A trade mule is an extra character whose sole purpose in life is to craft things for your other characters.

For example, if your main character is a leatherworker/skinner, and you’re looking for a way to increase your profit margins on Toughened Leather Gloves, it would make sense to create a trade mule who has herbalism and alchemy as his professions.

With two characters working side-by-side, you can get all of your Elixirs of Defense for free, and greatly improve your profit margin on Toughened Leather Gloves.

In fact, you don’t even have to level your trade mule above level ten in order to get your alchemy skill high enough to make Elixir of Defense.

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Don’t disregard low level patterns. Take for example [item]Toughened Leather Gloves[/item]. These Rare (blue) level 22 gloves sell really well on most servers.

The materials for these gloves are 4 medium leather, 2 cured medium hide, 2 spider silk, and 2 Elixir of Defense.

The leather and the hide will come very easy for you if you are also a skinner (as most leather workers are), the spider silk drops off spiders level 15-32. The Elixir of Defense is available from alchemist friends or guildmates, or off the Auction House.

Depending on your server, these gloves will fetch 2 - 10 gold apeice, and your materials costs should be about half that.

If you take the time to actually gather as much of the materials yourself instead of paying for them on the auction house, then you will be able to pocket a nice profit for a little time investment.

This is another occasion where the Auctioneer add-on really shines. Unless you’re in-game checking the auction house all the time, you may not know what crafted items are selling really well on your server. In fact, [item]Toughened Leather Gloves[/item] may not sell well at all on your server - Auctioneer will help you determine this, and help you find other crafted items to focus on instead.

Now, good business dictates that you do whatever you can to lower your expenses, and as a result, your profit margin will go up.

In this example, our profits will be limited by the cost of Elixir of Defense. Since a leatherworker/skinner cannot make them, and they are not available anywhere except through the auction house or from other players, you’re at the mercy of others if you wish to craft this item (I’ve seen a few servers where the cost of a single Elixir of Defense is higher than what Toughened Leather Gloves go for!)

How can we get around this limitation? With a Trade Mule (more on this tomorrow!)

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This week I’m going to talk to you about using Trade Skills to fatten your virtual coin purse.

As you know from my previous emails, I’m not a big fan of doing trade skills before level 60, because it slows down your leveling time.

Remember that this is coming from a guy who wants to hit 60 with a character as fast as possible. If hitting 60 as fast as humanly possible is not your goal, then by all means go right ahead and work on the trade skills and professions of your choice.

However, I want to give you some tricks to make sure that you actually MAKE money from your trade skills, instead of losing
money.

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I’ve been doing a lot of farming lately. To be honest with you, I’ve never had a need to farm gold before level 50 or so, but lots of you have been asking for farming spots for lower levels.

So, my team and I have rolled some new lowbie toons and we’re scouring Azeroth for some great low-level gold farming spots.

Stay tuned for the results of this - we’re actively seeking out the best places, and I’ll report them to you as we find them.

For you higher level guys, today I’m going to discuss farming the Scarlet Monastery.

Lots of people farm SM, but we wanted to know is it worth it?

We ran a level 60 Mortal Strike warrior, with mostly Valor armor (this is the first dungeon set of armor that you get from places
like Scholomance, Stratholme, and Blackrock Spire.

His weapon was nothing particularly great: the [item]Obsidian Edged Blade[/item] from Molten Core.

In other words, this would be a standard level 60 character that has done some end game stuff, but not a fully decked out toon. This is important for you to know so that you can determine whether you’ll be able to farm the SM instances faster or slower than our test character.

The results below are based on a few rules:

1. ALL blues and greens were VENDORED. Nothing was placed on the auction house.

2. All cloth was made into bandages and then vendored.

3. Repair costs were removed from the total profit .

4. We ran each instance in SM 4 times, and what you see below are the averages.

5. Time shown was the time to kill every mob in the instance, and then any respawns on the way back out.

SM Graveyard:

Avg time to complete: 20 minutes
Total Profit: 6g 34s 51c

Profit per minute: 31s 73c
Profit per hour: 19g 3s 81c

SM Library:

Avg time to complete: 22 minutes
Total Profit: 7g 99s 43c

Profit per minute: 36s 33c
Profit per hour: 21g 79s 80c

SM Armory:

Avg time to complete: 31 minutes
Total Profit: 8g 54s 75c

Profit per minute: 27s 57c
Profit per hour: 16g 54s 20c

SM Cathedral:

Avg time to complete: 37 minutes
Total Profit: 10g 91s 02c

Profit per minute: 29s 49c
Profit per hour: 17g 69s 40c

Now you have some hard data to use during your farming sessions.

What can you do to improve these numbers? I have two suggestions for you.

First, because we did not put anything on the auction house, you would probably double these numbers if you auctioned the greens and blues that dropped for you. Use auctioneer to get the proper price, and rake in the extra gold.

Second, if you don’t want to pay the auction house deposits or you don’t want to risk your greens and blues not selling, pick up enchanting as one of your tradeskills and disenchant all the greens and blues that drop for you. You don’t have to pay deposits at the AH for selling enchanting materials, they are almost always in high demand, and since you can’t auction the Bind on Pickup items you get in these instances, you’ll almost certainly make more profit selling the disenchanted materials on the auction house than you’d get for vendoring the item.

Finally, don’t think that you have to be level 60 to farm SM. The mobs are around level 35, and although they are elite, they are not particularly tough.

Almost any character level 50 or higher should be able to clear out SM solo (although it will take longer that it would with a level 60 character.)

And don’t overlook the possibility of duoing SM with a friend. We were able to clear out SM with a 45 warrior and a 41 Shaman with no problems at all.

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