Just Can't Get Enough

PTR to live in an instant, I thought it was going to be quick but this was less than a week since the story broke. Just in case you missed the news, I will be mostly talking about:

"All upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels." and "Adding a new token called Deeds of Valor which will cost 3000 Timeless Coins, and can be used to grant your character 100 Valor Points."

1 week is not a lot of time to hoard away 3000 valor points especially when the cap is 1000 for any given week. I was meaning to write a post on the best way to valor cap but was beaten to it by Alternative Chat, mostly because that kind of post takes an age to research, and I really couldn't be arsed. A big round of applause for the Godmother for creating possibly the shortest lived, current content article.

WoW Insider in the form of Matthew Rossi wrote about patch 5.4.8 and this is what I intend to elaborate on. Rossi wrote:

"Consider - easier valor, and valor made more useful, but still capped both weekly (1000 points a week) and overall (3000 total) - this means that you'll get valor faster, and spend it faster. Fully upgrading an item will take your entire week's worth of valor points (250 per upgrade, 4 upgrades) but this assumes you're not going into the patch with a full set of 2/2 upgraded items. It creates pressure to be capping valor every week, makes valor relevant again for a time."

If you already at 3000 valor points and all your gear is 2/2 upgraded, when the patch dropped then are still not going to upgrade all your gear to 4/4 this week. 4000 valor will purchase 8 gear upgrades @ 500 valor per item for conversion from 2/2 to 4/4. By my reckoning there are 15/16 gear slots depending on 2 handers/2 x 1 handers and off hand items. Half the gear is upgraded in week 1 but the rest of the gear will still take an extra 4 weeks and as Rossi pointed out a new piece of gear will wipe out an entire weeks valor cap.

This will create a meta game for the next few weeks as we all find the best ways to upgrade and valor cap. For some people like myself who chose the Timeless Isle as a method for gearing alts instead of running endless LFR and Flex, we are laughing about the amount of Timeless coins that we have stashed, and wish that we had not been so inventive with our methods of trying to get rid of a currency that we thought was past its sell by date.

I am rich

Not all my coins are spread equally and I will need to be inventive to maximise valor and coin usage. My plan will incorporate a wise implementation of Valor of the Ancients. After logging on with a character with a spare 30,000 timeless coins, I can immediately invoke the 50% buff. All other characters will then have 6 days to valor cap and any character not achieving this goal can be topped up the day before reset day using timeless coins. Half a million timeless coins will not last long with this kind of spending but it should help clear the hurdle of the first 8 weeks.

It is quite sad, but I thrive on this kind of shuffling resources around to maximise results. The only problem is that 5-8 weeks will test the patience of a saint. It is for this reason that people are asking for the valor cap to be removed. Blizzard will argue that in terms of Raiding the gear upgrades will allow for a 4-8% increase in relative power to trickle over a 8 week period instead of a sudden avalanche of power.

Wednesday will be Celestials and Ordos day, and Tuesday will be Deeds of Valor day. The rest of the week is mine to do as I please.