Guildie of mine sells the tanking epic armor kits for 300g, they raw mats AH for about 80g and he sells atleast one per a day. That's 220g for the nether/profit.

See, I think however... this will cause the inflation. People stopped doing netherwing dailies AFTER getting their mount, people will do Shattered Sun Offensive dailies until they hit exalted. 25 dailies cap and reasonable only 10-14 dailies or so available now? That's like 10 SSO dailies sure to bring in money. Even if the influx is only for 2-3 months, that will be 2-3 months of inflation.

I actually had 4 nethers saved up on my mage and decided to make [Runic Spellthread] just buying the primals off the AH and seeing if they would sell for 300g. I wait until I can buy the primals for ~10g each, so it's 100g to just buy the mats and the spellthreads sell in no more than a day. I just used my last nether last night though.

After reading this thread (like many others), I've been inclined to go off and make some money on my own. I had around 1900g from my own doings, like Skettis/PvP Dailies, questing in Netherstorm, etc., but then I decided to go and get mining up to Outland-level nodes.

This definitely made a noticeable difference in my profit - in around 1-2 hours of grinding mining, I picked up a good 5-6 stacks of Fel Iron Ore, 2 Primal Fires, and 5 Primal Earths. Of course, people don't farm for Fel Irons and do most of their grinding on Adamantite (30g/stack on my server), which is very nice.

But I'm sure everyone already knows this, and I have a question to ask :p

Is Legion Hold any good for a non-AoE type character like a Paladin/Warlock/Mage? I respecced Enhancement on my Shaman just so I could come to Legion Hold and quest in SMV at the same time. All the Warlocks died pretty quickly (10-15 seconds tops), but I was wondering if it's even worth it if I can't kill them all at once. My gear is mediocre, with around 17.5% crit and 1000 AP. Thanks in advance.

If the markup per nether is 200g, and I see many people selling their nethers for 50g, why not get other people to craft them for you and just resell for the extra 150g? If they are giving away free money, you might as well take it. Doing so will eventually push up the price of nethers high enough that people will start charging more than 50g each, meaning you'll have a reasonable chance of making a decent profit by selling the crafting directly in the trade channel.

There are many things of value in the game, Gold only being one of them. When it comes to preparing for the expansion, there are several things I plan to accumulate before that day comes:
1) As someone else mentioned, 75K honor and 5K Arena points. Honor is easy to farm if you are opportunistic (Good premades, AV daily, AV weekends) but can be painful if you are trying to grind it alone. Honor carried over from Classic Wow to TBC, and there is no indication they will not carry over into WotLK.
2) All 4 alts at level 70. Leveling from 60 to 70 will not get any easier any time soon. Might as well get it done now and have them all able to go into the next expansion in case I need them.
3) Tradeskills on my alts at or above 370. Being able to craft anything from any profession makes it very easy to adapt to a changing market and allows you to replace other "middle men" with an alt.
4) Epic mounts on alts. I am still not sure how many I want to pay to saddle up, and I may make more informed decisions as more information becomes available.
5) Some starter cash. It takes money to make money, whether it is buying patterns or stocking up on inventory to isolate yourself from price fluctuations, and starting with nothing puts you at a distinct disadvantage. I am guessing 5-10k should be plenty.


I am not sure how many of you actually have any schooling in economics, but if you are reading this and still in college, I would recommend signing up for a class or two, as I am sure you would find it interesting and educational.

Inflation is caused by one of 4 things: a sudden widespread increase in demand, a sudden widespread drop in supply, an increase of the money supply, or a sudden devaluation of the currency.

1) Sudden widespread increase in demand
A real world example would be the California gold rush of 1849. The discovery of gold in that remote region drove many prospectors out to that region, all needing basic supplies. This sudden demand drove up the price of simple things like clothing, food, and hardware up considerably. Often the only ones to strike it rich during this period were not the gold miners, but the general store owners and people transporting the needed goods into the region.

A WoW example of this is when the gates of AQ were first added to the game. Suddenly, there was a heavy demand for a number of things that normally flowed through the economy, such as cloth and metal. This demand drove up prices for those items and caused the price of the items crafted with those things to rise as well.

A similar spike in demand for enchanting materials drove inflation after the release of 2.3.

2) Sudden widespread drop in supply
A real world example of this would be the disruption of gasoline supplies to the U.S. in the wake of Katrina. The damage caused multiple refineries, drilling sites, and ports where foreign petroleum was offloaded in Louisiana to shut down, significantly disrupting the production and distribution of refined gasoline to large areas of the south. This quickly drove up the price of gasoline across the nation. Fortunately, the disruption was temporary as quick repairs were made. Also, the shortage was somewhat offset by the release of part of the national strategic petroleum reserve. These prevented the crisis from having significant long-term inflationary effects on the nation's economy.

I can't really think of any good widespread examples in WoW, but one isolated example is Thorium after the release of TBC. The price here jumped about 100-200% as miners were all busy working their way through outland. Demand had dropped but not nearly as much as supply had, causing a sudden increase in price. The net affect did not affect inflation across the board, but it did demonstrate how a loss in supply drives the price up.

3) A sudden devaluation of the currency
A real world example of this is in nations that are about to lose a war, such as Germany at the end of World War II. Once it becomes apparent that the government that backed the German Marks was about to be dissolved, people no longer wanted the Marks. As a result, people who had money found it difficult to trade that money for goods and ended up paying very high prices for those goods.

I cannot think of anything in the WoW economy that demonstrates this effect.

4) An increase in the money supply
A real world example is the United States housing market over the last several years. New approaches towards lending and some highly profitable investment schemes that involved buying asset backed loans (i.e. mortgages) on margin resulted in conditions where it was very easy to borrow money to buy a home. This sudden inflow of cash into the housing market drove prices up, causing 10-20% annual inflation in the housing market. This was an unnatural state as the rest of the markets around it were only experiencing 2-4% annual inflation. The increase in the Prime Rate eventually caused many of the mortgage investment schemes to cave in on themselves, resulting in margin calls, forced sales of mortgages on the open market, heavy losses for banks and investment houses invested in these schemes, and the sudden loss of available credit now being experienced across the nation.

This is really the cause of inflation that you are looking for with the release of 2.4 and the addition of more daily quests. It certainly happened with the release of the expansion, but not as much since. The essential question is will 2.4 significantly increase the amount of money in the WoW economy. In order to determine that, let's look at how money moves into the economy and how it leaves the economy.

Sources of Gold in the economy. These are things that cause the game to create a new piece of gold that never existed (not just transfer it from one player to another):
1) Gold dropped by mobs
2) Gold rewards for quests (including dailies)
3) Gold received for vendoring items

Sinks of Gold in the economy. These are things that cause the game to destroy a piece gold:
1) Auction House Fees (5% of everything sold on the AH adds up quickly)
2) Epic Flying Mounts
3) Respecs
4) Items bought from vendors (vials, thread, food, water, reagents, ammo)
5) Skill training

What is important to notice here is that most of the traditional ways of making gold really do not actually create gold in the economy, they typically remove gold. For example, if I mine a bunch of adamantite, prospect it, cut the gems and sell those gems to someone on the AH who then sockets them, no gold is created, but the AH does take its 5% out of the economy.

Before TBC was released, most people had epic ground mounts and few people were respec’ing. This left very few gold sinks in the game, and the gold dropped by mobs or gotten from vendors was greater than the amount leaving the system. The slow accumulation of gold caused steady inflation.

When TBC was first released, many people earned a lot of gold by doing quests during the course of leveling. This injected a lot of gold into the system causing a sudden and swift inflation. However, as they started reached 70 and began buying epic mounts, the loss of gold in the system began to cause deflation.

With the introduction of Arena's suddenly a large number of people began respec’ing 2-4 times a week from PvE to PvP specs between raiding days and arena days. This put another huge drain on the system.

Over the last 8 months or so, I would say most prices have been dropping (with the exception of the 2.3 release), and I would blame this on a decreasing money supply in the economy. Dailies have helped this, but I still see a lot of prices dropping as more people get more competitive for a smaller pool of cash. A sudden availability of more quests will certainly not have in instant effect on the economy. It may have a small long-term effect of slowing down deflation, but I don't expect it to change the direction and cause inflation.

Alright, I think I have rambled on enough in this post. If you have questions or want to discuss things further, feel free to contact me on the Titans of Azeroth forum (profile link). Oh, and we are recruiting (5/5, 9/9).

Sounds good. I'm debating between Legion Hold and the Blood Elfs at the Temple stairs. Has anyone done a comparison to see which yields more gold/hour? Perhaps I'll do 1 hour on each today and post results.

I'd say Legion Hold, the main reason being, the mobs are very close to each other, and respawn instantly. The blood elves are all spread out. The drops should be roughly the same. You could also probably reduce incoming damage and thus downtime by shocking shadowbolts at the last second, iirc those elves only cast heal when low hp, so you'd be taking more damage. Now the strength of legion hold is also its weakness. If there's alliance/horde there and they don't feel like sharing, youll get killed, while you can usually farm at blood elves more easily since it's a bigger place. You might want to choose depending on what you're going to use and keep a few armaments/tomes for yourself too. Oh final thing, if you have short attention span and/or tunnel vision, legion hold has a roaming elite that you have to avoid all the time, so well, it might not be the best idea if you get killed often.

It largely depends on your class which area is good for farming. As the mobs you are killing in legion hold are mostly cloth, an enh shaman could largely rip through the mobs. I find it quite irritating to farm legion hold thou as although the respawn is fast , it is hard to gather up mobs for AOE, so I have to resort to single target which isn't as efficient.

Any of the Manaforges in general really, unless there's something unique about Coruu that I can't remember.
Back when I was grinding Scryers rep on my mage, I had about 1100 spell damage, 9k mana, stopped once every 10 min to drink back to full, and spent about 2, maybe 3 fireballs per mob.
I used a combination of single targetting to round them up, and AE'd them down once I had a couple together.
I went from Honored to Exalted in about 15 hours total farming.
I'd say my g/hr was around 160g, factoring in Arcane Tomes, Signets, and greens/grays.
My memory is a bit fuzzy because that was a few months ago, but as with Legion Hold, if you can rip through clothies, your g/hr should be at least 120g minimum.
Its mostly Scryers rep items and greens/grays, and absolutely boatloads of netherweave.
The silver drops on the mobs aren't too shabby either, around 10-20s per if I remember correctly?

I know I'm lacking hard numbers, but that's the best I can do from memory.

On my server (EU:Emerald Dream) I have recently seen a flood of new JCers resulting in cheaper gems and more expensive ore. The word about JC being a cash cow really seems to have gotten out. Anyone else noticed this?
Luckily there seems to be virtually no wasted product from prospecting and I've been making rings to disenchant into dust and essences and some blue items with low material costs for shards.
It may be just the cheap skates on my server but the cheap gems like 13 healing or 6 agility seem to have gone up in value(4-5g each, from 1g) since season 1 gear has been purchased with honor.

Greyve, uncommon* gems are cheap because the supply is oftentimes far too plentiful to control.

Primal Air (as an example) is (was?) usually so rare that constantly patrolling the AH will let you control the supply: List your Primals at the price you want, buy all the ones sold by different people and relist them at your own price.

You can't usually do this with uncommon ones because there's so many - try selling a Teardrop Blood Garnet at 4g with half a dozen other Teardrops at 1g, and another dozen uncut Garnets at 75s. It's just not going to work.

Trying to control the Blood Garnet market is more difficult as well, given the relative ease with which more Garnets can be introduced into the world.

*EDIT: I use the terms "uncommon" and "rare" to describe gem quality, as to not confuse them with literally green color gems (matches blue and yellow sockets) and blue color gems.

Simple: They don't mind the loss in profit margins but they do want to unload their goods that much faster.