Sunday, September 30, 2012

Early on MoP Shuffling

   Today we are going to take a more detailed look on a most profitable venture that we can use to our advantage to make a metric ton of gold in  a short time. This is going to be a viable option for a short term because it will catch on very quickly and people will start realizing that they can skip paying the extra gold for it, but anyways let me get down to the juicy, and profitable parts.

   For this to work you need to have 2 characters, one of them needs to have alchemy, while the other one needs to have mining, or if you have those two professions on the same character then you don't need 2 characters.

   As you can see on the image it all starts with Ghost Iron Ore. The way to get the ore is obvious, either mine it or AH, either way is OK but i would advise you to go for the AH approach simply because it's a short window of opportunity on this plan, and it is surely going to loose it's momentum in a short time when people get more informed. But anyways back to the point, when you get the ore you will need your miner to smelt the ore. If your miner is not high enough to smelt it don't worry, it takes about 10 min to run around the starting Pandaria zone and your miner will have the skill to smelt the bars.

   Ok now you have Ghost Iron Bars in your bags, so what now ?  Simple you can take one of the two possible roads, you can either sell the bars for profit on the AH or you can choose the take the further refinement of the bars. If you simply want to sell the bars on the AH that's good, as you will still make a near 50% profit on your ore investment, but if you want to continue on with the whole deal keep reading. 

   After you get the Ghost Iron Bars send them to your alchemist who will take them and transmute them into Trillium Bars. If your alchemist just trained up and all he got was two patterns don't worry, he isn't bugged it's the way the new system works for Alchemy, you will need to make about 20-40 potions and the patterns will be revealed that way. So keep making those potions until the transmutation for Trillium Bar is revealed.

   After you have the transmutation available start making some Trillium Bars and selling them on the Auction House. As you can see on the image on the right i am making a good deal of profit on each bar, and the price for one Trillium bar is 10xGhost Iron Bars which in turn is one stack of ore. Just as a comparison, i bought the Ore from the AH for 75g per stack and sold them as Trillium Bars for 280g. That is 300%+ profit on that investment, and the best thing about it is that you don't really spend anything, as this transmutation doesn't waste your daily CD that you can use for the last step. Oh and just so i don't forget to mention, you can get extra bars if you are a transmutation master and your transmutations proc as you can see on the image below.

   And the last part of this plan is to take the Trillium Bars and use your Alchemist once more and use his daily CD to make 6 Trillium Bars into a Living Steel. The Living Steel is the new hot cake when it comes to crafting armor, so the demand for it is going to be high for a while, and if you are a transmutation master you have the chance to proc on it as well.

   So in short that is the way to go with the early on MoP metal trading, and no matter which route you choose to go know that the profit will be there, but if you have the ability then take on the three markets so you don't miss out on any of the possible profits.

   One last thing before i leave though, if you choose to sell the Trillium Bars know that the best time to put them on the AH is right before midnight ( that is when the CD for the Living Steel is reset ), because that is when people want to buy it the most. In the mind of the casual player it's "6 trillium bars for nearly 300 each is 1800 and the living steel is 2500, awesome i'll buy some" And that is how we get a hefty profit.

So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

MoP, Selling Caged Pets

   Mists of Pandaria is well on it's course, and from what i have seen already it is setting up to be an interesting expansion. We have new things to do, and new ways to make profit off from nearly every place we take a look at. Well today i chose to talk about a market that i think is going to be the next luxury market in WoW. As a clarification ,when i say a luxury market what i mean is a market that people buy/sell for commodities that aren't used to boost your raiding performance, nor make you a lean mean killing machine in PvP, an example for these luxury markets would be the Transmogrification and Pets markets.

   I have covered the section about making gold with pets in the past where we would craft or resell pets to people that were collectors and were willing to shell out top gold for them. Well with the new MoP pet battle system we have a whole new crowd coming in on a rather old market, and with their arrival the rules for the market are going to change.

   What this means is that, we used to sell the pets to people that only wanted them for the look, and now that they can do battle we are going to have people that are buying them for their combat abilities as well. 

   One thing that is important to know about combat pets is that you can tame a wild pet in the outdoors, but when you do that you can't "cage" him and then sell him on the AH (as far as i know and from what i have seen) but if you take a pet that you learned from an item, be it from a rare drop or a vendor pet and you level him up, then you can right click him in your pet list and from there you can choose to put him in a cage and then you can sell him on the AH for a hefty profit.

   There is another thing that is quite amazing with this patch about the pets market though, in a way Blizzard has made the pets to be shared across all your characters on your account, which in turn means that you end up on a globalized pet market. What i mean is simple, you want a pet Rat, but that Rat on your server is 1000g, you pop up on another server and you see it there for 1g, you buy that Rat there for 1g come back on your server and Boom you have a pet that you can either use, or resell for a hefty profit. Plus that same goes both ways, you can buy a pet from your server and then sell it on another server and make a starting capital if you want to change server.

   But back to the same server pet trading. One other thing that you might want to do is use up some smart advertising for your pets. Why this is a good idea is because people are still leveling their characters, and some by chance see the pet trainer and then they get hooked on the battle system. That is when you want to come in line and sell them the pet that they want, and the pet that will help them in the long run.

   So first thing you want to check is the AH, and see if maybe someone has posted a "leveled up" pet on there for a cheap price, then if they have you snag it and then try and peddle it, or if they haven't you have to level one yourself ,which is not all that hard. Your macro should be inviting and alluring to them, so use something like:

" Are you sick and tired of seeing your pets loose in a pet battle, well get your high level [Insert Pet Name] and never loose again "  

   In reality that is a bit of an over sale as the level of the pet has nothing to do with winning or loosing when he's facing a same level opponent, but that doesn't concern us, what we are interested in is making gold.

   So i am really curious to see how this market is going to morph in the coming months when people are done with leveling and are hard into the pet battle system, and they start buying/selling leveled combat pets.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.


Monday, September 24, 2012

Maximizing MoP Profits

   So here we are counting down the last hours before we say farewell to Cataclysm and open our hands and prepare to embrace Mists Of Pandaria. Well while we are waiting that doesn't mean we should just stand around in our capital cities and do nothing, on the contrary we should be hard at work to prepare.

Maximize your profits by Syndicating
   In the previous posts i covered the things that should be on your watch list for making profit by stocking up on materials, and then reselling them later on for profit. Well today we are going to take a look at a different thing that will be more about optimization and maximization of the profits that are to be had in Mists of Pandaria.

   So i will try to keep this as short and informative as possible. Few of the most important things that we want to make sure we don't botch would be to stay on the up side of the supply / demand curve and always be ready to sell what the people are looking to buy. But lets get down to more specific examples.

   Let's face it, the majority of the people that are playing this game have been playing this game for quite a while now, some are playing since the start of Cata, some are playing from WOTLK and there are even some that are coming from the Vanilla/TBC era. Well the same thing that all of these players have in common is that they all have multiple characters (alts) and they have different professions on them. Well if you are one of those people then you should make sure that even though you can't level all of your alts at the same time, you can at least make sure you aren't missing out on the things that are limiting your progression by a time table. 

      What this means is quite simple, if you have a Jewelcrafter, Scribe, Alchemist or any other profession that has a "daily" quest to do, make sure you do it and don't skip any of it. The reason for this is, even though it's it going to be very alluring to play your main and race for the top level 90, in the long run it will be very profitable NOT to skip on doing your daily profession quests, even though you might have to put some time into doing that.

   A great example for this would be the new Inscription daily research in the form of a Scroll of Wisdom that will be the new way to obtain those glyphs. There are 21 glyphs to be learned from that scroll which means that if you skip on a single day then you are skipping on getting some serious profit because there are no other ways to get that glyph except for the research, which in return means that not even your competition will have them so you could have a monopoly on that given glyph for a day or a week depending on the competition's luck of the draw.

   And last but not least, as i put in the first image above that says "Maximize your profits by Syndicating" you should really think about doing just that.  I covered a variant of this tactic a while back in a post that was about making gold with the help of a friend, but now we are going to take that idea and further build on it.

   To make it as simple as it can be i will get down to the idea right away. You want to make a syndicate of a given profession ( Jewelcrafting in my case ) and invite the top sellers in the market to join you for the greater good of all of you. What this means is that you all get to an agreement on who takes which gems patterns and then among yourselves you can have 4-5 or even more people all gathering their profession tokens and working as one opposed to all of you going for the same gems and then miss out on the profits that are to be had by selling a particular gem that someone was looking for, but couldn't find it because noone had learned the pattern. 

   Though to clarify, when i mentioned that you want to divide the cuts what i meant is that if JC 1 learns to make STR red gem, JC 2 learns to make INT red gem and i learn to make the AGI red gem, then i send a stack of uncut gems to both of them, and they do the same to me and we get back a cut version of the gems. So that way in a single cycle that will be needed to get one pattern you end up with 3 patterns, and the market is going to be controlled by your syndicate, meaning the opposition will need a much longer time to get in on your market while you will be up posting ALL your gems and undercutting only with the people that are in your Syndication. But if you decide to play it fair you can put your friends in your white zone so you don't undercut them but that is between you and them.

   So bottom line, while you are waiting for MoP it would be a good idea to talk to the major players in your server economy and give them the opportunity and the idea of a syndicate, and try to explain why this would be a great profit making idea. So for now i leave you with that and wish you a great time and fun in MoP

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.
   

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Back For MoP, Back For Gold

   So here we are back after quite a while with a new post, and hopefully the first in many posts to come. First of all i would like to say that i stopped with writing new articles on the blog for one reason and that reason was simply the fact that i didn't think there was anything new worth writing about, and i didn't want to make "new" posts that would be simply same as the old ones but from a different points of view. 

   Well all of that is about to change with the release of MoP. What this means is simply that all the markets are going to explode and be alive and ripe for the picking, and all you will have to know is how to make the optimal profit from those markets, and that is exactly where i will try to give you all a hand.

   Just like any market, or deal that transpires in the real world where the research and preparation are the key to being a success, the same goes for World Of Warcraft expansions. Knowing what to expect, and more importantly preparing for the upcoming expansion is 50% of the profit already in your pocket. I won't go into details on what you should have bought so far, simply because i made a post in two parts that was more or less a spot on about which items you should have stocked up on, the first part and the second part covered a wide market so you might want to check them out.

   Ok i am done with the words of wisdom, but now lets take a quick look at a tip that will actually make you a very hefty sum of gold in the longer haul, and it will make you go "Daaaaamn that was profitable"

   If you read up on these previous two posts back when i posted them, and you did some preparation and stocking up you should have a nice stock of soon to be older tier of materials, but if you haven't it's not all over as there are still almost two days left for you to pick up some bargains of the year. I will tell you exactly what to look for and what i stocked up and the reason behind it.

   First up i followed up on my own tips about the inscription and the inks in particular, i bought up all the cheap herbs that i could find up on the AH. The reason for this is that when MoP ships the only way to get the older inks would be either mill the old herbs (which are always rare to find) or exchange them for the newest inks (which will be expensive as hell), so this is why by buying inks now and then either reselling them or making glyphs with them in MoP is going to score you some awesome profits. While at the Inscription profession, you might want to take some Moonglow Ink, and Snowfall Ink and put them on the AH in stacks of 1, and the reason for this is because you want to cover the market for all the new Monk Scribes that will pickup Inscription and will want to do their Minor and Northrend inscription research.

  If you have a Jewelcrafter that has been a good boy/girl and has done his dailies and picked up on the epic cut gems then now would be a good idea to pick up the epic raw gems that are up on the Auction House for ridiculously low prices. Just for reference i picked up raw epic gems for 30-80g each, and i am well aware that in a few months i will sell those gems cut to twinks/alts for 1500-3000g easy. The reason behind this thinking is that the supply for these gems is finite and unless they introduce a way to get those gems by transmutes (which i doubt they will) you will end up with a VERY valuable piece of commodity.

   Lastly if you have an Enchanter you might want to pick up on some of the very under priced Maelstrom Crystals, or any of the other enchanting materials that you are low on stock. Just know that the price of the Maelstroms is going to crash in the next few days while anyone and everyone that has an Enchanter is going to be DEing their old gear and trying to sell the Maelstroms on the AH. The reason for stockpiling on these materials is simple, you will want to keep the Cata market covered for twinks that are always there, but the down side is that this is actually a longer term investment but a very lucrative one for that matter. Right now you will be able to pickup the Maelstroms for like dirt cheap prices of like 10-20g and after the dust settles they will be worth at around 100-140g (the vendor price for the ones that know how)

   So i leave you with this for now, but i will continue with new posts and more importantly posts about things that are profitable and things that will help you make a lot of gold. 

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.