Posted on Behalf of Cis from <Vindicatum> [A] Icecrown
So You Want to Farm Bloody Coins
“All that is necessary for the triumph of coiners is for scrubs to do nothing.” - philosopher Edmund Burke upon witnessing the massacre at Evermaw, 1770
“Who Dares Wins” - Motto of the British Special Air Service, famous for death-defying raids on Tushui Landing during the darkest days of World War II
“whats wrong with getting your butthole liked by a woman” - Savagistick-Kel’Thuzad, propounding on the ethics of bloody coin farming,Timeless Isle general chat, December 2013
Congratulations on your bad decision to farm 500/2000/whatever bloody coins. It’s going to be occasionally exhilarating, occasionally frustrating, and invariably time consuming.
On the plus side you stand to gain a pretty rare mount, multiples of a pretty rare and potentially lucrative battle pet, an exceedingly rare title, priceless achievement points, and, best of all, a huge number of lifelong worst enemies. All of which except the last will be borderline impossible (or at least astonishingly tedious) to collect after the expansion ends!
In this guide I will walk you through a number of best practices from my own observation and experience to collect coins as quickly and painlessly as possible.
1. In the land of the pandas, the PvE geared man is king
Whatever you think of the decision on Blizzard’s part, the fortunate/unfortunate fact is that raid gear is king in world PvP in 5.4. In instanced PvP, ilevel scaling makes sure that PvE gear is hot trash that you will never wear if you can help it. But out in the world, and on a certain Timeless Isle in particular, the ridiculous ilevel scaling of heroic Siege gear makes it indisputably better for fighting other players.
I would not recommend undertaking this grind on most servers unless you have either (preferably) a. some mix of normal and heroic Siege of Orgrimmar gear or (if you have no other recourse) b. full top of the line PvP gear. I did the grind with an ilevel of 574 or so but you can certainly get away with a little less. PvE trinkets are particularly disgusting- even if you otherwise have to use PvP gear you’ll really want Siege trinkets, hopefully of a better-than-flex variety. You may opt for a PvP trinket, but you’re giving up a lot of damage to do so (or you can be a human like me and not have to worry about it!). Worth noting that if you don’t have a good raid weapon, a conquest PvP one might actually be a passable alternative due to the huge amount of PvP Power. Fortunately/unfortunately this doesn’t hold for other slots.
2. So you’ve decided to sell your soul to Ordos
You should be aware of some of the quirks of being in Censer form. Obviously, using the censer puts you at great vulnerability when it first applies and does 90% of your HP in damage. Save yourself an embarrassing accident and do not censor if you are below 90% HP!
You should never censor up when there are serious threats nearby. It’s really painful to die immediately after using the censer and have to sit out the full 10 minute cooldown (more on this at the end). Keep in mind that a rogue who really hates your guts can just sit and wait for your juicy back to become available at 10% hp. Use the various clicky foods on the island like apples and turtle eggs to quickly recover after you censer and you can surprise people who took you for an easy target, or just get hunting more quickly. Any of the egg clusters on the beach, trees with a lot of apples, or the red crystals in the canyon are all good places to censer up if you can’t otherwise self heal.
So when you are flagged to Ordos (I’ll sometimes shorthand this to 'being red' in the rest of this guide) you are effectively a member of a third faction. Alliance and horde players are hostile to you, but other reds are friendly. The guards around the celestial court in the middle of the island become hostile, but the guards at the alliance and horde camps become yellow. There’s some unintuitive weirdness to this which you can exploit- namely, the guards in the camps do not react to reds in identical ways. That is, the guards of your pre-red faction will not attack you unless you attack them, period. But the guards of your pre-red opposite faction will still attack you if you attack a member of that faction in their camp.
That is to say: if you’re alliance, you can walk into the alliance camp and kill an alliance player while standing right next to a guard and the guards will not react. But if you go to the horde camp, stand next to a guard, and attack a horde player there, the guards will intervene and start fucking you hard. Be aware of this, it’ll get you coins and/or save your life.
That said, the guards have a very limited aggro range. If you are ranged, you can easily kill a player standing on top of a guard without that guard reacting. In fact, you may even experience the hilarious scenario with the Celestial Court guards where that person then attempts to shoot you back, only to aggro the guard onto him! That person will probably hate you forever, but you’ll have an excellent chance at his coin.
Presumably to give non-reds a little leg up, most of the buffs you can stack up on the island do not work for reds. The usable 1 hour buff items (Singing Crystal, Book of the Ages, Dew of the Eternal Morning) will do nothing. The shrines that give you celestial themed buffs will do nothing. The extra action button abilities you can pick up off the ground will fail to apply. The exceptions to this are the buffs from eating clicky foods like apples (5% to all stats for 10 minutes) and the buff from eating the fire flowers in the upper area of the island (the previous buff plus 5% HP every couple seconds for five minutes). The latter buff is rather difficult to keep up but could be nice if you have success in the upper area where the flowers spawn. The former buff should be kept up at all times, since the clicky food is everywhere.
So while red you will receive one bloody coin for every killing blow you do on a level 90 player who does not have the Sacrificed to Ordos debuff. When you get the KB on such a person, you put the debuff on them for 10 minutes. Some corollaries of these facts:
Blizzard evidently hates healers, sorry 
Sub-90s and people with the debuff are generally not worth your time to kill unless you feel sadistic or they’re otherwise getting in your way.
Priests with the angel form talent and death knights with purgatory will not give coins- unless they’ve died recently and the abilities are still on cooldown when you kill them again.
It is very dubious in my view to group up for this grind, since you’ll likely be playing a zero-sum game with your allies, which can easily devolve into frustrating and unequitable KB sniping. This is ultimately one of the few things you can do in the game that is tailor made to favor soloing.
3. On server hopping
I play on a PvE server. My quandry starting out was that this grind is effectively impossible on a PvE server. On PvE players must be PvP flagged for a red to attack them; this means that you will get zero or practically zero coins. If you are in this situation, there’s little you can do but make a friend and have him invite you to a PvP server. Even if you are on a PvP server, you may want to make a friend and have him invite you to a different PvP server. In my opinion the most desirable place to do this grind on is a middling-high pop server dominated by your character’s faction (I play alliance and did the grind on Kel'Thuzad-US). Some reasons for this:
Ensures traffic at your faction’s camp and lack of traffic at the opposite faction’s camp. See next section for my reasoning here; effectively this arrangement gives you a good hunting ground as well as a fairly safe sanctuary to run for when things get too dangerous.
You can read general chat. I know, I know, everyone in there is retarded. You need not actually touch the poop. You may derive some amusement from reading the wailing and gnashing of teeth of those people as you kill them, though. But mainly you will be able to see if people are coordinating against you, as well as get some heads up about important island events (ie Evermaw, Dread Ship, Archerius, celestials, miscellaneous other rare spawns).
In my experience, people on servers with this kind of faction setup actually have fairly little experience with or enthusiasm for world PvP. Since there is practically no one on the opposite faction, the aggressive instincts of the player base have atrophied as a general rule. They will make bad decisions in fights; they will likely not hold a grudge, pick a fight, or go for revenge, since they would rather just get back to what they were trying to do; and most importantly, they are more likely to not fight back and just accept an occasional coin extraction as a necessary tax to pay in their quest for timeless purps. (This is another good reason to let people with the debuff go about their business; a huge number of them will just go ‘oh well’ if they’re only dying once every 10 minutes.)
4. Some notable spots
I want to preface this list of particularly rewarding and useful spots on the Isle by saying that it is certainly not exhaustive. I heavily relied on these spots due to the particulars of my class, the server, and the competition (ie I tended to go where other coiners weren’t) so your mileage may vary considerably.
Your faction’s camp: probably the single best high risk/high reward spot for coining. The guards at this camp will not care that you’re going ham on your former friends unless you specifically target them, so you can easily prey on people coming off of the flight point or just rezzed at the nearby graveyard. This is the single most concentrated source of people who are freshly arrived to the island and therefore will surely not have the debuff, and they’ll often arrive AFK to boot. It’s fantastic. The high risk element here has two components: one, this is inevitably a very heavily trafficked area, so you run the risk of getting overwhelmed. Also, people you just killed can pop up at the graveyard almost immediately and come for revenge. Two, Evermaw passes by this camp and will sometimes die near it, leading to a huge flood of people who may decide to run you over. You can do very well here or you can eat shit painfully. Your best escape is the ocean (see the next section for an item that will make ocean getaways more practical for some classes). Don’t forget to scarf turtle eggs if you end up in a close fight; very few people realize to scarf them back.
The opposite faction’s camp: if you have followed my advice in the previous section and are doing this grind on a server dominated by your faction, this will be your sanctuary. You can still pick up occasional coins here, but you must be very careful of the guards, who will get angry if you don’t proceed carefully (read: be ranged and attack people from far outside the camp). A good place to be when Evermaw and the Dread Ship are going down if you aren’t feeling bold; in my experience a pretty mind-boggling number of Alliance will walk into the guards at the Horde camp on the way towards/away from these bosses and render themselves easy pickings. These guards spam a slow, net, and stun, but they only have ~1.2 million HP each and do not instantly respawn, so you actually can kill one or two of them fairly easily if it comes to that. Note that these guards see through vanish, feign death, and other stuff like that- the only way to make them deaggro is to drag them miles away. Your enemies will often not realize all of this, so use it to your advantage. When shit goes south, you’ll usually want to head here. It won’t always save you, but it will often save you.
Da beech: The whole beach area between the two faction camps ended up being my bread and butter area for low-risk low-return coining. All kinds of people tend to farm the turtles for some reason, and the turtles spam disruptive high damage cast-interrupting knockbacks; jump people who have pulled too much and you will get easy coins. Float between the two camps and use the ocean and the camp guards for relief when things get too hot. Monitor the status of Evermaw and the ship, which I discuss more below. Remember: AETE, Always Eat Turtle Eggs. Eat turtle eggs by the dozens; people will dully wonder how you’re healing so much as you kill them when you should have lost.
The Celestial Court mailbox and inn: More high risk, high reward. Coining here is most viable if you are alliance on an alliance dominated server, since the horde camp is within conceivable escape distance. People, and particularly badly geared people, tend to AFK here since they think they are safe; however, there is a gap in guard coverage at the inn which means even melee may freely partake in the harvesting. My personal best here was 10 nonresponsive people in one go. If you’re ranged you can get even more aggressive and cover a wider area of the celestial court, since the guards won’t really care. Just be ready to escape, since you’re only slightly out of visual range of the main quest hub/Celestial gathering area. Make sure you don’t try this while people are gathering for or killing Archerius or you will probably get pinched. See notes on the opposite faction camp for the guards here; they are identical ability and HP wise. Don’t be afraid to kill them if you must.
Evermaw: Use water walking or the Cursed Swabby Helmet (about which more below) and keep a decent distance behind the whale/between him and the land. Pick off the weak gazelles and don’t disturb the main pack, lest you be run over. If you can fear, fears in water currently seem to only send people straight down, which almost always seals their fate. Since people in shitty gear apparently love killing Evermaw and he can take forever to actually die, you can really clean up provided you don’t get greedy. Watch your fatigue meter. Warning: deny someone his Evermaw loot and he may hate you forever.
The Dread Ship: like Evermaw, but more dangerous. Use the Cursed Swabby Helmet and attack from below; a surprising number of people will die without even realizing what is happening. There is also a one way passage to the Dread Ship near the plateau where Archerius spawns that can be pretty productively roadblocked as badly geared people rush over to get the tag. The area near the horde camp is good as well if you are on a server with a lot of alliance, since people will commonly walk into the guards without realizing. Warning: deny someone his Dread Ship loot and he may hate you even more forever.
*DOUBLE SUPER SECRET DICK MOVE ALERT*: Wait around for someone to come summon the ship and let them do so. Then blow that person up, and quickly run in and out of the ship’s aggro range. If you’re the only person in combat with it, this will despawn the ship for the full duration it takes to respawn normally. This is probably counterproductive, since you won’t get a ship fight to kill people during, but it is guaranteed to make people really really angry.
Yaungols: this is an anti-notable spot; in my experience I would advise you to write off the whole upper area of the island where the enemies are Yaungols. This area is entirely too high risk for low reward. The main reason for this is the common existence of any number of 5 man groups farming Shaohao rep, who will effortlessly destroy you even in bad gear due to their numbers advantage. Generally better geared people go up to this area at any rate. Take the easy pickings down below. Stealthies may be able to get away with ganking up here more successfully, but I would still bet that there are better returns to be had elsewhere.
Rock Moss: I did very little coining in this cave, but it was a constantly popular spot for other coiners so it probably merits a mention: wait in the very back of this cave where Rock Moss spawns and occasionally spam chat that he is up; people will have a very difficult time cleanly escaping from this big twisty cave full of hard hitting elementals once your clever trap has been sprung. Didn’t seem that efficient to me, but something must have recommended it to the many people I witnessed grinding here.
5. Timeless Isle items, or “wtf hacker”
The rare spawns on the Timeless Isle drop a ton of weird gimmick items at a low chance. Some of these are actually really useful for farming bloody coins. No one actually uses these, so you will horribly confuse and anger your enemies when you bust them out. In the aggregate these can hugely increase your overall effectiveness. Some standouts:
Hardened Shell: Rare drop from a named turtle on the Isle as well as a saurok guy in northern Kun’Lai. People will run away from you during this grind. Constantly. It is no exaggeration to say that a third of my coins were from people on mounts who turned and ran when I opened up on them. Sealing the deal against these people, who do not want to fight you and will probably roll over, is very productive. Learn to lean on this shell and you will claim many coins that otherwise would have escaped your grasp. 10/10
Ash-covered Horn: Horribly awful to grind, this is a low drop chance from the strongest generic Yaungol mobs in the Ordos cathedral/near Archerius. Kinda worth it though, because this thing is an instant cast mount that goes at 150% speed for 20 seconds with an extremely short cooldown (1 minute). If you’re in trouble but can drop combat for an instant, this thing can clinch your escape. If you’re trying to catch a runner, he’ll be hard pressed to outrun this thing forever. 8/10
Cursed Talisman: Very rare drop from the mist elemental Spelurk in a cave near the tigers. Banish yourself for 20 seconds on a 5 minute cooldown. When you’re banished, you cannot attack or cast most spells and you are immune to all attacks. You can move, though. The assholery you can get up to with this thing is nearly unparalleled (this item in particular inspired the title of this section)- stir up the hive, and then waddle back to the safety of camp while immune to all damage. Stall for a cooldown, take a little breather, or decide you’re done for now and use it to bubble hearth. The only problem with this item is that it has 50 charges, which you can burn through very quickly with the 5 minute cooldown. Still, this thing will save your life many times over and cause profound anger for your enemies. 8/10
Cursed Swabby Helmet: From one of the openable treasure chests on the island. This item gives you water breathing and lets you move at mount speed in water for 15 minutes on a 1 hour cooldown. Gives you an immediate advantage in any fight that happens in the water, especially against melee if you are ranged- they will be hard pressed to keep up. Useful defensively to escape bad scenes at the camps or on the beach. Particularly useful offensively when you decide to crash the party at Evermaw or the Dread Ship: catch the weak gazelles chasing Evermaw while the rest of the pack thunders on, or sit deep underwater sniping people fighting the ship while they get chipped down by its abilities. Some of my best coin/minute periods relied on the use of this thing, and it’s quite easy to get. Must have. 10/10
Falling Flame: Rare drop from the fire elemental Cinderfall in the upper area with the Yaungol. On a one hour cooldown, this thing launches you extremely far and fast in the direction your character is facing. By extremely far, I mean you can easily end up in the Jade Forest if you don’t aim this sucker carefully. The upshot is that this item is a sure escape from your enemies barring geometrical interference (ie do not use it when you are facing a wall). Try to aim for water though, because you will still take fall damage and go splat if you hit land. Has 50 charges. A nice luxury item that will make your enemies go “what” when you meteor away at 1000 mph but hardly mandatory. 5/10
6. A few thoughts on the insurgent mentality and time efficiency
Perhaps all this is stating the obvious, but I feel like a few words on mindset when doing this grind would be helpful for some. Instanced PvP is in theory symmetric: the two sides have roughly equivalent numbers, power, and access to the map. Dueling is symmetric. Bloody coin farming is not symmetric.
In nearly every respect you are at a disadvantage when you go red. Even in an air-quotes fair 1v1 fight to the death with someone in similar gear to yours, the non-red has the theoretical advantage due to access to the buffs that reds cannot use. Just about the singular advantage a red can claim over a non-red is the ability to take refuge in the opposite faction’s camp. In addition, reds are inevitably truly and hopelessly outnumbered. No matter how good your gear is, PvP in this game is such that when approximately three or more people all jump you, you will probably die in a straight fight even if their gear is fairly bad and your gear is awesome.
Given these observations, you must approach this grind as an insurgent if you want to get coins quickly and minimize your deaths. The notion you must dispose of is your honor. Fair fights are anathema to you; your best-case kill is always somebody who is AFK and in greens. A captain goes down with the ship; you get the hell out of dodge just as soon as a fight no longer looks favorable to you. Fight smarter, not harder. In other words, you must play like a giant wuss.
To some this will not be fun. I find it rather fun. Regardless, you will be sitting out a lot of 10 minute censor cooldowns for few coins if you don’t play with the utmost caution and ruthlessness. There is a reason the preceding advice has focused on where people AFK (the camps, the inn) and where badly geared people tend to go (the beach, Evermaw, the Dread Ship). Having a huge PvE gear advantage gives you some room to push your luck and brute force through, but the principle is the same no matter what your gear is, since all it takes is four potato people rolling face on keyboard to hopelessly bog you down unto the point of death.
To that end, you really have to always be thinking about your means of escape. A few people could roll on you at any time and turn a stomp into a complete reversal. The answer to that situation is not to take a chance on winning the fight, but rather to flee. Even if you can’t get back to the safe camp, just dropping combat is often enough, since you are usually fairly safe as soon as you mount up. Sometimes you will die anyway and it can’t be helped; that is just the nature of this grind. But by focusing on escape you are pushing the odds into your favor in more situations.
And to that end I highly recommend engineering for this grind unless you have very good built in escapes from your class (paladin and rogue come to mind). Rocket belt stacked with any other speed boosts will almost always be sufficient to get you out of combat with somebody provided you aren’t being snared. I tended to keep as close of an eye on my rocket belt cooldown as I did on my damage cooldowns, so near in importance were they.
Finally, a quick word about managing the censer timer. I fell into a pattern where I would spend the first few minutes after censering doing safe farming (the beach, the safe camp, perhaps ducking into the close forest area), only going for high risk areas once the censer was off or nearly off of cooldown. This way you stand less of a risk of getting killed early and waiting out the censer’s cooldown to no productive end. It does a lot to mitigate the frustration of a death when the censer is already off cooldown and you can get back to work immediately once you rez.
7. Some warlock specific tips
I did this grind as affliction, but you could definitely do it as destruction as well (as for Demo, here there be dragons). I opted for affliction mainly due to the long tail of damage on fleeing targets, which scored me probably 100+ coins on people who would otherwise have escaped. The ability to spread all your dots around quickly is quite nice in situations where you find multiple people at the flight point or inn, any of whom might attempt an escape. Affliction’s extreme susceptibility to being interrupted is somewhat mitigated by the paucity of interrupts in the small scale encounters that are the stock and trade of this grind.
As was mentioned generally above, for warlock in particular I would strongly recommend engineering to enhance your ability to escape. Pair the rocket belt with Burning Rush and you will have a pretty reliable escape from even seriously bad situations.
You have some choice in talents. Dark regen is probably best in tier 1. Tier 2 you can go for mortal coil or shadowfury as you deem best. You will want dark bargain in tier 3 as another boost to your escape, and same for burning rush in tier 4. Tier 5 probably comes down to feel- Sacrifice is certainly viable but I went with supremacy/observer. If you do the same just be prepared to micromanage and dismiss your pet so you don’t get it caught on guards or have it keeping you stuck in combat when you wish to get out. You will invariably want KJC for tier 6. Glyphs are fairly self explanatory; make sure you get the water walking felsteed glyph for cool looking ocean travel when Cursed Swabby Helm is on cooldown, or you’re saving it for Evermaw/Ship.
8. The forbidden section: So You Want to Ruin a Coiner’s Day
I’m done with this grind by the grace of God, so I can now safely offer a few observations about how best to ruin a coiner’s day. Live by the sword, die by the sword. No honor among thieves and all that.
If a mob gets the KB on you, you don’t give a coin. If you hate a coiner more than a repair bill, pull a bunch of mobs as you go down and hope one of them hits you last. You can even use the suicide dagger from Isle of Thunder. If you are a DK or a priest, run purgatory and the spirit angel form talent, respectively. No coin for them.
By far the most discouraging time to kill a coiner is right after he has censered. This is also when the coiner is weakest. Nothing will teach a coiner like a full 10 minute time-out to think about what he has done. If you manage to do this twice in a row it’s extremely likely to induce a ragequit.
If you’re really bored and hateful, standing guard at your faction’s camp is highly irritating and can have a huge detrimental effect on somebody’s coins/hour. Your being there and willing to fight will induce dogpiles on a coiner even if your gear isn’t anything special. If you die, rez at the graveyard and get back in the fight almost instantly! You’ll make the grind that much slower and more miserable, which seems like a noble goal.
Name names in general chat. Tell people where you have seen the coiner. Never underestimate the ability of a spontaneous anti-fun police force to coalesce. When people did this I often had to relocate to less lucrative parts of the island immediately lest a dragnet of do-gooders come down all around me.
When you get in a fight with a coiner that you’re going to lose, stall for time and try to head for areas with lots of foot traffic. Momentum in fights on the Isle can turn on a dime, so if even one or two people happening by decide to dogpile the coiner you may well end with a surprise win. Large groups of people mashing all their cc are at the end of the day the ultimate bane of even really geared coiners; make them follow you into risky situations or else give up. Win win.
In my experience the later it gets in the night the more ascendant and aggressive the coiners are. Play during peak hours if you can help it.
If you do have to AFK on the island and don’t want to give some poor sap one of his 2000 coins, or you’ve just pissed somebody off and want to hide, the safest place from coiners is the steps in front of the celestials. The guard coverage, line of sight problems, and the number of idling people make it effectively impossible for coiners to approach there. That said, in my experience you are fairly likely to get killed anyway by people training giant turtles or fire elementals onto the crowd. Ain’t that a bitch.
9. I’m done
Thanks for reading, and happy hunting. While I have issues with the execution of this grind on Blizzard’s end - PvE gear supremacy is pretty idiotic, and poor healers - it’s certainly dynamic and unique, and hopefully it bodes well for further such experiments in world PvP in the next expansion. I hope this guide helps you derive fun out of the farm, or at least minimizes the pain.
On to the next grind.
5000 PvP pet battle wins anyone?
Yours in Christ,
Cis-Icecrown-US, <Vindicatum>
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