Sunday, January 30, 2011

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...




Thanks for stopping by!

5 comments:

  1. @ Shamaenei
    I just now got your name, clever hehe. And the long wall O' text posts won't stop until I stop writing. A friend asked me the other day how I'm able to come up with so much content and write several pages every day.

    The answer is simply that the AH game is a lot like economics in general IRL. There's more to it than supply and demand, there's people you need to work with. That's why so many things I write are all theory based as that's the most important thing to learn.

    And everything has a price.

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  2. great post, I LOVE your blog.
    pls keep continue.. ;) thanks for your work
    shaki

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  3. The last point is actually quite funny and a good example of a lot of players, that are terribly uninformed.
    At the end of wrath I still had some epic leg armors lying around, but prices were down. I kept them, but to my surprise they sell for more or equal the Cata blues.

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  4. @ Anon
    Thank you much!

    @ Sarge
    Just you wait, I has moar screens! Leg armors, spell threads, anything you can down grade sells for equal or more than cata level stuff.

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  5. on buying the NR enchants... i dont care, i will pay for them cause i can i like to be OP in the BGs and LFD when leveling a new alt. A friend smirked at 10g for a green something, and i said i would pay that... whats 10G to me when i send my alt a 25K starter kit? not much really. Yeah, only level 37? and i sent him another 50K, but he was in the AH and bought a bunch of mats for the main.

    @ Stokpile, the most amazing thing to me as i track my markets and such, is that you are in almost Every market. you do more w/ addons than i do, but still. I have focused solely on the DMC market and plan to hit 1M with that almost exclusivly. the profit margins are just so much better. about 100% consistently. at a one time high i was up to 415K, now i am down to about 40K so slowing down on the stockpiling, and i wont have enough to keep the pace for another couple weeks of making DMCs. Now i am just sitting on about 30+ DMCs. so i will get my money out of it. and i plan to wait till after the initial surge following the DMF. Plus i expect another price reset on herbs following the fair. And i want to let that settle out and see where the supply and demand is. Now its on to the projects of alts and PVP, read my blog for more if you care to.

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