Also, if you’re Arcane, the pants are the least desirable component of the T10 set. Don’t spend badges on them–the crafted ICC pants (Leggings of Woven Death) are vastly better (they’ll cost you a fair bit of money, but Primordial Saronites have come down a lot so it might not be that bad). The chest is the best piece–if you end up getting T10 pants for free (from VoA), then the other piece you can safely leave out is the gloves (the Gunship Captain’s Mittens from the Gunship Armory are better). You definitely want the chest, hat, and shoulders.
I looked at the T10 set last night, using the thing that lets your toon model the gear. Definitely want the hat, shoulders, and chest–regardless of stats, the look is just too cool.
I’m actually still using Sundial of the Exiled but am looking to replace it. Unfortunately all of the vendored items share a cooldown so I can’t bind them to a single ‘pop-all cooldowns’ macro. But while testing it out I got the ‘Epic’ achieve. (Not sure why I never put the other trink in the that slot for the achieve) Do all trinkets share that cooldown? Even drops from raids?
Rottingbird currently has 1 t10 and 2 t9s and I’ve got about 70 frosts, but I’m saving up for the chest. (or helm, but I’ve got the OS25 helm) Although I’m tempted to buy the t10 gloves for the set bonus and maybe replace the t9 with triumphs I’m rolling in. (Although the chest would be a sidegrade minus the set bonus)
Heroic Icecrown Glacial Wall does not fucking exist. :mad:
Like I said, “At this point, I *really *hope I don’t ever have to transfer servers again.” 
For more reasons than just having to cart around a farmer.
Leather, scraps, and off the best stuff, Arctic Furs. Do you have any friends with Leatherworking? They can turn your scraps into full leathers. And if your leathers really aren’t selling, then can turn them into items that a friend with Enchanting could DE, and then you could sell the chant mats from that. But I’d be surprised if you really couldn’t get the leather to sell at all.
Unless things have changed since the last time I looked, as a Frost Mage, what you actually want is:
Hit to cap > Spellpower > Haste
It’s a good stat for you, but not *quite *as good as SP. Don’t quote me on the exact stat ranking after that, but I think it’s Crit > Spirit.
And do note that I’m specifying *Frost *Mages here. The stat priorities are different for Arcane and Fire.
Pssst… You know Chromie’s really a dude, right?
After almost every Saurfang fight, I make a point of yelling “JAINA WHY ARE YOU CRYING.” I hate it as much as you do. (Just before the fight starts, I also yell “DWARVES…” :D)
Trinkets only share CDs when their on-use effect is the same. If you check the trinket’s page on Wowhead, I think there is probably a link to everything that it shares a CD with.
I’m Arcane. Frost is my secondary spec that I almost never use. Thinking of respeccing my secondary to try a fire build eventually.
Lalala…can’t hear you…Chromie is my gnome dream babe. And also a dragon, but definitely female. And kinky for mages.
Yup, Pillars. And yeah, looks like I’ll be crafting them tonight, since Saurfang refuses to cough up any of the three upgrades he has for me (do those braces even exist - must be hanging out with your shield). In particular the weapon would be nice. Part of the reason I wanted the DBS pants was for the Expertise because when I’m tanking with a 251 weapon against DPS in all 264s or better threat can get tricky if I get too many Dodges (and I have that aforementioned fetish for hitting stat caps).
“We named him DRANOSH!!!”
That or asking “Does anyone know what Dranosh means in Orcish?”
Oh, and for some reason I decided to do the Karazhan attunement. I think the plan was to farm the Attumen mount, but I forgot partway through the various chains and dungeons. And apparently that’s the easiest of the BC-era attunements? Thank God those were removed…
I guess they could be reasonable if you only had to do them once (maybe a BoA key or something?).
“plumber”
Oh, that’s all right, then. Haste IIRC is better for Arcane than it is for Frost.
At this point, I’m not even paying that much attention to my Expertise, and I’m not seeing any problems–and I’m up against multiple Shadowmournes. 
Get your Stam and Armor up first–then worry about threat statistics. You can ask the DPS to throttle back if you have to; you can’t ask the boss to not hit so hard.
Yup. My original guild was obscenely casual, and even *they *required that you have the key in order to join the Kara raid, just as a sign of basic dedication. This was also the era of needing to be keyed for each set of Heroic dungeons–you would have to buy a literal key to access the Heroic mode, and each set of dungeons had an associated faction that you needed to reach at least Friendly (or was it Honored? maybe it was Honored) with to buy the key. Ugh, such a grind. And then you had instances like the Arcatraz, where you needed at least one member to have *another *actual key to get in the door.
And in the case of the completely unexpected…Muz, Corn and Yeti were treated to this achievement by a PUG who knew what he was doing without telling us.
So I have a question for all the old hands about economics: Right now I’ve got (on my main) mining and blacksmithing maxed. As I understand it, pretty much all the harvesting professions give a meager fixed bonus, and all the crafting professions give a fairly nice configurable bonus that’re roughly equivalent, so that’s not at issue. What IS at issue is this: I need money, in the worst way. To what profession should I switch to make the most money on a regular basis by auction buying mats, crafting, and selling mats? Is that even possible? With blacksmithing, it’s theoretically doable except that the market is so relatively small for purples that it’s damn near impossible to get any reasonable profit as far as I can tell.
Essentially, I’d like to be able to get within spitting distance of buying some of the nicer goldsink mounts, or enough primordial saronite to craft the ICC legs/boots for my lovely wife’s ret paladin, etc. What’s my best option?
That’s actually where I hit the wall and thought “man, this is just stupid” last night (the first time).
First I needed to get a fragment from Shadow Labs, which required running Setthek Halls first to unlock regular mode.
Then, I had to run Steamvault - at least there was no pre-req for this (for normal).
Then, I had to run Arcatraz, only to find I couldn’t even get into the instance on normal mode without running Botanica and Mechanar first. Screw that. Found a guild member with some random lvl 70 toon that had the key and had him let me in just to get the quest done.
Then, had to run Black Morass, only to find out I had to do a stupid-long “look around the caverns” quest, then an escort dungeon, only to get in to a Violet-Hold-style portal dungeon.
So, getting attuned for the first raid required running 8 5-man dungeons. I guess it’s not really too much to ask, but after “growing up” on WotLK it’s certainly different.
/sigh - my own fault for not reading up before I jumped into it, and then being too stubborn to just give it up partway through. It’s probably easier just to die near Kara and run in as a ghost.
Originally you needed the key to enter the instance… eventually they changed it so that you just needed one person with the key to open the door, then the rest could just scurry in before it slammed shut.
I love it when we get that achievement as a matter of course–I typically PUG with a paladin tank, retri paladin, and myself (enh shaman) from my guild, which makes getting it trivial when he pops instead of Paletress.
Whenever Paletress shouts her little speech at the beginning of the fight with her, I always respond with /yell Yeah, that’s nice–now find some pants already!
I think mining is still a good way to make money. The trick to it is not to worry about selling Northrend mats so much. You’ll make your profit farming the lower zones and selling mats to people leveling their professions, like blacksmithing or engineering. My little hunter is selling stacks of copper bars for 10 gold as fast as he can list them.
Look at the AH, and see what’s selling best…mithril used to be pretty good. Possibly some of the Outland stuff…
I just did a VoA-25 pug run and lo’ and behold what drops off of him but the t10 Moonkin pants. The bonus was that I was the only druid in the entire raid so the only one rolling on them.
Now if only I can get the t10 resto pants to drop in VoA-10 (whenever I run it), I’ll be thrilled. 
Yeah, for that I have my alts, and even saronite is profitable as heck if you can hit titanium every so often. My other purpose is to make money while turning that wimpy +stam bonus into something useful.
I don’t think my way is efficient at all…but when I was mining, I ALWAYS stopped and mined any saronite (and of course, titanium) because no matter what, I was gonna get a minimum of 25g (vendoring) for a stack of saronite bars ( = 40 saronite ores). I could mine 2 stacks of saronite ores at a rate of about 5 ores per minute, so I could get 40 ores in 8 minutes…faster than doing randoms for gold. Flying around Ice Crown and Sholazar Basin were my normal farming zones. Of course, titanium ore and extra gems helped boost the gold count as well. And the negative is the time to hearth back when full and smelt the bars…let’s consider the last two sentences cancel each other out for this ball park figure.
So, the worst case scenario:
8 minutes = 25g
1 hour = 187.5g
6 hours = 1125g
53.33 hours = 10,000 g
I no longer mine…went over to Jewelcrafting, especially since I kept and stored all of my gems and bars needed to get to 450.
And yes…I was a mining whore.
Jewelcrafting and Enchanting are in pretty high demand all the time, with the bonus that you have the best chance of being able to do as-needed work using the person’s mats, in exchange for a fee and/or whatever tip they decide to give you. For JC cuts, I’d say that 5g is cheap, 10-15g is about average, and I’ve gotten 50g+ tips from people for whom I’m cutting multiple gems.
If you want to work with your own mats and the AH with JC, cuts are instant added value on almost any gem–the right cut can add anywhere from 10g to 50g or more to the value of a raw epic gem, depending on where the market is at.
Enchanting has become much easier to make time-distributed transactions with since they added vellums. The vellums themselves are usually pretty expensive, but the mats are easy–your best bet is to find a friendly Scribe who can pump them out for you. There are also any number of items that are worth more as chanting mats–DE them and post the results.
The downside to both of these is that they require a pretty hefty investment of mats and/or cash in order to build them up to a level where they’re making you money. JC would probably be the easiest one for you, if you decided to go that route–you can farm the average amount of mats you’ll need yourself before you drop Mining. The biggest problem is gems–you can’t Prospect ore until you’re a JC–so if you have a friend who’s a JC, that will give you a much better head start on ensuring you have enough mats to get you to 450.
Yup, my guild just kept it as a requirement after that point. Which should tell you something about how seriously people took attunement, since it really was a very casual guild. (That raiding core imploded, e.g., over a fight between the RL and GM about requiring Pally Power. :smack:)
Yep. “Effective Health” is the big deal for tanks, and Armor and Stamina are what mostly get you there. I’m probably behind the times, but now that I’m going to be tanking in my main raid instead of our casual (but still fairly progressed) alt raid, I did a little more research and got the suggestion to use an addon called “TankPoints,” which shows you a bunch of useful information about potential gear upgrades, including Effective Health and their own “Tank Points” stat which takes everything into account to determine which pieces of gear are the best. As a result of this I went out and bought a couple of badge pieces that, while not as solid for avoidance as my 277 pieces, had significantly higher armor and thus more EH. So now I have an EH set and an Avoidance set. My Expertise in both is hovering around 17 now. I have no trouble with single target threat, though as a blood DK, AoE threat is a little iffier especially with some of the heavy hitters we have. It’ll be interesting to see how I do in the “real” raid tonight.