Here’s something weird I started seeing over the holidays… is this happening on anybody else’s servers?
In Ironforge (and probably other capital cities, but I don’t spend much time there), the people standing around the mailbox in front of the bank start doing the /train emote. Over. and Over. and Over… in unison. It’s actually kinda funny, at first, then later, not so much…
Hmmm…could be a trinket that causes that. There’s one that makes people in the general area start /dance-ing. However, I seem to remember something that caused that to happen that I got in the mail, but I thought it was the anniversary bear pet, and that would have been well before the holidays, sometime in mid-November, I think. You had to have logged in on the anniversary of WoW going live (4 years! Whooo!) and opened the in-game mail that held the bear. But I don’t see how it would be happening after the holidays.
That’s the Toy Train Set - you can buy them for 250g from the Toymaker in Dalaran. Annoying as heck.
The comments in that Wowhead entry say there’s an addon that removes all sounds caused by the train set. Look for Train Wreck, should clear that up. I find it irritating as hell, too. I’m not terribly fond of anything that forces my character to do something I don’t want it to do.
If you haven’t gotten 2 drakes yet, Practise on 3.
For the last 2 times we were in OS we wiped for an hour with 3 drakes before facerolling 2.
We took out the second drake to land (shadron, I think). That removes the +100% fire damage debuff and makes keeping the tanks alive a bit easier (and if you eat the lava wall, there’s a chance you’ll survive that if you’re healers are quick. Don’t eat the lava wall anyway).
We found it was easier for all our players to turn the Spell Details down really low, to make it easier to see the void zones and stops the death knight spell animations interfering with seeing the void zones. We also got all our melee to take noggenfogger elixirs to that it was easier to see void zones without a giant tauren ass in the way.
Taking out the second drake gives you time inbetween the first and the third drake to do maximum DPS on the first drake. Blow all your dps cooldowns for that.
If you have the drake down to 15% (preferably lower) by the time the third one lands, and have almost everyone alive, you should do it. then all you have to do is organise AE’ing the adds down before turning your dps to the 3rd drake.
3 drakes is a very similar strategy, but requires monster DPS on the first drake (you need his at 20% or less by the time the second drake lands) and everyone moving together to take the portals for the second dragon.
Get your hunters to tame tenacity pets, and use roar of sacrifice when the tanks are getting heavy spike damage. It takes 30% of the damage after mitigation from the tank and obnto the pet. hopefully they survive 
I’ve considered stabling my orc hunter’s tiger and getting a new pet to try out, but since most of my quests currently have me in contested territory I’m leery about travelling around petless even for a short while. Alliance on my server seem to go out of their way to gank horde players. (of course part of the fun is avoiding or fighting them)
Hilariously last night my level 42 hunter found himself being chased by a “??” Alliance warrior. I passed him on the road and he turned and followed me, then suddenyl turned away. I wondered why, and then I saw two level 80 horde players to my right. I guess he didn’t want a real fight. 
Then again, a level 33 hunter tried to ambush me by Tarren Mill. I was still lvl 41 at the time. When he realized I was ten levels higher (I guess all he saw was “??” but IDK) he ran away, but came back with a level 32 mage. I killed them both. I was disappointed though…I went to do the quest of raising the undead guy in the cemetery of Southshore, but there were no nearby alliance players for the guy to attack. 
Thats what that sound is! A few nights ago a group of players came in the Auction house and did it all at once. It was annoying, but kinda funny. It reminded me of the “Choo Choo Shoe” from Charlie the Unicorn 2.
This probably isn’t news for veteran players, but also, if you get the quest from Nesingway Junior’s buddy, to get the pages of The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, you can auction them off as well. You have to kill a few hundred trolls to collect the correct pages, since they drop randomly. While doing other quests in the area (Stranglethorn) I collected a lot of pages, a lot of them were duplicates. I found that I was only missing one page to finish the quest, page 4. I became frustrated because after hours of killing trolls I couldn’t get that page. So when I made a quick trip to the AH to sell some ore I saw page 4 up fpr auction. I got it, finished the quest and then put up the other twenty or so pages I had for sell. Hopefully by the time I get off of work and lofg in tonight I’ll have sold them. Seems funny to me. With enough gold, you could probably solve that quest at the AH and never have to actuallyy search for the pages in Stranglethorn.
If it’s any consolation, last night I nearly died to that bastard. Being level 44, a 44 elite plus minions are a little too much for me to solo while trying to beat down those damn Syndicate Assassins at the same time. I would have died if my Priest GF hadn’t shown up right then to save me. 
Well, he killed me too on another server where my alliance characters are. I foolishly ran to attack him thinking “Its a horde player! I’ll get him!”.
It would be funny if he actually left the graveyard and roamed around southshore like Stitches does in Duskwood.
The going rate on these seems to be pretty high on my server - I think a lot of levellers have decided to just buy the pages. I sold the 25 or so extra pages I had accumulated for between 25-50s apiece. A tidy 10gp right there. This was at the neutral auction house in Booty Bay.
We got 2 for the first time last night! We’re planning to go in tonight and spend the evening working on 3.
I’m not sure I follow this–shouldn’t you take the first one down before you take out the second? I forget which was the second one we left up last night–I know Tenebron was the first.
We discovered and used the spell detail thing, and it helped. I’ll mention the noggenfogger thing, too. Not sure if the huge Tauren asses are a big problem, though, since most of our Tauren are druids (our tanks are orc, blood elf, and undead)
So we should focus on the first drake until the second lands, then switch focus to the second even if the first isn’t dead?
There’s an idea I’m not sure anybody has considered. I’ll definitely mention it. Thanks!
That’s not high - we sold our spare pages for 50s to 3g apiece.
Huh, well there you go then - hoard those pages!
I do wish the auction system was a bit better designed - is there a reason they don’t to proxy-style bidding like EBay? Or maybe this exists and I just haven’t found it yet… It would also be nice to be able to see whether listed items have actually been bid on - or even a past sales feature. Anything to help get a handle on the actual going rate for something. Again, maybe I’m just misunderstanding the current system, but all I see are current bid (which might be the minimum) and buyout. The Auctioneer add-on helps somewhat but I still feel like I’m just guessing most of the time. It also seems very fluid - in any 48hr period you could have lots of people doing the STV quests or none.
So, any hints for successfully playing the AH?
I have a DKP penalty in place for anyone who brings out one of these in a raid. It screws up food buffing when people are doing it and is just monumentally annoying in general
I’ve yet to really understand it too. It’s not well designed. It’s missing two vital statistics that I consider necessary to setting an informed price: what someone paid for the last item bought and when. Right now, the only information you have are what folks are selling their wares for, but you have no clue if people are buying at that rate. I could list my copper ore at 100g per stack, but it wouldn’t mean jack to someone trying to sell their own ore. And because you can’t just leave your goods up on the AH, but rather have to pay a deposit every 48 hours at the maximum, it’d be helpful to know if this stuff moves daily, weekly, or monthly.
I’ve resorted to doing either one of two things: either consult Wowhead.com for the average buyout price, or if there’s a lot of the item being sold, set the buyout price at the lower end of the per-unit scale (if people are selling copper ore for anywhere from 5s to 50s apiece, I’ll probably list mine for 10s or so). Auctioneer does help quite a bit with figuring out the per-unit prices.
For the auction house, best thing to do is get the “auctioneer” add-on. It gives you a lot more information, although it is a bit buggy. Speaking of buggy, if you use more than a couple of add-ons, get WoWmatrix. Run it every day and it checks all of your add-ons to see if they’re up to date, and if they’re not, it downloads and installs the most recent patch!
I created a macro for this, and hit it just over 100 times to get my first chicken.
The Brady guide was cool for doing the starting area and working up to level 10 or so. Some nice background on the dungeons, too.
But it’s absolutely USELESS when it comes to other stuff. What good is a list of craftable items if it doesn’t tell you where to get the recipe or what materials are required? What good is a list of weapons and armor if it doesn’t tell you where to get them? What good is a list of NPCs in a zone if it doesn’t tell you what quests they’re involved in or what they sell?
Frankly, I think wowwiki, thottbot, and wowhead are far better resources – and that’s coming from a guy who sells books for a living.
My alliance toons are in a “grownup” guild. It’s supposed to be for people over 21 (and their kids, if the kids can act mature). I’m sure some kids sneak in, but they know if they start acting immature they’ll get booted. It’s quite a relief.
Now if we can just get the idiots and children out of trade chat…
I find voidwalkers and monstrous hunter pets in cities even more obnoxious than mounts. It’s a real pain trying to click on a banker, mailbox, or auctioneer when there’s a voidwalker and a devilsaur standing right on top. Just dismiss your damned pet when you’re in crowded areas! And those huge multi-rider mammoths? Why do people even summon those in the cities?
When someone of the opposing faction does it, it doesn’t annoy me as much, because that’s what the opposing factions do. When someone of my own race/faction does it, though, it really pisses me off.
Tip: When you’re in a “target-rich environment,” always make sure the area around you is clear before you loot. As long as you haven’t looted the body, nobody else can skin it, so you can take your time fighting the next mob.
Another tip: Sometimes you have to kill a “guard mob” to get to a mining node, herb, chest, or whatever. As soon as you start combat, some twit runs in and takes your stuff. What I’ll do crowd-control the mob (sheep, trap, shackle…) and grab the stuff first. Then take on the mob.
Keep track of prices! I set up a toon as an auction mule and I send him all of the stuff. When copper (for example) is high-priced, sell it all. When it’s low, buy the cheapest and hold on to the rest until it goes back up. You can make a lot of gold if you can afford to wait.
That’s almost always true. On my server a few weeks ago, silver ore was selling for 10G each (not per stack - EACH), and silver bars were selling for 50S. That’s a 20:1 difference.
Well, once it’s smelted, it’s not used for much as far as levelling is concerned. If you’re an engineer and you use a lot of bombs in PVP, maybe, or if you’re trying to make a particular silver [random enchant] ring and it’s not happening, then sure. Otherwise, you smelt maybe a couple stacks and you’ve got more silver than you’ll ever use.
My miners all have stacks of silver bars left over…
I think what TwistofFate is saying is when doing 2 drakes up, it’s easier to do it with the 1st and 3rd drakes up - in other words, kill Drake #2 before engaging the boss. The 3 drakes always attack in the same order when the boss is up, and at a set time interval, as far as I know, so if you don’t have Drake #2 to deal with during the boss fight it gives you more time to kill Drake #1 before Drake #3 joins the fight.
My guild hasn’t tried 2 up yet… hopefully we’ll give it a shot this week. We’ve had the most horrific lag on our server for the past week which has kindof put a damper on our raid schedule. We can normally clear Naxx in 2 days, but it took twice as long last week, and Malygos was just a disaster 
Announcement: My human paladin, Eilyssana, is now the proud owner of Lil Timmy’s White Kitten
Walkin’ through a tunnel on my way to Cathedral Square, and there he was. Click, Buy
Ah, okay. From what he/she said, I took it to mean “DPS down #1 until #2 comes up, then just tank #1 until #2 is dead, then focus back on #1.” Which doesn’t actually sound like a bad strategy, given that from the sound of things #2 is more dangerous than #1 and the faster you can get him down, the better.