How can I make dosh in WoW?

May 18, 2006 10:27 PM

Auction House speculation in World of Warcraft.

Since I started saving for my mount I've found that more gold can be made by purchasing and re-selling items on the AH than by repeatedly farming instances. I've only found a few items that are really worth looking for, like swifthistle, or perfect deviate scales. It's been slow but quite rewarding.

What other items should I be looking for? I'm playing Horde - are there any items I can sell at the neutral AH for dizzying profits? Does anyone have any gold-making secrets?

Thanks in advance!

posted by malpractice to sports, hobbies, & recreation (14 comments total)

I used to pick up the cheapest listings of leather and hides for leatherworking, then disenchant. This probably works for any trade, just mail it to a mule to disenchant (skill doesn't factor into disenchanting, only enchanting).

Probably, if you look for it, you can find all the weird rare items you need for the recipes. Also, look for crap on timers. I remember some kind of salt shaker that made an unrefined leather into some kind of useable leather. Not hard at all to pick up a profit at the AH.

The thing is, all the time you spend farming money from various sources in WoW, you could buy 10x as much gold with the equivalent amount of time invested in making money in the real world and then buying it off those crazy chinese RANG RANG's. And that's just minumum wage.

If I were you I would focus your time in game on enjoying yourself rather than what tiny little profiteering you can do. Unless you're finding that tiny little profiteering is more enjoyable than the rest of the content of the game. In that case...
posted by GooseOnTheLoose at 10:46 PM on May 18, 2006

I've made thousands of gold from auction house reselling. Your goal should be to make a few hundred gold, and then watch the Epic item list for an underpriced purple. People tend to vastly underprice high end items because they don't know their worth. Also be on the look out for cheap Righteous Orbs and rare crafting recipes. I'm an enchanter, so I look out for rare enchanting formulas. I've bought Crusader for 300g and resold it for 500g, and bought Lesser Block for 50g and resold it for 150g. I managed to get two Foror's Compendiums of Dragonslaying for 500g and made a handsome profit on them once the prices on those went back up.

Also look for Righteous Orbs, Black Lotus, Arcanite Bars / Arcane Crystals, and other expensive crafting materials. Prices on mats fluctuate a lot. Learn what the bottom and top end prices are. For example, Black Lotus ranges from 5g to 50g on my server. If I see them cheap, I buy them up and sit on them.

Librams are good too. Lots of people find them and have no idea what the difference between the different librams are, so they'll list a Libram of Resilience for 10g or a Libram of Focus for 25g. (Others will also try to sell a Libram of Rumination for 500g, which is a similar type of cluelessness.)

Like with the Foror's books for me, sometimes there will be a glut of some high ticket item and the price will drop dramatically. If you have the money and patience, it's almost inevitable that prices will jump back up once the surplus is gone, so if you can stomach the short term investment, buy them up when they're cheap. If Righteous Orbs or Nexus Crystals are at 50g, buy them up! I guarantee they'll be up at 100g in two weeks' time.
posted by Khalad at 11:13 PM on May 18, 2006

I just want to add that I never spent more than 5 or 10 minutes at the AH at any time. I know people in the game that spent hours in the AH and made 10x more money than me. You don't need that kind of concerted effort, though. All it takes is knowledge. I started out knowing two or three items, and over time I added more searches to my repertoire as I figured out what other items were in demand.

I don't spend so much time doing it any more, but if I were to actively try to make money I would say I have about a dozen search strings to check. Off the top of my head:

"formula", "libram", all Epics, "flask" (for rare flask recipes), "greater eternal", "illusion dust", "large brilliant", "core" (for Core Leather or Fiery/Lava Cores), "orb", "black lotus", "arcan", "mooncloth", Bag | Enchanting/Herbalism Bags
posted by Khalad at 11:21 PM on May 18, 2006

Also useful for spotting deals is the Auctioneer mod. Try the command "/auctioneer percentless".
posted by squidlarkin at 11:22 PM on May 18, 2006

I made a fortune as a leatherworker by buying up stacks of rugged leather, making Wicked Leather Headbands, mailing them to my alt for disenchanting, and selling the results. Those headbands DE to one of three somewhat expensive enchanting materials, and give you a high return on the leather costs.
posted by nightchrome at 11:35 PM on May 18, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh, I just remembered! If you see something with a really low bid price--and especially if it has a high buyout, or none at all--bid on it. Very few people bid on items. You can get great deals when you're not desperate to get something right now and hit Bid instead of Buyout.
posted by Khalad at 11:36 PM on May 18, 2006

If you have two accounts, you can also make a great deal of money doing this cross-faction. The extra account is required because you can no longer bid on auctions from your own characters in the neutral AH. My main is Horde, but I have a level 1 Alliance alt sitting in the Darnassus AH, while my boyfriend has a level 10 paladin sitting in Booty Bay.

Items whose prices often vary wildly between factions include Nexus Crystals, Arcane Crystals and Arcanite Bars, the various Silithus items like Abyssal Crests and Signets, the valuable Librams, Black Lotus, and so on. And frequently there are items for sale Alliance side that simply can't be found Horde side (like Libram of Focus for the past couple of months), presumably because of the population difference, so you can essentially name your own price once you get them through the neutral AH.

You won't make much money selling items in the neutral AH itself - nobody really uses those auction houses except to transfer items between factions, and nobody wants to put high-priced items there because of the enormous cut the goblins take. (It's based on sale price, not vendor price, unlike the faction-specific auction houses.)
posted by emmastory at 3:31 AM on May 19, 2006

To get started:

Get the auctioneer mod with the additional search pane (latest stable pack should have it). Do scans once a day for a week - you can buy earlier if you want to or scan more often, but that amount of time will give a fairly good idea about current prices and should smooth out anomolous averages.

Use the new search pane (the fourth one IIRC) using common or better goods and reagents as criteria. Sort them by percent and then bid/buyout (as appropriate) from the best bargains on up.

Don't buy if it's less than 3%-4% bid rate as it could take forever to resell, but just go up list list until you run out of money. After about the 50% mark it;s diminishing returns, but it can pay to look beneath 50% for larger amounts or rarer materials with higher gold values so the smaller percentage profit is still worthwhile.

Reagents have little or no listing fee on the AH so check them as well - there's fewer bargains to be had, but it's still worthwhile.

Because many things will only be listed as bids, not buyouts, you might not get all or even most of your bids. That's alright - it costs you nothing and what you do get is pure profit.

Basically you're bottom scraping making cash off those too lazy to wait to sell something for a proper price. It took me a couple of weeks of this to get enough for the two mounts I needed via this method - and that was on a underpopulated horde AH (greater population tends to equal greater prices).

Once you've got some scratch together, you can persist or not with the bottom scraping, or move on to weapons - by now your auctioneer stats should be quite good. Daggers are always popular - but it can pay to check your server class stats and see what your class distribtiuon rate is like. Watch the market as each server will be different and by the time you've got your first thou you can move into epics as Khalad states.

Read the auctioneer forums to see what other people have said and find a style that fits your time and inclination.

Be prepared to stuff up and kick yourself for buying something expensive that's tough to unload - better to drop the price and be rid of it than pay mounting listing fees - but keep it for at least a week so you can try the busy weekend traffic. If you're not sure what something is, check it on thottbot before you buy. Sometimes folks list common but rarely auctioned items at outrageous prices for weeks so they can catch out unwary auctioneer users with a new 'bargain' when they finally drop the price.
posted by Sparx at 3:53 AM on May 19, 2006

Here's a somewhat related tip. If you've got engineering skill, I make a good racket making and selling [Thorium Shells] (heh, didn't think I'd ever get to do that here).

I can buy enough mats to make 20 for about 12G-15G, and sell the finished products for a total of 27.4G. They always sell, so as long as you have some startup capital, you're good to go. I can usually get away with doing this around 4 times a week.

Just don't flood the market, and it's like free money.
posted by Drunken_munky at 4:10 AM on May 19, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Because of the tier-conversion quests, you can get a respectable 17-20 gold per stack of Stonescale Eel (and/or oil), up to 3 gold per volatile rum and ironweb silk at the moment on the alliance side (prices may vary by server, welcome to Uldum.) Morrowgrain is needed for the new herbalists bags, so morrowgrain itself is selling well for the moment, as well as the Un'Goro Soil to grow it.

I know Darkmoon Faire just left horde side, so start saving up now- buy low-priced Glowing Scorpid Blood and Rugged Leather Kits to sell when the Faire comes back- 1 g for each blood, Rugged Leather Kits can go for as much as 4 g each, depending on how desperate someone is to get the uber necklace from the faire.

Also, if you come across small furry paws, torn bear pelts, etc., randomly on sale by n00bs, snap those up- those are also great to turn in for faction and tickets at the Faire and high levels are too lazy to go farm small furry paws.

Encrypted Twilight Texts and Abyssal Crests have a fairly steady market- regular price is 25 gold for a stack of 10 texts, 3 g each for the crests. If you can get them cheaper than that, do, then resale immediately. I've never, ever, ever, ever not been able to sell those- Cenarion Circle faction is a PITA and those are quick ways to bump it up.
posted by headspace at 5:11 AM on May 19, 2006

And if you're interested in doing a tiny bit of farming- Ferelas on the shore has 8-10 fish school/floating debris spawns. The one right next to the Goblin Engineer on the dock regularly drops a 40-50 level green item, *quite* often a fire resistance ring or necklace. Since Fire Resistance is king, you can get rich off one of those like whoa. (You need to be at least 250 in fishing to fish in Ferelas. If you're a good fisher, you can also hook yourself up with Stonescale Eels for completely free in Ferelas and Steamwheedle. I get better results in Steamwheedle, myself.)

Also, when the Faire is in town, characters that have never been can get a voucher for 5 free tickets from a barker in Orgrimmar and Ironforge. 5 tickets is enough to get a Minor Darkmoon Prize, and you almost always get low-level greens to sell. Once I got a pair of Feet of the Lynx, world blue item that was perfect for WSG 10-19 twinking- sold them for 50 g in less than an hour, and could have probably sold them for more.

If you're of the appropriate level, you can take Imperfect Draenethyst Fragments to Kumisha in Blasted Lands, and he'll give you a "bag of junk" that usually contains a green, but sometimes a blue. The fragments drop from any mob in the zone, and they're sometimes found on the AH way cheap.

All my other methods involve farming or leatherworking- heck, skinning can make you a ton of money- leather and hides always sell well, especially when it's time to make rugged leather kits. If you can collect a lot of deeprock salt, that sells fairly well for engineers and leatherworkers, but if you LW yourself and get a salt shaker, the refined deeprock salt sells big, because you can only make one every three days. (So I guess, if you see refined deeprock salt cheap on the AH, buy it for resale!)
posted by headspace at 5:22 AM on May 19, 2006

I've made most of my money off the AH by way of ore. My main character is mining/engineering so I watch the prices of ore, and wait until it's at a pretty good price before selling. Now of course, I have to have a bank/mule character hold all of it for me until the price is right.

With engineering, I've made a lot of gold from selling Hi-Explosive bombs because there's a quest at Light's Hope Chapel where you need to turn in 8 of them (along with other stuff). I've also made a good deal of gold from selling Thorium Widgets since the schematic isn't super common. You could also make the Thorium bullets and trade them for Thorium arrows and sell them as well. A stack of 200 Thorium arrows on my server is usually about 1 gold 80 silver.

As for the neutral auction hall, sell some of the non combat pets. I'm Alliance, and I really wanted a prairie dog, so I paid 5 gold for one!
posted by mabelcolby at 7:23 AM on May 19, 2006

Auctioneer, as mentioned above, is the way to make money on the AH - I can usually make 10g/day using it. Sparx' instructions are basically what I do. I got my epic mount, so I've taken a more casual approach to it, but I still make reasonable money from it. For a couple people in my guild, this sort of AH arbitrage has become more fun than the rest of the game.

The other place I've made a lot of money is from BOE recipes in the end game dungeons - I sold the recipe for greater fire resist potions for 450g (horde, Frostmane).

Profession-wise, tailoring has been a good source of money as well - on my server, bags consistently sell for about twice the cost of the materials to make them.
posted by pombe at 9:07 AM on May 19, 2006

Thanks for all your amazing replies! I've just installed Auctioneer, so I'll have a play with it and see how I go.
posted by malpractice at 2:13 PM on May 19, 2006