What I buy (and sell)

*Warning, picture intensive*

*names have been blurred for their privacy*

I've been hectic raiding this past couple of days, but now that we're just sitting on bosses and I rarely do 10 man I'll take the time to get back to gold making! The plate runed orb crafted belt is looking pretty good.

This week, due to a lack of time on my part, I focused on the highest profit to item slot markets, and you can see the results as follows!

My best haul of the week was spying a lvl 80 Ulduar drop recipe on the Auction House for a pretty low price of 2500 gold. Knowing that it was a steal, and taking a gamble, I bought it out immediately and waited a day before relisting it back on the Auction house for 5500 gold.

You can see how it turned out here:




In effect, that was 2725 gold just sitting by the Auction House and mailbox for not even a minute of going through the motions!

While I do not recommend beginners to do this, existing players with big pockets would be interested in this particular avenue of opportunity.

Most recipes will go through similarly well, but keep in mind that some recipes do not provide that good a slot item for certain class and specs, and that will devalue them in the time to come.

My most important advice if you're in this line, is that, you really need to sell them fast and quickly, even if it means taking a small cut in profits. The recipe drop of Ulduar can be quite volatile, and there are raiders and puggers out there wanting to make a quick buck.

Project: Emblem of Conquest source tables

This particular post will be consistently updated, so feel free to email me or post a comment if you've downed a particular boss and received some information.

Update: More info on Iron Council
Update: Iron Council is also optional
And I also forgot to mention, IC is the only place you can start Algalon unlock quest chain, you must do it on any hard mode for a chance of the quest item dropping.

As some people have asked, so shall you receive!

I've compiled the following Conquest badges table from just about everywhere, but its sort of incomplete. Its goal is to give you a guide to roughly the minimum and maximum conquest emblems you're likely to feasibly get each week!

We'll start off with the easy ones.

In ulduar, there are 14 bosses, one of which is Algalon which I shall totally ignore, since the 10 man version has only been killed once, and No One not even ensida has been able to take out the 25 man Algalon yet. I don't see us mortals accomplishing that feat anytime soon! :D

Of the others, there are 9 hard modes.
The bosses without hard modes are Auriaya, Razorscale, Kologarn and Ignis, of which they drop 1 Emblem of Conquest each on Heroic-25 and 1 Emblem of Valor each on Normal-10

25 hard modes:

In general, each boss will drop 1 EoC on normal mode

Flame Leviathan: 1 EoC
1 up = 2 EoC
3 up = 3 EoC (suspected)

the 1 tower up hard mode is probably the easy 2 conquest badges you won't want to lose. If you need a guide, you can check mine for how to deal with flame leviathan here.

XT: 1 EoC
Hard mode: 2 EoC

Iron Council: 1 EoC
Doing hard modes will bump EoC drops to 2

Freya: 1 EoC
3 adds each give 1 EoC for a total of 4 EoC
If your guild is just starting out but have managed to clear this far, this is another boss to take note of. Its a pretty easy 4 EoC for a normal boss fight.
The hard mode is Sartharion-esque and as far as I know does not give any more EoC. If you're hitting sunday or monday and are stuck on the other keepers, just do a +0 Freya for the easy 4 badges.

The other 3 keepers will drop an EoC each, their hard modes are probably the more challenging ones.

Followed by Vezax and Yogg Saron, who also have hard modes, but also drop 1 EoC each. I've not tried their hard modes.

Thus for a normal guild, you'll want to do both Flame Leviathan and Freya for an easy 2+4 Emblems of Conquest.

Following which you'll get an extra
3 EoC: XT, Kolo, IC,
5 EoC: XT, Kolo, IC, Razor(optional), Ignis(optional)
7 EoC: XT, Kolo, IC, Razor(opt), Ignis(opt), Hodir, Thorim

10 EoC: the above + Mimi, Vezax and Yogg

so the range would be about 5 to 13 EoC from hard mode 25s a week.
If your guild has progressed well, it would get 16 EoC + a week.

Then you'll want to do Emalon for the freebie 2 Conquests

You probably won't be able to break 20 EoC a week with just the above however, so you'll probably have to do the Normal-10 modes for more EoC

Its pretty good to do the hard modes since they are the only way you'll see runed orbs and EoC drop in the 10 man versions.

Flame Leviathan 1 Tower Up
You simply must do this one, its the easiest 2 EoC you'll ever see.
Don't waste your Ulduar 10 save without getting this down.

XT hard
Drops 1 EoC I believe, its easier now

IC hard
Never tried it, but should drop at least 1 EoC

Freya Hard
Just do with 1 up, my friend told me there was either a bug or intention, that when you do with 3 up, you'll still only get 1 EoC and 3 EoV.

Thorim, Hodir, Mimi, Vezax, Yogg
Very likely 1 EoC each

With the 10 man modes, you'll probably one to rush out a FL-1up clear before tuesdays to get that 2 EoC out, if you're running with a good team though you'll probably pick up about 5-8 extra EoC for a total range of 7-10 extra EoCs on top of your 25 man ones.

Feel free to correct me wherever I have wrong information or a typo elsewhere.

For those with Alts, if you play it right, you can end up with 6-9 emblems for an undergeared lvl 80 toon. Just do Emalon, FL 10 and 25, as well as buy a slot from any guild/pug that reaches Freya for the 3 Adds.

If you're looking to purchase stuff with EoCs:
18 - Runed Orb
(they'll be the only way to liquidate EoC a few months down the road)
16 - Necks
23 - Waist, Gloves
32 - Legs
58 - Conquest Heads and Chest

Pvp Gear:
46 - Shoulders and Gloves
58 - Chest Legs and Head

Buying and selling: Things to note when selling bracers

Now that ulduar is out, more and more people are desperately liquidating their purplish assets before they drop drastically in value. I've seen several more opportunities, and had a few more questions directed my way. One of the more common ones is the prices the bracers should go for.

For people looking to sell their emblems of valor, if you have 60 of those then the next logical choice would be to convert them to bracers and sell them. As it is currently, I discourage the conversion to either frozen orbs or scarlet rubies if you have more than 60 emblems, as while the bracers will now embark on a process of devaluation, the decrease in price is not so sharp as to be less then the next highest alternative cost. That is, converting 60 Emblems of Valor into 60 Emblems of Heroism and following that into 6 scarlet rubies.

At least for the next two weeks, I do not expect the EoV BoE bracers to fall below 2 x the price of 6 Scarlet rubies/frozen orb (whichever is higher). That is, a good ballpark in which you should sell your bracers at would be.

Let's just call the price of a cut/uncut scarlet ruby/frozen orb a liquidating unit, where we take the value of whichever one of those three end products at its highest value.
On Medivh, that would be about 85 gold for a cut gem.

Minimum (for quick sell) = 9 x liquidating unit
which would be 765 gold, the lowest price I would sell at on medivh
at least for the next few days

Maximum price = 12 x liquidating unit
which is 1020 gold
If I can sell a bracer at around +/- 100 gold of this sum then I would consider it to have been a good trade.

Some of you might wonder why I use 9 units instead of exactly 6. Well, you must consider that if you try to sell say six runed scarlet rubies, you risk the chance of flooding the market, causing you to relist the same product several times, or even worse, deflating the value of that particular gem market. Furthermore, converting all the emblems to gems and so on and so forth would in real like curtail a processing charge. A rough estimate of all these will give you the 50% markup on prices I provided above.

An idea to keep in mind is that market price is not the intrinsic value of the item, but the aggregate price in which a purchaser is willing to pay for it.

If you're reading this page because you intend to buy bracers to jumpstart your ulduar career, and you wish to see how an equitable price for the bracers can be calculated, then you can factor the above breakdown into your considerations. If I were to buy bracers in these few days however, I would seek to purchase them at at most 6 x liquidating units, as I believe that is the minimum floor level the bracers will drop to for the next 4-6 weeks. That is, for medivh, 510 gold.

The key component in all these trades however, is that you must act fast, be it in buying or selling. Everytime a new patch breaks, markets has never failed to fluctuate violently, and you'll see prices go up and down to incredible highs and lows. The best way is to ride the wave as fast as you can, and retreat early to safeguard your profits. I hope that answers the emails I receieved :D

Cheers! Ulduar in 12 hours!!!

I'll have to eat my words

I was wrong, Ulduar is coming out tomorrow.

Excitement!!

To buy or not to buy, pre-ulduar

When I logged in today, I had a flurry of guildies whispering me about tomorrow's maintenance.
For the record, I do not believe the patch will take place tomorrow.
Although if it does, I'll be logging into blogger and editing this statement. (joking :D)

There are two questions that are probably floating around out there, so I might as well address them now before the patch, and then copy and paste from my post into gchat/msn later :D

1) While 3.1 will most probably not drop tomorrow, 14th April, tuesday, might herald the end of season 5. I personally think blizzard will probably delay season 5 till a week after, or at the very least initiate freezes of one sort of the other. Do note that while points and rating are being reset, honor and hidden ratings will carry over.

What this means is that, you can probably expect less demand for pvp oriented enchants and gems and slot augmentations. Basically, anything that has the word resilience in it! That goes for crafted pvp gear too! If you still have those, try to limit your production of those goods. For me, I'm holding back my resilience gems and scrolls until at least one week after season 5 ends, so that when season 6 begins, a new flood of buyers will come in and snap up the augments at elevated prices.

2) My friends have been noticing that BoE epics from 3.0x have been dropping sharply in price with all the doomsayers forecasting the bombing of prices post-ulduar. While I do not doubt that prices will drop, it will not have such a rapid decrease as some people seem to think. In this confusion I've snapped up excellent deals like a surge needle ring for 70% of usual prices, I purchased it for 5500 gold and sold it around 5 minutes later for 7200 gold. The same went for a nobles deck, where I purchased all 8 cards for 4200 gold and sold it back to the market as a deck for 6000. Those are some of the items you can watch for on your server, as they are ilvl 213 epics that will still retain their value even into ulduar. If you have the money to throw, I recommend you pick them up once they hit 60-70% of their usual price, and then try to push them back into the market as fast as you can. Another good item would be arcanic tramplers or boots of impetuous ideals. Certain interesting ones would be Je'Tze Bell and Tears of Bitter anguish, but I would advise greater caution when dealing with those.

5 items you need to sell before 3.1 (for BoE epics)

While still relevant, this post is slightly outdated. If you wish to read about patch 3.2 preparation, you can click here.

With the ulduar patch coming in a few weeks now, I've been asked by several people on which items to sell while they still can. Today I'll cover the bind on equip gear, since these are the items that costs anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand gold. Some of you probably have some in your bank, or you have to find some way to liquidate your guild bank before patch hits. Today's post will show you 6 items you need to release back into the market before 3.1 hits.

Basically, the items that will be the worst hit will be those that have an immediate BoE ilvl 226 or ilvl 219 upgrade from ulduar. People looking to gear up their mains or alts, will hold off buying the following items, since it would be more cost efficient to purchase the higher item-valued slot piece instead of buying a ilvl 200 item only to replace it a few days later.

Another criteria for selection, is the exclusion of any future ilvl 226 BoEs that require runed orbs. Requiring 15 Emblems of Conquest, runed orbs will likely be an expensive commodity for quite a few weeks to a few months following patch release. Each crafted BoE will require about 5-6 runed orbs, which would be about 90 emblems. That would be almost enough to buy t8.5 head and chest piece. As such, I highly doubt that runed orbs will reach equilibrium prices anytime soon and will remain overpriced and expensive.

While some of the following items are still a decent placeholder for a newly minted 80 starting to gear up, come 3.1 there will be a disparity between these epics and the highest tier ilvl available, seriously devaluing the amount by which you can sell them for.

Thus, without further ado, here are the items that needs to go into someone else's inventory:

1) Anything that goes into the wrist slot
That is, basically any Emblem of Valor bracers that you have.
The key reason you should sell them off now, is because
a) more and more people now know that there is no further use for valor tokens, and the next thought that goes through their mind will be to convert them to bracers and sell it off, increasing your competition. And to make it worse, they will be willing to sell them at any price, driving it down to perhaps 500-800 gold each.
b) the week ulduar comes out, guilds will rush through ulduar-10 to ensure extra gearing up of their raiders, not to mention a large army of people waiting to bite their teeth into ulduar through pugs or small guilds. Ulduar-10 drops a plethora of ilvl 219 bracers, meaning that people gearing for bracers will be looking at the ilvl 219 wrist slots, and not your EoV bracers.
For a more detailed run-up of the bracers, check out my previous post.

2) Jewelcrafting:

Titanium Impact choker will be replaced by
-Nymph Heart Charm

and Titanium Earthguard Ring by
-Signet of the Earthshaker
although druids might still go for the Jewelcrafting ring

3) Tailoring:
Deathchill Cloak, Wispcloak

Will be replaced by
-Asimov's Drape

4) Blacksmithing

Spiked Titansteel Helm, sell it before
Iron Riveted War Helm appears on the AH

and the same goes for Titansteel Shield Wall
before people go for the ulduar 25 shield Northern Barrier

5) Leatherworking:

Get rid of Giantmaim Legguards, since Darkcore Leggings will be dropping in ulduar 25


With this list in hand, its time to hit the AH and trade channel and sell them off before their prices depreciate!

Breaking News: ilvl 219 EoV

I just found several shocking statements by the blues regarding EoVs on the blue tracker

You can read the blue tracker here and here
You might have to scroll down a bit

Certain key points can be derived

-Ulduar10 drops different colored EoVs
-Nothing besides relics/totems/idol/sigils will be added to the EoV vendor
-Blizzard doesn't "want piling up a bunch of emblems now to give a big advantage when a patch launches where someone buys a set of gear from the beginning."
-Which means, you won't be able to buy Tier8 tokens with EoV if things remain as they are until patch day!

What does this mean for you?

Sell your EoV bracers! Now! Yesterday!
Sell them while they still fetch anywhere from 1k to 3k!!!

Well that is, it depends on whether you still have any use for Emblems of Valor before Ulduar hits. So before I begin making premature decisions, here are still some last few things (besides selling the bracers) one could buy with it:
1) Off-spec Gear
2) PvP Gear
3) Tier tokens and remaining items for mainspec Gear

Why shouldn't one start liquidating their EoV stock?
1) You plan to change your spec immediately, or when ulduar comes out.
2) You've been pvping, and you just need that one or two more set pieces to get the bonus
3) You've only started raiding recently, or you've been really unlucky, and you really need that gear upgrade.
For those reasons, you might indeed make a better investment in gear upgrades than in liquidating your stock.

If you don't belong in the above categories, or unsure of where you are, you might then want to consider the following.
1) If you have an offspec, but you don't think you'll be using it for serious raiding anytime soon. Go ahead and sell your 60 badges, ulduar 10 and 25 will be dropping plenty of gear, and both versions will drop gear that are half a tier to a tier better than whatever offspec gear you can get from the vendor now.
2) If you're more pvp oriented, or you intend to start soon, just sell. Arena season has ended for now, although you can still earn and spend points for another week or so. (Do correct me! I have not really been keeping up with season 5) The new ulduar 10 badges can still be used for hateful gear. But more importantly, Ulduar 25 conquest badges can purchase Deadly gear. If you have yet to start pvping intensively, wait for ulduar, sell your badges now while they still fetch a pretty price.
3) If you have gear upgrades from the vendor still, but they are more of sidegrades to minor upgrades. Just go and sell your bracers, Ulduar is a few weeks away, and most of what you have now will be upgraded the raid you attend right after patch drops.

And if you're hesitating, here's why you should start selling now
a) There will be no further use for your emblems, you cannot buy tier 8 with it, so there is no point in saving it up to get instant upgrades the day 3.1 hits live.
b) The only way to liquidate EoV pre and post patch as a result, will be to buy these BoE bracers and sell. However, there will be a huge difference in the price they can fetch pre and post patch. Currently, the ilvl 213 Bind on Equip wrist gear are decent to best possible gear slots for a great many classes and specs, and are pretty much the BEST bind on equip bracers any class can get. BUT, once 3.1 hits, and the huge horde masses towards ulduar, you'll soon see ilvl 219 bracers hitting the auction house. That is because half the wrist slot drops in 10 man ulduar will be bind on equip, like this and this and this and this. I think you get my point!
The demand for the old ilvl 213 bracers will definitely tank(of the submarine type, not the soak damage kind).

Ultimately, you must make the right decision for yourself.
As for me, you'll find me in trade channel broadcasting "WTS 60 eov bracer, pst"

Cheers!


For those new to the site, you might want to check out my recap of past posts

3.1 low level crafting item feature: Silk Headband

Ah well, Now that April's Fool is over, move along move along :D
That was pretty sharp there, Anon.





As promised, here is another update on twink level crafted items that will come into vogue when Ulduar hits live:

For the previous item feature at warcraftecon, hit here

Today, we'll be taking a look at the silk headband, a white item on live servers.

Silk headband 3.0x
34 Armor
Required level:27
Normal (white) quality

Silk Headband 3.1+
34 Armor
+2 int
+8 Spi
+ 4 crit rating
Required level:27
Uncommon (green) quality

Crafting Materials:
3 bolts of silk cloth
1 fine thread (purchased with a few copper from the tailoring supply vendor)

The difference pre-patch and post-patch are huge!
By adding 8 spirit and 4 crit, it just became the only helm in the 20-29 bracket to give crit rating. There are only two caps better than it an both are blue, one of which is bop and requires farming of gnomeregan, and the other a rare drop that fetches over 50 gold.

In contrast you only require 3 bolts of silk cloth to craft one silk headband, on most servers, this would probably cost 50-60 silver. You could likely resell this back to the twink market at a modest 3-5 g markup. While its nothing spectacular for lvl 80s, it'll help lower level fellows work towards their epic mount with a few minutes work a day listing it up on the AH.

And if worse comes to worse, when everyone is squeezing in the same niche as you, well, you can always mail it for disenchanting, now that its an uncommon quality item!


Check back next time for more lowbie nuggets!
As for the lvl 70s and 80s out there, my next post will cover a gold making opportunity that would be for higher levelled characters

Profession Recipe Goodies in Icecrown!

I was journeying through icecrown hitting up the quests from the recalcitrant death knights and devout argent crusaders, when all of a sudden I espied a recipe drop from one of the mobs I demolished. The mob skeletal runesmith, had just dropped Enchant cloak - Superior Fire Resistance.

It was just the thing I was looking for, a handy cloak enchant in preparation for Sartharion 3 drakes. An extra 20 fire resist to a cloak slot that does not have much in the way of useful enchants is certainly a nice bonus. After wowheading it though, I realize that this discovery was more than just a PvE boost, but an opportunity to make a few hundred more gold before WoW enters 3.1 Ulduar.

Unlike other Bind on Pickup alchemy and leatherworking drops from the same mobs, this recipe can actually be traded and placed on the auction house, although if you have one in your inventory the recipe will not drop again for you. What you can do is to send the enchant recipe to an alt, who will then place it on the AH. It currently looks to go from 200-400 gold depending on market saturation.

This is one way to stock up on this enchant recipe for enchanters, which I believe will increase in importance during Ulduar. A cursory view of the bosses in ulduar shows us several bosses that would require elemental resistances:

Hodir's Frozen Blows, it does 40,000 raw frost damage that definitely requires frost resistance for mitigation. Tanks will certainly want to top up their slightly outdated ilvl 213 frost resist gear with extra frost resist enchants. The recipe can be obtained from the damned apothecarists.

Fire Resist is currently still useful for tanks doing Sartharion with 3 drakes, and might also come in play on the hard mode of Ignis the firestarter.

Nature Resist from the cult alchemist, might be useful on the freyja fight although I am still unclear as to whether nature resistance would be required.

Finally, Shadow resistance from the cultist shard watcher, would very probably in fights against bosses dishing out shadow damage, notably Yogg-Saron. Certain bosses from the ptr also appear to deal hefty amounts of shadow damage.

A few weeks after Ulduar is released, hard core raiders will be moving into more challenging modes of the encounters, and would start doing such specialised regearing and customization. This period of time would be ideal to liquidate the stock of Enchanting Recipes. At the very least, once would also be able to pick up fur lining or protection recipes if they were also leatherworkers or alchemists in addition to enchanting while farming for those recipes.