Meet the Baradin crocolisk. He is a nice and extremely rapidly reproducing reptile living in Tol Barad (inside, front of BH, not on the peninsula). He is also skinnable from slvl 500 providing the cataclysm leather and sometimes some volatiles on top of vendortrash.
I leveled an alt to have stay classy in the guild and seeing this opportunity learned skinning. After every won battle I go TB and skin. No matter how much I skin there is always more. Being hunter helps as I can freeze one, sleep one, scare one to keep the living ones away from the dead ones. Skinning these crocks provides 2000G/hour on average. Sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more, depending on how many people are around to kill them.
Why people are killing them? Because they drop quest reward. You kill 8, you get 20G from the quest giver. I skin them (and skin the crocs of the other 2-3 guys in the same time) and get 8*6 = 48G. You do the work, I get the gold.
The crocolisk-situation can't stop to fascinate me. People are ready to farm them for lousy 2.5G/kill but refuse to skin them for 6G/skin. Considering that they have 80K HP, killing them takes 8-10 secs. Skinning them takes 2. You also have to travel more as dead crocs are much more abundant than living ones. Still, I'm often alone farming crocs. Why?
Farming croc skins does not have the attributes that people hate in the AH business:
So if you have gold problems, if you are new player without start gold, if AH-"bots" undercut your 100G glyphs, get skinning and go to Tol Barad. The crocs are waiting. Don't let them rot away.
Some croc-related business tips:
I leveled an alt to have stay classy in the guild and seeing this opportunity learned skinning. After every won battle I go TB and skin. No matter how much I skin there is always more. Being hunter helps as I can freeze one, sleep one, scare one to keep the living ones away from the dead ones. Skinning these crocks provides 2000G/hour on average. Sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more, depending on how many people are around to kill them.
Why people are killing them? Because they drop quest reward. You kill 8, you get 20G from the quest giver. I skin them (and skin the crocs of the other 2-3 guys in the same time) and get 8*6 = 48G. You do the work, I get the gold.
The crocolisk-situation can't stop to fascinate me. People are ready to farm them for lousy 2.5G/kill but refuse to skin them for 6G/skin. Considering that they have 80K HP, killing them takes 8-10 secs. Skinning them takes 2. You also have to travel more as dead crocs are much more abundant than living ones. Still, I'm often alone farming crocs. Why?
Farming croc skins does not have the attributes that people hate in the AH business:
- You don't need to invest gold (leveling skinning makes gold at every point)
- You don't need to take any risk as leathers surely sell
- You don't need addons
- You can do it completely casually
So if you have gold problems, if you are new player without start gold, if AH-"bots" undercut your 100G glyphs, get skinning and go to Tol Barad. The crocs are waiting. Don't let them rot away.
Some croc-related business tips:
- You shall skin animals when the skinning tooltip is orange. Move to higher level zone when it's green.
- From Outland not every skinning gives skillup, it's not a bug
- If your last 10 skinnings gave no skillup, it's time to visit the profession trainer
- In Northrend there is a very good 370-430 skinning zone in Borean Tundra in the farm below the horde base. As ally you can skin the dying kodos and the boars. As horde only the boars
- From 430 go to Storm peaks and skin yetis south of the blue women base. They are lvl 80, oneshottable and give skillups up to 480.
- If you see a moron not looting his crocs, offer him 5G to do it. They are broke, they will be happy to comply and you get your gold back from the first croc.
- If a croc aggroes on you, CC and ignore it. Killing them is not cost effective.
27 comments:
Can you enter Tol Barad and do this if you did not fight in Tol Barad? In other words, is this viable for a non-pvper?
That was a bit of an overgeneralization. People dont do TB dailies for money, but for the TB reputation (and no, not just for the pretty mounts, the trinket for example is a great tank trinket).
It may also have something to do with your server population. On my busy server, the average lifespan of a croc is 0.00001 miliseconds and there are permanent races to see who gets to skin them first.
@Yaggle: of course. There is battle every 2:30 lasting 5-30 mins. That is PvP. After that for the rest of the 2:00-2:25 there is peace, one faction controls TB. If it's yours, you can quest there. Of course it's still PvP zone, so some bored punk can gank you but if there are other questers around, he usually cleaned up fast.
You forgot the obvious kind of people killing them - those who do so on their main characters, getting trinket for PvE reasons (or achievements, or mounts). For main character skinning is an unreasonable profession choice, it gives too little PvE bonus in undesirable stat compared to every crafting profession.
I doubt much people are doing dailies for the gold (who needs gold anyway these days?) Probably they are there for TB rep and tokens, in order to buy the trinkets and mounts that no gold can buy.
Also I don't think that skinning crocs will ever be popular with non-goblins, since it is considered dull and therefore something only bots and no-lifers would do. Quests are a different matter because they are all different...duh.
However on my server I already see regularly people skinning the crocs and even the spiders in the peninsula (extra tip for your readers!).
Killing crocs for rep is stupid.If you want rep, collect 4 other people and do the kill quests:
* Problim
* 12 remaining infantry
* ghosts/demons/prisoners
* Archmage/Svarnos/Warden
* 12 spiders
* Overlook boss
* Captain Harris
* 8 undead
* Keep lord Falson
* 14 villager
* cannoning
* Lumber camp horseman
* First LT
* 6 ghosts
* 5 restless infantry
In a full group they all take 1-2 mins + travel time. The whole tour can be completed in 20-30 mins. No point wasting time with collection quests.
@Gevlon
Killing crocs may give lousy rep/hour compared to other quests, but since the amount of rep and tokens you can gain per day are limited, one is forced to kill the crocs too.
I want that mount as fast as possible, not as efficient as possible.
@ Gevlon
Although I agree with the personal delight in skinning all of the crocs that the morons at TB are killing. Why bother with the annoyance of dealing with the mewling and unwashed masses...
Instead pack your bags and head to Deepholm, out onto the pale roost @ 36/19 and farm stone drakes.
This place has been forgotten by the leatherworkers and on some servers there is -no- one there to compete with over the spawns or the leather and you're not in a PVP zone and open to ganking.
These mobs spawn continuously and instantly, enter combat at half health after falling from the air.
You literally cannot kill and skin fast enough to overcome the sheer flow of mobs, and they give you additional dragoncales as a door prize. Because they enter combat stunned and are programed to lift off into the air, its nearly impossible to be aggro'ed by more than one at a time too.
The crocodiles don't grant any rep directly, they are just the target of one of the daily quests:
http://www.wowhead.com/quest=28162
The hides are 100% drop rate if you're on the quest so you simply have to kill 8.
The maximum amount of reputation you can earn per day in TB is 5500. If you're trying to raise your reputation to buy some of the trinkets at exalted (and you should be because they are good) then you will want to do every daily quest that is available to speed the process along.
I would also echo the comment that if you're on a busy server there will be a lot of people killing crocodiles and several people skinning at the same time. A corpse lasts a few seconds maximum before someone is skinning it. So:
1) It is unlikely people are doing these dailies for gold. Most people are doing it for rep and the achievements / items that comes from hitting exalted.
2) How many people you have skinning the crocs varies by how busy your server is.
I assume your sudden conversion to farming is because of the skinning racial. Is your character .. a worgen by any chance? And if your character was not a worgen would you have still choosen skinning and not another profession?
No, not worgen. The worgen racial makes skinning 10-15 minutes faster to level. Not big difference.
You didn't mention that the crocs also drop Crocolisk Tails, which is the basis for Beer-Basted Crocolisk, giving a +90str food buff.
I never leave home without it as a melee dps, and it runs for 7g+ on the AH (on my realm). ~140g/stack adds up as well if you're farming these.
Are you really suggesting that gameplay that isn't efficient in terms of gold making suggests the player is a moron or slacker? You don't think that perhaps there is simply a values dissonance between you and that player?
When I kill beast type mobs, I never loot them because I find it vicious for other players to skin my kills instead of their own. Sure, it's less gold/hour, but it would be morally wrong to contribute to another player doing something I believe to be vicious. They're free to do it, I just don't want to be a part of it. It's less gold for me, but I'd rather be moral than rich.
Also, there are players who feel participating in commerce or trading at all is vicious, since if the seller is getting more than the item is worth, then he's screwing the buyer, and if he isn't getting what it's worth, the buyer is screwing the seller. I don't believe this myself, but I know others do, and so wouldn't want to use tradeskills to make money over questing.
Also, someone might generally prefer, for roleplay reasons, the quest to kill alligators over the better gold/hour quest to kill ghosts or alliance npcs or whatever. Perhaps because alligators are animals and not human analogs, and they feel uncomfortable killing fake people in a computer game. Can you really say that they're wrong, or instead just that they're different from you?
The other day I picked up a vendor trash item worth a few golds during a raid. I had lots of inventory space, and knew someone would drop a repair bot I could sell it at in the next hour or so. I trashed/deleted the thing immediately, essentially throwing away a few golds just to get an empty bag space. Because I didn't want to carry around vendor trash while I was raiding, it made me feel untidy.
I have a good friend who always has almost no gold and who technically owes me several thousand, because she loves buying new mounts and pets. A new pet is worth more to her than having higher dps in raids. Is she wrong?
I run an extensive glyph business and I also make free glyphs for guildies and friends, because I enjoy playing in a more pleasant atmosphere where people act well towards each other.
All of these things are not gold optimal, and yet I can easily imagine reasonable, self-interested players choosing to do them instead of skinning crocs.
Really, I find it bizarre that you'd choose gold yields as your measure of an activity's worth. Gold has no intrinsic value. It's worth nothing by itself, only in what you can get with it. And if you can get that other thing without going through such an indirect route, why would you farm gold instead of playing to get the real thing you want? If I have 200k gold and someone else has 1k gold, and they're enjoying the game more than I am, then I would feel like I'd failed, that they were a better player than I.
Killing crocs is a reasonable pastime for a skinner, especially for one already @ TB doing their dailies.
People kill 8 crocs for the quest that rewards the token for the trinket and/or mount. I doubt gold is a significant part of the motivation. I have 4 trinkets and a weapon on 3 alts; TB is about tokens.
And the analysis also does not include the opportunity costs:
1) your skinner can not have raid aspirations in a min/max guild since skinning is not an optimal profession
2) If you have a lot of alts, then there is not a lot of opportunity cost to having a skinner. If you don't then your profit calculations need to take into account , e.g., you could be getting 100-200g per diem in a couple of minutes from alchemy or JC.
I am still not sure if I would recommend skimming to someone who needs gold.
There are not enough Horde on my server for it to matter but what I read is you do not have to win TB to skin crocs if, like most customers, you are on a PvE server.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2016644023
What if your "M&S" aren't skinners? Doesn't make much sense to skin if it's not your profession, and you are killing for the quest rewards only (or rep).
Gevlon, sorry for the off-topic question, but I noticed you say AH-"bots" - why the quotes? Do you not believe there are people botting the AH?
@Michael
Either you are a hard core roleplayer who cannot tell the difference between a game and reality or you are completly misguided. Skinning is a gathering skill, like herbalism or mining. There is no morality involved unless you are pretending to role play morality. Also your whole post misses the point Gevlon is making, outside of the M &S name calling, I believe his point is people who complain they cannot get enough game gold in WoW are lazy or stupid to a point as any fool with skinning can make 2000g and hour.
Re: Michael says "if you can get that other thing without going through such an indirect route, why would you farm gold instead of playing to get the real thing you want?"
Why wouldn't you? If the direct process of farming the thing you want requires 5 hours of work in game and the indirect process of farming gold to buy the thing you want requires 2 hours of work, why wouldn't you choose the path that is quicker and easier to complete?
On our PvE server we do not get flagged in TB even when we do not own it.
Also, I have a character on one account which holds all the TB Daily quests and shares them when the other faction owns it and I can do all of the phased quests except the one for killing the faction npcs and turn them in at the zone entrance at TB Peninsula.
I don't think you can be quite so judgmental. Skinning (typically) isn't your best bet as a pure-money profession, so few people have it. Even with that being the case, it's very easy to oversaturate the market on my server (one of the highest populated in the US). As someone who plays once a day, I typically have to sell my weekend's leather throughout the week. It's good gold, but because Skinning only supports one profession and hasn't historically been a prime money-making profession, few people have it. Criticizing who kill and don't skin is as silly as criticizing anyone who flies past a mine or herb... they may be making 4000g/hour with Alchemy/Inscription on that character. It doesn't make them an idiot for flying past the "free money" herb or mine that they can't pick.
This quest not only gives gold reward - it gives 1 tb badge.
125 badges can be traded for trinket, which raw value is about 10k gold (I took that from nowhere, feel free to value it yourself. The resistance trinket is very good on Nefarian, heroic especially).
10k/125 = 80 gold per quest.
With quest reward it is 100g per 8 crocs, 12.5g per one (which is actually not so bad).
Add this to daily cap of TB badges and you'll understand why people are doing this quest.
The problem with your rationale is that, in my experience,
THERE ARE NOT HOARDS OF PLAYERS COMPLAINING THAT THEY CAN'T MAKE MONEY
You have to strengthen that assumption before anybody cares about a post that says, "see how easy it is to make gold? why isn't anyone else doing it? They all must be idiots."
Sure, an occasional 11 year old may ask in guild chat or /yell for 200G to buy something. But an occasional experience does not prove your theory that the game is dripping with idiots.
You are clearly just so annoyed at the occasional idiot, that you are guilty of sampling bias.
Now if you had interviewed 5 random croc-slayers and the majority of them had been skinners, and admitted that they had no idea that they could skin those crocs and sell the skins on the AH, AND that they had recently QQ'd about not having enough gold, THAT might prove your point.
But essentially your argument is:
1. Players who complain about not having enough gold irritate me
2. This one time, at Tol Barad, nobody but me was skinning, and it was awesome
Ergo all players not-skinning like I was are idiots.
Gevlon, I think you're suffering a bit of a fundamental disconnect here. To you gold is an important aspect of the game, therefore things relating to gold are themselves more important than other aspects of the game. With that perspective it's easy to call people stupid for failing to do something so obviously profitable.
However to a lot of people gold is totally worthless, they have no need of it. If their guild doesn't use gold-bid and hands out feasts, flasks, and pots to raiders, and allows repairs from the guild bank then gold has literally *zero* impact on their overall game experience. It's as worthless as mud to them. Would you bother to go even two seconds out of your way to add to your pointlessly growing collection of mud? I rather doubt it, especially if you get it 'free' from doing all the things that do matter to you, like getting valor points and rep.
Think about this. In WotLK I did dailies and dungeons for rep, enchants, and gear. Just from that and auctioning off the random crap I got leveling I ended up with every single thing it was possible to buy in the game, including every pet, every mount, even the mammoth and the bike, with thousands of gold left over. It was a resource without any value to me since just from regular play I got enough to perform every action of importance that I needed. I quit early in Cata but it was already looking to be more of the same.
The only people who are short on gold in WoW are the truly, ludicrously stupid or new. I doubt they even make up 5% of the population.
1) You leveled up an alt, entirely for a guild achievement? Wow. Didn't you say something like "No one in their right mind would reroll for this achievement, this gold incentive is for recruitment" or something like that?
2) Most people don't pick Skinning as it is actually pretty bad G/hour generally, in addition to having a pretty terrible profession bonus. You could make a lot more gold herbing the Whiptail that constantly respawns around the crocs, or along the river in Uldum.
3) It's not 2000g/hour unless you actually do it for the entire hour. Besides, there is usually a frenzy of croc-killing activity followed by 2 hours of nobody being there; a scenario in which you admit that skinning isn't cost-effective. This is server-specific too, of course. Nevermind the cases when there is more than one skinner competing with you.
4) Leathers surely sell. Really? Prices have crept up from 1g/each to around what you apparently are seeing (6g), but who is buying leather? Just LWers and maybe a stack to Engineers. Nevermind the fact that your advice becomes more useless the more people follow it.
5) Still people don't do this but farm dailies for gold. People go to college to become social workers instead of lawyers, doctors, computer scientists. Or, hell, people go to college for the chance of a good job instead of becoming a mechanic, who charge $88/hour pretty much everywhere. It is generally not fun being poor in-game, but that does not automatically make anything that gives more gold (but takes less time) more fun in comparison. You dismiss "fun" arguments for the right reasons (we cannot have a meaningful discussion with Bob who finds window-licking fun), but you cannot simply ignore it either.
You leveled up an alt, entirely for a guild achievement? Wow. Didn't you say something like "No one in their right mind would reroll for this achievement, this gold incentive is for recruitment" or something like that?
Actually it was "Obviously no one in his right mind would class change for gold, new rerollers are the target audience of these offers." So it was definitely aimed at rerolls.
You can also skin the spiders.
On the side note:
There are Realms where savage leather sells under 3g. However if you are an Leatherworker it can be a gold mine for you. Just check the prices on Heavy savage leather, if it's more than 5 times expenive (+15g) than Savage leather = free gold. You also can go further, if you can make 10 Heavy savage leather, you can buy at Twilight Highlands a Pristine Hide and it might makes you more profit.
For example on my realm:
- Savage leather sells for 3g
- Heavy savage leather sells around 30g (sometimes more) -- at this point you would have 6g/leather income if you were skinning yourself (3g/leather profit if you bought the savage leather)
- Pristine Hide sells around 300-420g (Let's say you could sell it for 400g --> you need 50 savage leather for 1 Pristine hide, 400g/50 = 8g/leather(if you were skinning yourself) if you were buying the leather (3g each or cheaper) it gives +5g profit on each leather
With this method you can atleast double your invested money. Or make some nice income if you were skinning.
Me, myself prefer buying the cheap leather, because it's a way faster.
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