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!