WoW Economist

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!

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?

With many realms now well into phase 3, its time to think ahead to the next phase. When you’re able to retake the harbor and create the alchemy lab, its epic gem time. Each of the six raw (or uncut) gems will become available for purchase for the relatively small price of 10 Badges of Justice. Additionally, the epic gem cut patterns that where previously only available to those with Scale of the Sands reputation are now available with Shattered Sun Offensive rep.

So, what are the opportunities here? Well there are several:

1. You buy uncut gems for 10 Badges of Justice and sell the straight up in the AH or in Trade chat.
2. You buy uncut gems for 10 Badges of Justice, cut them or have them cut by a JC and sell them in their final form.
3. You buy the uncut gems in the AH or trade, cut them, and resell.
4. You buy select recipes if you are a JC, and hope the market comes to you for cuts which you charge extra for (epic gems, new recipes).

Let’s start from the bottom, for kicks. I do not advise you to follow the last option unless you are on a low-pop realm where these cuts are going to be hard to find. On the other hand, if you have sufficient rep from Mount Hyjal (Scale of the Sands), there is substantially less risk because these recipes are ten times cheaper. Here are some of the following we think will be in high demand:

• Design: Bright Crimson Spinel
• Design: Runed Crimson Spinel
• Design: Solid Empyrean Sapphire (sure bet)
• Design: Sparkling Epyrean Sapphire
• Design: Subtle Crimson Spinel
• Design: Teardrop Crimson Spinel
• Design: Luminous Pyrestone
• Design: Potent Pyrestone
• Design: Quick Lionseye
• Design: Reckless Pyrestone

Keep in mind that raiders who need these gems may already have a sufficient supply available from Black Temple drops and that raiding guilds tend to have a 375 JC who they can count on for free cuts.

Regarding point #3, we would recommend you buy and sell according to the cuts we predict will be in demand (see above). However, this is probably the riskiest option.

The first two points are going to be the least risky, if only for the simple reason that you didn’t spend any money to acquire the gems. But we advise you to keep an eye on the AH, see what raw gems and what cuts are being sold before making an investment.

I’m going to be slightly pessimistic for here in terms of overall risk:

Risk’ometer:

You’ve arrived at the new home of what was formerly WoW Investor.

In light of our blog’s better-than-expected success, we’ve decided to move our work to a new domain in order to create a more comprehensive resource for all the World of Warcraft economists out there.

Please make sure you update your bookmarks and RSS feeds so that you can continue to participate in this project. We’re excited about having you all here on the new website, where you can expect many exciting features to come in the future.

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