Off The Cuff - Surprise Moneymaker

Since I've got so few readers, I figured I'd be safe in this "big reveal".  Out of everything I've got, the one item pulling in the biggest profit for me is Tinker's Gears.  At the low mat cost of two Ghost Iron Bars, which average about 24g total on my server, I can sell these little beauties for 200g-300g a piece.

I'm imagining it's because of the Ghost Iron Dragonling, an also-easy-to-make 450 iLevel trinket which sells for a song and is popular among fresh 90s looking to bump up their iLevel to get into Heroic dungeons.  It comes with three Gear slots, allowing the wearer to customize it with +600 in three different stats.  Since the Gears are also unique-equipped, anyone using the trinket is forced to buy three different gears to put into it, which makes for a viable market for all of the gears, and not just two or three that carry the most popular stats.

I'm still seeing how much the market can bear in these things, but I can easily say that I'm selling 10-20 of them a day, even without constantly camping for undercutters.

Off the Cuff - Websites I Can't Live Without

Every so often, if I'm working on a rather lengthy post but don't want to leave you guys without something to read, I'll dash something off that I think might be helpful.  Today, it's the top three websites that I always have open.

• Battle.net - Now that the Remote AH is free, there's next to no reason not to visit this site frequently.  Sometimes I use it extensively for setting up transmog and rare recipe sales, sometimes for using the Neutral AH for swapping things from Alliance to Horde and vice versa, and sometimes just to grab something really quick that I've gotten an alert for.
• The Undermine Journal - If you've never been here before, you're really missing out.  TUJ keeps track of auction sales both current and past, and can be used to help you decide if buying something is a good investment, should your addon be indicating it might be.  For a small fee, you can even get it to keep track of specific items and e-mail you the results; I use this for a lot of rare recipes, and whenever I get an alert, I hop over to the Remote AH and snatch it up.  Can we say 50g for an item I later sold for 9000g?  Yes we can!  TUJ even comes with a handy round-up of recent gold blog posts on its front page.
• WoWuction - A new site to my arsenal, but already one I can't live without.  Similar to TUJ in that it keeps track of current and past sales, the feature I use the most is their Bargain Hunter, which can be found under the Reports tab.  Set it to your realm, and you're ready to see a list of items that could potentially be flipped for a goodly amount of gold; this is extremely helpful to catch something you may not have considered for one of TUJ's alerts.

There you go.  You're welcome.

Radio Silence

Wow, it's hard to believe it's been over a week without a post; this is what happens when I spend time away from a computer that doesn't have WoW installed on it.  I know I promised a detailed description of my big leveling push, but since most of it is old news by now, I'm going to have to renege on that.  Hopefully you can find it in your hearts to forgive me!

That said, let's get an update on what I've been up to.  Along with leveling Knand to 90 and working on various other characters' professions, I went out of town to a Japanese animation convention, which ate up a lot of my free time.  Despite this, not only did I get Knand to 90 first in my guild, but I've also maxed both his Jewelcrafting and Enchanting, and have earned him a respectable iLevel of 461; Looking For Raid level needs to be 463, which I'm confident I can get before that kicks in next Tuesday.  I've also managed to max Mining on the Death Knight and Alchemy on the Priest, and have almost maxed Herbalism and Leatherworking.  The DK has a second round of JC, which has enabled me to double up on my researches, resulting in me having twice as many cuts as I should have, which would be even more impressive had I been able to actually research every day since launch.  As it is, I've gotten two very important things for gold-making: The cut for Brilliant Primordial Ruby, and the Transmute: Primordial Ruby alchemy recipe.

Since I'm no longer needing to pump all my gold into Ghost Iron Ore for prospecting into red rares, I've started focusing on picking up Golden Lotus (for transmutes) and offloading some of the stock I picked up prior to the launch.  I've also (finally) gotten my gathering druid and one of my bank guilds transferred to the new server.  The druid is almost maxed on Herbalism and Mining, and once she is, I can get started on Alchemy: Flask Mastery for the DK, and Inscription for the Priest, instead of their current gathering professions.  Soon I'll transfer over the Tailor, and start maxing that, Blacksmithing and Engineering.

In the next few days, I'll post detailed descriptions on what I'm up to for each profession, as well as how I'm using them to further my secondary goal of hitting the gold cap on my main server.

Blink & You'll Miss It

First, let me apologize for this being a day late; I underestimated just how much my push to 90 would suck out of me.  More on that in a moment!  Now for what you guys really want to hear about: The winners of the MoP giveaway!

The winners are... RandomHero and Jocelyn Brown!  I'll be establishing contact soon to make sure I've got the best way to reach you.  Congratulations to you both!

A disclaimer: Blizzard still hasn't posted the digital key version, so you who won will have to wait a bit before I can get your prize to you.  If they haven't done it by the end of the week, I'll get with you guys and see if something else can be arranged.

Now, for the realm first push: Long story short, I didn't make it.  By several hours.  Most of the server firsts on my realm were won by folks in one of the top raiding guilds on our realm, so I imagine that not only did they have a lot in the way of assistance and materials at their disposal, but they also have a much more refined playing skillset than I have.  Dying multiple times is probably not the most efficient use of my time.  However!  I did make it to first in my guild to 90, and had a brain-blurring blast doing so.

I'll post a more detailed description of how things went when I've gotten some sleep; I only hit 90 about four hours ago, and I've been leveling my professions and enjoying flight in Panderia since then.

Almost Time!

So, guys, here we are.  Just over 6 hours to the launch of Mists of Pandaria.  I hope you're ready!

I feel like I am, but I'm also afraid that there's something I'm missing.  My PC is wired and ready to go, save for a few file transfers to make room for my Fraps recordings.  I've got both Fraps and TwitchTV set up, ready to start recording, and my laptop next to my PC so that I can check if anyone's trying to chat on the Twitch page.  Refreshments are set up in order of how I'm expecting to consume them: Water, canned breakfast shakes, diet Code Red, NoS on the beverages side; squeezable apple sauce, liquid whey protein, and various protein bars on the food side.  Keyboard's new, mouse is new, mousepad is new-ish.  Even dusted the desk to give myself a nice, fresh work area.  Vent has a special channel, just for me, that warns folks that they're going to be livestreamed if they enter.

Game-wise, Knand is parked in Molten Front, as has been the plan.  While he has a stack each of raid food and flasks, it's been pointed out to me that the first innkeeper he runs into will have better stat food, so I'll definitely grab a stack of that when I hit him, probably vendoring whatever food he's got left.  Zygor's new MoP guide has been loaded, and I'll make sure to double-check for any updates before I log in at 2AM; there's already been one, so I'm not taking any chances.  My five other addons are up-to-date as well: Postal (for quick and easy mailing), Bagnon (to keep my bags tidy), Lootfilter (instant vendoring of greys!), TradeForwarder (because I don't want to miss what wacky hijinks will be occurring in /2) and Addon Control Panel (turn addons on and off without having to log out).  I have a guildmate who wants to party quest through MoP, which I may do a bit of.  However, since I've got the dailies and Zygor's guide, if he starts to lag behind, I will probably have to continue without him.  Don't mean to sound cold, but I've got a goal to hit!

I'm going to try to get a bit of sleep between now and 2AM.  Feel free to visit the feed at http://www.twitch.tv/shewhogames, or to post encouragement here, on the Facebook page, or in-game.  Good luck to us all, and I'll see you guys on the other side of 90!

Ups & Downs

Real life intruded yesterday, keeping me from posting an update (or another installment of Free Fridays, but more on that later).  That aside, I have some actual developments to talk about.

First, the PC is up and running!  The new power supply was installed with minimal difficulty; as I suspected, the toughest part was wrestling it onto a work surface, and than back into its cubby.  I'm in the process of updating WoW, installing Zygor, and making sure all updates and patches for the computer itself are in place.  I've also acquired a 100' Ethernet cord from work to use, as I don't want to trust the PC's wireless card to the beating I'll be inflicting shortly.

As I'd promised myself, once I had the PC running, I began the final steps to transfer the bank guilds, starting with appointing my dual-gathering 84 druid Guild Master of the first.  Imagine my surprise when I went to Battle.net to do the transfer, and was informed that the GM had to have held that position for at least 7 days before they'd be eligible!  I had transferred a guild back in June without receiving a similar notice, despite having done the same GM swap, so to say that this completely blindsided me is an understatement.  Of course, had I prepared the PC when I meant to, two weeks ago, this would have been a non-issue, but thus is life.

This changes things a bit, since I won't bring over the gatherer or the tailor without the guilds; I'm not spending $50 for character transfers and another $70 for guild transfers later, when I can get it all done for the $70.  Due to this, my JC/Miner and my Alch/Herbalist will be remaining as they are, and I'll just have to wait until after MoP to have all 10 professions on one server.  Of course, this also means that I can spend a bit more time on the old server, selling off some things that tend to catch a higher price than my new place does.

So here's where I stand: Knand is out on the Molten Front, bags empty of everything except his quest items, a stack each of raid food and flasks, and his Hearthstone, set to the Valley of Honor where all the dailies are located.  All of his addons have been disabled except for Bagnon, Lootfilter, and Zygor.  Once 3AM EDT swings around and that magic quest pops into his log, Knand will turn in all the MF quests, hearth to Org where he'll turn in the dailies, hop to TB really quick to turn in those dailies, then hop back through the portal to start the MoP questline.  Estimates are that 24 dailies will produce 10-13% of the XP needed for 86, which will put me that much further ahead for only a few minutes worth of work; I'll probably do a dry-run tonight, just to get a general sense of how many minutes it might take.  I wish I didn't have to deal with loading screens (three by my count), as many a greater player than I have experienced problems with those.

Other than Knand's prep, I'm pretty much going to take it easy between now and then.  Maybe finish with my leatherworking rogue, maybe play a few rounds of TF2.  We'll have to see.

Am I Screwed?

It's a case of best-laid-plans here: The PC still stands, nonfunctional, and my sleep deficit is no where near paid up.  The only upside to last night was that I went through all of my characters on my old server and transferred any usable goods to the two bank guilds I'll be bringing to the new server, so that's one less thing for me to worry about.

I ran into another bit of a snafu yesterday, when I noticed that Blizzard's release time on my account had changed.  Originally it had stated that I'd be able to access MoP at 12AM EDT; while I thought this odd, I didn't question it.  While in my account settings yesterday, however, I saw that it had changed to now read 12AM PDT, which will be 3AM my time.  Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it definitely causes me to have to re-evaluate a few points, such as whether or not I'll try to get some sleep in the few hours before launch.  Original plan was to spend most of Monday sleeping, have some dinner, take another nap, then get up around 10 to get full awake, chill a bit, and finish setting everything up.  There's a part of me afraid that if I try to sleep past midnight, I won't wake up for the launch.

Goals for tonight: Get the power supply in the PC, and the PC running, if not raiding on it.  Transfer both guilds with the tailor and the dual-gatherer.  Finish leveling the rogue's Leatherworking and Skinning.