Small Item, Big Prices

As you know, we never cease to be amazed at what people will spend to save themselves a little work.  Actually we expect it to some degree, our entire gold making fortune is based on it in a way, but some things are simply ridiculous – even by our standards.

From an economics standpoint it is perfectly reasonable to expect a Nobles deck to cost more than 2,000 gold.  As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t yell if it was closer to 4,500 gold since that is about how much you would have to spend in mats to guarantee you got all the cards based on the percentages of the whole process.  A guildie and I ran the numbers one day – it was ridiculous.  So a price of 2,000+ is a bargain over trying to make it yourself.

Other things – not so much.  I am still flabergasted every week by the sheer volume of enchanting mats i sell.  and not just me, everyone who has Gavin’s Auction House Mastery Guide in our guild – about 10 of us, just cannot seem to saturate demand.  It’s ridiculous that a bunch of enchanters, who can all DE just like us, still go buy all that stuff from the AH.  But we smile and take their gold anyway.

But the Damaged Necklace has to take the cake in the too lazy department.  While rare, which normally points to high value, the benefit is pretty lame.  A soggy booger in your burger would be rare too, but I don’t see people lining up to pay big bucks for it.  As a matter of fact that’s normally grounds for the dracula lawsuit to kick in.

The quest you get from the Damaged Necklace is called Necklace Repair and rewards you with 1 Dalaran Jewelcrafter’s Token which are used as Currency For These Recipes.  Of course, you also get the tokens from the Jewelcrafting dailies.  The weird thing is that the dailies are much easier to do and reward a token as well.

The drop items you need for the JC dailies are most often a 13% drop rate which means you’ll get 1 out of about every 9 mobs you kill or so.  Look the things up on WoWhead and you’re pretty much guaranteed to spend no more than 10 minutes getting what you need.

But the drop rate for the Damaged Necklace?  Never more than .2%!  One drop maybe out of every 500 mobs.  And the .2% drop rate is only from elite mobs, with ONE exception.  Everything else that can drop the thing has a rate of .1% and down.  It’s that one exception we want to talk about.

Now, I’m not a big fan of farming, I really never do it.  But if you are bored you just might want to give a certain mob in a very out of the way place a shot.  You see, the thing about those Damaged Necklaces is that on our server they will sell almost instantly for 450 gold.  Dang – 4500 gold to get the equivalent of an extra JC daily.  It’s dumb, but it’s a fact.  The global market price is around 600 gold as well, meaning you should be able to expect about the same no matter where you are.  (bloodsucking lawyer disclaimer about results not typical and your own risk blah, blah, blah…)

So when I look at this, I want to know if I can do this and still make about 500-1000 gold an hour.  Of course, there is no farming place around that can net you that kind of cash unless the price for titanium is still through the roof on your server and NO ONE else farms for it.  Other than that you’re pretty much screwed if 500gph is a goal.  250-300, sure, but that’s not worth my time.  500 is the bare minimum.

So I figure that if my poor little tree form druid can kill a level 75 mob in like 20 seconds, I could probably do it in 8-10 as a chicken or something with some teeth.  (Chickens don’t actually HAVE teeth, but you know what I mean).  That means I could kill around 7 mobs a minute, or 420 an hour.  400 mobs an hour on a .2% drop rate means I should reasonably expect that rare drop about every hour and a bit I spend.

And don’t yell nub about the 20 seconds.  I’m being reasonable and conservative and also taking into account the time it takes to loot and run to the next mob, pick an herb from time to time and chat with guildies while I kill.  In other words, being realistic about this whole deal.

So your secret farming mob for the month?  The Mam’toth Disciple in Zul Drak.  Now, the cool thing about these guys is that there is simply no reason for anyone to be killing them unless they are doing the stomp the undead trolls with the mammoth quest (no I’m not going to look it up).  So no one is ever really there.

I flew out there for a little test run and found that there are generally about 35 of these guys around 72.8,41.9 in Zul Drak .  If you don’t have map coords they are near the place behind the deal on the thing where you went that one time.  The respawn rate seems to be about 7 minutes, so it’s unlikely you would kill them all and have to sit around waiting for more.

In 90 minutes (in a non-DPS spec) I waxxed 275 of these guys to collect 1 Damaged Necklace (woot lucky), loot 90 gold from corpses, get 5 1/2 stacks of Frostweave, a few herbs, 63 Chunk-o-Mammoth,  BoE Greens and various other goop, and vendor trash that sold for 75g.  Total for the hour and a half  =597 in various loot + 450 for the necklace – 1044g (divide by 3, multiply times 2, sigh the math) 696 gold per hour.

So it meets my standard of more than 500g an hour.  That probably doesn’t mean I will do it regularly, but you are certainly welcome to do so yourself from time to time.  Without the lucky necklace drop it would have been 571 gold total, or 380 gold per hour.  Not horrid, but not as good as the AH.

So I got suspicious about them and took a gander at the Ally side, and the price over there was 250g.  So I would still much rather SPEND the 250 and then use up only 10 minutes of my time fencing it through the neutral AH and make 200g for 10 minutes worth of work.

Now for some of you, 380 gold per hour for a relatively poor farming location might seem ok.  I’ve got an eevn better one for you in a couple of days that doesn’t depend on the rare drop part.  So if you must farm mobs these guys aren’t too bad.  Just remember, I made more money SELLING 3 necklaces from the Ally side to the Horde guys than I did from the 1 necklace I farmed myself.  So for my money working the AH the right way is WAY more Dominant than farming, but as far as farming goes, there is better and there is worse, this one seems to play out as better.