Team Speak is back!  We’ve had all kinds of problems with the server collapsing.  But no more.  We have moved the Team Speak operation to a brand new super fast VPS.

The server is FREE to use for everyone.  If you want a specific guild channel making up then let us know by either  filling in the contact form or leaving a comment on this post.  We are running Team Speak 2 which can be downloaded from here:

Team Speak Download

You can register with the server yourself. All you need to do is connect, and start talking!

Connection Details:

Server: WarAnvil
Server IP: 208.116.25.50

Feel free to enter your own nickname and then register later.

Thanks for the emails about the TeamSpeak server, I just want to keep everyone updated.

We have been having problems with the TeamSpeak server for some time now.  However we are now running a new VPS and should have the TeamSpeak up and running within the next few hours.

So what are you waiting for? Join us in the forum!

Let me introduce you to our brand spanking new website background!  We’ll be running this background until the next expansion comes a long.

Pray tell! We want to know what you guys think, if you can do better then feel free to contact us!

Ah, on the note of contacting us, we could really do with more writers to bolster the rate at which posts hit the site, if you think you have what it takes then hit the link above ‘blog for us’ or if you lazy click here

One final thing, on the topic of posts, we’ll be working hard over the coming months to really gear the site up for Cataclysm and that’s going to mean more and more super wonderful posts by our team, so stay tuned.

Hey all, its patch day again!

Now before you go running screaming into the night and threatening to cancel your account, lets note that its just a minor patch – but it brings some nice changes.

Big General Changes:

• The long awaited equipment manager has made it live.
• Gear now scales SotA and Wintergrasp vehicles.
• Wintergrasp quests are now weekly instead of daily.

A few class tweaks and bug fixes in the full notes included after the jump.

General

• When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).

• Equipment Manager
• New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion’s Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).
• Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

PVP

• Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator’s gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
• All Lake Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper’s Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.

Death Knights

• Improved Death Strike: This talent now also increases the healing from Death Strike by 25/50% and the tooltip has been adjusted to reflect the actual functionality after the hotfix in 3.1.0.
• Ghoul Frenzy: Now has a 10-second cooldown.

Druids

• Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid’s base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
• Improved Moonkin Form: Now grants 10/20/30% of spirit as spell power.

Hunters

Mages

• Mirror Images: The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage, and should no longer cast Fire Blast or Frostbolt on targets that are affected by crowd control debuffs that break immediately on damage unless they are already casting these spells when crowd control is applied.

Paladins

• Blessing of Wisdom and Greater Blessing of Wisdom: Now grant 92 mana per 5 seconds to prevent being overwritten by Mana Spring Totem.
• Exorcism: Can no longer be used on player-controlled creatures.

Priests

• Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
• Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
• Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.

Warlocks

• Conflagrate updated: Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 12 seconds of your Immolate, or 8 seconds of your Shadowflame. In addition, the increased critical strike chance of Conflagrate provided by this talent no longer requires the Immolate effect to have 5 seconds or fewer remaining on the target.
• Fire and Brimstone: Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 3/6/9/12/15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 5/10/15/20/25%.
• Nether Protection reduced to 30% damage reduction, down from 60%.
• Sacrifice (Voidwalker) redesigned: Sacrifices a portion of the Voidwalker’s health, giving its master a shield that will absorb X damage for 30 seconds. While the shield holds, spell casting will not be interrupted by damage. 1-minute cooldown.
• Shadow and Flame: Now also includes Shadowburn.

Warriors

• Juggernaut: Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 25%, down from 100%.

Items

• Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.
  Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
  Glyph of Rapid Charge: Reduced to 7%, down from 20% cooldown reduction to Charge.
• Arena weapons with an item level of 239 have had their rating requirements increased to 2350.
• Darkruned Battlegear 2-Piece Set Bonus: The bonus critical strike chance for Frost Strike and Death Coil has been increased from 5% to 8%.
• Furious Gladiator’s Staff and Furious Gladiator’s Greatstaff: The agility values on these two items were too high. They have been reduced by 50%.
• Glyphs
• Guise of the Midgard Serpent: The base attack power on this item has been lowered to balance it against items of a similar quality.
• Increased the health and mana restored from Northrend food and drinks.
• Most scopes now have a level requirement and will bind the item to which they are applied.
• Nightsong Garb 4-Piece Set Bonus: Chance for Insect Swarm to trigger an instant Starfire changed to 15%.
• Scourgeborne Battlegear 4-Piece Set Bonus: The runic power gain has been reduced to 5 runic power from 10 runic power.
• Ulduar 10-player hard mode weapons have been updated to item level 232.

Professions

• Jewel of the Sewers: You can now fish in all parts of the Dalaran sewers for this quest.
  Phantom Ghostfish: Can now be caught from Nettlefish schools in Sholazar Basin.

User Interface

• For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Bug Fixes

• Anti-magic Shell: Tooltip error corrected.
• Blood Boil: If no target is available for Blood Boil to hit, the spell will now cast and consume a blood rune but generate no runic power.

• Maim: Rank 2 of this ability is properly considered a stun and can be escaped by Blink.

• Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
• Lock and Load: The tooltip has been corrected to display its actual chance to occur.
• Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.

• Divine Sacrifice: Damage done to the Paladin while this is active will no longer cause the effect to break early, and if it is dispelled or cancelled early, the damage counter will reset correctly the next time the spell is cast.

• Shadow Dance: Issues with action bars and ability use arising from using Stealth while Shadow Dance is active have been fixed.
• Tricks of the Trade: To prevent exploits, this ability can no longer be cast on non-player targets.

• Demonic Sacrifice: This spell will no longer appear in any Warlock’s spellbook.

• Swordguard Embroidery: Now correctly increases ranged attack power.
• Tailoring

• Ulduar
  • Hodir should now reset in a timely manner if a group fails to kill him.
  • 10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs.
  • The Spark of Imagination: Characters that release in part of the boss room will no longer be ported to Westfall or The Barrens.

So there I am, sitting in stormwind, watching the hustle-and-bustle of the trade district all around me, when it pops into my chat window.

“I nedz 10g can i has plz thx” (actual spelling, yes.)

Now being the kind and compassionate light-following paladin that I am, I decided to engage our poor illiterate friend. Join me after the jump so you don’t be this guy.

[Me] “I’m sorry, what?”
[Poorboy] “nedz 10g”
[Me] “For what?”
[Poorboy] (After a 2 minute silence) “train”
[Me] “Training at level 5 does not cost 10g. Maybe, maybe 50s.”
[Poorboy] “I nedz can i has”
[Me] “Im going to ask you a question.”
[Poorboy] “k”
[Me] “What are your professions?”
[PB] “First aid mining”
[Me] “Ok, what you are going to want to do is march into that forest over there, and start mining copper. It should fetch you about 3g/stack on the AH.”
[PB] “whats ah”
[Me] “Auction House”
[PB] “k”
[Me] “Good luck.”
[PB] “can i has 5 g plz”
/ignore Poorboy

Well, I tried. OK, so it wasn’t an actual conversation, but it was based on a real one, with that same spelling and line of questioning. There was a guildie (we can just can just call him poorboy for now) who would ask – everyday- to borrow 3g. And everyday, I would get into the same line of questioning and conversation, like clockwork.

So I’ve decided, in an effort to stop these people, to help you crit your wallet as a low level character.

Questing

Now, while I shouldn’t have to say this… questing is a huge source of money, gear, rep and xp.
Its kind of a one-stop shop for everything you need while leveling, and there are so many quests to do.
Poorboy would often reply that he did not want to quest, because it was too hard.
So lets assume that you, like poorboy, cannot stand questing.
Since questing is such a great rewarder of all things, you are leaving yourself at a great disadvantage by not doing it.
But, you can use your professions to help make up that money.

Killing Humanoids

Killing things is one of those nice by-products of questing, and killing humanoids will net you a modest income. They drop money, cloth (which always sells in the auction house), grey trash (vendor it for more money) and greens/blues (Do not vendor these – put them in the auction house or disenchant.) See the Auction House topic further down.

Professions

Your character has the ability to learn two primary professions and unlimited (well up to three because there are only three) secondary professions. Some are better for money-making than others. You see, the professions themselves, they generate income. Its complex. (100 internets to anyone who gets the joke.)

Primary professions

There are eight primary professions to choose from and they are split into two seperate types: Gathering and Crafting.
Repeat the following after me:

• Gathering skills will give me money now and later. Income is steady and mostly reliable.
• Crafting skills will give me a good amount of money later, but will be a money sink early on. Income is great for higher levels, but can be sporatic.
• Crafting skills will allow me to enhance my own character and my friends.

Did you get that? If your goal is simply steady money – pick two gathering professions. If your goal is to enhance your own character – I highly suggest taking one gathering profession and one crafting of your choice (They all have their own benefits). Try to choose a gathering skills that funds your crafting skill to soften the blow.

• Mining (Gather)

  • Mining is a great gathering profession, as ore and bars are always needed by blacksmithing, engineering, and jewelcrafting.
  • Copper is easy to gather as a low level character and will give you about 3-5g a stack.
  • Always sell the ore, rather than the bars. It gets a higher price due to it being used by more professions in that form.
  • When you hit 450 – you can smelt titansteel once a day for a decent fee.
  • Each “level” of Mining gives you a passive 3/5/7/10/30/50 stamina. (Toughness)

• Skinning (Gather)
  

  • You see that beast you just killed? Skin it. Extra income. The easiest of the gathering professions.
  • Skinning produces leather, which is used for leatherworking and occasionally tailoring, blacksmithing and jewelcrafting.
  • You get good xp while farming due to the fact that your gathering requires you to kill things.
  • Each “level” of skinning gives you a passive +3/6/9/20/32 critical strike rating. (Master of Anatomy)

Herbalism (Gather)

• Enjoy the scenery as you walk through picking flowers.
• Herbs are used in alchemy, inscription and occasionally enchanting.
• Glyphs are big business right now, and potions are always in demand. (Glyph business will eventually taper off, but should still be steady income)
• Free heal over time spell, regardless of class. Lifeblood (Rank 1)

Thats all for right now. Join me for part 2 in a few days when we will discuss how to make money using crafting skills.

However this has a slight side effect for WarAnvil.  It causes our TeamSpeak to stop running.  We have to manually restart the server.  If you notice the TeamSpeak server is offline then please email us (use the contact page) and we should be able to fix it within a few minutes.

With some luck this will settle down once our host has finished doing whatever they are doing!

The server is back up and running now.

Grim.

For us here at WarAnvil, this is fantastic. It’s very heartening to see our server getting some proper use, but we want more! If your guild needs a channel, email me! If your friends guild needs a channel, email me! If you just want a channel for your 3v3 Arena Team, email me! Hell, if you register on the Teamspeak server you can create your own passworded channel, and it’ll be there permanently from that point on, so you don’t even have to talk to us at all if you just want a basic no frills channel! Remember, this is a totally FREE service we’re offering here. Your guild could have a raid ready Teamspeak channel TONIGHT.

If you want us to set up a channel, email me with the desired channel name and password. If you just want to try it out, log on and create one yourself! You can access the server by clicking the big old Teamspeak link at the top of the site. Now get in there and make some use of it!

Oh yeah, and did I mention you can email me?