High Society Top Hat & Rhinestone Sunglasses - Two Rare Items To Watch For

Way back near the beginning of Cataclysm, I first learned about the new High Society Top Hat which was supposed to be a new recipe for Tailors to make. I didn't have a max level Tailor at the time but the bit that caught my interest was the materials. It was going to use Polished Brass Rivets - an item only found by pick-pocketing or occasional random drops. As a very newbie gold maker back then, I set off to grind some mobs & do some serious picking of pockets with my Rogue. Sadly the recipe never made it into game & with the arrival of Mists of Pandaria, those lovely Polished Brass Rivets turned grey in my bank.

So why am I telling you this sad tale today? Well, I was randomly mooching through the Auction House earlier this week & the Rhinestone Sunglasses caught my eye. Listed at 40,000g, I had no idea what they were or where they came from so off I went to Wowhead. It turns out that they are now a very rare drop from the Blingtron 4000 and for the few players who have been lucky enough to find some in the Blingtron 4000 Gift package, they are selling for very high prices. They aren't transmoggable but they don't bind on equip either so you can safely use them & still transfer them to a different alt later.

The Rhinestone Sunglasses are also listed as crafted by Jewelcrafters so I thought to myself - where do I get the recipe? Back to Wowhead & reading the comments for the Sunglasses recipe, there was mention of the High Society Top Hat. It turns out that both these recipes have made it into game but with such a low World Drop rate that very few have been found. The recipe for the Top Hat has been changed to just 4 Dreamcloth & some vendor materials but on top of it being a super low drop chance, it only drops for Tailors! The Rhinestone Sunglasses recipe will only drop for Jewelcrafters and is also a super low drop rate.

Out of curiosity, I popped over to The Undermine Journal (EU) just to see how many of either of these items are available. Imagine my delight when I saw the Top Hat listed on my server at 200g! I have never logged into game so fast in my life! Luckily, the cheap Top Hat was still available so of course, I snatched it up straightaway!

There was another listed at 40,000g so I relisted my bargain too. I really don't care if I don't sell it though - my Gnome looks so cute in her Top Hat! Sadly the Top Hat is bind on equip but not transmoggable so anyone with the Recipe could make quite a killing on this one. I would put it in the same kind of category as the Rich Purple Silk Shirt although much more expensive of course.

So, that's 2 very rare drop recipes to add to your snatch list. With the Sunglasses dropping off Blingtron gifts, they may not hold their value quite so well but as The Undermine Journal is showing only 58 Rhinestone Sunglasses available across the whole of the EU servers & only 33 High Society Top Hats, I'd take a bet on their prices staying pretty high for the foreseeable future!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 20 Last But Not Least

Well it's been fun & made for some interesting reading across the gold blogosphere but at last I made it to Day 20 of my 20 Days of Gold Making. So todays topic is "Lets spread some blog love - which are your 'must read' or 'go to' gold blogs or even other you go for information & reading matter?"

For patch notes & news, I head to Wow Insider but I usually get there via tweeted links! I really have trouble finding stuff sometimes on their main site!

For details about in game items, places, quest problems or zone queries etc, the monster site of Wowhead is my go to site. I rarely look anywhere else for in game related queries.

For interesting gold related articles I tend towards blog reading. I'm a creature of habit so although I do read all the blogs on my blogrolls, I tend to read them in batches rather than as soon as they publish a new post. As I said, I read all of them but I don't want to link everyone here, that would be a bit silly! Other blogs I read as & when I get around to it including some that are so new, I  haven't even added them to my list yet! I pick up random posts from my twitter feed too.

Cold's Gold Factory - If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I regularly join in with Cold's Gold Blogging carnival each month and I often link to his posts. Besides being a dear friend, I happen to like the way he writes & the way he sees gold making opportunities in places I'd never think of. I love his Saturday Gifts for Gamers spot too - he does find the weirdest stuff sometimes!

Phat Lewts Gold Blog - I like the way Phat writes and although he's not writing quite as often as he used to (let's face it, many of us aren't writing so often either!), when he does do a new post, it's always well thought out & interesting.

Now I'm not a big fan of streamers & youtubers but mainly because it's hard to just listen when I miss bits from the chat room. I don't like to sit & watch either so I tend to give them a miss but @elvinelol is making quite a name for himself & was a great guest on Eviscerated Gaming Podcast a few weeks ago. He also has a twitch.tv stream & a website - check out his twitter profile for the URL's :)

And then there's the podcasts! oh my word! Do you know how many wonderful WoW related podcasts there are out there? Nope, nor me but I currently have 67 waiting in my queue to listen to & that doesn't include the ones I deleted because I got so far behind whilst I was traveling! Some of those 67 podcasts are over 2 hours long so I think I'm going to have to skip a few here & there to catch up! There's also a whole bunch of new ones just starting up too so I have no idea how I'm ever going to keep up with all of the ones I want to!

My list includes but is not limited to

• Eviscerated Gaming Podcast
• Hearthcast
• Nonmailz Nutz
• Tauren Think Tank
• Bitter & Salty
• Girls Gone WoW
• Darkmoon Herald
• Power Word:Gold
• Call To Auction
• The Mana Cooler

And lastly is Power Word: Gold - Jim has his fingers in so many pies he could fit into all the categories above! Blogging, podcasting, live streaming as well as hosting the Gold Blog Directory & The Hatchery (for new or would-be bloggers), I don't know how he keeps it all straight.

As I come to the end of my own 20 Days of Gold Making, I'd like to say a huge, heartfelt "THANK YOU!" to all the bloggers who decided to join in. I hope I've got everyone on my 20 Days of Gold Making - Participants list but if I've missed you or you decide to join in at some future date, just let me know & I'll add you.

It's been fun, it's been a trip down Memory Lane for many of us writers & I hope it's been interesting to you, my readers. Seeing how a person develops their gold making skill is a great way to learn to do it yourself & I tried to add in a few of the fun things you can do once you have a stack of gold!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 19 Rewards

Oops! I dropped the ball a bit this last week, sorry for lack of posts here. I've been kind of focused elsewhere & didn't look up until now! Anyway, today is the penultimate day for my 20 Days of Gold Making and the topic for today is "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?".

Well umm yes, I did buy myself a few presents, just a few mind you, some on this list were for friends and guildies who had put up with my obsessive gold making for the previous 6 or 7 months! I'd already bought myself the Vial of the Sands so that's not in this list.

What I did need was better gear so after I'd spent the summer finally leveling my Hunter, I treated her to a Witch-hunter's Harvester and bought one for a guildie too. Three Mekgineer Choppers (for me & 2 guildies), a Traveler's Tundra Mammoth & the Ring of the Kirin Tor completed my immediate spending spree but over the next month or so, I splashed out on quite a few other expensive goodies too!

As my Hunter love continued, I treated her to a Lava Bolt Crossbow and my Priest got a major boost from the Chelly's Staff of Dark Mending. Next to see a little playtime was my Death Knight - my scribe/jewelcrafter who had barely left the city for the previous 7 months! I can't remember exactly what I bought her but as she was dual-wield, I definitely bought 2 expensive somethings for her!

But it didn't stop there! oh no! I had a warrior on her way up and when she eventually dinged 85, I bought her a Masterwork Elementium Deathblade. All of my max level alts were kitted out with the best weapons I could find even though I rarely played most of them!

So at this point, my girls were all kitted out & I was focusing on getting my Loremaster finished which I did on Xmas Day 2011. A few days later, I just suddenly stopped playing. It was almost 4 months before i returned to game at which point I went on another spending spree!

I bought a Spectral Tiger, the Amani Dragonhawk and a pet or two but I always intended trying to resell the Tiger. The Amani Dragonhawk was probably my biggest 'self-present' and I love it! I finally sold the Spectral Tiger just a couple of weeks ago to a twitter friend who turned out to be one of my main Glyph competitors!

So where am I now? Still hovering around the 1 million mark, thanks to the Tiger sale. I've been very lax in my goldmaking during Mists of Pandaria but it's creeping up slowly. I'm having fun leveling & dungeoning though and let's face it, no-one really needs all that gold to enjoy the game.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 18 Advice for New Gold Makers

Today's 20 Days of Gold Making question isn't just a trip down Memory Lane as some of the early questions have been. Nope, today is Day 18 and the question is "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)".

This is actually quite a tough question to answer as so much depends on the current situation of the new gold maker. What level are their alts, which professions do they have and at what skill levels, and also how much gold do they have already. But as I was trying to think which piece of advice to give, I realised that actually there is a fairly straightforward single answer that would cover most new gold makers - at least to start with!

Research! 

Yup, read gold blogs (yay! you're here, it's working! lol), read forums, read Reddit, watch some Youtube or Twitch TV guys, listen to gold making podcasts - the list is almost endless & growing week by week. Don't forget to ask questions too - most public gold makers have Twitter or you could send them an email or ask on their livestream. A great place to start is my blog roll over on the right hand side of this page - I try to update it fairly regularly & as I find new gold blogs, I add them once they have a few posts published. It's sorted by most recent post too so if you don't have huge amounts of time to do your reading, the top few will always be the most current content.

Addons

The second most important piece of advice I would give is to get some Auction House addons - Auctionator is my favorite but Auctioneer is great too. Having said that, the great beast of the Auction House world is Trade Skill Master (TSM) and I use it all the time. It does many different things though so I think it would be intimidating to a total novice but there are loads of guides out there to help you learn it. I'm pretty sure I still don't use it to its full potential but I have calmed down on the gold making front for now so I guess it will be a while yet before I really get to grips with it!

Patience

The third important piece of advice I'd say is Patience! There are very few gold capped players who made their gold super-quickly. Most of us have been making gold for months if not years. The main exception would be those few players who saw the potential of the transmog market early on & dived in deep. By getting in so early and being prepared for it too, they had all the advantages of the huge buzz that surrounded the introduction of this new market & yes, some of them made a huge killing! That is the exception though, for us mere mortals who missed that boat, it takes time to build up your knowledge of markets, of hot selling items, of markets to avoid & which profession crafted items to produce.

Prudence

Lastly, I'd say prudence is vital too. Don't keep spending on stuff you don't really need, watch where your gold goes during normal playtime - do you reforge, re-gem & re-enchant too much? Can you resist that 'cheap' purple item on the Auction House or that lovely rare mount on the Black Market Auction House? If you can control your daily spending, spend wisely on raw materials for crafting, don't take huge risks when investing in items to flip (at least until you are really sure of your market) then you should see your gold balance creeping up nicely as you pull your gold from the mailbox.

There are loads of bits of advice I could give - that's partly why I started gold blogging! Each and every gold maker out there has their own way of doing things & every server is different too. By reading around, doing some research into markets yourself & trying things out, you will develop your own way. A little bit of Nev here, a bit of Cold there, throw in some Elvine or Power Word Gold & a bit of Eviscerated Gaming Podcast to top it all off & you'll have your own personal blend of goldmaking skills. The most important thing though - have fun!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 17 Pets

And so my 20 Days of Gold Making continues today with Day 17 "Pets - did you used to do the vendor pet sales? How have pet battles changed things for you?".

I know there was a Vendor Pet route guide at one point - an efficient but still slightly time-consuming route to pop around all the various vendors that sold pets so you could buy them to list on the Auction House. It still amazes me every day just how lazy some players can be or unable to look things up on the internet to find out how to get things for themselves!

I did used to sell the Moths from the vendor in The Exodar and of course, the White Kitten from Lil Timmy, wandering the streets of Stormwind. There was also Dealer Rashaad in Netherstorm but I rarely went all the way out there unless I had an alt leveling through Outland. The Mana Wyrmling was about the only one that sold for any real profit anyway.

My main pet income came from the low level Engineering pets - the Mechanical Squirrel & the Pet Bombling. My Engineer isn't high enough level to get the Mechanical Yeti plans & the Mechanical Toad recipe is super rare so I only flipped those when they turned up cheap on the Auction House.

Pet battles have changed the whole pet market as far as I can tell. The Engineering pets I do have the recipes for don't sell now, the materials to make them don't sell either (unsurprising of course!) and as they are not 'rare' types, the demand is low.

What I have done a few times though is to go to one of my alternative servers where I have some gold & buy cheap pets there. I learn them then cage them on my banker alt so I can list them on my home server. I should imagine that there is a pretty good market here for anyone who plays regularly on more than one server & who knows which pets are in highest demand. It's also a great way of picking up pets cheaply to fill the gaps in your collectors list. Sometimes it pays to be a server hopping altoholic!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 16 Flipping

So I'm on the downhill stretch to the end of my 20 Days of Gold Making now and today the question is "Flipping! Do you flip stuff regularly or sometimes? Big ticket items or smaller high volume stuff?". The best bit of this whole 20 Days thing is that not all the participants are gold blogs and from reading a few of their posts, it seems like 'flipping' isn't a word as widely used as I thought it was when I wrote the list of questions so just in case you're not sure what I mean either, here's my personal definition!

"Flipping - when you buy an item off the Auction House,

 purely with the intent to sell it again at a higher price"

With that said then yes, I do a fair amount of flipping, especially when I'm starting fresh somewhere or if I start a little competition with a friend. But I'm not very good at taking risks & I'm also not very good with keeping up with gear specs at raid level so I don't touch any high price items like Epic armor or weapons.

I usually look at high volume markets like herbs & ores, (most of the Volatiles were great for a while in Cataclysm) but also cooking materials like vegetables & meats. I actually flip these now rather than do the whole Ironpaw Token Shuffle as I got fed up waiting for my 100 year old soy sauce to sell! It seems the rush to level Cooking is pretty much over so now it's just mats for regular buff food usage.

I did a fairly detailed post about using Auctionator addon to find items to flip - you may know flipping as 'buy low, sell high' but that's a bit of a misnomer to be honest. I prefer 'buy low, sell higher' but it's not as eye catching I guess!

A perfect example of a major market for flipping is the transmog market. Experienced players in the transmog field know exactly which pieces of lower level gear has a transmog value & they snatch them up when the rest of us unknowing levelers list them on the Auction House for just a few gold. I know some transmog goldmakers also farm instances & rares for those special items but the building blocks of the transmog market is based heavily on flipping.

Alongside the transmog gear market is the high level leveling armor. In Cataclysm I did dabble a bit with level 77-80 green armor - some of the armor that dropped off Cataclysm mobs could be used by pre-Cataclysm levelers with stats that were way above anything available in Northrend. That market is still there but is much smaller now obviously, superceded by the level 80-84 green & blue armors from Mists of Pandaria mobs.

I haven't really dived into this one yet - I have managed to sell most of the greens I picked up whilst leveling at quite nice prices (199g - 299g for greens) but I haven't made a concerted effort to search the Auction House for those items to flip.

If you know your Auction House well, you can flip almost anything given the right price at the right time. The trick of course is to catch those bargains. Two tools you can use to help with bargain hunting is The Undermine Journal & Wowuction - both have txt/email message systems where you can be notified when something you are looking for pops up on their scans. The Undermine Journal also has a 'bargains' page which comes in very handy sometimes!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 15 Professions

The question for today on my 20 Days of Gold Making is "Professions - do you have all of them, some or none? Which is your favorite for goldmaking?" which is both an easy & a tough one for me. Yes, I have all the professions, most are maxed with the exception of herbalism (my loved/hated Rogue) and Engineering which is on my level 50-something Warlock. As for which is my favorite for gold making, that changes almost week by week!

If you've been reading here for a while, you'll know that glyphs & gems were my main gold makers during Cataclysm but with the advent of Mists of Pandaria, both seem to have ground to a halt. I've been transmuting Trillium & Living Steel on both my Transmute alchemists and making a few flasks here & there too but I can't say Alchemy is my favorite profession right now.

My paladin is really the only alt with any reputation locked recipes at the moment and she is my skinner/leatherworker. I've been making a mix of the various leg armors and the Epic gloves to make best use of her Spirits of Harmony which I get from doing the dailies & planting Songbell Seeds on her Tillers farm. If I can get cheap Savage Leather, I'm also making the Triple-Reinforced Mining Bags (to use up my Volatile Earths) and the Royal Scribe's Satchel (to use up my Inferno Inks). These have been selling around the 1000g mark, albeit slowly but I'm in no rush to get rid of them - they sit in my mailbox in 1 or 2 mails & I just take out another when one sells.

I've also been making quite good profits from the Mammoth Mining Bags - 48 pieces of Borean Leather usually cost me around the 1-2g mark so my maximum crafting costs for them is 96g. Until recently, I had managed to push the price of these bags up to around the 350g - 400g mark but I have a competitor now who insists that the list price should be 150g!

Now I know that I can sell them at 350g so I could buy out her cheaper bags but the problem is that at 350g, they don't sell quite so quickly and as she is both a skinner & leatherworker in the level 70's, she is obviously picking up Borean Leather as she is questing in Northrend. If I buy her bags, she will just produce more & I will run out of space before she gives up this market. So what I'm doing is snatching up most of the Borean Leather on the Auction House at every opportunity including Heavy Borean Leather & Borean Leather Scraps and converting it all to Heavy Borean Leather.

Once she hits level 80 & moves on to the Cataclysm areas, I'm hoping she will 'forget' this market but in the meantime, I am undercutting her & if she doesn't post any bags, I'm putting my price back up to around 250g. I'm still making pretty good profits so I'll stay in this market.

I've also been making some of the PvP armor, prices can vary a great deal from day to day so I just make a few pieces and jump in & out of the market when the prices are high. I'm also doing this on my Blacksmith but she only has 2 of the PvP recipes right now as she is only level 87 & struggling to get Spirits of Harmony. My tailor is still level 85 though and not likely to be leveling any time soon so the PvP Tailoring recipes will have to wait!

I've always had a soft spot for Leatherworking - it's my only original profession on my very first ever alt so I have recipes that are hard to get or no longer in game, I've slaved through various dungeons in the hope of getting the Stylin' leather hats recipes & I've got a snatch list for hard to get materials for some of the lower level recipes too. I really should start making those again - I wonder if they still sell? Hmmm, new post idea there I guess :)

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 14 How Much Time?

We're well over half way through my 20 Days of Gold Making now, some of the participants have almost finished and some are just getting started. I'm really enjoying reading all the posts, it amazes me how many different ways there are of doing almost the same thing!

So my question for day 14 is "How much of your playtime is devoted to gold making? Do you raid/pvp/pet battle too or is the AH your main playtime?"

If I had answered this during 2011 and the early part of Cataclysm, I'd have said that about 85-90% of my playtime was Auction House related. I was shuffling ore for enchanting materials, gems & transmutes, milling herbs almost everyday for my glyph markets & even farming materials for some of my crafted items. When I wasn't shuffling, milling, crafting or farming, I'd probably be found in the Auction House making notes, looking for bargains & generally absorbing as much price data as I could.

By this time last year though, I'd stopped playing completely and not just the Auction House but the whole game. I resubbed around April/May time when the Scroll of Resurrection brought me a new level 80 on my US account & I went straight back to dabbling in the Auction House.

Currently I am still spending much of my time in the Auction House but nowhere near as much time as before. I used to log in in the morning and still be there late at night. Now I have a few more Real Life things on my plate, I tend to log in briefly during the morning to relist any expired auctions but then I don't log again until mid to late evening.

I can see the difference in my gold making too - these days I'm much more of a dabbler here & there. Gone are the days of canceling/relisting 3-5 times a day and to be honest, my daily totals show that. But I'm enjoying the game again, playing, leveling and even a few pet battles here & there so the money doesn't worry me too much now. I think once I get my all girls upto 90 ( 4 to go) then yes, I may very well dive back into gold making on a more serious level. I still find heroics a bit daunting & stressful & don't even want to think about raiding with strangers!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 13 Biggest Yay?

Following on quite logically from Day 12 Biggest Oops, today's topic in my 20 Days of Gold Making is "What was your biggest Yay moment?"

I've been wracking my brain trying to decide which was my biggest 'Yay!' moment but most of them have not been gold related. Hitting 80 on my first ever alt, hitting 80 on my 2nd alt, the by-then hated rogue (I am a totally useless rogue & it took forever to get to 80 & a lot of deaths & bandages & healing potions!), off-tanking ICC for the first time & more recently, finally hitting Exalted with Golden Lotus on my Paladin (that was hard work too!).

Notable 'Yay!' moments include buying the Traveller's Tundra Mammoth & the Mekgineer Chopper - both expensive mounts at the time and in the case of the Mekgineer Chopper, well overdue! I had promised myself to buy it for my cute little pink pigtailed rogue when I hit 50k but when the time came, I was in full gold-making mode & that included not buying myself luxuries. Once my daily income was regularly in the 5-10k profit region though, I persuaded myself than the Chopper was only 2-3days profits & it wouldn't slow me down too much on my road to gold-cap!

I guess you'd expect hitting 1 million to be a big 'Yay!' moment & truthfully it was but it was also a big sigh of relief moment too. I'd been so focused on hitting that gold cap, I'd missed my guild dying around me, I missed most of the Cataclysm dungeons & when I eventually did stop & look around, I was kind of lost. I wrote my regular 'What's Been Selling' post that week & talked a bit about the anti-climax of finally hitting gold cap.

After that, my favorite 'Yay!' moment was when I snagged the Witch-Hunters Harvester polearm for one of my guildies & a Masterwork Elementium Deathblade for another. I tried to buy them both the Traveller's Mammoth (as well as a couple of other close guild friends) but none of them would accept!

My most recent & probably biggest ever sale was finally selling the Spectral Tiger mount I bought last summer & not only selling it but finding out one of my Twitter friends is one of my competitors on my server! It truly is a small world but we had a big chuckle when we revealed out character names to each other!

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New Blacksmithing Training Projects - Patch 5.2

Big news hit the patch 5.2 notes late last week & I thought it might be useful to pop some links here for you to have a look at. Along with the usual class changes, new raid/dungeon info, glyph changes & pet battle changes, there is also a large section for professions, especially Blacksmithing. You can read all of the patch 5.2 build 16503 on MMO-Champion if you wish but some of it is just datamined & a little lacking in explanations. Wowhead has a much better explanation, focusing on the Blacksmithing changes including some analysis and late yesterday, Euripedes on WoW Insider also laid out his thoughts on how this could affect things in game. The comments on both articles make for some interesting reading if you ignore all the panicky 'I hate change' type ones!

Quick Summary & Thoughts About Changes

Just in case you don't want to wander off to read all that stuff, I will summarise it here though. Basically, a whole bunch of new 'Training Project' recipes will be added to an NPC in your faction Shrine in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. All of these new recipes take only Ghost Iron Bars in varying quantities and will allow a level 85 character to skill up to 500 using only Ghost Iron Bars. Looking at the list of 'projects' and the huge amount of Ghost Iron they require, my inner goblin is rubbing her hands with glee at the thought. However it does have huge implications for other parts of the Auction House game as well as the game in general.

• reduced demand for 'old world' materials - including some very profitable niches for gold makers & levelers alike
• can I say 'bots'? Oh yes, I can just hear botters cranking up their systems as I type this, especially as most sensible goblins will more than likely be stockpiling already!
• Blizzard introduced CRZ (Cross realm zones) in an attempt to make the old world areas feel less abandoned, removing the need to farm old world materials like this will surely mean that levelers just zoom through those old zones even faster.
• Ghost Iron Ore will become a very active, competitive market with a huge spike in demand, especially as the new weapons & armor already discovered in earlier patch notes need so much Living Steel too.
• Other markets reliant on Ghost Iron, such as Jewelcrafting & Enchanting (from the 'shuffle) will see price increases too.
• It's probably only a matter of time until the other crafting professions get a similar makeover - Leatherworking, Tailoring, Engineering, Jewelcrafting, Inscription & Alchemy could all be changed in a similar way to make use solely of current materials. 
• It would be an easy way for Blizzard to keep professions up-to-date with each new expansion - just change the material required to the newest expansion resources et voila! updated professions!
• Random thought based on that last bullet point - if new expansion professions just need new expansion materials, will they still keep Realm First achievements?

My thoughts on this

Well, I have to say, I like the general idea of simplifying the earlier stages of all the professions. I'd imagine it would be fairly straightforward to remove some of the harder to gather materials & just make the low level recipes require basic materials - for example, take out the various 'scales' 'hides' etc from the Leatherworking recipes & just require leathers or take out the various elemental bits of engineering/blacksmithing recipes & leave them using only ores/bars. The new training projects way seems a very drastic change that will undoubtedly cause much outcry of dislike & relief too.

Remembering that this is just patch notes for the PTR (Public Test Realms), it could change before it goes live. The amount of Ghost Iron required for the training projects seems pretty damned high to me but then again, that could be Blizzards' way of trying to keep the uptake slow at first. The effect on the economy will be interesting to observe - more bots, more levelers choosing to level with only gathering professions, higher prices in several related markets & of course, all the goblins (like me!) trying to make as much gold as possible as quickly as possible. 

My Plan of Action

So I have to say, yes, this time I am going to stockpile. I don't usually stockpile in any great quantities, mainly because I'm a bit slow off the mark & prices have usually risen by the time I wake up to the opportunity! But this time, I got lucky! The morning before this announcement was released, I had already decided to up my gold making activities again & had picked up about 200 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore with the intentions of crafting & shuffling like a crazy fool. Since then, I've picked up another 100 or so stacks, all below 50g per, and my mailboxes are overflowing. 

I'm keeping an eye on Trillium Bars & Living Steel too as well as the basic Spirit Dust for my enchanter. My thinking is that the easiest source of Trillium Bars is the Alchemy transmute from Ghost Iron Bar to Trillium & as it has no cooldown, some players will be producing Trillium as a way of increasing their profits from the ores. As it is so easy to produce, it's a good way of making profits whilst waiting for the daily Living Steel cooldown, as long as you can get your Ghost Iron Ore/Bar at reasonable prices. 

Enchanting materials can come from disenchanting armor obviously but I'm willing to bet that the greatest source of Spirit Dust is players doing the whole Ghost Iron Ore shuffle. With Ghost Iron Ore prices set to rise, Spirit Dust prices should follow of course & therein lies a good goblins profits!

Summary

This new leveling way will be available to level 85 alts and above, making it a great way to switch professions, albeit an expensive way. Prices for Ghost Iron Ore (and related markets) will undoubtedly rise through the roof for a while until some kind of equilibrium is achieved in the market. The bravest, risk-taking goblins will make a killing whilst the rest of us just make some nice profits. 

Have you started stockpiling? What do you think of these changes? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this so leave a comment or you can tweet me @nevahaddict if you'd like to.

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 12 Biggest Oops!

Question 12 on my list of 20 Days of Gold Making was "what was your biggest 'oops' moment?". I thought almost all of us would have one of these to talk about, no matter how painful or annoying it was as the time but as I sit here to tell you about it, I really can't think of a big oops! I've either been very lucky or perhaps because I don't automate everything, I see my mistakes as they happen. I have had some ventures go slightly wrong though - usually when I try armor or weapons flipping!

Oops #1

Back in Cataclysm, Maelstrom Crystals were the big expensive enchanting material. They were selling for over 2-3000 gold or more early on as they were only disenchantable from epics. As always, some clever spark noticed that the Alchemists Stone was cheaper to make & could be disenchanted to a Maelstrom Crystal and as always, word spread & the prices started to fall a bit.

But the all-seeing Blizzard noticed too and only 2 months into Cataclysm, they nerfed the Alchemist's Stone so that was no longer able to provide Maelstrom Crystals. Luckily I read a post by Zoxy (no longer blogging, awww) so the evening before the patch, I snatched up all the Maelstrom Crystals on the Auction House (a whole 27 crystals but almost half my capital) then relisted them at 2x the price.

I was really, really lucky in the end, the first few sold for quite good prices but slowly - by the time I'd sold the last one, I was making a loss per crystal although overall I did at least get my gold back & maybe a little more. You can read my thoughts about this in my old post 'My Pocket is in Shock', it makes for a fun read for me as I panicked at the time. The best bit about that post though is the comments - most are still relevant today & some big names from the old days of gold blogging too.

If you're new-ish to gold-making and only have a limited amount of capital, that old post shows you where I was & how a big gamble like that worried me at the time. I have no doubt that you are probably feeling some of those same thoughts as you hit the 'buy' button sometimes. It all comes with time - experience, patience & lots of reading really does help calm those nerves, I promise :)

Oops #2

This one isn't so much a gold making oops as a mailbox oops! Back in December 2011, one of my guildies snatched a cheap Epic (about 8k when it should have been 12k) off the Auction House for me as I was in a dungeon. I mailed him the cash & he mailed me the Epic.

That sounds ok, doesn't it? Yeah? Well I asked him to send the Epic to my Paladin and I was playing my DK at the time, trying to get her geared up a bit. My DK was also my main crafter (JC/Glyphs) so I spent a lot of time on her. Stroll on early January & I took an unplanned break. I just stopped logging in overnight - no idea why, it just worked out that way.

It wasn't until I relogged in April that I remembered the Epic in the mail! Of course it was gone into the ether, along with who knows what else. I used to use my mailbox for additional storage so I probably lost a lot of stuff. Lesson learned there for sure!

I still use the mail for some storage especially whilst leveling through Pandaria. I send raw materials out to the leveler/crafter, do the crafting & send it back. It keeps the overflow out of my bags & I just take what I need from the mailbox. The difference these days is that I pay much closer attention to the mail expiry dates & if I'm planning on being away from game, I empty my mailboxes!

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