Project Lore

I remember a time, pre-BC, when the Blackrock Mountains were the place to group and raid. I unfortunately also remember having to pug to get my Light Forge Spaulders. I wasn't much of a guild person back then, so I would have to do the obligatory "Lvl 60 Paladin LFG for UBRS, PST".  There were always 3 strikes a group would always face heading into UBRS. 1.) Does your group have someone who's keyed? 2.) Do you have the DPS for "The Beast"? 3.) Does your group have the understanding of how to fight the General, (ex. the kiting strategy)? I can remember countless times when groups would just fall apart after one attempt of the General or when someone finally got their shoulders off the Beast and they'd say they have to leave because of something in real life and just force quit. Here we are two expansions later and we have a lot of new players to the game. I know quite a few people who joined in the middle of Burning Crusade's lifespan and never spent one minute in the old world dungeons. So they were lucky to have avoided the Excedrin (yes, the headache medicine) popping moments. But I'm wondering why were pugs in those dungeons so bad? I bring this up because since Wrath of the Lich King was released I've had to pug a few Heroics and even Naxx on occasion. The thing I've noticed is how smoothly the runs seem to go. Last week I pugged a 25 man Naxx group. Funny thing is we downed 3 quarters in under 3 hours. People listened. People did their jobs and did them well. This was incredible. Usually the more people in a pug the more drama, crying and problems you have or at least you would have had been back in the day.  Two weeks ago I main tanked a 25 man Obsidian Sanctum without vent and we downed it with ease. Even a run in Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle went surprisingly well. So here are three different experiences with the same results. Have players grown up? Are people finally "learning to play their class" as the old complaint use to be thrown around?  Has Blizzard done anything special to the game mechanics to make it easier to communicate without voices? You could say vent servers have helped but people have been using them for years and still have bad experiences. I'm just really curious to see if I'm the only one who's noticing this nice change in pugs. If you are experiencing a change why do you think it's happened? While I still prefer to run with my guild I can say that I really don't mind the pugs as much as I use to in the pre-bc days.

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The heart of World of Warcraft's economy is the auction house. It doesn't matter what server you're on or what side of the conflict you've picked. We all deal through the auction house. If you're a blacksmith, enchanter, seamstress or in my case a scribe (inscription) it's your livelihood for gold. Now I don't know how the rest of the professions fair, so I can only speak for myself and for my realm of Kargath’s economy, but I'm hoping you all will pitch in your thoughts and comments. When inscription was introduced I jumped on it. I wasn't into doing professions before, and I had two open profession slots so I picked up herbalism and inscription. I leveled my skill up rather quickly. All was well. Then WotLK dropped. It gave us scribes new glyphs, scrolls, books and what would becomes my money maker (till recently) - Darkmoon cards. Any scribe will tell you that when the expansion was released selling glyphs was profitable. I remember selling the Glyph of Vigor to rogues for over 150g. I was making great money. Then people realized how easy it was to level up inscription. Prices dropped gradually and now you're lucky if you can sell any glyph for over 50g. The real value of inscription has yet to come, as we've seen how many new glyphs will be purchased when dual specs are unveiled in 3.1. Right now the only way to make real money is Darkmoon cards, more specifically, Nobles cards. When the Ace through Eight of Nobles are combined, a Nobles Deck is created. This rewards a Darkmoon Card: Greatness. About two months ago I had 10,000g. I was buying Adder's Tongue in the auction house for about 20g a stack and selling Chaos, Undeath, and Prisms cards for 500g or more. The complete Nobles deck was selling for 20k and each card for 2500g. Ah, good times. Now you’re lucky to get 50g for some cards. Some won't even sell for 25g. The auctions will just expire over and over. The nobles are holding some value but not as much as they used too. Decks now go for around 12k, so they've dropped too. What caused this to happen? I'm sure a lot of you have been victim to this crime of Auction House Etiquette.  This rule of etiquette is often broken or just plain ignored. Let's take an item like, say, the Ace of Undeath. This item used to sell for 500g or more but for this example we'll just say 500g. After selling a few of these I know the price. So I go to the auction house and lucky me there are no competitors, so I start the bid at 475g and buyout at 500g. Now, as expected, someone else gets the card, they see my listing and naturally want to beat that price so his item sells. So you'll see someone beat my previous listing for something like 470g for bid and buyout at 495g. We might go back and forth by 5g or less just to be listed as the cheapest. Then someone comes in and just decides he wants to just sell the item for a quick buck and decides to kill both of our chances at making some nice gold and lists his for 200g buyout. Seeing this travesty my competitor and I are now forced to lower our price to beat his rediculous price. It's called etiquette or common courtesy to respect other people's auctions so we can all make money. Why does someone do this? I know this can't be just happening to scribes of inscription. So have any of you out there seen this happen? Have you logged into the game to check your auctions, only to find that your stuff hasn't sold because some jerk has out priced you by several hundred or even thousands gold for a quick sale? Because this is happening to all of us on all servers, it's killing the professions economy. I know there is always going to be competition, and I know we are always going to be fighting for the lowest price. Let's just be a little more cautious when we do so that we can all make money.

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I'd like to talk about the Paladin class, but more specifically about the idea of dual speccing. I started WoW on the day it was released, and up until about six months ago, I was a retribution pally. I stuck to my guns and took all the punishment Blizzard gave us, but when they supposedly fixed us and gave us amazing DPS only to take it away a month later I finally had enough. It was then I decided to read up on tanking. I spent weeks researching the spec and trying out different talent specs to get the most out of my paladin. Currently I've become the Main Tank for my guild on Kargath, and we are kicking Naxx’s butt right now. A few weeks ago I got to a point where I was stuck, though. I've obtained every upgrade I possibly can for my tank spec outside of Naxx. So I asked myself, what do I do now? I'm still running heroics and collecting badges for more gear, and during recent Naxx trips plate healing gear has been dropping left and right. Since nobody else wants it, I've started collecting it all. Now I'm spending those badges from heroics on healing gear. So aside from my tank gear I now have an epic healing set that's got my skills as follows: 2005 Bonus Healing, 26% Crit rating, 388 mana regen and a 17K+ mana pool, all unbuffed. Now that I have the gear, I've changed specs many times to work on my healing skills simply because I find it fun. The problem is I've done it so many times I'm capped at 50g per talent point reset. Personally I find this to be stupid and annoying. I know there are several things in the game that act as money sinks (Haris Pilton's bag for instance) but respeccing? Come 3.1, Blizzard is going to give us "Dual Specs" that will be 1000g and it will even change our glyphs and action bars. Great, but without an ETA on the horizon why don't they just remove the fee to reset for now? Why are players penalized for wanting to try something new? I've even had to pay twice simply because I've put a talent point in the wrong spot once and had to reset (which they addressed finally). What's worse is if I'm specced as a tank and my guild needs a healer, it costs me 100g to go holy and then back to protection. Anyway, I'm curious to see how many more people are out there that play an active role in two specs in their guild and if they are tired of the fees. Do you think that while we wait for the dual spec feature, we should get the option to change for free or are you ok with paying 50g per switch till 3.1 and then paying another 1000g to have the option?

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