Rift Beginner's guide Part 2

Continuing from yesterday with a crash course in how to play Rift we'll look at a few more points in the game that everybody should know when you first open it up. After I spend a little more time at the level cap I'll give you a once over of what dungeons and the like are all about.


Callings and souls.
A calling is your base class which pretty much just defines your armor type and how you want to play them. You have warrior, rogue, mage, and cleric to choose from. With each of these callings are several different souls to pick from of which you can have 3 at once. Each soul has it's own talent tree which decides if you're a wow hunter, a ranged rogue, a healing priest, dps priest, tank, or support class.

Support is a new role added into the typical mmo trinity. The support role is exactly what you think it would be, support. The entire soul tree is centered entirely around utility with things such as super awesome CC, aoe silences, snares, focused and raid healing counterparts to dps (1 damage also turns into 1 healing, not replaced) etc. Depending on how you spec and souls taken, you can be a very solid dps loaded up with utility. Fun stuff.

In other words there are dozens of different talent trees for you to look at and each one has a tool tip telling you what a recommended pairing is for it. Choosing talents is totally simple, take whatever adds to DPS, healing, or survival and grab utility with anything left over.


What's built in.
Since there are no addOns in the game currently, they made sure that almost everything you'd want comes already running by default. Unfortunately it is lacking in anything relating to the AH aside from the basic functions. Here's a few wow-esque addOns that come stock with the game.

Carbonite / quest helper: The awesome mini map and questing database from these two addOns is a much have for any game if you ask me. You get a note in an enemy's tooltip if they're for a quest, you can track them on your map and mini map and get yellow circles around the area the quest is at. Oh and the mini map is actually useful! In wow the mini map or compass were absolute garbage and had zero use what so ever, but the one in Rift has everything you'd expect it to have.

Map coordinates: Mouse over any pixel on the map and you see what coords you're pointing at. Winning. In addition to that you can right click and set a "way point" which is exactly what you think it is. It sets a marker on the map and you get a small arrow pointing you what direction to go in order to get to that point. You can only have one up at a time, but everybody in the group can set one.


Dynamic events.
The first are rifts which are entail a spawn point of baddies, mini quest, and unique loot. If you clear the stage that it's in within the time limit (if there is one) you'll get a bonus stage which is where all of the real goodies come from. Next are invasions and foot holds which are just a smaller version of a rift and only entail clearing a small pack of mobs to get some drops.

Lastly are epic invasions which are when dozens of rifts, footholds and invasions happen all over an entire zone at once. These are zone wide and totally massive. They require basically everyone in the zone to take part in a quest that gets added to your log by default to complete and get high end rewards and level appropriate epics.

If you're worried about there not being enough people doing them I took part in one the other day at like 2am and we cleared everything including the final boss with about 20 people total.

In addition to that, there is still good reason to do an epic invasion quest in a lowbie zone even if you're at 50. The rewards you get can be traded up for things you can sell to lower level players or special currencies you can use at any time at any level. Doing lower ones will give you lesser amounts than higher level ones of course, but you will still get a useful amount at any level.


Dynamic groups.
The big thing in Rift are world events that happen on the fly, some only need a small group of 2-3 people to do while others need an entire raid. To make this easier if you're group is trying to close a rift (spawn point of baddies, mini quest, unique loot) at the same time as another one is, both groups will be merged together automatically.

This is called being in a public group which the group leader can change any time they want by right clicking their picture and changing it from public to private. If your group goes above 5 people it'll be turned into a raid group which you can still invite more to and so forth. And as far as I know, you can still do regular quests while in a raid group and are not penalized for being in one.


PvP.
The same as wow. You can do world pvp if you're on the right server or flag yourself if you're on a carebear server. There are plenty of questing hubs and outposts for you to go explode if you feel so inclined. Be advised though that even at max level with decent gear, you won't be one shotting everything you come across and can easily lose a 1 on 3 battle if the 3 lowbies actually try to kill you.

The big difference here is that you have to select a certain pvp soul in order to compete instead of getting a ton of pvp gear just to not be exploded.


What am I playing?
I'm a dps warrior using the Paragon soul. Think fury warrior from TBC, dual wielding great aoe, and high sustained damage. My gf is playing a chloromancer mage which is a dps/healing support role. All of their damage heals either the group or an assigned target with certain buffs being handed out. So far every soul seems to have a solid niche that they can fit and do well in with their flavor of damage and such. Also of note is that you can have up to 5 different specs at once so there are plenty of options with a single calling.


Crafting and selling.
Ah what you've all been waiting for! Unfortunately there won't be anything here that you don't already know from wow. The only real difference here is the names of everything. The big thing to point out though is that every crafting profession has a set of daily quests you can do that you can start doing at level 1. Each quest is chosen randomly each day and at a max of 2 daily's per crafting profession. The reward is a fist full of assorted mats for that profession and tokens that are used to learn more recipes, think JC gem cuts but for every profession.

Each one of these quests requires you to turn in a number of crafted items to an NPC. The things you turn in don't have to be crafted though, so you can just buy them from the AH if they're cheaper than the mats and hand those over.

The prof daily quests (which reset at 4am server) scale with your current profession skill level and not your character level so you may get a quest at level 20 that needs you to deliver something to an NPC in a level 40 zone. I know, it happened to me many times. Also you can predict what you'll need to craft to a certain extent. The two crafting quests will want the highest tier material and the second highest material to craft something that you can make.

To put this into wow terms, Enchanting at 525 skill level would get one quest that needs maelstrom crystals and another quest needing heavenly shards. Below that you would have to craft something with GCE's and below that would be something needing hypnotic dust. I'm sure that's a tad confusing, but it's a lot harder to explain that it actually is. Once you check it out you'll understand completely.



Thanks for stopping by!

Rift Beginner's guide: Part 1

I've been playing rift for a month or so now and I've got a pretty strong grasp of the mechanics and game play. So for today and tomorrow you'll get to read a write up on the main differences between Rift and wow and a general overview of "how to play." Basically all of the questions that you'll have after your first 2 hours of the game will be answered here.


Money.
Gold, silver, copper has been turned into platinum, gold, silver. Same value and rarity as in wow but with different names. So anytime I say "plat" you can just translate that in your mind as gold in wow.


Mail.
It's instant between all players, but from the AH it's a little delayed. When you buy or cancel an auction it's delayed by around 45 seconds, but when you sell something it's instant. When you mail something add the item before typing in the name or it gets a tad temperamental.


Leveling.
If you wear plate, take 1 defensive talent and the rest dps and you're fine. If you go with a tank spec you can pull as much as you like usually, but things die VERY slowly. If you level as a healer it's the same as with wow, kill yourself. Your first purchase of a second spec is dirt cheap so being able to dps and heal or tank is no problem. It's all straight forward and easy to figure out. In fact, if you level a toon in wow to 60 without heirloom gear that's 20 times more of a nightmare than in rift.

Fun fact: I never enjoyed questing in wow. Ever. Not even on my first toon, I hated every single quest. None of them were slightly interesting minus like, 8 total. Meanwhile in rift, I'm having fun on at least half of the quests as they're interesting and have their own story in their own place. Not like blizz did in wrath and cata where every damned quests was either "zomg unded" or "zomg something's burning."


Best game mechanics.
Two things come to mind. One is automatic AoE looting. If you kill 10 mobs in the same spot once you loot one of them you auto loot them all. FUCKING WINNING! Like seriously, who ever made that call has got to have tiger's blood or something. After that is that you don't have to dismount to loot anything, don't have to wait 10 seconds before skinning a dead mob etc. Other cool things include when you need to kill a named mob but it's tagged, as long as you help kill it you still get credit. An when you're on a collect drops quest, everyone in the group can loot the quest item from the mob so you don't have to kill 10 bears for each person.


Talents.
Identical to wow for the most part. The main difference is that the more points you spend in a certain tree you'll get more abilities opened up. I don't mean that if you spend a talent point into X you'll get X skill. No it's more of a passive thing where 30 points into a tree will get you Y ability. That and you have talents that are like built in mastery where the more you spend there, the better you are at that role.


Mounts.
You can get your first one as soon as you can afford to buy it (2.5 plat), next at 40, and the last is at 50. With gold given from only quests I was able to afford my first one at around level 10.


Professions.
Identical to wow. Skill ups are green, yellow, and orange difficulties. The big difference here is that you can learn 3 at once and a lot of them are either splits of wow profs or combines. For example "Outfitter" crafts both cloth and leather gear, so it needs a leather gathering prof to supplement it. Meanwhile "Weaponsmith" is just what it sounds, a black smith that makes mostly weapons. Choose wisely. I went with outfitter, rune crafting (enchanting), and butchery (skinning).


Biggest thing missing from wow?
No addons, none, zero. They have stated that it's something they're considering for the future, but want to see how the game plays and the people go through it before they make a decision. In other words, the game is 2 months old fool! I think this is a good decision honestly, because unless you run the game right out of the box there's no way to really gauge the difficulty of learning and playing it. This is mostly from a developer's standpoint though. I'm sure that your average wow player has no problem working with addOns but if you're fairly new to the genre you'll be like a deer in headlights.


Bugs.
There aren't many bugs in the traditional sense, but there is a lot of things that I've noticed that make you wonder "why can't I do this?" By that I mean when a confirmation window pops up, you can't hit enter to say OK. Also the auto complete in the mail box is a bit temperamental. I'm positive that things like this will be fixed or added in later on as they've already handled a ton of this in the last patch or two. So in the mean time, be aware that there are still a few minor annoyances that you'll have to deal with.


Travel.
This is the most awesome change from wow right here. No more 10 minute flights from A to B! In every zone there is a portal that gives you instant travel to any other portal that you've come across thus far for a minor fee. And I do mean instant in the literal sense, you hit OK and you go to the loading screen and blam you're there. One per zone might not seem like a lot, but traveling on a mount is VERY simple when you stick to a road. In some zones that are much larger you'll find two of them there so the only hard part is finding them. And that's only hard if you have nobody at all to tell you where they are.


Thanks for stopping by!

Friendly reminder

Aloha all, I just wanted to check in and remind you that I'm going to be back to writing fairly soon. Bear in mind that I have a lot of stuff already written (over two weeks worth!) so it may seem a tad out of order as I was writing it as I leveled up and have since hit 50. Now that you've read my two entries on rift starter guides (you have read them haven't you?) you should be up to speed on everything you need to know so that you can understand what I'm saying when I talk specifics.

I'll be writing about making gold yes, but in Rift this time. All of the theory I mention then you can easily apply to any game with an AH and an established crafting system in place. The what and where is always important, but is trumped by the WHY every single time if you want to go far.

I'll be starting up again officially this coming Monday so be sure to check it out!


Thanks for stopping by!

Wow AH index

Today is my final entry on wow and it's going to be a simple index of my most important entries that I've written to date. I'll leave a link to this entry on the side so you will have easy access once I move onto writing about rift full time. I am beyond thrilled that all of you enjoyed my blog as I did writing it, but it's time for me to move onto something that I find more interesting.

Should you have any wow related questions, feel free to send an email to theahpile@gmail.com as I don't think I'll forget everything I've learned in 2 years over night. That and the fact that once new content and gems come out the methods and ideas will always apply.

Here are the most pertinent blog posts you will find here and possibly anywhere else. Each one deals with everything from pricing theory to campers to my massive list of what sells for a profit. Enjoy!


My credentials on the wow AH.
First gold cap: 1/18/10
1 Million gold: 5/7/2010
A fortune in 2 months
2 million gold: 5/1/11


Dealing with campers.
What every scribe asks 1
What every scribe asks 2
What every scribe asks 3
Vicious
Campers and greed
How do you kill that which has no life?


General AH theory.
Old markets are thriving markets
So sayeth the Stokpile
Dual monitors
Key ingredients
My specifics
The Method


Pricing theory.
Auction House Nirvana: Part 1
Auction House Nirvana: Part 2
Auction House Nirvana: Part 3


Buy, sell, and trade lists.
Comprehensive list of everything that sells.
Buying list
Best sellers
What DON'T I sell?


Profession specific guides.
Profession Overview: Inscription
Profession overview: Jewel crafting
Profession overview: Smithing & Leatherworking
Profession overview: Tailoring & Engineering
Profession overview: Enchanting
Low profit professions: Part 1
Low profit professions: Part 2
BoA enchanting guide


Off topic rants.
For the potential blogger
On raiding: PSA
A few gems from "Ask the devs"
Dungeon finder Call to arms (failure)
I bought the ultimate gold sink
Must nerd rage!


For those just starting up.
Where to start?
Profession Priorities
First place finishes last
Convert to goblinism and profit
Investments & Bracer enchants
Start up
Patience


Assorted tips.
Entry detailing the addOns I use
zeroAuctions set up guide
MS Excel enchanting price guide spread sheet
How much to Stokpile
Pro Tips



Thanks for stopping by!

A brave new world

And thus ends the great WoW empire of Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny. I have said just about everything that I have to say on the world of warcraft auction house and using it to make tons of gold quickly and easily so it's time to move on. As I mentioned last week I am moving over to Rift and am trying my hand at that game. Today's entry is to give all you a heads up for things to come with the blog.

First, the blog is going to be inactive for about a week or two while I figure some things out with the game. I'm level 50 right now which is the level cap, totally broke, and am getting my feet wet with some of the max level content in the game. I won't be raiding for a while as that needs some significant gear upgrades from the greens I'm in. Tomorrow I'll be posting an index of what I feel are the most important entries that I've made over the lifespan of my wow AH career as it were.

Soon I'll be writing up a beginner's guide to Rift so that anybody that is considering trying it out won't walk into it as a total newbie and can help others decide if it's even worth trying out. In addition to that, it will give any continuing readers a much better grasp of things that I'm talking about in my future writing on the game. I built an empire in wow and plan to do the same in this game eventually. But of course, such things take time and that means you'll get day to day updates on the things that I'm seeing and a bit of an intellectual head start should you move over to Rift as well.

I'll be writing about making the Rift moneys as well as anything that I find interesting about the end game content once I get up to it. I never really wrote much about wow end game because just about everyone who was reading already was having fun with it so there wasn't much of a point. But now with a brand new game, there's basically nothing at all out there.

As for me returning to wow again, I don't think it's very likely. I mean come on, I have 2 million gold and was the top DK dps on my server. I know my class inside and out and have no reason to log on when it isn't raid night. That doesn't really warrant a subscription fee if you ask me. Go do quests? No thanks, they're all the same with little to no story in them. Each one is a different rendition of "the shit is on fire" show. Pvp? I stopped playing during wrath because I was sick of guild hopping and am NOT going to do the same thing with arena teams. Achievements? I'm a goblin. I'm a very pragmatic person. Take that and guess how interested I am in killing 500,000 digital squirrels.


At the end of he day I'll still be writing regularly on the same topic as always, but with a different flavor topping. Once I get a bit more figured out and shed my newbie skin I'll give a full write up on the game, a few classes that I'm familiar with, the whole crafting and auctioning thing, and the obligatory how to make mega muneh! The idea behind writing about the game in depth before I get into the AH part of it all is two fold.

One is so that you, my dear readers, will be able to understand wtf I'm going on about and get a grasp of some new in game lingo. And the second is so that I have some time to actually figure things out for myself. The Stokpile Method doesn't work well if you have to count your pennies and go for broke when you buy a mount. So stay tuned, more quality and original content is coming soon! I'll be posting regularly again in two weeks time with a crash course in Rift game play being posted next week.


See ya then.

Like I always say...

Have you noticed how often I use the phrase "like I always say" in my blog? Well I have and it seems that it's almost every week that I say it. Throughout the lifespan of this blog I've repeated certain phrases and catch phrases of sorts fairly often. I do this for a couple of reasons. One is to drill it into your head because it's that important. And the other is because it's a very easy way to get people to learn, simple expressions can be remembered easily and morphed into your own version of it to fit your situation. So I took some time looking over older entries and came up with a handful of my most common expressions for you to put to use. Immediately!


A winner always knows where they're going. A champion never forgets where they're from.
This one is all about fun and respect. Be respectful to other people, both the morons and the competing AH barons. There is simply never a reason to be rude until you're insulted. Always have fun while you play the AH, even if you are driven to hit 1 million stop the moment it's no longer fun.


The most valuable thing you can have is time.
Going against the goblin adage of "time is money" a bit here. Yes you can make easy money prospecting, but how long does it take? When people call something easy, they always forget the whole "time consuming" part of it all. If you're spending a few hours a day working glyphs from the milling all the way up to posting and only making 5k a day... just stop. Please, please, PLEASE value your time a tad more than that. And I don't just mean your in game time, because your game time cuts into your living time. Do you really want to be 60 and look back remembering the week you spent 4 hours every night hitting a "mill herbs" macro? I should hope not.


Music is awesome.
Check out Korpiklanni, great folk metal. Here's a drinking song they wrote that is perfect for everybody. Ok I don't really say that a lot, but they're awesome regardless. Go watch and come back when it's done!


Have a reason that's more than just gold.
Obvious reason is obvious. If you're only playing the AH for cash, you won't get very far. The asshole (me) that undercuts your 300g gem down to 180g is going to really piss you off because you're losing a lot of gold by undercutting them and not selling at 299.99.99 like you want to. If money is your only motivator you're likely going to be very lonely on the AH (and usually IRL if you watch the greediest of the greedy play house) and will be driven out of markets very easily.

Now before you piss and moan "you're wrong Stokpile, I'll just come back when prices are high again" remember that the asshole 100g undercutter that pushed you out (me again) just made 50k profit from the market you left because you left it. If you would have stayed in you'd have 20k from that market and not a fat ZERO. Granted I have a zero as well each week. In fact I have 6 of them all in a row...


Don't forget the small fish.
Always sell everything, even if it's only for a few gold and goes slowly. If it goes slow then there's going to be maybe 1 other person that sells it. In other words you can dictate the price of it, set it, and forget about it. These types of niche markets I just love. Zero thought required and barely any effort involved. If you look at my enchanting numbers and all of the scrolls I sell on the list, you'll that there's a reason I keep to this.


Persistence
When you find a method that works great for you, don't worry about what I say. Do it and keep doing it, it's usually not a good idea to fix something that isn't broken. But that is entirely relative of course. If your method makes you 20k profit a week working a dozen markets while mine made me 240k profit in a single week, well, you've got some thinking to do.

Consistence
Now that you're sticking with the same method, you just have to make sure that you take care of your business every single day at least once. Do your cancel/craft/cancel/post cycle in it's entirety at least once a day and keep at it. If you do, you'll be at the 1 million gold cap 10 times faster than if you didn't. In the time that you're not selling, others are and are getting a stronger hold on the market while you're losing yours. The short hand version of this is to once again weigh your effort against your profits and determine if they're worth it. Time is valuable, remember?


Thanks for stopping by!

The G/Hour Misconception

One thing that really bothers me is when people talk about gold per hour. That is, the amount of gold you get in a given time frame doing a specific set of tasks. You can also relate this theory, and it is only just a theory, to the 80/20 rule where 80% of your gold must come from only 20% of your effort. Unfortunately both of these theories are almost impossible to quantify with any degree of accuracy.

Mind you I am not in any way saying that guessing your G/hour is pointless or always going to be wrong or a piece of information that has no meaning. No, I'm only going to try today to clear up an extremely popular misconception about the whole idea. One which just about everybody in the AH game likes to either ignore it or simply take g/hour as the word of god.

The only exception to g/h being immeasurable is farming a very specific group of mobs and skinning while alone or something along the lines of the shuffle when you vendor absolutely everything. You spend X time prospecting, Y time cutting gems, and Z time vendoring. Each one of those steps has an exact value attached to it which you can easily multiply and add accordingly. Hmmm, but what if you AH the rare gems? What if you like to DE carnelian spikes and turn them into scrolls to sell? Now it's suddenly impossible to calculate with any degree of certainty what so ever. This is where the problem comes in.

Let me give you the typical fallacy of the g/h myth. Actually it's more of a misuse of the theory than it is a misconception is certain cases. But that's just semantics, moving on. Here's the example: buy a widget from a vendor for 1g (copper rod, local cooking recipe, etc.) and place it on auction for 10g. That has taken you about 30 seconds to do so far. The items then sells for 11g, which gives you a 10g profit. What the typical person does here is instantly jumps forward in time to "omg I just made 10g in only 30 seconds! That means my gold per hours is 1200! Go me I'm gonna be rich tomorrow!"

Ok here's the first problem in why this is entirely wrong. You're completely skipping the 38 hours it took for that copper rod to sell. so rounding up here, that means that your g/hour from selling copper rods is somewhere in the range of... less that a friggin copper. Should you still sell copper rods? Of course. Is it great gold per hour? Obviously not.

The second problem here is another that is so staggeringly obvious that I'm shocked nobody has mentioned it before. These copper rods, these vendor recipes, these pets, you don't buy them from one vendor for 5g and sell them to another vendor for 20. You sell them to a person. A person who is either a moron, lazy, uninformed, or plain doesn't care what they spend on what. That person is not always there, the vendor that buys your common gems for 5g is always there.

So not only do these pro tips of slow selling items not make even a fraction of the gold per hour as they claim, they don't always have a person to sell to. Once you take these two things into account you'll have a much better chance of improving your actual gold per hours. Look a little bit deeper and you'll see that this whole time I've been repeating another one of my many AH motto's. Know your market. Know your customer.

To really make the g/hour theory applicable to anything is to add in one other part to the equation: repetition. If you get a world boe from an instance that you sell for 20k, your g/h is NOT 20k per dungeon run. So maybe make it like (gold / hour) / T where T is how much time you'd have to spend so that it can be repeated.

In the end, what you should be doing is what I keep telling you to do every Tuesday, look at the bottom lines first. Take the amount of time total that you spend working the AH, crafting, posting, collecting and everything else that goes into it. Tally that all up and then total up all of the gold you made for that day or week and put them together. That is what your real gold per hour is. Is that easy to do? No not really actually, I know because I've done it. But is it accurate? It is as honest about your g/h as you are. So when somebody claims an amazingly simple method of 600g/hour be wary as it is practically guaranteed that it isn't consistent.


Thanks for stopping by!