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WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-Up

Hello! Welcome to the 118th edition of the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up!

My name is Samadan and I am a content creator focusing on making gold using Professions and TSM. I have a number of guides over on YouTube and I also stream my adventures on Twitch. If you want to see previous articles, they are all archived here on wowhead.com

Legacy Loot Rules Coming to Legion

This was a surprise announcement. Normally, it’s not until the next expansion is out, but this comes as very welcome news to Transmog collectors and those that like to collect All The Things. Not to mention, these could become very lucrative raw gold farms!

Blizzard

With scheduled weekly maintenance the week of March 31, we’re enabling Legacy loot rules in Legion raids and dungeons.

We’re reached that point in an expansion where the content from the previous expansion no longer requires a full group, and the rewards are primarily sought by transmog collectors. With this change, Legion raid and dungeon encounters will drop a fixed quantity of class-agnostic loot. Today, if you and one other player enter Emerald Nightmare on Mythic difficulty and kill Nythendra, it’s unlikely that you’ll receive any loot, since drop rates normally scale to the number of players. After this change, Nythendra will always drop 5 items from her loot table, regardless of your group size.

Dungeons and many of the lower-difficulty raid bosses in Legion are already soloable by well-equipped Battle for Azeroth characters, though some bosses, especially on Mythic difficulty, may still require you to bring a few friends. Nonetheless, this should amount to a great increase in the availability of Legion transmog gear.

See you there!

This may well affect the market of many Legion items as there will be a greater interest in running these dungeons. I expect the prices of Legion enchanting mats to drop as the supply rises. There will be a lot more BoE greens hitting the market, so there is potential to snap up some bargains for your collection or to turn into a profit disenchanting or posting higher. However, with a flooded market, the margins may be slim.

Komlit has released a video discussing the raw gold potential, at this stage it’s still speculation , but it will be interesting to see what comes out as the top dungeon to farm.

Gold Making Lessons

u/ashaex has written a wonderful guide with The Things I Learned in my Journey to Longboi ..

Ash’s Rules to Gold Making:

Do what’s fun! If I hate doing it, I’m not going to do it, no matter how lucrative it may be.

This is the #1 rule for me; it trumps everything else! I’m pretty sure any goblin will tell you that there are a variety of ways to make gold in the game, so if you don’t find one thing fun, try other things. Chances are you’ll find something you enjoy. I mentioned that I didn’t enjoy sitting in front of the AH all day, but I don’t hate it. I spend as much time as I need in front of it, then do something else. I don’t find farming all that enjoyable, but don’t mind it every so often, especially if I’m gathering multiple needed materials at once, which leads me to:

2) Time > Money.

When possible, combine multiple farms at once. I’m on a medium pop server, and often mats from the old world (well, current content, too) will be outrageously expensive. But a quick run through ICC or Bastion of Twilight can help keep me restocked for weeks. I’ll make negligible raw gold, but when I take my tailor/enchanter on raids like this, I can stock up on both cloth & raw enchant materials (DEing what gives me those I need, selling the rest for raw gold, but most of the things I end up DEing). Also, it’s easy to turn cloth into enchanting mats no matter what xpac, so that’s always handy. But if it’s possible to make a profit by just buying the mats off the AH, that is always superior than farming to me, as any time I farm, I’m losing gold per hour. A stocked AH is still the fastest way to obtain mats. Of course, if I decide that I want to run an old raid because it’s fun, well, rule #1 trumps rule #2.

3) Hedge your bets!

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that nobody has a 100% success rate with flipping stuff on the AH. During my early stretches, I found myself with more & more herbs that I couldn’t get rid of due to how saturated the market was becoming. So I decided that, instead of just taking a big loss on the mats, I would turn them into profit another way: I leveled up Alchemy & Inscription. By this point, I was getting more & more comfortable with the way TSM did crafting, and boy did both things turn out to be quite lucrative. Professions became my bread & butter for gold making… Except when people are constantly resetting the mat markets! But there’s an easy solution: IF mats are so high that you can’t make a profit with your profession, sell the mats. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched herbs get reset on my server (particularly Zin’athid), rendering me unable to make potions & flasks for days or even weeks (thank you, Silas proc). I don’t sweat it, though, and just jump on the reset train and sell herbs while they’re high. Despite everything I sell from every area, anchor weed remains my most profitable item because it gets reset consistently, and people still buy it.

4) Develop a routine and stick to it, but don’t feel bound to it.

You do everything faster (remember rule #2?) when you get into a routine. Log the same characters in the same order, do your daily transmutes and/or checkups (garrison stuff if you have those built, for example). Do this to speed up your daily activities, but if it becomes to feel like a grind, or you start to dread something, mix it up just a little. Remember, rule #1 trumps everything.

5) Diversity. Don’t depend on just one thing for your empire. Like many of you, I was really nervous about the AH crash when 8.3 came out, as by then, professions had become my goto for gold making. I felt like my gold empire had stopped. I did have a ton of alts, however, with access to a ton of old raids to farm for raw gold. Yes, I still run old raids for raw gold, though usually I only do LFRs on a couple of toons. Even doing this, I have more than one purpose (trying to get that mind on my dreanor money achievement for my garrison, for example).

Even if the AH is the main source of your gold, and it probably is, you want to be in a variety of markets. People will tank some markets, but if you wait it out, that market will typically come back to a good spot. In the mean time, have other markets you can get well off. I sell enchants, bags, contracts, glyphs, potions, flasks, and a tiny, tiny amount of transmog (it sells egregiously slow for me, but does sell). I also still make a ton of gold off of the mission table, as it provides me with augment runes (2nd best selling thing after anchor weed for me; it’s honestly gotten better in 8.3 than it was before), mana pearls to turn into veiled crystals, and yeah, even a 203 gold mission will add up over time if you’re doing it on 8 or 9 toons! I still do flips and soft resets on the AH, but only for things I understand well and have time to dedicate to.

6) Listen to other goblins… and ignore them, too.

There is definitely a ton of great information available to goblins on this board and on youtube. Soak it up. But be careful – some people will try and convince you that things simply won’t work. Just remember that every server and market on that server is unique. What doesn’t work for someone on their server might work for you on yours. I have legit read that you can’t make gold, or make it quickly, on a medium pop server, but I just made 5 million in less than 4 months playing 2-4 hours a day. Just be smart and try to separate the good advice from the bad; most of it is well intentioned, at least here, I feel. This was my intention, anyway.

If you made it this far, thank you for indulging me. Hopefully I said one thing that might help you; if nothing else, thank you for your help. I read a ton here and have learned many things from many of you!

Sell on!

Congratulations Ash on reaching your goal and thankyou for sharing your journey with the gold making community. It follows a similar route to my own journey way back when and I can relate to many of the suggestions here. The number one thing here, “do what’s fun” Our time on Azeroth should be as pleasurable as possible, there’s no reason not to be having fun whatever you’re doing. You also showed great restraint not buying the Brutosaur straight away!

Bilis’s Summary on Flipping Commodities

Many were concerned with the new Auction House changes, the use of “Pretty Stacking” and flipping raw materials or commodities to gain some small margin per sale would become obsolete.

Bilis Onyxia has posted on Twitter some very insightful findings …

Commodities flipping seems to work, even without neatstacking! 30 days ago I started on a “new” realm with 100k gold and no items. Since then I’ve been buying and posting commodities once per day.

Here’s how that went:

I’m currently at 62k liquid gold, so you could say I lost 38k – but you gotta spend money to make money.

I had ~971k gold in sales, ~457k or 47% of that was profit. I only paid ~514k for the items that I sold, the remaining gold was spent on deposit fees and items I still own.

I spent ~461k gold on the items that I currently still have in stock, which isn’t too bad considering that I started with only 100k gold.

But even if you value these items that I currently own based on the lowest out of the 4 realm and regional pricesources (DBMarket, DBHistorical, DBRegionMarketAvg, DBRegionHistorical), their combined value is ~870k.

The top 40 items for me based on the total profit I’ve made:

Old content commodities can have *crazy* margins.

Paid 37s per Soy Sauce, sold them for 4,750g/ea.

Summary:

Started with 100k, now after 30 days I’m at 62k liquid with several hundred thousand gold worth of stuff on hand. Made approximately ~457k gold or a little over 2 WoW tokens in profit.

Commodities flipping works. Old content commodities can have insane profit margins!

This is fantastic to see some specific results and thankyou Bilis for sharing your findings. I’m sure many will be interested in looking for items like these to potentially turn to a profit.

What I do is actually fairly straight forward: Every day I search for commodities that are listed well below their usual price. I have groups that contain all BfA and old content commodities with a bunch of shopping operations for that.

Then I just repost everything at the current price – if that price allows me to make some profit. If the price is too low, I match the price of the cheapest auction that is listed at or above my minimum price. My auctions likely won’t sell in those cases, but it frees up space.

My profile essentially does most of the work for me. I share the profile with my patreon supporters, but you should be able to set up a slightly simpler version of this on your own as well, it can be fairly straight forward.

Most importantly it just takes some time/patience!

I highly recommend following Bilis and if you want some highly in-depth TSM profiles for both Retail and Classic like these, please do consider supporting them on Patreon.

Comp Stomp this week

Another reminder if you are looking for Marks of Honor, next week also sees the start of Comp Stomp, the special Battleground vs. AI opponents. Why is this so good? Because for every level 120 character you have, you will get 5 Marks from doing the quest associated with it, plus usually another 3 for the win. Wins are particularly fast and easy against the AI!

What are the Marks of Honor for? Well, you can use them to purchase higher ranks of the Uncanny recipes which are currently selling rather well with all the fresh alts being levelled. If you don’t want to use them for that, then you could always use them to buy legacy PVP gear sets!

So there is lots and lots to do in Azeroth during these crazy times. Please do take care, stay healthy and stay safe!

Further Reading

Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord Server. You can also catch me streaming live on Twitch on Sunday from around 7PM GMT UK Time (2pm Eastern Time) for the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up live on Wowhead.com, or you can tweet your feedback/thoughts via Twitter at @SamadanPlaysWoW

I hope you found this useful and If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do say so in the comments below..

Until next time, Happy Gold Making!