by Steve Zamboni
Almost all auction house tactics revolve around the undercut. It may be a single copper, a few silver or a few gold, or a freefall drop down to the price of materials. Regardless of the amount or the frequency, most undercuts share a common misconception: that you’re controlling the market with your undercuts. You’re not. Your competitor has the control. By undercutting, you’ve just let your competitor decide your price. You’ve let your competitor set a cap on your profits — and more, you’ve agreed to accept even less with your undercut.
The inscription market sees more than its fair share of this, sometimes on a large scale. The low deposits encourage large number of postings, followed by even larger numbers of cancellations and repostings. Prices fall as each new poster accepts and trumps the previous poster’s prices, until the market falls to the cost of materials and the walls go up. The final wall signals a complete loss of market control.
Once it’s up, it no longer matters who built the wall. If it’s your wall, you can’t raise prices until the competition perched above you goes away. If it’s not your wall, you can’t raise prices on your auctions until someone breaks the wall. Stalemate, and out come the piña coladas.
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by Allison Robert
5. The Coin Master
There are a lot of truly brilliant touches in this game, and I’ve long held the opinion that the coins in the Dalaran fountain constitute some of Blizzard’s best and most creative work. Their existence is equally subtle; the only clue that they’re there at all is tucked away in three fairly high-level fishing achievements. One has the eerie sense that, lore-wise, the population might have walked past the fountain in Dalaran for years without ever realizing that (evincing the sort of self-aware magic that characterizes the Harry Potter universe) it had quietly preserved the wishes of dozens of major and minor players on the world scene.
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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 Allison Robert
10. Get to the Choppa!
Engineering has long been the redheaded stepchild of WoW professions, taken only because players were interested in it or (later) because raids needed repair bots. Before Wrath, it had never really played a prominent role in raiding apart from that, which I always thought was a bit sad. It had (and has, I would argue) the potential to be the most interesting and amusing profession due to the wide variety of class abilities its gadgets can mimic, and it was a tad bothersome that it was so expensive and irritating to level with so few returns at the level cap. Engineering was the profession you’d reserve for a pampered alt you’d play for fun; your main wound up taking something, anything else.
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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 Fox Van Allen
we’re going to run down the list of the top ten most popular shadow priest glyphs and pick them apart, one by one. Hopefully, in the process, we can get rid of your cookie cutter build and find you a great new set of glyphs that matches your play style.
1. Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain
According to wowpopular, more shadow priests take the Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain than any other. Its popularity can probably be pinned to two factors.
First, it used to be a much better glyph. In the old 3.2 days, the glyph was a damage-increasing necessity that made our ticks of Mind Flay more powerful. Given the state of shadow priest damage back then, it was all but required for raiding. A solid chunk of shadow priests still hold on to this as a relic of that time.
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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 Mathew McCurley
Today’s Addon Spotlight is a grab bag of sorts. I asked my raid group for their favorite addons, and this is the result.
SquawkAndAwe
Some of my best friends are balance druids. Seriously. In fact, now that I think about it, a good number of my WoW friends are druids of some kind, mostly balance. You know how they say that you can learn a lot about a person by looking at who they surround themselves with? What does the moonkin thing say about me?
Much like ShockandAwe, a staple addon for enhancement shaman, SquawkAndAwe replicates the experience for our boomkin brethren. Squawk provides timers for Eclipse procs, trinket procs and use timers, and everything in between. If you’re a balance druid, you know that watching your buffs and procs intently is the name of the game, so anything that can help out in the slightest could be useful.
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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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