Gold Capped: Patch 4.0.1 fallout for cooldowns, addons and glyphs

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 Thursday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone, and we can now use the benefit of hindsight to see how well our predictions did. I'm going to start off with the elephants in the room: alchemy transmutes and addons.

I reported that the cooldown for epic gems had been removed in the PTR and that this was likely so that people wouldn't be put into the poorhouse by having to regem. In reality, the datamining that determined this was incorrect, and the cooldowns are now resetting at midnight instead of the old way. There's huge demand for epic and rare cut and raw gems now, and people are tending to go toward rares because the epics are just too expensive.

Like many patches, this one has brought with is a huge increase in demand for raw materials, so the price for Saronite Ore and Titanium Ore is likely through the roof on your realm. If you prepared for the cooldown removal by buying a ton of rare gems, you can still make a mint by selling (or cutting and selling) them. The eternals might be harder to move, since we all went nuts stockpiling them.

Addons

I reported that the auction house addons used by many of the serious crafters would be broken by the patch. They were. Auctioneer is still basically dead; however, Auctionator will serve in a pinch. At least it shows you the market price for stuff you're manually selling and has a smart pricing recommendation. The QA addon used primarily for the glyph and gem markets has been abandoned and is dead in the water. Luckily, the dev who wrote the fix mentioned in my initial report has been granted permission to take over the project. The fork is called Zeroauctions and it's is available for download.

Zeroauctions is exactly what you remember from QA, except that it now works. The Blizzard changes have forced all auction addons to get a click per event, which means that when you mass-post or mass-cancel your auction, you have to confirm via mouse click (or /click macro) for each batch. Posting 10 of a single item is one batch and one click, but posting 1 each of two different items is two batches and two clicks. I'll be writing up a guide on how to use ZA, including the crafting queue and auto-buying vendor mats at some point.

The default UI now has a very nice interface for crafting skills, but it still doesn't do craft queuing. ZA does that for you, but auto-queuing based on inventory is something we used to do with addons like KTQ, and I didn't even bother checking out KTQ because the data it relies on to determine stock on your other characters comes from Altoholic, which is badly broken.

Now, let's talk about the big market that everyone's been speculating about for weeks.

Happy Glyphsmas!

We all knew it was coming: The changes to the way glyphs work were going to produce a massive surge of demand that every scribe I know of has been preparing for for weeks. Additionally, while the historic glyph demand has focused on the "right" glyphs with a large but spread-out demand for the non-optimal class glyphs, this new patch led to many people's buying one of each glyph they can learn so they'd be set going forward. The huge amounts of inventory that were dumped into the AH just before servers went down seem to have been sold, and the demand remains strong. As people get their heads around their greatly changed classes, they come out of the woodwork to buy glyphs. The crafting materials have been raised from one to three inks, to make things worse. Herbs are upwards of 100g a stack on many realms, and ink is borderline impossible to buy for less than 10g each.

One of the weirdest markets for inscrivenatrixors, however, isn't trade-skill-driven at all. Vanishing Powder is purchasable at the inscription supplies vendor for a couple of silver, yet people have been buying it on the AH for as much as 1g each. This will be a short-term problem, because eventually players will realize that they're only saving a short walk. It takes even less long for this market to disappear when you announce in trade chat that the fastest way to make money is buy the dust at the vendor and list it on the AH; every time you do this, you can count on at least 100 new stacks being posted at lower and lower prices. It's only a matter of time until so many people know that it's vendor-bought that the price on the AH will meet the vendor price.

Another interesting change is that all vellums have been converted into "enchanting vellums." No more weapon vellum iii or armor vellum ii. I got broadsided by this, as I had just crafted 200 stacks before the patch. You can make them much more cheaply now.

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 now taking questions for a special series, "Ask an auctioneer," at basil@wow.com.