How to use TradeSkillMaster 2
WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!
TradeSkillMaster is the only addon you need to make millions of gold, and it's the only way to do that without expending an unreasonable amount of energy crafting and auctioning the items you sell. It's just been completely overhauled for version 2, and you should know that:
Version 1 is never being updated again. When it stops working, probably on 5.4 patch day, it's never going to get fixed.
Version 2 forces you to completely redo all your settings. There are no imports of your old groups or anything else.
Basically, you have no choice: if you want to use TSM (and no other addon comes within spitting distance of being as useful as it for gold-making), you have to upgrade to 2, and you're going to have to redo everything. If you're really unlucky, an addon updater might have already overwritten your old version with the new one and taken all your setup with it.
Version 2 took me a few days to get to the point I'm at now where I can do almost everything I did with my version 1 settings. In fact, I found all my experience with TSM 1 caused this process to take longer than it would have if I was completely new to the addon. Some concepts (like groups) are now very simple and intuitive, but it took me a while to get over my experience using TSM 1 groups.
That said, once I made the jump, I found that things are faster now and I expect I'll be able to make my gold with less effort. There are some things that are gone (or moved) but once I decided to try going without them, I realized I didn't miss them as much as I thought I would. There's plenty of help, but diving right in, here's what you need to know to get started with TSM 2:
Your categories and groups are gone
You can't recover them, and the new format wouldn't work for them anyways. Making new groups is going to be your first task. There's no definite guideline or best practice laid out anywhere for how to do this, so I'm going to do my best here.
When you open your profession window for the first time, it'll ask you if you want to create groups. Say yes. You now have everything you can make in one big group called Crafts and all the mats for those things in another group called Materials. These are going to contain mostly things you don't want to craft, so we want to take just the items we do craft and put them into a subgroup. This can contain anything in that main Crafts group, and you can create more subgroups under it. The purpose of subgroups is to change the prices and the number you craft.
Subgroups
The most wrong way to create a subgroup is to look through the list and click the items you know you want. This is sometimes unavoidable, but it's painful to try and do with anything more than a few items. The right way is to use the filter. If you're trying to select items with the same name (like Crafted Dreadful Gladiator pieces), you can type that in. If, however, you're trying to add all Mists of Pandaria enchants, you'll want to use the iLvl filter. Type "i85/i85" to filter to only items with a iLvl between 85 and 85. If you only give it one iLvl, it'll give you all items at or above that.
This advice was enough for me to get groups created with the minimum click labor for enchanting, jewelcrafting ("perfect", "i90/i90"), and blacksmithing, but if you're working on a professionthese two tricks won't help with, you might be in for a hard time. You can import and export groups, as well as make them on the TSM site, but this is the weakest link in the addon, which is still very much a work in progress. Luckily you only need to do this part once, and if you stumble, there's plenty of help.
Think twice, click once: what are you going to use your subgroups for?
How you separate out your items will determine how little you have to work to manage your business, and unfortunately, there are no generally accepted best practices for this. Generally, you'll want your first subgroup to have all the items you'll craft, and all its subgroups to be things you'll craft more of or sell for a different price. We'll soon be configuring "operations" that tell the addon how much to craft and what to set the price to, but for now, we're still making and organizing groups. Let's do a bit of planning here to save us some work later -- here's how I organized my enchanter's groups:
Crafts: default group created with all my crafts, including stuff I don't craft
MoP enchants: all scrolls I craft, whether it's 1 or 30
Make 10: all scrolls I want to make at least 10 of
Make 30: all scrolls I want to make 30 of
My "Make 10" subgroup consists of all of the really popular enchants in my "MoP enchants" group. My "Make 30" subgroup consists of all the really popular enchants in the "Make 10" subgroup. If I had some of those rep enchants that you can charge more for, I might have created a "high profit" subgroup under "MoP enchants" with a different profit setting.
Smooth operators
Operations tell TSM what to do to the items in a group. Back in TSM 1, you'd have one group for auctioning, another one for mailing, and you'd choose your restock levels in your tradeskill settings. Now, you have a single group and you can apply any operations you want to it. If you apply an operation to a group with a bunch of subgroups, each of the subgroups inherits the operation, but you can override that if that's why you created the subgroup.
Right now, let's focus on the two you need to get your auctions posted the day flex raiding comes out: Auctioning operations and Crafting operations.
Auctioning: Generally, I use the same auctioning operation for the whole profession, unless there are some items where I need to sell for higher or lower profit. You can create an operation in the operation window (it's a bunch of purple screws, third from the left), or you can go to the operations tab of your group and create one from there. All the options you want to focus on for now are in the "post" tab of the operation. All my scrolls are posted the same way: I post up to 60 individual scrolls, undercutting by 2g for 48 hours. I'll undercut all the way down to 110% the cost of the mats, my normal price is 200% mats, and the max price I'll undercut is 300% mats.
This will be the operation used for the group you associate it to, and unless you specify otherwise, all the subgroups in that group. If you want to, you can get fancy or simple with your prices. Both these will work:
max(vendor, 110% crafting, dbminbuyout(item:74248))
1g
Crafting: You want TSM to create a craft queue when you're restocking, and you tell it how to do that with a crafting operation. This is pretty simple: all it needs to know is how many to make and how much profit it should look for.
I created a crafting operation for my main MoP enchant group with a restock quantity of 1, then another one for my "make 10" group, and another for my "make 30". Now when I open my tradeskill, I can click the "TSM Groups" button and hit "restock selected groups". It builds my queue for me, and all I need to do is go get my mats and then spam "craft next" for an hour.
So much more
This is enough to get you started, but once you get this far, you may as well spend a little more time and set everything up. TSM will automate almost everything you do to make money, meaning you will make more money in less time. Just like TSM 1, TSM 2 requires an up-front investment in time, but compared to the way we'd have to do business without it, it's well worth that time.
Next topics will include setting your costs, setting up mailing between your characters, using the destroyer to DE/prospect/mill, using TSM to gather crafting materials from your bank and the vendor, and using TSM to buy.
Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
