In An Age

A month ago, I hated Inscription. Hated it with a passion and intensity that led to a 2,000+ word rant against the profession that would have been eventually been posted here, had Blizzard not opened a timely release valve in the way of low-impact Inscription. What made me so angry? Glyphs. Top to bottom, the entire design of Glyphs and what it did to Inscription… but nevermind. You are going to make gold in less than 20 minutes a day, three times a week, and all without making a single glyph (other than the ones to level you up).

I am pretty late to the blogging party when it comes to commenting on the Mysterious Fortune Card (hereafter MFC*), but that is fine, because there is nothing to really talk about. It sells. It sells in defiance to all common sense. There is plenty of text devoted to barking MFCs, undercutting, “bait & switch,” and so on. You won’t even need to worry about that. People bark for you, the undercutters will get bought out, and you will sell most of your stock without even trying. Price it between 35g-50g apiece and watch them fly off the shelves.

Depending on the going rates of MFCs and its market saturation, you may actually lose money doing anything else with your Blackfallow Ink. Unless, of course, you desire to profit off Inscription without even having the profession.

The above happens – look for it. Blackfallow Ink should not be trading below 10% of Inferno Ink’s going rate, at a minimum. I have been selling Inferno Ink at 190g for the instant sales it generates, and with that low-ball price buying the above 60 ink for 657g would bring back 483g profit, minus the AH cut, in about nine mouse clicks. The beauty of turning Blackfallow Ink into Inferno Ink sales is that you don’t even need Inscription to do it. Just park an alt in Dalaran and you are seconds away from the AH, Jessica Sellers, and the AH again. Turning those 60 ink into MFCs at 35g each would bring in 1,000g more profit however, if you did have a scribe.

…so yeah. Inscription is going to be pretty boring to talk about for the next 1.5 years.

Despite MFCs sucking all the oxygen out of the gold blog sphere vis-a-vis Inscription, I did want to offer some advice on making Darkmoon cards. The biggie? Darkmoon Card: Hurricane =! Darkmoon Card: Greatness. The latter was the Darkmoon lottery of Wrath precisely because the trinket was best in slot for most melee classes up until, and even including, Icecrown Citadel. Greatness survived four entire tiers of gear and was still amazing two years after its introduction. Hurricane, on the other hand, is likely to be outclassed as soon as 4.1 hits some months from now. It is already somewhat of a sidegrade to Crushing Weight that drops off the 4th boss in Bastion of Twilight, and people can purchase License to Slay from the JP vendor once T12 rolls around. The point is if you are thinking about jumping in, do so sooner rather than later.

I did sell a Strength Hurricane trinket for 26,000g which set the individual cards at 3250g, or the Inferno Inks at ~300g apiece once you discount the Volatile Life. If it at all looks like you can get a higher return selling the individual cards, I would do that – getting 5000g in the mail from a Three of Winds is always better than getting 400g for a Two of Stones by using Inferno Ink that would have sold five times that price. Inferno Ink that that makes each card worth at least 3500g in MFC sales at 35g apiece.

God, I hate MFCs.

*Not to be confused with that other MFC (Dane Cook, NSFW).

Chances are good that you already know about the Remote AH, and how you can pay $2.99/month to buy, list, cancel auctions and so on. What you may not know is that the $2.99 is there if you plan on actually moving any product. If you just want to check to see what is listed on, say, the Neutral AH, that is free. Just use your smartphone or iPod Touch to download the Mobile Armory app and go to town.

You may be confused, as I was at first. The Remote AH is a part of the Mobile Armory, and it’s ability to see currently listed items on the AH is a part of its free service. If you are like me, you have toons parked in the goblin cities to periodically check for deals on the Neutral AH, or perhaps even cross-faction toons to keep an eye out for arbitrage opportunities. Well, save yourself several log-ins and potential travel time by using the Remote AH (again, for free) to check up on those without ever having to log off your main character.

As for the actual monthly service, I do not think it is quite there yet. While it is fairly easy to search for specific items, you obviously do not have access to the addons you have when playing the game proper, some of which have more powerful searching and filtering tools (to say nothing about their listing powers). The one feature that would send everything over the top though, would be the ability to buy something on the Horde AH, list it on the Neutral AH, and then purchase it yourself for sale on the Alliance AH. Such arbitrage requires you to have a second account on hand to do it solo, but $15 extra a month is a bit steep in my opinion just to make some extra gold. $3 on the other hand? Instant sale.

If you are using the Remote AH and have some feedback to share, please do so in the comments.

If you have a character with a Leatherworking skill of 485 and a character at level 84-85 (it does not need to be the same character), it is quite possible for this scheme to make you thousands of gold in the time it takes you to take three portals. How? First look at the following picture:

Anything jump out at you? For the uninitiated, Savage Leather Scraps are Skinned from lower-level Cataclysm mobs and have no function in of themselves. You can, however, combine five of them at a time into one piece of perfectly good Savage Leather at 425 Leatherworking. In the above picture, we can see that the prices for Savage Leather Scraps are not, in fact, anywhere close to matching their proportionally-priced counterparts. In other words, you can buy five Savage Leather Scraps for ~9.75g, right click them, and sell the result for 35g. I did just that in the opening days of the expansion and ended up with something stupendously large like 14 stacks of Savage Leather without having skinned a single mob.

It would be easy to stop there and be satisfied with our haul, but we can click a few more buttons and increase the profit potential by, oh, let’s say a thousand times. With all of your 28% priced Savage Leather, you can combine them via a 485 Leatherworker into Heavy Savage Leather which increases it’s value quite a bit already (none was selling at 1000g apiece however). With your Heavy Savage Leather neatly stacked in increments of 10, it is time to take the final plunge: Pristine Hide.

Much like Arctic Fur of the Wrath days, Pristine Hide is something that can be Skinned very rarely from level-appropiate mobs… or very commonly purchased from Misty Merriweather (Alliance) or Threm Blackscalp (Horde) out in Twilight Highlands by anyone with 10 pieces of Heavy Savage Leather to rub together. This was actually one of my favorite activities in Wrath, as you could easily come across cheap Borean Leather on the AH and after some Leatherworking alchemy turn around and start selling Leg Armor kits with a 60% margin. In any case, I had neglected this market for quite some time until there was an auspicious bidding war in /Trade that was establishing Pristine Hide’s value in the neighborhood of 1850g.

Yeah, my jaw did the same thing.

Prices have dropped quite a bit since I wrote this article a few days ago, but the underlying scheme still works:

If Scraps x5 < Savage, then Buy.
If Savage x5 < Heavy Savage, then Convert.
If Heavy Savage x10 < Pristine, then Trade.
???
Profit.

I always get excited when hotfixes roll out, as they tend to shake up otherwise fairly stable markets. For example:

Dec 27th Hotfixes

Inscription

• The following reagents no longer have limits and are now available from Una Kobuna and Casandra Downs in unlimited quantities: Deathwing Scale Fragment, Scavenged Dragon Horn, Bleached Jawbone, Silver Charm Bracelet, and Preserved Ogre Eye.

If you were not aware in a general sense, the items listed above were limited stock vendor items necessary to make the following Inscription relics/offhands:

• Runed Dragonscale
• Etched Horn
• Notched Jawbone
• Silver Inlaid Leaf
• Tattooed Eyeball

Even if you did not have a Scribe or were not interested in making those offhand/relics, people (above level 84) still camped the vendor for hours and hours in order to flip the limited stock items on the AH for some serious cash. The Ogre Eyeball, for example, is bought for 26g and some change and was going for 200g-300g on my server. The idea, then, is to jump on this opportunity now before the rest of your server and the market at large corrects what it may otherwise still believe to be a limited item.

The other angle is that this lower vendor price may make the crafting of those offhands and relics profitable whereas it was not before. While the first two on the list are fairly low-level, the last three are all ilevel 346, which means they are at least equivalent stat-wise to anything you can get out of heroics. The Notched Jawbone in particular is pretty amazing for not just plate DPS, but also Protection paladins. With the Jawbone itself accounted for, the biggest question mark becomes the Inferno Ink. Twelve Inferno Ink is pretty pricey considering you could play the Darkmoon Card lottery with 10 and possibly hit the 4000g-6000g jackpot, but I would say the Jawbone should rake in more than what you would get for any of the “of Stones” cards, and would level your Inscription besides. Then again, other Scribes could be flooding the market for that same reason (creating the Notched Jawbone for leveling purposes) so definitely check it out beforehand.

How have I been making gold so far this expansion? Several ways, but my favorite is the Alchemy/JC cycle.

I originally picked Alchemy and Jewelcrafting for my main back in TBC because I did not want to rely on the AH to supply the metagems I wanted to cut and sell. The metagem transmutes back then required nine gems and four Primals and were on the Alchemy daily transmute besides. These days, the synergy between these two professions has only deepened and become refined into almost a pure cycle.

What is the cycle? You start with buying Obsidium or Elementium Ore off the AH – in my experience Obsidium Ore is preferable for our purposes, and the bot farmers have driven it down to 70g a stack on my server. Once the ore has been obtained, you prospect all of it with a goal of getting the uncommon Cataclysm gems. As mentioned in other articles, each one of these gems vendors for 5g by itself, or 9g if you cut it into anything at all. Rather than vendoring, we are going to use Alchemy transmutes to bake in some additional profit.

As with all things, you are going to want to check your own realm’s AH prices to judge which direction you take the next step. The first thing I recommend is the Transmute: Shadowspirit Diamond. This transmute takes three of every type of uncommon gem, including Nightstones, which are likely to be at or around 100g apiece due to their use in leveling JC and the daily. Fortunately, the Shadowspirit transmute makes two metagems before any transmute mastery procs. Once you have these metagems you can either sell them uncut or cut them yourself if you have snagged any patterns by now.

The second option you have is to utilize the other gem transmutes to turn three uncommon gems of the same color + a few herbs into a rare gem of that same color (e.g. Transmute: Inferno Ruby). The uncut rare gem market right now is a state of flux given the lack of socketable gear for the majority of players combined with a lack of JCs with the appropriate cuts. What this means is that you are not likely to be able to make much of a profit off of selling uncut gems – this state will naturally correct itself over time to resemble what we all remember from epic gems at the end of Wrath. The good news is that cut gems are probably going for 100g+ minimum, turning those three somewhat useless carnelians into, say, Brilliant Inferno Rubies which will sell for 7-9 times as much as the vendor price.

As a sort of thought experiment, imagine that 10 stacks of Obsidium Ore at 70g a stack gives you enough uncommon gems for a single Shadowspirit transmute and two other rare gem transmutes. If you are able to sell the Shadowspirits (cut or uncut) for only 350g apiece, you come out even before considering the rare gem transmutes (cut or uncut), not to mention any rare gems gained by prospecting and/or excess uncommon gems in quantities below three. Odds are good that you will be gaining more than that, widening your possible margin and allowing you to maintain a profit in case Obsidium Ore prices higher on your server.

Auctionator.

I have been a huge fan of the classic Auctioneer since I started playing the game back in the beginning stages of TBC, and it worked for me all the way until patch 4.0.1, Destroyer of Addons. With Auctioneer out of commission during that Black Tuesday, I decided to give Autionator a try. And I have never really looked back.

What is the difference? Auctionator is designed to be easy to use. Drag and drop your items into the box (or Alt-Left Click) and it will automatically undercut the lowest auction, with your competition listed to the right. If the lowest is too low, just click on what price you want to undercut. Hell, you can even buy other peoples’ auctions or cancel your undercut ones from this same screen. Auctioneer is capable of auto-undercutting, but you actually have to hit Refresh to get the current prices, which doubles the clicks necessary to offload your loot.

The Buy tab is similarly elegant in its simplicity and power. Want to see the current prices of Amberjewel and what it can be cut into? Bam! If you have auctions up that are being undercut you will see a red X next to it, compared with a green check-mark to show you are still the classiest act in town. Your most recent searches are saved along the left-hand side, but you can make shopping lists if you want to be pro. One of my favorite uses for these shopping lists is using the “advanced” search function which looks like this:

This search string will bring up every scroll for that gear slot and clicking the price will re-sort them so the most expensive (and thus most profitable!) are at the top. You can do the same thing with Glyphs if you want to remind yourself how much you hate the Blizzard designers.

I am known to troll the AH for deals on occasion though, and unfortunately Auctinator does nothing to change the hideousness of the default AH screen. That is why I do recommend installing Auctioneer too so you can easily browse 50 items at a time and sort things by prices. As has been reported on some of the other blog sites though, the future of Auctioneer is currently unknown considering the sweeping behind-the-scenes code changes that make scanning the entire AH in a few minutes unreliable at best, impossible at worst. While I recommend using Aunctionator simply because it IS a good AH tool even compared to Aunctioneer, you may want to become familiar with it should Auctioneer suddenly find itself no longer working or being discontinued.

What is the minimum monetary reward you are willing to accept for one posted auction?

This is the single most important question you can answer for yourself on your journey of wealth creation, for it instructs you in a direction that will ultimately be more personally rewarding and you will be more likely to stick with it long enough to actualize that wealth.

My personal minimum is now 30g. That may not make sense to you, and it’s not supposed to. That is my margin. You might not believe there is much difference between one auction with a 30g margin and five auctions with a 6g margin that you have automated, but there is a difference well beyond the actual time it takes to post said auctions: motivation, willingness, reward. If you are the type of person who is self-motivated to the point that every copper of profit feels like your birthday, and you can maintain that motivation over the long-term, more power to you; the entire world will be your market.

For the rest of us, we must choose.

Let’s talk about Netherweave Bags for a moment. There are plenty of gold blogs out there extolling the virtues of buying 3g stacks of Netherweave Cloth and selling the 16-slot bags for 9g with generally unlimited demand. I have dabbled in this market before, and these bags do indeed fly off the shelves on even low population servers. I am no longer in the Netherweave Bag market however. Why not? While some level of profit is always better than no profit, a 6g margin simply does not excite me anymore. I would much rather buy the 56 stacks of Obsidium Ore on the AH at 97g/stack knowing that each Nightstone I get from prospecting that Obsidium will pay for one stack of the ore, nevermind what I am getting for the other gems.

Does this mean if you are not dropping 5,432g on prospecting ore you are doing it wrong? Of course not. If you would prefer buying 1,810 stacks of Netherweave Cloth to make bags and (eventually) walking away 10,864g richer, then do that. That may come off as facetious, but that is not my intention. My intention here is to get you to (re)examine what is your personal profit margin so that you can use that figure to find the right market for you. It could be that you do not have 5,000g at a time to drop into gold-making schemes or perhaps you do not even have a JC character.

Let me use another example of a market I recently moved out of that you could probably move right into: TBC vendor cooking recipes. The recipes are Warp Burger, Blackened Basilisk, Golden Fish Sticks, and Spicy Crawdad. There are two vendors in Terokkar Forest, SE of Shattrath, who sells them in unlimited quantities for 3g apiece. Before the portals were taken out, I would fly out that way every time I tried my luck in heroic Sethekk Halls for the Raven Lord mount, and would end up selling two copies of each recipe for 40g apiece. I am not sure whether the novelty of Cataclysm has dried up the “boredom-filling demand” for filling up your Profession tab, or perhaps a lower price-point of 30g or whatever would tap into more potential customers, but I have not been selling them as fast as before. Either way, I am no longer bother flying out to restock sold recipes because the margin is not enticing enough. I imagine there are plenty of other persons, perhaps even yourself, that would be more than happy looting ~100g from a vendor every other day or so.

In conclusion: find your margin, then find your market. The AH is literally a gold mine with room enough for spelunchers of every skill and level of dedication. If you have a small acceptable margin or low seed money, stick with things like flipping cloth (believe me, people will pay 20g+ for Wool Cloth) and selling vendor recipes. If those markets do not get your mojo going, leave them. You do not actually need to be everywhere at all times. You will be wealthier in the long run – wealthy in all the various respects that word encompasses – when you have fun doing the things you need to do.

There are two transmutes you need to be doing whenever possible, if you have not been already:

Transmute: Living Elements – Volatile Life x15 (in Uldum)
Transmute: Inferno Ruby – Carnelian x3, Heartblossom x3

Like a lot of people, I imagined that Transmute: Truegold was going to be the king of the cooldowns. Maybe it is on your server, but on mine Volatile Air fluctuates between 65g-85g apiece which shoots the minimum price of Truegold to somewhere around ~1300g in mats in order to break even, let alone make a profit. If you can sell your cooldown to someone else at more than 800g, then by all means do that instead.

As far as Inferno Rubies go, you do not even necessarily need to have a JC character depending on the price of Carnelians in the AH, although obviously prospecting Obsidium/Elementium Ore itself brings the greatest returns. For example, Carnelians are around 45g on my realm’s AH, Heartblossom is 150g a stack, and Inferno Rubies fly off the shelves at 195g. Pressing a button with no cooldown and collecting 37.5g an hour later for each time I pressed it? Yes, please.

I would normally caution the flooding of items like Inferno Rubies, but there is little actual downside at this stage of the game. The stat consolidation post-Shattering has made stacking primary stats like Strength and Intellect even more of a no-brainer to most class/specs, so you can expect heavy demand for Inferno Rubies (and the epic equivalent later on) for pretty much the entire expansion. The best thing is that your market for Inferno Rubies includes not just people looking to socket their newly grinded Justice Point gear, but also the JCs trying to recoup their ~1500g cuts (since they could have sold the JC tokens for Chimera Eyes) under heavy competition.

I was having some early success selling the Blacksmithing weapons I made via leveling the profession, and it was not until I finally started leveling my main (the gatherer is nearly 83 from herbing/mining alone) that I realized why: they are amazing! I am a Protection paladin primarily, so the best weapon I had in Wrath for Retribution was a 251 sword off Marrowgar. While there was an early ~15 dps quest upgrade in Hyjal, the Obsidium Executioner was mind-boggling 150 weapon-DPS upgrade the moment I hit level 81. I found the same sort of massive upgrades with my other alts:

Citadel Enforcer’s Claymore vs Obsidium Executioner
H Midnight Sun vs Lifeforce Hammer
Sister Svalna’s Aether Staff vs Fire-Etched Dagger (+480 spellpower going from 2H –> 1H!)

The three weapons you should focus on are the ones listed above: Obsidian Executioner, the Lifegiver’s Gavel, and the Flame-Etched Blade. You can eyeball the materials in the table below:

Even in current ore/volatile markets, chances are good you can craft these weapons with ~650g in mats and turn around and sell them for 2000g. Even if you have to peddle them at 1,000g apiece you would be snagging a significant profit margin. As a bonus, each one of these will also boost your Blacksmithing by 5 levels the first few times, so even if you just make one or two you will recoup your costs and then some.

This is somewhat a continuation of my prior post on the Elementium Shuffle, but today I will be focusing on the relationship between Jewelcrafting and Enchanting.

All of these cuts are learned from the JC trainer. The Jasper Ring and Alicite Pendant give skill-ups until 485, while the Hessonite Band and the Nightstone Choker give skill-ups until 505. Note: you need 475 Enchanting to disenchant the last two jewelry listed above. Now, according to Wowhead the disenchanting percentages of the above jewelry is ~75% Lesser Celestial Essence and ~25% Hypnotic Dust. In my experience disenchanting however, the Jasper and Alicite jewelry broke down into Hypnotic Dust more readily than indicated. Carnelian Spikes is one recipe not mentioned above, as it takes Carnelian x3 plus three Jeweler’s Settings when you could use those same three Carnelians (plus some Heartblossom) to transmute into an Inferno Ruby. Wowhead does indicate the fist weapon disenchants into 1-3 Hypnotic Dust ~84% of the time though, so if you do not have access to an Alchemist it may be the way to go with your extra red gems.

Some final thoughts:

1) Although I am calling this the Elementium Shuffle, Obsidium Ore works just as well. Until more people hit the endgame, the uncut rare gems will not be improving your prospecting haul anytime soon, so pick the cheaper ore.

2) Make sure you are checking your AH for situations like this (click for full size):

A lot of people are putting the level 78 Cataclysm greens up on the AH for pennies on the dollar (copper on the gold?) – in the above case, they were selling an item that disenchanted into Hypnotic Dust x2 (80g) for 12g buyout. Regardless of whether these items D/E into Hypnotic Dust or Celestial Essence, you can probably expect to make 40g per piece of enchanting material. Anything under 35g is an instant buy.

3) Leveling enchanting past 475 at this point is, well, somewhat pointless. You can disenchant everything at 475 skill and actually have access to your Cataclysm ring enchants at that same level. Practically no one is going to buy enchants for their sub-85 gear, and we all know these Enchanting mats prices are unsustainable in the long term anyway – selling a stack of Hypnotic Dust for 1000g is simply absurd. Ergo, I am recommending you sell all the Enchanting mats you end up with right now before they become cheap later. There will still an scroll market later, trust me.