I am almost at level 81 on my paladin after running a few BGs, and I am starting to very slowly figure out what my buttons do.

If you are thinking of using the Scroll of Resurrection to magically create a level 80 character, and plan to run Battlegrounds, be prepared to die. A lot. Quickly. Although Blizzard kindly grants scrolled characters a full set of green gear with stats suiting their main spec, your opponents generally have full heirloom gear. My plate-wearer has around 26k health when buffed, while the rogues that literally two-shot me are between 50k-70k.

I created my new paladin on a server different from my other level-capped characters, so I currently have no heirlooms and no guild perks. I plan to invest in a full set of PvP blues when I hit 85 so I don’t really want to spend too much on gear now. Also, leveling is strangely slow with no perks or heirlooms. Basically I just hide in towers in AV and otherwise die a lot while slowly earning XP. It’s weird, and slightly masochistic, and pretty fun.

On that note, a quick guide to Scrolled pally pvp:

Glyphs: Get some! I recommend Glyph of Seal of Insight, Glyph of Holy Shock, and Glyph of Word of Glory for the Prime spots. I read a bit about these, but mostly I just cribbed off of Blessing of Kings‘ Coriel.

Holy Shock – Heals, hurts, stacks holy power, instant. Use it every time it’s up. With the default Scroll holy spec, this has a disc bubble-like proc that is a result of the holy Mastery stat.

Flash of Light – Fast, expensive heal. With the default Scroll holy spec you will occasionally proc some procy thing that makes this instant — the spell on your hotbar will gain a glowing border. Use it then!

Word of Glory – Heals based on how much holy power you have stacked, instant. Use it if you have 2+ HP stacked.

The point to these three spells is that they can all be instant, and I have found relative success just running around BGs and flailing at these buttons. Note that this is PvP only, and probably a bad idea for PvE.

Seals and Judgements and Blessings and Hands are the kinds of things that pallies used to talk about over Mumble during raids while I hummed to myself. Reading is for suckers, so I recommend you just start with the spells below.

When you respawn at a graveyard (and oh, you will) buff yourself with three spells:

Seal of Insight – Returns mana and health when you melee, glyphed will give +5% to healing. If you are ready for advanced pallying, use with Judgement to hit a mob with the force of holy power.

Blessing of Kings – Buffs the raid’s stats by 5%, giving you more sweet, sweet stamina. There is also Blessing of Might. Somewhere. I think.

Beacon of Light – 50% – 100% of the heals you cast on others (depending on the specific spell used) will heal yourself at the same time. With the default Scroll holy spec, using Flash of Light on your Beacon-ed self will create a stack of Holy Power.

Put these two utility spells on your action bar as well:

Cleanse – With the default Scroll holy spec, this removes one magic, poison, and disease from the target, says Wowhead. (“and”? Really?) Friends don’t let friends die from dots.

Divine Shield – The infamous bubble! Run away!

There. Three healing spells, three buffs, and two utility spells. Note that this is an incredible simplification of holy paladin abilities. Priests are kind of infamous for having a million different healing spells, but I am truly boggled at the number of cooldowns pallies contend with. You can save people, boost your heals, produce mana, remove others from snares, and so much more.

However, arguably a hotbar with these eight spells will at least get you through your first Battleground. I’m going to have to learn how and when to use most of these cooldowns to be a great PvP healer, but everyone starts somewhere.

I don’t know if y’all have had a chance to look at flasks on the auction house yet, but raiding is EXPENSIVE now. Repairs are pricey for all armor classes, flasks are still 200g each, and don’t even get me started on the price of enchants. I think that like us most semi-serious guilds are covering a lot of the cost, but raiding is still an expensive proposition at the moment.

Fortunately the Cataclysm profession markets are still full of quick ways to make gold! The prices of matierials are dropping and it’s a great time to take advantage of the high prices for most crafted goods. I have a whole assembly line of alts and an army of addons to help me find the best deals, but that’s not entirely necessary. In fact, it’s relatively easy to craft and cover your raiding costs each week with minimal time and effort.

There is one thing in common with all professions: for the most profit, buy inexpensive mats. (Or farm, but I hate farming.) You can use a mod like  Auctioneer’s snatch list to do this, but it’s not necessary. Just identify the handful of ingredients you need for your recipe of choice and check the auction house before logging off each day. If you see any of your materials up for lower than the usual price, buy them. Personally I tend to buy and store materials all week and then worry about crafting when I have more time on the weekend.

So, let’s make some money!

Alchemy: Alchemy has been a bit of a dog in the past for making money, but it’s become extremely profitable in Cataclysm. The absolutely easiest way to make some cash is the Living Elements transmute: buy 15 Volatile Life for ~6g each, go to Uldum and transmute them to Volatile Air, sell the Airs for ~40g each. (This is an even better proposition with Transmute Mastery!) Bam, 350+ gold a day.

Blacksmithing: Two words: belt buckles. Well, okay, five words: belt buckles and shield spikes. Farm the mats or buy them for cheap, sell both items for ~450g each. Dance.

Enchanting: Enchanting is always the last professions to see a price drop in materials. Heck, Maelstrom Crystals are still going for 2000g on my server! If you happen to have any pre-Cataclysm rare enchants you should clearly be selling those. Otherwise, enchanters have to get a little clever! Try doing a search on the AH for Uncommon items level 80-85. Buy anything under 20g, disenchant, sell results. At the moment you’ll gross 30-50g per item, which means that you’re probably not going to get rich but you’ll be able to cover your raid costs.

Engineering: If your other profession is a gathering one, the easiest way for engineers to make gold is of course through their electrostatic condenser. (And it’s being buffed in the next patch!) Free Volatile Airs? Okay! Without that option, your best bet is to make pets. Pick two of the new Cataclysm recipes, buy the mats when they are cheap, and list the pets for a couple thousand each.

Inscription: Unlike other professions that can focus on one of their new Cataclysm recipes, Inscriptionists should look to the past. Glyphs made with Lion’s Ink and Jadefire Ink sell at a steady pace and are very inexpensive to make. Keep an eye on Fadeleaf, Khadgar’s Whisper, and Kingsblood on the Auction House. If you are feeling particularly aggressive you can use a mod (I use Auction Profit Master) or a site like WowPopular to figure out which glyphs to make, or just start at the top of the list and make one of everything. I recommend listing glyphs for 12-hour periods so your prices are always relatively fresh.

Jewelcrafting: I almost don’t have to write this bit, as Jewelcrafting is already a gold grab. Do dailies, prospect Elementium, buy recipes, cut gems. Profit! I’ll give you a good tip though: save your uncommon gems for days when they are the JC daily ingredient, and then post ‘em up at 50-100g each. This trick works best if you’re one of those people who log on before leaving the house in the morning.

Leatherworking: Leg armor! Take a look at your server’s auction house and see which of the new epic leg armors have the best prices. These epic pattern are taught by the profession vendors in Twilight Highlands after you open your faction’s major city. The leg enchants are expensive to make, but they currently sell for about a thousand gold on my server. Sell two of these each week and you’ve covered your raiding costs!

Tailoring: Much like Leatherworking, leg enchants are the way to go here. Get the recipe for the Powerful Enchanted Spellthread if nothing else. Again, these sell for about a thousand gold each on my server, so even with the expensive mats you’ll still double your investment.

One caveat: check your auction house before investing in any of these ideas. Something that makes money on my server might be oversaturated on yours!

Enough about raiding, recruiting, killing, and stupid 3.2 priest nerfs and weird instance timers that make me want to GRAB A PUPPY AND THROTTLE IT AND O– wait! Right. Sorry. Scratch that last bit.

This Sunday is the Midsummer Fire Festival, which means it’s time for another crazed session of achievement grinding! I like world events quite a bit, and I will be sad when Brewfest is over in September and I have my violet protodrake and all the completed meta achievements to go with it.

Anyway, let’s go over the six achievements needed to earn the the “Flame Warden” title:

Ice the Frost Lord
Slay Ahune in Heroic Slave Pens. The official Midsummer Fire Festival page still says that Ahune is level 70, but I suspect he’ll be level 80 this year. Head into Slave Pens, clear just past the first room, and talk to the new NPC Luma Cloudsister to summon the big fella. He had a lot of adds last year that kind of added up, so assuming he’s level 80 you’ll likely need a full group of 5. Ahune also can drop a Scorchling pet and the completely badass-looking Frostscythe of Lord Ahune, so you’ll likely want to kill him a lot.

King of the Fire Festival
Complete the Thief’s Reward quest by stealing the flames from all of the major cities of the opposite faction. This is a great quest to do late at night, or early in the morning. If it’s like last year, the Undercity flames are easy, and the Orgrimmar one (right outside Thrall’s chamber!) is the most difficult. This quest gives you a Crown of the Fire Festival as a reward, which you need for later achievements.

Desecration of the Horde/Alliance and The Fires of Azeroth
A holiday staple, these are the “ha ha, you have to go back to Azeroth” achievments. Fly around Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, and Outland and honor or extinguish fires in both Alliance and Horde towns. Fortunately, doing this will give you lots of Burning Blossoms, which is the currency for Fire Festival vendor items. Assuming you have nothing from last year, you’ll need 400 Blossoms to buy the entire Fire Festival outfit, which is required for other achievements…

Burning Hot Pole Dance
… such as this one! Getting the set will take a bit of time, but otherwise this achivement is simple. Don your full Midsummer set and dance at (aka use) any of the ribbon poles for 60 seconds.

Torch Juggler
And here is the achievement I’ve been dreading. Juggle 40 torches in 15 seconds. I’m not sure of the actual mechanics of this quest, but the juggling torches daily last year caused me no end of grief. I suppose I am just not destined to be a circus clown.

And that’s it! Those achievements are a little time consuming, but pretty simple and lacking any of that RNG madness that people hate. Happy Midsummer!

Children’s Week started this weekend, and another holiday means yet another scramble to get all the achievements done. Nowhere was this chaos more evident on Friday night than in Battlegrounds, thanks to School of Hard Knocks. So many PvP novices, small children in tow, ignoring actually winning in favor of completing the achievements. I should know, I was one of them. And within hours of the holiday launch the official forums were littered with complaints about how unfair this achievement is and people were quitting immediately if it wasn’t removed from the meta-achievement.

You can probably guess by now that I think all the whining and moaning is silly. Don’t nerf Ulduar, and don’t nerf achievements. I realize that the Battlegrounds will be pretty borked for a few days, but such is the price of an even slightly dynamic online environment. Sometimes things change for a limited amount of time, and you just have to roll with the punches. And I also realize that some people don’t like PvP and resent having to do it for an achievement. However, again, not everything can be designed with your personal needs in mind. Think of the PvPers who are “forced” to do oodles of PvE every holiday for their chance at a violet proto-drake!

Anyway, with a DPS friend I managed to knock off this achievement in about 90 minutes and six Battlegrounds. Going in pairs (or a small group perhaps) definitely helps — it’s good to have an ally out there.

Assault a tower in Alterac Valley
This one is easy. Pick a tower a ways out — Tower Point is a good choice for Alliance — and make a beeline for it right out of the gate. If all the towers get captured before you can get there, hang around the final enemy towers (East and West Frostwolf for Alliance) and be ready to go kick some butt if the opposing side makes a break for them. If you’re in a group of two people, you’ll probably have to run AV twice.

Assault a flag in Arathi Basin
Assume that everyone is going to go for Stables. Pick something far away, like Mine, and head for it immediately. If all the flags are assaulted before you get there, just team up with the marauding band (there will be one, it’s AB) and see if you can’t snipe the flag while others are fighting. We got this in one AB run.

Return a fallen flag in Warsong Gulch
This one will be a LOT easier if your opponents are a little sympathetic to your plight. You might try softening them up by heading into their flag room, picking up the flag, and then dropping it so someone can return it. We also tried begging, dancing, and my friend ran around in his murloc suit for a bit. (Nothing says, “We come in peace,” like a hopping murloc.) Eventually you’re just going to have to camp your flag room, let people pick up the flag, and click like hell. We got this in a single WSG.

Capture the flag in Eye of the Storm
Ugh. This is the big pain in the bunch. Go help your side claim the middle, make sure SOMEONE has grabbed a tower, and then sit and click. And click. And click. We needed both of us to protect the other while flag carrying: I healed my friend when he had it, and he Death Gripped bad guys off of me when it was my turn. Apparently the other side loves killing the flag carrier. It took two EotS runs to get this achievement, and we were both ready to headbutt our monitors by the time all was said and done.

And don’t forget to have your orphan out! You can’t whistle for them while in combat, so you’ll want to do it ahead of time.

Good luck!

PS: Apparently you can do the Outland AND Azeroth orphan quests, giving you two new pets for collectors.

__________________

I admit to being a cynical jerk who lacks imagination and usually looks askew at role playing posts, but the story of DangerMouse and her orphan made me smile. “I am a cheerful tour-directing abomination in the eyes of nature.” Hee hee.

This weekend ended up being very much a WoW weekend. I finally got exalted with the Kirin Tor and Oracles, farmed a lot of Hodir rep, ran many heroics, got a badge upgrade for my shadow gear, twiddled with my UI, 8-manned Malygos, and cleared out the quests in Zul’Drak and Borean Tundra. I also started seriously working on Higher Learning.

For those who still haven’t looked yet, Higher Learning is an achievement to collect 8 books from around Dalaran. The books have a one-hour spawn window which occurs three hours from the previous spawn. So, for example, if the last book spawned at 8am, the next spawn window will be 11am-12pm. The  book spawns for three minutes from the moment it is first read, and multiple people can read it. Additionally, often a ‘fake’, or non-achievement, book will spawn, which again sets the timer to three hours. Completing this achievement (and following the instructions after it) takes you to our old friend Archmage Vargoth, who gives you a Kirin Tor Familiar pet.

Stalking the book spawns comes with it’s own lingo:

OTC: “On the clock”, aka the location is on the 1 hour spawn window
LLL: The lower bookshelf (by far right entrance) at the Ledgermain Lounge
ULL: The upper bookshelf (straight in front of you as you go up the stairs) at the Ledgermain Lounge
VG: Beside the right bookshelf in the Violet Gate
VH: Violet Hold, next to the regular daily quest giver
UVC: The upper bookshelf on your left at the Violet Citadel.
LVC: The lower bookshelf on your right at the Violet Citadel.
TOF: The upstairs balcony at Threads of Fate
DVC: The bookshelf on the right in the Dalaran Visitor’s Center.

Fortunately the 3-minute window mechanic means that people benefit from working together to track the spawns. There are a couple of different ways to leverage this:

• Find out if people are using a channel on your server to discuss spawn times. On Uldum Alliance, it’s #bookclub. People report if a spawn is fake, cover multiple locations, share timers, and so on. This is extremely valuable if you’re out farming and want to track what’s going on.
• Install a mod such as Higher Learning. It will sync up with your server book channel and track spawn times. An important note, though: Daylight Savings Time seems to have messed with Higher Learning, so occasionally it will automatically set the respawn time for 4 hours instead of 3. This is remarkably irritating. I often just reset my timers manually using the command “/hl set LLL” (or whatever location you’re tracking), which WILL automatically set the time for three hours.

As a final note, the timers reset when the server does. If you’re lucky enough to be sitting at home on a Tuesday morning, the minute that maintenance is over and see if you can’t find a book or three.

All told over the weekend using these methods I managed to nab one real book (for a total now of four out of eight) and be around to witness 4 or 5 fakes spawn. This is NOT a quick achievement, which makes the pet all the more special. Happy spawn hunting!

So you’re flying all around Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms to pay your respects to the Elders. It’s time consuming, but if you’re an Achievement collector you can get a little more bang for your buck by multi-tasking!

It’s Happy Hour Somewhere / Tastes Like Chicken
You have to go to all of the major cities, so why not kick back with a pint and a nice loaf of bread? It’s easy to get these two achievements just by visiting all the pubs and shops (like Trias Cheese in Stormwind) and having a bite or a sip of everything.

Shop Smart, Shop Pet…Smart
There are a few questable pets that you may not have bothered with in the old days of Classic WoW. Almost directly in between the two Elders in Feralas is a quest giver who starts the Sprite Darter line. And you have to go to Flame Crest in Burning Steppes, and to LBRS, so why not also finish up the quests for a pet baby spider and worg? (“En-Ay-Es-Tee-Why” and “Kibler’s Exotic Pets” respectively.)

Out at Shimmering Flats you can talk to Magus Tirth and buy an Ancona Chicken for a gold. Buy more than one — they sell pretty well on the AH. If you’re really being proactive, pick up some of Tigule and Foror’s Strawberry Ice Cream from a nearby vendor. You’ll need it for Children’s Week, and I bet it will sell well on the AH when that starts.

If you didn’t do them while leveling up, now is a good time to complete the mechanical chicken quests in Tanaris, The Hinterlands, and Feralas, and get a robot fowl of your own.

To All the Squirrels I’ve Loved Before and Pest Control
Many of these critters are easy to get on the fly, but if you’re Alliance you might want to love or kill a few of them now. The Barrens is your only home to Gazelles, and an easy place to find Prairie Dogs. Durotar is “hording” (ha ha!) all the Hares, and has lots of Swine. On the pest front, the only place I know of to find a Mouse is Westfall, so bonk one on the head while you’re out there.

Also, obviously if you haven’t done World Explorer yet this is your excuse.