The benefits of farming

So, it's been tough lately to get some quality mining time in so I can get accurate numbers for my mining experiment. Between leveling my hunter alt (the most fun I've ever had leveling a character), raiding and helping the guild with brewfest stuff, I haven't had an uninterrupted hour of farming time. A side note, I was part of the first successful AUO 10 man Onyxia raid on Saturday and it felt gooood. We got her on the 7th attempt. She truely is a loot pinata, dropping about 5 or 6 items (I can't remember exactly) which is awesome for a 10 man raid. I won the spellpower sword because I was the only one that could use it. I love winning loot by default! I don't need no stinking /roll.

On to the heart of the subject here. Mining does have it's benefits. I was doing a few laps around Icecrown and decided to head into Sholozar Basin. I had hit 3 titanium nodes in less than 10 minutes and was feeling lucky. I normally head into the Basin and turn left, flying clockwise mining as I go. I decided this time to turn right and go counter clockwise. Good thing I did. As I land to mine a saronite node, I notice the star on my mini map marking one of the spawn points of Loque'nahak, the spirit beast. My wife's hunter has all 3 spirit beasts, so I normally don't pay much attention to these spots any more, but this time I decided to take a look behind me after I mined the ore. Sure enough Loque was there! I quickly did a /gchat shout out for all hunters interested to head to my location asap. Darallun (of afkautoshot) quickly replied and hauled ass out to Sholozar. Luckily, no one else showed up and he had an easy time taming the beast. So now, Darallun has his second spirit beast! It was like the stars had all aligned that night. Darallun usually raids as Survival, but I think he needs to start going Beast Master and bringing out his new kitteh.

So, as we can see, sometimes farming has benefits that transcend the accumulation of gold.

Gone farming

It's been a sad few weeks for me. The wild price variations on crafted ammo has all but wrecked my income generation for a while now and sales of everything else I do have also been sporadic at best, so I'm going to run a short experiment over the next week or two. I'm going to start farming again. I'll be fishing and mining in 1 hour increments to see how much I can gather and convert into gold.

Farming is an important activity because in order to fund just about any tradeskill that you want to use for profit, you need a bankroll to buy materials. Yes, it is true, you need to have money to make money. Well, I'd like to amend that old cliche. You need to have money in order for your money to make money for you.

This experiment was really spurred on by a guildmate who is just about broke (in game). He has all these fancy professions on his two level 80's, but no cash to buy materials. So, I want to try to put a number on how much time it should take someone with a few basic gathering professions to get enough capital to start a crafting business.

Let the experiment begin!

A Little Advice for a Penniless Noob

A fellow guild member who has been absent until very recently has a dilemma. We found out about this dilemma when doing a Naxx 10 run on Tuesday night where he was playing his shaman alt. We wiped on the Dance and I noticed that he hadn’t released and was waiting to be resurrected when we got back into Heigan’s room. When we asked why he didn’t release and fly back (as Krys would say “Don’t be that guy”) he said he can’t fly back because he couldn’t afford a flying mount. That’s right, he quested to level 80 and somehow didn’t manage to have enough money for regular flying training. How this is possible, I don’t know. I know I must have made several thousand gold just questing between level 70 and 80. I’m sure if I think about it for too long, it will make me angry, so I’ll move on to the more important thing, which is giving this guy a little advice on how to make enough money to buy basic flying skill + a cheap gryphon.

First things first. To protect the identity of the guilty, I’ll call him Noob. Fitting, huh?

OK. So, Noob is this player’s alt. His main has…wait for it…450 herbalism and 450 alchemy. That’s right, maxxed out in 2 major money making professions. Clearly Noob is poor because he is clueless.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s what Noob should do:

1) Farm herbs on your main! Our GM, Krys, has offered to buy every stack of Northrend herbs that Noob can muster. That’s one hell of a deal, having a guaranteed buyer.
2) Save all the Frost Lotus that you get while farming for regular herbs. These are a primary component to all of the flasks used by core raiders. You can either use them to craft flasks to sell, or sell them in stack of 5 or 10.
3) Change your alchemy specialization to Elixir Mastery. This way, if you choose to make flasks with Frost Lotus you have a chance to create additional flasks which means free money.
4) Do not try for achievements, do not play any battlegrounds, no world pvp, no heroics, no standing around Dalaran looking pretty. Just get out there and farm.
5) Look up the recipes for Flask of Endless Rage and Flask of the Frost Wyrm. Save enough materials to make these flasks using the Frost Lotus you have saved from your farming. Don’t worry, it won’t be too much to have to save. Craft the flasks and sell them on major raid nights, which are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Those are some pretty basic guidelines for Noob to follow. He could probably get enough money for his basic flying skill and mount in less than 2 weeks. It’s up to him to put in the effort. There is no magic formula for making money. It just takes a little brain power and some time. Once he gets the basics down, then he can start working on more advanced techniques and branching out beyond selling flasks and herbs.

Bargain Hunting

Attention WoWMart shoppers. There’s a special on Lich Bloom in isle 3.

So, I have been keeping track of the herbs needed to craft the flask of endless rage. This flask seems to be a very popular item on raid nights so I’m using it as the basis for my test. An interesting thing happens on Bleeding Hollow for alchemists. The price of materials for a flask is usually equal to the price of the flask itself, +/- 3 gold. So, if you are a dual crafter, like say a Alchemist/Tailor or something like that, you’re pretty much out of luck when it comes to making flasks for enough profit to be meaningful, unless you do your homework. The word "meaningful" in that sentence is very subjective, but let’s assume “meaningful” is at least enough gold to cover weekly maintenance costs.

So, who’s making money off of Alchemy on Bleeding Hollow? Alchemist/Herbalists are. I suppose there just aren’t enough pure farmers on this server to bring the price of herbs down low enough for an Alchemist to buy all his/her materials from the auction house. One side effect of this “self employed” style of gatherer/crafter market is that there are very few, if any, deep under cutters. Producers are limited to selling what they have farmed for. You can’t sell 500 flasks if you didn’t farm 500 Frost Lotus so the cheap flasks get scooped up fast. Furthermore, since the cost of the materials is so close to the cost of the flask, no one is going to undercut the market rate by 40% like the Greedy Goblin does with his glyphs. This also makes flasks a bit more attractive to buy low and relist later.

What happens if you don’t want to gather your own herbs? You have to become a bargain shopper. This is where a tool like Market Watcher could come in very handy. Add the materials for a flask AND the flask you want to make to your Market Watcher addon and scan the auction house twice a day for a few weeks and take a look at the trend. Each herb should start to show a pattern of low and high prices over the WoW week of Tuesday through Monday. Gathered resources are almost always cheaper on Sunday and Monday nights as players unload their stocks after a long weekend of farming. Start buying herbs at their low point and save them for when the flask sells at its high point then craft the flasks and start selling. The high point for flasks is usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night as those are the nights most guilds are scheduled to raid. Remember not to flood the market with them, just post 2 or 3 at a time and repost as they are purchased. It really is an easy thing to do and it seems silly writing about it, but I suspect a lot of people don’t bother with this kind of planning and preparation. You may not get rich by selling flasks for a lower profit than someone with alchemy/herbalism, but you won’t have to spend time farming and ultimately that is the goal for a lot of us.

Of course if you enjoy farming like my wife does, then that’s more coin in your pocket for something that is relaxing and care free. Sometimes though, farming doesn’t produce enough materials to supply your crafting or real life gets in the way of us flying circles around Northrend so stocking up on materials from the auction house when they are dirt cheap is always a good idea, especially when it’s a rare drop material like Frost Lotus.

What's the materials cost vs. market price for consumables on your server?

Bull market on Glyphs

In case you are a Scribe and missed the boat on this one, two WoW Economy bloggers are reporting that glyphs are selling so fast that they are running out of supplies to make them. In other words, start selling glyphs NOW. I don't know if they will continue to sell throughout the weekend, but given the server stability on Bleeding Hollow, I'd say yes.

Click the links to hear the detailed glyph reports from:

The Greedy Goblin

and

Just My Two Copper

One more side note on this. The Goblin is saying that his ink supplies are running out. This means that the market for herbs may be affected by the glyph market. If you're an herbalist, check prices and supply and if things look good, start farming. I'll be investigating this further when I get home tonight.

My business

I'll give Gevlon the Greedy Goblin credit for coming up with this idea, but I wanted to say it again here so people have a clear understanding of what a business in WoW is. I've also elaborated on it a bit.

Most players in WoW are running a business and they don't even know it. Businesses can be categorized 4 ways:

Farmer
Entrepreneur
Factory Owner
Commodities trader

The Farmer is just that, someone who has a gathering skill and gathers good to sell in their raw form on the auction house. The backbone of the economy, they provide goods to the other three businesses.

The Entrepreneur is a tradesman who makes and sells his/her own goods. Characters with the gathering/crafting synergy professions like Herbalism/Alchemy fall into this category. See, you're a businessman and don't even know it! Hopefully this blog will get you to start acting like one. Marxists call you people the "petite bourgeoisie".

The Factory Owner is much more rare. A factory owner hires skilled laborers to assemble a product using materials that the owner provides. To a Marxist, this person is the evil Bourgeoise. In WoW terms, a factory owner is someone who buys materials in mass quantities and pays a player to create an item that the factory owner will sell on the auction house.

The Commodities traders to me are people who work the auction house like the stock market. These are the people who use Auctioneer and scour the AH for underpriced goods that they know will move, buy the item and relist it for a decent profit.

I've tried all 4 and for a while was almost exclusively a farmer. I got tired of seeing the price of ore fall lower and lower so I got smart and started to investigate the other three. The one I've done the least with is the Factory Owner. For the most part, I'd rather not deal with the hassle of finding someone willing to make a bunch of stuff for me and I always assume they'll get wise and start making the stuff themselves, thus becoming my competition.

I think the art of the Auction House is the art of becoming a really good Commodities trader, either by just doing the traditional buy low/sell high, or by purchasing raw materials for a super low price and using it to craft something that sells well and for a decent profit. My most successful attempt at "working" the auction house as a commodities trader was when for a few weeks, buff food was selling for about 60 gold per stack of 20. I bought it all up and sat on it until it became rare again and started selling for 100-120/stack. I sold everything that I bought and then some for a nice profit.