maybe one new one every 4 hours? And I read a lot of them back when I started playing in 2007. I also read Maintankadin and uses Thottbot.

Both of these sides are still around, although Thottbot is a satelite of Wowhead, and Maintankadin is still a good site for tankadins, but neither of them have stories. Another site I read a lot is MMO-Champion, but again, no stories.

All the 'big' sites I read, are not magazine-sites. They are fact-sites, or forums, but most of the times there are no stories. For those, I have a blogroll. And I had WoW Insider.

I wonder if another site will fill in the void, WoW Insider will leave behind,
the magazine for World of Warcraft has ended, and I already miss it.

Ahead of the Curve

Gathering up last night, I jokely said everyone only had 5 deaths that evening....  and on our 5th pull of the evening, the 26th in total, he went down, with me already floor-hugging....

Heroic Innovation

And with that kill, tomorrow will be a very strange raid for Innovation. Since I joined at the start of Cataclysm, Innovation didn't really had a bench. I cannot remember any raid where more then two raiders had to be left behind, even one being left out was rare.

I am not talking about the time Innovation went 10-manning Firelands, that was a dark time. The bench was huge there, at least 8 people. I was lucky back than. I was ranged, and during that dark winter, Innovation only had three ranged left. And than our guildleader decided, 25 or bust.

Not that our raids actually had 25 people all the time. But we always went in when 21 people where there. And we had our fun back, and tomorrow, Innovation has a Mythic Raid planned... only 20 allowed.

Our last raids where full, or almost full, so 28+ raiders. Which means tomorrow people have to be benched, something that Innovation has not much experience on. I am not envious of the officer-corp. They have to decide who to sit out, and why. The statement made was rotational. So everyone will have their 2 raids a week I guess.

And that 2 weeks before the next phase of this Tier, Blackrock. I actually do not think we will be going into Highmaul much after we can enter Blackrock. So it is only a short benching experience. But Innovation will reach Mythic again. Of that I have no doubt.

Was Mar'gok really the end-boss???

For the Horde

Some recap-thoughts about last two weeks.

- I raided normal Highmaul on the Horde

- I went in with the minimum Ilevel required (630)

- I didn't expect high numbers

- Retribution Paladins are OP it seems

- Innovation clears the first 6 bosses in one evening on HC

- I still have a 655-mission weapon

- I have a mythic Shards of Nothing from a mission

- A week after I spend 150 dkp on the heroic one...

- Lurche is the only one without a garrison sofar

- That will probably be fixed this weekend

- I retired my Mac

- Except the air station

- So I can't throw it away

- I got a new videocard

- the old one was old

- I also got a new monitor

- I now have 5 inches more

- Streaming raids on twitch will be restarted soon

- I read the news on bloods

- I am eating more frostweed than ever for all the catalysts

- I am no longer doing 'minor' alts' garrisons on raid-days

- I only have so much time

- I should maybe tear down the barn for an inn

- I should maybe do mines and depths

- all for followers

- I have Thisalee

- Imperator is irritating

- Friday is for the Horde

- It is Friday

The raiding has started.

Sunday night, Innovation went into Highmaul the first time, the Heroic version that is. Without much problem we got Kargath down. The raidleaders opted to skip Butcher, and we went to Brackenspore, which was a little more difficult.

More difficult, as in people that had to be steered in one direction. Of the 27 characters present, I think half of them was new, not only the players, but also what they are playing. Some longstanding members also decided to stop raiding durng the christmas break, but with about 8 pulls, and two bosses down, nothing to worry about.

The Birds stealing the show after Brackenspore

Before the raid, I made sure I was ready. 60 potions, 40 greater flask, three WoD-crafted pieces ( two of which where 670, one 655), and everything reasonable gemmed/enchanted. After all the making and upgrading, my Argent Dawn reagent-list looks like this:

19 Savage Bloods (used for upgrading gear)
856 Burnished Leathers
1207 Raw Beast Hide (used in LW CD's)
84 Temporal Crystals (used by enchants in general)
1260 Draenic Dusts (used by enchanting CD's)
802 Primal Spirits (a potential 15 more Savage Bloods)
36 Sorcerous Air (used in Greater Mastery Taladite, Weapon Enchant,Ring enchant))
162 Sorcerous Earth (used by Neck enchant)
151 Sorcerous Water (used by Cloak enchant)
93 Sorcerous Fire (used for Greater Intellect Flask)
3999 Blackrock Ore (used for Alchemy,BS,JC,Engineering CD's)
4681 True Iron Ore (used for BS,JC,Engineering CD's/Mastery Taladite)
50 Hexweave Cloth
426 Gorgrond Flytraps (used by LW and Tailoring CD's)
553 Frostweed (used by Alchemy CD's)
184 Talador Orchid (used for Intellect Potion/Flask)
301 Starflowers (used for Intellect Flask/Mastery Taladite)
180 Fireweed
141 Nagrand Arrowblooms
529 Alchemical Catalysts (used for Greater Intellect Flask)
81 Taladite Crystals (used in Greater Mastery Taladite)
371 Truesteel Ingots
67 Gearspring Parts
59 War Paints

What really jumps out is the amount of raw materials I have, normally for gathering professions. 8500+ ores, about a 1000 herbs, even after all the stuff I made. I still have a lot of Burnished leather, but getting those did require a bit more effort (Hello Clefthoof trapping). I have no idea what to do with the massive amount of ores at the moment, just stop mining is the only thing I can think of.

Some of the reagents are lower, but I did make a 670-Tailoring Cloak, 670-Necklace and a 655-trinket. Also a Blingtron was constructed, several engineering.blacksmithing pets, a LW-mount, and of course the before mentioned alchemy stuff.

I am wondering why I still have skinning on Mardah though, I should probably change it, but it feels wrong, and I am not sure Blizzard will come up with something useful for it. For that matter, Herbing and Mining as a profession are equally screwed....  why have it, if all the stuff you need can be done by your garrison-buildings....the three seem rather useless now.

Oh, yeah, I know I can make another 670-piece of gear, but I am waiting with that a little bit, just to see what will drop from bonus rolls. I expect one of my rolls will get me a cloak or necklace, so I can than replace the self-made one, with a leather working-thingie... raid starts at 1900, let us roll the dice again.

Mardah's real controller is spotted