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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: 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?
Insider Trader: 7 things that should stay in Cataclysm
We had the class preview series from Blizzard a few weeks ago, and it was a very welcome glimpse at what we could expect in Cataclysm. It's provided some hints about what raiding and PvP might be like in the new expansion, and it's led to a lot of commentary about raid instances and design. What we've not heard about yet, though, are professions and crafting. We know the Path of the Titans is lurking around the corner of Cataclysm either like a mugger hiding out in the shadows or a shiny present waiting under the tree. We can guess that professions might play into that to some degree, but it would still be guessing. Still, while the expansion is still many moons away, now's the time to start crossing our fingers and hoping for the very best. Here's a small list of things that were awesome in Wrath of the Lich King and should continue forward in Cataclysm.
Insider Trader: Inscription without grinding glyphs
In meat-space, Insider Traders are shifty Wall Street criminals who endeavor to make personal profits at the expense of retail and institutional investors alike by acting on foreknowledge of events that the public does not share. In World of Warcraft, Insider Traders use their their trade skills, professions, tenacity, bank alts and enormous piles of gold and mammoth mounts to inspire awe around the auction house. Inscription is a great profession for making money. Once the addons for making and selling glyphs efficiently became popular, many people selling glyphs became gold-capped. Selling glyphs these days is not all it's cracked up to be, however. There's now tons of competition, and on a lot of servers, glyphs sell perpetually for the cost of the mats to make them. Assuming you're not interested in going down that road, what can you do with this skill to make money?
Insider Trader: The very best buff food
The opening of Noblegarden, and its corresponding real-life holiday, means one thing around my home: food. And this holiday was no different, as about a half-dozen friends and family all gathered around the kitchen to enjoy a spring-time feast. It was good times, of course, with a lot of light hearts and happy faces. And then when the festivities were over, everyone went home, got online and we raided Icecrown Citadel. Obviously we all knew that we were going to be raiding in the evening, so as we sat down around the dinner, there were more than a few jokes. "Fish down!" "Who's got pig?" My non-WoW family didn't really get the jokes, but the raiders surely did. We don't cover cooking here in Insider Trader a whole lot, even though it's a fairly universal skill. Since it's a secondary profession, it's one that every character could have, if they took the time to level it. It's also a pretty important secondary skill, compared to its two compatriots, fishing and first aid. Cooking provides a wide combination of buffs as well as the ever-useful health and mana. Take a look behind the jump, and let's do a tour of the some of the most popular foods used in the end game.
Insider Trader: Review of Jewelcrafting in Wrath of the Lich King
At the end of an expansion, it's time to look back on the previous year and a half and think about what worked and what didn't. Jewelcrafting in Wrath of the Lich King especially needs this kind of review. Among the crafting professions, jewelcrafting had some of the most rigorous gating requirements. These requirements were only lifted near the end of the expansion. Ultimately, though, jewelcrafting was a surprisingly complex, deep profession. This was at once its strength in Wrath, but also its weakness. What made jewelcrafting such a richly designed profession? First, the profession had an indirect gathering method. This kept the levelling field somewhat random, forcing you to choose your best path for progress over and over. Second doing a daily quest was a key portion of levelling jewelcrafting and learning your recipes. Third, the high level of customization of jewelcrafting profession-rewards gave jewelcrafters a lot of interesting choices.
Insider Trader: Advertising your profession
There are relatively few avenues for selling your profession's wares. The first, and probably the most universal, is to create your trade goods and then list them on the auction house. This is a pretty common channel for selling trade goods. As such, there's more than a few techniques and arts to getting the most out of working the auction house. Check out Gold Capped, for example, to pick up a lot of great advice on how to work the AH. The second way to sell your goods is via small-scale professions gathering. We talked a few weeks ago about how to get together a crafting bazaar. The advantage to a crafting bazaar is that you get a lot of exposure from a lot of people. If your event is fairly well attended, then you're going to get a lot of different customers cruising to buy crafting goods. It's especially advantageous to spend time working with a consumer in a bazaar environment, because you have face-to-face interaction during which you can try and upsell the client. You can check out all of their gear and enchants, and make recommendations for things they might want to purchase to improve their performance. There's a middle ground between those two methods, however, and it combines a lot of the best traits of the crafting bazaar with the open, free market of the auction house. By advertising your profession on Trade, the official forums, and word of mouth, you can get in touch with prospective customers while still respecting and interacting with your server's overall economy. You get the chance to meet someone "face-to-face" (or, at least, whisper-to-whisper) and you get the same chance to review the gear that you would in the bazaar. However, you don't have to wait for a special location or particular time in order to meet those folks. Considering how important word-of-mouth can be to growing a network of steady customers, we should take the time to review a few tips for advertising your profession.
Insider Trader: End-game crafting materials 101
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. Reader Frank recently wrote me and asked for a bit of help with the "staple" products for each profession. Frank said, "Back in the days of Burning Crusade, I had a pretty good grip on the two or three raw materials that went across each of the professions. Are there equivalents to that kind of thing now in Wrath?" I assume that Frank was probably asking specifically about the crafting professions (like Blacksmithing or Tailoring), and not quite so much the gathering professions. A little surprisingly, he's not the only person to ask me about that this month. It's a little late in the expansion to do a basic guide to Wrath of the Lich King materials, but Cataclysm is going to mean one thing for certain. Everyone will rush to get their professions to a relatively max level, so that they can immediately roll over into Cataclysm recipes as early as possible. Put that together with Frank's request and the inbound patch 3.3.3, and I figured a quick tour of each profession's most sought after raw materials might give us a little boost. Let's take a quick tour of the crafting professions' common end-game materials.
Insider Trader: A crafting bazaar
When most people talk about making money with their professions, they usually get pretty focused on Trade channel and the Auction House. It makes a lot of sense, really, because these are the two main avenues of selling in the game. The Trade channel is named Trade for a reason, and if you can brush aside all the Chuck Norris and murloc jokes, you can fairly easily broker a deal. The Auction House, of course, has become a sort of mini-game itself. The strategies and addons for managing your inventory in the Auction House are nearly as complicated as anything you'll see out of Icecrown Citadel. But these two methods of selling aren't the only ways to get your wares across to waiting customers. If we look back to real life commerce in decades past, there was once a time-honored tradition of getting together with handful of other merchants, gathering in a park or meadow, and holding a big sort of vendor fair. The idea, of course, is that customers can come check out your goods, your neighbor's goods, and any other random valuable products. Now, part of this sort of merchant's bazaar is that you can look at several craftspeople's goods, and pick out the "best" product. Even though every crafting item created by every professional is functionally identical, you can still get together with people who create other items and do something similar. There's a lot to be said for the value of convenience, which is exactly what you're providing by taking part in this kind of gathering. Not to mention, the tipping public really likes the idea of a party. Let's jump behind the cut and talk about the Crafting Bazaar.
Insider Trader: Patch 3.3.3 changes for professionals
Matt's covered the basic profession changes in patch 3.3.3, but I wanted to spend some more time with those changes. At face value, they may not seem like a very big deal. However, the ramifications of the changes run a little deeper than many people would necessarily realize. The changes affect a lot about the way we habitually perform our trades, and will definitely affect how we sell items in trade chat and on the auction house. The most startling change for professions in patch 3.3.3 is probably the new NPC. Frozo the Reknowned takes your Frozen Orbs and turns them into more useful materials. (There was a time I thought I'd never get enough Orbs, but I guess times change.) Let's take a look behind the jump and do a little more trade-based analysis of these patch 3.3.3 changes, and what it means to the future of professions in Wrath of the Lich King. While it seems that the changes will make a great deal more convenient in the new patch, it does seem like the auction house prices for items are likely to go down.
Insider Trader: Just the tip
So, there you are. You stand near your faction's favorite commerce hub. You're hawking your enchanting skills over the Trade channel, doing your very best to get pick up a few customers in between rapid fire Saurfang jokes and not-so-sly murloc references. Then, finally you see these words: "LF Enchanter for Greater Assault, have mats. Will tip." You drop the person a quick whisper, group up to make it a little easier to find them, and then enchant their bracers with that sweet, sweet attack power. They thank you and place the tip in a trade window . . . 2 gold. Before you can even blink, the person breaks group, and logs out. It could be worse -- sometimes, you feel like you're lucky to get even 1 gold for your time. Especially with the Dungeon Finder making gathering enchanting materials easier for everyone, craftsmen are finding themselves struggling to earn cash via the old tipping method. After all, enchanters are no longer the single-flow hub of getting enchanting reagents. And while enchanters are the long-traditional tipped craftsmen, Jewelcrafters, Inscription practitioners, and just about all professions are in the same boat. How do you get tips? How do you handle the tips? What goes into a tip? Let's take a look behind the jump and start breaking down the ancient art of supplying tips.
Insider Trader: Advanced Trade Skill Window
A tradesman without tools would be challenged to create any final product. WoW isn't much different. If you're looking to master multiple professions across multiple toons, and make the most of your crafting time, you may eventually consider picking up a mod or two to help you. I was recently introduced to Advanced Trade Skill Window by a guild mate who, like myself, has multiple characters with many, many professions. The idea in my alt farm is that I'm trying to produce myself any final product I might need. This includes enchants, reagents, and even the transmutes required to produce gems. As we were chatting about this kind of set up, she immediately filled me in on the basics of ATSW. Gregg first looked at ATSW for AddOn Spotlight back in October. But considering how helpful it is to profession-hounds, I wanted to spend a little more time with it now. Advanced Trade Skill Window replaces your standard in-game trade skill windows. Whenever you hit the action button for your profession, Advanced Trade Skill Window will automatically open. Right off the bat, you'll get one of my favorite benefits of the mod. The screen is much, much bigger than the native interface, which gives you a lot more room to scroll through your recipes. But, obviously, there's a lot more to the tool.
