February 2023

Dungeon Dive: 100 Runs of RFK (1-10)

stargrace February 28, 2023 0Comment

Way back in July 2022 I started this challenge of 100 runs of RFK – and then for some reason I stopped. The purpose was to show the estimated amount of loot from each run vs. the actual gold per hour of items sold. Things have changed a bit since then, especially since I’m using a speed geared druid instead of just a random druid. My base speed in dungeons at 61 is somewhere around 240%-260% and that’s FAST (here is a link to a druid I followed when it came to gearing). My first post of RFK has me sitting at 57m to complete 10 runs. It now takes me about 2 minutes to run the entire dungeon. Since so much time has passed I decided to start over fresh, and these are the results for the first 10 runs.

You can see that the estimated gold (using TSM region market value avg) is just over 500k – and when I put them on the auction house (I’m using a profile from BilisOnyxia that I’ve tweaked and customized) it’s just over 300k if everything were to sell on my low population server.

Next week we’ll see how much (if any) of it actually sold, and I’ll use that to generate a more accurate idea of what GPH this dungeon rewards. As it stands now, the GPH is 712g – the amount I got from raw gold during the run. It also stands to note that it only takes me 26m to run this dungeon 10x. Ideally you’d want to optimize your time since you can’t run any more dungeons for the remaining hour, but you could always do overworld farms instead to fill that time up.

Addons used:

TradeSkillMaster
LootAppraiser
Faster Loot
Dejunk
MonkeySpeed
Nova Instance Tracker
WoWThing Collector

Another thing to note is that ALL of these types of runs are going to vary server by server. I happen to be on a low population server where things sell slow. Even pricing them low won’t guarantee a sale.

WoW Gold Making

Weekly Wrap Up [Feb6-Feb13]

stargrace February 13, 2023 0Comment

This week was a pretty good week, with 1.6 million gold in profit. The numbers are skewed a bit because I was shuffling some gold around, but overall, sales were up, with a number of larger sales. My process? I spend 1h a day working on active gold making, in this case it’s logging to 20+ different servers to put items back up for sale. Most of those items are pets, but on a handful of servers it also includes transmog and mounts. I don’t bother doing cancel scans or getting into AH pvp with anyone – I have tried in the past, and it’s just bad for my mental health.

I leave everything up for a 24h period, and rinse and repeat. If I can’t re-post, I’ll leave the items until the next day. In most cases it tends to work pretty well. If I need a break, I’ll post for 48h. Being on multiple servers means I can get smaller sales here and there and it simply adds up over time. Once I reach 100k on any realm, I tend to shuffle the gold back to my main servers. This can be through the AH, or through buying tokens, or maybe moving a character to shuffle goods around. It really depends on what I need at the time.

I did have a few other sales in there, the steelbound harness is crafted by a blacksmith, the ‘ol smoky recipe is engineering. Most of the sales continue to be pets since that’s the largest market that I’m in these days.

I’ve said this before but I think it should be repeated – the amount of effort you put into gold making is going to be directly related to the amount of gold you can potentially earn. I am content with my earnings considering I only spend 1h a day working on it. It leaves me with a lot of time to do other things, and some days especially during an MS relapse (like right now) doing even the mundane like looking at the computer screen, becomes a difficult task. I know if I wanted to push my gold making I’d have to devote more time to it. Then as you learn to optimize your method, you’ll shave time off. The amount of time devoted (in my specific case) tends to ebb and flow. When I add a new server, or restock my craft items, the time spent increases. Once those things are done, I optimize my time spent, and it reduces again.

I would absolutely love to spend more time learning markets and making mistakes and honing in on the parts of gold making that I really enjoy – but alas, I do only have so many hours in a day, and so for now it is what it is.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

WoW Gold Making

Addons to Optimize Craft Orders

stargrace February 9, 2023 0Comment

With Dragonflight we were introduced to a brand new craft UI, and with it, crafting orders. The ‘end game’ to professions relies on these craft orders to obtain your skill points and in some cases, those first time craft points. Unfortunately, the base UI leaves out a lot of information, and so I’ve been using some very specific addons to enhance the experience and I want to share them with everyone. First up – Journalator.

Journalator is an optional addon that relies on auctionator, and it comes with a whole slew of features for recording what your character is doing in game when it comes to gold – but what I’ve been using it for is tracking those pesky craft orders. Not only can you see who sent what, but it also records the materials used. Are you uncertain if the customer provided the mettle? You can mouse over the crafted item and it will tell you.

If you’ve placed an order it will also track that and who you placed the order with – you no longer have to remember the name of your favourite crafter. Maybe you want to order something else from them in the future, or get a recraft. I would be lost without this addon.

Next up – CraftSim. This addon calculates stat weights & average profit, as well as helps find the most profitable profession gear, and can simulate any knowledge point distribution. If you want to know what materials to use, how close you are to procing up the next rank, how much inspiration you have, or any of the other little tiny numbers that the basic UI likes to hide – this addon is for you.

TooManyAddons – this addon doesn’t help me make gold directly, but it does help cut down some time. You can create addon profiles and swap between them with the click of a button. I have one set for raiding / dungeons, another set for gold making, and even one set up for taking pretty screenshots.

Those are the main ones I’m using to help me out with my professions these days. I’m sure there are many more out there, but these are the ones that have helped me the most.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself!

WoW Gold Making

[Unpopular Opinion] Gold Making is Better on Low Pop Realms

stargrace February 1, 2023 0Comment

I fully admit that this title is a pretty open interpretation of the events. I have played on low population servers almost exclusively for years now and I’ve come to love and hate them. Almost all of my gold making prior to Dragonflight was done on these servers, and I was able to made gold cap without too much issue. Things sell – slowly. They sell for (usually) higher than the higher population servers because there are less people selling there. It also means there’s less buyers.

I am comfortable with that low rate of sale because I diversify my markets. Before the regionwide auction house I knew there were limited raiders, so alchemy was probably not going to be the profession for me. Now with regionwide everyone is fighting about undercuts but there’s profit to be made for a player like me, where as in the past, there was not.

At the start of Dragonflight I went looking for greener pastures. I had never attempted M+ before, and I wanted a chance to raid. I wanted to experience more than just gold making. I have multiple sclerosis so finding people who understand my physical limitations can be a daunting task. My guild on the low population servers is quite small, which is not bad but it did make things like raids more difficult to obtain. There’s also no one advertising boosts or sales on my low pop server. Anyway, I moved to a high pop server and things were really awesome as far as seeing folks around in the world and interactions with others.

The server was less awesome when it came to gold making – except for craft orders. Craft orders were my saving grace. I picked up a cheap copy of the lariat neck, the hourglass, and titanic rings, and I was set. My JC reached 100 without buying a single component. The thing is I didn’t know what the market was like on a high population realm. I would have to learn the market over again from scratch.

After a month on the server, I missed the comfort of my low population gold making. I got into a few undercut wars with people and that is a fight that I absolutely could NOT win, both physically and mentally. I didn’t know what people on this new server wanted. I was frustrated.

Plus, I missed my friends. They’re in a different time zone from me but I missed occasionally seeing a friendly face around. I don’t make friends easily, and while I thought moving to a more populated server was the answer – it turns out, I was wrong.

It also turns out that there are some really amazing and awesome communities out there who do cross realm M+ and raiding and everything else you can think of. People who are known for being patient, and for teaching others. I joined WoW Made Easy, and I joined Dungeon Dojo. Both communities are on discord, and while I haven’t actually participated in any events yet, there are options out there if you’re on a smaller server like I am, or you don’t really have a place with ‘your people’ to raid with.

I believe gold can be made on absolutely any server if you put in the time to learn the markets. Low population, high population, all of it comes down to a personal preference. If you have the time and the willpower to play the auction house pvp game and battle it out, a higher population will grant you faster sales and an instant gratification that a low population can never hope to achieve – but if you’re like me, maybe those servers are just not the place you want to be. There’s no ‘wrong’ server to make gold on. You just have to find what works for you.

Dungeon Dive: 100 Runs of RFK (1-10)

Weekly Wrap Up [Feb6-Feb13]

Addons to Optimize Craft Orders

[Unpopular Opinion] Gold Making is Better on Low Pop Realms

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