WoW Journal - 19-August-2005

A peaceful and quiet week of WoW. Playing on the laptop from a hotel room in the USA works, but more or less forces me to solo. When I log on in the early evening here, in Europe it's past midnight, and those guildmates who are still playing are already in a group in the middle of a dungeon. Well, no problem, a change of pace is good. I stocked up on herbs, and did a couple of solo-quests.

Then I discovered the hidden benefit of having done Scholomance several times in a 5-man group, doing all the Eva Sarkhoff quests. This had allowed me to buy the Transmute Water to Air recipe from the ghost vendor in front of Scholomance. And it turns out that essence of air is two to three times more valuable than essence of water. Buy essence of water for 7 gold, transmute it into essence of air, and sell it for up to 20 gold. And the cooldown for the transmute is only 24 hours, so I can do this once a day. First time alchemy brings me real fat profits.

The first of such transmutes I did because I wanted to have the icy chill enchantment on my weapon, which slows down the enemy when it procs. That needs both essence of water and air, but also several small brilliant shards, which I couldn't get hold of. And the enchanters of my guild all said that icy chill wasn't much good, and that I should go for the fiery enchantment instead. So I spent 20 gold on the ingredients for that. Well, the fiery enchantment *looks* good, but I'm not really convinced it is good. Seems the proc rate is about 10%, and then it deals 40 points of fire damage. That calculates to +4 damage per hit on average, which I could have gotten with a much cheaper enchantment. And as lots of the raid dungeons are fire based, I'm afraid the fiery enchantment doesn't do much there.

Speaking of looking good, I got a new shield, the Crest of Retribution. The stats aren't strictly better than those of the Husk of Nerub'enkan it replaced, but it looks much better. It's all spikey, and has a metal shine effect. I got our guild smith to add an mithril spike on it, and now it deals 21 to 55 points of damage every time I block. And it seems that this damage isn't reduced by armor. Combined with the improved shield block talent it gets pretty wicked.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:08 PM Permanent Link