Boiler room

A quiet weekend spent getting nailed by hard mode instances. Cleared ToC10 again - 42 minutes, a new record - and picked up the chest from Anub. I still have ilevel 219 gloves, cloak and helm. The T9 gloves are next on my list.

More fun stuff last weekend though - changed my offspec to Fury, which looks like a huge amount of fun. Less manic than Arms because you have "free GCDs" where all your attacks are on cooldown and you can do other stuff like sunder, demo shout, etc etc. With those two massive weapons you look really good as well... It feels strange not to be doing something every GCD though, and will take getting used to I guess.

I also decided to try to make the best use of my tradeskills to earn money at the AH. I've pretty much picked the worst time to do this, since MMO-champion.com has been running a series of "how to" guides, but nevertheless I am up about 500g over the four days I've been doing it, with an inventory "worth" (in inverted commas because no stock has any intrinsic value unless it is sold) another 500g. If I could turn a profit of 750g a week I'd be very happy indeed, since that would easily cover my flask and repair bills and allow me cash to spend on enchants and gems without me having to farm to do so.

I am an inscriber/herbalist, and I haven't followed the MMO-champion guide, but I did read a guide on the Greedy Goblin website which was most useful because it teaches you to think critically about what to make and sell, how to go about it, and (crucially) what addons to use. I cannot rate Auctioneer highly enough - it has moved on a lot since I last installed it in vanilla warcraft. Glyphs are a strange business - the cost of making a glyph is almost literally zero (while the herbs have an opportunity cost, this is defrayed by selling the rare pigments that you sometimes get as a side effect of the milling process), so any positive selling price is pure profit. It's possible to sell glyphs for up to 100g, but since MMO-champion got in on the act I sell most of mine for about 10g. Given the relatively low turnover of glyphs, and the large number of competitors, you have to have large numbers of glyphs on the AH at any one time to turn a profit and I don't really maximise the possibilities here. I have 30 or 40 glyphs on the market each day, and usually log on to find a few dozen gold waiting for me in the mailbox.

It's mildly annoying that the inscription gold-rush has now moved onto phase two, and herb prices are going through the roof (with herbs themselves being harder to come by), but these things come in cycles and the wheel will turn.