Actually, this is more of a look back at Tier 11, but don’t worry, I will cover the gold making enterprise towards the end.
Playing a paladin healer in Cataclysm has felt like a constant race with the nerf bat. At launch, Paladins were just too damn good, so over the course of a few weeks our healing model got changed just about every week. In that sense it was good that I hit 85 within 2 days, and was chain running heroic 5 mans on the 3rd day, because getting some gear early made the later nerfs mcuh easier to live with. Usually through a tier of content you watch your mana pool increasing, I had a time when it was decreasing with every patch and hotfix. Coming in with Tier 12 is another raft of changes, which will mean that once again I will have to retune all my reflexes and change rotation priorities.
Tier 11 gear sucked: I often /inspect other Holy Paladins when idling in downtown Orgrimmar and I have not seen a single holy paladin in tier gear. It is embarrassing when your secondary spec is fully equipped first. And what is it with placing all the healing maces on end zone bosses?
The new zones
Mt Hyjal remains a favourite for levelling … because the underwater zone of Vashj’ir is painful. While Vash has its moments, the 3D environment is painful to maneuver around, and its just too big. I think they would have done better to have taken half the ideas and saved them for a future patch/expansion. Deepholm was fine, although its frustrating with alts in that you outlevel the zone well before you actually unlock the faction vendor there. Uldum was a disaster with pretty scenerey, the Harrison Jones joke is a bit old, the none-too-subtle nazi references were lame, and it was slow death by a thousand cut scenes. Twilight Highlands was good the first time through, but as my alts ding 85 I run out of enthusiasm to finish the zone, and they retire to watch the fires outside the Auction House.
Content difficulty
5 mans: much, much harder than Wrath. Guild groups vastly preferable to pugging. I have not pugged since patch 4.1 (the Call to Arms random loot satchel does not tempt me). My gut feeling, is that even in close to full raid gear, its much harder to heal a random group of strangers than the Wrath instances were.
Most-hated new instance: Stonecore. Even post-nerf I still hate it.
Most-liked new instance: Deadmines. A little long, but a lot of thought went into making the fights interesting.
Raids: pretty good for 2 nights per week in the casual scene, but only if you have a solid team. As an introductory raid, much harder than Tier 7. It would have been pretty hard to have gone 12/12 hard modes on two nights a week. If half of my guild’s raid group had not quit in February, resetting our progress for almost two months, I think we would have reached 4-5 hard modes. As it is, getting all 14 raiders a full 12/12 clear in the last month still felt like a good achievement for us.
Most-hated Encounter: Lip Boss in the Nefarian fight. If I wanted to play a platform game, I’d play a platform game.
Most-liked encounter: Atramedes, once you got the hang of the sound mechanic, it was quite a fun fight for a healer.
Epic Fail: Throne of the Four Winds, random loot is random, and unloved. I think we sharded almost everything bar the tier drops from Al’Akir.
Levelling: trivial, and very much a solitary experience now that pvp/instancing via LFG/randoms exists and most of the non-instanced group quests were eliminated. Even without heirloom gear’s boosted xp, its very hard to actually complete all of a zone’s quests before you outlevel the zones. Some of the old zones had a great makeover, and the new stories were fun, but I am not really tempted to go back through them all again.
Cancelling the rift sub
I canceled over something relatively trivial. My Level 34 character was unable to buy water to recover from damage quickly, because all the vendors in zone only sold water that worked for Level 35+ characters. But I also quit because the game was too much like WoW, in that in order to access the end game content I would have had to have devoted 500+ hours to grinding reputations/gear. bad enough to do that in WoW, I’m not really tempted by doing it in a second fantasy theme park game.
If this had been my first MMORPG, I probably would have continued to Level 50. After all, when I started WoW I levelled a Holy spec paladin to Level 60 thinking I was playing a DPS class! But five years later, I am simply not willing to continue in frustrating play, when I have more rewarding experiences available elsewhere. No one else in my WoW guild managed to make it past Level 20-25 before the sameness of the content got to them, and they too cancelled their subscriptions.
Key Play Decisions
I was offered a position in one of the hardcore raiding guilds on my server. I turned it down. Carpe Jugulum is a guild on my level
No pugging. I have stuck largely with guild raids, bar a few Baradin Hold runs for the Loot Pinata Boss.
Only gearing one character (for raids, 5 mans, reputation, achievements, etc) not 2-5 characters.
Stepping up to be Raid Leader after the mass guild quit was worth it. I helped recruit replacements, and then led the Guild to virtual glory. Good times. For my next trick, making sure they can do the same without me.
A Million Gold
I started with around 300,000 gold. I spent about 100,000 gold levelling professions after launch. In the next six months I made 900,000 gold. This took about two hours a day of AFK/AH time. Sorry if you are looking for an “I Win” button, but my success came as a result of:
First, having invested the time to get five characters with fully developed professions in Mining, Herbing, Enchanting, Blacksmith, Tailoring, Alchemy, Inscription and Jewelcrafting. Thats about a thousand hour investment.
Second, identifying niche markets that were profitable. Reading Gold Blogs was helpful, but not necessary. The most important tool here is actually the add-on “Auctionator”, which saves time by compressing price/quantity information displays for rapid viewing, and having quick AH list/cancel functions.
Third, relentlessly pushing those markets every day.
My most profitable market was JC, where I went long and purchased all the 5 token meta-gem cuts, ignoring the rings altogether and only later buying the 3 token gem cuts. I also spent around 10k gold on each rare BOE meta-gem pattern or enchanting formulae that turne dup on the AH. When the mats cost me 45 gold, and the gem sold for 299g I made a lot of money – anywhere up to 10,000 per day.
My second market was enchanting scrolls. Slow steady earnings. A few coins from rare enchants for BOA gear, but not a big earner. However, because I have all the patterns, I don’t bleed money here. Disenchanting has been curiously profitable too.
My third market was BOE shields, which was a good earner due to the BOP nature of Chaos orbs. When other smiths were selling their orbs for 100g in trade chat, I was making 1,000 gold off them on the AH. The smith also makes looose change from enchanting rods.
The silly earner is Primal Might, which takes me about ten minutes to farm, and sells for 500 gold on my server. Not bad for something from two expansions back.
The Tailor makes spare change from making bags and spellthread. I don’t use the scribe much, the inscription market is broken (it has prohibitive entry costs, and its impossible to make gold without addons, a small army of alts and a willingness to cancel and relist thosands of auctions a day). I switched the scribe’s herbing profession to JC, and I’m making a long bet that epic gems will require daily mission tokens, so I have 58 of those stockpiled.
Things I don’t do for gold:
1) spam trade chat
2) snatch vanity items, hoping to flip them, everything I sell is something I make
3) farm and sell raw materials, I leave that to the bots
4) sell anything where I am making less than a 10 gold profit per sale.
Looking Ahead to 4.2 ‘the Firelands’
I will gear a second character for heroic 5 mans, purely for the farming efficency to get the iLevel 378 BoEs. The lower weekly VP cap creates a strong incentive to reduce playing time of main characters by about 25%, but it will be much harder for hybrid gear sets to be completed.
Will the new tier work with just seven bosses? Most of the ones I have raided in have had 12. A lot of things are still frustratingly unclear. With only seven bosses is the loot table larger or just more random? Its also not clear how some of the crafting materials are acquired, although 25 man raids will get more of them than 10 man raids. Maybe its a signal that the bosses will all be significantly harder than in Tier 11.
T12 gear for holy paladins is an improvement, mostly. Well, it would have been hard for it to be worse. Kurn has a pretty good breakdown at: http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/?cat=90
At some stage I will try healing Cataclysm 5 mans in Tier 2 gear. I’ll post screenshots!
The new healing paradigm gets some discussion here: http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/06/26/the-light-and-how-to-swing-it-balancing-holys-heals/#continued, and some number crunching takes place here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2593008994. While I’m not thrilled about the changes, I expect I’ll adjust after a week or two.
The guild goal for Tier 12, is to do some hard modes, and make sure at least one of our RDPS gets the legendary staff. Thats going to require some work…
Mechanics Are Easy 