Sunday, January 24, 2010

190,000 gold in the bank

Creeping so, so slowly toward my goal of hitting the gold cap. I haven't done a good job of crafting lately -- haven't sold much gear from blacksmithing, haven't made many scrolls. The vast majority of my time in-game has been spent using the dungeon finder tool. I love it! I do the random daily heroic on my main (gotta get those 95 Frost emblems!) and I've also decided to level my priest and DK to 80 solely through instances. I am going to craft the cobalt tank set for the DK once he hits 70 (which will be after like 8 more quests in Borean Tundra -- amazing) and he will happily plunge through multiple runs of each Northrend dungeon. My priest just hit 40 and is healing his way to the level cap. I'm starting to get sick of running SM-Cathedral and Uldaman with him but those are the breaks. (I'd be even sicker of questing in Desolace and Felwood, so there is that to take into account.)

The other thing I've been doing is getting into GDKP runs. Runs of TOC25 take about an hour and a half and have been excellent for gearing up my main. He's in 2-piece Tier 9 gear now and has the remaining two Trophies to finish off the set. Also, Reign of the Unliving dropped off of Anub and, although I should've stopped bidding, I wound up spending nearly 13,000g on the damn thing. However, there's a silver lining here: I made almost all of that money back already. My entire outlay for the day was 14,000g for the trinket and the trophy, and then I bought three BOE pieces to sell off. I got 2500g back from the GDKP pool, taking my expenditures down to 11,500g. Then, within 24 hours, two of my BOEs sold, including the DPS cloak for over 11,000g. Profit on those two items combined turned out to be 11,000g. So if I can flip the last ring for more than a 500g profit I'll have my biggest moneymaker of the week being ... the very run that was supposed to take gold OUT of my pocket. I have to say, I love that. (As it stands I've got the ring listed at a 5500g profit so I'll actually be pretty unhappy if I have to keep cutting the price down till it's only 500g. Ha.)

24,749g to go! Let's get this done!

Sunday, January 10, 2010

184,000 in the bank -- but there could've been more.

Yesterday I hit the 190,000 gold mark. I cheated, though; my shaman finally dinged 80, and after securing crafted blues for his chest and shoulders to replace his heirloom gear, I (a) passed the mail shoulders and chest off to my DK, (b) trained up his level 80 spells, and (c) shipped off his gold to my banker -- just a shade under 2000g if you're curious. Now after months of leveling, he'll be leaving Dalaran once a day to do the JC daily and cutting the gems my DK transmutes. He'll be a goldmaking bot but he'll net me at 1000g in profit every week if he only does the bare minimum. Seems sad, but at least he's not like my paladin, who raided at the bleeding edge up to the second or third week post-3.1 and now basically logs in to smelt titansteel. The shaman's in quest blues and greens and is eagerly awaiting the Cataclysm and the opportunity to max out JC and enchanting when that hits. I'm confident he'll be meleeing his way through postapocalypse Azeroth in a few short months.

So about that 190,000 gold; it turned into 184,000 courtesy of a GDKP run of TOC25. Only one true upgrade dropped for me, and I bought that. Plus, I picked up some Trophies, and redeemed one on my way out of the Argent Tournament grounds for a Tier 9.3 piece. After this week of dailies I'll be rockin' a sweet two-piece set bonus. I have an awkward extra Trophy as well, which is clearly third-wheelin' it and needs a partner. So I have to raid TOC25 at least one more time in order to get my raider up to speed. This GDKP run was interesting; people were getting really gunshy when bidding on a piece of loot hit 2000g. Makes me wonder; why don't they flinch about paying thousands of gold for a crafted BOE item, but the BOP stuff from raids doesn't fetch that? I think it's because people think that dungeon loot is "free" and they feel weird paying for it. Luckily I know better than that, and I was able to snag something from every boss except one -- and get over 1000g back when we downed the last boss. Also I was pulling upward of 4000 DPS and that was only good enough for 16th on the damage meter. Now that's humbling.

So now I basically need to not get bored with making gold so that I can hit the cap. Don't get me wrong -- I have been getting very bored. And I think people have been catching on to the low-level enchants I've been selling to make ridiculous profits: the mats for those have been getting terribly expensive, and with the prices of epic gems dropping like a rock, my profits are coming pretty strictly from transmutes, smelting, and the piddling few hundred gold I make on glyph sales every couple of days. But 30,000g should be easily doable before Super Bowl Sunday and after I give my friend his gift, I'll be able to relax on the obsessive goldmaking front. Well, kind of; the fact that I'm planning on leveling my DK and priest to 80 now are effects of the goldmaking craziness. What am I getting myself into?

Friday, January 1, 2010

175K in the bank ... thank you Battered Hilt!

Well, I didn't hit the gold cap in 2009 like I thought I might, but I'll be pretty surprised if I don't do so before the end of the month. That is, of course, unless some major GDKP opportunities come along in January. In fact, I've banked over 50,000 gold in the last two weeks so we should be well beyond the cap in short order.

However, I have to thank the RNG for 12,000 of that gold. Yes, the famous Battered Hilt dropped in Heroic Halls of Reflection and I won the roll! What a beautiful thing. If I hadn't when hog-wild in a GDKP run a few weeks ago and purchased the dagger out of ToC25, I might have actually started the quest line to get Quel'Delar, but since it's only an upgrade up 6 iLvl points, all I saw were dollar signs. Luck was with me, and even though we wiped after it dropped (and the run wound up breaking up a couple wipes later) I was thrilled. I put it on the AH for 14,000 gold, and within half an hour someone was announcing "WTB Battered Hilt 12K" in Trade. Well, I couldn't pass that up, so I ate the deposit and made the handoff on the Ironforge bridge.

Other than that, it's been the usual ritual of buying saronite ore, smelting it, transmuting it to titanium, and profiting from those bars; transmuting and cutting meta and epic gems; and the occasional foray into blacksmithing for profit. Actually, Eternal Belt Buckles were miraculously selling for 40g or so a couple days ago, so I made a stack and turned a few hundred gold profit off those. I also moved two Tankards O' Terror at 1100g apiece somehow, so I only have five of those left. I've started firing up the glyph machine again, although I don't know what the hell is wrong with the glyph sellers on my server; I sold two glyphs for over 40g for the first time in months yesterday and now everything's back below 10g again. Whatever, for someone who still has stacks and stacks of herbs anything I sell feels like a profit now.

Oddly, my focus has now turned to Cataclysm. Yeah, we don't have a release date yet, but what I'm referring to is making sure that I'm putting myself in a position to maximizing profits when the expansion hits. That means that my two 80s won't be sufficient; in order to level my professions to the new maximum, I'll have to have everyone at 80 and ready to go in advance of the launch. Worse, the two toons I have sitting at 80 only have two crafting professions (inscription and blacksmithing) and also have herbalism and mining. Yuck! I'm not going to drop those because they're kind of a pain to level and farming mats while leveling in the new zones will beat paying inflated AH prices. My JC/Enchanter is 76 (halfway to 77) so that's not bad, but my DK with LW and Alchemy is 69 and my tailor is still down at 36! Thus, my new plan is to:

A) Level the shaman to 80. He's rockin' heirloom shoulders and chest, so his last few levels shouldn't be too arduous. Definitely doable within January even at a really slow pace. Plus, he's getting a bunch of experience from the jewelcrafting dailies (to give you an idea, he's halfway to 77 and only half-done with Dragonblight. That's a lot of extra XP from JC dailies!)

B) Then I'll pass off the heirlooms to the DK and he'll be in enhancement shaman mail through Northrend. Hopefully my fellow dungeon runners won't inspect me!

C) At the same time, I need to gather 40 Emblems of Heroism (remember those?) and buy the heirloom chest for my 36 priest and speed him through the content. I want to at least get him to the point where he can make netherweave bags -- I really think there are untold thousands to be made from selling bags once Cataclysm hits and everyone and his mom is creating a worgen on the Alliance side. Getting all the way to Frostweave capability would be great but I don't know how much tolerance I have for going through Outland again. The second profession the priest has is Enchanting, but since the shaman has that maxed out already, he'll be dropping it for Engineering. At that point I'll have all of the crafting professions covered. By leveling the DK to 80 and waiting on the priest, I'll be gambling that at least one of the other six professions will be more profitable than engineering or tailoring. I don't think that's too far-fetched.

I've decided that I only have the tolerance for gearing up one toon as a raider at a time. Through Naxx/OS/EoE this was my paladin, and he cleared up to Mimiron in Ulduar before my schedule became too ridiculous to raid. Then, when this patch hit, I picked up the warlock and never looked back. Because of the hours I spend goldmaking, any additional time in raids and chain heroics would be absurd. So the warlock will be the only one going on GDKP runs and spending gold in huge chunks (he dropped just under 3000g on Bejeweled Wizard's Bracers yesterday in fact.) So these level-capped 80s that I'm proposing to accumulate will be sitting there as professionbots, seeing no new content, getting no achievements, nothing. As a point of reference, by paladin's last achievement besides logging in during the 5th anniversary of the game came in early August. I have over 20 days /played on that toon. Kind of heartbreaking, isn't it?

Less than 40K to the cap! Don't stop me now!