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I never really got off the ground with this WoW blog, but I thought I'd give another go now that we're hip deep into MOP. I have leveled both a Fury Warrior and my Frost Death Knight to 90. I have started working on my Ret Paladin too, but mostly I'm running Dailies, scenarios, and five mans on my DK.

I see a lot of chatter on the blog-o-sphere about dailies. I think the way they were implemented in 5.1 works. If you want to work for a few extra extra pieces of round out gear, you can run a few dailies.

But I have to say, they number of dailies, implemented in 5.0 was way too many. Running both those and the 5.0's on my DK is brutal and a grind. Blizzard says they aren't mandatory, but unless your running five mans as a full time job, they pretty much are to get your iLevel up. I don't know what you'd do with the valor you earn in scenarios and five mans either if you don't run dailies to access the rep gear.

I think like a lot of things Blizzard does, they take a good idea and do so much of it, they ruin. The Firelands dailies in Cata it the Argent Crusade dailies in Wrath were nice patch fillers, but building the whole entry level 90 game around them hasn't worked at all in my opinion. I was much happier with the model in Wrath and Cata and hope we swing back to something more like that in the near future.

Creature Comforts

I was looking for an activity, so I decided to start leveling some of the professions that I'd never done on my alts. I'm using my Fury Warrior as a bank alt, so I decided to level Blacksmithing and Engineering on them. I had read that both of these are expensive to level and don't generate a lot of cash, but with $300k in the bank, I figured I'm in position to finally level them now.

I've been at it a week and finally have both up to 425 and then I came across by new bank alt best friend, the MOLL-E. The portable mailbox for engineers is absolutely awesome. I've got an Argent Gruntling on my main, but the two minutes to use the mailbox is pretty limiting for AH duties and I don't like parking my DK anyway. The MOLL-E has a ten minute up time, which is perfect for cancelling and reposting all my glyphs. No more running back and forth to the mailbox. Woo Hoo! The two hour cooldown is a bit of a drag, but I usually don't repost that often anyway unless I'm just killing time on the weekend. Overall, it's a huge quality of like improvement for an aspiring goblin!

Questing in Cataclysm

So I've been thinking a lot about how questing has evolved and specifically about questing in Cataclysm.

When I started WoW back in Vanilla, the questing wasn't sophisticated by any stretch of the imagination. I loaded up my quest log with every available quest until it was full and then I went out and killed my boars. Pretty straight forward. There wasn't much story, but the good thing was you got to go out and explore the world the way that you wanted.

Questing now is a completely different beast. I worked my way through the Worgen starting area, and the entire thing was on rails. There's a pretty good story, but the entire experience was restrictive and I really didn't enjoy that aspect at all. I didn't feel like was out in the world at all. I was just walking through an interactive storybook.

Questing in the revamped zones was a little better. There was a definitely more structure, but you could still go out and explore. Things flowed well too, which was nice. It felt very natural and moved me from one place to the next well.

The new Cataclysm zones are another story. You only get a few quests at a time, and with the heavy use of phasing, you almost need to complete them in order to unlock the phases. If you don't do one, you might miss unlocking a phase and all the later quests. Not liking that one bit. It's nice to see the world change because of my actions, but I absolutely hate that I'm locked into something on rails and don't have much choice in what I do in a zone. I find this to be one of the least enjoyable parts of the new questing and I think it's probably why I haven't pushed too hard to level up in the higher levels yet. I just don't like how it's been put together.

Do you have any thoughts on questing in Cataclysm? Love it, hate it, or just trying to get through it to other content?

Northrend Blues

I have to admit, I'm suffering from a serious case of the Northrend Blues. What do I mean with all this new content?

Well, I spent several years leveling up two toons to 80 during Wrath, eventually running my share of heriocs and gearing them up. I also have three more characters I played into the lower 70's, two at 72 and one at 73. When Cataclysm came out, I started leveling my DK through Mount Hyjal, but I also made a new Worgen Warrior. I thought this would be a good way to see a lot of the new lower end content and see the alliance side, which I'd never really played much.

Problem is, with heirloom gear and the guild bump, I burned through that content in a couple of weeks. Outland wasn't bad, since I burned through that content quickly as well, but then I hit Northrend again. Even with the first couple of zones having Alliance quests, there's really a lot of overlap with the quests I've already done. And now that I've hit the Argent Dawn quests, there all the same ones I've done before. And if I want to level up the rest of my professions on my other toons, I've got to get them to at least 75, or higher in some cases, so that's going to be even more time in Northrend. Ughhh! You'd think two years would be enough time there, but I guess not.

To Scribe or Not to Scribe...

Lately I've been reading a lot about the Glyph market and there seems to be two polarized camps on it now.  One camp says that the Shattering and Cataclysm killed the Glyph market.  The cost of materials is up, while the demand for repeat glyphs has disappeared, resulting in prices below cost and no more profits. They say you can still make a little money on Fortune Cards or the Darkmoon deck, but the glyphmas is over.  

A minority of others are still making a boatload in the glyph market.  People seem to be have abandoned it because of the higher mat costs and moved on to greener pastures.  The ones that are left, are doing well.

Personally, I've seen both.  On the horde server with most of my toons, I'm printing money in the glyph market.  We don't have a regular camper in the market, so it's possible to post a couple times of day and sell a lot of glyphs.  Further, I never really saw that particular glyphs people were buying for special builds or to switch specs.  I always sold a wide variety of glyphs, mostly to levelers, and that continues today.  However, on my Alliance server, the glyph market is a mess.  A started a scribe to make money to buy my heirlooms, but it's been tough to scrape a few bronze together.  Few glyphs sell for much and mat prices are high.  Further, there's somebody posting large batches every few minutes so it's impossible to really make money.  The contrast in markets is stark.

What's your market like?  Are you still able to make money on glyphs or are you having to pack it in?