Goblin My Way To Riches

Well, hopefully!  I have been following Gevlon the Greedy Goblin and Just My Two Copper for some time and have finally plucked up the courage to try my hand at some money-making ventures.  Back at the start of WoW the friend who got me started in WoW used to spend hours in the AH and always seemed to have plenty of cash.  I remember being horrified when she cheerfully spent 1G to buy me a guild tabard, it seemed a huge amount!  Back then I had no idea that green quality items were better and could be sold; I used to vendor them then grind for ages to buy replacement armour from the Leather Armour vendor as I outgrew the gear I was crafting for myself *hangs head in shame*  When I made the dangerous journey from Teladrassil to Ironforge I was agog when she showed me the (then, only) Auction House.  When she explained about green and blue quality items I could have cried.  I was scrabbling about for coppers to train and I’d been flogging greens to the vendor!  When she explained about how she was using the AH (basically she was flipping) it all seemed very arcane.

While I have grown more confident about using the AH, seriously trying to make money from it has always seemed like a mysterious art.  When I have tried to make money from it in the past it has been by grinding raw materials and the results have often been disappointing.  On the other hand I have never, since those early days, been particularly short of cash.  I levelled a hunter then a mage to level 60.  I had the bright idea of farming leather to make armour kits to hand in at the Darkmoon Faire for the epic necklaces.  I farmed yetis for weeks.  I once took the time to calculate that each necklace took around 3,500 yetis.  I had nightmares about yetis and they still give me the shudders!  They didn’t drop a lot in the way of greens and blues (I only saw 2 blue drops and did the necklace grind 3 times) but they dropped a lot of food which was handy for my hunter, health and mana pots, and a lot of grey vendor trash which actually brought in a nice amount as it was mostly weapons.  I also sold the unwanted Thick Leather and by the time my hunter got her necklace she had just about enough for her epic mount.

Since then I have rolled several more characters.  I have never made huge amounts from selling on the Auction House but on the other hand as my collection of alts has increased so has my self-sufficiency.  They all have different professions and so my mail box is always busy!  The only thing I don’t have is an engineer although I did try it once before tBC came out.  I now have 5 level 80s, 1 76 and a 73, almost all with maxed professions.  I have 2 tailors, 2 leather workers, 1 blacksmith, 1 JC, 1 scribe, 1 enchanter, 2 skinners, 1 herbalist, an alchemist and 2 miners.  The only one of those that isn’t maxed is my warrior’s mining.  All of them have epic flying and across all my characters I was sitting on about 7,000 gold.  having been following Gevlon and JMTC for a couple of months and becoming increasingly bored and looking for a new challenge (PvP soon got old!) I’ve started to look for ways to put their professions to better use.

I had wondered about selling glyphs before having taken it up on my druid when it first came out.  I had discounted it as a serious money-maker having tried to sell my glyphs that I made whilst levelling; the market was awash with the same glyphs, you couldn’t give them away.  I’d got to the end of my research in stops and starts and then books came out.  That was where I had my first piece of luck with inscription.  The day after the patch my priest went to Naxx.  When I went to repair after I noticed the book in my bags; as it was green quality it hadn’t been rolled on, just looted normally.  I sent it to my scribe and she learned Glyph of Life Tap, the first scribe on the server to be able to make it!  I made a few and put them on the AH at 1,000G buyout and incredibly someone bought one.  I knew though that I wouldn’t sell many at that price (our server isn’t the high population and the economy can be quite sluggish).  Subsequent glyphs went up for 250G and I made about 5,000G in the couple of days monopoly I had before someone else learned it.  The price quickly dropped to 100G and sales slowed.  Within a week a couple of other people has learned it and it was  selling for less than 10G.  It was an incredible piece of luck but Inscription still didn’t seem like a viable way to make money.  I couldn’t work out how to organise it and so on.

In the last couple of weeks I have started following links from GG and JMTC and started to realise that maybe I could make money from my professions.  I found a site that detailed popular glyphs, I checked them out on the AH and the ones that seemed to be selling for 7+G I put on a spreadsheet.  I looked up all the mats and worked out what I needed.  I spent a couple of days herbing because low level herbs are often more expensive than Northrend herbs before I twigged that I could buy the high level herbs cheaply, make Ink of the Sea and trade it in for the ink I needed.  It has been an intense learning process!  I spent ages posting my auctions using the Appraiser tab on Auctioneer, then hours scouring the Auctions tab to cancel them all manually as they were undercut before I found out about Quick Auctions 2 which automates all the posting and cancelling for you.  Of course you have to get the settings right, the first time I tried (stupidly with all my glyphs, not just a test with a couple) I’d mis-configured something and posted my glyphs at zero bid and zero buyout.  I had to cancel the whole lot PDQ!

Another great site that has been extremely useful in help me figure out the practical details of running a glyph business has been My Auction House Banker, his blog is a mine of useful and very practical information.  JMTC also has a forum which has all sort of useful stuff; addons, Auctioneer, all the professions etc.  I have recently also subscribed to several other blogs all involved in similar ventures (they will all be appearing on the sidebar soon!);  Hit The Cap!, AH-Whoring (love the name!), A Gnome’s Conquest, Green Guts, Rags to Riches, Enchant Yourself, WoWEconomics, WoW 100K Gold Challenge, The Happy Scribe,  and last but not least Caffeine, Smokes and Auction House Fees (I can so identify with that!).  I will be scouring these sites to see if i can figure out how to use the Snatch feature in Auctioneer.  I can do basic searches but can’t for the life of me figure out how to search for stacks.

My biggest challenge has been to clear bank space.  I am an awful pack rat!  Anything that “might come in useful” gets stashed in the bank, some of it has been there for years. I had got to the point months ago where my 2 bank mules were running out of storage and I had to form my own guild and buy 3  guild bank tabs.  Yesterday I got ruthless and had a good clear out and stuck 95% of it on the AH.  A surprising amount of it is selling.  There are things like low-level cloth, enchanting mats, tBC gems, leather and assorted scaled, potions, primals and old essences, more pearls and spider’s silk than you can shake a stick at; it’s surprising how much of that old junk is selling, eg, I had 70 Heavy Knothide Leather and it sold for 360G.  I think that tomorrow I will get a fair amount back but it’s helped with my start-up costs.  I started with around 7,000 gold on my banker.  I  sank at least 3K into glyphs and today invested another 2,500 in Flask mats and almost 1,000 into Saronite Ore yet tonight I am sitting on almost 8,000 gold with money still to come from flasks, enchanting mats, gems and glyphs.  I hope the Goblin would be proud of me, hehe.  Best of all it’s been great fun and I’ve enjoyed the challenge.  Hopefully it will continue for the forseable future.