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The Queue: A barn full of cash
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I have a mighty long response to today's first question! Morte asked: You say "there are more than enough ways to make gold", could you give us a few ideas? I'm having a tough time keeping enough gold on my alts with all the garrison building expences.
The Undermine Journal returns
Back in July, we reported on the sad news that The Undermine Journal, long a staple resource for WoW's Auction House enthusiasts, was closing down. In their corresponding blog post, they did mention that if they were working on an Undermine Journal 2.0, and hoped to have it up and running eventually. That eventuality became reality earlier this week, when The Undermine Journal reopened it's doors. The new site is still a work in progress--there's no EU support yet, for example--but they plan on having that ready to go by the time patch 6.0 arrives, so never fear. I'm sure that news of The Undermine Journal's rebirth will be happily received by many, and may all of your auctions always be profitable. Welcome back!
5 ways to get rich off an agonizing grind
Skyshards are a bit like leprechauns: Some people never see them, and some -- usually the heavily inebriated souls awake at 2 am -- see them all the time. You need 10 for a Sky Crystal which brings Alani crashing out of her route around the Vale. Because that's the only way to get the Thundering Ruby Cloud Serpent, and because some of us are working on Mount Parade and will barf the next time we see the Argent Tournament, sometimes you just have to resign yourself to a long and boring grind. However, if you've got to kill thousands of mobs anyway, you might as well make the most out of it and improve your hourly genocidal "wages" with a few things: Helpful Wikky's Whistle A rare drop off Major Nanners. While definitely the least helpful item on this list, the Whistle isn't expensive to use and doesn't use a trinket slot. Blow it, and a tiny hozen will appear. Talk to him, and he'll run off to forage for you while you kill mobs. Once you get to around 50, Wikky will reappear with a Bag of Helpful Things. Warning: He vanishes fairly quickly if you don't talk to him, so keep an eye on the emotes in your chat screen. He'll always announce his presence. More past the cut!
The players and the auction house
Like many, if not most, players, I regularly use the auction house to buy and sell items that I need or want in WoW. And, like many players, I regularly experience frustration in doing so -- either I can't find what I want and/or it's exorbitantly expensive, or I can't sell what I'm trying to get rid of! I'm not sure which scenario I'd rank as more annoying -- not being able to buy what I want versus not being able to sell what I want -- but I find the latter to be exasperating in a particular way, especially if I know that what I'm selling is something useful. I admit it: I get really frustrated when things I want to sell don't sell. Relisting is annoying, and if I'm trying to sell an item, it's because I neither need nor want it, so carrying it around isn't something I feel inclined to do. Part of it is wanting to make gold -- who doesn't, after all -- but in addition, those bag slots are space I need for other things that I don't want to sell, like transmog gear. Hence, I am forced to admit that I can sometimes be one of the people that player Kidja complains about in this forum post. If I can't get a buyer on the AH for something at the price I think it deserves, I will sell it for as under-market as I dare simply to get the goods moving.
How to make gold without breaking (much of) a sweat
Making money in World of Warcraft can be a drag, requiring boring grinding or spending tedious hours watching price fluctuations in the auction house. And, while there's tons of advice out there on how WoW players can make piles of gold, it tends to be more involved than my attention span allows. (Though if your attention span does allow, you should go for it!) This is, after all, a game I am supposedly playing for fun: spending my fun time farming leather turns it into not fun time pretty quickly. However, fortunately for me (and those like me), you can turn a decent profit in WoW without jumping through many hoops -- even at low levels. All it takes is paying attention to the loot you find and following a few general guidelines, and you can make enough gold to buy (almost) anything you want as you level your way to greatness. Sound too good to be true? It's really not. So if you're a new character or rolling on a new server and want to be sure you have the gold to buy anything you might need on the trip to level 90, read on! (If you're already at max level, you may find a few useful tips here, but Gold Capped caters more to end-game players.)
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.
How to make gold when your competition is camping the AH
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! Making gold with heavy competition is hard. I get comments on my articles all the time about how my ideas don't work on some high-population, high-competition realm. There's an implicit (and sometimes outright stated) disclaimer that any advice you'll find here is general and may not apply to your realm. It's time to talk about what to do when you're always being redirected back to these weasel words. If your server really is so competitive that you can't make any normal strategies work, what can you do?
Breakfast Topic: What is WoW's most lucrative profession?
I've asked a version of this question previously in a Breakfast Topic when I was curious about which class had the easiest time making gold. There didn't seem to be much of a consensus in the comments, which is a good thing. No one class seemed to have an overwhelming advantage when it came to piling up a boatload of gold. But since Cataclysm launched, it's a question I've occasionally pondered whenever I hear someone grouse about the expense of gemming a tier set or enchanting a new weapon. One of the players in question was a max-level jewelcrafter, which threw me for a moment. "Shouldn't you be making money hand over fist on the Auction House?" I asked. "You can," he said. "But a lot of it just pays back the expense of leveling JC in the first place or recouping the cost of buying ore and gems." I'm curious. For all those of you out there who have two primary professions or just a host of alts with different trade skills, which one has earned you the most? %Poll-72880%
Gold Capped: The fastest way to make 10,000 gold
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! Every so often, I get asked something to the effect of "What's the fastest way to get 10,000 gold?" It's usually asked by someone who is perpetually poor in game and is looking to get a BoE or some other sort of reward that costs gold. The fastest way for me to get 10,000 gold is to log in and check my mail. My daily haul is many times that and scales based on how much time I have to craft, list, and relist. This isn't a useful answer to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, though. So what advice would be helpful? First off, if you're below level 85, get to level 85. This nets you quite a bit of gold simply from quest rewards and vendoring gear you acquire. If you're already level 85, the first thing you need to do is identify how much money you can make per hour running 5-mans for valor points that you can use to sell BoEs. On my realm, I could sell a BoE costing 1,650 VPs for about 10,000 gold. That means every valor point I earn could be worth 6 gold, which makes the 150 points I get from a 5-man worth 900g. I can do seven per week per character with the requisite gear. Also, every trash kill and boss kill has a chance of awarding you with valuables, including enchanting mats (if someone can DE) and BoEs.
Gold Capped: Relentless markdown wars
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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I got an email from someone recently about a new competitor. I have recently returned to the blacksmithing armor and belt buckles market. When I researched my old stomping ground, I found that materials cost has increased, profits are almost non-existent, and competition was rampant! I didn't let that get me down, however. I watched the market, checked the reference data, got a good handle on the situation, then when the time was right, made my move! Competition dropped like flies, profits rose, and life was grand. Then one day, I got a new big-wig competitor.
Gold Capped: Mobile Auction House functionality updated
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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The WoW Remote, or Mobile Auction House, has been upgraded. Here are the new features that have been announced: -Automatic price undercutting: Set the default buyout price of your auctions to match or undercut the current lowest buyout price for an item -Aggregated buyout search results: Multiple auctions posted at the same buyout price can now be viewed as a single group -Support for the following Guild features: Level, Perks, Rewards, Achievements, News, Events, and MotD -Realm Status -Search now suggests terms based on previous searches and matching items -Talent Calculator -Various bug fixes source While some of the features are available to everyone, whether they pay the $36 a year mobility fee or not, most of this concerns auctioneers. There are a bunch of welcome and much-needed changes and bug fixes in this patch -- so many, in fact, that it's left the vanilla (unmodified) Auction House so far behind that it's actually eating the in-game Auction House's dust as it laps it.
Gold Capped: Shattering Maelstrom Crystals
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. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Patch 4.3 will bring with it the ability to shatter Maelstrom Crystals into Heavenly Shards. This is unsurprising, as we have been able to shatter or transform the epic enchanting mats from other expansions. At this time, it looks like it will produce two Heavenly Shards per Maelstrom Crystal, and since it's not disenchanting, it's unlikely to be affected by the guild perk. This is going to be an opportunity for people to make some money, as well as provide a much needed sink for these Maelstrom Crystals, which have been piling up of late. The market for Heavenly Shards is a little odd. In case you've forgotten, you can make one from 16 Elementium Ore and 8 Obsidium Ore. Despite this being "common" knowledge, the price for these enchanting mats has a consistently high profit margin. Maybe it's because of how long and annoying it is to turn ore into shards, or maybe it's because of the large volume taken by the popular enchants this expansion.
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, the last trade skill and finances addon you'll ever need
Every week (since Feb. 14, 2010), 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, hate mail, or guild applications! edit: This post introduces the addon and concepts, but for a hands on setup guide, check out the basic and advanced posts. I have been playing around with a new addon, TradeSkillMaster. I've talked about a whole slew of other tools players can use to make money before, but none of them are anywhere near as awesome as TSM. Before I jump in, though, you should all probably know that this addon is still in beta. There are a few little bugs I've encountered (and reported), but the addon works very well in its current state. Please note that when you download the addon, you will need to download each module separately, as the entirety of the addon's functionality is accessed through the modules. They are linked in the description section of the TSM main page, but if you have a Curse Premium account, you can get them all at once. TSM is now my main tool for every single one of the markets I'm active in. That said, Sapu, the creator of the addon, needs help. He's done 95% of the code on the project so far, so if any of you are looking for an opportunity to work on an exciting and popular World of Warcraft addon project, I'd be just thrilled if it was this one. Down to business: what does TradeSkillMaster do, and why am I so excited that I wrote a post about it before it's done?
Gold Capped: Alchemy in Cataclysm
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, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. Email Basil (new address is basil@wowinsider.com; old one no longer works) with your comments, questions or hate mail! Alchemy is, again, a money-maker this expansion. The market isn't as straightforward as it was in Wrath of the Lich King, but it's definitely worth the slot on a character. One of the nice things about alchemy is that there is no alchemy vendor in Twilight Highlands who refuses to come out and do business until you clean up the first quest area at level 84. Now if only I had known which professions would require that and been able to stack them on a smaller number of characters than I did ... Today, we're going to talk about how to make money using flasks, potions, and transmutes. Two pieces of vital information: First, specialization procs account for as much as 20% extra product from the same mats. Second, while you can only have one specialization per character, you can change it for 150g by visiting the appropriate NPCs in Outland (one to unlearn, one to learn). Assuming you do your business in batches, this is probably cheaper than wasting another character's profession slot on a second alchemy tradeskill. If you need help with this badly documented process, just look up the mastery you are unlearning, and revisit the NPC that trains it to unlearn it.
Insider Trader: Tailoring in Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions. The state of all the professions in Cataclysm is still in a bit of flux, but at least most of the recipes have been added to the beta now. Like most professions, tailoring post-Cataclysm is going to look very similar to the way it looks now. Sure, all the numbers are higher, but the structure of the profession is basically the same. One of the key differences, however, is that while tailoring has historically required mostly cloth and vendor trash for recipes, it is now a serious consumer of "volatile" elementals. Look through the recipes you start doing in Wrath of the Lich King and you'll see mostly bolts of Frostweave. You still need the new type of cloth (Bolt of Embersilk Cloth); however, virtually every single recipe you'll want to train on, as well as most of the actually useful (and valuable) recipes, are going to involve Volatile Water, Volatile Fire, Volatile Life, and Volatile Air. This is also true of the other gear-crafting professions, leatherworking and blacksmithing; however, tailoring had one thing going for it that other professions didn't: Unraveling.
Breakfast Topic: The best and worst classes for gold
I started leveling a worgen rogue on the beta servers to get a better feel for the Alliance's leveling experience in Cataclysm, and it's my first time playing that class for any real length of time. After being introduced to the pleasures of Pick Pocket, the hostile inhabitants of the Redridge Mountains and Duskwood found themselves being relieved of their wallets with cheerful regularity. While the money-per-hour from pickpocketing isn't great, it still got me to thinking -- if you leave the auction house out of the equation (class obviously doesn't matter there), are rogues the best class to play if you care about making money? If they're not, which class has it easiest if you're interested in accruing a nest egg? Someone's mechanics or advantages have to be the best for a would-be millionaire, even if the vast majority of income in the game really doesn't have anything to do with what you play. Then again, the issue has a flip side. During The Burning Crusade, I would've said that protection warriors and paladins were at the greatest possible disadvantage for saving gold. High repair bills, terrible farming capacity, food, water, reagent and respec costs added up quickly for plate tanks. And until very recently, hunters were literally obligated to pay for every shot or arrow they fired. Someone's gotta have it best -- but someone has it worst, too. Which class gets soaked the most these days?
Gold Capped: Market timing
Want to get Gold Capped? Watch this space every week as Basil (also of the Call to Auction podcast, the Hunting Party podcast and outdps.com writes about making gold in the World of Warcraft. Have questions, comments, or threats for him to get off your damned server? Email Basil! The prices for all kinds of things fluctuate. I talked a little about this in my post for casual auctioneers, but there is serious money to be made with market timing for very little investment. Basically, the goal is to watch prices for a few weeks, try to predict their next swing, and take advantage by buying low and selling high. Watching prices Easier said than done, like most things worth doing. You might get hundreds of items you'd like to watch, and short of a photographic memory or a manual spreadsheet, you're going to need some help keeping track of it all. Enter Market Watcher. This is a nifty addon that, once configured, allows you to scan the auction house for just the things you're interested in, and will show you a graph of their prices over time once you get a couple scans done.
The OverAchiever: 5 lucrative achievements
Last week we discussed a set of achievements likely to drive the average player to the poorhouse. This week, in the spirit of consoling people who may not necessarily have a Traveler's Tundra Mammoth in their immediate future, I'd like to present a series of 5 achievements where at least one of the following is true: They're an unusual means of making gold in a way people wouldn't necessarily expect, or: It would be almost impossible not to make a pile of gold while doing them. Now, a disclaimer; the most obvious picks here would be achievements like Got My Mind On My Money or The Bread Winner, but they're more a record of your previous looting and questing rather than being something you really have to go for consciously. I'm on the lookout for slightly more interesting ways to grow rich from achievements that are not so directly concerned with moneymaking:
Fishing for profit
I'm an admitted and proud fishing junkie, but had long ago resigned myself to the fact that my favorite ingame pasttime was never going to be a source of revenue. But Alterac Volley has a great post on the degree to which fishing has actually (gasp, shock, horror) become a moneymaking endeavor in Wrath. While I'll grant that on most servers it's probably nothing compared to, say, Mining or Herbalism, there's gold to be made in them there streams -- and this is all the more true if your server hosts a large raiding population.AV observes that there are four types of fish most likely to be lucrative, and it's no accident that three of them (the Musselback Sculpin, the Glacial Salmon, and the Nettlefish) are the main ingredients of the Fish Feast, a valuable (although generalized) raid buff. I spend roughly an hour a week fishing up the materials for these to cover our raids and had never even looked to see what they retailed for. After reading over AV's comments, I took a peek at my server's AH and had a /headdesk moment discovering that my main could have been a much wealthier character if I'd just spent a little time yanking up a few extra fish here and there. So if your character is at or close to the Northrend fishing cap (and especially if you're still on the lookout for the Sea Turtle, which requires you to fish in Northrend pools anyway), give your AH a look and see how the fish are selling. You might be pleasantly surprised. And, as always, I highly recommend El's Extreme Anglin' as a great resource for the beginning and advanced fishermen out there.
