How to Not Make Gold

Followers of my Twitter will already know, but two days ago I bought Invincible's Reins off of the Black Market Auction House.  It was a very strange experience for me parting with as much gold as I did, and I felt like it was worth writing about.

The Setup
My main, and toon that posts everything but transmog is a level 90 Mage.  Since I can teleport anywhere else I need to go, I have my mage's hearth set to the Tavern in the Mists so I can keep an eye on the Black Market Auction House.  Until today only two items that had sparked my interest on my servers BMAH were a Drake mount from Cata that I wouldn't have farmed, and a Brawler's Guild invitation.  Additionally I bought some patterns early in the expansion to flip, bought both for 20k each, sold one for 30k, and the other ended up selling months later for 15k (not the best investment).  In general, I was in a "I want to see how much gold I can get on this server" state of mind, and wasn't spending much.  Then Thursday morning when I checked the BMAH I saw Invincible's Reins.

I knew that an epic showdown would follow by some of the server's top gold makers, and I wanted to get involved.  I was sitting at 1,838,647 g, according to my Tuesday logging of it, so I had gold to burn.  I made the initial 20k bid on the Reins, and went about my gold making routine on my alts.  A hour or two later, the price had rocketed to 150k.

The Battle
From then on I decided not to be involved in driving the price up until the end of the auction.  No use wasting gold right?  Too bad I lost this mentality somewhere along the line.  A few minutes after midnight the auction went from long to medium, which meant the auction would expire shortly after 2am, my time.  Being tired is not a great condition to make rational decisions.  The price was sitting around 300k, and from what I could tell there were 3 active bidders still in the running (including myself), one other Horde (my faction), and an Alliance character.  With under 2 hrs left it was time to test the waters.  I placed a bid making it 320k, then walked away for a while.  Then the notification came while I was in a dungeon that I had been outbid. When I got back to the BMAH the mount was sitting at 400k.  Okay, he's not playing around.  The Hordie noticed me and told me he's almost exhausted his funds, and that he was making one last bid, making the price 420k.  The Alli went with another agressive bid, and rose it to 500k.  The Horde character told me he was out, and wished me good luck.  And then there were two.

The Grand Finish
There were now under 30 minutes left, and we had already reached half a million.  My next move was to push it to 520k.  Of course slightly thereafter he pushed it to 600k.  Feeling around for this guy's stop point was proving fruitless, and I decided it was my turn to do some pushing.  From 600k I jacked the price up to 750k, and then went around to all my alts, to send myself gold cap.  I had 1.8 mill to begin with, so I had just enough left that if this guy decided to make a last minute move, I could have cap on my character and not have to run back to the bank to beat him (unless of course he capped it out).  The whole thing was fruitless.  After I upped the price to 750k, he disappeared, and I sat next to the Auctioneer as time ran out.  It was then that it hit me.  I just spent almost half of my entire stockpile of gold.  The feeling was unsettling.  I hadn't been at this low of a point (~1.1 million) in over a year.  I started freaking out, almost hoping that I would be outbid, so I could keep my enormous pile of gold, but the auction expired with my bid at 750k, and I had a brand new mount.  I thought I would feel buyer's remorse in an extreme way, but I don't.  Whether I got it in ICC or not, my mount is one of the most badass available in game, the steed of Arthas Menethil himself, resurrected by the Lich King.  I miss my gold, but I very much enjoy my new mount.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Phats' Weekly Lewt Review 12/28

Hey Everyone!

Hope you all are having a great and relaxing holiday!  Today as always I'm going to bring you my latest gold making escapades in the past week, in hope of helping you, and/or letting me vent a bit (you'll see below).

Tailoring
Tailoring has been really good for me the past few weeks.  I am still burning my daily CD, and selling both the crafted PvP sets and the Imperial Silk crafted (ilvl 476) gear.  Both at an amazing profit.  I actually can't keep the Imperial Silk crafted gear on the AH long enough to replenish it with my daily cooldown, which is nice!  I'm tending to craft only the gloves now, as both gloves and robes sell for about the same on my server, and gloves take 2 less cooldowns.  If I work up 6 cloths before I sell a pair of gloves though, I will make the robes.  As for the PvP gear, for some simple calculations I figure each PvP piece takes about one stack of Windwool (ie. 4 bolts) on average.  This means that for anywhere from 20-40g I can craft one piece of PvP gear.  That means Selling it from 150-350g is well worth my time!  I'm also crafting Netherweave Bags while AFK because the profit margins are strangely high on my server right now.

Alchemy/Farming
As I mentioned a few weeks ago when 5.1 dropped, I started planting Enigma Seeds.  I'm now using them to make flasks with the rest of the herbs that come up, since my 90 is an alchemist.  Just adds a little bit of value to my Lotus, but well worth it, as they both sell just as quickly for me.  Also, I've been using a spreadsheet to calculate my minimum Living Steel method (since TUJ doesn't account for procs from transmuting).  It's going well, but my profit margin is only about 100g on any given day, with procs taken into consideration.  With 4 alchemists, this means 400g/day so I can't complain for what little work I do to get it.

Burned at the BMAH
So recently I saw a Battered Hilt on the Black Market Auction House.  The starting bid was 15k and I know I can probably get anywhere from 25-30k on my server for such an item, and I figured if it didn't sell, I could use it myself, I've always wanted to do that quest line.  I won the bid at 15k and got the item, only to see that I had purchased the Alliance only version on my Horde character.  So I almost instantly opened up a ticket with a GM.  I got my response within 48 hrs, and I was not very pleased with it. They said 2 things: 1) They would not change the item to the Horde version and 2) They would not refund me the gold I payed for the item.  Bummer.  So I'm out 15k, it's my own fault but I figured they'd at least swap it for the Horde version, but what can you do.  Lesson learned, watch out for faction specific items on the BMAH.

That's about all for this week, it's been a lot of sales I figure because the college and high school kids have off this week through New Year's, and I've gotten a noticeable increase in sales, which is always welcome.  I will try to do another post some time before 2013, but I'm not sure that I will have the time.  In any case, I hope you all have a Happy New Year!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Phat's Weekly Lewt Review: MoP Style 10/19

So I haven't done a weekly review in quite some time, but I think it would be helpful to give you an insight into what I'm doing right now in game for gold making purposes.

Dailies
Even though I care about other factions, I always make sure I do my Tillers dailies.  They are the only faction (other than the crafting recipe ones) that directly relate to gold making.  Ironpaw Tokens are even extraordinarily useful in this time of the game, and will be in the months coming.  Cooking is turning out to be quite a lucrative profession for me, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.  Visiting my farm is one of the first things I do every day, as well as the Silk Fields just south of the farm for my Tailoring CD.  Very convenient.  My tailoring CD has to be one of my most favorite CDs of this expansion.  It takes raw mats and increases their value by at least tenfold.

Black Market Auction House
As a mage with ports to both Org and Vale I decided to set my main's hearth to the BMAH.  So far I've bought two heroic crafting patterns for their minimum 20k, and have flipped one for 30k.  I check this daily for great deals, and have already blown 80k on a mount.  Even though 80k was over my 50k threshold, I got a little caught up in a bidding war, which I shouldn't have.  I noticed the player bidding against me was running back and forth to the mailbox going up in 1k increments and decided to do 10k.  It got a bit out of hand.  Backfired you could say.  Oh well.

Transmogrification
I don't know how everyone else is doing with transmog gear, but so far it's been a great seller for me on my low pop server since MoP release.  I'd imagine larger servers are seeing too big of an influx of greens to be able to control the market, but I'm getting just enough greens in to hold my market down, and even though I'm not being good about reposting every 2 days, I've been making a lot using transmog strategies from last patch.

My Main's MoP Xmog
(Click to Enlarge)

On a related note I'm really loving the new look of the gear this expansion in every single way.  I love how when you quest all the questing gear matches, and that the gear is so intricate and not as generic as Cataclysm gear was.  It hasn't slowed down my transmog sales either, which is a bonus.  I think it is a step in the right direction from Blizzard, but I'll stop this rant right now before it turns into a monster.







Living Steel
I'm kind of disappointed with the way that Living Steel has gone this expansion, as Truegold had a much better presence throughout Cataclysm, especially in regards to profit margin.  I think it's mostly because all the crafted gear is raid finder level, so raiders can replace it pretty fast, and the non hardcore raiders don't bother buying it.  I've already dropped my 2nd JC for Inscription and I'm considering dropping at least 1 of my 4 Alchemists to pick up Inscription as well.  Mostly for the cards which will lose a lot of value after this upcoming DMF, but I think the trinkets will be in high demand through November DMF so the sooner the better IMO.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's certainly what I've been focusing in on as far as gold making in the new expansion.  What are your opinions on the viability of Alchemy (or any profession for that matter) going forward in WoW?  What's your new favorite profession?


Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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