"Hi Marcko
I've spent the last 3 months trying to clear my stock of titansteel bars and it's been so so hard! But I tried doing something different accidentally.
Usually I'd spam all my bars there at one time and I would get tons and tons of undercutters (sometimes even at 70g from 120g).
So i thought, why waste so much coin on deposit? So I posted only 4 every time and waited for them to get sold.
And i tried doing that for other items too.
And for some crazy reason, ALL OF THEM GOT SOLD.
Please explain. :S
Regards,
Khairy Farhan"
Welcome to the next level of auctioneering Khairy! You don't realize it yet but you've really matured in your selling methods simply by not posting every single item you possess at once. The same theory works on bags, epics and everything in between. What you were doing is called flooding and it truly effects markets. More items the lower the price (which also means undercutting below your own price), less items higher the price and faster demand will take care of items posted below your price.
Simple economics my friend, welcome to a whole new world ;)
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Great farming spot if you have a mining/skinner who can pick up cobalt nodes around the spot as well as skin the trapdoor crawlers. You could swap mining for herbalism I believe as there are talandra's roses spread around the area as well. The point of this area is to get iceweb spider silk and borean leather, everything else is just icing on the cake. I averaged one iceweb spider silk per minute farmed, which is just nasty!
I use the silk for the four spellthreads on my tailor because sometimes there literally are 0 on the auction house. Check out this video for location and more details.
Right now I'm trying to get to exalted on my DK scribe so I'm doing dailies and championing heroics every day to accomplish that. When I'm out running dailies I'm picking herbs left and right, and even spending a few minutes late at night farming herbs in Sholazar and raking in massive amounts of herbs, which in turn is making me quite a bit of profit from milling.
Thank you for reading my post today. This is Carbon from Gnomesconquest.blogspot.com and today I’d like to briefly touch base about some Cataclysm speculation.
While I may be a huge believer in netherweave cloth being big in the next upcoming expansion, there are so many other markets that are going to heat up real quick for a brief amount of time. For the most part old world mats will spike (pre bc) as everyone is leveling their new chars up. A lot of the bottlenecks most likely will not become problems anymore with the introduction of certain items boosting you multiple points (it’s been said that they were planning on adding them but I haven’t heard much more other than that).
While thorium and the other various bottleneck mats will most likely still sell somewhat well there are a few more that I think most people will not consider or at least stock up on until it is too late.
1) Truesilver ore – this should be simple enough to explain. Rare ore veins are pretty hard to farm in abundance but all the ore based professions briefly touch down on this ore and if blizzard decides to add in the bonus skills I feel that it is highly likely that they will require more of the rare mats to somewhat balance it out. This is where truesilver ore comes into play.
2) While on the topic of rare ores we can add in silver and gold ore as well. I have never really played these markets but if my theory holds somewhat true you may be well off to stock up on a little bit of it. Worst case? It stays the same but I highly doubt it just because of the influx of new characters leveling.
3) Netherweave cloth – I know I mentioned there was others but I feel you can’t possibly stock up on enough cloth. I don’t want to bore my current readers who read both Markco’s blog and mine but if you’re interested on my book of thoughts on this check it out on my blog (it’s a fairly recent post).
4) Mid level herbs such as fadeleaf, briarthorn, blindweed, etc. will more than likely see a spike in price as well more so on the horde side (goblin bonus is alch) but could be applicable as well for alliance; just not as high of a demand.
5) Mid level gems such as citrine, jade, etc. since most (all?) the ore based professions use these here and there. Plus any new JC’s will be gobbling these up as well. And again – back to my theory on the bonus items.
6) Level 40 mail and plate gear. This is one for more of the risk taker and it could be very profitable for the non boa slots (gloves / helms / legs / etc).
7) Chest and weapon enchants for boa items – again, if you aren’t already in this market it may be risky because most people will have their boa gear ready pre cata.
There are so many more things out there.
This is just a brief list to get the ball rolling if you have no clue what so ever on where to start. Check out the profession leveling guides around the internet and you’ll start to get a feel for what to save. Buy low when prices dip, you have plenty of time to amass a huge pile of goods before cata if you start now while it’s all still relatively cheap.
Thank you for reading my guest post today on JMTC and if you enjoyed the read and want to stay on the edge of new cataclysm speculation please check out my blog and subscribe for future blog posts! My blog can be found at gnomesconquest.blogspot.com
"Hey Markco,
I just watched your youtube video from Sunday regarding the vendor pets in Stormspire. Great video. I just wanted to add something though, that I noticed you didn't mention. At that same place in Stormspire there is also a "spare parts" vendor (Dealer Najeeb) who sells some "in limited supply" items.
These items include Adamantite frame,(4g) which is used for an old Netherstorm rep quest and a bunch of odd and various motes for fairly cheap. It could just be my server but I have really good luck reselling the Adamantite Frames for anywhere between 10-20g depending on the day. Depending on the cost of old world ore on your server, even if you have an engineer which I do, it often will beat the price of crafting it to resell, or if you just need it for crafting stuff. Also I'm sure this varies from server to server but some of the old primals go for a lot of money on mine and are often hard to find on the ah, so I'll also buy up any of the good selling motes if he has them, for cheap until I have enough to turn into primals for resale. It's not a huge amount of money but just something to look into if you are already out that way for the pets vendor.
Skorpsy (From Ursin Server)"
Hey Skorpsy, thank you so much for reminding about this vendor! I used to use it all the time in burning crusade and completely forgot about him! Nice tip :)
Wow
My cross faction trading has been very limited and I’m basically buying only a few items on my horde toons to get some gold over to the alliance and then I simply use my alliance toon as a second source of mats for the horde crafting side. I’d love to actually work both ah’s at once but I just don’t have the time! Just looking at the sheer volume of items I post horde side (2-3k!!!) I can’t imagine doubling my time and posting the same quantity on the alliance side. For now my alliance friends will remain my suppliers of materials :D (mmm titanium ore for 8 gold a piece? yum!).
Go on your server's auction house and look up "focusing lens." I'm sure you'll be surprised at how much these babies go for, considering the fact that they take uncommon gems to make! I've been using these to help get rid of the oh so elusive shadow crystals which are not used in my transmutes so all I can do is sell them raw (terrible idea), cut them (not too shabby), or sell them as focusing lens (awesome!).
These lenses are used by raids as well as people just goofing around in battlegrounds and major cities. For some reason whenever Markco runs through a town he gets hit by a few of these. Kind of fun actually haha.
Character: Sankir
Realm: Anetheron (US)
"About 2 weeks ago I was looking for ways to make gold to buy
primordial saronites and I stumbled upon your blog, found it very
helpful and have already made about 23k gold. Although you may already
know this but I have found that Juggling Torches seem to sell very
well, they have been selling for about 40g for 10 on my server and the
only time i've seen someone post these was a stack of 40 for 400g
(never sold). Now that I have my pet and all my achievements for
midsummer I use my Burning Blossoms from the dailies to buy 4 stacks a
day and so far they have always sold."
Have you found ways to make money off the summer festival as well? These torches remind me a lot of the necklaces from valentine's day except with a limited supply which makes them even more valuable. Sell them earlier during this event rather than later!
"Hello Marco
I have been reading your site for the past 3 weeks and already made shitloads of gold using your tactics etc.
I also watched ur insciption market crush by adding glyhs from %50 price to let other sellers buy.
I have a similar approach on gem selling and would want to share it with others.
It's mostly common sense with a bit of foxy twist.
You know cutting by 1s or even 1g will get u cut in a minute or 2 by same amount.
If theres a cutting war, I just made a tactic which generally works...
For this towork, you need to be online and watch your auction.
Lets say i'm selling insightful earthsiege diamond for 50g and someone cut me for 49.99, then i cut for 49.98, etc, etc.
I also added most of my competitors on my friends list so i can c where they r and at AH or not.
Lets say 50g is the %100 pct of this gem. If theres a cut war going on, i decrease the cut range to 30g from 50g. This is uqual to %55 - %60 pct. i stop and wait him to list his gems from %55 pct and i buy them all out. which means i will be able to sell them for %100 later on when hes not on, later on sometime, PROFIT. Of course he might not list any at all due to you cutting him so high... but we will get to that later.
When i do this, if person is clever, he stops posting(if hes not just keep buying his %55 pct gems for profit while his stocks get dry LOL) and logs off or just stop posting and wait my gems to sell out so he can list his for higher prices. But this also enables him not checking the insightful eartsiege market as often as if we had a cutting war going. After 5 to 10 mins, i put in a few more insightful gems from 48g and generally he doesnt check that market for 30 mins orso and i delete the gem that i put in for 30g,making me sell my gems from 48g for no competition. I play in a horde populated realm and in peak times like nights, you can really sell shitloads of gems in 30 minutes.
Of course this will not work if the other seller checks the market every 5 mins meaning he's stubborn but generally it works.
It's just common sensewith a twist.
It would be awesome if you can post this strategy:)
Regards
Sahjhan"
Nice detailed way to deal with undercutters Sahjhan! If the player being undercut was smart he/she would ignore your 50% undercut and just let demand take care of getting rid of it. However, this person is most likely running with an addon like quick auctions 3 and therefore will undercut your 50% auctions. Keep owning the undercutters Sahjhan!
This was my goal this week... find a way to make 1000 gold in 5 minutes of work, start to finish, time myself and make the gold. So far I have been fine tuning several strategies to try and find the fastest money makers in the game. Most of these methods make you a decent amount of gold but are limited to how many times you can use them in the same day. For instance, you aren't going to sell more than one or two of any rare non combat pet, but for many those are worth selling. I'm not including the farm-able ones that sell for thousands in this experiment nor will I include methods such as doing daily transmutes on four characters.
Here's the list of items I've come up with so far in my quest to make 1k gold in 5 minutes:
Titanium transmute, strange dust through disenchanting greens on the auction house, armor vellum III, iron bound tome, faces of doom, dragon hatchling and mana wyrmling pets from stormspire, wool cloth (cross server). The gold earned from these items is around 1400 gold (minus 500 gold in investments) and takes around 5-10 minutes to set up depending on how much wool, strange dust and titanium I use. I will continue looking for easier items to sell that yield very high amounts of gold for the time invested. I would particularly like to remove the titanium due to the crafting time but it depending on how cheap I buy the saronite ore it is a 200% return on investment.
Do you have any quick flips/crafts you have in your rotation that could be included in a make 1k gold in 5 minutes strategy? There are many many methods you could add to this list, everything from flipping infinite dust at 50 silver for 1.5 gold to crafting netherweave bags which yield huge profits but take 20 seconds to make!
Weigh both the time and the gold made in under 5 minutes for your strategies in the comments.
I wanted to cite this email to bring up Iceblade Arrows yet again but this time for a very important reason: You can be banned for being overzealous with the amount of arrows you post. Do one whole page of singles and you're pushing it... but do multiple pages and you are liable for a ban since you are detracting from the play of other players. This seems to only matter with regards to the ammo since I've never heard of players being banned for selling anything else on the auction house. It's ok to manipulate stacks but blizzard has cracked down on players for posting dozens of pages of individual arrows at a time. I personally do about 20-50 at most to be safe and not ever week.
Quick Auctions 3 Guide - 17 Steps
Setup and Posting
If you are using skillet, type /skillet standby to temporarily disable it while using quick auction. This is necessary for when you go to craft your glyphs, gems or enchanted scrolls. Since this tool is most commonly used by glyphers, I will be saying glyph while I explain how to use it, but you can interchange the word with gem or scroll. You can also expand quick auctions to include any item you sell in world of warcraft.
1. First off, type /qa config
2. Scroll down to post time and make it 12 hours
3. Post Cap at 2
4. Per Auction 1
5. Undercut by 1c
6. Price Threshold 3 gold (This is the value at which the price has gotten too low and you won't go any lower. YOu will post at this value at that point.)
7. Enable Auto Fallback
8. Fallbacks 60 gold (This is the value you will post when no one else has posted the item. Definately change this value for gems or scrolls.)
9. Now you are setup and ready to get started!
10. First, go to the auctions tab of the auction house UI. Select Summary at the top right, and then select glyphs on the left of the new UI that pops up.
11. Next, select get data, and then view the list on the right hand side of the UI that appears. You will see three columns. Column one tells you the name of the item, has an x if you can't craft it, and if you left or right click you can modify how many of the glyph you'd like to craft. In the middle column you can mouse over and get a description of what each value means. Green means you are the lowest, red means you've been undercut. You don't really need this number right now, atleast not until after you've posted the first time. The final column is the lowest buyout of that glyph currently on the auction house. Keep in mind QA does it's own scans, so you don't need to keep rescanning each time you use a feature of the tool.
12. Left click on any items above the value you'd like to sell glyphs for. I personally like to use 8 gold as my lowest point to craft glpyhs. Run down the list and use the Hide Uncraftables option in the bottom left to remove all the X's from view. Make as many glpyhs as you want, but I recommend 2 of each that you'd like to sell to get started.
13. Now exit the UI and open up your inscription tab. Here you will find a list on the right of all the glyphs you'd like to craft. Scroll down the list to see the materials you need for your crafting adventures. Go get them and then left click each glyph once to do a create all for that glyph of the amount you specified. This means you click once on Glyph of Disease and it will create as many as you specified earlier. If it was two then two will be created and you only need to click once to make that happen. You will need to click once for every glyph type you wanted to make.
14. Once this is done, type /QA config
15. Select Item groups at the bottom of the left hand side UI and type in the name glyphs or your character's glyphs or whatever you'd like. Now select that new Item Group and look at the auction settings tab. Here you could overide any general selections you made earlier, which is great for glyphs or gems or scrolls that sell at very different prices from the rest (ie an enchant like berserking).
16. Now go to the Add Items tab and type in glyph, then click add item. This will add every single item in your bags with the name glyph to your list of items you will use QA for when posting/canceling. You can make as many item groups later as you want and you can then add items individually by clicking on them. For the berserking enchant you could make a whole new group for just berserking with its own auction settings if you wanted to.
17. Now go to the auction house UI and select auctions. Click Post from the options at the top of your UI. BAM! All your glyphs magically get posted super fast at the perfect prices! Come back in a few hours to do the next step.
Canceling
To cancel your auctions go to the auction house UI and then select auctions. Click Cancel to cancel any auctions in which you are no longer the best price. You could view your summary tab under the auctions tab to see how many glyphs you have been undercut on first (remember to select get data under glyphs first). Now go to the mailbox, get your glyphs, then return to the auction house and click post under the auctions tab. All your glyphs will magically get shot back onto the auction house at the best price.Quick Tips
To turn skillet back on, simply type /skillet standbyYou will need to add more items to your glyph item group should you create new glyphs. Simply open up the item group, select the Add Items tab and type glyph then add item like you did before. Do this if you notice items not appearing in your QA list of items to craft after you've selected them in the summary tab.
Have Materials should be unchecked when viewing your profession tab. Otherwise items you want to craft but need materials for won't show up.
All prices in Quick Auction are based on individual items, not stacks.
RL First
Some days you just want a day off. Some weeks you just want every day off! This was one of those weeks and my RL commitments were a little overwhelming to say the least. That doesn't mean I stop producing content however! I'm looking forward to a very slow and relaxing weekend where I'll get to hang with friends on friday, spend all saturday with the ball and chain (who am I kidding I love her) and sunday surprise my dad with a gift which I won't name right now because he could be reading this post!!!
Wow Second
Ok so I made tens of thousands of gold this week.. I'm not really sure how much since I seem to buy up materials sometimes as quickly as I sell them! I'd estimate I'm cracking the 8k mark on good days but I'm also buying as much as 6k gold in materials as well. Eventually I'll get to the point where I have so many materials coming in that I can't possibly handle buying any more and that's when the money really starts rolling in. I'm hoping to break 50k this week in sales before taking out purchases on materials for future weeks. I'm running into competition on inscription from two players who camp the ah every night but I have my ways of etching out 2k gold right from under their noses while also making the rest of my gold from other professions. I also like to play with them and have 5 of each profitable glyph in my bags and I just post them each time they undercut. You see these players don't have stockpiles of each glyph so they have to waste time canceling their whole lot and then trying to re-post under my undercut. As soon as they're done I immediately re-post without having to cancel. All the while I've been selling glyphs while they run cancel scans and collect their mail. It's not the most efficient use of my time but I do get a little bit of joy torturing my competitors every once in a while. If only I had no life and could camp the ah like they do then things would really get interesting!
Oh by the way two blogs are back in business: ReloadUI and A Gnome's Conquest
Another great email which also contains some nice gold tips while praising the JMTC community (that's you btw).
"Hello Marcko!
Firstly I'd like to thank you for all the awesome information you provide the world with every day on your blog, and I'd also like to thank whole the JMTC community for all their tips and tricks!
Today I hit the 100k mark and couldn't have done it without you, and I'm obviously going for a mil'
I went from having a really hard time getting gold to cover my repairs and consumables for raiding, mainly due to having a really tight school schedule, to, as you would say "performing scrooge mcduck backflips into a sea of gold", and it's all thanks to your blog and the JMTC forums!
I was googleing desperatly for some tips on how to make easy gold, I found all these "amazing" gold guides, but due to not being old enough to own a credit card, I couldn't buy them, which was lucky for me I guess. I found your blog, I read every post on it and slowly started making some careful bids, and found out that it really worked.
I started using my professions, inscription, JC and alchemy to make gold and found out one particular strategy that was working really well for me, which was meta gems.
I sold all the popular meta gems for as much as 150g a pop and I would consider that my main income, and since a lot of people dont think about this there's barely no competition!
It took me three months to get to 100k, which probably would've been faster if I had more time to play outside raids.
THANK YOU MARCKO!
Cheers!"
You’ll want to collect cloth for cataclysm, people will pay a lot to level their bandages if they don’t have it up already (think healers). Once cataclysm goes live, bandages will be much more useful in the expansion with three different types instead of the current frostweave bandage which is a channeled heal. The embersilk bandage, for instance, will heal for a whopping 34,000 health and act like a hot instead of a channeled bandage. Healers will absolutely love this bandage for tossing out quick hots on targets in raid (the cast time has not been announced for this bandage but I'm assuming it will be 1 second) so be ready for a rush of players leveling first aid.
I highly suggest collecting the choke points for first aid: mageweave and netherweave cloth since netherweave is constantly inflated from players creating netherweave bags and mageweave is usually the hardest to obtain on the auction house. A thousand or so frostweave wouldn't be a bad idea either!
Right now frostweave cloth really isn't all that expensive for being the best cloth in the game and I expect embersilk cloth to be extremely expensive come cataclysm. At least double the current price of frostweave + inflation would be my expert gold guru estimate.
"Hello there Markco,
First of all I'd like to say thanks for all your gold tip and amazing blog, of which I read everyday. Last night I decided to give cross faction trading a go, and as I found out this can be very profitable. I only bought 2 recipes, which were Recipe: Savory Deviate Delight, and Recipe: Elixir of Giant Growth. I bought 3 of the Savory Deviate Delight Recipe, each for about 200-250g each, and 4 of the Elixir of Giant Growth, each for about 25g. I then transferred them to my alliance toons, and sent them to my bank alt. I kept and used one of the deviate recipes, and I later sold one of each to my awesome thorium farmer, both for about 500g. I then proceeded to post one of each of the recipes on the auction house, I posted the Savory Deviate Delight for 1000 gold, and to my surprise it sold within seconds of me saying something about it in trade. The other recipe ( of which I still have 1 of ), sold for 150g on the auction house.
I must say, I will be repeating this process and will later proceed to dive further into the markets, although, the prices aren't much different of ores, gems, etc. For about minutes of work, I made about 1100g of easy profit, only using 2 rare recipes which rarely appear on the Alliance AH. and I even got to keep on of the recipes. I must warn people though, the process of trading cross faction using the neutral AH, can be dangerous on high population servers, as there can be bots waiting for you to post your high value things at 1 copper. You can avoid this by posting a low value item ( such as food ) for 1 copper, and see if someone buys it, and add them to your friends list and then trade when the botter(s) are offline.
I also just wanted to add, thanks for bringing me into world of making gold, as it has affected a good part of my daily game play, in a positive manner.
- Mageshadow"
Nice tips Mageshadow :) For an item to flip back from alliance to horde try wool cloth.
"Markco,
I work at a JCPenney's and had an interesting thing happen. We have these people from Pakistan (they told us) that buy insane amounts of salon products when we have the buy 1 get 1 free, buy 1 get 1 for 99 cents or the XX% off sales. I have noticed the same people coming in every time we have these sales and decided to ask them what they did with them. They told me they sell them on Ebay sometimes but mostly sent them back to their home country and sold them for profit. They could buy hairspray for $10 here in the states and send it to Pakistan and sell it for between $50-$60 dollars. I started thinking "this sounds familiar, why is that?" Then realized that they're doing what I do in WoW in RL. They buy on 1 side cheap and sell it on Ebay (neutral AH) or send it over to Pakistan (cross faction AH) and make profit. These guys are in the store buying $200 - $300 worth of stuff every week so Im guessing business is good! Just an interesting story I thought you'd like to hear about
Wee (Azuremyst - US)"
Props for spelling my name right and thank you Wee for the cool story! For you, the readers of this blog, have you ever tried selling pets cross faction?
The Addon Abuser
These people are the most common millionaires in wow. They rely on addons like quick auctions 3, auctioneer's appraiser, and beancounter to really just abuse the competition. They also use snatch list or just standard search methods to find the best deals on the ah or through guilds/trade to reduce the cost of crafting their items. They tend to use all the materials they pick up from 'farming' the ah and everything is hammered into some kind of rational system. This takes a lot of experience and savvy addon use, something most starting players are not ready to jump into.
The Vendor and Resale Scanner
This person is less common in the millionaire scene but they are there mostly because they've put enough time in to eventually hit their 5th cap. Their method of making gold is to rely on auction house trends and auctioneer's vendor/resale scans. These are the people who can start a level 1 toon and make 1000 gold in a handful of hours played.
The Crafty Reseller
Similar to the vendor/resale scanner but different in that this auctioneer tends to buy items on the ah and then mix them up a little bit before putting them back. Unlike the addon abuser, the crafty reseller is not focusing on any one or two professions with their resale antics. You will see them selling saronite bars individually after buying a few stacks out, selling vendor pets for 4x vendor price, or any number of small repeatable ways to make gold. These players often have multiple toons with the same cooldown, like four alchemists for example to make steady income daily for very little effort.
Newer players tend to avoid the Addon Abuser and jump into using strategies on this blog or the JMTC forums which don't involve heavy profit manipulation through the use of automation based addons. Eventually though they gravitate towards what makes the most money the fastest and that is the proper manipulation of addons and buying out of materials in bulk for use by every profession.
-Harrison"
/run if not THO then local f,t,c=CreateFrame("Frame","THO"),1,0 f:SetScript("OnUpdate", function(_, e) c=c+e if c>3 then c=0 SetTracking(t) if t==1 then t=2 else t=1 end end end) THO:Hide() end
/run if THO:IsVisible() then THO:Hide() else THO:Show() end
Thank you Jonathan for the email! Hope this helps anyone else who has the painstaking task of both mining and herbing at the same time.
Not today's post but definitely good news:
Episode 9
Episode 10
Call to Auction is back!
Why am I so good?
I research, I practice, and I never assume that my ways are the best way to do things. Research is the #1 reason that players are good, practice is the #1 way to fine tune your play style, and never assuming you know the best way to do things means that you are open to new ideas which could eventually lead to you mixing multiple methods to find the best one for you. You can bet your epic boots that I have dueled thousands of players like you and that I know just by your body language what kind of player you are and what strategies you are going to use on me. Bring it on is my attitude, surprise me and see if I can predict your moves and counter successfully.
How it relates to playing the auction house?
The auction house is constantly changing, so just like the talents of your opponent's in duels, it helps to change up your strategies and always be a moving target on the auction house. Never get comfortable, never assume your adversaries have given up, and keep switching things up with what you buy/invest in. Research, practice and never assume you know everything are the keys to success.
An example of changing it up would be with inscription: I stopped selling all my glyphs that were below 20 gold and focused on selling 20-80 gold glyphs, armor vellum III's, runescrolls of fortitude and off hands. My gold per hour remained around the same but time invested was chopped in HALF.
Min/Maxing?
I min max everything and I try everything that I can to enhance my play style in pvp. The auction house is no different, if you can change your strategy to increase your gold intake by 5 gold for each product of type X, you bloody try it out!
Wrath of the lich king was an awesome time for the wow gold blogs and I have seen an explosion of creativity and interest with regards to making money in world of warcraft this expansion when compared to burning crusade and vanilla combined. Wow.com created gold focused articles, sites like jmtc and other blogs appeared entirely dedicated to accruing gold, and the jmtc gold forums allowed for players of all types to anonymously share their ideas. Blizzard also took more notice on how gold is made in their game by paying attention to the profitability of each profession and making changes occasionally to nerf overpowered methods such as disenchanting easily crafted gear. Basically, wow gold knowledge has exponentially increased since wotlk hit store shelves. There are still a vast majority of players who are pretty clueless when it comes to the economy, but thanks to sites like this one and the new found interest in gold making throughout the wow community there are many many more players every day hitting the gold cap. Now the emphasis is on skill, not time invested (although you need a good bit of time total to hit the gold cap) which has brought a whole new dynamic to making gold. In vanilla it really was all about farming and having the best recipes in the game for your profession, and other than those two methods you had to rely on ah flipping or cross server trading which was not as good as it is today (just because there were less items to flip and less people leveling new toons). As time passed players were getting more experienced and leveling more toons, creating even more opportunities for making gold. That's what it's all about after all, creating the opportunity and then exploiting it for the most gold possible.
I expect cataclysm to see even more intense gold making culture rise up out of the wow community. Blizzard has announced several additions to the craftable items available to professions in cataclysm which include pets, vanity items, and much more! There is also a rise in the number of players who are making gold their primary focus in the game, a method of playing unheard of in vanilla. There's just something amazingly rewarding about seeing all that money from successful auctions flow like a river into your bags. There's also a special satisfaction that you feel when you know you're buying up thousands of auctions with the knowledge that you will get ten times what you paid back by the end of the week. Whether you're flipping, crafting, or farming, you will definitely have more information at your fingertips in cataclysm than you did in wrath of the lich king. Thankfully this time around the gold making community won't be as isolated as it was in wotlk, as there are now literally hundreds of additionally sites which have appeared since I started JMTC. I'm not sure just how much of a catalyst this blog actually was or whether the move towards more and more useful gold information was just a cultural trend online, but I'm glad I made this blog and I wouldn't miss cataclysm for the world... of warcraft.
"Hi Markco,
it's me again, Luzianus from Todeswache EU.
What do you do to dump your excess of hero marks?
Most people buy gems for 20 marks each...about 150g on my Server...nice...but:
trade 60 emblem of triumph for 60 emblem of conquest (use shift ^^).
trade those for 60 emblem of valor.
Now go ahead and buy any of those bracers like Bracers of Dalaran's Parapets (tanks love them, but any other will do too).
Why I would buy emblem-items you ask? Every Emblem-item is BoP...every?...NO!...these bracers are all Bind on Equip.
Go to the AH, and sell them (at least 450g since you would get 3 gems for the same emblems). They sometimes sell for 1000-2000g.
If you don't want to sell them, you can at least equip your alts with these (tank-bracers are hard to find...took me ages).
Found anything else to do with these emblems? I am eager to hear your Ideas.
Cheers,
SeelenGeier
Luzianus (Troll Priest lvl 80 / disc/shadow)
-Todeswache EU-"
A combination of both selling gems and the bracers is the 'best' method as you won't be able to sell anywhere near as quickly if you solely sell bracers but you also won't make as much profit just selling gems. Mix it up :)
Post taken from the JMTC Wow Gold Forums and was written by MadCatter under the "Farming Strategies" section. If you haven't checked out the forum here at JMTC you're missing out no a wealth of information.
"I make about 4-500g an hour fishing. My way to do it is by the INSANE number of glacial salmon pools in Grizzly Hills. On my server, the salmon is about 50g/stack, and I can get reliably 8 stacks an hour, sometimes more, plus lots Suckerfish. When posting on the AH, I post half in stacks of 10, and half in stacks of 20, and they sell at about the same rate.
Finally, the route: I just circle the northern logging camp. If you have Gathermate or something of that nature, look at on your map. It is completely surrounded with salmon pools. The only downtime you have is when flying between the pools, yet they are packed pretty tightly. There is also large amounts of tiger lily there too, and a small amount of cobalt.
Thanks for listening!
PS: Pools can be fished with fishing skill one, so as long as you have that and a fishing pole, you can fish there."
As of the writing of this post (thursday morning) I am at 30k gold made this week... if I push I bet I can break 50k for the week! We'll just have to see... The hardest part is that I stockpiled nothing for this week, so all the gold made is from items accumulated during the week. All it's going to take is a dry spell of materials and I'll be stuck gold making wise. Either way, I'm very happy that my gold making strategies are still alive and strong :D
The blog had longer articles this week than normal and I'm looking for feedback regarding whether this was a good thing or not. Do you prefer quick one to three paragraph tips or much larger articles like this week featured?
"Hey Markco,
A few weeks ago I started a little experiment to see how long it would
take a fresh toon to raise 1000g with no external help. It all started
when my realm was down for emergency maintenance, so I created a new
toon on a different realm. I picked a human, because the run to
Stormwind seems to be the easiest/shortest and because Stormwind hosts
a unique vendor that I wanted to utilise for this experiment. After
completing enough starter quests to raise around 4 silver or so, I
made the run to Stormwind, set my hearthstone to the inn next to the
bank, sold off all my gear except my robe (a little modesty doesn't
hurt) and started my assault on the AH.
During my initial questing, I was lucky enough to loot a two pieces of
malachite and some linen cloth, so these were immediately listed on
the AH - 12 hour auction (to minimise fees) and undercutting the
competition. I was after quick sales to kick things off. The next step
was to perform a full scan of the AH using Auctioneer and search for
items to vendor. This enabled me to triple my initial 4 silver (side
note: why do people list auctions for less than they would get from a
vendor?) to a little over 12 silver. Next I ran to the canals and
found the fishing vendor who sells some very cheap (ie, a few coppers)
recipes. I purchased a few of each recipe and listed those on the AH
(again for 12 hours to save on fees) and then finally ran over to Old
Town to find the cooking trainer and vendor where I purchased more
recipes to list. As a level five toon it takes ages to run anywhere,
so I used my hearthstone to zip back to the middle of the city quickly
- hearthstone use can save a lot of travel time as a lowbie!
The next day I logged on to find a few gold in my mailbox from the
first round of auctions. Every auction I posted was priced lower than
the competition (if any) and for only 12 hours at this stage so I
could ensure quick sales and lower posting fees - very crucial when
starting out with next to nothing! At the start of the second day I
did another auctioneer scan and purchased all the vendorable items I
could, this time lucking out and picking up some bargains that I
vendored for almost 2 gold profit! Next, I purchased a few small bags
so I could carry more stock from the vendors I was visiting, gabbing
the cheapest 6 and 8 slot bags on the AH. Equipping these bags I
visited the fishing and cooking vendors again, this time filling my
bags up with recipes to list. I posted my auctions and logged off for
the day.
On the third day with a /played time of 1 hr 2 min I now had 22g 57s
13c, so I upgraded my bags (already!) to 10 slotters and posted the
old bags on the AH for more than I originally paid. Taking my new,
larger bags I ran out of the city to the crazy cat lady and purchased
a few of each cat she sells before hearthing back. I posted one of
each cat on the AH and stashed the rest in my bank, then did the
rounds of the recipe vendors again. By now I was slowly filling my
bank with recipes (and now cats) and things started rolling quickly
from there. This continued for a few days, sometimes I logged in twice
a day - morning and evening - and I typically spent 15 to 20 minutes
per session.
I slowly upgraded my bags, one at a time, for 16 slot versions. If
this was a toon I was planning on keeping I would have spent a little
extra and purchased Traveler's Backpacks because they can be resold
when you step up to 20-slot bags, but for this experiment I when for
the cheaper Netherweave Bags. I also purchased additional bank slots
so I could store more stock, reducing the number of trips to the
vendors I needed to make. When my bank was looking reasonably
well-stocked with recipes and pets, I hopped the tram to Ironforge to
really ramp things up.
Once in Ironforge I ran out to the Dwarf mount vendor and purchased
some rabbits from the little girl running around out there. Hearthing
back (with IF as my base now) I made the rounds of the vendors in
Ironforge, buying the various Tuxedo patterns, Heavy Leather Ball
patterns and the Engineering and Alchemy recipes available and it was
simply a matter of rinse/lather/repeat. In the space of a little over
two weeks I was able to surpass my 1000g target and I had a lot of fun
along the way - especially when one of the other recipe sellers
started trying to force me out of the market. I was especially
thankful for him when he undercut my recipe prices to such an extent
it was cheaper for me to buy off him than the vendors! (I wonder how
much he made off those transactions?) 8^) A little tip if you are
trying to "make sure your competition doesn't make any gold" - don't
just flood the market with the recipes you sell, it might pay to look
at what other items he/she is selling too! While I was engaged in a
price war with this seller (BTW, my first piece of hatemail came from
him - my main auction toons have never had any hatemail from
competitiors!) I was making a ton of profit selling the pets and other
recipes/patterns. If you really want to kill your opposition you
should maybe target their entire spectrum of products. Or just, you
know, get on with competing.
The final tally was: /played = 8hrs, 45 min for a net return of 1005g
42c 23c. All done with no help from other toons - if I could have
expanded my inventory to include the moths and owls from The Exodar
and Darnassus along with the recipes and patterns from those cities, I
could have made more money in less time. I did make the long run down
to Booty Bay to buy some parrots, but silly me forgot to grab the
flight point before hearthing back, so a return trip would have taken
too long for this experiment.
If people tell you it is too hard to make money, well I have shown
that you can get 1000g in around two weeks without any help and
without a lot of effort. With help and a bit of extra work the sky is
the limit! 8^)
Justarb"
Nice job man :)
I'm curious why you didn't just use resale from start to finish, I had 300 gold in one hours played time using the auction house and starting with around the same amount of silver from questing to level 6. The entire hour I played is actually recorded as part of the gold guide, but I like how in your example you used vendors to help get starter income. I remember that I used the enchanting vendor to get cheap dusts/essences for real easy starter cash but getting recipes from the fishing vendor was a nice call, very good find indeed. Hopefully your story will provide help for other players as well who are just starting out and it really helps those players who don't have a good enough grasp yet of the auction house to find their own deals by just buying vendor products to get things going.
Justarb's Response:
"One reason I didn't use resale was that I wasn't familiar with this
realm's economy. It was a fresh toon on a fresh realm and the prices
for some items were way off what I was used to on my "home" realm.
After a couple of days scanning the AH I got a better feel for the
prices of course, but by then I was having too much fun with the
vendor recipes. Another reason for not using resale was that I was
showing some friends how easy it is to make gold and they are not
comfortable using add-ons (silly if you ask me, but their choice) and
vendor recipes are easy to get and sell if you choose not to use
add-ons. For this experiment I only concentrated on vendor recipes and
pets, but on my main auctioneers I diversify - bags, enchanting mats,
recipes, pets, enchanting rods, gems, flipping, etc.
Enchanting dusts/essences from the vendors are a good way to get some
initial cash, but not really a viable long-term strategy due to the
limited quantities, but yeah, the cheap recipes from the vendors are
phenomenally profitable - coppers to gold easily. The other trick is
the quest recipe vendor in Old Town above the cooking trainer. He
sells about a dozen recipes that are normally only available via
questing (ie Westfall Stew) and not many people know about him. There
is no Horde equivalent which is a bit odd, but I tend to play Alliance
anyway. ;^)"
Automating Your Scroll of Enchantment Empire
Since JM2C readers are among the most wealthy, and most intelligent people in the game, I'm not going to insult anyones intelligence by giving you a 1-2-3 guide. I'm going to go ahead and assume that all you of guys are already employing these addons, and are already familiar with the industrial crafting method (as opposed to farming) of making gold in the AH. In the event that I go a little too fast and skip over some technical aspects of this procedure, there is a wealth of information in the JM2C Addon forums, that covers the basics of each addon.
Things you absolutely need before you begin:
Things that may make this process easier / more cost effective:
Important facts to keep in mind:
| Above: A fraction of the time... Above: ...For double the profit! |
The Automated Posting Process This is the hardest part of the procedure. And by hard, I mean time consuming data entry, that requires very accurate research. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up to possibly lose a lot of gold, instead of making a lot. When the profits come flying in later on, you'll be glad you were careful and diligent. We're going to be using Quick Auctions 3 for this phase, and I'll be using Enchant Boots: Icewalker as a demonstration, using prices accurate to my server at the time of this writing, and the procedure I use. So go ahead and do a /qa config, and let's get to work.
Now repeat this process dozens of times to include all the scrolls that will fetch a tidy profit on your server. The general idea, is that each scroll requires different quantities, of different materials to make, so you want to manually set your prices for each scroll when their being listed. |
The Automated Recrafting Process This part isn't hard, exactly, just a bit of a pain, as it requires a lot of alt+tabbing in and out of wow (if you don't play in windowed mode). To pull this off, you're going to make some very special macros. Start by making a new macro, call it something like Scroll1, and paste this into it: /ktq queue n XXXXX /ktq is the command to tell KevTook Queue that it has work to do, 'n' represents the number of items you want it to craft, and XXXXX represents the item id of the item you want to make. To get the item id of the scrolls, head over to wowhead.com and do a search for "scroll of enchant". Hit the "search within these results..." box, and enter in Icewalker. "Scroll of Enchant Boots - Icewalker" should be the only result you get. Click on that link. The URL you have in your browsers address bar contains the item id of the item in the address http://www.wowhead.com/item=38986 the 38986 is the item id that you need to finish your macro. So to keep a constant level of 5 Scrolls of Icewalker, the finished first line of your macro should look like this: /ktq queue 5 38986 If you some how got 60623 as your item id for Icewalker, you were looking at the actual enchanting spell "Enchant Boots - Icewalker" not the "Scroll of Enchant - Icewalker" items page. The difference is that one will work, and one won't. Now, repeat THIS process dozens of times too, to include all the enchant scrolls that you plan on needing to recraft on the fly. |
Automating Your Selling
I like the sound of that title haha. Here's how one reader of JMTC, Charles, made 100k gold in the month of may...
"I made at least 100k in the month of may:
1) buying arctic fur under 30g and selling horde side 50g
2) Titanium Razorplate selling at 2450g a lot this month
3) Titan Earth Guard Rings
4) farming frost lotuslichbloom, ice thorn, adder's tongue => flasks and potions of speed and wild magic
5) Saronite Swordbreakers and Dps wrist
6) buying cloth alliance side and selling horde side
7) crafting gems horde side and selling alliance side
8) Thank you Markco for all your gold tips"
Even though Charles sold a lot of high level epics, I would have to assume that the vast majority of his money came from cross server trading. Something as simple as buying 30 gold arctic furs and reselling for 50 gold on the other side makes a huge difference if you do it every single day. Like all cross server trading he had to make some money on both sides, so that's why he's selling cloth and furs to horde while selling gems to alliance. It's all about finding the right balance and different items to flip between the two factions if you want to be successful like Charles in cross server trading. Here's a screenshot of Charles' work making gold:
