Making Gold with Battle Pets

This is for Day 17 of Nev's 20 Days of Goldmaking.  Interested in reading other's views on the topics?  Nev made a post with all the participants here.  Check it out, there's some really great posts!  Todays topic:

Pets - Did you used to do the Vendor pet sales? How have pet battles changed things for you?

Predictions
Going into MoP I had some big hopes for battle pets.  With the stats of rare battle pets being higher than regular battle pets, and only a small purchasable amount of them, I figured they'd be shoo-ins for gold making.  That did not turn out to be the case.  As far as making a profit with battle pets, there are some pets I could farm and make decent returns with constantly, but as many know I'm not the farming type.

Current Markets
Believe it or not, I'm still able to sell vendor pets for a decent markup.  Players just generally aren't using Wowhead to find out where they come from, and on my relatively small server, there isn't much competition. The one advantage with the rare battle pets that I'm starting to see that wasn't there previously, is the ability to move capital across servers.  If I have 20k gold on server X, and I want to move it to server Y, battle pets are a (sometimes slow selling) way to do it.  I have a level 25 pet on my team, so I can learn and recage level 25 pets, which is what I aim for when flipping pets.

Also if you're starting out on a new server, I have never had trouble selling Tiny Shale Spider on a new server within my first posting for 500g-1,000g (note that all my "new" servers are usually high pop).   They're a great way to gain some starting capital and easily farmable by any character that played through Deepholm in Cataclysm.

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Dev AMA Thoughts/Highlights

After the Developer AMA on reddit, I'd just like to highlight and briefly comment on some of the things they said that relate to the AH and gold making.  (Dev posts in blue, my responses black).

Q: Cross Realm Auction Houses?
A: "With regard to the auction house, I can imagine a future where we might decide to make auction houses cross-server. It's not something to jump into lightly, but there may be ways to design a cross-realm auction house that ensures a viable economy without getting "too big"."

To me this just says "No this just isn't going to happen".  It's something that if it did happen we'd be given a wide window of notification, but is something they're not worried about at all right now, and haven't put any thought into yet.  They seem to like how Cross Realm Zones (CRZs) are working so far(see below), and have no plans to change how the AH works to be cross realm in the near future.

Q: CRZs Killed Hunting Rare Spawns and Gathering.  Also my servers economy!:
A1: "We understand some players have gotten used to the idea of farming nodes or rares without any competition, but we designed all of those features with a certain population in mind."
A2: "CRZ wasn't intended to fill up the auction houses of realms with low auction activity. That wasn't the goal of the feature, so blaming it for not achieving that goal isn't terribly fair."

Going through the AMA recap, there are a lot of questions regarding CRZ and the AH.  I agree here, it did really kill the ability to hunt rares on smaller servers, and may in fact hurt your gathering chances greatly (especially on lower level nodes), decreasing mats that are on the AH, because they are brought to other servers.  Don't think though that they won't adjust the spawn rates of nodes or rares, if they see it as needed.
So basically as a small pop server, there are now an equal amount of people camping a spawn, or competing for nodes as a high pop server. Working as 'Intended'.  Not so sure it's equal now, but I don't doubt that they'll make it equal "Soon.™"

Finally on a second article, "World of Warcraft Devs: Q&A for Fansites" which I first read on wowjuju, Blizzard answered a few more questions, only one of which I think has interest to gold making:


Q: What's the reasoning behind removing the Auction House from Pandaria?
A: Firstly, we want to ensure our servers are stable. The Pandaria hub will be a very crowded area. Ultimately, we think the model for TBC and WotLK worked okay, so we don't foresee any major issues with requiring players to return to capital cities to use the AH. This also helps keep the capitals from being ghost towns.


Not being on the Beta, I was actually unaware that they did this.  I can understand the reasoning, but I post non Transmog or Glyph auctions from my main, and could definitely see this as an inconvenience.  Can easily be resolved by switching my posting toon though, with minimal effort.  Not the worst thing in the world, but definitely annoying.  Guess they did it because they don't want Lagaran 2.0, and that's completely understandable.  That's all from me for now, what are your thoughts on these developments?

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Rare Battle Pets Mean Lots of Gold!

It seems Cold beat me to posting a list, but I'm going to post the list I've been working on along with the gold making tips here, but definitely check out his list as well.

So we have come to that juncture in time.  What to do with rare pets?  Well luckily for you I'm just crazy enough to put together a list, organized by means of obtaining, of all the current pets that are going to be made into Rare Battle pets.  That list can be found here. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with this. It's important.

You may be thinking "Why put together a list of the BoP and BoE pets?  We gold makers only care about the BoEs!".  Well you should care about the BoP pets as well because even though  "All promotional, CE, Blizzard Pet Store, TCG and quest pets are currently not tradeable", rare spawns will be, as seen in my table (as well as Achievement and DMF pets). Also note that Catchable pets will be non-tradeable (this post more recent than quoted post, meaning the only way to obtain rares without going out and catching them is these pets.  (I told you this list is important!!!)).   But first, as any respectable post including BoE items goes, a list for finding the BoE pets on the AH:

The BoE Pets:
Auctionator List:


***Rare Battle Pets:
Azure Whelpling
Captured Firefly
Crimson Whelpling
Dark Whelpling
Emerald Whelpling
Gundrak Hatchling
Hyacinth Macaw
Razzashi Hatchling
Disguisting Oozeling
Guardian Cub
Elementium Geode


TSM List:
s1@8498,29960,20769,10822,48116,67282,72068,8499,8494,48126,34535$@


BoP Pets
So now the truly interesting part of the post.  The pets that I'm most focused on is these.  The rare spawns. The Darkmoon pets will be tradeable, but IMO they're too common/easy to obtain.  Also, the Profession and Achievement pets will possibly be tradeable.  I have a feeling the Achievement ones may be made non-tradeable so I'm not going to solely focus on them.

The reason we want to get these is because "If you have multiple versions of the same pet on multiple characters on your account, they will be merged into one. We will place any extras in your bags or mail them to you if you are out of space."  This is important.  If you get say 10 of a rare BoP pet, one on each of your alts, you will recieve 9 in the mail that are (as of right now) sellable.  DISCLAIMER: I'm not guaranteeing that this will be how it is when MoP ships, but for now it's all we have to go on, and I'm digging it.

First is my favorite from the bunch:
Phoenix Hatchling

Image courtesy of Wowhead.com

This little guy is just cool looking!  Who wouldn't want a phoenix as a battle pet?  This guy is an ~9% drop from the last boss of Magisters' Terrace.  This can be completed on Normal or heroic, and soloed easily by an 85.  I personally would suggest you do a heroic run on each of the alts you want to try for this pet on rather than a bunch of normal runs on one alt.  Why?  Account wide mounts and this boss on heroic drops Swift White Hawkstrider.  Of course after you obtain it, feel free to farm the pet on regulars, or ignore the mount altogether, it's your call!



Mr. Grubbs

Image courtesy of wowhead.com

This guy intrigues me.  He may not be the most pretty pet, but comments on wowhead say this guy is not too hard to farm, because adds respawn in certain areas quite quickly.  When 5.0.4 comes out (the Pre-expansion patch) AoE looting will be added to the game.  Mr. Grubbs is going to be my first personal test of AoE looting.  If the adds spawn as fast as some claim they do, this 1% drop should be easily farmable (need to complete certain quests first).  Again I personally will not even attempt this guy until 5.0.4 drops, because hey why not wait for AoE looting?  The one drawback may be that when they make the pets account bound in 5.0.4 you may not be able to get the multiples.  Only time will tell (and hopefully some more blue posts before then!).  If nothing else I will cage the one that I get and sell it :-P.

Pebble and Jadefang

Image Courtesy wowhead.com

Tiny Shale Spider, obtained today.

There are two pets in Deepholm that I have my eye on for Battle Pets.  Pebble, the reward from doing 10 Dailies: Rock Lover, and Tiny Shale Spider, obtained from killing the rare spawn Jadefang.  If you have the dailies unlocked in Uldum you can try for both of these.  I had never gone after Jadefang before so I tried to see how difficult it was.  Jadefang was there when I went, and I got my first Tiny Shale Spider.  This comment on Wowhead explains how to get there perfectly.  For both of these you will need to have the dailies in Deepholm unlocked.  Like I said originally I am skeptical as to whether or not Achievment pets (in this case Pebble) will be tradeable, but I am confident that the Rare Spawns will be (ie Tiny Shale Spider).

*WARNING: Since Jadefang is (or was before Molten Front) a sought after pet, odds are Jadefang will be cached on your NPC Scan, don't let NPC Scan fool you, check for yourself.  You will be able to target Jadefang, if there, from the green rock (see the comment on wowhead).*


Crosolisks in the City

"Toothy"

The last pets I'm going to try to get multiples of are the Crocolisk pets from the Shattrath Fishing Daily: Crocolisks in the City.  These cute little guys are too good to pass up, even if "quest pets" are non-tradeable at the moment.  The reason I'm thinking that these guys could possibly be tradeable is because they're not directly obtainable from the quest, they are drops from the bags, and I think if they do become tradeable, they'll be great sellers.




That's all for me on the gold making front of these pets.  Which one of the Rare Battle Pets are you most excited about?



Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Blasted Lands NPCScan Add Macro

If you like this post follow me on twitter @PhatLewtsGold!!

I recently decided that it would be a brilliant idea to delete all my addons and start from scratch without making backup copies.  I'm a brilliant man, what can I say?  Anyway the result was me not having any of my rare spawns from blasted lands that I enjoy hunting so much in my NPCScan search.  I was feeling a bit lazy, and wanted to find a macro that I could copy/paste to add all of them at once.  After hunting for about 10 minutes I realized that I could have added them all in that time and that I can just make a macro myself, and here it is (separated into 2 macros due to character limits)

Blasted Lands Rare Spawns

/npcscan add 7846 Teremus

/npcscan add 8296 Mojo

/npcscan add 8297 Magron

/npcscan add 8298 Akubar

/npcscan add 8299 Spite

/npcscan add 8300 Rav

/npcscan add 8301 Clack

/npcscan add 8302 Deathe

/npcscan add 8303 Grunt

/npcscan add 8304 Dreadsc

/npcscan add 45257 Mordak

/npcscan add 45258 Cassia

/npcscan add 45260 Black

/npcscan add 45262 Narix

So there you go, just in case anyone wanted it, or is interested in hunting these rare spawns, the macro is waiting for your love.  The names after the numbers are irrelevant as they are just the nicknames you see when you type /npcscan.  If you want the full names for your reading pleasure, feel free to add them yourself :-)

Also as an added bonus, this is the route I take in Blasted Lands to hunt the spawns.  Is it the best way? Maybe/probably not.  Is it a decent/good way?  Yes.

Original Image from Wowhead.com

Have fun hunting your rares! 

Cheers,

Phat Lewts