Head games

Small update first. I sold my first glacial bag for 370g after 3 days of relisting for 370g. That's a small 40g profit since I'm not specced for bonus ebonweave or moonshroud cloth. If you are moonshroud specced (or get eternal shadows for really cheap) I'd recommend making one, but otherwise I don't feel it's worth it. The eternal life is better used for spellthreads, the shadows go into titansteel or buckles, and even if you're specced for ebonweave it really isn't saving you that much.

However if you're at a point where you can afford a 2,000g investment I definitely recommend making a titansteel razorpalte to sell. I've sold several for a few hundred to a thousand gold profit so far. As to the other ToC recipes I can't comment but imagine that the tanking bracers would do quite well.


Today we'll be talking about the aspect of the AH game that's not about gold, but the mentality behind posting and how/why you do it.

First thing you can do to mess with your competition a bit is to reduce your threshold price by 1 gold and 1 copper. This works especially well if you're being camped. When a camper sets their sites on you, they're paying a lot of attention to you and likely know what your lowest selling price is and will undercut you by either 1 gold or 1 copper. When you lower your threshold by this tiny amount you won't notice much of a change at all but will still be getting sales while ensuring that they get zero profit. The most effective way to deal with a camper is to make things not worth their while.

After a while they'll notice that their hours of time spent waiting on you haven't gotten them many extra sales. Then they'll either go back to casual posting or just posting at their normal times without the camping. At this point you have "won" and will continue to have a large stake in that particular market.

The other thing that I like to do is after I do my normal posting (as my competition eagerly awaits me) I always start with a cancel before I start to post just in case I over lapped with another seller at that moment. However once I am finished posting on all my different bankers I'll hop back on the first one I started to post on, usually my rare gem banker, and start another cycle of cancel/post.

This is because the campers will undercut you immediately after you log off and when you come back around a second time you catch them with loads of AH posting spam. They won't notice you sign on and since they're in the middle of posting they won't notice they're already undercut on that market.

The basic process looks like this:

-Log onto banker
-Collect sold and expired auctions
-Cancel any undercuts
-Collect mail
-Post auctions
-Log onto associated crafter
-Refresh stock of items to sell

-Repeat this for every banker you use
-Log onto original banker
-Collect mail
-Post auctions

The nice thing is that this only adds on a total of 5-10 minutes depending on how quickly you can log off from one character and on to another. The down side is that eventually they will catch on of course. If/when they do you can do one of two things. First you can just delay your second cancel/post cycle by 15 minutes so that you'll once again catch them in the middle of posting while you repost right under their nose. Sadly this will add a bit too much time for my liking. Also it's easy for somebody to think "well I'll just repost my stuff ONE last time." That usually leads to "one more time" turning into one plus 5 more times turning you into a camper yourself.

The other thing that you can do (which I prefer) is to just log onto your banker for a few seconds then log off them and go about your business doing other things. This will cause a flinch reaction in the typical camper, who usually isn't too bright to start, and they will immediately start to cancel post again. A few minutes later you show up and undercut while they're distracted once again. During this short lull in posting I take the time to do my scanning of the AH for cheap materials to purchase.

Eventually this posting time dance will get old and the camper will leave or stop camping. Either way you accomplished what you set out to do, get the basement dweller to stop staring at their friends list and fervently awaiting your log off messege. And the best part is that you do all this with no noticeable extra effort or time put forth while they spend a large amount of their time not doing anything but waiting. In other words you still get to have your fun and use your $15 a month while they sit there and stare.


Thanks for stopping by!

Inscription redux

Since I've been getting more comments here and there about inscription, I decided that it was high time I revisited the subject. Before I go on, make sure you read my previous posts relating to the subject. They can be found here and here. For sale price, undercutting, and related things read my post on undercutting. I also highly recommend reading Gevlon's post on his glyph industry, especially since that's how I got started into this monster of a market. Honestly, if you haven't read those posts and have questions about inscription, go read them first as most of your questions are likely answered there.

First I'll go a bit more into detail about my buying and selling prices for herbs and glyphs. I'll buy low end herbs for up to 15g a stack, this includes: tiger lilly, goldclover, deadnettle, talandra's rose, and fire leaf. The high end herbs I buy for 20g a stack which includes: adder's tongue, lichbloom, and icethorn. At those prices and assuming you always get the worst outcome from milling means that from a 15g stack of low herbs you will get a single ink of the sea for 3g per mill. For higher herbs you'll get 1.5 inks for 5g, or a price of 3.3g for a single ink per mill.

After that you need to consider the parchment price which is an average of 30s each. Now that all glyphs essentially have the same material cost you can easily put a single price as your threshold. This price should ensure that you can go as low as possible but never lose money. My threshold is 3.5g which turns into 3.33g after the AH cut from a sale meaning 13s profit. Sure that's not much of anything at all, but we're looking at the bottom end sale for the worst possible milling. More often than not from a low herb mill you'll get 1 sea ink and half of a snowfall. From high herbs you'll get 1.5 sea inks or 1 and 1 snowfall from the mill.

When you take into account snowfalls selling for 8g on average, you'll find that each icy pigment is worth about 4g. And that 4g will compensate you for all of the 5 herbs you just milled, assuming the ink is used/sold. Now the small sale of 3.33g turns into 3.33g profit. Seems a bit more worthwhile doesn't it?

When getting started you'll be required to buy a few dozen books of glyph mastery which should be rather cheap by now. Also be sure to pick up the recipes from the parchment seller in Dalaran. After that get yourself a few hundred inks of the sea from the AH or milling and go to town making glyphs. It's probably wisest to start with making 3 of each popular glyph and a few of the other ones that are useful in the standard specs in the game. You'll be seeing immediate returns on your investment and should make your money back rather quickly depending on how many goblins are competing at the time.

Ok that covers herb buying/milling. Now for crafting and selling. With so many glyphs to craft and sell, you should just pick a section of them, either by class or ink type and make a ton of those to sell. Once you build up a good stock you can, and should, make a few of every glyph you know. Every glyph sells with a relatively different frequency. By that I mean that some of them I'll sell out of every day, others might take me a week just to sell 2 of them. My normal stack size of glyphs that I always fill up to is 5 of each. However with the ones that sell very often I make sure to have 10 at all times since they tend to sell more than 5 a day. Since I only craft my glyphs every other day it's important that I have enough to last with my ignoring the stack size for two days.

Here's my list of glyphs that I make sure to have a larger than usual stock:

Deathknight:
-Death and decay
-Obliterate
-Deathstrike
-Dancing rune weapon
-Horn of winter
-Dark death
-Disease
-Pestilence
-Blood tap
-Raise dead
-The ghoul


Paladin:
-Seal of vengeance
-Lay on hands
-Blessing of kings
-Sense undead
-Bacon of light
-Divine plea
-Blessing of might


Mage:
-Molten armor
-Eternal water
-Frost ward
-Fire ward


Rogue:
-Mutilate
-Sinister strike
-Hunger for blood
-Vanish
-Safe fall


Warrior:
-Battle
-Charge
-Bloodrage
-Resonating power


As you can see many dk's need many glyphs since everybody and their mother has one. On top of that, most have no clue wtf they're doing or supposed to glyph so instead they'll waste a lot of gold buying whatever looks right. The rest of the classes either don't seem to ever buy glyphs or aren't the types to change specs too often. But for minor glyphs, those are the most important. Every class seems to have 1 legitimately useful minor glyph and the rest are just filler.

Most notably are paladins and warriors. These two classes have several minors that are good for every spec and, in the case of warriors, are very useful for all specs. So they have tendency to change them around from time to time depending on their current needs. In any case if you only craft glyphs every so often like I do, those are the ones I recommend you make a few extra of.

After all of this, we lastly come to snowfalls. These you can move as plain inks for 8g/ea or rune scrolls for 50g/stack of 5. But I highly recommend you make a bunch of offhands if you have some frozen orbs hanging around. Seriously, I get up to 180g each. This is what makes every single 3g sale a profit. One thing you can try is find somebody that's buying up a ton of eternal lifes as they're likely making cards and off load them a ton for cheap. Or of course you can try making cards yourself but I never suggest outright gambling with your gold since too much can be lost. Not much else to say about them other than move them as much as you can, as fast as you can, in any way you can.

EDIT: Also one last tip, make sure that you're exalted with whoever you are buying parchment from. The small bit of silver you'll save adds up to a fist full of gold each time you sit down to craft a thousand glyphs. And since you'll be doing this everyday or every other day... I'm sure you can see how fast it'll all add up.

Thanks for stopping by!

+Rep

EDIT: See gevlon's post today about the recently announced cataclysm changes if you have ANY DOUBT that it is the retards, slackers, and social twits that run this game instead of Blizzard. I am now 100% certain that there is zero chance I'll be hanging around for more than a day after I hit a million. And that day cannot come here fast enough.
/Rant


Starting today's post with a quote.

"The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."

-Cicero

The tl;dr: version of that is think ahead. If you go out drinking, sure you'll have a lot of fun but you'll be worse off the following morning more often than not. But If you completely ignore the taste of a fine wine through your entire life you're missing out on something that can be lovely. Now we apply this thinking to playing the AH. The shorter version is don't look for make a fast buck or sell one singular item for 9001 gold because you'll be worse off than if you tried to sell a ton of glyphs or buckles. Don't relentlessly pursue instant gratification! If you're patient you'll wind up making a lot more money than if you just sold off all your orbs for 15g when you KNOW that you can get 30 if you just wait a while.

Along these same lines is to maintain a proper reputation on your server. By this I mean thanking people when you buy something in person, responding to casual conversation with a friendly reply. And of course, always tip your local JC or enchanter if you don't have easy access normally.

When getting a service from a JC or enchanter, be sure to tip them at least 5g. Although I believe in the Mr. Pink philosophy on tipping (tipping automatically because of a socially imposed rule is retarded) it's generally very bad practice in a socially run world such as WoW. If you need this service many times and you don't leave a tip word will spread and you'll have a harder and harder time finding an enchanter. Sadly the large majority of people have no clue what a tip actually is and confuse it with a service fee. This is the problem with speaking American and not speaking English (ya see wut i did thar).

Also try to resist the urge to sell ammo in stacks of 100 or herbs in stacks of 2 for the price of a normal full stack. Sure you'll get some laughs in the present time and some quick cash, but you'll never be making money in that market ever again (and certainly lose that customer in other markets) once word gets out. And it will get out... fast. The idea is that you want return customers to consistently give you gold for your overpriced items.

My thoughts on if you sold something in a small stack for full price? Grats to you! If somebody is lazy and/or dumb enough to not look, they don't need their gold. If you buy a cut gem for 250g when the raw gem is up for 100 (very common) then you don't deserve your gold either! If somebody sends you 100g instead of a CoD mail priced at 100g keep it (unless they realize it soon after and say so). As you can tell, I do not empathize with the morons and slackers of WoW. At all.

Unfortunately if you do something "not cool" or "not friendly" well then you can easily wind up plain SoL when it comes to sales. There's a few people I know that farm materials I need constantly but raided with them before and they were the ones who stand in fire, get hit by Icehowl (god I hate that!), and other retarded things. So I will gladly pay an extra mark up in the HOPE that someone not so retarded will be getting my money and thus not waste it. And I'm not the only one who thinks like this.

However I am the only one who thinks about it logically and not "oh they're not coolfriendlyhelpfulletmeleechrunmethrurfcploxlolkk" type of thinking. And all of these fools have friends and they all buy your stuff. So play nice, let them think you're a socially acceptable digital entity while you line your pockets with their gold. The only thing that I don't apply this whole mentality towards is undercutting. Because it's very "not kool" to undercut a glyph by 50g. And many people will say oh that's so wrong 1 copper is enough! But when they need that glyph (rite nao!) all they'll see is a cheaper price and smile. That's because all these idiots are all out for themselves and nobody else when you get to the bottom of it. It's just another case of the rules only apply to them when they happen to suit their needs.

The short and narrow version of this whole post is to keep an honorable business to continue to reap the rewards of the social idiots that make Blizzard rich. Also that you should always be looking to the future and not trying for a fast sale just to make a quick buck.


Thanks for stopping by!

Post apocalyptic 3.3.3 neo Azeroth

This can sort of act as an extension of my posts on being cost effective. But more importantly will answer a very pertinent question: what to do with your frozen orbs? What's the market like after the patch? Now that it's been a little while since the orb vendor came to town it's given a bunch of things time to settle down. So here's my take on the aftermath and how it has effected my server and business.


Titansteel:
This is now a very profitable market. When the patch came these were at or below material cost, but eternal fires were still also very high. You may even remember me posting about flipping them for up to 50g. But now they are down to 15g a piece, who'd of thought they'd drop THAT low. We all knew their price would drop a noticable amount but damn, over 50%? Because of this, crafting a titansteel bar and selling it for even only 80g will still get you a nice 20g profit or there abouts.

Currently they are sitting pretty at 100-120g each. I'm actually pumping a lot of saronite into these, and I do mean a lot since it takes 24 STACKS of saronite bars to make a stack of titansteel without any procs. But for a potential 60g profit I can't resist.


Glacial bags:
Cheapest one on AH right now is 545g (mine) which is quite a profit margin of about 300g. I' crafted my one for the week and we'll see if it sells by the time the CD is up. I have no idea how well, if at all, these are selling.


Specialty cloth:
Short version is if your tailor isn't specced to make extra of a certain type of cloth... don't even bother. ALL of the cloth is going for about 80% of the material cost. That means if you only make 1 spellweave with your fires, you're losing money. But if you are spellfire spec and make two spellweave per craft then you're making some good money. I highly recommend finding a specced tailor to make you a handful of these, the best sellers are ebonweave (eternal shadow) and spellweave (eternal fire).


Crusader orbs:
These things actually haven't settled down. They seem to hover around 140g or so then drop to 90g the next day with a dozen or so on AH. This means there's some nice wiggle room for flipping. Especially if you sell them in stacks of 8 or 4, since that's the exact number the craftables require. I've since sold 3 titanium razorplate and am still entertaining the idea of buying other patterns. Since they get upwards of 1500g profit it's worth looking into.


Frozen orbs:
The big question on everybody's mind these days... what to do with my 9001 orbs I bought? The answer is simple: use them for crafted epics or sell them off for a profit. At the moment, turning 8 frozen into 1 crusader is a loss of up to 60g or just breaking even, the same with runed. You can sell the orbs for 25-35g and the most expensive eternal is life at 22g and frost lotus at a pathetic 15g. That leaves you with only the options I just mentioned, use them or sell them off. I'm using them myself for leg armors and spell thread and scribe offhands. But when I come into a large stock of them I'll just flip them immediately.


Glyphs:
With the change of reducing all glyphs into a single ink per, a lot more glyphs suddenly became worthwhile. There are far far too many for me to filter through and list, so I'll just leave it at that. What you should do is look through your trade skill window a bit more carefully next time you make a pass to fully restock your glyphs. Remember thinking that priest - flash heal is a popular glyph but didn't make any since it needs two inks? Well it still sells well and is up from 1g profit to 8g. Check it out.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 4-6

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first. Also at the request of a reader I'll be including my total weekly profit as well. But keep in mind that it's total OVERALL profit, not per market or banker like I did before. Just to give an idea of how much you can be making weekly if you have your fingers in every market you can.

Income per banker
Epic gems, rare orange gems, vendor pets: 64,000

Rare gems, meta gems, LW, misc: 29,000

Smithing and enchanting: 52,000

Glyphs: 12,000

Total weekly sales: 157,000
Total gold: 683,000
Total weekly profit: 37,000

Quite a large number in sales isn't it? Shame I didn't make an equally impressive profit. That's because I've been on another of my buying sprees over the weekend, and I've been buying loads and loads. So the mass spending did a number on my weekly profit which I expect to make back once servers come back up. Hand I not spent 6k on Haris Pilton bags, 6k on extra saronite and another 3k on leather things would look much more impressive. Here's to hoping I can move it all in a week.


Detailed Recap
--------------

EDIT: The leveling kit is now 100% complete and will begin to try selling it once servers come back up this evening. I'll be using the guild bank method as the annoyance of somebody having a change of heart and returning the whole thing in the mail would be a pain in the ass to handle. Again, I'll give details once it sells or fails.

Small update on the leveling kit. All old world mats have been collected and cataloged. Now I just need something like 800 northrend mats, half of which I'm using daily and having a hard time finding good prices on the rest.

As I mentioned in my random thoughts post yesterday, LW is back with a vengeance! I've been selling so many leg armors I'm damned near out of frozen orbs. And considering I had stockpiled over 300 before the patch... damn! In addition to that, I've raised my threshold and buying prices to match the demand for profession bags which are still up there selling for 95g a crack. I also dropped 3k+ on leathers so I now have a very nice stock of furs and heavy leather along with everything it makes. Since it's rare that these leather farmers crop up I'm buying an ass ton, possibly even a metric ass ton, while the getting is good.

Glyphs have been steady at the 1k+ per day range. I'm finally selling a bunch of my snowfall inks (thank ya darkmoon faire) and decided to try selling rune scrolls of fortitude. Much to my surprise they're selling now. I tried to make a few before and they were under material cost by a dozen different people for about a month so I never bothered with then. But now I'm making a nice 15g profit on each craft. The inks I value at 8g and the parchment at 2g for a nice number to work with.

So far I've sold a dozen 5 stacks for 20g a piece or a 100g total sale. That means that my snowfalls are effectively worth a lot more. Very cool. I've also had to raise my buying price on herbs a tad because of the recent shortages and increased demand for glyphs. But with the increase of sales and use of snowfalls, I'm not too concerned. This is probably because of the price of frost lotus being nearly nothing the herb farmers have moved on to saronite and leather. Which would also explain the increased supply and lack of herbs.

Buckles are still flying off the shelves faster than I can handle. I am now totally out of saronite even after buying 2,000 bars less than a week ago. This is partly because I used a bunch to xmute into titanium (and thus titansteel) since the prices went back up to the normal 120g per bar. It's a decent profit for sure, but since I have such a huge demand for saronite elsewhere it's a secondary market for me currently. If I come into a huge supply of saronite I'll be making this instead of just selling titanium bars.

I have sold another titanium razor plate, which needs 10 titansteel bars to make along with half a stack of saronite, for another 1k profit on it. From now on I'll be sure to keep one of these in stock at all times and may end up buying other patterns. Still undecided on which ones I'd buy, most likely tanking bracers as they're hard to come by and can't be replaced or upgraded with emblems or trophys. Aside from the crafted tanking bracers the only other option for a purple that's boe is the ones from valor emblems which nobody would be caught dead wearing because it's "only" i213 and thus not worth anything.

Rare gems have started to pick up again. A while ago I bought over 50 cut gems at my normal buying price and have slowly been pecking away at that huge back stock. It's a great feeling buying 30 brilliant autumn's glow for 8g and reselling them a week later for 45g each. Meta gems though are being camped something fierce so I took them down to material cost. Since I'm xmute spec and tend to proc a lot on meta gems (but NEVER epics dammit!) I'll still be making some profit technically.

Epic gems are finally running out, I'm down to under a stack of ametrines and mostly sold out of the rest. Just a week ago I had 4 stacks of orange epics and have since sold them all for 10-150 gold profit. Vendor pets have slowed down to a halt so much that only the lovely enggy pets are selling with any degree of success. Good thing I'm still getting 150g each for them.

I've been spending money like crazy since the farmers popped back into the game. 3k on saronite, another 3k on leather and two portable holes for my enchanter who desperately needed them. I mean seriously, with a full stock of scrolls ready to post, buckles, rods, and a ton of assorted enchanting mats I had 4 bag spots open. FOUR! And this is with 3x 20 spots and a 22 plus the crappy back pack.

In any case, I'm once again very much looking forward to next week so I get to see just how much of this massive stock I can move in a weeks time.


Thanks for stopping by!

More random thoughts

I did a post a while ago about a bunch of assorted things I had on my mind about the AH game that wouldn't fill an entire post (of my usual size at least). And as time passes cob webs tend to clutter up so today is another post of assorted nuggets of wisdom with no particular order or formatting.

~ First I want to thank The Gnome of Zurich for his comment on Cost effective 1 where they corrected me on the potential bonus of xmute mastery. I originally said that spec didn't matter, but they pointed out that it indeed can. Go and read their comment since with large differences in price it could matter a good deal. But if you're not xmute spec or have terribad luck like me (I've proced an extra gem twice in the two months I've been making them daily) you don't have to be concerned.


~ It finally hit me why spell threads have been selling so well lately. In fact I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't see it sooner as I would have made a ton more profit if I had. Can you guess why? It's not the 3.3.3 patch. Here's a hint: more uber OP easily gotten purples. No luck? The answer is the fact that the new VoA boss only drops legs/glove tier sets and the ICC crafted legs. This just dawned on me a few days ago and as soon as it hit me I went and bought a ton of arctic furs, orbs, and assorted LW mats to craft dps/tank/pvp leg armors. The only prices I checked were heavy leather and furs since I was so excited. Sure enough, within the hour after raid time I had sold 7 different leg armors for a cool 100g profit a piece! Look into it!


~ As an expansion nears it's end, people start to level alts to pass the time since they've either cleared all the content or have gotten as far as their "helpful friendly ppl" will let them leech. That means that max level goods such as saronite, NR enchanting mats, etc. will become less available and have a lower demand (read: prices drop). To counter balance this the demand, and therefore price, of old world goods and related enchants will go up. On the same token such materials will also have an increase in supply since even a moron knows to take a gathering profession while leveling alt number 9.


~ I've all but stopped using the addon Lil' sparky's workshop. This isn't because of any flaw with the addon, but that of another: auctioneer. I've been having to clear my auctioneer info every three days because as soon as I'd open the AH or mouse over an item my game would lock up for as long as 30 seconds. Can't have that. So if you're having the same problem with severe auction lag here's what I do to clear it up (courtesy of the JMTC forums).

First mouse over any item at all to get the tooltip to pop up. Make sure you don't have the AH window open and then type the following command:
/run AucScanData.scans=nil

After you do that just reload your UI with either your handy dandy macro you should have by now or just type:
/console reloadui


~ Selling cut bloodstones is still a great niche market. I get up to 12g for a plain cut or 15g for a perfect one. I tend to sell off about a stack of bloodstone cuts every other day which pays for all my repairs (if I was seriously raiding still) and covers all of my parchment needs with a small profit afterward. Very easy to get into and also takes nearly zero effort. If you have a JC and haven't tried this just yet please do so.


~ One thing that I still haven't found a work around for with the AH game is having a trade skill window open at the same time as the AH window. There's clearly enough room on the screen for it, but the WoW interface won't have it. This would be amazing because I could be crafting a million inks or heavy leathers while I'm busy posting or buying more stuff. It would reduce the afk time needed since I could combine it with my normal time spent buying. So if you know of an addon or something that will help get around this, by all means post and I'll give you a shiny new gumball!


~ I wonder how in gods name people found my blog since I advertised it only once on maintankadin and rarely post comments on other blogs.


~ When you open your inscription skill window, scroll down to the glyph of cleave in the warrior section. Notice something different? It's the only glyph that has what it does written above the materials. Where as the rest of the glyphs only show the material cost in the window and you have to mouse over the glyph to see what it does. Damned weird...


~ I haven't put much thought into the market post cataclysm release mostly because I won't be around of course. However the obvious suggestions are obvious. Stock up on low level stuff from trade goods to bags and especially wool cloth. Wool is the most expensive section of first aid and -everyone- levels first aid. Wool also happens to be a pain in the ass to farm yourself currently, though this may change with the expansion. Other than that just start making huge investments once the release date gets closer as the prices will continue to go down and supply will slowly rise as people are leveling many alts by now.

~ A fun item to flip is a small stack of 4 Golden Draenite. These are needed for tailors to make their non epic flying carpet. You can easily pick some up off the AH for a fist full of silver only to see somebody posting in trade buying them for 20g each. People really want that slow ass rug...but hey who are we to judge? We're all businessmen here after all.

~ If you don't have an engineer, find one that can make the lil smokey and pet bomblings and sell a few, here's the materials needed broken down nice and neat for you all. Well as neat as this blog will allow me to present it that is. Items that need other items to be crafted for reagents are grouped in different color text to try and make it a bit easier to understand.

Pet bombling!

1 heart of fire

* 1 big iron bomb
3 iron bar

3 heavy blasting powder
3 heavy stone

** 1 silver contact
1 silver bar

6x mithril bar
*** 1 fused wiring
2 essence of fire

**** 3 delicate copper wiring
6 copper bar (2 bars per wiring)

* Each craft of this creates two bombs instead of one.
** Each craft of this item produces 5 instead of one.
*** Each craft of this item produces 5 instead of one.
**** This is created by any level 1 jewel crafter, do NOT pay 20g for it.

------------------------------

Lil' Smokey! (this one happens to sell far more often for me)

1 truesilver bar

2 mithril bar

1 core of earth

1 fused wiring (see above)

2 Gyrochronatom
1 iron bar
* 1 golden power core
1 gold bar

* Each craft of this item creates 3 instead of one.


Ok I think that's all I had swirling around in the twisting nether of a mind I have. I hope you got something useful out of these ramblings and take a bit of the ideas here to make yourself some extra coin.


Thanks for stopping by!

Cost effective 3

Last post to follow up on my previous ones about being cost effective. This will focus once again on epic gems. However instead of actual gold, I'm going to be talking about stat upgrades and how much you're actually paying for that epic gem in terms of being cost effective. First a disclaimer: I am not advocating only using rare or even common gems instead of epics.

If you're in a high end guild working on heroic Sindragosa, then having epic gems will indeed help make the difference between a kill and a wipe. An extra 200 stamina will save a tanks life and help you get that server first/second kill. But if you're still grinding ToC and the lower spire because you're convinced you need better gear, open up elitistjerks.com instead of the AH window. In other words, you can think of this post as amount of use Vs. price.

We'll just be using red gems because this post would wind up being far too cluttered with numbers. Also we'll be basing this off of my server's average AH prices for cut gems once again.


Cardinal ruby - 200g
20 strength
40 AP
24 SP

Scarlet ruby - 70g
16 strength
32 AP
19 SP


For a rare gem you're paying:

70g / 16 str = 4.4g per strength
70g / 32ap = 2.2g per attack power
70g / 19sp = 3.6 per spellpower


For an epic gem you'll wind up paying a total of:

200g / 20str = 10g per strength
200g / 40ap = 5g per attack power
200g / 23sp = 8.7g per spellpower

Going from rare to epic is a difference of a whopping 130g, almost a 100% increase in price per stat point, all for a game breaking bonus of 4 strength, 4 spellpower, or 8 attack power.

Now I shall ask you the obvious. Is a 200g price tag worth it for a 4 point stat difference for something you got for your alt's offspec side-grade? I should hope not. How often do you play that toon? How important is performing at the absolute max to you? Referring to a raid boss dying and not just you topping recount, how much of an over all difference will it make? Any at all? There's also the fact that many bosses these days require (mostly) that you don't get yourself killed than they require you to have massive damage. Dead mage = zero dps.

Ask yourself all of these questions and answer honestly before you decide that 130g more is legitimately worth an extra 4 strength or if 130g for that extra 6 stamina is going to keep you alive. Putting my money where my mouth is, I always used epic gems on my tank because while doing progression raiding where that little extra bit will, and numerous times has, made a difference.

However for my alt DK I'm only using rare gems because I don't play them nearly as much so the value diminishes greatly because it's rarely in use. Regardless of that, I'm still more than able to carry my own weight in dps (and that of a few others) in a raid. This is all while saving myself a few thousand gold by realizing that I wouldn't be getting nearly as much out of epic gems as I would were I on that toon more often. If nothing else remember this: casually raiding/played toons do not need epic gems.


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