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!

Exclusive Update: Buy Rare quality Gems with Honor Points

If you came here looking for pvp gear to purchase, you can see my list of honor gear prices here

Apparently Blizzard has started listening to the people who were objecting to the 75k honor cap, especially since there was no way to liquidate the honor once you were already at the cap. In order to solve this, blizzard has made a change that was not mentioned anywhere, until now.




They have given the jewelcrafting vendor in the Orgrimmar (alliance will have their own equivalent) the ability to sell you blue gems for 10,000 honor points. Yep, you heard right, at the honor cap, you'll be able to buy 7.5 scarlet rubies and either sell them straight away or cut them and sell. It is a pretty good way to deflate the market however, especially since a lot of people predict that gem prices will slowly skyrocket when season 6 begins and ulduar easy mode enters farm stages and people grab tons of new gear with sockets.

For the horde, you will be able to buy them from lady palanseer



It would be best to slowly sell half your stock at the highest possible price you can fetch, and then keep a watch out for the next gearing phase of 3.1, likely within a few days to a week. So for those of you who are honor capped and have nothing else to buy, do so now! You might want to spread this knowledge out to your friends as fast as you can because when word gets out (like if it makes it to wowinsider) another horde of gems will start flooding the marketplace!

You might also wish to check out how to turn your wintergrasp tokens into gold here!

Buying and selling: Things to note when selling bracers

Now that ulduar is out, more and more people are desperately liquidating their purplish assets before they drop drastically in value. I've seen several more opportunities, and had a few more questions directed my way. One of the more common ones is the prices the bracers should go for.

For people looking to sell their emblems of valor, if you have 60 of those then the next logical choice would be to convert them to bracers and sell them. As it is currently, I discourage the conversion to either frozen orbs or scarlet rubies if you have more than 60 emblems, as while the bracers will now embark on a process of devaluation, the decrease in price is not so sharp as to be less then the next highest alternative cost. That is, converting 60 Emblems of Valor into 60 Emblems of Heroism and following that into 6 scarlet rubies.

At least for the next two weeks, I do not expect the EoV BoE bracers to fall below 2 x the price of 6 Scarlet rubies/frozen orb (whichever is higher). That is, a good ballpark in which you should sell your bracers at would be.

Let's just call the price of a cut/uncut scarlet ruby/frozen orb a liquidating unit, where we take the value of whichever one of those three end products at its highest value.
On Medivh, that would be about 85 gold for a cut gem.

Minimum (for quick sell) = 9 x liquidating unit
which would be 765 gold, the lowest price I would sell at on medivh
at least for the next few days

Maximum price = 12 x liquidating unit
which is 1020 gold
If I can sell a bracer at around +/- 100 gold of this sum then I would consider it to have been a good trade.

Some of you might wonder why I use 9 units instead of exactly 6. Well, you must consider that if you try to sell say six runed scarlet rubies, you risk the chance of flooding the market, causing you to relist the same product several times, or even worse, deflating the value of that particular gem market. Furthermore, converting all the emblems to gems and so on and so forth would in real like curtail a processing charge. A rough estimate of all these will give you the 50% markup on prices I provided above.

An idea to keep in mind is that market price is not the intrinsic value of the item, but the aggregate price in which a purchaser is willing to pay for it.

If you're reading this page because you intend to buy bracers to jumpstart your ulduar career, and you wish to see how an equitable price for the bracers can be calculated, then you can factor the above breakdown into your considerations. If I were to buy bracers in these few days however, I would seek to purchase them at at most 6 x liquidating units, as I believe that is the minimum floor level the bracers will drop to for the next 4-6 weeks. That is, for medivh, 510 gold.

The key component in all these trades however, is that you must act fast, be it in buying or selling. Everytime a new patch breaks, markets has never failed to fluctuate violently, and you'll see prices go up and down to incredible highs and lows. The best way is to ride the wave as fast as you can, and retreat early to safeguard your profits. I hope that answers the emails I receieved :D

Cheers! Ulduar in 12 hours!!!

To buy or not to buy, pre-ulduar

When I logged in today, I had a flurry of guildies whispering me about tomorrow's maintenance.
For the record, I do not believe the patch will take place tomorrow.
Although if it does, I'll be logging into blogger and editing this statement. (joking :D)

There are two questions that are probably floating around out there, so I might as well address them now before the patch, and then copy and paste from my post into gchat/msn later :D

1) While 3.1 will most probably not drop tomorrow, 14th April, tuesday, might herald the end of season 5. I personally think blizzard will probably delay season 5 till a week after, or at the very least initiate freezes of one sort of the other. Do note that while points and rating are being reset, honor and hidden ratings will carry over.

What this means is that, you can probably expect less demand for pvp oriented enchants and gems and slot augmentations. Basically, anything that has the word resilience in it! That goes for crafted pvp gear too! If you still have those, try to limit your production of those goods. For me, I'm holding back my resilience gems and scrolls until at least one week after season 5 ends, so that when season 6 begins, a new flood of buyers will come in and snap up the augments at elevated prices.

2) My friends have been noticing that BoE epics from 3.0x have been dropping sharply in price with all the doomsayers forecasting the bombing of prices post-ulduar. While I do not doubt that prices will drop, it will not have such a rapid decrease as some people seem to think. In this confusion I've snapped up excellent deals like a surge needle ring for 70% of usual prices, I purchased it for 5500 gold and sold it around 5 minutes later for 7200 gold. The same went for a nobles deck, where I purchased all 8 cards for 4200 gold and sold it back to the market as a deck for 6000. Those are some of the items you can watch for on your server, as they are ilvl 213 epics that will still retain their value even into ulduar. If you have the money to throw, I recommend you pick them up once they hit 60-70% of their usual price, and then try to push them back into the market as fast as you can. Another good item would be arcanic tramplers or boots of impetuous ideals. Certain interesting ones would be Je'Tze Bell and Tears of Bitter anguish, but I would advise greater caution when dealing with those.

5 items you need to sell before 3.1 (for BoE epics)

While still relevant, this post is slightly outdated. If you wish to read about patch 3.2 preparation, you can click here.

With the ulduar patch coming in a few weeks now, I've been asked by several people on which items to sell while they still can. Today I'll cover the bind on equip gear, since these are the items that costs anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand gold. Some of you probably have some in your bank, or you have to find some way to liquidate your guild bank before patch hits. Today's post will show you 6 items you need to release back into the market before 3.1 hits.

Basically, the items that will be the worst hit will be those that have an immediate BoE ilvl 226 or ilvl 219 upgrade from ulduar. People looking to gear up their mains or alts, will hold off buying the following items, since it would be more cost efficient to purchase the higher item-valued slot piece instead of buying a ilvl 200 item only to replace it a few days later.

Another criteria for selection, is the exclusion of any future ilvl 226 BoEs that require runed orbs. Requiring 15 Emblems of Conquest, runed orbs will likely be an expensive commodity for quite a few weeks to a few months following patch release. Each crafted BoE will require about 5-6 runed orbs, which would be about 90 emblems. That would be almost enough to buy t8.5 head and chest piece. As such, I highly doubt that runed orbs will reach equilibrium prices anytime soon and will remain overpriced and expensive.

While some of the following items are still a decent placeholder for a newly minted 80 starting to gear up, come 3.1 there will be a disparity between these epics and the highest tier ilvl available, seriously devaluing the amount by which you can sell them for.

Thus, without further ado, here are the items that needs to go into someone else's inventory:

1) Anything that goes into the wrist slot
That is, basically any Emblem of Valor bracers that you have.
The key reason you should sell them off now, is because
a) more and more people now know that there is no further use for valor tokens, and the next thought that goes through their mind will be to convert them to bracers and sell it off, increasing your competition. And to make it worse, they will be willing to sell them at any price, driving it down to perhaps 500-800 gold each.
b) the week ulduar comes out, guilds will rush through ulduar-10 to ensure extra gearing up of their raiders, not to mention a large army of people waiting to bite their teeth into ulduar through pugs or small guilds. Ulduar-10 drops a plethora of ilvl 219 bracers, meaning that people gearing for bracers will be looking at the ilvl 219 wrist slots, and not your EoV bracers.
For a more detailed run-up of the bracers, check out my previous post.

2) Jewelcrafting:

Titanium Impact choker will be replaced by
-Nymph Heart Charm

and Titanium Earthguard Ring by
-Signet of the Earthshaker
although druids might still go for the Jewelcrafting ring

3) Tailoring:
Deathchill Cloak, Wispcloak

Will be replaced by
-Asimov's Drape

4) Blacksmithing

Spiked Titansteel Helm, sell it before
Iron Riveted War Helm appears on the AH

and the same goes for Titansteel Shield Wall
before people go for the ulduar 25 shield Northern Barrier

5) Leatherworking:

Get rid of Giantmaim Legguards, since Darkcore Leggings will be dropping in ulduar 25


With this list in hand, its time to hit the AH and trade channel and sell them off before their prices depreciate!

Summation Mondays

It's been 12 days since this blog started, and i've gotten a few emails and a few days of spikes in page views, which has been more than i expected!

I'll take this time to address the e-mails that have piled up, and the search questions that sends people to this blog:

I'll start with this search result, what is the disenchanting skill level required for ilvl 213 items and up. I've had a few related searches and an email on this. Well, my answer is...
I'm not too sure myself! Since I'm the guild disenchanter, my enchanting level has sat at a comfortable 450. The old formulas to calculate minimum disenchanting level also do not work. I would venture a guess that it is between 375-400. I'm afraid I can't help much with this D:

Do send me an email or leave a comment if you can provide an answer!

The other topic I'm getting lots of hits and a few emails from are that of low level ways to make gold. It seems really popular, and quite a bit of people love the prairie dog whistle. Stay tuned, for I'll be adding more low level ways to make more gold!

Once again, do let me know if there's any particular level range or theme which you want coverage about!

Last, but not least, here's an excerpt of what one reader sent
Hi Sherry, I've really enjoyed reading a new blog that brings a refreshing change from the other blogs out there that helps people make gold with minimal time spent, and I've recommended it to my guildies, keep up the good work and update more. Would you like to consider putting pictures up on the blog though? Just to add a little spice

Well, I'm really not sure how to get an image host up and running actually. Could anyone help? And thanks for recommending it to your friends, I hope this blog can continue to grow like a gigantic feast! Please help to spread the word!

Low level mischief, whistles and hatchlings

Here's a tip that is pretty well known, but which effectiveness would vary from server to server.
It has to do with listing vendor sold pets on the AH for profit.

The first is the prairie dog whistle, which you can obtain from thunderbluff. If you park your bank in thunderbluff like I do (since it is much less laggy than crowded orgrimmar) its a vendor pet that is extremely easy to obtain, costs 50 silver, and would sell for 5 - 10 gold on the auction house. It sells because the extra few gold premium that buyers pay for it is equivalent to the opportunity cost of them making their way to thunderbluff all the way from undercity or orgrimmar.

Another good place is Eversong Woods, where you can buy the different dragonhawk hatchlings. This particular trick will take a bit more work, since you must run quite a bit from silvermoon city (another good place to park an alt) to fairbreeze village, and then back again to relist in on the AH. Alternatively, you could simply roll a new blood elf and run it to the village, and simply mail it to your bank alt. The dragonhawks costs the same, but can sell for slightly more, sometimes even for 15 gold.

What you can also do in addition to these, is to bring those two pets to the neutral auction house in booty bay. Since these are horde specific, alliance players will also pay extra for access to these pets. Combined together, the effective marketing and selling of the pets is a good way to make gold at both low and high levels.

Making Gold at very low levels

As I was levelling my lvl 38 twink/alt through stranglethorn vale, I would mail some items off for my bank alt to sell, and some to sell in the Auction House so as to make some gold on the side.

After a few days of about 15 minutes each, I realise that there is a very good opportunity in this untapped market. Here are 2 things to watch out for when you are in the area!

1)Elemental Water:
There's a tiny little island towards the northwest of Stranglethorn Vale which is full of water elementals, they have the best drop of elemental water that I have ever seen so far. Elemental Water is used for many recipes and goes surprising well on the medivh Auction House, from 15-25 gold. Do take care to post only when there are no other competing Elemental Waters on the auction house however, so as to maximise your profit. Trade volumes for this item are low however, so there should be plenty of opportunities to make some gold of this!

2) The green hills of stranglethorn:
Everyone knows this papers drop all over the place in this area, but it doesn't occur to many that there is a Neutral Auction House right in Booty Bay where they can immediately trade and sell these quest items! Alliance and Horde on medivh will both be looking for this items to turn in for quick experience, and you could be the one to sell them each piece for 1 gold to 5 gold.

Once again, make sure there are no competitors before you post your goods!

Update: Shacknews did an interesting article over what kaplan(tigole) said about the Green Hills quest, I intend to post about it soon.
Here's to your low level hero making some gold at 40!

Making Gold On Medivh

Hello!
I'm Sherry and I play on the Medivh server, and I would like to share with everyone my tips and tricks for making gold in world of warcraft