Gold-Making Opportunities from Firelands Nerf

Posted by Aleithia at 8:00 AM

Unrelated Update: Lead Systems Designer Greg Street says epic gems will be dropping from raids in 4.3.

Blizzard recently announced a significant nerf to the Firelands raid:

With the final showdown against Deathwing approaching, we’ve been keeping a close eye on players' progress through the current Firelands raid content. Before patch 4.3 is released, we want groups who are working on Heroic-difficulty content to be able to get as close to Ragnaros as possible, and we want players who are tackling normal progression to be able to experience as many of the encounters as they can. To achieve these goals, we’ll be toning down the difficulty of both normal and Heroic raids through hotfixes in the coming weeks. In general, we plan to reduce health and damage of all raid bosses in both normal and Heroic Firelands by around the same percentage we brought difficulty down for the original Cataclysm raids when Rage of the Firelands (patch 4.2) was released.

We're looking forward to seeing more groups of players face off against the firelord in the weeks ahead. However, before we make these changes, we want to give everyone a final shot at the bosses at their current difficulty level -- so this is a heads up that we’re planning to applying the difficulty hotfixes beginning the week of September 19.

What does this mean for making gold? How do we profit off this and other content changes that might come up in the future? Click through to find out.

Thinking Through Game Updates
Why is Blizzard making this change? What's their purpose? What are they trying to achieve? Understanding Blizzards motives and goals will help us find gold-making opportunities when game changes like this happen. Up until this point, Blizzard has seemed satisfied with the progression rate for raiders in this patch. But I suspect that their internal data is suggesting that the rate of progress has slowed since the patch was released. Normally we don't see nerfs of this level until a new tier of content is made available.

This signals to me that Blizzard is interested in more people experiencing the raid content. Couple this with a recently leaked interview about patch 4.3's raid finder adding a new (lower) level of difficulty for raids and you can start to see one aspect of Blizzard's plan to combat subscriber loss: Get more people participating in end-game content by making it more accessible.

So how do we profit on this?
Raid-related business is going to surge with the nerf. Existing raid groups that are stuck are going to get help progressing. People who haven't been raiding because PUGs (Pick-Up Groups) were hard to come by will start to raid more as the content becomes easier. This will lead to an uptick in consumables (potions, flasks, food) on the front end of raids and item enhancements (gems, enchants) on the back end for all the new loot.

The Firelands Raid has the following gear (complete list) types available:

• 2 cloaks
• 6 chests
• 8 boots
• 3 rings
• 7 gloves
• 7 helms
• 2 off-hands
• 5 main-hand weapons
• 7 one-hand weapons
• 8 two-hand weapons
• 4 ranged weapons
• 1 shield (Tank)
• 6 legs
• 5 necks
• 6 shoulders
• 9 trinkets
• 4 belts
• 10 wrists

That's a total of 100 pieces of gear, most of which can be enhanced in some way (either gems or enchants). Tier pieces (that gear for your class/spec that gives a 2 and 4-piece bonus, consisting of head, shoulder, hands, wrist, legs) are a high priority for people to purchase with valor points, so my guess would be that non-tier slots will need more enchants and gems. If you see popular gems or enchants selling for low right now, you might consider purchasing them and reselling after the nerf.

In addition to the gear, there are also drops like Living Embers and crafting patterns. Expect the prices of embers, the patterns and the gear from the patterns to decrease as the supply increases. Also expect the price of Bind-on-Equip epics to decrease as more are dropping with the higher number of people getting into the raid. If you're sitting on some, try selling them soon before the price drops. You might also want to keep an eye on trade chat and the auction house for those same BoE epics at highly reduced prices. Up until now, experienced raiders and epic trash farmers have been doing the selling. With less experienced raiders, there's a great chance they'll underprice their items.

What other opportunities arise because of this game change? How do you see this effecting markets? Any specific plans to capitalize on this?

I consider myself a somewhat casual auctioneer. I can be found via Twitter @Aleithia3. I also like getting email at Aleithia AT jasonthedce DOT com. Send me your questions and I'll try to write about them on the site.