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.

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.

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.

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.

The Truth About Inscription

This is my truth and my truth may be different than yours but...

After that infamous MMO Champion article (that I won't bother linking to) a lot of people thought they could make big bucks with Inscription. Mind you, these were people who either didn't have Inscription or had it at a very basic level. Although a lot of gold can indeed be made from it, arguably making Inscription the most profitable profession of all, there's a catch. Or several, if you will.

I was fortunate (and perhaps insightful) enough to have learned Inscription as soon as I created my first Death Knight, right after I got the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Back then, it wasn't immediately clear that this would become one of the greatest money-earners in WoW for a lot of enterprising people. Notice I'm underlining the word "enterprising" because the entrepreneurial spirit doesn't reside in everyone. There are plenty of Scribes (not Inscriptionists or Inscribers or other wacky names) that barely get by.

When the WotLK expansion was released, it wasn't cheap to level Inscription. Those who prepared beforehand (by hoarding various kinds of herbs) leveled it for cheap. Others, not so much. As anticipated, entrepreneurs had bought massive amounts of herbs before the expansion when they were cheap and sold them to new Scribes. These people made a killing.

I like to anticipate what I will do in the future so I had lots of herbs of all levels in my bank. As a consequence it wasn't hard for me to level Inscription although occasionally it was frustrating. At various times I would find myself without enough herbs, or needing just one more ink, or trying to stretch that green glyph as much as possible.

It's fine and dandy to level with trainer-bought glyphs but at one point you will have to engage in Minor Inscription Research, and later in Northrend Inscription Research. These are essential both for continuing your leveling process and more importantly for allowing you to discover powerful new glyphs that are not available from the trainer. I won't go into details here because I don't know exactly myself but an accomplished Scribe needs many weeks to research all the glyphs.

Are you still with me? Good. Let's say you've finally researched all glyphs possible. How will you know when to stop researching? At some point you will stop discovering new glyphs, BUT be careful here because sometimes towards the end of your "studies" there are days when you won't get a new glyphs. However, researching again the next day will render a new glyph. To be certain you got all, take the plunge and sacrifice some resources for a few days extra after you stop discovering new glyphs.

So now you're researched all the glyphs. It's all good but you're far from being a master. Patch 3.1 (or 3.2, I forget which) introduced a whole lot of new and even more powerful glyphs. In fact, most good glyphs were added then. The catch is that you can only learn them from Books of Glyph Mastery which randomly drop from Northrend mobs. Do you think you can easily farm these books in sufficient quantities to learn all the glyphs? Wrong. In all my Northrend "career", meaning that I've leveled 4 characters to 80, I've only had 2 books drop. The drop rate is abysmal.

This leaves you with only one option, really. The Auction House. Things are much better these days. After these books were first introduced, they would sell for upwards of 1000 gold. During that patch I made some serious gold selling glyphs for dual-specs but my biggest stroke of luck was that I had a book drop for me right when new glyphs were in the highest demand. While you can still get lackluster glyphs from the book, I was once again lucky to get a good one: Glyph of Haunt. During those hectic days I sold a whole bunch of these glyphs at 300 gold a piece and I was the only one who had that glyph on my server. Good ol' days!

But I digress. There are roughly 60 glyphs that can be learned from Books of Glyph Mastery. On my server these books go for 30 gold on average although if you watch out for them constantly you will be able to buy them cheaper than that. 30 x 60 = 1800 gold. That's the investment you're looking at if you want to learn all the book glyphs. And trust me, if you want to be a master, those glyphs are some of the most important.

Finally you're a master but also a few thousand gold poorer (depending on how well you planned your leveling). From here there are 2 major paths: either craft glyphs for yourself, your buddies and your guildies or recuperate your investment and make some serious profits by putting your wares on the AH.

It's easier said than done, especially if you don't have much experience with selling tactics. Inscription is unlike other professions, in that it can cost you close to zero to craft a glyph. To figure out how that works is like some sort of crafting Nirvana (it sure was for me) but it is not the scope of this article although I have explained it to some extent in the post that I just linked.

Inscription remains a very lucrative business but the days of easy profits are long gone, thanks in part to MMO Champion's infamous article. These days you really gotta hustle in order to make a buck. Selling strategies must adapt to various factors such as number and persistence of competition, your own finances, your stock of inks, your source of inks, the price of herbs and so on. Once again, these factors are not in the scope of this article. There's simply too much to discuss and others have dissected this a lot better than I ever could.

After reading all this (are you still with me?) you will probably imagine that I'm trying to dissuade you from becoming a Master Scribe perhaps in the hopes of reducing my competition. Not at all, let me assure you. I'm just trying to say this: get Inscription if you really feel drawn to it. It's a nice and very useful profession. If you have more than one character on a server it will come in very handy. The shoulder enchants are very nice. The offhand items likewise. There are some serious profits to be made with Darkmoon cards (although this might change with patch 3.3). In regards to glyphs, however, it's a whole new ballgame. You will require a lot of time and gold to get all the good ones and even then it is not guaranteed that you will survive the competition.

Personally I have learned almost all the existing glyphs, over 95%. Why not all? Because some of the trainer-taught ones are either useless or won't sell for anything. The market these days is shark-eat-shark. Very hectic. Constant undercutting, which drives the prices down. Barely a month or two ago some glyphs were going for 50-60 gold or more. These days it's hard to sell anything for much over 20 gold. But hey, that's all good! Supply has finally met demand. Profits are lower but since the cost of producing glyphs is very low, they are still solid. Buyers get what they want from a variety of competing sources while sellers... well, some of them have given up while others are doggedly soldiering on.

Think about all the above if you are thinking to learn Inscription for the purpose of making thousands of gold. If you think you are dedicated enough, have enough time and plenty of gold to invest in it, by all means go for it. Otherwise, Inscription remains a very useful profession and is still worth pursuing, even at a slower pace, because WoW has a ways to go and there are more expansions on the horizon.

Milling Statistics

I owe someone an apology. In my previous post regarding Inscription, I gave some milling numbers for Icethorn, Adder's Tongue and Lichbloom that in end proved to be wrong. An anonymous commenter attempted to correct me but I stubbornly held on to my opinion. After careful experimentation and observation, I discovered that he was actually right and I was wrong. So thank you Mr. Anonymous for pointing this out.

What really happened though? In my defense, because I'm not really that bad at math, I simply misinterpreted Wowhead's numbers. Quoting from my own example:

100% chance for 2-4 Azure Pigment per mill (5 herbs), average is 3 Azure Pigment per 5 herbs or 12 per stack of 20 which translates into 6 Ink of the Sea.

50% chance for 1-3 Icy Pigment per mill (5 herbs), average is 2/2 Icy Pigment = 1 per 5 herbs or 4 per stack of 20 which translates into 2 Snowfall Ink.

My error here is that I took the 50% chance for 1-3 Icy Pigments to mean just that: a 50% chance for an average of 2 Icy Pigments for each milling (5 herbs). Thing is, these two numbers are independent of each other. 50% merely refers to the chance of getting 1 Icy Pigment, while 1-3 refers to the minimum and maximum Icy Pigments that you could get from each milling.

I went ahead and milled a large enough number of herbs to create a fairly accurate statistic. This time I jotted down every ink. My numbers are 2.98 Azure Pigment and 0.56 Icy Pigment per mill. This syncs nicely with Wowhead's numbers and I'm sure that if I were to increase the sample size, I would get much closer to 3 and 0.5 which are the actual yield figures for Azure Pigment and Icy Pigment respectively.

Up until now I was rather convinced that the numbers I had originally given were correct because I could have sworn that I got 1-3 Icy Pigments per 5 herbs.

All this doesn't change anything though. The anonymous commenter remarked that I'm actually losing money if I'm selling glyphs for only 99 silver each. Like I said in the comments section, not quite. I'm making a hefty profit in fact. In fact, profit isn't even my main motivation right now.

In reality I'm not selling a lot of glyphs for 99 silver, but just a few. I could care less about those. Other glyphs still sell for anywhere between 1 gold and 20 gold. Or even more. My real and guaranteed profit comes from the stuff that I craft from Snowfall Inks.

My main motivation, and the thing that drives me, is simply to mess with the competition. This bunch of post-mmo-champion-guide noobs (I hate using this word but I don't wanna use a harsher one) needs to go back to what they were doing before that. They've helped "ruin" the glyph market but now I'm helping them run it right into the ground. This weekend I'm gonna try some AH flooding with most of the existing glyphs to see how they like it. My only disappointment so far is that I haven't gotten any hate mail yet. When I do, I will know that someone's getting desperate.

Here's to a fun weekend!

Changing Tactics With Inscription

There was a time before that infamous mmo-champion article (I won't even link to it :) that scribes were making a very decent living from Inscription. I would easily pull 1000 gold a day without stressing too much. Glyphs would sell for anywhere up to 50 gold or even more but I usually didn't bother with anything less than 15 gold. I would undercut for a few silver and probably relist once or twice a night. I would also craft a maximum of 2 of each glyph and post only 1 at a time. Noobish, what can I say.

Today, things have changed. Although my server was slower to catch up to the new-found knowledge, it eventually did and all of a sudden 5-6 major competitors came out of the woodwork and started undercutting each other. I continued undercutting them but dropped my undercutting to 1 copper. The new strategy worked for a while until I realized that there were simply too many competitors and a few of them were AH campers and I had no chance against them because the moment I logged off, they would undercut me.

By this point I had moved up, from 2 glyphs to 6 glyphs. I didn't dare craft more because certain glyphs simply reached such low prices that they weren't worth crafting. The campers were still at it and it had become stressful to watch the AH like a hawk for hours on end.

During this period I did some more research, particularly on Gevlon's and Markco's sites. These two guys are real goblins, in the sense that they truly live for profits and also have vast knowledge to back it up. I admit that in comparison to them I was clueless about handling such competitors, particularly in the glyph business.

You see, the glyph business is unlike any other. Sure, there are similarities but Inscription has certain particularities that will allow a knowledgeable player to make massive amounts of gold. I've stated time and time again that Inscription has been the single biggest money-maker for me in WotLK, by far. I would estimate it has earned me at least 60K gold. My only regret is that I didn't learn these tactics sooner. Little did I know back then. I'm far from being an expert now but my knowledge has increased and I am better equipped to profit from Inscription as well as from my other professions.

Getting back to why Inscription is so special, the basic idea is this: you can make a profit from selling a glyph no matter how low your price is. You can go as low as 40 silver (the price of Resilient Parchment at Exalted) and you would break even. Anything above this amount is pure profit. I'm not counting the price of Ink of the Sea because... it's free. How so? Once you get into this mindset, you will become free of prejudice and start seeing the reality.

To ensure that your glyph manufacturing costs are almost zero you should start from a very cheap supply of herbs. There are only 3 types of herbs worth considering and out of those you will only actually purchase 1 or 2. I'm talking, of course, about Lichbloom, Icethorn and Adder's Tongue. Out of these 3, I'll never buy Lichbloom for milling. If I ever find it at a low price, I would rather flip it than mill it. Lichbloom is the rarest of these herbs and also has the highest level. The second rarest, but a lot more common, is Icethorn. Adder's Tongue is the most abundant. The beauty of these 3 types is that they all yield the same amount of inks when milled, meaning that in terms of obtaining the best returns, you should always go for the cheapest herb, whether it's Icethorn or Adder's Tongue.

Milling a stack of 20 herbs yields on average 6 Inks of the Sea and 2 Snowfall Inks. The Snowfall Inks are the key. Using prices from my server, I will typically buy a stack of herbs for 10-15 gold (50s - 75s apiece). Snowfall Inks currently sell for about 13 gold each on the Auction House but they used to sell for a lot more, over 20 gold. At any rate, even if I were to simply sell the Snowfall Inks for 13 gold each, I would earn 26 gold from each stack of herbs, meaning a profit of anywhere between 11-16 gold per stack. After all this, I'm still left with a shitload of Inks of the Sea. And that's where I get my "free" Inks of the Sea.

I won't typically sell Snowfall Inks but instead I will craft other things from them, thus moving down the manufacturing chain and increasing profits by selling a product with a higher added value. Such examples are off-hand items and Darkmoon cards.

Having become tired of camping the AH and undercutting by 1c, I decided to try some new tactics.

For a day or so I posted all my glyphs with a massive undercut of 10 gold and a threshold of 50 silver, meaning that I wouldn't go lower than that. The plan backfired because by this point there were already very few glyps on the AH that were selling for more than 20 gold.

The next day I lowered my undercut to 5 gold and increased my threshold at 99 silver. I kept posting as usual, for 12 hours. Things started going slightly better. I posted 6 glyphs at a time but in spite of all this I was still undercut. I felt ok because even if the days of 1000+ gold per day were gone, I was still making 300 gold or so, without too much stress.

What brought me greater satisfaction was the fact that my competitors were starting to notice the effect of my undercutting. One guy in particular buys all my glyphs around 1 gold, to repost them, no doubt. Which is great for me because I can just make more of them and force him to buy greater and greater amounts. Furthermore, an added benefit is that my competition is kept busy trying to manage their competition, essentially wasting their time, while I am simply ignoring them and posting at my leisure.

I had also read that Gevlon was undercutting by 40 silver in an attempt to drive the competition out of the market. I'm now trying a similar tactic. I dropped my undercutting to 50 silver and I'm watching how things are going.

Currently I'm not even selling glyps for profit. I'm just doing it for fun and to piss off my competition. I have more than enough inks in stock (and funds to boot, as well as other sources of income) that I can afford to sell even at a loss. Good times ahead. My plan, no matter how evil it may seem, is to drive all these guys out of the market. Yep, I'm becoming a real goblin, following closely in Gevlon's footsteps.

If you are in the business of selling glyphs and suddenly come across someone who undercuts massively and daily, my word of advice is don't get mad. He's either a clueless noob, in which case his stock will quickly dry up and he will exit the market on his own, or he's a seasoned seller with massive funds that doesn't give a crap for how much his glyphs sell and his only purpose is to become the sole vendor of glphs on that server. If it's the second case, you might as well try other means to make gold if you don't have the funds to match. Don't embarrass yourself by sending the guy reproachful mails.

Personally I would really enjoy some "carpet bombing". This is another of those terms that I love so much. In case you're not aware what carpet bombing means, it refers to flooding the AH with goods that undercut everyone else at a very low price, causing competitors to either leave the market in disgust or else attempt to buy the low priced products and repost them at the "normal" price. Of course, if you try to flip them the seller will simply post more. It's a dirty trick but almost guaranteed to work. Unfortunately I don't have the time to craft dozens of glyphs because I would do this in a heartbeat.

I hope that this article hasn't created more problems than it has solved and I hope you glyph sellers who are reading this won't hate me too much for my "dirty tactics". Even if you do, that's life, kill or be killed. I won't lose any sleep over it, you can be sure of that.

Profit with Inscription and Darkmoon Cards

I've neglected crafting Darkmoon Card of the North for a very long time. It didn't seem very profitable for me to craft these cards but recently I found myself with tons of Snowfall Ink on my hands and I needed to get rid of it somehow. I'm slowly selling my stock of Ink on the Auction House but the keyword here is "slowly". I produce Snowfall Inks faster than I can sell them. Inscription has proven lucrative for me lately, in spite of certain recent upheavals in the industry.

One of the things you can craft with Snowfall Ink is obviously the random Darkmoon Cards which can be turned in at the Darkmoon Faire for a nice ilvl 200 BoE trinket. The catch here is that out of the 4 decks (Nobles, Undeath, Chaos and Prisms) the most valuable one by far is the Nobles, followed by Undeath. The others are mediocre and there's not a huge demand for them. As a consequence, the cards that have the highest value are the ones from the Nobles deck. Each of the Nobles cards sells for several hundred gold on the AH, while the whole deck (or the trinket) sells for upwards of 4000 gold.

So I had to get rid of some of my Snowfall Ink and luckily I also had over 2 full stacks of Eternal Life sitting around gathering dust. As a reminder, to craft a Darkmoon Card, the mats are:
1x Resilient Parchment @ 40 silver
6x Snowfall Ink @ 23 gold each (let's assume, although it's much cheaper for me because I mill my own herbs and I pick them up really cheap)
3x Eternal Life @ 15 gold each (I'm being pessimistic because I picked lots of these for less than 8 gold each on the AH)
3x Ink of the Sea @ 3 gold each (again, these cost me a lot less but I'm being pessimistic)
Total cost for 1 Darkmoon Card: ~192 gold. Realistically, my actual cost was probably around 100 gold or even less.

I had mats for 14 cards, being limited by Eternal Life. So I started crafting and went AFK for a couple of minutes. When I returned, I was surprized. The results were:
2 Undeath Cards - total estimated AH value: 130 gold
3 Chaos Cards - total estimated AH value: 140 gold
3 Prisms Cards - total estimated AH value: 130 gold
6 (!!!) Nobles Cards - total estimated AH value: 3300 gold

Total estimated cost to craft 14 cards: 2690 gold (although it's much less since I didn't buy the mats from the AH)
Total estimated value of 14 crafted cards: 3700 gold
Total estimated profit: 1000 gold

All this is looking pretty damn good. Of course, this 1000 gold profit can be increased by selling the cards at the optimum time. There are several options here:

1. Sell the cards now. Prices should be high but demand might be low.
2. Sell the cards when the Darkmoon Faire arrives. Prices will drop a lot due to competition but demand will be high.
3. Buy missing cards cheaply when the Darkmoon Faire arrives, complete decks and sell the decks. Market might be flooded with decks at that time though.
4. Buy missing cards cheaply when the Darkmoon Faire arrives, complete decks and exchange the decks for the BoE trinkets. Wait 1-2 weeks after the Faire and then sell the trinkets.

Out of all these options the best and most profitable one seems to be nr. 4. The logic here is to buy missing cards as cheap as they get and then sell the actual trinket (and not the completed Darkmoon Deck) in between Faires. If I sold the completed deck, people would still need to wait until the next Faire in order to turn it in. If I sell the BoE trinket, some people would need that trinket right now and would pay a premium to obtain it before the next Faire arrives.

To improve upon this method, I have a good mind to actually craft as many cards as possible, with my own low-cost mats. The only problem here is the Eternal Life component but I will try to buy that as cheaply as possible from the AH. I will even pick a few of them with my herbalist Warlock who is still in the process of leveling and who needs to start questing in Sholazar Basin where a lot of herbs are.

Don't think that this method will work indefinitely. Although the Darkmoon trinkets (especially the ones from the Nobles and Undeath decks) are pretty cool, they are only ilvl 200. What with Trial of the Crusader being more popular by the day and with patch 3.3 looming closer, a lot of high-end trinkets will become more common, thus lowering the value of the Darkmoon trinkets. These trinkets will still remain very popular for players who've just hit 80 but veterans will probably stay away from them.