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!!

The New 77-80 Market: 80-84 MoP Gear

As predicted, there is a new era of twink gear out that is equivalent to Cataclysm's 77-80 market (which is still alive and kicking).  Keep in mind that now is not a great time to sell, it's a great time to buy.  Lots of this will be on AH's for relatively cheap, but now is not necessarily the best time to post these, except leather (for monks).  Keep in mind that if you start posting at high prices will result in people undercutting you, ruining the potentially endless flow of great deals for the greens(and blues) on the AH.

Search Terms!
If you're using TSM, there is only one search that you need to do:

80/84/i364

These searches look for all items available to those in the range 80-84 with ilvl 364 and higher.  This will include all weapons and armor that came out in MoP available to this bracket.  There are 80-82 blues that are super OP, so keep an eye out for those, they're ilvl 409-425!

If you're using Auctionator you have to do 2 searches

***MoP Twinks
Armor/80/84/i364
Weapon/80/84/i364

And that's it!  You may want to go through this gear and hand pick the ones with the best stats, but at the current prices I'm seeing, if it doesn't sell, you can DE it for a profit!  Now is a great time to stock up on this to sell it throughout the expansion.  Even with a little gold you can make a decent investment, and expect high returns once a majority of the characters are at max level and not questing in the 85-86 zones that drop these!  Welcome to the new era of twink gear!

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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

Top 5 Professions to Level ASAP!

Today I figured I'd do a post on what professions I personally will be leveling as soon as possible.  Mists releases at midnight on the west coast US, which is a relatively ungodly 3 AM for those of us on the east coast.  That being said I'm still considering setting my alarm and having a pot of coffee on hand, but right now it looks unlikely. Once I do eventually log, I am going to focus on leveling my professions before stepping into Pandaria.

Living Steel

My main focus though is the new "Truegold", Living Steel.  This new alchemy cooldown is used in 28 recipes, all but 10 of which will be craftable at launch, given the crafter has the correct (and in some cases absurdly high) amount of Spirit of Harmony in some cases.  This precious metal is used in many crafts.  16 total are required to craft the new JC Epic Mount (which will require Exalted rep to get all recipes for), 1 is required to craft the new Belt Buckle, as well as quite a few needed for the BS and Engineering Epics.  Let's just say there's going to be quite a demand for this item, especially from those elite raiding guilds on your server.

Primordial Ruby

A JC's Best Friend

My second focus will be leveling Jewelcrafting acquiring all of the Jewelcrafting Primordial Ruby base cuts (Delicate, Bold, Brilliant) ASAP.  These cuts will be learned through research or doing Golden Lotus Dailies at Revered.  **Here's the thing to consider with Jewelcrafting though**, they're scaling gem cuts this expansion.  This means they're scrapping the Cataclysm (and previous expansion) model of say 40 base stats total for all gems. Instead, the off color gems will have more base stats to compensate for the lack of Primary stats (Int, Str, Agi).  This doesn't concern me because I think during the first few weeks people will still be following their old gemming ways, and I'm not too worried about these not being HOT sellers.  I may however stop once I get the Brilliant cut, so I can diversify.  The more colors of rare gems I can cut the first few weeks the better.

Without Further Ado, my list:
Top 5 Professions to Level (IMO)

1. Alchemy
• As Stated above, Alchemy transmutes will be used in many recipes, so I will be focusing on leveling the Alchemy my 4 Transmute Masters as soon as possible, to get these xmutes on the AH before the price drops 1 copper!
2. Jewelcrafting
• Again as stated above I want to take good care to learn as many cuts as possible, as soon as possible, and you can start researching once you hit 550, so after that I'm going to stop and focus on other professions.  It's also useful to note I have 2 JCs for double the research possibilities.
3. Tailoring
• Tailoring also has a new daily cooldown that will be added, which again will be craftable at only 550, so getting my 2 Tailors up to burn their daily cooldowns is necessary as soon as possible again.
4. Inscription
• Once again, Inscription is another profession has a once daily cooldown (525), which is a necessary material for Darkmoon Cards(600).
• This makes the individual Darkmoon Cards way more valuable, and will focus trinket seekers on getting individual cards as opposed to full decks.
• Take into consideration that there is also 3 BoA Staves that require 20 of these first daily CDs to make.  Priorities!!! **Note that you can acquire 7 per week doing proffesion specific (level 600) weekly quests, so this is where maxing your Scribe comes in handy.
• I'm not sure if you need to be a certain level to access the area, if so you will need to obtain that level as well. 
5. Mining
• This may seem like a curveball to some, given my (and most gold makers) "Gathering isn't the best GPH" stance.  I still agree with this, and think my profession leveling order above will payout the most, but my go to craft, Living Steel Transmute requires 6 Trillium Bars EACH, each of which require 2 of each color of Trillium Ore (so needs 24 raw ore total, 12 of each color).

• This bar cannot be smelted by Miners until 600 Skill Level, which can only be obtained by farming nodes (no smelting skill ups), so you KNOW the bars are going to be in high demand, and are also going to be very expensive for the first few weeks. By having my own miner smelt the bars, I can cut my costs, and acquire some ore for the transmutes.  It's a win win (except I don't want to level my Tauren Druid, but oh well).

So this is it, my master plan.  If anyone is curious I will be leveling my Mage (Tailor/Alchemy) to 90 first after all this, and starting my farm ASAP, so my mage will be the first one to be able to benefit from the Tiller's Bonus Spirit of Harmony, which is nice because then I'll have the option to choose between the most profitable of the two daily CDs (Tailoring/Alch) that character can craft, based on established AH prices. 

So that's my plan (and suggestion) on which Professions to level first.  Which professions are you planning on leveling up first?

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

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