10.1 Speculation, TSM Groups & Money from Engineering – Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 273

At 3,75g the risk exposure of investing in dust have increased by 2200% compared to last few weeks.

I’ve bought around 1 million dusts for an average of 1,38g since the initial release that they would sell to vendor for 1,5g back in January. But before 10.0.7 even hit, the news of it being needed in the Crests were released.

So people likely have a very large stock pile already which they planned to vendor but with the announcement choose to hold on to.

Then even when the announcement came, the price was often around 1,55-1,60. Which means that buying 100k dust wasn’t really a 100k*1,6 risk. Because you’re assured to vendor at only 0,1g loss. So getting 100k for 1,6 would only be a 10k risk even if the price went to 0. But each gold the dust went up would be 100k gain.
Buying in at 3,75g means that the risk exposure would be 2,25g per each. Or at 60% of invested capital.
So if market gets totally flooded. There will be millions of stock that can compete easily with the current price point.

Especially if the demand lowers a lot if there’s further changes to the recipe. Coupled with how many people who have alts set up for enchanting shuffling already.

With that in mind, if one makes the analysis that demand will outpace all of that. Then it would be a good idea to invest. But there might be quite a lot of stress if the prices tanks.

I’m sad, personally. I enjoy having the regular folks who send me orders every few days. It’s not the biggest money-maker but I was able to get quite a lot of my own potion supply covered through resourcefulness procs and got to feel like I was actually a useful alchemist on the server, helping people with their consumes.

Now it’s just another line on the spreadsheet to try to cancel scan to move on the AH. It’s already hard enough to make the regular pots profitably so it’s going to be even harder to make these ones.

I kinda wish they had kept the rank 3 pots BoP, but let people sell T2s they don’t want. Probably not really a workable plan, but I’m just personally sad because it is something I rather enjoy crafting.

Broadly speaking, there’s four different ways to make gold off of engineering. Two of them are guaranteed to be a pain in the a** with constant undercutting, while the other two are dependent on your server.

Option One: Making profession gear
Green-quality profession gear sells pretty well, in my experience. The mining helmet and bag will sell the most, followed by the fishing rod, tailoring tool, and JC tool. You won’t sell much engineering gear.

However, if you’re on a low population server, or if there’s a lot of competition that undercuts constantly, you may find this isn’t very profitable.

Option Two: Zapthrottle Soul Inhalers
This has the advantage of being pretty easy to get into– you just need to unlock the recipe, which doesn’t take too many points. The problem is that it’s also very server dependent, and sales seem to have slowed down massively over the past couple of months. You may find that you make low profits per sale and don’t make many sales.

Option Three: Parts
The second method involves making parts and trying to sell them in bulk. Now, the problem for someone just starting out is that you need a ton of specialization points to even compete in the market, and you’re very far behind, so it would probably be months before you could sell stuff at anything other than a loss.

But once you’re there, you typically use a multicraft tool and make Greased-Up Gears, Shock-Spring Coils, and Serevite Bolts. There’s a lot of people that post them constantly, so you have to really camp the auction house. Also, the price of materials can fluctuate a lot, especially Rousing Fire, so sometimes you’ll lose gold if you don’t pay close attention.

Option Four: Turning Illustrious Insights into gold
This option also requires a ton of specialization points. You want to get your Skill high enough so that you can use a Lesser Illustrious Insight to guarantee 3* on Tinker: Arclight Vital Correctors or on one of the safety switches (the former is usually more profitable).

At time of writing, a 3* Arclight Vital Correctors sells for 4-5k on NA, while the mats are around 1.8k. It takes 50 mettle to make one insight, which turns into five lesser insights, so you make 2.2k-3k per 50 mettle, plus whatever you get from Multicraft procs (again, use a Multicraft tool). You generally get about 300 mettle per week if you’ve maxed your artisans rep, plus 50 per Dragon Shard of Knowledge you find, so that’s 60k+ gold per week.

The problem is that selling these things is a raging pain in the a**. You will generally get undercut within ten seconds of posting one, and they don’t sell especially quickly. You can spend an hour cancel scanning and only sell one or two tinkers, and when you’re making 30+ of them per week, that means you can struggle to clear your inventory.

This last method was insanely good a few months ago (I made about two million gold in about a month), but by now, it seems enough people know about it that there’s too much competition for it to be as easy as it used to be.

Hey,

Setting a bit of a challenge for myself just for fun.

My idea (may have been done before) is to earn enough gold on a trial account and then buying a token. Obviously it is not that simple…

• $1k RAW Gold cap
• Level 20 cap
• No AH access
• No mailbox access

More points after explanation below…

So I am a druid, I have bought 4 x 14 slot bags from the leatherworking bag vendor in Old Town giving me 70 slots (taking away 2 x hearthstones). By gearing as a Tank I can essentially “Twink” it out by back to back dungeons by instaque.

I have already hit the gold cap, so was thinking I can stock my bags with 70 high value items that I can find throughout the world….. of warcraft (Southpark) then submit a ticket asking for 3 days gametime; this is generally approved from what I have read to allow someone to “see if they want to return” (note: I wouldn’t consider it a fail if they said No and I had to buy a 1 month sub).

Just seeking out some tips and tricks of where to find items of value that can be accessed with a level 20 trial account without the Dragonflight expansion.

I am using addons, in particular TSM so I can see the pricing on the auction house because, you know, trial cant open auction house; rare mob finder; and that is it of mention that I could think of to help with the item point of view (couple of QoL addons).

So far my ideas have been to

• Farm rare mobs (so far its going a bit under OK, just not sure if the rares in Elwin Forrest are the same as in Zuldazar)
• Back to back Dungeons to try and find rare BoE/recipe drops (I’m thinking this is my best bet)
• Solo farming Dungeons (do-able but slow)

From what I can see I can do this on multiple toons so once one is full I can start another.

Other things to mention is I realise I can go to work for an hour and just buy a sub (I already sub, I’m using an old separate account to try and work this). This is purely for fun and to see if WoW can actually be free.

Any tips/tricks would be appreciated, plus I’ll use this thread for progress updates if anyone is interested in the progression. Should be fun 🙂

So far (including $1k gold cap) I’m sitting at around $12k in less then 24 hours (about 6 hours of playtime beginning at level 1, and getting the druid to 20 and semi-geared, and 2 x other toons to level 10 ready to go).

Setup the Pandaria farm, harvest ores. Get transmute spec on an alchemist, transmute ghost iron to trillium and trillium to living steel. You need a stack of these (sold at a discount) to buy a token. Since you can’t buy herbs, you’ll need to gather them to get xmute spec (takes a range of classic herbs). Since you can’t trade, you’ll then need to drop herbing and pick up blacksmithing to smelt ores.

Farm unlocks at level 15, do it on as many alts as you can stand the grind for. You can also mine but you’ll need spirits of harmony to transmute to living steel off CD.

Perhaps not the fastest way, but if you want to grind it out, you can cover a subscription fee this way, and once the setup is done, you just have to login for daily cooldowns.

You can also expand out to the garrison. The big ticket items from there are the pets (herb shack, rare drop from level 2 or lower mines, menagerie, engineering hut), savage blood (use stables to get more), holiday events (spider boss, Christmas loot), archaeology fragments (mission table) and card of omens – for this last one, just keep stacks of war paints and make/flip cards once subbed.

Edit: some more:

• another place to look for big ticket items is expansion patch hub zones. With Chromie time, you can do stuff like the Argent Tournament to get pets to sell. Use /2 to sell them at a discount for quick sales. You can have 3 of each pet, so you can hold these for sale without taking up inventory.
• Holiday events also have pets and mounts you can sell.
• Darkmoon Faire is another hub for stuff to sell.
• Legion archaeology quests rotate and one of them rewards a grey worth several thousand gold, the tiara one. Unsure if this stacks.
• Pet Dungeons have rare, valuable pets you can sell. Talk to Breani in Legion Dalaran to start.
• PVP will let you save up honor to buy marks of honor, which can be used to buy recipes to craft for transmog.
• Legion mission table drops some things you can resell, most notably the tournament favor which sells for like 150k. Takes a lot of setup work, though.