Category: alchemy

11.0 Patch Issues & Stuff

Kurn / / alchemy, healing, professions, ramblings, the war within

My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂

That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”

The bank is being used by another member of your Warband.

As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.

To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.

Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.

I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.

Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.

And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.

That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.

I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.

So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.

In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…

There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.

In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.

So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?

Kurn's Q&A #26

Kurn / / alchemy, gear, general, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, q&a, raiding, ruby sanctum, weekly raids

Tuesday! A day off from raiding, a day to center myself and get caught up on a bunch of things, including weekly search terms that seem interesting.

1) what is raidwalled

“Raidwalled” is when a paladin with the talent Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian casts Divine Sacrifice, which activates Divine Guardian. This name comes from the warrior cooldown called Shield Wall, although Divine Guardian will not mitigate anywhere near as much damage as Shield Wall. However, it does affect the entire raid, whereas Shield Wall only affects the warrior.

2) bop remove cleave armor debuff ruby sanctum

That’s an awesome question. Next time I do RS, I’ll BOP an inactive tank for a second before freedoming them to see if that works.

3) do elixir mastery proc on potions

It astounds me that, more than three years since alchemy specializations were introduced, people still don’t get it.

No, Elixir Mastery alchemists proc on elixirs and flasks. Potion Mastery alchemists proc on potions. Transmute Mastery alchemists proc on transmutes.

4) drape of the violet tower holy paladin

DON’T DO IT DON’T DO IT DON’T DO IT BY ALL THAT IS HOLY DO NOT DO IT.

Okay, I may have exaggerated. But you have other options.

Fluttering Sapphiron Drape (10m Ony)
Flowing Sapphiron Drape (25m Ony)

And if you got lucky, Ahune dropped Shroud of Winter’s Chill for you and you didn’t get rid of it.

Honestly, I’d rank the cloaks thusly, from best to worst for a holy paladin:

25m Ony then Ahune then 10m Ony then Drape of the Violet Tower.

Seriously.

5) stormbringer gloves

I admit, I had no idea what the hell these were. The 251 Stormbringer Gloves are nice 251-level gloves. I would recommend the badge gloves over them, though, for a holy paladin. The Gauntlets of Overexposure are better — more int, more haste. They’re also available for 60 Emblems of Frost. Ultimately, I like the Unclean Surgical Gloves and the heroic Unclean Surgical Gloves better.

Here’s a comparison.

6) +casting +”beacon of light” +threat

I’m pretty sure that you do get some measure of threat merely by casting Beacon of Light. The Lich King looked at me last night after I cast Beacon of Light on an OT. It’s likely not much, probably the equivalent of a face pull, and would probably need to be done right when the boss becomes active (in the case of the Lich King, for example) in order to cause any significant threat.

Does the mirrored heal from Beacon of Light cause threat? I honestly don’t know. I’ll see if I can figure that one out.

7) any way to parse halion log

I use World of Logs, but the last I saw, it wasn’t able to parse both the shadow realm and the physical realm, since you’re only logging for your active realm.

I love WoL dearly and have no doubt they’re working on this issue.

8) halion beacon of light

What I like to do is beacon the tank here and raid heal, including myself. However, I never, ever hesitate to directly heal the tank, even if beacon is on them. I do this on most single-tank portions of fights. Will the beacon go through the realms? I do not think so.

9) holy paladin multiple beacon

You can have an unlimited number of beacons on a single target. The only limitation is how many holy paladins you have around.

10) is the weekly on the same lockout as the regular raids

Yes. That means if your weekly is Lord Jaraxxus and you go into TOC10 to kill him, you will be saved to TOC10. Same if it’s XT-002 Deconstructor and you go in to Ulduar 25, you are then saved to Ulduar 25.

Kurn's Q&A 22

Kurn / / addons, alchemy, blogging, classes, dungeons, facepalm, gear, general, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, professions, q&a, raiding, ramblings

Good evening, or perhaps good morning! Had a lovely Tuesday, including dinner with the family at my parents’ house, then got to login and play with the new chat features a little bit. Again, as stated before, please don’t be offended if I choose not to include you in my Real ID network. I feel that the tools they give us are still rather clunky and not remotely refined enough for my tastes to consider sharing with people I don’t already know in real life.

Having said that, BOY HOWDY, do we have a bunch of interesting terms this week! You’d think someone had been BORED TO DEATH at work or something! As such, starting this week, I’ll have an anonymous form for questions you’d like to ask me for this Q&A-style post. Look for it on Wednesday or Thursday.

In the meantime…

I clearly made a mistake last week when I said:

“I like seeing myself in search terms. It’s cute.”

1)

kurnmogh, why is majik the best tank?
kurnmogh, how did majik redefine the mage class and why was he so good?
kurnmogh sucks and majik rules
why is kurnmogh just not as good as majik at wow?

And my personal favourites:

how come kurn can only play any given class in world of warcraft just about half as well as majik?
how has kurnmogh played and lived in the shadow of majik for so long?

Let’s tackle these burning questions individually.

1a) Majik is the best tank because he is a stupidly good player. It’s like he’s an idiot savant.

1b) Majik was key in redefining the mage class because he was frost and he was competitive DPS through ’till Hyjal. His approach to playing his mage was one that involved using Billy, the water elemental, to his full extent, making sure to be hit-capped and generally not dying to stupid things. However, it should be noted that, while still drunk from the traditional pony keg booze after Maulgar, Majik did blink into Gruul, causing a wipe. He was so good because, as previously noted, Majik is an idiot savant when it comes to the World of Warcraft. It also helped that he was a meter whore throughout the ENTIRETY of Burning Crusade and this drove him to swap to an Arcane/Frost rotation which meant that he was constantly Arcane Explosioning on Hyjal waves. Like a tool. Sure, his numbers were huge, but I do believe he started dying more frequently at this point, which had a negative effect on his overall DPS.

1c) We’ll pair the next two together, as they’re essentially the same. It’s true, dear readers, I am not as good as Majik is at WoW. I just don’t have the instincts that he does when it comes to, well, basically anything. Majik is ten times better at this game than I am and doesn’t have this habit of forgetting to do things like pop class-specific cooldowns the way I do. (Nature’s Swiftness? What’s that?)

1d) My favourite questions! Hooray!

– Majik has four level 80s and is working on his fifth. The classes are: mage, druid, shaman and death knight. Kurn has six level 80s and they are: hunter, paladin, shaman, mage, druid, priest. As you can see, there’s some overlap. Majik’s hunter is in his 40s, Majik’s highest paladin toon still would get beat down by Hogger and Kurn hates death knights in general, so the comparison is really versus each other when it comes to a mage, a druid and a shaman.

– Given that Majik raided full-time on his mage for years, that’s not a fair comparison. This leaves us with two alts, the druids and the shaman. I fully agree I can only play the druid and shaman half as well as Majik can. Why? This is largely because I have spent all my time really focused on the paladin and the hunter.

– Thus, while I fully admit I can’t play a mage, druid or shaman as well as Majik, due in part to my not being an idiot savant, if he wants to try to level up his hunter or paladin to get a good comparison going, he is welcome to do so.

– As to living in his shadow, I’ve got to say that it was cold there in his shadow, to never have sunlight on my face. I was content to let him shine, that’s my way. I always walked a step behind. So he was the one with all the glory, while I was the one with all the strength. I wonder if he knows that I’m really his hero or everything he wishes he could be? Clearly, I am the wind beneath his wings.

Now that I’ve learned from my lesson regarding search terms, let’s move on!

2) unbound plague ticks damage

Here’s a parse of a mage in the raid having Unbound Plague for 10 seconds before passing it off:

[23:34:40.353] Mage afflicted by Unbound Plague from Professor Putricide
[23:34:41.515] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (999)
[23:34:42.459] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (1249)
[23:34:43.463] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (1561)
[23:34:44.410] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 1410 (A: 541)
[23:34:45.424] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 2439
[23:34:46.359] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 3049
[23:34:47.507] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 3811
[23:34:48.433] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 4764
[23:34:49.354] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 5955
[23:34:50.399] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 7444

Here’s me in the same raid for 11 ticks:

[23:37:09.981] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 681  (A: 289)
[23:37:11.135] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1212
[23:37:11.978] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1254 (A: 261)
[23:37:13.153] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1895
[23:37:13.965] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 2368
[23:37:15.331] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 2960
[23:37:15.877] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 3701
[23:37:17.203] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 4626
[23:37:17.827] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 5782
[23:37:19.300] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 7227
[23:37:19.964] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana Absorb (9034)

So you can get an idea of the damage: it starts out very low and ramps up hugely. The damage it does isn’t too bad, but if someone with Plague Sickness gets it, that damage is increased by 250%.

3) any new way to cheat unbound plague

Well, I don’t condone cheating. Are you talking about better plague visibility now that AVR and AVRE have been broken? If so, you may want to look into using HudMap:

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/hudmap.aspx

4) dbm mark vengeful shade

Okay, here’s the problem with Vengeful Shades; they’re not able to be targetted. That means you can’t click on them to mark them, you can’t hit V and see their health bars. You just have to watch for them when they spawn and run the hell away.

5) does feign death work on frozen orbs on toravon

Yes.

6) elixir mastery will double flasks?

Okay, let’s explain this again.

As an alchemist, you get this fun thing called “Mixology” which doubles all elixir and flask *durations* and increases their effects slightly.

In order to have the *possibility* to proc extra flasks, you must be an elixir-specced alchemist, that is an Elixir Master. This will not proc all the time. This will not double your haul. This happens approximately at a 10% rate from what I’ve noticed. So for every ten flasks you make, you will roughly get one extra.

7) how many people go into frostmourne on 25 lk

On normal, this is one at a time, approximately once a minute throughout the final phase when he casts Harvest Soul on someone. On heroic, EVERYONE goes into Frostmourne.

8) lightning-infused leggings worth it

I recently crafted mine, replacing the heroic Legplates of Failing Light. After looking at the Ruby Sanctum loot tables at MMO-Champion there are NO new legs being added. That means that there are no legs higher than ilvl 264 with haste on them. So yes. Definitely worth it for any holy paladin.

9) server transfer raid lockout

It all gets cleared. I had done my daily random heroic before I transferred my paladin. Then I transferred and ran another — none were barred from me, and I also got 2 extra Emblems of Frost by virtue of doing another “first” random.

10) shadow trap lich king

Don’t stand in them. It’s not rocket science, folks.

Kurn's Q&A #19

Kurn / / alchemy, dungeons, healing, icecrown citadel, lfg, paladins, q&a, raiding

Welcome, welcome, one and all, to Kurn’s Q&A! This is the time of the week when I look at my website stats from the previous week and see how I can better help those search for information by expounding on 10 search terms that led people to my site. I love Tuesdays.

1) “katrana prestor”

Ahhhhh, Lady Katrana Prestor, also known as Lady Onyxia! Katrana Prestor used to be an NPC in Stormwind Keep. There was Bolvar Fordragon, Anduin Wrynn and Katrana Prestor in the throne room in the keep.

At level 50, you could start an immense quest chain that begins in Burning Steppes called Dragonkin Menace. It would take you through Burning Steppes, over through Blackrock Depths, to Lakeshire, to Stormwind, back to Morgan’s Vigil, all over the damn place. Eventually, you would rescue Marshall Reginald Windsor, whom everyone from pre-BC probably loathes as much as I do, and meet up with him at the Stormwind gates.

There would be this truly awesome event that would take place — you’d escort Windsor up to the keep and accuse Lady Katrana Prestor of being Onyxia in disguise and she’d transform RIGHT FREAKING THERE and get the guards in the keep to turn into their draconic forms. Bolvar would LAY THE SMACK DOWN, but not before Windsor is mortally wounded. (I used to /cheer.)

Here’s the script.

Onyxia would vanish, presumably to go to her lair, and you would be tasked with restoring a medallion. You’d have to go to freaking Winterspring, to the top of a damn mountain, to talk to a blue dragon (Haleh, who appears in high/blood elf from) who’ll tell you to go to Upper Blackrock Spire and kill General Drakkisath and get the Blood of the Black Dragon Champion. (This eventually became party loot, but for a LONG time, there were only 1-3 of these that dropped at a time.)

Then you go back to Haleh and she would give you your Drakefire Amulet, which you had to have with you to enter Onyxia’s Lair.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of Lady Katrana Prestor as she was in the game before they removed the Onyxia attunement questline. More info here on Lady Katrana Prestor from WoWWiki.

Edit: Best video EVER. The Craft of War: Blind.

2) does divine shield drop lady deathwhispers

Drop Lady Deathwhisper’s what?

Curse of Torpor: Probably
Frostbolt: Yeah.
Mind Control: Well, you can’t pop it if you’re MCed, I don’t think, but if she makes the mistake of popping it for you, you will probably get released from the mind control.

3) dxe bossmods malleable goo putricide hard

Yeah, my DXE only shows me the location of one, not all three, Malleable Goos. Sorry. :(

4) elixir master not proccing 2010

I’m an elixir master. It procs. My proc rate usually sucks, but it procs enough to let me know I haven’t lost the ability to proc entirely.

5) fastest way to get emblem of triumph one night

Queue up as a healer or a tank and do dungeons all night long. Or, do Naxxramas.

6) hard mode professor putricide 25m strat

Funny you should mention that. I just wrote up a post detailing how my guild does heroic Putricide on 25m.

7) holidays grace for dps or healer

I understand your confusion in this day and age of spellpower instead of damage/healing and healing. Holiday’s Grace has mp5 which means it’s for healers. DPS have enough tricks up their sleeves to regen mana, whereas healers have a couple things, typically with long cooldowns, such as Mana Tide Totem, Shadowfiend and Innervate. mp5 is the only thing that will aid in mana regen for healers, so you’ll find it on lots of healer gear.

Rule of thumb: +hit = DPS caster, +mp5 = healer

That doesn’t mean all healers want a lot of mp5 or all casters want a lot of hit, mind you.

8) how to respond when someone asks for raid achievements

If you have them, link them. If not, you may be out of luck if you’re not really geared. You can always say “this is my alt, I know the fight from my main” if that’s the case, or just tell them you know the fight and just haven’t done it on that toon, even if you’ve never done it. The key here, of course, is doing research so you’re not That Tool that everyone else is carrying.

9) why cant i que for icc

First of all, it’s “queue”. Second of all, ICC is not a dungeon. You cannot queue for a raid group. You can sit in the raid browser for it, but I’m assuming that this is what you cannot do.

If you cannot select ICC as a raid to sit in the raid browser for, this means that Blizzard’s estimation of your gear is such that you won’t be able to adequately perform with that gear in ICC. Go get some gear.

10) on a holy palatin, what foods, enhants, and gems to improve mana regeration

… please, please don’t have been a native English speaker.

The more mana you have, the more mana you’ll regenerate. Divine Plea is based on our maximum mana, as are Replenishment and Mana Tide Totem. For mana regen food, you can either go with 40 crit strike food or 20 mp5 food. For everything else, it’s intellect. Make sure you’re also using the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond.

Elixir Mastery updated…

Kurn / / alchemy

That’s right, folks. That 10-proc of Flask of the Frost Wyrm? INTENDED.

To answer some questions brought up in this thread:

Mixology will work like it does now, if you know the recipe to create the flask, the flask will grant double the duration, so 2 hours in the new case.

Elixir Mastery is also being updated to work with the new flask design so for example where you got 2 or 3 extras before you will now get 4 or 6 extras.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/15864859958-change-to-flasks-in-310.html

Flasks and Elixir Mastery

Kurn / / alchemy, general, ptr

My paladin is an alchemist (and a jewelcrafter). Given that we can only use one potion during any encounter, I switched from potion mastery to elixir mastery right after 3.0 came out. It seemed pointless to proc mana potions that I could no longer chug.

The latest build of the PTR, build 9722, changed how flasks were made, and their effect.

All flasks recipes will now create 2 flasks for the same

amount of ingredients but now last 1 hour instead of 2.

Now, that seems a little weird. Two flasks for 1 hour each instead of one flask for two hours. Gone are the days of popping one flask for the whole night’s raid, thought I! Not only that, but anyone who’s been stockpiling flasks is screwed over. :(

Anyways, as an alchemist, I wanted to check that I still get the double-length on Flasks of the Frost Wyrm, so instead of a 1-hour duration, as per the tooltip, I get a 2-hour duration. I do. Sweet.

But, a friend and I worried, what does this mean for elixir masters and flask procs? Since every flask creation is essentially a 2-proc, does this mean our procs are gone?

I decided to try it out on the PTR. I don’t have an herbalist who’s over level 66, at the moment, so I transferred a toon over who brought herbs with him straight from the live AH. I brought 20 Lichbloom, 20 Icethorn and 4 Frost Lotuses, the ingredients for four combines of Flask of the Frost Wyrm, which should get me 8 flasks, according to the new 2-for-1.

So, I made a flask.

You create: Flask of the Frost Wyrm x10.

You think I’m kidding. I don’t blame you. I didn’t believe it at first myself. So I screenshotted it.

10flasks

I think what happened there was an old-school 5-proc, which is the original flask I was making and then 4 extras. But since you now make 2 every time you make 1, the 4 extras turned into 8. And then I made 3 more flasks, each granting 2, which is not an extra proc.

That’s okay. 8 extra flasks at once is just fine for me, thanks. ;)

Now, whether or not this will go live… I’m unsure. I would think it would ruin alchemy. Flask prices would tumble because they’re so common, and they’d be worth less than the cost of the herbs to make them. At the same time, everyone would flask up for content, even the cheap people, if flasks were 10g apiece or something ridiculous.

I was honestly expecting procs to be 2-6, which means 0 extras to 4 extras, which is how it currently works on live.

So… I guess we’ll see what happens. :)

Edited to add:

They stack! Check out this stack of 16 flasks. (Other flasks in my bags have not been stacked together, this stack of 16 is the result of my 16 flasks made.)

stackflasks