As we approach the end of the Cataclysm expansion — there are maybe four months left — playing the Auction House gets a bit trickier. There’s less enthusiasm on the part of buyers. More scary, though, is that the launch of Mists of Pandaria is about to render a lot of markets obsolete. It happened in Wrath and in The Burning Crusade too — those potions and flasks that were top of the line suddenly became worthless. Gear that once cost thousands of gold could be had for hundreds. It’s the nature of our in-game hobby. If you sit on stock, you’re going to lose a fortune. (Shamefully, it happened to me out of laziness.)

But not everything is set to crash. A few select items are going to increase in value, if not in the days leading up to MoP, then shortly after launch. These are the items you need to fill your bank tabs with. But which ones are they? What should you sell ASAP, and what should you buy?

3 markets set to crash in (or before) Mists

Some of us have a natural urge to hoard materials and crafted goods. It’s a good idea in general — short-term shortages can and do happen, and by having a reserve of the most useful materials, you can avoid short-term price spikes.

But this late in the expansion, you have to be careful. Like a game of fiscal hot potato, the prices of a large number of items are set to fall through the floor. If you’ve been stocking up on any of these three, well … the time to sell is now.

1. Queen’s Garnets were absolutely untouchable when Dragon Soul first launched. At issue was supply. You’re only guaranteed an epic gem by beating Deathwing on normal or heroic mode. Few raiders were completing the content, and those who were used the epic gems to prepare for heroic-mode raiding. An epic gem cost thousands of gold.

Fast forward to April 16, 2012. The Dragon Soul raid has been nerfed, nerfed, and nerfed yet again, allowing more casual players the opportunity to kill Deathwing on normal (and heroic) mode. More people are getting epic gem tokens. The price of red Queen’s Garnets have fallen lower than 1,000 gold on many servers.

From here, the price will only go down. The 10 extra points of your primary stat of choice mean less with each passing day, and when Mists of Pandaria launches, a whole new selection of better gems will be available. Anyone looking for a Cataclysm-era gem will just go with the cheaper Inferno Ruby.

2. Mysterious Fortune Cards are one of my favorite things to make. The demand almost always outpaces supply. They’re fun. They’re useful. They sell for a profit. What more could you ask for?

But here’s the thing — shortly before MoP launches, ink trading is going to undergo a reset. You won’t be able to trade Blackfallow Ink for lower-level inks anymore. And since that’s where a large amount of Blackfallows wind up going, people with supplies of Blackfallow are going to need to do something else with their stores. At that point, Mysterious Fortune Cards are going to be the only real outlet left.

Will MFCs stay fun? Yeah, they will, and there will likely always be a market for them. But in the short term, they’re a lousy investment. Don’t hoard them. Keep your on-hand supply low, and make them as you need to sell them.

3. Maelstrom Crystals are the backbone of the Cataclysm enchanting market. They’re used in just about every high-level enchant imaginable. And when maelstroms aren’t needed, they’re shattered to make the just-as-needed Heavenly Shards. Any enchanter worth his salt has a decent stock on hand at all times to churn out enchanting scrolls.

But of course, their usefulness is limited to the Cataclysm expansion. Enchanters will be churning out thousands of MoP enchants at a loss just to level their profession, replacing all the existing scrolls. And at the same time, all those absentminded hoarders with huge stocks of Maelstrom Crystals will be unloading them on the market. The price will crash, just asVoid Crystals crashed and just as Abyss Crystals did.

3 markets set to spike before (or after) Mists

We know that most materials will fall in price. That’s almost a given. But not everything will crash. In fact, a few markets will spike. Here’s what you should stock up on:

1. Embersilk Cloth is used for a handful of things right now in Cataclysm. It goes into the caster leg enchants. It goes into PvP starter gear. But most importantly, it goes into creating bags.

If the opening weeks and months of Cataclysm have taught us nothing, it’s that the bag market is nearly insatiable. Every character needs four at a minimum for questing and a whopping 11 to fill a bank vault, too. There will be a lot of pandas rolled in those opening days, weeks, and months, and a lot of new monks too. Simply put: There is no way us sellers will be able to overserve this market.

Because demand will outpace supply here, bag prices will spike. And if bag prices are spiking, you sure know the cost of materials will spike too. Chances are we’ll still be buying Embersilk when MoP launches at 10 gold apiece, and chances are we’ll still be able to make a profit. No reason to not stock up now while they’re relatively cheap.

Oh, and here’s a free tip: Hypnotic Dust will get really expensive, too.

2. Low-level inks are easy to obtain right now. Mill some cheap Cinderbloom, make some Blackfallow Ink, and then convert it into what you need at the ink trader. But as we’ve already discussed, that won’t last. Ink of Dreams will be the new Blackfallow. There will be weeks where there’s high demand for new glyphs but no ability to trade down to get low-level inks.

Without a question, that means low-level herbs will get more expensive. That might be a good way to play this, but it’s hard to argue with making low-level ink — it takes up way less space in the bags.

3. Vanity pets are typically expensive now, but as they say, you haven’t seen anything yet. When Mists of Pandaria introduces Pet Battles, there’s going to be increased interest in pets. Not much is known about Pet Battles right now, so it’s hard to say which pets will sell best — surely, that aspect will be well theorycrafted. But for now, just about any rare pet is worth picking up. After all, they’re not going to get any less rare.

Here’s the neat thing about vanity pets here: In MoP, all the pets currently soulbound to you will become sellable. That means if you find a rare pet, you can add him to your collection and trot him around Orgrimmar until launch. No point wasting bag space when you could be having a little bit of fun instead, right?

Looking to make more WoW gold?

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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…

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I rolled an alt a few weeks ago, I had a moment where I wanted to level a character from 1 to 85 on another realm just for the heck of it. So I picked a random realm, medium population, and rolled a worgen. Why a worgen? Well, it had been a while since I’d played through the worgen starting zone, and since I’d recently seen just about everything the Horde had to offer on the 1-to-60 front, I wanted to replay the Alliance experience again.

So I rolled a worgen — no heirlooms, no gold from outside sources, just me and the quests, like the old days of vanilla WoW. The most important part to me was that I was going to forgo buying any upgrade gear from the Auction House, instead using only what dropped from quests or instances. Call it a moment of vanilla nostalgia if you will, but that’s exactly what I had to do on my first character back in 2004, so I was going to do it again. I expected it to be tough; I expected it to take a while before I could even afford a mount at level 20.

I was so, so wrong. By the time I hit level 30, I had a little over 3k gold on my random alt, with little to no effort on my part. And I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it.

It all started with a pair of boots.

While questing in Westfall and marveling at the speed with which I was ushered through the zone, a random murloc dropped a pair of Bandit Boots. They weren’t of any use to me at the time; the stats were all wrong. However, I didn’t want to simply vendor the things — mainly because I realized what I had. These are one of the only black, leather, thigh-high boot options in the game at the moment. Heck, they’re a staple in my rogue’s transmog closet. So I decided to go place them on the Auction House, and after noting that everyone was selling them for at least 600 gold, I put them up for 350g, fully expecting to have them returned to me in 48 hours.

Two hours later, I was collecting gold from my mailbox and marveling at how quickly that had gone over. I checked the Auction House again, and all of the 600g pairs of boots were gone, too. In fact, there was just one pair there for 2g, which I quickly bought out and relisted for 350g. They sold in an hour. And this is when it occurred to me that I had hit upon a gold mine that I’d never really considered, and every ounce of useless info about armor sets and colors and what was cool and what wasn’t was now going to work for me in a way I’d never imagined possible.

I continued questing and continued collecting low-level greens and continued listing them on the Auction House, and by level 30, I had 3,000 gold under my belt — and that was after paying for that level 20 mount. So much for the difficulty of making gold! Keep in mind the gold numbers may vary from realm to realm depending on population, but here is what you want to look for if you want to turn transmogrification into a profit.

• Sell anything black. For some reason, there are an awful lot of people out there who want to dress their characters up in dark gear. Bandit Boots, gear from the Scouting set, the Ebonhold Mail set — and if you’re lucky enough to happen upon a set of Black Velvet Robes you’ve hit an inadvertent gold mine.
• Sell anything white. Conversely, there are players who are dead set on standing out, and they’ll deliberately choose all-white gear. That’s fine and also plays well into making a profit. Look for Aurora Robes, or simply keep an eye out for pieces from theAurora set. There’s also the Ghostwalker or Boneshredder set or the Alabaster Plate set.
• Chests, legs and shoulders matter more. Don’t knock the power of a good pair of black boots, but generally, you’ll see that chestpieces and legs will sell much more quickly than anything else, especially if they are aesthetically pleasing. When you’re looking at shoulder pieces, anything with a small model generally sells better than large models, with very few exceptions. This is because people don’t really want to show off the shoulder pieces. Belts? Not so much, although your basic black or white belt will usually sell pretty well, but nowhere near as high.
• Helms and cloaks aren’t important. Most people will simply forgo turning on their helm or cloak option and won’t bother using them for transmog. There are exceptions; if you find a headband like the Scaled Leather Headband or the Stonecloth Circlet, it will generally sell because it doesn’t block the model’s face. If you can make the Imperial Plate Helm, craft one and put it on the Auction House to see if it sells. There are always people out there looking for Stormwind guard helms, but it may vary from realm to realm. With cloaks, simple black or white cloaks tend to sell all right but not with the frequency of other pieces of gear.
• Less is more. This is going to sound terrible, but if you are lucky enough to pick up a plate thong from somewhere, bless you, you’ve just won the lottery. There is one basic rule of thumb for determining the aesthetic value of a piece of gear — if you put it on a female model and there isn’t much there to look at, it’s going to sell. Immediately. This isn’t to say it’s all plate thong sets, mind you; Black Mageweave Leggings and Elegant Leggings will sell just as well. Female off-the-shoulder robes like the Astralaan Robewill also sell, and two-piece robe sets will also sell quite nicely.For plate, there’s the Lofty Plate set, Glorious Plate, Vanguard Plate, Bloodfist Plate,Boulderfist Plate, Darkcrest Plate, Warlord’s Plate, Revenant Plate, Templar Plate, and the ever-popular hot pink Bloodscale Plate. For mail, sets with shorts like the Battleforge,Glimmering Mail or Blood Knight Mail do really well.

There is probably something to be said about that last point, but it all boils down to this: Players are extraordinarily vain creatures, myself firmly included. We want our characters to look pretty, and transmogrification allows us to do just that. But players are also remarkably lazy creatures, and if we can find something fashionable on the Auction House, we’ll likely choose that over hours of farming for a random drop. A lot of players have a lot of disposable income these days, when dailies and raids give us countless amounts of gold but very little to spend it on. Transmogrification is the one thing that people will absolutely spend all that gold on. Forget the mounts, forget the pets — we want to look nice!

If you’re wondering how to make all of this work for you on your main, go kill low-level mobs. If this sounds like a boring prospect, do the quests in the appropriate areas and kill mobs for those. There’s no guarantee on any of these drops, but if you’re out in the world and doing amusing quests, the drops are bonuses to the amusement factor. Don’t vendor that gear — check the AH to see if it’s a viable piece, and put it up there instead. Make those silly green items work for you. It obviously worked for people like the Mogfather, who we interviewed earlier this year; there is no reason why it can’t also put some gold in your pocket as well.

For my little alt on my random realm … Well, she’s completely set for gold. A random chance drop of a Hyacinth Macaw in Stranglethorn Vale took care of the rest of that. I don’t have to worry about paying for flying now, nor do I have to worry about repairs. I could probably buy my gear upgrades on the Auction House now if I wanted to — but I’d much rather play the game of transmogrification profit and see where it takes me. 100k by level 85? I don’t know if that will work or not, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

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!

In the game world, just as in the real world, prices of even the most basic of materials fluctuates based on your location. A hamburger in Beverly Hills costs more than a hamburger in Milwaukee. Heck, just about everything costs more in Beverly Hills — that’s just the way it goes. Your dollar is simply worth less there.

But what if we were going to move from Milwaukee to Beverly Hills? We could just brace ourselves and accept that we’re going to have to pay more for hamburgers. Or, we could load up our car with hamburgers and resell them for a profit when we arrive.

That concept is probably a bit disgusting — I wouldn’t recommend a cross-country trip with a car filled to the brim with ground meat. But when it comes to realm transfers, the idea’s right on the money. On some realms, gold is worth more. On other realms, the stuff you buy with gold is worth more. Making the most out of a server transfer (or indeed, making a realm transfer with the goal of making in-game money from it) is a skill that could make you rich overnight — literally.

Make an initial assessment

Before you file your change of address forms with the post office, you need to first do a basic assessment of your current realm’s economy and the economy of the realm you’re going to move to. This may sound difficult, but it’s really not. All you have to do is compare prices.

Make a small list of items that you frequently buy on the Auction House. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, just be sure to prioritize the expensive purchases — that is, the 100g Inferno Rubies over the 1g Cinderbloom. Try to incorporate good from a few different professions in your list to ensure variety. Once you’re done making the list, go to the The Undermine Journal or AHSpy.com and compare prices on the two realms.

For the sake of example, consider a proposed server transfer between the established realm Proudmoore (US) and Sisters of Elune (US). I found the following prices (effective March 20, 2012):

• Flask of the Draconic Mind 76g Proudmoore; 240g Sisters
• Inferno Ruby 110g Proudmoore; 228g Sisters of Elune
• Maelstrom Crystal 185g Proudmoore; 225g Sisters of Elune

Now obviously, we could go on with this list, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on after looking at just a few items. Sisters of Elune, a smaller, less established realm, has a less developed economy. And that seems to result in higher prices across the board. Sisters of Elune is the expensive realm. Its inhabitants probably won’t agree with the assessment, but it’s our Beverly Hills.

From Beverly Hills to Milwaukee …

Now, if you’re moving from Sisters of Elune (a more expensive realm) to Proudmoore (a cheaper realm), you don’t have a lot of options so far as making money goes. Instead, your main operative is avoiding taking a loss.

Since gold buys more on Proudmoore than it does on Sisters of Elune, you’re going to want to bring over as much gold as you can. Easier said than done, sure, but all I really mean here is that you want to sell off all your inventory and stored goods. Got 400 Whiptail in your bank? Sell it. That Mammoth Mining Bag filled with ore? Liquidate it.

Unfortunately, there’s a limit here — you’re only allowed to realm-transfer 50,000 gold in raw currency. If you’re looking to move more cash, you still can by filling your bags with items that show the smallest price difference between realms. Using the data we collected, it seems like you’d be taking the smallest hit by ferrying Maelstrom Crystals.

Of course, alchemists and engineers have another option. They can fill their bags with the incredibly expensive raw materials needed to craft Mechano-hogs and Vials of the Sands. There’s literally no difference in prices for vendor goods between servers. Exploit that fact.

From Milwaukee to Beverly Hills …

If you’re moving from a Proudmoore-type realm to a Sisters-of-Elune-type realm, there’s a lot of room for money to be made. After all, everything is cheap where you are now. Everything is expensive where you’re going. Your tactic is somewhat straightforward: Fill your bags with items that show the highest price discrepancy, in terms of percentage.

If you’re going to transfer large quantities of goods from one realm to the next, it’s important to keep in mind that your actions can have a massive impact on the economy you’re transferring to. This is especially true if you’re moving from a larger economy to a small one or if you’re seeking to transfer a high net-worth character.

How? Well, consider this: You’re transferring to a new realm, and because the price of Inferno Rubies are far lower on your current realm, you decide to purchase a supply. So far, so good — it’s a smart move. But what if that new realm only sees 10 or 20 Inferno Rubies change hands in any given week? What is your stock of 2,000 Inferno Rubies going to do to that market?

The answer is pretty plain and simple. Flooding the market with that much supply — more than the realm would be able to consume for the entire rest of the expansion — would destroy any semblance of price equilibrium that had been established on the new realm. If you’re going to ferry items from one realm to another, be smart about it, and ferry a mix of (non-hamburger) items.

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!

By their very nature, most achievements either directly or indirectly cost you gold or are at least associated with some extremely unpleasant trips to the Auction House. But there are always exceptions, and there’s a set of achievements in the game that will earn you a healthy nest egg if you care to go looking for them.

From my perspective, stuff like Got My Mind On My Money doesn’t count, as it’s just a reflection of how much gold you’re looting in the game and not in itself a means of earning income. I’m after the stuff from which you almost can’t help but make gold.

Concerning general achievements: Perhaps not surprisingly, you’re going to have a tough time finding a way to make money here. Most general achievements either cost you something (e.g., Into the Wild Blue Yonder) or are otherwise divorced from the game’s financial side (e.g., Friend or Fowl?). I actually can’t find a single achievement here that doesn’t meet one of those two conditions. Look elsewhere, folks. You will not be making money from the general achievements slot.

Quest achievements

Almost every quest in the game awards gold, so by definition, it’s impossible not to make money while you’re working on quest achievements. The Bread Winner and Justly Rewardedare implicit acknowledgments of this. You will definitely get the former while working on Loremaster and 3,000 Quests Completed, but I don’t know off hand if this’ll extend to the 30,000 gold required for Justly Rewarded. Because daily quest rewards count toward each, I wouldn’t depend on it.

• The Loremaster This is WoW‘s grand slam, but be prepared to work for it. For Alliance, there are now 3,428 quests between you and Loremaster; for Horde, there are 3,348. The average player doing Loremaster will probably spend anywhere between one to three months on it, depending on how many quests they did leveling up.
• 3,000 Quests Completed Assuming you’re starting from zero, you will get 3,000 Quests Completed (and thus the Seeker title) fairly late during your Loremaster grind. However, this is a little more forgiving that Loremaster, because holiday and dungeon quests also count. You know the candy buckets during Hallow’s End, the elders during the Lunar Festival, and the fires during the Midsummer Fire Festival? Those all count, so be sure to pay attention to the holidays. However, you can’t cheese Seeker with dailies — those’ll only count the first time you do them.

Back when I did the Loremaster grind on my main, she earned somewhere in the region of about 11,000 to 12,000 gold at level 80. A rogue player who leveled sequentially through each zone from scratch got around 19,000, and that was pre-Cataclysm. Don’t get me wrong — Loremaster is definitely not the way to make gold as quickly as you can, but you’ll find yourself sitting on a decent chunk of change before long.

As an aside, it is very rare for me to see a player with the Loremaster or Seeker title wipe, or otherwise cause major problems in, a group. Take from that what you will.

Exploration achievements

By contrast, exploring rewards experience (to non-level capped characters, that is) rather than gold, so you won’t find much here to enrich your bank account. However, there are two exceptions.

• Bloody Rare and Frostbitten Let’s be frank — these are terrible ways to make money efficiently. But as long as you’re working on them, it seems dumb not to acknowledge that the Outland and Northrend rare mobs will net you some extra cash. This is far more true of the Northrend mobs, who each drop an Abandoned Adventurer’s Satchelcontaining Frostweave, sometimes crystallized elements like Crystallized Air, and gold, but even the Outland mobs drop rares that can sold on the Auction House or disenchanted.

One thing, though — if the mob you’re hunting just happens to be a rare spawn that hunters are often after to tame (Loque’nahak and King Krush in Sholazar Basin seem to be the two most common, but there are certainly others), ask around in general chat before you kill it. There’s no law that says you have to do this, but slaughtering a rare spawn mob that some poor hunter’s been camping for hours kind of makes you a douchecanoe.

As an FYI, Vyragosa in the Storm Peaks shares a spawn with the Time-Lost Proto Drake, so if you kill her, the next spawn may be the valuable bronze drake. The Time-Lost is not the subject of any achievement … just endless, hollow-eyed nightmares. (Question: Why isn’t the Time-Lost Proto Drake an achievement?)

Oh, and go download NPCScan and NPCScan Overlay or SilverDragon. These are mods that will alert you whenever a rare mob is in range. Not only will they make your life so much easier while doing both achievements, but they’ll also help if you’re working on Scourer of the Eternal Sands in Uldum. The Mysterious Camel Figurines you’ll be hunting also count as rare spawns.

Player vs. player achievements

Gold that you earn from PvP achievements is usually going to be indirectly earned. However, I’m pretty sure that indirectly earned money is still considered legal tender.

• 250,000 Honorable Kills Consider this a catch-all category for all the honorable kill achievements. So how does killin’ folk make you money? It nets you honor, and honor buys stuff. In addition to PvP gear, you can buy things from each faction’s honor trade goods vendor (Edlan Halsing for the Alliance or Rogoc for the Horde), includingMaelstrom Crystals and a Satchel of Freshly-Picked Herbs. Be advised that the honor and justice trade good vendors are really just intended to give you a way to bleed off excess honor or justice points at the 4,000 cap, so the rate of exchange is (shall we say) punishing. But 250,000 honorable kills will have bought you quite a lot by the end. Curiously, it’s easier to make money with honor than conquest points, as you can’t buy anything that’s not BoP with conquest.
• Grizzled Veteran (Alliance)/Grizzled Veteran (Horde) Pretty much the same deal as the quest-related achievements above. They won’t reward as much as the average PvE quest, but they also reward honor.
• Just Another Day in Tol Barad (Alliance)/Just Another Day in Tol Barad(Horde) As above.

Dungeon and raid achievements

Dungeon achievements are another odd duck. When they give rewards other than points, they tend to be mounts or titles. While soloing older content will give you a nice chunk of change and often enchant materials or BoEs, you won’t see any achievement points from these beyond the first time you complete a dungeon/raid.

• Looking For Multitudes Dungeon running is actually pretty lucrative, assuming your groups aren’t all wipe-fests. As with Bloody Rare and Frostbitten, it’s not the most efficient way to make money (I believe that honor belongs to the jewelcrafters and scribes among us charging prices on the Auction House that would make a robber baron blush), but someone who really enjoys 5-mans will see a decent income from them. Obviously this is more true of the players who benefit from the Satchel of Exotic Mysteries, and these tend to be tanks and healers. Naturally, there’s an element of luck involved. You might keep opening these bags to find nothing but a chunk of cash and a raw Dream Emerald. Or you might keep opening them and finding cross-faction Argent Tournament pets and Hyacinth Macaws. Screw you.

Profession-related achievements

Professions themselves can make you a lot of money, but their achievements tend to be rewarded for the acts that do anything but. However, there are a few exceptions.

• A Bunch of Lunch (Alliance)/A Bunch of Lunch (Horde) As with its cousins elsewhere, quest-related cooking achievements can’t help but earn you money while you’re doing them.
• Kickin’ It Up a Notch As above.
• Our Daily Bread (Alliance)/Our Daily Bread (Horde) As above.
• 1,000 Fish Fishing can be a surprisingly lucrative profession as long as you’re going after the fish that everybody needs but doesn’t want to spend the time getting. In particular, the three types of fish required for the Seafood Magnifique recipe — theHighland Guppy, Lavascale Catfish, and Fathom Eel – tend to sell extremely well. The Catfish is particularly notable for being a fish that doesn’t have any pools available; it can only ever be caught from open water, and its drop rate is at best around 30%. Does that make it a real pain to fish up in quantity? You bet your life. And what happens to the cost of something when its supply is not as reliable as we would like? Come now, children. Surely you pay attention to the commodities market on occasion.
• Gone Fishin’ (Alliance)/Gone Fishin’ (Horde) Quests make money, ipso factoachievements concerned with quests make money, yadda yadda.
• Old Man Barlowned As above.
• Diggerest Some of the archaeology gray items vendor for as much as 200 gold, and ifyou’ve been spending month after month slaving away in Kalimdor in the forlorn and possibly futile hopes of nabbing a Crawling Claw, you will see lots of Imprint of a Kraken Tentacle and Chest of Tiny Glass Animals pop up rather than the tol’vir dig sites you so desperately want, but that’s OK because you’re getting stuff that makes you money, and I’m lying through my teeth and will never get that stupid pet, oh God someone please send help.

Reputation achievements

There are a lot of reputation grinds that will net you gold, but rather than list them all here, I’m going to cheat and go with an umbrella achievement.

• 50 Exalted Reputations Given the relative ease of farming faction rep via dungeons for home (e.g., Darnassus, Bilgewater Cartel), Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysmfactions, I would argue that reputation achievements are slightly less lucrative than they used to be. Time was when you had to quest your brains out and then (when necessary) do cloth turn-ins for home factions, or run specific dungeons for Burning Crusade rep (actually, you still have to do this). However, grinds like Brood of Nozdormu andHydraxian Waterlords will see you stomping old raids for fun and profit — a lot of profit.

World events and feats of strength

Most of the ways to make money with holidays revolve around selling things to other players and not really achievements themselves (e.g., Lovely Charm Bracelets for Love Is In the Air,Small Eggs during Winter Veil for the Gingerbread Cookie recipe, and selling wand charges to other players — you capitalist, you — for The Masquerade during Hallow’s End). It was once possible to make an absurd amount of money off the Elders of the Lunar Festival and the fires during the Midsummer Fire Festival, but Blizzard has since drastically nerfed the gold awarded for these. So there are definitely ways to make money during the WoW holidays, but in general they’re tangential to the achievement system rather than being the direct result.

Feats of strength are generally non-starters for goldmaking purposes as the vast majority of them are no longer attainable (and don’t even reward points when they are). However, you might actually make some money doing Insane in the Membrane – or at least, you used to. Freeing Knot Thimblejack in Dire Maul over and over again sometimes netted you rare leatherworking and tailoring recipes like Pattern: Hide of the Wild. However, the quest to free Knot has been removed from the game, as have all of the recipes he gave. Ouch.

Darkmoon Faire reputation is now significantly easier, as doing all the Darkmoon quests and dailies each month will net you 10,000+ rep and the gold you’ll get from the quests.

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!

With a little bit of creativity, you can actually turn the problems of a smaller realm into avenues for profit.

Before we try to craft a game plan, let’s talk for a second about the two major problems of playing on a smaller realm.

• Small realms have fewer buyers. This is perhaps the most obvious, hard-to-cope-with problem. There just aren’t enough people around to buy what you’re selling. On some items, sales are slow. On others, sales are non-existent.
• Small realms have fewer sellers. This appears to be a good thing — it obviously means less competition. But it also means that sellers of raw materials are few and far between as well. How the heck are you going to make money selling potions, for example, if you can’t get the raw materials to make them?

To be a success on a small realm, you’ll need a strategy for dealing with both these issues. Thankfully, there are some tactics that should help give you an advantage.

Focus on the top-selling stuff. On my high-traffic realm, I’ve sold a lot of esoteric stuff for damn good profit. Hundreds of thousands of gold worth of Darkmoon cards. Exotic pets.Swift Lovebird mounts. Big-ticket items that only 0.1% of the public was looking for. That works on my realm, but on a small realm, 0.1% might literally be two people.

Instead of going for the big scores, on a smaller realm, you’re much better off going for the common scores. Sell things that have the biggest potential pool of buyers — the most frequently bought and sold items. If you’ve ever dreamed of building a farming empire, a slow realm is a great place to do it.

If you’re an alchemist, focus on top sellers such as Mythical Mana Potions. If you’re a jewelcrafter, focus on Inferno Rubies. If you’re a tailor, focus on bags and leg enchants. Take a look at what’s being listed on sites like The Undermine Journal and what’s getting sold. Then when you see an opening, jump in!

Get to know your buyers. Do you know how all those small-town mom and pop stores manage to stay in business? They know their clients. They forge relationships. It’s one of the few beneficial things that you can do specifically because you’ve got a small realm.

How can you work this angle? Well, say you’re an alchemist. You’ve been listing Mythical Mana Potions pretty steadily for a few weeks, and notice that you’ve really only got three customers. Why don’t you try communicating with those buyers directly, offering to COD them a stack of potions every week? It’s a win-win: They get a discount over the usual price, paid for (in part) by the fact that you don’t have to pay AH fees. But more importantly, they get a reliable, steady source of potions at a reliable, predictable price.

And what do you get? Well, obviously, you get a reliable stream of income. But you also get a loyal customer, goodwill, and good advertising. Offer that you’ll gladly make any other potion or flask they need at a fair price. You might be surprised at the orders you’ll wind up taking.

Don’t be afraid to get the mats yourself. Normally, I recommend against farming. It’s time-consuming, and on most realms, getting mats is a simple effort of visiting the local AH or dealing with a farmer. On smaller realms, though, getting materials is a hassle. It’s a function of the few sellers in the economic equation.

What’s a business mogul to do? Well, on smaller realm, it may very well be worth your time to head out in the fields and farm up your own mats. It can be a real competitive advantage — how’s the competition going to make potions to list next to yours if there isn’t any Whiptail or Cinderbloom on the AH?

Advertise! On large realms, buyers just go and buy it on the Auction House. It’s because supply is good — if they need an Inferno Ruby, they can be fairly confident that there will be one on the Auction House. But that’s simply not the case on smaller realms. Supply of an item might be nil, or a needed item might be available but at an obscene markup.

The solution? Advertise your wares when the situation calls for it. If the Auction House lacked red gems until you showed up to list your batch of 10, tell trade chat about it. If you’ve restocked the supply of common enchants, tell trade. You may have a pool of anxious customers just waiting around to hear about it, especially if what they’re looking for is traditionally in short supply in your neck of the woods.

Understand that the service you provide is valuable! On my last two driving trips cross country, I found myself making the beautiful journey down I-70 through one of the most desolate parts of Utah. On both trips, I stopped at the same Burger King in Green River, Utah.

It wasn’t a coincidence. And it wasn’t because I like Burger King. It was because that Burger King is pretty much the only freakin’ fast food restaurant in a hundred-mile radius. And believe me, they know they’re the only Burger King in about 100 miles. A Whopper there iscrazy expensive. But I paid for it. And so did the other desperate travelers who stopped at the same restaurant.

You, fair reader, are that fair Burger King — a fast food oasis in a vast desert. You’ve got a terrible location, and because of that location, hardly any customers. But look at it from your customers’ perspective: You’re the only damn place around selling Whoppers — or really, meat sandwiches of any kind. You can charge $9.99 for a value meal. And given the fact that you have so few customers, you sorta have to charge that much.

If you’re on a smaller realm, you’re just plain working harder than those of us on larger realms. You have to deal with price fluctuations in materials, opening yourself up to more risk. You may even have to put in the time to farm materials yourself because it’s the only way to make the sale.

We won’t call it gouging, because it’s not. It’s adequate compensation for your work and the higher risk that you have to bear. A 5gold Mythical Mana Potion on a well-traveled server might be worth 15 gold in the middle of Green River, Utah. Remember, you’ll only see one-third as many customers at your little Burger King, so you need to maximize your receipts where you can.

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!

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.

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!

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:

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!

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!

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.

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