20 Days of Gold Making - Day 11 Addons

Addons - get it? lol

I do love my addons so when I wrote the questions for my 20 Days of Gold Making, I just had to ask about them! The Question for today is "Most of us use TSM, Auctionator and/or Auctioneer in combo with Postal - are there any other lesser known gold making addons you use?".

I used to use Auctioneer but it was broken by one of the patches last year and didn't get updated for a while so I switched to Auctionator. I also use Trade Skill Master (TSM) but not to its' full potential, I'm sure!

Other addons I use related to gold making are MySales & Auditor as well as RecipeProfit for Gathermate (although not so much these days).

MySales gives me a quick overview of what's sold in the last time period - you can set it for 7 days, 1 month or alltime & you can also set it per character or per server/faction. You can see a list of individual sales via your mailbox or you can go to the Items tab & it shows sales by item which you can sort in a couple of ways. There are only 2 commands to remember too /ms window opens the view below & /ms config opens the configuration/settings window - nice and easy to remember for my ageing brain cells!

MySales addon Items window

Auditor is just a little addon that lets me see a summary of in & out gold flow across various characters. I like it for seeing how much I've spent on repairs, materials etc & as a quick glance at my overall gold total for the server. It just adds a button to the edge of your minimap so it's unobtrusive & you don't need to remember any commands to open it!

Auditor addon example

Above, you can see an example of the top half of the Auditor window. I used it to keep track of my Paladin's earning whilst she leveled from 85 - 90, without any Auction House activity. The time frame can be changed between various time frames, including 'this session', 'today' & 'month' so sometimes if I'm on a farming run, I'll change it to 'session' - just to see how much that farming spree earned me.

The bottom half of the window isn't shown but it has a list of all your other characters on the same faction & server so you can check their balances/earnings without having to log them. I don't use that bit very much to be honest but it's there if you want it.

RecipeProfit for Gathermate is very useful when you are out & about in Azeroth. It adds vendor sold recipes/plans details etc to your minimap so you can easily find the vendor. With so much to do in Mists of Pandaria, it will be a while before I'm doing much lowbie stuff but when I do, I often stop by the vendors to grab a few of these recipes. An Outland recipe run in particular used to be very profitable although I haven't tried it in a long while now.

So those are my 3 extra gold making addons. I don't think any of them are totally necessary & TSM covers much of this data too. I just like the very simple, 'quick glance to get info' usefulness of them. I use the TSM Accounting module when I want to look at specific items sales/profits or drill down for much more detailed analysis or to see when I've messed up my sales price & made a loss on something! I've been lucky there though!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 10 Farming

The next burning question on my 20 Days of Gold Making is "Do you farm materials? Why? Why not? & Which ones? Where?" Oh I phrased this one really well, didn't I? lol

Ok, so my short answer is 'not normally' which doesn't really tell you anything so let me explain. I tend to buy most of my materials off the Auction House over time - I have a list of items I buy when I see them below their normal price & I save them up until I have enough - things like Spider's Silk, Large Fangs & Essence of Air which can be a real pain to farm myself.

I do farm some things though - Embersilk Cloth farming at the Fractured Front is always a fairly efficient way  to farm, especially if you use a Potion of Treasure Finding at the same time. I used to fish the Darkmoon Faire Shipwreck Debris pools occasionally for Embersilk too. These allow a fisherman to catch a Sealed Crate with lots of goodies inside - if you have upgraded to Mists of Pandaria, these crates now contain Mists level craftables such as Windwool Cloth & Trillium Ores as well as food & other stuff. If you haven't upgraded to Mists then they are still viable for Cataclysm goodies such as Embersilk Cloth & various Volatiles.

I also farm to 'test' areas for posts - there's a tab up top there with all my farming related posts if you are looking for good farming spots. I've not done much farming at all since Mists of Pandaria as I've been leveling & generally mucking about with all the new Mists related activities but I have no doubt I'll be farming things again later in the expansion, once I need  new post ideas or get frustrated with a lack of something on the Auction House!

These days of course there's also the Tillers farming - now this I do - I only have one full size farm so far which is producing either Motes of Harmony or various herbs (mainly for Golden Lotus supply) but I also have all my other alts with farms started so they can produce vegetables. I've eased off with the baby farms for now as I'm trying to be more focused with my time - those dailies definitely take up a chunk of my play time & I'm only doing one faction at a time!

I know farming materials isn't the best gold making method & certainly isn't very time-efficient but sometimes, you just need to turn up your music & go kill stuff - picking a good farming spot & letting rip with the AoE is very soothing after a frustrating day!

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Announcing...The AH Addict Newsletter

Yes, I've finally got organised enough to put together a newsletter! I've been meaning to do this for a while as I know how handy it can be to have blog posts delivered directly to your email inbox. In fact, I still get regular newsletters from sites I signed up with years ago & although I've not been involved very much, I do read them & it's a great way to keep up with stuff I might miss otherwise.

So what can you expect from my newsletter?

• Well, first & foremost it's the easiest way to make sure you never miss one of my blog posts especially as I'm not always the most regular of posters! 
• Newsletter only content - mini-guides, 'secret' farming spots (if I find any of course!) & any 
• Newsletter subscriber only competitions & giveaways

I hope you'll consider signing up - I hate spam so I won't be sending loads of spammy sales emails or anything like that, just the regular blog post & occasional extra bit of content or information I think you may find useful.

There's also an unsubscribe link in every email so if you do decide not to continue, it's easy to opt out again (but I hope you won't!).

Thanks for all your support over the last 2 years, I still love my WoW time & I hope I'll still be blogging like crazy in years to come. It's been great so far, come join me for the rest of the ride :)

Nev

Update: Cold pointed out another great reason to sign up "Email newsletters are also great for those readers that can't access your site from work, but still have email access. The newsletter allows you to actually read posts from work and ignore issues like Websense, school filters, etc."

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 9 Favorite Niche

Hmmm, my 20 Days of Gold Making questions seemed like a pretty good list to me originally but now I'm trying to write the posts, some of them are stumping me! Today's burning question is "What is your favorite niche market & why?" but I'm really reaching for an answer for this one!

I'm really not very organised in my gold making endeavors, I jump in & out of markets, craft a bit here, flip a bit there so narrowing it down to one niche is kind of difficult. I've had pretty good sales with the Netherweave Bag market, Essence of Air & the related enchants do well but not very often & of course, glyphs (if you can call them a niche market!). Niche to me though, means a smallish market, very specialised & not necessarily a huge profit earner. It has a narrow target audience, usually few competitors & not a huge supply of the item which allows for higher prices & profits albeit in smaller sales quantities.

Working with that definition, I'd have to say low level enchanting materials is probably one of my favorite niche markets. I periodically dominate the Strange Dust market & have always had good profits from the Greater Eternal Essence market. I'm a bit of a hoarder so any armor drop that doesn't have a transmog value, good stats for levelers or just doesn't sell, usually get disenchanted. I also used to buy very cheap green armor off the Auction House to disenchant, in an effort to get the guild achievement for disenchanting 25,000 items -  Dust, Dust and More Dust! I should probably get back to that soon as we never did manage to check that one off the list!

When I was leveling alts all over the place, my enchanter was kept pretty busy disenchanting every day so she has a bank stuffed full of all sorts of dusts, essences & crystals from all levels! It makes for a very pretty view when I open all her bags but right now, I'm just trying to maximise the sales prices to clear some space!

As I'm sitting here writing this, I suddenly thought 'why don't I try a 'profession package'? lol, I have so much saved up, I could probably put together a full leveling kit & sell it via trade! I've heard/read of others doing this with various professions, maybe I should give it a try! I just need to check what I have already, fill in the gaps & start barking! I'll let you know how that goes :)

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20 Days of Gold making - Day 8, Goals Revisted

I have to say, I have been totally surprised & am super pleased by how many bloggers are joining in with this 20 Days of Gold Making lark. I even feel a bit overwhelmed as I am already falling behind some of them but if you're a regular reader, you'll already know I go at my own pace on most things!

So today, I'm tackling question #8 "Thinking back to Day 2, did you ever reach your goal or are you still working towards it? If you reached it, have you set yourself a new one?"

My main goal was to reach 1 million gold which I did achieve back in July 2011, just 6 months after I really started working towards it. Everything fell a bit flat for me after that - it had been my in-game driving force for so long that I didn't quite know what to do with my self once I reached it!

I spent the rest of that summer leveling an alt or two with guildies, doing some pvp in battlegrounds & I even attempted a few arenas! That didn't go so well though as I'm not exactly a quick mover or thinker & we didn't have any voice chat in place either! Eventually I blew almost half of my liquid gold on a couple of mounts and some rare pets & set myself the target of Loremaster by Xmas. I missed that one by just one day but I was so glad to get it done, I didn't beat myself up on that 1 day delay!

Around this time I took a total break from the game, unplanned so when I did evetually crawl back, I'd lost the contents of various mailboxes! I still had about 350k gold though so it wasn't as bad as it could have been! Since then, I just mooched along, dabbling in various markets & eagerly awaiting the arrival of Mists of Pandaria. I told myself I'd get back on it when Mists hit but truth be told, there is so much new stuff in Mists that I've been very distracted again.

My new goal is to get back to that magical 1 million gold but I'm not going to rush - I have alts to level, pets to collect & achievements to chase too this time. I don't want to let my goldmaking be the only thing I do in game this time round so I'm hoping that reaching this goal won't have such a huge anti-climatic feel to it again.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 7 Tips for Starting Fresh

So far, many of my 20 Days of Gold Making questions have been reminisce type questions but Day 7's question is "If you were starting over again (maybe on a new server perhaps), how would you start building some capital & what goal would you set yourself?" so this should be a useful post for anyone just starting their gold making career! Be sure to check out some of the answers from other blogs that have joined in with my 20 Days challenge which you can find in my Participants post.

The problem I have with answering this question, is that I actually do this regularly. I started this whole blog thing because of a new alt/new server experiment, I have Project Shoofly on hold on my US account & I'm sure I wrote about my lowbie glypher too! So what to write that I haven't already written & with the advent of Mists of Pandaria, would my old ways still work?

For me, the tried & tested way is to use the herb vendors in Stormwind as well as some really low level fishing - all that junk you fish to start with adds up to a few silvers to get your Auction House activities underway! I used to head straight for the recipe guy in Stormwind too but I haven't tried selling those since Mists of Pandaria arrived. I'd guess there is still a small market there even if you can level cooking to max in Halfhill - not all players have high level alts after all.

After I have a few gold to my name, I start looking for underpriced materials to flip - it used to be volatiles & cloth in Cataclysm, now I would head for herbs & cooking materials (but still looking at cloth, ores, enchanting mats etc too). Ideally I look for fairly fast moving, high volume markets to start with, just looking for deals. I don't care if it's a single or a small stack, if it's underpriced, I'll try to flip it.

Once I have say 500 gold to my name, I'll start looking at armor - ilevel 364-377 (for level 83 & 84 but MoP gear stats) can often be found for 50g or less & I've had quite some luck turning these over for 199g-299g. Always check the stats on each piece though - you don't want to be buying lemons with such a limited amount of capital behind you.

My goal previously has always been to see how much I can make in say 30 days but that's as a side project. If I was starting over properly, leaving my main server behind then I think my goal would be to just keep building my stash at a steady rate whilst keeping my leveling alts nicely geared & professions leveling up too. I think 100k gold would be a nice round target to aim for but I don't believe in rushing & stressing out so I wouldn't put a timescale on it!

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Reader Question - Need Help, Been Away A While

I received a question from a reader this morning which echoes many of the questions I see over at reddit/r/woweconomy so I thought I'd post my answer here in the hope that it may help other readers too. I'm always happy to receive questions - either by email or in comments so if you have one you think I could help with, start typing! lol

Here's the email

Hi I just came back to WoW after a long break and truly remember nothing about the game. I have pretty much every crafter to 525 and thats it and I have never been one to have money. I do not know how to make money in wow and well with all the new content I am missing out and I hate that feeling. I am on the xxx server my main is frost mage level 89 as of this morning with tailoring and JC as his professions. I have a paladin lvl 85 with BS and mining I do not wanna buy gold but I have 1k gold to my name and everything is so expensive what can I do? Also i have so many ridiculous add-ons I do not know what they do or how to work them what do you suggest? I can delete them all and only put in the ones you suggest.

Please help me

Mike

And here's how I answered Mike - I may have got a little carried away & drowned the poor guy in information but as it's written, I'm sure he can re-read it if necessary. It's also a little disorganised as I just wrote it as the ideas came to me

Thanks for getting in touch, I hope I can help a bit at least :)
First thing is not to panic or stress yourself out - that's when bad decisions get made. You say your main is lvl 89 with tailoring & JC, so I guess you have picked up a fair bit of Windwool Cloth? Start leveling your tailoring a bit - most of the stuff you make for points will sell although it may not make you as much as selling the cloth will. You can start making your Imperial silk too (on the daily Cooldown) http://www.wowhead.com/item=86378 - you'll need it to make epics later or spellthreads. The most important thing here is to get to 600 if you can. Save up your motes/spirits of harmony & only buy 1 of the pvp tailoring patterns at first, just to get you to 600. Then you can start to increase your recipe collection & look for the really profitable stuff.

Unfortunately Blizzard has decided to gate many recipes behind reputation grinds so for Tailoring, once you hit level 90, you will need to start the Golden Lotus dailies. I haven't moved my tailor on yet but my Leatherworker bought the Golden Lotus reputation epic armor recipes & I have been able to sell them for pretty decent money, I am assuming Tailoring will be similar for you.

The other thing to help with this is to get your Tillers farm started on as many alts as you can - you can't expand your farm until you hit level 90 but even those 4 starter plots can be growing vegetable & making you some cash for just a few minutes work each day & you only need to be 85 to start your farm. Once you get your Tiller reputation to Revered, you can start using the 'special' seeds to either farm motes of harmony or if you need extra cloth, you can plant the seed that gives you cloth. Personally I'd go with the Songbell Seeds for Motes of Harmony.

In the immediate future though, you could take any of your alts back to Deepholm & try farming the troggs at the Fractured Front - if you drink a Potion of Treasure Finding before you start, you will pick up the extra treasure chests which usually have loads of Embersilk cloth in. That is still selling well on my server but you can also make Embersilk bags for even more profit.

Your paladin at 85 has Blacksmith & mining so you could also start leveling that one by mining - you will get xp from the mining & can either save the ore to level your Jewelcrafting or your Blacksmithing. Luckily JC doesn't have any major recipes locked behind reputation (except the mounts but they are luxury items for later on) so you can start to level your JC straightaway too. I have found that raw gems are stupid cheap on my server so I didn't even bother prospecting to cut gems. I just bought raw gems to cut for points & hoped for the 'blue' procs on the cuts.

Something you can do straightaway on your Paladin too is to look at the price of tin ore - yup - tin! Check out the price of Moss Agates too. If tin ore is around 15g a stack or less, you should be able to prospect it & get Moss Agates which are selling for 10-25g each at the moment. ( thanks to @elvinelol for this tip)

Another thing you can do soon is to go fishing the junk pools at the Darkmoon Faire - you only need a skill level of 1 to fish the pools & you will get all sorts of MoP raw materials out of the 'junk' boxes. Can be very profitable & will provide you with even more Windwool Cloth too.

So there's a whole long list of bits & pieces you can do in game which I hope will help but the biggest thing you can do right now is some reading! My blogroll is pretty good, Cold's Gold Factory has some great posts and many of the others have too. There's also Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/woweconomy/ where quite a few gold bloggers hang out to answer questions, some of which you may find useful.

One thing I did almost forget though - netherweave bags! 1 bag=1 stack of netherweave cloth - check out the AH price per stack & per bag & see if there's profit there. They still sell like hotcakes on most servers & if the cloth isn't cheap, if you have the patience (or a lowbie alt) you can easily run through some of the Outland dungeons to get the cloth :)

You mention addons - do you just mean AH addons or in general? For AH I use Auctionator & TSM(Trade Skill Master) but I wouldn't recommend TSM until you have a bit more gold to play with & a bit more confidence in your knowledge - it's a pretty big beast function wise & easy to mess up settings that will cost you gold.

I use a little addon called MySales to easily see what's sold over the last week/month etc & I use Altoholic so I can check profession details on other alts without having to log out.

Postal is a mailbox addon to get your mail out of the mailbox more easily. Once you get going, your mailbox will be full of all sorts of stuff (hopefully!).

Oooh and as a last item - I leveled my Paladin (LW/Skinner) from 85-90 without selling any leather, just vendor trash & meats etc I picked up - between quest rewards, vendor trash & a few bits of material sales, I made over 5000g. Once I calculated the leather sales price (I used it not sold it tho) I had a theoretical gold income of almost 10k from just questing 85-90. Maybe just questing on some of your alts will boost your current gold balance a bit too :) or there's dailies of course, once your main hits 90.

So that was my answer - long & lots of bits but without asking loads of questions to get more details, it can be tough to describe a really great course of action. I'm sure I missed loads of tips so that's where you guys come in - what did I miss? What would have been your first suggestion to Mike? Leave a comment if you'd like, I'd love to know too.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 6 Best Market

The topic for Day 6 of my 20 Days of Gold Making is "Which market has made you the most gold over the years?". This would appear to be a fairly easy question to answer but if you haven't managed to track the sales data, you just have to go with your gut reaction.

For me, I have 2 markets that did superbly well for me during Cataclysm, glyphs & gems. Unfortunately, my PC hiccupped & I lost all my sales data so I've never been able to see which of the two markets was actually the best one.

I didn't really start gold making until just before Cataclysm arrived in December 2010 & by January 2011, I had added Jewelcrafting to my maxed professions list & also added Trade Skill Master to my addon list. Both these actions boosted my gold making in a big way - suddenly listing 100's of glyphs was easy & crafting only the most profitable ones using TSM to tell me which they were, also increased my profits.

The gem market was a new one for me but the Elementium/Obsidium Shuffle was in full swing & the vendor price of the common gems was un-nerfed at that point so I went into full scale gem production, transmuting to higher quality gems whenever possible & selling stacks of common gems for the daily jewelcrafting quests. Even after the vendor price was nerfed, I still made good money by making jewelry to disenchant & then either selling the enchanting materials or making enchant scrolls.

At the height of my glyphing/shuffling period, I was easily pulling 7-12k out of the mailbox each day, just from gems & glyphs. If I had to guess at a split between the two, I'd say 55/45% between glyphs & gems but that is really just a gut instinct.

Now in Mists of Pandaria, neither market is doing much at all. Glyph sales have dropped in quantity & prices have fallen dramatically too. Gems seem to be hit & miss as well although I am selling a few here & there. At the moment, I'm still too busy doing dailies, leveling, dungeons & scenarios to really get into a proper gold making routine but part of my lack of enthusiasm for getting the gold machine rolling again is the sheer lack of sales on anything I have tried so far! Maybe I'm not seeing results because I'm not paying close attention but it all seems very hit & miss right now.

Hopefully things will change as everything settles down but with the new patches coming out so fast, the markets are in an almost constant state of flux - a good market one day will bottom out the next day & be back again next week! Don't get me wrong, I am not moaning about the good old days of easy gold! The truth is, there is so much gold to be made from dailies, questing & of course the new Tiller farms that I'm not feeling the urge to dominate markets any more. I'm enjoying the challenge of making gold in this mobile market but until I get all my girls maxed, gold is definitely taking more of a back seat. I still can't resist the Auction House though so leveling is taking longer than planned!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Participants

Just one week ago, I had a brainwave & my 20 Days of Gold Making challenge was born. Since then, I've had loads of comments & a few emails about it & I've been pleasantly surprised by just how many bloggers have decided to join in. I thought it would be nice to have a central list of everyone who's joined in so far so here it is!

Jason - WowRounded - Brand new blog. I love Jason's post about Leveling Small Guilds

Phat - Phat Lewts Gold Blog - If you haven't read Phat's blog, go & read it now! He has a great written style & really knows his AH stuff.

Dacheng - The Dacheng Diaries / Casual Noob  - This is a new blog to me, not very AH focused but I enjoy Dacheng's written 'voice' so I'll be heading back regularly!

Ross - The Feckless Leader - another newish blog & new to me too. Ross has written a great pet leveling guide if you have 1 or 2 high level pets already. I see my next addiction on the horizon!

Cold - Cold's Gold Factory (He's also made question 1 the topic for his February Gold Blogging Carnival! Thank You so much for your support Cold, mwah!)

Larry - WTB Skill - Another newish blog, from a PvP'ers perspective but Larry has just joined our goldmaking community so I look forward to a very different viewpoint. PvP is a complete mystery to me!

Shaft - Shafts Words - Another blog that is new to me, Shaft has joined the challenge & I look forward to hearing more stories from him too.

Gimp - Gimps Gold - A fellow Brit, Gimp drags me through suicide runs (sorry, I mean dungeon runs!) & makes it look so easy! He knows his AH stuff too & is a regular guest host on Power Word Gold podcast.

Faid - Clockwork Riot - blogger, youtuber & another regular guest host on Power Word Gold podcast, Faid is very knowledgeable & has a totally different style of AH'ing than I do.

Jafo - The Auction House Grind - not such a new blog but newish to me, Jafo has some interesting posts, you should go have a read :)

Farli - The Overcut - Farli is kinda famous for his transmog gold making but he writes about other AH stuff too. He's been afk a little while but he's back now, yay!!!!

Jojo - Admiring Azeroth - a fairly recent addition to my non-gold blogs list but one I read regularly anyway. Jojo describes herself as a noob gold maker so I look forward to reading her answers.

Soco - Vault Of Light - a fellow Brit, fellow gold maker & now on my server too, she writes a variety of stuff but competing with her on the AH is great fun too, she knows her stuff, that's for sure!

Kaitz - Memoirs of a Pet Collector - another new blog to me, Kaitz writes mainly about her pet collecting addition but as I'm just getting started, it's great info! Will be interesting to see how a pet collector makes gold too - keep going Kaitz, enquiring minds are curious :)

Jim - Power Word:Gold - blogger, streamer, podcaster & all around busy guy, Jim hosts the Gold Blog Directory on his site too.

PyrosGG - The Gold Storm - very new to my reading list but already full of great content, well worth adding to your list too :)

Evlyxx - Evangelysm - totally new to me but Evlyxx has been around a while & has decided to join in this fun challenge too - welcome to the madhouse!

Tailswish - Swishco Ventures - I enjoy Tailswishes posts but so pleased to see him return. I look forward to some interesting reads

Candlefly - Candlefly's Gold Adventures - another newish blog but an experienced goldmaker with a fresh view on many things

Xsinthis - The Golden Crusade - Author of the Annual WoW Wealth Survey, Eric has been around a while now & always has a fresh outlook & usually detailed analysis of stuff too.

Richard - Hunter Mastery - Richard's been away a while but he's back now, main focus was hunters & gold, will be interesting to see where he goes next now that he's back :)

Selltacular - Copper to Gold - a brand new blog with Day 1 as his first post! I look forward to reading lots more from him as his Day 1 post has lots of history & I'm nosy to hear more!

Marcus Ty - Gold Blog of Marcus Ty - author of a great Gold Guide (see righthand sidebar for link :P), he has some great articles on his blog. I love his twitter tips too, would definitely recommend a follow there!

Goblin Raset - The Drunken Mogul - a newish member of the gold blogging community, Goblin has just recently joined in with the 20 Days. Makes for interesting reading so far & I look forward to more stories from him :)

Droth - Droth's Treasure Troves of Gold - a brand new blog, kickstarting off with the 20 Days of Gold Making! He's been making gold since Wrath but only just started blogging so pop over & say Hi!

WoWProfitz - WoWProfitz blog - if you don't know my friend, the Clown, he's made a big impact on the blogging, podcasting & Twitter scene since the start of the year. His whole blog is well worth a read & now he's decided to join in here too! Sweet! Go say Hi :)

Wow! what a list hey? Some regular, well known gold blogs in there & it's great to see new gold blogs as well as more general WoW blogs joining in. If you've joined in & I haven't added you to this list, please tweet me (@nevahaddict) or leave a comment here & I'll make sure to add you too.

I do hope you are enjoying reading the answers to my questions - sometimes it's nice to reminisce on old times & just chat about stuff rather than teaching/analysing etc. There are lessons in these stories too which is just an added bonus as far as I can see & finding so many new (to me) blogs is the icing on my cake!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 5

The burning question for day 5 of my 20 Days of Gold Making challenge is "Do you keep the same banker alt or do you change them up occasionally? Why?"

I guess the short answer to this one for me is yes, I swap them around but the why is a harder answer! My original banker was one of my alts that I wasn't playing very much but when I did start leveling her, I needed a new one. That was Nevyn (& hence Nev here) which is a character from a Katherine Kerr book & he was the founder of my bank guild too. I began to get known on the AH & found people undercutting me instantly so he had to go.

My banker for the last 18 months has been my baby warlock who, for some reason, I dislike playing. Not because she's a warlock but I just don't like her! That makes absolutely no sense really but I don't like the way she looks even though she is almost identical to my main. I've even transmogged her somewhat to see if that would help but it didn't.

So my level 1 gnome mage was born & moved to Stormwind after a few months in Ironforge. Now I don't know why & I have no real proof of this but I have a gut feeling that over those first few weeks, I sold stuff easily that my warlock had been trying to sell for ages! This isn't the first time I've felt that either.

To make things easier I have saved any Journeyman's Backpacks (14 slot) or Traveler's Backpacks (16 slot) so I don't have to keep buying or making Netherweave bags. These 2 bags aren't bind on equip so when I feel like changing my banker, I can just send them on to the new one. Yes, it does mean that my banker doesn't have the biggest bags but now that I no longer play the glyph market, bag space isn't such an issue.

The hardest part of having a bank guild is when you want to add an alt to it. You have to find a friend willing to join in order to recruit your new banker. I'm lucky in that I have several RealID friends on my server so I usually just bug one of them. If you don't know anyone though, it can be risky. You have to make the other person Guild Master & trust them not to steal everything as you can't promote one of your own alts to Guild Master (at least, I couldn't last time I tried).

Overall, changing bank alts works for me - I get fed up looking at same alt all the time & as I mentioned, I'm pretty sure I get a little sales boost when I start using a new one. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

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20 Days of Goldmaking - Day 4 Bank Alts

The question for today in my 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge is "Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?"

To be honest, I really can't remember when I set up my banker guild but I do remember nominating one of my earliest alts to be my auction/bank runner very early on. In my Day 1 post, I included a picture of one of my old notebooks where I was keeping tally across my alts. I hadn't even found addons by that point so I was logging each alt & noting the gold totals! Nowadays I use Altoholic to keep track which is great because I now have alts on about 6 different servers!

In that picture, Pinkie was my banker at that time - & I had only been playing for maybe 2 months at that point. I was mighty pleased with those gold totals too - how things have changed huh? As for why I nominated her - I wasn't playing her very much & I didn't want to have my main questing alt popping back & fore to Stormwind. I also used the mailbox a lot to empty my bags so rather than have stuff flying all through the mail system, I'd send everything that might sell to Pinkie & then logged her at the end of each play session to 'do my auctions'. It was a familiar cry in my house at the time. Any response to 'come on, it's late, time for bed' was along the lines of 'but I still gotta do my auctions!' so that was another half hour gone.

In the end, I set my in-game alarm for a sensible time then would do my auctions. Later on in my WoW career, I ended up doing my auctions at the start, in the middle & at the end of my playtime!

I can't remember when I set up my bank guild but I bought the guild crest in February 2011 according to WoW Armory. I'm pretty sure I'd had the guild for a while by then - probably the summer before when I left my main guild. I know I definitely had my bank guild before Cataclysm arrived, purely because I did start to stockpile some stuff & my alts banks were full already!

That was my main reason for creating a bank guild - the extra storage space especially as I was getting more into the glyph market & had herbs & glyphs overflowing everywhere. It was also a small escape from guild life. I joined 2 other guilds after I left my original guild & although they were great people, I didn't feel as comfortable with them as I had in my old guild. I really missed my old guild & if I'm honest, I still do, even 2.5 years later.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 3

Today is Day 3 of my 20 Days of Gold Making & the question is  "What were the first techniques/tips/tricks you used when starting out?"

This sounded like such a good question when I made the list but now that I sit down & try to write about it, it's kinda tough! It was a fair while ago now after all. 

Sell Everything

I think I was selling everything almost from the very start of my WoW time - grey stuff to vendors & everything else to the Auction House. I was lucky that I had a friend or two already playing for a few months so they had told me about the Auction House. I didn't have any Auction House addons to start with though - every green piece of gear I picked up, I would manually look to see what range of prices equivalent items were selling for & price my item in the same range. I don't remember how successful this was but I did it for a fair while so it can't have been too bad.

Learn a Profession

I have no idea how profitable this would be these days but my first character had skinning & leatherworking. I used to craft stuff to get skill points but instead of disenchanting it as so many do these days, I put all my crafted stuff on the AH. Yes, even those level 10-15 basic green items. I used to have a notebook with my calculations in & I remember pushing the prices up by 10-20 silver each time I had to replenish my crafted stock!

Alliance Cooking Recipe Vendor

I found this guy in Stormwind during the Pilgrims Bounty holiday within the first few months of starting to play. I left my rogue in Stormwind specifically to buy the recipes & put them on the Auction House. Up until Mists of Pandaria arrived, I would still periodically buy a bunch & sell them easily for 20g or more each. I haven't tried in Mists as you can now level cooking in Halfhill so easily. It was also a great way to boost cash on a new server too.

Read, Listen, Talk to Other Goldmakers

This was the big one for me - finding gold blogs like Cold's Gold Factory & JMTC really opened my eyes to the wider WoW world. I had no idea there were so many blogs out there about WoW, let alone specific gold making ones. Needless to say, I read everything - I even went back right to the beginning of both CGF & JMTC and read all their old posts too.

I found Twitter & started following a few well known people & from there I found out about these things called podcasts. JMTC had it's Friday night chat thing, Auction House Junkies was just starting around that time, as was Power Word: Gold & these days there's Eviscerated Gaming Podcast too.

Now I'm one of those gold makers & people talk to me via Twitter, comments here & emails - I love it although looking back, I never thought it would turn out like this!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 2

The question for Day 2 of my 20 Days of Gold Making challenge is "if you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & when did you set it?"

I'd been casually making gold for a year before I started to get serious about it but the trigger for a goal was set during an ICC raid towards the end of my raid team's life. We had a new couple in the guild who joined us that evening for the first time & in one of those random conversations over Skype, he mentioned that his wife could buy 5 Mechanohogs if she wanted to (that would have been about 80k at the time). I probably had about 20k gold at that point & I thought I was doing well but when he said that, I decided on the spot that I wanted to beat her gold total!

This was in the summer before Cataclysm arrived & shortly before the whole guild implosion which left me guildless & wandering the streets in solitude. This is the point in time when I started to get serious about gold making. I had no idea there was even a thing called Gold Cap (around 214k gold at that point) but once I started reading gold blogs & learning all about addons & auction house stuff, I quickly changed my goal to Gold Cap.

By the time Cataclysm went live (December 2010), I was at around 50k & the Gold Cap was now 1 million gold. I liked the sound of that so that immediately became my new goal. I added jewelcrafting to my maxed professions list & never really looked back. I started this blog around the same time so if you are interested in my journey, it's all there for you to read. 

At around the time I added & maxed my jewelcrafting, Trade Skill Master was becoming more widely used & I hesitated but jumped on the bandwagon anyway. I am so glad I did! It revolutionised my glyph sales & my gem sales to the point where I was spending most of my time on the Obsidium Shuffle & making more gold than I had ever imagined possible!

I eventually hit Gold Cap in July 2011, just 7 months after I really started gold making which isn't too shabby at all. Then I faded! the whole race to Gold cap was my sole driving force to play the game at that point & I struggled to find new goals to push myself towards. I eventually blew a huge chunk of it on mounts & pets so now I'm back below 400k & my new goal is to get back to the million!

I don't tend to set myself intermediate goals - I just poodle along, working the Auction House & trying not to spend too much gold on luxury items in the meantime. I'm not in a rush so I don't want to stress myself out or sidetrack myself from enjoying the rest of the game this time round. If I start setting myself weekly or monthly goals then I will focus on those too much & miss so much content. I'll be quite happy if I can get back to the million by mid to late summer but I am not going to worry if I don't make it.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1

Here we go then - day 1 of my 20 Days of Gold Making. Todays question is 'when did you start gold making & what triggered it?'

I found the lure of gold very early on - in fact, if I remember correctly, I had enough gold for my riding training & mount at level 20 by the end of my 10 day free trial just by questing & selling vendor junk. It helped that I had about 6 different alts all running through starter zones in those 10 days so when I finally took the plunge & converted to a full account, all I had to do was send all the gold to my main.

I didn't set up a specific banker alt straight away but I did allocate one of my lesser played alts to be the auction house alt. As I was only questing at this point, any useful items were checked for sale price at the AH & sold if possible. I do remember clearly finding the cooking recipe vendor in Stormwind & selling loads of those recipes during that first Pilgrim's Bounty holiday. 

I used to keep a daily note of how much gold each alt had - I'm an accountant by trade so keeping track seemed natural & obvious to me. I remember lending 6000 gold to a newish guild member whilst my main was questing in Hellfire. I had all sorts of whispers from my closest guildies, telling me I was silly to trust this guy, what if he didn't pay me back etc but that 6k was only a small chunk of what I had already accumulated & I knew I could easily write it off if he didn't repay me.

2 months into my Wow career :)

My faith in him was rewarded though - he had needed the gold to dual spec so he could fill a gap in the raid team & once he had done that & upgraded his gear properly for raiding, he spent about a week just farming to make gold to repay me. He sadly left guild a while later to join a more aggressive raiding team - we were definitely not serious raiders! I mean we raided regularly but when your 2 healers are prone to giggle fits & the tank is a funny guy, things tend to break down a little, you know?

Anyway, fast forward to August/September 2010 & I found myself guildless & very very lonely in game. Cataclysm was coming but without a guild, I didn't know quite what to do with myself so I turned to the Auction House. It wasn't a conscious decision but as with any new project, I threw myself into it. If you go back & read my very first post here, you will see I thanked Cold & Markco for their useful blogs which I found in those first weeks of my gold making endeavors. From there, I found loads more, created my Twitter account & generally started soaking up information like a sponge!

By the time Cataclysm arrived, I had about 60,000 gold, a specific bank alt & a whole arsenal of markets, professions & tricks to run. Just before Cataclysm arrived, I rejoined my old guild but it was a very different guild with all the raiders having left overnight. I continued to pretty much run solo with occasional guild dungeon runs but I was so busy making gold, I kind of lost interest in social playing! I started this blog in the December & pretty much haven't looked back since.

Edited to add: Cold over at Cold's Gold Factory runs a monthly blogging carnival and in support of my 20 Days of Gold Making, has made Day 1 the topic for the February Carnival. Thank You Cold, for all your help & support xxx

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20 Days of Gold Making - Community Idea

Writer's Block? 20 Questions To Help Fix It

I've seen the 20 days of WoW meme on & off over the last few months & have just started it on my non-gold WoW blog She Rides Dragons. Whilst pondering some of the answers, it came to me that a gold making meme might be a good idea too so here goes!

Basically it's just a list of questions for gold makers to answer if they wish. Sometimes it's difficult to come up with a good gold making post especially if you're in a bit of a funk so this list might spark ideas for you or at the least, will fill a little dead space on your blog until you do get a good post idea! 

1. When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

2. If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

3. What were the first techniques/tricks/tips you used when starting out?

4. Do you use a banker alt/guild? When did you start doing that & why?

5. Do you keep the same banker alt or do you change them up occasionally? Why?

6. Which market has made you the most gold over the years?

7. If you were starting over again (maybe on a new server perhaps), how would you start building some capital & what goal would you set yourself?

8. Thinking back to day 2, did you ever reach your goal or are you still working towards it? If you reached it - have you set yourself a new one?

9.What's your favorite niche market & why?

10. Do you farm materials? Why? Why not? & which ones, where?

11. Most of us use TSM, Auctioneer and/or Auctionator in combo with Postal - are there any other lesser known gold making addons you use?

12. What was your biggest 'oops' moment?

13. What was your biggest 'Yay!' moment?

14. How much of your playtime is devoted to gold making? Do you raid/pvp/pet battle too or is the AH your main playtime?

15. Professions - do you have all of them, some or none? Which is your favorite for goldmaking?

16.Flipping! Do you flip stuff regularly or sometimes? Big ticket items or smaller high volume stuff?

17. Pets - Did you used to do the Vendor pet sales? How have pet battles changed things for you?

18.What is the most important bit of advice you could give to a new gold maker? (not a game newbie though, just a newbie gold maker)

19. Have you bought yourself anything really expensive as a reward for earning all that gold? Or do you have a self-present in mind for when you reach your goal?

20. Lets spread some blog love - which are your 'must read' or 'go to' gold blogs or even other places you go for information & reading matter?


If you do decide to join in, there's no requirements to post every day or even to answer every question - just pick & chose which question you feel like answering. If you do plan to do all of them though, leave a link in the comments so others can find you & it may even bring you some extra traffic.

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Living Steel - Still Profitable?

Living Steel - Still Profitable?

I think most of us know that Living Steel was a great way to make some really good gold early on during the expansion but as prices dropped, many moved away from this market as the profit margins got smaller. I know I was one of those who left it for a while, especially as the Ghost Iron Ore price didn't seem to come down by much at the same time. However, I recently snagged a bargain bundle of Ghost Iron Ore & decided to look at the costings for Living Steel once more.

I bought 92 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore at around 32g per stack for a total cost of 2944g. I already had 4 stacks in my bags so I converted all of them to Ghost Iron bars (48 stacks of bars), split them in half & sent 24 stacks to each of my alchemists. Converting 24 stacks of Ghost Iron bars to Trillium, I expected 48 Trillium bars for each alt but both my alchemists are Transmute Mastery so in the end, I received 62 on one alt & 61 on the other.

So that gave me enough Trillium Bars to do the Living Steel transmute  for 10 days on both alchemists so I kept a note of how many I received each day, obviously hoping for some nice procs! Without transmute mastery, I would have received just 20 Living Steel but in the end, I received 27.

I've been selling them as I produce them except on days when the price dropped really low. At the last count, I had sold all of them for a total of around 10900g. With an initial outlay of just 3000g, I think it's fair to say that yes, Living Steel is still profitable on my server as long as I watch my raw material costs.

What I haven't done is check for other uses of Living Steel. It may be that crafting Epic armor, the panther mounts or the Living Steel belt buckle would be more profitable but I don't have the patterns yet so plain Living Steel is my best option. As always though, check your own auction house for prices & use your own judgement.

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