Herbalism: Secret Cinderbloom Farming Spot for Lower Levels

If you have an alchemist or especially an inscriptionist, or if you just want to sell herbs as-is on the auction house, leveling through herbalism can be quite profitable. The amount of XP granted per node is pretty decent, especially if you're wearing heirloom gear. I leveled my druid from 75 to 80 solely through herbalism.

At level 75, you'd naturally be in Northrend, and on my server those herbs are more profitable on the whole than Cataclysm herbs. Also, Inscription uses a whole lot of Ink of the Sea, which is milled from Northrend herbs. However, your server may be different, and making tons of Blackfallow and Inferno inks isn't bad either. If you're also leveling alchemy and inscription, still, you'll probably want the Cataclysm herbs. Or maybe you're just sick of flying circles around Sholazar Basin and need a change of scenery. What to do?

Everyone probably knows by now that you can fly yourself to Hyjal and farm before you hit level 80. (If you don't, you'll need EK/Kalimdor flying. As a druid, it's easy to teleport to Moonglade and fly from there, but you can get there from anywhere in Kalimdor.) However, the giant difference in gear and mob health/hitting power can be a huge problem. Luckily, there's a great spot to farm (mostly) Cinderbloom in Hyjal, and until you've quested through the zone, it's almost entirely mob-free. That spot is the area near the Seat of the Chosen in the southeast corner of Hyjal, where the Twilight Cultists will later be hanging out. Until you phase the area, though, the only things you'll see are a few basilisks here and there. They are easily avoided at lower levels, and once you get to 77 or 78 (especially if you're wearing Cata greens) you can take them down without much trouble.

Here's a map of where to go:

Look, Ma, no mobs!

TSM Shopping List: Book Glyphs

I originally posted this list on the Consortium Forums, but I feel it's useful so I'm sharing it here.
If you're in the glyph market, you probably realize by now that the most profitable glyphs are those learned through daily research and via Books of Glyph Mastery. These are also the only glyphs really worth trying to flip, since the trainer-taught glyphs are so common you're almost guaranteed to be undercut within about 30 seconds.

Personally, I like to search for underpriced glyphs to flip from time to time. I mainly look for book glyphs, i.e. those taught by the Book of Glyph Mastery. Especially if I can find one under crafting cost, I'll snag it, but even if it's over crafting cost but way under market value, I'll buy out to try to reset.

One way to search for these is with a TSM shopping list. I went through Wowhead and put together a shopping list with all the item IDs for every current book glyph in the game. You can import this into your TSM and use it as you see fit. I hope you enjoy this and/or find it useful; if so, let me know!

TSM Book Glyph Shopping List:
s1@45738,45623,45741,45601,45790,45781,45625,45769,45799,45736,45782,45753,45758,45745,45731,45766,45771,45793,45755,45742,45779,45777,45746,45806,45800,45740,45732,45762,45785,45733,45780,45739,45756,45735,45772,45747,45604,45734,45764,45783,45797,45744,45792,45737,45789,45795,45757,45603,45778,45743,45770,45767,45761,45602$@

How To: Vendor Recipes

I'll start this post by saying that Faid over at Clockwork Riot has a great list of vendor recipes for sale for $2. It's well-edited, nicely laid out, and contains some extra tips. If you're brand new to selling vendor recipes, I recommend picking it up; my post is going to be a little less straightforward and assumes a bit more knowledge of TSM and basic AH techniques. Please note that when I say "recipes" here I mean any profession recipe/pattern/plan/schematic/formula/whatever, not just cooking recipes.

So, vendor recipes. I've had a lot of luck selling these, to people who are either too lazy to go pick them up from the vendor or who don't know they come from a vendor in the first place. Their ignorance is my bliss. I did a vendor run of half of EK on my mage yesterday and pulled in about 1200g. It's never going to be your primary money maker, but every copper counts, right? Right. How do you get started selling them, though?

1. Know where to get the recipes in the first place.
As I mentioned above, Faid has a nicely edited guide that lists profitable recipes by location in an orderly fashion. That's going to be the easiest way to find them -- she's basically handing the information to you on a plate.

You could also look on Wowhead and try to sort out everything and make up a big huge list and so on and so forth, but let me tell you: That would be a giant pain in the rear. Seriously.

Or you could do what I mostly do, and get an addon called RecipeProfit for GatherMate. Obviously you need to have GatherMate 2 installed in the first place, but you probably already do. If you don't, you should. RecipeProfit adds markers in for vendors and when you mouse over the marker, it shows the vendor's name, the items they sell, and how many you have. That last feature is limited, as it only counts what you have in your current toon's bags; it doesn't make use of Altaholic to show your other toons or auctions. Still, lots of information. It shows the icon both on the minimap and on your big map. Here's what it looks like:

1b. Make a flight plan.
No matter where you get your information, buying up the vendor recipes is going to involve some serious travel time. Many of the recipes are limited supply so you'll only be able to buy one at a time, but they're not all going to sell out on the same day so if you do this once a week or every few days you can build a slight stockpile. (I created a bank toon specifically for vendor recipe storage and selling, because I get confused when I post too many categories of stuff on one toon.)

Originally I had planned to grab recipes on my mage, since she can teleport around easily. However, I've ended up mostly doing it on my hunter, who has archaeology. I combine recipe buying with rare spawn hunting and archaeology dig sites. That way I'm not just flying around buying stuff. This would also pair well with a gathering profession.

After you've done this run a few times, you'll come up with an idea of how to get to the vendors most efficiently. Again, Faid's list is already organized for you, so if you're overwhelmed by the idea, go buy that.

2. Sell the recipes.
I use TSM for this, because individually listing each recipe would take forever, given that you can have hundreds of different items up at one time. I created an auctioning category in TSM just for vendor recipes, and I have several groups within that category for different price brackets. The vendor recipes sell for very different prices, so I didn't want to just throw them all in with one threshold and fallback. The threshold/fallback spreads for each category go from just above the previous group to the price the group is named after. That way I can undercut. You can undercut on these pretty seriously since you'll rarely pay even as much as 5g for one of the recipes. Then you just go to the auction house, hit Post Auctions in the TSM tab, and wait for the gold to roll in.

2b. Stay organized.
As I mentioned earlier, I have a bank toon specifically for vendor recipes. I set up TSM auto mailing to send all the recipes to her, so I don't have to pick through my bags; it saves on clicking and mailing time. I recommend doing this. Just create the toon as a mail-to character and then add all your vendor recipe groups. Voila, done. I also use AdiBags, which separates the recipes by profession automatically. You don't really need to do this since you're going to be selling everything, but it's there if you want it.

So that's it -- vendor recipe selling in a nutshell. Good luck!

As The Gold Turns: March 18-24

Start: 167,859g
End: 209,339g
Profit: 41,480g


A Good Week, Overall
I put a lot more effort into my auctions most days this week and saw an increase in profits. Initially I kept a spreadsheet with each day's spending and income, but then WoW started crashing too much and the data became increasingly inaccurate. I'm going to go with overall numbers and the notes I did manage to make to see which markets were the most successful. According to TSM Accounting, which lost some data due to crashes, my average daily income over the past seven days was 7620g, and average daily AH spending was 954g.

Cata Greens, Again
This week's chart toppers were the level 77-80 Cataclysm greens. No big surprise there. I check several times a day for cheap items and post them for 400-475g on average. I bumped the prices up this week and still had plenty of sales. I think a lot of them are going to the new level 80 SoR toons, but I've been in this market for months and it's always been a consistent source of income. Definitely making a lot more sales, though.

Enchanting Mats
I kind of don't have a good handle on the enchanting scrolls market, and I also think fewer and fewer people are raiding. The market prices for all the scrolls have gone way down and they don't move very quickly. Part of the price drop is because we've got ore botters on the server, ergo ore is cheap, ergo enchanting mats are cheap. Still, I got tired of crafting scrolls only to have them linger and take up bag space and incur reposting fees, so I've basically quit making most of them and am only selling the raw materials for enchants.

This week I posted up a lot of my stockpile of pre-Cata mats, as well as quite a few Greater Celestial Essences, all of which sold well. I waited until the price on GCEs went up from 50g to 80g per to maximize my profit on them, and I sold almost all of my stock. The old school dusts (Infinite Dust in particular) also went for a good price.

Gems
As with enchanting, the gem market is a bit rocky right now. It's still profitable but it does take a lot of time to shuffle (you can see my post earlier this week about what I prospected) and then to cut the gems. I finally spent some of my JC daily tokens on some new cuts and had success in selling them, albeit at fairly low prices. Again, though, between the ore bots and raiding coming to a near-standstill, that's to be expected. I still had some sales, although a majority of them were uncut Chimera's Eyes and purple, green and blue gems. The cut inferno markets are being driven into the ground; I still sold a few.

Glyphs
I did a nearly-full restock on glyphs over the course of the week. I've heard it's like Glyphmas 2 with the SoR folks but I'm not really getting that. In fact, my glyph sales have gone down pretty dramatically. This is probably because there are FOUR new serious competitors in the market, bringing the total to 7, and that means if I don't repost about once every ten minutes I'm undercut all the time. I still post several times a day and I do get a few sales, but it's on the order of hundreds of gold each mailbox check rather than the thousands I used to pull in. I'm going to do a post soon on how I'm largely getting out of this market, but not entirely, because I just won't be able to play enough WoW to keep up. With all the glyph changes coming in MoP, I don't want to end up sitting on a huge stockpile of obsolete glyphs, either.

Vendor Goods
I love vendor recipes. Sometimes they sell for ridiculous prices, sometimes only a few gold more than what I paid for them, but either way it's a profit. I usually see anywhere from 2-10 sales on these a day. I definitely don't have an inventory of every vendor recipe but I'm thinking of making a toon to keep them in stock so I can easily repost. (Hey, I don't have a warlock yet; why not a lock bank alt?) I use my mage to buy them since she can easily teleport around most of Azeroth. Faid has some vendor recipe guides for sale at Clockwork Riot for only $2 each (one for each faction). I haven't picked one up yet but I'm going to this week since I know Faid puts out quality content. Right now I just use the RecipeProfit for Gathermate 2 addon to see where the vendors are and what they sell. Some of the locations it has are inaccurate, though. I also sell vendor pets, inscription items from Twilight Highlands, and probably a few other random items.

Transmog
Still isn't really working out for me. I had a couple of sales this week which brought in about 3000g. There is one major transmog seller on my server and he or she seems to have the market pretty well on lockdown, along with a huge inventory of transmog goods. I've been buying chest and leg pieces that are in Keelhaul's high tiers that I see come up at low prices, but they really aren't moving. I don't want to put a lot more effort or gold into this since honestly it just kind of annoys me, but I'll continue to try it on a fairly casual basis.

Random Stuff
I've been clearing out and organizing my inventory and banks this week, so I've also posted up some one-off items, along with selling off some ore, bars, stones and leather I don't really need for anything. I've also made gold from leveling 3 of my alts a fair bit and doing dungeons and quests.

What I Bought
Mostly just stuff to resell, shuffle, and mill, although I spent a tiny bit on Fel Iron bars for Oph's engineering. I also bought her 280 flight when she hit level 70, since all my alts get that now. Slow flying is slow.

Verdict
This week was MUCH better than last week. I definitely put more effort into making sure all my toons were posting auctions for the stuff they had instead of just letting it sit around in their banks. I'm going to try to keep up a similar level in the coming week and see how things go.

77-80 Cata Greens and How to Find Them

If you follow goldmaking blogs or livestreams at all I'm sure you've heard by now about selling the ilvl 272 and higher Cataclysm greens. This market has exploded recently with the new SoR 80s; the item level of the gear they get isn't actually very good -- 232, I believe -- so a lot of them hit the AH to get their stats up.

Even prior to SoR, this was a great, reliable market for me. I've been selling these greens for a few months now at a good profit. Prices and volume have now gone up, but a lot of folks are catching on and it's harder and harder to find these really cheap the way I used to. I still search the auction house several times a day, though, and turn up enough to keep my sales going.

At this point, I am willing to spend up to 100g per item, and generally flip them for 475g. The majority of my profits for this week have come from selling this gear. I will buy almost anything (except plate "of the Tiger" items and some things with really bad stats) at the low end -- if it's up for 10g, it's mine. At the high end, I get pickier, trying to choose mostly four-stat items for any slot or three- and four-stat items for helms, shoulders and chests.

You can use Auctionator to search for these items pretty easily, and that seems to be how most folks do it. You just type in a search of Armor/77/80/i272 and voila. However, this search also shows you all the crafted stuff, which I tend to stay away from. I figure the people crafting it can tank my market at any time, whereas sticking to the dropped stuff lowers the competition a bit.

Instead, I use a TSM shopping list for most of it. I'll share it below so you can import it into TSM, but it's really straightforward. I went to Wowhead and looked up the item names for all the gear I wanted to buy, et voila. The only catch is that it sometimes turns up stuff you don't want, namely Rethban Ore and Orb of Mistmantle. But that's only two items rather than scrolling through a page of crafted gear results and trying to remember what you want and what you don't.

Here's the list:
s1@$aboraz;ameth'aran;baradin;bramblescar;darrowmere;direforge;dreadmaul;jasperlode;mistmantle;mosshide;nazferiti;rethban;southfury;stagalbog;sundown;yojamba@

Yup. That's it. Good luck, and don't try to take over the market on my server ;)

Edit: By the way, I don't really do much with the weapons aside from the Toxidunk Dagger, which frequently comes up cheap and sells for a reasonable chunk of gold. The green weapons just don't seem to be good movers for me and the deposits on them are too high, but you can also search Weapon/77/80/i272 as above if you think you'd like to try 'em.

Addons: Getting Organized with Adibags

With Blizzard announcing the imminent opening of the MoP Beta, it seems like a good time to go through my bags and banks and do some spring cleaning. Shannon at Shannon's Shenanigans has been doing the same thing on his livestreams, and it's quite a traditional end-of-xpac activity, at least for me.

I recently started using the Adibags addon with some encouragement from Jim at PowerWord:Gold. I've been rolling with it for a few weeks but was getting a little frustrated because I thought its categorizations weren't granular enough. This is because I am an idiot who apparently just downloads addons without reading up on how to use them. As it turns out, you can create your own categories in Adibags. Since I have actual OCD, this is Important to Me.

I've been logging into each toon in order and setting up categories for their stuff. Of course, I didn't take a complete Before screenshot, so you can't see the hideous mess I started with. However, my mage was one of the worst offenders, with tailoring, engineering (ugh!), and having recently dropped Alchemy, as well as actively questing and instancing. Can you say "tons of crap all over the place?" I can. She's sixth on my login screen, and since Adibags settings can carry over from toon to toon, she was already partially organized by the time I got to her. Here's a mostly-before shot of her bag and bank, though:

So how do you make categories? Pretty simple: Type /adibags to bring up the configuration screen, then on the left click on Filters->Manual Filtering. Drag an item into the Item box, select a top-level category (these seem to be set; more on that anon), type the name in the Section box, hit Okay, then hit Add association.

Once the category (which I suppose Adibags likes to call a Section) is created, you can add and remove items a bit more easily. Click on the top-level category under Manual Filtering on the left and the right pane shows a list of the categories/sections you've created. Then you can simply drag and drop items into the little boxes, et voila. It's pretty much just like sitting at the bank and moving things around into an aesthetically pleasing order, only better. Very soothing.

There's also a default action to split items by certain AH categories, which is pretty useful for gems and glyphs, at least. For whatever reason, I set up my own for consumables and most trade goods. I can tell you that with the following configuration, it shows gems divided by color, glyphs by class, and recipes by profession. (You have to uncheck the "Gems are trade goods" and "Glyphs are trade goods" to get it to work. At least I did.)

One of my favorite features of Adibags is its ability to merge all your stacks into one icon. Everything still takes up bagspace, of course, but you can see how many ores you have (e.g.) without having to count stacks. All you need to do is select Items on the left hand side and then click the options to merge stacks.

Here's what my mage's bank and bags look like now. Much better and easier to find things even without using the search feature.

The top-level categories that Adibags uses are:

• Ammunition (really? there isn't any)
• Consumable (includes water, food, potions, flasks, enchanting scrolls, etc.)
• Equipment (all of it)
• Free Space (this is just how it tracks your open bagspace)
• Junk (it puts rogue pickpocket stuff in here along with your hearthstone AND all your grey stuff)
• Miscellaneous
• New (it uses this to put a green highlight around your new items)
• Quest (self-explanatory)
• Trade Goods (whole lotta stuff fits this description)

Some examples: I've split up the consumables into water, food, pots, flasks, and moved enchanting scrolls into sections (by item slot) in Trade Goods. I put all my holiday and DMF items into Miscellaneous, sectioned by the name of the event. I have A TON of stuff I keep for potential transmog for my own toons, which is now filed under My Xmog in Equipment. No more combing through 10 rows of gear on my druid to figure out what I was keeping because it's pretty and what I actually intended to equip for stats. I've got lots more, and I'm sure the categories I use will change over time, but for now I'm really happy with what I've got.

Of course, I've also been vendoring a bunch of old gear that's both ugly and useless, and AHing all the things I think might sell and which I no longer want. After all, just pushing the peas around the plate doesn't actually get rid of them, does it?

What's your favorite bag addon? How strict are you with your inventory management? Are you clearing out for MoP?

Prospecting: This Week's Ore

As I mentioned in my last part, I was pretty lax about prospecting last week. I took a look at ore on the AH this morning and found a metric ton of elementium at about 40g a stack. I bought 159 stacks; there were about as many left, but I kind of got tired of spending money. I probably should've bought more, but I'm just going to go with this.

Since I just did all of this, I figured I'd give you guys a breakdown of how long it took and what I got. So here we are; I'm going to focus on the highlights rather than every little detail.

Elementium Ore

• Cost: Approximately 6360g.
• Given my available bagspace, lack of CKS, and slightly slow PC, it took me about 40 minutes to prospect all 159 stacks.
• 38 Inferno Rubies. Pretending that these are the ONLY things I sell from the prospecting results, as long as I sell them for 167g each I'll break even. At the moment, the prices for cut and uncut infernos are really low on the AH, but it's 7am Sunday. I'm going to hold them for raid times and post them then.
• All the stuff:
   

Alchemy:

• Totally didn't transmute anything because I was out of Heartblossom, for Inferno Rubies, and I have enough metas in stock at the moment.

Jewelry Go Boom, which needs to be further broken down. I mailed all the full stacks of uncommon gems to my JC/Enchanter to make into jewelry and disenchant. It took me an hour and 20 minutes to make and DE all of this.

Carnelian Spikes: 26.

• Spent 80g on settings (I had 2 sitting in my bags for some reason).
• 58 Greater Celestial Essences, at a current market price of 64g = 3712g (presuming they all sell)

Jasper Ring: 120.

• Spent 126g on settings.
• 193 Hypnotic Dust, which got mailed to my banker since I'm kind of stockpiling it for MoP.
• 59 Lesser Celestials = 19 Greater Celestials = 1216g.
• 7 blue-quality rings, mailed to another banker to sell. If the blue jewelry doesn't sell after a week, I mail it back and blow it up. Assume 350g sale price = 2450g.

Alicite Pendant: 60.

• Spent 63g on settings.
• 86 Hypnotic Dust, again went to the banker.
• 26 Lesser Celestials = 8 Greater Celestials = 512g.
• 5 blue-quality necks, same as above rings = 1750g.

Hessonite Ring: 60.

• Another 63g on settings.
• 114 Hypnotic Dust, to the banker to store. (Look, I have >500 on my enchanter anyway.)
• 36 Lesser Celestials = 12 Greater Celestials = 768g.
• 10 blue-quality rings = 3500g.

Nightstone Choker, 50.

• Spent 52g on settings.
• 76 Hypnotic Dust, to the banker.
• 40 Lesser Celestials = 13 Greater Celestials = 832g.
• 4 blue-quality necks = 1400g.

Very Rough Profit Estimate

If we assume that everything is going to sell at the prices I detailed above, and pretend that I don't sell anything else from this mess (no, I didn't make any scrolls; most of the prices are tanked on my server and have been for a few weeks), I got 16,140g worth of enchanting mats and 6,346g in raw Infernos. The latter will probably sell for more, but we're just pretending here, right?

So that's a total of 22,486g worth of stuff for an initial investment of 6,360g = 16,126g profit. Potentially more, possibly less.

As The Gold Turns: March 11-17

I saw that Shannon over at Shannon's Shenanigans is going to do a weekly post on what he's done to make gold and how it worked out. Shannon, I like your idea, so I'm stealing it. Mwah. Since I didn't know I was doing this until now, I don't have good records or screenshots for you; look for that next week.

A Slow Week
This week was actually really laid back for me in terms of actually putting in the effort to make gold. My husband, who lives out of town for his job, came in for a visit, which means I basically did nothing from Wednesday night on. I forgot to use my 2 transmute cooldowns, I didn't shuffle, and I didn't restock glyphs. So what did I do?

Those Cata Greens
This is currently my favorite market, because it's easy and pretty darn profitable. Folks are still posting level 77-80 ilvl 272 or higher BoE greens on the AH for as low as 10g. I just look through them all and pick up the ones that have quality stats (at least one primary stat, like agi/int/str, preferably some sta, and hopefully at least one relevant secondary stat). I'll spend up to 100g, maybe a little bit more for a blue item I know will sell. (I'm looking at you, Toxidunk Dagger.)

My price brackets for these items are, right now, 400g for 77 or 80 gear, and 300g for 78 and 79 stuff. I'll go 100g below that but not more, so I'm at least doubling what I spent -- and usually well more than doubling. With all the new Scroll of Resurrection 80s, I've been seeing quite a few sales, and I think the market is going up. I'm going to bump all my prices up 50-100g at the start of this week to see if it works. These green items were the major source of my profits for the week.

Glyphs
Even though I didn't restock any of my glyphs this week, I still enjoy posting them, so I just used what stock I had. I don't have a big stockpile since I've only been doing this for a few months, and that means I pretty much sold out. My glyph posting toon has gone from an average auction item value of 50k to 8k. Oops. There's also another person on the scene who appears to intend on seriously competing in the glyph market, so I'm going to have to stay on top of this if I want any sales. One day I posted in the morning and didn't repost at all and had ZERO sales.

There are four folks, including myself, who seem to post mass quantities of glyphs and undercut by 1c, so I pretty much have to repost every couple of hours for best results. Since I just got a Real Job, I pretty much won't be able to do this on weekdays once I start work. I'm not sure right now what I'll do about that; we don't know how glyphs are changing in MoP yet so I'm a little hesitant to sit on a huge stockpile if I can't sell them daily. We'll see.

I still made a few thousand gold from glyphs, in spite of my laziness.

Shufflin'
Gem prices have plummeted on my server, with cut Inferno Rubies down from about 400g to 120g or so. I've never gotten the shuffling spreadsheets to work and so I honestly have no idea how profitable the full shuffle is, but ore prices haven't dropped quite as much. And I didn't put the time in to shuffle anyway, so I was just selling back stock. At this point, TSM is trying to post at my fallback price based on crafting cost, and that's usually well above what the market is. I need to adjust my category and group settings for this. I'll probably work on it a little this week.

I sold a very few gems, mostly cut infernos, for a grand total of about 2k gold. Yippee. Since I didn't prospect, I also didn't make any jewelry or enchanting scrolls/mats, nor did I transmute metas. (The metas I have are suffering from the TSM overprice syndrome, above, so yeah.)

Selling ALL THE THINGS
I've been suffering from a serious lack of bag and bank space on most of my toons, and I finally re-installed Auctionator. Ergo, this week, I actually posted up a bunch of stuff I hadn't gotten into TSM groups yet. Vendor recipes, cooking mats, random greens, a few transmog items I stumbled across while leveling or instancing, crafted junk, etc. I've had about a 25% sell rate on this stuff, and I'm going to continue doing this to get rid of crap and make some gold. I'll also be buying more of the vendor recipes that did sell out, if I can figure out what they were. I don't actually have a great strategy for these; I just use the RecipeProfit addon for Gathermate2 and pick up stuff that looks, from the TSM tooltip, like a good idea.

Thanks to this clearing out, most of my alts now have a decent amount of gold on their own without my feeding it to them.

Leveling Engineering and Tailoring
I decided to ditch Alchemy on my mage and get her into Engineering, mostly because I was heartily sick of leveling Alchemy on a 3rd toon in a row. Luckily, I had most of the mats I needed to get myself to 300 engineering skill, so I only spent about 300g getting there. It'll get ugly now, because I'm on Fel Iron, and my miners are level 23 and level 33. On the other hand, I'm not in any huge rush; I don't play the mage much and I do want to work on the 33 rogue, so I think I can wait and not buy unless I see it well below market.

Oph's tailoring is kind of stuck. I need about one billion Frostweave Cloth, which is a pain to farm and expensive to buy. I gave my 75 DK a Blood spec and took her up to the humanoids in ICC next to the Argent Tournament and got 9 pieces of cloth in about 10 minutes, at which point I stopped for some reason. The mage herself is 65 so my best strategy is probably to level her to Northrend and go from there.

Verdict
I think I added about 10K to my liquid gold this week, but I'm not altogether sure. It may have been closer to 15K. I'll keep better track next week and let you all know real numbers and not off-the-top-of-my-head guesstimates.

Just a Hunter and Her Pets, Part the First: Cats

The main reason I started playing hunters at all was so I could have pets. My hunters have stayed Beastmastery from TBC until now, because the pets are the best part. BM puts the focus on your pet and lets you tame extra beasts, so how could it be wrong? I was thrilled when the challenge tames were introduced in 4.2, because they're unique and interesting to actually acquire. (If you're one of those people who runs around killing them to piss off hunters, don't tell me about it.)

Since my stables are almost full (Dear Blizz: Please give BM hunters bigger stables!), I thought I'd do a post and show you some of my favorite and most often-used pets. If you're looking for something cool for your own hunter, I also recommend Petopia, where you can browse pets by looks and family. Also, if you don't have it already, get the _NPCScan addon to track rares. _NPCScan.Overlay isn't a bad idea, either. You'll probably notice a preponderance of cats. I have three in real life and a heck of a lot more in game. I just like them, OK? I'll do more posts later with some of my other hunter pets.

Pez
This is my favorite cat, who sadly lives in my stable almost all of the time. She doesn't have any super special abilities, so she gets passed over in favor of pets who do. But I love Winterspring, and I love the Frostsabers. She's named after one of my actual cats, who is also stripey, though not purple. Of course I have the matching mount and non-combat pet. Getting everyone in position for this screenshot was like, er, herding cats. I'm still trying to come up with a mail transmog look to match them all. This is not a rare pet, but I get a lot of whispers asking me where I got it: Go to Winterspring and find a Frostsaber Pride Watcher, et voila.

Mistral and Cierzo

These are the two Spirit Beasts I use most frequently. Their Spirit Heal ability is pretty useful when you're farming, say, Lovely Charms in Throne of the Tides. I used to use them in raid fights where we needed just a little extra healing bump (a very little one) but we're past that now, so they just sit around with me in Stormwind and head out for solo battles. The NPC beasts are two of the challenge tames located in Mount Hyjal, and require you to basically strip down so they don't one shot you. How can you argue with that? I got Cierzo (Ankha) first, but I like Mistral (Magria) better because of the blue tint. They're named after the Mediterranean wind; same direction (northwest), different languages.

Itztli
This is Skarr, of course, who hangs out in the Molten Front on a rock platform. He shares a spawn timer with a similarly stony crab, Karkin. This guy took me forever to actually find. Certain hunters who already have him apparently find it amusing to go to the Molten Front and just sit near the spawn points with their tamed pet out, so they can set off your NPCScan and trick you. I hope you guys have to spend, like, 10 months camping to try to get Ban'thalos or something. (NB: I checked the zone for hunters and made a little announcement before taking this screenshot, so no NPCScan caches were harmed.) Mine is named after an Aztec god of stone. I don't actually especially care for this appearance, but I swear he does better DPS than other cat pets, so he's the one I raid with.

So there you have four of my cat pets. I've got more of them, but we'll save those for another day.

Darkmoon Deck Experiment: Part Two

I kind of let this project slide over the weekend because I really wanted to get my mage from 51 to 65, which I have now accomplished. (Now I just have to come up with a metric asston of Frostweave Cloth and switch her alchemy to engineering, since I don't really want a third alchemist just at the moment.) This afternoon, I got back to it. So here's what's going on.

First, you may recall that earlier I made 8 Rogues Decks and traded them in for 3 Darkmoon Vests, 2 Darkmoon Chain Shirts, and one Darkmoon Robe. I posted all those on the AH at 100g per, and also posted one deck. (I kept one for later.) I really like the purple Darkmoon Vest look for leather, and I was hoping someone else would too. I sold one Darkmoon Vest and the deck I posted, for a total of 123g 43s 66c after the AH cut. The vest that sold was of the Monkey, so I think whoever bought it did so for the stats and not the look. The other two I have are of Power and have yet to sell.

This afternoon I made 25 Strange Tarot, resulting in only 5 complete Swords Decks. I turned these in for 2 Azure Shoulderguards, 1 Cloaked Shoulderpads, and 2 Darkcloth Shoulders. I thought the mail Azure Shoulderguards might look good for those trying to create a mail version of the SW Guard type look; the Cloaked are just generally nice for low level rogue mogging; and the Darkcloth are small, low-profile cloth which I think is always appealing. I'm going to list those up at 200g each and see how it goes.

I also made 20 Arcane Tarot, resulting in 3 complete Mages Decks. I turned these in for 2 Darkmoon Pendants and 1 Darkmoon Necklace. Obviously I'll be selling these for stats, not mogging. I got two of the pendants because if they don't sell I'm going to give one to my rogue as an upgrade. Market average for both of these on my server is 89g but since none are posted right now I'm going to try them at 100g.

I've still got other decks to make and turn in, but for now I'm going back to my mage for a little while.

Darkmoon Deck Experiment: The Beginning

So I'm a little bored today, and I have a whole lot of uncommon quality inks of the lower ranks. I've already got several of each offhand made from them, so I thought instead I'd try a little experiment.

Because of Argo (@EpicPennyPouch on Twitter), I already used a Swords Deck to get some decent looking leather shoulders for my rogue. (See Argo's post here.) The low-level decks themselves don't move particularly well on my server, and I don't have a lot of luck in the mog market yet, so this is a total "just for fun" experiment. I'm making all the low-level decks, trading them in for the gear, and posting that on the AH. There aren't a lot of options at really low levels for transmog -- at least, not options I like -- but at least a few of these items aren't hideous. I won't be able to track the ink costs well because these have just been sitting in my bags for a while; we'll just see how sales go.

Starting at the bottom, I made 29 Mysterious Tarot cards, and got 9 Aces, 12 Twos, and 8 Threes -- 8 Rogues Decks overall, plus some extra cards. Here's what I'm going to do with them:

• List one Rogues Deck on the AH.
• Turn in three decks for Darkmoon Vest.
• Turn in two decks for Darkmoon Chain Shirt.
• Turn in one deck for Darkmoon Robe.
• Keep one for later.

I've posted the gear at 100g to start with. We'll see where it goes, shall we?

My WoW client just crashed but I'm going to do this with more of the decks and will update this post with the initial information, then make a new post later with any sales or lack thereof.

UPDATE: Within three hours, I sold one of the Darkmoon Vests and the Rogues Deck. Whee! I'm leveling my mage to try to get rid of some of this cloth I have sitting around (she's my tailor) but I will continue with this later.

Alchemy Leveling: Oily Blackmouth and You

If you're like most goldmakers I encounter, you probably level alchemists all the time. If you don't have at least one, you should (and not just because it's one of my favorite professions); the transmutes are great and getting four hours out of one flask is maybe even better.

Because (I think) of inscription, even low-level herbs can go for ridiculous amounts of money since max-level toons are willing to pay higher prices for stuff to make inks. That makes alchemy expensive to level, too, so any alternate methods are welcome, at least for me.

Which brings us to my friend the Oily Blackmouth. Check out the map on Wowhead showing where it's fished... yeah, Darkmoon Faire. With a lot of people still out there fishing for the profession quest and for their Sea Pony, there's a huge surplus of Oily Blackmouth on the AH during Faire week. This seems to carry over throughout most of the month, too. On my server right now it's at 31s, down from a (TUJ) mean of 1g 32s 83c.

How is that useful? Well, take a look at this popular profession leveling guide for Alchemy. It recommends making Lesser Healing Potion from 60-105, which takes 50 Minor Healing Potion (presumably you have these sitting around) and 50 Briarthorn. Briarthorn is killer, at least on my server -- 2g per right now, which is where it normally sits, and there's often none at all posted.

But then there's Blackmouth Oil. Once you get your alchemy up to 80, you can make these with 2 fish per oil.  It's a trainer recipe, so no need to make a special trip to pick it up. I will point out that it's yellow when you learn it, and goes green at 90, grey at 100, so this isn't quite an apples to apples comparison. Lesser Healing Potion goes yellow at 85 and green at 105. If you have the Working Overtime guild perk, it's not as big a deal.

I'm not leveling an alchemist at the moment so I can't give you an exact breakdown, but here's a plausible scenario (I think) from 80-100. Neither of these recipes needs a vial.

• Lesser Healing Potion - let's assume you get a skillup from every craft, so we need 20. Briarthorn at 20x2g = 40g (if you can find them all, and you need Briarthorn further along, too). We'll pretend the Minor Healing Potions are free, since you have them already. So, 40g.
• Blackmouth Oil - let's assume you have to make 1.5 oils per skillup, or 30 total.  2 fish per oil x 0.31g per fish x 30 oils = 18g 6s. Even if you have to make a few more, we're still looking at about half the cost.

But wait, there's more! I don't know about you, but I couldn't give Lesser Healing Potions away. Blackmouth Oil, on the other hand, can be used to make stuff that actually sells:

• Elixir of Water Breathing -- can also be used to level your alchemy all the way to 160 if you so desire; takes 2x Blackmouth Oil, a Stranglekelp, and a Crystal Vial. Stranglekelp on my server sits just under 1g average and sometimes goes way under that. Sells for 3g-ish but is a slow mover, IME. Still, gets you more skillups with less Briarthorn.
• Swim Speed Potion -- goes grey at 170; takes one each of Blackmouth Oil, Swiftthistle, and a Crystal Vial. On my server, Swiftthistle is expensive and the swim speed potions are really cheap and barely move, so I don't make these.
• Free Action Potion -- this is the good one. It uses the same mats as the Elixir of Water Breathing and doesn't go grey until 215. You need to buy the recipe for it in Darnassus, Ironforge, or Orgrimmar. And people love it for PvP. So if you have a decent PvP market on your server, just make a ton of these and sell them off as they go. Market average on my server is 5g per, for something that costs 1g 38s to make (per current TUJ numbers)... and there are hardly ever any listed, so people ask in Trade.

So there you have it. Even if your alchemist is already maxed out, as most of mine are, I sometimes snap up the cheap blackmouth so I can make the Free Action Potions.

The One That Started It All

Cymre asked this question:
Show us your very first screenshot from the game. Tell us about it, including the date, what you remember about the photo and who was in it with you. Do they still play?
I built a new computer mid-TBC so I'm missing my very early screenshots. This is the first one I have on my current PC:

It's not a raid screenshot, but I love this because it's a picture of me and one of my Kara raid buddies goofing around. We'd killed Durn and I decided to pose in his mouth so it looked like he'd eaten a bird, or something. This is from early 2008. Wardcleaves, the other toon in the screenshot, was our raid leader. I was in three raids at the time, and this was the laid-back, fun, "we need more coffee" Saturday morning ten man, Judge Wisely. We Wiselies did a lot of goofing around and a lot of, say, running each other through BRD repeatedly. We set off fireworks on the Kara bridge for someone's birthday, did circles around the poles during Midsummer Fire Festival, and talked about everything from the serious to the hilarious.

Sadly, JW is no more; Ward no longer plays WoW at all, nor do most of the Wiselies. Our magey mage picked it back up again for a few months last year but I only see him on Xbox now. I play on a different server. Lots of us are still Facebook friends, at least. Most of the best times I've had in WoW were with this group of folks. Miss you, Wiselies!

TSM Categories for Transmog Gear

Yesterday I was watching one of Jim's amazing livestreams and I noticed that his TSM auctioning categories for Cata greens and mog gear were very different to mine. I didn't take screenshots of my old categories, and until the servers come back up I can't show you the new ones. But adopting the method he uses (and probably many other folks -- sorry I can't name everyone, this was just the first place I saw it!) made everything much simpler and made me way more inclined to continue selling this stuff.

Previously, I had a categories called, for example, gear - xmog - plate - 1000. Within that category I had groups for every individual stinking piece of armor that went into it. This got really messy and confusing really fast.

What I have now is a single main category, just called gear - xmog. (I'll post screenshots of how this is set up after maintenance.) Inside that category I have groups named after the price brackets, so 500, 750, 1000, 2000, 5000 -- at least for now. Here you can see one of the groups, my 500g group (which doesn't have many items in it yet; I'm still setting these up) inside the gear - xmog category. Please ignore the general mess that is my TSM categorization. I'm working on cleaning it up, and this is part of it.

In the group settings for transmog items, I checked the box to add by item ID, since stats are not important, and set up the threshold and fallback according to the price bracket. Here you can see my threshold and fallback for my 500g group. I forgot to get a SS of the "by item ID" checkbox, but it's at the very top in the group overrides tab.

In the category settings, I set the post cap to 1, post time to 48 hours, and the behavior to post at fallback when the market goes below my threshold. (I may change that to not post at all for a little while until I get a better handle on the pricing structure; it's easier for me to pick them out when the text in the auction log is orange.) Here are the category settings:

As I collect new items, I simply add them to the appropriate price group, rather than having to create an entire new group for them. This has already saved me so much time, and it's so much tidier. I'm following a similar method for my Cata greens, except I have those priced by level. (I bumped my prices on those up yesterday and already had a sale at the higher price, so woo!) I haven't had any mog sales yet, but it's midweek and I didn't get much posted before maintenance.

This post probably makes almost zero sense without pictures if you don't see TSM in your sleep, so I'll add screenshots soon.

Edit: I added screenshots but I'm not sure they're actually big enough to be useful. Still getting used to Blogger so I will revisit this sometime when my Internet connection is better.

Addons: Panda for Inscription

I am an addon addict, it's true. My poor outdated computer has a hard time handling all the stuff I want to run, so I do a lot of switching on and off as needed using Addon Control Panel, which is pretty great in and of itself. Recently I found another addon I just had to grab, introduced to me by @Faid of Nerf Faids fame. (She also does awesome livestreams.)

That addon is Panda, and it makes milling like... super fantastic easy. It apparently has other features for disenchanting, prospecting, etc. but I haven't tried those yet so I can't speak to them.

Previously, I found milling to be a giant pain, because you're trying to manage stacks of who knows how many different kinds of herbs, which may be all over the place in your bags. I had set up a ton of macros for each "level" of herbs, but I couldn't keep track of which macro was for what on my action bars. Panda lets you set up a single macro that will mill any herb you've got. Check out this screenshot:

You'll probably need to enlarge that to see it better. Panda is at the top left of my UI right now, and if you look in Panda's upper right corner, you see the milling icon. Mousing over it provides the tooltip I highlighted: All you need to do is set up a macro that says '/click MassMill' (without the quotes, obviously) and throw it on your toolbars. I tend to bind stuff like this to action key 1 when I'm actually going to use it, and then just move it out of the way otherwise. I know some folks like the scroll wheel binds but they don't really seem to work faster for me since I just get a lot of "You are looting something" error messages. You need to have the Panda window open for the macro to work, at least in my experience.

Panda will also show you icons for all the herb types that can be milled, with a count in the lower right corner showing how many of that herb you have. In case you've got stuff in your bags you don't want to mill (Azshara's Veil, anyone?), you can instead click the individual herb icons to mill one at a time. Bit slower, but if you don't have bank space or are too lazy to go stash some of your herbs, it does work.

So now I've got a visual display of what I have to mill, along with a one-click macro to do it all. I no longer have to switch through multiple macros. Inscription is a really time-consuming profession, so anything that saves a few seconds here and there is great. I do wish it could somehow detect uneven stacks and move those to the bottom (so, like, if you have 44 whiptail it doesn't try to mill the 4 first and give an error), but I'm not sure that's even possible.

Overall, highly recommended. I'm going to be trying it for JC/DE shuffling in the near future. I understand that TSM has similar functionality, but I haven't figured it out, and this interface is super simple. Thumbs up with a night elf flip hop.

Today's Transmogs: Night Elf Hunter Kilt

I've been working on putting this outfit together for my hunter for about a month now. It's taken a while to gather up all the pieces. As I mentioned previously, I really, really like kilts in-game, and I thought it would be an unusual look for a hunter. Aqualaeta is definitely a Night Elf through and through, so I wanted something that matched the green and purple night elf colors. I also wanted fairly low-profile and streamlined, as "natural" looking as possible. I've had gigantic shoulders forever and ever but I thought with something less conspicuous, she could have more of a ranger look. So here it is; these aren't really the best screenshots but I'll try to get better ones soon. Please enjoy the Little Fawn, one of my favorite vanity pets.

I also took a shot at an action shot to show off the bow, although it was really hard to catch it since I wanted a wooded background and most of the mobs in Hyjal die in 1-2 shots. But there's a sprite darter!

Here are the items involved. This outfit started with the legs and the bow and went from there. I love this bow because it looks so foresty and perfect for a nelf hunter.

• Helm: Netherstorm Helm -- I like this because it's spiky, with my pointy ears and pointy eyebrows, and it's not overly showy and doesn't cover too much of my head. (BoE green)
• Shoulders: Spaulders of Sealing -- these have a great low profile without looking too much like turtle shells. I could do without the rivets, but overall good. (Quest reward from Desolace, both factions)
• Cloak: None (I almost never display cloaks, especially not with this chest piece)
• Chest: Ancient Chestpiece -- the color on this doesn't exactly match but it tends towards green and picks up some of the colors in the kilt. I love the open back design too much to go with my other option, which was the Skettis Chestpiece. (BoE green)
• Wrist: None (doesn't show under the gloves)
• Hands: Curse Lifter's Gloves -- again, I could've gone with a Skettis piece, but I wanted more green represented. I think these make a nice transition from the chest to the kilt and bow. (Alliance quest reward in Wetlands)
• Waist: Outrunner's Cord -- Looks fine, I think. I may go for the belt that actually matches the kilt at some point, but I like this for now. (BoE green)
• Legs: Oceansong Kilt -- obviously I like this since it was one of the main inspirations for the set. The colors are perfect. I'm not in love with the chain detail but I can overlook it. (BoP drop from the last boss in H-Ramps)
• Feet: Outrunner's Slippers -- I wanted it to basically look like I wasn't wearing shoes. I don't like that they're bright blue, though. (BoE green)
• Staff: Dreamer's Dragonstaff -- I like this because it's kind of woodsy and gnarly looking. Unfortunately the enchant glow kind of ruins the whole "simple" thing. At least it's a green glow, I guess. (BoP drop from Thorngrin the Tender in the Botanica)
• Bow: Honorable Longbow -- I can't say enough about this bow. It's got wood, it's got vines, it's got leaves. It's not overly flashy but it has just enough detail to be really attractive.  This shares a model and colors with the Dutiful Longbow (both of them being BoE greens) as well as the Wyrmstalker's Bow. The last is a quest reward from Icecrown that I sadly vendored  before I knew transmog was coming.

I really love this outfit and it makes me super happy to have finally gotten the kilt today and been able to finish it out and actually do the mog. The only things I'd really like to change are the color of the chest (wish it were a little bit greener), the enchant glow (turn it off! ee!), and the color of the shoes. I know there are other versions of the shoes in different colors but the blue seemed like the best option out of what was available.

Today's Transmogs: Night Elf DK in a Purple Kilt

I love transmogging. I need to do it more. I spent a little while today coming up with an outfit idea for my DK, who actually doesn't get played much except to do inscription stuff. (I am hoping to get her to 85 before MoP hits, though.) But hey, you should look good standing around milling in Stormwind, amirite?

Here's the idea I came up with:

What I really wanted was a frosty blue and white look, but I wasn't finding anything that called out to me. Kilts have always been my favorite legs in the game (possibly because of my druid addiction) and as I surfed through the options in MogIt -- great addon, by the way, whether you're mogging for yourself or looking for stuff to sell -- the kilt really appealed to me. The image itself is a screenshot from MogIt's preview pane. I think the overall purple color works since Snorgles is a Night Elf, although I still wish there were a blue option. I'm going to keep looking. These are the items:

• Helm: None (turn off display -- I like her hair too much!)
• Shoulders: Replica Soulforge Shoulders (these come from DMF tokens)
• Cloak: None (I almost never display cloaks)
• Chest: Saltstone Surcoat (BoE green)
• Wrist: None (doesn't show under the gloves)
• Hands: Fists of the Pack (Alliance quest reward in Felwood)
• Waist: Acherus Knight's Girdle (Vendor item: because it's INVISIBLE)
• Legs: Cassock of the Loyal (BoP drop from Hungarfen in H-Underbog)
• Feet: Greaves of the Slaughter (because I already have them, you can't see much of them, and they kinda match)
• Weapon: Swiftwind Blade x2 (Alliance quest reward in Loch Modan; I don't love the gold on this so I'm still on the lookout)

Overall I like this outfit pretty well; I'll probably grab the shoulders at this month's DMF and start picking up the rest of the items as I go.

Hello, World!

So this is my newest blogging venture. I thought initially that I'd primarily like to write a WoW goldmaking blog, but frankly I'm not good enough at it. So you'll occasionally see my ramblings on the subject and maybe sometimes I can provide some insight.

Character roster: I currently play on US-Shu'halo(A).

• My nominal main is Aqualaeta, an 85 Beastmastery Hunter. I generally raid with her; our guild is very casual and we are 6/8 DS 10N. (I used to be all hardcore in TBC, but I prefer this schedule now.) She is a JC/Alchemist.
• Pierogi is my 85 Holy Priest. She goes to FL sometimes but generally just does LFR and random HoTs. She is a JC/Enchanter.
• Alaeriel is my 85 Resto Druid, who mostly PvPs. She was my very first WoW toon, and we've been through a lot together, so that's why I use that name for everything. She has herbalism (of course) and LW.
• Snorgles is a 75 Frost DK who exists primarily to be a scribe. She also has alchemy.
• Ophuulii is a 52 Fire Mage. I find mages insanely boring but fairly fast to level, and I wanted a tailor, so here she is. She's been sitting in the low 50s for quite a while now, though.
• Whirley is my brand new, 28 Sub Rogue. I have a lot of fun with her in battlegrounds, and I leave her flagged for PvP. I'm on a normal server. Nobody has ganked me yet; it's kind of disappointing. Right now she has skinning and mining.
• Shockandale is a 24 Enh Shaman who never gets playtime. I keep promising myself I'll level a shaman to try healing at 85, but I never quite get there.

I also have a couple other alts, bank toons and so forth, and more on other servers. Druids are probably my favorite class; I have three of those at 80 or above. Hunters are next, with two 85s. I actually prefer healing, but right now my raid main is a DPS because she happened to get leveled first; when I moved to a new server, I wanted a max-level toon right away.

As far as goldmaking, I occasionally shuffle but find it super boring. Glyphs are my favorite market, although not always insanely profitable. I'm sitting at about 135k liquid right now and sales have dropped this past week as I've focused on my baby rogue, who is currently my favorite toon to actually play.

So, that's a brief introduction. Welcome, and thanks for reading!