During the years of development, WoW improved in several ways. The "hard work" moneymaking was shifted from mindless grinding to daily quests. The kill 10 wolves was changed to phased "ride on storm giant" quests. The "you need the prot warriors of half of the world to beat the 4 horsemen" was changed to "you have one hour/week to kill Algalon".Yet it's the latest tradeskill, inscription that is obviously the most messed up. Let me explain why: tradeskills are mostly for making money. They give some special bonuses, but they are all equalized (or supposed to be), so raiding does not really force you to have one and only one tradeskill. So let's see how can you make money with various tradeskills.
At first let's clarify that while all tradeskills are able to craft items of lower levels, - beside twinks - no one buy them. Even a braindead can level to 80 in greens. Only top level players pay gold to buy crafted items.
Blacksmiths, tailors, leatherworkers, engineers craft epic items. They are expensive, but pretty good. Some of them are BiS, others are "good starter items" and more or less must have to get into any decent guild. There are not many types of these items, for example blacksmithing crafts 21 epics. You check the AH price, check the material price, check competition and craft one. If it sells, you craft another. Simple.
Alchemy, enchanting and JC are more focused on "accessories". While the previous tradeskills also had some enchanments like belt buckles, these three are focused on these. However the number of gems, enchants and flasks are limited. For alchemy, you sell 6 flasks and 5 potions. For gems there are SP, AP, Stam, +hit gems and 5 types of meta. For enchants, there are 6 slots for tanks, healers, spell DPS, melee DPS, max 24 enchant, actually rather 14-16.
Inscription has 341 type of glyphs. Each and every glyph can be used by max level characters. OK, most of them are not used by skilled players, but unlike in gear, there is no tool for the morons to identify which is better. Ilvl 226 is better than ilvl 200, purple is better than blue, and hopefully even a moron can find out that a +agi epic is not the best for a mage. For glyphs there is no help, so they buy lot of types.
This means that anyone who wants to make money from glyphs must sell lot of different kind of glyphs. There is market for 150 runed scarlet ruby/week. Maybe not for you, but someone can sell that amount. No one can sell 150 glyph of nourish or glyph of rejuvenation. Why? At first becaue only restodruids buy it, while scarlet ruby is good for all healers and spell DPS. Secondly, because there are still morons who buy glyph of innervate and such. A businessmen can't teach his customers. I can't tell the idiot to get a decent glyph. If I want his money, I must supply what he demands.
So here I am, having two alts with 4 32 slot inscription bags full of glyphs. That's about 250 different kind of glyphs. I post 4-8 of each type (totaling 1500+ individual glyphs) every 2 days.
I use two alts, 5 addons, mass cancel macro, 800G worth of materials every two days. That get me my 10000+/week income. It's not much of human work, less than 1 hour of time every two days. But it needs such an infrastructure, such a research and focus that is unlikely in everyone who focuses on other game aspects and want to get some gold in 10 mins.
If you are a BS, you can make gold in 10 mins. You check the titansteel weapons in the AH and if you see one above material prices +200G or missing, you craft it and list it. The money will be in your mailbox, or the item returned to be listed again a bit lower.
On the other hand if you want to make money from glyphs, you have to do it as I do, or don't do it at all. If you just craft some random glyph, you most probably sell nothing. Glyph prices shift very fast, driven by random sellers, random buyers and the ever changing "flavor of the month".
On the top of that, even the materials for glyphs are inscribe-made and random, so the "LF for BS for [titansteel destroyer] have mats" is inconvenient for glyph-buyers, they must buy from the AH.
I start to realize that when I say "go sell glyphs", it's like Kungen saying "farm Mimiron hard mode". Trivial for someone who has the skills and the infrastructure, impossible for others.
I was rich before the inscription. I had like 50K, collected by a years' careful AH and furgal spending. After inscription I started to make 10K/week, reaching gold cap in 4 months.
On the one hand I could say I'm using a loophole in the system, an unneccessary complication that is too much for 99% of the players (some doesn't care that much, others couldn't understand). On the other hand in the real world every really big business is like this. Finding something that is there, but unconquerable (or even undetectable) for the others and take it.
Blizzard managed to create something that is so HC, both for creation and buyer selection that it would fit into the old Naxx40 ages and not WotLK. Imagine a gem saying "increase the effect of next Regrowth spell if a Regrowth is active on target"! Of course I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that making all other profession easy-mode and one to uber-HC makes a certain unbalance: you either do this, or you'll have hard time making lot of money. Of course you can make enough, but if you want "a lot", inscription is must be.
I don't know how could the genie be pushed back to the bottle. I guess it would be quite an uproar if the whole profession is deleted. Maybe a simplifying where every glyph does "+10% damage/healing to its corresponding spell" is in order. I don't know.
One thing is sure: this thing is messed up. "Messed up" means "profit" in goblin language.
42 comments:
lucky for you your server still have glyph buyers, mine is totally dead...
i've e doing 1k a week with glyphs, but, all of a sudden, they stoped to sell. so i had to sell them all for 2-3g lower to atualy sell them.
my new bussiness are eternals, their prices float so much, and their crystallized counterparts can get very high profit.
I am making a nice amount on glyphs. I dont sell as many as you at a time and dont list a lot of them due to the fact that they sell for under a gold.
I usually list around 500-600 at a time. I should try that mass cancel addon to be honest. Still, I have made about 8k in less than two weeks.
In my server, nearly all glyph prices are being undercut (to nearly raw mats price) every 6-12 hours. If you are posting it only every two days. I bet one can only get ~1000g per week if he/she is lucky.
Gevlon you have your own little glyph company. Watch out for taxes! j/k
I guess Blizzard could HC the profession by making a new ink and having it only drop from Ulduar bosses. Make the new glyph recipes and items be BOP and drop from Ulduar bosses. That would mess up your business though =/.
I'm having the same issue as some of the other commenter's;
The Glyph prices on Al'Akir are very low now. There are perhaps only a dozen or so glyphs that sell for more than 10g. However I've kept going (as I was enjoying using your methods) and I sell double ink glyphs at upto 9g and single ink glyphs at up to 6g.
In this way though it's a lot of clicking (and waiting for Auctioneer) for only ~750g profit a week, if that.
Interestingly though, I've found that your methods can be applied to the Gem Market. I mass buy Saronite Ore, prospect it and then create the gems that I don't already have in stock that are worth more than the raw mats.
You're right about there only being a score or so of really profitable gems, but these do sell in fairly large numbers, especially on wednesdays.
My gem business is probably making 500-1000g every two days depending on the market and how many scarlet rubys I'm lucky enough to prospect.
The down side is that its a horrendous ammount of clicking. If you find any macros for Mass Prospect / Milling (I'm using the one's you've already posted) then let us know.
Also I've get to find a good use for the green quality Green and Purple gems, they don't sell in any form, except as cut into random gems to a vendor (perfects go for 1g).
Anyway, thanks for your guides, keep them up, I'd like to try a different profession soon =)
Hey Gevlon, you could try a technique that I've used for a while now. I simply have an alt post whatever I'm selling at a very high price, then undercut myself.
For example, I'm a smuggler on 3 PvP servers, utilizing a friend's account. I buy the Recipe: Savory Deviate Delight on Horde side for 200-300 gold, then bring it back to Ally side. I'll have one alt post one of them at 932.35.67 - 1323.58.28 gold, then have my "Nice seller" post at 599-700 gold. Allies see the highly desired recipe at a 300-600 gold discount, and can't click buyout fast enough.
When I did sell glyphs, I had an alt post 2 of whatever I was selling at a really high price, for 48 hours. Then I'd put 2-3 of that glyph at a much more reasonable price, for 24 hours. I'd come back the next day, my glyphs had either sold or fallen off, and I simply had to relist some. Meanwhile, the other glyph makers had posted theirs below my high price, leaving me free to undercut them.
It just took up too much time in the end, since I'm playing 30 toons at once. But I was able to make over 10k with a level 19 twink inscriptionist, even with the limited amount of minor glyphs she could do.
@praxedes: I have never understood how anyone can make a fortune selling crystallized counterparts. Assuming there is even a large discrepancy in pricing between the eternal and crystal. Lets say Eternal Earth = 10g, crystallized Earth = 2. You have to sell ALOT to be even worth your time to buy them out, run to mail box. Right click a few times and sell as single crystallized versions. Not to mention, the demand isnt as high. I am on a high POP server and I dont even think I can sell 10 crystallized versions in 1 hour.
Reality doesnt even go that well since, 1) the prices of crystallized are almost never double that of Eternals, 2) Others will flood the market.
@Valor: The glyph market on my server isnt doing that well for me. I could probably make around 10k a week but thats mostly from JC. Maybe becos my new DK alt is not 65 yet hence I have limited glyphs to sell. Inks on the other hand are like free money. The prospecting and cutting way of saronite cant really be compared to the glyph because the glyph market has a few very important properties which makes it able to be mass produced and posted.
1) Cost prices can be easily calculated for scribes but hard for non scribes who have no idea how it works. Cost prices are usually 1 x Ink of the sea or at most, 2 x Ink of the sea.
2) The profit margin isn't that high and so buyers will rather just buy the glyph off AH and not ask their guildies to craft it for them. Most of the time, the other inks are on AH for more than the cost of ink of the sea
3) Very low deposit costs. This means that you can post in bulk, cancel unsold, and repost without any fear that you might be making a loss on your deposits.
4) The use of batch posting. Not every item and market can benefit from batch posting. If I batch post my gems, most likely I will make a loss since the profit margin in my server on gems is really low. Like 5-15g per cut gem. Glyphs allow you to set ridiculous undercuts like 40% from market, you see that if your ink of the sea cost 2g, market = 10g, at most your cost price will be 4.5g. Even with 40% undercut, you will still have a little profit after commission.
Anyway, the question on the addon for your mass prospecting/DE/Milling. All can be done by your enchantrix addon. Right click on it, click on automation, and check the box. And keep clicking Yes, while it starts to prospect everything. Try to be more careful when sleepy so you dont accidentally DE your epic boots like me.
This is the one I use for Mass-Milling
-------------------------
#showtooltip Milling
/cast Milling
/use Icethorn
/use Lichbloom
/use Adder's Tongue
/use *other name of herbs*
#showtooltip Prospect
/cast Prospect
/use Saronite Ore
You have to press the button each time you want to mill / prospect, I hope this is any helpful to you ;-)
I think inscription has a lot going for it, but it is out of whack with the rest of the tradeskills.
I like that they've made lower level items and materials desirable for higher level characters. That just makes a bigger market and creates more opportunities for people who want to specialise.
I also don't think anyone is forcing you to own the entire glyph market. If it's too much hassle, focus on a smaller segment?
What I mostly dislike is that prices are largely independent of the cost of materials. That's not a good thing for a tradeskill, imo.
Advice taken, I'll do it right now :D.
Was earning 300k per day. But competition was though in my server. I didn't had the mass cancel macro, nor the alts for them. Thanks for sharing your factory setup ;)
I actually like the way inscription is made. I wish other professions could have stuff usable by level 80s.
Seriously, 440 points in vain just to get like 10 crafting recipes... kinda pointless imo.
Inscription is more fun: lots of things to craft, lower level herbs still valuable supply for every demand.
This kind of design, can imo be applied to all other professions to make them feel more useful than just a handful of recipes.
Simple examples:
-introduce enchanting mats, ore, cloth, leather sellers which trade old world stuff for wotlk materials.
-add recipes that give % bonuses, so users of all levels can use.
For example:
-Enchants that give 1% extra mana, or health
-Tailoring nets out of any cloth, or more vanity clothes
-Armor kits that give + %armor to the Armor value of an item.
-blacksmithing sharpening stones and shield armors giving different bonuses, like %dodge, %weapon dmg etc
-crafted heirloom items using mats from all expansions.
and the list can continue...
Really now, this would make the professions feel more homogeneous and make the old world profession levels still feel like an integral part of the game, instead of a boring obstacle one has to cross to get to the end-game crafts.
-
I used to use the macros frederikiwersen posted, but i've found an addon that might just be as good, I recommend people try it out if they're looking for something with an attractive UI and very simple easy to use interface for single click prospecting milling etc.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/panda.aspx
http://www.wowwiki.com/Panda_(addon)
Thanks so much for the mass cancel script!
As a goblin who runs both inscription, JC, and DEing, I spent one night trying to figure out panda.
Panda just doesn't seem to work for me, I tried to configure it, but there wasn't much faq's or anything pertaining to it. What came down to it was I would have a bag filled with adder's tongue, click the mass prospect button... watch it mill 5 and then laugh at me.
So if you have any suggestions with Panda, I'd love to hear them as I spend too long doing the dirty work.
Inscription can be a nice gold maker but it requires mass producing to make a decent profit. I'd only advise it to people who want to spend a few hours each week doing crafting/ah business. And there are so many glyphs that it might take you a while to figure out which ones are the best sellers.
If you just want some quick gold, you're best of with a rare recipee. If you can make that super belt and sell two each week for 200g profit, you're making some nice gold with minimum effort.
As for mass milling, use enchantrix. It's included in the auctioneer package and has a one button miller/disser.
Making money with every profession is hc, because it is PvP. You're always competing with the best other business men.
I think inscription is in a way better shape than e.g. JC.
For inscription, you have to create a complicated infrastructure.
For JC, and I'm talking about selling gems, you have to invest time. And you have to invest a hardcore amount of time.
Other resource, but you still have to invest a lot of it. If you would like to sell gems, you have to pet your auctions on the AH. For 16 hours a day, because others are doing the same.
I just gave up because a person is camping the AH for 16 hours and undercutting every gem you put up withing minutes. You can only beat that much invested time with time, which you can't if you have a job.
I doubt you would be able to make money with selling gems, potions, enchants with your play style. Posting them once per day just means you will sell none...
I'm not complaining. I found my "niche", which is disenchanting arctic boots. It's a "lot of work" but I love dust.
You can sell a lot, prices are rising and falling on a daily basis, you can use "tricks" like selling different stack sizes and because of the market size, it can't be controlled by a single person.
And you can make a freaking fortune with selling enchants! People finally figured out that they can buy enchants. :-)
Tuskarr Boots
Cloak Haste
Gloves SP
Chest +8
Cloak Stealweave
Cloak Agi
Does anybody know an add-on where I can put in my value for the materials.
Like: dust: 5g, GCE: 15g, LDS: 20g. And the add-on shows "my price" on the scroll tooltip, so I don't have to calculate this myself to not sell under material cost?
It is probably healthy for your brain to remember all that stuff but... it's error prone...
The problem with enchantrix is that you need to click yes each time. So it doesn't help much. Perhaps I missed an option?
@bloodsshrike :
I had thought about this trick to put some items at a higher level to let the competition adjust their price. Then you put your item at a good price and it sells like candy. But I tried it only with belt and some items like that.
I thought about listing some items for a long time with crazy prices with an alt (prices with 4 or 5 digits for an item wich cost 10gold for exemple) for some time. The market price will increase. Then you can sell you items at a higher price. You could make some nice profits with new users of auctionner. I didn't try it but that could be an idea to eliminate some neest competitor not carefull enough.
Another problem with this 'messed up profesion' is herbs come too easy. Things like enchanting are difficult as items to disenchant are sparse at best when you've done all the quests. Inscription is really the only mass produce skill there is.
Hey,
I'm getting a decent living from glyphs myself at the moment aswell, and the only irritation i'm finding is knowing which ones i need to re-stock!
Is there a mod/macro that i can use to do that?
Russ
Possesions + WhoHas can tell you how many of the giving glyph you have on your main /alts and in total. Maybe that should help you.
Does someone has some input on the batch posting? Especially matching the prices. You can configure Auctioneer to undercut X% and max undercut the market value by Y%. Is there anyway to config it the way that you undercut always by X% if price if over Z, with no limit up and down?
I have been inscripting since March (should hit cap in another 3-4 weeks).
I think you're time estimates are a bit off.
3s to make a glyph and posting 25glyphs/minute still = a lot of time. I post ~500-600 glyphs per day and that is at least 20m of just leaving a toon at the AH.
This doesn't count time checking the 5-10% of the glyphs where people are posting below material cost, need active undercutting, etc.
This doesn't even take the macro'd 12-15s /stack milling.
Why bother making the glyphs? I don't even have a scribe. Right now I'm having reasonable success just by watching the market, bidding or snapping up underpriced glyphs, then relisting them at undercut but still higher prices when the market goes back up.
As Our Beloved Goblin points out, there are so many varieties of glyphs that this market has a wide spread of niches (unlike gems and epic crafting and so forth). And so many existing scribes are just happy to get glyphs off their hands at 20-40% of the 'market price'. Every night after raiding, and some mornings before work, I can bid on (or even straight buyout) some underpriced near-expiring glyphs. Then I can cycle through and find out which ones have risen back up in price again.
It never really occurred to me why this was so successful until O.B.G's post -- there really is no "duh!" way to see which glyphs are better than others for game play, short of seeing which ones are more expensive than others on the AH... (That said, I am still sitting on 17 Glyphs of Invisibility for Mages that I got for a song... but not a soul will buy them.)
I somewhat disagree with the idea that inscription is not profitable for the average joe...
I chose inscription for my toon based on two things, the shoulder enchant bonus and the cards of the north. It's one of the best ways to legally 'gamble' in the game, and no I don't have a problem =P
That said, before I came across goblin I was farming herbs, milling them and creating cards which sell for 500g+ ... If I was a little smarter back then I wouldn't have been trading the ink of the sea in the vendor I would have sold it on AH. Either way I was making some profit even with the 1 in 4 chance to get a nobles card. For someone who wants less risk they can purchase or farm herbs and mill them, post the inks and make decent profit. Other professions that have the potential to make the same money/week also take time/skill/infrastructure. Prospecting saronite into gems, creating items to disenchant, and posting enchants is a lengthy process and it requires two near max professions. I guess what I am saying is that the goblin style glyph business is not apples to apples in comparison to someone buying mats for an item and selling at a marginal profit.
Something I am experimenting with since I just started crafting more than what my bank character can hold is 'exchanging' bags with the bank. It transfers all of the glyphs in the bag and I can simply swap 4 bags out for 4 new ones and run back to repost. I like this method because I can track the profits easier, not worry about overlapping glyphs between banks, etc. Just make sure you use a bag mod that has re-stacking so when you drop them all in the bank it can make 1 stack per glyph.
Cancel macro is key, the one painful part I am still trying to overcome is 50 items per mail retrieval, then waiting a minute for it to refill the window.
My biggest source of income is usually my scribe (my JC/BS has his moments however). I run a much smaller operation then you do. I usually post 1-2 of about 70 or go different glyphs, and 5 or 6 Armor Vellum 3s for a total of around 80-100 auctions every two days. I would post more, but my scribe is still only level 60, and is limited at 375 inscription. I make 600-800 gold from each posting usually. The only addon I run is Auctioneer. Part of the reason for this is my scribe is the same character who sells the glyphs, reducing the need for other pieces of infrastructure.
While I agree that this is the profession requiring the greatest infrastructure to make profits, I disagree that it takes the amount you use. In order to make the profits you do it does, however it can still be scaled down smaller.
Gevlon -
Just curious what 5 addons you use? I'm sure auctioneer is one, and I'm sure you list them somewhere in your blogs, but I dug around a little and didn't see them listed.
Sorry if I missed something easy :)
@Kyle
I believe he uses the following:
Auctioneer (of course)
LilSparky´s Workshop
Possesions
WhoHas
And possible some others, though I can´t remember which ones.
Let's imagine a hypothectical situation. What if quests rewarded only gold and never armor or weapons? Sudenly all those low level tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing, etc. recipes have a much larger market. You could push it further and eliminate the random world drop greens & blues.
I don't see this happening as it would make leveling more painful, especially for new players. But, I think it helps illistrate a big difference glyphs have. The only place you get them is from an inscriber. If people needed leveling armor & weapons, tailors, leatherworks, and smiths would also have 100+ sellable recipes.
One compromise Blizzard could do would be to lower the level required to equip crafted armor & weapons by 5 to 10 levels. For example, the wand enchanters make that is equipable at level 5 is a bit overpowered. It's faster to just wand mobs than use any spells for levels 5 to ~ 9.
Another big benifit that inscription has is the low AH posting fee. This lets you post low volume items and still be profitable. It's not practical to relist a piece of armor or weapon (that has low demand) too many times as the post fee can rapidly gobble up whatever profit margin there is.
On my server, the markup on cut gems has shrunk to the point that if you don't sell it within a few postings, you're losing money.
-Aanar
"This doesn't count time checking the 5-10% of the glyphs where people are posting below material cost, need active undercutting, etc."
Don't do that! There's no good reason to manaully check for undercuts. Auctioneer config, mass cancel, and Batch posting means almost never manually looking at the Auction House. Throw in Snatch from the SearchUI and you spend even less time there.
I did a write-up on using Snatch. It has severely reduced the amount of time I spend buying mats.
http://ahantics.blogspot.com/2009/06/crash-course-in-using-auctioneers.html
It's also helped me reach a point where my cost to craft glyphs is LESS THAN ZERO. http://ahantics.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-cost-to-make-glyphs-is-less-than.html (Read the comments, I know that's not the only way to look at it.)
My server's turned into a dream for glyph making. Since the 3.1 patch, northrend herbs dropped to 50s each, meanwhile everyone else quit making glyphs, so the vast majority of my 1500+ auctions are priced above 40g each.
I'm actually making a solid 20k profit a week
I found the easiest way to keep track of what glyphs to restock/post was to keep them in stacks of 10 (4 inscription bags full of glyphs in order by class). I always keep at least 1 glyph in my bag (unless I plan on completley unloading something useless). Once the stack reaches 1 I craft the stack back up to 10.
This also works great because I Post 2 of each glyph at a time (12 hr. posts). I never have to cancel auctions when I get undercut... Just repost 2. Once you get the cycle down it saves alot of time avoiding the cancel auctions.
An awesome thing to get too is lil sparky's branch of skillet.
skillet isn't really maintained, but lil sparky has a branch being maintained...
With skillet, as long as I have milled herbs into pigments, I am told how many I can make of any given item if the inks were made from the pigments I have. it will queue the creation of the inks you need before the creation of the glyph/item.
I like the fact that I only make the inks I need on demand.
I also have two toons set up with 4x32 slot bags full of glyphs. In addition, I wrote a custom addon to list the glyphs for me. For each stack of glyphs in my bags, it scans the AH for the current lowest price, posts 3 new glyphs undercutting by 1c, and cancelled my old auctions if needed. I run it once in the morning at once at night. It's a nice feeling to know that for every glyph above 5g (my cutoff), mine will be the next one sold.
My addon is still buggy and has no interface. I do plan to release it at some point, but that's 3+ months away.
I Gevlon is right about the glyph making part of inscription having problems. The only way to make a decent profit off of the many glyphs is volume. It's even more problematic due to the fact that some glyphs are set up for pvp, some for leveling, some for raiding, and some because a programmer thought it was "cool" even though it doesn't really appeal to any of the players (I'm looking at YOU Glyph of Hymn of Hope).
On the other hand, there are the BOE epic offhands and Darkmoon cards, both of which can make alot of money and are very difficult to flood or undercut casual people out of the market (especially with DMCs).
However, I think that prospecting/JC has the biggest potential profit between now and the next expac simply because people will always need new gems even if they don't need to buy new glyphs. You end up with a few good rare gems to sell, a bunch of uncommon gems that can be made into meta gems (to cut and sell, though more slowly) or rings (to have disenchanted). If they could just find a good pattern for the purple uncommon gems it would be pretty much perfect as nothing else is wasted.
On the other hand, I'm still putting up a bunch of glyphs as I can still make 500-600g per day most days while JC is more spikey (and more profitable at the highs) and the BOE purples and meta gems sell much slower than most glyphs.
Leifo: "Why bother making the glyphs? I don't even have a scribe. Right now I'm having reasonable success just by watching the market, bidding or snapping up underpriced glyphs, then relisting them at undercut but still higher prices when the market goes back up."
The problem is, you've most likely bought those glyphs at a much higher price than it costs the scribe to produce.
A scribe's ability to produce is only limited by the amount of herbs he can reasonably get from the AH, which on most average servers, is essentially unlimited for most purposes.
You buying off his low-cost glyphs and trying to post them at higher prices is worse than the monopoly situation in most other market areas; in things like herbs or gems, etc, the time it takes to reproduce these products is slow, so the market would also be similarly slow to react if the other sellers don't have a backlog of herbs to get through.
However, this isn't the same with scribes. The moment they realize that something's hot, they can immediately reproduce a hundred more, at a fraction of your costs.
The only way you get a meager profit out of it is when the other seller is slow to react (i.e. scribe alt) or just doesn't care (has too much money to care).
@AHAntics
I keep reading that you can configure Auctioneer to automatically undercut as necessary, but how does one set that up? Can someone provide a details list of what settings to change? That's where I keep getting tripped up.
My guess is that inscription was intended to make a profit. An ideal profession would have:
(1) low material costs: Since the rather egalitarian crafting system in WOW has very few monopolies, the only real value-add (profit) from crafting comes from convenience. Convenience fees can get up to about ~40 gold (6 min at 400 g/hr) before the customer complains.
(2)Many usable recipes: The market from any single profitable recipe is easily saturated - since essentially an infinite supply can be crafted while afk. Add-ons are required to handle listing many different recipes - which reduces the supply significantly.
(3) Low listing fees: The listing fee should be << than the convenience fee to reduce competitive risk.
(4) Primarily profit-driven supply:
IE, if raider skill-ups generate an oversupply - the recipe won't be profitable.
So, an ideally profitable profession needs a lot of recipes with low material cost used in the current expansion - preferably a large number of which are not crafted while levelling...welcome to inscription. :) For comparison:
Tailoring: a few profitable recipes, but not many. Perhaps quality (4) if you count old-world bags.
Blacksmithing: several very profitable recipes. Quality (1) and(4) but not (2)and(3).
Leatherworking: several theoretically profitable recipes, but they seem to be dominated by people skilling up. None of the above qualities. I'd love to hear how to make large gold/time with leatherworking.
Jewelcrafting: similar to inscription, but high listing fees (also probably 60 or so separate JC patterns compared to 300-ish glyphs) (1), (2), and (4) but not (3).
Enchanting: similar to inscription, but only about 40 profitable recipes (WOTLK enchants - pre-BC stuff is probably quite profitable). Very high startup costs. (2), (3) and (4) but not (1).
Engineering: several profitable recipes, but a limited market. Quality (4) but not (1)-(3).
Assuming a primarily goblin supply pool, the gold/played time of various professions will tend to even out - however, even with add-ons - inscription allows much more played time than the other professions and thus higher profits.
Personally, I'd prefer some sort of resource management for professions (quintessance?) that restricted the number of items crafted daily.
I have to say i love Inscription.
I typically buy up Adders tongue at 15-17g. It has a 50% chance of dropping Icy Pigment when milled, that means you average enough for 1 Snowfall Ink.
The Snowfalls themselves sell on my server for 25-30g. So just selling those I turn an average of 10-15g profit off of any given stack.
After all that milling you have a ton of Ink of the Sea and you've Already made a profit from the Snowfalls so the Sea's are just icing on the cake.
Now all of those inks can be converted at the ink trader into still more ink types many of which i find can be sold at 2-3x the selling price of the Sea's.
What ever is Ink of the Sea is left over after that can become... Glyphs! So still More profit off of stacks of Herbs that have Already payed for themselves!
It really is amazing how much gold can be made this way.
Of course it is more work, that is why it makes money. The M&S don't want to do it. Which is fine with me. :)
I really disagree with the primary tenet of your argument... If simply making cash is the primary focus of professions then just about all professions fail miserably. Except for a few select servers and times, most professions are horrible for making money. The only profitable ones I can think of would be the gathering profs and enchanting, but then only via disenchanting.
Most profession's produced goods sell for little more than the original mats, and then can even be harder to sell. Once you look at the time commitment, leveling costs, and limited volume (ie you cant flood the market) there are many pursuits that are more profitable.
The reason for this explains the glyph market (and all other markets). WoW works on supply and demand... even better than most RL economies. You can't expect glyphs, or any other created product, to sell for 10x what it costs to make it, when there is a large supply of scribes to make it. This is compacted by the fact that some players just simply enjoy their professions and are willing to sell almost at cost.
Thus, the only way a profession can truly be profitable is win the demand is larger than the supply. A great example of this is win the new glyphs came out and glyphs that are now selling for 10-15g were selling for 120g because of the limited supply.
@Gevlon and all
I'll probably gonna hate myself for saying this, but it's only a matter of time 'till it will reach a great popularity among businessmen. So here goes : Quick Auctions (love this addon). What it does:
- set min value (threshold) to post items for (never to post below certain fix value)
- set max value to post items for, if nothing is on AH (fallback)
- set undercut amount (fix not percent)
- set rules for entire groups of items (you get to define groups)
- batch posting, cancel all
- the part I love : it can (batch) cancel only the auctions that were undercut
The downside is that it doesn't have an user friendly interface. You need to manually type every rule you want. But from my point of view, this is just another strong point, making it some sort of Auctioneer HC, following Gevlon's idea of this post. Enjoy !
For enchants I sell tons of:
2h Savagery
1h Exceptional Spellpower
Boots Icewalker
Usually have 2 up on auction all the time.
This might be a stupid question, but why is everyone mass canceling as opposed to letting the auctions run out? What benefit does that offer?
Thanks!
PS. Enchantrix is great for mass-milling.
Post a Comment