How I'm Making Gold in Cataclysm

This post is for the JustMyTwoCopper.org Blogging Carnival

Right now, I have three main sources of gold: cut gems, prospecting, and disenchanting. Other sources worth noting are smelting, glyphs, and daily transmutes.

Smelting for Profit

First, a quick update on my Rags to Riches project. Due to the chaos of the holidays and being snowed in at my girlfriend's place for the past three days, I haven't really had much time for blogging or WoW (hence being MIA for nearly the past week). I'll also be quite busy for New Year's, so my little R2R project is going to be put on hold until some time next week. But I will leave you all with a few random tips I discovered. The Vendor and Resell searches for Auctioneer are a lot more awesome than I gave them credit for in the past. With the low threshold of 5s profit for Vendor, I managed to turn ~20s into ~3g reasonably quickly. Putting a low cap for Resell, limiting it to bids, and sorting by lowest bid managed to get me some good mats for absurdly cheap. For whatever reason, people will post with a buyout of multiple gold, but a bid of only a few copper. Keep an eye out for those. And lastly, milling low level herbs and selling the pigments managed to bring in a few gold for very little time and effort. I hope to flesh out these concepts and give a more comprehensive overview on how my R2R is going once I have a little more time to spend on it.

Now for the real post. As far as I'm concerned, gathering professions are a waste of time once you've established a solid base of gold and have a steady income. Farming takes a lot of time and can be quite boring. I can buy ten stacks of Obsidium Ore in a matter of seconds, but it would probably take me a few hours to farm all that. If you're trying to make the most gold in the least amount of time, gathering professions really aren't worth it.

Rags to Riches: Bank of Wukam Edition

I believe it is a right of passage for every aspiring auctioneer to attempt a rags-to-riches. That is, start a fresh character on a new server with absolutely zero help and see how much gold you can make in a set amount of time, or before a certain level, or whatever.

So starting today, I made a dwarven shaman on my friend's server (though I will be refusing all help) and we shall see what we shall see! Oh, and the kicker? Not only am I starting on a fresh server with a fresh character, I'm switching factions. I play Horde pretty much exclusively except for the 3-4 scattered Alliance toons that never made it to level 10. So I know absolutely nothing about Alliance vendors and what I can sell from them at a profit. I'm hoping this will add an extra layer of challenge.

Prospecting Obsidium and Why It's Making Me Rich

Now is a really great time to be a jewel crafter, at least on my server. Obsidium will often reach prices of around 80g per stack, and rarely go much above 100g per stack. And uncut green gems don't usually fall below 15g, with the more popular ones (red, orange, and purple) staying within the 20-50g range. The best thing though, is that they're still selling like crazy. I'll post around 20 of each (except carnelian and sometime jasper, more on that in a second) and rarely will I get them back and only occasionally will I be so undercut that I have to cancel and repost.

Here is some quick math I hope will help illustrate why simply prospecting and reselling is so profitable. At the average best I see Obsidium for 80g per stack, and given an average of 6 green gems per stack, that means each green gem costs me 13g33s to "make." Even if the lowest I can sell them for is 15g, that's still straight profit (though not much). But I can usually sell at least the orange and the purple greens for three times that at the least. And this doesn't even take into account the occasional rare gem you get, nor the many other things you can use these gems for to make yourself even more money!

Of Guilds and Gold

"A friend asks for your time. A guild asks for your money."
- Fortune Card

This comes partially in response to Stede's post of a few days ago over at Venture, LLT, and partially in response to some recent drama in my own guild. The issue I'm trying to examine today is fairly simple: how does having more gold than most players think is possible affect your relations with your guild?

It might be best to start with that anecdote from my guild. Unfortunately, I didn't catch how the argument began (I was probably busy with the auction house, of course) but the gist of it was that one of my guild members (we'll call him "B") was fed up with another guild member ("S") supposedly bragging about how much gold he had and yet never proving it to anyone. B was getting rather pissed off and even managed to get one or two other members to join him in demanding proof. S, meanwhile, kept his cool and even dropped a few hints about how he was making that money (disenchanting seemed to be his "secret"), though he did also imply the reason he wouldn't show was fear of been hacked. Eventually, an officer stepped in and ended it all, so there was no real resolution, not that I think any could have been reached.

The Other Side of Gold Making: Gold Saving

So for my first real post I thought I'd do something a bit different. This is something I've not seen discussed, possibly because it is a bit self-evident, but it is worth mentioning nonetheless. There is another way to "make" gold beyond the normal buying and selling, and that is in the money you save by being able to craft your own gear / gems / enchants / flasks, etc.

One key thing acutioneers do is buy stuff off the AH or other players and turn it into something desirable that they sell right back for profit. The simplest, and my favorite, example is Jewel Crafting. Very few people want those nasty worthless dull raw gems. But everyone wants a shiny sparkling gem that makes you more powerful! So the JC buys the raw, cuts it, and sells it right back for much more than he paid, and that's how gold is made.

Why Hello There!

So this is a preliminary post mostly about who I am, why I got into the whole auctioneering thing, and why I decided to make a gold blog even though there are already so many.

To start, I'm a first year law student, so in all honesty I really should be doing more productive things than playing WoW. And that leads right into why I got into the whole gold-making aspect of WoW. Law school is quite exhausting, but not quite as utterly time consuming as I had thought, so I got back into WoW as a nice temporary distraction. I didn't really have time for raiding in any real capacity, so I figured I might as well try my hand at the gold making business as it was much less time consuming. I had been reading Basil's blog "Gold Capped" for a while and I had become fascinated with the thought of being gold capped. I was on my 3rd 80, so I wasn't really strapped for cash or anything, it just seemed like an interesting new challenge; just another arbitrary number to see how high I could get. I started taking his advice and and after finding other gold blogs thanks largely to TUJ, I began using their advice as well. I began utilizing my professions to their fullest and just kept raking in more and more gold. In less than a month, I managed to go from hovering between 5k and 10k to over 60k with minimal effort and time. I started stockpiling for Cata, and just couldn't spend my gold faster than I could make it! (This is a tad exaggerated for effect, as I was a little more selective in my stockpiling than I could have been.) So now it's already 2 weeks after the launch of Cataclysm, I just bought myself 3 shiney new epics for my Shaman with the gold I've amassed, and I'm still raking it in every day. Though I'm certainly not as fabulously wealthy as some of the bloggers out there, I am quite proud of myself in my own way and I continue to enjoy this lesser known aspect to WoW.

As for why I created a blog, the answer is really simple. I love writing, and I love giving my opinion even when no one cares. A blog is a perfect mix of the two.

I hope whatever readers I might be able to bring in will enjoy reading what I have to say, and even more importantly, I hope I have things to say worth reading!