Scarlet Monestary Graveyard

This was my random instance _5_ times in a row last night.  I pretty much hit the spectrum of players, too.

First group with a chain pulling / charging warrior (was awesome, we finished it before the 15 minute debuff even wore off).  Second was a real gem. 

We zone in, and get rolling.  I start following the warrior who just runs forward and proceeds to tank stuff.  Meanwhile the paladin just starts dealing on the warrior.  "Dude, wtf are you doing man?"

I'm confused, since he seems to be tanking just fine.

"Dude, wtf man, you are prot?  Omg I can't believe this, you are such a noob!"

I ask what the problem is, and the pally mentions that he is supposed to be tanking, and that the warrior was tagged as a DPS for the instance.  I check recount, and the warrior is just below me for DPS.  I point this out, but they seem to not notice.

The pally keeps going on about how much of a failure the warrior is, and how he and I are what are wrong with the new random instance LFG system.

We get to the crypt, and the paladin proceeds to run to the bottom, without killing anything, then finally drops a consecration.  Once the boss was down, they then turn to name calling, while attempting to troll me, and claim that I must be one of those 40 year old losers living in my mom's basement, and get my kicks by picking fights on the internet.

I point out that they were the ones that started a fight, but if they had such a bad grouping experience with me, they could put me on ignore so as not to have to group with me again.  They disband from the group, and I followed suit.

This, dear reader, is exactly the kind of humor I was looking for in the random dungeon LFG system.  Random people being complete fuckwads for no apparent reason.

The other three times I ran it after this were all good fast runs.  One of them the druid tank decided he didn't want to tank, and asked me to.  Told him I couldn't (have my -30% threat talent now), but it doesn't really matter, so he went cat form and we just blazed through the remainder of the instance.  It's a shame none of these runs count toward my pug or 'the Patient' title though.

I did hit level 31 on the shaman in all of that, however.

Additionally, I fired up a second banker to handle my JC work.  I figure I can use that banker to buy the titanium with while buying and selling gems to ensure that I don't sink too much money into the project at one time.  I bought 5 stacks of titanium on my main banker and prospected them.  It gained me 19 titanium powder, and 6 epic gems.  That is an overall net loss, even after the gems were cut and sold.  Thus, I will likely do that once per week or so, and simply buy raw gems to cut the rest of the time to fund the titanium purchases.

I am, however, still above 20kg, so things are still not doing too bad.

Level 30!

So, I hit level 30 on the shaman this weekend, mostly through BG runs.  Hooray Windfury!  Of course, using a 3.8 speed Axe, I rarely get to see the graphic, since it will generally 1 shot whatever it is I'm trying to kill at the time, so I don't even get the animation.  My target just falls over in a very anti-climatic way.

That said, the holidays are here, so play time is at a minimum.  I haven't raided since I last wrote about our lack of attendance on progression nights.  Thus why my shaman has been seeing the majority of the playtime.

I have, however, kept up an inventory of enchants so far, the most popular of which are Crusader selling for ~300g, Blood Draining going for 800-1000g, Blade Ward selling for 6-700g, +8 stats to chest selling for 75g (a 200% profit) and Enchant Weapon - Greater Potency selling for 60g (also a 200% profit).

Finally, reselling Arrows and Bullets continues to be a booming business.

After buying mats to replenish my inventory on the AH, my banker is sitting at just over 20kg.  Still a long way off of the gold cap, but progress is still being made.  I may start to recycle some of the cash from enchanting into Jewelcrafting so I can buy some of the more profitable recipes.  The problem with this, is there are always so few raw epic gems on the AH, that I could only get a few at a time, so it may not have a very solid ROI, and I may be better off simply concentrating on Enchanting for making money right now, and do JC right once Cataclysm comes out.

XT PuG x2

As I mentioned, I have been in the process of moving, so my play time is limited.  Thus I have yet to step into ICC (fiending for the action though), or any raid for the past week and a half or so.

That said, I don't want to fall too far behind in gathering the Emblems of Frost on either Ditto (paladin) or Becoming (druid).  Thus I found myself in two different PuGs for the weekly raid, which happened to be XT-002 in Ulduar. 

While running around on Becoming, someone was looking for more for the weekly.  I tell them I can either heal or DPS, they invite me.  After 10 minutes or so, the group is all formed up and ready to go.  We pile into our vehicles, I drove for a guild mate that happened to be in the same PuG, figuring I at least have the best chance for survival if they are driving. 

This is the first time I had ever done Flame Leviathan with no towers active, and wow.  What a joke that fight was.  He didn't even finish a second pursuit phase, and our Demo was the first one to be pursued.  So, FL down, we move on to XT.  Fight went great, was almost ended up activating hard mode, and likely would have if some of the DPS hadn't backed off.  That said, we did chain the heart phases, and ended up getting the speed kill achievement.

Later on, my girlfriend was around, and I got into another PuG to finish the weekly on Ditto.  This one was less stellar, but with similar results.

We get the group going, and I hop in a Demo to drive, with her gunning for me.  We get going, and I check my health vs the other Demo.  1.39m vs 958k.  Oh well.  We ended up downing it nonetheless, and in about the same amount of time.

We then move to XT, and the DPS was sloooow.  We ended up with my girlfriend and some random DK doing 5kdps each, and the rest of the DPS doing ~1.8-2k dps.  All the while, they were largely ignoring the bomb bots, so I ended up running around, and doing my uber Holy Shock -> Exorcism ->  Judgement -> Holy Shock -> "Hope it's dead" dps rotation on them, all while still healing 3x as much as the other healer.

Overall, the kills were clean and fast, so I will likely stick with pugging the weekly raid quest, since it appears even a group of scrubs can down XT.

No shaman action to speak of from last night.

On the AH / Gold Cap side of things, I'm up to 17k with ~80 auctions out standing.  Blade Ward continues to sell well, though there has been some competition finally joining me, so that may slow a little bit.  Even with the competition, though, the enchant scrolls are still selling for ~800g each.  Blood Draining is selling well also, however, sells for only about 600g.  I will likely start looking at the other gear enchants shortly, and try to keep a constant inventory of the more profitable enchants on the AH.  Currently, I just make sure I have one of each of the weapon enchants up, and that's about it.  I think keeping a steady number of enchants on the AH should help my profits quite a bit. 

Gems are of course selling well with all the new gear coming available. 

Finally, the Iceblade Arrows and Shatter rounds continue to sell for way more than they should, thanks to people who can't pay attention to some simple numbers.  That said, I am sure that each person only falls for this once, so it will likely only keep up for so long.  I will continue doing it until I don't come to a mailbox full of sales, however, as I make about 800% profit by doing so.

Gnomer and the AH

So, this weekend, I gave the random queue a shot again, and pulled Gnomeregan.  There were two different groups I had for this instance.  The first was terrible, the second was a rockstar group.  So, I'll concentrate on the first here :)

I zone in, and am patiently waiting for others to arrive.  I adjust some gear, set my totems up (soooo can not wait for the 1 button for 4 totems thing at level 30), and am still waiting for people to show up, when poof, in comes a hunter.  Ok.  Seems like people are just slow going.

Then I check the minimap, and notice the other three are already running ahead.  Apparently this was a group where a couple people dropped out.  No biggy, I run up to the rest of the group, and start smashing faces.  We get to the tunnel with the stairs down to the cleaning room, and the 'tank' charges past it to the next mob.  Ok, so I figure they may be new, and need some help figuring out where to go.  I help kill the one they are on, and inform them the way to go is back through the previous doorway.

They summarily ignore me, and charge up on the floating gear thing in the middle of the top platform.  I figure they are after the chest that spawns up there, which seems silly, but hey, perhaps they need some gear out of it, so we keep killing stuff up there.

Once everything is dead, everyone starts jumping down.  But not in the proper place to jump down.  No, instead they jump down in the spot that allows you to survive with like 5HP.  Fun.

So I end up healing the tank and myself, since the healer got eaten right away, and the druid missed the jump as did the hunter, so they just went splat.

We finally finish killing the mobs that were there when we had dropped, so I start res'ing people.  As soon as I res the priest, the warrior charges something else.  Since I didn't get put into combat, I just keep res'ing people, since at this point, I don't particularly care if the warrior gets smashed, since he's the reason we are in this predicament anyway.

After the druid and hunter were res'd, we caught up with the warrior, and were able to save him from being a floor decoration.  We kill Viscious Fallout, and he drops the Hydrocane.  The druid asks if he can need it since it is a big upgrade for him.  Now note.  This is a weapon with 26.x dps on it, and a breath underwater while equipped ability on it.  In otherwords, it's terrible for a druid, since they can already breath underwater, and ideally shouldn't be meleeing with a staff anyway, and one with any sort of caster or dps stats would work much better for them.

Whatever, I don't need it so doesn't matter to me either way, I pass, he gets the staff.

The warrior charges another mob, in the complete opposite direction of where we need to go.  We follow, I ask him where he is going.  He informs us that he is looking for the named boss down there (you know, the one we already killed?).  We remind him that we just killed it, and he starts to follow.  He then asks ( and I wish I had screen shotted this, I'll have to do that more often) "So who is the tank here anyway, I seem to be taking a lot of damage".

If the earlier part of the run didn't let me know how the rest of it was going to go, this certainly did.

A bit after that I hear "Hey, where is the hunters pet?", shortly followed by an alarm-o-bot and his 15 friends. As expected, we wipe.  The warrior, priest and myself all release and start to run back.  We zone in, and wouldn't you know it, the mobs at the beginning have respawned.  The warrior leaves the group.  The priest and I figure we'll start to clear some stuff while we wait on the others.

"Hey, can you res me?"

I look at my group frames, lo-and-behold, the hunter and druid are still laying on the ground, dead.

... Are you serious man? We all died, why would you expect a res?

The priest then left the group, and I figured I would follow suit.  Let them find their own res.

On the upside, after a couple of battle grounds, I joined another Gnomeregan group, and it was awesome.  Shaman healer, actually coordinated totems, and a warrior tank that started off saying "I don't want to spend an hour doing this place, so I'm going to be pulling so long as the shaman has mana".  Very smooth group.  The shaman went AFK once, I healed in the mean time.  Then I had to go afk, and just put the shaman on follow.

This experience highlights one thing.  We often say that a group is made or carried by a healer or a tank.  Truth is, the whole group needs to be at least reasonably decent (read: not retarded), or they can easily make an otherwise smooth run, a complete wipefest.

In other news, with the release of ICC, comes a new round of people needing to enchant weapons, gem gear, etc.  To say it another way its $$$$$ time.  In addition to the standard Blade Ward / Blood Draining enchants, and Runed / Bold Cardinal Rubies (among others, not worth listing them all out here), I have also started to take advantage of those who can't pay attention to simple details.

For instance, buying the Iceblade Arrows and Shatter Rounds that are in the AH in stacks of 1000, then relisting them for ~9x as much, in stacks of 100.  People buy them up, thinking they are getting a killer deal, because they can't be bothered to look at how many are being sold in that stack.  So I buy a stack for 35-50g, and sell it for 350g.  I then take that profit and buy the mats for a Blade Ward and flip it for 800g.

I think I may make a real attempt to reach the gold cap.