Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Ghostboci's farm

I can't remember when I last time did any kind of farming, but this one is too good to resist, so I refreshed an old article about it. The prices skyrocketed since the last time I did it.

It's connected to this nice blood elf girl in Halaa. She sells two limited stock items, Arkadian Claymore and The Sharp Cookie. They are green items with not too great stats. You can buy 3 of each.

Why do I buy them? Because they disenchant into 75% Greater Planar Essence x1.5, 5% Large Prismatic Shard and 20% Arcane Dust x3.5. So from 6 items I get:
  • 6.75 Greater Planar Essence: 162G
  • 0.3 Large Prismatic Shard: 2.1G
  • 4.2 Arcane Dust: 12.6G
All together 167G. The buy prices are 3x(2.22+8.77) = 33G. That's 144G profit, over like 1 min work. The stuff respawn in every half an hour, so it only needs me to log out on whatever I currently do every half an hour, and log to Ghostboci whose HS is in Garadar. If Halaa is horde, I fly there, buy, disenchant, and log out there on the top of the building. If it's Ally, I fly to Shatt, portal to TB and sell my stuff or craft Mongoose enchant scrolls.

I've made some testing about holding/taking Halaa. The result is simple: it's not worth the time. Taking it even without any resistance takes 20 mins, way too much. Defending it usually makes the attacker call more and more friends to help him, changing your 1 min shopping into a half an hour pointless guild war. Taking, defending is only cost-effective when:
  • Halaa is gray (after server resets)
  • Halaa is ours, attacked by a single low level or a low geared player, but even this case it worth to kill him twice. If he tries third time, it's pointless to camp him, he will return again and you will spend your time guarding his corpse
  • There is already a big battle between our and enemy forces and yours is winning clearly or will after your join
  • You can hire 2-3 henchmen for 50G to capture it. A tank pulls some to the flag, I kite the rest to the tank, the remaining people bomb them down.
Tip: the broken windows rule. If you see some flight stations captured by the opposing faction (and abandoned as the guy got bored bombarding alone), recapture them. Leaving them captured give the impression to the next enemy that he is not alone in capturing your gold mine.

From now on I will post a business tip every week. Since the game is old, some of them will be old to some readers. But hopefully useful for most.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Profits depend on your server of course. With more people rushing to get to Nortrend quickly and others using battlegrounds to level, grinding out or buying any outland greens can turn into a nice profit for enchanters.
But as with the tips from mmo-champion, you can expect lots of M&S to jump on this now and eventually abandon it again because "it takes too much time"

Smeg said...

i was disappointed to read about something that doesn't involve milking/exploitation of morons! did not see that one coming.

Malicious exploitation of morons fuels me!

Seth said...

Can't wait for the weekly tip, Gevlon, sounds worth a try to go to halaa.

Nagbag said...

To be honest i wouldnt even bother logging in for a measly hundred gold..

Unknown said...

@Nagbag

Of course, people, who count gold in tens and hundreds of thousands, won't bother to do that. While for some anything above their 200g/hr daily grind is nice.

Seth said...

Actually even I'm making 5K gold a day.. the halaa trip is worth it. 200G for 1min....
thats a hypothetical 18K/hour...

Unknown said...

@Jana

You're right about the gold/hr. How long does it take to log on, check who controls Halaa, fly, DE, send, and post the materials? Well, that's the wrong way of looking on it. If you have alts that are capable of DEing and have that ability to fly, then all you do is camp that alt near Halaa while you're on your main. Periodically check the status of Halaa, if you notice the your faction controls it, log on your alt, buy, DE, and log off. Repeat until you're uncomfortable holding onto the stock, or your bags are full. Then you fly to the nearest mailbox, mail everything to another alt to post on the auction house.

At a respawn time of ~30m, you can spend maybe 2-4m, depending on where you position yourself.

Let's say, for the sake of argument that it takes 4m to log on, buy, and DE the goods while it takes 8m to fly, mail, and post the auctions. In a given hour you will spend 8m posting, and 52m obtaining goods. In 52m you can acquire goods 13 times. If you get a comparable revenue to Gevlon's of say, 150g for each set of goods, you'll make 127g profit from each set. 127g * 13 = 1651g/hr.

Remember that the g/hr metric is the best method of determining your money making. If someone is making 10,000g in a single day but spend 4 hours doing it, he's only generating an income of 2,500g an hour. If you make 2,000g a day but spend 10m, you have an hourly income of 12,000g. The less time you spend on a money making endeavor means you have more time to spend making money or performing more fun actions.

Strutt said...

WOOT! actual gold making tips, on a gold making blog :)
good to see again Gev.

Nagbag said...

I understand the math behind Halaa g/hr tip, it's just my environment which won't allow easy hopping between realms (hour-long queues). Took it too close to self.

Zeran said...

Just a technical side note, the greens you buy in Halaa are BoP so you need to buy them with your enchanter.

Unknown said...

@Nagbag

I was under the impression that the queue was only to get your account on to play. I thought you could use /logoff and go back to character select to hop on another character right away.

Perhaps I was wrong. I've never seen a queue on my realm, so like always, the environment per realm alters the economy and market.