The style of writing does vary from time to time and often may be viewed as self-indulgent prattling. There are many times I am horribly, horribly wrong or miss certain painfully obvious things. Some would say this adds to the charm. Likewise, grammatical and typographical errors likely abound. There is no excuse for this aside from sheer laziness.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Price of Pants

One of Strev’s daily routines is scanning through page after page of listings hoping to snag a good deal on items to resale for a tidy profit. I’ve found that I tend to make a lot more overall from these ventures when I target a large number of “little things” instead of dipping a toe into the waters of speculating on blue and purple gear—it’s too easy to take a bath as the prices plummet. Although this basic strategy isn’t without some risk (Anybody need a few dozen stacks of Cobalt Ore?), I’ve been fairly successful wealth generation overall.

Where does the money go? Since Cataclysm released, I’ve dropped about 9k on various flight speed increases, 23k on leveling trade skills, 2k on a few items to stockpile for resale in a few months and about 6k on various enchantments, enhancements, gems, and frippery… and still have about 21k banked at the moment. For the “big players”, this is a trivial amount I know, but it’s very comfortable for me.

By and large, people with disposable coin tend to drop it on one of four things: vanity pets, vanity steeds, leveling professions and item upgrades. Frankly, I don’t really care too much about pets and mounts. Some of them are ‘nifty’, but not so much that I can justify blowing thousands of gold on one. The professions I want to have I have and at maximum level—maybe. I’ve considered playing around with tailoring or jewelcrafting but neither appeal enough to make a time and coin investment…yet.

That leaves gear. Evening time restrictions have left me unable to dungeon run with the guild as of late and I simply refuse to pug in Cataclysm. This means gear has to come from AH Bind-on-Equips or reputation rewards. As I was browsing the AH, I found a nice set of pants. Stupidly nice pants. 11850 gold nice. Breeches of Mended Nightmares (+512 stamina, +321 intellect, crit and haste and a red gem slot for good measure). Maxdps.com confirmed there’s only a couple of better options for the slot.

For a disturbingly long period of time I stared at the pants and contemplated my options. Should I burn over half of my nest egg on pants? What else is the money good for? I clicked the ‘buy option’. The auctioneer asked for confirmation. I chickened out.

In the end I decided to give it a week and see if the price drops. If it doesn’t, a week or two from now I may deem the money is trivial enough that I can just buy without feeling immediate buyer’s remorse. For now, though… let’s see how I can make that extra capital work for me.

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