WoW Economist

The inscription powerleveling guide I’ve been working on is finally complete! Naturally, there may be a few mistakes, so I urge you to try the guide on the PTR or once 3.0 goes live. If you find something wrong or you have a better route for a certain portion of the guide, feel free to leave a comment and let me know!

At the moment, it’s pretty pointless to level inscription past 350 as there are no new recipes for 355 and beyond. The only way to learn new recipes after 350 (and the only way to learn minor glyphs) is through Minor Inscription Research, which has a 20 hour cooldown. Below are the materials required to get to 350 inscription. The pigments come from different sets of herbs, which you can see on Wowhead by clicking each pigment’s name. The average return of each herb is about 2.5 pigments per mill (5 herbs), so you’ll need about double the amount of herbs to get the necessary pigments listed below. I plan on having one extra stack of each as a buffer in case of bad luck.

• 60x Alabaster Pigment (~6 stacks of herbs)
  
• 40x Dusty Pigment (~4 stacks herbs)
  
• 134x Golden Pigment (~14 stacks of herbs)
  
• 118x Emerald Pigment (~12 stacks of herbs)
  
• 114x Violet Pigment (~12 stacks of herbs)
  
• 110x Silvery Pigment (~11 stacks of herbs)
  
• 130x Nether Pigment (~13 stacks of herbs)
  

The following uncommon pigments have a chance to be milled from each set of herbs. With the volume of herbs required for the pigments above, you should have no problem getting these pigments.

• 10x Burnt Pigment
• 10x Indigo Pigment
• 5x Ruby Pigment

And finally, the parchment below can be bought from the inscription supplies vendors near every inscription trainer.

• 60x Light Parchment
• 121x Common Parchment
• 155x Heavy Parchment
• 30x Resilient Parchment

Now that you’ve stuffed your inventory full of materials, let’s plow through this guide. I started out at the Ironforge trainer until 300 Inscription, then moved to Honor Hold to finish up. You’ll need to make a few trips to and from the bank to mill the herbs and use the pigment, but make sure you mill enough Nether Pigment to bring with you to the Outland to get from 300 to 350 inscription.

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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.

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

Okay, this may be our riskiest proposal yet. If it pays off, you look like a genius. On the other hand, if it goes south, your forehead will likely have a fine rendition of the outline of your keyboard for days to come.

Being a rather cautious investor (I was more aggressive before I still didn’t have epic mounts on all my characters), I rarely engage in attempting to control markets nowadays. But it can be fun, once in a while, and immensely profitable. The perfect condition to execute it in, however, are rather rare.

It might look something like this:

Basically, there needs to be an obvious lack of a certain item that is usually in regular need. The auction house might only have a stack of 5, 10 or 20 left in it, which no one has bought because they only need 1 or 2 at the present time. Or the AH might have only have one or two of that item posted but no stacks. What you need to do is buy up all of the supply, and relist individually (if you bought a stack) at a very high markup (30-50% above usual market price). Then you have to sit there and keep refreshing the AH search; when someone posts that item below your buyout price, you need to buy it asap (you can relist or hold onto it, depending on how your current listings are doing).

Your goal here is to be the sole provider of that particular item and in doing so, charge an abnormally high price for it which in theory should be paid as you are the only supplier. As you can see, this has a serious probability of failure, most likely caused by needing to buy so many items listed below your price. It is also very time consuming because you need to watch the AH like a hawk. But if there are buyers desperate or rich enough swarming the market, you could come out seriously on top. We recommend you do this at prime time for a better chance of success.

Risk’ometer: 5

First of all, I’d like to say I’m very grateful for all the sudden participation this blog has received. I’m reading all your comments attentively and I’m excited about the bright future of all this

Now, down to business. I’m posting this based on my past observations of seller behavior in Trade Chat and the Auction House. It can be a mistake to categorize anything and everything one comes across but it can also be immensely useful to refining our understanding of how things work. All World of Warcraft toons have a real person behind them (most of the time) that will act in a certain way when it comes to the marketplace.

This is a rather long post, so get comfy.

1. The impatient one:

Note that I am not trying to pass judgment on this type of person. Everyone has their different selling style and this one just aims for the fastest transaction possible.

Desrciption:
This is the guy/girl that sits down at his computer for 2-3 hours and farms 2 stacks of Primal Water. They then hearth back to Ironforge or Orgrimmar and type “/2 WTS [Primal Water]x40 720g” when the current selling price in the AH is 22g per. Now 720g for 40 means hes selling at 18g a pop, 4g under the AH, because they want to sell them all and sell them fast.

Reaction:
Now here’s what you do: “/w impatientone i’m interested.” Invite them to join your party, meet up and then you say “/p hey i’ll take them all off your hands if you give me a bulk discount, lets say 700g and call it a deal.” He will most likely accept because this way, he doesn’t have to bum around in trade chat, selling them off one by one. If you’re really ballsy, you can ask for an even deeper discount, maybe 680 or 675. Don’t get too greedy though because this person just spend 3 hours farming and doesn’t want to feel like hes being cheated.

Well, you can probably guess the next step. You turn them right around to the AH for slightly less than the current price, but don’t put them all up at once or the price will crash and you’ll end up losing gold in deposits as 36 primals get sent back to your mailbox. The key here is to be patient, turning your seller’s weakness into a strength. Yes, the price will fluctuate and it might be a few days before you see the entire fruits of your labor (assuming an average sell price of 22g): [(22gx40)x0.95]-700g= 136g. Hey, patience pays off!

2. The one who will make you feel like you failed middle school arithmetic:

Description:

Watch out here, because you could fall into a tarp. This is the one trying to sell a Dawnstone for 46g when its going for around 47g in the AH (or even worse, for more than the current AH price). Hold on a second. There are two things we must always keep in mind. What’s 47g minus a 5% cut? 44.65g. And what additional cost are we incurring by listing on the AH? Risk. Deposit risk and market fluctuation risk. On the other hand, if you need that item for something else, it would actually be a good idea to buy it.

Reaction:

Ignore this guy (not as in add him to your ignore list, cmon I’m not that ruthless, I swear!). This one isn’t going to make you any money and he’s not worth your time. The offers in trade chat have to be even better deals than the AH ones, because of those two risks I mentioned above.

3. The AH n00b:

Description:

I really love this one, he makes me a good chunk of change every once in a while. You’ll be doing your daily AH browsing and come across this: Mote of Fire x5 4g75s. Yes, really. You will come across it every so often. Or maybe it’ll be Large Prismatic Shard x3 32g50s. It might even be Primal Mooncloth x2 50g. Whether the seller here was intoxicated when he put those up, plain clueless or just very generous is irrelevant. What matters here is how fast you can press BUYOUT.

Reaction:

Smile. Even if you don’t have another 5 Motes of Fire to make the Primal, don’t worry. Even if you have to use those shards to enchant a new piece of gear you just got, that’s okay. You just got value for your gold. And because of that, you come out ahead.

4. The tradeskill donator:

Description:

You’re watching the trade channel, as usual, for the deal of the day, trying to see clearly through all the tradeskill spamming. And suddenly, you see a Tailor, or a Jewelcrafter, etc start to offer their high level services for free. You don’t really understand why they would do this but why not take advantage of it? Well that’s exactly what you do. And without getting angry that they’re ruining your business (if you share a tradeskill with them)- they’ll either leave eventually or realize how much gold they’re forgoing and change their Samaritan ways.

Reaction:

Whisper them with what you want done. This could be a jewel cut (Living Ruby to Runed Living Ruby), a void shatter (Void Crystal to 2x Large Prismatic Shard), maybe a Shadowcloth transmute. Whatever it is, go buy the mats in the AH asap and get the free service before this person decides to start charging. These opportunities are few and far between so don’t lose a single second!

Here are a few basic pointers that are crucial to your understanding of the World of Warcraft Auction House:

1. The Cut: the inter-faction AHs located in Goblin cities take a 15% cut of the final selling price. However, since you should only be using these to transfer gold between your alliance and horde characters, this is largely irrelevant to being an investor.

The normal AHs take a 5% cut of the final price. That means that if you sell an item for 100g, you will only actually “get” 95g (the AH takes 5g). An easy rule of thumb is that for every 20g of the final selling price, the AH takes 1g. It is very important to keep this in mind when following advice here, as margins can often be quite small. For example, let’s say you buy a Living Ruby for 60g, cut it into a Runed Living Ruby and sell that for 62g. You would actually be losing 1g10s if the Runed Living Ruby sold. Why? Because the AH took a 5% cut of 62g which is 3g10s while the price difference with the Living Ruby was only 2g.

2. Auction Duration: The AH gives you a choice to select the duration the auction will remain until it expires and is returned to you via mail. The three options are 12, 24 and 48 hours. For the vast majority of auctions that are not listed very late at night, 12 hours should be sufficient for it to sell. The deposit price increases with longer times and will only be returned to you if the auction sells within that time.

The AH in our experience is a volatile market and while it is easy to predict in both the short and long term, it can be difficult between the two. What does this mean? It means that if I check auctions at 7pm, I can give you a reasonable conjecture as to how much a given item will be selling at in 3-4 hours based on the current trend and I can probably make, based on the evolution of the game, a decent estimate of what it will be selling at in a month or two but it is difficult for me to say anything accurate about the next 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks.

What’s the jist of that wall of text then? List your auctions for 12 hours, at prime time, and if it fails to sell, relist it again for 12 hours. The exception here is for items that have very low deposits relative to value or no deposit at all (example: enchanting mats). You can go ahead and list these for 24 or 48 hours and if you decide to cancel the auction and relist it, you don’t lose a single copper.

3. Pricing: You see 5 Large Prismatic Shards selling for 100g and the lowest price of an individual shard is 25g. You move quickly to buy the stack of 5 and relist them individually in the AH, a strategy that is discussed elsewhere in this blog. What price do you list them at? 22g? No. 23g? Fail more, nub. You list it at 24g99s99c because it will sell just as rapidly as if you listed it at 1c. This is the law of pricing that we recommend you to follow religiously. Always undercut by 1c. Period.