Back To Basics - A Reader Inspired Post

Today we have a post from Robert H, a reader who emailed me some feedback & a question. We got chatting and this was one of his replies. I thought he made some very good points so I asked if I could publish it here. I hope you enjoy reading a different perspective on gold making and one that I really should try to remember myself when I'm writing!

Robert's Story

Many gold makers focus on a massive stock of mats, max level gear or enchants, and "big ticket" items like mounts or transmogs. I'm no where near that level and don't have the time or resources to be a competitive gold maker. What I prefer to do is get the most out of the AH while leveling my toons. Perhaps my experiences can help others do the same. 

I began with a few basic assumptions. I needed an engineer for the new 5.4 changes, so chose that and mining as professions. I also decided that I would level at a leisurely pace, somewhere between "speed leveling" and going for Loremaster. I would level mining and engineering in one shot, i.e., as soon as I reached 350 and level 50 I would make all the items to reach the next limit right away (or visit DMF when in town). This motivated me to gather mats while questing. I play on a medium population server with an average economy, so my cash goal was between 2,000-5,000 gold per week.

With these guidelines in mind, I built up a steady supply of ores by making one or two extra trips around key zones while questing, not to mention earn XP and get occasional mob drops. I always had my DMF Adventurer's Journal in dungeons (almost no one carries those any more, so I had nearly a 100% greed success rate on those).

The results were great. While questing in Vanilla zones, I was able to earn about 1,500g a week just from ores, especially gold, iron, and occasionally tin. Truesilver was hit-or-miss. I used the daily price feature on the Undermine Journal to determine if ore or bars sold best and smelted accordingly (that also helped level my mining skill). 

Green drops sold modestly well, but only those with great stats or good for twinking. Cloth was variable. Outlands ores were very successful, as Fel Iron and Adamantite always sold for 100-150g per stack. Two laps a day around Zangarmarsh really paid off. DMF items from dungeons did well at ~250g apiece, and I averaged 3-5 sales a week.

At higher levels the results were even better. In less than an hour I sold 2 stacks of obsidium bars and 4 stacks of cobalt ore and pocketed 1200g. 

Not bad at all. In a little under 3 weeks I had accrued 19,000 gold from the AH after starting at level 1, well above my expectations. 

Your mileage may vary, especially if your server economy is vital or moribund. If you're new to gold making this might be a good way to learn the ropes with relatively low risk. Skills like knowing what to look for, when to post, how to undercut, and when to just vendor stuff that doesn't sell will get you ready for prime time.

I usually write about what I'm doing or planning in game but of course, it's been a long while since I was semi-broke & very inexperienced. Much of what Robert says is what I did to get started, long before I considered myself a gold maker.

As a gold making blogger, I tend to focus on specific things or tips you can do to make gold. Robert's story is a more general 'lifestyle' way of making gold than my current gametime so I'd be really interested to hear your early days stories too so feel free to drop me an email or maybe leave a comment below.

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Enchanting - Sources of Cheaper Materials For 5.4

With the upcoming changes to Enchanting in Patch 5.4, I thought I'd have another look at how I work with this profession & how I could source my enchanting materials as cheaply as possible. I've always just dabbled in the scroll market with the sole exception of the Enchant Weapon - Agility enchant for heirloom weapons. That enchant made me 1000's of gold over the last few years and at one point, I had upped the price to 1200g. It's one of the markets I let go when I took a mini break & I haven't got back into it since.

Until recently, I've just been buying my Spirit Dust off the Auction House when it fell to 2g-ish but in the last few weeks, it's been consistently at 4-5g all the time & the scrolls just aren't selling at high enough prices or volumes to justify that raw material price. At 2g a piece, it was reasonable to convert the Dusts up to Mysterious Essences too but not now.

So I needed an alternative source of cheap Spirit Dust & Mysterious Essences other than the Auction House. I looked at just buying cheap Green armor pieces off the Auction House but usually the prices are just above the level that I need to make cheap dusts so although I still check regularly, I don't get many bargains that way.

Back in November 2012, when Mists was still quite fresh, I did a series of posts with small, simple spreadsheets in them - including a 'Converting Enchanting Materials' one. The link for the conversion spreadsheet is still active & is a very quick & easy way to see at a glance whether converting up or down is worthwhile. Please feel free to download it if you want to - just please don't edit the online version!

Now that things have settled down in game & prices are more stable, I'm finding that Windwool Cloth is almost always around the 20g a stack mark - that means my Tailor can craft the current PvP Bracers using 4 bolts of Windwool Cloth (ie 1 stack) and then disenchant the bracers to give me an Ethereal Shard - I say 1 but often it is 2 Shards with the Guild perk, Bountiful Bags. That means that I can get my Ethereal Shards for 20g or less (depending on procs) which is usually 10g or more cheaper than the Auction House.

Using my handy dandy little spreadsheet, I can easily see that at that price, if I convert the Shards down to Dusts, I'll get a minimum of 9 Dusts for that 20g - not quite 2g a piece but still much better than the current 4-5g on my Auction House! The only problem with that method though is that Mysterious Essences are so expensive! If I break down a Shard to an Essence, do I really want to break expensive Essences down to Dusts! Or even worse, at 20g a Shard, when converted up to a Sha Crystal which then only costs 100g & they sell for around 300g most of the time!

I get around this conundrum by making & disenchanting lots of Bracers! By diversifying across the raw materials market & the scrolls market, I make sure I'm selling at a profit, no matter what is actually selling. Lately though, again in preparation for Patch 5.4, I'm storing up my Essences - I'll either make a killing on the scrolls or own the market for Essences - or at least, that's the plan!

And finally a really neat tip from one of my readers - Philip H. emailed me a couple of weeks ago to ask a question and gave me a little of his game story too. He mentioned something in his email that I had never even thought of so I asked & he gave me permission to let you know about it. I may be slow & you are all doing this but it does require a special set of circumstances so I have a feeling there's not many using this tip!

Basically Philip had leveled his main and been raiding, LFR'ing & doing a lot of max level stuff. He'd also vendored all of the useless soulbound Epic items that he couldn't use. At a later date, he decided to make this character his Enchanter and once he had leveled it to max, he used the Blizzard item restoration service to get back all those Epics he had vendored previously! Say hello to lots of free Sha Crystals!

You can get back upto 50 items at a time but can only use the service once a month but it's still a great idea. Obviously, it only works if you've vendored or deleted useless Epics before you learnt Enchanting but it's worth bearing in mind if you're considering changing professions on your main.

Have I missed some other way to get cheap enchanting mats? I'd love to hear your comments.

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What's Been Selling This Week? 26th August Edition

What a wild ride it's been this week! Not that my sales really show it but I made a couple of great deals early in the week & they should start paying off over the next week or so. I also found a gold mine in one of my banks so all in all, it's been a pretty good week!

Over the last few weekly reports, I've been banging on about Mysterious Fortune Cards and oh look! there they are again at the top of my earnings list! This week though, I've had a lot of competition from 2 people selling them at 7-8g a piece so to start the week, I just slowed down & thought I'd wait them out. Well, until I saw that one of them was trying to offload all his stock at 6g each in the trade channel! I quickly logged a different alt and whispered him - he had 1600 cards. I hesitated so he dropped his price to 5g each at which point I snapped them up! He also offered me the Starlight Ink he had so I grabbed a couple hundred of those too - at 20g each which is less than 50% of the current market price. I've been selling the shoulder inscription scrolls quite well so I thought I'd soon shift the inks too.

By Wednesday evening, the other cheap MFC guy had sold out or gone AFK for a while so I listed 400 cards in various stack sizes & actually barked a couple of times in trade. You can see the results in the screenshot - all 400 sold by the next morning at 16g each! Happy Nev that day.

I've also been doing a bit of prospecting & gem cutting - now that I'm using TSM2, I seem to have got the bug again - I think the challenge of making it work has given me the spark back for now. My server is still slow though so I'm not shifting gems at any great pace - I'm hoping the Connected Realms will help to fix that though!

I've also been picking up more & more of the 83/84 MoP Green Armor - buying any below 50g and reselling them for 199g or 225g. The usual Mammoth Mining Bags & Netherweave bags have been selling - although Netherweave Cloth seems to be getting more expensive these days. I can wait though - I'll just snatch the really cheap stuff & make bags in batches when I remember.

So what's this goldmine I found in my Rogue's bank? Cataclysm uncommon gems - 100's of them I'd totally forgotten about! I popped over the the Auction House to check the price of Hypnotic Dust. At 8-10g a piece, I decided it was worth the time to convert all those gems to rings & necklaces to disenchant. Above you can see some of the result - almost 1400g in one evening and I still have about 10 stacks of Dust to sell! That was a nice little bonus this week.

As an update to yesterdays Leveling Leatherworking post, I can now report that the enchanting materials I got from disenchanting all the low level stuff has netted about 2700g so far and the MoP green armor which I decided to sell has netted about 1300g so far. After an initial outlay of about 4200g to buy all the leather I needed, I've regained about 4000g so far and I still have some materials & armor pieces left to sell. I think it's just about paid for itself already you know :)  Now if I can just do the same with Engineering I'll be really happy!

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Leveling Leatherworking Before Patch 5.4

After I wrote my post a couple of weeks ago on the New Crafting Materials for 5.4, I realised just how long it was going to take me to learn all the new PvP crafted item recipes so I decided to sacrifice my 2nd Tailor and level a 2nd Leatherworker instead. I thought I'd share with you how I did it, how much it cost & how much it's going to save my sanity going forward!

Now usually when I level a profession on a high level character, I take my time & pick up all the materials off the Auction House as cheaply as I can. I use the Wow Professions website and their very handy list of materials as a shopping guide and just check out the Auction House each time I visit. But this time we have a deadline of 10th/11th September for the patch release date & I want to be ready for it so I bit the bullet & just went head first into buying everything I needed.

Luckily I decided to do this on the weekend when prices are often a bit cheaper anyway and I managed to pick up everything I needed to get me to 450 skill points for about 1600 gold. I did have a few bits in my main Leatherworkers bank such as hides and some part stacks of various leathers but not much really.

The painful bit was buying the Savage Leather - I could easily have taken my Skinner out for a couple of hours but I was on a roll and just wanted to get this done! I paid almost 2500 gold to get through the Cataclysm skill levels but finally made it to 500 when I could start some of the newer MoP recipes using Exotic Leather I'd already picked up cheaply on my main Leatherworker.

So after about 4 hours of buying, sorting banks, logging alts to gather bits & pieces & of course, learning & crafting, I finally made it to skill level 570 and got stuck! It's at this point that leveling a profession on a level 86 character sucks! I need just one Spirit of Harmony to buy a Contenders PvP recipe (outdated now but still cheap for a few more levels) or I need to get her out questing so she can pick up the 2 world drop Magnificent Hide recipes.

On the basis that it's the Magnificent Hide recipe that I really want & need, I'm going to be quite happy if I can pick that up quickly & just do the cooldown each day to build up my Magnificent Hide stock ready for patch 5.4 but I will need to be maxed 600 skill points to use any discovered recipes so I haven't got enough days left before patch to get there. Luckily my Rogue & Hunter both need a bit of gear to start their questing so I made a few bits for them and got a few more points that way.

Now here comes the nice surprise of all this - I had no use for anything that I crafted, I couldn't be bothered to try to sell any of the low level stuff either so I sent almost everything to my Enchanter. She spent a happy half hour disenchanting it all & I posted all the enchanting materials on the Auction House. I did send the MoP items to my banker/auction alt though - some of it is selling at 50g or more which is still better than the enchanting mats from it.

Just 4 hours after I listed everything, I popped back to see if it was selling. Oh man! Was I a happy banker - almost 1600 gold in the mailbox & over 40 auctions still to go. I haven't tallied up how many of the MoP greens have sold either but the overall cost of leveling my 2nd Leatherworker is coming down all the time!

As for my sanity - well, not having to wait almost 90 days to get all the new PvP recipes will definitely help! I know I'm going to end up with duplicate patterns so it won't halve the time taken but it should reduce it significantly. It will also give me a headstart on many of my competitors so I'm really looking forward to making a killing on this stuff!

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Enchanting Changes in 5.4 & Other Enhancements Too!

One of the changes that struck me as interesting in the patch notes for 5.4 was the changes being made to item enhancements. This includes enchantments, leg armors, spellthreads and I'll be honest, I'm not sure which Engineering item they mean - the tinkers gears maybe? I had a few questions about exactly what this meant for us goldmakers but although I've been reading comments all over the place, none seem to make it any clearer so I thought I'd do a post about it & see what discussion we get in comments!

Items
All permanent item enhancements provided by Enchanting, Engineering, Leatherworking, Tailoring, and various vendors and quests are now able to be applied to items of any level. This means all enchantments can now be applied to heirloom items.

• High level enhancements applied to items equipped by low level players have their power scaled down to be similar to enhancements intended for that level range. 

• Low level enhancements applied to items equipped by high level players do not grow further in power beyond their intended level range.

How I see this is that all the current top level enhancements can now be applied to heirloom gear and will scale down as appropriate for your level - a big change as previously, only enchants with no level requirements could be used. This is a good thing for most enchanters or at least for those of us who only make gold with top level enchants. But I know there are some of you out there who specialise in the older enchants for heirloom market & for the twink markets - this was one of my question areas - will mid-level enchants scale too? What if the scaling means that some of the mid-level enchants are still better than top level ones after scaling?

I think the second bullet point in the quote above indicates that mid level enchants will scale but will stop scaling when their max level is reached. The Crusader enchant is a perfect example - it won't scale past 60 so the question then becomes - will people still use Crusader below level 60 (if it's scaled stats are better than the top level enchants scaled stats) & re-enchant for the rest of the trip to 90?

I suppose that will depend on how well the scaling works - min/maxers will take whichever of the two types gives them the advantage at each level but I think most of the player base will just go for the simpler option of max level enchants.

I think the other professions will see a boost in sales too - I'm not very aware of mid to low level leg armors & spellthreads in current use, to be honest but I think the same thinking will apply. Why enhance an item twice when a single top level will scale all the way after all?

So how am I getting ready for patch 5.4 and all the changes? I may be wrong but I've been increasing my stockpile of current enchanting materials & I've started farming for Motes of Harmony again on my Leatherworker's Tillers Farm - I'd like a little piece of the action on the Leg Armors market as well as scrolls! I've never really got heavily into the Enchants market - I'm more of a dabbler there but I'll go where the profits are so this could be interesting to say the least!

What do you think? Do you have experience with Heirloom enchants & Twink enchants market? I'd love to hear your opinion on this as it's not one of my strong points! 

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What's Been Selling This Week? 18th August Edition

Keep It Varied!

Just a few days late this week with the post and the screenshot is from 19th so just a day late with that! Don't think it would have made much difference & my addon is set for 7 days so it still only shows a week's worth of transactions! I do have a very good excuse though - I spent a huge chunk of Sunday installing TSM2 & reworking all my auctioning & crafting groups. It was kind of nerve-racking but with the help of Phat Lewt's video series, I quickly got the basics sorted out. He covers all the modules, each has it's own video & he's kept the videos to around 7 minutes each - perfect for me - all the info without time to get too confused or bored!

So this week, I'm finally seeing some different items in the top section of my sales list - I've stopped making the leather & mail PvP items and have almost sold out of those now but instead I'm cutting gems & making some enchant scrolls. I did pick up a boatload of very cheap Windwool Cloth though so I have made a few of the Cloth PvP items - just to keep the gold flowing!

But the big seller this week is Mysterious Fortune Cards yet again! Until last night, anyway - Monday evening I did a deal with a player & bought 2000 MFC's from him for 5g a piece, knowing I was selling them fairly easily at 15g & I wouldn't have to mill for ages yet! Then last night, a different player decided to drop the market down to 8g a piece & list 100's of them. Now I could easily buy him out too but I reckon expecting these guys to stay out of the market would be pushing my luck so I'll just hang on to them until my competitors get bored of milling! I did manage to shift 3-400 before they dropped the price though so that'll show up in next weeks post I reckon!

One nice side effect of all that milling though is the production of Starlight Ink as a by-product. I've turned those into the 4 types of Shoulder Inscriptions & they are selling nicely too. I've not been paying attention to my scribe so I don't know if that's the best use for them but for now, it'll do!

I wrote a post a while ago about Titansteel and as you can see, I moved a few bars again this week. They've been dribbling out in 1's & 2's but nowhere near as fast as I'd hoped. Having said that, my server is still pretty dead, I think I'll hang on to them until the Connected Realms thing happens after patch - more people using the same Auction House should shift things in general, I hope.

I'm still learning new gem cuts on my Jewelcrafter but I'm cutting & selling gems too. I haven't started major prospecting yet though - my stash of Ghost Iron Ore isn't going anywhere for a long while yet so I'll prospect as the mood takes me or I run out of gems to cut! It's nice to see some gems making it to the top of my sales list though - Haven't seen that in a long while!

Had a run on Netherweave Bags this week too - I had picked up a load of Netherweave Cloth for around 3g a stack & I finally got around to converting it to bags last week. Cloth is back up to 15g a stack now & the bags are around 18g - just not worth the effort this week so I'll do my usual and wait patiently for the prices to fall again!

And that's about it for this week - next week's post will be the first full week of using TSM2 to craft & create auctions. I kind of like it already but I have a lot of tweaking of groups and operations to do yet so it will be interesting to see if there's any effect on my sales report next time!

Have a great week y'all :)

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Episode 11, Journal of Marcus Ty Podcast - Let's Get Ready for Patch 5.4!

Almost Ready to Lift Off!

Yep, it's another episode of The Journal of Marcus Ty podcast - episode 11 and we talk about getting ready for patch 5.4. If you want to find out how Marcus & I prepare for patches, what we've been doing for the last couple of weeks & just how much we've spent in preparation for this patch, you may want to have a listen!

Marcus also slipped back to his boyhood & just in case you need a translation - dog & bone = phone, whistle & flute = suit - yeah I know it doesn't make much sense but then Cockney Rhyming Slang never made much sense to me either!

You can find the show on iTunes or Stitcher or you can listen to it directly from Marcus' website - whichever suits you best :)

Show Notes

• Welcome to the Pig & Whistle, Stormwind
• A long talk on the ‘Dog & Bone’
• Basics for prepping for patches
• Buying up the Auction House (& how crazy it can get sometimes!)
• Deal Finding lists with TSM
• Nev and Marcus go shopping!
• Marcus really wants a Sky Golem and other new Engineering stuffs!
• Nev buys up all the Magnificent Hide
• Migrating from TSM1 to TSM2
• Lazy Girl Guide to patch notes (My post on Preparing for Patch 5.4)
• Steals & Deals of the week

Resources mentioned in the podcast:

Contact Marcus Ty on Twitter @MarcusTy
Contact Me on Twitter @NevAHaddict
Marcus' Blog - WoW Gold Journal
Email Marcus at JournalofMarcusTy.com

If you don't know, Marcus has written a very extensive gold guide and is working on updating it all the time. I've been an affiliate of his for a long while now as I believe it is one of the best gold making guides out there. You can get more details at his Auction House Secrets site. It's not for experienced gold makers of course but if you're just starting out, you will find it very helpful and there's a 60 day money back guarantee too!

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Cooking For Raiders in 5.4 - Part 2

A little while ago, I wrote a post about Feeding The Raiders in patch 5.4 but immediately received comments on the post & on Twitter that I'd missed the new Cooking recipes being added in patch 5.4! I meant to do an update post almost straight away but it got lost in the torrent of ideas that hit me at that time so I'm only just now getting around to it.

Ok, so in patch 5.4 there are 2 new sets of recipes - 1 set is 300+ individual buff foods and the other set is from a new Noodle Cart with +250, +275 and +300 stat buffs for either 10 man or 25 man options so that's 6 different Noodle Carts! I'll break them both down separately below.

New Individual +300 Stat Buff Foods

There's good and bad news about these new recipes - the good news is that they should be cheaper to produce than the existing +300 buff foods like Black Pepper Ribs & Shrimp for example but you're going to have to farm for some of the ingredients regularly because they have a limited life span of 2 hours! You're also going to have to kill rare mobs in Vale of Eternal Blossom for the other ingredients although those will probably turn up on the Auction House at some silly high price.

• Fluffy Silkfeather Omelet - 300 Strength, requires Aged Mogu'shan Cheese & 5x Fresh Silkfeather Hawk Eggs
• Stuffed Lushrooms - 450 Stamina, requires Aged Mogu'shan Cheese & 5x Fresh Lushrooms
• Seasoned Pomfruit Slices - 300 Agility, requires Ancient Pandaren Spices & 5x Fresh Pomfruit
• Spiced Blossom Soup - 300 Intellect, requires Ancient Pandaren Spices & 5x Delicate Blossom Petals
• Farmer's Delight - 300 Spirit, requires Aged Balsamic Vinegar & 1x Fresh Strawberries & 2x Fresh Shao-Tien Rice
• Mango Ice - 300 Mastery, requires Aged Balsamic Vinegar & 5x Fresh Mangos

The Aged Mogu'shan Cheese, Aged Balsamic Vinegar & Ancient Pandaren Spices are the items that drop from the rares in Vale of Eternal Blossom. With all the new activity there, you could see a lot of these hit the Auction House but I'd take a guess that they will be quite expensive initially. The Fresh ingredients may look familiar - most, if not all of them were quest items from the Golden Lotus dailies so Blizzard are recycling their in-game use! The Fresh ones are the items with a 2 hour life span so if you do decide to farm them, don't hang around too long!

New Noodle Carts (+250, +275 & +300 Buff Foods)

These are a bit more complicated & expensive to make and the details on the patch notes aren't very clear yet. Hopefully someone reading may have tried them on the PTR & will leave a comment below! (pretty please?)

You get the recipe for the various Noodle Carts from 3 different quest chains, one chain for each level of buff (250, 275 or 300) and it appears that it's the 25 food version that is the reward. I haven't found a source for the 10 food version yet though. There's conflicting data as to which of the 6 versions are tied to the 3 quest chains - on Wowhead, (thanks to @Sivation for the heads up here!) it appears the 10 food version is the one tied to the quests whereas  in their write up of the new cooking recipes, they have linked the 25 food versions to the quests!

Anyway, whichever is tied to the quests, the materials required to make the supplies for the carts are the same - 5 x each 250+/+275/+300 buff foods for the 10 food version & 10 x each of the same foods for the 25 food versions. Once you have your Noodle Cart, you will be able to set it out in the same way as you set out feasts & players can purchase their Noodles from you. It isn't totally clear yet whether you get the cash or whether, like Jeeves, the gold goes to the game. One comment I read says it goes directly to the game so I can't see any major benefits to spend the time & effort to make one of these carts!

Having said that though, it would work for a raid team to all chip in supplies to make one of these carts but as an individual, I won't be bothering with them unless details change my mind for me!

Effect on Current Cooking Markets

So what effect will this have on current cooking supplies & buff food markets? I'm really not sure to be honest - we may see a bump in demand for the materials for the current buff foods as people make them to then make their Noodle Carts so meat, fish & vegetables could be good sellers but there's also been a slow down on my server of sales of the existing 300+ buff foods so the prices have dropped to below 10 gold each. I've been picking those up at 3-5gold and have a few stacks of each type ready just in case but I haven't invested deeply in this market.

As for the Aged ingredients which drop from Rares in the Vale, I'm not clear on how much of this new patch is going to take place there so I can't advise correctly but if there is a lot of questing there then the sheer number of players doing the new content will almost guarantee a market for the Aged ingredients. Whether you go and farm Rares yourself to sell the ingredients or to make the new individual buff foods will be up to you but I'm pretty sure I won't be going there any time soon! I'm too far behind on gear & stuff to really join in with current content, I really must try to catch up soon! I will be keeping an eye on the market though - if it looks promising, I may have to actually play my Paladin a bit!

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New Crafting Materials for Patch 5.4

With the imminent arrival of Patch 5.4 and all the changes to crafting professions, I thought I'd have a little dig into which materials I'm going to need & how many I should be buying now. I'm not usually a fan of major stockpiling, I prefer to buy cheap materials every time I see them rather than when I want to craft & yes, that does mean I have a stock of materials but nowhere near the quantities that many gold makers pile up before a major patch.

This time though, the raw materials on my server seem to be dropping in price right now which is kind of strange but I'm not complaining! I've never really prepped for a major patch before for various reasons but I thought I'd give it a go this time round!

So what are the new materials that my Tailor, Leatherworker & Blacksmith are going to be making?

• Celestial Cloth = 10 Bolts of Windwool Cloth (4 bolts per stack of Windwool Cloth so 2.5 x basic stack cost)
• Hardened Magnificent Hide = 2 Magnificent Hides (1 stack of Exotic Leather per hide if I only use the daily cooldown to make it, 2.5stacks if I want to make as many as I like)
• Balanced Trillium Ingot = 1 Trillium Bar (made from 2 black & 2 white Trillium Ore or via Alchemy transmute of 10 Ghost Iron Bars (which is 1 stack of Ghost Iron Ore)).

Each of these materials is on a daily cooldown and is bind on pickup so you won't be seeing any of these on the Auction House. Each time you make one though, you will 'discover' a new PvP armor recipe or one of the new Epic item level 553 legs or belts. It's the crafted PvP gear for all three professions that interest me as a gold making non-raider. The Epic items take 21 or 28 daily cooldowns to make and I'm not sure the sale price of the final piece will make up for lost sales of the less expensive PvP gear.

The real kicker is the sheer number of PvP patterns to learn - for Tailoring it's 45, for Leatherworking it's 89 & for Blacksmithing it's 35 (that's if I counted them correctly in Wowhead professions tabs!). It's at times like this I almost regret Leatherworking being my main profession but it does have some advantages! OK, yes, it's going to take me twice as long to learn all the Leather & Mail armor recipes but it does mean that I stand a good chance of lower competition for the first few weeks. 

Think about it - in 35 days, any Blacksmith that's done their discovery every day will have all the recipes but so will all the other Blacksmiths so there will be competition on every piece of plate PvP gear! Leatherworkers won't even have half their recipes by then & given that Leatherworking isn't as popular a profession as Blacksmithing, there are fewer Leatherworkers to compete with me on those recipes that we have in common. The same thing applies to Tailoring of course but 45 days in and all the patterns will be learnt & available. 

On this basis a Blacksmith will need 1 stack of Ghost iron Ore per discovery so 35 stacks. A Tailor will need 2.5 stacks x 45 which is 113 stacks (rounded up!) and a poor Leatherworker will need 178 Magnificent Hides. The inequality in costs of these basic materials is really obvious at this stage - a stack of Windwool Cloth is 30-50 gold, a stack of Ghost Iron Ore is 30-60 gold but a Magnificent Hide which is on cooldown too is anywhere from 100-200 gold each and you need 2 of them every day!

Right now I have already got more than enough Ghost Iron Ore & Windwool Cloth to make all these cooldown items for both my Blacksmith & Tailor. My Leatherworker has been storing up Magnificent Hides for a couple of weeks now & I've been buying some off the Auction House when they fall to the 100g or less point but I'm still not going to have enough ready made. Luckily for me, the price of Exotic Leather has dropped sharply on my server this week so I may have to go the more expensive route & use the non-cooldown, 50 Exotic Leathers recipe to make extra Magnificent Hides.

Ok, so that's the armor crafting professions, what about the others? Well Engineering is getting a fabulous new mount - the Sky Golem - which requires Living Steel & also uses a daily cooldown item called Jards Peculiar Energy Source. This Peculiar Energy Source uses Ghost Iron Bars so that's more Ghost Iron Ore required. Then of course, there's the Jewelcrafting - a new raid & new Epic armor patterns means a bump in demand for gems (and enchants too) with Ghost Iron Ore being prospected to get them. I already have maybe 200-300 stacks of Ore sitting around so I'll be all set when the patch goes live. I'm not going to stop buying though - all those PvP Plate armors use Ghost Iron Bars as well so I'll be smelting until I'm blue in the face I think!

So if you like farming & you want a suggestion of what to farm over the next few weeks, I think this analysis kind of points you to Leather farming. You could go mining of course or on a mob killing spree to get cloth but my advice would be look for leather - less competition from bots and others players picking up cloth as they quest anyway.

How is your patch 5.4 preparation coming along? Have you got enough stuff or are you still buying up your Auction House? let us know in the comments below :)

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What's Been Selling This Week? 11th August Edition

Yet another week of slacking here at Casa Nev & no good excuses either - unless you count my dearest getting me hooked on the crack-game that is Candy Crush! It turns out I'm a lot more competitive than I realised and getting ahead of my Facebook friends & staying ahead of my fella has become addictive!

But I did manage to branch out a little this week so although my overall sales are pretty dismal, there is hope on the horizon for 3 new markets! As you can see from the screenshot, Mysterious Fortune Cards are still selling well & as a by-product of those, I have a few stacks of Starlight Ink accumulating. I decided to try the various Shoulder Enchants and have been pleasantly surprised by those selling well. I tried selling the basic inks too - the prices are such that 3 for the inscription is roughly equal to 3 raw ink - but none sold so I guess I'm not the only one trying to use them up somehow!

I also dipped a little deeper into the cut gem market - still no huge volume - either posted or in sales but a wider variety of cuts sold this week. Prices aren't too horrible but they're not great either - luckily the bots seem to be back & Ghost Iron Ore prices are staying around the 40g mark. I just need cheap Golden Lotus now to transmute some of the piles of rare gems that are building up. I could do the whole Jewelcrafter/Disenchanting thing but for the moment, I really can't be bothered!

Talking of Enchanting - I actually made some scrolls this week & they've been selling too! Again, I didn't dive in deep & the prices fluctuate wildly so I still have some learning to do in this market. I also had a couple of posts ideas so watch for those in the next few days!

In other news, I've almost stopped selling the PvP crafted gear - mostly because I'm trying to build up my stock of Magnificent Hides and because with patch 5.4 seemingly so close now, I've noticed sales slowing anyway. I really don't want to be left with a lot of this PvP gear once the new stuff is released! The Tailored PvP gear hasn't been selling for such good prices so I'd stopped that a week or two ago as well.

And that's about it for last week really. The Mammoth Mining Bags are selling but slowly & I've snagged a few of the level 83/84 green armour items for less than 25g so those are showing up on the bottom of the list too. I did make up 60+ Netherweave Bags on Sunday so I'd take a wild guess & say they'll be showing up on next weeks report!

Have a good week everyone - enjoy your gold :)

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How To Prepare For A New Patch - 5.4 Coming Soon!

First off, let me just say the preparing for new patches is not my strongest point! I tend to absorb information from my Twitter feed by reading tweets & following links people post there. This is not best practice although it works ok to a certain extent. It all boils down to how serious you are about your gold making! If you've been reading here a while, you'll know I'm not one of the really serious gold makers, I've even described myself as a lazy or laid back goldmaker on several occasions! But my style suits me and if time is your weak point, being more relaxed about it can lessen the pressure you put on yourself with limited playtime, especially if you actually do other in-game stuff too!

OK so, with that disclaimer out of the way - how would I go about preparing for a patch if I was really serious about making shedloads of gold with each new patch?

Read the Patch Notes! 

This may seem really obvious but I am always amazed by some of the comments in trade chat when a new patch hits. Stuff that has been talked about on Twitter, in blogs & forums, on live streams & podcasts for ages before a patch goes live always catches a lot of people out! Silly questions like 'why have my talents reset?' or 'where's the 'Have group, Will Travel'  button gone?' after they were changed in earlier patches.

I'm concentrating on the gold making stuff here but it's worth reading the class changes too - especially for a class you play & know well - you will possibly find a class change that affects which gem or glyph will be best for that class & that will create some demand when the patch goes live.

Read, Watch or Listen to Blogs, Podcasts, Livestreams or You-Tubers

If you're not already on Twitter, I'd highly recommend it. Other than being a nice way to meet fellow WoW players, there is a wealth of information regularly being discussed by players who are happy to share their experience via all sorts of social platforms. Links to blog posts or podcasts are a great way to follow up areas of interest to you as a gold maker. The chances are that if something caught your eye in the patch notes, it probably caught the eye of other gold makers too and they will be discussing it somewhere! My blog roll in the sidebar has most of the currently active blogs in it for an easy start point!

Try To Think Ahead To How The Patch Notes Will Affect Your Professions

Are there going to be new patterns/recipes for you to learn? Where will you find them? What are the materials for them? Are there new materials coming too? How will changes affect existing markets? These are all questions you should think about as well as how you can profit from them. You may not have all the professions available to you but if you can see what is likely to happen to demand for a certain material, you can snag some bargains now & sell for a higher price when the demand shoots up! As an example - if you don't have a Leatherworker, you have no need for Exotic Leather but you can still watch the market & snatch up bargains to flip to the Leatherworkers who didn't stock up beforehand!

Look For Smaller, Less Obvious Opportunities

Most experienced gold makers will spot the biggest money earners very quickly in any set of patch notes but the really good ones will spot the smaller items and make that a nice little niche market. Are there changes to existing recipes or professions that make a good item even cheaper to craft or buy? Look at how you might be able to profit from it.

Is there an item being introduced that has a relatively low cost but disenchants into a high demand or high priced material? I'm thinking of the Alchemist Trinket at the start of Cataclysm - it disenchanted into the very expensive, top level enchanting material and the materials to make it were relatively cheap so Alchemists who spotted this were making them as fast as they could! Blizzard spotted this & changed it fairly early on but canny gold making Alchemists had already made a killing on the Auction House!

Use Your Own Knowledge

This may sound a bit obvious too but don't forget that your own knowledge & in-game experiences give you the information you need to take advantage of certain markets. If you are a raider, you will know & understand raiding requirements much better than I do. You will know which items are likely to be in demand for raiders to stay at their best, whether that be gems, leg armors, flasks, buff foods or enchants for example. If you PvP then you will have knowledge of those related markets that I don't have & you can use them to your advantage over someone like me.

Of course, I know my Auction House & markets but I'll always be playing catch-up in those markets unless I listen to my own advice & read everything I can beforehand! I do read a lot of blogs & forums but I don't always process the information efficiently. Sometimes it takes a while for it to sink in & that's when your knowledge beats me to the early gold!

Physical Preparation - To Stockpile or Not To Stockpile?

This is one of those areas that is down to your personal preference, your existing gold balance & how much space you have in guild banks or bags! The earlier you read the patch notes and spot the raw materials that are likely to be in high demand post-patch, the cheaper you can snatch them up. As the patch gets closer to going live, those materials are likely to start increasing in price as latecomers or last minute panickers start to buy up stocks too.

I don't tend to specifically stockpile too much stuff as I buy plenty of cheap materials all the time and that gives me a natural nest egg of cheap-ish materials for heavy duty crafting as soon as possible. I also leave the materials in as raw a state as possible to give me room to maneuvre if necessary so ores stay as ores, herbs as herbs but I do convert cloth to bolts, it just saves on space!

The only exception to the raw state is stuff that is on a cooldown like Magnificent Hides & Living Steel - my crafters are in full production on those right now, with only 1 a day possible, it takes a long while to build up a stock. Yes, I know I can craft Magnificent Hides off cooldown but at 2.5 times the cost, it's not cost effective now that I've used up all my very cheap Exotic Leather!

Conclusion

If you've made it this far, thank you for sticking with me! I tried to make this bullet points but felt they needed more explanation & then it all got a bit lengthy! To my experienced gold making friends - do you have any other advice to give? I'm sure I've missed things!

With patch 5.4 looming on the horizon, maybe 2 weeks, maybe a month away, it's not too late to start preparing now but if you want to make some serious gold, I wouldn't hang about too much longer! Good Luck & Have Fun!

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How To Avoid Gold Making Burnout in WoW

Well it's time for Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival again, hosted now over at Selltaculars blog & this month, he has a really pertinent question, inspired by a twitter comment from @Wowprofitz! With the latest subscription numbers showing another drop in the last quarter, burnout & people leaving WoW is a popular topic at the moment. It's also relevant to gold making in that markets change as server populations dwindle & of course, less players to buy your stuff off the Auction House!

Burnout is not just for those fed up with dailies though - I wrote about my apathy after reaching Gold Cap for the first time in my 20 Days of Gold Making project and now it seems that the latest bunch of enthusiastic millionaires are feeling the same way. We spend so much time, heavily focused on that magic goal that it can become the only reason for playing so once it's reached - what do you do next?

What keeps driving you to make gold? What do you do to avoid getting burnt out?

This is a tough topic for me in many ways, I had an emotional reason for making gold rather than a practical one. I wasn't raiding, didn't need to spend gold each week to maintain my gear at the highest level, no flasks, gems or repairs to pay for. I just needed something to do alone whilst I licked my wounds from the guild drama that left me wandering lonely as a cloud in game.

I wouldn't say I'm driven to make gold in any way, it's just part of what I've always done from the very beginning. I'm an accountant by trade so gold, making money, playing with numbers is second nature to me and even though I'm not aiming for anything, I still poodle along, craft a bit here, flip a bit there and it's building again, almost without even thinking about it!

I can't even put my finger on what stops me getting totally burnt out with regards to gold making - I'm definitely not as compelled to log in to actually play the game as I used to be & I think the speed of patch releases this expansion has burnt me out in that respect - I just wasn't able to keep up & instead of working hard at catching up, I'm just dawdling along now. I do know that I don't want to stop my subscription though so the gold making is something I do in the way that some people play solitaire on their phones - it kills a bit of time and of course, I need material to write my posts here!

I'm not sure I even have advice to stop you getting burnt out - reading back what I've just written, it seems to me that I'm more burnt out than I realised! I've focused solely on gold making for so long, I find it really tough to be sociable in game. I've stepped down as GM of my guild and I really should try to find a more active one - try to rebuild that social aspect of my game that I loved so much at the beginning and although I've had lovely peeps on Twitter invite me to their servers to play with them ( *hugs to you guys*), I still hesitate for some reason. It doesn't help that certain people keep enticing me to other games either!

So I guess my advice would be

• don't let gold making become your sole reason for logging in 

• don't lose your friends & social contacts because you're too busy crafting, milling etc to chat or join in.

• DO keep doing dungeons, raids, PvP, leveling or whatever it is you enjoy most

• don't set yourself a big goal far out ahead, set smaller in between ones that you reach & keep going to the next. Hitting gold cap is a big anti-climax so keep going with small goals!

• DO sit down occasionally & think to yourself - do I still enjoy this or am I just doing it out of habit/boredom?

Having said all that, I do still get bursts of activity - something catches my attention or my mood shifts & I'll have a week of furious achievement chasing or pet battling or something. Or I get a flood of ideas for posts here & they need data so off I go to get it. So I'm not totally burnt out - I'm just not as focused as I used to be!

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World of Warcraft Gold Strategy Guide | Eric's Book!

Towards the end of last year, I received an unusual email asking me if I'd like to be a reviewer for a new gold making book that was being written. I hesitated at first as they didn't initially tell me who the author was but that was soon cleared up by a DM from Eric (@Xsinthis) on Twitter! Once I knew it was Eric Dekker, I was definitely curious to learn more & so began my journey as a technical reviewer! If you haven't come across the WoW Wealth Survey before, Eric is the creator of that too. If you have a read of that, you will understand why I looked forward to his book!

I'd receive a few chapters at a time & then added notes to the file to either clarify, correct or suggest stuff - it was interesting to see how Eric's mind worked as his methods are slightly different to my own. I tried to keep my comments constructive & I hope they helped a bit at least! The hardest part for me was writing my own biography paragraph for the credit section!

Fast forward to May this year & at long last, the book, World of Warcraft Gold Strategy Guide was finally published for all the world to see. Due to a small mix-up, I've only just received my physical copy but it looks great & makes a nice change from the online guides. I love real books that I can physically hold & browse through, they have a feel & smell to them that e-readers just don't have!

I don't usually do a sales type post as you will know if you read here regularly but having been so involved with this book, I feel I can safely recommend it to any of my readers who are just starting out in gold making. It covers everything from bank alts, choosing professions, setting up TSM, cross faction trading & getting the most out of expansions & patches. I think Eric has done a great job of explaining everything & most of it won't change when a new expansion is released. Yes, the names of top level materials etc will change but the processes & principles that Eric has written about will remain the same so you'll still be able to use the methods he teaches to make gold.

So if you have a few dollars spare or have been considering buying a gold making guide, I really can recommend this one - especially if you like a proper book! It is available for Kindle too, just click on the US or UK link box below & you'll see all the options available.

 

So there ya go - one of the random happy things that has happened to me over the last year & something I never expected when I started a blog - I guess I can add technical reviewer to my resume now? lol

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Journal of Marcus Ty, Ep 10 - Let's Go Shopping!

My Kind of Shopping!

Marcus & I recorded Episode 10 of The Journal of Marcus Ty podcast on Friday whilst dodging thunderstorms which was interesting to say the least! We had a good old chat as usual but this time, I dragged him Shopping! Not the boring, traipse around a shopping mall kind of shopping either - nope - in-game shopping so no feet were killed during the making of this show :)

We chatted about our week in WoW as usual & covered some of the news. Marcus has been looking at leather gear again - I'm starting to worry about that a bit! We covered what is a shopping list, how to set them up in various addons and why you should use them. We talked about the kinds of things we have on our personal shopping lists, what we consider the difference between a shopping & a snatch list is and of course, how a shopping list helps us both make gold in WoW.

You can find the show on itunes and Stitcher or go directly to the website, Journal of Marcus Ty and listen to the mp3 file from there.

Show Notes

• Welcome to the Pig & Whistle, Stormwind.
• Our week in WoW
• Update to the TMS2 Beta?
• Marcus raids for Glorious Plate.
• Shopping lists with Auctionator.(Nev’s post on Auctionator Shopping Lists)
• Shopping lists with Auctioneer
• Shopping lists with TSM2
• The Lazy Girl Guide to shopping

Resources mentioned in the podcast:

• Contact Marcus Ty on Twitter @MarcusTy
• Contact Nev on Twitter @NevAHaddict
• Marcus's blog at WoW Gold Journal
• Email Marcus at JournalofMarcusTy.com

If you don't know, Marcus has written a very extensive gold guide and is working on updating it all the time. I've been an affiliate of his for a long while now as I believe it is one of the best gold making guides out there. You can get more details at his Auction House Secrets site. It's not for experienced gold makers of course but if you're just starting out, you will find it very helpful and there's a 60 day money back guarantee too!

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What's Been Selling? 4th August Edition

In last week's report, I gave myself a mini to-do list which included expanding my markets into gems & enchants. I hit a small snag with enchants though but I have been doing all my profession cooldowns & that meant I had some extra gem cuts to choose from when hitting the cut gem market. I'm still working out which ones sell the best but as you can see from the screenshot, sales of 4 Brilliant & 7 Bold Primordial Rubies this week are not going to make me rich just yet!

My old faithful market at the moment is Mysterious Fortune Cards yet again - they have been flying off the shelf & I've been having a great deal of trouble keeping up with demand even though I'm not even barking them in trade! I've found that 15g95s is a sweet spot price for my server so I have to keep my herb costs as low as possible. With milling, ink crafting then card crafting, it's quite a time intensive product so if I can keep my herb/ink costs down to 3-4g per card, it makes it a little more worthwhile!

The price you see in the screenshot is a combination price - I sell my cards for around the 16g mark but in 1's, 5's & 10's and I don't bark them in trade at all. So the 77 stacks sold is a mix of the various stack sizes & the price is averaged across those sales too. Just in case you're reading it wrong! I'd hate to see someone try to sell cards for 49g each these days - although it's a nice memory :)

My Sales Addon Screen

The rest of my top sales are, as usual the various leather, mail & cloth crafted PvP items. I have been slacking on my Tailor though so not many cloth items up there. I'm also not selling Living Steel Belt Buckles anymore - the price is dropping for starters but also I'm saving up my Living Steel for Patch 5.4. Even if I don't manage to level my Engineering in time (for the Sky Golem Mount), I'm pretty sure the demand for Living Steel will increase so I'd rather wait for now & take larger profits later. I'm still watching the market though & I do post a few Living Steels when the price is high enough! I can't give up all that profit now after all!

So in this coming week, I plan on continuing my daily cooldowns & getting more into the cut gem market. Once I get my head around enchanting, I'll be throwing some scrolls up there too but Enchanting is the one profession I've never really managed to do well with! Let's see how that goes this week shall we? Oh & the other thing I didn't manage to do was get my Warrior out of the city to Itoka for the Lightning Steel Ingot recipe so that's still on the board for this week now :)

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This Week In WoW & Other Stuff

Life's A Blur Sometimes!

It's been an interesting week and a tough one too in Real Life but I have managed to keep up with the to-do list I gave myself last week. I had a really productive weekend last week & managed to write up quite a few posts & had ideas for several more. If you've ever blogged, you'll know how hard ideas can be to find sometimes & with all the gold blogs out there now, trying to be original is pretty damn tough!

On Monday I launched a giveaway for a Purple Puffer Fish TCG pet which is still running until late Sunday night 11th August or early Monday 12th August depending on where you live! There's been a great response so far and if you follow me on Twitter, I'll apologise now for the tweet spam for my giveaway!

Also on Monday, Episode 69 of the Power Word Gold podcast was released, the 5th time I've been a guest on the show. We talked about Eric's book (more to come on that soon), spreadsheets, growing ideas, my blogs, loads of shout outs & mentions for various blogs and podcasts too. Jim also asked me for my favorite podcasts so I listed them for him including Eviscerated Gaming Podcast, Tauren Think Tank, Hearthcast & Bitter & Salty. Eviscerated is explicit & not to everyones taste but it is my favorite podcast, in case you were wondering :)

On Wednesday, work got crazy busy so when I woke up Thursday morning with a severe migraine, my boss wasn't best pleased about me missing the day. I had no option though - when the flashing lights part of a migraine are in your direct line of focus, it's impossible to drive or read so I did the next best thing - I closed the curtains, took some meds & slept it off!

Just yesterday, I recorded Episode 10 of The Journal of Marcus Ty podcast with my good friend & co-host Marcus Ty - he's editing out the thunderstorm as I write - that was a fun challenge! We were both worrying in case of power surges etc but I think it turned out to be a good show anyway. I'll be doing a full show notes post once it's released with all the relevant links.

And through all of this, I've managed to keep doing my daily profession cooldowns on all of my alts. There's only one thing left on my to-do list & that's to get my Warrior the Lightning Steel Ingot recipe from Itoka on the Isle of Thunder. My Warrior however has dinged 90 & never been out of the city since! She's in quest greens so from what I can gather from friends & guildies, it could be kinda tough quest! I'll let you know how it goes soon!

Not much of a gold making post I know but I'm keeping my sales for the week until tomorrow's post! I'm hoping for a last minute bump in interesting sales to keep you all guessing! In the meantime, have fun & make more golds!

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