How to improve character and have a direction to improve for noobs

Ok.

There have been some posts and discussions over the few weeks in the WoW blogosphere about the difficulty of gaining enough information on how to improve your character. General consensus seems to be that the game gives you quite enough information on how to gem and enchant your character, but to me this is utter bull. The information is scattered and not concise, and sadly you have to resort to the internet resources.

To be quite honest, the mere basics of a character improvement are pretty easy to come around. To get the talents, glyphs, gems and enchants to at least tolerable level you can use WoW Popular in which you just choose the class, main specification and push button. The listing shows the most popular builds, glyphs and all in a very concise manner and thus gives a solid basic set up for your character. If you are clever enough, you can also see what these suggestions really aim to.

I'd say WoW Popular is the first place to go to just to get the basics right.

After hitting the magical 80, you find yourself grinding for gear and emblems. This is the part where things start to get ugly, as the gear contains so many stats and variables to take into account. Generally you should check Elitist Jerks or a dedicated blog about your class to see the main stats to concentrate on. For some classes MaxDPS gives excellent recaps on both the stats, rotations and specs, but not all. The rotations are a generalisation and you should -no, I should say you MUST- practise the rotations on a dummy to get them right.

To select the right gear or see if this goes above that you can use the MaxDPS's fine gear selection tool, for which you can even restrict the instances or raids you can attend to to see what would be best from that area. On the other hand, if you want to see what you SHOULD have on your character, you should see Gear-Wishlist which just ranks the gear for your character based on its spec: the beauty of this wishlist is that you can see where to acquire the gear, if it's sold or crafted and how it relates to other gear.

Caution should be advised, though. Gear-Wishlist is just dumb ranking system, and some of the suggestions will not endure a real stress test with all classes or specs! Running stuff like Rawr (highly recommended later on!!!) may well show the lack of finesse in the Wishlist ranking, but it's a solid way to build your character upwards.

For normal instances you are ok with the gear you have acquired from questing: in fact, some of the pieces hold as high as the entry raids (which are now defunct as everyone and their cousins are running ICC). Heroic instances require some normal instance gearing, but not much as long as you stay out of Halls of Reflection. To enter raiding you'd most definitely need at least the tier 9 equivalent gear, say almost full set of Emblem of Triumph gear with some random epics from heroics and perhaps that first piece of Emblem of Frost gear you should be able to get after all that daily heroic grind.

And you should put most emphasis as soon as possible in grinding the IC5 man instances: the loot and emblems really make it worth the while.

I hope this helps the newcomers and people with life to get their characters into shape and accepted in PUG raiding and/or guilds raiding. Just check your Gearscore for the nerds out there and be prepared with the strategies.
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Lost week

Yeah, that's not a typo: last week was truly a lost week for me: first a three day work trip which ended up being four days, then the holidays during which the weather was so great I just couldn't sit by the computer.

I did, however, have a nice email conversation with Tipa who directed me to a very intriguing side path from this regular WoW-whining of mine. I'm trekking that path whenever I can, rest assured I'll come up with something about that!

The few minutes I got to be in the game (make that two hours during the whole weekend...) resulted the following notions:
- The price of glyphs is rising again, and for many the price is stabilizing to correspond the cost of materials. Gone are the days of outrageous prices, both high and low.
- I made some decent wins with Nexus Vortexes, which I purchased some weeks ago. I purchased quite a lot of them and due to the fact that the AH deposits are enormous on these emblem vendored goods, I was pretty reluctant to sell them cheap. Now I made some 3-4 times the purchase price with them, and I'm certainly looking for more as soon as there are some for sale.
- 76-80 blues are appearing in very low prices, even though they sell for very nice profits. I'm not objecting, just wondering why people are throwing away all that gold: if there is demand, utilize it, right?
- Made Laiskajaakko Exalted in Darnassus and Exodar: Gnomeregan still waiting and then the main factions in the Old World have been conquered. Which makes me wonder, though: why do the toons who have passed lv60 and gone through the Dark Portal have to grind for their faction's reputation? They surely are world class heroes and should be considered equal to King Varian and other miscreants by that time. Really, which of the Old World heroes do you see fighting the monsters and demons of the Nether? Huh?
- And while going through the Drenai starting areas with my heavily over levelled protection warrior, I noticed that I really enjoy the storylines and stories which are obscured into the quests. I really want to make sure the Blood Elves' portal to Outlands (Sun Portal) isn't opened into Bloodmyst, and that's only because the story is scripted so well into the quests in there!

That's all for now. There have been a couple of very good discussions in the earlier posts, which I urge you all to read -and possibly even comment!- if you have spare time.

Dual-Spec glyph honeymoon over?

I was checking my Actioneering Alt, Copramo, yesterday and noticed that the glyph market is cooling down. Fast. At the same glyph you could have the high price of 25g and the lowest selling price at 78s.

I wonder if the 'new' reset of the talents causes any kind of hike in there?

Most probably not. Hope to sell the cheapo glyphs out and go along with the business as usual: vendor, convert, disenchant and resale. That's my Auctioneer Search rotation.

It works, but takes about 45 minutes to complete with a scan. All away from my questing.

What a bliss!