Gaming

Addons to Optimize Craft Orders

stargrace February 9, 2023 No Comments

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 No Comments

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.

WoW Gold Making

Weekly Wrap Up [Jan23-Jan30]

stargrace January 30, 2023 No Comments

I know, I am behind with the post! It has been a particularly busy week between real life and game stuff, but here’s my weekly wrap up!

I finally broke 1 million in sales again which was a very nice feeling. Keep in mind that TSM is not displaying my craft order gold, which is where most of my income is coming these days. As far as selling on the auction house goes, I’ve been sticking to pets.

For some reason the TSM ledger is duplicating my sales when I select a specific group (in this case, pets) so you’ll have to reduce everything in that screenshot by 1/2. I’ve reported the issue but I haven’t heard back yet. Pet sales have been steady – nothing through the roof, but enough to have a very steady income.

I am planning a post this week explaining what I’ve been doing as far as crafting goes, I only have 100 in two professions (three if you count cooking) and crafting in Dragonflight is of course MUCH different than any other expansion we’ve seen so far. Some people love it and embrace the complexity, others are not a fan. I’m somewhere between the two thoughts.

I have been selling some transmog since 10.0.5 went live, but not a huge amount, which makes sense because I didn’t exactly stock up. I picked up a few items (blood elf bandit masks), but they’re on my low pop server – oh, and speaking of that. I actually moved BACK to my low pop server. I’ll write more about that this week too.

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

WoW Gold Making

Weekly Wrap Up [Jan16-Jan23]

stargrace January 23, 2023 No Comments

My gold making has been looking pretty sparse lately, with nothing but pets filling the sales queue, but it has given me a lot of time to work on my characters and enjoy the game for a while, which I’m glad of.

This week I saw 659k profit, 719k in sales, and spent 60k (mostly on leveling up some professions and crafting a few spark items for alts). I know there’s a LOT of gold making potential coming up tomorrow (Tuesday) with the 10.0.5 patch, and I’m INCREDIBLY excited – but I’ve also prepared zilch. Zero. Nada.

Some sure hits? The legendary base items (mail and plate) from Shadowlands – this will grant you mythic transmog. More hits? Grey/white items will be items you can (finally) transmog, and people are going to be on the hunt for them. I meant to run through a bunch of dungeons and pick some up, but life got away from me (again). I hope everyone else out there is preparing better than I have!

Taking a look at sales – pets. Pets continue to dominate my sales. Since that’s what I’ve been spending most of my focus towards, it’s no real surprise. Crafting orders are also still dominating the charts.

I imagine the amount of gold I make from public orders will change once we’re limited from 20 to 4 – I’m not a fan of this change, I don’t think it will do what Blizzard expects it to do. I wish professions were made more evenly, I don’t see a reason to ask someone else to craft things for me in a lot of professions. I think that’s why there’s a lack of public orders. JC/Insc/Eng have all treated me very well. The others, not so much. I haven’t had an MS relapse in a little while, so I’m always on the lookout for that, if it happens I’ll most likely be going back to fishing (I’m not even sure how much profit fishing is giving these days, I’ve had such a good run with no relapses I haven’t had to do any fishing for a few weeks!)

I’m trying to get my paladin caught up with all the things out there, and then I can focus a bit more on making gold. In the meantime, at least there will always be pet sales.

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

WoW Gold Making

An Experiment in Kindness

stargrace January 18, 2023 No Comments

It bothers me a little bit that we get a weekly quest to complete public orders – some professions have significantly more ‘value’ when it comes to these orders, and for other professions, there’s rarely anything you would ever need. In a lot of cases, players end up sending these craft orders to their alts, and fulfill them that way. I think that’s a poor way to complete a quest – and on some servers I don’t even have any alts. So, I decided to ask on my realm for some help.

I asked in general (since that would target people in valdrakken) for someone to help me out by providing 3 blacksmithing orders. I would compensate for the cost, and provide the materials.

Within less than a minute, I had some personal orders – it had worked! Thanks to the kindness of strangers, my character was able to complete her quest. I even got a little roleplay out of it.

In the main screenshot to this post you can see where 1 person posted 40+ statue orders for the public to complete. They came with a note asking for the orders to be left unless you needed to complete your weekly.

I thought this was a really unique way to give back to the community, but on the same hand, I feel it’s not exactly the way that Blizzard had intended this quest to go. Three of my professions have no issues with this quest – Engineer, JC, and Inscription. The rest, I rarely ever see a public order for, and when I do, everyone else is fighting for them. It’s an important quest, if you miss out, you might feel as though you’re behind. Having alts request the craft order is one method of getting it knocked out of your journal, but it sure doesn’t hurt to be a little creative.

As always, happy gaming! No matter where you find you

Addons to Optimize Craft Orders

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

Weekly Wrap Up [Jan23-Jan30]

Weekly Wrap Up [Jan16-Jan23]

An Experiment in Kindness

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