Weapon Enchants for Tanks

I am sincerely hoping that the new Call to Arms implementation to the LFD-system will be the cream on the mashed potatoes (as we say in sweden) needed to have all those people who have thought about tanking but not tried it yet, or have grown tired of it, to decide to give tanking a go. I thought I'd do my part, by writing up a short post on the various weapon enchants out there for tanking.

The history of tank weapon enchants is a rather meager one. They're either few or bad, but usually both. It says a lot about them that most tanks preferred to use a Burning Crusade enchant back in Wrath. Fortunately, things don't look that glum in Cataclysm, but we're far from having a smorgasbord of enchants to pick from. Which is sad, I would really like it if more tank weapon enchants allowed for that little extra choice - more threat or more survivability? Survivability through reduced spell damage or physical damage? And so on, but alas.

Now in Cata we have 9 different 1handed weapon enchants, out of which only one is specifically designed for tanking - Windwalk. Windwalk, which gives 600 dodge and 15% runspeed on proc, is actually a great enchant and there is no question whether you should have that or any other if you could choose freely. Unfortunately, Windwalk costs no less than 6 Maelstrom Crystals. MC currently cost around 1000g each on my server, which means most people won't consider this enchant for anything but a really nice epic. When I can afford one for myself (or more importantly, get a weapon worthy of the enchant) I will write a post on the efficiency of that as well. For now Windwalk is out of reach for most upcoming tanks. Even though the prices probably will drop significantly with the upcoming 4.1 patch, I still think this enchant will cost a lot more than the options. So what are the options?

None of the alternatives come close in tanking efficiency compared to Windwalk of course, yet again, if money isn't an issue, that is the enchant you should go for. If money is an issue however, or you just want to enchant some crappy blue we have to take a closer look at the our choices.

Threat Enchants
Tanks can either go for threat or survivability. In the case of a threat enchant we would have to look at the dps enchants, such as Hurricane (450 haste on hit) or Avalanche (Nature Damage on hit). There is also Elemental Slayer, but I frankly don't see much use for that when tanking (or elsewhere). Haste doesn't do very much for tanking. For warriors and druids it might result in slightly more melee swings which will turn into more rage, but because of the rage and threat changes they made in the end of Wrath, we usually prefer to hit hard rather than fast. Paladins have even less use of haste, where the only benefit could be that more haste equals more melee swings which equals in more seal procs, but to all three haste would
be a fairly neglible effect on your overall threat. Dk tanks shouldn't even consider any other enchant than their own Swordrunes. So we can pretty much scrap the idea of getting ourselves a threat enchant, simply because the enchants available won't do that job very well.

Another threat enchant, which isn't really an enchant, is getting a weapon chain. The Cataclysm weapon chain, also known as Pyrium Weapon Chain gives 40 hit and reduces the duration of disarm effects by 60%. Disarm is very rarely an issue in pve content. Of the top of my head I can think of maybe two-three mobs that disarm in the heroics we have today. Although hit (and expertise) are valuable for keeping aggro, 40 hit is really low (about 0,5% hit) and most tanks prefer survivability anyhow.

Old Survivability Enchants
Let's take a look at some old survivability enchants. Does Mongoose still hold up, despite the fact that it is 4 years old by now? Would Blade Ward be a good idea? I wrote posts about Blade Ward and Mongoose back in Wrath which concluded that Blade Ward was decent, but Mongoose overall the best. What would they do for us today? If we assume the uptimes would be the same;

Mongoose
Teaches you how to permanently enchant a melee weapon to occasionally increase Agility by 120 and attack speed slightly. Requires a level 35 or higher item.


In my post I concluded that Mongoose was worth approximately 30 agility and 0,5% attack speed overall or 120 agi and 2% attack speed with 25% uptime. Back in Wrath, this was actually quite ok, since 30 average agi resulted in a decent amount of dodge. How good is 30 agility and 0,5% attackspeed today? Well, not very good. Most stats are worth some third or fourth of what they were in Wrath, leaving a neglible amount of crit, dodge and armor (less than half a percent) from the Mongoose enchant.

Blade Ward
Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Lasts 10 sec.

My old testing showed that Blade Ward resulted in approximately 1 extra parry per minute. That will probably have changed somewhat since 200 parry is worth less now than it was in Wrath. It had approximately 1,5 procs per minute which would result in 300 extra parry rating each minute or 1,7% extra parry. What's interesting is really how many extra parries we would get from this enchant. If we compare to how it worked in Wrath, where 300 parry rating resulted in extra parry each minute - parry is worth approximately one third of what it is at 80, which means we should get one extra parry every 3 minutes. Not very impressive.


New Survivability Enchant

For survivability there is only Mending in Cataclysm, which will occasionally heal you when doing melee attacks or spells. So how good is mending? Some simple testing shows that it doesn't work wonders, but it's definitely worth the few gold that it costs. Here are some facts;

• Mending heals for about 1000 hp when it procs.
• It can crit.
• Seems unaffected by stats.
• It doesn't generate threat.
• The inner cooldown is either really short (somewhere around 10 seconds), or there is none at all.
• Can proc from melee dots (like Rend)
• Can proc from spell dots.

I did some simple testing by instancing and 5 minutes worth of target dummy smashing on my paladin.

Stonecore
Total Healed - Approximately 140k.
Time in Combat - Approximately 22 minutes.
Healed per minute - 6000hp
Healed per second - 100hp
Hp5 - 500

Lost City of Tol'Vir
Total Healed - Approximately 120k.
Time in Combat - Approximately 16,5 minutes.
Healed per minute - 7000hp
Healed per second - 120hp
Hp5 - 600

Deadmines
Total Healed - Approximately 237k
Time in Combat - Approximately 34 minutes (damn that instance is long)
Healed per minute - ~ 7000hp
Healed per second - 116hp
Hp5 - 580

Level 85 Dummy
16 procs
50 hps
250 hp5

Boss Dummy
13 procs
40 hps
200 hp5

Level 85 Dummy - No Gear (except weapon of course)
10 procs
30 hps
150 hp5

The instances were tanked normally, using my skills as I always do, and as mentioned with a prot paladin. On the dummies I just used melee swings, with a 2,6 speed mace. As you can see the efficiency of the enchant varies widely depending on how many times you hit. As a paladin I have both plenty of spells and melee attacks, but I think the efficiency of the enchant is about equal for all the tank classes. In a regular tanking situation it has approximately 500-600 hp5. That's not an amazing number, but definitely not worthless. Will it make much of a difference whether you have this enchant or not? No, but a small one. If you want to pick an enchant for your tanking weapon before getting a weapon nice enough for Windwalk, I do recommend Mending out of the choices available.

Patch 4.0.6 - Wait, there was more

As soon as I get around to posting a post on the patch notes, they update them and I have to start all over again! Actually even for my last post they had managed to update them after I had finished it, so I had to implement the new changes before I posted it. I shouldn't complain, the changes are interesting and most of them well needed (yes, even the nerfs). I'll comment a little on other things than just the priest stuff this time though, I'll just pick a little here and there.

Heroic Nerf
Blizzard are bringing the nerf-bat down on most heroics. They are buffing some areas, but overall every heroic has become alot easier, and even if most heroics still are tricky I think you wouldn't have to be a psychic to predict more nerfs around the corner. Maybe we all knew it was coming, question is, do we want it to? I'm not sure if the difficulty of the instances was what was bugging me, on the other hand like I've mentioned before I have been running heroics mostly with guildies and I can imagine the general pug isn't doing as well. Come to think of it, a friend of mine had to do some 4-5 pug runs before he ever got passed Ozruk in Stonecore. So yeah, maybe the difficulty level was a tad too high. I suppose people could be divided into two faction about this nerf. The ones that think "well, just let it be difficult, otherwise the bad players won't ever learn to shape up. Or even better, the bad players might stop playing totally. Survival of the fittest". And the other one goes "there's no hope, there will always be bad players and right now they're just making it impossible to complete most heroics because they won't ever learn to cope with the difficulty level". I'm not sure which one of these I stand in, maybe one foot in both. In one way I do feel like stuff should be difficult, that is how we learn. But on the other hand, we can't expect miracles from everyone either. We have to realize that the bad player always will be a part of WoW and we have to adapt to that - just like we always have to adapt to the pvpers (do they ever adapt to us). It's a compromise of epic proportions, and these are the consequences of trying to fit so many different people together.

Priest Changes
Improved Power Word: Shield change reverted
I did feel like this was an odd change to begin with (it made the shield absorb 30% more when cast on yourself), so I'm not suprised they are removing it. It does seem odd that they invent a change, think it is good enough to implement and then suddenly decide that it wasn't (or that it was too good) and remove it again. Ah well, don't see that this will make much of a difference for us pve priests, it was probably just a little too good in pvp in combination with the other buffs to the shield they were making. Makes me yet again suspect that Blizzard are using several development teams that don't communicate much between eachother before they announce changes. "Hey, we're already buffing the shield over here, your change will make it op", "no your change will, ours is fine", "no yours, "no yours" and so on, until someone has to give in.

Strength of Soul now also causes the priest to become immune to silence, interrupt, and dispel effects for 2/4 seconds after using Inner Focus.
Yet another pretty synergy effect for the disc priest. It's interesting that Blizzard clearly thought that this talent wasn't very good when they implement such a heavy buff to the talent. How good will this be for the pve priest? Well silences and interrupts aren't a big problem in raids fortunately, and in any case probably not something we'd want to time with our inner focus anyway (since we want to use it with PoH and GH). I bet the pvping disc priests are happy though.

Prayer of Healing effectiveness has been reduced by 15%.
Let me just say I am not suprised. I don't know if I mentioned it before but I always thought of PoH as the best aoe healing in the game right now, especially when combined with the PoH glyph. Add to that Lightwell, Sanctuary, CoH and PoM and holy priests were pretty dang good. So good in fact that some guilds preferred to bring them for aoe heavy raid fights. I know those guilds weren't many and probably fighting heroic content, but that is always a sign that Blizzard will take notice of and probably act upon. Just as they did with dk tanks in Ulduar.

Binding Heal and Holy Word: Serenity now refresh the duration of Renew on the target, in addition to the other direct heals.
Binding Heal, Flash Heal, Greater Heal can now trigger Chakra: Serenity.
Thank you! I thought the only drawback of Chakra: Serenity really was that it had to be activated and maintained through Heal, which you don't always want to use. On heavy tank damage you don't want to have to through the occasional Heal just to maintain this stance. Great change this. But it makes State of Mind even less useful since the only thing that made it worth having was to make it easier to maintain the stance through Heals.

Circle of Healing effectiveness has been increased by 30%.
This is to counteract the nerf on PoH, and welcome of course. Last time I wrote something on CoH I said something along the lines of "this spell doesn't feel like it does much difference, I use it more like a spell to top people up than to actually help me with healing". This will hopefully make CoH a little more worth casting, although I already liked it for when moving around (which we do alot in raids).

Penance mana cost has been increased by 7%, but healing has been increased by 20%.
I don't see why they think like we have the mana to manage the extra mana costs, I've always felt like mana is rather tough when healing as a disc. On the other hand we really must be happy about the great buffs in throughput. Does make you wonder how Blizzard could let us run around and (clearly) suck so much until now. I mean... 20% extra is alot.

Shadow Orbs benefit from mastery has been increased by approximately 16%
I don't like shadow priesting and I don't know much about it. Something I did notice when playing shadow priest briefly however was that mastery didn't seem to be very good for spriests. When asking around about it it seemed I was right. Wonder if this buff will be enough? As reader Deception pointed out; "The short answer is yes".

Shaman Changes
Now that I actually have a level 85 shaman these changes interest me!

    Flametongue Weapon procs now deal roughly 20% less damage.
    The Windfury Weapon proc can now trigger 3 additional attacks, up from 2.
I am writing these two changes off at the same time since they ultimately affect eachother. Nerfing the one and buffing the other will have us ask which ones we should use. I am currently using Flametongue on OH and Windfury on MH but with these changes (basically 30% extra damage to windfury) we might want to use doubly windfury again? Testing and time will tell. It would be sad, because then it feels like Lava Lash would be the pathetic filler skill it was back in Wrath again. But if we look at another change we might get the explanation;

Flametongue Weapon damage now scales from attack power instead of spell power (for Enhancement shaman only).
I didn't know that it scaled from spell power, silly me thought that Blizzard had already thought about the problems with this and changed that a long time ago. It could be that the damage on Flametongue Weapon procs will skyrocket now due to this change (for enhancement shamans) and maybe increase the damage by about... 20%? That would explain why they are nerfing the damage, to bring it back to where it is right now.

Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman's Spirit, exclusive of short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped. In addition, its effects are now raid-wide.
It's funny how Blizzard repeat their mistakes. They redesigned Innervate because it was favoring some classes over others, since it too increased mana regen based on the targets spirit initially. Then they go and make the exact same damn mistake with Mana Tide. And realize all over again that it was a bad idea. The old way Mana Tide heavily favored holy priests, since we have the biggest gain from any spirit increase. I could easily gain some 40-50% total mana from a mana tide, imagine having some three resto shamans in a raid and that the thing only has 2 min cd. Crazy. So this change was definitely needed.

Deep Healing (Mastery) has been increased to 3% per point, up from 2.5%.
Yeah I felt like this was needed. Mastery for resto shamans wasn't as good as it is for some other healing classes, maybe not very good at all. I can't say with my limited testing, but from what I've heard from "real" resto shamans that seemed to be the case.

Greater Healing Wave mana cost has been increased by 10%; healing done has been increased by 20%.
I already felt like GHW was the best option when healing heroics, combined with Healing Rain (and Riptide and ES of course). That doesn't mean that I felt like it was all that, just the alternatives were even less good (HW and CH). So I really welcome this change.

Chain Heal's effectiveness has been increased by approximately 10%.
Yes please! Like I wrote about in my short post on my experiences with healing as a shaman, it felt like Chain Heal was way to weak right now. Just as with CoH for priests I don't feel like its worth using much more as to top people off between fights. I wonder of 10% is enough to make it good, but I know Blizzard don't want us to turn into chain heal spamming the way we did back in Wrath.

Unrelated, but interesting. One circle is evil. Can you tell which one? Most of our raid can't ;) (Except on this picture actually!)

Druid Changes
Shapeshifts: Entering or leaving a shapeshift no longer cancels root effects. It continues to cancel movement slowing effects.
I'm not really sure what to say about it. Maybe it is sufficient to say that it looked like Loves heart stopped beating for a moment when he read about this change. Another druid in my guild posted a forum post on the matter called "Druid Curse-Whine-Rant". Druids won't be druids any more... (but I heard at least restos were getting this as a talent instead).

Typhoon mana cost has been reduced by 50%.
This is great, we had a couple of boomkins who used it for cc in raids and they always had mana issues. I bet they're happy now. Will make boomkins a more viable option as cc:er overall.

Enchanting
Enchant Off-Handed - Superior Intellect now increases Intellect by 40, down from 100.
Good! It was silly that they had an enchant that made two semi-good blue weapons as good as an epic staff.

Alchemy
Alchemist's Stones for Agility, Strength, and Intellect have been added.
When I first noticed that the only alchemist stone there was seemed to be for tanking I was confused. I still don't know why Blizzard seemed to have forgotten about all the other classes but I am glad they are implementing them. Better late than never. Intellect and haste are good stats for priests, although I would've preferred to see Intellect and Mastery. It could've been worse, it could've been crit.

The number of herbs required to create flasks has been reduced, while the Volatile Life needed has been increased slightly.
I think I wrote a comment somewhere on the current issues with flasks being way too costly to craft, that the amount of herbs needed to craft one flask that lasted one hour were just silly. I am glad Blizzard have realized this and now maybe we can hope flask prices will drop from the 300-400g each range to more reasonable prices.

Archaeology 101

I'm having great fun with Archaeology at the moment, and I bet most of you have tried it out and probably come even further than I have. I still thought I'd take a moment to talk about it, since it works quite differently from other professions.

Archaeology is trained just like any other profession by a trainer in one of the big cities and has the same skill values, aka 1-75, 76-150 and so on up to 525. The big thing that differs archeology from other professions is that the material gathered - fragments - are personalized. No one else but you can get to them. This gives archaeology (hate spelling that word btw) less of a farming feeling than the other professions, eventhough it is actually more about farming than any other profession.


I don't recommend anyone below level 60 to start skilling archaeology, since it will take you into any zone in the old Vanilla world (don't know about Northrend and Outlands). To be able to dig in any zone without being killed by the local fauna, you'd want to outlevel them. As a commenter pointed out, it will only take you to areas of your own level or below (being max level I had no idea ^^). I still highly recommend having a flying mount for this, but I suppose that goes for any kind of questing and/or gathering.

Zones & Digging
When bringing up your map you'll see little shovels scattered across it. These indicate zones to dig in. Each continent (Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms at first)  has four zones and each zone has three sets of fragments. Everytime you've digged out a zone, a new one is added somewhere on the map. At first you only get a few fragments per dig, later on you get between 3-5 (and eventually maybe even more). The amount of fragments needed to complete an item increases too however. To find a fragment you have to enter a zone and press the survey button. This will make you place on out of three different survey scopes, indicating closeness and direction of a fragment.
The red scope means your still far away. This also has a pretty high fail level, meaning it will only show you in the general direction. In my experience it seems to be about 50/50, which means it will basically just indicate whether you are south/north/west/east of an item and not much more.
The yellow scope means you're pretty close, but still got some 40-60 yards to go. Also more reliable.
The green scope means the fragment is nearby, usually between 5-20 yards. Highly reliable. You actually have to stand within some 5 yards of a fragment to unearth it.

Find the fragment in the picture!

Fragments
As mentioned, what you gather as an archaeologist are called fragments. The vast majority will be fragments that are automatically added to the item you are currently finishing. This means you can only acquire them from farming digging zones. The fragments you gather can belong to one of 10 different types. These are spread out lore wise, which means that if you are surveying in an old night elf ruin, you'll find night elf fragments. You'll occasionally get a more rare green quality fragment, which is boe and an item put into your bags. These are sellable, and can be found on the auction house. These fragments belong to certain types, just as the regular fragments do. They count as 12 fragments in one, and can be added to any item of that type (aka night elf to night elf).

In the beginning you'll mostly find fragments belonging either to the troll, night elf, dwarf or fossil type, simply because those people are common (and old) in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. The first 75ish skills can be had just by digging. Later on you'll only get skill from completing items. Some people therefore recommend to not complete any items until you reach this limit. It's up to you really, it won't make a difference to whether you'll get that cool, really rare item in the end anyway. I heard that digging zones in Uldum are especially rare, so if you ever happen to get one there you should dig it out!



Items 

Once you've hit the limit of getting skill through digging, you'll generally need about 35 fragments to complete an item, and as mentioned you get about 3-5 fragments per dig, and 5 skills to solve an item. To this can be added the green quality fragments to further boost item completion, if wanted. Simply grab the green fragment and drag it into the little indentation underneath the bar. Not all items have this option, and some can have several indentations. Whether or not you'll want to save the green quality fragments for later or not is also up to you. Yet again I hardly think it'll make much difference when it comes to finding rare items or not.
The thing about archaeology is that you always know ahead which item you're completing. So you don't just gather a set of fragments and get an item on random, instead you get an item at random and gather fragments to complete it. The difference might seem minor, but it is a really smart way for Blizzard to get you hooked. Occasionally you'll get a rare item, which requires alot more fragments to complete, and you'll have a big motivation to complete the item so you can get that rare item. If you didn't know which item you'd get until you completed it, I think people would stop digging more easily. Evil Blizzard!

Fun with engineering

Most professions have some crafts that aren't very useful, but mostly for fun. With engineering this is rather the rule than the exception. Although there are plenty of very useful crafts as engineer, I still feel that most of them are tinkery fun stuff. Blizzard has really succeeded in making you feel like a crazy scientist when you're an engineer!

One thing that is just hilarious to do when you're an engineer is blasting lowbies with Decoys. Ok I realize I'm letting out my evil side here, but I just can't help it. It's really entertaining. I like it so much I'd even find it slightly ok if someone did it to my lowbie. It's an acceptable way to kill someone!

You need three things to make this work, and yes unfortunately, this trick only works for engineers.
1. The Decoy
2. The Trigger
3. The Lowbie

The first two are pretty easy. The decoy is called Explosive Decoy, and is a little bunny jumping around. It explodes when hit. Just placing it near lowbies might actually make them attack it and thus kill themselves, that is if they're stupid. This is of course the best way to use a decoy! Unfortunately, lowbies aren't as stupid as they look. So you've placed the decoy but the lowbie won't hit it? No fear! You can set it off yourself >:) By setting an EMP to your belt and pressing it the Decoy will go off instantly, dealing damage to any hostile target around.

Finding a proper lowbie might be a little more difficult. The Decoy does about 1600 damage, so you'll need someone with less hp than that, usually someone below level 40. Booty Bay, and sometimes Gadgetzan are good places to look.

But wait a sec, you'll probably say. Won't the guards shred me to bits if I start blasting lowbies? No! And that's the best part! Since you're not actually the one doing the damage, the decoy is, the guards couldn't care less! So off you go making BB or Gadgetzan unsafe, if you're lucky (and smart enough) to be an engineer!

Wish List

Nothing is perfect of course. If it was it wouldn't be perfect. Or wait now, how does that work... Ah nevermind. Here comes a little list of things I'd like to see change in a close to come patch!

The Portable Anvil (and forge)
Although Blizzard have simplified the crafting process for some professions, there are still some professions that are stuck in the stone ages. I remember when being an alchemist was a pain in the ass, because you had to go into the deepest corners of Scholomance to be able to do flasks. Or when you had to go to the trainer in Uldaman to train enchanting. I'm not saying these were good solutions, they were bad. It is good they removed them. Yet there are some professions that still need to go somewhere to do their stuff. Blacksmithers and engineers still need the forge and anvil to craft most of their items. Well, especially blacksmithers who need those two items for practically everything they do. I understand the rp factor of this, you simply can't carry an anvil around, sure I get that (maybe that should be a tauren racial though?). But considering what the gnomish engineers have been able to create over the years, like the Gnomish Army Knife to greatly simplify engineer crafts, one could think a portable anvil can't be too hard to create? Oh and while we're at it you might as well throw in a forge there too. It is sooo annoying being on an ore farm run and having to run back to some remote place all the time to smelt them. No one else has to do this! They've removed location necessities on all the other professions.

While I'm at it...
Come to think of it, there are actually quite some things I'd like to change about professions overall, not just the issues with Blacksmithers. For instance, I'd like it if you could sort your crafts more. Now you can sort them only after type and if you have all the materials for them. I'd like to be able to sort them after material usage. Like if I want to craft something using Citrines, I'd like to be able to get up a list of only such crafts, whether I have the mats for it or not. And another matter on crafts, I'd love it if you could queue not just the same crafts, but several different crafts. This would be especially awesome for professions like Scribes and Alchemists, who often do alot of few, different types of crafts in one go. Can't ya just tell the game you want to do 5 of those, 3 of those, 10 of those etcetera and go afk to do something more fun with your time than staring at your craft window?

Retroactive Quest Turn-Ins
You just killed 50 quilboars just for fun and the moment after some orc comes up to you and asks you to do the very same thing again? You point at the heap of dead bodies but he just shakes his head. Not so fun anymore. Being able to turn in quests retroactively is true in some mmorpgs, if I'm not completely mistaken (I think Guild Wars for example). That means the game keeps track of what you do and let's you turn in most of the quests after you've done them, even if you didn't have it. You don't have to get "permission" from some npc first. That means that if there is a quest to say, kill some dude, and you don't have it, the quest item (if there is one) will still drop. And in any case, if you kill him and ever find the dude who wanted you to kill him and talk to him and he says "hey I want you to kill that guy" and you say "hey I did that yesterday" he says "wow, that's great, have some of my old stuff I don't want anylonger". Considering Blizzard is already keeping track of everything we do through the achievements log book, this doesn't feel like such a difficult thing to implement. Other games have done it, which is yet another example of that it's quite possible. My guess is that it would mean quite the overhaul of the games item drop system though, and Blizzard just can't be arsed.

EDIT (10/5): I knew I had forgotten about something. I'd really love it if they'd remove daze. It's just annoying. I can't think of one single moment in the game when I thought "Wow! Good thing there is daze in this game!" but plenty of time when I've thought "God dang it, I frickin hate that skill!". The only reason Blizzard would want it is so that people wouldn't be able to mount through areas with mobs too easily. But why not? If you're too low leveled, you'll be beaten to death before you get anywhere anyway. Be gone pesty daze, you're no good!

These are just some few things though. Have you thought of something that needs to be changed?

Needing on lowbie gems

I play alot of lowbie characters, which means I play alot of lowbie instances. Playing a lowbie instance pug is a very special thing. It's like russian roulette really. You can end up with a whole group of people who not only don't know anything about the game, but act like douches too. Love actually did SM GY with a player who thought he was extremely cool because he needed on everything. And sometimes you end up with people who not only try to do their best, but are really nice people at the same time! Happens rarely but it happens.

And that is one of the issues about pugging, some play by some rules and some play by others. Are there a set of rules that work better or seem more logical? This time I'd like to talk about lowbie gems such as Tigerseye, Malachite, Shadowgem, Lesser Moonstone and so on. All the gems that drop in vanilla instances. Because fact is that some people need on them and some people don't. And I don't mean need as in plain ninjaing, but for the excuse of being Jewelcrafters.

I did WC the other day and we had a player who needed on all the gems claiming this very thing - since he was an aspiring jewelcrafter (and he had even skilled some) he actually needed the gems. Some people in the group agreed with him and some people didn't. So I thought, was he right or wrong to need the gems for that reason?

These gems where around since before jewelcrafting came around as a profession. That means that in the old days, there was no actual profession to use gems much, and so people generally agreed that since no one really used them properly, or more than anyone else, no one should need on them. This has lived on until today, but now we have jewelcrafting, a profession Blizzard put in to make use of all those gems... right?

That was what I initially thought anyway. On later skill levels you don't do much else than cut gems as jewelcrafter, but is that really so on the low skill levels? Gems don't actually drop anymore at level 60+, so above that level this issue vanishes anyway. I started to investigate.

It turns out that when searching on what you can craft with lowbie gems, you won't get an overabundance of jewelcrafting crafts. You'll actually find about as many, and sometimes more, engineering and blacksmithing crafts (and some leatherworkers and tailorers too). Doesn't that mean that blacksmithers and engineers should need on those gems? Aren't we like back to square pre-jewelcrafting then?

By the glance of it I'd say yes, but when looking more closely, that doesn't really have to be so. The bs, lw, tailoring and engi crafts that need gems (of any level) are generally tiresome and worthless. They take way more time and money to do than they're good for. This is not the fact with JC, which actually can craft some really nice items with gems. This means that any other crafter could use, but wouldn't use gems to actually craft something. But the question is if that really matters? The other crafters -can- use the gems, just as much as JC's. So shouldn't they have equal right to need on the gems? And with that many needers, can't we all just greed on them like we've been doing all this time? And besides, JC's can get their resource just like any other crafter, by gathering. Mining and prospecting in their case.

One last aspect comes into this calculation - how much do the professions have to use the gems to skill? Because of the fact that you can only craft expensive and mostly worthless items with gems if you're a bs, lw, tailor or engi, they usually actually avoid these crafts when skilling. Is this true for JC's as well? Well actually, JC's use gems quite alot to skill, which yet again probably has to do with that they don't only craft shiny crap from the gems, like the other professions. Note that they don't have to use alot of gems to skill, but it definitely helps. And they craft such pretty things which they later on can overprize on the AH for you to be devastated about when trying to find a decent neck on your lowbie alt...

In any case, to wrap it up. Do I think that JC's should be able to need on the lowbie gems that drop? Yes, up to a certain level it's definitely ok. The low leveled gems such as Tigerseyes, Malachites and the like are worth so little money that leaving them to up and coming jewelcrafters isn't too much to ask for (and skilling JC is really quite expensive). Later on the gems will be so much worth (about 10g a piece for Jades and such) that I'm not so sure that I think it's ok anymore. Like I said they don't really need the gems to skill, not much anyway, and there is no way to control the fact that they actually use them and not only sell them on AH themselves. Not much of a conclusion perhaps, "it's ok a little but not too much". But that is still the answer I have to give. JC's use gems more than any other crafter, but not exclusively. Considering the fact that they can gather gems for themselves, just as any other crafter has to do, I don't really feel they deserve or need any special cosseting. I'll give them a little niceness, but not much more than that.