Wake me when it's November...

I think we'll see the next expansion drop by mid to late November, probably even first week of December (a la Cata).  They won't be releasing it prior to Blizzcon because Blizzcon is a giant advertisement, which is the 7th-8th of November.  There will be a ton of buzz and everyone will go home and tell their friends, their guildies, their little brother/sister that the game is so awesome and they should buy it.  The whole idea behind the beta invites, Blizzcon (which is not at a loss, this is advertising folks), and the fansites that have direct links (and are totally allowed to datamine against the TOS) is to sell the game.  Social media is how massive games sell, and while I'm perfectly fine with that, I'm more into being entertained.

As with all expansions since the first (TBC), I will not be participating in any betas, I won't be speculating about how to make a mint the first week, and when I buy the game I will be getting a good night's rest for work in the morning and then trying to log on when I get home from work that Tuesday the Xth, whatever month it is.  I'll no doubt be days behind the first week, but like the tortoise and the hare, the hare unsubbed the next month because he got bored.  And in the end, I'll put together my mint within the first month - once I figure out what's what of course.

Note:  I don't like doing beta because 1) It's not live, everything is still up for change 2) it spoils the story for me and I love new toys and adventures 3) there is no dessert when it goes live, you get to do everything all over again 4) I absolutely love experimenting with game mechanics when they're live, and not so much when there are loads of bugs.  I don't even mess with PTRs.

So where does this leave me?  I've done about everything I cared to do in MoP, I've got the Heroic gear on multiple characters, I've got my gold tmog on 4 of my toons, I got all the reps, I made and pissed away millions of gold, and my guild is dead still.  For some reason the AH is still buzzing, I'm guessing people still leveling alts or doing PvP in that last preparation for Orcland. 

If there's one thing you learn from expansion to expansion, it's what the keep and what to dump.  This past week, after spending all my free time slaughtering demons over in D3RoS since 3/25, I decided to finally get rid of the crap in my bags and pass it off on the good people of Illidan.  No more buying, no more snatching, no more mailboxes rotating thousands of stacks of ores/bars/cloth/herbs.  Just sell it off.  I haven't been doing squat in months anyhow, so put that banker to bed.  What I've come to the conclusion of is simple:

Dump almost everything

I am going to hold onto my Windwool Collection however.  And some items are going to be quite valuable for leveling in the future, so I wouldn't get rid of those just yet.   I'm not going to tell you what to keep however, that's the job of the hoarders who stay home all day.  Here's a short list of some of the trash I've pawned off, and how I snagged a clean 117k in gold with about 1200g in AH costs in the past week doing nothing but posting once per day, going back to Diablo, and repeating in 24 hours.

Note that all materials/items are assumed to be Mists of Pandaria, not previous content.

* All epic BOE crafted armors and weapons.  This includes all the blacksmith, leatherworking and tailoring purples that take 21/28 days each to make.  If they are BOE purples that dropped off a mob, you may want to hold onto that for leveling/twink purposes later.  Further, the PvP blues are not worth holding onto, unless you're going to engage in some weird transmog idea later (I don't bother with it) then lock and load.

* Gems.  If it comes from Kyp/GI/Trill ores, it's going to be useless.  Leveling greens and blues will not have sockets in them, and people will be going for the new gems for their epics.  You may consider holding onto metas however, as there is a small demand for those.  Personally, I'm dumping them all.  Professions are going to be streamlined, so it may not be worth holding onto anything except blue uncommon and rare gems

* Enchanting materials.  I think 'server first enchanting profession' was generally scored within 30 minutes at release.  Tell you anything?  Hypnotic Dust was incredibly high in demand throughout MoP, and stacks of it prior to MoP could be traded for magewater.  But after the Miners and JCs moved onward, the best way to make it became through embercloth, which was going for a fortune and was time consuming to farm.  This caused prices of it to skyrocket because enchanting required a lot of it and they didn't have easymode shortcuts to gain 2-5 levels off very little dust.  MoP offered this.  Hasta la vista, baby. 

Shas, well, we all know the score on these things.  Ask the Maelstrom hoarders how that worked out.  Make Dancing and Jade and be done with them.  If you need Shas, check your enchanter's bank.  I went through my 4 enchanters and DE'd everything they weren't equipping or going to be using.  I scored about 6 scrolls just from that alone.


* LW Leg and Shoulder enchants.  What better use for Mag hide and your SoH?  Or leftover junk for darkmoon cards.  I hate darkmoon cards of course, too much time involved, but I do like shoulder enchants.  I wouldn't craft the Mag hides the old fashioned way (50 leathers), just burn cooldowns because you'll probably want to keep the hides around for next expansion when people aren't skinning MoP.  (I know, I said I wasn't going to say what to keep).  Sell those damned scales, too.  If you got em, off they go.

* Herbs.  I sell these in their glyphed version.  Alchemy was so damned bad for elixirs, pots, and flasks this expansion, unless it was the time following patches.  I heard from somewhere that milling won't be happening anymore, so there's no time like the present.

* Leftover raid materials.  This is a bigger list actually.  This includes all foods, fish, veggies, elixirs/pots/flasks, Spirits of War, Haunted Spirits, etc.  I personally craft my SoW into belts.  Nobody is going to care about these items, unless you want to keep some back for leveling come Orcland.  I usually don't care about anything for leveling except maybe flasks.  Cooking is generally one of my first activities to level, and the day MoP released I got home from work and went to 600 fishing prior to leveling.  I'm not even joking.

* Anything you've crafted with Living Steel that isn't a mount or a pet.  Belt Buckles and Weapon Chains.  I had dozens of these things laying around, and I used to make 10:1 buckles to chains.

* Engineer scopes.  My engineers were always guilty of having too many SoH in their banks, and I used to love screwing hunters every Tuesday by buying out all the LBSoDs and reposting at 5 to 10 times the price I paid.  Yeah, did this, I sold them all usually, and fuck hunters.  Because they required SoH, you couldn't just turn around and craft 2 dozen of the things, so I used to love getting all my money back with a sale a two, and then reaping it in off the worst fucking people in the game!  That's right, your bullshit of whining because you couldn't have the healing mace for your stupid pet healing has stuck with me for this long.  So, suck it!  Where was I?  Oh yeah, sell the scopes before they have no more value and are replaced by the first green recipe scope in Orcland.

So that's what I'm doing.  Am I going to be dead wrong on things?  Maybe.  Who cares, it's not like I'll be poor.  But I damned sure won't be getting stuck with anything I don't want to be selling.  It's bad enough having to redo TSM groups for a new expansion again, and I relish the thought of removing most of these categories only to replace them with new ones.

For now, I'm going back to Diablo again.  The game's actually a lot of fun, and feels very similar to the way we used to do it in D2.  Of course, the original abomination was horrid, but they're under new management now and it looks like they're going the right way.  I for one am glad, because the franchise looked like they were going to be happy putting a bullet in it.

Thanks for stopping in!