Alpha News and Thoughts 6.19

For those of you not following me on Twitter and possibly wondering where I've been, well I've been really busy. On top of that, instead of blogging during most of my free time, I've been (thanks to GoblinRaset) invited to the WoD Alpha, and I've been testing it out for about a week now. Since there's been a decent amount of radio silence on my end I figured I'd post some of my thoughts of the current Alpha and what we need to be watching moving forward.

General Updates
So there have been some Alpha updates, the most interesting for us being about a week ago. Lots of the latest updates have been class tweaks, but there are some gold making items that were added that we should be focusing on a bit.

Inscription
There were some general updates to inscription, namely all of the research spells have been removed and replaced by these spells instead. This will allow for quicker learning of non-trainer glyphs.  Right now I'm not going to comment on it, but check out Elen's (El from El's Angling) post on this on the Consortium Forums. There's not much I can add there.

Joker's Wild
Added to the most recent build are cards like Moon Joker. The Joker card behaves almost as you would expect it to, you can exchange it at the Darkmoon Faire for any card in it's deck (Moon is a deck). This is an interesting change, but keep in mind that it has an equal spawn rate to any of the other cards, so the Joker itself will also be very rare, but a great mechanism to take the RNG out of DMF cards. To me it will reduce the overall gating of the DMF cards, which would also reduce profits, but it opens up some new possibilities in Inscription that I think will majorly be a quality of life fix for most Scribes.

Big Vendor Bags
The last bit on the News side is the addition of the Gronnskin Bag. This is a 28 slot bag that has a sell price of 550g, implying it's likely that it's sold by a vendor (probably not in Alpha yet) for 2200g. Now, if the price doesn't go up, it definitely will effect the bag market. On the other hand things stacking to 200 will largely make bigger bags unnecessary, but realistically, we all enjoy that extra space.

Phat's Impressions
So I've been actually playing on the Alpha server, and I've enjoyed the Alpha thus far, and look forward to learning more. Garrisons are strongly intertwined to the questing experience. Every single quest line and rare spawn you find while questing rewards Garrison Resources, and the storyline keeps bringing you back to your garrison to build and fortify. What I'm trying to say is Garrisons aren't alt friendly. Gone are the days of leveling a toon to 85 just to take max professions and do a CD every day, it's just not going to happen. This video will show you what I mean, it's pretty short, just a peek into Alchemy/Garrison involvement (currently only the alch building is REMOTELY testable as far as prof buildings). Note that you'll need to use your garrison going to get your recipes:

Again, keep in mind it's early alpha. The mechanism to get the tokens to buy recipes isn't in game, but Elen (from above) has suggested in a separate thread that they come from Alchemy follower quests, not yet in Alpha. Now the one saving grace is that once you get the tome to learn 700 professions (only in Draenor), you will be able to craft the CDs, and for Alchemy at the very least, they're not soulbound! This may provide some relief for alts, but that's yet to be found. Otherwise alpha has been fun and buggy, and I can honestly say I enjoyed the questline and building up what little I can of my Garrison. Be sure to follow my blog to keep up with Garrison news going forward!


Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold

Key to Gold Making: Know Your Math.

I see a lot of questions on the Consortium Forums and on reddit where people ask how to tell if x profession or y profession is "profitable". In my opinion, one of the keys of an excellent gold maker is the ability to evaluate this information on the fly with some simple calculation rather than using a spreadsheet or tool (such as TSM) constantly. Know your math.

How I Do My Math
There are other ways of doing this, such as using addons and spreadsheets, but at a base level, I want to understand my product, and be able to purchase Ghost Iron Ore without using TSM to evaluate it, or a spreadsheet every time, being confident that I'm profiting at those prices. Now, no basic calculation will be perfect, but you have to trust that your theories are correct and there will be profits. Now for some examples.

Prospecting
I've used this example many times before, so if you've heard it already feel free to skip to the next subheading. For prospecting we know some simple rates. On average a stack of Ghost Iron will net you 1 rare and 6 uncommon gems, as well as some fraction of a Serpent's Eye. While the Serpent's Eye isn't negligible, I tend to ignore it for my simple calculations. How about those uncommons? The 6 uncommons will net you at a MINIMUM, 16g profit (2x jewelry that vendors for 9g each, and takes a 1g setting to make). Therefore an average rare gem (ie. each gem color) based on prospecting will cost you AT MOST:

Ghost Iron Ore Stack Price - 16g

Gold Making Invitational: My Competition's Strategy by Anddi

Today I've got a really exciting treat for you all, I asked Lakza, my main competition during the gold making invitational if he'd be willing to write up a post on his experiences, and he gladly obliged, so today I'm featuring a guest post by Lakza, otherwise known Anddi on his main server. I just want to give a big thank you to him for providing his perspective, I personally found it very interesting, and I hope you do too! Without further ado, his post:

Background
I only began playing WoW during early 4.3, starting off on a backwater RP server. In the last few months of Cata I got interested in gold making and built up some capital flipping items, eventually moving onto shuffling and more serious gold making with professions at the beginning of MoP. A year ago I transferred to a higher pop server, Proudmoore-US, which allowed me to greatly expand my gold making operations and to get into more serious raiding. I’m currently sitting at 5.6 million gold there, and am working towards a heroic Garrosh kill.

Strategy
Ironically given that I ended up winning the gold per hour portion of the competition, I decided early on that I’d be going for most gold overall and not really concerning myself with limiting my /played time. I was also curious to see what would happen if I used techniques I’d normally consider too boring or not worth the time investment on my main server, like farming and reselling cheap vendor mats.  As such, one of the first things I did after leaving the DK starting zone was farm enough Noblegarden Chocolates to buy a Swift Springstrider, which gave me a decent chunk of capital early on. I also decided to go with Mining and Skinning as my professions, since Vanilla leather prices looked good and I had no intention of leveling all the way to 80 in order to make a crafting profession worthwhile. I did initially level my toon to 60 to buy flying, but in the end I opted not to take the hit to what little gold I’d accumulated by that point and to just stick with flight paths.

Gold Making Invitational Wrap Up

Days 1-5
Days 6-15
Days 16-27

I got very busy during the last few days of the competition IRL, and could not continue the log style of my posts, so the last 3 days are in a group summary form.

Final Days Combined Log (28-30)
Unfortunately, due to unforseen circumstances IRL, these last few days will require a lot of out-of-game attention, so I will not be able to maintain the log style of the previous posts. That being said I am liquidifying everything I possibly can on the competition realm, going through my bank and things I've been putting off, buying LS cooldowns to dump excess Trillium. Liquidating. Everything. Doing a lot of cancelling when I can to get those extra sales. Restocking gems as well, anything I can to turn an extra buck. Saw my main competition on just 24 hours before the deadline, and I did a compare achievements on him yielding the following:

Now honestly, I feel that this guy is the only one who IMO will be competing with me for the two titles (most gold/most gold per hour). I'm not sure that anyone else has even been continuing on at this point, or is trying/playing at this level. So, comparing the numbers we see some interesting trends. One is that I've acquired roughly twice as much gold as Lakza. I'm very interested in this. From what I was seeing, he was very invested in flipping mat markets, and selling vendor items. This also tells me that he was making much better returns on his investments than I was, although again, I think my strategy was too long term. On our most gold owned, for one I'm assuming that we both currently were holding the most gold ever owned on our characters at the current time, which puts Lakza 6,000g ahead of me. I think that with persistance in this last 24 hours that I can overcome the gap and then some. I've been roughly earning 10k/day in the past 2 days, so getting 12-15k I'd feel comfortable in where I am, but it only means these last few hours are going to be essential in making my most gold title.

It really sucks, because I think it just took me too long to hit my stride, and given an extra week I could make over double what I have now, but there's no one to blame for that than myself. Throughout the 24 hours I was posting like a mad man whenever I got the chance and restocking/posting all my gem cuts in stacks of 5. At the end of the competition I decided not to go crazy and vendor all of my items as it would be a complete waste of future earnings that I plan to do on the server.

The final totals for the two winners were:

PhatLewts: Total: 61,203g | Playtime: 66hrs 46mins | GPH: 916.5
Lakza: Total: 56,678g | Playtime: 51hrs 40mins | GPH: 1096.6

So I was able to make 18k in my last day, and Lakza pulled in about 7.5k, giving me the larger total, and leaving Lakza with the most GPH. Lakza and I were very close throughout the competition, and I could tell early on that he and I would end up being the front runners by the end.

Post Competition Analysis
So, as I've been saying throughout I think that my strategy was poor for this competition. At the beginning I envisioned it starting to work properly much earlier in the process. I'm currently set to make hundreds of thousands of gold on this server, but getting to that position took longer than I expected. If I were to do this competition again, I'd have reused the strategy I used in my competition with Selltacular for getting in the gem market, that is, hiring out JCs and Alchemists to do my dirty work for me. I thought that given that this competition was roughly twice as long, that it would pay off in the long run to level the professions myself, but I do not believe that it has. The only way I could say that it has was that Tiger Opals were in the 40-50g range almost constantly on this server, which still leaves avenues for profits, but really cuts down on the margins. Being able to prospect for Vermilion Onyxes and cheap Tiger Opans was almost a must. If they actually sold for 40-50g people were making more than a stack of Ghost Iron was going for in just that one uncut gem. Good for them, but that's ridiculous.

Throughout the competition sales were a bit slower than I had imagined they'd be. I don't know if it's the size of the server, or perhaps the amount of big players in the market, but I dabble on a different medium pop server, and my turnover rate is much higher, and I went in expecting the same on this one. Managing everything from one toon was a bit of a pain as well, keeping armor auctions and gems/enchants/xmutes all on one character is a bit of a juggling act, but worked out okay in the end.

Hindsight is 20/20
If I were to do the competition again, I would probably change how I approached the whole thing. I like the way Lakza approached things, getting a few levels then flipping what they could. To me though that'd get boring, but is probably a much better short term strategy. Overall I think the biggest hurdle in this competition was building up quickly, and I was not as successful at that as I'd have liked to been, but now have a solid base to build upon on that server, if I indeed choose to do so. I've been talking with Lakza and he's expressed interest in writing an analysis post from his perspective on my blog, so I'm pretty excited about that, look for it later this month!

Guessing Competition
Probably most disappointing was my guessing competition. I had a lot of guesses in the 200k range, and man did I not live up to that. The winner is of course @discorddave with the following guess:

My guess for @PhatLewtsGold's 30 Day Gold Making Cinder Kitten Giveaway is 73,216 g! Contest details at http://t.co/zHDNEXtP73
— Discord Dave (@discorddave) May 7, 2014

For a while I was thinking I'd end up with less in this month long competition than I did in my 2 week competition, but thankfully that was not the case. So, congrats again to @discorddave, to whom I've already sent a DM on twitter to for the prize!

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold

Garrison Part 1 Gold Making Analysis

So today Blizzard released Part 1 in a 4 Part series all about Garrisons. I'm not going to go through all the nuances of the Garrison they've added, but solely focus on the gold making aspect. Now, before I get too far in the analysis here, I want to point out the most important part to us gold makers:

"The Garrison also grants you other powerful benefits. It will play an integral role in your professions on Draenor, giving your character access to more than just the normal two primary professions (we’ll cover that in more depth in part 2 of this preview series)."

So it seems that our long awaited in depth post about the interplay between Garrisons and Professions is on the horizon. Given how Blizzard has been tending to release information as of late, I'd imagine we'll see this next week around this same time.

Gold Making Invitational Days 16-27

Days 1-5
Days 6-15

Today I'm going to post the rest of the days of the competition, with a wrap up to follow tomorrow. Wanted to include it in this post, but it's taking me longer than expected to write, so I figured I'd throw the last chunk of days out for y'all to read, and get to the

Day 16
Made 762g in the overnight, reposted auctions in the morning quick. I got Crafty Vermilion Onyx (Exp/Crit) for my daily cut, not too bad! I made a bunch of those, reset a few other cuts, as well as some enchants and shoulder enchants (got ~3k by the night). Doing quite well with that. There are ~2 weeks left so I'm going to attempt to start building up capital, ended the night with over 1k, but I still will not hesitate to spend if an opportunity presents itself.

Start: 1,144g
End: 1,312g
Auctions: 64,102g

Gold Making Invitational Days 6-15

Previous: Days 1-5
Next: Days 16-25

So the contest wrapped up this past week, but I've been crazy busy. Drove cross country from NJ to Texas, starting a new job, and all that good stuff, so I haven't really been able to keep up with updating this properly, so here's days 6-15. Will probably put out 16-25 tomorrow or the next day, and then a nice wrap up post following that. Without further ado, here's Days 6-15:

Day 6
Had a decent overnight, ~900g in sales, it's time to reinvest it! Got a piece of 80-84 blue gear for 190g and reposted that, and invested the rest in my transmog list. Chain ran some UK dungeons, 2 Cobalt nodes per run is pretty nice gold. Ran till 72, then went out for the night, posted when I got home but did not play much, as it was late.

Start: 960g
Finished: 190g
Auctions: 53,372g

Day 7
A pretty dismal overnight put me to 223g, and increase of just over 30g. I spent most of that gold leveling up my Jewelcrafting mainly to hit 400 and start prospecting Saronite Ore. I have been getting a decent amount of Cobalt from UK, and being impatient as well as not wanting to buy from my competition who was flipping it, I was prospecting it for JC mats, even though it makes more sense to sell the cobalt raw and/or as bars. Now that I have no need for Cobalt, I will be doing just that. Hoping to hit 74 today. I will be away this upcoming weekend, and only be able to log on infrequently at best, hopefully to get a post scan off or two. I'm mildly regretting investing in transmog at this point. It may have been a little early and the posting fees take their toll with this low of a gold total. I've made some decent gold off the market, but not enough to sustain my posting habits, which are mostly a result of me having an unlimited amount of gold for menial things like posting, and I'm not in the habit of allocating some of my income for posting fees.

Hit 76 after chaining Gundrak for a few hours. Made a huge mistake and posted 10 stacks of frostweave for 6g/stack instead of 6g each. Was by the AH when I realized what was happening and was able to cancel some of the auctions before they were bought out. A pretty large set back considering I was -40g per stack for those stacks.

Start: 223g
Finished: 65g
Auctions: 60478g

Day 8
I posted quite a few items last night, which was a bit of a blunder as I did not realize that there was maintenance today, thus a waste of posting fees for the most part. Last night I was able to use TUJ and bids to secure some cheap materials though, most notably 50 x Exotic Leather for 5 silver a piece. Considering I'll probably sell it for ~2g50s per piece, a very lucrative investment. I also lost a few of my bids, and some did not expire during the maintenance period. I did a quick post scan after reset, another late at night, and leveled to 77 getting carried by a Cata geared 78. That was fun.

Start: 180g
Finished: 22g
Auctions: 56,273g

Day 9
Made a solid 1k in sales in the overnight. Reposted what I needed to, and ran a few dungeons putting me towards 78. I decided that 2 levels was mincemeat and it was time to really buck down and grind some Gundraks, farm some Obsidium Ore, ding 80 and knock of my first JC daily cut. As I type this CKS is prospecting my Obsidium in the background. I hit 80 and my /played is at 37 hours. Ouch. Probably would have been more efficient to not make gold leveling from 1-80 then go back and do it, but it is what it is.

I farmed ~20 stacks of Obsidium and just hit 500, which was perfect. Had 1100g on me and 6 stacks of GIO I purchased for cheap earlier. Bought what I could afford and went to town. It's killing me to waste these Tiger Opal's just to level JC, but what can I do? Got to 535 and decided to go for the gold and do Vermilion Onyx research since I'm on a limited timetable. Got Champions (Str/Dodge). Swing and a miss.

Now the question is do I level Alchemy, or hire out Transmute Alchemists? Now there are 2 major factors. Time is the first. To get 500 levels will take at least an hour between crafting and getting mats of the AH. On top of that I'd have to pay 4x Living Steel to spec Xmute Mastery, but I suppose that's a wash in the long run anyway. Tipping worked in my past competition, but trying a different route.

Start: 1,063g
End: 215g
Auctions: 54,396g

Day 10
Did not play a whole lot on the competition server today. Logged in twice to repost my auctions, but had a busy day, and did not do much gold making wise.

Start: 290g
End: 23g
Auctions: 56,934g

Day 11
Made a good 1,400g in sales in the overnight, my research yielded Polished (Agi/Dodge), which is not the greatest cut to start with. Although it hasn't payed off initially, I currently hold the only full stacks of Frostweave on the AH. I have 22 stacks @ 120g/stack, if they all sell I'm going to bite the bullet and level Alchemy 1-600. Having a Goblin and that ~2400g, I should be able to get Alch to 600 by the end of the weekend. Living Steel is 280g per right now, Trillium at 45g/bar. May Smelt a batch of GIO in preparation before I drop Mining. Decisions, decisions.

Start: 1452g
End: 183g
Auctions: 46,361g

Day 12
Only made ~250g in the overnight. Burned my Vermilion Onyx CD and got Wicked (Exp/Haste). Not a total loss, but nothing excellent. Tried to continue to level my Alchemy, but with major road blocks, and decided to wait until more mats are available and/or I had more gold.

Start: 489g
End: 28g
Auctions: 51,169g

Day 13
Wildly productive overnight in sales. Main sale being Alpheus Legguards for 1250g (1186 after tax). I reset some cheap gems (~55g/each, sell for 100g+) and decided to do research with Wild Jade, which yielded me my first excellent cut, Sensei's Wild Jade (Hit/Mastery). I'm going to try and reset some of the gem markets and see how that plays out for me. I use reset scans for these on my server to check for deep underpricings, and decided to use the same settings for this server.

Alchemy is still a major pain to level, and I'm not sure it's going to be worth it at this point. Bought a Hozen Peace Pipe for 400g, relisted at 1200g. Relisted gems throughout the day, reset about 6 cuts, invested in some transmog and got Alchemy to 300g before running out of money. Cancelled and reposted before heading off for the night.


Start: 1642g
End: 12s 32c
Auctions: 71,618g

Day 14
Logged in in the morning and reposted, learned a Primordial Ruby cut. Flashing. Sold a Ced's Crusher in the middle of the day that I had purchased for 2500g, and quite a few stacks of Silk Cloth to hit a high of 3,897g! I of course used my surplus gold to finish off leveling Alchemy to max. With JC/Alch fully maxed the only thing stopping me now is daily research for cuts.

This is a SS that happened later in the competition. Silk is good to flip on Small-Med servers.

Start: 772g
End: 102g
Auctions: 69,122g

Day 15
Did a Vermilion Onyx research, got a cut I could sell. I again Reset some gems, including mostly cuts I don't have, and made 2,800 during the day. Reinvested into GIO/Golden Lotus, and reset more gems. Getting a nice diverse set of gems, and manipulating prices. Starting to feel like I'm hitting my stride. Competition in gems is pretty fierce, and I don't have enough inventory so that I don't have to do cancel scans, which sucks for me, because cancel scans suck.

Start: 382g
End: 587g
Auctions: 71,146g

Previous: Days 1-5
Next: Days 16-25

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

@PhatLewtsGold
  PhatLewtsGold