From the ground up: Week 2

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: 63

Gold: 25

Inscription skill: 375

Herbalism skill: 358

Required purchases to make: artisan flying, epic flying mount, CWF



Building a Machine.
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Ya know, some people might wonder why this pet project of mine is so much fun to me. It's because it brings back all of the excitement from back when I first started to play the AH seriously. Every time I see a few glyphs sell while questing I get all sorts of tickled. Every single gold coin is earned, every auction sold is MEANINGFUL! When you have hundreds of thousands of gold, it becomes not as important the more you get. Horde side I can buy literally anything that is for sale, but with my lowly priest, a stranger in a strange land where so much is different it's difficult to make it alone. There are no friends I can turn to if things get sour, no guildies to run me through instances or loan me some cash to train my skills if I lose all my money. Nothing at all. So here I am selling only a few auctions a day while I see my full business selling hundreds.

It kind of reminds me of the good ole' days of raiding back in the tier 5/6 era. TK and BT were great fun and SSC would've been great if the trash wasn't the same annoying pull for a few hours. But the bosses... damn they were rewarding when they finally went down. Being the last man standing on my guilds first KT kill was
incredible. Watching lady Vashj's health slowly get lower and lower after each wipe was exhilarating! And when we finally made it to our first trip to sunwell just before wrath was released, just wow. Nowadays it's just don't stand in bad stuff, switch targets accordingly, collect purples. I say purples because EPICS died with
The Great Nerf with the 3.0 patch. So being completely broke with zero assistance is very sobering and kind of makes me appreciate what I have with both horde and alliance very meaningful. It brings back many fond memories of my time spent playing WoW which I greatly miss. Seeing my gold total slowly rise is almost the same feeling of working on a difficult progression boss kill as you close in on a kill.

It's the challenge and the journey that makes everything so worth while. Something given has no meaning. So when you deeply feel that you've earned something, that feeling will stay with you for a very, very long time. And when I hit a million I'll definitely be remembering that. Hell I still remember when I first hit the gold
cap, how excited and giddy I was on the few days leading up to it. The ones I got afterwords weren't as heart felt as I already had the infrastructure in place to do it so the goal achieved wasn't so impressive to me. But now that I'm starting back completely at zero with only my wits and a pair of professions to make a living,
I'm feeling the entire part of my first trip to the cap all over again. This is GREAT fun and I am so glad I decided to do this. As difficult and challenging as this is, I'm still looking forward to the rest of it and can only imagine where I'll be at come a month from now.

/emo


I swear it's a good thing that these random dungeons are so fun. With all my toons being horde, I have no clue what leveling path I should be taking as alliance. With my horde toons I know exactly what quests are worth doing and what zone I should go to next. Not the case now and I likely lost a lot of potential xp, but I made it up with the randoms. But alas after going OOM from killing 5 mobs I had to respec to shadow. 1g is now gone for good. On the up side at least I'm almost half way towards dual spec! Unfortunately the spec change barely got me any more mana efficiency as far as time spent drinking goes and took away my ability to heal randoms. I'll definitely be getting dual spec for disc/shadow for sure, but not at the cost of my first flying training.

My long term experience in the glyph market is definitely paying off. So far I've learned several dozen glyphs and instead of just expecting a complete loss of money on each craft like most professions, I knew right away which to craft. I knew that the glyphs of judgment and sense undead are always needed and made a nice 10g sale
on them. So far I've only had to make a few 'worthless' glyphs due to lack of any other options to skill up on. I'm not going to make green glyphs when I'm at such a low stock of inks due to finances as the skill ups are far more valuable.

I think that once I hit level 50 and get auto replenishment from VE my mana and drinking situation will be FAR better than what it is now, but damn is it getting annoying. This is the biggest problem with leveling a caster that's short on funding: no mana potions! I have a few on me for emergencies and healing instances, but I don't use them every CD like I did with my mage. And as cool as it looks, the damage of mind flay is for sucks as far as

In the interest of planning ahead, I bought some extra cloth and did all the reputation cloth turn ins at stormwind to get me up to revered. Since cloth is extremely cheap on the alliance side, 30% of what you pay on horde, it would wind up saving me roughly 30 gold once I purchase expert riding. Your rep with your faction's capital city now give discounts for flying skill and mounts in the respective towns in hellfire penn. So with taht saving me money there and the fact that cloth always sells so slowly I'd just vendor it puts me ahead a decent amount once I hit 60 and take it to the skies.

Gah inscription is finally past all the worthless glyphs and lowbie DMC's. It's up to celestial ink now, back to crafting worthwhile glyphs for a profit I go!

Questing in tanaris now and I made my first investment. I bought a cooking recipe that's only sold by the inn keeper there for 1g in hopes of selling it for about 15 or so. If it sells I'll buy a fist full more.

Sold another fist full of greens for 5g ea along with a few stacks of mageweave I picked up in ZF. I swear, my best market so far is looting mobs! The problem with questing in tanaris is that it's a desert and deserts as you know have zero flowers. So for the time being I'm not making any glyphs or getting any skill ups. But I
think my next stop after here would be feralas which I know has a bunch of good ones.

I'm going to take a few passes over the AH when I go to train next and see if I can see if there's anything I think I might be able to flip for a quick buck. I'll most likely be keeping an eye on belt buckles for a bit, see what their high end is at and try that. But before that I'm going to try my old favorite: eternal fire > crystallized conversion. Always good for a laugh and a few gold.

Money has been coming in slowly mostly because my main focus has been on leveling and not working the AH. This is because I can only make so make profitable glyphs with what little herbs I have. The higher my level, the sooner I'll be able to get inscription up to the point that I can mill NR herbs and will able to REALLY start
up the business. Naturally there's the flip side ot that as well; the more I level the more I have to spend on training. That includes skills, riding, mounts, and eventually dual spec. While dual spec isn't necessary, I cannot express how much I do want it so I can keep on healing randoms and such in between questing. Helps break up the monotony quite a bit.

Regardless, I'm going to slow down a lot on the leveling aspect and shift as much focus to the AH as I can so that once I reach 60 I won't be walking any more. I absolutely hate questing in hellfire on a land mount, like a lot. With the few hundred gold I have now I can afford the basic flying training plus mount, but I'm looking farther at epic flying. 5k is quite a lot when you have nothing to make money with and very little to invest. This is why so many people start their empires by farming or grinding in one fashion or another. It takes money to make money and the option for hard work will always be there, so that may be what I'll have to do for a bit just to get the necessary herbs.

I just realized something. I'm going to have to run my ass around once I get to NR as I won't be be able to buy a tome of CWF. I am not using my main industry to support myself in any way past the boa gear, so that is going to suck!

Just collected the mail and I'm up to 500g now, woot! Half way to dual spec and half way to being able to heal randoms again! I think I'll leave myself to level though instances only for the most part and spend the majority of my time on this toon parked at the AH. They ARE my banker after all heh. We all know getting into a new market is a daunting task, but getting into an entirely different economy is a whole different ball game, hell it's not even the same league. However the same basic rules will always apply no matter where you go in warcraft. People are always going to pay a large amount for simple things, out of the way vendors can be very
lucrative, everybody needs glyphs. I've always thought of glyphs as a consumable or a buff as opposed to an enhancement like a gem. With gems you gem your int, str, or stam. Which ever your spec digs the most and that's that, your gemming won't drastically effect the outcome of an encounter.

But glyphs can have VERY useful effects on specific encounters. A simple example is the glyphs for taunts. They give you an extra 8% chance for your taunt to land which combined with a decent amount of hit gear and 3% from debuffs makes it a guarantee that your taunt will always work. Normally a failed taunt just means that the mage
or holy priest just got 1 shot by trash. But on an encounter like festergut or DBS a missed taunt almost always means a wipe. So trading out a bit of threat or a small amount of survival for a promised wipe prevention tool is a wonderful trade off. Because of this, glyphs will always be a thriving market, which is one of the many reasons it was my obvious choice of a profession.

So far the obligatory spending list is looking like this:
1,000 - dual spec
300 - flying mount/skill
5,250 - epic flying
1,000 - cold weather flying

That's about 7,700 gold that I have to make between now and 80 through professions and quest rewards and assorted junk. Definitely quite a bit, but once you hit NR the quest gold is pouring in. I believe you get something like 2-3k just from quests and vendoring rewards. Combine that with selling green inks and whatever glyphs I craft between now and then I think it's definitely possible. The only mission after that is to get my healy chica decked out in purples at 80 which will be at least another 10k and then there's the ominous glyph market I must tame yet again. Now that's a hefty to do list, even for me heh.

I'm a retard. I just hit 48 and went to train. Remember when I said mindflay does fuck all damage? Heh that's right, I was using rank one and never trained it past that, now it's up to the proper rank. Wow I fail! I was wondering why a talented ability was only doing like 60-70 per tick with all the bonus spell power I have and
the glyph for 10% bonus. Just wow lol! And yes, I actually was laughing out loud when I wrote that.

I picked up a quest in middle of nowhere feralas to kill a bunch of naga around here and pick up their scales. Why does this matter at all? Because it just so happens that these are the naga that drop some clams which contain golden pearls. As in the ones needed for 30sp enchant. So far I've gotten 2 blacks and 1 gold and a 14 spot bag... fuk yeah. I'll be hanging around here for another 15 minutes or so killing naga now that the quest is done to try and get a second pearl. I'll see if I can get a scroll made for 30sp and cash that in to get dual spec. Hah! 3 minutes later I got a second golden pearl! Not bad at all I say! Uber excited! They're also falling over dead in moments now that I've got mindflay trained up to max level, which means 7 seconds per kill and ~250 exp. I'll be hanging around for a bit longer as there's a ton of purple lotus I can pick up which I desperately need for inscription leveling.

I left to turn in the quest after a couple more minutes of killing and got a follow up to go and kill the naga leader, joy! I never even knew this place existed until a short while ago. Granted I don't like farming, but you have to start somewhere and with no significant start up cash you do what you gotta do. Ok done with that section of quests, walked out with 5 more glyphs crafted a pair of gold pearls and 5 blacks along with a ton of clam meat. Not bad for a short amount of time questing for 18k exp at all. Off to darnassus to auction off this stuff and train inscription. Once this stuff sells I should be just about able to purchase dual spec. I'll be waiting till I have at least 50g more than the 1k cost so I can afford to train all the skills for both shadow and disc a bit after in case I don't get any glyph sales. Gotta be careful.

I see 5 golden pearls on AH for 30g ea and a few others for 50, the rest are all 100+ so I'm rather tempted to try and flip the cheap ones, but since I have zero knowledge of the alliance economy I'm very hesitant to do so. The potential to lose up to 50% of my gold is very frighting. I'll be keeping a close eye out over the
next few days and see how many get sold and how many expire. They're all up for 48 hour auctions so after two days I'll see if any sold and if none have sold I'll wait a bit more before lowering the price of mine. If a number of them do sell however, I'll be buying the rest of the cheap ones to flip. So far most of the single eternal I bought has sold as crystals so I've at least made up my investment on that so once the rest of it sells that'll be a nice 8g profit.

I sold a pair of the cooking recipes I got in tanaris for a total of 30g so I hoped on the birds and bought another 5 to stash away.

Not knowing anything about alliance leveling is becoming a pain as I near 58. I'm spending a good deal of time flying around and waiting for boats, looking on google/wow wiki for where the boats ARE and where they go etc. Getting very annoying. I'm questing in the hinterlands now and doing a bunch of 8k exp turn ins all around the old world from tanaris to stv to darnassus, god that place is out of the way! After there all I really have left is un'goro, winter spring, fel wood, and maybe the plague lands. I'll be healing a quick ZF and ST run for a few dungeon quests and to get back in the swing of disc paly again as I'm just under 1k gold. I'm sure that once I hit 60 I'll have earned at least another 300g for training and flying through glyphs or drops. The hinterlands has huge supply of purple lotus and sun grass it seems so I'm picking up a lot of herbs to mill into the inks I need to level inscription. It's a good feeling making sinister strike glyphs as they always sell for a profit.

Golden pearls are still at the same low price and none have sold so far and they're down to 12 hours left on AH. Once they fall off I'll repost mine for 80g each as a two stack. If the others post theirs at less than 30g I'll buy them and see if they can be flipped, I'm sure I can get at least 50 for them. Sold off all the crystals from the eternal fire so I'm going to buy another one and repeat a few times until I get dual spec.

Woot over 1k gold!

Woot dual spec!

Shit I'm broke again! >_<

It's all good though, the hardest part as anybody can tell you is starting out. I've already proven to myself that the glyphs are working as half of my income has been from inscription. I'm sure I could easily stop here saying well if I got 1k I could get 214k! Duh. It's all about how it's done and showing legit AH playing, that's the premiss. With none of the high end expenses in leveling getting gold is a matter of making sure you sell stuff to a vendor. But if you want the good stuff well, you've gotta play the game.

I just healed the avatar of hakkar fight in ST and my god that was a rush! It was like pure chaos! Dozens of adds flying around, everybody randomly getting aggro from off center spawns, several elites that seriously hurt anybody in cloth (me) and then a big ass skeleton dragon the swoops in and starts gobbling up the first person with threat (me again!) and finally all was done. I walked away wit ha very nice blue head piece from the quest and an increased interest in healing at 80. Gonna like this disc priest thing.

Loging on for some fun questing at 52 and collected my mail. Back up to over 200g so I'll definitely be able to afford basic flying at 60. Golden pearls are still filthy cheap here but on horde side they're refusing to go below 80g a piece. Must not be a lot of alliance alts so the raid scene here must be far better than horde. I know the best guild on Ysera is alliance right now since the former top dog was horde and they've recently disbanded. If that's the case it shouldn't be too hard for me to get into non epic fail ToC groups.

Level 56 now and finishing up the last few quests in winterspring. I've ran into a bit of a snag though. None of the herbs I'm getting are giving me the inks I need for another 20 skill points. I've out leveled my professions and that's not a good thing as my next stop is the palguelands and then to outland. So I'll have to either go back and farm or buy the herbs or inks. Since I'm going to be a bit short on cash after training expert riding buying is not an option. So unless I get lucky with a few sales, back to un'goro I go to farm. Bletch!

Though it seems that I'm making about a hundred a day which is quite good considering I'm questing 90% of the time and have very limited glyphs to sell. So I'm sure I can afford to buy a few herbs or whatever is cheap to skill up. Doesn't mean I have to like it though. Just spend 80g on IotS since I'm an hour or so from hitting outland and CBA to go on the long ass trip to un'goro and farm the herbs I need. I can get a port to dala for a few gold more and buy the last of the celestial inks that I need and any shimmering I might be short on. This is also because any herbs that I find in outland minus a fistfull of silver sage will only be giving me
etheral inks for the whole 12 levels I'll be there. If I wind up with any spare IotS for some reason I'll just stash them in the bank until I can use them as there's no way I won't be getting enough etherals to last me through outlands.

Just collected 300g from my mail box! I spent that money on a frostweave bag for 30g and a bunch of IotS and felweed. Looking for a dala port so I can get some good glyph recipes that sell often.

Ding 58 and off to outlands I go! But first I take a trip to Dalaran to make some glyphs... where I oopsed and spent over 100 something gold on training new glyphs and such. Heh down to 200 so no flying for me just yet. I do however have a large variety of profitable glyphs so it shouldn't take long to work it back up. Now that I can start crafting for the 9001 DK's out there things are really going to be picking up. I went in armed with a giant stokpile of 80 IotS and walked out of there with over 100 skill ups, a fresh stock of high end glyphs, and a stack of extra inks to refresh what ever happens to sell. I tossed my excess old world plats on the AH
for 2-3g each and they mostly all sold by the end of the night. So once I collect them and hit 60 I'll be ready to take it to the skies! Rawr!

Ugh skill trains and prof level ups are killing me! 3g per train is highway robbery, bletch! Not fun.

I just got stepped on by a fel reaver. I'm officially in outlands >.>

Ding 60 and I am the new proud owner of a shiny snowy griffon. I always thought the griffons and other alliance mounts were sooo much better looking than the horde. At some point I even plan to turn in a ton of cloth to get a frost saber mount, but that's a long ways off from now. It's a good thing that I thought ahead and did some out of the way quests and turned in cloth for storm wind rep or else I couldn't afford the mount plus class skills right now, yeesh.

Just healed a few runs through ramps, got some nice drops and experience. Had 2 DK's and a prot pally who all que'd up to tank. So I told them all to tank. It was in a word... interesting. They mass pulled everything and I can definitely keep 1 player alive through damned near anything right now, two I gotta work for it, 3... not so much hehe. But until we got to the big room where it splits off to the paths to two different bosses that's when trouble hit. All the mobs there hit exceptionally hard AND have an MS. Combine that with me having to shield myself to reduce push back from casters I had to let a DK die... QQ. Meh, not like that's the first time that's happen in the game lol.

Regardless, that combined with a few more glyph sales put me back up to 70g again after training the rest of my spells. Happy priest is happy. Up next is blood furnace.

Once I get back up to 100g I'll go back to flipping eternal fires and buy another few stacks of IotS. I'm sticking to stack sizes of only two for now so I can have as much of a diverse market as possible.

Ok this is so not fair. I just found the two coolest movie references and the most fun quest I've ever done in honor hold and all the horde gets is a quest with a reference to POOP! The exorcism of Colonel Jules and "A job for an intelligent man" both reference the exorcist and Tremors respectively. The exorcism quest was just plain awesome and was a tad creepy in it's own right. Very Cool. The Tremors reference was just too funny since I absolutely love that movie. In case you're unfamiliar with either of those movies, they're sci-fi and horror classics. Go watch them nao!

Good lord this is turning into a book O.o

Well the glyph machine is starting to humm and the engine is revving up! I'm doing the buy, mill, craft cycle already with outland herbs. At 12g/stack that makes 3g + parchment the cost of a glyph and with glyphs selling for 3.5g/ea bare minimum I'm back to the razor thin profits or massive profits once again. Granted the supply
is limited as I'm relying on questing herbalists currently, but soon I'll be able to buy mass amounts of IotS and then things will be really rolling along smoothly. Until then I'm still on my questing and random dungeon kick. I'll get back to flipping items soon I promise!

Breaking down eternal fires has always been a favorite past time of mine in my AH games. And the old tricks will always work it seems as I just sold another 3 eternals as crystals for a 10g profit per. And it looks like things are going to be
very interesting in the glyph market. Auctioneer is showing that the average price of Tiger Lilly is under 8g/stack. Wow. I sure wasn't expecting that one so that makes my potential profits much greater. However adder's tongue is averaging at 60g a stack for god's sake!

Ending the day at 25g with a very large supply of inks and inscription maxed out until I can level up more. Luckily I have almost 300 glyphs on auction along with quite a few assorted other things like cloth, old world herbs, greens, etc.

Calling the week closed at level 63. That means I have 15 levels to earn 6k... this is going to be interesting. The inscription pain train is ready to roll!


Thanks for stopping by!