Gold for your thoughts?

Once again I come to you with an entry of assorted ramblings, gibberish and gold making tips. As usual no semblance of order or flow, just a bunch of random thoughts that don't make the cut for an entire post.


Weekly farm run
If you're looking to get the enchanting recipes from ulduar here's a tip. Every time the weekly is a boss from there form up a 25m group and set yourself as ML and announce that you'll be taking the enchant if it drops. Nobody ever runs that place anymore, especially not on 25, so you get a shot each week it pops up. Sadly I haven't had much luck with it.

Another thing you can look into is taking your enchanter to Nagrand in outlands and chill out around the pvp zone halaa. When your faction controls it you can buy a few BoP greens fro ma vendor that DE into triple the vendor value in TBC enchanting mats. They respawn at a decent rate (is it 15 minutes? I don't remember) so this is a good way to fuel your goose scrolls for super cheap.


Morning bids
If you're like me and wake up early enough that you can take your time going about your business, it can pay off to check a few things on the AH. There's almost nobody on my server from like 5am to 10am. That means that if an auction has only a few hours left it's very likely that if you bid on it you'll win it. I've done this and saved at least a few thousand gold over time simply by bidding on something that was 2g lower than the buy out price. The same thing goes for the small hours of the morning, especially before Tuesday resets. Granted the AH bid timer is still ticking when servers are off line, but most people won't log on immediately as they come back up. And if they do, it's rather unlikely that their first thought is to check anything they bid on, more likely it's to try and get in a voa run asap since they just reset.


It's not about excess, but access
The point of having a bunch of professions and materials open to you isn't so that you can have an excess of gold, but access to the means of which to make more. The more options you have mean the more gold you can make. And when the market takes a turn for the worst from a crash, material shortage, or a few campers you'll be well prepared to deal with it. When glyphs get another few campers you need to drive off you can rest assured because your epic gems will still be selling well. The more you have access to the more excess you can have.


A goblin did it!
A lot of people naturally attribute a price spike or low priced item flood to a goblin. This is not always the case. In fact I would even venture to say that it's rarely the case. If you pay attention to the cycle of things you'll see that it's just a natural occurrence.

Expensive item > farmers come > supply spike > price drop > farmers leave > supply drop > expensive item.

Why do people automatically assume it's a goblin? Because an AH goblin is somebody that will make life very uncomfortable if you try to get into their markets. They have the resources to force people out and can ensure a zero profit for a good amount of time. Add on top of that their extreme willingness to do so is what makes people think "I see goblins!" Instead of thinking it's a goblin, think or it as opportunity knocking. Take the brief moments in price spikes to make some extra gold selling your own supply.

Hell if I could sell abyss crystals or cosmics for 100g each do you really think I'd be pressed about leveling enchanting? If you can get 4x the price of raw materials instead of the product, sell the materials even if you "need" them to skill up or hold a market. The bottom line is always making gold with the AH game. Think outside of the profession box once in a while, it'll do you some good.


Quality vs. Quantity
Some people get worried when they're only making a few gold profit from something and start to shy away from it or drop it all together. Before you get nervous or leave that market look at just how many you're selling and not how much they sell for. Bags, glyphs, buckles, etc. They all sell at a huge rate and sometimes only for a few gold profit. In cases like that it's always valuable to stay in it if you can handle the inventory space. I say this because you're only looking at the singular sales, not the bottom line at the end of the day.

If you sell 1 epic gem for 50g profit and I sell 50 netherweave bags for a mere 2g profit, guess what? My crappy-not-worth-anything bags just got me more profit than your gem did. If you sell 40 gems I can sell a hundred bags. And if you're already at a point where you can afford all that you need the quality of sales is irrelevant.

When quantity is irrelevant, apply quantity.



Thanks for stopping by!

From the ground up: Week 5

Happy Saturday to you all and here's the latest journal entry of the "From the ground up" project where I started a level 1 priest with not a single copper and intend to level them to 80 and amass a large amount of gold without the help of a single person. The only supplies they were given was a set of BoA gear and nothing else. They are starting out with only inscription, herbalism, and their wits with which they must turn a profit.

Here's the run down of my progress thus far.

Level: 80

Current Gold: 3,500

Total gold earned: 39,000
(according to my banker's statistics page)

Inscription skill: 450

Enchanting skill: 450

Required purchases to make: material stokpile, enchant chest - greater stats, enchant weapon - spellpower



Get enchanted
-------------
I'm suddenly thinking I should've rolled a human for this project. Rep grinds suck! Especially when they have a high price tag associated with them such as thorium brotherhood. At least when I go to grind out argent dawn the grind will be actually making me some gold instead of costing me a ton of it. But money or not, I never like to grind yet sometimes it's necessary.

My enchanting is over 300 now but I don't have enough skill to make any useful TBC enchants just yet. I don't want to waste several hundred gold on worthless enchants using tons of arcane dust when I can just wait a bit and keep making old world enchants that still give me skill ups. This will be going on until I think it's 325 when the good ones turn green. I'm all about saving money, but relying on green skills to level from is like a stress test that's out of control.

I've noticed something important about my blue competitor: they're not too bright. They'll go in buying cycles, now using 3 different toons to buy me out on, and recycle through the glyph pages and buy out anything that I reposted before raising the price again. So what I'm doing is listing all my glyphs at a normal price then posting another pair of each at my fall back price of 20g. This way when Blue goes to buy me out without looking at the prices again they'll pick up all my expensive glyphs in addition to my 3.5g ones. Working out very well so far. Just goes to show that a little observation can go a long way.

Just sold my first enchanting scroll, it was an unholy weapon enchant which I bought the recipe for 2g. And so it begins! Materials and recipe included I got a 50g profit from that one, not bad.

I'm now farming BRD for the fiery weapon enchant and the last few bits of dark iron residue to get me up to honored. I have a dozen or so stacks of dark iron ore and assorted MC mats that are taking up a ton of extra bag space. So I'm trying to get that taken care of ASAP so I have room to breath, after all enchanting does take up a lot of space. It's especially bad since enchanted scrolls only go in the normal bags and, combined with glyphs, space is once again at a premium. At least while farming I can get a ton of runecloth and vendor goodies by just looting mobs I'll have to kill anyways. It's far easier to just round up a room and aoe it down with holy nova then mind sear or delicately try to dance around them. So I'm only really losing the time it takes to loot a bunch of mobs. Not terrible I guess.

I picked up the lifestealing enchant for 40g which was a bargain considering the hours it takes to get keyed to Scholo and get it to drop. Now if only I could get a supply of shards to make all these old world enchants... sigh. I bought up what little I could and they're now up to 30g each, wow. Such a shame because I have all the mats for another dozen or so different scrolls for another 15 skill ups at least just missing the shards. Grrr frustration sucks.

While locked from instances, I'm back to the isle of QQ dailys to get shattered sun offensive rep up to honored. I'm doing this to get the recipe void shatter which turns a void crystal into 2 large prismatic shards. Considering that the shards are usually in the 10g range with crystals slightly below this can save a ton of gold. Hell it's even it's own niche market. Converting voids into large prismatics is literally a double your money investment even though the income comes a bit slow. But if people start buying up a string of enchanting rods you can safely assume that they'll need a few shards to craft their next runed.

I've got this BRD run down to a science I swear. 2 minutes in, kill, out and reset. Oddly enough the first time I farmed this enchant it took like no time. Now when it's expensive and I HAVE to farm it, this shit seems to be taking forever. Think I've done 12 runs so far? 20? I don't know.

Finally got it! Yeesh that took way too long. Off to strat next.

I really wish I could solo MgT in cloth, but it's just way too painful, boring, and long. So I'll have to tough it out for a few more days of SSO dailys until I hit honored. In the mean time, I'm grinding out argent dawn rep and picking up some much needed shards to level enchanting and make a few scrolls. I got a few fiery and icy weapon enchants made and on AH with no competition which is nice along with major mana/health. Still no world drop recipes found just yet. I'm mostly keeping my out for +4 stats as I doubt I can afford spell/healing power but I'll spend every last penny on them if I could. I'm looking for stats mostly because the sales are far more consistent and will give me a quicker head start in leveling up my enchanting. Once I get up to NR level enchants I'll be making a few hundred 8 stats and exp. spell power to glvoes scrolls since those sell all the time. Those and icewalker I can never keep on the AH they sell so fast so I won't be wasting nearly as much money maxing out my enchanting skill. I think once all is said and done I'll have spent about a thousand gold on skill ups that gave me nothing in return but that.

Only a thousand spent on an entire profession is pretty damned cheap if you think about it. Following the basic guide on wow-professions gives you the fastest path to 450 true, but it's also the most expensive as well. By making the more in demand enchants not only am I getting skill ups but I'm also getting something to sell. So in essence, I'm trading time spent skilling up for a large amount of profit and drastically cut leveling costs. Fair trade to me, after all there's no need to be 450 skill RIGHT NOW since I'm already making money with it RIGHT NOW. After all, a lot of the best selling enchants are from vanilla, heh.

Here's some rough math and scratch paper figures for you. Round numbers are not perfectly round.

enchant bracers - healing power = revered

About 1k rep per run

1 run = 10 minutes

11 total runs needed = 110 minutes = 2 hours of farming = 11 chances at a worthwhile mount

8 shards per run

5 dust per run

2 greater eternal essence per run

=

88 shards
55 dust
22 essences

=

A shit load of high priced scrolls.


Since I ran this place a million times on my paladin I know the perfect routes and can dodge nearly every extra mob in there. And while I'm on the way out in the opening room just after the back entrance I spam holy nova all the way out to clear most of the mobs in there for an extra few hundred rep. Sure I could be using the argent insignia and picking up turn in items but the sheer amount of extra looting of junk I'll have to do isn't worth the time just because of the huge amount that'll have to be done.

Partially through my rep grind with the AD and made a few of every old world enchant I can bumping me up to 320 enchanting skill. 5 more points and it's time to move on officially to TBC scrolls. At 325 skill I can start making shield stamina enchants and a few 15 strength to gloves enchants at 340. The strength enchant doesn't sell that often because very few know of it's usefulness. Apparently it's the best glove enchant for an unholy death knight. I haven't done much reading on the math, but I'm guessing it has some sort of a double dipping effect where you get 30ap from the 15 strength (plus scaling bonuses) and your ghoul also gets 15 strength and therefore 30 extra ap as well. Again, not sure on the math and what not, but I believe that's the reasoning. So slow or not, it's zero competition and huge profit margins, my kind of business. So far I've sold a pair of fiery and major health scrolls, 20g profit on the fiery one and 56g profit on the health enchant. Here's to alts!

I'm now 3k towards revered and all I can say is thank god I need all these materials and I can disenchant. I'd forgotten how annoying chain strat runs could be. At least once a day I get to break it up with SSO dailys and the random heroic. But still, dear god is this boring at times. Though I will say, if I wind up walking away with the baron mount, it'll all be completely worth it. No more getting stuck in doors on an elephant for me! So there's a shot at a mount, tons of shards and dust, and yet another twink enchant. After all of this I'll have all the skill ups I need to start acquiring arcane dust. Ahh arcane dust, I'll be needing hundreds of it. Something like 300 total or upwards of 700g worth of it.

It's all going into the previously mentioned enchants which will sell slowly I'd imagine so it's a rather large up front investment when you're playing it as close to the chest as I am. I'm done following the wow-professions guide at this point though and know exactly what to make and when. Minus 3 enchants they're all worth selling, but the others of questionable value just might end up getting sold on a vellumn. This is an entirely different market so I could wind up shooting myself in the foot. But with what I've seen so far, aside from material supply, things are basically the same as horde side but with far less people working the AH. Good thing for me.

Finally rep grinds are done (I think). Argent crusade is now revered, Thorium brotherhood revered, and timber maw honored. All rep enchants are now learned, scrolled, and auctioned. Now begins the expensive and long (expensive) process of TBC skill ups. I need so much dust it's astounding.

Ok TBC and old world enchanting leveling is now done and I'm off to the low level low profit high volume sale enchants of NR. I spent all of the 2k I had earned up from glyphs and crusader enchants on the mats needed but good thing I picked up a ton of dust in my heroic gear grind. I'm now down to 300g, 380 enchanting, and over 1,000g in enchanted scrolls with 400 inks and a ton of glyphs. Time to sit back and wait for the money to come in /knock on wood. Though I'll admit that I "cheated" a little bit with the TB rep. Since there hasn't been a single rep item on AH at all for over a eek I bought 500g worth horde side and sold them to myself alliance side with the help of a friend. I then gave them 500g from my alliance toon as a "tip" so to speak.

I only needed about half of what I spent but jesus I hate rep grinds and this was the last one I needed. I do NOT intend to do this with any other materials at all. Though if I find a wanted enchant scroll on the horde AH I'll likely buy it and drop the same amount of gold on alliance side. Again, no financial help just saving me the wait between now and when one inevitably appears on the alliance AH (regardless of price I'm buying it). This was merely to save myself potentially weeks and weeks of looking for rep items since I can't solo MC on my priest. And after countless BRD and strat runs... screw that!

Blah! I forgot I still have several days worth of dailys left to do for the SSO before my rep grind is done. Dammit all, I really should've rolled a human...

Just logged on and collected the mail and got another thousand in which I of course immediately turned around and spent most of. Refreshed my stock of inks back up to 250 IotS and got me another few enchanting skill ups. I'm in the last bad range of enchanting where I'm having to make very questionable enchant scrolls. By that I mean that I doubt they'll net me a profit and my only other options are green. Granted patience is key to a good AH game, but having to make 500 scrolls for for a few skill ups isn't in the realm of conventional patience, more like a stress test that's out of control.

Took a short break form the rep grind (sort of) and such to finish up the quests in darkshore. I'm now exalted with darnassus and get to ride on my favorite land mount in the game! The swift frostsaber! Dmn this thing looks so cool and it actually fits through doors! It's great! And yes I'm really this excited hehe.

So for now my general plan is to continue with the small time glyph sales until I max out enchanting. From there I'll be splurging on shards and shards only to gather all of the worthwhile enchanting recipes. I'll be making a few of them here and there as I skill up to 450 at which point I can enchant stamina to bracers. After that I'll be selling just a select few enchanting scrolls and all of the old world ones as well. Once I work up a solid 5k or so I'm going to spend it all on a shit load of mats from inks to dust to cosmics. That is where the true AH game will begin.

I'll then deflate the prices with loads of cheap scrolls and glyphs to remove as many of the small sellers and campers as possible. With that many pre crafted glyphs and scrolls and a stokpile of mats should allow me to take over a significant portion of the markets alliance side. This is rather long term because I'm having to spend everything I earn the following day to skill up and restock, but that's how it goes when you start out with zero financial backing. Regardless, I've always been fully confidant in this tactic and expect it to work as it always has. Different servers are different, but people will never change.

I've got a good stokpile of inks now (about 500) and now I'm going to try to maintain that while saving up money. I only need a few more enchanting skill ups before I can get access to a few really good recipes to sell. I'm referring to of course greater speed to cape and POWER STATS(!) to chest. I have a few abyss crystals ready that I've picked up from heroics and DE'ing old gear. I knew that at some point I'd roll enchanting so all of my epic and blue gear that was replaced was banked instead of vendored. I'd have loved to do this with all the greens, but simple space constraints wouldn't allow it and I didn't have the gold at the time to afford more bank spots. But it is what it is. Once I get those two enchant recipes trained and get up to about a thousand gold (so I can sit comfortably) I'll be trashing the glyph market something fierce. Good god I'm too excited at this and that's a bad sign as far as my wow imposed nerdiness is concerned. I mean come on, there comes a certain level of geekdom the moment you install wow heh.

I looked on the AH once again for essence of air and saw only 6 up... for 50g each. I'm sold out of agility scrolls and so are a lot of others. So I decided to try and farm a few. I set myself on the FP and went out to the store so I wouldn't notice the travel time and began to farm. I've got 20 minutes to kill until things reset so I basically decided to see what I could do with that time farming EoA's. Here's my thinking: if I can get 8 EoA's in that time frame that makes 2 agility scrolls, makes 400g, which then turns into 1200g/hour. And any of the other elemental related items drop and sell that's another hundred so tacked on top of that. Granted this type of farming can't be done perpetually as supply would be flooded causing prices to drop (and my ass wouldn't be out in the middle of nowhere). But since there's no competition for a high price fast moving item, it seems worth it now but definitely not on a consistent basis.

20ish minutes later I walked away with 15 essences, 4 elementals, and 3 breaths. I know that the last two tend to sell for a lot time to time so that made me smile. Being one short I of course decided to stick around until I got one more to make a full set of scrolls.

I've also taken to "farming" the auction house itself. By that I'm referring to the classic scan for cheap weapons and armor to DE. I actually managed to pick up 15 cosmics and 30 dust from it, all well below my normal buying price. Several of the weapons that I had purchased were Notched Cobalt War Axe. Making a point to point this out because there's a chance you can make some money of your own with them. They take 10 cobalt bars to craft so if you're lucky enough to find cobalt that cheap go on and make a few to DE into greater cosmics. 75% chance says that on average you'll be making a good profit from it, I know I have.

I just hired some help to get into kara and down Moroes for 160g so I've now got mongoose in my arsenal of expensive enchants that I can do now. Was easy enough and if I wasn't in cloth I'd have been able to solo it easily. One more day of SSO dailys and I'll be honored and get the void shatter recipe. Good thing since the shards are 15g/ea on the AH and voids are plentiful and cheap. Once I get that recipe I'll craft my first pair of goose scrolls. Now I'm off to nagrand to buy some uber cheap BoP greens from Halaa to DE.

Turned my EoF's into a pair of primos and collected a sexy 1500g from my mail tonight, half of which was from the primos. I used that to buy a ton of cosmics crystals and shards. I now have full access to every NR enchant in game. That's right, 450 enchanting baby! Now all I need to round out my collection is +4 stats, SP, and healing power vanilla recipes. Once I have those, the money will really start to flood in and I get finally begin my much anticipated attack on the AH and their campers.

Weee happy dance! I just picked up ench weapon healing power for 60 gold. Sixty... gold! Not sixty thousand, not six thousand, friggin 60 man! That's awesome! I'm awesome! Enchanting is awesome!

=D

Just got done with another toc 25 pug and cleared it again. I swear pugs on this side are sooo much better than horde it's scary. I can't help but wonder just how accurate "recount guessed absorbs" actually is. I mean granted I'm spamming shields on anybody likely to take damage, and they always do minus LJ, but damn. If you combine my healing done and absorbs I'm always well over a million done. Hell on twins I hit another over 3 million absorbed along with about 700k healing, though the fight didn't end till just before the enrage. On every other fight I put out at least 800k absorbs, and as high as 900k on anub. They were smart shields though for that fight. I'd only shield those that were at a couple thousand health, the tanks, and anybody that got hit with penetrating cold. Still I can't help but wonder if I'm that good (combined heals+absorbs put me at the top of healing meters every fight), I doubt it tbh but it's a pleasant thought none the less.

I can say this though, being able to pick out the MT in a crowd against the wall and have a pain suppression ready for the inevitable ice howl enrage comes, throwing a renew, power shield, and PoM while running towards them and following it up with a hasted penance and G heal makes me feel pro. Especially since I saved a tank's life today and last week as well in my two toc 25 raids so far. Hell even pulled that button mashing tank saving bit in 10m last week. Makes me feel like a boss.


You know, I keep telling myself that I should hold off on enchanting and focus on building a stock of inks to attack the glyph market. I keep selling a ton of stuff and reinvesting it into more scrolls. Granted they're selling decently, but I'm constantly dropping back down to nearly nothing as far as hard currency is concerned. But I finally have a full listing of every good enchant I have so I'm thinking I can ease off the massive investing. I'll just let what I have enchants wise sell and use the small amount of back up mats to replace any sales for the time being and let my gold build up a bit. Of course by then I'm sure I'll have found one of the last 2 enchants I need and blow it all on that heh. In any case, the reinvesting is only annoying because I don't get to see the large amount of gold that I could have, but it's still completely necessary. My gut is telling me to hold off on the buying so I'm going to follow my instinct and just buy only the bare bones essentials for a while.

Logging on to check the mail and blam another 2k in my pockets. I spent half of that to refresh my stock and got 2 stacks of crystals for INSANELY cheap. More twink enchants sold for a good 20% profit along with oodles of glyphs. Moving along smooth as silk.

Strangely enough though, if you've been reading lately you'll see that I've had major lag issues in SW. Well when I got on I was still lagging there and nowhere else, horde or alliance side. But after I canceled my glyphs the lag dissapeared as if it was never there... WTF? I don't get it but sure as hell not going to complain. Well it's official. Darnassus is now my banker's new home.

Back up over a thousand gold and am now slowing piling up a ton of inks. I need about another 400 to craft a ton of glyphs and have a bunch left over to lay in wait. Once I do and hold strong at 1k gold the price crashing begins. Mwahahaha!

Remember all the times where I say that I made all of my gold NOT by just getting lucky? The times that I said that it doesn't take luck but only observation and dedication to make a substantial living on the AH? Well. I feel that this project is turning out to be the complete opposite of that. I'm now getting a 500g/day allowance from my glyph competitor which pays for all of the gems and enchants and flask for my priest. They're methodically buying up all my cheap glyphs daily to relist STILL and I just craft and list more and more. At thsi rate I won't even have to crash the glyph market, just cap the sale price at 10g and know that I'll be selling everything I list for a good long time.

Unless they get wise to what I'm doing I can hit the cap on this toon in almost no time and that takes a lot of the fun out of it. After all, it's more fun to conquer than it is to rule. I started this project to conquer the glyph market alliance from the ground up instead of ruling it horde side. This just means that I get to focus on my favorite enchanting market twice over. Looks like I am getting outside help after all in building this empire. Still not sure how I feel about that.

Funny story. Two days after I bought the healing power recipe for a teeny 60g guess what I'm looking at on the AH listed for 3,500g? Yup, another healing power recipe. But wait it gets better, I see TWO of them listed! One for 3500 and one for 3k even. All I can say is timing... I has it! That and the 3k gold that's burning a hole in my pocket is making me really wish they were spell power recipes though. I'm sure one will show up soon enough since people are obviously farming MC as I haven't seen any achievement raids forming in /2 while I've been on. Here's to hoping.

Just got finished selling all of the 8 icy weapon enchant scrolls I made while skilling up almost a week ago. And now I'm buying up mats to make a few more. Come one come all and get your glow on! Lunchmoney needs lunch money!


Thanks for stopping by!

Knowledge is power

So you want to get into glyphs but don't want to handle the whole monster of the business. Well with a little bit of time spent over at EJ or learning from experience, you already know what you should be making glyph wise. In fact, all of the required research is already done. If you don't see what I'm getting at, I'm referring to the cookie cutter glyphs used by each class and spec. They are the most popular sales and are a great place to start if you're wanting to get into the business but don't have the time and/or resources to go all the way.

So here now is the list of expected glyphs for each class and spec. Please note that not every spec has 3 base major/minor glyphs so in those cases I'll just list the ones that I see bought and sold the most often. If you happen to be leveling inscription still or plan to in the future keep these in mind and make them for your skill ups until they go green. Remember that this listing is intentionally limited as it's for those who want to just work a small portion of the glyph trade and a number of these glyphs are debatable. The optional ones(or highly recommended but not required) ones I chose are just the ones I see used and sold most often.

Death Knight

Blood
-Deathstrike
-Dancing rune weapon
-Dark death
-Disease

Frost
-Frost strike
-Obliterate
-Icy touch
-Disease

Unholy
-The ghoul
-Icy touch
-Dark death


Druid

Resto
-Rpid rejuvination
-Regrowth
-Nourish

Lazer Turkey
-Starfire
-Starfall
-Moonfire

Bear
-Survival instincts
-Mangle
-Frenzied Regeneration

Cat
-Savage roar
-Rip
-Shred


Hunter

Beast mastery
-Steady shot
-The hawk
-Serpent sting

-Marksman
-Serpent sting
-Steady shot
-Chimera shot

Survival
-Serpent sting
-Explosive shot
-Kill shot


Mage

Frost
-Frostbolt
-Eternal water
-Molten armor

FFB
-FFB
-Molten armor
-Living bomb

Fire
-Living bomb
-Fireball
-Molten armor

Arcane
-Molten armor
-Arcane blast
-Arcane milliles


Paladin

Prot
-Seal of vengeance
-Divine plea
-Hammer of the righteous
-Salvation
-Judgement
-Sense undead

Ret
-Judgement
-Seal of vengeance
-Consecration
-Sense undead

Holy
-Holy light
-Beacon of light
-Seal of wisdom


Priest

Disc
-Power word shield
-Penance
-Flash heal

Holy
-Circle of healing
-Renew
-Prayer of healing


Shadow
-Mind flay
-Shadow
-Dispersion


Rogue

Assassination
-Mutilate
-Hunger for blood
-Tricks of the trade

Combat
-Sinister strike
-Killing spree
-Tricks of the trade


Shaman

Elemental
-Flame shock
-Lava burst
-Totem of wrath

Resto
-Water mastery
-Chain heal
-Earth shield

Enhance
-Flame shock
-Stormstrike
-Feral spirit


Warlock

Demo
-Felguard
-Life tap
-Quick decay

Destro
-Conflagerate
-Incinerate
-Life tap

Affliction
-Quick decay
-Life tap
-Haunt


Warrior

Arms
-Mortal strike
-Blade storm
-Rending

Prot
-Blocking
-Last stand
-Shield wall

Fury
-Whirlwind
-Heroic strike
-Cleaving



Thanks for stopping by!

Level enchanting the profitable way

After leveling up enchanting and needing to sell some of the worthwhile scrolls to keep buying mats for skill ups I decided to write a bout more in depth about it. So for all of you planning to power level enchanting soon, but are a bit put off by the cost here's how you can do it and still make some gold. Mind you this is the round about buy/farm recipes way so it won't be nearly as fast then if you just went the power level way. Most of it I will be shamelessly taking from wow-proessions. If I find it worthwhile, I'll write up another guide for the other professions or just give certain recommendations of things to craft instead of the basic throw away items to make some profit and just just taking a few thousand gold loss. So this one if sort of a follow to my boa enchanting guide.

Any enchants that need a specific recipe that isn't from a trainer will have a wowhead link to the source be it a vendor or mob drop. Again, reminding you that this is not a fast or easy guide, but you will make back a VERY large portion of your investment just through the skilling up process and potentially make a very large profit. Some scrolls might not sell for a while but a good number will sell within a few weeks at most. Approximated material list can be found at the very end. Anyway, on with the show.



* 1-2

1 x [Runed Copper Rod] - 1 Copper Rod, 1 Strange Dust, 1 Lesser Magic Essence


* 2-50
Disenchanting green quality items

or

48 x [Enchant Bracer: Minor Health] - 48 Strange Dust


Learn Enchanting Journeyman.


* 50-90
40 x [Enchant Bracer: Minor Health] - 40 Strange Dust

* 90-100
10 x [Enchant Bracer: Minor Stamina] - 30 Strange Dust

* 100-101
1 x [Runed Silver Rod] - 1 Silver Rod, 6 Strange Dust, 3 Greater Magic Essence, 1 Runed copper Rod

* 101-110
9 x [Greater Magic Wand] - 9 Simple Wood, 9 Greater Magic Essence

* 110-135

Go to Stonetalon Mountains if you are Horde and find Kulwia, for Alliance players go to Ashenvale and find Dalria. After you found the NPC buy these two recipes: [Enchant Bracer - Lesser Strength] - [Enchant Cloak: Minor Agility]

25 x [Enchant Cloak: Minor Agility] - 25 Lesser Astral Essence


Learn Enchanting Expert.


* 135-155
20 x [Enchant Bracer - Lesser Stamina] - 40 Soul Dust

* 155-156
1 x [Runed Golden Rod] - 1 Golden Rod, 1 Iridescent Pearl, 2 Greater Astral Essence, 2 Soul Dust, 1 Runed Silver Rod

* 156-185
40 x [Enchant Bracer - Lesser Strength] 80 Soul Dust

165-185
20 x [Enchant Bracer: Spirit] - 20 Lesser Mystic Essence

* 185-200
15 x [Enchant Bracer: Strength] 15 Vision Dust


Learn Enchanting Artisan.


* 200-204
6 x [Enchant Bracer: Strength] 6 Vision Dust

* 204-205
[Runed Truesilver Rod] 1 Truesilver Rod, 1 Black Pearl, 2 Greater Mystic Essence, 2 Vision Dust, 1 Runed Golden Rod

* 205-225
20 x [Enchant Cloak: Greater Defense] - 60 Vision Dust

* 225-235
10 x [Enchant Boots: Minor Speed] - 10 Small Radiant Shard, 10 Aquamarine, 10 Lesser Nether Essence

* 235-240
5 x [Enchant Chest: Superior Health] - 30 Vision Dust

* 240-245
5 x [Enchant Boots - Lesser Accuracy] - 20 Vision Dust, 5 Lesser Nether Essence

* 245-250
5 x [Enchant Shield - Greater Spirit] - 10 Dream Dust, 5 Greater Nether Essence

* 250-260
10 x [Lesser Mana Oil] - 30 Dream Dust, 20 Purple Lotus, 10 Crystal Vial

* 260-265

5 x [Enchant Bracer - Greater Intellect] - 15 Lesser Eternal Essence

* 265-275
10 x [Enchant Weapon: Fiery Weapon] - 40 Small Radiant Shard, 10 Essence of Fire

* 275-285
10 x [Enchant Chest: Major Health] - 20 Small Brilliant Shard

* 285-290
5 x [Enchant Weapon: Icy Chill] - 20 Small Brilliant Shard, 5 Essence of Water, 5 Essence of Air, 5 Icecap

* 290-295
5 x [Enchant 2H Weapon: Agility] - 40 Large Brilliant Shard, 20 Essence of Air

* 295-299
4 x [Enchant Weapon: Agility] - 16 Large Brilliant Shard, 16 Essence of Air

* 299-300
1 x [Runed Arcanite Rod] 1 Arcanite Rod, 1 Golden Pearl, 10 Illusion Dust, 4 Greater Eternal Essence, 1 Runed Truesilver Rod, 2 Large Brilliant Shard


Go to Outland or Northrend and learn Enchanting Master.


* 300-324
27 x [Enchant Weapon: Crusader] - 108 Large Brilliant Shard, 56 Righteous Orb

NOTE: You can also make several [Enchant Chest - Major Mana] if this is too expensive. It turns yellow at 305 and green at 322. Only trainable from Scryer's tier or your faction's town in Hellfire.


* 324-325
1 x [Runed Fel Iron Rod] 1 Fel Iron Rod, 4 Greater Eternal Essence, 6 Large Brilliant Shard, 1 Runed Arcanite Rod


* 325-335
10 x [Enchant Shield - Major Stamina] - 150 Arcane Dust

* 335-340

5 x [Enchant Shield - Resilience] - 5 Large Prismatic Shard, 20 Lesser Planar Essence

* 340-345
10 x [Superior Wizard Oil] - 45 Arcane Dust, 15 Nighmare Vine, 15 Imbued Vial

* 345-350
5 x [Enchant Gloves - Major Strength] - 60 Arcane Dust, 5 Greater Planar Essence

* 350-351
1 x [Runed Adamantite Rod] - 1 Adamantite Rod. 8 Greater Planar Essence, 8 Large Prismatic Shard, 1 Primal Might, 1 Runed Fel Iron Rod - Recipe location


Go to Northrend and learn Enchanting Grand Master.


* 351-360
9 x [Enchant Cloak - Speed] - 54 Infinite Dust

* 360-370
10 x [Enchant Gloves - Exceptional Spellpower] - 40 Infinite Dust, 10 Lesser Cosmic Essence

* 370-375
5 x [Enchant Chest - Super Stats] - 20 Infinite Dust, 5 Lesser Cosmic Essence

* 375-376
1 x [Runed Eternium Rod] - 1 Eternium Rod, 6 Greater Planar Essence, 6 Arcane Dust, 1 Runed Adamantite Rod

* 376-380
7 x [Enchant Chest - Super Stats] - 28 Infinite Dust, 14 Lesser Cosmic Essence

* 380-385
5 x [Enchant Weapon - Greater Potency] - 10 Infinite Dust, 20 Lesser Cosmic Essence

* 395-405
10 x [Enchant Shield - Greater Intellect] - 120 Infinite Dust

* 405-410
5 x [Enchant Chest - Greater Defense] - 50 Infinite Dust, 5 Eternal Earth

* 410-420
10 x [Enchant Weapon - Exceptional Agility] - 40 Dream Shard, 40 Eternal Air

* 420-425
5 x [Enchant Shield - Defense] - 30 Infinite Dust, 30 Eternal Earth

* 425-426
1 x [Runed Titanium Rod] - 1 Titanium Rod, 40 Infinite Dust, 12 Greater Cosmic Essence, 8 Dream Shard, 1 Runed Eternium Rod


* 426-430
4 x [Enchant Gloves - Crusher] - 80 Infinite Dust, 16 Greater Cosmic Essence, 4 Dream Shard

* 430-435
5 x [Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed] - 80 Infinite Dust, 20 Greater Cosmic Essence

* 435-440
5 x [Enchant Gloves - Armsman] - 10 Dream Shard, 40 Eternal Earth

* 440-450
10 x [Enchant Chest - POWER STATS!] - 40 Dream Shard, 40 Abyss crystal


Estimated materials required:
1 Copper Rod
125 Strange Dust
1 Lesser Magic Essence
1 Silver Rod
12 Greater Magic Essence
9 Simple Wood
25 Lesser Astral Essence
122 Soul Dust
1 Golden Rod
1 Iridescent Pearl
2 Greater Astral Essence
133 Vision Dust
1 Truesilver Rod
1 Black Pearl
20 Purple Lotus
2 Greater Mystic Essence
15 Lesser Nether Essence
10 Small Radiant Shard
10 Aquamarine
15 Lesser Eternal Essence
40 Dream Dust
10 Illusion Dust
1 Arcanite Rod
1 Golden Pearl
8 Greater Eternal Essence
172 Large Brilliant Shard
5 Icecap
5 Essence of Water
41 Essence of Air
56 Righteous Orb
1 Fel Iron Rod
261 Arcane Dust
19 Greater Planar Essence
13 Large Prismatic Shard
20 Lesser Planar Essence
15 Nighmare Vine
15 Imbued Vial
1 Primal Might
1 Adamantite Rod
1 Eternium Rod
1 Titanium Rod
552 Infinite Dust
49 Lesser Cosmic Essence
48 Greater Cosmic Essence
102 Dream Shard
75 Eternal Earth
40 Eternal Air
40 Abyss Crystal



Thanks for stopping by!

BoA enchanting guide

EDIT: I'm having some serious issues with AH lag in Stormwind currently and am even getting disconnected randomly. It isn't happening anywhere else for some reason. I've taken the normal steps to reduce lag (closing other programs, no downloads running, etc.) and nothing seems to help. I've also been purging my AH data daily and that isn't even helping. It's also taking me 3 minutes to collect 100 mails instead of the normal 45 seconds and a good 5 seconds for a buyout to register. Any thoughts would be immensely appreciated! If you happen to have a working solution and are on my server there shall indeed be a reward in it for you (horde or alliance side).


A commenter the other day was looking for a guide on how to acquire most of these old world enchants so I decided to put one together. Most of them are rep based and some cannot be farmed in the traditional sense, but being able to keep track of everything can be a tad confusing. So out of every old world enchants here's the ones that are useful enough to be sold and how I go about getting them.


First here are the enchants that do not require a specific reputation.

Boots - minor speed: Trainer recipe and is still a good one to have. Everybody knows the longest part of leveling is simply going from point A to B and this is a very cheap way to make sure you get there a bit faster. This is always in demand by people leveling with half a brain so make sure you remember to train it.

Chest - major health: Sold by Qia, vendor in winterspring. Very commonly sold and material cost is less than a gold coin. I sell these for up to 60g a piece.

Chest - major mana: Given by your respective enchanting faction trainer in hellfire penn or at the scryers tier.

Weapon - crusader: dropped by scarlet spellbinders in WPL at a 2% drop rate according to wowhead. Don't let that fool you though as the few times I've farmed it for myself (and a few others to sell out of bordem) it took maybe 3 cycles of clearing mobs and waiting on respawns. This is one you can farm very easily without much hassle at all so don't bother paying 500g for it.

Weapon - fiery: Found off of a BRD boss which is labeled as a rare spawn but is always there. It takes about 3 minutes to run in, kill him, run out and reset. I recommend that you get the shadow forged key first as it will save you a ton of time. For those of you like me and get lost the moment you enter BRD, I'll quote the few wowhead comments that helped me greatly in finding this guy and getting the key.

If you need the key, here's a great guide for it.
you tube video.

Finding the boss from the entrance. Note you need the key for this path, but if you have skeleton keys (black smith) or seaforium charges (engineer) you don't need a key at all.

"Enter the instance.Go through the gate on the left, then through the next gate on the right.Open the door on your left.Go up the ramp, and then straight up the next ramp to where all the arena spectators are.Go around to the other side of the ring and take that exit.Turn right and this guy is at the end."

Chest - greater stats: This is one you have to watch the AH for. It's a rare world drop so it can get a bit expensive. Naturally the only farming you can do for it is kill still and pray. Buy the recipe if possible but there's nothing you can to do find it faster.


Weapon - spellpower or healing power: Rare drop from MC recipes that are NOT bind on pick up. So if you have a nice plate class that can solo the bosses go for it. Otherwise watch the AH and be ready to drop several thousand on them. I've never personally solo'd MC so I can't offer any help here.

Weapon - Icy chill: Rare drop from the anguished highborne mobs in winterspring. Just run around killing everything in sight and it will drop eventually. The rate is fairly low so if you can find the recipe fairly cheap buying it won't be much of a waste. Also in the area that these mobs spawn there can be an elemental invasion so keep an eye out for the spawn Princess Tempestria. Might get some drops from her to sell.


Ok that's all the world drops, now for the rep guides. If you're human you'll have to figure out the specifics on your own. Writing this up for people that don't have the bonus in mind and because I'm jealous after having to do them all on horde and alliance side, so nyah!


Timbermaw Hold.
Enchants to get: weapon - agility, 2h weapon - agility
Rep needed: Honored

You most likely have all the rep needed here or close to it. But if not here's where you need to be killing stuff at. First collect 60 runecloth and go to southern felwood and you'll find a furbolg on the side of the road who gives you a quest to kill more furbolgs. After turning that in they'll send you all the way north to the furbolg cave. The quest NPC just outside of it will ask you to, go figure, go kill more furbolgs! The ones you need are right off the cliff you're standing next to. They also drop feathered head dress things that you can turn in in sets of 5 for 300 rep. You'll need to do this a few times to get up to friendly with them. At friendly you can get a quest to turn in some runecloth in the tunnel.

Then you can run through the timbermaw tunnel to the other side and find another furbolg for another quest to kill another group of furbolgs. While killing them keep an eye on what you pick up as there's several quest starting items you can get. The camps by the tunnel exit and north of the town are all able to drop them. After doing all these quests, including the ones form items, you should be honored. If you're a bit short you can just wander around killing furbolgs for rep to get the last bit you need.


Argent Dawn
Enchants to get: Bracers - healing power
Rep needed: Revered

This faction you're bound to have some rep with already, but if not here's the deal. There's quests all over the plague lands, both east and west, that give you a ton. So grab a dps spec and get to work questing. After getting a bunch of quests done head into Scholomance or Stratholme and kill everything you see. Make sure you do this on your enchants as all the greens and blues DE into the mats needed for any old world enchant of worth. My best recommendation is to just suck it up and aoe everything in one of those two instances that isn't breathing.


Thorium Brotherhood
Enchants to get: Weapon - mighty intellect and weapon - strength
Rep needed: revered

This one is the big pain in the ass. First thing to do is go to thorium point in the searing gorge, this will be your base of operations. Also note that there is no mailbox or inn keeper here. Your closest options for that are loch modan (alliance) or kargath (horde) so make sure you have all the rep items you need in your bags or in the mail. Speaking of rep items, here's what you'll be needing.

Dark Iron Residue: You'll need about 1,000 of this to get past honored. You can turn it in at stacks of 100 and it drops in hordes from any mob in BRD up to 8 at a time. You can also buy it for like 10g for a stack of 100. Usually cheap, but usually not in supply.


Incendosaur Scale: You'll find these from the mobs that you're killing for a quest so make sure you kill a whole bunch extra.

Kingsblood, heavy leather, or Iron bars: Basic gathering reagents needed along with a piece of coal and the dino scales to get to friendly rep. The rep gained doesn't change based on which item you hand in, but you will need different amounts. The totals are 10 heavy leather or 4 iron bar or 4 kingsblood PER turn in. So needless to say you'll be needing a dozen or so stacks of them.

After those things here's the expensive ones you'll need to pick up.

Fiery core - 500 rep
Lava core - 500 rep
Core leather (2) - 350 rep
Blood of the mountain - 500 rep
Dark iron ore (10) - 75 rep

All of the above are MC rare drops which you'll have to buy from the AH or farm for a few years to get enough. All of those items are turned to Lokhtos Darkbargainer who can be found at the Grim Guzzler down in BRD. Though you can only turn these in once you have hit honored reputation so keep that in mind. This is also the NPC who sells the rep items, but will only show you what you CAN buy, not what you COULD buy with enough rep. Here's a quote from wowhead for how to get to him. But if you have the direbrew remote just port on over like a lucky little bastard.

"You must have a Shadow Forge Key to get to the Bar.
Enter Instance.
Look left, see the gate, go open it. go through
take your first RIGHT. STOP. open that gate go through

There is a door on the LEFT Use Key again open door.
Kill mobs in room, or walk past them for 80.
go to Bridge control in back of room and "USE" it.
Go upstairs

Once upstairs
Kill Mobs again
look LEFT. Take that hallway. Don't go up or down a ramp, its just a regular hallway.
Once you are in this hallway, you are good, the only place it leads is to the bar."


Ok I believe that covers it. I hope you find that helpful and if I missed something feel free to comment and I'll edit it in.


Thanks for stopping by!

Report 5-25

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I, Stokpile the well dressed and lover of all things shiny provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. As usual, numbers and bottom lines come first.


Income per banker

Gems, LW, misc: 68,000

Smithing and enchanting: 63,000


Total weekly sales: 131,000
Weekly profit: 32,000
Total gold: 1,112,000

I made yet another week of huge sales that was counter balanced by massive stokpiling once again. It seems I can never make an ass ton of gold in a week without finding just as many great deals that I couldn't pass up. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing O.o


Detailed Recap
--------------
Saronite! I has it! I finally managed to catch an UF in action and picked up enough to smelt over 3,000 bars. Very excited to finally be stocked up again. I dropped 2,000 of the bars into the guild bank for later use and xmuted the rest which became a pile of 300 titanium bars. Setting aside two stacks for back up materials, another stack to my enchanter/smith and the rest is going into titansteel. Ah titansteel, never enough of it around. I generally don't keep a huge amount of plain raw materials hanging around. I'd rather use them as I find to the time to do so, sort of like a credit card for time, spend 5 minutes here and there so that I can have an entire hour later on.

Of course I always make sure that I distribute it evenly and not use every bit on buckles or make 5 million enchanting rods. Just taking advantage of a spare 5 minutes where I have nothing pressing to do, I'll start up a mass crafting session of 4 stacks of buckles, or start smelting 100 titansteel bars. Work now, play later.

I also managed to catch somebody clearing out their guild bank and bought a few dozen stacks of dust and a ton of greater cosmics. No such luck on crystals though, but I'm still well stocked with them since I haven't been able to craft many weapon enchants while being so low on cosmics. Speaking of enchanting materials, righteous orbs have been flooding in along with brilliant shards, but essences of air are nowhere to be found. Same goes with golden pearls. This is yet another time where I'm glad I take my own advice and stokpile like a madman.

I still have plenty of mats to make old world enchants while waiting for supply to return. Now I am once again the sole supplier of caster twink enchants and keeping the orbs off the AH means I have a pseudo monopoly on crusader enchants. Would be nice to be running the full spectrum of old world enchanting scrolls, but hey can't have everything.

Epic gems have been doing very well since I've been putting a much more personal touch onto the market. Keeping track of things allows me to ensure that I can maximize my profits. It seems that cardinal rubys are in the annoying middle area where they're too pricey to buy raw and sell cut, but cheap enough to tempt me. I'm down to under a stack of every epic color and struggling to keep enough of cuts on the AH. I'm now able to pick up gems as low as 80g and resell them for an average of 140g for this week, but still able to hit the 200g marker time and time again.

They're back in full swing after the crash with profit margins being almost exactly the same. I'm actually very grateful for the crash, I am. Once the dust settled only the people with the foresight to see that it wasn't over and still maintained a huge pile of materials while still having the guts to keep buying have remained in the market. Go on and guess who that one person is on my server... go on, guess.

/Evil grin

Tailoring has been almost totally absent from my weekly earnings this week as there's a lot more competition in that market, so I've been posting my wares at barely above material costs. As per my standard MO, I'm hoping to annoy and frustrate the competition into convincing themselves that tailoring is just a bad profession. No money to be made here people move along. Heh. I can deal with only making 2g profit on a sale essentially forever, but not many have the patience for that. People always want a magic "I win button" to push, sadly it doesn't exist. If it did trust me, I'd be a millionaire. Oh wait...


Thanks for stopping by!

Priceless investment

With Cata coming around soon and materials about to drop in price in the inevitable pre expansion release fallout, now is the time for the wise AH player to think long term and invest some of their gold. There's a good number of things that anybody can do that might take several thousand gold to do, but will be dramatically worth it. By that I mean there's a few things that you can buy that I would consider to have no true "value" so to speak in that I would pay damned near any amount of gold to get them. So for those of you wanting to go into cataclysm with the AH mail rolling in with that ever so wonderful ca-ching sound, here's my recommendations of things you need to pick up NOW and I would personally pay any price for no matter how much or how little gold I had.


Glyphs.
Yes inscription is a monster. Yes it takes a ton of start up money. Yes the stokpiling requirements are maddening at times and can take up a full banker's inventory, bank, and a full bank tab at it's height. That being said, inscription is still the most consistently profitable profession. When cata comes out every skill is being changed and thus every glyph will be updated accordingly along with numerous others being added in. There will be a lot of cosmetic and flavor glyphs as well so many people will be buying them to have fun with while leveling or just to mess around with.

Remember when dual spec came out? Remember the first thing you did after buying it and setting your talents? That's right, you bought the glyphs for your second spec. You and the other X-thousand people on your sever did the exact same thing on the same day. So when cata comes out it's all going to happen again, but this time it'll be twice over. Everybody will need new glyphs for BOTH of their specs and some even buy them for a third or even a fourth. People have shown themselves making as far as 50k in a matter of hours the day dual spec came out.

For those that already had every glyph open to them probably made triple that in the first week from nothing else but selling glyphs for 10g a piece. Now imagine that when there's even more glyphs to sell, even more people needing them and even more specs to consider. And of course there's the fact that nobody will know what the 'expected' ones are so everyone will take their best guess, try some out, replace them with different ones. I bet if you play it right you can make 100k in the first few days easily.

The investment here is a small bit of gold and the time between now and then doing the daily research to learn every glyph you can. If I didn't have a scribe I'd pay any price to max them out and buy all the glyph books and be prepared to spend even more. Hell when glyph books first came out I saw people in trade OFFERING 200g for a glyph of life tap or divine plea. And as we know, buying in trade is highly discounted so imagine what they were making on the AH!


Spell power, healing power, crusader, greater stats, agility.
Those are just a few of the enchants that go onto BoA gear. With millions of new worgen or goblins leveling by the thousands of people with 80s and plenty of heirloom gear, they'll all want their new babies looking pretty. The recipes themselves are BoE and can usually be found on AH for up to 5,000 gold. Crusader and fiery personally I'd just farm as they drop often and are always marked up too much. I know several people who regularly sell those enchants on a scroll for 1,000 several times a week. So that means only 5 people with loose change to make your money back. If you don't have these recipes on your enchanter, I'd spend almost any kind of money to get them. Hell I'd go as high as 8k probably and buy without flinching. Any higher though and I'd of course try to barter some, but if they say 10k or go away... they're getting my 10k.

Lastly if you don't have an enchanter, I'd also pay any price to power level one at least up to 300 or whatever the required skill level is for the MC recipes. It could cost something like 2k just to get to 300 skill, but with enchanting shaping up to be a massive money maker in cata I'd definitely finish the job and get to 450. I'd go as high as 20k to max out this profession because I know that the money I spend skilling up will be made back the instant people start hitting 85. If you don't have an enchanter, get one.


Nether weave, frost weave, and profession bags
These things I swear to you will never sit on the AH for more than an hour even if you list them 20 at a time. Currently I list those bags in sets of 8 and always sell them all off well before I check my mail in the evening. Now imagine the slew of alts being rolled that need new bags. Yeah, the AH will be picked clean of both bags and mats. At some points I could have my entire bank filled with crafted nether weave bags and sell them all off in no more than three days. This is something that I'd easily triple my normal buying price for the materials just to have a few billion bags ready to ship along with cata.

The tailoring skill required isn't that high and can definitely be done cheaply. As a wise spender I paid about 2.5k I think to level tailoring to make frost bags and if you don't have a tailor but have an open profession spot, get one. The profession bags from WotLK made by leather working will also sell very fast. Even right now it's hard to keep a supply of them and sell for over 50g profit per bag. Once again, the million babies leveling with gathering professions are going to want one. Get a tailor/LW or get one to make you a few hundred. Being able to have access to this constantly any time you want in the first month of release is truly priceless.


Gems? JC gear?
If you remember leveling in out lands you'll remember that a ton of quests gave you greens with several gem sockets in them. Even if you threw a crappy TBC common gem in there they'll still be the best thing you can get outside of a level 70 instance. But if you're doing instances you'll get even more gear with gem spots. So this depends on if the quests from cata also give gear with gem spots fairly early on like in TBC or if the instances are easy enough on normal mode to do with below average gear and likely skill on a lot of peoples part. No matter how good you are if you start playing a toon you've never played before you're not going to be a rock star. If you hand me an 80 lock in heroic t10 gear I'll be amazed if I can do more dps than a tank. But I digress. If we're able to get some good info on the quest rewards and ease of doing regular instances and rewards from them, selling common gems for 5g a piece would be insanely good money.

The same does not apply to JC leveling gear though as hundreds of JC's will be already crafting this stuff and listing it on AH at dumping prices usually. But depending on just how vast of a gear difference we'll actually see will depend on the profit you can make from crafting or if they should just get DE'd. Pointing out that Blizz has said that even ICC 25 gear will be replaced almost immediately. If you played wow from vanilla to TBC you'll remember the "epic greens" that were 50 times better than almost any t3 loot you could get. But going from TBC > WotLK your t6 gear lasted you through 25 naxx, malygos, and sarth. That's not going to happen this time around. So long story short keep a very close eye out and you can make crazy good money and can even get to try your hand at flipping, either the gear or just the DE mats, for a good amount of coin as well.



So for those wanting to plan ahead and invest, here's your check list:
-Get an enchanter
-Grind all the rep and buy the BoE twink enchant recipes
-Get a scribe
-Stokpile a billion glyphs and inks
-Learn every glyph open in WotLK
-Keep a close eye out for any level 80-81 gear from cata that has gem sockets
-Craft 20 billion bags
-Fill out another 500 bank tabs with bolts of associated cloth and heavy borean leather


Thanks for stopping by!

From the ground up: Week 4

Happy Saturday to you all and here's the latest journal entry of the "From the ground up" project where I started a level 1 priest with not a single copper and intend to level them to 80 and amass a large amount of gold without the help of a single person. The only supplies they were given was a set of BoA gear and nothing
else. They are starting out with only inscription, herbalism, and their wits with which they must turn a profit.

Here's the run down of my progress thus far.

Level: 80

Current Gold: 400

Total gold earned: 14,000
(according to my banker's statistics page)

Inscription skill: 450

Enchanting skill: 300

Required purchases to make: massive ink stockpile, 450 enchanting, old world enchanting recipes



Getting down to business
------------------------
Well my baby space goat priest in all her cutie goodness is now 1 month old. I hit 80 last week and organized all the mats I've been collecting. I decided that since I'm having so much fun healing that the best major purchase to make was epic gear instead of epic flying. I think it's fairly obvious if you can have a full set of gear waiting for you at 80 that you can surely afford epic flying at 70. Especially since I placed so much of my initial focus on leveling up opposed to making gold. I did that because I wanted the emphasis on this project to be on using professions and standing on your own feet, not flipping. I don't recommend flipping especially if you have a lot to lose. Also not everybody is able to be successful at it, not even myself. The only flipping I do are sure things as I am just not confident enough in it.

However.

I am very confidant in my ability to control a market to a large extent. I'm also certain that I'm still going to be able to 'out play' my competition. I'm looking at you Mr. Blue! That's right, I've already identified my primary competitor and AH camper. They have several bank toons all with the same naming convention of ___blue.
I'll see them log on several times a day, buy up my 3.5g glyphs and relist them for 45g. At 3.5g a glyph I'm still making a gold profit off each sale while creating more work for them to do and barely any extra for myself. I'm another on a probably long ass list of names they need to keep track of now. And in another 3 weeks when I learn all the research glyphs, I'll be their number one competitor! Rawr.

Woot I just killed my first NR rare spawn and got the achieve! Normally I wouldn't care too much, but that achievement in particular sounds like money to me. And it is. Got a useful blue ring which I sold an hour later for 30g, got 15g cash and a stack of frostweave from the bag. All in all killing a single elite just got me a total of 45g. Not too shabby.

I just logged onto my new alliance banker Lunchmuney shortly after sir blue logged off and finished buying up my cheap glyphs. Sure enough I was undercut on over half of my current stock of ~350 glyphs. I'm reposting and will go back to Stokpile and see if they come back to undercut me again. I'm trying to discern weather or not
they are a camper or if I just wandered to the AH during their normal business hours. Time shall tell indeed. I'm almost completely convinced that they're a camper, but one can never be sure. And since I don't have a reputation amongst the major players of this faction I know it's not personal, just business.

Well I finally got all my crap made and gems cut. Took forever! I'm short 6 frozen orbs and 200g for dragon eyes. I wasn't expecting to hit 80 for another couple days, but oh well. Sadly I haven't had a chance to heal any heroics yet because my connection has been shoddy at best. Last thing you want is a healer with little experience in low gear risking a DC every 5 minutes. In any case, I got my gems cut, threads sorted and enchanted. Not looking too bad. I think that once I work up 50 emblems for an int trinket and snag the one from reg ToC 5 I'll be ready. Basically I don't intend to heal heroics until all of my heirloom gear is gone.

My next big investment is going to be glyph mastery books. I've officially been noticed on the glyph radar so to speak. I really can't afford to get camped and/or bought out right now as it would completely kill me. Pushing the limit is dangerous and leaves you in a delicate situation. Regardless, having more glyphs means more potential sales and selling off 10 of any glyph I learn is, on average, going to be profit and not just making up the investment. The plan is to keep my head down low until I learn all I can from the books and research a bit more. Then once I have, you guessed it, I'll be stokpiling inks like a mad man.

So next purchase: 1,000g on glyph books, 1,000g on inks and such, 5,000g on epic flying.

Now that all of my heirloom gear is gone, I've been healing a bunch of heroics. It's easy! Hell I've even done the ICC heroics and not a single death. Even when the whole group was sitting in the stacking frost aura in PoS. They got up to something like 15 stacks or so and I still kept them all alive. How I've managed to die so many times that I refuse to go there as tank or dps is beyond me. Health bars go down, make them go up. I don't get it. Still having issues wth having to drink after a bit of heavy healing though. But I really think it's a case of not having replenishment. I did a CoS run with a ret pally and a bear tank. With kings and paw buff I had almost 29k mana and never had to drink even when the 2 melee dps decided to tank. Not even a problem when the mage face pulled for the N'th time. So that being the case, I'm going to start stacking spellpower to make my shields even more OP than they already are. That and if I decide to try out holy spec (or shadow for that matter) I won't be using a ton of fairly useless gems.

Wearing mostly healing gear with intellect gems my shadow dps is around the 3k range if I can just sit and cast away. I got the rotation and priority down fine, but a boost in like 300 SP will definitely get me up ahead to a point where I won't be embarrassed. Also a change in meta gems would help that out a lot also, but I'm not
going to spend the money for that. Hell most of my 'shadow' gear isn't enchanted or gemmed in fact. That's because I WANT to have good shadow gear, I do not NEED good shadow gear. What I do need though is gold and lots of it. Got to save money remember? And that means in any way that you can which is why I'm only using rare gems and not fully enchanting anything that's going to be replaced relatively soon past my starter gear.

I'm now up to 2k gold and can't seem to find any cheap glyph books. They're all at the 40g+ range which is insane, especially at the generally slow rate of sales right now. I'm trying to pay only 20g each but if I can't seem to find any I'll have to up my buying price by almost double. I do NOT want to do that.

I swear to god nobody doing heroic PoS bothers to LoS the frost debuff anymore. ever. I just healed a heroic HoR as my random today. I decided to drop shadow spec and go for holy. And of course I got the hardest heroic (in wotlk at least) with a spec I know nothing about. Heh, I failed horrible and had no clue wtf I should've done differently. Then we went again and I swapped over to disc, first two bosses = cake. Sure I had to actually use CD's but nobody died and only the fail dps that couldn't remember what threat is got close. The run away from the lich king event was a bit tricky on the last group. It seemed like the mage only had blizzard and living bomb on their bar, the DK had auto attack and the lock had rain of fire. Nothing but aoe the whole time so that meant that when more mobs joined in after the initial rush... that's right, dps get squashed. I'm convinced that if those people had half a brain to pay attention it would've been easy as hell the whole entire time as the tank would be the only one in need of serious healing and shields would take care of the rest. But of course, nobody CBA to get away from the fire.

Just logged on today and I now have 1500g woohoo! I spent 400 of it on more flowers to replenish my stocks as I was getting a bit low and the rest is going towards glyph books here and there and epic flying. Slowly but surely working my way up in the world. It's really fun seeing it all come together like this, it really is. I can feel every ounce of profit I'm making and every glyph sold has significance, it's not just "oh look another few gold" like it was horde side. It's memorable. This is also a good experience for any AH player because starting with zero and trying to gear out a toon with no help makes you really pay attention to what's worth something. You might not know who it's valuable to, but it still is and that's what matters. It also makes you notice small limited niche markets a lot easier than you would have otherwise, even if you were looking for them. I know that I wouldn't have ever thought to sell clam meat. Hell I always just vendor the clams and not even open them. Heh, not any more.

I have officially reached a major milestone in the glyph business. I have no bag space! I never thought I'd be so excited to say that I'm actually giggling to myself right now as I write this. With only making stack sizes of 3 I thought that only having 3x scribe bags and a frostweave bag would do the trick. I was wrong. I just did a cancel/post after picking up another 11 glyph books and crafting a bunch more. After canceling and answering the mail, I still have another 50+ glyph in the mail that I cannot hold on my person until I post what I have already. This is great!

Now that I have a significant amount of glyphs in stock, I need to continue building up a supply of inks. Before I go and totally destroy the glyph market, I'll have to do a ton of prep work. Namely, that's right, stokpiling mats. With several major businessmen working this market it'll take a load of effort to get rid of them or at least get them to back off some, I need to be in it for the long haul. That means being able to afford every damned ink and flower I see at my buying price no matter how much gold I have. And since I'll be dropping the sale price of my glyphs by over half, I'll need a good amount of gold to tide me over as well. But that being said, I'm still going to be focusing on getting epic flying first before I go balls to the wall and trash my only market. It's a matter of principle.

Scrap paper notes:
~ 10 of every glyph I can make and 10 of whatever I research.
~ 100 of each color ink. An extra 1,000 IotS and 300 etherals.
~ 2,000 gold in my pocket to continue buying out all the flowers and inks I come across.


All of that plus epic flying come to about 10k gold I need to work up before I really explode. Once I get busy rapidly deflating the glyph market, I'll be slowly acquiring low level enchanting mats and greens for DE fodder. That's right, that's the time when I'll drop herbalism and re-roll enchanting. Since I can make my own vellumns and not have to get scalped paying over 5g/ea it will work out nicely.
After stalking the economy on the alliance side of my server I've to a very simple conclusion: I could be rich here. There is almost no supplier of rare gems, barely anybody that sells epic cuts. Nobody posts their link in trade chat and those that do maybe have a dozen or so cuts. And of course, not a single useful meta gem cut either. It's insane. There are zero belt buckles, almost no rods, spellthreads are sold at or below material price. I mean the list just goes on and on! I sold a few extra cut gems I got for 30g each after paying 5g for the materials. Minus 6g per cut tip and that's 20g extra in my pocket. If I had my JC on alliance side, I'd get gold capped in less than a month even if I ignored every other market out there. In fact, once I get the glyph machine in full swing and got my stokpile of enchanting mats I doubt it'll take long at all to hit the cap with this toon. It's amazing how much potential to profit there is here. I love it!

I now have every glyph book I need purchased and only have to wait another 43 days or so of doing my daily minor/major glyph research. Sadly though I have barely learned any of the good glyphs to be gotten from that. No horn or winter, no SoV, no nothing.

I just stepped into my first raid as tank healer, ToC 10. It went well until I got a snowbold and the pally tank used their 1-up to go on. Nobody bothered to kill ti of course and the tree didn't try to focus on the tank due to people in fire. But we downed it. Did LJ and I let an incinerate explode because I forgot that I couldn't see names written in grind with heals coming in. Heh whoops. Cleared champs and I was the shielding god I swear. There wasn't much more I could do because of the warlock's pet on me the whole time spell locking me on anything but a penance. I basically had to wait until people were at mostly full health and spammed G heal to draw out the lock and it worked. Then I was free to cast as many heals as I wanted for the duration of the cool down. Only 1 person died luckily enough. But the weekly was only to kill LJ and a tank left afterwords soon followed by everyone else. Was fun regardless, looking forward to doing it again.

Shortly after that raid, I hopped my way into a 25m ToC. I have no clue wtf I'm supposed to do in the face of crazy resto druids on the raid and OP holy paladins on the tanks. During beasts I knew who to shield (melee) and got almost 900k absorbs and 200k healing done according to recount. But when LJ came out all the damage was entirely random minus the tanks. Granted the tree didn't get much effective healing done either, damn. I hate being clueless and/or useless. I guess that's in the same category of healing being boring as hell in a heroic with a crazy geared prot pally and people that don't stand in fire, that is when there's nothing to do because people are playing how they SHOULD be playing. I'm very much not used to that anymore.

Got up to champs and I did a lot better because I knew exactly who was going to take damage; everybody but me heh. Over a million combined absorbs and healing done along with 60 dispells. Fek yuh! We wiped on twins because nobody could switch targets, but we took it all the way to the enrage with only a few people dead. I took a look at the infamous healing meters while we were recovering. the tree and uber geared holy pally had a ton of the healing done. wild growth and holy light splashes are amazing when you can safely assume every last point is going to heal something. I had a tad under a million healing from my shield glyph and PoM spam. I was thinking "jesus I'm out classed here, I did barely half of their healing!" Then I looked at the absorbs done. Three. Million. Damage. Holy shit! I stopped 3.8 million damage from being done to the raid and easily saved a few lives with a well timed and borrowed time hasted penance, flash heal, PoM combo I'm sure. Suffice to say, I'm rather proud of myself. Happy face!

After using every mana CD I had I had about 30% mana left after the massive shield spamming. At least I didn't have to use a mana potion for that mess. Now that I think about it, I didn't even have to bail myself out and use power infusion like I normally do when I panic. Though when a few people forgot to change colors, which I assumed on the second vortex, I shielded myself and did the Inner Focus + hymn bit and saved their sorry ass. I'm sure that helped out my total healing a bit. All that being said I think I'm definitely getting good at this. As usual when playing a new class, the hardest part for me is remembering what panic buttons I can push, Like when I rolled a rogue I always forgot about cloak of shadows. Now I'm forgetting about power infusion. I'll get it in time. I'm also really getting the hang of using my heals as combos to keep somebody alive and top them off instead of just casting a greater heal and praying to the wow gods that they don't die before it finishes it's cast. Like shield, hasted flash heal, pom, flash heal. If that doesn't help, by then penance is off CD and I can hit them with that. Or if it's raid damage I'll shield a target with a pom after (with super low GCD thanks to BT), hasted flash heal the next, shield them too, repeat on down the line. If I was only relying on greater heal for any of those times somebody is bound to die during the raid wide triage.

For some reason, nobody but me is bothering to sell snowfall inks. I have yet to see anybody list more than a small handful on AH so far. Even with my main competition also listing a ton of super cheap herbs which, obviously, were farmed for free even they aren't selling snowfalls. I'm fully stocked up on runescrolls and off hands while having plenty of extra inks to do my research with and craft anything that I sell using them. Even with a large supply on my hands I can still sell them for a killing, I sold several stacks for 280g earlier today in a heart beat. Hell the faire isn't even coming back for another month and they're STILL moving faster than I can get them. So what did I do after I noticed this? I did what any observant AH player would do; I used that money to buy more herbs, milled them, sold more snowfall inks, pocketed the IotS, repeat. Fairly nice cycle of craft/profit especially since I need to do all of that soon enough anyways.

Now I'm up to almost 500 IotS and 2k gold on my banker, almost half way to epic flying. Now that the investment of glyph books is over and done with flying is my focus now and will be my next major purchase. After that it just comes down to massive stokpiling as I bide my time to trash the glyph market. The best part is, I know I'm going to make a huge profit and totally screw over the number 1 glyph seller on this server. How do I know this? Because they've constantly been buying my glyphs when their price gets low. And I don't just mean bottom barrel 3.5g/ea I'm talking as high as 7g per glyph they're buying for resale. Well how's that for coincidence, 7g is exactly what I was planning on dropping my price cap to! I need to play this one carefully though. If they get wise to my plans too soon I'll be left with another waiting game of who can go the longest making little to no gold with them. If they're just another camper or cancel/post monkey then they'll end up with an endless stock of worthless glyphs and have to sell them all at a massive loss of money. Ain't I a stinker?

I'm expecting that by week 8 I'll have a full flegged glyph and enchanting business set up and making gold hand over fist just like I am horde side.

I am finally done grinding out heroics for all my spiffy welfare purples. Out of all the runs I got a handful of frozen orbs to hang onto when I need more off hands crafted and an ass ton of dust and crystals. As you can imagine, I got almost zero cosmics from it all. Sad face. Noticing that the herb supply is very back and forth over here. The high end herbs are ALWAYS 2g each, which means there's no chance I'm going to buy them to mill. Gold clover is almost always too expensive for anybody to buy, but deadnettle and tiger lily are priced just right most of the time. But even then their supply is quite limited. The plain IotS however are always in a good supply at 2.5g each so I'm just going to stock up on them and just buy whatever cheap flowers I can when I see them. That means that my profits with a 7g price cap will be a lot less than I anticipated because I won't be able to get the kick back on the snowfall inks. Most interesting.

Just logged on again, collected mail, bought another few hundred inks and watched the gold trickle in. I collected my first full thousand gold from the mail in a single night of sales, go me! That puts me at 4300g alliance side, so looks like I'll be picking up epic flying tomorrow. Much sooner that I expected. Once that's taken care of It's time to start piling up a metric ass ton of mats for the glyph wall. The following morning I collected another few hundred gold and went on my merry way to learn epic flying. Tis a good day! Now to work on the mass of inks and plan to power level enchanting.

Ok epic flying is purchased, up to 1,000 gold on my banker and not a single decently priced herb or bottle of ink on AH. The whole time I've been here the good herbs have never dropped below 1g each and adder's tongue is always over 2g each. Sometimes I can catch tiger lily at a good rate or plain inks, but almost always grabbing just whatever I can get. I sure hope that supply comes in soon, I'm really wanting to get this kick started and start with a bang. That and I'm looking forward to owning the scroll market on both sides of the same server hehehe.

Leaving off this week's entry with me starting up the required rep grinds to get all the old world enchant recipes. Both rep grind and farming grind. The prices on useful BoE enchant recipes are always completely absurd, but people do pay them. Not me. I'll farm it and trade a bit of my time in for saving an ass ton of gold. First stop, plague lands!


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Don't automatically automatically DE

A common mistake that everybody (even myself) makes from time to time is always hitting the auto DE when doing random heroics. It's a great tool and saves a ton of time and inventory space usually, but it can cost you a lot of gold over time. Ever since it's inception, the prices of shards have plummeted drastically down to as low as 2g and the prices of crystals have mostly become very stable at 30g high end with a normal 25g buying price. I'm almost positive that 99% of every server out there has these materials in the same general price range. However you might be on that one random server that this doesn't apply to, in which case you can just ignore most of my advice today, but only today!

When going through you're daily heroic, lets say that it was UK and on the first boss the blue wand drops. There's an enchanter in the group. The auto DE feature looks mighty appealing. But first, why don't you check the vendor price on it? That's 11 gold from a vendor while the shard you'd get from the DE roll is 5g at BEST. Congrats, you just doubled your potential money by spending 3 seconds to mouse over the item and read the vendor price on the tool tip. There's a very large number of blues to be found that are better off in the hands of a vendor rather than an enchanter. Mostly these are weapons and shields that vendor for up to 15g a piece, but there's a few select armor pieces that are worth vendoring as well.

As for abyss crystals, I haven't seen many epics with a power vendor price more than the crystal, but there's a few I'm sure. Most notably is the spear and 2h axe from H ToC 5 along with the caster staff in heroic PoS. Though in their cases, the 1-4 gold you can get past the price of a crystal might not be worth it on your server. But if yours is anything like mine and you can get crystals for 25g and under fairly easily, definitely power vendor them purples. If you happen to be leveling a new alt and gearing them in chain heroics and the like, make sure to keep this in mind.

Also if you just happen to be questing for lore master or leveling up in general, keep an eye on the vendor price of the greens you pick up that are BoE, especially weapons of any kind. For me, my buying price of greater cosmics is 15g, maybe maybe as high as 16 if I'm desperate. But when I see a green at a 13g vendor price and is likely to give me 1.5 LESSER cosmics, well, that goes to the vendor. You'll find tons and tons of greens that you should vendor and not disenchant across all of northrend and sometimes even outland. Not so much in outland though as the price of dust is almost always 2.5g a piece and that's a ton of gold you can get from DE'ing those greens.

So keep all of this in mind when you're out and about doing stuff to things. You might find your pockets a little bit heavier on the way back.


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The AH food chain

Today's entry is on the subject of markets, niche markets, and all the things that exist underneath them. This is something that not many take the time to figure out and understand even though it is absolutely essential to getting ahead in the AH game. With every market that is not RAW materials, there will always exist at least one secondary market that decides how the primary one will fluctuate. You need to be aware of these sub markets at all times as they will decide if you should: continue crafting whatever it is that you're crafting, up and sell the materials themselves, or hold out on selling anything at all.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to be aware of what secondary markets you are relying on. Even if you have people CoD'ing you materials each and every day they will eventually look at the AH and if they find you're screwing them out of a significant amount with the CoD they won't do any more business with you. This is where honesty comes up as being very important. If nothing else the secondary markets (SM) will give you small clues here and there as to a particular direction your primary market (PM) might be taking.

With that being said and proper emphasis placed, here's the general food chain of a few markets to give you a small demonstration of what I'm talking about.

Saronite ore = Saronite bars = titanium xmutes = titan steel = toc epics

Here's that same flow with the prices of only the raw materials.

16g/stack = 50g/stack = 50g/2.5 = 90g/1 (minus 30g for eternals) = 44g profit

That 44g becomes 440 when you craft 10x titansteel bars. Add in another 960 for crusader orbs and 40g for the saronite dirks (for the razor plate) you're looking at about 1500g or so of an investment. Then you turn around and sell that bad boy for 3,800. All of that from a single purchase of a few 16g stacks of saronite ore.


And here's a simple one for glyphs

Adder's tongue = IotS/snowfall = glyphs + scrolls

Now materials

15g/stack = 8 IotS + 2 snowfall = 8 glyphs + 2 scrolls


Ok that's just the basic crafting chain, shouldn't be anything new to most. Now taking a sharp turn to the left we're going to take the same thing but get much more abstract with it. Remember me saying that you have to be able to think abstractly to do well? Well here you go.

Price of saronite ore =

price of saronite bars
Price of eternal fire, shadow, earth
Price of titanium bars
Price of titansteel bars
Price of titansteel based products

Price of the above = amount of interest = increased farming = increased supply = market flooding = price drops


And how about glyphs? Their supply is based off the price of frost lotus actually, NOT the price of herbs.

Price of frost lotus =

price of herbs native to sholozar basin
Price of eternal life
Price of select flasks/elixirs
Price of ALL inks
Price of fortitude scrolls
Price of inscription off hands
Price of darkmoon card crafting
Price of DMC: Greatness


Now going with the glyph example, what happens if we see a huge spike in demand for flasks? That means that every single thing in that list will be effected. With the assumption that all supplies are essentially infinite in that you can't go skinning gorillas in sholozar and eventually have them go extinct we can apply the basic economic formula of more demand = higher prices = increase in supply, so you can see how the rest will be effected.

~ More flasks need to be supplied so frost lotus goes up in price.

~ The supply of non-flask herbs will greatly increase, thus dropping their price greatly.

~ Prices on all inks will drop as the scribes are buying up and milling the cheap deadnettle and adder's tongue.

~ Eternal life prices will drop due to the mass farming being done

~ Prices of DMC will go down as the crafting price is far less causing mroe people to invent into them

~ Fort scrolls will go down due to the flood of snowfall inks (depending on the price of frozen orbs, the off hands may be effected as well).


Are you getting the idea of just how deep the proverbial rabbit hole can go? Now lets have us some devious fun shall we? What happens if lets say... YOU decide to gobble up every single flask you see on the AH? What happens if you keep at this for a week? Well you can surely imagine that all of the above would go down, but how does this benefit you aside from giving you a shit load of extra flasks? Do this during a time when supply of flasks are high, and therefore lower price on frost lotus. In addition to buying all the flasks, also buy up all the frost lotus and associated herbs. Watch then as more and more herbalists will crop up farming to their wits end to meet this "unexpected" demand spike.

Prices will rise on all flask related materials, SM, and PM. Now there's you behind the curtains with a bank tab filled with all of these assorted goodies and when the time is right prices are leveling out or showing a slight decline... baffam! Start listing all the stuff you bought for super cheap the week before from flasks to lotus to lichbloom, to snowfall inks, and absolutely everything that can be crafted with them. Lo and behold you have manipulated almost a dozen different markets with a simple purchase. You are now forcibly flipping the horde of items you were stokpiling for a massive profit. Next stop, saronite!

Wrapping up all of that non sense, these sort of massive market shifts usually don't take place over night. This takes place because on every server there's several big time AH players that buy up everything they see in a certain price range. Hell you might even be one of them or have a hand in it. If you remember the last patch and how it effected frozen orbs and everything they're needed for you can see the truth in this. Granted that was a very limited effect, but that does not make it's reach and effect any less profound. Mind you I said usually as with the example I just illustrated, it can indeed happen be it by intent or mere coincidence. So keep an eye out next time you're buying mats eh?


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Speed

This is an entry that I had written a while ago, but never posted. I didn't feel it quite belonged and didn't feel like I had gotten the point across properly. But now that I'm going over theory more than markets these days, it seems fitting. I must have re-written it a dozen times so if it seems a tad off or unfinished that's why.

Anybody can write a best selling novel. It's true, give any person a lifetime to dedicate to writing and they'll hit number one. But that isn't that interesting now is it? Sure having a best seller is great and all, but if it took you a life time to do that when a good writer can do the same each year the value would diminish a little. Emphasis here on good writer. You can think of this as comparing farmers to AH players. Sure you can both hit the gold cap, but can you define one as good at making gold and the other not? You can (and probably already do) by how long it took them to get capped.

The same thing can be said about making real money. Would you continue working your same job if your making so little you worried about paying bills? Doubtfully. Granted the dude working at a quick stop can be a millionaire at SOME point doing just that, but the guy setting up a full business enterprise will get there in a few years, not a lifetime. Who of those two would you consider "successful" at what they do?

Speed is a minor but important measurement tool that we use to judge the successes of ourselves and those of others but rarely even mention it. We always talk about time. Time spent crafting, time spent posting, our G/hour, our weekly/daily income. We speak of all this but nothing about the speed of things, just the total time. In the AH game, anybody can make 5k gold, but how long did it take you? Did it take you a day or two or did it takes weeks of boring grinding? We all have different reasons for wanting to amass a virtual fortune, but they are all YOUR reasons.

You want to get gold capped for X reason, but I might not care at all about X, only Y. Regardless of reasons, we all use two basic concepts to judge how successful we were at what we aimed for: amount of gold gained and the time frame we did it in. You have to feel some form of success to continually do something by choice, and the speed of which it's done is a great way to feel that you've actually succeeded and not just reached the end.

The amount gained is a personal milestone, one that each person sets that is significant to them. The speed of which you reach that milestone is how successful you consider yourself. If it takes me 6 months to make 100k and you did the same in a week, I won't think I'm that successful. Not because I base all my self worth on what others have done, but because you need some kind of reference for time spent/goal achieved. After all, time has no meaning unless you can base it off something. Set your own goal, your own mile stones and how quickly you want to get there, then race yourself. Make your reference about the facts, it's well known that getting to the gold cap with proper effort can be done in two months give or take. So don't say that Joe can do this in 2 months, say just that it CAN be done in that time.

Set your own milestones, goals, and get there as fast as you can. But make sure to enjoy the trip there as that's half the fun after all. And lastly with the title of this post, judge your own success on how fast you did what you did in addition to WHAT you did. Set your own standards. It doesn't matter if you're gold capped by a thousand or a copper. Doesn't matter if you killed Arthas with the whole raid alive or just the tank. Success = success. Next week, try and get the same thing done even faster because how soon you got there is just as important as the time spent getting there.

Thanks for stopping by!