Basil Berntsen

Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Sha Crystals are about to get a lot cheaper

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! I hope you don't have too many Sha Crystals saved up for this upcoming patch. The 5.4 PTR has new epic craftable PvP gear on it which will likely disenchant into them, and some of these pieces will take very few materials. Six Bolts of Windwool Cloth, for example, will make you a nice disenchantable purple cape. The Sha Crystal from this can be turned into two Ethereal Shards, each of which can make three Mysterious Essences. Right now, the vast majority of enchanting materials are made through disenchanting gear crafted by tailoring or jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafters turn green quality gems into rings and amulets which DE into a lot of dust and a few essences. Tailors make blue PvP gear that disenchants into shards. Sha Crystals are only made on the daily cooldown that enchanters get, or through disenchanting epic gear obtained in other ways than crafting. Patch 5.4 will change everything. These methods will still work, but it'll get you more materials per bolt of cloth if you use the new recipes. Each purple Crystal will be able to be broken down into two blue Shards, which can be broken down into 6 green Essences. This new way will make more enchanting materials per cloth than the existing ways.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: How to handle undercutters

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! I hear this all the time: "Every time I post anything, someone undercuts me within minutes." Luckily, there's a relatively simple solution to dealing with undercutters: ignore them. You don't ignore them hoping they go away, you ignore them because they aren't actually going to prevent you from selling your auctions. Think back to the last time you bought something from the Auction House; let's say an enchant. You search for the best enchant you can put onto the gear. If the lowest price is affordable, you buy it. If it feels too expensive (compared to what you've paid before or what you know the materials cost), you might buy the mats and ask friends or trade chat for someone to make it for you. You might instead look at the second best enchant for the gear if it's something you won't be wearing for long or you're not expected to always use best-in-slot enchants.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Never scan the Auction House again

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! Have you ever scanned the Auction House with TradeSkillMaster (the best auction management addon, well worth the trouble of learning) and not gotten a complete scan? Maybe you see an error message and your crafting window starts displaying unknown materials prices, even though you can see the prices right front of you when you search? This is a bug that affects anyone on a realm with a lot of auctions (more than 42554, according to the TSM error message). In essence, the GetAll scan that's used to grab a dump of the AH in a few seconds can be incomplete if there are a lot of auctions. As far as I know, the traditional scans are immune to this, but they take a lot more time; like 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Even if the scans work perfectly on your realm, scanning is still an extra step that you have to do every time you want to update the prices before you queue up your crafting list. Luckily, there's a way you can get up to date price information without ever having to scan the AH again.

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

How to check the Black Market Auction house without going there

The Black Market Auction House is a special AH that allows you to buy items that are rare and sometimes unobtainable with gold otherwise. It's an extremely effective gold sink, but it's tucked away in the middle of nowhere, and you can't see what's for sale on your realm from the remote AH. Unfortunately, since Blizzard doesn't make the BMAH accessible through the same API as the regular Auction Houses, you are expected to log in and travel to the Veiled Stair in order to see whether there was anything there for you. The Undermine Journal is a website that collects, organizes, and displays information about the Auction House of every realm: Horde, Alliance, and Neutral. Additionally, starting in January, they launched a (still beta) feature that shows us the contents of the BMAH. Assuming you're not on a PvP realm, you can avoid the flight to the Veiled Stair to check whether there's something worth buying by simply checking the Undermine Journal.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: How to make cheaper Enchanting materials

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! One awesome side effect of the latest patch's new PvP gear is a way to make Enchanting materials much more cheaply. Since all the new gear is iLvl 458 blues, they disenchant into an Ethereal Shard. Sometimes two of them, although that is probably from the guild perk. By far, the most popular profession to use to craft this type of gear for disenchanting is Tailoring. Windwool Cloth is cheap and plentiful, and 20 of them make a single Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's piece that can be DEed. The best pieces to make are the ones that take 4 Bolts of Windwool Cloth: Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cape of Cruelty or Prowess Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cloak of Alacrity or Prowess Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cuffs of Accuracy, Meditation, or Prowess Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Drape of Cruelty, Meditation, or Prowess After these, the materials start going up. That doesn't mean you can't use them, just that you'll have to live with a higher cost than all your competitors.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Patch 5.2's jewelcrafting changes and how to profit

There are going to be some new important recipes in 5.2 for Jewelcrafters: a "prism" style daily cooldown Serpent's Heart, and a no-cooldown recipe that allows you to craft the uncut meta gems, Primal Diamonds, out of gems and Spirits of Harmony. Kaliope reports that both recipes are world drops in Pandaria on the PTR, and shouldn't take long to farm. Serpent's Prism would have been a better name While the profession is better designed than ever (with much less waste for shufflers and far fewer items ending up at the vendor), the Serpent's Eyes that you get while prospecting Mists ore tend to pile up. They're used to make the 450 crafted jewelry, but the market for that isn't nearly as large as the supply of Serpent's Eyes. Many people end up making these into blues and disenchanting them so they're not wasted. Now that all JCs will have the option of turning three Serpent's Eyes into a prism every day, that will provide an outlet for the Eyes that may be more profitable than the 450 blues. So far, only a few Prisms have been opened, but they seem to award a random blue gem, just like prisms from expansions past. Since it's on a daily cooldown, it's unlikely to be able to push down the price of blue gems much. Is it worth using Spirits of Harmony? The new Primal Diamond recipe has no cooldown, but requires Spirits of Harmony which are their own sort of cooldown. One criticism of Jewelcrafting has been that JCs have nothing except research and extremely low-liquidity mini-pets to spend their Spirits of Harmony on. Jewelcrafters generate Spirits as quickly as any other character, and in theory, it'd be nice to have a JC option to use them on. Especially seeing as how anyone doing daily research will have almost certainly finished learning all their cuts by now.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Leveling blacksmithing just got easier

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! The PTR for patch 5.2 has a real treat in store for people who want to powerlevel Blacksmithing: you will now be able to get to 500 skill without having to wait for those rare old-world materials to show up on the Auction House! If you are level 85 and up, all you have to do is visit your Blacksmithing trainer in your faction's shrine (the same one that sells recipes for Spirits of Harmony), and they will offer you a fast-track path straight to 500 skill. The way it works is that you will be able to train patterns that take only Ghost Iron Bars to make grey items, and once you get up to 500 skill, there's a quest to make a Ghostly Skeleton Key. At the time this article was written, the data-mined recipes on the Wowhead.com PTR site seem to indicate that it will take a lot of ghost iron to complete. Of course, this might receive a rework before it hits live.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

What you should plant on your Tiller's farm

This hit my inbox the other day: What's the most profitable thing to plant in a farm? I'd assume in most cases people plant for their profession or whatever raw material sells for the most. I, however, am a chronic alt-oholic and have every profession maxed and available to me. I don't raid and can't stand dailies, so I only have patterns available that are vendor trained, bought with spirits of harmony, or learned off a cooldown. So what's the start and end of the equation? -Matt So what is the most profitable thing to plant on your farm? Matt assumes correctly that the majority of people simply plant what they can use to avoid having to buy off the Auction House. There is plenty of opportunity to improve this, though! Generally, the least profitable thing to farm is vegetables. This is only true because everyone else already farms them, and they're all you can farm until you get farther into the Tillers reputation grind. The reputation seeds for leather, ore, cloth, or enchanting mats are generally lower yield than simply getting Harmonies and trading those for what you need, and that's generally less than you'd get by planting Enigma Seeds, selling everything you get, and using that gold to buy leather, ore, cloth, or enchanting mats. In short, the most profitable thing to plant is usually Songbell Seeds or Enigma Seeds. Songbell Seeds Songbell Seeds provide you with Motes of Harmony, which provide Spirits of Harmony. If you have a profession that requires these to make items valuable to other players or allows you to use them to skip daily cooldowns, then you can figure out exactly how much one of them is worth and do the math.

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Buying Guides

Buying Guides By Basil Berntsen

Best places to farm meta cuts and Harmonies

Mists of Pandaria's economy has been characterized by having some of the recipes that make the most valuable items gated behind things that a main character would get: reputation, random world drops, and BoP Spirits of Harmony. Profession alts that you haven't leveled but have a maxed out profession are still very useful, but they won't be able to compete with people who happen to have that profession on a character they play. Specifically, jewelcrafters won't get meta gem cuts, enchanters won't get the best bracer and weapon enchants, and other crafters won't get Harmonies that they can use to craft gear. If you have an alt that you don't have time to level and properly play, but still want to get some of these gated recipes, what can you do?

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Train Nomi for free Ironpaw Tokens

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! After writing my Ironpaw Shuffle guide, JessicaHealy posted a very insightful tip in the comments, which I had actually missed from all the way back in November on the Consortium professions forum: the Cooking School Bell is an investment that's well worth the price of 50 Ironpaw Tokens. If you have completed To Be a Master and finished leveling your cooking, you can buy the bell which will let you summon Nomi, your very own trainee! Nomi has his own reputation faction that you need to do daily quests to complete, and once that's done, he'll provide you with a one time gift of 5 of your choice of token-bought food, and then daily Tokens of Appreciation, which rewards a free Ironpaw Token. Luphian, in the Wowhead comments, calculated the time it takes to get exalted: Non-human, and no guild perk: 1000 reputation a day: 42 days, but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4000 reputation removes four days, so it will take 38 days to get exalted. Human OR Guild-Perk (10% extra reputation): 1100 reputation a day: 39 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4400 reputation removes four days, so it will take 35 days to get exalted. Human AND Guild Perk (20% extra reputation): 1200 reputation a day: 35 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4800 reputation removes four days, so it will take 31 days to get exalted. Once this is done, in 50 days you will have the 50 tokens you spent to get the bell. If you're using the tokens to buy Soy Sauce, Rice Flour, or Black Pepper, it'll only take 45 days if you consider the reward you get for getting exalted. 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.

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Buying Guides

Buying Guides By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Inscription gold-making guide

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Have a scribe? Need gold? Look no farther. Inscription is one of the best gold-making professions in the game. You can make glyphs, Darkmoon cards, and all kinds of other odds and ends. Each of these markets has a characteristic time investment requirement and potential profit. Each realm is going to be different, but in general: Darkmoon cards: Scalable time investment, massive profits Glyphs: Massive time investment, low profit Odds and ends: Minimal time investment, medium profit Darkmoon cards start off simply enough: if you do your daily research, you can make a card a day. Different cards have different values, but on average, you'll make back way more than the value of the inks. You can trade cards, and the more cards you make, the better efficiency you'll have making decks. Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it'll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool's Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool's Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that's 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: How to make gold as an enchanter

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Enchanting can be a very good way to make gold. Every time someone gets an upgrade, the first thing they do is see whether there's an enchant they could put on it, and if so, either have someone enchant it in a trade window, or buy a scroll from the AH. The first thing you'll need to know if you're going to get into the scroll market is that it's not a good idea to use the default interface. You will face challenges that it is simply not equipped to handle. Chiefly: Knowing whether a scroll is profitable Knowing whether you already have scrolls made and for sale

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Cheap Ironpaw Tokens

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Feasts are expensive, but are still cheaper than everyone bringing their own food. The reason they're expensive is that they all require an ingredient that can only be bought with an Ironpaw Token, the 100 Year Soy Sauce. Ironpaw Tokens are a non-tradable currency obtained by doing quests (including dailies, or a weekly if you're a scribe), and their short supply can be a real limiting factor on leveling cooking. Leveling the "ways" of cooking requires a lot of tokens, and once they're leveled, using them requires a lot more. If you rely on dailies for these, you'll never have enough. A better way Luckily for us, you don't have to rely on dailies! The first thing I noticed when I was first exploring Halfhill was that Nam Ironpaw, the token vendor, had a repeatable quest called Replenishing the Pantry that asked for a Bundle of Groceries. Once I worked my way past the Preserving Freshness quest, he did, at least. Anyways, essentially, you can buy an empty container from Merchant Cheng (next to the seed vendor) which can be right clicked on to consume some quantity of cooking materials to make a Bundle of Groceries. This can be turned into an Ironpaw Token.

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: How to get a MoP Darkmoon trinket

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The Darkmoon Faire comes to town once a month, and if you want to get one of those amazingly good darkmoon trinkets, you're going to need a fairly large pile of gold. There are a couple of ways of going about it with varying levels of cost and effort. Interestingly, our own Fox Van Allen became a "Darkmoon Mogul" last expansion when he made his first million gold. At the time, you could simply make as many cards as you were willing to mill the ink for, and people willing to make those cards could profit in spades. There's still money to be made in this, however don't walk in with your eyes closed -- the system has changed, and there's more risk now than ever. Getting one the hard way Getting a deck for yourself can be expensive and simple, or cheap and complicated. You basically have two choices: hustle for cards to make your own deck, or buy a finished deck or trinket.

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Science

Science By Basil Berntsen

The economics of perfect gem cuts

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This expansion is the first one where "perfect" cuts (which are about a 10% proc rate when you're cutting a green quality gem) are blue quality, and even though they have different names, they have identical stats as blue quality gems. People still don't generally know this, and will sometimes skip over the perfect cuts when they're gemming new gear, but over time it will become more commonly known that there's no difference between socketing, for example, a Perfect Delicate Pandarian Garnet or a Delicate Primordial Ruby. If you're an enchanter, you may have noticed that the price for the common materials has gone way down, and if you're a jewelcrafter, you're probably wondering what to do with all the green quality gems you get from prospecting, as well as potentially looking wistfully at the profit margins on some of the really desirable research blue cuts.

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News

News By Basil Berntsen

Ink traders finally accepting new inks

If you're looking to get a Darkmoon Deck made before the end of the faire, you might be interested to know that despite a false start earlier this week, the Ink Traders and inscription vendors now accept trades of 10 Ink of Dreams for a Starlight Ink. Ink Vendors finally updated. Very sorry for the delay. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 12, 2012 The Darkmoon Faire is only around once a month, and the one on now is ending this Sunday, October 14th. Unless the Faire is going on, you can't trade, for example, a Crane Deck in for a Relic of Chi Ji. This expansion, unlike in others, Darkmoon Cards require an item that can only be made once a day by scribes, the Scroll of Wisdom. Scribes who have been hanging onto their Scrolls should probably look into making them into cards now that the inks can be gotten cheaply, since by the time the next Faire rolls around, there will be 3 more weeks worth of daily cooldowns waiting to be turned into cards. These trinkets range from pretty good to among the best in slot for most classes, so almost everyone can use one, and many people really want one. Additionally, since the Starlight Inks have been so expensive lately, the epic quality shoulder enchants have been quite expensive. Now that you can trade the much less expensive Ink of Dreams in for them, you should see the prices lower on the Greater Ox Horn Inscription, the Greater Crane Wing Inscription, the Greater Tiger Claw Inscription, and the Greater Tiger Fang Inscription. 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.

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Shuffling Ore in Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! What's my favorite part of the expansion so far? The way that Blizzard has reworked the Jewelcrafting, Enchanting, and Alchemy professions to more efficiently support the "shuffle". That's a cute little name we auctioneers give to a fairly complicated business that takes ore and turns it into cut gems and enchanting scrolls. In every expansion where this has been possible, there's been a ton of waste. It's great to be able to make gold by combining profession synergy, but vendoring stacks of, for example, green quality gems feels like a waste. How to do the MoP shuffle While the business seems complicated to outsiders, it's actually a lot simpler than it looks. Let's break it down:

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Six tips to make gold in the first month of MoP

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Every new expansion brings with it two things: more ways to make gold, and more ways to spend it. Making gold can be a very rewarding and engaging way to play the game on its own, but it's not for everyone. Here are a few tips that can help anyone make gold in the first few weeks of an expansion. Pay later A huge part of how much gold you have is actually how much you spend. Most people neglect this part of the equation, allowing their subconscious to choose when to splurge. A very simple way to have more money to spend on even more cool stuff is to avoid buying something until you absolutely need it. For example, if you decide to powerlevel that engineer or leatherworker, you have a choice: either pay now, or choose to wait a few weeks and level your profession when the mats go down in price. The only difference is the order you do things in, but waiting will save you thousands of gold in materials.

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Scattered Shots: Hunter PvP after Patch 5.0.4

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, Euripides is filling in for Frostheim, who has taken a week to debate shaving his arm hair. Hunters are shaping up to be excellent in PvP this patch. We've always been sort of acceptable at very high skill levels, but now we have a bunch of new tricks in our toolbox. It's still too early to give a definitive guide to the best choices you can make, but with everything that's changed, it's worth going over where we are now. Beastmastery is the spec of choice Marksmanship was the most commonly played spec for the last two expansions, mostly because of readiness and silencing shot. These can now be learned by any spec, and since BM has the best damage of the three specs, it's the default PvP spec. In addition to the raw damage, BM also has an additional crowd control breaking effect with The Beast Within, a stun, and the ability to tame exotic pets, including one with a heal. On its own, that heal isn't much to write home about, but with glyphed Stampede, it can heal for a large portion of your health.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Ink traders still accepting Blackfallow Ink

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The ink traders you find near inscription trainers allow you to buy any lower-level common ink you might need for the price of one current ink. Glyphs take a variety of inks, and if you want to craft one, you're more likely to need ink from some earlier expansion than you are a current ink. In Wrath of the Lich King, we were trading in Ink of the Sea. In Cataclysm, we've been trading in Blackfallow Ink. In Mists of Pandaria, including patch 5.0.4, we'll be trading in Ink of Dreams -- or at least the tooltip at the ink trader would have you believe.

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PC Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Mists of Pandaria Beta: Transferring wealth between servers with battle pets?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Note: This article is about the Mists of Pandaria Beta. There is no guarantee that this functionality will exist in the live version of MoP. The new pet battle system in Mists of Pandaria is going to be one of the most exciting new features for a lot of people; however, a potentially unintended consequence of the way it's currently implemented is that by selling pets on one realm that you bought on another realm, you will be able to transfer wealth between servers or factions. Orkchop wrote me an email that got me investigating: All these pets are bound to your account, across all servers, across both factions, and can be sold. You can log on to your level 90 main, buy some pets, learn them, then log on to another server, create a level 1 and go sell those pets at auction. All without touching the neutral auction house and its fees.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Spirit of Harmony crafting limitations

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The Spirit of Harmony is going to be the limiting factor in a lot of craftable items in Mists of Pandaria. Just take a look at all the recipes it'll be a reagent for -- some 153 so far, and they haven't even finished designing the professions. The interesting part of this is that the Spirits (and the Motes you can turn into Spirits) are going to be bind on pickup, which means that you can't trade for them. Does this means that you will not be able to level a profession up to the new maximum skill level without farming Spirits and Motes of Harmony yourself? Will it mean the end of readily available, entry-level crafted PvP and PvE blues?

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

How to set up your alts for gold making

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! One of the things I simply can't do is spend time on alts. Between the Auction House and playing my main, I simply don't have the time or interest to seriously use the other character slots on my account the way most people do. And then there's this guy: Hey Basil, I've been playing WoW for quite a few years now, and just recently stuck my pinky toe in the water that is the Auction House to profit from various sources. I have alts. Lots of alts. 8 at 85 currently. All of them are able to do HoT dungeons. Now my question is, is there an easy (or efficient) way for me to make multitudes of gold utilizing these alts at all? I would assume leveling as many professions as possible, but there has to be other ways I'm missing. Thanks for your time! Mellark, altoholic, Hyjal US. Having eight level 85 characters is a definite advantage when you play the AH. In fact, one of the things that holds me back to this day is lack of profession slots on level 85 characters. I have all the ones I absolutely need, but I'm missing some compared to a lot of my competition. Every character is an opportunity to have two professions, and each profession is a different way to make (or save) gold.

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Gaming By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Things that still sell at the end of an expansion

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The end of an expansion is a tough time to make gold. There's a lot more competition for a lot less demand. Many people see gold-making as a nice casual way to play while they wait for the next content dump, and fewer people are playing seriously (which is the root of demand for a lot of popular and profitable markets). To top it all off, we know that inflation is going to take a huge chunk out of our net worth when Mists launches, and there are a bunch of new things to save money up for. What kind of things can you still sell to make a profit?

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News

News By Basil Berntsen

Gold Capped: Unlimited long-term storage

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Ever see anyone trying to buy or sell a guild with bank tabs? There are people who will stop at nothing to store more stuff, especially those of us who play the gold-making game. One of the biggest challenges of making gold is, in fact, storing stuff. Bags are expensive, guild tabs are even more expensive, and there is a hard limit of 10 (for now) characters per realm. Each character has four bag slots and eight bank slots, as well as some built-in backpack and bank slots. This may seem like a lot, but what if you wanted to, for example, stockpile 10,000g worth of Hypnotic Dust, expecting it to sell for 70,000g in Mists of Pandaria? That could be over 700 stacks. Luckily, there's a simple and virtually free way to store unlimited amounts of stuff and save all your expensive inventory slots.

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