Hey folks, I’m back after a long 4th of July party! It was great! We had barbecue, fireworks of course, and a bit of WoW.  I still love the game, but Blizzard is just teasing with the release of 5.4, taking their sweet time to release it… It makes me want to wait for the patch to play again with all of the amazing new changes to take place. Here are some changes from the 5.4 PTR patch notes at Blizzard.

New Raid: Siege of Orgrimmar — Sounds great, but no information?! I would love to have Ally try and take on Org, but what do I know because they’re not saying…

New Feature: Flexible Raid Difficulty — I don’t understand why the need for this. If it’s easier than LFG Raid Finder, but harder than Normal, and difficulty scales on the players? The part about no minimum ilvl is pretty cool though.

New Area: Timeless Isle — Sounds intriguing, but is it for solo only? Seems like I should make a DK or Pally next after my Lock if this island is only for soloing.

New Feature: Proving Grounds — Sounds somewhat like a variation on the Brawler’s Guild, but with your challenge depending on your spec; healer, tank, dps, etc.

New Feature: Connected Realms — I don’t know why they would do this, except to make the servers feel more populated, without performing a shutdown of low population realms, which is bad for business. What will connected realms mean for buying wow gold? Will that make it easier?

Redesigned Arena System — I am a bit neutral on this, the patch notes aren’t very specific. It seems like they are just refining the system to be more fair in matching competitors.

The Legendary Quest Continues — Yes, now you can work with Wrathion again, and turn your ilvl 600 cloak into legendary quality, and only then can you access the Sanctum of Ordos on top of the timeless isle. This is account wide so you only have to do it once.

Battlefield: Barrens — The easy weekly quest to get a nice ilvl 489 piece of

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your choice — is canceled. Maybe the Siege of Orgrimmar is its replacement?

Whew, looks like a great lineup for the coming patch, I really really can’t wait! In the meantime while waiting, I continue to get the most ridiculous Chinese spam, here are some examples below:

Really? That’s the best you got? You won’t even make it easy for me to click a link? You think I’m able to decipher your broken English and

The requested URL /c/counter.php was not found on this server.

then manually type your website in? I think not, buddy… You shouldn’t be surprised that these spam mails don’t work, so stop letting yourself down every day.

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Hey kiddos, long time no see! Well, that time is upon us. The fabled firework holiday of beer, barbecue, and freedom… under surveillance. But  I digress. Let’s not forget what’s really important: World of Warcraft. This year the public holiday lands on Thursday, which means the public holiday is on – Thursday. Not Friday boo.

So what’s going on? A lot of 5.3 action. The Monk is 90, specs are heals and dps, with ilvl above 500. Not too shabby, unlike my computer. The folks at Blizz have really went all out to make the game easy for casual players to get good items, and at the same time making it more easy for end-game players to get high ilvl items too. Below are some easy ways to get your new/low ilvl 90 up in the gear levels.

Let’s start with the Battlefield Barrens collection quest (once a week). You have to collect 150 pieces of 4x different items: stone, lumber, meat, and oil in Northern Barrens. The starting quest is near the flight trainer in your appropriate horde/alliance Shrine in Vale of Eternal Blossoms. From there head to Durotar to accept the quest, and fly yourself next door to Northern Barrens to farm. I prefer farming 10+ mobs at a time for resources, while checking the map for nodes of various kinds. These are overturned supply wagons which have around 150+ supplies on each drop. Open crates like a madman and you get mad resources fast. When you have 150x of each resource, you complete the quest and use/buy a Latent Kor’kron piece of your choosing to combine with the Radical Mojo. You will get an ilvl 489 piece for this quest, which is a weekly quest.

Another easy quest is the “Path of the Last Emperor” quest. This is for 502 ilvl boots specific to your class. You also get the title “Darkspear Revolutionary” – and this quest is the last of a quest chain introduced in 5.3. This quest surprised me with how easy it was to get a 502 ilvl item.  You just go up a “mountain” while attaching ropes to checkpoints while you fight against the wind and a few weak mobs. When you attach the rope to the top and the old panda climbs up, you win.

Heroic Scenarios.  Your daily chance at a 516 ilvl item. You will have to complete all of the solo instances of heroic scenarios and then run a chain of quests for a guaranteed epic, and then you have a daily chance of a 516 drop in a Heroic Scenario. It only takes 3 people, which is great. They are not too easy, and don’t feel bad if you die… a lot. It is common. Just remember to keep releasing your spirit when possible and run back to continue helping your group. At the end of the scenario, you will get a random chance of a 516 item, or, as usual, gold.

And of course the Auction House. Nowadays Haunting Spirits are becoming more common, so they are going down in price. On my server they are around 3k each. Keep in mind this is a disenchant loot for 522 ilvl items, and people don’t replace 522 too often. In crafting this item is used in bulk (6+) to create crafted items of ilvl 522. This means many crafted items of 522 ilvl will be pretty expensive on the AH, like 20-30k+ expensive, each.

Before the July 4th holiday I recommend buying some wow gold now to beat the holiday rush, and get your own 522 item from the AH – the easiest and fastest way around. Have a great and happy July 4 everyone!

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So yeah I’m still really enjoying the 5.2 patch, taking my time. I’m almost level 90 now, so taking time is part of the game when you need that many xp points. Now that I have transcendence transfer I can really dodge, weave, and heal in PvP – and get away with it easily.  For those who don’t know, you first need to cast Transcendence, which puts a copy of you in floating meditation form.  You then cast Transcendence Transfer (in a less than 40 yard range), and you and your floating meditating ghost will switch places. It’s really quite handy for getting away from any enemy, especially when you want to solo some rare elite in Pandaria, and things don’t turn out so well… Like my unfortunate recent experience with Counith Waterstrider.

In other news, as I am leveling, I still get spammed in game and out of game, and it’s really really annoying. In particular: Panda4G I’m talking about you! Spammers. I mean really, who on Earth would click anything like the one below?

Would you even consider visiting that spammer? Didn’t think so. That’s why I stick with reputable companies like IGE.com and the others listed on the right side of the blog with the award medals. You won’t find these kind of lame spammers there.

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Well ladies (if there are any who read this) and gents, and aliens, I am hereby proclaiming the Monk as the most underestimated and unappreciated class in WoW… At least in PVP. Which I love. Even Blizzard admits that the Monk is a very powerful class and very few are playing the class to its fullest potential.

So we all know that the Monk is a hybrid class. You can choose to specialize as a Brewmaster (tank), Mistweaver (healer), and the Windwalker (damage). In PVP I have seen the Brewmaster used least, and even when I started my Monk I tried the tank version in PVP. It was humiliating (see previous post). I have not tried Brewmaster in 5.2 on PVP, and I’m not sure why I would after last time. Maybe Blizz has fixed it, but I’m in no rush to find out.

Next up, and quite common, is the Mistweaver. They don’t got the dots, but they got the hots. And the disarms, and the sprints, and the stuns, and the unbinds, while healing and removing harmful effects; aoe heals or healing over time, channeled. Add up a life cocoon with the glyph that allows you to cocoon while stunned, and you are an off-tank / healer, that can roll and sprint away to heal another day. If you have some mana extra, you can still do some finishing DPS when using crackling jade lightning. Another fun tactic is to keep a Jade Serpent healing statue summoned near the battles, while you heal from a far distance, and your statue heals up close, undamaged. You remain out of sight, and out of mind.

Then there is the Windwalker. This guy can do some serious DPS and admittedly I don’t know enough about this class because I am hooked on the Mistweaver. This specialization is about using fists, staves, maces, and more. One of the key moments in the life of a Windwalker is getting Fists of Fury, when you can pummel the enemy into a pulp, as long as they stand in front of you. This guy can also stun, break out of stuns, sprint. silence, and I believe some minor healing.. But nothing like a Mistweaver. I would consider this guy a DPS mistweaver with no HPS outside of personal heals.

So why do Monks rock in PVP? They are very hard to kill. They may not do the most damage, nor the most healing, they are more in the middle in many ways. I prefer the Mistweaver spec., and find it the best for my playing style. I enjoy being agile, stunning opponents, and participating in the battle, while playing my role as a healer. If I just healed, cleansed, and sat in the background waiting for the enemy to die, it will take longer, if at all. For example, when attacking a paladin or druid, using the melee-range silence and paralyze/snare to slow them down is extremely useful to take these kind of opponents down. If a monk were not there to silence/stun/slow these attrition beasts, they would run away and come back to fight another day.

I would say the monk is still trying to find it’s role in the minds of many players. Players today attribute a hunter with DPS, priest with heals, etc. But where does a monk fit in? Perhaps that is why Blizzard is still allowing the monk to still have so many advantages and positive abilities — because there are few players who even play the monk, or even know how to play it to its fullest. And many of these older players have their other main characters they can play much better than trying to learn a new class like the monk.

In the meantime, keep Monk-eying around!!!

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YES! The Thunder King is out! After waiting impatiently, though not so long, for the changes it is here! And that is why I have been busy, playing! In an interview on IGN, Gregg the “Ghostcrawler” discusses the direction he wanted to take MoP and make the game more “old school” world PvP friendly, along with adding many new rare monsters on the island. Of course, playing the game and figuring this out for yourself is much more fun! Even more fun is finding some Alliance groups in the middle of fighting these rares (whose health/stats are adjusted based on group size), and then interfering in some way to make them wipe (targeting heals, silences etc.), then rolling/sprinting/meditating away into the air. I love this kind of Monk-ey business! Oh yeah, can you say Ring of Peace?!? Wow!

In other news, apart from some minor nerfs, which looks like almost every class was affected, are some other excellent changes in the UI and even Blizzard going sneaky. There is the Isle of Giants, which is what I’m talking about. Did you hear of it? You will not hear about it in a quest line, the only way to get there is to get wet and swim your way to this mostly unknown land. About this Isle, the Ghostcrawler had this tidbit of truth to say:

Thanks to flying mounts, World of Warcraft had largely become a game in which you could surmount such challenges simply by flying over them. In the Isles of Thunder and Giants, however, flying is disabled. “Somewhere along the way, we’d lost the sense that being outdoors in the world was kind of a dangerous thing,” he said, adding that merely getting to some quest objectives used to be half the battle. “Walking around and fighting mobs is basically the heart of World of Warcraft, and we had lost a little bit of that and wanted to make it fun again.”

There are also many PvP changes, in particular with how much more desirable PVP Resilience is over PVP Power. As Eldacar summarizes it on his blog [here]:

Top end PvPers will primarily stick to PvP gear for most slots because they need the resilience to survive the enormous damage everyone is throwing around and the stats are still pretty good. The two places where we are likely to see PvE gear creep into arenas and battlegrounds are once again weapons and trinkets.

So now ya know what stat to stack when it comes to PvP, and what every other person will be focusing on as well. Enchanters rejoice!

And now about the important part, wow gold. There are always uses for gold in the game, whether repairs, mats, mounts, or something new on the auction house, gold still matters, a lot. Especially if you want to power level through a profession or just want a new riding skill, like flying.

As of now, it’s obvious I need to update the top 3, but right now its WowGoldPig, IGE, and EpicToon. I will say it again, they are not Chinese, and ugh… I don’t trust Chinese gold sellers. At all.

And with the prices of wow gold at all time lows, there is no better time than to buy some now.

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Ok, so 5.2 still hasn’t hit, which is really fine with me, but I am really looking forward to the new changes. How can Blizzard deal with this situation of people complaining about no content updates, and then the fact that Mists of Pandaria added so much to the game that they could easily wait until April or May for this patch, if they wanted to. That’s just my take though, maybe because after the year of nada from Blizz after 4.3.0 makes me a bit skeptical if any content will be released. But it’s on the PTR now so we know it’s coming. Unless aliens get to us first.

In the meantime I am REALLY loving this monk-ey business stuff. I love the variety of choices to stun opponents. I love being able to get out of stuns/locks easily. I love being able to sprint away. I love setting up a statue to effectively create 2 healers. The statue being the better healer.  Sure he lacks on DPS and Dots, but as far as being able to successfully *catch* and then *kill* this monk means I am low on mana, spells are on timer, and everyone else on Horde is dead too.

… And then there is Zen Meditation. I have been busy, so leveling has been slow, and I prefer to just play PVP at this point in life plus a daily dungeon finder to get my justice points.  To me, PVP is so much better than PvE. And now I have Zen Meditation. When I am able to level/quest in Pandaria it is PVP time! I really look forward to all of the possibilities of ganking and meditating away. The casting time on this “flying mount” is instant.  Keep this in mind with some of the new PVP items:

Horde Insignia of Conquering

Hardened Shell

Overgrown Lilypad

And some others that don’t come to mind just yet. Point is, I really think Blizzard WANTS more world PVP out there. However, a problem with world PVP is that it requires players to actually be in the zones for that to happen.  This is why I think Blizzard has decided to combine players from different servers into the same world zones. I was talking to a guildmate last night in the same situation as me: he changed servers because his old server had little to no people playing on it. Is Blizzard losing a lot of customers and trying to cover it up by confusing the players into thinking all is fine?

At any rate, I can’t wait to get to Pandaria. I should be having a new wow gold review coming soon, the prices are too low to pass up. And I predict a 5.2 release sometime in the first week of March. If not, no big deal because I’m not in a rush. The game now offers so much to do that I’m still catching up. How about all of the readers thoughts?

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Howdy ho folks! Well it’s that time of the year — Chinese Lunar New Year! It’s that cold part of the year when in China, it is their Lunar new year. This is the season for high wow gold prices and slow delivery times — because most everyone in China is on holiday and/or stuck in the ice and smog. No but seriously, delivery times are statistically going to take longer during this holiday than any other time of the year. Just an FYI because I care.

What I don’t understand is Blizzard’s love-hate relationship with the Chinese. Though Blizzard would never point the finger directly to China, it’s the proverbial camel nose in the tent.  It’s no secret the actions of Blizzard to ban nearly 60,000 accounts. Though unsaid, people who actually play the game know it’s the Chinese. Blizzard will even ban people on US servers who use a Chinese IP address. Even after all of this, they create a Chinese-themed expansion. Are they hitting a low in subscribers and are tapping into the Chinese to come farm again? How much lower can the price of gold go?

In other news it looks like Blizzard is going to drop patch 5.2 on us any day now.  The PTR is downloading on the client and as previously discussed, it’s going to be a game changer. Get ready for a lot of class tweaks and gameplay changes (and UI changes too.) This is going to be huge.

Meanwhile, what are your thoughts on spam friend requests? It is exceptionally annoying to get “friend requests pending” when I login, only to be a gold farmer spamming his virtual wares. I can report them for spam, but it happens again. Things like this are why I don’t like to buy from Chinese gold sellers, as places like IGE, or Wowgoldpig or others will not spam you in game. You pay for what you get, or so the saying goes…

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So while I am still enjoying the new expansion, Blizzard is set to release a major new patch for WoW, though no date has been set. Enter the Return of the Thunder King, or simply, Patch 5.2.0. Based on past patch experience, I am going to guess this patch will be at least 700mb in size, but that’s just me. Leave your guess in the comments!

Ok so this patch looks like a HUGE bundle of updates, and interestingly, that the ilvl for Throne of Thunder to be at ~500, and progressing towards an ilvl of 520 by the time the raid reaches Lei Shen. Cool! I really do enjoy how Blizzard is focused on the details of the game to make it as enjoyable as possible for everyone, trying to keep a balance between the hardcore and casual players.

Other improvements and changes are coming, there is quite a large list of the changes posted here, but one sentiment rings true to me… What pace should Blizzard release content. We are about 4 months or so into the expansion, with a MAJOR patch on the horizon, adding new content and many game changes. In the past (and understandably so), players would complain about the lack of content updates for WoW (again, understandable after the Cata stagnation.) Now it seems as though Blizzard could be pushing content out too fast. What are your thoughts?

Here are some highlights of the new patch, in my words:

• New Dailies: Isle of Thunder
• New Raid: Throne of Thunder
• Legendary Quest: Continues with Wrathion
• New World Bosses: Nalak, The Storm Lord; and Oondasta, the devilsaur boss
• Farming: New Sunsong Ranch additions, allowing you to “Buy the Farm”
• Monk: Path of Blossoms and Deadly Reach have been removed
• Mage: Improved Counterspell – Removed
• Rogue: Versatility – Removed
• Warlock: Imp Ability “Blood Pact”  - Removed
• Heroic Panda Dungeons: 100 Justice Points per boss
• PvP: Besides UI improvements, PvP Power is now split between main hand and off-hand weapons, like dual wielding for melee.
• Transmogrification: Two-handed axes, maces, and swords can be Transmogrified to each other, along with One-handed axes, maces, and swords, and also Staves and polearms can be transmogrified to each other.

There are many more updates as well, including many UI improvements for the Raid Finder / Conquest Finder, Battlegrounds finder etc. Overall this looks like it will be an amazing patch, but I do wonder about its timing… Although to be fair it has not been released yet, and I cannot find any estimated release date anywhere (no surprise.)

I think it would be a good idea for Blizzard to consider delaying the release of this patch as long as possible, to be timed when players start getting bored with the existing content and start to stray away. Just my two cents, either way I will still be playing!

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Hello Kiddos! It’s me again! (If you weren’t sure.) I’m still rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ around as a panda and have learned a valuable lesson: brewmasters SUCK in PvP — or maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but I have nearly full heirlooms and they don’t help, other than  transforming me into a high-hp punching bag with no (pvp) DPS. Meanwhile, in PVE land, the Brewmaster rocks. I can kill monsters no problem, but when it comes to PVP – nada. If you want to seriously de-moralize a WoW  player, make them play a Brewmaster PVP for a day.

Look, it’s not impossible to do some DPS as a brewmaster, but how much testing went into PVP as a brewmaster? I turned to Mistweaver instead and am loving it. The fast moving, channeled heals, Detox, the stuns, etc. etc. For me it really is a fun spec to play, but then again, a healing spec is not DPS. The Windwalker spec on the other hand basically has the same  skills as the tank (brewmaster), but does more DPS. I will get to that spec soon, but after the humiliating smackdowns on my brewmaster spec, I’m not quite ready to focus my chi into a Monk DPS spec again just yet. My heals rock.

And now onto the review that was not. One cool thing with the new expansion are the new Heirlooms sold by the guild vendors:
Heirloom pants — 1750 gold each
Heirloom helmets — 1500 gold each
Heirloom capes — 1200 gold each

Of course, you need to complete some achievements AND have your guild level high enough for these items to show up on your guild vendor… But it’s definitely worth it. There is just something extremely fun about being a twinked low level punishing players in pvp.

And then the review that wasn’t. I don’t know how long it’s been since I have done a wow gold review. Cletus messages me occasionally, asking as well, though he is not the same rabid review reader like before. So I picked out a peach of a site (of course Chinese), and start doing the screenshot process, start talking on chat — where the agent naturally tells me they have stock on my server.

So I go to continue their checkout process and get to p\Paypal, ready to pay for my gold. As soon as I get to the checkout page on Paypal and click pay, I am asked to verify a phone number, since it has been so long since I have used that account. Thing is, the phone number attached with that account is for a friends house who was not home… and so without going into too many details I will get this account situation fixed and do some much needed wow gold reviews. There are so many new sellers out there that need some serious reviewing!

If any of you have some sites you think are worth a good review, post your comments here. If you know of a good way to play brewmaster in pvp, post a comment here as well. I may be doing it wrong.

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Over the holidays it occurred to me that I need to do more WoW related posts. Why? Because I feel like it. Last month I was ready to review a gold seller when I had a paypal issue… And then it was Christmas. I digress, but I WILL get you some more wow gold reviews SOON! In the meantime,  I have decided to summarize World of Warcraft from the currency perspective.

- November 23, 2004: World of Warcraft was first released on this day. After roughly 5 years of development and testing, Blizzard went live with patch 1.1.1. At this time of WoW Classic, it was the same game yet different. Blizzard was competing with the likes of EverQuest, FFXI, and a few other MMORPG games that were a grind. WoW was no exception, though it was a comparably lesser grind than the other games.

At the time of launch, one of the only outlets to buy wow gold was from IGE.com, considered by many to be the pioneer of RMT. IGE was said to be selling gold initially at $40+ per 1 gold, and then in the next couple months shifted its price to around $40 per 100 gold. That is a BIG change from today’s prices.

- December 5, 2006: Two years and countless patches after WoW Classic was released, Blizzard releases “The Burning Crusade” expansion; the first for World of Warcraft. This patch added some new instances, locations, a level cap increase to 70, and many bug fixes and gameplay improvements. This is also when the original ZA bear – Amani War Bear – could be obtained.

At the time of TBC, the price for wow gold was hanging around $13 for 100 gold.

It was around this TBC era that Blizzard started to crack down on gold sellers, increasing the price of world of warcraft gold, and also creating an air of caution from gold buyers. In was reported in June 2006 that Blizzard banned 30,000 accounts, followed by a July report that Blizz has banned 60,000 accounts (and 22 million gold). In hindsight we can see that this did not solve much for Blizzard except increase cd key and timecard  revenues.

- October 14, 2008: Fast-forward (again) nearly 2 years since the release of TBC, and Blizzard releases the arguably best MMORPG expansion — Wrath of the Lich King. In its first 24 hours of release, it sold more than 2.8 million copies. This expansion introduced a LARGE amount of new content, including new zones, a level cap of 80, and the introduction of the Death Knight hero class. Since this patch, Blizzard has started to solidify WoW as the #1 MMORPG.

Even with account bannings ongoing, gold sellers would not be deterred, and the price of gold was selling at around $13.00 for 500 wow gold on IGE.com.

- October 12, 2010: Almost on queue, two years after WoTLK, Blizzard launches the Cataclysm expansion. Just like its predecessors, this patch has outsold all the others with 3.3 million copies sold in the first 24 hours. This very large expansion introduced many new zones, increased the level cap to 85, and added two new races: Goblins and Worgen. This is also the time players got to enjoy using their flying mounts anywhere in Azeroth, finally.

After the release of Cataclysm, players could find wow gold prices at around  $5.00 per 1000g.

- September 25, 2012: Another two years has passed and we are at the near present: Mists of Pandaria is released! The the joy of a mostly bored player base, Blizzard has released an expansion that is mostly Chinese… Quite ironic due to the issues Blizz has been having with Chinese gold farmers / spammers. In this expansion, Blizzard has added a new zone, several new dungeons and PvP zones, along with a new race and class: The Pandaren race and the Monk class. As you probably know, the Pandarens look like a panda, and the monk class is a fist-based class, similar to monks in other MMORPGs.

After the release of MoP, there was a huge initial demand of gold on all servers. As the law of supply and demand dictates, prices rose sharply for gold while supply was scarce. Months later, the prices have gone back down and you can find wow gold for under $1 per 1000 at sites like IGE.

In summary, you can see the price of WoW Gold continues to get cheaper as the years go by. I would attribute this to inflation, and Blizzard knows this. As with most MMORPGs, the developers need to introduce “money-sinks” for players to use their money at an NPC (to remove the gold from the economy, unlike the AH) on things like the Grand Expedition Yak at 120,000 gold, before discounts.

And for those of you who think tldr, here is a picture speaking more than 1000 words:

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