Making money with Inscription without Glyphs

Before I start, let me say that this post could also be called: "Making money from what people want instead of what people need".

A little bit of backstory
I have been trying to break into the Glyph industry for a while now.  Using my DK, I power-level his inscription up to 400, and started to to the daily research, creating 5 of every new glyph, which normally listed for about 20-30g each.
I'm up to 435 skill points now, and I have quite a few glyphs listed on the AH any given time. I also try to check if I've been undercut 2 or 3 times a day, and relist everything if I have.

The end result? Almost nothing, not even 100g a day. I'm still hoping that once I get more and more new glyphs, I'll start making money eventually, but this post is not about that, actually, it's about making money without the glyphs.

How?


I have to admit, I actually stumbled upon this miniature gold mine by accident, you see, I started inscription on my DK, not for the gold making opportunity, but for a specific item that I wanted to craft. That's right, a long time ago, I started inscription because I wanted to craft this. The thing is, I eventually forgot about it, and abandoned my DK's profession for a while, until the other day I remembered that I wanted this item, so I leveled him up, soon to realize that the technique required to craft it, was a drop from a specific part of Grizzly Hills.

Lucky for me, my DK is lvl 74 (has been for a long while), the exact same level as the mobs I had to kill, so I went there and killed humans for almost 30 minutes until the item dropped.
Once I was back, I decided to check the AH, since now I'm all about making gold with this toon, I thought I would see if this was actually a gold making opportunity. As it turned out, there were 4 other books listed on the AH, 3 of them were listed at 500g buyout, and the last one was listed at 1000g buyout.

When I saw that, I thought about listing mine (I had only enough money to make one, since I have been trying to make Northrend Cards aswell, and they are expensive to make), but something stopped me. Something I read somewhere around internet about using the Trade channel to sell your items.

So I gave it a try:
When using the trade channel, things change, for starters, you're offering a product, and specially in this case, one that not many people know about or even care about, so your message to the channel has to catch the readers attention.

You can't do something like this:
/2 WTS [Rituals of the New Moon], 500g

Simply because:
a- Some people will see you listing an unknown blue item at a relatively high price and won't care to look again.
b- You're actually setting the price, limiting yourself to only people who have 500g to spend on a luxury item, and leaving those who are willing to negotiate with you, out.

So, I choose the following message (wich produced nice results actually):
/2 WTS [Rituals of the New Moon], pst me and GET YOUR WOLF ON!

There are some key points we should be looking at on that text:
a- No price, this normally makes the initial whisper something like: "how much?", or even, people giving it a prices already. I haven't had the luck of having someone offering me an initial amount higher than what I normally ask, but still, it's a nice open door for that kind of opportunity.
b- The last part: "pst me and GET YOUR WOLF ON!" actually catches the readers eye. It will make them wonder: "why the hell a blue item will get my wolf on?" and subsequently, makes them click and read the tool tip. This way, you get people interested in what you're selling instead of waiting for those interested in it to go and look for it on the AH.
c- Negotiation: This relates to point "a" actually. My normal initial price for this item is 500g, so, when people say "how much?" I answer with: "500g", to wich sometimes I get a "ok, i'll get it", sometimes I get a "lowlz no" and sometimes, I get a "100g and I'll take it off your hands".

This last one is the most interesting one. You see, making the item (in my realm), costs about 80g on a bad day, so selling it at 500g is a super profit, one that allows me to actually lower the prices as much as I like. I normally take it down to 250g at most (which also makes for a killing profit if you ask me).

So, back to the negotiation part, if you happen to get a possible buyer who wants to save himself a few bucks, you can actually arrive at a middle point, where you feel comfortable with the profit, and he/she is happy thinking what a great deal they just made (a win-win situation :) ).


There are two important points here:
1- Instead of listing your known-to-few-players item in the AH and wait for them to go look it up and pay and overpriced amount of money, you offer it in Trade, making it posible for them to buy it and also letting everyone else know about it, which increases your customer number.
2- You are free to choose the price you want to sell the item for a specific customer, instead of having the strict and cold system that the AH has.

In my experience, I have to spend between 20-30 minutes offering the item and chatting with users until I sell it for a nice price.
I have had luck on some cases and I've sold it 2 minutes after my first post on Trade, at 500g.
One thing to notice about my experience, is that even though it's an item that requires lvl70 to use, most of my buyers are lvl80s, who want it exclusively for the use effect.
What does this tell us? Well, to me, it tells me that I'm not selling a standar item, and as such, I can't charge it at a standar price, no matter what some people might say.

Hopefully, you'll get lucky and in your server this item will sell for a nice profit aswell :)

Have fun making money!

My take on the new Hunter Class

These past few days, the WoW community has been a bit edgy with all the news about changes to every single class. And we're still waiting on the pally changes..., they've taken so long to publish them that I fear/hope they will be major ones....

Even though Blizzard has already published all other class changes, I feel like I can't give me honest opinion about all of them, since I haven't played all classes, and yes, the only class I've taken up to 80 is my pally, but I feel like I'm getting to know the hunter class pretty good, so I thought I would post my own take on what I think the new changes mean for us hunters.

And here we go, the changes:

We've all read them at this point, but if you haven't, here is the complete list, and here is the short story:

1. No more mana, focus is our thing now.
2. No more ammo. Don't ask where the ammo comes from... 
3. Three pets to carry around, even more to store at the stables.
4. A pet at level 1
5. Several talents changed
6. Mastery system for every tree announced
7. Three new abilities:
1. Cobra Shot
2. Trap launcher
3. Camouflage

So, lets go over this points one by one, and see how they will affect us:

1- No more mana. I consider this one a major change, for several reasons. For starters, it's one of our two main resources, we consume mana like it's the air we breath. Our dps is actually very dependent of our mana pool (at least while leveling) and now it's all going to disappear. All things considered...., I think it's a great change. One thing all mana users have in common (again, at least while leveling) is the downtime it produces. We can't kill if we have no mana, so while questing (or even dungeoning - that's right, I just invented that word - ) how fast we go from one kill to the next one depends almost entirely on how much mana we have left.  Yes, eventually we learn a new aspect that helps us in that front, giving us super fast mana recuperation, but still, we have to suffer a damage penalty, which makes us kill everything slower, which in turn, makes us wonder wether we were better off stopping for a drink instead of killing doing half our normal damage. 

Now that problem is going away, since our main resource (the other one being removed - ammo - ) is turning into focus, which we know so well, from watching it under our pets health bar. It basically works like the Rogue's energy although Blizzard hasn't said much about any actual difference with said resource.

In the end, I don't think focus is going to be a magical solution, since they're not taking away Aspect of the Viper, which makes me think, we'll still have situations where we'll need it. Still, I consider this  a big blow on the downtime problem.

2- No more ammo: This change right here, I really don't know how I feel about it. I know a lot of hunters out there hate the fact that we're the only class that needs to shot money (almost literally) in order to kill things.  We need to buy our ammo, which at first is not that expensive, but once you hit 80 and depend on every little upgrade you can get to maximize your dps, this expense becomes one of your major ones. But then again, I actually enjoyed that, to me, having to buy my own ammo (or make it if you're an engineer) makes the hunter a unique class, it sets it appart from all others. Yes it can be a pain, but I've always seen it as a small price to pay for being unique, now that's going away, I guess I'll have to wait and see what it feels.

3- Three pets to carry around, even more to store at the stables: This change really comes in handy. I won't lie to you, I do feel like with every change, the hunter is becoming more and more like a Pokemon Master, running around the world, collecting exotic creatures and training them to fight, now also having the possibility to swap them between combats? That just sounds too familiar, doesn't it?

Leaving the jokes aside, I do like this change. It does break the suspension of disbelief just a bit, I mean, where am I getting my other pets from? Errr..., lets keep that a retorical question, shall we?

Gameplay wise, it does give the hunter even more flexibility in the battle field, be it on a PVP encounter or a PVE situation, you are now pretty much covered (at least, pet wise).

4- A pet at level 1:  This one, right here, is a smart change. Blizzard probably got all his database admins and ask them, what class gets deleted the most or abandoned the first few levels? And they all went to their database consoles and started typing in queries until they all came to the same freaking conclusion: The hunter. Why? Because it's a class that's designed to be played alongside with a pet and for the first 10 freaking levels you don't get one! It's really frustrating..., really. Why the hell would I play a pokemon mas... hunter if I can't have a bloody pet to send and die for me!? Uh?! Well, that's all being taken care now, even if you can't really tame the one you want until level 10, at least now you get a pet to run around with you and help you kill things.

So, what am I trying to say with this? I approve of this change.

5- Several talents changed: This has been a common scenario for all classes so far (and I expect nothing less for the Paladins), since they're changing so many things around, some of the old talents are pointless now, and others are being improved. Lets see what we hunters can expect:

- Beast Masters: This guys appear to be the ones who get the new stuff, since Blizzard intends to make Cobra Shot their signature shot. So they get a couple of talents to improve it:

• Beast Mastery hunters will also have talents that make Cobra Shot superior to Steady Shot, such as Longevity reducing the cast time of Cobra Shot to 1.5 seconds.
• Beast Mastery hunters will have a new talent called Careful Aim, which increases the damage of the next Steady Shot or Cobra Shot, but also increases the cast time of these abilities. The intention is to make the combination of spells into a decent damage opener, especially in conjunction with the new ability Camouflage.

- Marksman: Nothing too fancy here, just a rework of the old Rapid Fire to grant focus immediately and will cause Rapid Killing to generate 3 Focus per second.

Also, Efficiency will reduce the Focus cost of abilities, instead of the mana cost.

- Survival: Same as MM:

• Thrill of the Hunt grants Focus when you land a critical strike.
• Hunter vs. Wild increases the hunter's Focus generation when his or her pet is snared, stunned, or rooted.

6- Mastery system for every tree announced: Same as the talent rework, this has been announced for every talent tree on every class. And in our case, there is not much to be surprised about, they're basically using the masteries to differenciate hunters of different trees (which is basically what the whole Mastery system was meant to do.. so.. they're doing it). Lets see what bonuses we're getting:

Beast Mastery 
Ranged Damage
Haste
Pet Damage 

Big surprise here, if you go BM you get a Pet Damage bonus! 

Marksmanship 
Ranged Damage
Armor Penetration
Double Shot 

If you go MM, dammage is your thing, not your pet's, so you get and extra Shot, for 50% damage and off the GCD.

Survival 
Ranged Damage
Ranged Critical Damage
Elemental Damage

Hunter abilities such as traps, Black Arrow, and Explosive Shot will do elemental damage of the following types: Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature, and Shadow.

7- Three new abilities: And for the final point in my list, the thing that probably most of us were waiting..., new abilities!

Lets see:

• Cobra Shot: Woohoo! A new shot! As if you didn't have enough already >.<. But is not bad at all, lets break it down:
• Does nature damage: So, as they said, it's great for targets with a lot of armor.
• It does share a CD with Steady Shot, but then again, it's meant as an alternative to the latter.
• Beast Masters are expected to make this their signature shot, so they'll have talents to improve it.
• Trap Launcher: Interesting ability. It will allow you to launch any of your current traps. I see this as a great oportunity to lay out some havok in the mist of a great pvp battle, and throw from far away our explosive trap, or even our snake trap and see our enemies cower in fear! I also see it as a great oportunity for an extra AoE from out AoE traps in PVE situations, when we're far away on those big pulls and all we can do is volley them down, now we have one more shot/trap to use. The only problem with this, is that it will replace our Freezing Arrow, but 3 levels later, so what exactly is going to be our new lvl80 ability? They didn't say....
• Camouflage: Lets read the whole post about it, because it does seem interesting:

The hunter enters an obscured state that prevents him or her from taking ranged damage. The character would still be subject to melee or area-of-effect attacks, and dealing or taking damage will break the Camouflage effect. The hunter can move and set traps when under Camouflage, and will receive a damage bonus when attacking while under Camouflage (which will then break the effect).

First things first..., where exactly do we take direct ranged damage? Not on PVE right? That's the tank's job..., so that part I see it being really useful on PVP situations, when you're hiding from other casters or even other hunters.
Still, the bonus damage from being camouflaged will be useful anywhere, no matter what it is that you're killing, so basically I see this ability being used in conjunction with our opener shot (since after shooting we lose our camouflage), to give it a little extra juice.
All in all, not the uber/super/hyper new ability one would hope to learn at the new level cap, but then again, neither was Freezing Arrow at first and then they all wanted us to start CCing with it :) So fingers crossed.


And here ends my take at the new and upcoming changes to this great and fun to play class. Lets stay tunned and see what changes between now and release date, because you know, some things will change once they hit the PTR and all the QQ starts coming down :)

Anyways, in the mid time, have fun and keep playing! :)

So, what's up with Gamon?

You know him right? Gamon?

You've probably heard him yelling like a mad man when Wrath kicked in, and all those new Death Knights were entering Orgrimar? He likes a good yell that Gamon :) That's why I always kille him whenever I can >.<

So, what's the deal with him? 

Well, for starters, for those of you who actually don't know who the heck I'm talking about, there is a NPC called Gamon inside the Inn at Orgrimar. If you can't find him, that's probably because someone has already killed him, just wait a bit, he has a 5min respawn timer... he'll be back.

Why can we hordies kill a fellow hordie?
Yes, that's right, we can kill Gamon..., he's just a lvl12 npc, so he won't probably put much of a fight, unless ofcourse, you're a lvl1 or something.
Anyways, the thing with Gamon is that he's part of a rogue quest in which you have to pick-pocket him in order to obtain a specific key, and according to game mechanics, if a mob is to be pick-pocketed then he has to be killable.

Gamon has other uses too, asides from being a punching bag for high levels (counting myself, yes :) ), he's is the only NPC who actually comfronts newly arrived Death Knights in Orgrimar. On that final quest, when you have to go and speak to Thrall, if you happen to pass close enough to the Inn, he'll come out running and attack you..., obviously, he can't really hurt a DK, but he has a special ability called Pride Breaker, it can knock back players, and dismount them if they're mounted, but that's it.

According to my sources, Gamon can be mind controlled by priests, which turn out to be really funny if used right.

In the end, next time you're strolling around Org and happen to see him inside the Inn, think twice before killing him, you might be messing with the quest objective of a poor lowie rouge.

Aaaand, that's about it for today, I wanted to talk about something different, so I chose dear old Gamon there, who keeps me smiling every time I see him and kill him ^^


Cya later!

Tips for the poor: Selling vendor stuff

Yes! As amazing as it might sound, I have yet another tip for those of you out there, who struggle for a living in the World of Azeroth.  If I keep this up, I might have to make a whole section on the blog dedicated to this topic!

Today's tip: Selling vendor stuff.

What is that you say? How can you make any money at all, selling stuff from vendors? Well, let me elaborate a bit more on that:

First of all, I'm not talking about any kind of stuff, I'm not talking about buying Fine Aged Cheddar and then posting it at the AH... no... I'm basically talking about profession recipes, plans, designs, and the whole enchilada. 
You see, profession trainers are not the only way to learn recipes, some can only be bought from specific vendors around the 2 worlds (Azeroth and Outlands... duh!) and some, can only be obtained through rare drops. We'll cover the easy ones to obtain today, the ones you can buy.

Now that we've cleared that out, how can you make money out of those items? Well, some of those items are really usefull to some professions.
Lets see an example here:

• Recipe: Blackened Basilisk
• Recipe: Warp Burger

Those two items are cooking recipes, they're sold by Innkeeper Grilka (horde side) or Supply Officer Mills (alliance side) on Terokkar Forest at 3g each. They are excelent for leveling your skills as a cook. And the most amazing thing? Almost no one knows where to get them. Since you don't learn these on the cooking trainer, people forget to go looking for them.

The only good thing that we can do for these poor people in order to help them is, yes you guessed it, fly/run up to Terokkar Forest, buy a bunch of them, and them put them on the AH.

Now, here is the tricky part, since we're trying to make a gold out of a market that not many people realizes it exists, we have to keep it simple, dont fill the AH with 10 or 20 recipes of Blackened Basilisk.., someone is going to realize sooner or later and then undercut us (the horror!), so... try to post them one at a time. I used to sell them at 40g each. That's right, 40 gold per recipe, that's a big profit if you ask me. 

Eventually, some less-than-smart player realized that he too, could make a buck out of those recipes and started to list them at 17g each..., needless to say, I had to put my stock down for a while, until that person had ran out of recipes, probably a leveling toon, who saw the oportunity and took it.

Yes, I could've listed mine a bit lower, and still would've made a killing profit, but I chose to wait, and time proved me right :) I have to go back and restock now.

Ofcourse, those two recipes are not the only ones that you can use. Like almost every tip for gold-making around here, your realm is going to dictated what you sould sell and what not to sell, you just have try and err. That's how I've learned.

A few more recommendations that have served me well in the past:

• Formula: Enchant Cloak - Superior Defense If you got a druid, this one and the next one, will net you some pretty good gold, since you have a free port to the only place where they're sold.
• Formula: Runed Arcanite Rod Excelent for making some fast and easy cash. I've sold this formula for up to 50g. Only one at the time, and if someone else is selling it, I'd wait, since I don't want everyone to know how easy it is to get.
• Pattern: Imbued Netherweave Bag Bought this on the AH the other day at 30g, then realized that I could buy it for much.. MUCH less at Shatt, so I now, every once in a while, I go there, and buy some, I've been selling them at 35g each. Pretty they sell better than the actual bag... wierd uh?
• Pattern: Dress Shoes This one right here, net me a few golds a while ago, I bought them since it was one of those items that once you buy them from the merchant, you have to wait to buy it again. And since the vendor is so out of the way, I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I honestly don't remember how much money I made with it, since after selling a few, I was out of the zone and didn't care to go back. (Shame on me!)

Anyways, that's a very simple list of formulas/patterns to buy low and sell extra high :). They can be a great money maker, specially for the first few hundred gold.

Now, go on, search the AH for them, and see if anyone is selling them, if not, then get out there, and try it out :) You'll probably be pleased with the results....

Cya around!

A week without posting

Yes, I spent a whole week without posting..., not that many people noticed... I think I'm the only reader of my blog, but hopefully, that will eventually change (here is hoping :).
Anyways, a lot has happened in a week, a very special week actually, since it didn't only affected real world, but the World of Warcraft as well since Noblegarden started.
I personally don't really get into this kind of world events..., going around getting eggs and whatnot... it's not what I want to do if I can avoid it (there is always those sick days, when you don't really feel like raiding or pvping, when a good old fashion world event comes in handy though :P).

Ok, so.. what's happened this past week? Well, lets see....

Martuuf (my leveling hunter) got to 70! (71 now actually!). Thanks to this, now I'm doing northrend instances Utgarde Keep every time I can (for some reason, lady RNG wants me to keep killing Ignvar and won't let me get into a random Nexus or AN >.<).
I've also proved my theory wrong thanks to this incursion into so fucking many runs of UK. People doing Northrend instances are dicks too >.<. I was really, I mean really hoping that once I got to 68 and went north, all my PUGs problem would go away...., well, ,guess what? They didn't! I don't want this to become a whiny post, but I gotta whine a bit... I can't help it... Why do people get into a group to just leave it the moment we zone in? Uh? Why do pallys with holy gear think they can tank? Uh? And why... OH GOD WHY is it that no one is breaking the freaking ice blocks but me?!?! >.<
Oh well, moving on to greener pastures... even though I'm tired of doing so many random UKs, I've gotten some nice XP from it, and emblems as well, I can't use them yet mind you, but I will.. soon enough...which is very disturbing actually... getting to 80, and already having emblems to buy gear that's better than heroics 5man...this is good AND bad at the same time, but I shall write about it another time.
Another good thing that happened to Martuuf, is that he can now fly on the cold! Yes I've bought him the tome... I really missed flying when I got to Vengance Landing, so after a bit of questing and running on my raptor, I decided it was about time. Now I only need like another 4k gold to get him to fly fast enough .... I hate flying at 60% >.<.

That's about it for Mart... I'll have to get back to him soon enough, but since I got this past week off work, my wife and I decided to play a bit of our alts, so I took my lvl46 drood up to 54! And she took her lvl47 Shadow Priest up to lvl 55...
I gotta admit it, I'm really enjoying playing a balance druid even though a bit undergeared, since I went from feral to balance at 45, but still, it's really cool being a supersized chicken who can shoot laser beams :)

So.. all in all, a good week.

Cya around!