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Insider Trader: Inscription and glyphs in Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped; Insider Trader focuses on specific trade skills. Glyphs and inscription are getting a serious overhaul in Cataclysm. I read an excellent write-up of the new system on my friend Kraklin's blog and realized that I haven't yet posted an Insider Trader on the new system! This will have an impact on people who make their money with inscription, as well as be a nice quality-of-life change for people who find themselves changing their spec and glyphs a lot. As soon as the pre-expansion patch 4.0.1 launches, we're no longer going to have to buy glyphs more than once per character. Once you learn a glyph, you will always see it in your spellbook and will be able to switch between your known glyphs with a Dust of Disappearance, made by scribes from the same ink used to craft glyphs. While this won't mean much if you tend to stick with a single set of glyphs, if you change them around a lot, you will find it easier to manage and less expensive. On the live servers, every time you make the change, you often end up paying enormous markups on glyphs -- there can be sporadic supply due to the massive number of auctions that need watching if someone is selling glyphs. After 4.0.1, assuming we know the glyph already, we'll just have to buy a single dust, and every scribe in the auction house will be competing for that business.
Gold Capped: Cataclysm launch is the best time to farm
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil with any comments, questions or hate mail! I've taken a bit of comment flak for ragging on farmers before. Yes, I read the comments! In a mature economy where there's lots of competition for farming and crafting, I still believe that crafting and using the auction house is the most profitable use of your time. Farming does not benefit from an economy of scale that you can use to make more money with crafting; no matter what, you can only farm a certain amount of product in a given time. However, you can AFK process many parts of the crafting process. Especially when I started writing this column, farming was something that would never make you as much money as investing in leveling a profession and learning how to use it (two-handed, dual-wielded) on the AH. This, however, will not be the case when Cataclysm drops. The people making real money will be the ones out there happily gathering the new ores and herbs so that the poor crafter saps like me can pay a huge premium for a very small supply.
Insider Trader: Old alchemy cooldowns
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped; Insider Trader focuses on specific profitable markets. Got this from Thoorull on Steamwheedle Cartel (EU-H): Blizzard has a long tradition of taking some "special" mats or crafts off of cooldown eventually, to help players along as content progresses. There are many cases: The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King cloth, Transmute: Titanium, Smelt: Titansteel, etc. What I completely fail to understand is why some now-trivial transmutes are still on a cooldown. Not just plain cooldown, but the all-important one which is used also for current epic gems. This includes vanilla iron, truesilver and essences, and TBC primals in addition to the said current-content epic gems and eternals. It completely baffles me why I can transmute a bajillion of titanium bars or current-content meta gems (as long as I have the mats) but not some old and obscure stuff. This is an excellent observation that's been bugging me for a while. Cataclysm is just around the corner, and everyone will be leveling new characters and doing trade skills from the ground up. It sure would be awesome to have the ability to turn readily available mithril and iron into much harder-to-find truesilver and gold. Let's look into what trade skill cooldowns really do.
Insider Trader: Making gold with titansteel
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also the writer for the Gold Capped column. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped, whereas Insider Trader will be focusing on specific profitable markets. Basil quickly realized that if he kept writing large comprehensive trade skill posts, he'd quickly run out of ideas for this column, so he decided to start deep diving into specific markets instead of trying to cram all the options into a single post. I mentioned this briefly in my mining post, but Titansteel Bars are one of those products that seems to be used for just about everything. Check out the Wowhead "Reagent for" tab, and you'll see what I mean. It is also used in very large quantities by the more popular items, like the iLvl 264 BoE crafted items. One way or another, titansteel is one of those things that seems to have bottomless demand and is therefore an excellent product to sell. High demand means high profit? OK, so it's not perfect. Titansteel may always sell quickly, but that just means you'll have more competition. Also, every buyer has a fairly good idea of what market price is, so when the supply dries up, you can't make too much of a premium. Let's look at your costs.
Gold Capped: Breaking the glyph wall
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. Almost all auction house tactics revolve around the undercut. It may be a single copper, a few silver or a few gold, or a freefall drop down to the price of materials. Regardless of the amount or the frequency, most undercuts share a common misconception: that you're controlling the market with your undercuts. You're not. Your competitor has the control. By undercutting, you've just let your competitor decide your price. You've let your competitor set a cap on your profits -- and more, you've agreed to accept even less with your undercut. The inscription market sees more than its fair share of this, sometimes on a large scale. The low deposits encourage large number of postings, followed by even larger numbers of cancellations and repostings. Prices fall as each new poster accepts and trumps the previous poster's prices, until the market falls to the cost of materials and the walls go up. The final wall signals a complete loss of market control. Once it's up, it no longer matters who built the wall. If it's your wall, you can't raise prices until the competition perched above you goes away. If it's not your wall, you can't raise prices on your auctions until someone breaks the wall. Stalemate, and out come the piña coladas.
Insider Trader: Early thoughts on professions in Cataclysm
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. The Cataclysm beta continues, and the crafting dudes abide. Betas can be tough when you're doing professions analysis. A lot of the itemization and various power coefficients aren't finished, so none of the gear created by crafting feels "permanent." And I don't believe any drop rate that isn't firmly sourced from live servers. In the words of many before me, "You can't take anything for granted yet." Makes it tough to know what you're looking at. Of course, that being said, the beta is providing a lot of tantalizing hints about what professions will be like in the expansion. There have been enormous efforts to reconcile the relative power levels of each profession, and I think the developers have made huge strides in that regard. Random stats on crafted items are making a comeback through items like Charred Dragonscale Shoulders. While these shoulders are obviously a shaman item, since hunters don't use their intellect, the random enchant portion will keep the shoulders interesting for many of our dearly beloved totem jockeys. (Heck, inevitably a hunter or two will be wearing them, despite the intellect.) Since intellect will provide direct scaling to spellpower, that random stat bonus could be very interesting.
Gold Capped: When glyph prices hit the wall
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. Imagine a typical glyph market on a busy realm: dozens of goblins sitting hunched over their steam calculators surrounding the trading pit, each figuring their costs and profits down to the last copper trying to gain an advantage over the others. Thousands of glyphs are posted every hour, most to be canceled and reposted an hour later at even lower prices. Eventually, one of the goblins has a flash of brilliance (or cracks under the strain; the records aren't clear) and posts all of his glyphs at a loss. The calculation engines grind to a stop, leaving the goblins to stare up at the big board in silence, then at each other. "Now what?" We call it the wall. One scribe picks a price and tries to hold the entire market to that price. If it holds, the market stops at the wall, and everyone on the other side watches helplessly as sales drop to zero. Sometimes it's done to drive off competitors; sometimes it's done to dissuade new competitors from entering the market, or just to burn up excess ink supplies ... or even just out of boredom to cause pointless drama, goblin style. Like all good goblin inventions, the wall appears simple on the outside, but remains complicated (and somewhat explosive) when put into practice. One complication is that there is more actually more than one type of wall.
Gold Capped: WoW Prospector and mailbag
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail, as well as check out the long awaited 11th episode of Call to Auction! I got an email from the creator of WoW Prospector asking me to cover it. After he assured me that his servers are housed in a fire proof room lined with asbestos and at least 300 meters from any residential zones, I agreed, mainly because it's an incredibly useful tool that has saved me a bunch of spreadsheet time. Essentially, the tool will tell you how much money you stand to make prospecting various ores, given the price of ore and what you can sell the raw gems for. Here's a screenshot of it in action:
Insider Trader: Enchanting the Cataclysm
Cataclysm is probably still a little bit away. Blizzard has not announced the final launch date, though, so there's really not any way to guess. Still, we're seeing more and more information slough out of the beta like so much tantalizing ice cream falling from the soft serve dispenser. The flavor of the week for professions, of course, is enchanting. Enchanting is probably the most fundamental template for improving a character beyond levels and gear. Even though jewelcrafters have been around for two expansions, people still talk about enchanted gear as being the baseline for character improvement. It makes sense, then, that the foundation is a flagship for gear enhancement in Cataclysm. However, with a few small exceptions, the rules about which stats get enchantments are changing. As you'll see as we go through the new enchants one by one, many of the new enchanting standards will be based on procs. We can guess this change is in the interest of making the stat bonuses more interesting and "deep," so it's going to be interesting to see which enchants different classes prefer. As warning, though, it's beta. It's almost certain some of these stats are placeholders or subject to change.
Insider Trader: Mining, the tradesman's multi-tool
Insider Trader is a column about professions, occasionally written by Gold Capped columnist, Basil Berntsen. Basil can't really tell the difference between the columns, sometimes, although ideally Gold Capped should be more focused on the Auction House, and Insider Trader should be focused on the professions. Well, as long as nobody calls him on it, he's going to keep choosing where he's putting his next piece by flipping a coin. Today was tails. Tomorrow, Gold capped is due. What does that make Time Is Money? Judging by the frequency, an edge roll. By the way; email Basil questions so he can start answering them in a "Ask an Auctioneer" post. I've said before that farming professions are usually a waste of time. The opportunity cost of a farming profession is another crafting profession, which could make you so much more money per hour that you can always afford to buy the mats you need. The exception to this rule is mining. All the gathering professions are simple and no risk. You pay nothing but time to level them, and you are able to make money by using them without risking anything but, again, time. The difference between your average player and an auctioneer, however, is that the auctioneer is always measuring his success in gold per hour. Extremely good farmers can do better than extremely bad auctioneers, however if you're capable of being an extremely good farmer, you're probably capable of being at least a good auctioneer, and are spending those hours doing a more repetitive, less interesting task for less money. Mining is the exception to this rule because it opens up the ability to perform several very important transformations:
Gold Capped: Plan out your professions
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from building a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) (we're recruiting!) to write up a guide that will help you make gold. Check out the Call to Auction podcast, and feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail. Every profession has some way of making money. You have different types of markets available and a limit of the number of professions you can have per character. This means that whether you're just getting started on the auction house or trying to plan your next milestone, you need to make choices and plan your professions. Road maps In order to make intelligent choices about your professions, you need a few vital pieces of information. First, a plan. What's your tolerance for risk, time invested and money invested? Second, you need to take stock of your characters. How many of them are capable of getting two professions maxed out? Are there any professions you don't need maxed out for your plan? Last, you need to know what you can accomplish with the resources you have. Once you have all this, you are able to make intelligent decisions.
Insider Trader: Celebrating with crafted items
We're about a week away from the 4th of July. On this day, our U.S. tradition involves firing copious amounts of explosives into the sky to celebrate our nation. We also barbecue, drink beer and do our best to keep whoever had the most beer away from the explosives. It's generally a lot of fun. There's just something magical about looking up in the sky and seeing fireworks. The good news is that the holiday has an analog inside the World of Warcraft. The goblins gather across the world and totally rock out with an awesome display of pyrotechnic skill. Sounds pretty cool. But I'm a do-it-yourselfer. Accessing the vast legions of crafters under my command, I put together a list of my favorite celebratory recipes in the game. Here are some crafted items that can help you hold your own in-game 4th of July bash.
Insider Trader: Starting your own crafting empire
Last week, I spent some time discussing how crafting has saved WoW for me in the past. More than a few folks echoed that statement, which was pretty heartening. Just as importantly, though, I had a couple readers drop me a line and ask for tips on how to go down the same path. They wanted any advice I might have on how to start one's own crafting empire. How do you get from "I have no professions" to "I am a master of all, a rival to the goblin kingdom" in a few easy steps? The basic idea behind building your own crafting empire would be that every profession is covered. You have it all. But it's actually a little bit deeper than that. You not only have to have characters with the requisite recipes, you also must have characters with the requisite gathering progressions who can then perform the gathering for you. It gets a little deep depending on how you design your empire. And it all boils down to one thing. Your ability to build and conduct your own crafting empire will revolve around your willingness to level alts. The actual class of your alts won't matter directly but you'll need at least a few. It is impossible to cover all the professions with fewer than four alts anyway, so you'll be doing the grind from level 1 to 80 at least three times. (Not four, because you can use a death knight for at least one of these crafters.)
Insider Trader: Profession hints from the press event; no pony, no moose
In case you didn't hear, there was a rather large press event over the weekend. All at once, a seeming floodgate of information spewed forth with Cataclysm goodness onto our waiting ears. Of particularly exciting note for us, the hammer-and-apron crafting crowd, we finally got some hints about what we're going to see -- and, painfully, some definites about what we're not going to see. First, Path of the Titans is out. And while that does mean that Blizzard is going to focus on making other content as high quality as possible, that means that Archaeology is being ditched as a true profession. It will be focused on providing lore benefit instead, which I'll acknowledge is a pretty cool idea. I was hoping to have a Bones-like character ready to to engage in forensic archaeology and absolutely make a killing on the auction house with my squinty goods.
Insider Trader: Crafting has saved WoW for me
If left to my absolute own devices in a complete vacuum, with functional equipment and skilled team members, I'm a PvPer at heart. I love the arena, love the battlegrounds and even love world PvP. However, my real-life friends are mostly PvE players. As a result, I tend to follow my second love: raiding. It's a great deal of fun cruising through the halls of Icecrown Citadel and killing Arthas' men. And having been a roleplayer in one medium or another for longer than Robert Pattinson's been alive, I tend to do all this in character. (I have forsaken vampires, though, don't worry.) However, we can't always play in a perfect vacuum, with friends or with functional equipment. Real life happens. I currently live on a mountain. Awesome views, but really bad internet. My internet connection drops like it's hot. I love playing with friends, but time is limited: I work two jobs, train the Dark Puppy and am maintaining a garden, a marriage and a household. And I try to stay fit in the meantime. Ultimately, this all means time, friends and equipment can all be in short supply. I keep up pretty well in terms of gear and skill, but I just can't be around much. While WoW is probably the most friendly MMO out there for the casual or time-restricted player, it's still a pretty big bummer to always be the guy getting dragged along in a raid. No one wants to be the deficient player. And more than a few times, it's left my mouse pointer hovering over the "cancel" button. But crafting and professions have saved me, every time.
Insider Trader: Cooking for cash
Insider Trader, when written by Basil (also of outdps and Call to Auction), will be all about how to use tradeskills to make money. Cooking is one of those secondary professions that anyone can learn, even if they already have two primary professions. Because of this fairly low barrier to entry, there are a lot of cooks around. So many that I've actually never leveled it myself! I just rely on the generosity of friends for my cooking business. How profitable is cooking? That all depends on what you cook. I got into this because I once paid 100g for five Spiced Mammoth Treats for my hunter's raid night. Why was I buying them on a Tuesday? Poor planning. What did I learn? The value of planning. We're going to start with a very important concept for auctioneers, here: tenacity.
Insider Trader: How to profit with tailoring
Tradeskills are the best tools for making in game gold. Every single profession can be made profitable. Insider Trader, when Basil writes it, is where you can turn to find tips and tricks to using professions in a profitable manner. That or rants about arrows. Really, mostly rants. Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out where the blurry line between Insider Trader and Gold Capped is, let alone what direction it runs. Have something to say to Basil? Feel free to email him! He strongly encourages all mail. Even the angry letters! He'll read those out loud dramatically to amuse his friends. Tailoring is not the profession most people think of when they think of gold making. Most people will find inscription, enchanting and jewelcrafting are the big money-makers, but what do you do if that's not the path you've chosen? When you select your profession, there are a lot of reasons to choose one over another. Tailoring has a cool mount and some awesome end game bonuses. If you've taken it for these, rest assured that you can still find a niche in the marketplace if you want to make money with it.
Insider Trader: Powerleveling professions on the cheap
Can I have 5 gold please? I need it to train my new level of skills. Woah, did you just put two hundred and twelve thousand gold into an open trade window?! Wait, where are you going? Wait!! Get back here! I'm not letting you get out of trade range! Oh my god, all this scrub has to do is click "trade" and I'll be able to buy every single mount in the game!! I am not letting him out of range. I wonder why he's wearing a monocle? Hey, he's jumping down to the docks! I'd better keep up with him. Hmm, he's taking an Elixir of Water Breathing? Strange. This guy must be a gold farmer or something. "/g ZOMG I'm gonna be rich guys!" Oh, you want to go for a swim? I don't care where you go, I'm not closing this window or letting you get out of range. You can't get away from me by swimming under a boat. Or into a cave. Or into that ... what the H-E-double hockey-sticks? "You are dead"? How? This guy is in the same faction as me! Oh. Professions are expensive! Getting a crafting skill to 450 involves geting all kinds of finnicky odd-ball mats from content that nobody ever runs these days, which typically means paying a whole lot for them. On top of it, all the stuff you make is pretty much valueless, and often fetches more at the vendor than it will in the auction house. What can you do to help turn these lemons into lemonade? First off, it helps if you're popular, smart, and patient. Popular people have friends who have tradeskills that might be able to help stem the losses, smart people have addons that can provide them with valuable information, and patient people are not at the mercy of low supply.
Time Is Money: Hate mail from competitors
Welcome to Time Is Money! This is the column where Basil "Euripides" Berntsen is occasionally allowed to post stuff that's too short for Gold Capped, but too long for Twitter. Have comments or questions about the in-game economy? Email Basil! We received a note from a reader this week, and I felt it was appropriate to get the Drama Mamas involved. While this is a situation somewhat unique to auctioneers, it certainly has dramatic potential!
Insider Trader: Reviewing blacksmithing in Wrath of the Lich King
Wrath of the Lich King has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for blacksmiths. It's passed through a few tunnels of high importance, then settled onto a kind of vestigial relevance before finally settling into a kind of usefulness. We'll take a look at that in a little more detail, but the great blacksmithing heartbreak of Wrath of the Lich King was our defunct specialties like Armorsmithing. These specialties were great when we had them, but they never really mattered in Wrath. Let's start with the one constant benefit of blacksmithing that lasted through the entire expansion. Like its close cousin jewelcrafting, blacksmithing is probably the most flexible craft in terms of profession bonuses. You get two more colorless gem sockets than anyone else. How worthwhile is that, though, really? In terms of raw itemization points, it's not necessarily a huge advantage. Most tradeskill character bonuses tend to boil down to an additional 80 attack power, 47 spellpower or maybe 60 stamina. These two colorless gem sockets are consistent with that level of crafting bonus. What makes blacksmithing's bonus extra special, though, is that you obtain the crafting bonus by using gems, which means any stat that's available from gems is available to you for your crafting bonus at about the same itemization cost. If raw attack power isn't your thing, you can focus on strength, agility or even haste. It might not sound like a big deal, but it's a nice little side bonus on top of everything else. So, the crafting bonus for blacksmithing was pretty nice. What was very important at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King?
