In most cases the biggest obstacle in one's gold making plans is the lack of time. Everybody has a life, and there isn't enough time to do everything you want in the game. People learn to prioritize, doing only the most rewarding businesses, but how you find those is a real challange. It is not simply just about calculating gold per hour with a spreadsheet, there are more factors in play.
Crafting
If you have many professions maxed out, crafting is most likely your biggest source of income. It is also the most time consuming. However different professions require different amount of time, based on which you can prioritize them. The most time consuming of these activites are, of course the shuffles. Prospecting ores and milling herbes can take hours and hours of clicking on the same button. They are very rewarding, but if you have limited time, it is best to put it off for some time. After the shuffles comes the products that are low on price/unit (even though the profit margin can be very high). I'm talking about items that you are selling in massive amounts. Mysterious Fortune Cards, inks, glyphs, Hypnotic Dust, etc. They are great, but crafting an item usually takes about the same time (2-3 seconds), and to make the same profit as you would by selling 1 piece of bloodthirsty gear, you would have to make about a hundred mysterious cards, which would take much more time. The last part of the business to shut down is the high price items. Gears, expensive enchants, decks, etc.
Auction House
Reposting on the AH, can take the most time, however it is necessary to make any money, so you can't put that off. However there are ways to optimize it.
- Start a bank character, and load it up with big bags. Bigger bags means less rounds at the AH for reposting.
- Start posting items for longer times. 24/48h.
- Level your character just enough so you can get the fast flying mount (or make one of your alts your bank character). In some cities like Orgrimmar, there is quite a bit of distance between the bank and the AH. If you are storing items in your bank/guild bank, and your business is so big that you have to make about 6-10 rounds from the bank to the AH, flying over instead of walking can save you 2-3 minutes in total. Notice that you can mount while you auto-loot the mailbox, so while you are getting items that are expired, or you cancelled them, you can mount.
- Use /reload ui macro. While you are auto-looting the mailbox, only the first 50 mails are displayed, and they can only be refreshed every 60 seconds. That is if you don't reload your UI. If you have a fast computer and internet, looting that 50 items will only take you about 30-40 seconds. If you reload, you can hit auto-loot in 5 seconds instead of waiting 30. In total this could also save you 4-5 minutes.
- If you haven't restocked your products for a while on either factions (in case you are doing cross-faction trading), you will end up with the most unwanted items on both sides. For example after about 2-3 weeks, everything worthy of any decent amount of gold is sold, so in the end you will make only 2-3k of gold daily, even though you still have 500-1000 items rotated on the AH. In this case it is wise to swap your stocks of products on the two factions. It takes less time then acquiring materials, and recrafting everything, and the products that are not wanted or low on price on one faction, could be great on the other. Using this method, I boosted my income from my burnt out stock from 2-3k/day to 12-13k/day.
9 comments: on "No Time for Crafting"
Anonymous said... October 15, 2011 at 11:39 AM
Great idea on faction swapping crap stock, and I wasn't aware of the /reload UI thing, first thing I'll take from a JMTC post for a while xD
Anonymous said... October 15, 2011 at 12:12 PM
"In some cities like Orgrimmar, there is quite a bit of distance between the bank and the AH." This is somewhat true. However there is an area in the Valley of Wisdom, northwest of the Valley of Spirits, (where all the taurens are) there is an Auctioneer, Mailbox, Guild bank and Personal Banker all within a very short walking distance. I personally prefer this area over any of the other AH areas in Orgrimmar
J.E. Douglas said... October 15, 2011 at 12:16 PM
Faction swapping is always a viable outlet for crap stock. And occasionally big ticket flips.
For not having time. I have a couple of different routines I go through depending on the time I have to alot that day to posting.
On a short day I take my two biggest sellers (JC and Enchanting) and concentrate on them. Rotating through their stock and any big ticket crafting (I will ignore anything that makes less than 35%).
With auctionator it cuts down my crafting time for those two to about 20 minutes to finish both.
Certain things that make money get added depending on the amount of time I have. My Lwer/Bsmith ends up 3rd in the position so I knock out two posting and the list of things I need to restock. My pet engineer and my inscriptionist since those are economies that are on the low side become lower priority.
Swapping between factions becomes the lowest priority unless again it's a server day since server reset day tends to get the biggest boost in sales. Especially if it's a patch day.
48 hour sales works for a lot of low level items and the items that don't have a lot of competition. But for things like JCing and enchants where there is a lot of competition you end up burning a lot of AH fees. 24 is generally the longest I would list an item even if it's sitting in my bank because I couldn't get back to it. The odds of an enchant selling after 24h on many servers is next to none.
Excellent post. Thanks for sharing
Moriturus said... October 15, 2011 at 9:27 PM
Get a guildmate to hearth you in Dalaran. It's mere steps from the AH to the mailbox and just around the corner to the bank. If you're stuck, use Ironforge on Alliance - straight shot between the bank and the AH, or Thunder Bluff, especially if you have a guild bank, where you can stay mounted the entire time.
Simca said... October 16, 2011 at 2:06 AM
The Troll AH in Orgrimmar is even better than Dalaran (and nobody is EVER there because nobody knows about it).
You can literally click the AH, the bank, and the guild bank without moving -at all-. The mailbox is just down the stairs, less than 3 seconds away if you jump.
It's by far the fastest AH route in the entire game.
Anonymous said... October 16, 2011 at 7:11 AM
How do you swap faction your large stock ? Neutral AH ? That wouldn't be viable on my server, too much snipers
Shockkmaister said... October 16, 2011 at 4:28 PM
There is no other way. Try at 4AM, that's when I do my xfaction trading, not much snipers then.
Justkiddingmate said... October 16, 2011 at 5:13 PM
About transferring items safely : I personally hit in all values at one side, then on the other side I have the good I want to tranfer already typed out in the search box.
I click create on one side, tab to the other, hit enter and take it.
This is done in 2 seconds.
Not saying that sniping is impossible this way, but they have to be really fast with it as it usually takes 2-3 seconds for someone to react to something new.
Stede said... October 17, 2011 at 10:26 AM
Waste of time to level bankers. Just drop 50g and port your bank toon to Shatt and walk to the Scryers bank.
Done.
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