Saturday, March 9, 2013

Reader Request Phaturday: Twink Gear Flipping Guide

Welcome to this week's Reader Request Phriday post (a day late)!  If you're interested in submitting a topic for next Friday's post, click here!

Today's question is from one of my readers, Bones.  Bones is 6 months into gold making, and making around 120k a month, playing on a mid-pop EU Server.  Bones' question is about Cata & MoP twink greens.  Being fresh into the market, they want to know how to best optimize and invest into this market, and how much supply one needs to start making some serious profits.  I've actually been wanting to go in depth into this for a while, I'm going to write a Mini-Guide to Twink Gear Flipping.

I. Objective
The object of the twink markets is to purchase low priced "twink" gear and resell it to levelers at a premium .  The gear in the brackets that we focus on gives the users a high amount of stats for their level bracket, and makes them OP.  Because of this, they are really great sellers, and can make you quite a bit of profit.

II. Purchasing
Purchasing this gear is relatively easy.  I use the addon TSM to do my searches, but other addons can do the trick.  TSM gives you the option to not have to do seperate armor and weapon searches as in Auctionator.
There are only 2 searches I do daily and they're as follows:
77/79/i272
80/84/i364

**General Purchasing Tips**

  • Avoid the following item suffixes:
    • of the Whale, of the Beast, of the Tiger, of the Invoker.  They do not have any desirable stats.  I read about this on Power Word: Gold a while ago, and for the longest time I didn't take the advice.  About 2 months ago I started doing it, and it's working fantastically.  You do not have to undercut these suffixes to make sales, people will want the ones you sell that have the more desirable stat distributions.
  • Know the crafted gear and don't buy it!  (or just do a 77/77/i272 search)
  • Use TSM's Alt+Click feature to buyout faster! 


Search 1:
The first search is for the 77-79 bracket, OP Cataclysm gear.  The supply of this gear is dwindling as more players are heading to Pandaria.  I personally sell the greens in this level at 500g, and the blues at 1,000g (The Alpheus Legguards could go for more).  I buy at up to half this price, simple as that.  I prefer much lower though.  Some days I don't post just so people won't know the price point to undercut to, and list things in the 20-50g range.

Search 2:
This search is for the 80-84 bracket, introduced in MoP.  This gear is from the Pandaria content, so there's a lot of it available, and on some high pop servers this may be hard to get a good business going.  I'm on low pop so I have a little more freedom with my pricing, so take that into account when choosing yours.  I price the greens at 500g again (also note by 500g I mean 499g99s99c), and the blues in this bracket at 2,500g!  The blue trinkets and weapons can go for even more, use your best judgement, but keep in mind that trinkets  this powerful are hard to come by in this bracket.

III. Selling
I gave you all my price points above, but I throw them all into 3 groups with 499g99s99c, 999g99s99c, and 2499g99s99c fallbacks, with a few trinkets and weapons in their own groups for extra gold.  I post everything on 48 hour auctions, and most of the time when people do undercut you they undercut you by a ton, because they think your auctions are so overpriced.  So, if you're undercut you'll have some things to buy for next round!  My inventory probably consists of 150-300 twink items, can't really put a solid number on it because my twink posting toon is also my transmog posting toon.

I hope I've covered any and all questions you can have about this market, but if you have more, feel free to ask them in the comment section below.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you like my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!!

11 comments:

  1. Thanks Phat

    My stock is leveling out at just under 100 items as its selling faster than i can buy it now!

    At this rate I'll hit my 1/2 mill this month.

    Bones

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice post. I'm going to have to check this out. What's the difference between this 'twink' group and the '77-80 cata' gear groups?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 77-80 gear (esp greens) is for people who are levelling and want an iLvl boost to get into Cata dungeons. Twink gear is best-in-slot gear for a particular level. You won't see many people buying BiS lvl 80 gear now b/c of the "effective level" changes to BGs in 5.2, but you will see some 79 gear going for more as folks in the bottom of the bracket level up to 79. You'll want to do the research to figure out if the stats make a piece BiS, for example, "of the Zephyr" is typically desired by rogues (I could be wrong, your mileage may vary). There are a few blues in this area that are going to be worth vastly more due to their twinking potential.

      Delete
  3. Very helpful... i'm new at wow and at making gold but got almost 600gp on my first twink flip. Considering that i have a low level character and had only about 30 gp to buy the gear to flip, i see it as a great result! Thanks again for the post!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad it helped! Now you can go buy 20 more to flip!

      Delete
  4. Would you recommend transferring to a mid pop realm for someone like me, who is on Tichondrius, which is a full server?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I honestly would transfer to a larger realm myself if it wouldn't cost so much to transfer my entire operation. I don't think smaller servers have as much gold making potential as larger ones.

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  5. Glad to see the 77-80 and 83-84 markets are working for you. You mention reading about items to avoid somewhere. I wrote about the items I avoid back in April of last year as well as again January of this year.

    These markets are as good as ever for me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, thank you for the link, the one from April is definitely the post I was referring to, wish I took the advice sooner!

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  6. Hey man, I started farming transmog recently but I have issues selling them on AH, no one buys em leaving me broken hearted :/ Could you give me some advice please?

    ReplyDelete

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