Someone in guild chat claimed that it’s more lucrative to pair herbalism with alchemy and craft and sell pots on AH than to have what I have which is herbalism + skinning and just selling the raw mats on AH. Anyone tested this and know it to be true?

I have herb/alch and sell mongoose and mana pots

Skinning is ~worthless since everyone had the same idea to skin Devilsaur's and at this point in the game's life everyone has their Devilsaur set.

Only thing is skinning is just so convenient compared to the other gathering professions because you’re also getting xp and often are completing quests at the same time. Even better as a troll with the racial bonus vs beasts. My skinning is already double my herbalism even though I started both at the same time. Also you’re just skinning and then the stuff goes straight on AH, no time spent gathering —-> crafting —-> AH. I figure the pots are worth more than raw mats but wondering if crafting time is figured into the calculus determining that alchemy is more of a money maker.

i mostly just vendor the leather.. i just see it as added loot from every beast.

How many of you are posting here but not re-upping?

As someone mentioned, escape artist. It would have saved me so many times already. Ive gotten value from perception like twice in the month. I thought the sword and mace skill would matter but pve content has been so easy i should have focused on pvp. Maybe maybe maybe aq or naxx human will come out on top but this phase, the next one, and 3 for sure i really really wanted to be a gnome

I meam devilsaur is still going for 14g and the set is like 400 on herod. When i tried to farm devilsaur there was so much competition i got farmed by horde instead. Two days ago i dropped skinning.

Its the least profitable gathering prof, but it costs nothing and provides free money while leveling. Id recommend everyone to be a skinner at least until 225 and then transition into a different prof

Anecdotably, of the expanded friend base that i recruited to play wow, 3 did 1 month sub and wont play anymore. Way way way more are signed up for longer. A few people ive played other games with have told me they prefer retail, but i dont know if those played this or just stuck w bfa.

My guess is about 20-30% of the initial surge are done with the game. I have no idea if this is more or less than what blizzard expected

My plan is to do skinning/herb until 60 and then get non-gatherning professions. The skins and flowers sell for decent on the AH, it certainly adds up. I just use TSM and set all my mats to post in stacks of 5 at 80% of the market rate regardless of if something is posted at a lower price and they always sell.

Sounds like you should be selling them for a bit more. Im happy when almost all my stuff sells... unhappy if all of it does

good point

anyone experience the devilsaur mafia on their servers?

oily blackmouth and firefin snapper are selling for cents. i suggest stocking up. in general, if you have gold you don't need now, keep it in assets that will appreciate as gold floods the economy, instead of in cash.

i dont think my server is there yet. Sulfurus is one of the post launch day added ones. its high-full pop but normally queue less. devilsaur leather is like 8-9g, and the set is going for 250g.

Im not convinced. A lot of people are running fishing bots which are artificially lowering the cost of that by flooding the volume. Unless you think theyll crack down the botting (i dont) stockpiling those mats is erroneous

the Righteous Orb market is so annoying to deal with

I bought a ton low at 18, have sniped an empty market to sell a few at 30-35 and then randomly idiots will undercut everyone and bring it back down to 18

playing the long game on them mostly, they should always be 30

Just gotta know the market. On days where everyone is busy undercutting each other at 2g when I know the price should be 3g, I just post it at 3g and wake up to find that it sold.

TSM added regional data, gonna be huge for flipping. Mostly I just try to flip BoE Blues/Epics and Recipes/Mats that can only be found via a drop. I've scooped up nearly 10 BiS twink blues so far that I am just sitting on. Anyone else here use TSM and want to discuss strategy for auctioning / buying prices?

Had never heard of TSM. Is it worth getting premium?

personally i dont think so but i havent really trialed out the feature (basically just a 'great deals alert') so i cant say for sure.

TSM is only as good as your item groups.

I had total sales in the hundreds of millions in the US Sargeras economy using TSM during Mists and WOD, but called it quits when Legion released.

What you do with it really depends on your goals, what kind of trader you want to be, and what time resources you're willing to spend on it. Putting together a full twink BIS list would be a good start, and my guess is that gold will fairly inflate in Classic, so you should be sitting on as much inventory as possible at all times rather than liquid cash.

Your pricing strategy is also going to be determined at least in part by how much time you're willing to put into playing the AH. Your margins will need to be higher if you're going to be a lower volume trader.

Always be wary of the "good deals" alerts because enterprising individuals can game those over time. In my experience, maybe 1 in 50 items is an actual decent deal, and the true home runs are gone in minutes to people with too much time on their hands. Sniper scanning and trade chat is your biggest source of home run deals. Lowball people in trade, and don't engage for long with people who give you the "it's on the AH for X, so I need X-1%" argument. Your required discount varies based on the item/quantity, but you're always starting with at most half price during negotiations.

I only lasted to level 8 on a modern Classic server before uninstalling so I can't speak intelligently about the current economy, but I'm sure retail strats translate so don't overlook flipping crafting mats as well. Especially ones that move quickly. Keep an eye out in trade, and send COD offers for good prices as well, even if other people outbid you immediately. Your goal is not to make a slave wage job for yourself, it's to get good deals. One favorite move of mine was to just pick some random mat and bark about buying obscene quantities, "WTB 100,000 [less common, but still useful in some way material], COD everything you have for $$/stack" and then striking up conversations with anyone who bit, sometimes finding people with large amounts of an unrelated item. I'd buy any quantity of just about any item as long as the price was worth my time to process it. Example, I purchased ~250,000 Windwool Cloth during WOD from a single seller who was doing who the hell knows what and had been simply vendoring all his cloth. I gave him a price that was worth his time to not just vendor it, and wound up selling it through a combination of the AH at a very nice profit, and using my 2nd account to turn some into blue PvP cloaks and vendoring those. I'd also of course keep the AH stocked with anything else that sold decently and used Windwool Cloth. The crafting part was time consuming, but something done while entirely afk by using basic AutoHotkey scripts and restocking of AH items is nearly fully automated with various TSM features.

The larger the quantity you buy, the bigger the discount you can get with a very real logical argument that you're basically buying this dude's problem. "How the hell else do you think you're going to move 20,000 Runecloth? You may be able to get 20s each on the AH over the next 4 months, but I'll buy all of it right now for 5s each." Prices made up, obviously. If he won't budget on the price, move on. We want DEALS.

Lot of words here to state the obvious, that you should just buy low and sell high, but just remember that the AH is a PvP game. Play the player, and anticipate the competition.


Other basic strategies:

1) Don't bother with fancy undercuts. Just use 1c. The number of sales you'll lose to people like me who intentionally buy the one that costs 1c more is VASTLY outweighed by the overall loss in profits by getting into undercut wars with idiots who think that slashing the price by 20% means something will sell faster. You can go semi-fancy with low supply, high ticket items that move slowly, but just remember every time you relist you're lowering your profit. Don't get into 2% undercut wars.

2) Do not use 48hr listing times for high volume items. You're pissing away money on deposit fees and there's zero chance you will not be undercut pretty much immediately.

3) MATCH STACK SIZES for pricing. Posting your stack of 200 "X" at effectively a 20% markdown just because some random dude listed 3 individual auctions of them at that price, with the majority of the market being the proper, higher price, is going to cost you a fortune and you're helping to tank the market price. Match stack sizes, use VARIED stack sizes, and most importantly CONVENIENT stack sizes. People will buy one stack of 10 or 20 at a much higher price to avoid having to buy 10 individual auctions. Your target market is not the person who uses an addon to quickly buy singles of things. This also cuts down on Mailbox time later.

4) People are lazy. You can and will sell vendor-purchased white items at obscene markups on the AH if it saves someone a trip to a vendor.

5) Dollar cost average is important in some markets. Don't buy your 18th copy of some twink item at the same price as you did your 17th one. You can definitely have too much of some things, and it's sometimes better to just cut your losses and invest that money elsewhere. Don't fall into the trap of feeling like you need to eliminate competition on something you have a lot of.

6) The more work you put into the groups and pricing operations, the better your profits will be. It might be easier to just dump all the Twink items into a single group with a single 50% dbmarket buy pricing operation, but not all items are created equal. If there's some uber fantastic rogue weapon on a twink list that's bound to move pretty quickly, you can afford to and should have a buy price that's higher than the B-tier rogue belt which is only marginally better than a C-tier item that you can craft. Spend the time to figure out which is which, and organize your groups accordingly. Groups and operations make the TSM goblin, not the addon itself.

I could go on for hours. I had a lot of fun crushing the Auction House over the years. It's a shame that Blizzard has been working so hard to ruin the experience by gutting professions and alts.

Edit: Oh, and remember that the Mailbox offers unlimited item storage. At the height of my operations, I'd have 20,000+ items or stacks of items floating around in mailbox storage at any given point in time. TSM makes it easy to keep characters and markets organized, but that's also why I used a dedicated AH account. When I quit in Legion, I wound up having to liquidate the entire account to someone from Reddit for pennies on the dollar because otherwise 100M gold worth of inventory would've just rotted in the mailbox.

Holy **** dude

thanks for that writeup

Lol that's a write up

5th onyxia kill, no black dragon sinew

kill me now