Wednesday 25 August 2010

Trade Forwarder Addon

Trade chat is a spamfest on most servers but I still pay attention to it while in town for that small chance that I’ll spot a great deal.

I use trade chat for the following:


1. Spotting flips – you can smell the desperation from some people who are trying to sell a high priced item fast,. I picked up 2 hilts for 7.5k each and flipped them for 11k – a total profit of 6400g for just a few minutes of work.

2. Finding Suppliers – In any market you’re serious about you’re going to need a ton of a certain item, for example in the glyph business you’ll want a lot of icethorn/adders/lichbloom. The cheaper you can get these materials the higher your profit be or the more room you’ll have to squeeze competitors out. Trade chat is the best place to find these suppliers as they’ll usually announce large quantities of items for sale at bulk discount prices.

3. People Looking to Buy High Priced Items – I usually have a lot of darkmoon cards on hand and while I keep around 2 of each on the AH at all times there are usually players who don’t like to check the AH (don’t know why) but will ask in trade chat “WTB STR Darkmoon card! PST” there’s a sales opportunity to move product faster.

The unfortunate thing about trade chat is that we have to be in a main city to view it, that means you’re missing out on gold making opportunities when you’re sitting around in a raid or AFK in an AV (just kidding :P ) but the addon TradeForwarder fixed that problem!

Trade Chat Forward to You

What this addon does is broadcast trade chat from anyone who has the addon installed currently in a town to everyone else with the addon regardless of their location.

That means the usefulness of the addon is dependant on how many people on your server have the addon installed, so spread the word! Email you’re friends the link to this post or on your guild forums etc.

You can download the addon over at curse: TradeForwarder

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Making Gold With Enchanting 3.3

Enchanting is the ultimate gold making profession in wow. It’s the perfect accomplice to all other professions and is a must have for anyone who is aiming to hit the gold cap

The majority of enchanters hate their profession. They do the whole LFW 5g tip thing in trade; make a pitiful 50g-100g a day and call it quits. They’re doing it wrong. You’ll never see me in trade channel.

If you don’t already enchanting on one of your characters I highly recommend you get on that first. There is a good enchanting levelling guide on wow-professions.com.

There are very few people who have reached the gold cap without enchanting – think of it like driving your car without one of the pistons. You only need to be level 65 to reach the maximum of 450 in enchanting skill, so grab it on an alt (death knights work well!) if your main toon(s) already have good professions.

Make Gold by Disenchanting

The strength of Enchanting really lies in its ability to enhance the profitability of other professions. I’ll give a few examples here of how it can be used in conjunction with your profession, keeping in mind most of these still work with the great reduction in price most realms have seen since patch 3.3! Most people are unaware that all you need to do is simply add up the mats for these products compare them with the value of the enchanting mats created, craft them, and then disenchant them. Remember to keep your eye out for people selling mats in bulk and gobble them all up, even if you can’t use them all right away.

Tailoring:

Duskweave Belt – Requires ~1.5 stacks of frostweave and produces 3.5 infinite dust.

Frostwoven Belt – Requires ~0.75 stacks of frostweave and produces 2 infinite dust.

The dust can then be re-used in the making of frostweave bags too.

Jewelcrafting:

Bloodstone Band and other such jewellery – Require 2 crystallized earth and a gem and produce 2.5 infinite dusts.

Jade Dagger Pendant – An eternal earth and some gems produces a dream shard.

Leatherworking:

Frostscale or Nerubian Legguards – Require half a stack of borean leather to produce 2 infinite dusts.

Blacksmithing:

Horned Cobalt Helm – Requires half a stack of cobalt bars and produces 6 infinite dust.

Notched Cobalt War Axe – Requires half a stack of cobalt bars and produces 1.5 greater cosmic essences.

Deadly Saronite Dirk – Requires 7 bars and 2 crystallized airs to produce a dream shard.

Inscription:

Faces of Doom – Requires various inks and a frozen orb (these are really cheap these days) and produces an abyss crystal.

Inscription also produces the vellums we’ll need for the next section!

Enchanting Scrolls

Asking around, most people hadn’t thought of making these which shocked me. First you need vellums which you can make yourself if you have a Scribe or just buy them from the Auction House.

As for the enchanting mats themselves; depending on which is cheaper, either buy them directly from the Auction House or produce them using the above methods.

On my realm, I’ve found that the mats are cheapest on weekends so this is when I stock up on them. More people are out and about producing the stuff via their profession or through heroic dungeon farming. You’ll have to check when they’re cheapest on your realm. Before anyone tries to inform me, yes, I’m aware enchanting mats have come down in value a lot in recent times and so have the cost of scrolls. They’re both relative to each other though, and the profit margin is still present.

The majority of enchanting scrolls sell after raids as this is when people get new gear that needs enchanting. Despite the enchanters who offer their enchanting service for free or for minimum tip in trade, it’s sometimes difficult to find one that has what you want, is online, isn’t obnoxious and isn’t going to steal your mats. Some people are just in a hurry or perhaps unsocial and scroll enchants make life easier for them. Regardless of the reason, many of these sell per day for me. To begin with, I’d attempt to get into the habit of listing 3 each of 5 different scrolls, then venturing further from there. Here are the best ones:

Mongoose – Still great for tanks to use (especially druids). The enchant formula is solo-farmable from Karazhan depending on your class – add up the cost of mats on your realm’s AH, the scroll sells regularly for about 400g on mine.

Powerful Stats - Ten stats to chest is used by just about every class and spec in the game, so usually sell a handful of these every day. They’re cheap to produce and sell for 150g or so.

Blade ward / Blood Draining – These are from BOP formulas in Ulduar so are known by less enchanters than the others, so sell perfectly when people give up trying to find an enchanter that has it.

Berserking – A little more expensive to produce, but every time a melee class gets a new weapon it has to have Berserking on it and they have to get it from somewhere. Still sells about 350g on my realm.

Spellpower to Weapon – Players with low amounts of gold get the 50 version and the majority of raiders use the 63, I like to sell a little of both.

Tuskarr’s Vitality and Icewalker – The most popular boot enchants so sell fairly well.

Lastly, the lesser used enchants such as Massacre, AP to various parts, etc still sell in scroll form as these are less likely to be advertised by the trade channel enchanters.

As an advanced technique to make gold with enchanting, if I ever see anyone in trade channel offering to pay people for skillups, I rush to them. I take my mats and a couple of scrolls and get them to pay me 10g or 20g for clicking their button so I don’t have to. These then go on the AH with the rest of

Enchanting Addons

The best way to sell scroll enchants is using Quick Auctions 3. I recommend creating a new category for each of the scroll types so that you adjust the threshold for each should there be a fluctuation in material costs. Set the post cap on it to 3 of each and undercut to say a silver and then just replace them on the AH as they sell. The best thing to note here is that they are free to list so if someone undercuts you, just hit the cancel button on it then post them again!

I’m also a fan of Altoholic for keeping track of how many scrolls you have in stock so you know how many more of each to make in time for your next Auction House listing

Postal is hard to look past. If you’re anything like me you get 100’s of successful auctions in the mail each day, having that Open All button is very handy. Note that if you open the options menu you can bring the mail opening speed down even further.

List of Items I will Stockpile for Cataclysm

Old world materials for all professions from skill level 1 to 50.
Early outland materials.
Twink weapon and chest enchanting scrolls.
Wrath enchanting mats.

Let's look at my reasoning behind these items.

Old world materials for skill level 1 to 50, particularly herbs used in alchemy for goblins, will make a lot of money early on in cataclysm. Players making their goblins or worgs will focus on powerleveling professions either as they level or once they hit 80, so I am not going to be trying to sell everything during the week of the release. Regardless of how well stuff sells, I will save 50% of my goods for inflation to kick in. This way my copper ore going for 5 gold a stack will probably be worth 10 gold or more per stack later on in the expansion. Next we have outland materials, since I assume outland will not change very much and all the materials from outland will not also be found in the "new" azeroth, these materials should go up with inflation. Twink weapons and chest enchants will sell great the first few weeks of cataclysm and I expect to sell a hundred or so of these babies. Firey, crusader, health to chest, etc.

Wrath enchanting mats are a bit tricky and a total gamble. I believe that inflation is going to take hold of these materials later on in cataclysm and so you will see decent prices that are atleast more than what they are now. I expect the rate of inflation to be 2 to 8 times the current values we are seeing now. That means that if I am correct that 100 infinite dust for 90 gold now will be worth as much as 720 gold in cataclysm about midway through.

Monday 23 August 2010

Saronite ore is one of the main crafting materials in world of warcraft and thankfully blizzard made it fairly easy to stockpile while farming or else prices would be ridiculous for many items, including titanium bars. Here is a quick chart of how to use titanium bars to make gold.

Buy Saronite Ore on the auction house, Smelt into Saronite Bar, Transmute into Titanium Bars, and finally Craft Titanium Rod, Titanium Weapon Chain, Titanium Plating and Titanium Shield Spike. You could also smelt titansteel.

The real trick to this is getting cheap saronite ore, which on most servers is just a matter of checking the auction house every time you log in. For every stack of saronite ore you will get 10 saronite bars and 1.2 titanium bars before alchemy transmute specialization.