Two of the things in WoW I've had the most fun with well making alot of money at the same time were solo farming DWG for EoS (pre-tbc) and solo farming the 12 orcs in BT before Teron. Obviously neither of these is profitable anymore so I guess what I'm wondering is if there is something similar to these out there right now, a mob or mobs that are very challenging to solo and provide a good profit. I realize gaming the AH may be more profitable but I find it kind of dry personally, I'd rather hunt for my profits even if I won't make as much. And I'm not talking like farming primals (i.e. retardedly easy mobs over and over again). The closest thing I can find right now is basically solo Strath runs but I'm wondering (especially since 2.4 is going to make people even better geared and open more possibilities) if there is anything else out there I'm missing (soloable or hell even duoable) that are profitable challenges?
Two of the things in WoW I've had the most fun with well making alot of money at the same time were solo farming DWG for EoS (pre-tbc) and solo farming the 12 orcs in BT before Teron. ...
See prevoius post - Gazhranka. We 3manned it and sold the book for 1500g. I will try to 2man it next time :-).
So by your own math you are pulling in around 1000g an hour and 30,000g per month. In 3 months, you clear ~100,000g. Out of curiosity, what's your gold balance?
Well the hourly figure is deceptive, because you can't do it for 2 hours a day and make twice as much; you're capped by the size of the market. I would realistically say that I pull in around 4-6k/week, depending on how open the market has been. I just bought an epic flier and skill last week and am back at 10k liquid with maybe 20k floating in the AH assuming everything gets a bid (which it won't, for awhile). I try to keep at least 5k liquid at any given time to leverage good deals on big ticket items.
Does anyone think that Server progression can affect economies in different ways?
The economy of our server absolutely tanks during the weekends, this includes everything from enchanting mats, lw mats, JC mats to even elixirs and potions. By the time it recovers from it its Tuesday and if there was a abundance of it even Wednesday. Not much time in there to actually take an advantage of the AH.
This is in contrast to some other servers where the economy actually picks up during the weekend as it is when I assume more people raid, do instances, etc.
Exodar is one of the newer servers, we only just had our first Illidian kill. I don't know if the general AH playing applies to my server.
Does anyone think that Server progression can affect economies in different ways?
The economy of our server absolutely tanks during the weekends, this includes everything from enchanting mats, lw mats, JC mats to even elixirs and potions. By the time it recovers from it its Tuesday and if there was a abundance of it even Wednesday. Not much time in there to actually take an advantage of the AH.
This is in contrast to some other servers where the economy actually picks up during the weekend as it is when I assume more people raid, do instances, etc.
Exodar is one of the newer servers, we only just had our first Illidian kill. I don't know if the general AH playing applies to my server.
I would tend to guess YES based simply on Supply an demand/server population =your client base.
Our server behaves similarly to Exodar, but there is probably an exception: Weapons and Armor. These tend to sell only on the weekends due to the increased player base.
Buy materials (and underpriced items) on Sat / Sun... Sell products during the week.
Last comment relates to the first--about setting prices and undercutting. There is a lot of very upscale Econ Major-sounding talk on this board about the fiscal horror of undercutting by too much, how it hurts everyone, how people who undercut by a lot are the scum of the universe. These people often talk about supply and demand but don't really acknowledge how demand is variable and inversely proportional to price! Almost everything sold in the AH or trade channel is a "want" item, not a "need" item, and it's easier to justify sating a want when the cost is lower. The market for Runecloth at 2g a stack is waaay bigger than the market for Runecloth at 3g a stack. Does that mean that people won't spend 3g for the stack? No--some people will. Many, perhaps. But for every person who does, there may be another who'd jump in at 2g. Those drastic undercutters are doing more than pissing off the established sellers for that item. They're also widening the market--enticing a much wider pool of players to bid and buy. This is what I did with shells and arrows: when I first began listing at 1g50s/stack and less, all the people who'd been listing for 3g and up for months began sending me ingame mails attesting to how they had been able to sell 10 stacks every day at 3g each and I should too because people will buy. And I thought, "well some people might, but I'd never buy it.... I'd buy it for 1g50s each though, and it appears that I can craft and sell it for that and still make some profit so why not try to target someone like ME rather than a fictional well-heeled buyer whose existence my competitors were attesting to?" It's worked out very well for me in my one small niche, and I'd like to throw this out as a consideration to others that sometimes undercutting does more than irritate the incumbents. Sometimes it doubles or triples the size of the market.
While I largely agree with what you're saying (the Wal-Mart vs. Target type situation), there is one significant exception that comes to mind: items that come from a cooldown. I've sold a lot of Primal Mooncloth in my day, and it bugs me when people drastically undercut. Who cares about expanding the PM market, because the supply changes only gradually, if at all (yes, more and more people get a toon with tailoring high enough for it, but people also drop off the market and stop making it every cooldown for the profit). If we've got a solid market at 40+g, then someone starts posting 2 every 4 days at 30 each, more people are going to see that and start posting their 2 every 4 days at 30, then everyone will expect to buy at 30.
As for your example, I'm not sure how much it costs to make the shells, but I'll use 1g for easy math. If a stack costs 1g to make and others sell 10 per day at 3g, you need to sell 40 stacks per day to break even. So yes, you may be expanding the market and getting more actual sales, but they're still making more money (until you've pulled the market itself down and everybody is only making that .5g profit, and that's what is ticking them off). But that's just the Wal-Mart way... minimize profit per unit and maximize units.
And I was SO not an econ major... I got B's in the 2 econ classes I took and didn't learn a single thing beyond supply and demand
As for your example, I'm not sure how much it costs to make the shells, but I'll use 1g for easy math. If a stack costs 1g to make and others sell 10 per day at 3g, you need to sell 40 stacks per day to break even. So yes, you may be expanding the market and getting more actual sales, but they're still making more money (until you've pulled the market itself down and everybody is only making that .5g profit, and that's what is ticking them off). But that's just the Wal-Mart way... minimize profit per unit and maximize units.
This is very similar with other smaller items, and lately I have been seeing it with larger items too. Items like the first aid / cooking books regularly are marked up 200-400% of their value, and every now and then someone will come in and post about 50 or so at a very minimal price increase, often they will lose money after the AH fee. I just list a few at a time to minimize the chances that I get screwed by this.
And going hand in hand with people not realizing that farming for money and then using money to buy what they want is more effective than farming materials for the item they want, people also seem to be ignoring the fact that selling an item for less than the composite costs is loosing you money, even if you farmed the materials yourself.
On an unrelated note, netherweave cloth seems to be up a bit, and selling netherweave bags has been a decent money maker for me lately. 5 gold used to be the lowest I would consider listing at, and with tens of thousands of pieces of cloth, I wasn't worried too much about the relatively low margin. Apparently someone else was, and the bag prices have steadily risen to upwards of 9 gold, which puts a much nicer margin of ~5.5-6 gold per stack of netherweave you buy @ 3 gold.
There's no real group of elites that one could farm effectively enough for it to make a decent income.
You could duo farm the Blood Elf Tier at the Black Temple quite effectively as a team though.
Actually, these aren't exactly elites, but I usually duo Legion Hold when I'm in the mood for it - with a Holy Paladin. There's absolutely zero downtime, except to clear our bags. The reason I opt to duo rather than just solo it (which I very well could, mind you - with minimal downtime, too!) is because of 2 reasons: firstly, the obvious healbot/buffbot role that the Paladin plays, much like in the Hearthglen/Tyr's Hand days. Secondly, and most importantly: looting.
I noticed my gold/hour goes up by ~30% (even though the cash drops are split between two people!) because I don't spend half the time looting. Both as arms and as fury, I effectively 2-3 shot these mobs, often times a Victory Rush + Auto crit will kill them. We're looking at 3-8sec (worst case) kill time per mob. Even with auto loot on, thanks to the awesome server lag client lag, retargeting, and misclicks, you're looking at 2sec to loot, I'd say. That's a considerable amount of time wasted if you compare it to how fast you're killing things.
The way we go about it is basically, that we both clear our bags prior to heading to LH, and my Paladin buddy loots absolutely everything. Once his bags are full, he trades me everything as quickly as humanly possible (hooray for right click trade window filling) while I'm still killing things. He then catches up as good as he can on looting the stuff I killed while he was trading me the contents of his inventory, and we carry on until full again, at which point we Vendor & Mail everything out from Wildhammer (Crusader Aura makes this flight a breeze.) We mail everything to the same bank alt (taking turns with whose bank alt we're mailing things to) and split things later to cut down on time.
We DE all the greens (excluding certain high-priced weapons which occasionally are better vendored) and prior to the recent LPS price decrease, would turn all of our Netherweave into Netherweave items or Arcanoweave Bracers for further DEing. At LPS prices of 30++ gold a piece up until about a month and a half ago, this made for absolutely obscene profits.
We actually gave it a shot running 2dps/1heal for Legion Hold farming at one point as well because I started getting annoyed with the too slow respawn times/travel times (having to intercept more often than every 15sec, and switching to battle stance making me lose all my rage, thus slowing my kill speed.) Results were quite amazing, since it seems that Legion Hold has a weird spawn mechanic in which at least 3-4 mobs are forced to be spawned at any given time - the faster they're killed, the faster they respawn. What we did is we had a rogue handle the far right pillar (looking toward the Elite's spawn point), weaving in to the center to kill mobs spawning there, and me doing the same on the far left (allowing me to pick up the Elite and kill it quickly to not have to continuously dodge it.) Respawn speeds were so absurd that our Paladin physically couldn't loot as fast as we were killing, running circles between our two spawn spots, throwing a holy light every 2-3 passes to top us off. Added bonus of this approach: 1/3 less vendor runs.
I suppose a Shaman might boost DPS a bit more, but with constant totem re-dropping, that might just slow down looting speed - plus, the mobs pretty much insta-die anyway, so I hardly think it's neccessary. Also, I didn't think of Crusader Aura when we went to try this out at first, but it definitely made the vendor runs less obnoxious; my biggest problem while farming is getting distracted or bored, and vendor runs do exactly that to me. As long as I can put on loud music and repeat a mindless routine I can keep myself going for quite some time, but if something throws me off, it's over.
Results were quite amazing, since it seems that Legion Hold has a weird spawn mechanic in which at least 3-4 mobs are forced to be spawned at any given time - the faster they're killed, the faster they respawn.
From what I can recall, there are certain areas and mobs in TBC that are flagged for dynamic respawn. This was painfully obvious in the first few hours of TBC, when the fel orcs in Hellfire around the cannons would sometimes literally spawn in faster than you could loot the previous body.
There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake
I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai
Yeah, I seem to remember that aswell - and you can definitely see it in action. However the thing is, usually its a fairly large population of mobs and a low "force respawn" value as far as I can tell - i.e. having 60 of the same mob spread all over the zone, if the total number drops below, say, 5, it forces a respawn instantly. Obviously that's not going to cause ridiculous speed farming since you can't possibly monitor all spawns at once, and since you'd have to travel too far anyway - but since Legion Hold has all of 14 (4 per column, 2 pats iirc) spawns right next to eachother, and a minimum that seems to be 3-4, you can imagine why that spot is so amazing.
Finally, I can make a contribution to this thread. We just killed the fishable boss in ZG and he dropped the polymorph book. This takes maybe 30 mins top (travel + kill) and you can gain a lot of gold from it. The last book they got sold for 1,8k in the Alliance AH.
We did this with a 3 man group, so if it sells around that, it's a nice 500-600g profit for a little work.
Paladin/Warrior can easily duo it, just stand on land near one of the idol/stone structure in such a way that you won't be punted (e.g. get your head under something).
But the book isn't a 100% drop rate. When you do get the book though its ~ 2,000g on Dragonblight.
P.S. me and some guildies periodically do book/mount/idol runs still =p
Paladin/Warrior can easily duo it, just stand on land near one of the idol/stone structure in such a way that you won't be punted (e.g. get your head under something).
But the book isn't a 100% drop rate. When you do get the book though its ~ 2,000g on Dragonblight.
P.S. me and some guildies periodically do book/mount/idol runs still =p
I was thinking of trying to 2-man it with a druid and my priest, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to get to him (it's been a while since I've seriously worked ZG). It seems like a bear and a tree would have the easiest time... just stealth there, clear the one group and start fishing, though I could be wrong.
I was thinking of trying to 2-man it with a druid and my priest, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to get to him (it's been a while since I've seriously worked ZG). It seems like a bear and a tree would have the easiest time... just stealth there, clear the one group and start fishing, though I could be wrong.
Nah, you don't have to kill anything. Especially if you bring a priest, just mind soothe. The only thing that will attack you is going to be fishes in the water, but they can be evaded and they really don't hurt (~200-300 damage a hit on my priest, my renews rick for 1100 every 3 seconds).
But youre kind of missing out on the additional benefit of the paladin. Judge Light and start meleeing too. Gahz'ranka has a lot of hit points, but his melee is weak and his only damaging attack is the punt.
Last comment relates to the first--about setting prices and undercutting. There is a lot of very upscale Econ Major-sounding talk on this board about the fiscal horror of undercutting by too much, how it hurts everyone, how people who undercut by a lot are the scum of the universe. These people often talk about supply and demand but don't really acknowledge how demand is variable and inversely proportional to price! Almost everything sold in the AH or trade channel is a "want" item, not a "need" item, and it's easier to justify sating a want when the cost is lower. The market for Runecloth at 2g a stack is waaay bigger than the market for Runecloth at 3g a stack. Does that mean that people won't spend 3g for the stack? No--some people will. Many, perhaps. But for every person who does, there may be another who'd jump in at 2g. Those drastic undercutters are doing more than pissing off the established sellers for that item. They're also widening the market--enticing a much wider pool of players to bid and buy. This is what I did with shells and arrows: when I first began listing at 1g50s/stack and less, all the people who'd been listing for 3g and up for months began sending me ingame mails attesting to how they had been able to sell 10 stacks every day at 3g each and I should too because people will buy. And I thought, "well some people might, but I'd never buy it.... I'd buy it for 1g50s each though, and it appears that I can craft and sell it for that and still make some profit so why not try to target someone like ME rather than a fictional well-heeled buyer whose existence my competitors were attesting to?" It's worked out very well for me in my one small niche, and I'd like to throw this out as a consideration to others that sometimes undercutting does more than irritate the incumbents. Sometimes it doubles or triples the size of the market.
I can agree with this to a certain extent depending on the market. I don't really think your average wow player will get a new piece of gear and decide that gems are too high of a price and just not get them. Certain items are "need" items that the average wow player will almost always get unless the price is ridiculously high in which case it's probably an abnormality and not the usual thing. I think you have to find the balance where people won't go somewhere else to get an item. In my experience the average price usually settles around that level anyways
"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"
Paladin/Warrior can easily duo it, just stand on land near one of the idol/stone structure in such a way that you won't be punted (e.g. get your head under something).
But the book isn't a 100% drop rate. When you do get the book though its ~ 2,000g on Dragonblight.
P.S. me and some guildies periodically do book/mount/idol runs still =p
Any particular reason a druid couldn't be substituted in for a warrior?
You can 2 man Gahz'ranka with any combination of Tank and Healer, provided as a tank you wedge yourself under the lip if the statue so that you don't get punted into the air.
He's also solo-able with a very well geared warrior chaining Major Frost Protection Potions, but this is a very risky strategy and killing him in the gear required takes a long time.
All you need with a second person is someone who can heal ~400 Damage every 20 seconds.
But the book isn't a 100% drop rate. When you do get the book though its ~ 2,000g on Dragonblight.
Wowhead lists the book at a 14% drop rate, so if we take the half hour time quoted earlier to do the run, that's an average of say 7 runs per book, or 3 1/2 hrs to get one. If you take two people and get 2000g for the book, that's about 285g per hour, or 190g per hour if three people go for the book. However, ZG resets every 3 days, so on average it would take 3 weeks to get a single book.
I decided to take on Alchemy a few days ago, and after leveling it and discovering some flasks, I got curious as to the profit margins on flasks, elixirs, and potions. After boring myself on paper for a while, I decided to put some stuff in a spreadsheet.
Basicly, you adjust the price of herbs/primals per 20, and the rest will adjust accordingly(I am an excel noob, so there may well be an easier way :P).
Hope some people will find it useful, any input is appreciated.
(Edit: to clarify, the spreadsheet shows the cost of flasks, potions, and elixirs, if you buy all materials)
Don't go transmute, I haven't seen a proc in weeks.
I've seen 2 procs total since they "Fixed it" and also 2 procs the entire time I've had it, which started around Thanksgiving. It is the biggest pile of dog crap in the game. I'm still almost 3 primal mights down from my initial investment.
I've seen 2 procs total since they "Fixed it" and also 2 procs the entire time I've had it, which started around Thanksgiving. It is the biggest pile of dog crap in the game. I'm still almost 3 primal mights down from my initial investment.
I have this stupidly simple solution to transmute mastery: Whatever you transmute, you get 1 additional, everytime.
I've seen 2 procs total since they "Fixed it" and also 2 procs the entire time I've had it, which started around Thanksgiving. It is the biggest pile of dog crap in the game. I'm still almost 3 primal mights down from my initial investment.
And then there is the opposite, the third xmute I did after getting the mastery, I got a 5 x primal might. Random is random, not something to complain about in this thread.
Wowhead lists the book at a 14% drop rate, so if we take the half hour time quoted earlier to do the run, that's an average of say 7 runs per book, or 3 1/2 hrs to get one. If you take two people and get 2000g for the book, that's about 285g per hour, or 190g per hour if three people go for the book. However, ZG resets every 3 days, so on average it would take 3 weeks to get a single book.
And like everything that uses the RNG that quoted 14% could very well entail many many more ZG resets. I I think we did ZG every reset with my pre TBC guild without ever seeing the book drop and two mage friends did ZG for months recently until they got it.
03/18/08, 9:21 AM
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