A Week of Garrison Gold-Making...

The overall aim was to build up a decent bank and hit gold-cap again using easily repeatable methods that aren't at the mercy of other players i.e. avoiding the AH as much as possible.

So... the results are in!
How much does the garrison bring in?

First, the setup took a long time to complete and I would argue that it's still not fully complete now.
Across my 11 max-level characters, I have 266 Epic level 100 followers.
Of those... 164 are at 675ilvl and 128 are Treasure Hunters.
Not all 675s are Treasure Hunters and not all Treasure Hunters are 675 but you get a rough idea of what I have available.

I tried to send the followers out every 12 hours, give or take, for a full week.  I resisted the temptation to throw in an extra few missions during an extended play over the weekend and even missed 1 full cycle when I was away one evening.

I tried to avoid 12hr+ missions but kept forgetting so missed out on a few extra over the week but that should be negligible.

It took me roughly 15 minutes per cycle of completing missions and sending the followers out again, plus a bit extra at the end to go through all the Salvage and count everything.

So how much was it?
13 cycles over 7 days produced:

                      93,500 GOLD!

This is me :-)

That was just the pure gold, direct from the missions.  There were also a few side benefits...

1 Champion's Honor which sold on the AH for 11k gold
1 Medallion of the Legion which sold on the AH for 3k gold
552 Big Crates of Salvage which produced:
Various BoE items -  vendored for a total of 8k
Ore -          272
Herbs -      951
Cloth -       193
Leather -   147
Dust -        136

Many Garrison Resources, Oil, Apexis Crystals and Primal Spirits... which I forgot to count.
Plus some actual usable gear for the lower alts.

I haven't worked out what to do with all of those mats yet, and there were many more that I gathered as I was building my setup.
I might try to craft some things that sell very quickly, or I may just dump them on the AH.
I have decided not to attach any value to them right now though.

Crafting with the mats is not the only way to squeeze more out of the Garrison...
The Garrison Resources are easily converted into fish to make the 125 stat food which still sells incredibly well.

Gold missions from the Shipyard can also bring in a nice amount so the oil doesn't need to go to waste.

The Barn is still very lucrative if you want to replace the Trading Post.  It does need regular re-stocking though, which means leaving the garrison occaionally.

The Mine and Herb Garden massively boost your raw materials if you have the time and inclination to gather them every day.

Then there are the profession buildings...
JC shack seems to offer the best for gold-making. 
With a follower in there, you can complete a simple daily quest for a reward of 200-300 gold.
I have so many JC chars at the moment I should probably be doing this anyway!

Enchanter's Hut goes well with the Salvage Crates.  Disenchant the Draenor gear from the salvage and pass the mats to an enchanter if you are confident you can then sell the enchants at a profit.

Compared to previous expansions where virtually all gold-making relied on the AH, it is a massive change.  Everyone has the ability to make gold on their own, never relying on beating the AH-campers to a sale or finding a niche product.

This explains why those sought-after mounts on the BMAH are quickly pushed up to 1 Million gold, demand has increased as more people are actually in a position to buy.

I'm going to dial it back a bit now, just aim for one cycle per day rather than two. 
It should actually produce more than half of the gold as I will avoid some of the Account-wide diminishing returns that Blizzard put into place on gold missions.  

Do you know ways to extract even more gold from the garrison?
Or simple ways to make decent gold from the mats?
I would love to hear them!

Mythic Magery: Kil'rogg Deadeye

Continuing our adventures through the Halls of Blood we come to Kil'rogg Deadeye!

The corrupted Orc warlord has imprisoned Ariok, our friend from the Draenor opening sequence, and is now introducing more Orcs to the Fel.

I prefer the style of increasing difficulty via complexity rather than (just) numbers, it makes the fights different enough that I don't feel too much like I'm repeating the same content.

It's a fine line though and it must be difficult to build just the right amount of complexity on top of what already exists to keep the fight fresh and challenging, but without undoing all the learning done on Heroic.

Kil'rogg follows this principle and stays very close to the Heroic version with just a couple of tweaks to keep it interesting.

The biggest difference by far is how to handle the Hulking Terrors, who have had a hefty buff since Heroic.

Their big hits cause massive amounts of Fel Corruption to the tank so they have to be killed very quickly. 
Unfortunately, they explode when they die so have to be moved out of melee range and finished off by the Ranged.
After the explosion, they leave behind a pool of Fel stuff which needs to be soaked by enough people to share the corruption it brings. 
Don't soak and it coalesces into a Fel Blood which needs to be killed before it reaches Kil'rogg.
Oh yeah, and a missed interrupt is pretty much a wipe.

Our setup is pretty much a mirror of the Heroic fight, taking the boss all the way to the entrance and tanking him and the Hulking Terror there.

We split into two groups so the adds are covered on each side and just go from there.

The emphasis in the fight is on adds as usual but the real key seems to be getting into and out of the visions as quickly as possible.
As the Hulking Terror is putting so much corruption on to the tank, the Visions healer needs to cleanse them before they are mind-controlled.

So, despite the majority of the fight being single target or at best 2-target cleave, the people going into the visions need to set up for AoE.

My Shaman would have had no problems at all with this, CL/EQ ftw!
As an Arcane Mage though, I tried to cut a couple of corners and keep as much of my single target as possible for maximum use of the buff on the boss himself.

This turned out to be a mistake and I was only given a couple of attempts in the Vision before being replaced by a Warlock. 
I didn't get the opportunity to find the right balance between AoE and single target, even the attempts I had in the Vision were cut short by our healer dying.  He was still learning the fight too, after all.

Maybe I should have spoken up a bit more and asked for the opportunity to spec for more AoE but we were shuffling the pack regularly to give everyone a go at that point and I figured I would just do better next time it came round to me.

Two attempts later and Kil'rogg was dead  :-)
Off the top of my head, I think it was 15 attempts in total.

Having 2 Hunters and 3 Mages outside is fantastic for making sure the adds are never an issue. 
This is where I would have struggled on the Shaman, constantly switching to the next add and the Flame Shock dilemma...
If everyone is on the ball, the Flame Shock (and the GCD) is completely wasted. 
If the adds lives a bit longer than expected though, and you haven't put FS on it, you harm your chances of actually killing it in time by having to cast underpowered LvB.

Either way, it ruins dps for the Shaman.

Arcane or Frost Mage... no problem!
No setup to worry about, full dps from the start and automatically slows the add too!
Easy-mode raiding  :-)

So, with an AoE-specced Warlock plus a melee in Visions 1 and 2, followed by Boomkin plus melee in Visions 3 and 4, the Visions were no trouble.
2 Hunters and 3 Mages on the adds and they were no trouble.

All it took to get the kill from there was for us to learn how to properly handle the Hulking Terror, and for the healers to get used to the demands of healing in the Visions.

It didn't take our tanks long to work out when they needed to move the Hulking Terror away from the boss and we just had the melee move in to soak the Fel puddle left behind. 
It was nice to see the melee doing some work for once to be honest  :-)

The healers in the Visions just adjusted their positioning so that all of the adds had to run through the melee's AoE to get to them.  The adds would be distracted (or destroyed) by a Bladestorm or whatever and the healer would be free to stand still and cast.

Overall, it's a step down in difficulty from Council but still an enjoyable fight.

Maybe Blizzard figured we needed some respite before the hell that is Gorefiend Mythic!

Jewelcrafting Shenanigans...

During preparations for the recent gold-making exercise I was exploring options for using up raw materials and I took a look at Jewelcrafting.

As it happens, earlier in the expansion, I had a JC plan!

It took so long to manufacture each gem at the time that they sold very quickly, sometimes selling out completely on my server, and prices remained consistently high.

So my plan was increase gem production to keep up with this demand and not miss any potential sales.

How do you do that?  Get more JCs!
I switched 5 or 6 alts over to JC, bought a boatload of ore from the AH and distributed it between them.
They were all starting from 1 but that didn't matter, they just sat in the garrison doing the daily CD and filling work orders.

I maintain that it was a good(ish) plan but for a couple of drawbacks:
1.  Shortly after I put the plan into action there was the patch that brought visitors to your garrison.  The Ore Trader allowed everyone to produce more gems if they wanted to.
2.  It was really boring.  I just got tired of moving ore and common gems from char to char.

So the JC-world domination plan was abandoned before it really got off the ground.

Well... I was looking at getting back into JC and checking out the Epic Gems.
You can't learn the recipes for them from a trainer, you have to actually go out into the world and find them!

Awesome!

This is an amazing idea! 

Actually having to play your character, maybe even going... outside your garrison!

The disappointing part was that I had to go to Wowhead to find out where the recipes dropped, why couldn't Blizzard put in quests for them? 
It seemed like such an obvious step to me, to continue the mini-questline which took you to the Gemcutter in the first place.

The recipes come from:
Versatility - Free one given automatically.
Critical Strike - Iskar in HFC (any difficulty)
Haste - High Sage Vyrix in Skyreach (Mythic only!)
Mastery - Rank 6 Brawlers Guild
Multistrike - Tanaan Arrakoa rep
Stamina - Rukhmar (World boss)

Ok... sounds easy enough.
So who is my best JC?
Oh dear... the only to make it all the way to 700, or anywhere near 700, was...

Warlock!

This was my free boost to 90 back in MoP, fumbled his way to 100 by virtue of having his own personal tank, failed the Proving Grounds, and hasn't moved since.

Oh dear.

Not to worry... back to Preach!

I was a Demo Warlock and they were gutted so Demon Hunters could have all of their abilities...

By the way, is this the most blatantly cynical move that Blizzard has ever pulled? 
Nerf Demo locks so heavily that they are not viable in any form of organised content.
All Warlocks switch to the other two specs which are both incredibly powerful.
Give all Demo abilities to Demon Hunter.
Any complaints? 
Well, the data says that nobody was playing Demo anyway.
No shit, Sherlock!

(also see Marksmanship Hunter/ Lone Wolf)

Anyway...
I have switched out of Demo, I hadn't enjoyed playing it much anyway to be honest, and decided to have a go at Affliction.  A spec so complex at one point it had it's own tailor-made addons to make it remotely playable.

Worth a go anyway.

It's not that complex these days... snapshotting has fallen by the wayside so it's more of a plate-spinning exercise trying to keep up dots on multiple targets.

Single target is very simple... keep up 3 dots, add a 4th dot when the Ember procs, fill with something else, pop CDs with trinket procs, summon and sacrifice Demons...

See, really simple! :-s

I'm off to practice in front of the dummies and hope I can get TMW to make some sort of sense out of it all, will let you know I get on!

Mythic Magery - Hellfire High Council

A real step up from the Heroic version and particularly challenging for the healers.

I thought this fight was fun at the other levels and I think it's even better on Mythic. 

The tactics haven't really changed, we don't even do the rotating groups for the debuff tactic from fatboss. 

Instead, we just stack very tightly on Gurtogg and have people move slightly further away as needed.

This keeps the whole raid (except Dia's tank of course) inside the numerous healing circles, hopefully taking a little stress from the incredibly taxed healers. 

In fact, the healing is so demanding on this fight we run with 5 healers instead of the usual 4.

Even with the extra healer, and the extra penalty for doing it, we are choosing to dispel the reaps to spread the damage more evenly across the raid. 

This goes against everything we know about this fight and is even worse on mythic as it spreads to three new people rather than two but anything that can reduce the strain on the healers is welcome. 

It does cause us some issues later on in the fight though, issues which I particularly struggle with. 

Anyway, as dps, much of the fight remains the same as heroic. We still follow the same priorities and there is still the intense thrill when you are fixated by Gurtogg.

It's that fixate that essentially decides who tops the dps charts but, taking that out of consideration, it's the Arcane Mage massive single target damage versus the multi-dotting Boomkins and Warlocks... it's a very close contest! 

The key to the actual kill though seems to be how we handle the Reaps. 

As we are dispelling it once each cycle, we have 9 to drop each time. This very quickly takes up a large amount of the available space and leads to a specific moment that causes most of our wipes. 

It is one of those 'moments' that occasionally arises in raids. 
You know that if the raid makes it through that key moment in decent shape it will likely lead to a kill.

It may be due to running with an extra healer, or it may just be that our dps is not quite up to scratch, but we can't kill Blademaster Jubei'thos before his second Mirror phase.
Knowing this, we avoid pushing him below 30% and switch to Dia for a while.

Unfortunately though, that second Mirror phase coincides with a ghost phase and, with both going on... we get the Reap.

This is where I er... cock it up.

I've often had a knack of using fantastic, helpful spells to kill myself (see Suicide is Painless) and that has continued here as I contrive to Blink into everything that could possibly kill me rather than the spaces in between.

Ghosts, Mirror Blades, other Reaps... You name it, I've blinked into it.  Often more than one of them at once.
I'm far from the only one though, this is the moment we either wipe or go on to kill the boss. 

It all depends how many people managed to negotiate the maze of Reaps, Ghosts and Swirling Blades to find a safe spit to drop their own Reap.

If it's 3 or 4 we can normally just go on to get the kill but it's often many more with chain reactions of deaths... die before Reap goes off, it jumps to someone else who panics and runs (blinks) to their death so it jumps to someone else who has no time to move and drops it under the raid... killing more people.

That kind of thing.

I might suggest we save Heroism to burn down the Blademaster on our next kill but I haven't checked how much that would hurt us on Bloodboil.

Otherwise, we are back to the headless chickens running for safety... we should get pretty good at it in time  :-)

 

The Gold Plan...

The Aim: 
To (re)make my Million Gold with as little effort as possible.

The Tools available: 
11 chars at 100 (sort of)
All profs (except Herbalism for some reason) maxed at 700

Stage 1:  Garrisons.
The main idea is to find some task that isn't too onerous to repeat at will for guaranteed gains, sounds like the garrison to me.

My main advantage is that I login, even if it's only for a few minutes, virtually every day so the garrison also plays to that strength.

I know I've missed the big gold rush from the garrisons after a series of nerfs but there is still plenty to be made.

The Setup...
The first step was to grab a load of followers with the treasure finder trait so that means a level 2 Inn. 
You're going to want a level 3 Inn to open up the Treasure missions anyway so that's no problem.

Harrison Jones is not only a treasure finder himself but also a god-send for levelling up your new treasure finder recruit each week.
Get him on as many chars as possible!

The treasure missions aren't the only ones that bring in the gold though, virtually all of the rewards can be vendored for a nice chunk and there are also the big rewards like the Medallion of the Legion and the Champion's Honor.

And, if you are doing so many missions each day, it makes sense to have the level 3 Salvage Yard so you have the opportunity to gain something from every mission.

Barracks level 3 for the extra follower slots.  Obviously, more followers equals more missions you can do at a time.

I also went for a Storehouse but that was mainly for access to the bank so I could dump anything in there that I didn't immediately vendor.

The Plan...
Cycle through the chars twice per day (when possible), completing missions and sending the followers out again.

Prioritise missions based on gold rewards.

Empty Salvage once per week, vendor all the BoE stuff (as I've said before, no clue about transmog).

It doesn't get much simpler than that!

Not an Auction House in sight!

But does it work?

Well... the setup took longer than anticipated. 
The weekly wait for a new follower, plus gearing them all up to 675ilvl, were things I hadn't initially considered.

I also hadn't considered that half of my chars found 'gimmicky' ways to reach 100 and had barely moved since. 
My Monk, for example, had gathered a total of 5 followers and not bothered levelling them up.
He, and the others in a similar situation, took a trip around Draenor picking up the free and easy followers so at least they had some to send out.

I had to prioritise levelling over gold for quite a while but I think it will pay off in the long run.

Needless to say, the gold wasn't immediately flowing in.  But I had enough encouragement from the main chars to see that, given enough time, it would flourish.

Fast forward to the present and the setup is almost complete. 
5 chars have all followers at 675ilvl including the treasure finders.
5 chars have all followers at 100 and half or more at 675ilvl
1 char, the lazy Warrior, was actually still levelling when the plan started so he's way behind with about 15 or 16 followers.

Conclusion to follow soon...

The Alt Plan: Discipline Priest

The Rogue has essentially finished his adventures in Draenor now, although he might have a run out occasionally, so it's time to turn my attention to another alt: 

Discipline Priest.

The scourge of healers everywhere with crazy absorbs and smart heals sniping everything going.

Well... that's the theory anyway.

A few trips to LFR taught me basically zero about how to play as Disc so I went to my favourite resource, Preach Gaming.

Oh... so it's not just PW:S spam?

Ok, let's go!

The Preach guide backed up my initial thoughts on the Disc Priest, that it is at it's most effective when shielding proactively but it's even more important than I thought. 

Knowledge of the fights and anticipation of the damage is vital to being a decent Disc.  There is no get-out-of-jail card like Healing Tide or Tranquility for when the shit hits the fan, so you have to make sure it never gets there.

How do you do that?

Ok, maybe it is PW:S spam.
Kept up on the tanks and anyone who looks like they will take some damage, that's the base from which to build.

From there though, weave in PW:Solace on cooldown to regen some mana and stack up Evangelism.

Penance on cooldown too... used offensively as often as you can get away with it, for another Evangelism stack, but on whoever needs it really.

And there are a couple of other talent choices like Halo/Divine Star/Other one I can't remember which you throw out there as needed.

That is most of the Disc Priest sorted and nets you a fairly decent HPS, capable of handling most situations if used proactively. 

To take it to the next level though, is Archangel!
An incredibly powerful spell on a super-short cooldown of 30 seconds.  This is where the knowledge of the fight really bears fruit, timing Archangel correctly can absolutely trivialise some boss abilities.

My giant male Pandaren (Guild was going for the Stay Classy achievement back in MoP so needed a Pandaren Priest, one joined the guild when I had reached level 87 :-s ) may look stupid with those little wings on his back but they make him feel like a superhero!

We aren't a DPSer now, it doesn't have to be used exactly on cooldown, but you want to get as much out of it as possible and that is where knowing the fights comes in.

Balancing using Archangel as much as possible against having it available for exactly the right moments is where the skill of Disc Priest seems to be, certainly not how many times you can press your PW:S button.

I've just begun to venture into Normal mode HFC and I'm still working out the best timings but I can see the amazing potential of the spec. 
Getting the Archangel right, using the guaranteed crit to put up some nice, juicy shields just before a big ability hits is a fantastic feeling.

And it's so different to the Resto Shaman, almost the opposite way to play.  The Shaman has the tools to recover from any situation, cooldown after cooldown available to stabilise the raid and bring them back from the brink.

The Disc Priest doesn't have those tools but can make sure they are never needed.  So far there hasn't been a lot of those moments in normal HFC but it was fantastic to challenge myself in the Mythic dungeons over the weekend.

I didn't get it right every time, and it's a struggle to catch up when you get it wrong, but it's worth it for those times that you get it absolutely spot on and sail through the encounter.

The only time I actually wiped the group was on Ner'zhul in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds.  It wasn't poor healing or badly-timed cooldowns though, I accidentally ran into the purple stuff and died instantly  :-(
Ah well, the pug group was nice enough that they just had a bit of a laugh at my expense as we ran back in.

The garrison has brought me up to speed with the Legendary Ring so now I am just collecting Tomes and doing the Shipyard missions.
Not much luck with gear drops in my Normal HFC attempts so far but I haven't done much to be honest so hoping that will improve.

I'm looking forward to seeing how far I can take this Priest, it's a lot of fun to play and challenging me in completely new ways.

Mythic Magery: Kormrok

I'll be completely honest... I've never really got this fight.

My Shaman used to struggle to hit decent numbers here so I used to focus on the dirty jobs... breaking out the one person in the hand going the wrong way or that's in the pool... making sure the runes were done properly... that kind of thing.

It always seemed like another one of 'those' fights, the ones that had lots of mechanics but none of them were really important.  The fight didn't require any precision.

Stack up for the hands... doesn't matter if a few people aren't stacked
Dodge the blobs... doesn't matter if you get hit a couple of times
Push the Empowered Runes to the middle... ok, it needed doing, but there was a lot of room for error.
And so on...

Mythic doesn't really seem much different.

The fight is almost exactly the same as Heroic.

The main added mechanic is the splash as Kormrok lands in a pool.  Everyone has a designated spot to stand and soak the splash to prevent bad goo stuff from covering the floor.

Except it doesn't really matter.

Half of our team gets it wrong every time and, while it restricts the space we have to play in, it doesn't have much of an effect on the outcome of the fight.

A lot of this has to be gear-related again. 
As we push the Empowered Runes around, sometimes in the bad goo, the damage taken must have been much harder to heal through in lower gear.

It does help that we have 3 mages, 3 hunters and a rogue doing it though.  Damage is spread throughout the raid and covered by a myriad of cooldowns.

So this fight trundles along like normal or heroic... we stack, we spread, we run to our spot to soak (some of us anyway) and close in on the kill until...

All hell breaks loose!

Suddenly, everything is happening at the same time!

Being dragged by hands just before he jumps into a pool, runes and blobs all over the place as we are spread for the Pound.

It's like Kormrok suddenly remembered it was supposed to be on Mythic!

My god, how did people cope with all this 20+ ilvls ago?
The damage is insane, even now, and I pity those under-geared progressing healers.

We have the dps these days to push through and kill it not long after all the mechanics hit so we don't have to deal with it for too long but we still have the odd wipe at this point.

Either we have lost one or two along the way so our dps is lower, or had to blow cooldowns at an unplanned point in the fight, or maybe just a poor attempt... but it's always at that point where it all blows up.

I don't even know if it settles down again after that because either the boss is dead or we are.

Playing this fight as a Mage is pretty much the same as Heroic was on my Shaman... I still don't get it, I time my cooldowns wrong or position poorly and have to move during them... something like that, I can't hit the big numbers anyway.

I heard somewhere that ranking Arcane Mages on this fight were doing literally nothing until the first set of Grasping Hands so they could guarantee a Prophecy of Fear proc landing on them.

That might be the way to boost my numbers but we have two Bladestorming Warriors so the hands aren't much of an issue for us.

I'll just stick to hitting the boss and doing the dirty jobs.