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How to profit off Winter Veil
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Winter Veil is probably one of the most profitable game holidays. There are lots of achievements and quests people do, and some of these involve acquiring things that can be sold on the Auction House. The most interesting thing is that none of the things people will be needing require a maximum-level character to get and are, in fact, farmable by just about anyone over level 6 or so. Small Eggs Let's start with Small Eggs. Five of these are used to make the five Gingerbread Cookies required for the holiday quest Treats for Greatfather Winter. Small eggs are easily farmed, but the demand for them between Dec. 15 and Jan. 2 is more than can reasonably be farmed by any one person. People in the know have been preparing since last year and have stockpiled these eggs. That said, the bulk needed to meet the demand generated by just about every single active player doing this quest on all their characters is pretty high, and these eggs don't come up on the Auction House that often for cheap. For the next few days until demand drops off a bit, people will buy these for between 2g and 5g, and if you have a character capable of killing level 6 monsters, you can farm hundreds an hour in Eversong Woods outside Silvermoon.
Pandaria to eschew capital cities for scattered vendors, separate faction hubs
In today's Mists of Pandaria Live Developer QA, a player asked whether we'd see a Dalaran-like capital city on the new continent of Pandaria. Cory Stockton's answer reveals a surprising amount about the new Pandaria paradigm of exploration.
Gold Capped: Shattering Maelstrom Crystals
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Patch 4.3 will bring with it the ability to shatter Maelstrom Crystals into Heavenly Shards. This is unsurprising, as we have been able to shatter or transform the epic enchanting mats from other expansions. At this time, it looks like it will produce two Heavenly Shards per Maelstrom Crystal, and since it's not disenchanting, it's unlikely to be affected by the guild perk. This is going to be an opportunity for people to make some money, as well as provide a much needed sink for these Maelstrom Crystals, which have been piling up of late. The market for Heavenly Shards is a little odd. In case you've forgotten, you can make one from 16 Elementium Ore and 8 Obsidium Ore. Despite this being "common" knowledge, the price for these enchanting mats has a consistently high profit margin. Maybe it's because of how long and annoying it is to turn ore into shards, or maybe it's because of the large volume taken by the popular enchants this expansion.
Fujitsu Lifebook AH77/E and SH76/E hands-on
If you're familiar with Fujitsu's AH572 and S761/C laptops, then you'll certainly recognize the similarities on their Japanese cousins. On the left we have the beastly 15.6-inch AH77/E, which sports an Intel Core-i72670QM processor (2.20-3.10GHz), 750GB hard drive, 8GB RAM, Blu-ray drive and a handy circular scrolling pad. We dig the slanted keys and their color-accented sides (combinations include black on red, white on black and black on blue), and likewise with the removable dust trap near the heatsink on the bottom side, though the already-discounted price of ¥175,320 ($2,284) is rather steep for a machine lacking a dedicated graphics card -- you get an Intel HD Graphics 3000 instead. If you're looking for something lighter than the 2.9kg AH series, then consider the SH76/E: at 1.34kg, it's one of the lightest 13.3-inch laptops that come with an internal DVD drive. Specs include a Core i5-2520M chip (2.5GHz-3.2GHz), 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, the same circular scrolling pad, the same dust trap and an impressive 13.7-hour battery life. Like its international cousin, the SH76/E can also swap its optical drive for a pico projector or a weight-saver frame. With the exception of the flimsy and duller display compared to the AH model's, the SH's overall build quality was satisfactory. However, Fujitsu wants ¥161,820 ($2,110) for its latest portable laptop, so you might want to customize it with cheaper components on the company's Japanese website (choosing a 500GB HDD would save you about $980, for instance). Both models will be available in a week's time. %Gallery-135892% %Gallery-135893%
Gold Capped: Dealing with Neutral Auction House sniping
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Neutral auction house sniping is the practice of lurking at the neutral auction house (which is usable by both factions) until someone tries to use it to move items from one of their characters to another across factions, and then stealing it. Unlike someone who ninjas a mount in a PUG, this type of theft is totally OK with Blizzard -- all the sniper is doing is buying a posted auction.
Gold Capped: Buy low, sell long
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I've often downplayed the "buy low, sell high" aspect of the money-making game, instead focusing on using trade skills to create value and profits. There is, however, a lot to be said for brokerage. It can be much riskier but has a very good profit per hour when you win your bets. Unlike a game of cards, though, the odds are not stacked against you. There's one key fact that can stack the odds of brokerage in your favor: People charge less for items in a trade window than others would pay on the auction house. The best strategy to take advantage of this is to buy low and sell long. Why long instead of high? They actually amount to the same thing, but the key here is that instead of immediately trying to find some buyer who will put more money into a trade window than you, you list the product on the auction house. The auction house is the great differentiator between people looking to make a quick sale and those willing to wait for a high margin. If you see someone selling something in trade chat, chances are that no matter how much they're asking for, they're expecting a low-ball offer and are willing to sell somewhere in the middle. So what is it about the AH that makes stuff sell for more?
Gold Capped: How to use trade chat to make gold
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! When was the last time you saw trade chat used to actually trade more than Chuck Norris jokes? Interestingly, it can actually be used for making gold! This might be a bit of a paradigm shift, so bear with me here. Trade chat is simultaneously one of the most overused and underused tools in our toolbox. Non-auctioneers sometimes use it almost exclusively because the addon-free auction house is intimidatingly badly designed. Gold-making pros sometimes get so wrapped up in their own business that we miss out potentially profitable chats. So how can you use trade chat to profit?
Gold Capped: 5 addons for profitable buying, selling and crafting
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! You can make gold in World of Warcraft without addons. You can also PvP and raid without addons; however, for the vast majority of people, that would result in lower performance. Unlike PvP and raiding, however, there is absolutely no way to use the default UI to be as productive in the auction house as you would be with addons. The default Blizzard UI for professions and the AH was not built for making money. I divide gold addon users into two groups: the people who want everything to be as efficient and streamlined as possible, and the people who simply want to be able to do basic tasks without as much hassle as the default UI imposes on us. Let's call them "power auctioneers" and "retail auctioneers." What addons are available now, and how can you use them to accomplish your goals?
Gold Capped: Profiting with tailoring
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Tailoring is a profession often accused of being a profitless pursuit. While any profession can be unprofitable if you try hard enough, let's talk about some of the things you can do with tailoring. I'm going to start with the market that's newest for this expansion: PvP gear.
Gold Capped: Can you ever have too many alchemists?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I got an email from Kaefera that got me thinking: I have recently been leveling 9x level 75 characters on my server, to completely abuse professions and make some serious cash. I'm currently giving each of them alchemy, I have 4 transmute specced alchemists so far, currently growing at a rate of an alchemist a week. My question to you is more of a suggestion, what would you suggest to grab as a secondary profession on each of them? I would like something similar to my Truegold, where I can log on once a day on each character, craft/do whatever in 5 minutes, then move to the next. So this is something I've heard before, but more in Wrath of the Lich King, when alchemist cooldowns represented a very serious amount of gold per day. The reasoning was (and is) that if you level a bunch of alchemists, you can log in once a day to each character to use their cooldowns and make disgusting amounts of gold with virtually no effort. The question is, does this still work well enough to justify the investment?
Gold Capped: Improving the default auction house interface
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The default interface for the auction house could use some loving. It's an essential part of players' gaming experience, and whether they use it or not, its design has an effect on them. We've seen many examples of Blizzard designing parts of their UI to include features provided by addons that had become so prevalent that everyone had to run them. For example, threat didn't always show up on the default frames -- back in my day, we had to run Omen to avoid pulling aggro from the tank. It's important to recognize that not every valuable interface tweak belongs in the basic WoW UI, though. If it's a feature that's only used by a small segment of players or is unnecessarily complex, it's probably best off in an addon. You won't see me advocating that the base AH UI keep historic pricing numbers, for example. It is, though, a travesty that you have to page through hundreds of pages of single auctions to get to the lower priced stacks.
Gold Capped: Ore-splosion
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The auction house is starting to have to stack all the ore they're listing for sale out back of the warehouse. Elementium Ore and Obsidium Ore have, in the last few days, been listed in quantities most people would consider unimaginable at prices that make auctioneers cackle. Until they realize that everyone has gotten this amount of stock. Level ones have been cropping up like mushrooms and listing hundreds of stacks of ore per night on every server I've checked into. I'm not the only one who has written about this. Everyone loves cheap Cataclysm ore. It means cheap blacksmithing goods, cheap gems, cheap enchanting mats, and cheap engineering items. It also has the unique benefit of having the highest price floor of any ore ever introduced to the game. Obsidium prospects into 6 green quality raw gems and an average of 0.3 rare gems per stack, and elementium into 4 green and 1 blue. This means that if you do nothing but cut and vendor the greens for 9g, the "floor" for obsidium is 54g, and elementium is 36g. Then you have the rares. This floor is the bare minimum of what the ore is worth, but it's used for so many things. What else can we do with all of it?
Gold Capped: TradeSkillMaster, the last trade skill and finances addon you'll ever need
Every week (since Feb. 14, 2010), WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, hate mail, or guild applications! edit: This post introduces the addon and concepts, but for a hands on setup guide, check out the basic and advanced posts. I have been playing around with a new addon, TradeSkillMaster. I've talked about a whole slew of other tools players can use to make money before, but none of them are anywhere near as awesome as TSM. Before I jump in, though, you should all probably know that this addon is still in beta. There are a few little bugs I've encountered (and reported), but the addon works very well in its current state. Please note that when you download the addon, you will need to download each module separately, as the entirety of the addon's functionality is accessed through the modules. They are linked in the description section of the TSM main page, but if you have a Curse Premium account, you can get them all at once. TSM is now my main tool for every single one of the markets I'm active in. That said, Sapu, the creator of the addon, needs help. He's done 95% of the code on the project so far, so if any of you are looking for an opportunity to work on an exciting and popular World of Warcraft addon project, I'd be just thrilled if it was this one. Down to business: what does TradeSkillMaster do, and why am I so excited that I wrote a post about it before it's done?
The Undermine Journal reboots with AH sales profiles
I reported when it went offline, and it looks like The Undermine Journal is back. It's added a bunch of realms, to boot. Additionally, the development blog post linked above has a few tidbits about some features coming down the pipes, including Twitter direct messages as a potential vehicle for market notifications. Also exciting is the possibility of a raw auction house feed being made available (for free), so other sites could make AH mashups of their own without having to redesign the armory crawler. This site is an amazing tool for stalking the auction house efficiently when you can't be directly in front of an AH. Combined with the Remote Auction House, this allows people to keep a semi-persistent presence on the market without needing to be in game all day. It's also invaluable for researching new markets and strategizing against your serious competitors. In fact, the only feature people have really voiced a lot of concern about is the seller activity page. The heat map can tell people when it's worth logging in to undercut, which can lead to people feeling like they're being unfairly targeted. The current items section tells interested players what other markets they could target someone in. The standard response to concerns is that this is all just data, and what people do with it is not the fault of site that makes the data accessible. There is no privacy in an open market, and just like you can hardly be upset if someone puts a photo of a sale sign in your storefront window on the internet, you can't get upset if a site like the UJ makes everything you have for sale available through a public interface. Personally, I like being able to stalk my competition more than I'm afraid of what they might do by stalking me. After all, there's only one of me and at least 50 of them. Additionally, I like to practice what I preach about market agility, and I like to think that every time a competitor closes a door on me, I can find a new door. Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped, plus the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.
Gold Capped: How to farm Maelstrom Crystals
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. Email Basil (new address is basil@wowinsider.com; old one no longer works) with your comments, questions or hate mail! The Maelstrom Crystal used to be disenchantable from an easily crafted epic. This was hotfixed, and the prices have unsurprisingly shot through the roof. People still want their gear enchanted, however, and for some reason these things keep appearing on the auction house. Where are they coming from? How can you get them? This article will discuss the current cheapest methods for getting them.
Drama Mamas: Proper AH etiquette when a guildie helps craft
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. So. Dreamy. I perhaps should have warned you that if you are going to send letters that contain even the slightest hint of a Jane Austen reference, this kind of thing would happen. Well, now you know. Hi, I recently had an issue with a guildie that I would like to ask about. At the beginning of the expansion, it was a goal of mine to get one of the Darkmoon Card trinkets crafted. As we all know, it is no small task. A fellow guildie (and fellow officer) offered to help me with the task. So I immediately flicked the farm herb switch, and set out to make it happen. After a couple of weeks, more research into available trinkets, and nearly 60 stacks of herbs, I was one card away from the deck. I was able to purchase the last card for a good sum of gold and finally had my deck ready for the Darkmoon Faire. With all of the gear research I had done, I concluded that the trinket I had worked so hard for was going to be replaced very quickly. So I decided that I'd try to sell it, reasoning that there were other personal goals I had in the game that could benefit from a chunk of gold. After posting it on the AH and being away for a day, my guildie that crafted it for me shot me a fairly aggressive tell saying how he thought selling it was a low thing to do. He explained that he even used some of his own herbs to craft the cards and that the only reason he offered to begin with was to help a guildie get raid-ready. I took it off the AH so as not to cause problems and explained that I wasn't aware he had to use his own mats to help make it all. I found out later that he had been ripping me to others about selling it before he spoke with me. I posted an explanation in our forums of why I was going to sell it at all. apologized if I offended anyone, and stated that I would be using it after all.
Gold Capped: Selling enchanting scrolls in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. Email Basil (new address is basil@wowinsider.com; old one no longer works) with your comments, questions or hate mail! Enchanting is a very straightforward business. You have a few steady sources of income; however, one of the reasons that its overall profitability is high is that Blizzard put it behind the level 84 phasing wall, making a huge chunk of the profession in Cataclysm only accessible to people who have access to the shard trader.
Gold Capped: Alchemy in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. Email Basil (new address is basil@wowinsider.com; old one no longer works) with your comments, questions or hate mail! Alchemy is, again, a money-maker this expansion. The market isn't as straightforward as it was in Wrath of the Lich King, but it's definitely worth the slot on a character. One of the nice things about alchemy is that there is no alchemy vendor in Twilight Highlands who refuses to come out and do business until you clean up the first quest area at level 84. Now if only I had known which professions would require that and been able to stack them on a smaller number of characters than I did ... Today, we're going to talk about how to make money using flasks, potions, and transmutes. Two pieces of vital information: First, specialization procs account for as much as 20% extra product from the same mats. Second, while you can only have one specialization per character, you can change it for 150g by visiting the appropriate NPCs in Outland (one to unlearn, one to learn). Assuming you do your business in batches, this is probably cheaper than wasting another character's profession slot on a second alchemy tradeskill. If you need help with this badly documented process, just look up the mastery you are unlearning, and revisit the NPC that trains it to unlearn it.
Gold Capped: Take the Mysterious Fortune Card house advantage
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on making money in game, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Anaalius's Darkmoon deck report. There's a craze in /trade. People are advertising Mysterious Fortune Cards that can be flipped to rarely turn into a Fortune Card that vendors for 5,000g. Like lambs to the slaughter, enough people head to the AH and buy a few that it's become a serious moneymaker for scribes. I use the expression "lambs to the slaughter" mostly in jest.
Gold Capped: Juggling the Volatiles market in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is BigJimm's post about profiting off the world events. The new elemental crafting materials are called Volatiles. Volatile Earth, Volatile Air, Volatile Water, Volatile Life, and Volatile Fire are going to be by-products of herbalism, mining, and killing certain mobs. While they're technically farmable (unlike ore, skins, and herbs), the only way to farm Volatiles is to camp things that drop them or to collect them as by-products of mining or herbalism. Let's look at the sources for each type of Volatile. Bear in mind that this is just beta information and thus is completely subject to change (as well as probably a little unreliable because of the small sample numbers). Elementium Vein will contain Water, Earth, Fire, and Air Volatiles. Pyrite Deposits will contain Fire and Air Volatiles. Obsidium Deposits will contain Air and Earth Volatiles. Herb nodes will all drop Volatile Life. There are a variety of elemental mobs that drop all the Volatiles, the most farmable of which are in Twilight Highlands.
