Tips and Tricks - The Magic of The Darkmoon Faire

I know it's been 2 weeks since my last post.  I've intended on publishing a post for my readers but, instead I've started work on 6 other posts, leveled 2 of my alts from 85-90, and started 2 new gold making projects which I intend on sharing, once I have them completely figured out.  Those projects may even be worked into my regular postings, um... once they become regular.  I really do need a posting schedule.  Without further ado, here is my next post in my series of posts inspired by Nev of The Auction House Addict.

20 Days of Goldmaking Day 3 - What were the first techniques/tips/tricks you used when starting out?

It's so hard to remember that far back, especially since at the time, I barely had a grasp on the auction house.  However, one thing definitely stands out in my mind; The Darkmoon Faire

Before Blizzard revamped the monthly event with the creation of the Darkmoon Island and DMF Dailies, if you wanted to reach exalted with The Darkmoon Faire, you only had a handful of options to increase your reputation with them.  There were various items you could turn in for reputation, with the completed decks being the quickest (yet most expensive) way.  I found myself buying the random items and various cards and saving them for when the Darkmoon Faire was in town.  At the time, I didn't know that the faire came to Goldshire one month, and to Mulgore the next.  I thought it was a bi-monthly event.  After my initial discovery of the faire, I spent the next two months hoarding items to turn in for rep.  By the time the faire was back in Goldshire, I had lost interest in getting rep and had gained interest in getting more gold together for my epic mount.  I found that these items were now way more expensive than they had been in my days of saving up for the rep turn ins.  I decided to sell what decks and items I had, and to my disbelief, they ALL sold, for WAY more than I had paid for them.  I had just 'flipped' items for the first time in my gold making career!  Go me!  This little discovery opened my eyes to the gold making opportunities presented by other holiday events.  However, it would be a long time before I actually took advantage of these opportunities. 

When I started out, I used websites such as Thottbot, Allakhazam, and Wowhead to research everything I intended to buy or sell.  I learned through research, trial and error, that some crafting materials sold faster if I posted them in different sized stacks.  This taught me that I could sell a stack of mageweave cloth for 5 gold, or sell it in stacks of 5 for 2 gold, simply because some players only need 5 cloth and would rather part with 2 gold than buy an entire stack for 5 gold.  This allowed me to sell 20 cloth for 8 gold instead of 5 gold.  This is just a basic example of how it worked, I don't really recall what amounts I was selling the mageweave cloth for. 

I also learned the importance of diversity.  The more you diversify your markets, the larger your customer base becomes.  I wish I had the time to level an army of crafting alts back then, I am still struggling to keep all of my alts up to date.  However, armed with their professions, my small squad of alts are helping me to continue to diversify the markets that I participate in.  They continue to help me find new ways of turning profit.


Just one of my bank tabs dedicated to DMF cards


As a kid, I always enjoyed collecting things such as coins, baseball cards, arrowheads, and various rocks.  I guess I've allowed the collector in me to carry over into the game.  I still buy, and save cards from various expansion content and make the decks for profit.  The older decks are slow sellers, but, it's something I've always done and will probably continue to do until it no longer turns a profit.

Lovely Charm Farming on the Farmland

Overview

The "Love is in the Air" event is now underway!  If you missed it last year, or you're new to the game, then you have your chance to pick up an easy mount - and if you're lucky - you'll get the Big Love Rocket from the daily dungeon reward!  Be sure to check out the complete "Love is in the Air" guide over at wowhead.com

 

Changes

There have been a few changes to the Lovely Charm Bracelets since last year.  I was a little upset upon discovering them, however, I'm going to try this market out anyway.

1. You can't mail the bracelets, you must use them or sell them on the toon you received them on.
2. You can't post them in the auction house, you must bark in trade chat in order to sell the bracelets.
3. You can trade up to 6 at a time and can not stack the bracelets.(Tip: don't make the bracelets until you're ready to use or sell them, the charms stack)

Farming

Before you begin your first farming session, make sure to pick up a Lovely Charm Collector's Kit from Kwee Q. Peddlefeet, located in each of your faction's capital cities.  You can find him in the spot with the rest of the holiday dailies.  I have been thinking about this all week, yet I've been forgetting to test spawn rates of mobs so I could get a leg up on the bracelet competition.  My first instinct was to head over to Valley of the Four Winds and try out some farming on the mobs there.  Here's the area that I farm. Click the picture to zoom in.

,

The mobs in this area have a pretty low amount of health and the ones with lower health spawn really fast.  They are also pretty tightly packed.

• Springtail Digger - 110,610 hp
• Springtail Gnasher - 156.698 hp
• Springtail Leaper - 55,305 hp

This farming allows me to make good use of my Golden Fleece for the extra 10-30 gold every five minutes, as well as use my Helpful Wikky's Whistle since I'm going to be killing a ton of mobs anyway.  After about 10 minutes I had gotten 58 Lovely Charms, enough for 5.8 Lovely Charm Bracelets.

One last note: the Wowhead guide also suggests farming the charms in the Storm Stout Brewery, killing the hoppers just after the first boss.  These mobs do NOT drop any loot.  I prefer the Springtail mobs that I have listed above because they drop other useful items for me; such as gold, greens, awesome gold-fetching blues, Windwool Cloth, and Motes of Harmony.

Please feel free to leave suggestions on other bracelet farming spots, in the comments below.   Happy farming!

"Goald" Making, My Path to Deep Pockets

20 Days of Gold Blogging - Day 2

I believe I will begin each of these '20 days' posts by giving thanks to Nev over at The Auction House Addict for creating these gold blogging questions for us to answer and for inspiring me to get started with my first blog ever. 

If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

Since diving into the world of gold making, I have made many goals; both related to and unrelated to gold making.  However, I think I'll spare my readers the pain of reading about making enough gold to obtain mounts and training.  If you're reading this blog, then you've most likely gone through that experience yourself or maybe you're in the process of getting there.  On that note, I think I'll treat you with something different that still pertains to "goald" (gold combined with goal) making.

My goalds revolve around actions or accomplishments rather than numbers.  Sure, like many of you out there, there are certain amounts of gold that I look forward to reaching. However, I find it more important for myself to focus on HOW I reach those numbers, rather than the importance of the numbers themselves.

In past expansions, I made most of my income through soloing old raids.  As a hunter, I found this both challenging and fun, and making gold from these runs was just a by-product of the fun that I was having.  Eventually, I realized that I enjoyed selling the items that accumulated in my bags, and saw that I was one of the few sellers for certain materials such as netherweave cloth.  As I continued to solo old raids and reap some nice profit, I began to thirst for more gold and thus, I created my first gold making goal.

My first goald was to start using my professions to quench my undying thirst for more gold.  At the time I only had one crafting profession that I knew inside and out; Alchemy.  When epic gem transmutes were released in Wrath, I started to use my daily transmute cooldown.  I don't think it was very long before some jewelcrafter started paying me for my daily transmute.  He would mail me the materials and a nice tip and I got to keep any procs!  About once a week, he would send me anywhere from 300-1000 gold which he considered to be 'profit sharing'.  I thought this was nice but it still wasn't enough, I wanted MORE!  I power levelled my jewelcrafting on my shaman, started cutting my own gems and began to post each of them, manually without using any addons.  It was extremely time consuming, but I was making a 3-5 thousand gold profit per day and I was happy with that amount at the time. 

Cataclysm is where my crafting professions really started to shine.  At the launch of Cataclysm, I was deployed and my internet was pretty slow at the time so I was forced to run fewer dungeons, fewer raids, and spend more time on the auction house.  Right after I hit level 85 on my main, I discovered TSM (more on that in a future post) and I finally jumped into the glyph market and had a good head start with jewelcrafting as well.  I started doing the elementium shuffle and got my Death Knight (enchanter/tailor) into the mix, disenchanting the green rings and necklaces and selling embersilk bags.  I found THE sweet farming spot in Deepholm, and with the use of potions of treasure finding, I was raking in the easy cloth.  Making roughly 80k in profit every week was exciting.

The raw results

After vendoring the trash

Looks like I found some screen shots of the results of one hour of my Deepholm farming!!! I thought I'd share them with you.

Boxes opened and greens DE'd

I kept a pretty heavy focus on the auction house for most of the expansion and thought I would reach gold cap by the release of MoP.  I was wrong, but not disappointed.  I had reached just over 600k before taking a five month hiatus from WoW.  I had a pretty good reason to stop playing WoW for that time.  However, that story will have to wait until question 13, which I may end up posting out of order.  I look forward to sharing my biggest 'yay' moment in that post!

Blacksmithing Endeavors

This expansion I'm trying to use all of my professions, like I should've been doing all along.  I'm loving the new addition of random blue quality ilvl 415 gear made from blacksmithing, tailoring, and leatherworking.  Right now I'm focused on the blacksmithing view, as it seems to be the most profitable of the three on my server.

For the last two expansions I've used blacksmithing for making and selling belt buckles only.  While this was a small and quick supplement to my income, it's just not enough for me anymore.  On the weekends I can buy up a ton of ghost iron bars for around 70 gold per stack, and forge them into gear.  I make an even amount gear for each equipment slot, then I arrange them by their slot and random enchantment.  I'm slowly learning what enchantments sell, and which ones don't.  For the ones that don't, I will eventually end up disenchanting them. For the ones that do sell well, after a month of doing this I will post a list of what I find to be the most popular random enchantments for plate gear.

An example of green quality sales

Selling these items is a little tricky and I use TSM (trade skill master) to handle selling the greens with the ignore enchantment option selected.  I don't mind taking a loss on selling the greens as I make up for that loss and then some with the sales of the blues.  Sometimes, even the greens sell for a small profit! When posting the green quality gear, I make sure that I'm only posting one of each enchantment for each equipment slot.  For example; I only post one ghost-forged guantlets of the hero, and one ghost-forged guantlets of the avatar and so forth.  I leave the duplicates in my bank. 

An example of blue quality sales

 I manually post the blues in order to ensure that my auctions remain competitive with the other auctions that have similar level requirements and enchantments.

In my years of experience, I have noticed that leveling gear sells much better later in the week and into the weekends than it does on last minute Mondays and gear up Tuesdays. 

 

Additional sales data

These blue belts seem to be the best sellers so far.  I've sold all of them for over 400 gold each!  At the cost of only 7 bars or about 49 gold, I'm making well over 800% profit per belt! We'll see how my second round of crafting and posting goes, but thus far, I'm liking the profits that I'm seeing.  Stay tuned for an in depth analysis at the end of this month!

The First Day, In More Ways Than One

20 Days of Gold Making - Day One

First, I would like to thank Nev of The Auction House Addict for creating this gold blogging meme and inspiring me to get started with my first blog ever.  I have also decided to enter my post as part of  Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival and will most likely continue to participate every month!


Over the course of the next few weeks you will get to know a little about my background as a gold maker through my 20 Days of Gold Making posts. It will most likely take longer than just a few weeks to tackle all 20 posts, but I'd like to stay optimistic on the idea of gold blogging.

The First Day - When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

My first in-game sale wasn't exactly an event that triggered my interest in gold making. However, it did teach me some fundamental rules that I now follow when it comes to making gold. Here's the story:

I had just started playing WoW on a trial account right around the time of The Burning Crusade pre-release event.  I started as a Night Elf Hunter and quickly found myself immersed in this new world called Teldrassil.  At this time I had no knowledge of WoW at all. I actually believed that Teldrassil was the only place in the game.  I read all of my quest info and all of the tooltips on my character abilities before taking a step away from my very first silver question mark.  As I leveled and looted my coppers, I vendored items that I didn't need and equipped any gear that I could that seemed like a good upgrade.  I was sure enjoying seeing my wallet fill with coppers and, after a while, silvers! I quickly came across someone who would teach me Alchemy and one who would teach me Herbalism.  I soon learned these professions and began to level them, not knowing what I had just gotten myself into.  After mindlessly chasing the yellow dots on my mini map, acquiring the herbs needed to level my alchemy, I really felt like I was getting somewhere in the game (boy, was my perspective extremely skewed!).  

Someone posted in general chat about wanting some minor mana potions.  I quickly looked at my list of items that I could craft with alchemy and found that I could make some for this guy.  Being the helpful person that I am, and wanting to make friends in this strange new world, I quickly responded in general chat "I can make those for you".  After some conversation, we met up, I crafted the potions and he opened trade with me.  Upon trying to confirm the trade, I got an error message.  I soon learned that I needed to have a paid account in order to trade with people.  He was offering me 30 silver for these potions that I had made with ease!  I felt that I just HAD to make this sale, so off I went to set up a paid account (he was nice enough to walk me through it).  After a few minutes, I paid my first monthly subscription fee to Blizzard and quickly logged back in to make my first sale!  I was so excited to see that incredible amount of silver sitting in my wallet!

I think the first thing that triggered my gold making was my love for PvP and the need for my first mount which, back then, was 40 gold at level 40.  I had heard about twinking from a friend and decided that I would make my Hunter a level 49 twink.  I made friends with a PvPing Warlock named Nedflanders who also happened to be an enchanter.  I may not have had the best of gear or enchants as a so-called twink, but it was fun.  At that time I only had one way of making gold without leveling. I didn't have any alts except for my level 1 bank toon.  I needed to kill things and sell their drops for gold.  I started with farming in a cave in Arathi Highlands where the mobs were respawning as fast as I could kill them.  I sold off the mageweave cloth and vendored the gray trash drops.  I gave the greens to my warlock friend to disenchant and also sold off the occasional blue world drop that mostly came from the chests that would spawn in that cave.  Gold making was slow until I discovered my first niche market, the Cold Basilisk Eye trinket.  This was back in the day of having to actually post in general or trade chat to find a group to do dungeons with. On a very low pop server it was almost impossible to ever get into a group to do any lower level dungeons.  This trinket was one of the very few available at that level. It's quite possibly the worst trinket in the game, yet I was able to sell them for 5 gold each due player's needs to fill their empty trinket slots.  Two days after this accidental discovery, I had farmed and sold enough of them to finally buy my mount training and my first mount at level 49.

After moving and taking a couple of weeks off from WoW I got back into the game, tired of PvP and ready to level.  I really don't remember how I made the gold for my epic riding mount and the training but it happened at level 60, if I recall correctly.  I ventured into Outlands for my first experience in The Burning Crusade around the time that The Black Temple patch was released.  At that point I had a new goal in the game, kill Illidan.  In the time that I had been away, my guild had merged with another one that just so happened to be a hardcore raiding guild.  I soon leveled my way to 70 and began gearing up and doing my dailies for gold, trying to save up for a flying mount and training and then the epic flying after that.  While the guild raided, I farmed for them, and I farmed too much.  I made flasks and food for the guild to show my support and dedication and sold excess on the auction house. The gold was building up slowly, but I would eventually get there.  I did end up making my debut into the raiding scene, but I never did get to kill Illidan during that expansion. But that's okay, I found my new reason for playing the game, making gold!