Pet Battling For Profits

Posted by J.E. Douglas at 12:58 PM

Every profession can make a profit.

This should have been written into your mantra from day one of your adventures in Azeroth.  We have talked about it many times how each profession can make some profit (yes even fishing and Engineering).

Even the quasi profession of Pet Battling can make a profit.    It just takes some planning and some time to rake up major gold.

I started off the Pet Battling profit making journey by leveling one of my pets to level 25.  The reason this is important is because you cannot add to your journal any level 25 pets that are purchased until you have hit level 25.  In this case I leveled up my Anubiseth Idol.  He dropped for me on one of my runs through Temple of Ahn'Qiraj.   Took me about 3 hours to level (I took my time over the weeks, so that would be three hours of actual pet battling time).  During this time I also added to my collection through the different leveling zones.

After he hit level 25 I picked up a couple of pets that I knew could be repackaged and sold.  When looking for the future captives of other battlers I wanted the more rare pets that people weren't stacking on the AH.  This cut out a lot of the holiday pets and easily purchased pets.  I decided to power level my Ghostly Skull (found in the Dalaran sewers).   While power leveling him from level 1 I dropped in one of my higher level pets to protect just in case there were issues with taking on the wrong type of pet.

Leveling Bobtheskull (yep,  that's what I named him) took about an hour and a half.  The basic idea is to throw him quickly into the ball from the start,  let him have one round (and make sure he survives) then drop the hammer for one of the higher leveled pets.  After you win all of the pets that are used in combat receive the XP (and any bonus XP for the pet being a higher level). 

Profiting with Bobtheskull is where you have to learn the way your server works.  If you have a strong pet battling group then you can drop your newly minted level 25 on the market for the going rate plus a premium for the time it took to level your toon.  The more rare the pet is,  the higher the sales price the pet should be put in.  So a pet such as Lil' Bad Wolf from Karazhan should be placed at a higher cost than one that can be purchased and sold quickly.

There are two paths you can take when selling your pets.   You can go for the quick turnover on sales.  If it takes your pets an Avg of an hour of game time to level and you sell them quickly then you are filling the need quickly.  The problem with this theory is that there is a limited amount of players willing to pay for higher level pets.  Once that quota is full (the ones that actually have the money to spend on a luxury item) then the sales will dry up.

The other thought process is to make sure that the pet is going for a higher price.  Even at 10x the sales cost of a lower level pet.  This will put a higher profit in your pocket and still keep the demand intact.  Basic sales technique says that if your item is continually out of stock then you raise the price to meet the demand. 

You can expand these ideas to your farming for those that one an extra type of income.  Paying a premium for your farming group for resellable pets can allow you to keep a different revenue stream together without tying up all of your time.  The important thing is to keep an eye on how your pet sales market is functioning.   A poor pet battling server can have you placing highly profitable pets on the market and having to list them time and time again.  A strong market can allow you to resell pets and even look at flipping pets that are listed by unaware sellers of their value.

Expanding your profit pyramid into Pet Battle sales can give you another road to profit as your other professions begun to wind down with the end of the Mists of Pandaria expansion

Good Luck and Good Pet Hunting

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