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How to make farming more profitable!
Last week I posted about soloable Bosses for Enhancement Shamans and I spend the last week Frapsing a bit and making a nice Intro for the Videos. Not quite 100% happy with that, yet – but it is getting there.
Anyway you can find all my videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/myrddinde
Now that everyone had a good start into the cataclysm, reputations have been farmed, some gear has been acquired and people look at other ways to spend their time I found it interesting to check which Level 70 raid bosses can be solo’d for fame and fortune.
If you plan to get to Level 85 as fast as possible you will most likely want to stock up quests to turn in. Once the XP gain is activated on December 7th you will be able to have a nice bunch of xp waiting for you.
A lot of things changed on the PTR, quests like „Sealed Vial of Poison“, „Damaged Necklace“, „XXX Must Die!“ weekly raid quest no longer yield XP.
These selected quests will bring you roughly 35%-40% into Level 80 with minimal travel time.
It has been a while since the last report and as you can easily see, I slacked. There is no real use for anymore gold and it doesn’t make much sense to use so much time on the auction house.
I have cut down massively posting glyphs and enchanting mats, sparing me 3000 auctions per 48 hours. On the other hand it means that even doing only minimal AH Business it is merely impossible to not gain masses of gold these days. Often I am even to lazy to relog alts to send materials and rather buy them expensive on the auction house.
After the post below where my Retribution Paladin soloed Molten Core I got a lot of questions regarding soloing Gehennas. There aren’t many things that can’t be outhealed by Judgement of Light or Seal of Light, but Gehennas casts a -75% healing debuff (curse) which makes the encounter still challenging.
But how can you do it? Basically I cleared the path back up towards the entrance, to get some room for kiting and started off with Seal of Command and Shadow Aura since the shadow damage is the most damaging move.
I have put up a short video of my last – but not best 😀 – Gehennas kill.
Good Luck! Let me know how it worked for you!
Usually we duo/trio Doomwalker for a fast kill and easy cash, but a few days ago there was noone around that was willing to help to kill Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker so I decided to give it a try solo.
Doomlord Kazzak worked out nicely at the start but the constant mana drain and the need for dispells ended up in a heavy consumption on mana. Either I was not able to keep up the hp or the mana and I am not really sure how to counter that. After a few tries I decided to skip him and rather try my luck on Doomwalker.
Doomwalker was really easy, I could keep up nearly 100% hp using Judgement of Light and Seal of Vengeance, it just took some time to get him down 😀
At 20% however things start to become tricky, Doomwalker enrages and attacks harder and faster (hat some 10-12k hits).
Even with Sacred Shield, Seal of Light, Judgement of Light he was slowly wearing my HP down.
The Earthquake Phase during his Enrage is probably the best time to gain up some hp. Other than that I was slowly drained of HP, let Argent Defender keep me alive, saved LoH for the next time I was low on hp, to have Argent Defender available right after.
The fight took roughly 17 minutes, which is a long time on a PvP Realm. Fortunately people were busy hunting turkeys at the time 😀
The loot was 498G and 2 BoE Cloaks that I sold for 275g each, nothing to complain about!
On Tuesday evening I decided to try to see how I could do in Molten Core on my Paladin. While some bosses seem to not be a real threat, Gehennas and Golemagg turned out to be somewhat tricky. It took me 3 hours to clear the whole place and a fair share of deaths to get the proper strategies for each boss, but in the end I managed ot get everything down.
To make the run perfect I got the achievement and the Eye of Sulfuras in the first run – I am such a lucky guy!
As each 2 months it is time for the Total Gold Acquired (tga) summary. I’ll list up the Characters and the niches they are earning gold with.
This one started out as Alternate char to farm old instances (mostly to farm Zul’Gurub for Mounts). For that reason she has „high looted gold“ (considering she is a newb Level 80).
Daisan is also selling old enchanting materials (Dream Dust, Illusion Dust, Greater Eternal Essences, Large Brilliant Shards and lower), popular glyphs, cooking recipes and the like.
TGA: 54127g
This char was planned to become what Daisan is now. An alt to farm zg, etc … But I found DK’s realyl unflexible and not fun to play, so I retired her as soon as she hit 80.
Exorial is selling epics, blues, profession recipes, basically everything that costs high ah fees.
TGA: 80350g
Slanty is my Scribe. He is selling nothing but glyphs ( 34.50g bid & 39.50g buyout) and all inks ( 5.25g & 5.75g).
TGA: 77418g
Arcane Dusts and Infinite Dusts are his only business.
TGA: 69015G
As you can easily see Myrddin is my Main Char. With 46000 g looted and more dailies than on the other characters. We used to farm Kazzak, Doomwalker, Magtheridon, Outdoor Dragons, Zul’Gurub, Ahn’Qiraj, Onyxia, Karazhan and the like to get our looted gold up fast.
TGA: 80945g
Finewares was my original sales character. I prefer to have sales on other characters than my main to avoid the whispers of players that want you to sell stuff cheaper, etc. But at one time Finewares just had no more capacity for all the materials. right now he sells only Greater Planar Essences and Greater Cosmic Essences.
TGA: 90131g
Magtheridon seems to be a pretty good sales test environment. High Population PvE, highly PvE advanced Realm. I started this Orc Shaman about 1.5 years ago. Secretly I would like to reroll another Shaman as the old Myrddin gets somewhat old, but I’d never leave Borked Guild, the best Guild in the world! So he ended up as Test Char for crazy AH Tests. I hardly pla yhim anymore though, so there is hardly any profit worth mentioning. He sells everything mentioned above, enchanting materials + glyphs.
TGA: 64455g
Summary: At September 09 I am at roughly 516 441 total gold acquired since the introduction of the achievement system. This is roughly 120 000g more since July. Don’t forget 300 000 auctions posted since 3.0 translate into 100 hours spent alone to retrieve mail in the best possible case, due to the 50 mail per 60 seconds limit.
There are several posts about the strategies used to get this done in the earning gold category. More posts to cover all aspects of my moneymaking will follow as I have time to write things down. I am sure you’ll find some useful advice or some tipps for your own auctions!
An instance that I particularly like to farm for gold are Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj. At level 80 the level 60 raid mobs do not really pose any threat and make a quick run quite lucrative.
A typical run takes about 45 min and averages about 250 gold profit, even if you just vendor all the drops you find. Here is a little screenshot from this afternoons AQ 20 run.
As you can see there is not so much gold from bosses, but the real goodies are the skillbooks for the Level 60 abilities that drop 1-2 per boss and can be vendored for 10g each. In addition, I just vendor the Blues/Epics since the value of shards is not worth disenchanting.
Further interesting drops are recipes/formulars that sell for huge prices on AH. For example the Blacksmith Patterns from Moam go for around 80g each.
Now about the mobs, here is a small list of tips that might make your gold farming a little easier!
Trash you should avoid are the Oozes, when they are low on hp they swallow you and regain hp while you lose yours … until you die … except if you have some dot that will outdamage its heal. It is best to avoid them and basically you only need to kill one if you are going for Buru.
You need to clear the anubisath trash before Ossirian. The anubisath guardians may cast meteor which hits for 10k+ damage. However there are some ways to reduce the damage taken. The damage is split by all targets it hits … if you have a pet out you only take half damage. You can resist a lot of the damage, since they are only level 62, but some kind of fire resistance is highly effective, too.
Kurinaxx is the first boss inside. He has 2 abilities that can be quite annoying.
The trick to do this solo is to use your cooldowns early, try to be at a high percentage of health when you are at about 70% healing reduction and try to outlive his hits. Once healing reduction hits 100% it resets to 0% and you can heal up.
At 30% he enrages and hits a bit harder.
Also if you continually move backwards then sandtrap will not hit you and is no threat.
Before starting the fight, make sure that the reinforcements from Cenarion Circle, Lieutenant General Andorov and his 4 Kaldorei Elite, come to help you. If you defeated Kurinaxx close to General Rajaxx they might not appear and you may need to ride back to the stairs leading down to Kurinaxx.
Lieutenant General Andorov will provide 200 hp/3 sec and an 10% haste aura (amplify magic can increase the healing)
Some people like the fight, some hate it. Since I am a friend of zerging down hordes of mobs I really enjoy this part as 7 waves of thrash come and you are to defeat them.
The 8th Wave is General Rajaxx himself. It is all tank and spank, just that his thundeclap reduces your current by 50%. do not forget to loot the corpses of the officers as they sometimes have some blue items that vendor nicely.
Moam is pretty easy to solo. If youa re a mana user he will drain 500 mana each few seconds, so you might like to avoid high mana spells and focus on your mana regeneration.
If you kill him too slow he will spawn 3 Elementals that do arcane explosions, but the elementals are only level 62 and will miss a lot with their spells. You can continue dps after you killed them.
I am skipping Buru the Gorger because the fight takes forever, he will always chase you and thus you will not have a lot of time to actually dps the eggs that will blow him up and make him vulnerable. Definitely doable, but it takes a lot of time. If you are going for it, make sure he does not hit you, the eggs have a nice blast radius, because his hit will place a stacking dot on you which can kill you fast.
I am skipping Ayamiss aswell. the first phase is an „air phase“ and as melee that sucks. Actually haven’t even tried her as enhancement shaman or paladin.
The Ossirian fight is quite fun. He is very strong and hits for about 3-4k, if he is not weakened. If you look around the area you will notice that there are prisms on the floor. You click them when Ossirian is close he will be weakened for around 30 seconds and also become vulnerable to certain schools of magic.
Basically you pull him on mount to the first prism and then you need to locate the next prism and move him there.
He casts a cyclone spell on you, but it will break on first hit. It is just an issue if you aren’t soloing him, because he will cyclone the tank and go for second on threat, which means the tank will be cycloned for the whole duration.
If you are getting used to the instance you can easily solo it in less than 1 hour, making it quite profitable, depending on drops. An easy 500g each week.
Generally speaking there are plenty of ways to earn cash, you just have to find the one that fits you best. I will try to show you a couple of ways that worked for me and some advice that I learnt the hard way.
The most obvoius way is all about killing mobs and hope for good drops. Personally I prefer to grind mobs that serve multiple purposes – like giving reputation, dropping special items in addition to normal drops, etc. For example the mobs on the Blades Edge Plateau's Etherum Prison Keys (if you completed the quest), Netherweave Cloth, Greens, Blues, Epics, depleted Items, Motes of Mana, Apexis Crystals, … there are plenty of mobs and fast to kill.
Of course there is also grinding by gathering. Just check AH, which resources are low Mountain Silversage, Terocone, Netherbloom, Nightmare Vine, Adamantite Ore usually sell very high on my realm. Much higher than the Potions and Elixirs you can make of it.
The best farming time seems to be late night and early morning. If someone else is on your route you can easily swap the direction of your route, change the zone or resource you are gathering.
The more professions you have access to via alternate characters or friends the more you can make of the drops you find. For example I have swift flying on a gathering char to get to minerals and herbs as fast as I can. The characters that crawl through instances have enchanting. The Jewelcrafter (prospecting), Tailor, Blacksmith, Engineer, Alchemist do not need to be high level characters since you need only level 50 to get 300+ max skill in these profession and it is enough to max the profit you can do with these professions.
With the exemption of herbs raw materials usually sell for less than the products you can craft from them. Just look at a stack of Runecloth. It sells on this Realm for 2.5g/20, but if you create Runecloth Belts and disenchant them you get 2-5 Dream Dust (3-7g), 1-2 (6.75-13.50) Lesser Eternal Essence or 1 Small Brilliant Shard (9.95g).
Awesome profit comes for example from:
Prospecting Ores is more gambling than a secure way to gain cash. Personally I like the excitement that comes with it and you can have great luck. Here is a nice list of prospecting percentages and which ores to expect.
So how do we gain the most out of the items we grinded? I suggest that you have a basic cache of money that will finance your daily expenses. This way you do not rely on the cash you get from the auctions and do not have to undercut the lowest price and you will gain a steady income after a while.
Even if you are not the cheapest seller, you will still sell plenty of auctions, after the cheaper ones are out, or when you manage to list your auctioned items at the first pages. Even after 2.3 it is still possible to gain money this way, since not all players sort the auctions after prize. There are stilll a few tricks. It seems that the auctions are sorted by the min bid price and not the buy out. If you sell your item for 1.99 bid and 2.50 buy out and someone else for 2.00 and 2.25 buy out your auctions will be listed as cheaper and most players use the buyout function anyhow.
On my Realm you can get Arcane Dust for example as low as 1g per unit and I still manage to sell mine for 2.75 bid 2.85 buy out. do that by listing masses of auctions. Since I can't compete with single sales or with whole stacks I specialized on stacks of 4 Arcane Dusts. Most people do not need 20 Arcane Dusts so they rather buy 4 for 10g than 20 for 20g. You will be listed after the single stacks but in front of the big cheap stacks.
From my experience Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays seem to be the best days and 17:00-20:00 and 23:00-0:30 the best sale times. These are the time frames where your items should be at the first pageof the auction house. If you use this smart you can sell the same items as other sellers with a significantly higher price. I also noticed that you should always include a buyout with a little higher price, this will encourage last minute buy out to "save" some money.
Basically you buy out all products below a certain price and resale them for more. If you decide to try that you have to choose the procduct careful. There should not be too many auctions of the item, it should not be too easy to get and the deposit price should be low. If you try to dominate a large market you will need a lot of money as reserve.
It also helps to have a few friends at your side while trying this. Many players look at the auction before they place their own items and many different characters with the same high prices will raise the overall prices.
For example I tried to dominate the market with Arcane Dusts as it seemed to be a stable market and even if I'd have failed I would not have lost a lot of gold, due to stable prices. I had 9500g when I started to buy all Arcane Dusts that were cheaper than 2.75g each and put it mine up for for 2.75/2.85. People started to dump all their reserves on ah only slightly cheaper than mine. I spent around 8k gold before the first of my auctions started to sell, this nearly killed me. The income was much lower than the amount of dusts that were dumped on the market. But with the Tipps I gave above I was able to make quite some profits there.
Which Item sare good for sale? It is really hard to generalize this for all realms, but from my experience you gain a fortune with mats that others need to level their professions. For Enchanting for Example there is no way around Vision Dust, Dream Dust, Illusion Dust, Eternal Essence. Usually You do not sell a lot of these, especially if You sell them expensive. But players that level up their professions need those in large masses and are willing to pay a steep price.
Auctioneer is an easy to use tool to put up large masses of auctions. It saves the prices you are using for your auctions, stack sizes and shows an overview of competition ont he items you are trying to sell.
Auctioneer includes Btm-scan, a tool that shows auctions which promise a certain amount of profit. The longer you use the tool, the better results it will provide.
Large amount of auctions mean a large amount of mails. A great help dealing with masses of mails is Bulkmail2.
Possessions is an addon, that lists items in inventory, bank and mail for all characters on the account.
I will be updating this post regularly, feel free to ask questions.