Thursday, 10 July 2008

It's a Pity Enchants Don't Stack

Admittedly, it would be a tad overpowered.  I mean, that crappy pair of white bracers I have would make excellent T7 tanking gear with all the bonus stamina it'd have...

So in 24 hours, Porphyrria went from 65 enchanting to 250.  She'd been soloing lowbie instances for a while, and DE-ing the drops, so she had tons of dusts and essences to play with.  That said, about half of the skillups came from buying stuff off the AH.  Farming for enchanting mats becomes progressively less feasible the higher you get.  Not simply because the instances get harder, but because the drops get fewer and far between in longer and more complex instances.

I tried running ZF for some mats the other day, and spent 70% of my time chasing after casters.  In ZF, they have this nasty habit of running away at low health, but not coming back.  They just stay wandering around at extreme range, occasionally casting at you.  I once spent 20 minutes searching for one mob that had glitched up to a high bit of static geometry.  Since it wouldn't come back like most mobs do when they flee, even if it couldn't see me, it took another 5 minutes to kill it.  I couldn't really move on until I did because the damn thing was keeping me stuck in combat.

In the end, it was easier to simply buy the mats off the AH, or buy appropriately-levelled green gear off the AH and DE that.

As it stands, I need to get Por another 50 points in Enchanting before she can DE the massive stockpile of ilvl 115+ greens I have.  That's a problem because those 50 points require 400 Dream Dust (oh, and 10 Greater Nether Essence.)

This is either going to take an awful lot of dungeon runs, or a colossal number of monies.

That said, one good thing has come out of all this.  If you've ever tried to powerlevel enchanting, you know how much of a pain it is.

Move to left side of screen, click "Enchant," move to right side of screen, click item, move to top centre of screen, click "Yes."  Repeat until suicidal.

See, enchanters can't just queue up a dozen enchants, click "Make" and then go off and craft a cup of coffee or a sandwich.  We have to do them one at a bloody time, repeatedly telling the game that, yes, we really do want to enchant that.  YA RLY!

But I've found a way around it.

Macro the first: "Craft-It™"

/click CraftCreateButton

Macro the second: "Yes, Damnit™"

/click StaticPopup1Button1

Here's how you use them: put them both on buttons next to each other.  Open up the enchanting window, pick an enchant.  Now, enchant an item in your inventory.  I'm not 100% on this one, so make sure you're enchanting an item that's already enchanted; if it's not, enchant it once then do it again.  Click "Yes" when the dialog asks you.

Now, if you want to repeat the enchant on the same item, press the first macro followed immediately by the second.  No need to pause or anything; drum your fingers across if you like.  The game will dutifully repeat the enchantment you have selected on the last item you enchanted, and dismiss the confirmation dialog without ever actually showing it.

Now, you could probably combine those two macros together by pasting the contents of the second macro after the contents of the first macro.  The only reason I've used two macros up there is because that's what I tested with, and didn't think of combining them until two paragraphs ago.

When you've got to do 20 Greater Defense to Cloak enchants in a row, those macros are a God-send.

P.S.  This is my first attempt at using an SVG image.  There's a fallback for people using antiquated software created back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Ansett was still in the air (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer!) Let me know if there are any issues.

3 comments:

Jesse said...

Once you know your way around, Temple of Atal'Hakkar aka Sunken Temple makes an excellent dungeon to farm for disenchanting. It is a bit of a maze the first couple times through, but once you learn the layout it becomes very easy to make speed runs. The instance has a lot of bosses(15) and quests(6) yielding a nice haul of loot, and if you skipped your level 50 class quest you can go back and finish it too.

Itsnoteasy said...

Aah, but here's the problem: for levelling enchanting, you want green items, not the blues that bosses drop. Blues almost always disenchant into shards. I've never seen a single enchanting recipie that required a shard by itself: they always require dusts and/or essences as well.

So boss drops are OK, but they're useless without a ton of random green drops.

Jesse said...

Hehe, I guess when they revisited the loot in patch 2.3 it wasn't all for the better. Fiery Weapon takes 4 small radiants, an essence of fire, and depending on the server can sell pretty well. The essence of fire supposedly had it's drop rate boosted so you could feasibly farm everything yourself then sit in a major city and sell fiery enchants for a while. Minor Haste to Gloves takes 2 large radiants, 2 wildvine, but doesn't sell at all.