Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part FOUR Gathering

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part FOUR Gathering

Our last post I discussed my thoughts for Inscription, and prior to that Enchanting and Jewelcrafting.

Those 3 professions have the power and sustainability for the upcoming expansion.  They are the 3 overall strongest professions for the AH baron.   However, they are not the only professions available to players... and not everyone may have those professions on the toon they wish to level first...

So, the remaining professions fall into 2 categories, gathering and the other crafting profs...

Mining would be the strongest here, though preference and availability, each of the others could be leveraged to great results.  But overall I rate them all closely enough that they are in one category.

Mining Pros:

1. Source material for 3 profession, engineering, blacksmithing and jewelcrafting. 
2. It is a pseudo crafting profession with the ability to make ore into bars. 
3. always in style, it will always make you gold, though less and less for the time invested as the x-pac moves forward
4. explosive profit potential early e-pac
5. SIMPLE... this is a time is money... 
6. Great way to get capitol, or keep capitol for future investments/purchases
7. XP from mining while leveling
8. Simple, Gather > Post > Collect gold, no need to do in depth market anaylsis (read  last comment below) 
9. Something to do while waiting for a raid to form...

Mining Cons:

1. TIME IS MONEY... its a great bang and fizzle... 
2. If you hate farming... well, yeah, you hate mining
3. Leveling speed distraction (got get the yellow dot, then get in combat for some ore and XP slows your leveling down.)
4. Profession bonus is no good unless you are PVPing or tanking IMO.
5. To maximize profits, requires careful and tedious market watching, analysis and holding inventory for max volume/price times on the AH.

Herbing and skinning:

Same as mining with the almost obvious differences.  Like the number of professions it is source to, and neither have the ability to do anything like craft bars... LW has the bonus of getting scales and leather...
Herbing will be strong, really strong with the coming glyphmas expected, and the value and demand for DMC trinkets... Here herbing is likely to be a bit stronger...

Really the best thing you can do here is just go with the one you have, or plan to level and leverage it for the best results by watching you posting times and volume based on server demand and player activities levels.  The first week or so, up to the first month, you will likely be able to sell everything you can gather.  Pricing is the trick.  Too high and people will not buy  it.  On my server, I would guess that about 250-350 gold will be the most per stack that would be marketable. 

Your best bet is use acutioneer to post, and rarely undercut the lowest prices... look for the "wall" and post under that.   A wall is the guy posting 20+ stacks (variable on server) and you want to often post under that price.  If it sells in less than an hour, you went too low on price.  Basically, take a minute to look at the market and don't blindly undercut the lowest price there... if you find you get better prices on the weekend, hold your mats till then.  Though in the first week or so, all bets are  off... just post at high prices for 12 hours and eat the deposit costs on  a few to get a sense of the market.

till next time. 

More food for though for MOP planning

My interpretaion now of the PVP crafted gear market is... so so, its viable and the current means of blue crafted gear being good entry level gear for starting PVP is great. 

Couple thought on things to watch for how to hedge your markets and bets for MOP.

They have said they are trying to bring about a resurgence of PVP in MOP and gas up the old Horde vs. Alliance battle.  If that takes place, it is likely that you will see a lot more players dabling at PVP and this could be a big generator of sales.  It could possibly make what are now marginally good markets into awesome markets.  Just watch how this plays out and be ready to react to info, and trends in MOP.  There is not a lot of plays you can make now, since most of the gear will require the new mats, just a market to consider watching more closely.

It could also swing the otherway.  With the changes to PVP, and the attempt by devs to make the entry level PVP game more new player friendly... the Crafted PVP gear may not be as valuable or necessary and the market could be complete fizzle... or it will be more viable to just go farm the honor gear up rather than purchase the crafted gear and such...

Just saying, it could be a bang, and it could be a bust...

But it is something to watch. 

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part THREE Inscription

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part THREE Inscription

Personnaly I an not fond of the glyph business, though many players I whose blogs I read do not share my opinion.  Actually, this has in many ways been one of the pinnacle professions for some of the most fiercer theory crafting and business marketing strategies I have ever seen.

Okay, its not that bad, and I am going to tell you first why this is not my favorite.   I will put up the negative points IMO first instead of the positive ones.

Inscription, why not to prioritize it:

1. HUGE inventory management, lots of herbs, pigments, inks, glyphs, fortune cards, relics and stuff.  It requires massive addon savy and/or on demand crafting and/or huge storage space available to really branch into the full spectrum of the market.
2. It does not have the staying power in the broad scope like JC and enchanting
3. MINDLESS HOURS OF MILLING HERBS, followe by extended AFK crafting of pigments into inks
4. The uncommon inks lose value after the initial rush in current levels and become a waste byproduct of the profession.  Having a any part of the manufacturing that is waste, is just that, it is a waste, or it eats up your time in ways that could be more gold productive.  I am talking about the uncommon inks from pre cata herbs.
5. Since it is has been such a huge money maker historically, it is well documented and very tough competition with people that hang on to an old broken money maker hoping it will get big again.  (it well get big again, keep reading)
6. I JUST DONT LIKE IT, compared to other options at least.  In a way it is like JC that it can move massive volumes for minimal profit margins, which is a comparable net gain, however, I prefer medium/medium (medium volume and medium profits)
7. Massive Barrier to entry on the glyphs... it takes a lot of months to get all the research done to learn all the glyphs, yeah it will be a lot of MONTHS.. you will not likely ever be able to reasonably speed this up with the books from wrath content, there will never be more than a few on any AH and the prices are likely going to be steep.. YMMV

I guess the last point really says all that needs to be said on my take for inscription, however, read on and get some insight to why I put it as #3 and not lower in my priority list.

1. Darkmoon trinkets!  We are still waiting on more crafting information to be finalized, but I think it is a safe bet that they will be back again and they will be good.
2. Relics and off-hands, they alone can be a great market if the ILVL of them is above the LFD or LFR
3. Glyphs always in style, people are always starting a new toon, comming back or something
4. Glyphmas 5.0 style... time will tell
5. Micro business oportunities, meaning, you can chose to pursues a more comfortable part of the market rather than the entire thing.  Micor markets below
• Just glyphs
• Just pigments (time is money, and it takes a lot of time to mill herbs to pigments, inks can be afk crafted)
• Just Inks, Sell the base mats to the crafters looking for final product process business, or the casual guys looking to buy the mats to have something crafted for themselves
• Just off-hands relics (the PVP items will likely stay pretty popular if they follow the current model)
• Just Darkmoon Cards
• Just Darkmoon Decks
• Just Darkmoon Trinkets
• Just Mysterious Fortune cards
• Select any range or segment of the glyphs, like go for glyphs, but only inventory and manage sales for say 15 or 25 (any number less than all of them really) glyphs.
• or any combo of these you wish to play with
6. Though I have not mentioned it before it could be considered a gathering profession, sort of, like with JC prospecting, Inscription milling could be a gathering profession.  Herbs > Pigments > inks
7. I MADE MY FIRST BIG MONEY WITH IT (story at the bottom if you dont want to go back and read my early posts
8. HAVE I SAID KABOOM, yeah, it has a KABOOM power in the early release days, weeks months, then a fizzle.
9. It will have the power to be a slow and steady staple if you choose to continue in the market past the KABOOM into the fizzle and will still be good, though IMO not so much as JC or enchanting.
10. Massive barrier to entry.  This one was up there in the other section too, but it makes casuals looking for a quick turn over, turn somewhere else, so the competitions is often going to be less, but it will be fierce
11. KABOOM POWER
• Glyph research could teach you glyph of travel form on day one, and you can capitalize on THAT... come on go look it up, and you should be able to tell that this will be a BIG money maker
• If you put in the time milling, making ink and going for the DMC/D/Ts KABOOM
• Combine anything with the power or the relics and off hands and PVP items
• GLYPHS, we are getting a major overhaul to the system, more info is really needed to know how this is going to flesh out, but expect a major surge in sales

Okay, enough... It made #3 on my list, really, in time, I may change my mind and go with the farmer guy since herbing mining will be OP too.

My story:
A 6 month forced break from WOW was over.  I returned from a military deployment... the old guild and old friends were scattered.  All that remained were a few broken pieces of the empty shell of what once was.  I made a couple server transfers, found great guilds that met every expectation as hovels of massive drama and misleading declartations of what they were.  they said raiding guilds, HA... not so IMO.  I am not sure that fit either of those guild were "Raiding Guilds".  More like "CASUAL, and we try to raid, even get lucky sometimes.. after the nerf" would have been more accurate descriptions IMO.

Then one of those shells wiggled and some old friends crawled out from under a couple of those broken pieces and said great things about Cata and raiding and GDKP runs, HM runs and yeah, it sounded good...  Then the Drama KABOOM destroyed that guild and I was pretty mad at guilds, all of them... they all pretty much were going to tell me one thing and do another.  Promise me anything they though I wanted to hear to get me to join their ranks... So, now raiding suck, and guilds suck and players in WOW are all degenerative rejects that hide in a virtual world and can not act like people when they have the layer of anonymity created by the interwebz.

Okay, time to back  up... what does all this have to do with inscription?  Okay, getting to that.  Those friends? yeah, the ones that I connected with after months... well, they were now HORDE, and on another server!!! (I was all alliance at the time.)  I had in the preceding months spent hundreds of real dollars on server transfers that did not pay off.  So I was not about to pay that again to go to a new server and AGAIN still to faction transfer. So I rolled a new toon, Horde, on that new server.  I had previously mastered the spending urge and found the power of multiple toons with multiple professions for farming, crafting and left it all and about 30K or so, on that old server with those completely abandoned toons.  I was starting new and needed a gold making plan, herbalism and inscription was the early cata plan.  And basically converted time into money farming herbs > glyphs when leveling, and later farming the AH for herbs to Darkmoon trinkets a the relics were a good staple too for mainenance income.. It took me 3 months of focused effort on gold making, one toon from level 1 - 85, and 400K in gold and reasonable inventories of mats.  I did not have interest in raiding, I was actually pretty jaded about it all, but later found myself going back to it after failed attempts at trying to PVP more seriously.  I was daily spending 20-40K in the AH on herbs and crushing them all down to inks and eventually DMCs and trinkets, while playing at the relics and other stuff, flipping vendor pets and other toy niche markets.  That is when 2 things happened... I found a lot of amusement in the AH market, I was manipulating it on a daily basis, and I found having that much gold to be amusing too.  the second thing was, I wanted to branch out.. and my new first love was enchanting... Inscription was a great kaboom for me, but when the fizzle came, I got out and found a  new market in enchanting... The 4.3 patch was an enchanting KABOOM, and inscription would have just been meh... so so, if it had still been my primary market...

With the information available now, and historical reference, Inscription is still a top contender, especially for the 5.0 release

Okay really quick thing for MOP planning

The ilvl monster should be on your radar as potentially your biggest money maker.  Keep an eye out for info from the PTR beta about this.

There are a couple things to look for:

1. What is the ILVL required to que LFD heroic dungeons?
2. What is the ILVL required to que the LFR raid zones?
3. What can you craft that has and ILVL equal to or greater than than one, or better yet both of those barriers to entry?

This will be a staple money maker in any market, People will PAY for the gear the gets them through that door, and into LFD and LFR...

Second thing to look at is what is best in slot pre raid gear you can craft... if you can craft BiS gear that is also above the LFR minimum it is a big winner.

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part TWO Jewelcrafting

Okay so its even harder to not get excited about jewlecrafting with the new mounts that have been data mined.  Wow Insider suggests it could be a million gold mount, the Onyx Panther.  Though nothing is certain, it is pretty clear that this thing is going to be supper expensive.  And flaunting the gold I have may be just the point of making one.  Though I prefer the other 4 Panthers to the onyx one, the colors are so rich and primary, and the black one is well, just not as eye catching as say the BRIGHT RED or BRIGHT YELLOW ones.  If you have not seen them, get out from under your rock and look em up on MMO Champion or Wow Insider.

So why or why not to level JC in early Cata.  Most of the reasons from yesterday apply here, but I am not going back to review them and copy here, I am going to make a fresh list.

Why Jewelcrafting will be my second priority:

1. My #1 raiding toon is a JC
2. The Profession bonuses are great
3. The sooner I can start doing dailies the soon I have more cuts for profit,  convenience and helping guild peeps, fellow raiders etc
4. If I can prospect ore and cut my own gems I can save a ton of money in the long run
5. It is indirectly a gathering and crafting profession, You can make gold by just prospecting for gems and neve cutting any of them for sale.
6. It has seen some great changes that lower risks and is looking like it will see more changes to make it a more balanced profession.  ATM its all about prospecting for red gems for profits, and minimizing losses with the rest of the cuts and such... Check out this post at JMTC on why it will get more balanced.  Lower risk is in the lower vendor value of the gems and there by the lower deposit cost on the AH
7. Its not just Prospecting and cutting gems,  Rings and Necks for raiding and PVP or for DEing to craft enchant mats... (a second post on strategies for this comming soon, maybe later today)
8. It is key to a successful ore shuffle market
9. There are some initial reports that all chanting mats will be tradeable to others, Like the current maelstorm shatter, but the other way around.  Final implementation of this is still up for confirmation and such, but if we get the dust --> lesser essence --> greater essence --> lesser shard --> greater shard --> crystal shuffling will be a big time sink, but a potential mega profit
10. Jewelcrafting has long term staying power.  There are 5 things end game players need/want.  Helm glyps, shoulder inscriptions, legarmor/spellthread, enchants and gems.  Of those items 2 are from vendors, leg enhancements need 2 professions, and then there is enchants covered yesterday and gems.  End game players need up to ~15-20 gems for their gear.  It meats the high volume requirement for a great business.  And it will be valuable througought the expansion like enchanting at volume. 

Okay, why is JC a monster in cage and you would rather some one else tames that beast.

1. PVP cuts + PVE cuts + jewelery + Ore + gems + other incidental mats.  That is a lot of different items to manage an inventory on and keep track of in an efficient manner.
2. The shuffle is a well documented and highly effective gold making strategy, you will have competition
3. AH deposit costs?  Not sure how this will be in MOP, but you have to figure it in to your selling price
4. Slow aquisition of patterns and cuts via the daily quests for tokens as well as the new JC proffesion gems (I will buy mine on the AH and spend tokens on cuts or jewelry paterns)
5. Profit per item is lower than some other profession, but it is covered by extreme volume, that means a lot more crafting time and post or cancel/post time at the mailbox.
6. The market will be strong at first and almost certainly see a sharp decline as more people get into the market
7. Due to volume of sales, and volume of players and the daily, weekly reset and weekly weekend cycles it can be a real roller coaster ride.
8. Gems stack both raw and cut and there are a lot of them, but the jewlery does not stack.
9. There is a lot of planning that can go into the market, however my experience is that this is a profession better run on an "on demand" crafting schedule.  So I dont like it by who that selling strategy is time consuming.  By this I mean buy your ore cheap and prospect it, but when it comes to crafting, you look at volume in the AH vs. popularity of cut and profit per gem to decide what cuts to make, then craft and post them.

Okay, so that is potentially a possitive not too.   I love auctionator for this, the UMJ has a great page that can help you too.  Because I like to precraft more and do a quick post in the 20 minutes before raid time with stocks precrafted and prepositioned for quick post cycle, I do not like this profession as I dont like to precraft that many gems and cuts and stuff. It is an even bigger inventory of items to manage when you get it in full swing... Though it is still a great profession and can be a monster money maker at many levels of market involvement... You do not have to cut every cut and post every thing in the AH every time.  What I did was go the AH w/ acutionator, scan a gem to cut, inferno ruby for example and then cut 5 each of the 2 most profitable cuts and post them.  Then search maybe demonseyes and do the same, though I might only cut 3 each of the 4 most profitable cuts... and post them and then the next gem color.  It could be a little or a lot of time in the AH depending how many gems I was listing.  I did this because it was such a volatile market and I was not fully commited to it, though I did gross about 250K from just this market strategy in the 4.3 gold rush event.

Not sure what is next, but there is more comming in this series.  Likely it will be inscription or mining.

The House Always Wins (3rd post today)

Okay, simple concept that makes its own post.  Since my next post will be on my thoughts for JC.  This series of posts have an underlying thought process as part of how I value professions, I thought it reasonable and necessary to cover it separately.

Its something that I learned a long time ago while learning Real world investing strategies

DOLLAR COST AVERAGING

In real world money markets, the idea is to keep buying stocks regularly at whatever price they are at, since you get more for the same investment when prices go down and that averages with your purchases at a higher price.  Basically every month, or paycheck invest the same amount of money into the "market" "fund" "stock(s)" of choice without reguard for the value of the stocks at the time.

How it has successfully been applied in WOW AH PVP... easily summarized in 2 points.

1. Buy everything under your threshold
2. Sell everything above your threshold

and enhanced by 2 more:

1. Post or cancel/post often
2. Diversify

Okay, sounds too easy, and yeah it quickly gets more complex.

BUYING:

1. Manufacture mats (the ore shuffle) for lower cost
2. Shop the AH 2-5 times daily, with the early mornings and late late evening often being your best times.  It has to do with the level of buying and selling activity.  Generally the majority of players buy what they need as they log on to play durring their play time early to mid evening.  Then at the end of the day they empty their bags into the AH... rather they spent the evening questing and random little things, or an evening spent largely farming... it usually has lower prices at those times because they post it all at the end of the evening and its still there in the morning.  As you play with this you may find nuances and anomalies on your server on the daily, weekly reset and weekend cycles. As well as affects of the time zone of your server and players that do not share that time zone.
3. If you are buying everything and have more mats than you can use, lower your threshold, if you can not get what you need, find another source, or raise your threshold, but in any case make sure as you change your "buy" thresholds, you change your sell thresholds too.
4. Find a farmer for you to COD mats
5. Offer to buy your friends of guild members just leveling items for a fair price that you can crush to enchanting mats for example

SELLING:

1. Again run a post or cancel post routine 3-6 times a day
2. Never sell below your threshold
3. Set your threshold to sell above the mats cost by maybe 5-50gold or more depending on the amount of competition and deposit costs, and how much you value your time.  Setting it low will get your more sales.. setting it high will get you higher profiit margins, or in some cases, you will never sell your goods.
4. Posting early evening is important, and 1-2 more times in the peak population times and once more before you "go to bed"/"log out for the evening"
5. Dont compete with the undercutters if you value your time, if you sell nothing, and everytime you are on you are undercut with in minutes especially by the same person, its time to find a market that you have less competition in, or forget all the good advice, and go for the advance techniques of war and server AH market domination

Post or cancel post often:

1. The more you post and pay attention to sales, undercuts, expired auctions and volume the more you can start to limit how often you do this and focus on the just doing at the best times for the least investment of time for the most gain.
2. Almost certainly you will be undercut, you combat this by undercutting them back

Diversify:

1. How I did this is I sold belt buckles, ALL CATA scroll of enchanting, leg armors, a few gems, as well as a few other fun items.. I did many other things, over the process of learning, transmutes, vendor pet, other vendor items etc...

It really comes down to how much time you want to invest, or how much gold you want to make, but in Las Vegas they say, "The House Always Wins"  That is the best example of dollar cost averaging I can come up with maybe...

here is a mathed out example:
Dum Dumbs require 3 Things, 4 Somethings, and 5 Morethings to craft
You buy Things for 5 gold and under
You buy Somethings for 15 gold and under
and you buy Morethings for 50 gold and under

3 Things = 15 gold
4 Somethings = 60 gold
5 Morethings = 250 gold
Total cost is 325gold
Sell theshold can be set to 325 and max 600... undercut by 5 gold

And you will always make gold  even if you never sell for more than 325... because you buy at 5, 15 and 50 gold and under.  That is your MAX cost for mats, but when you figure in average cost, you may find that your actuall cost on avearge is 4.5gold, 13 gold and  47.5 gold.. okay so if thats your average cost your average profit is 22gold at MINIMUM, and that is if you only ever sell at 325... In my experience, sometimes you will not get sales on and item as someone undercuts you to 324, but as they get bought out and then yours sell the market resets to a higher price, it cycles.. and that is why I suggest 3+ cancel post routines a day... once you learn how, you can do it in about 10 minutes depending on how many items you are selling. maybe like 5 miniutes to cance post 100 items.  10 minutes for 300 items, and 20-30 minutes for 1000+ auctions...   if you are short on time, just post. and cancel collect mail later.

The only thing not covered here so far is working in crafting time.. You can do things a couple ways here, and the risks and investment vary by how you do it... On demand crafting and buying or stockpiling, I prefer stockpiling since there is more money in it, but more risk too with the stockpiles... For me, since the best selling times conflicted with raid times often, I precrafted and stocked up, to reduce the amount of time needed to post when it conflicted with raid times... and it broke it up into various activities... Buying, posting, crafting, stocking etc...

BE THE HOUSE, WIN THE GAME!!!

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part one Enchanting

There are 10 professions in WOW right now.  8 are crafting, 3 of those also serve as Gathering professions. Then there are the 2 pure gathering professions.

1. Leatherworking
2. Tailoring
3. Blacksmithing
4. Inscription
5. Engineering
6. Enchanting
7. Mining
8. Jewelcrafting

The ones that can alos gather are:

1. Mining
2. Jewlecrafting
3. Enchanting

The pure gathering Professions are:

1. Skinning
2. Herbalism

So, What to level first and why?  Answers will be similar among many players, but the why and supporting reasons for each will vary.

IMO, enchanting wins.  For me this is a simple, hands down easy decision, and here are the reasons:

1. Passive gathering while leveing, DE the quest rewards and leveling gear
2. It will not take any additional time to gather the mats really, not like running to an herb, getting in combat and then having some one swoop in and Node Ninja while you are still in combat
3. No tempting yellow dots on the mini map to distract me
4. My raiding main is an enchanter/JC, and raiding in my priority
5. Enchanting has great a great profession bonus, you get to enchant your rings
6. I have had the greatest income playing in the scrolls of enchant AH market, I know it, I like it and can make a pile of gold at it
7. I will be able to help friends (guild members)
8. It is going to be expensive to level and very big barrier to entry in the opening days of MOP, though you can gather, you can not go directly "farm" mats.
9. You can do a shuffle to "farm" mats.. farm/buy ore/skins, craft them and disenchant them for mats.... rather the ore shuffle as we know it will still exist in MOP, who knows, but there will be a shuffle.
10. DE the AH for profit... disenchant items found on the AH.
11. It is complex, and involves a lot more processes to make it work, so less competition for that reason, but the competition you do have are often smart players at the AH game.  though all in all profits are good.
12. In the Gold Per Hour assessment, it meets the 2 requirements to make it a very profitable profession.  Reasonable to high profit per sale and reasonably high volume of sales.
13. AH deposit cost are 1 silver, so no loss really in cancel posting lots of scrolls
14. Cancel post cycles are fairly quick since you are not dealing with as many items as say JC or Inscription.
15. You can play small stakes in portions of the market or large stakes across the whole maket. ex. just the 5 most profitable scrolls or the 5 highest volume scrolls or make it 20, 10 most profitable , and 10 highest volume, or every scroll you can make a profit on.
16. It defrays the costs of having to buy enchants... a pretty big cost overall if you pimp your toon for raiding.

Okay, why not enchanting... though it is my #1 Pick, it may not be yours for some/all of the reasons below:

1. It is a more difficult profession to manage...
2. It has a pretty high cost of entry to level and purchase the formulas for a full book
3. Competition can be FIERCE
4. Stiff competitors are likely AH barrons and will make it hard on you to get a foothold in the market
5. Regulare AH scans to snatch low cost mats takes time
6. Massive inventories of mats are needed to maintain crafting cycles
7. The markets are very cyclical, fairly easy to learn, hard to master
8. Massive inventories require massive capitol investment.
9. Additional storage to manage stocks of scrolls and mats can be challenging
10. You could get caught with your pants down.. with all those stocks of mats and scrolls, if the price of enchanting mats falls faster than you can unload your inventory you can lose a lot fast.

Okay there you have it.. enchanting, there is very little "its fun" "Just because I like it" reasoning here.

Though it is fun to make piles and piles of gold in the AH... when Postal take 4 minutes to empty the mailbox,  your gold take is 20k 30K 40K 50K... thats fun... and I like it... there are negatives with each profession, this one is the profession I overcome the hurdles and learned to manage and tolerate the many downsides to the profession.

Tomorrow Jewelcrafting...

Posting evolution on the blog... SIMPLIFY!!!

I tend to get going on something I am writing and it promotes more ideas and such...

I share the ideas in blog format because its fun to watch subscribers, and the number of hits as well as get some comments and feedback.

Though mostly I decided to do it for 2 personal reasons, develope my communication skills and to have a way to do that where I spend some small amount of time in  a slower than the gears of my brain format...

At this point, I have decided I ramble in my posts... I just feel like I dont make a point > support that point and close... rather I think I attempt and fail to make multiple concurrent point, and weave the support for each one together in a muddy mess... It succeded in the personal goal, thinking out things for my own reasons, however, I ramble in conversations and often forget the original point...

In the end, I hope to deliver a cleaner, shorter and easier to read set of posts... I will have to see how that goes and would love your feedback, critical, positive or otherwise...

MoP storage and conversions? how things stack up...

So, if your reading this, and you have something in common with me about intendint to make gold in the MOP gold rush event... at some point you will run out of storage... It is just going to happen if you have a large amount of capitol you want to invest against inflation...

Still cleaning up banks and bags and organizing things for effeciancy...

Common herbs, or lower value per tier of inks will get milled and crafted to inks... the value per stack of ink will be higher than herbs... herbs that are less common and NEEDED to level alchy will be held onto... goldthorn is in this category, and mageroyal is so common and pleantiful that it will all get ground up...
What to stack here? herbs? inks? glyphs?  I am going inks atm, but may change my mind and convert a lot of that to glyphs... however, the glyphmas may attract to much competition, so inks may stay in my inventory rather than convert most to glyphs and still have some inks for new glyphs...

Ore vs. bars vs. gems?  thats a hard one to call in many cases... ore has flexibility, but will grind down into similar values per investment, but much greater values per stack... I think most of my strategy here will be on bars and gems... except for some things... there is just no need really to stack ore... sure the flexibility and volume of sales in this market are much higher, but the value per stack will not compare just copper, estimated on last UMJ look to be about 12 gold per stack.. inflation is likely to push that up, but the gems, malachite, tigerseye and shadowgems are 20, 40 and 140 gold per stack... so, yeah..... 10 stacks of copper worth 120gold total, becomes 3 stacks of gems worth 200 gold total current market value...   keeping pleanty of bars for the enchanting rod markets is key too as well as some of the other mats to craft the the rods... (read pearls and primal might)

Borean/Savage leather vs. Heavy counterparts... Thinking the heavy will win here too... 5:1 value... simple math... both will be in demand, but only one gets farmed... time is money friend, people have time to burn now, but MOP IS A RACE.. EXPECT PEOPLE TO PAY FOR SPEED...  Knothide leather, no.. HKL is not required to power level HBL is a good bet... 212 BL to power level according to wow-professions and 123 HBL...  Savage leather will need a closer look and more info to really get a good number... Profession info is not out there to be able to look at if you get new paterns at 500? and would it be cheaper to use the +3 and +5 skill points from old Cata mats from 500-525 or just go with the new stuff... Still a good bet for leg armors and such for the power leveling crowd....

Cloths.. make bolts... yeah, power leveling toons can get points from crafting cloth, but again the point on speed...

Still more cleaning, organizing and leveling to do with my toons, but I am well on my way to being fairly clear in my organization plans... and valuations of the material I am foucsing on and who will be doing the posting and such...  

And thats the next question for you to answer in your MOP gold rush plans... HOW DO THINGS STACK UP?

Plan to fail MOP gold rush or fail to plan..

Simple statements often have a great power of carrying a much greater depth than the statement’s words alone convey.  Often they are repeated statements reused over and over from historical figures, or are just cliché statements...

"A box of rocks" Does that make you think of a container full of stones? Or a person who regularly, or at least recently, does/did something with little forethought or consideration (or just plain stupid)???  Probably the later if I do not miss my guess.

Fail to Plan is a Plan to fail.

Phat at Phatlootsgold talked about plans to capitalize on how to maximize profits with play time in the opening month of MOP, and referenced a different perspective from Farli from The Overcut on similar thoughts…  

My plan is #1 get raid ready, #2 get an enchanter going, #3 get a farmer going and re-evaluate from there…

Simply make a realistic plan… when doing that maybe consider some of the following:

-Do you plan to Raid/PVP in the first? Second? Third week? Of MOP?  What are your guildmaster’s plans or your raid lead plans or if you are in one of those lead roles have you advertised to the players what your expectations are?  If this is part of your plan, leveling that toon early and beginning the rep grinds, honor/JP grinds, valor/conquest grinds, dungeon/heroic dungeon grind, profession grind for profession perks as well as having enough gold and resources to fully gem/chant/enhance your gear to end game content ready?  Figure roughly the following… roughly 20+ hours played to power level a toon to 90, and figure roughly 20+ dungeons or BGs for gear figure this will be another 20 hours played.  Add in the time to do dailies for rep gear and enhancements etc… all this to be raid ready… roughly 10 days or so of 4+ hours questing up, running dailies and dungeons/BGs for a rough timeline… but to be legitimately raid ready, I suspect you will need about 30-60 hours played after release to be there… PVP will be a bit easier I think with the changes to PVP gear…

-Making gold… first things first… what markets are you familiar with? And have a level of personal experience in to use for gold profits to support others that are working to get end game content ready?  What professions work for you?  For me this is enchanting.

-Farming… if your farmer toon is your end game main and a crafting toon also, you really have the best setup for early dual path progress… farm between ques, while leveling, and grinding… IMO the best combo for this would be miner/enchanter or herber/chanter… quest rewards get DE’d, leveling gear gets DE’d and you gather ore/herbs while out there leveling etc… when you are done with dailies and questing you go farm between dungeon/BG ques when everything else is done, dailies for rep, quest for leveling and rep etc…

So look at the stable of alts… Who will be first to 90 and why? And can you support getting a second up quickly for other purposes?  Look at your own personal tolerance to activities?  Can you go farm for 3 hours straight? Just going node to node?  Does your tolerance and game play allow you 4 hours a day to play, everyday and 6+/day on the weekend? 

Professions analysis, Pros/Cons and food for thought:
Gathering profs:

Mining – By far, above most others, the #1 profession to level up in the early hours and go make gold with.  The only one close, being herbalism… Mining, can be done between dungeons or  PVP,  it with you always while leveling and questing, allows you to go intentionally farm with a single minded purpose, you can gather and CRAFT (so it almost goes into the next category), making ore into bars can be very profitable and can be done while AFK (create all).  It is a source material for THREE professions.  Blacksmiths and Engineers will need lots of bars, and JCs will need lots of Ore.

Herbalism – Possibly better than mining in the early weeks, and definitely a strong contender.  Herbalism shares many of the same values as Mining… Though it is a source material for only TWO profession, alchemy and inscription… both do use massive volumes of herbs… I suspect it could be better than mining early on depending a little on the Darkmoon fair schedule… If we get the trinkets again… the volume of herbs to craft the darkmoon cards/trinkets will be enormous…

For simple gold making purposes, an herber/miner will be the simplest and a very competitive choice for sheet gold making potential, or cost defraying on leveling your own professions.

Skinning is the weakest of gathering professions IMO, its slower gathering than the others since you have to kill stuff, but you can get rep, trash drops, greens and more while doing it, so it is still competitive… It is not just the skins you gather that keep this one competitive, but all the other drops you get while farming mobs…   I think it will likely lose steam as time goes on, faster than other gathering professions, since Monks are Leather wearing… It also has the advantage of being a source material for 2 types of armor, leather and chain mail even though that is only one profession.

Gathering/Crafting Profs: (sorta)

Enchanting – ITS #1 in this category… It is my favorite, so maybe I have a bias… (read back or recall my 4.3 patch 10 days to a million gross income)  Its long term high demand use by all classes, specs, armor types and 5-6 per toon/spec/PVE or PVP (chest, bracer, gloves, boots, weapon, off-hand).  As a gathering profession it’s great while leveling since almost all quest rewards are likely to DE for more than they would vendor for.  In that way it takes on a near passive nature.  Though it is also one of the more challenging professions to manage and has a very competitive market.  Long term options to DE BS, LW, Tailor, JC crafted items give it long term flexibility.

JC – A great profession with lots of options though it’s going to be competitive if trends continue with the gated paterns by daily quests for JC and tokens to purchase the cuts…  It will be strong if you get to the dailies early and start getting cuts early, but I think there will be a lot of completion.  I has great potential, but if you are not familiar with the market and how to manage inventory… well you can go the simple route… JC is a gathering profession… just prospect ore… and sell uncut gems… it is also a great profession because the demand will be steady and long term as well as you can really flex options, prospect, craft gear, cut gems and any combo there in… as well as craft to DE if you have played the shuffle before, and been successful with it, you know the value of JC.  Also, the market could grow here from traditional level with the changes to the PVP stats systems/mechanics… More players may PVP more… I think PVP will no longer require completely different specs and gear and glyphs etc… you will be able to do well with a lot less on this front… maybe a glyph or 2 to change… but your spec will be a lot less dependant than it currently is and though I am not sure, I think there may be mechanics that allow you to change specs w/ a reagent instead of having to go back to the trainer…


Pure crafting professions:

Each of these has the potential to be great if you run heroics and if the “Orbs” are implemented as BOP like they were in early Cata… also they can have a pretty high cost of entry to buy the patterns and the PVP paterns and the mats and the training etc… but that is what it is… each could see some massive growth with a lot more people getting into pvp… the changes to PVP will make it a lot more entry level friendly I think…  and PVP gear may become in high demand.

Tailor – weak all in all, though a great option for flexibility and depending on how the new “Orbs” are if they are going to be BOP or BOE… for leg enhancements…

BS – also overall a weak like tailoring, except for the Belt buckles… and “orb” crafted gear.

LW – same as above, except the leg armor enhancements and the comments on the orbs

AND Engineering… sorta its own category, and could be a monster w/ the pets and pet battles and the account wide pet changes…

What are you doing to prepare for MOP? We just don't know much atm...

I am still working to level 2 new 85s... one to be a tailor engineer, 2 professions not covered, and one to be a miner/herber druid type... both are still in vanila zones though moving close to the outlands soon, and most of my time has been on the druid farmer... I think the farmer will be a far more profitable toon than a tailor engineer.  Still watching for some of the good stuff to see how various professions will be implemented... That will be some key data on how to stockpile some of the Cata mats right now guides are built on the "reach 525" basis... however, if you only have to go to 500 to get new MOP paterns recipes etc... ... though cata will be one of my lower priorities to stock, I just suspect that there will be large stocks in the market from people that wait till the last minute to try and dump after MOP release.

I guess a couple things to consider... buying the wrath epic gems for the leveling gear... they can be used in the early 60s or even late 50s... and in rare cases lower with the relics on DKs, Druids, Shaman and Paladins... though will those classes even still have a relic?  I know of some major changes to weapon slots for some classes are coming, like wands are main hand for casters, bows will be main hand for hunter etc... so overall, is ther just 2 slots at the bottom of the character screen? not sure... I am guessing wand/offhand for clothies, but what about paladins? mace shield? and no relic? 

So level the toons, level the profession, and not take anything to serious... Keep having fun and watching certain things that will have a massive demand spike.. and be under supplied... things that are low in supply now... at least low in supply compared to the demand to power level the profs.. spoke to this in some past posts and I am still working on the spreadsheet... leveling the 2 two toons will have some focused efforts durring the process.. 55-58 will be largely grining the N.W. corner of silithus... essence of air is allways low supply and high demand and high value... and in my experience it is the best place to farm it... elemental plateau in Nagrand about 65-66 will get a lot of attention while leveling... motes of air, high demand, low supply for the primal might market which is still alive for the enchanting rods need it and the primal air is still used in some enchanting recipies that are popular in the twinkish crowds... or power leveling people...

Okay, so I would end up with time better spent just power leveling the toons to 85 and then going back to level profession and taking a geared main out to silitus or the elemental plateau, but its more fun leveling IMO.. it get to see my scrolling text show "xxx XP" and money in the bags.. instead of just mindless GRINDING on a toon that just runs, one shots, kill and collects loot... effective, but wears out pretty quick...

There are still a lot of various blogs and articles on various strategys of how to really capitolize on the opening week(s) or month(s) of MOP...  I guess my overall goal would be to double my money invested at least... some things will be bang, and some things will be bust, there are no guarantees, and you can not really expect to make big gold piles in just one market in most cases... there is one market though that I think will be a big money maker... IF.. you have lots of gold.. you are willing to spend a lot of time... you can watch markets close... you can run the numbers for profit only... you dont have too much competion... DMCs...  If there is a new entry level DMC like there was in early Cata that are A) purple B) in the top 3 BIS C) they are again BOE... suplemented with relics and glyphs... that, could be a one shot ticket to big money... but saddle your self up for a LOT of time in the AH, buying herbs followed by a lot of time at the mailbox collecting purchases, followed by a lot of time milling, then a good bit more time turning pigments into inks, followed by more time crafting the cards, to finaly have a bunch of cards that wont make a deck and then eventually you have a trinket that will sell for 100K? maybe? 

Jems... limited by tokens for cuts
BS... limited by the number of BS and the amount of time it would take to make an item limeted to classes and specs
LW... same as BS
Tailor... same as above
Engineer.... who knows...
Enchanter... this would be the second best profession IMO...
Inscription... best crafting profession
Alchemy... likely too much competition
Herbing... best gathering profession
Mining... also, best gathering profession
Skinning... great, but not sure it will have the stay power of minin and herbing.

Who to cater too.. the week one raiders... they will be spending alot of gold to level their professions to get the new profession bonuses... and need more gear to flex the e-peen and fix their raid spot...

Any crafted gear that has an Ilvl above the minimum needed to get into heroics.. WIN!!!

See how much we just dont know yet?

Sad news... FOO/WOWMIDAS... hedging the markets

Sad new, fan sites come and go, and some replace other and grow... like Google... does anyone use any other search engine regularly?  I don't... anyway... AHspy, just started using it and prefering it over UMJ for markets and now its shut down... at least we still have UMJ... :-)

Lots of perspectives and idea on how to hedge the markets in preparation for 5.0/5.1...

FOO and WOWMIDADS have a couple posts going back and forth... I kind of had a good sense of the value of wrath mats being a better hedge for 5.0/5.1... I can reinforce and add to that value having recently leveled a toon through the post 4.3 xp nerf to NR...  The time players spend there is nerfed, that means leveling through will be faster and few mats gathered... Like you will have to slow or stop your leveling and go grind out some points in your gathering professions almost certainly... less time, is less raw mats, less quest greens getting DE'd etc... I will definately be lookin at this as a more valuable market for 5.0/5.1.  Much like I guess, LW will be popular w/ the new pandas and more specifically the monks...

Though that could be a very wrong guess about the monks... to me it seem natural that many players will choose Skinning/LW for a monk... first element that could make that a bad guess.. we are getting an 11th spot for a toon on each server, a lot of players will be leveling an alt and pick a more convenient or profitable profession. On the other hand, players will do what they do... that is become unsettled and look for the next best thing... what better time to switch servers... so fresh re-rolls on new servers may be more prevalent... on the down side, if they go skinning/LW there will be a surpluss of skins... possibly... my experience is that it takes time and effort going out of your way to cut hide/pick flowers/chip rock to gather enough mats to actually level you profession... On the positive side, many player that I would be focussin on for markets in LW would be those that are speed leveling 1-90 as fast as they can... this means a few dungeons and a lot of quests... for get professions, level them when you are 90...

Anyway, many of my last recomendations still stand for stocking, however some more valuations will come into play... part on inflation numbers from WOWMIDAS and my guesswork/hedging bets, and finally value per slot of storage space...

I will be consulting my magic 8-ball as well as other sources and let you know...
"Abra ka dabra!"
"Allah kah zhamm!"
"Bipity bopity boo..."