Myrddin´s Shaman Blog

Archive for the ‘Earning Gold’ Category

People often wonder how to start earning Gold on a new Realm. It is really not difficult to start out. When 3.3 launched 4 weeks ago I created a little Orc Shaman on EU-Ravencrest. Originally I intended to move Myrddin from Eu-Magtheridon, but I do not want to pay Blizzard money for a Realm Transfer.

I leveled the Char up to level 9 until I had about 8 Silver and went to Orgrimmar, asked a Guard for the Enchanting Trainer and bought 1 Strange Dust and put it on AH for 45/90S buyout. It sold quite fast actually and I was able to buy more Strange Dusts and put them on AH.

I took the Zeppelin to Thunderbluff and bought the Strange Dusts there, too … and also started to buy the Essences and the 2 Green Recipes from each Enchanting Supplier and put them up for 8.5/12.5G Buyout.

As you can see, money adds up quite fast. From my first 5G spare I bought a Portal to Dalaran. This way you can buy Dust in Thunderbluff, Hearthstone to Dalaran and then head to Orgrimmar. You end up with 2 Green Recipes, about 6-8 Strange Dust and about 4-6 lesser Magic Essence (~30G)

It is nice for starters, but the more lucrtative stuff is Illusion Dust/Greater Eternal Essences. The reason for it is that those can’t realyl be farmed easily. There are only Wicked Leather Headbands that DE into Illusion Dust and Greater Eternal Essences. All other items require hard to find rare and expensive materials to craft.

To level Enchanting there is no way around Illusion Dust and Greater Eternal Essences, so it is a good way to get some money from players who level Enchanting.

It is often possible to buy Greater Eternal Essences for 10-12G, but since the low cost Formulas to level enchanting require LESSER Eternal Essences some people really overlook the greater ones :D

So you buy Greater Eternal Essences up to 15-16G and turn each into 3 Lesser Eternal Essences and sell them in Stacks of 10 for 84.5-89.5G.

Then you can expand to other Dusts and Essences. Vision Dust, Arcane Dust, Dream Dust would be the ones I’d go for.

Now after 4 Weeks it looks like this: 1450G cash, 156G average earned per day (Level 9!! )

Inclusive materials the Char’s worth is about 5 000 Gold, which isn’t bad for a char that you log once a day for 5 minutes.

With that much gold – and the speed you earn it increases each day – it is no problem to start playing and have enough to level the character up.

It has been a little over 1 year that wotlk and the achievement system came live now. With all the 10 raids instances a week on 2 characters cost a lot of time, the summary is a little late this month, but here is the 2 monthly Total Gold Acquired overview.

(note: the picture is quite big, give it some moments to load)

Summary November 2009:

• Total gold acquired: 800713 g
• Average gold earned each day: 2149 g
• Gold looted: 80222 g
• Gold from Quest rewards: 56708 g
• Gold earned from auctions: 660548 g
• Auctions posted: 377604

I shifted my sales a bit, as you can see from the previous post

http://www.myrddin.de/2009/09/01/total-gold-acquired-september-09/

Here are the changes since the last post:

• Daisan: +72655 g
• Exorial: +18730 g
• Slanty: +1722 g
• Gregorius: + 49650 g
• Myrddin: + 100530g
• Finewares: +15433 g
• Myrddin, V2: + 25552 g

As you can see I mainly focused on Daisan and Gregorius for income, basically only enchanting Materials. glyphs are a nice income, but it just takes too much time to put all the glyphs up all the time. Also parking my alts in instances for BRD and Scarlet Monastery summons did not really boost sales. I logged my Myrddin (the orc shaman) on Magtheridon only 3-4 times the past few months, it is really too easy to make gold there.

Even now, with the recent disenchanting changes, there is still lots of profit to make with Infnite Dust and other enchanting materials. The buy cheap, sell expensive tactic is still working like a charm.

Generally I like to avoid selling Blues and Epics, because I find it rather difficult to find the balance between making most profit and getting people to buy my auctions. Also the pure profit is usually much lower than selling for example Glyphs.

Basically the same principle I am using for Enchanting Materials and Gylphs works on Blues/Epics/Gems aswell. I don’t ever undercut people, since their auctions will sell and then I am selling mine for much more profit.

But putting up 5000 Blue Items of the same kind doesn’t really make sense to me. Lets look at an example here:

Some Seller has 18 Auctions of Runed Scarlet Rubies up and is by far more expensive than the others above him. Each ruby has a 2.7g auction fee, summing up 48.6 gold. so each 48 hours he loses 1 of his rubies just to finance his auctions. Imo it makes no sense, to put that much rubies on AH, they are expensive and most people most likely use epic gems now anyhow.

By putting up up only 4-5 of these he will sell as much and cut his costs effectively thus raising his profits.

The strategy I am working on my other Auctions, to put up many expensive auctions doesn’t really work well with anything that costs a high auction fee. You can sell stuff expensive, but you have to watch competition a bit closer.

• For example you can add competitors to your friend list and wait till they put something on ah, then check their pricing.
• Put up smaller amounts and check more frequently to resupply.

Blue and epic shoulders, chests and weapons will hardly sell as good as they did before heirloom items.  People that buy these items now are most likely new players on your realm and they hardly have tons of gold to spend.

Plate items in general sell quite well, most likely due to the huge amount of paladins/dk’s we see this expansion. Those classes are looking especially for Strength/Crit Items, which makes “of the Soldier” greens and blues quite valuable.

Mail and Leather “of the Bandit” Items are used by Feral Druid, Rogue, Enhancement Shaman, Hunter. These are usually better itemized than the Quest rewards you run across. Especially since quest rewards do not get changed even if classes get major changes (Shamans and Retribution Paladins for example)

As each 2 months it is time for the Total Gold Acquired (tga) summary. I’ll list up the Characters and the niches they are earning gold with.

Daisan, Level 80 Paladin

This one started out as Alternate char to farm old instances (mostly to farm Zul’Gurub for Mounts). For that reason she has “high looted gold” (considering she is a newb Level 80).
Daisan is also selling old enchanting materials (Dream Dust, Illusion Dust, Greater Eternal Essences, Large Brilliant Shards and lower), popular glyphs, cooking recipes and the like.

TGA: 54127g

Exorial, Level 80 retired DK

This char was planned to become what Daisan is now. An alt to farm zg, etc … But I found DK’s realyl unflexible and not fun to play, so I retired her as soon as she hit 80.
Exorial is selling epics, blues, profession recipes, basically everything that costs high ah fees.

TGA: 80350g

Slanty, retired Mace Rogue

Slanty is my Scribe. He is selling nothing but glyphs ( 34.50g bid & 39.50g buyout) and all inks ( 5.25g & 5.75g).

TGA: 77418g

Gregorius, paused Warlock

Arcane Dusts and Infinite Dusts are his only business.

TGA: 69015G

Myrddin, World’s Best Enhancement Shaman (just kidding!)

As you can easily see Myrddin is my Main Char. With 46000 g looted and more dailies than on the other characters. We used to farm Kazzak, Doomwalker, Magtheridon, Outdoor Dragons, Zul’Gurub, Ahn’Qiraj, Onyxia, Karazhan and the like to get our looted gold up fast.

TGA: 80945g

Finewares

Finewares was my original sales character. I prefer to have sales on other characters than my main to avoid the whispers of players that want you to sell stuff cheaper, etc. But at one time Finewares just had no more capacity for all the materials. right now he sells only Greater Planar Essences and Greater Cosmic Essences.

TGA: 90131g

Myrddin, V2!

Magtheridon seems to be a pretty good sales test environment. High Population PvE, highly PvE advanced Realm. I started this Orc Shaman about 1.5 years ago. Secretly I would like to reroll another Shaman as the old Myrddin gets somewhat old, but I’d never leave Borked Guild, the best Guild in the world! So he ended up as Test Char for crazy AH Tests. I hardly pla yhim anymore though, so there is hardly any profit worth mentioning. He sells everything mentioned above, enchanting materials + glyphs.

TGA: 64455g

Summary:  At September 09 I am at roughly 516 441 total gold acquired since the introduction of the achievement system. This is roughly 120 000g more since July. Don’t forget 300 000 auctions posted since 3.0 translate into 100 hours spent alone to retrieve mail in the best possible case, due to the 50 mail per 60 seconds limit.

There are several posts about the strategies used to get this done in the earning gold category. More posts to cover all aspects of my moneymaking will follow as I have time to write things down. I am sure you’ll find some useful advice or some tipps for your own auctions!

Most of my ingame fortune comes from enchanting materials. The best thing about them is that there is no auction fee to put them up.

Using the Auction house as free of charge storage was actually how I got into the Auction House (AH) business. I put up the mats at 3 times the cost. I figured noone would buy stuff at that cost and if they would it would not be all that bad after all.

The odd thing that happened then was that people bought my mats anyhow. I got more mats from the AH and put them up expensive and they sold again.

A friend and me had this crazy idea to spend all our gold and dominate the Arcane Dust market, we nearly got broke doing this but when the stocks were emptied there were only our dusts left and peole started buying our expensive dusts.

Rather quickly we were able to expand to other materials and learnt a lot about how the auction house worked.

Dusts

Dusts are excellent, because they are really easy to get and as said above they cost no fee to put up. Tailoring and disenchanting can get you most dusts fast, easy and cheap.

• White Bandit Masks -> Vision Dust
• Runecloth Belt-> Dream Dust
• Wicked Leather Headband (LW)  -> Illusion Dust
• Netherweave Belt -> Arcane Dust

A handy macro for disenchanting is here:

/cast Disenchant
/use Runecloth Belt
/use White Bandit Mask
/use Avenging Blades
/use Netherweave Bracers
/use Netherweave Belt

The Dusts that I listed above are essential to level up enchanting. Every enchanter will need a lot of those when leveling up, so keep them up expensive. For all these Dusts I recommend stack sizes of 5,10,20.

20 will most likely be too expensive for the average enchanter and they will buy them in stacks of 5 or 10  as few as possible. Since most players seem to level up their professions in raid free time I’d recommend having those up on AH from friday to tuesday.

Infinite Dust, as it provides the best enchants, sell all the time I strongly suggest having Infinite Dust up all days. However Wednesday/Thursday/Sunday/Monday are the best days to sell those.

Players are lazy, they do not like to buy and retrieve single dusts and if they buy too many they have no idea what to use them for. This is were we make our profit. It seems that palyers rather buy 8 dusts for 42g than 20 for 60g. Most enchants require stacks of 2/4/6/8/10/12 Infinite Dust so you should supply plenty of those.

Essences

Essences are similar to Dusts, but some related tipps here:

• White Bandit Masks -> Lesser Nether Essence
• Runecloth Belt-> Lesser Eternal Essence
• Wicked Leather Headband (LW)  -> Greater Eternal Essence
• Netherweave Belt -> Lesser Planar Essence
• Avenging Blades (Halaa) -> Greater Planar Essence

I am putting up lesser essences in stacks of 10 only and greater essences in stacks of 1,5,10

For Greater Cosmic Essences I recommend stack sizes of 1/2/4/6/8/10.

Btw, Greater Eternal Essences turn into Lesser Eternal Essences (yes, I felt this was necessary to say). I am selling lesser Eternal Essences for 9g each while there are often Greater Eternal Essences up for 9g. The recipes below 300 require Leser Eternal Esences and it seems when leveling up enchanting, that people take the recipes too literally.

And here is what it looks like, when you collect your income (50 mails limit):

Don’t sell your stuff too cheap, you can have the materials on ah forever at no cost and eventually they will sell.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your sales!

Myrddin