Chronicles of Noobia: Phat's Weekly Lewt Review

So as I mentioned yesterday I'm in a heated competition with Selltacular from Copper to Gold, and I thought my weekly review would be a good time to go over what I've been doing in game to make gold.

Humble Beginnings

I started off the competition with a Belf Disc Priest. The reasons are numerous, but the main being Belfs are good models for transmog using Mogit and Atonement healing is amazing/mindless/like having a 4th dps in the dungeon. Anyway I quickly got bored at level 6, and wanted out of Silvermoon, so I decided to head to org to scope out the Auction House. Here I am greeting some of the local denizens of the Undercity Zeppelin Tower (I just missed the Zeppelin because I went to the wrong tower).

Upon reaching Org and realizing I had almost no gold, I did a few more quests and got Mining/Herbalism, actually picked a few herbs before deciding that I hated myself and got to level 8. That's when it hit me! The DMF was in town! I quickly picked up fishing and took the portal out to DMF to fish up the Floating Debris pools. A great strategy for some startup capital as they have mats like Windwool Cloth, Trillium Ores, and many other MoP level mats. Also since I did not have a mount yet, I spent time in between pools killing the level 10 crabs that surround the island for some extra XP/vendor greys. Here I am jamming out with the Tauren Cheiftans and not being productive.

So I got a good amount of crates crates, as well as a DM Adventurer's Guide so I could collect DMF items from dungeons and I ended up getting a Mysterious Grimore and an Ornate weapon on the first day (was really grinding because the DMF was ending soon and I wanted to capitalize ASAP. I spent the following 3 days grabbing crates in my down time as well as well as leveling with Mining/Enchanting.

Alliance vs. Horde Goldmaking Contest/Bloodbath

So it all started out with a tweet surrounding Wowprofitz 1.2 Million+ Gold Giveaway, plus a little Horde/Alliance bias, but isn't that how all great WoW conflicts start?

@Selltacular @WowProfitz Ally!? He's a clown, not a heathen.
— Phat Lewts (@PhatLewtsGold) January 7, 2014

Of course this sparked up a debate between Selltacular and I, and he challenged me to a "duel", in terms of who could make more gold (on their faction) in a set amount of time on a server with a roughly 1-1 A:H ratio. We got into Skype and hammered out the details, and the summary is: we're rolling lvl 1s on each respective faction, using no means of transferring gold from other servers (BoAs okay but just for leveling) and a 2 week time frame starting from the 9th (so today's actually the 3rd day), and we've rolled on an RP server because we will be donating the gold to Profitz's prize pool, and we figured we could make the most gold on that type of server when comparing all the 1-1 ratioish servers out there. Official explanation can be found on Selltacular's post here. I'm going to write up my weekly review tomorrow, and the focus will be on this alt server for the review, so that will be interesting I think, seeing how I fared on a new server starting with nothing!



Cheers,

Phat Lewts

WoDcast & Live Recording Drunken Musings Thursday, Jan 9th @ 9pm EST

Hey everyone! I know I just announced that we released (our long awaited) Episode 5 of the Drunken Musings Podcast, but I have 2 more podcasting related announcements!

WoDcast
Earlier today I recorded an episode of WoDcast with someone you may be familiar with as Marthius from The Consortium Forums:

For Reference!

Anyway, he recently started a blog over at 8bitbrucegaming.blogspot.com called Every Last Copper, as well as a podcast called WoDcast, and I was happy to be one of his first interviews for the show! He plans on doing a midweek segment interviewing gold makers from all walks of the gold making community, and it seems like it's going to be a really great podcast you all will enjoy.

Here is the direct link to the interview, check it out!

Drunken Musings Episode # 5

Long time readers will probably know about my podcast, but for ~5 episodes last year me and GoblinRaset from The Drunken Mogul would get on skype and discuss gold making topics while getting drunk. It is formally called The Drunken Musings of Insane Goldmakers, Drunken Musings for short. This past September we recorded our most recent (yikes) episode and had an all star lineup of guests, Stede from Late Nite With Stede, Profitz from WowProfitz, and Erogroth former cohost of the PW:G Podcast and writer of Get Rich WoW.

Anyway, the point is, GoblinRaset stopped playing WoW shortly thereafter and never edited/posted this podcast, but now he's back around, and finally got his act together and posted it on his website. It's about 3 months out of date, but it's kind of interesting to see how the game has changed since 5.4 dropped, and some of the people on the podcast's attitudes about WoW shift dramatically (looks at Stede/Profitz).

Thinking Like a Gold Maker (Part 1)

In this multiple part series, I'm going to go over my thought processes and how I think about concepts in gold making in World of Warcraft, and why I do things the way I do. Today I'm going to spotlight the Buying aspect, because in my opinion, it's the hardest part of gold making for new gold makers to nail down, as well as the most important.

The Logic Behind Buying Crafting Mats
Although it may not seem so from the outsiders perspective, there is indeed a certain logic behind purchasing items in WoW, and it's a key to making massive piles of gold. Whether it's raw mats or an item to flip, I always focus on one question when buying: "How much am I earning by making this purchase?" This may seem counter intuitive to some, but purchasing is actually when you make your gold. Just think about it. Yes, you may have to do intermediate steps such as prospecting and cutting gems, but your profit is going to be determined by how much you paid for the item to begin with, and how much you sold it for, because what it boils down to is: Profit = P_sold - P_bought, where P = Price. Are you buying at a reasonable price? Could you get it cheaper? Could you get someone to farm this for you? Minimizing cost is more important than maximizing selling price. How much you buy raw materials for is something that you can have MUCH more control over than how much you sell an item for.

Phat's Weekly Lewt Review 1/4

So for me this week has been an all posting, no crafting kind of week. I honestly haven't been in game much other than to post a few times a day. I may or may not have bought the Bioshock trilogy during the Steam sale and I may or may not be devoting godless amounts of time to playing through it. Anyway, here's the breakdown by the numbers:

In the last 7 days I spent 15,009g which turns out to be ~2k a day. This mostly CODs of ore and herbs from my suppliers for the most part this week. Might have splurged on some leather while crafting my LW CDs, but honestly no day this past week did I spend more than 2 hours in WoW. I'm doing a Cooldowns -> Post -> Logout cycle.

The way I craft is such that I can repost the same things (usually enhancements/gems/PvP gear what have you) without having to have a crating stage, so a lot of times I don't even visit the mailbox, just withdraw post cap from the bank with TSM, which is really great for times like now when I don't craft. I am honestly starting to feel a bit of drag in the game. There's no new anything on the horizon and there's nothing new and challenging in game at this point (that interests me at least). Basically just crafting and profiting from the same items that are go-tos. Thinking about getting a bit more creative in the near future, but only time will tell if that pans out.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

Warlords of Draenor Gem Changes

It is no secret that there are going to be big changes to gems come WoD. They announced reduced slots as well as armor that changes with your spec, leaving a lot of questions up in the air. In the past couple of days, one of WoW's Game Designers, @Celestalon has been tweeting up a storm on twitter about the gem changes. So here's what he had to say:

So there are no longer Primary stats on gems. Guess that answers the question of gear swapping, even for tanks. Something to do with the space-time continuum I suppose. A lot of WoW news outlets are covering this as a brand new development, but all of this was actually mentioned previously in this blog post by Crithto about a month ago. Honestly I had not seen that post either, and only noticed when the blues tweeted about it, and I did some research, and that's why I'm covering it now. So, for now at least, from the tweets and the blog post we only know the following stats will be on gems:

1. Critical Strike
2. Mastery
3. Haste
4. Spirit
5. Bonus Armor
6. ?PvP Power - this one is going to be a secondary stat on gear, but no specifications whether or not it'll be on gems.

That's it. There are other secondary stats that are being considered for WoD, but not as gems (supposedly to reduce confusion, but I don't think that's the case) they are: Readiness, Amplify, and Multi-strike. I'm sure that will make everything more "logical" to people and "clear up" the confusion of hit, parry, and dodge. I digress.