You've heard it said before, but when a new expansion hits you'll be doing yourself a disservice by trying to be the first max skill black smith or whatever. I know I may be a bit late on this one, but with the markets still fluctuating so much it still warrants mentioning. Look at the price of ore and gems on your server. 200g a stack of ore? 150g fro a rare gem? Screw that noise. Now I'm sure almost all of you were around when WotLK was new and saw how all of that went. Shit I remember a friend selling stacks of friggin' cobalt for 100g for a month solid.
This falls into one of the few extenuating circumstances where I go against my golden rule of no farming ever. At times like this farming can potentially net you more G/hour than any AH baron could on that same day. The reason for this is the same as always: wooo shiny! It's new! It's different! It's HIGHLY in demand with a presently very limited supply. And so then it's just a matter of following the basics of economics, supply and demand.
What a good goblin would do is take all the materials they acquired from leveling and AH them asap while leaving their professions at 450ish. I mean sure you can get a nice BS pattern and make a good tip and if you're lucky sell it for a profit at current prices. But think about the market for that for a moment. Cutting edge players, plenty of loose cash, not too bright. There aren't a lot of people around that meet all of those qualifications.
So it follows that selling the mats while prices are sky high is the best course of action. And once prices drop and finally normalize you can then buy back all the mats you sold for 1/10th of the gold you sold them for. Sure would be funny if you buy the same stack of ore from the same person for 10g when you sold it to them for 200g wouldn't it?
Amusingly enough though, I'm going to be going against both of those suggestions myself, farm stuff and don't level profs. I'm not going to farm a thing and use any and all mats I get to help level my profs. Simply because I can afford to and hate farming. However if you don't have a large bankroll it's in your best interest to find what the high priced mats are and farm them while ignoring your professions. Serious raiders who need the perks excluded of course.
Thanks for stopping by!
Oh Thank you, Thank you! I wasn't around for WotLK, I've only been playing about one year so I had no idea how the expansion would change things. When I saw the prices of raw mats, I couldn't resist all that lovely gold just sitting there waiting to be collected whilst I happily carried on levelling to 85, ignoring my professions totally - unless you include herbing/mining/skinning, which I maxed as fast as I could! To see you post so eloquently justifies my instincts & now I don't feel so bad :)
ReplyDeleteI like your approach to the ah in the beginning of the expansion. Sure you can make more g/per hour by farming than the usual glyph/gem/scroll selling, but farming sucks. I hate farming and I will never do it for the sole purpose of making gold (too many hours wasted in scholzar Basin farming enough saranite to level my engineering).
ReplyDeleteBut on the plus side to the new xpac, I've never seen vanilla and bc mats going for so cheap ever. It made leveling my 2nd JC, and my 2nd and 3rd Alchemist so much easier.
@ Hiru
ReplyDeleteGranted I don't like farming either, but for those that don't mind it TOO much now is prime time to do it. However even so, not power leveling your profs now will save you a boat load of funds by waiting a month at most.
I farmed the leather for my LW profession; I did enjoy it, and for a fair bit of it I was getting xp from it - for myself and/or my pet(s).
ReplyDeleteThe last skillups came from crafting pvp pieces which were upgrades for me.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion that farming will make more money than "any AH baron" could. Personally, I HATE farming, so I never do it. When Cata hit, I immediately started leveling my professions, and I can say that it's paid off many times over.
ReplyDeleteWhen Cata hit, I had roughly 300k in liquid cash. I've sold off a fair bit of stuff from my stockpile, probably around 50k. But the big moneymakers for me so far have been professions. I got realm first illustrious enchanter, and I also leveled blacksmithing, tailoring, and jewelcrafting very quickly. I'm now up at a little over 500k gold, and I've bought full BoE epic gear for 2 characters.
I've sold an absolutely massive amount of crafted pvp gear, and for a couple of weeks, just prospecting ore and selling gems was a huge gold mine.
I think you're right that farming is a very good way to make money right now, and also that the cost of leveling professions will come down over the next few weeks. But I also think that playing the AH with professions and crafted items can be phenomenally profitable, even now with the high material costs.
If a person has no professions at Cata levels, or no startup capital then farming can be lucrative. I have not farmed too heavily for my JCing, however I have made an absolute KILLING converting purchased ore at 100g (stacks of obsidium at under 100 regularly) into uncommon gems then selling those, or converting them to jewelery, then to dust and essences, selling those. If all of that fails, selling the cut gems to vendors if the ore was bought below 55g for a healthy profit.
ReplyDelete@ Xanda
ReplyDeleteThe key point is that you have 300k in cash when it all hit. Not everybody has that sort of capital and can afford to invest into leveling a profession. On my server if I power leveled all of enchanting, BS, and tailoring when I signed on I'd be looking at WELL over 30k. Most people are better off selling materials.
However on another server that I play on, the price of materials was less than a third of my main server, in which case playing the AH is a far better option. YMMV as always, don't always assume that one answer is the answer for you.
@ Anon
I did the same thing with enchanting. I'd de every green/blue I found and used that to level up and watched for a price spike on certain scrolls to make a bit of money back. Always gotta pay attention to markets and be sure your timing is right.
@Hiru: /wave! :)
ReplyDeleteI actually leveled mining on my hunter the first few days of the expansion and farmed like 40+ stacks of elementium ore, kept some for leveling engineering and prospecting, and sold the rest. Twilight Highlands and Uldum were great, mostly abandoned, and a lot of the nodes were away from mobs, so I didn't have to worry about my poor level 80 getting pummeled from 84-85 mobs.
But now we're almost a month into the expansion, and I don't want to farm. At all. I still have a decent enough stash of gold to where I can just buy the mats to level the rest of my professions. I'll still keep mining on my death knight, just so I can smelt ore when it's cheaper to buy than the bars.
I just wanted to say that I'm so glad you're back. I read you religiously back towards the end of Wrath. I started getting into Glyphs seriously in May with about 10k gold, and I hit 500k in December, about 6 days after hitting 400k. I was VERY upset that you left, because honestly the other gold blogs just aren't as good as you man.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, on the subject at hand, I did exactly what you did and spent roughly 150k on day 2 to get Server First Scribe. I know you kind of came back recently, but let me tell you that I made a killing with Darkmoon Cards that first weekend. The Darkmoon faire was in town for the first weekend of the xpac, then it left. I must've sold 10 decks that were made since then, because the faire was gone for a month and people didn't want to wait!
On my server I think the prices for mats has stabilized a little bit, but not really sure ya know? I wasn't in the AH game at start of wrath, so any idea about how long it takes for the market to settle? I really want to fill up my gbank (after I emtpied it of all the old world stuff), but don't want to bite off too much yet. Any ideas?
@ Anon
ReplyDeleteWell I wasn't playing the AH game at the start of wrath, but judging from what I've seen thus far in cata and a few other times where prices on thigns spiked (like frozen orbs, enggy pets, etc) I'd guess most things will have settled down mostly by 2 months in give or take. YMMV of course, some servers have already stabilized that I've seen.