Beginner's Guide to Blacksmithing in Patch 5.2

Pardon the cheesy banner, but I'm still new at the art side of this and I thought it was funny. Hush. :P Ok, so, today on Twitter I received this message from @JamesStorrie:

I just levelled bs and engineering can you point me in the right direction on how to make gold with these thanks

Well as a matter of fact, James, yes. Yes I can. In a nutshell, with any crafting profession, get all the current patterns, craft everything profitable that you can afford the mats for, and then post them. I know blacksmithing so I'll go through that,  but for engineering talk to @NotQuiteExalted, @ssmith0911, or @powerwordgold. Doing this without addons can take hours though, and it's in learning how to operate the addons where the specific "how to" comes in. So, without further ado, here are the prerequisite addons. Go to Curse.com to download these (if you're new to addons, they're virus free, and you don't need to subscribe or pay to download them).

ADDONS

Oh, TSM! How did I live without you? 

TradeSkillMaster - This automates and simplifies EVERYTHING that has to do with crafting. Huge round of applause to Sapu and his team for putting this together. Get the whole suite: Accounting, Additions, AuctionDB, Auctioning, Crafting, Mailing Etc.
The Undermine Journal GE - This show's you the global median and mean price for any item on the auction house. It does a bunch of other stuff to, but it essentially takes away the need to search the auction house, and allows for automated price efficiency (if prices worldwide go up, the prices for your posts will too). It also integrates with TSM. (Optionally, there is a Realm Edition, RE, on theunderminejournal.com that is useful for mat prices, as mat prices as more stable globally than locally)
Auctioneer - I use this less than I used to now that I utilize TSM more fully, but it has it's moments and is an overall improvement over the standard Auction House UI.
MogIt - This shows you an image of any item. In our case, it's great for considering whether or not to craft transmog items.
Postal - Makes looting your mailbox a lot easier and faster. Trust me, it's worth it.

Cullen and I go way back.

PATTERNS
1. If you haven't already, learn all the basic patterns from the normal trainer.
2. Browse Cullen Hammerbrow's (righteous Alliance) or Jorunga Stonehoof's (filthy Horde) goods. They sell 450 pvp and 463 pve patterns for 1 Spirit of Harmony each. Even with all the gear out there, these still sell pretty steadily as people get bored and level alts. Grind some Spirits and buy these patterns. I get between 2 and 10k profit a week from these; they pay for my repair bills.
3. Go kill Itoka. He drops a Strange Metal Ingot. In short, this opens up the 5.2 craftables: pvp blues and progressively awesome weapons. Every day, you craft one Lightning Steel out of 10 Ghost Iron Bars, and in doing so, learn a new recipe, similar to alchemy or inscription. Make sure you log on and craft your Lightning Steel every day, even if you don't plan on playing that day. These new recipes are selling like hotcakes, hotcakes that sell very very quickly.
4. Optionally, the Klaxxi start selling patterns at Honored that you can buy for 20 Kyparite. The 476 weapons take 5-8 Spirits of Harmony per craft and are a waste of Spirits in my opinion. But hey, they can still net you 2k-5k each, and are worth at least learning.

MATERIALS
1. Lots of Ghost Iron Bars. 5-15 stacks a day. Mine them if you want to, but buying off the AH is fine. I generally go on mining splurges once a month and have a decent stock at all times.
2. Trillium Bars. Find a Transmute Master guildie and transmute ghost iron bars into trillium bars. AH prices for trillium can be volatile and you might have days where you need a couple stacks.
3. Living Steel. If you read yesterday's "Week in Review" post, you know that Living Steel is about to get crazy. I recommend setting a max that you'll pay for them on the AH and buying any you find under that. Or find a transmute friend who doesn't mind giving you their daily CD.
4. Lightning Steel. This is BoP, so you only get the one's you craft, and you only get one per day.
5. Spirits of Harmony. Spirits are an art form in and of themselves, but are key to Blacksmithing so I'll put a few links and only spend a paragraph on them.

SPIRIT FARMING
When you first finish following this guide, you will probably find that you don't have enough spirits of harmony.

99 Spirits needed. Son of a...

First things first, do your dailies, and always loot everything  But for strict SoH farming, there are a couple good spots. If you have great burst AoE, I recommend the Dread Scar, in Dread Wastes; just run up and down grabbing all the warrior packs. You'll get greens and gold and about 20% more spirits from my testing than turtles, mainly due to CDs resetting during travel time. If you're a multi-dotter, farm turtles in one of two spots: the lake in Valley of the Four Winds that is located just west of the Grassy Cline flight path, or better but harder, the Northeast corner of Windward Isle in Jade Forest. For turtles, dot everything and let them die as they run to you. In addition to spirits, turtles allow you to loot the meat, bundle them into groceries for Replenishing the Pantry, and turn them into Black Pepper or Soy Sauce from Nam IronPaw, netting a very decent bonus profit. Depending on your dps, these three spots should bring in between 10 and 25 Spirits an hour. Any more than that generally gets hotfixed (RIP Zhu's Watch, you will be missed).

If you're SoH farming, your screen should look like this, as often as possible.

Alright, you have your profession leveled  your addons downloaded, and you know where to get materials from. How again do you make money with Blacksmithing? Here's the process.

SETTING UP TSM INVENTORY

First we setup TradesSkillMaster inventory settings.

Step 1. Open TSM with "/tsm"

Step 2. Modules are located as tabs at the top. Click Crafting. Make sure "Enable new Tradeskills" is checked.

Step 3. Click the subtab "Price/Inventory Settings." This tab determins what will be profitable. The drop downs are important but specific to your setup, so read the tooltips and fill them out accordingly. I get mat prices from AuctionDB, craft prices from AuctionDB, secondary price source as TUJ GE Market Median, Use lower of two, and have a 5% profit deduction. Make sure you have "Include items on the AH checked." Otherwise you will double craft your heart out. 

Step 4: Click the Auction Group Module tab at the top. It looks like a coin. Click "Categories/Groups" on the left and then the subtab "Create Category/Group."

Step 5: Create a new Category, NOT A GROUP, called Blacksmithing. Click Okay.

Step 5: Close TSM when you're done.

SETTING UP TSM CRAFTING QUEUES

Next we set up the TSM crafting queues. This can be tricky so I'll use screenshots, but what it does is pretty cool. You click one button, and from what you know how to craft, it determines what is profitable, based on the current realm prices and global prices. It then queues up those items so that you can click click click a different button and craft them one after another. If you don't have the materials, you go to the auction house and click "Crafting Mats"->"Search" and then just spam buyout until you're done. It automatically knows when you've bought enough. For BS, crafting mats is simple but even for tricky things like inscription where you mill herbs for ink, TSM automates everything and does the calculations for you. So, here's how you set up all this really neat time-saving stuff!

Step 1: Open TSM with "/tsm"

Step 2: Open the Blacksmithing tab at the bottom. It has a picture of an anvil.

Step 3: Click on the Green Materials section on the left. Scroll down until you see "Spirits of Harmony." These are Soulbound, so they don't have an AH value. They can be traded for two Golden Lotuses though, so we'll equate them to that. Check "Override Price Source" and "Multiple of Other Item." In "Other Item" type 72238, and click Okay. For "Price Multiplier" type 2.

Should look like this.

Step 4: Now click on the Green Options section on the left. If you don't want to craft any low level stuff or transmog (for starters, stick to current gear), check "place lower limit on ilvl" and set it at "450." Check "Override Max Restock Quantity" and set it to 1. Override minimum profit, but set that to whatever you feel comfortable with.

Should look like this.

Step 5: We're going to set up the actual queue's now. This will create both the crafting queue and the auctioning group for the item, so that both actions are automated. Go through each white group on the left "Armor-chest, Armor-feet, etc." and do each of the following steps. Start off by clicking on Armor-chest. 

Step 6: Scroll through the recipes and make sure each of the ones you want to craft have a check mark next to them.

Step 7: Click "Create Auction Groups." Category to put groups in should be "Blacksmithing" that we created earlier. How to add crafts should be "All in individual groups." The option "Groups to add crafts to" should be blank, and "Include Crafts Already in a Group" should be left unchecked. However, check the box for "Only include Enabled Crafts." This setups is less organized than some, but it allows for pricing to be automated by the market. In general, the less you have to think about posting, the better.

Step 8: Ensure that your chat window displays "Added XX crafted items to XX individual groups." (The XXs are the number of recipes added) If the words are any different, you clicked something different and TSM isn't going to be happy. Delete those groups and start that armor section again.

Step 9: Repeat Steps 5-8 for each Armor section that you can craft.

Step 10: Whenever you learn a new recipe in the future, you need to go back in and repeat steps 5-8 for that item.

Alright, first off, CONGRATULATIONS! The majority of the work is done. Now to actually craft and make some gold. 

Open up your blacksmithing; you'll notice a new tab at the top that opens up the TSM Crafting interface. At first, there shouldn't be much to look at, but based on Step 4 from "Setting up TSM Crafting Queues" the big "Restock Queue" button does something magical. Click it! Tah Dah! You should now see a nice sized list of things to craft. If it's too much, just expand "All" and right click anything you don't want to craft. 

Drakefist Hammer? Not today, son. Not today.

The list in the bottom right are the mats needed for everything in the crafting list. If you have everything, great, if not, also great! Go to your favorite Auction House and you'll find that with TSM there's a new tab at the bottom. In the TSM tab, click the word "Crafting Mats," make sure Blacksmithing selected, and hit search. Provided you have enough gold, you should be able to go though spamming the buyout button until it finishes. Loot your mailbox and Bam! You have all your mats. (For seasoned TSM veterans, sorry for the thoroughness of this, but c'mon, remember back before when you had to do all this manually? It's a really cool addon.) Finally just head on over to an anvil, and reopen the blacksmithing queue. At this poing, you should be able to stand at the anvil and just click "Craft Next" to your heart's content.

Now, before we post all your newly-minted goodies, there's one more round of one-time only settings to go through. 

SETTING UP TSM AUCTIONING GROUPS

When we were setting up the inventory, we navigated over to auctioning groups to get the Blacksmith Category made. It was out of order, but I'm a rebel. At least you know how to get there. "/tsm" -> "Auctioning Groups/Options." Well, you can play around with general posting options later, but we'll do options specific to Blacksmithing for now. 

Step 1: Click on the dark green Blacksmithing Category on the left, and click the Category Overrides subtab.

Step 2: General Settings- You can cancel your auctions in bulk by scanning the competitors auctions. Generally, standard settings are fine for this, but you can choose to ingore shorter or longer auction times if that suites you.

Step 3: Post Settings- You want the auctions to be up in stacks of 1, for as short of time as you can afford to play for. So if you're online all day every day, set the duration to 12 hours. However, if you only play 2 times a week, set it to 48 hours so it's at least up for as long as possible. Bid percent should generally be 100% of post price. This isn't ebay.

Step 4: Threshold- This is very debateable, but here's my take. As long as you're making a profit, you're fine, so I like so set it as a % of crafting cost. When it falls below this number it goes to "Advanced Price Settings" which I recommend be set to "Post at Fallback."

Step 5: Fallback- This is where it posts when you're, for all intents and purposes, the only one in the market. Also debatable, but I use either a high percentage 150%-300% of TUJ GE market median, or a decent percentage 100%-200% of TUJ GE market mean, depending on volatility.   

SUPER SECRET BONUS STEP

Go to "Auction Groups/Options"->"Options" (the green word on the left), and scroll down. See that "create macro and bind scroll wheel?" Do it.

POSTING

Now to make your gold from all the sweet loot in your bags. Head to the AH, click the TSM tab, and click "Post Auctions." (If there are any errors, ignore them for now). Let it scan all the items in your bags, then hold the control key down, and scroll your mouse wheel up and down and viola! You're done!  The cool thing is, the next day, all you have to do, is loot the gold from your mailbox, hit restock queue, buy some mats, craft next, and scroll your mouse wheel again. All the settings are a one time thing. Hectic at first. But Easy. Peasy. Done.

I know this was a lot to read, but there's a lot of tiddly little stuff to do at first to make money with Blacksmithing in World of Warcraft. Just remember, the key to making gold in the WoW, with or without a billion steps and settings, is just to 

Search. Craft. Post.

Every Day.

Reach me on Twitter @RyanAEckles or on YouTube at OneMinuteRaiding