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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The only thing I would say is that I don't necessarily agree with your Tailoring advice. I think the PvP patterns are not just a means to an end, but a very profitable end in and of themselves. Depending on the server, crafted epics can often be difficult to sell, especially at what they should be probably be worth.
ReplyDeleteGranted, tailoring's a bit of a special case among the gear professions because its epics don't take Spirits. In that sense, costs will always be fairly low, and it's hard not to make at least some profit on everything. Still, check out the crafted PvP gear market. The profit in terms of gold per piece often doesn't seem like much, but the margin is excellent. More importantly, there's a much steadier flow of buyers than there is for the epics.
+1 Tailswish. Tailoring in MoP is about selling PvP gear (and pre-panda bags). ilvl 476 stuff used to sell slowly, but now even that has dried up. On my server, they only sell at below cost price now. Same with spellthreads. If I could get my hands on the ilvl 496 recipes, I'd be in clover.
ReplyDeleteI'd definitely agree with your last item, Nev. Pandaren meats are in short supply, and they're easy to pick up while levelling. Also, skinners could hang around the dailies locations and pick up free leather.
I've gotten my hands on (and paid plenty for) all of the 496 tailoring recipes, and they sell verrrry slowly, plus they are expensive to craft because of the Blood Spirits, so being in clover might not happen. On the other hand, the PvP recipes are cheap to make and the profit margin is good, but you have to be aware that there's quite a bit of competition on the AH, at least on my server.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, I was in the market for the 496 epics (I bought all 4 patterns from the AH) but despite a few sales I gave up as the last 2 pieces I made I ended up selling for a loss due to the continuing downward spiral of Blood Spirit prices on our Server - people just wouldn't pay the price I was asking when they could see the price of the mats was way less than my asking price... The lower level tailoring epics and the i450 PvP gear are a much better (and safer) bet IMO.
Delete+2 Tailswish!
ReplyDeleteI have all 16 of the Cloth i450 PvP recipes and this gear sells really well on my Server. There is a fair bit of competition though so you most likley will need to be prepared to cancel and repost on a regular basis to maintain steady sales.
I also still make a lot of money on Cata bags (Embersilk and Illusionary) especially if you can pick-up Chaos Orbs for a reasonable price as there is no cooldown on creating Dreamcloth if you are using Chaos Orbs.
TBH, even though the prices are not massive, I love the fact that the Tailoring Epic crafted items don't require Spirits of Harmomny - I find farming them to be a real pain...
Thank you so much guys - I haven't started with my tailor yet so I was (wrongly)assuming it would be similar to Leatherworking. So glad I put this as a post - I knew y'all would correct me if I got something wrong :P
ReplyDeleteI do think this person who asked for help has a more fundamental issue. How do you have those skills and toons and so little gold. Going from 85-89 easily gets you more gold than 1,000g. The fundamental aspect of what I find is missing from many of those that dont have gold is they buy off the AH without paying attention to what the prices are. Many goods fluctuate greatly over the period of a week. Pick your market, watch basic goods and learn when to buy. This will also help you learn what and when to sell.
ReplyDeleteYou can sell anything. There really is not a wrong answer just learn your server. Given what he has I would still definitely recommend jc to level and sell. Easy gold with many options available on what can be sold even if you dont have an alchemist or an enchanter. One item that is worth noting is you can research the jc patterns by just using the cheapest rare gem to research. One you learn all of that colour you will learn every other recipe. Not a quick solution but a cheap one. I would pick blue to start with and go from there.
But I really dont think what items to sell is his issue. He needs a process and an understanding of the market. Best explanation was given by Marco in his early podcasts on gold making. If those are still available I do recommend them for anyone getting started. Start slow, take your time and just be patient.
Absolutley agree!
DeletePretty much my #1 key for gold-making is to know your target markets inside out which can then properly inform your buy/sell decisions. This doens't mean just checking the AH for an item once and then basing your prices on that - you need to be checking that market frequently over time to get a good feel for the 'normal' market value of the items.
The Undermine Journal can be a big help here but I don't think there is any substitute for understanding what flows 'through' that market - peaks, troughs etc.