...and, as promised, several dozen things you can do to make money, based on professions:
Tailoring:
1. Farm frostweave cloth more effectively for sale. Get the Northern Cloth Scavenging skill and farm packs of Converted Heroes in Ice Crown (west side, towards the middle). (Side bonus: these guys also may drop Books of Glyph Mastery that currently sell for hundreds no matter what server you're on).
2. Bags, bags, bags. Bored people roll alts. Those alts need bags. Bags will always net a steady supply of coin. (Remember, it usually isn't about making "one big score". It's a lot of little transactions that get you to your goals!)
3. Frill items for transmogrification! Look for items that look 'sexy' and supply the demand! You don't have to live on a RP Server to make money selling Black Mageweave and similar items. The nice thing about the internets is there's always a steady supply of pervs with money.
Enchanting:
4. Look for greens and better on the AH that would be worth more as dust or shards and bid or buy them out depending on expected returns.
5. Abyssal shatter! When abyss crystal supplies are high and cheap, buy them up and use abyssal shatter to reduce them to huge piles of infinite dust and greater cosmic essences.
6. Don't forget your roots. Use The Undermine Journal and price out enchantments that are a) Best in Slot for heirloom gear b) Useful from the previous expansion or c) A serious pain in the ass to get. Bonus points if it covers all three.
7. Make and sell those rare enchantments for the current expansion. List these Tuesday nights to maximize traffic from raiders getting new gear.
Jewelcrafting:
8. Do the Stormwind daily. Mind-boggling fast, rewards decent coin, and if is is a daily that requires nightstone, jasper, or zephyrite, sell the appropriate stone in convenient bundles of three in the AH (never more than 6 stacks at a time, 12 hours, check for undercutters periodically, but don't cancel your auctions...just put a few stacks of 3 under theirs.)
9. If you don't need or want tokens for recipes, DO THE DAILY ANYWAY for a chimera eye every day. On most servers this presently equates to getting an extra 100-150g for doing one measly daily. Let that sink in. You can get over a hundred gold for selecting ten nearby people and dousing them with stardust.
10. Be on the lookout for cheap uncommon gems that can be turned into jewelry and snatch them up, particularly if you have access to an enchanter.
The Shuffle: (JC + Enc = $. JC + Enc + transmute-specced Alchemist = $$$.)
11. Do the shuffle. You will need to enlist an Enchanter if you don't have one. If you don't have one, it's worth leveling up for this one reason alone. Stupidly simple and makes a fortune: buy cheap ore on the AH. Prospect it all into gems. Curse when you get zephyrite. Nightstone, alicite, hessonite, and jasper gets made into jewelry. The jewelry is then dis-enchanted and either made into scrolls for sale, or to sell as raw enchanting materials.
Carnelians should either be sold on the AH or if you have access to an alchemist with a transmute spec, should be converted to inferno rubies, which are then cut and listed on the AH.
I can't emphasize how incredibly well the shuffle has worked for me.
Alchemy:
12. Always use your transmute cooldown. Always. Even if you're not making truegold, converting 15 life into 14-16 more desirable volatile will mean at least another 100g a day for all the time it takes to enter a portal, use your cooldown, and hearth back to Stormwind. Just check the AH to see which volatile is selling the highest and if it is Fire, go to Hyjal; Earth, Deepholm; Water, Vashj'ir; or Air, Uldum. By this token, if you're standing around Stormwind selling your cooldown for less than 100g, you're screwing yourself out of money.
13. Use OTHER people's cooldown's. As we learned above, there's a set value a CD is actually worth, relative to the difference between the cost of Life and the rarest volatile of the day. If people in trade are offering to sell their CD for much less than you stand to gain by selling the results on the AH, take them up on it.
14. Sell your CD indirectly. If truegold is the CD flavor of the day, get a piece of truegold in advance. Offer in trade to sell truegold for "mats plus tip", then trade them the truegold you already have. Use your own cooldown later and if you get that lucky x5 proc, well...that's a free 2k gold without having to argue with someone over whether they should be entitled to the extras from your proc.
Blacksmithing
15. Belt buckles. Keep a supply going for Tuesday nights and weekends. This isn't going to make a a fortune, but a little bit here and there certainly helps.
16. Stormforged shoulders and several other pieces can be DE'd for heavenly shards. If ore is cheap on your server, this can mean a few extra coins along the way.
17. Enchanter rods. There is a small but consistent need for rods through an expansion's life cycle, but a heavy demand when new races and classes are introduced. It takes very little effort to be the primary provider of these on most smaller servers.
Skinning
18. Only farm top end skins. Yes, there's money to be had monopolizing medium and thick leathers (because, like wool cloth...people tend to blow past this content very quickly), but for sheer gold to time invested (and time is money, friend) stick to the flavor of the moment.
19. Know where to farm your leather. The following are amazing places of infinite leather and, as a bonus, you may get extra leather scavenging other people's quest kills: the spiders around the center of Tol Barad Peninsula, the crocodiles just west of Tol Barad keep, the spiders in the western part of the firelands (accessed by the dailies).
Mining
20. If you smelt it, they will come. When practical, convert ore to bars and enjoy a little added coin for your trouble. Pay attention to ore prices and know your market before playing extensively here. Expect bars to make a jump the week after 4.3 hits due to raiders switching to Blacksmithing without picking up mining.
AH Flipping
21. Flip things on the AH when you are reasonably sure you will be able to get 20% or more on the sale. Your snatch lists should include various enchanting supplies, ores, gems, herbs, and cloth, regardless of whether you can actually use them in your profession or not. Warning: Never flip any finished goods that can be mass produced for cheap by someone else (scrolls, belt buckles, etc.). You've just given your competition enough money to make another to sell at the lower price as well as a profit. That's BAD.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Auction Housing 101 and Some Sites to Bookmark
(Sorry this is so late, works has been nuts the last few days!)
Forget arenas. Forget Tol Barad and rated battlegrounds. The best and fiercest PvP you’ll encounter on any server is the Auction House. The competition is cutthroat and the unwary and/or clueless can lose their shirts. It’s also where you’ll be making the vast majority of your gold, so you need to learn how to work it. Knowledge is your weapon to survive. You won’t reach the top of your season’s PvP ladder without resilience gear. You won’t reach your gold goals without understanding the auction house. Today’s lessons are the very basics. In the auction house, you’ll be doing several things: purchasing and re-selling undervalued items (called “flipping”), purchasing raw commodities for processing with your trade skills, and hawking your own wares. But… what is your stuff worth? How much should you list it for? Should you go cheapest or not? How long should I list things for sale?
First things first, no matter what site you get your tips from, no matter what your personal Scheme of the Moment is, your mileage is going to vary severely based on your server. On a low-population server, you may have one or two people who are the only providers for a particular niche market (say belt buckles or enchanter rods) or you may have several people vying for dominance of the very lucrative glyph market. Smaller servers may have less competition for suppliers, but demand for high-end raiding consumables may be much lower. On higher pop servers, you can certainly count on there being competition, no matter what your market is, but have the luxury of a much wider potential market for those goods and services.
The first site to become familiar with is The Undermine Journal. Select your server and faction and you can see what is being listed on your server, in what quantities, historically how much it is being sold for and overall trending data. Many goods have price ranges that cycle up and down over the course of a week. Learn when raw goods will be available in quantity for cheap (often the weekends) and resell them when the market supply dries up later in the week. See what consumables (for example, specific gem cuts) and enchantments go for historically. There will always be curve balls. For example, content patches will always upset the apple cart somewhat, but knowing what to expect can mean profiting during every step.
You’ll also want a UI add-on to help your cause. Typically people either install Auctionator or Auctioneer. I have never had success in running both at the same time and each gives a little different functionality. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’m going to link several very good websites and free videos that show you how to set those up and give nice strategies you can use like:
1. Making snatch lists to grab things when they are cheap
2. Organizing shopping lists for common needs
3. Finding things that are being listed for less than the vendor price (it happens!). That’s just free money.
4. Finding things that are much cheaper than their disenchant value
5. Automate postings of your sales and do things like automatically undercut the cheapest competitor by a percentage or a copper
So, how long to list things? In most cases, 12 hours. Use this figure when posting overnight sales or for items with heavy competition (cut red gems, for example). Things that cost virtually noting to re-list, like glyphs and scrolls, 48-hours. The night before patches or planned extensive server maintenance set your auctions for 24 hours. You want to be the seller people see when the servers come back up!
The promised Links of good sites in general:
Nerf Faids
Kuja's Gold Mine
...and specifically on AH add-on set-up and use:
Alto's Goldish Advice
Ok, so for now, you'll be getting a little more familiar with your market. Next time, we'll just hit a few dozen quick and easy ways to make gold.
Forget arenas. Forget Tol Barad and rated battlegrounds. The best and fiercest PvP you’ll encounter on any server is the Auction House. The competition is cutthroat and the unwary and/or clueless can lose their shirts. It’s also where you’ll be making the vast majority of your gold, so you need to learn how to work it. Knowledge is your weapon to survive. You won’t reach the top of your season’s PvP ladder without resilience gear. You won’t reach your gold goals without understanding the auction house. Today’s lessons are the very basics. In the auction house, you’ll be doing several things: purchasing and re-selling undervalued items (called “flipping”), purchasing raw commodities for processing with your trade skills, and hawking your own wares. But… what is your stuff worth? How much should you list it for? Should you go cheapest or not? How long should I list things for sale?
First things first, no matter what site you get your tips from, no matter what your personal Scheme of the Moment is, your mileage is going to vary severely based on your server. On a low-population server, you may have one or two people who are the only providers for a particular niche market (say belt buckles or enchanter rods) or you may have several people vying for dominance of the very lucrative glyph market. Smaller servers may have less competition for suppliers, but demand for high-end raiding consumables may be much lower. On higher pop servers, you can certainly count on there being competition, no matter what your market is, but have the luxury of a much wider potential market for those goods and services.
The first site to become familiar with is The Undermine Journal. Select your server and faction and you can see what is being listed on your server, in what quantities, historically how much it is being sold for and overall trending data. Many goods have price ranges that cycle up and down over the course of a week. Learn when raw goods will be available in quantity for cheap (often the weekends) and resell them when the market supply dries up later in the week. See what consumables (for example, specific gem cuts) and enchantments go for historically. There will always be curve balls. For example, content patches will always upset the apple cart somewhat, but knowing what to expect can mean profiting during every step.
You’ll also want a UI add-on to help your cause. Typically people either install Auctionator or Auctioneer. I have never had success in running both at the same time and each gives a little different functionality. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’m going to link several very good websites and free videos that show you how to set those up and give nice strategies you can use like:
1. Making snatch lists to grab things when they are cheap
2. Organizing shopping lists for common needs
3. Finding things that are being listed for less than the vendor price (it happens!). That’s just free money.
4. Finding things that are much cheaper than their disenchant value
5. Automate postings of your sales and do things like automatically undercut the cheapest competitor by a percentage or a copper
So, how long to list things? In most cases, 12 hours. Use this figure when posting overnight sales or for items with heavy competition (cut red gems, for example). Things that cost virtually noting to re-list, like glyphs and scrolls, 48-hours. The night before patches or planned extensive server maintenance set your auctions for 24 hours. You want to be the seller people see when the servers come back up!
The promised Links of good sites in general:
Nerf Faids
Kuja's Gold Mine
...and specifically on AH add-on set-up and use:
Alto's Goldish Advice
Ok, so for now, you'll be getting a little more familiar with your market. Next time, we'll just hit a few dozen quick and easy ways to make gold.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Today's Moment of LOL
For the record, their bank did have restrictions, so I helped myself to a parrot before /gquitting a moment later.
Getting Started
At its most basic, wealth is generated in World of Warcraft in one of three basic ways: selling things you acquire to vendors and/or other players, selling services to other players, or as rewards for accomplishing in game tasks. None of these should ever be dismissed out of hand and better ways to do each will be the topics of many columns to come.
Now, as far as getting started goes, you have a few very basic options.
If you're starting out with some wealth already, you're in a good position. This initial influx can come from one of several different sources: a patron may give you a little seed capital as a gift or a loan, you can acquire gold in exchange for real world money either directly from gold sellers (I advise against it, personally. It's against the Terms of Service and if you ever get busted, you pretty much forfeit your account.) or by purchasing a non-bound item from the Blizzard Store and selling it in-game for gold. At present, the only available item is the "Guardian Cub", but expect there to be more in the future. It's hard for a company to look "free money" in the face and say, "You know. We have enough of that. Let's never do this again." It's why Michael Bey movies keep getting made, despite the fact they are all CGI garbage.
But let's say you're starting fresh on a new server, not a friend to your name, with just a level 1 character and no inclination of "taking shortcuts", legitimate or otherwise. Acquiring that first gold coin may seem daunting, let alone getting a million of them.
Note that your server itself will play a huge factor in how you make your money. I don't necessarily mean PvP vs. PvE ones, but things that can be both easy to judge (is it a lower or higher population server? What time zone does it live in?) and more difficult (What faction 'dominates' the server or is it equal?). Roleplaying servers will have a much higher demand for pets, cosmetic armor, and other frill items.
I highly recommend that you create and level a second character other than your 'main' character a bit first. It will exist to farm you raw materials for either selling or for use on your main. Good choices for a farming character are druids, as harvesting in flight form can't be beaten; hunters, so that when a resource node is guarded, aggro can be pulled away by your pet while you harvest it; or warlocks, for the same reason as hunters.
Throughout the newbie tutorial, starter experience, or whatever you wish to call it, you will have opportunities to pick professions. Do this now and pick two gathering professions. Herbalism, mining, and skinning are all incredibly profitable and it is much more productive to start raising them immediately rather than having to waste time later revisiting lowbie zones searching for Peacebloom.
Hoard your harvests and any cloth that is found until you get to your first major city and sell it all on the auction house for just barely under the lowest competitor with 12 hour listings.
Go to bed, knowing in the morning you'll likely have your first gold coin or two.
Tomorrow: De-mystifying the Auction House.
Now, as far as getting started goes, you have a few very basic options.
If you're starting out with some wealth already, you're in a good position. This initial influx can come from one of several different sources: a patron may give you a little seed capital as a gift or a loan, you can acquire gold in exchange for real world money either directly from gold sellers (I advise against it, personally. It's against the Terms of Service and if you ever get busted, you pretty much forfeit your account.) or by purchasing a non-bound item from the Blizzard Store and selling it in-game for gold. At present, the only available item is the "Guardian Cub", but expect there to be more in the future. It's hard for a company to look "free money" in the face and say, "You know. We have enough of that. Let's never do this again." It's why Michael Bey movies keep getting made, despite the fact they are all CGI garbage.
But let's say you're starting fresh on a new server, not a friend to your name, with just a level 1 character and no inclination of "taking shortcuts", legitimate or otherwise. Acquiring that first gold coin may seem daunting, let alone getting a million of them.
Note that your server itself will play a huge factor in how you make your money. I don't necessarily mean PvP vs. PvE ones, but things that can be both easy to judge (is it a lower or higher population server? What time zone does it live in?) and more difficult (What faction 'dominates' the server or is it equal?). Roleplaying servers will have a much higher demand for pets, cosmetic armor, and other frill items.
I highly recommend that you create and level a second character other than your 'main' character a bit first. It will exist to farm you raw materials for either selling or for use on your main. Good choices for a farming character are druids, as harvesting in flight form can't be beaten; hunters, so that when a resource node is guarded, aggro can be pulled away by your pet while you harvest it; or warlocks, for the same reason as hunters.
Throughout the newbie tutorial, starter experience, or whatever you wish to call it, you will have opportunities to pick professions. Do this now and pick two gathering professions. Herbalism, mining, and skinning are all incredibly profitable and it is much more productive to start raising them immediately rather than having to waste time later revisiting lowbie zones searching for Peacebloom.
Hoard your harvests and any cloth that is found until you get to your first major city and sell it all on the auction house for just barely under the lowest competitor with 12 hour listings.
Go to bed, knowing in the morning you'll likely have your first gold coin or two.
Tomorrow: De-mystifying the Auction House.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Setting Reasonable Goals
Goals. Everybody has 'em (except a certain local sports franchise). They may be short-term goals or long-term goals, but you should plainly think of why you're going to be investing the time and energy. It may be to afford an expensive mount...or a barn full of them. It may be to gear up alts, blow in taverns of ill-repute (Goldshire in Moon Guard, I'm looking at you), or just as a personal means of 'keeping score' on your way to the gold cap.
Having goals allows you to keep your eyes on the prize. When you know what you're working for, you're more likely to stay focused on achieving it. Most people will prioritize their activities based on meeting their goals, so ensure any goals you set are practical given your play schedule and other commitments...and just because they are stated, they aren't carved in stone. You may find your initial target to be too easy or too hard to reach in the time frame you want. Don't be afraid to adjust it accordingly. Remember the point of the game is to have fun and if you treating golding like a second job, well... there are times the ends just don't justify the means.
In a hypothetical situation, I'm going to plan on earning 30k to spend on a new purple toy for my priest. (Now that I read that last bit back, it sounds a bit rude, so just... don't think of it like that.) If my Scheme of the Moment(tm) nets about 2k an hour profit, so I know that I can devote a few hours here and there and achieve my slightly less undergeared alt in a couple of weeks without driving myself nuts.
As a side note, when you have a tangible reward that you're working toward (insomuch has pixels have tangibility), it makes it a LOT easier when you click that "buy-it-now" button on the Auction House.
Now, should you wipe yourself back to a zero balance when you make that purchase? Not at all! It doesn't take money to make money in WoW, but it helps a LOT. Your goals should include leaving yourself some cushion after big-ticket purchases. A number of market strategies require a bit of liquid lucre to effectuate properly, so leave yourself with options after the fall.
Having goals allows you to keep your eyes on the prize. When you know what you're working for, you're more likely to stay focused on achieving it. Most people will prioritize their activities based on meeting their goals, so ensure any goals you set are practical given your play schedule and other commitments...and just because they are stated, they aren't carved in stone. You may find your initial target to be too easy or too hard to reach in the time frame you want. Don't be afraid to adjust it accordingly. Remember the point of the game is to have fun and if you treating golding like a second job, well... there are times the ends just don't justify the means.
In a hypothetical situation, I'm going to plan on earning 30k to spend on a new purple toy for my priest. (Now that I read that last bit back, it sounds a bit rude, so just... don't think of it like that.) If my Scheme of the Moment(tm) nets about 2k an hour profit, so I know that I can devote a few hours here and there and achieve my slightly less undergeared alt in a couple of weeks without driving myself nuts.
As a side note, when you have a tangible reward that you're working toward (insomuch has pixels have tangibility), it makes it a LOT easier when you click that "buy-it-now" button on the Auction House.
Now, should you wipe yourself back to a zero balance when you make that purchase? Not at all! It doesn't take money to make money in WoW, but it helps a LOT. Your goals should include leaving yourself some cushion after big-ticket purchases. A number of market strategies require a bit of liquid lucre to effectuate properly, so leave yourself with options after the fall.
Reinventing Oneself
Ok....I let my three loyal readers down and didn't keep the blog up for the past well, almost a year. Time to fix that. I'm getting back into writing and keeping the blog up to date is, if nothing else, a way to guilt myself into keeping at it.
I suppose it's best to get reacquainted with things.
Hi, I'm Strev on Whisperwind. I'm horrible at pvp (often hilariously so), passable in the "blowing things to Kingdom Come" department, and very, very good at making gold.
I never had the intention of starting this out as a blog dedicated to helping peoplesteal my customers earn virtual moolah, but in the past months I've acquired (and mostly blown) somewhere in the vicinity of 1M gold. Guildmates and friends have asked me for advice and while there are plenty of wonderful (and better) free sites to get information to help you along (and I direct people to those as well), I'd like to take a more personal hand in guiding people from poverty to providence.
Nothing depresses me more then when I hear a guildie say they barely have the money to afford repairs. There are vast amounts of wealth out there for the taking! But while they may have spent hours watching videos of how to down raid bosses, they've never invested the time to learn how to make gold.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll cover both the basics and more advanced techniques. I'll give you tips, tricks, things that worked for me, things that blew up horribly in my face (and why!), everything I've learned and even things I know I do wrong (but why they are wrong and why I continue to do them).
For those of you who care about the continuing (mis-)adventures of Strev and the Alt Brigade, don't despair... I'll throw in updates here and there. It just won't be the main focus of the blog for now.
I suppose it's best to get reacquainted with things.
Hi, I'm Strev on Whisperwind. I'm horrible at pvp (often hilariously so), passable in the "blowing things to Kingdom Come" department, and very, very good at making gold.
I never had the intention of starting this out as a blog dedicated to helping people
Nothing depresses me more then when I hear a guildie say they barely have the money to afford repairs. There are vast amounts of wealth out there for the taking! But while they may have spent hours watching videos of how to down raid bosses, they've never invested the time to learn how to make gold.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll cover both the basics and more advanced techniques. I'll give you tips, tricks, things that worked for me, things that blew up horribly in my face (and why!), everything I've learned and even things I know I do wrong (but why they are wrong and why I continue to do them).
For those of you who care about the continuing (mis-)adventures of Strev and the Alt Brigade, don't despair... I'll throw in updates here and there. It just won't be the main focus of the blog for now.
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