Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Do you farm?



Technically, I DO farm. But realistically? Not at all. The only "traditional" farming I do is when I happen to be leveling a new toon. Leveling without a gathering prof is like trying to get gold capped without auctioneer...not a good idea. From time to time I might farm a rare pattern such as mongoose or +12 defense to bracers enchant. But that is only done once and they had a silly high drop rate, so that doesn't even count if you ask me. However a while ago I did take my miner and out of sheer curiosity I spent 2 full hours mining in ice crown with 8 people in the zone (mostly questing) the entire time.

I wanted to see just how much this 'F-A-R-M-I-N-G' thing gets you. At the time I did this, saronite ore was 17g/stack (bars were exactly twice the ore costs) and titanium at 250g/stack. Perhaps I simply suck at mining in ice crown (impossible with decent gathering addons) or just have ass luck, I made a total of 600g from all the ore I had picked up.

What if I prospected it all? Firstly, I'll never be convinced that prospecting titanium ore is profitable unless it's well under 200g a stack (good luck with that one). secondly prospecting and cutting gems would add on even MORE time to the 2 long, boring, painful, monotonous hours I had just spent flying around. All for what, an extra 200g more than the price of just the ore itself? Yeah, no thanks. So I still stand by the fact that farming is for leveling and the things that can't be bought. Time is money friend, what's yours worth?


(...got any saronite ore for sale?)


More AH giggles!
My jeweler has every rare gem cut along with 90% of every useful epic cut. So when I see somebody local needing a cut done I'll usually offer my help for a nice 10g/cut charge. While cutting a horde of rare gems in dalaran, I see somebody post in trade from Org "LF JC [random Ametrine cut] my mats and tip." I have the cut, I know i'm
nearly guaranteed a decent tip to use my hearth, but dammit I'm busy. So I ignore it and go about my business.

Time passes and they stop posting. I log onto my banker to post my gems, but I check the going rate of ametrines first. I see that same person that was looking to get those gems cut selling 3 Ametrines for 130g each (60 less than the next lowest seller). Not only that, they had also bought all the gems I had on AH of the cut they needed for 221g each. Naturally I buy the gems he had just posted at a massive undercut, cut them and re-post. They all sold by the end of the night at 170g and up.

Lesson learned: a denial of service is an invitation to your service...with a very steep fee of course!


Thanks for stopping by!

3 comments:

  1. Tell me about it... I used to try to farm in the off times after raids before I'd log for the night and I was just chatting with guildies and friends on vent, as opposed to standing in Dal running around the north bank... But I realized that even that time would be better spent working the AH for about 5-10 minutes a day. Since then I no longer worry about repair bills and am considering grabbing epic flying for alts that really don't need it!

    It's funny becuase it is so easy, anyone can do it, and it really is easier than trying to farm up gold (like I did with thorium ore for my original epic flying back in TBC).

    By the way; I also just made a new blog and who knows, I may get around to posting about my protection knoweledge some day!

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  2. Everybody has to farm at some point of course, we're not all born with start up money. Myself, I farmed primal air in TBC fro my epic flying. In fact, even today primals (or motes) are selling very well. But as you said, that time would still be better spent at the AH.

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  3. Just 'discovered' this blog. Thanks to Larissa's recent post. I'm a casual on the AH.
    Farming can work out reasonable at the lower levels, for example start a Horde character during one of the festivals that need Small Eggs, that gave my start-up character 1k gold, and another character on another realm 250g (towards the end of the festival).

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