Old School Jewels & Infinite Dust

I've been trying to get my head around the enchanting scrolls market over the last week or so. I'd decided to let TSM do the initial work for me & to pick out the most viable scrolls from the materials I had on hand. Now I'm a self confessed pack rat in game & in real life (although, tbh, my husband beats me hands down in RL!) so I thought building a craft list wouldn't be a problem.

It turns out, a lot of Wrath enchants are still going strong on my server so I need a lot more infinite dust than I expected. Cue Flux (from Power Word:Gold) with a timely tweet about the Crystal Citrine Necklace which disenchants to infinite dust or lesser cosmic essences and only costs 1 crystallized earth & 1 huge citrine.

Off I run to my JC & take her to the auction house where I find that huge citrines are selling for under 2g each. Good little gold maker/packrat that I am, I already had about 30 Eternal Earths in my bank & when I checked the price of Infinite Dust it was around 7g per dust. I rapidly snagged all 27 of the Huge Citrines at 2g or less & grabbed the Earths from my bank. Off I snuck to a quiet corner to craft all these wonderful necklaces where to my happy disbelief I found 3 other patterns in my JC craft list that would serve the same purpose!

The Bloodstone Band, the Crystal Chalcedony Amulet & the Sun Rock Ring all take just 1 gem & 2 crystallized earths so back to the AH where I was pleased to find that the bloodstones & sun crystals were also less than 2g each - I snagged them as fast as possible too. The Chalcedony were a little more expensive so I left them for now. These disenchant to 2.5 infinite dusts on average with the occasional lesser cosmic essence so at a mat cost of less than 4g, this is a good combination.

Back in my crafting corner, I set my craft queue to run while I perused my blog list. In total I spent 110g to buy a mixed bag of 67 gems. They disenchanted to 120 Infinite Dusts & 20 lesser cosmic essences which I stashed in the bank. I couldn't resist the immediate gold opportunity though so I put some 10 stacks of Infinite Dust on the AH at 7g per dust, just to see if people were in fact buying it. Needless to say, yes, people do buy dusts at that price!

Over the next few days, I continued to buy the cheap gems where & when I could, crafting & disenchanting as I went along. I now have a nice little stockpile of infinite dust & cosmic essences for when I eventually get my head around enchanting scrolls!

Keep your eyes on the AH for these items selling cheap as well. I remember making these when I levelled my JC so you may find them listed at silly low prices whilst people are levelling.

Tuesday & yesterday though, it was a different picture. One guy has listed all these gems at 8g each and there are no other sellers in the market. In the meantime, Infinite Dust is now at 2-3g per dust, also from the same guy. I either caught the market when he wasn't paying attention or someone twigged this market almost at the same time I did but has completely different approach to it.

I'll add it to my list of AH corners to visit periodically, along with enchanting rods & toughened leather armour. I'm ok with taking a little profit here & there when someones' attention wanders :)

Weekly Update with a Few Surpises

Well, What a week! After hitting 500k last week, I wrote that it was time to look away from my glyphs so the day after I wrote the post, instead of spending my usual time tending my glyphs, I got busy on my alts. I must have driven my guildies mad with all my logging in and out but once I get the routine sorted out, that will slow down. Patch 4.1 hit on Wednesday & not only broke almost all of my addons, I also got the dreaded DC bug. I have to say I wasn't very well prepared for the patch either & with husband home, my concentration & time were less than focussed on gold making.

After my usual bit of maths, I can see that I spent 15800g-ish to make profits of 45100g-ish. I also bought a Hurricane Deck for my paladin main but having heard so many comments about how bad the paladin DPS is now, I handed in the Deck to get some rep & have listed the trinket on the AH. If it sells, I make profit, if it doesn't, my now, seemingly-useless Pally gets some gear love. 

I can hear you thinking 'no surprises so far' but just look at my sales screenshot & compare it to previous ones! It doesn't show glyphs across the board this week! How did I decide what to craft in my mega alt hopping session? Well, I tend to scribble notes down when I read all those blogs in my blogroll so I got all the bits of paper off my desk & went through them to make a master list of possibilities. Next, I logged my bank alt to search for what mats I already had tucked away & to check AH prices for everything.

Out came my master Excel sheet (you can see an example in my Enchanted Thorium Blades post) where I broke down all the possible crafted items into their raw or semi raw mats & input the prices from the AH. I ended up with a smaller list of profitable items to craft so then it was just a matter of buying any mats I didn't already have & get to crafting.

My smaller list required mid level BS & Alchemy, maxed & mid level Enchanting & maxed JC. There were also a few mid level Leatherworking items but I've been dabbling in those anyway (see my Low Level LW post).

I wasn't sure whether to give you a list of what I made but I thought I may as well :) Obviously you can cherry pick from the list for your own circumstances but it might give you a springboard for your own ideas too.

Blacksmith
Arcanite Rod
Fel Iron Rod
Adamantite Rod
Eternium Rod
Enchanted Thorium Blades (to d/enchant)

Alchemist
Arcanite Bar
Transmute Inferno Ruby

Enchanting
Enchant Weapon - Hurricane / Avalanche / Heartsong
Enchant Bracer - Dodge
Enchant Chest - Mighty Stats
Enchant Gloves - Haste

Enchant Boots - Haste

Enchant Cloak - Intellect
Enchant Off hand - Superior Intellect
Scroll of Enchant Weapon - Agility (the lower level, essence of air one)
Mass disenchanting of jewellery for Cata mats
Disenchanting the Enchanted Thorium Blades for Greater Eternal Essences

Jewelcrafting
Bold / Brilliant / Delicate Inferno Ruby

Agile Shadowspirit Diamond

Burning Shadowspirit Diamond

Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond

Loads of the alicite/hessonite jewellery to d/enchant

Leatherworking

Shadowskin Gloves

Gem Studded Belt

Mammoth Mining Bags

Toughened Leather Gloves

Most of these have sold during the week but are not on my top list because they sell for lower amounts and/or less frequently but the profit margins are huge so they are still worth doing when you feel like it.

This week, I also managed to complete my Wintersaber Faction reputation grind & got my Frostsaber mount before the patch hit. I left my pally in Winterspring & as soon as I could log in after patch, I bought 10 of the new Winterspring Cub & mailed them to my banker. The first 3 sold for around 450g before anyone really caught on but I'd sold all of them by the end of the day with prices dropping to around 100g by the time I logged off.

By the end of the week, I was back to my familiar glyph routine. With so many bits to craft & source mats for, it's going to take a while to get into the swing of it but I'm sure, somewhere in that long list (and the ones that didn't make it this time!), is my next big venture.

I read so many blogs that I can't credit individual posts for the initial ideas that sparked my list but I do know that all that reading isn't a waste of time! If you're reading this as a novice gold maker then make some time & read those blogs too or use Flux's Gold Blog Directory to find all the information you could ever take in :)

What's Been Selling This Week?

Last week was probably one of my best ever weeks - shifting those Maelstrom Crystals certainly helped my numbers but I've continued with the cut gems albeit still on a fairly small scale.

I also had a brainwave & managed to work out roughly how much I'd spent in the week - 18k spent so that's 47k profit which puts me nicely over the 250k mark - next stop 500k please :-)

I mentioned the Rogues Decks last week & as you can see, they made in onto my leaderboard this week. The only reason the Swords Deck isn't on there is that I ran out of decks to sell! I'm going to hang on to my 'green' inks & try this again next month. I've always sold a few rogues &  swords decks but never this many - I guess there's an 'Insane' achievement underway for a few people on my server.

On the JC front - we had the nightstone daily 3 days in a row then 3 days of the zephyrite daily. The jasper daily hit on the weekend - I have trouble selling gems on the weekend due to very active undercutters but I suppose I can let them have a little bit of space to play!

It surprised me when I looked at these figures as I've actually not been paying so much attention to gold making this week - my little jc/inscription DK who sat at lvl 77 for about 6 weeks has suddenly grown on me & I hit lvl 85 on her on Saturday after a week of solid questing & I was actually brave enough to do some random dungeons.

My poor pally has been sitting around since she hit 85 as I was really embarrassed by her poor DPS - I've been struggling with the changes brought in pre-Cata but I spent a lot of time on various websites reading up, made a few changes & risked taking her through a dungeon last night too. I was pleasantly surprised when her DPS turned out to be about 2-3k higher than I expected - still not brilliant but it's a start in the right direction!

So for the coming week, I'm still data gathering for my blacksmithing project & I've got a shedload of medium leather so I'm going to try TSM on my LW'er. I've now got 2 plate wearers to gear up so I'll be questing & dungeoning for rep & gear for them & my rogue needs to get more guild rep too so I'm going to be busy this week!

So Close Now & A Nice Graph

I was hoping to report this last week but the AH has filled up with cheap Obsidium & Elementium ores so I just had to have them, setting this report back by a few days! But, as you can see, I finally made it to a nice round 200,000g. I've also got my DK to lvl 80 so she can do all the JC dailies now.

One of the few routines that I do stick to, is noting my daily gold balance on a spreadsheet & I thought you guys might find it interesting to see my progression over time. I've marked a few important dates - obviously the release of Cataclysm brought huge changes & increased prices but I think for me, the addition of Jewelcrafting to my repertoire has made a significant difference. You can see my DK's gold balance of 92k - that is all my JC & Inscription profits - I zero'd her balance to 5k when she levelled JC'ing then sent that 5k to my banker once my DK was self sufficient. I'm quite pleased with 92k over 2 months, I have to admit!

The other huge difference has been installing & using TSM for my glyph market. I've always dabbled in glyphs but TSM makes it so much quicker to cancel/repost & it highlights which glyphs to make. I've recently expanded my use of TSM to my Enchanter but only for the cata enchants for the time being. I levelled enchanting late in Wrath so I don't have many of the non-trained ones & I also haven't really built up knowledge on the twink enchants.

The one thing I didn't mark on the graph was my purchase of the new Agile Shadowspirit Diamond recipe around the 14th February - I thought originally that it would dent my figures but obviously it didn't - the sudden sharp incline at the end there, is a combination of meta gem sales & adding enchanting to my TSM set-up.

So where next? Well, my plan for today is to level tailoring on my Priest asap - I have most of the mats to well into the Wrath levels but Frostweave Cloth is so scarce, I may have to go farming. I hope I can make a bit of gold from the crafted items & I shall definitely be making netherweave & frostweave bags for all the points they can give! It may not be the 'most efficient use of cloth' way to level but it will certainly off-set some of the costs.

After that, well, it's just Mining/Blacksmithing on my lvl 60 warrior but that's going to take a bit longer.

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!

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

Yet More Obsidium Ore Prospecting!

So I've just about cleared the last bulk buy of Obsidium when I logged in this morning to find another sweet deal :) Yup, I am now the proud owner of another 1000 ores for a total cost of 2750g - that's just 2.75g each or 55g a stack.

This time, however, I've been really observant & kept notes of everything I've done to reduce this stack to profit. I decided to deal with the whole lot at once instead of in dribs & drabs to make record keeping easier. So what did I get? I got 53 carnelian, 35 zephyrite, 60 jasper, 47 alicite, 57 nightstones & 47 hessonite. I also got 17 of the rare quality gems but I'm ignoring them for the moment!

I'm still levelling my JC to 535 (yup, she's a draenai so gotta get extra 10 points) so the first thing I did was the Fire prism - that netted me an ocean sapphire & 2 demonseye to add to the lot above so I'm ignoring these too for now :)

I then started crafting - 30 Jasper rings (got 5 blues), 20 alicite pendants (got 2 blues) & 20 hessonite bands (got 2 blues). I sent the blues to my auctioneer & all the greens to my enchanter. I also made 15 carnelian spikes which went to my enchanter as well.


remaining stock

My disenchanting produced 39 lesser celestial essences (780g), 108 hypnotic dusts (864g) & 27 greater celestial essences (1620g) - all of which I am keeping for my enchanter to produce scrolls so I've valued these at today's prices if I had bought them with a total of 3264g.

At this point, I am already in profit - 2750g on ore, 3264g worth of enchanting mats & a small cost of 154g for the jeweller's settings means 360g profit at this stage. However I still have all of the nightstones (54), most of the zephyrites (32) and 27 jaspers as well as all the rare quality gems & all the blue quality jewellery to sell.

The nightstones & zephyrites will be used for JC dailies & sold at AH on those days. I may yet make Nightstone chokers to disenchant but even today they had an AH price of 25g each so I'll probably just watch the market & list when the prices rises. If all the blues sell, that's another 1382g (less AH fees of course).

I'm still getting JC cuts so for now, I'm just keeping my rare gems. I have an alchemist so I'll be sending some of the spare stock over to her to transmute to Shadowspirit diamonds as well. I'll be listing this stock over the next few days & keeping a tally so I'll try to report back soon (as long as I don't get this lot muddled with all the other stuff I keep producing/buying/selling!!

Can you see something I've missed? Let me know :)



The Second Dumbest Server on WoW maybe?

There has been a bit of a theme running through the gold blogs over the last couple of days, but Wes at CappedbyCata said it best in his I think I play on dumbest server in wow post! I logged on yesterday evening to find the AH on my server flooded by stacks of Obsidium Ore at just 50g per stack. I immediately bought 40 stacks before getting cold feet as I couldn't see the end of the listings! I passed word to my hubby who took his fill then logged an alt to go & let my guildies know. Two of my closest friends in guild managed to take their fill, as did several other guildies that I know about. Happy days all round then!

So why is my server possibly the second dumbest server on WoW? Well this morning I woke up extra early (about 6am ugh!) so I logged on as it's something quiet to do without disturbing sleeping beauty next door! What did I see? Over 250 listings of Obsidium Ore at less than 2.5g each! Luckily they weren't all in singles otherwise I may have passed but I just couldn't resist! I am now the proud owner of 90 stacks of Obsidium Ore at an average price of 50g per stack. I took out all the auctions below one guy who had his listed at 6.50 per ore & promptly relisted maybe 30 stacks in various multiples at 6.45g per ore.

 Besides watching the AH like a hawk for the next few hours, I foresee a LOT of prospecting, crafting & d/e'ing in my near future. I'll try to keep detailed notes and report back soon. It does follow nicely from my Obsidium Ore & Prospecting post and also I'll be keeping an eye on Mageshadow's post on Making Gold with Obsidium just to make sure I don't miss any tricks.