Some random ramblings of a casual Warcraft player on the Lightbringer (EU) Realm.

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Popping My ICC Cherry

So that now I have attained the long awaited Gold Cap, (I just love saying that :) ), I was shuffling around Dalaran the other night wondering what to do with myself. I was skimming through the usually banal offering of Trade Chat when I came across a ‘LF DPS for ICC10 – Last Spot’, no mention of gearscore or achievements. So I was upfront in my /W and said that I have never actually been to ICC but have read up on the fights and could put out decent(ish) DPS. The guy comes back and says that’s no problem but they were starting at Festergut and was that an issue for me. Well beggars can’t be choosers so I said no worries and got the invite and headed on over to ICC. When I get in the first thing I notice is that the other nine are all in the same guild, nearly always a good sign in my experience. We exchange pleasantries and quickly get down to clearing the trash up to the stinky one without any problems.

The raid leader then asks if everyone is happy with the fight, I check that I am just to stand behind him and all out DPS (like I have read) and he confirms that is pretty much my role as a Rogue in this fight. So off we go, I drop a TotT on the MT and start DPSing for all I’m worth but with only about 30% down we wipe. Ah well, release, head back and try again. This time we get him down to about 40% and another wipe. As I’m flying back I get a whisper from one of the raid, he apologies for the wipes and explains that the tanks are just learning the fight. I tell him that it is fine and that as I’ve never even been here before I was enjoying myself even though we were wiping. He also mentioned that Raid Chat was very quiet because they were on Vent, he invited me to join but as they were all speaking Dutch I thanked him but told him that as I was Scottish and didn’t speak Dutch that it would be better to decline.

We wiped again on the next run but this time we got him down to 80%. So one more try and it’s 20:53, and I was due to log off at 21:00. This time however, it all came together and Festergut became my first boss downed in ICC. (Hopefully not my last). He dropped a bit of plate and a tanking cloak but that didn’t bother me at all, I was just a little disappointed that I couldn’t join them on their attempt at Rotface too. Though I’m not a slave to the meters I was pleased to see that even though I have never been to ICC or RS before and never got any loot drops from VoA 10 or 25, that I could still put out some respectable numbers. Thanks guys and if you ever need someone to make up the numbers again, please don’t hesitate to give me a shout.

~McRaffles

Thursday 5 August 2010

Gold Capped

At last! I have finally managed to get to the Gold Cap on McRaffles. It was a long hard slog but I got there in the end . I will probably go back to PvP now and forget about the Auction House for a while. I think the cash will be used to get some of the nice shiny new gold-sinks in Cataclysm and maybe help level my crafting professions.



It was not actually difficult, it just took patience. During the times when it was getting to be a bit of a grind, I took breaks, levelling my Pally from 70 to 80 and spending about 40k kitting out my Rogue. Though I have no intention to try and hit anymore gold milestones, now I’m there I never intend to be broke again. I’ll always keep my stash above 100k and with the skills that I have learnt along the way, I know that I can always make some extra gold without too much effort. So I’m hanging up my Auction House cap, for now.

~McRaffles

Friday 9 July 2010

One Hundred and Eighty!

No, I have not decided to stop playing Warcraft due to the RealID debacle, for the noble ‘sport’ of darts. I have just reached the dizzy heights of 180,000 gold. Only 34,000 and some change to go before I hit the cap.

I thought I’d go back and reattempt my long shelved ambition to get the Loremaster, or at the very least the Seeker achievements, but after trailing around Duskwood for what seemed like hours I decided to give up those particular goals, life’s too short.

Oh and apologies to those who were waiting for further updates to ‘Rogue Reports’, but I have removed it from the blog as I’ve decided to polish it up, finish it off and submit it to the Blizzard 2010 Creative Writing Contest and see if I could win a trip to California to meet, greet and eat with the Blizzard writing staff and a replica Frostmourne.

Wish me luck please.

~McRaffles

Monday 21 June 2010

Totally Enchanting

I finally managed to get my enchanting up to level 450; how much of a nightmare must it have been pre armour vellums? I thought that as I had quite a descent stock of mats that it would be no problem; wrong again, I had no idea that from 375 to 450 was so mats intensive. To be fair, it probably wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I’d just stuck to the enchants recommended by the guide. However, being the gold grabbing little miser that I I’ve become (in game) I decided to level using the most AH friendly enchants and turning them into scrolls and doing so actually made a profit in the process. So that’s me with three level 80’s with Blacksmithing, Mining, Herbalism, Alchemy (transmute), Jewelcrafting and Enchanting all at 450. Now I understand that this is not going to instil fear into the hearts of the multi-nationals but, for me, this is a manageable little enterprise which has recently got me to another milestone and the all-time-high of 150,000 gold.

~McRaffles

Thursday 17 June 2010

Podcasts and Gold

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, a mix of being crazy - busy at work and the World Cup has seriously curtailed my time to blog. So, what’s been happening? First of all, I would like to thank everyone who contributed kind comments and constructive points about my little story ‘Rogue Reports’; especially Adam at ‘The Noisy Rogue’, Rilandune at ‘Heroically Random’ (formally ‘A Rogue’s Tale’), Daraia at ‘Daughter of Ravenholdt Manor’, Amelia at ‘In Shadows of Dawn’ and of course all my fantastic guildies over at ‘Knights of Columbus’. I probably won’t be posting any more parts of the story for a while as I am going to see if I can find the time to write a few more chapters offline to maintain continuity, and get ahead of the game a little, then start publishing them again.

Whilst at work I have recently discovered the joys of listening to Warcraft gold making Podcasts. As far as I know (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong) there are only two, the more established (currently 10 episodes) ‘Call to Auction’ and the relative newcomer with only two episodes so far (not including the test one), ‘One Copper Podcast’.

The ‘Call to Auction’ podcast is hosted by Markco, Euripides, and sometimes Faeghleis. Most people who are in anyway interested in making gold in Warcraft know Markco from the ubiquitous ‘Just My Two Copper’ blog. Euripides is from ‘outdps.com’ and writes an article called ‘Gold Capped’ for ‘wow.com’ and Faeghleis pops in now and then to do the sound, explain add-ons and basically keep the guys on track. This is an excellent, funny, well put together podcast which over the course of the episodes goes a long way to explaining the basics of gold making, more advanced strategies and looks at the gold making aspects of professions and the value of different add-ons.

The ‘One Copper’ podcast is hosted by Seth from 'One Copper' (one of my favourite gold blogs) and Coffelord (I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about him, apart from him being the leader of a large guild on the US server Mal’ganis and he writes a blog called ‘hilariouslyrandom’. This podcast is really growing on me. The first episode was a little rough around the edges with some dead-air moments and miscommunications, however the content is great and, in my opinion, that’s what’s important. The second episode came on leaps and bounds, much smoother and more professional. I am sure that as soon as Seth gets a new microphone this will greatly enhance the listening experience and make this a ‘must not miss’ podcast.

One of the questions that Coffelord posed on the last podcast was ‘Why do you make gold?’ This has been picked up by a couple of bloggers and I just thought that I’d put in my two coppers. I started my gold grind just before Christmas ’09 with about 3.5k in the bank, by the beginning of February ’10 I had raised that to 50k and at the start of March I had doubled this to 100,000 gold. I then went on a bit of a spending spree and geared my rogue up to a decent ICC raiding level (even though I have still not seen the inside of it) This cost me in the region of 40k. This, as well as shelling out for epic and cold weather flying for my alts, made a serious dent in my fortune. So I started again, albeit a little slower this time, as I was levelling my pally to 80 at the same time. I currently have around 143,000 gold and would probably be close to gold cap if I hadn’t splashed out so much, but hey, what’s the point in having it if you’re not going to spend it.

I don’t really have any plans to spend much more pre-Cataclysm, so I think I’ll use whatever I happen to have when I get there, to take full advantage of some of the lovely gold-sinks that Blizzard will no doubt tempt us with. I will probably also use a fair bit to level my crafting professions, though hopefully my gathering professions will go a long way to offset this. At the end of the day, as long as I’m still having fun, then I won’t worry about it, though I still hope to hit gold-cap eventually, just to know that I did!

~McRaffles