Tip: How to Make Money and Level Enchanting

Most of us that have leveled a toon or two (or more) to 70 knows that there are some quests out there that you simply did not do. If you are one of the lucky ones that leveled your toon after the big experience boost from 20-60, you probably have more unfinished quests out there. Well, now you are 70 and all of those unfinished quests are a breeze to complete and since you no longer need experience, the monetary reward for those quests has grown.


Well, guess what? Aside from free semi-enlarged monetary reward, you are still welcome to choose many of the fine item rewards for these quests. These quest items can then be Disenchanted for Enchanting Materials (or Mats). Now, I am not suggesting that you go back to Elwynn Forest or Durotar and start doing the quests out there. Low-level enchanting mats are generally very affordable in volume. But around the time you start requiring Vision Dust and Greater Mystic Essence, you can start questing around and getting those free items to DE along with some free money. You can't go wrong with FREE.


In a single day of questing (in the pre-Outlands world), I made about 135 gold and leveled my Enchanting a good 40 points. Not to mention the reputation you will earn, which is making a HUGE comeback in Wrath of the Lich King. Think about it. Happy Questing!

The true cost of your profession (enchanting)

Okay. The enchanting plot is ready. Refer to my original posting on tailoring on how to read these plots.

1). Plot 1, cost in gp plotted against skill points gained.
2). Running total of all GP spent to skill point 375
Observations:
much more expensive than tailoring (at least 500 GP more expensive). There are two maximums: around 300 and around 375. I also found that there is a huge jump in cost whenever you have to create an new rod.

Gem Cutting - A One-Click Business

Without a doubt, the most lucrative profession in the World of Warcraft is Jewelcrafting. Aside from the stuff you can make, gem-cutting is a one-click business that can make you tons of money, but in order to do so, you need some key designs.

Gemcutting requires no special sub-materials (with the exception of the Purified Shadow Pearl, which requires a Purified Draeneic Water, which can be purchased in just about any city in Outlands. You just need to have the standard Jewelcrafting tools and well, a Gem.

Below is a list of gem-cutting recipes that make a lot of money. (Click the links to see where they drop or can be bought.)

1. Design: Delicate Living Ruby - +6 Agility

2. Design: Balanced Nightseye - +8 Attack Power and +6 Stamina

3. Design: Glowing Nightseye - +5 Spell Damage and +6 Stamina

4. Design: Purified Shadowpearl - +9 Healing and +4 Spirit

5. Design: Shifting Nightseye - +4 Agility and +6 Stamina

6. Design: Solid Star of Elune - +12 Stamina

7. Design: Teardrop Living Ruby - +18 Healing

8. Design: Wicked Noble Topaz - +4 Critical Strike Rating and +8 Attack Power

9. Design: Smooth Dawnstone - +8 Critical Strike Rating

10. Design: Mystic Dawnstone - +8 Resilience Rating

You can also find a list of all Jewelcrafting recipes by clicking Here.

Now, most Jewecrafters with these cuts and other recipes will make about 5% of their money just by cutting gems and accepting tips for services rendered. The real money is made by what I like to call BCR, which is "Buy - Cut - Re-list". You see, most people that sell rare gems (uncut) in the Auction House sell them for less than the cut gems. So, as a Jewelcrafter, you should constantly keep watch on rare gems in the AH, buy those that are listed under the cut price, and then cut it and re-list it.

The hardest part about this concept is just getting the popular cuts. They tend to sell for 1,000+ gold in the Ah and sometimes as much as 2,000 or more gold. Your other option is to run the instances they drop in over, and Over, and OVER! If you're lucky, you'll get one on the first run. Happy Farming!

The true cost of your profession (tailoring)

Cross posted from my blog

We all know professions are expensive. Exactly how expensive? Wowwiki says it will cost you about 1200-1500 to skill up to 375 on tailoring. I was hoping I can find something that will give me a break down on how the money would be spent. To my disappointment this data was not readily available. So I decided to rely on myself and plot out the relationship between gold spent and skill gained in the tailoring profession.

Here is how I calculated the base cost. 1). I used WOWWiki's powerleveling guide as the base to plot out how someone would power level from level 0-375. 2). I used WOWhead to look up cost of each components needed to get the skill ups (price is current as of 6/30/08). 3). I plotted skill gain against cost required for leveling up on a XY plot.

This guide is for calculating material cost only. I didn't take into account the money necessary to train on the recipes needed. My eventual goal is to compare resource required to power level all professions. In this regard I imagine the recipe costs will even itself out across professions.

Here is a plot of gold cost against 1-375 tailoring. X axis is skill point, Y axis is cost in gold pieces.


The most striking thing about this graph is that tailoring is incrediblely inexpensive to level if you are only shooting for 360. As depicted by the figure above. The cost of the last 10 points is a whooping 1100 which is majority of the power leveling cost. If you remove the last data point and graph again you will get something like this.
Observe they are serveral dips in the cost structures corresponding to where you can turn raw cloth pieces into bolts of cloth.

If you start graphing running total of tailoring skills against total money spent up to the point you get something like this.

A total of 1300 GP to powerlevel tailoring from 1-375 which is pretty close to what WOWwiki had suggested. Now let's observe the difference with that last data point removed.
Essentially if you will only need to spend about 220 to power level to 360. A bargain comparing to a profession like enchanting which I plan to cover next.

Looking into the future: planning for WOTLK

Although this is not a 100% money making post there is enough money related issue I feel warranted to post on WOW Jones.

Here are some suggestions on what to do before the release of WOTLK.

Get all alts to level 70
Coming release of WOTLK most of the classes will see dramatic changes the way TBC did to the original WOW. Some classes will be nerfed, some classes will be buffed. You will never know which class you will enjoy playing coming the expansion. It doesn't hurt to have a few 70s in the pocket so you can pick the ones to take to 80. Currently I have a level 70 priest for healing. A level 62 hunter for DPS and a level 43 warrior which I plan to use for tanking. I plan to get as many of them to 70 as possible before the release. Adding the free death knight I think I will have all the corners covered coming release day.

Clean out your bank and bags
If you are like me, you will be carrying a full bank + bag of stuff. Some are junk, some are treasures, some are stuff with sentimental values only to you. Coming release day a lot of the treasure you collect will become junk overnight. For example, mooncloth's market disappeared overnight when TBC replaced it with primal mooncloth. A lot of "valuable" you have in the bank will go the same route when expansion gets released. Can any one say primal life for 1 GP? Liquidate them before every one else start dumping them.

Level up your crafting professions
You have probably been too busy leveling up your character and have neglected your secondary professions. This is a excellent time to level them up. Current secondary profession cap is 375, WOTLK will likely to revise this upward. It will be even more painful if you have to level it up from 0 coming expansion.

If you are still raiding, stop.
Your gear will be obsoleted coming WOTLK. You may be able to use your T4 for another 4-5 levels but new drops and quest items in WOTLK will surely push them out. Raiding is expensive and time consuming. Your time can be better spend leveling up another character. I however isn't oppose to running 5-men instances for team building purpose.

Cash is king
There is no way to predicate what will be hot what will be not. Save up cash, do some dailies. They will be inflation coming WOTLK but gold is the universal currency. I would say 2000-3000 GP is a well round number to have. Don't spend money on things that won't be useful coming WOTLK. Example, my priest desperately wanted to have the primal mooncloth set, but I can't justify spending another 1200 GP for it when expansion is close at hand.

Make friends
Coming WOTLK new guilds will form, old ones will disband, new people will join the game. Right now is the perfect time to meet up with a group of new virtual friends who will be sticking with you coming WOTLK. Smaller guild will be in fashion again because any 10 men guild can see the end game content. People who hasn't left WOW right now are the ones who have long enough attention span to stick around with you coming expansion. Maybe you should be "LF 9 More friends for WOTLK?" in /1?

That is all the rants I have time for. Remember, change is the only constant.

George Carlin passed away at the age of 71.

R. I. P.

May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008

No matter who you are, George Carlin has

at some point in your life, made you laugh.

His eye-opening, comedic genius will surely be missed.

Aldor Envy - It's not the size that matters, its the necklace.

Many of you should have noticed a recent imbalance in the cost of reputation-yielding items for Aldor over those for the Scryers faction. This is due to the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might which is available to anyone who is Exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive.

You see, if you are a member of the Aldor faction, the neck piece has a chance to proc, granting the wearer an additional 200 Attack Power, which when scaled with talents and abilities can produce allot more damage than the 333-367 Arcane damage granted to those of the Scryers faction.

When this was discovered by a Hunter friend of mine, he immediately began to grind out Venom Sacks, Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments and he is the first person I know that went from being exalted with Scryers to being exalted with the Aldor. That's not to say it hasn't been done before, he's just the first person that I know who has done it. The idea of him being out in Terokkar Forest in full epic gear just running around slaughtering every spider he saw had us all laughing for a good while, but we stopped and marvelled when he achieved his goal.

Anyway, what I am getting at is that farming Marks of Kil'Jaeden, Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments can make you an excellent amount of money in the Auction House, and it's easy farming. So from the inhabitants of Kil'sorrow in Nagrand to the Eclipsions of Shadowmoon Valley, grab your weapons and get to farming and you will find it to be quite lucrative.

Imagine going to bed and waking up the next morning to find that your WoW Toon gathered up 5 stacks of Heavy Clefthoof Leather and 25 stacks of Knothide Leather, not to mention acquiring some gold and a few good loot drops. Too good to be true you say? Well, in a sense you are right, but it does exist.

Blizzard Entertainment recently banned a huge number of WoW Accounts because they were found to be using Glider, a program which according to their website ... "plays your World of Warcraft character for you, the way you want it. It grinds, it loots, it skins, it heals, it even farms soul shards... without you."

Blizzard Entertainment is currently in the middle of a lawsuit against the makers of Glider, MDY Industries, claiming that it violates their EULA (End-User License Agreement). They are seeking injunctive and monetary damages, essentially saying that they want to stop production of Glider. They claim that it allows players to cheat, giving them an unfair advantage over players who do not use automation software.

Now I personally do not see anything wrong with the application. It doesn't alter Blizzard's source code by any means. It does not PvP for you with skills beyond human capability. All it does is grind, farm and gather for you. I would love to have a program to do my farming while I sleep so I could dedicate my play time to raiding dungeons and actually be able to afford my repair bills.

How do you feel about it?

Dailies Plague the WoW Economy

Most people who play World of Warcraft have recently noticed a huge flux in their server's economy. The general Auction House price for consumables and materials have gone through the roof and it is making it very difficult for casual players to obtain enchants and crafted materials. What is the cause of this sudden global WoW inflation? Daily Quests.

Thanks to recent patches and updates, the amount of daily quests that can be completed, and the amount available have increased considerably with the patched extension known as the Isle of Quel'Danas and the new faction, The Shattered Sun Offensive.

As it stands now, you can make over 400 gold per day just doing daily quests. So, if you do your dailies every day of the week, that's over 2800 gold each week. That means that a level 70 toon can conceivably obtain their epic flying in a short two weeks of doing dailies. Not to mention that after you do get your epic flying skill, you can then do more dailies by completing the Netherwing Ledge dailies to obtain your Swift Netherdrake mount.

Now, since the daily quests are in every sense of the word, easy money, there is less of a need for people to farm. Less farmers equals less crops, or in the case of WoW, less materials. That means that the few people who stick to farming can basically name their price on the materials they sell or the items they have crafted. Since the patches, I have seen the price of most Elixirs go up a good 15-20 gold per stack (5) and Flasks go up as much as 10g each. Don't even ask about Enchanting materials. My goodness!

So, as Blizzard continues to make this game easier and easier and more casual-friendly, it appears that they had absolutely no foresight into the damage their on-the-fly redesigning would do to the existing environment. Typically classic of big business.

A couple of things...

#1 - Due to a recent SPAM attack on WoW Jones, I have enabled the Blogger option for a "word check" for all comments. I apologize for the annoyance of this comment traffic stop, but it makes things easier to moderate.

#2 - I have been on a small hiatus from WoW Jones because of a promotion and additional responsibilities at work. Those things have since reached a plateau and I am now acclamated in my new position, so.... I'M BACK!

#3 - A special thanks to Faradhim for keeping WoW Jones up and running in my absence. You rock!!!