I don’t believe in love. Not anymore. I mean, it exists, certainly. But not in the way I had always believed that it existed. I always pictured love as something purely magical and enchanting. I just can’t see that anymore. I don’t know how I ever believed in that, maybe I was just naive and oblivious.

These days, it’s become clear to me that love only ends in destruction and misery. Nothing so great can last forever, so maybe nothing so great can happen at all. Eventually the one you “love” will die, become sick, injured, or completely break your heart.

I’m not so sure that I can handle that. I’m not sure that I’m meant to love anyone. I’m not so sure that anyone could even love me.

[[l.o.v.e.]]

The Crafter’s Tome and WowPopular have collaborated to bring us a nice list of the most popular crafted items in WOW. This is a very useful list for crafters wanting to make a little gold on the Auction House.

The List is Here.

Download AI URL: http://www.imgcapture.com/?p=2459

Material description:

This element has emerged in the side of a long-haired girl, often a number of design elements on the side of the object are reflected by a message that women’s charm! Elements of the girl from the side can be judged out of the element is designed for those who appreciate a woman prepared for this.

This element can be applied to a variety of women’s product design and packaging. For example the cover of cosmetics ads, sell ads and some background to the above site can use this element to create a more feminine and gentle-oriented forms.

Each Friday I will pick a forum post from the World of Warcraft EU forums and discuss it. I will pick the post from anywhere within these forums depending on what I find interesting, funny or just rather annoying.

Please click here to check out today’s forum post.

Summary

The original post focuses on a number of reasons why he/she HATES the new disenchanting option available in dungeons. The main reasoning is that the enchanting profession was difficult to level up and has been fairly useless to make gold with up until WOTLK. However the new disenchant option means that enchanting mats are much more freely available and people will no longer pay stupid amounts of gold for his/her enchanted vellums.

This post does not offer anything new but simply repeats what some enchanters already seem to think.

My opinion

I have read far too many of these types of forums posts and they all seem to offer the same idea:

This idea drive me crazy and I wish people would take a step back and think about it. The fact that the enchanting materials are now cheaper does not mean people do not need enchants. In my opinion it means more people will want to buy enchants than previously.

The OP mentioned enchanting vellums (scrolls) to sell so I will focus on that idea for a moment. I have often done exactly the same process when I had a maxed out enchanter and the process is extremely simple. You buy enchanting materials and the necessary vellum and then you enchant it. Work out how much you have spent and then add a percentage to that price to figure out how much you will sell it for. For example:

(Enchanting Materials+Vellum) x 120% = Price to sell on the Auction House

If your prices change then you will still make the exact same percentage profit from each sale. Enchanting materials are definitely cheaper at the moment and therefore the price you sell each scroll at will now be lower. However epic gear has never been so available in the history of this game and therefore the market for scrolls is now larger. This means you will be selling more scrolls for slightly less profit. So what is the problem?

Interesting Replies

Lobotomy writes:

“Moneymaking is up to players, not something that Blizzard has to fix because it can’t be done. While you work for a full day and get 200g in tips, I actually don’t respond to people that whisper me for enchants. I never advertise, I just make scrolls and put on AH, selling scrolls for around 4k per day with making auctions once or twice. A recent favourite was selling two accuracy scrolls for 981g each, costing me each 320g to make.

Enchanting makes money. Certain enchanters don’t make money though, Blizzard can’t fix enchanters.”

I think his final point is great, the fact that you are not making money on the Auction House or by using your professions is not often Blizzard’s fault. You need to reevaluate your own money making strategies.

Daelwroth writes:

“I used to make alot of money from greeding on items in Heroics, then if I won them, disenchant them into mats, and sell those on AH. It was my way of money-making with enchanting, but the money made dropped by 25% if not more.”

This reply proves my point. Relying on the luck of a roll to sell materials that may or may not change in price is never going to be a constant income. Relying compeltely on one method when there are so many available and then blaming the ’system’ is just aggravating. Also greeding on items and not telling his group that he could help them with disenchants is just greedy in my opinion, but that is the choice of the enchanter.

Melech writes:

Today, our travels have taken us to Cashel.  A quaint town en route to the larger city of Cork, it is the location of the rather famous ‘Rock of Cashel’.  Offering little more than the castle to the typical tourist, this town has maintained its pure, small town feel.  In fact, it has an overlooked quality to its houses and people.  Reminiscent of Brigadoon, it is a place of faeries and magick.  As we round the bend of a rather foggy, unimportant looking road behind the castle, a great expanse of frost covered fields opens before us, and we trek down to them – as further exploration is naturally necessary.  Placed quite grandly indeed amidst these pastures is the ruins of a once working monastery.

Known as Hore (or Hoare) Abbey, while the earliest known records date from about the 1270s AD, an awe-inspiring ruin is all that remains.  As we march single file along the worn and narrow cobbled path, the sun glares off the green and white fields around the abbey, and it practically hurts the eyes to look.  But you cannot help it.  Something about this place captures the imagination, and transports one into a world all your own.  An enchanting mix of the bright green of the grass, under a fresh dusting of snow, wraps around the warm grey stones, welcoming one in to stop and rest awhile.

As we wander amongst the tiny doorways, and walls that only stand a few feet high, I can literally see the air

A view from the entrance 'gate'

sparkling about me.  One can just imagine the fantastic bonfires and parties thrown by the infamous faeries when no one is looking.  But even so, there is a calm and quietly reassuring atmosphere in and around the buildings.  When walking through the graveyards it is not a place of creepy ghosts, but rather a place of peace and rest.  And even within these inviting walls, there is a sense of the monks still at work; walking, singing, and working around the many visitors that come to this place.

There is even a tune, subtle, floating on the air, calling you back.  It is going any place you desire – a childhood place, a place of the future – it is indeed wherever the wind may take you.  With this song, and the ‘pixie dust’ all around you, you can finally find your very own faerie world.  A beautiful piece of untouched Ireland, as the sun begins to set, we gather our selves together and reluctantly return to the real world.  Back into town for a soothing coffee to warm up, and just enough time to catch the bus back into the rather more hectic (merely by comparison) world of Dublin.

By far, my favorite part of Ireland, I hope that this amazing place can remain pure and enchanting – even in the face of the modern world.  As it has stood for so long, seemingly undisturbed, I have hope, and wish to remain forever in the captivating faerie world the abbey has shown me.

The full disc of the moon inside that of the sun !!!

It is something which is worth seeing. But I do not know why I am a bit disappointed. In my childhood I had heard of the whole earth becoming dark, as after sun set and the crows flying to their nests; something they do every day at sunset. And they always go westward.

I had seen better, more enchanting” diamond rings “, in magazines etc.

Hostess: Dean, Amy, I just sat you.Waiter: Oh, sh!t. What do we got?
Hostess: Well, yours are cool. They look like business people.
Waiter: All right.
Waitress: What about mine?
Hostess: I don’t know. They don’t speak English.
Waitress: Foreigners!
Hostess: I’m sorry.
Waitess: Are you mad at me?
Hostess: No, I swear! I’m just going by the rotation.
Waitress: I f*cking hate foreigners! It’s such bullsh!t!
Hostess: Like they don’t know how to tip?
Waitress: Oh, they know.
Waiter: Aw, yeah, they f*cking know!

"100g tip for a couple gem cuts? Sweet."

The above quote is from the movie Waiting, a comedy about a TGI Fridays-esque chain restaurant called Shenaniganz. As expected, the waiters and waitresses spend a lot of time bitching about tips, but there’s one group in particular they dread most — foreigners.

In the film, five or six Europeans sit down at a booth and pretend they don’t speak a word of English, presenting themselves as tourists who aren’t familiar with the American custom of tipping for service.

As crafters on every server can attest, some World of Warcraft players aren’t much different when it comes to tipping the people who make or enhance their gear. In one way, WoW’s bad tippers are worse than the foreigners in Waiting — you can see the Europeans coming, but Azeroth’s bad tippers don’t look any different from their better-tipping brethren.

Although real money is not at stake when it comes to in-game tipping, bad tips can influence player behavior — why would a crafter keep a BoE pattern if they’re getting paltry tips on big-ticket items? If they know from past experience they’re not going to recoup the going price of the pattern by crafting an item, why not just sell off the pattern?

Those were questions I asked myself a few months back, when I accumulated four Trial of the Crusader patterns for iLevel 245 gear and hadn’t ‘learned’ them yet. If I can get upwards of 5k for each of these patterns, I thought, is it really worth it to keep them for crafting?

As it turned out, it hasn’t been worth it. That’s a lesson I should have learned back in The Burning Crusade.

An example: Recently a Hunter had me craft a Crusader’s Dragonscale Breastplate. He had me travel to Undercity to meet him, kept me waiting for about 10 minutes as he finished buying off the materials, stood there eagerly while I hit the ‘create’ button, and ended the transaction by tipping a whopping 5g. Five gold is cool if I’m converting some Borean Leather into Heavy Borean for you, or if your level 50-something alt wants a Blue Dragonscale Breastplate. But if you’re asking a crafter to make you a near best-in-slot item that requires thousands of gold in mats, and you make that person travel to — and then wait for — you to gather up mats, you should tip them well.

"I like to swim in my guild bank's second tab."

I can’t help but notice how, on my server, there are a handful of people Horde-side who I’d consider completists when it comes to patterns and plans, while the rest seem content to max their crafting skill, make a few items for themselves and call it a day.

Around the same time as the above example, I had a player craft Crusader’s Dragonscale Bracers for me. I bought two of the Crusader Orbs with emblems, paid up the nose for the other two, and presented the mats with a 150g tip, which I still felt was kinda low despite my depleted in-game finances. Likewise, if I bring three epic gems to a jewelcrafter, I usually tip around 60g, or a little more than 20g per cut. I haven’t gotten any complaints, and I hope the crafters I deal with are happy.

Should we, as players, be tipping 15% or 20% on crafted items, as if we were settling the tab at a diner? No. A tip of 1k gold on an item that costs less than 6k to craft is problably excessive for most people, although if you’re one of those players sitting on more gold than Scrooge McDuck, you could make a crafter very, very happy that way. (I know one guy who was the GM of a large raid guild, and he claims he’s got more than 100k.)

Tips should reflect the value of the item being crafted, its rarity, its power, and the good faith of the crafter who learned it instead of selling it off at the Auction House. If a crafter makes a grand total of 15 Bracers of Swift Death, and she receives an average 10g tip for each of those bracers, the fact that she could have earned thousands more gold by selling the pattern will not elude her.

And while it’s true that every pattern sold through the Auction House finds its way into the possession of another crafter, those might not be the same folks who hang around in Dalaran or Orgrimmar for hours, offering their services in trade chat. Some people view crafting as a minigame itself, and it’s much better to have a reliable, frequently-available crafter on your friend’s list than it is to chase down a player who’s always in an instance or out farming somewhere away from civilization.

Of course, as in the real world, if you receive bad service you can choose to reduce your tip, or not tip at all. In the service industry, customers use their wallets to provide feedback. But if you’re happy with the transaction? Next time you excitedly gather up the mats for a big-ticket item and bring them to a friendly crafter for a key enchant or piece of gear, put yourself in their shoes and show your appreciation in gold. Like a bartender, they won’t forget you, and next time you need something they’re more likely to go out of their way to help you.

Related posts from Stormstrike:

Patch 3.3: Enhancement Shaman Talent Specs, Now With More Fire Nova

Lord Marrowgar down! The fight, from a melee perspective

The Frozen Halls: Enhancement Shaman Gear

More than just Gear(Score): An interview with Gear Score’s developer

There has been a surge in questions about the basics lately- people telling me that they are not producing enough DPS based on what they think they should do with the gear they have. I’m going to go over the basics today, and if you do everything you read here, you shouldn’t have that problem.

Let’s start with at the very beginning- your expectations. Just because your gearscore is 4500 doesn’t mean you should be doing 3000 DPS on a target  dummy. In fact, your gearscore is not a good measure of your gear, because it doesn’t know that hunters enchanting strength and going 300 over hit cap is bad. Also, your boss dummy DPS doesn’t necessarily indicate anything about your fully raid buffed performance. I can easily show you two hunters with similar quality gear and ideal specs for that gear, and one of them would do better on a raid boss, while doing worse on a target dummy.

Assuming your stated goal is raiding, target dummy parses and heroic parses are not the most useful tool to measure performance. Raid parses are. That said, if you aren’t already raiding, these will at least give you some information.

Let’s start with your gear. Hit is the most valuable stat until you never miss your target, which happens at 8% hit for raiding. Every point you spend on hit rating under the cap will give you more DPS than any other stat, generally. Never take a piece with spell power just because it has hit, however. In order to get yourself raid ready, take a look at Eidotrope’s pre-raid gear guide. He has a column for hit rating.

You need to gem and enchant your gear, as well as use epic ammo- it may not seem like much, but this is a vital step for your DPS. Also vital, while not gear specifically, is consumables. Use the best ones for raiding.

See? Gear is the easy part! Use the best gear you can, make sure you’ve polished it up nice, and you will be a tenth of the way there.

Now let’s talk about your spec and glyphs. If you are raiding, you will do the most DPS with survival or marksmanship. BM is fun, but unfortunately still gimped in raids, especially when you don’t have access to some of the more BM friendly raid gear (like the 4t9 set bonus).

If you’re starting out, you will likely find that you do more DPS as survival, because while marksmanship has the current high-water mark for DPS, survival is better DPS for many common (lower) gear levels. The difference is not much, however, so by all means, spec either way. Just make sure you are using a good raiding spec. My guides need an update, but to get you started, here’s the SV primer and the MM primer. When I rewrite them, I’ll go back and update this post. Those guides also contain information about glyphs.

Next up, your “rotation”. Note the quotation marks. You do not have a rotation, you have a priority list of shots. This is more often than anything else what a hunter can improve the most to get more DPS. In addition to what you would fire when you’re standing still, you also have to know what you would fire when you’re moving. The priorities can sometimes change based on cooldowns and boss abilities or phases. All in all, it’s not easy, however start working on it now and you’ll reap the rewards.

Your stand still priority lists for SV and MM are a good start. Again, I’ll update these links once I refresh the guides. Once you’ve gotten the hang of this (and gotten rid of any old bad habits like avoiding steady-shots for more than a cooldown in favor of a stronger shot), then start learning to plan your movements. All hunters do more DPS when they can stand still, so learn the fights, and try to position yourself in such a way that you’ll minimize your motion. Use disengage to get around- blizzard gave hunters a reverse blink for a reason

Last, and probably least, your pet. Wolves are the best DPS pet for all specs, and here’s how you set them up. Don’t sweat the details- if you have to (or want to) use another pet, go ahead. Just make sure that for raiding, you always use a ferocity pet, that it’s always level 80, and that you don’t let it die. Macroing the new cower damage reduction to mend pet is a good first step, leaving the pet on passive and actively managing it to keep it out of danger is a good next step. Lastly, now that they get a 90% passive AoE reduction, chances are for most fights, you pet will not die even if you ignore it.

Now that you’ve gotten the basics down, here’s one final tip: learn to use the EJ DPS spreadsheet and/or femaledwarf.com. These tools are invaluable when it comes to deciding between one setup and another. A note- the DPS numbers you see in there are not actual DPS numbers, but are for comparison purposes only. Here are my guides (with screenshots) on how to use the spreadsheet and how to use the femaledwarf website.

Hope this helps! Happy new year!

I had this post typed up yesterday, but doing so while at work let to it disappearing amidst the shitstorm of stuff I had to do at the time, so I’m posting a tl;dr version of what I had written up:

• New wing open in ICC today. Hopefully we can get some time spent on it today; if not, there’s tomorrow.
• Warrior and pally are almost fully decked out thanks to the badge system. Warrior lacks 3 tanking pieces, while pally lacks one. Pally also could use Furious PVP items, but those aren’t a big rush
• I’ve added tailoring, enchanting, and inscription to my in-game profession portfolio via my warlock and druid. 450 enchanting (with all major Northrend enchants save for the Ulduar tank ones) on a level 66 = lulz.

Argh…the work shitstorm has returned, so adios for now!

I have a thing for clouds, especially when they are gorgeously white and fluffy. Everytime I look up at the bright blue sky, I want to reach up to one of those clouds, climb on top of it, and fall asleep basking in the warm sun.

Guan Xing Yuan was a three-storey homestay hotel owned by an elderly couple, whom we affectionately called Lao Ban (boss) and Lao Ban Niang (lady boss). The hotel was surrounded by a vast garden, adorned with delicate plants and dainty pots of purple and white flowers which only bloomed in winter. In front of the hotel building, was a platform that extended out beyond the mountains into the open air.

We were hoping to see the yun hai at Guan Xing Yuan. Translated as “sea of clouds”, yun hai is a natural phenomenon that depended on the right climate and humidity. It doesn’t happen all the time and when it does, you literally get a sea of white, fluffy clouds floating below you, much like what you think you might see when you die and go up to heaven.

Waking up in the morning at Guan Xing Yuan was surreal. Despite the heated mattress I felt extremely cold and absolutely refused to get out of bed for fear that my persistent cough would act up again. That is, until Jason the tour guide phoned in to our room. Little piggies, time to wake up! He urged. Come downstairs and take a look at this. Hurry!

And then I heard my friend Jezz yell, Oh my god guys, you have to see this!

It wasn’t a sea of white, fluffy clouds – it was a whole universe of them. And they were all so crowded together and tightly-knit, it looked like a sheer, humongous trampoline made out of billions of bales of cotton wool. You could have thousands of fat Angels wearing heavy Dr. Martens jump on them and they would never give way.

My legs went wobbly, and I had to lean over the platform railings for support. How lucky am I to be able to witness this? I thought. I gazed far and beyond what was in front of me, tears welling up in my eyes. I felt small, tiny, puny, standing in the middle of this spectacle. I closed my eyes and prayed: Whoever created this magnificent, breath-taking work of art, please… take me away.

Is it right, that I secretly wished for this enchanting little place to be my personal hideout?

Download AI URL: http://www.imgcapture.com/?p=1852

Material description:

This is a very beautiful and sexy girl tread pattern of plant material. A very fashionable blue dots of ink-jet design, gorgeous and elegant red and green vegetation patterns, beautiful bright pink yellow blue green bean-shaped pattern, very fine beautiful black rimmed white flowers, as well as to have a perfect S-curve shape of the sexy woman with long hair fluttering so very ornamental patterns and visual impact yet. Is a great fashion sexy enchanting beauty of the graphic design material

Some crazy sky views as seen from my front porch. Pollution has a few perks…

Sometimes I wish I was a smoker so I would have mandated outside time.. even when it is freezing cold..

Earlier this year, near the end of Summer (September of 2009) I went out to Saguaro Lake with my kayak and my photo gear. I paddled out to the middle of the lake and sat in the muffling sounds of a 15 knot wind, water slapping against the side of my kayak and I heard the SCREECH of a familiar friend, a Desert Nesting Bald Eagle.

I had 30 lbs of camera equipment, sitting between my knees. I paddled hard,  trying my best to track straight as waves easily washed over the bow of my kayak. I looked up to see the eagle flying by with a wide mouthed bass in its talons. It was easily the biggest Bass I’ve seen snagged by any fisherman in my 3 years here in Arizona.  As it flew by me, headed for a large rock formation, I  paddle aggressively towards the same shore as a 28′ Bayliner zoomed past me and exploding the already rough water around me. It seems that even here in the middle of a water world I can’t escape the combustion engine.

From my kayak, I snapped nearly 150 photos and was fortunate to witness some 35 Black Headed vultures and Turkey vultures all descending in formation and surrounding this feeding king of the sky and warrior hunter of  water.

When I finally made it to the 10 foot rock face, I tied my kayak off and slung my lens and camera across my back and in my flip flops, scaled to the top of the rock. I had arrived just  in time to capture this Eagle surrounded by the scavenging Vultures.

A wild Bald Eagle’s Screech brings chills to any observers soul. It speaks a language we all comprehend,  though we can’t exactly translate it.

I feel this is my purpose for living here in the desert. There are between than 125-175 Desert Nesting Bald Eagles throughout the entire United States. 98% of whom all reside in Arizona. Unlike other Bald Eagles, these birds DO NOT migrate. They’re measurably smaller and have differing patterns of behavior to their cousins spread throughout the rest of North America.  They’ve been listed as an Endangered Species and are in a fight for their survival. No other species of Bald Eagle nests in such high heat and low humidity. It also suffers the highest mortality rate of any nesting species. There are thought to be only a few dozen breeding pairs left on Earth. All of which live in Arizona.*

If anyone would like to make a donation to my efforts, please feel free to contact me at kayaksurfer25@yahoo.com. I hope to release a book this year with some of the incredible images and stories from other observers. I hope to raise support for their protection and preservation through my photography.

for more information on the Desert Nesting Bald Eagle please check out the following link

* http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/birds/desert_nesting_bald_eagle/index.html

These fab images are for L’Officiel Brazil’s Winter issue and feature Lydia Hears who looks stunning in this pin-up/princess gone bad style shoot. I love the styling so feminine and enchanting it’s something different from what I usually go for. Oh and I love the last shot, imagine a princess doing that Naughty Naughty lol.

Styling: Mia Morgan

Photography By: Gomillion & Leupold

IMG|SOURCE: FGR

]]> http://i4aperture.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/i-love-the-holidays/ Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:31:08 +0000 i4aperture http://i4aperture.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/i-love-the-holidays/

….nobody around me likes the holidays…..

And just in case anyone doesn’t know this.. I’ve taken all the photos on this photo journal- DJ Cordero