Posts with tag farming

It's finally over. I have been farming Karazhan on and off for years, hoping to get my hands on the Fiery Warhorse's Reins. They are an exceedingly rare drop off of Attumen, the first boss in the zone -- and when I say exceedingly, I mean it. Ever since Karazhan was first introduced in The Burning Crusade, I've wanted that amazing flaming vampire horse for my very own. And every week after Tuesday night raids, I've ventured into Karazhan, making quick work of the trash in the stables, killing Attumen, and then collecting yet another pair of gloves to sell to the vendor.

This week, I wandered into Karazhan and fought my way through the trash, marveling at the sheer number of green items that dropped -- even a Ritssyn's Lost Pendant for my troubles. I started to get my hopes up, thinking that this could totally be the run that I'd see the silly pony drop. Unfortunately, I messed up -- I killed Midnight before Attumen could hop on his back and start phase 2. I vanished, hoping that would reset things, but I was left with a dead horse and no loot. However, I still wasn't saved to the boss, so I ducked out of the instance, did a quick reset, and dove back in again with fully respawned trash. This time, I waited for Attumen to hop up on Midnight, but I was kicking myself because I was certain that if I hadn't messed up the green-filled run, I'd be riding around on a horse. That was totally the winning run that I screwed up.

Except, apparently, it wasn't. All it took was a reset, and approximately four years after I started randomly farming this stupid pony, he dropped. Now he's mount #143 in my collection. At first, I was filled with a huge sense of relief, and then it was replaced by a sort of empty feeling. After all, the solo trip to Karazhan was a weekly routine that I could count on. I got used to doing it. So ... what now? I have absolutely no idea.

What's the longest you've spent farming a single item? Is there one elusive pet, mount, or other goodie in WoW that still escapes your grasp? What do you do when that long sought-after goal is finally attained? And while we're at it ... what the heck should I farm now?

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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 Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Every so often, I get asked something to the effect of "What's the fastest way to get 10,000 gold?" It's usually asked by someone who is perpetually poor in game and is looking to get a BoE or some other sort of reward that costs gold. The fastest way for me to get 10,000 gold is to log in and check my mail. My daily haul is many times that and scales based on how much time I have to craft, list, and relist. This isn't a useful answer to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, though. So what advice would be helpful?

First off, if you're below level 85, get to level 85. This nets you quite a bit of gold simply from quest rewards and vendoring gear you acquire. If you're already level 85, the first thing you need to do is identify how much money you can make per hour running 5-mans for valor points that you can use to sell BoEs. On my realm, I could sell a BoE costing 1,650 VPs for about 10,000 gold. That means every valor point I earn could be worth 6 gold, which makes the 150 points I get from a 5-man worth 900g. I can do seven per week per character with the requisite gear. Also, every trash kill and boss kill has a chance of awarding you with valuables, including enchanting mats (if someone can DE) and BoEs.

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This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

I used to farm Attumen in Karazhan every week for the Fiery Warhorse mount. I used to farm Anzu in Sethekk Halls every day for the Raven Lord mount. I used to farm the quest in Brunnhildar Village every day for the White Polar Bear mount. I used to farm a lot of things ...

One of my longest-running farming attempts was for the elusive Time-Lost Proto-Drake. I would fly around The Storm Peaks for hours while working on homework, watching shows on Netflix Instant, waiting for random heroic queues, etc. After a few months of diligent hunting, my determination to find, kill, and loot the reins of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake was incited all the more when a friend just happened to fly past the dragon on his way from Ulduar to Dalaran.

At first, I was upset that the mount I sought so dearly had fallen haphazardly into his hands. Soon, though, I realized that if someone could get the mount by sheer dumb luck, it would be much more likely that I find it through persistence. After I spent several more months farming, however, this same friend just happened to see the shadow of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake flash by while he was questing in The Storm Peaks on the new Worgen mage he created when Cataclysm dropped. When I saw him flying around on his second TLPD mount, that was the last straw for me. I gave up the hunt.

What items, mounts or achievements bring out the farmer in you? How long have you been farming for that seemingly unobtainable something?

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About the Bloggers introduces you to the people behind WoW Insider. You can find articles on more WI staffers in earlier About the Bloggers entries.

What do you do for WoW Insider?

Oh, man. I write Know Your Lore on Sundays, along with the roleplay column All the World's a Stage. On Mondays, you can catch the Weekly Podcast Roundup. On Thursdays, I write World of WarCrafts, and every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I write up The Daily Quest. In addition, I sometimes fill in on The Queue, pop in on the WoW Insider Show when asked, and I do those little guide graphics on the side of the site, too.

In short, I write. A lot. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Aaron wrote in the other day to say:

Despite having played WoW for years I'm a complete gold-making newbie and my characters are all dirt-poor because of it. I decided it was time to start playing the gold-making meta game so I've been reading through issues of your Gold Capped column, and while I've really enjoyed what I've read I'm afraid I'm still at a loss as to where to get started. Obviously I don't have a lot of upfront capital to jump-start my endeavor, either. I was wondering if you've ever written or would consider writing an article for complete, absolute beginners such as myself.

Unless you started the game with rich friends, this is something that everyone has to go through. People getting into earning gold from scratch often don't have any clue where to start, and they often have a bunch of incorrect ideas about what they need to get going.

Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil with any comments, questions or hate mail!

I've taken a bit of comment flak for ragging on farmers before. Yes, I read the comments! In a mature economy where there's lots of competition for farming and crafting, I still believe that crafting and using the auction house is the most profitable use of your time. Farming does not benefit from an economy of scale that you can use to make more money with crafting; no matter what, you can only farm a certain amount of product in a given time. However, you can AFK process many parts of the crafting process. Especially when I started writing this column, farming was something that would never make you as much money as investing in leveling a profession and learning how to use it (two-handed, dual-wielded) on the AH.

This, however, will not be the case when Cataclysm drops. The people making real money will be the ones out there happily gathering the new ores and herbs so that the poor crafter saps like me can pay a huge premium for a very small supply.

Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

Sometimes, the cheapest way to acquire the quantity of farmed mats you need is to buy them direct from a farmer. Buying them on the auction house is probably more convenient; however, your farmer has to pay the AH cut, and you have to beat your competitors to it. Having a farmer send everything they farm cash on delivery every day is a much more efficient way and has some serious benefits for both sides of the deal. How can you find farmers and convince them to send you goods instead of listing them on the AH?

This is not a one-way deal. You need to make it better for a farmer to ship directly to you than it would be for them to go and post their items for sale. To do that, let's look at the annoying parts of selling farmed goods.

Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who's trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he's made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it's left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they're paying for their supplies.

Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail!

I've gotten quite the mail bag of questions emailed to me. I'm going to select a few and answer them approximately whenever I feel like it. Remember when writing your question that if you want to remain anonymous, all you need to do is ask!

The first question comes to us from Mahgo, from Dath'Remar (US):

I am emailing your for some advice regarding making gold on the auction house. I have most professions at max level.

I currently use Auctioneer to undercut when I am selling what I make. Do you have any advice or could you please point me for some help regarding niche markets, or how to tackle the whole market?

Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from building a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) (we're recruiting!) to write up a guide that will help you make gold. Check out the Call to Auction podcast, and feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail. Basil is also soliciting questions for an upcoming Gold Capped series, "Ask an auctioneer" via email.

This post is best read while imagining me singing the title to the tune of "Where have all the cowboys gone" by Paula Cole. There -- good luck getting that out of your head!

Auctioneers rely on farmers for raw materials for various businesses. In fact, we rely very heavily on them, and there are quite a few markets that are only more profitable than farming in terms of gold per hour if we can do them on a very large scale ... much more than any one person can farm.

I've been flying circles around Sholazar Basin and boy, are my arms tired!

The interesting thing about the markets we work on is that it's almost no more actual work to make, for example, 150 Titansteel Bars than it is to make 20. The only difference is in how annoying it is to find mats, and the number of Dr. Who episodes you get to watch while AFK crafting. The difficulty of finding lots of cheap mats is really the only barrier we worry about. And any experienced auctioneer will tell you that, historically in Wrath of the Lich King, it's been no trouble at all.

For some reason, the majority of mornings I'd log in to do my buying, I'd see absolutely dumbfounding amounts of raw mats available for ridiculous prices. Cobalt Ore for under 20g a stack, Saronite Ore for as low as 7g a stack, Adder's Tongue for under 5g a stack and Eternal Shadow for as low as 15g a stack. I have access to unlimited storage and basically unlimited money, so I did what any opportunist with a basement full of toilet paper would do: I bought every last scrap every single time, reasoning that I'd eventually find time to use it.

We've all been soaking up all the newly released Cataclysm info from this morning. I was so busy drooling (and hammering) on my keyboard about the hunter changes that I only got around to thinking about the profession and guild changes after my fourth coffee.

Here's what we know:

• All professions seem to have a new cap of 525.
• You will be able to learn the next level of crafting skills at level 75. Well, alchemy works that way, and I assume that at least the other crafting skills will be the same level. No word on gathering skills yet.
• Guild perks are programmed into the client and have been data-mined; however, the more complex leveling system has been abandoned. No precise writeup about how guilds gain perks, but I hear they still work for experience.

Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast, and the Call to Auction podcast.

Enchanting mats are a strange business. They are in constant massive demand, and can be made in a variety of ways. Every Tuesday, thousands of guilds get thousands of upgrades that need to be enchanted, every day, hundreds of thousands of players run PUG and PvP content that gives them upgrades they want to enchant, and every day, thousands of players buy things like Bolts of Imbued Frostweave, which require enchanting mats to make.

The supply of Frost Lotus is and always has been low, however as I mentioned in my last column, there are ways to farm it. The most popular one was to get saved to an Ulduar raid ID where Freya's Elders (Brightleaf, Ironbranch, and Stonebark) have been killed, but Freya herself hasn't, allowing the herb nodes to respawn. Getting the nodes to respawn simply requires a "soft reset" of the instance, which means nobody zones in for 30 minutes.

Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the hunting party podcast, and the call to auction podcast.

Hi folks! Welcome to Gold Capped. There are many games to play in World of Warcraft: PvE, PvP, achievements, and today I'm going to introduce you to the one that people overlook-- gold making. Not just making enough to cover your expenses, but making unimaginably large quantities of gold. Making it easily, and enjoying the process.

Before I jump in, I want to introduce myself and learn a little about you guys. I have a gut feeling that the majority of players are living "paycheck to paycheck" and treat the auction house as an expensive vending machine where they can spend their hard earned dailies money. Am I right? Please select one of the options on my embedded poll!