Why I disappeared

Aloha all. I wanted to write to you all today and apologize for my sudden disappearance. I’m sure this may come as too little to late, but I feel that I should regardless. The short and simple answer is that shit happens and I didn’t have the time. Ok that’s a horrible reason I’ll admit, so let me give you a bit more details as to how that came about.

For quite some time I have been looking for a regular job in web design, which is what I spent X thousand dollars on an education for. After a while I still hadn’t found one so when my best friend says “Hey I’m moving out to Illinois while my girl finishes college, want to come with and start up a web business?” I immediately said hell yes. No questions asked.

That’s pretty much the story of my life right there, barely any planning or reason for whatever I do other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” After packing up we made the 15ish hour long drive out there and got set up. Unfortunately working freelance in the mid-west isn’t so easy. Granted it isn’t easy anywhere, but that’s another debate.

The simple fact is that I was desperate to leave my current situation and was borderline on taking a job in the all American fast food industry if that would get me out. So I took the first opportunity to get out and it worked out, at least a little. We get our first job in the business shortly after getting there from a friend of a friend.

It was a nightmare.

I can go on for hours ranting on about how brain damaged this person was (and I have) but I’ll spare you. The short version is they could barely use a computer and were telling me how to do my job at every turn. *stabby stabby stabby!* But we managed to get it done and find more contracts here and there. Meanwhile almost all of my time is dedicated to either drinking heavily or trying to find new clients. Or both, ya know whichever.

I stopped writing because first I stopped gaming for the most part. I was rich in Rift and was getting bored of the game. Although it’s more accurate to say that my mind was focused on work, creating new designs, learning new tricks etc.

Once things finally calmed down and I was financially stable about a year had already passed. At that point I just said fuck it and ignored the AH game and the blog (therefore you) all together. I was just thinking (very little at all) that at this point why bother? In the end, all of my writing and serious gaming had completely fallen by the wayside until just recently.

For all of you who only read for the tips on making the MMO moneys don’t worry that you’ve missed out on many great secrets, you haven’t. I’ve told you everything you need to know, the rest is up to you. And for those who actually read my blog for entertainment or because you just enjoyed my writing, I apologize. Yes I actually feel bad about not writing and falling out of the bloging thing.

However I do intend to get back to writing, and very soon at that, but it will take on a slightly different form. Mostly, I’m waiting for Guild Wars 2 to be released which will likely be the last MMO I intend to play for quite some time. With the planning of a reverse auction house, I am extremely interested in how well I will fare. For those of you that don’t know, what that means is that you can list what you have for sale AND what you want to buy. Very cool stuff. But I digress.

I don’t mean to turn this entry into something that belongs on a live journal post, but I owe an explanation if nothing else. Even if it is two years too late. Sorry about that. But fear not, Guild Wars 2 is currently in closed beta and, if all goes well, it will be in an open beta before spring time. Until then I’ll be working on my writing ability and hopefully get a job as a writer for one of the many fine sites out there on the interwebs.

Thanks for stopping by.

Taking a loss

As to be expected, I've taken a significant loss in a number of things that I've tried to sell. Not because of forgetting to do my homework, I've learned the hard way not to forget that part. I took a loss because I have very little to base my guess work on. And it wasn't until much later on that I discovered a few clues that would suggest avoiding a certain item. That being said, let me give you the full list of things that I have not sold or sold very few of so far. Anything that has sold came with a monetary cost that was not made back from sales to date.

Ornate steel choker
Gold gorget
Gold chain
Night iron gauntlets
Fine leather leggings
Plaited cinerium ring
Shining sapphire ring
Heartless ring
Reinforced leather helm
Reinforced leather belt

Each of the above items cost me two things. First is the obvious monetary investment it took to craft them. Sure I can RB them to try and recoup it, but that would be such a small fraction of the final cost that it's not even worth taking into account. I also don't have a toon that can use them so that is also not relevant. The second thing that I took a loss on was the tokens it cost to learn the recipe itself. That means time which is infinitely more valuable than the gold.

Each recipe took at least two daily of full dailys to get enough tokens for which could have been spent more wisely on something else that might (or might not) have sold. Like I always say, time is the most important thing you can invest because you cannot get more and cannot regain what you have lost.

Bear in mind though I am in no way saying that the professions that make these things are worthless themselves, far from it. I am only pointing out a few things that you should be avoiding unless you have nothing else better to spend your tokens on and have some decent cash that you can afford to throw in the gutter. While it is true that this can happen with anything on your shard, these are a few items that I know for a fact are not working out on mine and are very likely the same on yours.

As time goes on and I continue to experiment with different things to craft and sell I'll be writing more and more entries like this I'm sure. Once again there is little to no way to base your markets on. That is yet another reason that reading fine blogs such as mine is important even if you're already well off, you never know when a big loss is waiting around the corner. And the flip side of course is true, you never know if there's a fortune waiting right under your nose until somebody points it out to you. That's what I'm here for after all, to enlighten and to entertain.

I'm still looking for the markets that have a high rate of consistent sales because that's where you need to be if you want to get rich anytime this century. So far the closest I've found is bags, but their profit margins are so low it's still going to take a while with them. Then there is the "death and taxes" profession of rune crafting. I refer to it as such because the only two thing you can't avoid in life are death and taxes. Any time you get a new piece of gear you can't avoid heading to a RC to add some shine to it. But with the campers that farm for free that isn't an option either. So here's to searching!


Thanks for stopping by!

For those who farm

Although I'm against farming I still feel it's wise to mention it from time to time. Today I'm going to give a few pointers on farming spots, how to do them, what to expect, and when it's a good idea. That's right, a good idea to farm. However seeing as how I'm not the most adept or experienced farmer out there there could easily be better spots than the ones I've mentioned.

The farming locations that I'll cover are the ones that I've found merely by questing and wound up spending more time gathering than killing. In other words all of the farm spots tend to have a lot of nodes in a tight area. Here's my recommendations based on material type along with any note worthy points on it.


Titanium.
Most people will tell you to go to the level 50 zones if you want to farm this and of course that's not a good idea. When it comes to farming you never EVER go to where "everybody" says to go unless that's your only option. That's because obviously there's a lot of competition for spawn points. The best place that I've found is the south east portion of the drought lands. Not many people quest in there and the dominate node for the zone is cobalt. However in this higher level section you'll find oodles and oodles of titanium spawn points. Bear in mind though that there are a handful that spawn underground and aren't worth going for usually.

Fun note on this though. If you port to phoenix rise there can be a node spawn directly behind you and if you go to fortune's shore there can be one next to the neutral gang mobs in town as well just a short run to the west.


Carmintium.
The easiest route to farm this that I've found is along side the road between exile's den and white fall tavern. Just run your circle starting at exile's on the left side of the road until you get to white fall and then go back on the other side. There is also a cave that has 3-5 spawn points but is also loaded up with mobs.

If you don't see a node right outside that usually means that there won't be any inside either. But if you have great aoe and won't get killed it might be worth your while to look. There is a large number of spawns in stillmoor in the fields around the citadel, but you'll have to dodge countless mobs with a few elites mixed in so this is definitely not a good place to farm effectively.


Spellspun silk.
This is something that you'll only want to really farm if you can solo aoe it all. It seems that the only really viable option for this is the undead town at the very southern end of stillmoor. Be mindful of the few elites that sit by the walls though or you could be in trouble.


Cobalt.
Right in the middle of the northern portion of drought lands is the prime spot for this. Everywhere that has a little centaur camp is likely to have either this or gold hidden away. Anywhere that you see a few stone mountain pillar things is where you're going to find a node. Basically just look for big rocks sticking up and you'll get what you're after.


Chromite.
This route is almost the same as the one for carmintium, just in a different zone. You start out in perspice and follow the left side of the road north. Follow it all the way up to the last Guardian camp and then turn around. In each of the little pits with the scaffolding or tree stumps is where you're going to find the nodes you want.


Exotic hide.
There are two different spots that I've found for this. One is right outside of exile's den to the east. You'll find a bunch of tigers that hang around the sides of the road that you usually pass by entirely. They're spread out enough that it's easy to go one at a time and close enough together that you can aoe them if you can. The other spot is a little east of whitefall with the same situation, lots of tigers packed together nicely.


Orichilum.
There is actually only one route that I know of that won't take an hour to get 10 ore together. The only down side to it is that if you aren't a defiant it's not practical for you at all. You leave right out the front gates of meridian and make a right. Follow the mountains along the coast until you're think you're going to enter the desert. Right in the corner are a few elites and some wrecked boats which is where three nodes can spawn.

The elites can be solo'd by any pet class or tank and for everyone else they are very easy to avoid. After you check those spots head out into the lake and you'll find a buried treasure chest if you haven't already along with several other spawn points and elites to avoid. Aside from this spot your only other options are dungeons and the citadel in stillmoor with a ton of mobs and elites that cannot be avoided.


Thanks for stopping by!

Random rift thoughts 2

Aloha all! I'm here with another collection of random thoughts to help you make money in rift. As always just a few quick tips that only need a little explanation on what I'm talking about. I try to do more than just provide you with original content each day after all. I do my best to make sure that it is not only quality content, but also that there is a lot of it.

Enjoy!


1. Soulbind/Exotic leather belts.
This is a vendor bought recipe that takes 40ish tokens to get. To craft them it only takes 1 soulbind leather (2-5g on my shard) and an item sold form the OF vendor. This is noteworthy because if you're like me and RB tons of gear to get materials for insanely cheap this is the route to take. Before I discovered this I was crafting the boot which takes two pieces of leather to craft and this just increased my profit margins by 50% on it's own.

However for those of you who don't have OF on your rune crafter this is going to be a problem. I'd recommend making an alt just to be your RB workhorse in all honesty. Get their RC skill up to the 250s range and their OF up to the same just so that you can craft tons of greens and RB them on the spot. With only 6 items fitting in a mail to yourself this will save a ton on postage and loads of time shuffling junk around.


2. Tell the other faction you're doing crafting rifts.
Now I haven't tried this personally, but I have a feeling it will pay off well. Roll an alt on the opposite faction's side and walk them to their main town. When you or another group are starting to do crafting rifts log onto them and spam that they're going on for a few minutes to get more people to join in from there. You just might get a few extra lures popped out of it. The other reason that I'm thinking this is a good idea is that you just might get the same treatment in turn.

An MMO is a social game filled with oodles of social and/or casual people and this is the sort of thing that they get into. Friendly people helping other friendly people. So by doing this you can get your own returned favor of announcements when there's about to be 30+ crafting rifts going off which can be nice if you don't have the time or don't want to bother leaving an alt in the middle of nowhere to check.


3. Stokpile catalysts and eternal dust on Wednesday
As you know, all weekly resets happen on Wednesday and this includes crafting weekly quests. These are the quests that reward you with the crafting rift lures and it's very common to see several full raids doing these several times on your average Wednesday. This means that all of a sudden tons of minor catalysts, eternal planar dust, and assorted max level crafting materials have been introduced into the system. And there will be a ton of them.

When any large floods of supply come in the prices of them will always drop down by a noticeable amount. Because of that each week when the crafting lures are reset the prices of all of those will drop down and makes for a great opportunity for you to stokpile them all. The same is also true of other materials like carmintium and soul leather. When people get a small hand full of random materials that they're not going to use they tend to put it up on AH for a serious undercut. So in addition to getting a shot at great deals on rare mats you can do the same with the more common ones as well.


Thanks for stopping by!

The 40 plat price cap

It seems that I'm always going on about how you need to find the perfect price point for your markets on your server. It's of utmost importance to maximizing your profits to balance rate of sales with profit and I think I've found mine for rift. And that number is 40 platinum for everything, it's a sweeping generalization of prices sure but it seems to fit the bill, no pun intended. Naturally there isn't anything in game that you can auction for 40 platinum that isn't purple so that's what I'm going to be focusing on today. Of course should anybody be aware of a blue item that they can sell for that much I'd be thrilled to know!

The first epic that I crafted was a black iron hatchet, an epic 1h axe for warriors. It began to sell steadily once prices were at an acceptable point for me to list them, it began to sell consistently. I started listing them at 26 platinum which is about a 6p profit and over time slowly raised the price bit by bit as each one sold. However once I reached a 40 platinum price tag they just stopped selling. When something stops selling entirely, you'd think that something has changed.

It might be a patch, a hotfix, or just the community's view on the targeted class in general, but in this case the only thing that had changed was my price tag. I dropped the price back down to 38 and voila, they start selling regularly again. So 195% ish of the material cost is the ideal pricing point for this item.

Strange sure, but one case doesn't make a pattern.

The next epic I started to sell was the flesh reaper, this one is a bit more expensive to craft at about 28 platinum in materials. So I started to list these at 50 platinum with a fancy augment. Not a single sale. Ok so maybe 50 is a bit too much for an entry level epic and I drop the price to 45 platinum. A week later and I finally get a sale. Woohoo! So I craft another and list it back at 45 and sell another but at the same slow pace.

I get undercut by a few gold and I drop the price down to 39.55 platinum. Two days later it sold and I crafted another one to list for the same price. I sold yet another that week. The other one either sold or expired by the time I went to list another and I put it back up for 45 to see what happens. What happened was the exact same thing!

Ok so I'm two for two on selling things under 40 platinum better than higher prices, that is until I mention Martyr's fist and faith forged spaulders. Both sexy cleric purple gear, both cost roughly 25ish platinum to craft. And yes, both take forever and a day to sell with a 41+ platinum price tag.

So what's the deal here? Obviously people are willing to pay top dollar for crafted epics, but not many are. That part is easy to explain and I've covered it a few times so far, there just isn't a lot of money in the world period. There's a lot of quests and vendor bait but there's a lot of gold sinks as well so not many people can afford that.

The real question here is why 40? What makes this the magic number? Yes 39.99 is not particularly different than 40, but that bit of pricing psychology has been proven to be very effective for ages now. So I will ask again: what makes 40 platinum so special and not 45? Why not 100 platinum? We shall see.


Thanks for stopping by!

Don't compete with yourself

Another entry listed over at wowecon today. This one is on the subject of pricing once again and why you should leave a large and noticeable gap in price between the top end items and those that are second best. Here's the first part.

"Today's entry is on the general subject of pricing and the specific topic of being your own worst enemy on the AH. Let's say you have three different things to sell, A, B, and C. A is for max level players with a lot to spend, B is for people that are almost at the level cap and C is for those that have just hit the level cap. As expected, you'll want to price item A rather high as it's for people that have money to spend and it will probably last them long enough. However Items A and B are very close in level range, stats, and estimated length of use.

We all know that there is a solid market for leveling gear even when you're close to finished. That's because sometimes people level fast or skip areas or otherwise do things that don't upgrade their gear at the same rate as their level. So they might actually need to buy some gear so the last few levels aren't a nightmare. But there is also the other side that figures that it's not worth the money since it'll be replaced soon anyways. But with these two different items, one for near cap and one entry level gear, they're both going to be sold to the same person.

This is where the pricing gets tricky."


Click here to read the whole entry.

Thanks for stopping by!

The AH never changes

Entry is posted in it's entirety over at warcraftecon.net today. It's on the subject of why all of you wow players will still find valuable insight in the AH from reading my blog and why all of you rift players would do well to read a few of the wow gold blogs that are out there. Here's the first part

"And why does it not change? How does it stay the same no matter what game your playing? Because at it's core what drive the AH to function are people and we never change. The lazy people on wow are going to be lazy on Rift, the morons will stay morons, and the goblins will stay goblins. This means that everything I have learned from the AH game on wow will apply to rift and vice versa. The only changes are how you shuffle around names and numbers. Every situation I found myself in wow I'll find once again in rift and the same methods will need to be applied to work with it.

Hell I've even ran off my first camper."

Click here to read the whole thing.


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Making a few predictions

I've been following the development of the Rift economy very closely as you may imagine since I started playing. And as such I've noticed a few subtleties of trion that lead me to expect a few things in the not so distant future. I wanted to take today to share a few of my thoughts on this matter and have it officially in writing what I expect to see how close I am. Mind you that NONE OF THIS is official or hinted at by the developers, it is only my thoughts and expectations. So don't take any of this as gospel, just something to keep in the back of your mind.


Crafting plaques will be obtained easier.
With the dozens of new recipes that have been added in requiring 5 plaques a piece to learn these won't become common for a long, long time. They were added in to help people fill in gaps in their raid gear to help them progress faster through the raid content without nerfing the hell out of the raids. Because of this I expect there to be another way to gain plaques or a better chance of getting them. This may be done by increasing the drop rate from dailys and crafting rifts, or merely allow you to buy them with artisan's marks, or increase the weekly quest award up to 2-3 plaques instead of only one.


Crafting rifts.
I expect that these will soon include the new CD based materials as potential drops. For one to make these a bit more profitable for those that do them because right now no matter how lucky you are, you lose money compared to the lure cost. Lets face it, the minor cats are the only thing that's worth actual money from them as the common mats don't even make up 1/8 of the lure's cost to craft.


More vanity items.
This one is a given, the mathosian guard's armor is very popular and is the only costume set you can craft. People love this sort of thing and that was proven by how many people dove on it when it was made live. I expect outfitters to get the next full set and eventually artificers or RC's will get something that will add a little "woo-shiny!" to what you already have. By that I mean something like the random things you get from the event seals that add a little storm cloud over your head and the such or the apoth potions that let you turn somebody into a critter.


More augments.
With the release of patch 1.4 apothecaries can craft primary stat augments. While this is a great addition and much needed boost to a poor (see what I did there?) profession it is not nearly enough. Add to that the fact that the best and highest demand augments are mixed stat ones, I expect these to be eventually added in. More specifically I expect at least stat/power and endurance/block to be added if nothing else. While I would love to see some stat/crit ones put in I am not expecting this and I certainly hope that they don't add in the terrible stat/endurance ones. But regardless of which ones they do add, I am positive that there will be new ones put in.


Thanks for stopping by!

Rift 1.4 crafted gear

It's been almost a week since the patch hit so I've had enough time to go over it all on live and see what is what. Today I'm going to give you the important info that you'll need to know about all of these new goodies that have been added in. I'll go on a profession by profession basis and list off anything unique about them outside of what applies to every one of them.


Foraging, mining, butchering.
All gathering professions can craft a new type of material which is on a 20 hour cool down. Each one requires two of the top end materials related to that profession such as steeled leather, shadethorn lumber along with two items sold by the associated vendor with cost 4.2 platinum each. This puts their base cost at approximately 9 platinum + fee for the cool down. If you have a toon with all three gathering profs on them they can do each of them when the CD is up so they do not have a "shared" cool down.


Outfitter.
As with each of the gear crafting professions, there are a whole slew of new recipes. Each recipe for armor/weapons cost 5 plaques each to learn and require (on average) 8 items that are crafted by other professions with a 20 hour CD. Outfitter is unique in that it has a CD to use in addition to the new materials.


Rune crafting.
This profession does not have any new crafted recipes, but does have a CD to use for new materials.


Weapon/armor smith.
These professions do not have a CD but have the most sought after pieces of gear from the new recipes.


Artificer.
The big one here is the burning powerstone. It adds 200sp to your main hand or 2h weapon which includes both hammers and staffs. This is obviously the best weapon consumable in game for any caster, healer, or dps/support cleric so they are in very high demand. And you know what the best part is? They're cheap to make! To craft them it takes two refined gems and to get those they require your artificer to make any piece of gear that uses a brilliant or lights bane diamond and salvage it. Each salvage will produce on average 3 gem fragments and it takes 5 fragments to craft one refined gem.

The best items to craft are brilliant diamond bands (platinum bar and one gem) and lights bane diamond band which takes a lights bane diamond and a platinum bar. In total that costs maybe one platinum and I've been selling these things for as high as 15 a piece.

This profession does not have a CD to use.

There are also the new recipes that they can make which are rings and a staff. So far out of all the recipes added in, the most popular request that I've seen is the staff. And that's out of all the professions and not just this one.


Apothecary.
Out of all the professions, this one got the most love. First is the new ability to salvage essences. Note that there is a bug and any lesser essences that are BoE cannot be salvaged. Trion has stated that they're looking into this. All of the materials gotten from this salvage are all used for crafting augments of different levels. Here's the low down on what you get from this.

Green essences turn into basic "powder" and it takes 5 of them to make one inert thingy. The inerts are what are used in crafting augments and the type inert is tied to the item level that you salvaged. This is true of both blue and green essences. In addition to this powder, you will also get anywhere from 1-3 planar dust of the associated level which is enduring, endless, or eternal.

Now we come to the epic essences. Any epics that you buy from a vendor (that I've seen at least) cannot be salvaged, it's the BoE ones that you're after. The epic lessers can be any level from 10 to 50 and produce the same results. They will give you Prism fragments which turn into the mats needed for epic augments and 1-3 eternal dust. So depending on how you value eternal dust this can be some easy money for very little effort. Also of note is that the inert prisms sell for as high as 30 platinum each and the lowbie lessers sell as low as 5, heh you do the math.

Then are the epic augment recipes, each one takes 3 plaques to learn and requires one of the CD materials, two eternal dust, and an inert prism. After those are the pure augments which need a mighty vial of a related stat and inert crystals which come only from salvaging high level blue essences. To learn these recipes they take 212 artisan's marks each. The lower quality augments take much fewer marks and require level appropriate inert salvages.

To make these you'll need to salvage green essences that are BoP (until this is fixed) and rare greater essences. But since you can still get augments from planarite this isn't too much of a concern as they'll remain in the throw away category.

Leaving off on a potentially huge money making tip right now. You know all of those rune king seals that you probably have a million of? Trade in 75 of them for an epic lesser essence and salvage it for a few eternal dust and prism shards. They're suddenly not totally worthless! And the same thing goes for the new epic lessers gotten with dragon tears with the current world event so get going on those daily quests! And the best part is that both the tokens and the essences themselves are all boa so that means that you can do the quests on every toon and mail them all off to your apothecary. Pretty neat-o huh?


Thanks for stopping by!

The freedom money brings

Another entry is posted today over at wowecon and it's on the subject of why I bother to even do any of this. The money, the blog, the AH, etc, it all has a reason. Many reasons in fact. Here's the first part.

"One of the obvious questions that AH players get asked is "why?" Why bother making thousands and thousands of gold or platinum in wow or rift? The answer is the freedom that it allows us. They say money can't buy you happiness, which is certainly true. I mean after all, I have not once seen it on the shelves at the local Wal-Mart. Happiness is supposed to be in isle 4 isn't it? But money can definitely buy you things that will make you happy. In an MMO that means independence and convenience. Two words which I'll never spell right without a spell checker.

To me, happiness in the world of an MMO is being able to take care of any alt that I make without scrambling for funding. As soon as they hit the level cap I want to be able to kit them out in high end blue gear at the least so they can hop into the harder dungeons right away and not get carried. Having even more money means they can get suited up with shiny as hell purples and jump right into raiding if so desired."

Click here to read the whole thing.


Thanks for stopping by!

Take the E-peen out of the AH

Today I have another article posted over at warcraft econ. Today it's on the subject of how your ego is the most likely thing to hold you back. Here's the first part:

"A great writer once said a very blunt, but very pertinent one liner about how to write a great story and that is "stop getting your balls in the way of your writing! You keep trying to put your nuts in the middle of everything just tell the story!" Pretty in your face sort of visual isn't it? But it's a very important point and applies to virtually everything you will ever do, including the AH game.

First let me explain where they're coming from and the point they're trying to make with such a quote. The idea is that when you're trying to do something well, your ego is going to hold you back. It's as simple as that. Like I've said many times when it comes to the AH or writing a blog in general, do it for the sake of doing it. If you write for the sole reason of popularity you're probably going to fail. If you make money on an MMO just to show off you are going to have the opposite of fun. Sure it's nice to brag and to have 2,345,567 readers but if that's your goal you're obviously going to fall short."


Click here to check out the whole entry.


Thanks for stopping by!

Fill in the gaps

Aloha all, today I have another entry posted at warcraft econ. The subject today is things you should pay attention to while leveling that will make you a profit. More specifically, it's about what you should look for to identify what leveling items you should focus on selling first. Here's the first part.

"When you’re busy leveling your toon, there’s a lot more to pay attention to than just questing. I’ve already written at length about how everything sells and to try and AH everything that isn’t grey so I won’t be covering that today. Instead I wanted to cover something that’s mentioned every now and then but never in depth. I refer to the concept of niche markets which we’re all aware of to some degree.

A niche market is just what you would expect, a small specialized market. More often than not it is used in reference to a certain type of customer base, primarily collectors and vanity items. However there is another niche market that I have only seen talked about in great detail by the epic penny pouch, great wow blog found over yonder, and that is specific level ranges. In every mmo there are different items that are more easily acquired at certain level ranges such as rings or necklaces."


Click here to read the whole thing.

Thanks for stopping by!

PSA: How to properly AoE

Aloha all it's time for another public service announce from yours truly. Today's lesson in how not to fail is on the subject of AoE dps and how to do more than hit your channeled spell and scratch your balls. What's that? Why yes there is far more to aoe than just that. And before it gets brought up, I am fully aware that some classes are rather limited in their choice of aoe. For some of them, such as some rogues in wow, your only aoe is an on/off switch. By that I mean that either you're spamming aoe non stop or you are doing zero aoe with nothing in between. Bear this in mind with your class if you have the capability to do more than mash one button.

In fact, there are several different types of aoe "styles" to pick from. Choosing the right one for the situation is what will separate you, the super cool johnny awesome player, from the power drooling inbred mongoloids you'll come across in randoms. I'll start by listing a different style of aoe and then explain exactly what it is.

After that I'll go over when to use it and why it's important that you use that style instead of smashing your single "enemies explode" spell. The goal essentially is to get the best of both worlds. Aoe does more total damage, but won't kill a single mob as fast as focused fire will. Adopting these different aoe styles will do the most to have great spread damage while still focusing on the primary objective for the given situation.

You might ask why this is important or wonder why it is at all. Yes, yes I know, aoe dps are srs bsns! But when a fight requires good aoe, guess what? It is very serious business. Any time that I've seen aoe as even a slightly of an important factor it was always VERY important and was literally a pass or fail. If you couldn't do enough aoe in the right place the right way then it was a guaranteed wipe without question. Hence the PSA on aoe.


Full on AoE.
Obvious one comes first. This is where you're supposed to hit you're single enemies explode spell/attack, lean on back and scratch your nuts. The only time to do this is when there is a shit load of mobs all in the same spot. The amount that is needed to make this worthwhile varies greatly from player to player. This is because different classes have different aoe abilities and different groups of mobs might really need one focused down like a healer before aoe even matters. However I think that a good rule of thumb to follow is anytime there's 5+ mobs that do not have a high priority target (such as a healer) is when you should spam your big bombs non stop.


Cleave based AoE.
If you're not familiar with the term it means to replace your primary spam attack with one that hits multiple targets. Now you don't spam this attack and only this attack, it just replaces your standard filler ability. Meanwhile you continue your usual single target dps rotation on the marked target. One example of where this style should be used is when you have a pull that has 1 elite mob and 5 non elite buddies. Your single target priorities will bring down the elite almost as fast as normal, but all of the little buggers will drop rather fast which will greatly reduce tank damage.


Emphasized AoE.
By this I mean that you still want to focus on your single target, but throw in as much aoe as possible at the same time. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. Lets say your mega aoe spell is a big fire nuke you cast a ton and also have a talent that makes your 4 second cast meteor spell instant. For prioritized aoeyou'll spam your aoe until you get that instant cast proc and use it on the primary target. Or if you build up a buff on yourself with aoe skills and have a big nuke that consumes that buff this is another example of where this comes into play. Now the time to use this is once again when there are a lot of mobs around. There's no point to spamming aoe on only 2-3 dudes, that's a waste.

The proper time to use this depends entirely on your ability to do it and the group of mobs that you're facing. One easy example is another pull with a single elite and 50 little ones that die fast. Another good one is if you're facing a boss that summons swarms of mobs that get killed in 2-3 hits from aoe. Those types of fights are fairly common and it's always important to keep at least some focused dps on the boss at all times. If there's any sort of time limit on the fight with swarms of aoe adds this is imperative to downing the boss before you get eaten.


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Duplicate professions

Today I want to talk about a nifty investment that you can make in rift. With the profitable recipes coming from tokens that you can start to acquire immediately after learning a profession it takes a long, long time to learn them all. This is especially true for weapon and armor smiths because so much of it is useful for so many different people. And since there is no other way to acquire these tokens outside of dailys we need to look for a way to get around that. And I've found one.

This investment won't be on the massive 5k plat scale, but can be a lot if you're just starting out. It's as simple as power leveling a profession for a second time on an alt. You'll still get all of the daily quests and tokens for it regardless. Obvious I know, but the obvious isn't noticed sometimes unless it's pointed out. You leave your main crafter to do the dungeon runs and the like for rep and rare drops while still doing their dailys for tokens also.

Make a note of what recipes you're missing and just be sure not to double up on them. I'm not aware of any minimum level req to train max level professions, but my level 23 alt had 300 artificer so you can probably assume you can do it at level 15 at the worst or possibly level 1.

I'd suggest making a cleric so that you can easily solo earth and fire invasions or rifts. You'll still want to do these for a quick five egg shells to put with the 10 from dailys to get the profession bag. I was crazy lucky on my cleric and got a plaque on their second day being alive at maybe level 8 if that. So yes it is possible to get them that early.

Instead of taking duplicate professions, you can also take three crafting professions on the same toon to really maximize the tokens that you get. In addition if you have multiple toons with OF they each can do the weekly quest to get a plaque so that you can craft all of the epic recipes even faster. Once you have all of them available to you, keep doing the weekly and such on your "primary" crafter that you have all of the rare drop recipes on and keep trying to acquire the epic ones that you need alts to make. Once you have all of those on your primary crafter you can feel free to delete your alts that have duplicates of all the recipes you have on a single toon and start over with another profession.

This might seem time consuming, but power leveling a profession only take a long time if you farm everything you need. Please don't. If you buy everything it might total up around 150 plat using current average material prices which isn't too terribly high. Doing this will essentially cut down the total time frame by half to get all of the recipes from tokens and plaques. Is this viable? Well that depends entirely on you. It depends on how much you have, are willing to spend, and how cheap you can get materials for. That and how much you can sell the crafted goods for of course.

If there are only 3 epic recipes for OF that get a profit then this is totally not worth it. But if you're in the situation as I am where half of the weapon and armor smith recipes are profitable then this is something that you should seriously consider. As of this writing, I need almost three THOUSAND tokens to get all of the recipes that get a profit. At an average of 70 per day on 3 different toons that makes it 15 days or so to get them all. That doesn't sound too bad does it? Well unfortunately it's not that simple because all of the tokens don't go into the same pocket.

For OF I need 400 to finish that up which is 6 days on that toon and only that one. Armor smith needs 700 so 10 days for that toon and then another 700 for weapon smith which is another 10 days on the same toon. Keep in mind also that I've been doing these dailys for a month already, so starting up an entirely new profession that you don't have already will make this time frame much longer. This is why power leveling another profession just to do the dailys is a good option for anybody that wants to jump into a new market. Think about it.


Thanks for stopping by!

Casual George = AH guru

Today I have yet another entry written up that it posted at wowecon.net. Today I talk about the best and most informed person in game in regards to acceptable prices: the casual player. One question that everyone asks themselves when they go to sell an item they have never listed before is how much they should sell it for. What is XYZ worth? Check out the article and find out why Casual George is the best one to ask. Here's the first part of it all.


"I will admit first that it is true that a casual gamer doesn’t typically play the AH in the sense that a goblin or an otherwise AH focused player does. They do however play the game in many more ways that your typical raider or AH baron does. That means that they fit perfectly into the category of who you sell everything to. Does the expression “know your customers” ring a bell? It should because that’s exactly where I’m going with this.

This is not because they’re stupid or lazy, they are just the same as I was before I started to build my empire: uninformed. They just don’t know and if they do, then they either don’t have the time for it or would rather be just plain getting by. That’s the definition of a casual pretty much, limited play time, enjoys everything they do on game and are somewhat competent players at the very least. Suffice to say, casuals are my kind of people, probably because I’m a casual player as well."



Click here to check out the full article.


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Empty markets at a glance

NOTE: Quick tip on what to stokpile with the coming recipes and what to look out for now that Hammerknell is out. Any runes with hit/focus are going to be a big seller for a while as people try to hit the minimum stats. Also twilight bloom roots will be popular as they're needed in all of the augments and many consumables. The same is true with eternal dust because it goes into everything, expect a price increase in those.


Today I have yet another entry written up that it posted at wowecon.net. Today I talk about what you should consider when you search for an item on the AH and find nothing. Do they sell out that fast? Is there no market for it? Does nobody try to sell it? I discuss all of this and much more. This is very important info to have because when the new rift items come in patch 1.4 there will be a lot of empty AH windows. Here's the first part of it all.


"When you find something new to sell and are in a situation where there are none up on the auction house there is a good deal that can be interpreted from that. Sometimes it’s a recipe that you have just gotten and thus new to you or it could be a recipe/item that is new to the game entirely. But whichever the case is, the potential scenarios are always the same.

When you find yourself in a situation such as this you need to ask yourself a few questions before moving forward. First is the obvious question, can you afford to take a complete loss in this investment? If so then you can move on with the fun parts. Is there a market for this new epic item? Are there alternatives that are close to the same level for half the price? How many people tend to spend the extra coin to upgrade this specific item?"



Click here to check out the full article.


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Ooh, is that new?

Aloha all! As of today my first article is officially going up on wowecon.net and is useful to anybody that wants to make a little (ok, a lot) extra money on the AH. I discuss what to do when any new items are added into the game and how even a single new recipe can have far reaching effects. If you're interested in a more in depth look at how to profit from the Patch 1.4 crafted gear and the different ways there are to profit from it, I highly suggest you read it. Here's the first part.


"The first option is to sell the new gear itself. This one is pretty straightforward as you imagine, but there is still slightly more to it than craft and list. The most important part of selling either the crafted gear or BoE drops is when they’re not being actively farmed. This means prime time is a no go for listing these on the auction house. This is because the people that are interested in getting easy top end epics are either actively farming them or are about to be.

After all, why would you buy a raid drop when you’re going into that raid in 15 minutes? You buy them after you raid and don’t get the drop you’re after. Listing before the raid typically won’t do anything more than lower the current price of them. And that’s when you want to sell them. You have to know your server and know your customers."



Click here to check out the full article.


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New Rift Patch 1.4 recipes

As the title says there are a lot of new recipes being added in the upcoming patch along with a few current ones being changed drastically. First here's a quick copy/paste from the patch notes that are in progress.

"* New Artificer recipe: Blazing Powerstone, purchasable from trainers at 285 Artificer skill. Usable on main-hand weapons and adds 200 Spell Power for 4 hours.

* New recipes are available on the Armorsmith, Outfitter, Weaponsmith, and Artificer artisan store merchants. These are new Epic crafted items with set bonuses. Each set includes 2 pieces of armor, 1 weapon, and 1 ring to complete the set. Recipes can be purchased for Plaques.

* Recipes for new materials are available from the various profession trainers for 20 platinum - Enchanted Shadethorn Lumber, Tempered Orichalcum Bar, Steel-Stitched Leather, Bolt of Radiant Witchweave, and Infinite Essence. Each recipe has a 24 hour cooldown and are used in new production recipes.

* Crafting trainers now sell new reagents needed for the new recipes: Ethereal Flux, Magical Oil, Enchanted Lacquer, and Endless Dust. Foraging trainers now sell reagents.

* New Weaponsmith recipe: Exquisite Oilstone, purchasable from trainers at 285 Weaponsmith skill. Usable on 2-handed weapons and adds 10 melee weapon DPS for 4 hours."

That's not that many notes, but if you have a keen eye for profit then that is a whole lot to take in all at once. So before I get into the details, here's the short version of it all.

- Stokpile brilliant diamonds
- Apothecary might suddenly become extremely profitable
- Stop spending your plaques right now
- Pick up the apothecary recipes for the heroic vials (needed as materials for new augments)
- Eternal dust will go up in price
- Minor catalysts will go up in price

So that's the short version of it all, but there is so much more to it. The new recipes will be raid quality gear and when combined with an epic augment (which have all gotten a big boost) will be around t2 raid level gear. The down side? They cost a few hundred platinum in vendor sold materials alone. So there won't be a huge market for them, but that also means very low competition. As you will read in my upcoming article on www.wowecon.net, any time new things are added in there is potential for massive profits to come. The what and how you sell them is a huge factor as much as the demand is.

For those of you that can't afford this large of an investment, which even I'm not comfortable doing, there are still a bunch of things you can do to make a killing. First is to stokpile eternal dust and catalysts. They will all go up in price and the cats can be broken down my apoth's into essences which are needed for a number of recipes as well. There is also a new temporary weapon buff for +200 SP which requires refined bones to make.

To get those you need hollow bones and bloody fangs to craft a sacred fetish with artificer. The recipe for the fetish only costs about 50 normal tokens which is a single day of dailys. You craft a ton of them and salvage them to get bone pieces and so forth. This will not only be the best option for those that use 1h/totem but also for cleric tanks as well. These items will become in extremely high demand and the mats to make them are super cheap so start to stokpile 'dem bones yesterday.

And lastly are the recipes that will be added in with a 24 hour cool down. Since these are in a very limited supply and will likely be moderately pricey to make you can expect these to fetch a hefty profit as well. All of these CD mats are needed in all of the new crafted gear so if you don't want to go the route of selling the gear itself, just sell the mats to make it. But if you really want to capitalize on it all, do both!

So what is it that the great Stokpile, the well dressed and lover of all things shiny, is going to do? I'm banking on the mass wave of sales for the flawless +stats augments being the big money maker. For one, these already have a great rate of sales on live. The only problem is that they're rare as all get out. And with the newness of these recipes a lot of people won't even know that they can be crafted now and if they do the complexity of the mats will certainly put them off for a while.

I say complexity because you have to buy stuff fro ma vendor, learn a new recipe (two if you can't break down cats yet), use new vendor mats and crafted mats to craft. That and they're rather expensive to start crafting for almost anybody at 10ish platinum a piece. However they sell all of the time for 15 and up. I'm hoping to capitalize on this asap. Aside form that I'll definitely be selling the mats that are on a day long CD as there will be a solid demand for anybody that wants the gear made.

I'll pick up a recipe for each gear type to work for a large fee and only craft one or two pieces. And the gear that I will make I'll only make what I can use, so cleric gear it is. The last thing that I'll be doing is selling the 17 platinum vendor mats on the AH for a nice mark up on the AH to the people that are too lazy/stupid to bother reading patch notes. You'd be surprised how often people buy stuff that's sold from a vendor 20 steps away...


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What I've been up to

NOTE: I've recently updated the list and added a bunch of new items to it. There is quite a bit in this game that does sell regularly, you just need to find them so check it out!


Lately I've been getting my fingers into a whole bunch of different things and haven't said much here about it all. So I wanted to take today to get you all up to speed on what's been going on in my Rift world. You can consider this another semi-formal status report, but less focused on the cash and more focused on my current goals. I'll be covering what markets I've been having a degree of success with, what I've been experimenting with and what's next for me.

So farm armor smith has been my top earner as far as money goes with runes being a very close second. This is most likely because I'm still missing a ton of high demand rune recipes that are all BoP zone drops. The rune recipes I'm missing are scattered throughout trash mobs in every instance except for two. I got very lucky the other day and won my first roll ever over somebody else and got a tank rune recipe. I picked up the last BoE one later that day and now I have to suffer through countless dungeon runs to get the rest. I doubt that I'll be actively farming them and once my RC has their gear finished I doubt I'll be going back that much. It simply isn't worth all the time it takes for a chance at a chance.

Meanwhile my armor smith has almost every recipe in game. They need one more from plaques and one boe epic recipe while all of the reputation, rare and epic BoE, and token bought ones are taken care of. The same thing goes for all of the professions actually. All of the gathering professions have finished the quests to learn all of the refined material recipes. Weapon smith is also missing a few plaque recipes and has all of the boe ones that I know of which is very nice. Outfitter is almost there as well with all tokens, rep, missing a plaque here and there etc.

Also artificer is also totally finished as far as I know. I add on that last little bit there because I've found a few boe recipes online for it but there is exactly zero data on them, I don't even know if they're in game so I just consider that one finished. And lastly apothecary is totally finished since all the token recipes are completely worthless. I have every color of dye learned and really expected a bit more to come out of this as they're consumables and people like to experiment with their look a lot. Maybe I just need to actually market it? Who knows but who cares really, the profits are about 30g at the absolute most on the token ones and black/white are 2 platinum when you're crazy lucky.

This profession really needs some help.

On the financial side of things I am over 6,000 platinum now with no more effort than I put forth making my fortune in WoW. I don't expect to be totally filthy rich for a while as there just isn't enough money in game to be made. People typically aren't able to drop 500 platinum to gear out their 9th alt and aren't at the point where they're making a ton of alts either. But regardless of that I'm still comparatively wealthy considering the average rift player. It seems that I've been at a steady 100 platinum profit per day after all expenses. That includes my constant talent resets, travel, soul healing, and of course my massive material stokpiles.



But now that I'm almost finished with profession dailys for plaques that cost is going to be removed entirely and will drastically increase my day to day profit. On top of that I've been slowly increasing my daily profits simply by having more and more things to sell which is a bit of a given. However when I don't come across a massive amount of dust and catalysts for super cheap I've managed to make as much as 500 platinum profit in a single day. Not bad I think. Now all I have to do is cut my costs down by a little bit more and keep up with my patent pending Stokpile AH method and I'll be hitting the big time in no time.


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Salvaging for a profit

It seems like hundreds of people are picking up rift every day. This is evident in the fact that every other day a different level of items from trade skills are being dumped on the AH. And by dumped I mean barely over vendor value to the point that some are even losing money when the AH takes their 5% cut. Honestly that part makes me laugh.

But when you notice a page or two of gear being sold for 20g and under you should take a moment to think twice about passing it off as just another flood. The most common thing you find is gear and low level runes. Runes you can't really do much with so I just ignore them. At that low of a level you replace gear every 15 minutes so it's a total waste to spend money to slightly help you kill 30 mobs 9 seconds faster before it gets trashed. The gear however is where the money is.

For anybody with a salvaging ability you should make it a point to check the AH during prime time for crafted gear to break down that's like 20g or so and under. For this you'll want to focus on the level 40 and up range. Since every gear prof can craft item enhancements that are very useful (and last for a long time) these are actually in demand. A couple plat for an extra 15% to crit damage? Yes please! As useful and cheap as these typically are, there never seems to be any on the AH outside of the first ones you get from the trainer.

This is a market that is almost entirely untouched.

So far the most successful ones I've been selling have been exquisite whetstones and shield spikes. I'm still experimenting with the price ranges for everything right now so take this part with a grain of salt. Up until now I've been slowly increasing the sale price of these things, starting at only 1 plat and adding another 40g to the price tag each time I sell out. I'm only adding 40 because of the same reason that you always see things priced at $399.99 and such. You don't want to break that threshold even if you're only under by a single coin.

Right now the price it up to 2.6 plat and they're still selling. Right now I'm wondering a couple things for maximizing this little niche market. For one I have no idea what they exact % chance of getting metal widgets is. It seems to be 50/50 to get any of them in general and being able to get as many as 3 at once. What I really want to know is the chances of getting more than 1 and a way to move the processed metal that you get. The mid range enhancements sell pretty slowly so that's not a viable option, they may just end up being vendor food.

It's fairly often that I see a full page or two of carmintium gear up for 15g each when it costs more than double that to make. When it's that cheap the only decision I have to make is if I'm going to use RC or armor smith to break it apart for a profit.


Thanks for stopping by!

Assumed value

One expression that I tend to use now and again is "assumed value" or "assumed price." I wanted to take the time today to talk about what I actually mean by that and how to apply this theory to your own AH playing. The easiest way to explain this is to think of the assumed price as a buying/selling threshold. The primary difference here is that a threshold is based off of average market prices while the assumed value is based off of essentially nothing. That's right, nothing at all.

This is a value that you place on something personally and base that value on whatever you please. You take this number and base all of your other, more concrete, prices around it. Here's an easy example. To craft certain runes and pieces of gear you need vendor sold materials, simple and straight forward mats. These mats cost anywhere from a few silver to a few gold each and the recipes that require them are just as varied.

So I am giving them an assumed value of 3g no matter what the actual value is. This is the first reason I'm going to cover for using an assumed value, simplicity. If you were to just total them up into your thresholds individually things would get a lot more complicated with many remainders at the end. Doing this keeps it simple, fast, and efficient.

The next reason that having an assumed value is important is to calculate your selling thresholds easier when using materials that aren't typically bought. Things like eternal planar dust, shimmering shards, or minor catalysts are a good example. I'll tell you how this works first and then explain it a bit more thoroughly after words. Using a shard as an example lets say that they're 10 plat on auction, when selling one of mine I'll undercut by 50g. So anytime that I craft something that uses a minor catalyst my assumed price on them is 9.5 plat which is what I calculate in my threshold for it.

Now let me explain why. Things like catalysts I don't usually buy and hold onto so I only sell them. I don't however sell them plain and instead use them to craft epics so I need to have a threshold for them still. Basically I set my assumed price to whatever my selling price "would be" if I were to sell the materials plain. It's like how I say market price doesn't matter because what you paid for something matters more. This is the same idea except the opposite.

Here's a longer explanation. It doesn't matter what they're selling for on the AH, what matters is what you are ABLE to sell them for. If a catalyst is up for 100 plat that doesn't mean you should value them at that price, because they aren't ever going to sell. Now lets use a more realistic example. Lets say that they're on AH for 8 plat.

Obviously you have to undercut them if you want yours to sell any time soon so what you are able to sell them for is 7 plat. Since you're only able to get 7 plat out of selling it, then you shouldn't value them any higher. This assumed value I suppose could also be called their actual value because it is what you are actually going to get from selling it. Keep this in mind next time you go to sell something using rare materials.

And closing with one final example of when to use an assumed value. Whenever I RB a ton of greens I get loaded up with flickering shards, far more than I'll ever use. I can't sell them aside from a vendor because there are just that many around and you don't use a lot of them at all. Because of that I put their assumed price right at what a vendor will pay me.

I'll never ever sell them on AH but I did spend money to get them by buying mats to craft gear and RB. So I set their assumed price at 6g which is slightly under what I'm paying to craft RB gear. Even though they'll only ever sell to a vendor, I still paid money to acquire them which gives them a value just as much as it gives a value to all of the useful materials I get.


Everything has a price. Nothing is free.

Door charge

When it comes to entering any market there's going to be a door charge, an entrance fee of sorts. This is what you're going to have to pay and invest up front before you can even think about selling anything. Today I'm going to talk about what price you'll have to pay with any new market in rift and the potential consequences of such.

As per usual, I'll get the obvious out of the way first; money. In the business world we all know that it takes money to make money, and life on the AH in an MMO is no exception. You'll have to first skill up your trade skills, throwing away 90% of the cash you could be making off selling the mats as is. Luckily though, each profession has some form of a salvage option to get back some of the materials. Salvaging also gives you unique mats that can only be gotten FROM salvaging, these are used to make temporary item enhancements.

One example is whetstones which increase melee crit damage. These items help recoup your losses at higher levels and salvaging lets you sneak in a few dozen extra skill ups in the mean time. Bear in mind that it's not worth buying things just to salvage unless you're after the "salvaged only" type of materials as you're not promised the raw mats that went into it. The key thing here is learning how to cut costs and corners in every way possible. This is step number one in reducing your entrance fee which is essential to maximizing your profits.

The next and most important price you have to pay is time. Time is not free and is the most valuable commodity a human being will ever have access to. I say this because time is the only thing which you cannot change, reform, make more or less of. The time you have now is the only time you get. Each day has only 24 hours, no more no less. So learning how to "spend" your time wisely is imperative to being cost effective and reducing the price you have to pay with a new market.

The time investment in rift is much akin to the investment needed for the JC market in wow. You get dailys to do for crafting tokens which let you buy special recipes. Now you might be thinking "How can you be more time efficient when you have a hard limit on quests" but there are still ways to get around this as it were. But first we have to divide by zero and split up the definition of time.

In terms of breaking into a market that needs you to do daily quests you have to think of it in time frames, and not just a total number of hours. Meaning it will take X days to get this recipe and Y for that. This is different than total times because you can only do these quests once per day so your "total time" won't be more than an hour or two, even though ti's spread out over the course of a month.

Important distinction.

Since the higher you get in skill the more tokens you get form these quests you can sort of fake your way through it to a point. You can choose what form of currency (total time or money) you are capable of investing more of. You can power level your professions at the expense of a huge sum of cash so that you can get the most amount of tokens immediately as opposed to three weeks from now. This will cut the time frame of (fake numbers) 3 months down to 2 months.

This is obviously a significant decrease, albeit fictitious, but you can see the point I'm trying to make. By going this route you will be able to start working that market and selling those rare items immensely faster than only taking skill ups as you level.

The other "currency" that you can invest in is total time spent. By this I mean that you can just farm everything. You will drastically lower the plat cost but at the expense of not having much fun on game. This will also reduce the time frame, but depending on what you have more of (and value least) decides your course of action.

Whichever route you choose the goal should always be the same, get as many tokens as possible as fast as possible. The sooner you get into a market the faster you're going to turn a profit. Or lose everything. Ya know, whichever comes first.


Thanks for stopping by!

Rift leveling tips

In hopes of inspiring a person or three to play Rift I've decided to take today to give a fist full of tips on leveling up as the title suggests. The good news is that it will be far more then the painfully obvious "go here at level 10 do every quest, then go here" that you'll get in essentially every paid guide out there. Now you are going to get proper leveling tips for free ad free, imagine that! The bad news is that the only way it relates to making the rift plat is that you can't level your crafting unless you level your crafter. Enjoy!


Get a pet to tank.
Every calling has a soul that can summon a pet and only clerics don't have a tanking pet to start off with. Clerics don't necessarily need one, but more on that later. Warriors get beast master, mages get elementalist or necromancer, and rogues get hunter. Either way having a pet to tank is such a massive boon I cannot imagine leveling without one or a pocket healer.

The big thing that you'll have to get used to is that tank pets can actually, ya know, tank! It was amazing being able to not worry about pulling threat single target. Some pets are even able to aoe tank, but won't hold threat if YOU aoe. In other words, they can keep a few mobs occupied while you pick them off one at a time. Clerics don't need a pet because they are able to spec into cheap instant heals which will negate that necessity for the most part.


Level your crafting professions now!
Each crafting prof gets two daily quests to donate crafted items to the war effort. You should do these every day fro two reasons. First being that you get artisan's tokens which let you buy the "valuable" recipes and the sooner you start the more you'll have when you are able to invest in making some of them. The second is they don't give a pithy 200 exp at level 1, no they give a full quest reward of several thousand experience. Doing that every day twice a day is going to be a huge boost to hitting 50.


Leveling gear.
Simply put, ignore it entirely until your mid 30s. Don't ever bother with buying greens as you'll get all you need to be comfortably well off from quests. Blues however can last as long as 15 levels, this is especially true for the 33+ range and you can even be wearing a few pieces to 50. So save yourself some time and a bit of coin and don't bother buying anything until then. As for low level purples, as you may expect they're generally too expensive to be worth while and aren't going to last much longer than an equal level blue item.


Become a pack rat.
There are more profession overlaps than you can imagine in this game. That's probably why you can have 3 professions at once instead of only 1 or 2. If you're not using your cloth, stash it away for a toon that will use it. The same goes with any leather and boe greens. If you're reading this blog then you're probably going to level them eventually to make some money off of them so save yourself the hassle and save it all up for when you need it. When bag space becomes an issue keep an eye on the cloth and bag market. It's fairly often to see them being dumped from leveling up OF. The extra bank space if pretty cheap for the first 2-3 slots so it won't be a major investment.


Get the portals open early.
This is going to be a lot more handy then one might imagine and I recommend doing it as soon as you get your mount and have some spare time. Yes you'll be going through a ton of high level zones with mobs that will om nom nom your face, but stick to the roads and you'll mostly be fine. If you level up your professions higher than the zone you're questing or farming in then you won't be able to turn in your prof dailys, this will make that possible at early levels. You'd think that this is hard to do at first or require an hour or three of doing corpse runs, but that's not the case.

When I ran my baby level 24 cleric all over the world I died three times total. One time I died because I was busy writing up a wonderful entry for you all to read while auto running into a group of 5 mobs 20 levels above me. The second time was intentional because there were 10 mobs between me and the portal and I didn't want to spend 5 minutes walking around them. So I died on purpose and soul walked right on past them. All in all it may take 30 minutes depending on what portals you have open already and won't be filled with corpse runs.


Get all of your souls early.
You get new souls (talent trees) from quests that are opened up at level 13ish. To do them you have to close a rift to get a quest item which you have to use at a death rift. You'll most likely want to experiment with different soul combo's so get them done early. This is important because the quests give good experience and it's something that you'll be doing eventually anyway so you might as well get half a level out of it.


If you're doing it all solo.
Enjoy the rifts in rift. These are going to give you a lot of experience and items that you'll be wanting at 50 so take advantage of them any time you can. Again focus on the fire and earth ones for the egg shells, I cannot emphasize this one enough. Also be sure to do every quest that you can dig up and try to find groups when you have to kill elites, trust me you won't be able to solo them unless you're OP and leveling in style. Luckily enough you can use the LFG tool for the quests as well.

Deciding on what zone to go to next is fairly straight forward due to the bread crumbs that you're given, but if you see a quest is orange don't bother. To avoid the back and forth between zones and questing hubs just stick with a single zone until most of the map is uncovered. Also try and take part in the zone wide invasions as well. You're almost guaranteed to get at least one of the epic versions and several of the normal wide scale ones. With these you'll get killer exp, more planar mats, and special currency to buy some very long lasting gear. Oh yeah and they're fun as hell too. Nice little perk there eh?


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Random rift thoughts 1

Today's entry is going to be a large collection of short tips that have been in my mind lately. As my old readers may remember, my "random thoughts" entries contain just a handful of short quick tips to help you make some extra coin here and there. While they are important and do make/save money, they're far too short to dedicate an entire day's entry to. So instead I just write them down as they come and when there is what seems like enough, I'll post them all at once. There is no particular order of importance or any real semblance of transition. Read on and enjoy!


1. I got my first piece of fan mail!
For those of you that don't know, I refer to any in game mail I get yelling at me to stop undercutting by more than one coin as fan mail. Any time you get this, it means you're doing something very right and are about to lose another competitor. Today marks the first official piece of fan mail that I've gotten and it was in the rune crafting racket. There's been a few here and there trying to "bargain" with me, but now I got the real thing.



Happy goblin is happy. Ok that's not exactly very money making related, but it's an important milestone for every AH player out there. There is also a much more practical reason why it's better to undercut by larger amounts in rift. That's because there is no addons to automate the amount and it's a lot easier to hit "1, tab, 44" as opposed to "1, tab, 99, tab, 99." Doing this over the course of a few hundred auctions saves an absolutely huge amount of time.


2. Sell epics during the week.
As we all know, timing can be very important and can make or break certain markets. Pre-raid items such as potions and what not will never see great sales as they would before most raids start while post-raid ones only have great sales afterwards and are "meh" at all other times. A specific market in rift has the exact same issue and that is BoE epic gear.

It doesn't matter what armor type or role they're made for, if they're purple only sell them during the week. This is when people will grind out dungeons for a new shiny, spend 3 hours not getting one and figure screw it, I'll just buy one. This isn't true for the weekends because people typically have much more time to run dungeons or are out farming the mats "for free."


3. Epic recipes are priceless.
Your average expert dungeon can take about 30-45 minutes with a good group. With an average or bad group it can take well over double that. Epic recipes are all boe and (generally) only drop from the last boss of an expert dungeon with a wonderful 0.4% drop rate. That means that if you want to try and "farm" a certain recipe you are going to be beating out death and taxes in longevity before you see it. Because of that if there's one you want and don't see anybody selling it, no price is too high.

It's no different than materials you can't farm and aren't for sale on AH. You have to pay the going rate and whoever has them to sell has a temporary monopoly. When I see an epic recipe pop up on the AH I'll go as high as 120 platinum for it if it's valuable to me on my server. Of course if there's a low bid I'll try and snag it for cheap that way, but if people are camping it I'll just flat out buy it. The time it would take to get one by running an hour long dungeon plus another 15-30 minutes of que times plus a potential 40 minutes of wipes and corpse runs is...yeah you get the point.

Just buy the damned thing.


4. Check the Dunes of Akala for rifts
The Dunes of Akala is the area of shimmer sand in the NW where there's usually a hand full of major and minor level 50 rifts. It's worth it to port over now and then to see if there are any up or not. That's because this area is the prime spot for doing a bunch of crafting rifts. So if you hop over and only one or two rifts if any up there's a good chance that you'll find a group or even a raid doing a ton of them.

As I mentioned in my entry about crafting rifts you don't have to be in the group doing them in order to get the rewards, you only need to participate. This makes for a good opportunity to get a bunch of extra mats and if luck favors you a few extra plaques as well.


5. Promote higher prices: Success!
A while ago I wrote of an experiment that I was doing on the AH. Prices on many things were in the gutter and constantly below material costs even when people were willing to pay much, much more. What I did was instead of undercutting further I would list at the second cheapest or if everything was under the material costs, I'd list my wares at my normal price if nobody was selling them on the AH minus a few platinum.

A few weeks later and I'm starting to see a few things that I haven't sold before due to prices. Namely a few common runes used for leveling up but still very useful options. After that was a few low level crafted items like damascus weapons and the shields from the starting zone faction rep vendors. That and I got a few "oops" sales where people would buy my expensive stuff even though there are many more up for far less. That happened because not everyone sorts the AH by unit price and just assume that the one op top is the cheapest or merely buy what they see first.


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Where to start: Rift AH survival tips

Just as Rome wasn't built in a day neither is an auction house empire. Like you've heard hundreds of times "it takes money to make money" is forever true no matter where you go so you need to do something to get your start up capital. Today I wanted to give a few extra pointers and stepping stones for the lowbies that need to save for their epic mount at 50 or those without maxed professions. Believe it or not there are still ways to make money without tirelessly grinding away for hours on end.

Granted you won't be making a ton of cash, but it's more than you will spending an hour to farm up 10 platinum worth of ore. As per the theme of this blog, farming as your primary source of income is an absolute no-no which is why I write entries for both the big AH goblins and those that need money just to train their skills and everyone in between. Take what you read today and try and work it into your daily play time as I can promise it won't take up much time, even for those that only play two hours in a given day.


Know your dailys.
The daily quest for every profession is 90% predictable. You don't know what ones you'll have to do tomorrow but you will know what ones you can get which is any pair of 4 different quests (based on profession). As such you will know what daily quests that everyone else might be doing as well. For example, right now my outfitter daily can be to make silk shoes, composite shoes, exotic leather boots, or thick leather boots.

Each of those nifty pieces of footwear takes 2 of the associated material to craft and needs 6 total to be crafted for the lower ones and 7 for the higher. Where am I going with all of these random numbers? To more numbers obviously, but the ones you're looking for this time.

If it takes 14 exotic leather to do a profession daily, what stack sizes should you be AH'ing them at? that's right, 14. I've seen several stacks of leather up for 3g/each while I watch my stacks of 14 leather sell out for 20g/each. The same goes for every crafting profession out there so look into what kind of boots they need to craft and what not for the daily and start selling and/or flipping those mats in the desired stack sizes.Cloth however is the exception to this because anybody can pick it up and that lowers the price on it dramatically.


Again with the material conversions!
I know I'm sorta beating a dead horse here, but trading down RC mats is just too good to not mention all the time. The same thing goes for leather and cloth actually. The leather I can understand because you need butchery in order to turn hides into leather with can be used by an outfitter. The cloth however needs an outfitter to create and only they need it in any large amount.

The only guess I can make is somebody leveled their profession up so high that they can't get the materials they need for the daily where they're questing at. And while that's a good reason to buy something that you can craft by default, it's also the only reason. I've been making a nice profit by AFK crafting bolts of silk and thick leather lately and has helped fund my first alt's training and mounts. Definitely look into it.


Well it looks like it's good...
The average player is not sure of what's good or not stat wise so its all guess work to them. In fact the only real clue that's given to you in game is the stats on your armor class. If you're a warrior you'll see strength and dext on plate everywhere so you'll figure out (hopefully) that you get a use out of both while not knowing exactly how much of one is worth in the other. Because of this split stat items are the best to sell. People will naturally want to match their runes to their gear which has both on them and some AP at higher levels.


The Pokémon Imperative.
Artifacts, people just love to collect them all! Aside from an epic mount at 100 finished full sets, there is no reason ever to buy these. And yet people sell up fist fulls of plat for the blue level ones and even pay as much as 2 plat for common ones. I'm sure that if you do a little google work, you can find out where they all spawn at and can check those locations from time to time.

In case you're unaware, artifacts come from picking up the teeny tiny glowy objects that you see scattered all over the place in every zone. In addition to that, there is another out in scarwood that you can do 3 times in a day for one of 16ish different ones. To complete that set you need to have every last one so these can fetch a pretty penny.


Everybody has a use for something.
Outside of the first two zones anything that is at least common quality has a price tag on it for a player. It could be animal parts from butchery or common artifacts you've seen a dozen times. Some may only sell for a few gold each, but that's a few more than you had before. That pays for your skill training if you sell all of it when you can instead of vendoring it all without trying. Once you get to the mid 40s range you can spend as much as 1.5 plat just on skills which totals up very fast.

Now mind you the price of mats in the first two zones will go up eventually, but right now it's best to either use them or vendor them. The main reason being that the deposit cost of a stack of burlap for example isn't too far off from the vendor price and the average prices are maybe 50g over the vendor. When you have to count your copper watch what you decide to auction carefully.


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Platinum to the core

In case you don't know, "cores" are a crafting reagent that seem to drastically shift in price. They were added in an early patch as a zone wide rare drop and are required for most recipes from a zone specific quartermaster. Each zone has their own unique core which go into crafting level appropriate blue gear.

Several content patches later many people that have been 50 for a while still don't know what they're good for. This is why you'll see them for 20g today and then up to 5 plat tomorrow. Can you sense an opportunity for flipping here? I sure can.

Here's a list of all the cores and the respective zones that they drop in. Taken from the Zam wiki page found here.


Evergreen Core - Freemarch and Silverwood
Enchanted Core - Silverwood and Freemarch
Stone Core - Stonefield and Gloamwood
Shadow Core - Gloamwood and Stonefield
Rusty Core - Scarlet Gorge
Gnarled Core - Scarwood Reach
Cracked Core - Droughtlands
Glowing Core - Moonshade Highlands.
Frozen Core - Iron Pine Peak
Shimmering Core - Shimmersand
Dead Core - Stillmoor


Like I mentioned earlier, these fluctuate in price daily, sometimes hourly. This gives you a handful of options to make a profit with. The obvious I stated already, as usual, flipping them every other day. Buy them all up today for 30g each and resell them in a few days for a few plat each. The next is crafting some gear to sell "under" material costs. This is where it's important to stokpile...again. Buy up a metric ass ton of them when they're uber cheap and let them chill out in your bank.

They stack to 50 like most everything else so this won't be a problem as far as bag space goes. And then you just craft the associated gear with any cheap old augment. The primary level range you'll want to be focusing on is everything in the 30s area. This is because these blues will easily last you through the mid 40s range where you end up having to kill tons of mobs that are 1-2 levels over you. As such this small boost in theory is actually quite large in practice.

As a nice little bonus or added incentive here, most of the recipes can be bought at only friendly notoriety. Just by leveling up through the zone questing and doing a ton of rifts I hit friendly with everyone. There are a couple that require honored so I can't comment on them just yet, but I assume that they'll fetch an even higher profit. Speaking of profit the general price range that I sell at is anywhere from 3-7 plat per item. It might not be much but the sales are consistent and that is almost entirely profit. Especially when you're patient and buy the cores when they're down to only pocket change.


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Rift best selling items

Today is going to be a short list style entry on what my best selling items are in rift. No real explanations as always, just a large listing of what the most profitable items are that I have found. I'll go profession by profession and in addition to listing everything that sells, I'll also give recommended prices for what I typically sell each item for.

Enjoy!


Outfitter
Spellspun bag - 1.5 platinum
Shaleweave robe - 6 platinum
Steeled leather brigandine - 8 platinum
Witchweave bag - 9 platinum
Darkcloth leggings - 38 platinum


Rune crafter
Blazing dexterity rune shard - 4 platinum
Blazing indomitable rune - 4 platinum
Blazing intelligence runeshard - 2 platinum
Brilliant tough rune - 5 platinum
Blazing tough rune - 9 platinum
Incandescent indomitable rune - 10 platinum


Armor smith
Darkmetal tassets - 6 platinum
Orichilum gauntlets - 9 platinum
Faith-forged spaulders - 45 platinum


Weapon smith
Black iron hatchet - 30 platinum
Ebony hatchet - 6 platinum
Damascus saber - 4 platinum
Exquisite whetstone - 3 platinum
Steeltouched longsword - 4 platinum
Warden's dagger - 3 platinum


Apothecary
Nothing, sorry folks.


Artificer
Fine platinum chain - 9 platinum
Band of crystallized mana - 30 platinum


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