122,000 in the bank

Sales have been moving at a pretty nice pace lately. I haven't seen the same post-patch results as many other goldmakers but I'm not well-organized and I didn't do any preparation. My bad; epic gem prices are up 100g across the board. If I would've focused on that niche alone I'd be looking at thousands in profit. Still, the glut of new gear from instances of all sizes is causing enchants and gems to sell like crazy. I've taken advantage of the titanium transmute being taken off the cooldown and have been selling tons of converted saronite ore that way. I've also been buying cobalt ore at 25g a stack, making axes, DEing those, and selling that essences for about 19g per ... I'd love that to be higher but I'm not going to complain about turning a ~80% profit.

I have been burned on a few things; primary among these was a large purchase of abyss crystals that the RNG saw fit to turn into dust.

And let me just say that if I hadn't leveled JC and enchanting, I'd be bleeding gold right now. Glyphs are still in the basement; I do a QA post every couple days at random times, and I can't remember the last time one of them sold for more than 10 gold. I have held off completely on buying herbs, and in fact cleared the AH out of Frost Lotus even though my alchemist is transmute specced, making Flasks of Endless Rage for 60g lotus and effectively-free Lichbloom and selling them at 46g apiece. Nice profit there. I've even taken to buying out our resident idiot discounter's stock of flasks (he lists at 33g) and flipping them. He lists more, I buy em, mine sell, screw you.

One of my goals this weekend is to get serious about managing my enchanting scrolls. I have a couple hundred stacks of saronite ore to burn through and a bunch of recipes to buy from the shard trader. Hopefully I can find a way to soak up these piles and piles of cheap dust and turn them into heavy profits.

Pushed past 80,000

The Lord loves a titanium hoarder. Sales of ore that I acquired pre-patch pushed me over the 80,000 mark yesterday. I only have 15-20 stacks left so that well will be drying up soon.

I did manage to level my enchant/JC alt to 30 yesterday. Small steps, yes, but steps FORWARD. That's the important thing.

The next benchmark I'll be looking at is 85,000 gold, but more importantly 85,900. Why? Because that number is almost exactly 40% of the gold cap. Can I get there this weekend? We shall see.

I spent 45 minutes crafting death knight glyphs this morning. Nine more classes to replenish. I haven't made glyphs in well over a week. My sales are going to take a dive if I don't do this soon.

To the next 5000 gold!

Barely past the 70,000 gold mark

This morning's glyph sales just pushed me beyond the 70,000 gold mark. Well, pushed me beyond it again, I should say; I was there last night and decided it was the right time to level my alts' professions. My JC is only 26 so he's now maxed out for jewelcrafting and enchanting at 225 apiece. (Of course, this came with a bit of heartbreak, including buying several stacks of Heavy Stone off the AH at 9g a pop ... curse the marvelous bastard who wrung that gold out of me!)

With that in mind, I have a tough choice ahead of me: do I suck it up and level the DK to 65 so I can have a maxed-out alchemist? Power the little guy up from level 26 to 35 to reach the next tiers of JC and enchanting? Farm old-world herbs and thorium ore on my 80s so they can get there cheaply? Or chase gear upgrades with my two 80s in the Trial of the Champion (regular and heroic)? The latter option would be appealing, but I spent Sunday running that dungeon eight times. I looked at the loot table and there are five drops in there for my paladin: 4 for my retribution set, and one upgrade for holy. My first piece of loot dropped on run #7: my holy trinket. Exactly what I didn't want! I shouldn't complain though; my friend who came on his hunter got zero pieces of relevant loot. Zero. In eight runs.

On the other hand, 70,000 gold! 1600 more and I'm a third of the way home!

Up over 65K (or: I LOVE PATCH 3.2)

I just deleted what was to be this post's original title: "I couldn't be happier with the results of this patch." That's just wrong; I could, of course, be happier about that. But as it stands, I'm pretty damn happy. In under six days I've added another 30,000 gold to my net worth, putting me a tad over 65,000 total. That means I'm more than a quarter of the way to my goal of hitting the gold cap. Exquisite!

I'm at work right now and I got here a bit later than I intended; someone pulled me into a PUG of the new five-man instance, Trial of the Champion, and while I was there the chest for my paladin dropped, which was excellent. Then my Northrend Inscription Research was up in 15 minutes so I spent some time doing a talent respec for the pally, and once again the RNG failed to give me the ability to make the Glyph of Obliterate. So I logged into my main banker to check how the Death Knight glyphs were doing and whether I should post some more before leaving (answer: yep!) and I noticed that the same person had purchased all of the titanium ore stacks that I'd put up for 330g. I whispered him to ask whether he wanted more at 325g a stack and he said yes. 21 stacks later I was looking at 6000g and depositing my riches in my guild bank! Worth the wait for sure, but now I'll probably be at work past 10. Them's the breaks.

I hope to make another 5000g tomorrow. Shouldn't be too tough; I've got a ton of herbs (at least 50 stacks) in my scribe's mailbox and, if I finish everything I need to tonight, I'll have basically the entire day to be logged in for undercutting purposes tomorrow while I take care of things around the house.

I hope 3.2 is filling your pockets! It's doing so beautifully for me!

Welcome to Gold Capped!

Welcome, one and all, to my blog about reaching the gold cap in World of Warcraft. Join me on my adventures over the coming months and let's get rich together.

Yes, it may be a bit ambitious to call the blog Gold Capped! when 214,748g 36s 46c is so far away. But through various tricks I've learned on my own and from other helpful posters on the web, I know I can do it. It might take a year or so but I want to make it happen.

Why max out your gold reserves? Really, to see if I can do it. Also, my schedule with work and exercise has become quite sporadic (and demanding!) lately, so raiding doesn't seem to be a possibility, much less a priority. Leveling is something I have come to see as a necessary evil rather than an intrinsically enjoyable aspect of the game. RP is straight up mega-nerdy, and PVP/Arena has never appealed to me (it just feels like a waste of time). The economy in WoW fascinates me and I like the idea of trying to beat the system.

Where are you starting from? Not from scratch, that's for sure! Let me give you the rundown on my toons:

• I have two level 80 characters. Their tradeskills are maxed out; I have a scribe, a blacksmith, a miner, and an herbalist. You can probably guess how those professions are distributed among the two toons.

• I have two bank alts. One is strictly for glyphs, which on my server are not a big money-maker, but profitable enough. Selling glyphs requires an immense amount of management and it forces me to play the AH meta-game differently than I do with other goods. So there's the glyph-seller and the seller of everything else.

• I have a smattering of other lower level toons. As I said before, I'm not big into leveling, but I also don't delete characters just for the hell of it. I wanted to learn which class best suited me in WoW and eventually the two that I leveled up wound up providing the answer to that question. In the end, I find four of the classes in the game exciting and the other six rather dull; I'm going to keep all of this intentionally vague so people don't figure out who I am, but suffice it to say that the two 80s I have are both "interesting" classes.

• The bank alt just hit 10,000 gold last night. That's the pool of gold that starts this experiment: 10,000 even. I realize that to a lot of people, that sounds like a lot, but let's put it in perspective: I'm still less than 5% of the way to where I want to be! 10,000 lets me do a fair bit of investing but doesn't allow me to take huge risks.

So what's the plan?

The plan has three prongs:

• Play the AH for fun and profit. Buy low, sell high. Buy in bulk and sell in small stacks. Remember that profits of 2g or 3g add up (way up!) over time.
• Craft! With inscription, this is a must. Blacksmithing is more of a challenge but there are still items that reward the skilled crafter.
• Level alts to gain access to more professions (and the gold that comes with them!) I've barely touched my DK, and I don't plan to make a raider of him or anything. But he's going to be picking up two professions that I don't have at this point. I also have big plans for a little guy who's just sitting at 16 right now. If the DK leveling goes quickly enough I'll work on him before patch 3.2 drops, otherwise he'll get the benefit of the new heirloom chest!

I expect I'll flesh things out more thoroughly in the future, onceI have a handle on what I'm doing; for now this will have to serve as the introductory post.

Stay profitable!