Posts with tag alchemist-stone

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Except last week, when the holidays aggroed us. But rest easy, we managed to sheep the holidays, so now we can all go ahead and nuke down the rest of the year. As long as nobody breaks it early, our sheep shouldn't expire on the holidays for about 12 more months, give or take.

So you're a mage. You have a job, and that job is taking something that was previously intact and converting it into much smaller, bloodier, often frozen chunks of that same thing. You manufacture shattered mobs, and you take pride in your work. But you may also have a side project or two. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Self, perhaps when we aren't making warlocks explode, maybe we should spend our time sewing trousers. Or baking cupcakes. Or making necklaces."

Well, your self is right. You should be using your downtime in between vicious warlock kills to learn a side trade. They offer bonuses in the form of cool gear, extra money, and bonus stats, plus a bit of catharsis to help you decompress form all that murder. But which professions should you choose? That's easy: anything but mining. What's that? You'd like a bit more detail? Oh, fine.

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Engineering has quite a few useful tools in addition to their famous repertoire of toys, but not every player knows how to make the most of them. There are many reasons for this, including:

• Not being informed on the latest improvements. Consumables may be less cost-prohibitive, for example, than the last time you checked.
• Believing the "Engineering is useless" hype that lingers from darker days, and feeling creatively blocked after an expensive and tedious leveling process.
  
• Being an irrational yet strangely normal cooldown and consumable saving individual. Awkward Zombie illustrates the latter nicely, and we've talked about stingy cooldown use in the past.

This week, Insider Trader is going to discuss a handful of the Engineering tools that you really should be using to the fullest, and why.

You can tell the Wrath beta is winding down, because Ask a Beta Tester has been getting a lot fewer questions lately. Because of that, we're going to be pretty short and sweet today. If you still have questions, though, keep em coming!

Let's start today off with dfsnow's question...

What's happening with Alchemy and Alchemist's Stones in WotLK? Alchemist's stones have been like enchanting rods where you need the previous one to create the next one. Are new players going to have to grind Sha'tar and then SSO rep to create the reagent they need to create their level 80 Alchemist's Stone? I don't have to tell you how hard it will be to grind Sha'tar rep with no one running BC instances any more.

The new Alchemists stones aren't tied to the older ones at all. All the new ones will require to make is the appropriate Alchemy skill, some herbs, some eternals and maybe some oils.

A couple of the new Alchemist Stones in Patch 2.4 have had their stats changed in the past few days. I assume this change was made to make them more friendly to a wider variety of classes and specs, but you can never say for sure!

The Assassin's Alchemist Stone originally came packing +54 Critical Strike Rating, but now carries +108 Attack Power instead. The caster version, the Sorcerer's Alchemist Stone, has shifted over to +63 Damage/Healing from its original +54 Spell Hit Rating.

I can't speak for everyone, but those seem to be pretty good changes to me. Of course, my main is one of the classes/specs that don't need much Spell Hit, so I'm probably rather biased in that area. If you'd like to take a look at a screenshot of the updated stats for the Alchemist Stones, just hop on past the jump.