10,000 gold a day in Cataclysm

This is sort of a follow-up to my previous post about my strategy for making gold in Cataclysm. My strategies weren't 100% successful but I still managed to make over 10K gold each day since Cataclysm launched.

In fact, I made 10K the first day, 18K the second, and 14K the third. 99% of that (or even more) was from 2 sources: farming Cata ore/herbs and inscription.

Regarding inscription, some glyphs have held their prices over 100G while others have tanked. Though I tried to craft the most popular glyphs according to wowpopular.com, it turns out that some of those glyphs are crap in terms of gold making.

Because I don't have an unlimited supply of herbs and/or inks, I have to be selective with the glyphs that I wish to replenish. For this, I scan the AH occasionally with Auction Profit Master (the former QA3) and only craft 1 of each glyph that goes for 80G or above. And there are plenty of those.

I'm posting several times a day using APM and canceling once or twice. There's no point in canceling more often because I get undercut almost immediately anyway so that would be a waste of time. Despite having only 1 of each glyph at a time on the AH and despite not canceling often, I'm still selling a lot. My goal for now is to simply clear my stock. At any rate, even if I sell the remainder at a loss, I believe I have more than recovered my costs in crafting the initial stock.

Now mining and herbing are where it's at!

For mining, I'm selling mostly Elementium Bars, in stacks of 20 or singles. Initially they didn't sell very well but I guess demand wasn't very high for them. Now, they sell like hotcakes. I can't farm them quickly enough. Unfortunately, Blizzard has nerfed the spawn rate on nodes in Twilight Highlands where I like to farm for this ore. So now it takes longer to mine the same amount. On the other hand prices seem to have jumped up a little so that makes up for the nerfing.

I've sold Elementium Bars for between 300 to 570 a stack. I don't really care what the price is and I'm not waiting for prices to go up or to stay at a certain level. As long as I'm not undercutting by tens of hundreds of gold per stack, I will post my bars under the lowest seller. Oh and I always post 1 stack or 2 bars/volatiles at a time. It's a good thing not to flood the market.

Volatiles of all types are also selling like crazy. The funny thing is that even though they are the equivalent of Crystallized/Motes and not Eternals/Primals, each one of these volatiles sells for anywhere between 10 to 50 gold each. At one point I even sold one Volatile Air for 225 gold!

Regarding Volatile Air, my miner is also an engineer and the first thing I did in Cataclysm was to craft an Electrostatic Condenser for him. That is a very smart thing to do if you have a miner/herbalist/skinner + engineer. Those Volatile Airs are scarce and they sell for a lot.

Herbalism is a slightly different beast. Initially, herbs were selling much better than bars so I farmed a lot of them. At first, I farmed plenty of Twilight Jasmine in Twilight Highlands. The zone was teeming with that herb. But later I found out that Blizzard nerfed that too. It was good while it lasted.

Then, I realized that Whiptail, which is found mostly in Uldum, sold much better than the higher level herb. So I farmed lots of that. I sold stacks of Whiptail for between 280 to 475 gold.

Now, herbs seem to have slowed down so I've switched my farming more towards ore rather than herbs.

One thing that I've noticed is that these new mats seem to have very low vendor prices. In fact they are lower than Wrath mats which I find very odd. Could it be because Blizzard didn't want people to be able to vendor them and make lots of gold that way? That doesn't make sense because you can make a LOT more by putting them up on the AH.

A consequence of this low vendor price is that the AH deposit cost is also low, meaning that if you are undercut, it doesn't cost you jack to cancel and repost.

My strategy flopped where old mats are concerned. Saronite Bars are still cheap-ish and I can only sell a few bars a day, but at least I'm still making a profit. My only concern is that my banks and bags are overflowing with Saronite Ore.

Adamantium Ore similarly flopped but I don't think it's a bad investment because in the future these mats are bound to become scarcer and I'm not going to panic and sell-sell-sell at any price. I'm just bidding my time, slowly trickling them to the market.

So that's about it. As you can see, my strategy revolved mainly around farming and selling the new Cataclysm mats now, during the first week or two, when demand is high and prices likewise. I haven't made a lot of gold compared to others who might have speculated certain mats or items but on the other hand I don't ever recall making so much gold several days in a row.