So Close Now & A Nice Graph

I was hoping to report this last week but the AH has filled up with cheap Obsidium & Elementium ores so I just had to have them, setting this report back by a few days! But, as you can see, I finally made it to a nice round 200,000g. I've also got my DK to lvl 80 so she can do all the JC dailies now.

One of the few routines that I do stick to, is noting my daily gold balance on a spreadsheet & I thought you guys might find it interesting to see my progression over time. I've marked a few important dates - obviously the release of Cataclysm brought huge changes & increased prices but I think for me, the addition of Jewelcrafting to my repertoire has made a significant difference. You can see my DK's gold balance of 92k - that is all my JC & Inscription profits - I zero'd her balance to 5k when she levelled JC'ing then sent that 5k to my banker once my DK was self sufficient. I'm quite pleased with 92k over 2 months, I have to admit!

The other huge difference has been installing & using TSM for my glyph market. I've always dabbled in glyphs but TSM makes it so much quicker to cancel/repost & it highlights which glyphs to make. I've recently expanded my use of TSM to my Enchanter but only for the cata enchants for the time being. I levelled enchanting late in Wrath so I don't have many of the non-trained ones & I also haven't really built up knowledge on the twink enchants.

The one thing I didn't mark on the graph was my purchase of the new Agile Shadowspirit Diamond recipe around the 14th February - I thought originally that it would dent my figures but obviously it didn't - the sudden sharp incline at the end there, is a combination of meta gem sales & adding enchanting to my TSM set-up.

So where next? Well, my plan for today is to level tailoring on my Priest asap - I have most of the mats to well into the Wrath levels but Frostweave Cloth is so scarce, I may have to go farming. I hope I can make a bit of gold from the crafted items & I shall definitely be making netherweave & frostweave bags for all the points they can give! It may not be the 'most efficient use of cloth' way to level but it will certainly off-set some of the costs.

After that, well, it's just Mining/Blacksmithing on my lvl 60 warrior but that's going to take a bit longer.

Masterchef - The Wow Goblin Edition



Boy's Buff Food - bacon sarnie

Now, if like me, you maxed your cooking (and maybe fishing) during your first toon levelling thru the new cata zones - what cooking have you done since? I get the impression that many people see cooking as something easy to max & then they sort of forget about it or they just cook the 1 or 2 buff foods that they need themselves. I include myself in this category - I make the strength, intellect & agility ones to keep my 3 lvl 85's stocked up but that was it - until about a week ago!

Long story short - we had a chance to try the LK fight as a guild for the first time & I took it on myself to provide food buffs for everyone. I thought I would just go to the AH & buy it but whoa! those prices were ridiculous! My goblin instincts kicked in & I've been watching the market ever since!

Just look at some of these prices!

Fathom Eel 1-3g each = Skewered Eel 6-8g each   (Agi)

Dragon Flank 2-4g each = Grilled Dragon 5-7g each (hit)

Blackbelly Mudfish 2-4g = Mushroom Sauce Mudfish 7-9g each (dodge)

These are the best examples for profits but for now, I don't know what the sales are like. I can talk prices all day but if they don't sell very well, that's useless info so I'm gonna get my Chef's Hat on this week & see what's really possible.

Luckily both the fathom eel & blackbelly mudfish are Uldum fish pools (eel is along the coast & mudfish along the river) and as we are attempting the guild fishing achieve & I go to Uldum most days for the transmute volatile life > air, 10 mins fishing those shouldn't be too onerous.

Of course, the easiest way to pick up the mats for these is to be levelling thru Cata but I don't have an alt ready to go there yet. I have been working on my Loremaster in dribs & drabs though so I plan on taking her back thru the remaining quests in Cata zones to get some of the mats & I'll buy a bit on the AH - let's see how much is possible, shall we?

Profession Confusion

I'll be honest, my profs are all over the place! Each time I started an alt, I chose profs based on what I didn't have already but now that I'm more serious about making gold, I think I need to swap a few around to make best use of them.

• I recently dropped mining on my lvl 85 pally & made her my skinner because she's also my LW'er. I don't often go farming but sometimes it nice just to kill at random!
• My lvl 85 rogue has herbalism/alchemy (transmute spec), both maxed & no probs with this one.
• My lvl 85 priest has skinning & enchanting again both maxed but now that she's finished questing, I can't see any point in keeping the skinning.
• My lvl 78 DK has inscription & JC, both maxed. Again no probs with this one. She doesn't need to get to 85 & tbh, at the rate she's levelling, it will be years before she does get there! She is currently my no. 1 gold maker, parked in SW to bark my Mysterious Fortune Cards & sell the uncommon gems for the JC daily, otherwise, I'd probably move her to IF or somewhere quieter.
• Next up is my currently lvl 60 warrior with mining & blacksmithing. I've been levelling her a bit this week to get my blacksmithing up a bit. I'm really feeling the urge to add maxed BS to my repertoire so she's the most likely candidate for my next lvl 85 toon.
• My level 52 hunter is another problem girlie - she has JC (since superseded by my DK) & I've just started her on Tailoring as I dropped that on my DK to get JC. I'm not sure either of these profs are really on the best toon.
• Level 38 warlock has mining/engineering. She's my current banker & I only do the occasional dungeon to level her a little. Not in much of a rush for engineering & she gets the hand-me-downs from my blacksmith for raw mats.
• Level 36 shaman has herbalism & alchemy but I haven't played her in quite a while. My thinking was for her to herb her own supplies & to get a second transmute spec for the cooldowns.

I feel I need to drop skinning on my priest & the obvious replacement prof is Tailoring. I can powerlevel her fairly easily upto the WotLK level & now that Embersilk is coming down in price, I should be able to get thru to max level. As my healer, she's also the most likely candidate for HC's when I get around to them!

But that leaves my hunter with duplicate profs - I can't see that having a second JC is much benefit other than JC daily tokens but she's so far off lvl 75, I don't think that's an issue. Having a second Tailor might be beneficial for the cooldowns & if I level her tailoring as she's questing, that should keep the costs down too.

My other thought is that I don't have a maxed miner now but I don't farm very often & if I keep levelling my warrior then it will sort itself out.

What do you think - add tailoring to my priest or something else? Keep tailoring on my hunter & then drop or keep JC on her? making decisions is not my strong point so I'd love some thoughts or suggestions please :)

Farewell AH Alt - part 2!

It seems there's not many EU readers who wanted a free 5k boost so following Ali's post & Alto's post, I guess this little alt is going to survive to try another experiment!

I think I'll continue to use her as my banker, take a note of her starting cash & go from there. She has a profession slot open so my next decision is which one to level. I'm fairly familiar with Leatherworking, Alchemy, Enchanting & Jewelcrafting from my mains so I guess I should look at Blacksmithing, Engineering or Tailoring.

By picking a prof I'm not very familiar with, I will be using my brain to make a market rather than relying on already accumulated knowledge. This server is very different to my main server as well so it may or may not make for an interesting read! 

Another option is to start another alt to level with say, mining/blacksmithing combo & see how much I can make from questing, drops & 2 low profs. The only problem with this option is that I always have an overwhelming urge to get back to my main server so I'm not sure how much levelling will actually get done!

What do you think? Should I let her fade away or carry on experimenting? Which option should I choose - level a lowbie prof via AH in Stormwind or via questing/profs? And of course, which profession shall I choose?

My Pocket's in Shock - Again!

So today has not been my best day for thinking through my strategies & stuff. I sat down this morning, fully intending to get TSM working for my Enchanter but it's now gone 5pm & I haven't even logged her yet!

Why? I hear you ask. Well, there were only a few Mysterious Fortune Cards on the market so after a week of abstinence, I quickly made about 50 and started barking, in an attempt to get those few cheap ones sold & to push the price up a little. I checked to see if my usual competitors were online, none were so off I went, happily barking away whilst I did my glyph cancel/repost routine. Next stop, JC daily - yay!!! zephyrites today, got 40 listed at a nice price & went off to do my cooking & fishing dailies, barking all the while.



© Helen Shorey, used with permission



Managed to get most of the cheap MFC's sold, along with about 15 of mine. Went to post some more at a higher price & some guy had decided to post his 20 - all at just 10c below the last remaining cheap one! Made me want to screammmmmmmm!

There were lots of guildies online today so with all the barking & chatting, that was my morning gone. Came back after some lunch to see the new Agility meta cuts being advertised in trade. Dashed to the AH to see if any of the designs were listed or even just the cut gems - none - so I'm pretty sure no-one else has it on my server, Alliance side yet.

Managed to get the seller down to 22k - not sure it's the best bargain in the world but there are only 3 people selling the other 2 new cuts so I'm reckoning that I will have the market to myself for a little while yet & I have 5 stacks of uncut Shadowspirit Diamonds just waiting for me :) I listed 10 singles at 775g each & sold 2 as soon as I barked about them.

Why is my pocket in shock? Well, after my not so quick returns from the Maelstrom Crystals (still got 20/27!!) & a nervous few days trying to sell the Tsunami & Hurricane Decks, I'd decided that big ticket items were not for me! But I went ahead & bought the Design anyway - having plenty of cash is not conducive to sensible buying decisions, not for me at least!

Farewell AH Alt - Update & Giveaway

I've been chugging along on this little side project, popping in a few times a day to cancel & relist glyphs but with a max skill level of 150 & the server being changed to a 'New Players' server, most of the glyphs I can craft are selling for 15g-20g. I don't know if it's the new players or not but many of the glyphs are down to just 2g or less. I've been buying up a few, trying to reset prices a little but I've run out of patience now.

Current gold balance is approx 5100g, just a 1400g increase since I started on the inscription only part of the project. TSM has helped a lot to speed up the cancel/relist process but I've decided to call it a day on this little alt.

Rather than just delete her & the gold she's accumulated, I thought I'd offer it to someone out there in the blog world. Are you EU & want to play or already play on Terrokar Alliance side? Leave me a note in the comments & we can arrange to meet in game & I'll trade you the gold, bags & stocks she's got sitting there.

If there's more than 1 response, I'll split it all up & we can have a little farewell party in SW or something.

4.0.6 Herb Spawns on Eu Realm, Tested

I logged on early this morning (couldn't sleep again!) & as a way to fill my time quietly while my hubby slept, I went through my blog list, reading all the posts I missed late yesterday & overnight. Both Faid & Alto posted about the ridiculous herb spawn rates in Uldum & Deepholm so after the servers came back online, I raced my JC to get the new JC design Vivid Dream Emerald & then to get the new DK Glyph of Dark Succour.

Off to the JC daily quest giver - Jaspers - again! I only had 1 stack left so I posted them anyway & then logged my herbalist. By this time, hubby was awake so he logged his druid herbalist & headed to Uldum whilst my little rogue made her way to Deepholm (a little pickpocketing action on the side, just gotta be done!).

Herbs in Boots © Arty Allsorts 2009, used with permission

Now I'm not a regular herb farmer so my route was perhaps a little random but I managed 8 stacks of heartblossom, 4 stacks of Cinderbloom & 75 Volatile Life in my hour. My hubby managed 16 stacks of Whiptail mainly from the delta end of the river & 97 Volatile Life.

I didn't notice any particularly fast respawns so I don't know if Blizzard fixed this with our patch today or if there was something different between US & EU realms but overall, I have to say, I don't think this was as good for us as it was for you guys over the pond!

Patch 4.0.6 - What Caught My Eye?

I've seen other blogs talking about this patch for weeks now but the word on the wind is that it's going live tomorrow in USA & that means Wednesday morning for us in UK & Europe. I think it's safe to say that most regular gold blog readers know about the 3 new enchants & 3 new meta gems as well as the changes to the existing meta gems. There's a whole host of little bits & pieces in there for classes, gear & professions but 4 tiny snippets caught my eye. The whole lot is here if you want to have a look for yourself.

Not the biggest gold-making news by far but the lowly & seemingly useless Murglesnout is going to have it's own recipe, the Scalding Murglesnout! So now when you fish up all that fish, at least you'll be able to level your cooking a bit or save on mana drinks between fights. I doubt it will sell for big money at the AH - it's not a buff food after all but if you're fishing them up anyway, you may as well try to make the best out of them.

Secondly, the drop rate for Spider's Silk has been improved. If you read my lowbie LW post a while ago, you'll know that 1 of the items I recommended uses Spider's Silk & whilst I've been snatching it on my server for a while, supplies have definitely dried up lately. I'm not sure whether this improved drop rate is a good thing or not. Personally, it was always a pain to farm for so I always kept it when any alts picked it up.

I think most of the spider's silk I've picked up at the AH recently have been from levelling alts or people making space in their banks. Why do I say that? Well, the LW recipe & 2 tailoring recipes that use it most are blue items & there have been very few on the AH at all. This suggests that the people selling the silks don't have LW or Tailoring or they just can't be bothered with the lowbie stuff.

The third snippet to catch my eye is that they have improved the LW levelling from 500-510! Grrrrr, my LW is at 512, having struggled through with that stupid Cloak of Beasts just a week or so ago!

And lastly, the drops from the Tiny Treasure Chests have been improved slightly. It will be interesting to find out how much they mean by 'slightly', not that I'm a great tiny treasure chest farmer or anything but I have tried. I'm just not very good at killing lots of stuff quickly yet :)

Apart from the obvious biggies, what's caught your eye in the patch notes?

Yet Another Experiment! (or two)

It seems I'm not the only one out here who enjoys experiments in gold making! Syntalating has been running a major experiment on his server that makes for very, very interesting, edge-of-your-seat reading! I've linked to his latest post but he has links to the earlier posts that really need reading too. If you have ambitions to reset a market, I strongly advise you to grow your nails (more to chew on without getting blood everywhere!!) & gold balance first. I can't wait for the final instalment :)

Having raved about that, it makes my little foray into the world of low level glyphs seem like child's play & it is, to a certain extent. But I'm still finding it a challenge, even if the amounts of gold involved are comparatively tiny. Once my 30 day AH alt experiment finished, I had all this gold just sitting there so I started the next experiment.

The first morning I had managed to sell a few bits of stock overnight so my opening balance was 3697g. I managed to reset my MySales data so that it would show only the sales from this experiment going forward.

For the first 5 days, I concentrated on building up my ink & glyph supplies & just listing each glyph at the lowest market price at the time of listing. I manually searched for the highest priced glyphs & crafted those as a priority. I was only making 1 or 2 of each glyph, depending on herb/ink supply. My thinking was to have at least 1 glyph available in a variety of categories rather than 2 or 3 glyphs of the same. I also tried to spread my glyphs across all the different classes for the same reason. Basically a scattershot approach to see what hit & what missed :)

Day 6 dawned with an opening balance of 3814g - just 117g in 5 days - this was not going well although I now had 35 different glyphs listed & a few spare inks to replace them as they sold. By day 9 I had continued to buy herbs for ink & craft more glyphs but opening balance on day 9 was still only 3803g!

OMG! this was awful! I was only buying the very cheapest herbs (less than 3g per ink most of the time) but the average sale price was 15-20g per glyph if I was lucky. I decided to change my plan of attack & installed Trade Skill Master (thanks to Zoxy & Shamaenei for their excellent guides) even though my PC is slow enough already!

I also changed my listing behaviour. I had been listing for 48 hours & just leaving them there but now I'm listing for 24hrs & using TSM, I'm cancelling & reposting maybe 3 or 4 times a day (morning, late afternoon, early evening & last thing at night). I struggled a little with TSM at first as I had never used the earlier addons for glyphs but once I got to understand what it was doing, I could just fly through my little routine. When I log in, I empty mail ( ka-ching!), cancel auctions, scan for inscription only then repost. Simple as & only takes maybe 10 mins if I get sidetracked!

Results are good so far
day 10 o/bal 3763
day 11 o/bal 4009
day 12 o/bal 4219
day 13 o/bal 4282
day 14 o/bal 4565
day 15 o/bal 4709

Last 7 days, look at those prices!

So why does cancel/relist work for glyphs? I had a little think about it (not my strong point!) & came up with this thought - unlike raw mats, there is not enough demand for any one particular glyph that you can relist in the mid range & have the lower priced glyphs sell out while your listing is still active. I usually post my hypnotic dust mid range because I know the demand is there to sell through to my listing. By cancelling & relisting glyphs, I am usually the lowest priced for a little while & that means that if there is a single buyer for that glyph, I get the sale. Obviously then, the more often I can cancel/relist, the better my chances of selling.

That pretty much brings me up to date on this little experiment. Now you may think that the opening paragraph was only very loosely relevant to the rest of the post & just a way to plug a guy with gold blog but it wasn't! Syntalating's scroll/ore/mats experiment made me think about this lowbie end of the glyph market so I decided to try to reset a few of the glyph prices. I spent a whole 175g buying the very cheapest glyphs so that I could list as cheapest but at 60g+ rather than 20g!

I haven't logged in yet this morning but I'm going to continue this tactic for the next few days as well to see if it's possible on a server designated 'new players'. Wish me luck :-D

A Profitable 'Oopsie!'

I'm still trying to max my Leatherworking but having skinning on a priest is possibly the slowest form of farming torture! I've been contemplating dropping mining on my paladin & re-instating skinning but yesterday afternoon I had a total brainfart & clicked the wrong button before actually making my decision. Bye bye max mining :(

Oh shoot! now what? Well, I decided I may as well go ahead & level my skinning back up so I decided to turn it into  one of my 'experiments'! I balanced my pally out to 3k gold & a spare alt to 1000g to act as a banker for the duration of this little experiment. I have sent absolutely everything except vendor trash to the bank alt & she's been listing it. But my pally also has Archaeology so where the skinning sites have coincided, I've also managed to put a few skill points on my archaeology. I've also done some sidetrips to find Elders as it's the Lunar Festival & I was going to be flying around anyway!

So what has this to do with making gold & profits? A few days ago, Zoxy posted his JMTC carnival blog post and if you look in the comments, you will see I was very happy because he mentioned the RecipeProfit addon. This is an excellent replacement for one of my old favourites, RecipeRadar which is broken & no longer supported. So after unlearning mining, & relearning skinning, I logged out to get some addons sorted.

RecipeProfit adds icons to your minimap to show you where vendor recipes are - it works like the gatherer/gathermate nodes & you can switch it on/off quite easily. As I've been running around skinning, I've also had to empty my bags etc so I've spent a few minutes here & there, visiting vendors & buying recipes (by recipes I mean plans/schematics/design/patterns etc).

You can see from the mysales image & the AH image - things are selling fairly well! I still have loads of stuff listed & I haven't quite finished levelling skinning yet so more yet to come & this is just the first 24 hours.

I also got very lucky & picked up a Dark Whelpling :) Auctioneer price says average of about 1900g but it's on AH at 750g at the moment. I'm torn because my pally is my pet & mount collector but I also want the gold! arrrggghhh, decisions, decisions!

So I guess what I'm saying is, don't forget vendor recipes while you're out & about  - RecipeProfit is great & if you're currently doing the Elders runaround, why not pick up a few vendor bits while you're at it? It could be worth your while & if you're short of time to make gold, this is a great way to combine questing & shopping!