GoldMaking

Weekly Review [Apr14-Apr20]

This was certainly a week for transmog sales! Some unusual ones at that. I sold a Flaming Quartz Staff for almost 800k (there were some for sale on other servers at 50k) which was the largest single sale. One Blackrock Bulwark, a Warchief kilt, and some Emberfire Shoulders. Down at the bottom of the list was a few pets, but nothing to really write home about. I managed to sort through all of my inventory (minus recipes, I still need to distribute recipes to my AH characters), and S4 is quite literally just around the corner which will hopefully bring about a lot of excitement. I’m almost close to finishing off the Plunderstorm renown (at the time of this post I’m level 35, which means I only have 5 more to go) and I should be able to complete that with time to spare (I believe the event ends on April 30th). I did manage to reach my goal of collecting all of the battle pets, that was the main reason I was working on Plunderstorm at all.

In preparation for S4 I am doing – nothing. I don’t deal in commodity, so I’m not stocking up the shelves or anything of the sort. I don’t have it in me to partake in the AH PVP that goes on when everything goes live – I probably WILL partake in crafting though and I’ll stick my main crafters in the city so they can complete craft orders. I also hope to pick up the new recipes (PVP, mostly) and get a head start on that stuff. Materials are constantly cheap so I’m not buying anything ahead of time. That could change if I see a sudden spike, but I’m not expecting it.

I will be playing my demon hunter for S4 (I played her for S1 and S3, but played my evoker for S2 which I sort of regret). I know everyone is very excited about The War Within alpha / beta stuff but I’m trying to avoid spoilers (it doesn’t always work, but I’m making an effort at least). Anything you’re particularly excited about? Let me know in comments, and as always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself!

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar10-Mar16]

Another week, more sales. I was seeing things in the normal range once again, and it looks like the TSM ledger site has fixed itself too after the hiccup that came with leap year.

Sales this week came mainly in the form of recipes, a handful of pets, and some NLA transmog (we’re talking shirts). I also decided to change up how I had been posting my auctions, just to see if it made any difference. I have about 5,000 items in stock, across 28 servers. It takes me approximately 2 hours to post everything, using two accounts posting. I normally do it first thing in the morning in between doing my RL chores (getting the minions some breakfast, etc) and I normally just post everything for 24h and check once a day, never doing cancel scans. Sometimes RL gets in the way, or I have other obligations, or I simply don’t feel like spending 2h posting auctions so I’ve been trying to think of ways to split things up a bit and ease the time it takes me to post. I’ve been doing this daily since December 2022, with very few breaks between. It has been fantastic for making gold but let’s face it, sometimes we all need a bit of a change.

10.2.6 releases tomorrow – I’m not overly excited, but I think it’s because we really know very little about the event that has been hyped up above and beyond what we’ve seen in the past. I’m excited for TWW, but that’s because I know what we’re getting into. I’m even excited about Season 4 (though I’m feeling pretty cautious about the season changes they’re making). 10.2.6 is a beast of a different nature though, Blizzard having decided to go with no testing (this worries me) and no data leaks. We’ll just have to see what it brings for the gold making community, if anything.

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

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar3-Mar9]

The TSM ledger is acting a bit oddly ever since leap year happened, so this post is a bit late while I manipulated the display. In any case, the past week was pretty much on par for what I would typically earn in a week – but sales were WAY lower than usual (the number of sales). A lot of high ticket items sold, and I didn’t even break 300 – normally that number is around 1,000.

This week was another winner for transmog, I imagine the collectors are in full force until we get that 10.2.6 patch and some new content. I know the Hearthstone 10th anniversary event is running right now, but I’ve been staying away while the bugs are fixed on NA retail.

I did also have a few pet sales, but these were all under 150,000g in value, my biggest sale for the week was the “Domed Buckler” which went for over a million gold! It’s great when those sporadic transmog items sell. I didn’t see many crafted transmog sales, but I had a handful of lower value ones, and I decided to skip restocking this week. Instead I did some comp stomp across all of my characters and I worked on collecting knowledge on a few slacker crafters that I had. Plus of course I partook in my very first RP event over on Moonguard, which was a LOT of fun. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Turning Good Habits into Gold

This year marks the 6th year that I’ve had a solid focus on making gold in World of Warcraft. I’ve gone from cautiously working towards my Brutosaur mount (which I did get in time) to now having over 100,000,000 gold strewn across various characters and servers. If there was only one piece of advice I could give to people who are interested in making gold, it would be the following:

Make good habits.

This covers a broad range of ‘things’ that you would ideally ‘do’ – but that’s what it comes down to. I would focus on things you actually enjoy doing in game, and then turning those things into habits that you can profit from. Here are a few examples:

  • I have 24 characters set up at the moment to do tables in SL. These are characters who don’t do anything else, there’s no travel time, they’re just parked at the tables. If I need anima, I use my main and then ship it to whatever alt needs it. I do have 50 level 70 characters, so I could expand this much further if I wanted, but 24 is a nice neat number (it’s two servers worth, minus Dracthyr). I’ve had this going for two years now, and I earn a LOT of pet charms.
  • I do everything crafting related on 8 characters. You could use 4, but I have both horde / alliance crafters (4 on a high population server, and 4 on a low population server). When they were working on knowledge, I’d focus on one character each day, and do all of their crafting quests. I would also do the weekly world quest on them, and now I do superbloom. That means I now have 8 characters with max DF factions just by slowly completing things over time. I didn’t grind, which meant I didn’t burn out. I complete a LOT of crafting orders on my high population server (which is where I spend most of my time), and I don’t fuss too hard about the alliance team (they’re mostly there to collect alliance specific recipes). I restock crafted goods once a week, using SimCraft & TSM.
  • I do all of the pet battle quests on 4 characters once a week. This isn’t ideal, but I love pet battles, and that means I’m slowly chipping away at achievements, family familiar, and other goals. I only do this one day a week so that I don’t get completely burnt out. I’m still making progress.
  • I do all of my dungeon / raid runs on one day a week, with however many characters I’m feeling at the time. I usually multibox these, and I just take a day to knock it out. Over time, the items I earn (gold, recipes, pets, etc) add up, and while it doesn’t LOOK like a lot, initially, over time it builds.
  • If there’s a legion trainer up I’ll typically spend one day a week grinding out alts / leveling pets. I have hundreds of pets at any given time to work towards 25. I’ve gotten every single one of my alts to 70 with this method. It’s NOT ideal, but because I’m so consistent with it (I LOVE pet battles) I’ve got a nice army of characters now.
  • I don’t bother with things I don’t enjoy. I do not like to gather and harvest, so I don’t do it. The only time I’ve done it in the last 5 years was to get some achievements for professions, and I still don’t have legion mining finished yet, that’s how much I hate gathering. Doing things I do not enjoy is a sure way for me to avoid the game and NOT make any gold.

Find what you like to do in game, make it into a habit, and grow your gold from it. Figuring out what you enjoy doing is going to be the hardest part. If sticking with it is difficult then you may need to reassess. That doesn’t mean you can’t take breaks! I take them all of the time, especially during lulls in content – but I always find my way back.

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

Deep Dive: How Much GPH are DF World Quests

World quests seem to be mostly overlooked this expansion, but I personally felt they can reward people nicely if you’re just starting out and need some guaranteed gold as capitol. I wanted to find out approximately how much gph the DF world quests rewarded, so this is how I went about it. Ideally, you would have at least 5-8 level 70 characters to do this with (you could do all 4 characters in one day, or spread them out so it was one character each day).

I started with a level 70 retribution paladin, with an ilevel of 445 which is pretty low for this season. I’m using a few addons, including Zygor, which will let you create a list of world quests by queuing them, and then give you directions on how to get to each one quickly and optimally. World Quest Tracker is another nice one. I’m also using LootAppraiser to track the time & any loot I pick up (LA requires TSM to function) and I’m using FasterLoot (does what it says). I’m sure there are other ways to optimize this method of making gold, such as wearing speed gear, using food/potions, etc. I decided to keep it pretty simple. The second character I did this on is my main, a 70 DH with 487 ilevel and all of the travel portals unlocked.

Keep in mind world quests are now on a bi-weekly schedule. For NA they re-set on Tuesday and Friday. This GPH is for the Friday set this week (March 4). I decided to skip the pet stuff and save it for another time even though getting pet charms IS a nice way to make gold. For this experiment I’m focusing on raw gold only. I’m also including the dragon riding races, as they give pouches with gold.

It took me 27m to run through the gold / race quests – but I also realized this character doesn’t have the DF portal system unlocked, so a lot of time was spent traveling. You can absolutely cut down time by unlocking the travel system. In that time, I earned 7,065g (one of the races I did was in the dreamsurge zone, and it didn’t reward coin but instead rewarded currency, so that one was a bit of a time waster). I also ended up looting a shield that sells for a bit of gold, and some vendor trash. The 70 DH managed to complete these in 20 minutes, but for the purpose of this post I’m just rounding it up to 30m.

For a lot of people, 7k in 30 minutes might not be worth it – and that’s OK. If you’re just starting out in your gold making adventures, it might be a nice way to get your nest egg started, especially if you have multiple level 70s to do this on. If you spent one hour a day doing these world quests, that would equate to roughly 98,910g a week – and it could potentially be more if you optimized your routes or got easier quests (I had a lot of annoying quests, like the fishing one where you have to haul fish up on to the land from lava). The more characters you have, the better. It’s absolutely more than enough to afford a token a month – so long as you have multiple level 70 characters (you need at least 5 characters). If you only have one, this is not the method for you, as these quests only reset twice a week.