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Gold Capped: How to make money from leatherworking
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. Leatherworking has a pretty bad reputation as far as World of Warcraft professions go. Some people say that the biggest problem with leatherworking is that it's a frustratingly difficult profession to level. Others say that the worst part is how hard it is to make money off it, even at 525 skill. I can settle the argument right here: You're all right! Leatherworking is terrible on so many levels! That doesn't mean it's entirely useless -- after all, someone has to craft those i379 epics for druids, rogues, and shaman. And it doesn't mean that it's entirely profitless, either. It's not a profession I'd recommend for raking in the big bucks, but if you're otherwise stuck with it ... we may as well discuss how to squeeze a few pieces of gold out of it.
Gold Capped: Dealing with Neutral Auction House sniping
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! Neutral auction house sniping is the practice of lurking at the neutral auction house (which is usable by both factions) until someone tries to use it to move items from one of their characters to another across factions, and then stealing it. Unlike someone who ninjas a mount in a PUG, this type of theft is totally OK with Blizzard -- all the sniper is doing is buying a posted auction.
Gold Capped: Staying ahead of inflation
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. Do you remember the moment you hit 1 gold for the first time? I do. I was killing mobs in Ashenvale, vendoring Light Feathers and other various trash drops. It was an epic moment. That first piece of gold felt like so much money. It wasn't a lot of money, of course -- it just felt like it. But still, it was worth a heck of a lot more than one piece of gold is worth today. The reason: Azeroth suffers from a constant state of hyperinflation. The purchasing power of 1g is always falling, and it's falling quickly. Thankfully, though, you don't have to stand by and be a victim.
Gold Capped: Inventory balancing in TradeSkillMaster
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! TradeSkillMaster is the most powerful addon used to automate crafting and batch posting, and today, we'll be learning how to fine-tune the number of items created based on your selling history. Generally, when you started using TSM, you set up a default number of items for each trade skill group that you wanted it to keep in stock. For example, I told it to: Always craft enough scrolls that I had two on the auction house when they were profitable. Always craft enough of each meta-gem cut to ensure that I always had three on the AH when they were profitable. Now when I hit the Restock Queue button in enchanting or jewelcrafting, it queues up enough stock to bring my inventory levels to two scrolls or three gems. What if I invested in some recipe I sell a lot more of, though?
Gold Capped: How the heck do you price a Chaos Orb?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. We're eight months deep into the current expansion, and still, Chaos Orbs remain bind on pickup items available only by running dailies. You can't buy them with valor points. You can't buy them on the auction house. You can't hand them from one player to another. That creates a challenge for someone who's using a trade skill to make an epic piece of gear for someone else. There's no quick and simple way to find the value of a Chaos Orb, but for sure, they do have a definite value. And to get the most money out of your profession, you need to know exactly what that value is.
Gold Capped: Buy low, sell long
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! I've often downplayed the "buy low, sell high" aspect of the money-making game, instead focusing on using trade skills to create value and profits. There is, however, a lot to be said for brokerage. It can be much riskier but has a very good profit per hour when you win your bets. Unlike a game of cards, though, the odds are not stacked against you. There's one key fact that can stack the odds of brokerage in your favor: People charge less for items in a trade window than others would pay on the auction house. The best strategy to take advantage of this is to buy low and sell long. Why long instead of high? They actually amount to the same thing, but the key here is that instead of immediately trying to find some buyer who will put more money into a trade window than you, you list the product on the auction house. The auction house is the great differentiator between people looking to make a quick sale and those willing to wait for a high margin. If you see someone selling something in trade chat, chances are that no matter how much they're asking for, they're expecting a low-ball offer and are willing to sell somewhere in the middle. So what is it about the AH that makes stuff sell for more?
Gold Capped: How to earn money from tailoring
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Capitalism is the best, and communism is for dirty, Soviet-sympathizing hippies. If you disagree, email Fox or tweet him @foxvanallen so you can be added to the CIA's "list." When I was leveling my first-ever shadow priest, I instinctively took the tailoring as one of my two main professions. I did it because I was leveling a cloth-wearing class and thought it'd be easier if I could make my gear. It never really occurred to me that I could actually make money through tailoring. Of course, after exploring the auction house and learning more about my server's economy, I realized that I could make money with tailoring -- and in a number of different ways, to boot. It wasn't easy money, to be sure; tailoring had a lot of weird quirks that made making a lot of money challenging. It doesn't help that there are plenty of tailoring items being listed on the auction house at a price well below the material cost, either.
Gold Capped: How to use trade chat to make gold
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! When was the last time you saw trade chat used to actually trade more than Chuck Norris jokes? Interestingly, it can actually be used for making gold! This might be a bit of a paradigm shift, so bear with me here. Trade chat is simultaneously one of the most overused and underused tools in our toolbox. Non-auctioneers sometimes use it almost exclusively because the addon-free auction house is intimidatingly badly designed. Gold-making pros sometimes get so wrapped up in their own business that we miss out potentially profitable chats. So how can you use trade chat to profit?
Gold Capped: How to make money while leveling
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Disclaimer: Their expertise only extends to making in-game currency, because if they knew how to make millions in real-world money, they wouldn't be spending their time writing about WoW gold. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. There are hundreds of different strategies for making money once you've hit level 85, right? Max-level professions tend to be strong money-makers in the right hands, because they allow you to sell the latest and greatest items. It's a bit of a different story while leveling, however. There are gathering professions, of course, and some can provide fledgling characters with a solid chunk of cash. There are crafting professions too, but often times low-level gear and items sell for less than the materials it takes to make them. Making money while leveling isn't typically at the forefront of your mind when you're making your fifth alt on your home server -- after all, you can make more money running dailies at 85 than you can farming Wool Cloth. But if you're just starting out in World of Warcraft or are starting fresh on a new server without any of your main character's bank ... well, finding a way to make money while leveling is exceptionally important, especially so you can buy the much-needed conveniences that rich players take for granted, such as Flight Master's License and Expert Riding.
Gold Capped: How to generate Celestial Essences
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! Enchanting Cataclysm gear takes Hypnotic Dust, Celestial Essences, Heavenly Shards, and Maelstrom Crystals. I've spent the last week making and selling scrolls, and this has led to the discovery that these materials are not currently being used in the ratio they're being made. Celestial Essences are, by far, the bottleneck. This is not a scientific fact, but I sell a lot of scrolls, and that means that my materials use is probably a representative sample of my market's actual materials use. If you simply look at all the enchants at ilvl 300 and up, the ratio of materials used will be different than if you look at a sample of actual market data. Actual market data will include the fact that some enchants sell better than others. One could, however, take a look at Wowpopular.com's enchant list and weigh each recipe by the number of stars they give it to get a general idea. That said, let's look at the best and cheapest ways to make Celestials.
Gold Capped: How patch 4.2 broke the auction house
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Capitalism is the best, and communism is for dirty, Soviet-sympathizing hippies. If you disagree, Email Fox or twitter him @foxvanallen so you can be added to the CIA's "list." On June 24, 2010, I woke up at 4 a.m. I grabbed some coffee, got into my car with my roommates, and went to the Cambridgeside Galleria mall to stand in a ridiculously long line. The goal: to get an Apple iPhone 4. It was the latest and greatest thing, and we all had to have it. A very similar dynamic is happening right now in the World of Warcraft. There are a slew of new-for-patch-4.2 items currently available on the auction house. New BOE gear from Firelands. New tailoring and leatherworking patterns. New blacksmithing plans. Living Embers. New PVP gear. They're all -- at least in theory -- high-demand items. After all, given players' insatiable lust for better gear, customers should be lining up around the (virtual) block to be buying all this stuff. But on many servers, they're not. The demand is clearly there, but markets are struggling to function. What happened? Why did the market break? What are players doing wrong? And how exactly are you supposed to play the market with these new-for-4.2 items?
Gold Capped: Firelands panic sell-off
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! Patch 4.2 and the Firelands raid have arrived, bringing with them an entire new tier of gear, all of which will need to be properly enchanted and gemmed. There are BOP raid drops, BOE crafted gear, BOE trash drops, and of course, tons of valor point and PVP gear. If, like me, you speculated that all this activity would result in a massive increase in demand for enchants, gems, and item enhancements, chances are you stockpiled. So, have you sold everything you bought? I didn't. On my realm, the prices for all types of goods have fallen back to their pre-4.2 stockpiling levels. There has been a noticeable bump in certain markets like cut gems and volatiles; however, some of that may be due to a distinct reduction in miner activity over the last few months. The days of 20g Elementium Ore stacks are over, for now. What happened to all the demand projected for patch 4.2? Should you panic sell your stock before it goes any lower?
Gold Capped: How do I make money from alchemy?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Fox with your questions, or complain to him via the twetbox @foxvanallen social networking facepage web-point-oh! Hello again. It's shadow priest extraordinaire Fox Van Allen, filling in once more for Basil Berntsen. I guess that baby thing of his is still a baby. Hurry the hell up already, baby. Go out and get a damn job already, baby. Start pulling your damned weight around here! When I last Mind Controlled Basil and took over his Gold Capped column, I retold my story of reaching the gold cap. Though I played around in a bunch of different markets, I made the bulk of my money through inscription. That's not the only profession that made me money, however. One of the more fun markets I participated in was alchemy. There are hundreds of ways to play the alchemy market and plenty of opportunities to profit.
Gold Capped: How to reach the gold cap
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! Don't mind the intrusion, folks. It's me, Fox Van Allen. I'm filling in for Basil this week while he deals with the parasite that recently burst from his wife's stomach. (That's what those baby things are, right? Am I recalling seventh grade health class correctly?) If any of you have been following me on Twitter (and if you haven't, for shame), you may already know that back in March, Heartbourne of Lore Hound challenged me to a race to the 999,999g 99s 99c gold cap. I immediately accepted. After coming up with some basic rules (no gold buying, no server transfers, no "borrowing," no interfering with each other's auctions), the race to a million was on. During the contest, I was quiet about my gold-making activities -- I didn't want to tip off the competition. But now that the contest officially ended this past week, I'm free to talk about what happened. And so, my friends, what follows is the tale of how someone with virtually no gold-making knowledge went from next to nothing at the start of Cataclysm to, as of June 10, over one million gold.
Gold Capped: How to flip Books of Glyph Mastery
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! Books of Glyph Mastery are currently needed by scribes in order to learn all the glyphs in the game. While they will eventually no longer be needed, they will always be useful. Even when Blizzard gets around to letting you research all the glyphs without them, those research recipes are both on a one-day cooldown, and the books can be used to continue learning. These books are an excellent candidate for "flipping" for a few reasons. Let's look into why and how to flip them. Bad for the market? Speculative flipping is not bad for the market. First, when people say "bad for the market," they mean "bad for people who need to buy glyph books." While flippers seem to be making money from nothing, they're actually making money from risk. They buy up excess stock in times of plenty and sell it in times of scarcity, and this protects book buyers from having to deal with a nearly empty auction house as often. All flippers do is make it so that when a couple of new scribes start buying books by the wheelbarrow and completely empty the AH, they won't have to wait for more stock to trickle in from people leveling through Northrend.
How to turn ore into Heavenly Shards
There has been a recent surge of ore supply at ridiculously low prices on quite a few realms. Since grinding up that much ore takes so much time and since the prospected value of ore is having the rug pulled out from under it in patch 4.2, a lot of people are wondering if they have any alternatives. Here's how to turn 24 stacks of ore into a stack of Heavenly Shards with nothing but a blacksmith and an enchanter: Step 1 Smelt 16 stacks of Elementium Ore. Step 2 Smelt 8 stacks of Obsidium Ore. Step 3 Use the obsidium to craft 2 stacks of Folded Obsidium. Step 4 Craft 20 Stormforged Shoulders (or legs). Step 5 Disenchant into Heavenly Shards. Crafting Stormforged blue gear for disenchanting can be one of the cheapest ways to get Heavenly Shards, if ore prices are low enough. Also, other than disenchanting, all the steps here can be done by your character whilst you make dinner. Smelt all, smelt all, craft all, then craft all. The market for the shards is very deep, and as you post more of them at a lower price, the number bought spikes up faster than other markets (from scroll-makers stocking up, presumably). The calculation for your cost is quite straightforward: 16 Elementium Ore plus 8 Obsidium Ore is your cost for a single shard. On my realm, most days, that means I never pay more than 42g, and usually less than 34g. Since Heavenly Shards hover between 40g and 80g, I can usually sell anything I don't use for scrolls for 60g fairly quickly. The price for ore is likely to reduce after patch 4.2 hits, so don't make anything you can't use or sell before (or immediately after) that. 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.
Gold Capped: How to price Cataclysm glyphs
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! Glyph pricing has ignited more internet arguments than any other topic in the WoW blogosphere. Everyone has their own method, and there's always someone who gets offended by it. There is no actual right answer, just basic economics. The goal of any glyph strategy is to make gold, and the only sensible way to measure gold making is by calculating your profits per hour. The glyph lifecycle is herb > pigment > ink > glyph. There can be a lot of hours in that, so let's look at the best way to squeeze some gold from them.
Gold Capped: Earning gold for absolute beginners
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! Aaron wrote in the other day to say: Despite having played WoW for years I'm a complete gold-making newbie and my characters are all dirt-poor because of it. I decided it was time to start playing the gold-making meta game so I've been reading through issues of your Gold Capped column, and while I've really enjoyed what I've read I'm afraid I'm still at a loss as to where to get started. Obviously I don't have a lot of upfront capital to jump-start my endeavor, either. I was wondering if you've ever written or would consider writing an article for complete, absolute beginners such as myself. Unless you started the game with rich friends, this is something that everyone has to go through. People getting into earning gold from scratch often don't have any clue where to start, and they often have a bunch of incorrect ideas about what they need to get going.
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.
Gold Capped: How to do the jewelcrafting shuffle
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! You've bought your ore at a discount, you've prospected it all, and now you're trying to decide how to make your money back. Like in Wrath of the Lich King, we have the ability to process all of these raw gems in some way in order to make more money. This is usually called a "shuffle"; it amounts to common sense and knowing what the gems can be used for. Let's start with the basics. Each of the three modern ores prospects slightly differently. Obsidium Ore prospects into six green-quality gems per stack and a residual number of blue-quality gems. Elementium Ore prospects four green-quality gems per stack and one blue-quality gem. Pyrite Ore prospects into four green-quality gems, one and a half blue-quality gems, and an average of eight Volatile Earths per stack.
