Powerleveling Fishing from 1-450

Powerleveling Cooking 1-450

This guide has survived four years and soon to be 3 expansions. It’s a combination of fishing and cooking together as we mentioned in our previous article: Cooking & Fishing, Leveling them together.

Now, to be completely honest, you don’t need to level fishing for cooking. You can go grind little bits of meat and parts off of mobs forever but getting the mats with fishing is so much easier and lets you get your fishing skill up to 450 as well. Besides that, it’s pretty nice to be able to make your own fish feasts from scratch.

1 – 50: Brilliant Smallfish = 80. Mats (1 Raw Brilliant Smallfish)

• 80 Raw Brilliant Smallfish
• Fishing Holes

51 – 100: Longjaw Mudsnapper = 80. Mats (1 Raw Longjaw Mudsnapper)

• 80 Raw Longjaw Mudsnapper
• Fishing Holes

101 – 175: Bristle Whisker Catfish = 120. Mats (1 Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish)

• 120 Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish
• Fishing Holes

175 – 225: Rockscale Cod = 80. Mats (1 Raw Rockscale Cod)

• 80 Raw Rockscale Cod
• Fishing Holes

226 – 275: Spotted Yellowtail = 80. Mats (1 Raw Spotted Yellowtail)

• 80 Raw Spotted Yellowtail
• Fishing Holes

276 – 325: Your Choice – or combination of the following = 80.

• Mightfish Steak. Mats (1 Large Raw Mightfish, 1 Hot Spices, 1 Soothing Spices)
• Mightfish Fishing Holes
• Baked Salmon. Mats (1 Raw Whitescale Salmon, 1 Soothing Spices)
• Salmon Fishing Holes

326 – 350: Golden Fish Sticks = 40. Mats (1 Golden Darter)

• 40 Golden Darter
• Fishing Holes

At this point the recipes come from the trainer directly or from purchases with Dalaran Cooking Awards from doing the cooking dailies.  As with any profession, it is much easier to do all of this at level 80.  You’ll have to do the cooking dailies regularly to complete the rest of this guide, but that’s not the fault of the guide, the game just requires it.

351 – 375: Baked Manta Ray = 60. Mats (1 Imperial Manta Ray)

• 60 Imperial Manta Ray
• Fishing Holes

Here’s where you’ll actually have to use some beast meat for a little while.  The mats are normally to be had on the AH, so you don’t have to go farm all of it yourself, but if you’re cheap you can look each one up and go get them yourself.

376 – 400: Great Feast = 40. Mats (1 Chunk o’ Mammoth, 1 Shoveltusk Flank, 1 Worm Meat, 2 Chilled Meat)

• 20 Chunk o’ Mammoth
• 20 Shoveltusk Flank
• 20 Worm Meat
• 40 Chilled Meat

401 – 420: Anything else, although Spicy Blue Nettlefish sells fairly well.

421 – 450: At level 420 you can cook all of the other recipes in the game except for fish feast.  We recommend Dragonfin Filet using Dragonfin Angelfish as we cover in this post: Fishing For Gold.  Dragonfin Filet and any of the other recipes you buy with the cooking awards will take you all the way to 450, where you can make the premier buff food in the game – Fish Feast.

It’s then that all your Dominating work will make you the most popular cook around.  Everyone loves a fish feast, and you can make serious coin cooking up any of the foods you grab the recipes for.  We highly recommend doing the cooking daily every day.  It will maximize your buffs, and your gold earnings – especially if you can dominate it with more than one toon.

Now, even though leveling fishing doesn’t require running all over the place any more, it’s still a pain in the tookus.  It might actually take longer.  It’s easier, but a larger time sink.  After about level 225 it’s 10 casts per skill-up and that means it will take you around 4-6 hours if you did nothing but fish.

We’ve also got a great little tip for how to get those last few skill points in cooking in the Leveling Cooking Tip post, as well as a nifty mod that makes getting all your recipes for cooking or any other skill a whole lot easier in the post Finding Recipes Made Easy.

This little guide should make the prospect of getting to those dailies on alts a bit less daunting.  So grab a pole and a pan and get to work!  Soon you’ll be cashing in, just like we do.

Powerleveling Fishing from 1-450

This guide has survived four years and soon to be 3 expansions. It’s a combination of fishing and cooking together as we mentioned in our previous article: Cooking & Fishing, Leveling them together.

Now, to be completely honest, you don’t need to level fishing this way. You can stand your toon of any level in Dalaran at the fountain and go all the way from 1-450 if you like. But as long as you are at it, why not get your cooking up to 450 as well? Besides that, fishing is pretty dull and moving around a bit to catch different types of fish can break the monotony to some degree.

1 – 50: Brilliant Smallfish = 80. Mats (1 Raw Brilliant Smallfish)

• 80 Raw Brilliant Smallfish
• Fishing Holes

51 – 100: Longjaw Mudsnapper = 80. Mats (1 Raw Longjaw Mudsnapper)

• 80 Raw Longjaw Mudsnapper
• Fishing Holes

101 – 175: Bristle Whisker Catfish = 120. Mats (1 Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish)

• 120 Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish
• Fishing Holes

175 – 225: Rockscale Cod = 80. Mats (1 Raw Rockscale Cod)

• 80 Raw Rockscale Cod
• Fishing Holes

226 – 275: Spotted Yellowtail = 80. Mats (1 Raw Spotted Yellowtail)

• 80 Raw Spotted Yellowtail
• Fishing Holes

276 – 325: Your Choice – or combination of the following = 80.

• Mightfish Steak. Mats (1 Large Raw Mightfish, 1 Hot Spices, 1 Soothing Spices)
• Mightfish Fishing Holes
• Baked Salmon. Mats (1 Raw Whitescale Salmon, 1 Soothing Spices)
• Salmon Fishing Holes

326 – 350: Golden Fish Sticks = 40. Mats (1 Golden Darter)

• 40 Golden Darter
• Fishing Holes

At this point the recipes come from the trainer directly or from purchases with Dalaran Cooking Awards from doing the cooking dailies.  As with any profession, it is much easier to do all of this at level 80.  You’ll have to do the cooking dailies regularly to complete the rest of this guide, but that’s not the fault of the guide, the game just requires it.

351 – 375: Baked Manta Ray = 60. Mats (1 Imperial Manta Ray)

• 60 Imperial Manta Ray
• Fishing Holes

Here’s where you’ll actually have to use some beast meat for a little while.  The mats are normally to be had on the AH, so you don’t have to go farm all of it yourself, but if you’re cheap you can look each one up and go get them yourself.

376 – 400: Great Feast = 40. Mats (1 Chunk o’ Mammoth, 1 Shoveltusk Flank, 1 Worm Meat, 2 Chilled Meat)

• 20 Chunk o’ Mammoth
• 20 Shoveltusk Flank
• 20 Worm Meat
• 40 Chilled Meat

401 – 420: Anything else, although Spicy Blue Nettlefish sells fairly well.

421 – 450: At level 420 you can cook all of the other recipes in the game except for fish feast.  We recommend Dragonfin Filet using Dragonfin Angelfish as we cover in this post: Fishing For Gold.  Dragonfin Filet and any of the other recipes you buy with the cooking awards will take you all the way to 450, where you can make the premier buff food in the game – Fish Feast.

It’s then that all your Dominating work will make you the most popular cook around.  Everyone loves a fish feast, and you can make serious coin cooking up any of the foods you grab the recipes for.  We highly recommend doing the cooking daily every day.  It will maximize your buffs, and your gold earnings – especially if you can dominate it with more than one toon.

Now, even though leveling fishing doesn’t require running all over the place any more, it’s still a pain in the tookus.  It might actually take longer.  It’s easier, but a larger time sink.  After about level 225 it’s 10 casts per skill-up and that means it will take you around 4-6 hours if you did nothing but fish.

We’ve also got a great little tip for how to get those last few skill points in cooking in the Leveling Cooking Tip post, as well as a nifty mod that makes getting all your recipes for cooking or any other skill a whole lot easier in the post Finding Recipes Made Easy.

This little guide should make the prospect of getting to those dailies on alts a bit less daunting.  So grab a pole and a pan and get to work!  Soon you’ll be cashing in, just like we do.

How To Power Level Jewelcrafting

Now that we are well on our way here at DYS to getting you the best builds for all the classes, it’s high time we jumped up and became your go-to source for professions as well.  We’ll start it off with our Jewelcrafting Guide.  We’ll do the best we can to get all of the professions up in short order, including the secondary professions such as first aid and herbalism.

Dominate Your Server Jewelcrafting Guide

Just use the link above to go directly to the complete jewelcrafting powerleveling guide.  The rest of this article will discuss the ins and outs of leveling jewelcrafting as an overview.  We just might be able to save you a lot of time, gold and headaches if you’ll flow through this bit first.

Leveling JC is something Law will probably never do again, which means at least not for a few more weeks.  It still irks me to no end that about the only way to level the dang thing without spending what amounts to a small fortune is to farm your way through it – YUCK BOMB!  That’s right, the only way you can reasonably spend less than a huge pile of gold on mats for this is if you have a miner and a whole lot of hours to kill.

I prefer to use other people’s hours, that’s what the AH is for.  So I suppose if you are also patient you can just meander along through the leveling Jewelcrafting process as you find good deals for what you need, but I’m not that patient.  Rich and impatient means that I leveled JC from 1-450 in about 6 hours.  Not all in one sitting, of course.  It took a few days when there just wasn’t a single truesilver bar left on the entire AH and I had to wait for someone else to go get them for me.

But in the end I’m pretty happy with having chosen jewelcrafting for my shaman.  I had already done Blacksmithing and dropped Inscription for JC – for the buffs.  Sure, the shoulder enchant is awesome, but the JC only gems are even better – plus two extra sockets to shove more stats into from BS.  For  a lot of classes it’s really hard to beat the BC/JC combo for min/max.  It would be almost as good on my Mage as Enchanting/Tailoring, though not by much.

Anyway the first reason you should consider JC is the same reason we always recommend you choose a profession – because it helps your toon do whatever it is you like most.  PvP guys like engineering, but it’s pretty much novelty stuff in Raids (yes I know that repair bots can be handy but honstly there is a repair guy or three inside ICC).  While you will find tanks with mining skill for the buff, there are other professions with better buffs.  In other words, Gathering professions just don’t help your toon all that much for the most part, at least, not enough to do them on a main.

Lawbringer Has one toon for all of the professions (even though I skip gathering for the most part), which means that I make everything I need on all my toons.  One man show.  Flasks, threads, gems, chants, I never buy crafted anything – buy the mats cheap and make it my dang self.  And in that way Jewelcrafting has been the awesome of the bunch.

It’s hard to imagine living without jewelcrafting and enchanting, with alchemy coming in a close 3rd place.  One toon has fishing and cooking maxxed and there is a tailor and leatherworker in the mix to deal with the leg enchants.  But being able to cut your own gems is awesome.  You don’t have to ask if “anyone has the +12 to nub / +10 geek gem, you just keep up your dailies and go get it.

Now, JC is NOT my favorite thing to use for making gold, although you will see in this thread that there are people who swear by it.  It feels more risky to me since there is such a high cost of entry to the market as a seller and the ongoing costs (in the form of auction house deposits) can absolutely kill your margin.  But I do have a few pet gems that I keep up on the AH at all times – on our server the PvP Meta gems are a good, consistent sellers.

When you use our guide you might not want to go buy all of the mats at once.  It’s hard to keep track of everything, so do it by each guide segment.  Buy all of the mats for apprentice, get them in your bags, then stand at the trainer while you use up the mats.  Then it’s off the the mailbox to clear your inventory and back to the AH for mats for the next level.

We’ve tried to make the guide in such a way that it will be the cheapest route on most servers from 1-450, but you might find a different sweet spot in your leveling where you can get something like 80 shadow gems for next to nothing.  So shop with your eye on the guide page and look for those opportunities.  Even though we think the guide is about as good as it can get, it can’t take all things into consideration for all servers all the time.

In the end we think you’ll enjoy jewelcrafting as much as we do (even though Law resisted it completely for two years).  Is Jewelcrafting the best profession in WoW?  Maybe it is for some people, and it certainly might be the best one for you.  But one thing is for sure, getting your jewelcrafting leveling done with speed and precision (and at the lowest possible cost) is completely Dominating.

How To Get Elixir Mastery Without Doing Black Morass

Not all professions are created equal.  While I don’t use alchemy on any of my raiding toons I like to have one around to make gold with.  The only problem with that is that in order to really make a killing you certainly need to make it to level 68 and go get the Elixir Mastery specialization so that when you’re brewing up a few hundred flasks you have a chance to get even more to sell on the AH.

So off an on I’ve been leveling my trusty DK banker (who does alchemy and inscription BTW (and perhaps the only decent use I know for a DK (just a little DK dig there))) to level 68 for just this reason.  If your alchemy is at level 325 and you are also level 68 you can get one of three quests from several NPC’s scattered around Outlands.  Even if you do it the hard way the Elixir mastery specilization is worth it, but there is a much more Dominating way to get it done.

Here are the three quests:

• Master of Elixirs
• Master of Potions
• Master of Transmutation

Well, I never liked Black Morass anyway.  Then, when you consider the fact that you are going to have to do the silly walk-around quest and Old Hillsbrad first, bah, I’ve got gold to make with my time.  But I really REALLY want the extra flask procs – so what do I do?

I go get the last quest – Master of Transmutation and then pick up the recipe for Transmute: Primal Might.  By this time there are enough people just fiddling around in Outlands but not really doing anything there that making a Primal Might really shouldn’t be all that expensive.  In other words it’s pretty reasonable to find all the primals on the AH for cheap since no one uses them much any more, even if they are rare-ish.

Now, even though I want Master of Elixirs, I can use any of the Mastery quests to get there.  The only one that doesn’t require me to do a dungeon run (and have a flying mount for TK, not wasting that gold on a DK bank alt)  is the Master of Transmutation quest.  So I head out to Zarevhi in Netherstorm with 4 each primal earth, air, fire, water and mana – and the recipe from one of the vendors above.

If you go prepared you’ll be a Transmutation master in about 30 minutes or less if you don’t get lost easily and have the flight points.  Next just talk to Zarevhi again and tell him you don’t really want to be a transmutation master after all and pay him 150 gold (cheaper than a flying mount) to unlearn what you just did.  Don’t worry, it all works out well in the end.

All that’s left is to fly back to Shattrath and talk to Lorokeem (the bird doods kinda freak me out, but there’s not much I can do about it in this case).  Tell him you want to be an Elixir master and POOF!  You’re a brand new Elixir master ready to get all those free flasks out of your usual business for free.

Free gold is interesting to me, and so are shortcuts.  This way I don’t have to get a lock summon or buy a flying mount up to TK and then to the second boss.  I don’t have to do all the pre-reqs for BM and then actually do BM four or five times.  As a matter of fact there is an off chance the Primal mights could be already sitting on the AH from someone else making them for some goofy reason.

This works for any profession specialization, but specializations don’t mean quite as much now as they did in vanilla wow waaaaay back in the day.  Who knows, maybe Blizz brings that flavor back.  But in the meantime, on your bank alt alchemist (which I highly recommend btw) getting elixir mastery doesn’t have to be a huge pain in the tookus.  All you have to do is use this little trick and you’ll be maximizing your auction house domination of the flask market in no time.

Welcome to our next installment in the DK series. Today we cover Professions, Gemming, Enchanting and a few stats.

Professions:

JewelCrafting and Blacksmithing are you two top choices when it comes to professions for a DK. They combine the most Raid-Benefits to your character than any other professions. They are also the most expensive.
If you choose Jewelcrafting as one of your trade skills then you’re in for a treat. Jewelers’ Gems will be your best friends. You can have 3 of these unique Gems on your equipment with stats like 34 to Hit Rating or 34 to Strength and even 34 to Expertise that can produce results.
As a Blacksmith you’ll get two extra sockets to put those bad boys into.
One way to mitigate that expense, is to level Mining first while picking up twice as much ore as you really need. Get JC up and then drop Mining to pick up BS and use the remainder of your mats for that one.
If gold has always been an issue for you, feel free to pick up Gavin’s AH Mastery Guide

Your gemming priority is as follows:

1. Hit Rating
2. Strength,
3. Expertise / Armor Pen
4. Critical Strike

Enchants:

1. Strength
2. Attack Power
3. Critical Strike
4. Haste

Some Stats to make the above make sense

Hit Rating:

DKs and all melee classes share the same 8% cap on that, until you get 8% hit rating (263 Hit rating) this stat is your top priority. As long as your are not Hit capped you should be trying to get there. This is especially important when using a 2-H weapon, after all, every swing you miss is damage that you’re NOT doing.
Once you are Hit capped, Strength: you can never have enough Strength. For a DK 1 Strenght = 2 Attack power. Attack power directly translates into DPS …

Now the following comes from the guys at ElitistJerks.com. These guys really know the math.

Expertise vs. Armor Pen

Expertise
•1 Expertise Skill reduces the chance your attacks will be dodged/parried by 0.25%
•32.79 Rating is equal to 1% less chance your attacks will be dodged/parried.
•8.20 Rating is equal to 0.25% less chance your attacks will be dodged and parried (each) and thus is equal to 1 Expertise Skill.

Armor Penetration Rating
It doesn’t affect our damage from Diseases, Icy Touch, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike or Death Coil. This makes Armor Penetration have a reduced value for Unholy and Frost Specs. Blood however does have quite a lot of benefit from ArP Rating, due to the majority of its damage being Physical.
We need 15.39 Rating to ignore 1% armor on our target.

So although ArPen is cheaper to get (15.39 = 1% armor ignore) the Expertise affects both Dodged hits and parries which redure your DPS significantly. Bottom line, for a DK they are relatively equivalent because we use a slow 2-H weapon and Strength is always more valueable anyway, so gemming and enchanting for those stats may not be so wise. Don’t forget that most of your gear will naturally come with some of those stats

“What  do I need to upgrade first?”

Just remember, you will never be taken seriously as a player, for end-game content, if you don’t enchant and socket your gear.

WoW-Heroes.com

WoWHead.com/profiles

Both have a fantastic tool to look at yourself in the mirror so to speak. Using those web sites you can see, at a glance, what your character has equipped, what he is missing, what upgrades are available and where to find them.

That’s it for this installment of the DK series, tomorrow we’ll cover the finer points and before we’re done we’ll have gone over the gear as well .

Optimize Your Profession Selection For Maximum Low Level Earnings

Whether you’re starting your first toon or your 20th, you have one of two goals in mind. One is to get to 80 as fast as possible, and in that light we tend to tell folks to not even mess with professions until 80. But if you are making a toon to end up being a gathering profession alt in the first place, then you certainly want to maximize your time and effort. It is entirely possible to keep skinning, mining and herbalism completely maxed out as you quest.

Not all zones are created equal when it comes to the gathering professions. In case you didn’t notice, Teldrassil is a giant tree, so there isn’t a single copper node on the whole thing. Your new Night Elf warrior is going to be completely out of luck until you hit Darkshore if you choose to do the Nefl starting area. There are way around this, however. You don’t HAVE to use the Orc starting area just because you’re an Orc. In other words, once you decide which profession you want to level, go level in an area that lets you gain levels and skill-ups in both.

With that introduction, here is a list of all the starting areas and what gathering professions they support better than other professions or zones. It’s not unreasonable to hit level 20 or so with a couple hundred extra gold just for picking a few flowers or swinging your pick along the way.

Alliance

• Dun Murogh – Dwarf/Gnome:  This is probably the best gathering profession zone in the entire game.  No matter what you choose, there are plenty of mines, herbs and almost everything is skinable.  It just doesn’t get any better than this.
• Teldrassil – Night Elf:  Teldrassil is good for both Herbalism and Skinning, but there isn’t a single mining node.
• Azuremyst/Bloodmyst Isles - Dranei:  The Dranei starting areas are bigger and more spread out than Dun Murogh.  Although there is a bit of everything, it’s the worst of the areas for gathering overall.
• Elwynn Forest – Human:  You won’t do much skinning in Elwynn, and it’s better for mining than herbalism.

Horde

• Durotar – Orc/Troll:  Durotar isn’t terrific for any of the professions, you’ll have to wait until you get to the Barrens to start cleaning up on Mines and Herbs.  It is, however, far better for mining. Both areas are OK for skinning as well, but the place is so huge that you can spend a great deal of time running from node to node.
• Silverpine – Undead:  This is by far the best place for Horde toons for both Mining and Herbalism.  There isn’t a better Herbalism location anywhere else, actually, as it beats Dun Murogh and is very close to UC.  Not terrific in the skinning category.
• Eversong Woods – Blood Elf:  Decent all-around for gathering professions, but nothing like Silverpine.
• Mulgore – Tauren:  Not bad for herbalism, and just ok for mining and skinning.

The best overall choices for each faction run toward Silverpine for Horde and Dun Murogh for Alliance.  The proximity to both IF and Undercity make these two zones perfect for getting training without having to run very far, and the zones are packed full of almost every type of node or skinable mob.

If you like to run instances at level – SFK is also a really good option for Horde, although there really isn’t a great choice for Alliance.  Well, maybe Balckfathom deeps, but as a general rule we skip instances unless we’re just leveling for the heck of it.  Getting to 80 faster is our typical advice, but breaking up the monotony of a speed leveling grind with an instance here and there for gear isn’t all that bad.

This information will probably be the biggest help to those of you who are firing up a new toon on a new server.  Getting that first toon grabbing some sellable stuff right off the bat to begin your banking life can be important.  DK’s are the best for this sort of thing of course, but if a DK is not going to be your main (and please tell us it’s not) then you’ll be leveling up something else anyway.  Might as well earn some decent gold along the way by using gathering professions while you level, and then switching to your end game professions at 80.

But at the very least, you now know the best zones for each gathering profession, and in a small way it can help you be more efficient and earn more money on your next new toon.  It might not win you any awards, but it’s at least a little Dominating.

When To Buy, When To Sell – And When To Farm?

Farming is not something we do. It takes a perfect storm of circumstances to make me even think about it. But there are a couple of situations that came up recently that basically required doing a little bit of actually getting my hands dirty.

Well, OK, they weren’t my hands, but someone did some farming. It pointed out that there is a really good way to tell when there is a huge hole in the market where supply is way below demand. The good part is that it’s pretty easy to spot since the holes are HUGE on many servers.

In the end I didn’t actually do any farming at all, but I have some folks around the guild and the family that tend to miss the finer points of auction house Domination, but they understand that if they go get a few stacks of something they can get paid – by me.

The guy who has the gold makes the rules. It’s been that way ever since the Magna Carta. That one document took most of the power away from those born into power by shifting the money (and therefore the power) to those who had some cash. Enough with the history lesson, let’s get on to how you can take advantage of this with the whole force of more than 150 years of history behind you.

Normally we just buy low and sell high. It works best when you spread your offerings (and by default, purchases) out over a LOT of different types of things. By far my favorite is mats. Mats make up the majority of the profitable items anyway and only a pro should deal with Items – the market for those things is just too volatile.

When it comes to mats you are making a grave mistake if you try to deal too much with Northrend stuff. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it for a minute. Most folks who farm are going to do so at level 80. This means that when enough of them are out there herbing and mining Sholazar that there is going to be a huge influx of high end mats into the market, thereby depressing the prices for those items.

Everyone else is rushing to GET to level 80 and not stopping to farm along the way. You see, the way you know exactly what to sell is to project what everyone in the market is doing and then do whatever they are not doing. Everyone wants 25 stacks of Titanium ore right now before the patch. When the patch hits, prices will triple, but there will be soooooo much of it around that it will drop again rather sharply once all the Jewelcrafters get sick of prospecting at 15 gold a turn for those new rare epic gems (that won’t hold a price either if you know anything about the gems market).

So – what WE do to make gold hand over fist day in and day out without having to rely on hoarding and market spikes is very simple. Instead of Titanium (which you think everyone wants) you need to control the Mithril and Thorium markets. Instead of Arctic fur, you need to make sure you have a stranglehold on the Medium and light leather markets.

You see, all those guys leveling new toons and alts skip trade skills on the way to 80 (almost everyone does). Then, when they hit 80 they want to powerlevel two (or even four if you count cooking and first aid) trade skills all the way to 400+ in a few hours. This is where you get rich. Not on Titanium, not on Lichbloom, not on Borean leathers – it’s the low level stuff that has the best supply/demand ratio.

In other words, the amount of time it takes to get those things compared to the profit margin for selling them is often higher than the Northrend mats. You can get 20 stacks of light leather in the time it takes to get 5 or 10 heavy Borean. Because listing fees for low level mats are almost nothing, you can post them over and over again for almost any price you like and they WILL SELL.

These holes in the supply end of your market become apparent when YOU try to do what everyone ELSE is doing. I was working up Alchemy, Tailoring and Leatherworking on my DK bankers last week and there were 36 light leather and 13 Stranglekelp on the AH. That was all there was, and I needed maybe five or ten times that much. Since I have a lot of gold I could care less what the prices were, I would have bought them all and not even thought twice about it.

You see, there is no such thing as a “fair price.” Fair is in the eye of the beholder. When I want to powerlevel a profession I’ll pay 20 gold a stack for peacebloom if that’s all there is. It will still cost me a lot less gold if I pay Northrend mat prices for starting area mats because it requires so much less to get skill points out of that stuff.

If YOU don’t like the high prices for entry level stuff go farm some yourself. Use what you need and sell the rest – probably to me (and I’ll jack the price up to where supply equals demand and make the bucks off of your effort). That’s how a free market works.

If you know how people want to behave or how they ARE behaving in relationship to any market you can find what their need is and fill it. This situation showed me that there was a HUGE need for light leather, medium leather, Mithril, Thorium, and about a half dozen other things. It became obvious that there was no one on the server farming mats between the levels of 15-50, but hundreds of guys supplying Northrend stuff. Low supply and steady demand (demand for mats is almost always steady) means big profits if you can fill the gaps.

I still didn’t farm, but I told a few people I would pay them twice the market rate for every stack they could get their hands on. Now the AH has just enough mats at a price I set that I make far more out of the low end mats. And since I control the supply, I set the price. Every now and again some nut posts a few stacks at doofy prices and I happily buy him out and pop them right back up at the proper price.

The proper price is always the price where the supply curve meets the demand curve and establishes an equilibrium.

Item level has absolutely nothing to do with it. If there are 400 stacks of Titanium and a demand for 200, the price is at least two times too high. If there are 2 stacks of Liferoot and demand for 20 stacks, the price is 10 times too low. It makes no difference if the price for Earthroot eventually passes that of the price for the Titanium. Supply above demand lowers prices, demand above supply raises them.

So look for these types of things in your market, and be sure you’re looking in the right spots. If you must farm, look for the things most people skip (normally in the 150-300 skill range in most gathering professions) and pretty soon you’ll be raking it in with both hands and just laughing when everyone else is taking a beating on those highly volatile high end mats – while you vacation in Stranglethorn off your earnings from the lowbie stuff.