Filed under: Economy

WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

One awesome side effect of the latest patch's new PvP gear is a way to make Enchanting materials much more cheaply. Since all the new gear is iLvl 458 blues, they disenchant into an Ethereal Shard. Sometimes two of them, although that is probably from the guild perk. By far, the most popular profession to use to craft this type of gear for disenchanting is Tailoring. Windwool Cloth is cheap and plentiful, and 20 of them make a single Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's piece that can be DEed.

The best pieces to make are the ones that take 4 Bolts of Windwool Cloth:

• Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cape of Cruelty or Prowess
• Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cloak of Alacrity or Prowess
• Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Cuffs of Accuracy, Meditation, or Prowess
• Crafted Dreadful Gladiator's Drape of Cruelty, Meditation, or Prowess

After these, the materials start going up. That doesn't mean you can't use them, just that you'll have to live with a higher cost than all your competitors.

The Call to Auction podcast, which features our own Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, recently had the opportunity to send a big batch of questions about WoW's auction house, economy, and professions to developers Greg Street and He-Rim Woo. The devs gave out some great info, some highlights of which include:

• There are no plans for a sweeping auction house redesign
• Due to the popularity of the cooking and blacksmithing catch-up mechanisms, similar mechanisms for herbalism and mining might be on the way
• The Guardian Cub experiment was just that, and it's unlikely there'll be another item like it
• Splitting items off of a stack in the auction house is also unlikely going forward
• It's possible that buy orders will be implemented for high-cost items like Mechano-Hogs, unlikely for stuff like flasks and enchants
• The mailbox as the AH delivery system doesn't feel quite right and may eventually change

You can read the full interview on the Consortium forums.

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There are going to be some new important recipes in 5.2 for Jewelcrafters: a "prism" style daily cooldown Serpent's Heart, and a no-cooldown recipe that allows you to craft the uncut meta gems, Primal Diamonds, out of gems and Spirits of Harmony. Kaliope reports that both recipes are world drops in Pandaria on the PTR, and shouldn't take long to farm.

Serpent's Prism would have been a better name

While the profession is better designed than ever (with much less waste for shufflers and far fewer items ending up at the vendor), the Serpent's Eyes that you get while prospecting Mists ore tend to pile up. They're used to make the 450 crafted jewelry, but the market for that isn't nearly as large as the supply of Serpent's Eyes. Many people end up making these into blues and disenchanting them so they're not wasted.

Now that all JCs will have the option of turning three Serpent's Eyes into a prism every day, that will provide an outlet for the Eyes that may be more profitable than the 450 blues. So far, only a few Prisms have been opened, but they seem to award a random blue gem, just like prisms from expansions past. Since it's on a daily cooldown, it's unlikely to be able to push down the price of blue gems much.

Is it worth using Spirits of Harmony?

The new Primal Diamond recipe has no cooldown, but requires Spirits of Harmony which are their own sort of cooldown. One criticism of Jewelcrafting has been that JCs have nothing except research and extremely low-liquidity mini-pets to spend their Spirits of Harmony on. Jewelcrafters generate Spirits as quickly as any other character, and in theory, it'd be nice to have a JC option to use them on. Especially seeing as how anyone doing daily research will have almost certainly finished learning all their cuts by now.

WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The PTR for patch 5.2 has a real treat in store for people who want to powerlevel Blacksmithing: you will now be able to get to 500 skill without having to wait for those rare old-world materials to show up on the Auction House! If you are level 85 and up, all you have to do is visit your Blacksmithing trainer in your faction's shrine (the same one that sells recipes for Spirits of Harmony), and they will offer you a fast-track path straight to 500 skill.

The way it works is that you will be able to train patterns that take only Ghost Iron Bars to make grey items, and once you get up to 500 skill, there's a quest to make a Ghostly Skeleton Key. At the time this article was written, the data-mined recipes on the Wowhead.com PTR site seem to indicate that it will take a lot of ghost iron to complete. Of course, this might receive a rework before it hits live.

This hit my inbox the other day:

What's the most profitable thing to plant in a farm? I'd assume in most cases people plant for their profession or whatever raw material sells for the most. I, however, am a chronic alt-oholic and have every profession maxed and available to me. I don't raid and can't stand dailies, so I only have patterns available that are vendor trained, bought with spirits of harmony, or learned off a cooldown. So what's the start and end of the equation?

-Matt

So what is the most profitable thing to plant on your farm? Matt assumes correctly that the majority of people simply plant what they can use to avoid having to buy off the Auction House. There is plenty of opportunity to improve this, though!

Generally, the least profitable thing to farm is vegetables. This is only true because everyone else already farms them, and they're all you can farm until you get farther into the Tillers reputation grind. The reputation seeds for leather, ore, cloth, or enchanting mats are generally lower yield than simply getting Harmonies and trading those for what you need, and that's generally less than you'd get by planting Enigma Seeds, selling everything you get, and using that gold to buy leather, ore, cloth, or enchanting mats. In short, the most profitable thing to plant is usually Songbell Seeds or Enigma Seeds.

Songbell Seeds

Songbell Seeds provide you with Motes of Harmony, which provide Spirits of Harmony. If you have a profession that requires these to make items valuable to other players or allows you to use them to skip daily cooldowns, then you can figure out exactly how much one of them is worth and do the math.

Mists of Pandaria's economy has been characterized by having some of the recipes that make the most valuable items gated behind things that a main character would get: reputation, random world drops, and BoP Spirits of Harmony. Profession alts that you haven't leveled but have a maxed out profession are still very useful, but they won't be able to compete with people who happen to have that profession on a character they play.

Specifically, jewelcrafters won't get meta gem cuts, enchanters won't get the best bracer and weapon enchants, and other crafters won't get Harmonies that they can use to craft gear. If you have an alt that you don't have time to level and properly play, but still want to get some of these gated recipes, what can you do?

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

After writing my Ironpaw Shuffle guide, JessicaHealy posted a very insightful tip in the comments, which I had actually missed from all the way back in November on the Consortium professions forum: the Cooking School Bell is an investment that's well worth the price of 50 Ironpaw Tokens. If you have completed To Be a Master and finished leveling your cooking, you can buy the bell which will let you summon Nomi, your very own trainee!

Nomi has his own reputation faction that you need to do daily quests to complete, and once that's done, he'll provide you with a one time gift of 5 of your choice of token-bought food, and then daily Tokens of Appreciation, which rewards a free Ironpaw Token.

Luphian, in the Wowhead comments, calculated the time it takes to get exalted:

Non-human, and no guild perk:

1000 reputation a day: 42 days, but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4000 reputation removes four days, so it will take 38 days to get exalted.

Human OR Guild-Perk (10% extra reputation):

1100 reputation a day: 39 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4400 reputation removes four days, so it will take 35 days to get exalted.

Human AND Guild Perk (20% extra reputation):

1200 reputation a day: 35 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4800 reputation removes four days, so it will take 31 days to get exalted.

Once this is done, in 50 days you will have the 50 tokens you spent to get the bell. If you're using the tokens to buy Soy Sauce, Rice Flour, or Black Pepper, it'll only take 45 days if you consider the reward you get for getting exalted.

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Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.

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"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Have a scribe? Need gold? Look no farther. Inscription is one of the best gold-making professions in the game. You can make glyphs, Darkmoon cards, and all kinds of other odds and ends. Each of these markets has a characteristic time investment requirement and potential profit. Each realm is going to be different, but in general:

• Darkmoon cards: Scalable time investment, massive profits
• Glyphs: Massive time investment, low profit
• Odds and ends: Minimal time investment, medium profit

Darkmoon cards start off simply enough: if you do your daily research, you can make a card a day. Different cards have different values, but on average, you'll make back way more than the value of the inks. You can trade cards, and the more cards you make, the better efficiency you'll have making decks. Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it'll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool's Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool's Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that's 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Enchanting can be a very good way to make gold. Every time someone gets an upgrade, the first thing they do is see whether there's an enchant they could put on it, and if so, either have someone enchant it in a trade window, or buy a scroll from the AH.

The first thing you'll need to know if you're going to get into the scroll market is that it's not a good idea to use the default interface. You will face challenges that it is simply not equipped to handle. Chiefly:

• Knowing whether a scroll is profitable
• Knowing whether you already have scrolls made and for sale

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Feasts are expensive, but are still cheaper than everyone bringing their own food. The reason they're expensive is that they all require an ingredient that can only be bought with an Ironpaw Token, the 100 Year Soy Sauce. Ironpaw Tokens are a non-tradable currency obtained by doing quests (including dailies, or a weekly if you're a scribe), and their short supply can be a real limiting factor on leveling cooking. Leveling the "ways" of cooking requires a lot of tokens, and once they're leveled, using them requires a lot more. If you rely on dailies for these, you'll never have enough.

A better way

Luckily for us, you don't have to rely on dailies! The first thing I noticed when I was first exploring Halfhill was that Nam Ironpaw, the token vendor, had a repeatable quest called Replenishing the Pantry that asked for a Bundle of Groceries. Once I worked my way past the Preserving Freshness quest, he did, at least. Anyways, essentially, you can buy an empty container from Merchant Cheng (next to the seed vendor) which can be right clicked on to consume some quantity of cooking materials to make a Bundle of Groceries. This can be turned into an Ironpaw Token.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

The Darkmoon Faire comes to town once a month, and if you want to get one of those amazingly good darkmoon trinkets, you're going to need a fairly large pile of gold. There are a couple of ways of going about it with varying levels of cost and effort.

Interestingly, our own Fox Van Allen became a "Darkmoon Mogul" last expansion when he made his first million gold. At the time, you could simply make as many cards as you were willing to mill the ink for, and people willing to make those cards could profit in spades. There's still money to be made in this, however don't walk in with your eyes closed -- the system has changed, and there's more risk now than ever.

Getting one the hard way

Getting a deck for yourself can be expensive and simple, or cheap and complicated. You basically have two choices: hustle for cards to make your own deck, or buy a finished deck or trinket.

The top 1% wealthiest players control a mere 24.25% of the game's gold. Half the people who answered the survey had at least 35,000 gold. However, the bottom 75% of players controlled a mere 14% of the game's gold. This describes a huge disparity between the top gold earners and the bottom.

This is perhaps less than surprising, given the chasm between the serious Auction House players and the more casual farmers, and those who sometimes need to lean on their guild for repairs! But it's really fascinating to get some hard numbers, instead of just idle speculation. If you're looking to increase your WoW wealth, Gold Capped is a great place to start.

This year, Xsinthis is looking into how the average player's wealth has changed in the year since and with the recent expansion, as well as botting, gold buying and selling, and general exploits to help get a figure on these activities in game and how they relate to wealth levels. The survey is completely anonymous, and questions on the latter are 100% optional.

If you're interested in helping Xsinthis out by answering 5 short questions, head to the survey. It only takes a moment. And if you're interested in finding out more, check out Xsinthis' blog.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

This expansion is the first one where "perfect" cuts (which are about a 10% proc rate when you're cutting a green quality gem) are blue quality, and even though they have different names, they have identical stats as blue quality gems. People still don't generally know this, and will sometimes skip over the perfect cuts when they're gemming new gear, but over time it will become more commonly known that there's no difference between socketing, for example, a Perfect Delicate Pandarian Garnet or a Delicate Primordial Ruby.

If you're an enchanter, you may have noticed that the price for the common materials has gone way down, and if you're a jewelcrafter, you're probably wondering what to do with all the green quality gems you get from prospecting, as well as potentially looking wistfully at the profit margins on some of the really desirable research blue cuts.

If you're looking to get a Darkmoon Deck made before the end of the faire, you might be interested to know that despite a false start earlier this week, the Ink Traders and inscription vendors now accept trades of 10 Ink of Dreams for a Starlight Ink.

Ink Vendors finally updated. Very sorry for the delay.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 12, 2012

The Darkmoon Faire is only around once a month, and the one on now is ending this Sunday, October 14th. Unless the Faire is going on, you can't trade, for example, a Crane Deck in for a Relic of Chi Ji.

This expansion, unlike in others, Darkmoon Cards require an item that can only be made once a day by scribes, the Scroll of Wisdom. Scribes who have been hanging onto their Scrolls should probably look into making them into cards now that the inks can be gotten cheaply, since by the time the next Faire rolls around, there will be 3 more weeks worth of daily cooldowns waiting to be turned into cards. These trinkets range from pretty good to among the best in slot for most classes, so almost everyone can use one, and many people really want one.

Additionally, since the Starlight Inks have been so expensive lately, the epic quality shoulder enchants have been quite expensive. Now that you can trade the much less expensive Ink of Dreams in for them, you should see the prices lower on the Greater Ox Horn Inscription, the Greater Crane Wing Inscription, the Greater Tiger Claw Inscription, and the Greater Tiger Fang Inscription.

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Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.

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