We all know this situation: You finished up a quest, look at the rewards and decide nothing in there is worth anything to you so you just want to take whatever vendors for the most gold.
Even though the situation has become rare sometimes we don't have an addon readily available that will tell us what vendors for the most (usually after a patch comes by and makes your addons go up in smoke).
And since I couldn't find a decent listing I decided to simply figure out the basics myself and come up with the below tables of what sells for the most at vendors.
Before we dive into the actual table it's worth noting that the value of an item in terms of gold is mostly based both on stats and on ARMOR value (DPS in case of weapons). Since most quests give items of approximately the same item level it's rarely worth looking at how much value stats add to a specific item.
As a result this leaves armor as primary determination (we'll get to weapons in a bit) and the general rule of thumb is: The more armor, the more gold.
This already pre-determines the first thing you can look at when determining what's worth more. From most to least:
Plate
Mail
Leather
Cloth
Now besides the obvious list there's another that determines value based on type. I could go into the nitty gritty of things but in the end it's based on observations over a day's worth of auctioning and vendoring and some data I found regarding calculating the armor value of an item. Again from most valuable to least valuable:
Chest
Legs
Head
Shoulders
Feet
Hands
Waist
Wrist
Back
In case of armor this means a plate chest is worth significantly more than a mail chest but conversely a mail chest is going to be worth more than some plate boots.
Deciding between close matches is going to stay hard without an addon like auctioneer but in the end it's purely a matter of armor calculations. Generally though if you just cut the table in blocks of 3 (or so) then you can assume that a mail item from block 1 is going to be worth more than plate items in block 2.
It doesn't always work that way but 80% of the time you should get a better result than just picking up whatever plate item is in the list. When in doubt simply look at the value listed under armor and pick the highest.
Weapon gold value is calculated purely on their DPS values. That means the higher DPS the more gold a particular item is worth. And you guessed it: that makes 2handers of any kind top of the foodchain when it comes to making money. Overall the table looks mostly like this from most to least:
2handed
1handed
Wands
guns, bows and crossbows
Thrown and off-hand
Knowing that the only real question remaining is how the weapon gold values fit in with the armor type gear.
Here is what I came up with:
(weapon) 2 handed [staffs are top of the pool here]
(weapon) 1h anded
(weapon) Wands, guns, (x)bows
(Plate) chest, legs
(Mail) chest, legs
(Plate) head, shoulders, feet
(Leather) chest, legs
(Mail) head, shoulders, feet
(weapon)Thrown
(cloth) chest, legs
(Leather) legs, head, shoulders
(weapon)Off-hand
(Plate) wrist, waist, hands
(cloth) cloaks, head, shoulders, feet
(Mail) wrist, waist, hands
(Leather) wrist, waist, hands
(Cloth) wrist, waist, hands
I would like to ephasize at this point that these are ESTIMATES! Working off of this table has worked quite well for me so far but if you really want the most out of your quest reward choices you should probably look into downloading an appropriate addon.
But what about trinkets, shields, rings and other shiny things?
Currently I have no idea. After compiling the armor and weapon table I honestly had enough of compiling the data and I am still quietly hopeful that I'll just find a full list online somewhere.
Generally it seems that rings and necklaces are at the same level as leather legs, heads and shoulders. Trinkets I still have no idea and shields are right up there with other top of the line plate items (And thus generally a good pick).
Well lets hope this will be of some help to someone somewhere otherwise I just wasted an hour or two scribbling down numbers on a piece of paper ;).
Showing posts with label gold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gold. Show all posts
Monday, June 8, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Is endgame gold worthless?
I did inventory the other day. Outside of the infinite amounts of junk I have smeared out all over my alts I noticed that I had about 10k in gold laying around.
With my hunter, mage and death knight still a ways away from level 77 I quietly acknowledged the fact that I wouldn't have to worry about where the next 2 or even 3 epic flyers would come from.
In fact this time around I wouldn't even have to liquidate any of my assets and can reasonably expect to have another 5k gold through prodding around on the AH for maybe an hour every couple of days long before any of my 3 higher level alts gets to 77.
So looking at the current state of my characters and looking at purely what they 'need' in riding skills to get epic riding and epic flying I am looking at a grand total of almost 50k gold for all my alts left to gather (10 chars in total).
That 50k gold includes everything all my characters could ever want from riding and that is assuming you see epic flying as a requirement rather than a nice to have.
50k definitely sounds like a lot... but given that I already have 10k of that number and it took me about a month with very little effort on the AH to get 5k I could realistically achieve the 50k mark by the end of the year without putting any significant effort into making gold whatsoever. Significantly less if I just devoted a month or two to gold making activities.
I considered putting effort into the gold making process but then it hit me: Assuming you've already bought all the epic flyers you could possibly need and your professions are maxed what is there really left to buy?
A mammoth?
A chopper?
A couple of flimsy rings?
A gigantique bag?
Soap on a rope?
Some other random vendor stuff?
Most of everything else is either tied into some kind of badge/seal/token/honor/rating system or doesn't require gold to get but instead requires effort a.k.a. time. Worse still there is nothing that would allow me to trade in my gold to save some time in that regard.
So what does one buy once one has bought all the 'essentials'?
There's no gold sink big enough that would keep taking your gold and paying you off in a way that you would want to repeat it indefinitely (i.e. gold -> honor might be a start).
Repair and travel cost barely factor in at this point. Sure repair costs can be painful if you have no gold income from anywhere and you run instances all day but that's really a choice you make when you choose that particular lifestyle.
Gear comes from instances, from badges or from honor and arena rating none of which I can buy with gold. Titles come from achievements which translates to effort rather than gold and anything cosmetically interesting seems to come from an obscure trading card game which only kind of comes from gold... if you were allowed to sell gold for cash.
That indeed leaves a rather paltry selection of mounts, rings and arbitrary vendor junk...
So depending on the amount of alts you have there is actually a virtual cap on how much gold you can have before it becomes essentially nothing more than a little number on the bottom of your main bag. And even that number will stop climbing at 2^31 copper because even blizzard thinks that by the time you have that much gold you really should quit or seek help or some such thing.
So, did I miss something or is endgame gold really worthless?
With my hunter, mage and death knight still a ways away from level 77 I quietly acknowledged the fact that I wouldn't have to worry about where the next 2 or even 3 epic flyers would come from.
In fact this time around I wouldn't even have to liquidate any of my assets and can reasonably expect to have another 5k gold through prodding around on the AH for maybe an hour every couple of days long before any of my 3 higher level alts gets to 77.
So looking at the current state of my characters and looking at purely what they 'need' in riding skills to get epic riding and epic flying I am looking at a grand total of almost 50k gold for all my alts left to gather (10 chars in total).
That 50k gold includes everything all my characters could ever want from riding and that is assuming you see epic flying as a requirement rather than a nice to have.
50k definitely sounds like a lot... but given that I already have 10k of that number and it took me about a month with very little effort on the AH to get 5k I could realistically achieve the 50k mark by the end of the year without putting any significant effort into making gold whatsoever. Significantly less if I just devoted a month or two to gold making activities.
I considered putting effort into the gold making process but then it hit me: Assuming you've already bought all the epic flyers you could possibly need and your professions are maxed what is there really left to buy?
A mammoth?
A chopper?
A couple of flimsy rings?
A gigantique bag?
Soap on a rope?
Some other random vendor stuff?
Most of everything else is either tied into some kind of badge/seal/token/honor/rating system or doesn't require gold to get but instead requires effort a.k.a. time. Worse still there is nothing that would allow me to trade in my gold to save some time in that regard.
So what does one buy once one has bought all the 'essentials'?
There's no gold sink big enough that would keep taking your gold and paying you off in a way that you would want to repeat it indefinitely (i.e. gold -> honor might be a start).
Repair and travel cost barely factor in at this point. Sure repair costs can be painful if you have no gold income from anywhere and you run instances all day but that's really a choice you make when you choose that particular lifestyle.
Gear comes from instances, from badges or from honor and arena rating none of which I can buy with gold. Titles come from achievements which translates to effort rather than gold and anything cosmetically interesting seems to come from an obscure trading card game which only kind of comes from gold... if you were allowed to sell gold for cash.
That indeed leaves a rather paltry selection of mounts, rings and arbitrary vendor junk...
So depending on the amount of alts you have there is actually a virtual cap on how much gold you can have before it becomes essentially nothing more than a little number on the bottom of your main bag. And even that number will stop climbing at 2^31 copper because even blizzard thinks that by the time you have that much gold you really should quit or seek help or some such thing.
So, did I miss something or is endgame gold really worthless?
Monday, April 6, 2009
patch 3.1 (gold making) preparations
There's been a lot of chatter about the 3.1 patch, the next content patch and there has been a lot of speculation on when we can actually expect to see the patch on the live realms.
On that topic MMOChampion and various other sources have reported that the noblegarden (easter) event in wow has been undergoing significant changes in 3.1 adding quite a few new achievements for the celebration.
Considering the feverish work on the noblegarden event and corresponding achievements it's reasonable to assume that these changes are intended to go-live for this year's easter celebration rather than next years.
The noblegarden event according to the ptr's in-game calendar is scheduled to start on the 26ths of this month of our lord Medivh (or elune if you are of that persuasion).
While the date isn't carved into stone (few blizzard PTR changes are) it's very much reasonable to assume that in order for the event to start in a more or less timely matter we can expect patch 3.1 to hit a few days before that date at the latest.
So that leaves us about 2 weeks of preparation for the 3.1 patch.
Preparation indeed. 3.1 will bring new content and with new content the raiding scene will suddenly spring to live again coming out of the drudgery of endless naxxramas runs strapping on their best buff-foods/ flasks and whatnot to go out hunting the newest perils of ulduar.
And that my friends is where the money is. Demand for high-end consumables should shoot up in the first few days / weeks of the new content patch after which we will most likely observe a (temporary) increase in enchanting requirements.
So that means if you're looking to score a quick bucketload of gold now is the time to buy up all those cheap materials and go to crafting various raid consumables in the faint hope that that stuff will sell after the patch hits.
It better... otherwise I'll end up still sitting on my 1.5k northern spices and I'd have to dump those on the market for cut throat prices (Although there is a certain charm to a level 80 warlock bank toon pissing off whomever is playing the food market for a few weeks). I wish I could convert 10 northern spices to 1 cooking award, oddly enough even reasoning with the vendor doesn't make it so.
On that topic MMOChampion and various other sources have reported that the noblegarden (easter) event in wow has been undergoing significant changes in 3.1 adding quite a few new achievements for the celebration.
Considering the feverish work on the noblegarden event and corresponding achievements it's reasonable to assume that these changes are intended to go-live for this year's easter celebration rather than next years.
The noblegarden event according to the ptr's in-game calendar is scheduled to start on the 26ths of this month of our lord Medivh (or elune if you are of that persuasion).
While the date isn't carved into stone (few blizzard PTR changes are) it's very much reasonable to assume that in order for the event to start in a more or less timely matter we can expect patch 3.1 to hit a few days before that date at the latest.
So that leaves us about 2 weeks of preparation for the 3.1 patch.
Preparation indeed. 3.1 will bring new content and with new content the raiding scene will suddenly spring to live again coming out of the drudgery of endless naxxramas runs strapping on their best buff-foods/ flasks and whatnot to go out hunting the newest perils of ulduar.
And that my friends is where the money is. Demand for high-end consumables should shoot up in the first few days / weeks of the new content patch after which we will most likely observe a (temporary) increase in enchanting requirements.
So that means if you're looking to score a quick bucketload of gold now is the time to buy up all those cheap materials and go to crafting various raid consumables in the faint hope that that stuff will sell after the patch hits.
It better... otherwise I'll end up still sitting on my 1.5k northern spices and I'd have to dump those on the market for cut throat prices (Although there is a certain charm to a level 80 warlock bank toon pissing off whomever is playing the food market for a few weeks). I wish I could convert 10 northern spices to 1 cooking award, oddly enough even reasoning with the vendor doesn't make it so.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
'Old World' Valuables
With my job encroaching upon my valuable playtime I have resorted to the one thing a wow player can do in times where time is short: playing the AH.
The ah however doesn't really make for any exciting tales but I did notice a trend that I figured you might like to know about.
With the masses of unwashed deathknights having taken care of most of their outland levelling and even the achievement mongers having cleaned out the last parts of outland things have gotten quiet in ye ole outland.
So quiet in fact that it has begun affecting prices for outland materials. Sure sure, the demand isn't what it used to be and neither are the prices but then again the supply isn't exactly glorious either.
Primal fire prices are holding steady at a the 10g a piece mark on my server which, considering the relative ease of farming these on a level 80 character just goes to show that what once was just plain 'old' now has antique value.
Many azerothian trading materials seem to have been enjoying decent prices as well, a stack of thorium ore goes for more than a stack of saronite bars will go on my server and a lot of other trade materials are suffering from a lack of farmers and a continual demand from the profession levellers.
In other words it's good times on the ah. I am +2 epic flyers in what has been at most a pair of month of very little effort doing this and that very little of which being farming.
So if you're looking to make some quick gold and you haven't gotten around to cleaning all those alt's banks out yet, now might just be the time to find a few hundred gold hidden away in some old bank slot.
The ah however doesn't really make for any exciting tales but I did notice a trend that I figured you might like to know about.
With the masses of unwashed deathknights having taken care of most of their outland levelling and even the achievement mongers having cleaned out the last parts of outland things have gotten quiet in ye ole outland.
So quiet in fact that it has begun affecting prices for outland materials. Sure sure, the demand isn't what it used to be and neither are the prices but then again the supply isn't exactly glorious either.
Primal fire prices are holding steady at a the 10g a piece mark on my server which, considering the relative ease of farming these on a level 80 character just goes to show that what once was just plain 'old' now has antique value.
Many azerothian trading materials seem to have been enjoying decent prices as well, a stack of thorium ore goes for more than a stack of saronite bars will go on my server and a lot of other trade materials are suffering from a lack of farmers and a continual demand from the profession levellers.
In other words it's good times on the ah. I am +2 epic flyers in what has been at most a pair of month of very little effort doing this and that very little of which being farming.
So if you're looking to make some quick gold and you haven't gotten around to cleaning all those alt's banks out yet, now might just be the time to find a few hundred gold hidden away in some old bank slot.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Gold 101 - Predicting future trends
In today's installment of gold 101 we're going to tap into our spiritual clairvoyant side to see if we can see the future and make predictions based on our visions.
Making gold is 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration or in other words a good idea is worth more than working your rear-end off trying to flip and bid all day long.
But good ideas are hard to come by and even full time bloggers that blog about nothing else but how to make gold in wow will rarely make a post on their blog saying: if you sell x you will be able to turn a profit.
Besides obvious differences between server economies the reason for this is simple: If I reveal a niche market on a blog then chances are that people will read my blog post (even though that's pretty unlikely with noobding). If the knowledge becomes commonplace then everyone will want a piece of the pie and beforelong the pie will be gone (i.e. the market for x will collapse).
Call it greedy, call it healthy business, call it what you will but the fact remains is that people will rarely tell you exactly what steps to take to make gold (they'd rather write guides and sell those for real money see?)
But even for the completely uninspired there is one solid strategy that will work 90% of the time; And more importantly it even announces itself to you when the time comes.
Case in point: I and a fair share of other people knew that the prices for frozen orbs would go up, we knew the dream shard prices would go up slightly as well and we also knew that the prices for eternals would slowly but surely approach each other, a trend that is certain to continue.
We also knew a few other things about how the market would develop.
(Un)fortunately none of us are clairvoyant, instead we predicted a trend based on one simple thing: Patch notes
Every now and then Blizzard will roll out a patch to fix bugs, implement some changes, add new content or re-balance existing elements in the game. Before any patch is rolled out the changes are usually splattered all over the wow forums, discussed extensively and very much visible on either the PTR (public test realm) or through other channels.
So in essence, before every change to the game is implemented we know (to a certain extend) what is going to happen. We can literally see the future unfolding before our very eyes... and that future always has its roads paved in gold just waiting for someone to stroll by and pick it up.
Normally we'd look at the patch notes for the next patch and predict trends based on that but 3.0.9 or 3.1 are still too vague to make predictions on so lets take a look at 3.0.8 and see what you could've done (useful no?) before the patch went live:
The trick here is to skip the class changes (unless you're interested) and focus on anything that could be crafting related which is usually found in the professions section. So let's take a look at a few sections of the 3.0.8 patch notes and note my comments:
Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).
Result: This could very well mean that if mobs give full reputation at any level that the value of sellable reputation items may drop.
Glyphs
Glyph of Conflagrate now makes it so your Conflagrate spell no longer consumes the Immolate or Shadowflame spell from the target.
Glyph of Death and Decay has been changed to grant 20% additional damage instead of its current effect.
Glyph of Hammer of Justice: Now increases range by 5 yards instead of increasing stun duration.
Glyph of Invisibility duration has been increased.
Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
Glyph of Holy Light now affects friendly targets in a larger radius.
Glyph of Horn of Winter now increases the duration by 60 sec.
Glyph of Spirit of Redemption: Now increases the duration of the effect by a fixed amount of 6 seconds.
Glyph of turn evil now also increases the cooldown of your turn evil spell by 8 sec.
Result: As some glyphs are now more useful and other less useful the prices for those glyphs will adjust accordingly.
The Cooldown on Transmute: Titanium has been reduced to 1 day, and the materials required have been simplified.
Result: Cheaper titanium across the board.
Increased the materials required to make several recipes that require cobalt.
Result: Cobalt prices will go up a notch and stay there.
Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.
Result: Infinite dust prices may drop a tiny amount (still needed for a lot of other things) but dream shard prices will increase.
Jessica Sellers, a new vendor in the Dalaran inscription shop, will sell most inscription inks for the cost of one Ink of the Sea. She also sells Snowfall Ink for multiple Inks of the Sea.
Result: Ink of the sea cost will go up a notch.
The epic leg armor patches now require a Frozen Orb in addition to their other materials
Result: Higher frozen orb prices.
I could probably go on with a few more points and other notes in the patch can also be indirectly responsible for a shift in prices for mats but I think you get the basic idea.
Predicting trends based on patch notes is relatively easy and even though the results aren't always what you expected them to be (in my case the dream shard prices only went up by about 4g each, which is nice but not exceptional) you will generally be able to get some profit here and there (I still managed to make 200g off of selling dream shards after the patch).
So next time the big hooblah starts about new content this, new patch that and the blogosphere start filling up with PTR patch notes again take another look and read beyond your own classes' specific changes... who knows maybe the next patch will make you a whole lot wealthier.
Making gold is 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration or in other words a good idea is worth more than working your rear-end off trying to flip and bid all day long.
But good ideas are hard to come by and even full time bloggers that blog about nothing else but how to make gold in wow will rarely make a post on their blog saying: if you sell x you will be able to turn a profit.
Besides obvious differences between server economies the reason for this is simple: If I reveal a niche market on a blog then chances are that people will read my blog post (even though that's pretty unlikely with noobding). If the knowledge becomes commonplace then everyone will want a piece of the pie and beforelong the pie will be gone (i.e. the market for x will collapse).
Call it greedy, call it healthy business, call it what you will but the fact remains is that people will rarely tell you exactly what steps to take to make gold (they'd rather write guides and sell those for real money see?)
But even for the completely uninspired there is one solid strategy that will work 90% of the time; And more importantly it even announces itself to you when the time comes.
Case in point: I and a fair share of other people knew that the prices for frozen orbs would go up, we knew the dream shard prices would go up slightly as well and we also knew that the prices for eternals would slowly but surely approach each other, a trend that is certain to continue.
We also knew a few other things about how the market would develop.
(Un)fortunately none of us are clairvoyant, instead we predicted a trend based on one simple thing: Patch notes
Every now and then Blizzard will roll out a patch to fix bugs, implement some changes, add new content or re-balance existing elements in the game. Before any patch is rolled out the changes are usually splattered all over the wow forums, discussed extensively and very much visible on either the PTR (public test realm) or through other channels.
So in essence, before every change to the game is implemented we know (to a certain extend) what is going to happen. We can literally see the future unfolding before our very eyes... and that future always has its roads paved in gold just waiting for someone to stroll by and pick it up.
Normally we'd look at the patch notes for the next patch and predict trends based on that but 3.0.9 or 3.1 are still too vague to make predictions on so lets take a look at 3.0.8 and see what you could've done (useful no?) before the patch went live:
The trick here is to skip the class changes (unless you're interested) and focus on anything that could be crafting related which is usually found in the professions section. So let's take a look at a few sections of the 3.0.8 patch notes and note my comments:
Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).
Result: This could very well mean that if mobs give full reputation at any level that the value of sellable reputation items may drop.
Glyphs
Glyph of Conflagrate now makes it so your Conflagrate spell no longer consumes the Immolate or Shadowflame spell from the target.
Glyph of Death and Decay has been changed to grant 20% additional damage instead of its current effect.
Glyph of Hammer of Justice: Now increases range by 5 yards instead of increasing stun duration.
Glyph of Invisibility duration has been increased.
Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
Glyph of Holy Light now affects friendly targets in a larger radius.
Glyph of Horn of Winter now increases the duration by 60 sec.
Glyph of Spirit of Redemption: Now increases the duration of the effect by a fixed amount of 6 seconds.
Glyph of turn evil now also increases the cooldown of your turn evil spell by 8 sec.
Result: As some glyphs are now more useful and other less useful the prices for those glyphs will adjust accordingly.
The Cooldown on Transmute: Titanium has been reduced to 1 day, and the materials required have been simplified.
Result: Cheaper titanium across the board.
Increased the materials required to make several recipes that require cobalt.
Result: Cobalt prices will go up a notch and stay there.
Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.
Result: Infinite dust prices may drop a tiny amount (still needed for a lot of other things) but dream shard prices will increase.
Jessica Sellers, a new vendor in the Dalaran inscription shop, will sell most inscription inks for the cost of one Ink of the Sea. She also sells Snowfall Ink for multiple Inks of the Sea.
Result: Ink of the sea cost will go up a notch.
The epic leg armor patches now require a Frozen Orb in addition to their other materials
Result: Higher frozen orb prices.
I could probably go on with a few more points and other notes in the patch can also be indirectly responsible for a shift in prices for mats but I think you get the basic idea.
Predicting trends based on patch notes is relatively easy and even though the results aren't always what you expected them to be (in my case the dream shard prices only went up by about 4g each, which is nice but not exceptional) you will generally be able to get some profit here and there (I still managed to make 200g off of selling dream shards after the patch).
So next time the big hooblah starts about new content this, new patch that and the blogosphere start filling up with PTR patch notes again take another look and read beyond your own classes' specific changes... who knows maybe the next patch will make you a whole lot wealthier.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Gold 101 - Auction House Basics
Every now and then I get the question how I handle my gold and what I do to get more of it and the simple answer is: Play the AH game
I am no farmer or grinder, I don't do many dailies and I don't really do much questing once I hit my level cap. I don't farm reputation, I don't do many (high-level) instances and to add to that I spend a lot of time on gold-sucking alts. In short, I do whatever amuses me and this rarely makes me any gold.
So truthfully said that beyond what little income I can generate through playing my alts I am 100% dependant on the AH for an income.
Rather than telling you my specific business ventures I am going to attempt to give you the basic toolkit needed to make a profit in the auction house, give you a few tips on how to discover niche markets and most importantly dispell the Nr 1 myth or rather half-truth that currently floats around in regards to making money on the AH.
In fact lets deal with the half-truth first because it can be the decider on whether or not you decide to play the AH game or stick with your daily grind:
You can make a ton of gold with only 15/30 minutes a day on the ah
This is a myth for those who start out playing the AH game and will become closer to a truth a ways further down the line.
Getting that gold train started takes a lot of time in the beginning. Organizing bagspace, supplying resources, scanning the AH, finding niche markets all these things take up time. If you're just starting out with the AH game and you're serious about getting some form of income from the AH expect to invest 3+ hours initially... Eventually you can bring it down to maybe 30 mins per session but that assumes that you already are organized and have found your various niche markets.
You will also become good friends with excel or whatever you choose to keep track of your investments. Basic bookkeeping is a necessity if you're serious about money and just writing down cost/profit will really help in the long run to determine the viability of your investments.
If nothing else you will probably have to write down some market prices for various mats or other things depending on your chosen market.
This means ADMINISTRATION and Administration takes time.
Making money on the AH is easy but while you can make much much more gold on the AH than doing dailies you should expect that you will have to sacrifice doing your dailies in favor of spending that time on the AH (or in excel).
Ok, I hope the above really made it clear what you're up against with playing the AH and so lets move on to
The Basic toolkit
Auctioneer, an addon widely available through various addon sites is your primary tool. Get it, download it, install it and run the scans preferably at least once a day. Ideally scan before you're getting ready to dump a whole bunch of stuff on the market.
Don't have Auctioneer yet? Get it, run scans daily for at least a week and only then start making decisions. You will really need the average price indications auctioneer provides and you will lose hundreds if not thousands of gold if you decide to play the AH game without auctioneer.
That said, once you're used to auctioneer check into the various option menus. You can do a lot of beneficial customizing that may help your specific ventures but until then the default settings will do fine. Auctioneer generally also comes with extra tools like bottomscanner and beancounter etc. Try them all and see what they mean to you.
Be aware that a scan can, depending on your connection speed and processing power take up to 30 minutes on a decently saturated AH. My scans currently run 10-15 mins for about 300 pages in the AH... time you stand in the auction house and pretty much can't do anything except guildies over guildchat.
Even though it takes time: Auctioneer scans are absolutely vital!
The other thing that's absolutely vital is: Bag space. Have lots of bag space available especially on characters you want to be involved in your grand gold making schemes.
Seed money
Seed money is your basic starting funds. Just like a farmer would buy seed and expect to grow crops for a profit you need seed money to expect to grow a profit in the Auction house.
The simple truth of seed money is this:
All your gold is seed money. The more seed money you have the more profit you can make. Seed money sitting in your bank does nothing for you.
You can start the AH game at any time and at any gold amount however be aware that you may lose your investment in a bad deal so make sure you have enough gold available to cover your daily repair cost/ consumable cost for about a week in case stuff really goes bad.
With your seed money in your pocket and your Auctioneer scan freshly completed there's a couple of things we can start doing:
1. Flipping
2. Bidding
3. Market research
Flipping
Flipping is the art of buying low and selling high. You don't need a specific market for this... you can simply run a blank search on the AH and then sort by the percentless column. The lower the percentless value (blue) the more the item can be re-sold for. You can check the average price of an item by hovering over it and checking what auctioneer says is the average moving price.
Pick items that you think are popular (ores, rare crafting materials, specific weapons/armors etc.) or that you know a lot about and buy the ones that have a percentless value less than 50% and immediately put them back on the auction house at approximately 80%.
So if a stack of copper ore (20 pieces) normally goes for 8g and you see it on the market for 4g buy it and re-list it for 7g or 6g50s. The only time when you don't want to do that is when there's a lot of people offering copper ore for less than the average price of 8g. In which case you can either decide to list it for less (but always more than what you paid for + the auction house cut) or to hold on to the materials until the market is more favorable.
That's all there is to flipping... buy low, sell high. The percentless column will help you tremendously in this and you can decide whether to resell specific stuff or generally try and flip everything available in the auction.
Bidding
Bidding is a lot like flipping except that it takes a little more time to 'flip' the item. Do a blank search on the AH and sort it by how much time is left on the auctions.
See all those 30m / 2h remaining auctions?
Go through them and once again look for items that either have a really low percentless value or a very low low-end bid.
Just put in the minimum bid on the item and move on to the next item.
The beauty of bidding is that even if you get outbid you don't lose money (you get your bid back) and if you win you just picked up an item for an extremely low amount of gold and can then flip it for the average price (or a little lower).
This is especially interesting for slower moving markets like weapons and armor where auctions can often run their full duration. That said there's really no restrictions on what you should bid on. If you think there's a decent chance of selling it for even a little more than what you bid then you should bid on it.
Market research
Flipping and bidding are both very basic activities. You can make decent gold off of them without really worrying about book keeping and other things. If you just want to make some money on the AH to keep your characters afloat then bidding and flipping are usually enough.
The real money however comes from the results of market research. Market research is all about figuring out what people want and then providing the supply to their demand.
There's a few things you can do to determine demand:
1. determine needs. We know people 'need' consumables. We know people 'need' certain crafting materials. People need a whole bunch of stuff, some of it is more needed than others but based on their needs markets develop. All we really need to do is figure out what isused the most (like consumables for example ) and what crafting materials are in demand and then figure out how we can get those cheap and then drop them on the AH. I recently traded a few frozen orbs to someone who had more mammoth meat than they knew what to do with.
The market for mammoth meals was terrible at the time so he happily parted with 10 stacks of mammoth meat for some frozen orbs. After a few weeks mammoth meals were back in demand and I was able to sell all my mammoth meats as mammoth meals and made enough profit to buy back my frozen orbs and still be left with a lot of gold. I determined the need and used that need to my advantage.
2. Determine gluts. Not too long ago I picked up 20 stacks of netherweave for 2g50 a stack which was exceptionally low for my server. I couldn't resell the netherweave due to the market being covered in people trying to sell netherweave but I managed to get my netherweave crafted into stuff which I then disenchanted selling the enchanting materials for quite a profit (at least a hell of a lot more than the 2g50 a stack I paid). Using raw materials from a market that is flooded with said raw materials is a very good way to turn a profit.
3. Determine shortages. There are shortages. Keep an eye on trade for people asking for specific things. If the thing is not on the AH and people are asking for it in trade then they are willing to pay a premium for the item once it does get put on the AH. A shortage is different from a need in that needed items will always be needed, a shortage may occur for very off-beat items (levelling gear for example) which no one really needs but a lot of people would want to have. If you can supply a shortage with your goods then you are practically guaranteed a profit. Unfortunately unlike needs shortages go away and may never come back. But keep in mind... there are always shortages somewhere.
4. Re-evaluate professions. You have crafting professions, or at least you're very likely to have them. Go through each item on your profession list and have a look at what the raw materials cost and what the end-product goes for. Normally you won't be able to turn a profit but every profession has a few items in there that can turn the raw materials you need into a profit.
Never stop researching your markets. All good business ventures go down the drain at some point or the other. Just because you can make a profit selling x now doesn't mean you'll be able to sell x tomorrow. Keep an eye out for opportunities.
Keeping track
I know you think you'll remember all of it. And maybe in the beginning when you have 1,2 or 3 little business ventures you will... but at some point you're going to have to keep track of how much you make and how much you spend for each of your little business ventures.
Determining what raw materials cost on your realm and how much they would have to cost (max) for you to turn them into a profit is also worth noting down.
If you do not keep track of your business ventures you will eventually have a few business ventures that seem to be profitable but really aren't. In the end if something takes 1h of your time and you make 200g then you need to ask yourself if you could make the same amount of gold doing dailies or something else. If the answer is yes, then why are you doing it?
If you can't provide a good reason then you should probably find something else to spend your time on.
Grinding / Farming
Grinding and farming generally isn't needed when playing the AH game. However if an hours worth of grinding can fork you a tremendous profit then there really is no shame in getting down and dirty with some monsters especially if you can also gain xp at the same time.
My paladin has been farming some rhino meat for a while to supply the huge demand that was present at the time based on the cooking daily. I made a good chunk of gold from the rhino dog sales and half a level to boot.
Grind and farm when it is profitable to do so. If you can do something else to make you more money then why grind in the first place?
In the end you would ideally want to bring your grind/farm time to 0. This is very much possible... but don't be so shortsighted as to say farming/grinding is for idiots because every now and then you can make some serious gold by grinding the right things.
Before I leave you to your thoughts I'll leave you with a quick comment: smaller stacks sell better than bigger ones on the AH. I alway thought that to be obvious and yet I still see a lot of people trying to sell a full stack of frozen orbs on the AH for 1000+ gold and be surprised no one ever buys it even if they sell if for half the average price. No one wants to spend 1000+ gold on a stack of frozen orbs unless they intend to sell them as singles for a profit in which case you might as well have put it on the AH as singles in the first place and made a decent amount of extra gold.
*edit* If it's hard to read leave a comment and I'll chop it up a little... the post's structure made for some very long sentences that could use shortening. if you tl:dr then it's your loss. I don't cater to people who only want to voice an opinion and not read someone else's.
I am no farmer or grinder, I don't do many dailies and I don't really do much questing once I hit my level cap. I don't farm reputation, I don't do many (high-level) instances and to add to that I spend a lot of time on gold-sucking alts. In short, I do whatever amuses me and this rarely makes me any gold.
So truthfully said that beyond what little income I can generate through playing my alts I am 100% dependant on the AH for an income.
Rather than telling you my specific business ventures I am going to attempt to give you the basic toolkit needed to make a profit in the auction house, give you a few tips on how to discover niche markets and most importantly dispell the Nr 1 myth or rather half-truth that currently floats around in regards to making money on the AH.
In fact lets deal with the half-truth first because it can be the decider on whether or not you decide to play the AH game or stick with your daily grind:
You can make a ton of gold with only 15/30 minutes a day on the ah
This is a myth for those who start out playing the AH game and will become closer to a truth a ways further down the line.
Getting that gold train started takes a lot of time in the beginning. Organizing bagspace, supplying resources, scanning the AH, finding niche markets all these things take up time. If you're just starting out with the AH game and you're serious about getting some form of income from the AH expect to invest 3+ hours initially... Eventually you can bring it down to maybe 30 mins per session but that assumes that you already are organized and have found your various niche markets.
You will also become good friends with excel or whatever you choose to keep track of your investments. Basic bookkeeping is a necessity if you're serious about money and just writing down cost/profit will really help in the long run to determine the viability of your investments.
If nothing else you will probably have to write down some market prices for various mats or other things depending on your chosen market.
This means ADMINISTRATION and Administration takes time.
Making money on the AH is easy but while you can make much much more gold on the AH than doing dailies you should expect that you will have to sacrifice doing your dailies in favor of spending that time on the AH (or in excel).
Ok, I hope the above really made it clear what you're up against with playing the AH and so lets move on to
The Basic toolkit
Auctioneer, an addon widely available through various addon sites is your primary tool. Get it, download it, install it and run the scans preferably at least once a day. Ideally scan before you're getting ready to dump a whole bunch of stuff on the market.
Don't have Auctioneer yet? Get it, run scans daily for at least a week and only then start making decisions. You will really need the average price indications auctioneer provides and you will lose hundreds if not thousands of gold if you decide to play the AH game without auctioneer.
That said, once you're used to auctioneer check into the various option menus. You can do a lot of beneficial customizing that may help your specific ventures but until then the default settings will do fine. Auctioneer generally also comes with extra tools like bottomscanner and beancounter etc. Try them all and see what they mean to you.
Be aware that a scan can, depending on your connection speed and processing power take up to 30 minutes on a decently saturated AH. My scans currently run 10-15 mins for about 300 pages in the AH... time you stand in the auction house and pretty much can't do anything except guildies over guildchat.
Even though it takes time: Auctioneer scans are absolutely vital!
The other thing that's absolutely vital is: Bag space. Have lots of bag space available especially on characters you want to be involved in your grand gold making schemes.
Seed money
Seed money is your basic starting funds. Just like a farmer would buy seed and expect to grow crops for a profit you need seed money to expect to grow a profit in the Auction house.
The simple truth of seed money is this:
All your gold is seed money. The more seed money you have the more profit you can make. Seed money sitting in your bank does nothing for you.
You can start the AH game at any time and at any gold amount however be aware that you may lose your investment in a bad deal so make sure you have enough gold available to cover your daily repair cost/ consumable cost for about a week in case stuff really goes bad.
With your seed money in your pocket and your Auctioneer scan freshly completed there's a couple of things we can start doing:
1. Flipping
2. Bidding
3. Market research
Flipping
Flipping is the art of buying low and selling high. You don't need a specific market for this... you can simply run a blank search on the AH and then sort by the percentless column. The lower the percentless value (blue) the more the item can be re-sold for. You can check the average price of an item by hovering over it and checking what auctioneer says is the average moving price.
Pick items that you think are popular (ores, rare crafting materials, specific weapons/armors etc.) or that you know a lot about and buy the ones that have a percentless value less than 50% and immediately put them back on the auction house at approximately 80%.
So if a stack of copper ore (20 pieces) normally goes for 8g and you see it on the market for 4g buy it and re-list it for 7g or 6g50s. The only time when you don't want to do that is when there's a lot of people offering copper ore for less than the average price of 8g. In which case you can either decide to list it for less (but always more than what you paid for + the auction house cut) or to hold on to the materials until the market is more favorable.
That's all there is to flipping... buy low, sell high. The percentless column will help you tremendously in this and you can decide whether to resell specific stuff or generally try and flip everything available in the auction.
Bidding
Bidding is a lot like flipping except that it takes a little more time to 'flip' the item. Do a blank search on the AH and sort it by how much time is left on the auctions.
See all those 30m / 2h remaining auctions?
Go through them and once again look for items that either have a really low percentless value or a very low low-end bid.
Just put in the minimum bid on the item and move on to the next item.
The beauty of bidding is that even if you get outbid you don't lose money (you get your bid back) and if you win you just picked up an item for an extremely low amount of gold and can then flip it for the average price (or a little lower).
This is especially interesting for slower moving markets like weapons and armor where auctions can often run their full duration. That said there's really no restrictions on what you should bid on. If you think there's a decent chance of selling it for even a little more than what you bid then you should bid on it.
Market research
Flipping and bidding are both very basic activities. You can make decent gold off of them without really worrying about book keeping and other things. If you just want to make some money on the AH to keep your characters afloat then bidding and flipping are usually enough.
The real money however comes from the results of market research. Market research is all about figuring out what people want and then providing the supply to their demand.
There's a few things you can do to determine demand:
1. determine needs. We know people 'need' consumables. We know people 'need' certain crafting materials. People need a whole bunch of stuff, some of it is more needed than others but based on their needs markets develop. All we really need to do is figure out what isused the most (like consumables for example ) and what crafting materials are in demand and then figure out how we can get those cheap and then drop them on the AH. I recently traded a few frozen orbs to someone who had more mammoth meat than they knew what to do with.
The market for mammoth meals was terrible at the time so he happily parted with 10 stacks of mammoth meat for some frozen orbs. After a few weeks mammoth meals were back in demand and I was able to sell all my mammoth meats as mammoth meals and made enough profit to buy back my frozen orbs and still be left with a lot of gold. I determined the need and used that need to my advantage.
2. Determine gluts. Not too long ago I picked up 20 stacks of netherweave for 2g50 a stack which was exceptionally low for my server. I couldn't resell the netherweave due to the market being covered in people trying to sell netherweave but I managed to get my netherweave crafted into stuff which I then disenchanted selling the enchanting materials for quite a profit (at least a hell of a lot more than the 2g50 a stack I paid). Using raw materials from a market that is flooded with said raw materials is a very good way to turn a profit.
3. Determine shortages. There are shortages. Keep an eye on trade for people asking for specific things. If the thing is not on the AH and people are asking for it in trade then they are willing to pay a premium for the item once it does get put on the AH. A shortage is different from a need in that needed items will always be needed, a shortage may occur for very off-beat items (levelling gear for example) which no one really needs but a lot of people would want to have. If you can supply a shortage with your goods then you are practically guaranteed a profit. Unfortunately unlike needs shortages go away and may never come back. But keep in mind... there are always shortages somewhere.
4. Re-evaluate professions. You have crafting professions, or at least you're very likely to have them. Go through each item on your profession list and have a look at what the raw materials cost and what the end-product goes for. Normally you won't be able to turn a profit but every profession has a few items in there that can turn the raw materials you need into a profit.
Never stop researching your markets. All good business ventures go down the drain at some point or the other. Just because you can make a profit selling x now doesn't mean you'll be able to sell x tomorrow. Keep an eye out for opportunities.
Keeping track
I know you think you'll remember all of it. And maybe in the beginning when you have 1,2 or 3 little business ventures you will... but at some point you're going to have to keep track of how much you make and how much you spend for each of your little business ventures.
Determining what raw materials cost on your realm and how much they would have to cost (max) for you to turn them into a profit is also worth noting down.
If you do not keep track of your business ventures you will eventually have a few business ventures that seem to be profitable but really aren't. In the end if something takes 1h of your time and you make 200g then you need to ask yourself if you could make the same amount of gold doing dailies or something else. If the answer is yes, then why are you doing it?
If you can't provide a good reason then you should probably find something else to spend your time on.
Grinding / Farming
Grinding and farming generally isn't needed when playing the AH game. However if an hours worth of grinding can fork you a tremendous profit then there really is no shame in getting down and dirty with some monsters especially if you can also gain xp at the same time.
My paladin has been farming some rhino meat for a while to supply the huge demand that was present at the time based on the cooking daily. I made a good chunk of gold from the rhino dog sales and half a level to boot.
Grind and farm when it is profitable to do so. If you can do something else to make you more money then why grind in the first place?
In the end you would ideally want to bring your grind/farm time to 0. This is very much possible... but don't be so shortsighted as to say farming/grinding is for idiots because every now and then you can make some serious gold by grinding the right things.
Before I leave you to your thoughts I'll leave you with a quick comment: smaller stacks sell better than bigger ones on the AH. I alway thought that to be obvious and yet I still see a lot of people trying to sell a full stack of frozen orbs on the AH for 1000+ gold and be surprised no one ever buys it even if they sell if for half the average price. No one wants to spend 1000+ gold on a stack of frozen orbs unless they intend to sell them as singles for a profit in which case you might as well have put it on the AH as singles in the first place and made a decent amount of extra gold.
*edit* If it's hard to read leave a comment and I'll chop it up a little... the post's structure made for some very long sentences that could use shortening. if you tl:dr then it's your loss. I don't cater to people who only want to voice an opinion and not read someone else's.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
XP Gold rewards at level 80
With most people having a level 80 including myself I am now 'working' on characters number 2 and 3 to level up to 80 as well as working on getting the professions back to a useful level.
Unfortunately quest rewards from levelling my level 72s are just about enough to cover skill training and don't really contribute to levelling my professions much.
In other words: Professions are bloody expensive.
And even worse: I feel compelled to have each profession at at least a decent level to reduce my dependency on trading with others.
And while my AH business ventures are doing better than ever since I actually do invest a little time in them these days I regularly think about the fact that on my level 80 warlock I still have a large chunk of zul'drak and all of sholazar basin, icecrown and storms peaks left to do.
So how much gold could I potentally earn at level 80 from doing quests?
Before we dive into the calculations we need to be aware of a few facts:
1. Gray quests do not give any gold beyond that what is advertised in the quest text. So if a gray quest normally gives 45s and 600xp it'll give you 45s at level 80.
2. We know from wowwiki and various other sources as well as personal experience that 1xp is worth 6c at level 80. so for every 1k xp you can expect 1k * 0.0006 = 60s.
3. Most northrend quests give between 20k and 25k xp at level 80 depending on your zone meaning you can expect between 12g and 15g per quest excluding any gold you may be able to churn out by selling item quest rewards.
4. And this is an important one. If a quest says you normally get 5g and 25k xp you will only get the XP->gold conversion and not the base quest reward at level 80. So you will get 15g from this quest instead of 20g which is different from how it worked in TBC (*citation needed).
Next up we need to figure out how many quests we have per zone. On your way to 80 you either finished off Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord and the Dragonblight or not, either way you will notice that most of the quests in these 3 zones now are 'gray' to you and thus won't give you any xp->gold reward.
Grizzly hills is a bit of a toss up really since it's going to be right on the line of gray so it'll have a fair few quests that still give reward but an almost equal amount of quests that are gray already.
So the relevant zones remaining are:
Icecrown
Storms Peak
Sholazar basin
Zul'drak
Ignoring dungeon, dailies, raid and pvp quests so only looking at the group and normal quests wowhead will happily tell us the amount of quests per zone:
Icecrown - 250 quests -> 140 for achievement
Storms Peak - 159 quests -> 100 for achievement
Sholazar basin - 101 quests -> 75 for achievement
Zul'drak - 130 quests -> 100 for achievement
The reason I listed the amount needed for the achievement is quite simply because some quests are part of elongated quest chains and others can be damn near impossible to find. The achievements are however fairly easily completed and can be a good guideline to what can be achievable without investing hours upon hours in researching various questlines and travelling all over the map.
There's no point in going into detail on how much xp each quest gives and what the corresponding rewards would be since we're only looking for a rough estimate of what the total gold reward per zone would be.
As a result we're going to go with the value of 14g for each quest completed in northrend. This of course excludes reward items which may be vendored or not for additional rewards. Some of the quests are probably simple crumb-trail quests to send you from one quest hub to another but for the purpose of simplicity we will simply assume that they too earn you 14g.
What can I earn?
The low end represents the approximate gold gains for doing only the amount of quests needed for the achievement. The high number assumes you complete all normal and group quests in the zone (which is somewhat unlikely).
Icecrown: 1960g to 3500g
Storms Peak: 1400g to 2226g
Sholazar basin: 1050g to 1414g
Zul'drak - 1400g to 1820g
For a grand total of: 5810g to 8960g
This is excluding drops, item rewards and other rewards that may be turned into gold and represents and estimate. Taking extra item rewards and drops into account you can probably strap another 50% on those numbers meaning you're looking at 8k to 13k gold for those remaining 4 zones.
All in all those aren't bad numbers, especially not if you're interested in completing quests merely for the lore aspect beyond 80.
If nothing else it's good to know that you can easily pick up an epic flyer by doing nothing more than what you've been doing all the way till 80 (quest, quest, quest...)
Unfortunately quest rewards from levelling my level 72s are just about enough to cover skill training and don't really contribute to levelling my professions much.
In other words: Professions are bloody expensive.
And even worse: I feel compelled to have each profession at at least a decent level to reduce my dependency on trading with others.
And while my AH business ventures are doing better than ever since I actually do invest a little time in them these days I regularly think about the fact that on my level 80 warlock I still have a large chunk of zul'drak and all of sholazar basin, icecrown and storms peaks left to do.
So how much gold could I potentally earn at level 80 from doing quests?
Before we dive into the calculations we need to be aware of a few facts:
1. Gray quests do not give any gold beyond that what is advertised in the quest text. So if a gray quest normally gives 45s and 600xp it'll give you 45s at level 80.
2. We know from wowwiki and various other sources as well as personal experience that 1xp is worth 6c at level 80. so for every 1k xp you can expect 1k * 0.0006 = 60s.
3. Most northrend quests give between 20k and 25k xp at level 80 depending on your zone meaning you can expect between 12g and 15g per quest excluding any gold you may be able to churn out by selling item quest rewards.
4. And this is an important one. If a quest says you normally get 5g and 25k xp you will only get the XP->gold conversion and not the base quest reward at level 80. So you will get 15g from this quest instead of 20g which is different from how it worked in TBC (*citation needed).
Next up we need to figure out how many quests we have per zone. On your way to 80 you either finished off Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord and the Dragonblight or not, either way you will notice that most of the quests in these 3 zones now are 'gray' to you and thus won't give you any xp->gold reward.
Grizzly hills is a bit of a toss up really since it's going to be right on the line of gray so it'll have a fair few quests that still give reward but an almost equal amount of quests that are gray already.
So the relevant zones remaining are:
Icecrown
Storms Peak
Sholazar basin
Zul'drak
Ignoring dungeon, dailies, raid and pvp quests so only looking at the group and normal quests wowhead will happily tell us the amount of quests per zone:
Icecrown - 250 quests -> 140 for achievement
Storms Peak - 159 quests -> 100 for achievement
Sholazar basin - 101 quests -> 75 for achievement
Zul'drak - 130 quests -> 100 for achievement
The reason I listed the amount needed for the achievement is quite simply because some quests are part of elongated quest chains and others can be damn near impossible to find. The achievements are however fairly easily completed and can be a good guideline to what can be achievable without investing hours upon hours in researching various questlines and travelling all over the map.
There's no point in going into detail on how much xp each quest gives and what the corresponding rewards would be since we're only looking for a rough estimate of what the total gold reward per zone would be.
As a result we're going to go with the value of 14g for each quest completed in northrend. This of course excludes reward items which may be vendored or not for additional rewards. Some of the quests are probably simple crumb-trail quests to send you from one quest hub to another but for the purpose of simplicity we will simply assume that they too earn you 14g.
What can I earn?
The low end represents the approximate gold gains for doing only the amount of quests needed for the achievement. The high number assumes you complete all normal and group quests in the zone (which is somewhat unlikely).
Icecrown: 1960g to 3500g
Storms Peak: 1400g to 2226g
Sholazar basin: 1050g to 1414g
Zul'drak - 1400g to 1820g
For a grand total of: 5810g to 8960g
This is excluding drops, item rewards and other rewards that may be turned into gold and represents and estimate. Taking extra item rewards and drops into account you can probably strap another 50% on those numbers meaning you're looking at 8k to 13k gold for those remaining 4 zones.
All in all those aren't bad numbers, especially not if you're interested in completing quests merely for the lore aspect beyond 80.
If nothing else it's good to know that you can easily pick up an epic flyer by doing nothing more than what you've been doing all the way till 80 (quest, quest, quest...)
Monday, December 15, 2008
Managing your gold
Gold is a tricky resource and even though some of us have already gone past the point of having pretty much everything they want and gold to spare for completely useless things most of us have to deal with the reality that our gold supply is limited unless we want to spend hours on end grinding, playing the AH or doing dailies.
Rather than telling you how to get more gold I am going to give you a few tips on how to manage your gold better; in fact how to manage all your resources better.
I am not going to lie to you, most of these tips are obvious and pretty much common sense. But I have applied these simple strategies for years now in various games and I have very rarely been spotted grinding/farming resources unless I was being exceptionally greedy. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I have spent no more than 24 hours out of a years worth of playing grinding any kind of resource I needed.
On that note let me add this: Managing your gold and resources is not about getting rich, it's about not getting poor.
There's targets I have that I haven't met, that I could grind and farm for but for which I have decided to just play the game instead knowing that the goal will be met in due time because I know how to control my expenditures.
So off we go into the wondrous world of resource management and a healthy chunk of self-discipline.
DON'T YOU DARE SELL THAT!
I see it happening all the time. People are out levelling their alts or playing their various characters and end up with a whole bunch of stuff that they don't have an immediate use for. So they think, hey I'll just sell this on the AH, make a small profit and then weeks/months later notice that they could've used the resources on an alt or during a crafting project for a random buyer or a guildie and end up paying a significant premium because they need the resources right away.
You can see this the most during holiday seasons. If you need a whole bunch of small eggs during christmas for some eggnog you're invariably going to have to either farm for them or pick them up from the AH for extreme prices.
Now think back how many of those small eggs you found while playing your lowbie alts and how many you simply vendored or sold on the AH for next to nothing.
The cardinal rule here is: If it stacks, don't sell it
Other than inventory management there's no reason to sell stackable items unless they're absolutely useless to everyone. Those resources will come in handy the next time you're grinding up a profession or if nothing else you will be able to sell them at a significant profit if you're willing to
WAIT FOR IT
Sell things at the right time. There's always people out there working on their professions or picking up new ones. Your resources are valuable to them because they want them 'now' and not later. If you have resources available then you're always able to make nice deals either with the buyer directly or indirectly when there's a shortage on the AH.
There's no reason to rush-sell anything... provided that you
MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY
Inventory management is crucial. Buy all your bank slots on all your toons and equip them with the most affordable but largest bags you can find (netherweave bags in my case). If you don't have any alts yet consider filling up the remaining character slots you have with alts purely for banking purposes.
Give each character a type of resource to deal with. I keep all my tailoring mats on my warlock, all my ores on my paladin, all my herbs and alchemy on my druid, all 'general' stuff on my warrior and so on and so forth.
Stop thinking about inventory management. Make a simple system for yourself and whenever you are in town simply mail whatever you have to the corresponding alts for them to deal with later.
Picking a day to manage your inventory to take care of it all can be very helpful in dealing with large mailbox queues and will cause you to have space to spare. Having space to spare is crucial if you want to be able to just ditch your spare holy set in the bank because you won't need it on the next instance run. If you can't ditch it in the bank real quick then you're just dragging it around with you...
Which brings us to the second part of inventory management:
WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU DRAGGING THAT WITH YOU?
Yeah, I have a set of gear for this that and the other thing too, I have stacks of buff foods, fishing pole, trinkets, potions and whatnot in my inventory. And by Medivh I will drag them around everywhere!
Say what? Stop that: Take only what is necessary.
Are you really going to need 3 stacks of buff food while you're questing? or that extra set of gear?
Maybe you will, more likely than that you won't and you're wasting dozens of inventory slots on completely useless crud... crud that will force you to a) destroy stuff to pick up new stuff or b) cause you to run to town way more often than you need to.
This is gruesomely inefficient. You're losing money for every gray item you toss overboard and if you have to go to town all the time you're losing questing time by the bucketload. It may not seem that important but if you do a rough calculation on how much gold you are bleeding just by throwing away 'cheap' gray items you'd be surprised at how many gold you throw away a week.
There's a reason I quest a lot with my imp, it's because I can replace my soulshard bag temporarily for another 16+ slot bag leaving me with about 3-4 loose soul shards but 12 more bag slots to fill up before I have to go to town. And I can do this because I usually have an empty bag in my bank waiting to be swapped in for a full one.
In the end: Don't take things with you that you won't need and leave room in your bank for just dumping things off for a while.
THE AH IS YOUR FRENEMY
Last but not least there's the almighty Auction House. The auction house is the number 1 cause for people being as poor as they are. People buy recipes they'll never use or only use once, buy new gear on the AH that they end up replacing only days after. The AH is as much your friend as it is your enemy.
Scan it daily with tools like auctioneer so you know the average prices of stuff but don't be tempted to buy anything.
Why are you buying it should be the first question in your mind, if you can't come up with anything better than 'I want it' then don't buy it. In fact there's very little reason to buy anything from the AH unless there's no physical way for you to get the item in the first place. Patience is key. You simply have to assume that you will get what you want in good time and as a result you can curb your spending to the absolutely necessary.
The only thing the AH can be used for is to sell high and buy low. To achieve this look specifically at the resource market your stockpiling. If you're stockpiling a lot of ore and there's a shortage sell a few stacks for a decent price bearing in mind that if it's especially valuable stuff you're better off selling it in smaller stacks. Never ever sell all your resources though, since you will need them the second you have none.
Buying low is the other end of the stick and is something you'll be able to do quite easily when there's a lot of people on at one time... i.e. the weekend. Over the weekend you can get tremendous deals on things that you can sell for significantly more during the week.
Keep an eye out on the AH at all times and scoop up deals even if you can't use them yourself.
If it's not a deal, then why are you buying it? No really... why are you?
In the end the above won't make you rich but it'll allow you greater control of what you have... it'll allow you to make the snap decision to power level a profession and already have most of the resources ready, it'll give you greater flexibility and save you gold that you didn't even know you were losing.
When it's all said and done, when the day comes that I am stupendously wealthy the above will keep me stupendously wealthy no matter what I do. All that for the price of a little self-discipline... that's not so bad now is it?
So then, what do you do to keep your resources under control?
Rather than telling you how to get more gold I am going to give you a few tips on how to manage your gold better; in fact how to manage all your resources better.
I am not going to lie to you, most of these tips are obvious and pretty much common sense. But I have applied these simple strategies for years now in various games and I have very rarely been spotted grinding/farming resources unless I was being exceptionally greedy. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I have spent no more than 24 hours out of a years worth of playing grinding any kind of resource I needed.
On that note let me add this: Managing your gold and resources is not about getting rich, it's about not getting poor.
There's targets I have that I haven't met, that I could grind and farm for but for which I have decided to just play the game instead knowing that the goal will be met in due time because I know how to control my expenditures.
So off we go into the wondrous world of resource management and a healthy chunk of self-discipline.
DON'T YOU DARE SELL THAT!
I see it happening all the time. People are out levelling their alts or playing their various characters and end up with a whole bunch of stuff that they don't have an immediate use for. So they think, hey I'll just sell this on the AH, make a small profit and then weeks/months later notice that they could've used the resources on an alt or during a crafting project for a random buyer or a guildie and end up paying a significant premium because they need the resources right away.
You can see this the most during holiday seasons. If you need a whole bunch of small eggs during christmas for some eggnog you're invariably going to have to either farm for them or pick them up from the AH for extreme prices.
Now think back how many of those small eggs you found while playing your lowbie alts and how many you simply vendored or sold on the AH for next to nothing.
The cardinal rule here is: If it stacks, don't sell it
Other than inventory management there's no reason to sell stackable items unless they're absolutely useless to everyone. Those resources will come in handy the next time you're grinding up a profession or if nothing else you will be able to sell them at a significant profit if you're willing to
WAIT FOR IT
Sell things at the right time. There's always people out there working on their professions or picking up new ones. Your resources are valuable to them because they want them 'now' and not later. If you have resources available then you're always able to make nice deals either with the buyer directly or indirectly when there's a shortage on the AH.
There's no reason to rush-sell anything... provided that you
MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY
Inventory management is crucial. Buy all your bank slots on all your toons and equip them with the most affordable but largest bags you can find (netherweave bags in my case). If you don't have any alts yet consider filling up the remaining character slots you have with alts purely for banking purposes.
Give each character a type of resource to deal with. I keep all my tailoring mats on my warlock, all my ores on my paladin, all my herbs and alchemy on my druid, all 'general' stuff on my warrior and so on and so forth.
Stop thinking about inventory management. Make a simple system for yourself and whenever you are in town simply mail whatever you have to the corresponding alts for them to deal with later.
Picking a day to manage your inventory to take care of it all can be very helpful in dealing with large mailbox queues and will cause you to have space to spare. Having space to spare is crucial if you want to be able to just ditch your spare holy set in the bank because you won't need it on the next instance run. If you can't ditch it in the bank real quick then you're just dragging it around with you...
Which brings us to the second part of inventory management:
WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU DRAGGING THAT WITH YOU?
Yeah, I have a set of gear for this that and the other thing too, I have stacks of buff foods, fishing pole, trinkets, potions and whatnot in my inventory. And by Medivh I will drag them around everywhere!
Say what? Stop that: Take only what is necessary.
Are you really going to need 3 stacks of buff food while you're questing? or that extra set of gear?
Maybe you will, more likely than that you won't and you're wasting dozens of inventory slots on completely useless crud... crud that will force you to a) destroy stuff to pick up new stuff or b) cause you to run to town way more often than you need to.
This is gruesomely inefficient. You're losing money for every gray item you toss overboard and if you have to go to town all the time you're losing questing time by the bucketload. It may not seem that important but if you do a rough calculation on how much gold you are bleeding just by throwing away 'cheap' gray items you'd be surprised at how many gold you throw away a week.
There's a reason I quest a lot with my imp, it's because I can replace my soulshard bag temporarily for another 16+ slot bag leaving me with about 3-4 loose soul shards but 12 more bag slots to fill up before I have to go to town. And I can do this because I usually have an empty bag in my bank waiting to be swapped in for a full one.
In the end: Don't take things with you that you won't need and leave room in your bank for just dumping things off for a while.
THE AH IS YOUR FRENEMY
Last but not least there's the almighty Auction House. The auction house is the number 1 cause for people being as poor as they are. People buy recipes they'll never use or only use once, buy new gear on the AH that they end up replacing only days after. The AH is as much your friend as it is your enemy.
Scan it daily with tools like auctioneer so you know the average prices of stuff but don't be tempted to buy anything.
Why are you buying it should be the first question in your mind, if you can't come up with anything better than 'I want it' then don't buy it. In fact there's very little reason to buy anything from the AH unless there's no physical way for you to get the item in the first place. Patience is key. You simply have to assume that you will get what you want in good time and as a result you can curb your spending to the absolutely necessary.
The only thing the AH can be used for is to sell high and buy low. To achieve this look specifically at the resource market your stockpiling. If you're stockpiling a lot of ore and there's a shortage sell a few stacks for a decent price bearing in mind that if it's especially valuable stuff you're better off selling it in smaller stacks. Never ever sell all your resources though, since you will need them the second you have none.
Buying low is the other end of the stick and is something you'll be able to do quite easily when there's a lot of people on at one time... i.e. the weekend. Over the weekend you can get tremendous deals on things that you can sell for significantly more during the week.
Keep an eye out on the AH at all times and scoop up deals even if you can't use them yourself.
If it's not a deal, then why are you buying it? No really... why are you?
In the end the above won't make you rich but it'll allow you greater control of what you have... it'll allow you to make the snap decision to power level a profession and already have most of the resources ready, it'll give you greater flexibility and save you gold that you didn't even know you were losing.
When it's all said and done, when the day comes that I am stupendously wealthy the above will keep me stupendously wealthy no matter what I do. All that for the price of a little self-discipline... that's not so bad now is it?
So then, what do you do to keep your resources under control?
Friday, June 6, 2008
Fishing Gold
Nearing the end of my questionable career in monstrous regiment (guild) I had picked up fishing and trained cooking in tandem (something that is easily done although does result in a bit of travel around the world).
I am not going to recommend any specific guides to train fishing and cooking at the same time since there are a ton out there and I really just fudged around with it myself till it was what it is now.
Google it if you're interested I am sure you will find a ton of advice.
The big question however for me was always: Why should I pick up fishing and cooking in the first place?
The answer is obvious if you're heavily invested into raiding. Stacks of buff-foods can cost a pretty penny and if you're going raiding more than once a week you're actually burning gold purely on consumables which you are not likely to get back during your raids.
You could opt to raid without consumables but a lot of guilds will frown upon this practice.
But what if I don't raid?
Then you are most likely in the position I am in now. Guildless, doing 5-mans and generally having a good time levelling some alts. Buff foods can be helpful sometimes but they're not needed and definitely not worth buying.
So why fish? Well, fishing is pure gold. At lower levels firefin snappers and oily blackmouth as well as stonescale eels and deviate fish are in decent demand with alchemists and crazy people. At higher levels you can practically turn any fish into some useful buff food which will sell for quite some gold on the auction house.
With profits ranging from 5g for 5 deviate delights to 30g for a stack of fisherman's feast it turns out that there are very little things you can fish up that are worthless.
All the extra things you fish up out of pools of fish like crates, 'junk' and motes of water are generally gravy and can usually also be sold for a decent profit (even junk seems to be valued quite high).
In terms of value for money it is very much possible to get the same, if not more money from straight up fishing than you can get doing dailies because you can just stand and fish rather than having to whizz all over the place to get dailies done.
Combining dailies and fishing is without a doubt a good idea and can generally be combined fairly well (considering the fishing and cooking dailies send you places where other dailies can be done).
All in all it's good not to underestimate fishing as a source of income and the time invested is usually not as big an issue as people make it out to be simply because you make money as you train.
In wow, fishing truly is catching and there is no cost involved.
I am not going to recommend any specific guides to train fishing and cooking at the same time since there are a ton out there and I really just fudged around with it myself till it was what it is now.
Google it if you're interested I am sure you will find a ton of advice.
The big question however for me was always: Why should I pick up fishing and cooking in the first place?
The answer is obvious if you're heavily invested into raiding. Stacks of buff-foods can cost a pretty penny and if you're going raiding more than once a week you're actually burning gold purely on consumables which you are not likely to get back during your raids.
You could opt to raid without consumables but a lot of guilds will frown upon this practice.
But what if I don't raid?
Then you are most likely in the position I am in now. Guildless, doing 5-mans and generally having a good time levelling some alts. Buff foods can be helpful sometimes but they're not needed and definitely not worth buying.
So why fish? Well, fishing is pure gold. At lower levels firefin snappers and oily blackmouth as well as stonescale eels and deviate fish are in decent demand with alchemists and crazy people. At higher levels you can practically turn any fish into some useful buff food which will sell for quite some gold on the auction house.
With profits ranging from 5g for 5 deviate delights to 30g for a stack of fisherman's feast it turns out that there are very little things you can fish up that are worthless.
All the extra things you fish up out of pools of fish like crates, 'junk' and motes of water are generally gravy and can usually also be sold for a decent profit (even junk seems to be valued quite high).
In terms of value for money it is very much possible to get the same, if not more money from straight up fishing than you can get doing dailies because you can just stand and fish rather than having to whizz all over the place to get dailies done.
Combining dailies and fishing is without a doubt a good idea and can generally be combined fairly well (considering the fishing and cooking dailies send you places where other dailies can be done).
All in all it's good not to underestimate fishing as a source of income and the time invested is usually not as big an issue as people make it out to be simply because you make money as you train.
In wow, fishing truly is catching and there is no cost involved.
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