Prospecting values Excel file

I've got a day of work so I created an Excel file which estimates the profit for prospecting Cataclysm ores based on current market prices for full stacks of ores, basic gems and enchanting mats. The base for this file was taken from Drockrock's post on the Consortium forums.

The Excel file can be found on Google Docs: Prospecting Value Excel file

By posting this on the Internet I can't prevent anyone from copying and distributing it so anyone wanting to do just this is welcome to do so. If you want to share this, please share this blogpage or do not change the header in the Excel file, I'm a starting blogger and would enjoy a bit more traffic :)


Preview:


Update 06-01-2011: I've added meta gems to the sheet as well, as you can see on the pre-entered values (which are actual prices from my server) they easily have the best profit margin.

Price resets

It's time for a well known trick used by auctioneers to increase their profits. Resetting the price of an item to be able to sell your own supply for a larger profit margin. I've been sitting on a decent amount of Greater Celestial Essence from disenchanting Carnelian Spikes. Which I'm still expecting to be fixed soon btw, an Item Level 317 weapon which disenchants reliably in 2-3 Greater Celestials doesn't seem to be right.

The supply I had however had been created during the weekend when Obsidium Ore was quite cheap. Unfortunately during the weekend the Greater Celestials were also at about 60% of normal market value with loads of them posted. I figured I just had to wait untill Monday or Tuesday for them to rise to their normal price again. On Monday the lowest buyout was 60g and Tuesday prices had risen to 68g. This morning there were still a couple of them listed for 70g buyouts, but only about 15 of them.
Since there was a large gap between the 70g ones and the rest, which were a little above market price, I decided to buy out all 70g buyouts and re-list those and my own for 85g.

If all of them sell, which they will over the coming days, I didn't make 225g (15 x 15g) from relisting the 70g buyouts but 1.125g from relisting them and increasing the price of the 60 I had in my bank.

This applies to every item for which the price fluctuates during the week. If you want to sell them for the normal marketprice you can choose to not wait for the cheaper ones to automatically drop off the Auction House. Buy them out and reset the price to increase profits.

Disclaimer: I could have bought out as many Greater Celestials as possible during the weekend and re-sell them once the price had risen again. Once the market has settled a bit after Cataclysm I will do that but right now I'm being very careful with buying to re-list. Prices are all over the place, it only takes one or two other Jewelcrafter / Enchanters to start doing what I'm doing and prices will drop significantly. I'm not going to risk having a stack of Greater Celestials which I'm going to have to sell for a loss.

The Obsidium shuffle, pt 2

Due to the good profit I made two days ago with prospecting, cutting / crafting and disenchanting I checked the Auction House again this morning and bought out 30 stacks of Obsidium Ore for 109 gold each. My logic behind this was the 46 stacks earned me a profit of 4.700 gold in one day with some extra enchanting mats, gems and BoE's still left unsold. So I figured I could set an upper limit of 162 gold per stack of Obsidium Ore (2.760 + 4.700 / 46).

I did almost the exact same as before but finetuned a couple of steps:
- Before crafting any necklaces or rings I checked the prices for the raw gems, several were in the range of 50-75g which is a better profit margin than crafting / disenchanting them for 1-2 dusts.
- I checked if any gems were needed for the daily JC quest. I was in luck since Ogrezonians in the Mood was today's daily. I bought out every single Jasper below 60 gold (about 15 in total) and relisted almost two stacks in batches of 3 and 1 for 60 gold. At the time of writing 32 of those have been sold, almost 2k gold worth of sales from just Jasper gems.
- Since the Greater Celestial Essences sold much better than the Lesser Celestial Essences I tranformed all the Lesser's to Greater's. Almost all have been sold already which is another 3k incoming.
- The BoE blue rings and necklaces sold quite fast so I increased the prices for those from 195 gold to 299 gold. They're still selling strong, especially the Jasper ring's, having a level requirement of 79 might have something to do with that.

Conclusion
Even with a much lesser deal on the Obsidium Ores (I payed 50 gold more per stack) I've already made 1.5k profit for 45 minutes of work. I haven't sold a single Hypnotic Dust or cut rare gem yet from this batch so I expect the profit to rise to 5k at the bare minimum.

The Obsidium shuffle

Ok, ok, I'll admit it's been a while since my last post. I've been busy leveling my main character and haven't paid a lot of attention to the Auction House for the past few weeks. In fact I've only just started trying to earn back the gold I've lost since Cataclysm was released (leveling enchanting & jewelcrafting and some nice BoE PvE and PvP items took a nice chunk out of my balance).

This morning I had a wonderful opportunity to start making some well needed profit. I logged on before work to check some auctions and relist my glyphs when out of habit I checked the prices for Obsidium Ore and I was able to grab 46 stacks for 60g each. After checking some prices I decided to buy the whole lot to prospect, craft and disenchant.

I prospected all 46 stacks, which gave me the following gems:
44 Alicite
40 Carnelian
47 Hessonite
41 Jasper
40 Nightstone
46 Zephyrite

2 Amberjewel
2 Demonseye
3 Dream Emerald
3 Ember Topaz
4 Inferno Ruby
1 Ocean Sapphire

I crafted 2 Bold Inferno Ruby's, 2 Brilliant Inferno Ruby's and 2 Smooth Amberjewel's. I can't cut any other rare gems yet so I stored the other gems for later use.

The uncommon gems I used to craft the following items:
Alicite > Alicite Pendant
Carnelian > Carnelian Spikes
Hessonite > Hessonite Band
Jasper > Jasper Ring
Nightstone > Nightstone Choker

I then disenchanted all the uncommon quality items. I didn't get too many procs for a rare quality item, but the ones I did get weren't disenchanted since the Cataclysm levelling is still going on at large either from mains or alts so I'm expecting to sell at least some of them.

When I finally finished prospecting, cutting, crafting and disenchanting I ended up with the following items to be sold on the Auction House:
2 Bold Inferno Ruby (listed for 224g 50s each)
2 Brilliant Inferno Ruby (listed for 179g 50s each)
2 Smooth Amberjewel (listed for 248g 50s each)
10 Nightstone (listed for 55g each) *
6 BoE blue's from crafting rings and necklaces (listed for 195g each)
150 Hypnotic Dust (listed for 15g 90s each)
44 Lesser Celestial Essence (listed for 32g each)
30 Greater Celestial Essence (listed for 90g each)

* Always check the prices for individual gems, Nightstone is an excellent example of an uncommon gem which sells for good profit, on my server at least.

If all auctions sell for the prices listed above, which I'm not expecting, I'll be getting 9.518 gold for my effort. With an initial investment of 2.760 gold I've got a potential profit of 6.758 gold for about one hour work, not bad. This is without doing anything with the other four types or rare gems and Zephyrites, these should definately give me another 1.000g at least and maybe even more. For the time being they're stored away and not bringing in any gold so I'm not including them in the profit calculation.

When Maelstrom Crystal's finally start appearing for decent prices it might be more rewarding to use the enchanting materials for enchants instead of selling them raw.

For the more visually inclined I've included a small flowchart for the Obsidium shuffle. All jewelcrafting actions are colored like the gems which are needed for that cut / craft and all disenchants are gray colored.

As a small proof of concept: After 4 hours I've already sold all the Inferno Ruby's, one of the BoE rare rings, a good amount of enchanting mats and the Nightstones. I've got 3.869 gold waiting for me in my mailbox, 1.100 gold profit! I'll probably be checking the Remote Auction House when possible for the rest of the day to keep track of the rest of the auctions so I'll keep updating the process.

Updates:

13.10: I noticed Zephyrite is needed for today's JC daily so I quickly listed five batches of three for 150 gold and already sold one batch.

13.36: Another 1.067 gold incoming from sold auctions in the past hour

15.59: It's slowing down 557 gold incoming. Probably related to being undercut

23.47: To finish the day, 1.973 gold worth of auctions sold during the evening.

Total profit for today from just this batch of ores is about 4.700 gold, not bad for one hour in the morning and 5 minutes relisting in the evening!

Feast of Winter Veil

The Feast of Winter Veil is approaching and if you're like me and are looking for a way to make a profit out of it there are some things you should know. First, you're late! You should start preparing for holiday events months in advance. Right now you're probably not the only one trying to buyout needed materials and prices are already inflated compared to a couple of months ago.
But it's not too late. There's still potential for a decent profit but you'll have to check the Auction House more often and be more careful about what to buy.

How to make profit
To understand which items have good potential to make a profit during Winter Veil we have to start by looking at the quests and achievements that require tradable items. Every holiday event in World of Warcraft consist of a couple of quests which either give an achievement upon completion or reward gimmicks or requirements for achievements. People want to complete these quests and achievements and we're being payed to facilitate that.

Let's have a look at the quests:
Treats for Great-father Winter 
Treats for Great-father Winter 
The Hero of the Day 

And achievements:
'Tis the Season
The Winter Veil Gourmet

Any character that wants to complete all Winter Veil quests and achievements will have to aquire the following materials (vendor bought materials are not included):
- 5 Gingerbread Cookie
- 1 Deeprock Salt
- Winter Garb (3 pieces, red being the Alliance set and Green the Horde set)
- 2 Small Egg

The Gingerbread Cookie is a level 1 cooking recipy but let's assume at least some people will need help with creating the needed 5. We make a lot of gold from the lazy and ignorant, let's not forget about them ;)

For the Winter Garb set we need the following materials:
Green Winter Clothes / Red Winter Clothes:
4 Bolt of Runecloth (16 Runecloth)
1 Bolt of Woolen Cloth (3 Wool Cloth)
2 Red Dye (vendor)
1 Rune Thread (vendor)

Winter Boots:
1 Copper Bar
1 Bolt of Woolen Cloth (3 Wool Cloth)
4 Rugged Leather
1 Rune Thread (vendor)

Shopping list
I'd recommend the following shopping list for Winter Veil:
- As many Small Egg's as you can get, there really is no limit on this since most players want at least 5 of these and expect an undercutting war within hours of Winter Veil starting, not having to cancel, retrieve mail, relist is a definite plus.
- 100 Deeprock Salt
- 800 Runecloth
- 300 Wool Cloth
- 50 Copper Bar
- 200 Rugged Leather

Listing the goods
Start by listing Small Egg's in batches of 5 and 1 and Deeprock Salt in batches of 1, prices are dependant on your server and possible competition. List these the day before Winter Veil starts as late as possible, having enough on the Auction House at the start of the event will increase the potential high profit sales. Don't list everything you have in one go, you're very likely to be undercut soon so there is absolutely no need to.

Pre-make all the Winter Garb items and list a couple the day before Winter Veil, I'd say about 10 of each should do the trick.

Maximizing profits even further
If you're on a server with small supply of Rugged Leather you can try to inflate the prices by buying everything listed for not-to-redicously-high prices, don't attempt to control the market for any of the cloths or Copper Bars. Those are simply too easy to farm and usually in pretty high supply, particularly with the increased spawn rates of old-world mines.

Levelling enchants

Since most 'end-game' enchants aren't selling this close to Cataclysm I decided to list all levelling or twink enchants. I've noticed an increase in sales for enchants like Crusader and Mighty Intellect in the past few weeks so I figured there was more gold to be gained from these enchants.

I've created the following list based on two criteria:
1. The enchants can't have an item level requirement
2. The enchants have to give a significant bonus

Based on these two criteria I've selected the following list of enchants. Some of these are quite hard to get if you don't have them already, be prepared for some reputation and AQ20/40 grinding if you want to collect all of them.

Cloak
Enchant Cloak - Stealth (melee & hunters)

Chest
Enchant Chest - Greater Stats (all)

Boots
Enchant Boots - Greater Agility (melee & hunters)
Enchant Boots - Minor Speed (all)

Gloves
Enchant Gloves - Greater Strength (melee)
Enchant Gloves - Healing Power (casters)
Enchant Gloves - Superior Agility (melee & hunters)
Enchant Gloves - Riding Skill (all)

Weapon
Enchant Weapon - Agility (rogues and dualwield hunters *)
Enchant 2H-Weapon - Agility (hunters *)
Enchant Weapon - Crusader (melee)
Enchant Weapon - Healing Power (casters **)
Enchant Weapon - Mighty Intellect (casters)
Enchant Weapon - Spellpower (casters **)
Enchant Weapon - Fiery Weapon (melee)
* Will become very expensive to craft with the changed droprate for Essence of Air
**Not everybody is aware of Mighty Intellect being the best enchant for casters since 4.0.3, don't underestimatie the selling potential of well known enchants.

Shield
Enchant Shield - Greater Stamina (all)
Enchant Shield - Vitality (all)

I don't have all of the enchants yet but I'll update this post after some time when I have a bit more information about which enchants actually sell. Unfortunately the amount of expected sales can't be directly linked to the quality of an enchant, otherwise I'd see much more Mighty Intellect sales instead of Spellpower or Healing Power.

Take a break once in a while

I knew about the change to Jessica Sellers, being on a EU server I had the advantage of having the change confirmed by American players before my server went down for patch maintenance. A big thank you to the kind folks from the Just My Two Copper forums! Of course I traded as many Ink of the Sea as I possibly could but I also bought all resonably priced herbs from the Auction House and quickly pulled all of my glyphs.

I couldn't be 100% sure, but I predicted most scribes wouldn't be aware of this change so I hoped prices would rise quickly. As far as I knew it wasn't a well know fact and it most definately wasn't in the patchnotes. If my competition did not prepare properly and didn't sit on a high supply of already crafted glyphs I'd have a good chance of controlling at least a part of the glyph market. If they did prepare or did have a large supply I'd miss a couple of days of selling so there was no risk involved.

The first few days not much happened, there was no noticible change in glyph prices or amount of glyphes posted. I did enjoy a couple of days downtime though, not having to mill, craft, post, check for undercuts and repost but instead prepared my scribe for Cataclysm by levelling her to level 80.

After four days or so I did start to notice a change in glyph prices, mainly in the glyphs made from Ethereal Ink. These where all 20g-50g before the patch and are currently between 45g and 125g.

On a normal weekday I used to make about 1000 to 1500 gold on glyphs, after I started selling again I noticed quite the increase in income:

This is from Tuesday morning 8AM to Tuesday evening 10PM, almost 2900 gold from two posting sessions.

I could have continued to sell glyphs during the couple of days after the patch, but by keeping my glyphs of the Auction House I managed to get a much better profit margin and learned a bit about my competition (they're not sitting on large supplies and don't check the JMTC forums :)). Sometimes it's best to wait out what happens after a high impact change and collect the profit later on.

The importance of stockpiling

Cataclysm is right around the corner now, the elemental invasion is ruining Orgrimmar and Thunderbluff (or Ironforge and Stormwind) and at least on my server everybody and their mother is waiting in the cities for the elementals to come. I did not expect that to have a negative impact in my Action House adventure, well it did...

That's right, Lichbloom is the best example at the time of writing but herbs are dissappearing from the Auction House and prices are rising to a level unseen for a long time. Glyphes are selling better than ever but I can't restock and I'm slowly, but surely, starting to run out.

Thankfully it's Friday and I'm expecting the supply to rise again during the weekend when casual Joe is escaping the depressive November weather outside by farming the crap out of Scholazar Basin and listing his Adder's Tongue for 20g a stack.

At least that's what I'm hoping for, if I'd have to make an educated guess most casual players are probably going to do the same thing everybody else has been doing all week; hang around the cities, kill elementals and group for the four new bosses.

Important learning point

Even though I haven't really been able to start stockpiling Ink of the Sea I should have had a much bigger fallback stock at this moment. It's such an amazing time to be a Scribe on my server at the moment with only two serious competitors, one of which is probably having the same problem I've got and has become a lot less active over the past few days. I could be making an absolute killing but can't due to dwindling supplies.

I'm definately going to make sure this doesn't happen again, I should have made arrangements with farmers over the past weeks so I could at least let them know I need more herbs. I also should have purchased every single stack below my treshold instead of getting what I needed and hope for prices to drop, other people have reported herb prices to drop so I was expecting that to happen on my server as well.

How to start making gold with glyphs

In my opinion the most challenging profession to start making gold with is Inscription. You have to have some form of automation or be willing to sit behind your computer looking at the AH screen for hours at a time. A total of 340 glyphs is a lot especially if you want to be selling them all at just a little bit under your competition.

You also have to invest some gold before reaching it's full potential, with the 4.0.1 changes a new scribe is looking at the following expenses:
- 57 Books of Glyph Mastery
- 603 Inks to craft all glyphs available from trainers and books
- Two banking alts and 6 Pack of Endless Pockets to hold all of them (eventually you'll need 8 Packs and skip a few glyphs)
With this you've only crafted each glyph available without the Northrend and Minor glyph researches once, in order to be succesful at selling glyphs you're going to need a lot more Inks though. On my server this comes down to about 6.5k gold, if you've been collecting the needed Inks beforehand.

But what if you don't have 6k available but want to start making some gold right away? I would recommend starting with all the glyphs available from trainers which are listed on Elitist Jerks as best choices and the first two available from your first Northrend and Minor researches. At time of writing this are the following glyphs:
- Glyph of Arcane Blast
- Glyph of Arcane Missiles
- Glyph of Arcane Power
- Glyph of Backstab
- Glyph of Cleansing
- Glyph of Crusader Strike
- Glyph of Death Strike
- Glyph of Disengage
- Glyph of Dispel Magic
- Glyph of Divine Favor
- Glyph of Earth Shield
- Glyph of Earthliving Weapon
- Glyph of Ferocius Bite
- Glyph of Focus
- Glyph of Froststrike
- Glyph of Healing Stream Totem
- Glyph of Holy Nova
- Glyph of Ice Lance
- Glyph of Icy Touch
- Glyph of Imp
- Glyph of Incinerate
- Glyph of Insect Swarm
- Glyph of Lash of Pain
- Glyph of Mage Armor (if possible)
- Glyph of Mending
- Glyph of Mind Flay
- Glyph of Misdirection
- Glyph of Moonfire
- Glyph of Mutilate
- Glyph of Plague Strike
- Glyph of Power Word: Shield
- Glyph of Raise Dead
- Glyph of Rebirth
- Glyph of Rejuvenation
- Glyph of Scourge Strike
- Glyph of Shadow Bolt
- Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain
- Glyph of Sinister Strike
- Glyph of Soul Swap
- Glyph of Water Shield
- Glyph of Word of Glory
- Glyph of Wrath

After you've created two of each glyph make sure you know how much each glyph cost to make, I personally spend max 5 gold on each Ink which results in a maximum cost of 15g 50s. Of course I want to make a little bit of gold on each sale so I won't list a glyph below 20g buyout.
Since some of these glyphs will be made in bulk by levelling scribes you wont be able to list all of them all the time (unless you're willing to sell them with a loss) but you should be able to list enough to make a little profit every day. Keep investing that profit in Book of Glyph Mastery and don't forget to do each glyph research whenever possible and your daily profits should increase steadily.

This amount of glyphs can be listed manually but I strongly advice to check out Auction Profit Master. With just a single Item Group for your glyphs you can very easily post all your glyphs, check if you've been undercut and repost if needed.
The settings I use for my Glyps Item Group are:
Post cap: 2
Per auction: 1
Undercut by: 1c
Threshold: 20g
Fallback: 65g
Maximum price: 170%

This ensures I will never post below the line of making and losing gold, don't post glyphs at retarded prices (max 110g50s) and only undercut for 1 copper (preventing a rapid decline of listing price due to heavy undercutting).

Just make sure to check your auctions for being undercut whenever possible and relist if needed, don't burn yourself out by re-checking every 15 minutes though.

What I've done so far

Alright, let's see how badly my memory is failing me. I've been playing the Auction House for about three weeks now, and made about 15.000 gold in the process, let's see if I can recall what I have done untill now.

My idea of making gold before was farming Stratholme with my Paladin main character to gather the mats for Crusader enchants. My Paladin is an enchanter and I can easily pull half the instance with him so each run took me about 15 minutes. An hour or two worth of farming gave me enough scrolls of Crusader enchants to last me a week or two. However Stratholme is quite inconvenient to reach and heroic instance queue's were often faster than me clearing what I wanted to clear, even by queuing as dps. So I wanted a better result for time and efford invested.

The first market I went out to explore was selling scrolls of enchants, my main being enchanter was the most important reason for this. I started out with creating a spreadsheet in Excel which listed all the Northrend enchants I could make and formulas to calculate the cost-to-make based on actual Auction House prices. I knew what each enchant would cost me and I could easily check for how much I could sell them. Since I was sitting on a comfortable pile of mats, running loads of heroics as an enchanter has it's advantages, I could make almost all scrolls I predicted would earn me gold. I crafted the scrolls and listed them, manually, on the Auction House. Not all of them sold but some did and I invested the profit in even more Enchanting mats, created more scrolls and listed more scrolls, manually.

My Paladin is an Enchanter / Jewelcrafter, guess what market I dived in after feeling comfortable selling scrolls? That's right, Jewelcrafting! Not a very big success though; it's getting really close to Cataclysm and gems aren't exactly flying of the shelves, on my server at least. Only having a few of the epic cuts and no meta cuts bought with tokens and the high listing prices for gems didn't help either. So I quickly started looking for a more lucrative market than gems.

The only options I had available to me were Herbalism, Alchemy and Inscription, I hate farming so it would have to be Alchemy or Inscription. I didn't feel confident about Alchemy since I don't believe flasks or elixirs will sell properly so I decided to go for Inscription. My scribe was a level 70 alt who's sole purpose was creating Darkmoon cards to give my Death Knight (old main) the Greatness trinket. I hardly did a single Northrend discovery and hadn't learned a single Book of Glyph Mastery.
Attempting to conquer the glyph market really rocketboosted my knowledge of playing the Auction House. You just can't expect to randomly make some glyphs, list them on the Auction House, restock your supplies and make a decent amount of gold in the process. I quickly realised I was about to invest too much time for too little gain, that's not what I wanted to achieve. Luckily I'm not the first to start selling glyphs so all the problems I wanted to solved can be solved easily with some common addons, Auction Profit Master and EasyMail being the most important. Since I've started selling glyphs I've invested a lot of gold in buying the Books of Glyph Mastery which is really starting to pay off. I've doubled my daily glyph income and there's a lot more potential income to gain.

Which brings us to today, me creating this blog :)

My current plans for the nearby future are:
- Find a decent addon to help me craft the glyphs I've sold
- Buy as many Proto-drake Whelps as I can to resell later in Cataclysm
- Level my scribe to 80 in preparation for the Cataclysm changes to professions
- Learn all glyphs on my scribe to increase my daily profit from glyphs

Introduction

Hello,

I'm Coldstream and I've decided to start yet another 'World of Warcraft road to riches' blog. I've been a World of Warcraft player addict for many years now but only recently I've started creating and selling items to make gold pure for making gold. I'll be updating this blog with all the nuggets of wisdom I discover and/or find on the big bad Internet.

Since I've played World of Warcraft since launch (give or take a few weeks) I have some advantages over a much newer player. I already have multiple level 80 characters with maxed out professions (Alchemy, Enchanting, Inscription, Jewelcrafting and Herbalism) and if I really wanted to I could reactivate my girlfriends account and have access to all except Blacksmithing. However since I tackled one market at a time I'm fully convident anyone could do what I have done.
I play on the Horde side of a backwater European server with a very bad Alliance vs Horde ratio, last time I checked it was about 8:1 in favor of the Alliance. Not the best place to be but I call it home :)

Well that should be enough about me, time to start with some real content.