Warcraft Gold Tips

by Basil Berntsen

As you start spending more time making money, you start to realize how much time you waste. Have you ever had to mail every single item in your bag to another of your characters? It’s a lot of right-clicking. There are a bunch of tasks like this, including selling to vendors, buying from vendors, prospecting, posting for sale, and crafting.

First, know that only some things can be really automated. If there’s a cast time, for example, the best you can do with a macro is shorten multiple clicks into a single macro that can be clicked or hotkeyed. Luckily, there’s no cast time on vendor and mailbox interactions!

Vendors

The first macro I’ll share is one you can use to sell every grey item in your bag. There are addons for this; however, a macro takes no memory and doesn’t need to be updated every patch.

/run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local item=GetContainerItemLink(bag,slot) if item and item:find(“ff9d9d9d”) then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end

What this is actually doing is right-clicking on every gray item in your bag, so don’t do it in front of your bank unless you want to deposit all your grays into it.

The next vendor macro you might find useful is a hotkeyable macro for buying vendor goods. If you have TSM (or some other addon that queues crafts and gives you an auto-buy button at the vendor), this won’t be as useful. I still use it for some things, though. Sometimes you just need to buy a lot of something from a vendor.

/run BuyMerchantItem(6,20)

Those numbers indicate what you want to buy and how many of them. The first number is the slot at the merchant; 1 is the top left, 2 is the top right, 3 is just below 1, and it continues on that way. Be careful not to use the wrong index, or else you could find yourself stuck with a lot of the wrong item. The second number is how many you want to buy. Some items are sold in stacks, but this will specify a precise number (just like shift-clicking on the item).

Mail

Next, we consider the mailbox. Mailing between characters can be tedious if you have to right-click each time. While TSM can be set up to auto-mail items to alts based on groups (which is handy if you don’t list what you make on the character that makes it), it can be intimidating to set up. Also, it won’t help you if you’re looking to do a one-time mass mail. There are a few things I find myself mailing a lot, and sometimes I want to mail everything of a particular quality, and sometimes I want to do it by name.

This macro will right click everything matching the name “Elementium Ore.” Simply open your mail, type the name into it (and a subject, if you want), and then click this macro. It will put 12 items into the mail and then warn you that you can’t attach more than 12 items per mail for each item in your bag.

/run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local item=GetContainerItemLink(bag,slot) if item and item:find(“Elementium Ore”) then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end

It’s not going to work if you type “Elementium ore” because it’s case sensitive. If you want, you can just say “Ore” if you want to mail all your ore. Be careful with this type of matching, though. If you tell it to mail all your “Obsidium,” it will also match a lot of green gear you may have in your bags.

Here is a macro that will right-click based on item quality:

/run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local texture,itemCount,locked,quality=GetContainerItemInfo(bag,slot) if (quality==2) then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end

That “quality==2″ is what determines what gets clicked on. Leave it at 2 to mail greens, change it to 3 for blue quality items, and change it to 4 for epic. This macro is useful if you’re using an addon to buy items that can be disenchanted for a profit. Be careful, though, as it will click on everything in your bag that matches the quality, even if it’s soulbound. Also, if it’s bind on equip and you don’t want to bind it, you should be extra careful not to press this macro away from a mailbox. It will at least ask you before equipping it, of course.

Milling, prospecting, and disenchanting

Some things can’t be completely automated, especially things such as milling, prospecting, and disenchanting that are designed to take time. That said, the default interface for these abilities is rather clunky. Without a macro, you need to hit the ability, find the item in your bag, and click on it. It’s error prone (ever disenchanted your offset?) and clunky. With a macro, you can make one button that will only work on the items you’ve specified. For example:

/cast Disenchant
/use Stormforged Legguards

Or even:

/cast Disenchant
/use item:52306
/use item:52307
/use item:52308
/use item:52309

The first one is pretty obvious, and it will disenchant with one click (or key press) onlyStormforged Legguards. (Obviously, I wrote this one when that was still profitable.) If you craft for disenchanting, this is the way you want to disenchant.

What about jewelcrafters, though? It’s one of the best professions for crafting cheap greens. Here’s the problem: If you are making Jasper Rings, each one has its own name. They all have the same item ID, though, so you can /use an item number instead of a name.

Click anything

The last trick I’ll post here is how to click anything with a keybindable macro. Whether you want to press space bar to click “craft next,” shift-mousewheel up to click the post your next auction button, or press 1 to hit Heroic Willon Ultraxion, you can write a macro and keybind anything.

First off, you need to know the name of whatever it is you want to click. Save this macro, and keybind it to something so you have the use of your mouse:

/run local f = GetMouseFocus(); if f then DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(f:GetName()) end

Now hover your mouse over what you really want to click with your keyboard, and press that macro. It’ll give you the name of the object in the chat frame, and you can now macro a click. Here are some I have looked up and keybound:

• This one will click Heroic Will on Ultraxion, as well as Ysera’s damage mitigation from phase 2 of Madness: /click ExtraActionButton1
• This one will click the TSM post button, and TSM will even bind it to the mousewheel for you if you ask it to: /click TSMAuctioningPostButton

In short, if you can click it but want to press a key, you now have that choice.

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World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

The #1 best-selling in-game World of Warcraft leveling guides. Join over 60,000 Zygor Guides users to level your character, make tons of gold, earn achievements, titles & much more…

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Hey everyone, I’ve been away for a while and wanted to give you a quick update.

I’ve been playing Starcraft 2 along with World of Warcraft ever since the Beta of SC2 came out. It has come to a point though where I am enjoying starcraft 2 more now and will be taking a break from WoW for the time being.

However I still really enjoy creating content and videos, so if you’ve enjoyed the content on WoWConfidential and you are a fan of Starcraft 2 or just want to check out what I’m up to then come over and subscribe to the Starcraft2Collective youtube channel.

Here’s an example of my latest SC2 video created March 14th, 2012:

by Basil Berntsen

Making gold with heavy competition is hard. I get comments on my articles all the time about how my ideas don’t work on some high-population, high-competition realm. There’s an implicit (and sometimes outright stated) disclaimer that any advice you’ll find here is general and may not apply to your realm.

It’s time to talk about what to do when you’re always being redirected back to these weasel words. If your server really is so competitive that you can’t make any normal strategies work, what can you do?

How sure are you?

The first thing you need to do is determine whether you’re jumping to conclusions. If you dip your toe in the market and it becomes unprofitable overnight, with no sign of decreasing activity from your competition, they may just be flapping their arms at you. As soon as your stock stops being listed, they may just revert to the profitable status quo and expect you to not notice. Seeing a bunch of undercuts and unsold auctions doesn’t mean that there’s no money in what you’re doing; it might simply mean that you have to wait for it.

The best way to decide whether you’re looking at a hyper-competitive market rather than being shooed away from a competitive one is to check the prices on AHSpy.com or theUndermine Journal. Also, try keeping your goods continuously listed for two weeks before deciding that it’s too competitive to make money.

I’d bet that a large portion of the comments I get are from people who don’t do this and are just assuming that since it’s not immediately and obviously profitable, it’s not ever going to be. Demand in this game is constantly shifting, and you’re doing yourself a disservice by not giving a market a real try before writing it off.

No, this is for real

If you play someplace like Mal’Ganis or Earthen Ring, there will be some serious competition, and I believe you when you tell me how hard it is. I’ve heard stories of real players with a second account who will cancel and relist their inventory every 10 minutes or so, crafting constantly while playing their main in another window.

Then there are the cheaters, people who break the terms of service will eventually get banned — but until they do, they can farm for way longer than any real player. Unfortunately, these cheaters have an enormous impact on the economy, especially on high-pop servers where they’re best able to turn their illicit gold into real money. The best place to ensure that you’re fighting real players is in the crafting segment of the market.

Farming is the act of making something out of nothing but time. Spend an hour, and any character with a farming skill will have a bunch of mats needed by crafters. AFK farmers are capable of producing many times the amount of stock that would be needed to satisfy the immediate demand for the crafted goods they make. And this is all added to the stock available from the real farmers.

While you will occasionally find someone cheating in the AH, it’s rare. Anyone willing to invest the time and gold needed to get a character to at least level 75 and Cataclysm level crafting typically won’t bot for longer than it takes them to realize that Blizzard eventually catches all of them.

Gaining a foothold in a profitable market

The normal strategy for making gold is buying mats, crafting something from them, and then selling that on the AH for more than the cost of the mats. When your competition in profitable market seemingly has the ability and willingness to undercut you almost immediately almost every time you post, though, you may feel frustrated. The money is right there; you’re just not getting any of it.

The one thing that people tend to forget, though, is that it’s not just about how quickly you undercut, but also about the quantity and price. You can sometimes compete effectively with a stalker by capturing sales that they miss because they’re not willing to pay the listing fees for a lot of stock when they know they’re just going to be cancelling it in a few minutes. Ignore their undercuts, and make sure that your stock is listed during heavy demand periods.

If this isn’t enough for you, you can step it up. Hit them where it hurts: in their gold per hour. Post a large quantity of items at a much smaller margin than they’re used to. If it all sells, you’ve hopefully made up in volume what you lost in profitability per sale, and if it doesn’t sell, then you’ve forced your competitor to spend more time for less money. You don’t have to babysit your auctions, and they have to babysit theirs.

Either of you are able to make the other one not make much money, and if you’re tenacious enough, you might be able to drive the others out and catch the profits when prices rebound.

Unprofitable markets

What’s typical of a hyper-competitive market, though, is walking into the middle of something like this. If multiple stubborn competitors are playing chicken and waiting for someone to blink, the best you can do is throw your time and pressure into the mix.

If the prices are already at or below your cost, there are two possibilities. First, you might not have the same cost as your competitors. This could be as simple as having to pay more for ore. It might be more complex if you’re turning raw mats into multiple other types of mats (like through prospecting or milling). If your competitors for gems assign the whole cost of their ore into the red gems and are willing to undercut you down to vendor price on other colors, you’ll win business for cut red gems but lose business on the other colors.

Second, the competition might be working with stock that they value for less than they could sell it. This can result when they farm their own or if they purchased before a recent price raise. Either way, they’ll only be able to make profits until their cheap stock runs out, at which point they’ll have to start buying the same way everyone else does.

The best advice I can give you is to analyze what you’re paying for mats. See if there’s a way you can get a better deal to put yourself on an even footing with your competitors.

Second, if you really can’t conceivably get mats low enough to compete, it’s probably worth waiting out the stock. Unless the cost of raw farmed mats goes down before you finish, you might be able to make a bundle by buying out all the goods under cost and waiting until people stop listing them for less than it costs to make.

For example, say Ebonsteel Belt Buckles cost 110g to make (you could sell the mats for 110g on the AH), and they’re regularly selling for 90g. Instead of buying mats, buy all the buckles under 110g, and keep doing so until they stop being posted for that. Then you can list the ones you bought competitively and make a decent margin, considering you didn’t need to smelt or craft.

There’s no way to get around it: The more gold making auctioneers there are in a server, the smaller slice of pie each will get. The reality is, though, that the larger realms with the larger economies will attract more gold makers, because a small slice of a big realm might be worth more than a large slice of a small realm. Carving yourself a small piece of a big pie can be a challenge, but if you get good at it, the potential profits are enormous. The only difference between you and the competitors trying to lock you out is that they are already comfortable.

Looking to make more WoW gold?

Never again worry about having enough gold. Gold Secrets makes it easier than Ever. 100% game legal, no hacks or cheats. Totally profitable, totally portable.

20k Leveling is designed to walk you step by step through making gold in World of Warcraft with rock solid, fundamental strategies which will allow you to easily make 4000-8000 gold every day while you level.

World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

The #1 best-selling in-game World of Warcraft leveling guides. Join over 60,000 Zygor Guides users to level your character, make tons of gold, earn achievements, titles & much more…

Totally updated for the Cataclysm Expansion pack and includes a full in-game leveling guide mod! The new 1-85 horde (and 1-85 alliance) guides are fully functional step-by-step guides that will make leveling a breeze for you!
Read more… »

by Basil Berntsen

Gold making is one of those games you can play without much cooperative interaction with other players. If I hadn’t been set straight about how to raid by cooperative guildies when I started, I’d still be as bad as I was when I started, minus any progress I’d have made myself. This type of environment is a breeding ground for less-than-optimal gold making strategies, so here are five myths about gold making that continue to require banishment.

1. Mats are free if you don’t pay gold for them. It doesn’t matter whether you picked up a gem from a Satchel of Exotic Mystery, farmed a stack of herbs, procced a bonus somehow, or mugged someone. If you figure your cost on the mats for whatever you’re selling as what you actually paid for it, you’re doing it wrong. The value of crafting mats is what you could sell them for.

The problem here is that people tend to assume that what they paid for something — its cost — is what they should use to calculate what they paid to make something. This could be a perfectly fine way to do business, except that farmed, swindled, traded, or procced mats are not usually something you have significant supply of. Unless you can produce “free” mats as often as you want, you should count the profit between what you really paid and what the mats are worth as soon as you have them in your possession. Then decide whether to craft or sell based on whether the crafted items can be sold profitably.

2. The cost of mats is absolute. If you prospect a bunch of ore and get a bunch of gems, are they worth what you paid for the ore or what you could sell them for? What if you can cut them first? Red gems sell for a lot more than all the other colors. If you are trying to decide which gems to cut and sell on the Auction House, the decision of what value to assign the raws is going to play a large part in how much money you make.

Unlike the earlier example where you have a limited quantity of mats available for much less than market price, you can buy as much ore as you want, within reason. There is no right answer to this question, but it’s possible to avoid some common pitfalls.

• Unless you are literally deleting things instead of selling them, don’t assign all the value of what you’re making to one mat. Even if all you want is Blackfallow Inks or Inferno Rubies, the other gems and ink will have some value, as long as you can sell them.
• Since it takes time to turn raw herbs and ore into ink and uncut gems, don’t simply assign the value of these inks and gems as what you paid for the ore. Add a bit at this phase to represent the time cost of processing.

Remember that in order to avoid getting inundated by copious amounts of less desirable items that are produced as a byproduct of processing for what you really want, you might need to lower your value on these in order to sell more.

3. Haunting the Auction House is the best way to compete. Haunting (or camping, or stalking) is when someone stands in the AH for hours on end and as soon as a competitor undercuts them, they relist a cheaper auction, usually by very little. This practice is the lowest form of auctioneering and shouldn’t be considered the mark of a pro. People who rely on haunting are usually making less money than they would selling valor bracers and always making less money than they could by prioritizing their time better.

The determining factor in how much you sell on a given night is going to be the number of active, competitive auctions you have. Being undercut forces you to split the demand with your competitors, but unless demand isn’t strong enough to push through the competitors’ stock and make it back up to yours, you’ll make a sale.

The most effective thing you can do with half an hour between DPS queues is to break into another market. Diversify and compete with more people for more markets instead of focusing down on a single one. After posting all my blacksmithing PvP gear, I know I’m being stalked and will be immediately undercut. Instead of waiting for that to happen and relisting all my stock, I’m busy making tailoring PvP gear. Or gems, or enchants, or leatherworking enchants. At the end of night, I’ve listed five times the number of auctions, and while I’m more likely to see them expire unsold, at least I’m not spending time (and listing fees) on cancelling and relisting the same small set of goods. I’ll pull in many times the profit per hour as a camping competitor.

Instead of letting my competitor turn the game into a game of chicken, where we’re competing to see who can stare at a monitor for longer, I force them to sell for less by undercutting heavily and posting a lot of stock. We can now compete on efficiency, and whoever can make sellable goods for the least money and time will make the most profit.

4. You don’t need addons to be competitive. You do need addons to compete if you’re playing the gold making game. Unlike raiding or PvP, where the built-in tools are at least basically functional, the default in-game UI for the Auction House (and some would argue, professions) is unusable. The mobile (paid upgrade) AH has some of the issues addressed, but you can’t run a serious business there on 300 transactions per day.

5. You need very specific addons to be competitive. If you’re interested and able to learn Trade Skill Master, of course I’d recommend it. It’s hands down the best gold making addon made for the game. There’s more than one way to scale a murloc, though. Auctionator makes the AH work the way it should in the default UI (and in the mobile AH, although Auctionator doesn’t have as many bugs).

Looking to make more WoW gold?

Never again worry about having enough gold. Gold Secrets makes it easier than Ever. 100% game legal, no hacks or cheats. Totally profitable, totally portable.

20k Leveling is designed to walk you step by step through making gold in World of Warcraft with rock solid, fundamental strategies which will allow you to easily make 4000-8000 gold every day while you level.

World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

The #1 best-selling in-game World of Warcraft leveling guides. Join over 60,000 Zygor Guides users to level your character, make tons of gold, earn achievements, titles & much more…

Totally updated for the Cataclysm Expansion pack and includes a full in-game leveling guide mod! The new 1-85 horde (and 1-85 alliance) guides are fully functional step-by-step guides that will make leveling a breeze for you!
Read more… »

by Basil Berntsen

All enchanters know that Maelstrom Crystals can be expensive, especially now that more players than ever have access to pretty good epic gear through the Raid Finder. This increase in demand has touched all professions that make things that improve gear, including enchanting. I know I went from paying under 90g for a Maelstrom Crystal to paying over 250g at one point soon after the launch of patch 4.3 and the Raid Finder, and that was after stockpiling (and subsequently blowing through) more than 75 stacks. If I knew then that I could have been making them in unlimited supply at 146g each, I’d have made a lot more.

The bare minimum you need to make maelstroms is an enchanter with access to Firelandswho is at least friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal. At the entrance to the instance, Naresir Stormfury the quartermaster (edit: or his counterpart outside the instance), will sell you a couple of epic cloaks for 250g. These can be disenchanted into Maelstrom Crystals.

This is not a stupendous price unless you’re unable to get enough maelstroms to complete a batch of scrolls at a fair price from the Auction House. It’s a decent way to put a cap on your unit price, though. So how do we bring this down to 146g?

The better your reputation, the more of a discount you get. Here are the mechanics we are going to use to drive our cost down to 146g:

• Exalted reputation will get you 20% off the price. I raided casually on my main in Firelands and got to revered quite a while ago, which is 15% off. My enchanting alt, who has only ever tanked a few Firelands raids for friends, is friendly, which gets him a 5% discount. If I were a goblin with Best Deals Anywhere, I could have skipped raiding all that pesky content and gone straight to 20% off.
• Guild perk: being in a level 24 guild will get you a very nice 10% perk, Bartering. This stacks with your reputation discount by adding to the total discount. For example, a goblin in a level 24 guild would get 30% off, or 175g each.
• Even better guild perk: Bountiful Bags gives you a 20% yield boost when disenchanting epics. This is an average, but so long as you look at the long run and do more than a couple of these, it’s what you’ll get.

So assuming you’re exalted (or a goblin) in a level 24 guild, your final cost for a Maelstrom Crystal will be under 146g.

Efficiency, efficiency

If you’re going to do a run of these, you’ll want to spend as little time as possible or make as many as possible within a given amount of time. The key to this is macros. Sure, you could have the vendor screen and your bags opened and click, but you have to be looking at your screen for that. If you keybind macros to buy and disenchant, you can watch TV while doing this.

To buy a cloak, keybind this [edited]macro:

/run BuyMerchantItem(1,1)

To disenchant that cloak, keybind this macro:

/use Disenchant
/use Sleek Flamewrath Cloak

Lastly, the most efficient way to do this is find someone with a character that qualifies for the prices who is short on gold and long on time. Offer to pay them a premium on the maelstroms if they will make them for you.

Be aware that if you pick the wrong person to ask, they may simply keep all the maelstroms and sell them themselves on the Auction House. You want to find the sweet spot — a person who wants or needs money but doesn’t think that gold is worth working for, the kind of person who has two gathering skills and only ever uses them when they’re saving up for something.

Market price

The market price for Maelstrom Crystals is mainly driven by two things:

1. The number of them being generated organically through disenchant rolls in a random group, enchanters DEing old gear, etc.
2. The number of upgrades people want to enchant.

The more upgrades people get, the more scrolls they’ll buy and the more enchanting mats they’ll buy from the AH if they elect to have a friend or guildie enchant their new upgrade. This means that demand (and usually prices) tend to spike on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That said, the longer this expansion lasts, the fewer drops end up being needed and worn by people. Also, every time something isn’t needed and worn (or greeded for an off spec), it contributes to the organic supply of Maelstrom Crystals on the AH.

As you can see from the header image for this post, the market price on the majority of realms is well above the price at which you can make maelstroms yourself. This is for three reasons:

1. Most people don’t have the ability to get rock-bottom prices, as their reputation, guild level, or race might not be optimal. The Horde prices should drop faster than Alliance prices, because in addition to all the raiders at the 20% exalted discount, they also have a bunch of banker alt goblins.
2. Most people who would have the best price don’t know about this trick.
3. Assuming you can make about 500 Maelstrom Crystals an hour, you need to sell them all at 6g profit after AH fees in order to equal the gold per hour you get running heroics. I need to sell them for 30g profit each after AH fee to equal what I can make crafting for an hour.

Still, there’s plenty of room for some casual gold making here. This is the kind of work you can’t do while waiting for a queue (since you need to be in a raid group); however, it’s the kind of work you can do while chatting with friends or watching TV.

Looking to make more WoW gold?

Never again worry about having enough gold. Gold Secrets makes it easier than Ever. 100% game legal, no hacks or cheats. Totally profitable, totally portable.

20k Leveling is designed to walk you step by step through making gold in World of Warcraft with rock solid, fundamental strategies which will allow you to easily make 4000-8000 gold every day while you level.

World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

The #1 best-selling in-game World of Warcraft leveling guides. Join over 60,000 Zygor Guides users to level your character, make tons of gold, earn achievements, titles & much more…

Totally updated for the Cataclysm Expansion pack and includes a full in-game leveling guide mod! The new 1-85 horde (and 1-85 alliance) guides are fully functional step-by-step guides that will make leveling a breeze for you!
Read more… »