Posts with tag inscription

There are hundreds of different strategies for making money once you've hit level 85, right? Max-level professions tend to be strong money-makers in the right hands, because they allow you to sell the latest and greatest items.

It's a bit of a different story while leveling, however. There are gathering professions, of course, and some can provide fledgling characters with a solid chunk of cash. There are crafting professions too, but often times low-level gear and items sell for less than the materials it takes to make them.

Making money while leveling isn't typically at the forefront of your mind when you're making your fifth alt on your home server -- after all, you can make more money running dailies at 85 than you can farming Wool Cloth. But if you're just starting out in World of Warcraft or are starting fresh on a new server without any of your main character's bank ... well, finding a way to make money while leveling is exceptionally important, especially so you can buy the much-needed conveniences that rich players take for granted, such as Flight Master's License and Expert Riding.

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!

Patch 4.2 is going to bring with it a whole new tier of craftable gear, all of it better than the current craftable gear. The ilvl378 gear all takes Living Embers, which are purchasable for valor points and drop from Firelands raid bosses, but the ilvl365 stuff only takes Chaos Orbs. One way or another, everyone is going to be wanting to get this stuff crafted, and that means there's an opportunity for gold makers.

If you can gather or buy the materials, crafting these and selling them on the auction house will likely be a brisk business. If you can't, though, you can still stockpile the mats now (while they're cheaper) and sell them after the patch. Let's look at the different tradeskills that will be seeing some heavier than normal demand.

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. Today, we are convinced that archaeology's RNG won't apply to us.

There are a number of interesting (and by interesting, perhaps I mean "occasionally very expensive and likely to drive you insane via RNG-laden accessibility") mounts available from professions, though for some of them, you'll have to be a practitioner in good standing before you'll ever be able to learn them.

Regrettably, I am the bearer of some very bad news this week concerning the Vial of the Sands for all those of you who like circumventing the highest costs in the game.

Also read:

• Combining The Ambassador and Mountain O' Mounts
• Mountain O' Mounts in Outland
• Mountain O' Mounts in Northrend
• Mountain O' Mounts in 5-man dungeons
• Mountain O' Mounts in raids
• Mountain O' Mounts from achievements
• Mountain O' Mounts from PvP

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!

Books of Glyph Mastery are currently needed by scribes in order to learn all the glyphs in the game. While they will eventually no longer be needed, they will always be useful. Even when Blizzard gets around to letting you research all the glyphs without them, those research recipes are both on a one-day cooldown, and the books can be used to continue learning. These books are an excellent candidate for "flipping" for a few reasons. Let's look into why and how to flip them.

Bad for the market?

Speculative flipping is not bad for the market. First, when people say "bad for the market," they mean "bad for people who need to buy glyph books." While flippers seem to be making money from nothing, they're actually making money from risk. They buy up excess stock in times of plenty and sell it in times of scarcity, and this protects book buyers from having to deal with a nearly empty auction house as often. All flippers do is make it so that when a couple of new scribes start buying books by the wheelbarrow and completely empty the AH, they won't have to wait for more stock to trickle in from people leveling through Northrend.

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!

The glyph market has spawned quite a few of the important modern auction house addons. It's a uniquely challenging market, as there are hundreds of different products, each with their own balance of suppliers, buyers, and materials. The challenges faced by early glyph producers were met by a hodgepodge of fairly complex addons and macros, and only recently have unified solutions began to appear. I remember that at one point, I had addons to:

• Keep track of how many glyphs I had on the AH, in various characters' banks and in their inventories.
• Allow me to queue a list of glyphs and build a materials list (that allowed me to buy the vendor mats with one click).
• Automatically queue enough glyphs in the second addon to assure that I kept stock levels at my desired level.
• Automatically post every glyph I made onto the AH.

The tasks needed for this market are not unique, and so the most important tool that can trace its origin to the glyph market is certainly TradeSkillMaster. TSM is an addon that I've covered before, and it's built from the ground up to be perfect for glyphs. It's also perfect for a lot of other markets, but mostly those you can treat like glyphs.

The professions dev Q&A is a sleepy little document that reads like it was written by and for farmers -- but buried between questions about fishing and archeology, a few relevant pre-announcements can be found. Notably:

Quote:

Will you provide a way to speed up the acquiring of glyphs usually acquired through research and glyph books? Glyph books (Book of Glyph Mastery) are hard to come by now that people spend so little time in WotLK content.

Yes. We will be changing the discovery spells so they can teach all possible glyphs, and the books will simply provide a no-cooldown method to do the same thing.

source

Glyph books made all kinds of sense in Wrath, when they were obtainable anywhere by anyone. Now that they're only dropping for people as they level, the supply has plummeted. New scribes are having their short hairs held over the fire by the people who will end up paying too much for their glyphs, so I suppose it's a probably fair, but Blizzard is changing it.

Coming soon, new scribes will be able to finish learning their glyph books by research alone, and books will only be an added bonus. This will reduce the price for them, as cheap scribes who are willing to wait will no longer be snatching up any inexpensive books they find.

If you have any of these books that you're trying to flip for a profit, use them or sell them quickly, before the mat is pulled from under you. Take heart; I still have at least six Tomes of Polymorph: Turtle in a storage guild bank somewhere that I took a bath on. That's all part of the fun of speculation, and it makes wins feel better.

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Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped as well as the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.

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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!

Glyph pricing has ignited more internet arguments than any other topic in the WoW blogosphere. Everyone has their own method, and there's always someone who gets offended by it. There is no actual right answer, just basic economics.

The goal of any glyph strategy is to make gold, and the only sensible way to measure gold making is by calculating your profits per hour. The glyph lifecycle is herb > pigment > ink > glyph. There can be a lot of hours in that, so let's look at the best way to squeeze some gold from them.

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, GnomeWorks is to trade skills what fire was to cavemen.

These past few weeks have been very good in the old email box for suggestions for addons to be featured on Addon Spotlight, so keep those recommendations coming. In the next few weeks, I've got a recommendation spotlight planned as well as a grab bag. Also, there is an idea kicking around in my head about a "my first addon" spotlight, where new addon developers pitch their addon and we talk about it constructively. What do you guys think?

Today's Addon Spotlight is one of those "long time coming" pieces; people were utterly shocked over the fact that I had not talked about GnomeWorks before. Well, there is a good reason for that -- GnomeWorks is still in its alpha development stage. As far as profession windows go, prior to Cataclysm, an addon of this type was almost required. The sorting features and customization options on the default profession window was lackluster at best.

Those of us who make Darkmoon decks will no longer have to park our scribes in Dalaran to access the ink trader there, because patch 4.0.6 will bring with it the addition of ink traders in Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Now, aside from changing an alchemist's proc specialization, there's no reason to move any crafting character out of the main cities!

Bashiok

Ink Traders are being added to Stormwind and Orgrimmar in 4.0.6.

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The ink trader used to be the center of every glyph maker's business. Now that the traders only take the somewhat more expensive Blackfallow Ink, they're mostly used as a way to create more Inferno Ink. I also sometimes use them to trade Blackfallow Ink in for lower-level, common inks when I need them for glyphs, but that's only when my stocks of old-world herbs dry up. So far, actually, it's been only Ethereal Ink from Outland.

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Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped, plus the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label.

With your death knight at level 85 and all kitted out for raids, there's one more step you can take to make your death knight the best he can be: Learn some professions. A profession can provide self-buffs that nudge your DPS or suvivability up to the next level. It can grab you a lot of extra gold on the auction house (or drain all your gold, depending on which profession you take and how you choose to level it). Finally, it can provide you with some cool toys. This week, we'll take a look at WoW's professions to see which ones are tops for a death knight.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Except last week, when the holidays aggroed us. But rest easy, we managed to sheep the holidays, so now we can all go ahead and nuke down the rest of the year. As long as nobody breaks it early, our sheep shouldn't expire on the holidays for about 12 more months, give or take.

So you're a mage. You have a job, and that job is taking something that was previously intact and converting it into much smaller, bloodier, often frozen chunks of that same thing. You manufacture shattered mobs, and you take pride in your work. But you may also have a side project or two. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Self, perhaps when we aren't making warlocks explode, maybe we should spend our time sewing trousers. Or baking cupcakes. Or making necklaces."

Well, your self is right. You should be using your downtime in between vicious warlock kills to learn a side trade. They offer bonuses in the form of cool gear, extra money, and bonus stats, plus a bit of catharsis to help you decompress form all that murder. But which professions should you choose? That's easy: anything but mining. What's that? You'd like a bit more detail? Oh, fine.

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, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on making money in game, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Anaalius's Darkmoon deck report.

There's a craze in /trade. People are advertising Mysterious Fortune Cards that can be flipped to rarely turn into a Fortune Card that vendors for 5,000g. Like lambs to the slaughter, enough people head to the AH and buy a few that it's become a serious moneymaker for scribes. I use the expression "lambs to the slaughter" mostly in jest.

Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions.

We've all heard someone say something to the effect of "I don't make Darkmoon cards because I don't have enough gold to beat the random number generator." What do they mean? Here's the situation: Darkmoon Cards of Destruction are craftable by maximum-skill scribes, and they award a completely random card. There are 32 possible cards they can give you in four different "suits" of eight, and if you match up a whole suit, you can create one of four Darkmoon decks. These decks start a quest that, when turned in at the Darkmoon Faire, provide one of the best trinkets in the game.

The Darkmoon greatness decks last expansion "outlived their iLvl" in the sense that since they were so perfectly itemized for quite a few classes that they would reward their owners with better performance than later-tier trinkets, especially token-bought trinkets. Looking at the new decks, they are almost as perfectly itemized, so I suspect that they will provide their owners many months of use before they get overshadowed by some new drop. What this means is that everyone wants one of these, and they're very expensive to make and thus very rare.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests and is trying to find a good recipe for Lamingtons.

Is everyone excited? How about anxious or intimidated? Cataclysm comes out tonight at midnight, and by tomorrow afternoon, everything will be different. Before you know it, there will be level 85 priests running about your respective realms and spam requests in trade chat for Inferno Rubies. Everyone's priorities are about to change -- but for now, we're still in the calm before the storm.

In this calm, I though I'd focus on professions for priests. There have been a lot of small changes to professions that I think we need to give some attention before we get further invested in them. Plus, the start of the expansion is when professions get the most use, what with all that new, easily accessible gear. Let's get started.

This article is part of our Countdown to Cataclysm series -- preparing you for Cataclysm launch one day at a time.

Cataclysm is going to change the world of professions -- so without any further ado, here are the most important changes.

General

• The skill cap for all professions is now 525.
• There is a lot of content locked behind a phased area you can not unlock until you're level 84.
• The new elemental trade goods are called Volatiles.
• Herbing and mining now provide experience.
• Archeology will be trainable.
• Guilds can see links for all members' available professions.