The Cataclysmic Art of Making Gold
 

In the tradition of previous threads, I figured it might be the right time to start a discussion about making gold during the transition to (and later in) Cataclysm.

Right now, many people have a lot of gold amassed, so I'm wondering if there's good ideas to invest for the upcoming expansion. Some investments might be obvious, such as materials required for cheap leveling, given the likely mass of Goblins and Worgen that will level professions, but others might be less so. So, let's share some!

A few things I already contemplated myself:

• Argent Tournament minipets. These are currently dirt cheap, at least on my realm, but it seems unlikely that upcoming Worgen and Goblins will grind the champion badges to buy them at the tournament, so they might go up significiantly in price.
• Battered Hilts - rich Worgen and Goblins collecting achievements might pay a premium for these later for the achievement, so if these are currently cheap on your realm, you might want to contemplate snagging a few. This is obviously a fairly significant and risky investment!
• Emo-food - same idea as above, even though they are a lot cheaper; people might not want to gather the recipes or materials for these later.
• Runecloth - I'm not in the beta and didn't find info on this, but if the new factions have the expected Runecloth turnin for reputation, runecloth might go for a hefty premium for folks wanting exalted with the new factions asap. It's worth noting that Worgen are a bit less likely to create a huge demand since there's no Worgen faction mounts.
• Glyphs with 4.0 - since glyphs are changing to become permanent, a lot of players will likely just want the full collection right away, and previously useless glyphs might become a lot more useful, so having a stock to sell when 4.0 hits might make significiant gold.

So, how's your investment plans looking?

The cauldron of flasks recipe requires the guild achievement "Create xx(1500? 2500?) Flasks", so stockpiling materials to make any flask might be profitable.

Before you start getting crazy with the stock piling of mats, the guild achievement and reward is to make cataclysm flasks.

I haven't had a chance to look at the new crafted recipes for Cataclysm, but is it safe to assume there will be entry level raid gear crafting patterns available? Being one of the few on your server able to craft something is always a boon - I'm one of maybe 3 people on The Scryers with Blade Ward and Blood Draining, and I can charge 200g+ for them. Having the mats laying around to power level your own trade skills and be first to those patterns, rather than selling them to someone else, might prove more lucrative in the long run.

One thing I'm giving thought to is, on my characters which have the Zul'Gurub crafting recipes, farming Zul'Gurub for the exotic materials (bloodvine, souldarite) that will simply no longer be available once the instance closes down forever. The gear will likely only be useful as vanity gear, but it should prove to be exceedingly exclusive vanity gear, which may add to its value for a small subset of players that want to stand out. (Obviously this isn't going to be a volume business.)

This assumes those recipes will still exist, and those materials aren't removed from them, once the Cataclysm hits. I'm not in beta, and my attempts to test professions on the PTR have met with various bugs that have prevented me from checking this particular detail.

A 3-daily visit to the ZG fish boss - seeing that the future of Polymorth Turtle is uncertain.
Attempt to control the market for leveling enchants(crusader, 29/30sp, stats).

Farming up boatloads of Large Brilliants and Essence of Air for Enchant Weapon - Agility and the 2-handed version are my tickets. Instead of requiring the relatively uncommon Crusader Orbs, the Agility enchants will probably benefit any dual-wielding classes through the huge AP increase and crit chance. I would be curious to see if the Strength buff from Crusader really outshines Agility that dramatically, given the presence of an internal CD.

Heirloom Cloaks and Helms will be made available through Guild Leveling... while there's no craftable head enchant, there are a few cloak enchants that are heirloom friendly which could prove useful. Subtlety? Stealth? If nothing else, the Enchant Cloak - Lesser Agility might serve.

Serving the Heirloom market as much as possible is going to be something doable with current resources, since the rules governing enchants on Heirlooms are not likely to change.

So, I've tried to put together everything I've found from blue posts and mmo/wowhead cata databases regarding professions. The idea, of course, is to try to find the largest money-makers and quickest levelling tricks (since being among the first high-end crafters will ALWAYS be highly profitable). Here's what I've found; if you have any first-hand beta experience and see something I've got wrong or that I've missed, tell me and I'll edit.


Gathering Profs

• Herbalism: no lotus-equivalent; will be steady purveyors of Volatile Life, which is used by absolutely everyone for everything, ranging from flasks to crafts (meaning it should be worth alot).
  
• Skinning: the new rare-type leather will be, from the get-go, obtainable via both RNG on skinning and for a certain amount of leather (you skin savage leather, 6 make one heavy savage leather, and heavy savage leather will be worth one pristine hide); that will probably mean Pristine Hides will cost (relatively) less than Arctic Furs.
  
• Mining: will provide mostly volatile fires and shadows, much like saronite gives shadows and earths

So at a first glance, one could reasonably surmise that the most valuable volatiles will be life, water and earth, since barring mob-farming, they come only from herbalism (life) and mining elementium (life/water/earth). Shadow and Fire will likely be much more common around the board, as they come from your basic mining node (obsidian). They will probably be in somwhat high demand at first though, but I think life will really be worth mining early on.




Crafting Profs
Note for BS/LW/Tailoring: Multiple level-ups for rare, expensive to craft items will make quite a difference in levelling these profs, as now you can not only craft much more expensive items for the triple level-up, but you can also realistically hope to sell it for a profit, since it is, after all, a valuable item.

• Alchemy: Alchemy looks like it's going to be very, very profitable. Alchemy is going to be the sole supplier of the new rare mat required for all HL crafts, and it'll be on a 20h CD. This means we'll be faced with a high demand / low offer situation (break out the Alch rerolls!), so prices should rocket. Other means of making money should include the classical transmutations (I believe truegold is the new titansteel); there should also be a possibility for high profit with utility potions such as the Potion of Deepholme or the Potion of Treasure Finding.
  
• Blacksmithing: enchanter's rods should be a nice money-maker as well as a couple few easy points; it is also worth noting that you can stock-pile a few runed titanium rods now; other very likely money-makers will include tanking BoEs, as this time, unlike for WotLK, you will absolutely need decent 85 blues to get the job done.
  
• Enchanting: Blizzard has stated that they wanted enchanting to be easier to level (which seems to be the case, judging by spells in the mmo-champion database; the ring enchants cost one shard and is yellow up to 475); also, people will be changing gear fairly quickly, so there should be quite a bit of enchanting; there is also a vanity pet available, so if it's BoE it should be quite a money-maker.
  
• Engineering: now with bows and crossbows! These are pretty good stat sticks, so engineers should expect high demand.
  
• Inscription: three main things here. The first is the Darkmoon Cards, which are supposed to be "DMC: Greatness" kind of good; and DMC:G was an incredible trinket, and is still selling 3-4k on most servers, even 2 years after launch. The second is OH frills & relics: inscription ofers many 333 blue items of this kind, which will likely be in high demand. Finally, and this is quite new, inscription will offer blue-level patterns for BS/LW/JC/Tailoring/Enchanting (I believe it's called "Reclamation: [prof]"). There is another odd thing I noticed: "forged documents", which starts a quest. Anyone know what these are?
  
• Jewelcrafting: uncommon-level gems will probably be worth quite a bit because people will always be happy to throw them into the quest items they get (in WotLK I managed to sell various uncommon red gems 30 to 50g in this manner); they also still have a daily, which will likely reward a Chimaera's Eye, the new Dragon's eye.. Other profit sources will include vanity items as well as fist weapons.
  
• Leatherworking: leather craftables, whether healing, DPS or tanking, should also make some excellent coin during the first few weeks; also, item enchancement should be nice because people will be changing gear quickly.

Any thoughts?

While it's very likely to change, the state of beta mining suggests that Obsidium will be so much harder to farm than Elementium that if you want to level your own tradeskills, let alone turn an early profit, you'd better set to work mining immediately before the starter zones are swamped.

Obsidium -- Hyjal and Vashj'ir almost exclusively, about 4 total nodes in Deepholm. Drops Earth and Shadow.
Elementium -- Deepholm, Twilight Highlands, presumably Uldum, and even Tol Barad. Drops roughly equal parts Earth, Water, Fire.
Pyrite -- Rare replacement of elementium in Twilight Highlands and presumably Uldum. Drops Fire and Earth, I believe.

Jewelcrafting is also affected by the Obsidium drought: prospecting Elementium is impossible until 475, while uncommon gem recipes go green at 460. Worse, there are very few quest rewards so far that actually have sockets. I would guess that before the beta ends, Deepholm will wind up half-Obsidium, and some rich Obsidium veins will show up in Uldum. That would balance things out much closer to their demand.

Even more likely to change is Blacksmithing, which currently takes 100+ bars of Pyrium to reach epic craftables and only 20-32 to craft each one. The result will be a lot of people, even Blacksmiths, deciding to get their crafts from someone who's already leveled it.

A beta-testing guildmate whom I have no reason to disbelieve states that polymorph spell is available on the beta Mage trainers.

Some things I imagine are obvious, but just want to toss out here anyhow:

1) Old World herbs/ore/skins will decrease in value now that we can fly in the Old World. While Worgen/Goblin profession leveling may have an impact, the days of Mithril and Thorium being insanely overpriced will be gone. Because they're even easier to farm than the new ores, their price will be capped by the new ores.

2) The way the Justice and Valor points are structured, there's nothing to buy with Justice points for raiders after you have your dungeon gear. With the 10% guild bonus, if rare gems are put on Justice vendors, this combined with the RDF could result in rare gem prices getting capped quickly.

It depends on what the demand-side looks like, as much as the supply side. Recipe counts are incomplete in Wowhead, and what really matters is which recipes people make. Life is used for Darkmoon (40 life) and Flasks (20 life), so I agree that that's key. Earth appears to have been removed from making Jewelcrafting pieces (unless that's how you make Jeweler's Settings). With that change and having the RDF from the get-go, I suspect demand for Earth might be lower. It takes 50 Fire to make the new 22-slot bag, so I imagine that'll bump up demand there. The Tailoring cooldowns have been spread out, so that there are 5 per week, and each one takes a different 30 Volatiles. This will spread demand more evenly. Also, Volatiles are not involved in crafting the new Meta gem.

More on the Tailoring CD - Dreamcloth is the new cooldown, and there are 5 Dreamcloth CDs on separate weekly timers. Each CD is in its own zone (though we don't know if there's a specific spot in each zone yet), and takes 8 Embersilk Bolts and 30 Volatiles. One (1) Dreamcloth per spellthread, two (2) each for some different 359 Rares, and five (5) for a 24 slot bag (shouldn't really be price-limited by the existing 3000g 24-slotter). There's a new 22-slot bag as well.

Alchemy - Cauldrons require one of each of the 4 Flasks to make, and Big Cauldrons require 3 of each Flask. They're not implemented yet, but if that's 10/25 for an hour, that's probably not going to bomb Alchemy, and it'll bring the Flask prices closer together. Guild Cauldrons are the big question mark though. If they're implemented at a static price, that'll have a major impact on Flask prices. Also, each Flask is made singly at a time and they're hour-long flasks. Each of Cinderbloom, Azshara's Veil, Twilight Jasmine, and Whiptail are used in batches of 8 in two Flasks (each Flask takes 20 Life, 8 of two herbs, and a Vial). Since the Flasks are +300 to a primary stat, that'll basically split the physical DPS Flask in two. However, there is no +Spirit or +MP5 Flask, so all Spell DPS and Healers will be using the +Int one, Flask of the Draconic Mind. We can expect that one to dominate sales, so that'll boost Azshara's Veil and Twilight Jasmine prices - those will be the herbs to shoot for.

According to Wowhead, these quests are not currently in the game.

On this note, the only guild achievements it's been confirmed you can do pre-Cataclysm are the Reputation ones and the Legendary ones. So if your guildies all grind unique factions, you'll be able to get a leg-up on guild XP and guild leveling, which brings tasty treats like mounted move speed, more XP/rep gain for kills/quests, in the first few guild levels. The way I see it, there's going to be a strong incentive to reach Guild Level 14 ASAP, because that's a 10% increase in your skill-up chance. So when you're leveling professions, having that a few days earlier could be huge. Of course, that depends on what the Guild XP curve looks like - if it's going to take two months at the daily cap to hit level 14 anyhow, then doing it in 59 days instead of 60 is no big deal, but if it takes like 2 weeks at that cap, then this becomes reasonable.

According to the guild leveling thread in this forum, the rep achievements only count when you hit revered with the guild (to prevent players from jumping around to provide points). So while you can do the achievements pre-Cat, the speed at which you gain guild rep is such that you will not likely be able to use those achievements to help gain those earlier perks.

In the guild I'm in on the beta, leveling through the perks happens faster than gaining rep. It's most likely that your guild will be level 25 a fair bit before you have a chance of being exalted. Granted this experience is based partly on working in the beta when some things (dungeons) did not give guild rep but I think it's mostly accurate.

Very true, and I wanted to add that this also is likely to extend to the prospecting results from those - the gems used for leveling JC in that skill range. I'd expect that they will briefly - maybe for a few weeks - bump up higher when folks are still busy leveling to 85 while others start up their Worgen and Goblins, but shortly after, those should drop in price.

If you want to make some quick gold on launch day, keep a mage in Dalaran. Most of us have our hearths bound there and with the portals being removed, a lot of people who forgot to leave Dalaran earlier will want to get to the old world as fast as possible.
Also, for those of us with level 80 alts also bound there, this quick money maker should be around for a few weeks as people begin to move their alts as well once the initial rush to level has passed.

Have you checked that the Caverns of Time portal has also been removed? If it hasn't, then that portal is very near two of the new zones and less than 12 minutes flight time from both Horde and Alliance capitals.