Throughout Mists of Pandaria, any server has seen an occasional mount sold in trade chat or on the Black Market for gold cap- 999,999g. After all, that's all you can give someone...right?
All the badass mounts and the stupid chicken is the most expensive.../sigh
The development team behind Warlords of Draenor is making strides to reduce the incoming inflation caused by people earning gold questing all their characters to 100, gathering resources, and then turning each of those into enchants and gear worth thousands. They've increased the material cost of crafts. They've done away with Justice points and Valor, and made it so non-raiders (read: goldmakers) will be able to spend gold on non current items and gear, and they've added plenty of new gold sinks. But with an average inflation rate in WoW that has always been on the cusp of hyperinflation, I'm not the only one who doubts prices won't rise in Warlords of Draenor. So, what?
So, prices rise. The value of gold decreases. 999,999g only buys you a mount that would have previously sold for 500k to 700k. We've got a gold cap and we might start seeing some creative moguls in trade chat start requesting a toon and a half worth of gold for those almighty mounts, especially as the supply of TCG mounts dwindles over the next year or two. Granted, I'm making two or three assumptions in this post, but if anyone sees this happen, or happens to ever see a SST sell for gold cap, let me know so I can know I wasn't entirely speculating.
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Alysrazor is one of those quintessential bosses from the Firelands raid; she loves Ragnaros, is made of fire, has fire abilities, spits fire everywhere, avoid fire by fire the fire, and she fire fire Mcfirefire. In other words, if you did this raid when it was current, you were pretty sick of the colors orange and red by the time it was all over. Luckily for goldmakers, there's so much of the nasty stuff on the ground that even at level 90 with ilvl 500+, people still have a lot of trouble soloing this boss. That's where the goldmaking opportuntiy is.
The goal of killing this boss is to get the ground mount Flametalon of Alysrazor, which looks absolutely fantastic for those who have flame-theme transmog sets. And before you ask, no, this is not the mount that looks like Alysrazor, that's the Smoldering Egg of Milagazor which drops off Rag (the purple one is from the Firelands Achieve). As far as profit potential goes, I recommend either posting out 5k/run or just letting people offer their own amount. You'll get haggled either way, but with the offer version, you'll occasionally get a nice 10k run offer.
(Math Break: This mount has a very low drop chance, 2%, and if a comparable epic ground mount is worth ~100k, then each Aly kill has an expected value of 100,000g/50 or 2,000g. However, people who want the mount and are willing to pay for the run will very rarely be risk averse or risk neutral, and instead internalize a higher drop chance for the mount than it actually has - i.e. they'll feel lucky - and will be willing to pay more for it because of that. So, because they feel lucky they feel like it has a 10% chance of dropping, and the run is worth 100,000g/10=10,000g. If they can get a run for 5k, that's a half-off discount and both parties walk away happy; they don't have to fly through those stupid rings and you get more than the expected value of the run.)
STRATEGY
Start off the fight behind the boss as she will claw the ground whenever she's near it. I personally like to grab the last three feathers so I'm always close to Aly's tail, but that's personal preference. DPS her and fly through the first four rings that spawn before immediately returning to the ground to kill the two hatchlings. These adds take 1000% extra damage for a brief period but if you don't kill them, begin to just absolutely wreck you. When they enrage, they are very naughty little baby birdies (I've solo tanked Garrosh with no problem on my Guardian Druid, these guys wreck him). So kill em quickly with the buff and get back into the air. If your flight buff falls off, grab a feather and you should get boosted back up. From here it's just 2 minutes of flying through rings and staying in bounds until the tornado phase.
The rings themselves give an 8% haste buff and refresh your ability to fly. When you get 25 stacks of the buff, you get an extra 75% crit. Because of this, if you're super-geared, some people just skip the hatchlings all together and kill Alysrazor before the tornados, but why risk that when you're selling the run, right? If you're having trouble with rings, an easy way to do them is to start above and behind Alysrazor until one spawns. Then, without moving, aim for it and fly straight forward. After you hit the ring, hold or tap spacebar a little bit to get back up in the air, so you can get your bird's eye view (lolz, get it?). Repeat this process of going ring to ring. However, if you have good reflexes, and can manage to follow your rotation while flying behind her without doing the aforementioned ring-to-ring strategy, you'll probably get more damage in. Really though, if you're terrible at rings, don't worry, just relax, because everyone was terrible at first. Give it a couple attempts. :)
One of my favorite guide pictures from when this was current.
Too bad the arrows are pointing in the wrong direction.
For the tornado phase, you land and deal with a billion types of fire on the ground and the fact that you can't see anything over the sheer amount of particle effects on your screen. The goal here though is to strafe around in a big circle and follow a tornado. If you do so, you should avoid most of the damage. The middle lane tonado is best since it's closest to your speed, but be aware that you will catch up to it, so don't be one of the countless raiders out there that didn't let go of their "run" key and died by hugging a flaming tornado. Also, you can still hit Aly while she's flying overhead, but if you need to focus on where your feet are then feel free to do so. With a geared dps toon, she should drop pretty easily after some practice, and either you or your customer will eventually have a shiny new mount!
CONCLUSION:
All in all, I like this mount run; 5 minutes of haggling, 5 minutes of flying, and 5 minutes of fighting for 5,000g is a pretty decent deal when an efficient mining route brings 3,000 gold per hour. I would prefer it to be a guaranteed drop, but maybe then everyone would already have the bird. It's not at the top of my to-do list, but this is definitely something that I can do once every week and is more fun and exciting than an SSC run. Eventually, people will have high enough gear/ilvl that even the worst players will be able to solo her, but until that day comes, an opportunity for profit exists.
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Last week, I made the biggest investment I've made in the game so far, or at least the biggest purchase of a single item. I bought a slightly underpriced Ghastly Charger's Skull the awesome new flaming ghost horse mount from the Trading Card Game. Almost immediately I regretted the decision, as I know very little about the TCG market, but in the end, what better way to learn, right?
The first step was doing what I normally do with items, spamming trade. Most things sell pretty quickly but expensive items take a while, so I wanted to make a macro for it. Unfortunately, you can't actually shift+click to link items into a macro (ikr? Try it if you don't believe me). If you don't know how to make a macro for items, PowerWord:Gold did a good video a while back. But if I can try and explain in a few sentences, with the cursor where you want the link to go, press "Escape" to back out of that macro window then "Enter" to open up the normal chat pane, and type Anyways, I looked up how many there were being sold in the US and had a nice fancy smancy bark "WTS Ghastly Charger, Rare TCG Mount! Only 27 available Worldwide! Pst with Offer" Got a couple offers the first day but no one followed through and actually purchased.
Then something funny started to happen. In economics, there's something called Ownership Bias, also called the Endowment Effect. It's actually a really simple concept that everyone experiences almost much every day: when you start to claim ownership over something, you begin to value that object more than you did beforehand. I have a really cheap Ibanez-knockoff guitar that is scratched-up, hardly works, and was $79 when I bought it with my saved up allowance 12 years ago, but it's priceless to me because it's mine. A professor did a fun example of this with in one of my classes where he had a bunch of really cheap cups and a bunch of decent pens. He asked us how much the pens cost. "Meh. About a buck or two." And how much did the cups cost? "Probably about a dollar or two." (He clearly ran through the 99 cent store on the way to work.) Anyways, he passed out the pens and cups randomly to the students at the beginning of class, and at the end of the two hours went back around asking everyone if they wanted to trade in their cup or pen for a different cup or pen. Almost nobody did the trade! Even though monetarily there was absolutely no difference (and the students had been told so upfront!) the cups had transition in everyone's minds from just part of an experiment to a possible favorite coffee mug or a gift for the little sister.
Back on topic, my TCG mount, went from a quick investment, and only an investment, to "man, you know, it would look pretty cool if I was on that outside of raid." And then the little devil popped up on my shoulder a little later adding on "Didn't your raid team's main tank lowball you? If he wants it, just think how jealous he'd be." And then the angel chimed in the next day, "Your priest is almost lvl 90, doesn't she deserve a new mount to ride around on? Oh, wait a second, this is a lvl 20 mount and you're leveling your monk next! How great would it be to see him on it at level 20!?" I'm just completely fascinated that, over the course of a week, I have gone from being willing to sell it for 250-275k to putting it up on the AH for 375k and legitimately wondering if I should post it for more. Usually, with almost any other item I've sold it's the other way around; you start high and then when it doesn't sell, you lower the price until it does sell. Here, I'm subconsciously raising the price so that it doesn't and I can convince myself that I'm better off learning the mount myself.
"For real though, guys. I'm just trying to go do proving grounds. Get off me."
I'm not saying I'm gonna stay out of the TCG market forever, but I'm gonna have to get a better deal next time, cause I am five minutes away from learning this thing and wasting that initial investment.
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Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day. (and NOT just buying random mounts!)
