Fun Fact Friday - Frost Lotus

This Fun Fact Friday post is long overdue.  I really hope to be able to bring you this content on a weekly basis.  I actually have another post ready to go for next Friday, let's make sure I get those screen shots in for it in time!! Onwards!!! To the gold making tip!!

My Hunter as a Frost Lotus prepping for a Firelands Raid.

Where does Frost Lotus come from and how can I use it to make gold?

Frost Lotus is mainly acquired when leveling herbalism or simply farming WotLK herbs.  While they don't serve much use other than crafting flasks for alts to use from 75-80, they can still make you a little profit if you have a tailor or tailor friend/guildie that is at least revered with the Kalu'ak and has the Emerald Bag pattern. If you're grinding the rep yourself, you can also go the extra mile to get exalted so you can pick up a Nurtured Penguin Egg from the Kalu'ak quartermaster, cage him and resell him on the AH.  You can even level him to bring in some additional gold!  Go check out The Kalu'ak on Wowhead.com for info on gaining reputation with The Kalu'ak.


Why should I try selling this?


Like the pattern for the Hyjal Expedition Bag, the pattern for the Emerald Bag requires some rep grinding in order to obtain the pattern.  There doesn't seem to be too many people selling these across the US servers, so there should be little to no competition.  They are cheaper to make than their 36 slot brother and may be a more appealing option to players with shallower pockets.  For around the same price, they still provide 10 more slots than the 22 slot Embersilk Bag.  

Who are my customers for this bag?

I can't promise you that it will sell very quickly, and I am by no means implying that this will make you a lot of gold.  Simply test your server's market.  Keep an eye on the different herbs on TUJ and learn when they are generally posted in small quantities, not huge batches like a farmer.  These non farmers are your target, they are leveling alts who may want more bag space and wouldn't mind dropping ~500g for a 32 slot herb bag (15g62s50c / slot) versus spending ~1000g for a 36 slotter (27g77s77c / slot).  That's an extra 500g for 4 more slots!!!!


I hope you enjoyed this Fun Fact Friday's trip to the past!  Join me next Friday when I show you a few good reasons for some dragon slaying. 

Gaining Control of My Glyph Market

Making gold from the glyph market has been slow but steady during this expansion.  I'm okay with the fact that I only make around 15k per week in glyphs, or as low as 5k on a bad week.  For me, it's not much work to restock most of my stuff by buying up what gets crafted as people level for about 1/6th - 1/3rd the normal crafting cost.  I'm able to offload it eventually, making hundreds of percent profit off of each glyph that I buy.  Sometimes I still chill out and spam my milling macro on a Sunday afternoon.  Then I watch some TV or listen to WoW podcasts while I make my inks and turn them all into glyphs.


A couple of days ago I logged onto Garmemnus to do my daily glyph collection from the mail box and go about my normal stacking and posting routine.  Once I had made my trips to the bank to re stack it all, I headed over to the auction house.  I use TSM to post all of my glyphs, so I clicked the post auctions button, tabbed out and read some new blog posts, messed with twitter, and tabbed back in.  My threshold for glyphs is 40g and fallback is 300g (raising it to 400 soon).  Out of 172 glyphs in my bags, TSM was only letting me post about 30 glyphs.  My first reaction was to check my settings in TSM.  Then I quickly realized that one of my major competitors listed walls of all of his glyphs for 25g each.  Rather than waste my time posting what glyphs that I could, I decided to send him an in game message.  I asked him if he was leaving the market.  Later that day he said he was and that he would sell me all of his glyphs for 10g each.  I inquired about his stock of glyphs and decided that it was well worth it to purchase his entire inventory.  I even offered him 15g per glyph to show him my appreciation, since he had been a very reasonable competitor, helping me to keep the prices high.  Yesterday I opened my mail to find his entire stock, COD'd to me!!  About 9500g later I had almost a complete restock of all of my glyphs, I didn't have to mill herbs, make inks, and craft all those glyphs! Which saved me a good bit of time and 5-10g per glyph in crafting cost!! 

350 Different Glyphs to post every day!!!

With him out of the market, I hope to see an increase in glyph sales this week.  Thursday is always my most profitable day of the week for glyphs.  I'm hoping to see an extra increase on that day.  However, with his absence, I'll have to keep a closer eye on prices and opportunities to reset them if need be.  Without him buying up the glyphs that are priced under the crafting cost, maybe I'll be able to do some more restocking for cheap, and most importantly, save more time!  I wish you all the best of luck in the crazy glyph market that exists on most servers today!

Fun Fact Friday - Frozen Orb

Frozen Orbs - Their Eternal Use 

I believe that I might start taking a look into the past every Friday to find something from past expansions that is worth sharing and that may bring you a little extra coin.  These things might be new to some of you, or maybe a reminder of something we've forgotten about.   Today's topic is the frozen orb and how it will likely have a use in current content for years to come.

What is a Frozen Orb?

Frozen Orbs are items used in many Wrath of the Lich King crafting patterns.  They drop from the last boss of any Wrath Heroic Dungeon.  Farming them may not be worth your time, but they do appear fairly frequently on the Auction House.  Their appearance on the Auction House is mainly the result of high level players doing Wrath Heroic Dungeons for transmog items or for the purpose of grinding out reputation such as the Alliance Vanguard, for the mekgineer's chopper pattern.

I don't want to make any Wrath gear, so why should I care about these?



Let me introduce you (a reaquaintance for some) to Frozo the Renowned.  He was implemented in Patch 3.3.3 to assist in alleviating players of the immense supply of Frozen Orbs that no one wanted anymore.  He is located behind the Magus Commerce Exchange in Dalaran.  He accepts Frozen Orbs to trade for Runic Orbs, Crusader Orbs, Eternals, and Frost Lotuses.  I don't know what this guy does with all the orbs he gets, but that's not the point.  I normally pick up Eternals from him with the goal of creating a Mekgineer's Chopper.  This is probably the best way to get the most amount of money from your Frozen Orbs.  If you don't have an Engineer or the starting capital to invest in making a chopper, you can still buy up some orbs for cheap and trade them in for the most expensive Eternal and sell those on the Auction House.



Processing Frozen Orbs into a mount.

1. Buy out the Frozen Orbs that are cheaper than the Eternals you need.
2. Buy up some cheap Arctic Fur and keep a nice stock of it on your engineer.
3. Send some Cobalt Bars to your engineer and make Cobalt Bolts. (Buy the bolts or ore if they are cheaper)
4. Use a ring to teleport yourself to Dalaran or get a Mage to port you. (Keep a toon in Dalaran for even more convenience)
5. Trade in your orbs for the most expensive Eternal (normally Eternal Fire)
6. Figure out which is cheaper to obtain, Titanium Bars or Saronite Bars (search Titansteel Bar on TUJ, it will tell you which way is cheapest.) Ore you can go mine the mats you need prior to purchasing extra Eternals. (see what I did there?)
7. Transmute the Saronite Bars into Titanium Bars and smelt the Titanium Bars and eternals into Titansteel Bars
8. Get your Engineer to K-3 in Storm Peaks and pick up the required vendor materials
9. Make the Mekgineer's Chopper and sell it for profit.

Now that mounts are account bound, wouldn't it be harder to sell the mount?

Actually, no, it won't be.  New content continues to bring new players to the game.  As time goes on, more people get around to saving and/or making gold and will be looking for places to spend their hard earned gold.  It's a good thing for them that you'll be there to help them get rid of it :)  I have stopped doing this because I simply forgot all about it (time to pick it back up again).  When I'm in full swing I usually sell 1 mount per week.  It's a nice additional 4-5 thousand gold profit every week for some very minimal work, provided that I purchase all of the materials.   You can better economize your time spent on this by making multiple mounts at once, but it requires a large investment just for the vendor materials alone (12500g per mount).  In the meantime you can be watching the auction house using a dealfinding list to snatch up the materials you'll need to craft more mounts once you've depleted your stock.  Try barking in trade chat while you are posting your auctions, newer players might not even be aware that the chopper exists.  Some players may have forgotten that they want one.  Make a barking macro and be creative with it. 

My macro that generates the most chatter and sales goes something like this:
"Cruise the Isle of Thunder in style with this shiny new two person Mekgineer's Chopper.  Go pantless for that extra breeze! Get yours now for only xxxxx gold!"


Good luck and happy mounting!

Bank Alts Anonymous - 20 Days of Gold Making Days 4 and 5

My pet Secretary is camera shy :D

For days 4 and 5 of Nev's 20 Days of Gold Making, she asks "When did you start a banker alt?" and "Do you keep the same banker alt?"  I'm combining these two into one post for two reasons.  First, these questions go great together, and second, I don't feel that I can write a meaningful post on each question by itself. 

Day 4 - When did you start a banker alt?
Day 5 - Do you keep the same banker alt?

I started my very first banker alt after my first month of playing WoW.  A co worker of mine introduced me to the curse website for addons.  After he pointed out some helpful UI addons, I browsed around a little.  I stumbled upon Auctioneer, my first auctioning addon, and it sparked my curiosity.  To learn about how to use Auctioneer, I did a google search and somehow came across the idea of using a bank alt to auction my items for me!  Garmemnus was born!!!  A level 1 human warrior destined to live out the rest of his days in the Commons of Ironforge.  With the release of Cataclysm, Deathwing forced my hand in moving Garmemnus to Stormwind so he could be easily accessible to his customers.

Garmemnus' Glorious Glyphs (3G)

My auctioning has evolved since then.  I now participate heavily in a few markets and I'm continuing to expand!  Garmemnus now handles glyphs only.  He doesn't need a guild bank, but he does belong to one of my banking guilds.  After Garmemnus started to handle around a 300-400 glyph posting cycle, I decided that I needed another bank alt to manage all of my other items.  For this purpose I created Selltacular.  Any item I picked up that could be useful to someone else was sent to Selltacular for listing on the AH.  Now that Selltacular is managing random items, gems, enchants, shoulder inscriptions, DMF items, he is carrying a pretty heavy stock.  Things were a bit chaotic with Selltacular.  I needed a better way to organize my auctioning.  Consequentially, I decided it's time to bring on another toon to handle the selling of all gear.

Behold!  My latest creation: BILLINGTRON!!!

Billingtron Doesn't Know Where His Diamond-Tipped Cane Is!

Billingtron got his name from the MoP Engineering robot - Blingtron 4000.  I was posting something on one of my banktoons in Stormwind, keeping my eye on trade chat, when someone asked if there was a 'bilingtron' up anywhere.  I was already thinking of creating another bank toon, and was just waiting to come up with a name that I liked before creating the new guy.  So I am giving a warm thank you to that random person who had trouble typing 'blingtron'!  After I finished posting my auctions, I created Billingtron and got the guild set up.  The next step was sending Billingtron all of my gear that had been crafted, dropped, or purchased for resale.   Once I finished and listed his auctions, I was quite happy with seeing my name in the auction house UI. 

I logged on to Billingtron to relist auctions the next day and almost immediately, someone asked trade chat for a bilingtron again!  He specified that he wanted it on the Trade District bank steps.  I took this opportunity to speak up in trade chat.  I stated that I was on the Trade District auction house steps if he really needed me.  My chat box was soon filled with whispers of laughter from others who had saw the entire event transpire.  That made me smile!

I have established a good name for myself on Selltacular by utilizing clever barking methods that were inspired by Cold of Cold's Gold Factory.  And for that, I believe I will always keep using him.  Come to think of it, I need to update and generate new barking macros.  Garmemnus will probably always continue to sell glyphs, and as far as Billingtron goes, I LOVE him!