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 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 Basil Berntsen

Enchanting mats are a strange business. They are in constant massive demand, and can be made in a variety of ways. Every Tuesday, thousands of guilds get thousands of upgrades that need to be enchanted, every day, hundreds of thousands of players run PUG and PvP content that gives them upgrades they want to enchant, and every day, thousands of players buy things like Bolts of Imbued Frostweave, which require enchanting mats to make.

The more things change

Recently, Blizzard added the ability to disenchant easily with the need before greed loot system, and created a massively popular random 5 man dungeon system. There’s no overhead, just automatic mats appearing in everyone’s bags. This created a huge source of supply for enchanting mats. Also, the amount of Infinite Dust created with each disenchant was recently raised significantly, altering the balance of dust to Greater Cosmic Essence available.

The demand for enchanting mats is not fixed. In fact, there is no market in WoW that has static demand. As things get cheaper, more people find them affordable and that increases demand. While high end raiders wouldn’t dream of entering a guild instance without the best enchants on all their gear, many people don’t run that type of content. They put the enchants they can afford onto their gear they have. As infinite dust became more and more affordable, people started enchanting more gear with better enchants, and this served to increase demand for greater cosmic essences.

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by Basil Berntsen

Frost Lotus is a component of raiding flasks, and it is gathered as a very rare chance from regular herb nodes, as well as Frost Lotus nodes that appear in Wintergrasp and Freya’s room in Ulduar. The price of Frost Lotus has skyrocketed since patch 3.3 on many servers. This is partly due to the large increase in demand for flasks that the new content brought us, but I believe partly because of a reduction in supply.

The supply of Frost Lotus is and always has been low, however as I mentioned in my last column, there are ways to farm it. The most popular one was to get saved to an Ulduar raid ID where Freya‘s Elders (Brightleaf, Ironbranch, and Stonebark) have been killed, but Freya herself hasn’t, allowing the herb nodes to respawn. Getting the nodes to respawn simply requires a “soft reset” of the instance, which means nobody zones in for 30 minutes.

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By Rhidach @ Righteous Defense

Lovely Charms are somewhat of a rare commodity–going for huge chunks of gold on the auction house (as bracelets), and being divvied up sparingly by various miserly mobs. For the achievement alone I needed 120 of these random drops, and was looking for the quickest, least painful way to get them.

I first tried Ulduar on Tuesday, but apparently Blizz moved exceptionally fast and hotfixed that tactic (along with any other mobs you kill with a vehicle). I put out some feelers for a spot with lots of meleeing, aoe-able creatures. A guildie offered up a spot suggestion: by the Avatar of Freya in Sholazar Basin.

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by Basil Berntsen

I have sold so many auctions that the counter in the statistics section for my auction alts has rolled over into negative numbers. I am currently worth about 150,000g, and that’s after I bought myself a Quel’Delar and a pair of BoE boots the first couple of days after the patch launched. I suspect the reason I was picked to write this instead of someone who is already at or over the gold cap is that I’ve been able to accomplish this with extremely limited play time. I do most of my work in half an hour every weekday morning, leaving the rest of my time free for raiding with my hunter, writing about it at outdps.com, arguing with Frostheim about it on the Hunting Party Podcast, and taking care of my other show (Call to Auction).

When you decide you want to make ridiculous sums of imaginary money, where do you start? Well, that all depends on what you have. If you have been playing for a while, chances are you have a level 80. All characters have two primary profession slots, and maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll have some professions already trained! The higher, the better.

There are two ways to make gold in WoW. Grinding and everything else. If you are literally starting from nothing, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but unless you have a friend willing to loan you money, you’re going to have to grind. You need gold to make gold in the auction house.

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I’m aware that this location for Crystallized Fires had been found previously and posted somewhere (what hasn’t?) but what I wanted to share with you is something I had to test and find out for myself.

Go to Frostfloe Deep in Storm Peaks. I shouldn’t have to draw you a diagram showing you where this is. This cave is north of Camp Tunka’lo and has Wailing Wind wisp mobs inside.

-No set respawn timer- The cave and mobs are for a Horde questline. The faster you can kill them, the faster they respawn somewhere else in the cave. I brought a boomkin friend to this cave and had him kill stuff in the back section. He kills one, another respawns next to me etc. We could barely keep up and at one time almost died to the respawns.

TLDR== Picture the Gothik fight in Naxx. The faster you kill live-side, the faster they spawn on dead-side. Same thing as Frostfloe Deep.

Have Fun solo or with a friend.

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when you are 5-23 mobs will drop linen, when you are 30-40 you get linen, and due to SM, alot of it. Lvl 41-50 you get mageweave, and sm cath/zf gives a lot of it. At the other hand, Wool cloth, has a short lvl range, and there’s not too many instances that drop them in bigger quantities. As if that wasn’t enough, to lvl tailoring and first aid you need tons of wool cloth. So guess what we want to farm in lower lvls?

Wool Cloth

To the spots!

Ashenvale, one word, furbolgs. They drop tons of it.

The Barrens, the dwarves at the excavation site.

The Stockades

Hillsbrad foothills, Durnholde keep.

Other spots: (mentioned by posts, I prefer the others though)

Worgens in duskwood, it works, but they doesn’t drop as much and are a pain in the ass to kill imo.

Deadmines are another spot, the mobs tend to linen instead of wool half of the time(almost), but it works. The plus here is that you never have to wait for respawns and if you’re a high lvl it’s easy to mass the mobs and aoe them down. (cred to Xollax)

The quillboars in the barrens was suggested by Kingyoshi9, definitely a nice spot when questing. But I would say that you shouldn’t grind there, there are just better places. =)

These are probably the best spots to farm it, they are there when you are lvling. Ofc higher lvls, 40-60, could farm there as well, with eez, and the money you earn is nice.
You might need some lvls for stockades.
Grind a lvl at one of the places and you will have enough money for epic mount when it’s time =)

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Make a raid and go in Zul’gurub, start farming all the trash there but i recommend that you skip the “Gurubashi Axe Thrower’s” since they do some annoying and long stuns that may end up getting you killed. What you are farming is :

All the Bijou’s, colour does not matter. For around 30 minutes i was able to get 20 Bijous, wich sell for 15g a piece in the ah, or if people on your realm dont actualy sell these make em 20g a piece but not more since nobody will buy them. People need these Bijous to raise their rep with the Zanadar Tribe so there will be alot of customers i guarantee it. I sell them sepherately since more people will buy them that way. So that’s like 300g per 30 minutes or 600g a hour for me. If you dont get the idea for what bijous im speaking of
heres a picture Blue Hakkari Bijou – Item – World of Warcraft i randomly linked that picture , doesnt mean you gota farm the blue one speccificly.

Also if you are better geared and have a way to survive through some 95-111k HP mobs id advise you to go in to the Molten Core and start farming trash.
The trash drops Lava Core and Fiery Core – these moneymakers sell for 50g each ,but the drop rate is kinda low so you’ll get like 1 lava or fiery core for every 10 monsters you’ve killed and if lucky you can also get some BoE epics wich i also sell around 30-40g each. These Core’s are also used to gain reputation, with the Thorium Brotherhood or they can also be used to craft classic weapons, legendary materials etc so expect to have alot of costumers again. I grinded for an Hour There and i got 6 Lava Cores and 7 Fiery Cores + some BoE belt (worth 35gold in AH) so that makes is 685g in a hour.

But i also have to mention that its all a matter of luck – you might get a lot of drops or less drops

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