World of Warcraft Blog

The last time I posted something that looked like a guide on this site was … a long time ago. People who know me are aware that a huge part of my activity when I started playing World of Warcraft (or any other MMO actually) was trading and it definitely was something really enjoyable during the early days of the game.

I eventually stopped trading after reaching something like 15 000 gold (and that was a lot of money back in the days) because I realized that gold wasn’t really useful … I never really had to farm again because I’m not a big spender. A few months ago I started playing again and decided to level all classes to 80 (mostly to make my life easier on the site) and eventually realized that I would have to find 40 000 gold to buy an epic flying mount on all these new chars. This is where I stopped leveling and started to go back to the Auction House … 4 years after my last sale.

I apologize for the wall of text, if you want a good reason to keep reading I will just say that I made 125 000 gold in 7 weeks just by doing that. (and probably have an extra 25 or 50 000 gold in reagents sitting in my bank)

Addons

You will need addons and there is NO WAY you can survive without them. People who know how to use them will make tons of money, all the others will just wonder why people undercut them so fast. (This is probably the most unfair use of addons in this game in my opinion, but that’s just my opinion)

• The first one you will have to download is obviously Auctioneer, just download the latest release version and install it.
• The second one isn’t very popular yet but is VERY powerful if you know how to use it : Quick Auctions 2.

Just make sure both addons are installed if you want to follow this guide.

Risk-free investments

If you’re not comfortable with massive AH trading, there are a few ways to make gold out of the AH without any risk. The best examples are Borean Leather and Cobalt Ore.

Borean Leather is kinda hard to sell on most servers and can go as low as 30S or 25S on some of them …. That’s pretty awesome when you realize that a Nerubian Chestguard takes 12 Borean Leather and sells for 5G 29S to the NPCs …. Yes, that’s 44S for each unit of leather. If you buy 25 stacks of Borean Leather for 5G each, you will get 95G just to buy them, go AFK while you craft 41 Nerubian Chestguard, come back to sell them at the closest NPC.

You can do the exact same thing with Cobalt Ore and Cobalt Bar, a Cobalt Triangle Shield takes 4 bars and sells for 5G54S, that’s 1G38S for each bar. In some occasions Cobalt will sell for 1G/unit at the AH and buying 15 stacks at this price will get you 114G just to craft a few shields.

If you are really lazy, you can just use Auctioneer to automatically scan for items listed below their NPC price to buy them from the AH just to sell them to the closest NPC.

• Push the arrow at the top of the AH Panel to scan the whole Auction House, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds and it will let you download the data of ALL the items at the Auction House.
• When the scan is complete go to the Search tab at the bottom of the Panel and go to Searchers > Vendor.
• Set a value in Minimum Profit (like 10s), checking “Allow Bids” will let you bid on any auction that could yield a profit when it ends and “Allow Buyout” will only scan for profit based on the buyout (if you really want instant cash)
• Just click Purchase at the bottom of the screen (Holding CTRL + Alt + Shift when you click it will let you purchase all the items at once) and wait for the end of the auctions to grab your items and sell them at the closest NPC

Just keep in mind that it definitely isn’t as profitable as Cobalt or Borean Leather. You will probably do it for a few days because it’s fun and eventually realize that the profits are really low because everyone with Auctioneer does it.

Buying items

Now that you know what to buy and how much you want to spend, you need a way to do that automatically …. and this is where Auctioneer becomes really useful.

• Run another full scan by clicking the double arrow at the top of the AH panel
• Go to the Search tab and Searchers > Snatch

The Snatch function of auctioneer lets you build a shopping list of all the items you want to buy and the maximum price you want to spend on them. To add an item just :

• Drag and drop it in the frame
• Set a price for this item, check “Allow bids” if you want to buy stuff without buyout (Note: I don’t do that) and “Allow buyouts” if you just want instant items. (That’s the option I use)
• Push “Search” at the bottom left of the panel

Auctioneer will automatically list all the items available at this price at the AH, you can just select one and click purchase or just Ctrl + Alt + Shift click Purchase to buy all the results (and this is what you will do most of the time if you have a decent Snatch list)

It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two (scan included) to empty the AH of all the cheap Cobalt / Leather / Eternal Earths etc …

Enchanting (and disenchanting)

Enchanting is a good way to make money, most players do that by sitting in the Trade channel to find people who needs enchants and try to get a few golds for clicking a button but your best bet to make money is … disenchanting.

People do not really need gold in WotLK and the AH is full of opportunities for people who want to make a nice profit just by disenchanting stuff, having access to a Jewelcrafter / Blacksmith / Leatherworker will make your life much easier for that.

The goal here is to buy cheap materials from the AH, craft them into items to make a profit by disenchanting and selling the dusts/essences/shards, I’ll split them into three categories:

• Low Level Dust/Essence Items - They yield 1 or 2 Infinite Dust, 1-2 Lesser Cosmic Essence, or a Small Dream Shard. (Average value is around 6 or 7G most of the time)
• High level Dust/Essence Items - Gives 2 to 5 Infinite Dust, 1-2 Greater Cosmic Essence, or a Dream Shard. (Average value should be around 20 or 25G)
• Dream Shard Items - Disenchant in a Dream Shard. (Average value is 10 to 20G depending on your server)

The most profitable professions to craft these items are :

Blacksmithing

Disenchant from Blacksmithing mostly uses Cobalt Ore, that’s a good thing because it’s also something you can buy without any risk depending on your server. When you have enough cobalt you can craft :

• Horned Cobalt Helm and shouldn’t cost you more than 10 or 12G in mats, 10G profit.
• Notched Cobalt War Axe is also a high level essence/dust item but is a weapon and gives one or two Greater Cosmic Essence 75% of the time instead of dusts. This is very important because if you also disenchant items from other professions you will usually run out of essences before you run out of dusts. 10G Profit as well.
• Deadly Saronite Dirk is also interesting now that the price of Saronite has dropped. If saronite sells for 65S/ore on your server it shouldn’t cost you more than 10G to craft this dagger, if Dream Shards are enough it’s another 10G profit for each dagger you disenchant.

Leatherworking

Borean Leather is also a risk-free material depending on how low it is on your server and let you craft a few more items to disenchant.

• Arctic Boots is a low-level Dust/Essence item and its crafting cost should be around 2G50S or 3G … disenchants into 6 or 7G of materials.
• Dark Iceborne Leggings requires 24 Borean Leather and 5 Crystallized Shadow. Most of the time it won’t cost you more than 10 or 12G to craft this item, another 10G profit each time you create an item.

Jewelcrafting

Oooooh Jewelcrafting … What would I do without you. First you will need a LOT of Eternal Earth and Eternal Shadow, then you can buy all the Bloodstone, Chalcedony, Sun Crystal and Huge Citrine from the AH below 1G or 1G50S depending on your economy.

• Crystal Citrine Necklace, Sun Rock Ring, Crystal Chalcedony Amulet and Bloodstone Band are low-level dust/essence items and shouldn’t cost more than 3G or 3G50S to make, once again it’s a 3G profit everytime you craft and disenchant an item (and you will usually craft 100 or 200 of them at a time)
• Shadowmight Ring is very profitable and shouldn’t cost you more than 10 or 12G. Disenchanting will yield 10G profit (again.)

And we’re done with disenchanting! There are a few other items worth disenchanting but the ones I listed above are what I used to make money. You can easily figure out a few more ways to make money out of disenchanting by yourself at this point anyway.

If you end up crafting a lot of items, you might want to use this macro to disenchant all these items just by pushing one button :

/cast Disenchant
/use Bloodstone Band
/use Crystal Chalcedony Amulet
/use Sun Rock Ring
/use Crystal Citrine Necklace
/use Shadowmight Ring
/use Dark Iceborne Leggings
/use Arctic Boots
/use Notched Cobalt War Axe
/use Horned Cobalt Helm

At this point, you can either sell the reagents at the AH or …. make even more profit out of them by selling enchants!

Selling Enchantments

Selling reagents directly at the AH isn’t a very good idea if you start disenchanting a lot of items because you will eventually crash the prices if you try to sell everything you have. Crafting Scroll of Enchantment is a nice way to get rid of your reagents fast and make an extra profit if you’re lucky.

There is just one simple rule to make sure you don’t waste your time, never sell your scrolls for less than the reagents cost, even if it’s a way to get rid of them faster the goal here is to make more money, not less.

This is where you will first use Quick Auctions. This addon will automatically scan the AH and post / cancel your items based on the criteria you set for each one of them, you can also set criterias for multiple items at once but you won’t do it for the Scrolls of Enchant.

First, type “/qa config” and go to General to set a few settings for ALL items, my config is :

• Undercut by: 10s
• Treshold Price: 9999g (This is only here to make sure that I don’t lose money if I forget to set a price on something). The treshold price is the minimum price required to post an item.
• Fallback Price: 9999g (Same). The fallback price is the price the addon will use to post the item if you are the only one selling it at the AH.
• Fallback After: 500% (Same)
• Bid Percent: 100% (I don’t really like the idea of having a much lower bid than a lower buyout, I just keep that to 100%)
• Post Cap: 3 (Don’t flood the market)
• Items per Auction: 1
• Post Time: 48 hours

Now move to the Item groups sub-menu and create a new group for one of the scroll you want to sell, like the one for Enchant Chest - Powerful Stats.

• Create a new group called “SoE - Chest - Powerful Stats” in the Item groups sub-menu and click the newly created group on your left.
• Change the Treshold price to the materials price of the enchantment, in this case 4 x Dream Shard (20G each) and Abyss Crystal (50G each) will set your treshold to 280G.
• Change the Fallback price to 2 x materials price, a 100% margin might seem huge but it works most of the time.
• Click the “Add item” tab and click the Scroll in the list to add it to the items affected by these settings

That’s it, everytime you click “Post” at the Auction House the mod will automatically scan this item, check if the lowest price is above your treshold, and automatically list it if it’s the case. If nobody sells this item the addon will just post it at your fallback price.

The problem with scroll of enchantments is simple, they all have different reagents requirements and you will have to create an item group for each scroll. It will take one hour of your life and depending on how fast the economy evolves on your server you might have to modify the prices every now and then but that’s something I never did in 2 months.

Calculating the reagent cost of each item will take a little more time …. But I’ll be nice and share the spreadsheet I use with you, just change the reagents cost on the right and print the new prices before you go back in game to create all your groups.

You can download the .xls (Excel) Spreadsheet. (If you don’t have Excel, OpenOffice will open it without any problem)

You will end up with 60 or 70 groups depending on how many enchants you sell, just keep the scrolls in your inventory and go to the AH.

• Go to the Auctions tab and click “post” at the top of the panel.
• The addon will scan the auction for all the items that match an item group in your inventory …
• After scanning, it will automatically split the stacked items in your inventory and list all of them.

Here you go, all your auctions are posted and the money will start flowing in your mailbox in a few hours! You can also create an item group to sell reagents at the same time if you want to get rid of them even faster.

After a few hours, go back to the auction house and push the “Cancel” button at the top of the panel, it will scan all your auctions to check if someone undercuts you. When it’s the case, Quick Auctions will automatically cancel the auctions, just run to the nearest mailbox and get your items back before relisting with the “Post” button. Pushing 2 buttons is all it takes.

When you will have enough money, I suggest that you just keep 5 scrolls of each enchant at all time and restock every few days depending on how fast you sell them. Of course it doesnt apply to weapon enchantment, you shouldn’t have more than one of them because immobilizing a lot of money is always a bad idea.

 

Auction House Guide - Inscription

Welcome to the second part of the wonderful Auction House guide, this time I will explain why a few people can make tons of money out of Inscription. If you thought that the Enchanting part was fun, you’re going to have a good laugh with this one.

Leveling Inscription

I’ll start with the basics, most people didn’t bother checking Inscription when it was released and I think a huge part of the playerbase just doesn’t know exactly how it works. (Note: DO NOT sell any of the glyph you will craft during your leveling, just keep them for later)

You buy herbs from the Auction House (or gather them, obviously) and mill them to get pigments. Then you use these pigments to craft inks, then you need one (or two in a few cases) ink and a parchment bought from the NPC to craft a glyph. Most people just buy the herbs from the AH, craft all the inks themselves, and level like that … Bad idea.

A few patches ago, Blizzard introduced an “Ink Trader” named Jessica Sellers to the game, this NPC will let you trade the Ink of the Sea you get by milling any Northrend Herbs for ANY lower level ink. If you want to compare it to other professions, just imagine it as a NPC that will give you Iron and Mithril in echange for Saronite.

The easiest way to level Inscription is to buy the first tier of low level herbs (because stuff like Peacebloom or Silverleaf is usually really cheap) and then buy Adder’s Tongue, Lichbloom, Icethorn.

These 3 herbs yields the highest amount of pigments to create the Ink of the Sea you will need to buy the lower level inks. You can always check the AH every now and then for the lower level herbs if you think it’s a cheaper alternative but on most servers, it won’t.

Note that if you are really evil and don’t want to level Inscription, you can usually buy Ink of the Sea from the AH and trade it for lower level inks to relist them at the AH with a 100 or 200% margin. People who don’t have inscription and need their glyphs often buy the mats from the AH and ask a guildmate to craft them for free, this is where you cash the easy money.

Learning new Glyphs

That’s the small problem with Inscription, just like Jewelcrafting you won’t start with all the recipes and you can’t just buy them from the AH or farm them. There are two ways to discover new glyphs :

• Run Minor Inscription Research and Northrend Inscription Research daily. (24 Hours Cooldown)
• Buy Book of Glyph Master to instantly learn a new Glyph recipe. (But this is actually a bad idea)

Run your research every day as soon as you can, BOTH of them, minor glyphs sell as much as major glyphs. Buying a lot of Book of Glyph Master sounds tempting but you shouldn’t do it for two reasons :

• You cannot discover ALL glyphs with these books, and the inscription research will give you the most used Glyphs most of the time.
• A lot of people will start buying and reselling them with a 300% margin as soon as this guide hits the front page.

Being able to sell more glyphs is always good, in the end you should just decide if Inscription brings enough money to be worth the investment when you start. But keep in mind that some glyphs can only be learned from this book and you will NEED them anyway, so don’t hesitate to buy one if something cheap appears at the AH.

The Real Price of Glyphs

Why is it so profitable to sell Glyphs? It’s easy, on most servers it won’t cost you anything to craft them … Let’s say that you buy a stack of Adder’s Tongue / Lichbloom / Icethorn for 15 gold, you will get an average of 12 Azure Pigment and 4 Icy Pigment out of each stack. That’s 2 x Snowfall Ink and 6 x Ink of the Sea …

Snowfall Ink is used to craft a few high level items, the Runescroll of Fortitude added with Patch 3.2.2, and Northrend’s Darkmoon Card (I’ll talk about that later) …. and usually sells for something like 10G at the AH. Yes, you just got 20G worth of Snowfall Ink out of a 15G stack of herbs, and the 6 x Ink of the Sea are a “free” bonus.

Crafting glyphs costs pretty much nothing and most of your sale will be 100% pure profit.

Let’s make some Glyphs!

Selling Glyphs is really hard and will require you to do a lot of research to find the most valua…. No, just kidding, you just sell all of them. Trying to figure out what glyph is worth crafting or not is just a waste of time because the glyph market is always moving and ALL glyphs will sell, no matter how bad they are.

If you just started with inscription you shouldn’t be able to craft a lot of glyphs, just start with a short supply of all of them like … 3 units of each.

• Go to the AH, open the Auctions Tab and click Summary.
• Now click Glyphs and Get Data, Quick Auctions will scan the AH for a while
• You will end up with a list of glyphs and their price. (Do not pay attention to them, the price of Glyphs move really fast)
• Glyphs with a red X next to their name are all the glyphs you cannot create yet

To craft a glyph, double click its name in the list, type the amount of glyphs you want, and hit enter. Do that for all the glyphs, it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.

Now open your Inscription tradeskill window and click the small “QA” button at the top right, a new window will appear with the list of all the glyphs you want to craft.

• The bottom of the list will list all the materials you need to craft these glyphs
• You can craft a Glyph by clicking its name once.

At this point you will need to buy parchments from the inscription supplies vendor and all your inks from our good friend Jessica Sellers. Just stockpile enough Ink of the Sea to be able to buy everything you need.

I’ll have to admit that I never found an “easy” way to do it (and I’m sure someone will be nice enough to point me to a decent addon to help with that), buying 500 inks at once require you to click 500 times and is just not possible. Personally, I just use FreeRefills, for example if you need to buy 137 Lion’s Ink just type :

/freerefills add [Lion's ink] 137

Please note that you need to use the ITEM LINK and you can’t just type the name of the item in the command line. The mod will automatically buy 137 Lion’s Ink from the vendor next time you visit it, once you’re done make sure you type :

/freerefills del [Lion's ink]

You need to delete it once you’re done because Free Refills will ALWAYS try to make sure that you have 137 Lion’s Ink in your inventory, this is a problem when you use that to buy your parchments, forget about it, and end up with 400 parchments the next time you visit the NPC.

When all the supplies are in your inventory just sit in front of your screen and click each glyph one by one … Yes, this is the boring part, no, there is no way to craft all the glyphs at once. Just use that time to start rumors about your raid leader in the guild chat.

(Finally) Selling Glyphs

Now that you understand how Glyphs work, and that all your Glyphs are in your inventory we can finally move to the easy part. Selling!

Type /qa config and create a new item group called “Glyphs are cool”, the settings are really straightforward:

• Undercut by: 10s
• Threshold price: 6g (It depends on your server, really, but 5g or 6g is usually a good threshold)
• Fallback price: 59g99S99C (Because it’s much cheaper than 60G, really. You can lower or increase it depending on how guilty you feel to sell for that much money)
• Fallback after: 100%
• Bid percent: 100%
• Post cap: 3
• Per auction: 1
• Post time: 24 hours (or even 12 hours if you spend a lot of time hugging the AH, keep in mind that even if the deposit fees for Glyphs aren’t really high you might end up selling 1000 of them at once, that’s why 48 hours is usually a bad idea.

Go to “Add items” and just type “Glyph” in the text field and hit enter. All the items with “Glyph” in their name will be added to this rule. (Make sure you don’t have a bunch of Books of Glyph Mastery in your inventory before you do that)

Now just head back to the Auction House and … Click post!

That’s it, you now have 20 to … 300 Glyphs at the AH depending on how many of them you sell and how strong the competition is on your server. Just wait a few minutes/hours and loot all the gold flowing in your Mailbox.

Now let’s see if we can increase your productivity.

Posting, Looting, and Relisting

If you plan to sell Glyphs regularly: never, ever, ever, ever do that on your main character, on any character you play. Just create an alt. You will craft Glyphs with your main character and sell Glyphs on alts with 4 x Pack of Endless Pockets.

You need to do that because as you learn to create more glyphs, you will really start to need a LOT of space in your inventory to sell everything at once. Ultimately you will end up with 3 alts (Selling all the glyphs for 4 or 3 classes on each alt).

To manage that without too much effort you will need :

• BulkMail2 to send the glyphs to your alts.
• BulkMail2 Inbox to loot them.

BulkMail2 is very interesting because it lets you send automatically items to an alt. For example let’s say that you always want to send all the Glyph of Dark Command you craft to your alt named Munin, type :

/bulkmail autosend add Munin Glyph of Dark Command

Do that for all the glyphs you want to sell from this alt, go back to your main char and craft them. Next time you will visit the mailbox, click the “Send” tab and all the glyphs will be listed on the right with the name of your alt next to it! Press “send” at the bottom of the list and all your glyphs will be mailed in no time. Of course it works with multiple alts at the same time and you should always craft on your main, mail to alts.

Looting on your alts should be quite fast because of BulkMail2 Inbox but depending on your server/connection quality, there are a few occasions where looting mails will be very slow. The only workaround I found is to use Postal instead and try again with Bulkmail later. You shouldn’t rely on Postal because for most people, it will bug the send feature of Bulkmail (You can’t just run 2 mail mods at the same time and expect everything to work as intended)

Important: You can only loot 50 items from the Mailbox at a time, then you have to wait a minute or two before you can loot the next 50 items.

Refilling Glyphs

After a few hours/days of sales, you will need to recraft all the glyphs you sold. Over time you should try to increase your stock of glyphs to always have 20 units of all the glyphs you can create. You could argue that having 20 [insert worthless glyph here] is a waste of money but a 60G sale would be enough to pay for the whole stack, and if it doesnt sell you will never have to craft one again.

The best way to do that is to cancel all the auctions on your alts (the fees aren’t that expensive), loot your mailbox, and go to the Auction House. Then go to the Auctions Tab and click Summary to do a Glyph scan again. The list will look like this :

• Glyph of Sprint (7) 19 3G 75S

The (7) is the amount of Glyph in your inventory, just double click the name and add 3 glyphs to the queue if you want to refill to 10, and do that for all the glyphs. If you can count up to 20 without too much problem it won’t take more than 5 minutes to do it on all your alts, the craft queue is independant from the character and you will just have to move back to your main character to craft all the glyphs for your alts. (And mail them automatically, thanks to Bulkmail)

Getting rid of your Snowfall Inks

Yes, I lied to you, even if your Snowfall Ink will be enough to pay for your stack of herbs, it might be a problem to get rid of all of them if you start crafting a lot of Glyphs.

If you really need to sell a lot of them there are a few things to do :

• Create an item group for Snowfall Inks in Quick Auctions and always try to sell them
• Craft Runescrolls of Fortitude and sell them, you might get a few more gold out of them
• Craft one or two unit of Faces of Doom and Iron-Bound Tome and always try to sell them at the AH with a Quick Auction item group again

…. and that’s it. No, I didn’t forget the Darkmoon Cards, I just don’t think the market is worth it anymore. You can do it if Eternal Life are really cheap on your server but everything you get that doesn’t have “Noble” in its name is pretty much worthless and you will end up wasting a lot of time trying to sell your cards.

Even the Nobles cards aren’t as good as they used to be, people can easily find something better in raids and Icecrown Dungeons in 3.3 will probably kill the Darkmoon Cards market, just don’t do it.

“Carpet Bombing”

If you want to get rid of competitors in a very very aggressive way, you can always try the “carpet bombing” technique. Basically, the goal here is to scare competitors away by selling a lot of glyphs for a very low price (4 or 5 gold, maybe even 3 if you feel confident about your margin).

You will need to change your Quick Auctions settings slightly to do that, just set your threshold and fallback price to 4G and make sure the Fallback % is set to 100%. You will now post all your glyphs at a flat 4G price, except if there is someone selling them for cheaper.

Most of the time, competitors will just back off for a few days and wait until you run out of materials but if you have 10 000 inks of the sea in your bank it can be an interesting strategy.

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