General Update: 7/10/2009

Ok, I've been a bit of a slacker lately and haven't posted much. My life has been very hectic with holidays, work stuff, Raiding, and even some trips to the hospital (don't worry everything is fine). So, I will try and give a general update of what is going on in my WoW life.

The Gear Guide:
I've updated my raiding gear guides to include every item in Ulduar. So, it should now be complete until 3.2 comes out. I want to point out that this list is still based upon a pre-3.2 Lunar Rotation. I probably one updated it for 3.2 until right before the patch is released.

Regarding the guide don't expect any serious changes. It is very similar to previous lists, and most of the changes were due to the addition of Algalon gear. Basically, its not important to study the new list. If you already have a good gear plan it is still probably good.

Raiding:
I must admit that Raiding has been quite draining lately. My 25man schedule is the usual 3 nights a week for 3 hours, but my 10man group now raids for another 2 or 3 hours after that. To some of you 15 - 18 hours of raiding a week may not seem like much, but it is tough when you combine the late nights with my family responsibilities. Hopefully it won't go on for to much longer.

The 25 man group is doing well. We have 4 hard modes down and are working on a couple of others. Despite our success I am starting to feel a sense of urgancy. Time is running out on the Meta Achievement and I want an Ironbound Drake before they are removed. The four hard modes that we have could probably be considered 4 of the easier ones leaving most of the heavy hitters to still be downed.

The good news is that our 10man groups are going very well. My group is only missing the Vezex and Yogg hardmodes. The guilds other 10man is just missing Yogg +1 and they got the Ulduar Undying achievement. So, we are in a very good spot to complete the meta on 10mans, and the additional experience we are getting on 10mans should help us meet our goals for the 25man raid.

The other positive sign is that both 10man groups are working on Algalon. My group has worked on him for 2 weeks now, and he is hard, but maybe not as hard as he seems.

Algalon feels like a break through fight. There is a lot of stuff that gets thrown at you very early in the fight and when you wipe after just a few minutes it sometimes feels like your not making much progress. However, that feeling can be misleading. There is so much to adapt to from the very beginning of this fight that it is hard to pick up quickly. Healers have to deal with the huge raid damage when a Star dies. Cosmic Smash is much more difficult to avoid then your standard void zone. The freaking constellations running around beating on people. Figuring out how to survive big bang and at the same time dealing with the massive damage that the tanks are taking.

That is a lot of stuff that all of that happens in the first minute or so. So, as you try to hone your strategy it may feel like your not making progress because most of your attempts don't' last more then a couple of minutes still. However, when we make a break through the fight will be come much easier. Our attempts will go from lasting 2 minutes to testing the 6 minute enrage timer very quickly once we figure out how to deal with everything. So I am happy with our Algalon progress. Hopefully he will be down soon.

My Inner Goblin:
I've been reading the Greedy Goblin for quite a while and I have often wondered how much gold I could make on the AH if I really put some effort into it. I don't really need the gold because I made plenty while leveling 3 toons to 80, but I'm interested in the challenge.

I started my experiments in the Flask market. Specifically the [Flask of the Frost Wyrm] market. I am kind of risk adverse when it comes to this sort of thing. I didn't want to get really far out on a limb with a lot of stuff and lose a bunch of gold, so I selected this market for my first attempts. The average cost to produce a flask seemed to be less then the average flask prices on the AH. Plus, I am an Elixirs master Alchemist so the procs mean added profit, and if my effort completely failed I could always use the flasks for my raid consumables.

The next two businesses I picked up for dual purposes. I hate not having my professions leveled up all the way to 450. It looks sloppy and I hate finding out that I can't do that enchant because my skill level isn't high enough. So I got into the Meta Gem business with my warlock and into the bag business with my priest. The results were mind blowing.

The Meta Gem business is easy. [Skyflare Diamond] were selling for 25g - 30g on my server and [Chaotic Skyflare Diamond] were selling for 50g - 75g on average. You do the math. I've decided though that this is a weekend market. The cut gem prices seemed to go down quite a bit on raid days. It seems to me that the real money to be made is on the weekend players.

The bag business is a little more difficult because you have to look at several different mats to figure out if it is profitable at this time, but for some odd reason it also seems to be a less developed market on my server. There never seems to be a lot of bags on the AH. For that reason undercutters don't seem to matter. I seem to be able to put my bags on the AH at my prices and they will sell even if there are undercutters with posted for a 25% discount.

Not all of my efforts have been successful. I've tried buying Eternals and selling Crystallized pieces and that hasn't been that successful. People on my server seem to be a little more savy in that regard. I also bought a ton of Shoveltusk flank before patch 3.1 was released for personal use and as an investment but Fish Feasts seemed to have killed that market. I have been focusing on the raid nights so far. I'm going to be switching to the weekends here and hope I have better luck.

All in all, I've made several thousand gold over a week or so with just a couple of hours work. Not bad, but I'm not going to be hitting the gold cap anytime soon at this pace.

Other Toon News:
Outside of raids, Graylo has been working on the Ardent Tournament stuff and getting his rep up with the different alliance factions. All in an effort to be able to access my bank once every 8 hours and help my alts to level up a little big quicker. Indicated above Graypal and Grayfel have been forced into business. I would love to raid both of them if I had the time but, given my already busy raid schedule its just not possible.

Grayvik has also suffered some due to my renewed interest in the Ardent Tournament. He is up to 53 right now, but he would easily be a couple of levels above that If I wasn't spending so much time on Graylo doing the Tournament stuff. On top of that, leveling has become more difficult for him. I am now about 2 and a half levels ahead of my guide. All of my quests are green and on occasion I have to fight grey mobs. He is in searing Gorge at the moment but I am going to look at jumping ahead again once I get out of the zone. I guess the good news is that 58 is just around the corner and then I can jump to the easy Outland leveling. That will be a great day.