Weekend discussion: 4.1 and you

Since last week's discussion entry did fairly well I decided to put up another one of the same vein for this week. Same deal as last week. Keep the discussion polite, constructive, and try to add in your own thoughts to each comment. Think of this as just another thread on a random forum about making the wow gold.

The topic for this week is how has 4.1 effected your market of choice BESIDES not being able to get free gold anymore. I'm sure that one thing that has hit all of us. What I'm mostly looking for is smaller things that we may not have noticed or thought about right away, but now that they're happening we can see them with perfect hindsight. As with last week I'll go first.

For me the biggest effect that I'm feeling is the sudden lack of volatiles. Obviously this is due to the shuffle nerf, but that's going to be the very absolute base starting point of any problem that's come around with us. The sales of pvp plate gear have gone way up and I'm almost of of materials for them even with over 5 full stacks saved up in advance. And accordingly the price on them has gone up as well so I am able to take advantage of that which is a great thing for sure.

They're not going for double the average price from last week which was only 200g or so. Now they're a steady 400-450 because not many people are able to craft them with the lack of supply.

How can a drought in supply be turned into profit? Simple. I start doing my elemental xmute for fires instead of air and put a pause on that stokpile. I already have a semi decent amount of them hanging around, but being able to keep selling the pvp gear at such huge profits is going to bring in much more gold than something that I don't need right now.

Sometimes you just have to make a judgment call and weigh what is going to profit you more, selling something now or something else later. Yes it is very important to stokpile for the long term, but you never want to miss what could vanish tomorrow.


So what odd changes in your markets have come around since the patch? What are the problems that they've caused? What possible benefits can be had from them no matter how big or small?


Thanks for stopping by!

Hooray for patch day!

So patch 4.1 has come and is shaking up the markets all over the place. The most noticeable effect was of course the nerf to the shuffle, so no more free money and such for us. In all honesty I'm so glad this came through as there is going to be a massive wave of people leaving the JC market. Today I'm going to cover some of the major effects that this patch has had already including the shuffle. One last note on the shuffle note though, I won't be going too in depth with it because I've already covered the wide range of effects that it will be having in older entries.


How did I do?
I wasn't around most of the day, so I only had a patch "night" explosion. Regardless of that though, I made well over 50k in a single night from all of my markets. Makes me wiggle. That and I managed to sustain 20k dps on chimeron until death strike spam became a priority. Loving these buffs, the frost rotation is so much more fun to play and is a ton more fast paced than before using frost presence.


What's hot?
Second best enchanted scrolls. Things like mighty stats, avalanche, and hurricane are flying off the shelves for me and are selling at almost triple the profit as they were all of last week.

Next is any gem with agility on it. I find that a little strange as strength gems have historically been the best selling ones, even in this expansion. Regardless, delicate rubies have been selling for well over 200g a piece and I sold over a full stack on patch night.

After that are enggy and vendor pets. Yes the new achievement brought a breath of fresh air into these markets and mini fel reavers are back up to 900g and selling a ton. The cheaper enggy pets are a solid 150-300g sale on each with only a 20g investment on the mats.

Tanking enchants. Out of all of the enchants from level 10-85 ones relating to tanks are selling the best, especially ones requiring dream dust. I've sold several sets of those on patch night and they're taught by a trainer so get to it if you aren't already. This even includes heavy borean armor kits from LW.


Got lag?
Try turning off recount. My entire guild was having problems with mega lag all night, but once we turned off recount (even the updated version) it up and vanished. So if you started having lag after the patch and weren't before give this a shot.


What's new?
Top end enchants are now selling on scrolls for a consistent profit. Woohoo! On my server crystals have dropped to 850ish and I've picked up a few at 700. It looks like once more gear starts getting DE'd they may drop down to a mere 500g or lower. What are they at on your server?

The price of ele ore and bars have predictably gone up since nobody is buying it wholesale anymore. And because of the lack of insatiable demand the prices aren't being undercut nearly as much.

On the subject of ore, hard ele bars are now much more profitable than before. If these were selling at a loss on your server last week, give it 2-3 days and check back in on this market. You just might find yourself a new niche to work.

Lastly are rare LW leg armors. These things used to be totally garbage, but are now selling for triple the material costs as opposed to half. Finally LW is getting some love.


The shuffle.
Instead of saying why it's dead and the effects it will have, I'm instead going to give a few thoughts on the current state of JC. Now that there won't be any more free rare gems to be sold prices are obviously rising to match the new demand with the influx of gear, this means that we're all going to burn through our stokpiles rather quick. So now we need to find new supplies for our gems and how to go about matching them with prices. Unfortunately there are only two places we can go for gems: prospecting now expensive ore and buying raw ones from the AH. Shocking, I know.

Luckily if you've been in the JC biz for a while this won't be anything new to you. Once the prices get back onto an even keel simply buy a few gold below market price for the raws and sell the cut versions appropriately higher. However, I'd still keep your thresholds the same as they were before the patch because those rares are still paid for and can be sold as low as 5g for a profit. Once prices get low enough compared to the "new" market price of raw rares buy them up to relist later one. This will help you keep a sizable stokpile while everyone else burns through theirs in the coming weeks.


What have I been up to?
First of all, I spent about 60k on patch day. That's right, I spent every last bit of the mega profits that I had made that day. As always, any type of expenditure like this is an investment, even if it's gear. Spending on gear allows me to avoid having to do normals and skip ahead on heroics and the like, buying trade goods and such is no different.

This time however I've been buying cut gems and enchanted scrolls. Basically I've been resetting the prices on just about everything that's in high demand right now. I've also spent a good amount on crystals, but that's mostly so that I could have their groups already set up in ZA for when they become a regular sale.

The reason for buying the gems and scrolls up is because their material costs have been significantly increased and all of the ones that I bought were under the new prices. That means that if they want to keep making more they'll need more mats, but they won't be able to continue selling at that price.

That's where my stokpile comes in.

Like I wrote about the shuffle, I'm doing the same thing with gems and enchants: take the prices back up and buy out all of the cheap stuff. With my bank tab and a half full of raw materials I can out last and out price almost anybody while still turning a profit. With the massive demand from new gear, which is going to keep increasing for several weeks minimum, I should be able to make a killing by flipping all of these things. I spend a ton of gold now so I can make even more gold later, high risk high profits. Now this is exciting!


Thanks for stopping by!

Enchanting class reference

NOTE: This was written before 4.1 so I'll be updating it as I go over the updates on EJ when they go through.


For those of you who are still having difficulty with enchanting and aren't sure what to sell this entry is for you. Basically it's a quote from EJ and every class/spec forum of the recommended enchants for every slot. I'm also including the lower cost alternatives such as mighty stats instead of peerless stats. You'll also notice that many wrath level enchants make an appearance as well.

Anything that is not from cata I'll mark with a star and any enchants that are for different specs of a certain class I'll make a note of as well. This listing will also serve as a quick reference guide for anybody that is unsure of which enchants they should be using. Simply put almost every one of these enchants will sell on a scroll for a profit.

Please note that enchants for tanking and healing specs are very subjective and are based more on personal preference and necessity rather than a one size fits all for dps. If I have made any mistakes on ones that are "for sure BiS" please leave a comment and I'll edit accordingly.


Death knight:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike
(blood: protection)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(blood: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - major strength or critical strike
(blood: major stamina* or dodge)

Gloves - mighty strength or exceptional strength
(blood: greater mastery or mastery)

Boots - lava walker or earthen vitality
(unholy or frost: haste)

Weapon - N/A


Druid:
Cloak - greater intellect
(bear: protection or major agility*, cat: major agility*)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(bear: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike
(bear: agility or major stamina* or dodge, cat: agility or critical strike)

Gloves - haste
(resto: mastery, bear: greater mastery or mastery, cat: mighty strength or exceptional strength. Yes really.)

Boots - lava walker or mastery
(bear: lava walker or earthen vitality or assassin's step or mastery, cat: major agility)

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane
(bear: windwalker or mighty agility, cat: mighty agility, resto: power torrent or heartsong)


Hunter:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike or major agility*

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - agility or critical strike

Gloves - major agility*

Boots - assassin's step or major agility

Weapon - mighty agility


Mage:
Cloak - greater intellect

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike

Gloves - greater mastery or haste

Boots - mastery or earthen vitality or lava walker

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane


Paladin:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike
(prot: protection, holy: greater intellect)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(prot: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - mighty strength or critical strike
(prot: major stamina* or dodge, holy: mighty intellect or critical strike)

Gloves - mighty strength or exceptional strength
(prot: greater mastery or mastery, holy: haste or mastery)

Boots - mastery
(prot: earthen vitality or mastery or lava walker, holy:haste or lava walker)

Weapon - landslide or hurricane
(prot: windwalker or mending, holy: power torrent or heartsong)


Priest:
Cloak - greater intellect

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike
(shadow: mighty intellect or speed)

Gloves - greater mastery or mastery or haste
(shadow: haste)

Boots - mastery or earthen vitality or lava walker

Weapon - power torrent or heartsong
(shadow: power torrent or hurricane)


Rogue:
Cloak - greater critical strike or major agility*

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - agility or speed

Gloves - greater mastery or mastery

Boots - major agility or assassin's step

Weapon - landslide or hurricane


Shaman:
Cloak - greater intellect
(enhance: major agility)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or speed
(enhance: agility or speed)

Gloves - greater speed or haste
(enhance: greater mastery or mastery)

Boots - lava walker or mastery or earthen vitality
(enhance: major agility)

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane
(enhance: landslide or avalanche)


Warlock:
Cloak - greater intellect

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats

Bracers - mighty intellect or critical strike

Gloves - greater mastery or haste

Boots - mastery or earthen vitality or lava walker

Weapon - power torrent or hurricane


Warrior:
Cloak - greater critical strike or critical strike
(prot: protection)

Chest - peerless stats or mighty stats
(prot: greater stamina or stamina)

Bracers - mighty strength or critical strike
(prot: major stamina* or dodge)

Gloves - mighty strength or exceptional strength
(prot: greater mastery or mastery)

Boots - mastery
(prot: earthen vitality or mastery or lava walker)

Weapon - landslide or hurricane
(prot: windwalker or mending)



Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 4-26

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 gold total: 1,778,000
Total sales: 266,000
Weekly profit: 45,000 (110,000 before epic purchases)
Current gold total: 1,823,000




Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:


Yellow, blue, purple, meta, common gems:


Tailoring, misc glyphs & vendor pets:


Enchanting & smithing:


Engineering & mining:




With my extra spending this week my prediction seems to be right on time.

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
It's been a pretty awesome week for business once again. The boe plate gear has finally started to sell again. While the profits aren't as high as they were before,the rate of sales is definitely higher. So much higher in fact, that I've had to start buying up a couple thousand volt fire. Yes thousands, as in plural. In fact everything relating to volatiles has been up high this week that I've had to cave in and get a few extra stacks from the alliance side.

Mini fel reavers have sold out so I had to convert a full stack of air to the ether thingies. I crafted another dozen of them and have since sold four the following evening. I wonder if I should power level enggy on another toon so I can have a gnomish spec for it as well. Now that's hard core. But now that I think about it my gobby WILL have an extra profession slot open once they don't need herbalism anymore...

Meanwhile leather pvp gear has been sucking up all of my waters and life along with a few fire as well, the same goes for the int plate from smithing. And to top all of that off, I've been using 3x alchemists xmute CD to keep up with all of the volatiles so much that I've been getting pretty low on life as well. Kind of funny in it's own way.

I saw my first epic drop from trash the other night since joining my guild. It was the caster sword from the very last trash mob we killed that night which was kind of amusing. Since nobody wanted it for main spec it went up for sale. Naturally I gave them a good price of 30k and bought it right after raid. I threw power torrent onto it and...gave it to my gf. Come on, you should know by now that I'm not into flipping epics! So that was a nice dent into my profits along with getting a pair of upgrades that needed some 5k enchants done to them. The bank says owwie!

The goblins that me and my gf have been leveling are now several levels into cata zones and are coming along nicely. Mine has their alchemy high enough to xmute volts which is as high as I need it to be. The rest of their skill ups will mostly come from that, but once it goes gray I'll drop the extra gems and flowers on maxing it in preparation for epic gem xmutes. That will bring my alchemist count up to 3.

In addition to that, I've decided that I'm going to eventually drop herby on them and level up gnomish engineering. Why? Why not? Ok I'll be honest, it's because I want to be able to craft the new mini pet that gnomish spec can make. Granted it'll take a month or two just to make up the cost of leveling the profession but what else am I going to spend my moneys on?

Ending on a personal note, me and my gf got our goblins to 85 the other day. So naturally we celebrated by getting all sorts of purple goodness so we can skip the terror that is normal dungeon groups. We each spend around 30k in total not including the mats used up for enchants and gems. I've been playing as sub and actually have the most complicated rotation in game down very well. I walked into doing almost 10k dps in greens.

Not too shabby for only 15 minutes of reading. And just before I did my weekly collections I dropped another 30k on tank shoulders for my DK for, yup you guessed it, a dps upgrade. Well at least I don't have to worry about drops in the new heroics!


Thanks for stopping by!

Random screen shots #83

Aloha all it's been a while since I posted a ton of random screens and they've been building up. As usual, no real gold tips just a ton of random giggles for you all today. Also it appears that the patch is going to hit tomorrow, so get your tank gear ready for randoms and sell your crafted epics asap.

Enjoy!


Contrary to popular belief, I have actually convinced all of the auctioneers to give it to me as protection money.



No camper is safe when banker girl is on the watch! Om nom nom!



Never before has avian genocide looked so bright and colorful.



A few random enchant scrolls that you wouldn't think sell but still do.




People just love the Stokpile.



Mind you the vendor sold mats are 12.5k and as low as 11.25k if you're a goblin...



Time to buy!



The potential hazards of stokpiling when blizz nerfs a vendor price =(



If you want a GEE or any other essence you have to go through this guy who likes to keep the prices high. Or just ya know, go through the alliance AH like I do. And who says you can't make money on my server? This person seems to be doing just fine since they've been at this since wrath (I think).



Organization. Sometimes I lack it.



Enggy still makes the bank.



Erm, wtf?



Gems, I has dem!



Came across this gem of NPC banter while leveling my goblin. Maybe I am and maybe you should!



It's always nice when the healer appreciates good dps.



Stokpiling done right...or terribly wrong.



Sometimes LW does fetch a good price afterall.




Quite possibly one of the funniest things I have seen in wow.



I love it when I get to take a screen like this.



What happens when I'm done buying.



While grinding rep in the netherstorm, I came across a completely random boat that is literally out in the middle of nowhere.



Yep, they still love me!



Not bad for two pieces of tank gear, unbuffed, and not using any CD's. Oh and the tank gear. Did I mention yet that I'm wearing tank gear to DPS with?



As sad as it is, I gotta admit. I lol'd.



Something random I found in Shat that I've never seen before. Any idea what this is?




Thanks for stopping by!

Weekend discussion

Writing up this entry today to generate some discussion over the weekend as the title suggests. I felt the blog could use a bit more of discussion oriented content so this is my attempt to remedy that. The subject is your biggest personal short coming when you play on the AH. The goal here is to talk about what our weak points are and how we can go about improving upon them.

I ask that all readers chime in with their own faults (no matter how big or small) and ideas on how to help those that are mentioned. I'll be keeping an eye on the comments over the weekend and add in my thoughts. As per usual with the comments, please keep it constructive, serious, and informative. And also this is not a blogging carnival or anything of the sorts. Think of more as a thread on an AH forum so there's no need for 5 page long responses.


I'll start things off with my own.

My biggest short coming on the AH is my absolute reliance on addOns. If ZA and other similar ones broke tomorrow, I'd be out of the game the day after. The biggest issue that comes with this for me is what I wrote about a long time ago in an entry called Manually automatic. The abridged version of that entry is that when you do things by hand you can get a much better feel for what's going on in a given market.

You'll know when certain competitors are gone or when it's time to raise/lower your selling prices and thresholds. This is something that I've gotten out of touch with a lot lately and am not sure how to go about getting back into it without entirely dropping my addons and doing it all manually. Hell I don't even know how the new(ish) auction house functions work. Any suggestions?


Please drop a comment or two with your thoughts on how to help me or others that have commented along with what part of your AH game could be improved.

For the potential blogger

Not exactly a gold making entry in the traditional sense today. I hear a lot from people that I talk to about making gold that they would love to start a blog or have thought about it and such but are still undecided. So if you fall into that category this entry is for you. With a small dose of luck, all of us bloggers will have another name to add to our blog rolls while all of the readers will have yet another gold blog they absolutely must read each and every day.


The beginning.
I first got the idea after reading Gevlon's blog and seeing how successful he was with it, this was back when he was talking about making gold 95% of the time. But after reading it for a while along with a few others I noticed that they were all missing a ton of potential things to talk about even after I had read over most if not all of their posts. And with having so much gold making ideas floating around in my mind and no decent way of organizing them I figured screw it I'll start a blog too.

Why not?

I didn't advertise, didn't set up any fancy system to track who was coming or desperately try to increase my traffic to make money on ad space while giving half assed gold tips like some others out there. The only advertising I did was a single post on the paladin forums I used to frequent and that was it. Hell I didn't even know I could check how many page views I get a day and from where and so forth until a few months ago. Did you know I have a few readers from Portugal? Fucking cool! Though I will admit that lately when I get a great group in a random I'll post a link for my blog at the end for the hell of it mostly. Any way moving right along.


Actually writing.
I like to think I am fairly well spoken when I want to be and that translates into how I write every entry with loads of detail. Combine that with a logical mind and I can point out almost every nuance of how I work the AH and can describe it well enough (or so I like to think) that anybody with half of a brain can grasp it well enough to mold it into their own method. The best tip I can give anybody on the actual writing of a blog (not the content) is to write how you think. Not how you speak.

If you were to read over a conversation you have in game or listen to a recorded conversation you had you may be surprised at what you would find. It's fairly common for the average person to say "um, like, well, but" 500 times in any given conversation. However when you think all of that gets cut out to quicken the process. So my advice is to pick a topic and write out your thoughts on it and then go back and "clean it up" so to speak. The benefit of writing is that you can change what you said 10 seconds ago, so take out all of the extra words that aren't necessary. Word things better, use proper grammar and abuse that spell checker! Anybody that's talked with me in game can swear that I can't type to save my life so take advantage of all the crutches that writing provides you.


Content.
Obviously the most important part of any blog is the content. And anybody that's a writer will tell you to write what you know. Are you a cop that wants to write a novel? Write a crime novel or a comedy buddy cop type of book. Are you into making the wow gold? Then write about it! What markets do you like to work the most? Why are they so fun? What are the small little tidbits and pro tips and tricks that help you eek out a bit more coin each week? Do you mess around with any niche markets?

Talk about who they sell to and why they sell. Tell us all how you got into it and what the competition is like. Hell you can just mimic any other gold blogger out there and pick a topic and just spell out every last bit of that market with all of the gory details. In other words what you write about is entirely up to you which can be quite daunting to a lot of people. So don't put it off by saying "zomgz there are so much stuph! What does I talk about!?"

Just pick a single market and then run with it. Take craftable bags for example. Tell me who they sell to, when the best times are, how you can advertise them in trade for a few more sales. Just don't skip anything when you write because every last detail is important. Even if it seems obvious to you, it might not be for a few hundred billion people out there.


Getting nervous?
The main thing I think that holds people back from starting a blog is simply fear of failure. People worry that nobody will like them or say that their tips are shite and they're totally wrong or simply that nobody will ever read it. When I started writing this blog I didn't care if I have 5 people reading or 5 million. And I still don't. Like I've said dozen times I write because I want to and because I enjoy it. Meanwhile if I happen to help a bunch of people in making gold then that's an awesome bonus for sure. Just like making thousands of gold, do it because you want to and because it's fun.

And if you're worried about people making fun of you and telling you off in comments saying you suck you fail and so forth there's something that you need to be aware of. When you run a blog you have this AMAZING feature called the "delete comment button." It is a wonderful thing. If somebody is rude, screw 'em! Just delete the comment and move on with your life like it never happened. I've gotten a few trolls here and there and it hasn't bothered me once because once it's gone, it's gone for good.

As for getting people to read it's as simple as writing well, making a new post every day, and writing quality content. With the amazing one post link that I did, I get a noticeable amount of hits every day. If you're good people will find you. And as for just wanting to be popular, if that's the sole reason you want to write a blog... don't. Most likely you will be severely let down. But if you want people to comment so that you "feel" like people are reading and care about what you think let me share a quick example on how the amount of comments isn't that important.

My entry called What have you got to lose had 200 page views. And 4 comments. Yes out of 200 people that read it that day only 4 of them had anything to say about it. More often than not if I read a blog post and I completely agree I won't leave a comment. Why not? Because I have absolutely nothing to add other than "My name is Stokpile and I approve of this message."

While we're talking about traffic, just so you know my average amount of hits each day is between 200-300 so it was a fairly average day as far as that day's traffic goes. That's every day and I don't get many comments at all, but I still have a lot (relatively speaking) of people that come to hear what I have to say every day. In other words, don't sweat it if you don't see 50 comments an hour after you start.


Have fun, be interesting.
Once again repeating a mantra of mine, have fun with what you do. If you have fun with your writing then by default you will be interesting to read. If you notice not every last one of my entries is about making gold, but people still read them. There's a ton of blogs out there that I read and a lot of the topics they cover I'm already familiar with, but I enjoy them regardless because they're interesting. Seeing things from a different point of view is always fun for me and it seems that is the case for many others as well.

In short don't make a blog out to be a chore. If you enjoy yourself writing then so will the people reading.


Final advice.
The last words of wisdom that I can give you is to be consistent. If you update everyday for a month and then stop for a few days, a lot of people may think that you've just stopped writing all together. If you won't be writing an entry for a few days, write one up to say so. Just write something, anything to keep people interested. Personally if somebody doesn't update in a week I stop going to their blog entirely. If you want people to read and hear what you have to say, well, you have to talk to them.


Thanks for stopping by!

Dual monitors

NOTE: Looking for a recommendation on where to acquire Wildvine that doesn't require herbalism. I remember them dropping quite well from trolls, but since cata removed tons of old mobs I don't know what is still in game.


This is something I'm a little surprised that I haven't written about before. I recommend to anybody that uses their computer for anything more than sending email to do immediately. Get a second monitor! Most video cards these days have a second port that you can plug another monitor into and it is (for the most part) plug and play. Hook up the second monitor, shuffle your desk around some to fit it and 15 minutes later you're done.

To get a decent size monitor is extremely cheap today, especially when compared to only two years ago. Hell you can probably get a good sized one of average quality for only $100 if you look. No this isn't going to be a techy entry today, this relates entirely to making the wow gold and then some.

Simply put, using two monitors makes life infinitely more convenient in so many ways, especially if you're a gamer and is a necessity if you actually work on your home computer. I've been using two for something like 8 years now and have no idea how I could possibly use a computer without it. Yes it is that amazing. Please, allow me to tell you why!

Multitasking. That is the name of the game and has always been one of the most important skills an AH baron could ever have. Having a second monitor lets you spam your post auctions macro while reading such fine blogs as theahpile.blogspot.com for example. Also while collecting mail or scanning the AH you can still keep an eye out on trade chat while doing your normal irl business.

Here's another practical point for it. You'll never have to worry about saying "sorry, was tabbed" ever again. Ever. You can be sitting in raid waiting for a ready check and watching cartoons or what have you and you still won't miss it. Also you'll never need atlas loot or half of the questing addons out there. You can search wowhead while playing wow (so you can wow while you wow or something like that).

Also if you're like me and try to have as few things open in wow as you can, you can look up a recipe on wowhead and look for the mats on the AH or start heading toward the vendor that sells them. Another thing I use it for is to be mass crafting or de'ing stuff while writing entries for the blog like this one. In fact I'm currently crafting a ton of enchanting rods while I write this sentence.

As a personal note on the ease of play that two monitors gives me, I can be busy drawing in photoshop on one monitor while watching for the pull on the other so that lets me get even more work done in an average day. Think about your average day on wow. There's constant times where you have to wait 2 minutes here, 5 minutes there and so forth. That's a lot of time that you could be doing something instead of sitting on your hands and just waiting.

Like I always say, time is the most valuable thing in the world because you cannot create more of it or get back any that you've lost. Simply put, having a second monitor allows you to do so much more in those small blocks of time. And of course if you do any irl work on the computer you'll make life a whole lot easier by not having to move windows around. Trust me on this one, it is most definitely a worthy investment.

Is there anything that you have/do IRL that improves your AH game?


Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 4-19

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 gold total: 1,643,000
Total sales: 259,000
Weekly profit: 135,000
Current gold total: 1,778,000




Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:


Yellow, blue, purple, meta, common gems:


Tailoring, misc glyphs & vendor pets:


Enchanting & smithing:


Engineering & mining:




Things are moving along quite smoothly. I started making a few more random enchanting scrolls that I've been having good luck with sales on. Oh and I finally managed to break 20k dps! Woo woo go me!

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
Ok first thing is first, more random enchants.

Enchant Gloves - Blasting
Enchant Boots - Surefooted
Enchant Boots - Agility
Enchant Boots - Greater Agility

Enchant Gloves - Agility
Enchant Cloak - Lesser Agility
Enchant Shield - Greater Stamina
Enchant Boots - Greater Stamina

Enchant Bracer - Deflection
Enchant Bracer - Greater Stamina


Agility is always going to be a popular enchant so they'll likely stay just as good for a long time to come. As for the stamina enchants I expect them to start selling even more once 4.1 comes with the tanking boa gear. They typically sell for anywhere from 60-100g each which is 95% profit as the dream dust is super cheap and the nether essences are only expensive if you just buy them when you see them. Wait for the prices to drop down and you can probably get them for as cheap as 5g each and dust for only 50 silver. Moderate to low rate of sales with zero competition and the best profit margins you could ever hope for. That's my kind of market.

I got another sale for a mechano hog this week for 16k. Happy face.

The supply of savage leather has dried up so much that I've had to turn to alliance sources to keep up with it. Unfortunately over several days of watching their AH they don't seem to have much of a supply either so that whole market is in a serious down turn this week. I've had to take to flipping epic leg armors and losing sales on pristine hides while barely having the mats for the leather pvp gear. The same goes for profession bags, borean leather is getting quite hard to come by as well. But on the positive side I am decently stocked with arctic furs so there's that.

Speaking of down turns in markets, the caster pvp plate has been shafted all week long with people posting at dumping prices or 10g above material costs. And that's even taking into account the absurdly cheap prices on the mats already. I think I done pissed somebody off >:D

Speaking of pissing people off, the campers are on me in full force this week. Every time I go to cancel, I wind up canceling damned near every single auction. 200+ gems and upwards of 300 scrolls... that's a lot. So my undercut amount is bad to 8g for gems and 10+ for scrolls. I've built my back up entirely so this won't be a problem at all on that end. And of course, I don't need the gold in any case.

More and more time has gone by since I started playing again and that means I am cutting more and more types of gems. And that means that bag space is once again at critical for Stokpile. So I'm having to reduce the amount that I have cut in his bags as "back up" gems down to only 1 instead of 2-3. Sure that may not seem like a lot buy if you look at my master list you'll see that if you take 1 off each gem cut that's an entire bag that gets opened up. With that much extra space I won't have to make nearly as many trips back and forth from the mail box to the AH. WTB 32 slot gem bags!

Over the weekend, I burned through a ton of my enchanting mats that I've had stokpiled and had to add DE'ing back into ye old ore shuffle. Mind you, I have not had to DE or buy enchanting mats for well over a month, that should give you an idea of how much I like to pile up. But with the new heroics just over the horizon I'm having to build it back up again so that put a rather noticeable dent into profits this week. It's been another week of obscene buying sprees which included several full stacks of volatile fire, water, and air.

However I am doing my buying smart and am not paying more than 50g per stack of ele ore. The biggest downside is that I have some SERIOUS campers on orange and purple gems that don't go away until the small hours. So those colors are piling up rather quick and aren't helping me make back the cost of the ore. Meanwhile I've taken to vendoring all of the blue, yellow, and green rares because they just aren't that popular of a gem color at all for any class and do me exactly zero good collecting dust in two different banks. So I'm keeping a ton on my fishy tailoring mage (in case epic gem xmutes use rares) and hold 7 stacks in the guild bank for daily usage while the rest get vendored.

I swear trying to balance a stokpile for a current market that is booming and having a potential nerf bat swung at it's face is NOT easy. So I've decided that if the nerf comes I'm going to rely on the huge demand spike of the new heroics to take care of my current stokpiles of enchanting mats. So I'm back to working up 1,000 dust, 500 GCE, and 200 shards. This is far from cheap or fast. Once this stokpile is built back up, I'm only going to buy things as I need them until I hit two million. Which by the way I am still expecting to be in the first week of may.

Meanwhile on the RL side of things, I've gotten several high priority must get done tomorrow types of projects which is taking out a big portion of my gaming time. As always real world work comes before AH work and raiding. But the plus side to that is that I may be able to get a few much needed upgrades to my machine. Computer parts that are totally for business purposes. Totally.

And ending this week's report on a small celebratory note. After spending X thousand gold on what is possibly the rarest enchant in game, I made my first sale of it on a scroll...for 60 gold. Woohoo!



Thanks for stopping by!

What DON'T I sell?

Every AH baron out there has their own master list of their markets. Obviously I do too and I even have one for everything that I buy. But today I'm going to list the opposite with a few explanations of why I don't work those markets entirely or very rarely. The reasons that I don't work a particular market are generally the same few over and over again, but I'll be giving the reason why regardless along with a brief once over on any reason specific to that market.


Tailoring made bags.
These used to be a favored market of time, but have since been phased out of my normal AH rotation. The main reason is that they require a ton of afk crafting time as each bag takes a full minute to craft the bolts and then the bag itself. And since these things sell so damned fast if you don't make like 100 all at once you might not be able to keep up with it and you'll lose the advantage of selling all of them. In other words if you only craft a few dozen at a time you won't be getting much gold on the return. Most of my afk crafting time is spent either smelting, crafting gems to vendor, or making tons of buckles.


Raw materials.
The only raw mats excluded from this are hard ele bars and the occasional GCE. The reason that I don't work this market should be obvious, I use every scrap that I can get. While it is profitable to convert all sorts of things from greater > lesser or normal leather to heavy or even buying greens to DE. The fact remains that adding in the extra step to craft scrolls or gear and what not will add much more value to them at a very small time cost.


Glyphs.
Huge amount of inventory to manage. Having to scare off all new 20 hour campers once a week. Takes as much time to work as every other market combined for much less profit. Simply put, I just don't have the time for this monster. It's great if you want to play the AH seriously but not have to deal with massive lists of things to buy and craft.


Dark moon cards.
This market, like glyphs, requires a rather large inventory of herbs and time invested to mill them. Also a good amount of afk time to craft all of the inks is needed as well. Normally that won't be too much of a problem for me and I'm sure I could squeeze this into my AH schedule without much of an issue. The main reason that I choose not to work these is the RNG involved. I tend not to have great luck when it comes to these sorts of things and the last thing I want is a 50k investment rotting away in my bank. I'm sure that the numbers are mostly in favor of profits, but I am a bit too worried that I'll hit a strong streak of bad luck and lose a lot on it.


Vial of the sands.
Well for one thing I don't even have archeology trained on a single toon. But even if I did have the recipe I don't want to drop that much in vendor mats when I see the price of it drastically falling as each week passes by. I always see the same few people posting in trade chat throughout the whole day that they're selling or crafting one and I don't want to compete with the trolls with such a high investment type of item.


Cloth pvp gear.
These have been flooded at dumping prices almost since release and show no signs at all of going back up. Simply
not worth it.


Rare quality leg enchants.
Same thing as the cloth gear, these are always being sold at dumping prices. But even on the odd day where they're profitable, I can always get a better profit margin by making something with heavy leather. Turning it into heavy is even more profitable for me if I just hold onto it until I need more for hides or gear.


Primal might.
I don't sell these partially because of the other uses I have for the mats and partially because of supply issues. The primal airs are always in short supple and fetch a great price when turned into enchant scrolls and even when sold as is.


I'm sure there's a handful of other obscure or niche markets that I'm forgetting to mention in here. Maybe something like cooking recipes or faction specific items, but that covers the majority of it all. Anything not mentioned here that I don't have in my master list you can just chalk up to laziness.


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Success Story: Ysera horde, LW bags + aoe spots

I bet you were all thinking that the angry, vicious, anti-social Stokpile would have no part of this nonsense!


This is my entry for Kammler's gold blogger challenge, though I don't think it qualifies as it's been so long that I cannot remember their name. So instead I'll refer to them as Hunter, as I remember for sure that that was their class. My first big bit of sheer market control was the LW area in mid wrath. I had a macro that I would post in trade multiple times a day saying that I was buying plain borean leather at X gold a stack.

After a while Hunter started to sell it to me regularly and became my personal farmer keeping my very well supplied with it. He thanked me constantly for the consistent business as it allowed him to buy epic gems and max enchants for all of his gear. I thanked him as well and gave him a nice bonus bit of gold for all of the help. Then came the obvious question: wtf am I doing with 400 stacks of leather any way?

I told him that I was crafting stuff to sell and I needed that much leather to keep up with it. Then we got to talking about making gold and he told me about his issues with making cash and how much he hated farming, but did it any way to get his gear filled out. So I directed him to my blog and pointed to my entry on how to work LW and said to read it and get back to me.

After he did he came back and was going on about how amazed he was that all of those things actually sold and for a good profit. I went on to explain that there are a lot of farmers out there and they all seem to need farming bags. I told him to finish rep grinding with the walrus people and grab the recipes for the mammoth mining bag and traveler's trapping pack.

Once he got that I pointed him to a much better place to farm leather if he was so inclined. He was originally going to the basin like everyone else was and because of that it took ages to gather enough leather to be useful. So instead I sent him to the fjords to explode the boars there which spawn fast, come in huge groups, aren't neutral, and respawn fast enough that you never stop killing. I told him that most people tend to farm in the afternoon on the weekends and that was the best time to list them in large amounts. I gave the basic tips of during prime sales time not to be afraid to buy out undercuts because they'll sell fast enough that it wouldn't be much of a risk at all.

After going through my blog and seeing that I had several gold caps under my belt he made the comment that the info was great and a huge help but now I was his competition. But I'm not ALWAYS insistent on dominating a market. So I told him that I'd let him have the entire LW market for a few weeks so he could get a feel for what the while AH game was about. During this time I was getting head long into glyphs and gems and didn't have the time to put as much focus on LW as I did before.

When all was said and done, they had made over 5k gold and felt richer than ever before. We basically shared the market, only posting in our normal times and didn't make it a point to overlap and undercut each other or to avoid it. It was basic AH competition and they turned out much better for it. I'm always glad to help people that put in the effort to learn which is half of the reason for even writing this blog. But I can't lie, it's a great feeling when one of your "students" succeeds


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What have you got to lose?

NOTE: I'm still looking for any info I can get about the enchant recipes for herbalism and advanced herbalism to gloves. They apparently don't drop from the same mobs since cata (they are all removed). However the same goes for mining to gloves, but I found that on the AH and I doubt it was hanging around somewhere. The only one I can guess at is molt thorn, a rare spawn, dropping adv herbby in swamp of sorrows. He was the only plant mob that wasn't removed from there and wowhead still ahs it on his loot table.


I'm writing this entry as an addendum to my entry called And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the shuffle nerf. This should clarify a few things that people are still up in the air about.

With the recent data mined bit on mmo champ about common gems vendor price being nerfed, a lot of people are saying that this won't ever happen. They cite such things as it being an experiment by blizz or the epic gem xmute in wrath losing the CD on it. But weather or not it happens, you should still make preparations. As the old adage says "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." Obviously I don't know for sure if this will or won't go live just as I don't know how epic gems will be introduced. But for all of you that are certain that it won't happen let me ask you this:

What have you got to lose?

This guessing game of predictions is one of the fundamental parts of the AH game, but in the business world this is know as risk analysis. Basically you weigh the potential risk against the potential gains or prevented losses. And with this change there is A LOT of losses to be prevented. First here are the potential losses if this change does go live and you do nothing at all to prepare.


Your stokpile of common gems are now worthless.

All of the rare gems that you thought were "free" are now quite expensive. These are almost all going to sell at a loss due to massive gem dumps that will go on for quite some time.

All of your enchanting mats will drop down to almost nothing. All of your enchant scrolls are now going to sell at a massive loss. All of them.

Tailoring dream of deepholm is going to rise in material cost greatly as the flood of VE is suddenly gone. Completely.

BS crafted gear and buckles will most likely go down in price. Less ore prospected means more bars will be sold, lowering the price.


So there's a ton of gold that can be lost to say the least. What do you have to gain if this goes live? Nothing at all. Prices will change and shuffle around and will eventually level off and stabilize once again. That's if you don't prepare or sell off what you can right now.

Now lets assume that you do take the necessary precautions and sell off your stokpiles of gems, enchanting mats, etc. Here's what you risk.


Losing a stokpile of common gems before a demand spike from new heroics for metas.
Losing a stokpile of enchanting mats before a demand spike from new heroics.
Flooding your bank with uncut rares that you'll use eventually anyway.
Flooding your bank with volt earth that you'll use eventually anyway.


Not that intimidating is it? No, I didn't think so. If you're good you'll be able to rebuild most of your stokpile of these things pretty easily and quickly when the patch comes. So at most, you'll only lose some of your stokpiles. The flood of ore will still continue and you'll still be able to do the shuffle just as before only now you'll have to do it a bunch up front. And all of the VE's you'll still use and sell and the same goes for the raw rare gems. In other words, you really don't have anything to lose at all.

So what exactly am I doing? I'm gonna go with the "go big or go home" mentality. I'm gathering a massive stokpile of gems and lowering my total stokpiles of enchanting mats. I don't want to get caught with my pants down when the scroll demand goes up with the heroics, but don't want to have a ton of over priced ones either. As for the gems I'm selling all of my commons to recoup the price on every rare that I find.

This means that my stokpile of rares will completely dwarf that of any other AH player on my server. I'll be able to sell low and buy up their stock forcing them into xmutes and having much higher thresholds than I will. This will allow me to really have a firm amount of control over the entire JC market for a long, long time.

In the end even if you don't think this change will go live I'd still say to pretend that it's gospel and prepare accordingly. Why do I say that? Because you don't have much to lose other than a couple of long nights of prospecting. And what you have to gain is a very valuable lesson that you'll have to learn the hard way at some point, everything burns. Everybody will come into a situation where one of their markets gets set on fire by blizz and is no longer a viable method of making gold. Preparing for the shuffle nerf will give you some experience in what to do in case that happens. You can just think of it as a fire drill.


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Dungeon finder Call to arms (failure)

Seeing as how I'm not the nicest guy in the world and have zero tolerance for fail players I suppose it's my turn to give my thoughts on this latest abomination made by blizz.

If you haven't heard about it yet, here's the lay down on this new feature that's going to ship with the coming patch. When there is a significant shortage of a certain role in the dungeon finder (only tanks obviously) a new icon will appear on the UI. This icon signifies that there is a call to arms for tanks to go do random dungeons. The tanks that que for a random, kill the last boss, and que for it ALONE will get a goodie bag. Remember that alone part, it's important later. Inside that goodie bag will be a random selection of either flasks, potions, gold, mini pets, and mounts dropped by any current dungeon boss. Sounds cool right?

Wrong.

The theory behind this piece of crap feature is to motivate tanks to que more often for randoms even after they did their one for the day. Here's the first problem I have with this. Remember when you were rewarded with 1800 honor points for winning a TB on attack? Do you remember what type of player that attracted? In the words of Gevlon, it was nothing more than a lightning rod for M&S. Free shit always draws the morons and slackers before it will ever attract somebody else. Blizzard is forgetting one flaw in their logic with this idea. They aren't going to motivate any tank to que more than they already are. A tank gets an instant que, that is MORE than enough reason to go do a dungeon, you get in there immediately when you get the notion to do so.

Also they're targeting the wrong crowd of course. They're not bribing a tank to do a dungeon, they're bribing them to do a dungeon with YOU. They have to go deal with the random selection of mouth breathing, fire standing, sheep dot'ing, oom healer pulling, inbred fuckwits that inhabit the random dungeons like maggots in a month old corpse of a tauren. This is the reason tanks don't que too often, it's not because there's so few. It's because they run with their friends or a full guild just to avoid this bullshit. That's the same reason I only que as a tank when me or my gf need to do a daily random and it's an hour before reset. See? I que for the instant group, not because I want to. Fuck no! The faster I can get in the faster I can leave.

If you ask me, blizz should just give a tank 150g for doing a random heroics and finishing the whole instance. They get the 150g every single time they complete an instance and not just once a day. Why do I say that? Because that is what me and countless others pay to hire a tank for the instant que. But that still wouldn't work and would in fact hurt things even more when you don't go with a group of decent players you already put together.

Why do I think this call to arms garbage is going to make randoms even worse? Simple, how often do you get a tank that is plain terrible? I don't mean the guy that has low aoe threat or the one that can't hold threat on a boss when you do 15k+ dps. I mean one that key board turns, clicks spells, has no idea what cc is, and doesn't know a thing about a single boss. I bet the answer is not that often. They're out there sure and we've all had to deal with them or drop group, but for the most part random tanks are tolerable.

Enter call to arms giving a reward of what is crack to the M&S, nothing useful. Now you have brostormlol the arms warrior in half pvp gear that has never tanked before. Enter worgenlol the paladin that puts on righteous fury and doesn't know what holy power is. Enter arthasdklol who hits blood presence and thinks they're a tank now. Don't think it won't happen.

DON'T THINK IT WON'T HAPPEN!

In all honesty I'm thinking that this so called "feature" will do nothing but make randoms even worse. The fact is that the vast majority of warcraft subscribers aren't just below average casual players. Those people I ahve nothign against at all. The vast majority are just terrible. Sucky. Fail. Noob. Mouth breathing powerdrooling fuckwit. Take your pick of words. They're bad and this will "motivate" them to tank. I'm reminded of the South Park episode where Cartman wants to become a Nascar driver. He's not a professional driver, but does it anyways. Lots of people get killed in the process. Arthasdklol and worgenlol want to tank for the goodie bags but are not actually tanks.

Lots of people get killed in the process.

Simply put yes you might get another 20 tanks per server doing 10 extra random instances. Sure that means that a hundred or so DPS get 2 minutes taken off their que time. But what's going to happen is they'll get stuck with arthasdklol or worgenlol or brostormlol and leave group because these people are such shit at tanking that they leave group and have to wait another 30 minutes in que. So instead of lowering the average que time it's probably gone up.

As unexpected from me as this might be, I agree with a lot of people out there who think that a few good tanks will come out of this. Me? Agreeable with anybody but myself?

Preposterous!

Ahem. No tanking is not hard. At all and if you say it is then you're either an absolutely amazing tank and know every teeny tiny bit to help you do your job or you're just more trash that competent players boost in randoms. I don't care if you agree because that's not an opinion, it is a fact. Doing the job of a tank in a 5 man is just as easy as doing dps on skull or spamming greater heal on one person and sometimes hit another 2-3 buttons. It's easy.

The problem is that not many people CAN dps only skull marked mobs. Not many people CAN hit their heal button when health goes lower. Not make people CAN hit an aoe ability when they pull. It isn't a fear of difficulty, but one of ability and responsibility. If a dps fails, not many will notice or care. If a tank fails it's obvious and you get raged at by everyone. The people that are convinced that they're awesome, but just need better gear (most of lfg) know they can't do it and don't want to seem less than incredible.

I'm sure there isn't a lack of jobs to clean toilets out in the world or to clean up after hours at some adult entertainment venues or hand over burgers at fast food joints. Why don't people do it even though it's easy? Because they don't want to. The fail players don't want to tank and will never amount to anything more than people that make you nerd rage but still have to carry on your back through your daily heroic.

So yes tanking is easy and that is not related to the shortage of them. The shortage of tanks is due to the abundance of failures. I used to tank but I stopped because I'm not going to carry anybody anymore. That's another tank that won't be doing chain randoms for a goodie bag. I wonder how many others are in the same group as me?

And as for the dps that are in tears saying "well we are getting screwed because we're dps." Shut the hell up. You lose nothing but que times.

Going to close with a quote from Gevlon on this topic which I feel sums this all up perfectly.

"The situation has a real-world version: underemployment and unemployment at the same time. There are lot of engineer, IT-specialist and medical doctor posts open. They have great salary offers. In the same time millions are unemployed. Why don't they take these well-paying jobs? Because they are unqualified, uneducated and often drunkards. If we would increase the salaries of IT specialists, could the no-high-school guy take it?"


It is not and never was an issue of desire or motivation, but one of ability. And not always the ability of the tank for that matter.

Report: 4-12

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 gold total: 1,491,000
Total sales: 328,000
Weekly profit: 152,000
Current gold total: 1,643,000




Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:


Yellow, blue, purple, meta, common gems:


Tailoring, misc glyphs & vendor pets:


Enchanting & smithing:


Engineering & mining:




Another week goes by and another market gets invaded by Stokpile. Mwahahahaha! And in other news, the great Zurathustra is in a raiding guild once more O.o

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
I am now joining the ranks of the many AH barons out there that are building an army of xmute alchemists. Me and my gf are leveling a pair of goblins together and I decided to take herb/alch for mine. And when I saw the huge excess of herbs that I wasn't going to use (and too lazy to AH) I decided that I could use a third xmute toon.

I remembered that I still had skinning on my mage from way back when and have since started to power level alchemy on them as well for another CD to use. I had a decent amount of low level herbs to send over, but the rest were farmed on the AH so that's a few thousand gone from this week's profits. But once it gets to cata levels I can start making a lot more cash back from it even if I only use the living elements xmute.

I'm also getting into working the pvp leather gear. I know I said it was a fail on my server, but prices of leather have finally gone down significantly and the dumpers are mostly gone. It doesn't sell nearly as fast as the plate gear does, but it still sells none the less. And keeping track of it isn't difficult at all so it's worth it to have a set hanging around.

I've also started raiding again. I know, finally right? I walked into the guild not knowing anymore than what tank spot videos told me and held a top 10 dps slot every pull. And I even got a helm upgrade, shame it's a friggin tank piece. Anyways, I mention this bit from my personal fun time area because that means I'm going to have to change around my posting habits a little. Raid invites go out at 830p server time and end at around 12ish. That means I'll miss prime posting time.

So to counter that I'm listing my auctions at around 8p and once more at midnight just before I log off. But since I keep extras on me at all times this can be as simple as logging onto a banker and hitting post. I don't necessarily have to do a full cancel, craft, post cycle every time. Sometimes just listing up a few of your wares will suffice. Though weather or not I do a full AH cycle depends on when I notice what time it is because I'm bad like that.

It's been another long and crazy week for work. Combine that with an actual raid schedule I'm not able to hit the prime posting times again and probably won't for a good amount of time. Blarglelele!

With the announcement of the nerf to the shuffle, I've taken to stokpiling a shit ton more than I usually do. I'm buying up as much ore as humanly possible so that I'll have a very large stokpile of "free" rare gems to outlast just about all of my competitors when prices on them shift down. I've dropped well over 20k in the last two days into ele and pyrite ore to prospect along with buying out a ton of VE that's under 10g each.

Over the weekend either somebody got desperate or just made an "oops" with the AH pricing. I saw somebody selling the 50 agility recipe for a mere 300g. Naturally I decided to buy it and flipped it for 3k a matter of hours later. Made me smile.

I'm buying the VE because most of it comes from prospecting pyrite ore and not many people will be doing that come 4.1 so it should go up in price. Even if that's only for a day or two like it was with VL for the alchemy trinkets it'll be worth it. Along with VE and rares I'm also trying to pile up a decent amount of enchanting mats for the new heroics and the explosion of demand for enchants.

Even though the price of enchanting mats will go down there will be an initial demand spike and I think it might outlast the price fall. Or more accurately that I'll go through my stokpile before price changes become an issue. It's a big risk, but I love the enchanting market so I'm taking it. And naturally this is putting a rather large dent into my profits for this week. But with a small dose of luck it will all be made up once the patch comes. As is always the case, big risk means big rewards. And with my massive stokpiling I'm taking a huge risk that has the potential to allow me to completely own several markets for a long time if things pan out the way I'm hoping they will.

Aside from all of that though, spell threads finally picked up a bit this weekend to the point that it was profitable to sell them. I think I'm just going to stokpile the dream cloth and eventually get into selling the 26 slot bags. After I make a few for myself of course.

LW is still doing great with the profession bags and I've been getting fairly decent profits from the agility pvp gear. Pretty odd that this market has been in the dumps for ages and suddenly is picking up. Not entirely sure why that is. Is a new arena season starting soon or something? I don't know.

Thank god for cross faction trading. I managed to get a few stacks of LBS alliance side for a little bit over my normal buying price. After begging my gf to head to a neutral AH I was able to finally craft enough twink scrolls to be happy with them. I'm down to only a few shards, but plenty of GEE, dust, and crafted scrolls. I still can't find any essence of air to save my life though. But I can't really complain too much, I seem to have at least one up at all times.

And as a closing note, I've managed to acquire such a large stokpile of mats that there's barely anything that I need to buy. Out of all the materials in all of the markets here are the only things that I'm short on.

Essence of air
Large brilliant shard
Primal air
Savage/borean leather
Righteous orb
Infinite dust
Crocolisk tail
Arctic fur

You may also notice that they're mostly things that I always buy no matter how much I have stokpiled already. As for absolutely everything else I have more than enough to cover a full month of buying absolutely nothing with high rates of sales each and every day. Stokpile actually has a big enough stokpile. That's never happened to me before...



Thanks for stopping by!

And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth

NOTE: This is actually the entry that I've written for Monday, but it is far too pressing to wait on. So you'll get the entry a bit early but have to wait a bit longer for more. Get cracking!


It was posted on mmo champ a few days ago that the uncommon gems from prospecting will sell for 75 silver instead of 9g when the patch comes. As we all know this was the saving grace of JC's everywhere being able to make all of the rare gems totally free along with easy money. This is also one tiny change that will have quite possibly the largest and most diverse market impact since gem sockets were added in tbc. Today I'll be going over in detail what to expect and how to prepare for it. Some of the things I'll talk about are server dependent and you'll have to know your market to know if they'll bypass you or how they will come about.

But regardless of your gem market, yours and every other related one will be drastically effected in the long term. Lastly of note is that when I mention a price shift going up or down, you can also interpret this as prices will stabilize. Some servers are very up and down on gems so this big shake up will help to even things out.

A few notes on my entry from yesterday are in order I'm sure. Yes I still believe that rare gems will be a great market when epics come out. The only catch is that you might not want to stokpile rares now with the changes coming to the gem market and the same goes for commons. Now why are the prices getting slashed so dramatically by blizz? I think it's a deterrence to botters in all honesty.

Think about it. They make tons of gold by selling cheap ore to players that want gold as well. The only way to remove that is by discouraging people to buy every bit that they can find. If they don't sell 500 stacks a day each then their motivation is going to drop to almost nothing. All of the other markets will even out over time after getting over the initial crash. But who is to say that they won't move to herbs or skins next? Well herbs only effects a few markets.

The most prominent one is alchemy and glyphs. Nobody should care about alchemy because it's as dead as it ever was outside of xmutes. Glyphs though could return to the wrath days if the price on all herbs was cut in half. And as for skinning, that effects only a single profession so the wide spread effect wouldn't be nearly as devastating.

And before I get headlong into it let me give you the short version of this whole entry: prospect and vendor commons as much as you possibly can until the patch comes and sell off a large amount of enchanting mats. And for those still wondering about epic gems, this is all based on current information of which we have exactly zero on them. So there is no way to know if you'll shoot yourself in the foot if epic gems xmute from commons.

The first effect you'll see is obviously going to be rare gem prices going way down. Since herbs are pretty cheap and the commons to xmute them being worthless the price of these will go down accordingly based on how many jc's on your server have an alchemist handy. However over time once the initial stokpiles of these get sold, cut, or vendored the prices will go up since your server won't have 500 stacks of ore being prospected every single day. Expect an initial crash in these prices then for supply to drop off significantly over time and prices to go up to a manageable level.

The next thing you'll see (loosely server dependent) is a small increase in herb prices. This is because at 75 silver per common gem, every color is going to be just about worthy of an xmute to craft. That means more herbs will be wanted giving those prices a small boost.

Black smithing will be effected too. With the plethora of ore no longer being prospected, you can expect a lot more of it will be smelted into bars which will have a noticeable effect on any crafted gear and buckles. Right after that is volatile earth going up in price. Not as much pyrite will be prospected causing a severe drop in supply of VE in the market which will effect anything associated with it. I plan to keep a few stacks of it around for a while waiting for prices to go up some. The most noticeable effect this is going to have on are the prices for buckles.

Obviously this will hit meta gems the hardest. Currently the material cost of a meta gem is 81g before xmute spec. That is based on nothing but 9g per common, 3x of each needed, and divided by 2. Once the prices drop down to throw away levels the bare minimum price of a meta gem will be 6 gold and 75 silver before mastery. So suffice to say if you think this market is bad now just you wait. This one is going to crash hard so try and sell off as many meta gems as you can that cost you over 100 to make.

What's next? Things in the enchanting area will return to where they were in wrath. The price of dust becomes about 2g each with GCE being around 4g. So you'll want to sell off any enchanting mats you have soon. The same goes for cata level scrolls, get rid of them! This is going to be very depressed, I love seeing all of the big numbers on enchanting every time I write a business report. The main thing that you'll have to change in your daily play from this is that just about every single green item you get do NOT disenchant it! The price of the mats can get so low that a 5g vendor item will be a loss as DE fodder.

After that ye old fire prism CD will suddenly be worth considering again. It will cost about 13g to craft and you can get a chimera's eye out of the deal. This is entirely up to you and what you see price wise on rare gems. The jury is still out on this one, but I'm going to guess that this still won't be worth crafting.

However there's a few things to consider that could be different possible outcomes from this one change. For one, the bots may stay around and keep ore prices down even more than they are currently. With very few people spending 40g per stack they'll have to lower their price even more which could be low enough that buying to prospect for rares could be viable. The other is that they'll totally vanish leaving the supply of commons to xmute and rares to cut almost totally gone. Because of that I'm holding onto my rares and still going to vendor all of my commons except for reds.

What are my recommendations? Empty out your toy boxes of everything. I would venture to guess that the supply of common gems will be the same as in wrath, more than enough to keep you stocked up with anything that you need. So long as you actually try to stokpile. I don't think that the bots and uber farmers are going away anytime soon so the supply will still be there and people will still prospect a ton. Even back in wrath when prospecting wasn't greatly profitable for a a lot of servers, it happened anyways. Get ready folks, everything is about to change.

Even if the vendor price doesn't go down as low as under a gold it's obvious that blizzard has intent to lower it. I highly doubt that it will be high enough to make prospect/vendor shuffles viable so even if the markets don't totally implode from this they still won't be in the state that they're in right now. So when the price gets lowered there will still be wide spread repercussions being felt across many different markets a month later.


Thanks for stopping by!

Epic Gems - Fallouts, Stokpiles, & Reminders

EDIT: Come 4.1 uncommon gems will no longer vendor for 9g and instead will sell for 75 silver. So get your prospecting and such done asap and dump your stokpile of them if you have them while the getting is good. So ignore any advise to stokpile them or rares for right now. I'll be giving my thoughts on this tomorrow.


Aloha all, it's your not so friendly goblin Stokpile here with a friendly reminder. With all of the big talk going around about epic gems and wanting to pile up now to make a fast 400k tomorrow. Now as with any patch with big potential for easy profits, it's far too easy for us all to forget the hidden gems right beneath our noses. You see what I did there?

OMG I am so funny!



Ahem.

For you long time readers here's a Stokpile 101 pop quiz. What was my most profitable market during wrath after enchanting? Can't remember? Here's a hint. It's the same market now that people say is in the gutter. Ok enough of the guessing game, the answer is rare gems. Yes rare gems, the same ones that everybody is all poo poo about. The reason that this market wa so profitable is the same reason as glyphs, the same as second best enchants. Not everybody has thousands to spend. Not everybody wants to spend hundreds on an alt or an off spec.

People buy the enchant mighty stats because they can't justify the several thousand for the top end version. So these people are looking to save money or just not spend as much even if they're rich. I'm in the same group, I know I'll be replacing my epic boe chest soon (ish) so I'm not spending 10k on an enchant even though I'm about to hit 2 million. It's just plain silly. Granted we always want to get as much profit as we can get from every single sale, but that is no reason to not selling something because you can sell something that's worth more. If there's a market for something, you need to be selling it. Let me divert the discussion with absolute ninja like precision to explain my rationale on this.

Turn the clocks back to late ToC era where people were throwing purples on their 6th alt with leveling suddenly being made amazingly fast and easy, relatively speaking of course. Casters were among some of the most popular alts to have and so there were two prime enchants that were more popular than any other options. 30 spell power and healing 29 spell power. With the price at the time of golden pearls being so high, 30 sp was quite expensive, especially since it was extremely rare to find somebody that even had it. Even though it was only a single point better than healing power which was even a third of the price of 30sp. Personally, I sold both of them.

If somebody wants to save 200g they're going to try. And when they go looking they'll see a healing power scroll and buy it. So the question is, why aren't they buying it from you? Sell it. Sell any option you can because people WILL be looking for it. Yes denial of service can get you some extra coin here and there, but that only works if the buyer can't go somewhere else. But when they have that option you want to make sure you are the one that makes it available.

Ok back on topic.

First of all think about how the prices of cata started out. Everything was insanely expensive and most people couldn't afford much of it. And so they all turned to third best and second best if they're a big spender. When epic gems come out every single JC and their mother will clamor towards it, casuals and goblins alike. So depending on how easy you can acquire them the prices can come down pretty fast. But they'll still be extremely expensive compared to 20g rares and 9g commons. Now since people will be going so hard for the purple shiny gems a lot of people will be forgetting all about the rare gems since they're just oh so terrible and non profit now. Sarcasm.

So what am I stokpiling in anticipation of epic gems? Rares that's what. They already sell very well now and once people are geared up in purples on their mains with epic gems, a lot will be low on funding. But they'll still NEED to have gems for their alts, but at a much lower cost. The same thing happened in wrath with epics. The prices on rares held steady for a month and all of the AH players got out of them and went full force into epic gems.

However in addition to rares I'm trying to keep all of the bases covered. Here's the short version of what I'm doing in preparation for epic gems. Nothing of which I'm suggesting for you to do by the way. Do what you feel is best until we get more info.

- 2k pyrite ore
- 1 bank tab of assorted cata herbs
- tons of assorted rares
- 6 stacks of each colored common

A month later after epic gems came out the demand for rares hadn't changed much at all, but the supply sure had. That's when the price of cut gems went up a good amount because nobody was bothering to sell these old crappy non purple things. The same will happen again, that I'm certain of. So when they go looking for something in the lower price range, sell it to them.


Thanks for stopping by!

Epic Gems - Xmutes & My Thoughts

NOTE: Pro tip. Max out your justice points on ALL of your different toons. Maelstrom crystals will be sold for about 3750 JP come 4.1 so get a head start.


Continuing from yesterday on the subject of epic gems. Yesterday we covered pyrite ore prospects and why it isn't too likely. After pyrite ore prospecting, the next thing that people are thinking of are alchemy xmutes. Once again there is no clear pattern here for this. However there is more validity to this claim than that of prospecting pyrite ore.

In TBC there were no xmutes for gems epic or otherwise, but in wrath you could xmute rares and epics. Now the so called "pattern" here has a bit more going for it. Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, the event of having gem xmutes twice counts as a pattern. Though in my opinion twice in the same expansion isn't nearly as important as once in two different expansions would be. And now in cata, we can xmute rare gems with the current commons and herbs. Twice in the last expansion and once in the current one gives this a very high possibility of happening. Enough so that I'd wager my bank on it.

Could it be that epics will require 3 rares and 3 herbs? Who knows, but that would definitely be a huge boon to the JC market on top of the epic gems. That is definitely something I'd like to see. Especially since I'm stokpiling all of my rares that don't sell instead of vendoring them.

I think that if any of the popular beliefs on epic gems are to be believed, this one is the most likely situation. I say this because you can use herbs to xmute rare gems. In wrath it was eternals but now there aren't enough volatile/eternals to associate with each color gem. So unless blizz adds in a new volatile shadow or some such I doubt it'll be that. So if xmuting gems comes out, which I'm sure it will, this is the most likely way they'll come. You may also require rare gems or a handful of commons.

There is also the possibility that nobody has mentioned yet. An epic gem xmute will require all of the above. It could wind up needing 2 rare gems, 6 common gems, 3 herbs, and a random volatile. With the current over abundance of common and rare gems I wouldn't be shocked if this were the case as they would be quite accessible for everybody and the price almost as low as the current rares. That would let everyone have their fair share of epics for all of their alts. What I expect is that the epic gem transmutes will require herbs and rares, and possibly something else in addition to that.

So that's my take on pyrite ore and and xmutes, but the main question hasn't been answered yet. Where will they come from? Well there is one pattern that has and always will stay consistent and reliable. Gems come from prospecting and gems come from mining. This means that the only thing we know with certainty is that there will either be a new ore, a current ore will yield epic gems, or they will be mined from "gem" nodes. I believe also that there will (most likely) be a transmute for epic gems requiring any combination of current materials.

Any materials? That's quite a bit to stokpile and requires more storage than even I can muster. Let alone the gold investment needed to have a decent size stokpile. So what's a goblin to do? Like I've said before, one can only have as much preparation as one has foresight. The short version of anything mentioned about epic gems is that nobody knows.

Then there is the potential for a new zone, new dailys hub, new raid, and new mining nodes. It's just as possible as anything else is. Though this isn't something that I can put much of a comment on. It would definitely be pretty nifty to squeeze in another zone to muck about in.

If I had to pick a possibility of where epic gems will come from, I would have to say that they will come from raids a la TBC. I think they will either come in the form of the tried and true gem bags and/or mining nodes. I base this on absolutely nothing more than a gut feeling. It will either be this or the Firelands in 4.2 won't be just a new raid, but it will gate us to a new zone with a new map. The biggest argument against a new zone is the question of where would they put it? A zone with it's own map somewhere in the middle of nowhere such as deepholm is the answer. But I have been wrong before.

My best possible advice is twofold. First you should definitely stokpile something. Second, only stokpile something that you'll be using in bulk if you pick completely wrong. There's a ton of guess work going on and plenty of things to reference, but zero information from blizz on the subject. Make your choice, even if that choice is to do nothing but wait and hope that you chose wisely. Or just got lucky.


Thanks for stopping by!

Epic Gems - History & Pyrite

NOTE: Loot list for ZA/ZG is up on mmo champ now. The good news is that there's plenty of gem sockets that will need to be filled and a diverse amount of gear to be enchanted as expected. The bad news? My DK is still going to be wearing her damned tanking helm and tanking boots and blue bracers to DPS in. Yes they're significantly better than the any of the purples in the new instances. Sad face!


Part one of three giving my thoughts on where epic gems will come from and what to look out for. It seems that every blogger out there has given their thoughts on the burning question that has been asked since the gem market has bottomed out. Where oh where will epic gems come from and what should I be doing before? Well I think it's pretty silly to speculate right now in all honesty. But regardless of that I'll be giving my thoughts on it throughout the rest of the week now that everyone else has finished their walls of text on the subject.

There are numerous paths that blizz could take and many previous examples to support a certain trend. The problem with all of this speculation is that they're all 100% opinion and are all just as valid as the next. Consider that my disclaimer. The entries this week are in no way to be taken as a "sure thing" or a "most likely scenario." It is merely my opinion no more and no less. That being said, lets move on.

A lot of things that people are saying lately is that cata relates a lot to burning crusade. And to blizzard's credit, was my favorite expansion and hope they make cata more so like TBC was. In any case what people who say this seem to forget one thing when talking about epic gems; where they originally came from. First let me remind the older players and educate the new ones. TBC was the first expansion to have gem sockets and naturally was the first to have epic gems, but they didn't come from prospecting. Yes you read that right, no epic gems came from prospecting ore.

Allow me to link you a few of them before we continue.

Crimson Spinel (red)
Lionseye (yellow)
Empyrean Sapphire (blue)

And now here is the highest level ore from TBC Khorium Ore

If you click the link you'll notice that it cannot be prospected. In TBC epic gems came from either mining a special node from a raid, rare trash drops from the top two raids, or from the TBC equivalent of around 200 valor points. They weren't common to see in raids and were typically sold by the top raid guilds of the server and then filtered through from the mid range guilds.

To sum up this brief history lesson, people who compare cata to TBC and talk about trends in epic gems forget that there was no prospecting and no transmutes. In other words, one speculation that people don't want to mention, either out of ignorance or not wanting it to happen, is that there WON'T be any epics from pyrite ore. There won't be any xmutes from current herbs or gems or anything what so ever.

But to contradict that possibility is the fact that blizz is wanting to make the entire game totally accessible to everyone. That goes from top end raids and all the way down to include purple text gems for all. However blizz DOES like to also give the hard core players something to gnaw on for a while before it gets nerfed and ultimately made obsolete. So if blizz goes the TBC route of epic gems, we'll see the firelands raid have epic gems from either trash drops or nodes. The prices will be in the 1k each range for a while and then the raid gets nerfed to just about pug levels. Maybe you might need a raiding rep to learn the gem cuts or the xmute recipe.

Who knows? I sure don't, and neither does anybody outside of blizz development. But damn it sure is fun to guess!

The next possibility that comes up is pyrite ore. The only reason people think this is because pyrite is a rare ore. Titanium is a rare ore. Titanium gives epic gems. So pyrite ore must give epic gems. Let me explain this logic using different words.

Lead is a metal.
Gold is a metal.
Gold is very valuable.
So lead must be very valuable.

Yeeeah, not quite so much. Yes you can make a claim to blizz keeping to patterns, but when something happening once (epic gems from rare ore) does not in any way constitute a pattern. So anybody saying that there is a pattern with epic gems and prospecting is in the wrong. Completely 100% wrong. However to contradict this, you can relate previous patterns to make an educated guess as to potential pattern. But once again this is only a guess and it is based on very loose reasoning. But here's a practical reason for it to go against predicting a pattern based on previous ones. You can already prospect pyrite ore.

In wrath you couldn't prospect titanium until epics were released. And in addition to that blizz isn't keen to any "patterns" of adding new items acquired from prospecting or milling or gathering. So with that being said I don't think that epics will come from pyrite ore. But I still have a decent stokpile of 2,000 ore juuust in case I'm wrong on this one. If nothing else I'll still be using the bars, rares, commons, and VE's from it all.


Continuing with this tomorrow.