Last week I wrote about my first 10 runs through Sunwell and how LootAppraiser calculated the recipes and loot I had obtained at a generous 267,948 gold – except then you still have to actually SELL the items. This is week two, nothing has sold, and I’m here to talk about my next 10 runs. This time LootAppraiser only valued the runs at 43,068g even though I looted roughly the same number of items (1083 vs. 1134) and even had more ‘noteworthy’ loot. I’m using region market value avg as my marker for what ‘value’ is in this case.
I once again kept anything that had a sale rate of 0.02 or higher, and anything that was worth 5,000g or more. I do play on a low population realm, so sales are going to be far and few between, but for anyone who thinks you can just run 100 (or more) runs of dungeons and walk away with millions of gold, you’re going to want to think twice. Next week we’ll see how we do for runs 21-30, and maybe we’ll actually sell something, too.
Last week I wrote about a new challenge where we take a character I had at 47 and see if she can earn enough gold for a token on a brand new server with limited playtime (one hour a day). Turns out life conspired a bit and I wasn’t able to play nearly as much as I had hoped, limiting my gold making even further. How did she do?
I did manage to level the druid from 47 to 53. One thing that really helps when it comes to making gold is being at least level 60. Yes, you CAN make gold just fine if you’re not level 60, but there are so many less worries and more options when you take leveling out of the equation. Doing pet battles rewarded me with a handful of stones that increase the rarity of your pet that could be sold on the auction house, and I sold one for 10k which gave me a pretty nice nest egg of cash to get started with. I didn’t have bags so I had to get that sorted, and my druid also didn’t have any gear, so I purchased a few pieces for her (at level 53 she’s now at ilevel…. 45). That left her with a grand total of 6k and some change for the week. Not anywhere near enough for a token. We’ll get there, hopefully.
I also picked up two gathering professions for her, she’s sporting herbalism and mining. I gathered some silverleaf and sold it for 8g each, which net me about 250g. Remember I’m not using TSM or any other addons for this challenge, just to keep things interesting. I’m also not flipping anything in the AH, so most (if not all) of my gold will probably come from farming and quest rewards.
Setting her up with a covenant will be next on my plate, as well as getting to 60 so she can have some fun in ZM. Maybe she’ll be able to harvest an essentia or two to help pay for that token before they completely fall through the floor in value. It looks like they’re already hovering around 15k on this server, well below where they were last week. Flying makes them easier to obtain, and I expected that they may not be the greatest cash making item for too long. It’s important to take advantage of these things before they crash, and being one step ahead of buyers and market tends to take a lot of energy and attention. Anyway, to afford a token players need to make roughly 7,000 gold per day. Here’s hoping I can get closer to that goal this week.
How did this casual goblin do last week in sales? According to the TSM ledger, not too shabby at all. I spent a total of 170,476 gold, and I sold 609,029 worth of items, leaving me with a 7 day profit of 438,553. Remember, making gold is something that does take time and the more time you can invest in it, the bigger the payout. For the amount of time I spend actively working towards making gold I am incredibly pleased with this amount. Keep in mind I am not crafting any fancy shadowlands gear. I have none of my legendary leveled, and I only just recently (as of yesterday) unlocked the latest crafters marks.
A large portion of my gold this week actually came from the vendor. HALF of all my gold, in fact. I bought the supplies for composite bows at a very cheap price, and I made a lot of them. Below is what I spent:
You can see I bought thread, bones, and leather. Then I sold everything I crafted to vendor (that’s the ‘unknown at the top of the sales item list).
I also made a huge purchase of korthite crystals. I bought 510 of them for 435g. At the start of the week these were selling for around 600g and I sold off about half of my stock at that price. I still have 210 left, and the price has dipped back down to around 410g so I am hanging onto them for now. I sold some progenitor essentia that I looted for 30k because I expect the cost of the 291 legendary base to fall once more people unlock the item, and I’m also not really concerned about owning one myself. I don’t run anything more than LFR these days, and my ilevel is already well above the requirement to run dailies.
The next surprise I encountered was just a ‘right place at the right time’ moment. On Sunday someone bought out almost all of the laestrite ore. I had purchased around 800 of them for 1-2g the previous week. They were reset to 25g each and I put my 800 up – and they actually sold. I was quite pleased with this, to say the least.
Not really any other surprises in sales this week, it’s my usual mash up of crafting + flips. I have some non-gold making related goals that I’d like to accomplish, so I’ve been spending my precious moments in game doing that (silly things like finishing each covenant story once, reaching 80 in each covenant, and obtaining faction on my four main crafters). I expect sales to slow down now that the buying phase of 9.2 has cooled off a bit, at least on my low pop servers. We’ll just have to see next week!
You see those YouTube videos all the time, “I ran abc123 dungeon 100 times, and made a billion million gold!” so why not in blog format. I’ve been running Sunwell 10x in a row on a speed geared druid I have to show off the millions of gold you can make.
Except you won’t make millions of gold, because when you loot an item it doesn’t translate into an instant sale. No matter what server you’re on. I’m going to break down these posts into 10 run increments and I’ll keep a tally of what sells / doesn’t sell over the weeks as I write about it. You can see I’m using the region market value avg as my price point, and during my first 10 runs, LootAppraiser thinks I’ve got enough items for 267,948 gold. I did loot one interesting recipe (Vengeance wrap) and a handful of smaller recipes (sunblessed breastplate), but honestly nothing was very fascinating. One week after this run, and nothing has sold. I kept anything with a sale rate of 0.02 or higher, or anything worth 5,000g+ I did make a grand total of 453g in raw gold, but considering it took me 45 minutes to run these 10 dungeons, that’s not exactly something to write home about.
I love playing the sims 4. No surprise, right? When I got bored of the base game, I started playing the ‘legendary challenge’ version, making up strange rules as I went along in order to invent my own fun and create a unique story. Over the years I’ve adapted this for World of Warcraft and now I’ve decided to start one of said challenges in blog format, beginning today and updated on (gasp) Wednesdays.
The challenge:
Can casual NA players earn enough for a token each month with limited play under some set rules. Now, to be honest here I already know the answer to this challenge is yes, but let’s try it out anyway and see how it goes, step by step.
The Rules:
No flipping. A lot of gold I make comes from flipping, but as a casual player it’s difficult to know what to flip, and it’s difficult to be active enough to find said item in order to flip it, which brings me to rule two.
Playing only one hour a day. Whether I want to break that into chunks so I’m playing 3h in a row or 1h each day I’ll leave flexible, but the maximum amount of time involved shouldn’t be more than 7h a week.
No help from any alts. I moved this character to a brand new server that I’ve never played on before, I didn’t research it, I have no idea what the market is like (having said all that, now I’m beginning to rethink this challenge).
The Character:
A 47 horde druid with 350 gold to her name. She’s currently wearing heirloom because I leveled her up with pet battles and I didn’t need anything better. I’m not sure if I’ll bother leveling her, or just work with what I have. I guess that’s all just part of the fun.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of lists and tracking things, so of course it should come as no surprise that I’m making this post. This is a 30 day look at sales starting with my inscription crafter. She’s also my engineer, though I don’t think I included any restocking of engineer items this month. The numbers are a bit thrown off because this character also sells my crafting components, as you can see by the arcane crystal and progenitor essentia being listed.
My pet and cloth seller didn’t do very well – but this is just one server. On my other server cloth tends to sell much better because it’s a roleplay server.
I have yet another character who sells transmog, and I’m still stocking that up so I don’t have very many pieces. I also went through and removed anything that wasn’t worth at least 1k.
My jewelcrafter did OK considering I don’t own any of the fancy new recipes, nor do I have any legendaries unlocked. Old stuff is still selling. I just recently leveled her up, so I’m hoping for bigger numbers next month.
My blacksmith is also my alchemist, and I just recently leveled her up so most of her income didn’t come from any crafting at all, but just selling off supplies. In hindsight I should have kept all of these, because the cost of them is now through the roof on my low population server.
I also briefly set up an AH character on a second account, and this is the result of that below (I re-set this up yesterday, we’ll see how that goes). I find using two accounts a bit awkward just because I’m not used to it. That being said, it is very nice not to have to interrupt my main account to do AH stuff like reposting.
All in all, it has been a good month for sales on this one server. Glyphs remain one of my best sellers, and arcane crystals are right up there because I have no competition (that will change, it always does). I’m hoping to spend the next month working up more stock, preparing for magetower, and maybe I’ll even level up a legendary or two (sarcasm, I have no intention of leveling up legendaries as of yet).
How are other goblins out there doing? Are you on a low pop or high pop server? What are your favourite things to sell? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming!
It was a pretty fantastic week for gold making! Keep in mind I am NOT crafting the new items, and I am what I consider to be a casual WoW player. I step away often, I’m often AFK, and I average around 1-2h of actual game play per day (I usually have to decide: spend an hour harvesting or spend an hour doing my dailies? That’s just how it goes). I did make some changes to my gold tracking for convenience sake. Previously I was only tracking my two main servers. I was tracking them separately but I decided to just keep track of total gold across all servers. There’s no real reason except that it’s easier for me. I’m using altoholic to keep track of those numbers, and then checking the TSM ledger to confirm them. So far it is all adding up just fine.
This week I made roughly 432,000 gold in profit – probably in good part to flipping the new ‘pog’ craft material. I also spent a large portion of gold, I bought a token, I bought pog, and I also bought +speed gear for my new farming druid that I’m trying to gear up. I’ve never really done any farming before because my time is usually better spent making gold in other methods, but I’m finding it a nice change of scenery.
The month long profits have been fantastic for me. Remember, the more time you invest in this, the more your profits would be. People who can dedicate more time and resources (multiple accounts, multiple realms, 5+ hours a day, etc) will naturally make more gold than you. That’s simply the way it works. For the amount of time I put towards making gold, I am incredibly happy with these results.
In an example of why some methods work for some servers and not others – I purchased a new 9.2 crafted piece of gear that someone had priced at 21,000 gold. I am not sure if it was intentionally priced that low or not, but it was the only one up for sale. It happened to be mail boots, and I know mail is not very popular (few classes wear it) and boots are apparently not a popular slot either (I think a lot of people are going for rings and necklaces). Then the stats were versatility (what mail wearer is looking for that?). Anyway, I bought it for 21k and put it for sale for 50k. Pog essentia are selling for roughly 15-25k on my server. Flipping it this way put it at a nice profit for me, but still well below what crafting cost would be.
The item actually sat on the AH for two days before anyone came along and bought it from me. Yes, it did eventually sell, but it was what I consider for the piece a VERY slow sell. On other servers I watched people talking about the newly crafted items flying off the shelves – but not every server is the same. My server has no raid guilds and this is just one factor out of many that changes and affects the economy. Remember these points in your own gold making adventures, and take the time to learn your server. What sells and why. Then capitalize on it.
Since returning to the game just over a month ago, I’ve watched goblins on twitter, discord, and reddit, as they prepared for 9.2 and then followed the aftermath of sales (or potential sales) to see what everyone was up to. The reason my own posts about this have been sparse is for a few reasons, but the main one is that I am not doing much current tier content. I don’t have any legendaries leveled (I don’t even wear any on my characters), I don’t have the faction required to craft the marked gear, and I’m not a hardcore min/max goblin, so while I have been doing the new dailies in Zereth Mortis, I have not been farming rares and puzzles. I won’t be one of the first people with items for sale.
I am also a low risk goblin. I don’t often try to predict where the market will go or what blizzard will do. I applaud goblins that do but it’s just one more reason why I love gold making, there are MANY ways to make gold.
That being said, I did invest in one prediction. Since I am on a very low population server I spent three days buying out all of the progenitor essentia that was typically priced at 12-8k gold. In those days I scooped up 60 progenitor essentia for around 400,000 gold. Just to show how low population my server is, once I had bought all of those, it typically took half a day before a single essentia would be posted. I personally have no use for essentia (or pog, as everyone is calling it) since I won’t have the faction required for a while and I’m not planning on leveling up legendaries but since there was (before today) no use for these items, I banked on them being of low value. I figured that value would climb as people earned their faction and wanted to craft the newer items.
I put them on the market for 30k each, being the only player with any for sale, and – they all sold. They all sold to one person, who is probably either going to try to flip them themselves, or use them to craft the new stuff and then sell that for a premium. Personally, I am incredibly happy with my purchase and the timing of my sale.
One, I was concerned blizzard would change the drop rate on this item since it seems like there will be an enormous imbalance in supply / demand. Even farming for 6-8 hours players are reporting that they only found four pog. I personally have found zero after taking four characters through Zereth Mortis.
Two, my low population server tends to undercut until things have almost zero value, immediately. There are 210 legendaries for sale on the AH for 7 gold (I realize these items have almost zero value these days, but at 7 gold why even bother putting them for sale). Leveling up legendaries is quite literally just throwing gold into a void where you may not see returns for ages. I am not interested in playing that game.
Three, while there WILL be a demand, I personally feel that on my server, there won’t be AS MUCH of a demand due to the low population, a sever lack of raid guilds, and because blizzard changed the AH to display a warning if you try to buy more than 1 unique equip piece of gear. Previously people would buy a whole set and then only learn after that they could only wear one. That should happen far less frequently (if at all).
For me, this was a risk that paid off, and I got out immediately. I imagine that the pog will go up even more in value after everyone earns their faction (which should be today, for the first round of folks) – but again, I didn’t want to keep playing a risky game. Who knows how many others had pog stored up and saved just waiting.
Could I have made more gold? Of course, there is a min/max to this game, and I could have optimized things further. I could have crafted with the items, I could have waited to see where they settle after the downtime and when they have a functional use, etc. Again, I am much less interested in making the MOST gold I possibly can, and more interested in taking small steps to make gold that is comfortable to my play style. There’s no right or wrong. It’s all just different methods.
I will say it has been fascinating watching other goblins froth and foam at the mouth for pog. Some have moved servers and are clearing out pog to eventually transfer over to other places. Some have invested all of their savings into this. Other still asked and wondered about whether they should level up legendaries or if it was too late. I am content to watch from the sidelines, having already made what I consider to be plenty of profit for myself this week.
There are so many resources out there to help players make gold, I wanted to share a few of my most used and favourite ones. These are not going to be a list of addons but are external sites / tools.
Vendor shuffle resource – make a copy of it and adjust the prices accordingly to find out the base amount to scoop up those materials at if you want to do vendor flips.
Shadowlands Crafting – If you want to craft legendaries or anything else in Shadowlands, this is the resource for you.
The Gadgetzan Times – A simple way to calculate profits of crafted items using the WoW API.
Magpie.wow-petguide.com – This seems to be working fine still, and lets you compare pets across realms. It will let you import your own characters, show pets that have zero auctions on a server etc.
There are of course a giant list of streamers, discords, and YouTube channels too – but I’ll save those for another post and keep it short today.
Disclaimer: TSM does not guarantee you sales, and it does not automate anything. Every action requires manual input. As one wise person said: “TSM helps you execute a strategy for gold making. TSM is not the strategy. – Gumdrops 2022”
One of the most useful tools that TSM offers (in my opinion) is the ability to restock crafted goods based on variables that you set. This is going to be a very basic introduction to doing that – it can get a LOT more complicated. I’m a fan of starting with things on the base level and then learning and building your operations from there so don’t be afraid to play around. Before getting started I would also suggest you go into the TSM settings and make sure the crafting tooltips are enabled.
First, you’ll want to make some groups. We already know that I love organization, so my crafting groups are organized by specific tradeskill->current content stuff-> old content stuff. You can organize this any way you want. The default restock operations are all you technically need to get started.
This will restock a minimum of one item, a maximum of three, with 100g profit. Now, that’s not always going to be what you want so let’s get a little more complicated. TSM lets you use ‘If-functions’ and there’s a wonderful article written by BilisOnyxia on how they work. One of the common values I like to use is DBRegionSaleRate. I don’t necessarily want to restock something that is REALLY slow to sell (or perhaps never sells). If I want to only craft items that have a profit of at least 50g, and have a DBRegionSaleRate greater than 0.3 I would write my restock operation in the ‘min profit amount’ section to read: ifgt(DBRegionSaleRate, 0.3, 50g) – you can adjust these values for your own use on your own servers. Remember to reference those awesome if-functions that you read about earlier.
When you have a restock operation that you like, assign it to the group you want (you might want different operations for say, alchemy compared to inscription) and then open your craft window. Click TSM groups, highlight the stuff you want to restock, and of course click restock selected groups. What you SHOULD see next is the crafting queue fill up like I’ve got showing in the very first screenshot. You will then want to make sure you have someone selected in the ‘gathering’ tab of the crafting UI and you may also want to fiddle with the ‘sources’ section.
You’ll have also populated the tasklist of steps you need to take to complete your restock. /tsm tasklist if you happen to have closed this or it didn’t open. This list is based on your sources in the gathering tab, so if you’re not sure why it’s making you do ABC thing, check there first to make sure you have the order the way you expected.
As you craft that task list will update, and so will the queue in your crafting UI. Put them for sale, and you’re done!
A few things to keep in mind – if you want your restocking to be accurate, do your AH/Mail stuff first and then restock after. TSM needs to ‘see’ that stuff to know what has sold / hasn’t sold. Otherwise you might end up crafting 10 more of something that you already had 10 of. Another thing that often comes up is the crafting price of something is WAY off base. There can be a few reasons for this, but that’s why we enable crafting tooltips. This lets you see what the exact item is that might be throwing off costs. Perhaps someone put a single enchanting item for sale for 1,000,000 gold on the AH and now TSM thinks it’s going to cost you that much because you’re referencing it. Sometimes you won’t have a crafting value for an item, so it won’t restock. A common solution for this is to check and make sure your vendor sold items have a value attached to them. After certain updates TSM loses that data, just open the vendor who sells it and they should repopulate. Now let’s say you want to manually adjust the price of an item. For example you want a specific ore valued at 1g and nothing else. To change the price of a material, open your craft UI, reports, materials, and search for the item. Then manually adjust it to read 1g (or whatever string you want to use).
Remember that there is a LOT of support for TSM out there, and no one way of doing anything. If you’re not sure how something is going to work for you, create a new profile and play around with operations. Don’t mindlessly post things without LOOKING at what you’re doing. That’s an easy way to lose gold. If you have a question check out TSM support, check out the WoW Economy & TSM discord, and check out reddit. There are people who are willing to help – but the more specific you are, the better. If you come in asking vague questions, the vague answers you’ll get back might be frustrating.
Girl Goblin 