The Daily Circuit

     For those who love pets and pet battles, the daily legendary circuit is a great way to grab some extra gold, along with pets to put up for auction, pet bandages, and of course, battle stones. As an added bonus, you will run across all kinds of rares while flying from battle to battle, which is even more gold in your pocket. The quest rewards alone total just under 140G for doing all three of legendary beast dailies and the four Pandaren spirit tamers. I generally do my circuit during off-peak hours, ensuring I snag more rares. I generally make around 500 gold doing this run, which takes around an hour to do. This does not count anything I might pick up to auction.

Start at the Shrine of Seven Stars (or shrine of two Moons if you are a dirty, nasty hordie) and pick up the three legendary beast quests. This was the part where I was supposed to tell you, “Follow the route shown below.” Sadly my CorelDraw does not want to play nice with my WoW screnshots. So this was will be an all text explanation.

The only pet battle you will engage in in the Vale is a fight with No-No, a nuclear disaster of a beaver. Best bet for fighting him is to use three moths, all with alpha strike, cocoon strike and moth dust. Use moth dust when its off cool down, use cocoon strike to avoid being hit by No-No's dive ability and otherwise spam alpha strike. Do not attack when the beaver dam is up, pass until the dam is down.

Along the way to No-No you might run across the rares cracklefang, Ai-Ran of the Shifting Cloud, Spirit of Lao-Fe and Shadowmaster Sydow.

After defeating No-No, your next stop is the Dread Wastes to take on Gorespine, who is by the coast in the southwest.. From this point on you will be using the “Howl-Bomb” team for all of the legendary beast fights. For those who are newer to pet battling, this team consists of an Unborn Valkyr (with Shadow Shock, Curse of Doom, and Unholy Ascension), a Pandaren Water Spirit (with Water Jet, Whirlpool and Geyser) and Chrominus (with Bite, Howl and Surge of Power). The basic strategy is to open with the Valkyr, spam Shadow Shock, until she is close to death. Get a curse off and on her resurrection round, cast Unholy Ascension. When the Valk goes down, bring in the water spirit. Cast Geyser, followed by Whirlpool. Then bring in Chrominus and cast Howl. If the beast lives through this, cast Surge of Power. This team works better on some of the legendary beasts than others, so bring some pet bandages, RNG will probably dictate you have to restart a handful of your battles.

After Gorespine, comes the Pandaren Water Spirit. Follow the coast line to the extreme southeastern corner of the zone. You may run into Zandalri Warscouts and Omnis Grinlock along the way. For this guy, I use a Jade Owl and spam slicing wind, using lift-off to avoid the dive attack. Jade Owl can sometimes solo this fight. Round out your team with an Oily Slimeling (with Absorb, Corrosion and Acidic Goo) and a Mirror Strider with Water Jet, Healing Wave and Pump.

Then onto Greyhoof, and along the way you may spy Torik-Ethis and Jonn-Dar. Greyhoof uses the standard howl-bomb team. Greyhoof is in the Valley of Four Winds, in the southwestern part of the zone, near Nessingwary's Safari.

After Greyhoof, skip down into the Krasarang Wilds to fight Skitterer X'ia. You might meet the rare Cournith Waterstrider along the way. X'ia is a standard legendary beast fight. Once you done, head back into the Valley of Four Winds to face off against Lucky Yi, a giant cricket. Keep an eye out for the rare mob Blackhoof while on your way. For this fight don't waste your time spamming Shadow Shock. Cast Curse of Doom, followed by Unholy Ascension and execute the rest of the strategy from there.

You then have along flight over to the Jade Forest to fight Kawi the Gorger. There are several rares to look out for along the way. After Kawi, you fly north to square off against Nitun and the fly west to fight the Whispering Pandaren Spirit. The Whispering Spirit is a bit of a pain, as his first pet is a moth, with moth dust, that seems to always hit and frequently stun. Best team I have come up with for him is a Celestial Dragon to open with (using Moonfire, followed by Arcane Winds, followed by Flamethrower, and repeat ad infinitum), Bonkers (with Jab, Dodge and Tornado Punch) and a snail (with Ooze Touch, Acidic Goo and Dive).

After the Whispering Spirit its on to Dos-Ryga and from there onto the Thundering Pandaren Spirit. I use a team of Arctic Hare, Pandaren Mechanical Dragonling and Bonkers for this guy.

You round out the circuit by doing Kafi, the Burning Pandaren Spirit and Ti'un the Wanderer.

Here is a list of co-ordinates, in the order I do the circuit:

/way Vale of Eternal Blossoms 46 59

/way Vale of Eternal Blossoms 47 65

/way Vale of Eternal Blossoms 42 69

/way Vale of Eternal Blossoms 30 78

/way Vale of Eternal Blossoms 11 70

/way Dread Wastes 73 20

/way Dread Wastes 25 28

/way Dread Wastes 26 50

/way Dread Wastes 39 61

/way Dread Wastes 61 87

/way Krasarang Wilds 14 35

/way Valley of the Four Winds 18 77

/way Valley of the Four Winds 25 78

/way Valley of the Four Winds 88 18

/way Jade Forest 39 62

/way Jade Forest 48 71

/way Jade Forest 42 38

/way Jade Forest 57 29

/way Jade Forest 28 36

/way Kun-Lai Summit 73 77

/way Kun-Lai Summit 67 84

/way Kun-Lai Summit 64 93

/way Kun-Lai Summit 35 56

/way Townlong Steppes 57 42

/way Townlong Steppes 72 79

So there you have it. Along with the gold, there are pet bandages, pet treats that increase experience gained by pets, and battle stones. A perfect way for a pet enthusiast to make some gold in an hour. Again sorry for the lack of graphics, hopefully the list of waypoints will suffice.

Peace.

Goals

   This may sound like a no-brainer, but one of the most important things you can do when making gold is to set goals and then stay on track.  I recently became interested in gold making (or re-interested) as I noticed Kassandra’s gold approaching the 100K mark.  I set short-term goals of getting to 100K and once reaching this benchmark, not allowing my gold to dip below 100K. 

   I achieved these goals easily enough.  Things is for weeks, I did not set any new goals, and realized it last week when I saw Kass’s total gold at 102K.  I had been spending gold as soon as it came in.  I dropped 18K to craft myself one of the panther mounts, I figured as a jewelcrafter it was kind of obligatory that I had at least one of the panther mounts.  Let’s not forget pets.  There are all kinds of pets out there that I am just too lazy to farm for, so I turn to the auction house and activate my spending spree ability.  So for weeks my gold on Kassandra hovered around the 100K mark.

   I have decided to switch into high gear, or at least stop treading water.  I figure that I can make 10K a week without too much work, and that based on this, if I work at it and save, by the time the end of January rolls around, I should have at least 200K if not more.  This is my new goal, reach 200K (optimistically reach 250K) by the end of January, and not let my gold dip below this.  If I make more in a week, if I reach my goal sooner rather than later, well then I might indulge myself in some reward spending.  I will also set new goals once I reach my current goals.  My long term goal is 500K by the time the new expansion hits.

   I have one more week of being out of town and in a state of exile from Azeroth.  I did manage to take a quick (9 hour drive) home this weekend.  I did my pet trainer circuit, and made notes, so that once I get back home I can post my guide.  I also found around 4K in my mailbox from successful auctions I had posted a week ago.   I posted some new auctions and am curious to see what will be waiting for me when I get home.

   I managed to reach a few other goals with a single day of playing.  I always max out cap my valor each week, and this week was no exception.  I also beat the Celestial Tournament again, and picked up Chi-Chi, leaving me with just Yula to acquire.  Finally, I was able to get the Tideskipper from Serpentshrine Caverns, leaving me with just needing the dragonhawk pet from Tempest Keep  to get my raiding with leashes part two achievement.

   Now it is time to think about my blogging goals as well.  My initial goal was simply to start a blog and make regular posts, which I’ve done.  I even worked up the nerve to submit a post to Power Word Gold’s Hatchery.  For those of you that don’t know, Power Word Gold is a well-know blog about, what else, but making gold.  The Hatchery allows new writers a forum to post their work, gain exposure, and possibly gain some feedback as well.  Building on this, my new goal is to make more of my posts guides, along the lines of my previous post about beating the Darkmoon pet master and how to make gold with pet farming.  Along with that goal, I am also setting the goal of adding tables and screenshots to my future blogs, to make them a little more visually appealing.  I am not much of a graphic artist, so this will be a rather slow process for me.

   That’s it for the week.  Come the weekend I am going to dive in to Azeroth and my next blog as well.

   Peace.

Jeremy Feasel: Pet Battle Guide

   I am out of town for the week, so that means no Warcraft for me, since WoW and crappy hotel internet do not play together well.  I’ve decided to run home (a 10 hour drive) for the weekend for the express purpose of doing the Celestial Tournament, since another win will get me my third pet (who will be Chi-Chi).  Then it’s back to Azerothian exile for the week before things return to normal.

   Despite being out of town, I did want to keep up with this blog.  I worked up the nerve to submit my last post to The Power Word Gold Hatchery the other day.  I am already at work on a detailed guide to doing my favorite pet tamer/rare hunting circuit, and I have promised myself to include graphics for this one.

   I wanted to include at least one useful tidbit in this post, instead of it being a mere update of what I’ve been up to, so here is my guide to battling Jeremy Feasel, the Darkmoon Fair pet master.  The team I put together is actually a fusion of many different posted strategies I have run across for beating this guy.

   Jeremy Feasel will open the fight with his pet ‘Judgment’ which is essentially a Darkmoon Eye on steroids.  Judgment belongs to the magic family and all of his abilities are magic abilities.  My opening pet is a Pocket Reaver.  The Reaver is a mechanical, so all of Judgments’ abilities are weak against my opening pet.  I chose the following move set for my Reaver:  Metal Fist, Quake, and Fel Immolate; or in shorthand 1,2,1 .  Below is how my rotation goes on the Pocket Reaver:

   

                     Round 1: Quake

                     Round 2: Quake continues

                     Round 3: Quake continues

                     Round 4: Fel Immolate

                     Round 5: Metal Fist

                     Round 6: Quake

                     Round 7: Quake continues

                     Round 8: Quake continues

   Around round 8 or 9, Judgment should go down.  At this point your Reaver will be low on health, if he hasn’t already died and activate his failsafe.  Jeremy Feasel will bring out Honky-Tonk for his next pet, which is just a super-charged Darkmoon Tonk.  Honky-Tonk belongs to the mechanical family and all the abilities he uses against you are likewise mechanical.  The Reaver’s Fel Immolate ability is an elemental attack and therefore is strong versus mechanicals, like Honky-Tonk.  Spam this ability until your Reaver goes down.  Honky-Tonk will already be banged up from eating all the quakes.

     Once your Reaver goes down, bring out a Celestial Dragon.  The move set to use on this guy is 1,2,2 .  If Honky-Tonk has plenty of health open with Starfall and follow up the next round with Arcane Storm, this allows Arcane Storm to gain a damage boost.  If Honky-Tonk is near death cast Arcane Storm immediately.  Either way, once you have cast Arcane Storm, follow up with spamming flamethrower.  It is imperative that the weather be arcane winds when Feasel’s last pet comes out, as the weather effect will prevent the last pet’s stun.

   Jeremy Feasel’s last pet is Fezwick, an annoying Darkmoon Monkey that belongs to the beast family.  He uses two beast attacks and a humanoid attack.  As mentioned above, the weather MUST be arcane winds when Fezwick comes out, so that his stun ability is negated.  If your Celestial Dragon is still up, continue to spam Flamethrower and use Arcane Storm on cool down.

   Once your Celestial Dragon goes down, your third and last pet can be any hard hitting mechanical pet, using mechanical abilities of your choice.  I personally use a Son of Animus, but a more obtainable pet would be the Darkmoon Tonk. 

   I have used this team against Jeremy Feasel about a half dozen times and I have yet to lose.  With the next fair being a few weeks out, you have plenty of time to obtain and level the pets I mentioned.

   Peace.

Pet Sales

   Lately I have been dabbling with pet sales.  One of the things I like best about selling pets is the deposit on auctioning a caged pet is low, a mere one silver to run a twenty-four hour auction.  It would take me a hundred listings before I even lost a single gold piece.  Pet sales are slow, at least on my server, but I am going to wager most pets, if priced right, should sell within a week or two.  

  This guide assumes that you are a veteran pet battler and that you have the Tamer title.  If you are a complete novice to the world of pet battling, you will not be able to go after the quested pets I mention below, but you will be able to farm the pets from the raids, as well as deal with the vendored pets.

   The first order of business is determining what pets are cageable and where they are obtained from.  The two broad categories of tradeable pets that you will regularly deal with are pets that drop from instances/raids and pets that are purchased from vendors.  Sure there is the Guardian Cub which is a tradeable pet purchased from the pet store, or pets like the feline familiar that are obtained during seasonal events, but raid drops and vendors are the two common sources you will be dealing with on a regular basis.

   So here is a table of easily farmed pets from instances and raids.  A well geared 90 should be able to solo farm for most if not all of these pets.  This list is not all inclusive.  The drop rates on most of these guys is in the neighborhood of 10-15%, so if you regularly farm these instances you should routinely be acquiring pets to sell, especially if you have multiple 90s to farm with.

Lil’ Bad Wolf	Karazhan	1657
Menagerie Custodian	Karazhan	1722
Fiendish Imp	Karazhan	1657
Phoenix Hawk Hatchling	The Eye	1368
Lesser Voidcaller	The Eye	1835
Pocket Reaver	The Eye	2348
Tideskipper	Serpentshrine Caverns	1763
Tainted Waveling	Serpentshrine Caverns	1464

 As I said, the list is not all inclusive, but these are eight tradeable pets that are easily farmed.  You can see that all of them command a decent amount of gold based on their mean auction value (I used mean Alliance value).  To the drop list, you can add doing the four Pandarian Spirit Tamer Quests (adds another four pets for you to possibly obtain) and the three beasts of fable quests (adds another three possible pets to obtain).  These pets also will generally auction for 1000 gold or more.

     The list of vendor pets is huge.  This guide will focus on two of these pets.  It’s just my instinct that these pets have enough of a cool factor and enough obscurity as being obtained from a vendor that they will sell.   The two vendor pets I flip are the Ghostly Skull and the Blue Clockwork Rocket Bot, both of which are purchased from vendors in Dalaran.  To add value to these pets, both of which are of uncommon (green) quality, I use a stone to make them rares.  If you regularly do the beasts of fable and pandaren spirit tamers, you will be swimming in stones.  Count on getting a couple hundred gold for each of these that you auction. 

   You can also try leveling some of the little critters you plan to auction.  There are numerous guides out there that explain how to level a pet to 25 in an hour or so, if you don’t already know how to do this.  You don’t necessarily have to raise your pets to 25 either.

    This week I have made around 10K in pet sales.  I know this hardly makes a goblin extraordinaire, but it’s enough money to make me happy.  Most of what I earn, I simply spend on pets that elude me or that I am too lazy to go out and farm.

  

   Peace. 

Numbers

    In the realm of Azeroth we seem to be surrounded by numbers.  They are everywhere.  Item level, character level, DPS, there is no escaping numbers.  Numbers can be a good thing, but they can also be abused.

   Let’s take the pet score.  This may be a number you are not familiar with.  Wowprogress is a site that ranks all kinds of things, realms, and characters by item level, guilds by progression and more.  One of the rankings on this site is something called a pet score.  Without knowing anything about how the site makes a ranking determination you could make all kinds of assumptions.  You might assume that the number of pet battles or the number of PvP battles you have one might be factored into computing this score.  One assumption I made was that the number of pet related achievement points was factored into this score.  The other day I found out I was very wrong in my assumption.

   In my guild, is a shaman, Wildsong by name.  She is (or was) the undisputed pet champion.  If it’s a collectible pet, she has it.  She has the Ethereal Soul Trader; she has the various rare drops from throne of thunder.  She has over 500 unique pets.  In checking her ranking, she is first in the guild and fifth on the server for pet score.  This, of course makes perfect sense.  It did until the other day.

   I am online the other day, plodding about and an achievement toast comes up in guild chat.  “Wildsong has earned the achievement Taming the World”.  Along with that toast was another one announcing she had defeated Grand Master Aki.  I was stunned.  I got the tamer achievement a long time ago.  I would have figured Wildsong did too.  I congratulated her on her achievement and took the time to ask how the Celestial Tournament was going for her.  Her response was that she had not yet beaten it, but now that she had beaten the tamers in Pandaria, she had hope and confidence.

   I thought it would have gone without saying that she would have beat not only the Pandaria tamers, but the Tournament as well, based on her pet score and ranking.  I have managed to beat the Tournament five times now.  I have two of the reward pets to prove it and am working on the third.  My ranking is second within the guild and ninth on the server.  Apparently these scores and rankings followed some logic I was not familiar with.

   I looked into exactly how WoWprogress computes these numbers.  They do it based solely on the number of pets you have, the level of said pets, and the quality (rare, uncommon, etc…) of said pets.  For instance a level 25 rare pet is worth is worth 62.10 points.  The same pet as an uncommon is worth 57.32 points.  A rare level 23 pet is worth 51.96 points.  It is entirely feasible that a player could never fight any tamers and simply accumulate a huge collection of wild pets from Pandaria and have a huge score.  Fill up all 1000 pet slots with bandicoons and marsh fiddlers and level them to 25 and you too could have a high pet score and ranking.  Let’s do the math.  If I decided to capture every wild pet in Pandaria with a quality of uncommon or rare, and then level them to 25 I am quite sure I would be first on my server.  Let’s assume that I wind up with 75% uncommon (750 pets) and 25% rare (250 pets).  My pet score would then be 750*57.32 (this equals 42,990) plus 250*62.10 (this equals 15,525.  My total pet score would be 58,515.  By way of comparison, the number one pet score on my server is 17,088.  The number one slot in the entire US has a score of 36204.

    Clearly we can only draw limited assumptions from Wowprogress’s pet score.  My hypothetical collector of bandicoons and marsh fiddlers would probably be ranked number one in the world.  This same hypothetical character would probably never win a PvP pet battle, would not be able to defeat most tamers and would probably have very few pet achievements.

   All numbers are the same in this regards.  Let’s take iLevel.  The common wisdom seems to be that higher iLevel generally equates to higher performance.  This of course is simply not true.  One thing I seem to have plenty of is trinkets.  I have a nice mix of tanking and DPS trinkets.  Let’s say that my highest iLevel trinkets are my DPS trinkets (these will be the 553 pieces from SoO normal) and that all my tanking trinkets are from LFR (so my tanking trinkets are iLevel 528).  A flex raid is forming and they need a tank.  I decide to cheese iLevel and equip my 553 DPS trinkets.  Sure this will give me a boost in iLevel, but probably won’t really do wonders for my performance as a tank.

   How about DPS?  The higher the DPS, the better the player, right?  People seem to forget that not all characters are created equal.  Let’s take a shadow priest and a frost mage ad let’s say they are geared to LFR level (they both have an iLevel of exactly 528).  At the end of a boss fight, the meters announce the frost mage did 219K DPS, and the shadow priest did 165K DPS.  Must be the mage is some kind of hero and that the shadow priest might need to learn his class.  Thing is, this is the expected performance for both classes.  Check out the site Noxxic.  This site tells you the projected DPS for a character based on their class/specialization and gear level.  In the example I just used, each character is doing their expected amount of DPS.

   I could go on and on.   Numbers have their uses, but players have a very bad tendency to dogmatically make assumptions about numbers and take a raw number as some kind of gospel truth about a character’s performance or worth.  Playing with numbers requires just a little bit of thought.  It’s not as simple as “character x has higher DPS and therefore is the better player”.

   This seems like a good place to conclude.

   Peace.

Minimum Wage

I have been raiding a lot as of late, and so have started to pay more attention to repair costs and money in general, as repairs tend to add up and become expensive quickly. It occurs to me there is probably an average 'wage' in Azeroth, so today I thought I would examine money making. I have had an active interest in making gold for some time, ever since Burning Crusade hit. I have also never been a goblin, I might use the auction house on occasion, but I am more of a blue-collar type when it comes to gold making. I have generally relied on farming, questing and grinding.

One of the more proletarian ways to go about making gold, is to run a daily routine on the Timeless Isle. The other day I decided to estimate what exactly I generally make for every hour I spend on the isle. I time myself and actually found I was out farming mobs for longer than I would ordinarily. The three daily quests I do take less than thirty minutes.

Between quest rewards and vendor trash I made 184 gold. Not factored into this, was a stack of 20 wildfowl breasts I accumulated from killing those obnoxious pink flamingo looking mobs over and over. Also not factored into my profits were the 11 motes of harmony I got. I could have certainly used the resulting spirit of harmony to buy and then auction any number of things such as golden lotus or trillium ore. I am just going to wing it and estimate that if I auctioned the wildfowl breasts and used the spirit to buy some commodity and auction it, my earnings for one hour of time on the isle would be 225 gold.

This is about as proletarian as things get. So based on this very limited experiment, I would say the Azerothian minimum wage is 200 gold, give or take. If your intake is less than this per hour then you are either A. raiding or B. Sitting in a city and trolling chat.

A minimum wage player, who plays a mere 10 hours a week, makes 2k a week. This means the same player makes 8K a month. Obviously repair costs have not been factored in.

Based on all of this, it is not the least bit hard to make gold. I proved this by spending an hour doing three easy quests and farming mobs. I wasn't even trying. You might think I intentionally made huge pulls or pulled non-stop to inflate my earnings during my test run. You'd be wrong. I did things at my normal, rather slow pace. You might not become a goblineering millionaire, but you can certainly live well enough on minimum wages, at least in Azeroth.

Peace.