It's been a while since I gave an update on my primary and most reliable source of income: the auction house. For a few weeks there, Traveler's Backpacks were a steady source of income. At most there were only 3-5 packs up for sale at a time with most people putting them up for 22-25g each. It was a simple matter to buy out the lowball packs and resell between 28-30g. I consider myself a Traveler's Backpack specialist at this point and I'm able to identify the highs and lows of the market as well as quickly spot good deals for people selling over the trade channel. Over the past few days, the supply of the backpacks on my server has far outstripped the demand and prices have plummeted to 19g. I've decided to hold on to my inventory of 4 packs until conditions improve.
The point of all this is to become a specialist in a few items to become intimately familiar with the ebbs and flows of the market. Auctioneer is a great tool to start building some familiarity with price points of items on your server, but does not replace the human touch gained by specializing in a particular item. I've also specialized in Deviate Fish and Stonescale Eels as I've become a proficient fisherman and sell these items often. The Deviates run from 50s-75s each and the Stonescales are usually 1g each on my server.
A new way I've found to try and get my feet wet with a new item to specialize in is using the broker feature in Auctioneer. By typing '/auctioneer broker X' in the chat window (make sure auctioneer is loaded), where X is the amount of potential profit in silver, I can try to break into a new item market at an attractive price point. Essentially the tool looks at the current auctions and compares the buyout prices to historical buyout prices. If it spots a difference between a current and previous buyout price greater than the amount of silver you specified it will list the item out. I usually go with 1000 as my minimum which would be a potential profit of 10g. Again, this is a powerful tool to spot deals on items you may not be familiar with but beware - previous items recorded by Auctioneer may not have actually sold, or the market demand for a particular item may have dropped since then. The key here is to scan often, and take a risk on new items flagged by the broker feature that you are willing to potentially have to sell later at a loss. Like anything, be smart with your risks and don't invest all of your money on one long shot.
Using the techniques I've outlined in this post and throughout the blog I'm up to roughly 400g with my level 39 hunter and an alternate auction character
on a total of about 8 days of gameplay. At IGE prices 400g would sell for about $35 and with 8 days of gameplay that's $0.18/hour. Looks like I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon. As usual I'm always looking for great new ideas on making money, so post comments if you have any. I'm still hopeful that I can push up the $0.18/hour as a lot of my time up until now was spent leveling my hunter and learning parts of the game. In fact I'll be in that mode for a while until I hit level 60. Only 21 more levels to go!
Monday, May 29, 2006
Monday, May 22, 2006
Efficiency part two: Combat
I'll give a quick warning about this post - it is heavily skewed toward Hunter play as it's the only class I have played extensively. Now that I got that out of the way, let's dive in to some of the combat efficiency techniques I've used to my advantage.
Preparing for battle:
- Before embarking on a mob hunt, make sure you are well stocked. Get into the habit of selling off or banking all your vendor trash or unused items and stocking up on supplies. Buy food and drink so you can quickly heal and refresh mana while out. Fill quivers and pouches with plenty of ammo. Of course, always have the largest quivers, pouches, and bags you can reasonably buy (or better yet find). The last thing you want to do is run out of supplies in the middle of combat and have to run back to town. It really breaks up your groove and slows you down.
Buff discipline:
- Constantly refresh your buffs, whether they are potions, spells, item charges, or whatever. Even when fighting weaker opponents use all your buffs because you'll be able to take them down faster. Obvious stuff, but its easy to lose track and forget.
Takedown timing:
- This one is especially for Hunters - the most efficient way to takedown an opponent I've found so far. First, I send in my pet, cast hunter's mark, and wait until he is right about at the enemy. At that point I'll fire off either a serpent sting (for fast takedown) or scorpid sting (for keeping the damage to my pet low). The idea is that the arrow hits the target just after the pet arrives and 'growls' the target. That way the enemy focuses on your pet and gets slammed with a spell an instant later. When the enemy is very low on health, I do two things depending on if it will run away or fight to the death. If the target is a runner, hit them with a concussion shot when they are about 10% to avoid chasing them down for the final blow. If they won't run then make the final one or two hits hand-to-hand. This saves time as you need to run up to the monster to loot anyway (remember to shift right-click to auto loot). Additionally, it will help level up your hand-to-hand weapon skills along with your ranged skills.
Macros:
- Macros are helpful to simplify some tasks, I especially like one I made to combine the hunters mark and pet attack in to one simple action. Go to http://ui.worldofwar.net/ for a nice collection of macros and other user interface mods to make your combat more efficient. I haven't played around with macros too much, but they aren't too powerful by design as the ability to cast a series of spells with different timing falls into the 'bot' definition, something seriously frowned upon by Blizzard.
As always, I welcome any fresh ideas in the comments - especially combat efficiency techniques of other classes.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Efficiency part one: Power leveling
Like in any good business, efficiency is a key principle in maximizing profits and return on investment. I'd like to share some of the little things that I use to be more efficient that when applied over and over will help increase your profits in the game. Part one will focus on power leveling efficiency. In future posts I will discuss combat and profession efficiency.
Power leveling:
- Quests are often great for gaining quick experience. Pick up all the quests you can in an area at your level range. Often times you are simply required to kill some number of beasts or grab some item off of a mob (which is like a free bonus to grinding). The trick here is to get all of the quests and mark the locations as notes on your mini-map. Use the Cosmos UI for note marking and Thottbot to get quest locations. Once they are all marked, plan a path that will enable you to do a circuit of quests and come back to the town (or towns) where you got them all. The idea here is that repeatedly getting one quest and returning is slow and inefficient, it's better to run from one to another and cash them all in.
- Grinding purely for experience purposes should be done with tightly packed mobs. Humanoid mobs are great for going from one to another as they tend to be the most closely packed. Just be careful not to get overwhelmed and make sure you are always in an area that matches your level range to maximize leveling speed.
- Use the rest system to your advantage. As long as you are not playing Warcraft 24x7 you can gain 2x the normal experience after returning to the game after 8 hours. See this article for more details - the game manual also discusses this subject. The key indicator that you are gaining bonus experience is that your experience bar will be blue. My strategy here is to do all of my questing and grinding when the bar is blue and if I still have time to play, switch over to profession leveling or auction house trading when the bar goes back to purple. If I did the reverse I would not be utilizing the rest system to the maximum efficiency each day. The thing to remember is this: if planning on logging off for 8+ hours, do it at an Inn and make sure your experience bar is purple.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Fishing and herbalism update
As I suspected based on some auction scans the Deviate fish are selling well on my server. So far I've sold 3x 20 stacks for a total of 14g. I ran a few tests at our fishin' hole in Barrens (see previous post) and I can pull up 20 Deviates every 30 minutes. I didn't target Deviate schools (they look like little whirlpools) during the test which would increase the yield significantly. That's roughly 9g per hour. Pretty amazing considering a level 15 armed with nothing more than a rickety 20 copper fishing pole could pull down that kind of cash. I wish I knew about this lucrative method earlier! In any case, this is the most reliable (and boring) gold making method I've seen so far.
The herbalism profession is ramping up slowly. It takes a lot of running around gathering herbs to boost the skill. I'm going to try running an herbalism 'circuit' in the Barrens over the next couple of days to ramp my ability. The idea is to use the herb resource map at WorldOfWar.net and run around a big enough circle so that the herbs will already respawn by the time I hit the start. Rinse and repeat. We'll see how well it works.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Gone Fishin'
Based on some of our reader feedback and my personal observations I'm shifting my professions to more profitable ones. I had leveled up skinning to 225 and leatherworking to 150, but neither of those professions were giving me good returns on my time. Granted, some very high level skins and the top notch leather products sell well (think Dragonscale and Dragonscale armor) at the auction house, but I was just not able to consistently sell stacks of leather and hides for good prices with a near artisan level of skinning. On top of that the few decent leatherworking items I could occasionally sell like Toughened Leather Gloves had expensive reagents which cut into my profits. Time to move on and explore new professions.
One of our readers suggested herbalism and alchemy which, based on some initial auction house scanning, seem to be more profitable at lower levels. Fishing was also mentioned as a good money maker, and it won't even take up a main profession slot! Little did I know that even a secondary profession like fishing could be more profitable than both skinning and leatherworking with less effort and cost.
In Orgrimmar I picked up beginner fishing at the trainer, bought a cheap pole, and started casting away at a murky pond in the Valley of Honor. After about an hour of fishing, using shiny baubles from the supplier near the pool, I was up to a skill of 50. This is a profoundly boring profession - make sure you have something to read or do while fishing. I would just cast and then wait to hear the splash when the fish bit the hook and clicked. I could do this mundane and repetitive task without even looking at the screen for most of the time. I then trained up on apprentice fishing and headed over to the Barrens where I'd heard there were some good fishing holes.
Based on some auction scans, raw Deviate Fish were going for 4g per stack of 20. Wow! Considering you can find Deviates in the pools outside of Wailing Caverns in a low level area like the Barrens this profession definitely seems promising. I fished the pools for a couple of hours, pulled up 45 Deviates amongst other fish, and ramped my fishing skill up to 125. Just for kicks I ate one of the Deviates and it shrunk me down to half size. Apparently they can be cooked into Savory Deviate Delight which can turn you into a pirate, ninja, and other random effects. Guess this is fun for players and they'll pay a premium for it.
In order to get expert fishing, I had to go over to Booty Bay and buy a book entitled "Expert Fishing - The Bass and You" from the fishing supplier there named Old Man Heming. It requires 125 skill in fishing to use. After this I spent a few more hours fishing in Booty Bay to ramp my skill a bit more. I mailed my Deviates and other reagent-type fish over to my alternate character for auctioning, I'm excited to see how quickly I can sell these little morsels.
I'll dive more into herbalism and alchemy in a later post and give an update on how the fish are selling.
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