Vanish Fix in Patch 3.3?We have a change for Vanish in place for 3.3. You will get to try it out soon (tm). As promised, if it proves a significant buff to rogues, we may have to compensate elsewhere. Just because it hasn't worked as intended doesn't mean it will be balanced when it does.
and
Teh Gladiators #93 are out.
Auction House Guide - Introduction and EnchantingThe 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)
AddonsYou 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 investmentsIf 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 itemsNow 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:
The most profitable professions to craft these items are :
BlacksmithingDisenchant 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.
LeatherworkingBorean 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.
JewelcraftingOooooh 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.
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 EnchantmentsSelling 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.
And I think we're done with Enchanting ... The original plan was to also write something about Inscription but I think I'll wait a few more days before throwing another wall of text at you. See you next week?
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