Earlier today I was perusing the official WoW forums, looking for any new info about our favorite game, when I noticed a particular post. Warla, the player in question, was announcing that they had collected all of the cooking recipes in the game. At first glance, this might not seem like much of an accomplishment, but there are a lot of recipes that are more readily available to one faction or the other, such as Dig Rat Stew. Taking into consideration that Warla is on a PvP server and can't easily do a trade through the neutral auction house, this is actually quite a feat.

I'm not really a perfectionist when it comes to my professions (and I'm definitely not the type who would announce such accomplishments in a public forum), but I have known other people that were. One guy I know is a blacksmith and spent hours researching and tracking down every last pattern that was available to him. The same guy was making a point to complete every single available quest in the game too, so his blacksmithing goal wasn't really his loftiest.

One of the most sought-after items in the latest patch is undoubtedly the design for the new meta gem, the Chaotic Skyfire Diamond. On my server, the Coilskar Sirens who drop the item in question have been camped incessantly since players were able to log into the game yesterday afternoon. This is understandable, since the gem is now the best of its type for most raiding DPS casters and is in high demand.

Unfortunately the recipe may be bugged. Most patterns that drop off of specific creatures are bind-on-pickup and can only be farmed by those characters that actually have the profession required to learn the recipe. For instance, the pattern for Ragesteel Shoulders can only be looted by blacksmiths. Recipes that can be looted by any character tend to be world drops and do not bind-on-pickup. The plans for the Eternium Runed Blade is an example of this type of item. On the other hand, the design for the Chaotic Skyfire Diamond lives up to its name and doesn't follow the trends already set in WoW. It is not bind-on-pickup, but it drops from specific creatures and only seems to be appearing for jewelcrafters, at least according to the data and comments on Wowhead.

What have your experiences with this pattern been like? I wasn't able to farm it up on any of my characters aside from my jewelcrafter, even after spending quite awhile killing Sirens. Did you experience something similar?

The other day I listed the items that will be used in new recipes after the patch. I did miss a few things, but with your helpful comments, I've updated the original article to be more complete. I'll mention again that it's difficult to make predictions on what will sell the best, but nonetheless I've decided to list some of my thoughts on the subject below.

Nearly every patch includes new items for players to farm up. While these additions are typically new tradeskill recipes, occasionally other goodies are thrown into the mix. The upcoming patch 2.3 contains both of these types of items for your farming pleasure (or annoyance). I'll quickly cover the items, where they're dropping and the creatures that drop them in order to create a consolidated resource to help plan your farming once the patch hits the live realms.

First off is the new leatherworking bag. The pattern for the Bag of Many Hides can be found through the mass slaughter of the Gordunni ogres in the Barrier Hills above Aldor Rise in Shattrath. This recipe will allow a leatherworker to create a 24 slot bag to hold the essential tools and materials of their trade.

Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader -- your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Want to make a completist crafter crit in his pants? Give him a good whiff of something he may not even have know existed: Alliance- and Horde-only patterns. "What?!? They've got stuff I don't have?" That's right -- each faction enjoys a variety of profession patterns available only to that side via quests or faction-specific vendors.

While most of these patterns are low- to mid-level frills, plenty of entrepreneurial crafters find them meaty (or profitable) enough to be worth jumping through hoops for. Beyond the satisfaction of having literally all of the available patterns in a particular trade, craftspeople may actually carve out a niche crafting items for players on their faction who don't normally have access to them.

The neutral Auction Houses are a crafter's bread and butter when it comes to finding these patterns, although having a friend on the other side is even better. Almost all of these patterns (and the items they create) are tradable, although you'll find a pair of Alliance cooking patterns listed that remain stubbornly marked Bind on Pickup. But most are available for cross-faction movement via the neutral auction houses. There aren't many new Burning Crusade-era patterns to track down and agonize over, though -- just one lone Draenei pattern (listed after the jump). It seems that the bitter tears of Horde herbalists pining for Herbalist's Gloves washed the faction-specific pattern trend right down the drain.

Read more for a list of faction-specific crafting patterns.

My priest has been, for some time now, looking for a pattern for the Truefaith Vestments - the epic crafted priest robes. While I would occasionally see a Robe of the Archmage or a Robe of the Void pattern, I've not seen any of my own. However, over the past couple of weeks, I've seen more and more Robe of the Archmage patterns - as seen above. The cost has dropped dramatically, as well - what once sold for a hundred gold and up is now, as you see, more often selling for 30 to 40, when they sell at all.

This has started to puzzle me, as the pattern drops off of Pyromancers in lower Blackrock Spire, of which there are few, and difficult to get to. I've gone with a number of groups that refuses to attempt the pull with the Pyromancers, simply because it's large and difficult. So where then, do these patterns come from? Several commenters on Thottbot claim that you can solo your way to the right area with the use of stealth or invisibility potions, and one poster goes into some detail about two rogues taking the group down with timely use of sap, vanish, and evasion.

But even if the pattern can be acquired with the efforts of one or two players, this doesn't explain the sudden appearance of so many in the marketplace. It's possible that the drop rate has been increased, but it seems unlikely that the drop rate of one of the epic robe patterns would go up while the other two remain the same. In my past experience with the game, a sudden flood of rare items on the market has been an indication of a new farming technique or hack, allowing farmers to now easily acquire something that was usually difficult. (For an example of similar circumstances in the past, see this old Dire Maul hack.) However, at present, there's no evidence one way or the other - so this remains simply an oddity...