Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Nepotism at its Finest

As my little family of toons grows, and as I deal with the troughs of the grief that the beginning of the end game is causing me, I've begun to look at building out my skills to keep my toon family as independent as it can be. I hire my own toons for goods and services with a great sense of pride and family values.

I'm loving wearing gear that I craft myself. Its definitely got a fun feel to it. Especially when well funded by an older sister, but that's neither here nor there.

In my present alt-aholic state, I've got my leatherworking rogue who makes her own clothes and my tailor priest knitting his own stuff. Techinally I also have a blacksmith warrior, but he really hasn't seen enough action to count. At each level my priest dings, I check the tailoring tab to see what new pieces are available to equip.

Ding 24 and there's a new pair of shadow damage gloves available to craft. Sweet, because he's got enough into the shadow tree to get mind flay. One of the required ingredients is a Shadow Protection Potion. Check AH, and no potion available. Ok, ok, he's also an alchemist, so check AH for the recipe. Nope. Ok, check on thottbot and see that the recipe for the potion is limited available from a vendor in Ashenvale.

So he heads over that way, finds the vendor, and nothing. Not available. Quest quest quest in the immediate vicinity and keep checking the vendor any chance you get. Finally, several hours later, ding, the recipe is mine.

Learn the recipe, and check the necessary ingredients. Grave moss. Ok, check AH, nothing. Well, time to call in your big sister. Luckily, Amava didn't drop herbalism, and also happens to remember where there's some moss. Switch toons, fly to shatt, portal to stormwind, fly to sentinel hill and ride a swift saber over to a graveyard in duskwood. Easy peasy, got my moss. Hearth to shatt, and mailed over the moss.

Switch to my Paladin and buy the cloth needed. Mail that over to the priest.

Switch back to Priest and make the potions, and then weave the gloves.

That right there is why I want to be self-sufficient. If I didn't have the herbalist, I'd have to either wait for it to be available on AH or be nice to some other herbalist and ask them to help, something I'm not interested in doing when already battling with an antisocial retreat.

Then I got to thinking about that formula sold on a limited basis by that vendor. Hmmm, I wonder how many other recipes I'm missing across all my cooks, enchanter, engineer, tailor, alchemist, leatherworker, blacksmith, and jewelcrafter?

Google search comes up with an addon that'll show you a listing of all recipes for a profession that you do not currently have, along with the minimum skill level you need to learn it.

PERFECT

That's what spawned the idea for my new Druid. Her job is to shop. She's going to hop from vendor to vendor, waiting in line for those rare recipes. Well, she'll be waiting at the inn nearest to the current vendor she's stalking, but first thing I do when logging into WoW will be to hop on her and check the vendor for the next recipe. Sunday night I created her with the intention of clearing through to level 5 so she can learn some professions, and then getting over to Auberdine, where the lowest level tailoring pattern that I don't have yet can be bought on a limited basis. Of course, when I get there, the pattern is right there sitting on the shelf for me to buy, thus making the "personal shopper" concept a bit silly. But monday night she's going to find the next vendor on her list and go camp that guy out until he coughs up the goods, and so on. And she'll get some levelling action in as she needs to head to more and more dangerous turf to pick stuff up.

As a gift for the new pattern, my tailor made Moody 4 Mageweave Bags. Gotta keep those jobs in the family. Nepotism at its finest.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What was that add-on? (Kind of feeling lazy to search!)

Anonymous said...

BTW, I also try to be self-sufficient, even if I'm still missing a few skills (and on a drunk day I deleted my 40ish warlock with 300 gnomish engineering!). Actually, I wasn't drunk, but I had not played it for a while and completely forgot about ENG! :) Of course, a couple weeks later I could use a scope but could not find one in AH! :)

The "worst" part of self-sufficiency is related to Enchants and BoP crafted stuff: unless you dual-account and dual-box, you can't chant your alt's BoP gear... That's only a problem at end-game because before that, AH greens are often better than blue quest rewards, save a couple exceptions...