So I'll apologize now if this has been brought up and I just missed it. Yes, I have read the entire thread, but after 90 pages things start to get blurry in the head

The question: How do you make money as a BS?

I make my money via JC prospecting, skinning, Cooking (spicy talbuk) and Dailies. I like changing it up to keep things interesting. I recently bought my epic flyer and I'm feeling good. However, my roommate, who has been playing as long as I have, has never broken 1K gold ever. He has mining and blacksmithing. I know you can make money with mining, but really, how does one make any kind og money with BS?

Thanks in advance.

edit: Swapped skinning and LW. Stupid me.

Unless you have rare patterns there isn't really any way to make money with BS on a sustainable level.

You could try making/selling sharpening stones, maybe weapon chains and maybe some of the resist gear from rep (although this isn't exactly a hot seller) but aside from that, I'd say most of the people that level BS are doing it for the weapons, rare items, or BoP crafted items from SSC+.

Stop using hourly rates when something is (a) unsustainable, (b) unpredictable or (c) not competing with other activities (and thus lacks opportunity costs). It adds nothing to the discussion and is not even a correct use of the metric.

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As far as making money as a BS...you normally won't, unless you have BoP epic patterns. I did good business in Khorium when TBC first came out and people wanted paladin plate for S1 Arena (paid for my 350-375 leveling pretty nicely), but there is very little demand for anything other than Red Belt of Battle right now.

Hard Khorium Battlefists look promising, but get thee to Sunwell or you ain't getting the pattern.

For BSing I craft weightstones and sharpening stones for people. That's really about it. Rarely I will craft someone an arcanite/adamantite/eternium rod but again that is a rare case.

I've noticed a very strange thing on my server today, prices of pretty much every usable good have gone up through the roof, and we're talking spikes of around 50 - 100% of primals, herbs, ore, enchanting mats, nethers etc etc.

While I understand that with the new dailies the amount of money on the server increased, and thus the prices for many items will rise, I don't really get how come prices on so many items jumped by such a huge margin over-night ( everything was 'normal' yesterday in the evening when I was logging off ).

Is it a case of someone with an obscene amount of money trying to control the whole market or is there something that I'm missing ?

On my server, in retrospect, the right position to be in the day before the patch was to have all of your cash invested in primals.

Primal Life and Primal Air have almost doubled. In addition, inflation certainly is very noticable. Where do we think prices are going from here? Are 20g Primal Life and 30g Primal Air sustainable?

I think people are going to keep doing the new dailys, if nothing else up to the reputation level they are aiming for.

Its a difficult decision right now, determining whether I should be buying up all the primals I can now because prices are going to keep rising or whether prices are going to stabilize soon. I wonder when the professional farmers are going to decide the best gold/hr they can make is farming primals, which very few "normal" players want to do.

Edit: In response to the poster above me, Uther has had very consistent upward pressure on the price of all kinds of crafting materials (Primals, leather, etc) other than enchanting materials since 2.4. Arcane Dust and Planar Essence are hopeless for selling at a profit now, I suspect because of all of the free greens from the dailies.

Illusion Dust, GEEs and LBS net substantially more on my server than Outland chanting mats, so quick trash/easy first few bosses in Strath for DEables have yielded good profits to me. I'd say on the order of 100-200g/hour on my mage (though it helps to be able to AoE down the trash packs even with 2-3 elites).

The real reason we should have seen primals as the right market is the number of primals required by the vortex belt patterns: 10 to 20 each. I don't think anyone brought this up as motivation though. Hind sight is 20/20, I guess.

I made a tidy profit off of about ~250 void crystals I had banked up for 2.4

Haven't even seen the big spike yet. When the badge vendors come out primal life (healing enchants, spellthreads) and fire/manas (spell dmg enchants) are gonna sky rocket.

In the mean time Primal Manas seem to be pretty low as lots of people get motes from the daily quests. I've already made some decent cash simply buying up manas & nethers and selling spellthreads as the price for a Spellthread hasn't dropped much yet. I think investing now in a reasonable stock of the various Leg enchants (tailoring & leatherworking) while Primal Nethers are so cheap will probably do ok come Badge day.

I think that this factors in too; I usually get 3 or 4 greens in addition to the SSO bags. Dust on MG has been low for a while now though.

I'm curious about selling LPS. I've been selling stacks of four for 108g (27 each) since before 2.4. Who is the one buying these? They do not always sell the first time, but after a relist or two someone buys them. I'm no complaining, just wondering what would drive someone to scroll through 2 pages of 20-25 each LPS and pick mine? So raise your price and be patient! :P

The snatch evaluator in auctioneer has become my friend too. I set it up and run my normal herb/ore/primal searches and don't even have to pay attention to anything, just click yes if the addon tells me to!

My next venture is buying darkmoon cards for the fair, I have found I can make a lunacy deck for 450ish and probably sell it for 1000 when the faire is in town. We'll see next week if this works or if I have a lunacy deck for my hunter to grind with.

I'm interested to see how epic gem prices will react to the badge vendor, I honestly expect to see the prices go up from the pit they are currently in (~200-400g) since everyone will want them for their shiny new badge epics. That being said, with so much stuff to spend badges on, I see vortexes rising back up to 300g or whatever the gem equilibrium ends up being (since they cost the same amount).

Something very interesting about this is, it's not going to hit every server at the same time. Those of us on the slower servers can observe what actually happens on the faster servers, and plan accordingly. In fact, I'm tempted to set up an alt on the fastest servers just to monitor their auction houses for changes.

On my server I still see Nether Vortex's around 300-400g. Do others see this? That puts Badges at a floor value of 20g to 27g. Is it just that badge farmers on my server are short sighted, or do you think this will maintain? If so, that means that the gem vendor will sell gems to people for the equivalent of 300-400g, which wouldn't actually drive down the price of badges at all.

Primal Nether Versus Nether Vortex.

I remember reading a while back where people were compairing the fact that primal nether cost 10 badges and vortex cost 15 and we using that to make the argument that if primal nether are say 100g (which is much higher than people are reporting) then a vortex shouldn't necessarily be any more than 150g (which is much less than anyone seems to be reporting. So I was just interested in revisiting this discussion.

On my server atm, primal nether are around 60g +/-20g and nether vortex are 200g +/-50g. The main reason that I can see for this is the there must have been a ton of people around with primal nether sitting in their banks, and once they became BOE they are unloading them into the market. Whereas, with the nether vortex, almost no one had these stocked up and thus the whole market of vortex is driven by people turning in their badges. Thus, I imagine at some point (probably when the badge vendor opens, certianly when S4 starts) the extra primal nether will get used up and they will rise to meet the G per badge that the vortex are currently at ~ 13g/badge. Though, they will probably never quite even out as there should always be a slightly greater supply of primal nether from people running heroics, whereas, pug SSC and EYE runs are pretty rare... On the other hand, I think people also have a somewhat irrational aversion to turning in badges for primal nether, whereas, even if the G/badge were the exact same, they would not have an aversion to turning in nether vortex-which seem to be a much more acceptable turn in for badges.

Judging the need for Primal Nether in the future...

First, I was just curious for how many classes are there legs from the sunwell badge vendor that you would expect a lot of people to pick up?

I know as a rogue, I don't think I've heard a single thing about people going to pick up their rogue legs from the vendor when it opens, but maybe that's just because I'm slightly beyond the badge vendor in progression.

Second, other than leg enchants of all sort, what other uses will Primal nether be put to when S4 goes out? All I can think of is the rarely used surefooted enchant.

Part of what I was thinking was also that the current disparity between primal nether and nether vortex is short term. So yes, nether vortex will most likley always be more valuable, but the degree to which they are different now is not a long term difference I don't think. Rather, it reflects the fact that Primal Nether have been and always will be easier to obtian, but it is only recently that they could be be released into the market.

I still maintain my target price of 200g for Vortex as well. At any rate, if you want to short vortex sales (ie. make money if they drop in price), your best bet is to buy a bunch them with badges now and sell before the market crashes, then use the cash to buy the gems you would have otherwise spent badges on once the market stabilizes.

By the way, the comparison of nether to vortex price is completely meaningless. Most primal nethers are produced from running heroics and almost none from badges. The reverse is true of nether vortex. You can't estimate a nether at costing 2/3rds of a vortex expressly because that's NOT where nethers come from. Right now nethers are at 25 to 30g on my server, which I think will be the stable price. Maybe 35g.

Obviously there are huge server differences, but I honestly can't imagine that the market on primal nether's is anywhere close to settling since they've been made BOE. That is, even though people are continuing to run heroics in the mean time, I think the influx from that is only a small portion of the flood that is still flowing out of people's banks since the BOP dam broke.

Also the comparison is not completely meaningless because they are equivalent in at least one respect. It is true that you can't turn them back in for badges and they are coming from different sources, but for example, when S4 comes out and suddenly everyone and their little brother wants new leg enchants and the price of a primal nether sky rockets, the fact that they CAN be purchase from badges as well, does provide at least a small braking force against insane price increases.

Vortexes have been going on my server for 200-250g, while nethers are 60-80g. Price for nethers has been increasing slowly (was about 50g on patch day) though people often advertise cheaper nethers to unload in bulk. Vortex price hasn't really gone changed since the patch hit, though supply of nether vortex on AH is slowly decreasing and there's often buyers in Trade looking to buy them.

As for the demand for Primal Nether, the Sunwell engineering, jewelcrafting, blacksmithing and leatherworking patterns for BoP items require 4-9 of them.

I don't think it's irrational at all. You said it yourself. Most people still don't have access to nether vortexes outside of badges. And even if they do they will have to face the possibility of rolling against 25 people to get a vortex vs. 5. Not to mention a nether is a guaranteed drop in any heroic instance. The only guaranteed vortexes are off Vashj and Kael, which are still well beyond the capabilities of most guilds. You can easily spend hours clearing SSC or TK and not see a single vortex. Happened to us plenty of times when we were still running them.

Then you have to take into account the loot that can be crafted with vortexes vs. nethers. With vortexes you are looking at Dragonstrike, Stormherald or Belt of Blasting which last until you until black temple, 1850 arena rating and sunwell (respectively).

With nethers you can get some tier 5 quality boots from the boe patterns but mainly you're still looking at tier 2 crafted weapons, spellstrike, leg armor and tier 4ish LW/BS plans which are not better than badge rewards for the most part (especially the upcoming badge gear). So why spend badges to make gear that will be inferior to what you can buy with the same badges in a couple weeks?