Alchemy: further observations

Another post on my continuing efforts to break into the flask market. After this post today, I expect to be making two more focused completely on my entrance into alchemy. One will be another "How To" type of post, another will be my closing thoughts on entering the market.

As you can see from my business report yesterday, I have made up the 4k deficit in roughly one week. I spent an estimated 4k on materials and profession leveling cost and then deposited just over 4k into my bank. Remember 4k of my flask sales were not profit, that gold was recovering my initial losses. Big difference.

OK either I am a lucky bastard or elixir mastery procs a ton more than the advertised 20% extra. Each time I go to craft another stack of flasks I always wind up with at least 8 bonus ones, that's over 30% more for free. I also have noticed that there's a few other herb UF left on the server so I'm picking up lotus for as low as 15g instead of the estimated 20g average. That means that if I sell a flask for 19g I'm making a noticeable profit and not bordering on losing money. That's a good thing! Unfortunately I can't say the same thing about lichbloom which I've always noticed has some serious price fluctuations.

I have also started to craft flasks of pure mojo which are selling just as much as the rest. And speaking of sale quantity, I'm starting to look at flasks as if they were nothing more than expensive glyphs. By that I mean sure you might not get a huge HUGE amount of profit on each sale but you sure will sell an ass load of them, I mean really. I'll post a stack of flasks as singles, log back on an hour later and they're all gone! So this is leading me to reevaluate my strategy a bit. Since my main competitor spends most of their time in sholozar farming materials "for free" that means that they're not at the AH posting more. So what I'm going to try and do this week is post my wares for a gold more than them at the range of 20-22g per flask.

The idea being that they'll sell out theirs while not noticing me much more because they'll still have half a page worth of flasks they made that have sold. So they get to keep their place in the market without any noticeable effect because of me. Meanwhile they'll be posting their stack of flasks on the AH and I'll be posting two stacks just above while making a significant amount of profit more than they are. Hell I may even wind up posting several stacks! The potential of having another market like glyphs where I can massively craft a ton of inventory while afk, post hundreds and then completely walk away knowing almost all of it will sell by the time I look back is very exciting.

The tactic of being second lowest is a very viable strategy for any market where the item being sold usually sells in very large amounts like buckles or glyphs. The only thing to keep in mind is that if you're using the auto fall back feature in QA3 you'll have to set your fall back price to a specific price and have to check to see if the prices have gone up manually. With the material prices, I'll once again point out that the market price of materials doesn't matter when you sell a flask. The only thing that matters is how much YOU paid for the materials. Just like gems or transmuting titanium bars, so long as it's you making a profit and not somebody else all is well.

Here's a brief explanation of what I'm talking about with the QA3 and fall back bit.

You go to start an auction.
QA3 checks the lowest price on AH.
lowest price = 19g
QA3 checks your threshold
threshold = 20g
QA3 cannot post
QA3 checks if you have a fall back
fall back = 20g
QA3 check if you want to post even if you're not the lowest
auto fall back = true
QA3 posts auction at 20g

What the above does is based on your threshold and max price being the same with the auto fall back feature enabled. In other words no matter what the prices look like for any flask you'll only post yours at 20g and ALWAYS post flasks weather you're the lowest or highest priced.

Random thought. For the last week my daily random for my DK has been Nexus every single time. Annoying!

It seems that the UF never checks their auctions or is very adamant at their threshold price of 20g per flask. I've been selling mine at 19 a piece for roughly 5g or so profit. So for the time being I can freely post my wares without any worry or thought about the no lifer UF. But once they finally notice that they're not getting any sales, which will be soon, that's when the real battle on the AH will begin. I'm expecting that will happen within a week, most likely less.

Once I'm officially on the radar as it were I'll begin with my tactics of posting just above them first. I'll continue with that for a certain amount of time then if that doesn't get me anywhere I'll attempt to buy them out while posting at a gold above their price. If that doesn't work I'll just resell below them in an attempt to completely take them out of the equation. And if god forbid that doesn't work I'll be leaving the flask market. Yes it's a real possibility that I won't be able to compete, but it's simply a case of time and effort. I won't be breaking my back to get into a market when I have no "need" for one, but I definitely won't be giving up easily! Rawr.

So I'm going to give things a bit more time before I give my final say on the matter, but things are definitely looking good. Only let down so far is not getting to have a truly epic battle on the AH right away. Later on down the line depending on how things go I may just try and buy out the UF and see if I can get flasks to raise in price by a few gold. Since they're the only one that has a real say in the market price they're the one that has to be bought to make a change. Sure people love cheap flasks for raiding, but people also love to make a noticeable profit with their profession. Sorry folks, you can't eat your cake and have it too.


Thanks for stopping by!