Ice Crown thing of crafting things

With the release of ICC we got the new "crafting reagent" of primordial saronite. This is its own market much like runed and crusader orbs once were. And just as before, people are making serious mistakes on how to handle them thus wasting a lot of money. First off, they're new. That means they'll be very expensive at the start just like anything else. And also like everything new, it will drop in price rapidly. The mistake that people make is buying them up while they're still new rather than waiting a week and saving a few thousand gold. The smart ones, or those not concerned with BiS gear, used all their frost emblems to buy these up relatively soon and sold them for several thousand each.

Right now they're likely hanging around 2,000ish a piece, perhaps as low as 1800 if you buy in trade chat. What does this mean to you? It means that you should learn from the past and realize that their price will keep dropping until it bottoms out at whatever it happens to sit at. For my server this has already happened, but I'm expecting it to drop a bit more when the new VoA boss comes out. That's because frost emblems won't be such a rarity with people getting better gear to carry them deeper into ICC and even more sources of emblems. Thus they get more emblems from vault and being able to raid ICC more and buy more saronite to sell and so forth.

The same thing happened with crusader orbs. You got triumph emblems from ToC and the daily, then onyxia and vault. The only major difference is there's a few people that think they'll be able to get shadowmourne and will be buying up a lot. Then when they realize they're not going to get it (likely most of them) they'll flood the market with their 20 some odd saronites, dropping the price even further for a time.

Suggestion: Wait for your servers price on primordials to drop another 100-200 gold or so on their average price then wait to see somebody selling a large amount of them for less. Then it won't take much effort to buy and relist them or sell in trade for a decent 100g profit on each. Yes I know I recommend against flipping, but with such a small market, and a predictable one at that, it's not too big of a risk. So long as you don't jump the gun and try to buy early (before the prices have bottomed out and leveled) it shouldn't be too difficult to make some spare change.



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Business report changes and accounting.

I've decided that I'm going to clean up my up coming business report format. I've shuffled around all my inventory so that each banker will each be handling a specific section or two of my business. I'll also be leaving all profits they make on them until Tuesday so I'll have a much clearer idea of how much I am making from each of them. Granted I can't give a fully detailed "this profession made X income at Y cost for Z profit" because that would take far more effort than I'm interested in putting out honestly.

However this will give all of you a very good idea of each profession's has how much "potential" profit and can make your decisions about weather or not to enter that market educated ones. Never work harder, work smarter! Anybody can spend 12 hours camping the AH instead of one hour just posting, but not everybody has a solid understanding of a market and the other markets that effect it as well.

Also what I will be doing is making one banker dedicated to purchasing mats and nothing more. This will help you see the general cost to keep a widespread business going for a week of time and obviously show a more clear picture of my weekly profit. One thing to keep in mind is that what I'll be posting is the material price for EVERY profession I use and NOT including whatever I already have a stock of, so take that with a grain of salt.

This is however something I recommend everybody to do so you can understand your markets a bit better as well as see if you're actually making the profit that you think you're making. That's a handy piece of information to have around if you ask me. However, it is a bit time consuming and I likely won't be continuing with it for very long because of the sheer annoyance of buying only on one toon. But it is still a good thing to do now and again just to keep things fresh in your mind until you're 100% confident in how your particular market is running.

This will all be starting a week from this Tuesday, but I wanted to post this today so in the mean time you can do a bit of your own accounting. If you haven't done this sort of thing before, I also recommend that you keep a detailed log of how much actual time you spend both at the computer and while you're AFK posting/crafting. Again, this is to give you a better understanding of where your time is going and where your real money is coming from. Give it a shot, you'll be surprised what you find out.


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Raiding the AH!

When I'm not busy mucking about on the AH, I raid. And over the time that I've been doing the AH, I've noticed a lot of things that raiding and AH playing have in common to the point that I consider really working the AH a type raid.

Raiding requires a host of addons and possibly macros to make things easier.

DBM or BigWigs (Auctioneer or QA3)
Omen (lil sparky's workhop)
Recount (Bean counter)
raid frames (bagnon)
Scrolling combat text (postal)

You also have to work with other classes (professions) to balance out your raid (inventory). Without this balance you won't be able to succeed in the boss encounter (AH sales). You have to deal with other people, some morons being carried (AH campers), some are good players (competition), and some are just normal casual players (suppliers). In addition to them, you also need a sufficient raiding roster (stock pile) in case some raiders can't raid (items sell out). The real fun in raiding to me is progression (new markets), the challenge (sales) of getting to the end boss (gold cap x2).

I raid as a tank which may effect my business mentality on the game which makes me self contained and unable to rely on others to do my job right mostly.

Now how does this relate to making gold? Simple. The success of a raid is the same as an AH business. They both need the same things in organization, balance, etc. If you want to have a successful AH business, look at it the same way you look at a good raid. It has to work like a well oiled machine, doing the same markets/boss strats every time because you have proven that they work. Keep your auctions above your threshold and call the raid after too many wipes.

Just think about it some time.


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Hidden Treasures

Short post on a few things that I rarely see done lately and tend to sell with a degree of regularity. Not huge profit margins, but they are very friendly to the 'fire and forget' mentality, which is always a good thing.

Delicate copper wire: Created by any level 1 jeweler. It's bought because you need it to make certain repair bots which are in turn needed to craft Jeeves. I can get a stack of copper for say 4g and make 10 of these things. Post them all up for anywhere from 2g up to 10g each and sell them all at once. Sort of scary since you can just make a level 1 alt, send them some copper bars and a gold coin to train JC and you're done.

JC leveling rings: I got this idea from Gevlon and found that these things actually sell. I always assumed that since they were leveling pieces for leveling alts they'd be flooded perpetually. Not the case apparently. You can craft these for about 2g and sell them for 15 a piece. And the best part is if you set your threshold to only 2g when you get undercut below that, buy them out and get them disenchanted for a profit. It's a wonderful thing.

Saronite Shuffle: This is where you buy a ton of saronite ore, prospect it all, and use the gems for DE rings, rare gem cuts, metas, etc. This used to be hugely profitable, but not so much now that the market on dust has crashed on every server basically. However on my server saronite ore is falling in price steadily so this has become worth the time to do once again. If you used to use this method but stopped like many, look into it again and you may be surprised. The main thing that is making this profitable for me is the common gems and what they can be used for. Green JC rings, meta x-mutes, and simply selling jades and chalcedonys as singles. Hell just a single dark jade pays for a stack of ore so anything else you get from it is profit. Remember to buy it all on saronite Saturday!

Small speculation here. Since mining profit is almost directly tied to JC profits and the decreasing price on gems and thus saronite, what other farmable mats are going to go up in supply? Since many have several gathering professions, I'd imagine that they'll start farming something else. Perhaps I'll be seeing more leather or herbs? I can only hope the supply of leather increases as that would be a very large profit for my LW business which I love oh so much.

Vendor pets: I've said this a few times before but I just have to repeat it again. Flying out to the netherstorm once a week and spending 500g on vendor pets from Dealer Rashaad and the lady in Dalaran makes so so much money it's insane. If you haven't gotten into this yet do it now!

Crystallized eternals: I mentioned a while ago that I like to sell eternal fires as 10 crystallized fires at a ludicrous mark up. This also applies to shadows and earths being sold in pairs to people filling out their bag of epic ammo. So far in the entire time I've been on this server I have had zero competition selling crystallized at 300% mark up or more. This is a friendly reminder that if you haven't given this a shot yet please do so. All it takes is a single eternal fire to try it out and worst case, you lose 3g from reselling the eternal.



AH giggle of the day
A subtle emphasis on how lovely selling vendor bought pets can be. Special attention to the ones that are vendor sold in horde cities for a few silver being sold for 80 gold.






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Business report part 2

Continuing my business report from yesterday.

Enchanting:
This is the profession that I've spent the most time grinding out this and that for. It is also my newest market so there's been a number of enchants that I have to take a loss on, but that's all part of the process. I've gotten honored/revered in a few
reputations and farmed a few world drops as well. Some took longer than others and of course some were also more profitable than others.

Enchant - Bracer Major Defense: Unsold

Enchant - Shield Major Stamina: Standard inventory. Slow but steady sales on this one. Most likely due to the common floods and droughts of arcane dust on the AH while being the most viable enchant when defense is not needed.

Enchant Bracer - Healing Power: Still of questionable value considering the time it took to grind AD revered. If you already have the necessary rep on your enchanter then go for it, but nothing I would grind out for.

Enchant Weapon - Spellpower: Unknown. I took myself into MC to kill a few bosses for this and downed the frist two and no drop. It is definitely not a 100% drop like the TBC ones were changed to. However the enchant is still in high demand, so if I see the recipe on AH I'll buy it for a reasonable amount and go from there.

Enchant Weapon - Agility: Standard inventory. I farmed up the rep for this enchant and its 2H equivalent. It sells very often for very nice profit margins. Well worth the time.

Enchant Weapon - Crusader: Standard inventory. As you may know from my other posts, this enchant sells for a lot of profit and often.

Enchant Weapon - Strength: Unsold. Took me around 30 minutes to get the rep for this and over the week has not sold a single scroll.

Enchant Boots - Cat's Swiftness: Unsold. Not a single sale and the primal airs could have been put to far far better use.

Enchant Weapon - Fiery Weapon: Standard inventory. Took me 3 runs in BRD to get the drop over the course of 15 minutes. Great profit great sale speed. I'll be trying out icy chill next time I see the recipe for sale, but I expect that to be a loss.

Enchant Weapon - Executioner: Unsold. Took a bit of effort to get this one due to my enchanters gear not being spectacular. So far I've sold a single scroll for it with no competition. Not impressive at all.

Enchant Weapon - Unholy: Standard inventory. I was amazed that this enchant sold with the essences being only 5g each. Worth the 30g I paid for the recipe. Sells regularly for 100g profit.

Enchant Weapon - Life stealing: Standard inventory. See enchant Unholy.

Northrend enchants: This section has a good number that aren't worth selling at all. So I'll list what I'm selling with a sufficient degree of success, the rest take on a case by case basis. But for me if it's not listed it's either a total loss, too low of a profit margin, or is far too often being posted below normal material costs.

Weapons:
Greater potency
Exceptional spellpower
Mighty spellpower
Berserking
Black magic
2H greater savagry
2H massacre

Boots:
Greater fort
Icewalker
Greater assault

Bracers:
Greater spellpower

Cloak:
Greater speed
Titanweave

Chest:
Super stats
Powerful stats

Shield:
Major stamina

Gloves:
Exceptional spellpower
Armsman



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Business report part 1

Since I've hit the gold cap, I decided that I'll be giving a moderately detailed business report every teusday. This way when you read my posts and I mention that
I'm going to be experimenting with either a new market or a new product, you'll know the next week if it may be worth your time. This will be a longer than usual post, but if you want a good idea of what sells and what's worth the time to grind out then look no further. But since I've had a lot of different things to play around with, I'm going to need to split the first one up over a few posts. Here's part 1 of my report. I'll be splitting items into several different categories along with a short note about it if necessary.

Standard inventory: I am always keeping a stock of this item.
Secondary inventory: I will craft and sell these so long as I have a stock of the items that uses similar materials
Unsold: A complete loss of time, money or both.

Smithing:
Titanium Shield Spike: Unsold
Titanium Plating: Unsold
Titanium Weapon Chain: Standard inventory, but nothing I will be mass crafting. I'll keep a stack of 5 around and only craft more when all have sold. Only reason I'm not ignoring it is because they do sell and there's no competition.

Alchemy:
I picked up the recipe to transmute essences of water into air. I got this because two highly profitable enchants require the air but they are always in short supply or are at insane prices. They sell far too slow to be worth the effort without putting them into a scroll. Unfortunately the transmute still has a 20 hour cooldown which is shared with epic gems, a total waste.

X-Mute essence of air: Total loss
X-Mute meta gems: Standard inventory. In fact just yesterday I made 28 earthsieges with the mats for 20 and sold all of them cut.
X-mute titanium: Secondary inventory to belt buckles

JC:
I bought the epic cut for a few X/resilience orange gems. So far only SP/resil and strength/resil are selling with any frequency. My next cuts to get are a few eye of zul cuts that match the rare versions that I sell frequently.

Durable ametrine: Standard inventory, Well worth the cost
Resplendant ametrine: Secondary to other ametrine cuts. Sells, but of questionable value due to slow sales
Stat/resil epic gems: I have not gotten many, but since it's rare that you see a melee class gem for resil this is also of dubious value. No intention to get the rest of these cuts any time soon.

Inscription:
Off hands are still selling at a rate of one of each every day so are officially standard inventory. Glyphs are still moving like usual and snowfall ink demand price has dropped a lot. Maybe I'll see some cheap nobles decks to possibly flip for a profit.

Tailoring:
What, tailoring? I don't have a tailor! But I do know some nice people that ARE tailors. I crafted a handful of sapphire spell threads and sold all of them in 3 days for 40% profit. The only problem is they require eternal fires that I use to X-mute meta gems which sell almost immediately. Due to the sheer speed of sales, these take a back seat to my meta and crystallzied sales, but still very nice profit here. I'll be testing out brilliant spell thread eventually.

Sapphire spell thread: Secondary inventory to meta gems and crystallized fires.

Leather working:
Plain armor kits have been flooded for ages so I haven't sold any of them and to the vendor they go. Heavy armor kits however have been selling a lot and for large prices as well. LW profession bags have been very very slow to sell, but mining bags are still steady sales each day. As for leg armor kits both epic and rare they're still dipping below market value constantly. I could craft a pair and wait for prices to go up, but even then the sales aren't too consistent. As for converting leather to furs, this has been making me GREAT money, so I'll be keeping up with this. LW practically has its own version of the saronite shuffle.

Borean armor kit: Unsold
Heavy borean armor kits: standard inventory
Mammoth mining bag: Standard inventory
LW profession bag: Secondary to all other LW goods
Heavy borean leather: Secondary to all other LW goods
Leg armors: Not worth the time
Reinforced mining bag: Unsold.
Arctic Fur: standard inventory.


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Having a System

One of the most important tips I can give any AH player is that it is so important to have a system. Just with an IRL business, you follow other successful business models because they're proven to work. Translating that into wow, you need to find the specific method that works for you and your server. The importance of having a system for your markets is that it keeps you organized and consistent. You always want to have the same amount of items for sale and in stock so you always know what's selling, if you should expand on a market, or if one isn't profitable enough for you. My system is based on mass afk crafting, stockpiling, twice a day listing, and stack sizes.

Of these small tips, you're probably already doing one or two of them right now. But until you're aware of it, you can't take full advantage of it and the information that is provided. Also you'll spend a lot less time trying to figure out what you have, how many you want to craft and such. Less time spent waiting is more time spent playing.

Twice a day listing.
I list my auctions once in the morning which will grab the early players, the afternoon heroic grinders, and some of the pre raid crowd. I then list again at night, usually around 11pm server time, to catch 80% of the post raid crowd. On my server most raids start around 6-7 and end around 10-11. And all those shiny purples need gems and enchants done. Listing my stuff at these times gets me the most time at low prices when the most people are likely to be buying them. This way there is no need to be camping the AH (since almost all of that time is wasted regardless) since I already know that a lot is going to sell anyway.

Stockpiling.
I always keep a very large inventory of things that I sell so that when there's a price spike or a shortage of materials, I still have plenty to go around. It also makes it so that I don't have to scan the AH for materials several times a day. There's only 4 things I scan the AH for every time I'm there and that's because you almost never see them for good prices. These are things like old world essences, arcane dust, righteous orbs, etc.


Mass afk crafting.
The biggest boon to the AH player is that you don't have to be there for it. With such a huge stockpile of raw materials, you can spend a large amount of time sitting there watching your crafting bar slowly fill up. Crafting a stack of belt buckles takes 500 seconds, or just over 8 minutes. I craft several stacks at a time so that takes me almost 30 minutes, but it makes every bit I need for the week usually. While the mass crafting goes on, you get to do some house cleaning, school work, read, professional work, look at lolcats, etc. I do mass crafting so that I'm free to do my normal stuff I do when I'm at home. All I need is a spare 15 seconds to select a different item and hit Create All. Remember, it's important to not be a no life, Chinese gold selling, AH camping, nobody like myself!

Stack sizes.
Stack sizes refers to the amount of a particular item you have in inventory for your banker to sell, even if it doesn't stack like cut gems. This lets you know how many of that thing sold yesterday, how many you need to craft, if you need to craft more than your normal amount, if you should stop crafting, and so on. If I set a stack size of 5 of [item] and every day I need to craft a full set of 5 [item]'s that will tell me that I should increase my normal stack size because I'm constantly selling out of them (which means losing the opportunity of selling even more). In short, this is the method that I use to keep my inventory organized.


With all that said, all you need to do personally is work it into your personal schedule which is the only hard part to it. I can't offer any help other than I do my mass posting while I do my "I just woke up and look like a zombie" routine of getting coffee, breakfast, showered, ready to leave. When I get home i do the same in reverse, I start my auction bit up and slowly become a zombie as I get closer to needing to sleep. Fit these basic things into your daily schedule as best you can, and I know you can work in a space of 2 spare minutes here and there, and you'll see results the following day.




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Big Number Syndrome

Do you love seeing lots of gold in your mail box!?!?

Do you squeal like a little girl when you sell an epic gem for 250g when you bought it for 245?

Do you not care how much time and gold you invest so long as you sell something?

If so, you may have a business threatening case of Big Number Syndrome, or BNS.

I'm being told that with my gem business I'm "doin' it wrong." Epic gems are where the money is at and I'm wasting my time with rare gems. The problem is that people really don't want to expand their bank account, they merely enjoy seeing big numbers pop up. Sure the big money may be with epic gems, but that's also what almost every single other jeweler is doing and has much smaller profit margins than rare gems. Sure I sell epic gems when I can get a good deal. And I get the most income from my epic gem sales. But what these people fail to realize is that income and profit are entirely different things.

Income is just that, the money that "comes in." Profit is the money that comes in AFTER you take into account the price you paid (time or gold) to get said income. When I collect my mail from my banker from epic gem sales, I'll pull in a few thousand at a time. However I didn't make 3k gold just then. I most likely made anywhere from 800-1200. Also don't forget that if you're not wasting your time camping the AH you're going to get undercut and lose several gold on EACH deposit for an unsold epic gem, this will add up extremely fast. Also on top of this, you're not going to be selling a hundred epic gems a night to get these big numbers you crave so much.

Rare gems on the other hand, there is little competition. The raw gem prices are also very, very cheap. What this means is that you will sell a whole lot of them with very little time/input cost on your part. And just because "epics = cool" does not mean that there is no market for the "not so cool" people buying rare gems. After all, would you really stick 2,000 gold worth of gems into an alt you only play every now and then? My alts minus one have all rare gems and I still have just as much fun playing them.

Lucky for you, there is a cure for BNS! It's called "awareness." If you're aware of the price you pay for a gem and how much it sells for, you will immediately waste a lot less time and begin to make a much more acceptable profit for your time.



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Location, Location, Location!

You have a bank alt, they're level 1 and have no mount. So where are they? Choosing a proper city to operate in is an important decision believe it or not. Most just park themselves in their factions capital city and just go with it. Fortunately for alliance Stormwind is the best spot for you that I know of. However for horde you have several options depending on what your banker mostly sells. This is important because after all, time is money friend!


Orgrimmar.
The capital of the horde. Also was the biggest pain in the ass city for a long time. But it is still where 90% of people will be going to sell things in trade chat. Because of that, this is where I place my primary banker that does all of my buying. But for all other purposes, it's a terrible place due to all the run time from AH to bank and such.


Silvermoon City.
If you need a lag free environment for your work then this is a great place, I almost never see anybody here. It does suffer the same problem that Org does in that the distance from AH --> bank is too far for my liking. Although the scenery is very visually pleasing which is a big plus in my book.


Thunder Bluff.
Now this is more like it! Lag free, short run time, and the guild totem (bank) is right out front. This is also where I have my smith working from since the anvil and forge are directly behind you. Also the scenery is rather pleasant. If your banker has a mount I recommend you operate from here. This is a primo spot since the bank and AH are "outside" locations so you won't have to remount once you leave them.


Undercity.
This is the perfet spot for your glyph bankers. With the massive amount of back and forth you do between the AH and mail box, it's nice for it to almost literally be beside you. Also lag free, but the trip to the bank may be a bit annoying for some. However if your banker has a full set of scribe bags, you'll only need to take 2 trips, maybe a third on average. Another place where you can stay mounted at the bank and AH.


Dalaran.
For you engineers, this is still a bad place to work from. Sure it's very nice if you happen to be passing by on your main, but I doubt your bank alt will have the proper engineering skill to work from here anyways.

One thing to keep in mind is that if somebody is selling an item in trade chat and you offer to buy on a toon that's in TB, they might not reply. So to avoid this, simply tell them that you can get on a toon that's in org, or just change toons and hope it hasn't sold by then.


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Gone Solo

Simple post today on the specs that I use to solo with And where I go. I primarily solo with my DK as she's my enchanter, but when it comes to soloing for fun or some nifty mounts, I take my pally. Usually I do the basic rep farms for when I get curious about an old world recipe and decide it's worth the effort to see how well it sells. These specs are obviously not intended for raid use, but whenever you go to solo an old raid you'll want to spec for it on your first run or two there. This is because even though you may have ran it a million times when it was a max level raid, things are obviously quite different when you're alone. The main things you want to emphasize when soloing is burst damage (to make it go as fast as possible), run speed, and of course self healing. Now if you're in light armor and can't heal yourself, well, best of luck!

Pally specs: Prot or Ret. Usually I'll go as plain ret for trash and prot for bosses. It really depends on if you need more damage or if survival is the primary issue. As ret I'll usually judge light and use seal of cleave. When I get to a boss I'll use seal of light, keeping sacred shield up as much as possible and ignore consecration depending on mana. As prot, you can usually just faceroll your 969 rotation and win. As ret you can just let your instant flash heals keep you up and with a long duration sacred shield they should have a nice crit rate. Combined with the DR from the imp. RF talent and toughness makes you far more durable that normal.

As prot just load up on as much block value gear as possible and you should take almost no damage at all. Just change seals according to the situation you're in and it should go well. Even if it takes a bit longer than as ret, you'll get there with confidence barring any dps requirements like stacking debuffs or what have you.

DK spec: Blood is the defacto solo spec due to the need for healing and lack of a shield to reduce hits you take to almost nothing. I'm sure you can do most as either unholy or frost, but blood can keep yourself alive almost forever with death strike spam healing you for over 4k a hit. Naturally a decent amount of tank gear is recommended just so your DS heals you for more, but since I don't have any and can't be bothered to get it for my DK, I use pvp gear which still makes me crit immune and is loaded up with stamina.

Places that I generally solo are molten core, heroic MgT, scholo/strat, and BRD. Weather it be for some obscure vendor location or very valuable mats I'm in need of with none on AH to be purchased. Obviously if I could just buy the stuff I wouldn't bother, but sometimes the grind is unavoidable. The last solo grind I did was strat for argent dawn rep for a bracer enchant which I've sold 4 of so far for triple the price of the required mats. If a few more sell It might be worth it.

Next is MC or BRD for a few rep items for the thorium brotherhood to get the 15 str enchant. If people won't give me 200g for crusader, they'll give me 50g for that one. All about options!


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QA 3 set up

Finally I know!

I use the addon Quick Auctions 3 to do the bulk of my auction listings. It is truly a necessary tool for any wow businessman. It cuts your posting time down to almost nothing. Doing a post of 1,000 glyphs using auctioneer batch post can take 15 minutes or more, but with QA3 it gets done in under 5 minutes. It also does the same for my gems, enchanting rods, basically anything that has either the same material cost or same general price range.

The use is very easy, it's the set up that takes a while and needs the real explaining. I will say up front though that I am by no means the be all end all expert on this tool, just that I have been using it with a large degree of success. Once you get the hang of using this addon, which won't take long I promise, you'll have a much better understanding of tomorrow's inscription how to post.

I don't use QA3 for all of the auctions I post because either it isn't practical, or isn't possible to be used effectively. Namely enchanting scrolls.

Alright first, you obviously need the addon itself. Get it from curse.com here.

Once you get it installed the first command you need to know is "/qa config". This will open up this window where you set up all your item groups such as scarlet rubys or glyphs.




Ok once you get this window showing click on the "item group" section and type in the name of the group (name has no bearing on your auctions, just a name) then hit enter. I'll be setting this up for glyphs in the interest of keeping it simple.



Now that you have a named group you need to add items into that group, so go to the "add item tab" and type in "Glyph of" minus the quotes of course. This will add every glyph in your INVENTORY into the list, meaning if you have any on auction, in the bank or mail they won't be added in. If you want, you can just scroll down and click on each of them manually.



With a load of items in the group we can now set up for real. Go to the "Auction settings" tab. First thing to do is to set the post time. The default is 12 hour listing, but I set my glyphs up for 24 hours. Click on "override post time" and set it to your preference. I also tell it to ignore AH posts that are in stack sizes higher than 1 since everything I use QA for are always in single stacks, especially glyphs.



Next is quantities, or how many of these items will be posted in what stack sizes. I have this set to post at most 5 items in stack sizes of one.



Next is the important part, MONEY! I set the undercut value to 3g and the threshold to 3g 50s. That means that I will always undercut the lowest price by 3g each time, but will never list below 3g 50s. Note that when typing in the price you must type it in as Xg Ys Zc then hit enter.



Lastly is the fallback prices. In a nutshell, if you can't undercut somebody or there are none on AH this is what you post at. It also sets the maximum price that you will post at. With glyphs I also have the "override auto fallback" and "enable auto fallback" boxes checked. What this means that even if I can't undercut, the auction will still get posted. I do this only with glyphs since their AH deposit is almost nothing, but with gems and such it's quite a bit more. So I trade about 1g in deposit costs for the ease of an empty inventory which does a lot to help me stay organized. I set the max price to be 100% of my fallback price so no matter what I will never post a glyph above 30g. You can change this as you deem necessary of course.



Now that we got it all set up and ready to go, lets post some auctions. Go to your local auction NPC and go to the auctions tab. You'll notice up top you have a few new buttons. The ones you mostly need to be looking at are "cancel" and "post." What cancel does is it will scan the auction house looking only for things that you have in an item group and take note of anything that you have been undercut on. After it does its scan and will give you a message saying that it's done and is ready to cancel. This whole process takes about 2 minutes for 1300 auctions to be scanned and canceled.

After this you collect your canceled auctions, go back to the auctioneer and hit the "post" button. Now it'll do exactly what you'd expect, it posts your auctions at your set undercut value under the lowest poster. If the lowest post is below your threshold price, it will instead post it at your fall back price. Posting a full set of inscription bag of 715 glyphs is around 5 minutes give or take for a total of about 13 minutes to list my entire stock of glyphs. Note that when posting with a full inventory you need to have at least 1 bag spot open so that QA can split up the stacks.

Hope all of that was easy to understand and that you have no issues setting up. As you use this tool for other item sets and other markets, you'll be a lot more fluent with it and it'll be easy. Large addons are always a bit daunting to try and figure out, so this should be at least useful. Tomorrow I'll post my inscription guide, the last in the profession how to series.


Thanks for stopping by!

Profession How To Part 5: Inscription

Following up the QA3 set up guide, this is the general how to inscription post. First thing that is daunting about inscription is the massive massive stock of items you'll have which needs a dedicated banker or 3. The second issue with getting into this market is the rather steep entry cost you have to pay up front just to get a stock of glyphs and start your business.

Rough Entry Cost:
-83 days of northrend inscription research.
-60 days of minor inscription research
-57 books of glyph mastery (assuming you haven't used a single one)
-Over 1,000 ink of the sea to craft or dozens upon dozens of herb stacks
-A stock of 3 of almost every single glyph at the least
-A dedicated banker with 4 pack of endless pockets on their person and every bank slot purchased also with inscription bags in them.
-Your scribe will also need as clear an inventory as possible, preferably with a pair of scribe bags on them as well.
-A handful of vendor sold glyph techniques found here.

When I first started my glyph business I spent over 5,000 gold on flowers, books, and the like. Granted I made that all back in about 4 days, it's still a steep cost for when you're starting out and don't know if it's a decent market for you to get into. Be mindful and do your homework on it.

First thing's first, addons:
-Lil sparky's workshop
-Bagnon
-QA3
-Auctioneer
-Postal


Since I'm sure you read the post teaching you how to set up QA3 I'll just assume that you know how that works and have it set up already. Also see my post on AH tools for a more detailed explanation on these addons and the few macros you'll be needing.

1. First you take your banker to the mail box and collect expired glyphs. Use the reload macro to help take them faster with postal. Then go to the AH and click on the "Configure" button at the top center. Click on "Glypher" and hit "Scan Glyphs." What this will do is get you the most up to date info on glyph prices, takes about 2 minutes.

2. Now log onto your scribe. Open up your inscription skill window and LSW will load in the auctioneer data you just collected. On the right side of the window you'll see what the average price is of each glyph. There may be a better process to this, so bear with me, but here's how I go about my crafting.

I look at the prices given to me by LSW and any glyphs that it prices at 10g or more I select. Then I mouse over the item and in the tooltip bagnon will tell me how many of them I have and who has them. If I have less than 5 on my glyph banker I make enough to have 5 total. While these are being made I scroll down and repeat this many times until either my bags are full or I have made all the glyphs that I need. I do my crafting in UC next to the scribe trainer for buying extra parchments and so I have absolutely no lag at all with a large supply of mixed inks on me so I don't need the ink trader in Dal.

3. Now I mail off all the glyphs and hearth to Dalaran to refresh my stock on inks. At all times I carry 200 inks of the sea, 120 Etheral inks, and 60 of the rest. In addition I hold onto 160 resilient parchment and 60 of the rest. Make sure that your scribe is exalted with the faction that you're buying parchment from to get the best discount (if you're buying in Dal, it's kirin tor rep).

4. Next, long onto the glyph banker and collect the mail. Naturally you'll have to make a few trips bank and forth from the bank and the mail box so getting this enchant is a bit of help. One suggestion is to have multiple bankers for your glyphs. Of coruse only do this if you have the spare character slots and have an actual NEED for it due to the many trips to and from the mail box.

5. Once you have your inventory situated, go to the AH and if you have any glyphs up still, hit your cancel all macro and collect. Once that is taken care of, simply go to the auctions tab and hit post. QA will post all your glyphs that you have on your person while you go get drink or make a sandwich. Once you're back grab some more glyphs from yoru bank and repeat. DONE!

If you find it necessary, or don't mind camping the AH (god forbid your time is worth nothing to you!) you can go to the auctions tab and hit the "cancel" button. This will scan and cancel everything you've been undercut on. Now you just repeat from step 4.

6. If you have a ton of herbs now is when I usually do my milling keeping on hand 20 snowfall inks to craft the offhands scribes are able to and sell off the rest as is. I don't waste my time making cards as I have rather fail luck with nobles. The price of snowfalls are basically tied to the price of herbs, so if you sell 1 snowfall ink for the price of the stack of herbs you got it from, all those inks and thus glyphs are all 100% profit in your pockets.


A few closing thoughts on this whole thing:

-Inscription requires a decent amount of maintainance and AFK time. Unless you're only posting a few sections of glyphs and not the full
book, this might not be the profession for you.

-Set a "price" on ink of the sea. This plus parchment and a small crafting fee is your threshold price and works as your own internal price conversion of sorts. I value inks at 2g each. So your average glyph costs me 2g + parchment + 1g base crafting cost. So after the AH cut from a bare bottom sale of 3.5g I'm still making a profit, albeit a tiny one. But no matter what, I won't be selling below material cost.

-It is wise to have a large stock pile of herbs or inks. On my average day of crafting (which I do once every other day) I use around 400 inks total. If herb prices spike or there's a drought in supply, you're plain SoL for that time without a stock.

-Be very mindful of your threshold. Also know what the usual price for herbs are on your server and do your best not to purchase above your normal price. This ensures that no matter what you're making some kind of a profit.

-Lastly, just because you have money in your mail box does NOT mean that you made a profit. Be attentive to the price and sales of snowfall inks and any ink that you purchase without milling.


Thanks for stopping by!

Spending money: Entertainment and business

Work has really been piling up lately, so I haven't had much time to work on the QA set up and inscription posts, so I'll be writing on my post gold cap experience.


The few days before the gold cap I was so excited that I had completely stopped spending money on anything but repairs and things I knew would sell that same day (cardinal rubys, weapon enchants) due to the excitement of being so close. Now that I have a large sum of money, it needs to be spent in some way. Currency in any form is used for two things and has no other purpose: Buying goods and services. Of course 'services' can be defined many ways such as using your wealth as a means to influence others. Them doing what you want them to do is a 'service' that your money has afforded you.

Entertainment:

So what am I going to do? Well first thing is first, reward my banker for all their hard work with a full round of portable holes and a Gigantique sack. After that I bought them a nice new tuxedo and some very expensive jewlery. Why would I buy this stuff when it does 'nothing' for me? For the same reason that I buy and collect mounts, it's a piece of art and I enjoy looking at it. Ok but what about the rings, you never see those! Ok I'll admit I did that for the sole reason that I COULD do it. It was such an obscene waste of gold I laughed myself silly when I put them on and that's what I got from the waste of rings. I got to laugh, I enjoy laughing, so it's no different than giving somebody money to tell you a bunch of jokes and funny stories. Just because the 'use' of the vanity items that I got wasn't something tangible does NOT mean that I got nothing at all.

After this I treated my main to an early purchase of Pillars of Might even though they can't wear them until I get the EoF glvoes due to the lack of defense. Regardless they're effectively Best in Slot and being on the last tier of content makes them completely worth it. But since I love my tanking job so much, I'd buy them regardless of course. And with the icecrown radience making tanks take a large amount of hits all the bonus armor is a great way to deal with the incoming 15k auto attacks from a boss. But even though the armor does nothing for magic damage, any other options for this slot won't net me more than a few stamina so they're going to be worn all the way up to heroic ICC, possibly even until level 82 when a questing green reward is better. /shudder



Business:
Well I'm already knee deep in the AH side of the game that if I were to stop now I'd definitely miss doing it, so I'm going to see how much I can get before cataclysm is released. Gold capped twice over? Three times? A million? Only time will tell, but until then I need to stock up!


After spending money on nothing that will make me a profit, I went on a stockpiling frenzy and spent about 7k on assorted materials, many of which are still sitting in a crafter's mail box still. When I had bought up all there was on the AH (at my normal threshold of course!) it was almost immediately refreshed and I bought up another host of mats for the evening and had over 600 things sitting in my bankers mail waiting to be sorted. I also found a guy in trade selling 60 stacks of saronite bars and since I'm constantly running out of them I bought all they had. When you can go through 30 stacks in two days time, this is a god send. Of course I loaded up on dust, old enchanting mats, leather (the 2k I spent on leather recently has already run out), and enough herbs to mill into at least another 500 inks (I have 2k inks already in my bank).

With any luck this massive influx of goods will keep my busy for a while before the need for more arises. I'll still be buying more when I see good prices to keep the markets that use those materials at a steady price, but I HOPE that I won't be running out of anything for at least a week or two.


Thanks for stopping by!

Success!

This pic of my banker says it all (shame it won't fit). /Happy dance

THE CAP!

Comming Soon!

No real post today as I'm currently working on a semi in depth guide on setting up the addon Quick Auctions 3. Since this tool is so important to any up and coming AH businessman it deserves a bit more special attention. It will be a full walk through to the best of my knowledge complete with screen shots and all. This will then be followed with "How to inscription" since the two truly go hand in hand. And since inscription in and of itself is a monster of a profession will also take some time. Stay tuned!

However in the mean time I will let you know that gem sales have picked up to their normal position as far as profit is concerned. I am selling rare gems for the same profit margin as I was a week ago, but now I'm able to buy them for almost the price that a vendor gives you. In fact I purchased 2 stacks of raw gems which I cut and then vendored immediately. Technically though, I'm actually making a higher rate of profit than before. I'm still getting a min of 3g profit per gem, but when I'm paying 5g per gem as opposed to 8g makes me feel a bit more fuzzy inside.

I also went into ZA to get the recipe for executioner enchant. We'll see if it sells and how well. Next to do is grind out argent dawn revered since I've been seeing several people posting that they want the bracer healing power enchant done with no answers. If this twink enchant sells well, I may have to bite the bullet and take my ass into MC for the 30 sp to weapon enchant which is ALWAYS in demand. But wowhead says it has a sub 1% drop rate and hasn't been boosted to 100% like the TBC ones. I may go and kill a single boss and see what's what. Will update later on how it all goes down.



Current Total: 207,000
GAH! So so clooose!

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Indirect Farming

When people set out to get a large sum on money be it for a chopper to kill friends with when you drive off a cliff and /slow fall. Or a ridiculously over sized mammoth to block the Org mailbox or fishing pool in Dal or just want to reach the gold cap. A lot of them have the same thing in common: they're always looking for something to sell for thousands all at once. How many individual items can you list that will ACTAULLY sell for more than 5k on your server? 6? 7?

Ok now what's the drop rate (0.forgetaboutit%) or proc chance on getting it (0.0%)? How long would it take you to get it? If it's an epic boe, how many others in your super cool "lfm icc 10 rep grind going for 40 hours straight" group will be needing on it? Can it be ninja'd (all signs point to yes)?

Now ignore your thoughts of 'well i'm still getting [something useless or overly time consuming] while I try to get this item that sells for over 9000' thinking. Mining saronite with 30 other miners in the zone will get you closer to [super expensive purple text] than directly going after what you're wanting for "the big sale." The reason for this is the same reason that farming is not free. The fact is that if you want to make a large sum of gold, the idea is to find a market of easily crafted items that you can sell repeatedly. Things like glyphs, gems, or belt buckles. Since they are always in demand, you will always have a customer, and lots of them.


Here's the senario (fake numbers are fake):

-You have 1 hour open to you per day to do nothing but acquire shiney moneys.

-Eternal shadows sell for 50g each, which you can farm 20 of in your single hour of super fun money making farm time.

-Eternal fires sell for 100g each, which you can farm 7 of in your 1 hour of super fun money making farm time.

-You need eternal fire to craft a [super cool purple].

Do you A) farm the 'big sale' item of eternal fire needed for your [super cool purple item]? Or do you B) farm the eternal shadows, sell them and use that money to buy the fires you need? If you said answer A, go back to your second grade school and apologize to your math teacher for telling them they suck at teaching and that their class blows goats because you fail at learning math.

Farming shadows will get you 1000g while fires will net you only 700. So even though you need fires for whatever it is you're wanting, selling shadows will get you there 300g/hour faster. So when you are farming eternal shadows, you are indirectly farming the fires that you need. There are only so many hours in a day, and time is the only thing you can't get back or save up. Use it wisely! In other words, get as much gold as you can if you're farming and use that to get what you're REALLY after.

To expound on this slightly, the most common profession used by people that have gotten gold capped is inscription. If you're in there, you are IN THERE! But if you ask any of these scribes (say inscriptionist and I'll gut you with a fondue fork!) how much their average glyph sells for, you won't really get an answer above 20 gold, some have average sales of 10g (translation: they make as low as 7g profit after material costs on average).

Sure you may sell the odd glyph here and there for 50+ on a lucky day (on my server a glyph is never higher than 30g for more than 20 minutes). But on average, you're not making 'the big sale' every time you do your parchment scribbling. Then how are these people making several thousand gold a day!?!? One word: quantity. If you sell 400 glyphs a day for 7g profit each day, you're raking in a ton of money. If you make all your money from trying to buy a battered hilt for 5k and flip it for 15...you're going to be waiting a while.

TL;DR: there are many items in the world (of warcraft). Sell them!


AH giggle of the day
I was "hard at work" converting a few dozen stacks of borean leather into heavy when a discussion started up in trade chat about the weapon enchantment Blackmagic. According to EJ this is the best enchant you can get as a caster DPS for your MH weapon, and (for mages at least) is competitive with 81 SP. So people were discussing the proc on it, up time, dps value and so forth. Many agreed that indeed the theory craft was correct and is better than mighty spellpower. Of course I had to put in my thoughts on it to add a bit of emphasis to it being the best you can get. With this in mind, I stopped my mass crafting (and paused the show I was watching online) and got on my enchanter. Scanned the AH for black magic scrolls, undercut and posted 2 as this discussion went down. Shortly after trade chat returned to the good old fashion ANAL [ITEM] I had sold both of the scrolls for 200g profit on each.


Lesson learned:
A little advertisement can go a long way!

Current total: 197,000


Thanks for stopping by!

Business Report

It seems high time for a decent business report on my AH antics. This will simply be about what I've been selling with success, a few interesting deals I've gotten, and an all around recap of how things have been going. Over the last 3 days I haven't had much time at all to play let alone craft and post anything, so all my auctions have been up during the off hours and only yesterday was able to have them during prime time (5pm-12am server).

But even with me stocking up on whatever I can, I'm still able to turn a decent profit with the few auctions I've had time to post. In fact, most posts probably weren't even undercutting at all since I just batch posted them all without doing an AH scan at all, so now that I think about it I have been doing GREAT for not even doing a single scan lol. Ok on with the report!


Blacksmithing.

Still making great money selling belt buckles at around 15 sales a day. Weapon chain sales have gone down to only 1-2 a day, but I'm not pressed since I don't have to think about it, just post and collect. The enchanting rods have been selling a pair of each every single day besides titanium rods due to a pair of campers. No worries as the plummeting prices will surely drive them away soon enough. Sadly I am completely out of saronite bars and none on the AH for a reasonable price, so I may have to either raise my threshold price for the buckles or not sell any for a bit. We'll see how it goes.


Inscription.

Still cruising along at a solid 1k-2k per day. I've raised my max sale price up to 30g and I think it'll stay there for a while to come, but my supply of ink of the sea is getting rather low. I'm down to a stash of 600 ink of the sea and about 80 of the rest. This profession sure takes a ton of maintainence, but if I can get a decent supplier of herbs then I won't have to bother with milling so damned many flowers every other day. Now if only snowfall inks would sell a bit faster I could consider this 100% profit. What I may end up doing is taking a trip to sholozar basin and posting in general chat that I'm buying all herbs at X gold a stack and inks at X a stack. I did this before and got a solid supply for the week, but I don't like the idea of having to sit there and not be able to actively do something else since this does require my attention.

It usually does get me a good amount of sellers because the farmers that are there are actively farming and get an immediate guaranteed sale, thus saving them the effort of mailing off herbs, making bag space and getting to the AH. Hell I might get a private supplier or two from the deal so it could be worth the time, who knows. Either way I need to stock up as inscription is a profession that you cannot afford to be without a large supply of mats at all times since a price spike or drought in supply will put an immediate halt to your business without one.


JC.

Epic gems are still flying off the shelf and still able to have a decent stock of a few of them, namely ametrines and dreadstones. Rare quality gems however are not selling well at all over the last couple days due to so many people posting them for 8g and less. So I'm taking the time to stock up on cheap ass gems and wait for prices to go up a bit and make a killer profit once prices return to normal. This price drop usually happens about twice a month, so I'm not sweating it too much. Still annoying as hell though for my best money maker to be turning almost no profit because of the price drop. But with the slowly decreasing price of epic gems and being on the last tier of raid content, this market may be drying up for good. I sure hope not.


Leather Working.

Leg armors still aren't worth the time and effort to craft since they're selling for 15g LESS than I can get for selling the mats. I recently spent around 1,500g on regular borean leather and making a 100% profit on converting it to heavy borean leather. Along with that I'm still buying arctic furs with the heavy leather and getting a decent amount from that as well. I'm paying 3.6g for the heavy leather and selling it for 7g+ and the furs I'm selling for anywhere from 45g to 55g each. Leather working bags aren't selling too well, but the mammoth mining bags are still going at a rate of 2 sales per day at 95g a piece. And surprisingly out of no where, the heavy armor kits have been selling quite a lot more than they have been lately. Sold a few of these for 5 times the price i paid for the regular leathers to make them, that sure made me smile! Very good profit comming from this end.

I also got my kalu'ak rep up to revered for the LW bag recipe and have since sold 6 at the same price if the mining bags. Since I had never quested in the tundra with my LW it only took about 45 minutes to do all the missing quests which got me revered. If you got the spare time I highly recommend getting this recipe for your LW.


Alchemy.

Mostly inactive since I can't get a decent price on ESD mats. Dark jades and chalcedonys are selling for 15g EACH! Prospect a stack of saronite and get one of those gems and the rest of the stuff you get is all gravy, it's pretty nuts. The meta x mutes are still selling as I make them, still no awesome procs from my mastery on epics sadly. I also haven't been able to x mute titanium since I'm totally out of saronite and any that I get has to go into making belt buckles. Hopefully this profession will pick up soon.


Enchanting.

Out of curiousity, I grinded up timbermaw hold rep up to honored to get enchant weapon agility and 2H weapon agility recipes. Took me only 90 minutes since they drastically increased the rep you get from the first few quests. And since I hadn't done a single one before it took almost no time. The one hand agility enchant has been selling quite often, likely to be put onto heirloom gear or the few twinks that are still around. The 2H version is selling some, but I can't really see what people would be putting it on. Either way, they both are making me well over 100g profit per scroll even with essence of air being semi pricey at 20g each (needing 4 per enchant) and my outright refusal to farm them. In any case, it was a worthwhile investment of my time.

Mongoose scrolls have all been sold! And by all I mean even the massive back stock of mats I had has been cleared out as well. The only arcane dust on AH is at 3g each and above, so the profit margin isn't that high compared to when I was paying half that for them. I also took my enchanter into regular mode arkatraz for the enchant 2H major agility recipe. I didn't have the key and definitely was not about to do the long ass quest chain for it, so I crafted a set of titanium skeleton keys to open the door (good thing they're a smith as well!) and got it in about 15 minutes. I've sold 2 of those scrolls so far for 250g each with mats costing somewhere in the area of 130g. Along with this, I'm also selling a crusader scroll each and every day for 80g profit and up. Very worth it to farm up this recipe. I still haven't sold a scroll for cat's swiftness or defense to bracers, so I think I'm just going to write off these enchants as a total loss.

Aside from a select few armor enchant scrolls, most are STILL below material cost. The only ones making me a profit are weapon enchants (I sell at least 1 berserking scroll a day), super stats to chest, greater fort to boots, armsman to gloves, and sometimes greater speed to cape. The rest I'm basically ignoring and intend to sell extra cheap to cut my losses at some point. I wouldn't say that it was a mistake getting into this market, but I definitely did not do enough research into it and ended up wasting a few thousand on scrolls that are selling for 40% of the price of the materials and below. How people can keep doing this and not realize how little income they're getting is beyond my understanding. It's probably another case of "I have money in my mail, it MUST be profit" or "I farmed all the mats so they're free!"

I think once I sell off most of the scrolls, I'm only going to be making weapon enchants and a very few select armor enchants. I'll post an update later on once I finally settle on what scrolls I intend to keep selling.


Vendor jumping and others.

I'm always amazed when this sort of thing sells. I've sold more vendor pets for 60g profit and vendor sold drinks for 10g a piece. Also I'm still selling off at least one eternal fire as crystallzied for triple the price you can buy the eternal for. The funniest part is you can see an eternal for 25g right up top and crystals for 7.5g then the SAME PERSON will buy 10 of my crystals. If you need an eternal, why not just buy one? I'm also still selling several vendor profession bags each day with enchanting bags selling the most followed by gem bags and lastly mining bags. Not concerned with the mining bags selling so little since the people wanting mining bags are buying my big ones from LW selling for such a tremendous profit.

By vendor bags I mean the ones you can buy from your faction's inn keeper in hellfire for about 10g each which I sell for 32g every day. I stocked up on a dozen of each so I'm going to move my vendor camping toon over to the netherstorm and start grabbing the engineering mats and vendor pets from them to sell. Again I will point out that I am not actively "camping" these vendors, just leaving a toon logged out next to them and only hop on them every now and then.

Current Total: 192,000
Proof!

Thanks for stopping by!

Profession How To Part 4: Smithing and Alchemy

Next profession: Inscription!

Black Smithing.

My favorite money making profession because it makes loads of gold, takes little effort (nigh zero), and most believe it isn't profitable, which means nearly no competition.

There's only a few items that I craft and sell with smithing and a very simple process for it. Here it is.

Belt buckles - 35g min price, 75g max price
Costs 25g for me to make based on Eternal shadow priced at 10g ea which can spike to 20 and up. If that's the case and buckles are low, I'll sell the shadows and wait a bit before crafting more. With some VERY impressive belts available for emblems of frost, some of which are BiS or close to it, many are making them one of their first few purchases...and they all need buckles!This is the only item that I check up on form time to time. This is because I can't post my whole stock at once, but I can't post just 3 or 4 either. I post 5 at a time and check in whenever I have a spare 45 seconds to log in refresh and log out.


ENCHANTING RODS:
Truesilver - 3g to make, sells for up to 40g
Eternium - 6g to make, sells for up to 20g
Fel iron- 15g to make, sells for up to 80g
Adamantite - 45g to make, sells for up to 80g
Titanium - 25g to make, sells for up to 80g

These things I keep two up on the AH at all times. Some sell faster than others, but usually you'll sell one of each to the same person about to power level enchanting so they can "enchant their gear for free." I'm told that arcanite rods sell well also, but I don't have the patience to deal with getting the arcanite bars so that's just a small suggestion.

Titanium weapon chains cost 17g to make and sell for upwards of 60g a piece. Simple to do, I craft a stack of 5 and post them all for 24 hours and forget about it. There is such little competition with anything here minus the buckles that it's truly set it and forget it.


Alchemy.

All I use this profession for is transmutes. On my server crafting potions or flasks is selling at a loss without being specced for it and making maybe 2-3g profit per. So unless you have a private supplier that has no problem selling their lotus for insane prices, or just insane proc luck, go X-mute spec or don't bother.

X mute titanium has no cool down which means that if you can get a decent price on saronite ore/bars you can turn that green stone into gold for little effort. I make anywhere from 6-15g profit per bar I x mute.

X mute epic gems and metas are solid income. The epic gems sell for more than double what the material cost is.Just make sure you're doing a proper x mute to get the most profit margin of the raw epic gem and mats to make it.The most popular metas I sell pre cut are:

• Relentless earthsiege


• Chaotic skyflare


• Beaming earthsiege


• Insightful earthsiege


• Austere earthsiege

The rest of the meta cuts I see are drowning in the sub 20g range, obviously less than material cost no matter what server you're on.The eternal cut used to be an easy sale to tanks which were having troubles getting to the defense minimum (it's not a cap folks, defense is still beneficial after being uncrit) so they would use this gem instead of the standard austere. But now with purples raining from the sky this isn't nearly the problem it was when you first hit 80 at release. Last I checked, these were selling for 12g each, 2g more than a single dark jade.

Simply buy a stock of the materials needed and saronite whenever it's cheap enough to profit by making it into titanium. After that get a JC to cut your metas or sell them raw and post your titanium in stacks of 1 and 3, just be sure not to flood the market.


Thanks for stopping by!

Vendor jumping.

I mention this briefly from time to time (I think I have at least) so this short post is to give you all a list of vendor purchased items that can fetch a decent price on the AH. Some sell for sheer ignorance of others, some for out of the way vendors (buying your time), others because people don't know what wowhead is for (it's like calling in sick and going to the beach...but for databases).

Most of these things I discovered either by reading other blogs, leveling a profession that needs vendor sold recipes, or simply taking lucky guess. Ok on with the list! Here's all the npc names/locations, vendor prices, and my general sale prices.


Adamantite Frame
sold by - Qiff (area 52, netherstorm), dealer najeeb (stormspire, netherstorm)
sold for 4g, my price 25g

Hardened adamantite tube
sold by - Dealer Najeeb (stormspire, netherstorm)
sold for 12g, my price: 50g

Khorium power core
sold by - Qiff (area 52, netherstorm)
sold for 5g, my price: 100g

Flask of port
sold by - damned near any drink vendor in a major city
sold for 1 silver, 50 copper. my price: 10g

Skin of dwarven stout
sold by - damned near any drink vendor in a major city
sold for 1 silver, 20 copper. my price: 10g

Ice cold milk
sold by - damned near any drink vendor in a major city
sold for 1 silver, 25 copper. my price: 3g

Enchanter's Satchel
sold by - horde/alliance inkeepers in hellfire penn.
solf for 14g, my price: 32g

Gem pouch
sold by - horde/alliance inkeepers in hellfire penn.
solf for 12g, my price: 25g

Mining sack
sold by - horde/alliance inkeepers in hellfire penn.
solf for 10g, my price: 35g

Plans: Adamantite Rapier
sold by - Aaron Hollman, shattrath
sold for 4g, my price: 30g

Plans: Adamantite Rod
sold by - Aaron Hollman, shattrath
sold for 4g, my price: 30g

Plans: Eternium Rod
sold by - Mari Stonehand, shadowmoon valley(alliance), Rohok (horde) hellfire penn.
sold for 12g, my price 40g

Plans: Lesser Ward of Shielding
sold by - Mari stonehand, Shadowmoon valley(alliance), Rohok (horde) hellfire penn.
sold for 6g, my price 20g

Pets: blue dragonhawk hatchling, Brown rabbit crate, cat carrier (siamese), mana wyrmling, red moth egg
Sold by - Dealer Rashaad
sold for 10-40g, my price 20-200g

That's all that I can think of as I'm writing this, but I'm sure you can (and I encourage you to do so) add to the list with any other vendor purchased items you might be selling. I'll update this post with any other neat vendor goodies that come up.

And in case you're wondering, no I do not spend hours and hours flying around and camping vendors for these items to re spawn. I'm sure most people by now have AT LEAST one toon they don't play very often. So take that unplayed alt and park them near one of these vendors and whenever you have 2 minutes to kill, log onto them to buy the item and mail it off to your banker.


Thanks for stopping by!

It's all in the numbers

This is going to be a simple but very effective post about stack sizes. Wonder why certain things aren't selling? It could simply be due to the stack size that you are posting them at. While this might seem like a no brainer, some things that are obvious need to be pointed out before you can consciously say "hey that makes sense, I should try this some time!"

First example is one that I used to make a large profit, but thanks to the auto DE feature blizz added in, isn't worth much. Dream shards are used to purchase many enchanting recipes, which cost 4 dream shards per (mostly). At the time I was doing this your average shard sold for 15g a piece. I bought any blues and any shards (stacks or singles) at 15g and relisted them in stacks of 4 for 25g each. That's 10g pure profit on each sale, of which there were many.

After this stopped working I went on to heavy borean leather. Current stacks and singles are around 4-5g each. I post stacks of 4/10 for 7.5g each. They sell while the stacks of 20 and singles are still on the AH.

Arctic furs (which you can buy for 10 heavy borean from Braeg Stoutbeard in dalaran) I post in stacks of 2 because that's what the leg armors require.

Eternal shadow/earth I sell as crystals in pairs because of the epic ammo material amount.

Fires I sell as crystals in singles since a lot of people need 1 more eternal fire, but have 7 crystals already and thus think they're "saving" money. Shame you could have bought the cheaper eternal and sold your spare crystals! With eternals selling for 25g/ea and posting them as crystals for 7.5/ea that's a hefty profit margin.

All common gems I sell as singles or as three for the JC daily that requires two common gems of different kinds and the frozen orb that needs 3 (dark jades, shadow crystals, chalcedony).

Cooked dragonfin I sell in stacks of 5, 10, or 20. If a stack of 20 is up for 5g each, put up a stack of 10 for 7g and more stacks of 5 for 7g as well. Although these you want to sell as full 20s if possible.

Potions, the rare occasions I sell them, go up in stacks of 5 since most people think that's as high as they stack up to.

And titanium bars I sell in stacks of 3 for people doing their titansteel CD's.

Of course there are many things you want to sell as singles. Things like enchant scrolls, belt buckles (any type of item enhancement really), flasks, abyss crystals...you get the idea. Stuff that's expensive and/or consumable = single stacks.

Give it a shot and you'll see some interesting sales.

AH giggle of the day
I log onto my smithing banker after raids tonight to catch the post raid crowd. I got talked into doing a 10m after our standard 25 so I missed out on a good amount of AH sales. I check the belt buckles and there's not a single on on auction. So I post them fro my normal "no competition" price of 65g. 2 minutes pass while I'm handling other auctions and they all sell. I post another set of 5 but for 75g. A few minutes pass and they all sell. I repeat this process yet again and have sold 3 more as of this writing. Quite curious to see how high it'll go before a competitor shows up. So far this has given me a total of 565g pure profit in under 10 minutes.


Lesson learned: Nothing in this world is untouched by a potential stroke of luck. So you never know when you might get a lucky break and be handed a temporary monopoly. When you do, be sure to take advantage and milk it for all it's worth!

Thanks for stopping by!

AH tools

Today will be a shortish post about what addons I use and any important macros. There aren't many and the explanations are rather simple, so just about anybody should be able to grasp the use of them. First, addons!

1. Auctioneer, your bread and butter. gives you the pricing of everything, appraiser tab lets you afk post large amounts of items while automatically setting the under cut amounts and threshold prices.


2. Lil sparky's workshop gives you the auctioneer data in your profession skill window. This is amazing if your crafting toon isn't the one you post auctions with.


3. Postal is used to gather your mail all at once. For those with a lower ping and decent computer, check out this link on how to speed up your mail retrival (by Tella) and how to let you get all your mail while afk (by Zero)


4. Quick auction 3 very amazing tool for posting mass amounts of auctions of a single group such as glyphs, monarch topaz, herbs, ore, and so forth. extremely fast.

Now the macros, first is the cancel all macro.

/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo("owner",i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,"^Scroll of Enchant") then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

This one will cancel every scroll of enchantment you have on auction, all you need to do is be at the AH, hit it, then go afk while they all return to your mail box. In the macro where it says "^Scroll of Enchant" you can replace this with any group of items you have a large amount of that have the same word in them. For example you could change it to "Glyph of" to cancel all glyphs, or Forest Emerald to cancel every forest emerald you have up. Very useful forwhen everything you own was undercut and you want to re list them all or if you just re filled your stock and want to keep all auctions set to expire at the same time.

Next is the command to help get mail faster. With the link I mentioned above you can let it go while you're afk, but I find that doing it manually is infinitely faster. The problem is your mail box only holds 50 mails at once and it takes a full 60 seconds for new ones to come in after you first open it. If you collect it all nice and fast with postal, hit the macro

/console reloadui

and you'll do just that, reload your user interface, and voila, full mail box. This cuts about 40 seconds of time out of each collection, but you can't go afk for it. But the faster you can reload your UI the more worth it to stay there this becomes.

Lastly are my two 'grinding' macros. I use these for when I have a ton of saronite or flowers to prospect/mill. It takes away the click, move mouse, click bit into one button. Very good for when you're reading the news online or a book in your hands. Sure you're on game, but you're not exactly IN game.

For prospecting use:

#showtooltip
/cast prospecting
/use saronite ore

For milling use:

#showtooltip
/cast milling
/use Icethorn
/use Goldclover
/use Tiger Lily
/use Deadnettle
/use Adder's Tongue
/use Talandra's Rose
/use Lichbloom
/use Fire Leaf


Note on the milling macro, if you have 1 single tiger lilly in your first bag spot, and a full stack after it, you'll have to put the single into your bank (or any stack that isn't a multiple of 5) because it will use the first flower you list in the macro in the first bag slot it appears in. Give it a shot and you'll see what I mean. It will also try to mill the herbs in your pack in the order they're listed in the macro. So the one listed will first mill all of your icethorns, then mill your goldclovers and so forth.

AH giggle of the day
I'll let this image and this npc speak for itself. Breanni


Lesson learned: Spending 3 minutes on wowhead can save you up to 100 gold or more on silly AH prices!


Thanks for stopping by!

Profession How To Part 3: Enchanting

Next professions: Blacksmithing and Alchemy

Enchanting. A strange market I must say. Many enchant scrolls on my server sell for LESS than the material cost of the mats, even if you craft JC rings to DE for mats and buy in /2 for very low cost. Namely cloak enchants, tuskarr's, and defense enchants. I've found that weapon enchants and low end enchants (striking, super stats, icewalker, etc.) sell the most, but weapon enchants get you the most profit per sale.

I don't DE gear to sell mats, I use every bit I get. Turning gems and crystallized earths saves about 1g on dust, but since that takes a lot of time i only do it when there are NO mats on AH for an acceptable price and I need to refresh my stock. Here's a link to a great post on the JMTC forums for a spreadsheet to calculate the material cost of each enchanting scroll. Did wonders for me, the thread is only 2 pages long and will give you an idea how to tailor it to your own prices. It is rather intuitive. If you don't have MS excel, you can get open office and work with it just fine.

These are my minimum sales prices and enchant list of ones that are worth selling (for my server). I'm going to emphasize that these are only the ones that sell on MY server. For you, some regularly used enchants like shadow armor or defense to chest might be well worth crafting and selling. Unfortunately the scrolls are being sold for half of what it costs to make (guess how I get my own gear enchanted!). Even with my guild giving a 50% discount on enchants for raiders, I still buy most of mine from the AH because of this.

All of my sales are based on the following assumed material pricing, which is the max I pay per item:

Abyss crystals: 30g/ea
Greater cosmics: 13g/ea
Infinite dust: 30g/stack
Arcane dust: 2g/ea
Void crystals: 8/ea
Armor vellum: 30g/stack
Weapon vellum: 120g/stack
Large prismatic shards: 4g/ea
Righteous orbs: 25g/ea
Large brilliant shards: 10g/ea

If you're finding that prismatic shards are a bit pricey, here's a friendly reminder that saved me tons per scroll in materials: void shatter

.Weapons.
Staff greater spellpower - 300
Accuracy - 310
Berserk - 440
Crusader - 150 (recipe drops from this guy and others in the same spot. Took me 20 kills for the drop. however it is also boe so you might be able to buy it.)
Great potency - 25
Black magic - 330
Mighty spellpower - 270
Superior potency - 195
Massacre - 360
Exceptional spellpower - 55
2h greater savagery - 40
Goose - 280 (Moroes in karazan, lvl 70 raid in deadwind pass. If you don't have the key or a lock pick of some sort, you can drop through the floor on the back side. 100% drop rate). Remember to be in a raid group!


.Gloves.
Crusher - 110
Exceptional spellpower - 15
Armsman - 60

.Bracers.
Major Stamina - 100
Superior spellpower- 120
Greater assault - 110
Striking - 14

.Boots.
Icewalker - 16
Greater fortitude - 25
Minor run seed - 15

.Chest.
Powerful stats - 170
Super stats - 20

.Cape.
Titanweave - 75
Greater speed - 90
Wisdom - 140

.Shield.
Intellect - 25
Major stamina - 40 (Purchased from this npc in shattrath)


Also of note is that scrolls have zero deposit cost, so you can list as many as you please and only have to worry about the 5% AH cut when they sell, helps keep your profits high. What I do is I keep a stock of 4 scrolls of each armor enchant and 2 of each weapon enchant (except mongoose, I keep 4 of them on me) while posting 3 and 1 of each respectively. In addition to that, I try to keep a load of enchanting mats in my bank for all northrend enchants along with a handful of TBC mats for mongoose and a few others I'm experimenting with. I currently sit with over 20 stacks of dust, 20 stacks of cosmics, 10 stacks of abyss, and whatever cheap TBC mats i find i buy. Here's a great post by the goblin about a nice spot to get some extra cheap greater planars and occasionally dust.

Keep a close eye on how much you pay for materials and how much you list for. When I first got into this market a few weeks ago, I came to find out that I had sold a handful of enchants 10g below material cost, heh woops. But as with getting into any new market you need to expect to make a mistake here and there. Because of that I highly recommend using the spread sheet I posted at the beginning so you can see for yourself just how low you can post your enchants for.



AH giggle of the day
I have been dealing with several AH campers in my JC market for the last week or so, hence the lowerish profits. But now they are making their way into all of my other markets and ONLY post things there when I log on, namely enchanting and blacksmithing. For the longest time I never saw them post a single item from those professions, but now they are camping almost every market I am currently in. So what am I doing? Letting prices plummet to near material costs in less than 15 minutes each time I post.

Now the profit for myself and may others is nearly nothing. Last night, belt buckles dropped from 75g to 35 in no time which is a measely 5g profit BEFORE AH cut and not including losses on deposits. My next step was to then invade THEIR markets. Now they don't have any amazing profits either. Unless they're already caped, they're about to lose a lot by selling me very under priced goods =D

Lesson learned:
Be careful who you start some AH PvP with, they might have more loose cash than you do.


Thanks for stopping by!

Profession How To Part 2: Leatherworking

Tomorrow's profession: Enchanting

My secret cash cow for a long time until purchased arctic fur with heavy borean doubled the price of regular leather. However it is still solid g/hour.

Start by purchasing oodles of plain borean leather and use it for the following:

(Based on 12g/stack of regular borean leather or 3.6g/ea heavy borean leather)

Heavy leather - 4.5g/ea minimum sale price, I usually get upwards of 7.5g/each for this simple conversion.

Arctic fur - 45g/ea. Prices get as high as 60g each for this. you can turn 10 heavy leather into 1 fur by purchasing it from this guy in Dalaran. Depending on the current rate of this, I may even buy some of the cheaper heavy leather on AH to turn it into furs for a modest profit.

Leg armors (ice scale and frost hide) - 120/ea. These are constantly falling below material cost so I don't bother with them usually, but it is an option if prices are more stable on your server. Aside from the listed fur prices, orbs are about 5-7g each and the chitten/scales are about 2-3g each. Take this and compare it to your server's price range and decide if this is a viable market for you. Keep in mind if the leg armors are at 200g and up, wait a few days to see what happens as they may bottom out to 90g each leaving you with a stock that isn't going to sell for a profit.

Heavy borean armor kits - 20g (usually get 35+ each). Very consistant sales to tanks gearing themselves up and not wanting to drop big money on high end enchants for starter tank gear. Also many progression tanks (myself included) use an armor kit for their gloves as there are not many great options for this slot.

Regular borean armor kits - 4g (can sell as high as 10g each). It isn't often that these will sell due to it being a prime craftable for leveling your LW, but when the AH isn't flooded they'll fetch a decent enough profit for it to be worth listing.

Mammoth mining bag - 45g (pattern requires sons of hodir honored). These bad boys sell for 95g regularly and I always sell at least one per day every day, sometimes up to 5 all at once.

Pack of endless pockets - this is an item i do NOT craft! Why? because on of the msot popular guides to leveling professions comes from wow professions.com. And they have you craft a large amount of these which sell to only one type of person: a scribe's banker. Due to that, they will be on AH for well below material cost and always in large numbers since not many people need them. This is contrary to the normal armor kits because those are actually used by people leveling up, and not one specific type of person. One key to making money is to know what is selling to who, remember that.

Trapper's Traveling Pack - requires the kalu'ak revered. I don't have the rep to craft this, so I can't say with any experiance or certainty that they sell well enough but I never see any on the AH so it might be worth crafting a pair and seeing what you can get for it. Since I'm sure there's many others that CBA to deal with the silly rep dailys for them and fewer still that are LW'ers. If you give this a shot, please let me know how it goes for ya and I might even end up considering getting the rep for it myself.

Ok, here's how I work the leather (simple stuff):

1. Buy a large stock of leathers for 12g/stack and under
2. Craft enough plain armor kits to have 5 in stock, list for 6g with no competition
3. Turn the rest into heavy leather
4. Craft a stock of 4 mining bags, list for 95 with no competition
5. Craft a stock of 12 heavy armor kits, list for 40g with no competition
6. List most of your remaining heavy borean in varying stack sizes at no less than 4.5g/each. Try and keep at least 2 full stacks on hand at all times in case you sell out of mining bags or armor kits. Also if you see full stacks on the AH for 5g/ea, list yours in stacks of 10 for your normal price. Basically keep changing the stack size so that you're the only one posting at that amount. Might seem silly, but this gets me sales of high priced leather when there's cheaper options just due to the stack size.

Closing thoughts on LW

-Very little effort and 90% afk time with this profession. The only time you have to ACTUALLY be at your computer is when you're checking how many bags and armor kits you have. crafting all of them takes less than 2 minutes, then you hit Create All for the heavy leather conversion and go afk. Occasionally go to the fur vendor and buy a fist full. Come back, list, and profit!

-This profession requires a constant supply of leather and a large stockpile of it as well. Because of this I made a macro that posts in trade that I'm buying, my price, and reminding people that you can just CoD mail it to me. So every time I happened to be in a major city, I'd hit it and collect a few CoD mails of leather in an hour or 2. Also the fact that i was saying that I would buy everything they had in stock got some attention as well when I made good on that offer. This got me several consistent suppliers until 3.3 came. Remember, when you stock up, REALLY stock up!


No AH Giggles today, instead a small business report.
It seems the farmers have been on a caffiene induced bender as both the AH and trade chat have been flooded with uber cheap mats over the last few days. Namely enchanting materials and saronite which is strange because that sort of thing is usually only in mass supply on the weekends. Unfortunately this causes my daily profit over the last few days to drop significantly lower than usual. There have been stacks of abyss crystals at 20g each (normally 35) and epic gems for as low as 130 as opposed to 170each. How can an AH junkie like myself pass up such great deals? So once this massive influx calms down, I should be seeing some killer income.

I mention this because it helps me emphasize a point which is very important to hitting the cap. If you only want to learn to use your professions to stay 100% self sufficient you can stop reading, otherwise take a note. Always, Always, Always stay stocked up! If you see a great deal on something you sell, take it or some one else will. And guess what that some one else is NOT doing? Buying your stuff! In other words, know when to stock up, and when to empty your bags.

Thanks for stopping by!

Profession How to Part 1.5: Undercutting

Short-ish post today on the proper method of undercutting your competition. First, I'll point you to a post that will likely explain it far better than I can (the goblin). Now I'll explain my take on it, what I do, and how it's done. First, I undercut by a lot more than your average person does. When people post a gem for X gold, somebody will post the same gem for Xg - 1 copper. Me? I'll post it for 4g less, sometimes even more. Other times, I'll simply post 1g lower than the next lowest listing. The when and why you undercut is more important than the amount.

The reason that I undercut by large amounts is to get rid of the AH campers. Any up and coming businessman knows these people. The ones that sit in their parents basement all day, spamming their AH refresh button, undercutting your stuff immediately after you post it for 1 copper less. Or they wait for you to log then post under you. Now there's no magical trick to this because you can't MAKE them stop posting. What you can do however, is make them no longer want to list for 1c less or make that market simply not worth their time.

Or you can do what I like to do and mess with them relentlessly by logging on your toon that you post on before you leave so they think you're posting again when you're not even there. Or if you're only working a small inventory, send your stuff to a different toon and post on them. Sure this takes some time, but it TOTALLY is worth it when the hate mail flows in >:D

I will undercut down to a gold above material cost without hesitating (and I get my mats very cheap), I'll drop the price by 20g at a time without feeling bad about it in the least. Just because the "cool ppl" say you should only undercut by a few silver, doesn't mean that you HAVE to. After all, these "cool ppl" saying that "you're screwing yourself out of profit and losing money" are the ones sitting with 1k gold and think of themselves as AH wizards. Not the case. Now keep in mind, I am not advocating undercuting by 50g every single time you are undercut. That would be plain silly. Deep undercuting without reason is plain stupid.

By undercuting by large amounts you'll push away the campers and the casual sellers, leaving the market mostly to yourself and a select few others. It's rare that you'll have an entire market to just yourself and the occasional random sellers, so once you notice that there's only 2-3 people competing with you, you can go back to undercuting by smaller amounts. The people that aren't scared or annoyed by your deep undercutting are the ones that have been in that market for a while and have plenty of money and stock to deal with it.

Suffice to say, unless you're 100% confident in not needing money from that market and have plenty of spare time, you won't get rid of them. Granted this will royally piss off the HC campers and the Chinese gold farmers, so you may end up not making much profit for a week. Lord knows I've had this happen to me a few times. Sadly when 2 leave, it seems 4 pop up in their place.

Also of note is the lower the price, the faster something will sell. So if you just have a few things you know are worth some coin, go and throw them up for far below average if you're nearly broke. Otherwise don't worry about undercutting by huge amounts as it won't get you anywhere.

Naturally the amount you want to undercut depends on your profit margin for that market. The higher your profit per item sold is, the more you can undercut with it still being worth your time to list. One example is inscription where you can undercut by extravagant amounts and still make great profit since a glyph costs ~3g to craft. Selling one for 9g just took your investment and tripled it. Where as with gems your profit margin is far smaller so the more you undercut the less the whole process is worth.

This is the sort of thing you'll only come to truly understand with experience in your personal market because you won't notice the campers or how much actual profit you're getting (every server and market has several campers I promise) and simply say "profession Y is fail for making money, you're just lucky!" Once again, I'll ask you this: how much is your time worth? Think about it.

Post on leatherworking will come tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by!