I’m known online as Kurn. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, off and on (though mostly on), since 2005. I have served as a guild officer in multiple guilds, a healing lead, a raid leader and a guild leader. I have run a blog about WoW and my adventures within it since 2007. For a time, it was the most popular blog dealing with holy paladin stuff, through much of Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. I had two podcasts to do with World of Warcraft as well. Finally, I have a small YouTube channel with almost 300 videos, most of which have to do with WoW or other Blizzard properties, which was started in 2006.
To be clear, I’m sharing this information so that you can understand that I am a long-time player who cares about WoW and I am someone who has given back to the community — and continues to do so.
I am writing this post today because of the guild bank issues that continue to plague hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of guild banks. There are other issues that also need to be discussed, such as guild bank logs, warband bank issues, void bank issues and problems with reputation, not to mention weekly quests not resetting, though I have much less information on those. As such, I’ll keep my discussion to the guild bank issues, while bearing in mind that there are many systems that have been adversely affected since prior to the launch of The War Within. I did want to note that apparently the warband bank issues are related to the visibility of the items, but this does not seem to be the case with guild bank items.
TIMELINE OF EVENTS
– On August 13/14 (depending on region), Patch 11.0.2 was released.
– In the patch notes for this release, it noted that Cross-Realm Guild bank functionality was now available.
– Shortly after this release, reports started to roll in that items were missing from guild banks.
US thread in the Bug Report forum:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-what-happened/1918643
EU thread in the Customer Support forum:
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-items-gone/528709
Of note, the US thread did not receive any responses from any Blizzard representatives, while the EU thread received several, mostly from Felranys, and many of these were apologetic in nature. These were mostly along the lines of “I’m sorry I don’t have any new news, details have not yet been shared with us”.
– On September 20th, Linxy posted threads in both the EU and US forums, which was the first the US regions heard anything from a Blizzard representative:
US: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-update/1963451
EU: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-update/538628
In it, they said:
Due to how some of the data was lost, we’ve reached a point where the result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items for them.
The important thing to note here is that this heavily implies that some guilds will have an incomplete restoration, yet the rest will have a complete one. However, based on the responses since then, it seems that the reverse is true. Some guilds had an incomplete restoration, while the rest have had nothing restored.
For myself, my personal guild bank is the one that’s affected. I received the following, after losing hundreds of patterns and entire tabs being wiped clean:
2x Pink Mageweave shirts
1x Wildvine Potion recipe
1x Wildthorn Mail recipe
1x Schematic: Dark Iron Rifle
Not even the items shown in the bank logs themselves as being deposited (and not withdrawn) were restored. I’ve read hundreds of comments and hundreds more forum posts from others who are worse off than me.
– On September 23, the US thread in the Bug Report forum was closed without any response.
– On October 2, the EU thread was closed with this response from Yryadorne, directing people to the general EU thread:
– Almost two months after the patch, restorations still seem to be going out, though I still have yet to read about anyone being fully restored. (As a point of data, I have not received anything since that one mail in late September.)
RESTORATION OF ITEMS… AND TRUST
In my 19 years of playing World of Warcraft, I have never, ever, ever run into a situation with my character or a guildmate’s character where Blizzard did not do the right thing. As any of my former guildmates will attest to, I have opened a ridiculous number of tickets over the years to ask for Blizzard to fix something. A guildmate of mine had lost her Vashj vial for the Vials of Eternity quest (which led to the Hand of A’dal title). I have screenshots of me standing in Mount Hyjal, arguing passionately for my guildmate, and getting stomped by the incoming boss because I was talking to a GM about it. Ultimately, the GM discovered that my guildmate had accidentally dropped the quest — which had deleted her vial. Totally get it. It was my guildmate’s fault. The GM did the right thing in telling me that she had just picked up the quest a few days ago. The collaboration and communication from the GM in question was outstanding.
Years later, there was a bug in terms of normal/heroic switching in Blackrock Descent in Cataclysm, which meant that my raiding guild was stuck in two separate instances of BRD. Once again, I reached out to Blizzard for help and, once again, they did so. We went off to do Bastion of Twilight and the next raid night, we were properly synchronized to the right Blackrock Descent instance.
Never, in my long history in WoW, have I been let down by Blizzard the way I have been when it comes to the guild bank items disappearing.
(Yes, I know the GMs and community managers are different than the developers, and that the GMs are limited in what they can do. I’m using the GMs as proxies for my experiences with Blizzard as a whole. They take a lot of crap from users and they deserve better than they get.)
As a player, it is gut-wrenching to look at empty bank tabs where hundreds of items should be. And my items weren’t even all that personal. They were items I collected over more than a decade of play, storing away for a variety of reasons. Some are no longer available in the game. Some are available, but extremely limited in number (dragonscales, for example). And it just flat-out sucks that they’re gone. Part of me wants to trust Blizzard when they say, “we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items”.
As someone who works in tech, though, I can’t trust what Blizzard is saying here. Blizzard has been running this game for more than 20 years (when you count alpha and beta and such). As such, they know how important data integrity is. They know that every byte of data matters. And they probably have PETABYTES of data. One gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. One terabyte is 1024 gigabytes. One petabyte is 1024 terabytes. Blizzard’s data probably is in the realm of petabytes. Worse, that data is always changing. Anytime you vendor a grey or disenchant an item or buy something or upgrade something or put something in the bank or loot something, the data changes. And that’s just inventory. What about levelling up? There’s experience to think about, reputation, how much mana or focus or rage or whatever you have, plus how much health you have. The data is always changing. It is almost never static.
Guild banks are included in that. Pull out 10k gold, deposit a BOE, withdraw a stack of Black Lotuses, drop in a stack of Flasks of Distilled Wisdom. It shifts, it changes. It’s not quite as dynamic as a character’s inventory, but in a large guild, yeah, stuff can be withdrawn or deposited, including repair costs and such.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is that, particularly for larger guilds, the state of the guild bank NOW is likely to be very different from the state of the guild bank when the bug occurred.
Let’s say that Blizzard has a snapshot of all the data from right before that maintenance period. The amount of work to reconcile all the changes between Day 0 (when the bug happened) and Day 50-something (which is the period of time we’re at right now) is likely to be A LOT.
So when a Blizzard representative tells me that they “do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items”, that’s where I’m stuck. That’s why I’m still out here making a big deal about this. You want me to believe that the devs who have made (and maintained) this game for 20 years did not make a backup of the game’s data before adding a patch to production servers?
I don’t buy that. Data integrity is vital. Anyone who has ever touched a live database knows that you back it up and, ideally, have another backup for it in another physical location, just in case.
You want me to believe that the devs who have made (and maintained) this game for 20 years did not keep backups of the game’s data for 30/60/90 days after the patch?
Super unlikely to me. Storage is cheap. For a game that just launched an expansion that still has subscription fees, storage is a pittance.
And yes, I know there have been layoffs. I know Blizzard has been affected. I’m saying that at this point, 20 years in, I’m pretty sure that any organization would have very specific processes for maintenance during the application of patches. What if the patch explodes and destroys things? Then they roll back to the backup and try to figure out what went wrong on their dev instances and then they try again. But they always should have the opportunity to roll back.
I’m not saying they should roll back NOW, mind you. I’m just saying that the data absolutely must exist somewhere. It doesn’t make any sense at all that they wouldn’t have this data from mid-August, prior to 11.0.2. That’s where I’m stuck.
Would it be an absolutely incredible amount of work to reconcile the state of guild banks between mid-August and now? Yes. My opinion is that if they have the data (and they should have the data), they can do it.
As such, I think Blizzard is saying one thing to make us think that they cannot restore things when, in my opinion, they are CHOOSING not to do so. And I think that’s a mistake. I’m not just saying that because I’m affected and I will benefit from them restoring the banks. I’m saying it because we’ve already lost trust in Blizzard by virtue of having lost the items in the first place, the possibility that they are able to and choosing not to hits even harder.
Everything in this game is a line in a database. If they won’t restore guild banks, who’s to say that this couldn’t happen to other things? And who’s to say that they won’t restore those other things? I don’t want to lose my Hand of A’dal title. What about my Rhok’delar? What about my Benediction? What about my reputation with, say, Timbermaw Hold? Or the Argent Dawn? What about my Feat of Strength, The Fifth Element? If guild bank items can get wiped like this, what’s to stop something from wiping out these achievements or items or titles? And what’s to stop Blizzard from NOT restoring them?
I get it, they’re not obliged to restore anything. I’ve read their end-user license agreement (EULA). I maintain, though, that there’s a difference between being obliged to do something and choosing to do the right thing. Further, they probably can’t be honest with us, due to the drama that any admission that they don’t want to waste the time on restoring the guild banks would cause.
So Blizzard is in a tough spot right now. The restoration of items may never occur. So will our trust in Blizzard ever be restored?
For me, it won’t be, not as it stands. I need a real explanation or a full restoration, ideally both, before I can put any faith back into Blizzard. Should I ultimately decide to step away, I know you won’t miss my single subscription. I would hope, though, that you have someone counting the number of people affected by this who decide to cancel their subscriptions. I have a feeling there will be more than few.
Thank you for your time.
In other news, I tried about 10 pulls on Zekvir and got OBLITERATED, so that was hilarious.
I really do have other things I want to talk about — goldmaking, professions, how I’m finding the expansion. But it’s with true regret that I say that this guild bank thing is sapping my energy and enthusiasm to play.
Hi folks, long time no talk. I have a lot of updates for you which I hope to get to this coming weekend.
In the meantime, please take a look at the latest video on my YouTube channel, which is entitled The Great Blizzard Bank Heist. If you’re not aware, a lot of people have had stuff vanish out of their guild banks since the pre-expansion patch hit. We’re talking decades’ worth of stuff at this point. I’ve lost two full tabs worth of stuff (ALL MY DRAGONSCALES, all kinds of rare and no longer obtainable patterns) and only realized it late last week. CHECK YOUR BANKS, see if anything is missing. If anything is, let’s make some noise about it and try to get Blizzard to do the right thing.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to my blog, where I previously said a whole bunch of things were “Future!Kurn’s” problem, and I am now regretting it… 😅
Okay, so let’s talk about The War Within, in general, and then, more specifically, professions.
The War Within
There is just so much to do. I want to clone myself — not my toons, but my actual, physical self, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.
That said, I did take the time afforded me in early access and I dinged 80 on Kurn at some point on Saturday.
Oh, apparently at 8:14pm ET. 😂
I decided to prioritize getting Kurn to 80 because that would allow me to skip the intro on other characters. By Saturday, I’d already brought over my shaman (double gatherer), and like, look, it’s a great intro, loving the story overall, but I did not need to do it, uh, 11 times on 11 separate toons. So I did it once on Kurn and then on the shammy and then I pushed to get Kurn to 80 and all that jazz so I could enable the skips.
That said, I feel like I mostly took my time in levelling? I did a lot of sidequests in a bunch of places and so was very nearly 80 when I finished the campaign. I felt as though the Isle of Dorn and the Ringing Deeps (which, btw, has been SUCH a lagfest pretty consistently that I can hardly stand to be in the zone) were very slow — in a good way. I got to explore places, pick up side quests, skin things, all that jazz. And then as soon as I got to Hallowfall it felt like it was just GO GO GO GO. And I’m not complaining about it, either. It was really, really cool. I was exhausted afterwards, but it was totally worth it.
As to Azj-Kahet, I really haven’t done a lot there apart from the alliance thing and all that jazz. Literally just the campaign stuff, so there’s a lot left for me to explore.
I have done exactly one delve, the Earthcrawl Mine, which I’d done once on Beta, and now once on live. I want to do more delves, but there’s so much to do! So delves can wait a bit.
I really like the story, too. Do I occasionally want to smack Anduin? Yes, but we have to remember (or those of us who didn’t play Shadowlands have to understand) that he’s been through some severe trauma. So it’s okay. As we have to give ourselves grace when we’re going through a difficult time, we have to give others grace. So Anduin gets a pass from me for now.
I’m really enjoying the story. I want to unlock the Earthen (there are a number of quests to do that which I have yet to do) and learn more about them. I’m looking forward to seeing what our involvement in Azj-Kahet will mean. It’s very promising from a story point of view, IMHO.
Professions and Such
I have to admit, I did not expect the profession treasures to be so numerous and so easily found. There are two for each profession in each zone and each treasure gives you 3 points in that profession. So that’s 24 points alone from treasures. As a result of this, if we look back at my blog post and see that when it comes to going past 40 points in Leatherworking, “that’s a problem for Future!Kurn”. Well, the future is now and I still don’t really know what to pick. 😅
Leatherworking
I did put 10 into Flawless Fortes and then 30 into Epic Ensembles… and then I started putting points into Learned Leatherworker. I’m not at 5 points there yet, so I’m not 100% sure if I’ll go into the resourcefulness, multicraft or concentration specs. If I’ll be crafting a lot of reagents and intermediate-type crafts, multicraft seems like the place to go, otherwise resourcefulness to save mats, right? Concentration is tempting at this stage in the expansion because I have not been careful on it. It’s hard when you’re at a rank 4 thing and you can make it a 5, you know? That’s several thousand gold difference in terms of profession equipment at this early stage.
Basically, Epic Ensembles has been a good choice for me and with some rank 2 mats, I can guarantee a rank 5. I’ll call that a win, especially because as my own equipment gets better, I’ll be able to do it with rank 1 mats.
Skinning
Tanning is going well. I decided to go to 20 in Tanning and then start putting points into the specific leathers. Waiting an hour between charges of Sharpen Your Knife was just annoying. Also, they just hotfixed (on Monday) the fact that LWs could waste their SYK skin action on “trivial creatures”, so that’s good. I’ve wasted three of those cooldowns on “trivial creatures” who, honestly, didn’t seem all that trivial to me!
Blacksmithing
Good lord, everything takes a bloody Core Alloy! Thankfully, they’re not that hard to make and you can also find them in chests and stuff like that. But good lord, I go through Bismuth awfully quick.
I’ve hit level 50-something as a blacksmith and I’ve put in 10 into Means of Production, then 10 into Tools of the Trade and I’ve just got a couple points in Trade Tools right now. What I really need to do is go treasure hunting on all my toons for all their professions. Still, I can reliably make rank 3 things with crappy mats. Also, are Null Stones hard to find OR WHAT? I’ve picked a ton of Null Lotus, and some imperfect null stones, but not nearly as many as the herbs. And things in BS require Null Stones. So rude. Anyway, getting there, making money, it’s all good.
Engineering
Engineering is such shit that I may actually drop it.
… I won’t, and I know I won’t, but oh MAN, it sucks. You have to do the Invent process daily. This requires 25 Pile of Rusted Scrap, which can randomly drop from TWW mobs, but also can be in chests, and I’ve found like 15 of them in an ore node at one point. But this is such a pain in the ass because I’m on my warlock and I hate playing my warlock.
Oh, and that’s not even the half of it! Once you invent, you can then basically “deconstruct” or whatever the “invention” and then get some notes. If you get 15 pages of notes, you can make them into an organized pack of notes and THAT is what you learn new schematics from. It took me three days to learn my first thing, basically, and it wasn’t even a piece of profession equipment.
I am so not impressed. Should I have read more about this or tested it on beta? Yes. Did I? No. Do I regret that now? Yes. But I will continue to complain about it because hi, I’m Kurn, and I drink red haterade.
Jewelcrafting
Not doing great here, honestly, just because I have a lack of mats. All my Bismuth is going to Blacksmithing and such, so while I’ve accumulated a bunch of points, I haven’t spent any because I’m not even 25 in JC yet. Fail, but that’s my bad.
Enchanting
I’m going for the mana oils. Not much to report yet because everything is so expensive, good lord. I disenchanted most of my greens and sold 100 (?) Storm Dust for like 10k or something on Saturday? I regret it a bit.
Tailoring
Yep, Textile Treasures it is, but I haven’t had much of a chance to get out there into the world and see how much cloth drops. I’ve made some cash on low-rank profession items, though.
Inscription
The evoker, who makes Treatises, has almost discovered them all.
What I, the person playing, have discovered, is that holy shit, ink is hard to make and so is Boundless Cipher. To make one Treatise, I need 2 of the Apricate Ink, which makes the Cipher, along with 5 Arathor’s Spear. THEN I need to make either two more Apricate Ink ortwo Shadow Ink. Oh, and then 2 of various other reagents, leyline residue, crystalline powder and… something else like viridescent spores? Or something? All of that to make ONE of these suckers.
Also, I’d made a couple earlier on Monday and couldn’t use them… and then was informed in Trade that you could use them later on. We must have been blocked in using them until worldwide launch. So that’s going okay, even if it’s expensive. It’ll pay off.
As to my other scribe, I’ve barely touched my druid because Darkmoon Cards are flooding the market right now. You can put together a full deck for under 2k, possible even under 1k. I am saddened by this and will need to rethink my druid.
Alchemy
Slow going, friends, slow going. Madrana’s getting there. She needs to get the points in ominous, but is at the point where she could craft a Blasphemite if, you know, she had the 80 transmutagens. My other alchemists are nowhere near this level of progress… and that’s okay.
Mining
This is going swimmingly. My double-gatherer has 10/40 in Plethora of Ore and then is 45/45 in Bismuth! This means I can, theoretically, mine a full Null Stone from a Bismuth node. But, more importantly, I can refine the ore from rank 1 to rank 2 and to rank 3. That’s only for Bismuth, but that’s okay. My other two miners are making (slow) progress with Ironclaw and Aqirite.
But, there are also camouflaged ore and herb nodes!
So yeah, good progress, and I’m feeling good about this.
Herbalism
Having even just the Botany spec unlocked makes farming so much easier. Love it.
That said, most of my herbalists are starting out with Bountiful Harvests and one is already 40/40, I think. The others are going 5/40 and each focusing on a separate herb for now.
Gold
I’ve made about 300k gold since Thursday night. Well, my warband bank has increased by that amount. Each character started with 5k gold on them and some have dipped back into the bank and some haven’t. Regardless, it’s been a pretty decent weekend and I expect this week and next weekend to be booming as well.
I also picked up a Spinner’s Amulet of the Harmonious that was like a 3/8 or something? 561 or 564? It was BOE and blue and I sold that sucker for 58,999 gold. Gotta love those drops. :)
What about you?
So, have you jumped into The War Within? What’s your priority? Tell me about it! :)
All right, folks. Here it is. The very long profession post for The War Within. Note that these are, as always, just my opinions (and I always have a lot of them) and that there is a Comment Policy in place here. Please don’t be a jerk, thank you kindly.
In the past, when trying to untangle something to do with holy paladins or something, I would often try to explain it here on my blog to see if I really did understand the thing. I’d be in the middle of writing something and go “oh, wait. WAIT. HOLD THE PHONE,” and then go test something at 2am or whatever.
When it comes to planning for The War Within and professions, I have been researching for like, a month. At least. Are you excited yet??
Kurn’s Characters
Let’s start out with the fact that I have eleven level 70 characters ready to go for early access on Thursday, August 22, at 6pm ET. Here is my spreadsheet of professions for the various toons. Please feel free to make a copy for yourself and organize your own stuff!
Okay, so if we look at the spreadsheet in question, we have 11 characters and have this spread of professions:
Uh, yep, that is, in fact, the case. In my last post about this stuff, I had 4 herbalists and 3 miners and 3 alchemists. As I’d mentioned in the last post, I want all the characters I can’t play well to have a gathering profession, because then I can at least level them. I am very bad, for example, at being an evoker. I still don’t know what 97% of the skills do. I die frequently. I am just bad.
Part of that is because I just don’t care enough to be better on those characters. I could go to Icy Veins or something and figure out the right spec and the right rotation and I did spend some time doing that in Dragonflight, but ugh, doing that for all these characters? All eleven? No thanks. I dislike playing a warlock, I don’t enjoy playing a warrior, and, like I said, I am just bad at being an evoker. So, at minimum, those three toons need gathering skills. The evoker already has herbalism, it’s largely how I got her to 70 in Dragonflight. The warrior? Hah, the warrior was a boost when I bought The War Within. And the warlock? I was already 65-66 by virtue of profession quests most weeks and then I just took him out and did stuff for a week. (While healthstones didn’t properly cool down, just FYI. That was unfun.)
Anyway, the only two toons who don’t have a gathering profession are Madrana (I am not dropping alchemy, which I have had since the day I rolled her, nor jewelcrafting, which I’ve had since it was introduced in Burning Crusade — I spent days in The Exodar!) and the priest, who’s an alchemist and enchanter. This is because I am confident I can level Madrana within a gathering profession and, at the very worst, I can do all kinds of follower dungeons with the priest. I still sort of know how to heal, after all. But everyone else needs a gathering profession for the time being to get up to 80.
(80? Dear God, I feel like I should be prepping to run Azjol-Nerub and Ahn’Kahet: The Old Kingdom. Which I guess we kind of will be, given the theme of this expansion and its focus on the Nerubians. But you still get my point, right? As I was levelling my latest timerunner, an Alliance druid, to 70, I kept muttering to myself “look, you’re not in the Mana Tombs. You’re not in Auchenai Crypts. You’re not queued for Sethekk Halls. THIS IS BETTER.”)
So, yes, it’s to help with levelling characters I don’t want to kill things on and such. But, it’s also to help with making gold. Let’s talk about that, shall we?
Kurn’s Herbalism Plans
In The War Within, you have three Herbalism trees for your profession. They are Bountiful Harvests, Botany, and Overloading the Underground. Much like in Dragonflight, if you put 40 points into Botany, you gain the ability to pick herbs while mounted.
However, I have just saved myself 160 points of Herbalism in the early game because:
One of my planned herbalists is a druid, who can already do that
I’m actually annoyed that I bought the Sky Golem, because I have an engineer who was boosted in Pandaria and, therefore, learned how to make the Sky Golem. I even had 21 of the 30 Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source I needed! I even had a few of the 30 Living Steel I needed! So why did I buy a Sky Golem? It’s because I had run out of time. 21 of the Jard’s means I needed 9 to make the golem, which means nine daily cooldowns consisting of 90 Ghost Iron Bars, which is 180 Ghost Iron Ore. That doesn’t even include the Living Steel mats, which is TRILLIUM. Yeah, no, wasn’t going to be able to build it in time — which is my fault. I didn’t think I had any of the Jard’s source, but, lo and behold, I had 21. Crazy. Anyway, I looked at my spreadsheet tonight and decided to buy the Sky Golem. I went to The Undermine Exchange site and looked up Sky Golem. I clicked on it and scrolled down to where it shows the realm data and I clicked to sort by price. At the time, the cheapest was for about 23,987g (something very close to 24k) on the Dragonflight server. So I created a new alt there, withdrew the money from my warband bank, then purchased it on Dragonflight, put my leftover cash (and the mount) into the warband bank and then learned it on a toon over level 30 (the requirement).
While I will put points into Botany eventually, I’m not going to do it right at the outset. I’m probably going to learn it as my second tree, but I will only learn it, and I won’t put points into it. Upon learning the specialization, “Gathering herbs in Khaz Algar will replenish 1 Vigor. +30 Deftness while gathering herbs.” You don’t need to put points into it at all, just open it up, and you’ll get those perks. I’m planning on getting to 100 Herbalism pretty quick on at least one character — it’s probably just a couple of hours of farming if you get some special nodes and such.
So if I’m not putting points into Botany, where I am putting points?
Bountiful Harvests.
In case you’re not aware, the WoW devs have realized there’s a problem with the increase in gathering skill leading to fewer rank 1 herbs/skins/ores. Eventually, rank 2s and 3s get devalued in comparison. After not playing for several months and coming back this summer, it was ridiculous that I could buy a rank 3 Bubble Poppy for less than a rank 2 sometimes, and it always cost me less than a rank 1! So the key in all gathering professions is going to be in your ability to pick, mine, skin and refine your herbs, ores and skins. To do so, you need 40/40 points in Bountiful Harvests to refine to rank 3. You only need 20/40 points to refine to rank 2, but I think it’s really going to be worth it to drop your first 40 points directly into Bountiful Harvests.
From there, it sort of depends where you’re going to farm. You will want to max out one of the sub-specs to 40/40 because it’ll allow you to find Null Lotus more often while picking that specific kind of herb. So if you want to herb the crap out of Mycobloom (which is the most common herb, like Hochenblum was), max the heck out of it to allow you to more easily come across the Null Lotuses. Null Lotuses are, of course, used in the making of flasks, so this is going to be an important ingredient as we approach raiding and Mythic + dungeons. Looking at the calendar Blizzard provided, normal dungeons are open as of early access (to those with early access) on August 22, while heroic dungeons open on the global launch on August 26. Just over two weeks later, on September 10, Normal and Heroic raids (plus LFR Wing 1 and Mythic 0, heroic seasonal dungeons, etc) open up. The following week, September 17, Mythic raids and Mythic + dungeons open up.
Early access theoretically will not grant a long-term advantage to people. In this recap from a November, 2023 interview with Ion Hazzikostas, it states:
Players will be unable to do Mythic 0/Mythic+ dungeons, loot the best items from rares, access weekly profession cooldowns and profession specialization points.
Now, there’s two schools of thought on what the heck this actually means.
Players won’t be able to spend any accumulated profession specialization points until after the reset on Tuesday, August 27, or Wednesday, August 28 (depending on region).
Players are only unable to access weekly profession quests (like craft 2x of this thing, or give me 16 ore, etc) and are unable to get a spec point from the Algari Treatise books.
Far be it for me to actually link to the WoW forums, but, uh, there’s a few threads and this one seems less hostile than some.
I think the second school of thought makes more sense. Just don’t implement the weekly profession quest thing until reset and don’t allow people to use the treatises until reset. It seems way easier to implement those things rather than not allow people to open trees and use points, right? I would hope it’s a limited effect, but I am also somewhat prepared to get no points until August 27. Which would suck. But at least I’ll be herbing and mining and skinning?
Why am I talking about this? Wasn’t I just talking about important dates in WoW? Why yes, yes I was. So why am I talking about points and stuff?
It’s simple. If we just miss out on like, 3-4 points in the early access, that still leaves 2 or 3 weeks of full specialization points (knowledge points?) to cash in on the surge for flasks and potions and all the things so people are ready to raid or do mythic +.
For the gathering professions, let’s say 3 full weeks of getting (and this is an estimate):
3 points from a profession quest
1 point from an Algari treatise
5 points from random gathers
3 points from the epic random gather item
So that’s 12 x 3 = 36 points, which does not count the bonus for the first node of that kind.
For Herbalism, there are five kinds of base herb nodes:
Mycobloom
Blessing Blossom
Arathor’s Spear
Luredrop
Orbinid
Then, there are four (?) empowered types:
Crystallized
Altered
Sporefused
Irradiated
AND there’s Lush, like there was in Dragonflight
Now, assuming you can get each of the herbs in each variant type (and you may not, I’m not sure), that means:
5 from the base nodes
5 from the variants on each (5)
So that’s another 30 points.
Given perfect luck in nodes and such when it comes to Herbalism, you can theoretically get 66 points in the first three weeks. Don’t quote me. I don’t know if you can get, say, an Altered Arathor’s Spear or an Irradiated Orbinid. (Also, I’m bad at math, in general.)
This means that you, as an herbalist, have a choice. Do you go for the ability to refine herbs first OR do you go for the ability to find more Null Lotuses on a single type of herb? You can’t do both before raids come out, not even in the three weeks before mythic raids/mythic +.
For those of us with multiple herbalists, this isn’t an issue. One herbalist can get the ability to refine the herbs to max rank (40 in Bountiful Harvests) and any other ones can focus on the actual nodes, leading to more Null Lotuses. (I should note that I just spent like an hour herbing and mining in the beta and I got like 2-3 Null Lotuses, without any skill in a specific node and just flying around the Isle of Dorn. Of course, I didn’t have much competition, so your mileage may vary on live servers.)
For those with just a single herbalist, I gotta go with the ability to refine herbs to max level. This is something that will be useful throughout the entire expansion. Even if you max out every single spec tree and node within that tree, you will still be picking rank 1 herbs as we await the Midnight expansion, probably in the next 18-24 months. People will still want flasks and potions and fancy stuff in a month, two months, 12 months. And they will almost certainly still want max-rank herbs. At the beginning of the expansion, it becomes even more important that they’re max-rank because not everyone will have blue profession gear yet, and so people will need to use Concentration to max it out. If Concentration takes 5-6 minutes per point to regenerate, this severely limits how much of anything crafters can make. The higher quality the materials (the herbs, ores, skins), the easier it is to max out the final product. As time goes by, it’ll still be important to be able to refine these things to a max rank, but the demand will be mostly earlier on. (In my opinion.)
So, my plans:
1 Herbalist to go 40/40 in Bountiful Harvests to get the refine to ranks 2 and 3
Other Herbalists to go 5/40 in Bountiful Harvests to open up the various nodes, probably starting with Mycobloom, and then go 40/40 to get more Null Lotuses
Whew. Is that it? Are we done?
Not even close… 😅
Kurn’s Mining Plans
Herbalism and Mining are very similar in terms of trees. You have three specializations and Bountiful Harvests equates to Plethora of Ore, while Botany equates to Mining Fundamentals and Overloading the Underground equates to Mastering the Mysterious.
That said, there are a couple of major differences here. The first is that Mining Fundamentals is a freaking 60 point node and it’s at 60 points that you can finally mine while mounted. 60! Outrageous! 😂 Similarly to Botany, though, if you open up the spec, you restore 1 Vigor when you mine, so this is useful to bear in mind.
Plethora of Ore is likely where I’ll start out, but the interesting thing is that each ore has its spec and it’s within that spec that you can learn to refine the ore. Bismuth, which is the common ore, has a 45 point spec and it’s at 20 points you can refine Bismuth — and only Bismuth! — from rank 1 to rank 2. At 40 points (out of 45), you can then refine Bismuth — again, only Bismuth! — from rank 2 to rank 3. Filling out the spec allows you to stop damaging Null Stones when gathering Bismuth. What’s a Null Stone? Looks like it’s going to be a very in-demand mining gather. I don’t think it’s exactly the equivalent of Khaz’gorite, because it’s not an ore, exactly, but it’s a byproduct of mining.
Okay, let’s look at how many points we can realistically get in mining in three weeks, like we did with herbalism. Again, this is an estimate:
3 points from a profession quest
1 point from an Algari treatise
5 points from random gathers
3 points from the epic random gather item
So that’s 12 x 3 = 36 points, which does not count the bonus for the first node of that kind.
For Mining, there are three kinds of base ore nodes:
Bismuth (the most common)
Aqirite
Ironclaw
Then, there are four (?) empowered types:
Crystallized
Weeping
EZ-Mine
Webbed
AND there’s Rich
AND there’s Seams
Now, assuming you can get each of the mines in each variant type (again, I’m unsure), that means:
3 from the base nodes
6 from the variants on each (3)
So that’s another 21 points.
That means that we can estimate about 57 points in the first three weeks, assuming things go perfectly and you’re able to get every combination of node and such.
So, what do we do here? What is going to be most in-demand? Like the herbs, I think it’s going to be the refined ores. I’m looking at putting in 10/50 into Plethora of Ore, then unlocking Bismuth and just slamming in the next 45 points into it to get me able to refine Bismuth at ranks 2 and 3 and get undamaged (?) Null Stones. That brings me to 55 points, and then I can start in on another node. I don’t know how frequently we’ll come across Ironclaw and Bismuth once we leave the Isle of Dorn, nor do I know how prevalent Aqirite will be elsewhere, so depending on market demand, we’ll see where my next 45 points go.
It’s at this point I would also consider maxing out the 60 points in Mining Fundamentals. With the initial rush out of the way, now we want to go for efficiency. Without a mount like the Sky Golem, we have no way to avoid putting points into this tree. You can just go for it after maxing out a single kind of node in Plethora of Ore, in my opinion, and I’m thinking about it, too, since it will save so much time on every. single. node. for the rest of the expansion. We’ll revisit this in the future.
As such, my plans for my four miners:
1 Miner to go 10/50 in Plethora of Ore to unlock Bismuth, then max out that node
1 Miner to go 10/50 in Plethora of Ore to unlock Aqirite, then max out that node
1 Miner to go 10/50 in Plethora of Ore to unlock Ironclaw, then max out that node
Now that I can refine those three ore types to max, I will probably have my fourth miner start filling out Mining Fundamentals (to 40) and get Rich Deposits and Seams maxed out
… I don’t know about you, but I’m already tired thinking about all this. 😅
Kurn’s Alchemy Plans
We’re going to skip Skinning for now, because I have four planned Alchemists, so let’s get these multiples out of the way before we get to the singles.
Compared to everything else, Alchemy is ridiculously simple. I’m planning to put 10 points into Thaumaturgy and then 20 points into Gleaming Transmutagen, so I can make Blasphemite with the Gleaming Glory transmutation.
The only trouble here is that you need 80 Gleaming Transmutagen to do that. This took me about two hours of research to figure out: You need to use Thaumaturgy until you discover one of three new transmutes: Ominous Herbs, Ominous Call or Ominous Gloom.
You also need to drop another 15 points into Thaumaturgy: 10 more to unlock a new subspec and then 5 into Ominous Materials, so that you can discover those things. So it’s only at 45 points total in Thaumaturgy that you can start doing Thaumaturgy to discover one of the transmutes above. I finally discovered Ominous Herbs. The wow-professions page says you have to do it on certain mats, but it may be outdated because I did it on Ominous Transmutagen and it just took A SINGLE use of Thaumaturgy on 20 Ominous Transmutagen and I learned Ominous Gloom.
Doing Ominous Gloom granted me a bunch of stuff including 23 Gleaming Transmutagen. And then it promptly went on CD for 24 hours. Luckily, I can reset that on the beta. Another one gave me 21 Gleaming Transmutagen. 22 Gleaming Transmutagen on the next. Then 23 on the next. So we’re looking at a minimum of four transmutes to get enough Gleaming Transmutagen to create the Blasphemite.
… or are we?
Turns out that if you push Thaumaturgy to 35/55, “Performing acts of Thaumaturgy now grant Gleaming Transmutagen.” So I tried it out on 20 Luredrop and I got… 3 Gleaming Transmutagen. 20 Gloom Chitin got me… 3 Gleaming Transmutagen. 20 Blessing Blossom? Yep, you guessed it, 3 Gleaming Transmutagen.
The good news is Thaumaturgy doesn’t have a cooldown. The bad news is it’s 20 of each item for 3 Gleaming Transmutagen. While we will definitely want to get to 35/55 in Thaumaturgy eventually, it’ll really only be when mats calm down a little in price or if we have a ludicrous number of spare mats. It’s probably best to go back to Thaumaturgy to get to 35 after you’ve started making your Gleaming Transmutagen regularly through the transmutes.
So, my four alchemists are all going in this direction unless there is A LOT of Blasphemite on the market. As far as I’m aware, only alchemists can make Blasphemite… Could be worth a lot.
That said, flasks and potions are both smaller trees now than they were in Dragonflight, so if you’re not all about the transmutes, or if gold is a bit tight, Potent Potions looks great especially if you’re out there raiding or pushing mythic +. The Bulk Production potion subspec, at point 20, says: “The first potion you craft per day will grant you 5 soulbound conjured copies at max quality.” That is going to be so much cheaper for those of you doing fun raiding/dungeoning things!
Still, I’m aiming for the transmute game for now.
What next…?
Kurn’s Inscription Plans
Oh, right. Having two scribes is kind of a late decision, all things considered. To say that I have made a lot of gold over the years by virtue of Darkmoon Cards and Inscription would be the understatement of the century. I think I topped out at like seven million gold at some point?
So, they’ve changed how Inscription works with Darkmoon Cards in The War Within. You no longer craft the cards, as I understand it. You find them. Like… out there. In the world. 😒 How dare they make us LEAVE THE COMFORT OF THE CITY? 😂 And as you spec into each deck, halfway through you get a point that gives you a 50% higher chance to find the damn things. And then at 30 points, you can “learn how to transcribe other Khaz Algar Darkmoon Cards into Darkmoon Cards of (the deck)”.
Given that my scribe is my Evoker, whom I cannot play worth a damn, as previously noted, I was not thrilled. I was basically just going to give up on making tons of gold with Inscription… and then I levelled my druid on MOP Remix and now hi, hello, I have an 11th character to do something with. Since it’s a druid, obviously it’ll be an herbalist (also as previously noted), but it’ll also be a scribe. The druid will be my “go forth and see what drops” toon for Inscription. So I’m going to:
Take Archival Additions. Oddly, as of Beta (11.0.2 (56110)), once you open Archival Additions, you can go through Cryptic Collection and then select any of the decks without depositing any points in any of them. I don’t know if that’s intended. If it is, heck, pick a deck and drop 15 points into it so you can start getting cards to drop. As you get more points, drop them into the same deck so you can basically recraft other cards into your cards.
If it’s not intended, it’s the same theory — max out one deck before moving on to the next. It’ll just take some extra points.
But for my evoker, who will spend her time herbing and crafting the new Algari treatises and such, she’ll go into Pursuit of Knowledge. Like Dragonflight, the treatises are discoveries while crafting treatises. Just selecting Pursuit of Knowledge gives you the Inscription treatise. On beta, I crafted my first Inscription one and then discovered Blacksmithing. Then I crafted that one and I learned Leatherworking. So it probably won’t be too hard to grab them all and it doesn’t require any points that I can tell so far. They are still BOP, so these will need to be requested through crafting orders.
(Honestly, I think something is weird with Inscription with the lack of needing to drop points in. I guess we’ll find out at launch.)
Okay, what’s next on the list… all the single-toon professions, I guess.
Kurn’s Skinning Plans
Oh, this is just rude. In the Tanning tree, we have Tanning and then Luxurious Leathers and Concrete Chitin. You have to max out both the leather and chitin subspecs to be able to refine both to rank 3. 😒 And in order to even get to both subspecs, you need to put in 30 points into Tanning. So that’s 40 points into both leather and chitin subspecs plus 30 into Tanning, which is 110 points. Bloody hell. On the one hand, may as well get started here because… I’m going to want rank 3 leather and chitin to work with as a leatherworker myself. On the other hand, ugh, it’s not appealing to me. But I’ll probably take it anyway and start with Concrete Chitin, just because I’m a mail wearer myself. So 10 points into Tanning, then 40 points into Concrete Chitin, then going back to Tanning to open up leather and continue the process. But I’m not happy about it!
I looked at the Harvesting tree and, frankly, I noped out for the time being. I love the idea of creating stuff I will need for cooking and stuff, but there’s so little information about cooking and fishing (no, I will not go into those in this post) right now that I can’t make an informed decision about picking up Harvesting at this point.
Luring looks fun, but I’ll worry about that last, I guess.
Kurn’s Leatherworking Plans
Okay, on to Leatherworking. I’ve had LW on Kurn since the first day I ventured out of Shadowglen. (Skinning is something I’ve dropped and picked back up a couple of times, but never LW!)
While I am interested in learning how to craft armor for leather and mail wearers, the awesome thing about leatherworking is how much profession equipment it can make, so that will likely be Kurn’s focus to start. In Dragonflight, leatherworkers could make 8 pieces of profession equipment or accessories: LW Smock, Skinner’s Cap, Floral Basket, Durable Pack, Protective Gloves, Jeweler’s Cover, Smithing Apron, Alchemist’s Hat… and the blue versions thereof. It looks to be the same in The War Within, with 8 green recipes (all learned from your trainer) and 8 blue recipes (all purchased with Artisan’s Acuity).
As such, Kurn’s first 10 points will go into Flawless Fortes (note that’s pronounced fortays, not forts) and then I’ll go ahead and max out Epic Ensembles. Of note, at the max rank, you’ll use 5% less Concentration when using concentration on professions equipment. Not sure where I’ll go after 40 points, but that’s a problem for Future!Kurn.
Kurn’s Blacksmithing Plans
Similarly, Blacksmithing also has 8 profession equipment recipes and looks to be the same as Dragonflight, so that’s the direction I’ll go with Blacksmithing. However, it gets much more complex in Blacksmithing. Because of course it does. 😅
First up is 10 points into Means of Production, then unlock Tools of the Trade. Doing this unlocks your own blue hammer, so you don’t have to pay any Artisan’s Acuity to learn this one.
Then, there’s a choice between Trade Tools and Trade Accessories.
Of the 8 profession equipment recipes, five aretools and three are accessories. So I’m going to go with Trade Tools first and max it out and then move into Trade Accessories, although it looks like you have to max out Tools of the Trade to get the other subspec, so we’re looking at 60 points in Means of Production before we can open up the other of Trade Tools or Trade Accessories.
I’m suddenly really glad I have like 11 days off work around the launch… 😅
Kurn’s Engineering Plans
Engineering, like Blacksmithing and Leatherworking, has a number of recipes for profession stuff too! It’s got 7 types of things, unlike the 8 for the other two. It’s somewhat even, with 4 tools and 3 accessories. Thankfully, the tree is less complex than Blacksmithing.
First, I’ll drop 10 points into Engineered Equipment to open up Inventor’sNecessities. Drop 5 points there and then I can move to Profession Gear, where I can max that out for 30 points. Boom. 45 points and done for now. Again, I’m not sure where I’ll go after that, but it’s still Future!Kurn’s problem.
Kurn’s Jewelcrafting Plans
Jewelcrafters can make four profession accessories, but I don’t think I’m going to spec that way at first, shockingly. Given my army of alchemists, I am probably going to go into good, old fashioned Gemcutting. So I’ll drop 10 points in there and then move to Ruby. All the cuts (Emerald, Onyx, Ruby and Sapphire) will improve your ability to cut Blasphemite as well as the type of gem, so it’s really what you prefer. I think I’ll go Ruby just because I like crit as the main stat. So I’ll learn that and then I can automatically open one of the subspecs from there, which will likely be the Quick Ruby because who doesn’t like crit and haste? I’ll then max out Ruby and continue to put points in Quick Ruby. That’s 60 points in and beyond that is, you guessed it, Future!Kurn’s problem. 😂
Kurn’s Enchanting Plans
Okay, we’re getting into the last couple professions here and, let’s be clear, I’m a noob at them. I have very little idea what the hell I’m doing here.
Truthfully, when it comes to Enchanting, I’ve been looking at Gleeful Glamours. This kind of stuff is always somewhat popular, but it’s not necessary like actual enchants are. That said, these are in the same spec (Ephemerals, Enrichments, and Equipment) as things like Mana Oils… And those will be needed by raiders and such.
So I might just go 5 points into EEE, then 10 points into Material Maestro, followed by 0 points (to start) in Optimal Oils. This gives me the Oil of Beledar’s Grace recipe, which is for healers.
Then I might go back to 10 more points in EEE and pick up Deceptive Decorations for the Gleeful Glamours, and we’ll see if the healer mana oil outsells the glamours, I guess.
I could go straight for Everlasting Enchantments, except that I don’t know squat about who needs what. There will always be a huge market for those, so I don’t mind taking my time to learn about them and get into the market Later ™.
I will want to eventually get into Supplementary Shattering to get the multicrafting bonuses for the Deceptive Decorations, but that can wait. And I don’t know that I need Designated Disenchanter unless it’s super hard to get enchanting mats. Again, we’ll have to see.
Kurn’s Tailoring Plans
Okay, finally we come to Tailoring. My tailor is also a miner and is a mage, so I kind of know how to play him and he’ll be Out There in The World. As such, it’s very tempting to just go all out and max out Textile Treasures to maximize my chances of getting cloth while out in the world. Note that Nerubians count as humanoids, so “your chance to find cloth from humanoids” includes them.
Then again, dropping 10 points into Quality Fabric and then opening up Spellthread to learn Weavercloth Spellthread is bound to be worthwhile.
I will probably pass on Threads of Devotion for the time being since I only have three cloth-wearers in my arsenal and the priest and warlock won’t be doing too much of that “fighting” thing.
This leaves us with From Dawn Until Dusk. This is where the cooldowns occur — the Dawnweave Bolt and the Duskweave Bolt. Either way you go, it’ll be 60 points to fully max out one of the two: 10 points in From Dawn to Dusk, then 30 in Duskweave or Dawnweave Tailoring and then 20 in Duskweaving or Dawnweaving. To pick up the other, you need to drop another 20 points into From Dawn to Dusk, then another 50 to max out the other one, for a grand total of 130 points to max out both. As such, it’s probably best (at least to start) to only focus on one or the other.
I think I’ll max out Textile Treasures, then head to From Dawn to Dusk and get one of the two (unsure which yet), then max that out. That’s like 120 points total, so that’ll keep me busy for the foreseeable future!
Don’t Forget your FREE 200 Artisan’s Acuity!
The War Within’s equivalent of Artisan’s Mettle is Artisan’s Acuity. Here’s how to get 200 free acuity in a very short video I made from beta.
Your Turn!
What are you planning on for your professions in The War Within? Check out the Wowhead TWW Profession Calculator and share your builds with me!
First up, updates. My mage and my warlock and my priest have all hit 70. It really was easy. I didn’t even have to do any of the pre-patch event to ding them. So I have 8 level 70s. And, once my timewalkers come over, I will have 10 level 70s. I feel like that’s probably 7 too many… But I am set to make some serious cash at the outset! I am very excited about this. More excited than the fact that Warband Banks work (although that is awesome), and more excited about it than the pre-patch event that I dipped a toe into today. Meh. I’m not all about cosmetic/transmog rewards, so I’ll probably just do things through once and be done with it. That gives me a bit of time to relax and not level something for a while.
Okay, enough of my updates. I wanted to talk about THE META. This is a good, old-fashioned Kurn rant, complete with examples to illustrate my points, so get yourself a drink of your choice and settle in for the next, uh, 1700 words and change. :)
The Meta
I don’t know if it’s because I started raiding when we were lucky to get 20 people into ZG for a couple of hours to kill Venoxis, or if it’s because we only ever hit up Molten Core with a full 40 people once (and once, we 27-manned Gehennas!), but I’ve never really understood the whole concept of what is the “best spec” at this time.
Okay, let me rephrase that — I’ve never really understood why people seem to care so much about what is “meta” and what isn’t.
When I started raiding, there wasn’t any room for this “optimization” nonsense. Three warlock curses up on a boss? HAH. We didn’t have three warlocks! We were lucky to have two warlocks on any given night in Vanilla and like 6 warriors who could hold aggro on Garr’s adds while the warlocks banished the other two. It was not a fun time, but we (usually) made it work. Because that’s all we had, you know? We didn’t have the luxury of saying “sorry, resto druid, we don’t have a spot for you because we have 8 priests healing”. We needed healers! We needed everything.
So when people talk about “the meta”, I want to acknowledge that yes, there are likely specs and classes that are performing really well right now. Heck, back in Burning Crusade, Beastmaster Hunters were all the rage. There was a single macro you could just hit over and over and over and over again and boom, you topped damage meters. On Gorefiend in Black Temple, I had to actually swap from my holy paladin to my hunter, Kurn, in order to not mess up the whole raid. I raided on a shitty laptop with an integrated graphics card and things did not cooperate with the encounter. I couldn’t function as a Vengeful Spirit quickly enough to take care of the shadowy constructs that would spawn, and if I was the FIRST person killed, then it was going to be a wipe. So I came in as Kurn (swapped to BM, even though my forever-Marks-heart broke at it) and would feign before every Shadow of Death cast, leaving me able to avoid dealing with constructs and death on that fight at all. And, because I think we had four BM hunters in the same group that night, I did quite well, considering all I had was crafted gear and a couple things from Karazhan.
“But Kurn,” you say, “switching to BM for Gorefiend is playing the meta!”
Kind of. The only reason I did it was because I was incredibly undergeared for T6 content on my hunter, having basically a couple pieces of the equivalent of T5 (from my Leatherworking) and some scattered epics from Karazhan. Had I thought I could keep up with my hunters in any other way, shape or form, I guarantee you I would have gone in as Marks. But the whole point of my swapping to my hunter was to not mess up the raid. So I pulled out all the stops and did everything my hunter possibly could do not to mess it up. In this sense, I played the meta to compensate for crap gear.
The way I see it, when we look at all things being even, I don’t particularly care about the meta and, I guess, that’s why I don’t understand why others care so much. Granted, I’ve never been in a guild that has pushed world firsts. I’ve never been much of a PVPer, so I don’t care if the combo of, for example, frost mage, holy pally, sub rogue, would suck in arenas, if I wanted to play with Majik and Fog.
But that’s the thing, right? Everything has to be even. So when we look at my guild’s first kill of Gorefiend, back in the day, my gear was not even, so I had to step it up with the spec to make sure we had enough DPS. (Not going to lie, the stacks of Ferocious Inspiration, my using a flask and food, etc, really helped.)
So what happens when things aren’t even? Let’s take, for example, Magister’s Terrace, again, back in Burning Crusade. At the end of the instance, you’re flying around the room, trying to kill Kael’Thas, but he’s throwing crap at you and you can hardly stand still. You’re dodging arcane spheres, phoenixes, flame strikes, all kinds of shit. How do you think that went for a holy paladin? Answer: badly.
I could reliably heal three of five people on the fight. Myself, my tank, and one DPS. That’s it. If we didn’t have healthstones from a warlock or didn’t have healing potions or didn’t have bubbles/ice blocks/etc, at least two people would die. And I was in full tier five gear. The gear should have been more than equal to the task. I daresay my skill was, too. But the fight was unfair for a holy paladin, because I had one instant-cast spell (holy shock) on a 15s cooldown. This was before beacon.
I had a priest alt at the time and did the instance in scattered blues and a couple of epics from Karazhan. Healed it without any issues. Like EZ MODE. Compared to my T5 paladin. That is ridiculous.
I did not let one challenging fight have me switch my raiding character, though. Were things harder to heal as a holy paladin than a holy priest? HELL YES. Did I care? No! Apart from dreading Shadow Labs (for Grandmaster Vorpil — the teleporting always screwed me up), and hating Magister’s Terrace, I could do anything any other healer did, barring a battle rez. (Okay, and healing while moving was hard even with Divine Favor and Holy Shock.) But my class and spec had so many benefits! Blessings of Might, Wisdom and Kings! Blessings of Sacrifice and Protection and Freedom! Crits returning 100% of mana cost! (I miss you, Illumination.) I loved the utility of my class. Hell, the very first time I killed the Lich King, both tanks had just eaten it, LK was at 11% (so 1% to go), and I bubbled and taunted the mofo and, yes, then died shortly afterwards when my bubble expired, but I bought the team an extra few seconds to DPS the crap out of him. And we won! And it was my Lay on Hands that crit Dayden as we took down Lady Vashj for the first time!
Show me a priest who can tank the Lich King for 10 seconds without dying. (I mean, apart from the priest who tanked Onyxia, who was shadow…)
The thing is, though, that even if all gear is equal and all instances are equally balanced for all specs of everything, the one thing that is never going to be equal is skill.
When doing most things in WoW, having skill that’s about average will still get you pretty far in the game. If your skill is higher than most people’s, it’ll get you further — mythic raids, high mythic key dungeons, that sort of thing. I still maintain that if your skill is high enough, you probably don’t need the added bonus that “the meta” will give you. If you can pull together your ideal group and it fits the meta, great! But if you pull together your friends and your classes and specs aren’t perfect, that’s okay too. Hell, I did the 45m Baron run in Strat UD in Vanilla in 39 minutes with 2 mages (one frost, one fire), a warlock (destro), a holy priest and myself as a Marks hunter. My CAT (that’s right, my CAT) tanked. No bear, no turtle. A cat. And we did it in 39 minutes. We used shacks and traps and then the mages and the warlock would go AOE down the towers while me and the priest drank. That was emphatically not the best group to do the Baron run with, most of us in a hybrid of T0, T0.5, ZG and possibly a tiny bit of AQ20 gear and a couple pieces of MC gear. We weren’t overgeared for the instance, though our gear was probably higher than some attempting the run. But our group composition was ridiculous. And we did it to see if we could. And we could!
I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is… think outside the box. Use your class and spec skills to their fullest extent. Did you know that you could cast Divine Intervention on a hunter pet? Well, you could. I can’t advise you do so, but you can definitely do it. Similarly, you could mind-control and sheep the same mob (or is it vice-versa?). Weird? Yes, definitely. But play around with your skills.
Dungeons and raids, even outdoor mobs, they’re all just puzzles. Can you brute strength your way through them? Absolutely. But can you sit there and be patient and do something you have absolutely no business doing just because you thought you’d try? Yes, you can.
Challenge Yourself
Coming this new expansion, that’s my challenge to you. Go do something really dumb on your favourite character. Try to solo something that is not typically soloable. Try to make creative use of your abilities to do something neat. Don’t break the game, don’t get caught making “creative use of game mechanics” to exploit anything. But go do something fun and stupid.
Example 1: I would take night elf hunters to Dire Maul East to kill Lethtendris with me as an application. They would need to make great use of feign death, shadowmeld, track demons, and would need great pet control. If we killed Lethtendris without too much trouble, you were in.
Example 2: I would take dwarf hunters (due to the lack of shadowmeld) to Winterspring and get them to kite… I think it was Azurous, to Everlook, whereupon the guards would help you beat him up. If they did it successfully within a certain number of attempts, they were in.
These are fun and stupid things that test your skill and your ability to think outside the box. Yes, this is a game about the holy trinity of tanks, healers and damage-dealers, but it’s also an open world. The world is yours to explore. Do so! :)
My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂
That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”
As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.
To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.
Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.
I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.
Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.
And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.
That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.
I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.
So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.
In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…
There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.
In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.
So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?
If you’ve been reading my blog for virtually any amount of time, you know that I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure out of making gold. At one point, I was at like 7-8 million gold? Buying WoW tokens for myself (and my brother) can be expensive, though, so I found myself at something like 700k about 6 weeks ago. I am now approaching 1.1 million gold. And every single copper of that gold was hard-earned. With it being the dog days of the expansion, plus with MOP Remix active, it is damn hard to make any money. I’ve gotten my ~400k through quests, mostly the dragon racing world quests on numerous alts, and very little through the Auction House. And that makes me a #sadmoose.
So I am going into The War Within aiming to be super organized with my characters and my professions. How organized? Well, I’m glad you asked! Here’s a public (view-only) spreadsheet of my toons and professions. That links to the spreadsheet, feel free to make a copy and tailor it (hah, get it? Tailor?!) to your own needs. And here’s an image.
It’s not final yet. Like I don’t know that I need 4 herbalists and 3 miners, frankly, much less two scribes and three alchemists. Let’s break it down a bit.
We’ll come back to Madrana in a minute, because she’s pretty much the outlier.
My shammy (not the baby shammy, that’s a whole other shammy!), has generally been the farm character for Madrana’s alchemy and jewelcrafting since, uh, 2007? 2008? And, I think it was back in Cataclysm, when you were able to gain experience by herbing or mining, I was like this is the ideal way to level a character I don’t know anything about. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve grown accustomed to my shammy. I spent a lot of time being enhancement/resto and, in more recent years, elemental/resto. But I spend almost all my time on the character just farming herbs and ore. And, because of that, I get experience and I get to level and it’s grand.
Now, because of the experience one gets while gathering, I have decided that I want most of my characters to have at least one gathering profession that doesn’t require killing anything — so herbalism and mining. This explains my evoker (which I still don’t know how to play), my warrior (which I can kind of play but don’t like to play), and my warlock (no idea beyond incinerate and chaos bolt, tbh).
But I sort of know how to play a mage and I know how to play my “grandbaby” paladin (I’ll explain in a minute) and I know how to play my baby shammy and I don’t super know how to play a priest… but I know how to play Madrana.
So because I know how to play Madrana, she can just heal her way to 80 or whatever. I could theoretically do the same with the priest. I just go disc and bubble things, right? hahaha!
And I could do the same with my mage, but DPS queues are still a thing, so I thought, no, I’ll make him a miner, which is currently is. But I also wanted him to be a tailor. So that’s how I started Dragonflight with him.
As to the grandbaby paladin, this is my Dark Iron Dwarf paladin I rolled on Mists of Pandaria Remix. It’s not my “baby” paladin who is, I believe, still sitting on Skywall. I rolled the character with the goal for him to be a miner and a blacksmith, so I could drop blacksmithing on my warlock and pick up mining to feed his engineering. And I could absolutely heal on the grandbaby paladin… but honestly, am I going to? Probably not. So mining to level makes sense.
Then we come to the baby shammy. This is another character I rolled on MOP Remix. She is 65 presently and is destroying things on Timeless Isle (sidenote: DANG, that frog poison still sucks!!!). She is also…
…
… a goblin.
LET ME BE CLEAR, I STILL HATE THE HORDE. It makes me feel sick to turn in quests to Garrosh and to kill Alliance soldiers. I loathe the Horde with every fibre of my being.
So why did I roll a Horde toon?
I rolled a goblin for the racial. Goblins receive 20% off normal vendor prices when the vendor is associated with a rep. It’s the same discount you’d receive at exalted with the rep in question. And goblins get it as baseline. Note that it doesn’t mean you get exalted automatically or that you get access to exalted goods or other things behind a reputation barrier. It just means you get the 20% discount.
So I rolled a goblin (and would have done so if it was Alliance too) for this discount. Do you know how much a single Draconic Vial costs? FIVE GOLD! Ridiculous!!! A single Primal Flux? FIFTEEN GOLD. HIGHWAY ROBBERY!!! Is it the cost of doing “business”? Yes. But eff that noise. With Warbands coming in about a week (July 23), you will have the ability to share a Warband bank with your other toons — even cross-faction ones. So maybe my warlock needs like 100 Primal Flux. That’s 1500 gold. But with the goblin? 1200 gold. It’s not necessarily worth it for 5-10 reagents, but when you scale it up? Hell yes, it’s worth it. And if I can level a toon easily (and holy COW, is it easy!!!), why not do it? (If I feel like it, I may roll an Alliance druid as well. We’ll see.)
So my goblin will not be doing much apart from buying stuff for my Alliance toons, but if I want to, she’ll be able to level via something. I am not convinced I want her to do herbalism and alchemy, but is it ever bad to have a lot of herbs? Is it ever bad to have “too many” toons who can do transmutes? My thinking is no.
Still, I have beta access, so I’m going to check in on some of the things each profession can do before I finalize everything here. I may ditch inscription on the warrior and keep alchemy and get herbalism instead of the other way around. We’ll see!
Like, okay, I was 100% going to buy the expansion. I have bought all the expansions. I did not foresee myself springing for the top-tier pre-order deal, though…
AND YET.
The interesting thing is that I have some PTO planned for the week of launch (unintentionally coinciding, I swear), and so I saw the three days early access and I was like “well, shit” and coughed up the cash. This also included a 70 boost and access to the beta.
So, current state of All The Things for me:
Kurn, Madrana, shammy, dragon are all 70, plus now my warrior (who was 41) is 70 as well
Priest and mage are 60 and 61, while warlock is 64
Dark Iron Dwarf paladin is 70 in MOP Remix
I have achieved my original goal, but I don’t think I’m done with remix yet
I have created an 80 hunter skinner/lw on beta
As such, I’ve also played around with professions in beta, although just about an hour’s worth so far. The NPC crafting orders are a weeeeee bit fucked. I did report all these things, btw, but:
Lua errors when selecting NPC crafting orders (with 0 addons/etc)
A request for a rank 4 item … when the item only goes up to rank 3, so it’s literally unable to be completed
Issues with taking orders when I didn’t have the ability to add the reagent in that I could take the order and then had to cancel it
Hilariously, I already hate one of the NPCs. He gives me the shittiest mats (if he gives any mats at all!) and then expects a rank 3 (max rank) item! Like get fucked, my bud. hahaha.
Anyway, things I want to play around with on beta include other professions plus delves. I haven’t even left the old world yet, so some exploring would be nice. I’m not planning to do too much testing because when you then do it over and over again on live, it’s SO BORING. Like I am ALREADY not looking forward to dealing with the quest to open the warband thing. (I gave some feedback on the very low drop rates for the items, but it’s ultimately a short-ish quest chain and it’ll be fine even if they don’t buff the drops.)
So it bodes well for the expansion for me so far. I’m hoping to do up a proper spreadsheet this weekend and I’ll share it with you folks, so you can see just how stupidly organized I try to be when I take things seriously!
I wasn’t going to take part in the MOP Remix. I really wasn’t. I did not like the pandaland expansion. I think the thing I liked most about it was farming Zandalari Warbringers.
And yet, when I realized levelling characters would be trivially easy and those characters would end up on live after Remix ended… I was intrigued. You see, I have like seven toons. Kurn, Madrana, a shaman, a dracthyr evoker, a mage, a priest and a warlock. Do I know how to play the evoker, the warlock or even the priest properly? Absolutely not. In none of the specs. So why do I have them?
The shaman is a miner/herbalist and started out as a draenei and has always been my farm toon for Madrana. (She is now a male dwarf.)
I had to roll a dragon this expansion because, uh, dragons. My dragon is an herbalist/scribe.
My mage is a miner/tailor. I’ve had this mage since my brother convinced me to create one with him on a PVP server. Once I hit 30 and got WTFPWNED every single time I logged in at the Southshore inn, I transferred. Fog’s warrior transferred later. This mage started life as a human female and is now a dwarf male. I LOVE the dwarf male emotes, okay?
My priest is an alchemist/enchanter. She came to be because my brother “needed” a healer as he levelled his paladin. He tanked. I “healed”. (I literally put him on follow and threw out some heals and read or watched TV while we did this, much of the time.) The most exciting thing the priest has ever done was a full BRD run with my brother tanking after just the BRD prison popped. My brother was like “that’s IT?!” when the instance officially ended and asked if everyone wanted to keep going. We did, so we cleared the instance. And then I read someone’s blog that sounded SUSPICIOUSLY like our instance run! The blog is now offline, but it was sisters, I believe? Who were a shadow priest and resto druid? Hots’n’dots or Dots’n’hots or something like that.
But I hate the warlock. I really do. He’s presently level 64 and has only levelled via profession quests.
So I was like, okay, if I can level easily to 70 and that toon moves to live in a couple months, just before the War Within launches… then I can pick up mining/blacksmithing on the new toon and drop blacksmithing on the warlock and pick up mining and keep engineering.
For those of you keeping track, that means:
Kurn: Skinning/LW
Madrana: Alchemy/Jewelcrafter
Shammy: Mining/Herbalism
Dracthyr: Herbalism/Inscription
Priest: Alchemy/Enchanting (still needs levelling to 70)
Mage: Mining/Tailoring (still needs levelling to 70)
Warlock: Mining/Engineering (still needs levelling to 70)
New toon: Mining/Blacksmithing
So I rolled a male Dark Iron Dwarf paladin. (They have +5 to Blacksmithing.) I’m levelling him ret in the world and holy in instances. Here, have a look at me healing 3 MOP Remix dungeons!
MOP Remix is interesting. I don’t know that I like it for the experience, but another toon to 70 without too much trouble? Doesn’t sound bad, frankly.
So are you in Remix? What have you done? What should I not miss out on?
Oh, and, please note that I am no longer active on Twitter. I have moved to Blue Sky:
It is 4:28am. I have work in… not too many hours. But I came across a video on YouTube while I couldn’t sleep and they were talking about how holy paladins should use the burning meta gem in Cata Classic.
And I was like… that’s not right, is it?
So what did I do?
First, I scoured THIS VERY BLOG to see what I have to say about Cataclysm meta gems. Know what I found? One post. One. That’s it. And it doesn’t even mention the Burning Shadowspirit meta?
So I got out of bed and went to check what gems were in Madrana’s old helms — both original Madrana and baby paladin Madrana. Ember Shadowspirit Diamonds were in basically all of my old holy helms (different ones for tanking and the odd ret helm).
And I’m like how did I not mention a whole other meta gem? I was very, very confused.
Until I saw a comment at Wowhead. The Burning meta used to say 3% Increased Critical Damage until 4.3, whereupon it changed to 3% Increased Critical Effect.
Judging from Wowhead, Cata is going with 3% Increased Critical Effect for Classic. (And, it seems, the second iteration of Holy Radiance, but that’s for another post.)
So, questions:
1) Was I really unaware of this change at 4.3???
2) If I wasn’t unaware, why did I keep using the Ember?
3) Why have I been researching this and writing this for 20m in the middle of the night when I have work the next day?
I think I’ll do a bit more research this week and come up with a good video/post about Cata and holy pallies. In the meantime, yes, use the Burning Shadowspirit Diamond as your meta. And here’s what I still believe is a pretty decent max-level spec for a PVE holy paladin.
Okay, back to bed. The birds are chirping and the sun is coming up. I am not going to be a happy camper at work…
