Friday (15 Oct) - A Tale Of two Faction AH's

Friday (15 Oct) - A Tale Of two Faction AH's

Wild was both overjoyed and dismayed Friday night. After the ad hoc Thursday night ICC raid Wild got into, the guildie raid leader asked if anyone was interested in a Ruby Sanctum (RS) run on Friday night. Wild was a definite yes for that. He planned to run around 7pm. So, Friday night Wild logged in around 6pm to ensure he got an invite. The raid leader from Thursday was already in game and already in a raid. But it wasn't RS. It was ICC. The G2 ICC group had decided to run a third night. They had locked the raid and were working on Sindragosa, the 11th boss in ICC. Wild was despondent. A keyboard glitch has cost Wild a whole week of raiding with G2 and a shot at the Lich King. The G2 raid killed Sindragosa for the first time. And they spent a good part of the evening learning the Lich King fight. I was overjoyed at the progress. What rattled Wild's cage, though, was that the ICC run was unscheduled, and one of Wild's greatest complaints with FS was failing to keep raiders informed of events and essentially keeping only a core subset of raiders in the loop. Wild can't hang around in game all day, while others who can get to go to these ad hoc raids. I know I'm venting a bit, but just when Wild sees his goal in front of him, circumstances are locking him out from even trying to achieve it. Wild sent an in game mail to Lady Hunter, who runs the G2, and who still has a raid lockout that would start us at the Princes, I believe. I asked her that if she decides to run that raid before Wednesday to please contact me. I want in that raid. I'll be quiet now.

The Horde and Alliance Auction Houses went in diametrically opposed directions over the past three days. Happy has been euphoric. Demand for enchanting materials on the horde AH have gone through the roof. Happy is selling almost everything he has at prices to four times higher than average. Happy made ten days worth of sales over the past three days. The flood is ebbing, but even at low tide Happy is still making more than on any normal day. It won't last, and I still don't quite get why the surge for mats. Happy is taking full advantage, though.

On the Alliance side it is the complete opposite. Nobody is buying anything. Eighty percent of the mats Lost put up for sale expired without being bought. Prices, if anything, are even lower than they were before. Poor Lost's profits are at a trickle. What makes it even worse is that there isn't any real price dumping, which would become bargains Lost could exploit later. The prices haven't fallen enough for Lost to buy up stock. This is the first time there have been such widespread differences between the two Auction Houses. I really don't have a reason for it, either.

Wild ran the weekly frost raid in Naxxramas Friday night as a way to forget that he was missing out on the Lich King battle going on under his nose. Actually, I need to change the name from the weekly "frost" raid to the weekly "JP" raid. JP, or justice points, is what has replaced frost badges now. The raid group was pretty awful, and we even wiped on our first attempt when they tried to just bludgeon their way through the fight, when there are mechanics to the fight that just can't be ignored no matter how over-geared you think you are. We killed the boss, Rasuvious, on our second attempt.

The JPs Wild got from that quick raid maxed him out at the hard cap of 4,000 justice points. Wild can't earn more without spending down some of those points. The problem is that Wild can't find anything he cares to spend them on. As best I can determine, JPs can be used to buy Tier gear, some special gear sold along with the Tier gear, and heirlooms. Wild could buy all of his T10 gear for both healer and moonkin specs if he wanted to. But JPs can only purchase the i251 level version. To get the i264, Wild still needs one special token per piece of gear, tokens that are only dropped by a couple of bosses in ICC 25 man. Nobody is running ICC 25. Nobody. Wild has full i264 gear except for his bracers (which has no T10 equivalent). The i251 T10s would be a downgrade.

So Wild looked at it from another direction. Another change made by the patch involves gear type. Different classes of players wear different types of gear. From the lowest to highest armor type, there is cloth, leather, mail, and plate. In general players try to use the gear type appropriate to their class, but sometimes choose to use lower armor type gear, usually because the stats are better. For example, Wild's appropriate gear type as a druid is leather. However, Wild can also wear cloth gear, and on his healing set is using two cloth items right now. Moonkin often wear quite a bit of cloth because Blizzard did a very poor job of providing leather caster gear for ranged DPS (since druid moonkins are the only class that would wear it). So moonkin use a lot of cloth gear, because there is plenty of it to support mages, warlocks, and priests.

What Blizzard has done now is encourage players to use only their appropriate gear type, by giving all players a trainable talent that provides a fairly strong buff if ALL of our gear is of the right type. Wild does not get that bonus because of those two pieces of cloth gear he wears. Just as an aside, I don't like this. If Blizzard only wanted us to wear a certain type of gear they should have just made it so that it was the only type we could equip. As well as giving us gear that is as good as what, say, Wild could get in cloth. But no, now we have a situation where it would be foolish for Wild to roll on cloth, even if it was better than the leather item I have, because of that buff. It also means that perfectly good gear that no one of the right class needed will be destroyed because the guy who could use it is the wrong armor class. Badly done.

Back to Wild and those two cloth items he wears. One is those bracers. There are no bracers of any kind short of Heroic mode ICC where Wild can get i245 or better leather bracers with haste on them. Wild desperately needs haste, and I refuse to replace those cloth bracers. There are no bracers Wild can buy with JPs that have haste of them. None. The other cloth item Wild has are his gloves. There is a leather equivalent that Wild can buy with JPs. It has haste, but less than what the cloth gloves have. I will most likely buy them, anyway, as I have to buy SOMETHING so that I don't lose points by being maxed out. Wild's best bet for his bracers is a drop in ICC - by Sindragosa. It's an i251 piece, but it has haste and it would be an upgrade. Wild can dream, anyway.

Later ... ok, Wild made a couple of gear changes. Since I had to spend some JPs, I opted to buy the leather i264 gloves [Gloves of the Great Horned Owl]. It has only slightly less haste than the cloth gloves, and it's short one socket, but fully enchanted and reforged properly and it'll do. After swearing Wild would enter Cata with cloth bracers, I decided to play with the [Wrists of Septic Shock] Wild had picked up and left languishing in his bank. They are i251 leather bracers, so they are both an upgrade (from i245) and gives Wild an all leather gear look and buff. No haste, but I reforged it to get a small amount added, and used a haste gem in it's one socket. When I tried out the new gear - Well, it was pretty nice. Very nice, in fact. That armor type buff is pretty potent. Wild gained health, mana, spell power, crit, and mana regen. I did take a hit in haste, although it was a small one, dropping from 27.78% haste to 27.60%. Wild has a long way to get to the "ideal" haste rating. That percentage equates to a haste rating of 804. The number Wild is aiming for is 1015.