You know, when I’m not posting blogs on all of the moonkin changes in Cataclysm, I play this little game called World of Warcraft. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
So I figured, it might be a good idea to give you guys an update to what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been thinking, what I’ve been messing with.
Progression, gear, professions, money making. This is getting crazy!
Progression
We are still working on Lich King 25 heroic. After six years of World of Warcraft, this sure is one heck of a fight. We struggle with phase 2 wipes. It seems to be nothing more than defiles going bad, healers being caught in the worst kind of moments, Valkyr’s missing a stun, not taking the splash damage they are supposed to, and so on.
I’ve seen it on 10 man. I get the feeling that, once we get through phase two reliably, it should go down fairly quickly hereafter. Phase 3 is not very hard to get your head wrapped around, once people understand how to move in the Frostmourne room, and when the tanks can coordinate the spirit soaking.
I don’t fret, though. We clear the other 11 bosses in a few hours, and I’m not unaccustomed to wiping. It’s been slow over the summer as well, and as long as I’m with good company, I don’t really mind the wiping.
Halion is a difficult fight as well, but we are making great headway on him as well. The normal version died rather quickly, of course, but the heroic version sure pulls out a few teeth. However, in just some 3 hours we went from wiping at 90% to passing to phase 3 with no deaths. Now we just need to cover the last 50% of the fight.
Two bosses left and many months until the expansion. I’m in no rush.
Gear
So, I’m getting pretty close to my BIS list. Well, the ICC one, at least – we haven’t killed Halion on heroic yet, ofcourse, so I’m holding out for those items.
In our tier 10 set, both the gloves and pants has crit and hit. Most people replace the pants with the cloth pants from Festergut heroic, which has haste and hit instead. The alternative is to use the cloth gloves from Gunship, which also has haste and hit. Either way, you have two items, both of them can be used to swap out a crit tier piece for a haste piece. I had the choice of battling the clothies on the pants, or take the cloth gloves. The choice was easy when nobody wanted the gloves.
That leaves me missing one heroic token. My normal DFO could use an upgrade, but I’ll be swapping DFO with the trinket from Halion once we get him down on heroic. This leaves my belt and boots, both ilevel 277 leather boots with spirit, that will eventually be swapped out for the cloth pieces without spirit. The leather pieces are alright, but still some 20% behind the cloth pieces with both haste and crit. Last but not least, I’m gunning for the Royal Scepter from Lich King heroic when we get him down. Piece of cake!
Professions
I’ve been running with jewelcrafting and enchanting for ages now. And I was getting pretty tired of both of them. Engineering is currently the best profession for moonkins – the glove enchant is absolutely amazing. So I dropped jewelcrafting and three hours later, I had spent 5.000 gold for 450 skill points in engineering.
Besides the cool buffs, engineering is absolutely hillarious. Speeding around with rocket boots, doing flight form bombings on passing alliance players, luring lowbies to attack explosive critters. And having the wormhole generator, MOLL-E and, of course, Jeeves, makes everything a lot faster.
When it came to deciding between dropping enchanting and jewelcrafting, my choice was on the future. Both of them are equal in the bonus we gain, but if I dropped enchanting, I would end up with two professions both requiring a lot of ores and bars. Instead, my plan is to make money with enchanting and use that money to level engineering in Cataclysm. I should come out even.
Engineering is fun!
Money
In the past few months, I’ve been working on getting a little bit more cash in my bags. I’ve never really been one for making a lot of gold. For most of this expansion, I’ve hovered around 20.000 gold, not needing more, not spending more than the raid bosses cover when they die. But the allure of money is too strong, and so I started playing with the action house. I was on a steady 5.000 gold a week, if not more, and I enden up at some 60.000 gold when I dropped my jewelcrafting. This was obviously how I made most of my gold, buying gems, cutting them and relisting them.
With jewelcrafting gone, I suppose I’ve lost my income as well. Still, I couldn’t help myself from buying a lot of cheap Cardinal Rubies yesterday, and getting my guildies to cut them. That and 14 Dreadstones, 24 ametrines and a handful of Zircons. I suppose I haven’t really lost my income, I just need to ally myself with someone who can be bothered to cut that many gems.
For the first time in history, I was scammed, just the other day. Well, not so much scammed as bethefted. Well, he didn’t really steal from me, rather I gave him a lot of gold. The story is as such: I’ve been selling Titanium Powder to this guy for a long time. Many stacks of it, and I’ve given him a good discount because he has bought so much. So the other day, I had a few stacks, and asked if I should COD them to him for the usual price. A deal was struck, and I send him the powders. And 600 gold. The 600 gold I was supposed to put in as COD, not just as an extra present.
I wrote him and said “Hey dude, I made a mistake, can you return the cash?”, and he said “Sure mate, not a problem”. Thinking that my 1.200 gold would land in my mailbox soon, I didn’t really do much more. Five hours later, I write him to hear what’s up with my gold. “Deghan is ignoring you“. Well I’ll be damned!
I know, I know, this is largely my own fault. I could just have checked the mail before I sent it. But it does sadden me when people destroy a good thing just for a bit of cash. My feelings on it is that, if he really had to keep the cash and put me on ignore, then he probably needed the gold more than I do. I guess I learned my lession!
Blog?
Right. The blog is going great. Since I started Qieth’s Quips in November, I have gained a steady 1.200 new visitors each month. Current statistics show me at 9.200 visitors per month, which is quite a nice growth in just 8 months.
I am having a graphics artist freshen up the site a bit. A few people commented that the background and logo isn’t really very moonkin-y, and I figured that particular feedback was spot on. Ginny “Immamoonkin” Higerd is working on some sweet, sweet graphics, and it should be ready within a week or two.
No, sorry, no previews just yet. All I can say is that it will be very awesome, and very much moonkin!
Any suggestions on growing blog readership? Yours sounds like a great success story, and your content is great. I’m at the place I imagine you were 6 months ago, and I’d love some “pro-tips.”
I found Qieth’s site because Graylo add it as a followed blog. I have enjoyed my experience with the site and its one of the few I make comments on (even if I went back to feral in ICC). The other place I have found some great resources is the Blog Roll thread in the MMO Champion class forums. Getting listed there will help give you exposure. Hope that helps.
Aye, I think most of my initial success came from forums – MMO-champion in particular. I am a longtime poster in pretty much any moonkin thread on MMO, so people know me, know the stuff I post, and – i suppose – respects or accepts (whatever you prefer
) my responses. I have a link to the blog in the druid blog roll and in my signature.
This is probably the best tip I can ever give you: Use your signature. I haven’t made anything intrusive. Up until yesterday, my signature was pure text, updated whenever I made a new blog post. But when you post a lot, and people know you, they come to value your answers, and they are probably more inclined to click links in your signature.
** Some claim that my mod status on MMO Champion gave me a lot of clicks – I doub that, really, cause there was no increase in the visitors, mostly because the regulars already knew me in the threads **
If you want to talk about blogging, join us on blogazeroth.com. Its a small forum for WoW bloggers.
Another few quick tips: Visit other peoples blogs, make comments to their posts, start a (friendly) discussion. It might make the author interested enough to come visit you, talk about you, refer to you, or add you to their blogroll. Use Twitter to send out notifications when you write new blogs, and ofcourse: Write, write, write
Well I know blizzard can refund your gold and take it away from the guy if he clearly wrote “can you CoD this item for this much gold” and then you later said “I made a mistake, can you send it back” and he agreed, they can look at everything we write online, so they can probably sort that out… otherwise you just fucked up this guy’s reputation xD I’m not going to get near him now.