90K gold in the guild bank

Yes, this is essentially just a rearrangement. My one seller had a lot of gold that had been withdrawn from the guild bank on him and I simply deposited this, alongside some proceeds from glyph sales, into the bank. Sitting on 90,000 now. Not bad.

Vacation tomorrow, and then on Monday ... my server's sellers had better watch out.

Back in the saddle ... till Wednesday

Well, I leave for a trip on Wednesday and won't be playing WoW regularly until a week from Monday, but I guess an update right now won't be completely pointless.

Right now I have just 75,000 gold in my guild bank, but I've made progress in other areas. My DK dinged 68 on Friday night and went ballistic, finishing the Transmutation Specialization quest in record time and powerleveling Leatherworking almost all the way to the maximum. I sold the four leg armors that I crafted without a relist, but unfortunately Arctic Fur prices have gone through the roof on my server (they were hovering around 20g a month ago and have since jumped to 60g ... what?) and this is not a profitable venture at the moment. With Frozen Orbs sitting in the 20-30g range, I was hopeful that I could enter this market and make a killing, but no dice. I'll be watching material prices like a hawk, though, so once the market is right you'd better believe I'm going to be a player in it. I've also been doing my daily Majestic Zircon transmute; with mats going for 15g and the gem selling for 150g uncut, I'd be stupid not to! I should have the Cardinal Ruby transmutation quest complete before I leave for my trip so I'll be ready to soak up the multiple procs when I get back.

I did sell a Nobles Deck during the Faire, happily, so my cash on hand is looking to be a bit more than I'd expected. Unfortunately, Eternal Life hasn't been cheap anytime I've checked it, so there probably won't be more cards in my future. Fortunately, nobody else has entered the glyph market during my hiatus, although I'm sure my competitors are loving the lack of competition.

Plus, my shaman is approaching level 35 (and 300 JC/enchanting, of course)! I just finished up the Mirage Raceway quests, so that means lookout Stranglethorn! Then the slog toward Outland begins (and eats away at my soul).

That's the update! Later!

Bringing my total down: 75K in the bank

After all that I posted this afternoon, I needed a bit of "therapy" via WoW to calm my day down and get refocused. That session ended up lasting 3 hours (thank you to the kind people at Caribou Coffee!) and included:

• Glyph posting on all my alts. All told: 550 glyphs! I guess the undercutting has gone down a bit while I've been off; usually there are many sub-threshold offerings and as a result my glyphs don't post.
• A bit of leveling on the DK. Went from 3% to 20% of the way to 68 in Netherstorm; too easy with a flying mount and two heirlooms! I shudder to think of how quickly the kills would come if the DK was wearing well-itemized plate shoulders and chest instead of the caster gear he has now. (I didn't want to farm more emblems to get him to 68! Sue me!)
  
• Powerleveling leatherworking on the DK. His skill went from 0 to 231 today, then I ran into a bit of an issue with whether I was willing to purchase rugged leather at 1g per. I opted not to. In hindsight, that's really kind of a clumsy thing to do; one powerlevels a profession because one sees profit at the end of the tunnel, and a bit of additional cost shouldn't slow the process. (If it was 200g/stack instead of 20g, then yes, you wait. But hoping to find it for, say, 15g a stack next time you log in instead of 20g? That's a poor philosophy.)
• Disenchanting every piece of skill-up leather gear made by the DK with the shammy. My bank is overflowing with various dusts; at some point I should re-read my enchanting power-leveling guide and figure out which dusts I should just be putting on the AH instantly.
• And finally, I bought my little shammy his turning-40 present: an epic mount in the form of Mekgineer's Chopper. Yeah, possibly dumb, and yeah, it sets my earnings back and is a significant delay in my march toward the cap. But I knew I wanted one on a toon, and I knew I wanted the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth as well. But that mammoth is BoP and comes with significant discounts at exalted with the Kirin Tor, and I would never pay 20,000g for a vendor item that I could get for 16,000g instead. So I dropped 15K on the chopper. I was considering offering up "13,000 plus my titansteel, arctic fur, and cobalt" for a nice round 500g tip, but right now on my server the hog parts plus titansteel bars are over 14K combined. Essentially, this means that I was maybe looking at saving 200-300g when all was said and done, and since I can make that back by blacksmithing two Savage Cobalt Slicers, I figured screw it. So now my 31 shammy needs to ding 40 and I can haul ass around Dustwallow Marsh and Felwood with a questing partner in my sidecar.

I probably have 100,000 gold between all my characters but I only have 75,000 in my guild bank. And because of my lack of gold-making ability with my internet connection down, I think I'm fine with that. When I get my new computer built and my home re-wired, we're going to start the real moneymaking.

Gold-making on hold

Well, it took me seven years, but I'm finally rid of the worst ISP in the universe. Unfortunately, the reason why is because I moved into my new house, and five days later my internet connection promptly went out. It's been five days since then, and although I've managed to sneak a little WoW in with my meals (free internet at Panera FTW) I've devoted almost no time to gold-making. I did post a batch of glyphs on Friday and managed to make all of 30g off of seven sales; the competition is evidently still there and not letting go.



The good news is that my DK has dinged 67 and will have the mats to level a good chunk of leatherworking once my connection is restored (on Thursday ... another five-day interval. Weird.) So he's one level away from transmutation specialization and is going to get there by questing through Netherstorm (a zone I've never been to at all with my two other characters who could survive there.)


All told, I'm probably still around the halfway point to the cap. With inscription burying me, I'll be racing toward 68 on that DK and leveling up the shammy (who sits at 31 currently) to get the mega-synergy between alchemy/JC/enchanting online.



Oh ... and I have all the components at home for a powerful gaming rig. Here's to getting work done on the laptop while I do my AFK work at WoW on a dedicated machine!

I have 100,000 gold in my bank

And you can't have a single copper. Mine mine mine.

A weird combination of events led to some 7000g showing up in my mailbox last night. The least odd thing was that someone bought one of my Nobles Decks off of the AH. I think it was listed at 3700g; after the AH cut it was right around 3500, so maybe I put this one up for 3650? Hard to know.

The next strangest thing was that I listed seven Nobles cards individually, and four of them were purchased within 24 hours. One of them for over 800g!

But the weirdest thing was that evidently someone successfully reset the market for Arctic Fur. I bought in a while ago at 22g apiece and have been sitting forlornly for weeks looking at my three stacks of furs that were (to my knowledge) still selling for 17-18g. Checking in yesterday ... the lowest buyout on the AH was 60g! How did that happen!? Since I'm not raiding, I confess that I haven't kept up on Trial of the Crusader craftables, maybe there's a demand now because of those? Anyway, I unloaded the majority of my Arctic Furs at a profit of 30-35 gold apiece, and then I mailed off 5000g to my banker, who put my guild bank into the six-figure club.

An auspicious milestone for sure, but I'm still over 7300g away from the halfway point. Let's finish strong!

Hovering just shy of 95K ...

I wasn't going to post until I met my next major milestone (which, if it's not bleedin' obvious, would be 100,000 gold), but a new and tenacious competitor has arrived on my realm, and real life has taken a substantial bite out of my playing time. These two concurrent events have conspired to drive my gold-making down -- way down! Add to that the fact that my titanium stockpile has disappeared, and you can see what I'm contending with.

I can't do anything about real life, and I'm certainly not going to farm more titanium. Didn't really farm much in the first place, maybe two stacks of ore. That was enough for me. And the competitor, frankly, doesn't bother me. For some reason he posts his auctions from Stormwind, so I haven't had a chance to check his statistics to see how much gold he makes since most of my auctioneers are in Ironforge, but it is annoying to watch my auctions go up between 4.5-8 gold where they used to be 20-50 or more. Still, if we both play the game the same way, the one with the most gold will eventually win; I just hope it's me!

I've been able to find a little bit of time to eke out levels on the DK, and holy cow does that process absolutely speed along when you're wearing two +10% XP heirloom items and, frankly, you can do what a DK does. Fevers and strikes and obliterate and dead! And death grip and fevers and strikes and obliterate and dead! And fevers and Dancing Rune Weapon and strikes and obliterate and dead! It seems like it's that fast sometimes. One fun part about this process that I didn't expect was the potential to explore new parts of Outland. WOTLK was released before I had a level 70 toon and both of my 80s sprinted through the Burning Crusade content like a it was a tiresome chore. This time I'm planning my route more carefully -- with the help of Jame's Alliance Leveling Guides -- and exploring regions I haven't seen before. When I hit 325 skill in Alchemy, for instance, I flew into Telredor in Zangarmarsh to pick up the recipe for Super Mana Potion and noticed that there were quests available to me at two hubs. I was surprised at this since, after all, I was only level 60, but here I am on the cusp of dinging 63 with a grand total of 10 completed quests in Hellfire Peninsula (one of my least favorite zones in the game). I've spent very little time in Blade's Edge Mountains, Netherstorm, and Shadowmoon Valley, so I'm hoping that when I finish up with the very wonderful Zangarmarsh, there will be questing opportunities in these three zones (although I fear that I'll have to spend a bit of time in Nagrand and/or Terrokar before these "new" places become available to me).

With any luck, I'll outlast this annoying new competitor and be posting about the 100K gold that's in my guild bank. But for now I've deposited 90,000 and am moving glyphs at deep discounts.

The Plan: updated

Nobody reaches the gold cap by accident. Or, if they do, well that's impressive. A couple weeks ago I outlined my short-term WoW plan. It's prudent to update it now.

1. Gold making. Log in on all three glyph-posting bankers, cancel undercuts and all auctions at "medium" time left or lower, collect mail, post. If gold on hand reaches 1000 or more, mail it to the main banker. Log in to the scribe, do Northrend Inscription Research, make 5 of those glyphs, email them to the appropriate banker. If Savage Saronite sets and enchanting rods are sold, check that I have the mats on hand to make more. If not, do the usual AH run, which is: (a) saronite ore, (b) Icethorn, (c) Adder's Tongue, (d) cobalt if necessary, (e) price checks on abyss crystals and eternal belt buckles to see if they're worth listing. Craft plate pieces, mail them to the banker, list. Continue till the gold cap is reached, mail off 20K to my friend as a thank you for introducing me to WoW, continue till the gold cap again, and drastically reduce operations until I'm below 200K gold again. Possibly ruin the glyph market once I hit the cap by listing every glyph at 4g apiece when I log in.

This long term goal remins intact. However, I've dumped abyss crystals from consideration given their free-fall with the implementation of Trial of the Champion.

2. Crusader title on the main. Currently an Exalted Champion of four different factions, but maintaining Valiant status with Ironforge in order to double up on the dailies. Will continue to do the following dailies until I'm exalted with the Argent Crusade (about 9000 reputation points to go until I hit that): A Valiant's Field Training, At the Enemy's Gates, Threat From Above, Battle Before the Citadel, Taking Battle to the Enemy. Skipping the weapon-fetching quest and anything involving jousting in a ring. Additionally, if there is time each day, I will try to run the Heroic daily while wearing the Argent Crusade tabard in order to speed up the march to Exalted. (After Patch 3.2 goes live, this will become a mandatory activity in order to gear up the Warlock for raiding and so that Emblems of Conquest and Triumph can be collected so I can be a "scrub running around in full 8.5.")

I haven't been insisting on running the Heroic daily as much as I thought I would be; our server still struggles with a major tank shortage, and it's sometimes difficult to even put a group together. Rather than waste my time sitting around Dalaran in a group with two other DPS doing nothing, I've focused on other aspects of the game, like leveling my shaman. (I have run Trial of the Champion on regular difficulty several times; of course my loot never drops. QQ.)

I did manage to get Exalted with the Argent Crusade and thus the Crusader title is what I rock on my warlock. I also bought him dual-spec and am doing much better damage with Destruction than I was with Affliction. He only has about 20 emblems to go to buy that first piece of tier gear; hopefully that will be in hand within a couple of weeks.

3. Level the DK to 68. I really ought to just mail him the cloth +10% XP shoulders that are languishing on my never-played priest and get on with this. He's at 58 right now, and in order to get an alchemy specialization he has to be 68, otherwise I'd just stop at 65 when he could max his skill. Still, since the DK is still an OP class, I should be working on this much more fastidiously at the current moment before the inevitable nerf, but establishing myself as a gold-maker has taken so much of my time that it's usually time to hit the hay before I can log in on him. I have no interest in playing the DK but starting at 55 is very appealing.

Haven't even logged over to this guy in over three weeks according to Altoholic. I imagine I should pump him up to 68 so I can take advantage of the meta gem transmutes when my shammy is going for 450 JC skill. Plus, I've made so much money since the patch dropped that I can afford to pay inflated AH prices for alchemy-leveling bottleneck mats.

4. Level the shammy and his big money professions to maximum. Do I need another 80? Probably not. But I need a 77 to do that Damaged Necklace quest and if you're at 77, why not 80. Plus, it might be fun to smash face with a melee shammy in raid instances, and at the next boss drop back to heal. What I need to do is make a list of all the chokepoint ingredients for JC I need, and maybe send my paladin back to the Old World to grind out some mining (sigh) if things are too expensive.

I'd almost forgotten how long leveling takes. Even with four heirlooms on this guy (four!) and the accompanying 20% XP bonus, leveling is still a chore. Grinding on skeletons in Duskwood is never as unappealing as when you're impatient to level a new profession or two. However, it's always genuinely hilarious when Crusader procs so that's a bonus (I bought the scroll for 60g off the AH ... great price!) Happily, I'm now to the point where Jame will help me level clear up to 77 in the Grizzly Hills. (For what it's worth, I wanted to test the quality of the other leveling guides on wow-pro.com and stuck to the early level guides; I don't recommend them. Jame's guides, though, should be printed out and kept next to you at all times from 30-77.)

So, what's the new plan?

Besides having no plan, the worst thing one can do is to follow an outdated plan. Therefore, here's my new plan for the foreseeable future. I will reexamine this when I have reached 100,000 gold, or after four weeks, whichever comes first. (I bet you know which one I'm hoping will come first.)

1. Continue making gold as I have been doing. This means doing my usual AH routine and engaging in copious amounts of inscription and small amounts of blacksmithing. It also means purging my remaining titanium ore stockpile.
2. Make gold in a new way: by buying and reselling underpriced mats. I asked a question over in the JM2C Forums: what can you do with a huge sum of gold? And what I'm going to do is convert my priest to my fifth (yes, fifth!) bank alt and have him be Mr. Markup. I'll be buying, collecting, and relisting any Trade Goods that are underpriced. Wish me luck!
3. Max out alchemy on the DK. Yep, it's time to suck it up and ride through the Dark Portal. Like a fool, I'll probably drop 6000 gold on both levels of flying just to save time on leveling, but if I do I'll be able to recoup the money that much sooner with sales from alchemy. Even though I anticipate that it'll be less fun than playing my shammy, I am prioritizing this because it simply needs to get done.
4. Level the shaman to 35 and get enchanting and jewelcrafting to 300 each. Baby steps. If I'm going to spend all my time in the AH listing and relisting, I won't be able to do much in the way of leveling. Therefore if I can pick up five levels in four weeks while grinding up my DK, I'll be happy.
5. Obtain my Tier 8 chest for my warlock. This one. Four weeks is a reasonable time frame to accomplish all of the above and still farm 27 Emblems of Conquest.