Stokpile: The Index

Even though I've since retired from the game, I'm sure that a number of people will come around looking for gold advice. Since I have a large number of assorted posts on the subject of, well just about everything relating to gold, I decided to write this one last entry. This entry is nothing more than what I feel are the most important entries that I've made and the ones that contain the most pertinent information in the AH game for both new comers and experienced tycoons. Remember, one can only have as much preparation as one has foresight.


First of course are my credentials: proof of amassing over one million gold.

Proof of a million


Theory and methods:
The importance of Stokpiling.
The art of the undercut.
Addons
QA3 set up guide.
Have a system.
How the markets work.


Profession guides:
JC guide.
Leatherworking guide.
Enchanting guide.
Smithing and xmute alchemy
Inscription guide.


Miscellaneous tips:
Vendor goodies
What 1k gold can do.
Everything I sell.
Best selling items of each profession.
Importance of learning for yourself.



Thanks for stopping by!

Closed for business

I have reached a million gold. I have purchased a run through ICC 25m. I have gathered 50,000g with a single character without the aide of a any other player or any characters of my own. And now the time has come for me to take my leave of the AH game and warcraft. Unfortunately my writing in the blog is going with it for the most part, but I won't take it down. I'll be leaving the blog up for anybody who still has things they can learn and for others to stumble upon. Even though the economy will drastically change each expansion, the methods and theories will not.

So far I've made over 150 entries into this blog over the course of 6 months and It's been quite an interesting time writing. I must say that I've enjoyed writing this infinitely more than I ever anticipated doing so. Maybe someday I'll look into writing professionally. It's been great fun talking with you all and I even learned a thing or three from readers of this blog since starting this whole thing up. So here's the last few pieces of advice that I'll offer you. On Monday I'll be writing a formal index of my blog for any and all that come across it in the future. The whole point being to point out the more important entries that I've made over the last few months.

This is all I can think of so I hope I've helped out a few people here and there. Thanks to everybody for reading, but it's finally time that I took my leave of this game. Perhaps I'll see you around in Starwars, FF 14, or guild wars 2 when they finally release it. Who knows?

-Stokpile anything and everything you sell. There is always a material shortage or price war right around the corner.

-Be patient. No business ever grew to king kong proportions over night.

-Have a reason. If you're not having fun or aiming for a serious goal don't bother with the AH game. You'll get frustrated and lose a lot.

-Do your homework. Every market needs research done with it before getting into one or before expanding further. Do it.

-Always learn. There's a million and one gold blogs out there. By reading this you're already going in the right direction, but never stop. There's always new tricks to be found so go and find them.

-Undetcutting by gold and not silver is a sure fire way to get people pissed at you. It's also one of the only ways to remove a competitor. Always undercut by a few gold at least. Take your hate mail and angry tells from competitors as a sign that you're doing exactly what you should be and doing it well. I keep screen shots of what I lovingly refer to as "fan mail" around for inspiration. And for some good laughs of course =P

-Lastly and most importantly. When I was working the AH it was never about the money. Never. Don't let that be your sole driving force in the AH game, you'll only lead yourself into stress and frustration. I always say to have a reason, a driving force to play the AH game but this goes deeper than that. If you want to enjoy yourself you have to do something you want to do because you want to.

This is true in every aspect of daily life and everybody that has ever lived can attest to this. You'll never feel fulfilled working a job you hate to buy shit you don't need. Be yourself, do what makes you happy. Don't try to get something because it's expected of you to do so. If you don't want to settle down and start a family, don't do it because it's what is expected of you. Your life will be miserable. Don't work 200 hours a week at a desk job that's far too reminiscent of the movie office space. You'll hate your life.

Do what you can enjoy. Follow your heart and never ever give up. For me, my enjoyment came from playing the AH. Others enjoy achievements and would rather gargle broken glass than work the AH like I do. Are they Doin It Wrong(tm)? No they're doing what makes them happy. Find something you enjoy then pursue it and never let it out of your sight. So long as you're happy and aren't making anybody's day less enjoyable, how can anyone argue with you.


Thanks for stopping by.

Profession cliff notes

Here's another entry I had already written but haven't gotten to post just yet. Fun fact, I even show up on Google now. Type in my name you will see me right up top. Check it out!

This is a short series of entries rolled up together about the basic info that you need to know on working each profession out there. A while ago I made an on going series about how to work each of them in detail, but some people only need the basic info to get by. You can find it off to the side titled "Profession How To." Also If you start with the basics and learn as yo go, you'll be far better off as you'll learn things from experience that can't be taught in the traditional sense or be found in a guide book.Refer to The List for everything that I've been selling in a certain market.


Glyphs:
~ There is no such thing as too many Inks of the Sea. Trust me. If you're fully in the market and not just a few types of glyphs, fill up bank tabs with IotS and never stop buying more.

~ Make a stack of 5 of every glyph you know.

~ Post your auctions for 48 hours.

~ Craft more only when you have 2 or less of one type of glyph.

~ If you are sold out of a glyph, make 10.

~ Craft two of each off hand and list them one at a time

~ Sell armor vellum in stack sizes different that the most common on the AH. If there's a bunch of 20 stacks, list yours in stacks of 5 or 10.


Tailoring:
~ Craft a 10 stack of epic threads and list them 4 at a time as singles.

~ Post your auctions for 24 hours.

~ Make sure there's never any ice web spider silk on the AH for an acceptable price.

~ List as many as 60 netherweave bags at a time and -always- buy more cloth. It is completely impossible to stokpile enough materials for this market.

~ Be mindful of what you pay for eternals and frozen orbs

~ List your specialty cloth in stacks of 2 with 24 on AH at once. Also don't bother making any of the cloth if you're not specced for it.

~ Spellweave seems to sell the best out of the 3 specs.


Blacksmithing:
~ If you have access to an alchemist that's willing to xmute saronite into titanium, you can never EVER have enough saronite bars. If you can fill up a full guild bank with 6 bank tabs with nothing but saronite bars do it! Just like borean leather, you can go through so much of it so fast in so many different markets it's insane to not buy as much as you can at all times.

~ Craft ToC epic dps/tank gear 1 at a time and only make more when they sell.

~ Post your auctions for 24 hours.

~ Undercut on your epics by at least 10g and always have a bid option set to at least 95% of your buyout.

~ Make sure you have a mid range sale price cap on buckles so you won't attract too much competition with high prices.

~ List 4 buckles at a time during the day and up to as many as 10 after raids end, they sell fast.

~ Craft 2 of each enchanting from from TBC (eternium, fel iron, adamantite) and list them both. If the market for titanium rods looks good make a pair of them as well. Careful as a lot of people make a ton to skill up and list at dumping prices.


Leatherworking:
~ There's no such thing as too much borean leather.

~ Post your auctions for 48 hours.

~ List your heavy leather in the same method as I mentioned for armor vellum. The same goes for any epic gear.

~ Make 4 mining bags and 3 LW bags and list them in pairs.

~ List heavy armor kits in single stacks and 4 at once.


Enchanting:
~ Craft 4 of each profitable scroll and list 2 on the AH as singles.

~ Post your auctions for 48 hours.

~ List 4-5 scrolls for ones you notice constantly selling out. For my server it's Ex spell power to gloves and ice walker to boots.

~ Any old world enchants never list more than 2 of. This gives the impression to a potential buyer that you don't usually make them and that they're still rare since you only have one up.

~ When there's a large supply of mats on the AH buy everything.

~ Put out the extra effort (or gold) to get old world enchants.


Alchemy:
~ Be very mindful of what you pay for herbs.

~ Post your auctions for 12 hours.

~ If you're not elixir spec, don't bother making flasks to sell. Same goes for potions.

~ Do your daily xmute weather you're xmute spec or not.

~ Only list flasks when most raids are about to start, and list a ton of them.

~ If there's heavy competition or low prices, list yours as second or third lowest and you'll still get some sales after the cheap ones are bought up.

~ I still believe that xmute mastery is the best way to go.


Jewel Crafting:
~ Post your auctions for 12 hours.

~ Rare gems and metas: craft 3 total and only list 2 at a time.

~ Epic gems: craft two at a time. List a pair of the most popular ones and only a single cut of the less commonly bought ones. This helps to save a ton on lost deposit costs.

~ Craft leveling gear two at a time and list them both.


Engineering:
~ List the pets from Gnomer two at a time and don't be shy about listing them for 300g and higher. They'll sell.

~ Post your auctions for 24 hours.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 6-22

Here's the business report that I was planing to post on Tuesday.


It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I, Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker

Gems, LW, misc: 44,000

Smithing and enchanting: 23,000

Glyphs: 3,500

Total weekly sales: 70,500
Weekly profit: Negative 700k or something
Total gold: 447,000


Yes that's a big ass number in the negative right there. I'm including my run through icc 25 as part of my weekly earnings or lack there of.

Detailed Recap
--------------
Quickie update on the toc LW front first. I finally found the recipe for the leather melee DPS chest piece on AH. I got it for 1500g which isn't bad at all though that is my max price on such things usually. But out of sheer curiosity I would've paid a good deal more for it. Now I have every recipe from toc that I wanted and managed to craft a pair of every single one. That took at least 9000 crusader orbs to make, possibly even more.

So in a weeks worth of time the leather bracers have sold twice. The mail bracers twice as well, while the mail and leather chest pieces have not sold a single time. Meanwhile the plate tank/dps gear along with the non-spirit cloth gear has been selling too fast for me to keep in stock. Last time I tried to make some dps gear from LW it took ages to sell for a tiny profit. This time I managed to make about 2k profit with several new pieces left unsold. If I don't sell the chest pieces soon I'll be writing them off as a loss.

And yes those are some rather low numbers that you see up there. As such this will be a comparatively short business report, but still with lessons to be learned. Since I'm just about at my goal I've stopped taking the time to scan the AH regularly for more materials. I have stopped stokpiling. I've also mostly stopped working glyphs horde side again.

I have finished selling off my leather working products minus a few toc epics and armor kits. I have maybe 5 profession bags left to sell out of 20, no more plain leather or furs left in stock. Frozen orb based items are gone as well.

Eternal fire, life, and air are also completely used up. As is my stokpile of abyss crystals and dust and cosmics. I still have a good amount of old world materials, but no more goose scrolls for me. My bank tab dedicated to saronite bars and nothing else has dried up. In fact I've sold everything that wasn't epic or meta gems so far as I had an ass ton piled up for ruby sanctum. As is apparent from the sales numbers, the gem market is still thriving and will continue to do so for a bit of time.

What is it that you can learn from this? Me the warcraft millionaire pulling in so little sales when I can push as high as 60k -profit- in a single weeks time? My name. I am Stokpile. I stockpile. Last week was a good week for profits, and so was the one before it, so what happened? I stopped stokpiling materials and ran out leaving me with very little in the way of things to sell.

Take this as my final attempt to drill into your head how pivotal it is to stokpile as much as you can any time that you can. Especially if you're working in many different markets because the materials for one will cross over into several others. Example: I ran out of eternal fires so I ran out of crafted titansteel, no epic threads, no toc plate epics, no earthsiege meta gems, etc. I also used up my frozen orbs to turn them into crusaders so anything that used them is also out.

Take a lesson from this week's business report. The moment you stop to stokpile the materials that you need is the very moment your rate of sales will plummet.


Thanks for stopping by!

Why I plan to quit

EDIT: I began responding to a few comments in my typical long winded manner and it got so long that I decided to edit it on in to the OP. On the question of any other up coming projects that I might have, here is my response.

-------------------------------

Firstly, I want to say that reading all of you thinking that I have helped you more than Gevlon and Marcko definitely impresses me as they've been writing about gold for a damned long time and I've been around for only a few months. Also Gevlon helped me the most while Marcko mostly pointed me to smaller niche markets along and of course Tella who was also great for pointing me to a few markets I missed as well. Even a goblin is allowed a measure of pride and bragging rights now and again. Everything else I've learned on my own. Again, if I can do it so can you. Especially since you have so many resources to learn up front and not deal with as much trial and error as I did.

The game that I'm most excited for (and have been since the announcement) is Guild Wars 2. The only problem I had with the game was, ironically, the ability to make money. You had to farm to make any money, but it was generally very light and you never needed more than you got from leveling up in all reality.

Unfortunately the game is probably at least another 2 years off, but I'm still extremely excited for it just like I was when I first heard it was in development. In the mean time though, I'll likely pick up FF 14 or Star Wars and if there's an AH type of system in there, you bet your ass I'm going to make a point of dominating it! And of course, I'll be writing all about it.

Suffice to say, unless I somehow wind up with a job that requires me to actively be playing WoW (heh wouldn't that be the day!) I'll be I'm keeping my eyes out for other MMO's in the mean time. Unfortunately, there currently aren't many that are that well done imo.

However if I start up another blog for another game and/or project I'll be sure to update here. But it'll be just like this one, for my own purposes and no other advertising. If you want to learn about something, the first step is to seek it out. If you can't put out the effort to look, you don't deserve the knowledge.

-------------------------------

Even though I've completed all my goals in wow, I'm not done writing just yet. I still have a few posts written and one final experiment I'm doing over the course of the week so stick around. I'm not done yet!


I've been asked many times in comments, private messages, and in game tells why I plan to quit the game. So this entry will hopefully end that mostly (in before "why you quit wow" comments). If nothing else, I can just direct them to this post and they can read for themselves if so inclined.

TL;DR: I'm bored.

1. I have a million gold. I proved that you can get rich easily which zero support. My biggest entertainment in the game lately of playing the AH holds no remaining goals that are meaningful to me.

2. Raiding. I just don't have time to raid seriously anymore. And as much as I like it, I'm not going to spend 15 a month to casually raid toc as there's not a chance in hell that I'm going to pug ICC even with the 5000% damage buff. I can only deal with so many retards for so long before I bite off my tongue. I'm sure that if I applied to a solid guild and spent a goodly amount of time memorizing the fight mechanics which I've seen all of one times I could get into a proper raiding guild. Especially if I said 'pretty please' and slipped 200k across the proverbial bartering table. But alas, I'm just no longer that interested in it.

3. With the direction that Blizz is taking the game come Cata it's going to be only more of the same with free purples being crammed down your throat. Unless you're doing heroic ulduar or the top end of ICC all the boss encounters in this expansion have been extremely self explanatory. Also they have been very "casual" friendly. Unfortunately in this situation, casual wow player translates literally into power drooling mouth breathing inbred fuckwit.

Yes I know that casual players are not complete incompetent morons that couldn't tie their own shoes until they were 21. I'm a casual player. I don't stand in fire nor will I ever see a tank do more dps than me. However there are more failbots in this game than people who enjoy success for the sake of success. It's the journey that matters not the destination or reward. The people that just want to look awesome while AFK are the ones that blizz is catering to now and have been this whole expansion. Again, only so many retards at once people. You can call me an elitist if you want, but if you care about how you appear to others and social status more than anything else you can just get the hell out.

4. No AH playing, no raiding, what else is there for me to do? Grind out achievements? No thank you. Emphasis here on GRIND. 99% of all of them are boring as hell and involve zero challenge what so ever. The achievement system in Guild Wars (called titles) was all about challenge even though there were a few that were obvious fluff and gold sinks. That being the case I was all about going through the game on hardmode and going by myself with only the internal AI or a friend to accompany me through the world. Due to that I'm not going to spend several hours farming AQ to get rep. Not interested.

5. Even irl I'm completely against wasting money. In fact I generally don't like to waste anything haphazardly. So spending 15 a month on something that I rarely use is entirely out of the question. Would you spend 15 a month on wow if you only played by yourself for an hour or two a week? I hope not.


Those are my reasons for leaving a game and I'm sticking to them. Also I am not going to donate my gold to somebody for any reason at all. I believe something given has no meaning and does nothing to benefit in the long term as it is only a temporary fix. If you don't earn something, you'll never appreciate it and won't be able to fully take advantage of what you've gotten. Thus, wasting it.


Thanks for stopping by!

From the ground up: Success!

I interrupt your regularly scheduled business report to give you this breaking story of win. Post money sink gold total is still updated though.

I have reached my goal with my 'From the ground up' project yesterday afternoon. I must say it was a load of fun. So today's entry is just the highlights of the last two months of my trip from 0-50k and how I started yet another financial empire with glyphs and enchanted scrolls from the ground up. This may seem like a long entry, but keep in mind it's covering the last two months of this projects duration. If you want to see long, go read each individual entry I made for each week of the project.

I recommend every up and coming AH player give this a shot. The only real rule is that you receive no help from any other characters including your own. The only 'benefit' you're allowed is to use enchanted BoA gear. Make an alt on the opposite faction (or entirely different server) and mail off some BoA's to them and see how long it takes you to hit 80, get geared, get epic/CW Flying, and hit the 50k marker. First one to the mark with the lowest /played gets a cookie!

Screen 1 of my 50k alliance side.





Screen 2 of my 50k alliance side. Full sized screen shot.





Screen of my final horde-side gold total.





/Played for my priest.





/Played for their banker.




I was invited by the guild that I hired to take me through ICC for some Ulduar 25 hard modes and walked away with this. Later we managed to get Algalon to 1% before he ran away.





I started a priest named Allystokpile (after my main banker Stokpile) alliance side of my current server along with a banker for her named Lunchmuney (my horde banking guild name). My horde characters sent over a set of BoA gear then said fair thee well. I had zero assistance from my main bank account or friends on the alliance side, of which I have none. Out of all the problems I faced there's only really 3 that stand out as an honest to god annoyance.

- Starting out and not being able to afford water.
- Bag space.
- Losing track of sold enchant scrolls from having only 1 bank alt.

I couldn't afford water. I couldn't train all of my skills to max rank when I leveled up. I was completely broke without a main or a friend to help support me. I didn't even have bags.

After doing most of the starting area I managed to get water bought from selling mob trash drops and found a pair of bags. I picked up some clam meat which I sold soon after for 15g/stack. I used that money to train my professions up (herbalism and inscription) and bought a few basic flowers. I crafted a handful of glyphs here and there along with some armor velum. A few gold came in from glyphs which I used to purchase some Eternal Fires and resold them as crystallized fire which more than doubled my investment.

This managed to sustain me all the way up to level 20. It wasn't enough though to train fully every spell that I got as I got it. I didn't even train my res spell to max until much later on and barely trained any shadow spells what so ever.

Throughout the course of leveling I was able to identify certain greens, trade materials etc that would fetch me significantly more than a vendor price. I also never trained first aide up to max and there are several priest spells I don't even know rank 1 of. I never trained them as I'd never use them making the gold cost an utter waste.

Throughout my entire time /played I spent a total of maybe 2 hours total farming, 3 if I wanted to over estimate. All the rest was spent either in raids, heroics, leveling, face time with the AH, mass crafting, or just plain being AFK. I farmed shards in Strat to skill up enchanting as there were none on the AH. I farmed a pair of golden pearls in Feralas for a spellpower scroll (again none on the AH at all). And lastly I made 3 short farming trips to the old world to farm Essence of Air and water for agility/healing power scrolls. You guessed it, zero on the AH. Not even for 500g a piece.

At 20 I bought my first land mount and riding skill.

At 40 I bought my epic land mount and training.

At 42 I bought dual spec and fully trained all of my spells that would be used to max rank. Thanks Blue.

At 60 I bought basic flying training and the mount. I made sure I did a lot of stormwind rep quests while leveling in the old world to get the faction discount for being revered.

At 68 I learned cold weather flying.

At 70 I dropped herbalism in favor of enchanting and began to train that up. I had to farm stratholme a few times because there were ZERO shards or materials of that level on the AH for several days. I figured that this was normal at the time.

At 71 I bought every BoE epic I could find along with filling every other slot with a BoE blue item. This included gems AND enchants for all of them. Both toc and ulduar craftables, JC neck/ring, etc. I bought the gear first because while leveling I found that I really enjoyed healing and wanted to walk into heroics and raids ASAP instead of flying around at 280% speed doing nothing but waiting for money to come in.

If I wanted to continue to level with epic flying, I would have had to wait another week at 80 before fully stripping out of my greens. I didn't want to do that so I made the personal choice to fly slower while knowing the annoyance would be greatly compensated for by being able to raid immediately at 80.

At 78ish I finished skilling up enchanting and was able to start crafting NR level enchanting scrolls in addition to my twink scrolls.

7 days after hitting level 80 I bought epic flying and every glyph book I had left to read.

Here's a complete list of everything that I have bought and their estimated price in the short lifespan of this humble space goat priest. You should consider yourself blessed if you got a healer that was a fresh 80 with gear like mine =P

Merlin's robe - 2000
Bejeweled wizard's bracers - 1000
Wispcloak - 300
Titanium spellshock neck - 500
Titanium spellshock ring - 500
Runed mana band - 60
Titansteel spellblade - 650
Cord of the white dawn - 850
Spell slinger's slippers - 750
Spellweave gloves - 200
Faces of doom - 80
Healing power recipe - 60
Spellpower recipe - 3000
57x Book of Glyph Mastery - 1150

450 Inscription skill - 2000
450 enchanting skill - 3500
Other assorted blues - 100
Full gear enchants - 1300
Full set of rare gems - 300
Full set of epic gems - 2000
Riding skill and mounts from basic land to CWF - 6500
Dual spec - 1000
Old world reputation items - 800

Grand total spent on leveling, professions, gear, and enhancements
=
25,600g


As of now, it has been 59 days since this toon was first created and I have amassed 50,000 gold in addition to all of the purchases I've made. It took me 1 month to reach level 80 then buy everything and another month +/- a week to gather 50k gold. At that rate, in roughly 3 months I'd have another character gold capped. I say 3 and not 4 months because I have since learned many many more glyph recipes and would likely find the last enchanting recipe I'd like to have. I also am sitting on a large stokpile of inks and enchanting materials so I won't have to build up a supply from nothing again. In doing all of this, I took advantage of a few very poor AH players to fund my leveling and required purchases along with profession skill ups. Due to my experience in the AH game they were out played and helped me get rich far sooner that I had imagined.

This is my proof to you that anybody can get rich and afford themselves all the luxury that comes with it. I did not get any help. I didn't "get lucky" with finding a market that made me thousands in an hour. And I didn't farm my way into thousands of gold. I went from zero gold, zero silver, and zero copper to over Fifty Thousand gold all by myself. It was clever thinking, experience, knowledge of the game and knowing how your average wow player will (not) think when they're in front of an auctioneer. If I can get rich while still buying everything you'd expect to buy all by myself with a single 80 and banker you can too. Anybody can do well financially in this game if they set their mind to it.


No excuses.

Mail call!

EDIT:
In case you didn't notice (like me) it's the mid summer festival in azeroth this week. The thing that makes it worth mentioning is that you can use the LFG system to que up for the event boss. Also the gear he drops (purple cloaks and super cool looking staff) has all been upgraded to i232 gear. There's a cape for each spec and they're all damned good imo. Also the first time you do it each day you get a bag that contains 2 Emblems of Frost and has a chance at the seasonal mini pet.

Also worth mentioning is that you can que up and kill him as many times as you damned well please. So that means that you can farm the capes and staff to your heart's content. Or in my case, the enchanting recipe for Deathfrost. It basically makes your weapon proc an Icy Touch like the DK spell and has a damned cool looking effect. So enchanters get your butts in gear and farm the recipe and try to sell a few scrolls for it! Materials are 2 primal water and 2 primal shadow, totaling about 50g on my server. So I'm listing a scroll on horde and alliance side for 150g.

Since setting up the email for the blog I've already gotten a handful of emails, much to my genuine amazement tbh. So Taking the time today to answer them in this entry. I'm not replying via email because any questions that one person has there's likely others that have the same one in mind (or just haven't thought to ask yet). So if you're wondering why I haven't responded, that's why. Also of note I'll only be referring to people by first name or character name here. Depending on the influx of mails I may wind up giving shorter-ish answers to some and if the frequency goes up a bunch I think I'll just dedicate my Friday posts to this little bit.


Fred says...
I am a failure at making gold but I am optimistic for the future. I am currently leveling 5 alchemists simultaneously (they will all be transmute masters like my two warlocks). I am hoping that having 7 cool-downs per period will help me get the jump on the JC business in Cataclysm. I have all the gathering skills in the game maxed out as well as JC, Inscription and Tailoring. Working on LW and have abandoned BS because I just can't stand it. I know you are busy but I would like you opinion of my plan for Cat; Transmute gems, sell them (cut or not), mining ore and prospecting it for gems to do transmutes and further support JC.


That's a solid plan actually. Xmutes are easy guaranteed cash and you can use that to bank roll your primary markets or give you the backing you need to get into one. I did the same thing in my alliance project using glyphs which start making profit immediately and used that gold to level enchanting and stokpile the mats. So your basic plan for Cata is identical to one that I've been using for a while now and has been a great success for me. And with you having 7 xmute specs (holy shit yo!) that shouldn't take long at all to get your other businesses up and running. Good luck!


Trugrav says...
I've been reading your blog for a little bit after returning to wow from a long hiatus. The first thing I did after returning to the game was roll a shiny new paladin on a new server along with a DK bank toon. I got my DK up to 60 and will get him to 65 eventually and thanks to your blog have him enchanting low level scrolls (right now just crusader, fiery, icy, and lifestealing) and for a while was making a decent profit, I was able to purchase epic flying at 80 and still have about 10k gold left over working solely in this market, that's how good it was. Now though i'm in an undercut war with an AH camper though and am selling my scrolls for almost no profit (He has to be loosing money though cause i'm on my stockpile of mats I has saved up for just such an occasion) I figured this would be a quick thing but it's been going on for a couple weeks now and i'm almost out of reserve mats. what's your advice on the situation. So you know I also have a JC/transmute alchemist but almost no paterns for JC. With my alchemist I can sometimes make money on meta gems but this is a shrinking market too.


Determined competitors are a thing that you'll just have to learn to live with I'm afraid. Just ask the enchanters and jewlers how much they like me. Like I always say it's an issue of time and money. Is the money from it worth trying to stay in it? How long are you willing to put up with low profits? Though since you're only doing low scrolls atm, it's not likely that either of you will want to back out as it's an amazing niche market to be in. Once you skill up some and get access to NR enchants (or even mongoose) you'll have a much wider market open up to you. So the short version of my advice is to wait it out until you get more recipes available. Otherwise (if you're already at that point) try to get the meta cuts for chaotic, relentless, and insightful. They always have their ups and downs, but are definitely worth staying with.


Outlier says...
Just so I can be more exact: I'm sitting at about 15k gold (fluid)... with I don't even know how much in mats. I'm working on the JC (blue gems for now, have about 2 stacks of epics but I'm still learning the blue gem market so I figured I'd start and focus there). Also I'm focusing on Enchanting scrolls, which I'm killing right now. (I also have an alchemist to do all my transmutes/meta's)

So on to the questions...

1) I don't have a lot of the Gem Recipes. Especially the epic cuts (I have one of each epic cut, 2 of red). The blues/meta's I'm finally starting to get under my belt. But there's still quite a few cuts that I need.

In your recent posts if I get you correctly, you are saying that you are slowly moving out of the Gem market, selling off your supply as the demand slowly goes down.

So in my position what would you do? Would you just stick only to doing the daily and adding gem recipes really slowly? Would you invest quickly to get some more cuts before demand completely diminishes? I just don't know if the investment will pay itself off with raids finishing up.

2) Buying thresholds. Okay so I have been opening up my buying threshold quite a bit. Here's what my enchanting materials look like now (inside the spreadsheet you gave us).

Infinite Dust: 1.10g
Greater Cosmic Essence: 19g
Dream Shard: 3.50g
Abyss Crystal: 29.50g

In QA3 I add about .20-.30% profit onto the material cost. I can't keep up with demand. What do you do in this situation? Do you raise material thresholds. Do you try and find alternative ways to get the material? Any advice?

Enchanting has given me crazy profits so I want to push it to it's limits.

Personally I wouldn't get into the JC game at this point in the expansion. If you already have some worthwhile cuts go for it and keep the dailys up. But definitely don't go hog wild trying to break into it, act more as a casual seller in the market than a big supplier. I'm not totally out of the market though, I left rare gems behind and am now trying to stokpile epic gems for ruby sanctum. Taking a chance on their being a demand spike afterwords. But if you have access to an xmute spec alchemist or just cheap raw meta gems, those are always worth cutting.

As for keeping up with enchanting demand, it's tough as hell. Sometimes if I have the time I'll DE a bunch of JC rings for dust, but not that much anymore. Mostly what you can do is to scan the AH for greens and see if there's any that are cheap enough to buy or bid on for DE purposes.


Thanks for stopping by!

From the ground up: Week 7-8

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: 41,000

Total gold earned: 151,000
(according to my banker's statistics page)

Inscription skill: 450

Enchanting skill: 450

Required purchases to make: +4 stats enchanting recipe

Looks like I'm almost there!

Taming of the shrew
------------------------------
Logging on for today and went up over 1500g in a single night placing my a hair below 10k even. MB just got done with with giving my daily allowance of gold and I'm off to craft more glyphs as per usual. Still no luck on the last enchanting recipe I need sadly. While I craft my glyphs I'm going to count just how many I had to make because of MB and company buying my "horrible market ruining, doin' it wrong (tm)" priced glyphs.

It seems that the other usual posters of armor vellums are getting discouraged and giving me free reign for the most part to list them for 7g each instead of 80 silver over material cost. Definitely giving me some great supplemental income for purchasing extra mats for my own enchants and flasks.

Finally researched a useful glyph with slow fall and steady shot. Granted they're not the constantly selling out type of glyph, but at least they're useful and sell more than 1 a week heh. Still waiting to discover the mortal strike glyph, but all things in due time. I think I only have another week or three before I know every
glyph available. That's when MB is really going to hate me because then I'll lower my sale price even more down to 6.5g and let them buy up every single glyph I own. Fail!

Random thought, I used to get annoyed when I'd do my glyph research and get low level armor vellums because I couldn't vendor them and had no use for them. But now I get a little giddy when I do because it saves me a lot of gold in the long term with not having to use max level ones and the lower level ones never sell for much if there's even any on the AH. Now when I go to craft twink scrolls I can lower my thresholds by another few gold with the money I'm saving by checking for low level vellum.


Glyph sales by class (thanks blue)
Deathknight - 100
Druid - 105
Hunter - 80
Mage - 60
Pally - 130
Priest - 80
Rogue - 45
Shaman - 100
Warlock - 80
Warrior - 100

That makes a total of 880 glyphs sold at an average price of 4g sales makes 3520g income and at 80% profit is 2,800g profit just from taking advantage of another cancel/post button monkey. And I still have over 1k IotS left over with a full set of the rest. It's kind of pathetic how easy it is to take advantage of somebody that thinks they're untouchable.

Nothing special went on this week actually other than me being only 30 days away from having all my glyph research finally completed. But even with that being the case, I still have a huge number of stokpiled inks and enchanting mats and glyphs that will sell. I say will sell as opposed to my silly competitor MB who is convinced that buying my glyphs will be turning them a 5k/day profit. Even when I was the only major glyph seller horde side, I never pulled a steady 5k/day even with 30g price caps where as on my alliance toon they're capped at 8g. Meh, doesn't matter. I'm still on top of the game, on top of the AH and on top of one of (if not the most) gigantic piles of wow gold ever collected in the same spot.

/Flex

The glyph sales have been as steady as ever to both players and the new competitors. It's fueling my enchanting business quite nicely and I'm rarely at a loss for materials. The only time I get short si when I forget to make blade ward scrolls and have to shell out a full stack of crystals again for them. On top of that I'm constantly selling a set of 4 power stats every night it seems. Tough to find the supply, but I can definitely afford to stokpile when it comes in.

The best part is, when I get a full line of glyphs bought out or undercut when I'm not around to craft/list more it still flows nicely along. Every gold I make goes towards -something- and that something lately has been infinite dust and cosmics. Ex spell power to gloves and fort to boots have been going like mad! I've been taking full advantage of my glyphs being bought up when the price is low and can count on the stupidity of others. Just like I do horde side! Except now it's almost a guaranteed 400g/day promise on top of every other sale I'll make during that time. The tactic of raising my sell threshold worked nicely and managed to snag a few extra gold coins from selling my glyphs at a 4g min instead of the previous 3.5 gold. Looking forward to next week when I hit my goal.


Thanks for stopping by!

I bought the ultimate gold sink

Long ass post today about my experience in buying the biggest gold sink I could think of. An escort through all of ICC 25m.

TL;DR: The run was epic, the guild and their members are awesome. It was definitely a pleasure running with them and, if I wasn't quitting soon, I'd love to run with them again. Great people, great fun, great challenge. The only bad part of the night was my terribad frame rate the entire time.


I have officially purchased the ultimate gold sink. The other night I hired 23 members of the guild Extra Crispy from Ysera-US horde to escort myself and a guest through all of Icecrown Citadel 25m. For those of you wondering how much I paid, the total number was 800,000 gold for the night. The details of the deal were rather simple actually. 25m raid, every boss must die, 50k per boss kill in the first wing and 200k up front for each following wing. I had to take a portal/summon each time of course to get the money. Since I took my DK who isn't my lead banker, and thus 100k withdraw limit, I had Stokpile withdraw 200k at a time and mail it all ot her in seperate mails. That way I could just grab one huge stack of gold, hand it over and pick up the next quickly as to not slow us down.

The deal was for two players to be kept alive as best as possible (fire standing not included), and we were to both pass on all loot. Granted the entire guild needs nigh zero from any normal mode bosses so a few pieces (including shadow's edge) were offered to us. But since I only run as DW and my buddy is a caster (and hates melee) it would be better off as an alt's off-spec side-grade because I'd literally shard it as soon as I got it. And now the fury warrior jesus shall commence with the smiting of many small kittens.

Yes that's a ton. Yes it's possibly even a metric ton. But what would be more wasteful, me canceling my account with a million gold in the bank never to be seen again or use it for something and give it to people who obviously aren't complete morons?

Also here's another reason why it's not a waste (in my opinion) to buy a run through ICC. Anything fun has a price. To me being a part of a great group of people going through a successful raid are some good times. It's what I miss the most about TBC and not just collecting purples like we all are in this expansion. The guild I ran with allowed me to have that same fun one last time before I left the game. Great big thanks to everybody in Extra Crispy that helped an old school (ish) raider have some fun. With all the guild hoping and never knowing how much fail is in a guild until you raid with them it's just far more of a hassle than it's worth. But back in TBC if a guild called themselves a raiding guild they were the REAL THING. How many guilds on your server call themselves a raid guild and can't get past saurfang? 'Nuff said.

Also with a guild that's capable of 100% carrying a random person through ICC including the LK they probably have their whole raiding roster decked out in all the weapons that he drops. If you see the loot table, that's the only gear he gives. So if your guild gets up to that point where nobody needs a weapon from him, why not carry somebody through it and sell off the title and a weapon of their choice? I mean if you're not actively working on heroic version of the LK encounter, killing him gives you nothing but extra crystals and emblems. Both of which you can get if you boost somebody through there along with a few thousand guild for your raiders and/or guild bank.

The run was split up into two seperate nights due to time constraints, but the first raid night was only 2.5 hours long and all we had left was sindragosa and the LK to take down.

I paid 800k for this run and we're not 1 shoting it all. I wasn't expecting all the bosses to jsut roll over for us and I didn't even want it to be a 100% perfectly flawless run either. I like that. I don't want to falcon-punch our way to victory over everything and see free purples raining down like the rest of this entire expansion. Its great to see progress and after a wipe they identified what the issue was and fixed it on the spot then blam. boss falls over with a hole in their chest

We wiped on queen because apparently if you have a proc from dbw, you can't get bitten because you're shape shifted so of course the top dps goes to bite the next top dps and they're shifted, an unexpected rogue on the rampage is scary and tore up several people. After we recovered everyone that was getting a bit and had the trinket took it off for something else, I think a couple even went without a second trink.

A few random observations about the runs.

Before every boss there was a feast on the ground accompanied with a raid warning saying that it was down and when it was about to expire.

There was a 5 count before the MT (go go paladin) would pull every time.

Their raids start at 730pm server, and at 730 on the dot the first trash pack was busy dying. That made my night worth it right there. Almost every guild in the game takes at least an extra 30 minutes after raid "start time" to so much as even get to the instance. I loved it.

4 frames a second average all night, that sucked balls.

Fun fact, half the people on vent spoke french or had a heavy accent.

Valithria was damned cool. It was pure chaos. And I like chaos. tons of adds spawning all the hell over the place, man I'd love to tank that fight.

I think I managed to hold my own throughout the raid. I didn't die on a single boss fight aside from H loot ship from pulling threat on adds. I couldn't tab around fast enough and still DPS to find out which I hadn't built threat on yet. I also sustained 10.5k dps on saurfang (including the 20% buff) and any other tank 'n spank type of fight. Not bad considering I knew zero fights after the first wing and was rocking an awesome 4 fps.

So far my favorite fight has been blood council. Again because of the pure chaos that is going on. I almost got myself killed a few times from the "move and you die" debuff. Luckily I'm a DK and have a number of tools that I can use to help myself out. But it was a pain in the ass to get a big stack of it as you finally get back into melee range only to be knocked right back and have to sit there doing nothing. If you armory "Daecidia" you can see all the achieves that we did from a single clear.

When all was said and done, I had the bloodhalls down on heroic, H marrowgar, H gunship, and over a dozen ICC related achievements.

I got the feeling that a couple in the raid were not so happy that me and my buddy interrupted their raid week. Though more accurately it seemed that they were more concerned with getting purples that were more purple than their 'old useless' purples with green text to prove that they are SUPER purple. I hate people that think of loot as a reward and not the tool to get more boss kills, be able to do more fun stuff, or to simply better yourself.

And I'm sure that millions of people would consider it to be "lowly" or "pathetic" to have to buy a run through ICC. Fun fact, I paid 800,000 gold for the run and I still have over 400,000 in my bank. Meanwhile they all sit nice and pretty with their 2k gold. Wonder why it's such a sad thing that I bought a run through the last tier before I left the game...

But for the most part they were really cool. for all intents and purposes it was just like i was an honorary guild member. No special treatment no insults or anything. just what I was hoping for.

The guy that set up the deal was also the guild's main tank and he even went as far as to run fraps for the fights. I thought that was just too cool. Here's a couple of the vids where we did some achievements or otherwise interesting. All of it is from a prot pally perspective.

Flu shots
H Blood princes
LDW Full house
Valithria portal jocky

We downed Sindragosa rather easily even though I messed up on the frost blast positioning. I didn't chain the blocks, but didn't manage to get into the position they wanted perfectly right away. But after the second blast on me I got it. I went unholy for the fight so I wouldn't have to worry about the debuff stacking up from hitting her lightning fast, especially with all the haste I have as frost.

As for the Lich King himself, well, that made every gold coin worth it to see the fight first hand. I screwed up on defile of course, I knew that you had very little time to move but I didn't know that you had basically ZERO time. Since I was the lowest dps of the DK's in raid I stuck to spamming chains on all the valks when they came out so they could focus on killing them asap and it worked out well. In a word the fight was holy-shit-super-cool-epic-awesomeness! Yes, that's a word. Promise.

All in all the whole experience was well worth it. Even if I wasn't quitting soon (thus making all the gold worthless to me) I still would've done it. Hell I'd even have spent my full bank on it. Blizz may have totally botched this entire expansion but there are definitely a few fights that are truly memorable. Hard mode twins in ToC, LK, Blood princes, Valithria, Iron Council and countless ulduar hard modes of course.

And to top it all off, apparently one of the raiders that with us has some quality pen and paper drawing skills and offered to do a nice sketch of my DK as a personal thank you. That's awesome. It doesn't matter who you are, if somebody says to you that they want to draw a portrait of you as a way to say thanks you can't help but feel like you're king of the world for a few moments. Seriously, that's beyond awesome. It also makes it even more cool because I fancy myself an artist as well (since that's sorta my job after all), but can't draw anything without a mouse to save my life. So even though I think my toon looks wicked cool I'd never be able to make an artist's rendition of them and screen shots just don't have the same personal feel as something hand drawn does. Call me old fashioned.


Lastly if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll notice that my normal blue double-border style isn't here today. And you may also notice that the only time I remove it is when I have screen shots to show. So here you go,a collection of screens that I took through out the evening of great fun, death by bad stuff, recount padding, and 'splosions!















And here's the picture the fellow raider drew for me. I think it's hands down adorable!





Thanks for stopping by!

Can or should?

Since I'm getting a few more comments than I'm used to and questions relating to older posts I've set up an email address for this blog. Should you have any questions regarding older posts, something I haven't covered yet, or just questions in general feel free to drop me a line at theahpile@gmail.com and I'll do my best to help you out. In the mean time, if you have a question regarding the current entry I've written go ahead and keep commenting there. I'll be checking the email daily and if I find a good one, I'll make a post here about it.

Naturally I'd like you to include a name of some kind so I don't refer to 50 different anonymous for the sake of clarity. Also the more specific you can be the better. Please don't send me questions regarding how to get rid of a camper as the only thing to do for that is time and money. I'll respond to as many as I can that I think I can help with and any that happen to be particularly interesting will be posted here.
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A lot of people want to know if they should invest into this or that. Others want to know if they have the means to get into X market and, if they do, should they. Well, I don't have an answer for ya. Sorry folks, move along.

...Still here? Well crap, thought I might get an extra day off >_<


There's a lot of things that you can do in the AH game no matter what you have access to or not. I've made many posts on what you can do with an inventory or a flat amount of gold to work with. Hell my from the ground up project already has me decked out in epic gems, every i245 BoE and 5k flying the week I hit 80 and is over 15k gold. That just goes to show that I CAN do it. You can do it too, but should you? That's the philosophy behind this entry. Identify why something should be done, and not just the possibility of it.

That's the thing about "can be" and "should be." Such as you CAN get gold capped by dailys, you CAN win a WSG by a mindless zerg tactic, or you CAN drive your car with your knees, that doesn't exactly mean that it SHOULD be done. The thing is not many people like to improve something that works, even if its only worked a single time or even if they have no clue at all why it worked. See any AV "zerg the general strat" that wins and loses. Then see which one has a seriously geared tank with a pocket healer or 3 and which face plants into a quick and embarrassing loss amidst name calling and a sea of QQ.

Yet with as many groups that fail at zerg's they still do it because it's easy and familiar. If you just follow a step by step guide without thinking first if you should do something you can easily wind up in a bad spot. Then you'll complain and wonder why it didn't make you rich over night. Well if the average price of an abyss crystal for you is 50g and Berserking scrolls sell for 200g... no you should not get into that market. Even though I always say how great enchanting is. In other words, use your head.

What about the glyph business, could you? Should you? Well sure you can do it, but depending on the goblins and campers and trolls (oh my!) around your server it might not be a thing that you SHOULD do. But none the less, capability will always be around to tempt you with all things shiny. It's a well known fact that glyphs can get you gold capped fast but I ask again; should you take that route to do so? Do your research, see who sells what and how much. See what the material and buy in prices are going to be. And once all that is done, you and only you decide if it should be done.

You can also put this whole thing into the perspective of wants and needs. You want your new alt to get to 80, but to you need to? If it isn't a need, then there's no reason to drop a huge amount of gold into the leveling process. What about that nifty BoE purple that costs 10k gold. Do you NEED it to help secure a boss kill or keep a raid spot? I kind of doubt that. Or do you just want it to have a higher gear score. You have the funding for it and barely the gold to repair and afford flasks and keep up your AH game. You could buy it, but should you?

To relate this to a more likely scenario think of can or should in terms of entering new markets. If you're still building up your financial empire across only a pair of markets, could you slow that down and invest into starting another one? Of course and I'm sure it would be a lot of fun. But should you? If you don't have a steady and stable income it wouldn't be a great idea. When you spread your gold out too thin it becomes harder and harder to keep up with any demand. However if you have a good stokpile of materials plus pre crafted goodies for one market and have the gold to do so then by all means you definitely should invest into another market. So long as you think before you act you will do well.


Thanks for stopping by!

In the zone

NOTE: I recieved a great comment on yesterday's post about selling obscure cooking recipes by Archangel. If you like using out of the ordinary ways to make some extra change check it out. Well written guide of what and where. Here's the list of recipes they sell, but read their comment for the whole deal on it. Good stuff indeed!


Archangel says:
Booty Bay: Cooked Glossy Mightfish, Fillet of Redgill, Giant Clam Scorcho, Hot Smoked Bass
Westfall: Clam Chowder, Spiced Chili Crab
Loch Modan: Loch Frenzy Delight
Felwood: Chared Bear Kabobs, Juicy Bear Burger
Winterspring Monster Omelet
Feralas: Baked Salmon, Lobster Stew
Tanaris : Grilled Squid, Poached Sunscale Salmon, Spotted Yellowtail
Azuremyst: Crunchy Spider Surprise
Desolace: Heavy Kodo Stew
Auberdine: Fillet of Frenzy
Arathi Highlands: Barbecued Buzzard Wing
Feralas: Hot Wolf Ribs, Mightfish Steak
Ashenvale: Big Bear Steak, Lean Venison
Theramore: Dragonbreath Chili, Roast Raptor, Mystery Stew
Stormwind: Crocolisk Steak, Curiously Tasty Omelet, Crocolisk Gumbo


Anything repetitive can get old and boring fast. Somethings you only need to change up just a tad for them to be just as awesome as when they were new. Others you might need to entirely change how you do things to keep interest in them. And sometimes, you just need to be in the right frame of mind. That's what today is about, getting into the zone where you're all fired up and ready to do some awesome something of something to something! Heh, way back when I was leading raids, my call to pull was always shouting "GO DO STUFF TO THINGS!" No need to delay things with something silly like specifics. Pushaw!

Even as much as I love playing the AH, it can get a bit boring and become more of a grind at times. But I know that's mostly because of doing the same thing over and over and not enough inspiration. What I do to keep perspective is keep track of my goals. I go over in my mind the many ways that I can go about them. Come up with other potential avenues to get there. Or just remind myself why I'm doing it in the first place; it's fun!

First there's the obvious one: music. Damned near everybody uses music to get them into the mood for something. For me I prefer energetic music with a groove to it. Not in the typical hip-hop or dance type of groove specifically, but anything that MOVES. Apparently though, there aren't any songs entitled "LETS KICK SOME ASS AND MAKE WOW GOLD ON THE AUCTION HOUSE!" that I'm aware of. And dear god for the sake of all that is good and holy I hope there aren't any. In any case here's a few youtube links to a few songs that I've had on replay lately. I tend to find the odd song here and that that I get hooked on and play it non stop. Yes it gets annoying. Yes it gets annoying to me at times. But dammit, it's just so cool! One is rock-ish, another is heavy, one is electronic, and the last is just plain weird. Most songs are rated PG-13 but I'm sure at least one reader here will have an appreciation for my bizarre tastes in music. Check them out.

Something rockin'.
Something electronic.
Something extra heavy.
Something completely different.

I also like to remember my first gold cap personally, I was so proud of myself for achieving that. I also remember when my guild got its first KT kill. KT as in Kael'Thas Sunstrider, NOT the pansie ass bag of bones in naxx. Honestly if you're proud of killing him in the level 80 version of naxx... go away. Unless you did it in all level 70 gear and questing greens, just go. I'm such a friendly guy aren't I. I remember the feeling that I had and know that once I get to where ever it is that I'm going I'll have it just like that again. When I'm thinking that playing the AH is getting a bit old that revs me up and sets me right back on track. Usually with even more determination than before.

Remember me mentioning a while ago about personality traits and the AH? Well if you know yourself well enough that you can consciously identify certain things that make you YOU, then you can use them to your advantage. One of mine is that I can be a spiteful bastard at times. Sometimes without any other reason than just to be spiteful. Granted, that's not the most attractive thing you can say about a person, but if you're aware of it, you can use it can get things done. And fast. But as with anything that falls into the "not so nice" category you should be careful of course as things won't always work out for the better in the long run. Go undercut every seller in every market by 50g just to "stick it to them" and see how much closer to the gold cap you get. Or buy up a billion and five materials for something that sells slow just to make damned sure a competitor won't have any stockpiled mats for the next decade and see what you get left with. A big number in the red, that's what. Tread carefully.

Since I'm obviously all about getting things accomplished though, it can be a good thing in some situations. Example. When somebody tries to work their way into a market that I've fallen in love with or tries to knock down a few niche items that I'm selling, that's when the nice-guy-hat you'll see Stokpile wearing in his armory comes off. Usually replaced with something metal. With horns. And fire. I will vehemently defend my scroll and epic gear markets. They're too much fun to stop working in so I'll very quickly thrash the prices to keep somebody out. Not because it's good for business, but because I love doing it and it's mine. But mostly just because >:D

One other thing that I do to get into the zone of working the AH is reading. Completely unrelated since what I read tends to be on the opposite end of the spectrum that playing an MMO is on. But it gives me something to occupy my thoughts and I'll ponder over what I've read while I play the AH game to give me something to do with my hands. I'm not the type that can stomach sitting still for more than 2.3 seconds at a time without going insane. While I'm at the AH I'll be pouring over what I've read and/or learned and once I'm done with my craft/sell bit I'll have let what I've read sink into the back of my mind to give me a better understanding and "digest" it all if you will.

This is especially useful when you're trying to teach yourself something IRL such as a new language (WoW is actually a good tool for that believe it or not) or refine a skill that you already have. Basically it's forcing your mind to focus on something legitimately productive while your hands are busy at the key board. Sort of killing two birds with one stone. When I'm actually working, I still spend a little bit of time on WoW while I think about my next step to take. And I coincidentally happen to be making large sums of WoW gold while I get some real work done. Cool, huh?


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 6-15

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I, Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker

Gems, LW, misc: 45,000

Smithing and enchanting: 59,000

Glyphs: 5,000


Total weekly sales: 109,000
Weekly profit: 50,000
Total gold: 1,230,000


Well I've recovered from my 3 day long bender and finally got some sleep. Of course during that time I made sure to at least do a cancel/post while waiting at home for a ride to the next stop. I sure as hell wasn't going to be driving myself anywhere, that's for sure.

And holy crap I just noticed I have yet another gold cap. Woohoo number 6!

Detailed Recap
--------------
It seems that titansteel prices are slowly dropping in price but crusader orbs are becoming even more and more scarce. A very annoying catch 22 for the toc epics market. On that note, I picked up the recipe for bejeweled wizard's bracers finally for 1500g. I learned it and sold two of them before the week ended. So they're now in my standard inventory now so long as I'm stocked up with epic gems. I also took my pally into another toc pug and got the other mail dps recipe so I'll craft a set of bracers/chest and see where it goes. I then bought the leather dps bracers for 1500 and am looking to pick up the leather chest piece as well.

I know last time it took a bit to move the bracers, but I said the same thing about the tank piece. Though lately the tank epics have been selling in pairs at a full buy out price which nets me well over 1k profit per sale. Ok 20 minutes ago the mail bracers have sold for a decent 300g profit. it isn't astounding but I'll keep making them as I get more orbs in for the time being.

Seriously, get in on this market if you can afford it. A quick suggestion if you're working in this market though. Set up QA3 to give you a bid set to 90% of the buy out price. You'd be surprised on how many extra sales this has gotten me. Sure you won't get the full amount of profit you'd like, but that's sure better than no sales at all. It also has a way of inciting a small bidding war when there's only one up on the AH. When this happens, people will tend to either say screw it and stop bidding or just buy it out completely when they normally wouldn't.

I'm getting stuffed to the gills with my epic gem purchases. I've even taken to buying up some cut ones as well when the price is right. The profits from the market so far have been very good to me and still allowing me to stokpile a good amount of extras for when ruby sanctum goes live which I hope is today. Taking a gamble on the gem prices spiking up good and high temporarily. And with the inevitable material shortage, thanks to yours truly, I'll be in a great position to take the reigns and get advantage of the price increase. Worst case scenario and prices remain the same then I'm just stocked up to last me until cata comes out.

Since leaving the glyph business, it seems that my former competitors have returned in full force. So of course, I had to trash the market. Again. I pulled glyphs down to 10g and even at that price and barely posting anything I did rather well. I didn't even start crafting new glyphs until like Wednesday when I had only about 800 or so in stock. Heh whoops. Admittedly that was also due to me being out of vellum's of both types so I had to spend almost all my IotS on those to refill. Regardless, it's still a thriving market on horde side and is doing just as well alliance side. All hail the King of professions.

Lastly, twink enchants have been picking up from a brief lull once more. It seems like every weekend is still a promised fistful of sales in that area. Even if I sell none during the week, come Saturday there they go flying off the shelves again.


Thanks for stopping by!

Inscription profit nerfed?

It would seem that the nerf bat has finally managed to swing its way towards glyphs. Or has it? Some of you may have read it, some may not but I decided it was a large enough of a change to give my thoughts on. Here's the full quote of the blue post from world of raids. The major change is the last bullet point.

Path of the Titans & Glyphs


* Path of the Titans has been scrapped and will not be implemented.

* Instead Blizzard will focus on improving the glyph system, as they feel it didn't quite hit the intended goals in Wrath.

* Glyphs will now be available in 3 categories: Major, "Medium" (PH name) and Minor.

o Major glyphs are core to each class and will be expected to be used to perform at maximum level.

o Medium glyphs will be to provide "fun" alterations to abilities.

o Minor glyphs will largely function as they do today.

* Based on the mockup shown, you'll be able to have 3 glyphs of each type at level 85: Major, Medium and Minor.

* The glyph UI will now display all of the glyphs available to your class, even if you haven't learned them yet, to the right of the section where you apply your glyphs.

* Blizzard wants to make glyphs permanent so you don't have to carry a stack of them around. Simply learn the glyph and then you can swap it whenever you want.


What does that mean? It means that you won't have to change out glyphs ever again. If you run 3 specs or like to min/max and change glyphs on a per fight basis you won't have to anymore. Granted nobody does that really outside of high end guilds, but there it is. With the addition of a 'medium' level glyph scribes will have another huge market to work in. And with so many people being of the mindset that "I MUST have everything" there will be a buying frenzy that will out do the dual spec glyph sales I'd bet. Unfortunately at some point most people will have bought all the glyphs their class can handle for all their toons. This might not be within the first month or two, but it will happen. When it does profits will go down considerably.

Does this mean that you shouldn't bother leveling a scribe? Hell no! If you stokpile the herbs and such now while the getting is good you'll be primed and ready for a huge amount of profit. Even if it's only temporary, it'll be a huge amount of it and almost all at once. I still stand by my advice to get yourself a scribe and stokpile all the inks that you possibly can. With there being a new tier of glyphs and changes to nearly every other glyph out there and addition of many new ones, inscription will be just as fierce as a money maker as it ever was. Even if it's only temporary.

The only question is how long should you stay in the business. Once profits start to slowly dwindle as more and more people have maxed out their glyphs for their class/spec and alts, you'll have to take a look at your rate of sales. Also since a lot of people (the cancel/post button monkeys) will consider this a complete nerf. And like any moron that sees a nerf all they can read is "no gud its for only nubs now." See ret paladins after the nerf bat hit the in the teeth then look at a geared ret paladin in ICC. Still 100% viable dps.

That means that there's a good possibility that all the major sellers on your server may leave or go down to only casually posting glyphs instead of rolling out the full glyph machine daily. If you get into a situation like this where there's barely any major competitors, or only one or two, then I'd say stick with the market fully. Plain and simple people will always need glyphs as everybody has an alt to level and gear and glyph out. And now they'll be much more likely to spend even more money on you since they have so many glyphs to buy.

It is my pseudo-professional opinion that inscription will still be a major profession in the AH scene, but it won't be the dominant force as it once was. If you don't have a scribe, get one to 450 and get all your research taken care of. Stokpile all the inks that you can and reap the rewards of your patience come Cata. Just remember to keep an eye out for further changes and look for signs that it's time to get out of the market once the new expansion craze dies down.

In the end it will depend on the server population mostly. Right now not many people trade out glyphs and use them like consumables, but there's still a booming market for them. In fact, not that many people have 3 different specs that they use often enough to change glyphs out for. But if you're on a higher pop server then that means more alts are getting rolled all the time, just like now. This is what's going to allow a scribe to sustain a big AH business just like they can now. And with new alts means more glyphs. And more twink enchants, and more leveling greens/blues. And more cheap farmed materials. God bless the alts.


Thanks for stopping by!

Taking the weekend off

Few things to update you all on. First, no post today about making the WoW gold. Sorry. Second, I have finally arranged an ICC 25 run. Well, more like I finally got around to trying heh. I'll be dedicating a bit of an entry about the details, but I believe it's going to be quite fun.

Next I wanted to thank everyone for reading. I originally started this blog to sort of shake out the cobwebs in my brain to help me think. When you have a million instances of different bits of assorted math going on while you work and keeping track of every market and trying to trace back all of them to their source while still holding a mental inventory of what you have stokpiled and what you always need to buy more of and what you're almost out of... you get the idea. It wasn't my original intention to set out to make a gold blog to help the masses increase their income.

But as things progress, word got out and that's just what I'm doing. I only advertised this on maintankadin as the community there helped me greatly with my tanking and I wanted to be able to give a bit back. As for everybody else, well, I have no clue how you found this blog but here we are.

Thank you all much for reading! You've made it a great bit of fun and helped turn this blog into more than just gold and copper. It's coming up on my last few weeks on the game so I wanted to make sure that I said that at least once. Especially Mulegirl (you'll see him posting comments here and there). I love that a competitor can read all my "secrets," get annoyed at my ruthless undercutting, know that I'm STILL working their markets and still be able to hold a polite conversation with them. Very cool.


Here's why there's no post today. Obviously taking a couple days break.

It's that time of the year for me where I am given a socially acceptable excuse to goof off for a day or two and act like I'm back in college without much in the way of consequences. I'm taking it. Over the next few days I won't be writing much because, well, I probably wouldn't be capable if I tried. In the mean time, I'll be far too be busy with infinitely more important things. Things like consuming about 50 too many adult beverages of assorted brands and getting into hopefully not too much trouble (or catatonic stupor). Yes it's my birthday over the weekend and I'm taking it seriously... or not very serious at all. It's a matter of perspective =)


Catch you all Monday!

Play the farmers

This entry is inspired by a post at maintankadin in one of the gold making threads that cropped up. It's the website that taught me and many others how to run a prot pally and not just face roll left to right. The proper way is from right to left. I felt that the theory behind it warranted going a bit more in depth with to explain and expound on. This is one of those times where if you're not consciously aware of something you can't do much with it, let alone capitalize on and take further. Here's the original question and answer I'm referring to and a link to my entry describing the effects of different markets upon each other.

Courtesy of Ceela from Neptulon-EU.


Rodos says:
Does anyone have a good strategy for artificially lowering the price of raw materials (other than dumping large quantities of said materials)?

Context: Primal Might sells well for me, but recently the price of Primal Air shot up to 60g each, and Primal Water is high too, which really eats into the profits. I sent Rodos out to Nagrand and sucked up about 5 air over breakfast this morning. I transmuted 3 and listed the other 2 at the current (high) price, so I'll get a decent return on my farming time either way, but I'm lazy and would prefer to just buy, transmute, list, collect gold.

How do I start a price war that I can capitalize on? I realize that if there's a real shortage there isn't a lot I can do, but I'd like to probe and see if I can bring some suppliers out of the woodwork.


Ceela replies:
Given time, the high price will encourage farmers anyway, as long as it looks like there's money to be made. You might be able to persuade them to farm more by buying one or two from each seller so they realise there's a profit to be made and start warring on price :) Alternatively, if you can spot a pattern in when they (re)list theirs, list a couple yourself just beforehand at a deep undercut to force their prices down.

On my server saronite ore's just on the downswing again from a big supply shortage/price spike. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not that prices started coming down again once I gave up waiting it out and mass-bought at the higher price, thus making it a bit more worthwhile farming (I suspect that nobody was buying at all for a while).


Given time, the high price will encourage farmers anyway
This is a fact of WoW. When profits get up there people will swarm to get while the getting is good. I wrote about it once while talking about the life cycle of different markets and the secondary ones that effect them. Encouraging people to look into farming it by posting in /2 on a few different names commenting on how the prices are crazy and how gosh darn, if only you could farm them yourself!

If nothing else, you can usually rest assured that prices will always be swinging so long as there's a relatively consistent demand. So if you are wishing the price on adder's tongue would go down, you usually just need to wait for it to happen. And sooner or later it definitely will and prices will crash then the cycle will begin once more. Be there when it's time to buy.

This is also the very same reason that I try to keep my prices low if I don't have a pseudo-monopoly (god that word sucks to type). If you saw that heavy armor kits or belt buckles were selling at 200g each, I think you'd try to craft a few to sell. After you undercut of course. Then another person gets the same idea of course. Then I have to be a jerk and crash the prices.

Of course.


Buying one or two from each seller
This is a great tactic for those that don't buy up everything they see regardless. But even if you do, take a look at who the sellers are. If you see somebody selling a ton of mats that are out of your buying range, buy a couple anyways to encourage them to keep farming. Eventually they will lower their price to either undercut the other farmers or to try and get more sales faster. Either way they'll all end up in your bags at the end of the day and that's the point after all.


List a couple yourself
A great way to manipulate the UF's is to give them the illusion of competition. The people that spend a few hours a day farming are willing to list their stuff at rock bottom prices if they have to so they can ensure daily sales. Also, they aren't usually clever or patient enough to buy your cheap wares and relist at their price. If you post a few stacks a little bit beneath theirs a minute or two after they do they'll usually still be there at their tent near the AH and post a bunch more under your. Then just hop onto another toon and buy them up. The only thing to be careful of is that you goods can easily be bought by somebody else and have no effect on the farmer at all, leaving you with less mats than you had a bit ago and usually losing a few gold as well. Granted it's a small risk but a risk none the less. However the fun when it works just totally makes you feel like a boss.


Prices started coming down again
When you buy up an ass ton of mats that's going to draw attention. If it's in a material flood it'll keep it going for a bit longer as people see there's still good profit to be made. If it's in a drought they'll still see that people are willing to pay a certain price and it'll encourage them to keep up the farming. Everything in the AH game tends to have an effect and, depending on the item, can have some very large and immediately noticeable ones. If you work it right they can greatly play to your advantage.


Thanks for stopping by!

Routine

It's important to have your own personalized daily routine as it adds greatly to how quickly you do your AH game. And as we all know, saving time saves money. So today I'll give you my daily routine to help you refine and redefine your own to match the markets you work with.


1. Log into stokpile and collect mail. Cancel undercut auctions and collect mail again. I do this because I usually have 30+ sold or expired auctions to collect right when I log in and another 30+ that I'll cancel. Doing it in this order saves me the need to /reload to collect them all. Then I post all that I have in my bags to make some extra space as they're likely full short of a huge night of sales.

2. Log into my enchanter and que of for a heroic as DPS. Then I go through her mail crafting new scrolls as I see one has sold. Collect, cancel, post and craft any toc epics that I need to replace. By now the que has finally popped and I go faceroll to get some EoF.

3. Log into my mage to post more epic threads/pets and do my buying. I do my buying on my last banker because at this point my biggest fans are swarming towards the AH and tripping all over themselves to undercut me. This gives them the time to do so and feel all sorts of clever and special that they've beaten me.

4. Log onto my alchemists and do their daily gem xmute.

5. Log onto my former main jc/lw and start up crafting the gems and any profession bags that I've sold.

6. Before logging off, I clear my auctioneer data so that I can ensure that I'm not lagging any because of the stored data.

7. Lastly I go through my two bankers and do another cancel/post cycle just as the campers are finishing up owning me and ruining my AH fun.


All in all it takes a total of 45 minutes (not counting the daily heroic), especially since the buying portion is always rather fast. Once you've built up a large stokpile you don't have to constantly clear the AH of materials unless you have serious competition. At that point you're only maintaining your supply and ensuring that a drought won't end your fun. After all of that is done I go about my business with daily heroic runs on any other toons that I care about having frost emblems.

I hope that gives you a good idea of how to run your business instead of just randomly loging onto the first banker you see and just 'going with it' from there.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 6-8

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I, Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker

Gems, LW, misc: 41,500

Smithing and enchanting: 60,000

Glyphs: 1,500

Total weekly sales: 103,000
Weekly profit: 20,000
Total gold: 1,180,000

I've once again been spending on my DK. I bought an ICC 25 boe neck and ring totaling 18k for her (in addition to equipping a pair of toc epics and i251 kirin tor ring) and finally managed to break AND sustain 8k DPS in vault this week. I almost broke 9k when I could AoE the adds with pestilence and a chain of rime procs, but on the pure tank 'n spank fire boss it was a solid 8k+ start to finish. Now if I went into ICC with the pug carrying buff that'd be almost 10k. Fek yuh! So once again big sales but low profits due to my love for playing the DK chica.


Detailed Recap
--------------
I'm taking a rather large risk in the epic gem market for the sheer thrill of it. I'm still stokpiling as many cheap gems as I can find and keeping my reserves up while only selling certain cuts when the price is right in hopes of one last price spike when the ruby sanctum raid comes out. Since a ton of the gear is going to be upgrades for 80% of your entire server, people will be going there a lot, especially the trinkets from 20m holy crap. So people will be upgrading their mains, alts and off specs with tons of gear that has several gem sockets.

My idea is that the cheap gems are all flooding into my pockets so when the demand hops back up there won't be anybody else (mostly) with stokpiles of gems ready to cut. Once that happens I'll be able to make a killing while severely pissing off the people that oh so love me on my server. Good times!

Other than that the profits have been steady and a bit after raids end I've managed to catch a ton of gems without any cuts on the AH. So I made a few of those and listed a handful over night and sold most of them each time. As of now, my lowest sale price is 130g which gives me a 30g profit.

Spell thread sales are still in the gutter (love ya mulegirl!) but I'm definitely not going to give up on that merkat. Enggy pets are still selling every day and since the craze has worn off I'm the main supplier. A while ago their price got down as low as 60g some times. Now they're back up to the 180g+ range. They're pretty annoying to figure out what the specific mats are and such if you're not an engineer, but if you don't mind the head ache get a few made and have some easy profit. This is one of the many situations your average AH player will come across and it comes down to more than just a heavy stokpile and an aggressive play style.

It comes down to either leaving or just having good timing to make that uber profit. Knowing your competition and market is what saves the day when you get into a drawn out battle with niche markets such as this one.

There's a few new players in the LW scene so I'm once again making sure that there's as few mats on AH as possible while cutting down on the prices. Not as easy as it sounds though as this is where all of the UF of the server have gone so supply is huge, profit margins are crazy, and demand is just as strong as ever. Bags and armor kits are now down to half of what I usually sell them for and heavy borean is down to 70 a stack, sometimes lower. Good thing I still have a couple thousand heavy borean I picked up for wicked cheap.

/wave

With all the fun and excitement going on with my pet alliance project, I suddenly kick started the glyph machine back into full throttle horde side. It took a bit to get going due to the fact that I had about 1800 glyphs that have expired still chilling out in the mail. Then I had to refill my ink stocks, mostly because I had completely ignored it and used up 90% on armor velumns. And with the weekly numbers I pull with enchanting, you know that's quite a feat in and of itself. But after that initial annoyance, I tossed them back up, crafted another hundred or so to refresh the stock and blam. Not much profit this week as I only got started up again a bit ago, but look forward to next week for much better numbers. The glyph inflation shall continue but now on both sides of the fence, hehehe!

I managed to flip another battered hilt this week for a good 1.5k profit, always makes me smile. In addition to that, toc epics have been going like crazy. So much so that I've taken to straight out clearing the AH of titansteel daily since there's no possible way I can xmute enough saronite to keep up with it all at this point. The same goes for crusade orbs, there just aren't enough of them around. I'm not going to start listing them two at a time since they have an extremely high deposit cost, but I am keeping a much closer eye on the sale speed so I may pop back in to list another set here and there.

In point of fact, I just sold the tanking AND dps chest/bracer combo a few minutes ago for almost the max price I set onto them. That gives me a whopping 1800g+ profit on the chests and 900g+ on the bracers... each. Booyah! I am allowed to say that just this once, right? Booyah?


...booyah.