by Basil Berntsen

I’ve said before that farming professions are usually a waste of time. The opportunity cost of a farming profession is another crafting profession, which could make you so much more money per hour that you can always afford to buy the mats you need. The exception to this rule is mining.

All the gathering professions are simple and no risk. You pay nothing but time to level them, and you are able to make money by using them without risking anything but, again, time. The difference between your average player and an auctioneer, however, is that the auctioneer is always measuring his success in gold per hour. Extremely good farmers can do better than extremely bad auctioneers, however if you’re capable of being an extremely good farmer, you’re probably capable of being at least a good auctioneer, and are spending those hours doing a more repetitive, less interesting task for less money.

Mining is the exception to this rule because it opens up the ability to perform several very important transformations:
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by Basil Berntsen

Every profession has some way of making money. You have different types of markets available and a limit of the number of professions you can have per character. This means that whether you’re just getting started on the auction house or trying to plan your next milestone, you need to make choices and plan your professions.

Road maps

In order to make intelligent choices about your professions, you need a few vital pieces of information. First, a plan. What’s your tolerance for risk, time invested and money invested? Second, you need to take stock of your characters. How many of them are capable of getting two professions maxed out? Are there any professions you don’t need maxed out for your plan? Last, you need to know what you can accomplish with the resources you have.

Once you have all this, you are able to make intelligent decisions.

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by Michael Gray

I put together a list of my favorite celebratory recipes in the game. Here are some crafted items that can help you hold your own in-game 4th of July bash.

Fireworks from engineering

Fireworks are the number one staple of the 4th of July. The celebrations include everything from your hand-held sparklers to the big, blooming explosions thousands of feet above your head. These raucous explosions are a celebration of our country, our history — and also of things that explode.

When you’re talking explosions in Azeroth, you’re talking about engineers. Sure, you can buy some flares and such from vendors, but I’m talking about homebrew fireworks here.

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by Michael Gray

The basic idea behind building your own crafting empire would be that every profession is covered. You have it all. But it’s actually a little bit deeper than that. You not only have to have characters with the requisite recipes, you also must have characters with the requisite gathering progressions who can then perform the gathering for you. It gets a little deep depending on how you design your empire. And it all boils down to one thing.

Your ability to build and conduct your own crafting empire will revolve around your willingness to level alts. The actual class of your alts won’t matter directly but you’ll need at least a few. It is impossible to cover all the professions with fewer than four alts anyway, so you’ll be doing the grind from level 1 to 80 at least three times. (Not four, because you can use a death knight for at least one of these crafters.)

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by Basil Berntsen

Cooking is one of those secondary professions that anyone can learn, even if they already have two primary professions. Because of this fairly low barrier to entry, there are a lot of cooks around. So many that I’ve actually never leveled it myself! I just rely on the generosity of friends for my cooking business.

How profitable is cooking? That all depends on what you cook. I got into this because I once paid 100g for five Spiced Mammoth Treats for my hunter’s raid night. Why was I buying them on a Tuesday? Poor planning. What did I learn? The value of planning. We’re going to start with a very important concept for auctioneers, here: tenacity.

I’m not talking about tenacity that makes you pwn noobs in Wintergrasp better; I’m talking about the ability to keep a business running for the long haul. More than just this batch, just this week. I reasoned that because everyone can cook, there must be tons of incredibly cheap food for sale on the AH. I reasoned wrong, mostly because most people who can cook only cook for themselves. Instead of increasing supply, they’re lowering demand.

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by Basil Berntsen

Tailoring is not the profession most people think of when they think of gold making. Most people will find inscription, enchanting and jewelcrafting are the big money-makers, but what do you do if that’s not the path you’ve chosen?

When you select your profession, there are a lot of reasons to choose one over another. Tailoring has a cool mount and some awesome end game bonuses. If you’ve taken it for these, rest assured that you can still find a niche in the marketplace if you want to make money with it.

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by Basil Berntsen

Professions are expensive! Getting a crafting skill to 450 involves geting all kinds of finnicky odd-ball mats from content that nobody ever runs these days, which typically means paying a whole lot for them. On top of it, all the stuff you make is pretty much valueless, and often fetches more at the vendor than it will in the auction house. What can you do to help turn these lemons into lemonade?

First off, it helps if you’re popular, smart, and patient. Popular people have friends who have tradeskills that might be able to help stem the losses, smart people have addons that can provide them with valuable information, and patient people are not at the mercy of low supply.

Popular

Well, if not popular, per se, at least friendly and willing to network. Seriously, the most expensive part of leveling a tradeskill is vendoring all the stuff you make to level. If you had the ability to lean on, say, and enchanter friend of yours, you could ask them to disenchant anything you make that is disenchantable. You’d be surprised how much these older enchanting mats go for. In fact, if you ever find yourself making something where the mats you are using are worth less than the enchanting mats you get out of it, keep using that recipe until it turns grey, no matter what your powerleveling guide says. If you are making money at any step along the way, milk it. Also, note down what you are doing for later, as you might be interested in doing this over the long run to help finance later, profitless steps toward tradeskill mastery.

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by Basil Berntsen

Enchanting is like the auctioneer’s sonic screwdriver. Having a maxed-out enchanter is a major boost to many other professions, as their ability to disenchant is just amazing. It will help you recuperate money when leveling your professions, as well as open up business opportunities that may not have been profitable otherwise.

So how else can you make money with enchanting?

The wrong way to make money with enchanting

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by Basil Berntsen

Inscription is a great profession for making money. Once the addons for making and selling glyphs efficiently became popular, many people selling glyphs became gold-capped. Selling glyphs these days is not all it’s cracked up to be, however. There’s now tons of competition, and on a lot of servers, glyphs sell perpetually for the cost of the mats to make them. Assuming you’re not interested in going down that road, what can you do with this skill to make money?

First, let’s look at our mats.

Everything that a scribe can make is going to be based on herbs. Scribes can mill herbs into pigments, which they can then craft into inks. Before inscription, old world herbs were cheap. Since inscription has a bunch of things that require ink from old world herbs, the prices have gone up considerably. Luckily, Blizzard saw fit to provide us with an ink trader, who resides in Dalaran. Jessica Sellers will sell you one of any of the old world common inks for a single Ink of the Sea, which you get from milling and crafting Northrend herbs. You can also, if this suits you, turn 10 Inks of the Sea into a Snowfall Ink, the rare Northrend ink.

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