by Michael Gray

The beta is providing a lot of tantalizing hints about what professions will be like in the expansion. There have been enormous efforts to reconcile the relative power levels of each profession, and I think the developers have made huge strides in that regard.

Random stats on crafted items are making a comeback through items like Charred Dragonscale Shoulders. While these shoulders are obviously a shaman item, since hunters don’t use their intellect, the random enchant portion will keep the shoulders interesting for many of our dearly beloved totem jockeys. (Heck, inevitably a hunter or two will be wearing them, despite the intellect.) Since intellect will provide direct scaling to spellpower, that random stat bonus could be very interesting.

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by Basil Berntsen

Sometimes, the cheapest way to acquire the quantity of farmed mats you need is to buy them direct from a farmer. Buying them on the auction house is probably more convenient; however, your farmer has to pay the AH cut, and you have to beat your competitors to it. Having a farmer send everything they farm cash on delivery every day is a much more efficient way and has some serious benefits for both sides of the deal. How can you find farmers and convince them to send you goods instead of listing them on the AH?

This is not a one-way deal. You need to make it better for a farmer to ship directly to you than it would be for them to go and post their items for sale. To do that, let’s look at the annoying parts of selling farmed goods.

• Unsold inventory If you list 20 stacks of herbs on the AH, it’s possible that you’ll get undercut and the demand will never outweigh the additional supply, meaning you won’t sell your stock. This costs you your deposit fee (which goes up as you make longer auctions).
• Delayed reward Even when your items sell, they don’t always sell right away.
• Uncertain prices Prices can vary wildly, and you never know how low you’ll have to post stock at to make it move.
• Auction house cut You make 5 percent less than your clients were willing to pay, every time you make a sale.

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by Steve Zamboni

Imagine a typical glyph market on a busy realm: dozens of goblins sitting hunched over their steam calculators surrounding the trading pit, each figuring their costs and profits down to the last copper trying to gain an advantage over the others. Thousands of glyphs are posted every hour, most to be canceled and reposted an hour later at even lower prices. Eventually, one of the goblins has a flash of brilliance (or cracks under the strain; the records aren’t clear) and posts all of his glyphs at a loss. The calculation engines grind to a stop, leaving the goblins to stare up at the big board in silence, then at each other. “Now what?”

We call it the wall. One scribe picks a price and tries to hold the entire market to that price. If it holds, the market stops at the wall, and everyone on the other side watches helplessly as sales drop to zero. Sometimes it’s done to drive off competitors; sometimes it’s done to dissuade new competitors from entering the market, or just to burn up excess ink supplies … or even just out of boredom to cause pointless drama, goblin style.

Like all good goblin inventions, the wall appears simple on the outside, but remains complicated (and somewhat explosive) when put into practice. One complication is that there is more actually more than one type of wall.

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by Steve Zamboni

With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who’s trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he’s made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it’s left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they’re paying for their supplies.

Glyphs and Ink of the Sea

Everything that inscription makes can be traced back to a stack of herbs, so all item prices can be calculated from the price of the herb. Each stack of the “good” Northrend herbs — Adder’s Tongue, Icethorn and Lichbloom — will produce one bottle of Snowfall Ink and six Ink of the Sea (IotS). Each stack of the lower-quality herbs — Goldclover, Deadnettle and Tiger Lily — will produce five Ink of the Sea and half of a Snowfall. While seeming the inferior choice, these lesser herbs will often sell at a substantial discount and may be more efficient if found in large quantities; two stacks of Tiger Lily will produce 10 IotS and a Snowfall, a much higher yield than a single stack of the more expensive varieties. Lichbloom and Goldclover will usually sell for higher prices to flask makers, so they are seldom milled for ink. Given the large number of Adder’s Tongue nodes in Sholazar Basin (256), it is the most common herb used for milling.

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by Michael Gray

So, alchemy in Cataclysm is starting to look pretty damned good. (Granted, all of the trade skills are looking good in Cataclysm, but I’m writing about alchemy this week.) Alchemy is one of the most stable crafts between expansions, though. You have your standard potions — intellect, damage, healing, mana, health, stuff like that — as well as your alchemist-only items like alchemist’s stones.

Things get a little more exciting in Cataclysm, though. One of the most interesting potions I’ve seen so far is the Potion of Deephome. On use, it teleports the user to Deephome. It’s a pretty neat effect, but it definitely makes me curious about Deephome. The dungeon finder tool is incredibly effective for teleporting players inside dungeons, so I don’t see why your acerage alchemist would have to use the potion. Still, for sheer flavor, it’s fun to see potions doing more than just buffing stats. I think that’s a nice little side effect that’s been a long time coming.

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by Cyrak

Item production is the most lucrative gold making scheme in WoW

In this section of Ultimate WoW Gold Guide we’re going to focus on the art of production and speculation in the World of Warcraft economy. This is the end game of WoW gold making and can also be the least effort depending on how you decide to approach it.

The producer is the player that uses professions that make equippable items from raw materials. Some high level producers choose to gather their own raw materials, but I personally prefer to simply purchase them from trade chat or the Auction House. This method of gold making can be done without ever leaving town.

As we discussed in the first section of the guide, the most lucrative production professions are Inscription, Jewelcrafting, and Enchanting. There is a logical reason for this (and for why professions like Blacksmithing and Leatherworking have fallen behind). These professions produce items that are frequently replaced, particularly Jewelcrafters and Scribes. Glyphs and gems are replaced on a nearly weekly basis by many players, this means that there is always a high demand for your goods whereas when you’ve crafted the Icecrown recipe legs and boots there’s little to be gained from the services of a Blacksmith or Leatherworker.

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by Basil Berntsen

There’s a new tool in my kit. The Undermine Journal, whose alpha was just recently launched, is a site that lets you see data from your auction house live from the internet. My realm was recently added, and when I searched for Eternal Belt Buckles, it showed me a convenient Google Finance-style graph of the price and availability, as well as the mats needed for it, and a list of my competition!

Words fail me, so hop past the break for a screengrab.

My goodness, was I ever excited when I saw this! Combine this with the remote auction house, and you have a recipe for a disastrous amount of AH camping at work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

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by Basil Berntsen

Auctioneers rely on farmers for raw materials for various businesses. In fact, we rely very heavily on them, and there are quite a few markets that are only more profitable than farming in terms of gold per hour if we can do them on a very large scale … much more than any one person can farm.

I’ve been flying circles around Sholazar Basin and boy, are my arms tired!

The interesting thing about the markets we work on is that it’s almost no more actual work to make, for example, 150 Titansteel Bars than it is to make 20. The only difference is in how annoying it is to find mats, and the number of Dr. Who episodes you get to watch while AFK crafting. The difficulty of finding lots of cheap mats is really the only barrier we worry about. And any experienced auctioneer will tell you that, historically in Wrath of the Lich King, it’s been no trouble at all.

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by Cyrak

You’ve got your startup gold, epic flying, and if need be a steady stream of gold through daily quests. It’s not enough, you want more. The next step up the gold making ladder is the resource gatherer. These players pick up tradeskills like Herbalism, Mining, and less commonly Skinning and traverse the world picking up items that are useful to other tradeskills.

Which Gathering Profession to Pick?

For the serious money maker you’ll want to write off skinning immediately. Skinning requires you to not only kill mobs, but they also must be beasts. Finding and killing mobs is significantly more time consuming than flying around looking for mineral nodes. Leather goods gained from skinning also are basically only used by leatherworkers, and leatherworking is far from the most lucrative profession. You’ll want to ignore this skill completely.

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