Weekend (11 Oct) - Now They Come in Packs, Elites that is

Weekend (11 Oct) - Now They Come in Packs, Elites that is

Wild took the weekend off, but JB and Happy were busy as usual. Happy had sent some considerable change JB's way over the weekend in order for her to upgrade the gear on her enhancement spec. JB was raised enhancement, but after she learned dual specs and added the elemental spec, she mostly abandoned the melee centric enhancement spec.

Of course, whenever Happy has to give up big chunks of change, he always complains that "it's a bad time" to be spending money. It's true the Auction House is going through one of it's down phases, were prices are unstable and several of Happy's best money makers are stagnating and unprofitable. And ever since Happy destroyed the Pygmy Suckerfish market, he's tried to be more cautious. Pygmy Suckerfish, which used to trade at around 5 silver each until Happy went crazy buying them up, making pygmy oil, and then vendoring the oil by the hundreds for a tidy profit. The fish sells at wildly fluctuating prices now, totally out of control, at a cost of anywhere from an unprofitable 20s to upwards of a gold apiece. Crazy. Happy sent the last of his pygmy suckerfish to JB last week and got out of that market.

With pygmy suckerfish in mind Happy has played it safe with large prismatic shards, which has a very high profit margin. The shards are one of the few items that Happy can farm (sort of) for a steady supply, and which he manipulates through pricing and quantity limits to keep those profits high - until recently. There are similarities between pygmy suckerfish and large prismatic shards. Happy bought the fish at very low prices and then sent them to JB to be turned into pygmy oil through her alchemy profession. Any alchemist could do this, but few had figured out just how profitable vendoring the oil was. Large prismatic shards are typically farmed by getting green items and disenchanting them. That's a lot of work to actually farm them, and costly to buy the gear off of the AH. However, there is another mat called void crystals, which pre-WotLK were pretty valuable. Void crystals are still farmed and have use, but their demand is now much lower and that causes prices to jump around - very high when quantities are low, almost free when too many get dumped into the AH.

Happy buys a lot of very cheap void crystals. He then sends them to Wild, who uses an enchanting ability to "shatter" the void crystals into two large prismatic shards. As with the fish, few enchanters seem to have figured this out, and Happy has been able to sell modest numbers of them almost every day at over 200% profit. Two things have happened. One, there has been a much longer period where void crystal prices have been extremely low. That was great news for Happy at first, as he bought them up. But at such a low price, and in still high quantities, Happy can't just buy them all, and other enchanters have started to notice. That's the other thing that happened - there are now two other competitors who have gotten heavily into the AH game. We run the risk of over-stocking the AH, which leads the more casual AH players to dump prices in order to get the sale. As a result Happy's sales are down and large prismatic shard prices have fallen by 40%. That is still a profitable price, but Happy fears that the golden goose is going to get cooked at some point.

Another item where Happy missed a market price jump all together is greater cosmic essence . . . Excuse me, but Wild figured he'd better interrupt this. No one is interested in your AH theories, Happy, Wild tells him.

Yea, JB chimed in, let's talk about me!

JB went back to the beginning with her enhancement spec. Stopping by her Trainer in Org, JB wiped out all her enhancement talents and started over. She modelled her spec after the very good melee shaman in the guild, knowing that would be a good raid spec. JB then surfed the AH for some decent pieces with +hit on them. It's pretty easy to buy good gear for a melee shaman as there is always a ton of it - but very few have +hit, which is critical. JB got what she could afford, but finished still far short of the minimum she'll need (she has +189 hit; she needs 367 at minimum). More will have to come over time. She also did not have Wild update her enchants. That is also costly, and JB would rather wait to see how much the spec is used first. Still, she now at least as a good talent spec and melee gear she would not be ashamed to bring to a regular dungeon run if needed.

JB also needs a heavy infusion of +hit gear for her main elemental spec, and that is much harder to find than melee +hit gear. Using green quest gear and not much else, she can get her elemental +hit to 218 at the moment, but that severely gimps her DPS and just about every other stat. And she needs a minimum of 289 to be raid viable.

But +hit isn't so necessary for questing or other non-raid activities, and JB was a busy girl over the weekend.

When we left off JB was 75% of the way to level 79 and had 52 of 100 quests done for the achievement. The only Zul'Drak quests in her log were the two associated with the elite bully Darmuk, which JB would have to go back and kill at some point. She wanted easier targets, though, and so searched for and found another quest hub at Zim'Torga. Lots and lots of quests here! There is a really fun quest series involving a number of troll gods that have been chained and forced to do others bidding. JB had a blast hunting down and killing their captors, freeing the gods, and helping them take revenge. They die in the end, but their spirit returns and the trolls again have their gods back. Pretty cool.

Those quests DINGED! JB to level 79. One more level to go.

A quest line related to the gods quests involved killing Warlord Zol'Maz in order to get a key that will later be used in a dungeon quest at Gundrak. Wild remembered that one well, as he had a terrible time completing it. The Warlord was considered a tough fight, even as a level 77 elite, and even though JB would have some help from a tiki warrior npc that she could summon. Even getting to the point of engaging Zol'Maz required killing three members of his family (JB had to think of them as just as evil as Zol'Maz in order to do the dirty deeds) and robbing them of items that would give JB access to the Warlord.

The fight, which Wild barely survived after a more than one try, was anti-climactic for JB. The Warlord hit hard, but with the tiki warrior tanking and JB self-healing and blasting away, Warlord Zol'Maz died fast, and even the tiki warrior was still standing.

That bolstered JB's confidence to go after the next leg of that quest chain, which was to farm level 76/77 elites until they coughed up two items JB needed. The elites were called Guardians and Altar Wardens.

JB went after the guardians first. They were stone giants, so JB expected them to hit hard, always a concern for her even in her nicely armored mail gear. And as JB learned when she tagged her first one, they could also stun, taking JB out of the action for several seconds at a time. Despite the hits and the stuns, JB steadily burned down and killed the 76 elite. But he didn't give up the goody JB was after.

All of the guardians patrolled just inside the inner wall of a relatively small, square area. They were numerous enough to be at risk of aggroing more than one, and that's exactly what happened when JB engaged her next elite. JB could not handle two of them at once and went down.

Once she was back in business, JB tagged a level 77 elite and killed it, just to show the others that she could and would. That one dropped the item JB was after.

JB moved to another area and the altar wardens. JB had to watch out for other mobs, called scions, which tended to hover close to the wardens and could make the fights a lot more complicated. JB was careful to pull the wardens away before lighting them up, but light them up she did. Level 76 or 77, it didn't matter. JB killed four of them before they dropped the second item JB needed. Hmm, that makes seven elites killed in the space of an hour or so.

JB was again running out of quests, but the quest line led her to one more elite target, the Prophet of Akali, a level 78 elite. It was a fun fight, but once JB got Akali down to 75%, one of the troll gods, Har'koa, appeared to help. Akali has a number of nasty attacks, and JB spent almost half her casting time just maintaining her health, but between JB and Har'koa we brought the Prophet down.

JB is now 58% of the way to level 80, and has completed 88/100 quests in Zul'Drak.