Gold problems in World of Warcraft? Free advice!!

Ok, so, I said yesterday at the end of my rant about FFXIV beta ... that I'd write this guide of sorts.

This guide can be used by both the alliance and horde sides.

First: a little insight as to my past. I have played World of Warcraft numerous times. The first time I played was on the US servers when a friend wanted me to join him and some fellow co-workers to have fun after work. When I first got in, it looked good, I was impressed with the graphics compared to the graphics of FFXI that I was playing at the time. I got up to about level 35 or so (solo mind you), and tried my hand at a dungeon. I unfortunately was a warrior, and as I didn't have any money making skills, and my friend that got me in refused to help me whatsoever, I didn't have skills that I should have had. I was built around doing DPS, not tanking. But this group that got me in expected me to be a tank. I didn't have taunt ... yes you read right, I didn't even purchase taunt. Mainly because I had no money, and was budgeting myself so that I did have a little cash. I got bitched at and told I was a noob and was told I should just quit now. So I did.

Then some friends in the UK told me that they'd pay for me to play on the EU servers with them, as long as I got my own copy of the game. This proved difficult as I live in the US and basically the only way for me to get the EU copy was to find it online. GamersLoot.com proved to be helpful in that. Shameless plug yes, because their stuff is discounted from retail for the most part. These friends actually helped me out, they got me in their guild, and helped me level up. At first I started a hunter, and that went well, until I ended up in stormwind and saw that the server population for hunters was about 75% LOL ... I had to take a break for a while, but that went well, I wasn't hurting for cash, but I wasn't rich either.

Later on, when I had more time on my hands (when I lost my last job) I got to play on the EU servers again, this time with Wrath of the Lich King. I started up a new character, a Druid. I found some specific hints on the net randomly that helped me start my gold-making prowess. Not enough information out there to make me swim in gold with what I found, but enough to get the gears turning in my head about how to make money. By the time I got to level 70, I had enough money to purchase the cold weather flying ability, and still had money left over.

I stopped playing EU WoW when my friend lost his job and couldn't pay for me to play anymore. Just recently however I decided to get a game card for the US servers. I started just 4 days ago, and am currently level 27, with over 400 gold on me, and over 800 made thus far.

So, how did I do it?

Easy: The auction house!

Firstly, you'll need at the very least, two addons. Gatherer and Auctioneer. Well, Gatherer isn't really NEEDED per say, but it's nice to have, especially if you have co-guildies that use it as well, so you can get the nodes that they gather put on your map.

From the start of your character, if you're new that is, do the starting quests. Equip whatever you can get from the quests that is better than what you pick up off the mobs. If you can't equip whatever the reward is, pick whichever will sell to the NPC for the most, or on the AH for the most (auctioneer helps with this, but in the beginning you probably won't be selling this stuff on the AH). This is the very basic basis of the tactic I use... Use those quest rewards! If it's not usable, sell to a vendor the best thing there. Once you leave that initial starting area and go to the mini-town between where you started and the main town... skip it. Go straight to town, do not pass go, do not collect 200g .. well, not yet at least.

Once in town, open up the auction house, and scan it with auctioneer. This may take some time of course, as there's just so much that may be listed. Once it's scanned the first time, your auctioneer is set for some fun down the line. Next, you have to decide your gathering skills. Yes, skills... two of them. Look in the Auction House, and look under the supplies for the different gathering skills. Look specifically at stuff from skinning, herbalism, and mining.

What are you looking for? Full stacks of materials. Look at the buyout price for the full stacks of things. What one is giving the most bang for a stack? How many stacks of that are available? Do some other research on some sites about what skill level is needed to gather that item. You may be surprised to find that some of the expensive things may be low level gathers. I would suggest picking up one map-able gather ability, with skinning to back it up. Why? Well, with skinning you can hunt beasts and then skin them for their materials, while having your tracking watch for the other gather skill you chose. I myself am on Lothar on the US servers, on the Horde side, and right now, stacks of Stranglekelp were going for roughly 40 gold a stack of 20, and only 3 partial stacks were on the AH. Granted, I'm also partial to doing herbalism as my other gather skill, purely for the fact that the herbs are out in the open with the mobs I'm killing for skinning, so I don't have to visit the edges of the maps or caves where the mining nodes are, and not the beasts. I see the use in mining though, as you can get gems as well, which are for jewelers, so you can hit up two markets easily, but those gems are few and far between, while herbalism also caters to two markets, it's the same stuff so you don't have to hope for that gem when you're mining so you can get money from the jewelers.

Find that niche in the market you could set yourself up at, and get those gathering skills. Now go back out to that mid-town area, and continue your questlines. Whenever you get through them and end up back in town again, scan that AH with auctioneer. The more times you scan, the more reliable the results can be, and you may have auctioneer catch something that you normally wouldn't look at for making money. Grind up those gathering skills, and sell everything you get on the AH. Auctioneer has a nifty tab at the bottom called "appraiser", you can set those gathered things to be batch-posting, so you can post up all those gathers real easy. The other nice thing with auctioneer is that it will automatically undercut the market by a small fraction (10% default) so yours gets sold quicker. Granted, if there's none on the market, it tries to put it up for the average that it's seen.

There's other tabs in auctioneer that can be useful. I don't remember what it's labeled as, because I've only been on the server 4 days I haven't gotten a lot of info for some items, so I haven't looked beyond the appraiser and browse tabs LOL. Anyway, there's a tab where you can do a search of the auctioneer database (useful to go here right after scanning the AH) for items that are seriously under-priced. On the EU servers, I managed to spot a book that was being reported as being 500% under it's normal price. I looked at it, and it was only 1 gold buyout. The normal selling price was over 500 gold. I quickly purchased it, ran to the mail, picked it up, and put it back on the AH. Within 5 minutes, it sold, and I just made almost 500 gold. This kind of thing won't happen often, granted... but that's still awesome to find sometimes.

One more thing to note: other skills. There are other skills you can pick up that aren't limited. These are cooking, first aid, and fishing. Many new players fail to realize that you aren't just limited to two skills, and only find out about it much later. Most of the time this comes in the field of first aid. They are then forced to grind through the stuff they've already passed by in levels. They either will try to save money by going back and slaughtering the monsters that drop the low level cloth, or they purchase it off the AH ... This is another small niche. Linen cloth is dropped off some low level humanoids, so you could find yourself a nice spawn place that has lots of humanoids and grind on them to your bag-space's content. Granted, you'll also get a lot of grey items, but hey, it's easy money too. There is one spot that has been in the game since the beginning, that is special. This special spot is in Westfall. Along the western side, up on the cliff, is a windmill, with a small shack next to it. This area has an endless spawn of Defias people, and they drop linen. What does 'endless spawn' mean? Once you kill all the people in this area, another couple will pop, sometimes 3 (when the shed repops). There is NO downtime. Even if you go and gather all the mobs into one big group, then AOE kill them all at the exact same moment, a single group of 2-3 will spawn instantly. Grind that linen cloth up, then sell it on the AH. Granted, it won't sell for much, but if you spend 30 minutes slaughtering that spawn, your inventory will be full of stuff to vendor-trash sell, and cloth sell.

There you go ... simple? yes. Easy? yes. Not a lot of info I'm sure, but, even if you're a high end player, you can figure out, the best way to make money? Off other people's pocket books.

Oh yes... Vanity pets ... or just pets in general, go for a ton on the AH, no mater where you go / come from. Find a pet that's not there, or is selling for a lot, and find out how to get it. Then go get it LOL. There is one pet that I know of that is only available to the alliance to purchase, and that is of the white kitten carrier. In stormwind, there is a small boy that spawns, and walks around town (path below in the pictures, starts at the top left, goes counter-clockwise), then despawns where he spawned at. He spawns with a SINGLE white kitten carrier, for under 1 silver if I remember right. He spawns 4 hours after he despawns. If you catch him at the start, you can grab that cat before anyone else. To get a feel, or just want to see if he's out, walk his path in reverse whenever you hit town. On the EU servers, that cat was going for 40 to 50 gold. On Lothar right now, on the horde side, that same cat is going for over 100 gold... but of course, that takes two accounts to get it transfered over to the horde side, but still. Another big vanity pet would be that of the tiny whelplings ... they've got a shoddy droprate (0.08% at best) but they go for over 1k gold each if you can manage one.

Liked the info? consider possibly donating to me on the right over there... I still have to purchase Burning Crusades and Wrath of the Lich King for the US servers, seeing as Blizzard can't transfer the expansions I had on the EU servers to the US. ... or drop me a line on US Lothar @ Kinam saying you liked it, or that it helped.

Proof? From the EU servers:
My gold acquired ... most notably look at average gold/day ^^

Lil-timmy's path:

I'm done..

Yea, you heard me..

I'm done.

With FFXIV beta that is .... since my last writing, I've played 0, yes ZERO time on it. This is not because of getting absorbed into SC2 or anything else. This is simply because theres stuff that's still broken that they refuse to comment on, or fix.

Reasons NOT to play FFXIV:

1) You can't grind a single class up to wherever you want without interruption

Reason) Surplus. This stupidity has not been explained why it's there, or what it does. All the tester's have found out is that it's a method of them to slow down your leveling so you don't end up getting max level on day 1 of launch

2) Only 2 mage classes at start

Reason) As you may or may not know, as you level your physical level, you get stat points to distribute on your character. 3 of the different stats are made for melee classes (of which there's like 5), and the other 3 are for mages. Why is this bad? Because of surplus, the only way to smoothly level, is to then switch classes and level a different one for a while when you start getting surplus on one. With being able to hit surplus so easily (you can start getting it from new character / class within an hour), you have to swap jobs very often. With only two mage classes, you really shouldn't swap over to a melee class, as you have no stats for it. So you're semi-restricted to go to a gathering or crafting class.

3) Menu driven EVERYTHING.

Reason) Quests tell you 'go touch this'...first instinct in a mouse + keyboard game? Click! ... nope, you've gotta open the menu, then choose to interact with whatever it is you're supposed to do something with. Heck, there's an elevator in the starting town that we're able to start in in beta, you have to interact with it to use it. Doing so causes you to go into a cutscene of sorts to ride it up/down...the animation of which may take longer to load and play than it would be to just walk down the stairs nearby. The other reason this is bad? Because the menu is LAGGY AS ALL HELL. Hit menu, wait 2 FULL seconds for it to come up, choose something, wait another 2-5 seconds for the next screen to come up ... yea that gets annoying. No, this is not a graphical problem, this is the fact that the menus are displayed from the server. So when you hit an option, it sends a request to the server "hey I am opening this thing here, what do I see?" ... this goes over the net however slow it may be on the servers, then the server's gotta send back everything you see.

4) Solo Play Required

Reason) They say they want to push party-play, but it's just not conducive to the experience gain method they have currently. As you go around, the only way to gain skill points for combat classes, is to do an action while engaged in combat. This means, that for you to gain a level, you have to be in a fight. You get experience based on the difficulty of the fight granted, but that's another issue. So for those of us that enjoy playing mages, we don't get experience for healing that tank after the fight is over, even if it took us 5 casts to get them full.

5) Mages get more shafts than an archery contest target.

Reason) MP ... simply put ... MP ... that's the main thing. See, while out fighting, you have two modes (I've written about them before) ... active and passive. While in active mode you can cast spells and everything, but your HP doesn't regen. When you go into passive mode, your HP will start to naturally regen. This means that your 'resting' thing is actually just passive mode. While in passive mode though, your MP doesn't regen at all. The only way to regen your MP is to touch a crystal / node. So mages are pretty much bound around these crystals and nodes when they're out grinding. The fact that there's only 2 mage classes was described about above. The fact that even if damage is healed on someone, if our heal lands after the fight is over, we get no exp for it, or if we're being friendly and decide to heal someone while passing by ... yea we get nothing for helping them out. So, power-leveling is out of the question for sure, as mages get nothing for it. Oh, yea, both the mage classes? yea they're both considered healers. At level 5 you get a healing spell on both classes. Nuke class? yea both are nukers, but with the lack of MP regen, you're only spending your MP on heals, not nukes.

6) Active / Passive mode stupidities

Reason) Short but sweet, HP but not MP regen while in passive. TP that you gain in a fight will drain at a rate of 300 every 5 seconds while not actively engaged in a fight. Granted, TP is fairly easy to get, and you have a max of 3000, if you're at max, this means if you don't pick another fight within a minute, you're starting with 0 TP. Why so much TP? some moves are only 250 TP, while big hitters are 1k ... so meh.

7) Crafting stupidities

Reason) I hate crafting as it is, unless it's easy. I'd much rather be able to purchase a recipe from a shop and then just be able to pull up my 'menu' of recipes that I know, and be able to make something from that. As it stands now, that whole menu driven thing? Yea, it makes crafting near stupid seeing as each ingredient box acts just like the menu in when you click on that box, it query's the server for what you have in your inventory. Firstly, you have to know the recipe for something to make it. Recipes can consist of up to 8 items, much like FFXI. But this time you don't choose what crystal to craft with, this time you put in the ingredients, then hit craft, and if it's something that's in the system, it'll pull up a menu with what those ingredients could make. Yes, you read that right, COULD make. See, the same recipe of ingredients could actually be for 3 or 4 different things.

8) Inventory un-intuitiveness.

Reason) You've got your inventory right? equipped items still count towards your backpack limit, just like XI granted, but with other issues which I'll list next, it sucks. See, there is no sort method at all. Your inventory is populated in the order that things came into your inventory. So, you go out, start questing / killing, get drops, get into surplus, then go to town to sell (again, menu stupidity), and pick up a new main weapon/item to start leveling another class. That item you just purchased is now at the bottom of your list, with whatever you didn't sell in between your other equipment and the new stuff you purchased. Granted, I'm not sure if they've added a sort option in, I'm not going to go try and see, and with the way they've pushed patches out, I highly doubt it. While you're out killing things, you can barely see when something gets dropped, and that's not the only problem ... see when something drops, even while solo, it goes to a loot pool. Gradually it'll get to your inventory, but you won't know it until it may be too late... you may get some great item dropped off a mob, not notice it, then see a message saying "not enough room, item UberSexy lost" later on down the line. Oh, that loot pool? yea it's not a true pool. While partied up if you kill something, and it drops something, it's assigned to someone's pool, it may not be your pool, and when you go to look at the pool, you only see yours, not everyone that's in the party.

9) No safe

Yea, you read right, there's no house for you to go store your stuff you're not using right now. So if you're like me and like mages, you're then left with having to pick up a gathering class (again, menu driven to harvest nodes LOL). So, you gather all this nifty stuff! What are you going to do with it? Craft it up? Sell it on the AH ... no, you can't do that, they're not doing AH in this at all...more on this later. Well, you best craft with it, or sell it to a vendor, or find someone in your linkshell that is using that item and give/sell it to them. Oh, you could stick it on your rented retainer person to sell it, or hold it, but that's another issue LOL. With 80 slots in your backpack (at least in beta ... who's to know, that may be the max whenever you do quests to increase it's size) you run out of room real quickly.

10) Rented retainer

What's a retainer you may ask?? Well, in beta, they're free to 'rent', but in live I'm sure it'll cost some money. These retainers can hold a limited amount of items, and you can set up only 8 of those items to sell stuff for you. There's market wards (which is menu driven to get into from a specific part of the city) where your retainer can be summoned to give items to, and set up a bazaar. This is pretty much a money sink for you to just constantly have a money drain. If your stuff doesn't sell, you still have to pay for the retainer I'm sure.

11) No Auction House

Yea, no auction house, they're not interested in it. They said they'll possibly make an option to search the market ward's retainers that have bazaars, but that's not going to be very good. See, every item may have different materials that were used to make it ... so you may have a desire to get a woolen robe for it's stats, but there's going to be like 10+ versions of that same named robe, just because one may be a different color due to the materials that were used.

12) No inspect

Yea, that's another thing we can thank the JP's for. They considered 'inspecting' to be rude in their culture. So, rather than just take out the information sent to the player saying 'so and so is inspecting you', they took out the option to inspect all together. There were some people that were walking around in an awesome looking robe, but we had no idea what the name of it was, or where to get it ... and go figure, they were JP players, so they didn't understand our questions as to where to get one of our own.

13) Alpha goodness

What?!?!? See, the beta forums had in them the alpha version threads for issues. What was in them? many things that are still in being complained about. Of course, the menu-for-everything is top of the list for many. MP regen is another. Loot pool is yet another. AH is another. Crafting is another. Yea, pretty much everything I'm complaining about in this post? yea, it was bitched about in alpha. Other things: Mouse... it's software, so it's laggy as all heck. Keyboard? you can't configure it at all, so you're stuck with what they give you for layout. Got a controller? great, you can configure every button on that no problem.

With all these things, it's clear to see, that even though the game will be released by many months on the PC before they release it for the PS3, it is being made for the consoles, or they want you to go out and get a controller regardless. There are other issues that I have with the game, but I'm tired of complaining. So, on to good things?

Bah, I've not got any good things going on it seems... I mean, I just sat here for 5 minutes trying to think of something good that I could write about for a bit to counteract the rant above...Ok, perhaps just one thing: My gold-making skills in WoW have not decreased at all. I think I might make a blog post and tag it for people to see easily and make use of it. Yea, I think I'll do that tomorrow?