One of the biggest secret money-makers in WoW is wool. It’s weird that everyone seems to know that wool always costs about as much or more than silk, everyone needs it to level up first aid, but no one seems to know why. Well you’re about to find out, and how to cash in as a low level toon or even farm a bit from time to time on your main.

Wool is expensive because it’s one of the harder cloths to get in the whole game. It’s actually surprising it doesn’t sell for more than Runecloth, since it actually drops a lot less often. To explain why, let’s look at the levels cloth drops from mobs.

Analyzing the chart shows us why wool is so hard to get. Although all cloths drop for about 20 levels, take a look at the 30% drop rates. When we look at the levels of mobs that drop the individual cloth at a 30% chance, we can see that you only have at least a 30% chance to get wool for a mere 5 levels. Another interesting fact is that for the two highest level cloths Runecloth and Netherweave, about 90% of the mobs that drop these cloths do so at a 30% or higher rate. This means it’s much easier to collect Runecloth than it is to get wool.

Wool is even more difficult to farm for Horde characters than Alliance since the best drop rates are in the Deadmines and the Stockades. Since you would have a really hard time getting into the stockades instance in the middle of Stormwind, which leaves Horde toons with only one really good farming run and that in contested territory.

You may get your hands on a ton of silk, and it sells well, but it is just as profitable to run for wool. The best spot is definitely the Deadmines. But you can also grind through the Foulweald Furbolgs in Ashenvale forest. The Furbolgs are easy to get to for both Horde and Alliance and drop enough wool to get about 5 stacks an hour if you can kill them fast enough.

Also watch the wool prices on the AH. If someone is selling too low, be sure to scoop it up and repost it for sale at high market value.

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16 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Amazon.com has made a fortune reselling books. You can have your own little version of this in WoW and make some serious money on a regular basis. There are several types of books every player needs, and they are all in odd places to purchase.

For twinked toons, it can be particularly frustrating to be leveling up and need to train the next level and it’s just too difficult and time consuming to run all the way across the world to buy one. Enter you and your careful planning. You keep a mental list of where these books are sold and grab a few whenever you’re in the right area. Post them on the AH for a tidy profit, and you’ve got yourself a nice little business for virtually no effort whatsoever.

First Aid - everyone trains first aid, and first aid books will always sell on the AH. Here’s where you get them:

Heavy Silk Bandage, Mageweave Bandage, Expert First Aid
Alliance - Deneb Walker in Stromgard Keep, Arathi Highlands
Horde - Balai Lok’Wein in Brackenwall Village, Dustwallow Marsh

Netherweave Bandage, Heavy Netherweave Bandage, Master First Aid
Alliance - Burko in Temple of Telhamat, Hellfire Peninsula
Horde - Arasella in Falcon Watch, Hellfire Peninsula

Fishing - The fishing books are pretty easy to get, although you won’t sell as many. Most people don’t take the time to level fishing all the way, but it’s hard to find the vendors for these books if you don’t know where to look. For both Alliance and Horde you buy the books from:

Expert Fishing - Old Man Hemming on the lowest level in Booty Bay, Stranglethorn Vale
Master Fishing - Juno Dufrain just SW of Cenarion Refuge, Zangaramarsh.

Cooking - Cooking is another skill a lot of people ignore, but the first book can be a real pain to get. These will sell a little better than the fishing books, but not quite as fast as the First Aid books. However, since they are more rare on the AH, you can normally make more money off each one by marking them up more than you might be able to with first aid.

Expert Cookbook
Alliance - Shandrina in Silverwind Refuge, Ashenvale
Horde - Wulan in Shadowprey Village, Desolace

Master Cookbook
Alliance - Gaston in Honor Hold, Hellfire Peninsula
Horde - Baxter in Thrallmar, Hellfire Peninsula
Kalaen in Thrallmar, Hellfire Peninsula
BOTH - Naka in Cenarion Refuge, Zangaramarsh
Lethyn Moonfire in Cenarion Refuge, Zangaramarsh

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3 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

We’re going to combine a bit of economic theory with a bit of aggressiveness and show you how to work the auction house no matter what level you are. If you learn to play in the World of Warcraft sand box, you’ll be able to do it forever because even the pros work the same way on all the realms. The complexity increases a bit, along with the gold piles.

The WoW auction house is a closed economy. There is never an influx of completely new product to throw things into a loop except when there is a major patch or expansion release. Even when those events occur, you should be able to flow into the new items with ease. So the things that work today are probably going to work a year from now. Items will rise and fall a bit in value, but rarely completely fall out of favor.

There are three ways to make extra gold in the WoW economy just by using the AH and trade channels properly. Those three avenues are expertise, wholesale, and speculation. Expertise is the least risky, and speculation the most.

Expertise means you know something about a small variety (or a large segment) of items and what they should be worth right now. Here’s how we use it. I used to go farm small brilliant shards from Herod in SM armory. At level 65 I could run all the way to his room and hardly ever draw aggro. Before the 5 instances an hour nerf, I could do this about every 6-8 minutes. I would go a couple of times a week for a few hours.

It’s how I bought my first epic mount - small brilliant shards. I knew that every single one I got would sell for 6 gold 75 silver. I was in the chat channel one day and some dude was advertising small brilliant shards. I asked him how many he had - he said how many do you want? I told him - all of them - at the right price. I ended up buying 48 of them for 200 gold, that’s just a touch over 4 gold 11 silver each. I sold every single one of them that week for 324 gold, a profit of 125 gold for basically nothing.

The last example had a bit of a wholesale touch to it. If you know what something should be worth, but can buy a whole big bunch of it cheaper and then trickle it into the market with some patience, you can make a decent profit at it. I’ve got a few guys who send me every scrap of cloth they farm because I will buy every single piece for a set price that’s about 80% of market value. I get a 20% profit, they never have to work the ah.

Speculation can be risky because it can take some serious dough, and it might not work at all. If you are going to speculate on green items or above, I highly recommend being an enchanter as well, so at least you can cover most of your losses by disenchanting and selling the mats. Speculation involves situations where you suspect demand is going to rise, and beating the market to the price increase by buying something while the price is still low, and then releasing it when the price goes up. A great example of this was when Shaman got dual-wielding. When this news came out, I spent a few weeks buying up all the one handed axes lvl 40 and above at the ah and held them all until patch day. Prices went up like nuts as all the Shaman went to the AH to get shiny new one-handed axes and I made a killing.

The chances that will present themselves for serious speculation are few and far between in a closed economy. Also note that because the economy is closed, the market will correct itself pretty rapidly. I tend to go more with the expertise end of the scale and stick with what I know.

There is one thing you absolutely must do when it comes to the ah. I had heard it before, but stubbornly refused to put hundreds of gold in my pocket by ignoring this one point. Buy during the week, sell on weekends. Prices on many realms rise by as much as 25% from Friday noon to Sunday late night. But gold farmers work all week long. They hedge themselves by dealing mainly in bulk. You can normally buy the simplest things like silk cloth on Tuesday for as low as 40 silver a stack and then turn around and sell the same stack on Saturday for 70 silver or more. That’s almost 100% profit in 4 days. If Wall Street had anything like this they would be falling all over themselves to get to it.

So start small, and get to know a few things very well. Buy low, sell high, when in doubt disenchant and sell the mats. That’s the AH in a nutshell. I highly recommend having one toon that does nothing but banking and AH for you - that way you can concentrate on the AH when you are there, and on questing when you are questing. Watch how the prices rise and fall on your server for a few weeks for a few consumables, and then test those trends yourself for a week or two. Then you can get busy making some real gold. Of course, all of this is much easier if you use auctioneer, but that’s a topic for another time.

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Enchanting can be a very lucrative career profession. The only thing I hate about it is standing around in a major city spamming the trade channels with: level 345 ‘chanter LFW can do [some enchant] [another enchant] blah, blah, blah. Only to have to get into a 2 minute conversation with everybody anyway about every one of the 40 or 50 enchants I can or cannot do and what the mat price is and what I charge for it. It can really be a hassle. But you can still make a TON of gold with enchanting and never enchant anything but your own gear.

Just like fishing and cooking are great for new toons and making bags is perfect for the mid-level characters, there’s just no beating enchanting for making the big bucks for your epic and flying mounts. Questing in outlands will land you the most amazing greens, and I would personally swear that they drop twice as often as in Azeroth. Most of these greens are better than the level 60 dungeon gear from before the Burning Crusade patch. However, because of the stats most people need on their items, about 25% of these drops are completely worthless. I mean you can’t sell them in the auction house at all. You can’t even give them away. So the greens in outlands can be pretty hit-or-miss. They will either leave you agonizing over whether to equip it, sell it at the ah, or vendor it away.

Don’t worry about that if you have enchanting. The great thing about this technique is that you don’t have to mess around with maxing out your enchanting skill to make money at it. At skill level 275 you can disenchant nearly anything you would ever want to. The blues which might require a higher level enchanting skill to disenchant you don’t have to worry about either. Almost every party will have at least one other enchanter, if there is a roll everyone passes on, just let the guy who spent 2000 gold getting his enchanting to 375 disenchant it and then everyone can roll on the shard instead of the item.

So you can do this without having to spend a ton of money leveling up your skill. The greatest thing about disenchanting items for money is that there are NO auction deposits for enchanting mats. Which means you can go for the highest price possible and re-list them all 100 times if necessary to get the very maximum price. On top of that, the amount of materials needed to get even one skill point in enchanting past 325 is insane. So the materials are in high demand no matter what your server. Plus, at the level of the people buying these materials, money has usually ceased to be a big deal, because you can easily earn 100 gold just off of trash items in a few hours grinding.

So when you begin dreaming about that flying mount - you might go retrain in enchanting and spend a couple hundred gold getting it leveled up. After about three weeks of casual questing in outlands, I was able to disenchant enough mats to sell the whole pile on AH for well over 1,500 gold, enough for my flying mount and a riding crop to boot on one of my alts. So whether you are farming, questing or raiding, enchanting is one way to make some serious dough without having to advertise. Next, our favorite farming spot.

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19 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

How would you like to spend under 6 silver, and make 15, 25, even 50 gold within a few hours later?

If you’ve been getting my email alerts for any length of time, you already know that I love selling things to twinks. Twinks go ga-ga over every last possible point of agility or intellect, and invest tons of gold into their twink characters.

Well, what we have here is the only +agility bow/gun/thrown weapon that a twink 19 rogue can get. Everyone who’s building a 19 twink rogue will simply have to have it, and will be willing to pay lots of gold for those two little points of agility.

There are a number of factors that make this item so special.

• These are only available from a single vendor, who is only friendly to Horde (sorry Alliance guys!)
• They only spawn in the vendor’s inventory occasionally… perhaps once per day
• Another item (nice, but less desirable) frequently spawns in its place

The vendor is question is Eralan, the poison vendor in Tranquillien (in the Ghostlands.) Based on our tests (this is not definitive), it looks like Eralan spawns a special item for sale about every 4 hours. 75% of the time, that special item will be the Sinister Scimitar. The other 25% of the time, she will spawn Throat Piercers.

If she spawns a Sinister Scimitar, then someone will have to buy it. Once it’s been bought, she should spawn a new special item for sale within 4 hours.

As you can see from the auction house info from Allakhazam.com, the average selling price across all servers is over 33 gold, with a median and most frequent selling price of 20 gold.

Make yourself a Blood Elf alt toon, and run him to Tranquillien. Make a habit of logging in and checking Eralan for this item as often as possible, and whenever you find it, email it to your bank alt, and make yourself some easy gold.

And don’t disregard the Sinister Scimitar. It’s not half bad, and still can fetch 5 to 7 gold on the auction house:

The easiest thing to do is to just sell it on the Horde auction house, but if you really want to maximize your gold, you’ll want two accounts (on a PvP server), or an Alliance accomplice to get the item from the Horde side to the Alliance side. Since they are so rare in the Alliance auction house, you’ll want to make sure to spam trade chat to let everyone know that they are available.

Have fun selling twink gear… it’s a techinque we use quite a bit to Dominate Our Server.

-Gavin

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34 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

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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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

If you already have some gold to use as a seed investment, buy out all the items of a particular type from the auction house, and then relist them at higher prices.

The best items to corner the market with are trade supplies. Find something in high demand (you can use Auctioneer for this) and buy all of them that are available. Then, relist them a few at a time (if you relist too many at once, you’ll be competing with yourself, and you’ll clue everyone else in to what you are doing).

I routinely do this with illusion dust, small brilliant shards, large glimmering shards, and arcane crystals.

The only drawback to this method is that, in order to be as effective as possible, you need to hang out at the auction house to buy out anyone that tries to come in and undercut you.

However, if you’re starting with a large enough bankroll, you can easily make 30 gold per hour doing nothing.

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If you’re going to be playing the auction house, timing is everything. Buy items on weekdays (during the day, if possible) and sell them on the weekends. Prices tend to go down during the week (when there are fewer people playing, and therefore less demand), and rise over the weekend (when most people play.)

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