Posts with tag disenchant

Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

There's a whole lotta loot going around these days, if you haven't noticed. New loot, loot that looks like tentacles, armor pieces, armor set pieces, transmogrification gear, upgrade gear, heroic gear, Raid Finder loot ... you name it, it's dropping. As players complete the Dragon Soul raid on every difficulty, they are learning what a nightmare loot can be in a raiding environment. Let's make loot a bit more manageable, yes?

Loot addons are a fun category of addon to talk about because they don't really clog up your screen or add much to the user interface in a notable way -- well, until you open up a chest full of loot and you get to clicking.

teksLoot

Yes, teksLoot still works. Sure, it hasn't been updated in almost a year. It's still one of my favorite addons, dammit. I'll be using teksLoot until it horribly falls apart in my hands, reduced to a small mound of dust at my feet ... clinging to the last, hopeless rolls I will make in the Raid Finder for that cool sword off of Madness of Deathwing.

• Step 1 Smelt 16 stacks of Elementium Ore.
• Step 2 Smelt 8 stacks of Obsidium Ore.
• Step 3 Use the obsidium to craft 2 stacks of Folded Obsidium.
• Step 4 Craft 20 Stormforged Shoulders (or legs).
• Step 5 Disenchant into Heavenly Shards.

Crafting Stormforged blue gear for disenchanting can be one of the cheapest ways to get Heavenly Shards, if ore prices are low enough. Also, other than disenchanting, all the steps here can be done by your character whilst you make dinner. Smelt all, smelt all, craft all, then craft all. The market for the shards is very deep, and as you post more of them at a lower price, the number bought spikes up faster than other markets (from scroll-makers stocking up, presumably).

The calculation for your cost is quite straightforward: 16 Elementium Ore plus 8 Obsidium Ore is your cost for a single shard. On my realm, most days, that means I never pay more than 42g, and usually less than 34g. Since Heavenly Shards hover between 40g and 80g, I can usually sell anything I don't use for scrolls for 60g fairly quickly.

The price for ore is likely to reduce after patch 4.2 hits, so don't make anything you can't use or sell before (or immediately after) that.

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Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped as well as the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.

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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, 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!

The Maelstrom Crystal used to be disenchantable from an easily crafted epic. This was hotfixed, and the prices have unsurprisingly shot through the roof. People still want their gear enchanted, however, and for some reason these things keep appearing on the auction house. Where are they coming from? How can you get them? This article will discuss the current cheapest methods for getting them.

Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions at his new email address, basil@wowinsider.com.

All the coolest enchants take Maelstrom Crystals. Why do most guilds not send raiders back home with a note to their parents when they show up with the second-best enchants on their gear? Because these crystals can be pretty darned hard to get. Even when they are available, they are very pricey. You can't even buy the recipes for some of the cooler weapon enchants until you can get your hands on five of these.

So what's the best way to get them? If your answer is to wait until your guild starts getting raid drops it doesn't need, then click through for a pleasant surprise.

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.

When you have an enchanter in your party, getting drops in a dungeon can be sort of an autopilot thing: you hit the disenchant button and move on. Reader Akwihahlo actually sort of has a beef we this. As he points out, the Dream Shards you get from disenchanting a blue BoE on most servers only go for around 5-10 gold a piece, assuming you can sell them at all. In the meantime, the blue might go for more on the auction house to a player still looking to gear up for dungeon runs, or it might just plain vendor for more than you could get from the dream shard. With the new functionality that automatically shows sell prices in the tool tips of all items, it's even easier to tell when an item is lucrative as "vendor trash."

For my part, I tend to be the type to greed lucrative-looking BoEs (or even BoPs with very high vendor values), but I don't sweat it if others do. For some people, it's not so much stretching your gold as getting the run over with so you can get to those 2 extra emblems at the end. What's your method? Do you consider the pros and cons before you hit the disenchant button, or do you prefer to just hit it and get on with the run?

Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast. Don't forget to drop by Onyxia-US this Sunday at 7:30 PM eastern time to get ganked by one of the CtA hosts and take the money of the other one! A good time will be had by all, and we'll be sticking around after the event to chat with readers and listeners!

Grinding is a pain. Avoiding grinds is why I got into the auction house in the first place. Repetitive and boring tasks are not fun for most people. Unfortunately, while some businesses are relatively grind free, certain tradeskills require us to do something like milling (inscription), prospecting (jewelcrafting), or disenchanting (enchanting).

The more volume you want to sell, the more volume you need to process. I know of scribes who sell 1200g a day of glyphs at an average of 8g each. That's 150 glyphs sold, which means 150 Ink of the Sea squeezed out of northrend herbs. You get 5-6 inks per stack of herbs, so this guy mills a minimum of 25 stacks of herbs a day. Each stack of herbs requires at least 4 hardware events (clicks or keypresses).

As you may have noticed, there was no patch 3.3 this week, which means the guesses are starting to be wrong. Way back in October, we guessed that the patch would drop sometime in the next three weeks (on Tuesdays, of course), but Matt "Matticus" Low was an outlier -- he said in the aftershow of this podcast that the patch would drop on December 1st. In fact, he said he was so sure that he'd shard his legendary mace Val'anyr if it didn't.

Of course, as you now know (since you're logging into the realms and the patch isn't out yet), he was wrong. And so, as you can see above, we made him delete (since you can't disenchant legendary items) the mace. He's bummed, but he'll get over it, we're sure. That's what you get for betting on patch dates.

So when will the patch drop? Next week (the 8th) is an excellent guess, and I believe it's Turpster's guess as well. In fact, in the same podcast linked above, I believe I bet $20 (or 50 levels, but surely T wants the money) that it wouldn't drop next Tuesday.

Enchanting is probably the number one most complained about thing in patch 3.3 (or at least was until last night's nerf bat got the undead and paladins in an uproar). But hopefully this is all going to cool down a bit with what Bornaak just posted a short while ago.

His full statement is after the break. But the key line from the release:

To maintain the importance of the profession itself, the disenchanting UI option will only be available for groups that have a character with the necessary level of Enchanting to disenchant the items that are obtained.

More after the break.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.

UPDATE: Most groups use the automatic Disenchant option available in the loot roll box as of Patch 3.3.

This week, we're going to help you understand a practice that varies wildly from group to group, server to server and even expansion to expansion. "In the past few months, I've run into a situation with people who are (or who I think are) new players who happen to be 80," reader Sarabande writes to WoW Rookie. "To them, the idea of DEing BoP items for shards is completely alien (and to at least one, he just rolled greed on everything 'just to see if he could get it')."

Should your group roll for unwanted or unneeded drops when an enchanter is on hand to disenchant them? What's accepted in one situation might be scorned in another. Because there's no single way to handle the situation, it's important for new players to be aware of the options. It's also important to understand the reasons why players feel so strongly one way or another about this issue. Because there's no single "correct" method, the savvy player respects the group consensus.

The folks over at WoW Economist have started up a blog on one of the most popular problems in World of Warcraft: making money, and lots of it. The truth is that it's not hard to do, whether you're working with professions, trying to hang in the AH, PvPing, or just starting out, but everyone's got a tip to share, it seems, and WoW Economist is no exception.

This time around, they've got a good short analysis up of what might happen to green BoEs in Wrath of the Lich King. Once upon a time, there was actually a good market for BoEs on the AH -- some of them even challenged Karazhan gear in the early days of level 70, so anyone new to 70 could just spend some time in the Auction House and pick up some nice gear for running the basic instances and starting to build up blues and epics. But in my experience the market has thinned out lately -- while there's always a market for enchanging materials you can get from BoEs, people aren't that interested in buying green gear with epics so easy to get elsewhere. Most of the time, I get more from vendors for greens than I can actually sell them for on the AH.

But WoW Econ says there's a bump on the way -- Death Knights are going to be shooting through 60-70 directly after Wrath, and they're going to want the level 66-70 greens floating around (plate gear with Strength and Stam on it), so that will probably sell well. But everything else is pretty much dried up -- DE it if you can, or just vendor it away and move on. The gold will come quicker in Northrend anyway.

I sure thought that we'd covered this before, but all my searching tells me that we haven't. So, since the past few weeks have been late endgame epics, here's a bit of awesomely husky loot -- if you haven't ever gotten this one, you definitely should.

Name: Cannonball Runner (Wowhead, Thottbot, Fishing)
Type: Rare Trinket
Damage/Speed: N/A (see below)
Abilities:

• Summons a cannon that will fire at enemies in front of you.
• Lasts for 10 seconds, with a 5 minute cooldown. Will reportedly attack enemies that aren't aggroed, so be careful dropping it in a crowded area.
• Fires about seven shots with an average of 50 damage each (though can also crit), so about 350 damage, depending on whatever you're shooting at.
• And of course, the name itself hearkens back to the famous Burt Reynolds epic, Cannonball Run.
• And the icon (a smiley-face adorned bomb) is great, though Blizzard has since reused it as a number of different bombs and grenades.
• And finally, it's one of the best trinkets in World of Warcraft.

How to Get It: You've got to drop Cannon Master Willey, hiding in the Scarlet Crusade's armory in the live side of Stratholme. He's down at the end of a hallway, and as you fight him, other people will show up, so one of your group has to sit on cannon duty and fire cannons at the bad guys that show up while the rest of you fight Willey. Down him, and the trinket will drop at about a 17% rate. At level 70, the whole instance is pretty much soloable (depending on your class skill and gear), so odds are that as long as you keep on top of things, you can probably make your way to him by yourself.

We'll have to see if Willey shows up in some form in the upcoming Caverns of Time version of Stratholme -- considering that Old Hillsbrad (with all of its familiar faces) is the most popular CoT instance, it's not hard to guess that he will.

Getting Rid of It: Sells for 1g 8s 50c, disenchants into a Large Brilliant Shard. Boom!

If you've played the level 70 game and done the Shattered Sun Offensive dailies, you probably know where this is going. On a good day, doing the complete Outland daily circle, I can come out with somewhere around 10 disenchant-worthy items between regular drops and Shattered Sun Supplies. Leafshine says she can sometimes spend up to 10 minutes working on Disenchanting, and I can believe it. Every time I process a batch of greens on my disenchanter, not only does it take some time to get through with them, then I have to process multiple piles of reagents, and figure if I'm going to store them, sell them, or use them to make a tailoring blue which I will then disenchant into a shard.

If added disenchanting for friends in there, I could spend all the day disenchanting. I have to commend Leafshine for putting up with it, and I don't think it would be a bad idea to start charging a disenchant fee - even if it's as simple as taking a cut of the materials. It's one thing to expect a disenchanter to be ready to disenchant dungeon blues that no-one needs, but it seems like another to mail your stuff to them and expect them to take their time to disenchant it free of charge. I know that friends should help each other out with tradeskill stuff, but there's a limit. Yeah, we're friends, we've raided together, but if I expect you to take 10 minutes out of your play time to help me out, throwing you some gold for your time seems like nothing more than common courtesy.

Every Friday, Insider Trader slips you the inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Nerf fishers – kicked back in their comfy Fishing Chairs, they definitely corner the market on chillin' with style. In honor of the upcoming three-day Labor Day weekend, we take a look at the newest way to hang with style (and psst, you don't actually have to be fishing to use this tip). At the other end of the spectrum, for those of you who demand crunchy bits, we've dug up some efficiency tips for hard-working enchanters. So whether you choose to spend Labor Day kicking back on the beaches of Stranglethorn or toiling in town over a hot disenchanting window, read on for Insider Trader's Labor Day special.

First up: the Fishing Chair. Available only via a special loot-coded version of the "Gone Fishin'" card from the WoW trading card set "Through the Dark Portal," this card seems to inspire some remarkable player enthusiasm. To quote wowhead.com's particularly eloquent description: "The Fishing Chair provides the discerning angler with a comfy place to rest his laurels and store his refreshing beverage of choice. The item is usable from the inventory and does not need to be equipped. Using the Fishing Chair opens a nice-looking folding chair with attached umbrella and drink holder. The umbrella's lining is decorated with a pattern of worm-baited hooks, very thoughtfully. The Fishing Chair works the same as a chair in any inn and can be sat in by clicking on it. While seated you can eat, drink or fish."

But it's not just fishers who are putting the Fishing Chair to good use ...