While I was running around leveling my warlock I decided to try a random group instance.  After a long wait and almost getting a group, I was bumped to the front of the queue.  That put me into a group that was 1/2 done and struggling.  As I got there the group cycled a few more members.  We got a new tank and another DPS.  Other than the tank and healer bickering about how bad the other was, the group moved at a steady pace.

They did comment on how crappy my stats were at 74 for the high gear score I had.  I guess the BoA items must add a lot to gear score at my level.  My stats are pathetic.  I have under 9k health and mana.  I did hold my own on the charts.  Not sure how though.

I started out as destruction because thats what I was leveling as for the last hour.  I felt clumsy in the group.  My rotation went out the window and I was pulling a god deal of agro.  I must have been front loading the damage too much.  I also struggled to manage my mana/health.  So I made the switch to affliction 1/2 way into it.  Affliction is much more natural for me to play.  I spent most of the time leveling as affliction and raided another lock as affliction at 60 and 70.

I knew my dps would suffer a little on trash but I would survive much easier and felt better with agro.  I found that my damage didn’t go down all that much.  Mobs were living long enough I could spread the damage around a bit.  On the last boss (single target) I pulled top damage at 1086 dps.  My damage for the run was about 920 dps.  I know that not all that much, but I remember kicking level 80’s from groups because they could not pull that much damage.  You really have to wonder what they are doing at 80 to suck that bad.

The shaman healer claimed he needed the cloth robes.  So he asked everyone to greed and trade with him.  I rolled need as the only cloth in the group and I was replacing a green.  Good luck getting me to pass it for someone I don’t even know.  He tried to make a stink about it but the group would not let him.

My 2nd group later on when I was 75 was just pro.  Great tank, great heals, and went fast.  I watched my damage closer that time.  I stayed destruction the whole time this instance.  I was 1381 dps for the run.  On a few larger single target mobs at the end I saw 1700 and 1900 dps.  I did have better party buffs this time though.

I remember trying to get groups on my leveling characters and it just never happened.  What I like about this option is that it keeps working to fill the group.  I hate being that guy that has to find people to finish a run.  When a tank drops it finds a tank.  I know I only ran this once so it may not be as smooth every time.  So far so good.

You can’t just cut me off with no warning.  This last week I discovered the Military channel on my Dish.  I usually have enough stuff on the DVR.  Without playing wow,  I was watching more tv and running out of DVR content.  I just started watching some stuff on the military channel.  Snipers, sappers, and special ops stuff.  Then this week the whole channel just vanished.  I check the full guide and its listed as a channel that I don’t have a subscription for.  So I had a free week preview and they cut me off without me even knowing it was only a preview.  So what does this have to do with Warcraft?

I dusted of my Warcraft account today.  So I figured I would post an update.  I’m not saying this is my return to WOW, but I do have the day off and the wife is out of town for the weekend.

First thing I ran into was the patch that was released this week.  Something that I have done many times before.  While it was loading, it reminded me my add-ons were out of date too.  I use the curse updater to manage a good deal of my add-on updates.  When I opened the curse client, I also had to update that.

So far I like the changes I see to the Curse updater.  The new UI is much cleaner.  When updating the add-ons, it no longer does that little pop up progress bar.  It just does it now.  Its a small detail, but it just acts more professional now.  Now that its loaded, I see 22 things needing updated.  I tell it to update all and it finishes about the same time as the patch.  With my authenticator out, I’m ready to roll.

I do a quick check on my banker.  He had 850 gold sitting the mailbox waiting for him.  So I tossed a few things up I had sitting in my bags and called it good.  I didn’t log in to work the AH.  Then I am left with what to do next.  I’m planning on avoiding my guild members. (I know I should have been kicked by now, but my guild don’t kick people).  So that rules out my 2 80’s for now.  I do have plans on making my Warlock my main.  He is only 73, but I know he had some changes this patch.  So the Warlock it is.

As I log into my lock, I remember that he was one of my glyph mules.  4 inscription bags and wearing a suit.  First thing I need to do is clean him up and send him out into the wild.  After I got him out into the wild, I realized how much I have neglected him.   He was not far from 74 so I finished out the level and headed in for training.  Lots of spells needed to be trained.  I also picked up epic flying and a 2nd spec.  I honestly don’t think I needed the 2nd spec for my warlock, but it can’t hurt.  And talking about neglect, this lock only has an imp and a voidwalker.  I intended to keep this guy affliction and the only pet I needed was the imp for Dark Pact.  I don’t need those other pets yet but I know I will if I ever get this guy in heroics/raids.

So my first day playing in several weeks I was able to blow a lot of gold and burn off a about a level of rest XP.

I see that Thaoky is doing a lot of work on Altoholic.  By depending on his code for KTQ, he saves me a lot of work.  I was able to just ask Altoholic for an item count and it would give it to me.  That was a wonderful feature that made KQT work.  If I had to write the code to track every item every char had in every location and build in account sharing, I would not have made this mod.  So everyone needs to give Thaoky a big thank you.

The downside is that any number of changes in Altoholic can break KTQ.  The author makes his changes, does his testing, and releases a working mod.  He has no idea what code someone else is connecting into.  That’s a risk I took when I wrote this.  The same holds true for all the other mods I depend on.

Back to the problem that broke KTQ.  Altoholic has a function called GetItemCount(ItemID) that I found one day while digging around the source.  It was a public function so I could call it from another mod and did not have to change any source in Altoholic to do so.  Recently the author restructured his code a little bit.  This is a common thing for devs to do.  In the process he moved that function to a location that made it local (or private).  Private functions can only be seen by local code.  That excludes me.

I decided it was worth contacting the author about it.  Try to get him to open it back up again.  When I checked his change log for the upcoming release, its already changed.

r66 | thaoky | 2009-12-28 18:03:24 +0000 (Mon, 28 Dec 2009) | 1 line Changed paths: M /trunk/Tooltip.lua GetItemCount() is now a public method again.

I took a peak at the alpha source and found where he opened it up for other authors.  I don’t know if it was just KTQ users that requested it or if other mods use it too.  Either way, we thank him for it.  You can find it over at curseforge if you are looking to test it out.  Many of you may find this easier than hacking my source.

There is a lot of power in this application.  More than most people realize.  Many people don’t even know it exists.   It is basically a gear calculator that can help you make choices about your items.  As you get more of one stat the value of other change.  To truly compare gear, you need to take into account the other items you have.  This is more important for some stats than others.  Some classes feel the effects of this more than others.   Rebalancing hit and spot checking side grade items is what I use it for the most.  Like any good tool, you need to know when to use it and when not to use it.

Here is a video guide they had on the Rawr website.  This is a great overview on how to use it.  So take a moment to watch it.

So you can see how easy it is to tell if an item is an upgrade or not.   When you select a gear slot on the right side, it lists all items of that slot and highlights your equipped item.  Items higher in the list are better upgrades.  You can also see how close to best in slot your item is.  This is very valuable when looking to spend badges or dkp on items of the same item level.  Most of the time you can just tell if its an upgrade, but when its not as clear is when rawr helps you the most. 

Rebalancing hit is one think I like to use it for.  I mark all the items that I have.  When I get new item and there is a large difference in hit in the same slot I will turn to rawr for help.  I mark the new item and run the optimize option.  Rawr will let me know if i need to put on one of those old pieces of gear because of the hit difference or if its better to regem.  It takes into account all stats, but hit is the clearest example.

Now that I am a raider, this is about all that I use it for.  But I also found a lot of value in it when I was about to finish leveling my characters.  When I get about 3 levels away from max level, I plug my character into rawr to plot out my gear path.  It has filters so you can include or exclude raids, pvp, craftables, and things like that.  So I set the filter to show me all the quest, rep, and craftable items.  This highlights all the best items you can pick up with minimal work as you hit 80.  If your questing, you may as well be questing for the easy gear.  If its a rep item, you can be doing quests that give you that rep.  This has little value now in WotLK with so many options available to get gear.  Remember this one when your char hits 83-84 and your thinking about getting raid ready.

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.