WoW Economist

In less than two weeks, we’ll be exploring brand new territory with thousands of new items. We’ll have to transition to the new (lower) value of gold and it’s going to be a bumpy ride. For a while, the market is going to be out of whack with Outland items being dumped into the market to make room for the goodies in Northrend.

It’s hard to predict exactly how the economy will react to these changes, especially considering I wasn’t playing during the launch of the Burning Crusade. On one hand I could say prices will drop drastically because everyone will be eager to get rid of them for new gear, mounts, etc. in Wrath. There are dozens of gold sinks to motivate players to spend, spend, spend. Many players believe dumping everything they can into the AH is a great way to make some quick gold. And it is, but it has its consequences.

But, then again, the value of gold is going to drop. There will be a lot more gold in the economy with the new quests and it’s going to take some time for players to adjust to seeing these larger numbers next to the gold coin in their bag. They’ll feel wealthy initially, willing to spend more on new and old items. This could drive prices upward. I definitely believe this will happen long term. I just can’t say much for the short term.

My guild is slowly emptying the guild bank and stock piling gold to buy ourselves the first BOE recipes we can get our hands on. There’s a lot of crap in there that’s been rotting since the first days in Karazhan. I’ve yet to see a guild use their guild bank effectively. We do well dishing out epic gems and enchanting materials to our raiders that get new loot, but there’s still four other tabs full of crap that’s rarely touched! Today I offered to take the position as the guild accountant, at least for the liquidation process. I’m sure it’ll be worth clearing out the bank to make room for new materials, patterns and consumables, but I’m not sure how far the 15-20k gold will get us.

I personally just bought a few yellow, red, and purple gems with my badges, had them cut, and sold them for 250-300g a piece. I’ve also bought some of my guild’s high end mats to craft into BOE epics and sell. I’m mostly shooting for one of the server’s first two-passenger mammoth mounts. It’ll be nice having my own vendors attached to my mount for repairing and restocking on ammo. I just hope they are part of some faction I can get exalted with for a 20% discount.

So, how are you preparing for Wrath of the Lich King? Please take a few minutes to post a comment and share with all of us. We all benefit from each other’s insight, and you may spark an idea for a new WoW Economist article before Wrath!

To keep inflation down, gold sinks in the WoW economy are a must. Usually, these are just vanity items that suck some of the pure gold out of the market. Thanks to Warcraft Econ, we now know of quite a few from the current build of Wrath’s beta server. Below is a video highlighting some of them. I’m really looking forward to having my own vendors attached to my mammoth!

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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I need your help! Because of the short supply of certain herbs on my server, I haven’t got very far in writing the inscription guide. I just didn’t have enough herbs to copy over to the public test realm. I’ve been wasting a lot of time farming them manually on the PTR.

So that’s where you come in!

I know you’ve been stockpiling herbs over the last month or two. If you could prepare one character full of a few stacks of each herb, copy it over to the PTR (US PVP realm), and mail me the stacks of herbs, I would greatly appreciate it. You can send the herbs to my PTR character, Frolic (Alliance on the US PVP realm), or whisper me if you catch me online. I should be on the PTR for most of the day. If I can get a few of you to do this, I should have the inscription power leveling guide finished by tonight.

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.

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.

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

Before I start this post, I just want to say hello readers. I’m Kevin, the new guy here. I’ve been hiding in a dark corner working hard on getting WoW Economist to it’s own domain and website, so I haven’t been able to contribute much until now. Will and I have some great plans for the upcoming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled and make sure you subscribe!

As you no doubt have noticed, patch 2.4.2 is up on the public test realm and the official patch notes have been released. From an economists point of view (as many readers have already pointed out), the changes to our crafting cooldowns, Void Shatter in particular, is a new opportunity to take advantage of before the economy stabilizes.

The cooldown for Void Shatter will be removed in the next patch, but be wary of stocking up on Void Crystals. While there are a few possibilities for some quick profit, they are unpredictable.

You might think it wise to buy Void Crystals to shatter and sell as soon as the realms are up after patch day. I don’t expect it to take long for the market price of Large Prismatic Shards to drop. Unless you plan on camping the login server and being one of the first to start shattering and spamming the trade channel, I wouldn’t recommend this route. It could be the most lucrative choice, but definitely the most risky.

Another outlook would be buying Void Crystals in hopes they end up in short supply, giving you a chance to sell them at a higher price. With the patch, the demand for Void Crystals will likely increase because it will be more cost effective to shatter them than to buy the shards themselves. This one is a little more predictable than the time it will take for the shard prices to fall, so it isn’t as risky of an investment, but the yield won’t be as high either.

My best recommendation to you is to sell any Large Prismatic Shards you may have laying around and use the gold to buy them back in the form of Void Crystals before patch day. Come Tuesday of 2.4.2, have them shattered (or shatter them yourself) and enjoy the extra pocket change.

On a side note, what’s the point (besides perfectionism) of patching the crafting quest for the Onyxia Scale Cloak? Does anyone even bother with Blackwing Lair any more?