From the ground up: Week 3

Happy Saturday to you all and here's the latest journal entry of the "From the ground up" project where I started a level 1 priest with not a single copper and intend to level them to 80 and amass a large amount of gold without the help of a single person. The only supplies they were given was a set of BoA gear and nothing else. They are starting out with only inscription, herbalism, and their wits with which they must turn a profit.

Here's the run down of my progress thus far.

Level: 80

Current Gold: 700

Inscription skill: 450

Herbalism skill: 450

Required purchases to make: epic flying, 50 glyph books



Moving right along
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Collected my mail and got 200g from glyphs and another 50ish from assorted junk. The golden pearls finally sold! I put them up in a stack of two when there was none on AH for 90g ea. Patience is a virtue so I'm told. In addition to that I also fliped one of the eternals I bought for another 20g profit, now to work on the other one. I'm currently watching the prices of frozen orbs to see what their normal price is. When I first looked there was 4 up by the same person for 45g, today they're down to 35. Not bad. I'm going to wait a bit then buy one and craft an off hand to sell.

Ding 68! Off to northrend I go! I got all the essential disc and shadow talents, now I'm moving into the other trees. Finished by healing a DK and Pally tank in RoB out in nagrand for some very fast and very awesome gold and exp. I wish blizz put in more quests like that, maybe not with such OP rewards, but still great exp and all
around fun.

The money is now really starting to shuffle around. I got back up to 1k gold and went right back down to 500 after training spells and buying more ink and flowers. Doing another NR scribe research this afternoon and I'll be able to learn more glyphs to skill up from. Then I can start looking for glyph books to learn the really good ones. This is so exciting because I'm getting to see the ground work and foundations getting laid out right from the get go. When I first started getting serious about making gold I had no clue how far I would go or what a monster my business would turn into. But now I know and knowing where this is all leading to is so exhilarating! Of course my enjoyment of the disc priest may have an effect on that as well, heh.

I can say this about the alliance market, they need a damned blacksmith in a big way. I almost never see more than 3 buckles on the AH at once. I just looked and they're going for 75g each while horde side they're down to 30g... for srs.

Officially on my way to the boat that takes me to the Fjords. Most interested to see what kinds of awesome quests await me and further proof that play as Horde is the "hard mode" equivalent of leveling. Trust me even knowing diddly about what I'm doing leveling as alliance has been infinitely easier than horde ever was. Kek!

I'm glad I chose inscription for more than the instant profit building that it provides me. I'm sure I could do equally well with another one, or at least have far less expenses, but being a scribe is good times. Also the taming of the shrew that I'll have to do, well, I'm looking forward to it. Breaking into the glyph industry
full force is NOT an easy thing to do. Casual sellers are tolerated but serious (goblin) competition is most certainly not welcome. I don't know if anybody even reads my entries on this subject.

Good god the alliance has one hell of a long ass boat ride to the Fjords!

Now that I've got a good amount of inks stokpiled of all assorted colors, I'm going to begin investing my money into glyph mastery books. I'm only making stack sizes of 3 currently and don't have a strangle hold on the market like I do horde side so what I have should suffice as I'm still gathering flowers while I quest. That being the case, the smart thing to invest in is information, knowledge, trade skills. I'm going to be keeping an extra close watch on the varying flower prices, but so far either the uber farmers have taken the week off or there simply aren't any. The supply of IotS is steady and at a good price of 3g but most herbs are crazy high. The only cheap ones are tiger lily, but that could easily be due to a few herbalists leveling in HF.

My first glyph book! I open it slowly, making sure not to dent the spine or ruffle the pages. With a certain child like glee I peer inside the first page.

-MAGE

Omigah a mage glyph! Maybe it's molten armor! Or fire ball! I loooooove fire!

I delicately turn the page to see just what type of mage glyph is in store, already envisioning the immense profits I could be walking into. Nearly visible gold coins swim around my head, my imagination ripe with excitement. As the page curls back I see the glyph name written in fine bold print:

FROSTBOLT




I just healed another random, sethekk halls. Back in my hey day of TBC tanking, this was the only auch instance I was willing to do on heroic. You could not possibly drag me into the rest, and even then if I didn't have a pocket priest for fear ward I still wouldn't go. So going in there as a healer was truly a different experience
and knowing how it's supposed to be tanked, well, see the above picture. Nobody tried to kill the summoned adds that cast the staking elemental damage buffet and of course, nobody but myself and the death knight OF ALL PEOPLE bothered to LoS the arcane explosion on the last boss. I used every CD except for shadow fiend cuz I
forgot what I bound it to and had no time to look. two people died when I got sheeped as I couldn't take them from 1k health to full in time to save them from standing in a fifth explosion. Jesus, I fuggin earned the useless blue shoulders I got in the reward bag.

Sure you can say they might not have done the instance before. Sure you can say they were learning. Bricks learn faster than these people. The boss does an emote that he's powering up over 9000 then explodes the room with four very obvious pilalrs around. They go to almost no life while the other two run from behind a pillar
still at max and a fresh power shield on themselves. How could this be I wonder quietly to myself? Who cares, moar pew pew! I go back to the quote of Cicero I posted a while back: "...the wise man avoids pleasure to secure himself greater pleasures." In other words you deny yourself the fun of attacking the boss when you're abotu to explode so that you may CONTINUE to attack the boss. Makes sense doesn't it? Not to these power drooling half wits, they want their marshmallows and they want them NAO! Ugh. Nerd rage off.

I'm discovering very interesting similarities between the horde and alliance by doing all of their quests. They are both focused on survival of their own, but their methodology is somewhat different in the end. It basically looks like this:

WE HAVE A PROBLEM! Any solutions people?

Alliance - Kill it! Kill it with fire!

Horde - Kill it! Kill it and slice it up into little bits so we can poke at it with a stick and see what happens when we toss it into boiling toads blood and add in a severed hoof of a goat that died of the curse of dewm! Then feed it to the local wildlife and see if they get sick or have any SEVERE STOMACH PAIN then mass produce it and load it into catapults filled with pulsating green goo and fling the barrels at high velocity into on lookers and enemies both then laugh with ghoulish glee as their flesh melts from their very bones! RAWRZ! Collect 19,860 experience points.

Ya know... sometimes fire is just too simple a tool.


I recently crafted some armor vellums as I saw there was only 5 up as singles for 10g each. It costs me 3g to make them so I crafted a stack and listed it in stacks of 5 for 5g each. They just sold so I'll be watching these regularly. When there is a want, there shall be a supply.

My god I've forgotten just how painful it was leveling in NR without flying. So I've decided that once I work up to another 1,000g I'll be spending it on like a primo saronite and dropping it and mailing the CWF book to my priest. Seriously, this is beyond aggravating. Especially when you have to kill like 5 mobs to get to a
flower. Sheesh.

With me not having a bank alt alliance side I'm having to do all of my own banking and it's rather tedious with having to post glyphs several times in between answering the mail. What I've been doing to save me some bulks of time is whenever I see that I've sold a glyph of X I'll go ahead and craft one of them in the middle of my quest. Naturally this isn't perfect as I can't do it while healing or if I just don't realize I sold one, but it's a start. Any time I can save at the game is time I can be afk doing something else. Granted 5 minutes spread out over the day is the same as 5 minutes all at once, but it's a lot easier to pause for 5 seconds a bunch of times than sit and stair for an amount of time so small you can't justify getting up for something.

Ok CWF has been purchased and I am once again down to nigh zero. But all is well as that's to be the best 1,000 I ever spend. With me not knowing the alliance quests well and my general paladin mentality (aggro everything and nuke it if you get dismounted) doesn't work well in cloth. In the interest of not being wasteful, I've decided that I'm going to give a thousand gold to a totally random player, kind of. I'll be hiring a random priest to group with me and give me a few pointers on the spec. And the added benefit of being able to fly in NR, perhaps the greatest time saver of all, is not having to wait an hour after missing the boat back to the old world or 5 minutes for the damned thing to reach the docks. Simply amazing.


I log on for my night of super fun time gaming and collect an amazing 850g from glyphs and glyphs alone! Woot! I turned around and used that extra change to fill up on a few hundred more IotS and am down to 250g. So that's 200g profit plus a restock of materials, things are moving alone nice and smooth. I think that I've got most of
the "essential for profit" glyphs so I'll be now saving up my money for epic flying and materials. Unless I happen to find some glyph books for cheap, like 10g or so, I'll be passing on them until I get my super flyer.

Once epic flying is purchased, I'll be splurging on all the books that I need and then either start the slow process of collecting materials to level enchanting or start pimping myself out in BoE gear. Which of those depends on how good, or more accurately, how confidant I am in my healing. If I wind up being plain terrible at
it then this will be just another gold making project. I hope that's not the case.

Experience is really helping me a great deal here, but not with the market, with the glyphs themselves and who buys them. More specifically though, knowing enough about other classes that I can have a strong idea of which glyphs would sell more often than others. They are both the cookie cutter "expected to have" glyphs and the debatable ones.

Just hit 73 and walked back into UK with another group of baddies and man handled that place! Rawr! Things are a lot easier now that I'm remembering to cast PoM every chance I get and am no longer shying away from PoH. Still need to work on paying attention 100% of the time though, being a super geared tank sorta does that to ya
from time to time heh. Also need to work on the whole 5 second rule thing so I won't have to rely on shadowfiend to keep my mana up in longer-ish fights. I'm also having to cast power infusion on myself as opposed to a DPS class for the intense throughput it gives me when I have to spam big heals for the duration, but that's likely because of tanks in greens acting like it's tier 10 without a proper spec not knowing WTF to do.

I'm definitely getting a hang of this whole healing thing now. I'm beginning to think that my mana issues aren't of my own, just my gear and ungeared groups. To be expected as we're all in greens, but when the group runs smoothly I almost never have to drink, just pop shadow fiend on the like 3rd boss and I'm good. That being said, I'll be spending the bulk of my gold on starter gear for heroics and the such. I expect two weeks of steady sales to have it all purchased. I'm really looking forward to healing my first heroic and raiding as disc. I'll probably just get the high end blue gear crafted first as that's only a few hundred gold and then take a break from healing and dps while the money comes in. Once I have most of the essential gear made I'll be heading into heroics as the healer.


Thanks for stopping by!