I was prepared

I have a tolerant wife.  This is a good thing for me, because I tested it a little this week.  On Tuesday I woke up at 3:00 in the morning to start gaming like a maniac and played through the day and she was amused, though not so much by being woken up in the middle of the night.  I failed to get 2 of the 3 achievements I was aiming at for this expansion that day and was very concerned that I would fail further, but that was not to be the case.  The proof, as they say, requires pix:

The tricks involved in getting it were several.  First, I had to buy a very specific recipe that took 4 days to acquire.  It became available at 4:00 in the morning on Friday so to avoid anyone else beating me to the punch I woke up in the middle of the night for the second time in 4 days to play video games.  (Did I mention my wife is tolerant?)  I stood beside the questgiver as 4:00 ticked over, completed the quest immediately and began crafting, which is the other tricky part of the equation.  You see, the recipe that I used to get to 525 became extremely unreliable by the end.  To get from 524 to 525 I had a 9% chance of success each attempt, and the previous ones were similarly bad.  The trouble with this is that with a new expansion just coming out the cost of materials was hideously high and I wanted to be very sure to succeed so I needed to spend a TON of cash to make sure I didn't fall slightly short of my goal.

Ziggyny was doing some math using Markov chains a little while ago on profession skill up chance.  He gave me the numbers for my chances of success and they weren't nearly as pretty as I was hoping.  I was crafting Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamonds, and thankfully I had alchemy capped so I could actually make them myself. My expected number of Diamonds necessary was 47 and I got myself up to 68 stored up.  According to Ziggyny I had a approximately 90% chance of success with 68, and it turned out I only needed 42.  I spent a boatload of money buying ore from people (A lot of my suppliers seemed to think it was an early Christmas with the outrageous prices I was paying) and now I have 42 of a single gem cut.  To be fair, that gem is by far the most needed gem so the server demand will vacuum them up in an instant; whether or not I can recoup my costs or not is another question entirely.

I feel good, I feel great!  That feeling of having 3 goals, all of which should be entirely reachable, and failing utterly at the first two while the last remained at best uncertain was terrible.  The feeling of completing the third and watching my competitors bitch and kvetch about how they should have gotten it themselves was a wonderful thing indeed.  In this instance I was prepared.