Taking a loss

As to be expected, I've taken a significant loss in a number of things that I've tried to sell. Not because of forgetting to do my homework, I've learned the hard way not to forget that part. I took a loss because I have very little to base my guess work on. And it wasn't until much later on that I discovered a few clues that would suggest avoiding a certain item. That being said, let me give you the full list of things that I have not sold or sold very few of so far. Anything that has sold came with a monetary cost that was not made back from sales to date.

Ornate steel choker
Gold gorget
Gold chain
Night iron gauntlets
Fine leather leggings
Plaited cinerium ring
Shining sapphire ring
Heartless ring
Reinforced leather helm
Reinforced leather belt

Each of the above items cost me two things. First is the obvious monetary investment it took to craft them. Sure I can RB them to try and recoup it, but that would be such a small fraction of the final cost that it's not even worth taking into account. I also don't have a toon that can use them so that is also not relevant. The second thing that I took a loss on was the tokens it cost to learn the recipe itself. That means time which is infinitely more valuable than the gold.

Each recipe took at least two daily of full dailys to get enough tokens for which could have been spent more wisely on something else that might (or might not) have sold. Like I always say, time is the most important thing you can invest because you cannot get more and cannot regain what you have lost.

Bear in mind though I am in no way saying that the professions that make these things are worthless themselves, far from it. I am only pointing out a few things that you should be avoiding unless you have nothing else better to spend your tokens on and have some decent cash that you can afford to throw in the gutter. While it is true that this can happen with anything on your shard, these are a few items that I know for a fact are not working out on mine and are very likely the same on yours.

As time goes on and I continue to experiment with different things to craft and sell I'll be writing more and more entries like this I'm sure. Once again there is little to no way to base your markets on. That is yet another reason that reading fine blogs such as mine is important even if you're already well off, you never know when a big loss is waiting around the corner. And the flip side of course is true, you never know if there's a fortune waiting right under your nose until somebody points it out to you. That's what I'm here for after all, to enlighten and to entertain.

I'm still looking for the markets that have a high rate of consistent sales because that's where you need to be if you want to get rich anytime this century. So far the closest I've found is bags, but their profit margins are so low it's still going to take a while with them. Then there is the "death and taxes" profession of rune crafting. I refer to it as such because the only two thing you can't avoid in life are death and taxes. Any time you get a new piece of gear you can't avoid heading to a RC to add some shine to it. But with the campers that farm for free that isn't an option either. So here's to searching!


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For those who farm

Although I'm against farming I still feel it's wise to mention it from time to time. Today I'm going to give a few pointers on farming spots, how to do them, what to expect, and when it's a good idea. That's right, a good idea to farm. However seeing as how I'm not the most adept or experienced farmer out there there could easily be better spots than the ones I've mentioned.

The farming locations that I'll cover are the ones that I've found merely by questing and wound up spending more time gathering than killing. In other words all of the farm spots tend to have a lot of nodes in a tight area. Here's my recommendations based on material type along with any note worthy points on it.


Titanium.
Most people will tell you to go to the level 50 zones if you want to farm this and of course that's not a good idea. When it comes to farming you never EVER go to where "everybody" says to go unless that's your only option. That's because obviously there's a lot of competition for spawn points. The best place that I've found is the south east portion of the drought lands. Not many people quest in there and the dominate node for the zone is cobalt. However in this higher level section you'll find oodles and oodles of titanium spawn points. Bear in mind though that there are a handful that spawn underground and aren't worth going for usually.

Fun note on this though. If you port to phoenix rise there can be a node spawn directly behind you and if you go to fortune's shore there can be one next to the neutral gang mobs in town as well just a short run to the west.


Carmintium.
The easiest route to farm this that I've found is along side the road between exile's den and white fall tavern. Just run your circle starting at exile's on the left side of the road until you get to white fall and then go back on the other side. There is also a cave that has 3-5 spawn points but is also loaded up with mobs.

If you don't see a node right outside that usually means that there won't be any inside either. But if you have great aoe and won't get killed it might be worth your while to look. There is a large number of spawns in stillmoor in the fields around the citadel, but you'll have to dodge countless mobs with a few elites mixed in so this is definitely not a good place to farm effectively.


Spellspun silk.
This is something that you'll only want to really farm if you can solo aoe it all. It seems that the only really viable option for this is the undead town at the very southern end of stillmoor. Be mindful of the few elites that sit by the walls though or you could be in trouble.


Cobalt.
Right in the middle of the northern portion of drought lands is the prime spot for this. Everywhere that has a little centaur camp is likely to have either this or gold hidden away. Anywhere that you see a few stone mountain pillar things is where you're going to find a node. Basically just look for big rocks sticking up and you'll get what you're after.


Chromite.
This route is almost the same as the one for carmintium, just in a different zone. You start out in perspice and follow the left side of the road north. Follow it all the way up to the last Guardian camp and then turn around. In each of the little pits with the scaffolding or tree stumps is where you're going to find the nodes you want.


Exotic hide.
There are two different spots that I've found for this. One is right outside of exile's den to the east. You'll find a bunch of tigers that hang around the sides of the road that you usually pass by entirely. They're spread out enough that it's easy to go one at a time and close enough together that you can aoe them if you can. The other spot is a little east of whitefall with the same situation, lots of tigers packed together nicely.


Orichilum.
There is actually only one route that I know of that won't take an hour to get 10 ore together. The only down side to it is that if you aren't a defiant it's not practical for you at all. You leave right out the front gates of meridian and make a right. Follow the mountains along the coast until you're think you're going to enter the desert. Right in the corner are a few elites and some wrecked boats which is where three nodes can spawn.

The elites can be solo'd by any pet class or tank and for everyone else they are very easy to avoid. After you check those spots head out into the lake and you'll find a buried treasure chest if you haven't already along with several other spawn points and elites to avoid. Aside from this spot your only other options are dungeons and the citadel in stillmoor with a ton of mobs and elites that cannot be avoided.


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Random rift thoughts 2

Aloha all! I'm here with another collection of random thoughts to help you make money in rift. As always just a few quick tips that only need a little explanation on what I'm talking about. I try to do more than just provide you with original content each day after all. I do my best to make sure that it is not only quality content, but also that there is a lot of it.

Enjoy!


1. Soulbind/Exotic leather belts.
This is a vendor bought recipe that takes 40ish tokens to get. To craft them it only takes 1 soulbind leather (2-5g on my shard) and an item sold form the OF vendor. This is noteworthy because if you're like me and RB tons of gear to get materials for insanely cheap this is the route to take. Before I discovered this I was crafting the boot which takes two pieces of leather to craft and this just increased my profit margins by 50% on it's own.

However for those of you who don't have OF on your rune crafter this is going to be a problem. I'd recommend making an alt just to be your RB workhorse in all honesty. Get their RC skill up to the 250s range and their OF up to the same just so that you can craft tons of greens and RB them on the spot. With only 6 items fitting in a mail to yourself this will save a ton on postage and loads of time shuffling junk around.


2. Tell the other faction you're doing crafting rifts.
Now I haven't tried this personally, but I have a feeling it will pay off well. Roll an alt on the opposite faction's side and walk them to their main town. When you or another group are starting to do crafting rifts log onto them and spam that they're going on for a few minutes to get more people to join in from there. You just might get a few extra lures popped out of it. The other reason that I'm thinking this is a good idea is that you just might get the same treatment in turn.

An MMO is a social game filled with oodles of social and/or casual people and this is the sort of thing that they get into. Friendly people helping other friendly people. So by doing this you can get your own returned favor of announcements when there's about to be 30+ crafting rifts going off which can be nice if you don't have the time or don't want to bother leaving an alt in the middle of nowhere to check.


3. Stokpile catalysts and eternal dust on Wednesday
As you know, all weekly resets happen on Wednesday and this includes crafting weekly quests. These are the quests that reward you with the crafting rift lures and it's very common to see several full raids doing these several times on your average Wednesday. This means that all of a sudden tons of minor catalysts, eternal planar dust, and assorted max level crafting materials have been introduced into the system. And there will be a ton of them.

When any large floods of supply come in the prices of them will always drop down by a noticeable amount. Because of that each week when the crafting lures are reset the prices of all of those will drop down and makes for a great opportunity for you to stokpile them all. The same is also true of other materials like carmintium and soul leather. When people get a small hand full of random materials that they're not going to use they tend to put it up on AH for a serious undercut. So in addition to getting a shot at great deals on rare mats you can do the same with the more common ones as well.


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The 40 plat price cap

It seems that I'm always going on about how you need to find the perfect price point for your markets on your server. It's of utmost importance to maximizing your profits to balance rate of sales with profit and I think I've found mine for rift. And that number is 40 platinum for everything, it's a sweeping generalization of prices sure but it seems to fit the bill, no pun intended. Naturally there isn't anything in game that you can auction for 40 platinum that isn't purple so that's what I'm going to be focusing on today. Of course should anybody be aware of a blue item that they can sell for that much I'd be thrilled to know!

The first epic that I crafted was a black iron hatchet, an epic 1h axe for warriors. It began to sell steadily once prices were at an acceptable point for me to list them, it began to sell consistently. I started listing them at 26 platinum which is about a 6p profit and over time slowly raised the price bit by bit as each one sold. However once I reached a 40 platinum price tag they just stopped selling. When something stops selling entirely, you'd think that something has changed.

It might be a patch, a hotfix, or just the community's view on the targeted class in general, but in this case the only thing that had changed was my price tag. I dropped the price back down to 38 and voila, they start selling regularly again. So 195% ish of the material cost is the ideal pricing point for this item.

Strange sure, but one case doesn't make a pattern.

The next epic I started to sell was the flesh reaper, this one is a bit more expensive to craft at about 28 platinum in materials. So I started to list these at 50 platinum with a fancy augment. Not a single sale. Ok so maybe 50 is a bit too much for an entry level epic and I drop the price to 45 platinum. A week later and I finally get a sale. Woohoo! So I craft another and list it back at 45 and sell another but at the same slow pace.

I get undercut by a few gold and I drop the price down to 39.55 platinum. Two days later it sold and I crafted another one to list for the same price. I sold yet another that week. The other one either sold or expired by the time I went to list another and I put it back up for 45 to see what happens. What happened was the exact same thing!

Ok so I'm two for two on selling things under 40 platinum better than higher prices, that is until I mention Martyr's fist and faith forged spaulders. Both sexy cleric purple gear, both cost roughly 25ish platinum to craft. And yes, both take forever and a day to sell with a 41+ platinum price tag.

So what's the deal here? Obviously people are willing to pay top dollar for crafted epics, but not many are. That part is easy to explain and I've covered it a few times so far, there just isn't a lot of money in the world period. There's a lot of quests and vendor bait but there's a lot of gold sinks as well so not many people can afford that.

The real question here is why 40? What makes this the magic number? Yes 39.99 is not particularly different than 40, but that bit of pricing psychology has been proven to be very effective for ages now. So I will ask again: what makes 40 platinum so special and not 45? Why not 100 platinum? We shall see.


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Don't compete with yourself

Another entry listed over at wowecon today. This one is on the subject of pricing once again and why you should leave a large and noticeable gap in price between the top end items and those that are second best. Here's the first part.

"Today's entry is on the general subject of pricing and the specific topic of being your own worst enemy on the AH. Let's say you have three different things to sell, A, B, and C. A is for max level players with a lot to spend, B is for people that are almost at the level cap and C is for those that have just hit the level cap. As expected, you'll want to price item A rather high as it's for people that have money to spend and it will probably last them long enough. However Items A and B are very close in level range, stats, and estimated length of use.

We all know that there is a solid market for leveling gear even when you're close to finished. That's because sometimes people level fast or skip areas or otherwise do things that don't upgrade their gear at the same rate as their level. So they might actually need to buy some gear so the last few levels aren't a nightmare. But there is also the other side that figures that it's not worth the money since it'll be replaced soon anyways. But with these two different items, one for near cap and one entry level gear, they're both going to be sold to the same person.

This is where the pricing gets tricky."


Click here to read the whole entry.

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The AH never changes

Entry is posted in it's entirety over at warcraftecon.net today. It's on the subject of why all of you wow players will still find valuable insight in the AH from reading my blog and why all of you rift players would do well to read a few of the wow gold blogs that are out there. Here's the first part

"And why does it not change? How does it stay the same no matter what game your playing? Because at it's core what drive the AH to function are people and we never change. The lazy people on wow are going to be lazy on Rift, the morons will stay morons, and the goblins will stay goblins. This means that everything I have learned from the AH game on wow will apply to rift and vice versa. The only changes are how you shuffle around names and numbers. Every situation I found myself in wow I'll find once again in rift and the same methods will need to be applied to work with it.

Hell I've even ran off my first camper."

Click here to read the whole thing.


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Making a few predictions

I've been following the development of the Rift economy very closely as you may imagine since I started playing. And as such I've noticed a few subtleties of trion that lead me to expect a few things in the not so distant future. I wanted to take today to share a few of my thoughts on this matter and have it officially in writing what I expect to see how close I am. Mind you that NONE OF THIS is official or hinted at by the developers, it is only my thoughts and expectations. So don't take any of this as gospel, just something to keep in the back of your mind.


Crafting plaques will be obtained easier.
With the dozens of new recipes that have been added in requiring 5 plaques a piece to learn these won't become common for a long, long time. They were added in to help people fill in gaps in their raid gear to help them progress faster through the raid content without nerfing the hell out of the raids. Because of this I expect there to be another way to gain plaques or a better chance of getting them. This may be done by increasing the drop rate from dailys and crafting rifts, or merely allow you to buy them with artisan's marks, or increase the weekly quest award up to 2-3 plaques instead of only one.


Crafting rifts.
I expect that these will soon include the new CD based materials as potential drops. For one to make these a bit more profitable for those that do them because right now no matter how lucky you are, you lose money compared to the lure cost. Lets face it, the minor cats are the only thing that's worth actual money from them as the common mats don't even make up 1/8 of the lure's cost to craft.


More vanity items.
This one is a given, the mathosian guard's armor is very popular and is the only costume set you can craft. People love this sort of thing and that was proven by how many people dove on it when it was made live. I expect outfitters to get the next full set and eventually artificers or RC's will get something that will add a little "woo-shiny!" to what you already have. By that I mean something like the random things you get from the event seals that add a little storm cloud over your head and the such or the apoth potions that let you turn somebody into a critter.


More augments.
With the release of patch 1.4 apothecaries can craft primary stat augments. While this is a great addition and much needed boost to a poor (see what I did there?) profession it is not nearly enough. Add to that the fact that the best and highest demand augments are mixed stat ones, I expect these to be eventually added in. More specifically I expect at least stat/power and endurance/block to be added if nothing else. While I would love to see some stat/crit ones put in I am not expecting this and I certainly hope that they don't add in the terrible stat/endurance ones. But regardless of which ones they do add, I am positive that there will be new ones put in.


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Rift 1.4 crafted gear

It's been almost a week since the patch hit so I've had enough time to go over it all on live and see what is what. Today I'm going to give you the important info that you'll need to know about all of these new goodies that have been added in. I'll go on a profession by profession basis and list off anything unique about them outside of what applies to every one of them.


Foraging, mining, butchering.
All gathering professions can craft a new type of material which is on a 20 hour cool down. Each one requires two of the top end materials related to that profession such as steeled leather, shadethorn lumber along with two items sold by the associated vendor with cost 4.2 platinum each. This puts their base cost at approximately 9 platinum + fee for the cool down. If you have a toon with all three gathering profs on them they can do each of them when the CD is up so they do not have a "shared" cool down.


Outfitter.
As with each of the gear crafting professions, there are a whole slew of new recipes. Each recipe for armor/weapons cost 5 plaques each to learn and require (on average) 8 items that are crafted by other professions with a 20 hour CD. Outfitter is unique in that it has a CD to use in addition to the new materials.


Rune crafting.
This profession does not have any new crafted recipes, but does have a CD to use for new materials.


Weapon/armor smith.
These professions do not have a CD but have the most sought after pieces of gear from the new recipes.


Artificer.
The big one here is the burning powerstone. It adds 200sp to your main hand or 2h weapon which includes both hammers and staffs. This is obviously the best weapon consumable in game for any caster, healer, or dps/support cleric so they are in very high demand. And you know what the best part is? They're cheap to make! To craft them it takes two refined gems and to get those they require your artificer to make any piece of gear that uses a brilliant or lights bane diamond and salvage it. Each salvage will produce on average 3 gem fragments and it takes 5 fragments to craft one refined gem.

The best items to craft are brilliant diamond bands (platinum bar and one gem) and lights bane diamond band which takes a lights bane diamond and a platinum bar. In total that costs maybe one platinum and I've been selling these things for as high as 15 a piece.

This profession does not have a CD to use.

There are also the new recipes that they can make which are rings and a staff. So far out of all the recipes added in, the most popular request that I've seen is the staff. And that's out of all the professions and not just this one.


Apothecary.
Out of all the professions, this one got the most love. First is the new ability to salvage essences. Note that there is a bug and any lesser essences that are BoE cannot be salvaged. Trion has stated that they're looking into this. All of the materials gotten from this salvage are all used for crafting augments of different levels. Here's the low down on what you get from this.

Green essences turn into basic "powder" and it takes 5 of them to make one inert thingy. The inerts are what are used in crafting augments and the type inert is tied to the item level that you salvaged. This is true of both blue and green essences. In addition to this powder, you will also get anywhere from 1-3 planar dust of the associated level which is enduring, endless, or eternal.

Now we come to the epic essences. Any epics that you buy from a vendor (that I've seen at least) cannot be salvaged, it's the BoE ones that you're after. The epic lessers can be any level from 10 to 50 and produce the same results. They will give you Prism fragments which turn into the mats needed for epic augments and 1-3 eternal dust. So depending on how you value eternal dust this can be some easy money for very little effort. Also of note is that the inert prisms sell for as high as 30 platinum each and the lowbie lessers sell as low as 5, heh you do the math.

Then are the epic augment recipes, each one takes 3 plaques to learn and requires one of the CD materials, two eternal dust, and an inert prism. After those are the pure augments which need a mighty vial of a related stat and inert crystals which come only from salvaging high level blue essences. To learn these recipes they take 212 artisan's marks each. The lower quality augments take much fewer marks and require level appropriate inert salvages.

To make these you'll need to salvage green essences that are BoP (until this is fixed) and rare greater essences. But since you can still get augments from planarite this isn't too much of a concern as they'll remain in the throw away category.

Leaving off on a potentially huge money making tip right now. You know all of those rune king seals that you probably have a million of? Trade in 75 of them for an epic lesser essence and salvage it for a few eternal dust and prism shards. They're suddenly not totally worthless! And the same thing goes for the new epic lessers gotten with dragon tears with the current world event so get going on those daily quests! And the best part is that both the tokens and the essences themselves are all boa so that means that you can do the quests on every toon and mail them all off to your apothecary. Pretty neat-o huh?


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The freedom money brings

Another entry is posted today over at wowecon and it's on the subject of why I bother to even do any of this. The money, the blog, the AH, etc, it all has a reason. Many reasons in fact. Here's the first part.

"One of the obvious questions that AH players get asked is "why?" Why bother making thousands and thousands of gold or platinum in wow or rift? The answer is the freedom that it allows us. They say money can't buy you happiness, which is certainly true. I mean after all, I have not once seen it on the shelves at the local Wal-Mart. Happiness is supposed to be in isle 4 isn't it? But money can definitely buy you things that will make you happy. In an MMO that means independence and convenience. Two words which I'll never spell right without a spell checker.

To me, happiness in the world of an MMO is being able to take care of any alt that I make without scrambling for funding. As soon as they hit the level cap I want to be able to kit them out in high end blue gear at the least so they can hop into the harder dungeons right away and not get carried. Having even more money means they can get suited up with shiny as hell purples and jump right into raiding if so desired."

Click here to read the whole thing.


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Take the E-peen out of the AH

Today I have another article posted over at warcraft econ. Today it's on the subject of how your ego is the most likely thing to hold you back. Here's the first part:

"A great writer once said a very blunt, but very pertinent one liner about how to write a great story and that is "stop getting your balls in the way of your writing! You keep trying to put your nuts in the middle of everything just tell the story!" Pretty in your face sort of visual isn't it? But it's a very important point and applies to virtually everything you will ever do, including the AH game.

First let me explain where they're coming from and the point they're trying to make with such a quote. The idea is that when you're trying to do something well, your ego is going to hold you back. It's as simple as that. Like I've said many times when it comes to the AH or writing a blog in general, do it for the sake of doing it. If you write for the sole reason of popularity you're probably going to fail. If you make money on an MMO just to show off you are going to have the opposite of fun. Sure it's nice to brag and to have 2,345,567 readers but if that's your goal you're obviously going to fall short."


Click here to check out the whole entry.


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Fill in the gaps

Aloha all, today I have another entry posted at warcraft econ. The subject today is things you should pay attention to while leveling that will make you a profit. More specifically, it's about what you should look for to identify what leveling items you should focus on selling first. Here's the first part.

"When you’re busy leveling your toon, there’s a lot more to pay attention to than just questing. I’ve already written at length about how everything sells and to try and AH everything that isn’t grey so I won’t be covering that today. Instead I wanted to cover something that’s mentioned every now and then but never in depth. I refer to the concept of niche markets which we’re all aware of to some degree.

A niche market is just what you would expect, a small specialized market. More often than not it is used in reference to a certain type of customer base, primarily collectors and vanity items. However there is another niche market that I have only seen talked about in great detail by the epic penny pouch, great wow blog found over yonder, and that is specific level ranges. In every mmo there are different items that are more easily acquired at certain level ranges such as rings or necklaces."


Click here to read the whole thing.

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PSA: How to properly AoE

Aloha all it's time for another public service announce from yours truly. Today's lesson in how not to fail is on the subject of AoE dps and how to do more than hit your channeled spell and scratch your balls. What's that? Why yes there is far more to aoe than just that. And before it gets brought up, I am fully aware that some classes are rather limited in their choice of aoe. For some of them, such as some rogues in wow, your only aoe is an on/off switch. By that I mean that either you're spamming aoe non stop or you are doing zero aoe with nothing in between. Bear this in mind with your class if you have the capability to do more than mash one button.

In fact, there are several different types of aoe "styles" to pick from. Choosing the right one for the situation is what will separate you, the super cool johnny awesome player, from the power drooling inbred mongoloids you'll come across in randoms. I'll start by listing a different style of aoe and then explain exactly what it is.

After that I'll go over when to use it and why it's important that you use that style instead of smashing your single "enemies explode" spell. The goal essentially is to get the best of both worlds. Aoe does more total damage, but won't kill a single mob as fast as focused fire will. Adopting these different aoe styles will do the most to have great spread damage while still focusing on the primary objective for the given situation.

You might ask why this is important or wonder why it is at all. Yes, yes I know, aoe dps are srs bsns! But when a fight requires good aoe, guess what? It is very serious business. Any time that I've seen aoe as even a slightly of an important factor it was always VERY important and was literally a pass or fail. If you couldn't do enough aoe in the right place the right way then it was a guaranteed wipe without question. Hence the PSA on aoe.


Full on AoE.
Obvious one comes first. This is where you're supposed to hit you're single enemies explode spell/attack, lean on back and scratch your nuts. The only time to do this is when there is a shit load of mobs all in the same spot. The amount that is needed to make this worthwhile varies greatly from player to player. This is because different classes have different aoe abilities and different groups of mobs might really need one focused down like a healer before aoe even matters. However I think that a good rule of thumb to follow is anytime there's 5+ mobs that do not have a high priority target (such as a healer) is when you should spam your big bombs non stop.


Cleave based AoE.
If you're not familiar with the term it means to replace your primary spam attack with one that hits multiple targets. Now you don't spam this attack and only this attack, it just replaces your standard filler ability. Meanwhile you continue your usual single target dps rotation on the marked target. One example of where this style should be used is when you have a pull that has 1 elite mob and 5 non elite buddies. Your single target priorities will bring down the elite almost as fast as normal, but all of the little buggers will drop rather fast which will greatly reduce tank damage.


Emphasized AoE.
By this I mean that you still want to focus on your single target, but throw in as much aoe as possible at the same time. Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. Lets say your mega aoe spell is a big fire nuke you cast a ton and also have a talent that makes your 4 second cast meteor spell instant. For prioritized aoeyou'll spam your aoe until you get that instant cast proc and use it on the primary target. Or if you build up a buff on yourself with aoe skills and have a big nuke that consumes that buff this is another example of where this comes into play. Now the time to use this is once again when there are a lot of mobs around. There's no point to spamming aoe on only 2-3 dudes, that's a waste.

The proper time to use this depends entirely on your ability to do it and the group of mobs that you're facing. One easy example is another pull with a single elite and 50 little ones that die fast. Another good one is if you're facing a boss that summons swarms of mobs that get killed in 2-3 hits from aoe. Those types of fights are fairly common and it's always important to keep at least some focused dps on the boss at all times. If there's any sort of time limit on the fight with swarms of aoe adds this is imperative to downing the boss before you get eaten.


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Duplicate professions

Today I want to talk about a nifty investment that you can make in rift. With the profitable recipes coming from tokens that you can start to acquire immediately after learning a profession it takes a long, long time to learn them all. This is especially true for weapon and armor smiths because so much of it is useful for so many different people. And since there is no other way to acquire these tokens outside of dailys we need to look for a way to get around that. And I've found one.

This investment won't be on the massive 5k plat scale, but can be a lot if you're just starting out. It's as simple as power leveling a profession for a second time on an alt. You'll still get all of the daily quests and tokens for it regardless. Obvious I know, but the obvious isn't noticed sometimes unless it's pointed out. You leave your main crafter to do the dungeon runs and the like for rep and rare drops while still doing their dailys for tokens also.

Make a note of what recipes you're missing and just be sure not to double up on them. I'm not aware of any minimum level req to train max level professions, but my level 23 alt had 300 artificer so you can probably assume you can do it at level 15 at the worst or possibly level 1.

I'd suggest making a cleric so that you can easily solo earth and fire invasions or rifts. You'll still want to do these for a quick five egg shells to put with the 10 from dailys to get the profession bag. I was crazy lucky on my cleric and got a plaque on their second day being alive at maybe level 8 if that. So yes it is possible to get them that early.

Instead of taking duplicate professions, you can also take three crafting professions on the same toon to really maximize the tokens that you get. In addition if you have multiple toons with OF they each can do the weekly quest to get a plaque so that you can craft all of the epic recipes even faster. Once you have all of them available to you, keep doing the weekly and such on your "primary" crafter that you have all of the rare drop recipes on and keep trying to acquire the epic ones that you need alts to make. Once you have all of those on your primary crafter you can feel free to delete your alts that have duplicates of all the recipes you have on a single toon and start over with another profession.

This might seem time consuming, but power leveling a profession only take a long time if you farm everything you need. Please don't. If you buy everything it might total up around 150 plat using current average material prices which isn't too terribly high. Doing this will essentially cut down the total time frame by half to get all of the recipes from tokens and plaques. Is this viable? Well that depends entirely on you. It depends on how much you have, are willing to spend, and how cheap you can get materials for. That and how much you can sell the crafted goods for of course.

If there are only 3 epic recipes for OF that get a profit then this is totally not worth it. But if you're in the situation as I am where half of the weapon and armor smith recipes are profitable then this is something that you should seriously consider. As of this writing, I need almost three THOUSAND tokens to get all of the recipes that get a profit. At an average of 70 per day on 3 different toons that makes it 15 days or so to get them all. That doesn't sound too bad does it? Well unfortunately it's not that simple because all of the tokens don't go into the same pocket.

For OF I need 400 to finish that up which is 6 days on that toon and only that one. Armor smith needs 700 so 10 days for that toon and then another 700 for weapon smith which is another 10 days on the same toon. Keep in mind also that I've been doing these dailys for a month already, so starting up an entirely new profession that you don't have already will make this time frame much longer. This is why power leveling another profession just to do the dailys is a good option for anybody that wants to jump into a new market. Think about it.


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Casual George = AH guru

Today I have yet another entry written up that it posted at wowecon.net. Today I talk about the best and most informed person in game in regards to acceptable prices: the casual player. One question that everyone asks themselves when they go to sell an item they have never listed before is how much they should sell it for. What is XYZ worth? Check out the article and find out why Casual George is the best one to ask. Here's the first part of it all.


"I will admit first that it is true that a casual gamer doesn’t typically play the AH in the sense that a goblin or an otherwise AH focused player does. They do however play the game in many more ways that your typical raider or AH baron does. That means that they fit perfectly into the category of who you sell everything to. Does the expression “know your customers” ring a bell? It should because that’s exactly where I’m going with this.

This is not because they’re stupid or lazy, they are just the same as I was before I started to build my empire: uninformed. They just don’t know and if they do, then they either don’t have the time for it or would rather be just plain getting by. That’s the definition of a casual pretty much, limited play time, enjoys everything they do on game and are somewhat competent players at the very least. Suffice to say, casuals are my kind of people, probably because I’m a casual player as well."



Click here to check out the full article.


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