It's been a very busy RL week. Raiding decisions got put on hold while I dealt with stuff. Not fun stuff. Stuff that ended up making me VERY sleep-deprived.
Sadly there was almost no wow. Or SC2. I have the lovely box but haven't had the time or brain energy to install and start playing it.
So instead I'm going to talk about AH dabbling. I do dabble, really. I have some enchants that I stick up from time to time, I pay some attention to raw mat costs, and I try to post my cut gem every day, but I don't take it seriously and I don't attempt to hit the gold cap. I generally try to have enough to buy epic flying or other things as I want them, but that's about it. I figured I'd talk about nice dabbling opportunities, ones that don't require a huge outlay of gold or time but do decently well for me. You'll need a max profession for most of these.
1. Gem flipping. This only works if you have access to a max jcer with a nice selection of epic cuts. The uncut gems can vary wildly in price, so I'd get a sense of the market before jumping in. But really all you do is...
a) purchase cheap uncut gem (epic)
b) find best epic cut (this may not be the one that is the highest price. Some of the more popular cuts, like a runed cardinal, will be slightly cheaper but sell better.)
c) cut gem and list on AH
d) profit!
The profit here can be rather nice. I picked up about 8 ametrines for 60g each (that's quite cheap for my server), and am gradually cutting and reselling from 100-120g each.
2. Prospecting. I use Wow Prospector to determine if it's worth it or not. Since I also do my jcing daily, even if I can't sell the green quality gems I'll eventually use them, so not a loss either way.
3. Transmutes. Because of all that prospecting and/or mining, I tend to have gems lying around. One blue gem + one eternal = one epic gem, with the chance of multiples since my alchemist is transmute spec'd.
4. Inscription. I make vellums, resell inks, and make cards for Darkmoon decks. The vellum and inks are probably your best bet, as the price of Eternal Life is higher than most of the cards sell for right now.
5. Enchants. I dabble here, really. Vellums come from the scribe, and mats from the AH if I can get them cheaply, or from dungeon runs. There's about 100 g profit in selling a scroll of Enchant Staff: spellpower (the best one), and it means I don't have to lay out 500g every time Lyllea gets a new staff.
6. Selling everything. Yup, everything you get from leveling, all that stuff. Mail to bank alt and sell. You might want to avoid the weekends for this, as the low-level markets get flooded with leveling alts selling stuff.
Now the most important thing to remember is....
Everything has a cost. Farmed mats are worth what you can get on the AH for them, they are NOT free. To give an example...
I often mine ore on my way to ICC. If I luck out and get a scarlet ruby out of one, that's 40 g. Now, I can send that to my alchemist, combine with an eternal fire and get a cardinal ruby out of it, but the cost to make that cardinal ruby is still eternal fire cost+ scarlet ruby cost. Make sense?
I've been pondering the "farming is free" concept that so many people have, and the reactionary "farmed mats are worth exactly the AH cost". In fact the second is mostly correct, but lacks a distinction. If you intend to sell something directly, it is worth the AH sell price of x-5% (or is it 10%? Doesn't matter). However if you plan to use it to craft, then it is worth the fully price you'd pay to buy, meaning that farming to craft is cheaper than farming to sell, since you use a material that costs x, but if you had attempted to sell it you'd only get x-5%. This also means that crafting to use is cheaper than crafting to sell, but that farming to craft to sell is at the same level as farming to sell.
ReplyDeleteI like that idea! If I don't think about it, I tend to fall into the farming=free thing, since I don't really farm so much as go "oooh, ore/herbs" as I'm wandering around the world doing dailies or leveling.
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