Tired of an empty guild, an empty, a very expensive Auction House, a newly dinged level 85 with no gold and a desire to try to get into some Horde side raiding I finally realised that keeping my Horde priest on a low pop realm and on a minority faction was a pointless exercise. I had considered a realm transfer a week ago but struggled on, the Blizzard hit me with an advert on the loading screen.

The timing was impeccable and I decided that with all the problems and the offer it was like a sign from the gods. My dear old friend, Gricey, happened to be online and on his Horde alt on Draenor EU and a few questions to him suggested it sounded like a suitable candidate for my new home. Then a trip to Warcraft Realms stats page confirmed that it could be a good realm but a couple of other realms also looked appealing so I rolled a couple of level 1 toons and set of for 30 minutes “spying” in Orgrimmar.

I was looking for signs of an active community, a active but not stupidly priced mats market on the Auction House what I was also looking for the treatment of the trade trolls a section of the wow community I have no respect for and will avoid at all costs. Draenor as a recommendation was my first visit it looked good financially as the AH was full and prices not to far off the prices I’m used to on Shadowsong EU. The one thing that I was worried about though was the spam in trade and lack of pug activity.

I also gave Kazzak EU a look and that ticked all the boxes and had a over stocked AH with rather low prices on mats and good prices on finished products meaning my tailoring and enchanting could be levelled up and then return an income, which is high priority as I have 200g left of my 7000g from last week after levelling enchanting to 350 (and getting ass raped for the price of the rods needed to do the enchants) and HATE farming for gold. Other realms that looked good were Defias Brotherhood and Stormscale but visits there didn’t give the same warm fuzzy feeling I got from the other 2 realms. It was hard to split Kazzak EU and Draenor EU so I decided to visit the realm forums and there was nothing to split the 2. In the end it came down to the AH prices and the sheer volume of pugs being advertised on Kazzak EU that sent me there. 

I was mad at myself for not doing this last week when I could have played the markets a bit with my 7000 gold and transferred some profitable items over to Kazzak EU, but with a measly 200g it simply wasn’t worth the effort of looking for items I could drag over with me. Mistakes, we all make them this one is recoverable. 

Next on my to do list is finding a full time guild there, but as I got invited to a level 25 "super guild" within a few minutes of logging on the immediate rush to do so has been removed as I can get the benefits of the guild perks already, but I have a good feeling that my Hordeside adventures will be much better after the move. 

more »

Mists of Pandaria has brought many cool new things and 3 of the key features for me are the fact that pets, mounts and achievements are now becoming account wide.

Pets are becoming account wide to facilitate the abomination that has been labelled Wowkemon around the community. But that aside the benefits of account-wide pets is bitter sweet sure it will save us all buying a pet multiple times and enabling us to use hard to acquire pets on our alts. The flip-side is that as an auction house player I'll have less opportunity to sell pets to other players in numbers. However, there are rumours of being able to sell battle pets and that may well be a better income stream than traditional pet sales anyway.

Mounts is pretty much the same deal and getting all my raiding achievement mounts on my alts will truly rock it also makes mount acquisition a bit faster if you can be bothered to grind rep with a faction on 2 characters simultaneously (Baradins Wardens/Argent Tournament). But the biggest win here for me is that Evlyxx will finally get the Baron's Mount that my deathknight, Nobunaga got a while back.

However the kicker are account-wide achievements. This for me is sweet and will allow me to recover my long lost TBC raiding achievements from when Evlyxx was an alt to my other priest purely because he was a tailor, in particular the Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal titles.

more »