Anexxia’s WoW Burning Crusade Classic (Classic TBC) Crafting Master Recipes List

 

When it comes to crafting in the early years of WoW, I was pretty serious about it. I made lists of my enchanting recipes, checklists of my Glyphs, and wish lists for rare patterns. As a completionist, I kept up my pursuit of those recipes until I got them, or the expansion came and went (oh hai there +4 Stats to Chest enchant that I STILL don’t have!)

That carried over to WoW Classic, where I made my initial guild a rare recipes and reputations tracker. With the official leak announcement of WoW Classic: TBC on Friday, I set to work to create a spreadsheet we could use to track Triumvirate‘s master crafters and the recipes we can make for the guild.

I’ll be using it as the basis of future content here, and wanted to share my work with the greater WoW Classic community as well.

My ask is that you share the link to this post to ensure folks are directed to the most current version of the spreadsheet, as it is likely to change over time, as the extent of “some changes” becomes known.

Happy TBC planning and theorycrafting!

My WoW Classic Druid Hybrid Healing Build

Druid Talents

I’ve got a secret to let you in on: Just because you *can* go all the way through to the bottom of Classic talent trees for any given spec doesn’t mean you *should*!

Over the years, talents and builds have become increasingly simplified. But during Vanilla, players regularly customized their builds based on how they planned to spend their time, with a goal of not having to pay their hard-earned gold to respec constantly.

That’s why even though I raid healed, my druid never put more than 31 points in her restoration build.  Never. Ever. Yet I was pretty much always at the top of the druid healing charts, and never ran out of mana. And I was a menace in PvP too. And that was all thanks to the way I spent my talent points.

Find and Enhance Your Classic Play Style

While there are some healers who loved the challenge of keeping their tanks alive, I wanted to keep *everyone* alive. That meant I needed a quickly replenished mana pool, and to downrank and heavily rely upon my HoTs. And that’s where the Balance talent tree came in.

In addition to buffing druid pew pew pew lazers, the Balance talent tree also provides crits for your healing spells and buffs your mana regen. Because all that moonfire spam comes at a high mana price.

My preferred talent build for early on in Vanilla was a variation on the “Moonglow” build. As my gear improves, I’ll shift things around and put more points into buffing my regrowth in the restoration tree. But at absolutely no time will you ever see me filling out one of the talent trees all the way down.

While it may take you some time to get into the groove with your Classic build, I encourage you to spend some time theorycrafting and trying out different talent builds until you find one that helps you get into the zone with how *you* want to play your class.

 

How to Find a Guild for WoW Classic

Greetings!

Now that we are in the home stretch for the Classic WoW launch, it’s time to start thinking about what you want to do in-game, and to find a guild that will be the right fit in which to do whatever that is.

That’s where I found myself a few weeks ago, when Blizzard announced the timing for the Classic WoW name reservations. Because if you only have three names you can reserve, well, you need to know *where* you’d like to reserve them.

In expansions past, when I’ve looked for a new guild, I’ve always started my search through my @Anexxia Twitter account. I tried that for Classic but didn’t find what I was looking for. I’m sure many others are in that same boat, so here is how I found my Classic guild.

TL&DR

You can play Alliance-side with me on Pagle by joining up with the Grievance Gaming guild. Read the call for members on the Battlenet forums, then submit your application on the Grievance Forums, and note that I sent you. And don’t forget to let me know you submitted your app!)

What’s Your Ideal Classic Guild?

In Vanilla WoW, I was in a raiding guild that was the 3rd progressed Alliance-side on our server. And it was a huge time sink. I know that raiding is still a priority, but I can’t commit to the same perfect attendance record. That’s why I went looking for a casual raiding guild.

To figure out the right guild for your Classic adventures, ask yourself these questions:

  • How much time do I have to play Classic WoW each week?
    • Do you have a big blog of time one day per week? A few hours each day?
  • What kinds of activities do you most enjoy in-game?
    • Do you like World PvP? RP? Raiding? Dungeons? Crafting?
  • What will your most likely play days and times be?
    • Does a Pacific or Eastern server and its typical playtimes work best for your availability?
  • What is the class and role you want to play?
    • And make sure it’s actually a thing. For instance, I’d blocked out that my first shadow priest wasn’t actually a gnome…because that was not possible!

Finding a WoW Classic Guild With the Right Fit

I’ve written many times in these pages about the importance of finding a guild that’s the right fit. In Classic, like Vanilla, you’re going to be spending a lot of time playing with people on your server—rather than Group Finder’ing it up with randoms from other servers. This makes finding a server with a good server population and community equally important to finding a guild you love.

Here are the Americas and Oceanic realm names and types:

PVE Servers

Name Type Time Zone
Atiesh Normal Pacific
Mankrik Normal Eastern
Myzrael Normal Pacific
Pagle Normal Eastern

PVP

Name Type Time Zone
Faerlina PvP Eastern
Fairbanks PvP Pacific
Herod PvP Eastern
Stalagg PvP Eastern
Thalnos PvP Eastern
Whitemane PvP Pacific

RP

Name Type Time Zone
Bloodsail Buccaneers RP Eastern
Grobbulus RP-PvP Pacific

Oceanic realms will be:

Name Type Time Zone
Arugal PvP Australian Eastern Time
Remulos Normal Australian Eastern Time

For EU realms, see this post on the forums.

New Ways to Build WoW Classic Community

In Vanilla, we had server-specific WoW forums. Today, we have Discord servers and WoW Classic realm subreddits to unite the Classic server communities. Here are the ones I’ve come across:

(A HUGE thank you to folks behind Classic Discord for making it easier to share Discord realm links. B/C I would not want to be updating the above list with expiring Discord invite links every few weeks!)

I highly recommend joining the realm subreddit and Discord to get a feel for who is playing on the server. If the conversation feels like a good fit, then check out the recruitment posts to see which guilds are a match for what you want to accomplish in game, and when you will be looking to play.

How to Make Your Classic WoW Guild App Shine

It’s likely that whatever guild you are applying to for Classic WoW will have their standard application that will be asking who you are, what you want to do in WoW Classic, when you are available to play, and what your gaming history is.

Some applicants shoot for getting through the app as quickly as possible. While you can still get an invite with a brief and to the point application, I always look at a guild app as a way to find your niche within the guild. Share a little bit of color about who you are IRL and what you consider to be some of the best times to be had in-game. give the guild members reading your app a reason to smile, laugh, or reply to your app!

Shameless Plug for Joining Grievance for WoW Classic

If you’re looking for a casual Alliance raiding guild for Classic, I encourage you to consider joining Grievance Gaming’s Classic guild on Pagel. Grievance is a family-oriented online gaming community with a very rich and honorable heritage that spans numerous online games over the past 19 years, during which Grievance has proven that one can have a very rewarding gaming experience, yet have a life as well. The concepts of family, honor, and loyalty are hallmarks of Grievance and are expected to be upheld and respected by all members. Read our official recruitment post on the WoW forums, then head on over to the Grievance Forums and submit your app, especially if you are a healer who wants to raid in Classic.

See you in (Classic) Azeroth!

P.S. If you’re a gnome and playing WoW retail, check out Gnomeregan Forever—it’s a guild that’s just your size!

A Time to Remember

This weekend, we celebrated the life of our Gnomeregan Forever guildmaster—and friend—Forbidra.

It was lovely to have so many players take time out of their day to share a few words about Forbs, or to simply join in the cheers of “Forbidra Forever!”

This show of support for Forbs—and for the gnomes—greatly touched me and my fellow guildmates.

In the crowd, I saw former members, Twitter friends, and Warcraft community leaders—especially the WRA guilds—all coming together to celebrate one gnome’s life’s work.

After the formal memorial, we marched in a procession to Ironforge, and set up shop in Tinkertown, sharing ale and stories.

Thank you so much to everyone who came out.

For more screenshots and remembrances, visit the #ForbidraForever Twitter moment.

Sometimes it’s the Small Things

Fishing chair! At last!

Why no that WASN’T a gnome pun, thank-you-very-much.

It’s just stopping to smell the flowers.

Or in this case, to sit in my newly obtained fishing chair.

My sweetie got the loot card for me for my birthday, but there was some sort of a redemption bug that took a very long time to sort out.

But after checking every few weeks, my mage was finally victorious and took the chair for a test-sit, as it were.

The verdict: this is the only way to fish.

What small things in game have made you smile this week?

What to Wear: The Shadow Priest’s Guide to The Emerald Nightmare

It’s been a very long while since I’ve put together a gear guide, but this seemed like a good time since my gnomies are about to start raiding.

Know Your Priorities

First things first, get to know your stat priority:

  • Haste
  • Critical Strike
  • Mastery
  • Intellect
  • Versatility

Note: If you take the Legacy of the Void or Mind Spike talents, you’ll swap #1 and #2 with each other, per Icy Veins.

Note that Noxxic has a different shadow priest stat priority (Intellect > Haste > Crit > Versatility > Mastery). I suggest you see what works best with your play style and gearing.

Gem Appropriately

Maximize Your Enchants

Shadow Priest Gear Priorities for The Emerald Nightmare

I’ve linked to the Wowhead page for the LFR version of each item; from there you can select your mode of choice to review the different stats. If you’re not sure which piece of gear to use, as you juggle ilevels and stats, consider using an addon such as Pawn to help you more easily determine which piece of gear is your best choice.

Cape

Chest

Feet

Hands

Helm

Legs

Neck

Relics

Rings

Shoulder

Trinkets

Waist

Wrist

Legion Thoughts

WoWScrnShot_051316_112132
Usually, silence on the blog means that I’m feeling disengaged with the game. But this time around it’s been quite the opposite.
As a very active participant in the Legion Alpha and Beta testing, I found myself completely caught up in the game for the first half of this year. In addition to trying out all the caster classes I usually play, I also leveled my Forsaken shadow priest to 110 and focused on leveling her tailoring, cooking, and fishing to max level.
Yes, that’s right…I leveled all those professions on a character who wasn’t going to be playable after the launch of the game…because I was having so much fun!
Fun!
The reason we play this game, right?
Which brings me to the other reason I’ve been quiet. I’ve been spending my live gaming time playing with a new guild. That’s right, I leveled several new gnomes after joining Gnomeregan Forever, an all-gnome guild on Wyrmrest Accord.
I’ve been trading tweets with the guild’s leader @gnomeregan4ever for several years now. And with the advent of gnome hunters with this expansion, it felt like to right time to go all-in on gnomification.
Although I’ve certainly internalized stories for my characters (and occasionally shared them here), this is my first time playing on an RP realm. And I have to say—I LOVE IT!
I’ve RP’d with a fellow fisherman on the Stormwind docks, who cheerfully shared his fishing tips (and Rumsey Rum) with me. I bantered with other bank alts on the difficulty of finding just the right outfit to project that serious but mischievous shopkeeper look.
And every day, as I am out and about in the world, I marvel at the seriously awesome outfits I see everyone wearing. In addition to the tier sets of years gone by, I’m so impressed by the very individualistic looks that the Wyrmrestians have put together. So you can definitely expect to see some fashion posts from me.
Suffice it to say this new server feels like home already. And we’re just getting started.
I promise you’ll be seeing a lot more from me on these pages soon. There’s just so much going on in-game right now that’s making me excited to log in every day. Here’s hoping it stays that way!

Initial thoughts on the Warcraft Legion alpha

WoWScrnShot_120415_180757

Why hello there. And yes, that IS a gnome hunter you see before you. A slightly confused survival hunter, mind you, but a gnome hunter all the same. And her trusty mechanical pet, Sparky.

Creating this gnome hunter was my first activity upon installing the Legion alpha. I thought it would be a good way to warm up before jumping into the expansion, given how many hunter alts I’ve levelled as of late. But it was actually a pretty strange experience due to survival being the only spec available to you. And survival being all about being a melee hunter.

Now, melee hunter is not an altogether new concept for me. I do recall being in Scholomance in vanilla WoW and having a melee hunter, who kept dying, as part of the dungeon group we’d assembled. But I honestly hadn’t given it another thought until we’d heard about the spec overhaul at Blizzcon this year. Luckily, my experience with the all new melee hunter spec did not involve lots of dying. The hatchet throw works well for pulling a mob away from an area that a patrol might walk too close to, and the harpoon shot is an efficient way to get you to melee range of your target. Right now, however, the leveling experience is a bit off. At level three you get a quest reward gun that you can’t use at all. In fact, you are using auto shot and your pet to slowly kill your mobs, thanks to your bare action bars. After a few levels of this minimalism, I was ready to check out the shadow priesting.

Continue reading “Initial thoughts on the Warcraft Legion alpha”