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Preparing for the Expansion
Preparing for the Expansion
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The expansion is now less then two months away from hitting
store shelves and its a very good time to begin preparing your
characters for the leap into Outland. There is a lot of new
content coming out and its best to prepare yourself for it so
that you can jump right in and enjoy without nothing holding you
back.
What better time to do it then now? Your raiding schedule has
probably slowed while your guild waits on the expansion and
market prices are remaining pretty stable. The winter holidays
are coming up so its a good time to get in some extra farming
and preparation for the upcoming expansion!
If youre level sixty, then continue reading on for lots of
helpful tips to get yourself ready for the expansion. If youre
not level sixty, worry not! Many of these tips apply even to
you, although the majority of the new content begins to level
fifty five.
Cleaning your Inventory
You can examine most anyones character and find a vault loaded
with crafting materials, consumables, spare gear, and junk. When
the expansion comes youll be needing a lot more room for even
more items that will come from the various instances and quests.
Thats why its a good idea to take a look through everything and
try to clean-up!
Id start off by selling stuff youre sure you wont need. Gray
items, potions youll probably never drink, and crafting
materials that youll never use. All good candidates to head to
the nearest shop or auction house to be turned into coin. Try
out auctioneer to mass-sell items easier.
Next would be making an alt and having it hold your extra stuff.
Make a level one character and park it outside of a bank. Mail
it your unneeded stuff and have it store it for safe keeping in
its vault/inventory. This is a lot of work, but great for
collectable items that youll never be getting rid of anyway.
Outside of that, attempt to organize your bags around so you
know where everything is at and make room for lots of awesome
new things.
Quest Journal
The expansion will be bringing about a large assortment of new
quests and youll need somewhere to put them all. Youll have an
expanded journal (by 5 slots) when the expansion comes around,
but the more room the better.
Do this, take a look at each quest in your journal and ask
yourself the following questions:
Do I want to put the effort into finishing this quest?
Do I have the extra time available to finish this quest?
Do I want the reward for this quest?
Is this quest doable with my available resources?
Have I made any progress that I dont want to abandon?
After looking over those questions, if it looks like you really
dont need that particular quest then drop it. You can ALWAYS
pick a quest back up, so you wont be losing it forever.
Taking up Jewelcrafting
Jewelcrafting is an awesome profession that will be a big money
maker. Its also an expensive profession, requiring rare gems and
various amounts of stone and metal to level up with. These gems
can only be obtained reliably through mining. When the expansion
comes out and jewelcrafting is introduced there will be a skill
to allow a greater chance of getting gems out of mineral veins,
but that isnt in right now.
So the best thing to do would be pick up mining and get it to
300. Youll have tons of extra metal and stone to make items with
AND youll have your mining ready to farm gems to jewelcraft
with.
Dont wait around until launch and try to purchase the materials
off the Auction House in order to raise your skill in
jewelcrafting. Inflated prices will reign and itll be way
better, like any profession, to farm the materials yourself.
Rolling a Blood Elf or Dreanei.
Lots of people are planning to start fresh with a new Blood Elf
or Draenei come the expansions launch. This means that lots of
things, especially newbie gear, will become scarce when the
races are introduced.
Thats why it may be a good idea to load up on gear (enchanted if
at all possible) to give to your alt as it levels up. Get it
while its cheap and in plenty of supply so that you dont end-up
meeting supply and demand at launch.
As a note, the two new starting zones do a wonderful job of
introducing new characters to the game. As such, they will have
plenty of gear to get new characters from one to twenty. The two
new starting zones for each race take players on the express
trip from level one to level twenty with all the supplies they
need. If you want to go above and beyond that though, now is the
time to act.
Supply and Demand
Until the initial expansion rush is completed you will probably
see a lot of things, especially consumable items such as
crafting commodities, skyrocket temporarily in price. Anything
related to the expansion will be inflated in price due to
something we like to call supply and demand.
A lot of players will be looking into making alts, trying
jewelcrafting, and powering through the new levels to get to
level sixty. However, a situation arises where there will be
more demand for items then there is supply. When this happens
prices begin to rise, kind of like what happened during the war
efforts campaign.
During the war efforts campaign players could turn in cloth,
metal, herbs, etc. in exchange for tokens that can be turned in
for green quality items or reputation. During this time all of
the various turn-in items skyrocketed in price while the green
items fell. When enchanters found out how much supply in green
items there was, the green items began rising in price (as
enchanters began buying them out in bulk) and the enchanting
shards, dusts, and powders fell in price (as enchanters put more
and more on the market).
When everything fist went live with the war efforts campaign,
things were really unstable. Copper went as high as several gold
for twenty bars which is beyond outrageous! As things went on,
it settled down and prices returned to somewhat normal (but
still inflated). When the war efforts were over, the prices
settled down to what they normally where.
As you can see in this example, the same will most then likely
happen. Youll find a lot of items on the Auction House for way
more then theyre actually worth and the extra amount of gold the
expansion will be placing into circulation wont be helping
either.
Thats why its a good idea to get farming skills ready to farm
crafting commodities and to go ahead and obtain anything youll
absolutely need for the expansion right now. For about a week or
so after the expansion the market will be topsy turvey with
things going really high then really low and all over the place.
Its a really good idea not to get caught up and spend more money
then you should on items that just arent worth it.
So in summary, stock up on items youll absolutely need and if
you want to take up jewelcrafting then pick up mining, if not
then make sure any professions youre serious about are as high
as they can go.
Dont Buy Gold!!
Lets pretend for a minute that we here at Ten Ton Hammer dont
despise the secondary market and the damage it does to in-game
economies. Okay lets not, thats too much work. Instead Ill just
deliver the facts to you straight up:
DO NOT BUY ANY GOLD FROM THE SECONDARY MARKET!
DO NOT BUY PURPLE ITEMS FROM THE SECONDARY MARKET!
Dont be tempted by their evil! Here is why: When the expansion
launches you will find tons of quests, enemies, and instance
bosses who give large amounts of gold as rewards! Flying mounts
start at 1,000 gold and that will be no problem with the
expansion!
Knowing this, DONT BUY GOLD!! Blizzard has made 100% sure that
youll get all the gold youll need through questing, instance
running, and other activities. Youll be able to get money for a
flying mount easily and youll have plenty left over to do over
things!
Quest rewards at level sixty start out at somewhere around 5-10
gold a quest. Trash enemies in the level 58-60 instances drop
something like 20-40 silver each. Nethercloth sells for a ton to
the NPC and drops like crazy! There will be tons of new ways to
make cash.
So if you go out and buy gold thinking you need to in order to
stay competitive, stop and think for a moment. There is a lot of
better things you can do with that cash then go out and give it
to the secondary market. That and its a complete waste!
Dont buy items either, most all of the BoE epic items available
now are nothing compared to the new drops in the 5 man
instances. See our loot preview for examples!
Outside of all of the advice given, the best tip possible is to
use your head. Dont get scammed with overpriced items and dont
fall for the secondary markets tricks. Get your inventory and
quest journals cleaned up and if youre the impatient type begin
farming items to level up jewelcrafting.
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