Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides & Rematch

I’ve been using the rematch addon for quite some time, but what I didn’t realize was that there’s a website that compliments it so perfectly. Xu-Fu’s strategies allows you to import teams of pets through the rematch journal along with notes so you know how to defeat your opponent. You can see lists of pets you own, what pets you need to follow the guides, and discussions with other players if that guide isn’t working out for you. You can customize and adjust all of the scripts to better suit you pet battle needs – and let me tell you this site was amazing when it came to completing the Deadmines pet battle dungeon. It saved me so much time and was completed in a relatively fast amount of time.

You can link it directly to your bnet account so that your pets are imported, and it can provide you with all sorts of handy lists and guides besides importing them into the game. You can search for guides by expansion too, so if you wanted to do that celestial tournament that you keep putting off, this is a fantastic resource.

What I especially love is that I have a number of tabs for each expansion in my pet journal and then just import the battles I want for those expansions from the Xu-Fu site to populate it. No more searching out of game for tactics on each battle or wondering what pets I need.

Importing the battle strings also sets the skills for your pets and it will even load your team based on your target – incredibly handy things.

Honestly, I just can’t recommend Xu-Fu’s Pet Battle Strategies & Rematch enough if you’re any sort of player who does pet battles. If you happen to try them out, let me know in comments what you think.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Getting Organized

One of my favourite things to do in real life, is clean and organize things. I know, how odd is that, right? It’s something I take pride in and something I do very well. When I’m stressed I clean. When I’m happy I organize. I just like things being neat and tidy. A messy desk (my work station) will bother me to no end.

Gaming is the same way. This week I took some time to organize my sellers, and split them into 4 different merchants. I have one selling nothing but pets, one selling nothing but recipes, and two selling everything else (a lot of transmog items that I know will be around for a while). I also have my tailor selling bags. There is a practical reason behind this besides my personal OCD, too. One reason is that if you have more than 1k items on the auction house and you happen to use tradeskillmaster it can cause a hit in performance. It’s a known issue that the developers of TSM caution against – as lovely is it may be to see your name up in the stars on sites like the undermine journal for having the most value posted.

It can also take a long time to scan your auctions when it comes to posting, so I like them split for that reason. Then there are my personal reasons. I like to run a cancel scan on pets and bags (and drums) but I leave transmog items up for the full 48h instead of looking for people undercutting. I would just lose too much money if I was checking them multiple times a day to see if any were below mine. I know some people swear by this method and they log in every few hours and cancel all their undercut items but I don’t have the patience for that and I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to be the cheapest for your items to sell. The quick fast sales will go, leaving yours next in line.

All in all, I have about 10-14 million gold worth of items up on the auction house, 600-700 items total, spread between four characters (two accounts), and two servers. That’s just right for me and my gameplay. I know some of the bigger goblins out there are on 20+ servers and making a killing, but I’m just a small fish and I’m content with the way my gold making has been progressing.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Blaugust – It’s Coming!

An event that I have looked forward to in the past is once again getting kicked off starting August 1st, but if you want to participate you don’t have to wait until August to sign up!

The jist is 31 days of blog posts, whether you’re an old veteran or someone new just starting out. There’s a discord, mentors, and some really neat things happening this time around, so I highly suggest you go check out the post written by Belghast over here. Even though I will be slightly MIA next week (eep, it’s so soon) I am hoping to be back in top form for August, with a post every single day for the few lovely readers who have managed to stick around.

I’m always in a small state of conflict when it comes to these events. I eagerly sign up and try to become a part of the community that surrounds it, but I feel very much on the outside of things. Sometimes it’s because there are others who tend to monopolise every single conversation so that there’s no real way to edge into things, and other times it’s just because I feel like I’m in some other world compared to those taking part. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had my site for 12 years now and it’s just a matter of “git offa ma lawn!” (ie: I’m just cranky) but I’ve never felt like I really fit in. Still, I make the attempt and sign up and at least it motivates me to keep writing and posting every day (for the single month, and typically into the following months leading up to NaNoWriMo) which is always a good thing. If you’re looking for advice, or help (especially if you’re considering changing your brand name) I have a lot of experience with that, so please don’t hesitate to give me a nudge. I’ll try to post a few informative pieces throughout the month and hopefully others will feel motivated and inspired. Sign up, see what a great community it is, maybe find a new site or two that you can relate to. It doesn’t have to be about gaming (though most of the participants are gamers, just as a heads up).

Remember it’s something YOU should enjoy, first and foremost. <3

Gold commeth, and gold goeth away..

Well, my dreams of amassing 4 million gold by the release of BfA have all but flown out the window, but I sort of knew they would. At the beginning of July I decided that I wanted to have my horde and alliance characters each on their own servers, and I wanted them to be different servers in terms of population. My horde characters are comfortably sitting on a high population server now, and that’s why there’s a dip in my money – I bought 6 WoW tokens to complete the various faction / server transfers while I got set up. My alliance characters are together on a low / medium population server (my main server as it were).

Why the two different servers? A lot of reasons, one of which being I wanted to be able to have one of every class for each faction. I have the alliance side taken care of, along with 8 of those characters sitting at level 110. The horde side isn’t nearly as fleshed out. I only have two characters (a third I’m still waiting to transfer) and only one of those is 110. Will I play them all? Probably not. Does it matter if I separate them? No. It’s just one of my weird OCD quirks. I like the idea of having 1 of everything, and then getting professions etc. all set up on them. Plus if there’s another garrison / order hall type mechanic in BfA I’d like to be able to take advantage of that. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

I did at least manage to stay above a million liquid, and that’s my smaller goal in the meantime. The AH mount or any other big expenses will just have to wait. It’s really not that big of a deal to me, but I hope sales pick up because they’ve been pretty slow. I still see lots of goblins making some really good coin, but I am not one of them. Plus, Nugette is due in a week, so I know my play time will be greatly reduced for the next few weeks while we get adjusted to another newbie in the family, and work on our schedule.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

My Road to 4 Million Gold

I started off tracking my gold May 16th and I had a total of 176,000. Not a very impressive number by any means. Now, June 26th, I’m at 2,174,000 and I’ve crossed over into the 2 million gold mark. I’m still quite far away from my desired goal of 4 million, but I have been keeping above where I need to be just slightly. Again this will probably take a nosedive in a few short weeks because I’m due with my second baby, but it has still been a fun adventure so far.

Where does the gold come from?

By far my biggest sellers have been flips that I picked up off of the auction house. I bought a Guardian Cub for 75,000 and I re-sold it for 400,000 gold. The person who bought it from me relisted it for 550,000 but I think I’m still the winner in that deal. I have had a few smaller deals like that but as you can see by my chart growth is not steady or rapid. There was a period of almost two weeks where I barely made anything and sales all but dried up.

I have only 1 character doing order hall missions and I tend to hoard my crafting supplies instead of selling them. I found an amazing deal where a player was selling 100 spirits of harmony for 35g each, so I picked them up and I’ve been making living steel on my alchemist that I hope to use towards a sky golem. Of course the other part of that is my engineer needs to create a daily for 30 days and there’s no way to bypass that. I do have two engineers, so I’m contemplating making two sky golems a month, but creating mounts is a market I’ve never really gotten into.

I have been doing a few monk farms, mostly for BC recipes and I’ve gotten a few lucky drops that way but nothing astounding. I am still playing on three servers total but I’m contemplating downgrading to just two, a horde and an alliance server. I don’t want to spread myself out just to try to obtain gold when I honestly have plenty for my needs. Gold is just a fun challenge for me, a new way to “play” the game when I don’t actually have a lot of time to game. It’s mostly passive (at least the way that I’m doing it) and doesn’t require a lot of hands on time. Sure I might be sitting in game, but IRL I’m typically tending to my little, doing chores, or just trying to beat the heat while I deal with this 9th month of pregnancy (it has been rough). It gives me a way to feel connected to the game when I would otherwise want to quit.

I’ve been doing the Midsummer Festival quests on some of my baby alts, farming blossoms so I can pick up pets and toys that I don’t currently have. I know fellow goblins are stockpiling them for when the festival is gone and people want the pets again, but I want them for myself and my collection, first. Spares can certainly go towards the market.

I’ve almost got one of every alliance created now on my main server, and I have been contemplating doing the same for horde on my backup server. There’s also rumors of server merges and I wonder how that will affect gold making, more competition and more goblins crammed into the same places. I don’t tend to run cancel scans because I find them a waste of time, I know sales would increase if I tried to undercut every time a player undercut me. To each their own, there’s no one “right” way to make gold.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!