The AH food chain

Today's entry is on the subject of markets, niche markets, and all the things that exist underneath them. This is something that not many take the time to figure out and understand even though it is absolutely essential to getting ahead in the AH game. With every market that is not RAW materials, there will always exist at least one secondary market that decides how the primary one will fluctuate. You need to be aware of these sub markets at all times as they will decide if you should: continue crafting whatever it is that you're crafting, up and sell the materials themselves, or hold out on selling anything at all.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to be aware of what secondary markets you are relying on. Even if you have people CoD'ing you materials each and every day they will eventually look at the AH and if they find you're screwing them out of a significant amount with the CoD they won't do any more business with you. This is where honesty comes up as being very important. If nothing else the secondary markets (SM) will give you small clues here and there as to a particular direction your primary market (PM) might be taking.

With that being said and proper emphasis placed, here's the general food chain of a few markets to give you a small demonstration of what I'm talking about.

Saronite ore = Saronite bars = titanium xmutes = titan steel = toc epics

Here's that same flow with the prices of only the raw materials.

16g/stack = 50g/stack = 50g/2.5 = 90g/1 (minus 30g for eternals) = 44g profit

That 44g becomes 440 when you craft 10x titansteel bars. Add in another 960 for crusader orbs and 40g for the saronite dirks (for the razor plate) you're looking at about 1500g or so of an investment. Then you turn around and sell that bad boy for 3,800. All of that from a single purchase of a few 16g stacks of saronite ore.


And here's a simple one for glyphs

Adder's tongue = IotS/snowfall = glyphs + scrolls

Now materials

15g/stack = 8 IotS + 2 snowfall = 8 glyphs + 2 scrolls


Ok that's just the basic crafting chain, shouldn't be anything new to most. Now taking a sharp turn to the left we're going to take the same thing but get much more abstract with it. Remember me saying that you have to be able to think abstractly to do well? Well here you go.

Price of saronite ore =

price of saronite bars
Price of eternal fire, shadow, earth
Price of titanium bars
Price of titansteel bars
Price of titansteel based products

Price of the above = amount of interest = increased farming = increased supply = market flooding = price drops


And how about glyphs? Their supply is based off the price of frost lotus actually, NOT the price of herbs.

Price of frost lotus =

price of herbs native to sholozar basin
Price of eternal life
Price of select flasks/elixirs
Price of ALL inks
Price of fortitude scrolls
Price of inscription off hands
Price of darkmoon card crafting
Price of DMC: Greatness


Now going with the glyph example, what happens if we see a huge spike in demand for flasks? That means that every single thing in that list will be effected. With the assumption that all supplies are essentially infinite in that you can't go skinning gorillas in sholozar and eventually have them go extinct we can apply the basic economic formula of more demand = higher prices = increase in supply, so you can see how the rest will be effected.

~ More flasks need to be supplied so frost lotus goes up in price.

~ The supply of non-flask herbs will greatly increase, thus dropping their price greatly.

~ Prices on all inks will drop as the scribes are buying up and milling the cheap deadnettle and adder's tongue.

~ Eternal life prices will drop due to the mass farming being done

~ Prices of DMC will go down as the crafting price is far less causing mroe people to invent into them

~ Fort scrolls will go down due to the flood of snowfall inks (depending on the price of frozen orbs, the off hands may be effected as well).


Are you getting the idea of just how deep the proverbial rabbit hole can go? Now lets have us some devious fun shall we? What happens if lets say... YOU decide to gobble up every single flask you see on the AH? What happens if you keep at this for a week? Well you can surely imagine that all of the above would go down, but how does this benefit you aside from giving you a shit load of extra flasks? Do this during a time when supply of flasks are high, and therefore lower price on frost lotus. In addition to buying all the flasks, also buy up all the frost lotus and associated herbs. Watch then as more and more herbalists will crop up farming to their wits end to meet this "unexpected" demand spike.

Prices will rise on all flask related materials, SM, and PM. Now there's you behind the curtains with a bank tab filled with all of these assorted goodies and when the time is right prices are leveling out or showing a slight decline... baffam! Start listing all the stuff you bought for super cheap the week before from flasks to lotus to lichbloom, to snowfall inks, and absolutely everything that can be crafted with them. Lo and behold you have manipulated almost a dozen different markets with a simple purchase. You are now forcibly flipping the horde of items you were stokpiling for a massive profit. Next stop, saronite!

Wrapping up all of that non sense, these sort of massive market shifts usually don't take place over night. This takes place because on every server there's several big time AH players that buy up everything they see in a certain price range. Hell you might even be one of them or have a hand in it. If you remember the last patch and how it effected frozen orbs and everything they're needed for you can see the truth in this. Granted that was a very limited effect, but that does not make it's reach and effect any less profound. Mind you I said usually as with the example I just illustrated, it can indeed happen be it by intent or mere coincidence. So keep an eye out next time you're buying mats eh?


Thanks for stopping by!