Current State of Raiding

I think I'm going to post about several things today. I'm just in the mood I guess.

Of course, I recently switched both servers and factions, moving from Malygos/Alliance, to Earthen Ring/Horde. I've certainly suffered from second thoughts because of the switch, but by this point  I am back to being firmly comitted to my Mage on Earthen Ring.

Mal is now a Blood Elf. She's hawt. She's a redhead. And she looks much more like her FFXI incarnation than ever before, which is a big plus to me. And she's now in mostly ICC 25 / ICC 25 Heroic Gear. She's got a base SP rating of about 3350, a Crit Rating of about 42%, and 1125 Haste (before buffs). Her gear score (I hate GS! just had to say it) is around 6100...still a bit behind much of my guild, but now by a much smaller margin. I'm still Arcane. And my average damage in ICC on a single-target mob is normally around 11-12k DPS. I'm consistantly holding 6th to 10th on damage in my guild, and I just don't see that gap decreasing much at this point (those that are ahead, are a LOT ahead). I'm doing over double the damage I was when I left Malygos, which, by the way, I think is rediculous.

My guild is now downing 9/12 Heroics in ICC. All that is left is Putricide, Sindragosa, and LK there on Heroic. Halion proved to be very easy for us, and I'm expecting us to switch right to hard modes on him, though I could be wrong (I'll find out tonight!) - this just in...I was wrong!.

I think I had posted it before. But my main goals after the transfer was to get back to 50k gold on Earth Ring. Get into an active guild doing 25 man content. And re-establish the alts I'd need to support raiding (specifically, I needed a farmer and an alchemist, and a Jewelcrafter). Much of these goals have now been reached. Though I still don't have an alt-farmer high enough for current content farming (my alt hunter is 63 now). Everything is in a good position.

I was spending a lot of time actively working to make money, but I quickly burned out on that. Fishing seems to be a very good and reliable way to make money on Earthen Ring...but it's so damned borning. I have, however, decided on a slow-but-steady approach involving minimal time and effort (I'm talking about 2-3 minutes tops a day), and even though I'm spending less than 5 minutes on it I'm still averaging about 200g per day. That works better for me, and its been reliable and consistant.

Though I doubt anyone cares, all I'm doing is two basic things. I transmute a Sky Sapphire into a purple gem and sell it (usually for around 120-130g uncut...cut gems sell for about the same amount, but much less often). And I do the jewelcrafting daily, and sell the gem for 80g. I've stopped doing dailies entirely. Though I will sometimes do some fishing before a raid, and that can quickly add up to another hundred or so gold in 30 minutes.

So, now that my main goals have been reached, I've moved onto new things. I've started spending time achievement farming. For example, I've just finished with the exploration achievements and I did all of the summerfest achievements (something I normally don't bother with). I've started working on re-earning my lost 5-man dungeon achievements (a lot of them were lost with the transfer)...and this has led me to consider working on Argent Dawn Rep (my one Strat run was awesome and netted me a lot of gold for very little effort). I think I earned about 2.5k gold in just one run, including an Orb of Deception (worth a lot), the Deathcharger mount and achievement, a ton of righteous orbs, several other valuable BOE blues worth over 100g each, and about 200g in misc mats.

So, I'm definitely going to go back and redo all 5-mans with my mage. And I'll probably go ahead and work on getting Argent Dawn rep up to max. That'll earn me a new title, though little else. I might even try to run all L70 instances so w/ my mage. Though that may not be very easy...we'll have to see. I did do a clear of normal Magister's Terrance at level 80 in Uldaur gear, so going back should be easier now and MT is one of the harder 5-man BC normal instances. After that I might consider trying to max out Cenarian Circle rep. I'm not actually that far away from that anyway.

After that, my plans are bit more murky. I've considered going back and trying to earn old-world quest achievements. But I'm a bit leery of this, even considering that this content is probably going to be gone for good in a few months. But in practice, I don't know just how extensive that is going to be and considering I'm planning on doing 1 or 2 new alts in Cataslysm, and I've just been (slowly) working up two alts right now...I just don't have that much incentive to work on those achievements. Not to mention the fact that the faction change erased so many quests from my completed total. I think I'm currently considered to have completely only 70 or so Kalimdor quests and less than 100 Old Kingdoms quests.

I'm also going to stick with my slow money-grind. I think my new goal will be 80k before Cataclysm hits. And that should be very easy to reach at this point since I have no more big purchases to make. I might even spend a bit more time with my DK. And I'm also thinking about merging my 2 accounts back to one. My current experience has shown me that the ability to run characters through instances just isn't that big of a deal anymore. LFG makes it too easy to find groups (and IMO lower level groups tend to be more friendly anyway). So the biggest draw just isn't there anymore. And that would save me a considerable amount of money over the course of a year.