Posts with tag resources

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The best resources for making gold are not a very well kept secret. These sites and utilities are used by most serious auctioneers, and anyone looking to start making gold, even if only casually, would do well to learn how to use these.

The Undermine Journal

The Undermine Journal is first on my list. It is a site that does a lot of things, but most importantly, it shows you the price for any item on any realm. You can look back at how the price and supply for sale changed over the last two weeks, and you can see all the auctions of any competitor by clicking on their name. You can also compare prices on your realm to prices on other realms or the other faction on your realm.

The potential for research here is limitless. Any time you're looking for a new market, the first question you have to ask is whether there's enough of a gap between cost and price to support your margins, and seeing the answer to this question over a period of time is way more valuable than seeing just what's on the Auction House when you decide to check into it.

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

Back in the dark ages of history, in vanilla World of Warcraft, I rolled a rogue. This was before battlegrounds, when dishonorable kills were a fear and world PvP was a rush, when men were men, mages sheeped for fun and warlocks ... well, let's just say that warlocks have a reputation that they've earned.

World of Warcraft was my first MMO, after coming from persistent worlds hosted by Neverwinter Nights. I played a rogue there, too, steeped in Dungeons & Dragons rules and the like. World of Warcraft was both nothing like and exactly like my roguish experiences before -- a sneak who dealt devastating damage with small weapons, no matter whether the target was gnome or giant, fearsome orc or fiery dragon.

In the midst of a Westfall investigation (tasked by SI:7 to infiltrate a tower), I noticed a few growing complaints in guild chat: "We have seven rogues in the guild but only one priest; would someone please roll a priest?" I told them I would, sent my rogue back to the character select screen, and rolled the character that would take up the entirety of my vanilla experience.

Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

Listening Music: Roger Waters and the classic combination of Pink Floyd's "The Happiest Days of Our Lives + Another Brick In The Wall, part II." I hate when the radio only plays half of this piece. Even though Floyd split the piece into two on the album, I find it hard pressed to do the latter half justice by dropping the epic "intro." The helicopters and interlude scream is the best part, be honest with yourselves.

Last Week: We addressed the issue of protection warriors in arena. We talked a bit about a few of Ghostcrawler's posts dealing with the most annoying specialization to face. After that, we discussed some of the problems with both perception and design.

This Week: Before getting back to the beginner's guide to arenas, we'll be discussing energy, focus, and rage. Each have individual benefits and detriments in an arena setting, often very different from one another. More after the break!

This is certainly an issue (if not a full-blown problem) in my guild, so I wouldn't be surprised if most guilds have a rough time getting guild members to use some of the outside resources they've put together. Nowadays, there are so many ways to make a guild website and so many different things you can do with one that most every guild has at least one place online to call its own. And those places are usually frequented by one or two people in the guild (usually the person running the site and/or maybe the GM and an officer or two), but in my experience, it's kind of tough to get people to use those resources, just because of lack of interest or know-how or habit. What's the point of having a database of members, a message board, and a blog and picture gallery when no one uses it?

Enter Ankie of WoW Ladies, with an intriguing idea to support the guild's website.

Looking for a guild? Well, you can join ours! We have a tabard and everything! Check back for Amanda Dean talking about guilds and guild leadership in We Have a Tabard.

It's so nice to run a raid when everyone is up to snuff on their characters and can focus entirely on what their doing. Unfortunately there seems to be at least one person who is not at the top of their game. Either the healer that's standing in fires or the DPS that can't fight their way out of a paper bag. They're not bad people and they mean well, but they are better cheerleaders than raiders. What's a raid leader to do?

I like to help people out and give people a shot, but there's only so much that I can do. At some point I have to consider the needs of the other nine or people in the raid over the needs of the single player. I was leading ToC 10 with a Hunter pulling 1800 DPS and the entire raid averaging about 2700. We had a number of wipes, but low DPS was a contributing factor. I called out the DPS saying, "Guys, I really need to be seeing 3K DPS." The 1800 Hunter said, "I don't think Hunters can pull 3K DPS." I nearly fell out of my chair.

My first response is to try to offer quick suggestions for how to resolve an issue (this is considerably easier when it's a raid awareness problem rather than a role problem). I feel genuinely awful when I have to remove someone from a raid, but the raid environment is not where one should learn his or her class.

A few folks over at the Twisted Nether Wiki have done a great thing and compiled a nice full list of all of those little online WoW utilities that we talk about every once in a while. From character improvement tools like Be Imba! to resources like Kaliban's Loot Lists and even humor sites like WoWBash, if it's online, WoW-related, and worth visiting more than once, it's on this list.

And of course it's a wiki, so even if it's not on that list, you can add it. But it is cool to have all of those resources in one place -- we mention them, obviously, when there are updates to share, but if you don't bookmark them when you hear about them, they might have fallen off your radar. There are so many great and well-designed tools out there for players to use that something like this, tracking them all, is great to have.

WoW.com decided it was time to bring back some Hunter luvin'. It was that or they just needed a new Dwarf to pick on. So now you got me Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge. Make sure to drop by here every Thursday as we explore what it takes to play a Hunter.

Have you ever caught yourself wondering, "Hmm... where I should go for my next upgrade?" Or how about "I wonder what pet I should get for raiding?" Another favorite of mine is "What spec should I use for raiding?" (This is always a trap. Even if you give a solid spec, someone will always find a something wrong with it.) For these types of questions, I feel it's always better to follow the maxim "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

What's my point? Well, it seems that many Hunters don't know that there is a wealth of information out there. I would bet that there is probably a resource that can help answer all of your questions. You just need to know where to look.

For solid information, we all know about Elitist Jerks. But sometimes finding you can't help but say to yourself, "There has to be an easier way." Believe it or not, there is. There are many other resources and sites out there.

I'd like to take a minute to address the concerns of one of our readers. Since my return to WoW Insider, I've been focusing on sanity, progression, and congruence.

Dear WoW Insider:

I need help, and I figure between me and that guy in the last Breakfast Topic, I'd have more than a good chance of you guys having suggestions to my current dilemma.

I'm fairly new to WoW, having started in December 2008, after a long stint on FFXI. I was glad I made the move, and I haven't looked back. I toyed with a few classes before settling on a blood elf rogue. I zoomed through classic, Burning Crusade and have now made Northrend my home.

I hit 80 a couple of months ago, and although many guilds have offered for me to join along the way, I always replied that my brother's guild was going to take me in as soon as I turned 80. I've been with them on a few heroics and even saw the inside of Sunwell as my first raid ever, although I must confess all that left me feeling a little bit bewildered as I didn't really know what was happening most of the time. I was constantly asking for help, asking where I should stand and what not. While most of the guild was really nice and understanding (and still are), I'm feeling a little bit out of my depth. Most of the guild members are very experienced, as you can imagine. Some of them are on their second or third alts clearing Naxxramas, and most of the guild are working on Ulduar progression.

Amazingly enough, there are still many new players coming into the game that need some tutoring. I consider myself to be downright patient. If someone asks for help or advice, I'm there. If I don't have the answer, I point them to one of the many WoW resources that will assist them. At one point in time we were all rookies, and many of us still have many nuances of the game to pick up. I love to watch people learn and grow.

Bear in mind that WoW has a variable learning curve based on familiarity with MMORPGs, time spent playing, coaches, and aptitude. There comes a time though, when folks should be pretty self-sufficient. The argument "I'm new" no longer holds water. For example, it goes without saying that hunters should always check their ammo supplies before going into instances and in general, clothies should let the tank pull.

It seems the vast majority of drama we've heard regarding guild banks comes from ninja schemes and disgruntled members. Vaela of Hyjal expressed her exasperation with guild banks in the Guild Relations forum. She feels that there is an imbalance between players who donate resources to the guild bank and those who make the most withdrawals. The original poster asked for suggestions on systems to fairly distribute guild bank resources.

The responses focused on cooperation and reciprocity with the guild bank. The purpose of the guild bank is to fun the guild's activities and exchange objects of value. In the end, the system comes off as a communist type of public ownership arrangement, as opposed to the free trade system that rules the auction house. To quote Karl Marx, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Communism as we've known it has largely failed, most likely because people don't fully buy into the system.

Kirkburn from the great WoWWiki (I like their one line description of us, and yes we do link to them all the time) writes to tell us that they have cracked 45,000 articles on their site as of last night. From Arathi Basin to Zul'jin, they now have over 45,000 articles on everything having to do with World of Warcraft. Congrats to them!

I've only ever created one over there (and it was for a joke), but all of us here at WoW Insider have nothing but respect for all the diligent archivists over at the Wiki. They have a terrific resource over there, and it is as clear an authority as they come, especially on a lot of the lore and background information on the game. Great job, all, on 45,000 articles, and keep up the good work.

Kirkburn also tells there are updates due over there as well-- sometime before the end of the year, they're planning an update to MediaWiki 1.11. And they're also going to incorporate more with the Wikia network, which runs all kinds of niche wikis like this one, by creating a single logon across all the sites. Sounds like things are jumping over at WoWWiki, and we're glad to hear it.

Hunter's Mark has a terrific series up that's a great resource for anyone playing this game, not just Hunters. It's called "Being a Know-it-all Without Knowing it All," and if you've ever wondered where to go, what to do, or how to make your character better, reading through the series will give you access to pretty much every tool available online to figure out what's what.

None of it is really new (it's definitely not news that Wowhead and Thottbot exist), and if you read our little site frequently, you're probably very familiar with what all these resources have to offer (we're pretty thorough like that). But if you know someone who's looking for a little more insight on the game, or want a general overview of everything that's available and what each site can offer you, this is it. From the Loot Lists to Bosskillers, tons of information about everything you need to know in World of Warcraft is online, and the Know-it-all series is a great overview of what's what.

[ via Mania's ]

Petopia has posted a nice guide to feeding your Hunter pet, from the basics all the way up to the math behind each pet feeding tick. If you've ever played a Hunter, you already know that when your pet gets unhappy, you need to feed it, but did you know that the difference between your pet and the food's level affects just how happy the food makes it?

The guide also has some interesting info about "raw fish" and "raw meat," two food categories recently added to the game. At this point, apparently raw fish and meat are interchangeable with their cooked counterparts, but in the future, Blizzard may create pets that only eat raw food, or that are only interested in eating cooked food.

Anyway, if you've played a Hunter all the way to 70, most of this will be very familiar to you (even if you only knew that an unhappy pet wanted food). But as a very general overview of pet feeding tips and resources, it's a good one.

I was actually running Wailing Caverns with a few guildies from IctfB on last Friday night around midnight when I heard the news: Wowhead had sold for $1 million to Affinity Media, the company that supposedly ran IGE, the notorious goldsellers. We'd received a tip from someone who claimed he used to work for IGE, and we rushed to get the story up and also make sure it was right-- word was that Affinity didn't own IGE any more, and that Wowhead had maybe sold because of that.

Still, in the week or so since, players have had plenty of questions. Did Wowhead sell out to goldsellers? Did Affinity really sell IGE and are they really out of the goldselling business? And why did Affinity want to buy yet another database when they already owned both Allakazham and Thottbot? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of changes would come for Wowhead?

WoW Insider got a chance to sit down for an exclusive chat with both John Maffei, president of the ZAM content network at Affinity Media, and Tim Sullivan, CEO of Wowhead, to talk about Affinity's past, the sale of Wowhead, and what's coming next. They wanted to clear up questions, and we wanted to get answers. To read the full, exclusive interview, click the link below.

Defenders of the Light, mace-wielding upholders of justice, and hard to kill; paladins are the only Alliance-specific class, and a great newbie class to play. A paladin can take damage, dish it out (although more slowly than DPS classes like the rogue or mage), all the while healing, resurrecting and buffing their party. With the upcoming 1.9 patch, paladins are going to see some changes, but the first few levels won't change much, so here are a few things to get newbie paladins going:

• Infoceptor lists all the paladin's spells, including costs.
• Rampage's guide has a lot of general discussion of paladins, but also walks you through the first few levels as a human pally.
• WoWHealers has a basic FAQ covering race, talents, acronyms and more.
• TenTonHammer's guide is a good overall resource and promises a 1.9 update.
• Hester's PvP guide is useful, although you may want to try different strategies as well.
• The official forums are rich with 1.9 information and the European forums feature a guide.

Paladins seem to have fallen into disfavour at the moment, but as a generally good all-round class they are fairly easy to solo with (if you have the patience to wait through the low damage output) and valuable to groups, as well as easy to get the hang of. My second ever character was a paladin and I really enjoyed taking her through instances and the like. Enjoy.

[[Previous classes: Mage, Priest, Druid, Hunter]