Power Auras

I've just discovered a little mod called "Power Auras". I know it's been around for a while, but I'm generally mod-averse and I've never really needed it before. However, with the changes to Sacred Shield and Divine Plea, all of a sudden, I needed a mod that would easily keep track of whether or not I have certain buffs on me, so that I can recast them in battle without having to constantly look through my buffs in the corner to try to find them. A couple of people suggested power auras, so I decided to have a look.

The mod is really very useful and one thing I like about it is unobtrusive. Basically, I can make auras or pictures that pop up around my character when certain triggers happen, including things like gaining aggro, having a certain percentage of health or, as I originally intended it, losing or gaining certain buffs. Since these are all picture and sound cues, you can customize them so that they fit nicely into the graphics of the game as a whole. For example, you can make a runed, translucent, purple circle around your character that fits right into the game graphics as a whole.

At first, I tried to make them too unobtrusive. For instance, I had little yellow triangles come out of my shoulders when Divine Plea was down and had little leaves under my feet for when Art of War was up for my ret spec. The problem was that I couldn't see the auras at all under the absolute mass of spells flying around. I imagine the little auras are nice for hunters, mages and healers, but as melee, whether tanking or dps, I'm always at the centre of half a million different spell details. I simply couldn't see them.

However, what gave me the right idea was the crossed swords I decided to put over my head when my target was at <20% health. This was made so that I could know when to use Hammer of Wrath, rather than rely on the little bit of scrolling combat text I only see once. It was really visible, and I decided to repeat that pattern with my other auras, such as when Sacred Shield and Divine Plea aren't up. That worked like a charm. I'm now immediately aware when my Sacred Shield goes down so that I can refresh it as well as thing like Divine Plea. I also added a couple of big symbols for when Hammer of Wrath is available and when my health drops below 35%.

There are a couple of annoying things about the mod. First, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable an aura without deleting it. This is a bit annoying, since I need different things when I'm in my two specs. For instance, as prot, I want to know when Divine Plea is up, but as ret I only care when it is available. There's no way to simply change or disable a mod and the mod has no way of knowing which spec I'm in. So, when I'm ret, I have the little "Divine Plea isn't up" picture most of the time. The second problem is that there's no volume control. I use a big red lion picture to let me know when my health is low. I also wanted to attach a lion roar so that I get an auditory cue. However, try as I might, there was no way to change the volume and the lion's roar is completely lost in the background noise.

Overall, then, this is a very useful mod. I can see it being useful in other contexts and for other classes as well. For instance, I could use it on my hunter to warn me when Serpent Sting has dropped or I could use it on my warrior to let me know when Battle Shout has fallen off. The ability to know when health has dropped low without always looking up to the corner is useful in its own right, even if the sound effect is largely useless. I look forward to using this fun and flexible mod in the future.

Making Gold

I'm rather wealthy in the game of World of Warcraft. I've bought the vendor mount and just about every epic I ever wanted and given to my guild besides. I'm now working on my mini-pet collection, which I bring out against matching enemies (Azure Whelpling for Malygos; Dark Whelpling for Sartharion, etc.). Moreover, I do it with very little effort; I make about 1500-2k gold per 45-minute session. A lot of the time I'm asked how I did it, and my usual response is "Jewelcrafting", but this isn't quite true. Or rather, it's like asking someone why they are such a good athlete and having them answer, "By running". It kind of misses the point of the question.

In order to explain how I've managed to make this money, I'd like to address two mistakes people make about the economy in general. The first mistake is to think that the market is insane, rife with mistakes that are easily exploited by the clever auctioneer. The second mistake is to think the market is perfect, crawling with competitors ready to outcompete you immediately. Neither is true, and they both undermine the ability to profit.

The first mistake leads to the belief that the auction house is really about buying low and selling high. There is definitely money to be made this way; I bought my first epic mount with this strategy. However, the problem with this strategy is that it depends on other people's mistakes. Sometimes, you'll get really lucky and you'll notice others making mistakes. Other times, though, you'll not find a single mistake anywhere or get beaten to the mistake by someone else. Other people try to generate mistakes by monopolizing a section of the market. They'll remember the 30g they made on their first golden fishstick and forget about the 150g they lost on the rest. In general, monopolizing leads others to undercut you and you're stuck with a ton of useless stock. Ironically, you make money for other people doing this, but rarely for yourself.

The second mistake, however, is thinking that the economy is perfect and that every margin has been squeezed away by an infinite number of instantaneous competitors. This simply isn't true in WoW (it's not true in the real world either, but that's another story). There are tons of opportunities to make money by using crafting or even just little things like an import-export business. Yes, you will have competition, but they're trying to make a profit too, and will tend to drop out if the margins drop too low. In fact, entrepreneurship is in short supply and is the most valuable thing in WoW.

What I would say is that there are two tips for generating wealth in World of Warcraft:

• Generate Wealth
• Think Exponentially

By generate wealth, I mean that you should do something genuinely useful. Then people are paying you money for the service you have provided. Buying low and selling high doesn't really generate any wealth, at least not directly. It's a zero-sum game, like poker. However, production is a win-win game, where you gain the profit and the buyer gains the generated and now useful product. As long as you're producing wealth, while you might have competition, you are actually generating your own profits by generating things that are valuable.

By thinking exponentially, I mean that you should think in terms of how you can multiply your investment, not really think of how much profit you can make. Don't think, "I can make 100g by doing x", but "I can get back 130% on my investment by doing x". Try to find industries where you can throw two thousand gold at it in a sitting and make 150% back. When you multiply, rather than add, you generate more wealth in the long run. When you start to act in this way, you end up actually increasing your profits very quicly and with a miminum of invested time.

Those are my tips for making gold. I've been playing the game for two years, and discovered what I think is a foolproof philosophy. In fact, there are tons of other industries I'd like to play around with. It's too bad I can't find more things to spend my gold on.

Strategy: XT-002 Deconstructor

I thought I'd put together a few little guides on how to tank various fights in Ulduar. These guides will be completely first-person. I'll just go through what I do and how I do it, and the reasons I do it throughout. On this particular fight, I'm one of the offtanks, which means that my job is to tank the Pummellers. Of course, that's so easy it's not even worth mentioning. My real job, like everyone else's, is to dps the boss. The enrage timer on this fight is extremely tight, so the goal is to squeeze as much dps as you possibly can.

First: gear and buffs. For gear, I wear my block/threat set. It's basically every bit of block rating gear I've picked up since Wrath began, which means at this point, everything but hands (since they never dropped for me) and a second ring (since it doesn't exist). Darkmoon Card: Greatness is huge here. It's both threat and block value. Otherwise, my set's a little under 2k unbuffed block value and over 3k unbuffed ap. For buffs, I use a Dragonfin Filet (the strength food) and a Flask of Endless Rage. There's no need to be fancy here, and you actually take more damage from the tantrum the more hitpoints you have.

So, when the fight begins, I take off Righteous Fury. This is important. There's no tank who can hold aggro from me with Righteous Fury when I have my threat set on. I run in behind the boss and start thwacking away. I pop wings early in this fight, since otherwise I won't get full use of them. It'd be nice to get the extra damage from bloodlust, but I won't be there for the full heart phase anyway. Then, it's the usual threat rotation. Seal is Corruption.

At some point, he will drop his heart. A quick tab targets it for me. Then I swivel my camera around so I can see both of the heaps of trash on my side (we have another add tank for the other side) and keep dpsing away on the boss. At some point, a Pummeller will spawn in one of the scap heaps. At that point, I throw up Righteous Fury, which I will keep up for the rest of the fight. I run up to the Pummeller, throw my shield, then exorcism, then judgement, then Shield of Righteousness. Assuming he is surrounded by Scrapbots, I'll also drop a Consecration. If there's any Boombots around, I stay as far away as I can and save the Judgement and ShoR for when I get back.

Now there's a little bit of a tricky part. I pull the Pummeller in such a way that he's right on top of the Deconstructor so that I can dps both while still blocking the Pummeller's attacks. At this point, unless I missed my shield slam, I've cemented aggro, so I go back to targetting the Deconstructor. The main tank should have enough of an aggro lead now that I won't catch him (though I usually end the fight at ~90% of the main tank's aggro so be careful). Between Consecrates and Hammers of the Righteousness, I can hold aggro pretty easily on the Pummeller without ever targetting it again.

Then it's just rinse and repeat. There are a couple tricky bits. Of course there are the bombs. When that happens, I just spin and run away. Don't back out. Pummellers can actually hit pretty hard from behind, but it's better than blowing up the raid. A healer will probably get you, and if not, use your Divine Protection. Then go back and reposition the Pummeller like you did before. The second tricky bit is that, on the second phase, you may end up with two or even three pummellers. That's okay - it's why you have your block set. Just position all of them and go back to dpsing.

That's the whole thing. Remember of course to run away when you have the bomb. Watch your aggro, because a paladin in a threat set and Righteous Fury will steal aggro. Remember to keep Divine Plea up, since you can't dps without it. Tantrums will get most of your mana back, but that's not enough. Pop wings whenever you can; don't save them for the heart. Keep focussed.

As I do more bosses in Ulduar I'll post more of these little strategy guides.

Sacred Shield, How I Love Thee

Sacred Shield is one of those little abilities that most protection paladins forget about, but is one that makes us unique and even more durable than we already are. It's a thirty second or one minute ability (depending on whether you talented it) that procs a little damage shield whenever you get hit, at most every six seconds. It's basically free EH that gets added to all the EH we already have. As priests have known for years, but never tell anyone, damage absorption rarely overheals, because it is pre-emptive. The only way it wouldn't get used is if I don't take any damage for ten straight seconds, which is highly unlikely.

The reason most protection paladins forget about it is that we were so used to holy paladins casting it on us for so long. Since it's thirty seconds, holy paladins would often cycle through the tanks, popping one on each. In fact, if you have a holy paladin healing you, you shouldn't cast it, because it overwrites (as far as I can tell) and theirs is better than yours. So, we largely forgot about it. I'd throw it up in instances and occasionally ten-mans when there isn't a holy paladin, but otherwise, it was unused.

Patch 3.1 changed all that, though it didn't change most of our habits. Now, paladins can only throw up one sacred shield at a time. That means, unless you have a paladin directly assigned to you, you're not getting it. Finding out who is healing me is why I hang out in the healing channel, and it's even more important that it used to be. It is now our responsibility to shield ourselves and if we're not doing it, we're missing out on one of our best abilities.

We can talent the ability too, so it is less of an annoyance. As I've mentioned in other posts, little 30 second cooldowns are generally annoying, but we can talent it to 1 minute, which also improves our absorption and our Divine Sacrifice ability to boot. This one is strong enough that I don't really mind it, and I've got a nice little macro I use so I can either cast it on myself or choose a focus for it in cases where I want to throw it on someone else:

/cast [target=focus] Sacred Shield; [target=player] Sacred Shield

Overall, then, Sacred Shield is a wonderful ability, exactly the kind that a tank needs. Unless a holy paladin is assigned to heal me, having a reactive shield gives me more survivability in any fight where I won't be one-shot, which, as far as I can tell, is all of them.

Ulduar: The Return of the Block Set

I like being right. From all t5 content onwards, there were several fights where having a solid, block and block value set were very useful for progression. In fact, it was our niche, to the point where guilds would recruit a protection paladin just for the trash in Hyjal. And AoE tanking was fun. There was something pretty awesome about having 25 elites thwacking at you, futilely trying to get through your awesome shield.

Wrath brought two things. First, we weren't the only AoE tanks anymore. To be honest, that's neither here nor there. If other tanks want to AoE tank, more power to them. It doesn't affect me. Second, though, Wrath had very few AoE tank fights. There were adds on Sartharion and there was the dreary trash on Gothik, and that was it. A set was nice to have on Loatheb. However, let's face it, even if it had AoE fights, Naxx was so easy we really didn't need separate sets for anything, ever.

Not to be deterred, I picked up a hell of a block set in Naxxramas at great cost on the presumption that it might be useful again in Ulduar, and I was not disappointed. So far, Razorscale, Decontructor, Kolargarn, Freya and Thorim can make great use of a block/threat set. Deconstructor is one of those fights where I'm tanking only sometimes, so I need to max out the dps I can do and block value is great for that. The others all have swarms of waves that make my healer's job much easier if I can block the damage. I don't know the fights past this point yet, but the trash is getting hard enough that a proper trash set is proving beneficial in several spots. All in all, then, I'm quite happy that I have this set and I've even upgraded my belt and ring to new ilevel 226 block gear.

For a while in Naxx, I was scratching my head as to why there was block value on anything. Most of the fights were vanilla relics in which a boss hits a single tank real hard. It was like a whole aspect of tanking had been forgotten about. With Ulduar, this aspect is coming back, and I couldn't be happier for it.

Naxxramas: Good Riddance

The big mistake with Karazhan was that it created a 10-man bottleneck for 25-man raiding. Guilds collapsed, reformed and recollapsed as a result of this bizarre decision to make everyone complete a 10-man dungeon multiple times for months before they would be plausibly geared enough for 25-man raiding.

However, while there was a mistake in the general progression of raiding in TBC, Karazhan itself was a beautiful, well-designed, well thought-out dungeon. All of the fights were very interesting, if not unique, and the zone itself was absolutely breathtaking, featuring an eerie, Gothic quality that will not soon be forgotten. It was rich with lore, and despite the frustration of its serving as a bottleneck, I took two characters to exalted with Violet Eye with few complaints.

For Wrath of the Lich King, on the other hand, they decided to have Naxxramas as their starting raid dungeon. Naxxramas, as people know, was the last dungeon of "vanilla Wow" before TBC came out. It came out only a few months before the expansion, and was largely lost in the shuffle. Less than 5% of the player base ever got to see it. So, that the designers didn't want all that work to go to waste is understandable.

The problem was, as an opening dungeon, it was a disaster, for two reasons. First, it looked horribly dated. In fact, it looked exactly like what it was, recycled Undercity skins in big, empty rooms. While Karazhan blew us all away with its beautiful new graphics, Undercity was perhaps the ugliest place in the entire game. After going through beautiful new heroics like Halls of Stone, to then spend months in barren rooms was a disappointment, to say the least.

Second, it was too easy. Karazhan was the perfect difficulty level. All the fights were challenging, but not impossible. Curator was a real dps gear check, but all the fights and even the trash needed to be learned and ultimately mastered. On the other hand, Naxxramas was a joke. We cleared it on our third week or raiding, which was ridiculously easy, since we did it with only half of our core raiders. Like most guilds, we were soon able to clear it in a single evening, leaving us with nothing to do for months until Ulduar came out.

Between patches 3.0 and 3.1, raiding in World of Warcraft reached its lowest ebb, one to which I hope it will never return. Effectively, they removed all of the challenge to the game, and those of us who didn't leave wondered if it would ever return. For months, guilds have run the driest, ugliest content that Blizzard has ever been produced. As an introduction to the new expansion, Naxxramas was a horrible failure.

Fortunately, Ulduar has now come out. Okay, the siege area is kind of ugly, but the rest so far looks quite nice and I don't feel like I'm stuck in a nineties shooter. The fights so far seem well balanced, hard but not impossible, and rewarding skill rather than just brute force. I'm enjoying raiding again for the first time since October. Now I plan to simply forget that Naxxramas ever existed.

Noblegarden

Blizzard's holiday events have gone through quite an evolution over the years. Until October, they were innocuous little festivals, with lots of little fun things to do. For me, the two I really enjoyed were Winter Festival, a kind of Christmas event and Hallow's End, the Hallowe'en festival. You could open presents or kill the Headless Horseman and a bunch of other little fun things. They were part of the background, making Azeroth more of a living world.

In October, though, things changed. The holidays themselves stayed largely the same, but the Achievement system revamped them in significant ways. If you did all of the achievements for an event, you would get a title, and if you got all of the titles, you would get a mount, the Violet Proto-Drake. People will do anything for a title or a mount, as I myself proved during my "bear runs" in Zul'Aman last year.

This got more people interested in the events, but it also created the situation where, if you wanted the reward from the event, you had to do all the achievements. All of a sudden, the achievements required balancing, something they'd never needed before. Blizzard wanted to put some sort of limit on the number of mounts available, so they felt more like an achievement for those who got them. Other achievements, which were the result of pure luck, raised huge ire among the population, who saw the drake they'd worked hard to get for six month vanish because of the random number generator.

The disaster struck: "Be Mine!", an achievement for the Fool For Love title at Valentine's Day. On a four day event, you had to get eight different little candies from bags. However, the bags were only available once per hour and you only have a ten percent chance of getting one per hour. On average, you needed three bags to get all the candies. Even a cursory glance over that math will show the problem: even if you set your alarm to wake up every hour, there was a chance you wouldn't get the candies. If you didn't, there was a very good chance. Goodbye title. Goodbye drake.

The fan base went ballistic, more ballistic than I've ever seen them. Dozens of people claimed they were going to leave the game, and I believed them. What had been a minor incentive, a mount, to participate in fun and interesting festivals had become a source of frustration and anger. "Did they really expect us to wake up in the middle of the night?", people were asking. Blizzard had miscalculated. In order to be fun, achievements need to be at least somewhat challenging. However, they seemed to miss the point that their festivals were never challenging and were never really an achievement. They were fluff and attempting to add challenge or rarity to fluff upset the people who were having fun. It was like ordering push-ups at a Christmas party.

Noblegarden, on the other hand, was a fantastically handled little holiday. As the only holiday designed after the introduction of the titles and mount, it seemed to get the balance just right. True, getting the title meant finding literally hundreds of little eggs in towns full of dozens of others hunting those same eggs, but that's what Easter Egg hunts are all about. All the items needed were available from the eggs, but if they didn't drop, you could still buy them for chocolates, one of which was in each egg. So, you felt lucky when you got the items, but not frustrated when you didn't. I really enjoyed the event, something that I can't really say for "Fool For Love", which was imbalanced and frustrating or the New Years Festival, which was properly balanced, but boring.

When Octoberfest rolls around, we will see whether they learned their lesson when it comes to the achievement, "Have Keg, Will Travel", which requires you to get a special mount from the Octoberfest event. Two years ago, you could get one in much the same way as Noblegarden worked, but last year they changed them to a rare drop. If they learned anything from the disaster that was "Be Mine!", they'll change the achievement. Fortunately, given the thoroughly successful Noblegarden event we just witnessed, it seems like they have.