Episode 15 Journal of Marcus Ty Podcast - Noodle Carts!

Fishing Boats in Zante

In a show full of giggles (from me) & corny jokes (from Marcus) we tried to cover the secondary professions this week. We talked about our week in WoW and some of the problems we've been having - Marcus finally found his Albatross but is still chasing his Noodle Cart and I can't use a glider to save my life! 

News from the Front is all about Connected Realms and Marcus got all techie, a bit of Blizzcon and the London Meet-up. Next we dived into cooking, fishing and archaeology - the whys and hows of making gold with secondary professions is one of the lesser talked about methods and we completely skipped First Aid. 

Marcus sidelined me a bit with his Alchemy section and then went all Alcheologist on me too! But I got my own back when I remembered the Pilgrims Festival right at the last minute and made him late for his lunch date with his wife! Oops!

We had great fun recording & I hope you enjoy listening too. If you have anything you'd like us to talk about or you want to add something, feel free to contact either of us, email & twitter details are below. We'd love to hear from you and of course, if you like us enough, we'd love some iTunes reviews or Stitcher thumbs ups too!

As always - you can find us on iTunes or Stitcher Radio or you can listen via the website if you prefer.

Show Notes

• Noodles, Noodles!
• Our week in WoW - troubles with transport!
• News from the front - Connected Realms, Blizzcon & the London Meet-up
• The Endless Grind of the Timeless Isle
• Why level the secondary professions?
• Making Gold From Cooking and Fishing
• Archeology love it or hate it
• Markets of the week.

Resources mentioned in the podcast:

• Contact Marcus Ty on Twitter @MarcusTy
• Contact Nev on Twitter @NevAHaddict
• Marcus's Blog WoW Gold Journal
• Nev’s Milestone Interviews
• Nev’s Iron Paw Shuffle
• London Meet-up
• Email Marcus at JournalofMarcusTy.com

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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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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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Yet Another Cooking & Ironpaw Tokens Post!

It's been a while since I created my Ironpaw Token spreadsheet & made it available to my readers but I have to admit, I've been slacking! Not only have I not been doing much with the cooking materials, I haven't really been very focused on gold making at all. But a week or two ago, I read Zerohour's post about his approach to Ironpaw Tokens & it struck a chord with me so I thought I'd have a go at something similar on my server.

To do so though, I needed to really understand what his spreadsheet was showing us. I got there eventually - it seems that getting my head around the variables is taking me longer each time I tackle this Ironpaw Token stuff! Must be getting old or something :P

Anyway, I discovered that my server has some nice inexperienced Auctioneers who post the various meats & fish for silly low prices so I initially set my top value per stack at 25 gold. I've since been buying everything  (well, meat & fish) under that price & converting much of it to Ironpaw Tokens via the Bundle of Groceries & Restocking the Refrigerator quest in Halfhill.

I've also been concentrating on the 300+ buff foods (mainly Black Pepper Ribs & Shrimp & the Mogu Fish Stew) as the various Banquets are selling for only 10-20g each on my server. Each of the 300+ buff foods has 4 ingredients - by fixing my Ironpaw Token price at 25g per token, each recipe costs just 100g to cook and as each 'craft' makes 5 items, that's a base cost of 20g per 300+ buff food.

The Black Pepper Ribs & Shrimp I have been listing at 58-65g & they are selling out quickly. The Mogu Fish Stew is slightly lower priced at 35-45g but I'm creeping the price up on those & they are still selling well.

What I'm finding is that the Raw Tiger Meat & the Raw Turtle Meat tend to be the items listed cheaply most often along with Krasarang Paddlefish.  I'm keeping a few stacks of the meats in reserve so that's actually 1 less Ironpaw Token I need to cook the Sea Mist Rice Noodles & the Chun Tian Spring Rolls.

I haven't gone into full 'dominate the market' mode just yet - I'm still testing the markets. I also don't have a huge stock of Ironpaw Tokens but with 2 alts doing the Tillers dailies as well as buying all the cheap stuff, my inventory is bound to increase over the next week or two. I've also increased my 'base' price per stack of meat/fish to 30g as there just wasn't enough supply under that price. It means that each single food has a maximum price of 24g each & with my sell price at 60g-ish, that's still plenty of profit for my liking!

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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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Reader Question - Need Help, Been Away A While

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

Here's the email

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

Please help me

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Flasks - Testing the Market

Flasks & Potions

Just about a week ago, I posted about What to do with Golden Lotuses & came to the conclusion that I should dip my toe into the Flask market. The comments to that post seemed to confirm this so off I went to make some flasks!

Since I wrote that post however, my ever so slow moving Leatherworker finally made it to honoured with the Golden Lotus faction & gained access to the Epic armor recipes. It turns out that what I thought was a good stock of Spirits of Harmony wasn't anywhere near enough so this week, she's been planting Songbell Seeds again, thereby crimping my Golden Lotus herb production!

I thought I'd report back on my market test so far anyway, just so I don't forget.

Over 8 days of planting Enigma Seeds, I gained 47 Golden Lotus - that's almost 6 each day - I like this increased drop rate for sure! Enigma Seeds cost only 1g each so for a total outlay of just 128g & 2 stacks of Crystal Vials, I managed to make 35 flasks & still have 7 Golden Lotus left over. I also only used the other herbs I got from the farm produce - none were bought or herbed. I have quite a few of the other herbs still in my bags too.

I checked the Auction House prices manually & decided to make just 3 of the 5 types of flask to start with. As they sold, I made a few more & also added a few of the other 2 types. As of this morning, I have only 14 flasks left to sell.

I also made 5 Potions of Luck just to see if there was any interest there - not so far but I'll keep listing them as long as their price is above the cost of the Golden Lotuses.

Flasks & Potions Spreadsheet

You can see from the spreadsheet screenshot that so far, my gold made from flasks is over 2500g & as I said earlier, that's with just an initial investment of 128g. So I'd say this was a fairly successful market test but it is a small market & it has taken all week for these few flasks to sell.

To be fair though, I haven't been listing them just before raid time & when I have listed them, I've listed them for 48 hours & walked away. I'm pretty sure, if I had paid more attention to posting times & reposting when undercut, that I would have made that profit more quickly. But this is a side venture for me as I explore various markets to write about & with an eye for future profitable endeavours.

So now what to do? Flasks are showing themselves to be profitable for now but I also need Spirit of Harmony for my leatherworker to craft Epic armour! I guess I'll have to get my DK & Warrior to 90 so I can start expanding their farms! Arrrgghh! more dailies!

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Leather Conversions Spreadsheet & Bags

Leather Conversion

I promised you more spreadsheets so today we have a Leatherworker's spreadsheet. I wrote a post way back near the beginning of Cataclysm about converting leather scraps up to better qualities as a way to make some easy gold. It's nice to see that the old tips & tricks still work now that Mists of Pandaria is live & I've included some of the older conversions in this spreadsheet as there is still gold to be made there.

Now there are two ways to use this spreadsheet - you can download a copy of my Leather Conversion spreadsheet & just manually input prices from your Auction House or you can use The Undermine Journal .csv file as I explained in last weeks post Easy Data from TUJ.

If you decide to manually input the prices, you will need to overwrite the VLookup formulas in column B but the rest of the spreadsheet will still work. (If you want to try your own VLookup formulas, keep reading, instructions at end of post)

If you want to try the TUJ data file, follow the instructions in the post to get a .csv file onto your PC. Open it in Excel or Open Office & just copy/paste the whole sheet into tab 2 of my Leather Conversion spreadsheet. It should pull the data through to the main sheet automatically.

Leather Conversions Spreadsheet

So what are we looking at? Well, I've tried to keep it fairly simple but it took me a while to get there so I hope you can follow what I've done! Converting up from the various leather scraps is a bit more time-consuming but can be very profitable - just look at the price of Savage Leather Scraps on my server today (red dot line). Converting up from those scraps means that my Savage Leather would only cost me 33 silver - a big saving over the 9 gold or more that someone is trying to sell their Savage Leather at! If there are enough Savage Leather Scraps to convert to a Pristine Hide (250 scraps, in case you were wondering), that's only 17 gold 50 silver for a Pristine Hide - big profit there or even use the ultra cheap hide to make the scribe or mining bags for even more profits!

Now I've only included the bags here but you can easily add rows for leg armours or anything else you like - add a row for the leg armor & a row for each type of material it uses besides the leather then use a VLookup formula to get the prices from the TUJ data file. A quick a-b formula later & you should see if it would be profitable or not.

Ok so I promised help with the VLookup formula for those of you not sure about spreadsheets. It's really very easy but sometimes the help files make it confusing. This is what Open Office says :-

"Syntax

=VLOOKUP(SearchCriterion; Array; Index; SortOrder)

SearchCriterion is the value searched for in the first column of the array.

Array is the reference, which is to comprise at least two columns.

Index is the number of the column in the array that contains the value to be returned. The first column has the number 1.

SortOrder is an optional parameter that indicates whether the first column in the array is sorted in ascending order. Enter the Boolean value FALSE or zero if the first column is not sorted in ascending order. Sorted columns can be searched much faster and the function always returns a value, even if the search value was not matched exactly, if it is between the lowest and highest value of the sorted list. In unsorted lists, the search value must be matched exactly. Otherwise the function will return this message: Error: Value Not Available."

OK - so the Search Criterion is what you are looking for in that huge table of data - in our case Savage leather, Pristine Hide etc. For this formula to work, your description in the main spreadsheet must be identical to that in the data file so watch for spelling mistakes & random apostrophes.

The Array part of the formula is merely the parts of the huge data file that the formula is going to look at. The formula doesn't need to look at the whole file, it always starts with the item name column so you have to tell the formula which columns to look at. In our case, it only needs columns C & D so I click C1, hold down the shift button & page down to D12000+.

The Index part of the formula is which column contains the data you want to use in the formula - for us that would be column D or 2 (it's the 2nd column in our array). If we wanted to pull data from other columns, we would just increase the Array columns (say columns C to H) & put a 3,4,5 or 6 in the formula to pull data from that column.

Sort Order is important to us here - the data file is so big, we really don't want to sort it in ascending order before we do anything so the last part of the Vlookup formula for us is a 0 (zero).

So for this file, our Vlookup formula looks like this 

=VLOOKUP(A5;'TUJ Data'.$C$2:$D$12668;2;0)/10000

The Undermine Journal data prices are expressed in coppers so I have divided the Vlookup results by 10,000 to get to a gold/silver price.

So there we go! I hope it's clearer than mud to those of you who need the help but if you are having problems, do feel free to comment, tweet me or email me & I will try to help further. 

As for leather converting - don't forget, you can convert the lower leathers up to higher ones too - it's rarely profitable but if you just need that 1 or 2 more pieces to get a skill point, it can be a time saver.

Image © Austin Appraiser under Creative Commons licence

Mists of Pandaria Level 90 - What To Do Next?

Level 90 - So What's Next?

After a week of almost nothing but questing, I finally made it to level 90 on my first character - my beloved Retribution Paladin. I contemplated being a ruthless goldmaker & leveling a different alt purely for goldmaking reasons but I just couldn't do it! My darling girl got left way behind during Cataclysm because I just could not get the hang of the Holy Power changes. Now I seem to have just magically managed it & I'm feeling much better about that, as you can imagine!

So where does she go from here? I've been reading my Twitter feed & numerous blog posts for the last few weeks but without actually being there or doing that stuff, it's difficult to make sense of it all. Some information has stuck but not enough to make an informed decision as to my next steps. Talk about information overload & too much choice!

If you're a regular reader, you'll know I don't raid (well, not since ICC anyway, long story) & I didn't do many dungeons during Cataclysm either. I really do want to do more in game than just making gold this expansion though so yes, I will be doing dailies for gear reputation grinds. However, I also need to look at the various factions for goldmaking stuffs and of course, there's lots of lovely new mounts to aim for as well.

For this post, I'm going to ignore the gearing up possibilities & just look at professions. There are too many gear options for me to cover & the chances are, you'll need class/spec specific advice anyway which I certainly can't do!

Leatherworking & Tailoring

The Golden Lotus faction has patterns at Honored level purchased with gold. With over 50 dailies available (depending on progress), it shouldn't take too long to get to just honored level. There are also shoulder & chest armor at Revered & 3 new Crane mounts at Exalted. Hopefully you unlocked the Vale of Eternal Blossoms whilst you were leveling so you just pick up the daily quests from their NPC's in your faction city there.

The Leatherworking patterns are the leg armors & epic armor (ilvl 476) for chest & gloves - all the usual combinations - Mail (agility & intellect types) & of course, Leather (intellect & agility types).

The Tailoring patterns are the spellthreads & epic armor (ilvl 476) for chest & gloves too - intellect or intellect & spirit combos.

Blacksmithing

The Klaxxi is the faction for all your Blacksmithing needs - as with the Golden Lotus above, these patterns are available at Honored reputation level. As well as the epic chest & gloves patterns (ilvl 476) there are also weapons patterns but these are rare quality ones with ilvl 463. There is also the usual enhancements of belt buckles, shield spikes & weapon chains available.

Gearwise, there are epic legs & waist items for all classes at Revered (also ilvl 476) & my favorite is the Amber Scorpion mount available at Exalted :) Rare quality weapons are also available at Exalted, ilvl 463 so if you can make the rare quality weapons from patterns available at Honored, you should find a market for these as people aren't going to be raising their reputations with all factions as once.

Jewelcrafting

The Order of the Cloud Serpent is the faction that teaches you to fly on the cloud serpent mounts (need Exalted though) but it also has the patterns for the Jewelcrafting Panther mounts - 2 mount patterns (Jade & Sunstone) at Honored, 2 mount patterns (Ruby & Sapphire) at Revered & lastly, the Onyx Panther at Exalted.

Enchanting

The Shado-Pan faction has the 3 weapon enchants for you at Revered & the August Celestials have the strength, agility & intellect bracer enchants, also at Revered. It seems a bit of a pain to have to level both factions to Revered to get at the recipes but for me, the bonus is the 2 Cloud Serpent mounts available from the August Celestials at Exalted & the 3 Riding Tigers available from the Shado-Pan also at Exalted.

Other Professions

Lucky you! You don't have to grind any specific factions to get any patterns. Alchemy & Inscription are 'discovery' based so as you create potions or do your daily research, you gain new patterns at the highest levels. Engineers get to learn everything from their trainers, as small compensation for how complicated some of the items are to craft I guess :P

Next Steps for my Paladin

My Paladin is a skinner/leatherworker & I have saved all my leather whilst leveling. So my first faction to start with will be The Golden Lotus, a faction that was recommended to be first for all classes/crafters anyway due to the fact that you need Revered with them to open the Shado-Pan & August Celestials dailies.

Lissana over at Restokin.com has a great guide post to all this faction related stuff too, especially if you are gearing up as well as leveling your professions.

I haven't mentioned the Tillers here because although having your own farm will be very useful & make a fair bit of gold, I just haven't got my head around it yet & there are loads of other Tiller guides out there already! I'm using Els' Angling guide to the Tillers & farm related stuff but there's also a wealth of detail in The Godmother's posts about her farming adventures, well worth a read if you're looking for the nitty gritty stuff.

I hope this helps - I know I panicked when I saw all those quest givers suddenly appear on my map last night! I ignored them & went to get my flying training so I could explore those last few places for the achievement & then I sat down & fished for a while!

Leveling Zen Master Alchemy - My Way & The Right Way

Leveling Zen Master Alchemy

I currently have 2 Alchemists - both Transmute Masters. One is my rarely played Rogue & the other is my main candidate for leveling to 90 first but whilst I'm still faffing with banks, auctions & getting to grips with all things Pandaren, I thought I'd get these two started with their farms at least.

My Leveling Method

In my usual manner, I checked the Auction House for pandaren herb prices & was pleasantly surprised by how cheap the Green Tea Leaf was, so I grabbed 18 stacks for around 490g (just 25g a stack!). I knew they were the starter herb for Alchemy & of course my main money making profession of Inscription uses them too. In doing so, I may have got slightly sidetracked from my plan to get my farm started & I started leveling my alchemy.

I dived straight in & learnt the Zen Master level & the 2 trainer taught recipes - Master Healing Potion & Master Mana Potion. Almost 2 stacks of healing potions later, I'd picked up about 10 new 'discoveries' & off I went, back to the Auction House to price up the next leveling potion. Within about 1 hour, I was at skill level 590 and had picked up a nice bunch of new recipes, including Transmute: Living Steel - yay!!!

Back to the Auction House to price up the Trillium Bar - Eeeek! no way was I paying those prices so I took my little Rogue out to start her farm. With that done, I logged into my Hunter & did exactly the same thing again! I still had a load of Green Tea Leaf left from earlier so that reduced my costs this time round. As I neared 590 skill points, the discovery for Transmute:Trillium popped up - phew! That was lucky otherwise both my girls would have been stuck until Trillium prices dropped or my Miner actually got out of Stormwind!

Again I got lucky - someone had listed Ghost Iron Bar for just 262 gold a stack or 131 gold per Trillium transmute so of course, I snagged as much as possible, having 2 alchemists waiting for it now. Just 5 transmutes later, I'd maxed my skills for my Hunter & on the very last transmute, the discovery for Living Steel popped up.

Now I know there are some folk out there who are going to hate me but my very first Transmute:Living Steel proc'ced for me -  woop woop! 2 Living Steel to sell straight away. To make you hate me even more, I've now done 3 days of Living Steel transmutes & have had a proc every day - giving me 9 Living Steels out of 6 cooldowns!

Overall, I spent 3090 gold on herbs & ghost iron bars to level both alchemists to 600. Out of the potions, elixirs & transmutes I made, I have sold 3524 gold's worth so I am already back in profit & have 7 Living Steels still to sell as well as enough Healing potions to keep my alts alive whilst they level through The Jade Forest. What I don't have yet is all the recipes so once my herbalist starts to level, I will go back & make more potions to complete the discovery process on both alts.

How I Should Have Leveled!

As I sat down to write this post, I realised I hadn't noted down everything I had done, so off I went to Kaliope's Crafting blog to look for some of the details I'd missed. What a slap head moment that was! One of the very first points she made in her Alchemy summary was

'don't learn Zen Master Alchemy straight away, just the healing & mana potion recipes'

Basically, you need to make a whole bunch of the Master Healing Potions to start learning the discoveries. Once you have made about 5 potions without a discovery, you have probably learnt all the discoveries at that level and THEN you can learn Zen Master Alchemy & continue making Master Healing Potions until the recipe goes grey. In this way, you will maximise the number of discoveries you make with the cheapest & easiest potion, giving you a wider selection of recipes to make for the rest of your leveling process.

So that's my Oops! of the week so far. I'm off to read the rest of Kaliope's profession summaries - I do not want to find a similar oops on any of my other professions, that's for sure :)

Image credit © Horia Varlan under Creative Commons licence

Mists of Panderia - Where Shall I Start?

Mists of Panderia - Where Shall I Start?

So I finally got home after my travels & one of the first things I did (besides collapse into bed & sleep for 5 hours!) was upgrade my EU account to Mists of Panderia. I've been following various tweets over the last week about all the different things people are doing & I have to try to decide where the heck to start my Pandaren adventure!

I don't really want to rush any alts to 90 although I do want to get them all there in the next month or so and I also want to max my professions. From Twitter, I'm getting the impression that a farm is a must have for all my 85's but as yet, I have no idea how to get the the Farmer NPC guy!

I have had a little play with pet battles on my US account and also raised a baby Pandaren Monk to level 10 but gold making on that account is unimportant to me so I'm going to leave that out of my musings. I will probably poodle my US Hunter along very late at night when my US friends are around though.

So what do I have in my stable of alts & which order should I tackle stuff?

1. Paladin - Retribution, Leatherworker & Skinner. also my Achievement Queen but that's not so important now. Gear wise she's kind of middling. I never got to grips with the Holy Power system so she's just been gathering dust although she is my first love & I feel the irrational urge to level her first & fast too.
2. Death Knight - Frost, Jewelcrafting & Inscription - my main melee DPS girlie, she's also been my main gold maker with her professions. I know there are kobolds in the Glyph market now though so I'm not sure if I want to keep fighting that battle.
3. Priest - shadow/holy, Enchanting & Tailoring. I'm honestly not very good on my priest - I didn't start healing until the very end of Wrath & never had the confidence to face many Cataclysm dungeons with her. Her gear is ok but I think she will struggle a bit in Panderia.
4. Rogue - Combat, Herbing & Alchemy - geared to mid Cata PvP level, she will definitely struggle in Panderia. I love my lil gnome rogue but I'm really really bad at all the moving around & jumping type stuff so she's never really had a chance!
5. Hunter - Marksman, 2nd Alchemist & 2nd Tailor, this girlie is my favourite for a bit of PvP & some dungeons too. I seem to be able to pull some ok DPS numbers out of her although still not spectacular. If I do dungeons in Mists, I'm pretty sure she will be my 1st choice but her professions are only basic - no extra plans/recipes etc, just the basics to get at the additional cooldowns in Cataclysm.
6. Warrior - Arms, Mining & Blacksmithing - my newest level 85, she just dinged the week before Mists of Panderia arrived so her gear is still end leveling greens & a few blues. She will probably struggle in Panderia too but although it took me over a year to finally get her maxed, I did quite enjoy it in the end.

My initial thoughts were to take my gatherers out first - get those farmed items onto the Auction House & capitalise on the early rush but I'm already seeing prices dropping dramatically & stabilising at fairly reasonable prices too so that blows that idea out of the water.

Next thought was to take my Paladin out first - (instinctive really, she is my fav!) her Leatherworking would be ideal with all the new monks that suddenly sprung into existance! But then I remembered I dropped skinning last summer & am only half levelled on that now - do I spend an afternoon getting that to Pandaren level?

I'm hearing that professions are fairly easy to level now so I'm also wondering, shall I just throw some gold at it & get all my professions leveled via the Auction House & just play which alt I want to? My old friend Khalior is writing again - 2 great posts to get me thinking this week - a Grab Bag of Random Tips & More Random Tips for Panderia

But then there's the whole Spirit of Harmony being Bind on Pickup thing! Most of my girls will need them at some point. Faid literally just posted about SoH & determining their value whilst I'm writing this & that's given me a whole new lot of stuff to think about!

Phat over at Phat Lewt's Gold Blog has also been analysing this kind of stuff too - his post Top 5 professions to Level ASAP makes some really good points & based on his thoughts, I could happily level my hunter first (Alchemist/Tailor). Even though she doesn't have extra stuff from earlier expansions, I'm not sure that matters too much right now - my other Alchemist & Tailor will get leveled soon enough to fill any gaps there.

And lastly, just now, Jim from Power Word:Gold has just published a new post 'How To Eat An Elephant' - apart from making me smile at the title, he also makes some very good points that are perfectly timed for me as I write this post! It's good to know that as I sit here, frantically trying to work out how to catch up for missing the first week & worrying that I'm falling behind, there are others out there feeling exactly the same sense of being overwhelmed by all the possibilities Mists of Pandaria & Blizzard have brought to us. I don't think I'll be complaining about boredom anytime soon, that's for sure!

Image © Alex Bellink under Creative Commons License

Shake That Salt Shaker - Engineers Get Groovy!

© TheGiantVermin, Salt Shakers on Flickr, under CC Licence

Just a short post today as I'm away from home & can't access my main account. I will resume my weekly sales updates once I return home again though.

One of the nifty gadgets that Engineers can make is the Salt Shaker. It requires an engineering skill of 250 & is usable only by Leatherworkers with a skill level of 250. This came to my attention whilst I was writing the Engineering pets posts recently. The Tranquil Mechanical Yeti requires Cured Rugged Hide in its' making & part of the process of curing is to refine deeprock salt.

Salt Shaker Materials

1 Mithril Casing = 3 Mithril Bars = 3 Mithril Ore
6 Thorium Bars = 6 Thorium Ore
3 Gold Power Core = 1 Gold bar = 1 Gold Ore

The salt shaker originally had a cooldown but that was removed & now the only limit to how much refined deeprock salt you can make is how much deeprock salt you can source. It's not the most widely used material but the drop rate is fairly low so I'd say your best source will be the Auction House over time.

Cured Rugged Hides are used in level 60 Epic & Rare armors including the Black & Blue Dragonscale sets. I'm not sure if these are good mogging items as I haven't kept up with mogging trends but you should be able to see from your own servers data on The Undermine Journal.

As I mentioned above, the main use I can see for cured rugged hide is in manufacturing the Mechanical Yeti. So with the salt shaker, I can therefore make money in several ways

• As a LW'er, I can hoard as much deeprock salt as possible & refine it for sale to other leatherworkers
• As a LW'er, I can snatch up rugged hides to cure & also sell to other leatherworkers or engineers
• An an Engineer, I can make Salt Shakers & sell to leatherworkers

The other good thing about the Salt Shaker is that many Engineers forget about them once they level past 250 but the salt shaker can give skill points all the way up to 290 (altho it goes green at 280, so probably hard work to get those last few points this way). If you make a few at 250 & find they sell on your server, then why not make a few extra, get the skill points & make gold while you're at it? lol

On my EU servers, the salt shaker sells for around 55 gold with materials in the 15 gold range. It's not the fastest seller but most leatherworkers will need one at some point & with the influx of leather wearing Pandas soon, I'd like to feel fairly confident that there will be a boom in leatherworking too.

Nev's Glyph Strategy | Lazy Girls Guide to Glyphing

Laid back glyphing © Nev 2008

I received a reader email the other day asking about 'Nev's glyph strategy' after they had listened to an old PowerWord:Gold podcast & I realised that I'd never actually written a post about it! The timing is also fortuitous as there has been a fair bit of glyph talk on Twitter too so here we go - how I do glyphing - laid back, get there eventually style - my Lazy Girls Guide to Glyphing!

Some scribes like to make a few of every glyph, they have bags & bags of stock, they 'wall' prices in an attempt to control the market & to be honest, I admire their dedication & organisation skills but I just don't work that way. If you want to read more about hardcore glyphing, have a look at Twitchie's latest post 'Two Character Glyph Operation', Faids 'Glyph Competition: A Primer' or Huntermastery's 'Return of the Inscriptionist'.

I have my TSM groups set up by ink & I cherry pick the highest priced glyphs to craft & list. I suppose this is a variation on the 'Buy Low, Sell Normal' theory although I do prefer 'buy low, sell as high as possible' version :) I am also averse to hard work in a game so my method works well for the more casual gold maker.
Each morning I empty my mail, do a cancel & relist at the Auction House then do an Inscription only scan - it's very quick & gives me the information shown below in the screenshots. As you can see, someone else is raising glyph prices on my server & doing all the hard work for me. The bulk of the glyphs I craft are Ink of the Sea or Ethereal Ink ones & depending on herb availability, I may only craft glyphs above 400g or 200g if there is a good supply.

I've only recently returned to the glyph market but without spending huge amounts of gold on herbs, I am happily making 4-8k gold per day with just 2 or 3 cancel/relist sessions - each of which takes only 5-10 minutes. Ink is currently costing around 10 gold per ink so I have changed my Threshold price to 50 gold. This means that I don't have to worry too much about what price TSM wants to post a glyph. Even a sale at 50 gold is making me some profit - not much, admittedly but the time saving effect is worth the loss of a little profit.

Now before you saw 'wow, look at those crazy prices' - yes, my server does seem to be a bit special when it comes to glyphs but I did a little experiment on another server using only a level 10 scribe & I still made a fair bit of gold. The trick is to control your herb costs & only buy inks or herbs when the craft cost is much less than the glyph prices. When leveling your inscription, don't make 5 of the same glyph just to get points! No, just make the glyphs that show up as profitable in TSM & watch the skill points accumulate painlessly!

The above screenshot is a sample of my listed auctions - you can see the wide range of prices TSM has listed them for. Now I've only been crafting glyphs that TSM says are above 250 gold but as the market prices move, TSM adjusts & undercuts other listings, hence the 104 gold glyph - but that is still way above my crafting cost so I have no problem with that.

As a very extreme example - look at this screenshot! Some random scribe has listed glyphs at 1000 gold each - TSM automatically undercut him by my few silver preset & I left my auction there, even though I had zero expectation of it selling! Well, I'm happy to say - it did sell!

If I Knew Then What I Know Now!

So Cold has been nagging me to start writing again, along with Jim & Gimp and a few others so what better way to kick off than with an entry for this months Carnival? If you've not come across this before, Cold posts a topic & lots of different people do posts & send him the links for one big article link post each month - Colds Gold Factory Carnival has all the details & previous months topics.

Using your knowledge that you have gained from auction house experience: If you were starting over as a gold maker, what is one thing you would do differently than the first time, and why?

just about 2months into playing

When I first started making gold, I had zero knowledge & multiple alts with random professions. I didn't even know there were gold blogs or even that Wowhead existed! My main/1st alt was a human paladin with skinning & leatherworking - yes I know - don't ask! My 2nd alt was a rogue with alchemy/herbing. Most of my other alts from that time didn't survive the periodic culls as I wanted to try different classes/races etc but didn't want to leave the server.

3months into playing

My rogue is still my alchemist/herber although I rarely farm these days. My paladin dropped skinning for mining then re-levelled skinning & most recently took up Engineering (again, don't ask!). My priest has Enchanting/Tailoring, my warrior has Mining/Blacksmithing at last, my hunter has Alchemy/Tailoring & my DK has Jewelcrafting & Inscription. I never picked up professions for gear or stats benefits, I just took the next one I didn't have already!

So what would I do differently - get my professions organised I guess. I didn't pick up JC until January after Cataclysm hit & along with Inscription, it has accounted for most of my income. Having said that, if I had taken up JC earlier, I'm not sure I would have had the cash to buy all the 100's of stacks of ore that I buy now to feed demand but then again, those were different times.

So using all the resources available to choose each profession for maximum benefit for each class & the ones that make most cash, I would have started Inscription & herbing on my 1st alt as getting all the daily research done for glyphs takes the longest. On my second alt, I'd have gone for mining & JC and levelled it as I quested. My 3rd alt would have been my herber/alchemist & my 4th would have been enchanting/tailoring to benefit from all the cloth my earlier alts had picked up & to disenchant the resulting tailored items to level my enchanting.

So what about skinning, blacksmithing, leatherworking & engineering? I'm a confirmed altoholic so yes, I'd pick these up too on the next few alts coming through but I've never studied the markets for weapons & armour or gadgets so to me, they are not so profitable yet. Skinning is always a good one to have whilst levelling though so I'd give that & leatherworking priority over blacksmithing & engineering.

Profession Confusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell AH Alt - part 2!

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

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

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

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

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

So Leatherworking's Not Quite Your Thing?

How about Alchemy instead then? There are about 8 items an alchemist can make below 150 skill points that can make a nice little bundle for you if herbs are more your thing. Of course, there are others & you will need many of them to level up but the following 8 items are the regular sellers at more than a few silvers each.

The first thing I should say is that I have most of these herbs on my snatch list at really low prices & I grab them whenever I see them. I also have some low level toons which I level with herbalism & mining as standard as I have all the main professions covered on higher alts, so I usually have a ready supply of low to mid level herbs.

Linking to my Leatherworking post yesterday, Elixir of Defense is available at 130 skill points & uses 1 Wild Steelbloom & 1 Stranglekelp. It's used in the Toughened Leather Gloves and I used it on one of my low level clothies who was dying too often for my liking :) I usually list these for 3g each & make 20 at a time. I don't list 20 though, only 2 or 3 at a time on the AH.

Also linked to Leatherworking but at 50 skill points is Elixir of Minor Agility (1 Silverleaf & 1 Swiftthistle) & at skill 140, Elixir of Lesser Agility (1Wild Steelbloom & 1 Swiftthistle). I usually post these at 3g each but sometimes they sell for 5 or 6g each. Give it a try on your server - you may have lots of leatherworkers around :)

Moving away from supplying Leatherworkers, there are also 2 potions which sell regularly to pvp'ers - the first of which is Swiftness Potion (skill 60). This takes 1 Swiftthistle & 1 Briarthorn and can also used by leatherworkers but I think most sell to pvp'ers, especially those below lvl 20 as it increases run speed in battlegrounds (great if you're trying to keep up with the flag carrier). These regularly sell in stacks of 5 for 10-20g, especially when it's a Call To Arms weekend for Arathi Basin or Warsong Gulch.

The Free Action Potion is available at skill 150 & uses 2 Blackmouth Oils & 1 Stranglekelp. Whilst researching these recipes, I noticed that this one has the same materials as Elixir of Water Breathing, available at skill 90. Currently I am selling the water breathing one at about 5-10g each for people who are going through Vashj'ir.

I've found that the Oily Blackmouth fish sell better than the Blackmouth Oil so you may find the fish are expensive to buy - never mind, just go fishing & use some for the above potions & sell some fish too!

I'll be looking at some of the other professions over the next few days, so don't forget to pop back when you can. I hope this will help as you level your alchemy or as you start to build your gold making skills.

A Most Excellent Problem!

I'm leaving my AH alt running in the background for a few days - I'm still doing the same old stuff whilst levelling my new little hunter over there. I'll do some intermittant progress reports but in the mean time, I need some help on my main server gold-making endeavours!

So what's this excellent problem then? I hear you ask - well, basically, I'm jumping around tactics & professions like a cat on a hot tin roof - so many options, combinations & possibilities that I just don't know where to start making a plan of attack! I know I need a plan, doubling my gold in the last month is purely down to the inflated prices of cata mats but I want to maintain this level of income if not increase it.

A bit of background might help I guess so here it is :) Mid-October 2010, I had about 25k across all alts at the time that I first discovered many of the gold blogs in my list over there ===> 
By the time Cataclysm launched, I'd reached the dizzying balance (for me, anyway) of 50k-ish & am currently sitting at 92k, having powerlevelled a Jewelcrafter yesterday (only at 495 for now but just started dailies, so that will help). I put this rapid improvement down to reading so many informative blogs each day & trying out some of the techniques so I thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts & experience with us newbies.

I currently have mining, herbing, skinning, alchemy, cooking & fishing at 525, enchanting at 500, leatherworking at 485, inscription at 450 (still!) & now JC at 495. During cata, I have been making gold mainly by farming as I quested, maintaining a small but steady glyph business & doing my daily volatile life -> air transmutes.

So, where do I start to make this chaos into an orderly routine? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated, even if you just point me to an older blog post that I may have missed.