This week we look ahead to Classic Season of Discovery and some simple ways to get ahead with some starting gold. We also take a look at a couple of items that have hit new highs with the release of 10.2 and why they are in such demand. Finally, we investigate racial abilities and how they can have a massive affect on profits in Dragonflight.
My name is Samadan and I’ll be your guide through the World of Gold Making!
Early Gold in Season of Discovery
With Classic Season of Discovery launching this week, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some simple things you can do to get early gold.
Level with Skinning – Picking up skinning early on can be invaluable as you can skin beasts that you kill (or others leave) and easily vendor the scraps and light leather for some early silver.
Enchanting / Tailoring Shuffles – There is an easy vendor shuffle you can pick up early on as long as you can pick up Linen Cloth for under . A simple shuffle would be to make Linen Bags and vendor them.
A more in-depth shuffle is to make Brown Linen Robes and disenchant those, use the essences to make wands and the Strange Dust to make Minor Wizard Oil and vendor everything!
I have a video going through my process as I have been doing this in Classic Hardcore for a few weeks now and turned into
Leatherworking Shuffle – There is also a similar vendor shuffle for Leatherworking buying Medium Leather for under and Medium Hide for under to make Hillman’s Shoulders and vendoring those. You do need to be quite high in Leatherworking before you can start this, but it’s easy enough to do especially if you skin as you level.
Warcraft Champion has a great video covering this …
Professions – In general there are several items early on that will be useful to other players. Things like bags, food, potions and armour as it will be limited severely by level as the phases unlock and there will be much min/maxing as players find the greatest items. There is a great guide here for Best Profession Items at level 25
All in all it’s going to be a fun game mode with the levels restricted, so new niches will evolve as time goes on!
Soaring Items for Vast Profit in 10.2
One of the items to come out strong in 10.2 is the Obsidian Cobraskin
Just wondering, what has caused this massive increase? As in, what specific piece of gear is apparently so overpowered that it can justify the materials increasing tenfold?
Similarly, I saw rousing air and rousing frost at 50-55g each yesterday. Is that purely being driven by potions?
As you can see the price has certainly hit a high as it’s in demand and supply is low …
graph courtesy of undermine.exchange
But being BIS alone isn’t why it increased so much, it’s because it’s a BIS item for the top meta DPS specs of this patch: BM hunter and enhancement (other top dps being DH and assa rogue who use other stuff such as toxified).
So you have a MUCH larger proportion of the playerbase playing those classes than before, hence causing a sudden and sharp increase in demand in the new patch and hence shortages and therefore high prices.
TL;DR: 2 of the top5 meta dps have it as their main embelishments
EDIT: and it was indeed also reset twice (for EU specifically) in the morning for the first GV/2nd spark: once from around 8.5k to 12k around 5am at reset, then reset again around 10-11am from 12k to 40k, when they were running out in the entire region.
Another one was the Centaur’s Trophy Necklace which saw a similar rapid hike in price …
Graph courtesy of undermine.exchange
This was due to it being a required component of several BIS items for this season. This goes to show how keeping an eye on the competitive WoW community can be essential as a gold maker.
Manthieus has a great video going through this as a case study …
These markets are obviously fleeting and there is likely much less profit to be had now that the initial rush has hit, but it’s a classic example of those that investigate and speculate ahead of time can potentially reap huge rewards.
Racial Abilities & Professions
Something that has become apparent now that professions have hit the bleeding edge of min/maxing in a competitive market is that how important racial abilities can be for some professions as pointed out by TheLazyGoldMaker.
Personally I think it is a bit annoying that racials has such an impact on professions as an example enchanting, even tho you have maxed out your profession, then you are still not gaurenteed max rank procs because you are missing the +5 skill from bloodelf racials. Even more so since I don’t play horde.
But what anyhow, would like to hear your opinion on this and I’ll link the video below.
One last thing, according to The Lazy Goldmaker, the +5 enchantingskill racial is a 20% gold increase for him on certain crafts.
Getting the right amount of recipe skill has a significant impact on goldmaking, being able to reach the inspiration break point to hit max rank for instance is an important one, or being able to guarantee maximum quality for a given recipe. Then there’s the Hidden skill value break points. If you can get within 5% of the recipe difficulty, you will proc max quality some percentage of the time regardless of inspiration procs. This makes more skill extremely valuable if you can reach the threshold where this kicks in.
It’s an interesting point and demonstrates how far you need to go sometimes to make a profit in highly competitive markets.
So, to make 100x R3 I need to craft 300x without including resourcefulness. Without blood elf I would spend 83gx300 (mats are 83g at the moment) = 25k to sell them at current prices of 300g each or 30k. Include the AH cut and you have a 2k profit.
As a blood elf, I only need to spend 17k so I get a 10k profit.
On topic, I don’t actually see an issue with the racials. In order for recipes to be profitable, there needs to be a scarcity. Otherwise it becomes no different than farming herbs/ore. For over a decade we have asked for professions and racials to be important and now they are and it is great.
This is honestly the best iteration of professions they have had.
One of the things they said they will look into next expansion is Inspiration, so perhaps in the future this will be less crucial. As it stands, having to race change just to be profitable is certainly unappealing and costly for many.
Further Reading
Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord Server.
I hope you found this useful and If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do say so in the comments below..
Until next time, Happy Goldmaking!
Samadan
