Pro Tips

NOTE: I'm going to be writing a several entry series in the near future, it will be an overview of each profession now that everything has leveled out. It will cover best selling items, profession specific strategies, pros/cons of the market, and price guides. If you have anything specific that you'd like to see please make a comment on any current entry and I'll be sure to make a note of it.


Today is an entry of just assorted tips that don't need much explanation but are worthwhile none the less. Each one will only have a short explanation and then I'll move on to the next. The main reason being is there's all sorts of 1 shot tips that would be an absolute cop out and waste of space if I dedicated an entire entry per day to a single paragraph. Enjoy!


1. Don't advertise
This mostly comes into play shortly before a patch. The current example is volatile life and the new epic alchemist stones. Don't advertise that you're buying stacks of 200 when the AH is empty. Nobody really needs that many full stacks of VL. This will cause people to look and ask why and they'll find out your secret; they're going to double in value when the patch comes. Then you suddenly have more competition than you would have had and lower profits because you got too greedy. Though if you must advertise that you're buying in bulk don't do it often, maybe a few times during peak hours a day at the most.


2. Crafting now has low cast times
During WotLK crafting a belt buckle took almost a minute to do, the same goes with all old enchanting rods. However all of the new stuff is just a second or two and it's done. This means if you have a friendly BS or JC ask them to do some work for you if you don't have the recipe yourself. It'll be only a few moments of their time and you can drop them a few gold for it. This allows you to branch out more than you normally can and hit more markets. It is also a good way to experiment in a market if you don't want to spend the -random currency- to get a certain recipe.


3. Don't literally buy everything on the AH
When you're stokpiling materials always leave a little bit on the AH. It doesn't matter if the stuff is old or new, high supply or low. The reason is as soon as it's empty or there's one or two left there's going to be a price spike, usually a large one. One example that I'm dealing with lately is Illusion Dust. I need it for all of my twink enchants but every time it gets emptied out it spikes up to 15g each instead of the 2g it was yesterday. If you have a massive stokpile then you don't have to worry too much as you'll have enough to last you until the next reset but that's rarely the case. You want to buy enough so that you're set on it but don't drive the prices way way up when you'll be out in a few days. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot by clearing out everything.


4. Make use of your dungeon que time
I do this every day when I have to wait the 30 odd minutes to get into a random heroic as dps. I take this time to do a lot of crafting and do the bulk of my purchasing. By doing this you can cut a ton of time out of your daily routine, personally this almost entirely cuts out the time I spend buying.


5. Work the AH and use an anvil at the same time
I do a lot of my AH playing from dalaran with my enchant/BS toon because there's never anybody there so lag is nonexistent, and I happen to have the kirin tor ring for them. If you didn't know, the engineering only banker that's in the engineering shop in dalaran can now be used by anybody. There also happens to be an anvil close enough to the auctioneer that you can mass craft buckles or rods while you cancel or post auctions. Great time saver right there.


6. When crafting glyphs, check warrior and warlock glyphs first
I say this because I'm sure most servers out there don't have a great supply of non cata level herbs and aren't able to craft a dozen stacks of every glyph at once. Therefore you're required to pick and choose which ones you'll make since you can't pile up all of them. Now most people will just go down the crafting window or an addOn's read out and warriors are at the bottom of the list. This means that there may not be a lot of them listed and you can have very low competition in that particular class. This may or may not be the general case, but is worth mentioning as a possibility.


7. Don't always downgrade
Yes cata level enchants and such are expensive. Yes you can save money by downgrading to NR quality goods. But please check the prices first, don't be that guy. I wish I took a screen now that I think of it, but I sold an epic NR dps leg armor which sold for 120g while the silly, unpopular, not epic, shitty ass, blue, cataclysm level dps leg armor was 40g cheaper and gave better stats. Silly people are silly. This is one point where I will outright call you a complete idiot.

And lastly, here's another funny screen shot of people buying vendor pets. Unfortunately with the removal of portals in shat and dalaran we can't laugh too too hard at them. Unless they paid five times the vendor price of course. Oh wait...




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Things to come

Hey all, I just wanted to give you a quick little preview of what the next few weeks hold in store for the blog.

In the upcoming weeks I'm going to have a several post series each week in addition to one stand alone entry and my business report.

I'll be covering topics such as botting problems, solutions, and the real situation of it all.

There will be another profession how to series in which I'll go over different pricing guides and methods with each one along with what their hottest selling items are.

And after that I'll be answering the question that every scribe is asking. How do I deal with daily campers?


Thanks for stopping by!

Future patch speculations

I see a lot of people wondering if they should start stokpiling pyrium ore in the event that blizzard lets you prospect epic gems from it. There's also the question (in my mind at least) of glyphs for all of the new skills that came with cata. Currently the only one in game is for warriors which is no longer able to be learned as far as I know. I've done research for two weeks now and haven't learned it and glyph books hold nothing new to learn.

So here's my thoughts on some things that may come.

Pyrium ore. I'm stokpiling this for sure, but not right now. Prices on it are still falling bit by bit each day and I only have so much storage space. Once it goes down a little bit more I'll start filling up bank tabs of it. I would recommend you do the same only with a few caveats. First, I use pyrium bars to make a ton of buckles so I'll be using it all at some point no matter what. So if you're going to buy it up and let it collect digital dust I'd tell you to wait a bit.

Can you afford a substantial investment and not be scared? To fill out a bank tab or two it'll cost upwards of 100k and you will see absolutely zero return on it for a good amount of time. If that makes you feel uneasy or if you simply can't afford it this isn't for you. This type of investment is for the people that have already made their 214k and not for those that are still building up their funds and AH infrastructure.

So once the ore falls to about 160g/stack or so I'll fill up a bank tab and an alt's bank with mining bags for it. The draw to this is the absolutely massive profits that can be made. We all remember the price of titanium ore go up ten fold during wrath and we have a good idea that blizz likes to stick to what worked in the past. So I think the chances of this giving epic gems in the future is very likely. If not I'm going to lose an ass ton. This is leaps and bounds the largest investment and risk that I've ever taken. Exhilarating ain't it?


Glyphs. I seem to remember reading that blizz didn't want to add in glyphs for the new skills until people have had a chance to play with them as they were designed first. I could easily be wrong on this, so if you know otherwise or know the source of this feel free to say so. However it would also be very strange of them to add all of these nifty new skills that were designed in the interest of fun and not give us a chance to add any flavor to them. If I could glyph a boomkin's muchrooms to look like the extra cartoony version of the ones from super mario I totally would. Or double the damage of necrotic strike and remove the healing debuff. There's a lot they can do with any of them.

That being said I'm sure they'll add in a few down the line, but the question is how will we go about getting them? Will they be just vendor sold recipes or will they add in a new glyph research or book for us scribes to grab? Who knows. But after that we need to guess what inks they'll need, and my guess is that they'll all need the new black fallow inks to be crafted. I'm basing this entirely on the fact that that's what the warrior glyph needs. That and they're new with cata so it would make sense that they need new herbs.

So that means that I'm going to start stokpiling cata inks to craft a ton of these. Once they come out, and I'm positive that they will, the demand for them will be enormous. That demand will siphon all of the ink supply and drive the prices sky high. There's a lot of room to make some profit here be it from the glyphs themselves or ink or the herbs. What are your thoughts?


Thanks for stopping by!

Silly tricks

NOTE: I was refereed to a great blog from Anaalius' blog called trading with zoxy. The post that was brought to my attention was about the addOn MySales. It's a great tool to keep track of your sales per character among other things. I highly recommend both the addOn and their blog.


A few tricks for you all today that will appeal to your inner troll. These are some things that you can pull while on your bankers and working the AH to really throw off the competition. Everything from the silly poke in the side to really driving your serious competitors crazy. I'm mentioning these things because they're all small little tools to get rid of those pesky AH campers and intruding goblins. As with the deep undercutting strategy the only way you can get rid of them is if they're either unable to compete or are too frustrated. Here's some ideas that can help with the latter.


1. Stay logged on until wow automatically disconnects you.
I do this every day and night and it's damned effective. After a while the campers will realize that you're not going to give up and rather than spam undercut you only for you to undercut by a few gold they wait until you log off. This will make them hang around for another 20 minutes or however long it takes before you're auto booted. This makes them spend a significant amount of extra time not making any money with no effort from you.


2. Cancel undercuts but don't repost until later
Same reasoning as above, but more to cause confusion. They'll start thinking that they've missed you or, if you're lucky, that you've given up for the day and they'll stop camping for the time being. Meanwhile you come back 20 minutes later and undercut them all.


3. Never post more than a set amount
This one is actually rather important. Personally I think it's wise to hide your stokpiles of goods and only show your muscle on the AH when it is necessary. For one, you want to blend in as "oh I'm just another nobody trying to get by in this harsh war torn world." But if people see that you're willing to sell a widget for 20g but see you listing them for 200 the next they'll be more inclined to wait and not pay top coin.


4. Do 2 cancel posts within an hour
This one is more to buy you some time as it won't last forever. But when there's a new player in town this will buy you some time to notice as they'll post after you log for the day or night and call it done. You do your normal cancel/post cycle as if nothing special is going on and log off then come back a bit later and do it again. Sort of the same as the first one but slightly different. After they pick up on this you can start doing a dance of who's going to do their auctions when trying to come in just before or just after somebody logs off.


5. Do you AH'ing right next to them at the exact same time
Now this one will definitely appeal to your inner troll and get you a few spiteful laughs if nothing else. I remember doing this several times in the JC market when somebody would come in with a few stacks of gems and try to get in on the market that I owned. I would sit and wait right next to them before I took my turn of doing a cancel/post and do little wave and hug emotes. Then say in /s channel that they were undercut by 20g. It's evil, I know.

(This one comes from Kemmler's comment below)
6. One trick I use that wasn't on your list is what I call the "10th slot alt". I roll, cancel and re-roll a 10th slot alt every few days. It only takes a minute to send him to SW. Then I can use my inventory through that alt to wage deep undercutting against the deep undercutters or bleed a few silver lower postings from my competition.

For the deep undercutters, they usually bite and undercut my alt so I can buy their stock with my main--just to add salt into the wound. The few silver below doesn't do anything but irritate them and create the illusion of more competition in a market than there really is. Gives them something else to think about.


Thanks for stopping by!

The new list (Cataclysm)

Voila! The fabled master list of Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny is here at last! I said a while ago that I was working on it and I think it's finally complete enough to share. The most noteworthy change between this list and the previous one (aside from the obvious cata stuff) is that the vanilla enchants of healing power and 30sp are no longer good investments with the change to intellect. So far I have sold only a pair of healing power and 30sp scrolls. If you already have the recipe great, but don't go dropping 10k on it. Yet all of the NR enchants are still going strong.

As before, this is a simple list of everything that is worth selling that I'm currently dealing in. Nothing special and no explanations, just a massive list of all that is profitable. Apparently I've set a trend with this so called "master list" thing. Whatever you see listed here I am either crafting or having somebody craft for me to sell and it all makes a profit. Anything from 5 gold to 500 gold. If you're looking for a simple list of what you can sell to make gold, look no further.

And to answer the constant question I'm seeing all over of "what cataclysm enchants are profitable" I've marked all of the cataclysm items I sell with a star. Also I've made a note under each section how much of each of the crafted goods I try to have in stock at all times.


BLACK SMITHING
(2 rods, 2 pyrium gear, 60 buckles, 10 weapon chains)

Titanium Rod
Adamantite Rod
Ebonsteel Belt Buckle*
Elementium Rod*
Pyrium Weapon Chain*

Elementium Deathplate*
Hardened Elementium Girdle*
Hardened Elementium Hauberk*
Elementium Earthguard*
Elementium Stormshield*

Ornate Pyrium Belt*
Ornate Pyrium Boots*
Ornate Pyrium Bracers*
Ornate Pyrium Breastplate*
Ornate Pyrium Gauntlets*
Ornate Pyrium Helm*
Ornate Pyrium Legguards*
Ornate Pyrium Shoulders*

Bloodied Pyrium Boots*
Bloodied Pyrium Shoulders*
Bloodied Pyrium Helm*
Bloodied Pyrium Breastplate*
Bloodied Pyrium Gauntlets*
Bloodied Pyrium Legguards*
Bloodied Pyrium Belt*
Bloodied Pyrium Bracers*


LEATHER WORKING
(6 profession bags, 10 blue leg armors, 4 epic leg armors, 6 heavy armor kits, 4 normal armor kits, 2 armor sets)

Heavy Borean Leather
Heavy Borean Armor Kit
Mammoth Mining Bag
Trapper's Traveling Pack
Twilight Leg Armor*
Scorched Leg Armor*
Savage Armor Kit*
Heavy Savage Armor Kit*
Dragonscale Leg Armor*
Charscale Leg Armor*
Icescale Leg Armor
Earthen Leg Armor
Frosthide Leg Armor

Bloodied Leather Belt*
Bloodied Leather Boots*
Bloodied Leather Bracers*
Bloodied Leather Chest*
Bloodied Leather Shoulders*
Bloodied Leather Helm*
Bloodied Leather Legs*
Bloodied Leather Gloves*


ALCHEMY
(20 NR level metas, 80 cata level metas, 100 inferno ruby, 100 ember topaz)

Transmute: Shadowspirit Diamond*
Transmute: Living Elements*
Transmute: Inferno Ruby*
Transmute: Ember Topaz*


MISCELLANEOUS
(40 bars, 8 stacks of food)

Beer-Basted Crocolisk
Copper Rod
Smelt Hardened Elementium*
Titansteel Bar

VENDOR PETS
(4 of each pet)

Obsidian Hatchling
Albino Snake
Calico Cat
Blue Dragonhawk Hatchling
Brown Rabbit Crate
Cat Carrier (Siamese)
Mana Wyrmling
Parrot Cage (Senegal)
Red Moth Egg
Winterspring Cub*


JEWEL CRAFTING
Misc.
(40 wires)

Delicate Copper Wire

Jewelery
Jasper Ring*
Carnelian Spikes*


Green*
(4 of each)

Steady Dream Emerald
Puissant Dream Emerald
Regal Dream Emerald
Sensei's Dream Emerald
Piercing Dream Emerald
Vivid Dream Emerald
Nimble Dream Emerald
Zen Dream Emerald

Red*
(6 of each)

Brilliant Inferno Ruby
Bold inferno Ruby
Precise Inferno Ruby
Delicate Inferno Ruby

Yellow*
(6 of each)

Quick amber jewel
Fractured amberjewel
Mystic Amberjewel
Smooth Amberjewel
Subtle Amberjewel

Purple*
(4 of each)

Timeless Demonseye
Accurate Demonseye
Etched Demonseye
Glinting Demonseye
Guardian's Demonseye
Purified Demonseye
Shifting Demonseye
Sovereign Demonseye
Veiled Demonseye
Retaliating Demonseye
Defender's Demonseye

Orange*
(4 of each)

Artful Ember Topaz
Fierce Ember Topaz
Inscribed Ember Topaz
Keen Ember Topaz
Polished Ember Topaz
Potent Ember Topaz
Reckless Ember Topaz
Resolute Ember Topaz
Adept Ember Topaz
Willful Ember Topaz
Deft Ember Topaz
Fine Ember Topaz
Skillful Ember Topaz

Blue*
(6 of each)

Stormy Ocean Sapphire
Solid Ocean Sapphire
Rigid Ocean Sapphire

Meta
(6 of each)

Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond*
Burning Shadowspirit Diamond*
Agile Shadowspirit Diamond*
Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamond*
Austere Shadowspirit Diamond*
Eternal Shadowspirit Diamond*
Ember Shadowspirit Diamond*
Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond*
Revitalizing Shadowspirit Diamond*
Relentless Earthsiege Diamond
Insightful Earthsiege Diamond
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond
Austere Earthsiege Diamond


INSCRIPTION
(3 of each)

Ink of the sea Glyphs


TAILORING
(40 netherweave bags, 10 gem bags, 10 imbued nether bags, 10 rare spell threads, 4 epic spell threads)

Netherweave Bag
Powerful Ghostly Spellthread*
Powerful Enchanted Spellthread*
Bag of Jewels
Imbued Netherweave Bag


ENGINEERING
(20 bombling and smokey pets, 6 world destroyers, 5 yeti, 10 de-weaponized pets, 40 fused wiring, 2 choppers)

Pet Bombling
Lil' Smoky
Fused wiring
Personal World Destroyer*
Tranquil Mechanical Yeti
De-Weaponized Mechanical Companion*
Mechano-Hog


ENCHANTING
(4 of each scroll, 1 of each maelstrom scroll)

Enchant Weapon - Berserking
Enchant Gloves - Armsman
Enchant Weapon - Mighty Spellpower
Enchant Weapon - Mongoose

Enchant Chest - Greater Stats
Enchant Weapon - Crusader
Enchant Weapon - Lifestealing
Enchant Weapon - Mighty Intellect

Enchant Weapon - Agility
Enchant Weapon - Strength
Enchant Chest - Major Health
Enchant Weapon - Fiery Weapon

Enchant 2H Weapon - Agility
Enchant Weapon - Icy Chill
Enchant Boots - Minor Speed
Enchant Weapon - Unholy Weapon

Enchant staff - Greater spellpower
Enchant - Hurricane*
Enchant chest - Major mana
Enchant off hand - Superior Intellect*

Enchant bracer - Precision*
Enchant boots - Precision*
Gloves - Precision
Enchant weapon - Black magic

2H - Massacre
Gloves - Armsman
Weapon - Deathfrost
Chest - POWER STATS!

Bracers - Speed*
Bracer - Superior spellpower
Boots - Haste*
Chest - Mighty stats*

Gloves - Haste*
Boots - Tuskar's vitality
Shield - Major Stamina
Enchant Shield - Greater Stamina

Gloves - Crusher
Cloak - Stealth
Enchant Boots - Earthen Vitality
Enchant Cloak - Wisdom

Enchant 2H Weapon - Mighty Agility
Enchant Weapon - Exceptional Agility
Enchant Weapon - Blade Ward
Enchant Chest - Stats

Enchant Weapon - Major Spellpower
Enchant Weapon - Major Intellect
Enchant Weapon - Soulfrost
Enchant Gloves - Superior Agility

Enchant Bracer - Dodge*
Enchant Gloves - Major Spellpower
Enchant Boots - Mastery*
Enchant Gloves - Mastery*

Enchanted Lantern
Enchant Cloak - Major Agility
Enchant Chest - Mighty Resilience
Enchant Gloves - Major Agility

Enchant Boots - Major Agility*
Enchant Boots - Assassin's Step*
Enchant Boots - Lavawalker*
Enchant Bracer - Agility*

Enchant Bracer - Greater Critical Strike*
Enchant Bracer - Greater Speed
Enchant Bracer - Major Strength*
Enchant Bracer - Mighty Intellect*

Enchant Chest - Greater Stamina
Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats*
Enchant Cloak - Greater Critical Strike*
Enchant Gloves - Greater Mastery*

Enchant Gloves - Mighty Strength*
Enchant Weapon - Landslide*
Enchant Weapon - Power Torrent*
Enchant Weapon - Windwalk*

Enchant Weapon - Executioner
Enchant Cloak - Titanweave
Enchant Shield - Lesser Block
Enchant Boots - Greater Agility

Enchant Boots - Agility
Enchant Weapon - Mighty Spirit
Enchant Bracer - Exceptional Spirit
Enchant Chest - Exceptional Spirit*

Enchant Boots - Greater Spirit
Enchant Weapon - Icebreaker
Enchant Gloves - Minor Haste
Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed

Enchant Chest - Super Stats
Enchant Gloves - Blasting
Enchant - Heartsong*
Enchant Boots - Surefooted

Enchant Gloves - Agility
Enchant Cloak - Lesser Agility
Enchant Boots - Greater Stamina
Enchant Bracer - Deflection

Enchant Bracer - Greater Stamina
Enchant Bracer - Greater Strength
Enchant Weapon - Superior Potency
Enchant Weapon - Greater Potency

Enchant Weapon - Potency
Enchant Weapon - Blood Draining
Enchant Bracer - Superior Stamina
Enchant Cloak - Lesser Agility

Enchant Shield - dodge
Enchant Chest - Greater Dodge
Enchant Cloak - Superior Defense


Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 1-25

NOTE: If you've ever wondered why my weekly reports are so long it's because they, well, cover an entire week. As the week goes by I write into a draft entry what I'm doing, buying, noticing and so forth. Then once the weekend comes around I edit it around and such in case I contradict myself or get an idea Monday, write about that, then go with it and make a decision on it Friday. In other words, they're as close to live moment to moment market updates that I can give.


Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them with up to date market observations in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.

Previous week total gold: 517,000
Current gold total: 582,000
Total sales: 231,000
Weekly profit: 65,000
Amount spent on Stokpiling: 161,000


Break down by profession
------------------------
Gems, LW, & misc: 46,000
Tailoring & vendor pets: 16,000
Enchanting & smithing: 113,000
Glyphs & inscription: 36,000
Engineering & mining: 20,000


Notice the new additions to the professions? That's right, I'm starting to work glyphs and enggy gets it's own section now that it's making me some noticeable bank. Same goes with mining as it's worth mentioning due to it's profit even though it's not technically a crafting profession and only works in material conversions.

And holy mother of dog shit have I been stokpiling this week! Read on!

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
My constant ever present M.O. has always been to stokpile as much and as often as possible. And that has never been more prevalent than now. I must have bought a few thousand ore to shuffle around. And I'm on one of those weird servers where it's 100g/stack and DE'ing anything but the spikes is a loss. I've also dropped at least 10 grand on volt life in anticipation of the patch and new alchemy trinkets. With all of the prospecting I've got about 80 raw metas hanging around. I really hope the new cuts are fairly easy to farm up.

I also sold out of the old enggy pets and spent another few thousand on mats to craft 30 of each. I also am starting to stokpile inks again as I'm finding that late at night is when a few stacks of old world herbs show up for good prices. Also on the prospecting note, I'm going to need at least another week or two so that I can move all of the common gems I have that aren't metas. I bought tons this week that's going to take me a while to move.

srsly.

I managed to finally sell the enchanting horde pet for a small 200g profit. Considering the time it took to sell I'm not going to bother with it as the materials are still falling slowly. I would imagine that it can fetch top coin on the neutral AH though. At the start of the week I ran out of infinite dust and had to go back to DE'ing old WotLK JC rings. But when I ran out of abyss crystals that basically put a halt to that market. I've since increased my buying price to ensure that I can stay in the market. Some profit is better than no profit after all.

I've also been having some good profit from shuffling obsidium ore as I detailed in yesterday's entry. I have a stock of 2 stacks of raw metas that I'm holding onto while the rest are selling for an easy 80g profit. I'm still banking on being able to acquire the new meta gem cuts soon after the patch comes. But if not I can still make the money back with selling current meta cuts and raw gems easily.

Later on in the week I decided to pick up a round of vendor pets from the stormspire out in the nether storm. I set my mage's hearth right next to the vendor hoping to get my full mini pet business back into full speed once again, especially now that the high end enggy pets are going well. I wound up selling about a dozen of them at close to my max price by the end of the week. Good call on my part.

Also I've sold a pair of Elementium Deathplates this week, one for 10k and the other for 12k. That makes it 3 sold for over 10k at roughly 3,000 gold profit on each in a 2 week span. A very good profit margin as truegold is down to about 750 each and people are "selling" their orbs for 200-250 in trade while crafting for others. It seems that once again epic dps plate is a great seller. Thank you goblin death knights? Suffice to say, anytime I wind up with 3 orbs I'll be crafting one of these right away.

I'm finally getting back into the glyph business, not nearly as hard core as I was during WotLK. Due to the changes in how you can convert inks it's far more complex than it was before. To ensure that you're not losing money you basically have to buy herbs of each level to get your inks. Instead of buying a million of the newest ones and trading them down at the ink vendor you have to mill them all individually which makes for a lot of extra time. Add into that the constant lack of supply and high prices of them and it just isn't worth it for me anymore.

The NR level herbs are still around in a good supply now and then so it's even more important to stokpile them than before as supply dries up often. This also means that the total income from glyphs will be a lot smaller than it could be since I'm only working with IotS glyphs. But with the new high prices on glyphs it gives the potential for some really huge nights of selling. In fact on my first night of selling I pulled in over 5k gold from glyphs alone. Not bad for a one night stand. Towards the end of the week I started watching the supply and just said the hell with it and started making glyphs of all kinds when I could.

I finally managed to come into a huge supply of ore to prospect, so much so that I dropped a whopping 6k in a single night. That sure took some time to sift through. But it's all good, I managed to walk away with a dozen red rare gems, 50 greater essences, 6 blue necks, and almost a stack of every other color rare gem. In fact I wound up buying so much assorted goodies that night that I did several cancel/post cycles in a row because I kept getting more and more stuff to craft and sell in addition to numerous gem cuts being sold out.

I'm apparently being camped on my vendor pets market. So much so that they're down to 80g each and as low as 60 the following night. Why you'd camp this of all the markets out there is beyond me. I find it hard to believe that it's that profitable. Maybe they want the laughs all to themselves? Maybe they got offended at me laughing incessantly at the idiots that pay 500% more than the vendor cost and want to stop the mean man from doing laughing at people that don't (should) know better? Who knowsh highlander!

I'm starting to consider leveling up inscription high enough to craft the boe blue relics. I currently have him leveled up just enough to make the new warrior glyph and that's just from making fortune cards which I'd make anyways. I won't have to level my warrior as my other toons can buy the vendor reagents and just mail them off which is a plus. There's that and it would be nice to be able to say that I have all professions running at their maximum potential. But blah, warriors, blah inscription. Lots of effort.

After leveling up my shaman and maxing out mining I was finally able to smelt a ton of cheap pyrium ore I've been piling up so I can have a decent supply of buckles on hand. And by the time Saturday rolled around I had already sold off the 3 stacks that I had crafted. The same goes for elementium rods as most of the BS people out there have finished dumping their rods. The added benefit of being able to make hardened elementium bars which are selling for 20-80g profit depending on the
time of day.

I'm stokpiling volatile life as well because when the next patch comes there will be 3 new epic alchemist stones which requires (along with a few herbs) 50 volatile life. They'll each have a primary attribute of agility, strength, or intellect as the current one only has stamina. This means that oodles of alchemists out there have not crafted their stone and will be in a rush to grab the mats for their epic trinket.

Currently volt life is going for 8g and under so I'm buying up everything at that price and below in hopes of being able to double my investment by listing them in stacks of 50 when the patch comes. So far I've spent maybe 10k on them so far and I'm really hoping that I'm not just buying stuff to feed my volt air xmute for the next decade.

Last note is that I'm starting to get in on crafting the Tranquil mechanical Yeti pets. The globes of water are the hardest things to come by, but can be farmed relatively easy in un'goro crater and I'm told they get fished up fairly easily also. They sell currently for 400g each give or take and that's almost 300g profit. I actually went out and farmed the materials for my initial pair as I only had a few of the elementals on hand. One sold that night and the second sold the next morning. There isn't a lot of competition selling these for two reason.

The first being the obscurity of the materials, I mean globe of water? Come on, most people don't even know what that thing is, let alone what it's used for. The second is the sheer complexity of the materials needed which is why most enggy pets sell so well to begin with. The plans for the pet are learned by an easy quest chain in winter spring started by this goblin. Here's the material break down to craft one.

- 2 Globe of water

- 4 Thorium widget:
12 thorium bar
4 runecloth

- Cured rugged hide (requires 250 LW):
Rugger hide
Refined deeprock salt [deeprock salt, needs salt shaker]


- 2 Truesilver transformer:
4 truesilver bar
4 elemental earth
2 elemental air

- Gold power core:
Gold bar (makes 3 per craft)



Thanks for stopping by!

Back to the shuffle

NOTE: I found a screenshot of the vendor that sells crafting mats for justice points. Check it out here. Note that the sack of herbs is a stack of a random cata level herb. As always don't get what you need, get the most valuable.


Since everybody seems to be giving their take on the new "obsidium shuffle" I suppose it's my turn. However I keep seeing people missing a few key points that I want to bring to light. The main thing is the sale price of raw common gems. Plain and simple gems fresh from the prospecting. But first here's the low down on how the shuffle works.

First you buy a ton of ore and prospect it. You cut and AH the rare gem with your most profitable cuts. And by using the common gems for assorted other things, the rare gems are pure profit. Here’s all of the things you can do with them.

3x of each color = 2 meta gems
2x any color = DE green JC jewelry = 1-2 dust
2x any color rare proc = blue JC jewelry to auction off
3x red gems for carnelian spikes to de = 2-3 greater celestial essences
Turn the DE’d mats into scrolls or sell them as is.
Cut and vendor common gems for 9g

Using my server’s prices where the ore is at 100g/stack. You will usually get on average from a single stack 1 rare gem and 5 common gems. You of course can only get 4 commons but I've found that to be quite rare and luck is not usually in my favor with these kinds of things. At that price a single common gem sold on the AH for 18g almost entirely covers the cost of prospecting. Anything more than that is profit.

First there's the choice to vendor the cut gems if for some reason obsidium ore is insanely low. I read on another gold blogger's post that 54g is the lowest that the ore should be sold for as that's the average price of the cut common gems you'd get from a vendor. For the life of me I can't remember where, I think I found the link on Cold's blog. Ok enough of me rambling and failing at memory.

After that you can turn the commons into meta gems. The xmute requires 3 of each color common gem and max alchemy to do and always gives you 2 meta gems and has no CD at all. Currently metas are getting anywhere from 20g to 200g profit depending on the cut. They can also be sold raw if you don't have the cuts learned yet. Or you can stokpile them all for when the new BoU recipes are released with the patch which every single DPS class should be looking for. Personally I'm trying to find a good balance between selling raw meta gems and hording some for the patch. Since common are worth 18g each on average, a meta costs 180g to make before mastery comes into play. This price is important to keep in mind when deciding what to do with all of the commons.

Other than metas you can do what I'm currently experimenting with and that's just selling the common gems raw. At 20g a piece (18ish after AH cut) that pays for the 5 ore you bought to prospect it, a loss of something like a single golden coin or less from the AH cut. However gems can dip down to 15 but more often than not they're in the 30ish range for a few. Namely the ones used in the JC power leveling guide on wow professions like hessonites. That combined with the blue, purple, and greens for JC dailys you more than make you money back from selling raw common gems. The odd rare gem you get here and there is an easy 100g of pure profit after you cut and sell it.

And lastly are the carnellian spikes that I mentioned before to DE. Even after a sharp decline in the price of essences, this is still pure profit. So the potential profits on average from each method after paying 80g for 1 stack of obsidium are as follows:

5 non blue or green gems sold raw, 140g
or
1 rare gem and 3 non blue or green commons, 190g
or
1 random common and 3x carnellian turned into spikes = 2 greater celestial essence, 150g
or
3x of all colors turned into a meta, 360g


The obvious problem with the above is that you never know what colors of gems that you'll get. That's the only thing that makes turning them into metas sketchy. But the ability to do more than just vendor them is very alluring. Being able to fuel the meta gem market and enchanting market at the same time is just great.

Then there is the JC made jewelry for DE and sale purposes. For me I only make alicite necks because the raw gems don't sell much at all so there's nothing else I can do with such an abundance of them. Unfortunately this is only recouping a loss as 40g for a necklace for me turns into 20g in dust. Sometimes you can proc a rare quality neck that can fetch upwards of 100g but only if it has desirable stats on it. I tend to shy away from counting on luck.

The other necks and rings are also at a large loss of profit when DE'd because purples are almost always 25g and up, the same with greens. So those I recommend selling raw or using in meta gems. The main point I'm trying to make here is explore all of your options before going off what anybody says, regardless of how well they're doing with it. YMMV plays a large roll in everything.

Usually though I seem to get a ton of one color and I'll sell down to a multiple of 3 since metas and spikes need 3 gems. After that if I have a bunch of carnelians still but am low on celestials I'll make the spikes. This prospecting game is all about balance this time around and not luck nearly as much since you're basically promised a profit with each click. How has your luck been with prospecting?


Thanks for stopping by!

Auction House Nirvana: Part 3

NOTE: For those of you wondering about the glyph market like I am, I found an -amazing- article on it that helps you out with buying prices, inks, etc in a very simple format. check it out here. Though take the blackfallow ink trade in part with a grain of salt.



Part 3: The Application
In case I've lost some of you already here's a short recap:

- You want to be priced high enough that you get the most profit
- Priced low enough that people won't think too long about buying
- Low enough that it won't attract too much attention
- Listed in the buyers "expected" price range


A lot of this is based on the mentality of your customers and a lot is based on the potential goblins lurking around. You don't want the goblins to notice the large profit margins and you can try to hide this by cleaning the AH of all the materials regularly. What this will do is cause people that are farming them to list them at a very high price since they think that nobody is selling them.

An example of this is netherweave and frostweave. One day there will be two pages of it dirt cheap and the next day there's 3 stacks at 100g (yes I'm aware that almost everyone knows that these bags are a great market). Now by buying up all of the cheap netherweave every chance you get accomplishes several things.

First you raise the price as the demand is there but after you bought everything the supply is not so the prices go up. This will attract attention of people questing in outlands and the farmers. They'll start listing things that lowers the price, thus giving you more of a stokpile.

Secondly, anybody that's thinking of getting into that market will see the high priced materials more often than not and think that it's not profitable to get into. That removes the bulk of potential competitors. Even your average goblin will fall for this if they're not doing their homework live I've said to do many a time.

And lastly, anybody that wants to buy the bags will have to go through you and you get to set the toll. This is because as far as they know the current high prices won't go down for a while if at all and they need their bags now.

Those are the things you need to keep balance with. Don't drive away too many people, don't raise prices too much, let them fall so you can stokpile all the cheap materials to craft your widgets and repeat the cycle. Once you manage to get this rhythm down in your market of choice you'll have learned the hardest part of the AH game. This is when you can truly say that you've mastered your markets. Finding that happy medium where you have just enough interest in people farming and not too much to draw serious competition in selling is the way you can guarantee yourself a future of wealth in wow.

I hope I explained what this so called "middle ground" theory is all about in a way that you all can understand. It took a decent amount of thought to really spell it all out so some smaller pieces might have gotten lost in the shuffle. Take what you've learned and see if you're at a point where you can apply it. Good luck and as always...


Thanks for stopping by!

Auction House Nirvana: Part 2

NOTE: A new version of the patch notes is up on wowhead. A notable change for the AH players is that xmute pyrium bar will only need 1 volt earth and 1 elementium bar. So depending on your server's prices this might become profitable to do.


Part 2: The explanation
It will be different for every server and every market and it will change constantly. It is another fine example of the butterfly effect where a small shift in one market may completely rearrange the middle ground of another one. Experience is absolutely paramount here. You may think of this as a cop out, but when you have been playing the AH for a while you can just "feel" when these shifts will happen and you can notice where the middle ground is on instinct.

If you're thinking to yourself that I haven't really told you what the middle ground is yet you're right I haven't.

What the so called middle ground is, is a point where your maximum sale price is high enough to milk every last copper from the buyer, but still low enough to be ignored by most sellers. In short, it's a method of pricing. Yes I've said before that you'll never be without competition and there's no such thing as a monopoly. But what I'm talking about now is somebody that wants a share of the market, not somebody that crafts a random widget and lists a few.

Remember what I said at the beginning about you have to get to the cross roads before you can find the middle ground? That's what I'm talking about here. You don't find this spot until you've already managed to scare off most of the competition. It's not until a market is floating on it's own that you can find the right price range to sell at.

The secret is that you can draw out your dominance of that market for as long as possible. Simply put as don't get greedy. Be smart about what you sell things for and don't just throw a large number at the AH.

When looking for this middle ground you also have to forget how much gold you have piled up and ask yourself "how much would I be willing to pay for this? Is it truly worth X gold? Do a lot of people have that much to spend on it?" When crafting high end NR scrolls I think of what their high price was in WotLK and reduced it by about 100. That's because cata is still new and people are used to those scrolls being expensive even if that prices of the materials are in the gutter. They don't know because they didn't look. If they did check the material price they wouldn't be buying 4 a day every day.

However, if I was listing the scrolls at say 700g each people would start to wonder about the material price. They'd think holy crap that's a lot for an old widget, I wonder what the materials are so I can buy/farm them instead. Then they find out that I stand to make over 600g profit. But with your price being at the middle ground they think "well sure it's expensive, but it's not as bad as this other one. Plus it is a high end enchant after all so sure it's a little pricey." Then they buy it without thinking to see how much it really costs to make.

Right now you're basically playing on the customer's expectations. People expect an engagement ring to cost like 10 grand or something crazy expensive. But if you wanted to sell them one for $50 they'd think you're scamming them. But since 10k is out of their price range and they see one for say $5,000 it's a lot more reasonable. But what they don't know is that the difference in quality is actually so minute that you won't notice unless it is directly pointed out to you.

It's a common sales tactic of exploiting that fact. These days people almost always mentally translate "expensive" into "top quality." Rarely the case. Hell you can spend $15,000 on a car wash if you like, it's still not going to be that much better than the one I got last week for 20.


Continuing with this tomorrow.

Auction House Nirvana: Part 1

NOTE: When I first started to write this I had planned on it being one long entry, but it grew and grew to the point that it because a several page monstrosity. I've split it up into 3 entries to give you a day to digest what you've read in between.


Part 1: The Introduction
One expression that has been universally heard a million times too often is "find the happy middle ground." The (almost) universal response to that is "WTF are you talking about?" As you've likely guessed by now, I'm going to do my best to explain what that is and how to find this open air concept of making gold.

This middle ground is not a means to make gold or some fancy hidden secret market. It is nothing more than a method to increase your already existent cash flow. It strengthens your already firm grasp of a market. If you're just starting the AH game you have to GET to the middle ground. If you're in the thick of things, you just need to know where to stand. This middle ground is the single difference between those that are simply rich and those that are wealthy.

This middle ground is a cross roads with an expensive toll that you get to set. The cross roads is a thousand miles away from the casual farmer working on becoming the next big AH baron. You have to go a certain distance before you can get there. But once you do what you've accomplished already will be set in stone and all who wish to pass must pay your fee.

If there ever was a "true" gold making secret, this is it. But it's infinitely more abstract than anything else you'll find in the AH game. It's not a secret farming spot or an item that sells for thousands hourly. It isn't evern a method per-sé or undercutting strategy. It is an idea.


First I'm going to revisit the standard AH cycle of profitable markets.

A Widget sells for 200g each and is in high demand.

You craft and sell many Widgets a day.

People notice that you can farm a Widget easily and begin to do just that.

People begin to sell and undercut their Widgets on the AH.

A Widget now sells for 20g each.

Due to reduced profits people stop farming widgets, reducing supply.

A Widget sells for 200g each due to high demand.


Make sense? Let me explain that a little further. The basic thing here is drawing attention to yourself. When people see that something is easy money, they'll flock to it like moths to a flame. This increases the supply which in turn will lower the price. The people that just got into it will leave because the easy money is gone, reducing supply which will, that's right, raise the price.

This is the reason that I don't sell berserking scrolls for 700g each when I know for a fact that I can. This is why you should undercut by several gold at a time and not by copper. This is the middle ground you need to find.


Check in tomorrow to see how this relates to the so called middle ground and how to prevent costs from falling.

Report: 1/18

Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them with up to date market observations in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Starting gold: 425,000
End of week total: 517,000
Weekly profit: 102,000
Amount Spent on Stokpiling: 95,000
Trade skill ups: alchemy - 525, engineering - 500

Break down by profession
------------------------
Gems, LW, misc: 46,000
Tailoring, enggy pets: 23,000
Enchanting, smithing: 96,000


And another long report this week. I've been working my way back into tons of new markets and changes are happening daily so I've got a lot to say. Once my shaman is done leveling I'll have them handle the enggy and misc markets to make thigns a bit more accurate

Detailed Recap:
---------------
I dropped another 4k on maxing out alchemy so I could do all of the transmute snazzyness which is yet another necessary investment. I'm sure that I'll more than make that up with meta gem sales once I acquire the new cuts in the patch. I also dropped about 2k or so on leveling engineering up enough to make the mini fel-reaver. I figured they've been going for a few hundred over material costs and I have good luck with the older pets so I'll give it a shot. A few hours later after crafting my first pair of world destroyers I sold one for a good 150g profit and sold the other shortly after.

The bonus is each one crafted gives me 5 skill ups so it's a nice way to max out engineering if you're interested. But even better than that was me logging on the following morning and seeing that I've sold 4 of them for 150g profit each. The fact that I listed them for 600g below the only other seller probably helped that a bit. I've since raised the price to 1,000g in hopes that they'll stay a hot commodity at that price. I'm going to look into finding a gnome that can make their version and have a pair made to test the waters. If their sales are as good as the fel reaver I'll be back for another dozen.

I also leveled engineering because it was a good excuse to level my enhance shaman and skill up mining at the same time. Hardened elementium is regularly going for at least 50g over material cost so this may be a good way to make some easy money with any extra elementium bars that I pick up.

With JC it seems that the obvious gems are still obvious. Strength and intellect are once again fetching a high profit with equally high competition leading to large price swings. While this is great for a small boost of income, it's not for those that want high consistent profits due to the massive amount of competitors out there. They don't have to be goblins, just a jeweler that happens to know a str/int gem cut and they list tons of them every day. The key here is to watch closely as there will be luls here and there in sales. What I do is keep a pair cut and have my threshold set around 170g rather than my normal 15% minimum profit.

Because of this my best gems have been the off the beaten path gem cuts, especially mixed colors. Artful topaz is a great seller and has been going for triple the raw gem price lately. The same goes for blue hit gems and yellow haste gems. After doing a significant amount of reading on EJ it seems that any DPS class that buys a haste or crit gem are definitely Doin' it wrong (tm). But hey who am I to judge? They make me rich and I'm completely ok with that. I think my next pick will be puissant green gem thingy. I got a number of green rare gems and have to off load them somewhere.

I ended up buying the cuts for haste and mastery and even though they have lower sale prices, are the most consistent sales I have in gems. Once I get a handful more cuts this is truly going to be a profession to rival my enchanting market I can see it now.

Prospecting has been going shockingly well. Buying ore at 90g/stack is either a huge over all profit or at worst, a 1g loss. The raw gems are going for on average 18g and change with some going for 80. Red commons double their value by turning them into greater celestials. And any spares I get are turned into meta gems with alchemy.

Speaking of alchemy, I'm finding that xmuting elements is a far better investment than truegold. Life goes for about 5g while volt air (while xmuting in uldum) goes for 30-40 and is also used for hurricane scrolls. The scrolls give me up to 200 profit each and the xmute itself triples my investment. The truegold mats only leave me with about 200g profit with no procs and that's as high as I can usually sell a CD for. Unless you're notorious for tons of procs, take another look at what you use your xmute CD on. I personally prefer a higher profit margin than a higher item price tag.

Leg armors have been in a real flux lately with the changing prices on savage leather so I backed off of those for a little while. They're being crafted a ton, but sell just as often so it's more a matter of when to sell rather than if. The profession bags are still going strong with the exception of pack of endless pockets which I've stopped crafting. I never made any during wrath because it was a highly crafted item to level LW. I tried it again with cata as there were none on the AH for several days and decided to give it a shot. Thus far I've only sold one for 37g and another for 80g while the rest sell for up to 150 a piece. So I'll be keeping a single one crafted for the odd times where prices go up and I can catch a nice profit.

The volatiles are slowly starting to creep down in price from 20g to holding steady at 15ish with a few going steady at 10 and under. So I'm going to be using most of them for dream cloth CD's until they level off before I start to stokpile them again. The earths seem to be a major "choke point" in that so many things use them be it for skilling up or for gear enhancements at 85. As such whenever I see these at 10g I buy everything I can but never a copper more. Granted I only use them for a few things personally, but I use them a lot.

Belt buckles are flying off the shelves at a nifty 50-150g profit which is sucking up my supply of volt earths along with the dream cloth requiring 30 of them. I'm still not getting into crafting elementium rods as those are still getting dumped and the bars are going up and down almost hourly.

However out of curiosity I bought a few extra stacks of bars when they were low as they're needed for buckles and made a pair of rods. I set my threshold price high then lo and behold they sold that night for 150g profit. I looked and there was only one other person selling them. So I'll be keeping a pair on me for when that happens. I also crafted an elementium deathplate with the orbs I've acquired through my daily heroics to see how that does. I know the crafted epics were huge sellers back in WotLK so I figure I'll give this a go. Especially since orbs are BoP there's nothing else I can do with them.

The epic dps plate chest wound up selling for a 400g profit 2 days later while the rods are selling for a good profit only when there aren't others on the AH. So I'm expecting the elementium rods to be another hot selling item once people are done dumping what they have. I'm getting tempted to try and flip all the ones I see that are under material cost since mine are starting to sell regularly.

As for tailoring, bags sell the moment I list them but the spell threads are too risky to craft for the same reason as the new enchanting rod is. However WotLK epic threads are going well as are the new epic ones made with dream cloth. I've stopped crafting frost bags because the dust needed is for one, non-existent, and for two simply give me a much higher return with enchanting. So tailoring is still a niche market profession. If you can get a firm hold on the market it's all you'll ever need to get by but won't make your filthy rich.

Enchanting scrolls are starting to come down in price and materials are in the process of leveling off instead of plummeting. This is a good thing as I've got plenty of dust to use and the only worthwhile enchants barely use any of it. I'm hoping that the dumped scrolls will either be bought or dropped soon to open up a few dozen more things for me to sell in this market. Still having great fun with the NR enchants and a few select twink scrolls. Sadly essence of air is -still- non existent and the drop rate is still absurdly low. Such a shame because they sell
for over 300g each.


Thanks for stopping by!

The Method

Quick tip before things get underway. A new update in the patch notes says that trade goods will be purchasable with justice points. Expect a a short flux and drop in their prices as people cash in. Aside from that start saving up yours in case there's some decent conversion rates. So don't DE or vendor off hand items for the time being.


It's been a good amount of time since I got back into the AH game so it's high time I wrote about what I call "the method." This is my daily process starting from when I log in until I'm done with the AH for the day for running my AH business like a well oiled machine. No special market tips or high price items will be mentioned, just the most efficient process that I've come up with that works for me. Everybody needs to have a routine to be efficient at what they do, human beings are creatures of habit after all. When reading this try to find ways that you can improve your own routine or merely set one up if you haven't already.

Firstly, you'll notice that I cancel my auctions often in this process and do multiple cancel/post cycles for the same banker. This is because like many other AH barons, I have a personal fleet of dedicated campers. If they're not camping me personally they're just camping that particular market. I do a lot of cancels to throw them off and think that I'm not going to post more just yet or at all that day. Yes this is a simple and far from fool proof tactic, but the campers typically aren't too bright and fall for it -very- often. I use this method because it's the most balance I can get between time efficiency and "hands on" time and does the most to get rid of campers and serious competitors.

As such I've made it a part of my daily routine and it has served me well for quite a while. The extra bonus of this is that it helps to drive prices down much faster without having to camp which scares off a lot of potential competitors and pisses off the campers a ton. Once prices go down to a certain point (or they're just frustrated enough) it's no longer worth the time for the campers to hang around your market all day every day and allows you to raise prices to whatever you see fit.

Now on with The Method.


First I log into my primary banker Stokpile and collect the mail. I talk to the auctioneer and do a cancel/post cycle and log out of him. Now I haven't crafted anything yet or will for a bit in case there's any campers about or people just about to post a large amount of auctions in my markets. This gives them time to undercut me and go about their other business while I continue with my routine.

After that if I notice that I've sold any vendor pets I'll port over to Dalaran on a different toon and buy another set of them to mail over to Stokpile. Otherwise I continue on and log into my other bankers and do the same thing of collect the mail and cancel/post.

When I get onto my enchanter I que them up for the daily random heroic and instead of instantly collecting the mail with a get all, I look for what's sold so far. When I see a sold enchanted scroll I craft one of those before I collect the mail. This is how I keep track of what scrolls I need to make because I can't see how many I have in my trade skill window tool tips. Once I've crafted a replacement scroll for all of the ones that have sold I collect all of her mail and go to the auctioneer for another cancel/post. While I'm waiting in line for a random dungeon, I'll start buying materials that I know I need. I total up how much I've spent and send a mail over to my buying toon of how much I've spent so far. After the dungeon is done I'll go to the justice vendor and spend whatever JP I have if I can afford anything.

After that I log onto my JC/LW toon.

First I open the mail and see how much I "owe" my enchanter and mail that much gold to them. I keep a set amount of gold to buy so I can keep track of just how much I spend on a weekly basis which will tip me off if I'm doing something wrong. I do my JC daily if I haven't already and open up my JC skill menu. I look at the tool tips of all the worthwhile gem cuts I have and see if I need to make more. I always keep a set of 4 gems on Stokpile, 2 in the bags and 2 on the AH. After going through them I cut whatever gems I need and then do the same thing with LW leg armors and profession bags. I mail them in addition to any surplus of heavy leather to Stokpile and head to the auctioneer.

Then I do my daily scan of the AH to buy whatever materials I happen to need. This is the longest part of the process as there's just so much that I need to buy every day. From old world enchanting mats to cata level gems I need it all in bulk. So long as it's at or under my buying price I'll take every last scrap that I can get my mits on.

After I'm done buying I collect it all from the mailbox and start to divvy up the stokpiles. If I managed to snatch up any carnelian gems I'll go ahead and craft the JC fist weapons until I've used them all up and mail those to my enchanter. Things that I don't need a lot of every day like elementium bars or borean leather I throw into the guild bank in their respective tabs. I have one for enchanting, smithing, tailoring, inks, and miscellaneous junk. Whatever doesn't go into the bank I then mail off to the appropriate crafting toon.

After that I get to the crafting. I log onto the JC/LW last (as they're the primary crafter) so that the altoHolic database updates with what my other toons have in their bags and on the AH. I go through each of the profitable gems I cut in my skill window and mouse over the icon to get the tool tip. I then craft enough of that item so that I own 4 total of each cut, 2 for the AH and 2 to keep on hand. I found that having only 2 up is a good balance so that I don't lose a lot over AH deposits when something is undercut or goes unsold and enough so that if there's a buyer that needs a few of them I get more than a single sale. For things that sell in groups like bags for instance, I'll list upwards of 4 at a time.

Then I do the same with my LW goods but I keep a set of 8 profession bags instead of the normal 4.

I log off of them and onto my tailor. I pull any extra netherweave bags out of the guild bank I need and craft replacement spellthreads. I do the final cancel/post cycle on them. If I happen to be out of netherweave bags I'll ignore this for now as they take so long to craft. Once I log off for the day or will be afk for a while is when I'll start to mass craft bolts of netherweave and the bags.

After the tailor comes Stokpile who handles the gem and LW business. I log onto them and cancel anything that was undercut already which is usually about 10 gems so far. I collect the mail and relist my wares at another undercut which at this point had driven the price of gems that I'm selling by 10g plus what my competitors undercut me by.

Once he is finished I hop back onto my enchanter/smith and do another cancel session before collecting the mail. After the mail box is empty I will disenchant any greens that I've mailed over to her. Then I go to the guild bank and look in the smithing tab to see if I need any more enchanting rods. If necessary I'll take out the required materials to craft another set of 10 belt buckles if I sold a bunch that previous night.

After all of that I go back to the auctioneer and do a final cancel of undercut enchanting scrolls, collect the mail, and post all of their wares. When crafting scrolls, I have a different "stack size" for each scroll which I base on numerous things. For rare enchants like 30sp or mighty int, I'll only list 1 at a time to keep up with the "it's rare therefore expensive" mentality. For other things like mighty stats or hurricane, I'll list 2-4 at once. For enchanting rods I only post 2 of each, mostly due to bag space, and list 4 buckles at once as they tend to sell often.

Finally if this happens to be Monday night or Tuesday morning, I'll go through all of my banker toons and deposit all of their gold except for 5k into the guild bank. This helps me keep track of what markets are doing well and what ones need to be looked over again. After that I withdraw enough gold to have 100k on my buying toon and make a note of how much I've spent stokpiling that week.


And that as they say is that. My ideal times to do this are at 11am and 11pm server time so that makes my AH cycle happen twice a day. That's because those are the general times that people are out questing, farming, doing chain instance runs and when raids typically start to let out. But since I don't live on the game (contrary to popular belief on Ysera) I don't always hit those times try as I might. With my work schedule being what it is and the fact that I sleep every other day it seems I'm generally missing the prime time AH sales. Once all of that is done I hop onto whatever toon I want to play and go about my business of giving wow the business. The whole process takes maybe an hour give or take per cycle.

I hope you learned something and have a bit more insight as to what an accomplished wow millionaire does when they first log on. If I only did the cancel, craft, post cycles it would be more like 20-30 minutes at most. But it's the buying and sorting of materials that takes up the bulk of my time which I don't mind that much at all. It's always fun to say...

"Look at this stuff! Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you say my collection's complete? I've got gadgets and gizmos a-plenty. I've got whozits and whatzits galore. You want thingamabobs? I've got twenty!"

Ok that's enough of the little mermaid for today.


Thanks for stopping by!

Looking for a guest post

Since I started this whole blogering thing I've heard a lot of people talk about auctionator yet haven't found the time to try it out. It's obviously a great tool with so many accomplished people singing it's praises and I'm sure that I'm certainly not the only one that's in the dark about it. So there's a lot of people that stand to gain from a walk through for it, myself included. I also have not had a guest entry before so I'm sure you can tell where I'm going with this.

Are you a pro at auctionator or similar addOns for the AH game? Want to be immortalized on this super secret yet super awesome blog? Send me an email to theahpile@gmail.com with what you've written. I'll set a tentative deadline for 2 weeks from now as next week's entry schedule of mine is full but all of the next is open and flexible.

I would prefer that you included a name but I won't require it. If you have a blog, wow related or otherwise, please include a link and a short overview of what it is and I'll be sure to add in a few plugs and pop it onto the blog roll.

As for the content, please be as detailed as possible with a step by step walk through of setting it up. Screen shots are a big plus of course. Tell us all how you use it, what you specifically use it for, and what other addOns you use in conjunction with it.


Hope to hear from you soon!

WTB... stuph

Fake post today as it's the weekend and there are no special projects going on. This is like the list of all I sell except it's everything that I buy. Mostly for my benefit so I can keep track of all the materials I need and my thresholds. Can't be expected to remember -everything- now can I? So this is everything I buy for what profession and for what price regardless of how much or little I use it.

Also note that the numbers in parenthesis are the amounts that I try and have stokpiled.

Smithing
Pyrium bars - 10g/ea (200)
Elementium bars - 5g/ea (500)
Adamantite bars - 4g/ea (200)
Eternium bars - 4g/ea (100)


Tailoring
Frozen orbs - 10g/ea (80)
Eternal life - 5g/ea (40)
Netherweave cloth - 12g/stack (everything)
Embersilk cloth - 40g/stack (1000)
Knothide leather - 3g/ea (80)


Misc.
Volatile earth - 15g/ea (400)
Volatile fire - 15g/ea (400)
Volatile water - 10g/ea (400)
Volatile life - 8g/ea (300)
Volatile air - 22g/ea (400)
Eternal air - 5g/ea (40)
Eternal fire - 10g/ea (80)


Leatherworking
Borean leather - 1g/ea (everything)
Savage leather - 3g/ea (everything)


Jewel crafting
Elementium ore - 56g/stack (everything when gems are needed)
Obsidium ore - 40g/stack (everything when gems are needed)
Carnelian - 11g/ea (everything)
Inferno ruby - 50g/ea (everything)
Pyrite ore - 120g/stack (everything)
Chalcedony - 2g/ea (40)
Blood stone - 2g/ea (40)
Dark jade - 2g/ea (40)
Huge citrine - 2g/ea (40)


Enchanting
Essence of air - 40g/ea (everything)
Large brilliant shards - 15g/ea (everything)
Mote of shadow - 2g/ea (40)
Mote of water - 10g/ea (40)
Small radiant shards - 4g/ea (40)
Essence of fire - 1g/ea (20)
Essence of water - 10g/ea (12)
Essence of undeath - 10g/ea (20)
Righteous orbs - 30g/ea (20)
Fel lotus - 2g/ea (20)
Living essence - 5g/ea (12)
Infinite dust - 60g/stack (900)
Greater cosmic essence - 6g/ea (200)
Greater planar essence - 12g/ea (100)
Arcane dust - 2g/ea (600)
Void crystals - 4g/ea (100)
Abyss crystals - 22g/ea (300)
Heavenly shards - 20g/ea (300)
Greater eternal essence - 30g/ea (everything)
Illusion dust - 4g/ea (everything)



Thanks for stopping by!

Old markets are thriving markets

NOTE: I edited in a short section on JC as I've been experimenting a bit before I wrote this entry.


Seeing as though prices on most mats are still ludicrous I figured I should write a bit on old markets that are still around and as healthy as ever. So for those of you that can't or won't make the several grand investment into working the new gems, enchants and such, this is for you. Note that I have yet to touch alchemy outside of metas and am not ready to tame the glyph monster just yet. In fact, unless herb prices -drastically- drop I probably won't be getting into glyphs at all. I'll be giving a listing of each profession and what I'm currently doing with them that doesn't require huge investment costs in leveling and materials. Enjoy.


Enchanting
This is still my favorite and most profitable market. Said it before and I'll say it again, get in on this! Twink enchants are still going strong. However there's a few new additions to this list. Mongoose and berserking scrolls are selling several a day everyday for me and more than doubling the material costs. Mongoose for 480g? Yes please. Berserking for 450? Thank you much! The only ones that are selling slow are +4 stats to chest and icy chill.

Granted icy chill was always a slow seller, but nobody else makes them so it's worth having one or two hanging around. So here's the old enchants that are selling very often. Unfortunately essence of air is basically non-existant so I can't comment on the agility scrolls, but I'm sure they're awesome as always.

Crusader
Mongoose
Berserking
1h Mighty Intellect
Major mana
Major health
Fiery
Life stealing


JC
I've been having decent sucess with NR level meta gems, this is mostly due to the high prices of current metas. Here's the ones that have been selling most often.

Insightful earthsiege
Chaotic skyflare
Eternal earthsiege
Austere earthsiege
Beaming earthsiege


Blacksmithing
I'm sure you know where I'm going with this one. Enchanting rods, fool! Still constant sellers and even more so now as there's even less competition than before. The list is short, so here's the ones that I'm selling still. Note that I'm not making elementium rods just yet as they're still selling at a loss

Eternium rod
Adamantite rod
Fel iron rod
Titanium rod


Leatherworking
As I mentioned in the conversion entry, regular to heavy is still strong along with the rest of the vendor exchanges and mining bags.

Arctic fur (bought with heavy borean)
Heavy borean leather
Heavy borean armor kits
Mammoth mining bag


Tailoring
Not much being sold here other than the obvious sadly. With the price of NR eternals down so low you can make a killing with selling the specialty cloth to people leveling tailoring through that range. And the bags of course are still impossible to keep in stock. Unfortunately bags have a retarded long crafting time.

Netherweave bags
Frostweave bags
Ebon/Spell weave cloth


Engineering
Same as before with a few small items having a solid niche market for fun and profit.

Fused wiring
Pet bombling
Lil' Smokey
Smoke flares of all colors (don't ask me why)


Ok that basically wraps it up. I'll be updating The List once I start working my way around the JC racket and see what's what there. Granted not everybody has an enchanter to make easy money, but there's still plenty of ways to generate income with other professions that don't need you to farm. I'm guessing that the markets will have normalized for the most part fairly soon with another big drop in prices a month or so later. Here's to hoping it comes sooner. Anybody else making good money with other old stuff?


Thanks for stopping by!

BOOM BANG CRASH!

The other night the enchanting materials and gem markets crashed in a few spots, namely shards and dust. Meanwhile infinite dust has rocketed up to 10g each with a few pages up. Shards have been cut in half and celestials have dropped 20g and hypnotic dust is down under 10g ea. The same thing happened with raw gems where prices are now down to 30% of what they've been for a while. I wouldn't mention a price drop if it weren't for the fact that there's tons of them in that price range with the crafted versions having a drop in price as well.

This is probably because cata has been out for a while and more stuff is getting DE'd instead of being put to use. Hell the last few heroics I've done everything got DE'd minus a single piece of gear. That leads me to believe this is happening, or is about to happen, across all of the servers. Also as more gatherers are out and about instead of leveling they're farming ore with the same thing going for skinners and herbies. So prices have taken their initial dive which means that their getting closer and closer to leveling out to their normalized prices. Even if you've been making a killing flipping and selling your over priced wares, this is still a good thing.

Oh noes what to do!?

Don't worry, I got this. With this being the seemingly new price I'm expecting that it will hold steady for a week or so before any more major drops happen. So I'm busy buying up all of the cheap stuff that I can and selling it all at the new low market values. However I'm only going to be buying a little bit more than what I need instead of creating a massive stokpile to fill my bank. Once things start to go down again little by little, I'll only buy materials as I need them instead of in advance like usual. This will prevent me from having to sell at a loss and will keep my weekly income in the black.

I suggest you do the same and keep a close watch on the market to see how prices are fluctuating on your server, but I wouldn't be surprised if you experience the same thing as I am right now. I remember once in WotLK the epic gem market crashed -hard- over a weekend on my server for no reason and the same thing happened on numerous other servers. Why these things happen I can't say with any certainty other than sheer coincidence. But when something is expected it is not beyond some measure of control and potential for profit.

In the mean time however I'll still be buying up carnelians to craft JC fist weapons to DE as that still doubles my investment even after a large price drop of celestials. The same goes for flipping jaspers and zepherites every day. They're neeed for the JC daily where you have to cut 3 of a certain blue or green gem and turn them in. Note that you have to actually CUT them, you can't just buy the pre cut gems and complete it. And since it's only ever these 2 gem colors you can take control of the market fairly easily.

They get as high as 80g each when dailys reset. With this you can try buying them at normal prices and list them in the morning as singles for a mark up or in stacks of 3, the exact amount needed, and a larger mark up. Try both and see what people are most likely to pay for them.

If there's a large amount of miners lowering the price of ore, most JC's are probably prospecting ore and likely have a few already in their bags. If this is the case selling them as singles would be best, but if ore is still priced high selling them in 3's would be the way to go because people mostly won't have any spares or a stokpile of them in advance. Sadly for me there's usually not many of these raw on the AH so I'm not able to be a good goblin and stokpile them for myself, but it does make prospecting a stack of obsidium ore seem much more promising.


Thanks for stopping by!

Hooray for patch notes!

Next patch notes are up! You can check them out over at wowhead right here. Take a few minutes to browse over them and then read on. Here are my thoughts on what's going to be hot and make you some extra bank.

Stokpile meta gems now!! Blizz is adding in new cuts for meta gems that make the choice of which to use very obvious to anybody and require 3 red gems to activate. This means there might be a good number of people shifting their gems around now that they don't need to have less optimal ones socketed. Here's the notes on them:

"Meta gems with the Chaotic and Relentless prefixes now have a requirement of 3 red gems.

New meta gems have been added:
Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage),
Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage)
Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage).

These new recipes are unbound and can drop from any
Cataclysm creature. The new meta gems have a requirement of 3 red gems equipped."

That means you need to get your JC toon ready to go out farming for these recipe drops. My guess is that since they're unbound they'll be the same rare drops that cost a fortune to buy so make sure you have a decent bank for them if they're not uber common drops. I'm sure with their scarcity and newness they'll fetch a decent price next to the chaotic gems. The chaotic ones are the crit rating and crit damage metas that will require 3 red gems to work when the patch comes. So if you don't want to drop the cash on the new metas this will be the one you want for DPS. I'd just cut all of the gems personally, why limit yourself?

So start stokpiling the shadow spirit gems and get ready for a rush of sales. One thing I haven't looked into are the preferred gems for the healers as there's many options and they all seem good to me. Then again I only heal on my days off of bringing the pew pew. Any comments on that note?

After that the only real change that relates to making the wow gold is a ton of skills are being nerfed, buffed, levels changed and so forth. That means the glyph market is going to be turned inside out yet again. As always when a patch comes with a lot of skill changes there will be tons of glyphs that either go up or drop in value. Be sure to read carefully over the skill changes and craft glyphs accordingly.

So to all of you that are riding the glyph train to wealth check them out as there are a ton of them. Most of the glyph changes are buffs so if you're doing well you might just see an increase in sales and nothing else. But if you're getting into it slowly or only working glyphs a little bit now is your chance to hit it big. Branch out your business a little bit and craft a bunch of the new ones that are getting popularized and dump the ones that are being nerfed asap.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 1/11

Yes it's that time again. Today's the day of resets, updates, and weekly collections. Here's my weekly report of what I've been selling and in what markets. I also give a few notes on them in addition to the weekly profit from everything combined. As always, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Starting gold: 440,000
End of week total: 425,000
Weekly profit: -15,000
Trade skill increases: enchanting-max, tailoring-max, smithing-max, leather working-500, mining-450, JC-515, inscription-450

Not that organized or in depth as before I know. I'm still sorting out which bankers are dealing with what and of course I had to buy a few pricey purples for my DK chica which put a damper on the total profits obviously. Along with old world and 310 flying. Also the profits aren't 100% accurate as I've leveled a few of my toons so their questing gold and rewards threw a wrench into the mix. In other words take this weeks profit report with a grain of salt, but the sales and market research are worth paying attention to.

And here's a (bad) screen shot of a few vendor pets that I remembered to screen cap when I collected the mail.


Detailed Recap:
---------------
Alright this is going to be a fairly long one as I'm recapping everything from the last several weeks of my assorted AH playing. During my vacation I didn't have much time for the AH game, but still got quite a bit done.

I've gone through over 6 full stacks of enchanting vellums, so that should give you a good idea there for the enchanting market. As you may have guessed from my recent posts, twink enchants have been booming along with goose and berserking. In fact, I've been selling a boat load of formerly high end WotLK enchants. From staff spellpower to power stats.

The enchants from cata that I've been having good luck with so far are Hurricane and heart song for weapon and Intellect to off hands. Those have been getting me about 200-300g profit each. They also gave me 3 skill ups each to boot. But those are currently in decline but do have their price spikes again. Just the other day in fact I sold a hurricane scroll for 1k gold which was about 400g profit. Not bad if I do say so myself.

I also bought a maelstrom crystal for a cheap ass 1k gold and crafted an enchanted lantern. It hasn't sold yet horde side with only 1 other person selling one. So it looks like this isn't that great of an idea currently but I'll try selling it to the alliance and see if I get any takers.

I've once again emptied the AH of borean leather for a solid week. It's up to over 1g each for a single piece of regular leather. Go me! But with that I've also gotten back into selling the LW crafted bags and am getting 100g+ for the mining bags. But far slower sales for the skinning and scribe bags so far. I'll be keeping a few of them to be listed as no competition is a good thing... for me that is. The tanking leg armors are selling for a very nice 100g+ profit while the dps ones are selling at a loss.

That's most likely (almost guaranteed) because of where they fall in place of leveling up LW. It stays orange for a while and is almost a promised sale at some point so they both make a decent bit back. As to why it's one and not the other I'm not sure. One likely answer is that the AP armor is learned after making 5 of the stamina armors. So people will keep crafting the AP armor until it turns green thus flooding the market.

Also I've gotten back into selling the vendor pets from dalaran. Buy them for 40g from the vendor and AH them for 200g each, got several sales already so look into this if you haven't.

Tailoring is slowly being leveled and keeping itself afloat with nether and frost bags along with ghostly spellthreads. Decent profit on them, but the market is still a bit shaky on it. However converting cloth into bolts is very profitable and I can't guess why that is. Bolts sell for 60g+ and the cloth to make them is only about 40g total. Towards the end of the week I got my mage up to 84 and maxed tailoring by making dream cloth and tons of spell threads. I crafted a few of the epic ones once I got the pattern and sold one of each that night and the rest the following day. The stamina ones sold for 850ish and the spirit one sold for 1,100 and change. Not bad for 1 out of 5 possible week long CD's. If you'll be working the epic threads pay very close attention to the volatile markets as they're quite volatile.

OMG I IS FUNNEH!

For me the volatile air cloth is far far too expensive to be worth making as it's over 1k gold (airs at 33g+) and the threads sell for less. That and I need the airs to make hurricane scrolls. The chaos dream (the one with the orbs) is a great money maker to craft the dream cloth if you just CBA to spam trade with "will work for food" posts. The good thing of the volatile markets is that they stack up to 200 instead of 10 or 20 like before. That means that people will sell under market price fairly often if you'll buy out their stack of 132 volatiles. And since you're a good lil' goblin (you did race change your banker didn't you?) you can buy them all up and undercut without fear.

I've barely touched BS as the ore is insanely pricey still, but it went down some for a day or so and I snatched it up while the getting was good. I maxed it out by crafting the epic dps chest piece as I had the orbs already. Unfortunately bars are quite a bit higher priced than the ore and I don't have a capable miner just yet. So the buckle market is still a ways off. I did buy a few pyrite bars at 50g each when somebody dumped a few and made a nice 80ish gold profit per buckle which sold that night.

My miner is a lowly 73 and getting them high enough to max mining will take a long time, especially since I hate questing in NR. Once they're able to smelt pyrium I'll be back into that market full speed. Though later on the prices of pyrium slowly dropped and I started to stokpile a bit of it and once again buckles are impossible to keep in stok.

/happy dance

As for gems, I only have 4 recipes so far (mastery, strength, haste, hit) but they're selling fairly well with a decent profit. However the red gems are constantly shifting in price up to 100g drops so I'm getting out of that for a while to let it level off. The yellow gems though are pretty stable and make good profits along with the blues. I'll be picking up an orange and purple cut next, but haven't decided on which ones just yet.

Lastly on JC I haven't even touched meta gems yet. Since blizz made the main melee dps gem completely worthless and totally fuckered about with the rest it's still having extreme price shifts. Since so many people aren't sure what they should be using and there's still plenty of people dumping under material prices this market isn't worth getting into just yet. Although blizz has stated that they'll be reverting the change to the melee dps gem so it will be worthwhile again. As it is now, having more blue than red gems is absolutely retarded even with hit being blue.


This all translates in to me spending 15,000 gold on:
Max enchanting
Max black smithing
Max tailoring
Max jewel crafting (close enough)
500 skill leather working
20k darkmoon card
10k epic belt
10k epic chest piece
Stokpile of materials

At the end of all of this I've managed to max out BS, tailoring, enchanting, and almost done with LW. That combined with the buying of epic gear for my DK and starting to stokpile all of the new materials, the fact that I'm only down a few grand isn't too bad at all. Personally I think I'm doing very well already with all things considered. Easily the best spending decision I've made hehehe.


Thanks for stopping by!