Gold Capped: TradeSkillMaster advanced guide

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!

edit: This is the TSM advanced guide, which assumes you've read at least the basic guide, if not the introductory description of the addon.

So last time we talked about TradeSkillMaster, it was just to go over the basics of the crafting queue. Let's finish the guide and talk about how to set up TSM so that it requires nothing more than a few minutes a day to get your work done.

First thing we'll want to do is update the addon. Since the last post, there's been a new version posted that's ironed out a few bugs. Don't forget to update the Crafting, Auctioning, and Shopping modules as well. The others haven't been changed.

So following the last guide, your trade skill window now looks something like this:

Notice that big Restock Queue button? Right now, it probably won't do anything -- or nothing you'd want it to, at least. It can, however, be configured to queue up crafts that are profitable based on the number you want to keep on the AH and how many you already have. Click on the purple scroll around your minimap to bring up the configuration controls, and then click your profession:

Click on Options to bring up this page; the key here is that this is for the whole profession. We'll drill down to individual craftable items next. I've set each of my cuts to be crafted whenever I get below three. I didn't choose a minimum restock quantity or else I'd always craft that many, even if it would bring me over the maximum number I wanted to keep in stock. Also, the minimum profit I've shown here is not appropriate for all markets (glyphs come to mind). You can select to only queue things that are profitable based on gold instead of percent of materials cost, or both.

I hear you asking yourself, "How does it know what my profits are?" The answer is in the next image. Click on crafting options (the third icon down on the right) and you'll see this:

The two functions you'll absolutely want to set here are:

• What to base the prices it uses to calculate profitability on

• Which characters and guild inventories you can use

I've told TSM that my cost is the market value for the materials and designated the minimum buyout for the price. The difference between minimum buyout and market value is simple: Market value is a running weighted average, and minimum buyout is the lowest price available at any quantity on the AH from the last scan. Since I'll always undercut the lowest item on a crafted good, that makes sense for the price value. I will often make or buy mats days before I use them, though, so using minimum buyout for the crafting cost would make less sense for me.

It gets messy with things like raw gems and inks where you can either buy the unprocessed ore and herbs or buy the actual reagents (like inks or uncut gems), but I still use market value for the cost because the opportunity cost of cutting and selling an uncut gem is what I could have made selling it raw. It gets even messier when you have so many raw materials in stock that you value volume over profitability, and it's positively filthy when you get multiple types of goods from the same processed raw mats.

As for the inventory settings, you'll want to include all your alts and any storage guild banks you own. I've unchecked the guild bank for the actual guild I'm in because it's not my stuff in there. This will make it so that when you queue something that requires items not in your bag but are in your bank, an alt's bag or bank, or a storage guild bank, it will appear as yellow. Red would mean that you have no items anywhere and have to buy or make them. Lastly, you can set a 5% profit reduction universally here that lets you account for the AH fees.

At this point, if you were to click Restock Queue, it would queue up any profitable recipes up to the quantity you specified in the profession's global options. If you want to set certain items to queue a higher quantity, then you'd want to go back into the profession options and click here:

You'll be able to set a maximum and minimum restock quantity here for the specific item.

The last thing I'm going to show you overrides the costs you set a few steps ago. The market value of your mats is always an important part of your profitability, but sometimes it's just what you want to use. Click on the materials header to the left, and here you can override the cost of any item used in your trade skill.

In my case, I value Inferno Rubies and Shadowspirit Diamonds based on the cost for the mats to transmute them. I have to manually adjust these values to reflect reality every time the markets for them shift, but there's such a huge difference between that value and what the uncut gems sell for that I have no other choice.

This shouldn't be done, by the way, if you can't keep enough in stock to list both raw and processed mats. If you're short, you want to list them which ever way has the highest price. For example, I can transmute red gems for just under 60g, assuming I am a transmute specialist on my alchemist. I can sell uncuts for 90g or more, but the market for that is not infinite. As I flood the AH, I have to undercut harder and harder to sell them. I can sell cut red gems much faster at that price range, so I list both cuts and uncuts, increasing the number of red gems I get my money back on.

Try this out for yourself and let me know how it works for you. Also, share any tips or helpful suggestions you may have.

Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped as well as 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.