Grimmtooth's Troops

As long as I’ve played, I’ve seen a constant flow of envy from other classes.  They look at our magnificent demonic steeds, and say "Hey, why can’t we have one?"¹  They gaze longingly at our portals and whinge, "why can’t we use them?"  They even cried about healthstones so much that Blizz gave them a vending machine for healthstones. I imagine that somewhere out there, someone’s upset that they can’t summon Warlock pets, either.

The most recent outbreak has been over a new quest series in patch 5.2 in which Warlocks go to change our mundane orange fire for green fire, as it should have been all along².  Apparently, some people are annoyed that we get to have all the fun here, and want something like it for themselves. Ignore the fact for a moment that there’s nothing about (for example) mages³ that gives them that "cool factor" like Warlocks, and thus no real REASON to have a special epic quest series.  They just want it, because, reasons.

As always, Auntie Flora has worked long and hard to bring a solution to you.

You want all the warlock goodies?  Here’s what you do.

1. Log out.
2. Select CREATE NEW CHARACTER⁴
3. Select class = WARLOCK
4. Log in.
5. Get your neat Warlock stuff.

You’re welcome.

1. Mind you, they didn’t look at the massive cost of our mats and go, "Hey, why can’t we be taxed as much for our mounts?" [↩]
2. Don’t get me started on THAT, [↩]
3. You know that fire mages have GOT to be at the center of this. [↩]
4. If you have no free slots, delete a mage. [↩]

In the “goblin” world, there are goblins, and there are those that write about goblins, and there are those of us that more or less peer in from the edges, bemused at how far one person will go to make a few gold pieces.  I fancy myself in the latter, no illusions there, but I wonder where WpW Insider’s resident goblin journo places himself?

His topic of the day was something near to my heart, inscription as a money maker.  As usual, he almost gets it right, or almost gets it wrong, but doesn’t really nail either.

Buy the Numbers

The first thing I want to tackle isn’t provably wrong – not yet, or at least not provable by me – but I want to shed some light on the statement that possibly was edited down for brevity.¹

Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it’ll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool’s Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool’s Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that’s 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.

What’s he talking about, Fool’s Cap requiring fewer stacks?  Well, basically, what he’s saying here is that Fool’s Cap yields up more Misty Pigment than other herbs do.  If he got his numbers from WoWHead, I do question them – WoWHead does not appear to purge old data that often, so the numbers up there could possibly include Beta data.  Hard to say, since they’ve become less transparent by the day.²

However, I wrote a little addon that has been tracking all milling I do in real time.  So far, the yields look like this.³

So, everything hovers around the .25-pigments-per-mill level, except for Fool’s Cap, which has yielded around .60.  Yes, that’s more than double, which is in excess of WoWHead’s numbers.  I have no idea whether this will hold, but I’ll be monitoring it.  Right now, I don’t have enough samples from all herb types to make me comfortable publishing a link to the database, but before too long I will.

The upshot is, yeah, right now it’s worth it to buy Fool’s Cap for purposes of making Darkmoon cards.  But now that Euripides has let the cat out of the bag, I expect there to be at least a window in which it will be priced beyond reason.  Keep your eyes on the prices.

Don’t Believe it

Glyphs are a whole other beast. I’ve said a few times that this market isn’t worth pursuing, and to some extent, this still holds true. The main reason I’d advise against trying your hand at the glyph market is that everyone else disagrees with me, and that the profit per hour in this market is purely driven by competitors’ willingness to spend more time cancelling and relisting.

This shows some old-fashioned thinking on Euripides’ part.  The “work harder not smarter” attitude works, if you have no other interest in this game than to sell things and make gold. I’ve other things to do. This is and has been a side-project, in which I attempted to determine if one could make money on the AH in an intelligent way.  I’ve succeeded – if you disagree, it can only be on the matter as to what degree I’ve succeeded.  However, since I started this exercise in Wrath, I’ve accumulated over 1,000,000 gold, so I think I’m on solid ground here.

I published my methods here, so I won’t go into great detail now, but essentially these principles held, and still hold.

1. Treat the enterprise as you would a retail outlet.
2. Maintain a working inventory of glyphs.
3. Cultivate a reliable, inexpensive source of materials.
4. Rotate stuff out when its price drops too far (as opposed to a forced reset, which is too labor-intensive) and shelve stuff that doesn’t sell at all.
5. Don’t worry about Euripides and the goblins.

#5 is the part that flies in the face of what Euripides said. He maintains that you have to undercut like a fiend.  I don’t. I sold 5000 GP worth of glyphs last night.  Does that sound like a good turnaround for an hour’s work? It does to me.  I post ONCE per day. I still sell stuff. There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest reason is that the stuff that sells, will sell.  Some “goblin” may undercut me, but if the glyph is a seller, then his glyphs WILL be bought, then mine are right there for the next buyer.

Don’t take the advice of trolls

I like angry letters, so when I have time to troll my esteemed competitors, I’ll go and post a "glyph wall" of 3 of each glyph for triple the materials cost. This is just expensive enough that it’s not worth them buying me out, and cuts the high end of the market (the 300g glyphs that cost 15g to make) out from under them. This can be fun, not unlike popping bubble wrap. I still get undercut within an hour, but since this doesn’t really drive demand up that much, I don’t end up selling anything more than I would have at the high prices. That’s generally when they’ll mail me letting me know this.

In the end, though, I can’t spend all day trolling — they just wait for me to have better things to do and then go back to their old ways.

I encounter a number of idiots like this on my server⁴ and I always get the last laugh, because while they’re all wrapped up in this little game of theirs, I just keep posting and selling.  They were thick as fleas on a camel when the expansion posted, but they’re gone now, and I an still making bank.  Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.

If you’re going to disregard my advice and try to get into the glyph market, the best advice I have for you is to make sure you have the most efficient possible setup, and undercut really frequently.

If you want to make money making glyphs, and you don’t want it to be your life, then disregard this advice and reflect on the article I linked above.  Exercise patience and intelligence⁵ and you’ll not want for gold in days to come.

Moving on

I’ve a couple more tweaks to make to see how far I can push this thing, but now that I’ve gotten my Million, it’s all become rather pointless. I’m not one of those one-percenters that digs the money just for being the money. My goal has been to provide a comfortable nest egg for ten toons on this server, and I’ve more than accomplished my goal. Anything else is just gravy.

Everybody loves gravy.

1. Or uberness. One never knows. [↩]
2. Doesn’t mean I’m going to wax poetic about WoWDB any time soon. [↩]
3. Green = common yields, Slate = rare yields. [↩]
4. And yes, that’s a direct Euripides quote, and yes, I just called him an idiot. It’s justified. Trolls are idiots. [↩]
5. No comment. [↩]