Rift Beginner's guide Part 2

Continuing from yesterday with a crash course in how to play Rift we'll look at a few more points in the game that everybody should know when you first open it up. After I spend a little more time at the level cap I'll give you a once over of what dungeons and the like are all about.


Callings and souls.
A calling is your base class which pretty much just defines your armor type and how you want to play them. You have warrior, rogue, mage, and cleric to choose from. With each of these callings are several different souls to pick from of which you can have 3 at once. Each soul has it's own talent tree which decides if you're a wow hunter, a ranged rogue, a healing priest, dps priest, tank, or support class.

Support is a new role added into the typical mmo trinity. The support role is exactly what you think it would be, support. The entire soul tree is centered entirely around utility with things such as super awesome CC, aoe silences, snares, focused and raid healing counterparts to dps (1 damage also turns into 1 healing, not replaced) etc. Depending on how you spec and souls taken, you can be a very solid dps loaded up with utility. Fun stuff.

In other words there are dozens of different talent trees for you to look at and each one has a tool tip telling you what a recommended pairing is for it. Choosing talents is totally simple, take whatever adds to DPS, healing, or survival and grab utility with anything left over.


What's built in.
Since there are no addOns in the game currently, they made sure that almost everything you'd want comes already running by default. Unfortunately it is lacking in anything relating to the AH aside from the basic functions. Here's a few wow-esque addOns that come stock with the game.

Carbonite / quest helper: The awesome mini map and questing database from these two addOns is a much have for any game if you ask me. You get a note in an enemy's tooltip if they're for a quest, you can track them on your map and mini map and get yellow circles around the area the quest is at. Oh and the mini map is actually useful! In wow the mini map or compass were absolute garbage and had zero use what so ever, but the one in Rift has everything you'd expect it to have.

Map coordinates: Mouse over any pixel on the map and you see what coords you're pointing at. Winning. In addition to that you can right click and set a "way point" which is exactly what you think it is. It sets a marker on the map and you get a small arrow pointing you what direction to go in order to get to that point. You can only have one up at a time, but everybody in the group can set one.


Dynamic events.
The first are rifts which are entail a spawn point of baddies, mini quest, and unique loot. If you clear the stage that it's in within the time limit (if there is one) you'll get a bonus stage which is where all of the real goodies come from. Next are invasions and foot holds which are just a smaller version of a rift and only entail clearing a small pack of mobs to get some drops.

Lastly are epic invasions which are when dozens of rifts, footholds and invasions happen all over an entire zone at once. These are zone wide and totally massive. They require basically everyone in the zone to take part in a quest that gets added to your log by default to complete and get high end rewards and level appropriate epics.

If you're worried about there not being enough people doing them I took part in one the other day at like 2am and we cleared everything including the final boss with about 20 people total.

In addition to that, there is still good reason to do an epic invasion quest in a lowbie zone even if you're at 50. The rewards you get can be traded up for things you can sell to lower level players or special currencies you can use at any time at any level. Doing lower ones will give you lesser amounts than higher level ones of course, but you will still get a useful amount at any level.


Dynamic groups.
The big thing in Rift are world events that happen on the fly, some only need a small group of 2-3 people to do while others need an entire raid. To make this easier if you're group is trying to close a rift (spawn point of baddies, mini quest, unique loot) at the same time as another one is, both groups will be merged together automatically.

This is called being in a public group which the group leader can change any time they want by right clicking their picture and changing it from public to private. If your group goes above 5 people it'll be turned into a raid group which you can still invite more to and so forth. And as far as I know, you can still do regular quests while in a raid group and are not penalized for being in one.


PvP.
The same as wow. You can do world pvp if you're on the right server or flag yourself if you're on a carebear server. There are plenty of questing hubs and outposts for you to go explode if you feel so inclined. Be advised though that even at max level with decent gear, you won't be one shotting everything you come across and can easily lose a 1 on 3 battle if the 3 lowbies actually try to kill you.

The big difference here is that you have to select a certain pvp soul in order to compete instead of getting a ton of pvp gear just to not be exploded.


What am I playing?
I'm a dps warrior using the Paragon soul. Think fury warrior from TBC, dual wielding great aoe, and high sustained damage. My gf is playing a chloromancer mage which is a dps/healing support role. All of their damage heals either the group or an assigned target with certain buffs being handed out. So far every soul seems to have a solid niche that they can fit and do well in with their flavor of damage and such. Also of note is that you can have up to 5 different specs at once so there are plenty of options with a single calling.


Crafting and selling.
Ah what you've all been waiting for! Unfortunately there won't be anything here that you don't already know from wow. The only real difference here is the names of everything. The big thing to point out though is that every crafting profession has a set of daily quests you can do that you can start doing at level 1. Each quest is chosen randomly each day and at a max of 2 daily's per crafting profession. The reward is a fist full of assorted mats for that profession and tokens that are used to learn more recipes, think JC gem cuts but for every profession.

Each one of these quests requires you to turn in a number of crafted items to an NPC. The things you turn in don't have to be crafted though, so you can just buy them from the AH if they're cheaper than the mats and hand those over.

The prof daily quests (which reset at 4am server) scale with your current profession skill level and not your character level so you may get a quest at level 20 that needs you to deliver something to an NPC in a level 40 zone. I know, it happened to me many times. Also you can predict what you'll need to craft to a certain extent. The two crafting quests will want the highest tier material and the second highest material to craft something that you can make.

To put this into wow terms, Enchanting at 525 skill level would get one quest that needs maelstrom crystals and another quest needing heavenly shards. Below that you would have to craft something with GCE's and below that would be something needing hypnotic dust. I'm sure that's a tad confusing, but it's a lot harder to explain that it actually is. Once you check it out you'll understand completely.



Thanks for stopping by!

Rift Beginner's guide: Part 1

I've been playing rift for a month or so now and I've got a pretty strong grasp of the mechanics and game play. So for today and tomorrow you'll get to read a write up on the main differences between Rift and wow and a general overview of "how to play." Basically all of the questions that you'll have after your first 2 hours of the game will be answered here.


Money.
Gold, silver, copper has been turned into platinum, gold, silver. Same value and rarity as in wow but with different names. So anytime I say "plat" you can just translate that in your mind as gold in wow.


Mail.
It's instant between all players, but from the AH it's a little delayed. When you buy or cancel an auction it's delayed by around 45 seconds, but when you sell something it's instant. When you mail something add the item before typing in the name or it gets a tad temperamental.


Leveling.
If you wear plate, take 1 defensive talent and the rest dps and you're fine. If you go with a tank spec you can pull as much as you like usually, but things die VERY slowly. If you level as a healer it's the same as with wow, kill yourself. Your first purchase of a second spec is dirt cheap so being able to dps and heal or tank is no problem. It's all straight forward and easy to figure out. In fact, if you level a toon in wow to 60 without heirloom gear that's 20 times more of a nightmare than in rift.

Fun fact: I never enjoyed questing in wow. Ever. Not even on my first toon, I hated every single quest. None of them were slightly interesting minus like, 8 total. Meanwhile in rift, I'm having fun on at least half of the quests as they're interesting and have their own story in their own place. Not like blizz did in wrath and cata where every damned quests was either "zomg unded" or "zomg something's burning."


Best game mechanics.
Two things come to mind. One is automatic AoE looting. If you kill 10 mobs in the same spot once you loot one of them you auto loot them all. FUCKING WINNING! Like seriously, who ever made that call has got to have tiger's blood or something. After that is that you don't have to dismount to loot anything, don't have to wait 10 seconds before skinning a dead mob etc. Other cool things include when you need to kill a named mob but it's tagged, as long as you help kill it you still get credit. An when you're on a collect drops quest, everyone in the group can loot the quest item from the mob so you don't have to kill 10 bears for each person.


Talents.
Identical to wow for the most part. The main difference is that the more points you spend in a certain tree you'll get more abilities opened up. I don't mean that if you spend a talent point into X you'll get X skill. No it's more of a passive thing where 30 points into a tree will get you Y ability. That and you have talents that are like built in mastery where the more you spend there, the better you are at that role.


Mounts.
You can get your first one as soon as you can afford to buy it (2.5 plat), next at 40, and the last is at 50. With gold given from only quests I was able to afford my first one at around level 10.


Professions.
Identical to wow. Skill ups are green, yellow, and orange difficulties. The big difference here is that you can learn 3 at once and a lot of them are either splits of wow profs or combines. For example "Outfitter" crafts both cloth and leather gear, so it needs a leather gathering prof to supplement it. Meanwhile "Weaponsmith" is just what it sounds, a black smith that makes mostly weapons. Choose wisely. I went with outfitter, rune crafting (enchanting), and butchery (skinning).


Biggest thing missing from wow?
No addons, none, zero. They have stated that it's something they're considering for the future, but want to see how the game plays and the people go through it before they make a decision. In other words, the game is 2 months old fool! I think this is a good decision honestly, because unless you run the game right out of the box there's no way to really gauge the difficulty of learning and playing it. This is mostly from a developer's standpoint though. I'm sure that your average wow player has no problem working with addOns but if you're fairly new to the genre you'll be like a deer in headlights.


Bugs.
There aren't many bugs in the traditional sense, but there is a lot of things that I've noticed that make you wonder "why can't I do this?" By that I mean when a confirmation window pops up, you can't hit enter to say OK. Also the auto complete in the mail box is a bit temperamental. I'm positive that things like this will be fixed or added in later on as they've already handled a ton of this in the last patch or two. So in the mean time, be aware that there are still a few minor annoyances that you'll have to deal with.


Travel.
This is the most awesome change from wow right here. No more 10 minute flights from A to B! In every zone there is a portal that gives you instant travel to any other portal that you've come across thus far for a minor fee. And I do mean instant in the literal sense, you hit OK and you go to the loading screen and blam you're there. One per zone might not seem like a lot, but traveling on a mount is VERY simple when you stick to a road. In some zones that are much larger you'll find two of them there so the only hard part is finding them. And that's only hard if you have nobody at all to tell you where they are.


Thanks for stopping by!

Friendly reminder

Aloha all, I just wanted to check in and remind you that I'm going to be back to writing fairly soon. Bear in mind that I have a lot of stuff already written (over two weeks worth!) so it may seem a tad out of order as I was writing it as I leveled up and have since hit 50. Now that you've read my two entries on rift starter guides (you have read them haven't you?) you should be up to speed on everything you need to know so that you can understand what I'm saying when I talk specifics.

I'll be writing about making gold yes, but in Rift this time. All of the theory I mention then you can easily apply to any game with an AH and an established crafting system in place. The what and where is always important, but is trumped by the WHY every single time if you want to go far.

I'll be starting up again officially this coming Monday so be sure to check it out!


Thanks for stopping by!

Wow AH index

Today is my final entry on wow and it's going to be a simple index of my most important entries that I've written to date. I'll leave a link to this entry on the side so you will have easy access once I move onto writing about rift full time. I am beyond thrilled that all of you enjoyed my blog as I did writing it, but it's time for me to move onto something that I find more interesting.

Should you have any wow related questions, feel free to send an email to theahpile@gmail.com as I don't think I'll forget everything I've learned in 2 years over night. That and the fact that once new content and gems come out the methods and ideas will always apply.

Here are the most pertinent blog posts you will find here and possibly anywhere else. Each one deals with everything from pricing theory to campers to my massive list of what sells for a profit. Enjoy!


My credentials on the wow AH.
First gold cap: 1/18/10
1 Million gold: 5/7/2010
A fortune in 2 months
2 million gold: 5/1/11


Dealing with campers.
What every scribe asks 1
What every scribe asks 2
What every scribe asks 3
Vicious
Campers and greed
How do you kill that which has no life?


General AH theory.
Old markets are thriving markets
So sayeth the Stokpile
Dual monitors
Key ingredients
My specifics
The Method


Pricing theory.
Auction House Nirvana: Part 1
Auction House Nirvana: Part 2
Auction House Nirvana: Part 3


Buy, sell, and trade lists.
Comprehensive list of everything that sells.
Buying list
Best sellers
What DON'T I sell?


Profession specific guides.
Profession Overview: Inscription
Profession overview: Jewel crafting
Profession overview: Smithing & Leatherworking
Profession overview: Tailoring & Engineering
Profession overview: Enchanting
Low profit professions: Part 1
Low profit professions: Part 2
BoA enchanting guide


Off topic rants.
For the potential blogger
On raiding: PSA
A few gems from "Ask the devs"
Dungeon finder Call to arms (failure)
I bought the ultimate gold sink
Must nerd rage!


For those just starting up.
Where to start?
Profession Priorities
First place finishes last
Convert to goblinism and profit
Investments & Bracer enchants
Start up
Patience


Assorted tips.
Entry detailing the addOns I use
zeroAuctions set up guide
MS Excel enchanting price guide spread sheet
How much to Stokpile
Pro Tips



Thanks for stopping by!

A brave new world

And thus ends the great WoW empire of Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny. I have said just about everything that I have to say on the world of warcraft auction house and using it to make tons of gold quickly and easily so it's time to move on. As I mentioned last week I am moving over to Rift and am trying my hand at that game. Today's entry is to give all you a heads up for things to come with the blog.

First, the blog is going to be inactive for about a week or two while I figure some things out with the game. I'm level 50 right now which is the level cap, totally broke, and am getting my feet wet with some of the max level content in the game. I won't be raiding for a while as that needs some significant gear upgrades from the greens I'm in. Tomorrow I'll be posting an index of what I feel are the most important entries that I've made over the lifespan of my wow AH career as it were.

Soon I'll be writing up a beginner's guide to Rift so that anybody that is considering trying it out won't walk into it as a total newbie and can help others decide if it's even worth trying out. In addition to that, it will give any continuing readers a much better grasp of things that I'm talking about in my future writing on the game. I built an empire in wow and plan to do the same in this game eventually. But of course, such things take time and that means you'll get day to day updates on the things that I'm seeing and a bit of an intellectual head start should you move over to Rift as well.

I'll be writing about making the Rift moneys as well as anything that I find interesting about the end game content once I get up to it. I never really wrote much about wow end game because just about everyone who was reading already was having fun with it so there wasn't much of a point. But now with a brand new game, there's basically nothing at all out there.

As for me returning to wow again, I don't think it's very likely. I mean come on, I have 2 million gold and was the top DK dps on my server. I know my class inside and out and have no reason to log on when it isn't raid night. That doesn't really warrant a subscription fee if you ask me. Go do quests? No thanks, they're all the same with little to no story in them. Each one is a different rendition of "the shit is on fire" show. Pvp? I stopped playing during wrath because I was sick of guild hopping and am NOT going to do the same thing with arena teams. Achievements? I'm a goblin. I'm a very pragmatic person. Take that and guess how interested I am in killing 500,000 digital squirrels.


At the end of he day I'll still be writing regularly on the same topic as always, but with a different flavor topping. Once I get a bit more figured out and shed my newbie skin I'll give a full write up on the game, a few classes that I'm familiar with, the whole crafting and auctioning thing, and the obligatory how to make mega muneh! The idea behind writing about the game in depth before I get into the AH part of it all is two fold.

One is so that you, my dear readers, will be able to understand wtf I'm going on about and get a grasp of some new in game lingo. And the second is so that I have some time to actually figure things out for myself. The Stokpile Method doesn't work well if you have to count your pennies and go for broke when you buy a mount. So stay tuned, more quality and original content is coming soon! I'll be posting regularly again in two weeks time with a crash course in Rift game play being posted next week.


See ya then.

Like I always say...

Have you noticed how often I use the phrase "like I always say" in my blog? Well I have and it seems that it's almost every week that I say it. Throughout the lifespan of this blog I've repeated certain phrases and catch phrases of sorts fairly often. I do this for a couple of reasons. One is to drill it into your head because it's that important. And the other is because it's a very easy way to get people to learn, simple expressions can be remembered easily and morphed into your own version of it to fit your situation. So I took some time looking over older entries and came up with a handful of my most common expressions for you to put to use. Immediately!


A winner always knows where they're going. A champion never forgets where they're from.
This one is all about fun and respect. Be respectful to other people, both the morons and the competing AH barons. There is simply never a reason to be rude until you're insulted. Always have fun while you play the AH, even if you are driven to hit 1 million stop the moment it's no longer fun.


The most valuable thing you can have is time.
Going against the goblin adage of "time is money" a bit here. Yes you can make easy money prospecting, but how long does it take? When people call something easy, they always forget the whole "time consuming" part of it all. If you're spending a few hours a day working glyphs from the milling all the way up to posting and only making 5k a day... just stop. Please, please, PLEASE value your time a tad more than that. And I don't just mean your in game time, because your game time cuts into your living time. Do you really want to be 60 and look back remembering the week you spent 4 hours every night hitting a "mill herbs" macro? I should hope not.


Music is awesome.
Check out Korpiklanni, great folk metal. Here's a drinking song they wrote that is perfect for everybody. Ok I don't really say that a lot, but they're awesome regardless. Go watch and come back when it's done!


Have a reason that's more than just gold.
Obvious reason is obvious. If you're only playing the AH for cash, you won't get very far. The asshole (me) that undercuts your 300g gem down to 180g is going to really piss you off because you're losing a lot of gold by undercutting them and not selling at 299.99.99 like you want to. If money is your only motivator you're likely going to be very lonely on the AH (and usually IRL if you watch the greediest of the greedy play house) and will be driven out of markets very easily.

Now before you piss and moan "you're wrong Stokpile, I'll just come back when prices are high again" remember that the asshole 100g undercutter that pushed you out (me again) just made 50k profit from the market you left because you left it. If you would have stayed in you'd have 20k from that market and not a fat ZERO. Granted I have a zero as well each week. In fact I have 6 of them all in a row...


Don't forget the small fish.
Always sell everything, even if it's only for a few gold and goes slowly. If it goes slow then there's going to be maybe 1 other person that sells it. In other words you can dictate the price of it, set it, and forget about it. These types of niche markets I just love. Zero thought required and barely any effort involved. If you look at my enchanting numbers and all of the scrolls I sell on the list, you'll that there's a reason I keep to this.


Persistence
When you find a method that works great for you, don't worry about what I say. Do it and keep doing it, it's usually not a good idea to fix something that isn't broken. But that is entirely relative of course. If your method makes you 20k profit a week working a dozen markets while mine made me 240k profit in a single week, well, you've got some thinking to do.

Consistence
Now that you're sticking with the same method, you just have to make sure that you take care of your business every single day at least once. Do your cancel/craft/cancel/post cycle in it's entirety at least once a day and keep at it. If you do, you'll be at the 1 million gold cap 10 times faster than if you didn't. In the time that you're not selling, others are and are getting a stronger hold on the market while you're losing yours. The short hand version of this is to once again weigh your effort against your profits and determine if they're worth it. Time is valuable, remember?


Thanks for stopping by!

The G/Hour Misconception

One thing that really bothers me is when people talk about gold per hour. That is, the amount of gold you get in a given time frame doing a specific set of tasks. You can also relate this theory, and it is only just a theory, to the 80/20 rule where 80% of your gold must come from only 20% of your effort. Unfortunately both of these theories are almost impossible to quantify with any degree of accuracy.

Mind you I am not in any way saying that guessing your G/hour is pointless or always going to be wrong or a piece of information that has no meaning. No, I'm only going to try today to clear up an extremely popular misconception about the whole idea. One which just about everybody in the AH game likes to either ignore it or simply take g/hour as the word of god.

The only exception to g/h being immeasurable is farming a very specific group of mobs and skinning while alone or something along the lines of the shuffle when you vendor absolutely everything. You spend X time prospecting, Y time cutting gems, and Z time vendoring. Each one of those steps has an exact value attached to it which you can easily multiply and add accordingly. Hmmm, but what if you AH the rare gems? What if you like to DE carnelian spikes and turn them into scrolls to sell? Now it's suddenly impossible to calculate with any degree of certainty what so ever. This is where the problem comes in.

Let me give you the typical fallacy of the g/h myth. Actually it's more of a misuse of the theory than it is a misconception is certain cases. But that's just semantics, moving on. Here's the example: buy a widget from a vendor for 1g (copper rod, local cooking recipe, etc.) and place it on auction for 10g. That has taken you about 30 seconds to do so far. The items then sells for 11g, which gives you a 10g profit. What the typical person does here is instantly jumps forward in time to "omg I just made 10g in only 30 seconds! That means my gold per hours is 1200! Go me I'm gonna be rich tomorrow!"

Ok here's the first problem in why this is entirely wrong. You're completely skipping the 38 hours it took for that copper rod to sell. so rounding up here, that means that your g/hour from selling copper rods is somewhere in the range of... less that a friggin copper. Should you still sell copper rods? Of course. Is it great gold per hour? Obviously not.

The second problem here is another that is so staggeringly obvious that I'm shocked nobody has mentioned it before. These copper rods, these vendor recipes, these pets, you don't buy them from one vendor for 5g and sell them to another vendor for 20. You sell them to a person. A person who is either a moron, lazy, uninformed, or plain doesn't care what they spend on what. That person is not always there, the vendor that buys your common gems for 5g is always there.

So not only do these pro tips of slow selling items not make even a fraction of the gold per hour as they claim, they don't always have a person to sell to. Once you take these two things into account you'll have a much better chance of improving your actual gold per hours. Look a little bit deeper and you'll see that this whole time I've been repeating another one of my many AH motto's. Know your market. Know your customer.

To really make the g/hour theory applicable to anything is to add in one other part to the equation: repetition. If you get a world boe from an instance that you sell for 20k, your g/h is NOT 20k per dungeon run. So maybe make it like (gold / hour) / T where T is how much time you'd have to spend so that it can be repeated.

In the end, what you should be doing is what I keep telling you to do every Tuesday, look at the bottom lines first. Take the amount of time total that you spend working the AH, crafting, posting, collecting and everything else that goes into it. Tally that all up and then total up all of the gold you made for that day or week and put them together. That is what your real gold per hour is. Is that easy to do? No not really actually, I know because I've done it. But is it accurate? It is as honest about your g/h as you are. So when somebody claims an amazingly simple method of 600g/hour be wary as it is practically guaranteed that it isn't consistent.


Thanks for stopping by!

On raiding: PSA

No gold making entry today, sorry about that. Today I'm going to talk about raiding and the crap that for some reason people are still doing that causes fail after fail attempt. Today is one of the few times where if you disagree I will flat out say you are entirely 100% incorrect and need to stop playing. Yes they are are very simple things and yes they DO matter. They matter a lot.

And to answer the question that is begged by an entry such as this let me explain why these things piss me off. Getting killed because 5 people don't know that fire hurts is not fun for me, nor is it fun for the other 19 people that you just stole time from. Also it's not annoying that you're bad at a game, it's aggravating because if you cannot comprehend "dps switch to skull" then you are not just a dumb player, you are a dumb person. Fact. If you can't do that, then I'm terrified to be in the same state as you because you might not stop when you see a red light show up. And nothing pisses me off more than blatant stupidity.


If you click, you are wrong.
At the risk of sounding rude, if you click most of the abilities in your primary rotation/priority then you have got to have a brain the size of a golf ball. The amount of physical coordination is zero, if you can type a single sentence without a spelling error then you can use keybinds. The only exceptions here are certain CD's that are used maybe once or twice a fight.

Some examples are bloodlust, army of the dead, and maybe even vanish. These spells are typically cast only once per fight so there's no reason to keybind them when if you wait the 1-2 seconds to hit them it most likely won't change the outcome. It can and does happen, but rarely. If you're a mage clicking fire ball or arcane blast, then you are wrong.

And before you even THINK about moaning that "oh well keybinds may work for you, but clicking is still better for me and works better" shut up. Don't talk because everyone that might read that by accident will become dumber. There is zero excuse outside of a crippled hand not to keybind your skills. If you think that clicking is better for you, get better because you're terrible right now compared to ANYBODY in equal gear and half of your "skill."

EDIT: Thomas made a good comment that requires me to clarify this a little. They mentioned that as a healer they use a click addOn which most healers use in some form or another. This is entirely different than what I was getting at above so let me expand on this a bit. By "clicking" I refer to (as a tank) click on the boss, move mouse, click charge, move mouse, click rend, move mouse etc. As a healer click a player, move mouse, click heal 1, move mouse, click player, click heal 2 etc.

What should be done is click player, hit button 1 to heal click next player hit button 2 to heal. That sort of thing. It may not be a lot of difference in time, but over the course of a 5-10 minute fight it adds up really quick.

When using a click addOn to heal it's usually just left click for heal A, right click for heal 2, alt+left click to de-curse and so forth. For dps there shouldn't be any clicking involved aside from the extra long, once per fight, CD's that I mentioned. As a DK I'm not going to waste a bind on army of the dead, I cast it once per fight or every other fight depending on recovery time. While tanking I click my "go go uber threat" abilities because they also only get used once or twice per fight. They aren't used nearly enough to add another bind to memorize and commit to muscle memory.


Keyboard turning is wrong.
Again with the keybinds. You have strafe and run keybound by default and, if you're not clicking your spells there is no reason not to hold down your right mouse button to turn. You're slow, you're clumsy, and you're losing a ton of dps-heals-tanky positioning. Yes a lot, and yes if you keyboard turn when you have a perfectly good mouse you're wrong.

Here's a link to an image that illustrates (see wut i did thar) this fact far better than I ever could.


Bad stuff is bad.
Obvious point is obvious. If your graphics setting are even remotely decent, there is no excuse to start running immediately when you're on fire. This is the main reason why I would make a terrible raid leader or GM. If you get hit by the bad stuff for more than two ticks EVER I would instantly kick you from the guild if I could and spam your account information all over the interwebs to make sure you get hacked so nobody will ever risk playing with you ever again. Now if the bad stuff has an obvious warning like, I don't know, the sound discs on Atramedes there is no reason to get hit once. No reason, no excuses. If you get hit you failed terribly at the most basic human instinct, don't get set on fire.


Yes +5 stats are worth 2k.
I've already proven how easy gold is made in this game. No I'm not referring to my 2 million gold, I'm talking about when I had full epic gear, gems, top end enchants, epic flying, full BoE purples, AND 50k in under 2 months with a single toon that had zero help from a single person. For a DK 5 strength is equal to about 10 dps (using simple numbers here).

If you include tanks and assume 8 healers in a raid, that means there are 17 people doing damage on the boss. 17 people X 10dps X 300 seconds in a fight = 51k more damage. Now multiply that by another 5 gear slots and that's over 250k more damage. I don't know about you, but I've seen MORE than my share of sub 200k wipes. If you wouldn't be so lazy and get the top enchants, you wouldn't have those frustrating wipes.


Skill > gear.
Ulduar was done by Gevlon with a raid wearing only blue gear. World first Neferian kill was done in 333 blues and a few greens. Your raid is probably in all purples now with a few actual epics by now. If you're wiping on Chimeron still, that's because your healers have no idea how to do the fight. If you're wiping on halfus it's because your DPS are plain retarded. You do NOT need better gear, you need to learn wtf to do!

This is, was, and always will be a cold hard fact. If you think you need better gear for normal modes then don't ever join a raid with me or I will cut you. My shammy was doing over 11k dps the moment they hit 85 with not a single boe purple. That means they're ready to raid 3 minutes after hitting the level cap. Why? because I learned how to paly while leveling instead of hitting the "any-key" to continue the grind. Get better, get loot.

No you are not in paragon, no you are not in midwinter (well maybe not), but that doesn't mean that you have to act like the lol-kids that click 1-2-3-4 all night long. Take some pride in doing something well for gods sake. Just because you're not the best doesn't mean you can't try. Aim for the moon and reach the sky and all that jazz.


BiS > purple.
Outside of the odd racial bonuses, if you're wearing a pvp weapon and don't roll on a pvE weapon of the same ilvl then you are wrong. Resil does nothing to help you pew pew. If something is an upgrade and you don't take it then you're most likely doing it wrong. The rare exception is if you're next in line for a weapon or OP trinket or 4pc tier and if you take a second best item you won't be next in line for BiS anymore. That I get and agree with, that's a legitimate investment there. But if you're using say the boe strength trinket and the BiS trinket drops from chimeron and you pass...you're wrong. That would constitute you being called a loot whore.

Why? Because all you want is loot and lots of it and you don't give a damn what it is or if it's even good. Just higher numbers and more purple than the last purple. This is why I wore (wear) tank gear because it was an upgrade over my blue dps gear. And lastly, if you're claiming that you're passing on loot to save DKP for gear in firelands, then you have no business in a guild that is even remotely interested in progression. Go join the social raiding guilds, max out your valors there and let the guild replace your monkey ass with somebody that wants to down more than 5 bosses a week. You're holding them back not the other way around.


Dead DPS = zero dps.
The moment you die your super good dps is worthless and has no meaning, no matter how high it is. I recommend to every single person that raids to never have recount running. It's a terrible distraction and promotes shitty playing. However if you still insist on it, look at damage done during a fight, NOT your dps. 20k dps is like a 20" dick. Sure it's great to brag about, but it's worthless if you don't know where to stick it. If you think you're top shit because you can do 30k dps and die from fire standing 20 seconds later, may I suggest to you a blender. WILL IT BLEND!?


For the tanks: Stamina is no longer your god.
Back in ICC and ToC heroic where 2 hits could easily kill you, stamina stacking was the only way to go to ensure that your healers (and their infinite mana bars) could land a few heals to top you off. Now two big heals won't fill you up at all, and especially not if you cram stam gems everywhere. Now it's about taking as little damage as possible, not being able to take more. In other words, dodge enchants are your friend and mastery is the new stamina or whatever the bear equivalent is. In current gear, shield tanks are very close to blocking every attack.

A DK and a bear can pump up their pseudo shield pretty high and are able to ensure it's up back to back almost all of the time. That's a huge amount of damage taken off folks, your stamina does nothing to reduce mana and let your healers top off the raid. In other words if you're stacking stamina gems or wearing dual stam trinkets and not working on HM progression, you have no business in tank gear. You're wrong.


Thanks for stopping by!

How I shuffle: Part 2

Continuing on from yesterday where I spoke on all of the useful things that can still be had from the shuffle. Today I'll talk about my stokpiling and balancing methods on gems and enchanting mats. It may sound simple, but when you work all gems, metas, and scrolls full scale it is infinitely easier said than done. This balancing act is critical to being on top of all three markets and not having to worry about running out of materials at the same time.

Here's what I'm doing with all of the gems that I get in better terms than just DE crap and cut rares.

Rare orange, red, and purple: Stokpile 9 stacks of each and cut the rest to AH.

Rare blue, yellow, and green: Since I have such a massive amount of these right now, I just vendor them. At over 400 of each raw hanging around I don't foresee needing more until I hit level 86.

Common blue: keep 6 stacks in the bank. I use two stacks for the daily, 3 stacks for future meta gem xmutes, and another stack to sell for the daily. All others that are in excess of 6 stacks I merely vendor.

Common green and purple: Same as blues, but any extras that I prospect get turned into JC gear to DE and AH the rare procs.

Common yellow: 3 stacks in storage for meta gems at all times and extras are turned into JC gear if I need more dust.

Common orange: This is where things start to get tricky. I try to keep a stokpile of 7 stacks of ember topaz in the bank and 2 full stacks on my crafter. If I ever go below that amount by a significant amount, about 3-4 stacks or so, then I send off ALL of these gems to my alchemist to xmute into more orange rares. They sell at a rate of around 15-20 mixed cuts per day, so I really need to keep on top of it.

The problem that comes up is when I'm short on meta gems and rares at the same time which is when I need to do the AH juggling act and guesstimate what is going to have higher rates of sales tomorrow instead of lumping it all into one giant stokpile as usual. But when I'm well stoked up on both metas and rare oranges, I stuff all of these into the bank because I know for sure I'll need them come next week.

Common reds: Now here is the really hard part of the shuffle. A carnelian can be turned into a meta, a high profit and high rate of sale rare gem, or a very in demand enchanting material. As you saw above, GCE's are my top priority in terms of what I want to get out of the shuffle. With all of the cata scrolls that I move every day my normal stokpile of 500 just isn't enough, let alone easy to reach or maintain. But if I have at least 200 in my bank I'll count that as good enough to consider the rest of the list. Because as important as it is to keep working enchanting, supplying two markets is more important than just one.

I try to keep 9 stacks of rare reds and I am -very- diligent about this because I can sell over two full stacks worth of cut reds in a single day. If that stays consistent for a few days in a row, which it has many times, then this stokpile will vanish into thin air rather fast. And being out of mats is never a good thing even when it makes you rich. I basically try to keep a bare minimum stokpile of everything that common reds go into. 200 GCE, 60 inferno, and 80 metas. If I'm under any of those, that's where every last gem will be pumped into until I reach that plateau. If I'm low on all three of them I refer to the list I mentioned above and only go up to the bare minimum instead of the full happy and cozy stokpiled amounts.

First I'll go up to 200 essences then 60 infernos and finally 80 metas. However if I'm seeing a higher rate of sales than usual on rare reds then that means that either my campers and/or competitors are on break and are leaving the market to me. In which case I'll see double the rates and thus need double the materials. This is where it is paramount to watch your markets very carefully. You don't want to miss out on having free reign on red gems because you turned them all into metas that are now being camped. You got to be careful out there.

Thanks for stopping by!

Going to rift

Remember when I said I was going to be sticking around for a while? Well I lied apparently. Wow just can't hold my attention that much anymore. I raid 3 nights a week, do auctions occasionally and the rest of my time is me afk or gearing up umpteen alts with my gf. Not that interesting, especially for a monthly fee. I suppose you could say that the straw that broke the camels back was having my account locked for the third time in a week because I have to reset my router daily and that gets blizz to thinking I've been hacked into.

Meanwhile a bunch of people I used to run with and had fun playing together have gone to rift including half of their guild. So my wow account is officially canceled (again) and I have started up Rift and this time it seems I'll be gone for good.

I'm glad you all kept on reading and if you have any interest in playing Rift you can look forward to me doing the blog thing on there. Same place, same schedule.



Thanks for stopping by!

How I shuffle: Part 1

This was originally written as a single entry but, as per usual, wound up being far bigger than intended. So I'm splitting it up into two parts, the first is about what can still be salvaged from shuffling ore around and the second will be about what and why I shuffle around.


Last week I wrote about how the shuffle is still viable and today I'm going to talk a little about how I'm doing it. Seeing as how the botters or uber farmers have returned once again to ysera I'll just assume that they're either returning to your server or are just about to. Since I was one of the last people to enjoy the vendor shuffle I think this is a fairly safe assumption. The idea here is to point out the many uses that the shuffle still has and to put it all into practical terms of what to do with it all instead of "go make gold fool!"

First I'm going to reiterate that if you want to shuffle you must, absolutely must use everything you get. Just as the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo to survive, so shall you use every part of ore and it's byproducts to get rich. Ok now that you have been forewarned, on with the show.

After I buy out a few billion stacks of ore and prospect it I take stock of what I have, what I need, and what materials I may run out of sooner than others. Here is my order of priority of all shuffle related products:

1. Celestial essence
2. Inferno ruby
3. Ember topaz
4. Meta gems
5. Other rare gems
6. Hypnotic dust

Let me give a bit of explanation on that order real quick. GCE's are very hard to come by on a decent price and there's still a few out there with a stokpile of them that were gotten very cheaply. After that is rare red gems because they're the most profitable gem cut and sell in stacks each day. After those are orange rares because they can hold a primary stat and a useful secondary which makes them almost as popular as red. Add onto that their exceptionally wide range of secondary stats makes the quantity scale tip over.

Next in line are meta gems because they have huge rates of sales. Even though they sell more often than orange gems, they rank lower because they take less to craft in that the other colors of gems are not used for much of anything at all. That and they're xmuted and make at least 2 per craft means that I'll generally get more of them than other rares making their supply much greater than a specific color.

Next are the other assorted colors of rare gems. These only rank above dust because they're not typically cheap enough to buy and cut on the AH. And bringing up the rear is the dust you get from DE'ing the not so worthwhile common gems. I put this as the bottom rung simply because I can just buy the dust from the AH at my standard price a few days of the week. They're a part of the shuffle because, well, they're a natural part of it. That and it's one less thing to search for and they give me options to not DE them, but sell them as is on the associated daily.

The purpose of shuffling now is to continue to be cost effective and not to get free money. Right now my maximum buying price of ore is 40g per stack where as pre 4.1 it was the usual 55ish range. Instead of prospecting anytime I wanted to make some easy money I only do it when I need mats. Unfortunately with the massive demand currently that means a ton of shuffling for me just to keep up with it all. As I wrote yesterday, you should look at the shuffle as an option, as an investment in materials, not as "insta-gold."


Continuing on with this tomorrow.

The Shuffle Lives On

Many claim that the shuffle is dead as of the patch, even I said so. But after watching the markets since then and giving a bit more thought on the matter, I don't think that's entirely correct. I honestly believe that the shuffle is down, but not out. Not for now at least. Why do I think that? Because you can still profit from prospecting ore and if you can do that then you can shuffle. You just have to be very mindful now instead of smashing your face against your prospect macro.

Bottom line points on the shuffle:

• It still works
• Requires JC, xmute alchemy, and enchanting
• No longer free money
• All mats and gems are an investment at an "assumed" vendor price
• There is no vendor everything safety net
• You must exploit every aspect of the shuffle to profit
• Continues to fuel several markets with huge cuts on costs

I'm going to be covering how the shuffle is still clinging to life today by giving several examples of how you can profit from it in the same way. First thing to point out is the new floor price of 30g per stack of ore. That's the new vendor everything and profit price range. Before 4.1 you would ask "how much should I vendor" where as today you will ask "should I vendor?" To be honest, I feel a little guilty writing this entry because it feels like fake content in a way because things are mostly the same. But it's the "mostly" part that is pushing me to write this up.

The things that are the same are, well, everything minus the cut uncommon gems step. Buy a ton of ore, prospect, vendor useless greens, DE stuff, so on and so forth. The primary difference is what pricing points you put on gems, enchanting mats, metas, and what you intend to do with them all. Also the main thing to keep in mind is that with probably 90% of the people that were shuffling ore totally gone there isn't a flood of gems anymore and there won't be again if things stay the same.

So bearing that in mind the obvious price increases have happened and are compounded by the increased demand. All supplies are drying up fast, even mine. So that means that if you can outlast the competition you're going to be in a happy place.

Assuming a stack of ore sells for 40g, you'll get no less than 4 common gems but it will average out to 5 and a fraction of a rare. I believe it's 1 rare per 3 stacks of elementium ore? In any case, 2g per ore makes 10g per prospect and that translates into paying 10g per common gem. That's only a single coin more than before the patch that they were all valued at anyways, but the difference this time is that you can't get that money back from a vendor. This assigned value is an investment that must turn a profit in and of itself or you lose your money. So what do we have available to us that can use the same pricing method of a 10g common gem?

Metas.

Once you factor in the vendor price of the rares and xmute spec, you're looking at around maybe 7-8g or so per common. This gives you a lot of wiggle room where most of the other JC's out there have none. You DO have xmute spec don't you? Good I thought so, you're learning! So at somewhere around 40-45g per stack of ore, the method of shuffling ore with the intent of crafting meta gems has not changed what so ever.

On my server these are now selling for at the lowest price of 150g with a top price of 500, but lets go with a more realistic price of 200g across the board. That turns the shuffle into a 160g profit for every set of gems you put together with a very healthy market and a reliable customer base. Meta gem sales were great before the patch and now they're even better with the increase of demand. Once the demand simmers down the lack of competition will compensate for that thus keeping this an extremely profitable market to be in.

So 10g (ish) per common gem, what else can we do to match that up from before? Disenchanting. The biggest change here is based entirely on how the enchanting material prices are shifting on your server. The only real thing that I can say here is that if they have gone up you can safely shuffle for DE mats to sell as is.


Ok I think that's enough of that. What's the purpose to stating all of the above? The simple fact that at 40g per stack of ore you can continue to shuffle to your heart's content but without a safety net. In other words, don't buy 9000 stacks of ore, only buy it as it becomes available or as you need it. But what can we do now? Ore prices are likely still in flux right now, I know they are for me. But I haven't mentioned rare gems. This is where things get tricky. If you assume selling the average rare gem for 50g then the shuffle is alive and well just as it was before even at 50g or so per stack of ore.

We can still make metas, we can still get easy DE mats, and we can still sell rare gems for great prices. The only change is that none of this is free and your threshold has to be above the vendor price. The short version of all of this is if you add 15g to the vendor price of anything you get from the shuffle and sell it all at that price, you're going to profit no matter how much you do it.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report: 5-10

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.

No screens this week. Apparently, blizz has once again "detected a change in my log in process" and has disabled my account until I reset my password. Thank god I never have problems when I have to reset it...o wait.



The upcoming craftable recipes for 4.2 are up on mmo champ. The short version is stokpile a billion volatile fire and water. Also load up on pristine hides and, if you're going to craft some yourself at some point, chaos orbs as well. Each recipe minus cloth takes 3 each while the tailors need 8ish dreamcloth per.



Detailed Recap:
--------------------
Another week, another round of amazing profits. And also the guild is now 9/12 in 25m with chogall at 27% after our 6th attempt. I was spot on with my prediction of heavenly shards going up in price, they've more than tripled so far with an average price of 40g or so. More of them are getting used in enchants and more people are pounding away at the new heroics that only give crystals. This puts a damper in my market because shards aren't easily gotten from the shuffle which is my primary source of enchanting mats. As such I've adjusted my buying and selling prices accordingly. Damn good thing I stokpiled a few hundred of them pre patch that's for sure.

I'm really looking forward to the next arena season, I'm curious where and how the new pvp gear recipes will be obtained from. Most people thing they'll be sold by the vendors in the TH for material exchanges. Either way, I'm going to be the first to grab them and start selling them off for a killing. With the awesome luck I'm having now with the current crafted gear, the new and improved versions should have new and improved sales to match.

I sold yet another motorcycle this week for over 16k gold, this market just too easy.

There's been some pretty hot items this week that have been selling far more than usual. Buckles have gone up so far that I've gone through 5 full stacks of the things this week. The same goes for mending and heartsong scrolls, they've been selling like crazy. And rounding that off is enchant scrolls of executioner, as in the recipe that used to drop in the old level 70 ZA raid instance. It obviously has very little use these days, but has been making me a few hundred gold every day.

Early in the week I took to resetting the price on red stat gems. I bought up anything that was 100g and below while my threshold is in the 80g range. I wound up with between 20 and 30 of int, strength, and agility cut gems after buying them all out. And before the week was over they had all sold for 150g and up. Now that's a nice amount of profit right there. The biggest advantage that being rich in this game gives you is the ability to take large risks on investments like this on a whim. It sure is exciting and very gratifying when it pays off.

I've had to change my buying price and thresholds for any enchants using heavenly shards. I'm now paying as high as 45g for each of them since the supply is basically gone. Everybody is running the new heroics and there just isn't any way to get them cheaply. I may look into craftable items to DE into full shards, but I doubt there's any cost effective options for this. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Closing note on a random enchant scroll. It's a BC enchant for major intellect and for some reason it has been selling CONSTANTLY all week. It's a drop from a random mob in the nethertorm that takes about 6 minutes to farm and is BoP. I'm not sure why it's been so hot lately, but it sells one a day for a few hundred gold profit. If you've got an enchanter, give this one a shot and see how it goes.


Thanks for stopping by!

Glyph of jewel crafting

NOTE: This entry was written before the nerf to the shuffle but I am still posting it because it does contain a lot of useful information. Check in after my weekly report for my thoughts on why the shuffle is still viable.


Today's entry was inspired by a conversation I had a bit ago with an Ysera local AH baron. Also please note this was before the announced nerf to the shuffle. It seems that even today people don't get why I undercut by large amounts and why most successful (read, non campers) goblins do the same thing. Even though I have covered it in depth many times over. Today won't be a rehash of all of that per sé, but more of a "how to" for those that want to work gems to it's fullest potential. We'll be covering undercuts first, but before I get into it allow me to ask you a pair of questions to illustrate the points that I'll be making.

Do you know why I can sell a mechano hog for 17k? Because that's what it's worth.

Do you know why people will sell a bold inferno ruby for 30g? Same answer, because that's what it's worth.

...to them.

That's the catch right there, that 17k mechano hog is worth exactly that much to the one that bought it. Conversely the 30g inferno ruby is worth that much to the one that sells it. If They didn't feel that it was worth that much they wouldn't be selling it. Meanwhile I wouldn't be selling a bike for 17k if I didn't think it was worth that much to somebody.

You'll notice that each entry that I linked above not only spans the entire life of this blog, but they all deal with campers. They all deal with getting rid of competition. And in the current gem market, there is no shortage of that on any server. The point of the large undercut is that it will drive away a ton of competitors all on its own. That's because 90% of the people that sell gems are doing it ONLY because of the shuffle giving "free" rare gems.

Once prices get down to a certain point the market is then labeled as fail, unprofitable, and boring then they move onto something else. That leaves you with only the people that know the score and just wait as prices always go back up. That and the one thing that fuels the massive banks of every goblin, quantity over quality.

Let me make the obvious comparison that nobody (that I know of) has made yet. In doing so, allow me to give you the short history on how the glyph business used to be ran during wrath.

- Buy a ton of herbs to mill.
- Sell off the uncommon inks or turn into them into DMC cards or scrolls. Set aside a few for your daily research.
- Sold uncommon inks pay for the entire stack of herbs, making every glyph "free."
- Learn every recipe for glyphs and craft a few of all of them.
- Undercut everyone fiercely while making a profit on every sale to get rid of casual sellers and campers.
- Slowly start to raise your sale price and reset prices on many glyphs at once.
- Get crazy rich 2 months later.


Make sense? Now let me reword that just a tad with a copy/paste of the above and you'll see what I'm getting at.

- Buy a ton of ore to prospect.
- Sell off the uncommon gems or turn into them into DE gear or metas. Set aside a few for your daily quest.
- Sold uncommon gems pay for the entire stack of ore, making all of the gems "free."
- Learn every recipe for gems and craft a few of all of them.
- Undercut everyone fiercely while making a profit on every sale to get rid of casual sellers and campers.
- Slowly start to raise your sale price and reset prices on many gems at once.
- Get crazy rich 2 months later.


In case you can't tell, the gem market now is 100% identical to the glyph business of wrath under different names. There is only one small catch and that's the comparatively large deposit fee, but in all reality that's something that can be almost entirely ignored. But why are people getting all QQ about low prices and big undercuts when they understand the whole mentality when it comes to glyphs which is the exact same method that works so perfectly? The main reason that people are complaining about gem prices now is because they are simply too used to the big numbers that they see in their mail box next to a sold gem.

But the sale price does not, has not, and will not matter when compared to the profit made on that sale. This method has worked well for any successful goblin you read about and it will continue to work well until the optimal method changes like it did with the 9g vendor price. If or when the nerf to the shuffle changes then so will the method, but until then this is going to remain the best way and the best market to get rich with.

And for the people that still cling ever so desperately to the notion that when you undercut by more than 1 copper you're losing money, check out my business reports over the last few weeks and look at the gem sections. That's right, around 80k on average in profit every single week. Are large undercuts always necessary? Of course not, I've said so many times and pointed out specific markets and items that should never be undercut by more than a couple gold at the most. But those very few specific things aside, the gem market is the same as glyphs and warrants the same methodology to get the most out of it.


Thanks for stopping by!

A few gems from "Ask the devs"

If you haven't heard, a thread on the official forums is being voted on for ask the devs on the topic of professions. They're taking hundreds of public questions and will answer a dozen or two of them later on. I sifted through a few pages and found some interesting ones that I'd like to see answered in depth. And of course, I found a few people that...ugh. People that just don't get it. See? I don't have to say moron every time I get annoyed. Wait, woops.

In any case, here's a few of the choice questions that I found with my own thoughts on them and a few that I pulled out just for the lol's. So you all get some gold theory and laughs today, aren't you lucky! It will be fairly long as there are a good number of interesting questions to be had and some seriously dumb one as well which is why I'm posting this on a Friday. But at the end of the day, it's an entry about a discussion, so it's meant more for entertainment and to be an "interesting read" more than anything else.

While you're reading it, think of how you would answer these select few questions if you were a developer, trying to balance use and fairness while catering to both socials and casual players. Not so much considering goblins though as we will always find a way to profit from a profession. Enjoy!


"Given that alchemists & herbalists have such a gigantic income (more so than jewel crafters, enchanters and blacksmithers) due to their unique ability to create disposable items, such as potions, flasks and elixirs."
Krakan
Undead mage

I had to start off with one of the silliest I found. Gems are consumables and so are enchants. Gear gets replaced, alts get gear, off specs and off off specs. There is more than enough gear to take care of. My weekly 100k+ profits say so. And as for alchemy being profitable, either you spend a dozen hours farming "for free," are on the luckiest server for an alchemist, or are simply clueless.


"Gathering professions are unattractive to both pve and pvp players .Do you have any plans on making them ither more fun ,moving them to a separate profession tier(and allow to have 1 with 2 craft professions) or merging them with the professions they are needed for - eg herb for alchemy and insciption ,mining for jc and bs ets."
Aprix
85 Human Warlock

This I think would be pretty cool, sort of like a tertiary profession. You get two crafting professions and one associated gathering profession. It would make deciding on profs a lot easier and make the leveling process streamlined a bit more I think. Would this be something you'd like to see? I mean I don't exactly farm a lot (at all) but it kills me when I see a line of 50 dead crocs and not one hunter in site or a string of rich ele nodes in a row. It would drastically increase supply of all materials minus ench mats and the gold wouldn't go to people that only speak binary.


"Are there any plans to make potions divisible into two types like elixirs? It can be annoying when you're unable to heal yourself under pressure because you had to add more dps to the target, and vice versa, so would it be possible to allow use of one restorative potion and one that grants a certain amount of a stat per fight?"
Maievs
85 Night Elf Rogue

Any love that alchemists get from Blizz the better I say. And this would be a massive boon to any guild that raids more than twice a week socially for the lulz. Since healer mana is very strict right now, and looks to stay that way, healing potions are amazing. In fact they have saved my life a couple of times to be honest. But then there are fights like Chimeron and the Ele council that throw that out the window. Big dps check and tons of strain on healers so you have to make a split second decision of "will I die? Will the extra few thousand damage mean a kill?"

That and it would make pot spec alchs a little bit more rich which is a great thing as I mentioned. I like that we have to make decisions on potions, but when you miss a prime time to use a dps pot (i.e. bloodlust, aligned proc bonuses) you can drastically lower it's value and you may not even need a healing pot the entire fight. Decisions are good, but when you choose wrong it's a near waste isn't so great.


"For a lot of the player base Archaeology is soul destroying. For some people having to complete over 1,000 artifacts to get the item they want is neither fun, nor casual (which was the purpose of this profession?). It is also gut-wrentching when you hear of someone who got the same item in less than 50 artifacts. Are there any plans to address this?"
Everybody
1-85 farmer/lore hound

Fuck that shit!


"Can we have an XXL JC bag? Those of us who cut gems for AH would have easier times with a 36-40 slot JC bag, as cut gems don't stack. Or just make cut gems stackable."
Ceriulun
85 Night Elf Druid

Dear god, how many times have I written this in an entry? Or times I said it in a comment? Seriously people, it kills me to see a 32 slot LW bag and a 24 spot gem bag. Who the hell has 32 different stacks of leather at once?


"Any plans about enchanting/disenchanting? I spent lots of gold lvling it. Yet it doesnt seem to give proffit,people just farm mats and dont give tips. Maybe give only the enchanter the possibility to dissenchant?"
Captivity
85 Tauren Priest

Yeah, look at my weekly reports and you can go cry. Thake a shower, wash off the shame, because you can't do it because you have failed.


"Will daily cooldowns become 7perWeek like Valors from heroics now?"
Melena
85 Human Priest

Not a likely occurrence, but this is a very interesting thought. If you could craft 7 truegold all at once and throw them on the AH all at once would you? I sure hope not, but a lot (90%) of people will. It would make for great flipping bargains and cause prices to swing heavily every Tuesday. This would mean that you have to at least be aware of this happening and then you can make some good money without any professions at all. More chances to make gold, more chances for the lazy and the stupid to, well, stay lazy and stupid.


"Are there any plans to allow a player to train more than two primary professions?"
Cyrogen
85 Draenei Shaman

The day that this happens is the day that 4,681 new bankers are born on every relm. /Hope


"Will there be any major quest chains or titles related to professions in the future?"
Isseit
85 Dwarf Paladin

This would be pretty cool I think. It would be pretty sweet to get a title or some such to have every BS or JC or Ench recipe in game. It would also make linking a profession easier to get a few oooh's and aaaah's from trade and pull out a few extra sales from people that want to touch your awesome. That and it would be wicked fun linking it in trade, or walking around with the title only to ignore/deny any requests for the service. Or just be an excuse to charge 400g to enchant earthen vitality teehee.


-insert 30 questions on epic gems, 10 on enchanting is terrible, 50 on get rid of the auto de because enchanters can't make money, another 6 on why is inscription so terrible at everything, and 20 more wanting goggles and alch trinkets upgraded-


"Make new dailies for every profession, maybe?"
Tumargran
85 Tauren Warrior

This I'd like to see only if it gave something more tangible than gold or profession currency. I'd like to see them give a random batch of materials for that profession or a chance at a bop recipe for a vanity item or a 346 crafted weapon that's cheap to make.


"With some professions, particularly Inscription, converting raw materials into items can be a very lengthy process. Inscription for example requires you to mill 4 times per stack of herbs to get pigments. You then convert these pigments into Inks, and then you can craft your item. Are there any plans to shorten this process?"
Almyna
85 Goblin Priest

This I believe was mentioned as something that Blizz wants to do in the future. Unfortunately I think you'll be raiding kara at 95 by then and I'll be long gone, but if this was implemented sometime soon... hoo boy! Every goblin siddenly gets triple their g/h by being able to either automate the process or cut it in half. Imagine if you could prospect 3,000 ore in a few minutes? Hell, I'd even be happy with prospecting an entire stack with one click instead of 4.


Thanks for stopping by!

Where to start?

Kammler recently wrote that it seems most of us are writing mostly for each other. In other words each entry is more of an "advanced only" level of understanding and doesn't offer much in the way of help for anybody really getting into (or back into) the AH game. Lets be honest, if you read my last 10 gold posts you won't really know what I'm going on about more often than not if you aren't already experienced in it to some degree.

Today I'm going to give a handful of tips for people that already are familiar with the AH game, but only on a smaller scale. So if you're literally just starting out this will be useful to you, but still requires a small amount of knowledge of the AH game. Or if you happen to just be returning to the game this will be perfect. The idea here is to write up something that can be useful now and not something that requires large amounts of planning ahead.

If you're already having success working your market of choice but want to improve how well you run it or just want to expand, read on. I will be covering not only what to do, but how and why as well. Note that the how's and the why's are the most important in the long term, but the what's are the things that you can do now to make gold now. Now mind you, I'm not going to say go sell this and that because if you haven't figured out that you should sell something, I'd venture that you're beyond help. If you need some suggestions on things that are profitable, check out the list. It has everything that I sell for a profit, just pick something that you can craft and see if you can turn a profit on your server with it.


Diversity is king.
Getting the most obvious out of the way first. More markets means more gold. Period. You want to have access to as many different crafting professions as possible so that no matter what happens to one market you'll have another to fall back on. Right now the best ones to have are JC, enchanting, and xmute spec alchemy. JC does the shuffle, alchemy makes the meta gems, and enchanting is plain awesome on it's own in addition to having a place in the shuffle. Do note though that currently, alchemy is 99% worthless if you don't have access to meta gem cuts from JC.


Patience is a virtue.
When supply starts to thin out, don't jump ship immediately or raise your buying price just yet. Give it a day or three to see if it returns or evens out and you can save a lot of gold.


The hardest part of making gold is not spending it.
I think that about sums it all up. You may read of other big time AH barons talking about buying 40 boe epics for their alts off spec and donating 200k into their guild bank from time to time. I know I'm guilty of doing my (more than) fair share of wasteful spending on stupid things I don't need. The simple version is this: you are not us. You do not have a million gold to throw around as you please.

Don't take this as an insult because it's not, just something very important that you need to realize. If you want to make gold for the 100 mounts achievement then go for it. Just don't spend your bank total of 50k on three mounts because then you'll only have to start all over from the beginning. And starting up is the hardest part. Spend your money as you wish, but spend it wisely and always keep a decent sized reserve to keep making more.


Keep learning more.
Obvious point is obvious. The more you know and the more you learn, the more you can open up new markets and gold making opportunities that you didn't have before. If you're reading this, you're already in the right place.

Above all else, know your resources. Check out all of the gold blogs out there, a lot of them either have a list of everything they sell or talk once a week on what has been selling well for them. Look into them and pick out what you're able to craft. Then go through the AH and see if there is any profit to be had for you in that market.


Craft everything.
Once you have a decent amount of gold saved up, you can start to invest into certain items that have high profit margins but low rates of sales. Not necessarily things like a mechano hog as that's a very large investment, but things like twink enchant scrolls or crafted mini pets. These different niche markets all sell consistently for great profits but they tend to take a while to go through. But when somebody with a lot of loose cash is looking around for a mini fel reaver, don't you think that it should be you selling it to them?


Take it one day at a time.
If you're low on gold and you can't bank roll a massive stokpile and the ability to plan ahead this is what you really have to do. Only buy materials as you need them to craft only what will be turning a profit today and tomorrow, not next week sometime. This is the best way that you can save up money and avoid investing in the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The main idea here is to keep making gold in multiple markets without extending yourself too much. If you only have 20k or so then the last thing you want to do is invest 20k into enchanting mats. Even though you'll eventually make a profit on them, all of your other markets will come to a halt because you can't fund them any longer. This will also give you the added benefit of learning your markets inside and out which is absolutely imperative for when you really want to go big.


Profits margins > big sales.
When deciding on what to sell always go with the highest profit margins. That is, the total sale minus the price you spent on materials. If you buy a raw gem for 50g and sell it for 60, that's a 10g profit margin so you would be better off selling a 10g gem for only 30. This is the best way for you to start off when picking a market.


Farming is not free!
This is something that you need to get in your head right now. Here's a link to a perfectly written post by Gevlon that sums it up completely. If you do not agree with this or are just unable to get through to yourself that the flower you just picked up is not worth zero gold then there is no way that you'll ever get a decent amount of gold together without spending your entire week farming. Fact. I cannot emphasize this enough, everything has a price even if you didn't pay it. The point of playing the AH is so that you don't have to work at a very boring and repetitive task for 5 hours for a meager 400 gold. And if you want to counter with "well I didn't spend any gold to get it so how is it not free" you are still wrong. You're wrong, wrong, WRONG!


Thanks for stopping by!

Changes and decisions

Once you reach certain milestones thing tend to change a lot. Your whole outlook has turned around from when you first started your journey. Making the wow gold is no different once you hit two million and as such I'm changing up my AH game, methods, and markets. That's what today's entry is all about, what I'm doing with the AH now that I have absolutely no reason to play on it outside of some extra kicks here and there. I'm sure I can buy literally anything and everything forever right now.

The first thing to change is my posting habits. I usually post everything I sell in 12 hour cycles starting at 11am server time and go from there. Now I'm only going to list gems once a day at some time in the evening, preferably before my guild starts raid invites. This is mainly because of the sheer amount of gems that I sell that clog the mail box with sales and expirations. Add on top of that the necessity of two cancel/post cycles this takes a while. So that is going to be the first thing I cut out.

After that is tailoring and enggy. These are going to be cut out entirely with the exception of motorcycles simply because it's too fun to see a 16k sale to resist. The enggy pets require a lot of material juggling that can get hectic at times and tailoring is plain worthless imo. This will also free up a ton of volatiles to be used elsewhere.

Next is smithing. I'm going to stop selling enchanting rods completely and only sell one set of pvp dps gear at a time instead of the normal 2 sets of dps and 1 set of healing. Too much inventory space is needed to keep a few hundred bars and several stacks of volts hanging around.

Leatherworking is also going to be cut down to just the profession bags from wrath. The constant supply droughts on cata leather and the inability to stokpile it is a major hassle, especially when you want to sell the hides for a premium in addition to the leg armors and pvp gear.

Enchanting is going to be the only market of mine that remains entirely untouched. This is for two, technically three, reasons. The biggest reason is that my main is my enchanter and enchanting banker. Duh. The next is that it is still the most fun to play around with, especially now that top end enchants have a market. Lastly of course is the fact that it is as awesome as JC profits with less effort involved. I'll still be listing in this market at my semi usual times, if nothing else it will remain twice a day whenever I get around to it.

As far as spending goes, I intend to buy anything and everything that I damned well please. When craftables come out in 4.2 (which has been confirmed) I'll be the first one to pay 10k each for the "fire lands thing of crafting things" and the associated recipes. Any of my alts that I enjoy playing regularly will be decked out in whatever boe purples I can find and the same goes for my GF.

I'm basically leaving the Lunch Money bank perpetually open for any and all purchases. I do however wish there was something really significant and memorable that I could buy like I did in wrath. I'd love to buy a max level guild, but I highly doubt that would be possible due to all of the members that would have to be considered.


What would you do with two million gold?

Report: 5-3

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: 1,823,000g
Total sales: 445,000
Weekly profit: 241,000
Current gold total: 2,064,000




Profits from MySales:

Gems, LW, & misc:


Yellow, blue, purple, meta, common gems:


Tailoring & vendor pets:


Enchanting & smithing:


Engineering & mining:




The first week of the patch is over and it sure was kind to me. Lots of profit and HUGE gains in dps. I managed to consistently top the dps charts in raids this week and only need to replace my helm to be in all dps purples. Looking sharp!

Detailed Recap:
--------------------
Out of all the things that happened with the patch, the one thing that I grossly underestimated was engineering. I thought my normal stokpile of a dozen of each pet was enough. Holy shit was I ever wrong! In two days I had sold out of everything except for the yeti, not sure why that old boy was left out. And to top all of that off, over the course of two days I had sold four mechano hogs. Yes four of them and for full price to boot. To put that into perspective, I usually sell 2 every month. In other words all pets aside, enggy just made me a massive 9000g profit over two days. Woo woo!

I never wanted the recipe for the toad mini pet than I do this week >_<

The lack of power miners and bots are definitely being felt already in my non jc markets, namely the lack of volts. I'm almost out of fire and air with a stack of life and water remaining. Even with doing 3 elemental xmutes each morning with the spec I'm still starting to fall behind. I did a damned good thing with stokpiling earth though, belt buckles have been flying off the shelves and I have to craft another 5 stacks to keep up with it. And they're all selling for over 200g and steadily.

Another nifty thing that worked out was flipping epic spellthreads. Just before the patch came I got a handful of each at only 400 a piece which have all sold for 1k even. And on that note rare threads have been going for triple their previous (lack of) value along with rare leg armors from LW.

Holy shit enchanting! Oh damn am I happier than ever that I like to stokpile! I've almost sold out of all my heavenly shards (300) that have gone up by 10g and are in short supply. My massive supply of dust (1800) is down to a mere fraction of that and the GCE what I had (700) now need to be completely replenished. Profits from thsi market are just insane, I've been selling earthen vitality scrolls for as high as 150g when they only take 2 dust to make! The same goes for mighty stats (2 lesser essences) are going fro as high as 250 per scroll. And I sold all 5 I had up last night.

I have now sold one of every scroll using maelstroms with the exception of the tanking weapon enchant. Each one sold with a threshold based on 700g per crystal which are now as low as 400 each. I suppose I was waaay off on my guess to where their price would end up settling down. If things keep going at this rate they may get as low as 200g a piece. Pretty crazy when they were as high as 2k only a week ago.

Random note, the leather pvp gear has seen a massive spike in demand. Is this because people want it to get their ilvl up fro the new heroics? Is it because all of the leather is being turned into hides, thus reducing the overall supply? All I know is I'm getting as high as 150g profit instead of the normal 80ish from before.

I'm quite happy to say that wrath enchants are still just as popular as ever. This was one niche market that I was worried would go away, but it seems that it is still here to stay. And I don't mean enchants that are still BiS like certain agility ones that don't have a cata equivalent, I mean things like berserking, wisdom, and staff enchants. The demand for these scrolls hasn't changed one bit with the patch, but the demand for all current scrolls has basically tripled. Happy goblin is happy.

Fun fact. It costs me about 170g in deposit fees to list a full set of all of my gems. I do that twice a day, 7 days a week so I'm spending about 2,380 gold every week in only deposits for gems. Pretty crazy, eh?

And on the topic of scrolls, twink enchants have seen a huge demand spike as well. Caster ones and health to chest have been selling far more than before along with crusader. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I am definitely not going to complain since I'm the only seller as per usual.

As the weekend draws to a close, I sold yet another bike and a few more top end enchants which included wind walk. I also sold the last of my crafted epics for a good 1k profit on each of them as well. As expected mighty stats has been selling at least 4 scrolls a day, all over 100g with the pitiful material cost of about 20g. On monday afternoon I pulled a massive 20k out of the mail in sold enchants and smithing goods. I think that's a personal best for one night.


Thanks for stopping by!

I have 2 million gold

Yes. Really.


Full screen image.


Somebody out there has over two million gold and plans to do absolutely nothing with it but make more. Even more unbelievable is that that someone is me and actually does have a life. Be afraid, be very afraid. Much like my other success entries, this is where I allow myself a bit of a pat on the back and to brag a little. But fear not, as always I will give you a few keen tips on how to make the wow gold. I'll skip the whole defending the fact that I have a life and a job etc outside of the AH because that's not necessary. And if you think that, well, stop being jealous.

How I did it can be summed up in one word and one word alone: Persistence. Don't give up, don't lose sight of your goal, and don't compromise. That is probably the best advice that I or anybody else can ever give. If you want to hit seven figures then you have got to keep at it every day and that is just what I did. Stick out every drought in every market because no matter what, they will pick back up eventually.

To date, my most profitable markets have been rare gems and enchanted scrolls. Knowing when raids let out the most throughout the day is very important to working these markets so ask around on your server. Talk to guilds that are known to down more than 2 bosses a week, ask in trade or just watch trade chat if pugs are fairly popular and successful. By successful pugs, I mean that they get through at least 3 bosses or else there won't be much gear handed out that needs gems and enchants.

Anytime a patch is coming, be damned sure to keep a close eye on the changes. Check up on the patch notes every day to see if there are any potential changes coming that could effect the AH. And don't just look for ones that say "Enchanting materials are changing." Everything effects everything on the AH, it's one big ocean out there. An effect on gems will effect enchants which will effect farmers and so forth. With every change to professions (and sometimes even classes) there will be a market and supply shift.

Speaking of classes, keep up on what the "flavor of the month" class and spec is for pvp, usually in 2's. If the community decides that a certain spec is OP faceroll easy, start to sell resil/stat gems that match up with them. Even if they're not really that broken, do it any ways and reset prices if you have to. People that know nothing about pvp but still want "lulpwnface" will clamor to these things even if they're a terrible option. Don't judge their purchases, just make sure they purchase from you!

So what's next for Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny? First, I'm going to mix myself a sweet gin and tonic. Then I'm going right back to work making pretty pictures IRL. And I suppose I'll play the AH until I see 3 million. That's right I'll be sticking around yet. Though I will say this: the day blizz recycles another piece of old content is the day my account is deleted. But until then yours truly will be hanging around to provide you with quality content every week day.


Now don't you have some gold to be making?