Money or gear?

I did my weekly attempt at Highmaul over the weekend (all in the name of upgrading my ring for PvP). This time I figured I might as well try to do Heroic as far as possible so that I might get some gear upgrades out of it. I mean, given the choices between getting gear and not getting gear ... you'd be crazy to choose not gear, right?! Right. The first group I was in was a little odd. Most groups choose to run with 2 tanks, but this one had 3. No worries, the leader said, the third is just around in case we need him (??). He'll go dps, the leader said, until then. The first boss was quite easy and we 1-shotted him. The 3rd tank put out less than 10k dps. That is horribly, astoundingly bad. Even tanks should be putting out that much, if not more. A piece of gear dropped that would be an upgrade for me ... and of course, I rolled a 10. No worries, the 3rd tank won it! The second boss we had to attempt twice because the tanks didn't know what they were doing and didn't bother to ask before the fight. The 3rd tank, again, put out less than 10k dps. Another upgrade dropped for me! ... aaaaaand the 3rd tank won it again. Awesome. We wiped twice on the third boss before I left. The tanks didn't know what they were doing and there were far too many DPS who weren't pulling their weight. I managed to join a group for the third boss and we successfully 1-shot him ... and then everyone left! This was something that happened on pretty much every boss, regardless of how well we did. I suppose it is mostly people looking for a particular piece of gear? Through group-hopping I managed to down the fourth and sixth bosses as well. I got three upgrades, including a weapon! The interesting part of all of this is that one of my bonus rolls actually yielded a piece of gear (that would be the fourth potential upgrade). It was 'forged' so it got an extra 6 iLvl, taking it from 670 to 676. The reason it is interesting is that the piece of gear that I won is actually BoE. Which means I can sell it on the AH. There were a couple of the 670 variety on the AH for ~13-14k, but none that were 676. So basically the question becomes - do I want a gear upgrade for PvE or do I want more gold? I've got almost 200k gold and nothing to really spend it on at the moment. On the other hand, it's not like I'm trying to be on the bleeding edge of raiding and my gear is totally fine for what I'm trying to do. I'm not sure what to do!

Odds and Ends

Over the weekend, I tried to run through Highmaul again to get my weekly allotment of Abrogator Stones. I don't know if I just got lucky last week or unlucky this week or what ... but I must have tried at least 10 groups over 3-4 days before we were able to defeat the second to last boss, Ko'ragh. After spending so much time in the LFR tool, I began to wonder if Normal and Heroic Highmaul were on the same raid ID. I asked in the next group I joined, and they told me that it was possible to do both every week and get loot from them both! Fantastic! I just doubled the amount of potential Stones each week.

So I joined a heroic Highmaul group. The first boss went down pretty easy. I believe the mechanics for most bosses are the same in heroic and normal, but the damage and health are higher in heroic. And, of course, the gear is better. Unfortunately, the first boss was pretty stingy and didn't drop any stones. The second boss is a really easy fight for melee - you just stand around and dps. There's nothing to dodge, the boss only moves occasionally ... easy to put out good dps. In fact, I managed to top the meters again!

Heroic Highmaul

I did learn, later on that weekend, that Recount does not always accurately record DPS, but I don't think that was an issue for this boss. #1 in heroic! Wow. I actually used the bonus roll you see in that screenshot and got exactly what I needed - a good trinket! But again ... no Abrogator Stones. At this point I went to wowhead and checked the comments on the quest; turns out you can only get them from one difficulty each week. Bummer. I stayed in the raid to see if I could get any other upgrades (the iLvL for gear in heroic is 670-675, higher than my PvP gear) but we wiped a couple times on the next boss and then the group broke up. I'm currently 50 stones short which will probably take 3 weeks.

PvP-wise, I needed two more pieces of gear (keeping in mind that one of my rings is the PvE because it has better secondary stats) for a full set. I was going to be 200 conquest short this week, but on my second RBG win of the week I actually got a piece of gear! I went about 4-5 weeks without getting any gear until last week, when I got non-set pants ... which I didn't need. This week's piece of gear though? One of the pieces I needed! I am now fully decked out in PvP gear. We also managed to break into the 1800s in 2s which was pretty exciting.

I did a couple more dungeons with my priest last night, got up to level 85! In one run, we somehow managed to accidentally pull a boss while already engaged with a large pack of mobs. What ensued was chaotic, frantic, and totally awesome. Check out chat!

Take note of my sweet transmog!

And lastly, I know that I mentioned I had hit exalted with 4 of the Pandaria reps, but I'm not sure I ever showed off my new mounts! I'll spare you a picture of every new mount (some of the reps gave 3 mounts), and instead just do one for each rep. Here is the Klaxxi mount:

He is SUPER excited for this picture

The Shado-Pan tiger (1 of 3):

Apparently I got a little carried away with hitting the space bar before the screenshot

Order of the Cloud Serpent:

The lightning is constantly moving on this one!

Golden Lotus (1 of 3):

The animations for this guy are hilarious

The lore from World of Wacraft is actually pretty interesting

I stumbled across this post today, which details some of the lore of Warcraft: http://imgur.com/gallery/sRptv

There are 6 posts about it total so far; you can find links to 2-5 at the bottom of that first post and #6 is here: http://imgur.com/gallery/kZWT2

Epic ring quest line

I've gotten pretty close to full PvP gear over the past couple weeks. I still need the belt and one trinket and then I'll have full 690 PvP gear ... except for my ring. One of the rings I've been using this whole time is the second stage of the epic ring quest line, ilvl 680. Not only is it fairly close to 690, but it also has the right secondary stats that I want, so I've been putting off buying a replacement for Conquest. Unfortunately, none of the other PvP rings have that same mix of stats, so I started to look into what I actually need to do to upgrade it.

The next part of the quest line requires you to kill the last two bosses in Highmaul, the raid content that was available upon release of WoD, and collect 125 Abrogrator Stones (these can be collected slowly from your Garrison or more quickly from running Highmaul). Sunday rolled around and I had some free time so I decided to give Highmaul a shot. I watched videos on the first two bosses while looking for a raid group in LFR. I got accepted so quickly that I didn't even have time to finish the first video, which made me even more nervous.

Things went pretty smoothly though. The mechanics for most fights were pretty simple and straightforward, and we always had people dropping out before each new boss so I had a couple minutes to try and research each fight beforehand. It turns out my gear is pretty good for the Normal setting of this raid! Normal drops ~655 gear, Heroic drops ~675, and Mythic drops ~685 gear. The PvP gear I have is all 660 so few things were actually upgrades. I managed to hold my own though in terms of DPS, even leading the charts for one fight!

The bonus roll you see in that picture is a pretty cool feature. Each week you can "buy" up to 3 bonus roll chances with either gold, apexis crystals or ... a third thing that I cannot remember (you can also get 1 bonus roll a week from your Garrison's War Mill). After every boss, you have the ability to use one of those bonus rolls in an attempt to get a piece of gear. I used 4 for the day and got only one piece of gear - a necklace that ended up not being an upgrade. The rest of the chances produced an insignificant amount of gold (~25). Some of the bosses also have a chance to drop BoE gear which, if you win, can be sold on the AH. I managed to win one piece and sold it for 4,500 gold.

It took us 3 attempts to down the second to last boss, we wiped once on the final boss, and then the group broke up. Later that night I tried to find a group that was going to kill the last boss. After two wipes, the third time was the charm and I had managed to clear all of Highmaul in a single day!

One interesting thing is that the size of the raid is elastic. The second group I was in was a 10 man, while the first was a 15 man. The difficulty of the zone scales to the size of your group!

I'll need to run Highmaul 2-3 more times to get enough Abrogrator stones, but I'm feeling pretty good about finishing that level of upgrade! The next upgrade has a nice buff that occasionally procs to give you an extra 10% of your main stat.

Let's back up a smidge

Before my cross-server farming session of War-God Dokah, I finally managed to reach exalted with the Netherwing Faction. I actually remember people farming for Netherwing rep back during TBC and deciding not to do it because I had flight form on my Druid and didn't want to put in the effort to reach exalted.

Let me tell you, that was a great decision. This was not an enjoyable rep grind. I mean, some of the quests were alright - there was one where you just flew around and hit lazy peons with a "Booterang" and that was pretty fun. Well, the first time you did it, at least. It just took forever to finish them, and any of the quests that required you to interact with mobs couldn't be completed while on someone else's server which meant you couldn't do them while waiting for your RBG team to queue. It was also in the middle of nowhere and some of the quests required you to fly all the way across the continent. That took a good 10-15 minutes even with the highest flying speed.

Initially I thought the grind would be pretty quick since there are eggs that spawn that you can hand in for rep outside of just doing the daily quests. The only problem is that everyone is looking for these eggs and flying around looking for them is bloody boring. I checked the spawn points when I got to the quest area and that was it. Nevertheless, I finally got exalted and snatched up all the mounts (they're pretty cheap at this point):

He's yawning because he's tired of all the pictures!

Taking advantage of the phasing servers

Over the weekend I spent some time farming War-God Dokah in the Timeless Isle. He drops several tokens at a time that can be exchanged for rep with some of the Pandaren factions. As a rare spawn, his respawn timer is 30-60 minutes. The first two times I killed him, I simply sat there, watched the spawn point, and caught up on some internet reading.

And then one of the comments on Wowhead made me try something different. When you join the party of another player, you are moved to their server. I had noticed this while queueing for RBGs ... occasionally I would end up on a PvP realm which led to some interesting encounters. Anyway, using the LFG tool, you can click on the Custom groups and there are a plethora of random groups available. Some of them are simply for the new profession vendors, some are for rare spawn fights that require a raid, some are for farming reputation, some are for farming barn boxes ... the important thing here is that you have almost every server available to you. Which means that you have almost every server's spawn point/rate available to you.

Join a group, see if he was there ... if not, leave the group and join another realm. I kept track of the spawn times on the different servers and went back after 30 minutes. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it did not. On the whole, though, I was able to farm him far more quickly than had I simply sat and waited on my server.

Another way to take advantage of this is in Ashran. Recently on my server, the Alliance have simply owned Ashran, making trying to complete the events a colossal pain. Every week you have a 200 conquest point bonus that can only be earned in Ashran, so you have to go there and do events. After spending 45 minutes and getting rolled over in every single event, I checked out the LFG tool. There were 3 groups available, all advertising that they were winning events. I put in a request to all of them and eventually got invited. I should note here that if you are already in Ashran, you will not be phased to the new server. I had to leave, then requeue. The queue for this server actually took some time (as opposed to mine, which is instant), but it was well worth it. That group easily won each event that took place and I quickly had my conquest cap for the week.

PSA: Double check your auctions before you post them

Much to my dismay, none of the crafted profession upgrades have been selling. That left me with quite a large stack of Savage Blood and nothing to use them on, so I decided to sell them off. The price has been steadily dropping, down to around 400 gold yesterday. I figured it was better to sell them off before the price dropped too much more, and that if I ever needed more I could just buy them back at a lower price.

I put up 7 stacks of 10 each. I set the price to 430 gold per unit for each stack, so about 30k gold before the AH cut.

Just 5 minutes later, I saw a bunch of messages flash that my auctions had sold. Given that I had priced them above the lowest single batches, I immediately had a sinking feeling ... I rushed back to the AH to see, and, sure enough ...

Instead of setting the price up Per Unit, I had done it Per Stack. So I sold 70 Savage Blood for 4300. Awesome.

So always make sure to double check your pricing configuration is correct!!

Leading the Cavalry

I reached exalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpent faction last week. This is the faction required to ride any of the flying dragon mounts from Mists of Pandaria. It's a pretty easy rep to get to exalted. Once you hit Revered, you can purchase a token from the vendor that doubles the amount of rep you get. You can also farm the dragons on the Timeless Isle for eggs, which reward 1,000 reputation each turn in. All of this is in addition to the normal daily quests.

Once you hit exalted, you can purchase the remaining two flying serpents if you want to (you get the first for free, since you raised him from a pup and he loves you). Their motion while flying is definitely interesting, an undulating, almost.

Conveniently enough, after getting all three of the serpents from that faction, I had 50 summonable mounts. This awards you the achievement Leading the Cavalry and presents you with a very handsome Albino Drake: