Gold Update

Last month, I made sure to take note of my gold totals after buying July's token to see what sort of income I really have on a monthly basis. I was basically starting from 407k gold.

Backpacks from this month:

Cres

Piffle

Lak

Grand total around 546,000! Honestly, I am surprised. I was not expecting to have made that much; in fact, I had been planning to tell you why I had hardly made any money!

Three reasons I was expecting to not have made much money:

1) The Salvage Yard was nerfed. Basically, it was too good, so they decreased the likelihood of getting a crate and reduced what those crates contain. The Blue explanation is pretty awesome.

2) "Reduced the frequency of high-value gold missions appearing across multiple characters." Yup. They nerfed the gold generating missions for your garrison followers, too!

3) New crafting upgrades. So this one is interesting. 6.2 added two new levels up upgrades for the crafted gear. These recipes call for Felblight, easily obtainable if you kill Kazzak each week; 30 for the lower upgrade (Mighty), 60 for the highest (Savage). They also call for a similar number of [Particular Type] Essence. At ~400 per Felblight and ~40 for each essence, you're looking at about 13k and 26k in mats, respectively. This does not factor in the number of profession mats you need though (175 for the lower, 350 for the higher). At ~15 gold per mat, you're now looking at ~16k and ~32k ...

Which is to say, fairly expensive. And this is all before realizing that only 2-3 of those upgrades are ever in the AH (on my server, at least) so people are free to make crazy markups if they like. This leads to a big problem: nobody ever buys them.

I had more than enough mats lying around, so I made some. In fact, I made one Mighty of every profession I have and two Savages for my Jewelcrafting/Inscription. I've got over 100,000 gold tied up in upgrades that I can't sell. Yet the price of simply creating the gear itself has plummeted so far that not having at least one upgrade in the AH doesn't make sense.

So yea, if those upgrades ever sell I will be sitting pretty.

So ... that's a little different.

With news of 6.1 approaching, I had begun saving up the books it usually takes to acquire crafting recipes. You can create 1 a day, the bigger recipes take 5. To be safe, I had saved up 10 of each, just in case they increased the price for this last recipe.

I logged in late last night, planning on making some upgrades, throwing them on the AH, and going to bed. Imagine my surprise when none of the vendors actually had any new recipes. To Google I went, wondering what I was missing.

Turns out that the only way to get the new recipes is from a vendor that randomly shows up in your Garrison's main hall. One profession shows up each day for the entire server - yesterday was Tailoring, today is Leatherworking. But that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to have that vendor! There are other NPCs that offer daily quests that can show up instead. If you don't have the profession vendor, you can join someone else's garrison and get the recipe that way. I guess this is Blizzard's way of making sure people are visiting other people's garrisons? I missed the Tailoring vendor last night so that's unfortunate. But I was able to make two Leatherworking upgrades this morning and put them in the AH - the very first two in there! I way overpriced them ... I will be shocked if they sell.

On a more positive note, Monday I hit 40 wins in Rated Battlegrounds for the season. I was greeted by this mail:

I'm Revered! FEAR ME!

Which, of course meant that it was time for some more selfies!

What a sexy little skeleton horse.

Brace yourself - 6.1 is coming

6.1 is scheduled to be released tomorrow. I haven't read through the patch notes too closely, but one thing I know that is happening is that they are adding a thid upgrade for the profession-created items. I am betting that this will be a popular selling item at least for a short while after the patch, as people try to get their items upgraded to the highest possible iLvl.

The current upgrades were once a great way to make money, but the demand has been decreasing, lowering the price from the 25-30k price range to the 15-20k price range. I have been saving my profession generated materials for a while now in anticipation of this release, hoping to take advantage of the buying frenzy. According to wowhead, the materials for these new upgrades will be:

200 Profession Materials
30 Savage Blood
40 Sorcerous Element

It's probably too late at this point if you haven't been saving up your materials, but the price might remain elevated for another week or two. Additionally, I am betting the price of Savage Blood sees a temporary bump in price as people buy them up to craft the new upgrades. The cost of Savage Blood has been between 5-600 gold recently. After the short term bump though, this will likely decrease even more though, as they are adding more ways to generate them.

Making the most of your professions

Every day you can transform raw materials into your profession's crafting materials. In your garrison profession building, you can submit similar raw materials as work orders, which are then converted into crafting materials as well.

The question is, what do you do with the crafting materials?

Most of the professions offer 3 choices:

1)  Use 100 to create an epic piece of gear (iLvl 645). These generally do not require too many other mats and sell for anywhere between 2500-5500 gold. When WoD first came out they were selling for much more, but the market is saturated and so the price is depressed.

2) Use 150 to create an upgrade for the epic gear. Most of the armor gets upgraded from 645 to 655, but trinkets get bumped up to 670, I believe. These patters require 15 Savage Blood and 30 Sorcerous [Element changes based on recipe], in addition to the Profession's crafting mats. Savage Bloods can be bought in your garrison for 50 Primal Spirits (gotten from gathering skills as well as the level 3 Barn) and generally sell for 700-800 gold on the Auction House. The Sorcerous materials are generated by work orders at your profession building and sell from anywhere between 10-70 gold each, depending on the element.

3) Use 200 to create the higher level upgrade for the epic gear. Not sure what it goes to, 665 or 670. These patterns also require 15 Savage Blood and 40 Sorcerous materials.

So what's the best choice? In #1, the crafting materials are worth ~25-55 gold each. In #2 and #3, you have to (potentially) spend gold on the Savage Blood (~11-12,000) and the Sorcerous matierals (1200-2800). So you're if you're spending somewhere around 14,000 gold to even produce the Upgrade, then how much do they sell for?

I have found that the upgrades from #2 and #3 generally go for between 20,000-30,000 gold in the Auction House, depending on what profession it is. I've sold a couple Inscription upgrades for the higher end of that, but there were a lot of Leatherworking upgrades in the AH over the weekend so that one only went for 20,000.

Even considering 14,000 gold to produce the upgrades, you're talking between 6-16,000 gold profit. If you only make 6,000 then you're looking at a value of 40 gold per Crafting Mat for the #2 upgrade and 30 for the #3 upgrade - this is still higher than the value of the lower end of gear. On the higher end though, you're getting 80-107 gold per crafting mat. That's anywhere from 2-4 times as much profit - a massive difference!

Obviously you should do a little research beforehand in case prices of the materials change drastically at some point, but I think the Upgrade materials are the way to go.

Well alright then!

I finally got my mage far enough along that I can have a second small building in my garrison. Since he's actually got Inscription, I went with the inscription hut. And what did I discover?

That the weapon I had taken up Blacksmithing for, at the expense of Jewelcrafting, was actually made by Inscription after all!