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Saturday, October 17, 2009

Flip Books of Glyph Mastery and Profit

Here's a short gold-making tip for you. Although this is something that you should keep in mind in general, I applied this method to Books of Glyph Mastery with a high measure of success this past week. Not a big earner on its own, this method won't make you tons of gold but you can chalk it up as another source of income in your diversified money-making portfolio.

I'm talking about flipping. If you know your server's market very well and how prices ebb and flow during the week you can successfully flip items on a frequent basis. Mats in particular are susceptible to flipping since you can be almost certain of what their prices will be as the week progresses.

Books of Glyph Mastery aren't exactly mats. They are a scarce commodity and, although in theory you can farm them, in reality the drop rate is very low. Ever since they were introduced I only had 2 drop and I've been questing extensively in Northrend.

The market for these books can be fickle. Demand is based on how many people need to master their Inscription profession. Luckily (if you're trying to sell them; less so if you're trying to learn as many glyphs as possible), a scribe needs a whole bunch of these books in order to learn some of the most powerful glyphs in the game.

My scribe, for example, has learned all the glyphs from the Book, all the glyphs from research and most of the glyphs from the trainer. Being a very patient individual, I bought Books over a period of a few months, whenever prices were at their lowest. Now, since I can't use them for myself anymore, I am keeping an eye out on their prices.

About a week ago I spotted a sharp decline in price. Usually these books sell for around 30-40 gold. The price "anomaly" had brought them down to 15 gold and less. The obvious thing to do here was buy everything under 15 gold. I could've squeezed my margins even more by buying everything under 20 gold but I didn't want to risk it because sometimes people undercut each other like crazy.

I bought about 30 Books between 8 gold (!!) and 15 gold. I sold them a few days later, when prices "normalized", for 30-45 gold. Net profit: at least 450 gold.

Although you won't be able to get rich from this scheme, it's worth keeping an eye out for cheap Books, especially ones that are waaaay cheaper than what's normal for your server. Sometimes people have no idea what an item is worth and they just post it at whatever price, just to get rid of it quickly. When you see it, snag it. As long as you are confident that prices will go up in a few days, this is a surefire way to round up your profits nicely.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

People are doing this on my server; unfortunately I'm the unlucky scribe looking to buy them :(

I'm curious - how do you know when you've learnt all the glyphs from the books / researches?

Darth Solo said...

Ah, good question. I too was afraid that I would waste an expensive book only to find out that I can't learn anymore from it. However, once you've learned all glyphs from books, you can't learn anymore. You get a message to the effect of "You have learned everything from this book".

Shannara said...

That is weird. It sounds like your server is hosed. Ive never seen it under 250g on Ghostlands-US and Garona-US. And thats only when they are in the AH.

Ah well,

Darth Solo said...

My server is high-population (as far as I can tell), probably that's why. 250G was the price a short time after these books were introduced (patch 3.1 I believe).

You can still apply the same strategy whether the books are 25g or 250g. If you see them for 100g or 150g => 100g profit!

Flippies Custom Flip Books said...

These are just like the flip books at http://www.flippies.com