Peter's Blog

Ongoing World of Warcraft notes/tips:

• I'm making nice profits from making and selling guns. Some other things such as sniper scopes don't sell well, maybe because people don't really look for them.
• To use the engineering skill to make more sophisticated/lethal/profitable items you need to gain engineering experience. I find I have to keep buying training for new items and making them just for the experience: if you keep making the same easy items your experience stops going up. I make them and then either sell them or keep them in the bank in case they are useful later (just what is a copper modulator?).
• Can't wait to make an exploding mechanical sheep!!!
• I made two dummy targets. I think these are a kind of decoy to drop when you are running away from a group of monsters. I haven't tried them out yet, they are not that easy to build and I don't want to waste them.
• don't speed read. Spent an hour killing birds for flight feathers before realising I was supposed to be getting light leather.
• by all accounts, skinning is quite a lucrative profession. It is easy to find dead animals to skin (or make your own dead animals, just take a living one and kill it) and the leather is in demand for bags (which are expensive to buy) as well as guns and goggles. It is hard to find leather for sale anywhere except auctions (where it is quite expensive) and a stall at the darkwind faire (where it was cheap but the darkwind faire disappeared the next day).
• When selling through auction, enter a buy-out price. Most of my stuff is sold for the buy-out price. Maybe I price them too low but I still make a profit and I do sell them. In fact, often the same person will buy more than one of my rough boomsticks so maybe there is some profiteering going on. I don't care much, as long as I am not left with unsold stuff which I have to offload at a loss.I have a feeling that WoW purchasers like to get things instantly and no buy-out price is a disincentive.
• When buying through auction, it doesn't hurt to make a bid. You may save compared to the buy-out price, especially if the auction doesn't have much longer to run. I got myself a nice two-handed axe this way. Better still, do your bidding at off-peak times. Incidently, I sold the two-handed mace I bought a while back for about what I bought it for. It served me well. It wasn't soul-bound so I was able to sell it, soul-bound is bad.
• I like the way you cannot tell precisely when an auction will end. No chance of being outbid by one copper in the last second.
• use the alt key to cast a spell on yourself without having to click on your character to select it as the target.
• use left click with shift if you have a pile of, say, 20 copper bars and want to put just 10 in the bank. Same to buy more than one item from a vendor.
• read the tips that appear on the loading screen. The tips in WoW are generally useful and don't state the obvious.
• you can only have one blessing (I think it is) at a time. Be warned before buying extra blessings. I had a rank 2 blessing that improved my armour but still bought a rank 1 blessing that deals 5 damage every time I get hit. I think I should have saved my money and concentrated on the armour blessing. I'm not sure of the advantage of extra armour compared to extra damage dealt when hit. Fighting is a matter your own health lasting longer than your enemies. You having better armour means he does you less damage. Him being hurt when he hits you means that you take relatively less damage compared to him. I think this applies to however many baddies are attacking you and whether mele or ranged attacks. At the end of the day, I'd rather not be taking any damage: it takes you closer to zero and even if you don't die you are left vulnerable.
• Some of the baddies are attractive looking females and it is weird killing them with a big axe (I'm not a misogynist psycho).
• went to stormwind city. Very detailed but gave me motion sickness unlike anywhere else in the game. Outside stormwind was a noobie area with low level monsters. Could take out three at once with no probs.
• flying on griffins is cool. Can still look around and see yourself from below/ahead. The sun glints from my axe (which just happens to be the title of my new album). Fly over weird unexplored areas full of unimaginably difficult (level ???) beasties.