The Backstory: Encore

Oh my UI with super huge buttons, badly positioned unit frames and 8fps!!

Anyone following this blog from day 1 will know that the reason for me starting to blog was to write about my progress in WoW and while that has sort of happened I've never really caught up with my pre-blogging story. The last installment was 10 months ago and got to the end of Ulduar in terms of game progression as I just joined the guild Encore. Anyway, the story so far can be read in the following posts The Backstory: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12 and Part 13.

Encore were a very different type of guild to what I had become accustomed to in Deadwood. While they were a raiding guild they were much more relaxed in their approach to raiding, in hindsight this wasn't actually a bad thing but at the time it frustrated me greatly and I think I also had not really come to terms with being part of the rank and file of the guild after so long as an officer.

That said the majority of the folks there were good people and they were raiding 25 man which was one of the 2 reasons I left Deadwood, the other being the need to have people in /g to chat with and hopefully run dungeons with (remembering that this is pre-dungeon finder). However, their progress was slow as they had only just gotten to Freya, and I was used to clearing Ulduar. Their casual style and their unwillingness to move into the Trial of the Crusader because, "the 3rd boss is a PVP fight and we're not a PVP guild" according to their GM.

So after only 3 weeks, I decided that Encore was not the guild for me and posted an application to join Quercus, one of the other 2 guilds on my original shortlist and on October 15th 2009 I got the mail to advise that I had been successful in my application to join them and a new adventure began...

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 12

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making. You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. The question I am covering today is:

What was your biggest 'oops' moment?

My biggest 'oops' is an easy one. Back in Cataclysm I was selling Lil Timmy's White Kitten. After bumping into Lil Timmy unplanned. I had tried selling it Alliance side for 500g for a few weeks without any luck and then via the neutral auction house for a few more weeks, using the remote AH. After so much activity and being teh only seller I decided to hold back for a week or so. After a while I decided to go get some cats of the Crazy Cat Lady outside Stormwind and had forgotten that I had the White Kitten and promptly put it up for sale along with the much more common cats which were selling for 50g.

However I only found this out because a fellow gold maker on my server had spotted this as an obvious mistake and had not only bought it but also mailed it me CoD for 100g, which I duly paid up as I was so relieved not to have missed out on a bigger profit.

Since that time I have started using Trade Skill Master and have the cats on auto pricing and therefore the mistake won't happen again, assuming my rules are set up correctly of course.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 11

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making. You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. The question I am covering today is:

Most of us use Trade Skill Master, Auctioneer and/or Auctionator in combo with Postal - are there any other lesser known gold making addons you use?

There are many addons that assist the gold making process. Most of these are widely used and provide a wide range of benefits mostly assisting in saving time or providing snippets of information so we don't need to make the effort. Besides those posed by Nev in the question above, things like Altoholic, Sell Junk, Gatherer, Lil Sparky's Workshop and MogIt all provide assistance in their own way.

However, there is only one addon I use, that I consider lesser known simply because I have not seen it advertised by the popular gold making sources. Like most of my favourite addons this is small and simple requiring no configuration or maintenance. It doesn't try to provide more than one feature and end up a piece of bloatware.

What is it? Let me introduce to you One Click Enchant Scroll, which simply provides a button in your tradeskill window to directly create enchantment scrolls and also displays the number of enchanting vellums in your inventory on it.

A comment on the Curse page in 2011 suggest this isn't compatible with Skillet, but as I don't use this I couldn't confirm that this is still the case.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 10

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making. You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. The question I am covering today is:

Do you farm materials? Why? Why not? Which ones, Where?

Many people farm materials from around the world of Azeroth, herbs, ore and skins are the obvious ones as they have professions associated with them. There are also items like cloth that can be farmed indirectly by killing hostile NPCs out in the world too. Farming is a time consuming thing and involves moving around the map to known spawn points and gathering or killing. It is a great source of gold but the gold per hour isn't great and for that reason I prefer not to farm in the traditional MMO sense. I prefer to farm my mats on the Auction House.

Gathering can be done quickly and at most times cheap enough to make the financial outlay outweigh the loss of time. However, there are times when farming the Auction House isn't viable either because the mats are not there or too expensive, which often means they are in short supply. Then you have to go out and farm yourself.

A recent example of this is when I was levelling my 3rd alchemist. Most low level herbs were freely available for less than a gold per item, then I hit a wall. I needed 35x Goldthorn and the single stack of 20 on the Auction House was 500g (25g per herb!) which is just stupidly high and I am way too tight to spend that much and then have to farm the rest. I also needed 10x Wild Steelbloom and there were none on the Auction House. Fortuantely, my druid is a herbalist and as he can herb in flight form, I simply sent him out to Arathi Highlands to farm some herbs as both are prevalent in the zone. While I only needed 45 herbs in total I spent a good hour gathering herbs and ended up with 4 stacks of each herb, which after using what I needed for my alchemy levelling, I sold on the auction house at 10g per herb and made myself just under 1000g AND saved myself another 500g which made my low level farming session worth at least 1500g per hour. Not earth shattering I agree much better than losing gold!

Finally, I'd just like to apologise for publishing day 8 and 9 in reverse order,

Terrace of Endless Spring: Sha of Fear

The Sha of Fear is a single-phase encounter during which he will summon adds and send a tank, a healer and 3 DPS to a remote platform to fight a Terrace Guardian and only after he dies can they return to the main platform, if he does not die before the next group of 5 players are banished the raid will wipe.

• Tanks MUST stand in the circle of light as this will create a safe zone, called the  Wall of Light, behind the tank. The raid must stand within the Wall of Light so they take 10% less damage, and gain immunity to Breath of Fear.
• Healers can remain within the safe zone for the entire fight. 
• Ranged DPS will sometimes have to exit the safe zone to deal with adds spawning on the platform. 
• Melee DPS will spend most of the fight behind the boss (so outside the safe zone) and they will occasionally move to deal with the adds that spawn on the platform or to take cover within the safe for Breath of Fear.

While the fight is not difficult to understand, there is a high DPS requirement and as you must have 2 tanks (1 on the boss and 1 on a platform) you will have to 2 heal the fight. The real tough parts of the fight are getting the balance between DPS on the boss and killing adds as well as avoiding much damage as possible by avoiding the impact locations of Penetrating Bolts and not getting caught outside the Wall of Light when Breath of Fear.

On the Terrace Guardian platforms, players must master consuming the Sha Globes as the 5% heal will likely result in a wipe as will failing to line of sight Death Blossom.

Terrace of Endless Spring: Lei Shi

Overview

Lei Shi is a single-phase fight and when she reaches 80%, 60%, 40%, and 20% health, she summons 3 water elementals, and goes immune until at least one add has been killed. She has two special abilities causing her to either disappear until damaged by AoE attacks or she will channel wind spell that pushes players away from her and damages them until she has been damaged 4% of her health.

Instead, of performing melee attacks, Lei Shi constantly casts Spray at her current target which deals a large amount of Frost damage to them and anyone within 2.5 yards of them. Getting hit by Spray also adds a stacking debuff which increases Frost damage taken by 16% per stack, for 10 seconds.

Every 10% Lei Shi will gain a stack of Afraid which will increase her casting speed 8% per stack which results in Spray being cast more frequently.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 8

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making. You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. The question I am covering today is:

Thinking back to day 2, did you ever reach your goal or are you still working towards it? If you reached it - have you set yourself a new one?

I already answered this one in the Day 2 post as I don't really set myself any goals, just use the gold as an enabler to allow me to be frivolous and buying mounts, pets and items to enable me to raid and as long as that can continue to happen I'm happy.

That said, I am still hoping to hit 1 million gold and hope to hit that figure before too long, the only obstacle in the way is selling my stock which seems to grow faster than I'm selling it. Damn them AH bargains!

A bit of a lame answer and a ridiculously short post (especially for me) I feel as if I am failing but with my recent posting schedule of 1 per day for the past 2 weeks I guess I can get away with one dodgy post ;p

Terrace of Endless Spring: Tsulong

The encounter against Tsulong is a two-phase fight. The first is the Night Phase during which Tsulong is hostile. The second phase, the Day Phase, Tsulong is friendly, and your raid must heal him, while protecting him from various adds. Each phase lasts 2 minutes and is indicated by his energy bar.

Tsulong's health is reversed each time a phase change occurs, so that the amount of health that is missing from Tsulong's health in the Night Phase becomes the amount of health he has during the Day Phase. Defeating Tsulong is achieved by killing him during a Night Phase or healing him to full health during a Day Phase.

The first phase is always the Night Phase and he enrages a few seconds after the end of the second Day Phase.

Night Phase
During the Night Phase, Tsulong makes regular use of three main abilities.

• Shadow Breath: a frontal cone breath attack that deals Shadow damage and applies a stacking debuff, which increases Shadow damage taken by 100% for 30 seconds, per stack;
• Dread Shadows: a stacking debuff that Tsulong applies to all raid members every 2 seconds and increases the damage that the players take from Dread Shadows by 10%. This can be reset by moving through the Sunbeam Tsulong creates. Unlike LFR, each second that a player stays in the Sunbeam, its radius becomes smaller, until it disappears.
• Nightmares: is cast at the location of a random player which deals Shadow damage to all players within 8 yards of the point of impact, and also fears them for 3 seconds.

Night Strategy

• Tsulong should be tanked facing away from the raid, and tanks should swap on every Shadow Breath. The tank currently not tanking Tsulong should NOT  be in front of him.
• Ranged DPS and healers spread out at least 8 yards apart, to minimise the damage and fears caused by Nightmares. 
• Move out of teh Nightmare ground effect to avoid getting feared.
• Resets your stacks of Dread Shadows at 12-18 stacks by walking through the Sunbeams. DO NOT STAND IN THE BEAM FOR MORE THAN 1 SECOND.
• DPS Tsulong.

Day Phase
During the Day Phase, Tsulong is friendly and needs to be healed he uses 1 ability:

• Sun Breath: a frontal cone breath attack that deals buffs raid members it hits with Bathed in Light and damages any adds it hits.
•  Bathed in Light: restores 25% of maximum mana and increases healing done by 500% for 6-seconds.

There are three types of adds during the Day Phase:

• Embodied Terrors: large adds that place a dispellable debuff called Terrorize on random raid members and on Tsulong himself.
• When cast on players, Terrorize damages the player for 20% of their current health each second for 10 seconds.
• When cast on Tsulong, Terrorize damages him for 2% of his total health every 2 seconds for 10 seconds.
• Fright Spawns: are small adds that are created when an Embodied Terror is killed, that cast Fright in a cone in front of them, dealing a high amount of damage and fearing all affected players.
• Untable Shas: are adds that spawn around the room and move towards Tsulong. When they reach him, they deal a very high amount of damage to Tsulong before they disappear.

Any adds alive when the Day Phase ends, will not despawn when the Night Phase begins.

Day Strategy

• Have your healers always stand in front of Tsulong, so as to benefit from Bathed in Light as often as possible and heal Tsulong.
• Tank the Embodied Terrors and the Fright Spawns in front of Tsulong so that he damages them with his breath. If done correctly, this will cause all the Fight Spawns to be instantly killed by the breath attack.
• Make sure that the Fright Spawns are always facing away from the raid.
• Untable Sha adds are the top priority, since they must be killed before they reach Tsulong, or else they deal a massive amount of damage to him. These adds cannot be tanked, but you can stun, slow, and knock them back (inc. Death Grip and Gorefiend's Grasp).
• DPS should help heal Tsulong immediately after a Sun Breath if they can cast a heal

Healing Concerns

• Lay on Hands does NOT work, the cooldown is triggered, Tsulong will gain Forbearance, but no healing will be done.
• Effects like Guardian Spirit and Life Cocoon DO work.
• The raid still takes damage and WILL need healing.
• Tank damage from the melee attacks of the Embodied Terrors and Fright Spawns, as well as very high tank damage from the frontal cone attacks of the Fright Spawns.
• Healers must be prepared to dispel the following three effects during this phase:
• the Terrorize debuff from Tsulong;
• the Terrorize debuff from random raid members;
• the fear effect caused by  Fright, from tanks or any other raid members hit by this cone attack.

Revamping the Macro System

The wow macro system is great for combining several slash commands that execute together when you click a single action button or keybind. It allows for a total of 54 macros (36 account wide and 18 character specific ones). Some people love them (including me!) and others are afraid to use them for fear of being accused of cheating or simply being unaware of how to program them.

The in-game support for macros is almost non-existent and the only change I have ever seen was when they added the save button to the UI a few months ago. Then from nowhere came the message below:

Taepsilum

Devs are looking into revamping the whole macro system at some point, meanwhile, simply increasing the number of slots would probably be good enough. They were having some discussions about doing just that but we still don't have any concrete plans on the way, if anything changes we'll let you know.

source

Upon reading this news I was overjoyed as I have all my macro slots full on all my priests and my paladin and then I sat down and thought exactly what I wanted from the changes and to be honest I couldn't think of much I wanted changed beyond more slots and more character spaces to allow more complex macros.

It is not that I want to have an I win macro or a lazy man's macro that simply has a complete rotation in one massive /castsequence macro, that was so vanilla and if I wanted to spam 1 button I could just go play an arcane mage or a windwalker monk. However, there are some features that while not being a game changer would make the macro system better.

Things that spring to mind are:

• a tutorial on how to make a macro;
• a search facility for the icons;
• a syntax check;
• a flexible macro;

The last item on that list needs a bit of explaining as what I'm after is a macro that changes completely depending on your location. If you're doing the Golden Lotus dailies it could be the bomb for bombing teh cannons, in Nizao Temple it could be for throwing the bomb at the mantid vehicle, in the Heart of Fear it could be the Impaling Spear in Mel'jarak's room. This is possible as there is an addon, I Has Macro Lol that does exactly that, sadly it is now woefully out of date and being botched to make it work so I simply refuse to use it.

Beyond those six things I can't think of much to add to the system. What would you like to see changed in teh macro system?

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 9

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making. You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. The question I am covering today is:

What's your favorite niche market and why?

My favourite niche market is shirts. A lot of armour shows bare arms and sometimes that makes transmog sets look bad. Shirts will fill the gaps and can be used to mask the gaps by closely matching the colour of the transmog or to provide contrast to it. Either way players will pay good coin to achieve that "perfect" look. Some shirts sell a lot better than others and I'm not really sure why that is but the reason is irrelevant the investment for shirts is small and the returns range from 10g to 200g. 

There a number of good things about the shirt market. The first is that the market has almost no competition  so the few of us that are in it do not need to price gouge each other so our returns are good. Then there is the fact that some shirts are rare patterns that are priced highly on the auction house so not many people will buy these rare patterns for something they see as a worthless item. The last thing about the market is that a few good sellers are simple vendor items that can be purchased relatively cheaply and flipped so you don't even need to hold stock.

There is a downside though as the number of purchases are low, a bad week will see zero sales a good week may see you hit double figures but then for the effort put in it is easy money.

However, I'm still missing the one true gem in the shirt market, the Rich Purple Shirt but at current AH prices it is simply not a viable proposition and I'm just hoping that one day I'll catch one cheaply on teh auction house, or maybe even try farming it from Dire Maul.....

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 7

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. Today's question is:

If you were starting over again (maybe on a new server perhaps), how would you start building some capital  and what goal would you set yourself?

While I have recently settled in on a new server as part of my "Project Titan", what I did was to transfer an existing toon with a few thousand gold and just start reproducing the system I use with enchanting and jewelcrafting that earn me gold on my home server of Shadowsong, but that is not really in the spirit of the question so I'll not bore you with that.

Knowing what things are important in making gold certainly helps you on a new server and the three thing to remember is that many people are lazy, most are unaware of how the auction house charging works and many more unaware of the source of many items (or where to find out). 

After rolling my toon I'll go and kill the local humanoids as these drop copper as well as armour and other assorted items and the copper is THE important thing here and as I need some cash to get started, I don't quest I kill them humanoids until I am level 5. By this time I'll have amassed a personal wealth of 20-30 silver from the killing spree and selling the drops. 

I don't normally use Auctioneer, but on a new server and being cash starved means you can deploy the one awesome feature, the Appraiser feature (see here for a guide). This allows you to identify items that you can vendor for more than  they are being auctioned for, success will vary realm to realm but I have managed to turn a 50 silver pot into around 100g within 15 minutes of arriving at the auction house, though normal results tend to be between 25 and 50g. This should be enough to get you set up with some proper gold making and I usually continue from this point by learning mining and skinning or herbalism and selling everything I mine/skin/herb as I level.

Hearthcast AoE Appearance

Recently, I have become a new listener to an old podcast, Hearthcast is a show aimed at the more casual player and while I don't consider myself truly casual I do enjoy listening to their fun show and this week I have been lucky enough to make an appearance on their AoE quiz.

Like many WoW raids, the quiz comes in 2 modes, normal, taking on Rewt or heroic facing the might of Freckleface! The show is due out today so I'll not spoil the surprise of who I chose to battle or what the outcome was so if you want to find out you'll have to download episode #156!

Terrace of Endless Spring: Protectors of the Endless

Protectors of the Endless is  council style fight with 3 bosses Protector Kaolan, Elder Regail, and Elder Asani. that varies in difficulty according to the kill order chosen. In this sense it is reminiscent of the Iron Council in Ulduar and the Bug Trio in AQ 40.

Phase one starts when the fight begins, and will have all 3 bosses active. The bosses use a limited number of abilities, have individual health pools, when one of the bosses is killed phase two begins

Phase Two begins and the two remaining bosses are healed to full, each gains a new ability and their damage is increased by 25% for the remainder of the fight.

Phase Three begins when there is only one boss left alive, he is healed to full, gains another new ability and his damage is increased by 25% for the remainder of the fight.

Project Titan Update: Illogical Actions

Back in October 2012, I set up a plan to attain the Herald of the Titans, Feat of Strength. This involved setting up home on a new server (Defias Brotherhood) with my Horde charcters, rolling a new priest and setting up a new guild, including a new website.

Thankfully I was able to recruit some friends from Exhumed, and through the realm forums and some advertising on the Rawrcast and Convert To Raid podcasts, I was able to fill a few more spots.

If you've been watching my achievement feed to the right you may have noticd I got the Herald of the Titans a few days back and may have wondered why I hadn't published anything yet and it has simply been a matter of unavailable time until today.

Heart of Fear: Grand Empress Shek'zeer

Grand Empress Shek'zeer is a three-phase fight. Phases One and Two will alternate until the boss reaches 30% health, at which point Phase Three begins.

Phase One begins when the boss is engaged, during this phase, your only enemy is Grand Empress Shek'zeer.

Phase Two begins after 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and ends when all the adds that spawn during this phase are killed. Shek'zeer is not present during this phase, and cannot be damaged.

Phase One then starts again, and this cycle continues until Shek'zeer reaches 30% health, at which point Phase Three begins.

Phase Three your only enemy is once again Shek'zeer.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 6

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making. You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. The question I am covering today is:

Which market has made you the most gold over the years?

I have been actively generating gold all my WoW life and initially that started as simply auctioning off things I collected on my adventures through the game and that covered most of the first 4 years. I had become interested in the potential for making gold in Vanilla after hearing a podcast where the guy had been able to buy a friend an epic mount simply by controlling the herb and alchemy market by buying everything and listing it at high and varied price on  a few characters. I tried to emulate this but soon discovered that I had too little gold and that my alts naming convention gave the game away that it was the same person (all my toons ended in with the rather obvious "yxx" and became discouraged rather quickly and left the manipulation to the richer folks.

Heart of Fear: Amber Shaper Un’sok

OVERVIEW

The encounter against Amber-Shaper Un'sok is a three-phase fight.

Phase One lasts until the boss reaches 70% health. During this phase, you will mainly have to kill small adds and avoid damaging ground effects.

Phase Two starts when the boss summons an add and ends when the add is killed. During this phase, Un'sok takes 99% reduced damage (so all kill the add)

Phase Three lasts until Un'sok dies and is a very intense phase, for both healers and DPS players. During this phase, the boss gains a sizeable increase in his damage.

During the fight, Un'sok will transform random players (including tanks) into a Mutated Construct. When transformed the player can use certain special abilities, and must perform the most important part in the encounter, EVERYBODY MUST have an excellent understanding of the Construct as this is the key to success as much as the DPS output.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 5

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. Today's question is:

Do you keep the same banker alt or do you change them up occasionally? Why?

A long. long time ago when Evlyxx was questing in Tanaris, bags were very expensive, flights only went one stop and there was only an Alliance Auction House in Ironforge. This meant that selling things on the Auction House was a very time consuming process. I was moaning about this and my WoW mentor of the time Kittiah, asked why I didn't have an alt character that I used as an auction monkey? I replied that it had never occured to me to do that and promptly created a 2nd human priest and Wilkini was born.

Eventually I found a need to level Wilkini and created a new auction monkey, a rogue named Bevlyxx (So named because she was the Bank of Evlyxx, no really), she too was levelled and eventually replaced by my warlock, Strigimaga who was originally rolled as a 19 twink but that ended when she too was levelled during Wrath and I then moved onto my death knight, Nobunaga who was rolled purely to experience the starting zone.

To this day he is my primary auction house character and he sells all the odds and ends that I gather on my travels around Azeroth, Pandaria and Outland as well as things like transmog gear and the items I flip from the auction house. My crafters look after their own auction house sales so he isn't my only "banker alt" but he is the one.

Heart of Fear: Wind Lord Mel’jarak (10)

Wind Lord Mel'jarak is a single-phase fight with 9 adds that become active when you pull Mel'jarak

• 3 Sra-thik Amber-Trappers;
• 3 Kor'thic Elite Blademasters;
• 3 Zar'thik Battle-Menders;

Dealing with the adds is the key to beating the boss and can be crowd controlled. Adds of each type have a shared health pool but when 3 adds of the same kind die, Mel'jarak gains a buff that increases his damage done and his damage taken.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 4

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. Today's question is:

Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?

I have always had a bank alt, well at least since Evlyxx was level 40 something and questing in Tanaris as the auction house was all the way back in Ironforge and it was a pain in the butt to travel between teh two points. with single stop flight points and the boat between Menethil Harbor and Theramore. Eventually all my bank alts turned into normal alts and now they are all fully fledged alts with a minimum level of 85.

I did have a personal guild bank during Wrath and Cataclysm but due to my desire to have all my toons in the guild and the fact that I was not really utilising the guild bank itself I decided to sell the guild and just use my personal guild bank, It does mean I am restricted on storage space but it isn't causing me a major problem in the past 2 years so I can't see it causing a long term problem.

20 Days of Gold Making: Day 3

Nev from Auction House Addict has created a community project for the gold makers among us 20 Days of Gold Making You can find a list of all of the participants in this blog post at AH addict. Today's question is:

What were the first techniques/tricks/tips you used when starting out?

My first techniques were pretty basic and not very complicated even for the complete beginner. I simply went out in the world and farmed mobs for specific drops. I didn't start by aiming for a common drop and stack it high and sell em fast I opted for the rare drop and sell it for loads of gold, at least by Vanilla standards as I farmed some rare drops (Cold Basilisk Eye and the Big Iron Fishing Pole spring to mind) after reading something on http://wow.allakhazam.com/ which I sold for something like 40g each.

I really would recommend that any new character starting out in the game or on a new server start with farming to give you a few gold to start your empire with as a few hours spent early will help you progress  much faster and unlike my start I really would not aim to farm rare stuff but rather start off with selling stuff like copper ore and light leather as these are things that power levelers are generally too lazy to go get yet are incredibly easy to get regardless of your level (assuming you have hit level 5, which you need to be to get professions of course).