Just Do It!

I just learned something amazing about goldmaking from a level 38 monk who has never heard of The Undermine Journal, Wow-Professions.com, and didn't know what an addon was: in other words, a noob. What he told me just blew me away. Get this, he told me that he made 5,000 gold in the past 5 days just from mining copper ore.

Ok ok, so maybe it's not stupendously impressive. A lot of you out there can make 5000g in a day if you want to. Some of you might even be able to rake in 5000g in an hour or two with some shenanigans and a little bit of luck or timing. But think about it, at level 38, this guy made enough gold to pay for the average raider's weekly upgrades, repairs, enhancements, and consumables, and he did so with the LEAST profitable ore on the LEAST profitable profession.

Sorry, Lilliam. Engineering doesn't even qualify as a profession anymore.

Since I started blogging, a couple of my guildies have started coming to me for advice. I've helped them set up TradeSkillMaster.  But really, this level 38 is who they should be talking to because addons help you save time, but making gold is all about my sign off "Search. Craft. Post. Every Day." And that's what this guy did.

Rather than hanging out in Stormwind, he just kept his character at the entrance to Deadmines while he was waiting on dungeon queues to pop. He still chatted with friends in guild chat but was also able to fill up a couple bags of ore a few times over that way. Whenever bags were full he'd either smelt them or sell em. The most important thing I got from the brief time I spent chatting with him though was that he enjoyed it; mining ore and skinning was calming for him. So try to stick with professions that you enjoy! While copper ore has spiked a couple times to 1.5g and 2g on Tanaris-US, is has averaged between 60s ang 1g per ore, which means he farmed up...a lot. If he spent the same amount of time, (or if YOU spent the same amount of time) farming ghost iron, which is much more plentiful, in between dungeons, heroic scenarios, or whatever, you would be very wealthy.

I mean, "click here" if you really want to, but just get out there and go mine some!

So, here's the moral before I go get all longwinded: if you need gold, or spirits, or achievement points, or valor, or gear, JUST GO GET IT! This game is full of really fun distractions, and if you want to enjoy those distractions, go ahead. But if you are really going after a specific goal, then avoid everything else. 

• Stay out of Stormwind and Ogrimmar.
• Spend and hour farming  those spirits of harmony.
• Make sure you craft and post everything you can whenever you log in.
• Dedicate 30 minutes a day to mining. 
• Run 1 random a day for Valor cap.
• You'll be glad you did. 

And until next time:

Search. Craft. Post.

Every Day. (And maybe spend a little more time in Deadmines, lol)

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Roller Coaster Week

Just wanted to give a little weekly wrap up for any budding fans out there and well, this week has been absolutely nuts.

Oh yah, I just went there

But really, RL and goldmaking alike has been really crazy, and not in the awesome way, but not necessarily in a bad way either. Moving into a new house, and it looks like I'll probably be spending more time than I used to on my laptop, so I'm thinking about going with a shared addon system. I'll try to edit this post later and add a link, but in essence, rather than having your addon folder on your computer's hard drive, you have it on Dropbox, or some other cloud-based file sharing system.  That way, all of your configurations are the same no matter what computer you log into, as long as that computer has your Dropbox login info. 

As far as gold goes, I geared up my bear, and got him raiding, and geared up my priest. I bought some Haunting spirits for Blacksmithing, and then started moving for a few days, so I wasn't really able to post from my PC. I hate to say it but after the gearing and the investments, I was down to less than 50k. Granted, I keep a very large majority of my wealth in inventory, but still, as someone who tries to walk the walk, that really was a downer. So, I came back and was pleasantly surprised when I looted 120k from my mail after the weekend. 

This weekend was also about the same time that I put together a guide on what I thought would happen with the 5.3 ore and herb changes. All of a sudden TUJ came along and gave me a big high five. THANKS GUYS!  YOU'RE AMAZING! I started blogging to help people make gold, growing readership in order to help more people. This was a huge help and I'm really grateful for the boost from y'all and the guys over at Stormspire too.

As far as actual guides go, been piecing together mining slowly but surely and also been working on a case study for a friend from Twitter. Seeing how that goes. Trying to do right by both of those and put in the effort required to make those worthwhile and helpful for the longterm. Other than that, the raid team is just working on Iron Qon. Yayyy!!! Until next time:

Search. Craft. Post.

Every Day!

Been a while since the last update so here's the current values

Fabulous dress, dahling. And is this your...date?

Glyph poster: 

Glyph Value:71,373

 He cuts down trees. He eats his lunch.

Main Poster:

Lumberjack Value: 555,405g

Mats: 

Total Auctioning Value: ,549g

Estimated Inventory: 90k

Avg # of Posting: 720

Revenue per Posting: 105g/post

My Pride and Joy

Total Gold: 84k 158 (-74k)

Total Value of Auctions: 627k(+123k)

Est Inventory: 90k

Mats: ?

Total Wealth: 801k (+139k)

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The Biggest Opportunities...

....are always at a new patch or expansion. While I was expecting the supply-side Gathering Changes to be the biggest market force, I was off the mark in the short run (Edit: herbs are down, as expected, but ore....). In /g the other day a friend said "Man, I just spent 1,000g regemming" to which someone else said "yah, me too." Turns out, that because of the pvp power changes (and a few class changes) people are regemming EVERYTHING, especially on PVP servers. This has caused a HUGE shift in the immediate demand for gems. Luckily JCs have been able to keep up and most markets don't have people paying 4,000g per gem.

Gems are still selling very very well, although it may not be the mad dash it was that first day (apparently some people did very very well for themselves, pulling in upwards of 25k-40k per hour in gem sales). There have been recommendations made as to what gems to sell, and the list I've heard repeatedly is
Amethyst - Mysterious, Tense, Assasin
Jade - Forceful, Zen, Jagged
Sun's Radiance - Quick, Smooth, Mystic
Vermillion Onyx - Deft, Artful, Adept, Reckless
DO NOT CRAFT THESE! Well, you'll probably craft some of them, but hold your horses. This list is from a great, informed, but relatively new goblin on Stormspire.net. I crafted these on a whim from his recommendation when I first read it and sure enough, not all of them sold because that was what sold well for the class makeup on his realm and not mine. My recommendation is to go to The Undermine Journal for your realm, navigate to crafted-jewelcrafting-rare and craft 5 to 10 of anything yellow or red, but be ready to go back and craft another 100. For whatever reason, on Tanaris-US Smooth Sun's Radiances are selling out every 60 seconds but that's it. I was either late to the party or am not on a happening server. Still, sold 5k in gems yesterday, so it was a good day, and I'm liking the new patch so far.

Dammit, Garrosh, this is why we can't have nice things!

Also, sell your Latent Kor'kron Armor NOW. Prices are dropping quickly, so take advantage of people willing to pay 2-3k while you can!

Raiding:
Got Ji Kun down last night, so we're sitting at 4/13. One of our raiders got very lucky when the Heroic TF staff dropped. Our last pull of the night was a 1% wipe so we did one more and got her down. I know it's one of the intro heroic fights, but really, that fight is rough. I prefer dps checks.

 

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Making Gold from 5.3 Mining/Herb Changes

Well, patch 5.3 is out today, and while I anxiously await its release, figured I'd share how I'll be making money from the patch changes.

Only changes this blog cares about:
Node gathering professions can now be leveled in Pandaria from 1-600! This is, or could potentially be, a pretty dramatic shift in the marketplace. You get "ghost iron nuggets," "kyparite fragments," and "torn green tea leaves"  that act like motes: 10 of them turn into 1 ore. So-

Old way to level Mining 1-600(if you're Horde, /shoo): Go to Wow-Professions. Alt-tab back and forth, swap continents multiple times, and learn the mining routes for each of the following 1) Darkshore/Elwynn Forest, 2) Hillsbrad Foothills, 3) Western Plaguelands/Feralas,  4) Burning Steppes, 5) Ungoro Crater, 6) Hellfire Peninsula, 7) Nagrand, 8) Borean Tundra/Howling Fjord, 9) Sholazar Basin, 10) Mount Hyjal, 11) Twilight Highlands, 12) Jade Forest/Valley

New Way: Valley

So, where would this be useful? You have to be 85 to use the Pandaria portal, but that's really the only restriction on the new system. There are a two main situations where it would help:
1. Switching profession @ lvl 90
2. Outlevelled gathering profession zone/too lazy to go back and catchup

From here we can identify some changes in the future supply, and thus the change in prices. In the first situation, all ore/herbs would be replaced by Pandaria equivalents. So, at first dramatically, and then evening out over time, we should expect to see an increase in supply of Pandaria herbs/ore (and thus decrease in price). Simultaneously, we will see an decrease in the supply of all other herbs/ore (and therefore an increase in price).

For situation 2, I don't know about y'all, but I either stop leveling my profession at 100, 200, or 400. Somewhere in there, there is a zone or an ingredient or SOMETHING that I just can't get or don't want to grind out. It will be different for everyone but one thing remains the same: more people will have leveled to 100 than 200 (because you need to level to 100 first) so there will be more lvl 200 switchers than 100. Likewise, even fewer people will have gotten to fel iron ore, so more people will be nuggeting that grind rather than going out to Hellfire Peninsula. So, we have a trend, all old world ore will become more rare as lvl 90s switch professions and just spend an afternoon grinding, but the more recent ore will become less farmed than the older content. Here is a handy dandy picture: find your expansion's end boss!

Action steps:
1. Long term relative price increases in old world ore and herbs, so stock up now if you see anything less than 100% median market price.
2. Ininital influx of levellers testing system out=shock to supply. Be ready to buy a LOT of cheap Green Tea and Ghost Iron. Set a threshold, and buy anything under that. Glad I got my scribe to 80.
3. Longterm, more people will be farming current ore and herbs, so there will be an increase in supply and drop in prices slightly here. Be ready to sellback your step #2 ore in 2 weeks - a month, but if you have inventory now, convert some to blacksmithing/living steel/etc now. Prices are going down, so convert and decrease your inventory.
4. (optional) There's something very interesting that MIGHT happen on very populated servers, where there are always people out farming. The expected value of each node is no longer 5.5 ghost iron ore/node, but instead less, since it's giving out 1/10th of an ore to lowbies. So, it's essentially wasting nodes that would have otherwise been mined fully, if the zone is always being farmed. This means that on very high pop realms, the ghost iron/green tea supply is actually DECREASING by this change, which would lead to a price increase long term for ghost iron.



Talking points:
1. What do you think will be a resting point for prices? What variables are you considering?
2. How likely do you think action step #4 is?
3. What affect will this decrease in herbs have on the ink market?

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Explaining Inscription Arbitrage (Glypher to 80!)

I think I can officially say that I'm an altoholic now. Funny thing is, I've only ever considered myself to have had one toon, my warrior. I leveled my bear when I found out about the JC/Enchanting shuffle, and he got raid geared somehow. And today, got my priest to 80 finally after discovering inscription arbitrage a while back. But I officially have 3 toons over 80! :)

C'mon...she's a Draenei, how was I supposed to xmog her?

Oh what was that, you ask? What is inscription arbitrage?

Well, arbitrage is just a fancy word for taking money and making more money with zero risk. Buying low and selling high on the AH (or the stock market) is not arbitrage because there is risk involved: prices can fall, people might not buy, or you might repost so many times that posting fees are more than your profit. However, an example of arbitrage is finding something on the AH that vendors for more that you could buy it for. In short, it means absolutely zero-risk profit, however minimal that profit is. Auctioneer has a search function for this (oddly it's not the one titled "Arbitrage;" that tool is for cross-faction trading, which is not true arbitrage. It's the "Vendor" one.) This is also a great way to get start-up cash for a fresh toon on a new server.

Arbitrage at its purest. Immaculate Scepter: Bid-23g. Vendor-26g.  

The Inscription arbitrage, the one I leveled my priest for, is pretty awesome, has been around since 5.0 launch day, and in essence, sets a price floor on the price of herbs. It keeps them in check and ensures that herbalism is always a profitable profession. It's not new, but it's a great tool if you aren't aware of it.

The way it works: any time herb prices drop below 1g 50s per herb, inscriptionists can mill the herbs, turn them into inks, and then craft any of the blue shoulder enchants. The cool thing is that rather than auctioning them, you vendor them since their vendor price is so high. You'll come out making a little bit or a decent amount more than you started with, depending on whether you're in a level 25 guild or not.
Note: As of 5.3 this strategy no longer works. Shoulder enchants vendor price have been reduced from 18g to 1.8g. Whamp whamp.
 Best thing is that you don't have to deal with the hassel of auctioning, so it's immediate profit. The gravy, or arguably the main course, is that you'll have several stacks of Starlight ink out of the deal. As you can tell from the link, these sell for between 50g and 150g each, so a stack is about 1000-3000g. Wowhead claims that the milling yield for misty pigment is a 25% chance at between 1-3 (24%, 0.6%, 0.6%, respectively). In short, blah blah blah "expect about 1 Starlight ink per stack you buy."

Shh. get on with it.

So, in order to do this, you need to have an inscriptionist at lvl 80 with inscription at lvl 540. 

My results:

Over the course of my leveling, I've scanned the AH while waiting on Tank queues and was able to buy 150 stacks of green tea leaves at between 1.5g and 2.0g. I use TradeSkillMaster Destroyer, with even stacks unchecked, it's a great search tool that puts all the herbs in one place. While, I had some rain poppy and other miscellaneous herbs, really, the green tea was exactly 150 stacks: 3000 herbs on the button. How perfect was that for testing?!

I did this in two milling sessions, and must have crafted something that required starlight ink out of boredom unfortunately, because the numbers there just seem off, but in all, the test was a success. She milled 107 misty pigments, which I split and posted half as ink and half as pigments, for a total of about 7500g. She also crafted 248 shoulder enchants, which vendored for 4,600g.

Revenue

     Pigment     7383g

     Enchant     4649g

     Total                   12032g

Cost         (150x40g)

                                (6000g)

Profit                        6032g

ROI= 101%

There's a really interesting lesson here though that I haven't read anywhere else. If I want to do this long term, and assuming I can find buyers/uses for starlight ink, I am willing to pay much much more than 1.5 for herbs. Granted, it's goes out of the realm or classic arbitrage beyond that price point, but call me a greedy risk taker. In fact, from the ROI above we know that, combined with the cost assumption that I paid 2g/herb (that's the "150x40g" thing), I'm willing to pay 100% more than that, or 4g per herb, which, although ridiculous sounding for green tea leaves makes sense when you consider the idea that, with this process, every stack of herbs gives you one free starlight ink. In short, the question everyone should be asking is, "how much more would I pay for a stack of herbs if every stack gives me a free rare Ink?"

Anyways, hope this helps and gives perspective, and when looking at my numbers, please remember that my pigment/rare ink numbers were about 50% less than what they should have been, for whatever reason. i.e. I was expecting an ROI of about 160%.

Don't level at 3AM. Your scribe eats your ink.

THIS IS MADNESS!

THIS IS MADNESS!

THIS. IS. MY. MARKET.

Alright, so maybe I'm going a little overboard, but this is a follow up on the blacksmith shenanigans from earlier. Here's the situation in case you missed it. One person had no idea what they were doing and posted every craft at zero profit. No goals competative meta goals in mind, just trying to make any gold they could, erroneously thinking that endercutting by 400g meant things would sell faster (Hint: it doesn't; a 1c undercut is the same as a 400g). Her presence had 2 of my BS guildies and 2-3 other competitors posting under 100g for current items that should be worth over 400-500g. Then, it spread. 

She had an alt.

I looked at leatherworking and the same was happening there. Then the presence of leather prices drove down cloth prices and then the whole AH started dropping. Not a lot mind you- 5%, maybe 10%. There's a lot going on in the marketplace, and I'm not sure if it was this girl's fault, but I'm personally vested and wasn't willing to take the chance. I also have a lot of inventory at stake. So, I took a big risk and made a play.

I reset the PvP market. All of it. It was awesome. Literally went through and bought/reposted at 150% global median price every single item on the AH that started with the word "Crafted." 500 pieces in total. But because prices were so ridiculously low, I was able to do this for only about 65k. Granted, that's a lot, and way more than I'm willing to afford right now. But luckily, even if they don't all sell, they're all good looking transmog stuff that will sell for more than 90g later.

Temporary results:

Two blacksmiths have dropped: the main undercutter, and one other that I didn't keep track of

One of my guildies stopped undercutting by as much. Not sure why. I should talk to him though, because he's killing his profit.


Now, I don't normally do talking points but let's throw this one out there:
Do you guys think this was a good idea or a bad one?
What else good could happen?
How could it backfire?

Storytime and Heroic Thunderforged

STORYTIME
Well, I took a little time off the heavy grind, as I alluded to in my last post. But I have two fun and quick stories to share with y'all that you can hopefully take with you on your WoW goldmaking journeys.

Hell yah! Storytime!

Situation 1: As I said on my Twitter, there were no Ghost Iron Bars up on the AH the other day. This never happens. So, while on my glyph poster, I decided to pull from my inventory and do a quick reset. Average prices for bars are about 7g each on my sever. Posted ten stacks of 10 at 18g each, ten stacks of 10 at 15g each. and five stacks of 20 at 13.5g each. (Low volume buyers are forced to buy the more expensive ones, and if someone needs a lot, you get the profit as they buy up the ladder). Anyways, within a minute or two, someone posted ten stacks at 7g each. Since he was online, I whispered him to suggest that he could earn a higher profit if he posted higher, somewhere in the range of 8g and my price of 13.5g. 

         Understand, I'm a nice guy, trained in communication and conflict resolution. I also try to follow a rule of never explicitly telling anyone how to play or exactly what to do. Also, while I understand econ, I'm not an expert, and the Auction House is ridiculously complex (no really, there's a reason I haven't linked my charts and graphs), so I don't have enough foundation to tell someone exactly what to do. Long story short, this guy goes ballistic on what was polite advice (*cough* that he later took *cough*) calling me names, cussing me out, letting me know he can post how he pleases, for some reason repeatedly pointing out that this is a "GAME," and flaming me in trade. 

        The punchline of the story is, that he was doing things against his guild's code of conduct. I know this because I happen to also be in that guild. I also happen to have been an officer in that guild since the launch of Cataclysm. Moral: be careful which anonymous bank toons you cuss out, or better yet, just be a nice person all the time. Otherwise, you might just get a shiny new /gkick.

Situation 2: This one is more of a throw-your-hands-up-in-defeat problem. Below is a picture of a competitors recent sales.

Blacksmiths will immediately know where this is going

There is a blacksmith on server named Kirien. Kirien thinks that 100g is a good price for blacksmith gear. Reckles likes higher prices. Kirien likes to post low. Kirien also posts a lot. Reckles does not like Kirien being in the market. But seriously, of the pieces listed in the picture above the CHEAPEST median price globally is 415g. Since I haven't been online as much, I can't keep her or him in check either. It's terrible because I see other people starting to undercut and post at 98g, and 97g. I've reset a few times, but other than building up a massive inventory of pvp gear I just don't know what to do. One thing this blacksmith is doing very well is crafting/posting daily, but she is just making very little profit. Please, everyone reading know that if you're the cheapest on the market, it doesn't matter if you're selling for 100g or 500g, people still buy happily as long as you're under the global average price. The difference is that if it took you 5 minutes to gather the ore and post the 11 pieces of gear in the picture above, then selling them them at Kirien's prices would earn you about 250g profit (her actual profit). If you sell them at the median price, you might not sell as many, but you don't need all of them to sell to compete with that profit; you just need to sell ONE, because selling ONE piece earns you 450g profit. 

      I'm almost frustrated enough to go on another binge.

RAIDING

In raiding news, we got the stupid turtle down after three days on the last pull of the week. As a Titan's Grip player, I'm sad, as a Fury Warrior, I'm ecstatic, because Shellsplitter Greataxe HTF and Shellsplitter Greataxe H both dropped. As my raid leader said as soon as they dropped "Welcome to SMF, Reckles!" Really though, it's kindof a WoW dream come true. There is legitemately no better weapon for a fury warrior in the entire game than what I have right now. It's so surreal. Like, if I work hard and practice and theory craft, I can now be one of the best dps in the world, because gear is no longer holding me back. That shiz is cray cray. Anyways, thanks for letting me brag a little about my weapons, guys!

Until next time remember that the best way to make gold in WoW is to 

Search. Craft. Post.

Every Day

Lesson Learned

So, I think I hit it too hard last week. I mean, didn't do too much out of the ordinary, but with the blog taking off, I guess I wanted to show off for you guys and show that I knew what I was talking about. You know, get my bankroll up and all that jazz. Granted, I did that, so my bank toon is happy, but honestly, I'm just whooped.

All that Bubbling Anima makes her sleepy.

      In the past week, I kept things pretty normal, but added an extra cancel/rescan during the day, which is against my whole "diversify" mantra. Rather than craft once every day or two, I crafted once or twice a day. While that's probably normal for some moguls out there, I'm not used to it. And honestly, it got me thinking about doing a mass crafting session of the pvp goods during the weekends. You know, "make 5 of each of the contenders sets." Something along those lines. So I can just "Set it and Forget it."

Don't you toy with me Ron Popeil!

      In other news, some friends over at Stormspire recommended some other blacksmith transmog craftables so I bought about 30k of mob drop recipes off the AH (Don't worry, they were all good deals! I checked!) So, hopefully that'll increase income in the near future. One problem I've run into though is finding a way to find and store the huge amount of new mats required for the transmog items. With current gear, crafting is simple; get GIB and Trillium, and find an anvil. With transmog crafting, once you load your queue, you're presented with 80 billion different mats. It's very profitable, and I've already broken even with a majority of the items still on the AH, but crafting has been a pain. It'll take a little doing and some time in Excel but a dealfinding list should do the trick. That way, any time I there are mats on the AH, I'll be able to snatch them up. Not 100% sure how best to prepare for future crafts though, but, experience will tell. I'll let you know as I go. Until then, keep up the routine and remember to

Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.

Glypher to 65

Short post today, but made a big step in the glyph market. Finally had enough time to get my glyph maker to level 65. Which means, she can start learning and making Lick King/Northrend glyphs. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but as far as I know, that's a huge majority of them. DK's don't have any higher than that, and a few other classes too. So while I won't be able to play in the entire market, once I spend the next 80 years doing Daily Northrend Research, I'll be able to at least see what the profit potential of the glyph market really is. The past two weeks have been beetween 3k and 4k. Hopefully we'll be able to improve on that pretty significantly, since today alone I learned 15 new recipes. For fellow inscriptionists, don't forget to regularly scan the AH for Books of Glyph Mastery under 300g or so. They only save you one daily cooldown though if you're considering profitability, so really, even 100g is too much in a competitive market.

Not sure if I'll power level this toon to 90 so she can do MoP inks and glyphs or not, but I'm just glad there's forward momentum in what has been a fairly stagnant section of my gold making strategy. 

 Well, I'm off to scrutinize some Horridon videos and see where I can improve.