My Top Glyph Picks for patch 5.0.4

In the upcoming patch, 5.0.4, the whole glyph system is being revamped, and many glyphs are being removed/changed/added. Given that, there will be many people looking to buy some of the new glyphs for their characters, whether it be for looks, or for utility. Here, I hope to list what I think will be some of the best sellers in the month leading up to Mists of Pandaria. Granted, this is just speculation, but I hope that the reasoning that I provide for my picks makes sense to you. I am going to limit myself to no more than 5 per class, so I do not overwhelm you, so don't take these picks as being the only one I see as good sellers, but just what I think will be the best sellers. Generally, I will try to stick with 3 major, and 2 minor glyphs each.

Glyphs and Transmog, My Submission for the August 2012 Blogging Carnival!

To begin, this post is for "Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival". The topic this time is,

As WoW gold makers, we must be flexible and adapt our posting, pricing, and relisting strategies based on the individual markets.  Every server is different, yet within the same server, each market can be completely different as well.  For the August Gold Blogging Carnival Topic, let's illustrate some of the ways we post differently based on the different profession markets.  
Compare & Contrast 2 Different AH Markets and How Your Gold Making Strategy Varies In Each Market

My post will be about how I handle glyph selling, and transmog. Now, to be honest, I have taken a bit of time off of glyph selling, since I have been engrossed with the beta lately, but I still find time to sell some transmog items. So, this post will mostly be reflecting on how I was selling things a couple months ago.

First off, how I sold glyphs can be summarized pretty simply:

• I took the shotgun approach. Just posted 2 of EVERY glyph that was even marginally profitable(as in, at least 5 gold above crafting price, and due to the super low cost of Whiptail, the crafting cost was super low, about 15g a glyph max).
• I posted for 24 hours
• I checked in with them every couple hours, or after a major competitor logged on. I had all of them(if they post more than 5 glyphs) on my friend list on every toon I play. I also know the posting cycles of the major ones, through the amazing TUJ.
• I aggressively undercut and try to shut out certain people, namely my chief competitors. I used to be kinda nice to them, but they weren't to me, so it's WAR. Got one to leave the market for like a week, then I left for a couple days to see if he was watching, and lo and behold, he was, and came back immediately. So, I came back too, and demoralized him further, made sure to log on IMMEDIATELY after he logged off, no matter what I was doing(except raiding, of course!). Got my bank toon to be on my other account, and literally camped the AH all day some days, just to demoralize him further. It worked, and he stopped competing, or did so not as aggressively. 
• I did minimal flipping, although I did reset some markets which were prices very low but had very little stock, especially if they were Northrend glyphs.

How I sold transmog is way different:

• I carefully examined and priced all of the pieces I was selling, or buying to flip
• I posted for 48 hours
• I never checked in. Frankly, I had no competition, and I don't price based on it anyway. Fixed prices all the way
• I did an auctionator search almost every day for items to flip, plus farmed for them in Blasted Lands all the time

As you can see, the way I approached the two markets were very different. With glyphs, I was very competitive, paid a lot of attention to my competition, but I was not very particular about the, um, particulars. With transmog, I was very careful about the pricing, but cared little about competition. 

I would say that for the effort spent, transmog did give me more gold, but glyphs gave me more gold overall. In other words, I spent little effort or stress in selling/flipping transmog items, but didn't make a lot either, and couldn't really push it too hard to make more. I had to just be patient. But with glyphs I could and did push things hard, and it paid off almost immediately. So, they both had their benefits I suppose. 

Overall, which did I like more? Probably glyphs. Between the highly competitive atmosphere, and high payout, it was exciting and fun. The downsides, of course, were added stress and attention, but that's all part of the game of glyph selling. If you prefer a more relaxed, patient approach, then transmog would be the way to go most likely, or another similar market, like the 77-80 green market.

I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Why I am Happy About Spirit of Harmony

The following may put me in the minority opinion among gold-makers, but that's fine. I am not your average gold-maker, if there is even an "average" to speak of. In other words, I am not the type of gold-maker that does it for the sake of it. I make gold in order to spend it on the things I need in order to progress in other areas of the game, namely raiding. Let's just say that I have seriously seen some people who are into gold-making who barely know how to spec, or what abilities to use on their toons, or how to play in general. This kinda saddens me, as I think if you are going to be making fictional currency in a game, you should at least be interested in playing it. Oh well, that is neither here nor there, and I have no reason why I am bringing it up right now, other than I just feel like venting.

Anyway, why am I happy about Spirit of Harmony? A few reasons, which I will put in a tidy bullet list:

• First, it will make certain items more scarce, namely Darkmoon Cards, Crafted Gear, things like that. Yes, I know that Darkmoon cards will also be able to be made with the Scroll of Wisdom, but that is limited to one scroll per day(which are also used for other things). Point is, because of the fact that Spirits will not be tradeable, and many people will not be paying other people for their spirits(if they even have the recipe needed in the first place, which will come into play with the recipes given by factions), there will almost definitely be less of these items flooding the AH, which of course means higher values for the ones YOU craft.
• Because the Spirits will no longer be tradeable, the prospect of just sitting in a city and camping the AH will no longer be really that viable, at least for certain markets. Of course it will still work for others, but that is beside the point. If you want Spirits, you will have to go out and get them in the world, or in dungeons. This makes me happy, because certain lazy, trade-spamming gold makers on my server will be at a clear disadvantage, because I will have more Spirits, more rep with the factions, etc. In other words, there will be a better gating system to certain markets: time and effort, not just how much gold you can throw at it. High gating is a good thing for those who put in the effort to get past them(like me).
• The design of spirits will help spread the wealth around somewhat. It will probably become somewhat common for people to ask to use the Spirits that other people have. Depending on the ease of getting Spirits, this may mean that they will have a high value. So, for people who are not that into the gold-making game but who love to grind rep with factions and get lots of Spirits, this can be a boon, and create a sort of symbiotic relationship between the strict gold-makers(who don't really play the game) and the people who DO play the game. More gold all-around is actually a good thing. It means more people to buy the other things you are selling.

In summary, I am happy about Spirit of Harmony because it will make certain things more scarce(and thus, more valuable), will spread gold around, and set gates to certain markets(or at least to how much can be produced in that market), which if you take the time to pass them, will reward you immensely. 

Preparing for Mists, Part Two: Market Speculation

In the first part of this series, I went over what will be the main feast for raiders in Mists, and how to go about getting the huge amount of Pink Turnips necessary to make them. In this second part, I want to go over some potential hot markets(and not so hot ones) to pay attention to come Mists.

To preface, this is all speculation, and pretty uneducated speculation at that, as I am no expert by any means,  so I encourage you to think about this yourself, and perhaps prove me wrong if need be. So, that said, here are some market predictions!

Pink Turnip: Remember when I pointed out that my guild is going to need A LOT of these things every week? Well, this is going to be the case with every guild who decides to use the main feast for raiding. As I doubt many of them will have the foresight or coordination to produce these in-guild, at least in the first few months of the expansion, I expect this vegetable to become relatively scarce and high-priced during that period. Don't expect to be selling many until about a week or two into the expansion though, as it takes a week for the first raid to open up, and it also takes a lot of cooking(and thus, a lot of other materials) to get to the point where you can even buy the recipe for the feast. Here, to illustrate what I think will happen, a highly scientific analysis made with Paint:

The Jogu Flip: There is a little drunk NPC in Halfhill(the main city in Valley of the Four Winds), who, for a fee(free if you raise his reputation to exalted) will let you in on what crops are good to grow that day, meaning that you will get more from those crops. Now, there are two ways to go about using this information. The first and most obvious is to plant what he says is good to plant, and thus have more to sell on the AH, or to turn into Bags of Groceries for tokens. The second way is to take advantage of people who use the first way, and buy the crops that they post the day of/after heeding Jogu's advice. I predict that the price for these crops will be temporarily lower due to the increased supply on the AH, but will quickly return to normal, because most crops are used a lot in cooking recipes(meaning, that there will be a lot of movement in this market). If you are observant, you can take advantage of this temporary fluctuation in the price, and flip the crops after they go back up to non-inflated prices. Now, this depends on if the profit you can gain will be more than the price for listing the crops, or will be enough to even make it worth the time. I think it will be, at least in the first few months at least, as I think cooking materials will be very high priced during that time.

Archaeology Keystones: The Lorewalkers are likely to be a very popular faction in Mists. Not only do they give a sweet-looking mount at exalted, but they also are the faction one has to grind(to revered, so not too bad) to get belt buckles. Thing is, I really doubt that many people have taken the time to get their archaeology up during Cataclysm. This may just be my perception, but it just didn't seem too popular, especially with the non-casual crowd. Well, when they find out that the best way to grind reputation with the Lorewalkers is to have archaeology(and specifically on their Blacksmith), there will be a lot of people going out and grinding it. This means, obviously, many more keystones(the items used to help complete certain relics) being in demand. Of course, the increased number of people grinding out archaeology may bring more keystones into the market, but I doubt it will be enough to cover the amount in demand. I have ground the profession to 525 myself, and I can attest to not getting enough keystones from just my grinding. If they are cheap on the AH now, pick some up and hold them until the start of the next xpac.

Anyway, that is it for now, hope these three markets end up panning out, and working for some of you! Let me know what you think!

Preparing for Mists, Part One: Feasts

Before I get into the meat of this subject, I want to clarify something. You may have noticed that for being a blog which kind of has a gold-making feel and name, I have not written much about the subject. To be honest, part of the reason is because I have felt pretty hesitant to tread on already covered ground, just posting to put words out there and get page views. I want to be as original as I can. In this series that I am starting, Preparing for Mists, I hope to do just that.

How do I intend to be different than the rest(or many of the others) with this? Well, one thing I have noticed is that many of the gold-making bloggers focus on making gold in the game for its own sake, as its own end in a way. To many(not all, of course) of them, gold making is their endgame, their PVP. That's fine, to each their own and all that, but gold making is not my driving force in the World of Warcraft. Mine is raiding. As such, all gold-making that I do is primarily for the purpose of financing my raiding toons, and the guild that I am part of. Now, of course I love to splurge on a nice-looking mount to transmog set, but those are secondary concerns.

Anyway, I thought that I would take this perspective of mine, one of a dedicated raider in a raiding guild, and use that to inform the way that I write about gold-making. Here is my first attempt at that goal, a series on how to prepare yourself(and your guild) for raiding in Mists of Pandaria.

Another disclaimer: this series will not be specifically about making gold exclusively, rather, it will be about preparing for raiding in a way which will save gold. As the saying goes, "a penny saved is a penny earned".

And yes, I am really long-winded :P

If you have done any cooking on the Mists beta, or read about it, you will know that Blizzard is changing the way that buff food is handled. Cooking will have (insert number here) "Ways", or specializations, which focus on making food which benefits a particular stat, with the exception of the Way of the Brew. Each Way will also have its own feast, which gives everyone 250 extra in their primary stat, and a little extra to people who have the primary stat that is associated with that Way. For example, the Banquet of the Pot will benefit Mages more than they will Death Knights, as the Way of the Pot specialization is about intellect.

Additionally, each feast now comes in two sizes, 10 and 25, with a higher material cost to make the 25-person version. Also, feasts are produced in batches of five. As an aside, I originally thought that they were made singly, and when I took a look at what the mats were to make one of them(as I thought) I literally thought that Blizzard was playing some sort of joke. having those same mats produce five makes much more sense, although it is still going to be a higher cost than what we have been used to in Cataclysm. What are the mats, you ask?

Pandaren Banquet (serves 10)
1x 100 Year Soy Sauce
10x Jewel Danio
10x Raw Tiger Steak
50x Pink Turnip

Great Pandaren Banquet (serves 25)
1x 100 Year soy Sauce
20x Jewel Danio
20x Raw Tiger Steak
100x Pink Turnip

As you can see, the 25-person version is simply twice the material cost, save the Soy Sauce, which is purchased with an Ironpaw Token. An interesting thing about the mats here is that they are of four different types. I already mentioned the Soy Sauce. The Jewel Danio is a fish that, from what I can tell so far, is only fished in the level 90 zone(in pools and open water). The Raw Tiger Steaks are looted form tigers you kill, and the Pink Turnips can be looted from Yaungol that you kill, but seems to be much more reliably gained through farming, which I will get into in a bit.

Now, to prepare for your raid's feasting needs, you will have to consider a few variables. First and most obvious, is the raid size. This will set the base cost of mats per feast. Second, you want to determine the amount of feasts that you will need per week, which is a little more involved, but not too much. After these two steps, you will come out with a material requirement that you will have to fill every week. Let me walk you through the process, using my raiding group as an example.

First, my guild raids 10-mans. That part's easy enough.

Second, to determine the amount of feasts we will need per week, I can either spitball it(as in, just guess) and add a little more on top to be safe, or I can attempt at a more educated guess. Let's try the latter. First, I will want to figure out the amount of raiding time spent per week. For our guild, we do four hour sessions, three days a week, which means we raid for 12 hours a week. Now, given that we are not the most hardcore type of guild(although we are pretty good in my opinion), and factoring in that this calculation will be for the first few weeks of content, which means it will be new for us and we will be relatively undergeared for the content, I estimate that we will be wiping a lot. That said, because it will be so new for us, there will probably be some amount of time spent in-between pulls to figure out our strategy. In other words, we probably won't be wiping and running back in to pull in 2 minutes. I would put the in-between fight time at probably an average of 6-10 minutes. The fight time average I would put at about 4-5 minutes, because I am sure we will be wiping a bit on the first couple minutes of a fight, which will balance out the longer times.

Total time for pull+wipe+run back in, buff up and pull again = ~10-15 minutes. As I am a believer in preparing for more than you will need, I will go with the low part of the estimate, 10 minutes.

12 hours/10 minutes=72. As, in, at worst we will need about 72 feasts per week. Now, as I don't trust my estimation skills too much, I like to add a bit more, and so will go with 80 feasts per week needed. If we prepare for that, and end up needing less(or even far less) than it's not like the feasts will go wasted, and we can adjust our estimates accordingly.

Remembering that each feast recipe produced actually makes five, I determine that we will need to make 16 feasts. That comes to a material cost of:

16x 100 Year Soy Sauce
160x Jewel Danio
160x Raw Tiger Steak
800x Pink Turnip

Which, in my opinion, isn't really all that bad, if we make the acquiring of materials a team effort. The fishing and killing part of the equation is easy enough, but the part that I want to get into is the turnips. 800 Pink Turnips a week may seem like a high cost, but it actually shouldn't be too much if people pitch in. My idea is requiring every raid member to take the minimum of time to start their own farm, which takes less than a half hour to do, and require them to grow a certain amount of turnips per week. How many turnips, you ask?

Well, turnip plants, when planted and harvested, provide(from what I have seen in my limited experience, so correct me if I am wrong) 5-8 turnips per plant. If we multiply that number by 10(the number of raiders), we get 50-80, as in, if everyone plants one. This means that to get 800 turnips reliably(as in, only taking the low number, 50, into account), each raider on average will have to produce 16 plants worth of turnips. That means four days of planting for the people who only get 4 plots(the starting amount). Additionally, as you can start farming at level 86, so anyone with a current alt at 85 can take the tiny bit needed to level it to 86 to start farming if they don't want to have to plant turnips on their main. Either way, it is super easy to plant and harvest the turnips, they cost next to nothing for the seeds, and it takes just about the same amount of time as any other daily, so there is no excuse for not taking advantage of it.

Again, the gold that your guild does not have to spend on the hundreds of turnips necessary to produce feasts is gold that you effectively earned. Additionally, it will mean more turnips on the AH, which will mean lower prices for when you do need to buy some. In fact, and here's a trivia section for you, this idea of growing your own crops affecting the larger market has even been the focal point of a famous US Supreme Court decision, Wickard v. Filburn, which helped define the powers that Congress had under the commerce clause. What can I say, I am a politics nerd :P

I hope you actually made it though the long-winded post, and actually gleaned something informative and/or interesting from it(other than my overuse of parenthetical statements, or my irony at doing one now, or my obviousness for pointing out the irony, or the long-windedness of this parenthetical statement). Either way, you can expect another post in the same vein soon, although I haven't quite determined the topic yet. Thanks!