The Azeroth Cookbook

Wrath of the Gold Gathering

Wrath of the Lich King and Northrend are bringing some interesting changes to the WoW economy. Quests pay at least 4 gold each and there are hundreds of them. Alchemists and Scribes are buying up tons of herbs and crafters are getting their tools into new leathers and ores. Not to mention the new gear, food items, and so on.

So there’s a pretty fair quantity of new items for the gold grind and a pretty fair amount of new cash coming into the game. Prices, of course, will vary from server to server and Horde side to Ally.

Do you like to farm for your gold?

Northrend herbs start at 30-40 gold a stack and go up from there. More and more farming will tend to push prices down some, but Glyphs, that require inks made from those herbs, will help to keep herb prices up. If you want to take up herbalism I have a quickie guide to leveling herbalism from scratch.

Cobalt and Saronite ore look like they’re running 40-50 gold a stack and Titanium is just grim right now. Mining is always a good money maker and all the ores sell well.

Borean leather is somewhere around 20g a stack and you’re going to be killing lots of critters, so the shear quantity of skins should keep those prices relatively low. Rarer skins, though… Artic Fur is looking pretty grim, too.

Hungry? Chunk o’ Mammoth is going for 10g per piece right now. Just avoid the D.E.H.T.A. druids when you’re covered in Mammoth pieces.

Auction House Pricing

When you puts your loots up for sale on the AH check the existing prices first. I use Auctioneer (advanced,) but it’s not essential for price checking. Some people seem to skip this step. For example, let’s say prices for an ore are going at 45g a stack. BobBank comes buy and throws his up there for 200g a stack. Lol wut? Why? I think sometimes its to screw the Auctioneer data, other times people just aren’t looking. It’s a waste of effort since it’ll never sell.

Next comes NotAfarmer, who posts a pile of stacks at 5g each (when the market is 45.) Sigh… what do you do with these people? First, he’s hurting himself since he could get a lot more for each stack, next he’s hurting the market. Actually this is great for buyers, but we greedy types would like to see things a bit higher, which makes it worth our while to farm or make the item. What some of us will then do is buy out all of NotAfarmer’s stuff and resell it at market price.

Then there’s ZogMuffin, who puts up 20 stacks of something at market price or lower. The issue here isn’t necessarily the pricing, but that Zog is locking up 20 stacks of his inventory, which won’t sell, because BobBank gets a clue and undercuts him. So the first few items the buyer sees are Bob’s and Zog gets all his items back in the mail when his auctions expire.

Unless you have a monopoly on an item I don’t suggest putting up a lot of that item. Store the surplus in your bank if it’s selling and prices seem reasonably stable. Post one item at a time if it’s a slow seller, just a few if it sells faster. You’ll sell just as much and you’ll have fewer returns to deal with.

It’s funny sometimes… You see a game where one person posts his items and then he and three or four others will alternately undercut each other by pennies. Then NotAfarmer comes along and dumps a pile of that item, undercutting everyone by 60%. So one of two things happens: his stuff gets bought out by another seller (for resale) or the price creep game starts again at the new, lower, price.

Need More Bank Space?

Make a private guild, just for your banker/mule. Start it up like any other guild, then kick everyone out when its ready to go. It’s probably a good idea if you let them know your plans ahead of time. Bribery (2-5 gold per signature) will get sign-ups a lot faster.

Once done you have access to that nice, large, guild bank. All to yourself. Every once in a great while someone sells their guild and that’s the one I have. Didn’t have to bother with the signup fuss and only paid 70 gold. Then I bought another pair of tabs and now bank space is no longer an issue.

Storing stuff in the mailbox is a good idea for smaller quantities, but doesn’t work so well for larger quantities due to bugs in the system. You won’t lose stuff (as long as you don’t store it for more than 30 days,) but you might not  see it either, until the mailbox is emptied.

Summing Up

Mining and Herbalism for the (gathering) Gold.

Dedicated bankers are a good idea, for all of your buying and selling, and private guilds allow lots of storage space.

Watch the current prices so you can make a good choice about pricing your stuff and try to avoid posting a ton of stuff at one time.