topbg

PTR Patch Notes – WoW

Posted by Lawbringer in Auction House, Economics, Heroics, Instances, News, PVE, PVP, Patch, Supply And Demand, Tips, World of Warcraft, WotLK

Interesting Items In The Next Patch

We recently put up a page for the Patch WoW links at Blizz. But we also want to give you some more insights incase you don’t go into patch notes like some folks (and you know who you are). So here are the more interesting tidbits coming from the current PTR notes.

Titansteel bars will no longer have a cooldown, expect prices to drop a bit since supply will be able to more adequetly match demand. The same thing applies to Moonshroud, Spellweave and Ebonweave – no more cooldowns on those.

Random dungeons have been such a hit that the concept is moving into the Battlegrounds. Using this system will give you extra honor equivalent to 30 kills the first time through each day and an extra 15 for further BG’s the same day. Since honor per kill is being doubled, that’s going to mean a lot more honor in random BG’s than queueing for specific battles. Marks of honor for specific battles are also being removed, we can only assume that those items which required marks will now be purchased with honor instead.

the deserter debuff for bailing on a random dungeon has been increased to 30 minutes. leaving a random party for any reason will trigger this debuff, which overwrites the usual 15 minute debuff. This will prevent some of the goonery for instances like Occulus, where people leave the second they see where they are. Honestly, just make the run mon.

For holiday bosses, you can now queue for the encounter without having to do the prequel quests each year. As long as you’ve done the boss before at least once you can just queue up random and go spank them.

But the big one is that those worthless Frozen orbs will now actually be useful for more than just vendoring. A new NPC is being added in Dalaran that will convert your Frozen orbs to other items. Here is the list of what he sells in exchange for frozen orbs (consider this to be currently accurate but Blizz has been knows to change their mind at the last minute).  You can see the (current) list of items Frozo is selling at the link below.

Items you can get from Frozo the Renowned

Frost Lotus for a Runed Orb – that’s going to help some.  It’s also going to raise the value of the orbs a bit and lower values for certain eternals.  Since only one orb drops per heroic, there shouldn’t be a huge change in Ah prices for the items above, but beware the first week or two while everyone blows through all their extra orbs they might have sitting around.

I’m kicking myself now for finally vendoring about 60 of them, but you might be able to snag a few cheap stack off the AH before this change goes live.  There are also some class changes you’ll want to take a look at.  Once again DK’s are getting the most fiddling while most other classes remain fairly static.

It’s not what we would call a Dominating patch, but Frozo and the random battlegrounds will be a nice couple of changes.

18 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Leatherworking Leveling Guide – Leatherworking Guide to 450

Posted by Lawbringer in Efficiency Tips, General Tips, Gold Building, Leatherworking, PVE, PVP, Power Leveling, Powerleveling, Raiding, Skinning, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, World of Warcraft, WotLK

Powerleveling Leather Working From 1 to 450

Leatherworking  is one of those professions that doesn’t get a whole lot of play.  But it does have reasonable gold-making and toon buffing potential for your character – plus it’s not all that expensive to power level if you do it properly.  Having a good Leatherworking Guide can certainly save you time and expense.  The link above will take you all the way through the steps to do it cheaper and faster.

Primarily we recommend that you use professions that have the greatest benefit to your toon for end-game activities such as arena and raiding.  The crafting professions are generally best for this but the list of professions with the best toon buffs combinations is fairly short.

You’ll see a lot of casters going with Tailoring and Enchanting, while mail and plate wearers tend to go with Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting for their min/max needs.  It’s hard to beat those combinations for pure added power.  However, if you already have those professions covered and need something different for balance Leatherworking isn’t a bad choice either.

The fur linings can actually outdo the extra gem slots from blacksmithing, even if you are slotting in the JC only gems.  If Spell Power and Attack power fit your toon needs best, Leatherworking is a great choice.

The Leg armors and drums also have some decent profit potential from auction house sales.  And considering there are probably far fewer Leatherworkers than Tailors on many servers it means that for the most part you can probably make more selling leg armors than threads.  That’s not always the case on every server, but you might look into it.

Getting all the mats for leather working may be a little tough for power leveling, but if you know ahead of time what you need and have any patience at all at the ah you should be able to get it done without too much waiting and expense.  Northrend mats should be plentiful, it’s the mid levels that might give you fits.  A DK alt with skinning is just the ticket to solve that issue.

If you’re cheap, and don’t mind farming, skinning is a joke to level.  If you skin your way through the mats list in our Leatherworking Guide, you’ll have no trouble making it through the rougher parts of the leatherworking mats.  Plus, DK’s come with all the flight paths and and epic land mount to boot, so you don’t have to waste skinning on a main.

So while Leather working may not be your first choice, it’s certainly not a bad choice for an end-game profession.  And if you’re using it for raiding you may very well end up with one of the new 264 ilevel gear recipes which are selling quite well in patch 3.3.  As a matter of fact – I may just do JC/LW on my old druid.  In the end leveling leatherworking is not all that hard and gives you a chance to Dominate in raids and at the AH.

2 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Jewelcrafting Leveling Guide – Jewelcrafting 1 to 450

Posted by Lawbringer in Alliance, Auction House, Economics, Efficiency Tips, Gathering Professions, General Tips, Gold Building, Horde, Jewelcrafting, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, World of Warcraft, WotLK

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.

4 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Gold Secrets – Timing The Market

Posted by Lawbringer in Alchemy, Auction House, Death Knights, Economics, Efficiency Tips, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Raiding, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, Tricks, World of Warcraft, WotLK

When And What You Post Can Make A Big Difference

This one hearkens back to an old saying – since some of us are older than others (and I’m not sure they even use this phrase much any more) an intro is in order.

“That guy could sell [snow cones/refrigerators/ice cream/(anything cold)] to an Eskimo”

Yeah maybe – but wouldn’t he sell a LOT more snow cones to people in Phoenix, Arizona?  I mean there are some people that are just born with a certain amount of arrogance, and it is quite natural for that to directly translate to e-peen.  In other words, why go out of your way to sell the worst possible items at the worst possible time in the worst possible way just to prove you can sell something.  There is another old saying that I like quite a bit better:

“Work smarter, not harder.”

That, in a nutshell, is our entire gold-making system.  You can go farm, you can track hundreds of items, you can depend on your main toons’ crafting professions, you can spam trade chat, you can sell ice in Northrend . . .

As for me, I prefer smarter.  Now, being smarter doesn’t mean you’re some sort of genius.  All it means is that you track what works and what doesn’t work quite as well.  Then you have to filter that information to find out what really works best based on some sort of quantifiable number.  We can all be very subjective about things, being smart is when you set your preferences aside and just make a cold, hard decision based on cold, hard facts.

And that’s what we did.  For two years we tracked everything about everything we did that had anything to do with gold in any way.  What we came up with is a way of making gold that is based on a very simple root – time.

For a few years, I was a personal trainer.  I did the same thing with working out.  I hate working out – HATE IT.  So when I found a system that cut the time requirement down to the bare minimum and got even better results – I could do that.  And it was so simple I could teach other people how to do it as well.  The cool thing is that it works every time, for every person, regardless of age or any other factor.

And the idea rubbed off into everything else I do.  So when I started in WoW, it wasn’t long before I realized I needed more gold – a lot more.  So I applied the time factor to everything I did to make gold – and I did it all.

  • My first 1000 gold farming copper, tin and bronze in Darkshore (pretty nub stuff)
  • Grinding mobs for cloth
  • Farming SMGY
  • Farming rares for twinks
  • Crafting blues
  • blah
  • blah
  • blah

That was pre-BC.  Around the time the Burning Crusade came out, I was full tilt into the AH.  And what I found was that I could make more gold at the AH in less time than any other method.  And not just a little more gold – a LOT more.  I could scan the AH for under-priced stuff other people had farmed (copper, cloth, twinkitems) and then just re-list it for a profit and never leave IF.

And that is why I never farm – ever.  There is always someone else out there willing to waste hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of their time and sell those farmed mats to me for under market price – it’s the silliest thing I ever heard of.  Then, for about 2 minutes worth of work, I can turn right around and sell those mats for market price and make 15%-50% profit.

If I was just doing it with copper and tin it wouldn’t amount to much really.  But when you do it for EVERYTHING – it turns into a lot of gold really fast.  But I have digressed egregiously from our original premise – well, sort of.

When you begin operating an AH-only methodology, you get a really good feel for how the market moves.  And you don’t have to be anal retentive to sense things.  Today we’ll look at just one timing tip that can make a big difference in how fast you make gold on one type of crafted item – and time is everything.

A few days back we posted the article: Best Gold-Making Professions On Bank Alts, which was a follow-on from the article: Alchemy – WoW Quest Tricks.  Both of those articles bring us to the real point.  If you’re going to use a bank alt for crafting professions (which you should) there are some professions that fit bank alts better than others.  Alchemy is a great fit for a bank alt.

If you’re going to use alchemy on a bank alt, you need to be an elixir master for the procs of extra elixirs and especially flasks.  Since you’re getting the mastery for flasks, you will want to be selling those flasks for maximum profit – and now we come to the point.

As you scan the AH for things to sell throughout the week, the temptation is to just post them as you get them.  For certain categories, that works well – such as mats.  Mats are like a little black dress or blue jeans, always in style in every season and decade or day of the week.  We only resell items (armor, weapons etc.) on weekends when the most people are on (especially the nubs who don’t get to play all that often).  And there is a best time for other things as well.

For flasks, it’s Tuesday.  I know I know, big surprise, but it’s an easy thing to overlook.  After server reset, everyone is rushing back into ICC or doing the weekly for their frost badges, or even VoA for the week and the demand for flasks goes from a trickle to a roar.  And since there is a huge demand spike on Tues, there is a corresponding price spike potential.

If the raid leader requires you to flask and there are only 10 flasks on the AH (all yours btw) then you will pay whatever the price is or you don’t raid.  Pretty simple when you think about it.  Buy up all your flask making mats during the week and on the weekends (especially from the farming goobers who are killing time on Sat afternoon).  Then on Monday brew up a few dozen of each.  Tuesday morning you can throw all your flasks up on the AH (even buying out the other guys selling too cheap), corner the market, and quite easily double whatever you spent on mats.

So:

  • Get you a DK
  • level to 68
  • get elixir mastery
  • buy up flask mats during the week
  • make flasks on Monday
  • buy out cheap flasks Tues
  • sell all flasks Tues
  • make another 1,000g a week
  • Dominate

It’s when you start stacking things like this that you really start to get rich in WoW.  Find a sweet spot for alchemy, Inscription, JC, DE, resale, mats and whatever else you can get your grubby little enterprising hands on and pretty soon you will never want (or need) to pick another weed, kill another mob or swing another pick as long as you play WoW.  And, you’ll have a LOT more gold to boot, which is quite simply – Dominating.

12 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Best Gold-Making Professions On Bank Alts

Posted by Lawbringer in Alchemy, Auction House, DE, Death Knights, Economics, Efficiency Tips, Enchanting, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, Tricks, World of Warcraft, WotLK, tailoring

Two Trade Skills That Fit Great On Bank Alts

Alright kids, let’s review.  We don’t farm here at DYS – well almost never.  From time to time the perfect conflagration of once per year occurrences happens that makes us do it, as we have mentioned in this post: Investing And Farming For Gold.

Next, we recommend banking be done in certain ways.  First, a bank alt is by far the best use for a DK we’ve ever seen, and we’re going to tell you which two professions suit bank alts best.  But a DK banker is perfect because you only have to get to level 65 from a level 55 start to train all the way to Grand Master in any profession.  But over the last six months we’ve figured out two professions that just stand far and above the others when it comes to making gold quick and easy.

The first one will come as absolutely zero surprise to anyone who reads DYS.  Enchanting – the gran-daddy of them all when it comes to gold making.  I recently had to change my tune a bit when it comes to Jewelcrafting, but I still don’t make as much from Jewelcrafting as I do from enchanting – not by a wide margin.  Just in case you missed it, here is another post if you want to read about the true power of enchanting for making gold: Best Profession For Those New To Gold Making.

Currently, you’ll want to focus on DE items between level 200 and 300 skill.  With everyone doing 5 million heroics per day, the market for Northrend mats is pretty depressed already – flooding it with another 50 stacks of infinite dust will just generate even more downward pressure on the price by inflating supply that much more.

A few months ago we suggested using a DK as your bank alt and giving them Enchanting, it’s a little more complex than that if you want it to be, as in this post: More Banking Toons Make It Easier To Make Gold At The AH.  But after working with that system for a few months, another profession has jumped out of the woodwork as absolutely perfect for the single DK bank alt.

You will need one DK, a desire for more gold and enough patience to gain 13 levels.  You’ll need  to hit level 68, but with a DK that’s pretty easy to do in just a few hours if you concentrate.  Then it’s off to the profession trainers for Enchanting and . . . Alchemy.

Alchemy is perfect for a bank alt because it requires zero rep to get all the recipes, so you can stand all by yourself in the major city of your choice and end up with every recipe in the game through discovery.  And you’ll make all the accidental discoveries in record time.

In our last post – Alchemy, Wow Quest Tricks, we talked about how to get the Elixir Master profession bonus for Alchemy without doing the Elixir Master quest, which is a pain in the tookus.  At level 68 your DK can do exactly the same thing and end up with Elixir Mastery and that’s where the real dough starts rolling in.

On an average day I will have my DK bank alt brew up around 200-300 elixirs and flasks.  Now that’s just the number I have mats for.  Since the proc rate for Elixir Mastery is a little higher than 10%, I generally end up with an extra 10-15 flasks for every hundred I make, sometimes more.  With flasks on our server going for about 60g, that’s 600+ gold for zero extra work.

All I do is put all of the herbs and other mats for the best alchemy potions (Lil’Sparky is a must here) in my Snatch filter for AADV and grab everything under 100% market price a couple of times a day.  Then I just afk brew, post the products and profit – generally while raiding or watching SportsCenter.

Alchemy is ridiculously easy to make gold with, and unlike Tailoring, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking and other professions that can be lucrative, they also all require that you be level 80 and gain exalted rep with certain factions or acquire recipe drops in raids to get the patterns that will make you serious gold.  (yes, I have seen the stupid youtube video of the guy DE’ing the JC rings a bazillion times, but with northrend DE mats prices being what they are LilSparky’s tells me I would lose a lot more than I gained doing that right now.)

So My main DK banker does Inscription and Alchemy.  Inscription is another good fit for bankers, but if you only have 2 to work with.  On a single bank alt, alchemy and enchanting is the only way to go.  Between those two professions you should be able to knock down an easy 2,000 to 5,000 extra gold each week and not spend more than a few minutes each day fiddling with it.  It’s easy, fast and very Dominating.

9 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Alchemy – WoW Quest Tricks

Posted by Lawbringer in Alchemy, Auction House, Death Knights, Economics, Efficiency Tips, Gathering Professions, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, Tricks, World of Warcraft, WotLK

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:

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.

6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Jewelcrafting Tracking For Maximum Gold Profits

Posted by Lawbringer in Auction House, Economics, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Jewelcrafting, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, World of Warcraft, WotLK

Spreadsheet Helps You Track Your Expenses And Income

Yes, I said Jewelcrafting.  I know there is this misconception out there that I hate Jewelcrafting, but that’s not really the case at all.  Although I don’t think it should be the cornerstone of your gold making business, it can still be a decent part of it.  The real reason that I haven’t reported much on JC is that I haven’t had one, but recent changes in patch 3.2 have forced my hand into the business.

Jewelcrafting has become far more like what it was in BC than it has been to date in WotLK.  If you have all the recipes you can make some real dough.  The trouble, of course is knowing exactly where the profits are.  And although Lil’Sparkys can help, we all know that it doesn’t update quite as often as it should and has a tendency to be quirky.  In other words, it is more of a guideline than a hard and fast analysis tool.

And that doesn’t really work for the seriously anal retentive.  There are people who want to know things precisely.  I don’t happen to be one of those people.  I’m getting back into JC to shield myself from spending too much on jewels for all my new gear sets.  BUt I do realize that if I’m feeling pain when it comesto prices, that must mean that the market has evolved to the point where there are some profits to be made.  Anytime it hurts, I want to put the hurt on someone else besides me.  Yes, I’m a robber baron, so sue me.

with all that being said, I don’t always make up everything I teach.  You don’t need to go around inventing the wheel all the time if it already exists.  And while this might not be the most sophisticated tool you’ve ever seen, it certainly might help you take advantage of the current market situation and get the insight you need to truly Dominate with Jewelcrafting.

jc spreadsheet world of warcraft wotlk

An alert reader, one that is keen on the JC market, ran accros a spreadsheet at Warcraftecon that helps you track everything you need when it comes to Jewelcrafting.  Thanks to Jurandr for sending us the email, and after a cursory review I can say that it definately will help you track all of your prospecting and profits should you choose to engage in such activities.  I know on the alliance server for the DYS guild I have scooped up all the cheap mats I can find for alchemy and transmutes because the profits are nice.  You can only do it once a day, but an extra 1,000 gold a week for two minutes worth of work sounds like my cup of tea.

So check the spreadsheet out at this link: http://www.warcraftecon.net/?p=1777 and see if you can make it work for you.  It just might have you, and the rest of us, Dominating with Jewelcrafting again.

4 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Spying On The Competition

Posted by Lawbringer in Auction House, Economics, Exploits, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Low Level, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, Tricks, World of Warcraft, WotLK

Making Gold For Newbies Doesn’t Have To Be Guesswork

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Um, whatever.  This is a dog eat dog world, and if you’re doing something well it’s only a matter of time before you’re not alone any more.  For more than two years we’ve been teaching people how to Dominate – especially at the auction house.  But from time to time we have to step back (even though the pros gripe at us) and start back at the beginning.

A few days back we brought back an article from back in the day talking about using enchanting for making gold.  Amazingly we get the same old crud from people who think it’s more complicated than that, but disenchanting will always be one of the cornerstones of any good wow gold making business.  But it certainly isn’t the whole story.  Everyone should be using far more than enchanting to make gold and today we’re going to talk about sniffing out the pros in your market and following their lead.  It’s a way to break into the business without getting your feet all that wet.

In the real world marketing sector, there is a lot of follow-the-leader.  Innovation is expensive and very hit or miss.  But a formula that works well tends to work pretty well for lots of things.  We’re working on a technique for the very advanced gold maker, but it takes a ton of gold to do it on a lot of things and it can be risky (or at least it seems to be dangerous – the worst that can actually happen is a break even).  And one of the ways we figured out what the Chinese gold farmers are REALLY doing these days came from price capping.

Price capping is also a pretty advanced technique, and you don’t have to know how to do it to make some gold using it.  It works best if you’re the one in charge, but you can also ride the wave of someone else price capping if you know how to spot it and what to do when you see it.  Below is one example of a price cap.

mageweave cloth world of warcraft wotlk

You see at the top a few stacks of Mageweave at 924% above market price.  This can only be one of two things: somebody made a mistake, or someone is price capping.  Of course, even the price cap might just be ignorance, but let’s give this dude the benefit of the doubt.  Now, in this case the price cap is not going to work.  You can’t move a market of four pages of stacks with four stacks.  The only thing that’s going to happen from this move is maybe a 1% or 2% bump in the overall price of this item.

Here is another example of a price cap done right.  You might recognize the name.  But I also recognize the names above me.  It doesn’t take too long to figure out who is price capping.  When you scan for mats to resell, you’ll start to see the same five to ten names all the time.  As a general rule; those guys are your real competition at the AH, and everyone else is buying them new shoes.  Of course, all pros aren’t going to the hall of fame, and we’ll see why in a second.

northern stew world of warcraft wotlk

This is the way that price capping is supposed to happen.  The difference here, although you can’t see it, is that the majority of the Northern Stew on the AH has been capped which will seriously affect the price.  You can also see another example of someone price capping who doesn’t really know what they are doing.  After being on this particular server for a while I know that Poliea and Tracea are alt bankers for one person – whose main banking toon happens to be Katharinea, not too hard to figure out who that is after a while.  But whoever it is isn’t much competition because she ends up buying all of my price cap markdowns and never price caps hard enough to actually move the market.

But more to the point, when you see something like what is happening above, it means someone is trying to move the market up.  When you see that, it’s a good time to buy out whatever low priced items there are left on the AH that the price-capper has left behind and then resell immediately as prices rise.  In other words, you can buy a little Northern Stew at 1 gold and resell it at 2 gold.  They are pretty sure to sell since almost everything else on the market is 14 gold, if you see what I mean.  Or you can cash in on their price capping push by cooking up some Northern Stew a few stacks at a time and the price-capper will probably buy you out in an effort to corner the market.

The point is that you can tag along behind the big boys and make a pretty good living riding their wake.  The water is smoother and you won’t have to risk very much.  Making a profit from a moving market without having to move the market is pretty shrewd, and just a little Dominating.

13 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Best Profession For Those New To Gold Making

Posted by Lawbringer in Auction House, DE, Economics, Efficiency Tips, Enchanting, Exploits, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Instances, PVE, Supply And Demand, Tips, Trade Skills, Tricks, World of Warcraft, WotLK

Anyone Can Make Gold Using Enchanting For Disenchanting – Here’s How:

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 435 ‘chanter LFW can do [some enchant] [another enchant] blah, blah, blah. Only to have to get into a 2 minute conversation with everybody anyway after linking my stuff 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 flying mounts. Questing in Northrend will land you the most amazing greens, and I would personally swear that they drop twice as often as in Azeroth & Outlands. Most of these greens are better than the level 70 dungeon gear from before the WotLK patch. However, because of the stats most people need on their items, about 50% 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 Northrend 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 375 you can disenchant everything in the game.  Combine your DE work with just putting minor enchants on your own gear as you go from 70-80 and you can easily hit skill level 400-425 and sell most of what you DE along the way.

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, if you run just a few heroic dungeons you can easily farm enough Dream Shards to buy all of the top end recipes for yourself or your guild mates. 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 a few hundred gold just off of trash items in a few hours grinding, or from dailies.

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 Northrend, a famous nub I know was able to disenchant enough mats to sell the whole pile on AH for well over 2,500 gold, enough for half her flying mount (and she’s only level 73 so far). So whether you are farming, questing or raiding, enchanting is one way to make some serious dough without having to advertise.

9 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

World Of Warcraft The Domination Podcast – A WoW Podcast

Posted by Lawbringer in Alliance, Auction House, Economics, Funny, General Tips, Gold Building, Gold Farming, Horde, Humor, Hunter Pets, Instances, Leveling, PVE, PVP, Patch, Podcast, Raiding, Supply And Demand, Trade Skills, World of Warcraft, WotLK, hunter

podcast world of warcraft

The Domination Podcast Episode 19

This week on the podcast it’s the Patch 3.2 blitz show.  The guys go through all the most important or missed facts from the patch notes since the patch is here – just as we have predicted in the last week.  There are a few things you really need to be aware of so that you can really go into patch 3.2 and truly Dominate.

The Domination Podcast Episode 19 Transcript

podsafe music network

 
icon for podpress  The Domination Podcast Episode 19 [14:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

5 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

topbg