Dailies actually worth doing.

This post is going to be on somewhat of a tangent, it involves making gold and saving time doing it, but not with the Auction House or mods. Recently with the release of Patch 3.1 the Argent Tournament was released. Now I know most of you have taken a peak at it but perhaps some of you haven't realised the quick gold from dailies that are available there? (Updated with info from Nick!)

Once you have done enough dailies to reach the Champion status with your home city, and you have done the Black Knight questline you'll be able to do 6 AT dailies that combined reward 1000 argent crusade rep, plus 1500 rep with Sunreavers/Silver Covenant, 500 rep with your valiant faction, and 128 gold per day (or 88g + an additional 1000 rep with a home faction).

I have been able to do these 6 quests in about 15-20 mins so while not a huge amount of gold for your time, added to the reputation gains I think it is more then worth doing. So let's talk about how to do these quests faster to save ourselves some time.

Ok so once you have reached Champion status, you will have access to four quests. They are:

1. Among the Champions (4 jousting)
2. Threat From Above (kill chillmaw)
3. Battle Before The Citadel (fight at citadel)
4. Taking Battle To The Enemy (kill 15 scourge)

And these two specific Valiant's quests from the faction of your choice:
5. A Valient's Field Training
6. At The Enemy's Gate

You will need to accept becoming a Valiant for another faction, this can be done while you are a Champion. For the two Valiant quests you don't actually need to do anything, simply by doing the Champion quests you will complete the Valiant versions as well. (there are also two other valiant quests, but they require you to actually do things besides what the champions quests require.

So for optimal speed in completing these dailies we start immediately after accepting them by throwing a 'lfg for chillmaw' into general chat, then go and start working on doing the Among the Champions. For those of you having trouble with this quest, here is how you do it really easily. Start the match with three sheilds up, accept the dialogue to fight, and immediately throw a shield breaker and then close in with your opponent.

This allows you to start the battle with more defense then your opponent. Next your going to sit there spamming ability one, the sword one. When your opponent turns away to get distance immediately start spamming your charge ability. Once you charge turn and use sheild breaker and get back to your opponent to use ability one again. Rinse and repeat till defeated. Thats it. Make sure you refresh your shield as needed, and at least once a minute or it will dissipate. Once your done with each battle refill your mount to full health and start the next battle.

At some point through this you should have gotten an invite to a group to kill chillmaw, (you were throwing 'lfg for chillmaw' into channel 1 right?). As soon as you get invited to a group that has the required three people leave the Argent Tournament and head to Chillmaw, he spawns southwest of the tournament. Don't worry about completing Among the Champions, the group quest is more important. Should you be there before everyone in the group is there, a little to the southwest are some scourge that can count towards the Taking the Battle to the Enemy quest, use your time to its fullest.

Once your group is there, kill chillmaw, then head south to the Citadel, ask your group if anyone else is going to the citadel too. With luck at least one out of the other two people in your group is going as well, and two people make the Battle at the Citadel very easy and quick. The key to this quest is killing the Boneguard Commander, he's the only one in the kill count thats even remotely difficult. If you have a party member you each take turns charging him, he goes down real quick with 2 on 1.

Finally head back north and finish your 15 scourge kills, I usually go to sindragosa's fall and kill whelps as they go down real quick. Then finish up the Among the Champions quest. That it! Each quest turn in give the option of a writ for 250 rep or a purse with 10 gold. Six quests which reward 13.5 gold plus four 10 gold purses and after you sell the couple of gray loot items, your looking at 128g for 6 dailies and a couple thousand reputation. While I honestly hate dailies, I think these are actually worth doing, plus that undead white horse mount is awesome. Read more!

Grindy... Go Go Away

I have taken the glpyh market by storm over the last few weeks and made a bundle. There however is one thing that irks me. Milling. While I am also at it lets discuss Prospecting and Disenchanting. These are the skills within tradeskills that make these professions really grindy.

By grindy I mean, repetitive and boring. Which actually gives me some hope. Blizzard has made many attempts to change WOW to be less grindy and more interesting. If we look just to the recent past we can note the changes to mining nodes and even the amount of herbs that drop from a single node. The fact that all Wrath drop rates are progessive is also a good indication. Perhaps this is our light in the distance.

Lets be honest if you have taken up Jewelcrafting, Inscription or even Enchanting to some extent, you understand my pain. Well, those of you being active suppliers in the WOW economy do. I really dislike the sitting in Dalaran clicking Mill over and over again, and I already use Auctioneer to speed up the process by having it auto asking me to Mill/DE/Prospect. (If your not doing this yourself it is a component of Enchantrix, part of the Auctioneer suite and can be enabled throught the Enchantrix Configuration UI).

Generally, my daily AH business is very fast. I log in do a scan of the AH, tab out and read the current blogs for two mintues. Step two, I tab back in click 'Batch Post' Then leave for the 10 mins or it takes to post the 300+ auctions I have. I Tab back in one last time to run snatch and see if there is anything I want to buy. All in all it takes about 15 minutes and I do it once a day listing for 24 hours (although i am considering a change to 48, and having my auctions overlap each other). It is fast, which is my goal and I make anywhere from 600-1200g a day that I get off my lazy butt to list items.

This part I have no problems with, it is the once a week milling for dye and restocking that is so tedious. When you have 120+ stacks of herbs, milling takes forever..... Which is the whole point of today's blog post. As you know I am all about saving time and lets be honest sitting there clicking 'Mill' over and over again sucks. With Blizzards recent changes to make WOW less grindy, I think that brought to their attention they would be willing to change Prospecting and Milling into a skill within the standard Tradeskill UI. Once there it would be a simple click to 'Mill all' of a specific herb, a couple of tab outs and whala! complete.

As for Disenchanting, i think it would need to remain seperate, we wouldn't want to automatically DE our tier 8 by accident right? Anyway at this point your wondering why I brought this up, well I recently went into the WOW Suggestion Forums and added my two cents to someone else's post requesting the same thing.

Here is the Link: Add your opinion!

Go my loyal readers.. I know there is at least one of you. Thanks Marcko, you're my very first commmentor! And bug Blizzard to make this change! Read more!

A New Direction?

So I started this blog at first to be a place where my podcast notes could be posted for those who wanted to review them. As time past I decided to add a little to that and eventually I came to a point at which I questioned where I was going with all of this. Was this for my podcast notes? Was it going to become a real blog? Before I went off into a hundred diferent direction I took a little break, started a variety of articles that i never published, read blog after blog on wow auction house gold advice and generally sat around wondering what to do.

I decided that another blog on wow gold advice seemed kinda pointless, there are a wealth of them out there, and most information is covered multiple times. I knew I wanted to be different. I knew I wanted to have a simple easy to understand blog, that helped wow players to save some time and earn more gold with less time spent.

With those thoughts in mind I decided I wanted to keep it simple and focus on one subject. Simply put, all articles will be focused on 'saving time'. There will be no deviation on this, every single article will focus on this subject. It wont happen instantly as I will need time to either rewrite or delete and redo the blogs already posted. To start off I will be focusing on addons for a bit, primarily a series of articles on the finer points of auctioneer (the last two articles were me feeling out this idea).

The secondary goal for each article will be simplicity and ease of understanding. I am a firm believer in K.I.S.S. and to this end, I will attempt to follow this principle while writing. Eventually I will return to doing my podcast segments, once I have established a decent amount of material on this site. The last thing is that I may depending on the amount of content I am putting out seek to find another blog to share space with, or to host what I write as a contributor.

Finally I hope to develope a simple format that each of my articles will follow, any input from readers would be helpful on this. Thanks for reading and as always your comments and critism are welcome. Read more!

How to use ATSW

Advanced Trade Skill Window is a wonderful mod for saving time. It allows for two really useful features that can shave time off of your auction house crafting sessions. The first is the ability to que up entire lists of items to make, and the second is the ability to create custom sorting lists.

Advanced Trade Skill Window will dominate two aspects of your productions. The first is in what you want to produce. Obviously we want to make products that will sell for more gold then it will cost us to make them. By the same token we know that most of our recipes produce items with a negative net value. In other words the materials would have sold for more.

In every profession there are items that are profitable which players are looking to buy in steady quantities. However I'll cover how to find profitable items in a later article. Today I want to talk about what to do with these recipes once we have found them. This is where ATSW can save your time. ATSW allows you to create custom lists, so what we do is create list with only the items we want to consistently produce and sell.



So this Is what ATSW looks like. It doubles the width of the Trade UI, moving production and mats to the left and leaving the right solely for recipes. The major sections are the ones with red squares around them.

Section #1: Is the most important in my opinion, the check box will allow you to sort recipes by your own custom categories, and the edit box brings up a UI to set those categories (seen in the third screenshot)

Section #2: Is the Filter where you can type in a variety of options to limit what you can see. The following is taken from the Readme file and explains how to use filters:

ATSW has a powerful search function built-in. You can either just type some text into the search box and have ATSW filter the recipe list according to your entry, or you can use one of the following parameters:

:reagent [reagent name] - filters the list to only include items that need the specified reagent
:minlevel [level] - filters the list to only include recipes for items with at least the given level requirement
:maxlevel [level] - the same as minlevel, just the other way round
:minrarity [grey/white/green/blue/purple] - filters the list to only include recipes for items with at least the given rarity
:maxrarity [grey/white/green/blue/purple] - should be self-explanatory
:minpossible [count] - filters the list to only include items that can be produced at least [count] times with the material in your inventory
:maxpossible [count] - do I really need to explain this?
:minpossibletotal [count] - like minpossible, but considers material in your bank your alt's banks and buyable materials (actually it depends on what you have activated in the options window!)
:maxpossibletotal [count] - doh!

You can even combine multiple parameters and a text for a name search, like this: "leather :minlevel 20 :minrarity green" - this will show you only recipes with the word "leather" in their name, a minimum level requirement of 20 and a minimum rarity of "green".

Section #3: Cover the production, it is pretty elf explanatory, however the bottom right button called regents is awesome.



By pushing the Regents button after you have qued a large list of items you would like to make, ATSW will generate a list of regents needed to produce everything. To take it a step further ATSW even allows you to auto buy regents from sellers when you have the trade window open with them. This is extremely useful for things like inscription as it allows me to instantly buy stacks and stacks of parchment.

So we have learned how ATSW allows us to produce lots of items relatively simply, but the true strength of ATSW is in the building of custom categories. As you can see below I prefer two. Profitable, and Not Profitable. Section 6 will allow you to type in any category that you would like to create, and then it is just a matter of clicking on the plus to open a category and then click on the recipe to the right to sort it.



I prefer the setting up Profitable and Not Profitable categories because once set up it allows me to bring up a list of the items I produce on a regular basis without having to see the other 90% of recipes which I don't. I hope this helps you to see how using ATSW can be useful, and please stay tuned for a future post about how to find these profitable recipes.

As always, your comments, questions and criticism are always welcome.

Miy
Read more!

How to Snatch!

This article will talk about using the Snatch function of Auctioneer. Snatch is one of the many functions of the mod auctioneer. Snatch allows you to instantly bring up a list of items that you are interested in and then basically click and buy them almost instantly.

The first step is to of course do your scan for the day. Without a recent scan, Snatch will not work properly and be pretty much useless. With the release of the latest version of Auctioneer Advanced you will note a double arrow scan button like the one circled in the image below.




This button will allow you to scan the entire auction house in about 20% of the old scan time. I am personally able to scan my entire AH in about 2 minutes. So step one is to do your scan for the day. Next we need to go over to the Search tab which is circled above. Within the search tab you will find a rather large list of different modules all listed on the upper left corner. For now under the Searches heading choose Snatch (section #1). One you have chosen it you should see something similar to the image below.

The next step is to build a list of items you want, this would usually be items you buy a lot of. Personally as I am playing around in the glyph market at the moment, I buy a lot of herbs. The list is built through section #2 below and will appear in section #3 when you have added it correctly. Items can be added to section #2 by shift clicking them, dragging them from your bag or even shift clicking items links in trade chat. Once a picture appears in the box of section #2, add the price you would be willing to pay and then push the add button to add it to your growing list in section #3.

Our final step before we make use of Snatch is to save this list. This is done by typing a list name in the bar in section #4 and clicking the save button. If you do it correctly the name for your snatch list will turn green. From now on whenever you want to search for this particular list of items, simply select it from the the down arrow in section #4 and your ready to go. The main purpose behind Section #4 is to have the ability to make and manage multiple lists of items your interested in buying.

Finally your ready to click on the search button which you will find on the lower left side of the Search AH UI.



Once you have done a search your screen should look something like the one below this. If you have set every thing up properly, you can hold done shift, ctrl, and alt and click on the Purchase button (the one circled below) and que Auctioneer to buy every item on the list!



Pretty simple huh! That is pretty much it, there are a few more options such as the ability to only see items that meet your prices range and can be bought out immediately. You can see these options by scrolling down on the options pane (Picture #2) which you can always reopen by clicking on the plus sign (the one circled in the picture above).

I hope this was informative and useful for you, if you have any questions please leave a comment!

Here are a few links on other similar articles that also discuss Snatch.

Tales of a Priest: Auctioneer



Read more!