My Paladin was my raiding main for a long time.  Heading into the Ulduar patch he was full best in slot as Ret.  We had a healer shortage so he was healing as we started into Ulduar.  With it looking like my move to healing would be long term, I geared out my priest in a few pugs and made him my main instead.  I just like to heal on my priest more than I do as a Paladin.  With that change, my Paladin sat and his gear fell behind.  I decided its time to refresh his gear.

I have gotten him into a few runs to help out a guild group or a friend when my main was already saved.  Last week I got into a friends ToC25 run where I won a new weapon and purchased 2 trophies.  After that run I had just enough emblems to get a pirce of gear with one of those trophies.  I was almost sad to put my Betrayer down until I equipped my new weapon mid run and saw the results.  That run is what pushed me to update things.

I downloaded an old friend of mine to help me out.  Rawr. With Rawr I can just point it my my armory and plug in any other items I have and it will assemble the optimal set of gear for me.  It will balance hit for me and pick the gems needed.  It will gem for the socket bonus if its worth it or skip it if its not.  I have a good idea of what it will pick for things so I can verify whats going on.  Because my guy does not have any epic gems yet, this will be a big shopping list. (There are also a few upgrades that I received and just banked at the time so they have no enchants or gems in them)

Rawr

Here are the enchants that I need to get mats for: Berserking, Crusher, Assult to ring, Icewalker, Fur lining, +10 Stats to chest, leg patch, and an Eternal Belt Buckle.   I also need lots of gems.  I know a JC that can cut all the cuts I need.  A few of those enchants are for a few things I was thinking about crafting.  An important step would be to decide if its worth crafting a few things.  So lets look at the options.

 [Valorous Redemption Breastplate] (354.78) -> [Titanium Razorplate] (475.36)
[Bracers of Unrelenting Attack] (323.85) -> [Crusader's Dragonscale Bracers] (368.75)
[Girdle of Razuvious] (275.86) -> [Belt of the Titans] (320.5)
[Melancholy Sabatons] (283.28) -> [Battlelord's Plate Boots] (307.82)

Those numbers are the dps calculations according to Rawr.  I know they shift around based on different items equipped.  To get these I equipped all the upgrades and ran the optimizer.  I left the items in and just checked the comparison in the chart for the DPS values.  I know these will not be exact this way, but the relative differences is what I’m looking for.  Here is a chart with more details.

If I was a serious raider on this character in our guild I would have all of these things crafted in a heartbeat.  I would also do that if I was trying to join a guild with him.  Because I am not doing either one of those with him I wanted to break down the value of each upgrade.  The chest and wrist are both i245 items.  Those items also give me the best return and will last me the longest.  The only item I am going to hold off on are the Boots.

After I did all this work I went back to look for other easy upgrades for my belt and I discovered one from emblems called [The Belt of the Singing Blade].  I know I have the emblems so that just saved me 2300 gold.  I think I can build my shopping list now.

Craftables (5776.40 Gold)
10 Titansteel Bar
12 Crusader Orb
56 Saronite Ore
6 Arctic Fur
8 Eternal Water
1 Eternal Air
40 Icy Dragonscale

Enchants (1118 Gold)
48 Infinite Dust
9 Greater Cosmic Essence
9 Dream Shard
14 Abyss Crystal
1 Arctic Fur
1 Crystalized Water
2 Nerubian Chitin

Gems (1800)
1 Prismatic (+10 stats)
8 Bold Cardinal Ruby (20 str)
3 Etched Ametrine (+10 str / +10 hit)
1 Relentless Earthsiege Diamond

This puts my upgrade cost around 9,000 gold. Checking my numbers in Rawr before and after gives me a 11% dps increase.  Having all this information in front of me I can break down where I am getting this increase from.  Just by enchanting my gear that needs it and getting better enchants gives me the largest increase at 5%.  Replacing all my gems and putting gems in gear that needs it gives me another 3%.  The last 3% is from crafting a chest piece, bracers, and buying a belt with emblems.  It is interesting that correct enchants give the largest increase at the lowest cost.

Now to go spend some gold.

I set out to change the way I post glyphs.  I moved away from QA2 and started using Auctioneer batch posting.  I moved from several listings a day to once every 48 hours.  With auctioneer I set my price to market price with 60 silver undercut and posted 4 at a time.  I basically used the exact settings of another blogger that promotes this method.  I ran this method for 2 weeks.  The first weeks data was discarded because I know this is long term strategy and wanted the numbers to even out.

The second week of using auctioneer gave me 3,000G in sales.  I know many people would be lucky to get that much in sales a week.  But when I look back at previous results, my sales are way down.  At the same time, the time I spent on glyphs was minimal.  In that respect the gold per hour was much greater.  I had weeks where I was making more than 3,000 in sales a day easily.  More recently before I started this test I was still pulling in just over 1,000g a day.  The effect this had on me was unexpected.

I had a few other markets I worked lightly where I did this same thing too.  My results in those markets were much better than I previously had.  Working the AH was one of the few things I was doing in wow.  I would log into my main for raids but with new content so close our drive to raid current content has slowed down.  So I am raiding less.  Using Auctioneer, I am posting and walking away from the computer more.  With 48 hour auctions, I was not even logging in on days where I had no raids or auctions to be posted.  My wow time cut way back.  I wanted to have a 3rd week of data but ended up missing a few postings here and there from not logging into wow.

With me not camping the AH as much, several markets shifted on me.  For a long time I suspected that I maintained the price of herbs on the server.  This proved to be true when I was not there to buy out all the low priced herbs every 4-5 hours.  Checking every 48 hours I saw tons of herbs at dirt cheap prices.  I had held them up high going on 3 months and now when I look in on them they are so cheap that I almost can’t resist buying out everything.  But with me not selling as much, I don’t think I should stock up on so many.  (I’m already way over stocked). 

I see that I am slowing down with wow.  Not playing as much.  I am just not as involved in the game as I was before.  I am practiclay taking a break from wow.   Although my breaks from wow never last long.  With that I return to my family as we make prepare for the holiday infront of us.  I wish you all a good week.  Happy Thanksgiving.

I recently added item tooltips to my blog and it was very easy to do.  mmo-chamion has an item database http://db.mmo-champion.com/ and they opened it up.  They released a little script that you can embed into your site to have all your item links show that tooltip.  Here is the script for http://db.mmo-champion.com/:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://db.mmo-champion.com/tt.js”></script>

Just add that to your site.  It works best in the <head> element.  Once you add that script, all you have to do is place a URL pointing to an item like http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49623/shadowmourne/ and it will add the pop to it.    Shadowmourne.  I think wowhead also offers this option, but I don’t know if its this easy.

I have been falling behind on my herb purchases.  I never did pick up any new farmers after I lost my last few.  What I did instead was just camp the herbs on the AH.  Never letting them fall below a set price.  I moved the market average up and it held there for a few months.  I no longer camp those mats and instead just check them every few days.

Today I made a huge purchase because they fell so low.  I spent 3400G at the AH and took a great deal of herbs off the AH in one pass.  It feels good to have a lot of herbs again.  I think I just picked up close to 250 stacks of various herbs.  It’s going to be one huge milling session.

I made the mistake once before where I cut myself off because the low prices scared me.  I never should have stopped buying last time.