Sunday, November 22, 2009

Enchanting

I think enchanting is going to be big for 3.3, so I am doing an experiment into the profession as a serious scroll provider. I put 3k in mats into it, so we'll see what happens. More later.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Tips for a happy goblin




Okay, i suppose I should actually offer some useful advice. Well, nobody can really know your market.

So with that in mind.

1) Know what professions you have, get them to max level. For example inscription can make glyphs, cards, vellum, and has two cooldowns. All three areas can be profitable, and make sure to burn your CDs every day.

2) Know your market. I finally figured out what works best for time vs money in my market, which was completely different from my previous market. Every market has a profit for you somewhere.

3) Use tools like QA2, KTQ, etc. QA2 saves me TONS of time when its probably configed, much better than auctioneer for some purposes (but auc does so many things QA2 cant touch).

4) Keep probing! Look for new markets. The tried and true (ie saronite shuffle, glyphs), may or may not work on your server.

5) Know your mat prices! For example. For the longest time I thought, well the heck with snowfall, i'll just buy the stuff like goldclover and tandera's rose. But they dont give many snowfalls, and are about 80% of the cost of lichbloom/icethorn. Now that I actually use the snowfalls I can't keep them in stock long enough to make useful stuff. So icethorn/lichbloom is actually cheaper than the rest of the herbs. But not as plentiful, right. So guess what. Farm the other stuff from scholozar if you want to farm, and sell it on the AH. That's right, sell it. You can get the same amount of money (or very similiar) as the higher herbs, which are actually much more useful to you.

6) Undercutting. Do you need to be the lowest guy? Sometimes yes, but in hot markets you can go a few above, unless the guy at the bottom has 28 stacks.

7) Know your timing of market. Every market is cyclic. I looked at arctic fur prices saturday, they were 120g each. I looked at them again sunday morning, a few at 80g. Enough to make a leg armor and get 80g profit off it. Dont look once and see the market isn't profitable, this is a rookie mistake. Look for a few weeks. Know whos selling.

8) Is it a monopolized market? If so its not as profitable as other markets. You may have your work cut out for you if you want to enter that market. If it's a monopolier, friends that guy on each of your toons. As soon as he logs out, repost all your stuff.

9) Post often. For tight markets you are undercut within the hour. So don't bother listing for more than 12 hours, have a nice stack, just login, post using QA2, log out. It's just a few minutes. I estimate for every time I login and repost I make 100g. It has nothing to do with the length of posting merely the timing. Also definately post before, during, and after the busy period (6pm, 9pm, 12pm)

10) Look in trade, have deep pockets. This is something I learn every day. There is always a soruce of revenue in trade.

a) For example, the same guy who sold me furs for half the going rate is the same guy selling ilvl 200 epics at inflated prices. One is a good deal, the other not so much.

b) Some people sell epic gems by the bulk, or ti ore. I once spent 3000g on ti ore before 3.2 hit, in one blow (or was it less, i can't recall). Make sure you have enough space and deep enough pockets you that you can buy these opportunities. Last night someone was selling red epic gems for 125g x 7. I bought all 7, thats about 1000g. Alot of dough, but you make 50g per cut or so.

c) Mr Enchant leveler. I gave him 10g + vellum per enchant. He gets 15 skill points, I get 20g each in profit. We're both making out on the deal.

There is *always* someone in trade who just wants to get rid of stuff and wants cold hard cash right now. That's your sucker.

11) Speculation/Gambling (don't touch your seed corn). Now alot of goblins do speculating on the next patch,and that's what makes the real PVP game fun (which is the economics). But most of us have no clue what's really going to happen because we dont think like a herd. Somethings are really obvious, for example Ti ore in 3.2. But how many foresaw the glyph explosion in 3.1? And what about 3.3? The saronite - Ti bar CD is being removed. What will that do? This is gambling, folks. Don't spend all your money gambling then bitch that you have no capital. ALWAYS HAVE SEED CAPITAL. Without this, you can't do anything. You cant buy those great deals in trade. You can't buy your mats. For me this level is at least 5k.

12) Farmers. Great goblins have deals with farmers, to get lower prices than AH, and a reliable income stream.

Life on a new server


So after many many tactics, I decided on the best one for my situation. 4g minimum, 20g max, if anything is below 4g, don't post. Sure enough 2/3 of the glyphs are below my minimum profit. I decided I just can't be bothered with the small time. Not when my glyph costs are 3g up to 5g. (excluding snowfall sales). It's much more profit/hour this way, no more making two zillion glyphs and getting no profit for them. There are still a handful of glyphs that sell which allow me a nice market.

Also diversity is really the key. The glyph golbin wasn't everywhere. In fact armor vellum sells just as well as all glyphs and has a good profit margin to boot. Darkmoon cards are a good bet, I've already made my investment back and then some. When DMF comes I'll have a few decks.

What else? Heavy borean armor kits sell like hot cakes, with 5-10g profit from each. I can't keep them in stock enough. Random enchants do well. Some guy was giving away nice enchants for free so I gave him 10g and armor vellum, he made 10 random upper-vanilla enchants for me. Not huge profits but say 20g each. Of course there's the tradition pets and old world recipes. All in all my main banker has 4.5 k and the glyph toons have 1000g total (the one w/ DK, hunter, paly, druid has 900g and the other has 100g). That says that a) Glpyhs are still a huge investment for not much reward, and b) some glyphs with popular classes sell much better than other classes, like 10-fold better.

At this point I'm mostly out of stock so I'll have to take a look to see where I can find a new market. Most people have some profitable way to make DE mats via JC or tailoring. Or have a alchemist for better gold making. I may level a DK to 65 and start grinding out alchemy, which is a huge profit (and I was an idiot to drop I think, but a) its easy as hell to level and b) I was bored with it).

I read all these posts about inscriptionists making 10k gold per week on glyphs, that may be true if a) you have deep pockets, b) you have a means of getting inks (no milling) very cheap, c) if you have all the glyphs, d) most important, you are willing to SIT THERE and camp the AH every single night. For the rest of us, in tight servers, it's not happening. Even Markco is saying that he doesn't make glyphs any more, there isn't a point. The new market for my money has to be flasks, it's a guaranteed profit and you can really do well.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Coexisting in the inscription market

Lets face it, you probably aren't the only person in the market trying to make a living selling glyphs. From what I learned, there are several groups of people in this market.

1) Is the AH stalker. You can't get rid of him. he's been there forever, and camps the AH 5 hours a day. Do your best to undercut whatever he is selling, by using auctioneer - search - general - and type in his bank toons name. This is the worst guy to get rid of. The worst part about this guy is the constant undercutting. You can either crash the market or just go about your business as normal, and look for other avenues of profit. You can crash the market and he'll happily stay there, losing money on every glyph, to try and get rid of you.

2) The casual seller. This guy may post a few times a day for selected markets. Probably doesn't have everything. Not a real threat to your business

3) The QA market dominator. Makes every glyph possible, and blasts out several or dozens of each glyph. The best thing to do is is to undercut with one or two glyphs. Then he'll have to repost hundreds of glyphs, which takes a very long time. Buy up those glyphs that he sells at a loss. Know what glyphs this guy doesnt have and charge 30-50g for them.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Inscription woes continued

Well I did try undercutting to the bone, with a 5g price ceiling and a 1g minimum. Things are picking up, but I noticed my competition has adjusted accordingly. So i am still getting undercut, but things are selling faster. Overall that's more gold in my pocket; at this price point things move alot quicker, and making the glyphs isn't a huge pain (just a small one) . However there is the huge benefit of knowing that the AH campers must decrease their prices to barely profitable to undercut me.

So this will be the reality for a while, i'll revisit in a few weeks and see if I am still getting undercut so much. Up to about 2000g on the bank toons, which while nice is pretty bad considering the time investment. Hopefully with more glyphs learned the profits will increase. I'll probably start farming herbs and doing dailies to get into a safe margin. At this point I am upgrading two toons, a few upgrades a week, so once I run out of honor (for gems) my cash is going to drop like a rock. Plus when 3.3 hits I will need tons of enchants.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Inscription woes

So I discovered a few things.

First, there is a way to make glyphs very very easily. Not totally automated, but pretty dang close. It's called KTQ, and links altoholic and Skillet (and i think some others) into a seamless process. Check it out!

Second, I found that my new server ET is much much more competitive than my old server. I would post every night or twice or three times a day, only to find every single glyph to be undercut. Sales are slow at best, I am only selling 10-20 per day. Hardly enough keep afloat. Still, I managed to buy all books of glyph mastery that I could, now I just need to learn 90 glyphs by research. This is the main problem and will just take diligence, logging in every day.

So what to do. Well, I can continue with a horribly inefficient model as is, or undercut like crazy. So I am trying the new tactic of carpet bombing, reduce prices on everything dramatically. If they want to undercut go ahead, but i am not playing Mr. Nice Guy any more. The glyphs are essentially free from a material point of view, i sell enough other things to cover their costs. We'll see what happens.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Black Temple gear vs Naxx epics

Currently I'm using the glyph market to fund gearing up my hunter with BOE epics/blues, who has all but head, neck, 1 finger and 2 trinkets in ilvl187 blues or better, fully gemmed. (getting a dps toon geared without a huge guild is insanely difficult btw - a major reason why I switched servers). Speaking of the hunter, I ran naxx10 last night (one drop in 5 bosses that was even useful for hunters is FTL), so yeah real crap dps, only 1600 on trash and so forth. I went from being right at the tank's level of dps at the beginning to near the top of the chart at the end. Did I get better? What do you think?

No, in fact people got worse. We had two outstanding dps but people kept leaving and getting 'bored', we were constantly 8 manning it with only one decent dps. Of course anyone who is running naxx10 3 hours before weekly reset is pretty crappily geared, so that was true in this case. Hopefully I can get another run in sometime soon.

The other thing about the hunter is that I'm slowly replacing my BT gear as noted, and by and large the so-called upgrades are not huge. For example, my halbard of desolation from black temple first boss with enchant is as good as two one handed swords ilvl 200 without enchants. Granted w/ enchants that is 100 AP difference, and one of the swords has a wasted stat (expertese). But my point being is that black temple gear is about equiv to ilvl 187 gear BUT has intellect and hit to boot. So for example I know my dps level isn't high, but 1) my mana pools are larger than they should be, and 2) I am hit capped (true I gemmed for all hit to get there). So at patchwerk I was doing 2400 dps with only 3 ilevel 200 epics. I see alot of people in my social guild who couldn't dream of pulling out these numbers because their gear is not raiding gear, its leveling gear.

So what's the point? 1) Most likely the tier 9 stuff we are seeing now is going to last to level 85 again and entry raiding at that point in cataclysm. 2) Don't be fooled by thinking that just because something has more AP and crit means its an upgrade, it's very hard for end-game raiding piece (which typically has 6 stats on it, ie stam, int, agi, AP, ArP, hit) to be upgraded by a leveling piece (which typically only has AP/crit) 3) Don't pay attention to gear score in some cases- my hunter's GS was about half of what you would expect for naxx10 level gear. Look at the person's gear. If you are sporting all T6 and Hand of Adal, that player is pretty damn good.

The other point is that I am going to buy items almost every single slot off the AH. Truely I am burning money to do that, probably 10k when it's all done. But anyone can do this. Why do people show up and insist on guilds carrying them through TOC, heroics, and naxx to gear is beyond me, and frankly pisses me off.

Glyphs and a new server

I transfered my hunter to ET, the alliance server where I do some day raids (1x per week so far), and got started in a serious way to make glyphs. Well I burned through all I made in 10 days (about 2000g), by buying herbs, parchments, and most importantly 30x books of glyph mastery. I think I am pretty close to knowing all the glpyhs. I now have the DK, druid, hunter, priest, paly, and most of rogue markets on two different bank toons (and a third bank toon for misc stuff). So I've been able to track those pretty accurately. So far things are good, about 200g in the first day just due to glpyhs, and probably another 500-600g for vellum, scrolls, offhands.

The offhands are great, they are nearly free (just 2 ink of sea and 1 frozen orb), and sell for 200-300g. That's at least 150g profit from each. The key is the snowfall ink, which is pretty worthless otherwise (useful for NR research also), also I sell about 5 vellums every day with several gold (or more) profit each day. These are huge sellers and if you are not providing vellums I ask why not.

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