Quick Tips - Skinning & Herbing in Highmountain Zone - Legion

I started my herbing alt in Highmountain after checking the prices of herbs in the Auction House. Foxflower was selling at the highest price by a large margin so I figured that was a good a place as any to start my Legion adventures.

What I didn't know was that when you pick a Foxflower, there is a chance of it spawning a ghg fox which runs around nearby and drops more Foxflowers. All you have to do is run over them to collect them. Sometimes that's easier said than done though, especially if a mob is attacking you at the time!

I had 27 Foxflowers from one pick and at 50gold plus on the Auction House, that's a very profitable way of herbing!

Another thing I thought of as I was questing and arrived at Nesingwary's camp, was that I should have brought my skinner here too. As always, Hemet Nesingwary has quests that require a lot of killing of various animals in the vicinity so if you are a skinner, it's an area full of carcasses to be skinned. It's not the best zone for skinning so far and I'm a fair way into the questline but this small area should prove profitable whilst you are leveling through the zone. I wouldn't start my skinner in this area just for the skinning though as most of the mobs have been humanoid.

One other nice surprise I had so far in Legion was the value of vendor trash - after just an hour of questing, I vendored all the trash in my bags and made over 400 gold. I'm not saying this is a great way to make gold but as a simple result of questing, it's a nice little bonus.

So what do I think of Legion so far? Well, having got sucked in by the easy leveling during the Invasions, I went from one level 100 to 4 level 100's, a 95, two 90's and of course my new Demon Hunter at 98. There's also a level 100 boost waiting for a decision to be made - I'm leaning towards a Shaman for the boost as I don;t have one yet and although learning a new class at level 100 might prove difficult, it can't be any harder than playing a Rogue who was left at level 83 in Mists of Pandaria for the whole of the Warlords of Draenor expansion!

I'm enjoying the leveling process so far and I'm taking my time  - yes, I'm still spending a bit of time in the Auction House but for now, that's just a start and end of playtime activity. I'm not sure how much goldmaking I'll be doing but as I come across ideas and feel the urge to write, I'll be popping them here as quick tips. You can also keep up with my doings on the podcast - The Journal of Marcus Ty. Marcus talked me back to joining him for our bi-weekly chat about goldmaking in Legion!

If you have any tips or questions, feel free to drop me a comment below.

Timeless Isle - Island of Loot & Leather

Patch 5.4 finally arrived this week and as planned, I took all my crafting alts out to do some random killing in Pandaria to get the relevant new recipes (Hardened Magnificent Hide, Celestial Cloth, Balanced Trillium Ingot & Jard's Peculiar Energy Source) before taking my main over to the new Timeless Isle. Having been at work on Patch Day, I didn't get to the Isle until about 9pm and to say it was crazy busy would probably be the biggest understatement of the year! I didn't know that many people were still playing!

I probably made the best decision to do my craft/AH stuff before heading to the Isle though! There were only 4 Crafted Malevolent PvP items on the AH until I got there! My Paladin was only just about geared for the very first level of LFR so the mobs on the Isle are pretty hard work for her! With so many other players there though, I was pretty much able to just run around & pick up the treasure chests which yielded about 6 new pieces of item level 496 Epic armor items as well as shedloads of Timeless Coins, the new currency.

The following day I had booked as holiday - I expected to be busy playing all the new stuff in WoW but I have to be honest, I'm not really getting it! It's pretty hard work on a rubbish Paladin so I guess I need to take my even worse geared but seemingly unkillable DK over to do the questing type stuff! I did play for a few hours on Thursday but again, mainly running around picking up chests and skinning!

Oh my! The best thing about the Isle for me is the skinning! It is heaven to land on the beach & just see turtle carcasses stretching to the horizon! Skinning them also gives a few Timeless Coins each so although I won't be getting my 50,000 coin trinket anytime soon, I am picking up bagloads of free Exotic Leather! The other side effect of this is that there is loads of cheap Exotic Leather on the Auction House. I've been buying it up whenever I see it at 40g a stack or less.

Now apart from the fact that I need 2 x Magnificent Hides for 2 Leatherworkers each day for the Hardened Magnificent Hide cooldown (for the next 45+ days!), I've also been watching the Magnificent Hide market for a while & it rarely if ever, drops below 150g per Hide. I'm thinking that if I can control the availability of cheap Exotic Leather, I can probably control the price of Magnificent Hides too. If I have too many, I can just sell them at 150g or more & make an easy 50g profit each!

I'll be doing my usual What's Been Selling post on Monday but I will say now that the gold hasn't been flowing anywhere near as fast as I had hoped. It is flowing though so I'll tell you more about that next time. How has the new stuff affected your goldmaking? Too busy playing or are you raking it in at the Auction House?

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Where to Farm Large Fangs

Arathi Highlands

As part of my new series on farming for hard to find on Auction House items, I went back to the same old Lowbie Leatherworking post. One of my best lowbie selling items was the Barbaric Bracers & when I can find Large Fangs on the Auction House, they still sell pretty well even now.

As with Spider's Silk, these were always hard to find but since so many zones & beasts levels have changed with the reworking of the Vanilla zones, it looks like there is only one type of beastie that drops these now. Off I went to the Arathi Highlands, just over the bridge from the Wetlands. The Highland Fleshstalkers (level 28/29) are pretty close together but there aren't a huge number of them. I easily cleared the whole lot in about 5 minutes on my level 81 hunter & I was having to wait for respawns. With such a low drop rate, after 30 minutes of killing & waiting, I had only 2 Large Fangs but my bags were almost full with Raptor Hide, Raptor Eggs & Raptor Meat.

The other downside is that my Hunter is not a skinner - I'm sure the medium leather would have been a great gold boost for my 30 minutes farm time & perhaps they would have respawned just a smidge faster too.

Overall, I was fairly disappointed and I certainly wouldn't recommend farming these for any gold making activity. However, if you are questing in this area or leveling your skinning then perhaps concentrating on the Highland Fleshstalkers for a little while will give you a small gold boost in the process.

Having said that, farming Large Fangs to make a set of Barbaric Bracers for your own character is perhaps not as bad a you might have feared. Waiting for them to turn up on the Auction House is going to take a long while & your baby alt will have leveled way past the need for Barbaric Bracers while you get the materials together.

Scavenging For Gold

When I started writing this post, it was to be a follow-up to my Low Level Leatherworking post but as I delved deeper into the numbers, it became quite obvious to me that Leatherworking on it's own is not quite as profitable as I'd originally thought! If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I dropped mining & picked up skinning again on my leatherworking pally as I was finding it expensive to max my skills using bought leather.

Now I'm guessing but I think a lot of players dropped skinning as they neared Wrath max LW'ing because the top level items didn't actually use that much leather. With the release of Cata, top level LW recipes once again increased the need for Savage leather but I'm not sure many players went & relevelled skinning.

The other change that seems to have affected leather supplies is the ability to track herbs & ores at the same time - the old advice was to put 2 gathering skills on a new alt - usually herbing/skinning or mining/skinning but with the ability to track herb & ores at the same time - most people now recommend herbing/mining for a new alt - further reducing the number of skinners out there.

My original post mentioned 4 low level recipes you could make for profit but I've since added a few more to my repertoire, including :-

White Leather Jerkin - 8 light leather

Swift Boots - heavy leather, swiftness potion & thick spider's silk

Black Dragonscale Breastplate - 25 rugged leather, 25 black dragonscale & 1 cured rugged hide

Shadowskin Gloves - 8 thick leather, 8 shadow silk & 4 cured heavy hides

Blackstorm Leggings - 10 rugged leather, 2 cured thick hides & 8 breath of wind

Warbear Harness - 28 rugged leather & 12 warbear leather

So I've added thick spider's silk, black dragonscale, shadow silk, breath of wind, warbear leather & swiftness potion to my snatch/dealfinder list & I pick them up for silvers whenever I see them. Breath of wind is probably the most expensive but as a rule, I've not paid more than 4g each for them over the last 2 weeks. I'm not able to find all the mats at my prices all the time so I buy them as & when I see them cheap & let my stock build up a little. Once I have enough mats, I craft a few items & post them for sale.

But this week I've been having trouble getting rugged & thick leather - there's been virtually none on the AH most times I've looked & if there was some, it was at silly high prices - as high as 8-10g per piece!

This is where your scavenging skills come in! It's perfect if you have low capital too as the only outlay is time & perhaps a few flight path fees if you don't have flying yet.

If you haven't found it before, wow-professions.com is a wonderful resource for levelling any profession - it's also great to give you an idea of where to find each type of leather - I'm not suggesting to go out to kill stuff just for the leather mind you, oh no - we're gonna be a bit sneaky! Say you need borean leather - well, we both know that Sholazar Basin is full of creatures being killed regularly so type in /who sholazar basin & if there are more than 2 or 3 players of the appropriate level there, it may be worth following them around as they quest to tidy up behind them. If you're lucky, they won't be skinners themselves or you may find some opposite faction players levelling there too - it's all 'free' leather for your scavenging pleasure :)

The one tip I would give is to hang back a bit though - I've found that some players leave a bit of trash loot on the carcass once they realise you're skinning their kills - it makes the carcass un-skinnable :(

The most obvious place for scavenging is Tol Barad just after your faction wins - everyone dashes over there to do their dailies & you can easily pick up 3 stacks from the crocs in 10 minutes or so if you don't have much competition.

I'm currently working on some reputations & my Loremaster achievement so I pick my zone depending on what leather I need. You could do the same or you could pick your zone & skin whilst waiting on the dungeon queues. Either way, you're not standing around in Stormwind or Orgrimmar wasting time, after all 'Time is money, friend'.

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!