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
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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!


Thanks for stopping by!