April 30, 2015

For The Children!



Another year has passed and another Children's Week has arrived... Another chance to abuse orphans for achievements... It's not only because of that, each of the orphans gives a wide variety of Battle Pets for your collection at the end of their respective Quest Chains.

New thing this year is [Green Balloon], which you can buy from Blax Bottlerocket (Orgrimmar) or Craggle Wobbletop (Stormwind) for only 10 silver coins.

At the end of their respective quest chains:
If you already have all of these Battle Pets, you can chose to take [Pet Care Package] which has a guaranteed drop chance for [Flawless Battle-Stone]. Even if you don't need it, take the package as this little stone is worth several thousand gold on the Auction House.

When it comes to achievements, they are pretty much straightforward... You can find a detailed guide on Icy-Veins. However, I'd like to give a couple of suggestions.

Best possible place to complete [Daily Chores] would be Isle of Quel'Danas if you haven't unlocked any other Daily Quest hub throughout your leveling as there are around 15 Daily Quests in the entire area... Other (fast) alternative would be Halfhill Market in Valley of the Four Winds. Note: Orphan needs to be summoned when you are turning in quests. He does not need to be around while you are actually doing them.

[School of Hard Knocks] can be nuisance to complete on Max Level. Best possible suggestion I can give is to do this achievement with your lower level Alt, preferably between levels 70 and 80.

April 23, 2015

Intermission. Kinda...

I'd like to apologize for the lack of streaming in the past few days. I know that most of the streamers treat this as their jobs but, for us, this is just playing for fun and, it will most likely, remain that. We have Real Life obligations that can't be postponed and a bit of a scheduling conflicts that will, hopefully, be resolved soon.

We are still very young at all this and, I know that we don't have a Fan Base but, I'd like to ask those interested to "Favorite" our Twitch Channel so that you will be notified when we go live. You can also Bookmark this Blog because we will be posting here regardless of what :).

Also, I'll be posting a bit of our history tomorrow. How we got to know each other, origin of our "Group" name and such so... Tune in.

April 22, 2015

TIME!!! We need more time!




[WoW Tokens] finally got introduced to European population... It can be bought for 20 EUR (15 GBP) from the in-game Shop, and starting price was 35,000 gold in the Auction Houses across the Europe region.

Be advised that price of the Token is dictated by Demand for the same, so... If demand for tokens is high, price will be rising. When demand drops, price will drop. Tokens were made available to players around 5PM CET and, as noted, initial price (set by Blizzard) was 35k gold per token. Peak price was achieved 7 hours later (Apr 22nd, 2015 12:05AM) with price almost 10k gold higher, 44.981 gold. Price started dropping down after this point and it currently circles the number of 40k.

As a reference, [WoW Tokens] were made public on April 7th at 7AM EDT on NA (North America) realms with initial price of 30.000 gold per token... Token achieved it's peak price only 4 hours later at 31.218 gold and price dropped after that point. As stated, price is controlled by Demand so, at that point price on NA realms started fluctuating with highest price of almost 27k and lowest of almost 20k. Current price of the token on NA realms is ~25k gold.

April 20, 2015

Me Nemesis Is Su Nemesis

NOTE: This "feature" was nerfed in Patch 6.2. You can no longer queue for Ashran in pre-made raid groups.

Original Article follows.

Is it just me or Blizzard didn't think these quests through when they were implementing Quests and Achievements for Gladiator Sanctum? I mean, yeah... The concept must have been awesome on a paper but, it sucks ass when it is implemented in-game.

Idea behind it is awesome... Get a quest, go to the best place to farm kills (which is Ashran), hunt down your enemies and when you hit a number of 500 <insert race here> deaths you get rewarded with a title... The Death StalkerOrcslayer, The ButcherGnomebane, Terror of the Tushui, and even the Meta Achievement / Title Warlord of Draenor are awesome. Cross-Realm system and Connected Realms only make things piss easy to obtain some of them, obtaining others is a living hell. Why? Race imbalance.

Older races (expansion wise) have best chances of completing your quests. The chances are that you can get 500 kills for each Orcs, Undead, Trolls, Tauren (as Alliance) and Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, Night Elves (as Horde) quests in one or two days. As I already mentioned, I am not a PvP player. I am doing these quests only because A: Achievements and B: Titles. It took me about an hour to get ~400 kills for Orcs.

Blood Elves and Draenei are also popular races so, you won't have problem obtaining those as well. Although Blizzard got flamed on announcement, Worgen were more popular in character creation than Goblins, from what I have seen during my time spent in-game. From what I have observed, completing quests for these can go from about a week to a full month.

And then, we come to the worst race to make Nemesis of... Pandaren.

From an "April fools" joke, through Heroic Unit in WarCraft III, to Playable Race with vast Lore in World of WarCraft, this (youngest) race is THE MOST FUCKED UP TO HUNT. I have seen crapload of people crying and QQing in Guild and Ashran chat how they took the quest "god knows when" and it took them really long time to get it.

There is an upside for all of this... Open your group finder and search for Premade Nemesis Groups.
You will see something like this:


You see how there are numbered groups? In every specific group are placed players that have a specific quest. That's because you can get 5 kills for a single kill if all your party members are on the same quest and are in range when the killshot happens. So, at least there is some upside to all this. You can even find someone and pay him a few hundred golds to stand in place and get chain-killed. Just be sure to find 4 more people that are on same quest as you are.

April 19, 2015

1 down, many more to go.

Well, we have started. Our lovely team of Blood Elfs marched through their starting area, completely wrecking everything in sight. From Sunstrider Isle to Fairbreeze Village and Farstrider Retreat, no quest was too small or opponent too strong.

Ending up at level 12 in Tranquillien, Ghostlands, we've stopped for the day. But not before taking a selfie at the border.

(✌゚∀゚)☞ TwoDumbFucks doing Horde Loremaster 1-100 (✌゚∀゚)☞


So... With a help of a friend, Redub, we are gonna stream some gameplays... Our channel name is UnitedBreakers, named as an homage to a name of the guild that we were both in. We will start with Horde Loremaster Leveling 1-100...

Choice for playing Horde characters is because we will be focusing on Loremaster Achievements (Questing) from the very start. Both of us play mostly on Alliance side, my Loremaster "chasing" is a work in progress on my own and since Redub did that with Alliance characters, twice, we will be experiencing the story from Horde perspective.

Since we play on different realms, I am on Sylvanas-EU and he is on Moonglade-EU, our characters will remain on realms we played until now because of easier transfer of resources (if needed).

I also added widget to the stream that can be found on the top right side of the blog so... Enjoy the streams.

Watch live video from UnitedBreakers on www.twitch.tv

April 16, 2015

Retards of the Auction House

There is nothing worse than getting pissed off over some random and not that important thing. Be it some random douchebag hunter that trolls the entire raid with [Aspect of the Pack] turned on, scumbag that does not move out of the fire and then flames healers for "being useless" or fucking greavers that are corpse-camping you even though they don't have any in-game benefit because they are usually 50-80 levels higher than you. I guess they weren't breastfed when they were babies and lack of that exhibits as need to torture random lowbies and newbies. It's one of the reasons I hate playing on PvP realm, mostly because I know shit about PvP. But, that's the story for another time.

Another branch of people that I hate in WoW are Retards of the Auction House (in further text RotAH). These are people that:
a) Don't know how Auction House functions;
b) Don't want to know how Auction House functions;
c) Don't give a shit about anything related to Auction House
d) Profit through trolling on Auction House.

These people, also, don't seem to notice that even game such as WoW has it's own in-game economy that gets ruined with every small move that they make.

Let me get something straight. I am a casual PvE player. I don't "play the Auction House" and I am not earning tons of gold. With introduction of [WoW Token] in upcoming Patch 6.2, I will be making just enough so that I can afford next month to play.

Everyone knows what Undercutting is. My rant is, however, aimed mostly towards players that do not understand how functional undercutting works. Why do I call it "Functional Undercutting"?
Lets take a look at definition itself:
undercut, verb: offer goods or services at a lower price than (a competitor).
So, the way I see it, Effective Undercutting is when Player A offers [Tabard of the Lightbringer] at a price of 50.000 gold and then you place your own auction asking for 49.500 or 49.000 gold, undercutting original price by 1 or 2%. IF (or WHEN) Player C comes along, and wants to place his own auction, he does the same and undercuts my auction by the same amount that I did placing his auction for 48.500 or 48.000 gold. That way, average price of the Tabard stays more or less equal for a longer period.

Ineffective Undercutting is when I go to the Auction House and offer [Tabard of the Lightbringer] at a price of 50.000 gold and then comes some random douchebag and offers the tabard at the price of 30.000 gold and then, the next one comes and lowers the price even more (15.000 gold, for example).

This, in itself is both bad and good thing. Why is it bad? Because in some cases, for some items, a set period of time needs to pass before price can be corrected back to the original value... In most cases, value can be corrected back immediately without any problem but in some cases, people will avoid such an item by saying that "price is inflated" and that "item was much cheaper earlier / yesterday" even though rarity of the item dictates high price.

Right now, I am not dealing with items of high rarity. I have some auctions for herbs, Augments and mostly gear that has Transmogrification Potential. As an example, this is what I encountered in AH today:



Pieces of [The Forgotten Peacekeeper] item set, that I am trying to sell on AH, resemble Freethinker's Armor, removed Zul'Gurub paladin set. In itself, it's Transmog value is high and price should not be too high because pieces are rare, but not THAT rare. I came across ridiculously high and ridiculously low auction prices.

You can see very good example of Ineffective Undercutting.
  • Pants: 2 Auctions of 500g, undercut Auction of 244g and all subsequent undercut auctions that start under 170g, ruining the price of the auction.
  • Shoulders: Ridiculous auction of 75.000g, followed by realistic price of the item ~3.000g and then ineffective undercuts of 530g and even worse for a price of less than 100g.

Good thing is, if you are willing to risk, you can buy Ineffective Undercut (for example, the undercuts placed at 100g) and then sell it at the original price in a few days, after the price gets corrected. It's the same principle used in Auction Sniping. Downside of this, is that, although they have good Transmog Value people don't buy them that often. You will usually spend several days re-posting the auctions before someone buys the items.

Another type of people that I hate in-game, that fall under RotAH group, are trolls. These people usually dump enormously high amount of materials into the AH, all in the stacks of 1... Example:


611 [Starflower] stacks of 1. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Throughout the playing I have seen some really weird amounts going up to the few thousands... With the release of WoD, most of the materials that once stacked in 20s now stack in 200s. While I see the need to place auctions in stacks of 5, 10, 20and even 50 even though maximum amount of materials in a stack is 200, I fucking can't see reason of someone placing 611 stacks of 1.

And I am gonna leave it at that and go play for a while until I find something else that pisses me off.

Timewalking



Timewalking, a feature discussed a few Blizzcons ago, is finally arriving in Patch 6.2. Every few weekends we will be able to queue for "Special version" of old-school dungeons in a new sort of "Heroic" difficulty. When we queue, our gear will downscale and bring down our hero's power to the point of it's strength during the time period when specific Dungeon was active.

Currently on PTR testing are following Dungeons:
  • The Arcatraz
  • Black Morass
  • Mana-Tombs
  • The Shattered Halls
  • The Slave Pens
  • Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom
  • Gundrak
  • Halls of Lightning
  • The Nexus
  • Utgarde Pinnacle
So... When we, for example, queue up for Black Morass, might of our Character will downscale and he will be as powerful as any LVL70 character was at that period. When dungeon is finished, everything is returned back to normal. It's the same principle that is used currently in Ashran with PvP gear upscaling from lower to higher iLVL when you engage in combat.

Hogs

So... Apparently, [Hogs] will finally arrive into the hands of brave adventurers throughout Azeroth.
This miniature version of Hogger, initially intended as a reward for [WoW's 10th Anniversary] got removed as a reward for said achievement only to be replaced with [Molten Corgi]. According to latest datamining published on both MMO-Champion and WoWhead, Hogs will be a reward from new Darkmoon Faire achievement, [That's Whack!] obtained from Darkmoon mini-game, Whack-a-gnoll.


Tanaan Jungle Preview

Patch 6.2 is in the works and with it, opening of the Tanaan Jungle and venturing into it's wilderness...


And, hey... We get to camp [Supreme Lord Kazzak] once more... As with everything else, he is getting his model updated a little bit.