WoW Rookie: Save everything, sell everything
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.
It's clean-up time around here. Now that the WoW Rookie Guide is up and running to shuttle you to precisely the information you've been wondering about, we're poking through our older pieces to bring them up to date. (If there are any WoW Rookies whose datedness you find especially galling, shoot me a link at lisa [at] wow [dot] com and I'll prioritize it for updating.) Sometimes during the updating process, I uncover little gems, like this excerpt from Elizabeth Harper's 2007 piece Money-making 101. Be sure to visit the entire article, by the way; it's an outstanding resource to make sure you arrive at your character's more costly milestones with gold in your pockets.
In the meantime, let's talk about what's worth selling and what's not. First of all: keep everything. Make buying or making big bags a priority; after all, you can't make money if you can't bring home loot to sell. If your bags get full, sure, go ahead and destroy grey items (items with their names listed in grey letters). (To destroy an item, left-click it, drag it to an open spot on your screen, and left-click again to drop it; reply "Yes" to the dialog box that pops up.)
The important thing to remember is that virtually everything you pick up has value to someone. (Just look at that hottie at the top of the article in his Crochet Shoulderpads. That's bucc.) Even certain grey items can be desirable to collectors. Let's look at the various quality levels of WoW items and what the levels generally mean to you as a seller.
Grey – Poor Quality Often derisively referred to as vendor trash, grey items are boring, everyday objects with no special properties. Greys are of no particular use to players, though some enjoy collecting full sets of grey armor (which usually has a unique look). However, even a grey item will have a value to an NPC vendor. Pick up all the greys you have space for, just to resell them. They may not sell for much, but those bits of coin add up!
White – Common Quality These items have no special properties, either, but they are used as components in trade skills or reagents for spells. These are certainly useful to other players and may sell reasonably well on the Auction House. (Even if they don't sell like hotcakes on the AH, they can still be sold to an NPC vendor for coin.)
Green – Uncommon Quality These are uncommon items with magical properties. Green items and higher may generally be disenchanted by Enchanters. Greens often sell well on the Auction House, depending on their specific stats. (For example, something with Strength and Spirit won't sell as well as something with Strength and Agility, since the latter stat pairing is more useful to melee combat classes; most players will view the Spirit stat points on the first item as wasted itemization.)
Blue – Rare Quality Blue items are superior, Rare items with magical properties. These are higher quality than green items and are always worth gold on the Auction House (although many blues are Bind on Pickup).
Purple – Epic Quality Epics are exactly what they sound like: higher quality again than blues and certainly worth a good bit of gold at the Auction House. You may be lucky enough to find one of these on a random mob, but they're more usually obtained from high-level quests or instances.
There are two other item categories you may see around on other players, although you won't ever loot them from mobs.
Orange – Legendary Quality Whoa, you've spotted a legendary item! These usually require long, complex quests involving endgame raiding to acquire.
Gold – Heirloom Quality Heirloom items are Bind to Account items designed for experienced level 80 players to purchase for their lower level alts. Some heirloom items scale to the level of the person wearing them, providing stats equivalent to a Rare quality item.
Now that you have a relative value for the items you pick up, how do you know what's valuable and what's a waste of inventory space? We say, so long as you have inventory space to spare (and the biggest bags you can afford are always an excellent investment), you shouldn't care. Fill your inventory to the brim -- you can always run back to town to sell when you're full up. In the case of an inventory crisis when you're afield, however, sacrifice grey items before white, white before green, and so on.
walks you through all sort of new-player concerns, from game lingo for the beginner to joining your first guild as a mid-level player and on to what to do when you finally hit level 80. Visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.
