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!

-----
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!