Posts with tag apm

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

In StarCraft, my favorite RTS, there's a common term known as APM. APM stands for actions per minute, which refers to how many commands a player is able to enter per minute. If you have fast fingers and you're incredibly skilled, your APM can soar into the hundreds with your flurry of multiple commands per second. If you're an average player, you will probably stay under 100 APM for the majority of each game. APM isn't a direct indicator of player skill but rather a measurement to describe the way the player is interacting with the game via a keyboard and mouse.

The tempo of our rogue rotations is a topic that I love exploring. Subtlety feels fast to players, while assassination rogues often complain that their rotation is slow. By applying the concept APM and a few other input metrics, we can try to quantify exactly what makes a rotation seem fast or slow. Rogue rotations are constantly evolving between expansions and even as we acquire gear, and math can help us examine the net effect of these changes.

Every week (since Feb. 14, 2010), WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, hate mail, or guild applications!

edit: This post introduces the addon and concepts, but for a hands on setup guide, check out the basic and advanced posts.

I have been playing around with a new addon, TradeSkillMaster. I've talked about a whole slew of other tools players can use to make money before, but none of them are anywhere near as awesome as TSM. Before I jump in, though, you should all probably know that this addon is still in beta. There are a few little bugs I've encountered (and reported), but the addon works very well in its current state. Please note that when you download the addon, you will need to download each module separately, as the entirety of the addon's functionality is accessed through the modules. They are linked in the description section of the TSM main page, but if you have a Curse Premium account, you can get them all at once.

TSM is now my main tool for every single one of the markets I'm active in. That said, Sapu, the creator of the addon, needs help. He's done 95% of the code on the project so far, so if any of you are looking for an opportunity to work on an exciting and popular World of Warcraft addon project, I'd be just thrilled if it was this one. Down to business: what does TradeSkillMaster do, and why am I so excited that I wrote a post about it before it's done?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. Email Basil (new address is basil@wowinsider.com; old one no longer works) with your comments, questions or hate mail!

Enchanting is a very straightforward business. You have a few steady sources of income; however, one of the reasons that its overall profitability is high is that Blizzard put it behind the level 84 phasing wall, making a huge chunk of the profession in Cataclysm only accessible to people who have access to the shard trader.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Kaliope's Cataclysm jewelcrafting coverage.

Auctionator is a simple, lightweight addon that allows you to do some pretty basic stuff very efficiently. I've said before that there are some serious problems with the auction house interface, and even though the last design pass left it in a better situation than it was before, it's still pretty bad for a few reasons:

• You can't see the price of your competition when you are listing your auctions.
• The default suggested price is absolute nonsense and doesn't contain a buyout.
• You can't see the unit price for auctions when you buy.
• You can't sort by anything useful when you buy.
• You can't save searches to avoid retyping each time.

None of these are game-breaking, but they're the reason every single person with over 100,000g uses addons. I am still an Auctioneer user, but while its dev team was sitting on a nonfunctional development build when patch 4.0.1 broke the addon, I had to go elsewhere to avoid being tormented by the almost functional default interface. I discovered that of all the addons I played with, Auctionator is the one that will remain part of my toolbox going forward, simply because it has a few killer features that I find easier to use for some tasks.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail!

I'm going to start trying to include a link to something I've enjoyed reading in the gold-making blogosphere every week. Our first installment is JMTC's blogging carnival about lessons learned while preparing for Cataclysm. There are 18 submissions, which should keep you busy for a while.

We've talked about auction house PvP before, but today we're talking about a glyph PvP method I like to call bait and tackle. Here's the problem: In order to sell glyphs, you need to spend a fair amount of time crafting them, as well as milling. In addition, on most sizable realms, there are a few hard-nosed competitors who are willing to play for longer than reasonable players. There have been times when, day or night, if I posted a batch of glyphs, every single one would get undercut exactly every 10 minutes.

Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. Basil can't figure out a way to make this a full-sized post, so he's just going to write it here: the gold cap is 1 million now. Email Basil with your questions.

In my recent post about using addons to more efficiently craft, I promised that I'd explain how to use these same Quick Auctions-based addons to sell. The basic workings of both Auction Profit Master and ZeroAuctions are actually quite simple. You give it a list of items, and you give your list a pricing scheme. Each time you batch post, it goes through your inventory looking for items on your lists to post.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

I hope you're not falling asleep on the job. Is healing getting a bit boring for you? Are you not happy with the way you're playing? Quite simply, the speed at which healers do stuff can lead to raid success or raid failure. Its no secret right? The more things you can do in a minute, the better. For DPS players, this is a fairly accepted fact. The more spells or abilities they can squeeze out, the higher their DPS goes. But what about healers? It all boils down to making the right decisions. Some healers are excellent at healing. Some are excellent at running. There are many that have a problem doing both at the same time.

So this week I wanted to introduce a term called actions per minute and what it means for healers. In the end, its all about being efficient. Are you a healer who waits around for stuff to happen or do you make stuff happen?