My guest post on Just My Two Copper

Hi everyone! Just wanted to give y'all a heads-up about my guest post "Free tool for WoW bankers" on Just My Two Copper. Yes, as you might have guessed, it's about BankAlt.com, my special WoW project. I have decided that now's a good time to announce the site to a larger audience and JM2C is probably the best place to do it.

If you like to craft in World of Warcraft or to make gold with professions, there's a high chance that BankAlt will help you become not only more efficient but also more profitable. So head on to read the article or jump right to BankAlt.

Farming as therapy

Farming for ore and herbs may not be everyone's cup of tea, nor is it the absolute best gold per hour method of making money in WoW but it has one advantage: it doesn't require a lot of neurons. By this I mean that you can do it on auto pilot, while engaging in other activities.

When I get in the farming mood, it becomes therapeutic. Some people consider fishing to be therapeutic but for me it is too static an activity and besides you have to constantly keep an eye on the bobber. Not so with ore and herb farming. The only thing you need to do is check the minimap occasionally.

I'm the type of person who likes to multitask while doing certain activities. For example I usually have to do something while eating: watch a movie, read a blog or an article or read a book. Eating is one of those activities that can be done on auto pilot while engaging in a more meaningful activity. Since time is limited and precious, this makes a lot of sense to me.

I like to apply the same philosophy to World of Warcraft, or other similar games. Here are a few of the things that you, or I, could do while farming:

You could listen to music and sing along, provided you are either home alone or American Idol material or are not ashamed to make a fool of yourself.

Or you could, if you are lucky enough to have dual monitors, watch a movie/show/Youtube/etc on your second monitor.

Or you could engage in discussion with a spouse/friend/family member because you don't need to give too much attention to the farming activity itself.

Or you could eat/drink. I've done this many times and I assure you it's not hard at all.

Or you could listen to a podcast. This, in fact, is my favorite activity while farming. I have a number of podcasts I subscribe to and some of them are 1 hour in length. That's long enough to gather sufficient mats and short enough to not reach total boredom.

Or, if gambling is your drug, you can try a little poker or real money blackjack on your second monitor.

There are probably other activities that you can easily do while farming but I haven't thought of them yet. Suggestions are welcome.

If you are concerned with making full use of your limited time, dual-tasking is probably for you. The time spent in WoW is same as the time spent in real life so why not make use of the same amount of time for both WoW and real life?

Farming is so easy that anyone can do it. If you really want to go crazy, you can even level all the way to 85 doing nothing but farming. There are no high level or complicated strategies involved. There is no brainpower involved. Just get on your mount and make a circuit of your favorite farming area. And the best part about doing something else while farming? No stress. Someone else snatched your node from under your nose? No problem, you can just move on while listening to that great podcast in the background.

So just chillax while farming. It's therapeutic man!

Post-Cataclysm gold tips

This post is a follow-up to My Cataclysm gold strategy and is also written in response to Marcko's (of Justmytwocopper) blogging carnival challenge.

My gold-making tips this time are also restricted to certain professions, namely gathering (mining and herbalism, inscription and jewelcrafting).


For Miners/Herbalists

During the first week or so of Cataclysm I concentrated mostly on mining/herbing in the new areas and simply selling the mats on the auction house, plus some inscription on the side. These alone netted over 100K gold in a little more over a week.

Gathering allowed me to discover and explore the new areas, while at the same time making a lot of gold in the process. The XP from mining/herbing nodes is also nothing to sneeze at.

While prices for the new herbs and bars have stabilized to an extent and are even decreasing, I feel that it is still worth it to farm mats because there's still a long way to go before prices will hit Wrath levels. If you don't find farming boring, then I advise you to keep at it, at least for another couple of weeks. Sell, sell, sell everthing you find and resist the urge to use those mats to level your own professions. Remember, opportunity cost.


For Scribes/Inscriptionists/Inscribers/Inscriptors/...

Personally I have shifted away from farming to an equally (or even more so) profitable endeavor. Namely inscription. I guess I was running out of interesting podcasts to listen to while farming but I think the biggest factor was time. Even if I don't make as much gold in a day from inscription compared to farming, I believe that the gold per hour from crafting glyphs is a lot more than from farming.

Glyphs are still hot-selling items despite the fact that they are now learn-once-use-many. The most expensive seem to be the ones crafted from Ethereal Ink (Outland herbs) and Ink of the Sea (Northrend herbs).

While Ethereal Ink is very expensive (and so are Outland herbs), that's not the case with Wrath herbs and Ink of the Sea. I can still find cheap inks and herbs which I mill and convert to inks.

As for the lower level inks, I like to buy cheap herbs (there's plenty of them now that most new scribes have finished leveling) and just convert them to inks. It is folly to exchange Blackfallow Ink for lower quality inks at the moment due to the fact that this new ink is extremely expensive.

So I won't bother with anything crafted from Blackfallow Ink or Ethereal Ink for now. In a couple of days my worgen druid will reach Outland and he's a herbalist so I will use him to gather some herbs (for both XP and mats) but until then I'm sticking with the other inks.

My strategy is to use Auction Profit Master to scan the AH for glyphs, once a day. I will create a list with just 1 glyph of anything that sells for at least 60G. Then I will craft and post, just once per day with a 12 hour duration. On weekends I'll post/cancel/re-post 2 or 3 times but I won't bother on weekdays. Usually the next day I'll find that about half of my glyphs have sold. The cool thing is that on weekdays I don't have to cancel the glyphs. By posting them at "rush-hour", i.e. in the evening with a 12 hour duration, they will expire on their own some time the next day while I'm at work.

I also keep a list of glyphs that have sold along with the price they sold at. You don't have to do that but it allows me to tell at a glance which glyphs are holding their price and which can be crafted more than once. Speaking of which, I prefer to craft 1 of each because prices are somewhat volatile for certain glyphs and I want to minimize risk as much as possible because mats are now more expensive than they were. Also, posting 1 glyph allows me to work under the radar of the big sellers.

Currently, I make 1000-2000 gold from inscription daily, without trying too hard and just posting once per day. If I get more into it (more frequent scans/posts/re-posts), I can make more. The other night I made almost 4K simply by resetting my crafting queue and creating a new one. Total work: about 30 minutes.

My "secret", if you can call it that, is that most of the inscription work I do is AFK. Look for a future post on the subject but there are too many details to get into and now's not the time. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to do it though.


For Jewelcrafters

If you are a jewelcrafter, these teeny-tiny tips might benefit you. After Cataclysm I've noticed that 2 items are continuing to sell very well and in fact the demand for them seems higher than in Wrath BUT the supply is much lower. I'm talking about Nightmare Tear and Enchanted Pearl.

Nightmare Tear is crafted from 1x Dragon's Eye + 5x Infinite Dust. As a jewelcrafter you should do your daily Dalaran JC quest, unless it's a pain in the ass to get to Dalaran. My JC is posted in Dalaran and I do that quest every day. The green Wrath gems can be bought cheaply from the AH. Infinite Dust on my server is about 2G a piece or less. Dragon's Eyes vary in price but they can be anywhere between 40G-100G.

Simply by buying my mats off the AH, I can create a Nightmare Tear for a cost of around 100G and I can sell it for 200G. They seem to be selling as soon as I post them.

Enchanted Pearls are another under-the-radar item. They too are prismatic gems but they cost much less to craft and are thus less risky than Nightmare Tears. They only require 1x Northsea Pearl ( < 1G on my server) and 1x Infinite Dust. I like to sell them for 15G-30G.

One other tip is this: if you can find someone dumping cheap Enchanted Pearls on the AH, snatch them and re-post at the "correct" price. The other night someone had posted a dozen of them at under 2G a piece. I grabbed them all, then re-posted at 30G apiece. In a couple of hours 4 of them had sold.


For everyone else

For the rest of us, you can try selling Vanishing Powder and Dust of Disappearance which can both be bought from the inscription supplies vendor. There are lots of foolish/lazy/ignorant people out there who buy these for a premium from the AH instead of getting them from the vendor.

As an example, I buy Vanishing Powder for 35 silver for 5 pieces and sell them for 75 silver apiece. Dust of Disappearance is even better, though it is a higher risk item. I buy mine for 10G apiece and sell them for 15-30G apiece. Hefty profits right there.


The End

As you can see, my post-Cataclysm gold-making strategies are mostly based around certain professions but let's face it: having access to a high-level profession opens up your horizons and gold-making opportunities by a lot. Even if it's hard for someone to fully level a crafting profession, there's no excuse not to have at least one gathering skill, if not two. And even then, you can still do some "auction house PvP" and flip a few items around. Bottom line is: with or without professions, to make gold in WoW, some work is involved!

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.

My Cataclysm gold strategy

I'm not one of the big gold-making sharks, nonetheless I have made a few preparations for Cataclysm and hopefully my gold reserves will increase by a decent amount during the first few weeks of the expansion. To be honest I'm not dedicated 100% to making gold because I've got plenty for now and I would also like to actually play the game the way it is meant to be played.

For Cataclysm I would like to try something new. It remains to be seen if my experience and observations will give good results (or not). My strategy is not overly complicated and is made up of several pieces. Here they are.

Glyphs

As always, glyphs remain my main source of income. When patch 4.0.1 was released I made several mistakes mostly due to my not reading the patch notes very carefully. The biggest mistake was that I didn't realize that glyphs would require 3 inks instead of 1. I had a few hundred inks stocked up but it wasn't nearly enough to make lots of gold. In retrospect, I should have crafted the most popular glyphs in advance and stocked them before the patch. Instead, I did all my crafting post-patch which was another big mistake.

This time, I've hopefully wised up and I've been buying cheap herbs off the auction house for a while, milling and converting them into inks whenever I got the chance. By "cheap" I mean anything that goes for 15 gold or less per stack. A stack of herbs produces about 2 glyphs so my costs are around 8G per glyph. For such a major patch I'm expecting glyphs to sell for tens of gold each so my profits should be proportional.

Another strategy that I'm applying here is this. Due to not having enough ink to craft 10 or even 20 of all the glyphs in the game, I've had to narrow things down to just the most popular glyphs. To find out which ones are the most popular I've headed to wowpopular.com and made a list in Excel with the top glyphs for every class.

Even narrowing down the glyphs to the most popular I still don't have enough ink so I've decided to craft only 5 of each. This also serves to spread out the risk because if a glyph drops down a lot in price I should still have a variety of other glyphs to fall back on. Having 5 of each should also help me to clear my stocks quickly. At the moment of writing this I have already crafted 400 glyps (that's 80 different glyphs, 5 of each) and have ink for another 200 or so.

I'm planning to list my glyphs on the auction house the night before Cataclysm is released, with a 24 hour timer. I haven't used this method before so I don't know what will happen but hey, even if I sell all my glyphs at a loss I won't end up on the streets (of Stormwind). Profit comes with risk.

As I write this paragraph, it is now post-patch 4.0.3a. This means The Shattering has happened and new race-class combinations have been enabled. I applied the strategy outlined above and listed all my glyphs with a 24-hour period but unfortunately I haven't sold a lot. What I did sell made me a nice profit. From about a dozen glyphs sold (perhaps even less), I made 1000 gold by selling each glyph for about 80-90 gold each. Not too shabby. On the other hand I'm still left with a lot of stock. The sad truth is that people are still willing to undercut glyphs to the ground, despite glyphs now requiring 3 inks and not being able to buy lower level inks with Ink of the Sea. I will maintain my position though and hope that Cataclysm will bring a lot more customers. At any rate, I don't believe I'll be losing money on this, on the contrary. It's just that this is probably the last time I will be selling glyphs en masse because it is simply not worth the time investment anymore.


Saronite

My next strategy is something that I've been preparing for a very long time. I've been buying cheap Saronite Ore from the AH whenever the price was right. This one is a 100% safe investment because I've purchased the ore below vendor price for the bars. This, for me, is 60 silver a piece, or 12 gold a stack of ore. Converting the ore into bars results in a cost of 1.2 gold per bar and Saronite Bars will vendor for 1.25 gold.

I now have several hundred stacks of ore. I haven't bought this ore to vendor it. Instead, I've stockpiled it in the hopes that people will need lots of Saronite Bars to level Engineering, Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting. You literally need hundreds of bars for these professions.

As I write this, once again, it is post-patch 4.0.3a. Demand for Saronite Bars has suddenly skyrocketed and I'm selling bars for between 2+ gold each up to 7+ gold each. Just a while ago I sold a whole stack of individual bars for over 7 gold a piece. Wait, scratch that. My 7+ bars are selling like crazy so now I've upped the price to 10+ a bar. Compared to how much I paid for the ore, I've made between 500% and 800% profit on these bars.

With Cataclysm, I'm expecting the demand for Saronite Bars to grow because fewer people will be farming it and there will be all these new characters who will want to level their professions. As such, this seems like a very good investment.

Adamantite Ore

I have also been buying some cheap Adamantite Ore so that I can prospect it for Adamantite Powder which can be used to create Mercurial Adamantite which is used by Jewelcrafters to level their profession. Now this has been a bit of a gamble because so far I haven't had much success selling the Mercurial Adamantite. It remains to be seen if Cataclysm will change this.

Farming

My favorite strategy will be farming. It may not be the most efficient in terms of gold per hour but for me farming is fun. I'm talking especially about mining and herbalism. In Cataclysm (if previous expansions are an indicator) there will be huge initial demand for the new types of ore and herbs. I plan to spend most of my time during the first couple of weeks simply flying around the new areas and farming stuff.

Farming is not for everyone. Some people despise it because they claim there are better ways in which to make gold. That may be true but for me farming is exciting. I love flying around and the new areas especially will make this sweeter. I love it when a node pops on my radar and I swoop down to claim it. There's always the thrill of discovery when a node yields a bonus such as a rare gem or herb.

So for me farming is therapeutic. It is also fortunate that my Hunter is a miner and my Priest is a herbalist. These are the 2 characters that I would like to level to 85 first. While farming I will be queuing up for the new dungeons. This way I can both make gold and level at the same time.

I won't be using any of the farmed mats myself to level my own professions unless I need them for some cool new crafted item. Looking back to previous expansions, this seems like the smart thing to do. Initial demand for these mats is incredibly high and supply is scarce because most people are concentrating on leveling and not farming. Later, when things have settled down and everyone has leveled their main, mats will drop down in price a lot. That will be the time to buy cheap mats from the auction house and level my own professions.

Conclusion

As you can see, these aren't extremely complicated strategies and I don't plan to agonize day and night about ways in which to make even more gold. What all these methods do have in common is that they require professions in order to work. There's Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, Mining and Herbalism.

The truth is that although one can make gold without any profession, having one or two of them maxed out helps a great deal. Personally I have all professions maxed and this has helped me a lot because they are all inter-dependent and synergistic. Besides, you can easily swallow the cost of crafting one thing or another, especially if you can do it afk.

My advice is not to lose a lot of sleep over how much gold you will actually make at the start of Cataclysm. The true gurus will undoubtedly make hundreds of thousands of gold each. Personally I'll be content if I can make more than I would on a normal day, while having fun at the same time.

Note: This article was featured on JustMyTwoCopper's blog carnival for November.

Sharded all my tanking purplz

Last night I decided to shard all my protection paladin's epic tanking pieces. Why you may ask? Because I don't think I'll be tanking again in Cataclysm. Thanks Blizzard for making tanking frustratingly hard (at least for noobs like me)! Now at least I won't have to worry about juggling two specs.

I've been thinking about disenchanting my tanking set for a while but I was hesitating due to the fact that I had invested almost 20K gold in that set. However, I failed at tanking normal dungeons, much less heroics. And so, I figured that I wasn't any good at paladin tanking. At any rate, I enjoy retribution more so I'll be going as retribution from now on.

I also hesitated to shard my set because I thought that there might be a small chance to tank some Cataclysm dungeons but after I heard that they will be much tougher, I decided against it.

What convinced me to shard everything was the elemental invasion which caused a jump in Abyss Crystal prices. I decided that it's now or never because I won't be able to get as much for that armor or for those shards in the future. The prices for Abyss Crystals were a bit over 20G so I disenchanted everything that would vendor for less than 20G. Of course, I kept my ilvl 232 weapons because they vendor for over 20G.

So I've cut my losses by selling those crystals now and good riddance paladin tanking!

360 gold an hour mining Fel Iron

Here's another method of making a reasonable amount of gold that I have discovered recently. The only catch is that you need to have Mining and epic flight. If you don't have epic flight you can still use this method to make some gold but you won't be making 360 an hour or even 300 an hour.

I stumbled upon this method after needing a bunch of Fel Iron bars for my mage who's also an engineer. I didn't have enough bars in my personal stock so I checked the price on the auction house. A bar is created from 2 ore. The cheapest ore was 1.5G a piece and there weren't many at that price. The bars were more than 3G a piece. I figured that since my hunter (also my miner) has 310 flight, he might as well farm the ore himself.

One of the best - if not the best - places for Fel Iron is Hellfire Peninsula. In 10 minutes I had 2 full stacks of ore and I called it quits because that's all I needed.

Extrapolating, this would amount to about 360 gold an hour, farming Fel Iron. It might not be the best way to make gold in WoW but it's one more method under your belt and worth considering if you are a miner (with epic flight) and need the cash.

Make hundreds of gold with Shadowgem

I will now reveal one of my biggest gold making secrets. Well, it's not that big. In fact, if taken by itself it is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

However, I do believe strongly in diversification. What this means, in a nutshell, is that one should try to cover as many niches of the gold-making market as possible. Yes, you can certainly concentrate on the big money makers such as glyphs or gems but there's strong competition in those quarters and the stronger the competition, the lower your profits.

Thus, it's a good idea to spread your business to all reaches of the gold-making trade.

Playing the auction house is one of the big ways in which players make gold in World of Warcraft. Well, this technique is taken for granted by many, yet some still have trouble understanding how it works. One of the most obvious ways to play the auction house is to buy low and sell high. How does this apply to Shadowgem?

Many months ago I noticed that very often there were very cheap Shadowgem posted on the AH. On other occasions, the prices would be much higher by orders of magnitude. This disparity is what prompted me to keep a watchful eye on the Shadowgem market. From then on, I added this technique to my gold-making portfolio.

My technique is simple: I will buy any amount of Shadowgem under 1 gold and sell it for much more. I usually sell for 1.5 gold and up. Often I sell for over 2 gold and sometimes for upward of 4 gold. Each. Sometimes people are selling these for a few silver a piece and I cackle madly when I buy them. It's insane!

Over time I made hundreds of gold by selling Shadowgem. Sometimes there's a lot of supply and not much demand so the prices stay low for many days. Eventually they always jump up again. I've found that often I can safely create 48 hour auctions at a price of around 1.5 gold a piece because the deposit is extremely low and usually they sell in that period.

So why the hell do people need so much Shadowgem? It's a very low level item that should be very cheap, yet it isn't. I've puzzled over this for some time but I didn't bother to figure it out because I was too lazy and I didn't care a lot. One day I decided to check and it is as I suspected. The biggest use for Shadowgem is for leveling Jewelcrafting. People need about 40 of them to craft Gloom Band and another 20 to craft Ring of Twilight Shadows. That's at least 3 stacks of Shadowgem for every leveling jewelcrafter.

I'm selling these as singles but after realizing what they are used for, I am going to try to sell them in stacks of 10 and 20. Here's the trick though. Someone might buy a cheaper stack of 20 because they know they need 20 for leveling. After they use them, they might find out that they still need a few singles so they will generally pay any amount for those singles since they don't want to spend all the cash for another stack of 20. So generally you can get away with selling singles at a higher price than stacks of 10 or 20.

I'm predicting that in Cataclysm there will be high demand for Shadowgem, at least in the first few weeks, as people try to level their Jewelcrafting. You might want to stock up on a few stacks yourself. I've got plenty.

Patch 4.01 - the (brief) revival of inscription

Any WoW player who has a pulse and is still interested in the game should have noticed by now that patch 4.01 is on the PTR and can also be downloaded with the background downloader. WoW Insider has also made the announcement.

Among the many, many goodies that this patch brings, which is pretty much all the class changes and new mechanics from Cataclysm - sans the new races, the sundered continents and other Cata-only features - is the revamped glyph system.

As a brief refresher, the new glyph system will consist of 3 tiers instead of the current 2 and will also allow any player to learn all the glyphs for their class, just once, and then swap them into the glyph interface when needed. Once you learn a glyph you won't be needing to re-learn it again, ever.

Untold amounts of electronic ink have already been spilled over this controversial change and I don't believe any consensus has been reached. One thing is for certain: inscription, as a profession and a means of making gold, will change. For bad or for worse, it remains to be seen.

Seeing that patch 4.01 will hit before Cataclysm, bringing with it the new changes to glyphs, I suddenly realized that this might well be inscription's last big breath in terms of gold profits, before it will be dragged in line with the other professions.

What will 99.99% of people do shortly after patch 4.01 hits? They will buy all the glyphs they need for their various specs. This means instant high demand for all sorts of glyphs, even those that weren't popular before. Those who are anticipating this change (like myself), stand to profit from it. The only requirement here is to have enough inks or herbs in stock. Luckily I have both inks and herbs and I was just wondering how I was gonna get rid of all those herbs short of selling them for a pittance.

Now, profits from the glyph business won't simply peter out with Cataclysm. I'm sure the overall demand for glyphs will drop but it will stabilize at a certain level and perhaps prices will even become more stable since every single glyph will potentially be useful to someone.

In conclusion, with patch 4.01 I'm expecting a spike in demand for glyphs (along with a corresponding spike in profits) followed by a gradual dip, another spike when Cataclysm launches thanks to all the new characters and people returning to the game, another gradual dip and finally a relatively stable (but lower than currently) demand post-Cataclysm.

Liquidate now!

MMO Champion is estimating that Cataclysm will be launched on November 2nd or close to that date. I tend to believe these guys because they've been right in the past with their predictions. Apart from that, patch 4.0.1 will hit live servers sooner than I would have expected. All this means that Cataclysm is indeed upon us.

My subscription has expired for about a week and I don't want to renew it just yet. I want to play again before Cataclysm for several reasons. First, I want to get some more discipline healing done on my priest. Second, I need to sell all my stocks of mats because I have a feeling they'll lose a lot of their value in the expansion.

Normally I would have hung on to my stocks because a lot of people will re-roll and will want to power level their professions. This expansion, however, will be different. Remember that while normal recipes will give one skill point, blue and epic ones will give more, up to five if I'm not mistaken. This means that fewer mats will be required to level your professions so demand will likely be lower.

Furthermore, since people will be able to fly in Azeroth, they will also be able to gather old-world mats very quickly, likely leading to an over-supply.

That's my problem for now. I have to clean up my inventory and guild bank. I'm not really looking towards making a killing during the first days of Cataclysm. If I can see an opportunity I'll take it but I won't be intentionally spending time to make even more gold. I want to enjoy the game by playing my classes in the revamped world.

I'm still not sure when I should renew my subscription. If the Nov 2nd date is correct, maybe I should wait until the first week of October. I still have a lot of things to take care of in real life until then. I haven't even been around a computer for the past week so I'm a bit out of touch with the online world. What I'm seeing from the Cataclysm beta makes me hungry for leveling some new classes and trying the new mechanics.

New glyph selling technique

Here's a quick tip regarding how to make gold with inscription. In case your gold from selling glyphs has slowed to a trickle lately, why not try this technique?

I've been experimenting with this new method and it seems to be working. Before I started using this, I was making a pathetic 100G a day or less from inscription but now I'm back to making hundreds and even more than a thousand a day on the weekends. The only thing that seems to make a difference here is how often I can check, cancel and re-post my auctions.

My new method is as follows. I scan the AH using QA3 and select 1 of each glyph that goes for over 20G for crafting. Just one. No more 10 of each glyph. Not even 4 or 2. Though it may seem like a lot of work, I found that it works for me, and in fact it's less work.

The logic (at least how it applies to my server) is that because glyph prices oscillate wildly from one day to the next, they might go from 50G to 5G in a couple of days. If I crafted several of each glyph I'd go nuts and I'd be left with a lot of valueless stock. By crafting just 1 high-value glyph I can strike surgically right at the heart of the glyph market. Wow what a crappy metaphor!

Anyway, now I don't have to worry anymore that my stock of glyphs is losing value. By crafting a single glyph, my stock is always fresh with expensive glyphs. Let those damn campers waste their time on cheap glyphs.

At this point you might say, yes Darth, but you're missing out on a large part of the glyph market. You know what? I don't care. The extra time I would put into crafting the cheaper glyphs just isn't worth it for me. I have enough gold as it is. I'm just trying to keep my gold-making at about 1000G a day from various professions, dailies, instances, etc. Anything over that is just icing.

Inscription is dead

The time has come to proclaim that inscription is finally dead in the water. At least for me. There was a time when I was making a lot of gold from inscription. In fact I made over 100K from it and those were good times. 5 months ago inscription was still going strong and I still made a few hundred gold a day easily. On weekends I made 1000G consistently.

These days, I'm pulling around 60G a day and if I'm really lucky, I can make up to 100G. The truth is I don't even bother with inscription the way I used to. I'm mostly trying to clear my stock.

The competition has become a bunch of vicious sharks. Glyph prices oscillate wildly from 60G to less than 1G in a few days. Some of these guys seem to be 24/7 online, undercutting instantly and continuously. There's no point in trying to beat them. Besides, it seems that demand for glyphs has dropped.

Cataclysm will sign the final demise of inscription. In Cataclysm you'll be able to add glyphs to your "spell-book" or some-such interface, meaning that once you've added that glyph you can swap it at any time you wish, i.e. it becomes permanent, much like spells that you only learn once.

Let's see those undercutters undercut the Cataclysm glyphs to oblivion. That will render inscription truly dead.

For now, I'm just concentrating on other things. I continue to craft a limited set of glyphs, only those that sell for at least 20G and only 2 at a time.

It was good while it lasted.

What would you do with a million gold?

For many WoW players, 1 million gold is a fabulous amount, something that they will never hope to attain even if they were to play for a lifetime. For others, it has long become a reality. Personally I'm sitting on a quarter of that amount, so it's perfectly reasonable to assume that, if I really set my mind to reaching 1 million gold, I could do it.

Beyond the novelty of having such a huge amount of gold, one has to wonder what can be done with so much virtual money. I mean what's the point? I can't even use a quarter million.

Besides the obvious (buying all the vanity pets, mounts, equipment, etc. for all your characters), here's my idea. I would try to control the market for certain goods for a period of time. Would I need 1 million gold for that? Probably not, but it's certainly a nice fallback amount in case things go wrong.

I wouldn't be able to do it for extended periods of time and I would probably need to take a week off from work to accomplish this. By "controlling" the market I mean "form a total monopoly on certain goods". I would probably scope out some scarce crafting mats and I would buy them all below a certain threshold. Then I would set my own price and sell them at that price. I would buy all undercutters and re-post.

What would I accomplish? In the end probably not much. It would be more of an experiment but in the best case I would turn even more profits. Unfortunately I don't know what success such a scheme would have due to people constantly undercutting, at all hours, even in the middle of the night when I can't do anything about it. That's why I'd have to take time off from work. So in the end it might not be such a great idea after all.

I just wish I had $1 million instead. I'd certainly find a use for those!

What about you? What would you do with a million gold?

Inscription still going strong

This morning I was surprised to empty my inscription alt's mailbox and find 2000 gold from yesterday's sales. Well, to be honest, it was almost 2000, more precisely 1999G 89S 2C. Usually I sell for less than 1000 a day. On weekends I can watch the market more closely and of course sell more.

The method I continue using, with the minimum amount of stress is the one detailed in my Inscription these days post.

This basically implies crafting only glyphs which sell for at least 20 gold, 6 of each, posting 1 of each at a time using QA3, then logging in occasionally and re-posting. Later, collect profits.

Inscription these days

Just a quick heads-up on how I do business with Inscription these days. Things have calmed down a bit and prices seemed to have stabilized. My strategy is simple...

1. I buy cheap herbs whenever I find them. I watch out for Icethorn or Adder's Tongue, ideally at 10G a stack. I will buy any amount at that price.

2. I mill the herbs and convert them to inks. Snowfall Inks become Runescrolls of Fortitude most often, that I sell for a decent profit. Occasionally I will craft Iron-bound Tomes but the profit here is not high due to many sellers undercutting each other to the ground.

3. By the time I craft my glyphs, I have already recuperated the cost of buying herbs and even made a profit due to selling Runescrolls.

4. I scan the AH with QA2 and queue up 4 of each glyph that's at least 20 gold. I won't even bother with cheaper ones. I could definitely do that, in which case my profits would be higher but it would mean a bigger time investment and I'm not willing to do that anymore.

5. I then craft everything that's in the queue, and then post 1 of each glyph with QA2, undercutting by 1c. I always use the minimum duration, which is 12 hours. That's so my undercut glyphs can return to my mailbox as quickly as possible.

6. Whenever I can be bothered, I log in and just get QA2 to re-post. It will "refresh" only those glyphs which have been undercut.

7. I can't be bothered to use QA2's option for cancelling undercut auctions anymore because it takes precious time. Here's where the 12 hour posting comes into effect. Every once in a while when I log in I will just grab everything from my mailbox, whether gold or unsold glyphs, and the re-post everything with 1 click.

And that's about it. I try to keep the stress at a minimum. Inscription continues to bring in significant revenue. Using this method I will easily make between 100G and 1000G a day. I will usually make less whenever my most expensive glyphs have sold out and I will make more whenever I have just crafted a new batch of "expensive" glyphs. Typically I will scan and craft once, at most twice, a week.

Over the gold cap. So what?

A few days ago I finally passed the "Gold Cap". Back in September I had less than 50K. Today I have over 218K.

So what the hell does all this mean? Nothing really. It's actually very anticlimactic. In fact I didn't really try hard to make gold recently. Thanks to my OCD I feel compelled to do my daily Auction House business so this allowed me to make at least 1K a day without trying too hard. In all, I probably spend about 30 minutes daily managing crafting, searching the AH, buying cheap mats, posting and emptying the mailbox. That's too much time if you ask me.

Now, all this gold is spread across several different characters, with my bank alts having most of it. In reality I only reached the psychological gold cap, meaning the limit for a single character, so I could potentially reach multiple "gold caps" in the future on each character. I won't make a conscious effort though.

Another issue is what am I going to do with all this gold? I've been thinking hard about this and I can't find a good answer. At least there shouldn't be anything that I could want for in World of Warcraft. On the other hand I'm not gonna spend tons of cash on crap. I'm so tight-fisted that I won't even get my alts epic mounts. But that's a topic for another occasion.

One thing that I will probably do is slowly buy the remaining vanity pets that I need for my hunter, you know, the expensive ones.

My big plan is to keep over 200K gold until Cataclysm hits. There's no knowing what cool money sinks Blizzard will add, so I want to be prepared.

Now don't hate on me for being rich in WoW. I'm poor in real life so it compensates.

Flipping epics is risky but potentially profitable

Flipping epics is not for the faint of heart or for the empty-of-purse. What's this "flipping epics" I hear some of you asking? Simply put, it means buying epic items from various sources, like the Auction House, trade chat or directly from players, with the intent of selling them at a later date for a profit.

This is inherently risky because epics are very prone to devaluation. Today's "1337 epix" might be just trash tomorrow. A simple patch, not to mention an entire new expansion, can make certain epics obsolete.

I decided to try my hand at flipping epics all the way back in October during Brewfest. I wasn't the only one, of course.

The epic item in question, as you might have guessed, is the Tankard O' Terror which drops only during the holiday from Coren Direbrew. Because during this holiday there were hundreds and thousands of Coren runs, this awesome weapon was flooding the AH and it was easy to get one for a good price.

So what's so special about this weapon? Well, for one thing, its item level, which is 226. Back in patch 3.2, a 226 weapon was pretty damn good, especially for a BoE. This meant a fresh level 80 player could get themselves an amazing weapon for a very reasonable price. The Tankard has some very nice stats, including a slow speed of 2.6, and plenty of agility, crit, haste and AP. Stats galore, in essence. It makes an awesome weapon for enhancement shamans, dual-wielding frost death knights and combat mace rogues. It so happens that these classes also dual-wield so they can get 2 Tankards for double the fun. Oh, on second thoughts I guess feral druids can also use them. I'm not very familiar with druids so please excuse me if I missed something here.

Due to the over-abundance of Tankards, their prices on the AH dropped like a rock during Brewfest. I decided I would exploit this and buy as many I could under a certain price threshold, with the intention of selling them a couple of weeks after the holiday was over, for a premium. Needless to say, many other people had the same idea.

Here are some stats.

I bought a total of 22 Tankards for a total of 15,300 gold.
Average price: 695 gold
Minimum price paid: 550 gold (this one I bought COD from a player who was advertising it in trade chat)
Maximum price paid: 800 gold (this was toward the beginning of the holiday when prices were still "high")

I sold all of them for a total of 20,000 gold.
Average price: 909 gold
Minimum price sold: 800 gold
Maximum price sold: 1300 gold

Total profit: 4700 gold <-- not bad

It took me a month and a half to sell all of them. There was very high competition during this time. At any point there were at least 4-5 Tankards on the AH, but usually more. Today, the price remains low: under 1000 gold. As you can see, I made a hefty profit, but... There's usually a "but" in these situations.

In order to reach this profit I had to invest 15,000 gold and it was a risk, although a calculated one at that. I had enough "capital" to afford making this experiment. I knew that on a high population server as my own there had to be lots of other people who saw the same opportunity. I also knew that these people were smart enough to be patient and wait it out, until the price was just right, before they put their Tankards on the AH. Another looming problem was patch 3.3. It would bring more powerful items, up to ilvl 277, which meant the Tankard could suddenly lose a lot of its value.

After Brewfest ended I didn't know what to expect in regards to AH price. I sold my first Tankard for 1300 gold but from there on it all went downhill. Prices were dropping and people were undercutting each other. Luckily they didn't like selling at a loss, so they kept the prices reasonable. With patch 3.3 on the horizon I knew I had to sell my Tankards quickly.

I had seen people on various forums talking about this, saying that they would wait months, if they had to, in order to sell the Tankards for at least 2000 gold. Well, I decided I wasn't going to risk it. After all, waiting for a few months and hoping for the price to go up, in other words waiting for the competition to liquidate their stocks, might well render the Tankards obsolete due to more powerful items being introduced to the game. And one more thing: I figured that less profit in my pocket now is better than more potential profit who-knows-when in the future. Hence, I sold my entire stock and the profit wasn't bad after all.

I did risk a few things here. I couldn't predict how prices would evolve after Brewfest. I had no way of knowing how many people had also done the same thing. I also didn't know how many Tankards had been bought by these people for the purpose of being flipped. There was also no way of knowing how obsolete the Tankard would become and how soon that would happen. In addition, the Tankard event was unique in WoW (although similar events have taken place in the past). As a result, the entire venture was on the risky side.

In conclusion, if you don't have a lot of cash to burn, be very careful when attempting something similar. I wouldn't even think about trying this with crafted epics or epics that are regular drops from a dungeon/raid, unless I was very familiar with prices and I could snatch a severely underpriced one. I call the Tankard O' Terror a "one-shot epic" because it only drops for a week once a year and then it's gone forever. If you can take your chance with such an item, then try to calculate all the associated risks and go for it. It might be well worth it.

Morons of the day

I don't want to hijack Gevlon's weekly "morons" posts but sometimes I feel like I gotta speak out. I also don't want to call people names but sometimes I gotta wonder...

The first example is that during Winter Veil I've been selling Holiday Spices at a hefty profit. Not as hefty as some of the guys in Gevlon's article but it makes me ask myself why would someone pay more than 1000% on the AH for something that can be bought from a vendor not 20 yards away?

My second, and funnier (to me), example is of a guy who was spamming this in trade chat today:
"WTB Frozen Orb 10G each".

Now you might think, what's wrong with that? Well, for one thing, since patch 3.3, Frozen Orbs have dropped (on my server) from 30G to less than 10G. Here's the punchline, though. Not even 1 minute before I saw this trade chat request, I had bought 2 Frozen Orbs from the AH for 5G each. Not only that, but if that person had bothered checking the AH, he would have found dozens of Orbs at prices between 7G and 10G. I could have made a quick buck by selling him a few AH-bought Orbs but I couldn't be bothered.

The moral of the story is simple: check all sources before buying something and if you don't know where to find a certain item, ingredient, what-not, check Wowhead. A couple of minutes of research can save you tens or hundreds of gold. Word.

How do these guys turn a profit?

Here's a Real Life Story ™ for you armchair economists out there. In a way this is also relevant to WoW so that's why I'm throwing it out there.

My old wristwatch died out on me and I wanted to buy a new one. I won't mention any brands or models here but my old watch was a digital solar and I wanted a more elegant one so I set my sights on an analog solar. I also wanted something special so I chose a watch with a titanium case.

The manufacturer listed the watch at a recommended price of $300. I wasn't expecting to buy it at this price anyway so I checked my favorite online shopping site but they only had the steel version for about $110. Looking elsewhere on the web I found a site which sold all kinds of watch brands and they listed the watch I was looking for at $180. This was considerably more than the $110 steel watch so I looked elsewhere.

On eBay I found a decent store with very good reviews that was selling this watch for a $160 Buy Out Now but it also had a Make an Offer option. So I offered $120. I wasn't expecting the offer to be accepted. After all, there's a big difference between $160 and $120 for a $300 watch. When my offer was accepted I was very surprised.

Here's my dilemma.
- Watch starts at $300.
- Sites sell it for $180.
- eBay vendors sell it for $160.
- this particular eBay vendor accepts to sell it for $120.
- he offers free UPS shipping which should be another $10.
- he has to pay eBay fees which could be another $10.
- he probably has to pay Paypal fees on account that I paid with an e-check, who knows how much commission this will cost him.

Balance: the seller probably makes under $100 for that watch.

Here are my questions:
- How much profit does this guy actually make by selling watches for such a low price?
- Related to the above, how much does the watch actually cost him?
- How many watches does he have to buy in order to get a volume discount?
- If there's a volume discount, I can't imagine it being for quantities lower than 100 pieces, which would mean the seller needs to invest a huge amount in stock, considering that he's selling many other models from many other brands. Is that feasible? We could be talking about tens of thousands of $$$ here.
- What's the actual price for which the manufacturer (or another intermediary) sells these watches to my seller?
- Related to the above, what would be the actual cost for the manufacturer of the watch for a timepiece that is made not only from an expensive material (titanium, heh heh Titanium) but also uses a fairly advanced technology and is also elegant enough to be mistaken for a much more expensive device?

As you can imagine, I'm not expecting anyone to come forward and say, yes, watches such as this one cost the manufacturer X amount and so on. I'm very curious though as to what the secret is behind these good deals. How do these sellers manage to survive, yet alone make a hefty profit?

From all my WoW-economics experience I can assume a few things. For example I can imagine that the seller has a pretty low margin per each watch sold but he makes up through volume. This store had thousands of buyer reviews and they also sold $3000 Rolexes (or is it Rolexi? :). If I were to make a WoW analogy, I would liken it to the glyph or jewelcrafting market where some crafters base their profits on high volumes at low margins per item sold.

I can also assume that the seller has access to some sort of cheap supply but what baffles me is that there's only one manufacturer so why would they sell this $300 watch to distributors for $50 or so? The difference to WoW is that in WoW there are many suppliers of raw mats and manufactured goods that compete against each other. It's easy to find a farmer, for example, who will sell you a stack of Icethorn for 10 gold instead of buying it from the AH for 15 gold.

It is certainly possible that the manufacturer actually sells these watches to distributors for, say, $50. The distributor then sells them to actual sellers for, say, $60 and the seller then passes it on to me for $120 minus his profits. In the end the seller still makes $30 or so per $200-$300 watch. That's the only scenario that makes sense to me.

But then if the manufacturer can sell these watches to distributors for $50, what the hell are their costs to manufacture said watch? $30??? The mind boggles.

In conclusion dear friends, am I really off base here? Are my theories sound or complete science fiction? What does the economist in you think about this situation? How about some (made-up) numbers? I would rest easier at night if I had at least a clue to this mystery.

Sell your Arctic Furs now!

If there's just one more piece of advice that I can give you before patch 3.3 is released (rumored to be on Tuesday the 8th), it is this: sell all your Arctic Furs now!

I don't know what the deal is with Arctic Furs but the drop rate really sucks. You literally have to skin 100 mobs in order to get one drop. Sometimes though you can get lucky. The day before yesterday I got a Fur while questing with my rogue and yesterday I got 2 more Furs in quick succession by killing the same mobs.

Anyhoo, I remember a few months ago Arctic Furs were selling on my server for around 30 gold, which is still a lot. Then the price slowly climbed to 40 and then 50 gold. Today it hovers around 90-100 gold.

Though I have a Leatherworker and I can craft various things with these Furs, I prefer to sell them these days. Patch 3.3 will allow everyone to exchange 10 Heavy Borean Leather (or 60 Borean Leather) for 1 Arctic Fur. On my server that means between 40 and 50 gold. And that's a big difference from the 90-100 gold that they currently sell for.

Fact is, if the price of Arctic Furs on your server is a lot higher than the price of 10 Heavy Borean or 60 Borean Leather, sell all your Furs now. The common leather is always in plentiful supply, being very easy to skin. I have liquidated all my stock of Furs and I will sell each one that drops for me until 3.3 hits.