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!

Inscription - Hope For Lowbie Glyphers

© Nev 2008 Every scribes best friend

About 3 weeks ago, I decided to take another look at the glyph market on my lowbie AH Alt's server. For those of you who don't know, I started this blog with a new alt on a new server, levelled her to lvl 10 & took up inscription. The idea was to see how much gold I could make in 30 days via inscription & AH flipping. I got to about 6500g before I realised that it didn''t really make for good blogs posts, day after day so I abandoned her in SW & started blogging about other gold making stuff. (If you're interested, you can read those posts by using AH Alt from the tag cloud in the side bar)

I did a post about giving away my cash as I never intended going back & thought it might help someone else getting started. I got 1 whisper so he had 5k & I popped a bit in the guild bank to say thank you for not kicking me out even though I hadn't been online for months or really contributed to the guild levelling! That left me with 936g to start my latest little escapade.

My lowbie glypher is maxed at skill level 150 until I get her to level 20 (probably next year sometime!) so at this time, she can make glyphs using midnight ink, lion's ink & jadefire ink as well as the Rogues Deck ( from Hunter's ink) & the Swords Deck (from Dawnstar ink). I've also been doing my Minor Glyph Research for the last 3 weeks so I do have some of the discovered glyphs too.

I ran a TSM AH scan for just the inscription market & looked at what glyphs to make. I was horrified to see that none of the glyphs I could make were selling above 20g each. However, TSM was telling me that due to low herb/ink prices, there was still some profit to be made so I thought 'sod it' & decided to make 1 of every glyph I could. I made my craft list & went shopping for herbs to mill. That first day I spent 480g on herbs but as the midnight ink prices were down at less than 1g each, I could make an awful lot of glyphs for that 480g!

Over the next week or so, I logged in maybe 3 times a day - 9am, 4pm & 10pm-ish to cancel & relist as well as to restock but after the first week, I got a bit more casual & only logged in maybe once or twice a day & to be honest, not every day either! 

The screenshot above shows that over the last 17 days of MySales data, I sold 6264g worth of glyphs at around 12-15g each. MySales is configured to show 1 month so in effect, this whole story is about the last 17 days or so. For a level 10 Glyphing alt, I think that's pretty good going.

This screenshot shows the total number of sales & income per glyph but this is only the top page. As you can see, there were one or two glyphs with slightly higher prices but most stayed in the 10-15g range. By only buying herbs when TSM told me the ink prices were 1-2g or less, I knew that even at 10g, I would be making a small profit.

My opening balance was 936g, I received 6264g in sales & my closing balance was 4548g so overall I spent 2652g on herbs, parchments & listing fees, leaving me a profit of 3612g.

As a by-product of all this low end glyphing, I also have shedloads of Hunter's Ink & Dawnstar Ink which I have yet to make into the lowbie Darkmoon decks. I also currently have around 90 glyphs still waiting to sell but I'm not going to make any more glyphs so those will just add to the profit figures for this little escapade.

Now, before anybody jumps on this and says I was lucky with the herb prices, yes, possibly I was. My main server rarely has any ink price below 4g but at the same time, the actual glyph prices are much higher even at this low end of the market. This experiment server has 1 or 2 players posting walls of glyphs at 15-20g across the board but I was still able to make a profit on a lvl 10 alt played very casually.

Regular readers will know from my weekly sales reports that glyphs have been my main source of income for the last 6 months or more & that top end glyph prices on my server are over 200g & even 350g on occasions. I've had many comments about being lucky with my glyph prices but I think this shows that even at the very bottom end of the glyph market & with horrible bottom end glyph prices, there is still profit to be made & hope for anyone just starting out with inscription.

Spare Inks? Faire Inks!

As a side benefit of milling herbs for all the different levels of inks for my scribe, I usually end up with shedloads of uncommon or 'green' inks like Hunter's Ink or Royal Ink. I'd been selling a few at the AH but they just seem to dribble out of there & I decided I really needed to do something with them or my bags were gonna explode!

So two Darkmoon Faires ago, I made up all those inks into the various cards & sold the decks and spare cards at the AH. I managed to shift 64 low level decks at prices ranging from 35g to 85g (Rogues, Swords, Mages & 1 Demons Deck). That netted me a healthy chunk of gold across the week, just over 3000g, according to my MySales data.

Last month the Faire was in Thunder Bluff on my server so sales were lower but I still managed to shift about 20 various decks but prices were much lower so only about 500g on my MySales but I did find someone asking in trade for decks & managed to sell them 36 decks (mainly Rogues) for 1000g.

This month I have fewer inks to use up. The prices of Cataclysm herbs have dropped a fair bit whilst supplies of the lower herbs have reduced and forced prices up, so I've been using Blackfallow Inks & the Ink Trader much more.

Also this month, I have a fair few Primal Lifes - my warrior & hunter are both going through Outlands & my Main has been working on her Loremaster out there so I've collected them at random. I've made up as many Greater Darkmoon Cards as I can & have listed each one at 75g. These are the old TBC, lvl 70 equivalents of todays' Hurricane/Tsunami cards so they don't have huge value but I get more Darkflame Ink than any of the others. I've tried selling the ink but it just doesn't seem to move at all!

I keep the cards in stacks & make up the decks just before I'm ready to post, they stack in 20's whereas the completed Decks don't stack at all. The Faire is in Shattrath for us this month so it will be interesting to see how the demand is.

What do you do with your uncommon inks? Any other suggestions for me?

What's Been Selling This Week?

I've had a busy week gearing up & rep building this week so my gold making has slowed a little. Add to that a severe shortage of Outland & Northrend herbs at even vaguely reasonable prices & you can see the effect on my sales.

Doing a bit of maths & I've worked out that I spent around 27k on various stuff so total increase in cash is only 20k but out of that 27k - 8k was for fast flying for 2 alts & 3k for a set of Terborus's bracers so it would have been 31k up :-)

I did a bit of excel wizardry too - I thought it might be interesting to see where the bulk of my cash is coming from.

Inscription - mainly glyphs - 21.3k

Jewelcrafting - 15.9k

Enchanting - 6.1k

Leatherworking - 1.5k

Tailoring (Netherweave bags) - 0.6k

Random other stuff - 2.1k

So although there's only 1 or 2 glyphs showing up at the top of the leaderboard, the sheer variety of glyphs adds up to my best sellers overall.

I've also expanded my LW'ing a little - I've made a full set of the Bloodied Leather agility pvp set & some of the well known lesser blues such as Toughened Leather Armor. As each piece of pvp gear sells, I'm making another so I always have a full set listed. The lesser stuffs aren't exactly flying off the shelf but if I pick up the mats over time at very low prices, then it's almost pure profit. I want to give the market a bit more time before I report fully.

This week, I've also been working a bit more on my Tailoring - I'm at 510 now & run out of my cheap volatiles - being the skinflint that I am, I'd rather wait to level further until I can get some more cheapies rather than pay silly prices at the AH to get those few points now!

I've also been selling a few bits & pieces from my mid level Blacksmith but for some reason, they haven't shown up in the MySales report. I guess I've not activated the addon so I'll need to fix that before next week!

With Leatherworking, Tailoring, Enchanting and Inscription either at max or close to max level, I really need shedloads of volatiles. I'm wondering how you guys get enough for your needs - do you buy at AH, transmute volatile lifes or do you farm them?

I feel the need for a second max level alchemist for the extra transmute - lifes are still the cheapest - but for now I just don't have a viable profession slot. My next highest alt is my mining/BS warrior at 62 & after that, I have a bunch in the 40's. Maybe I should just focus on one of those & try to level her as fast as possible - still gonna be a while though :(

TSM - Part Two - Crafting & Posting Glyphs

So here we go - part 2 & I hope this doesn't get confusing! I'll try & run through it in the order that I run as part of my routine so it will involve a little jumping around :)

First off, go to the Auction House & open your usual browse window. In the top right hand corner, you'll see a new box marked TSM - this is your open/close button for the pop out menu, shown below. Button 1 is your Post, button 2 is your Cancel, button 3 is the Scan menu, button 4 is the milling/prspecting shopping button & button 5 is your Shopping - crafting mats. The ones I haven't labelled are ones I don't generally use & certainly not for part of my glyph process so I've left them out for now.

I numbered the buttons from top to bottom but actually the first one I use is Button 3! This is the scan button which brings up its' own sub menu, shown below. If you have more than one profession set up for use with TSM you can click as many or as few of these categories as you like. I tend to scan just for the craft I'm working on as it's quicker & then my data is current for the relevant craft. Scanning for inscription only will look at all herbs, pigments, inks & glyphs, as well as any of the other miscellaneous items used for relics, tomes & decks. I'm guessing but this scan takes maybe 1-2 minutes at the most.

Before I go any further, I touched on this in yesterday's post - I preset my ink prices so that each ink/glyph group can have it's own threshold. In the window below, you can see I have Midnight & Lion's Ink preset at 5g per ink - this means that my threshold for these glyphs can be as low as 17g (3xink + parchment + AH 5%). This price shows up later in the process when shopping so I always know how much my maximum ink price is for any given set of glyphs.

To set these prices, go to the main TSM window (from your minimap icon), press the inscription button on the left hand side then choose Materials from the list. You have to put a tick in the Override box then enter your maximum ink price & hit 'okay'. Done! This is a preset so you only need to change it when your server prices for herbs change or if you find you under/over estimated ink costs.

After scanning, close down the AH window & open up your usual Craft window. At the top left, you will see a button for Open TSM Crafting, which opens this restock window. At the left hand side, you will see your ink categories (which we set up yesterday). If you hit the big 'Restock Queue' button, it will produce a list of glyphs to craft (on the right hand side) and a shopping list at the bottom left. In the last day or so, this module has been updated to included Inks & pigments in your shopping list so that makes life a lot easier!

The one thing I haven't quite worked out is why it didn't add in Glyph of Flame Shock & Glyph of Immolation Trap - it says they meet my profit criteria & I don't have any on other alts or anything either. All I do with these is a quick double check at the AH. Close down Craft window, reopen AH window & browse for these two - if they are still at profit & not too many of them, I add them to the craft queue manually.

To add or remove glyphs manually, you just left or right click the glyph name in the left hand list.

So we now have a list of glyphs required to restock & it's created a shopping list for us - time to go shopping! When I am having a buying/crafting session, I use button 5 the 'Shopping - Crafting mats' button. Open your AH browse window, open the pop out menu. It imports my shopping list to the bottom half of the window & searches the current listings for inks, pigments & herbs - sorted by the cheapest first. Your preset ink price is shown alongside the ink in the bottom window - in this screenshot it says 6g (old screenshot - I've updated since then!!).

Alongside the big BUY button, it shows how many available & price as well as the price per ink - watch this price & click buy for as long as it stays below your preset price. Once the ink price goes above your preset price, you can either make an executive decision to continue buying or you can hit the 'Skip Current Item' button at the very bottom of the window. If there is enough supply to fulfill your shopping list, it will skip to the next ink type once you have enough of this one.

At this stage, it's time to collect your herbs from the mailbox & do the usual milling routine. Then re-open your Inscription window, reopen the TSM page & hit the big 'Craft Next' button. If there weren't enough herbs available at your preset price, you can narrow down the list of glyphs by clicking the 'On Hand Queue' button. I'm not 100% positive but I think the parchments may be a limiting factor here so go get what you need before you shorten the queue!

With the recent change, actually making the ink is now part of this queue so it's time for a quick coffee/smoke break if you have a lot of inks to craft. I sometimes prefer to do this the old fashioned way so that I can process the inks by volume - i.e biggest workload first while I go get coffee then sit through the smaller ink craftings. Unfortunately, you still need to click when the item type changes - good of ToS :(

Once you have clicked your way through all the glyphs in your craft list, it's time to post! Back to the AH browse window, open the TSM pop out menu & hit button 1. It will scan & queue all the glyphs in your bags ready to be posted. If any prices have changed whilst you were crafting, you may end up with a few left in your bags as it won't post any that fall below your threshold (unless you set it to post at fallback, covered yesterday). I had a measly 4 to post when I took this screenie but usually it's upwards of 200 on my main scribe.

You can start clicking the 'Post Auction' button while it's still scanning/queueing but 200 still takes maybe 2 mins max, including my clicking time :) If you click slowly, you will see the details of each post so if you've made an error somewhere or it wants to list something you don't want it to list - just click the 'Skip Item' button at the bottom. Once you gain some confidence in what TSM is doing & that you're happy with your groups/prices etc, you will be able to click like a madman.

It will post at your preset undercut amount or your fallback, depending on your settings. The Cancel process is exactly the same except it's button 2 and it only cancels auctions which have been undercut! This is why I love TSM - 2 minutes to cancel 200 auctions & 2 minutes to repost them all (mailbox is the limiting factor for speed here).

As a last bit of information, I also use button 4 on the AH TSM pop out menu - this is the 'Shopping - Milling/Disenchanting & Prospecting' button. I use this on days in between major glyph craftings to pick up herbs at low prices - a bit like a snatch list I suppose. Click 1 of the 3 buttons at the top (mill/prosp/disench) then pick your ink from the drop down list and hit the 'Go' button. The display is very similar to your shopping list buying page but it doesn't show you your preset ink prices so bear those in mind. If you buy these 'cheap' herbs regularly & mill as you go, it certainly cuts down on the pain of a major glyph crafting session!

So that's pretty much it! I hope this helps you as much as it did me. I now cancel/repost maybe 4 or 5 times a day & my glyph sales have shot through the roof. You still need to bring your brain to the party as no addon is foolproof but once you gain confidence with it, setting up multiple professions is pretty much the same. I think TSM is really, really useful for glyphs because of the facility to group by inks & therefore, to preset your ink prices & thresholds by ink rather than by class or whatever.

I've also started using TSM for my Cata JC rare gem cuts & for my cata enchants - seeing the possible profit figures at any one time certainly make it easier to avoid the low profit scrolls that I still have a bag full of from pre-TSM!

As always, feel free to ask questions - I'll answer as best I can. Good luck & happy glyphing.

TSM - Basic Set Up Guide for Glyphs

I promised Alto a guide for TSM for his Glyphs so here's the first part - the set-up. Fluxdada at Power Word:Gold did a great video on this yesterday but I do mine slightly differently & also if you can't watch video at least you can read mine, hey? lol

Now I have a disclaimer to make - I've never used any of the other addons for glyphing so although I have been extolling the virtues of TSM for glyphs, in reality, I have nothing to compare it to!

I used to go to the AH & check, class by class, for which glyphs had the highest sale price, then I would make those if the herb prices were sensible. I listed them for 48 hrs & rarely if ever, cancelled & reposted them. For me, it's the ease of buying herbs within a set price range & the cancel/repost function that has me raving about TSM. If you already have an efficient system, I guess changing to TSM may not be your best option but hey ho, I'm sure there are some readers out there who scrabble through as I was, so maybe this can help them :)

So what I've done here is to take a load of screen shots & numbered various things. I'll talk through each 'number' & hope it flows logically enough for you to follow.

This bit is very brief! Number 1 is the 'Craft options' button & number 2 is the 'Auctioning groups' button.

OK, so press the Craft Options button (#1) and this is what you get on the Data tab at the top there. Number 3 is a drop down menu - I like to use the AuctionDB - Minimum buyout option for mat prices & craft prices - this is the TSM database from the scan I'll show you later. My Auctioneer is playing up a little so I haven't kept those scans up to date. The TSM scan is so quick as well that I can run it every 5 minutes with no pain, if needs be!

The 'profit deduction' slider is set to 5% which is the AH cut - if you're posting on the Neutral AH, you may want to adjust this here.

Number 4 is where I originally had problems - I have 2 alts with inscription but on different servers so make sure to pick up the correct alt name from this drop down menu. If you craft glyphs (or anything else, for that matter) then send to a banker for selling, pick up the banker alt name here too. The same goes for the Guild drop down box alongside - if you have glyphs stored in a seperate guild bank, pick up both guilds here.

Next up is the Craft Management Window tab - the only things I change here are the Max Restock Quantity & the Minimum Profit (number 5). Both are fairly self explanatory & totally up to you how you set them. 

Moving on to the Profiles tab, I believe the first alt you set up anywhere in game on TSM, becomes the default profile! This took me a while to work out as I added a second & third alt before realising that I couldn't use the same default for everyone! So, before you go much further, put your current alt's name in here at Number 6! If you want different profit amounts depending on which alt, you will need to go back to box Number 5 & change it once you have a new profile set up. ie I set this up for AHAlt then when I go to Mainalt, I change the profile name/set up new profile & it will bring these values in unless I change them.

So at last, we get to the Inscription window! Click the icon to the top left & then the Options button in the left hand list. The first thing you will see is a list by class - I prefer to sort by ink as it makes pricing & buying herbs much, much easier. So just click 'ink' in the drop down menu at number 7. 

 Now at this point, we still haven't imported any of our profession skills/items so click 'Crafts' in the left hand menu then click 'Force rescan etc etc' button (Number 8). This should open your normal profession window behind this screen then close it again once it has imported your craftables. I've had a problem here once or twice so I either just log out & in again or do a /reload which seems to fix it.

Hopefully this will have imported all the glyphs/items you can make so now click an ink in the left hand list - I've picked Midnight Ink. You can see it has brought in all the glyphs I can make with Midnight Ink but none of them are selected. Pressing 'Enable all crafts' button at number 9 will pick up every glyph in this list.

Now, when I set up for the first time, at this point I click 'Create Auctioning Groups' which brings up a pop-out (marked 10a). Just click the large 'add crafted items from this group etc etc' button & it will automatically create a new group called 'inscription - midnight ink'. Now if you have already set up or are going to set up seperate profession groups, the category box will need to be used - the drop down menu will show you your 'master groups' as it were & just pick from there.

If you are still learning new glyphs, they won't appear in a group until you put them there. Go back to ink group page (#9 above) and tick the new item to 'enable it' then click the box marked number 11 and this box will pop up - in the drop down menu (at 11a), pick the name of the group to add your item to (in this case, midnight ink)  & hey presto, your new glyph is now in your crafting & auctioning groups. 

Now we go to the auctioning group button (number 2 on the first screen shot!) & you will see your crafting by inks list on the left hand side  are now showing as auctioning groups as well. This is where we set up our undercut amount, our threshold & fallback. In the screenshot below, I have marked the 'Categories/Groups' with a red blob - this is your override settings so if you forget to set amounts for individual groups, these are the settings that it will default to.

Post Time & Post Cap are both easy - as is the undercut amount - I hate those guys who undercut 1copper so I usually put a random amount in here! At number 12 I have set my minimum price at 25g & my fallback at 138g but at the very bottom of the screen is a drop down menu which allows you to decide what TSM will do if the price falls below your threshold. Somehow I managed to miss it in the screenshot but I have mine set to 'don't post' so it never posts below 25g. 

So that's pretty much the set-up covered. You can see below that I have a different Price Threshold for my Midnight Ink category. On my main inscription alt, I have a different threshold for each ink group depending on my ink prices but I'll show you that tomorrow when I cover the crafting & cancel/repost parts of TSM.

I think I've covered most of the basic set up stuff. If you think I missed something or you want further clarification, please leave a comment - this is my first 'tutorial/how-to' so I doubt I got it all first time :) I'll cover crafting, restock queues, posting & scanning in part 2, currently planned for tomorrow, real life permitting.

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.

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

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.

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!

Auction House Alt - Day 16 Update

Today I took my banker to the inscription trainer & powerlevelled her (hehehe!) to 75 to get the Minor Inscription Research facility. I used 10 stacks of peacebloom/silverleaf at 2g a stack to get there & made enchanting vellums for as many points as possible, knowing that they will sell even though they are now available from the vendor. I also bought 1 stack of bruiseweed for 7g to make some Midnight Ink to produce my 1st glyph.

One mistake I made was to make too many Ivory Inks at the start - I was watching the skill points, not checking at what point the next recipe became available so I posted the excess Ivory Inks on the AH, along with a bunch of the Enchanting Vellums. I also bought a 5 stack of Vanishing Dust just for the hell of it - listed 1 for laughs & it sold for 3g! Of course, the other 4 are now listed too :)

Another booboo I made was forgetting that I had actually put anything in her bank! When I did that side trip to Exodar last week, I bought extras of all 3 types of Moth Eggs & stashed them away & promptly forgot about them until now. I checked the AH to see how many were listed (none at all) then listed 1 of each at my price. I bumped it up a little from the market average just for giggles & fingers crossed.

After a late night mailbox check, I was pumped to see this - WOOO HOOO!

Day 14 - Time for a Few Changes

So I've reached a point where I'm happy with my capital & I'm starting to get a little bored of doing & writing about this experiment of mine! I feel the need to change things up a bit so I've started a human hunter to level a bit.

But the question is which pair of professions will make most money at low levels? I don't really want to go with herbing/mining combo as I've found that the new questing process is too quick to keep my gather skills upto the level of the zone I'm in. On my dwarf shaman on my main server, I hit Wetlands & started seeing so many herbs I couldn't pick yet, that I had to go back to Loch Modan & skill up there. The same thing has happened as she went into Arathi, go back to Wetlands & skill up again. I thought I had been gathering a fair bit while questing but obviously not enough!

So, which profs? - In the end, I chose skinning & leatherworking. I can make gear for myself as I go along & I know some of the lower items sell well - maybe only a gold or two here & there but it does sell.

I'm also going to put inscription on my banker but buy all the herbs I need. With the minor inscription research available at skill 75, I can at least be making glyphs on a regular basis.

I also wondered if it was worth putting enchanting on my banker - either for some of the lowbie scrolls or just to disenchant lowbie, mega cheap gear & sell the mats. I'll have a look today at enchanting mats prices & make my decision from there.

The important thing for me, is that I'm not likely to level that far on this server. I already have 10 toons on my main that need attention & a guild full of lovely people to talk to & play with most of the time. If I was starting here with a thought to stay & level all the way, my decisions would be very different, that's for sure :)

What do you think, dear Reader? Any suggestions or your own stories to tell? Let me know

Mysterious Fortune Cards & Adventurer's Journals - not for me!

As you can see from my blog list, I read a lot of the most popular gold blogs out there. Most of them have at least mentioned the Mysterious Fortune cards over the last week or so but I am yet to jump on that bandwagon - why? because the demand for these has stripped our auction house almost bare of Cata herbs so the prices have skyrocketed!

I've also found a lovely quiet spot in Vashj'ir which nets me 2.5-4 stacks per 10 minute circuit (as well as 15-25 volatile lifes) & they are selling at 12-18g a piece, almost faster than I can list them! With herb prices so high, a single blackfallow ink can cost as much as 60g & the cards are selling for about that too so I'm giving them a miss for now.

I mentioned the lack of Outland herbs for Ethereal Ink to my husband & he decided he needed to get his Explore Outland achievement & made a killing on the Outland herbs too. They are selling individually for 8 gold or more, as the scribes are not forking out for the Cata herbs to mill and exchange, but are buying the correct herbs for each type of ink they need.

Obviously this is not happening on all servers, so if you have a level 80+ herbalist, it may be worth checking out the various prices before deciding where to spend your time - herbing for xp & profit or levelling inscription for profit.