After many weeks of heavy discussion, a friend has finally convinced me to move my blog from WordPress to Blogger. Both engines are nice, but the work I will need to do to keep the blog running each week is less with Blogger, so I have copied the entire site over there.
Sorry to inconvenience those that do follow this blog regularly. Please redirect your bookmarks to: http://dwarfwench.blogspot.co.uk/
Dwarf Wench
This weekend was our first wedding anniversary. While we are rather limited in celebration options, I had arranged to have a raid night off and we planned on having a lovely day together just enjoying the company. Things never quite seem to work out as we plan.
Mr Wench managed to have an accident at work on Thursday, hitting his head and cutting a deep gouge along his scalp. He’d been advised by the first aid team to just leave it as they didn’t think it would require stitching. On Friday morning, however, it was still bleeding so Mr Wench woke me up to get a second opinion on whether he needed to go to the hospital. I got up, took a quick look and confirmed that I thought a hospital visit would be necessary…and then collapsed on the floor.
I’m really not the sort of person that faints at the sight or blood or anything and I’d been checking on the progress of his head wound the day before. One of the symptoms I get with ME when under stress or particularly worn out is that my temperature can suddenly go up or down without warning. I also react badly to temperature rises (nothing to do with ME, just a bonus quirk) so after all the stress of keeping an eye on Mr Wench and just generally having been a little run down, I woke up, my temperature rose and I overheated. Annoyingly, I’d managed to collapse behind the bathroom door and while Mr Wench had seen the sudden colour drain from my face and checked my fall, I was now blocking the bathroom door shut and he couldn’t get out. Mr Wench is not just my husband, he’s also my carer. Having watched over me for so many years, he thankfully realised this was likely a temperature issue and covered me in cold damp towels and flannels until I started to be responsive again. After cooling down again, I was just exhausted and a bit bruised and he was able to head on to the hospital to get his head treated with medical glue.
Our anniversary celebrations were a little more quiet and subdued than we’d planned, but it reminded us that we have each other to lean on.
In World of Warcraft, I have done very little this week outside of raid time commitments. My auction sales and stockpiling are becoming more reserved as we approach patch day. I have stopped restocking PvP armours and am just selling off the stock I have left, as it will be mostly useless by patch day. Jewellery, enchants, gems and the like will still be useful so I cam still keeping them stocked. The rest of the time has been used to stockpile more materials. I have been focussing more on Magnificent Hides, Exotic Leather and Windwool Cloth this week as my supplies in each are rather low and I feel it will be impossible to have too much! Witht he increased amounts of each used for new daily coolowns, I suspect there may be an increase in demand leading to higher prices which would choke my supply line or force me to raise crafting prices.
Show Me The Money
215,118g
That’s down by just over 110k from last week but the increase in stored materials and supplies is huge. As I’ve done this over the course of a few weeks, I have been able to buy just the low priced items rather than paying much more when demand is higher. One more week until I start to see my finances going in the right direction again!
Recently I stumbled across a little addon that might as well have been written for me. If you happen to have memory issues due to illness (or even just have a lot to do and tend to forget some of them) this is a great addon for you to look into.
It allows you to create little checklists on a profile system so that you can either have a little checklist for each character or (like I do) a global list broken down into several sub-lists for each character so that I can see it on all the characters.
You can choose to have each entry on the checklist reset on a daily basis, only on specific days or weekly and you can set the day and time for resets. In the accompanying picture, you can see my setup. As the titles are all character names, I’ve blanked them out (mostly because I have problems if people try to whisper me during a raid as it ruins my concentration) but the rest should be clearly visible. As I complete each task I just click the box next to it and depending on the settings the entry either disappears completely or gains a yellow tick mark in the box.
I use it to remind myself of all my crafting cooldowns, AH restock, reminders to check on my farm or hand in lesser charms for bonus rolls once a week and well anything else I can think of!
If you are interested in taking a look for yourself, you can find it here.
I will admit that this week I have gone perhaps a little over the top in my stockpiling efforts. My aim here was to store a large quantity of the crafting materials that I use regularly while they were a reasonable price so that if my speculation is correct and the prices on these items rise whent he 5.4 patch is released on 10/11th September I would still be able to craft as much as I wanted at the current prices I use. It would also mean that with a large stockpile I would not be hindered by any lack of supply on the auction house due to increased demand.
This is a minimum risk strategy really. If my speculation is wrong or the prices drop instead of rising I won’t really lose out. I already know I will use all these materials in crafting and as a new tier will be available the demand for enchants, gems etc will be high.
I have several bank tabs full of Ghost Iron Ore ready for smelting/prospecting as needed as well as a large amount of Trillium bars and Magnificent Hides ready for crafting cooldowns so that I don’t get stuck with a day or two where I can’t use CDs to learn new recipes and gain the new crafting materials. With the new Engineering mount requiring 30 each of Living Steel and the new engineering craftable (Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source) both being on a daily cooldown, it could be a long time until these reach the auction house. I’ve also stocked up on Golden Lotus to make sure that I can keep myself stocked with raid flasks for personal use (or sale if the price goes up on my server to make them a viable selling option) as well as to be able to transmute gems if my stocks start to run low.
Show Me The Money!
328,675g
That’s dropped from last week by about 63k but I’m not worried as I expect to make that back with interest once the patch arrives!
There are many ways to make gold in World of Warcraft. You don’t have to choose one and ignore the rest, you can dabble in as many markets and types of income as you like. My health restricts gameplay that requires me to concentrate to a couple of hours each day, which is usually reserved for raiding. This means that the methods I choose to use to make gold are ones that require no endless killing of monsters or running of instances. My income is primarily through making purchases on the auction house and then selling those items on the auction house either in the same form or crafted into new ones. To help me in this, I have every crafting profession at maximum level although the introduction of so many time-consuming factions in this expansion containing crafting recipes does mean that some of the newer recipes are not available to me.
My stable income is usually from the things that people need to continually buy each time they get new useable loot: enchants of all types (including inscription and tailoring) and gems. I also like to keep a good stock of PvP armour and Glyphs on the AH, as while these are one off purchases they are quite popular.
It did occur to me just after I’d made the previous post that my gold funds would be dropping a lot before they go up as the new patch isn’t very far away. The reason for this is that with a new patch some items often have a greater demand and go up in price, as well as with a new tier of PvP and PvE gear players tend to find themselves purchasing more enchants than usual. With this in mind, I tend to stockpile items that I use regularly that I am expecting to go up in price so that I am not forced to suddenly pay a lot more than I usually do to acquire them. This enables me to have a larger profit margin when the patch hits. The investment will hopefully pay off in a few weeks when the patch arrives, but as with all things it is a bit of a gamble albeit a low risk one.
Show Me The Money!
391,696g
It surprised me to find that while stockpiling so much this week I still managed to make a small profit with my regular sales. I guess that mostly suggests I haven’t been stockpiling enough!
A quick note here about something I stumbled across today. As the second edition of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide has now been released, the first edition of the book is now free to read online at http://cfstreatment.blogspot.co.uk/
You can also find the details there for the new edition which will undoubtedly be much more thorough and up to date as so much more research has been done since the first book’s release in 1998, however the information in this first book is still very relevant.
For anyone wishing to know a little more about the illness of many names (CFIDS – chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome, CFS – Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, ME – Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) this is an easily accessible source of information that will not cost you a penny.
Over the past year, my health has been drastically worse whilst struggling to recover from my wedding. I’d hate to think how bad I might have been if I hadn’t restricted everything to 20 guests and a tiny, tiny quiet celebration. In this time, I’ve still been playing WoW, trying to learn a new expansion, trying to keep my raid team going etc. Some of it has been successful and some not. My guild struggled a lot and eventually had to close down its raid team. Many of the more active members of the guild stopped playing WoW and I barely did anything on AH at all aside from buy things to make myself smile or upgrade armour to allow me to catch up with other raiding characters.
With the funds I had stored I didn’t really need to worry about gold, so I just let it slip out of my mind and focussed on finding somewhere new to raid and on getting back to a stable health pattern again. Suddenly this week I noticed that my little nest egg had dropped all the way to around 400k. I realise that this may still be more gold than many players have as most do not enjoy spending many hours engaging in “AH PvP” as a friend of mine has been known to call it. For me though, this drop was horrific! The start of the expansion had seen me with over 2 million gold. My new raiding home had been sorted and I had caught up in item level with my new friends, but my gold balance was woefully lacking.
Time for a kick up the backside and some hard work!
It occurred to me that this would be a great time to document how I go about gaining gold in game. Many friends and guildmates ask how I manage to make money, so I shall endeavour to give an update and record of what I have been doing every Tuesday when I reach the end of my WoW week.
To prepare for my hard climb back to millionaire status, I have spent the past week checking on my auction house addons. By fortuitous coincidence, the new version of Tradeskill Manager was released this week, so I have spent a lot of time this week learning how to use the reworked features and in setting up endless groups from scratch. For anyone wanting to have a look, it is now available for public download at Curse and the TSM team have put a LOT of very hard work into it. It’s very special!
Show Me The Money!
Starting capital: 389,659g
With the distinct lack of new content in World of Warcraft at the moment, I have had very little incentive to blog about it, so I’m afraid that today is another ME/CFS related post.
One of my old school friends has a child with autism, and in her quests to try to understand him better in order to improve his life quality, she reads a lot and visits many websites. Today she linked me to a video on YouTube which was made to help show people without autism what the world looks like to someone on the autistic spectrum suffering from sensory sensitivity.
The video stunned me.
As I may have mentioned before, ME/CFS sufferers can experience a wide range of symptoms and the selection that one person may get will often differ from the selection of symptoms that the next person has. There are common symptoms that almost all people with an ME diagnosis have in common, but the list of secondary symptoms is a seemingly inexhaustible list that fate appears to take a random selection from. I think of it as a kiddies sweetie pick and mix in hell!
The reason that the autism video meant so much to me was that I suffer from sensory overload as a secondary symptom of ME/CFS as do a few of my friends. This was the first time I’d seen someone try to convey in video format what we see, hear and feel in a normal day. It had never occurred to me to try to show it this way. There are many illnesses and conditions that produce similar effects, for example it is frequently a symptom in PTSD cases. We try to explain to people what we mean, but its difficult to show someone.
This video attempts to convey the difference between someone that does not suffer from a form of sensory overload and one that does. The first view is that of most people, and the second with sensory overload. The brightness is a little overdone on the second clip from my experience, but it does get the point across. If you have ever wanted to understand a little more about autism or other conditions that have sensory overload as a symptom, have a little look. Maybe it will show you why I usually wear sunglasses even on cloudy days and often have earplugs in if I’m in the wheelchair!
One of the key problems for sufferers of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is that we are ignored. Our illness works against our ability to be seen and heard. ME is a difficult enough condition to try to explain to people, but trying to do it whilst exhausted and confused makes the task near impossible. Making public displays and being seen and heard in the community requires energy and many sufferers are unable to tolerate the noise and brightness that would be required to do something as simple as be present at a demonstration.
There was a time when I thought that all we needed was to have someone famous develop ME. Not that I’d wish it on anyone, but it seems that once a celebrity develops an illness the media are all over it. I realised after a while that it wouldn’t matter. There have been several celebrities diagnosed with ME including one of my idols, Michael Crawford. There’s plenty of interest in stories about these people but how good a story can you really make about someone lying in a dark room, without the energy to talk to you? We can’t fight our own battle, and the medical and governmental personnel that decided years ago to back the wrong treatment can shout louder and be seen. All we can do is rely on others to fight our battle for us. The people who have lived with the illness and managed to recover, the people who have cared or are still caring for severely afflicted ME sufferers or the few medical professionals that continue to fight for a cure.
Recently an hour long documentary film was produced in the UK by Natalie Boulton and Josh Biggs – the mother and brother of a severe ME sufferer. It has been assisted by many people giving their time and skills voluntarily to help us be heard.
You can find their official site here. Please help us be heard.
When my beta key arrived for the Mists of Pandaria beta, I was excited. I thought that while I might not manage to put in the endless hours that some of the more dedicated testers do, I am not afraid to give feedback and I tend to think about changes in a realistic way. I understand that the classes must all be balanced and while I might occasionally wish that a heal spell was more powerful or that I could do something that a different class does, I know that it would not be as much fun to play the game if my character was unfairly balanced against others.
I clearly hadn’t thought this through to the conclusion.
I thought the biggest problem with allowing so many people to test the beta would be that many wouldn’t understand the role of a beta tester and would just treat it like they were getting the game early and complain endlessly on the chat channels without ever providing Blizzard with feedback. I had forgotten what it was like to play the game without addons.
Now I know that most of you are probably thinking that this is going to turn into a sulky post about how the game isn’t as much fun without my addons – whinge whinge…
It isn’t. I totally understand and support Blizzard’s reasons for not enabling the use of third party addons at this time in the beta testing process. It would take forever to get the game ready for launch if half of the bug reports and character balance feedback that was coming in was actually due to problems in addon code rather than the game itself. A large part of the beta testing population are also testing for the first time and may not be very experienced in troubleshooting addon problems. All this I know and support wholeheartedly. However, I actually require some addons to modify the base game in order to be able to play at all. I have written here before about the addons I use and why they are essential to enable me to play. Without them, I struggle to do more than move around and hit a couple of abilities.
So the reality of beta testing for me is that I’m currently unable to test past the Pandaren start zone, and even doing that much has been a real struggle. My testing will have to wait until a few basic addons are allowed to be added.
Dwarf Wench 