Who am I?

Who am I?
Can I conceal myself for evermore?
Pretend I'm not the n00b I was before?
And must my name, until I die be no more than a way to hide?
Must I hide?
How can I ever face myself again?
How can I face my fellow man?
The Armory has all my gear
My n00bish talents you'll see I fear
But now is time
I have some epics
to reveal myself to you.
Who am I.... who am I? I'm M E R V Y N


Is it sad that I did not need to look up the song to to be able to parody it? (For those of you who don't know, it's from Les Miserables.)

Is it also sad that I've been planning this post for awhile?

Good Idea, Bad Idea: The Auction House

There are many n00b stories surrounding the AH and how it takes some people a while to find it. A couple have been posted here in the comments, some I have heard and then there is my own story which does not differ much from most of the n00bs. Below is the conversation I had with my RL Friend introducing me to the AH.

RL Friend: Grats on hitting level 20. Hey what skills are you leveling?
Me: Well I was herb & skinning, but I dropped the herb for leatherworking.
RLF: That will be useful for your hunter.
Me: Yeah I thought so too, except I have all these recipes that I will never use for myself.
RLF: Well, you can make them and sell them on the Auction House.
Me: Auction House? What's that?

And then I am told all about the auction house and I learn to stop vendoring my light leather. w00t.

Nowadays, I feel that I am no longer an Auction House n00b. I believe I have graduated and I'm pretty good at playing the market and there are some essential tools that are needed to maximize profit and minimize your expenses when you need to buy materials or items.

Those tools are: Auctioneer, a wonderful add-on and allakhazam.com.

Now Auctioneer only works if you spend sometime scanning the AH. Basically, you have to have your character sit there and the program looks at every auction and looks at the price ( about 15 to 20 minutes). If you are just installing Auctioneer, you probably need to do this three times in the first week you install and once a week thereafter. The more you do this the more reliable your data is going to be. It is important to get as much info as possible for those weird things you pick up in your travels as well as keeping tabs on popular items.

Another important time to scan auctioneer is after a major upgrade. After 2.1 was implemented the prices of knothide leather and netherweave cloth plummeted, I was hoping it was a momentary blip because I made a lot of money off of these materials, but alas it was not. Keep in mind that there can be other unforseen changes to the economy after upgrades, so to make sure you get a handle on these quickly, scan often.

Auctioneer is also very useful in making sure you don't get taken for a ride. If you want to buy some felweed so someone can make pots for you and there are only a few on the AH and the price is way higher than Auctioneer says it should be, then you should probably wait on buying that item until there are more on the AH.

Now the best way to use Allakhazam is when you find a rare or weird item that you may only have one or no scans of the item.

Several weeks ago, while doing Netherwing Dallies, Formula: Enchant Chest - Major Resilience dropped. I did not have any info in my auctioneer on the item, but it was a green enchant, I probably would have put it up on the AH for 20g or something. However, since I had no info, I went to Allakhazam and it told me that this measly green sells for 475 gold on average and I gave it to my RL friend (yes, the very same one who hipped me to the AH) in hopes that he would get his epic flight form sooner, who sold it for 350g.

So, those are some good ideas.

Of mixed use is prospecting the AH (buying low and selling high). I will do it sometimes, but only with items, that if they don't sell I can actually use (with some exceptions -- like Primal Mana on the AH for 2g each.) I did it recently with Don Santos' Famous Hunting Rifle. I found it on the AH for 1,000 gold and tried to sell it for 2,000. I wound up selling it for about 1,400 -- still a tidy little profit, but it took several weeks. (Auctioneer has an add-on called Bottom Scanner, that will recommend you buy things that are very low in price -- if you decide you want to go that route.)

Here is a bad idea: Cornering the Market -- or attempting to. In this circumstance, you buy up everything on the AH of one kind of herb, leather or cloth and then resell it at an inflated price. This is a bad idea because you can never truly corner the market in this game. I have cloth and leather stored in my bank toon that I wait for just such a moment and then throw a bunch of it up on the AH at prices significantly lower than the other seller has set and yet still higher than the normal market price and I and others who do that same thing make a tidy profit off of other people's risk.

Of absolute stupidity is what someone on my realm tried to do a last week and that is make gold off of something you obviously have no clue about. This person bought all the epic recipes on the AH (selling for around 300 to 800 gold). Then they proceeded to mark them all up to 1,500 gold, what they did not discern in many of these recipes is that the item was Bind on Pickup (BOP) which meant that only the crafter could ever use it. No crafter is going to buy a recipe for 1,500 gold, then get the mats that will either take weeks to farm or hundreds more gold to buy, just for a single piece of gear. I would like to think that this person did not even realize that they were BOP items and thought that if the crafter was going to make money off of the recipe they would be willing to pay top coin for it. Sadly they were mistaken and wound up slowly dropping the price all week. It also didn't help that no one else putting these recipes up on the AH followed this person's lead -- they kept the old prices.

One final note: Inflation. As time goes on, Auctioneer will not keep up with inflation. You will start to notice that most popular items are being listed at 5 to 10% higher than your Auctioneer has them for. Since gold, copper and silver are created out of thin air, and once your epic flying mount is bought, you have no mortgage to save for, inflation is always going to be a problem -- just keep farming and doing quests to keep up with the Joneses. (This may also happen in reverse with high ticket items, which get farmed more as more people get better geared and do higher instances and get better drops.)

In the end, it's all fake money anyway, so if you lose money on the AH, its not as bad as having your entire IRA in Enron -- just like the rest of the game, it is something to have fun with.

What kinda of buff could you get from sex?

According to MMORPG.com the new game Age of Conan will have a way for characters to have sex and the characters will then receive a buff from it.

"MMORPG.com has learned from a reliable source at Funcom that characters will be able to have sex and will receive a buff for the action. That is not to say, however, that there will be explicit sex in the game."

So that got me thinking about what that buff could be and if I was programing it, how would I do it. (Note: this is only for straight sex, there would have to be a whole different system for gay sex.)

First off, I would make a different buff for both male and female characters, however, female characters would not automatically get the buff.

The chance that the female character would get the Female Sex Buff (FSB) would be based upon a complicated fomula. The formula would start out that the FSB procs 30% of the time after having sex. However, every time the FSB procs, that chance goes up by 2% to a maximum of 60%. The male character would also affect the FSB, they would start at 0% and go up .5% each time they have sex -- however that percentage can be increased if the male's partner gets the FSB three times in a row (i.e. the male cause the FSB to proc three times in a row with any partner) after that happened their percentage to cause a FSB would start going up by 2% an encounter to a max of 40% -- therefore a Male and a female character at max would always cause a FSB to proc.

The Buff for the male would be the following:

Testosterone Buff: Character must not do anything strenuous for 5 minutes, which would include running or fighting. If they rest for 5 minutes they get a 25% buff to all stats and vitality for 2 hours. If rest is interrupted by any strenuous work they lose 25% to all stats for 20 minutes.

The FSB would be:

The Glowing Buff: Character gets an immediate buff which includes a 15% haste rating increase and a 15% buff to all stats and vitality for 3 hours.

So the Age of Conan would be just like real life in the sense that after the sex the woman is ready for more and all the guy wants to do is go to sleep. Also, men will lie about how big their proc rate is just to get a women in bed with him!

Respect my Authoritay!

Why is it that in every major instance run, guild or position of authority, you never see a hunter running the show?

Personally, as you can tell from my title, I have never felt quite secure enough to lead a Raid Instance and I have yet to be asked to join a position of authority amongst my guild. As a matter of fact, the one Hunter who did have a position of authority in our guild has retired their hunter and is now playing a priest.

On a side note, I found out today that I have been nominated as Assistant Class Leader -- but what kind of position of authority is Assistant Leader of the class that has no leaders? But I digress.

When I first started reading Big Red Kitty, I had assumed, since he wrote with such forcefulness and authority, that he must be the leader of his guild and he must run two or three groups through Karazhan a week. Then to my dismay, I learned that he did not lead his guild, he did not run the Kara instances... if BRK wasn't leading, what hope did the rest of us Hunters have?

Meanwhile, however, because I read people's blogs and keep track of trends, I seem to know a bit and offer a lot of insights to the entire raid -- so why don't I lead?

Honestly, I have always been happier being the man behind the throne, the man with the throne's ear than the one sitting upon it. I wonder if similar qualities draw hunters to be hunters, maybe we do not want to wield power, but we want to have a say in how that power is used.

Lets use the armory to see if I am right:
What Class leads what guilds?

• Eternal n00bies' Guild: Paladin
• Death & Taxes: (No Guild Leader) Rank 1: 3 warriors, Druid, Mage, shaman
• Nilium: Warrior
• Last Resort: Warrior
• Meet Your Maker: Warlock
  
• Curse: Rogue (Level 60?)
• Forte: Warrior

So does what makes a good leader not make a good hunter? In my case, I just don't think I want a job running a guild or a raid, but I do want to be useful and helpful to my guild in any way possible, so when they ask for help, I usually pitch in wherever I can, but what are my motivations for doing so -- I would be honored to be asked to take more of a leadership role in the guild, (but not THE leader of the guild,) and I am perfectly happy being known as the guy that is reliable, can be called upon to do good things, bring the DPS, etc.

So I'm curious, whatever class you play, are you happy where you are at? Do you want more responsibility? Less? Why?

A lot of loot for an off night

So, I log on last night because there was some discussion of running a heroic with a Kara team member to help him get some primal nethers, but no one shows up, so while waiting I head over to Blade's Edge Mountains to do some dailies, make some gold -- when I'm done, heading back to Shattrath, I stop by Zangamarsh to kill a few Bogflare Needlers in hopes of getting a Captured Firefly. I figure I'll spend 20 minutes farming there and then find something else to do. I wind up spending about 2 hours until one drops -- a little crazy to get something that I want just because I was a fan of Joss Wheadon's Firefly, but I'm still waiting for this heroic group to show up.

On a side note - another real life n00b moment: Some of my friends from college were so excited to see Joss Wheadon's movie "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- I happily went pretending all along that I knew who this Joss Wheadon was -- I figured I should know this film maker, they all knew him. I don't remember how much later, but it was years, when I realized the only reason why they knew Joss Wheadon was because they knew Joss Wheadon, he was a senior at my college when I was a freshman. End RL n00b moment.

So finally, I gave up on the heroic group and put my name into the LFG for Shadow Labyrinth. Why Shadow Lab? Because I was 1200 away from revered and I still wanted that damn Sonic Spear . So to my surprise, I get invited to a PUG rather quickly and to my even greater surprise, we have a very good tank and a good mage. After an Arms Warrior quit the group after being embarrassed by pulling a pat (weird, but he wasn't adding much in the way of DPS) we got a good warlock, and while the priest had a weird spec, he was damn good at keeping us all alive. And so I got a Pattern: Stylin' Purple Hat And then, thank Elune, when we get Mummur down, my baby drops, the Sonic Spear -- that and Auchenai Key made for a very nice night.

Now I have to decide whether to put +35 Agility or +70 Attack Power on that baby.

Pop Quiz

Like my banner? I was looking through some old screenshots and found that one. I wasn't sure that it summed up n00bishness, more like the end result of the queasy feeling we get before we are about to do something new or scary, but it was a fun picture so I threw it up there.

So, tell me, what is wrong with this picture? Please list the many why I am a n00b.

And remember there are no wrong answers, only dumb ones!

It shouldn't be this easy...

One of the posts that I wanted to do since I started this has been a general compendium of sites that are really, really useful. I've sprinkled some in here and there, but there hasn't been one major blog roll, that I can then turn into a side column that we can always click on to check on stuff.

The jobs a big one and I just haven't had the time to focus on it yet, lucky for me Lassirra at The Hunter's Mark has already a lot of done it for me in two great posts.

Being a Know-it-All Without Knowing it All

Being a Know-It-All Without Knowing it All: Part 2

These are close to what I was going to write anyway, so that made it pretty easy, now I have to tie all these up in a little bow and put them in a sidebar -- add a few sites of my own choosing and voila!

In the meantime, I would call these two articles required reading for all of us n00bs.