I know people are always doubting if my business model in wow really works. What I am doing it to keep stuff at a high price at the auction house and never undercut anyone. In fact my prices are often 5-8 times higher than normal and people often write me nice mails that I am crazy … but what can I say … it works!

How does it work?

During the Burning Crusade, my good friend Terrantal and me decided to take over the Auction House for Arcane Dust. It was quite a stunt back then, think we invested 17k gold, which was a lot back then and at least I could not have lasted 2 more hours before I was bankrupt. With tons of Enchanting mats in store I posted auctions with 2 price ranges. One expensive one and an even more expensive one to make my other auctions look cheaper than they were.

Weird enough, the expensive auctions sold more often than the cheaper ones and soon we expanded to other branches. Today’s posted auctions value around 900k gold buyout.

This can work with nearly every product, that has a low auction fee or if the you can afford to have the item at the auction house for a very long time and still make profit.

For example

• Enchanting mats, fee: 1 silver for 48 hours
• Glyphs, <2 silver for 48 hours
• Recipes, < 10 silver for 48 hours
• Companion Pets, very low fee for 48h

Glyphs are a perfect example, since they have low crafting costs, their auction fee is next to nothing and the profits are huge. Another of my favorites are Blood of the Mountain, I buy them for 500g and resell for 1650g. It may take a while to get them sold, but if you do the math I can have them at the AH forever and still do profit selling them.

If you like to do old content, these turn out to be extremely profitable. For example Molten Core drops quite a number of recipes, e.g. Healing Power, Spell Power – which are the highest ones you can put on heirloom weapons. Illusion Dust (22.95g per 1) and Greater Eternal Essences (99.50g per 1) from green items and the above mentioned Blood of the Mountain. A single run can easily yield 6k gold if you are not in a hurry to sell items – 1 recipe 3950g, 1 Blood of the Mountain – 1650g, 3 Greater Eternal Essences 300g = 5900g without gold from bosses and vendored epics.

No Mass Sales

Of course selling items en mass is unlikely this way, but the auctions you sell will be extremely profitable. There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. You need to be persistent, if you have only energy to do these things short term you won’t get happy doing it. You cannot afford to slack with these auctions, since you will only sell when:

• the competition pisses of buyers
  e.g. 1000 auctions of 1 dust, no one likes to click 60 times to get a stack of cheap dusts, or to skip through 20 pages at the AH.
• the competition slacks
  e.g. cheap stuff has been sold out, forgotten to repost stuff
• someone who is leaving the realm buys out expensive stuff to transfer to the new realm to get around the gold cap
• you are the only one offering a special product
• you have customers that are lazy
• you have customers that don’t care

This happens more often than you may think. There are days when you log on and have sales for 5-10000 gold waiting in your mailbox and you get this fat grin on your face. There is a quite a number of players who worked this business model successful themselves. You should really try it out.

You can probably earn a little more by crafting items yourself, getting enchanting mats cheap and fast but I prefer the lazy man’s approach and don’t waste time with that. Just buying stuff cheap then put it expensive on the Auction House.

The Story so far

If you have followed previous posts, you know that I had already 2 Million Total gold acquired in February and I took the opportunity of this post to create a new summary.
Since the last post in February I gained roughly million gold for a grand total of 3,110,276 Gold since the achievement system came live. This was 1145 days ago, averaging 2695 gold/day.

Total Gold Acquired: 3110276g
Gold Looted: 293015g
Auctions Posted: 863157
Time spent retrieving these auctions: 287,72h

Here are the other stats:

Related Posts

• Total Gold Acquired: February 2011, 2 000 000 Gold
• Total Gold Acquired: October 2010, 1 400 000 Gold
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• Total Gold Acquired: November 09

Plague Quarter

The Plaguewing is one of 5 wings inside the level 80 raid Instance Naxxramas and harbours 3 Bosses, Noth the Plaguebringer, Heigan the Unclean and Loatheb. The most famous one is probably Heigan with erupting poison waves in his room, that require precise movement, the Heigan Dance! The videos all show first kills, so the tactic at the start of each fight isn’t perfect, read below for some tips!

Noth the Plaguebringer

Let’s start with Noth, as he is the first encounter in the Plague Quarter. From time to time he spawns some adds, throws some curses, cripples your attack speed and teleports to the balcony to spawn more adds. As you can see I haven’t been there in a while and the fraps was my first attempt. As shaman make sure to dispell the curse and kill adds asap, you can save shamanistic rage – glyphed – to remove the cripple as it will hamper gaining MSW stacks. Should have thought about that before rushing in like a cowboy

Click here to view the embedded video.

It appears Noth the Plaguebringer drops a good 170ish gold and 2 epics.

Heigan the Unclean

Back in wotlk, the Unclean was my weekly reminder to brush my teeth and take a shower, but what he was really famous for is erupting poison over the room. The eruptions follow a pattern, the Heigan Dance. Fortunately you do not have to pay attention too much about it solo. In raids you put the casters on the platform and have melee dance across the room. Heigan casts a 300% casting speed debuff which made this tactic kind of necessary. But since you are always melee with him and get the debuff all the time you can basically stay on the platform all the time until p2 begins, then you need to do the dance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Heigan also drops 170ish gold and 2 epics.

Loatheb

Loatheb is the last boss inside the Plague Quarter. He has a nasty ability, blocking all healing for like 15 seconds, then giving you a few seconds only to heal up. Every few sec he will spawn a spore which causes you to do 0 threat, don’t take it too fast or he might kill your totems, and at the same time the spore will increase your critical strike chance by like 50%. Backpeddling on spore spawn might make it possible to have your wolves get the buff aswell. Other than that it is pretty simple, Heigan doesn’t hit hard and you might want to save Maelstrom Weapon Procs for the fading of the healing block.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Posts

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• Enhancement Shaman solos Gruul’s Lair
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Magical Damage

Since there is a lot of magical damage, frost and shadow, it makes sense to have Drums of Kings and Prismatic Elixir as buff, it will help a lot staying alive. Other than that I had the typical PvE DPS spec.

Avoid Blizzard

As you can see I ran in with no plan and just dps’d him down, at first I stood inside the blizzard, while it is smarter to circle around sapphiron. This way you can basically avoid the blizzard damage completely and just have the frost dot, dragon and drain life to deal with. You can also drop drain life with glyphed shamanistic rage, but I did not do that in the video.

Anyway here is the video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sapphiron will drop ~170g and also 2 epics and the key to 10 man malygos, Key to the Focusing Iris.

Thanks Kapténx for the hint!

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Positioning

Once in a while Void Reaver pushes the player with the highest threat back and starts hitting the second highest one. So the idea is to fight void reaver at a slope in his room sp he can kock you a bit further away than normally, out of reach of the sliencing orbs, then you can cast 1-2 Spells before being silenced again.

Since we can’t use spells my choice of Weapon Imbues is earth living on mainhand and flame tongue on offhand, to get the most out of lava lash. You should check your previous parses, if your windfury or lava lash damage is higher and maybe go with wf / earthliving instead.

Imbues and Glyphs

Unleashing earthliving can be done while silenced and it does heal a good 5k and it can proc earthliving weapon for some more healing … and it gives + 30% to your next instant heal. This makes it really nice in this fight.

My pvp spec is enhancement resto, but it seems that too much defense is a bit counter productive there, it is easier to get him down faster.

The only 2 changes to my normal PvE loadout is the above mentiones Earthliving and Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem. This glyph places a weak shield on you for a few seconds but it is strong enough combined with unleash earthliving to keep you above 50% hp.

Once in a while you will not be silenced then cast a heal, feral spirit or shamanistic rage. You can for example use feral spirit + spirit walk to get further away from the next impact, etc.

Video

Enough of the talking, here is the video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Void Reaver drops 3 pairs of T5-Shoulder Token and a level 70 epic in addition to 250 gold.

Related Posts

• Myrddin solos Plague Quarter
• Enhancement Shaman solos Sapphiron
• Enhancement Shaman solos Gruul’s Lair
• Patch 4.1 introduces massive drop in Gold from certain Bosses
• Enhancement Shaman solos Sartharion 10 man

Announcement

The original announcement, which you can look at here, Blizzard mentions only a few bosses. At the moment it is unclear if other Bosses, for example in Black Temple, Tempest Keep, Serpent Shrine Cavern, Doomwalker, etc are nerfed aswell.

The gold amounts on the following encounters have been substantially reduced: Flame Leviathan, Magtheridon, Gruul the Dragonkiller, Doom Lord Kazzak, and all encounters in Karazhan.

The first thing that struck me, when engaging Magtheridon, was that the Channelers no longer helped each other, they simply stood still channeling and only aggroed targets would fight back.

This should make the fight soloable for most classes now, except maybe mages.

How much Gold is left?

After a short while the Pit Lord lay dead in front of my feet, erm hooves … Now do not kill the messenger for the following horror news. While he still drops the same amount of items his gold was reduced by 90%. It seems they dropped his gold from ~500g to ~50g, which is a bit harsh, but on the other hand would explain the nerfs mentioned above.

Guessing wildy, I’d say this 90% nerf goes for Kazzak/Doomwalker aswell … not sure if the 250g raid bosses (Gruul, etc … ) are reduced to 50 gold aswell or – which is more likely imo – to 25 gold average.

You better make the rest out of the remaining resets if you are still working on “Got my Mind on my Money” (100k gold looted) Achievement. At the moment I can get about 6500g per reset, which indeed looks like a lot

Related Posts

• Myrddin solos Plague Quarter
• Enhancement Shaman solos Sapphiron
• Enhancement Shaman solos Void Reaver
• Future of Zul’Gurub remains unclear
• Cataclysm: Zul’Gurub removed

Lately I have been repeatedly asked if I already breached the 2 million total gold acquired mark. As you may know I specialize in overpricing stuff and prefer to sell 1 auction for 100 gold, than 2 for 50 gold. It is not the quick sale I am aiming at, but the lazy, unprepared customer who doesn’t care a lot what he pays for and wants item xy right NOW.
The launch of Cataclysm has given my price model a huge boost, even expensive materials do not seem expensive compared to some of the normal prices we see these days, at least on Ravencrest.

Total Gold Acquired February 2011

As you can see at the Summary below, the new solo abilities of my Enhancement Shaman provide a great income. At times I ahve 6500 gold looted per 7 days. Doomwalker, Kazzak, Black Temple, Magtheridon, Serpentshrine Cavers, Tempest Keep, Molten Core, Zul Aman, Karazhan provide a huge source of Gold looted for relatively small effort. Add in a few epics to vendor and the occasionl recipe (have one on ah for 30k gold atm) makes it quite worth the effort!

Another thing I have been doing regularly is daily quests for guild xp and gold as side effect.

Also I find it kind of interesting to see that Glyphs sell much better still than I could ever have imagined with the 4.0 Glyph System. Of course Blackfallow Ink is expensive, but I made all my Glyphs before the change and still earn a good 5k a week jsut by selling my old stocks. Illusion Dusts / Greater Eternal essences seem to have turned into decent money makers and the market seems to be pretty much dry at all times.

My 11000 remaining Infinite dusts haven’t sold that well, yet. But I suppose I’ll be able to sell them “soon” as their price combined with cosmic essences and dream shard is slowly starting to rise.

Anyway enough for that, here are the updated stats. don’t forget Daisan and Myrddin breached the 214748 g mark, after which the gold amount turns to -214748g and slowly rises up to 0 and then displays as normal. Myrddin is listed at 170307 total gold acquired, meaning 214748 + 214748+ 170307 = 599803g, from previous posts you can easily verify that. The same goes for Daisan who adds up having 534885 total gold acquired. Finewares, my original sales alt, is 700g short from breaking the display, too.

Total gold acquired per character

• Myrddin: 599 803 g
• Daisan: 534 885 g
• Gregorius: 180 858 g
• Slanty:  157949 g
• Katya: 31 835 g
• Exorial: 121 781 g
• Finewares:  214 002 g
• Myrddin – Magtheridon, Horde: 103 707 g
• Stormfront – Ravencrest, Horde: 53 825 g

Total gold acquired: 1 998 645 g

By the time I finished polishing up this post I probably breached the 2 million   Also you’ll notice some chars missing, Pathfinder for example my 85 druid alt, since he earned only 12k  and is below the 30k gold threshold. Also I was busy in playing the auction house before the achievement system came live.

Here is a screenshot statistic tabs:

Statistic Breakdown

• Total gold acquired: 1 998 645 g
• Average gold earned per day: 2 469 g
• Gold looted: 217 310 g
• Gold from quest rewards: 102 858 g
• Gold from auctions: 1 667 167 g
• Total auctions posted: 750 051

The last summary has been done on october 15th, 128 days ago and I made 597 296 gold isnce then, 4666g/day on average.

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Sartharion

The Onyx Guardian is in charge of Guardin eggs of the Black Dragonflight inside the Obsidian Sanctum. He has 3 Lieutenants at his side, which in this case I killed first.

Abilities

• Cleave – Inflicts 35% weapon damage on the target and chains to up to 9 players in proximity.
• Flame Breath – Inflicts 8,750 to 11,250 Fire damage to all enemies in front of the caster.
• Tail Lash – Inflicts 3,063 to 3,937 Fire damage to enemies standing behind Sartharion and stuns them for 2 seconds.
• Wall of Flame – Walls of Lava build at the sides and flood the area surrounding Sartharion.

In a Nutshell

The fight starts out fairly easy with not that much incoming damage. Sartharion hits for 9500-10000 and his breath for around 8000. His attack speed isn’t very high and as long as no Lava Blazes spawn there won’t be any issues. Eventually more and more Lava Blazes will spawn and you should try to kill some of them off, hopefulyl they won’t run for your wolves and come right for you. Try to not have them hit by the Lava Walls that come from time to time, since that will make them big and hit quite hard.

Pesonally I used Heroism late in the fight, when my health began to drop beyond what was self healable. In the end I almost got overrun by Lava Blazes, but it seems like the better decision to focus on the boss than wasting time to kill them off.

Killshot

Video

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Teron Gorefiend

Abilities

• Summon Doom Blossom
  Teron summons dark clouds called Doom Blossoms that randomly shoot players with bolts that hit for around 1450 shadow damage.
• Crushing Shadows
  Targets 5 random players and applies a debuff that increases shadow damage taken by 60% for 15 seconds. Can be removed by invulnerability abilities.
• Incinerate
  A debuff ability dealing 2775-3225 fire damage and 8325 damage over 3 seconds. It can and should be dispelled.
• Shadow of Death
  Every 30 seconds Teron applies a debuff to a random player that lasts for 55 seconds. That player die after the debuff is expired and will turn into a ghost for 60 seconds. Cannot be used against the main tank.

In a Nutshell

Shadow of Death cannot be cast on a tank, isn’t that great? This simplifies the fight a lot Also the remaining mechanics like Doom Blossoms seem to be pretty much trivialized with a Resistance Elixir and Drums of Forgotten Kings.
The only thing you need to pay attention to, is Teron gorefiend’s hard hits. He will still hit you relatively hard, I’d say between 7-10k per hit. You will have to plays a bit more defensivel than reckless and save your Maelstrom Weapon procs to keep your health up. If you get below 50% pop your wolves or shamanistic rage.

Video

Here is my first solo kill

Click here to view the embedded video.

Teron Gorefiend will drop 250 Gold and 3 Epics!

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Archavon the Stonewatcher

Abilities:

• Rock Shards
  Inflicts 472 to 528 physical damage in an area of 5 yard around the target 9 times a second, for 3 seconds.
• Crushing Leap
  Inflicts 5,000 Physical damage to a random target and its allies within 10 yards outside melee range, and causes knockback in the area.
• Choking Cloud
  Inflicts 2,000 damage every 1 second and reducing chance to hit by 50% to everyone standing in it. Cast immediately after Crushing Leap.
• Stomp
  Inflicts 3,770 to 4,230 unmitigable damage to everyone and stuns them for 2 seconds. At the same time, he will Impale his highest aggro target.
• Impale
  Inflicts 28,275 to 31,725 Physical damage and stuns the target for 8 seconds.

There is a lot of incoming damage. Melee, Impale, etc … so use your cooldowns wisely, maybe place Searing ttoem a bit away to Archavon needs to turn and run to kill it (at times) which gives you the extra second to heal through this. You’ll play this very defensive, but then it is doable, was the hardest boss I tried so far.

He dropped 2 items and 177 gold, 37 Honor!

Edit: Here is the Video. As you can see, I always popped some pets before he grabbed me, this is to make sure he has something to punch instead of me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Good luck trying!

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Hydross the Unstable <Duke of Currents>

Hydross has 2 forms that he switches to, depending on where you fight him. Due to the nature fo the fight you need to switch the places once the Mark of Hydross stacks too high. Doing so will spawn 4 adds doing full nature/frost damage and turning immune to this form of damage.

Water Form

• Purify Elemental:  He casts this when he enters the water beams, making it a player-determined occurrence. It will make him enter a purified state in which he is immune to frost and will hit for frost damage. When casting this, he will also spawn four Pure Spawn of Hydross. These are also immune to frost and also hit for frost damage.
• Mark of Hydross: Stacks up to 5 times, increasing frost damage received by 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250 percent.
• Water Tomb: Casts on a single target every 7 seconds. Stuns for 4 seconds and deals 4500 frost damage over 5 seconds (which means that anyone getting this with a 100% debuff needs to be healed before the DoT ends). It also applies to all people within 8 yards of the original target, but it won’t chain to secondary targets.

Poison Form

• Mark of Corruption: Stacks up to 5 times, increasing nature damage received by 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250 percent.
• Vile Sludge: Casts every 15 seconds. Deals 500 damage each 3 seconds and reduces healing and damage done by 50%. Lasts 24 seconds.

In a Nutshell

On my first try I just tried to zerg him down in frost form, but he started hitting for 8-9k pretty fast got him down to 30% but then the damage was jsut too high to compensate. The second approach was a bit more careful , using wolves / elementals / rage for transitions and switch when the mark reaches 50% extra damage. Then it was pretty easy, switched to poison and then back to frost before killing him.

Fortunately Water Tomb will not be cast when soloing the boss, which makes this a whole lot easier.

Hydross drops 250g and 3 epic items.

Good Luck

Edit:

Video

Here is a video of my second kill. As you can see I use feral spirit to help through transitions, and keep the nature phase as short as possible, due to his imunity tonature damage. For Second frost phase I just used heroism to bring him down.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Skadi the Ruthless

The run is faily simple, the mobs are easy to kill. For the bigger pulls shamanistic rage, wolves and hex are a good help. You will skip the first and second boss by running by. This should not take longer than a few minutes.

To kill Skadi the Ruthless you need to pick up 3 Harpoons that some of the adds drop to the ground (they are sparkling) and then use the harpoons with the boss in range. After 3 hits he will drop from his Proto Drake and engage in melee combat. It is fairly simple, here take a look at the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Good Luck!

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Al’ar <Phoenix God>

Al’ar is the first boss in Tempest Keep, Netherstorm, Outlands. In Burning Crusade (Level 70), it was a 25 man raid encounter. Immune to fire and exploding adds, armor debuff and aoe fire damage (inclusive +fire damage taken debuff) make this fight way more challenging than it may seem at first glance.

Abilities

• Flame Buffet
  A stackable debuff incurred every 2s that causes 1750-2250 fire damage and increases fire damage taken by 10% per application. Cast if no players are within melee range.
• Flame Quills
  Periodically during phase one Al’ar will fly to the center of the room and use his Flame Quills ability, essentially nuking the upper platform around the room. Anyone standing on the platform at that time will receive huge amounts of fire damage which will lead to an almost certain death.
• Flame Patch
  During phase two Al’ar will spawn burning patches on top of players that do a considerable amount of fire damage (~3000 per tick). Moving from them as soon as possible is advisable.
• Dive Bomb
  30 second cooldown. During phase two Al’ar will periodically dive bomb a random target. This will cause around 5000 fire damage on a single target. This damage can be partially resisted. Two phoenixes will also be summoned and Al’ar will move to where he landed.
• Melt Armor
  60 second cooldown. A debuff used on the current target, reducing their armor by 80%. Al’ar must be immediately taunted by a second tank. Lasts 60 seconds.
• Phoenix
  A phoenix is summoned every time Al’ar switches positions during phase one. Two phoenixes are summoned every time he uses Flame Crash during phase two. These hit for 1500 damage and have ~140000 hp
• Ember Blast
  An ability used by the phoenix adds that inflict 8750-11250 fire damage to nearby players, throwing them into the air and causing an additional 1000 physical damage. This occurs roughly 15 yards around the phoenix adds when they are killed.

For Dummies

You basically start on the left upper platform (the whole room needs to be cleared). Al’ar will come down to you and you can dps him, I used a pvp spec with “Frozen Power” and Frost Shocks and Frostbrand Weapon. Everything related to fire are lost gcd’s

Then at some point Al’ar will leave the platform and move to the next. Use Ghostwolf to get theare as soon as possible since he will cast flame buffet with noone in melee range. The spawning phoenix will follow you there and you should kill it as soon as possible on that platform. Place yourself that the 25 yard knockback on the phoenix’ death will not knock you down.

Once in a while Al’ar will fly to the middle and bomb the uppare area, you need to get downa nd move to the first platform as soon as possible and meet Al’ar there.

Repeat until Al’ar dies.

Phase 2 is fairly simple. Just kill adds and do not stand in fire. Melt Armor will make you take a lot more damage. You can have wolves or earth elemental taunt the boss just in time so they will get the debuff or jsut careface it and put some more effor tin self healing

Al’ar will drop 250g and 3 epic items.

Good Luck!

Related Posts

• Enhancement Shaman solos Sartharion 10 man
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• Enhancement Shaman vs Skadi the Ruthless