Money Can't Buy Me Love? Pfff.

Here’s a quick tip in case you have too much gold on your hands, and are looking for a way to get rid of it efficiently: drop a maxed out trade skill, and powerlevel another one. If you’re feeling especially bold, take up blacksmithing. Bonus points are given if you can’t wear plate mail.

While on my recent trip to America, I found myself stuck with my Japanese laptop as my only gaming outlet. This is a laptop I tried to save money on while purchasing; something that always ends up biting you in the ass later. With a desktop machine, this is actually a viable option, as you can always go back later and swap parts out or around. With a laptop, you’re kind of stuck with what you get on day one, and what I got was one of those “works great for email, and that’s about it” models. I found myself standing around in Ogrimmar, spitting out about 4 frames a second, politely declining raid invites as soon as I’d log in. It sucked.

I decided to make the most of my time, though, and finally ditch Engineering in favor of Blacksmithing. Using the AH and anvil don't require lightning reflexes or silky framerates.

A little background on that: I had originally powerleveled Engineering in order to get a second hearthstone for Tanaris. I was a raid leader for AQ20, and showing up early to help the warlock get summons started helped get the raid rolling. It was part of the job, and I really didn’t mind. The trinkets and crap I could make were all pretty stupid, and there wasn’t a single piece of leather gear my rogue would have found useful. The Engineer’s ‘toolkit’ consists of a Blacksmith’s Hammer, a Screwdriver, and a Wrench. And yet, what kind of armor do they make? Cloth caster gear. Whoop de fucking doo.

One of the first articles I wrote here at NotAddicted was about a QQ thread I had come across on the forums where some retard-o-tron was crying because his pal netted him ‘a few times over the weekend’ in the beta testing of the upcoming Arena portion of the game. He was devastated over this horrible imbalance, and went so far as to say that everyone needed to be engineers in order to compete in the Arena. I pretty much crapped all over him, and was secure in the knowledge that not even Blizzard would be so retarded as to completely nullify an entire tradeskill in the Arenas. Tradeskills are a way of diversifying your toon from the next guy; by grinding engineering, you should be able to use that ‘skill’ you have to your advantage. Never mind the fact that the trinkets often backfired to your horrendous disadvantage.

I was wrong. Blizzard apparently WAS that retarded. Engineering items are unusable in the Arena, and yet, Timmy McFredbob over here can slam my face in with his Blacksmithing crafted Deep Thundertron 2000.

Yeah. That’s fair.

Engineering is due for an 'overhaul', but after grinding from 300 to about 354 to be able to make White Smoke Flares That Don’t Work in Ogrimmar, or Healing Potion Injectors That Use The Exact Same Fucking Cooldown As Regular Potions, I began to realize an overhaul wasn’t going to rescue this trash profession. The icing on the cake came when I realized the new transporter I would be able to craft would end up transporting me (a Hordie) to a fucking Alliance city. Dead Serious. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

So, I ditched Engineering, and began the long crawl to Blacksmithing 350 in order to craft my Drake Fist Hammer.

My secondary profession is Mining, which actually complements Blacksmithing, but I’ll be damned if I was going to fly around on my horsey looking for little yellow dots on my minimap at 4 frames per second. I ran straight to the Auction House and began to buy out stacks of everything I would need to build up to 350.

I barely made it.

After mailing all spare gold off of all of my alts, and selling all of those “memory maker” epics that were never going to be used again, I managed to drag my way up to 351 Blacksmithing, and craft my new mace. I ended up spending around 1600 gold in the process. The raw mats for crafting the mace itself cost around 400g (10x Primal Fires, 10x Primal Earth, etc etc). When you think about it, I see people trying to sell BoE epics on the AH for 2500 sometimes, and this mace is pretty much the best non dagger main hand 1h in the game… so I don’t really regret spending the gold either.

Before I started this little mission, I was sitting on about 1200g on my main, and really had no intention of grinding out the fast flying horsey. I could give a shit if I arrive to the instance 2 minutes later. Let those with the epics fly there at the speed of light and summon me, dammit. Good job, guys.

At this point I’ve all but given up on WoW, and am reaching the point where I intend to just have fun with it until the next thing comes along (Warhammer, in my case, I think). Before I went to America, I had respecced 6 times in the course of a week, just to try out all the specs I never got around to. I’m combat maces now, and I actually kinda like it. Other rogues love to crap on me because the stuns don’t work on bosses; but when we duel, I seem to be the one that wins… what’s up with that?