Patch 4.3 hits the PTR - News on Epic Gems and more!

Patch 4.3 is up on the PTR now and wowhead has been busy datamining info from the PTR build. New are 10 zones, 84 weapons, 768 armor items and 226 gems, recipes and other profession items.

There's good news regarding Epic Gems. There are transmutes for Epic Gems though we don't have any information on what the mats will be yet. The gems themselves are uncut and there are patterns to cut them though we don't how we'll acquire the patterns yet.

Anyhow, there's not much sense repeating the info here. To see all the new stuff, check it out at the source on wowhead

Patch 4.3 PTR build14732 - Spell Changes, New Items, Maps and More!

Pyrite Ore Crash update

Just a little update here.

On my server for a few days after the news about epic gems broke pyrite stockpilers were in denial. They kept insisting pyrite would not crash and kept the price propped up for a few days.

I was advertising in trade to buy pyrite and got flamed a lot for it. I was accused of lying and making things up to "cause panic and crash pyrite". Most of that comes from a few guys with a lot of alts who seem to spend more time flaming me and trying to discredit everything I say than anything else.

Reins of the Spectral Tiger pricing oddity

I was perusing The Undermine Journal last night and typed in Reins of the Spectral Tiger for the hell of it. There were none available on my server but I immediately noticed something odd on the "other markets" graph. The highest price was 429,496g 73s and 16 servers had one up at exactly that price.

HURRAY! The auction bot transferred!

This is server specific to Antonidas US but I have a number of readers from the server and this is terrific news for us. The auction bot transferred his main to Stormrage US on Sept 13th and his posting bots haven't been seen working the auction since. Hopefully he'll stay there now and transfer all the alts he left behind here soon too. I feel sorry for players on Stormrage though, he's probably already pulling the same crap there he pulled here for years.

Base Materials - What they are and why they're important

Base materials are high volume items like herbs, ore and volatiles. They are the base material for many crafting processes. Some of the processes are obvious with base materials being used directly to make a high volume item like Truegold. Other's like the ore shuffle aren't so obvious, being longer processes with several processing steps utilizing multiple professions to turn ore into enchants.

Pyrite Ore Crash

Yes pyrite ore will crash.

The only reason pyrite ore prices were so high in the first place is people were stockpiling it in anticipation of being able to prospect epic gems from it. Ghostcrawler specifically mentioned they expect it will take an entire patch cycle for one to replace all his gems with epic gems. It wouldn't take very long at all if epic gems could be mass produced by prospecting pyrite. That means it's virtually certain we won't be able to prospect epic gems from pyrite unless of course blizzard changes their mind.

The demand for and price of pyrite has been held artificially high for a long time by stockpilers hoping to make a killing on epic gems. Those stockpilers no longer have a reason to continue overpaying for it. The price of pyrite is already down a fair bit and will drop further as more stockpilers and farmers hear the news. The price of pyrite will crash is crashing, the only question is how far will it crash?

Things will snowball from there causing a ripple effect in other markets. Some sellers will panic and sell too cheaply. Some pyrite will get bought out by people like me who like to play the materials markets contrary to what everyone else is doing (buy when everyone else is selling and sell when they're buying). Some pyrite will get prospected which will raise the supply of rare gems causing a drop in rare gem prices, which in turn will probably drag elementium and obsidium prices down too. Truegold, eternal belt buckles and many other things will follow like a row of dominoes falling down.

Eventually it'll hit rock bottom, the oversupply will peter out, prices will rebound and stabilize at new levels. In my experience it seems the faster and harder a market crashes the sooner and more robustly it rebounds so here's hoping it's hard, fast, over and done with quickly and with as little pain as possible.

Of course it's still always possible blizzard will change their mind yet, or they could even be playing mind games with us to surprise us on patch day but I'm not betting on either.

Patch 4.3 - Epic Gems a raid drop

Well I called it (Last chance for Epic Gems) when I said we either won't get epic gems at all or if we do we won't like the way they're implemented. According to an Interview with Greg Street on MMO Champion they're going to implement Epic Gems as a raid drop this time around.

That brings up a few more questions.

Will they be cut gems ala the BC heroic 5 man epic gems or will they be uncut gems Jewelcrafters have to cut for you?

Will they be BoE or BoP? Those BC 5 man gems were BoP at first.

If they're cut gems will they be Unique Equipped like those BC gems were?

If they're raw gems, how are we going to purchase the gem cuts, with the same tokens we use now or something new? Or maybe the patterns will be raid drops too?

Players will start dumping Fools Gold (Pyrite Ore) stockpiles now. The price of Pyrite will plummet and affect the price of all kinds of things from Truegold to Eternal Belt Buckles,  to blacksmithing epics. Depending on the size of current stockpiles it's quite possible pyrite prospecting could drive down the price of rare gems and drag the price of elementium and obsidium ores down with it too.

Greedy Blogger - Bullshit sells scams

There's a new mod out there being sold for *real money* making absurd claims about what it can do and being flogged by one of the biggest wow gold sites.

The site flogging this mod isn't allowing comments on the post flogging the mod. Gee I wonder why? It provides a link to another site that blatantly breaks the ToS by offering the mod for sale for real money. The language and claims on the selling site fit the posting style of the owner of the linking site and he's well known for being all about making real money and putting his less savory content on seperate sites so it seems obvious what's going on there.

Search Engine Hits - The power of Google

I noticed a huge spike in traffic to the blog today so naturally I was curious what was causing it. At this rate the total pageviews for this blog since it's inception will more than double in 24 hours. I figured it had to be either my most recent post patch 4.3 - last chance for epic gems or some big site linking to my blog driving the traffic.

After doing a little checking I found when typing "epic gems 4.3" into a Google search my article came up first.

Just goes to show the power of choosing good titles for articles. :)

Patch 4.3 - Last chance for Epic Gems

Patch 4.3 is in the works with a projected release sometime in November. New things for 4.3 include the Transmogrifier, Raid Finder, Void Storage, the final Cataclysm raid featuring Deathwing, 3 new 5 mans and more. There's plenty of coverage elsewhere (MMO Champion for one) on all the new stuff Blizzard has told us about. I'm going to speculate on something they still haven't told us about, Epic Gems.

Since this is the final content patch for Cataclysm, if they're going to introduce new Epic Gems it pretty much has to be in 4.3. The problem is predicting whether or not they *will introduce them at all and if they do how they'll be obtained.