Hitting 80

Yes, I've finally hit 80 on my death knight and started to gear her up, and I'm already having good enough gear for most heroics (except for maybe ToC and some of the harder ones). I haven't focused a lot at making gold for the past few weeks which in combination with buying some enchants and such has brought my total gold down to about 22k. With the patch coming out tomorrow (today for you readers) I've decided to get back in business. I got a lot of stuff stocked up for the patch for example a lot of infinite dusts and heavy borean leathers and also a bunch of snowfalls and eternal lives that I will make into cards once I see how the patch affects the prices, but as I've said before, I'm not worried.

On the other hand I have completly forgot to stock up on glyphs and as I have a test tomorrow I don't have time to recraft them today. So the first thing I'll do tomorrow is to refill my glyph stock to make sure I get as much money as possible out of the patch.

Right now I got about 1500 infinite dust bought for around 2g each, and if I get the price rise to 3-4 or even 5g as I want I can get anywhere from 4500 to 7500 gold for them. With the increased demand for saronite there will most likely be less dust on the market, and combined with the regular demand increase of enchanting mats that comes with every patch I am confident I'll get, at the very least, my money back.

I also got about 1000g of heavy borean leather that I trust will go up once you can buy arctic fur with them. I've also done pretty much none work in the gem market so I still got a lot of raw gems left that I can cut and sell for a good price.

As I have now hit the (level)cap and school is calming down for the holidays I will try to be more active with my posting and goldmaking. I am quite interested in trying out the pure goblin way of glyph selling instead of my weird mutated alternative after Kevmar said he had a lot of sucess with it. Right now I'm trying to find a way to make KTQ use the market value instead of the lowest buyout of the last scan, but as I know nothing about lua it's not going well. With some luck it shouldn't take too long to fix it but if anyone with some knowledge of lua could take a look at it I would be very grateful.

That's what I've been doing the last few weeks and hopefully I'll be able to speed it up a bit in the next few days.

Gearing up a tank for less than 2000

Not a gold related post today instead I'm focusing on tanking.

I have planned to start tanking on my death knight once she hits 80 (or earlier) and therefor I need to find a good tanking set to start out with, and as I am of the oppinion that everything can be bought for money I decided to focus only on stuff that can be bought before even setting a foot in an instance. So here's what I have so far, you may notice that the legs and boots aren't buyable but drops in ToC normal. I took them as they were the best stuff I could find that is easily avaible. Bear in mind I will use Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle that gives 25 defense skill, which will put me at 1 defense rating below the cap.

I also haven't got that much expertise but I think I will be able to manage with what I have, I think it is around 26-30 expertise (I get really confused by all those ratings) so it's enough to beat the dodge cap, but still not enough for parry (which is at 56 if I got it right). I also lack some hit (got like 10 hit rating with that set) which I plan to find a way to get, maybe through enchants.

Even if this set is far from perfect it should give me a pretty good view on how much it will cost me but as I am using wowhead to see the prices right now it may vary in-game.
I wont bother writing all the names as you can see them yourself by looking at the comparision.
The gear itself will cost a little less than 1800, that's pretty low as I will most likely get the JC epics cheaper as I can make them myself. The epic gems (which I may replace with rare gems instead as I probably wont keep my gear for very long) will together cost 375g + about 300g for the dragon's eyes required for the JC only gems.

That puts the total cost at 2500, or 1850 (I don't know how I got to that conclusion as I said earlier that the gear costs 1800 but I don't have time to check everything up once again) if I use rare gems, which I most likely will do. I consider this to be the maximum price I will pay as it will be pretty easy to get the stuff cheaper than that during a longer period of time (leveling from 70 to 80) by buying underpriced stuff or having them crafted with my mats. That is not counting enchants as I haven't decided what to get yet. The prices may not be exact due to the now ridicolous prices of titanium, but I'll take care of that later.

I'd love if someone good at tanking could give me some advice on either my gear, gems or enchants or just tanking in general.

Leveling

Today I spent most of my time leveling, and as I am now level 68 I just hit Northrend and took my first steps there (unless you count leveling my main and doing the JC dailies). I hit level 69 and got a bit on my way to 70, where I will get my epic flying mount for 5000g *cries*.

Except for my upcoming depression due to losing 5000 gold I have been doing pretty good today. Not a big increase in gold which I have about 17 000 of, but instead I got myself a bunch of herbs ranging from between 15 to 18 gold. Due to a few reasons I will not tell you the exact amount but I will be well prepared for a short term price increase.

I am also trying to find a way to get my jewelcrafting more profitable as it's currently just sucking the gold out of my pockets as my gems never sell.

That's it for today.

Spending Day!

As the title says, I have spent a lot of gold today. About 2.5k I think (got some income that makes it hard to be completly sure) on various stuff putting me back to about 16.5k gold. But how did I manage to spend all this gold? Well, I did 3 things:
1. I got my death knight a new haircut and leveled her to 68 and bought a cold weather flying book.
2. Bought a bunch of cheap herbs.
3. Bought a third guild bank tab to store all the herbs.

By combining these three I lost a whole lot of gold, but I see all of them as investments so I haven't really lost anything.

It's late so I won't write anything more today.

Back to leveling...

I have said in a previous post that I do not like leveling, and I prefer the end-game. However, sometimes we're forced doing things we don't like, like leveling an alt.

I did it a while ago on Ferni to get her enchanting and JC up, unfortunantly it appears level 65 isn't enough. Sure, it allows me to skill them up to 450 but that's not enough in the case of JC.

As any jewelcrafter I will have to do the dailies to get the good cuts, the problem is that these quests takes you out in Northrend to kill mobs that are at least level 70. I don't know if you've tried to kill a mob 5 levels higher than you but it's hard, even as a death knight.
First you have the fact that they have more health than you, additionally they have crushing blows and you'll miss, a lot.

That's why I have decided to level Ferni to at least 68 to be able to kill a mob in less than 5 minutes. The first thing I did was to buy a flying mount, setting me back about 600g. I am not logged on right now so I am not completly sure but I belive I currently have 6500g after the mount purchase meaning I made quite some money today, mainly through gems and enchants, glyphs are still not selling well (see the picture, click to magnify it).

The titanium prices are finally dropping and I had the chance to buy a few stacks for 250g today, but I didn't think it was worth it. On AH they were on for 300g so within a few days the prices should be down. I have still not decided on what to do about the glyph situation, I can either wait it out or do something about it, today I made a list of all glyphs even remotely worth selling in skillet in case I would decide to do some price dumping of my own.

I put about 5 to 10 in it, but the issue is, of course, inks. It appears as that there's some kind of bug in skillet making me unable to see the amount of inks I need (it showed x pigments and y inks in the shopping list, in some cases the inks were exactly half as many as the pigments and in others they weren't), but it appears as that this would require between 600 and 1300 inks of the sea. 1300 would cost me about 3000g if I made them myself but if I sold all snowfall ink I would get it for only 400g (if every snowfall ink sold for 13g).

I would propably be able to sell them eventually but I am not willing to risk half my pile of gold at something like this. I might do once I get an answer from a guy I mailed today asking if he would want to have a steady supply of snowfall inks (he bought all 8 I had on AH). He is propably just doing as a one time thing to get himself a nobles deck but it's worth a try.

Math Class

Once upon a time... No, that's not how I'm going to start this post. Instead we'll take a look at the glyph market. The first thing I noticed when I logged on and posted my glyphs was the lack of other posters. It appears as that the price dumper(s) plan have worked, I only saw 2-3 posters at each glyph and no competition at all on some. Unfortunantly I only got 225g from glyph sales during the weekend, but I suspect the prices will rise soon.

I also made about 450g from enchanting/JC, it has started to become a gold mine.

On top of that I decided to do some calculations on the how effective making your own inks is compared to buying it of the AH. The price for one ink on the AH is 2.5g. It takes about 6 seconds to make an ink (2 for milling and 2 for making the ink, I added 2 seconds to make up for lag and human error). One hour is 3600 seconds thus I can make 600 inks/hour. The price for one ink if I make it from a stack of adder's tongue bought for 15g is 0.33g (15-13 = 2, 2/6 = 0.33) if the snowfall ink sells for 13g, the higher it sells for the cheaper my inks are. The money saved by making my own inks is 2.5 - 0.33 = 2.17. So if 6 seconds of my time are worth 2.17g or more I should buy the inks of the AH, otherwise I should make them. In one hour I make 600 inks so 2.17g * 600 = 1302g. That means that when I hit the point I make 1302g per hour I should start buying them of the AH. However, as I did my calculations with 6 seconds instead of 4 this is not correct.

If each ink took 4 seconds to make that would mean I made 900 inks/hour putting the gold/hour cap at 1953gold/hour. But as this is the case in a perfect world and not likely to happen we can say that the cap is propably between 1500 and 1900g per hour.

Now, if you are still awake, I will tell you that the titanium prices are still high, about 18g per ore, but they are showing some signs of decreasing in price and they will propably be down to reasonable prices sometime during next week.

To finish the post I'm just going to write how much money I got at the moment. Smacky got about 3400 and Belsebub got 900 putting them at 4300g while Ferni got 1900g. In total I got 6300g (I know it doesn't add up, I got a few old alts with a few g on my server and the addon I use to see how much gold I have adds them all together), and I am once again starting to make profit from my AH work.

That's all for today

Organization is the key!

One of the most important parts of sucess is organization. It doesn't matter if you play football, work in the army or sit at your computer trying to make gold from the AH, you will always need organization. I must admit I've been lacking it during the weeks I have been writing this, something I plan to change.

The most important change I will make is to separate my alt's economy making it easier to see where I loose money and what I need to work more or less on. I will also try the new Excel addon to see if it will be able to give me a good overlook of my glyph sales.

So here you go, a complete list of all my (active) alts with their current uses and gold and with some luck none of the other scribes of my server will use this open window into my mind to counter my actions.

First we have Belsebub! No applauds? Oh well, he's my main, 450 inscription, 450 engineering used mainly for having fun or get stuff that are to hard for my other chars to obtain. Sitting at 650g at the moment.

Smacky (I know, crappy name) the glyph poster and inoficial trade channel alt (mainly because he's usually my richest alt). Got 2700g.

As I said I will try to keep my diferent characters separated, however, as Belsebub has no real income as Smacky does all the posting I will add their gold together. This puts them at 3350 gold.

Ferni (my brother made it because he wanted to try death knights and I decided to steal it for my professions, no comment on the name), works with gems and enchanting scrolls/mats. She's got 760g right now, something I hope to increase with all the scrolls I made to level her enchanting to 405.

That means I am now sitting at a total of 4184 gold, a lot less than yesterday. This is mainly because I bought some eternal earth and greater eternal essences for my enchanting leveling but also due to the current glyph situation. So while it may look bad I have some hope that I will be able to make a lot of gold soon™.

That's it for today, the glyphs are still low and I still haven't gotten a response from the guy I mailed so I will have to assume the price dumping is intentional. I have raised my threshold to 14g making sure I get some income from glyphs without throwing them away for 3-4g each.

Diving Into Gems

Today I leveled up the last 20 points of JC on my death knight and started prospecting titanium. Now lets do some math!

The chance to get each specific epic gem from a prospect is 4%. There are 6 diferent epic gems making the chance to get one 24% per prospect. 24 * 4 (the amount of prospects per stack of titanium) = 96% chance to get an epic gem per stack. I had about 8 stacks stocked up and later I bought 1 more to get 2 more titanium powders, this should've given me 9 gems (well, 8.64 but well round it up to 9). Instead I was lucky enough to get 13 (may have been 14, not completly sure about that). The point is, I got really lucky.



Additionally I also got 22 titanium powders. Compared to the 23.4 I would have gotten in a perfect world I made a small loss but the gems I got made up for it. And of course I also got a whole lot of green and blue gems.



I also did my second daily JC quest and handed in 20 titanium powders and bought the recipe for Defender's Dreadstone. Some people would propably have considered it to be better to buy maybe a red or blue cut but I decided that as there was a low supply of these (only two other sellers on the AH) and it sold for a lot (500g) it was my best choice.



I also got a lot of cut gems sold so I made a nice profit during night. On the other hand those last 20 skill points were expensive (25-50g per skyflare diamond hurts), but I should be able to get most back on the cuts.

I ended up with 5100g, a loss compared to yesterday but nothing too big. I also need to refill my stock of glyphs, after doing that I should get some more profit from them. That's pretty much all I have to say say today.

Patch day

Patch day, the greatest day for every moneymaker in WoW. The day where morons throw all their money away on gems, enchants, gear or just shopping for fun. Nothing beats patching day. And I missed it... As you can see in previous posts I was away for a week beliving the patch wouldn't be released. Unfortunantly I was wrong I just finished the download while writing this.



However, all is not lost of course. There are still tons of moneymaking opportunities out there waiting for me. First of all I got my titansteel investment which is now worth about 110g each, which is a nice profit as I bought them for around 80. I've also got some titanium that sell for about 14g each. Considering they sold for about 10 earlier I could sell it for profit, however, I will first check how profitable prospecting would be.



On the glyphs I made quite some money. around 400g putting me at 6200 gold. On top of that almost every glyph has skyrocketed in price to about 2-4 times the normal price. I hope to make a lot of profit of this. Later I picked up 600g from glyphs.



Two of nobles was down as well to about 400g so I bought one and I now have a complete deck to sell when the fair is back.



I have also leveled my DK to level 65 and prospected about 1700 saronite ores. I am now at about 430 JC but due to some crazy gem prices I have problems getting it higher. The days around a patch are propably not the best for leveling a profession.

All in all, a good day. I ended up with about 5700g, 100 less than I started with, but I got a lot of stuff done and I should be able to speed things up a little with JC and enchanting on my death knight.

Also, there will be no Monday posts due to real life reasons. But I should be able to post more now as I wont go anywhere and I will try to post every day.

Looking good

First a quick update on my glyph buisness. I had a pretty crappy night with about 56g gold in total. However I noticed that I had forgot to pick up a bunch of the glyphs I made yesterday from my mailbox so I had 12 diferent well selling glyphs which I hadn't put up. Now when I put them up I've made about 400g so far today not cunting the money I got yesterday with glyphs for about 60-70g pending.



Later I bought 6 books of glyph mastery for 59g each, so I am only lacking 4 now. But the greatest investment I did today was buying 800 saronite ores for 10g per stack. Yes, it's not a typo, 10g/stack. I'm aware of that it propably was a botter or chinese farmer (and bottter) but I wont say no to an offer like that, even if it is not "moralic". Of the same guy I then bought 4 stacks of titanium. I haven't been a fan of buying tons of titanium for the patch as I everyone else will do the same thing, but decided to have a small stock as my DK will propably get to 450 JC before the patch.



Before I finish I will give you a quick look at my alts and their purposes:


I have propably said I got two alts for my auctioning on top of my main. The first one, a level 7 paladin I use for glyph posting and buying those underpriced stuff you sometimes find in trade.

I also got a death knight which is currently at level 63 making her way to level 65 for getting enchanting and JC up.

All in all I'm currently sitting at 5000g with 7 nobles card stocked up. This is about 1k less than I had when I started but considering my investments in ores I feel I'm doing pretty good.