Are You Ready for 4.1?

All indications point to 4.1 coming tomorrow 4/26/11. You are not prepared! Or are you? Wow Insider has a pretty comprehensive guide to 4.1 HERE. Of course there is a ton going on here most important of which is NOT a new raid instance. The Firelands raid and the associated Hyjal healing will likely come with patch 4.2. This means that unfortunately, there’s probably still no dailies in hyjal. If I discover I’m wrong and the Hyjal rep dailies ship with 4.1 I’ll be sure to get a guide going pronto. Of course, we are getting new heroic dungeons, the Looking for Guild system, and a veritable ton of class/instance/gear balances.

One thing I’ll make sure to do tonight is prospect all my Obsidium/Elementium ore, cut the uncommon gems, and vendor them. Notes indicate that uncommon gems will no longer vendor for 9 and will end up being a much lower amount. This will drastically lower the value of the gems that aren’t used for select craftables or the JC daily as well as lowering the price of the ore they come from since there is no longer a high “minimum” prospecting value. Is there anything else you’ll be doing at the last-minute to prepare? Finishing gearing an alt to be ready for the ilvl 346 required new heroics? Something else?

You can find the most current patch notes on Blizzard’s blog HERE.

Daily Thoughts: Some Jewelcrafting Tips & QQ

I’ve been making money hand over fist selling WotLK uncommon and rare gems since the middle of WotLK. It was a massive cash-cow and once I got a little bit of gold saved up from farming ore, prospecting, and selling cut gems I switched to buying ore and speeding up the process by a metric ton. Although I also eventually had herbalism, alchemy, tailoring, blacksmithing, inscription, and enchanting, nothing ever came close to the sustained profits from selling those WolTK gems for me – and still hasn’t. (more…)

Daily Thoughts: After the Break

Fear not, dear readers, I haven’t forsaken you. I mean that in the original context of the word, not that I might have raised you from the dead with the Vyr’kul, in case you were wondering. Like so many these days, I’ve been a little bogged down with the holiday rush, family get-togethers, and, well….the Cataclsym! Oh the wonders if the end of the world.

So far, my paladin has reached 85, my warrior is gaining more rested XP at level 84, and my shaman is starting to feel neglected at 81. The rest of my toons have barely seen me do more than log in to start the rested XP process. Yes, in case you have alts at the previous level cap, you have to log into them once before they’ll start accruing rested experience. I suppose my death knight has seen a little love, but only because I need some enchants. There’s a fair chance he’ll end up being my 3rd or 4th 85 due to the need of having max enchanting and inscription.

Toons

Although my paladin is still fun, and will likely remain my main (though ret spec instead of holy as primary), my warrior is just blowing through the quests. At 84, even with stat deflation caused by leveling and very few regular dungeons under his belt, the warrior can still break 10k dps without too much trouble. Victory rush, which heals 25% of my hp after getting a killing blow, helps me keep on keeping on as if I had a pocket healer following me around *insert any cataclysm zone here*. Ret paladins damage just feels a little gimped in comparison, not really bad mind you, just mediocre. Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer for WoW) did put a blog post which, among many other things, comments that ret paladins dps might be low and could be buffed, along with a re-imagining of our mastery. To read about that and a great deal of future balance changes to come check it out. Other highlights include, shockingly, survival hunter damage nerf. Despair hunters, despair!

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