I´m currently at quite a loss and might need some obvious stubbing... But it seems my server is pretty rediculous. None of the tips here seem to work quite well for me... The crafting methods fail because of demand and supply, and I´m not experienced enough (and willing to take such a risk) to really play the ah.
What I tried is the standart JC Pattern conversion. However the prices for Arcane Dust hover around at 1g-1.20g, essences at 6-7g, prismatics go for 25-26g, ore is at least 30g a stack (and by the life of me, I cannot imagine who would pay that!) and gems range from 25g for a star of elune to around 55g for a ruby, maybe adding 10g for a cut. Primal earths are 3-4g for the most part, Water AND air at 20g and adamantite dust is quite non existant on the ah. Finding cheep greens to disenchant one has to be quite lucky, and green gems can rarely be bought for 50s in case of moonstones and peridots, garnets and draenites are often ~75s, if at all.
I tried bottomscanning with few results. I tried specifically searching ores, gems, herbs, primals fo underpriced auctions... With the result that I´m mostly sitting on my goods in case of lower level stuff I bought cheaply or getting outbid by other players until the potential profit is gone.

Though I´ve read through the first 55 pages of this thread (and of course keeping up to date to the end) I cannot imagine how there´s such large quantity of gold to be made to finally get my herbing twink his epic mount. Now granted, if I resort to farming adamantite myself I might get it done, but with a 4-day-raid schedule and an jc/enchanting twink to level so I am self suppliant that wont happen very often...

What am I doing wrong? I guess I need to analyze the market more, but how is your standard approach to analyzing the market and finding your sweet spots?

Dont worry too much just remember that a lot of people read EJ boards (~560.000 Views on this Thread ) and take up the advices too (especially to become a Jewelcrafter). For example on my Server they start to sell crafted Earthstorm Diamonds for 55G or Adamantite Ore went up to 30G+. So the margin is really tiny now. When this thread wasn't so well known i could sell crafted Earthstorm Diamonds for ~150G and could buy Adamantite Ore for 22G. So you see that it is not easy anymore to make easy Gold.

As a general rule you can try as usual to buy low and sell high. For example check if Adamantite/Gems are during the week more expensive then on the weekend (or the other way around). Else you should try to find a synergy which works for you. You like to farm Netherweave (or you can buy it cheap) and you like to farm Adamantite Ore? Good now you can prospect the Ore and you will get:

- Adamantite Powder
- Fel Iron Ore (convert them to Bars)
- Uncommon Gems
- Rare Gems

Now cut the Rare Gems and sell them. Take the Fel Iron Bars + uncommon gems and make the lvl 62-63 Green Rings and disenchant them. Use the Arcane Dust together with the Netherweave to craft Arcanoweave Bracer (disenchant them for Large Prismatic Shards).
The above one is only an example there are way more synergies than this one. In general it is now way harder to gain a lot of Profit with only playing the AH. It's way more benefitting if you can (and want) to grind any of these Ressources yourself and play then the AH Game.

Would it be wise to stock up with black lotus's? I mean they are going for around 13g atm and with the new changes perhaps one can make some money out of it?

If you want to make money from quests, Netherstorm is the best place for it. I'd suggest not to level up in Netherstorm.

What i did was lvling in nagrand till 68, and in BEM till 70. But i did fair chunk of leveling in instances - cca 50% of every level.

Thanks for the comprehensive advice I´ve been already doing that and am bringing up my own lil bloodelf not to bother other people with 50 rings per day That part is actually a no-brainer and still works, though the profit might end up rather scarce with dust at 1gp... Well, guess until I´ve a better picture of the ah I´ll have to resort to good ol' grinding between arena matches and the like. Lucky me! My main is a miner and I strangely enjoy flapping around farming adamantite :P

However, on a quick login I found that my all of my stacks of Golden Sansam sold for more than 30g each. Thats actually about 25-50% more than terocone or even manathistle go for, quite a surprise. Either I´ve been lucky with someone leveling up an alchemist or I might have found a demand for the heal power elixier...

I doubt it. Though they´re replacing black lotus with fel lotus, I cannot see the use black lotus would have in 2.4. Granted, Flask of Distilled Wisdom - Spells - World of Warcraft MAY replace mighty restoration with spirit/int synergy, but I don´t play caster classes, so I can't comment on that one. Besides that BL hardly has any use anymore. In Addition, adding blinding light and pure death to the illidari mark vendor will kill supreme power.

I made my money in two ways.

1) Level up alts. I levelled a paladin up to 60 in the old world only. I pushed him through the Hellfire Instances until he reached 62, then started doing the quests. He was 66 by the time he moved into Terokkar, and he hadn't touched BEM, SMV or Netherstorm when he reached 70. Doing all the quests in those three zones got me about 4000g right there, and it was actually fun doing it (as opposed to farming/grinding). Obviously that's not a way to make some quick cash, and it's not really repeatable (unless ofc you keep levelling up alt after alt). But if you level one up anyway, it pays off to make sure to take care of some things. Quest only with lots of rested XP. Spend a lot of time in Instances, especially if you're out of rested XP. Don't let yourself be PL'd through stuff by friends on a 70 toon, as too much XP is lost that way. Grind the last 15% of a level here and there. In other words the more quests left at 70 the better.

2) Make money by not spending any. Sounds simple, but that's what I do. None of my alts has an epic flyer, even though I have the cash to buy three of them by now. None of my alts has got any crafted gear. All they've got is greens and blues from quests, as well as the odd drop from an instance run now and then. I personally consider twinking my alts a waste of time, money and effort. My priest is a 375 tailor, but I never bothered to make him his primal mooncloth set. Waste of mats (and therefore money). My paladin is my primary miner. He'd be the perfect ore farmer with an epic flyer. True. But I prefer to just buy the ore off the AH and then go farm the cash killing bloodelves selling the tomes and signets. I may be a tad slower overall, but I don't need an epic flyer for it, saving me 5000g.

While I agree with your first point I don't think you should be overly cheap concerning the distribution of flying epic mounts among your toons.

An epic flyer on a gathering(herbs/ore) toon is a good investment since it almost doubles your farming speed.
In addition it is an investment that doesn't become obsolete over time (opposed to gear). Engine-wise they can't really make the flyers much faster than they already are or you will start missing nodes while farming.

Beside you ARE spending money as opposed to what you claim. You buy ore from the AH. It would most likely take less time to farm it yourself on your paladin (with an epic flyer) as opposed to grind the money by killing mobs. It is better to invest into something for greater effectivness in the future than to sit on your money. If you are saving for something specific ignore this advice, but if you are not, buy your farmer an epic flyer. In the long run you will be able to make more gold.

[EDIT]In reply to Targozha's post[/EDIT]

Firstly, thanks to all for a series of utterly great ideas. As has been pointed out, once an idea hits these forums, its trashed on live within 3-4 days. That said, I'm still making profit from Prospect -> Mercurial > Braided > LPS. Sadly though, Adamantite prices on our server have rocketed to around 30g/stack, and theres really not that much profit in buying off the AH - its getting close to the 3 stacks of Fel Iron being cheaper than 1 of Adamantite.

Previously, I had been hoarding the gems that came from prospects (I keep 10 of each at all times) but the prices for gems have now started to rise - Talasites for 20g through to Rubies for 75.

What is a reasonable number of items to put up at any one time in order to shift them fast enough to avoid undercutting.

Also, given the widespread knowledge of the JC Green rings, has anyone tried ahing the rings as opposed to the resultant dusts - I managed to sell half a dozen Braided chains on the AH at 15% above the price I normally sell LPS for - not too sure if it was a fluke/daft purchaser....

That isnt the situation anymore TBH.

If anything do use netherstorm and SMV to lvl up fast, so you can start to make much more cas thru the 1 billion dailies available.
The simple fact that the daily quest limit will get up to 25 and youll get additional dailies fro PvE and PvP makes it a much better source of income than sparing NS quests. Not to mention you get rep in the process and honor from the PvP ones.

Another thought that occured me today: in patch 2.4 the epic gems will be more readily availible due to the fact that attunements are lifted, rewards from sunwell bosskills and drops from bosses like Mag. Is it really smart to bet on rising rare gem prices for 2.4? I'm really thinking about dropping my gems now in the AH (don't have that many anyways since ore prices on Blackrock EU make prospecting nowadays a pretty unattractive venture) and buying other materials such as void crystalls and scales/hides for leather armor kits (or even the finished product). Primal mana might also be interesting since the spelldamage enchant on legs require it. We had a short but strong rise of its price when 2.3 went live.

Well if you consider the droprates, the need of guilds and the number of people required to get them i dont think theyßll be common anytime soon.
You will at least require 10, rather more ppl to farm any trash that drops them. Now the droprate isn gigantic, and you need several of them, in the right colors, to socket your gear. Not to mention the price you´ll have to pay for the cuts that require Scale of the Sands Rep...

Apart from a few mentions of fairly high level stuff that a lot of people aren't able to even attempt, there hasn't been much mention of farming instances for money in this thread. Has anyone got any experience of running instances with a far smaller group than normal (eg, soloing or duoing 5-mans, or 25-mans with a 5-man party) for money, with gear that's possible to obtain without having been in a raiding guild or pvping for half your life? I'm specifically thinking of TBC instances here, but if any interesting tricks with lower level instances would be good to know also.

(I'd particularly love to know anything that's possible with a holy priest, heh, but, hey, I'm not hopeful!)

Here's my little tip for making money with a tailor - one that's made me perhaps a couple of thousand gold total, so nothing amazing, but worth sharing if you're not already aware of it. (Also this may not be useful on your server, as it works due to the fact that there aren't many people doing it.) It's basically, selling [Satchel of Cenarius], which I put up for 69g bid, 75g buyout, making a minimum of 20g profit per time. I hope noone from my server is reading this.

The recipe is available from Cenarion Circle at Revered (which is ridiculously easy to get now that they've increased rep gains, but easy enough before due to people selling [Encrypted Twilight Text]s on the AH), and takes 1x [Black Lotus], 6x [Runecloth], 4x [Ironweb Spider Silk], and 2x [Mooncloth]. I check the AH every day for all those materials, and will buy any [Mooncloth] I see for 7g or under, [Ironweb Spider Silk] for <= 1.5g, [Black Lotus] for <= 7g (unless I have a massive surplus, as I do right now), and [Runecloth] <= 2g a stack. This makes the total for materials (3 * 6) + (2 * 7) + 7 + (4 * 1.5) = 45g. That's 25.5g profit after the AH cut, but the prices of reagents are much lower a lot of the time, and occasionally I'll put up the price. (When I started selling them, I'd put the BO price at ~140g, but I stopped doing that as I felt it was too much of a rip off!)

This is an example of how I've made most of my money: identifying craftables with reagents available from the AH that for one reason or another have a significant profit margin due to rarity of some sort. Either it's a rare recipe, the reagents are relatively rare, or there aren't many people who can make it (or, not many that [Item not found!]are[] making it at least). Make a list of all everything you need, figure out the highest price you can pay for each and still make a decent profit, and just keep checking the AH. If you can't find the reagents reliably, or the price of the crafted item itself is too low, then don't bother - but there are always a few things where it's possible to do the above. Identifying them is just a matter of patience.

Not any great revelation, just a small contribution to a great thread.

You're a little late to the JC cash cow game. It's dried up quite a bit on servers like yours and mine. While I can get more than 55g for a living ruby, all of the mats for JC craftables that used to convert quite profitably into enchanting dusts, essences, and shards are all selling for significantly more than before. On my server [Primal Earth] and [Eternium Ore] are selling for 200-300% of what I used to be able to get it for, [Adamantite Ore] is up 25%, and [Large Prismatic Shard] is down 16%.

Solution: Stop prospecting and sell your ore and primals at the newly inflated price.

That's the question I have for JCs. On my server, I can sell my adamantite ores steadily at 30g a stack. I don't really follow the prices of all the gems, but I think living rubies are at 70g, stars of elune at 30g. Is there really a profit in prospecting? Because my auctioneer tells me that the HSP for prospecting is actually 22g.

But then the JCs must be still making money or why would my ores keep selling?

It might be that they are losing money, but it doesn't appear like a loss because other profits offset and cloud it. For example, suppose they profit 10g per rare cut and average 1 rare gem per stack. If the break even point is 22g, then they earn 32g per stack and pay 30g, so they net 2g per rare gem. Now this is strictly worse than just buying the uncut gem and gaining a net 10g per rare gem, not even bothering with prospecting. But not everyone recognizes the 2g as a loss over the optimum, so they continue doing it.

However, I suspect that your auctioneer data is wrong and 30g is the break even point. It's probably undervaluing adamantite dust and the uncommon gems.

Don't forget that you can bypass the AH as well! Many people are lazy and/or afraid of it. They hate listing fees and don't like it takes a cut of their profits. If Adamantite sells for 30g/stack on your server, you may be able to make deals with some farmers who'd be happy to COD you stacks for 25g/per and be content taking the lower payout since it's guaranteed and means they don't have to travel to Org/use the AH. If you see an underpriced stack of Adamantite up, that person may be one such person! Buy the stack, but also send them a tell.

Except for the Skettis escort.

/nitpick

This also works well for primals/dust for the JC necks. I was facing 6g primal earths and 15g+ adamantite powder stacks and 4g+ eternium bars. I wasn't about to be paying 25g+ for a neck that I could only DE into 1LPS for around 28g (droppin to 23-25g lately), so I started posting in trade and now have a fairly continuous supply of all my mats at around 15-16g per LPS cost. Easy 10g profit (when they sell, more on that later) and don't have to mess with the AH or fees.

As for the LPS, anyone having trouble moving very many at once? I noticed that my alt is one of 2 or 3 people putting them up at a time on our AH and yet they sometimes sit up there till moments before the 48hour listing is done and the sell...most of the time. Now, granted, not that much new gear is surfacing right now, but we do have new guilds moving into new content so gear is bound to drop that needs enchanting, but mats seem to not be changing.

I'm going to try and store a good 50-60 LPS before next patch and move them for 30g+, but we'll see.

My hunter got to level 70 with little to no rest exp just doing all the quests in each zone as he went.

By the time he hit 70 I had only done 5-10 BEM quests and hadn't even stepped foot into NS and SMV.

So it's possible to level up quickly and still have those zones left over so it's smart to make sure you do EVERY quest in each zone(including dungeons) as you level if you are more concerned with making money than getting to 70 to raid/arena.

Dailies are a nice source of cash but you can only do 10 currently. And all the new dailies that will be opening with patch 2.4 on Sunwell Isle only yield 4-5g in comparison to the current 9-12g price current dailies yield.

In other words saving normal quests is still a faster cash source (And quite a bit less boring) than simply speed leveling to 70 (ignoring instances) and then doing dailies.

The key is figuring out your Gold-Per-Prospect average and establish a profit margin that you want to maintain, which will dictate how much you'll pay for raw materials. Here's a very rough, theoretical example:

Green Gem Average - .25g*90% = .225g/prospect
Blue Gem Average - 40g*18% = 7.2g/prospect
Adamantite Powder - .225g *100% = .225g/prospect
TOTAL = 7.65g/prospect*4 = 30.6g/stack to break even

If you want a 25% profit margin, then you should pay no more than 22.95g/stack for ore (30.6*.75).

This principle holds for nearly every conversion-driven formula. Of course, the key is finding the right market to exploit, which is the fun part =)

Keep in mind that there's no deposit for enchanting materials. I chuckle at the folks who undercut all the enchanting mats by a lot, because I can post things for 10-15% above whatever they post at, with the longest time period, and if they don't sell, just put them back up. Yes, it's more work, and annoying that I've got to move things over and over again, but I'd rather get 26-28g for an LPS after a few days instead of 22-23g for one now.

Well my problem isn't that I'm being undercut, its that I'm literally making more per day than I can sell per day. I may make 6-8 per day on average just buying mats for either arcanoweave or the jc neck at too low to pass up prices and then only be able to move 4-6 that day, sometimes less. Just wondering if people are having the same trouble (I know, what a horrible thing to have, too many LPS) or are finding different/new ways to offload their bulk amounts and still make their profits.

Another tip I've had to learn for myself is: Dont worry about the margin, if it's profitable, it's profitable. Plain and simple. Yes, sometimes putting time into 1 thing isn't as profitable as another, that's different. But like the gem and the LPS market. They've gone down, people's margins are lower so you can't "Get rich quick!" scheme it, but you will still make money. I'm only pulling ~10g per shard in profit (minus time of course), but to me, that's easy money in a market that is almost always viable, and, with the patches coming up, the possibility of an even more lucrative market, I think it's safe investment.