Monday, December 28, 2009

Gold Capped Part 2

It took roughly 24 days for me to hit the cap when I started “going for it”. I started with roughly 50k gold and worked up from there. I’m very happy with this considering I spent between 25-30k gold on gear and various other items in the process. Now that I hit the cap, my aggression (price fixing markets) at the auction house is going to slow down a bit. I’m going to focus on raid nights primarily to do my posting and use the weekends to stock up, rather then go full force 6-7 days a week. I should still be able to bring in ~20-25k a week not including item flipping.

I currently use a dual LCD setup, one a 26” and one a 24.5”. My 26” LCD is my “main” monitor where I play my Warrior or DK at 1920x1200 resolution full screen. My 24.5” is used for posting on the AH, I have 4 accounts total and 3 of them are used for AH’ing. I run the 3 posting alts simultaneously on the 24.5”. I have a pretty powerful computer (Intel I7 overclocked, 8GB RAM) so my computer can easily handle 4 WoW clients at one time. I’m able to maintain 50+ FPS in Dalaran on my main account while running the other 3, if that’s any indication. This setup is pretty overpowered because I have my alts at the SW spot where I can access the mail and AH without moving. Because of this I’m able to pretty much just click post, cancel and loot my mail with extreme ease. Here is what I have on each poster:

Poster #1: Druid, Mage, Hunter and Paladins glyphs, enchanting scrolls that cover cloak, chest, bracer and 1H slots
Poster #2: Priest, Rogue, Shaman and Warlock glyphs, Armor Vellums, Snowfall Ink, enchanting scrolls that cover hands, boots, 2H and shield slots
Poster #3: Death Knight/Warrior glyphs, regular/epic/meta gems, belt buckles, BOE epics, flasks and other misc items

Like I said, I have these guys parked that the SW AH trick spot and it takes literally 5 seconds to mouse over to them and post/cancel or loot mail on all 3 accounts. How often do I re-list? Considering how easy it is, pretty often. I can pretty much post/cancel/loot mail in between every arena queue if I want because it takes so little time. I’ll take a picture of this when I get home to illustrate. This method is especially potent for glyphs because I am able to literally cancel/repost ALL my glyphs in a few minute time span with little effort. The most time consuming part of all this is restocking enchanting scrolls and glyphs. I’m considering increasing my threshold to 7 or 8g on glyphs so I don’t spend so much time milling, creating IotS and crafting.

In the coming weeks mmy gold supply will take a temporary drop due to buying gear in the GDKP runs (if they drop). I’ve already bought Death’s Verdict for my Warrior and I’m looking to buy Deathbringer’s Will and Polar Bear Claw Bracers, as well as one T10 piece set piece off Saurfang. These items will probably set me back 40-45k. I already have my PVP template setup on my Warrior for Season 8 with these items included, it’s going to be pretty freaking overpowered. After you calculate Wrathful (season 8) gear in, I’ll be sitting at ArP soft cap, hit cap, 33k+ HP, 5k+ AP, 38%+ crit and 850+ resilience unbuffed. It should make for some good times!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Saturday, December 26, 2009

I Came, I Saw, I Capped!

Despite the mail being messed up, I manage to hit the cap today with a little left over. I was hoping to hit it yesterday as a Christmas gift but I haven't played much recently due to family commitments.




I'll write more about the experience on Monday. Luckily it didn't take too long, thanks to the 3.3 patch. If it weren't for that then it probably would of taken a week or two more.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Life After The Cap?

I haven't reached the gold cap yet but I was just thinking about what I'm going to do after reaching it. If all things go well I'm only a few days away from it. What is there to do after reaching the gold cap? I'm certainly not going to stop making gold, it's because a daily part of my routine while playing the game. I can't imagine not having my posting alts going while playing my main character. I certainly won't push as hard in some markets like glyphs. I've been babying the glyph market quite a bit, often price fixing popular glyphs in cookie cutter builds. This can be a time consuming process which I'll probably limit to a few times a week, rather then a few times a day. I'm going to also increase my threshold from 3g to 6 or 7g to lower the amount of restocking required after a days worth of sales. You know what really sucks? Slacking and not restocking for a few days, then running your /ktq queue 10 glyphs and having it queue up 650+ glyphs in Skillet! It's good because you know you have sold a lot, but have fun milling/creating IotS and crafting for a few hours!

Enchanting materials are coming down as supply continues to be high but demand is starting to drop. Abyss Crystals are down to 30g or less on the AH. This is most likely due to the huge amount of heroics people are running in conjunction with the new disenchant feature. Because of this scrolls are coming down in price as well, I had to update my spreadsheet (seen here) with new prices and adjust thresholds accordingly.

There's a new version of Quick Auctions 2 that was released recently. I highly recommend it as it does live posting now rather then queuing up and doing a bulk post after scanning is complete. This works really well because the posting mechanism could get overloaded previously during bulk posting and cause some duplicate posts. Now while it's scanning your auctions it goes and posts right then and there preventing this from happening. When you hit the cancel button it also now tracks the total amount of auctions being scanned which is nice.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Weekly Gold Summary - The Home Stretch

Well it's that time again. The week went very well. I picked up Bryntroll for my Warrior in the GDKP but nothing really expensive dropped. Sales are still very high as the patch is still in its new stage. Competition has increased in various markets though as it seems people are trying to cash in on the demand spike of the patch. Enchanting scrolls have dropped in price, along with material costs. Abyss Crystals are down below 30g, Dream Shard at 9-10g and Greater Cosmic Essence at 13-14g. Infinite Dust hasn't moved too much, it's holding at about 1.7g per unit. The Jewelcrafting market is as active as ever, I notice new people every day in trade chat spamming a bulk macro for buying epic gems.

Glyphs are still holding strong, the super camper is still gone so that leaves me as the dominant presence in the market. I have been price-fixing popular glyphs here and there to keep maximize their profits. The guy that logs in every day and does a mass post at market price is still there. It’s quite annoying because I end up buying up most of his 12-13g posts for popular glyphs. I end up handing him about 400-500g a day but it more then pays out when I sell well over 30 of those same glyphs at 55+g before he does his daily login again.

Overall Weekly Profit: 52,001g
Total Gold: 174,255g

I was hoping to top 200k but things slowed down the last few days and I had some real life stuff to attend to. I also have 2 BOE’s I picked up from the GDKP runs, one from ICC 25 and one from TOC 25. They are both sitting on the auction house and should sell anytime, when they do that will boost me over the 195k mark. If the two BOE's had sold before this post then I would of broken my previous record, my weekly profit would of been 73k! I’m hoping to hit the cap before next week; it depends on how active the servers are during the holidays.

Deal of the Week:

Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder
bought for 7,500g (GDKP), sold for 17,000g

Friday, December 18, 2009

Gold Cap Next Friday? / GDKP

This week is off to a great start. The resident AH super camper seems to be have disappeared. He was my main competition in the glyph market. Perhaps he got tired of competing with me? Either way I'm happy. Because of this I have been much more aggressive with my price fixing on a lot of the popular glyphs. I have a ton of glyphs at 45-60g up and they sell like crazy. It's nice seeing your sold section in the AH window full of sold glyphs ranging from 45-60g. I've maintained Glyph of Blocking at 90g for the past few days and I've sold at least 10 of them! The money is really coming in this week from Inscription. This evening I should pass the 165k mark. I've been able to maintain a 10k/day profit margin since 3.3 and I'm really happy about it. This may or may not last through the weekend though, as raiding days are usually the big money making days for a lot of people. The weekends are a good time to stock up on cheap materials to prepare for the week, although Sunday evening is a popular selling day too.

If I don't spend anything on both GDKP runs, then I'm on track for breaking 200k by my weekly summary on Monday! The GDKP runs net an extra 11-12k or so since ICC 25 was released and people spend 10-15k per item that drops on average, so the splits are quite nice. The main items I'm looking to snag are Deathbringer's Will from ICC 25 and Death's Verdict from ToC 25. Any other item that drops I won't spend much on. One thing is for sure though, if Deathbringer's Will drops then that will put a minor speed bump in my road to the cap, as I will probably have to drop some serious coin to win it. I've decided to hold off on the Primordial Saronite for Shadow's Edge until I hit the cap. If either trinket doesn't drop this week then I'm shooting for the cap next Friday!

One thing I've been asked is my reasoning for participating in GDKP runs as opposed to regular PUGing or raiding. Why spend money for items when you can get them for free in PUGs or raids? It's simple: convenience. I'm a PVPer at heart and my priority when obtaining gear from raiding instances is it's benefit to me in arena. It's very difficult to obtain popular items like Death's Verdict in PUGs as you are usually rolling against 8-10 people for it if it happens to drop. I've been in many raiding guilds in the past and I just don't want to commit to raiding schedules to obtain a few select items that I want. In a GDKP raid, you always come out with something (gold) even if nothing drops that you want. I don't have to worry about having enough DKP to get a certain item or worry about a loot council selecting me for it. If I want a certain item, I can get it then and there.

Besides price fixing some scrolls, belt buckles and a lot of glyphs, I managed to flip a few more Battered Hilts for 7-8k profit each. Despite the increased drop rate they are still an excellent item to turnaround if you can get a good price. The demand for them is huge and there still aren't many available to meet the demand, so they still sell for a lot.

In other news, my alt Warrior's 2s team broke 1900 rating last night with my Warrior sitting in only 440 resilience :) I'm pretty sure we could break 2000 but we decided to stop because it was getting late. We were crushing quite a few 2100+ teams before we stopped, the only team giving us real trouble were Rogue/Priest due to my lack of resilience and the Rogues ability to just sit on me putting out huge pressure the entire game due to it.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Controlling Glyphs

Lately I've been focusing more on the glyph market. The camper/possible bot I spoke about in one of my previous posts hasn't logged in for 3 days. This has given me a chance to control more of the glyph market. For the past 3 days there's only been small handfull of glyphs that were selling for over 10g (his threshold) due to competition. Maybe he decided it wasn't worth camping for all day and night to stay on top with only a few glyphs, maybe he server transferred, maybe he's just taking a break, who knows. I do hope he isn't coming back though as my sales have gone up considerably.

This has given me an opportunity to take back some of the glyph market. A few days ago I spent about 1000g resetting a ton of glyphs and it has more then paid off. The first thing I did was reset popular glyphs which are used in cookie cutter builds for various classes. This information is pretty easy to obtain. Even 2 days later a majority of my 60g glyphs are still in that price range. I am monitoring my high priced glyphs more carefully, buying out the few people here and there that post a few glyphs for super cheap (undercutting my 60g posts). When looking at your auction house tab and seeing a ton of sold glyphs for 35-60g, it's very rewarding to see that it pays off.

Resetting glyphs is a very important tool to making profit through Inscription. One thing I recommend is to have all your competition on your friends list so you can buy them out when they aren't online. One poster in particular logs on a fews a day to post at Auctioneer's market price (usually 6-12g). He posts 1-2 of a variety of glyphs. If any of those undercutsare my high priced glyphs, as soon as he logs off I buy them out. He benefits from his glyphs selling and I benefit from my glyphs selling at 60g while he's offline. It's important to be proactive if you are really looking to do well. It's easy to just post and forget, but if you really want to make money you need to put some effort into it. Flipping is one of the most important aspects, whether it's glyphs, belt buckles or a Battered Hilt for 10k.

Speaking of Battered Hilts, Blizzard announced that they are increasing the drop rate on them, so I would recommend unloading now.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Weekly Gold Summary / 3.3 Thoughts

Well, the first week of 3.3 is coming to an end. Overall I'm very happy with the way the servers have performed. Opening day was surprisingly stable once the servers finally came up. The only day that had some extended lag was Saturday evening during peak hours. The new content and features are bringing back some players and giving their current player base something to do until Cataclysm.

I went to both GDKP 25 runs on both my characters. We cleared the first 4 bosses of ICC 25 with relative ease. The only encounter that really presented a challenge was High Overlord Saurfang. It's more of a healing fight then anything once you have 5+ people marked. I picked up Bryntroll, The Bone Arbiter on my DK and Blood-Soaked Saronite Stompers on my Warrior. I ended up making about 12,000g total between both characters when both pots were split up, which means I ended up only coming out about 4,000g in the hole after buying both the axe and the boots. My quest to hit the gold cap may hit a snag in the coming month as I am working on buying 25 Primordial Saronite for Shadow's Edge. I won't be able to get the axe itself until The Plagueworks (next wing in ICC) opens on January 5th. The actual Primordial Saronite will cost between 60-70k total so that will definitely cause a delay. The good thing is that I can doing very well on a daily basis as far as gold making is concerned!

Onto the weekly report:

Overall Weekly Profit: 51,099g
Total Gold: 122,254g

While this number may seem high, it definitely could of been higher if I stockpiled more. Everything is flying off the shelves at elevated prices and I ran through my stock pretty quick during the first few days. The weekly profit does include restocking, the number would of been much higher if I didn't blow about 20k gold on the GDKP runs and stuff in general. :)

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the possibility of flipping Battered Hilt, the quest item that begins the chain for an ilvl 251 weapon seen here. The chain itself is very easy, I happened to pick up one up from heroic Forge of Souls (before the drop rate was nerfed) the opening day on my Warrior and did the quest chain in about 3 hours (instances included). Throughout the week I kept in an eye in trade chat to see if I could pick up another one to flip. On Saturday I managed to buy one from someone in trade for 10,000g, 4 hours later:



I was a bit nervous at trying to flip it as I wasn't entirely sure if I could get away with selling it for that much. I've seen them in the auction house for that much but I wasn't sure if they were actually selling. I was absolutely thrilled when I saw it sold. It's very rewarding making almost 9k in one day from flipping one item alone. One other item I was looking to flip was Wodin's Lucky Necklace. Someone put it up as a 48H auction without a buyout, bid starting at 9,000g. I kept an eye on this for the 2 days it was up, this necklace is a best-in-slot or near best-in-slot item for multiple classes so I knew it would sell for a lot. I bid 10,200g on it when the auction duration was short and won! Three hours later:



Both of these items sold in one day! It was a record high for me as I also did about 5-6k in sales so I ended up with a nice 20k+ profit in 1 day. Which brings me to:

Deals of the Week:

Battered Hilt bought for 10,000g (trade), sold for 18,979g
Wodin's Lucky Necklace bought for 10,200g (AH bid), sold for 16,000g

Overall it was a very exciting week, new content, features and a ton of sales.

Friday, December 11, 2009

100k!

Just a quick update:



Woohoo! Now onto the gold cap...

Scourge Strike Nerf / Scrolls Scrolls Scrolls!

I guess I'll begin this one with the negative. Yesterday Blizzard in usually fashion decided to 'hotfix' Scourge Strike to only allow the physical portion to crit. The funny thing is, SS went literally MONTHS untouched on the PTR, then after 2 days on live they do this. While I do agree that double crits in PVE were a little too high, this is NOT the way to go about "fixing" it. For one, the new Scourge Strike was HIGHLY mediocre already in high rated PVP. The only time it was good was when the stars aligned in what could be the equivalent of /randoming 100 and rolling a 95-100 and getting a double crit on a cloth wearer. With this change, our damage will be LAUGHABLE, our SS CRITS will hit Paladins and Shaman for 2.5k or less. A Paladin can literally sit there with Sacred Shield on himself and throw out a Holy Shock once in a while to keep himself at 100% with a DK on him now. I'm happy I have a Warrior to resort to or I don't know if I could continue playing this game. My main enjoyment out of this game comes from playing arena and this nerf will put is in even a worse spot. Currently Chains of Ice is bugged as well and can only be cast on one person at a time, it wouldn't surprise me if this isn't bug but a 'hotfix' as well. The Damage Dealing Forums are quite hilarious right now with thread after thread regarding the nerf. The developer's really need to think this stuff through and use a scalpel instead of a hatchet when throwing out nerfs like this.

Okay enough venting, onto the positive stuff. Scrolls sold like CRAZY last night. I don't know what was going on but my sales have actually increased since Tuesday. Maybe it's more and more people getting the patch and logging in? I'm not sure. Check this out:





I went through a total of 4 Berserking scrolls at 1100g, 3 1H - Mighty Spellpower scrolls at 700g+ and a ton of others at a huge markup. I usually get my Abyss Crystals at 40g or less so I made a nice profit last night. I didn't have time to add everything up but I'm pretty sure I'm over the 100k mark now. I'll post a screen shot to make it official when I get home and loot my mail! The Saronite Stuffle
is going well still. I was able to snatch up 150 stacks of ore for 12g/stack from farmers in trade and the AH the past few days, so I went on a Prospecting/Disenchanting frenzy last night to keep up with all the scrolls that were selling.

Deals of the Day:

Bought 10x Crusader Orbs for 1125g (trade chat), resold for 250-275g each
Bought Surge Needle Ring for 500g (trade chat), resold for 1650g

One last thing, the drop rate on Battered Hilt , the quest item used to make the item level 251 Quel'Delar weapons was hotfixed to be significantly lowered. They are selling for 15-20k on my server, so keep an eye out on those. If you can score a good deal on one it would make a great item to flip.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

3.3 - Day Two / AH Camper or Bot?

I hope everyone had a good 2nd day of 3.3. Wednesday as many people know is a raid day so the usual goods flew off the shelves and them some thanks to the patch. I'm completely out of Flasks of Endless Rage and Frost Wyrm. The prices on Frost Lotus are heavily inflated to the point where I can't really profit buying it off the AH. I'm able to pick up a few Frost Lotus here but the flasks I get from that last about 10 minutes until they are all sold. I'm hoping I can pick up a bunch for a decent price to get some stock back. I was able to have another 5 figure day at least! I'm really hoping to get the 100k milestone (for myself) within the next few days. I've never had over 100k gold, I came close during TBC when I was heavily involved in epic gems but ended up quitting before I got there.

I experimented with resetting the Frost Wyrm market. The highest Frost Wyrm flask on the AH was 30g, lowest was 25g. I ended up spending about 1.5k buying them all out. I reposted at 55g and had a few biters, but it wasn't long before the price went from 55g, to 45g, to 40g, to 34g and then back down to 30g. I'll probably end up breaking even but I don't think I'll attempt that big of a buyout again. I guess I was hoping that with the heavy flask demand and inflated Frost Lotus prices that other flask makers were running out of stock as well.

There's a scribe on my server who I'm starting to think is a bot. I've sent him tells a few times during peak hours and he has responded. He is literally online ALL the time though. I ended up playing a lot yesterday, I logged in at 7pm and ended up playing off and on until 7am, then I slept for 4 hours so I could get up and go to work. He was online when I logged on at 7pm, he was online all the way to 7am and at 11am when I checked before I left for work. I've had some friends that play during the day check as well and they say he is always online. Luckily for me all he sells are glyphs on one character (so he has a limited supply to work with), but he pretty much chain posts using QA2. I'm going to report him when I get home and have the GM's look into it. I discovered he has a 10g threshold so I was thinking about bombing all glyphs to just below that to see what he does. My only gripe about that is that despite his rampant reposting 24/7, I still manage to sell a ton of glyphs at 30-60g. With that being said I'll probably just report him and hold off on the carpet bomb.

We ran ICC 10 last night and it was pretty fun. The Lower Spire is the only wing available at this time. They aren't opening up the next wing until January 5th, which is kind of ridiculous. This bugs me because the instance itself is quite easy. We went in there with little to no experience and ended up 1 shotting every boss except for Saurfang and that was due to a healer DC'ing. I know this isn't hard mode but the normal instance should still provide a challenge. It's one thing if they gated the hard modes but gating the easy modes in such a strung out manner sucks. Raiders have basically tacked on additional hour to their weekly raid schedule to clear this content until January 5th. The gunship fight is fun though, flying around on the rocket pack is awesome, too bad it isn't permanent!

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

3.3 Aftermath

The 3.3 patch release is behind us and I was quite surprised at how stable the servers were considering I play on a high population one. The new LFG tool is awesome for finding a group and it's very quick. A friend of mine and I queued up together for the new Frozen Halls heroics and they went well. We wiped a few times in Halls of Reflection because the tank was pretty horrible but that's about it. In my first run in The Forge of Souls, Battered Hilt dropped and I rolled a 99 and won it. I did the whole quest line and picked up my Quel'Delar, Might of the Faithful. I was pretty stoked about it because it's a huge upgrade. My warrior dinged 80 about 4 days ago and I'm happy with how his gear is coming along. I threw up an armory link to my warrior with the sword. Overall I'm enjoying the new 3.3 dungeon experience and especially the LFG tool. The weekly raid quest is also another cool feature, an easy 10 man Malygos kill later and we had our 5 Emblems of Frost and Triumph.

I had a record night in gold making, as I'm sure some other heavy sellers did too. My net profit for the end of the night was in the 11,000g range and I'm really happy about that. Pretty much everything I had up would fly off the shelves. The new glyphs sold very well, I went through about 30 of them total at an average of 30g each. I did spend a little gold on gems/enchants for my new gear but overall it was a great night at the AH.

The new Scourge Strike is pretty much awesome. The first thing I did on my DK was go into The Forge of Souls and saw some HUGE numbers with SS. The average double crit was around 17k, and this is in a 5-man without optimal buffs or Sunder Armor! I hope everyone's 3.3 experience was a positive one!

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Weekly Gold Summary

I wanted to get this out before the craziness of patch 3.3. The week went pretty well. Everything moved pretty well... glyphs, flasks, gems, scrolls, belt buckles etc... One of the big pluses of going on the TOC 25 GDKP runs is the opportunity to pick up cheap BOE's to sell for a profit. In a GDKP run the person whoever bids the most gold wins, there is no main spec, off spec etc...

Deals of the Week:

Signet of the Traitor King bought for 4,250g (ToC 25 GDKP), sold for 7,700g
Titanium Spikeguards bought for 1,800g (trade chat), sold for 4,650g.


Overall Weekly Profit: 41,455g
Total Gold: 71,155g

A majority of my profit was invested in more inventory and professions or used to buy my fresh level 80 Warrior a few things. Fortunately this week should be a big week so my overall gold amount should shoot up quite a bit. Most of my investing is done and I shouldn't need to buy much more for my alt. I guess we'll see!

3.3 Today! Let The Madness Insue

Well it's official, 3.3 is today. As with many previous content patchs, I expect the servers to be highly unplayable and lag infested during peak hours today. I've always played on high population servers, so maybe it's not as bad as other servers with lower populations. I've got my alts stocked up and ready to post, as well as my scribe sitting at the Inscription Supplies NPC in Dalaran. It's definitely going to be an interesting day to say the least.

With everything going on this week my 3's was only able to play 10 games. They were an uneventful 10 games and we dropped to 2354. Our healer said he was exhausted and playing pretty horribly, which we witnessed first hand. :P We aren't really looking to push into Gladiator until the last few weeks of the season. We aren't putting much effort into it and only playing 10 games a week does a number on your coordination as a team, as well as individual awareness and reaction time. With 3.3 comes the new Scourge Strike change, so that should be interesting. I'm not sure what my take on it after messing with it on the PTR. It's VERY RNG based, if you don't crit at all you hit for hardly anything, but if you double crit you hit for a HUGE amount. The only problem is that the double crits are so few and far between. I'll probably throw Cinderglacier on my weapon, use Sigil of Awareness as well as an ARP trinket and hope to get a 12k double crit on a clothie. The strike itself is hurt even more now by disease cleansing, as if it wasn't a pain in the ass enough for us. I'll just have to stay quick with my totem stomping mouseover macro.

If you are a Blacksmith, I recommend trying to move Vengeance Bindings. They are required to make Titanium Spikeguards and are very good starter bracers themselves. I've been selling 1-3 a day at 120g markup. It's nothing major but it's a nice little extra income to add to your posting alts.

Monday, December 7, 2009

3.3 Tomorrow? Preparations

The word on the street (MMO-Champion) is that 3.3 is tomorrow. Boubouille is usually right about these things so I wouldn't doubt it. Like most content patches, I expect the day of its release to be completely unplayable. Usually servers start to work properly later at night but the peak hours will more then likely yield unplayable results. Can Blizzard ever release a content patch without breaking their own servers? They may have done it in the past a few times but I can't recall when off the time of my head.

Preparations are going well for the patch. I'm trying to stock up on flasks, gems and enchanting scrolls. Because of this my progress toward hitting the cap has hit a temporary snag because I'm investing (as I should) just about all my profit I'm making in more inventory to prepare for the patch. I'm hoping it will pay off as this is the first time I've really attempted to stock up for a content patch in hopes of selling at a big profit.

Last night's GDKP runs were mediocre as far as drops go. I did the TOC 25 GDKP run on my Warrior alt and TOGC 25 GDKP on my DK. Nothing dropped that I really wanted, I picked up a few pieces of ilvl 245 DPS plate for 500g each on the Warrior but that's about it. The TOGC 25 run went well, we stopped on twins after about 5 attempts on them. Our best attempt was 10%, since then we figured out an easier strategy and should have no problem downing them tonight when we continue. We still have 38 total attempts left, so we'll have plenty to work with on Anub. A majority of the raid are well geared alts of hardcore raiders that have already downed Anub so I think we have a pretty good shot at him. I'm wondering how much competition I'll have if heroic Death's Verdict drops. I don't think any of the melee DPS or hunters are stacked and willing to spend as much as me (40k+) on it. If it happens to drop I'll more then likely pick it up. Why am I willing to spend so much on it? It's a best in spot item even in ICC and I can make the gold back I spend on it in a week or two at most.

Friday, December 4, 2009

A New Perspective / Flasks

It's funny how your perspective on something can change. Since I started getting really involved in gold making again, I look at just about everything people are selling in trade chat and try to deduce if there is a potential to make profit out it. I find myself jumping on deals more often and flipping them for profit. In the past my biggest reason for not doing so was the nuisance of trying to sell goods and maintaining auctions. For me, mods like Quick Auction are a godsend and make canceling and reposting SO much easier. Having to manually check a bunch of auctions to see if I've been undercut, then go through them one buy one and cancel them, collect them from the mailbox and then manually repost them with a 1 silver undercut was both time consuming and annoying. This was the main reason I would usually drop out of markets or slack with Jewelcrafting.

Now that I have my posting alts and mods setup, it's so amazingly easy that it is enjoyable. Spotting a good deal is pretty easy if you know the market, now I can take advantage of it whenever I see it. For example, late last night someone announced in trade that they were selling 15 Crusader Orbs for 4000 gold. This was way below market price as they usually sell for 385-430g. I offered him 2500g (233g each) and he took it. I immediately threw them on one of my posting alts, created the item group in QA2 and posted them in a batch of 5 with a 1s undercut. Within 10 minutes they all 5 sold for 390g each. It's a very satisfactory feeling when you do something like this.

I made my first batch of flasks yesterday and boy do they really fly off the shelves during raid times! I sold about 40 Flasks of Endless Rage/Frost Wyrm and 25 Stoneblood in about two hours. The Endless Rage/FW flasks sold for 32-35g each and Stoneblood for 37g each, talk about a nice profit considering I bought all the Frost Lotus for 30-40g! Between glyphs, flasks, enchanting scrolls and belt buckles the gold is really starting to pour in. I made back the 15k I spent buying out that guy's inventory I mentioned previously in less then 2 days and I still have plenty of it leftover.

I'm going to two GDKP runs this weekend, one on my Warrior who just dinged level 80 and another for my Death Knight. The only thing I'm really looking to pick up on my DK is Death's Verdict. My Warrior however obviously needs a lot. The main focus of my Warrior though is arena so I'm probably going to try and pick up two trophys and Justicebringer as a good starter weapon. I'm not really looking to gear him out completely in PVE, but if some good plate items drop that I can get a deal on I'll probably pick them up. I'm probably going to post a weekly update on my gold status similar to Tella as I get closer to the cap.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Compromised Account Inventory - To buy or not to buy

There was certainly an interesting end to last night. Since I logged on last night everything was going as it usually does, auctions were selling, I picked up a few good deals in trade chat, etc... Then, as I was literally 1 minute from logging off for the night, someone advertised in trade chat that they were selling a bunch of uncut epic gems at 80g a piece. I naturally jumped on it right away and bought ~10 Cardinal Rubies, Dreadstones, King's Amber and Ametrine all at 80g each. It's an awesome deal on my server as uncut gems usually go for 130-160g.

I asked the guy if he had anything else for sale. All of a sudden he opened trade and started putting really random items in like 10 Arctic Fur, a rare pet, 20 Abyss Crystals, 20 Flasks of Endless Rage etc... then he would give me a price. The price he gave was about half of what the stuff actually worth so that led me to believe the account was hacked and he was unloading inventory. I've encountered this in the past a few times. Back in the TBC era I bought over 40k worth of uncut epic gem inventory from what at the time was a hacked account (or someone impersonating as an officer and got wrongly promoted) unloading one of the top PVE guild's bank. I snatched up all of it at about 1/3rd the market price.

I ended up buying out that guy's entire inventory and it cost about 15k. I talked the guy down a little more because I knew he was in a hurry to unload everything. My view on this is that someone will buy out everything and make a bunch off it (my competition), so why not me? Does this mean that I am going to intentionally buy stolen goods in real life? No. Why? Consequences.

If someone was performing a huge sell-off from a hacked account or something similar, would you still jump at the chance to buy it all out at a huge discount? I think the goblin in all of us would.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Introduction

First off I would like to thank Tella for inspiring me to make gold again. I haven't gotten serious about making gold since I took up Jewelcrafting during the TBC era. I will eventually hit the gold cap and I will keep that progress updated at least once a week if not more. A little background on myself: I've played WoW since release, I've always been heavily into PVP and PVE and was have been in top progression guilds through Vanilla WoW and early WotLK. I took a break from serious PVE during TBC to do primarily arena where I was a 4-time Gladiator as well as Vengeful Gladiator during Season 3 in 2s as Warrior/Druid.

My primary focus in the game right now is making gold and arena. I still have some interest in PVE but I don't really want to get tied down to a mandatory raiding schedule as most serious PVE guilds have. I have been doing GDKP ToC 25m runs on my server and they are a lot of fun. If you aren't familiar with them, the loot system involves bidding gold on all loot that drops. There is no such thing as offspec or main spec, whoever bids the most gold on an item wins. In our runs, items begin at 500g and progress in 250g increments. All of the gold that is spent on items is put into a pot and the pot is distributed evenly to the 25 people in the raid at the end. The end result is usually 2000-2500g per person in the split, which is not bad for 45 minutes worth of work. The bidding itself can be hilarious, last week Death's Verdict sold for 40k gold! We have some seriously stacked people so you see items going for a lot.

As far as gold making goes, right now I'm utilizing Inscription, Enchanting and Jewelcrafting. I'm going to level up Alchemy this week and get into the flask/meta/potion market as well. Right now I have two posting alts on two separate accounts, I'm going to transfer my Inscription alt to make my main account this week so that will leave me with three posting alts on three separate accounts, as well as my main account. Yes, I do have four WoW accounts, but it's a hobby I enjoy and the $60/month subscription fee doesn't really hurt me financially. :)

I'm usually running three to four WoW clients at one time while I play, I have a somewhat high-end computer so it can easily handle it. I run both posting alt clients at 800x600 resolution in windowed mode and run my main client at 1920x1200. I'll usually alt tab and hit the QA2 post/cancel buttons as well as loot my mailbox in between arena queues or when I have a little downtime in an instance. This certainly gives me a leg up on the competition as I'm easily able to cancel/repost all my auctions frequently with little effort. I have my alts parked at the spot in Stormwind where you don't have to move to access the mailbox or Auctioneer (hope they don't nerf that). I'll keep my gold progress tracked on the right side.

Current mods (for gold making):
Quick Auction 2
Kev Tool Queue
Skillet
Auctionator
Postal

Right now my posting method with QA2 basically looks like:
2 of each glyph while I'm online (4 if I'm not)
1 of each scroll while I'm online (3 if I'm not)
5 snowfall ink singles on on alt and a few stacks on the other
2 Faces of Doom/Iron-Bound Tomes
Numerous Rituals of the New Moon (thanks Tella!)
5 Armor Vellum III

I don't post in larger quantity while I'm online because if a poster sees they are only undercut by 1 glyph or scroll, they are less likely to repost. I know this isn't the case with all people but it does tend to be true sometimes. All posts are done at a 1s undercut. I mainly use Jewelcrafting for the Saronite Shuffle, I'll cut and post the rare gems I get from prospecting on my main character casually. I'll probably get more into the epic gem market in the future. It's kind of hard to track my actual profit per week, as I'm continually trying to add to my scroll inventory (I would like 5 of each scroll eventually including weapon scrolls) but if I had to guess it's around 25-30k a week. I bring a bulk of my liquid assets to the GDKP runs, on the last run I brought 54k, on the run before that I brought 24k, if that's any indication.

I'll try a little harder to keep track, it'll be a lot easier when I'm finished getting my scroll inventory together. Right now I keep a stock of 10 of every glyph I can make and usually restock every night. I'm probably going to increase it to 15 or 20 soon. Yesterday I sold out of two different glyphs a few hours before my usual restock time!