the Darkmoon Amulet

[Ynir]

Let's compare the properties of the following items:

Eye of Hakkar
+1 %crit
40 AP

Myrimidon's Signet
+10 str
+7 agi
+17 sta

Darkmoon Faire Amulet
+10 str
+19 agi
+10 sta

All of these baubles look very tasty. Spangles will not confront Hakkar for quite a while, however. The Signet is a world drop, 0.3% from Spectral Tutors in Scholo, among other places. I last saw it at AH for 800g, triple what it is worth. The Darkmoon Faire equivalent is looking really good.

The Darkmoon Faire is described here:

http://www.goblinworkshop.com/darkmoon-faire.html

although some of this may be out of date.

After scratching around in the forums and on Thott, it is apparent that the first increment of Darkmoon Faire rep is obtained most easily by farming Vibrant Plumes from Screeching Harpies in the mid-southern sector of 1000 Needles. The drop rate is about 13%, and the harpies spawn very quickly.

Of 1200 tickets required to get the amulet, it seems that a maximum of 276 (for non-humans) can be obtained by turning in plumes:

276 tickets / 12 tickets per turn-in = 23 turn-ins
23 turn-ins * 5 plumes per turn-in = 115 plumes

This is an afternoon's work, in the best level 30 farming zone that I have ever seen. Plumes, 50s greens, and iron veins in abundance. Spangles has accumulated 40 plumes so far, mostly by agreeing to go away while someone else levels there, and receiving plumes in the mail.

Viable turn-in options for the remaining 930 tickets are dense grinding stones, rugged armor kits, or thorium widgets. The logistics of handing off 1500 dense stone or rugged leather to someone else for processing are overwhelming, however.

Spangles could farm bat eyes in EP and look for Blood of Heroes at the same time. But she won't. That's that.

Owewa, level 35 lock and 315 engineer, makes thorium widgets for Spangles' activities in DM and EP. We need to make widgets sufficient for 930 tickets:

930 tickets / 20 tickets per turn-in = 47 turn-ins
47 turn-ins * 6 widgets per turn-in = 282 widgets

1 widget = 3 thorium bar + 1 runecloth

282 widgets = 846 thorium bars / 20 per stack = 43 stacks thorium bars
= 282 runecloth / 20 per stack = 15 stacks runecloth

Spangles is a major runecloth supplier to the IF AH, and has plenty on her auctioneer alt. Ynir, the miner/herbist druid, is too young at level 26 to help. So the price of the amulet is the price of 43 stacks of thorium bars. We value the amulet at 200g max, so that equates to 3g to 5g per stack.

Owewa, like all engineers, has absolutely no space to store anything. The postage required to shuffle mats and widgets around is the hidden cost in this enterprise.

I read, but don't know for sure, that vibrant plumes sell for 50s apiece. Widgets are often materials cost, or less, when someone dumps a bag of skillups. I wonder if those prices spike during the Faire, however. The price of dense stone was skewed upwards, last I looked.

PS. This project pales in comparison with obtaining revered faction with the Thorium Brotherhood to get the Mighty Intellect (+22 int to Weapon) enchant:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Thorium_Brotherhood

Assuming Spangles can farm 1200 gold to buy 2400 dark iron ore, how will she barge them to Lokhtos Darkbargainer in the Grim Guzzler Tavern?

[Mavfin]

I guess it's all in how you look at it. The grind for the Darkmoon necklace is the kind of thing to drive me nots, but YMMV. Good luck!

[Bun-Bun]

I guess it's all in how you look at it.  The grind for the Darkmoon necklace is the kind of thing to drive me nots, but YMMV.  Good luck!
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It's a way to get a decent ammy without having to raid. It looks like it has awfully nice stats for a druid, and some joy for a hunter as well.

And once Hykim dumps out her Rugged Armor Kits and various animal bits at the next Darkmoon, she'll be over 600 tickets. :)

[Concillian]

I have the Darkmoon Amy on my warrior.

There is a horde quest that makes plume-farming VERY easy, I got the required plumes for 300 tickets in about three hours including travel time to the faire by doing the level 30 quest "Test of Endurance" repeatedly (break 1 box, 10 harpies come, break another 10 more come, I was averaging about 1 plume per minute when zoned into pure grind mode). This is not a common quest and many horde 60s will never have completed it.

The farming of that cave is much more drudgery without that quest. And you are largely out of the way of people who are leveling, since you're way in the back of the cave. If someone comes by needing the quest, they are generally happy to have someone finish the quest for them in exchange for the plumes they have.

non-humans can get 317 tickets from plumes alone, humans have their rep bonus, that cute them off early.

The rest I got just using the thorium and dense stone I got while mining up arcane crystals. Mav can attest that I was doing a lot of mining at the time. I needed to get BS to 300 anyway, and the widgets got my Warlock's engineering up to 300. I did the whole thing in less than a month wihtout having to specifically grind for Darkmoon, I was grinding for BS and engineering, by the time it was for darkmoon, I was so close to 1200 I didn't mind the drudgery of mining. Plus I'm still 12 arcane crystals short of arcanite needed for my warlock mount and the remaining crafted warrior items (ET helm and Stronghold gaunts)

In grinding silithus rep you will get scorpid blood with reasonable regularity, but you run out of quests for scorpids pretty quick, and they are no use for pure rep grinding. I ended up with about 10 (only 1 turn in) in doing the quests there.

It is reasonably easily obtainable, but it takes TIME.

I do feel it's the best easily obtainable DPS ammy for warriors, the Fordring necklace beats it out (marginally) for offensive stats, but the Darkmoon ammy adds quite a bit of defensive stats for a very small loss in offense. You've already seen what some defensive bonuses can do for grinding in terms of how often you have to eat/bandage.

[Concillian]

I read, but don't know for sure, that vibrant plumes sell for 50s apiece. Widgets are often materials cost, or less, when someone dumps a bag of skillups. I wonder if those prices spike during the Faire, however. The price of dense stone was skewed upwards, last I looked.
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These prices absolutely spike during the faire. At least on Terenas.

During the faire, I was pricing dense grinding stones and they were about 6-7g per turn in (8). But lately I've been buying dense stones at ~2g per stack (2 stacks = 1 turn in).

I sell widgets on a regular basis, and they go for well over materials cost. Thorium is usually 5-7g per stack and runecloth 1g - 1g50s. this puts each widget between 80s and 1g15s. But I put them up one at a time for tribute runners at 1g 75 and I usually sell 2 per day. Sometimes someone dumps a bunch on the AH, but then I let them pass and go back to my 2 per day. There seem to not be a lot of engineers making widgets.

For widgets at faire time I saw the price actually decline as more people were putting up stacks of them. they were hovering around 6-7g per turn-in (same as dense stones), which is still over materials cost, but much less than you can get from the people who need 1 widget for a trib run).

Plumes I would get 50s, but not totally reliably. I think I sold around 30 plumes or so, and ended up with about 12-13g profit.

All of these are very market dependent.

[Ynir]

Those of us who grind for wintersaber trainer faction exist in a geological time scale, and have an exponentially larger pain threshold than the rest of you. :wacko:

"Grinding" for this beautiful bauble is a lark, a picnic, a walk in the park, let me tell you.

PS. I have never seen the same number of tickets obtainable for plumes show up twice in all the references I have seen. I think this is because the number was changed in a recent patch. Also because many authors do theoretical calculations and report the result as experimental practice. :lol:

[Concillian]

PS. I have never seen the same number of tickets obtainable for plumes show up twice in all the references I have seen. I think this is because the number was changed in a recent patch. Also because many authors do theoretical calculations and report the result as experimental practice. :lol:
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I can tell you that I had exactly 317 tickets before I had to use something else.

Starting at 0 rep with faire I was able to get:
312 tickets from vibrant plumes
then I turned in the "5 free tickets" quest for 5 more (if you do this first you end up with 305 tickets, because you hit the rep level one turn in earlier)

Of course, all the quests above plumes are 20 tickets per turn in, so I had 17 tickets left over after I got the amulet. But there is no 'theory-craft' involved in that number. That is what I actually had, and I don't think I could have done things any more efficiently.

Humans gain rep quicker, so will be able to have fewer plumes before they reach the rep limit where they stop accepting them.

[oldmandennis]

The farming of that cave is much more drudgery without that quest. 
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Hmm, everybody I know seems to think the "Test of Faith"(I think) part where you jump off the cliff is the coolest thing. It's definatly some of the easiest XP you will get.

I got a bunch of plumes when the Faire first came out, figuring the easy tickets would probably be nerfed before the next faire. Unless you were planning on AOEing them down, the harpies respawned as fast as I could kill them.

[Skandranon]

Let's compare the properties of the following items:
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Curious. Why compare two amulets and one ring?

[Watto44]

Hmm, everybody I know seems to think the "Test of Faith"(I think) part where you jump off the cliff is the coolest thing.  It's definatly some of the easiest XP you will get.
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The Test of Faith quest-line is still one of my favorites in the game. Great fun, with some nice RP elements to boot!

As for the amulet, I'm half-heartedly grinding for it at the moment. I knocked over the vibrant plume part of it while grinding for mount cash in deadwind, but collecting the necessary thorium is proving to be more of a pain in the butt than I thought. I've yet to find a decent spot to get a reasonable amount per hour, and it's proving to be quicker to grind for some cash and buy the thorium from the AH. (Grr.) At least the runecloth is easy to get. :)

[Concillian]

Unless you were planning on AOEing them down, the harpies respawned as fast as I could kill them.
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Well I was using warrior AoE. As the harpies come in groups of 3-4, with about 15-20 seconds between groups (as fast as you can kill them), WW is perfect for this. As I said, I was averaging 1 plume per minute, at a ~13% drop rate, which is between 7 and 8 kills per minute, or ~average of 1 kill per 8 seconds. You can't do that on the singular spawns simply because of travel time in-between. The biggest advantage is the walk is only about 3 seconds to the boxes, then they swarm to you.

Yeah, test of faith is cool. I didn't notice the quest until I made a shaman and was sent to the quest NPC for a totem quest. So my first 4 characters all missed it. Maybe I was generalizing too much.

[Concillian]

I've yet to find a decent spot to get a reasonable amount per hour, and it's proving to be quicker to grind for some cash and buy the thorium from the AH. (Grr.) At least the runecloth is easy to get. :)
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Yeah, since I got mining up, I refuse to buy from the people on the AH. Most of the miners are 'gold farmers' and now that I'm self-sufficient I'm not buying from them on principle. About the best I was able to get on thorium is ~40 per hour by bouncing between two characters logged in different parts of the world where RTVs spawn. That was an absolute best case for me. Not the best rate.

The bonus to mining yourself is that you get the Arcane crystals and other gems (Blue Sapphires are pretty valueable, the others aren't terribly valuable, but will still fetch between 1 and 5 g on Terenas). Mining strictly for thorium is kind of 'eh', but when you add in the gems it gets decent.

[Ynir]

I wouldn't dream of impugning your analysis.

As you point out, it's more complex than it appears. Makes planning ahead a bit nebulous.

[Ynir]

Curious.  Why compare two amulets and one ring?
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All are useful. Two are entirely inaccessible to me, and one can be had for a handful of feathers and some thorium bars.

[Arnulf]

All are useful. Two are entirely inaccessible to me, and one can be had for a handful of feathers and some thorium bars.
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I got this one.

I did it with a mix of dense grinding stones and glowing scorpid blood. Both the scorpids in the Burning Steppes and Silithus drop the blood. As a miner I did make my rounds in the Steppes gathering dense stones and getting the blood from the scorpids. The drop rate varies. You get 20 tickets for a stack of ten.

-Arnulf

[Raven Vale]

Do you still have to be a LW to turn in rugged kits , Eng or BS for the widgets etc . I think at one time you had to be , does the same old true or has it changed . If so
it may be worthwhile farming now . Cheers .

edit: Text has gone all weird ,looks ok where I am typing it though , nm :)

[Kevin]

Do you still have to be a LW to turn in rugged kits , Eng or BS for the widgets etc . I think at one time you had to be , does the same old true or has it changed . If so
it may be worthwhile farming now . Cheers .

edit: Text has gone all weird ,looks ok where I am typing it though , nm :)
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You no longer need to be the profession that can make the items to turn them in. It was true at one point like you said, but isn't anymore.

[Raven Vale]

Thankyou .

Vibrant plumes , look out :P

[LavCat]

You no longer need to be the profession that can make the items to turn them in.  It was true at one point like you said, but isn't anymore.
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Are you sure about this? It was not the case when Woad got her amulet about six months ago, and I don't think it was true for Tribade when she was working on hers last time the fair was in town. At least no one offered to let her turn in rugged armor kits.

[Zarathustra]

Are you sure about this?  It was not the case when Woad got her amulet about six months ago, and I don't think it was true for Tribade when she was working on hers last time the fair was in town.  At least no one offered to let her turn in rugged armor kits.
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Positive. This was a recent patch change. 1.9, maybe?