Raid Recovery: Flame Leviathon exploits and ethics for raid solutions

Most of you should have spent substantial time on raid recovery from wipes on Flame leviathan, be it on 2 towers, 3 towers, or even 4 towers. Well, you've watched how 2 players can take down a 10man FL and how 4 players can do that with a 25 man FL.

But today is not about that.

Today is about a bug with Flame Leviathan, that will allow even 1 single player to solo FL-25 with 4 towers, even though it will take forever.

Its an exploit that I've seen quite a bit of places using, and I have mixed feelings about it. Being so widespread, I'm still unsure why blizzard hasn't nerfed it yet considering how quickly they did the Freya nerf. Well, I suppose it is because this time a video wasn't posted that made it to wow.com or mmochampion.

Perhaps if I write about it here, Blizzard will finally do something...

Basically if you've done flame leviathan on 4 towers, you know that is no joke, and is harder than quite a bit of other hard mode bosses. For example XT-Deconstructor is a joke compared to 4 up. However, with the bug, a 25 man team can effortlessly kill a 4 towered Flame Leviathan in 2 to 3 wipe recoveries.

Step 1) Clear trash all the way to the last pack, with people moving back right after the last pull of adds have been killed. You will engage flame leviathan, and the raid group will kite the truck all the way back until the truck exits the boxed up zone.

Step 2) Dps normally, including doing shutdowns and effectively fighting him as normal while ignoring all other adds and laser beams and whatever.

Step 3) Eventually you'll all wipe, and Flame Leviathan will slowly roll back towards his spawn point. At this point you must graveyard zerg all the way to the vehicles, board it and engage quickly, following step 1.

I found out about this after joining a pug (on my alt) that turned out to be raid led by chinese gold farmers, who promptly got their ilvl 239 loot on their own alts.

I personally think that this way of doing this boss isnt ethical as it really defeats the point of the particular game. A problem is presented and there is a solution, but this way of doing it is akin to just typing an instant win code and grabbing the loot.

I'm not sure about other people however, as the other pugs were just happy to get their 2 EoC and a chance at 226 loot, what do you all think of this raid solution?

Also, I would like to give a shoutout to Bosskillers for adding me to their resource page for flame leviathan!

Golden flames and frozen lords: Important numbers to take note of in the midsummer fire festival

Here is another quick one on the fire festival after the last. I'll make a more complete post soon!
And I bet you're dying to know what is the maximum number of blossoms attainable.

But here are some things you'll probably want to know about this 2 weeks of midsummer.

Resources I found really helpful
Wowhead's very comprehensive coverage
Wowwiki's article

I've also obtained certain information from other people.

It seems quite a bit of people have obtained Flame Keeper/Flame Warden and I've also popped some questions over to them.

Here's what you need to know:

You can get a maximum of about 1000 blossoms if you do every single bonfire including those in ˜Northrend.
632 From normal Quests, about 200 plus from doing dailies every day, and 120 from doinng the northrend fires.

You'll want to take note that Northrend fires do no count towards the meta-achievement: flame keeper title.

You'll get roughly 500 to 700 gold in pocket change just from turning in all these quests. So its a pretty good bonus.

If you're running short of blossoms, here are some blossom saving tips!

Your alt can do dailies for the TORCHES, which can be traded, and thus mailed towards your main so you won't have to waste blossoms purchasing torches for the 40 juggles in dalaran achievement.

(you need about 10 torches to throw to easily get that achieve)

And yes, you can probably sell those spare torches into trade channel for spare gold pieces.
Gold!

You can also resell the midsummer mantle back to the vendor for 100 blossoms if you are within the 2 hour window. The 2 hour window works for the time you are logged into the game and not for real time. I have yet to check if you can do this for other items. But as a result, you have an extra "virtual" 100 blossoms to play around with.

If you intend to make use of it, you might want to complete that particular achievement soon as the refund trick looks like something blizzard might change their mind and hotfix it

The pet dropped by Ahune is different from the 350 burning blossoms pet, so pet collectors beware..
This will be a horrible week!

Over and out!

Midsummer Fire Festival: Torch catching and tossing in 2009

You can view my previous post on pvp gear buy list here if you missed it.
Or perhaps you might be here for the post about epic gems and titanium ores

Here's a quick one, just before I go off.

Midsummer's festival begins in wow today, and you're probably rushing off to do all those quests.
For those stuck in torch tossing or torch juggling/catching, here's a few tips.

Bind the torch to an action bar so you won't have to click them out of your inventory. It makes it faster, and you can do more tries in a shorter amount of time.

For juggling or catching, go to less crowded cities like Silvermoon or Exodar (or thunderbluff or darnassuss) and then just throw the torch, look at the ground for a shadow. I personally equiped a movespeed buff item, like the meta gems or a leg enchant, but you can do it without those. If you're a JC, you can pack out your ruby hare from the bank.

As for those people still levelling their mains or toons, you'll probably want to dance around the torch, as it gives an extra 10% exp for a maximum of one hour

Over and out!

Buy pvp gear in honor of arena points, a complete table of what is available in the game at lvl 80 (Season 6 Arena 3 lines of pvp tiers)

Last time I gave a list of all the items that were available for purely honor points (i.e. pvp gear for honor) and without any ratings attached to it. After having dabbled a bit in PVP recently, I've found that a few games of arena a week with a good friend was pretty fun, and had done slightly further research upon the types of gear available. I've also completed making a list of all the wow honor and arena gear for you to use!

Thankfully, unlike end game PvE, PvP gear is really really simple, having only a handful of choices at the most for each slot, and having all the possible gear being available from only two vendors. Of course, I'm discounting all the hardcore PvPers that PvE to get vold'rethar to be used inside Arenas.

The two vendors of which I speak of lies within Dalaran Sewers, rather close to the arena master in the region, and also the faction specific gear vendor, which will be in Orgrimmar or Stormwind respectively.

The other by which I'll go about this would be to start with the physical locations by which you can acquire them, and then by pure honor, followed by rating requirements.

For people who are just starting off, I had previously recorded all the pure honor items in a post over here (with pictures), but I'll do a short recap.
Orgrimmar is where you go to purchase all the pure honor items, and you can purchase the Hateful Tier Pieces for a total of 212,000 honor points
If you are interested in their individual prices, they are

For 31600 Honor
Shoulders
Gloves

For 49600 Honor
Chest
Legs
Helm

Other means of acquiring this include paying half arena points and half honor, or by burning emblems of valor into the respective gears. There is also always Vault of Archavon 10 lucky drops.

From the same area, you can also purchase all the Deadly Offset gear for pure honor. Besides Emalon 10 drops, this is the only way to purchase those items
Their prices are as follows

For 31600 Honor
Bracers
Hateful Ring

For 38000 Honor
Cloak
Neck
Deadly Ring

For 49600 Honor
Battlemaster Trinkets
Belt
Boots

Now that you've gotten a bit of starter gear, and perhaps you've dabbled in a few arena games and traded a bit of ratings, what do you have in store for you in the future?

With climbing ratings, you'll be able to start accessing deadly series tier gear!

In order of ratings, here's how they line up:
Deadly Relics/Sigils/Idols/Librams at 1250 rating, 350 Arena points, 6400 Honor
Deadly Gloves at 1300 rating, 400 Arena Points, 7200 Honor
Deadly Legs at 1350 rating, 700 Arena Points, 12000 Honor
Deadly Chest at 1400 rating, 700 Arena points, 12000 Honor
Deadly Head at 1450 rating, 700 Arena points, 12000 Honor
Deadly Shoulders at 1500 rating, 550 Arena Points, 9000 Honor

If you've reached all the way up here, or even halfway there, you should probably consider the arena-less honor currency only gear purchasable in Org/Stormwind that requires rating and honor points only.

Furious Gear (Rating requirement, Honor required only)
Furious Wrists 1400 rating, 39400 Honor
Furious Waist 1450 rating, 62000 Honor
Furious Feet 1500 rating, 62000 Honor
Furious Neck 1550 rating, 47400 Honor
Furious Ring 1550 rating, 47400 Honor
Furious Cloak 2000 rating, 47400 Honor

With the gear and a good team composition, you're probably on your way up the ranks, so you'll want to look at the gear buyable with arena points at that level of rating too!

Furious Offhands, 1850 rating, 1100 Arena Points
Offhand weapons counts under this category
Furious Wands/Librams, relics etc, 1850 rating, 1150 Arena points
Furious Weapons Tier 1(2handed), 1850 rating, 1400 Arena points, 50000 Honor
Bows count as 2H in terms of costs
Furious Weapons Tier 1(1handed), 1850 rating, 1200 Arena points, 35000 Honor

Furious Weapons Tier 2, All requires 2350 rating
2 Handed, 4250 Arena Points
1 Hand caster, 3585 Arena Points
1 Hand melee, 3000 Arena Points
Side Arms, 1245 Arena Points

Furious Tiers (ilvl 232)
Gloves 1600 rating, 1300 Arena Points
Legs 1650 rating, 2150 Arena Points
Chest 1700 rating, 2150 Arena Points
Head 1750 rating, 2150 Arena Points
Shoulders 1800 rating, 1750 Arena Points

And that should be a complete list of all the mainstream pvp gear in the game at the moment, don't hesitate to tell me if i've made any mistakes in the compilation!

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Stay tuned, I'll be publishing a guide on how to quickly get your new pvp toon kitted up as fast as possible in the shortest possible time, honor and gold investment.

Item focus:The prospects of Titanium Ore and patch 3.2, 6 preparations you can make way ahead of 11 million people

Update, I just realised warcraftecon has also made a post about this, so for an alternative viewpoint, you might want to click here!



The Blue Post in question

From that particular blue post we can see the sources for the new epic gems, and it doesn't take rocket science for us to see that the ways to obtain them are almost identical and parallel to the current means of obtaining rare gems.

Well, what kind of epic gems will they be? The answer is that they have already been in the game files for quite a while and have appropriately epic sounding names, a list of which you can find in this wowhead link here



Some e.g. of the new gems include King's Amber (the yellow equivalent) or Flawless Ametrine (the orange equivalent) or Majestic Zircon (for blue) or Eye of Zul (for green) or cardinal ruby(red) or dreadstone (purple). Pretty spiffy names I should think!

In general, each epic gems has about 4 more stats than its previous, for example a runed cardinal ruby has 23, 4 more than the 19 of a runed scarlet ruby.

They share the same stats as the current stormjewels as well as having more variety (a greater choice of stats and including mixed color gems), but have the benefit of not having the unique-socketed attribute meaning they can be placed inside every single socket that you have replacing all the rare gems.

Whether you are a Jewelcrafter or not, I would think you might be interested in what this change might entail for you and also what preparations you should start making for it.

1)The easiest effect that you'll see as a result of this will be a devaluation of stormjewels, simply because they have the exact same stats, and that stormjewels have a unique-equipped restriction. I predict stormjewels will slowly start to drop from their 400 to slightly over 1000 gold position into a few dozen gold less than the prices of epic gems in 3.2 Following which people will purchase stormjewels as a cheaper alternative to fill up a slot, with stormjewels still remaining slightly more expensive than rare quality gems.

2)The next up would be its immediate effect on existing blue gems. Once again, it won't take a rocket scientist to say that blue gem prices will definitely drop. Personally, I see a rather small decrease in the range of 10-25% throughout the whole assortment. I base this using the previous time such a change happened in burning crusade, especially when the Sunwell Patch came out. To be fair however, gems appear to be much easier to obtain this time round, and Blizzard will very likely include some bottlenecks to stop a flood of epic gems into the market.

3)Similarly, this would also affect the market for Saronite ore, which will also dip slightly.

For all of the above items, I would advise you not to rush in liquidating them, but to start keeping an eye out and sell them when you see it can go for a good price. Their markets should remain relatively stable such that you can continue your current course of profit, but for stormjewels you would probably wish to rid yourself of them as soon as possible.



4)The core of the epic gems origins however, will lie in this very important ore:
Titanium ore, which takes the place of saronite ore in that you can now prospect it for all the new epic gems under a similar random number generation system. I've seen prices gradually increasing, but instead of asking you to buy buy buy, I would urge you to take caution. This is because I feel that the current methods of obtaining epic gems feels far too easy, and I suspect blizzard might spice up things a little. As a result, I would advise you to keep an eye out for titanium ore, and carefully purchase them when they hit below market equilibrium as they are wont to do on weekends and goldfarmer periods.

Similarly, if Titanium ore are to rise in prices, the joint commodities of Titansteel bars and Titanium bars would also similarly rise. Once again, exercise caution, and try to limit purchases to when they are severely underpriced.

As I see it however, Titanium ore have reached a new peak, rising from 100 plus gold to 180 as I am writing this. Let's see if the Gold Farmers will catch up with this development. It is clear however, that there is a prospective opportunity in prospecting titanium ores.

5)For Jewelcrafters, you might want to take note of this particular section.
In 3.2, Jewelcrafting Tokens will be the means by which you'll purchase Epic Gem Cuts, which means that you should start stocking up on all your JC tokens now, and it is probably expected that there will be a rotation between hyperinflation and hyperdeflation as Jewelcrafters fight for market share. A sizable number or raiders will be switching away from the Jewelcrafting professions however, so take that as you may. Also, while less important, dragon's eye would likely appear less on the AH, so you might want to stock up on a few of those right now.

6)For everyone else, you'll probably want to save your EoH instead of spending them on rare gems now, since they look to be an alternative form of currency to buy raw epic gems. The same goes for people looking to convert honor into gems, you might want to save your honor points as battleground tokens instead.

Bonus:
For the cunning ones in the crowd, you've probably noticed the heaploads of BoE ulduar epics, that also happens to have lots of sockets. While this is really for the long term, you'll probably want to keep in mind when choosing gear that the Best in Slot rankings will also be upset when epic gems are officially introduced.

However, take care to handle all of these with a generous grain of salt, as the PTR has not even been out yet, and as the GM says, everything he wrote is still as yet subject to change, even up till Live.

Darkmoon Decks: Making gold and gaining reputation outside the Faire

The first part of the darkmoon series deals with Darkmoon Card Death
and the second with Insane in the Membrane Achieve

Now that the darkmoon faire has ended, you might think that your hopes in working with the Darkmoon Faction is over. But fear not, thanks to inscription, there are still other ways to curry favor or trade for gold with the darkmoon people.

With the advent of 3.0 and inscription, low level scribes have been able to create new low level version of darkmoon decks that instead of giving card trinkets, give out BoE equipment for different slots at different level brackets.

The most important thing to take note about these darkmoon deck series is that they are
1) Bind on Equip
2) Can be turned in at any time and anywhere

You can buy one of these decks today, fly to a desolate location like desolace or tanaris, and still summon a darkmoon quest-giver and turn in those low level decks. Each deck also gives comparative reputation, generally 25 rep(the major decks are worth 350 rep), as well as experience points, which you can also use to level up your alts. (they work out to be about 1 normal quest at their respective levels)

The decks are:
Rogues Deck lvl 10
Swords Deck lvl 20
Mages Deck lvl 30
Demons Deck lvl 40

All of these decks drops items that are very good (in general) for both leveling classes and twinks, especially since they can be equipped the instant you turn into that level bracket and are comparable to blues within their range. Except for rogues and swords which give you items with random attributes, you can choose the exact reward for your decks, depending on which is more profitable on your server.

If you're starting off, I recommend you buy swords deck to try your hand at this market. I generally can purchase Swords deck for 5-10 gold, and sell the resulting item for a few times that price like 40-65 gold sometimes. Occasionally however I get a badly itemized shoulder slot and I would simply give it away or vendor it. Since the initial startup cost is quite low, and you can be almost any level to use this, its a pretty good way to go about making gold if you're new to wow too.

If you yourself are a scribe, then you might have some of this hanging around. Using ink of the sea conversions and using up your idle rare pigments, you can make the mages and demons deck for a rather low price and sell your extras. You can then sell the quest turn in item on the AH for usually twice to thrice your cost price.

Darkmoon Fair 2: Buying and spinning cards into gold

This is a follow up article to the first one on darkmoon cards. Previously, we talked about a Darkmoon card which will (in general) sell decently on most servers for most classes, being an all round good profit avenue.

Part 3 is now up for people looking for alternative darkmoon means

Today, I'll be doing something slightly different, in a quirk gold method unique to the Darkmoon Market. Firstly, let me introduce you to the achievement insane in the membrane. Amongst the many other almost impossible reputation grinds, is the Darkmoon Faire reputation. The only way to get Darkmoon reputation, also happens to be either doing Darkmoon quests or turning in Darkmoon cards.

Luckily for some of us, there just happens to be people that are just insane in the membrane, and are going about doing all the reputation farms. As it so happens, some of them are willing to pay gold to you so that they can turn in your decks. The going rate happens to be about 100 gold for any of the level 80 darkmoon decks.

In essence, you trade the "turning in of decks" for gold. There are two ways of going about this, many times the reputation buyer will have some turned in decks, which are cards, upon which he trades you the card and the gold for your deck of the same series. Alternatively, sometimes you might meet at where your Darkmoon Faire is currently located, and you hand him the deck for the AH price, following which he turns in the deck, and returns the card to you and you return to him his deposit minus the turn in fee.

Working with a person in this manner, I've flipped decks in this manner for cards and have gotten about 600 easy gold. The best thing about this is that in this case the other party pays a markup for your turn in, whereas in a few days after the faire is over, buyers must again pay a markup for your turn in. So if you perhaps buy a Chaos deck for 200 gold, trade it for a Berserker Card and receive 100 gold, if you sell it even at a 100 gold markup you will receive 400 gold revenue in total, or 200 gold profit, essentially 100% of the amount you used for investment.

Unfortunately, not every server has people going for insane in the membrane so this won't work for everyone. But if there is one such person on your server, you might well wish to take advantage of this opportunity!

Dark Horse in Darkmoon Faire: Darkmoon Card Death

You can view Part 2 of the Darkmoon Series here
And Part 3 here for people who don't wish to spend so much or are low in level


It has been a few days since the darkmoon faire has been out, and its time for those people with decks saved up out there to get your hands upon the actual cards and finally place them in your trinket slots! But for the rest of you who don't require a trinket, there is actually a gold reserve hiding deep within this week's Darkmoon Faire!

The card in question is DMC: Death, and its been in the game for quite a long time, but has been steadily buffed each patch. Currently, what it does is to give 85 critical strike rating and has a proc that shoots out an additional shadowbolt that does not go onto GCD (global cooldown), but has an ICD (internal cooldown). It doesn't share an ICD with say Greatness deck however, so both of the darkmoon trinkets can proc together!



If you don't raid or pvp, then you might want to skip the following section or two and go straight down. But if you're interested in why Darkmoon Card: Death is a up and coming monetary opportunity, read on!

PvE
Due to the crit rating on it, it works well for many players as a starter trinket until they get better ones. The critical bonus works for both physical and caster attacks. For melee players, its competition is Bandit's Insignia, and for casters, Extract of Necromantic Power.

Its value lies in being BoE, as well as a solid trinket in its own right, making a great fit for people who just dinged 80 and entering naxx, or for people levelling alts and needing a great boost. It is also within a reasonable price range, hovering around 1000 gold on most servers, making it a popular choice for those above-mentioned new 80s. (the obvious comparison would be the 5000 gold and up nobles deck that gives you DMC greatness)

PvP
Combat with other players, be it arenas, battlegrounds or wintergrasp, is where this card really shines. Its the second best trinket for many many combinations and specs, and thus equivalent to a Best in Slot trinket. (Since you have two trinket slots so you would need to put a BIS and a 2nd place BIS in them)

The shadowbolt basically fires off in the first few instants you throw upon your target, giving that extra 2k to 3k (if it crits, yes it can crit) to your burst window. It also plays almost exactly like clockwork, and you can probably predict each proc of the trinket according to a stopwatch or addon.

The arena and BG players I've seen toting this Darkmoon Card around the most has been rogues, death knights(the proc seems to be affected by their own buffs) and retribution paladins. And if you arena, especially in 5v5s, you would probably find glee in proccing multiple shadowbolts upon the focused target and bringing the person from 100% to 0% in one or two gcds.

Fun Fact!
For those of you dutifully doing your argent tournament dailies, more specifically those where you equip your lances on horseback, DMC death has the very unique effect of proc'ing on your mounted attacks, giving you a slight but noticeable damage dealt to the opponent. It works to about 2000 damage each time it procs, and you would probably see it once or twice per fight at the very least, meaning it gives you an extra attack or two if you have this trinket equipped.

It is also the only way in the game at the moment that you are able to attack mounted opponents outside of the standard mounted attacks and a friend attacking your opponents.

Obtaining and flipping the card
In general, most players go about collecting all 8 cards slowly before forming the deck. A good way to go about this would have been to slowly pick out low priced cards one by one over a long period of time, to greatly lower the average price per card from the eight. Generally, the completed deck sells for ave price per card x 8 + a small markup (about 50-100 gold). Assuming that each card costs 100 gold, and the deck sells for 900 gold, to heavily discount the cost of purchase you can do the following trick.

Check once or twice every day for the Undeath Cards, for me I go to the AH and set it to search for undeath, with the rarity value set to rare so I get to skip all the junk items on the AH and go straight for the cards. If you buy even 3 items at a greatly lowered price, say when the AH is flooded and some cards sell for 50 gold. Following which you just snap up the rest of the cards at the price they go for in the market. Then your eventual cost price will be 3 x 50 + 5 x 100 = 650 gold, which is 250 gold less than if you were to buy a completed deck by another person.

You can also buy cheap cards for trading later, in case the market runs out of the card you bought at a cheap price, so you can trade for a more expensive card with another player willing to trade. (sounds like pokemon, i know)

Advanced
Now that you have an idea of what the Darkmoon Card Death is about, I will share with you a trick that most scribes and card watchers have been doing since Day 1 of Darkmoon Cards becoming Bind on Equip.

You basically get your hands on 2-3 decks on darkmoon faire week at a cheap price, and then you hold it. If you're lucky your auction house will be filled with people looking for immediate gratification and flooding it with lvl 80 darkmoon cards that are very cheap. Following which you wait a week, and after that a few more days for the trickle supply to dry. AND THEN, you place it back in the market.

I normally list it in the AH for a 50% markup or more, for example: DMC death for 1500 (when i buy it for 650) and then broadcast in trade chat, stressing that they WILL NOT BE ABLE to get such a trinket until the darkmoon faire comes about in a few weeks time, which can be very long for people trying to gear up for naxx and then jump straight into ulduar. I have also seen people purchase DMCs from me to jump straight into Arenas. Naturally, this is a very capital intensive venture, and if you start now you might get burned if you do not know your server well and some scribe suddenly pops in with the same idea. Also, if you start buying cards at this time, if you are unlucky there will be gougers on the AH buying up certain numbers to force a monopoly.

The best thing about this is that you don't have to be a scribe, although the whole strategy is much more risk free if you can make your own DMC. If you have the capital and long term view, you can probably make yourself and extra few thousand from selling DMCs a few days to weeks after the darkmoon faire has come and gone.

Tomorrow, I'll be continuing on some other tricks you can pick up on while the darkmoon faire is still in town. If you intend to try the above Darkmoon Card trick however you might want to bookmark this page for future reference after the darkmoon faire is over.

What I buy (and sell)

*Warning, picture intensive*

*names have been blurred for their privacy*

I've been hectic raiding this past couple of days, but now that we're just sitting on bosses and I rarely do 10 man I'll take the time to get back to gold making! The plate runed orb crafted belt is looking pretty good.

This week, due to a lack of time on my part, I focused on the highest profit to item slot markets, and you can see the results as follows!

My best haul of the week was spying a lvl 80 Ulduar drop recipe on the Auction House for a pretty low price of 2500 gold. Knowing that it was a steal, and taking a gamble, I bought it out immediately and waited a day before relisting it back on the Auction house for 5500 gold.

You can see how it turned out here:




In effect, that was 2725 gold just sitting by the Auction House and mailbox for not even a minute of going through the motions!

While I do not recommend beginners to do this, existing players with big pockets would be interested in this particular avenue of opportunity.

Most recipes will go through similarly well, but keep in mind that some recipes do not provide that good a slot item for certain class and specs, and that will devalue them in the time to come.

My most important advice if you're in this line, is that, you really need to sell them fast and quickly, even if it means taking a small cut in profits. The recipe drop of Ulduar can be quite volatile, and there are raiders and puggers out there wanting to make a quick buck.

Project: Emblem of Conquest source tables

This particular post will be consistently updated, so feel free to email me or post a comment if you've downed a particular boss and received some information.

Update: More info on Iron Council
Update: Iron Council is also optional
And I also forgot to mention, IC is the only place you can start Algalon unlock quest chain, you must do it on any hard mode for a chance of the quest item dropping.

As some people have asked, so shall you receive!

I've compiled the following Conquest badges table from just about everywhere, but its sort of incomplete. Its goal is to give you a guide to roughly the minimum and maximum conquest emblems you're likely to feasibly get each week!

We'll start off with the easy ones.

In ulduar, there are 14 bosses, one of which is Algalon which I shall totally ignore, since the 10 man version has only been killed once, and No One not even ensida has been able to take out the 25 man Algalon yet. I don't see us mortals accomplishing that feat anytime soon! :D

Of the others, there are 9 hard modes.
The bosses without hard modes are Auriaya, Razorscale, Kologarn and Ignis, of which they drop 1 Emblem of Conquest each on Heroic-25 and 1 Emblem of Valor each on Normal-10

25 hard modes:

In general, each boss will drop 1 EoC on normal mode

Flame Leviathan: 1 EoC
1 up = 2 EoC
3 up = 3 EoC (suspected)

the 1 tower up hard mode is probably the easy 2 conquest badges you won't want to lose. If you need a guide, you can check mine for how to deal with flame leviathan here.

XT: 1 EoC
Hard mode: 2 EoC

Iron Council: 1 EoC
Doing hard modes will bump EoC drops to 2

Freya: 1 EoC
3 adds each give 1 EoC for a total of 4 EoC
If your guild is just starting out but have managed to clear this far, this is another boss to take note of. Its a pretty easy 4 EoC for a normal boss fight.
The hard mode is Sartharion-esque and as far as I know does not give any more EoC. If you're hitting sunday or monday and are stuck on the other keepers, just do a +0 Freya for the easy 4 badges.

The other 3 keepers will drop an EoC each, their hard modes are probably the more challenging ones.

Followed by Vezax and Yogg Saron, who also have hard modes, but also drop 1 EoC each. I've not tried their hard modes.

Thus for a normal guild, you'll want to do both Flame Leviathan and Freya for an easy 2+4 Emblems of Conquest.

Following which you'll get an extra
3 EoC: XT, Kolo, IC,
5 EoC: XT, Kolo, IC, Razor(optional), Ignis(optional)
7 EoC: XT, Kolo, IC, Razor(opt), Ignis(opt), Hodir, Thorim

10 EoC: the above + Mimi, Vezax and Yogg

so the range would be about 5 to 13 EoC from hard mode 25s a week.
If your guild has progressed well, it would get 16 EoC + a week.

Then you'll want to do Emalon for the freebie 2 Conquests

You probably won't be able to break 20 EoC a week with just the above however, so you'll probably have to do the Normal-10 modes for more EoC

Its pretty good to do the hard modes since they are the only way you'll see runed orbs and EoC drop in the 10 man versions.

Flame Leviathan 1 Tower Up
You simply must do this one, its the easiest 2 EoC you'll ever see.
Don't waste your Ulduar 10 save without getting this down.

XT hard
Drops 1 EoC I believe, its easier now

IC hard
Never tried it, but should drop at least 1 EoC

Freya Hard
Just do with 1 up, my friend told me there was either a bug or intention, that when you do with 3 up, you'll still only get 1 EoC and 3 EoV.

Thorim, Hodir, Mimi, Vezax, Yogg
Very likely 1 EoC each

With the 10 man modes, you'll probably one to rush out a FL-1up clear before tuesdays to get that 2 EoC out, if you're running with a good team though you'll probably pick up about 5-8 extra EoC for a total range of 7-10 extra EoCs on top of your 25 man ones.

Feel free to correct me wherever I have wrong information or a typo elsewhere.

For those with Alts, if you play it right, you can end up with 6-9 emblems for an undergeared lvl 80 toon. Just do Emalon, FL 10 and 25, as well as buy a slot from any guild/pug that reaches Freya for the 3 Adds.

If you're looking to purchase stuff with EoCs:
18 - Runed Orb
(they'll be the only way to liquidate EoC a few months down the road)
16 - Necks
23 - Waist, Gloves
32 - Legs
58 - Conquest Heads and Chest

Pvp Gear:
46 - Shoulders and Gloves
58 - Chest Legs and Head

HODIR DOWN!

Haha, I know I havn't been posting much,
But I've been busy working out the kinks between Thorim and Hodir

Now that its down:

Mimiron I'm looking at you!

(maybe I'll upload some pictures for that)

I was too excited on the hodir kill that both him and the chest despawned after that.

:D

In the meantime, here's some things I've found useful:

MMO Champion have re-released and re-updated their loot lists for ulduar,
I had been waiting for this for quite a while!
But be warned, their 10 man hard loot weapons aren't updated to the ilvl 232 versions yet.

Here's some raiding videos I had fun watching while commuting:
Taken from MMO champ again

Third world Algalon Kill
I thought the song went quite well

10 Man Flame Leviathan 2 manned
This just smacks of gold making opportunities, take your lvl 80 alt with another skilled players lvl 80 alt, and watch the epics roll in! It reminds me of the time when 8 dps zerged sarth, I'm pretty sure an underman of a FL-25 should be possible


Scheduled Programming returning soon!

Recognizing a bad trade and knowing what to do with it.

I had been reading this comprehensive post over at wowenomics that talked about the bad trades people make and how to recover from it. I found it a very educational read and I intend to share my own perspective also, but I shall do it here within my comfort zone :D

The article talks about identifying your mistakes and picking yourself up instead of moping over it. I find this a very refreshing change from all the other blogs out there, as while everyone had been talking about their successes, few had down an in-depth analysis of their failures.

While Jederus has outlined his solutions into 7 key categories, I would like to focus more on the types of mistakes that one can make, which makes it easier to decide what solution to focus on.

1) Risky Ventures/ Testing of waters
This is something we must all take part in, and that is to explore new opportunities and new markets. Sometimes we succeed brilliantly, sometimes we fail terribly.
When we do fail, what we must do is to employ the strategy of loss minimisation.
For example, in 3.1 what I did was to take a gamble on armbands on the construct.

I purchased it at 1600 gold, intending to sell it at a 25% markup, around the market price I suspected it would hover for a few weeks. Unfortunately, I underestimated the number of people rushing headlong into Ulduar 10 and have subsequently flooded the market, rendering me unable to sell it. The market price now hovers in the few hundreds.
What I did in the end, was to pass it to a Holy Paladin friend of mine, as he would actually benefit from this wrist slot upgrade. While it was undeniably a loss, my main goal was to minimise it as there was no way to recoup the gold used.

It would also be what Jederus calls donate!

2) External Changes/ Shock
Sometimes, a mistake or something fundamental changes about the market you're moving in, sometimes that change is not your fault.
Very often, blizzard will make stealth nerfs and hotfix or undocumented patch changes. Sometimes, it totally screws up a cash cow of yours.
It happened to me in the form of Kibler bits

I had purchased a few stacks of buzzard meat before, and sold them nicely to Hunters and Demonology warlocks as they were easy to make and were the same as the mammoth treats that cost northern spices. I could buy each stack at 1 or 2 g and sell it to those damage dealers for 20g.
In 3.1, it got nerfed from 30 str, stam to 20 str, stam, and I had to subsequently lower my price in the AH. I have been "bleeding them back into the market", and once I finish my stock, I will no longer sell them as it has dropped below my minimum gold per active action ratio.

3) Miscalculation
It happens to the best of us, some joker sold a gray at 100 gold and you accidentally purchased it. Or perhaps you sold a stormjewel at 60 gold. Its those things that make you want to kick yourself in the foot.
The best thing to do now is to suck the loss up and unwind the trade, following which you diversify back into other industries. In a sense, you will spread the overheads (cost of this miscalculation) and thin it out over your other markets to attain economies of scale.

4) Entering a contested market.
I've faced this in the Jewelcrafting market, as people come in and go, and random people sell gems at a loss. Its the bane of a lot of small time operators, as they seriously do not have the time to deal with the big players, or a person who comes to ruin the party.
In this case, I will sometimes practice strategic domination. Often, I'll wait till nightfall, or some lull in sellers, buy out some sellers, and relist my items. This involves both holding the item and waiting for the write time, as well as knowing when to enforce a sudden monopoly.

And with that, I should have covered the mistakes that can often happen while dabbling in trading. Do let me know if you've found it helpful!

A summary and shoutouts

This has been long overdue, but its time to give shoutouts to the people who have featured this blog!

Warcraftecon.net
Where I am now a guest poster, the most recent was about gem recovery, and my first was about spidersilk boots

wowenomics.wordpress.com
Recently, they found value in my stormjewel item guide and featured it in their weekly blog post roll.

Markco's Blog
About a month back, when everyone was still in a tizzy over 3.1, he featured my post on eov bracers which you can read over here

Big Bear butt
For directing his visitors to a humor list I wrote for Noblegarden week

If you're new to the site, or have only been here recently, you might want to look out on the things you might have missed out on!

One of the more popular articles amongst guilds has been my short series on Flame Leviathan, if you are intending to do hard modes anytime soon you might want to check it out.
an update on flame leviathan information, as well as a theorized hard mode tower to rewards list
the first flame leviathan article

Another recent one is the hateful and deadly pvp gear that you can now buy with honor in 3.1

If you're an enchanter for your guild, you might also want to check out the cloak enchants for resistance that you can obtain in icecrown for use in guild progression against the elemental damage that some bosses throw out

Item Feature: Gems; Stormjewels wide and varied

The assessments in this posts have become slightly dated with the introduction of the patch3.2 notes, for the latest updates, you might want to check here for epic gems in 3.2 titanium ores

If you're a hardcore raider, you would have probably heard of these.
And then subsequently gasped at the Auction House prices.

They go anywhere from 400 gold on some servers to 3000.
Generally, I find them hovering about 1000, with occasional fluctuations.

Here are the three gems you will be most interested in:
Runed, Bold, Delicate





And the next 3 runner ups:
Rigid, Brilliant, Solid

For those unaware, these are the best gems in their genre in the game at the moment. In general, they have an extra +4 stat.

I would hypothesize that these are unique-equipped version of 3.3 Icecrown epic gems, none of which you'll be seeing anytime soon!

You can only equip a single stormjewel in your gear at any one time.

This makes people more willing to spend the 4 digit sum, on a best in slot socketed item. In addition to the difficulty in obtaining them, they have a 6% chance of dropping from the ultra rare titanium lockbox, and a 0.2% chance of dropping from a bag of fishing treasures.

You won't be seeing more than a few of the stormjewels on the auction house at any one time.

Here's how to play the Auction House with these.
Time investment: 5 minutes scans over 7 days
Initial Capital: Quite hefty, anywhere from a few hundred gold to a few thousand
Risk: Scalable, go for higher margins if you're risk averse

Let Auctioneer run for a few days to get a rough gauge for the stormjewels. I recommend you stick with the safe gems, Runed, Bold or Delicate, as demand is always there for those gems...

Mainly from dedicated dpsers looking to squeeze every drop of damage output.

Just keep an eye out for those gems, and buy them if they drop about 200 gold or 35% away from the median price, whichever margin is greater to be safe.

For me, whenever I see a gem listed at 300 gold less than the next one available, I'll just buy it out and re-list it. Usually it sells in a few hours right after I re-list it.

My best mark so far has been to buy a Runed Stormjewel for 300 gold and sell it for 1600 gold 3 days later.

And before you ask, no, I think prices will still stay high for this period of time. There are many factors for these, but 0.2% loot rate is really very small for a daily quest.

If you happen to loot an epic gem from your fishing bag, I would recommend that you sell it whenever you can get a good price however. (Unless you just got a ilvl 239 epic that you can socket)

Cactus, Volume 2

Leap of Faith: +15 dodge

Following the grim phone call, I was thereafter informed by my friend that her laptop was still under 24 hours on site repair service.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I hurried off to make another phone call

Amazingly, I managed to secure a living person on the other side of the line!

Yep, no computer operator

To top it off, a repairman will be dispatched off to my house the next day.

It took a bit of trouble, but I was able to convince the repairman that I was actually, my friend.

Repairman: Did you just move house? The address is different from our records.

Me: Um, no, just taking a break over at my friends house, my house is undergoing renovations

Repairman: I see, and your friend doesn't happen to be at home...

Me: Could we get on with repairing the laptop?

It was then that I was introduced to their method of performing maintenance on damaged devices. After fiddling with the laptop for a while, he concluded that the motherboard must have somehow exploded and that he would conduct repairs on the spot.

By repairs, he meant replacing the whole laptop.

By replacing, he meant taking the hard drive out from the old spoiled laptop into an entirely new laptop, of which the empty hard drive he would now replace with the old laptop's hard drive.

Old hard drive into new laptop, remaining parts sent back to his company.

Wow.

That was probably the most incredible IT repair job I've ever seen.

Its like finding a burst tyre wheel in your car, and having the insurance company buy you a brand new car.

Its like finding a rotten apple in a fridge, and waking up the next day to see an entirely new fridge.

Just wow, I mean, its normal if you see a fly in you soup, and get a new soup or some other appetizer in replacement.

But a whole new laptop?
I'm buying their goods, and slapping a very long repair service bundle on it.


Hey I think there's an ant in my laptop.
No problem ma'am, here's a new one.

Cactus, Volume 1

There is a saying that cacti are the most low maintenance plant you could ever get. It doesn't need watering, you can just put it in a pot and leave it there and it just lives, without any leaves. Or actually it does, but you already knew that. To have it die, you practically have to kill it by cutting it apart and drinking its life fluids. And even then it regrows.

Like wolverine! The movie one, with claws.

Actually, I watched the movie for Gambit, all 2 minutes of the accumulated screen time he had.

120 seconds...

I digress,
Back to cacti

My point is that, they're effectively unkillable(yeah I made that word up), and yet
All of us, you, me, have at least a friend.
The friend, who manages to kill every single pet or plant under their care.
cat? check
goldfish? check
cactus? check

Well, recently, it has come to my attention that I am just like that with computers

I've mentioned before that I had been posting on a borrowed laptop.

"Was", being the operative word

That I was mortified was an understatement
Grimacing, I placed a call to my friend

Sherry(me): I have good news and bad news
Friend: That sounds ominous, I think I'll take the good news first
Sherry: The good news is, there is only one bad news
Friend: ... (trepidation)
Sherry: As for the bad news, I just blew your laptop up

Somehow, it spontaneously combusted

It wasn't my fault!!!

To be continued...

Purchasing with honor in 3.1, an illustrated pvp gear guide list

I've not seen any proper listings or tables on the net yet that places everything in one place, so I hope this will be helpful to you:

The following will show you the items you can purchase with honor in 3.1, and also their prices!


As you can see the old savage class-specific sets have been replaced by shiny hatefuls. Take note that those prices are with pure honor, and you can actually purchase discounted versions if you happen to have arena points. In those cases, please refer to your arena vendor.

The total cost of the set above,
would be 2 x 31600 + 3 x 49600
which will be 212, 000 Honor points
which is about 3 x honor cap

Thus, if you're gunning for the set pieces without arena points, it might take a while!
Especially with the new wintergrasp quest changes.

Personally, I think you could try replacing a hateful chest that is ilvl 200 with a wintergrasp vendor chest that is ilvl 213, and just grab the other 4 hatefuls for the set bonus.

Let's move on to the non set piece items:





In 3.1, we can see that blizzard has given the honor vendors plenty of upgrades, no more of the blue savage gladiator gear now. What you see are hateful and deadly purples!

Instead of only hateful gear, you can now buy deadly pvp gear with no rating.

For most people, you'll probably be better off using the wintergrasp trinkets over the medallion, although some might find the battlemaster useful. The medallion has underwent a steep discount however, if I recall correctly it used to be 49600. Most people will want to pick up the full set of deadly gladiator Wrist, Belts and Boots, Back and Ring.

Hey, thats almost everything.
Well, assuming you don't go for the trinkets, here's how much things will cost:

38,000 x 3
49,600 x 2
31,600 x 1
to a total of 244, 800 Honor

All in all, if you totally buy everything and everything from the pure honor vendors alone, you would be spending and farming giant piles of honor and spending them at the same time due to honor cap!

To buy all honor pieces, you would need 212000 honor points for set pieces and then 244800 honor for accessories for a total of 456800 honor points.

Well, that's going to take a while...
All the best in honor farming and pvp pursuits!

Passing Guild Leadership

Well, this past few weeks, my guild has been making modest progress under new leadership. I have only recently officially handed it off an officer to manage, and as far as I have had heard, things are going well.

This had brought a burden off my back, and I've found using modern tools like Msn messenger (or whichever messenger is used), Skype, and Ventrilo, to be immensely useful in the decision making process.

As a result, I will take a break from spearheading progression, although I will not be completely absent from all runs. And this way, I get a peaceful lull to spend more time on this site.

I'm still using an interim com borrowed from a friend at the moment, so 25 man raiding is a bit too much of a lagfest, but 10 mans are okay, and of course the friendly auction house beckons. I would think that gold-making is probably one of the best aspects of wow that you can do on a graphics card challenged computer!

Twink Feature: Forest Leather Bracers

While you're here, you might also want to check out the lvl 29 bracket bracer if you came looking for twink item and profits

While I'm still waiting for news of my computer, I've put a lot of thought into my item feature series, and I'm going to be trying out a new style today.

I intend for today's post to be something that can be read in a minute or two, and then digested over a longer period later.

Here we go!




Forest Leather Bracers
are the best bracers in the lvl 10-19 bracket for any class that can use agility.

Wrangler's wristbands of the monkey
are its only competition, but its off by quite a mile, losing 2-3 agility for 3 stamina

Expected Purchase Price: 1-15 gold
Expected Sell Price: 95-115 gold

Time investment: 5 minutes over 7 days
Expected yield per week: 291 gold approximately

Level requirement: any toon that can walk to the auction house

Gold minimum:
If you're lucky you can buy the bracers off the AH at 1 gold,
and re-listing it costs only 3 silvers, so the startup cost is almost nil.
i.e. anyone can do it!

Technique:
What I usually do is to integrate one more search into my AH-search list to include forest leather bracers, and basically purchase it once I see it.

Most people are unaware of the potential value of these wrist slot items as a best in slot for lvl 19 twinks, and often price it with other greens of the same level.

I usually see about 3 of the bracers over the course of the week, and proceed to list each one (making sure there is only one at a time on the market) until they sell.

I try to push the sale as far up as possible, and normally people are more than willing to pay the extra premium to see the item up on the auction house all the time.

Give this a spin, and tell me how it works on your server :D

And feel free to give me your thoughts on this remake on the item feature series!

My com has exploded! And now I need a new com. Blast you flame leviathan!

Houston, Houston, my com has been downed! Its undergoing emergency repairs now. It, however, did not drop any phat loot, & I for one, hope it can get repaired and won't require salvaging.

The funniest thing is that it died on the shutdown phase of the leviathan, (I've been getting people to try the continuous application of pyrite barrels instead of bursting) when my computer entered a shutout of its own.

When flame leviathan, that unfriendly fire truck, was spewing out its golden rockets, my graphics card were sputtering in spasms as prismatic flares flashes across the screen.

I suppose this wipe was inevitable, its a 3-year old desktop, which makes it an antique by modern definitions. I even had a friend come and overclock the processors and graphics card a while back, just to keep the fps in raids. Now that its final spark has extinguished, I'm waiting to see what the repairman has to say, but I'm already planning for a new computer entirely.

So far I've been hearing good things about Dell PCs, especially for the higher range models. (say for gaming) My colleagues have told me that they have a 24 hour service if you sign up for it where they come to your pc at any time of the day to repair it, no questions asked. That sounds like a pretty strong argument, and the prices don't look that bad either. The only thing is the looks of the Dell PCs, which seems to pale a bit in contrast to perhaps HP. Hmm, I guess I'll have a bit of time before the reports from the repair labs come back.

In the meantime however, I'll live off a borrowed computer from my friend. That means no raiding, and I'm dreading the 7 hour installation and patching process. On the plus side however, that means I have more time to work on this site, patching the tags into the posts, and polishing up some posts with new information and ideas.

I'll probably work on the Flame Leviathan series (FIRE TRUCK)
Which I had the overall strats and loot stuff crammed too tightly into my first post. Following which I wrote a follow up to address the the more pressing issues.

I'm also thinking of refurbishing the PVP issues, and also the low level twink item gold opportunities in the coming future!

*wtb new com*

Noblegarden: Musings and Round-up

First of all, in between the end of noblegarden and the start of children's week, Gevlon is back!

Well, there's only about half a day to a day before Noblegarden will end, I hope everyone has gotten their eggs! One thing I noticed in the last few days is that all the jerks who were polluting the areas on Days 1 to 2 have mostly scooted off, after finalling getting their achievement, or had their fill of griefing other people.

Because of that, it was most heartening to see good folks abound at the starting zones! Kaliope has shared some of her memorable experiences and I figured it would be a good time to share mine too!

I would see people around making heavy use of general chat, be it offering their blossoming branches for un'goro's hard-boiled, or sharing their tuxedos and dresses so everyone could be a part of it and easily get their achievements instead of running all around the place.
Its really nice to see "/1: anyone needs a tuxedo to get their achieve? pst me" instead of people going "/1: Tard get the F out of my camp spot". None of the asshats in Big Bear Butt's post were egg hunting thse past few days.

As for the Shake your Bunny maker, I really do think its more of a playful nod then anything in particular. But like here and here. I do have some thoughts on the matter too!

It was interesting that the most sought after and wanted females weren't the blood elves, or draeneis, or humans or night elves, the ones that there were crowds and mobs spilled all over the streets in dalaran were all clustered around Orcs and Trolls Females, which I dare say you would agree are a distance from being either photogenic or a face you would want on a playboy magazine! Regardless of the motivations of the achievement author, I would say that Females from the Tauren Orcs and Troll races finally got their time in the spotlight! Or the carrot light with bunny ears.
It reminds me greatly of the Dove advertisment quite a while back about true beauty! (and photoshop...)

For those of you rushing to complete your achievement before the clock ticks over, here's also the best circuit to do the desert flowers achieve:
-> From dalaran, take caverns of time portal to Tanaris
-> mount up and ride all the way to thousand needles, once you enter the region, pop your flower and ride back to the tanaris flightmaster outside gadgetzan and fly to...
->Slithus, plant it right there, and fly to...
-> Desolace, yeah you can plant it on the docks or anywhere really
-> fly to ratchet and take the boat to booty bay
-> following which you take the flight path to badlands and get your achievement!

And for all of you who have "the noble"
I guess its time to start on children's week!
But please do give a thought also for the real children out in the real world, and hop over to Brigwyn's children's week child's play auctions and give him a hand in doing your part for charity!

Noble on Medivh, my ultimate egg spawn point spot

And that is it for me, noblegarden is as good as over. I have braved many ignoble people, but at long last I have my eggs and meta-achievement.

As is customary, here is my top secret hunting location that I now share with you.



Yep, 5 spawn points, literally right next to each other. You don't even have to move a single yard. Also, the grass patch and alcove nearby will also have 3 spawn points each.

If you can find a quiet time, you can probably round up 7 eggs per minute, its almost like fishing. If there is really no one around, its pretty helpful to read a book or newspaper/blog as you wait for it to spawn. Even on busy times, a lot of people will miss quite a bit of the spots you can see above.

That is my easter gift to you!
The ultimate noblegarden egg spawn point spot.

I'll have one or two more posts up soon on my thoughts about this week, as well as a gold related post (yes, finally). Check back soon!

For those who wish to see my previous post on how to deal with noblegarden jerks, here are the 6 ways to kick their ass.

Flame Leviathan Hard mode reduxed, upgraded and updated: Towers, Loot, and resets

Update:
I'm currently trying to compile a list of the Emblems of Conquests that you can obtain per week, if you would like to help out, please click here

I'm typing out this update so as to more pertinently and directly address certain questions which result in people arriving at my previous post on how to kick flame lev butt with towers up. As well as to answer certain questions that I did not have or provide answers for before.

We'll begin with one I was severely amiss to have neglected:

How do I activate Hard mode???
Yep, I wrote the whole previous article without talking about this.

Well, the way to do EASY mode is to simply talk to Brann Bronzebeard, who will automatically transfer you to EASY mode, following which you just steamroll a path to Flame Leviathan and face roll :D or if you're pugging it, wince in frustration

If you're looking to pay some repair costs, the HARD mode is activated by talking to the Lore keeper of Norgannon, he will then activate all 4 towers. There are now 4 towers in the clear path to Flame Leviathan, simply DESTROY the towers you DO NOT want to see Flame Lev use, and leave the towers you want up.

If you intend to do hard mode, and it just so happens that THAT person in your guild just had to talk to brann, having everyone exiting the instance, and forming a new raid group with a new instance id or doing a reset, should theoretically work.

Why should my guild do hard mode?
You don't really have to, but here are the benefits

If you're doing 10 man, you should really do at least 1 tower up, because that will give you TWO emblems of CONQUEST instead of 1 emblem of valor, yes there is no typo, you read that right. You get a ilvl 226 emblem like a 25 man raid instead of the ilvl 213 valor emblem.

If you're doing 25 man here is where it gets really interesting!

(?) stands for unconfirmed, if you have a screenshot, or loot data, please feel free to update me
I'm compiling these data from what I've heard from friends and other guilds

Towers up | no. of 226 items | Emblems of Conquest
0 up | 2 items(?) | 1 EoC
1 up | 3 items | 2 EoC [Confirmed]
2 up | 4 items(?) | 2 EoC
3 up | 4 items(?) | 3 EoC (?)
4 up | 3 ilvl 226, 1 ilvl 239 | 3 EoC (?)

Take note that while Titanguard is ilvl 232, it drops from all modes of Leviathan as all Ulduar weapons will begin from ilvl 232.
Also, while not confirmed but highly likely, each tower up will increase significantly the chance of a fragment of val'anyr. It is possible that runed orb will replace this in 10 man.

!0 man tentative loot tables: (by popular request)
0 up | 2 items | 1 Eov [Confirmed]
1 up | 2 items | 2 EOC* [Confirmed]
-
4 up | 2 items + 1 232/226(?) | ? EOC
Would also appreciate further data, thanks anonymous!

Towers to leave up, Recommendations and Advice

All towers will summon moving beams of certain colors that will AT LEAST do a 15k damage AOE, so its a case of DO NOT STAND IN THE FIRE :D. Furthermore, each tower up will add 50% HP AND DAMAGE to Flame Lev

I'll first explain what the towers do:
Towers | Beam Color
Thor, Storms | Yellow
This is the easiest tower by far, and has no special effect, however I *think* it 1-shots passengers who are flung through a beam into the giant yellow fire truck leviathan.
Hodir, Frost | Blue
One of the tougher towers by skill, but easiest on gear. All movement speed is reduced by 20%, only siege engines should be worried by this, and the beams gain the ability to iceblock in its aoe. Iceblock can and MUST be removed by tarring + ignition.
Freya, Life | Green
This tower summon lasher adds, simply ask your demolishers to focus fire on them. They add a bit of extra damage to the raid, and that is about it.
Mimiron, Flames | Red
Pretty much the killer, the beams leave a flame path that deals 15k damage per second. If you're unlucky the flame beams will route into your Fire Truck Kite path, and then your siege engines die, horribly. If not, your raid might be stuck with a fire wall blocking their way, or have one popped right behind them as Fire Truck closes in.

How should you go about them? i.e. What towers should you start leaving up in order of difficulty.

Y, G, B, R
Thorim, Freya, Hodir, Mimiron

Any tips on Preparation?
Do Eye of eternity 25 man first, followed by Vault of Archavon both 10 and 25 man if it is up. This way you get ilvl 219 to ilvl 232 (pvp) gear that you can use to Pimp your cars. Ignore all set bonuses and whatsoever before boarding your vehicles! Only ilvl is considered in the creation of your car. You can be a plate warrior and wear cloth healing gear. (Not that you should roll on blanketing robes of snow if your healers need it, they will scream! and rightly so)

And that's it, GL in pwning Fire Truck's engines!

6 types of Noblegarden Griefers and how to deal with the cheap tricks they employ

For those of you who need a egg spawn spot, the link right there will show you the one I used. It'll get you your spring rabbit in a jiffy.

With noblegarden on the servers, jerks have been finding new ways to annoy the rest of the rabbit loving populace. They are out to get you, but never fear, I present some of the greatest ways to take terrifying terrifying vengeance back on them...

In order of frustration:

6) The Mailbox Camper

You know this person, he's the Tauren on his Kodo humped over the mailbox, or the Draenei on his elekk blocking a quest-giver, or anyone with a mammoth and an Napolean Complex. He's been griefing since you were a level 1, blocking your access to anything that ever needs you to right click.

Now, he has plonked his big fat kodo butt over your egg spawn point, and he's not going to budge.

Here's how to resolve this overgrown monstrosity:
BABY SPICE

It has wiped raids from thaddius to kologarn, it shall now wipe the floor off of mammoths, I present

Before

After


This particular mammoth was innocent, but was unfortunately the only one I could find in Dalaran.

5) The wannabe cat druid

He's a disgrace to the tauren and night elf druid community everywhere. This is the druid that shapeshifts to flight form just to nab that herb node from under your nose when you're clearing the mob, or that particular water hyacinth that you're trying to get when there are 12 other hyacinth right in the area for him to go to.



This is the cat that whizzes around the starter zone and hovers about until you start seeing an egg and moving towards it, then he sprints up, takes it, and /spit on you. Following that he tails you for another 10 minutes, blowing his sprint cooldown whenever he can just to aggravate you.

Here's how to give him a tight smack:
your 100% mount
mount up, ride to the other edge of the zone, loot your egg.
/laugh



thanks for the rabbit on dreadsteed picture!

If that didn't work, you might want to take a stick out of his book, and turn the following griefer style back on him:

4) The AFK-Looter

Yep, another person you know. Its THAT person, THAT person who jumps at Alexstraza's Cache in Eye of Eternity and refuses to budge. THAT person who clicks-clicks-clicks on the 4 Horseman Chest and then goes off to the toilet for 15 minutes. He does this for everything that can be opened, from quest chests to loot chests, he's the bane of questers and masterlooters everywhere.

You will see this guy run towards the egg, and start opening it, and...
and...
and...
stand there for the next half an hour.

Well, its actually not that harmful, as even though he takes up an egg spawn point, there are still plenty more to go around. Its a good counter-measure against the no. 5 griefer however.

3) Your zone has a sudden infestation of all three griefer types mentioned above

Ouch, it happens. You'll need to break out the big guns for this one.

Misdirection:
Remember the Elune stones, the moonstones, Archmage Valganoth summoning staff, BRD drill machine, Crashing Thrashing Racer? Take them all out of your bank and go crazy. If your class has flashy aoe, go all out with that too. With all the flash and bang from that, maybe they'll think twice about coming near you if you make it hard for them to see the eggs too.

2) You have no. 3, and to compound it, you must face the Lag Monster.

You're in Elwynn Forest, or Durotar, and you have the entire server population there with you. There isn't a square pixel without a rabbit or two, and each spawn point is overflowing with rabbits AND their rabbit pets. But wait, all the jerks on your server are also there with you! You see sparks start flying, and Noblegarden is starting to look like a really bad time to log into wow...

It might just be a good time to visit some old places that you've never been to for a long while, like Mulgore for the Horde, and Dolanaar for the Alliance. They look to be 50% to 67% less crowded for the servers I've looked at, and there'll be less jerks anyway!

1) Exasperation

You've come into Noblegarden looking for a good time, either frolicking with cute rabbits, or perhaps one of your pitstops in getting a 310% speed violet proto-drake, but you've had your mood fouled by quite a bit of these jerks in your first few days of the event.

Well, now this is a hard one to combat. Its not easy to fight off endemic greed when its every other person you see in the starting zone who thinks its a dog eat dog world out here in a virtual game world. While we can't do anything directly to them to stop them from polluting our grasslands, (wtb ability to attack own faction) I feel the best way to counter their plague is to:

Do a nice deed as your "daily quest"
Just because so many people are out to screw other people over, doesn't mean you have to let them make someone else's life miserable!

Just a few hours ago, I waved a lvl 58 over to my egg spawn point after watching her being mercilessly beaten to egg spots by a no. 5 cat druid griefer. (lvl 58s still have to use the 60% mount I guess) I simply AFK-Looted the egg until she came over, and then closed my window so she could loot it.

Later on, when I was going to do the hot springs achievement in un'goro, my rabbit disguise got broke because of the devilsaur >_<. It just so happened that the same lvl paladin was around to throw a timely blossoming branch to turn me back into the rabbit and get my achievement!

If your day is being ruined by Ignoble-garden Jerks, try to make someone else's day! Karma will be sure to turn around for you! At the very least, you would be glad having put a smile in another person's heart!

If you missed out on the spawn point at the top, I've updated it and the link is here!

Random thoughts on Noblegarden

After looking at the 4 starting zones, It looks like a good idea to go Silvermoon / Thunderbluff
Following which, if there are still like 29 people in your zone, camping at an egg spawn point might be the best thing to do. I just got a Spring Circlet from an egg!

Flame Leviathan Hard mode guide with towers, for the less hardcore

I've recently made a more updated version and Q&A about this post here so you might want to check it out.

I had a rant about managing my guild and about ulduar, but i thought it would be better if I wait until i had cooled down a bit more before i made any decisions.
To get my mind off that, here's a how to guide from my PoV on how to tackle Flame Leviathan using a mixture of people types in a guild that isn't so hardcore. This doesn't have a lot to deal with gold making though, and more about me leaving my thoughts on how to do flame leviathan down, so bear with me!

Basically, Flame Leviathan with 0 towers up, isn't even really a boss fight, its more like Archavon, but easier. Its a Pinata Train! So skipping that, I'll move straight to 1 tower or 2 towers up.

Here's a breakdown of this long post:
a) Preparation
b) In Combat
c) Recommended Towers to leave up
d) Looting the flame leviathan
e) Leviathan the loot pinata, and how it can make you richer

Preparation:
What I had my guild do, was run 2 25-Eye of Eternity, yep 2.
2 x 20 people, the first run was a skeletal crew of tanks and healers with quite some alts thrown in for good measure. The second round had about 23 people, filled mostly with the remaining people and some family/friend members that had logged on. All in all, it will drop 8 ilvl 226 items. For the people who need it, they got their items. We got off with 5 ilvl 226 items that will be used for the flame leviathan fight that would otherwise be disenchanted.

The reason for this is, while Flame Lev. is gear dependant, it only looks at the ilvl of your gear, not the itemization. So you can be a plate wearer and chock in leather healing gear that is ilvl 226 and your vehicle stats will rise. (yes i wore robes of blanketing snow to tank flame leviathan, all our healers had it, and leather stuff, and mail stuff)

Because of that, and previous gear from OS3 and KT25, i ended up with about 1800k HP on my siege tank. For other vehicles, your HP and DMG will also scale up along with your gear ilvl.

(if your guild can't take down eoe easily, you might try running ulduar 10 for ilvl 219 gear too)

Actual Fight:

Basically, the fight has 3 phases
1) Siege engines kiting Leviathan around
2) Demolishers launching passengers onto Leviathan in the meantime to take down the 4 turrets
3) Blowing cooldowns on leviathn during shutdown, and picking up people from phase 2, following which you go back to phase 1

For the siege engines kiters:
Kite it like Grobbulus or Anub'rekhan fight, around the entire room, Leviathan will randomly select one of you siege engines (or if you're unlucky a demolisher). Simply use the boost (button3) to clear corners, and get your ass away from leviathan. Those who are not kite targets, press button 2 to interrupt flame jets (its channeling, so activate enemy cast bars). Each kite lasts for about 30 seconds, generally, 5 seconds before kite target change, you would have your siege engines spread a bit, and start running the opposite way.

For Demolishers:
Stay at max range from Leviathan, while waiting for your guild leader to call out for launches. After you launch your passengers, wait till phase 3 starts, and fire away with your saved up pyrite barrels.

For Choppers:
You have the toughest job in this fight, this role is best reserved for people who are good at playing action games, but have horrible gear. You need to spread tar in Leviathan path (generally a good way is to tar the current kite targets actual location, since leviathan will go to that spot anyway) and also to pick up the parachutes in phase 3.

With towers up, whether you succeed or not depends on how many shutdowns you can get on Leviathan before all your siege engines and demolishers die.

You will want your two best (ilvl 226 geared) kiters on the siege engines. And your most agile (in terms of reflexes) player on the choppers. The launchees simply have to be geared enough to take down the turrets while withstanding they heavy and constant incoming damage. Keep your demolishers far away and launch as soon as possible each time. Have choppers tar the area and the shooters in siege engines and demolishers fire on the tar.

With the basic gist of the fight out of the way, here's what happens when you have additional towers:

Mimiron: Flame paths succeeding fireballs
Hodir: Ice beams and iceblocks
Thorim: Lightning bolts
Freya: Lasher Adds

Generally, here's what towers you should leave up depending on your group composition (and i don't mean by class)

Group with people that react quickly, but has terrible gear (because they are alts/just came back/using pvp gear) i.e. skills > gear
Do Hodir first, it slows speed down by 20% and ice beams activate that iceblocks targets. So long as your choppers melt the iceblocks fast enough (just tar and incinerate), it acts as 20% slower movespeed on the fight as a whole. It means you just need 0.2 more shutdowns than as normal.

If however, you have a bunch of tired people filled with ilvl 226 epics, you should opt for leaving thorim up. Thorim basically increases the damage sustained by your raid by incredible amounts , but ilvl 226 equipped players should be able to take the extra incoming damage. Otherwise the fight is equivalent to normal mode.

(Do note that for every tower up, Flame Leviathan gets more HP and does more DMG)

Using those 2 as starting points, the next one you should try leaving up is Freya.
The lasher adds can be resolved by simply having your demolishers burn them down everytime they come up, which is pretty easy for anyone to do.

Once you have successfully done those, lets get ready to loot the pinata train!

Each Additional tower increases the chance of Fragments of Val'anyr dropping.
My guild had the luck of two having dropped so far.

I have never done 0 tower up before however
But on 1 tower up 3 ilvl 226 items drop
I assume that at some point, an extra ilvl 226 item drops and later it will get converted to a ilvl 239 item. Could someone help me confirm this?

(for people doing 10 man, you might be interested to know that 2 Emblems of Conquest drops when you have even just 1 tower up)

And you should try keeping a person with engineering in your raid, they can salvage the train for around 16 random bars (I think my engineer got titanium bars) as well as random eternals. A friend has told me that titansteel bars also drop.
And thats about it, tell me if you find this guide helpful, or have any ideas on how to improve it.



Gold making element:
Flame leviathan with 0 towers can be easily pugged. And it has a chance of dropping Iron Riveted War Helm, pretty much the best dps plate helm you can get from the Auction house at the moment. Which you can probably sell for 8-11k gold depending on your server mileage.

The ideal way to do it is, organise a ulduar raid on monday nights for puggers, and invite them only if they accept that you have reserved the BoE helm. Make sure they understand that Iron Riveted War Helm is reserved for you, before they join, so that it is fair and ethical for both you and them. Zone in, kill Leviathan, loot him and run out. People will join because they get an easy 2 runed orbs, as well as a chance of ilvl 226 items that is MUCH easier to get than from Emalon. And it is the last day before reset, and a lot of puggers that have done naxx will be unable to find slots for ulduar simply because they just aren't very good. You can employ the Archavon people to zerg Leviathan and still be able to down him. If you're lucky, you get the helm and you can sell it the next day. If not, you get at least 2 runed orbs on your alt before reset.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45107