warcraft – Carach's Clan Casual Gaming

September 3, 2017

Death Knight Guides

It probably won’t come as a surprise that I watch a fair number of videos about WoW. I play enough characters that I need to rely on the work of other folks to figure out what the best gear, stats, rotations, and so forth are.

Other than Icy Veins, a great site for all this stuff, a new favorite of mine is Preach Gaming on Youtube. A couple of months ago he started posting class guides for every spec for 7.2.5 and beyond. What I really like about his guides is that he explains how things like talents, artifact weapon traits, and abilities all interact. This gives a good grounding for not only what talents you should take in different situations, and different situations call for different talents, but WHY you should be taking them.

Since I found them useful, I thought I would post them here where folks can find them more easily. He posted them in alphabetical order, so I will do the same, starting with Death Knights.

July 14, 2017

Tomb of Sargeras (LFR), Raidbots, and SimCraft

With the second wing of Tomb of Sargeras open in LFR, chances are improving to get two and four piece set bonuses from tier gear. My guild, Învictus, isn’t able to run Tomb of Sargeras on normal yet, not enough people, so those of us who can, run Tomb on LFR. The problem is that for many of us, we already have gear with an ilevel higher than what the base level is in LFR (885). Despite this, it is still worthwhile to run Tomb on LFR for the following reasons:

Running with your guildies. This one should be obvious.
There is a chance to get upgraded gear. I have seen drops in LFR for Tomb of Sargeras titanforge up to 915, which is pretty danged good and likely higher than most gear any of us have other than legendaries and artifact weapon.
Set bonuses. As I mentioned at the start, it is getting easier to get set bonuses and have more options for forming them to make the best of your gear. Even if the gear you get is a lower ilevel than what you currently have, the set bonus could make it an upgrade. For example, on my monk, I just got two pieces of her tier gear. One piece is 5 ilevels less than the gear I had equipped and the other is 15 ilevels lower. (I got unlucky on getting any sort of upgrade.) You might think that I would be taking a hit of I equipped the tier pieces, but you would be wrong. Despite the lower ilevels, the tier pieces should give me about a 1% increase in dps. (The ret spec on my paladin sees a 3% increase in dps for a similar loss in ilevels.)

You may be wondering how I can know it is a 1% increase, and that brings me to SimCraft and Raidbots. SimCraft is a program you can download that allows you to run simulations on your character to see what sort of damage you could, in theory, be doing against a given type of boss. There is also an addon that works with it that allows you to copy and paste a data string with your character data from the game into the program. This allows you to more easily run sims on different combinations of gear.

Raidbots does all the SimCraft does, but rather than being a program on your computer, which will take up system resources if you try to run the simulation while still in the game, it runs in the cloud and it runs much faster than SimCraft does on my computer. The downside, if you want to call it that, is there is sometimes a queue of folks using it (I’ve seen it as high as 150 or so) but the servers get through it pretty quickly. You can also copy and paste the output from the SimCraft addon into Raidbots to compare sets of gear easily.

Raidbots has a lot of features that are worth playing around with but don’t get too caught up in it. It is just a tool to help you pick the right gear for your character, not something to start stressing over. Always remember the game is supposed to be fun.

You can find the SimCraft addon on Twitch and you can find Raidbots at raidbots.com.

June 23, 2017

Not a lot of time? Time to farm some dreamleaf

I didn’t have a lot of time to play between getting home from work and dinner so I decided to spend it farming up some gold. Well, farming up some dreamleaf which should convert to gold on the auction house.

The best place to farm dreamleaf is Shala’nir in Val’Sharah, where you can find some of the plants but more importantly, there are plenty of vilepetal rooters, desecrated ancients, and defiled grovewalkers which you can herb after killing. The vilepetal rooters will always have dreamleaf and can have yseraline seeds and blood of Sargeras. The other two have a chance for these things as well but you will often just get vendor trash. Since these are mobs that you kill, they also have a chance of dropping items from your shoulder enchants, Bloodhunter’s Quarry in my case.

I’ve included a map of my favorite route below. It takes me about 8.5 minutes to complete the route. Sections of the route marked in red are those that I fly over. If you don’t have flying you will have to kill more mobs to complete the route, which would slow things down. For each complete route, with dreamleaf rank 3, I gathered an average of 168 dreamleaf and 78 yseraline seeds. In the 26 minutes I spent farming, I gathered:

515 dreamleaf
239 yseraline seeds
6 blood of Sargeras
26 leystone ore
4 dreamleaf seeds
341g worth of vendor trash

I sent off 200 dreamleaf to my inscriptionist and 200 yseraline seeds to my alchemist. I used the bloods to buy more dreamleaf. I put everything else on the auction house. My auctions have a total value of 12,702 gold, assuming everything sells. Dreamleaf is one of the easiest herbs to sell as it is the preferred herb for milling as well as being used for potions.