Big Gold-Making Secret Revealed!
Posted on August 4th, 2008 by Gavin under General Tips
There are times when I am a little bit reluctant to give away one of my best-kept secrets. I’m certainly not the only one who uses what I’m about to show you, but it makes making gold so foolproof, that somehow it hurts my feelings just a bit to tell 40,000 people about it! Oh well, you can see how dedicated I am to giving you the very best tidbits without holding anything back for myself.
If you’ve been reading DYS for any length of time you’ll know I’m a big AH power broker. I typically run hundreds of auctions each week and virtually all of my gold comes from being a merchant (not a farmer). I don’t do dailies except for rep situations, and I can easily afford anything I could ever want.
What I am about to show you is a big part of that process. There was a time when this was a lot more guess work and expertise, but this little mod has just blown the doors off of making money from trade skills.
Once upon a time, you had to just know a LOT about how each profession worked, and which recipes were good for what. You needed to know the cost of all the mats for about a dozen recipes in each profession; which things you could vendor, which to DE, what went on the AH – it was enough to drive you pretty batty.
I’ve done articles here at DYS about bags, using DE to make big gold, some rare recipes – in other words, a little bit of all of this. Well, that was back in the stone ages as far as I am concerned now. I found a mod that does everything I ever wanted and even a bit more when it comes to trade skills: Lil’Sparky’s Workshop.
Lil’Sparky’s is gold just waiting to be made. And for some crazy reason this mod has been around for about a year but only around 3,000 people have downloaded the thing. That is insanity to me. More than 15,000 folks have looked at it and had no clue how much gold it was worth to them. Here’s hoping you are smarter than that. Take my word for it and go grab Lil’Sparky’s right this second.
You can download the latest version here: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7663-LilSparkysWorkshop.html
Now, what this mod is going to do is tell you what every single recipe you know is worth to vendors, the AH and for DE. That covers every way you can possibly make money from a crafted item. You have to use a few other mods to make Lil’Sparky’s do this, just read the requirements in the download screen (I recommend AADV, Informant and ATSW)
Once LS (Lil’SParky’s) is up and running (and assuming you have plenty of AADV data to work with) all you do is open up your profession screen and you are going to see a wealth of new information.
I’m not going to walk you through every single thing in LS, because frankly that would take a fairly long guide, and I figure you’re all big enough to figure it out for yourself. But the screenshot above illustrates a couple of things I do want to point out.
Whenever you see numbers in bold, bright letters, that means there is money to be made on that item. On the top you see we can expect to get 116 gold if we sell Soulcloth Gloves at the AH (the little “a” next to 116 means ‘auction,’ a “d” means ‘disenchant,’ and “v” is ‘vendor’). The number to the right means we can purchase ALL of the mats to make Soulcloth Gloves either at AH or vendors for just 54gold 44 silver – a profit of 61gold 56 silver – so I just pop over to the AH and start buying up everything I can find for these little gems, knowing I will make a hefty profit in no time flat, plus get a few skill-ups to boot!
Even better is the second example. Remember one thing kids if you hear nothing else in this post:
ENCHANTING WILL MAKE YOU MORE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER PROFESSION PERIOD!
Now we have a mod to help us make even more money from enchanting than ever before possible. I don’t even have to wait for bottom scanner to pick things up for DE, I can just craft them with the info from LS! I see here I can make Netherweave Belts for just 7g 19s and then turn right around and DE them and sell the those mats for 21g 11s on average. Holy cow, that’s about a 200% profit! I don’t know about the Ah on your server, but I can probably buy 100 stacks of Netherweave at any given time. That’s a lot of Netherweave Belts – and a LOT of gold about to go in my pocket.
Without LS I would never really know which recipes I can do this with so easily. Now it’s right in front of me every time I open a trade skill window on ANY of my toons. Not only that, I can save recipes like this on one toon and it will give me a shopping list like this:
As you can see the shopping list tells me how many of each item I have on alts, in banks, and inventories on all my toons on the server. Then it will list which things I need to purchase from vendors – it will even auto-buy the exact amount of vendor items I need with the push of a single button at the trade merchants. Getting excited about this yet?
This shopping list will appear on my banking toon when I log in – my goodness; am I in gold heaven or what? So I just log all of my toons, pop in a queue for all of the best recipes for each profession, log the banker and go on a serious shopping spree. As long as I buy the mats for each thing in the queue for at, or below 100% of ah market value, I win big.
Then I just mail all that stuff to the trade skill toons, make everything, send it back to the bank or enchanter for DE, and it’s CHA-CHING, CHA-CHING, CHA-CHING.
Don’t waste another minute – go get this mod and start Dominating with crafted items right away.
A very nice addon, very unknown as well. This is the first time i’ve seen it, and it looks like a real time saver! Although I, and i’m sure others, have made money in the same way, this will save time and therefore increase cash flow!
Enchanting/Jewelcrafting are the best money makers. Both are most effective by using the AH rather than trying to farm materials. Jewelcrafting (imo) makes the most gold, but you have to be very good at working with the market. Enchanting makes a little less but is far easier, especially with this new addon. Great work, the share is greatly appreciated!
An excellent Add-on; but I have a problem. My play-pal and I have used the AH to make gold for a long time now, but recently things have just gone all scew-wiff. Something that sells for 100g one day is at 5g the next! There’s no continuity anymore, no trends, nothing to guide you – and this is reflected in Lil’Sparky too, which can only work with currrent prices. BUT just because some nitwit has put lots of a particular item in the AH at a crazy high price doesn’t mean they’ll sell. But Lil’Sparky ‘reads’ that as current price. Worst still are the players who flood the AH with masses of an item at like 5% of what you’ve been selling it for over the last 6 months. Is there a solution? I’ve used Auctioneer (same problem) and would love to use lil’Sparky – but without reliable data, what can one do????
yeah, bea, that’s a problem in general with the auction house. my understanding is that auctioneer/auc-advanced use some statistical methods to try to reduce the influence of crazy prices, but people can still game them. so like all auction mods, the info from lilsparky’s workshop is best viewed through the prism of experience.
Not a great solution, but I suggest you buy out ALL the low price items and repost them (do your math first to ensure you don’t lose out on deposits). Also, look for items that are on AH for LESS than the vendor pays. Buy those up and go vend em. Idiots constantly put trade items up less than vendors pay, so in effect they are missing out on money; even if they put it up for vendor price, they lose due to deposits (though dont buy these because there is no profit for you). Even if I make 2 copper, I buy out this sort of thing all the time…worth a walk from AH to vendor…hehe
Good luck
(PS cosmos addon will tell you vendor prices when you hover over items)
Only problem i see with this mod is that once it becomes more popular, and alot of people on the server have it, the prices of certain materials will fluctuate like crazy. Look at it this way, everyone with this mod will see pretty much the same screen with the same prices etc. They’ll see where profits are to be made and adjust their prices accordingly thus meaning that raw mats will become more expensive or finished products be cheaper.
And because the AH is being played/manipulated 24/7, you could very well end up buying out the raw mats to make something which originally sold at 100g and ending up selling it for 60g or there abouts because other people can see what you’ve done.
When Auctioneer was released we faced the same problem. if everyone caught onto it surely the profits we made from it would decrease vastly. The addon got made public after a while, later followed by free guides on how to use it. However, although profits decreased, they didn’t decrease by much.
The smaller the amount of people use this addon the better, but when it comes to it the majority of people, most won’t acctually use it. This is largely due to it requiring regular auctioneer scans. Very few people with the addon acctually bother to scan, which helps us who use these addons to their maximum potential.
However it plays out, it’s definately worth getting the most out of it right away. If it lasts well into lich then all the better!
I will have to take advantage of this. I don’t recall ever seeing this addon before. thanks for sharing
For what it’s worth…
When I first read about Auctioneer, I made a level 2 character on another realm with only 10s that I collected on the way to the Silvermoon AH. I collected data for about a week and then started to “play” the market. After only three weeks or so, I gave up and considered it to be a win because I had collected over 500g even though I never played that account except to do AH transactions. It was a sort of mini-game that I would play every day after I was done on my real realm.
With only 3,000 people using this mod out of 11 million players, I think we still have a chance at a pretty good run and are not likely to see any big changes at the AH.
Arty makes a good point – tons of people use Auctioneer, yet it is still the very best way to profit from the AH. Not many people use it to the best advantage, so those of us in the know continue to make big gold.
People here at DYS rely on Gavin to give the very best tips, and this is certainly one of them. We might not want the entire WoW universe to know about LSW, but a couple thousand DYS folks using it won’t hurt us at all.
woot. thanks for the review!
yeah, i wrote this a while ago. the idea hit me when i first got my spider silk boots pattern and wondered just how much money it took to make em vs what i could sell em for. there’s another mod that tallies up reagent costs (fizwidgets reagentcost) but it doesn’t include any info about how much an item my sell for or what its de value might be. and it’s not presented in a table form for quick reference which is really the whole point of this mod.
i honestly don’t know why more folks don’t use it. maybe it doesn’t click for how it might be useful. even if something isn’t particularly lucrative, you can still quickly determine which skills make the most sense to use to level up a trade.
i’ll be interested to see how the d/l totals move after folks read this. i hope they aren’t turned off by the “out of date” .toc file, but there was no reason to modify it just to modify it — the mod works fine as is.
thanks again and enjoy!
lilsparky
See…I snooze, I lose. I made a video about this a while back and it’s just been sitting on my hard drive.
Additionally, anyone who doesn’t have an enchanter that can DE max level items is missing out on some serious gold making.
Bottom line though, this works and Gavin beat me too it.
-Luke
Gold-Secrets.com
And this is the first time i’ve actually appreciated that im a Tailor/enchanter! WOOOOT!
I just read this and thought (my enlish is good but spelling terrible) “WoW… I’m gonna get that AddOn right now!” I’m a total NOOB at making money, I mean, I’m lvl (and it took me 6 months to make it there) 45 and have like 63g and no mount and when the lvl for a mount was redused to lvl 30 I just felt so embarresed, like the biggest noob in all of Azeroth. I’m a bit new to these tips so I was wondering if you could send a new guide on the Auctioneer for us noobs out the who dont have one?
Oh, and for all of you who want to tell me how much I suck and all that, feel free to write all you want, I’ll just go cut myself… (that was a joke, I’m not emo (although I do listem to nightwish))
Gavin -Man, I love ya!!!! Warcraft is far more than a game, it’s a pasttime. By giving helpful hints like this, you make this pasttime so much more dynamic and enjoyable – thanks for all you do, and keep ‘em coming!!
I downloaded the addon and set it up, but it says it’s out of date.
Read the post above by the mod author. Even though it says it’s out of date, there was no nee to update the .toc file for the mod just for the heck of it. You’ll just have to set your UI to load out of date mods, it won’t hurt anything and the mod works just fine.
Ok so how do I set my UI to load out of date mods?.
Chad, You can load your out of date mods after you sign in and on your character screen. Down on the left bottom, will be the words ‘Add-Ons’….. Click on it. It brings up all the add-ons that you have downloaded. Up top, I believe, is where it says – Load out of date mods….. Hope this helps you.
Anyone know if this works on MACINTOSH? I use cosmos with no problem. Many mods are fine for both…but not all. For example, I can’t find a threat meter for my warrior that works on Mac. Auctioneer doesn’t seem to work either, probably because it uses a .exe file to do the calculations (i think, its been a while, but i seem to recall that was the problem…
Mac people, let me know pleeeeeeease (I <3 the AH, and I think Gavin is great. Never vend unless you absolutely can’t sell…)
just about every mod should work on a mac, there is almost no difference between the folders of WoW than there is with PC.
I have this mod myself and with Auctioneer and other mods such as X-Perl, they all work fine on mac
worldofwarcraft>interface>addons>yourmodhere
very nice addon, it’s great for crafting professions. Love the enchant price it offer!
I have PriceEach, which also show the vendor price when point to an item, but not in profession list.
Just last night I was thinking about switching out of tailoring and starting up jewelcrafting. Now I don’t think I should. Right now I’m Tailoring/Enchanting, not max level in either but high enough to DE highest level items and such. Any advise on what I should do? I’m definetly keeping enchanting but should I ditch tailoring for jewelcrafting or not?
It depends how far down the tree you are. JC IS profitable…but if you are below, say 100, then go ahead and dump it if you really want. Otherwise, make an alt. You can get pretty far without leveling up (i think 150 or so) but make it a class you like so when you must level up, you won’t cry. I have multiple alts, and try not to overlap (except skinning or mining which are profit makers on their own). For example, I have master of elixirs, (w/ herb), a hi level enchanter/skinner, an engineer/miner, etc.
You should know that because everyone finds enchanting profitable, recipies are ridiculously expensive, as are materials on AH. And once you have an enchanter, count on Disenchanting a lot of nice stuff that would otherwise get you decent money on AH. You will learn which things not to DE (like leather items that are “of the monkey” for example) because they are good for a particular class. Soulbound quest rewards are almost always DE items. GL
Very nice piece of advice. Thanks for throwing this out to us Gav and kudos to lilsparky for writing such a jam up mod.
I started playing around with this mod the other day after reading this post.. i only had around 1200g to start with and have already made over 1000g profit in 2 days… Definately worth it. No more Dailies hoo rah
FoT- its HooYah (navy), HooWa(no clue how the Army spells that) or Ooh Rah (my personal choice
)… just throwin’ that out there… 
Grats on the profits
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
now everyone knows :”(
owell
Im an avid player of the AH i’ll DL this to see what its like looks like a good one Gav, oh and if noone noticed from Gavin’s screenies, the number on the left of the item is color coded common/uncommon/rare/epic or thats what im getting from it anyways. I use ATSW so i already went through and sifted out blues, set, epics. i hope it works with atsw but i can already see a line 23 error comming my way on that. so ill use 1 or the other but still very nice looking addon. all these posts should now be deleted and theis addon no longer available for DL
lol
Okay, downloaded Lil’Sparky – but there are other add-on’s required. Started with (or tried to start with) Advanced Auctioneer. Spent way too much time being sent in circles by various URLs and ended up with… nothing. Do you have a good URL from which to download the additional required add-ons?
Thanks!!
Yes a package would be amazing!
OK, we’re not going to mess with making a bundle up and hosting it and then having to check when all of them update, but it’s really not super hard to get what you need.
This only requires two things really – Auctioneer and a vendor price mod. Auctioneer can he gotten at http://auctioneeraddon.com/dl/#preview (this is the newest version and will be compatible with patch 3.0 but not before, use the last version if you install now and update on tuesday while the patch is being installed)
Then for a vendor price mod get valuation at the same place you got LilSparkys – done, easy peasy.
Now, for better functionality it needs enchantrix, but that comes with Auctioneer so no biggie there. I also use it with advanced trade skill window which is also at the same site you got lilsparkys.
Does that do it for you?
anyone else have a problem downloading this mod i could never get it to download got any tips?
Odd, I tried it again after I saw your comment and it downloaded in like 3 seconds. I would imagine you have something blocking it in your browser or something.
I haven’t been able to test yet, does this work in 3.0.2?
It doesn’t seem to work with the new patch. My auctioneer ADV is okay, a little buggy at times but functional. Not sure why LS doesn’t work yet…it may need an update for the patch as well.
Hey – Agreed ere – Lil Sparky’s doesn’t work in 3.0.2 – Auc Advanced latest patch is good, but it’s all a bit tricky without Lil… Is there any alternative tool to this excellent piece of work?
the tradeskill api has changed somewhat, but it shouldn’t be too hard to fix things. expect that a new version will be available before too long.
thanks lilsparky … anxiously awaiting new version
Well , I down loaded the add on and I’m starting to catch on:) (duh) but what I don’t see is the queue and the shoppin list. Am I missing something>? I see the bright yellow numbers of what it could sell for and mats cost. Dont want to sound stupid but the bright selling number, does that repesent those items that HAVe sold for that price or just might sell? Our AH on ourr server stinks..
lsw only gives you price information. the shopping list stuff comes from whatever tradeskill mod you’re using. i think the original article paired up with Advanced Tradeskill Window, tho i prefer Skillet myself. both of those provide shopping lists and crafting queues.
ty:)
@applejack:
It’s probably like several other alt-inventory/equipment viewing mods out there. You probably have to log into each toon and open up all the bags, character panels, tradeskill windows, bank bags, etc. for a second or two so the mod can record what each toon has.
Thnx very much that worked!! unfortunately on my low pop server , (I have every profession) I can make the items problem is having the people to buy them. Seems outland gear ect they just wont buy.:((…btw..whats aadv?