When WotLK launched, I did not take my main into Northrend, I took my Herbalism/Engineer shaman alt instead. While everyone else was questing through Dragonblight, I stumbled upon the path leading into Sholazar Basin from Borean Tundra. Herbing there was picking gold out of the ground, and to my total shock I found the southern hills filled to the brim with Saronite and even Titanium deposits, all of which would be untouched until the sea of humanity hit 77 and got their flying mounts. I zipped back to Stormwind, dropped Engineering, bought all of the ore I could off the AH to powerlevel Mining via smelting. Some six hours later, I was selling Saronite Ore at 150g a stack.

Cataclysm is upon us in a few hours, my friends, and I fully intend to spend the first major part of it farming. Had I known before Wrath came out the ease of getting into Sholozar, I could have prepared better. Have you prepared for Cataclysm? My goal is to get into Uldum and/or Twilight Highlands and get to farming before people make it out of Hyjal, and after the jump will be how I plan on doing it.

Most of the data I used comes from Kaliope’s crafting blog, specifically the Mining and Herbalism leveling guides. She runs an amazing resource over there, which you definitely should check out – you can find it through the links provided or through the blogroll to your right.

Uldum and Twilight Highlands are the highest “endgame” zones in Cataclysm, meaning the unwashed masses will have to get through Hyjal/Vashj and Deepholm to start stealing your nodes. But what is even spawning in those two places?

Uldum = Cinderbloom (425), Whiptail (500), Elementium Vein (475), Rich Elementium Vein (500), Pyrite Deposit (525).
Twilight Highlands = Cinderbloom (425), Twilight Jasmine (525), Elementium Vein (475), Rich Elementium Vein (500), Pyrite Deposit (525)

Assuming you are starting out with 450 in your gathering professions, the goal then becomes to hit 475 in Mining and 500 in Herbalism before you can conquer Uldum with any sort of gusto. Or 470/495 with Gathering on your gloves. Or even 490 Herbalism with Herbalist’s Gloves + Advanced Herbalism. So what is the quickest way to get those 20-40 skill-ups?  

Northrend.

Ayep. Set your hearth in Dalaran, train your Illustrious gathering rank, fly out to Icecrown/Storm Peaks, farm Rich Saronite Ore deposits and Icethorn all the way to the needed minimum, and then take the one portal to rule them all to Uldum’s doorstep. As noted in Kaliope’s comments for those pages, there are several European readers who achieved Realm First following her guide. I do not particularly care about the achievement, but hey, if it happens while I am selling Elementium and Whiptail at 500g/stack, fantastic!

According to this Alchemy guide, Whiptail can start being used for skill-ups at 475, and becomes required (along with Twilight Jasmine) for anything past 495. After the Realm Firsts are decided, I will probably leave Uldum, head up to Theramore, take the boat to Menethril, and then farm Twilight Jasmine in the Highlands until I pass out. If you are trying to decide which of the two high-end herbs may end up going for more, note that the Agility and Strength flasks require Whiptail whereas the Intellect and Stamina flasks require Twilight Jasmine.

Good luck.

Live under a rock? Just now returning to the game? Resistant to change? Philosophical rejection of material goods leave you too poor to pay the exorbitant mage portal fees? There are a number of reasons why you may still have your hearth set to Dalaran, but fret not intrepid players! Dalaran is not quite the oubliette it is made out to be. For there is still one portal to rule them all…

This portal is still operating post-Shattering and is located in the Violet Citadel, taking you outside the Caverns of Time in Tanaris. From here, the world is your slightly-pain-in-the-ass oyster.

The secret? Silithis! I kid you not. Take either the flight point slightly south-west of the CoT cave entrance or the Gadgetzan one. When you get off the AFK flight point at Cenarion Hold, turn on low-level quest tracking and grab the quest from the faction-specific NPCs standing in front of the Blasted Lands portal; once you do, that portal will become clickable:

Take the portal to Blasted Lands, and make sure to abandon the quest. From here, it is a short ride through the Dark Portal for TBC content… or you can click on the handy Stormwind portal on the other side. BAM!

Horde, as usual, has the better deal in this case. There is a portal to Orgrimar across from the Stormwind portal, but they get the added bonus of being able to head to Shattrath, where the portal to Isle of Quel’Danas still stands revolves in mid-air in all its faded, portaled glory. Taking this portal and using QD’s FP is an easy jump to Silvermoon, which also has a teleport to Undercity.

Does any of this actually save any time? Yes! And no. It actually depends to what degree you may or may not have missed the boat. Boats dock for exactly 60 seconds before they head off, and it takes 3:25 before before another Northend boat docks again. The following assumes that you just missed the boat, as that feels like what always ends up being the case:

CoT Portal –> Silithus –> Blasted Lands –> Dark Portal –> SW = 7:30
Dalaran –> Borean Tundra –> Boat –> SW = 10:17
CoT Portal –> Theramore –> Boat –> Menethril Harbor –> IF = 11:35

If you end up getting on the boat just as it is leaving in a sort of best-case scenario, you can make it to Stormwind in just shy of six minutes the straightforward sort of way. All of the above is under the assumption that you are moving at just 100% speed on your mount. If you end up moving faster due to talents or Crusader Aura, the CoT portal path ends up being faster than the boat as there is that initial mounted stretch going to Gadgetzan and again in the Blasted Lands.

Cataclysm is out in three days, and if you do not have three guild banks full of Eternals and Saronite Ore and Abyss Crystals and old newspapers/pizza boxes then you may as well submit to a life of poverty and panhandling for the next two years… right?

Not so much.

The concept of investments and speculation in World of Warcraft is fine, but precious little consideration has been given to the concept of time horizons. Most people understand “the flip” where you buy something at 50g and relist it at 100g – that is easy money indeed as you realize the profits immediately with a time horizon of zero. Hoarding Eternals and Saronite Ore and Abyss crystals for sale at potential profit six months (or more!) from now is something else entirely. Will you even be playing WoW six months from now?

No, really, this is a serious question.

Time Horizons
I do not care if you have been playing since WoW Friends & Family alpha, each and every one of us has conditions under which we would no longer find the game worth playing. There are about five people who are the only reason the in-game song and dance continues for me, for example, and if IRL concerns take one or more of them away the whole house of cards will come crashing down, taking all value of gold with it.

Not that I am recommending some hedonistic spending splurge which ends with you living day-to-day and taking Payday Advance loans to cover your repair bills (41g per wipe in Cataclysm, by the way). What I am recommending is that you do a little self-analysis before following “investment” advice from people with obviously longer-term time horizons than you.

Speaking of “investment” in air quotes, allow me to play the other side for the moment. After the jump I will analyze some of the investment advice being given out in preparation of Cataclysm.

The following items are being suggested to stockpile for Cataclysm on the basis of either low-risk and/or high-reward gains:

Saronite Ore
Eternals
Abyss Crystals

Saronite Ore
Half a stack of Saronite Bars vendors for 12.5g, thus buying up a bunch of Saronite Ore below that price is “guaranteed profit.” There are 98 slots in a tab of a guild bank, and thus if you filled them up with Saronite Ore you are looking at 1225g in vendor goods. Minus, of course, what you actually paid for 98 stacks of Saronite ore. Even if you bought it for the absurdly low price of 6g a stack, that guild bank tab is worth a whopping… 637g after AFK smelting for over 17 minutes (1029 seconds). The more likely scenario is that you paid around 11g for the stacks, meaning you have a floor profit of… 147g. For an entire guild bank tab. The idea, of course is that Saronite Ore will be worth a lot more in Cataclysm, as Blacksmiths and Jewelcrafters and even Alchemists will be more willing to spend gold to buy the mats to powerlevel their professions.

Yeah, maybe. At its height on Auchindoun, I saw Fel Iron Ore going for 60g and Adamantite Ore around 40g a stack during Wrath. Saronite is the Adamantite equivalent, so let us assume it hits similar prices: your 11g/stack Saronite goes to 40g/stack and your guild bank tab is worth… 2842g. Six months (or more!) from now. Two days ago I sold a Savory Deviate Delight recipe I got farming level 15 mobs for 10 minutes for 750g. There is an argument here that you could do both, but that is sort of my point. One of these two options is 26% as profitable as the other, with a much shorter time horizon. And you get 98 bank slots back.

Going back for a moment to Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, and Alchemy. According to Wowpedia, a Blacksmith will need 205 Saronite Bars, or about 21 stacks of Saronite Ore. Oh, and 330 Cobalt Bars (16.5 stacks of Cobalt Ore). Jewelcrafting will need roughly 65 uncommon Wrath gems, ~60 Eternal Earth, and five rare gems to go from 350-425. If we assume 1.5 gems per Prospect, JCs need maybe 11 stacks of Saronite Ore. Alchemists learn Transmute Titanium at 395, with it staying orange until 420 and yellow until 430. That means ~32 transmutes with 8 Saronite Bars apiece, or 256 Saronite Bars. Might sound like a grand-slam for supplying Alchemists, but they can also go 395-425 with 10 Deadnettle, 5 Talandra’s Rose, and three stacks of Icethorn (15g/stack at the moment).

Eternals
Will Eternals prices inflate in Cataclysm? It is really hard to say. Right now Eternal Earth is flirting around a JC-enforced vendor price of 1.82g apiece (two Eternal Earth = Stoneguard Band = vendors for 3.65g)… but there are several stacks of Primal Earth on my AH for 1g apiece. Eternal Fire is actually going for 35g apiece, and I am dumping what stock I have to capitalize on that price – there is not a whole lot of Primal Fire up for sale, but the upper limit on price seems to be 23g. Eternal Water and Primal Water are both jokes. Eternal Air is ~12g while Primal Airs have consistently sold for 50g-60g the entire duration of Wrath. Of course, Primal Air is a component to the +15 Agility to gloves twink enchant, which is probably the buoy force to its long-term value.

Abyss Crystals
What about Abyss Crystals? Sometimes the market is truly dumb, as I too have recently bought 10g Abyss Crystals when the going rate of Greater Cosmic Essense is still 8g. But what really are the odds that Essense and Infinite Dust will explode radically in value? The price of Greater Planar Essenses and Arcane Dust was largely, and perhaps completely, propped up by virtue of Mongoose still being a good enchant for endgame tanking (and DPS shortly after the AP change in 4.0.3) after all. Based on what we know of Cataclysm enchants, there does not appear to be any still-good Wrath enchants. Which means all that Infinite Dust and Essenses are useful for the just the people leveling Enchanting from 350-425. How much would they need? Let us look at some of the power-leveling guides that people may be using:

http://www.wow-professions.com/wowguides/wow-enchanting-guide.html
http://www.almostgaming.com/wowguides/wow-enchanting-guide

So the first guide has 603 Infinite Dust, 5 Greater Cosmic Essenses, 10 Crystalized Water, 30 Eternal Earth. Also 6 Greater Planars, 6 Arcane Dust, and 1 Eternium Rod to make the Runed Eternium Rod. The Runed Titanium Rod will take an additional 40 Infinite Dust, 12 Greater Cosmic Essences, and 8 Dream Shards. Meanwhile, from the same guide, getting from 300-350 takes around 330 Arcane Dust and 15 Greater Planars. So roughly double the amount of TBC mats, which leads credence to stable increased pricing in the future. That second guide recommends 356 Infinite Dust and a whopping 115 Greater Cosmics to go 350-425. It is pretty safe to say that Wrath enchanting materials will retain their value into Cataclysm despite not having a “killer app” in the form of TBC’s Mongoose.

Conclusion
The take-away from all of this is two-fold. First, whenever you hear someone talking about investments, the thing to keep in the back of your mind is what your realistic time horizon consists of. You may think your time horizon is only three weeks into the future and you end up playing for five years. That is okay! Time horizons are personal things and there is no way to get them “wrong.” You can (and will) make gold with a time horizon of zero.

The second thing to keep in mind is the simple principal I used when it comes to “investing” via the AH: never invest in something you would/could not end up using. I did half a dozen or so Battered Hilt flips back in the day and I never once worried about losing gold on them because in the back of my mind I knew that I could end up being satisfied with a Battered Hilt purchase at 6000g or whatever if I could not sell it at 12,000g. If you plan on having 98 stacks of Saronite Ore in the guild bank, that is fine, but you will feel a lot better about that investment if you had a backup plan of, say, making 100,000 Saronite Bombs. Any investment is never a total loss if you could end up using the investment itself for another purpose.

[This entry submitted to Not So Secret Society’s Best of the Month Blog Carnival for December]

The golden period of this scheme has aged somewhat, but with patch 4.0.3a the drop rate of Savory Deviate Delight and the Elixir of Giant Growth recipes has increased dramatically. These are zone drops in North Barrens (and presumably South Barrens), which means any given mob in those zones has a chance to drop them. Given the nature of Horde questing through the Barrens pretty regularly, the Horde market for these two now-common drops is probably low enough on your server that you would be better off selling Wool Cloth. But as for the Alliance…?

If you have a second account and/or toons on both factions of the same server, you can probably make a decent margin buying the patterns Horde-side and then selling on the Alliance AH. The alternative may be a little bit easier in this case: farm it yourself.

The toon I used was my level 71 hunter, who is otherwise chilling out in Dalaran in the 20 minute DPS queues. Now while there are technically a lot of areas where you can farm mobs for these two drops, I am recommending Fray Island in SE North Barrens. Mobs you are going for are the Southsea pirates. The hunter is perfect for this because he has a 38% movement speed with Cheetah Aspect + talents, can track humanoids, will one-shot the mobs with ranged attacks, and has Dalaran as his hearth. That last part is actually the most important.

Starting from Dalaran, you can take the Cavern of Time portal to Tanaris, mount up, and then trek straight across to the FP south of Gadgetzan. From here it is a quick FP up to the besieged Alliance town of Northwatch Hold. From there, it is a short ride to Fray Island. If you don’t have the Northwatch Hold FP, you can either take one to Ratchet and head south, or go to Theramore and head north along the coast.

The reason I like Fray Island is A) it is out of the way* and yet easy to get to, B) the humanoid mobs respawn very quickly, C) each mob gives you a handful of rep with all four goblin factions (if you’re into that sort of thing), and D) I am 100% positive both recipes drop here. I farmed the harpies up at Dry Hills for about ten minutes and got nothing – while it could be bad luck, if I am going to get down and dirty farmin’ I want sure-things only. In my experience on Fray Island, the ratio was 2:5 on Savory Deviate Delight vs Giant Growth Potion drops. Random loot is still random of course.

The Deviate recipe will sell for more because every toon is capable of cooking, whereas only Alchemists can learn the Giant Growth elixir. It is probably a good idea to snatch up all the reasonable Deviate Fish that may be on the AH – with the increased availability of these two recipes (both of which require Deviate fish), you can expect the demand for Deviate fish to increase.

As a final note: don’t just vendor all the greens and other drops you get from slaughtering the level ~15 mobs. You can usually push sales by listing every green at 5g minimum (undercutting identical auctions if necessary) with the weapons going for 10g

*Edit: There is actually a quest in Ratchet that sends Alliance/Horde toons to this island, so you may actually see traffic coming from that direction. It is still pretty out of the way.

Welcome to PVSAH (Pffv-SAHH!), otherwise known as Player Vs Auction House. I am your host, Azuriel of Auchindoun. I know what you are thinking. “A blog about generating wealth via the World of Warcraft Auction House? That has never been done before. Why didn’t I think about it?” Why didn’t you indeed! Fortunately, you need not think anymore as I shall be doing enough thinking for the both of us. And I won’t even charge you $37 for the privilege!*

At this point in the introduction, I am generally supposed to whip out my credentials as if the size of my golden e-peen is some kind of barometer for my ability to transfer wealth to you. All bloggers are fundamentally exhibitionists at heart though, so here you go:

“Not even the gold cap?!” I hear you say. Putting aside, again, whatever mystical correlation exists between gold-capping and transference of said ability to other people, I am operating on the completely intentional handicap of zero glyph sales, aka AH hard mode. I will save the “why” for another day but suffice it to say it is not because I lack a toon with max Inscription and all of the glyph recipes – it would truly be dumb to make a stand against the profession while buying 80g glyphs off the AH.

That about wraps up the obligatory introductory post. I have no delusions regarding my ability to make daily posts or turning this blog into some kind of community-oriented ponzi scheme, so neither should you. Three on-topic posts a week is my general goal, although my more specific goal is for someone out there to gain from my beneficent omniscience.

*Although if you want to send me cash via Paypal, I will not stop you. In fact, I insist!