Great Success!

It has been a good few weeks.

I've been amazingly busy recently and that won't change, so my blog posts are going to be sporadic at best. However, this is due to a few things that have been absolutely amazing in my life

First off, my job just changed offices, and with that move came a huge promotion for me. I will be making approximately double (or more) my old income, and the work is not a whole lot different. There's more pressure, but that's to be expected!

The only bad thing about it is that the job now contains a decent commute of ~320 miles/week driving, and my car is... well... it's special.

As far as WoW is concerned, I'm back over 250k (for the 4th time) and recently my guild has been working on some achievements.

Namely, Glory of the Cataclysm Raider. And we finished it tonight. Server first, and US 14th Drake of the East Wind!

So, I'm stoked. =) It's been a good day!

On keeping to topics

As anyone who trolls TUJ obsessively knows, Cold and JMTC have recently been having what I would call a lover's quarrel. Both of them have dedicated posts to flaming the other, over some small amount of RL gold.

Guys, no one cares. Take that crap off of your blog. No one wants to see it.

If I see a new post on TUJ, I assume it's a new post talking about how to make gold. I don't want to hear about your deep hatred of another gold maker, that doesn't interest or concern me in the slightest. Post about something relevant.


On that note, I decided to do something probably foolish. I learned my seahorse =). I never could move it, and after the price dropped to ~150k on my server with multiple people still trying to unload it, I just decided 'why not' and learned it. It looks cool, but I kinda wish I hadn't xfered to get it! heh.

Cheers,
- Bryan

Eep!

Sorry about the hiatus, I've been exceedingly busy the last week or so and haven't had a chance to post (and slight writers block, but that's ok)

So, 4.2 is imminent. We all know what that means! There's some excellent opportunities to make massive quantities of gold, in a short period of time.

So far, here's what I've distilled from the patch notes and other sources (I'm looking at you, gold bloggers!)

1) The shuffle is getting nerfed again. This was to be expected, but don't let the new 'soft cap' of 16g fool you, that ore is still worth a bunch. All it really means for me is that the zephs I vendor drop in value significantly. That's ok, it's a small nerf and I look forward to even more people giving up on the shuffle, letting me profit even more from slightly more scarce enchanting mats.

2) A dearth of new gear is coming out. This of course means that enchants and gems will sell like lemonade on July 4th for a short period of time. I'm prepared, are you?

3) Some glyphs are changing. The huge overhaul with books/research is NOT happening, but some glyphs will see an uptick due to changes in BIS setups.

4) Summer is here. This yearly cycle will of course throw some markets off, but that just means more opportunities to make gold to me!

I've got about 80k worth of enchanting scrolls saved up (which I expect to be worth much more at that point) and hundreds of rare gems, as well a ton of the other items that will spasm upwards like truegold, leather, and dreamcloth. I'm also stocking a large quantity of Volatile Fire, which I expect to more than double in price.

On another topic, I recently spent a ton of gold on a quartet of mounts; 3x Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger and of course that epic seahorse that I snagged on another server. I managed to move 2 of the deathchargers for about 20k profit, but I'm having trouble moving that darn seahorse. I expect it will sell eventually though, and that will provide me with enough capital to potentially break 500k liquid before the patch. I certainly will afterwards!

I'm excited =)

Lets raid!

So I hear you like raids. I also hear you like PvP and maybe just like to watch other people play games. So we put a game in your game so you can game while you game. Pro.

In other words, announcing my live stream!

http://www.justin.tv/bheal

The stream will be active pretty much any time I'm not at work, so check it out!

Schedule right now (all times in CST):
Tues 9pm-1am Raid. Heroic mode BoT and either BWD or T4W to follow once its clear.
Weds 9pm-finish Raid. Heroic mode BWD/T4W, whatever wasn't done on Tues.
Thurs 9pm 5v5 Arenas.
Fri-Sun, TBD.

I hope you're as excited about it as I am about hosting it. =)

Watch live video from Mallrat's WoWtv on Justin.tv

Oops I did it again.

I spent all my gold. =/

Well, not all, but I'm definitely back down to 250k ish. I spent 25k on that Reins of Posiedon (which will come back to Illidan late this week and hopefully be sold quickly thereafter, although with such a big ticket item I don't expect it to sell immediately) and I bought a cheapish Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger for 60k. I should be able to flip the deathcharger in a couple weeks for 100-150k, but if not, it was a decently cheap new mount for my priest!

Sigh, I have gotta stop doing this. =)

I have an important announcement tonight, so stay tuned for more goodies from Mallrat!

Book of Glyph Mastery

All of us who use inscription know what this little gem is and how it works right now. For anyone who doesn't, BoGM and the two daily research crafts each have a specific set of glyphs, and once you've completed that set you no longer need to do any more of that type - but you do need to continue any you have not finished.

As is, you need over 50 BoGM to learn them all. Because this is a WotLK item, I've decided that the long term value of the books will only increase. Therefore, I had started stockpiling them, buying out any under 450g and relisting at 500g for storage. Well, two things occurred that changed my perspective.

First, these books started selling in mass quantities at 500g, double the average I was buying them at. This was due to me emptying the market out and essentially resetting it at 500g, so I stopped posting them.

Secondly, I noticed this today from the Q/A #7 - Professions:

Will you provide a way to speed up the acquiring of glyphs usually acquired through research and glyph books? Glyph books (Book of Glyph Mastery) are hard to come by now that people spend so little time in WotLK content. - Furlqt (NA/ANZ), 에르네스트린덴만 (KR), Kånê (EU-ES)

Yes. We will be changing the discovery spells so they can teach all possible glyphs, and the books will simply provide a no-cooldown method to do the same thing.

Wait. What? People will now *need* 0, but rich folk can just buy some 200 books and just learn everything instantly?

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that I plan on holding a ton of these books, and once this change goes live... /evil chuckle. I think I'll go for about 2 bank tabs full, or ~2000 books. That seems a nice number, and I'm already 10% there. =)

This just goes to show you, be aware of all blue posts, not just patch notes!

Other things of interest:
- Chaos Orbs will be unbound in future patches. This generally means *new* orbs will be unbound while existing ones are unchanged, so I would not stockpile them.
- Archaeology has some interesting changes in store, but nothing really concrete yet.

Happy goldmaking!

Extreme mount sniping!

I bought gold today, I confess it.

I did it totally legit too! I was browsing the AH via undermine, and did a search for rare mounts/pets using the given tool (by the way, check that tool out if you haven't - "companions" under "enhancements") and saw that someone had Reins of Poseidus up for 250k.

Like any good goblin, I immediately checked its page out to see what kind of prices this sold for elsewhere. I found that 250k was a good price but very slightly high. most sold for between 200-250k, with the max being 450k and... what's this.... one up now for 20k on some backwater server?

Surely not. 20k? I had to see this for myself.

It was up. I immediately added the seller to friends, and told him I'd give him 25k to unlist it while an xfer went through. I then transfered a mage over with some gold, and bought it.

Total resources invested: 25k, $25, and 1 hour. Estimated return? 200k+.

I essentially bought 150k gold for 50 bucks xfer fees.

And in 3-4 days, when this mage transfers back, I'll be one exceedingly happy goblin!

The curse of 300k

300k is the bane of my goldmaking existence. I first hit 300k over a month ago, and shortly thereafter I spent an absolute ton of gold. I went back down to under 200k for a day or so, while I splurged on all sorts of goodies and reinvested lots of capital.

About 3 days ago, I hit 300k again, and got all the way up to 340k before the same thing occurred. This time, however, I was cautious and I've been hovering right around 300k as a variety of things occur

First off, I've acquired a couple farmers. A couple friends of mine were asking me how to make gold, and after trying to explain economics to them for a while I just gave up and said "you know, if you buy these cheap herbs and mill them, and then turn them into ink, I'll buy them, that's how you can make gold"

And they did.

Now, I get hundreds of blackfallow and inferno ink in the mail, at reasonable but below market value prices, and I think everyone has benefited from the arrangement.

First off, I am able to devote the time that I had previously used milling and inking to other activities. Sure, I lose out on that profit, but I intentionally set my buy point just below the midpoint of profit, so that I'm still making a killing on glyphs, dust, cards, and everything else.

Secondly, my friends are able to churn through thousands of herbs and know that they are making money! Anything that I need that they don't provide, I just continue to do myself and it works out fine.



Another friend asked me what I was doing with all the saved time, to which I replied: "Prospecting." He thought it was pretty funny. =)

The moral of the story? Don't let yourself feel bad if you manage to outsource things. The bottom line is that everyone makes gold this way if done correctly.

Got JP?

Today I want to talk about something that used to be mainstream but has since vanished from the thoughts and minds of many.

I, like many hardcore raiders, have a surplus of both honor and justice points. Now there are these newfangled trade good vendors, but the stuff they offer is just so amazingly expensive that it's truly a waste of gold. For example, on Illidan I can purchase a 200g Maelstrom Crystal for the low low price of 3750 JP/HP.

While I appreciate the thought, Blizz, do you really expect me to be *happy* that I have to nearly cap the bloody things just to get 1 crystal? I'll pass, thanks.

Instead, I opted to find alternate ways to spend my excess honor and jp.

Remember back in Wrath, when epic gems came out? Eventually they were purchasable via honor and jp, and that has never changed. Cold (whose blog you will find here) posted today about how these gems still sell remarkably well. Well, I can corroborate that story, these gems often sell for 2-300g, simply because not a whole lot of people are still making them, and almost no one is picking up the recipes now.

Note, these gems cost 220 jp OR 165 honor. The math is close, but it is NOT worth it to trade jp to honor to purchase these. You can get them from Harold Winston in Dalaran for JP, or in Orgrimmar / Stormwind for honor

Happy hunting!

Size Matters!

Stack size, that is.

This post is dedicated to all of the industrious goblins out there who listed 217 of any item, in stacks of one.

Please go die.

On behalf of every goblin out there, I would like to thank all the players who list your stacks in reasonable numbers. 5, 10, 20, 200. You make our day. If you list large quantities of things in stacks of one, you are only hurting your own sales. Now on certain markets it's fine to list a reasonable quantity of items in stacks of 1. Darkmoon cards, fortune cookies, even dust/essences.

However, if you list more than 30 auctions, you're not going to sell as many. List 10 in stacks of 1, and then put a stack of 20 up! Not only is it less work for you to open the mail, but that stack of 20 is a lot more appealing to anyone who needs more than 1 item!

If I'm posting a dumb amount of something, I like to post in a ton of different stack sizes. I'll post a handful at 1, 6-8 in stacks of 2, and so on for stacks of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 20. It's a bunch of work to vary it so much, but guess what? They always sell.

And after all, isn't it all about making sales? At least that's what my boss tells me every day. =)

And there was much rejoicing!

Yay, darkmoon faire rep finished!

One step closer to a nice shiny new title, Mallrats the Insane.

I actually ended up making a good chunk of gold while doing this, because of my inscription business. I would have made a lot more, but I got impatient and decided to push through exalted this month instead of waiting until 4.2.

I've probably spent far too much gold so far in May, I spent probably 100k this week on random things like a Vial of the Sands and whatnot, heh. I'm still ahead, at around 280k liquid, but it could have been so much higher!

Rumours of my death have been greatly exagerated....

... said the Obsidium Shuffle.

Yep. The shuffle is far from dead. Here are the prices on my server:

Obsidium Ore: 200+ stacks at 30g/stack or less, constantly.
Green gems: 7, 14, 7, 7, 13, 8. (using minimum price right now, rounded down)
Dust: 7g, GCE: 25g, HShard: 30g

What does this tell us? Green gems are averaging 9g+ uncut on the AH, the same floor as before. If you disenchant everything and AH the Zephyrite, you still see nearly the exact same profit, and once you factor in rare quality jewelery (even at a paltry 20g/item, which is far below what you can get) you come out at 10+g per green gem.

Net result? Obsidium is even more profitable than it was, because of two reasons: Ore is bottoming out, and less people are doing the shuffle.

I for one, plan on sharding hundreds of stacks of ore this weekend to take advantage!

A Sprinkler System Approach to Goldmaking

While reflecting on my options for the upcoming 4.1 patch, I finally grasped a concept that has been floating around in my brain undeveloped for a few months now.  I realized that even though our instincts tell us to always make the highest priced item and sell that, that is not the way to maximize your income.

Most of the markets and niches that exist in the WoW economy can be derived from three main sources: herbs, ore, and drops (greens, cloth, etc.). When you buy herbs, you have a large number of options available to you for processing these herbs. You can make potions, flasks, glyphs, darkmoon cards, ink, and other things to list on the auction house. Before I understood that there is not unlimited demand, my goal was to make the most expensive item I could out of them - Darkmoon trinkets. (herb -> pigment -> ink -> dmc -> deck -> trinket)  I spent countless hours milling and making inks, only to realize that I could not move them as quickly as I wanted to.

So, I started selling decks and trinkets. My profits went up, even though I got a smaller ROI on my herbs. I went even further, and started selling cards, decks, and trinkets. Up again went the profits. I continued in this vein until I was selling damn near every thing I could make with herbs via inscription, and my income skyrocketed to over 10k/day net. Sure I was spending more money to make this much, but that's ok - I had the capital to do so.

The point I want to impress on you is that when a goblin tells you to diversify, he isn't necessarily saying that you need to level a new profession or alt. That goblin is simply telling you that you need to find more avenues to use in order to increase the volume of your sales. There is a finite amount of demand in a server, and no matter how many thousands of glyphs you post - there is only going to be a few sold, and that amount isn't going to change very drastically no matter the price. To increase your profit past that point you have to sell something else.

Picture your products as a drip sprinkler system. At each designated point, a little water seeps out (a sale). The more holes you have, the more water gets out. The more water gets out, the happier your lawn (bank account) is.  The water left in the hose is your inventory, and the less there is the better, because you know that all that water went towards a happy lawn.

This is why Blizz is nerfing the shuffle, incidentally - because a sprinkler system with an open hose at the end, on the sidewalk, doesnt make the grass greener at all, it just uses up all the water. =)

And off we go!

Having wanted to do this for some time, I finally took the plunge today. Welcome to my new (and first!) blog!

So why am I doing this? Well, I decided that I wanted to help all those people whom I deal with in WoW who have absolutely no idea how to make gold with any reliability. First, though, a little about myself.

I'm located on the Illidan server, hordeside, in the guild <Angry>. We are 13/13 heroic this tier, and ranked top 40 US for progression - and I'm happy to say that it is the best fitting guild for me that I've ever been in. They do everything, and they do it well.

My main is Mallrats, who was my first ever character on WoW and has been my primary toon for the entire time.

I'm currently floating around 235k gold, which is a little lower than it has been because I spent about 50k yesterday on boe epic gear for my 85 mage (for no apparent reason either, as I haven't played him since lol).

I have to say, that so far the lessons I've learned by making gold seem to be eminently transferable to other avenues. There are a few core values that really set the stage for everything I do in WoW, and if only I could figure out how to apply them irl, I'd be set. =D

1: Always be doing something.
  This is the most important one, and sadly enough it's the one I have the most trouble with staying on top of. What does this mean? It means that if your toon is afk in org and you're tabbed out watching a movie, you had better be crafting a ton of something to pass the time. Waiting for the next pull on heroic nef? Prospect some ore. Waiting on your bg queue? Go do some archaeology. The key concept here is that Time is Money (incidentally this is one of my bank alts' guild names) - Everything we do has a cost and a result attached to it. Call it an opportunity cost if you will, it signifies that you spent x amount of time doing y. That time could have been spent in other ways, ways with different costs and different results. The goal is obviously to be utilizing your time and other assets in the most profitable way possible.

2: Don't waste your resources.
  This should be a no-brainer, but we all do it. For example, I just spent 50k on boe epics for a toon that I play very rarely. Don't do that! There are other ways that you can waste resources that are less obvious though. If you are trying to bully a market, the odds are very good that you are wasting your gold. Sometimes this works out, but the vast majority of the time you at best break even. Stockpiling is risky too, but a whole lot safer than actually monkeying with the markets and it doesn't really fall into this category unless your gamble fails miserably. (and for the record, my guild bank full of pyrite ore makes me uneasy)

3: Think before you act.
  Before you buy, ask yourself a few questions: Will this make me money? How fast can I expect to turn these items around? How much should I make? How can I minimize the time required to process this? Little things like that will impact your bottom line quite significantly, because you're more likely to recognize a bad investment if you're always thinking about your profit.

There are more, but those are the most important ones by far, because they will get you in the habit of doing the right thing, and that is better than any random tip out there. But, speaking of random tips, here's a little bit of insight on one of the ways I make gold:

Darkmoon Faire Reputation
  Remember the Insane in the Membrane achievement? Well, people still do this, and they do it all the time. One of the biggest time and gold sinks in this achievement is the DMF part. The only way to increase this reputation past friendly is by turning in large numbers of decks. Hrm... A decent number of people needing a specific set of craftable items in large quantities??? Like any smart goblin, I recognize an opportunity! The decks that you can make are many - you can make Rogue/Sword/Mage/Demon decks (25 rep each) or you can make the Vanilla, BC, Wrath, and Cata decks (350 rep each). Me? I make them all. Why limit oneself, right?

  The first step is to break things down, and for this we'll focus on the Rogues deck. There is only one way to manufacture these cards, and that is through Inscription by using Hunter's Ink which is made after milling Mageroyal, Briarthorn, Swiftthistle, Bruiseweed, and Stranglekelp. Of these, the latter two are the 'high level' herb, generating double the quantity of rare inks. Ok now we know where to get the ink, and how to make the cards. Now, we need to set a price. I arbitrarily chose 4g/1rep for lower decks and 5g/1rep for the epic ones, thinking that I'd make people pay for the privilege of  turning in 14x fewer cards. This means I price my Rogue/Sword/Mage/Demon decks at 100g, and all of the Vanilia/BC/WotLK ones at 1750g. Cata decks obviously still command much higher prices, even on such a developed server as mine. (although earthquake decks push my 1750g limit on some days)

  The next step is to automate material gathering as much as possible. I used TradeSkillMaster to set a snatch price of around 60% retail, and then broke that down into ink, pigment, and individual cards as well - you will be amazed at how many people will list, for example, a Two of Mages for 3g. Keep in mind that Rogues is 3 cards, Swords is 4, and Mage/Demon is 5 cards, so adjust your buylist accordingly. I don't snatch herbs because I do massive herb buys as a part of my glyph industry (which gives me an outlet for the normal inks).

  So you've got your buylist set up and you've set prices, now all there is to do is list them (48h list) and wait. This is NOT a high volume market, you will probably go 2-3 weeks without selling any epic decks, and then when the faire is close they will all sell in a firestorm of profit. The minor decks will however sell much more reliably, someone generally buys every single one off the AH about once a week.

  An important note is storage, because there are about 250 different cards. I choose to post all of the rare quality cards on the auction house, between 20 and 3000g. Set up a shopping list in Auctionator and routinely search for each individual group of cards (" of undeath" and so forth, with no " so that it searches for every card), and if you notice that all 8 cards have a presence on the AH, feel free to buy the ones you need, cancel the ones you had, make a deck, and post that instead! This reduces the number of auctions you have, and the decks sell for more gold anyway.

  Anyway, hope this helped any aspiring goblins on their way to riches. =)

 - Mallrat