Inscription - Excel profit file

I've made a new Excel file to help me decide how to make best use of all the herbs I purchase. I've been buying about 200 stacks of herbs daily and deciding how to turn all those pigments in a healthy profit has taken me a lot of napkin math, so it was time for an updated version of my Cataclysm profit file.
I haven't included the option to create Inscriptions and vendor those as explained in my post about Vendoring Inscriptions. While it can reward a good profit, with the Ink trader accepting Ink of Dreams for Starlight Ink it's currently just not a viable option. If Inks prices drop by a great margin it'll be worth it again and I'll probably include the option in the file.

The Excel file can be found on Google Docs: Mists of Pandaria Herb profit sheet

Like with all my other Excel files, 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 and directing people to this blog allows them to comment so I can further improve the file if needed.

Preview:

Easy buying on high population servers

Over the past days I've spend a lot of time buying herbs, milling them for pigments and create inks to resell the Starlight Ink. On the high population server I'm curently playing on I've noticed one major difference compared to my previous server; browsing the Auction House is slowww. So slow in fact that it's a lot more efficient to use Blizzard's Remote Auction House instead of TradeSkillMaster (TSM).

Buying loads
The process which enabled me to purchase the needed herbs quickly was a combination of scanning the Auction House with TSM and buy the cheapest auctions through the Remote Auction House. I'm not online 24x7 so for me it's no big deal to scan for the herbs from in-game, logout and buy from the Remote Auction House. I'm assuming most know their way around TSM so I'll focus on Remote Auction House in this post.

The required steps to quickly buy herbs are:

1. Open the Remote Auction House app on your phone or tablet and go to the Auction House and choose 'Browse':
   -
   
2. Tap 'Search' and select 'Trade Goods' and 'Herb' as 'Categories', if you want to you can limit the search to specific herbs I never bother:
   
   
3. Scroll down untill you've found the herb you want to purchase, tap the herb (I choose Green Tea Leaf in this example:
   
   
4. If there are a lot of Auctions at the same price the Remote Auction House will stack them. By tapping those stacks you enter the buying screen:
    
   
5. In the following screen you can select the amount of stacks you'd like to buy, you can select any amount up to the total amount of stacks and the Remote Auction House will purchase them in seconds:
    

This little trick enabled me to buy way faster than I'd be able to with TSM due to many timeouts and long time spend 'searching for auction'. Just remember you can only buy 200 auctions per day through the Remote Auction House so choose wisely :)

Vendoring Inscriptions

I've returned to World of Warcraft and after a few weeks of leveling a new toon on a completely different realm I've returned to World of Auctions as well, yay me! :)

Rags to riches
Over the coming weeks I'll post about my progress into forming a new empire, I haven't migrated any of my characters to the realm I currently play on so I've started with absolutely zero resources. My new main is running around in Panderia but since I'm taking a more casual approach I'm only level 86, therefor most of the upcoming articles will be about markets a leveling scribe (lvl 600) can exploit.

First market: inscriptions
The main market I've been focussing on, apart from selling glyphs, is buying out all Ink of Dreams priced below 5g. The inks are then used to create the tradable Inscriptions: Crane Wing Inscription, Ox Horn Inscription, Tiger Claw Inscription and Tiger Fang Inscription. These Inscriptions can be vendored for 18g 75s, which is 6g 25s per ink gaining me a profit of 1g 25s per ink!

The Inscriptions can also be regularly reset, mainly during the evening when regular Joe has won new shoulders in the LFG and doesn't want to spend 1.000g on the Greater Inscriptions. If only I could find a way to keep the multiple-gold uncutters away to maintain high prices for more than a day...

WoA stars for this market:

Profit
Risk
Hassle

While you'll have to spend a decent amount of time crafting the inscriptions this is a very good gold maker with absolutely no risk involved.

Resource dependancy

How to become less dependant on a single resource and it's availability on the Auction House? As you might have noticed, my main source of income is the Obsidium Shuffle. This means of course I need quite a lot of Obsidium Ore. Usually I can get those without too much of a hassle but there will always be times when the much needed ores are too expensive. Little over a week ago the price for a single stack suddenly spiked to 180 gold on my server, it took about 5 days before dropping to normal levels.

If you're not prepared for these price spikes you're going to lose either potential profit from not being able to craft and sell or you're going to sell with a much smaller profit margin. So what can we do to get a little bit close to a Goblin's utopia, reaching our maximum profit every day?

Stock
Before I'm even going to mention any other options it's important to realize how the market works in WoW. Disregarding the presence of farmers (the evil kind) for now, a typical farmable item like Obsidium Ore will have significantly lower prices during the weekends. Many casual gamers will do less Auction House related activities during the week compared to the weekends, resulting in higher volumes of items sold but generally at lower prices.
Farmers (again the evil kind) mess up this pattern. Whenever a couple of farmers hit a server and reduce prices to rediculously low levels the motivation for regular farmers (the good kind) will drop. If the farmers leave after a couple of days, it takes a while before regular farmers have noticed they're gone and prices, and thus their profit, are back to normal. Occassionally this leads to prices as shown below where farmers reduced the price well below average (90g-100g), disappeared for a while and came back for another price reduction.

Obsidium Ore prices

If you know what price to expect, or more importantly know what price not to expect. I personally have a purchase price of 65g a stack. I know prices will fall below that mark on a regular basis and usually can purchase enough to keep me supplied during the days where prices are well above this 65g mark.
Doing a little bit of research and not being afraid to invest several thousands of gold will eventually pay off.

Diversify
The second option is of course to include other materials in your daily gold making cycle. Increased prices for Obsidium or Elementium Ore do not mean leathers and herbs are expensive as well. In fact there's a good chance the farmers (the evil kind) aren't gone but have simply moved to another material. Following their activities and buying when they're selling is an excellent strategy to buy low and sell normal / high.

In order to properly diversify the markets you're currently active in it's important to realize which tradeskills each resource is being used in.

Tradeskill	Main material
Alchemy	Herbs
Black Smithing	Ores
Enchanting	Ores *
Engineering	Ores
Inscription	Herbs
Jewelcrafting	Ores
Leatherworking	Leather
Tailoring	Cloth

* Even though Enchanting uses dusts and essences as main materials, the prices for those are set by Jewelcrafters disenchanting rings and necklaces created by the Obsidium Shuffle.

Three tips for a starting goblin

This post has been specifically written for the February edition of Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival. Cold asks us "What 3 Pieces Of Advise Would You Give A Little Goblin? (3 Top Tips For New Auctioneers?)". Well, I've got three tips which I'm hoping are useful for starting auctioneers.

I am however going to start with a requirement instead of a tip, consider this a small bonus on top of the three tips ;)
If you want to start making serious gold in World of Warcraft it's going to cost you a lot of time, time you're not going to be able to spend on other activities like running heroics, pvp'ing, raiding or whatever else you can imagine. You can of course still do those things but it's going to cost you more time. If you're not willing to spend the time needed to start making serious gold, these tips might still be worth reading (I hope they are) but please don't expect major profit for minor effort.


Tip 1: Research
In order to start selling and start making a profit you need to identify the markets you can be successful in on your server. Spend some time doing research into what these markets could be while keeping in mind whatever limitations you have.
For example when I started out two and a half month ago I had two max level characters with both professions maxed out. I had a Jewelcrafter / Enchanter and a Herbalist / Alchemist, one of my characters also had Fishing and Cooking maxed. I started doing research on how to make gold with just those four professions and the small start capital I had available. I listed all available markets I could enter with just these two characters, which were:
 - Twink / alt Enchants
 - Flasks and Elixirs
 - Herbalism
 - Supplying raiders with Fish Feasts
 - High level Enchants
 - Transmutes
 - Rare and Epic gems

I quickly decided Herbalism was too time consuming for my liking, Flasks and Elixirs or Fish Feasts wouldn't be worth the effort at the end of the expansion. I had just returned from a several months long break so cutting Rare and Epic gems wouldn't be feasible since I had just a few cuts and no Jewelcrafting tokens. This left Enchanting and Transmutes so I started doing a more thorough research into those markets.

A spreadsheet listing the costs of the materials and calculation potential profit based on current Auction House prices is an excellent resource for this. I'd recommend creating one yourself since you'll get a better understanding of what you're actually going to sell. If you don't know how or don't want to create one there usually are good spreadsheets available at gold making forums like The Consortium or The JMTC forums.

After you have researched each potential market pick just a single one to start selling in, make sure you really understand this particular market before moving on to the second tip.


Advanced tip 2: Expand
You've succesfully started selling in your first market and making some profit on a daily basis, now is the time to start expanding. Re-use the research you've done before and enter the second best market. After you've succesfully entered the second market and are making some profit on that market as well it probably time to move on to the third step.

The idea behind this tip is quantity beats quality. You're also going to become more resilient, being active in a lot of different markets means you're less vulnerable to short-term changes to the economy.

This tip remains valid no matter how many markets you're currently managing, always keep on the lookout for new markets to enter. After having entered some or all markets identified during Tip 1 you can start expanding your horizon. Research the markets you currently cannot enter, with the gold you've already made leveling a new tradeskill just to make more gold might be a viable strategy. You won't know unless you've researched and by doing your research properly you're minimizing the risks of investing in an already lost cause.

Advanced tip 3: Automate
Listing a couple of items can easily be done manually, checking for undercutting, cancelling and relisting isn't too much of a hassle either. Now imagine doing this for dozens of items, you're going to spend more time at the Auctions House or the mailbox than anywhere else. Fortunately there are some excellent addons which take care of the most time consuming aspects of making gold. I'll give a short description of the addons I'm using and why I use them.

Auction Profit Master
Auction Profit Master is the addon I use to automatically create auctions, check for undercutting and cancel if needed. This is all based on previously defined groups.
For a small introduction to configuring APM see this Inside Trader article by Basil Berntsen.

EasyMail
I use this addon to collect all mails with just a couple of clicks, not having to worry about opening hundreds of mails and collecting hundreds attachments a day is pure bliss.

Auctioneer
Auctioneer I use for the occasional full scan of the entire Auction House and regular scans of the items on my Snatch List. Auctioneer is a very extensive addon, take the time to understand it's functions and then decide which of those functions you would like to use.

New patchnotes 4.0.6: buy Volatile Life?

I've already discussed the new meta gems coming in patch 4.0.6 but I've found some more possible moneymakers in the new patchnotes.

The changes (besides the new meta gems) I find particularly interesting are:

• A socket has been added to all crafted epic armor pieces that did not already have one.
• Alchemist's Stones for Agility, Strength, and Intellect have been added
• The number of herbs required to create flasks has been reduced, while the Volatile Life needed has been increased slightly
• Vivid Dream Emerald (new gem) provides resilience/spell penetration and can be purchased for 3 Illustrious Tokens.

I don't think there is a huge amount of crafted epic armor pieces out there, but there might just be enough to have a noticable effect on the sales of rare gems. Combined with the requirements for the new meta gems I'm expecting a larger sale volume for cutted Inferno Rubies. Now would be the time to buy them cheap or hold on to the ones you're getting from the Obsidium Shuffle.

Jewelcrafter should also hold on to three Illustrious Jewelcrafter Tokens so you could purchase the new gem immediately and possibly make a profit from them while nobody else is selling them. Cut rare gems haven't been my most profitable market for a couple of weeks though so I'm most likely going to skip this.

The Alchemy changes might have the biggest impact of all currently announced changes. The newly added Alchemist Stones will most likely have similar reagents as Lifebound Alchemist Stone, some herbs and 50 Volatile Life. If we combine this information with the reduction for herbs and increase in Volatile Life needed to create flasks there's only one logical conclusion: The demand for Volatile Life is going to increase. The biggest question is if the increase will be enough to result to an increase in price. I'm going to take the risk and stock up on cheap Volatile Life, if it's a miss I'll have enough mats for Transmute: Living Elements and hopefully won't be at a large loss.

What do you think? Are we going to see a price for Volatile Life or am I taking a huge gamble here?