WoW Economist

I was a bit surprised when I heard that the new profession, Inscription, is coming well before the Wrath launch. Eyonix stated that the pre-Wrath content will be patched “in the coming weeks” and according to some of my own insider info, Wrath isn’t scheduled to launch until early November. I can only assume the patch will land somewhere in the middle. I’m hoping for sooner than later.

Iktomi hinted in a comment in our last post that we might have some success selling “tradeskill power leveling packs” of herbs to new inscribers. Perhaps even a step-by-step guide to go with the raw materials. That will likely fetch more profit than the soon-to-be-inflated market price of herbs. Did anyone try this with Jewelcrafting in the Burning Crusade?

Whether you plan to sell your herbs individually on the auction house or in packs directly to new inscribers to quickly boost their skill, I’d highly recommend investing gold into herbs as soon as possible. Once the patch hits the test realms, I’m guessing prices will slowly rise on the live realms, then sky rocket when the patch goes live. It’s also worth noting that Cenarion Herb Bags aren’t that expensive to craft and hold 25% more herbs than Netherweave Bags. I was recently invited into the Wrath beta so I’ll be working on an Inscription power leveling guide as soon as I get a stock pile of herbs to transfer over.

This post will be one of many analyzing the data we receive from the Wrath of the Lich King beta. If you have beta access or a spare key and wish to share information with us (or loan us a key), we’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment and let us know.

Inscription is the new profession in Wrath of the Lich King and has been mentioned numerous times over the last six months. However, we never really knew what materials were required for this new craft. Until a few days ago…

It seems Herbalism is the complimentary profession to Inscription. To inscribe spells or scrolls, ink is used. Obtaining ink is much like Prospecting for gems - you crush five herbs using Milling for one (or more?) ink.

From what I’ve heard, the first three low level inks (Ivory Ink, Silver Ink, and Earthen Ink) require the first three low level herbs (Peacebloom, Silverleaf, and Earthroot respectively). I can only assume each successive herb is used for it’s own color/type of ink.

This is going to be huge for the herb market! Mining is primarily used for Blacksmithing, Engineering, and Jewelcrafting while Herbalism’s only major profession is Alchemy. Inscription is Herbalism’s new best friend in the expansion and we will see a significant rise in herb prices, especially in the first few weeks. I’d estimate 5-10x in the first few weeks (especially for the lower end mats, not so much the higher end ones), and slowly drop down to 2-3x current market prices where it’ll likely remain.

I’ve got six “storage bins” ready for herbs, so I’ll be stocking them up like mad over the next many weeks. According to my girlfriend, Wrath is scheduled to launch November 3rd, so we have plenty of time to buy all the herbs our little bank alts can hold without artificially inflating the market and overpaying.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

The Holiday Fireworks Vendors are out and it’s the only day of the year to get some insanely cheap Red, White, and Blue sparklers! According to Wowhead, the price of these sparklers averages anywhere between 4g and 7g - a pretty good return if you ask me. They will take up quite a bit of valuable inventory space though.

Like the snowballs, you’ll probably have to wait a few months before they actually reach this price. But I bet you could start selling today and make a gold or two per sparkler if there’s no competition.

So if you have a few extra character slots, store some extra sparklers and ground flowers for a rainy day! By the time you remember you still have a stock pile, they might be worth selling.

It looks like the economy is beginning to settle down after the initial rush for Season 4 gear. I’m sure there’s a bit of fluctuation left to go before I’d consider the market stable again, so no need to rush getting rid of everything you invested in for the new arena season. You still have time.

I found it interesting that the motes and primals went up quite a bit more percentage-wise than Void Crystals and Greater Planar Essence. I still have a few stacks of Void Crystals to dump and fortunately the prices are still high enough to make a good profit after AH fees. I was a little frantic before Season 4 trying to gather up all the cheap enchanting materials and took about 2k gold in loans from friends. They’re all paid off and I’m sitting at about 2,300 gold and double that in items to sell. It was a success for me and I did well considering it was the first time I’ve taken advantage of the new-area-season inflation.

How did you do with Season 4? Leave a comment and let us know how much profit (or loss, but I sure hope not) you ended up with. We’d love to hear!

June 24th! Not only does this mean new, badass gear for the hardcore PVPers (Spartan helmets, anyone?), but new gear for the casual guys too. With the Season 2 sets purchasable with regular honor points, we should see many more regular players running around with Tier 5 equivalent gear and guild progression should pick up a bit.

We economists know what new gear means! The demand for enchants, cut gems, leg armor and spellthread will be on the rise. So it’s time to start hoarding for a week or two while we wait for Season 4 to roll around. I just started on a new server about a month ago so I’ve been working hard on earning as much gold as I can to stock up on the materials needed to buff all the new gear that’ll be floating around.

It’s probably not safe to buy out the AH, but definitely watch the trade channel and keep tabs on auctions throughout the day. Try to snag as many deals as you can on all of the high-end materials needed for the gear buffs mentioned above. Just hoard em until Season 4 starts and sell at your discretion.

On an unrelated note, I’d like to apologize for the lack of updates lately. Will, our main writer, has been very busy lately and hasn’t found the time to post. I’ve been working on some exclusive tools for WoW Economist readers (yea, that’s you!). They’ll be in their beta stage in the next week or two, so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of ideas (with the help of your suggestions) for new articles so I’ll be sure to write more often. If you’ve got any ideas for a post, just leave a comment below and let me know so I can take note of it.

As you may have heard, Auctioneer got a few updates recently. What really stuck out at me was the new additions to the SearchUI - Converter and Vendor searches.

Originally, if you wanted to look for vendor deals, you had to turn on BottomScanner while scanning the entire Auction House and click through each deal that Auctioneer found. Pain in the ass!

Now you can pop open your SearchUI of Auctioneer Advanced (the magnifying glass icon in the yellow tab on the side of your screen) and search your last AH scan for any items you can bid/buy and sell directly to the vendor for a small, but quick profit. This is a great feature for building starting capital on a new bank alt.

Another feature added to the SearchUI is the Converter search. With this function, you can browse for any motes, greater or lesser essence, etc. that you can instantly convert (into primals, lesser or greater essence, etc.) and resell for profit.

And finally, there’s more tooltip tidbits. Your tooltips should now show the deposit cost of listing an item on the AH for 24 hours. There’s also a new “suggestion” line under the AH deposit cost. Auctioneer tries to keep track of where an item came from (whether you bought it to DE, convert, resell, or otherwise) and reminds you what to do with it. Very handy for those doing a ton of buying (bidding in particular) and selling.

It seems that with the popularity of Quel’Danas dailies combined with the relative value of Aldor shoulder enchants and proc requirements on exalted neck pieces, the value of those respective reputation tokens has risen sharply. Indeed, killing blood elves on the new daily quests yields far more Sunfury Signets and Arcane Tomes than Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments. And thus, the laws of supply and demand take hold once again and gift us with an exploitable market opportunity.

So one way to get cash here would be to head on over to Legion Hold and kill every demon in sight. Here are a few other ways:

• Always choose Aldor reputation items as your reward from daily quests.
• Buy cheap Scryer reputation items in AH, trade at 1:1 ratio for Aldor equivalent, resell.
• Buy cheap Aldor reputation items in AH, trade at 1:2 or 1:3 ratio for Scryer equivalent, resell.

Here’s a pristine farming location for Aldor reputation items if you prefer grinding it out:

I’ve recently realized that with the BOEification (copyright, me) of Nether Vortices there may be a very real market opportunity in crafted epic belts. It must be noted that with the lifting of attunements in Hyjal and Black Temple, many raiders are adamant on upgrading every possible slot outside of the actual instance in order to counter bad drops and push through content faster. It should also be noted that some of the upgrades to the waist slot over the following crafted BOEs come well into T6 content and therefore these items are often well worth their while.

Now this might require a lot of free cash (1K+) and several relists but could net you a few hundred gold in profit. Be sure to check the AH to see if there is already a crafter on your server participating in this market… if there are too many, your profit might be too small to justify the risk. If not, I would try listing them for 12 hours around about 5 or 6pm server time… this will catch the attention of players getting ready to raid. You might also want to advertise in trade chat that the item has been placed in the AH.

Blacksmithing:

• Red Belt of Battle
• Belt of the Guardian

Tailoring:

• Belt of Blasting
• Belt of the Long Road

Leatherworking

• Belt of the Black Eagle
• Monsoon Belt
• Belt of Deep Shadow
• Belt of Natural Power

Risk’ometer: 3

Edit: The math wasn’t really wrong after all; just poorly laid out.

I wanted to take a look and see at what price levels prospecting might be profitable. For simplicity’s sake, and also from what I’ve heard in the Jewelcrafting circles, let’s keep this analysis exclusive to the big one, Adamantite Ore. From Wowhead’s data, it looks like each prospect has a 22% chance to drop a blue gem and an 80% chance for 1.37 green gems (either 1 or 2 green gems will drop).

Anyways, here’s what to do:

1. Find out the average selling price of a blue gem on your realm (add up average prices of Talasite, Noble Topaz, Living Ruby, Nightseye, Dawnstone and Star of Elune and divide by 6). Let’s call this x.
2. Find out the average selling price of a stack of Adamantite Powder (20). In my experience, this doesn’t sell too well, so you might want to vendor instead. Let’s call this z.
3. Find out the lowest price you can get a stack of Adamantite Ore for (20=1 stack). Let’s call this y.

• 22% chance for a blue gem from 5 ore.
• 80% chance of 1.37 green gems every 5 ores= 4.38 gems per stack. 18 green gems=1 blue gem (Brilliant Glass). That means every 4.11 stacks, or 82 ores, you have a guaranteed blue gem. [1/(82/5)]=0.06.

0.22x + 0.06x + 0.05z= expected gold from one prospect (5 ores).

0.28x + 0.05z (simplified)

y= price of 20 ores (see above).

If [(0.28x + 0.05z)*0.95]>y/4, then prospect. Simplified: 1.064x + 0.19z>y.

If you’re vendoring the powder, use 1.064x + 0.9>y, then prospect.

NOTE: This is assuming the gems prospected sell on their first listing.

NOTE2: This will only work over a large amount of prospects. The main reason for this is so that the sample size is large enough to justify the equation but also that you get the necessary green gems for Brilliant Glass and so that you get enough variation in your blue gems.

I’d like to note a couple more things regarding patch 2.4.2. First of all, Brilliant Glass is now set to be on a 20 hour cooldown, which is a slight improvement, but which still may be a roadblock for getting rid of those green gems. An alternative would be using them to transmute Skyfire Diamond or Earthstorm Diamonds. Or, you could straight up sell them in the AH although this may be slightly riskier due to the huge supply. Secondly, I’d like to note that, according to the patch notes, there is now a slight chance for Brilliant Glass to yield an epic gem, which means that this may be even more profitable than it appears. However, I do emphasize the small in “small chance” and this shouldn’t be something you rely on.

Risk’ometer: 2

WoW Insider has a short but great post on the math behind drop rate percentages. This may not be obvious to some people and the math behind the percentages will make it much clearer.

While Wowhead may tell you the drop rate of a Badge of Justice from Shattered Sun Supplies is 10%, you are not guaranteed a badge in 10 supplies. You actually have a 34.87% chance of not finding a single badge from opening 10 supplies.

Here’s the math:

• Take the percentage chance of not receiving the item you are after (in this case, 100% - 10% = 90% or 0.9)
• Raise that to the nth power, where n is the amount of times looted (in this case, 0.9^10 = 0.3487 or 34.87%)
• The result is your chance to not get the item in the number of times you’re looting (or 100% - 34.87% to get the percent chance you will get the item, 65.13%)

This math applies to items opened, corpses looted, herbs picked, ores mined, gems prospected, and everything else with a drop percentage attached to it.

And speaking of prospecting, we have a great article coming up that will break it down and give you an idea of how profitable it might be to buy up your server’s Adamantite Ore and spend the day prospecting. Stay tuned!