midnight – Kurn's Corner

Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 3

Kurn / April 19, 2026 / 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 1

Kurn / April 6, 2026 / 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 / February 24, 2026February 24, 2026 / 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.

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.

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 / February 3, 2026 / 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?