Monthly gold update

Last month I came in at about 546k gold. This month:

Laktose!

Crescendo!

Piffle!

781,600! Whoa. 235,000 gold this month! That's a big difference compared to the previous month, which was about 140k profit - almost 67% more!

Playing dressup - it's not just for dolls!

The other day I posted a picture of my mage looking somewhat similar to Shredder. He just ended up with that gear by chance, it was all from garrison quests. I thought he looked pretty cool with just two exceptions: his cloak was too short and his weapon was totally derpy.

So the other night I decided I had had enough of not looking 100% dapper and decided I would visit one of the tranmog NPCs and fix the situation. There was only one problem ... apparently I have been vendoring/disenchanting every single piece of gear I replace. I had nothing to transmog. Nothing! Not a cloak, not a weapon, not a robe, not a hat ... nothing.

Fortunately there was an easy solution to this problem - there are a number of vendors that sell old PvP gear for honor. Oh, except I have no honor on my mage. Hm. Fortunately, I remembered stumbling upon some NPCs in Dalaran that sell old PvE gear. I ported to Dalaran, bought the cool looking stuff and then went to wowhead to see if there were some anywhere else. Sure enough, there are also a few in Orgrimmar!

The only problem was that they don't sell any good looking 2h weapons. The solution to that? I noticed a level 300 BoE staff in the Guild Bank that looked pretty sweet. For some reason I have the ability to withdraw 10 stacks a day, so ... uhh, yea. Anyway, here's the new and improved Piffle:

New cloak, weapon, and robe. Cloaks MUST be long!

The robe is very similar to before, just has a little more orange / yellow in it

I felt like that complimented both the new cloak and weapon

It wasn't until after I bought everything I wanted from the vendors that I realized I had spent seven thousand gold! Haha, woops. I went through the same process (with the Orgimmar vendors, at least. Dalaran is harder to get to if you can't just port yourself there) with my Priest and Druid as well, being a little more thrifty this time. I probably spent around 10k total on all of them:

The staff is actually what you get from salvage boxes!

Cape is probably the best looking one I have on any character!

The Chest and gloves are last season's PvP 

Not sure how crazy I am about the yellow / green scheme on my druid. But it's a fun change for now!

The next expansion has been previewed

I didn't see it myself, but someone put together this album which has some of the information that they showed: http://imgur.com/a/kiFqg

Some quick highlights:

• New class - Demon Hunter!
• Separate system for PvP talents / abilities
• Artifact weapon you level up
• Instead of single person garrisons, you'll be chilling in a specialized domain for your entire class

This ... this was creepy

So there I am in my garrison, collecting mission rewards and sending new ones off, when I notice something out of the corner of my eye come into my main hall. After exiting out of the mission interface I was able to get a better look at what it was that had floated in ...

You never take me out anymore!

... a kite!?


So strange.

When nobody wins ... everybody loses

What you're looking at here is the scoreboard at the end of an Arathi Basin rated battleground match. The game started off very poorly for us - the leader of the group decided on a strategy (all but two to Blacksmith!) and then when we saw where they sent all their troops (to Lumber Mill) he changed it ... which led to us getting neither of them, somehow. So we spent some time with just 1 and 2 bases at the beginning.

Somehow we made a great comeback, swiping 4 bases of our own for a time ... and losing one of them right at the end. This led to ... a tie!

And, as you can see in the rating change, everyone lost rating because of it. Kind of weird how that works, I would have thought no rating change.

A very late weekend update

Saturday was very productive, both from a WoW and real life perspective. The morning was all chores - mowing the grass, doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, etc.

The afternoon led to some 2s play that was simultaneously pretty good and very frustrating (seriously, hunter comps are auto-lose). After a couple games though, we decided to try out ... LFR?

So, each raid has 4 difficulty levels - Looking For Raid, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. Of those 4, LFR is the only one where you cannot pick and choose who you go with. It just puts you in a queue, similar to doing 5 man dungeons. LFR is gated, so only the first 6 or so bosses are available at this point (they release a new wing of Hellfire into LFR each week). We went through that and most of it was pretty easy, though there was a fight or two that was messy; my brother got an upgrade or two and said he had fun! Nice.

Emboldened by my success in LFR, I joined a Normal raid for Hellfire later that night. Previously I had cleared the first three bosses but had been unable to get past Kilrogg in two different groups. The leader of this group made it clear from the beginning that this was not a "learning" raid. He was here to clear the instance and if you couldn't keep up (DPS or mechanics-wise) you were getting the boot. "It's not personal, it's just business." Of course, people say this all the time ... very few are able to actually follow through on it.

We got to Kilrogg and he went down easily; in fact, I'm not even sure we had a single person die. It was great! At that point I knew I had a good group. We continued on with a wipe here and there and before I knew it, had done all the bosses that were available in LFR.

Soul Remnant is for the legendary ring quest!

Admittedly, I have not watched videos on most of the fights in Hellfire. I had no idea what the next bosses were going to do, outside of reading a quick explanation in Blizzard's built-in Raid Guide. Nevertheless, I managed to not get kicked out of the group! Some other people did though, including the off-tank. We got through all the bosses except for the last one; at that point it was rather late and the leader called the raid (we had wiped ~3 times on Mannoroth, the second to last fight). Some of the other bosses:

Xhul'horac - kill the two guys on the outside first!

Mannoroth rises ...

... the beginning of the fight ...

... he dead!

Despite using every single bonus roll I had accumulated, I was unsuccessful in getting any set pieces. #sadface I did get a couple of other upgrades, though nothing monumental. Actually, funnily enough, I got a weapon upgrade ... except the only problem was that it was a 1her. And I don't have an off-hand. So at one point after a wipe while we were waiting to find another person, I hearthed to my garrison, took the portal to Warspear, and bought the PvP conquest offhand (iLvl 700). Of course, since I didn't want to keep that, I had to go back every 2 hours and re-sell it (only had to do this one other time during the raid).

I did try to get into a couple groups for the last boss on Sunday, but I didn't have a ton of time and those groups were being picky. Of the handful that were doing Archimonde, 2 required you to have the achievement for already beating him! Still, it's a complicated fight, so I guess I understand that (people did the same thing for the last boss in Highmaul on Heroic). I did get into one group, and then after one attempt they broke up - bleah. Here's the guide video for the fight, crazy, huh?!

Diversify your portfolio

Friday was a pretty uneventful night, so I ventured into the most recent raid - Hellfire Citadel. This was my second foray in on Normal. The first time I was with a guild that was making its first attempts and we got the first two bosses down before I had to leave.

This time was another partial guild run, but with a different group. We got the first 4 bosses down before running into the buzzsaw that is Kilrogg Deadeye. Some of the bosses were pretty cool. There was one that summoned giant deathly purple blobs that you had to dodge:

Here they come!

In fact, that boss drops tier tokens! He didn't drop a Druid token, but still, pretty cool! That's the first tier gear boss I've killed in ... oh, I don't know, 6 years-ish?

The gold "You won!" is from my bonus roll - gold is a loss, in this case.

I've been using a variety of PvP gear (660 and 700 ilvl), which is pretty solid. My iLvl is around 682, so I got a couple of nice upgrades on this run. And at the end, I hearthed back to my Garrison and found this in my mailbox:

Thanks Postmaster!

Apparently it had been on a corpse that I never looted. I sold it, because I will have the PvP belt fairly shortly which is a higher iLvl anyway. I also managed to get an upgrade from a garrison mission - not only was this one of the few slots I needed to upgrade, but it even has a socket! Now that is winning.

Awww yissss.

Honestly I really enjoyed raiding. I definitely fell into a funk for several weeks where I was so focused on doing all the daily stuff (profession, pet, garrison, AH, other random dailies) that I never got around to actually playing the game. Raiding is definitely something I enjoy, and I am kind of disappointed I never checked out BRF. I'm hoping to get through Hellfire on at least Normal!