Posts with tag crafting

Some people are just driven by the need to make things, whether it's art, writing, or any other kind of craft. World of Warcraft certainly seems to have a wealth of crafty types, who use their skills and expertise to do everything from making shoes to sewing adorable plushies to truly amazing cosplay. But while there are plenty of crafty players, not everyone has the talent or inclination. So tell us, do you World of Warcraft craft? If so, what's your craft of choice and why?

And, for those of us with neither crafting inclination or talent, well, we can always enjoy the work of others -- or just enjoy playing the game!

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WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Have you ever scanned the Auction House with TradeSkillMaster (the best auction management addon, well worth the trouble of learning) and not gotten a complete scan? Maybe you see an error message and your crafting window starts displaying unknown materials prices, even though you can see the prices right front of you when you search? This is a bug that affects anyone on a realm with a lot of auctions (more than 42554, according to the TSM error message). In essence, the GetAll scan that's used to grab a dump of the AH in a few seconds can be incomplete if there are a lot of auctions.

As far as I know, the traditional scans are immune to this, but they take a lot more time; like 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Even if the scans work perfectly on your realm, scanning is still an extra step that you have to do every time you want to update the prices before you queue up your crafting list. Luckily, there's a way you can get up to date price information without ever having to scan the AH again.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.

Ideas for unique guild concepts are hard to come by. This week, a guild leader who thought she had a winning formula finds out that no one is interested. Let's look at what she came up with and how we can rework her ideas to entice more recruits.

I have recently transferred from Nazgrel to the RP server of Moon Guard. I did this with a certain goal in mind, to establish an all Goblin Trade Guild. I have hit a crucial snag however and can't seem to generate any interest in my Guild idea. One major selling point of my Trade Guild would be that we would hold a monthly [Bazaar] in which other Guilds would be encouraged to join in and sell their wares along with us. Using [Gryphonheart Items] we would create an item catalog and haggle over prices. I was hoping that this would help revitalize the role play community. Nothing I have tried has worked to recruit Any suggestions?

Eagle-eyed PTR users might have noticed that Pierre, the Engineering-crafted cookstove and battle pet, has disappeared from the pet journal. Cory Stockton confirmed via Twitter that Pierre was indeed pulled from patch 5.2, to the disappointment of Engineers and pet collectors everywhere.

We've written about Pierre on WoW Insider before, and, as silly as I feel admitting this, I'm pretty sad he's not going to be in the patch! Sure there's tons of cool mounts, loot, and delicious lore still to look forward to, but pets, man! Come on! As of yet the reasons for the change are unknown, but I certainly hope that when he does at last appear in the game, he's still as face-meltingly adorable as he is now.

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There are going to be some new important recipes in 5.2 for Jewelcrafters: a "prism" style daily cooldown Serpent's Heart, and a no-cooldown recipe that allows you to craft the uncut meta gems, Primal Diamonds, out of gems and Spirits of Harmony. Kaliope reports that both recipes are world drops in Pandaria on the PTR, and shouldn't take long to farm.

Serpent's Prism would have been a better name

While the profession is better designed than ever (with much less waste for shufflers and far fewer items ending up at the vendor), the Serpent's Eyes that you get while prospecting Mists ore tend to pile up. They're used to make the 450 crafted jewelry, but the market for that isn't nearly as large as the supply of Serpent's Eyes. Many people end up making these into blues and disenchanting them so they're not wasted.

Now that all JCs will have the option of turning three Serpent's Eyes into a prism every day, that will provide an outlet for the Eyes that may be more profitable than the 450 blues. So far, only a few Prisms have been opened, but they seem to award a random blue gem, just like prisms from expansions past. Since it's on a daily cooldown, it's unlikely to be able to push down the price of blue gems much.

Is it worth using Spirits of Harmony?

The new Primal Diamond recipe has no cooldown, but requires Spirits of Harmony which are their own sort of cooldown. One criticism of Jewelcrafting has been that JCs have nothing except research and extremely low-liquidity mini-pets to spend their Spirits of Harmony on. Jewelcrafters generate Spirits as quickly as any other character, and in theory, it'd be nice to have a JC option to use them on. Especially seeing as how anyone doing daily research will have almost certainly finished learning all their cuts by now.

WoW players today tend to consider the deterioration of the in-game community in terms of relatively recent influences like the Dungeon Finder and then the Raid Finder. We sometimes forget that design tweaks and new systems have been chipping away at the paradigm of Azeroth as a place to forge ongoing personal relationships for years now. Take a gander at the beginning of this analysis I wrote on the death of the Azerothian salesman all the way back in the hyper-modern era of The Burning Crusade circa 2007:

Forget the endless debate over hardcore versus casual -- there's another moniker that we here at Insider Trader hold dear: salesman. What's that? You don't know any salesmen in WoW these days? You're not alone. Times have changed since craftspeople toiled to build reputations as the go-to traders on their servers ... when Ironforge was the hub of civilization, where a few elite enchanters held court over the entire server with coveted formulae from such exotic locales as Stratholme and Scholomance.

It's a brave new world in today's Outland. Most enchanters don't enchant for the general public at all, unless you provide mats and a tip. And in any profession, with so many other players on the servers who have the same patterns (even rare patterns are generally available from more than one player) and so many easy ways to make money (hello, daily quests!), there's little reason to hang around town to build a regular clientele. Components provided or created by other professions are readily available on the Auction House -- there's no need to seek out and nurture relationships with another player from a complementary profession.

Have the conveniences Blizzard has developed for today's crafters meant the death of the salesman?

Most WoW players would agree that convenience and self-service is the way of today's game. But for one stubborn tradesman on Sentinels (US), life as an Azerothian salesman is anything but obsolete. Daen, a dedicated craftsman and proprietor of Daen's Crafting Emporium, single-handedly maintains what may be one of World of Warcraft's last remaining bastions of personal craftsmanship and trade skill service -- with a twist. This proprietor not only aims to provide personal service, but he does it at no charge, with the insistence that customers devote sweat equity to their mutual creations as well.

An important crafting change has just been pushed live on the public test realms. Patch 4.3 will finally lift the soulbound restriction on Chaos Orbs, allowing players to freely trade them and roll on them at the end of heroic instances. No mention was made of whether or not orbs will be purchasble with valor or justice points, but only that they will be free-rolled for when they drop.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, Frozen Orbs were not initially soulbound but lost their restrictions and need-roll exclusivity over the course of the expansion. It was assumed that the same thing would happen to Chaos Orbs as time went on, and lo and behold, it has. Crafters will have to adjust prices accordingly now that a rare component will become less rare.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

Face it: WoW crafting is boring. Learn a recipe, put in the materials, click to create. Repeat again and again to skill up and get new recipes. The end. We have exciting-sounding skills such as engineering and alchemy, but we have no experimentation and little customization! While we've gotten crafting dailies to make the skill-ups a little more fun outside the usual materials grind, Blizzard should probably update how crafting skills work.

Personally, I'd love a system that favors some creativity. Imagine if materials for alchemists were in certain classification: increase or decrease, physical or mental, strength or speed, endurance or power, etc. If you mix an increase reagent with a physical, mental, or power one, you'll make a strength potion. Choose decrease, mental, speed, and endurance, and maybe you make a consumable potion that lowers mana/rage/energy/runic power/focus to targets within the blast radius. No premade recipes, just players experimenting with the game. I can see a similar situation for cooking (mm, spicy chocolate gator bacon!).

Gathering could be redone a bit, too. Imagine if you could break down items to get certain materials, sort of like enchanting. Skinners can break down leather for rare hides, miners can melt down armor to retrieve rare minerals, herbalists could ... pick mushrooms out of pies?

What would you like to see change in WoW crafting? Dyes added to change armor color results? Choosing blades and hilts when crafting a weapon? RP leather armor and whip options tied to custom emotes for those nights in Goldshire?

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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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

If you can make blue PVP and leveling gear, you can make a lot of gold. Blacksmithing is one of my most profitable businesses, and almost all of the money I've made is from that gear. Sure, belt buckles are great cash when there's no massive undercutting war, but every night a couple of people kit out their plate alts with my Hardened Obsidium gear or start a PVP set with my Bloodthirsty Pyrium gear.

There are three professions that you can use for this market: blacksmithing, leatherworking, and tailoring. All three of them have gear that is appealing for alts and new characters; however, be aware that some of this gear is made by people leveling the trade skill and isn't worth making.

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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Enchanting is one of the biggest money-makers in the game. Most of that money is earned by selling scrolls, which are simply enchants saved on a vellum. I've written about selling these before, but it was a long time ago and the tools have changed considerably. Making gold with enchanting is surprisingly straightforward and involves three steps: getting mats, crafting scrolls, and posting them.

Let's start at the beginning

Which enchants do you sell? Assuming you're already 525, you'll definitely want to consider all the Cataclysm enchants. The ones used in leveling are almost always going to be cheaper than the mats, but the rest of them may be profitable, especially the ones that you have to buy off the vendor. It's probably worth investing in the new bracer enchants; however, bear in mind that these are somewhat rare BOE random drops that might cost you a fair bit.

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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The recipes that drop from trash in Firelands have had their drop rate nerfed in a recent hotfix:

Hot fixes notes

The rate at which crafting recipes drop has been greatly reduced.

source

This makes sense from a design perspective; these patterns take some pretty rare boss drops to be made and produce gear on par with normal mode Firelands boss gear drops. On most realms, everyone who is getting the recipes is trying to sell them -- at first, for a lot; however, I've been picking them up for a tenth of what they were being listed for yesterday.

One of the interesting artifacts of this system before the nerf was that the people most likely to get the recipe were people farming reputation by doing trash runs. The people most likely to be able to craft the items were the ones in the more organized and progression-minded raiding groups. Now that the drop rate has been reduced, in a few weeks when more guilds are making it farther into the instance, it's possible that more recipes will drop into the laps of raiding guilds than trash PUGs.

Click past the jump for a list of the recipes that are affected.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

In my non-WoW life, I am the complete opposite of mechanically inclined. This caused my dad many problems as I was growing up, as he is a natural handyman. My mind is artistic, while my hands are not. This is probably one of the reasons I like to play WoW: I can craft. My only limit is the materials needed to craft. Outside of WoW, I have plenty of materials -- just no skill.

Though I love to collect tabards, mounts, and pets, crafting is my passion. I have maxed out all of the professions except for leatherworking and tailoring. Hopefully within the next week, those will be maxed out, too.

My favorite crafting profession is by far inscription. I love to make glyphs. I love to make Darkmoon Faire cards. I love getting my shoulder enchant at level 70 despite no rep with Hodir. My favorite thing to craft are Netherweave Bags. Honestly, this was the only reason why I wanted to have a tailor. I love making the bags and giving them away free to new players.

My least favorite crafting profession is probably jewelcrafting. I enjoy all the perks, but the grind from 500 to 525 ... ugh. It is still hard for me to do the daily quest for my jewelcrafter.

Here are my rankings of crafting professions:

1. Inscription
2. Engineering
3. Cooking
4. Alchemy
5. Tailoring
6. Blacksmithing
7. Enchanting
8. Leatherworking
9. First Aid
10. Jewelcrafting

What are your favorite crafting professions and why?

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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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

When Cataclysm launched, it brought with it a new design for low-level crafting alts. In order to progress to the most desirable items, players had to get access to a "trader" NPC located in a phased area of the Twilight Highlands. This could not be done until level 84. A lot of auctioneers leveled a lot of alts they otherwise wouldn't have just so they could max out professions. I, however, was not one of them. And my laziness (or prescience?) seems to have paid off, because as of patch 4.1, all the previously locked profession content is now available from your friendly local profession trainers!

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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Aaron wrote in the other day to say:

Despite having played WoW for years I'm a complete gold-making newbie and my characters are all dirt-poor because of it. I decided it was time to start playing the gold-making meta game so I've been reading through issues of your Gold Capped column, and while I've really enjoyed what I've read I'm afraid I'm still at a loss as to where to get started. Obviously I don't have a lot of upfront capital to jump-start my endeavor, either. I was wondering if you've ever written or would consider writing an article for complete, absolute beginners such as myself.

Unless you started the game with rich friends, this is something that everyone has to go through. People getting into earning gold from scratch often don't have any clue where to start, and they often have a bunch of incorrect ideas about what they need to get going.