5601

So I broke down and tried professions and I was totally right. Soul-crushingly tedious (LW, skinning). Skinning’s not so bad–or, well, it is, but it’s fairly fast and after maybe a couple hours I’m just about ready to skin Cata mobs. LW, though. Fuck that.

5602

Just think, if you hadn’t ignored them from the start it would’ve been virtually painless and actually very useful! :)

5603

Leveling a crafting profession can be a mini-game, of sorts.

  1. Figure out what items you need that you can’t easily get yourself; in this case, there aren’t many raw materials that a Leatherworker needs that aren’t obtained through Skinning, so that’s easy.
  2. Watch the AH for a week or so, to get the items that you don’t already have… and Skin a lot in the meantime.
  3. Assemble the best items to get skillups (there are a ton of crafting guides out there); this is much easier now than it used to be, since higher quality items give multiple point skillups now, when they’re still in the orange skillup range.
  4. Most of the final items won’t sell on the AH, but if you know an Enchanter, they can disenchant them and most of those enchanting mats will sell, eventually, and are cheap to list on the AH.
  5. Get to max Leatherworking and make cool epics for yourself or friends, if you run heroic dungeons and get the orbs. Get cool bonuses with uber wrist enchants and cheap leg enchants.

Like anything else in WoW, it can be fun if you spend a modicum of time in preparation, and look at is as a mini-game while you level, not a grind.

5604

Don’t kid yourself… MMOs are a grind, with various clever disguises. We’re just all OCD enough to partake liberally. :)

5605

So, I think I’m seeing a bug, but tell me if I’ve got this wrong:

Using the default Mr. Robot weightings for a Holy Paladin (which I dispute, but that’s a different issue ;)), which are:

  • Int = 100
  • Spirit = 75
  • Haste = 40
  • Mastery = 35

The tool recommends that I use Legguards of the Gentle over Greaves of the Misguided

Based on my math, GotM gives you 202 haste & 20 int whereas LotG gives you 50 Spirit & 172 Mastery. Because you would use an orange gem in the yellow socket to give you int and haste, right?

So by my calculations, Greaves of the Misguided comes out ahead slightly, due to its red socket which allows for more int. But I think the tool is incorrectly marking Legguards of the Gentle as having a red socket when it doesn’t?

5606

You don’t HAVE to match sockets. And you can reforge.

In essence, the 30 spirit + 104 mastery + 68 haste after reforging is worth sufficiently more than the 202 haste that the very small advantage you get from the better sockets on the greaves is overwhelmed.

FULL WORKING:

Iignoring the socket bonuses on the legguards (+80 Int), but matching the sockets on the greaves (since swapping 20 Int for 20 Spi AND 20 haste is a good deal according to these weightings) (+60 Int, +20 Spi, +20 haste). So you end up

Legguards: up 20 intellect (from 2 red gems), 10 spirit (30 ahead -20 from the purple gem in the greaves), 172 mastery
Greaves: up 222 haste. (20 from the socket bonus, 202 from base stats)

which looks like a win for the legguards until you reforge that mastery into haste. Deduct the reforged haste off both sides and compare:

Legguards: 20 intellect, 10 spirit, 104 mastery 2750 + 3640 = 6390
Greaves: 154 haste = 6160

5607

Wait, what? You can put a red gem into a blue socket?

sigh. Why did I not know this? HOW was I supposed to know this?

Thanks Aceris. Looks like I have some re-gemming to do.

5608

You don’t know any professional raiders who can snort at you for doing your gems wrong. The only reason I know it is because I mentioned my confusion at the complex process of gemming to my coworker who’s Kind of a Big Deal (or was at one point) and she explained to me that no, you do not always gem for your socket bonus. The only slots that can only take the gems that they are slotted for are Cogwheel Slots (which you don’t have to worry about if you’re not an engineer) and, I think, Meta slots. Every other kind of slotted gear will return a bonus if you coordinate your accessories to fit into the fashion sense that it apparently comes packed with (like the profusion of blue sockets my current crap gear has which do me little or no good). In Lich King, unless the socket bonus was pretty significant, once you hit your caps and activated your meta you’d fill any open slots with red gems, because at some point Blizzard decided that red was the best color and the red/purple or red/orange difference in benefit to stats you give a damn about was almost never big enough to make it worth your while. I don’t know if that’s still the case any more or not, but I’m late to the game in general and just not being able to get epic gems to put in my holes is already throwing me for a little bit of a loop.

5609

O_o

I’ve been playing WoW for almost six years now on and off and I had NO IDEA you could do this!

I’ve been dutifully putting only the right color gems in the right sockets.

I’d love to just admit that I’m dumb but this is absolutely not very “discoverable” from merely looking at the interface.

They should really change this so that the socket has no color at all, but the socket BONUS tells you what gem you need.

ex:

Socket bonus: +10 intellect when using a red gem

5610

The trick is, that only works for gear with one socket. For epics with two or three slots, you have to match all of them to get your bonus. There’s also the problem of using dual-color gems to hit multiple qualifying standards. Say, for instance, you’ve got a piece of gear that wants a blue gem, a yellow gem, and a red gem. Generally speaking, you personally want all of those to be red gems because reds usually correspond to your primary stat. If the goal is determined not by matching the requirements for each socket, but instead by matching the requirements for the gear overall, you can put in two reds and one green and you’re good (you have installed two red, one yellow, and one blue gem, which meets the requirement). If you have to match the sockets themselves, you have to burn two slots satisfying the blue and yellow conditions instead of just one.

5611

No, it’s easier to use the colours as they are. They just need to make sure that people understand you don’t need to match it up, only if you want the bonus. Once people know that, the current system is the most elegant one.

I mean, I made the same mistake, but it was while levelling in TBC. I’m sure it’s clearer now…

5612

Has anyone noticed that the embroidery for cloaks that DPS caster tailors can do gives a single point of Spirit… Super annoying, as I’d like to have no additional spirit whatsoever.

5613

5614

Haha, I know, but it’s one of those things my OCD self has a hard time with (same reason I won’t do 26-slot bags, despite having the mats). Once I saw Spirit turn green I had to take off every piece of gear and add it back until I found the culprit.

What is our Oscar-winning friend above saying?

5615

Sorry BigWeather! I thought you were making fun of me for my minmaxing OCD. Oh man, that’s funny.

5616

Yeah, I mean, it shouldn’t bother me but it does! To the point that I go with the +Stamina enchant on my Robes rather than the superior +15 to all stats because I don’t want green Strength, Agility, or Spirit.

/someone help me!

5617

O_o

I must have stopped reading patch notes at the wrong time.

I super totally didn’t know that.

5618

Well, that’s not how it works now, but that’s the problem with changing from making the sockets enforce their own requirements and shifting those to general gear requirements across the entire piece. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why per-socket color requirements are what they are. The existence of multi-color gems would create some interesting complications.

5619

So the Guild I was raiding with imploded due to nobody showing up and nobody applying, so of course I immediately apply and get a trial invite to a Guild which is better and has downed more Heroic bosses.

Plus, this new Guild? They do DKP, and trial members can spend DKP. This is a shocking concept that I know is very new, but apparently trial members do their part in boss kills, according to these guys, and therefore should be allowed to bid on items.

(Also, wonder of wonders? Voice chat is actually clear. The only person talking is the raid leader. Makes it so much easier!)

5620

re WoW crafting profitability: the fundamental resource in an MMO is time. On its own given all the mats, crafting takes no time - therefore the value add is almost 0 which is why most stuff only sells for the cost of underlying mats. The actual value add is the labor that goes into pulling the mats up, not the labor that goes into selecting “Elementium Deathplate” and clicking “Create”

The only exception to this will be stuff where access to production is gated; e.g., patterns you can only get via raiding. Likewise for stuff where the mats are gated (e.g., Chaos Orbs) but in this case you’re still mostly just paying for the time it takes me to farm up 3 Chaos Orbs to make you that Elementium Deathplate.

If you want to make steady, reliable money with professions you should just go farm herbs or ore or something. I can pull up 750g in Obsidium in about 30-45 minutes depending on how much internet surfing I do during the process. Or you can try to exploit underpriced auctions; if you have a large enough capitol base (lots of gold) you can probably make really good money this way. When I see Obsidium selling for less than 3g each on Moonrunner I generally start buying & reselling.