Connected Realms Update 9/25/2013

In my most recent post, I might have complained a bit about how my realm was relatively dead compared to past expansion ending return of players, but there's been quite a bit of news about connected realms since then, and I figured I'd take some time to update everyone on the current status.

Blizzard Testing the Waters
Now, it seems that Blizzard is finally taking the plunge.  Yesterday Blizzard updated their Connected Realm forum post with the following update from Nethaera:

In order to implement our first Connected Realms, Boulderfist and Bloodscalp will be taken down for an extended maintenance beginning Wednesday, September 25, at 3:00 a.m. PDT until approximately 11:00 a.m. PDT. During this time these realms will be unavailable for play. Additional realm connections are planned for the near future, and we’ll be posting a full list at WorldofWarcraft.com as soon as we’ve finalized the details.

So finally, Blizzard is testing out Connected realms on live servers!  While I'm skeptical about the near future part about the phrase "Additional realm connections are planned for the near future", I'm excited that they've actually taken the plunge to experiment with some live realms.  Of course, I'd like to analyze the two realms based on realmpop and AH size data, so let's have a look.

Boulderfist and Bloodscalp
First I want to note that these are both PvP realms. I'm just going to lead into this with some data, the populations are pulled from realmpop, and the Market Value of the Auction Houses are pulled from Wowuction:

Realm	Total Pop	Alliance Pop	Horde Pop	A/H Ratio	MV Alliance(Million)	MV Horde(Million)
Boulderfist	65728	21573	44155	0.489	0.97	2.57
Bloodscalp	45202	13158	32044	0.411	0.64	2.37
TOTALS	110930	34731	76199	0.456	1.61	4.94

To me this is a pretty interesting move by Blizzard.  I want to start off this segment by saying this could just be something they're doing for testing purposes, and have no impact on how they're going to combine realms in the future, but for right now I'm going to assume it will.

Population Balances
You'll notice that in both these servers the Alliance to Horde ratio is under .5 Alliance for every Horde player, and the connected realm will be no different.  They combined two Horde heavy realms, almost unchanging the overall faction makeup of the realm, which is a bold move.  Now if they stick with this, it will be very interesting to see how people react.  To me, I'd want to play on a balanced server, but the server I play on is 1.015 A/H, and you can't get much closer to balanced than that.

Auction House Implications
Now my realm which I complained about being small and lacking in sales has a market volume of ~1.5 million when I don't post transmog (~2.5 million when I do).  Because of this I think I'd be a bit unhappy if I was on the Alliance side of this connected realm.  On the other hand, they have about double the population as my faction. With the same AH volume as my current server, they have twice the audience.  I'd take it, but it'll be interesting to see how things shake out here, and hopefully we'll hear some results from this initial testing in a week or two, I'm sure there's bound to be posts on the Blizzard forums incoming in massive numbers once it's live at 2pm EDT, 11 am PDT today.

What are your thoughts on the direction they took with these connected realms?


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!

Phat's Patchly Lewt Review

I haven't done a weekly review in a while but I figured it'd be useful to do a 5.4 super awesome post.  (But Phat isn't every post you do super awesome!?).  You're too kind.

Timeless Isle
From a gold making standpoint, there are pretty lackluster things on the Isle.  From what I've seen personally, the 496 BoAs are kind of killing the crafted PvP market, although I think that gear WILL sell, just at lower price points than we're used to, which isn't the best news.  On top of that, all this 496 gear can be disenchanted, making Sha Crystals cheap, but keep in mind to turn the token to gear it has to be the appropriate type of armor for your class (ie only plate wearers can use a plate token).  I haven't actually done the math, because it's hard to determine drop rates of each of the tokens with so many sources, but one can assume, at most, that an enchanter can disenchant ~40% of these pieces of gear that they get.

Of course, because of this, Sha Crystals have tanked a bit on most servers, but in my opinion people will get sick of grinding the Island after a while, and although the prices may remain lower, I think they'll rebound a little.  There's also a great thread on the Consortium where we discuss this, check it out!  On the 5th page of that thread is also a collection of the treasure chests you need to check out if you're interested in getting coins/maximum armor tokens across alts.

Non-Gold Making
Honestly I've spent a lot of this patch doing non-gold making activities.  My character's gear was "okay", at an ilvl of 504 going into the patch, mostly from raid finder and the Shado-pan Assault 522s.  I took it upon myself to grind out some of the few slots I had 483s on, and I bought heroic bracers off the BMAH for a steal - 26k, and used valor to bump em up to 574s.  I even did the first wing of SoO in a pug, getting the Tier Chest on my first try.  That's more of the actual game than I've played in a long while.

Auction Housing
I was at the Auction House on and off, but when I was, I was disappointed at the level of sales.  That's not to say they didn't increase, they did quite a bit.  It honestly just didn't live up to the hopes I had, at least in the first week, as far as volume of players returning to the server.  My low pop is still low pop.  There's nothing like an end game patch to show you how dead your realm really is.  Even though people came back sales are at a snails pace.  Maybe double what they were a month ago, but still to me that is lower than I expected.

Selling Relics of Old
Oddly enough, and I did not expect this, I sold 2 relics the week of 5.4's release.  Both for 10k, one Relic of Xuen and one Relic of Niuzao.  That last one in particular struck me as a little odd.  To me there's no reason for a tank to buy these Relics at all.  First of all you can get a 496 trinket from the Timeless Isle, which is pretty good for tanks, and you could fill your second slot with the newly craftable http://www.wowhead.com/item=102483 which may not be BiS by a long slot, but the ilvl is where you'd want it to be.

Anyway, it sold, glad they did, and I'm honestly surprised they've done so well.  I wasn't expecting them to sell at a nice price (I was thinking sub 4k if at all), but this was a nice surprise.  I almost regret skipping making DMF cards this past DMF, but I think it was a good predictive decision (although it may have been wrong), and would make it again given the circumstances.

That's it for now, hope you enjoy the patch!  I'm looking forward to the 553 craftables, but there's still weeks to go for that.  I might get back into doing my Weekly Reviews, this was kinda testing it out.  I enjoyed writing it (and hopefully you enjoyed reading it), so odds are I will be starting them back up again.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!

Being Well Prepared for Patches

This post is for Selltacular's Gold Blogging Carnival, be sure to check it out for more great entries!  This month's topic question is:

How do you prepare for changes in the game?  How does it affect you at patch time?

Know the Changes
If you've been making gold a while, you know a major raid patch is going to spike consumables and item enhancements/gems right off the bat.  Those things go without saying.  Have them crafted ahead of time so you're ready for the rush.  After that, understanding the nuances of profession changes in a specific patch and how it'll effect you is essential.

Take this patch, 5.4 for example.  Tailoring is getting a new cooldown that cost 10 Bolts of Windwool, and it's all you need to craft raid gear.  Excellent!  No mats needed from DEing raiding gear is good for me, on my small server I've stayed out of these markets due to low availability and overpricing of these raid mats, so I'll actually be getting involved now.  Also, there's still the old CD which is required to make pant enchants, which does not share a CD with the new one.  So there's another 8 Bolts of Windwool a day.  So I'm going to need 18 Bolts per day, or 90 pieces (4.5 Stacks) of Windwool Cloth JUST for my cooldowns on one tailor each day.  Yikes!  On top of that, if you want to craft the new gear that's an extra 6-8 Bolts per piece. This is good to know pre-patch so I can stock up on this stuff in a big way!  After you fully understand what's going on, make a game plan!

Game Plan
I think that for this specific example, I'm going to go through my thought process, so I'm actually going to tell you what I am planning on doing when the patch hits.  First of all I'm assuming servers will be down for extended times, and I don't like the idea of posting on 48 hr auctions before the servers go down, although useful for some, it's not my thing.  So the first thing I'm going to do is log on and do a quick posting.

1. Post auctions.
2. Get new cooldowns - Tailoring/LW/BS/Engineering.
• Unfortunately for me these are 4 different players.  Didn't think that one through!  
• These patterns drop from MoP mobs, and I have a few sub-90s in this category, which is fine.  I'm most likely going to just grind some turtles on my 85s. 
3. Enjoy patch
• Subset of this is playing the Timeless Isle to get my undergeared Scribe some gear, so they can farm the new Techniques.
4. After a while farm up the Inscription Techniques. 

It's not that thrilling of a game plan is it?  Oh well, it just kind of highlights the most important/most lucrative part of this patch, the new profession CDs.  5.4 is going to bring around the most interesting gold making content in quite some time, and I hope you all are able to capitalize on it!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!

Gold Making in 5.4

5.4 comes out in 1 week, and I put together some information on what's going to happen and where/how to get your new recipes as well as what's changing.  I spent quite a few hours this weekend on the PTR, so everything in this post should be current as of the latest PTR build.

Tailoring/Leatherworking/Blacksmithing
I decided to group these three together because they're all getting (relatively) the same change.

New Daily Cooldowns (CDs)

• The three new corresponding CDs for these professions are Celestial Cloth, Hardened Magnificent Hide, and Balanced Trillium Ingot.  The recipes for these can be found off all mobs in MoP.
• The CDs work like the previous ones, each day you will learn a new random ilvl 476 PvP recipe or 553 PvE recipe. 
• The 553 PvE pieces require 21 CDs for a belt, and 28 for pants.  

• The daily cooldown can be bypassed using Spirit of War, which is a bit of a change from last tier. Instead of the new PvE gear REQUIRING it as a reagent, it helps you make it faster. Like the previous raid tier, these are found my DEing raid quality items from the Siege of Orgrimmar raid.
• The CDs still require the same amount of base mats PLUS the Spirit of War to bypass the cooldown.

Enchanting

The only major change coming to Enchanting is scaling enchantments.  You can now use any enchant on any ilevel item, and the enchantment will scale to a level appropriate enchantment.  This potentially kills some profit on BoA enchants, as people can just use MoP enchants, enchant once, and be done with it, while more hardcore twinks might use them as they optimize DPS in certain level ranges.  This will be an interesting change to keep track of in regard to old as well as current enchant sales.

5.4 will also introduce Sha Crystal Shards, which 3 of will make into a Sha Crystal.  Currently only older tier gear will DE into this stuff, so it's honestly not too exciting unless they decided to make the crafted PvP gear DE to these again before 5.4 drops.  

Engineering

Engineering is getting 5 new recipes, one of which, Jard's Peculiar Energy Source, is the new daily cooldown, found off any MoP mob, and a necessary mat (along with the equivalent amount of Living Steel).  Below are the new items that you can craft with this cooldown:

• 5 CDs/LS: Advanced Refrigeration Unit: New 36 slot cooking bag
• 15 CDs/LS: Pierre and Rascal-Bot: 2 New pets, one can be used as a campfire, the other a tribute to Bad Robot Productions. 
• 30 CDs/LS: Sky Golem: New badass epic mount.  Most likely the best investment out of all of the CDs, especially during the first few months.  

Inscription

Inscription is getting about 40 new glyphs, mostly cosmetic minor glyphs, but they will be in demand as a lot of them are more interesting than current minor glyphs.  Some techniques can be found in MoP, while others can only be found on the Timeless Isle.  

From what I've seen on the PTR, there are 2 types of techniques, BoE which drop only on the Timeless Isle, and BoP which drop off any MoP mob.  This means you don't need to be 90 to get all the patterns, but you'll be relying on others for the Timeless Isle ones.

Scribes will also be getting a recipe for a PvP trinket: Crafted Malevolent Gladiator's Medallion of Tenacity (Thanks to ShaddamV for pointing this out).

Alchemy/JC
Alchemy and JC aren't getting much love this patch, but gems and living steel will continue to sell well.  The usual.

Cooking
I'm not going to cover cooking in depth, but there will be new 300 stat recipes added as well as noodle carts. Compared to these other things, they're looking like small fish right now, but I'm still going to grind it out on my Cook who has Master of the Ways, expecting these other professions to have a much higher return.

Virtual Realms: Not Live on the 10th!
Just in case you missed it, Virtual Realms will not come with the 5.4 patch, they will come some time after release.  We'll most likely see some more info before then, and I'll keep you up to date.

That's my summary for 5.4.  If you have any questions, or comments, feel free to leave them below! 

Cheers,

Phat Lewts
If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!

Drunken Musings Ep 4

I've been on vacation for most of this week, so I haven't been able to mention this, but about a week ago me and GoblinRaset recorded episode number 4 of our Drunken Musings of Insane Gold Makers podcast, and if you're interested you can give it a listen here.

Since I just got back, don't expect a gold making post today, but there will be one this weekend!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!

Dying Poor in 5.4

Blue tweets have come out that say:
U.S. has two weeks from yesterday
Until 5.4 drops and rocks your World
of Warcraft, Hellscream's wrath's unfurled.

Wise gold makers know patch time is near,
The time to switch to TSM 2 is here!
For 5.4 will break TSM 1 it's said
And leave your competitors left for dead.

But not you, because you made the switch,
Even though setting up your groups was a bitch!
Now you're better off, no worse for wear,
And you won't end up pulling out all your hair.


For serious though guys.  TSM 1 will most likely break with the patch, as it will not be updated any longer (the current version of TSM is 2.0.x, by Patch day we may be on to 2.1).  Start learning TSM 2 if you haven't already.  I know there are a lot of people out there who are really "hating" the addon, but I have not talked to anyone who's been using it for over a week, and set everything up that would EVER want to switch back.  Unless you want to be stuck posting auctions by hand in 5.4 I highly suggest upgrading ASAP!


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you enjoy my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!

TSM 2 Transmog Importing

I finally got around to updating my Xmog list.  I've added a few items, taken a few out, and I've created a ton of subgroups for my own use that I'm playing around with, expect a post on that in the future once I've worked the kinks out (or watch me work out the kinks live when I stream).

Importing:
Step 1
Have TSM 2.0 and all it's modules installed, as well the addon Mogit (Mogit is the best addon for xmog).

Step 2
/tsm -> Groups -> New Group -> Type Group Name -> Enter