Alchemy changes & content patch

Blizzard started to release information about the upcoming changes to the professions. The alchemy changes are connected to Tigole's announcement that Blizz wants to rework the amount of consumables needed for raids. The changes for alchemy include

# Elixirs now stack in two categories, Battle (Offensive) and Guardian (Defensive) Elixirs. You can only have one of each type of Elixir up at a time. As a result Elixirs now stack with class abilities such as "Arcane Intellect."
# Four new defensive elixirs have been added. Two are on trainers, one is in Halaa and one is in Cenarion Expedition.
# "Flask of Petrification" can no longer be turned off during its duration, but it now will clear all threat from all monsters for the duration of the effect. Though monsters may reaquire you after the effect ends.
# The cost to purchase Imbued Vials has been reduced.

The cost for the vials is only very minor compared to what some herbs cost at the AH. Some main problems still won't be fixed with this and questions remain. For me the food buffs via cooking seem to be in good order, fishing will get slightly buffed with the patch as well. So it looks like you'll only be able to have one elixir of each type (offensive/defensive) on you at a time, which will stack with buffs (remains to be seen what the new elixirs will be like), which is most likely more benefitial to casters. Question is: Will flasks count as some type of elixir? If not, why should they still procc for elixir master? All the elixir masters trying to reasoning why flasks should procc for them makes me tired anyway. I can understand they try to defend it, but at the moment potion and elixir master are nowhere near par. One main reason for this is that the new major protection potions are way to expensive to produce and for ~30g a potion, no one is using them.

I'm really disappointed with the state of alchemy and my mastery (being potion). Thulf has always been one of the best alchemists on Argent Dawn, since release. As alchemy is easy to level, many people have alts being alchemists which satisfy their "normal" potion needs - a fact that makes it harder for us "fulltime" alchemists to brew in bulk to maybe discover additional recipes. There is a demand for high-end potions, but still it's too easy to obtain all the recipes, or at least was in old "vanilla" WoW. The new discovery system is just too random to do any good. While i embrace the idea of having some variety between the crafters, a serious alchemist brewing thousands of potions can still be unlucky and not discover a single new recipe. I discovered one flask so far, while i know some others who only brew very seldom already got 2-3 new recipes. My main gripe with the situation elixir vs. potions is, beside the major prot pots, that the new 15sec boost potions are not useful enough to be in demand. Maybe if they would not share the same cooldown with eg. mana/healing potions people would consider them more. I know ALL BoE alchemy recipes and most BoP ones as well, still it does not put me in a situation where some of the pots, I'm one of the few alchemists to know the recipe, are in high demand. The cost vs. usefulness just does not cut it. The main potion i get some joy out of my mastery is the Ironshield one, but that's about it for the moment. So IMO Blizzard also needs to rework the level of potion use vs. elixir use.

Back to the changes for consumables: The posted changes don't really change *that* much. Depending on how the new elixirs will be and what herbs they'll use, i forsee some new bottlenecks for herbs, as eg. only certain types of potions are being valued best and therefore demand for those herbs will go up while some other elixirs won't be bothered much about anymore. So far there is no word about maybe improving the herb supply a little bit by eg. give one more from each node. Oh, i just got one Lichen from the node, the rest i have to share with the other three herbalists in my group. If it will still be possible to use flask + 2x elixir + food buffs + weapon buffs, etc. It won't really change that much (at least not for tanks or healers)... although for some weak geared raids some of the DPS race fights could prove more troublesome. There are rumours about flasks using up both slots for elixirs, but nothing definite yet. Blue said they'll most likely release more info on the alchemy changes at the end of the week. As it was stated the preview does not include all changes, this will stay interesting. The reduced amount of potions you can use will have a slight impact on the amount of gold/farm time invested in raiding but it's still not enough to make up for a whole night of wiping at new content wit new pots each go, where you maybe spend 20-30 pots of each type per night. So hopefully there is more to come... I can understand Blizzard does not want to retune every encounter due to heavy changes, but if you eg. look at the AP you can gain from pots/flasks the mentioned change is minimal and does in no way reduce the necessity of potting up for difficult encounters.

Blizzard also released a sneakpeak into new content for the upcoming patch 2.1.0. Looks like more "casual" lvl 70 content will be implemented, which is nice. Even if some talk about upcoming Skettis becoming the new Silithius and fear the new content will be equally grind orientated, we'll have to wait and see. Maybe Blizzard learned from those past mistakes, maybe not. Nether Drakes will be implemented as well, the non-armored ones. Looks like the already existing questline will continue in some way. The Netherdrake mount will be 280% (epic) speed, while the armored ones from arena will be 310%. I'm not sure if I'll bother to obtain one. I'm not really fond of their looks and might only go for it if it's a difficult thing to obtain (yes, I'm an achiever *g*). I really would like to know where the PvE counterpart for the 310% mount can be acquired.. only time will tell.

On a last sidenote, in addition to AtlasLoot i started to use SellFish, which adds sell values (selling stuff to a vendor) to your items. Useful if your bag space is limited and you have to decide what stuff to throw away.

Medivh's Journal

So half of Karazhan is full with books, i wonder how long it would take to read them all? Months? Years? One of the most important books inside Karazhan is Medivh's Journal tho. The questline will allow you to summon Nightbane at the end. As we recently killed Aran and could seize the journal, I started to work on the final steps of the quest. Only one quick run into heroic Shattered Halls left to be able to summon the dragon. The reward at the end is a bit .. meh, but at least the urn to summon him will stay.

Talking about books in Karazhan: Did you realized all the Sealed Tomes laying around on the floor (starts after Curator)? Between all the books some of them you can pick up, either being a trap or granting you a book with a one hour buff. As they are not BoP, everyone can just pick them up and hand them over to a class that makes best use of that buff. If you leave Karazhan, books/buffs are gone - they respawn on the floor after some time btw. The funniest is the one that turns you into a worgen when it proccs. On a sidenote, all books leave a single page in your inventory after being used. I uploaded copies of those pages:
Wrath of the Titans
Legacy of the Mountain King
Torment of the Worgen
Redemption of the Fallen

Do you use Elkano's BuffBar? If so (and you're not afraid of beta versions), there is a new beta version of ElkBuffBars out. The main improvement feature is that you can very easily add new "buff groups" (configured by blacklist/whitelist). I use this feature to eg. have a seperate group for the buffs i can maintain and my weapon procc (to get a better feeling how often it does procc). The beta works great for me and is really worth trying. For weapon proccs you could also try ProcMeter tho.
Talking about mods, the SpamSentry mod is really nice.. used it for some time now. As the filter is very agressive, you have to watch closely tho which people land on the spamlist. I had to take the trade channel of the watchlist, as regularly people ended up on the reportlist that should not be there (NO, i did not report them). But in the sum up makes reporting gold sellers much easier and less annoying for yourself.

Surely you would not deny an old man a replenishing drink?

We went back to Karazhan to visit our friend Aran and have a cup of tea with him. Unfortunately he went mad before we arrived, so we had to kill him. After two warm-up goes to adjust tactics slightly depended our experience from last time, we took him down without major problems the 3rd time. One of those fights, when you got the boss down, you ask yourself "What was causing trouble before?". But i still think it's a fun fight, while i can understand some people get an overload error by doing several things at the same time. We found it helped us to have one ranged attacker with a raid icon on his head running after the blizzard, that way even people with low gfx settings etc. could see it fast enough to react.

We decided to check out Medivh's Chambers afterwards, as we heard he got this huuuuuge love trap he calls his bed. As several fleshbeasts drooled on his stuff, we did not want to stay but went to visit the Prince. It's quite funny on the way, there are some doors, if you open them you get attacked immediately. In another context I'd have said "It's a trap!". We reached the prince quickly and after a very short tactical briefing engaged him... in the first go he went down to 6%. Looks very doable. In our next attempt we were really unlucky with elementals and wiped, resulting in the prince to bug. He was not attackable anymore - WTF?! The more bugs you encounter in these "already tested instances", the more you can understand eg. raid groups complaining about Serpentshrine or the Eye - asking Blizzard if they tested the buggy crap at all.

What to do? We decided to go back to the room with the Imps and keep one enslaved imp, take him with us and release/fight him next to the prince. This worked to unbug him and we could have another go. Unfortunately this whole thing took far too long, therefore we got respawns and called it a night. But we'll be back next week, really did not seem that hard at all. Maybe Tinfoil Hats will prevent him bugging out next time.

I discovered recently that my KillSalvation mod stopped working, no idea why. Therefore i installed a new one called Block Salvation for this purpose. In addition i installed a new mod called SpamSentry - Anti goldspam. This mod provides you with several filters to keep goldspam away from you and in addition provides you with a two-click possibility to report gold-sellers regardless if they whispered you or send you mail. I tested it for two days now and am satisfied with the functionality, I'll keep that one installed. If you get annoyed as well, check it out.

Nielas the Ghost

Our adventures in Karazhan are going quite well. We established a fast enough pace to go from Attumen the Huntsman to the chess event in one night. The side-entrance enables us to go back the next raid and start with the Shade of Aran (after bashing down the annoying magic immune eels), who is the ghost of Nielas Aran (the father of Medivh). This fight is a *lot* of fun (heh, finally i can go DPS *g*) but boils down to everyone knowing exactly how to react in the different situations. If you have a handful of people with you that visit him for the first time, it takes a moment until all get into the right "swing" and you can have some good attempts on him. As we operate two Karazhan raids at the same time and intend to mix people around, so everyone knows to play with everyone, we only had two serious raids with attempts on him yet, after bringing "new" people up to speed on the encounter. Our best go was 13%, so i assume the next time we visit him, when all people saw the fight before, hes dead meat... oh wait, then again hes a ghost. ;)
One thing we experienced was, that some people had trouble to spot the Blizzard. If you got problems with that as well, make sure your spell detail level is not turned down to low, as then you'll only see half of the Blizzard what other people will see. And of course it's always Blizzards fault *insert comment about lame wordplay here*

I was able to upgrade some of my gear as well. During our recent runs i could snatch the Wrynn Dynasty Greaves and the Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable. In total i know have 12.8k HP while being very close to 75% damage reduction against bosses. Very nice, on the right way I'd say. ;) Talking about gear, what's recently wrong with the Blizzard Armory? My profile was last updated one week ago... do they only update during maintenance now? Slackers!

On the note of socketed gems in gear, did you know you can eg. insert a heroic BoP gem (like the one we got yesterday in heroic Mechanar *grumbles*) into a BoE item and still give the item to someone else or sell it? More info in this thread. Talking about heroic dungeons: Yesterday i finally got the opportunity to test my 300+ Shadow Resistance gear. Most of it are TBC greens "of Shadow Protection". We tried it on the first boss in heroic Mana Tombs and i resisted around 50% of his damage - makes the fight much easier. Now i need to test it in heroic Arcatraz on the shadow damage boss there.

As a closing tip: If you run as many mods as i do, sometimes you might run into the limitation of the allocated memory. There will be some major changes on memory usage of mods and the UI with 2.1.0 but it's already possible to use part of the functionality. If you set the memory threshold to "0" (zero), WoW will use as much memory for mods as is needed. While some rogue addon could eat up all your memory, it's very unlikely and if you reach a set threshold WoW will exit anyway. So I strongly suggest to change it like this; will become the default setting with next patch anyway. It's also possible to test the new memory garbage collecting function, you can use a macro with

/script collectgarbage("setpause", 110)

If you're ineterested in further info about the changes, read here.

The Ironshield

After our Karazhan raid yesterday, which was very smooth (no wipes at the known bosses), i could gather some people to join me for a quick Old Hillsbrad run. Since quite a while now i was searching for the Recipe: Ironshield Potion. I even started to enter myself into the LFG system and PUG that place, paying off other alchemists in the groups to pass, should it drop. But i had no luck so far.. until yesterday night. The other alchemists in the group were so nice to pass for me (thanks again guys!), so my joy about that drop was huge. ;) This leaves only two alchemy recipes to gather, which are not faction sold. Talking about faction, after my next Coilfang run I'll be able to acquire the Recipe: Major Nature Protection Potion.

Since the Armory is being more and more used by people, there is a lot of discussion and many suggestions how to take a service like that to the next level. Wouldn't it be the next logical thing to connect players also outside the game? Create a large community, add extra service like attunement tracking or recruiting? There are a few services that try to gather the critical mass to be successful, one being in beta is Rupture. I'm very sure we'll see more and more features added over time, be it from Blizzard or at some other community. A nice guild/raid community management system would be a good start...

Talking about raiding: I replaced CTRA for good. I always wanted to try oRA2 (which is compatible to CTRA concerning raid functions, so it does not matter what people use in the raid) and recently installed it. Very nice, like it a lot. Especially MT management is much faster with it. Depending on which additional functions you need, you might have to install additional mods, but IMO it's well worth it.

heroic Shadow Lab

As a quick pre-comment: I went back into the raiding game. I joined Impact recently. Before TBC i raided a few times with them and they are a nice bunch of people. Currently we try to run two groups for Karazhan and as soon as people are geared up enough we'll peak into Gruul's Lair.
After our last Karazhan raid a group of us decided to adventure into heroic Shadow Lab. It takes much longer in heroic then on normal, so bring enough time and don't start in the middle of the night, like we did. :)

In SL there are some things that got changed for heroics. The first two rooms at the first two bossed are the greatest pain. The warlocks near Ambassador Hellmaw are four now and beware, they cleanse each other. So it will be necessary to keep them crowd controled out of LOS from each other or a loose one can free others. I recommend using a warrior tank who stance dances for the fearing Felguards, they hit hard enough to one- or two-shot people if the tank gets feared. We had good success with using a hunter to kite them a moment and then feign, should the tank get feared. Ambassador Hellmaw has nothing new to show, just his fear seems to be longer.

The next room with the large groups (up to six mobs) requires good planning and use of CC abilities, especially as they cause more damage on heroic. If you have a priest, he should MC a mob even if hes the main healer. The acolytes (sp?) have powerful healing spells, so he can heal with them as well. We had trouble to kill Blackheart the Inciter with only one healer, so i suggest to take an off-healer with you as well. The fight is just too chaotic and one healer will struggle to keep the group up.

The next interesting challenge causes Grandmaster Vorpil. The voids will spawn much faster and his hellfire does more damage. So jump from the platform after a teleport in a split second or you take huge damage. One new trick he learned is that he'll banish a random player, can even hit the tank. As this fight is a faster time race on heroic, we found the best tactic for us was to have the tank in DPS gear (as Vorpil hits like a wuzz) and DPS him down fast. Should the voids become too many, we tried to kite him down south and when he teleports us, take him north afterwards. In total this should give you enough time to kill him.

Murmur is a nice awareness check in heroic. His touch will now work like a magnet for the other group members, so you have to spread out quickly again or else you'll take damage from your team mate exploding. Beside his Sonic Boom, he now got another AoE ability which will hit you, if you don't run back into the circle fast enough after the sonic boom. So basicly you spread out inside his circle. Watch if you get yanked from a touch and when the sonic boom comes, you run out and directly after the cast you run back in. As this fight is very boring in normal, they should have done this for normal as well - finally makes it a challenge. Unfortunately we were so tired when we reached him, that we wiped at 4%, 5% etc. After a few tries we decided to call it and get some sleep. Next time we'll take revenge. ;)

I just discovered that ItemSync seems to have problems catching all items from eg. chat. Some items it just can't remember. As the author is busy and did not fix that problem yet, i decided to switch to AtlasLoot Enhanced for the moment. Basicly it's a database with loot lists for the various instances or faction vendors etc. I tried it and very much like it... it's quick to check for certain drops and it keeps extra lists for heroic as well. In addition i upgraded my Atlas. AtlasLoot Enhanced will integrate itself into the Atlas maps, but as not all maps are in Atlas, you're better off using the own interface to check for drops. As there are several beta versions and older versions floating around, here are the two i installed (those work together perfectly):
AtlasLoot_Enhanced_v2.04.00_Beta4
Atlas 1.9b1

The Dark Portal becomes porous

Yo Thulf! Where have you been? That's a question i was often asked over the last days. But you know how it is.. xmas & NY, some holidays, good food and such. I reloaded my batteries for the upcoming expansion. So yes, I'll be here with you for the new adventures to come.

The last patch brought us the "opening event" for the Dark Portal. Tons of demons coming through.. but boy, what a disappointment. Again a situation i ask myself why i pay a monthly fee. Such a lame implementation... even if they would have revoked the undead invasion again that would have been more fun. So what do we get? Only one quest and Kruul (raid boss) roaming around as Kazzak left through the portal. The quest tabard is just the standard AD design - yay for time invested in cool new models Blizzard. *rolleyes* Then i rather play a warcraft inspired flash game like Tower Defense instead of crappy new stuff. /rant over

The last patch broke a few mods and also gifted us with a bunch of bugs - like not correct working raid promotes, etc. - which result in players asking Blizzard "Are you prepared?", referring to the expansion. I'm not sure yet how well it will be handled with the storm of players.

In preparation for TBC, here are links that might aid you for the start:
- Burning Crusade Maps with Locations
- Noob's Guide to Outland
- Reputations FAQ in BC

There are tons of pics and movies out from the beta server, most are rather bad or boring. I'm still waiting on teh final exploration movie... but in the meantime you can drool over Warrior T6 models
or check out this movie: Karazhan (Unskilled) [416 Mb]

On a final note, i updated my addon list to the right again. Minor changes like link fixes to new versions and such mainly. The most interesting new mod i installed is PartySpotter, which adds visibility for raid members with group numbers on your map. Some more features, go check it out. And for all fishermen, you can rejoice: The new Fishing Buddy beta brought the EasyCast function back.

click-click-click... Tonk

Yesterday i joined Impact for a raid into BWL. A nice bunch of people, i very much enjoyed the time. Nearly forgot to add that lucky me could snatch the Head of the Broodlord Lashlayer during the raid. Not sure if the rewards will be of much use in TBC, but i want to experience the nice scripted questlines... and heh, in TBC they will yield XP as well. =)
As was being expected after the recent patch, it turned into a stress test for updated mods and configurations. Personally i had to realize that with my new actionbar mod Bongos, there were no real cooldowns on my skills. Sometimes a skill would grey out (that's why i did not realize before) but in 95% of the time i could not distinguish if the skill was available. It was an interesting experience to go through BWL and just go after my "feeling" for when and which skill to use. For this mess, it went ok i think. *chuckles* This happened as i did download the mod with a direct link, while the main sites were down, and the author does not have a proper readme.txt included. He also offers OmniCC which fixes the problem and also adds a visible cooldown on eg. items i have in my bank - really nice.

One thing that stroke immediately as highly annoying was the "click-bug" that was introduced with the new patch. Basicly while in a raid you'll hear a clicking-noise every time someone joins/leaves the raid channel... drives you insane fast! To fix it either use the following macro or search the mod-sites for a tiny addon against it.. i saw 3-4 different ones.

/script if not _clickfixed then __xps=PlaySound; function PlaySound(snd) if (snd~="igCharacterInfoTab") then __xps(snd); end end _clickfixed=1; end

During the last days i also saw the first Hippogryph Hatchling. It's one of the special rewards from the WoW TCG. Looks quite funny. I also heard that with the last patch the idle animation from the Zergling was improved... have to look out for it.

I started to update my addon list on the right and clean it up or change broken links. As some of the addon websites still have trouble, it might take a few days until it's complete, but most links are updated already.

Apparently there is a gold dupe bug that surfaced first on the Mannoroth server. Blizzard tried to contain the damage and deleted a ton of posts and suspended many players. Rumours say a GM showed up on the bridge to AH and perma silenced and sleep every player who was talking about it. I'm not sure how exaggerated those reports are, but seems Blizzard did not handle it with the sensitive but the huge Ogre-Hammer. Although they did not set back the affected servers, which seems odd. Some more info on the EJ Forums.

A last tip for our engineers: Since the patch there is a new schematic for a Steam Tonk Controller available at the Darkmoon Fair. It will cost you 40 tickets. The controller itself is rather cheap to produce, has 50 charges and more important is BoE so you can hand it out to friends as well. From what i hear you can summon the tonks everywhere but in the large cities. So yes, also in raid instances. ;)

The madness from within...

...appears on major patchdays, like this week. Longer maintenance, servers up, servers down... emergency maintenance until midnight. yay! Not that it would matter, as basicly no one is playing with the Blizzard standard UI, the addon websites are getting hammered and are more offline then reachable.

I was able to snatch most updates for the mods i use. A few, like eg. Gatherer & Auctioneer, will be delayed for around one or two weeks - as announced by the authors. One thing i can't live with tho, is the unknown ETA for the new version of DAB. Therefore i switched my barmod. First I tried Bartender 3, but i got errors with it as i don't use FuBar, odd.. but i was not up to fiddle around with it too much and just commenting out the FuBar stuff did not help. Then i tried Bongos, which i like... easy to setup, nice to configure. Only thing that does not work properly yet is the stance-page-switching. It's not possible to use the config tab for that option properly and the mod says it will use (for a warrior) pages 6,7,8 for the stance switching, but in reality it uses 7,8,9 for it. So if you should use it, that's why you keep messing up your bars. ;)

Should you still struggle to find updates for your mods, maybe the following links can help you:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=53986209&sid=1
http://www.discordmods.com/cgi-bin/showmessage.pl?forum=general&msgnum=1137
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=52828590&sid=1
http://www.wowace.com/files/ (works even when mainpage is down)

If i find the time during the next days, I'll play around a bit more with the new talents and stuff. Right now I'm busy to set up my UI and configure my new mods.

In the meantime you can start reading about the macro changes: Macros Library 2.0 by Class. I'm sure in the WoW forum you'll find ample posts as well.

I appologize in advance should i not answer to comments quickly atm, but i made the "mistake" to port my blog over to the new beta blogger, which is still very buggy if you don't use eg. IE as a browser. And it's not possible to change it back. *sigh* Talking about comments, please always post your char name or similar (choose other) and not Anonymous. Much nicer to see whom you're talking to.