Tag Archive for 'guide'

Wrath: Overview of Daily Quests Level 75-80

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Yashima
on December 18, 2008
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Some time ago I wrote the first part of my Daily Quest Guide for Wrath. It gave an overview of all dailies available from level 70-75. Now we are level 78 and looking for more interesting things to do, despite not yet having reached Exalted with the Kalu’ak (we both want the epic fishing rod!).  So here is the second part of the list of dailies in Wrath. I hope I didn’t miss anything – I have not yet done any of these since we have little time to play due to Christmas preparations.

Valiance Expedition

Knights of the Ebon Blade

The Wyrmrest Accord

Argent Crusade

Kirin Tor

The Oracles & the Frenzyheart Tribe

Note: you can’t have Orcales + Frenzyheart Rep at the same time. There is a quest to swap your rep between the two tribes:

From Oracle to Frenzyheart: Frenzyheart Champion lands you at Honored (or even higher?) with the Frenzyheart & Hated with the Oracles. The other way round goes here:  Hand of the Oracles. Both quests seem to be repeatable every day. You need to have been Exalted with both for this achievement: Mercenary of Sholazar. Very cool idea :)

The Oracles

Frenzyheart Tribe

Non-Reputation Quests on the Skybreaker in Icecrown

Miscellaneous Non-Reputation Quests

PvP Quests in Wintergrasp

These don’t award reputation but Stone Keeper’s Shard

Brought to you by Yashima from “Yashima Plays” @ http://wow.delusions.de

Be Feral with 15 Howling Fjord Quest Rewards

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Yashima
on December 9, 2008
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As I wrote below I respecced Yáshimá to feral yesterday. Now I have been feral before and enjoyed playing the spec a lot. There is just one problem. She is an Enchanter. What do Enchanters do with gear they don’t think they’ll need anymore “because I’ll just level her Moonkin for a while?”

So now I am in need of any kind of item to replace items with Spellpower.

Here’s my selected (Alliance) quest + quest reward for the easiest route to have a full feral equipment again within hours of arriving in Northrend. I’ll choose a single quest reward for each slot, I will also try to choose the easiest quests to achieve this. (Basic WoWHead search I am using for this). Many of these quests involve short chains … because most often a reward is only given after doing 2 or 3 things for a person.

Note: There are no idols available as quest rewards in the Fjord.

There are quite a few quest chains involved. Especially if you “lust” for the blue trinkets you will have to complete 2 complete quest hubs. Personally I will probably do all quests in the Fjord a second time (Yashima has already completed them and now Yáshimá will), maybe I will just switch the order of some of the hubs I’ll do a bit now that I know where I can expect which reward.

Most often you can also try a few other ways to obtain loot: do an instance run or two, contact your favorite crafter, scan the AH or hope for world drops that fit you. This is just a list of stuff that you can get without need for lucky rolls or farming mats which should be fine for all you Alts out there.

If you manage to get into a group for a run on Utgarde Keep, there are two quests you should take with you:

Moonkin: Level 80 Starting Gear

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Yashima
on December 5, 2008
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So here’s my plan for minimum effort to obtain a nice starter set of spellpower items to heal and dps at level 80:

Since I will of course also be running an instance every once in a while each and any of these items can be replaced by what I can obtain through instances. I just hate to depending on winning a roll on an item that doesn’t even drop every time on a boss.

What I am wondering while looking through items: is there no Hit Rating + Spellpower Gear???

The most stressful will probably be to camp the AH for the BoE items and get to Revered with the Kirin’Tor. Currently I am half-way to honored thanks to the Cooking quest. We have already finished most of the other quests that award Kirin’Tor faction. So I’ll have to champion them at 80. I have no idea how hard the Sons of Hodir reputation will be to earn …

Update: I already managed to snag the boots and the off-hand and I am finally making my new Alchemist’s trinket. I decided that in direct comparison for “leveling items” I will keep my S3 Wrists and S3 Chest instead of choosing the items selected above. I’ll see if any upgrades come when they came :)

Wrath: Overview of Daily Quests [Level 70-75]

Published
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Yashima
on December 1, 2008
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We just dinged 75 last night and so far we have seen a bunch of different dailies. We’ve repeatedly done several and I want to try now to make a list of all Alliance Dailies in the lower half of the 70-80 bracket grouped by the reputation they award.

Valiance Expedition

The Kalu’ak

The Wyrmrest Accord

Explorer’s League

Quests that reward Venture Coins in Grizzly Hills

Kirin Tor

  • [70] Infused Mushroom Meatloaf (150 rep) – this is only one of five different cooking dailies you can get from Katherine Lee in Dalaran.

Misc (awards no faction?)

  • [72] Seared Scourge – Starts in Granite Springs in Grizzly Hills
  • [74] Pieces Parts – Starts Southeast of Blue Sky Lodging Grounds, Grizzly Hills
  • [74] Shredder Repair – Southeast of Blue Sky Lodging Grounds, Grizzly Hills

So there are several factions to farm reputation for even in the beginning areas of the new continent. The quests themselves also have a nice variety and they do award experience while you are not yet level 80.

I haven’t been able to try all the dailies yet but so far the most fun has been the Steel Gate Patrol. If you haven’t done it yet, go to Howling Fjord and shoot some Gargoyles!

Brought to you by Yashima from “Yashima Plays” @ http://wow.delusions.de

The “Hello World” Addon

Published
by
Yashima
on November 20, 2008
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I am trying to learn to program my own addons. I’ve been installing other people’s addons for a few years now. Being a software developer I am thinking I should be able to do it myself.

Yet I am having a very hard time getting into it and there are very few tutorials especially current ones are rare. It is not trivial to learn from other people’s code either because so many addons use libraries and not all code is equal in readbility.

1) Documentation

Online you can find quite a few resources that all help in certain aspects.

I like learning from other people’s code. My best source for code so far has been Tekkub (whose code you like is very much a question of personal preference). Together with his repositories, the APIs published on WoWWiki and the Lua Manual,  I was finally able to put together a small “Hello World” style addon. One of his simplest addons is the tekJunkSeller. Just take a look at it.

For a bit of offline documentation I ordered a book about WoW addons. Actually there are several books available. I checked the table of contents and this one sounded most promising.

2) Developer Utilities

First things first: installing a few resources.  There are quite a few lua editors out there and a few other developer utilities. Here’s my current list:

  • WoW UI Designer: a nice looking lua ide
  • tekPad to evaluate lua code in the game.
  • BugSack to be able to see errors and stacktraces (I’ve had that forever actually)
  • svn repository. I already had one. I guess most people will not need revision control immediately. I do because I want to be able to access my stuff from different places.
  • Macro to obtain the name of a frame/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage( GetMouseFocus():GetName() );
  • Macro to obtain an item ID /script local infoType, info1, info2 = GetCursorInfo(); if infoType == "item" then DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage( info1 ); end

3) The Basic Structure

Now that your preparations are all done on to the addon programming stuff. Here’s the basic structure of the simplest WoW Addon:

  • HelloWorld.toc: contains meta information on the addon. For example: name, author, website and loading information. It also has to has a “toc” = table of contents for all the files or libraries included with the addon.
  • HelloWorld.lua: contains the actual code of your addon.
  • You could have an xml file as well to define your frames. Personally I want to try the all-lua approach.
  • Put these files in a HelloWorld folder in your Interface\Addons directory and once you filled them with content you can test your addon.

4) The HelloWorld.toc File

The toc file is more important and versatile than you would think at first. But right now I want to keep it very simple (the LineNumbers are not included in the actual file!):

1-- ## Interface: 30300
2--
3-- ## Title: HelloWorld
4-- ## Notes: Say "Hello!" to the world
5-- ## Author: Yashima
6-- ## Version: Alpha
7--
8-- HelloWorld.lua

Just a quick explanation, most of this is self explanatory.

  • Line 1: contains the version of the interface this addon was written for
  • Line 3-6: basic information on the addon and its’ author
  • Line 8: the table of contents consists of a single file in our case

What you can also do here:

  • control load on demand behaviour (nice example)
  • insert dependencies or optional dependencies
  • give more information on the author etc.

5) The HelloWorld.lua File

Here’s a sample file.

1-- UIErrorsFrame:AddMessage("Hello World",0.5,1.0,1.0,5.0);

As far as I was able to find out all code (except functions which must be called) in the lua file will be executed when the addon is loaded. The one line in this file will simply print a message to the in-game error frame with the AddMessage method. Of course the message here is “Hello World”. The additional parameters control the color and fade time of the message.

Of course keeping it so simple won’t get you far. Here’s another example with some very simple event handling.

1-- local function OnEvent()
2--   UIErrorsFrame:AddMessage(arg1,0.5,1.0,1.0,5.0);
3-- end
4--
5-- local f = CreateFrame("Frame")
6-- f:RegisterEvent("CHAT_MSG_SYSTEM")
7-- f:SetScript("OnEvent",OnEvent)

This code does some very simple event handling. There is a local function called OnEvent() (lines 1-3) that will be executed when the registered event(s) occur and does the same as the previous example: it prints a message to the error frame.

The lua code in the global scope that will be executed on load is found on lines 5-7. In Line 5 we create a simple frame with CreateFrame and on this frame we can register events to listen for in our case the CHAT_MSG_SYSTEM (line 6), an event that is fired when a system chat message (they are displayed in yellow) is received.This event has a single argument arg1 that contains the chat message. On line 7 we finally define that when a registered event is fired we want the OnEvent() method to be called. Since we only have a single event registered all this is pretty simple.

So here’s a tiny first addon. I will continue with this topic once I learn how to do more.

Great Inscription Guide

Published
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Yashima
on October 1, 2008
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Via Toomannyannas I found BananaShoulders really nice Inscription Guide.

Quoting the shopping list from Toomanyannas:

  • 150x Earthroot, Peacebloom, or Silverleaf
  • 60x Briarthorn, Bruiseweed, Mageroyal, Stranglekelp, or Swiftthistle
  • 150x Grave Moss, Kingsblood, Liferoot, or Wild Steelbloom
  • 140x Fadeleaf, Goldthorn, Khadgar’s Whisker, or Wintersbite
  • 210x Arthas’ Tears, Blindweed, Firebloom, Ghost Mushroom, Gromsblood, Purple Lotus, or Sungrass
  • 350x Dreamfoil, Golden Sansam, Icecap, Mountain Silversage, Plaguebloom
  • 360x Any Outland herbs

So I think I am good. Bananashoulders gives the hint that I missed when trying to level: 15 Fiery Inks to make 15 Fine Vellum gets on to the magic number of 250 from which you can level on with the next set of herbs.

But I sure hope that it is going to be less than 350 of the herbs that give Silvery pigments, because I am nowhere near that number … that’s nearly 18 stacks of those herbs. I might have maybe 10 or 12.

Blog Feature: Guides

Published
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Yashima
on September 30, 2008
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Many blog writers like to write guides for others – I am no exception.

Wether mine are any good is not for me to decide. But to make it easier to see what kind of stuff I wrote that I think may have lasting value (at least until Wrath hits), I made a guides page: see my pretty new page full of guides.

I also made a new Characters overview page from which the single character pages can be reached: Characters Overview.

Leveling Inscription

Published
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Yashima
on September 29, 2008
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Not yet finished. I am not sure it is possible to really level this profession to the max. I am stuck just below level 250 at 248 exactly.  What follows is the protocol of my leveling Inscription on the PTR.  I’ll update the protocol when I level more.

Most important lesson learned: use all Ruby Pigments or Fiery Ink – which is made from them – to make Fine Vellum. This stays orange for a while. Everything else is a waste of very valuable mats. If things stay this way run in circles in teh Swamp of Sorrows to farm endless amounts of Blindweed.

Notes on the side:

  • Scrolls are quite expensive to craft
  • Cutest item “Certificate of Ownership“: allows a hunter to rename his pet
  • Funniest Tooltip “Unpredictable Results beyond level 40″ (on Scroll of Recall I)
  • Scrolls of Recall only usable for Scribes themselves :P
  • WoWHead’s Inscription Data from Wrath differ from the PTR (big surprise)
  • my French is really bad but I was still able to communicate a little ;) PTR weirdness

Subtle and interesting: for a while every 5 points new Glyphs become available and the old ones turn yellow, most efficient way to level is to make a lot of different glyphs. Nice touch. While people are leveling there will always be a lot of different glyphs on the market. Sadly this doesn’t stay true later on and around skill level 230 leveling becomes hard right now because Glyphs become available and are instantly grey.

How Inscription works basically:

You mill herbs for pigments. You get 2-3 pigments from 5 herbs you mill and have a chance for a rare pigment of appropriate level.To make items you usually need parchment which you buy from the vendor. Most items need 1 parchment and 1 or 2 inks. At Skill Level 80 you can make the first Glyphs.

Continue reading ‘Leveling Inscription’

Your 12 step program to more gold – Part 2

Published
by
Yashima
on August 30, 2008
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Lakshmi's AuctionsSo in Part 1 of this guide I wrote up how you can prepare to make lots of gold from your fellow players.

So if you followed my advice by now you probably have set up a banking alt, started saving your gold, got yourself some helpful addons and a few big bags full of loot.

Now what to do with that loot?

Here comes the second set of tips how to become rich in the World of Warcraft.

7. Don’t stockpile. Sell everything. When logging of for the night, switch to your bank alt, empty their mailbox, run over to the AH and just put up everything for sale. Don’t worry too much about getting good prices for your stuff or wasting money on AH fees. Selling lots of cheap stuff is better than not selling a lot of expensive stuff. Every copper counts!

8. Consider your professions. Professions are part of my personal gold making scheme. I have two characters at max level. The second one I leveled mostly because I wanted a character with maxed out Tailoring and Skinning. My main has Alchemy and Herbalism and I am leveling a third character with Jewelcrafting and Mining. The easiest professions to make money of are the three gathering professions. If you want to level another alt just choose Skining and either Herbalism or Mining as professions. From the crafting professions there are those that are more useful than others:

Alchemy: the specializations are nice because they help make the most out of materials. Use your timers if you have the time to log on. Transmutations are money makers for a minimum amount of invested time. Primal Earth -> Primal Water is my favorite. Alchemy is cheap to level I think.

Tailoring: make your own bags. Again: if you have the time to use up your timers … they all generate money. Plus there are some things that can be sold. Even when it is not Xmas the Xmas outfits sell quite nicely sometimes. I think it is nice to have a tailor to be able to use up all that cloth you find to make items for your Disenchanter (up next).

Enchanter: well most Enchanters really are Disenchanters, right? Of course you could just ask a friend to do it for you. But it is much more comfortable to have your own. But … it is a bit expensive to level this as you need to have quite a high level to be able to disenchant most things you find. But the Enchanting mats are definitely worth it on the AH. It is a good idea to use your Bank alt as Enchanter if you plan to level your Bank alt (my bank alts are level 38 and level 36). Right now on our realm you could get rich from Greater Eternal Essences and Greater Nether Essences. Illusion Dust is also very nice. (Enchantrix which is included with Auctioneer usually is very helpful to see which items will yield which enchant mats)

Jewelcrafting: Definitely not cheap to level. But Lakshmi has now reached 350+ and can sell cut gems on the AH and that makes great money. I have not yet bought a single one of the recipes for the rare stones, they are too expensive with every recipe going for at least 300 gold. It would take way too many gems to make a profit from a single recipe. There are enough “free” recipes for uncommon gems that still sell. Prospecting is also very nice. Even “simple” gems go for great profits on the auction house because most are needed for a variety of recipes and often those are recipes people will craft for their alts. I don’t think the timer for the Brilliant Glas recipe is very useful unless you get skillpoints from it and still have a huge cash of uncommon gems from the times when these sold for next to nothing.

Leatherworker: Has some nice items for your alts. For the rest it is much the same as Tailoring except that you need a Skinner for the Mats.

Smith: I have to say I never leveled a smith so I can’t really say anything about that. I much prefer to use my ores for Jewelcrafting.

I am very curious about Inscription and the new mechanism to sell enchants on the AH. I believe both will be huge in making gold. As with gems, buff food, flasks etc.  I believe that Inscriptions and Enchants are items which cannot really be obtained from anywhere but your fellow players.

My price for best return on investment for crafting professions goes to Jewelcrafting right now. Enchanting and Alchemy should be close. Nothing beats gathering professions however because everyone tends to stockpile mats for their crafting profession “just in case” which is not helping in making you gold. Just sell it!

9. Cook and fish. If you are into fishing you probably already know it’s a gold maker. Fishing has a very good time:gold ratio. On the lower levels you are better off using up only the cooking materials that you need to level and selling the rest, preferably in big batches that people who are too lazy to farm are looking for. I never thought people would buy all the Mystery Meat and stuff I found. Absolute bestseller are the items you need for the level 225 cooking quest. Any kind of pool fishing will yield an ok amount of gold. The best fishing is in the three zones around Shattrath. Zangarmarshes are usually the quietest. You can just wander around the lakes and fish out all the junk plus some fish. I like my Golden Scale Vendor Fish. When I feel like it I do the cooking and fishing dailies with my druid. Both are easy to do and yield a nice return on my time.

10. Auctioning for the Experts. At first you just sell everything for whatever price feels right. If you keep it up for a while you will learn what sells and what doesn’t. If you have a few minutes to spare on your auction runs let Auctioneer scan the AH. It stores a lot of price statistics which will help you in the long run. But don’t trust those statistics blindly! Thinking is still required. There are people who game Auctioneer users. Once you have a feeling for the market and prices you may consider doing some AH Flipping. Flipping is when you buy something cheap and sell it again for a good profit. Flipping carries a big risk. Use it sparingly and only when you are pretty sure that the price you are paying really is cheap. I think my best flip recently was buying to Shadow Pearls for 80 silver (silver!) and making them into two Necklaces of the Deep which sold for 100 gold each.

There are some weapons across all levels that will always sell sooner or later for a nice price. Sometimes you can find them cheap and resell them.

Much less risky is to buy cheap green items and disenchant them or buy cheap ores to prospect them. Buying uncut gems and cutting them also yields nice profits. But anytime you buy something to re-sell there is risk involved! Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work out every time. Just keep going.

Most of the time I just sell stuff I have found.

Additional Pricing resources:

  • http://www.wowhead.com
  • http://www.wowecon.com

11. Set yourself small goals. It is much easier to save up to reach 1000 gold instead of 5000.

12. Plan ahead on your own purchases. If you know that you will want certain items, plan ahead. Wait for a good deal or until you get the materials during your normal play. Having to buy stuff “now” on the AH costs a fortune usually. You will want to reserve that kind of behavior for emergencies. Finally: in this game time time equals gold. Always remember that farming most often is a boring activity that takes lots of time and somebody else may have done it for you and offer the goods you need for a price that you can easily pay when you think how long it would take to get the gold as opposed to the items.

So basically my gold making scheme  is adding a gold making aspect to a variety of in-game activities I have fun with instead of stupidly doing dailies or farming some type of ore or leather until I drop dead of boredom. It still takes (out-of-game) time (until all your wares are bought) and some spending discipline to get lots of gold, but it is not impossible even for somebody with little time on their hands to get enough money for any type of mount.

A fast mount is a good investment by the way as it allows for much faster gathering or daily questing at max level.

I hope there was something in this guide for everyone and I’d be glad to hear of your strategies for making even more gold.

Your 12 step program to more gold – Part 1

Published
by
Yashima
on August 30, 2008
.Tags: , , 2 Comments

Last night I crossed the 7000 gold treshold the first time and I am well on my way to reach the 10k. Since Softthistle asked how I do it, here I deliver. This post is about how I am going about getting rich in the World of Warcraft.

I’ve always managed to steadily increase my hoard when I had that goal and I had it most of the time. Sometimes the gold was a means to an end. Mostly I wanted to buy various mounts. I still remember saving up for my very first Tiger for my very first Druid. The biggest challenge thus far has been the epic flier. As most of you will have discovered, it is not a trivial goal to reach. But who doesn’t want an epic flier? It is also very nice to just have a nicely bolstered budget for those impromptu shopping sprees at the AH: Recipes, Badges of Tenacity or weapons for your alt.  Just buy what you want, don’t let yourself be limited by the amount of gold you can beg from your guildies!

For me though the trade game is not only the means to a goal. I do have fun seeing the hoard increase just for the sake of having more gold available to spend on … well don’t spend too much. That’s the first rule.

1. Save your gold. Don’t spend gold on random stuff. Every time you buy something at the AH it must either be an important goal of yours to get the item or the item has to bring in more money than it cost very soon. If you want to become rich, the first step is to not go on shopping sprees. Tip: If you can’t manage to save your gold, setup an alt as savings account and be sure to mail him everything above a certain amount and be also sure to mail it to “Bänk” not “Bank” if you called your alt “Bänk”. (SendSelf or Postal may help here)

2. Be patient. Whatever you do, it takes some time. Try to enjoy this money-making as part of the game. Otherwise just stick with step 1. If auctions and professions are not for you, do your dailies and quest a lot to get money. Hope for valuable drops and stick to step 1, the rest of this is all about how to make money using your fellow players and playing the markets of WoW.

If however you want to get into the trade game to make gold here’s another 10 steps to get you started.

3.  Get yourself the following addons:

  • Auctioneer: it keeps track of all auctions you participated in, it stores prices and automates auctioning. It helps find out what the market is now and what it was in the past. You do not want to do without this one!
  • Bag addon: a bag addon that does categories and big one-bag inventories. I use ArkInventory. Use whatever you like, just don’t go with the default bags. Having organized bags is a big help when deciding what to sell.
  • teksJunkSeller: or any other addon that automatically sells your grey junk for you.
  • ColaLight: or any other addon that shows how much an item will be worth at the NPC Trader, so you don’t accidentally drop something big when your bags are full.

4. You need a trusted Banker: Set up your bank alt if you have not done during step 1. Unless you are playing a character that is questing near one of the big cities you really want one of these.

5. Get bags to haul your loot. Prepare your character and your alts: give them big bags. But don’t invest in bags that are too big or too expensive. Go with what you can easily obtain without spending a lot of time or gold. 14-16 slots is good. 18 slot and above is overkill. Bonus points on this step if you can craft the bags yourself or get a guildie to craft them for you. At first you don’t really need bank slots. If you go with a banker character your mailbox and bags should suffice.

6. Play the game. Oops. What? Yes: play the game! Even on an alt. You need stuff to sell on the AH and how do you get that? By playing. Getting gold has become a lot easier with Burning Crusade and I am sure it will be even easier with Wrath.  There are so many more markets, another profession and more levels.  If you haven’t noticed: more levels are good for the traders among us. And the best markets are where few people play the content. Which is not the max level content. One easy example: people pay a lot of gold for some Truesilver Ore, Gold Ore or even Silver Ore. Those are the rare metals of the early game. They pay a lot more for that than for the level 60+ Fel Iron which is abundant because so many people are in Outland. Tip: Sell the smelted bars of the rare metalls not the ores. Rare metalls cannot be prospected. For other metalls always check to see if the ore or the bar brings more gold.

Most people repeat the content at max-level over and over. Very few people play the lower level content so drops from this are rare. There is green stuff “of the falcon” going for tons of gold in all level ranges on the AH. So I say: play the game and loot, loot, loot. Take everything and put it in your big bags, then mail it to your banker and go play some more. As you get to know prices it is great to see that nearly every drop can be sold for a small or sometimes bigger profit. That’s part of the fun to see that just by leveling an alt you can easily get a lot of stuff to sell to people on the AH.

So much for the first part. Prepare yourself for the second part – coming up soon!