Some WoW Downtime + Updates

Just a quick update. I haven't been playing much WoW in the last week. I blame BioWare for this. I started playing Mass Effect 2 and put over 20 hours in last week. I played the game and put about 10-12 hours in when it first came out last year but stopped playing. When I tried to resume that game I didn't remember the story so I started over. Man that game is good. BioWare + SciFi is a damn good match. If you played the first Mass Effect but got frustrated by the constant inventory management and the Mako driving sequences, give ME2 a try. They streamlined the hell out of the game and got rid of all the annoying things from the first one. It also runs smooth and is stable on PC, unlike the first one in which I experienced a lot of audio glitches and crashing. I also started playing Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend. I still need to finish Red Dead Redemption as well. Too many great games, not enough time!

So yeah...catching up on other games requires WoW downtime. I did play a little bit but really have nothing major to report other than I have nearly capped Alchemy and Enchanting on my priest and hunter respectively (both professions at 440 currently). Played a little bit yesterday and dinged 76 on my priest. This is my fifth grind from 70-80 and each time if feels like it gets slower and slower. Even with the 20% bonus experience granted by my heirloom gear it's still a pain in the ass.

Which got me thinking.

For Project Tauren Shaman I'm thinking about transferring my orc hunter from his current realm to Doomhammer, where my shaman resides. The reason is because my horde has an heirloom set and the thought of leveling that shaman without the experience bonus makes me shudder. The hunter heirlooms aren't perfectly itemized for a shaman but they will work out okay I think. It's about the experience bonus anyway. Yes, I'm spoiled by those damn heirlooms! If I end up doing this I'll be sure to include the details the next time I updated Project Tauren Shaman.

Back to alchemy and enchanting briefly. Been making some decent gold selling flasks and meta gems during raid nights. The flasks are profitable only because I had some herbs stockpiled so I didn't have to purchase any up front. I don't think I'll be selling flasks regularly as it's a pretty competitve market with lots of reposting and undercutting. That and I'm transmute mastery. The mats to make meta gems are cheap and when the transmute mastery procs and I get a two for one, that's just extra free gold in my pocket. I post my gems at really odd times, like super late at night or first thing in the morning when I wake up. Seems to work. Having success selling mostly Austere Earthsiege Diamonds, Chaotic Skyflare Diamonds, Relentless Earthsiege Diamonds and Ember Skyflare Diamonds. I sell gems at 12 hours to keep posting fees minimal in case I need to cancel and repost.

Enchanting wise, I sold a few scrolls of Enchant Cloak - Titanweave and made a few hundred gold and have been spending dream shards trying to pick up profitable enchanting recipes, such as Enchant 2H Weapon - Massacre. I haven't looked into buying up mats and selling them on the market just yet, but will do so soon and see how profitable and competitive it is.

Okay so that wasn't a "quick" update after all.

A Scribe's Tale: Farming vs. Purchasing

It's no secret that a great place to farm Northrend herbs is in Sholazar Basin. I used to do this on my Death Knight scribe quite regularly. I'd farm for an hour or so, mill the herbs and craft various inscription stuff to sell on the AH. Then I learned on a fellow gold blogger's blog (sorry, I don't remember who) that Weapon and Armor Vellum III are great sellers on the AH, so I focused all my farmed materials on the crafting of those. My short time farming would usually allow me to sell a stack or two of each, and they sell fast on my realm. Usually within a matter of a couple hours.

I realized three things pretty quickly:

1) There's a lot of demand for the vellums if they are selling that fast, which means there must be a lot of enchanters selling their wares on the AH.

2) The number of sellers selling vellums on the AH is super low compared to all the people selling enchants. There's room for me.

3) Farming is too time intensive to keep up with the demand of the vellums.

So I went about and started adding herbs to my snatch list in Auctioneer, hoping to get as many stacks of herbs on the cheap to mill and turn into inks of the sea, which is the ink needed to craft the vellums. And it has paid off. Sure, it's more of an upfront investment to purchase all the herbs instead of farming them, but think of all the hours I would lose if I farmed herbs for one hour a day! The sheer volume of vellums I can stockpile and sell results in so much profit that the cost of purchasing the herbs is like dropping a penny into a wishing well.

Here's some things I've learned about selling vellums on my realm. Your realm may vary, it's your job to pick up on the trends:

1) I find that selling them in stacks of 5 works best for me. The few other people selling vellums regularly seem to do it in full stacks fo 20 or one at a time. Offer something different than your competitors.

2) Weapon vellums are much more profitable on my realm, probably due to there being more people selling weapon enchants than armor enchants. Still, both are profitable and its a good idea to sell both.

3) They sell pretty well 24/7, but they sell extremely fast on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

To summarize, farming can be profitiable in short bursts and it's a great way for a beginner gold maker (which I still consider myself to be) to familiarize him or herself with the economy and what's worth what. I believe everybody should farm a little here and there when it's convenient. But purchasing and stockpiling your mats on the AH gives you much more time to craft and sell, and that means more money in your pocket. The benefit of stockpiling is that when all your stuff has sold on the AH, you just grab more out of the bank and restock, whereas with farming you have to drop everything, fly to wherever, spend time farming, etc.

Hello JMTC Readers :)

First of all thanks to Markco over at Just My Two Copper for the link to my blog. Second, welcome new readers. Well I guess that would be readers period, as you're probably the first. This blog is fairly new - only a couple months old in fact.

Here's a quick overview of what this blog is about. My goal in WoW is to have every profession maxed out and get gold capped eventually. I'm also doing a project where I level my first Horde toon to 80 before cataclysm comes out, so that I can see Azeroth from Horde eyes before things change forever. The secondary objective of this is to see how much money I can make leveling to 80.

I call it Project Tauren Shaman and you can read about it here. For a quick summary so far my Tauren Shaman is level 20 and has 340 gold.

A little update on my first goal of getting every profession capped. I recently got Blacksmithing and Herbalism to 80. My level 80 hunter has been slowly grinding out Enchanting and she is now at 430. I'll probably get lazy and just buy the mats needed to level to 450 on the auction house. Speaking of, the last 10 points in blacksmithing required nearly 1000 gold in AH purchased mats. The good news is those 10 points let me make 10 Titansteel Shield Walls, which netted me nearly 5000 gold once they all sold. (Most of them sold Tuesday - Thursday on my realm, which is basically raiding time) This speaks volumes about how investing in materials in the AH (versus wasting hours and hours farming the same mats) and turning them into products people want can net you huge profits. Farming does have its place, but turning 1000g into 5000g in just a few minutes of crafting time is a no brainer.

Back to my professions. I now have the following crafting professions maxed (all gathering professions are maxed, as is cooking and fishing on one character): Enchanting, Jewelcrafting, Inscription. As mentioned earlier I'm nearly there with enchanting and my 73 priest has Alchemy up to 395 I believe. My lowly level 40 mage has tailoring up to 300 so that will be my focus soon. After that I'll work on leveling up a leatherworker.

Here's a quick gold tip: If you have more than one herbalist toon you probably have a surplus of random herbs stashed in somebody's bank. At least I did. I needed to free up some bank slots so I sent dozens of stacks of random herbs off to my scribe to have them milled. Once everything was milled I turned all the various inks I ended up with into random glyphs, crafting two or three apiece. I also ended up crafting a couple rare quality off-hands which sold pretty quick on the AH, turning some dusty old herbs that had just been sitting around doing nothing into a couple hundred gold. The glyphs I stashed away in my bank toons guild vault for Cataclysm. Why? Once the expansion hits people are going to be buying out every possible glyph for their toons because of the recently announced changes to the glyphing system. Sure, the glyph market will be saturated, but the demand for every glyph in existence will also be through the roof and that will drive prices up.

Could I have made some decent money NOW by just selling the herbs? Sure. But I will make a lot more later by converting them all into glyphs and just having a little patience. Thanks for reading.

Reselling Books of Glyph Mastery

Just a quick gold tip for my readership (currently 0).

In the words of Alice Cooper, "school's out for summer". I've noticed the change on my realm as well as the economy, as more players are active. And with that activity are more people leveling, questing and grinding/farming. This means the auction house is being flooded with more materials, thus driving down costs as sellers undercut eachother. This is currently affecting the prices of Books of Glyph Mastery on my realm.

The regular going price for them on my realm is around 30-45 gold depending on how many are being sold on the AH, but with the recent surge in activity I routinely find them for around 13-15 gold.

The other night I found six such books of glyph mastery, each for 13-14 gold. All the rest were listed for 20+ gold with the highest priced ones listed for around 40 gold. I decided to wait until not so many were on the AH (at the time there were 2 full pages of listings) and resell them later. Sure enough, a couple days later there were less than 10 listed, all 45 gold and up. I relisted the six I had bought earlier for 43 gold and they sold within a day, netting me around a 300% return on investment.

So keep an eye out for books of glyph mastery on your realm and add them to your auctioneer snatch lists.