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• My level 52 hunter is another problem girlie - she has JC (since superseded by my DK) & I've just started her on Tailoring as I dropped that on my DK to get JC.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?

My Pocket's in Shock - Again!

So today has not been my best day for thinking through my strategies & stuff. I sat down this morning, fully intending to get TSM working for my Enchanter but it's now gone 5pm & I haven't even logged her yet!

Why? I hear you ask. Well, there were only a few Mysterious Fortune Cards on the market so after a week of abstinence, I quickly made about 50 and started barking, in an attempt to get those few cheap ones sold & to push the price up a little. I checked to see if my usual competitors were online, none were so off I went, happily barking away whilst I did my glyph cancel/repost routine. Next stop, JC daily - yay!!! zephyrites today, got 40 listed at a nice price & went off to do my cooking & fishing dailies, barking all the while.



© Helen Shorey, used with permission



Managed to get most of the cheap MFC's sold, along with about 15 of mine. Went to post some more at a higher price & some guy had decided to post his 20 - all at just 10c below the last remaining cheap one! Made me want to screammmmmmmm!

There were lots of guildies online today so with all the barking & chatting, that was my morning gone. Came back after some lunch to see the new Agility meta cuts being advertised in trade. Dashed to the AH to see if any of the designs were listed or even just the cut gems - none - so I'm pretty sure no-one else has it on my server, Alliance side yet.

Managed to get the seller down to 22k - not sure it's the best bargain in the world but there are only 3 people selling the other 2 new cuts so I'm reckoning that I will have the market to myself for a little while yet & I have 5 stacks of uncut Shadowspirit Diamonds just waiting for me :) I listed 10 singles at 775g each & sold 2 as soon as I barked about them.

Why is my pocket in shock? Well, after my not so quick returns from the Maelstrom Crystals (still got 20/27!!) & a nervous few days trying to sell the Tsunami & Hurricane Decks, I'd decided that big ticket items were not for me! But I went ahead & bought the Design anyway - having plenty of cash is not conducive to sensible buying decisions, not for me at least!

Farewell AH Alt - Update & Giveaway

I've been chugging along on this little side project, popping in a few times a day to cancel & relist glyphs but with a max skill level of 150 & the server being changed to a 'New Players' server, most of the glyphs I can craft are selling for 15g-20g. I don't know if it's the new players or not but many of the glyphs are down to just 2g or less. I've been buying up a few, trying to reset prices a little but I've run out of patience now.

Current gold balance is approx 5100g, just a 1400g increase since I started on the inscription only part of the project. TSM has helped a lot to speed up the cancel/relist process but I've decided to call it a day on this little alt.

Rather than just delete her & the gold she's accumulated, I thought I'd offer it to someone out there in the blog world. Are you EU & want to play or already play on Terrokar Alliance side? Leave me a note in the comments & we can arrange to meet in game & I'll trade you the gold, bags & stocks she's got sitting there.

If there's more than 1 response, I'll split it all up & we can have a little farewell party in SW or something.

4.0.6 Herb Spawns on Eu Realm, Tested

I logged on early this morning (couldn't sleep again!) & as a way to fill my time quietly while my hubby slept, I went through my blog list, reading all the posts I missed late yesterday & overnight. Both Faid & Alto posted about the ridiculous herb spawn rates in Uldum & Deepholm so after the servers came back online, I raced my JC to get the new JC design Vivid Dream Emerald & then to get the new DK Glyph of Dark Succour.

Off to the JC daily quest giver - Jaspers - again! I only had 1 stack left so I posted them anyway & then logged my herbalist. By this time, hubby was awake so he logged his druid herbalist & headed to Uldum whilst my little rogue made her way to Deepholm (a little pickpocketing action on the side, just gotta be done!).

Herbs in Boots © Arty Allsorts 2009, used with permission

Now I'm not a regular herb farmer so my route was perhaps a little random but I managed 8 stacks of heartblossom, 4 stacks of Cinderbloom & 75 Volatile Life in my hour. My hubby managed 16 stacks of Whiptail mainly from the delta end of the river & 97 Volatile Life.

I didn't notice any particularly fast respawns so I don't know if Blizzard fixed this with our patch today or if there was something different between US & EU realms but overall, I have to say, I don't think this was as good for us as it was for you guys over the pond!

Patch 4.0.6 - What Caught My Eye?

I've seen other blogs talking about this patch for weeks now but the word on the wind is that it's going live tomorrow in USA & that means Wednesday morning for us in UK & Europe. I think it's safe to say that most regular gold blog readers know about the 3 new enchants & 3 new meta gems as well as the changes to the existing meta gems. There's a whole host of little bits & pieces in there for classes, gear & professions but 4 tiny snippets caught my eye. The whole lot is here if you want to have a look for yourself.

Not the biggest gold-making news by far but the lowly & seemingly useless Murglesnout is going to have it's own recipe, the Scalding Murglesnout! So now when you fish up all that fish, at least you'll be able to level your cooking a bit or save on mana drinks between fights. I doubt it will sell for big money at the AH - it's not a buff food after all but if you're fishing them up anyway, you may as well try to make the best out of them.

Secondly, the drop rate for Spider's Silk has been improved. If you read my lowbie LW post a while ago, you'll know that 1 of the items I recommended uses Spider's Silk & whilst I've been snatching it on my server for a while, supplies have definitely dried up lately. I'm not sure whether this improved drop rate is a good thing or not. Personally, it was always a pain to farm for so I always kept it when any alts picked it up.

I think most of the spider's silk I've picked up at the AH recently have been from levelling alts or people making space in their banks. Why do I say that? Well, the LW recipe & 2 tailoring recipes that use it most are blue items & there have been very few on the AH at all. This suggests that the people selling the silks don't have LW or Tailoring or they just can't be bothered with the lowbie stuff.

The third snippet to catch my eye is that they have improved the LW levelling from 500-510! Grrrrr, my LW is at 512, having struggled through with that stupid Cloak of Beasts just a week or so ago!

And lastly, the drops from the Tiny Treasure Chests have been improved slightly. It will be interesting to find out how much they mean by 'slightly', not that I'm a great tiny treasure chest farmer or anything but I have tried. I'm just not very good at killing lots of stuff quickly yet :)

Apart from the obvious biggies, what's caught your eye in the patch notes?

Yet Another Experiment! (or two)

It seems I'm not the only one out here who enjoys experiments in gold making! Syntalating has been running a major experiment on his server that makes for very, very interesting, edge-of-your-seat reading! I've linked to his latest post but he has links to the earlier posts that really need reading too. If you have ambitions to reset a market, I strongly advise you to grow your nails (more to chew on without getting blood everywhere!!) & gold balance first. I can't wait for the final instalment :)

Having raved about that, it makes my little foray into the world of low level glyphs seem like child's play & it is, to a certain extent. But I'm still finding it a challenge, even if the amounts of gold involved are comparatively tiny. Once my 30 day AH alt experiment finished, I had all this gold just sitting there so I started the next experiment.

The first morning I had managed to sell a few bits of stock overnight so my opening balance was 3697g. I managed to reset my MySales data so that it would show only the sales from this experiment going forward.

For the first 5 days, I concentrated on building up my ink & glyph supplies & just listing each glyph at the lowest market price at the time of listing. I manually searched for the highest priced glyphs & crafted those as a priority. I was only making 1 or 2 of each glyph, depending on herb/ink supply. My thinking was to have at least 1 glyph available in a variety of categories rather than 2 or 3 glyphs of the same. I also tried to spread my glyphs across all the different classes for the same reason. Basically a scattershot approach to see what hit & what missed :)

Day 6 dawned with an opening balance of 3814g - just 117g in 5 days - this was not going well although I now had 35 different glyphs listed & a few spare inks to replace them as they sold. By day 9 I had continued to buy herbs for ink & craft more glyphs but opening balance on day 9 was still only 3803g!

OMG! this was awful! I was only buying the very cheapest herbs (less than 3g per ink most of the time) but the average sale price was 15-20g per glyph if I was lucky. I decided to change my plan of attack & installed Trade Skill Master (thanks to Zoxy & Shamaenei for their excellent guides) even though my PC is slow enough already!

I also changed my listing behaviour. I had been listing for 48 hours & just leaving them there but now I'm listing for 24hrs & using TSM, I'm cancelling & reposting maybe 3 or 4 times a day (morning, late afternoon, early evening & last thing at night). I struggled a little with TSM at first as I had never used the earlier addons for glyphs but once I got to understand what it was doing, I could just fly through my little routine. When I log in, I empty mail ( ka-ching!), cancel auctions, scan for inscription only then repost. Simple as & only takes maybe 10 mins if I get sidetracked!

Results are good so far
day 10 o/bal 3763
day 11 o/bal 4009
day 12 o/bal 4219
day 13 o/bal 4282
day 14 o/bal 4565
day 15 o/bal 4709

Last 7 days, look at those prices!

So why does cancel/relist work for glyphs? I had a little think about it (not my strong point!) & came up with this thought - unlike raw mats, there is not enough demand for any one particular glyph that you can relist in the mid range & have the lower priced glyphs sell out while your listing is still active. I usually post my hypnotic dust mid range because I know the demand is there to sell through to my listing. By cancelling & relisting glyphs, I am usually the lowest priced for a little while & that means that if there is a single buyer for that glyph, I get the sale. Obviously then, the more often I can cancel/relist, the better my chances of selling.

That pretty much brings me up to date on this little experiment. Now you may think that the opening paragraph was only very loosely relevant to the rest of the post & just a way to plug a guy with gold blog but it wasn't! Syntalating's scroll/ore/mats experiment made me think about this lowbie end of the glyph market so I decided to try to reset a few of the glyph prices. I spent a whole 175g buying the very cheapest glyphs so that I could list as cheapest but at 60g+ rather than 20g!

I haven't logged in yet this morning but I'm going to continue this tactic for the next few days as well to see if it's possible on a server designated 'new players'. Wish me luck :-D

A Profitable 'Oopsie!'

I'm still trying to max my Leatherworking but having skinning on a priest is possibly the slowest form of farming torture! I've been contemplating dropping mining on my paladin & re-instating skinning but yesterday afternoon I had a total brainfart & clicked the wrong button before actually making my decision. Bye bye max mining :(

Oh shoot! now what? Well, I decided I may as well go ahead & level my skinning back up so I decided to turn it into  one of my 'experiments'! I balanced my pally out to 3k gold & a spare alt to 1000g to act as a banker for the duration of this little experiment. I have sent absolutely everything except vendor trash to the bank alt & she's been listing it. But my pally also has Archaeology so where the skinning sites have coincided, I've also managed to put a few skill points on my archaeology. I've also done some sidetrips to find Elders as it's the Lunar Festival & I was going to be flying around anyway!

So what has this to do with making gold & profits? A few days ago, Zoxy posted his JMTC carnival blog post and if you look in the comments, you will see I was very happy because he mentioned the RecipeProfit addon. This is an excellent replacement for one of my old favourites, RecipeRadar which is broken & no longer supported. So after unlearning mining, & relearning skinning, I logged out to get some addons sorted.

RecipeProfit adds icons to your minimap to show you where vendor recipes are - it works like the gatherer/gathermate nodes & you can switch it on/off quite easily. As I've been running around skinning, I've also had to empty my bags etc so I've spent a few minutes here & there, visiting vendors & buying recipes (by recipes I mean plans/schematics/design/patterns etc).

You can see from the mysales image & the AH image - things are selling fairly well! I still have loads of stuff listed & I haven't quite finished levelling skinning yet so more yet to come & this is just the first 24 hours.

I also got very lucky & picked up a Dark Whelpling :) Auctioneer price says average of about 1900g but it's on AH at 750g at the moment. I'm torn because my pally is my pet & mount collector but I also want the gold! arrrggghhh, decisions, decisions!

So I guess what I'm saying is, don't forget vendor recipes while you're out & about  - RecipeProfit is great & if you're currently doing the Elders runaround, why not pick up a few vendor bits while you're at it? It could be worth your while & if you're short of time to make gold, this is a great way to combine questing & shopping!

Don't Forget your Lowbie Skills Can Make You Money Too!

Rather later than planned but I thought I'd continue my foray into low level craft items that sell well. I covered low level Leatherworking & some low level Alchemy items in 2 previous posts but I don't have quite so many items on any of the other proffs, so this post is a bit of a round up!

The biggest low level money maker profession is probably Inscription - I have this on my AH Alt & now she's up to skill 150, she's doing ok thanks :) I'll do a proper update on her later this week. Gathering herbs while you level or putting them on your snatch list is a great way of keeping costs down - it's a fairly labour intensive prof in general with the milling, crafting inks then making the glyphs but it is worthwhile if you do your homework.

I won't go into great detail on glyphs - too many to cover & much better posts re glyphs already out there on the net. But, what do you do with all your 'rare' inks? Make Decks of cards of course! Obviously at low levels, this won't be the big ticket items like Darkmoon Card of Destruction but the lowbie ones like Mysterious Tarot at skill 85 (which gives the Rogues Deck) or Strange Tarot at skill 125 (which gives the Swords Deck).

Both of these can be used to increase your reputation with the Darkmoon Faire but that is another post! Needless to say, these 2 decks still sell fairly well so if you have excess Hunter's Ink & Dawnstar Ink, this may be an option. If you end up with odd cards, check the AH - I often find the individual cards for as little as 3g each. Rogues Deck usually sells for 50g & up whilst the Swords Deck sells for 80g & up. There are two other decks at slightly higher levels so keep your eyes open for those too.

Next profession is Engineering - now my alt is still only low in this so the only item she crafts on a regular basis is the Mechanical Squirrel Box at skill level 75. I'm selling these at 25g each at the moment & creeping the price up a little each time I post. I occasionally have competition from levellers but no-one else seems to be bothering. Very basic mats of copper, malachite & linen so most of that 25g is profit :)

I'm currently levelling Blacksmithing on a level 50 alt so I'll go have a look, see what she's got to craft & I'm going to power level Tailoring on another level 50 alt in the next week or so. I'll take notes & get back to you for low level items to craft for profit on those professions soon.

Don't Be A JOAT!

As a follow up to my butterfly post on Monday, I thought I'd fill you in on this week & what I've learned already.

I've learned that no matter how many lists you have/make, there's always something else that pops up & grabs your attention! I've been pretty good at sticking to my intended routine but the bit about doing my JC daily & listing the appropriate gems on the AH has kinda fallen off. Once I start seeing those 'a buyer has been found' messages pop up in my chat box, I just have to dash back to the bank to see if I've got any more to list or 'damn, I've run out of xyz, gotta prospect more ore' 'craft more rings to d/ench' or whatever it is that's grabbed me.

You've heard the expression " jack of all trades, master of none"? Well, I think that's me - I have a pretty good understanding of most of the profs by now (except BS & Eng) but I've never stayed concentrating on one market long enough to become a master.

At least one of the main gold blogs had a post about diversification but I've just spent 20 mins looking for it & can't find it so someone link it pls so I can give credit! Diversification is good, it allows you to have experienced fingers in many gold making pies but there is a qualifier there - you need to build up knowledge & experience in a single market before you jump into the next!

Markco explained it pretty well earlier this week in his post as did Ali in her guest post mentioned in my post linked above but it actually takes a bit of sitting down & thinking about before you realise that that is exactly what you're doing (or not doing, as the case maybe).

This last few weeks, I've got the gold fever. I'm not much of a history student but even so, I'm getting a taste of the addiction/fascination with gold that created whole towns on the basis of a few nuggets of the real stuff found in a river in the 1800's.

I get such a buzz when I see those 'buyer found' messages, it's ridiculous! My hubby can always tell when I'm emptying my mailbox by the k'ching sounds & apparently when my Mysterious Fortune Cards are selling well, according to him, I cackle in my corner!

So what can you take from this ramble that will help you make gold? Hmm, tbh, I'm not sure but perhaps my message today is - are you jumping around, from crafting to listing to farming to ah camping to disenchanting to barking & back to listing? If you are, how much other WoW stuff are you actually doing as well? When was the last time you put a level or two on an alt or got an achieve? I know my JC'er hasn't left Stormwind in weeks & she's not even my banker and my poor little shammy is sitting in the Hinterlands somewhere, totally abandoned.

So go on, be a devil, let your bank/auction alt have a break & go & get some levels done. Hey, getting to 50 opens up the next lot of profession training, maybe that will make you some more gold down the line!

Drowning in Zephyrites?

I posted a few stats from my big Obsidium prospecting session a little while ago but since then I've been buying ores at anywhere from 26-50g per stack & following my methods from that post. I'm 8k up in four days so I feel it's going fairly well but now I'm absolutely drowning in Zephyrites!

I've been crafting necks/rings & spikes to disenchant or sell the blues then selling the enchanting mats. We've also had 3 nightstone & 2 jasper JC dailies in the last week but no Zephyrite dailies so I haven't been able to get rid of any that way.

I figured I wouldn't be the only one with this problem so I decided to have a look at my options.

First off, the raw gems are selling for maybe 7-10g each but with a 5g (ish) deposit & hundreds of them on the AH I need a sell price of at least 15g to make any gold (cut & vendor =9g + 5g AH deposit if it doesn't sell).

I've only just maxed my JC so trying to find a cut for the zephyrites that sells well seems a bit silly as I only have a few cuts available so far. I don't want to 'waste' my JC tokens on zephyrites just yet. Having looked at the prices of cut zephyrites, even the perfect cuts are selling for maybe 25g if it's a really good day.

With the upcoming changes (summarised nicely by JMTC) to meta gems, I have been making shadowspirit diamonds, ready to cut as & when the new cuts are available but this eats into my stocks of the other gems which are making gold in other ways. I'm trying to find a happy balance between using the other gems this way for stock & still making gold now.

So the only other option I can see for now is to utilise my alchemist & transmute zephyrites (+ azshara's veil) into ocean sapphires. I have one cut available for now but should be able to get another later today (unless it's the Elemental Goo daily, 'cos my JC'er is only lvl 76!).

Luckily I have a herbalist questing thru Vashj'ir at the moment so I don't have to lay out cash to get the herbs required, just a lil' bit of extra time picking flowers as I go.

I need to watch the Ocean Sapphire market a bit more closely over the next few days - I've not been that interested in the cut gems yet as I have so few cuts but now seems like a good time to get interested!

What do you do with all your excess zephyrites? Have I missed anything obvious? Let me know what you think.

Training a Butterfly!

I've been trying to write this post all weekend - editing, wiping & starting again & then in 3 seperate blogs there are posts which link in & explain perfectly what I've been trying to say! Grrrrr lol

My butterfly is my brain - you've all seen a butterfly flit between flowers in a seemingly random fashion, well that's how my brain works! I log in each morning with full intentions to do something specific & then by midday, I've done loads of stuff but not what I intended at the start! So I need a routine, a 'method' if you will & I need to stop jumping around every time I see a new 'shiny' to distract me.

Aliciana's guest post at JMTC relates to knowing your Niche Markets - something I've overlooked since I started trying to make gold. I had some beginners luck before I found all these wonderful gold blogs by applying instincts and common sense - 2 things I think I've lost sight of as I now 'work' at making gold.

Then later in the day, Alto posted his Common Sense post - another few chords started ringing in my ears and now this morning (UK time that is!), Stede has posted a full scale, in depth look at Jewelcrafting. This is one of my newer professions and one that I have dived into wholeheartedly, ignoring some of my more familiar profs & ignoring common sense a little.

So besides linking to these 3 great posts, now what can I talk about today? Well I thought maybe a little public analysis of what I have & what I should do with it might be useful to other butterfly brains out there! For the moment, I'm going to ignore my LW & Inscription & focus on the holy trinity of gold making at the moment - Alchemy, JC & Enchanting, all of which I have finally managed to max to 525.

I've been buying Obsidium Ore whenever I see it below 50g a stack - this last few days it's been as low as 29-35g a stack so I currently have a mailbox full of it to deal with! I have been using the now-famous spreadsheet which Zoxy explains really well in his post but my PC is pretty old & slow & I find tabbing in & out of game to be evermore frustrating so I've kinda gone with my gut feelings & my trusty calculator. It doesn't help that prices on my server are so stupidly low that the only real way of making any gold at the moment is enchanting materials from disenchanting jewellery - monotonous & time consumimg.

I'm going to try to stick to a routine for a few days & see how it goes. This is my provisional routine which I will adapt as necessary.

• Log in to banker(s),
• collect post
• squee with glee/cry over lack of gold
• relist any returned items
• list any new stuff sent from alts
• run auctioneer fast scan (time for a coffee & smoke anyways!)
• run snatch search, buy if needed
• check prices of all raw Cataclysm gems & herbs (for possible transmutes)
• fill in spreadsheet
• log in to JC alt, do JC daily
• if JC daily is jasper/nightstone or zephyrite, list gems on AH in 1's & 3's & hopefully at higher price than yesterday
• check enchanting mats stock, decide whether to prospect/craft/disench more stuff
• use spreadsheet to decide if metagem transmute is sensible, send mats to alchemist
• Log in to Alchemist alt, do daily transmute volatile life > air, send to enchanter alt
• Do metagem transmutes if viable
• Log in to Enchanter alt, check price of Enchant Weapon - Hurricane (currently the only scroll worth selling on my server) & make a couple if price is good.
• Last but not least - WALK AWAY NOW & go do some actual playing!

So what do you think? Have I missed anything or is there still too much in there? I'm thinking I will do this probably twice a day, morning & early evening. I have to break the habit of popping to my banker every hour or so to see if anything's sold & I also have to stop buying Obsidium Ore even if it is down at 25g a stack - at least until I work thru the last ton of the stuff in my mailbox!

photos © Arty Allsorts 2008, used with permission

AH Alt Day 30 - Final Count Up & Next Phase

I've kinda let this little project slip for the last week or so - I've been so busy prospecting obsidium, milling herbs & buying maelstrom crystals that I didn't even check her auctions for the last 2 days!

Anyway, final cash count over 30 days of pure AH flipping & a little inscription side action has netted her a whole 3537gold. Not much more than last time I reported in but I still have quite a bit to sell. Closing stock is as follows:-

First Mate Hat - bought for 500g hoping to sell for 3000g or more
Design - Jeweller's Sapphire Monocle - bought for 50g listed at 250g
2 Swords Deck
1 Rogues Deck
16 various glyphs
1 Titanium Toolbox - bought for 15g, listed for 75g
& 5 cooking vendor recipes.

Her inscription is maxed at 150/150 (she is only level 10!!) so rather than just abandon this alt, I think the next experiment will be to see how much she can make in the next 30 days from Inscription alone. Obviously I will continue to try and sell the remaining stock listed above but unless I see some fantastic deal, I won't continue to flip AH items or vendor items.

I think this may prove less lucrative than pre-Cata - there does seem to be a general slowing down of glyphs on this server & my main server as well as a lot of very low priced glyphs (less than 2g!). But I think it's worth a try even if it is only on a small scale.

Wish me Luck!

My Pocket's in Shock!

Yup, I spent almost half of my liquid gold yesterday morning after the server restarted - I happened to be trying to log in just as they were coming online & had spent the previous hour or so, reading about the Maelstrom Crystal nerf over on Zoxy's blog and loads of others.

I logged in & nabbed the whole lot while most people were still blissfully unaware that the servers were back up or that the hotfix had gone live. I am now the proud owner of 27 Maelstrom Crystals and very few fingernails.

It's taken me a further 24 hours or more to come to the understanding that I am more risk averse than I ever realised! I think that perhaps if I'd reached 200k before this happened, maybe I wouldn't be worrying so much. Not only that, it's just a bloomin' game for pete's sake! It's not even 'real' money after all!

But you know what? I've actually worked pretty damn hard for that stash - I've read blogs, I've made spreadsheets, I'm going to suffocate under an avalanche of sticky notepaper soon & I've spent hours upon hours in the AH, watching markets, trying to get an understanding of things.

In my head, I know these things will sell & I 'know' the market will rise for a while. I also have a maxed enchanter so I can always use them for the top end enchant recipes & sell those instead.

But in the meanwhile, I'll still be gibbering in the corner, chewing my fingernails!

What's the biggest purchase you've made & how long did you deliberate before or worry about it after?

Mysterious Fortune Cards Revisited

Back in December I wrote a post about  Mysterious Fortune Cards & how they were not for me at that time - I was still levelling my herbalist through the new zones & making a fortune from the herbs that all the MFC required. Well, the market has settled down, herb prices have dropped to between 50-75g a stack (mainly Cinderbloom) & I've dived in! I've even been barking in trade occasionally.

Admittedly profits aren't quite so high as they probably were in December but that's OK, I do actually want to leave the treadmill of milling/inking/card making/ listing to play this game sometimes which I know I wouldn't do if these were selling at this rate but for more money! I have some pretty major competition but they seem to be evening players so I'm owning the daytime market & letting them have some profits in the evenings - I'm so nice like that! lol

Yesterday I did have to giggle all day to myself - anyone listening in must have thought I'd lost it! There was a new entrant to the market who likes to list a 'full deck' of 52 then barks like crazy about how cheap his bulk purchase is compared to all those singles (mine!) but every time he barked, I ran out of stock! In the end I just made up 200 cards & listed 20 as soon as he barked then another 20 as they ran low. I didn't quite managed to clear my stock but I now know to just wait them out - I refuse to post at silly prices just to get rid of them.

If you really want to know how to play this particular bit of the game - have a read of the Masters' articles - Cold's Mysterious Fortune Card posts - he pretty much has it covered & this post has links to other great blogs that wrote about MCF's too.

In other news, I managed to get the Fortune Cookie recipe yesterday so today's plan is to try to create a Fortune Cookie market - my auctioneer has only seen about 200 so far according to my scan data so it may be a lost cause for now or no-ones really caught on. I have my fingers crossed & I'll let you know how it goes in a few days :D