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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ti ore

Well we are getting some info on prospecting rates of rare gems from Ti ore (see here). Looks to be about one per stack of ore. So you would sink in, right now, 200 gold, for a stack, and get an epic gem, on average. My thoughts are that ore prices are going to go up and up and up until the patch hits, then plateau for a few weeks, the drop down to a steady state.

But who knows! Now that we have some ideas on the prospecting rates we start to know how much we need to accumulate. The other thing that people are overlooking; with all the farmers in icecrown, I find myself competeing with several people all the time. If I am lucky i'll get a node or two in an hour. That's not much reward for time invested.

BUT! There is another way to do this. GO do WG every day, and reap in the honor. Remember gems sells for 10k honor? If you don't care about PVP, just soak up the honor and buy gems. That would be my plan. The time reward is funner, and you wouuld put in the same amoutn of effort to get 10k as it would to farm a stack of Ti ore.

Update: Well, you never know how the market will react. It seems the chinese gold farmers were out in full force mining the crap out of Ti. On sunday morning there were no less than 10 stacks of Ti, selling at 8g/ore and dropping. I bought 5 stacks or so at 130g a stack (6.50g each). My guess is that i'll break even on the investment, since I don't have any JC tokens in stock. My further guess is that when 3.2 hits, the market will be glutted with Ti, and the gems will sell for 100g each uncut, and 120g cut. Rare gems are already not selling, even the scarlet rubys. The others, i really can't give away. So far JC is a giant bust for gold purposes.

Well, not quite. You see those chinese gold farmers? They were selling stacks of eternal earth for 90g each. And i buoght a few, made some rings (hint next time do the ring that is 1 EE and 1 E shadow which is 1/2 the cost of a EE). Anyway I made 300g that night, selling dust/GCE. However when the EE stacks were 150g I didn't make much of a profit.

Right now i'm back to 2000g on hand, maybe that much again in auctions (which are totally not selling). Now is the time for raw materials; sell your dust, sell your ore. Other than, not much is selling.

Random gold tips

I think with all suggestions it is strongly dependent on your server. On our server for example, dust sells for 5-6g each, and greater cosmic sells for 10g. Heavy borean leather sells for 100g. However, its difficult to move this because it's not used much in high level LW recipes. Nerubian chitin is a different story through.

The two main things that always seem to be true are:

a) fragments will always sell better than wholes (ie motes/primals).

b) Farming up mats, make it into epic stuff that sells regularly is highly likely to be profitable. Nowadays the frozen orb market is crashing pretty fast, those are still used for LW and tailoring enchants.

c) Bidding will work maybe 10% of the time. So what. It usually results in a significant profit for you.

d) Recipes still sell pretty well, its a very steady business.

e) Certain types of cloth are highly profitable. Wool on horde side sells for 10g a stack sometimes. Silk you can't give away. Mageweave is decent. Runecloth is very common (thanks to all the DKs). Netherweave is surprisingly profitable.

You could go to many farming spots at many different levels and grind mobs and make about the same amount of profit, 100-200g per hour.

f) The isle of QS dailies are not to be underestimated, even at 80. An hour or less doing the dailies results in 30-40g from the dailies but more important 3-4 stacks of netherweave, and a bunch of greens.

g) You are always going to do the best with what makes a continual steady profit than looking for that one customer who needs what you can sell for a substatial mark up. For example, some of my enchants that i powerleveled to 450 with still have not been sold, 4 months later. Likewise with the beginner 80 epic pieces. I finally sold my hunter two-piece set. Probably made 600g. But it took a month to sell those things. That cuts into your profit margin substantially.

h) Enchants are a mixed bag. Sometimes you'll get the most money selling the greens. Leveling greens always always sell for 5g if they are useful. Ditch those that have just +spirit or +mp5 or whatever. And sometimes you can DE stuff for profit, like armor at level 74-80 for 10g each. Sometimes you can put those mats on the right enchant scroll and make profit, but many of these scrolls are not valued. Also many of the high end ones need abysal shards. You would be crazy foolish to buy those shards at 100g to put into an enchant ,where the top guilds have stacks and stacks of these in the gbank. You really have to know your customer - top end raiders, to do well in this market.