Empty markets at a glance

NOTE: Quick tip on what to stokpile with the coming recipes and what to look out for now that Hammerknell is out. Any runes with hit/focus are going to be a big seller for a while as people try to hit the minimum stats. Also twilight bloom roots will be popular as they're needed in all of the augments and many consumables. The same is true with eternal dust because it goes into everything, expect a price increase in those.


Today I have yet another entry written up that it posted at wowecon.net. Today I talk about what you should consider when you search for an item on the AH and find nothing. Do they sell out that fast? Is there no market for it? Does nobody try to sell it? I discuss all of this and much more. This is very important info to have because when the new rift items come in patch 1.4 there will be a lot of empty AH windows. Here's the first part of it all.


"When you find something new to sell and are in a situation where there are none up on the auction house there is a good deal that can be interpreted from that. Sometimes it’s a recipe that you have just gotten and thus new to you or it could be a recipe/item that is new to the game entirely. But whichever the case is, the potential scenarios are always the same.

When you find yourself in a situation such as this you need to ask yourself a few questions before moving forward. First is the obvious question, can you afford to take a complete loss in this investment? If so then you can move on with the fun parts. Is there a market for this new epic item? Are there alternatives that are close to the same level for half the price? How many people tend to spend the extra coin to upgrade this specific item?"



Click here to check out the full article.


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Ooh, is that new?

Aloha all! As of today my first article is officially going up on wowecon.net and is useful to anybody that wants to make a little (ok, a lot) extra money on the AH. I discuss what to do when any new items are added into the game and how even a single new recipe can have far reaching effects. If you're interested in a more in depth look at how to profit from the Patch 1.4 crafted gear and the different ways there are to profit from it, I highly suggest you read it. Here's the first part.


"The first option is to sell the new gear itself. This one is pretty straightforward as you imagine, but there is still slightly more to it than craft and list. The most important part of selling either the crafted gear or BoE drops is when they’re not being actively farmed. This means prime time is a no go for listing these on the auction house. This is because the people that are interested in getting easy top end epics are either actively farming them or are about to be.

After all, why would you buy a raid drop when you’re going into that raid in 15 minutes? You buy them after you raid and don’t get the drop you’re after. Listing before the raid typically won’t do anything more than lower the current price of them. And that’s when you want to sell them. You have to know your server and know your customers."



Click here to check out the full article.


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New Rift Patch 1.4 recipes

As the title says there are a lot of new recipes being added in the upcoming patch along with a few current ones being changed drastically. First here's a quick copy/paste from the patch notes that are in progress.

"* New Artificer recipe: Blazing Powerstone, purchasable from trainers at 285 Artificer skill. Usable on main-hand weapons and adds 200 Spell Power for 4 hours.

* New recipes are available on the Armorsmith, Outfitter, Weaponsmith, and Artificer artisan store merchants. These are new Epic crafted items with set bonuses. Each set includes 2 pieces of armor, 1 weapon, and 1 ring to complete the set. Recipes can be purchased for Plaques.

* Recipes for new materials are available from the various profession trainers for 20 platinum - Enchanted Shadethorn Lumber, Tempered Orichalcum Bar, Steel-Stitched Leather, Bolt of Radiant Witchweave, and Infinite Essence. Each recipe has a 24 hour cooldown and are used in new production recipes.

* Crafting trainers now sell new reagents needed for the new recipes: Ethereal Flux, Magical Oil, Enchanted Lacquer, and Endless Dust. Foraging trainers now sell reagents.

* New Weaponsmith recipe: Exquisite Oilstone, purchasable from trainers at 285 Weaponsmith skill. Usable on 2-handed weapons and adds 10 melee weapon DPS for 4 hours."

That's not that many notes, but if you have a keen eye for profit then that is a whole lot to take in all at once. So before I get into the details, here's the short version of it all.

- Stokpile brilliant diamonds
- Apothecary might suddenly become extremely profitable
- Stop spending your plaques right now
- Pick up the apothecary recipes for the heroic vials (needed as materials for new augments)
- Eternal dust will go up in price
- Minor catalysts will go up in price

So that's the short version of it all, but there is so much more to it. The new recipes will be raid quality gear and when combined with an epic augment (which have all gotten a big boost) will be around t2 raid level gear. The down side? They cost a few hundred platinum in vendor sold materials alone. So there won't be a huge market for them, but that also means very low competition. As you will read in my upcoming article on www.wowecon.net, any time new things are added in there is potential for massive profits to come. The what and how you sell them is a huge factor as much as the demand is.

For those of you that can't afford this large of an investment, which even I'm not comfortable doing, there are still a bunch of things you can do to make a killing. First is to stokpile eternal dust and catalysts. They will all go up in price and the cats can be broken down my apoth's into essences which are needed for a number of recipes as well. There is also a new temporary weapon buff for +200 SP which requires refined bones to make.

To get those you need hollow bones and bloody fangs to craft a sacred fetish with artificer. The recipe for the fetish only costs about 50 normal tokens which is a single day of dailys. You craft a ton of them and salvage them to get bone pieces and so forth. This will not only be the best option for those that use 1h/totem but also for cleric tanks as well. These items will become in extremely high demand and the mats to make them are super cheap so start to stokpile 'dem bones yesterday.

And lastly are the recipes that will be added in with a 24 hour cool down. Since these are in a very limited supply and will likely be moderately pricey to make you can expect these to fetch a hefty profit as well. All of these CD mats are needed in all of the new crafted gear so if you don't want to go the route of selling the gear itself, just sell the mats to make it. But if you really want to capitalize on it all, do both!

So what is it that the great Stokpile, the well dressed and lover of all things shiny, is going to do? I'm banking on the mass wave of sales for the flawless +stats augments being the big money maker. For one, these already have a great rate of sales on live. The only problem is that they're rare as all get out. And with the newness of these recipes a lot of people won't even know that they can be crafted now and if they do the complexity of the mats will certainly put them off for a while.

I say complexity because you have to buy stuff fro ma vendor, learn a new recipe (two if you can't break down cats yet), use new vendor mats and crafted mats to craft. That and they're rather expensive to start crafting for almost anybody at 10ish platinum a piece. However they sell all of the time for 15 and up. I'm hoping to capitalize on this asap. Aside form that I'll definitely be selling the mats that are on a day long CD as there will be a solid demand for anybody that wants the gear made.

I'll pick up a recipe for each gear type to work for a large fee and only craft one or two pieces. And the gear that I will make I'll only make what I can use, so cleric gear it is. The last thing that I'll be doing is selling the 17 platinum vendor mats on the AH for a nice mark up on the AH to the people that are too lazy/stupid to bother reading patch notes. You'd be surprised how often people buy stuff that's sold from a vendor 20 steps away...


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What I've been up to

NOTE: I've recently updated the list and added a bunch of new items to it. There is quite a bit in this game that does sell regularly, you just need to find them so check it out!


Lately I've been getting my fingers into a whole bunch of different things and haven't said much here about it all. So I wanted to take today to get you all up to speed on what's been going on in my Rift world. You can consider this another semi-formal status report, but less focused on the cash and more focused on my current goals. I'll be covering what markets I've been having a degree of success with, what I've been experimenting with and what's next for me.

So farm armor smith has been my top earner as far as money goes with runes being a very close second. This is most likely because I'm still missing a ton of high demand rune recipes that are all BoP zone drops. The rune recipes I'm missing are scattered throughout trash mobs in every instance except for two. I got very lucky the other day and won my first roll ever over somebody else and got a tank rune recipe. I picked up the last BoE one later that day and now I have to suffer through countless dungeon runs to get the rest. I doubt that I'll be actively farming them and once my RC has their gear finished I doubt I'll be going back that much. It simply isn't worth all the time it takes for a chance at a chance.

Meanwhile my armor smith has almost every recipe in game. They need one more from plaques and one boe epic recipe while all of the reputation, rare and epic BoE, and token bought ones are taken care of. The same thing goes for all of the professions actually. All of the gathering professions have finished the quests to learn all of the refined material recipes. Weapon smith is also missing a few plaque recipes and has all of the boe ones that I know of which is very nice. Outfitter is almost there as well with all tokens, rep, missing a plaque here and there etc.

Also artificer is also totally finished as far as I know. I add on that last little bit there because I've found a few boe recipes online for it but there is exactly zero data on them, I don't even know if they're in game so I just consider that one finished. And lastly apothecary is totally finished since all the token recipes are completely worthless. I have every color of dye learned and really expected a bit more to come out of this as they're consumables and people like to experiment with their look a lot. Maybe I just need to actually market it? Who knows but who cares really, the profits are about 30g at the absolute most on the token ones and black/white are 2 platinum when you're crazy lucky.

This profession really needs some help.

On the financial side of things I am over 6,000 platinum now with no more effort than I put forth making my fortune in WoW. I don't expect to be totally filthy rich for a while as there just isn't enough money in game to be made. People typically aren't able to drop 500 platinum to gear out their 9th alt and aren't at the point where they're making a ton of alts either. But regardless of that I'm still comparatively wealthy considering the average rift player. It seems that I've been at a steady 100 platinum profit per day after all expenses. That includes my constant talent resets, travel, soul healing, and of course my massive material stokpiles.



But now that I'm almost finished with profession dailys for plaques that cost is going to be removed entirely and will drastically increase my day to day profit. On top of that I've been slowly increasing my daily profits simply by having more and more things to sell which is a bit of a given. However when I don't come across a massive amount of dust and catalysts for super cheap I've managed to make as much as 500 platinum profit in a single day. Not bad I think. Now all I have to do is cut my costs down by a little bit more and keep up with my patent pending Stokpile AH method and I'll be hitting the big time in no time.


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Salvaging for a profit

It seems like hundreds of people are picking up rift every day. This is evident in the fact that every other day a different level of items from trade skills are being dumped on the AH. And by dumped I mean barely over vendor value to the point that some are even losing money when the AH takes their 5% cut. Honestly that part makes me laugh.

But when you notice a page or two of gear being sold for 20g and under you should take a moment to think twice about passing it off as just another flood. The most common thing you find is gear and low level runes. Runes you can't really do much with so I just ignore them. At that low of a level you replace gear every 15 minutes so it's a total waste to spend money to slightly help you kill 30 mobs 9 seconds faster before it gets trashed. The gear however is where the money is.

For anybody with a salvaging ability you should make it a point to check the AH during prime time for crafted gear to break down that's like 20g or so and under. For this you'll want to focus on the level 40 and up range. Since every gear prof can craft item enhancements that are very useful (and last for a long time) these are actually in demand. A couple plat for an extra 15% to crit damage? Yes please! As useful and cheap as these typically are, there never seems to be any on the AH outside of the first ones you get from the trainer.

This is a market that is almost entirely untouched.

So far the most successful ones I've been selling have been exquisite whetstones and shield spikes. I'm still experimenting with the price ranges for everything right now so take this part with a grain of salt. Up until now I've been slowly increasing the sale price of these things, starting at only 1 plat and adding another 40g to the price tag each time I sell out. I'm only adding 40 because of the same reason that you always see things priced at $399.99 and such. You don't want to break that threshold even if you're only under by a single coin.

Right now the price it up to 2.6 plat and they're still selling. Right now I'm wondering a couple things for maximizing this little niche market. For one I have no idea what they exact % chance of getting metal widgets is. It seems to be 50/50 to get any of them in general and being able to get as many as 3 at once. What I really want to know is the chances of getting more than 1 and a way to move the processed metal that you get. The mid range enhancements sell pretty slowly so that's not a viable option, they may just end up being vendor food.

It's fairly often that I see a full page or two of carmintium gear up for 15g each when it costs more than double that to make. When it's that cheap the only decision I have to make is if I'm going to use RC or armor smith to break it apart for a profit.


Thanks for stopping by!

Assumed value

One expression that I tend to use now and again is "assumed value" or "assumed price." I wanted to take the time today to talk about what I actually mean by that and how to apply this theory to your own AH playing. The easiest way to explain this is to think of the assumed price as a buying/selling threshold. The primary difference here is that a threshold is based off of average market prices while the assumed value is based off of essentially nothing. That's right, nothing at all.

This is a value that you place on something personally and base that value on whatever you please. You take this number and base all of your other, more concrete, prices around it. Here's an easy example. To craft certain runes and pieces of gear you need vendor sold materials, simple and straight forward mats. These mats cost anywhere from a few silver to a few gold each and the recipes that require them are just as varied.

So I am giving them an assumed value of 3g no matter what the actual value is. This is the first reason I'm going to cover for using an assumed value, simplicity. If you were to just total them up into your thresholds individually things would get a lot more complicated with many remainders at the end. Doing this keeps it simple, fast, and efficient.

The next reason that having an assumed value is important is to calculate your selling thresholds easier when using materials that aren't typically bought. Things like eternal planar dust, shimmering shards, or minor catalysts are a good example. I'll tell you how this works first and then explain it a bit more thoroughly after words. Using a shard as an example lets say that they're 10 plat on auction, when selling one of mine I'll undercut by 50g. So anytime that I craft something that uses a minor catalyst my assumed price on them is 9.5 plat which is what I calculate in my threshold for it.

Now let me explain why. Things like catalysts I don't usually buy and hold onto so I only sell them. I don't however sell them plain and instead use them to craft epics so I need to have a threshold for them still. Basically I set my assumed price to whatever my selling price "would be" if I were to sell the materials plain. It's like how I say market price doesn't matter because what you paid for something matters more. This is the same idea except the opposite.

Here's a longer explanation. It doesn't matter what they're selling for on the AH, what matters is what you are ABLE to sell them for. If a catalyst is up for 100 plat that doesn't mean you should value them at that price, because they aren't ever going to sell. Now lets use a more realistic example. Lets say that they're on AH for 8 plat.

Obviously you have to undercut them if you want yours to sell any time soon so what you are able to sell them for is 7 plat. Since you're only able to get 7 plat out of selling it, then you shouldn't value them any higher. This assumed value I suppose could also be called their actual value because it is what you are actually going to get from selling it. Keep this in mind next time you go to sell something using rare materials.

And closing with one final example of when to use an assumed value. Whenever I RB a ton of greens I get loaded up with flickering shards, far more than I'll ever use. I can't sell them aside from a vendor because there are just that many around and you don't use a lot of them at all. Because of that I put their assumed price right at what a vendor will pay me.

I'll never ever sell them on AH but I did spend money to get them by buying mats to craft gear and RB. So I set their assumed price at 6g which is slightly under what I'm paying to craft RB gear. Even though they'll only ever sell to a vendor, I still paid money to acquire them which gives them a value just as much as it gives a value to all of the useful materials I get.


Everything has a price. Nothing is free.

Door charge

When it comes to entering any market there's going to be a door charge, an entrance fee of sorts. This is what you're going to have to pay and invest up front before you can even think about selling anything. Today I'm going to talk about what price you'll have to pay with any new market in rift and the potential consequences of such.

As per usual, I'll get the obvious out of the way first; money. In the business world we all know that it takes money to make money, and life on the AH in an MMO is no exception. You'll have to first skill up your trade skills, throwing away 90% of the cash you could be making off selling the mats as is. Luckily though, each profession has some form of a salvage option to get back some of the materials. Salvaging also gives you unique mats that can only be gotten FROM salvaging, these are used to make temporary item enhancements.

One example is whetstones which increase melee crit damage. These items help recoup your losses at higher levels and salvaging lets you sneak in a few dozen extra skill ups in the mean time. Bear in mind that it's not worth buying things just to salvage unless you're after the "salvaged only" type of materials as you're not promised the raw mats that went into it. The key thing here is learning how to cut costs and corners in every way possible. This is step number one in reducing your entrance fee which is essential to maximizing your profits.

The next and most important price you have to pay is time. Time is not free and is the most valuable commodity a human being will ever have access to. I say this because time is the only thing which you cannot change, reform, make more or less of. The time you have now is the only time you get. Each day has only 24 hours, no more no less. So learning how to "spend" your time wisely is imperative to being cost effective and reducing the price you have to pay with a new market.

The time investment in rift is much akin to the investment needed for the JC market in wow. You get dailys to do for crafting tokens which let you buy special recipes. Now you might be thinking "How can you be more time efficient when you have a hard limit on quests" but there are still ways to get around this as it were. But first we have to divide by zero and split up the definition of time.

In terms of breaking into a market that needs you to do daily quests you have to think of it in time frames, and not just a total number of hours. Meaning it will take X days to get this recipe and Y for that. This is different than total times because you can only do these quests once per day so your "total time" won't be more than an hour or two, even though ti's spread out over the course of a month.

Important distinction.

Since the higher you get in skill the more tokens you get form these quests you can sort of fake your way through it to a point. You can choose what form of currency (total time or money) you are capable of investing more of. You can power level your professions at the expense of a huge sum of cash so that you can get the most amount of tokens immediately as opposed to three weeks from now. This will cut the time frame of (fake numbers) 3 months down to 2 months.

This is obviously a significant decrease, albeit fictitious, but you can see the point I'm trying to make. By going this route you will be able to start working that market and selling those rare items immensely faster than only taking skill ups as you level.

The other "currency" that you can invest in is total time spent. By this I mean that you can just farm everything. You will drastically lower the plat cost but at the expense of not having much fun on game. This will also reduce the time frame, but depending on what you have more of (and value least) decides your course of action.

Whichever route you choose the goal should always be the same, get as many tokens as possible as fast as possible. The sooner you get into a market the faster you're going to turn a profit. Or lose everything. Ya know, whichever comes first.


Thanks for stopping by!

Rift leveling tips

In hopes of inspiring a person or three to play Rift I've decided to take today to give a fist full of tips on leveling up as the title suggests. The good news is that it will be far more then the painfully obvious "go here at level 10 do every quest, then go here" that you'll get in essentially every paid guide out there. Now you are going to get proper leveling tips for free ad free, imagine that! The bad news is that the only way it relates to making the rift plat is that you can't level your crafting unless you level your crafter. Enjoy!


Get a pet to tank.
Every calling has a soul that can summon a pet and only clerics don't have a tanking pet to start off with. Clerics don't necessarily need one, but more on that later. Warriors get beast master, mages get elementalist or necromancer, and rogues get hunter. Either way having a pet to tank is such a massive boon I cannot imagine leveling without one or a pocket healer.

The big thing that you'll have to get used to is that tank pets can actually, ya know, tank! It was amazing being able to not worry about pulling threat single target. Some pets are even able to aoe tank, but won't hold threat if YOU aoe. In other words, they can keep a few mobs occupied while you pick them off one at a time. Clerics don't need a pet because they are able to spec into cheap instant heals which will negate that necessity for the most part.


Level your crafting professions now!
Each crafting prof gets two daily quests to donate crafted items to the war effort. You should do these every day fro two reasons. First being that you get artisan's tokens which let you buy the "valuable" recipes and the sooner you start the more you'll have when you are able to invest in making some of them. The second is they don't give a pithy 200 exp at level 1, no they give a full quest reward of several thousand experience. Doing that every day twice a day is going to be a huge boost to hitting 50.


Leveling gear.
Simply put, ignore it entirely until your mid 30s. Don't ever bother with buying greens as you'll get all you need to be comfortably well off from quests. Blues however can last as long as 15 levels, this is especially true for the 33+ range and you can even be wearing a few pieces to 50. So save yourself some time and a bit of coin and don't bother buying anything until then. As for low level purples, as you may expect they're generally too expensive to be worth while and aren't going to last much longer than an equal level blue item.


Become a pack rat.
There are more profession overlaps than you can imagine in this game. That's probably why you can have 3 professions at once instead of only 1 or 2. If you're not using your cloth, stash it away for a toon that will use it. The same goes with any leather and boe greens. If you're reading this blog then you're probably going to level them eventually to make some money off of them so save yourself the hassle and save it all up for when you need it. When bag space becomes an issue keep an eye on the cloth and bag market. It's fairly often to see them being dumped from leveling up OF. The extra bank space if pretty cheap for the first 2-3 slots so it won't be a major investment.


Get the portals open early.
This is going to be a lot more handy then one might imagine and I recommend doing it as soon as you get your mount and have some spare time. Yes you'll be going through a ton of high level zones with mobs that will om nom nom your face, but stick to the roads and you'll mostly be fine. If you level up your professions higher than the zone you're questing or farming in then you won't be able to turn in your prof dailys, this will make that possible at early levels. You'd think that this is hard to do at first or require an hour or three of doing corpse runs, but that's not the case.

When I ran my baby level 24 cleric all over the world I died three times total. One time I died because I was busy writing up a wonderful entry for you all to read while auto running into a group of 5 mobs 20 levels above me. The second time was intentional because there were 10 mobs between me and the portal and I didn't want to spend 5 minutes walking around them. So I died on purpose and soul walked right on past them. All in all it may take 30 minutes depending on what portals you have open already and won't be filled with corpse runs.


Get all of your souls early.
You get new souls (talent trees) from quests that are opened up at level 13ish. To do them you have to close a rift to get a quest item which you have to use at a death rift. You'll most likely want to experiment with different soul combo's so get them done early. This is important because the quests give good experience and it's something that you'll be doing eventually anyway so you might as well get half a level out of it.


If you're doing it all solo.
Enjoy the rifts in rift. These are going to give you a lot of experience and items that you'll be wanting at 50 so take advantage of them any time you can. Again focus on the fire and earth ones for the egg shells, I cannot emphasize this one enough. Also be sure to do every quest that you can dig up and try to find groups when you have to kill elites, trust me you won't be able to solo them unless you're OP and leveling in style. Luckily enough you can use the LFG tool for the quests as well.

Deciding on what zone to go to next is fairly straight forward due to the bread crumbs that you're given, but if you see a quest is orange don't bother. To avoid the back and forth between zones and questing hubs just stick with a single zone until most of the map is uncovered. Also try and take part in the zone wide invasions as well. You're almost guaranteed to get at least one of the epic versions and several of the normal wide scale ones. With these you'll get killer exp, more planar mats, and special currency to buy some very long lasting gear. Oh yeah and they're fun as hell too. Nice little perk there eh?


Thanks for stopping by!

Random rift thoughts 1

Today's entry is going to be a large collection of short tips that have been in my mind lately. As my old readers may remember, my "random thoughts" entries contain just a handful of short quick tips to help you make some extra coin here and there. While they are important and do make/save money, they're far too short to dedicate an entire day's entry to. So instead I just write them down as they come and when there is what seems like enough, I'll post them all at once. There is no particular order of importance or any real semblance of transition. Read on and enjoy!


1. I got my first piece of fan mail!
For those of you that don't know, I refer to any in game mail I get yelling at me to stop undercutting by more than one coin as fan mail. Any time you get this, it means you're doing something very right and are about to lose another competitor. Today marks the first official piece of fan mail that I've gotten and it was in the rune crafting racket. There's been a few here and there trying to "bargain" with me, but now I got the real thing.



Happy goblin is happy. Ok that's not exactly very money making related, but it's an important milestone for every AH player out there. There is also a much more practical reason why it's better to undercut by larger amounts in rift. That's because there is no addons to automate the amount and it's a lot easier to hit "1, tab, 44" as opposed to "1, tab, 99, tab, 99." Doing this over the course of a few hundred auctions saves an absolutely huge amount of time.


2. Sell epics during the week.
As we all know, timing can be very important and can make or break certain markets. Pre-raid items such as potions and what not will never see great sales as they would before most raids start while post-raid ones only have great sales afterwards and are "meh" at all other times. A specific market in rift has the exact same issue and that is BoE epic gear.

It doesn't matter what armor type or role they're made for, if they're purple only sell them during the week. This is when people will grind out dungeons for a new shiny, spend 3 hours not getting one and figure screw it, I'll just buy one. This isn't true for the weekends because people typically have much more time to run dungeons or are out farming the mats "for free."


3. Epic recipes are priceless.
Your average expert dungeon can take about 30-45 minutes with a good group. With an average or bad group it can take well over double that. Epic recipes are all boe and (generally) only drop from the last boss of an expert dungeon with a wonderful 0.4% drop rate. That means that if you want to try and "farm" a certain recipe you are going to be beating out death and taxes in longevity before you see it. Because of that if there's one you want and don't see anybody selling it, no price is too high.

It's no different than materials you can't farm and aren't for sale on AH. You have to pay the going rate and whoever has them to sell has a temporary monopoly. When I see an epic recipe pop up on the AH I'll go as high as 120 platinum for it if it's valuable to me on my server. Of course if there's a low bid I'll try and snag it for cheap that way, but if people are camping it I'll just flat out buy it. The time it would take to get one by running an hour long dungeon plus another 15-30 minutes of que times plus a potential 40 minutes of wipes and corpse runs is...yeah you get the point.

Just buy the damned thing.


4. Check the Dunes of Akala for rifts
The Dunes of Akala is the area of shimmer sand in the NW where there's usually a hand full of major and minor level 50 rifts. It's worth it to port over now and then to see if there are any up or not. That's because this area is the prime spot for doing a bunch of crafting rifts. So if you hop over and only one or two rifts if any up there's a good chance that you'll find a group or even a raid doing a ton of them.

As I mentioned in my entry about crafting rifts you don't have to be in the group doing them in order to get the rewards, you only need to participate. This makes for a good opportunity to get a bunch of extra mats and if luck favors you a few extra plaques as well.


5. Promote higher prices: Success!
A while ago I wrote of an experiment that I was doing on the AH. Prices on many things were in the gutter and constantly below material costs even when people were willing to pay much, much more. What I did was instead of undercutting further I would list at the second cheapest or if everything was under the material costs, I'd list my wares at my normal price if nobody was selling them on the AH minus a few platinum.

A few weeks later and I'm starting to see a few things that I haven't sold before due to prices. Namely a few common runes used for leveling up but still very useful options. After that was a few low level crafted items like damascus weapons and the shields from the starting zone faction rep vendors. That and I got a few "oops" sales where people would buy my expensive stuff even though there are many more up for far less. That happened because not everyone sorts the AH by unit price and just assume that the one op top is the cheapest or merely buy what they see first.


Thanks for stopping by!

Where to start: Rift AH survival tips

Just as Rome wasn't built in a day neither is an auction house empire. Like you've heard hundreds of times "it takes money to make money" is forever true no matter where you go so you need to do something to get your start up capital. Today I wanted to give a few extra pointers and stepping stones for the lowbies that need to save for their epic mount at 50 or those without maxed professions. Believe it or not there are still ways to make money without tirelessly grinding away for hours on end.

Granted you won't be making a ton of cash, but it's more than you will spending an hour to farm up 10 platinum worth of ore. As per the theme of this blog, farming as your primary source of income is an absolute no-no which is why I write entries for both the big AH goblins and those that need money just to train their skills and everyone in between. Take what you read today and try and work it into your daily play time as I can promise it won't take up much time, even for those that only play two hours in a given day.


Know your dailys.
The daily quest for every profession is 90% predictable. You don't know what ones you'll have to do tomorrow but you will know what ones you can get which is any pair of 4 different quests (based on profession). As such you will know what daily quests that everyone else might be doing as well. For example, right now my outfitter daily can be to make silk shoes, composite shoes, exotic leather boots, or thick leather boots.

Each of those nifty pieces of footwear takes 2 of the associated material to craft and needs 6 total to be crafted for the lower ones and 7 for the higher. Where am I going with all of these random numbers? To more numbers obviously, but the ones you're looking for this time.

If it takes 14 exotic leather to do a profession daily, what stack sizes should you be AH'ing them at? that's right, 14. I've seen several stacks of leather up for 3g/each while I watch my stacks of 14 leather sell out for 20g/each. The same goes for every crafting profession out there so look into what kind of boots they need to craft and what not for the daily and start selling and/or flipping those mats in the desired stack sizes.Cloth however is the exception to this because anybody can pick it up and that lowers the price on it dramatically.


Again with the material conversions!
I know I'm sorta beating a dead horse here, but trading down RC mats is just too good to not mention all the time. The same thing goes for leather and cloth actually. The leather I can understand because you need butchery in order to turn hides into leather with can be used by an outfitter. The cloth however needs an outfitter to create and only they need it in any large amount.

The only guess I can make is somebody leveled their profession up so high that they can't get the materials they need for the daily where they're questing at. And while that's a good reason to buy something that you can craft by default, it's also the only reason. I've been making a nice profit by AFK crafting bolts of silk and thick leather lately and has helped fund my first alt's training and mounts. Definitely look into it.


Well it looks like it's good...
The average player is not sure of what's good or not stat wise so its all guess work to them. In fact the only real clue that's given to you in game is the stats on your armor class. If you're a warrior you'll see strength and dext on plate everywhere so you'll figure out (hopefully) that you get a use out of both while not knowing exactly how much of one is worth in the other. Because of this split stat items are the best to sell. People will naturally want to match their runes to their gear which has both on them and some AP at higher levels.


The Pokémon Imperative.
Artifacts, people just love to collect them all! Aside from an epic mount at 100 finished full sets, there is no reason ever to buy these. And yet people sell up fist fulls of plat for the blue level ones and even pay as much as 2 plat for common ones. I'm sure that if you do a little google work, you can find out where they all spawn at and can check those locations from time to time.

In case you're unaware, artifacts come from picking up the teeny tiny glowy objects that you see scattered all over the place in every zone. In addition to that, there is another out in scarwood that you can do 3 times in a day for one of 16ish different ones. To complete that set you need to have every last one so these can fetch a pretty penny.


Everybody has a use for something.
Outside of the first two zones anything that is at least common quality has a price tag on it for a player. It could be animal parts from butchery or common artifacts you've seen a dozen times. Some may only sell for a few gold each, but that's a few more than you had before. That pays for your skill training if you sell all of it when you can instead of vendoring it all without trying. Once you get to the mid 40s range you can spend as much as 1.5 plat just on skills which totals up very fast.

Now mind you the price of mats in the first two zones will go up eventually, but right now it's best to either use them or vendor them. The main reason being that the deposit cost of a stack of burlap for example isn't too far off from the vendor price and the average prices are maybe 50g over the vendor. When you have to count your copper watch what you decide to auction carefully.


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Platinum to the core

In case you don't know, "cores" are a crafting reagent that seem to drastically shift in price. They were added in an early patch as a zone wide rare drop and are required for most recipes from a zone specific quartermaster. Each zone has their own unique core which go into crafting level appropriate blue gear.

Several content patches later many people that have been 50 for a while still don't know what they're good for. This is why you'll see them for 20g today and then up to 5 plat tomorrow. Can you sense an opportunity for flipping here? I sure can.

Here's a list of all the cores and the respective zones that they drop in. Taken from the Zam wiki page found here.


Evergreen Core - Freemarch and Silverwood
Enchanted Core - Silverwood and Freemarch
Stone Core - Stonefield and Gloamwood
Shadow Core - Gloamwood and Stonefield
Rusty Core - Scarlet Gorge
Gnarled Core - Scarwood Reach
Cracked Core - Droughtlands
Glowing Core - Moonshade Highlands.
Frozen Core - Iron Pine Peak
Shimmering Core - Shimmersand
Dead Core - Stillmoor


Like I mentioned earlier, these fluctuate in price daily, sometimes hourly. This gives you a handful of options to make a profit with. The obvious I stated already, as usual, flipping them every other day. Buy them all up today for 30g each and resell them in a few days for a few plat each. The next is crafting some gear to sell "under" material costs. This is where it's important to stokpile...again. Buy up a metric ass ton of them when they're uber cheap and let them chill out in your bank.

They stack to 50 like most everything else so this won't be a problem as far as bag space goes. And then you just craft the associated gear with any cheap old augment. The primary level range you'll want to be focusing on is everything in the 30s area. This is because these blues will easily last you through the mid 40s range where you end up having to kill tons of mobs that are 1-2 levels over you. As such this small boost in theory is actually quite large in practice.

As a nice little bonus or added incentive here, most of the recipes can be bought at only friendly notoriety. Just by leveling up through the zone questing and doing a ton of rifts I hit friendly with everyone. There are a couple that require honored so I can't comment on them just yet, but I assume that they'll fetch an even higher profit. Speaking of profit the general price range that I sell at is anywhere from 3-7 plat per item. It might not be much but the sales are consistent and that is almost entirely profit. Especially when you're patient and buy the cores when they're down to only pocket change.


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Rift best selling items

Today is going to be a short list style entry on what my best selling items are in rift. No real explanations as always, just a large listing of what the most profitable items are that I have found. I'll go profession by profession and in addition to listing everything that sells, I'll also give recommended prices for what I typically sell each item for.

Enjoy!


Outfitter
Spellspun bag - 1.5 platinum
Shaleweave robe - 6 platinum
Steeled leather brigandine - 8 platinum
Witchweave bag - 9 platinum
Darkcloth leggings - 38 platinum


Rune crafter
Blazing dexterity rune shard - 4 platinum
Blazing indomitable rune - 4 platinum
Blazing intelligence runeshard - 2 platinum
Brilliant tough rune - 5 platinum
Blazing tough rune - 9 platinum
Incandescent indomitable rune - 10 platinum


Armor smith
Darkmetal tassets - 6 platinum
Orichilum gauntlets - 9 platinum
Faith-forged spaulders - 45 platinum


Weapon smith
Black iron hatchet - 30 platinum
Ebony hatchet - 6 platinum
Damascus saber - 4 platinum
Exquisite whetstone - 3 platinum
Steeltouched longsword - 4 platinum
Warden's dagger - 3 platinum


Apothecary
Nothing, sorry folks.


Artificer
Fine platinum chain - 9 platinum
Band of crystallized mana - 30 platinum


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You're hired!

Note: This isn't the official post for today. Click Here to read it.

Aloha all! Very cool news on my end I wanted to share with you all. I am now officially a professional-ish writer on the subject of the auction house! I have been hired on staff for the website www.warcraftecon.net where I'll be writing four articles a week over there on the exact same subject that I talk about here: making tons of money in your MMO of choice.

Warcraftecon if the go to site for a lot of wow based economy information. While I am not actually playing wow, I do write about the auction house and general economic theory in an MMO which applies to every game that has one. For everything that I write that it wow-centric you won't be finding it here, I'll leave a link and a short description of what I wrote about up top and that's all. For my normal blog posts however, I'll have a direct link to the site where my article is published.

So what does this mean for the blog? It means that sometimes you'll have an extra link to click to get your daily fix of into on making money on the AH and that's it. I am certainly not abandoning this blog, not by a long shot. I'll be keeping all of my rift centric writing here while my general purpose theory and wow specific writing will be over there.

Lastly, there is no need to worry about me sending all of my "best" content over there and leaving only the left overs on my blog. At the worst, I'll be splitting up the location of my writing. At best you will have even more awesome stuff to read while you pretend to be busy at work! Suffice to say, I am very excited about this opportunity and I look forward to sharing even more of my thoughts on the AH with all of you.


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Heavy Metal Platinum

I've been playing rift for just over 2 months now and I'm still having loads of fun with it. I've already changed mains and have every profession at max skill level. In addition to that I have every token recipe purchased and basically every recipe from plaques learned as well. That being said I think I'm well on my way to having my "crafting empire" in full swing. That and playing wow isn't even a consideration at this point. I say all of this because today I want to go over my favored market in rift and the one that is making the most platinum out of all of the ones I have open to me.

To date armor and weapon smithing has gotten me more profit than any of my other markets by a large margin. My best selling gear is plate dps oriented and my biggest profit margins are from anything that's purple. The epics sell for a high profit margin because people expect them to be expensive and they actually are pretty expensive to make. By knowing how my customer base is thinking allows me to get away with much higher prices in this market as opposed to any others. Just as it was in wow, the most popular items are all melee oriented which is still the most popular class.

It seems that the generic melee and generic caster "names" of classes attract the most attention. This could be because people are lazy and don't want to find out wtf a cleric is so they go with warrior (rawr smash!) or a mage (rawr 'splosions!). Or it could be because that's their preferred style of play, who knows. Regardless they all come to me for their shiny gear. For epic weapons, the best selling items by far are the black iron hatchet and the fleshreaper which are 1h and 2h items respectively. When I don't have an augment on them they tend to sell extremely slow, but any time they do their rate of sales is fairly consistent.

As for the blue weapons, the best ones are typically tank or caster focused. 2h maces sell to clerics and 1h maces and swords sell to clerics, mages, and warrior tanks which are all in the same level rage of late 40's. This is likely because the ones you get from questing and normal mode dungeons don't typically have the most important stats for these classes: hit, focus, and avoidance.

A weapon that you get at level 38 is going to be better than one you get at 50 if the low level ones has the primary stats you need. And without a certain amount of these stats you won't get into the expert mode dungeons so these are both extremely popular and necessary. Without buying them you could spend 12 hours doing random dungeons just to get two specific items so that you can do what you're really wanting to.

After that we have armor smith that makes lots of gear for every role for clerics and warriors. Clerics are the generic healing class, but can fulfill every role from tank to support and wear chain mail armor. If you're a melee cleric you will by default have a caster stat to melee stat conversion so anything that's chain with non caster stats is going to be a slow sale. That's because while a cleric tank does like parry, they have a talent that increases your parry by X% of your spell power so 1 sp = 3 parry. That's a lengthy explanation I know, but it is needed to understand why I don't focus on certain items.

The most popular epic armor I craft are the faith forged spaulders which is a cleric piece with generic caster stats. Every cleric in game should want these when they hit 50 as they are loaded with everything you need even if they are a tad expensive. Though oddly enough the epic armor for warrior dps is severely lacking in the sales department. The best selling rare items from this profession are the darkmetal sets for both warriors and clerics. This is again due to the fact that they have hit and focus on them or are just loaded up with crit. Out of all the stats in game crit seems to be the most important one after reaching the cap on focus or hit so anything that has that over ap/sp is going to be a hot item.

Out of all the things I can craft in both professions, I was let down the most by the ranged weapons. I barely sell any guns or bows ever for any level range outside of a sub level 20 bow. Why this is I cannot begin to guess other than the fact that there are only a few classes that use them. But even still there is little to no competition in these markets so why they still sell so slowly is beyond my understanding at this time.

All in all these professions are pretty fun even though they take a lot of inventory management with all of the different materials they both need. And they need everything but flowers. I only hope that rune crafting starts to pick up a bit more later on, but unless pugs start forming and doing better in raids and the harder rifts I don't think this will happen. In a solid raiding guild you'll have every profession covered for consumables and that includes RC so they typically won't need to go to the AH that often. But we shall see.


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The lonely goblin

When patch 1.3 landed the other week I had a bit of time to kill due to extended maintenance. While waiting for shards to come back up I was browsing assorted rift forums, looking for some random info here and there on crafting and searching for a few recipe locations. During my browsing I would of course look for any "how does i make the plt lol" types of threads and went through them. After reading a few here and there and thinking of what I see in general and chat typically I noticed something.

I am all alone.

Out of dozens of pages and countless comments on game I have only seen a single person talk about working the AH to make money in rift. Literally, only one person. Yes I have competitors and yes people sell stuff on the AH and make money from it and yes there are a few people that claim to have hundreds of thousands of platinum. But there is not a single goblin on the entire shard. And considering what I've read so far, I wouldn't be shocked if there's maybe 6 goblins in the entire game for all of North America. That's a pretty crazy thought isn't it?

For all of the people hat claim to be rich let me tell you a few things that every single one of them has in common.

- No screen shots or other form of proof
- Gives away thousands every day to guildies and friends
- Is convinced that making money is easy as hell
- Doesn't understand why everyone doesn't have 500k platinum
- Has the exact same "method" as everyone else: get a monopoly on a recipe, profit.
- Farms all of their materials for free

Ok so they're obviously not too bright. At all. The farming for free failure is so widespread in this game it's staggering to me so that makes taking the goblin route a little bit more interesting. But when people are selling crafted gear for 10 platinum under the cost of the all time record lowest prices you KNOW they believe it. And the saddest part of that is that anytime somebody asks for advice on making some money or what items tend to sell well or profs that can make money they're met with 12 different versions of "go farm noob." Every answer to what sells for a profit is precluded by 12 different versions of "first farm the mats."

To me this is unheard of but it's the truth. Outside of two other people, I have not seen anybody working any market consistently. And of those two people, one spends hours a day farming for free and the other only works a single market and not much of it at that. What does that mean for yours truly? It means that there are countless areas of the AH where I have zero competition that's what! While that may seem like taking easy street to fame and fortune it's not. That's because there just isn't a lot of money in the world to be spent.

In addition to that there isn't much way for it to be artificially generated either such as through daily quests or dungeons. 95% of every coin comes from another player so while one person spends all of his money it doesn't evaporate, it goes to somebody else. But when they do go broke there isn't any real way for them to get more cash other than selling something to another player. This is going to make getting rich rather interesting without a massive demand monopoly. It also means that it is technically possible to have every penny that every player has. I think that's a fair goal to aim for.


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Lets talk competition

My competition to be exact. Almost immediately I noticed the main competitor in the rune market and have since noticed another. The second one only works the high end stuff while the first sells almost everything in game. And just about all of it is selling under materials. They're obviously in the "farmed it for free" group of idiots. This is apparent in the fact that they're continuously selling things and continuously online. Far far more than me and this is truly frightening.

How do you kill that which has no life?

Well I already know how. Today I ask a better question: how do you kill somebody that has a lot of cash and places absolutely zero value on their time? That's an important question indeed and unfortunately is one that I have no answer to. The second one is obviously a businessman, a goblin. I can understand them and therefore am able to handle them eventually. A legitimate, honest to god no-lifer is something you don't come across every day and is a little depressing if you ask me.

Suffice to say this is a serious problem, one that I don't expect to solve any time soon. In the mean time though I have to learn to deal with it. The first thing I'm doing is trying to find out when it is that they post what on the AH. As far as I know there is no macro or script that you can use to make the cancel/post cycle any faster or easier. Trust me I've looked, oh dear how I have looked.

This means that they're doing all of this by hand for hours at a time. That leads me to believe that they only do a single cycle when they go to do one, they would have to truely be inhuman to camp the AH with as much crap as they're listing. If that's the case I'm going to have to REALLY work hard to take them apart.

The name of the game here is adaptation.

I'm going to have to adapt to how they play and change my methods around to suit this unique situation. Obviously I've had to deal with campers and the like before, but NEVER one this insane. And it figures that they're the first one that I come across on a brand new game where I barely have a leg to stand on financially. It seems to me that they flush the AH at least 3 times a day and as many as 5. I haven't managed to pin down any sort of schedule that they have, but I do know that they're not camping me specifically. So I've added them to my friends list and am doing the tried and true "list when they're done" method. It seems to be working so far.

In addition to that I'm doing exactly what anybody should do with a camper; make their AH life miserable. I've decided that 70g is as low as I will sell any rune which is a 100% profit. While that might seem good, that's only a 50g profit margin off the mats. 50g is almost nothing.

The main thing I have to do is find a pattern. If they have a pattern it will tell a lot about how often they camp and what they sell when. If I can figure this out then I can easily work myself around them and make a nice profit. But until then I'll let them buy up my cheap runes when they reset the price only to be undercut. They're starting to sound a little blue..


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Augments: What, When, and Why

Something that makes crafting gear for profit a little tricky in rift are the augments that you can add. These are all small bonuses to an assortment of different that's like a rune or enchantment, but the catch is that you can only add them to a crafted items as it is crafted. So once an item is made it can no longer be augmented and using one of the higher level ones has a chance to fail to boot. So this chance of failure means you don't want to buy something expensive for it to just blow up when you're only going to sell it.

This is also a big reason for people to buy the mats instead of a cheaper pre-crafted item so that they can be sure it has the right augment for them. You can tell what augment was used based on the prefix attached to the name, but you can only tell how good it is by manually comparing the stats to a plain version of the item. Because of that, most people won't bother to look at what augment was used, only that it has one and matches up correctly. By that I mean that there isn't any wisdom or int on a melee dps weapon for example.

But when somebody goes to buy something from the AH the first question is the most important as it is an automatic yes or no on the spot: can I afford it? If your wares are too expensive then you're not getting a sale and that's the end of it. If it does happen to be in their price range that is when you get the continue with the rest of the silent AH interview. Anything with an stats appropriate augment is going to be better than without just like an item without a rune or enchant is not an upgrade without it. So better is better obviously enough. But augments aren't free.

The real question you need to ask before wondering if you should add an augment to an item or not is how long are they going to be using it. If it's only a leveling piece then the primary concern is going to be price. The average player will look for any gear that's blue and available and grab the cheapest one regardless of bonuses like that. Why? Because they don't care that's why. Sure it's nice, but it's not important enough to wait for a good deal because by the time you find one that item is going to be replaced.

However if it is an item that's going to last them for a while then things get a little tricky. This is one of two situations where having an augmented item is more important than not and it varies from buyer to buyer. For example if you are trying to just get geared enough to do t2's you'll want every tiny bit of extra stats that you can grab so that you can que for them. But if they know that they'll be getting boosted through dungeons and go straight into raids these extra stats are meaningless as they only need just enough so that they don't feel entirely worthless.

Then we come to the social player who just wants to look like they're good without actually being good. For these people you can just throw on any PoS augment so long as it has the right name. It could be a +1 bonus to strength and they won't care because they won't ever look or even care to. This, like most everything, comes down to knowing your market and who your customers are. One final random note about when to use an augment is for any high priced items. This way the little bit of extra stats may be that little extra push that convinces them to buy it.

Now let me give you a few specific in game examples. The Fleshreaper is a great 2h weapon that rivals some t2 gear. If nothing else the big reason to buy one will always stand: it's epic and you can have it NOW. But it is pretty expensive to craft and takes a whopping 4 plaques to learn the recipe which means not many can craft it outside of the people who "collect" every recipe then ignore them forever.

Since this item is rather expensive to make and sells somewhat slow you'll want to give a prospective customer every reason to buy it that you can, this means augment it. It doesn't have to be an epic level 20 platinum valued augment, but you don't want to throw on some PoS either. I try to add in either a max level green or a rare quality one any chance that I get for these types of items. Anything that is expensive and sells slow is when you want to throw on a good augment.

The other important example to consider is leveling gear. This is gear that's going to be replaced in a few days or a week at most depending on the range. Anything that is under level 40 will be replaced quickly while anything above may last until 50 and into t1 runs depending on the luck of the drops. When somebody is buying a good piece of gear to level and quest with, what are they looking for exactly?

They want something that's right for their spec and is going to last a long time without being too expensive for what is essentially a throw away item. Leveling gear counts as throw away pieces because that's exactly what you're going to do with them. Use them for a while then toss it. This means that price is the more important factor here.

Using one of my best selling weapons as an example, the bony hatchet, you don't want to augment these things. The reason is because it is going to be a total waste to do so more often than not. The only time I use one is if I find myself with a bunch of augs that I'm not going to use any time soon so I'll just throw them on because they're too much of a hassle to auction off. In short, use good augments on expensive high-end items and don't go out of your way to use them on leveling gear.


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Random drops price guide

When you're out and about questing, doing invasions, or closing rifts you'll come across tons of random goodies. Some of these goodies are "throw aways" or should go to a vendor, but most of them have a value on the AH. Since these drop only from things that 70% of everybody is doing many times every single day a lot of them aren't worth much. They are however still in high demand. Today I'm going to do my best to list off as many as I can think of and then I'll give you a good idea of what price range you should be selling them in.

This is all of course based on your server so YMMV as per usual. The bulk of these items are going to be coming from rifts and zone invasions, but I'll list other things as well and make a note of where they come from if you want to specifically go looking around for them. And lastly, as with any list type entry that I do there will be a link over yonder to this entry and I'll update it frequently. This way you'll have easy access and the prices and item will always be current.

Enjoy!


Planar essences.
The common ones you'll want to just vendor or RB for the most part. The only exception to this is the ones with 3 active stats such as strength, dext, and crit. If it has resists or endurance it's a throw away. As for the greater ones, those are always useful at any level above 30. I say above 30 because you're not very likely to be able to have a focus to put them into until that point. These are all random drops from invasions (zone and normal), rifts, and foot holds.

Common lesser: 1 platinum
Rare lesser: 2-4 platinum
Greater essences: 1-5 platinum


Planar consumables.
By thins I mean things like earth runes from earth rifts and soul shards from death rifts. Each of these are useful in some way but are worth nothing more than what a vendor will pay you. I like to keep a handful of each kind around for when I go rifting by myself as they can add a lot of damage or self healing in addition to potions.

The only possible exception to this are the level 50 versions because they are needed to craft resistance consumables. The emphasis here is on "possible" because I have not crafted any resistance items (runes, potions, etc.) because they need a bunch of eternal dust which is a tad expensive for me right now. That and the fact that I haven't seen any on the AH either makes me wonder. Long story short, these are almost all throw-aways. Use them or vendor them.

The only exception to this are the ancient/elder tablets from water rifts and that whole world event thing that's going on. A lot of dps warriors use these for the energy regen and is crucial to a few builds. They go away when you die and only last 15 minutes-ish so they'll go through a lot of them on your average day. In this case they're definitely worth hanging onto for either use or for sale if prices seem worth it.


Artifacts.
These are the little glowy tiny orbs of light you see scattered all around the world. You complete "sets" of a certain type and that gets you a lucky coin. You use these coins to buy vanity gear or an epic mount. Don't get excited because you need to finish 100 sets to get the mount which is NOT easy and if you buy them all is far more expensive than the mount itself. You can also get ones that are unique to elemental zone invasions as well which are very sought after. For any green artifacts from invasions, add 3 platinum. For rare invasion artifacts, they can be as low as 3 platinum.

Common artifacts: 1 platinum or less
Green artifacts: 3-5 platinum
Blue artifacts: 10-15 platinum

Do note that this does not include the new artifacts that can only be seen with the "quantum sight doo-boppy" that was introduced with the patch. As for those I can only assume that the price is much much higher than the normal ones you'll find in your daily routine.


Augments.
These are all over the place in price. My guess is that a lot of people aren't too sure what they should be worth or sold for. Also if you're not going to craft any gear these are totally worthless to you so they can easily be thrown onto the AH for next to nothing. For the rare ones you can make some good money flipping them. There's also not a good way to list them off below the rare levels, but I'll try.

Rough, fractured and "not good" sounding: Throw away
Plain names: 50g to 1 platinum
Green mixed stats: 1-3 platinum
Rare single stats: 2-3 platinum
rare mixed stats: 1-2 platinum
Epic single stats: 8-20 platinum

However with that being said, there are a few specific types of augments that are worth a little bit more than the rest in the same level. The ones that come the mind as the most important are spell power, melee crit, spell crit, block/endurance combo, int/spell crit combo, and attack power. This is because AP/SP are the msot obvious choice for somebody that doesn't know anything about what stats are the best. If you're a caster you'll probably want more spell power right? After that is crit which is more valuable because it is the best stat for almsot every soul combo in game. And lastly is block/endurance combo because block is just the best stat hands down for any tank.


Recipes: rare and epic.
This one is a little tricky to pin down due to the people you'll be selling these to. There are three different types of people that would be interested in these ranging from the average, the savvy, and the idiots. One type of person is the AH player which knows full well that if they wait they can get them for extra cheap. Another is the collector who believes that they are priceless and the last is the moron that will buy the recipe then buy the mats so that they can craft the item once and then forget they even have the recipe next week.

A random note on this is that for some reason rare artificer recipes seem to always be flooding the AH and even when there's only one up they tend to be at about 5-15 platinum each. Perhaps there are just that many more out there or their drop rate is just much higher. Because of this, it's very hard to come up with a good rule of thumb for what to price these at, but here's the averages that I've been seeing on my shard.

Rares: 15-30 platinum
Epics: 60-150 platinum

Rune crafting recipes are an entirely different beast just like arti recipes are. I have only ever seen epic BoU recipes on the auction house and they're almost always in the range of 40-70 platinum each. This is probably because their sale price is 1/3 of what you'll see on the price tag for an epic piece of gear. This may be what scares people off from buying them for the same price as other epic recipes.


That's all that I can come up with for now so I hope that gives a few of you out there a hand when you get a lucky drop. I'll be leaving a link to this entry off to the side under the index for easy access. I'll update it from time to time as the economy changes or when I find something new that fits in with the rest.


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So what's "free" anyway?

The more I play the more annoyed I get that things are being crafted under material costs. But on the flip side I'm beginning to understand WHY this is and it's not as bothersome as it was at first. "Free" is typically defined as something without cost weather or not it has a value. But as any businessman will tell you value is the same as cost when it comes to deciding what to do with it. If I gave you the keys and pink slip to a brand new Porsche I don't think you'd believe it was without value.

You could either drive it and look all "mid life crisis-ey" or you could sell it off for half the price and probably finish paying off your home. Or you could launch it in a catapult for the lulz. Either way that car has a cost and a value. The cost is what it takes to use it and the value is what you can get out of it. You can either get 20 seconds of entertainment, a warm fuzzy feeling when you give it away, or a few years of security when you use the money from selling it to pay off all of your bills and debts.

The wise man will bear this all in mind before making a decision.

So what to do? Since we're talking hypothetically with a sports car let's keep rolling with that and move onto why I think so many crafted pieces are selling under material costs. Lets say you decide not to give away the sports car and don't have access to a car-a-pult (such a travesty, I know) and you decide to sell it off for the almighty dollar. So how are you going to do that? Maybe you're in the know and I'm just a fool, but I have no clue where I'd go to sell a brand new sports car for a halfway realistic price without a trade in arrangement. Just like I don't know who to sell these hard to find materials to in rift.

Starting to tie it all together now?

The fact is that these materials and recipes can be a pain in the ass to come by. This is partially because of their rarity and partially because of the fact that not many people are even capable of getting them on their own. Be it gear or level requirements for the zones that they drop in and what not. You can't have a value or a price tag without a prospective buyer. With the great rarity of the mats the price is naturally high, but they're not selling because not many people can afford them while the rarity keeps it high even with lack of a significant demand. What is the price or "value" of these rare mats if nobody is buying them then? I'll tell you, it's value is precisely what the vendor will pay you for it.

That's right, just like with everything else if you can't AH it then vendor it. Crap sitting in your bank makes you exactly ZERO profit. Even if you can put something on AH for 500 plat that doesn't mean shit if it'll never sell, which seems to be the case with a lot of mats. So if we go under the assumption that the materials X, Y, and Z are never going to sell for more than a smidgeon over the vendor price we can effectively remove them from the sale price equation.

Do that and then all of a sudden that 5 plat loss becomes a 15 plat profit. Isn't economics fun kids!? Imagine if the demand for gold IRL entirely vanished. It would still be just as useful as before for both practical purposes and vanity, but the value it once had would be meaningless.

Not to mention economic collapse.

But people would then be trying to sell it for whatever the hell they can get or would just use it to make things that DO sell. Things like wedding rings and computer parts. That's exactly what is happening in rift. People won't buy the mats but they will buy what they go into, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is going to be very difficult to wrap my mind around if this winds up being true across the board. I know of a few rare mats that do sell consistently for a regular price and base my values off of that. But for anything with purple text that's an entirely different story.


Thanks for stopping by!

The Rift List

Well it was only a matter of time before I put one of these together. My old readers already know what's coming, but for anybody new here's the gist of it. This entire entry is nothing more than everything I sell. No explanations no theory, no nothing. This is just a comprehensive list of everything that I sell. Want to know how to make money in Rift? Craft a few of these and keep reading my blog and you'll find out.

Everything is sorted by profession and I'm even including the raw materials that I sell frequently. Once there is a decent way to do so I'll include item links to them as well. This page will be updated frequently and linked on the side for easy access. Also I'll mark anything that I recommend using an augment on with (a) so you'll have a rough idea for that as well. Want to know what to sell in Rift to make some platinum? Look no further.

Enjoy!


Outfitter.
Shaleweave robe
Shaleweave handwraps
Spellspun bag
Witchweave bag

Silken bag
Red scar headwrap
Steeled leather brigandine (a)
Steeled leather leggings

Steeled leather boots
Robes of flowing dark (a)
Wayward brigandine
Lockweave shoulders

Conditioned leather boots
Nightshade belt
Leggings of the hunter (a)
Darkcloth leggings (a)

Darkcloth slippers (a)
Darkcloth cap (a)
Nightshade belt
Conditioned leather shoulder guard (a)

Hood of the flowing dark (a)
Darkcloth belt (a)
Darkcloth shroud (a)
Ceremonial visage

Ceremonial breeches


Armor smith.
Darkmetal tassets
Darkmetal helm
Darkmetal shoulders
Red scar boots

Noble girdle
Steel spaulders
Orichilum gauntlets
Worshiper's chainmail

Orichilum buckler (a)
Faith-forged spaulders (a)
Steel buckled
Buckler of the scholar

Stoneshatter spellshield
Dark iron gauntlets (a)
Night iron gauntlets (a)
Implacable steel gauntlets (a)

Carmintium fauld
Dark iron helmet (a)
Faith forged helm (a)
Soul warden's helm

Sabatons of the devout (a)
Night iron sabatons (a)
Implacable steel Helm (a)
Implacable steel greaves (a)

Refurbished mathosian tabard
Refurbished mathosian barbute
Refurbished mathosian leggings
Refurbished mathosian gauntlets

Refurbished mathosian pauldrons
Refurbished mathosian greaves
Implacable steel helm (a)
Weight of the world (a)

Hauberk of the devout (a)
Orichilum chausses
Orichilum cuisses
Glossy steel helm (a)

Greathelm of grandeur (a)
Weight of the world (a)


Weapon smith.
Martyr's fist (a)
Ebony hatchet (a)
Darkmetal battleaxe (a)
Darkmetal scepter

Spellhunter's cudgel
Darkmetal sword
Fleshreaper (a)
Orichilum claymore (a)

Runeguard blunderbuss
Damascus shiv
Damascus war hammer
Damascus saber

Logger's axe
Exquisite whetstone
Fine whetstone
Spark smiter (a)

Steeltouched longsword
Spined compound bow
Ebony maul
Spellsmasher

Orichilum mace
Lightsmasher (a)
Merciless blade
Black iron hatchet (a)

Malevolent great axe (a)
Shadethorn bow (a)
Carmintium spell cutter
Callous blade (a)

Stone cleaver


Rune crafting.
Everything blazing, radiant, and incandescent.
Icewall rune
Feral rune


Raw materials.
Perpetual glow
Perpetual flare
Kinetic charge
Kinetic burst

Sentient surge
Sentient blast
Witchweave cloth
Flickering Crystal

Exotic leather
Bolt of composite cloth
Pristine distillate
Potent distillate

Spiritweave cloth
Minor catalyst
Catalytic essence
Refined gem

Inert prism
Inert crystal


Apothacary.
Nothing. Nothing at all.


Artificer.
Gold chain
Platinum choker
Platinum necklace (a)
Bound-flame ring (a)

Fine platinum chain (a)
Ill-fated relic
Stonefallen band
Red scar tracking manual

Platinum gorget
Shadethorn spellstaff (a)
Stoic pendant
Polished mahogany rod

Polished runebirch rod
Talisman of emphatic defense (a)
Tysumi's treatise on arcane travel (a)
Titan's signet (a)

Band of spells (a)
Dragon hunter's iron ring (a)
Dragon ruby ring (a)
Triple-knotted band

Orichilum wand (a)
Orichlum amulet (a)
Spell staff of raging lightning (a)
Luminous crook

Puglist's signet (a)
Brilliant diamond band
Blood berylite signet
Lightsbane diamond band

Burning powerstone


Thanks for stopping by!

About this blog

I'm writing this entry as a formal introduction to what I write about, making platinum in Rift. Throughout the rest of the week I'll be posting my "list" entries which will contain everything that I sell and what sells the best. With that being said, lets get started.


What do I do?
To put it simply I sell stuff, and a lot of it. I do as much as I can in as little time as possible to make tons of platinum in Rift every day. I do it because it's myown little "mini game" in an mmo. I did the same thing in wow where I was one of the first (if not THE first) player to hit two million gold. For those of you that ask "how to make money in Rift" you've come to the right place.

I use the auction house and every profession in game to craft and sell things while using basic methods and auction house theory to make huge profits. All of these methods and theories have been proven to work and will continue to work because they're not based on the game, but instead on the people that play the game.


What don't I do?
This is the important part that sets me and my blog apart from 90% of the players. First and foremost I do not farm a single thing nor do I recommend it. Out of all my time on game not a single minute is spent farming materials or recipes or anything of the sort. Farming is boring, repetitive, and a terrible way to make money. I personally do not find farming to be interesting or entertaining and as such I don't want to spend $15 a month to do something that I am not enjoying.

Lastly I do not farm because that does not make anything free. The flowers or ore that you just picked up have a value and a price, even if you didn't spend money to acquire them you spent your time. Time which could have been spent on having fun doing what you really want to be doing. And no I do not sell platinum like the 400 spammers you have on ignore.


No exploits. No hacks. No cheats. No ads.
While playing wow I used addOns as did everyone who played the game. In Rift there are no addOns but (from what I hear) botting and the like are very common on some shards. I do not do any of this. How I make money is doing exactly what anybody can do the moment they train a profession and is 100% legitimate. Like many people, I believe cheating lessens the value of a game and detracts from the enjoyment.

I believe that something given isn't nearly as important as something you have earned on your own accord and that is exactly what cheating is. Every method and theory I write about is entirely legal and doesn't even fall into some kind of "grey area" in the rift terms of service. And you'll never see 400 ads on this blog unlike many others.


How to use this blog.
Over the next few days I will post several entries on what I sell, what the best selling items are, and a few small price guides. I write every weekday from Monday to Friday and occasionally write an entry for the weekend. Once a week I write a status report on the markets that I'm working in, different observations, and general minute to minute updates on the rift economy. Almost every entry that I write is about how to make money or cut costs and the reasoning behind it.

My last note here is for those who have just started to read. I highly suggest you glance over a few of the links in my wow AH index entry. Most of what is written there isn't wow related and is general AH theory. Everything from figuring out how to price your items and why I say to stokpile materials and undercut by large amounts is covered there.


Thanks for stopping by!

Weekend status update

Aloha all! I'm writing one of a few odd entries on the weekends for a status update on what I'm still hunting down in rift. There isn't much in the way of AH platinum tips as it's mostly for my personal benefit. This is one of many ways that I keep track of what I'm missing and need more of etc. So today is what I'm still looking for recipe wise.


Reputation recipes:
Charmer's caldera runs on everyone. There's a few daily quests that give a little rep, but not much at all. The quest item turn in is fast and easy, but it'll cost like 200 plat to get the rep needed and across 3 toons that's a ton of cash. So rep runs it is!

The mage still needs granite falls, but that instance is an abomination! Seriously, it takes forever to do even with a pro group so that's on the back burner. But aside from those two, the rest are taken care of for all that I need. While the CC rep is important, there's 5 recipes after all, it will take far too long to do on 3 different toons and is far too pricey to buy right now.


Token recipes:
These are almost entirely done minus the BS ones that I'm not going to bother with. I have every recipe from normal daily tokens for everything minus 2 weapons (424 tokens) and one piece of armor (255 tokens). There are still a handful of different colored dyes that I can get, but those haven't been profitable since ever so I'm not going to bother with them.

The plaques are the real issue as one would expect. My armor/weapon smith needs 14, artificer needs only 8, RC needs 16 more, 8 for outfitter, and 2 for apothecary. Again, I'm not worried about apoth at all.


Random drops.
These simply cannot be farmed in the traditional sense. They're all very rare zone drops from expert dungeons that are BoP. As such they are in very high demand and catch a huge profit if you're lucky enough to get one. For those that do have them you might have a complete monopoly that will last a long, long time. The only instance I'm farming is lantern hook because in addition to there being a few bop recipes that I want there are 5 boe ones as well in addition to an epic recipe. With that much potential it makes it worth running once a day, that and it's a fairly easy one since it's a T1. The only problem there is just getting a group for it, heh.


So all in all that makes maybe a month or two to have all of the recipes that I can get for sure. With a dose of luck I'll pick up a few more from dungeon drops or off of the AH. And as of this writing I have officially broken 2,000 platinum. That's enough to gear up every alt I have in epics...or to expand my business of makin' the business!


Thanks for stopping by!