Cataclysm: Emblem Conversion explained

Currency Conversion Emblems

Update

Blizzard changed the conversion rates, read the update at the end of the post.

Blizzards announced a while back that they were in the process of redesigning the currency system. The idea is to make things much easier by having only 2 PvE and 2 PvP currencies in the game. A lower, easier to obtain currency – Justice Points – and a higher valued currency that is similar to the current Emblem of Frost – Valor Points.

Once a new tier of gear becomes available Valor Points would be merged into Justice Points. Basically this is what will happen when Patch 4.0.1 goes life.

Older emblems and badges will be converted into gold.

„Cataclysm: Emblem Conversion explained“ weiterlesen

Total Gold Acquired: August 2010

Lots of Gold!It has been a while since the last summary. Concedingly I slacked with auctions, lost mats worth a 100-200k in expired mails on Magtheridon and Ravencrest. In addition there was the Lich King progression, soccer championship, hot summer, etc. Once you get to a point where gold becomes pointless it is becoming increasingly difficult to be motivated to have auctions up, etc 😀

„Total Gold Acquired: August 2010“ weiterlesen

Total Gold Acquired: March 2010

Lots of Gold!It has been a while since the last report and as you can easily see, I slacked. There is no real use for anymore gold and it doesn’t make much sense to use so much time on the auction house.

I have cut down massively posting glyphs and enchanting mats, sparing me 3000 auctions per 48 hours. On the other hand it means that even doing only minimal AH Business it is merely impossible to not gain masses of gold these days. Often I am even to lazy to relog alts to send materials and rather buy them expensive on the auction house.

„Total Gold Acquired: March 2010“ weiterlesen

Earning Gold on a New Realm

People often wonder how to start earning Gold on a new Realm. It is really not difficult to start out. When 3.3 launched 4 weeks ago I created a little Orc Shaman on EU-Ravencrest. Originally I intended to move Myrddin from Eu-Magtheridon, but I do not want to pay Blizzard money for a Realm Transfer.

I leveled the Char up to level 9 until I had about 8 Silver and went to Orgrimmar, asked a Guard for the Enchanting Trainer and bought 1 Strange Dust and put it on AH for 45/90S buyout. It sold quite fast actually and I was able to buy more Strange Dusts and put them on AH.

I took the Zeppelin to Thunderbluff and bought the Strange Dusts there, too … and also started to buy the Essences and the 2 Green Recipes from each Enchanting Supplier and put them up for 8.5/12.5G Buyout.

As you can see, money adds up quite fast. From my first 5G spare I bought a Portal to Dalaran. This way you can buy Dust in Thunderbluff, Hearthstone to Dalaran and then head to Orgrimmar. You end up with 2 Green Recipes, about 6-8 Strange Dust and about 4-6 lesser Magic Essence (~30G)

It is nice for starters, but the more lucrtative stuff is Illusion Dust/Greater Eternal Essences. The reason for it is that those can’t realyl be farmed easily. There are only Wicked Leather Headbands that DE into Illusion Dust and Greater Eternal Essences. All other items require hard to find rare and expensive materials to craft.

To level Enchanting there is no way around Illusion Dust and Greater Eternal Essences, so it is a good way to get some money from players who level Enchanting.

It is often possible to buy Greater Eternal Essences for 10-12G, but since the low cost Formulas to level enchanting require LESSER Eternal Essences some people really overlook the greater ones 😀

So you buy Greater Eternal Essences up to 15-16G and turn each into 3 Lesser Eternal Essences and sell them in Stacks of 10 for 84.5-89.5G.

Then you can expand to other Dusts and Essences. Vision Dust, Arcane Dust, Dream Dust would be the ones I’d go for.

Now after 4 Weeks it looks like this: 1450G cash, 156G average earned per day (Level 9!! )

Inclusive materials the Char’s worth is about 5 000 Gold, which isn’t bad for a char that you log once a day for 5 minutes.

With that much gold – and the speed you earn it increases each day – it is no problem to start playing and have enough to level the character up.

How to Solo Gehennas

After the post below where my Retribution Paladin soloed Molten Core I got a lot of questions regarding soloing Gehennas. There aren’t many things that can’t be outhealed by Judgement of Light or Seal of Light, but Gehennas casts a -75% healing debuff (curse)  which makes the encounter still challenging.

But how can you do it? Basically I cleared the path back up towards the entrance, to get some room for kiting and started off with Seal of Command and Shadow Aura since the shadow damage is the most damaging move.

Keep in mind:

  • use Shadow Protection Aura
  • always move backwards to minimize the time you stand in Rain of Fire
  • at first get the Guards down
  • make good use of Sacred Shield and instant Flash of Light
  • delay Bubble as long as possible to remove the healing debuff, heal up before you get the debuff again.
  • once the adds are down switch to SoV and outlast Gehennas

I have put up a short video of my last – but not best 😀 – Gehennas kill.

Good Luck! Let me know how it worked for you!

Solo’ed Doomwalker

Usually we duo/trio Doomwalker for a fast kill and easy cash, but a few days ago there was noone around that was willing to help to kill Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker so I decided to give it a try solo.

Doomlord Kazzak worked out nicely at the start but the constant mana drain and the need for dispells ended up in a  heavy consumption on mana. Either I was not able to keep up the hp or the mana  and I am not really sure how to counter that. After a few tries I decided to skip him and rather try my luck on Doomwalker.

Doomwalker was really easy, I could keep up nearly 100% hp using Judgement of Light and Seal of Vengeance, it just took some time to get him down 😀

Doomwalker at 20%

At 20% however things start to become tricky, Doomwalker enrages and attacks harder and faster (hat some 10-12k hits).

Doomwalker at 07%

Even with Sacred Shield, Seal of Light, Judgement of Light he was slowly wearing my HP down.

Doomwalker at 04%
Doomwalker at 01%

The Earthquake Phase during his Enrage is probably the best time to gain up some hp. Other than that I was slowly drained of HP, let Argent Defender keep me alive, saved LoH for the next time I was low on hp, to have Argent Defender available right after.

Doomwalker Dead

The fight took roughly 17 minutes, which is a long time on a PvP Realm. Fortunately people were busy hunting turkeys at the time 😀

The loot was 498G and 2 BoE Cloaks that I sold for 275g each, nothing to complain about!

Total Gold Acquired: November 09

It has been a little over 1 year that wotlk and the achievement system came live now. With all the 10 raids instances a week on 2 characters cost a lot of time, the summary is a little late this month, but here is the 2 monthly Total Gold Acquired overview.

cash_200911(note: the picture is quite big, give it some moments to load)

Summary November 2009:

  • Total gold acquired: 800713 g
  • Average gold earned each day: 2149 g
  • Gold looted: 80222 g
  • Gold from Quest rewards: 56708 g
  • Gold earned from auctions: 660548 g
  • Auctions posted: 377604

I shifted my sales a bit, as you can see from the previous post

http://www.myrddin.de/2009/09/01/total-gold-acquired-september-09/

Here are the changes since the last post:

  • Daisan: +72655 g
  • Exorial: +18730 g
  • Slanty: +1722 g
  • Gregorius: + 49650 g
  • Myrddin: + 100530g
  • Finewares: +15433 g
  • Myrddin, V2: + 25552 g

As you can see I mainly focused on Daisan and Gregorius for income, basically only enchanting Materials. glyphs are a nice income, but it just takes too much time to put all the glyphs up all the time. Also parking my alts in instances for BRD and Scarlet Monastery summons did not really boost sales. I logged my Myrddin (the orc shaman) on Magtheridon only 3-4 times the past few months, it is really too easy to make gold there.

Even now, with the recent disenchanting changes, there is still lots of profit to make with Infnite Dust and other enchanting materials. The buy cheap, sell expensive tactic is still working like a charm.

Paladin versus Molten Core!

On Tuesday evening I decided to try to see how I could do in Molten Core on my Paladin. While some bosses seem to not be a real threat, Gehennas and Golemagg turned out to be somewhat tricky. It took me 3 hours to clear the whole place and a fair share of deaths to get the proper strategies for each boss, but in the end I managed ot get everything down.

To make the run perfect I got the achievement and the Eye of Sulfuras in the first run – I am such a lucky guy!

Eye_of_Sulfuras_Daisan

Earning Gold: Blues, Epic

Generally I like to avoid selling Blues and Epics, because I find it rather difficult to find the balance between making most profit and getting people to buy my auctions. Also the pure profit is usually much lower than selling for example Glyphs.

Basically the same principle I am using for Enchanting Materials and Gylphs works on Blues/Epics/Gems aswell. I don’t ever undercut people, since their auctions will sell and then I am selling mine for much more profit.

But putting up 5000 Blue Items of the same kind doesn’t really make sense to me. Lets look at an example here:

Runed_Scarlet_Ruby

Some Seller has 18 Auctions of Runed Scarlet Rubies up and is by far more expensive than the others above him. Each ruby has a 2.7g auction fee, summing up 48.6 gold. so each 48 hours he loses 1 of his rubies just to finance his auctions. Imo it makes no sense, to put that much rubies on AH, they are expensive and most people most likely use epic gems now anyhow.

By putting up up only 4-5 of these he will sell as much and cut his costs effectively thus raising his profits.

The strategy I am working on my other Auctions, to put up many expensive auctions doesn’t really work well with anything that costs a high auction fee. You can sell stuff expensive, but you have to watch competition a bit closer.

  • For example you can add competitors to your friend list and wait till they put something on ah, then check their pricing.
  • Put up smaller amounts and check more frequently to resupply.

Blue and epic shoulders, chests and weapons will hardly sell as good as they did before heirloom items.  People that buy these items now are most likely new players on your realm and they hardly have tons of gold to spend.

Plate items in general sell quite well, most likely due to the huge amount of paladins/dk’s we see this expansion. Those classes are looking especially for Strength/Crit Items, which makes „of the Soldier“ greens and blues quite valuable.

Mail and Leather „of the Bandit“ Items are used by Feral Druid, Rogue, Enhancement Shaman, Hunter. These are usually better itemized than the Quest rewards you run across. Especially since quest rewards do not get changed even if classes get major changes (Shamans and Retribution Paladins for example)

Total Gold Acquired: September 09

As each 2 months it is time for the Total Gold Acquired (tga) summary. I’ll list up the Characters and the niches they are earning gold with.

Total Gold Acquired: September 2009, 516441g

Daisan, Level 80 Paladin

This one started out as Alternate char to farm old instances (mostly to farm Zul’Gurub for Mounts). For that reason she has „high looted gold“ (considering she is a newb Level 80).
Daisan is also selling old enchanting materials (Dream Dust, Illusion Dust, Greater Eternal Essences, Large Brilliant Shards and lower), popular glyphs, cooking recipes and the like.

TGA: 54127g

Exorial, Level 80 retired DK

This char was planned to become what Daisan is now. An alt to farm zg, etc … But I found DK’s realyl unflexible and not fun to play, so I retired her as soon as she hit 80.
Exorial is selling epics, blues, profession recipes, basically everything that costs high ah fees.

TGA: 80350g

Slanty, retired Mace Rogue

Slanty is my Scribe. He is selling nothing but glyphs ( 34.50g bid & 39.50g buyout) and all inks ( 5.25g & 5.75g).

TGA: 77418g

Gregorius, paused Warlock

Arcane Dusts and Infinite Dusts are his only business.

TGA: 69015G

Myrddin, World’s Best Enhancement Shaman (just kidding!)

As you can easily see Myrddin is my Main Char. With 46000 g looted and more dailies than on the other characters. We used to farm Kazzak, Doomwalker, Magtheridon, Outdoor Dragons, Zul’Gurub, Ahn’Qiraj, Onyxia, Karazhan and the like to get our looted gold up fast.

TGA: 80945g

Finewares

Finewares was my original sales character. I prefer to have sales on other characters than my main to avoid the whispers of players that want you to sell stuff cheaper, etc. But at one time Finewares just had no more capacity for all the materials. right now he sells only Greater Planar Essences and Greater Cosmic Essences.

TGA: 90131g

Myrddin, V2!

Magtheridon seems to be a pretty good sales test environment. High Population PvE, highly PvE advanced Realm. I started this Orc Shaman about 1.5 years ago. Secretly I would like to reroll another Shaman as the old Myrddin gets somewhat old, but I’d never leave Borked Guild, the best Guild in the world! So he ended up as Test Char for crazy AH Tests. I hardly pla yhim anymore though, so there is hardly any profit worth mentioning. He sells everything mentioned above, enchanting materials + glyphs.

TGA: 64455g

Summary:  At September 09 I am at roughly 516 441 total gold acquired since the introduction of the achievement system. This is roughly 120 000g more since July. Don’t forget 300 000 auctions posted since 3.0 translate into 100 hours spent alone to retrieve mail in the best possible case, due to the 50 mail per 60 seconds limit.

There are several posts about the strategies used to get this done in the earning gold category. More posts to cover all aspects of my moneymaking will follow as I have time to write things down. I am sure you’ll find some useful advice or some tipps for your own auctions!