Dragon Shard Farming & Future Speculation – Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 265

I 100% maxed out the entire engineering profession by farming dragon shards

Initially, I was doing this to get ahead on engineering and max out the skill for crafting bracers and tools. That legitimately made me a lot of gold and was worth it. However I just really began to enjoy shard farming, and I wanted to max out the profession for personal achievements

This took probably like 8 hours a day for the past month and a half. idk exactly but rough estimate i think around 250 of knowledge was Dragon Shards*.

I’ve recently been getting 45-55 a week in the last 4 weeks , I didn’t grind that hard week one since I wasn’t really aware of the implications of dragon shards or how to effectively farm

I build my routes off of the chests that don’t appear on the mini map, like djaradin caches or clan chests. Those are frequently up because they don’t appear on the mini map, and I get the dirt in between them, and shard hop after each route

I shard hop after i finish a route , then shard hop and do the same route. Which zone I do depends on the available quests / world boss that week. Basically whichever zone has the weekly world boss is the one I spend the most time in.

Here are my routes specifically for shard hopping

I’ve made 35-40m gold (I don’t have TSM and I buy stuff so idk exactly how much) with engi since launch, but yeah I could’ve made infinitely more with alchemy or enchanting if I grinded this hard

Initially, I went for the zapthrottle soul inhaler, and after the profits became too slim for it to be worth cancel scanning all day I went into profession tools and gear (bracers/guns). It was mostly a product of being one of the first people there. You can still make a modest amount of gold with crafting orders for profession tools and gear but it won’t be as lucrative as it was when people were still racing to max out skill for those crafts

Probably a bit biased here since i started playing week one and have been grinding, so I’m always ahead of everyone and making gold, but I think the system is pretty great overall. Of course there are improvements to be made with certain aspects, such as better connecting customers and crafters, but I think it’s been a success.

Regarding the dirt/treasure farming, I don’t really consider this part of the profession system, even though it can be used as a main progression method if you’re insane enough. and yea, I love farming the treasures, I’m still doing it even though my profession is maxed, just not as sweatily of course.

*I’ve edited responses to questions in the original thread into one whole post with edits for legibility.

TLDR:
Here’s the link, it finds dragonflight commodities with low quantity that are about to increase in price: https://saddlebagexchange.com/wow/shortage-predictor
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WoW Commodity Futures!
Many of you are familiar with the basics of supply and demand. When quantity bottoms out it means prices will be going up very soon. If you flip and reset items on the AH you are very aware of this.

With this concept the Saddlebag Exchange team is proud to present our “Dragonflight Commodity Shortage Futures” search: https://saddlebagexchange.com/wow/shortage-predictor

Our tool uses the Blizzard API data to track the changes in quantity similar to oribos.exchange. The difference is that we are measuring the rate of change in quantity and using it to narrow down commodities that are likely to sell out in the near future.

Our search also looks at the current price and allows you to find items that have not yet increased in price vs the normal average price!

After prices increase and this is found by the API, many people will jump on the item. Competition will increase making it harder to sell at a high price. Eventually this will drive prices back down.

Our tool lets you get there first to find shortages before they happen and before prices go up! For casual crafters this means you can post a few items at much higher prices than normal with a very good chance they will sell out. For flippers this will find the best flips and resets around!

If you are unsure of an item will increase you may just want to wait and see what happens. We account for this and we also have have a system of discord price alerts build into the search that will allow you to monitor specific items found by our search with the Copy Input Data button you will find after running the search. Using this data with our “/wow price-register” command in our discord you can get an alert via direct message when the price increases.

Discord link: https://discord.gg/836C8wDVNq

You can find more info on our price alerts here: https://github.com/ff14-advanced-market-search/saddlebag-with-pockets/wiki/WoW-discord-price-sniper-and-spike-alerts

FYI with the same alert system we also offer regional monitoring of items on local server markets for all of you who like to flip the “Design: Elemental Lariat”. I’ll make a new reddit post about this feature in the future.

Message us in our discord if you want to try our alerts and we will give you the role with access to run the commands. Our patreon also automatically applies this to your discord user for anyone who wants to support the site and help us pay our server bills.

So I talked about the cooldown cloth in my video on tailoring, and it works quite well, but there are ways to make it even more profitable

Q2 bolts galore
As anyone who has any tailoring alts will know you do end up with a lot of bolts, particularly q2. The Q3 bolts should always be sold on the AH as they are so expensive, and there’s pretty much not a single recipe you can utilize the value on the AH, but for the q2 bolts you have options.

The various ways he talks about expanding on uses are ..

• Bags
• Spellthread
• Optional Reagents

Then he goes further in the full guide to talk about reputation requirements and suggested builds.

Won’t lie not a fan. Up front I was interested – but i’ve lost all motivation for it.

I’m mainly a PvP player – its really all I’ve played for for years. However in SLS3 I really dove down the crafting rabbit hole with JC/Ench and managed to do fairly well. In a relatively short time frame, I was able to profit about 2.5m which was the most gold I’ve ever had. I was having a blast. I found myself logging in just to check my mail and get new listings rolling if even if it was for 15 minutes.

When the expansion dropped, I was pumped to get in on the crafting early. I’ll admit I probably didn’t do enough research to know exactly where to go with my KP but I figured I had a decent plan. I played a bit of beta, watched some videos. Had the gist of it. Feel like I pretty quickly got behind on KP though because I’m not a huge fan of all the nonsense PvE grind i needed to do to get recipes and more KPs. I just want to log in, que up and craft. That being said, I did do some grind. I got to the point I could craft wafting devotion 3 stars with insp procs. Prices were still fairly high at this point. I had 25% inspiration at the time (know it could have been better) so i bought enough mats to craft 5. not one proc. I know thats not an insane chance. I get it. But I really don’t think I enjoy that profit margins are entirely based on RNG – regardless if its inspiration/multicraft/resourcefulness.

I dunno, just after that I really kinda gave up on trying to get KPs and crafting. Even for JC now, going through the gems I can craft even the 3 star ones – mats cost like 980 and the gem sells for 1000. Whats the point? At this point all of my alts are just gathering professions and i have them run loops while waiting for que’s.

I really like how Crafting Armour and Weapons work. I am actually enjoying having to spam Trade Chat to sell my Crafts. I am enjoying interacting with other players and it has actually led me to make a lot of new friends in the game. Overall that has created a really positive experience.

Explaining Inspiration rates to people all the time can get abit frustrating, and a lot of people don’t understand how it works (or even want to know). And it can be embarrassing when your 40% inspiration rate takes 7 attempts to Proc.

Crafting Consumables though is horrible. The new crafting systems for consumables has taken away any chance of being self-sufficient for the sense of saving money, unless you invested in it from the start. However the trade off is, there are always cheap consumables available if you’re looking to save money.

I did make a lot of gold early on with Enchanting, selling Sophic Writs R3s until the buffed the Titan Orb drop rate. But by that point I was stinking rich already, so didn’t mind so much. As I said earlier, I am really enjoying the interactivity that comes with Crafting and selling armour now, I have barely looked at my enchanting recently.

The main improvement is to add a Catch up mechanic for new players/alts for Knowledge points. Maybe increased Dragonshard droprate up to a certain level. I don’t think a new player should be completely caught up in 1 week, but maybe after a month, they’re nearly up to speed with everyone else.

Also 1 Talent respec in the first week would have been nice.

I like it but it needs much improvement in a couple of key areas.

• Trade Chat is not sufficient to conduct business. Trade chat, by default, isn’t searchable, persistent or filterable.
• Transparency. The system is wide open to scam behavior. You have no way to confirm what inspiration, resourcefulness or even skill level of the crafter. It just feels bad to be forced to completely trust people.