WoW Economist

Gold-making tips from a WoW millionaire

Apr 19, 2009 Auction House, Gathering, How-To, Investing, Resources, Videos

I saw this a few days ago on World of Raids and was drawn to the “0 to 1,000 gold in 4 hours” title. I was a bit skeptical, but I watched the video anyway. Turns out there’s some pretty good information in there! He’s since released another video and a PDF that explains some really efficient gold-making tactics.

This one summarizes his basic strategy and more-or-less proves his “quick gold” claim. I was still a bit skeptical as it could be faked fairly easily, but his 2nd video and PDF proves that he really knows his stuff. I’m excited for his next video.

His site, WoW Auction Mastery, has the same videos in high-def and the PDF I was talking about. He’s supposed to have a few more videos coming in the next week. I’ll probably review them in more depth pretty soon. I’m going to put a few of the techniques to use and report back with my findings! Leave a comment and let me know what you guys accomplish as well. Maybe I can get him to write us a guest post!

Profitable Prospectin’ for WotLK

Mar 22, 2009 Auction House, Crafting, Patches, Professions, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

This is the first of many guest posts. Richard (Twinkletoes - EU Kul Tiras) sent me this article two months ago and I promised him to post it as soon as I could. Unfortunately, my recent injury significantly delayed it, but the basic concepts are still valid. A belated thanks Richard!

Ever since the release of the Profitable Prospectin’ article from last May I have been an avid prospector making enough gold to kit out my main and alts.

With the release of WotLK came new Ore and new Gems. AH prices have been fluctuating for the core materials and it took some time for this to settle however the wait is now over and we have enough information to dust off the article and give it an update.

The basic principles are still the same, work out the price of the resulting gems a prospecting session should make; if they’re worth more than the raw materials then it’s worth it. In the original article we stuck to Adamantite Ore and for WotLK Saronite Ore is the ore of choice.

I will leave the maths explanation for the original post but the theory is still very similar. There is a 24% chance to drop a blue gem and a 108% chance for either 1 or 2 green gems.

Test Results

Over a two week period I bought 112 stacks of Saronite Ore at 35 Gold each for a total investment of just over 3.9k. This prospected into the following:

If we AH everything we prospected this would result in sales of 7.6k. With an initial investments of 3.9k that leaves us a profit of 3.7k.

For the theorycrafters amongst you the 112 stacks should result in 3.5k profit (I was lucky on a few extra Scarlet Rubies).

What’s interesting is the time required to make this much gold. By far the most time is spent doing the prospecting itself and then placing the gems on the AH at the right price. I would estimate that I spent about 1 hour game time for the above test.

Tips

This probably goes without saying but spend a little time tracking Saronite Ore on the AH at different times and on different days. Find the highs and lows on both prices and availability.

Ore is generally cheaper on the weekend and on my realm there are only 10 or 12 stacks below my target price at any one time. I aim to clear these out most days depending on how much I have invested in gems.

As with the original Profitable Prospectin’ post, this will only work over a large amount of prospects. Prospecting for profit works on the law of averages and you need a large enough sample size to justify the expense.

Although I put most of my green gems on the AH I am also saving a fair number of stacks back for the soon to be released Icy Prism. On that note, look out for cheap Frozen Orbs.

Having a Jewelcrafter at your disposal will greatly increase your profit on the blue gems. The higher level gem recipes are gained through the daily JC awards and running various instances. As a guide, the top ten gems from my realm make an extra 50 to 70 gold per sale. We got 99 blue gems from the test above and if we converted just half we would have made an extra 3k on top of our 3.7k of profit.

Arena Season 5 starts today! What are you gemming?

Dec 16, 2008 Arena & Battlegrounds, Class Specific, Crafting, Investing, Patches, Resources

Another late post! No more slacking from me, I promise!

I just got done watching my server slowly count down to shutdown. You know what that means? Arena Season 5 with lots and lots of new gear! A few dozen sets of gear, at least!

Just like Season 4, I hope you stocked up and prepared for enchanting and jewelcrafting because they’ll be hot, hot, hot over the next week or two. Last season, our readers together earned hundreds of thousands of gold profit. Enchanting materials (dust at least) didn’t seem to do as well as expected, but essences sold quick. What sort of surprised me was how much was made from leg armor and spellthread - huge profits in these areas. I stocked up on Frozen Orbs with plans for Icy Prisms, but I may start crafting the new spellthread instead.

Jewelcrafters did well too since most of the gear needs socketing. In Wrath we have some new, unique cuts designed specifically for PVP. I’m hoping to see these gems take off in price. If you’ve been running heroics over the last few weeks and you have a small pile of Stone Keeper’s Shards, go grab the new Jewelcrafting patterns from your Wintergrasp quartermaster - most of them are just 12 shards a piece.

Now, before you run off trying to be the first to login and buy up all the mats on the AH, let us know what race and class you play mainly and what gems you’ll be using for raiding, arenas, and battlegrounds. I can’t be an expert in all classes, so your recommendations will help us all invest properly with a wide variety.

Death Knight preparation and investments

Nov 5, 2008 Class Specific, Factions & Reputation, Farming, Investing, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

A few guides and shopping lists are floating around to prepare yourself for rerolling a Death Knight. With the introduction of a brand new class into WoW and the fact that all races start in the same area, the leveling process in the first few weeks is going to be chaotic. That’s where these guides come in.

Scattered around Azeroth and Outland are many repeatable reputation quests. Almost all of these quests offer experience the first time you turn them in and usually some bonus reputation as well. There are a dozen or so of these quests that are well worth doing after your Death Knight escapes the Scarlet Enclave. The major ones being the cloth turn-ins for every city faction and the turn-ins for Outland factions. I’m not going to go into much detail about the quests themselves, but the complete shopping list should give you an idea of what items to start investing in.

• 300x Wool Cloth
• 300x Silk Cloth
• 300x Mageweave Cloth
• 300x Runecloth
• 6x Blasted Boar Lung
• 6x Scorpok Pincer
• 11x Basilisk Brain
• 14x Vulture Gizzard
• 5x Snickerfang Jowl
• 1x Imperfect Draenethyst Fragment
• 1x Flawless Draenethyst Sphere (very rare unless you kill Teremus, you can probably skip this one)
• 30x Core of Elements
• 30x Crypt Fiend Parts
• 30x Bone Fragments
• 30x Savage Frond
• 30x Dark Iron Scraps
• 2x Thorium Bar
• 1x Golden Rod
• 8x Hi-Explosive Bomb
• 8x Unstable Trigger
• 10x Unidentified Plant Parts (or 360x to get you to Honored before you do Zangarmarsh quests, helping you to hit Revered for your head enchant before you leave Zangarmarsh)
• 6x Bog Lord Tendril
• 10x Mature Spore Sac
• 10x Glowcap
• 6x Fertile Spores
• 5x Sanguine Hibiscus
• 30x Arakkoa Feather
• 10x Oshu’gun Crystal Fragment
• 3x Pair of Ivory Tusks
• 10x Mark of Kil’Jaeden (for Aldor)
• 10x Mark of Sargeras (for Aldor)
• 1x Fel Armament (for Aldor)
• 10x Firewing Signet (for Scryer)
• 10x Sunfury Signet (for Scryer)
• 1x Arcane Tome (for Scryer)

The Death Knight starting area quests will get you past level 58. Afterwards, you’re forced to roam around Eastern Plaguelands for a while - with dozens, maybe hundreds, of other Death Knights, all competing to complete the same quests. The reputation turn-ins will give you a significant boost (a level or two initially, and a few bars every few levels during Outland leveling) and will allow you to push past the chaos into uninterrupted leveling.

Speedy Scribe: Power level your Inscription in patch 3.0

Oct 10, 2008 Crafting, Farming, Gathering, How-To, Patches, Player Interaction, Professions, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inscription: Help me finish the guide

Oct 7, 2008 Farming, Gathering, Patches, Player Interaction, Professions, Resources, Wrath of the Lich King

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.

A drop rate is a probability, not a guarantee

Apr 29, 2008 Farming, Gathering, Raiding, Resources

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!

Inflation

Apr 13, 2008 Resources

You might have deduced this yourself, but the WoW economy is almost sure to experience some pretty steep inflation in the months to come. The price of most commodities is likely to steadily rise and it is unclear whether a nearing release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack will have any curbing effect. We will discuss this closer to the release date; for now, we only know it has reached alpha status.

What are the causes of this sudden expected inflation?

• The daily quest limit has been raised to 25 from 10.
• The new daily quests are far easier and less time-consuming.
• Raiding bosses that are on farm status is now significantly profitable with each boss dropping 10g.
• Badges of Justice now drop from all raid bosses, 15 of which can be turned in for Nether Vortices and sold for around 200g. They will later be currency for epic gems which we expect will also be quite valuable (more on this later).
• No added money sinks to counterbalance the above.

Inflation is triggered when more money is present in the economy. The aforementioned points ensure that gold is now easier to come by and thus we expect to see more of it in the World of Warcraft and therefore, expect inflation.

This is more of a warning post than anything else, but how can you protect yourself from an economical standpoint?

1. If you expect to be needing a particular gem, enchant, craftable item, etc in the near future, buy the mats asap and hold onto them.
2. If you aren’t in need of immediate gold, keep the items you wish to sell for a bit and sell them when the price has risen acceptably.
3. Go gank every ally/horde you see at Quel’Danas, hampering their easy daily quest progress and thus reducing the amount of gold that is injected into the WoW economy.

Just kidding about that last one

Let me add that we have a surprise coming up for you guys in the next week or two, so stay tuned!