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Don’t Rokk The Boat

Time to kill many things and go through their pockets.

Time to kill many things and go through their pockets.

 

It’s usually not a good idea to do anything that requires higher brain functions when you’re sleep deprived. For example, when you’ve had a total of sixteen hours of sleep over the past week, you should avoid things like brain surgery, operating a motor vehicle, or walking more than thirty feet.

So writing about World of Warcraft should be safe. Right?

As much as I don’t really follow the lore, storylines, or just about anything that separates Warlords of Draenor from any other expansion, there is one thing in WoD that has been wonderful to me – the garrison. Thanks to multiple garrisons, like the eight I have on my Horde server, I’ve managed to amass a few hundred thousand gold in the bank.

Over on the Alliance serve, though, things are much different. It is a dark story, one filled with poverty and sadness. I don’t have the manpower (re: garrisons) to sustain the sick gold making opportunities, not even close. But I came to the realization that I’d really like to buy some things. Gear upgrades, profession mats, that short of thing.

This put me in the awkward position of having to find a second job just to make ends meet. Art was dangerously close to imitating life, and since there’s no Wal-Mart in Stormwind that needed a greeter, or a fast-food Inn in Ironforge that would hire me to ask “would you like fries with that”, I had to resort to the Internet. This meant Youtube videos.

This meant Oldbess.

You just can’t go wrong with Oldbess. Dude consistently puts out some great gold-making videos, and for some reason – maybe the dinosaurs, maybe the boat – this one really tickled my fancy. (Don’t ask what his fancy is, because he’ll probably tell you and your regret will be immediate. — Editor)

I watched this video, liked what I saw, then put what I learned into practice. There was celebration, and there was sadness.

TL;DR – In Pandaria, there is a ship parked just off the coast of the Isle of Giants. It’s filled with Dinomancers, and occasionally the rare War-God Dokah will spawn there as well. Get to the boat, chug a Potion of Luck, and like a one-man Somali pirate crew kill everyone on board. Once everyone’s dead and you’ve looted the bodies, hop over to another realm (either manually or with an addon like Cross Realm Assist. Rinse and repeat.

I was a little curious to see how well this was going to work. There were maybe two dozen Dinomancers on the boat, which was not a bad amount given the confines of the ship. Plus, the location of the ship was well off the beaten path so I thought I’d have the spot all to myself. I downloaded the CRA addon to speed things up, and had two Potions of Luck to use for my experiment. Forty minutes would be plenty of time to see if the spot was going to be profitable, and besides I had other things to do with my day. Sadly, sleep was not one of them.

During the video, Oldbess mentioned that the Cross Realm Assist addon was buggy. That shit was bang on. It didn’t happen every time, but in 40 minutes I probably had four occasions when the lua error window popped up and puked out lines of error code all over my screen. The addon itself worked fine for the most part though. A little bit of code puke is a small price to pay for rapid realm hopping.

Now for this spot to be profitable, you need several stars to line up properly. You can’t have too many people camping the boat or you’ll never kill anything. And you have to be able to realm hop fast enough to keep the kills coming at a relatively constant rate, and not waste your Potion of Luck.

It didn’t take me long to be glad I’d installed CRA, bugs and all. I’d realm hop, and if mobs were up I’d kill them. If they weren’t up, or people were in the process of killing them, I’d just drop the group and go to the next realm. I never stopped moving, except on two occasions when I hopped onto a PVP realm and by the time I saw that red mob charging at me was a person, I was eating my guts because oh damn, buddy had a buddy with him. But for the most part, every realm I jumped to I was able to kill at least a few Dinomancers which made it worth the trip.

So just how worth it was it? That’s the bottom line after all. Well, after 40 minutes I ended up posting about 1000g worth of raw mats (ore, veggies, cloth, leather) on the AH. I vendored greens, junk, and pets, and walked away with about 700g in my pocket. This was just the first time through, so the jury’s still out as far as overall effectiveness of the spot. I wouldn’t recommend this spot without the Potions of Luck, or if it is later in the day. I ran it mid-afternoon and still had competition. But it’s worth your time to give it a shot.