Once you hit Outland and begin to surf through the materials required to not only reach 375 in your given profession, but then to proceed through making your epic sets, you might start feeling a tad dizzy. One of the main reasons for this across all crafting professions is primals.
As an example, let's consider the Ebon Netherscale pieces from Dragonscale leatherworking. In order to make the breastplate, bracers and belt, you will need, among other things: 36 [Primal Fire], 36 [Primal Shadow] and 3 [Primal Nether]. In other words, 360 [Mote of Fire] and 360 [Mote of Shadow], and this only once you've reached 375.
This week, Insider Trader explores the best places to farm for the motes you'll be needing, along with the benefits provided by engineering, alchemy, mining and herbalism. We also take a look at how to benefit from trades, with a list of further reading.
Each week, Insider Trader takes you behind the scenes of the bustling sub-culture of professional craftsmen, examining the profitable, the tragically lacking, and the methods behind the madness. For more farming guides, check out our cloth farming guide. For a complete list of profession guides, feel free to peruse our directory.
As many servers approach Phase 3, we're going to be one step ahead as always and make sure you're all prepared the day Phase 4 hits. It'll be some time before anyone reaches it I'm sure, but if you're anything like me, you always want to know what is on the horizon.
Phase 4 concludes the taking of Quel'Danas and the progressive content, thus some of the quests are simple things like putting the finishing touches on the new Shattered Sun Stronghold. However, there are still a few things that need some work. This phase will focus on an Alchemy Lab and a super cool statue to plant in the middle of the freshly taken town.
Read on for more information on Phase 4, as well as links to guides for each of the new quests you'll encounter!
The first daily quest of Phase 4 of the reclaiming of Quel'Danas is Discovering Your Roots. This quest begins at the newly unlocked Alchemy Vendor, Mar'nah. Of course, she has been unlocked, but not her stock. She claims to need a special reagents for that: Razorthorn Root. She says it's fairly difficult to harvest, but this quest shouldn't give anybody too much trouble.
After accepting this quest, fly out to Razorthorn Rise. This region is directly on the border between Terokkar Forest and Hellfire Peninsula, up in the mountains. If you cant find it, just look at the picture above.
This is similar to the quest I Was A Lot Of Things... from Shadowmoon Valley, in that you need to use some local beasts to dig up your plants for you. Luckily, you don't need to rely on the intelligence of some dumb pig that gets massacred by all of the nearby monsters and turns on you if you accidentally hit an AOE. You get to control the Ravager you'll use to dig up your five required Razorthorn Roots.
Acquired from Anchorite Ayuri just outside of Sun's Reach Sanctum, A Charitable Donation marks the final step on the reclaiming of Quel'Danas and the construction of the Shattered Sun Stronghold. It isn't a daily quest so much as it is a daily reputation vendor.
It's easy to look at the quest and get angry, because it's a fairly obvious money sink. Give 10 gold, get 150 reputation. Keep in mind that it's completely optional, and the only thing it unlocks is a little flavor for the world. If you don't want to do it, don't do it, don't feel bad avoiding it. It won't hurt anybody.
If you do want to contribute, though, donating that 10 gold moves the server toward earning a pretty neat thing. After enough donations, a statue will be built commemorating those that died in the battle for the Sunwell Plateau, and the friends and family they left behind. It is also a sign of unity between the Aldor and the Scryers; the monument has two sides, one with a Draenei and one with a Blood Elf. It has no real effect on the world, but it's pretty cool to look at.
As I mentioned, this quest is basically a reputation vendor. You buy reputation, and this can only be done once a day. You pay 10 gold and get 150 SSO rep, so if you run one of the easy dailies(such as Distraction at the Dead Scar) for roughly 10 gold and 250 rep, you can turn that into a total of 400 rep. That sure beats buying Coilfang Armaments for 25 gold each, to turn in for 75 reputation. If you do this quest regularly, you can shave a few Magisters' Terrace runs off of your grind to Exalted.
As always, if you need to know more about this quest, take a look at Wowwiki or Wowhead!
Unfortunately for Anchorite Ayuri, it seems that not so many people were willing to donate 10 gold to her thoughtful cause. Luckily, Anchorite Kairthos is here to tempt those of us with overflowing wallets to donate a little more.
A Magnanimous Benefactor is a one time only quest found at the top of the Sun's Reach Harbor inn that can only be acquired at Exalted reputation. If A Charitable Donation was a money sink, A Magnanimous Benefactor is a money black hole. The reward is very, very cool, though. For the low, low price(donation!) of 1,000 gold, you will be awarded a title, 'of the Shattered Sun.' For example, I would become Alex of the Shattered Sun. Sweet.
Now, a thousand gold is a steep price, but in my opinion this is one of the cooler titles in the game. My main has Hand of A'dal, but Of the Shattered Sun sounds way, way cooler, even if Hand of A'dal has more prestige. This title is also unique in that you can acquire it purely through solo play. Justicar/Conqueror can be gotten through semi-solo play, but you need to join groups and raids in Battlegrounds. Plus, it takes way longer to get.
If you're Exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive, you probably have far more than 1,000 gold. All of those daily quests(and/or Magisters' Terrace runs) up to Exalted? Go ahead, spend 1,000 gold. Have something to show for that work.
Methedras asks once again over on WoW LJ if now is a good time to be playing the old Warcraft RTS games, and, actually no, now is probably not a good time to be playing them. You should probably be heading up to the Isle of Quel'danas and helping your realm and the Shattered Sun get those dailies unlocked.
But yes, after patch 2.4 has quenched your interest in the World of Warcraft for a while, now would be a perfect time to play Warcraft III and its expansion, the Frozen Throne. Because we are right smack dab in the thick of the lore following both of those games -- Illidan and Kael'thas' stories have just finished, and the main event, with Arthas Menethil, is just about to start in Northrend. Up until the end of Wrath of the Lich King (and we're just now reaching the end of the Burning Crusade), World of Warcraft was really just a gigantic, cross-genre, extremely involved and detailed sequel to Blizzard's earlier Warcraft games.
There are other places to go beyond this, however, of course, and we've discussed a lot of them before (and will again, no doubt). But yes, if you haven't played the RTS games yet, you've already missed half of the story. Now would be a great time to play them, before you miss the second (and in my estimation, much more interesting) half.
Originally, there was only one way to obtain Badges of Justice: Heroic bosses. Now there are a couple more: Heroic daily quests as well as raids. Still, there hasn't been a way for the die-hard solo player to get their hands on some badges -- until now. The Shattered Sun Offensive (SSO), the new faction associated with patch 2.4, assigns many daily quests (to help you fill the new 25-dailies-a-day limit). Several of these quests reward you with Shattered Sun Supplies, a box which contains a high-level green item, and also -- coming to my point -- has a chance to contain a Badge of Justice.
According to Wowhead, there are seven dailies that reward Shattered Sun Supplies. Some of them are apparently only available during certain phases of the SSO effort, so let's say you can do five of these per day. I don't have numbers on how often the supplies contain a Badge, but let's say it's a 50% chance, based on one comment that Badges are contained "more often than not." So on average, you could get 2.5 Badges per day just by doing these daily quests, which means 60 days to get one of those snazzy new 150-badge weapons. That's a long time, but arguably justified by the fact that these quests are probably pretty easy. Overall, this is, in my opinion, an excellent enhancement to the Badge system. Your thoughts?
Update: Suzaku questions my hypothetical 50% drop rate in a comment. Obviously, the impact of these badges will depend on how frequent they are, and we just don't have solid numbers on that yet. Not to mention it may change during testing.
Friday afternoon, when I checked the PTR, only about thirty percent progress had been made on retaking the Sun's Reach Armory. Less than twenty four hours later, we were about ten percent into the next phase, retaking Sun's Reach Harbor. Either a lot of new testers hit the PTR due to the weekend and the new patch build or Blizz helped us along. Either way, here's a quick overview of the new content that's unlocked in this third phase of the Shattered Sun Offensive.
Once the Armory is retaken, it's filled with Shattered Sun guards, three new daily quests become available and several new vendors are spawned in the building. Dragonhawks, piloted by Kael's minions, circle the building, doing battle with the archers on the upper level. On the bottom floor, you'll find an ammo vendor, the only one I've been able to find on the Isle. Upstairs are several new "Exotic Gear Purveyors". This is where you'll find all the PvP gear available for Badges of Justice or T4/5/6 armor tokens.
Once upon a time, titles were markers of PvP status. In the old PvP system (before patch 2.0), people who had attained a particular PvP rank had the option of showing it next to their name; I never got past "Captain," but it was fun all the same. With the new PvP system, though, the ability to gain these titles were removed from the game, though as I recall players retained the highest rank they had ever achieved as an optional title. Shortly following this development, Blizzard announced that they intended to expand the title system, giving them out to players for various achievements PvP and PvE alike.
The second phase of quest and NPC progression on the Isle of Quel'danas began a couple days ago on the US PvE PTR. Yesterday I covered the retaking of Sun's Reach Sanctum and the second phase is all about the building just across the road, the Sun's Reach Armory. The Armory is infested with demons, as you can see in the screenshot, and the new daily quests are all about driving them away.
First of all, let me state that the daily quests from phase one were still available on the PTR even after the Sanctum was taken from the Wretched. The names and quest text are a little different to reflect the changed state of the Isle, but the quest objectives and rewards remain exactly the same. It should be safe to assume that this trend will continue throughout every stage of the Shattered Sun Offensive.
When you first arrive at the new zone, the Isle of Quel'danas, in patch 2.4, you'll find a chaotic scene, even if there aren't hundreds of naked, level two Blood Elves running around getting slaughtered by level seventy creatures, as there are on the PTR. The Shattered Sun Offensive, the united group of Scryers and Aldor, have a small presence on the isle, consisting of a few tents and a boat, and they're combating a large group of demons and Blood Elves. As time goes on and more daily quests are completed, the new faction will gradually retake buildings on the isle, unlocking vendors, quest givers and a portal to Shattrath. Here's a quick run down of the quests and NPCs involved in the first phase of the offensive, which came to a close a couple of days ago on the US PvE PTR.
The first building that is retaken is the Sun's Reach Sanctum, pictured above. It's infested with Wretched, the undead-looking, lowest form of Blood Elves and it's security measures are non-functioning. This of course leads to our first daily quest, "The Sanctum Wards". In this quest, you must obtain four Mana Remnants from the Wretched and then use them on one of the large red crystals near the Sanctum to help recharge them. The crystals are wards that, when recharged, begin to zap nearby baddies with magic. Basically, you need to kill a few Wretched (the drop rate of the quest items is pretty high) and then click on the items in your bag while standing near a crystal. This quest was quick and easy to complete even with a lot of competition from other players.
Each week, Insider Trader takes you behind the scenes of the bustling sub-culture of professional craftsmen, examining the profitable, the tragically lacking, and the methods behind the madness. For more farming guides, check out our cloth farming guide. For a complete list of profession guides, feel free to peruse our directory.
Methedras asks once again over on WoW LJ if now is a good time to be 
Originally, there was only one way to obtain 
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