Posts with tag first-aid

Can't make it to Anaheim for the convention? WoW Insider takes you behind the scenes at BlizzCon 2011.

What's the #1 physical ailment at BlizzCon 2011? Sore, blistered feet. WoW Insider visited with Sue, an R.N. who works at the Anaheim Convention Center's first aid station, for advice on what con-goers should do to make their time at BlizzCon healthy and comfortable.

"Don't wear new shoes!" exclaimed everyone at the first aid station in unison. "Most of what we're doing here today is Band-Aids," Sue adds, noting that the front hall of the convention center is one-quarter of a mile long. Don't try to get away with sandals or shoes with no socks, she advises. To make it through BlizzCon, you need the real deal.

This article is part of our Countdown to Cataclysm series -- preparing you for Cataclysm launch one day at a time.

Cataclysm is going to change the world of professions -- so without any further ado, here are the most important changes.

General

• The skill cap for all professions is now 525.
• There is a lot of content locked behind a phased area you can not unlock until you're level 84.
• The new elemental trade goods are called Volatiles.
• Herbing and mining now provide experience.
• Archeology will be trainable.
• Guilds can see links for all members' available professions.

Step aside, class changes. Back off, world revamp. Now it's time to put what everyone really wants to see into the spotlight: trade skills. MMO-Champion, which is having some difficulty staying up and stable this evening, has what you're looking for amongst its Cataclysm information.

Blacksmithing Tailoring Jewelcrafting Alchemy Enchanting Leatherworking First Aid

Mining Fishing Herbalism Inscription Engineering Cooking Skinning

Okay, trade skills aren't the most exciting thing in the world, but these previews give us a glimpse at what sort of stats we'll be dealing with on our gear in this expansion. Just look at the Elementium Poleaxe, Bio-Optic Killshades and the new gems. If those MMO-Champion pages aren't your style, there's also a good unofficial trade skill compilation on the Cataclysm forums.

---

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgens to mastery and guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

---

I don't PvP that often (especially not with my Hunter), but I still found this list of Hunter macros over at Huntman's Lodge really awesome. Whether you just want to make some common tasks easier (the one-button target/Hunter's Mark/pet attack/start attack is a macro every single Hunter should have), or you want to cut out some keystrokes (the /use [target=player] Heavy Frostweave Bandage is a macro that's great for every class out there), macros can provide a lot of solid support to your game in any situation. For some reason, we all use addons, but macros are generally overlooked, despite the fact that the system Blizzard has built in for macros can be pretty powerful all by itself.

Garwulf has even more macros for Hunters on a special page, and of course there are lots and lots of suggested macros and macro guides available online. Especially since macros started being saved to the server instead of your individual machine at home, if you're still using regular abilities on your bars, looking over the available macros for your class should help you out a lot.

WoW lets you do a lot of things from cook great feasts for your raid-mates to spend a lazy evening in some peaceful part of Grizzly Hills catching some fish for dinner. You can make bandages, sew cloth into handy bags, skin beasts to make armour or even make your own mount from a rather expensive pile of tubes and springs or a few dozen bolts of highly prized cloth. I just mine and mine and mine. Then I mine some more and maybe do a little fishing in Dalaran fountain.

All in all the game is pretty well serviced in the realm of professions, both primary and secondary. However I can't help thinking there needs to be a bit more variety. People seem to pick the easy professions or the ones which make the most cash very quickly. Should there be tertiary professions, like lockpicking, and should they be made available to all? At the same time, do you think Blizzard were smart when they only provided two profession slots? Do you think people should be able to learn all of them, even if they could only take one or two to Grand Master level? Do you think, aside from first aid, cooking and fishing, there's a missing profession? If you could add one to the game, what would it be?

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

This queue is certified Panadaran free.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Today's reading music The Crossroads by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Every time I'm in the Crossroads I think of that song.

Yokumgang asked...

"Why can't we bandage while bleeding?"

I've been thinking for awhile now that I'd like to approach Blood Pact a bit differently. Thus far the bulk of my posts have focused on playing a Warlock at level 80. Granted, a casual Warlock at 80, but still, my aim has been towards max level players. Aside from the obvious problem that raises of excluding lower level 'locks, this approach pointlessly limits my available subject matter. And that's just plain silly. So, since I still haven't wriggled my way into a new raid group, I think this is a good opportunity to delve into some of the topics I've been ignoring, with the goal of writing a more balanced column in the future.

While pondering what specifically I should post this week, I perused the writings of some of my fellow class columnists, and discovered that most of them had, at some point, explored their class' profession choices. A topic which I then discovered had never been broached by Blood Pact. But then, since the topic of the post is rather evident in the title of the post, I guess there's no point in belaboring its introduction. I'll start with the secondary professions, move on to the gathering professions, and finish up with the production professions.

Each week Arcane Brilliance brings you a column about Mages and all things Mage-related. That's right, Arcane Brilliance is nothing if not consistent. You won't find any server instability here. We're never down, we're always up, and you can always enter our instanced content. And the best part? Arcane Brilliance doesn't charge you 15 bucks a month. Although, donations are totally welcome.

So how's everything? Did you make it through patch day unscathed? Did you log in, like me, and find that your Mage's face, forearms, and feet were gone, and there was a hole through his chest (pro tip: upgrade your video card drivers more than once every three years)? Are you running out of mana at an outrageous clip? Are your crit numbers from Molten Armor up or down? Did your guild manage to make it into Ulduar yet, and if so, did you manage to snag any phat loot? Did you dual spec your Mage so he can now both DPS and DPS? I went Frostfire/Firefrost, myself. When triple-specs hit, I'm taking a Frarcano-fire spec. Mark my words.

All in all, I'd say 3.1 wasn't too bad. We have some new glyphs to play with, the Argent Tournament is good, clean fun, our mounts can swim, and we have a whole new batch of loot-pinatas to blow up. Our DPS seems to be down a bit, but we're still beating Warlocks, so I'm not going to mail any angry, expletive-laced letters to Blizzard just yet. I've written them--rest assured--but I'm not yet prepared to actually invest in stamps for them. Those things are like a buck apiece these days.

So now we turn to the third and final installment in our guide to professions for Mages. If you missed them, the first two parts can be found here and here. This week we'll investigate the merits of Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, and Engineering. As an added bonus, we'll take a quick peek at the three secondary professions and enumerate the reasons for investing in them. Yes, even though you can conjure Strudel from the very air around you with but a word and a snap of your fingers, you still need to learn how to cook

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

Patch 3.1 is looming ever closer, and things are about to change in a big way. Today I'll be discussing how the patch is going to affect your professions, and how you can take advantage of this by maximizing your profits on the Auction House.

Players have become increasingly bored with raiding because the content that was released with the expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, was too quickly conquered. Across the board, players are showing up to raids on an inconsistent basis, and many people now spend much of their time on the Public Test Realm playing through Ulduar.

This has contributed to falling prices on the Auction House for raiding materials and consumables, because not only have many people stopped raiding, many others have decided to save their gold and raid without being buffed to the gills.

What should you do in these tight times? Aside from the things for which you are currently saving, the patch will bring with it a 1000g bill to learn how to dual spec, costs to fund raid wipes, bring new consumables, and enchant and gem new gear.

By learning what to sell and purchase and when, you can minimize your post-patch costs and make some gold while you're at it.

One of the weirdest changes in Northrend so far is the way First Aid training works, strangely enough. Used to be that once you hit a certain level, you could just go run to the trainer to train up the next wave of bandages (or you could buy a manual from a trainer somewhere), but not so in the expansion: to get Heavy Frostweave Bandages, you have to depend on what seems to be a world drop.

The rules are still a little hazy, and the plans to get it seem to be somewhere between experiment and superstition: we know for sure that you need to have 390 First Aid already to get the book to drop (though you need 400 to actually use it), and we know that it can drop from almost anywhere in the world. But apparently there are a few places where it drops more often: in Zul'Drak, sometimes in Sholazar Basin, and sometimes in dungeons. Other than that, everything else is just rumors -- I haven't gotten the book yet, and I've been 400 since I had enough Frostweave to level up. I heard it was on the AH for around 20g, but of course that varies by realm, and when I checked today, it wasn't on the AH at all. And we've also heard that once you learn it, it won't drop for you again, so there may eventually be an AH market for these -- until all potential sellers actually learn the recipe, that is. And then there's this, which just makes my head spin. We may see another level of Frostweave bandages in a future patch.

Very strange, and strange choice by Blizzard to do it this way in the first place. It also appears that a stack of Heavy Frostweave Bandages sells to vendors for only 5g, so the days of nabbing lower-than-3g stacks of cloth on the AH and selling them to vendors for a profit may be over. Which is fine, because your guild's tailor could probably use it anyway. But I am bummed I haven't see the manual drop yet -- the better my gear gets, the less the non-heavy bandages do for me.

Update: Yes of course they can't be on the AH, because as you can see in the screenshot above, the manual is BoP. Never mind. Thanks, commenters.

Off a question on professions we recently took in Ask A Beta Tester, it occurred to me that it would probably be helpful to provide players with a few ballpark figures on budgetary expectations for Northrend. Blizzard's been pretty frank about its desire to reduce ingame inflation, so it's reasonable to expect a number of compelling demands made on your e-wallet (especially if legions of grasping guild leaders worldwide get their wish and start taxing the living hell out of you). Bottom line? You're going to bleed gold out of your ears unless you exercise some financial restraint. But...whatever. Screaming over the ingame cost of everything keeps me from looking at my real-life stock portfolio. I need a drink.

PROFESSIONS: Your first few minutes on the continent, no matter where you land, are going to be pretty expensive if you train up your tradeskills immediately. Polar22 in the AABT comments provided an extremely helpful link to WarcraftEcon confirming that each major and minor trade skill, with the exception of First Aid, will cost 35g to level to Grand Master. First Aid is more expensive at 50g. So, assuming you train your two major tradeskills in addition to Fishing, Cooking, and First Aid, count on being out 190g in addition to whatever it will cost you to train new recipes. WarcraftEcon estimates the total damage for an average player will clock in around 400-500g for these initial recipes and the Grand Master skill-up. That sounds broadly accurate from my experience in the beta, so plan on toting 500g along if you want all of your professions trained up immediately. The bleed begins!

We have a lot of profession questions today, but also a few about Achievements, the Beast Mastery 51-point talent, and what happens when you push Death Knights off a cliff:

Riley asks...

How is the Shaman Hex ability working? Does the target still have control of movement and does the PvP trinket work against it?

Hex is a the crowd-control spell for Shamans referenced by the devs at the class panel here, and it's been tinkered with a lot since we first heard about it. It was originally meant to be more of an emergency-only, short-duration CC. In its present form, Hex's duration has been increased to 30 seconds and it doesn't necessarily break on damage. However, in PvP the target can control where they go, the PvP trinket does work (you can also shapeshift out of it as a Druid), and it's considered a curse and can be dispelled by Mages, Druids, and restoration Shamans (who will have the ability do dispel curses with a 31-point talent Cleanse Spirit). Think of it as a somewhat odd combination of Counterspell, Fear, and Polymorph.

This morning, while catching up on my weblog reading, I came across a post written by Kestrel pointing out that many players still have not trained first aid, and are not carrying, or using, bandages.

Although this shouldn't have struck me as surprising, it did make me pause. Didn't everyone get the memo that post-expansion, bandages are integral? Hasn't everyone been bullied into training it? Are there really still players running around wiping more often simply because they won't carry a stack of bandages?

Evidently. If you need convincing information as to why you should be carrying this item, posts like Kestrel's will walk you through some of the situations in which not doing so can be disastrous.

As a last note on behalf of all hunters; please heal your pet in groups. Better yet, get a macro.

Wowhead updated its database earlier today. While most of the new items were to be expected, (such as the new leatherworking bags, the new ammo and the quest items for the new daily heroic quests,) there was one that came as a surprise. Apparently, a new first aid book has been discovered in patch 2.3: Artisan First Aid - Heal Thyself.

The appearance of this item creates a lot of questions. Does this mean that characters will no longer have to do a quest to earn artisan level first aid? Or will this book merely be a reward for the current quests? Will this book be sold, and if so, where?