[RP] Arysh’ Short – 1

Brief glimpses of memories flashed past Arysh’ eyes, each one unrelated to the next.

Sitting on the floor of a room some where she could no longer remember, playing with some toys.
Fire. Burning. A heavy metallic scent in the air.
People screaming. She thought these might be family members, but she wasn’t sure why she thought that.

She tried to block out these thoughts by clenching her eyes shut, and then Arysh sighed when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to be getting any more sleep.
“Fine. Whatever.” She groaned softly and tossed the covers to the side. It was a new day, and she had work to do anyway. Who needed sleep.

Arysh walked over to the window of her sparsely decorated inn room, and drew open the blinds. Below her, the city of Valdrakken was already bustling with early morning vendors trying to hawk their wears. She could almost hear them calling out good morning to each another as they set up their display stands, eagerly waiting for the crowds that would be pushing through. She was hoping to join them, one day. For now she was just hoping to get a job. The partially open bag of gold coins on her desk was a constant reminder that her life savings wasn’t enough to get her very far, and that she had to think of a more permanent solution to her situation, soon.

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Weekly Wrap Up [Jan02-Jan09]

** note: This does NOT include craft order money, which was over 300k for the week **

I’m not sure if TSM is tracking the gold made from craft orders (I don’t think it is, I’m using accountant right now to track them), but that’s where most of my focus has been this week – aside from playing the game. I now have 10 characters at level 70, and I took 4 of them through timewalking and raids, and also completed the weekly. I put a few older items up on the AH, but most of my time was spent focusing on a new endevour & creating new characters, which you can see the results of in the item category of my sales.

The “rhinestone” sunglasses from Dragonflight are selling exceptionally well. This recipe has only dropped for me once so far in all of the fishing I’ve done. I’ve done a LOT of fishing. The components required are pretty cheap, and I’m getting a pretty nice profit for each sale. I only put one up at a time, and I just replace it when it sells. On average it’s one pair a day and I’m happy with that.

I also sold a bunch of replica gear that I had sniped for 1s a while back. I’ve been trying to sell this on my low population server for months now, so I’m glad to see it go. There’s a few recipes in there (leftovers from fishing), and some fish, and me clearing out my Shadowlands JC inventory. There’s a few people who like to do cancel scan wars on the AH, and I didn’t feel like participating in that, so I set all of my SL stuff to 115% crafting cost, and just want it out the door. Even on my best of days, cancel scanning is just not something that I enjoy doing.

The WoW token on NA has been VERY low, so I picked up a few and stocked up my bnet balance. I also decided to boost a rogue on my 2nd account to 60, and I moved a DK to my main account and a new server. Overall, I’m pleased with my progress given that very little of my time was actually dedicated to making gold. It felt nice to catch up on some knowledge points (professions) and to clear out some quests. I’m having an absolute blast with Dragonflight, and making gold on top of that is just a really nice perk.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Guest Post: Dragonflight Alchemy

This article on Dragonflight Alchemy was graciously written by Beta and ThetaJay!

Alchemy in early Dragonflight

1: The Concept

Like all other professions in Dragonflight, alchemy has had a complete overhaul. However, perhaps unique to alchemy is the introduction of rafted intermediate reagents, namely Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent. Both of these reagents are used in crafting the top tier potions and phials.

Due to the limitations of gaining profession knowledge in the early weeks of the expansion, an alchemist could theoretically only be specialized in one of the three following categories early on:

  • making intermediate reagents;
  • making potions;
  • making phials.

By having access to all three specializations at the same time, it would be possible to have a complete crafting pipeline without having to rely on a middle man, only the purchase of gathered materials from the auction house. While this was our initial idea, when executing the plan we discovered many ways of optimizing the pipeline to maximise potential profit.

The first task at hand was to plan how we would allocate the limited knowledge points for each specialization. At this point it is worth discussing how the inspiration node is designed to work. With a maxed out inspiration node, an inspiration proc will always provide the exact number of skill points required for a full-quality upgrade. For example, the skill required for making a quality 2 Phial of Elemental Chaos is 225, and for quality 3 one needs 450 skill. A full inspiration node provides exactly the 225 extra skill points required to bridge the gap between quality 2 and quality 3. This leads to the following key observation when assigning knowledge points:

The most efficient way of spending early knowledge is to spend points until quality 2 crafts are guaranteed, and then the remaining points are assigned to maxing out the inspiration node.

1.1: Building the intermediate reagent crafter

Specialization for intermediate reagent making was simple:

  • 15 points in Alchemy Theory;
  • 40 points in Chemical Synthesis;
  • 30 points in Inspiring Ambience.

This was achieved within the first week of Dragonflight very comfortably. Additional points over the following weeks then went into Resourceful Routines.

Importantly, with this build one is able to use all quality 2 herbs to guarantee making quality 2 Omnium Draconis. Further, one can check that it is impossible to craft quality 3 Omnium Draconis without inspiration, so this rendered quality 3 herbs completely useless for this build.

1.2: Building the tertiary crafter

Our original plan for potion and phial crafting was naive. We planned to max out Batch Production and Inspiration, and then use a mix of quality 2 and 3 Draconium Vial, Omnium Draconis, and Primal Convergent to guarantee making quality 2 potions and phials with inspiration procs allowing us to craft quality 3.

However, the whole situation changed at 1 AM on December 5th, when we realized that it was actually possible to use only quality 2 materials to hit exactly 213 skill points for potion crafting, and 225 skill points in phial crafting, which is the skill required to craft quality 2. Even with finding these extra skill points, we were still able to obtain maximal inspiration and multicraft, allowing us to inspire into making quality 3 finished products. We call this the 2/2/2 build. The completed build for potion crafting was achieved on week 1 of release, and the build for phial was achieved on the reset of week 2 due to the extra 12 knowledge points required.

The finished builds ended up as follows:

  • 10 points in Potion (resp., Phial) Mastery;
  • 10 points in Potion (resp., Phial) Lore;
  • 20 points in Batch Production;
  • 5 points in Alchemy Theory;
  • 30 points in Inspiring Ambience.

Depending on profession tools and skill level, one needs some extra skill points to obtain the true 2/2/2 build. For example, for phial creation this was achieved by allocating excess knowledge to Alchemical Theory to gain access to decay phials for further first time crafts.

1.3: The overall plan

After the builds were online, our plan for alchemy was as follows:

  • Buy quality 2 herbs and awakened elements from the auction house.
  • Craft Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent.
  • Sell all quality 3 Omnium Draconic and Primal Convergent obtained from inspiration procs on the auction house.
  • Use the quality 2 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent to craft potions and phials, and then sell them on the auction house.

Let us make a few comments on this plan.

  • Since quality 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent is not required for us to make potions and phials, we sell all of them. This action has two advantages.
    • Anyone who buys them immediately loses in the market, since they are inherently making consumables at a higher cost.
    • This is essentially a hedge against the price movement of herbs and awakened elements.
  • As more and more people realise that a 2/2/2 build as described above is possible, inspiration on intermediate reagents will slowly lose its value. Eventually, quality 2 and quality 3 intermediate reagents should effectively have the same price. As such, at some point resourcefulness will outperform inspiration on intermediate reagents, and we need to prepare for that.
  • A big, but overlooked advantage of this plan is that we only use the auction house twice:
    • Buying quality 2 herbs and awakened elements;
    • Selling quality 3 intermediate reagents and all end products.

    If someone instead relies on buying Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent from the auction house for crafting their potions/phials, they are paying an extra 5% of the auction house commission fee to do so.

In what follows we will describe how we managed to achieve this build, the math behind the trading, and some thoughts for the future.

2: Grinding the profession

There were two essential grinds for the execution of the plan: knowledge points and artisan’s mettle.

The need for knowledge points is evident with the builds described in the first section. For the reagent making we needed access to 85 points, for potion making the end number came in at 100, and for the phial crafter we needed to squeeze out 110 knowledge points.

Knowledge grinding is a standard concept to most of us now, and of course we heavily recommend the guides on WoWhead. However, we point out two overlooked ways of squeezing out essential knowledge points that people may not consider:

  • It is possible to buy recipes from the auction house and reputation vendors to get the first craft bonus;
  • In the first weeks of Dragonflight it was possible to profession shuffle to hit 4/5 reputation with the Artisan’s Consortium for an extra 10 knowledge points.

Artisan’s mettle is important for two reasons. Firstly, profession gear requires mettle to craft, and the skill bonuses from these were essential to see the builds through. If you are on a high-pop server, then you probably had access to all rare professional equipment on week 2, which makes things a lot easier. But unfortunately, this is not the case for us (EU-Doomhammer), so we had to rely on some harder grinding to see the build through.

Secondly, and especial important for the phial maker, artisan’s mettle is required for experiments to discover new recipes and to obtain skill points. The recipe for the phial that we wished to craft could only be obtained through these experiments.

After our realization that a 2/2/2 build for potion and phial making was possible, we spent a lot of time and energy preparing the builds (especially in the case of the phial crafter which required extra skill points) before the first EU reset so that we could capitalise on the potentially novel build. And we were blessed by the RNGod for getting the Phial of Elemental Chaos recipe two days after we started. The grind, of course, is something that paid off in the end, else we would not be here writing an article about it!

3: A spreadsheet

On the Saturday before the raid release, we began testing the build. It was then that we realised that there were even more small optimization that could be made. For example, by using sagacious incense (which sells extremely cheaply on the auction house) it is possible to have an extra 2% inspiration, however, was it worth doing?

We immediately realized that we needed to be able to rapidly estimate all of our costs to make the right decision, especially when deciding how to weight our profit margins and ratios of potion to phial crafts. The solution to this problem was a simple one in theory, we sat down for a few hours on Saturday morning and made a spreadsheet that would calculate everything we required.

The spreadsheet takes a few inputs:

  • Market price of herbs and awakened elements.
  • Market price of quality 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent.
  • Market price of quality 2 Draconium Vial.

We then needed to consider how the three secondary stats: inspiration, multicraft, and resourcefulness should be encoded into the spreadsheet. Notice that for every 10 points of secondary stat it gives 1.1% of resourcefulness, 1%of inspiration, and 0.9% of multicraft respectively.

  • Inspiration is quite straightforward. When it procs, you get quality 3, otherwise, you get quality 2. So in addition to the above inputs, we also take the market price of quality 2 and 3 potions/phials into consideration. Since we want to undercut them evenly, we use the ratio of prices of quality 2 and quality 3 potions/phials on the market to determine our price.
  • Multicraft required some trials to pin down. After about 10k crafts, we are confident that if you spend all knowledge points in multicraft, each proc on average gives you an extra 200% of products. For example, each multicraft potion proc gives you on average 15 potions in total (5 baseline and 10 from multicraft). So if your multicraft is 10%, you are expecting a 120% productivity.
  • We simply ignored resourcefulness in the beginning. But some trials tell us that without spending points in resourcefulness, one proc gives you about 0.3 worth of a craft, and the number becomes 0.45 once you fully spec into the tree. For example, if you spec fully into the tree and have 10% resourcefulness, then after 1000 crafts on average you will save mats for another 1000 * 10% * 0.45 = 45 crafts.

We quickly noticed that multicraft is usually better. Inspiration beats multicraft only when the quality 3 price is more than 3 times of the quality 2 price (2.3 times if you don’t spec into the multicraft node). Inspiration beats resourcefulness if the quality 3 price is at least 1.45 times of the quality 2 price (1.3 times if you don’t spec into the resourceful node). And multicraft is always better than resourcefulness. Take this paragraph with a grain of salt, because we are doing linear approximation here. If you want an extremely precise computation to decide which secondary stat you need to go, write down the complete formula of the cost of your pipeline, then compute its partial derivatives on secondary stats. Time to go back to school.

Inspiration is better than resourcefulness almost all the time for potion and phial making, but resourcefulness will outperform inspiration eventually in intermediate reagent making. This comes in handy in choosing enchantments for professional tools. Notice that enchantments for professional tools scale with your character level, so level all your crafters to 70.

It took a few hours for us to be sure that the spreadsheet formulas were correct, with a few mishaps along the way. For example, for a while we ran the spreadsheet without including the 5% auction house fee, something we caught later on when our profit margins seemed a bit too good to be true.

The spreadsheet is not for estimating how much gold we can earn, but for helping us make the decision whether we should trade or not. If we can have a 20% margin, then we can do it casually, if 0% then we just stop, and if 50% we can really spend an hour or two crafting nonstop.

If gold-making via crafting, or even just playing the auction house is something you want to get into, we cannot stress enough how important it is to have some form of a spreadsheet which can quickly tell you the relevant pricing information. It allowed us to craft without any ambiguity or risk.

4: Trading on the AH

Since we are buying a lot of materials and selling six different products (quality 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent, quality 2 and 3 potions and phials), it involves some interaction with the AH. We are both new to this part of the game, so a lot of mistakes have been made, and a lot of experiences have been learned.

The biggest mistake is the lack of patience, especially in selling quality 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent. Since they are byproducts, we usually sell them at either the market price or even at a discount. But this market is far more active than we expected.

The second mistake is spending too much time undercutting, especially before the raid release. After a few days of trading, we started to realize that any loss of profit mostly came from time spent not crafting, as opposed to not undercutting. So eventually we just put the consumables at a reasonable margin and stopped worrying about them at all.

Our principle is not speculating, that means we buy mats, craft, and then sell all of the products before we start a new buying round. Ideally, this is an arbitrage, but the price movement is very volatile. Eventually, we found out that by having a small bank of mats, we can make the procedure much faster: we can send Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent to potion/phial alchemists before we start crafting them (2000 Omnium Draconis crafting takes about 20 minutes, and this was very often the bottleneck in maximising profits).

It was very interesting to see the liquidity and the behaviour of the regional AH. Before the raid release, almost all our sales are in big chunks (it was common to see a single order of 100 to 200 phials). We believe they are either big guilds buying consumables or individual players speculating on price movements. After the release, sales were mostly in small chunks (10-20 per order) which is clearly individual raiders and dungeon runners buying their personal consumables. This results in different trading strategies: Before the raid release, we often undercut the market by 10% of our margin, to make sure we can be easily hit by big orders and then move on. After the raid release, we are happy to do much smaller undercuts because things sell immediately after they are on the shelf.

The price volatility of herbs and awakened elements was insane. A well-timed purchase would result in more than 10% extra margin. However, it naturally was very difficult to predict price movement. We believe that with some data and analysis, a reasonable quantitative model could be built to indicate buying signals.

5: Some final thoughts and the future

Some final thoughts:

  • It would not be a gold-making article if there are no numbers. We each bought a token just before the release of Dragonflight, which at the time gave us 600k total gold on day 0 of the expansion. This grew to 1.5m gold essentially from crafting and gathering while levelling. We launched the production of our build four days before the release of the raid, and we had made 25m gold profit by the time the raid released. Most of time was simply spent AFK crafting. During these days we pretty much always had a comfortable 50% margin on the market which we pretty much dominated (one could visibly see when we placed our products on the regional AH charts). Of course, these profit margins could not last forever, but at the time of writing we have made in the region of 50m profit from this strategy.
  • The pricing spreadsheet was, by far, the most important part of the process. It gave us quick and precise cost estimates under the current market condition, and allowed us to make easy and swift decisions. Our final strategy is rather involved. It buys 9 different mats and sells 6 different products, so simple mental math would not work well in this volatile market.
  • Selling quality 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent hedges against price movements of materials. If on average the price of herbs and awaken elements go up by 20%, our cost will go up by roughly 15% (depending on inspiration rate and the price difference between quality 2 and 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent). There were a few times when the potion/phial market overreacted to severe material price movement, and our margin skyrocketed as a result.
  • Since all secondary stats are multiplicative, it is much safer to underestimate their effect (thus overestimate the cost) than the opposite. After all, not trading is better than trading at loss. It also means that an error in estimating one term can cause disaster in the cost and profit approximation.
  • On the other hand, since people inherently fear trading at loss, our precise pricing spreadsheet allowed us to keep trading when other people were cautious. Combined with the high demand in the alchemy market, it gave us very exciting opportunities at times.
  • When our products were selling well, as we have already mentioned the bottleneck to profit is simply crafting speed. Blizzard has capped crafting speed at 75%, which is 4x speed than 0% (standard Blizzard math…).
  • The regional commodity market gives traders in low-pop servers a unique chance to compete, something we are thankful for on our server. Even though the server-based part (especially the crafting order) is still a downside, we are exposed not only to a larger market but also to bigger buyers. We joked a lot about  Gingi being the only buyer for our consumables, there are many Discord messages between us about our entire stock of products being “Gingi’d”.

Although we have described how we set up our build to dominate the market within the first weeks of the expansion, some readers might be surprised to learn that this build is still providing us in the new year with comfortable profit margins and we are still dominating the alchemy regional auction house. Of course, we have had to make some adjustments already to ensure this, and we are actively trying to predict the future of this build. Let us share some of our thoughts here.

  • Understanding all secondary stats certainly not only helps alchemy. Similar calculations can be done in other professions, especially those that require multiple steps.
  • Quality 3 Omnium Draconis and Primal Convergent market will eventually collapse due to them not being needed t craft quality 3 end products. This is already happening to Primal Convergent in the EU. When the price gap is less than 5%, we will use Quality 3 reagents in crafting instead of hedging, thus simplifying our strategy.
  • As an extension of the above, Quality 3 Primal Convergent can be used in making Sagacious Incense and Potion Absorption Inhibitor. That means we can further diversify our strategy by adding these two products (both Quality 2 and 3) into our sale list, something we have already begun implementing to great success.
  • A better understanding of material prices in terms of productivity and demand rather than historical data will greatly improve buying timing of materials, which becomes more and more important as out profit margin decreases.
  • By pushing our knowledge gain every week, we are still finding new edges. We have already described the 2/2/2 build, but as of now we are actually working with a 1/2/2 build, where the quality 1 material is the Draconic Vials. Quality 1 Draconic Vials are simply bought from the alchemy supplier for a flat gold price, which removes any volatility from vial prices on the auction house. This actually equates into a large profit gain, especially in making potions, where five vials are required per craft.

It’s Important to Check Before you Post

It is VERY important to check and triple check before you place an item for sale. Whether you’re using a posting string with TSM, using Auctionator, or even just putting your items up for sale using the base UI.

When you use the base UI, a few things happen depending on the item / if there are any for sale. If others are up for sale you’ll price match the last one. The auction house works on a LIFO method “last in first out” so there’s no need to undercut that auction.

The thing is, there are some ‘less desirables’ out there who want to make sure you lose gold. Unpopular opinion here, but I do not condone what these goblins do. They put up ‘bait’ in the auction house. Then the next person who isn’t paying attention comes along and matches their prices – and they attempt to buy out those people. Then they can resell the item for a profit. Personally, these are the sort of goblins that give other goblins a bad name. I don’t think that gold making needs to be done by tricking others or fooling them out of gold. That opinion isn’t shared by everyone, which is fine. It’s simply not a method I use or believe in.

Now, it IS common for people to just naturally make a mistake when putting an item up for sale if they have no idea what the value is – especially if there are zero already for sale. If the item has no others for sale, for example, the default UI will commonly use a very low price from Blizzard. In some other cases people have used their TSM strings to post very expensive items for vendor value (when there are no regional prices, for example, because the item is too new).

You don’t HAVE to post at the default number given – always make sure you check so that you’re not being baited into posting for under the value. In the case of the fluid above, they actually vendor for 62 silver – not a huge amount, but when you bait all day long and occasionally catch thousands of these things being posted, it can apparently pay off.

[Challenge] Expanding to Other Servers with new Characters

In World of Warcraft, I’ve constantly played on low population servers. First it was because I was playing with my husband, then with friends, and then simply because it was comfortable and I was used to it.

The thing is, over the years low population servers have no longer been fun for me to play on (in most cases, there are exceptions). This year I decided it would be a good idea to experiment with higher population servers and see how that goes.

A wise goblin once told me “60 slots – if you aren’t using them you are losing them” so I decided to use my 2nd account and create a character on a whole bunch of servers. I didn’t want to transfer funds to each of these servers, but I wanted to give them some pocket change to play with. This account is also a completely separate battle net from my main account. There are no unlocked allied characters on the horde side.

Right now Blizzard has a promotion going on where you can play Dragonflight with some restrictions if you do not already own Dragonflight. This battlenet does not own the expansion. Normally, one of those restrictions is you can’t make a Dracthyr without first having a level 55 on the server. Thankfully, that rule doesn’t pertain to the promotion.

I created a Dracthyr, and did their first quest. It rewarded 25g. I summoned my mailbox, mailed that to the actual character I wanted to keep, and then deleted. Then I took that 25g to the AH, and in a few seconds (thank you region wide auction house) I flipped it from 25g to 150g. That’s a much nicer number to work with. Recipes and pets only require 1s as a posting fee, and pets can be transferred across servers without any effort.

I haven’t made 60 characters yet, but it’s a start. This is a little more dedicated that I usually am in my gold making, but I do like to challenge myself, so let’s see where this goes. Since it’s my second account it doesn’t really affect my game play at all, and who knows, maybe in time I can work towards being one of the ‘big’ goblins, too.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Weekly Wrap Up [Dec19-Dec26]

It’s the last weekly wrap up for 2022! Unfortunately it looks like the TSM ledger is displaying some weirdness, so the stats are not exactly reliable (how do I have almost 500k in sales, 150k in purchases, and come out behind 299k? I am not sure). Despite what that chart says, gold IS going up! This week was a bit slower because of the holidays (and let’s face it, I’ve been playing a huge amount of Dwarf Fortress instead of WoW) but I still found myself having a lot of fun. What sold?

The Dragonflight version of Rhinestone sunglasses have been doing pretty well for me! They’re cheap in cost to make (material wise) and I fished up the recipe very early on. I sold 3 this week, less than the 5 I sold last week but that’s OK. This week I didn’t have any huge expenses like fish for faction. I did buy an ace of earth to boost the ilevel of an alt, but even that was sitting under 30k. I also bought some fish to work on cooking but with everyone home and playing, the prices have been manageable.

Sales I didn’t expect? I’ve actually had a LOT of those.

My tailor made 52k in sales – and none of it was from Dragonflight. She has been selling old world bags, and they have been flying off of the rack. I didn’t expect people to buy them but I sure am glad they did!

TSM is still not working for Dragonflight quality items, but it works perfectly fine for old world items and there’s still a lot of buyers out there! You might recall that I recently moved OFF of one of my low population servers to a medium/high pop – and it was a fantastic decision. I’m so happy playing where I am now. It’s a bit awkward at times for farming (feast, I’m looking at you) so I tend to invite my character back over with my 2nd account to phase to a quieter area, but for the majority of my game time, the change has been awesome.

I haven’t found a home there yet, but I’m taking my time and not immediately jumping into anything.

Yes, it was a great week for World of Warcraft, and now that all 4 of my main crafters have reached 70, I can focus on setting them up properly. So far I’ve done very little Dragonflight crafting. That isn’t a problem for me though. You might recall I also never bothered to get into Shadowlands legendary crafting – and I was still able to make gold. Sure, I’m not making billions, but again for the time invested I’m pretty happy.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Weekly Wrap Up [Dec12-Dec19]

This week the ledger painted a much nicer picture, but I still ended up 500,000 gold in debt thanks to fish. I decided to splurge! I bought 10 WoW tokens when they were 150k, and I also bought 100,000 fish to turn in to the Tuskarr folks, climbing from renown 13 to 24. I did also make a lot of sales, earning 1.3 million gold overall. It just wasn’t enough to offset my costs of 1.9 million. Probably the most gold I have spent in a very long time.

I don’t spend a lot of gold. I don’t find myself needing too much and I’m not an end game player so there hasn’t been a reason. I’m sure I can earn this back over the next little while, but it will take some time.

My best sellers this week continue to be Darkmoon cards which I get from fishing, fish, and way up there almost at the top are the Dragonflight ‘Rhinestone’ sunglasses. I got the recipe pretty early on, and I sell a pair or two a day for 20-25k each. The craft cost to these is pretty low, and a few other people have them on my server as well, but I’m thankful for the little bit of coin I get.

I’ve also gone back and started restocking old world materials again. Bags in particular have been HUGE sellers. I’ve even been selling embersilk bags of all things. I don’t know who is buying it (or why) but it’s interesting to me since they’re 22 slots, and sell for just over 2k each. Is it the colour, maybe? They’re a lovely pink shade.

Whatever the reason, the sales have been steady enough that I decided to keep stocking them. Blacksmithing hasn’t been selling nearly as well, but I’m still listing items. I know Dragonflight items tend to sell for the lowest possible price since there are just so many people crafting right now, and I’m only too happy to melt back to older professions to see what people are interested in. With the announcement that grey/white transmog items are becoming BOE (headed to the PTR soon) I expect that people might be out there rounding out their collections.

I’ve heard a lot of people upset about the difficulties they’re having in making gold due to abc123 reason and I just want to say that making gold is very much possible no matter what server you’re on. You may need to adjust your expectations (I see goblins making millions a second, I am not one of those people), you may need to find your niche (ie: don’t follow the throngs of people aimed at a particular crafting spec), you may need to diversify, and you may need alts – but it is absolutely still fantastic gold making out there. Don’t give up.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

[Casual] Road to 10 Million – COMPLETED!

For the past 146 days, I’ve been running my ‘road to 10 million’ challenge, where I earned gold on a low population server, and attempted to make gold cap within a 1 year time frame. I figured this would be a fairly casual endevour, and I just wanted to prove to people that you can make gold anywhere. That holds true even more today than in the past, thanks to the region wide commodity auction house.

Today I completed that goal on my first server – yay! The graph shows some interesting things. The very first gigantic rise was when I bought a number of Shadowlands raid items to my low population server. I sold them at a hefty profit and then things tapered out a bit again. I played maybe 20 minutes a day, mostly just restocking my auction house character and looking for deals to buy every once in a while.

Most of my gold came from fishing (Dragonflight), and Strange Goop (Shadowlands). It was never huge amounts, but it was constant on a weekly basis. Then on November 28th Dragonflight released, and sales spiked. Most of my sales after the release have been fish & recipes. I have no level 70s on this server, and no crafters. I’m incredibly pleased that I managed to reach 10 million gold with (what I consider to be) very little effort.

Tips? BE CONSISTENT. You can’t make gold if you’re bouncing all over the place never invested in anything at all. I don’t make millions in a single day, but I am pretty consistent. It adds up.

Stop FOMO (fear of missing out). Unless you’re the VERY FIRST to hit a new gold making method, maybe don’t follow the crowds. Yes, we would all love to have jumped on the crimson combat recipe / gear train, but by the time most of us hear about those things, they are no longer the profit they once were. It does not matter what everyone else is doing to make gold. Find what YOU like to do, and find your niche from there.

Have fun. If it becomes work, or you’re just not having fun, don’t do it. If it’s stressful, don’t do it. This is a video game, and we all have real life obligations that we like to escape from. Making gold should be something that is fun and shouldn’t add stress to your life. I realize that’s easier said than done, especially if you rely on a token to continue playing, but your time is valuable. Do something you enjoy.

What’s next now that I’ve reached 10 million? I haven’t decided quite yet. My other low population server is at just over 8 million gold, so I’m thinking I will focus there next, and then when I’ve reached gold cap on two servers, I’ll probably start a new challenge. Since raiding and M+ is something I’ve never really been able to do (whether it’s because of my available time or because of my health issues) I might end up buying some boosts. In the meantime I’m just happy with my casual progress.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Is it Worth It?

I get asked this question at least once a day – “Is fishing worth it” – and I always give the same answer. Your idea of ‘worth it’ and mine are going to be very different. Fishing is very RNG based in Dragonflight, which is part of the reason, but there’s deeper reasons to why there’s no one answer to these questions. I can’t answer whether or not something is worth it for someone else, because I have no idea what their criteria is.

I have multiple sclerosis and during a relapse (which I’m just going through the tail end of now) my eyes and my hands don’t function as they should. I usually use apps to read text to me and to type for me. Fishing (and pet battles) are two World of Warcraft activities that I can still partake in because they require minimal hand movement (and because fishing has sounds). Making gold is about consistency. The activity I choose to do rarely matters, but being consistent does matter. For me, fishing is worth it. I’m making anywhere from 150k-1 million gold a day depending on which recipes drop and how fish are selling. I usually do pet battles with my main account in the meantime. Looking at text, reading the auction house, having to move my character around, these are awkward for me a lot of the time, so I am incredibly thankful that there are some activities I can still do that don’t put a strain on my body. When I’m able to, I get back to the auction house, gathering, crafting, and all of that good stuff. Some months are better than others.

The point of this is – stop asking someone else if abc123 activity is “worth it” – take the information provided, and make an education guess at whether or not it will be worth it FOR YOU. Maybe even try it for a little while. You can decide for yourself whether something is enjoyable enough / profitable enough for you to continue doing it – or you can move on to something better.

We’re Selling Fish – Why?

This is why I love to lurk in the WoW Economy discord. Someone came into the farming channel yesterday and mentioned that the repeatable catch & release quest was rewarding faction – it had never rewarded faction on retail before. It used to reward faction on beta, but that was removed, and never carried over for the release.

I immediately jumped up and purchased as much fish under 25g as I could buy, raised my Tuskar faction, and then sold whatever I had left over. It was glorious. Sure, I was out a few hundred thousand gold, but grinding Tuskar reputation has never been fun for me, and I managed to unlock a bunch of recipes I needed.

The price of fish will continue to fall, but it should remain higher than it has been as people want to round out their renown. It is 10,000 fish for an entire level of renown, if you’re paying 25g each that’s 250,000g per renown level. If you’re close to a specific tier you want, or you’ve just got a LOT of gold, 250k for a level isn’t exactly *that* bad. Of course everyone is going to have their own opinions on that one.

I’ve been in the middle of a multiple sclerosis relapse, so I’ve been doing a lot of fishing (it’s the easiest thing for my hands, my hands don’t function well during a relapse). I wish I had of held on to it for moments like this, but it couldn’t be planned, we had no way of knowing the reputation would be turned on. Still, it’s a neat example of how gold making changes and is fluid. The price of fish at one point was 150g (for the green ones, they reward more faction).

Did you take advantage of the sales or were you one of the many who were going after Tuskar reputation?

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!