Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 5

Kurn / / blogging, classic, ramblings

Welcome to yet another Sunday Brain Dump!

Topic 1: Haven’t done much

I have to admit to not having done much in the last week. After many years of not watching hockey regularly, I’ve returned to it, and it’s the playoffs now. My team, the Montreal Canadiens, have played 7 games and have now won 4 (they won Game 7 against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Tampa) and are now moving on to the next round. So I haven’t done a whole lot in WoW. But I also don’t have a lot to do in WoW. Farming remains the constant chore, but it does sometimes feel like a chore. Maybe I’ll take month off or something. I feel like I need to find a goal in the game.

Topic 2: Classic Plus?

There’s a lot of talk about a Classic Plus mode — hints from Blizz, a possible announcement at BlizzCon, stuff like that. And there’s the final shutdown of Turtle WoW coming this month. I can understand, Blizzard/Microslop need to protect their trademarks and copyrighted material. But my understanding is that Turtle WoW was developing new CLASSIC content? Wow. That’s wild. And it’s SO COOL. Different zones, mobs, quests, loot? Incredible.

So is that what Blizzard’s potential Classic Plus mode will include?

I played a tiny bit of Season of Discovery and I … didn’t like it. Was it kind of neat to see new talents/spells/abilities on different classes and specs? Sure. But they were all a bit weird to me. A mage, healing? Very weird. And having some key abilities available at like, early levels? My nephew was a rogue who had shadowstep extremely early on. I don’t know if that’s the way to go, at least for me and my interest. Part of what I always enjoyed about levelling was the gaining power aspect. Getting talents at 10 and then building on that every single level, even if you didn’t get anything at the trainer, that was awesome. So it’s weird to me to see stuff showing up at the start.

But the idea of exploring new zones at like, 50-60? New quests? New gear? Maybe alternative dungeons or small raids? I’m not saying I would do a ton of that group content, but I’m saying it would interest me.

Topic 3: What happens after Naxxramas?

The question occurs to me that if Classic Plus exists, is Naxxramas still the endgame in Classic? I mean, you typically go Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, Naxxramas, right? With things like ZG and AQ20 thrown in there for people who are maybe trying to gear up to get into something like Molten Core.

But what happens after Naxx? In a Classic Plus, that is? Do you get a Tier 4 that isn’t from Burning Crusade? Or a Tier 5? What about a Tier 6? Because the thing about Classic is that it does have a termination point. After Naxxramas, that was it. You headed to Outlands. Naxx released June 19, 2006 and patch 2.0.1 launched on December 5, 2006, followed quickly by Burning Crusade’s release on January 9, 2007.

So what do you do after Naxx? IS there something after Naxx in a Classic Plus world? I don’t play a ton of Classic these days, but I know that people were definitely raiding Naxx successfully, way more than originally. I’m sure that it having existed for 15+ years before people got into it in Classic servers really helped, as most of the challenges are solved. People know how to do 4 Horsemen. People know how to do Instructor Razuvious. There’s no mystery left. And raids and stuff have gotten harder since Naxx. Kael’thas and Vashj were hard compared to what we saw in Naxx (well, the Wrath version of Naxx at 80, anyway).

Another question: if there is something post-Naxx in a Classic Plus world, does that mean one has to go through MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx to get the gear required to go through whatever comes next? Or will they introduce a catch-up mechanic?

There’s an interesting site, The Classic Project, at wowclassic.plus. These people are not affiliated with Blizzard, but are taking surveys to see how people feel about various bits of change in a potential Classic Plus world. It’s kind of neat, just need to sign in with a Discord account and take the surveys if you like.

In one of the surveys about the world, it asks about attunements.

Should attunements be streamlined/made easier?

  • No, and if you touch the Onyxia attunement questline, I’ll lock you away with Marshal Windsor
  • Sure, cut out the aggressive travel sections, but keep the spirit of attunements intact
  • Yes, I’m tired of going to BRD or grinding righteous orbs just to enter a raid – cut it down and allow players to walk in easily.

 

I definitely voted no, because I will lock someone away with Marshal Windsor if I need to! I believe that attunements do a lot for bonding and team building.

Seriously, go do these surveys. I’m doing one right now and one of the questions is:

Should Damage/Heal over Time spells be able to crit baseline for all classes? The options are No, DoTs and HoTs shouldn’t crit, Yes, change it to allow them to crit, or Only if they make it a new talent that you can spec into.

And I instinctively went for the talent and then stopped, remembering one of the Blizz folks at a BlizzCon years and years ago saying that if you didn’t take a specific talent in one of the DPS warrior trees, you weren’t being creative or imaginative, you were just being a bad (whatever spec) DPS warrior. So while I don’t particularly like the idea of HoTs and DoTs critting for anyone, I don’t like the idea that you have to talent for it. If there’s an action someone can take in order to get their spells critting, and they don’t take it, that seems like a bad (class name here), right?

Basically, this survey is making me think a lot about what I want to see in a Classic Plus world.

What about you? Any interest in such a thing? What would it look like to you?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 4

Kurn / / blogging, midnight, patches, ramblings

Welcome, one and all, to Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump — actually on a Sunday! :)

Topic 1: 12.0.5

Gonna be honest, I really don’t care much for this patch.

I tried the void assaults — boring.

I tried the ritual sites — less boring, but still boring.

Haven’t messed with Decimus’ stuff yet. In part, because I don’t have anything except maybe my bow that is already upgraded to 6/6 Hero.

Hide and Seek Decor Duels: apparently, Track Humanoid worked for this. Which is hilarious to me, as a hunter. But also, zero interest in this. (It was hotfixed.)

Fishing: Listen, I like fishing. I don’t know that I want to bother with spearfishing, etc. I’ll probably give it a try, though.

Marksmanship Hunter: I had to partly respec due to the partial refund of talent points I was given, but I didn’t take Explosive Shot. I should probably research things and respec appropriately, but I don’t know that I need Explosive Shot? Again?

Decor stuff/Housing: All I really care about at the moment is using Decor to make money, so most of this doesn’t affect me.

So… really, it’s all kind of meh to me at the moment.

Topic 2: Gold

When I hit about 1.7 million gold, I bought my next token, for about 235k gold. I’m now back up to 1.6 million and have used my token. I’m making decent money, but it’s not consistent. I need to look at making more cash more reliably. I’m way too reliant on concentration to make top-level potions and flasks at the moment. And I’m not using a lot of my other crafting professions to make good-quality gear, but I am getting recipes pretty regularly with moxie.

What stuff are you selling lately?

Topic 3: Bugs

Tell me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot.

That’s how it feels. Reading through the hotfix notes makes me chuckle and also just shake my head. How do these things get through whatever passes as “quality assurance” these days? Do they even have quality assurance at Blizzard presently? Because it really doesn’t feel like it. Like, what the hell is this patch note?

Valeera is no longer unwilling to attack Poison Dart Frog or Giant Cursed Bullfrog.

… why would she have been unwilling to attack the frogs? Why is she so poorly coded? Or what about this one?

Pandaren characters who boost during the intro sequence will now be able to port to their houses.

??? How on earth does a boost during the intro mean that they couldn’t port to their houses?

I know part of it is spaghetti code. This has got to be a vast codebase that dates all the way back to the early 2000s. I’m sure there’s still some code there that has been untouched since Alpha versions of Vanilla WoW. So I assume that’s part of it, right? But still, that’s where QA should come in.

I don’t develop software for the masses myself, although I do know how to program and read code in a variety of languages (PHP, JavaScript, Python). I have, however, spent the last decade of my life working for various SaaS companies (Software as a Service), so I see up close and personal how software is built. I know that the product team has to communicate their needs to the development team. The development team does the hard work of research and coding. Then, theoretically (although this does get skipped out on a lot), a quality assurance team tests the potential release for bugs, including regressions (which are bugs that were squashed previously, but can sometimes return for various reasons). Once internal testing is complete, you then get some public users to beta test it and development continues to fix any bugs the beta testers have found. Meanwhile, marketing is getting ready to push out a ton of, well, marketing about the latest and greatest, support is working on documentation and stuff to ensure people know how to make things work, and everything goes live when the new version goes live.

Or, at least that’s how it’s supposed to go.

As Helmuth von Moltke the Elder wrote in 1871, “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”

And it’s true. Sometimes you have to roll things back because something happened once everyone got access to something and something went horribly awry. Sometimes a bug that wasn’t part of testing anything shows up and you need to hotfix it. All of that is totally normal.

What I posit is not totally normal is the frequency with which these WoW bugs occur. Not only that, but the type of bugs that occur. If it has to do with the new content, QA didn’t do its job.

So the track humanoids issue in the Decor Duel? Bad QA.

The Pandarens boosting thing? That was assuredly not part of testing at all, which is why it’s having to be hotfixed. My theory on this is that when they introduced housing, something in it is tied to character creation. And character creation gets interfered with by boosting. Not only that, but Pandaren are special, because they are neutral until the end of their intro quests, right? So if this only happened to the Pandaren, we can make the following assumptions:

1) Housing relies on character creation to some extent, which makes sense — someone cannot have a home without a character.

2) So somewhere in character creation, they (now, or at least since housing was introduced at the tail-end of The War Within) tie … I don’t know, a housing and decor database to the character. So let’s say that as the character is created and various database tables are created, we now create a housing one and a decor one. (Again, this is a guess.)

3) At some point, long ago, they introduced character boosting. I believe you can create a new character who will automatically be the boosted level. So they had to interrupt character creation at a specific moment to prevent having to start out at a level 1 or whatever.

4) When creating housing, we can assume that the link has not been fully established for a character who is not one of the two factions, Alliance and Horde. We can assume that the boosting track goes down one path instead of reusing the original code, lest boosting not give you your boosted toon.

5) End result: Pandaren who are boosted, who (presumably) get their faction at a different point than fresh-rolled Pandaren, cannot port to their plot because something went wonky on character creation.

Again, that’s just my assumption. But we can see within that assumption where things went wrong. Based on those suppositions, I believe that whoever implemented housing at character creation did not think about boosted characters beyond a regular boosted character who starts out as a Horde or Alliance player. Most Pandaren (except maybe those who, like NeutralAgent on YouTube) choose a faction eventually. But it’s not immediate in most cases.

So while I will say that such use-cases are more difficult to think of, someone should be thinking about it.

And what really gets me about this is that so many of the players of this game could think of the use-cases that could break things. Like the Track Humanoids thing. Or could at least question whether or not character creation for a boosted Pandaren is similar enough to other characters. You know what I mean? Often, our knowledge of the game is just so deep and so broad that we can see these problems coming a mile away.

I think that’s part of the frustration players have with the game. If we could see something coming a mile away, why can’t the devs?

There are a couple of possibilities that come to mind, here.

The first is that the devs don’t have deep game knowledge. Seeing how much turnover (and how many have been laid off) means that people are relatively new to the codebase. And while we can probably assume that a certain percentage of Blizzard employees are fans of Blizzard’s games, they may not be assigned to work on the game they enjoy the most. So it’s entirely possible a large chunk of WoW people don’t have a ton of long-term game knowledge.

The other thing that comes to mind is that people are relying entirely too much on AI for coding. It is mandatory for Microsoft employees (which Blizzard employees are) to use AI. Mandatory. As in, you don’t use it, you’re likely going to be out of a job.

Do you think Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT or whatever “AI” model they use (probably Copilot) has any game knowledge whatsoever? Do you think that an AI model can truly wonder about the possibility that if someone is appearing as, I don’t know, a chair, their character would still show up as a humanoid? Do you think that an AI model can contemplate and reason through why Pandarens might have a problem with porting to their homes?

The answer is no. Even AI models that are trained on that codebase cannot necessarily make the links between seemingly disparate items the way a real human can. It may know the exact chance of looting a Skullflame Shield off a random mob in Silithus, but it cannot link these examples together on its own. It would need a real human being to force it to review the code for all these things and ask if there are differences, or to point out the differences, at which point the AI will undoubtedly say something like “great context, thanks!”

A third possibility comes to mind — it could well be both of these.

All right, enough ranting for me for now. What would you like to hear me ramble about next week? And what do you think about patch 12.0.5?

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 3

Kurn / / blogging, midnight

Hey, hey, gang! Look! I actually had time on Sunday to post a Sunday Brain Dump! HOORAY!

Topic 1: Valeera — again

I had to do it. I had to download an addon to mute her stupid ass. It’s called Mute Valeera (Delves) by Italistqt. It’s phenomenal. I was halfway through my first delve after installing the addon and I was like… this is awfully quiet. AND IT WAS AMAZING. Here’s the link:

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mute-valeera-delves

Topic 2: 90 — again. Again.

I’ve really only been concerned about getting Kurn up to 90, which I did ages ago. For the other toons, I’ve been herbing and mining my way there, slowly but surely. And for the first time in a very long while, my second character to max level was not either my paladin or my shaman. For years, it was my pally — my raiding toon, Madrana. It hasn’t been her for a long time, though. The regular toon who usually makes it to max second is generally my shaman, who is both an herbalist and a miner. So I just go out on him and go to town farming.

But this time? This time it was my mage, who is a miner and a tailor. I’ve been farming mobs for Sunfire Silk and Arcanoweave and as I do so, all kinds of ores spawn, so I’ll take a break, let mobs respawn, mine a bit, then go back to it. So now my mage is 90. Hilarious. I am SO BAD at my mage. I still think I’m potentially worse at my shaman, though.

Anyway, the shaman is at like 87 now, but the druid just dinged 86! Beware, shammy! Druid’s gonna catch ya!

… and let us not forget that many of my toons have been 90 before. And 100. And 110. And 120. Like, yes, I know, we cannot be at level 300 or anything like that, that’s way too daunting for a fresh player on a new toon. But like, Kurn would be something like level 160 at this point. 90 in MoP, then figure 10 levels each for WoD, Legion, BfA (all of which happened), but then ALSO for SL, DF, TWW and now Midnight.

What’s kind of neat is the warband mentor thing, so like, my levelling is going to start skyrocketing soon, becaue for each toon you get to 90, the more bonus experience you get on your other warband toons.

Topic 3: Skinning

I can summon the Grand Beast in Voidstorm!

Hilariously, I still have some crappy RNG on the majestic skinning bits. Better than it was, but not great by any means. Still, I’m pleased to have that checked off and I can sell a couple Majestic Hides here and there.

Okay, that’s it for me for now. What are you up to? Do anything interesting this week? What do you want me to talk about next week?

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 2

Kurn / / gold, ramblings, skinning

Well, time got away from me and so here we are, again, on Monday, posting a Sunday Brain Dump. Whoops!

Topic 1: Valeera

I really didn’t think a delve companion could be more annoying than Brann. I really, truly did not think that was possible. AND YET… Not only do I not like her emotes, but she will occasionally (frequently?) run into a room to harvest a node of herbs or ore and PULL THE ROOM. Great. Thanks, Valeera. I was totally ready for that.

Then, because I have been playing this game off and on for 20+ years, I know how to pull mobs back so that we don’t get other mobs, like patrols or whatever. So I will often set my pet to passive, autoshot one mob and then take care of that large and ugly thing in a safe area. Valeera, on the other hand, does not like my pro strat and will leap into the fray, fighting the mob basically where they started. 🙄 This has, on more than one occasion, led to multiple mobs pulling. Thanks, Valeera. Super helpful. 😒

The other thing she does that drives me absolutely bananas is that she yells “STRIKE!” right after something dies. Strike? Strike what? What the hell, dude? Blizzard, tell me you coded Valeera entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded Valeera entirely with Copilot. 😟

And none of that even touches on the fact that she will occasionally just… not fight? She leaps in and out of the fray, seemingly randomly. She also breaks my traps EVERY CHANCE SHE GETS. She is the absolute worst and, I cannot believe I’m saying this, I wish I had Brann as a choice.

I will say this, she is not the worst healer. She’s not the best, but she’s not the worst. With my pet, Fluffy the Turtle as my tank, Kurn as DPS and Valeera as off-DPS/off-heals, I can do a fair amount. It’s just painful is all.

What do you hate most about Valeera?

Topic 2: Gear

Look, I’m glad that we have other ways beyond raiding or even doing dungeons (and mythic dungeons) to get gear. I’m really glad. My characters have traditionally lagged wayyyyy behind in gear. The whole Adventurer to Veteran to Champion to Hero thing is stupid though. IMHO. I miss when you got a piece of gear and it was good and you were like “nice!” and would try to get another piece of gear. Now it’s like “okay, I got a Champion piece so I may as well upgrade it because who knows when I’ll get a Hero piece” and like… what? Really? This is, to be fair, my first real go-around with this. I never really got anything higher than Champion (and on Kurn, at that, no one else) in past expansions. Like I said, I’m glad that we can get good gear from things other than raiding, other than dungeons, etc. But dear God, sometimes I miss the very simple “kill boss, hope item drops, hope the hunter doesn’t ninja it, yay got the item” routine of getting gear.

Also, I am so not into the modifiers that were used at some point, like heroic, but I know things got even weirder somewhere in there, with like half-step upgrades and stuff?

What’s your favourite way to get loot?

Topic 3: Bad Guesses

So when the expansion started, I looked at the skinning tree and thought that the diffuser skill would be useful. After all, motes of everything are used in basically everything, so I thought that was the wise way to go.

In fact, I did not realize just how abundant the motes would be. I enjoy throwing diffusers on virtually everything I skin, but this is not the way to get the big bucks in skinning. I am finally getting close to maxing out the Talented Tracker section. I can make four of the lures and usually end up fishing for all the fish almost every day, and then I go spawn the majestic beasts and often get absolutely zero majestic items for my trouble. Next week, I’ll be able create the Grand Beast Lure, so that’ll be fun.

But it got me thinking about how good I am at predicting some things in-game and how bad I am at predicting others. Many moons ago, there were these green gems, I think it was Talasites, and in a forthcoming patch, a new cut was going to be released with stam and resilience (for PVP) and I was like “OMG, this will make a FORTUNE!”

Reader, it did not, in fact, make a fortune. 😢

I was, however, pretty good at predicting things like nerfs and buffs and stuff when it came to raid encounters.

Honestly, I would take the inverse these days, and I would rather be able to properly predict what’s going to make money versus the meta-like things in the game. 😅

What about you, are you good or bad at predicting in-game things?

And that’s it for Brain Dump 2. Anything you folks want me to discuss next week? Let me know!

Kurn’s Sunday (Monday) Brain Dump 1

Kurn / / cataclysm, healing, midnight, professions, ramblings

Hey there, folks! Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in this very galaxy, I used to do answers to search terms here on my blog. I’d look up the search terms that brought people here and I’d answer them as best I could.

I don’t have those kinds of analytics these days, but I do still have a blog and a brain, so I thought I’d use the combination to brain dump on 3-5 topics every Sunday. (Who me? Starting on Monday? Yes.)

So here, for your reading enjoyment, is Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 1!

Topic 1: Patron Orders in Midnight

I recently hit the 1.5 million gold mark on my bank toon. Most of my characters have somewhere between 1500 and 2000 gold on them, and if it’s over that, I send the money to my bank toon. (Gone are my days of trusting anything remotely related to a “bank” to hold my cash.) When I think about what I’ve done in order to get that much money (half a million profit in three weeks), a lot of it comes down to fulfilling Patron Orders on my various toons. I have like 7 characters I regularly do orders on, plus a couple others I’m pulling into the rotation.

Here’s what I do, pretty much every day, on all of them:

I log in, check the orders and then do them in this priority sequence:

– Are all the materials provided? Do it if I know the recipe, regardless of the payment.

– If not all of the materials are provided and I know the recipe and I have the materials on-hand, do I get 2 points of knowledge? If so, do it. If not, do I get 1 point of knowledge? Check to see if other orders will reward me 2 points of knowledge instead of 1. If they don’t, then fulfill the order.

– I also prioritize first-time crafts, assuming I have the materials or they are easily obtained.

– Unless the order gives 2 points of knowledge and a nice reward, I don’t fulfill it if it requires using more than 200 concentration to get to max quality. (a rune, a thing to help craft that goes for a thousand or so gold, etc)

– After all the orders for that character’s professions are done, I send everything that’s not soulbound, in terms of rewards, to my bank toon.

I then rinse and repeat for virtually all my characters.

By the end of 15-20 minutes, I have probably gained 1-4 points of knowledge for each character, I have gained a few trade goods (ore, herbs, leather, scales, rarer trade goods too), and each character probably has earned 30-60 moxie. Most importantly, most of my characters probably have at least 800 concentration.

It is okay not to fulfill a wildly expensive order, even if it’s a first craft, even if it’s got a nice reward, if it’s going to cost you 5k to get the materials. Don’t sweat it.

* Fun fact: if you get a max-level vial as a saved reagent while crafting something alchemical, you can probably just sell that sucker by itself for a stupid amount of gold.

Topic 2: Tuesday Prep

On Monday evenings and Tuesday afternoons, I start crafting for reset day in North America. Tuesday nights are huge for selling of consumables. I will typically do the following, especially since most of my characters will have most of their concentration:

– Flask-specced alchemist (Madrana): Will craft once or twice to get 2-4 flasks (pre-multicraft). Multicraft is, of course, the way to make money on max-level flasks. Nocturnal Lotuses are still outrageously expensive, so I save them up throughout the week from farming and can sell a couple of extras for over 2000 gold each on Tuesdays.

– Potion-specced alchemist: Will craft 3-4 times to get 15-20 max-ranked potions. We’re talking mana potions, potions of recklessness and Light’s Potential, whatever I really have mats for without buying anything. Again, multicraft is excellent here.

– Enchanter: will craft 2-3 times to get some max-level Oil of Dawn or Thalassian Phoenix Oil.

If I’m feeling extra motivated, I’ll cook a bunch of food of Kurn, too, like Royal Roast or Impossibly Royal Roast.

Last Tuesday, I made over 50k in the span of like 2 hours while all this stuff sold.

Topic 3: Cleansing

I went Timewalking to heal Cataclysm dungeons this past week. Here’s a couple of videos.

Bar none, the thing I hate most about it, apart from running with randos whom I despise within three seconds of the start of the run, is that Cleanse is on an 8-second cooldown.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH WE HAD TO CLEANSE/DISPELL/ETC IN CATACLYSM??? It was a freaking lot more than every EIGHT SECONDS. I know, I can hear you now, prioritize, Kurn! Yeah, well I was trained for like 7 years to cleanse all the things as soon as I could unless it was……. whatever that damn warlock debuff was. Oh, right, UNSTABLE AFFLICTION. I need to be able to cleanse all the things. I was GOOD at it. And having an 8-second cooldown on CLEANSE drives me absolutely crazy.

And there you have it, folks, my first Sunday (Monday, in this case) Brain Dump.

What do you want to hear about next week?

Preparing for Midnight

Kurn / / expansions, facepalm, midnight, professions

I’ve been rereading some of my old posts, from before The War Within launched. Man, I was so excited. I’m looking forward to Midnight, but I’m not as excited as I was for TWW. Gosh, I wonder if that has anything to do with the Great Blizzard Bank Heist? Nahhhhhhhhhh… 😂

That said, I have always done better with that whole “preparation” thing if I forced myself to write stuff down or blog about it. Like there were several times in the past where I would wonder about X or Y and would pose that as a question to myself in a blog post and then test it out or look it up. And so that’s sort of where we’re at today.

Professions

All right. Looking back at my prep for The War Within, I was, shall we say, a little overzealous and perhaps more than a little ambitious.

This time, it’s a little less so. I think.

Maybe.

First of all, even though I rolled a goblin shaman for TWW (for the discounts), I hardly touched that character. She’s still 73. So whatever. I’m not dealing with her. So the Baby Shaman is out.

This brings me down to 10 characters. This is still a Lot, but I don’t plan to level most of them until way later. The primary reason I have them is because I want all the professions, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

I do, in fact, have them all covered, Herbalism and Mining (x4), Alchemy (x3), Inscription (x2), then Skinning, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting, Tailoring, Enchanting and Engineering (all x1). Plus Kurn regularly levels up Cooking and Fishing. My shaman can also fish since he’s generally out in the world, collecting All the Herbs and Ores, so why not also fish as needed?

So why the focus on professions? Well, last time around, it was because of Profession Accessories and Profession Equipment. So that’s still a valid reason. With all my toons, I can make virtually any base-level equipment or accessory for any other profession. Here’s a spreadsheet showing what can make what for whom.

(The spreadsheet did not take an inconsequential amount of time. Eesh. But I know I’ll be referring to it come Thursday night!)

The other reason, of course, is Decor.

Listen, I’m not a huge Housing person. It’s fine. I just don’t care that much. It’s almost like pet battling — I don’t participate, but I sure as heck will use other people’s interest in it to make gold. The difference is I have a house and I have decorated a tiny bit, but I don’t ever pet battle or level pets or any of that. I will farm a rare pet, but I don’t do anything else.

Anyway, I’m doing quite a bit more with regards to Decor.

Many of my characters have had their professions for years. Decades, even. Madrana has never dropped Alchemy (from her day 1 in Vanilla) and has never dropped Jewelcrafting (from the first day of Burning Crusade — I spent wayyyyyyyy too long suffering in Exodar to ever drop it). Kurn is the same with Leatherworking, but Skinning has been a yo-yo affair with mining, or it used to be. I think it was when you could level via picking herbs and mining (Cataclysm?) that I got my shaman going with Herbalism and Mining and endeavoured to keep Kurn a Skinner. Anyway, despite some of that longevity on some of my older characters, some of my characters have either new professions or only have professions for a specific expansion or two.

Let’s look at my warlock. My warlock has Classic through War Within Engineering (barring Shadowlands, which I did not play). This is because, when I boosted him, you still had to go through all the hundreds of levels from 1 in Classic up through whatever in other expansions. You could do it through just using Ghost Iron Ore, but I was also levelling Blacksmithing on him. So it was worth it to farm the old school mats. Which meant a lot of farming.

But I don’t like playing a warlock very much, so I dropped Blacksmithing and picked up Mining on him, so I can level by gathering without doing too much incinerating or whatever I’m supposed to be doing.

As a result, my grandbaby paladin (so not Madrana, not the paladin on Skywall, but the one I rolled in Pandaria remix) has Mining and Blacksmithing. But he’s a new character. Well, new-ish.

So he doesn’t have Classic Blacksmithing. Or Outland. Northrend. Etc. Or he didn’t. He does now. (And I’m working through Battle for Azeroth now, while still doing secrets of Blacksmithing for Legion…?)

Why on earth am I levelling Blacksmithing? For Decor. Every single main profession has at least a couple of Decor items they can craft in each expansion. Vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cata, etc, etc, etc.

But because this character did not get to level Blacksmithing outside of Dragonflight and TWW, I’m having to go back, because I want the ability to craft virtually every piece of craftable Decor. (I put my foot down at levelling all my professions in Shadowlands. At least for now.)

The rush on Decor in this pre-patch period has astonished me. Not only have so many people pre-purchased the expansion, but they are dropping serious amounts of gold on Decor.

In the last two weeks, I’ve made almost 260k gold. Some of that is old-school mats (I’ll get to those in a sec!), but a lot of it is just simple crafts from various expansions. I sold some Suramar Fences today. I sold something from Classic Blacksmithing the other day. Every single day, I sell something. Here’s what I’ve been selling.TSM Ledger, showing 9049 items sold, 259,837 gold total.

So that is almost 260k in 14 days and while I do check my auctions a couple times a day, they generally just go, eventually. (You will see some old school stuff in there. Like I said, we’ll talk about that in a sec.)

Ultimately, my goals are as follows:

  • level Blacksmithing (and Inscription) to the point where I can get Decor recipes for those two in the vast majority of WoW expansions prior to early access (BS is almost done, working harder on Inscription)
  • be able to craft profession equipment and accessories fast for me, my alts and, of course, Ye Olde Auction House
  • make money in the expansion with profession equipment/accessories and Decor

Old School Stuff: Money & Nostalgia

Folks.

Levelling crafting professions in Burning Crusade is, no shit, my hand to God, the fucking worst. I remember it not being great, but oh my god, trying to power-level Blacksmithing through Burning Crusade content nearly caused me to throw my computer out the window.

There’s just like a sort of dead zone in the middle of it where nothing was orange to me and I didn’t have the rep (THE REP!) to buy certain recipes that would get me through it. I ended up running MAGISTER’S TERRACE multiple times to try to get a drop from Kael! It was awful.

The ignonimy of not having the rep was insulting. INSULTING. Madrana is so far into Exalted with all of those factions, any of them would fall over themselves trying to give her the recipes.

Eventually I ended up getting Friendly with the Scryers and bought a limited-number recipe in Zangarmarsh and it worked out, but…

… I had to sit there on Elemental Plateau and farm Motes of Fire.

Friends, I have spent a lot of time in my life on Elemental Plateau, farming Motes of Fire, Motes of Air, fishing up Motes of Water, but holy crap, when Primal Fire is 700-800g EACH, you gotta do what you gotta do. (Fun fact: transmuting Air to Fire is a possibility, but it still has a once per day cooldown! The expansion came out over 19 years ago and that transmute still has a cooldown!?)

I made it out of Burning Crusade content on the grandbaby paladin in the end, swearing I never want to set foot there again, although I need to do so for my scribe, now.

But as if that weren’t bad enough, after Burning Crusade comes Wrath!

Folks, Cobalt deposits feel like they hardly exist. At all. I’d go farming for an hour and come back with like, 30 Cobalt. 30! And I’m flying around the starting zones and Zul’Drak and and and nothing. I can only assume other people have the same bright idea I do.

I finally, finally managed to get out of Wrath and things were way better for Cata and Pandaria.

The Zandalari Warbringers and Zandalari Warscouts are godsends for all kinds of materials from that era. They’re all one-shottable by me in my crappy gear and all I do is turn on RareScanner and it makes the noise and there we go, I kill the things. Can’t complain about those mobs at all. It’s fun to camp them or fly around from spawn to spawn and see if I can kill multiples in a row.

Draenor, OTOH, is a piece of shit. Actually, so is Legion. But Draenor requires me to build a whole other garrison and then have secrets of blacksmithing to do this nonsense to buy the stuff. That’s a major pain. (I am not looking forward to Inscription here.)

But Legion! LEGION! Just to get to level 80 Blacksmithing, I had to learn Demonsteel! And what a pain in the ass that was! I even had to do a dungeon I’d literally never done before! Super rude. And of course, when I’m one point away from 80 (which is when I can learn the Decor patterns), I had to go through thirty crafts of Demonsteel Bars. Do you know what that is? That’s 30 Leystone Ore and 60 Felslate Ore!

Anyway, while it was a lot easier to get from point A to point B without crafting 10834 greens without getting a single skill point, it was gated in other ways. I don’t mind the talents for Dragonflight, The War Within and Midnight. That’s an interesting way to gate things off. But oh man, it’s been a rough few days for my poor grandbaby paladin.

All of that said, go farm Motes of Fire in Burning Crusade content. They are worth a fortune right now.

Also, it’s very helpful to have to be in older zones because you can collect a crapton of lumber. Do it on a druid if you can. Flight form FTW.

In terms of nostalgia, it was interesting. I know Nagrand like the back of my hand. I know most of Outlands really well. Same with Wrath content. (I did spend a bit of my mining time just keeping an eye out for a certain proto-drake.) But as I moved into Draenor and Legion, I moved from rock-solid knowledge of things to wondering wtf was going on. How did I get a garrison? Where are my trainers? What FREAKING PORTAL do I even take out of Stormwind?!

And then I’d come across a spot where I remember farming for leather, or doing laps for herbs and ore. I’d remember chasing that damn moose all over the place. I’d smile as I remembered collecting large groups of basilisks and AOEing them down on my hunter and then skinning them all.

It’s been an interesting, if unintended, trip down memory lane over the last week or so.

Oh.

And this is possibly the most hilarious thing of them all. While I was levelling the grandbaby pally’s Classic Blacksmithing (it was a slog, but it wasn’t too bad), I found myself needing to learn how to smelt Dark Iron Ore. And in order to smelt one bar, you need eight ore. So I went to BRD, I went to Searing Gorge, and I went to Molten Core.

Now, I didn’t want to kill any bosses in MC so I could reset the instance.

Got past Lucifron and Magmadar (and got some ore from behind the doggy), crept past Gehennas and Garr and into Geddon’s chamber. Geddon has quite the quick patrol, so I mined some ore here, ran over there, and then made the mistake of hitting Blade of Justice which leaves a Consecration on the ground behind it. I don’t even know what talent does that, but I was like, okay, yeah, I should have 8 seconds before Geddon comes up this hill in his patrol.

Friends, does this Consecration last the 8 seconds I’m used to?

No.

It burns, BURNS, with righteousness, for like 13 seconds.

Geddon got the last tick of it and I was trying to bubble/hearth, but I have some damn thing that reflects damage on me and Geddon died.

I sighed and rolled my eyes and said, out loud to myself, hah, watch him drop the bindings.

Bindings of the Windseeker? SERIOUSLY?

AND THEN HE DID.

(Garr did not, when I went back to kill him.)

I have spent enough time in Molten Core in my life that I have seen a lot of shit happen. I’ve seen a warrior challenging shout all the Rag adds and fall through the floor, killing himself and the adds. I’ve seen what’s out the window. Like I know the instance, okay?

I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever seen either of the bindings drop.

Wild. Just wild. This game, dumb as it sometimes, never fails to amaze me. Whether it’s ludicrous prices on Primal Fires, dead spots in levelling professions, the worst-ever RNG, the most random of drops, I am always legitimately amazed by this game on a regular basis.

What are your plans for Midnight? Or what’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen in the game? Let me know down below.

Howdy, Strangers

Kurn / / facepalm, midnight, ramblings

Well, it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last posted here. <brushes dust off of things> Pardon the mess, and the length of my absence.

I stopped playing WoW for about a year. About the guild bank stuff.

My views on playing WoW…

And then, after enough time had passed, I realized that I had unconsciously made some major changes to my views on WoW. (And yes, these are just my views.)

First, subscribing to the World of Warcraft, if it gives me enjoyment, is fine. This is especially true if I don’t give them any of my own money. I liken it to how I deal with Netflix. For years and years, Netflix was the one subscription I never went without. And then, they started making decisions that I didn’t like. They started cancelling shows I loved. As a direct result of that, I can (and do) go months and months without being subscribed. Then I resub for a month, maybe two, then I unsub again. I can absolutely treat WoW like that. And I have. When my game time ran out in late 2024, I let it go. At the time, I was fairly certain I never wanted to play the game again. (Do not get me started about the data loss; I am still very angry about it.) However, I found myself drawn back to content about WoW, particularly the Goldbound series by Pathalerix on YouTube.

The sheer joy that Pathalerix seems to have for playing the game was, well, infectious. I’m still mad. I’m still not going to trust Blizzard worth a damn. Microsoft can eat shit. (Or is that Microslop? hahaha) But why deprive myself of something I want to do when I don’t have to directly give them money and I can sustain myself on gold? And if I don’t want to do it any longer, I don’t have to. The fact that I no longer run a guild, no longer raid, etc, means that a WoW sub is no longer vital to me. It hasn’t been for a very long time. And so, I resubbed. I even started my own “locked” challenge. (I have exactly one episode up and then I have hours and hours and hours of footage that I have to edit and I hate editing sooooooo… Anyway. I’m sure I’ll get back to it eventually.)

Since resubbing, I’ve let the subscription lapse already. 😂 I wasn’t playing actively, so I just let the sub go. And then I resubbed a week or maybe two ago. Again, using gold/WoW tokens.

Second, I will admit I changed my mind and bought the base version of Midnight — again, with gold. I’m actually planning to upgrade to the top version with gold at some point over the next couple of weeks. It comes with 3-day early access to Midnight and a month of gametime, so I’ll probably do that to try to make tons of gold at the start of the expansion. After all, the more gold I make, the more I can do with it. I need about three tokens to purchase the upgrade. I would only need two tokens, but there’s that pesky sales tax in Canada and Quebec, so I do actually need three. And tokens are about 300k gold at the moment, so we’re looking at about 900,000 gold. I have that much, I just want to build up a bit more of a reserve before I blow that much cash.

Basically, as long as I can pay for things in gold, whatever. I will play if I want to. I will not play (and let my sub expire) if I don’t want to play or if I’m not having fun.

However, I will not trust these bastards. Nothing is forever. They clearly do not care about data integrity. So long as I accept that risk, so long as I understand that a failure can wipe out my whole account, so long as I don’t count on things remaning the same (in terms of my account and characters), I will enjoy what I do in the moment. Why? In part because I’m going to pay with gold. I won’t spend my own real money on this company. Or others in the Microsoft family. I don’t respect them, I don’t trust them, and they don’t respect me or the time and money I’ve given them over the years. So that’s it. It’s a transactional relationship we’ll have, with fake money (gold) paying the way for those transactions.

Speaking of Microsoft…

Oh, man, I am done with Microsoft products. Barring what I have to use for work 🤮 (and Minecraft, which I bought over a decade ago), I’m just SO done with that company’s products. And I stayed true to my word (no pun intended!) — last summer, I swapped over to Linux on my main desktop. (I have a MacBook laptop that’s mine and a work MacBook as well.) So to hell with Windows. I won’t ever own a Windows machine again. I’m enjoying Ubuntu (it’s actually Kubuntu, so Ubuntu with KDE) and I’m very comfortable with it as my main personal computer.

The only thing I miss about Windows is Adobe products. I love Photoshop. (I know, GIMP is available and an option.) And in order to actually edit things I need some kind of video editor like, you know Adobe Premiere. So editing is made more difficult by virtue of having to use my 4-year-old MacBook Pro to edit videos on my work setup versus doing it on my desktop. It doesn’t make it any easier to do a task I dislike in the first place.

Still, everything else is fine. Just about everything else I use works beautifully. Steam games run wonderfully. I truly can’t complain about switching to Linux. And it feels particularly good to have swapped away from Windows after decades (decades!) of being a Microsoft operating system user. I started out with like, DOS 5.0 in like 1990? 1991? I remember DOS 6.0 being a Big Deal. Here’s what my first PC looked like — 286, 1 meg of RAM, 40 meg hard drive. And a 2400 baud modem. 😂

So way to go, Microsoft. You drove away a user who had spent thirty-five years on your operating systems. Not just because of the Great Blizzard Bank Heist, but also because Windows 11 is a piece of AI slop, plus all the ads, plus the fact I can’t trust you, particularly after the Recall announcement.

So what now?

Well, I’m planning to play Midnight until I get bored. I was overly ambitious with The War Within when it came to professions. I did not do even 75% of what I had planned with my toons. So what I’m hoping to do.

Before the launch:

  • Level a couple toons to 80 (Madrana is 80 by virtue of the character boost with the purchase of Midnight)
  • Make another like 200k then buy 3 tokens for the upgrade
  • Poke a bit at the beta, see if I can make any quick, fun-sized videos

 

After the launch:

  • Bring toons to the new city (Silvermoon, IIRC?)
  • Get Kurn out into the world and sell leather and various drops immediately (may just DE greens and sell the dust)
  • Get my double-gatherer shaman out into the world and gather and sell stuff
  • Focus on getting all kinds of profession equipment/accessories craftable so I can sell them (and make them for my own toons)
  • Get Treatises discovered/learned for my scribe, although I may change my main scribe to be my druid rather than my evoker

 

So yeah, I think that’s what I’m aiming for. Oh, and like, juggling life and work and stuff too, of course. ;)

What about you? What are you up to?

More Blizzard Bank Heist Stuff

Kurn / / facepalm, the war within

Well, I’ve been a bit busy. I posted an update video last week.

And I just posted this to the thread on the US forums.

Dear Blizzard,

I’m known online as Kurn. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, off and on (though mostly on), since 2005. I have served as a guild officer in multiple guilds, a healing lead, a raid leader and a guild leader. I have run a blog about WoW and my adventures within it since 2007. For a time, it was the most popular blog dealing with holy paladin stuff, through much of Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. I had two podcasts to do with World of Warcraft as well. Finally, I have a small YouTube channel with almost 300 videos, most of which have to do with WoW or other Blizzard properties, which was started in 2006.

To be clear, I’m sharing this information so that you can understand that I am a long-time player who cares about WoW and I am someone who has given back to the community — and continues to do so.

I am writing this post today because of the guild bank issues that continue to plague hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of guild banks. There are other issues that also need to be discussed, such as guild bank logs, warband bank issues, void bank issues and problems with reputation, not to mention weekly quests not resetting, though I have much less information on those. As such, I’ll keep my discussion to the guild bank issues, while bearing in mind that there are many systems that have been adversely affected since prior to the launch of The War Within. I did want to note that apparently the warband bank issues are related to the visibility of the items, but this does not seem to be the case with guild bank items.

TIMELINE OF EVENTS

– On August 13/14 (depending on region), Patch 11.0.2 was released.
– In the patch notes for this release, it noted that Cross-Realm Guild bank functionality was now available.
– Shortly after this release, reports started to roll in that items were missing from guild banks.

US thread in the Bug Report forum:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-what-happened/1918643

EU thread in the Customer Support forum:
https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-items-gone/528709

Of note, the US thread did not receive any responses from any Blizzard representatives, while the EU thread received several, mostly from Felranys, and many of these were apologetic in nature. These were mostly along the lines of “I’m sorry I don’t have any new news, details have not yet been shared with us”.

– On September 20th, Linxy posted threads in both the EU and US forums, which was the first the US regions heard anything from a Blizzard representative:
US: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-update/1963451
EU: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-update/538628

In it, they said:

Due to how some of the data was lost, we’ve reached a point where the result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items for them.

The important thing to note here is that this heavily implies that some guilds will have an incomplete restoration, yet the rest will have a complete one. However, based on the responses since then, it seems that the reverse is true. Some guilds had an incomplete restoration, while the rest have had nothing restored.

For myself, my personal guild bank is the one that’s affected. I received the following, after losing hundreds of patterns and entire tabs being wiped clean:

2x Pink Mageweave shirts
1x Wildvine Potion recipe
1x Wildthorn Mail recipe
1x Schematic: Dark Iron Rifle

Not even the items shown in the bank logs themselves as being deposited (and not withdrawn) were restored. I’ve read hundreds of comments and hundreds more forum posts from others who are worse off than me.

– On September 23, the US thread in the Bug Report forum was closed without any response.
– On October 2, the EU thread was closed with this response from Yryadorne, directing people to the general EU thread:

https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-items-gone/528709/732

– Almost two months after the patch, restorations still seem to be going out, though I still have yet to read about anyone being fully restored. (As a point of data, I have not received anything since that one mail in late September.)

RESTORATION OF ITEMS… AND TRUST

In my 19 years of playing World of Warcraft, I have never, ever, ever run into a situation with my character or a guildmate’s character where Blizzard did not do the right thing. As any of my former guildmates will attest to, I have opened a ridiculous number of tickets over the years to ask for Blizzard to fix something. A guildmate of mine had lost her Vashj vial for the Vials of Eternity quest (which led to the Hand of A’dal title). I have screenshots of me standing in Mount Hyjal, arguing passionately for my guildmate, and getting stomped by the incoming boss because I was talking to a GM about it. Ultimately, the GM discovered that my guildmate had accidentally dropped the quest — which had deleted her vial. Totally get it. It was my guildmate’s fault. The GM did the right thing in telling me that she had just picked up the quest a few days ago. The collaboration and communication from the GM in question was outstanding.

Years later, there was a bug in terms of normal/heroic switching in Blackrock Descent in Cataclysm, which meant that my raiding guild was stuck in two separate instances of BRD. Once again, I reached out to Blizzard for help and, once again, they did so. We went off to do Bastion of Twilight and the next raid night, we were properly synchronized to the right Blackrock Descent instance.

Never, in my long history in WoW, have I been let down by Blizzard the way I have been when it comes to the guild bank items disappearing.

(Yes, I know the GMs and community managers are different than the developers, and that the GMs are limited in what they can do. I’m using the GMs as proxies for my experiences with Blizzard as a whole. They take a lot of crap from users and they deserve better than they get.)

As a player, it is gut-wrenching to look at empty bank tabs where hundreds of items should be. And my items weren’t even all that personal. They were items I collected over more than a decade of play, storing away for a variety of reasons. Some are no longer available in the game. Some are available, but extremely limited in number (dragonscales, for example). And it just flat-out sucks that they’re gone. Part of me wants to trust Blizzard when they say, “we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items”.

As someone who works in tech, though, I can’t trust what Blizzard is saying here. Blizzard has been running this game for more than 20 years (when you count alpha and beta and such). As such, they know how important data integrity is. They know that every byte of data matters. And they probably have PETABYTES of data. One gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. One terabyte is 1024 gigabytes. One petabyte is 1024 terabytes. Blizzard’s data probably is in the realm of petabytes. Worse, that data is always changing. Anytime you vendor a grey or disenchant an item or buy something or upgrade something or put something in the bank or loot something, the data changes. And that’s just inventory. What about levelling up? There’s experience to think about, reputation, how much mana or focus or rage or whatever you have, plus how much health you have. The data is always changing. It is almost never static.

Guild banks are included in that. Pull out 10k gold, deposit a BOE, withdraw a stack of Black Lotuses, drop in a stack of Flasks of Distilled Wisdom. It shifts, it changes. It’s not quite as dynamic as a character’s inventory, but in a large guild, yeah, stuff can be withdrawn or deposited, including repair costs and such.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that, particularly for larger guilds, the state of the guild bank NOW is likely to be very different from the state of the guild bank when the bug occurred.

Let’s say that Blizzard has a snapshot of all the data from right before that maintenance period. The amount of work to reconcile all the changes between Day 0 (when the bug happened) and Day 50-something (which is the period of time we’re at right now) is likely to be A LOT.

So when a Blizzard representative tells me that they “do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items”, that’s where I’m stuck. That’s why I’m still out here making a big deal about this. You want me to believe that the devs who have made (and maintained) this game for 20 years did not make a backup of the game’s data before adding a patch to production servers?

I don’t buy that. Data integrity is vital. Anyone who has ever touched a live database knows that you back it up and, ideally, have another backup for it in another physical location, just in case.

You want me to believe that the devs who have made (and maintained) this game for 20 years did not keep backups of the game’s data for 30/60/90 days after the patch?

Super unlikely to me. Storage is cheap. For a game that just launched an expansion that still has subscription fees, storage is a pittance.

And yes, I know there have been layoffs. I know Blizzard has been affected. I’m saying that at this point, 20 years in, I’m pretty sure that any organization would have very specific processes for maintenance during the application of patches. What if the patch explodes and destroys things? Then they roll back to the backup and try to figure out what went wrong on their dev instances and then they try again. But they always should have the opportunity to roll back.

I’m not saying they should roll back NOW, mind you. I’m just saying that the data absolutely must exist somewhere. It doesn’t make any sense at all that they wouldn’t have this data from mid-August, prior to 11.0.2. That’s where I’m stuck.

Would it be an absolutely incredible amount of work to reconcile the state of guild banks between mid-August and now? Yes. My opinion is that if they have the data (and they should have the data), they can do it.

As such, I think Blizzard is saying one thing to make us think that they cannot restore things when, in my opinion, they are CHOOSING not to do so. And I think that’s a mistake. I’m not just saying that because I’m affected and I will benefit from them restoring the banks. I’m saying it because we’ve already lost trust in Blizzard by virtue of having lost the items in the first place, the possibility that they are able to and choosing not to hits even harder.

Everything in this game is a line in a database. If they won’t restore guild banks, who’s to say that this couldn’t happen to other things? And who’s to say that they won’t restore those other things? I don’t want to lose my Hand of A’dal title. What about my Rhok’delar? What about my Benediction? What about my reputation with, say, Timbermaw Hold? Or the Argent Dawn? What about my Feat of Strength, The Fifth Element? If guild bank items can get wiped like this, what’s to stop something from wiping out these achievements or items or titles? And what’s to stop Blizzard from NOT restoring them?

I get it, they’re not obliged to restore anything. I’ve read their end-user license agreement (EULA). I maintain, though, that there’s a difference between being obliged to do something and choosing to do the right thing. Further, they probably can’t be honest with us, due to the drama that any admission that they don’t want to waste the time on restoring the guild banks would cause.

So Blizzard is in a tough spot right now. The restoration of items may never occur. So will our trust in Blizzard ever be restored?

For me, it won’t be, not as it stands. I need a real explanation or a full restoration, ideally both, before I can put any faith back into Blizzard. Should I ultimately decide to step away, I know you won’t miss my single subscription. I would hope, though, that you have someone counting the number of people affected by this who decide to cancel their subscriptions. I have a feeling there will be more than few.

Thank you for your time.

In other news, I tried about 10 pulls on Zekvir and got OBLITERATED, so that was hilarious.

I really do have other things I want to talk about — goldmaking, professions, how I’m finding the expansion. But it’s with true regret that I say that this guild bank thing is sapping my energy and enthusiasm to play.

The Great Blizzard Bank Heist

Kurn / / facepalm, general, the war within

Hi folks, long time no talk. I have a lot of updates for you which I hope to get to this coming weekend.

In the meantime, please take a look at the latest video on my YouTube channel, which is entitled The Great Blizzard Bank Heist. If you’re not aware, a lot of people have had stuff vanish out of their guild banks since the pre-expansion patch hit. We’re talking decades’ worth of stuff at this point. I’ve lost two full tabs worth of stuff (ALL MY DRAGONSCALES, all kinds of rare and no longer obtainable patterns) and only realized it late last week. CHECK YOUR BANKS, see if anything is missing. If anything is, let’s make some noise about it and try to get Blizzard to do the right thing.

Thank you.

Profession Updates after Early Access

Kurn / / expansions, gold, professions, the war within

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to my blog, where I previously said a whole bunch of things were “Future!Kurn’s” problem, and I am now regretting it… 😅

Okay, so let’s talk about The War Within, in general, and then, more specifically, professions.

The War Within

There is just so much to do. I want to clone myself — not my toons, but my actual, physical self, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.

That said, I did take the time afforded me in early access and I dinged 80 on Kurn at some point on Saturday.

Kurn dings 80 in The War Within

Oh, apparently at 8:14pm ET. 😂

I decided to prioritize getting Kurn to 80 because that would allow me to skip the intro on other characters. By Saturday, I’d already brought over my shaman (double gatherer), and like, look, it’s a great intro, loving the story overall, but I did not need to do it, uh, 11 times on 11 separate toons. So I did it once on Kurn and then on the shammy and then I pushed to get Kurn to 80 and all that jazz so I could enable the skips.

That said, I feel like I mostly took my time in levelling? I did a lot of sidequests in a bunch of places and so was very nearly 80 when I finished the campaign. I felt as though the Isle of Dorn and the Ringing Deeps (which, btw, has been SUCH a lagfest pretty consistently that I can hardly stand to be in the zone) were very slow — in a good way. I got to explore places, pick up side quests, skin things, all that jazz. And then as soon as I got to Hallowfall it felt like it was just GO GO GO GO. And I’m not complaining about it, either. It was really, really cool. I was exhausted afterwards, but it was totally worth it.

As to Azj-Kahet, I really haven’t done a lot there apart from the alliance thing and all that jazz. Literally just the campaign stuff, so there’s a lot left for me to explore.

I have done exactly one delve, the Earthcrawl Mine, which I’d done once on Beta, and now once on live. I want to do more delves, but there’s so much to do! So delves can wait a bit.

I really like the story, too. Do I occasionally want to smack Anduin? Yes, but we have to remember (or those of us who didn’t play Shadowlands have to understand) that he’s been through some severe trauma. So it’s okay. As we have to give ourselves grace when we’re going through a difficult time, we have to give others grace. So Anduin gets a pass from me for now.

I’m really enjoying the story. I want to unlock the Earthen (there are a number of quests to do that which I have yet to do) and learn more about them. I’m looking forward to seeing what our involvement in Azj-Kahet will mean. It’s very promising from a story point of view, IMHO.

Professions and Such

I have to admit, I did not expect the profession treasures to be so numerous and so easily found. There are two for each profession in each zone and each treasure gives you 3 points in that profession. So that’s 24 points alone from treasures. As a result of this, if we look back at my blog post and see that when it comes to going past 40 points in Leatherworking, “that’s a problem for Future!Kurn”. Well, the future is now and I still don’t really know what to pick. 😅

Leatherworking

I did put 10 into Flawless Fortes and then 30 into Epic Ensembles… and then I started putting points into Learned Leatherworker. I’m not at 5 points there yet, so I’m not 100% sure if I’ll go into the resourcefulness, multicraft or concentration specs. If I’ll be crafting a lot of reagents and intermediate-type crafts, multicraft seems like the place to go, otherwise resourcefulness to save mats, right? Concentration is tempting at this stage in the expansion because I have not been careful on it. It’s hard when you’re at a rank 4 thing and you can make it a 5, you know? That’s several thousand gold difference in terms of profession equipment at this early stage.

Basically, Epic Ensembles has been a good choice for me and with some rank 2 mats, I can guarantee a rank 5. I’ll call that a win, especially because as my own equipment gets better, I’ll be able to do it with rank 1 mats.

Skinning

Tanning is going well. I decided to go to 20 in Tanning and then start putting points into the specific leathers. Waiting an hour between charges of Sharpen Your Knife was just annoying. Also, they just hotfixed (on Monday) the fact that LWs could waste their SYK skin action on “trivial creatures”, so that’s good. I’ve wasted three of those cooldowns on “trivial creatures” who, honestly, didn’t seem all that trivial to me!

Blacksmithing

Good lord, everything takes a bloody Core Alloy! Thankfully, they’re not that hard to make and you can also find them in chests and stuff like that. But good lord, I go through Bismuth awfully quick.

I’ve hit level 50-something as a blacksmith and I’ve put in 10 into Means of Production, then 10 into Tools of the Trade and I’ve just got a couple points in Trade Tools right now. What I really need to do is go treasure hunting on all my toons for all their professions. Still, I can reliably make rank 3 things with crappy mats. Also, are Null Stones hard to find OR WHAT? I’ve picked a ton of Null Lotus, and some imperfect null stones, but not nearly as many as the herbs. And things in BS require Null Stones. So rude. Anyway, getting there, making money, it’s all good.

Engineering

Engineering is such shit that I may actually drop it.

… I won’t, and I know I won’t, but oh MAN, it sucks. You have to do the Invent process daily. This requires 25 Pile of Rusted Scrap, which can randomly drop from TWW mobs, but also can be in chests, and I’ve found like 15 of them in an ore node at one point. But this is such a pain in the ass because I’m on my warlock and I hate playing my warlock.

Oh, and that’s not even the half of it! Once you invent, you can then basically “deconstruct” or whatever the “invention” and then get some notes. If you get 15 pages of notes, you can make them into an organized pack of notes and THAT is what you learn new schematics from. It took me three days to learn my first thing, basically, and it wasn’t even a piece of profession equipment.

I am so not impressed. Should I have read more about this or tested it on beta? Yes. Did I? No. Do I regret that now? Yes. But I will continue to complain about it because hi, I’m Kurn, and I drink red haterade.

Jewelcrafting

Not doing great here, honestly, just because I have a lack of mats. All my Bismuth is going to Blacksmithing and such, so while I’ve accumulated a bunch of points, I haven’t spent any because I’m not even 25 in JC yet. Fail, but that’s my bad.

Enchanting

I’m going for the mana oils. Not much to report yet because everything is so expensive, good lord. I disenchanted most of my greens and sold 100 (?) Storm Dust for like 10k or something on Saturday? I regret it a bit.

Tailoring

Yep, Textile Treasures it is, but I haven’t had much of a chance to get out there into the world and see how much cloth drops. I’ve made some cash on low-rank profession items, though.

Inscription

The evoker, who makes Treatises, has almost discovered them all.

What I, the person playing, have discovered, is that holy shit, ink is hard to make and so is Boundless Cipher. To make one Treatise, I need 2 of the Apricate Ink, which makes the Cipher, along with 5 Arathor’s Spear. THEN I need to make either two more Apricate Ink or two Shadow Ink. Oh, and then 2 of various other reagents, leyline residue, crystalline powder and… something else like viridescent spores? Or something? All of that to make ONE of these suckers.

Also, I’d made a couple earlier on Monday and couldn’t use them… and then was informed in Trade that you could use them later on. We must have been blocked in using them until worldwide launch. So that’s going okay, even if it’s expensive. It’ll pay off.

As to my other scribe, I’ve barely touched my druid because Darkmoon Cards are flooding the market right now. You can put together a full deck for under 2k, possible even under 1k. I am saddened by this and will need to rethink my druid.

Alchemy

Slow going, friends, slow going. Madrana’s getting there. She needs to get the points in ominous, but is at the point where she could craft a Blasphemite if, you know, she had the 80 transmutagens. My other alchemists are nowhere near this level of progress… and that’s okay.

Mining

This is going swimmingly. My double-gatherer has 10/40 in Plethora of Ore and then is 45/45 in Bismuth! This means I can, theoretically, mine a full Null Stone from a Bismuth node. But, more importantly, I can refine the ore from rank 1 to rank 2 and to rank 3. That’s only for Bismuth, but that’s okay. My other two miners are making (slow) progress with Ironclaw and Aqirite.

But, there are also camouflaged ore and herb nodes!

So yeah, good progress, and I’m feeling good about this.

Herbalism

Having even just the Botany spec unlocked makes farming so much easier. Love it.

That said, most of my herbalists are starting out with Bountiful Harvests and one is already 40/40, I think. The others are going 5/40 and each focusing on a separate herb for now.

Gold

I’ve made about 300k gold since Thursday night. Well, my warband bank has increased by that amount. Each character started with 5k gold on them and some have dipped back into the bank and some haven’t. Regardless, it’s been a pretty decent weekend and I expect this week and next weekend to be booming as well.

I also picked up a Spinner’s Amulet of the Harmonious that was like a 3/8 or something? 561 or 564? It was BOE and blue and I sold that sucker for 58,999 gold. Gotta love those drops. :)

What about you?

So, have you jumped into The War Within? What’s your priority? Tell me about it! :)