Gold Capped: Automating the grind

Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast. Don't forget to drop by Onyxia-US this Sunday at 7:30 PM eastern time to get ganked by one of the CtA hosts and take the money of the other one! A good time will be had by all, and we'll be sticking around after the event to chat with readers and listeners!

Grinding is a pain. Avoiding grinds is why I got into the auction house in the first place. Repetitive and boring tasks are not fun for most people. Unfortunately, while some businesses are relatively grind free, certain tradeskills require us to do something like milling (inscription), prospecting (jewelcrafting), or disenchanting (enchanting).

The more volume you want to sell, the more volume you need to process. I know of scribes who sell 1200g a day of glyphs at an average of 8g each. That's 150 glyphs sold, which means 150 Ink of the Sea squeezed out of northrend herbs. You get 5-6 inks per stack of herbs, so this guy mills a minimum of 25 stacks of herbs a day. Each stack of herbs requires at least 4 hardware events (clicks or keypresses).

Today we're going to talk about ways to set up your addons and user interface so you can do this boring repetitive work as efficiently as possible. As I've said before, addons and UI customization are what separate you from the unw... your buyers. Your ability to accomplish a large number of tasks in as short a time as possible allow you to make respectable income in game without requiring unhealthy amounts of time. Plus, if you're going to spend unhealthy amounts of time anyways, you might as well put those hours to work as efficiently as possible!

Auctioneer is our first stop (as usual). Auctioneer can be configured to allow you to automatically process your goods. Importantly, it will not allow you to get away from the rule of "one hardware event per game cooldown", as that would be breaking the terms of service. What it can do, however, is present you with a confirmation box every time something you can process comes into your bags that asks you "do you want to process this?"

Also handy, it has a persistent ignore list, as well as a temporary one.

Clicking "Ignore" will prevent auctioneer from ever asking you if you want to process something again. A good place to use this is on Cobalt Ore (which is always worth more smelted) and (heh) your gear. If you simply don't plan on doing your processing now, but don't want to ignore something permanently, click no to make the box go away until you reload your UI or log back in.

Clicking yes will mill, disenchant, or prospect whatever it is in your bags that needs doing. Of course, we can't have this be any less functional than a processing macro. The goal is we want to be able to press the space bar or something while facing away from the keyboard and watching a movie.

Paste the following into a macro, and drop that macro onto a keybound action bar somewhere:

"/click" macros are the best thing since sliced bread. Just about everything on your screen has a name, and if you macro a "/click [name]", it will generally click on it for you. The hard part is finding out the names, however there's an easy solution for that too! Paste the following into another keybound macro, and it will tell you the name of whatever it is you're hovering over whenever you hit the keybind:

So I used that to find the name of the yes button. I also used it to find the name for the Eternal Fire on Frozo the Renowned, so I could press a button to bring up the confirmation dialogue instead of having to move my mouse left and right every time. Seems like a little thing, but it adds up when you're passing in hundreds of items.

Back to Auctioneer: how do we get this functionality active? Like all the most interesting fiddly bits, you'll find this in the options. Specifically, the Enchantrix options. Type "/enchantrix config" to bring up the relevant window, then click on "automation":

Check the first three boxes. This will also catch herbs for milling and ore for prospecting. If you happen to be doing this with an enchanter, you'll immediately be asked if you want to shard all the hard earned off-set gear in your bag. Please click on "ignore", and you'll see all that gear appear in the dropdown list here of permanently ignored items.

Why use this instead of my milling macro?

If you're only ever processing one or two things, this might seem like a bit much for you. A simple macro will suffice if you have only a few items you'll ever work with. These macros look like this:

The simplicity of this solution is attractive, however as you add more tradeskills and materials, these macros can easily get out of hand. If you are, for example, in the business of buying older ore and herbs, prospecting and milling them, and then selling the resulting mats to players leveling tradeskills, your two macros could quickly get enormous and grow past the character limit. Another example is disenchanting. Using Auctioneer's auto-disenchant option allows you to easily scan the AH for gear that disenchants into more gold than it costs. There is no macro big enough in the world to contain the name of every possible item you get this way!

Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money. Or gold, as it were. Wait, that doesn't make sense... you can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? Every week, Gold Capped will teach you the tricks of the trade. From setting up your auction addons and user interface, to cross faction arbitrage, to learning how to use your tradeskills.