Post by Deleted on Oct 15, 2013 20:35:47 GMT
This my outline for last night's presentation. I'm posting here since it was too difficult for people to take notes at the time. If anything here is unclear for new readers, or those familiar with it, reply below with questions and I will make clarifications to the guide.
1 – MMO Economics
• Think outside of your own gold total and consider the entire wealth of the serves, how much gold is in play by all players combined. That is the server’s economy. Yes, Blizzard employs economists to help monitor this sort of thing and shape it in a desirable way.
• Every item looted is wealth created that did not exist.
o Herbalism, Mining, Skinning
o Looting corpses
o Quest rewards
• Every item sold to a vendor or purchased from a vendor is wealth converted, often at a loss.
o Grey/White/Magical items sold
• Items purchased from NPC vendors are wealth destroyed.
o Purchased Mounts, Black Market Auction House
• Repairs are wealth destroyed.
o Your gear deteriorates the more you use it. Presumably you are earning gold during this period, and so repairs function like a form of taxation on your earnings in game.
o Raiding is purely an expense (a fairly large one too) with little gold reward in return.
• The Auction House is wealth exchange between players but also destroys wealth.
o On the surface the AH functions as an exchange of items for gold between players following normal economic rules of supply and demand as well as others.
o The AH also bleeds money from the economy by charging a small amount to post an auction, and the AH takes 5% of the gold from a successful auction as its cut. This is gold that is removed from play.
• In short, think of your actions in terms of how they create, shift or destroy wealth.
2 – Non-Auction House Techniques
• Quests
o Loremaster. Quests award bonus gold at max level instead of the xp they would normally award. The less quests you run to hit 90, the more you'll have to cash in on later.
o Dailies (New & Old). There are about 55 Cataclysm dailies in total and can be run within 90 minutes total awarding 20 gold a piece.
• The Riches of Pandaria Achievement
o A guide on where to find them all
• Loot Scenario
o An introductory guide
o An advanced guide once you're familiar with the place to maximize profits
o It is easy to procure 20 elder charms from a single run now, prompting the question what to do with them:
If you have max rep with the Sunreaver Onslaught, buy the Sunreaver Bounty for 15 charms which gives gold and often a feast and occasionally another key to loop the cycle.
Replenish your stock of specialty tools for the scenario: Sleep Sand, Potion of Light Steps, Arcane Propellent etc. for use during your next run.
Run older LFRs: MSV, HoF, Terrace, and bonus roll every boss. You’ll get about 35 gold extra per bonus roll which adds up to several hundred extra gold a week. If you win loot, that’s worth the same or more, and if you are an enchanter, this is an amazing way to farm 20-30 sha crystals in a week. Sha Crystals can be used to fuel enchanting or sold individually for approximately 300 gold each.
• Waste Not, Want Not
o Loot everything and know what to do with what you loot.
o Grey items, always vendor - this is equivalent exchange.
o White items, usually vendor – this is equivalent exchange.
Exceptions are sometimes made for things like food mats and craft materials from older expansions like spider silks and elemental items.
o Non-soulbound green magical items can be tricky to handle:
The individual vendor price of such items is often greater than their value as mats if disenchanted, but averages out a bit better over multiple items.
NOTE: Enchantment materials cannot be vendored, they can only be auctioned or traded.
Ideally, you can work with an enchanter to simply disenchant these mats for you and then auction them or stored to pay for your own enchantment needs.
You can set up a personal relationship with an enchanter to supply them magic items for a flat fee going forward.
You can simply donate them to an enchanter in the guild with the understanding it benefits the guild.
The key issue here is what is worth more to you, keeping the item in play in the form of enchanting materials or their raw wealth.
o Non-soulbound blue and purple magical items are worth a lot on the AH. In particular high level items that have a low level requirement.
Ex: Level 450 gear usable at level 85. Bear in mind 463 is heroic dungeon gear for level 90s and starting gear for Mists in approximately 372.
o Soul-bound items that cannot be used can be either disenchanted or vendored.
Prior Expansions:
• If it is green or blue quality, disenchant or vendor at your discretion.
• If it is purple quality, vendor it. It has no value as a crafting material. The derived mats are only useful for making high-end enchantments from that expansion that are of no use now.
Current Expansion:
• Disenchant or vendor at your discretion.
• Kill Grinding…
o In Mists…
Use a Potion of Luck.
Go to the Temple of Niuzao on a day when the Ox is running around the temple rather swiftly. You’ll note a sharp increase in the number of Mantid around the area. Pull groups of 10 or so adds, tag them, kite them in front of the Ox and watch him kill them all but instantly. The higher kill rate is there to draw procs from the luck potion and increase your loot. This is only effective if you have good survivability. Probably works best in a team.
Go to the Emperor's Spine, the great wall, where the Mantid are attacking. There are large pulls of a dozen Mantid and respawn quickly. Go with a group for this.
o In Cataclysm…
Use a Potion of Treasure Finding.
Go to the Twilight’s Hammer base in Twilight Highlands, the lowland area run by ogres and ettins. You must have completed this area of the Twilight Highlands questline for this to work. The base will be overrun by large packs of 5-7 mobs bunched up nicely fighting npcs. They are easy to aoe down in seconds at this level and by the time you’ve cleared the base a few groups will have respawned.
3 – Auction House Basics
• Search for the item you wish to sell, post for 1 copper lower than the lowest posted entry, profit.
o Do this for a month and you will learn the price range and fluctuations of that market, enough to know when to post and when to wait for a higher price.
• Resource Farming
o Crafters drive about half of the economy; people who are too lazy, burnt out or wealthy to be bothered farming their own mats.
o A site with guides and maps on where to farm materials. Look at the farming tab, but also the leveling guides for gathering professions.
• Consumables
o Raiders are the other driving force in the market and WoW’s end game is centered around the quest for new and better gear, something that shifts weekly.
o The constant change in gear means there is always a perpetual demand for any armor/weapon enhancements.
o Raiders also require buffs: food buffs, potions and flasks are a guaranteed market, though not always a lucrative one.
o This market has 2 faces, the raw materials market for raiders who craft all these things for themselves, and the ready-to-go market for raiders who can’t or don’t want to be bothered making these things for themselves.
• Battle Pets
o Vanity and Battle Pets are a commodity on the AH. The rarer the drop rate/find, the more gold it will fetch.
Ex: Moon Moon was selling for 25k a week ago when he debuted.
Ex: Pets for the Raiding with Leashes achievements sell for 2-9k each.
• Transmog gear also sells well. This can be harder to identify but specific pieces are sought after and if one were to devote time they could learn what these were. To get an idea for this look, search the AH for expensive, but low level gear, odds are it's there for transmog.
4 – Supply and Demand
• Supply and Demand change in game with every expansion and within each patch.
o Ex: All colors of gems are viable for gearing this expansion due to a rebalancing of their stats, thus making them all have moderate value. Contrasted with Cataclysm when only Red gems were useful for most specs and they sold at a premium while the rest were all but worthless.
o Ex: Meta-Gems sell for 800-1200 gold now instead of 400-500 gold in Cata because of how the recipe changed to use uncommon instead of common gems.
o Ex: Golden Lotus became more expensive and Common gems became harder to find and more expensive on the AH during 5.3 because more players figured out how to milk the gem market through transmuting gems.
• There are 2 separate Supply and Demand curves: the Production Curve that stems from gatherers selling mats and crafters, then the Consumption Curve stemming from crafters and consumers of their finished goods. The first curve influences the later.
• Start with examining the resources that gathering professions work with. What resources are the hardest to obtain or rarest to find.
o Ex: Green Tea Leaves are plentiful and thus cheap. Snow Lily and Fool’s Cap are harder to get due to their smaller spawn area and thus more expensive.
o Ex: Ghost Iron ore is plentiful and thus cheap. Kyparite is moderately easy to find being in very easy to locate areas. Trillium is very rare and thus very expensive.
o Consider, Enchanters are their own resource gatherers, but their supply is regulated by how active the toon is and gear drop-rates.
o Spirits of Harmony can be applied to any resource in the market and thus help achieve equilibrium as players gravitate towards spending them on the most expensive resources currently either to make gold or save on costs, which in time rebalances the market.
• Second, understand the demand. For this, you need to look into the crafting side of the equation, that which consumes those resources.
o Ex: While Ghost Iron is plentiful, Blacksmiths now have daily cds which use 10 bars/1 stack a day which is a significantly higher demand then in the past. This results in ore prices being unchanged from Cata despite the increase of ore supply. The same is true of cloth.
o If you are dabbling in a particular resource, research it. Have someone with a craft profession link it to you and then shift-click the resource and it’ll search for all recipes that use it. Alternately, search for the item on WoWHead.com and it’ll give you the same information. Then evaluate if there is any demand for those items it can be used in.
5 – Make Your Craft Profession Work For You
• Alchemy
o Potions and Flasks
o Transmutation CD - Living Steel
o Meta-Gems
o Transmute Ghost Iron into Trillium
• Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing
o 553 patterns
o Crafted PvP gear
o Leg Enchants and Belt Buckles
o Tailors: Bags (Netherweave and higher)
• Inscription
o Dark Moon Decks (first 2 patches only)
o Staffs and Off-Hand items (first 2 patches only)
o Shoulder Enchants
o No Glyphs
• Enchanting
o Anything current
o Farm Sha Crystals
• Engineering
o Mechano-Hog/Skyclaw Golem
o Trinket & Cogwheels
o Hunter Rifles (first 2 patches only)
• Cooking
o Feasts
o +300 Stat foods
• Fishing
o Check with Cooking recipes to see which fish needed.
o Always needed for Int-buff foods
6 – Advanced Auction House Skills
• Determine how long to post your auction for. The more active and volatile the market, the shorter the duration you should set your listing for. You want to be able to react to rapid price changes to keep your listings competitive. Shorter listings are cheaper to do.
• Pick up and addon like Auctioneer or Auctionator to rapidly post auctions and survey the competition. Each of these addons brings more features to learn in time, so consider looking for a tutorial on how to maximize their use as you grow comfortable with them.
• Buy Low, Sell High. You can learn to do this the hard way by learning each market meticulously, or you can automate it. Auctioneer has a search function built in for this.
o An advanced guide for Auctionator
• Look up Guides on WoWHead: found from Community tab, Guides, Economy and Money
1 – MMO Economics
• Think outside of your own gold total and consider the entire wealth of the serves, how much gold is in play by all players combined. That is the server’s economy. Yes, Blizzard employs economists to help monitor this sort of thing and shape it in a desirable way.
• Every item looted is wealth created that did not exist.
o Herbalism, Mining, Skinning
o Looting corpses
o Quest rewards
• Every item sold to a vendor or purchased from a vendor is wealth converted, often at a loss.
o Grey/White/Magical items sold
• Items purchased from NPC vendors are wealth destroyed.
o Purchased Mounts, Black Market Auction House
• Repairs are wealth destroyed.
o Your gear deteriorates the more you use it. Presumably you are earning gold during this period, and so repairs function like a form of taxation on your earnings in game.
o Raiding is purely an expense (a fairly large one too) with little gold reward in return.
• The Auction House is wealth exchange between players but also destroys wealth.
o On the surface the AH functions as an exchange of items for gold between players following normal economic rules of supply and demand as well as others.
o The AH also bleeds money from the economy by charging a small amount to post an auction, and the AH takes 5% of the gold from a successful auction as its cut. This is gold that is removed from play.
• In short, think of your actions in terms of how they create, shift or destroy wealth.
2 – Non-Auction House Techniques
• Quests
o Loremaster. Quests award bonus gold at max level instead of the xp they would normally award. The less quests you run to hit 90, the more you'll have to cash in on later.
o Dailies (New & Old). There are about 55 Cataclysm dailies in total and can be run within 90 minutes total awarding 20 gold a piece.
• The Riches of Pandaria Achievement
o A guide on where to find them all
• Loot Scenario
o An introductory guide
o An advanced guide once you're familiar with the place to maximize profits
o It is easy to procure 20 elder charms from a single run now, prompting the question what to do with them:
If you have max rep with the Sunreaver Onslaught, buy the Sunreaver Bounty for 15 charms which gives gold and often a feast and occasionally another key to loop the cycle.
Replenish your stock of specialty tools for the scenario: Sleep Sand, Potion of Light Steps, Arcane Propellent etc. for use during your next run.
Run older LFRs: MSV, HoF, Terrace, and bonus roll every boss. You’ll get about 35 gold extra per bonus roll which adds up to several hundred extra gold a week. If you win loot, that’s worth the same or more, and if you are an enchanter, this is an amazing way to farm 20-30 sha crystals in a week. Sha Crystals can be used to fuel enchanting or sold individually for approximately 300 gold each.
• Waste Not, Want Not
o Loot everything and know what to do with what you loot.
o Grey items, always vendor - this is equivalent exchange.
o White items, usually vendor – this is equivalent exchange.
Exceptions are sometimes made for things like food mats and craft materials from older expansions like spider silks and elemental items.
o Non-soulbound green magical items can be tricky to handle:
The individual vendor price of such items is often greater than their value as mats if disenchanted, but averages out a bit better over multiple items.
NOTE: Enchantment materials cannot be vendored, they can only be auctioned or traded.
Ideally, you can work with an enchanter to simply disenchant these mats for you and then auction them or stored to pay for your own enchantment needs.
You can set up a personal relationship with an enchanter to supply them magic items for a flat fee going forward.
You can simply donate them to an enchanter in the guild with the understanding it benefits the guild.
The key issue here is what is worth more to you, keeping the item in play in the form of enchanting materials or their raw wealth.
o Non-soulbound blue and purple magical items are worth a lot on the AH. In particular high level items that have a low level requirement.
Ex: Level 450 gear usable at level 85. Bear in mind 463 is heroic dungeon gear for level 90s and starting gear for Mists in approximately 372.
o Soul-bound items that cannot be used can be either disenchanted or vendored.
Prior Expansions:
• If it is green or blue quality, disenchant or vendor at your discretion.
• If it is purple quality, vendor it. It has no value as a crafting material. The derived mats are only useful for making high-end enchantments from that expansion that are of no use now.
Current Expansion:
• Disenchant or vendor at your discretion.
• Kill Grinding…
o In Mists…
Use a Potion of Luck.
Go to the Temple of Niuzao on a day when the Ox is running around the temple rather swiftly. You’ll note a sharp increase in the number of Mantid around the area. Pull groups of 10 or so adds, tag them, kite them in front of the Ox and watch him kill them all but instantly. The higher kill rate is there to draw procs from the luck potion and increase your loot. This is only effective if you have good survivability. Probably works best in a team.
Go to the Emperor's Spine, the great wall, where the Mantid are attacking. There are large pulls of a dozen Mantid and respawn quickly. Go with a group for this.
o In Cataclysm…
Use a Potion of Treasure Finding.
Go to the Twilight’s Hammer base in Twilight Highlands, the lowland area run by ogres and ettins. You must have completed this area of the Twilight Highlands questline for this to work. The base will be overrun by large packs of 5-7 mobs bunched up nicely fighting npcs. They are easy to aoe down in seconds at this level and by the time you’ve cleared the base a few groups will have respawned.
3 – Auction House Basics
• Search for the item you wish to sell, post for 1 copper lower than the lowest posted entry, profit.
o Do this for a month and you will learn the price range and fluctuations of that market, enough to know when to post and when to wait for a higher price.
• Resource Farming
o Crafters drive about half of the economy; people who are too lazy, burnt out or wealthy to be bothered farming their own mats.
o A site with guides and maps on where to farm materials. Look at the farming tab, but also the leveling guides for gathering professions.
• Consumables
o Raiders are the other driving force in the market and WoW’s end game is centered around the quest for new and better gear, something that shifts weekly.
o The constant change in gear means there is always a perpetual demand for any armor/weapon enhancements.
o Raiders also require buffs: food buffs, potions and flasks are a guaranteed market, though not always a lucrative one.
o This market has 2 faces, the raw materials market for raiders who craft all these things for themselves, and the ready-to-go market for raiders who can’t or don’t want to be bothered making these things for themselves.
• Battle Pets
o Vanity and Battle Pets are a commodity on the AH. The rarer the drop rate/find, the more gold it will fetch.
Ex: Moon Moon was selling for 25k a week ago when he debuted.
Ex: Pets for the Raiding with Leashes achievements sell for 2-9k each.
• Transmog gear also sells well. This can be harder to identify but specific pieces are sought after and if one were to devote time they could learn what these were. To get an idea for this look, search the AH for expensive, but low level gear, odds are it's there for transmog.
4 – Supply and Demand
• Supply and Demand change in game with every expansion and within each patch.
o Ex: All colors of gems are viable for gearing this expansion due to a rebalancing of their stats, thus making them all have moderate value. Contrasted with Cataclysm when only Red gems were useful for most specs and they sold at a premium while the rest were all but worthless.
o Ex: Meta-Gems sell for 800-1200 gold now instead of 400-500 gold in Cata because of how the recipe changed to use uncommon instead of common gems.
o Ex: Golden Lotus became more expensive and Common gems became harder to find and more expensive on the AH during 5.3 because more players figured out how to milk the gem market through transmuting gems.
• There are 2 separate Supply and Demand curves: the Production Curve that stems from gatherers selling mats and crafters, then the Consumption Curve stemming from crafters and consumers of their finished goods. The first curve influences the later.
• Start with examining the resources that gathering professions work with. What resources are the hardest to obtain or rarest to find.
o Ex: Green Tea Leaves are plentiful and thus cheap. Snow Lily and Fool’s Cap are harder to get due to their smaller spawn area and thus more expensive.
o Ex: Ghost Iron ore is plentiful and thus cheap. Kyparite is moderately easy to find being in very easy to locate areas. Trillium is very rare and thus very expensive.
o Consider, Enchanters are their own resource gatherers, but their supply is regulated by how active the toon is and gear drop-rates.
o Spirits of Harmony can be applied to any resource in the market and thus help achieve equilibrium as players gravitate towards spending them on the most expensive resources currently either to make gold or save on costs, which in time rebalances the market.
• Second, understand the demand. For this, you need to look into the crafting side of the equation, that which consumes those resources.
o Ex: While Ghost Iron is plentiful, Blacksmiths now have daily cds which use 10 bars/1 stack a day which is a significantly higher demand then in the past. This results in ore prices being unchanged from Cata despite the increase of ore supply. The same is true of cloth.
o If you are dabbling in a particular resource, research it. Have someone with a craft profession link it to you and then shift-click the resource and it’ll search for all recipes that use it. Alternately, search for the item on WoWHead.com and it’ll give you the same information. Then evaluate if there is any demand for those items it can be used in.
5 – Make Your Craft Profession Work For You
• Alchemy
o Potions and Flasks
o Transmutation CD - Living Steel
o Meta-Gems
o Transmute Ghost Iron into Trillium
• Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing
o 553 patterns
o Crafted PvP gear
o Leg Enchants and Belt Buckles
o Tailors: Bags (Netherweave and higher)
• Inscription
o Dark Moon Decks (first 2 patches only)
o Staffs and Off-Hand items (first 2 patches only)
o Shoulder Enchants
o No Glyphs
• Enchanting
o Anything current
o Farm Sha Crystals
• Engineering
o Mechano-Hog/Skyclaw Golem
o Trinket & Cogwheels
o Hunter Rifles (first 2 patches only)
• Cooking
o Feasts
o +300 Stat foods
• Fishing
o Check with Cooking recipes to see which fish needed.
o Always needed for Int-buff foods
6 – Advanced Auction House Skills
• Determine how long to post your auction for. The more active and volatile the market, the shorter the duration you should set your listing for. You want to be able to react to rapid price changes to keep your listings competitive. Shorter listings are cheaper to do.
• Pick up and addon like Auctioneer or Auctionator to rapidly post auctions and survey the competition. Each of these addons brings more features to learn in time, so consider looking for a tutorial on how to maximize their use as you grow comfortable with them.
• Buy Low, Sell High. You can learn to do this the hard way by learning each market meticulously, or you can automate it. Auctioneer has a search function built in for this.
o An advanced guide for Auctionator
• Look up Guides on WoWHead: found from Community tab, Guides, Economy and Money