Realm First Profession Feats of Strength - Gone in Warlords

One of my highlights for Mists of Pandaria was earning the Realm First! Zen Master Blacksmith Feat of Strength.

@twitchietgw @perculia @Seerax Realm First profession achievements are also gone. They don't integrate well w/profession changes.

— Owen Landgren (@olandgren) February 27, 2014

With the news that Realm Firsts for leveling are gone in Warlords, several avid tweeters got straight onto Owen Landgren to be met with the same answer about professions. Gone.

I've gotten a huge kick out of realm firsts over the years. In Cataclysm,  I ruled out getting myself a realm first profession, purely because the professions were gated behind leveling to 84 before completing the journey. However, an experienced realm-firster and fellow guildy raced to 85 very quickly picking up Realm First! Illustrious Leatherworker in the process. It was a proud day for a newly formed guild, and got me excited for the possibilities in Mists.

In Mists of Pandaria, I set my sights on blacksmithing. In doing my research, I identified [Spirit of Harmony], as the bottleneck for efficient leveling, even though they were BoP. After I coerced my constant (and favourite) companions in game to help me farm a [Spirit of Harmony]... finding out that in order to use the spirit to purchase a PvP recipe, I needed to be level 87 to get to the Shrine of Seven Stars, I was completely dejected. Morose even. I let my dream float off into the mists, and continued questing (with aforementioned favourites).

Apparently I hadn't quite let it go, because I started complaining bitterly about another 'gate' in profession leveling until Whip (our previous realm first leatherworker) yelled, "Just make greens, doofus!". Renewed, my wife and I set to work pillaging the horde auction house for ghost iron ore, while my army of alts kept an eye on Alliance prices. Green, after green, after green was hammered off the production line, and suddenly... Bam! Almost 2315 in Australia on launch day, I was proclaimed realm first.

At first I was surprised, then relieved and then just overjoyed as the myriad of 'grats' came in through tells, the guild and a big hug from my wife. All in all, it cost me around 46k and some forever indebtedness to Jondy, Kal and Whip. Feat of Strength? Priceless.

So I for one, will be sad to see realm first professions going for Warlords, but I understand that given the scant information about how much professions are changing, they may not make sense at all in the new expansion.

For the Record: January 2014 Glyph Sales

Lots of gold from glyphs, but nothing quite as fun as chatting with Stede and Kathroman on Late Nite with Stede.

Stats:

• Total Glyph Sales: 78197g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 1801
• Average Price: 43g42s

I'm done with tax reporting for this quarter, so it's time to back-date this glyph post. Yeah, that's right... I can leave something until the next month entirely and 'pretend' I posted this 3 weeks ago... what of it? Just wait until I actually create some pretty graphs for the 3M gold milestone from a few months ago.

So plenty of glyphs sold this month. In fact, about 500 more than the last three months. Business is booming.

Fortunately, with a LOT of help from my wife, my schedule opened up for a brief window at the end of January, and I grabbed a guest spot on the Late Nite with Stede podcast - Episode #16. If you're not familiar with the podcast, I strongly suggest you check it out for all your gold making related news. I'd like to thank Stede and Kath for having me on the show and indulging my penchant for random statistics from my gold making in Mists.

As promised on the podcast, I'll be posting some charts and graphs of my gold making statistics I discussed on the show. In particular, I promise that I'll post my glyph posting vs. sales statistics at some point during March, which will contain almost a year worth of data. On a positive note, with all that extra data, my conversion rate is looking a little better than the 3.5% I was talking about on the show.