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.