Glory of the Cataclysm Hero

I picked up my long overdue [Reins of the Volcanic Stone Drake] by completing Glory of the Cataclysm Hero this week, as the silver lining on a cancelled raid. Finding guests when we are a couple down for heroic mode content is proving to be very difficult this close to patch 4.3. The following raid night I even had trouble finding a single ranged DPS that was up to the task, so with a third of our week already down we had a romp through four normal bosses, leaving a heroic Beth'tilac this week for a full strength guild group.


If I may digress further, the silver lining on the romp through normal mode bosses was Kalus was able to complete his [Branch of Nordrassil]! You can barely see the shadow tree of life, but he's there, kicking some ass. [Remind me to update with a gallery link to the action shots here]

Meta achievements can be a little painful, as it is difficult enough to schedule 9 hours of raiding per week for 10 or so people... when it comes to a ton of achievements across a bnuch of heroic dungeons, it tends to get a little messy. Fortunately, after a few guildies smashed through a bunch of achievements together quite a while ago, we were able to put together a group to help Jondy and I finish off our missing ones.

500k Gold Milestone and Interview

I finally submitted my interview for the Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame, so head on over and check it out! In the mean time, I've been flipping cubs and managed to move another 100k across to horde while maintaning my 500k balance on Alliance.

I've also given my glyph operation a major overhaul, since the guild bank interface has gone from clumsy to unruly... a great feature for guild masters would be to allow turning off logging of transactions from guild bank tabs. It's not like the armory can provide an out of game interface for that anymore, and the amount of data kept for display in game isn't worth the hassle.

The picture above is from when I first introduced Twitchie the Gnome Warlock, but because he was a glypher, I couldn't show you his face.

Guardian Cubs on Dath'Remar

The [Guardian Cub] is here, and the prices are already plummetting on Dath'Remar.

The cub started off at a modest 25k and fell to 15k almost immediately. The next morning it had hit 11k with a total of 13 cubs available. On day 3, it had hit 7.5k and has slid down to just over 7k.

At this point, I'll be waiting until it is under 5k to pick mine up... How long do you think that will take? Do you think it will even get there?

Update: The Undermine Journal is now updated with data over the last day or so, with the price dipping just under 6k.

October Glyph Sales

Stats:

• Total Glyph Sales: 53,937
• Total Glyphs Sold: 1410
• Average Price: 38g25s

So a very similar haul to last month as I go in to maintenance mode. I'm coming up to 25,000 glyphs since the start of Cataclysm, and have been putting my interview together for the Warcraft Econ Hall of Fame since I recently hit the 500k milestone. Yes, I snuck that in there... 500k, woo! More on that when the interview is up.

Jondayla wins the Booty Bay fishing contest!

Just a few minutes ago, Jondayla won the Boot Bay fishing competition for the achievement Master Angler of Azeroth, leaving only catching that elusive fish for Accomplished Angler and the Salty title.

Since Jondy started down the path of fishing milestones, she has taken the Azerothian fishing community by storm.

I remember my days of trying to fish up [Old Ironjaw], with no luck at all. Jondy on the other hand scooted on down to Orgrimmar just to be diplomatic, and after getting the achievement... decided to cast half a dozen times since she hadn't been ganked yet... and BAM! Wasn't even looking at the screen when [Old Crafty] landed in her bags and the achievement emblazoned her screen! We're not sure... but we estimate about 7 casts... TOTAL.

Jondy has also been running around all over Azeroth completing the newly introduced cooking and fishing dailies in Ironforge and Darnassus. After conclusion of this story, you'll understand why I'm puzzled at her bemoaning RNG for her missing out on the last of her cooking dailies. Jondy announced that her fishing daily in Ironforge was to put Young Ironjaw up on display. We both thought that was kinda cute after my efforts to fish up the old bastard. You guessed it, BAM! [Old Ironjaw] fished up in the same cast as [Young Ironjaw]!

So all but Salty, Jondy has been relaxing of late fishing for a [Dark Herring],

September Glyph Sales

Starting with the stats:

• Total Glyph Sales: 59,204
• Total Glyphs Sold: 1518
• Average Price: 39g

The average price continues to climb, potentially in no small part to a conversation I had with a fellow glypher. As I have mentioned before, a lot of my low priced glyphs are bought by competitors in the glyph market. I make a profit, they attempt to reset the market price, and I make even more coin undercutting the inflated new listing.

Recently I was online when my competitor started to buy up glyphs, so I initiated a chat thanking him for the sales. He immediately recognised me, and asked why I post my glyphs at such low prices. We had a quick chat, and in a lull in the conversation I was naturally AFK milling and missed the conversation resuming. It turns out that my competitor is a fellow blogger, and writes about gold making and glyphs specifically, so was particularly interested in my methodology. He also asked me to refrain from posting in his newly reset market for at least a couple of hours.

I was delighted. I thought, "this stranger is just a friend I haven't met yet". A kindred spirit in the gold making community. So I wrote him a mail explaining, yes, I'd leave reposting until later in the afternoon. I also mentioned that I had a blog myself (that since most of my raiding is now covered in the guild blog) that deals with gold making, and I'd love to swap sites and chat about glyph strategies.

I didn't hear back from my fellow glypher, but it did give me some things to think about. He is willing to buy out cheapish glyphs, just to reset the market for a couple of hours at most. When I say cheapish, based on my costs he sometimes buys glyphs at 5x the cost price. His maximum price is over 300g, so I started to think about how many he would have to sell to make a profit on his initial investment. At less than 10%, I figured that buying out cheap glyphs might just be a reasonably time efficient way of collecting a stockpile of glyphs. No milling, no turning pigments into inks... just browsing for underpriced glyphs for purchase and resale. Certainly the margins are lower, and frustrating if the market doesn't stay reset for long, but finding cheap herbs and milling isn't for everyone.

It's a shame that I didn't get to catch up with my fellow glypher, as I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have guessed my main motivation for approach to glyph selling. I'm very comfortable with the amount of gold I generate in game, and I've accumulated more gold than I could reasonably game. Aside from making enough coin so I can by my 6th 85 alt another pair (or two (yey for dual spec)) of Valor bracers at 5k, my income is far greater than my expenses. Yes, originally I was into glyphs to make a whole bunch of coin, but since Cataclysm...

... I'M ALL ABOUT VOLUME.

Devotees will recall that my goal from the start of Cataclysm was to make 25,000 glyphs inside a year. I was so keen on doing this all by myself, that I expelled all the other inscribers from Twitchie's guild so I could more easily track my progress. Of course, I was devestated when Blizzard dropped the guild achievement down to 2,500 glyphs... but a quick tweak to my processes meant I could easily track my progress myself.

So my pricing really has very little to do with maximising my profits, and all todo with moving large volumes of glyphs. I realised quite early on in glyphing, if you just hit every single profitable glyph, regardless of how fierce the competition the coin just comes flowing in.

The volume is also my motivation for never cancelling glyphs in order to repost. If I want to have the cheapest glyph of each time right now... I just make them all and post new glyphs. The side effect of this approach is that I make glyphs in reasonably large batches, which makes tracking my progress towards the achievement more efficient.

One thing did change after my conversation with my fellow glypher. I raised my ceiling price for posting glyphs from 96g to 296g. If someone can by glyphs at 500% profit to me, and then reliably sell enough at 10 times that price to make it worth their while... why not see how much of that psychotically priced glyph market I can capture? Well in the last month I had 77 glyphs (or 5% of my volume) sell at between 96g and 296g, which I'm going to call bonus monies.

Now into October, I'm back to a 48 hour post cycle since I'm not as active with my daily gold making routine. I've also had the supply of everything aside from whiptail and cinderbloom pretty much dry up, so potions and flasks have taken a dive as well. Fortunately, I've been able to find a reasonable amount of volatile life, and I have plenty of Darkmoon Cards for this months faire... and I'm secretly hoping they distinguish between the reputation earned with the current faire with the new and approved 4.3 faire... that was a lot of epic decks to get two toons over the line to exalted. Finally, the savage leather has all but dried up, so my killing on epic leg patches has too for the time being.

August Glyph Sales

It's that time again, starting with the stats.

• Total Glyph Sales: 110,199
• Total Glyphs Sold: 3737
• Average Price: 29g49s

An absolutely massive month of sales. Excited to be back over 100 glyphs a day and breaking the 100k gold mark for sales. The average price is still climbing, and I'm guessing that is just due to demand since there is an increasing number of significant entities in the market. Yes, that's right... I called them entities. Fellow sentient beings just seems too touchy feely.

The alarming thing about the stats is the volume of gold I'm getting through. Since I'm not yet at the 500k gold mark, I must be spending a whole bunch of extra coin on my alts for 4.2. Which reminds me, introductions to a couple of newly 85 toons is in order. I also had 31.5k sales for [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle] so other sources of income aren't insignificant.

20,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

A full 2,500 glyphs ahead of schedule comes the 20,000 milestone on the road to 25,000 glyphs in a year since Cataclysm launched.

One of the pleasant surprises from milling sooo many herbs is just how long the Darkmoon Cards are remaining profitable. I have just ticked over 400,000 gold in Darkmoon Card sales since the launch of Cataclysm, and on average I'm still able to get at least 100% markup on the cost of creating decks. [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] is still BiS for most casters in the game, and [Darkmoon Card: Tsunami] is a delightfull healing trinket and sells for even more coin. I generally just aim to offload the, "only useful for grabbing an extra hit in Chimaeron" [Darkmoon Card: Earthquake] at cost. The hurricane cards aren't particularly good sellers, with quite variable prices but still a money maker. The cards do make good presents too, and I'm up to over a dozen used for alts, friends and guildies.

Twitchie's Workshop

Rather than explain my workshop as I have done in previous posts, I thought I'd post some screenshots of Twitchie's newly upgraded setup. Firstly, it's all about the satchels. There are 344 unique glyphs in the game, so while all of them aren't profitable to make regularly, the more space the better.

More space! I have a guild bank tab for spill over glyphs. When I relist expired glyphs, I generally only put up two of each profitable glyph, so depending on the volume of sales and fluctuations in price, I will have a lot that go into storage for posting another time.

My second guild bank has recently been converted to ink storage. Despite the complete lack of midnight ink in the picture, it really helps to know what I've got on hand. Right now, the tab is almost empty, as I can't keep up with the current glyph demand. The good news is, prices are going up!

The last tab is for general storage, particularly Darkmoon Cards and spare rare inks and pigments. Anything else BoE is fair game here too, since I have very little space not devoted to glyphs in the bank.

July Glyph Sales

Starting with the stats from July:

• Total Glyph Sales: 51692
• Total Glyphs Sold: 2319
• Average Price: 22g29s

So last month I had a good week off 'active' warcraft. We had friends stay and both Jondy and I took an entire week off raiding. The timing was a little interesting given that it was the second week of patch 4.2, but it was planned far enough in advance that it was worth dipping under our regular 100% attendence.

The average price has remained steady, and I got back into the routine towards the end of the month for some more consistent sales.

I've upgraded my workshop since patch 4.2. Helly kindly made me 10x [Royal Scribe's Satchel] which has given me an extra 40 slots for glyphs. I've also started using the Restock queue in TSM, which adds an extra level of automation for creating high demand glyphs. With both of these improvements, I've decided I'll only need one bank tab for spill over glyphs, converting a second bank tab for ink storage. With the TSM Gathering module, having inks in a guild bank rather than the mail give me better visiblity of my stockpile, leading to fewer restocking errors.

For the first time, I've also been buying herbs direct from a herbalist. I had been cautious about doing this as I really don't enjoy the bargaining process... however after I bought a TON of herbs direct from their trade ad, I thought I have nothing to lose (particularly when they said, "if you need more I can go and farm some"). So I sent my price via in game mail, and was delighted to have several mails chock full of [Whiptail]. So the convenience was worth it, but the added bonus was it was 10% lower than the minimum price I'd seen through the AH in the last few weeks.

For August, I'm back to a 24 hour posting cycle. While I don't like to babysit auctions, I think a 48 cycle was getting a little too long, particularly when TSM Crafting can't tell if my currently listed glyphs are actually the cheapest. I've put in a ticket on Curseforge and with any luck that won't be too hard to implement.

After I heard a chat about collusion in the gem market, I was tempted to whitelist (rather than blacklist) my biggest glyph competitor, but haven't implemented that yet. When you whitelist someone, you never undercut them, but post items at the same price. The theoretical advantage behind doing this to a competitor is that when they cancel and repost (which I never do with glyphs, but many do) they won't cancel the auctions that you have price-matched, because they haven't been undercut, giving you longer exposure in the market at the lowest price. If anyone has any experience with this tactic, let me know in the comments.

June Glyph Sales

Starting with the stats from June:

•     Total Glyph Sales: 72624
•     Total Glyphs Sold: 3331
•     Average Price: 21g80s

The average price of a glyph continues to plummet on Dath'Remar, but I continue to sell more and more glyphs as my process is refined. I'm rarely using more than my bank and one guild bank tab for the stockpile, and usually have around 30k stock on the AH, with a coverage of around 2 of each profitable glyph posted each time I post.

Since patch 4.2, I've been making a killing with leatherworking and jewelcrafting, dwarfing my glyph sales, but I'm looking forward to persisting in the market at least until I've created 25,000 glyphs since Cata.

Cross Faction Frost Biting

 

I snagged Perobas the Bloodthirster for my third rare towards Frostbitten, thanks to a helpful horde hunter, and his faithful crab.

 

May Glyph Sales

Starting with the stats from May:

• Total Glyph Sales: 77375g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 2450
• Average Price: 31g58s

The average price of glyphs has taken a drastic hit, with the number of competitors increasing and at least one that has set a maximum value for glyphs at 40g. Volume is up, but it's taken an extra 25% in sales to still fall short of the 81.8k revenue from April.

Another factor in falling glyph prices is the reduced cost of herbs, with stacks of cinderbloom and stormvine both available at around 20g. Whiptail is still worth milling since it can be found occassionally at around 34g a stack (which is about equivalent for milling purposes).

Finally, a large factor in the average price of glyphs I sell is the volume of glyphs I'm deliberately pumping out. I'm currently still on track to produce 25,000 glyphs in a year, which changes my threshold for how much profit for each glyph I'm prepared to make. Listening to the Power World: Gold podcast the other day Nev from Auction House Addict commented that she concentrates on glyphs that sell for over 100g. When Cataclysm first came out, I too enjoyed a Merry Glyphmass but even then I would pump out glyphs down to the 50g mark just to push as many as possible out.

At this point, I think I've conquered a great strategy for getting a great volume of sales (considering the competition) in the least amount of time. However, I'm wondering if my 48 hr, no cancellations strategy is pushing the price lower than I'd like.

Justice Point purchases for the toon who has everything

So you've been running heroics on many a toon, and very quickly you've run out of gear to spend Justice Points on. If you're anything like me, you now have every conceivable heirloom, even ones that you don't see using in the foreseeable future. What next?

Coin. Twitchie is all about the coin. In the true spirit of, "Time is money, friend" I have broken down the options to the coin value per boss kill. The calculation uses 77 Justice Points per boss (from the guild perk, For Great Justice at level 18).

I wasn't surprised at just how little extra value you get, but I was surprised at just how bad [Maelstrom Crystal]s were.

Naturally the mileage on your server may vary, and these Dath'remar prices are the mean prices for the realm from the Undermine Journal. For the herbs, I nominally guessed the average value of a herb based on middle ground between Cinderbloom and Twilight Jasmine.

Item	JPs	#	Value	Total	$ / Boss
[Greater Celestial Essence]	400	1.00	41.82	41.82	8.05
[Heavenly Shard]	600	1.00	53.47	53.47	6.86
[Maelstrom Crystal]	3750	1.00	236.00	236	4.85
[Savage Leather]	375	5.00	3.36	16.8	3.45
[Elementium Ore]	1000	20.00	1.89	37.8	2.91
[Hypnotic Dust]	100	1.00	2.51	2.51	1.93
[Embersilk Cloth]	1250	20.00	1.46	29.2	1.80
[Satchel of Freshly-Picked Herbs]	1500	20.00	1.40	28	1.44

Deathcharger's Reins

I found something exciting in my Satchel, the other day. [Deathcharger's Reins]! To my surprise one of the few times I solo queued for a random heroic on Zenborg as a healer, I hit the jackpot. Borgthor rarely tanks outside of guild activities, but my newly dinged 85 DK tank Borgelmir has been doing a bunch. It has still been worthwhile, since he's had at least 3 free flasks and some gems in addition to the extra coin.

I also just realised that outside of Twitchie's exploits and the odd piece of mount news, I've posted very little else. Guild raiding is covered on our forum and blog, so feel free to head on over and check it out. At 12/12 and 3 hard modes, we're traveling very well as we hurtle towards patch 4.2 and firelands.

April Glyph Sales

Starting with the stats from April:

• Total Glyph Sales: 81897g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 2030
• Average Price: 40g34s

A 1/3 rise in number sold which was pretty huge. I'm seeing a decline in the average price, with some new competition. While I like to reset the price down to 125g, I have a competitor that thinks 40g is even more reasonable, which could actually be a positive thing for volume.

The most fun looking at the data is the while the addon only picks up the name of the buyer less than half the time, the number of glyphs bought by my competitors is AWESOME. If I make a glyph for 10g, my competitor buys it for 30g (and all the others at that price point), re-lists it at 300g and I undercut and sell more of the same at 125g... it's win, win, win... there just aren't enough wins for that.

Looking ahead to May, things are getting even more cut-throat, and I finally get the TSM gatherer module to tell me what's stored in my guild bank in the crafting window.

10,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

10,057 Glyphs done... and 7,807 to burn in order to satisfy the first guild glyph making achievement come 4.1. Now that Blizzard has decided to reduce the achievement from 25,000 to 2,500 glyphs I'm hoping they have a progressive list of achievements so I can continue on my way to 25,000 glyphs in a year since Cata launched.

I'm pretty happy with my new system, and how easy it is to churn out the glyphs. I have 6 [Bag of Endless Pockets] in my bank, which leaves enough space for a few BoP items and PvP gear (although doubtful I'll ever commit to that grind on a second (let alone third) toon). I have 4 inscribing bags on my toon, one of which stores inks and parchment ready for glyph production. That leaves at least 3 huge bags and the backpack for processing glyphs from the mail box. I also have two guild bank tabs reserved for glyph stock as well.

The beauty of all this storage is that it allows me to produce glyphs very efficiently. Regardless of what I have on the AH, or in storage I can create an entire batch of all the profitable glyphs and get complete coverage of the glyph market. Since I cover the entire market, even after the first few rounds of undercutting (which is pretty brutal with glyphs) I still have a reasonable coverage at the lowest price.

When I re-list glyphs, I just set a maximum number of glyphs to post at the lowest price and anything over that I just whack back in my glyph storage. I will often do a 'top up', and create the extra high demand glyphs that have sold out at this point, and save the mass production for later.

Creating glyphs faster than I can sell them is great for high demand periods. On weekends, I take three trips to the AH, each time taking 3 inscribing bags worth of glyphs, 2 from my bank and one from the guild bank. I can take advantage of the increased demand and post more glyphs without having to make them at the time. At my peak, I've had almost 2000 glyphs listed for a total of over 100,000g worth of glyphs for sale at one time.

The next question is... what to do if there isn't a 25,000 glyph achievement to shoot for? Do I complete the goal I set for myself, or do I scale back production for absolute maximum gold per hour and get reacquainted with some other markets?

March Gylph Sales

Starting with the stats from March:

• Total Glyph Sales: 71404g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 1563
• Average Price: 45g68s

The number sold was up, particularly due to some better results during high demand times. Pulling down 8k gold on a Sunday was a fantastic result. The ability to post more glyphs for the weekend is due to my new processes for handling glyphs, which I'll be posting about for my 10k / 25k milestone for the guild inscribing achievement.

February Glyph Sales

I finally got around to exporting data from MySales and it was great to finally have some hard numbers on my sales in the AH. I finally installed MySales when I started trying to reduce my addon footprint. The behemoth Auctioneer was on the way out, replaced by Auctionator and the precursors to Trade Skill Master. I finally decided to remove beancounter, and loaded up MySales instead.

There are a couple of little limitations for MySales, which don't impact the data too much. Firstly, the date for the sale is always when the coin is collected. For glyphs, that isn't much of an issue, as I tend to collect mail at least once per day if not twice. Enchants that I sell on Zenborg, or the rubbish I try and offload on my little storage toon is a different story. Secondly, the addon doesn't always do a great job of recording the name of the buyer. It is really fun to tally up how much other toons spend on your stuff... particularly your competitors (but that is a story for another post).

So here's some numbers to go with the graph for February.

• Total Glyph Sales: 59302g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 1267
• Average Price: 46g80s

So at over 2k per day, the glyph market is quite healthy.  I think the slump in sales (and subsequent rise) in early February was due to my decision on how to tackle the 25,000 glyph guild achievement inside a year. At this stage the numbers indicate that I'm only selling 60% of the glyphs I'm churning out for the achievement, which is actually a little better than I had anticipated. The best part of the new system is that while I'm creating an excess of glyphs, I'm spending less time doing it and making more gold per hour.

I'm happy with the average price being under 50g. I refuse to sell glyphs for more than 125g, and am often undercutting my competition by as much as 50g (on the rare occasion more). There's just something about going above a 900% markup that doesn't sit well for me. Yes, the glyph market has a stupendous number of items to keep a track of. Yes, at times it can be a little labour intensive (windowed mode woodpecker milling is awesome). Yes, competitors can be ruthless. Yes, glyphs are a one time investment now (and a couple of hundred gold is but a drop in the ocean)... but providing quality glyphs at a reasonable price, is just not that difficult.

I'm pretty excited to look at some of my other markets and have another look at glyphs for March.

Cross-faction Arbitrage Never Looked So Good

 

A big shout out to all my Hordies who have been supplying the Alliance with Volatile Life and Twilight Jasmine at 66% and 35% of their (Alliance) market value respectively.

Initially I was completely disinterested in stepping over to the Horde side to help make coin purely because it seemed messy, risky and time consuming. The first few times I moved coin across to Horde, I used the neutral auction house and just soaked up the 15% cut, moving very very expensive linen cloth.

Once I had a decent amount of capital, I realised that I could actually sell my Darkmoon Cards for more on Horde than on Alliance, and the adventure began. The desire to complete the Mix Master achievement for the guild, the awful flask market on Dath'Remar, saw me sinking large amounts of coin into Volatile Life on Horde and since then I haven't looked back.

Volatile Life is very easy to move, since it stacks in 200, which is worth over 1k per stack. Even though it's a little messier, I couldn't resist snapping up Twilight Jasmine this morning at around 3g50s each... so much so I blinked and 10k had disappeared in a flash. With any luck, I'll be able to make flasks at less than the combined cost of the materials again.

Thanks again to my underlings at <Antithesis> for helping to move the coin around.

250k

Another gold milestone crept up on me the other day; 250k on the server. I had originally intended to get all the gold on alliance, but I have started to get into cross-faction arbitrage, with a fantastic avenue to pursue it. As soon as I had hit 250k, another Darkmoon card sold, and Twitchie finally got to equip a well deserved [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] of his own. I still have a deck up my sleeve for Zenborg in about a weeks time.

Now that I'm at 250k gold, I'm not sure more coin is any more useful. Since I'm not likely to spend more than 50k gold on a single item, as long as I'm over 200k I'll be on the lookout for the most attractive of money sinks.

Image by: tao_zhyn

Exalted with <Fidelity>

 

I'm excited to have finally reached exalted with Fidelity! I have mixed feelings about the restrictions on the ways you can increase guild reputation, but once I figured out the various reputation and guild experience caps I hit the daily circuit pretty hard. I'm pleased that Blizzard are also increasing the amount of guild reputation rewarded for raid bosses, and I'll continue to try and round up guildies for guild heroics which is much more entertaining than dailies.

My dailies of choice were the Tol Barad, and it just so happened that hitting exalted coincided with enough commendations to purchase: [Reins of the Drake of the West Wind].

 

5,000 / 25,000 Glyphs

 

A big milestone yesterday for Twitchie, hitting the 5000 glyph mark since Cataclysm hit. Since Twitchie is in a 'quiet time' guild, he's the only scribe in his guild, making glyph output very easy to track.

So at the moment, I'm just a touch behind the goal of 25,000 glyphs in a year. Initially when I started this quest, I was dominating the glyph market, and increased production of glyphs just lead to more and more coin. There were a few 'glyphmas' moments after cataclysm hit where I just could not keep up with demand and the coin was flowing in. However, recently there has been a surge in competition on the glyph market, so both sales and profit are falling.

Which leads me to the question, "Do I really want to achieve my 25,000 glyphs in a year goal?"

On the positive, I think producing an average of almost 70 glyphs per day over the course of a year is pretty awesome. And even with the increased competition, it is still an excellent way to make coin in game.

On the negative, as my competition increases, my sales decrease, profit margins falls and inventory management gets more difficult as I have trouble offloading glyphs as fast as I produce them. The bottom line is my gold per hour suffers, and while I love the gold making game withing World of Warcraft, there's a lot of other things I like to do in game.

So... I'd love to get your thoughts. Firstly, what do you think of the goal itself? Are you into setting yourself an extremely arbitrary target and going for it? Or do you prefer to reach your gold goals as efficiently as possible?

Secondly, what is your strategy for the glyph market? Do you have multiple posting alts divided by class (or by volume like this consortium poster)? What addons do you use to manage your inventory?

I'm resistant to multiple posting alts, and would prefer to use any or all of: Twitchie's bags, bank or guild bank to manage glyph inventory. I'm keen to find an addon that can not just shuffle stuff between bags and bank, but follow a set of logic about how it does it (e.g., make up stacks of 2 glyphs for posting from my bank). I haven't found this addon yet, but I'll keep looking. The major limitation of using one toon is simply that even with four scribbling bags, there isn't enough space to post all of the profitable glyphs in one sitting, but keeping inventory management manageable without resorting to posting alts would be a nice compromise.

Drake fixed!

 

=O I'm actually riding!

PUG Horror Stories #1: Ah $#@% it!

By way of introduction, my shadow priest Zenborg will be covering all things related to pick up groups. I to a lot of 'pugging' on my alts, and will share some of my experiences (both good and bad here). On with the story...

Today on Twitchie, I had a random heroic dungeon group disband in record time, and it inspired what will probably be a long series of posts describing some horror stories, as well as my own advice on how they could be prevented.

The Death Knight tank asked at the start of our Heroic Throne of Tides run, "Any CCs?". I was only a few words into my sentence describing my fear / succubus combination, our Ret Paladin’s repent (and the group disbanded so quickly I can’t even remember the third DPSs class) when he followed up with, "Ah $#@% it" and pulled the first pack which is notable for it contains not just one, but two healers.

The tank also didn’t specify a primary target, so we all merrily opened up our AOE and set in for what turned out to be quite a long haul. Eventually, the tank marked a skull target, but with virtually non-existant interrupts it just wouldn’t go down, since two healers far out paced the DPS. I did my best to time fears and a death coil, but to no avail and the healer left... then a DPS, and another... and after a final expletive declaration, the tank as well.

So my plea to tanks (especially for a pick up group) is firstly, mark a skull target! If nothing else, a single skull means a mob burned down quickly, reducing the healing load. It also gives melee a definitive target that their white damage lands on, and should help substantially with knowing which mob will have the majority of aggro pumped into it.

Secondly, in a pick up group, use some CC at least on the first pull. As we all just experienced, a 15% buff to damage and healing can’t overcome completely ignoring the basic abilities of the mobs you’re trying to kill. If you EVER have to wait for the healer to regain some mana, use MORE CC. It is completely false economy to avoid using CC and burn the group as a whole down faster, if you then have to wait around for healer mana. Be nice to your healer, use CC, and the run will go smoother and faster than if you didn’t. If after the first pack, your healer announces they are bored... then by all means ramp it up a little bit.

Lastly, a plea for all tanks and melee DPS... interrupts are awesome.

I love bags!

 

I just can’t get enough bag space, so finally after kitting out Zenborg and Twtichie in their BoE tailoring epics, I had enough [Dreamcloth] left over to make Jossamine (Jondy’s warlock) a pair of [Breeches of Mended Nightmares] AND make Borgthor a [Illusionary Bag]!

The tough decision was which bag in my bank to replace, as the smallest is now 20 slots. [Tattered Hexcloth Sack] won out over [Papa's New Bag].

STOP PRESS!

While I got the wowhead link for [Papa's New Bag], I realised there's ANOTHER bag that is 22 slots called [Papa's Brand New Bag] which also had a chance of dropping from Bronjahm <Godfather of Souls> in The Forge of Souls. I hope it was just bad RNG, and not passing on the bag because I thought I had it.

So back to the bags I actually do have... In the screenshot above, you can see my other favourites. Right to left, they are: [Mammoth Mining Bag] which I keep on me full time now that I am crafting a LOT of [Ebonsteel Belt Buckle]s and just pop a few on the AH each time I log on. Perhaps it's time I put it back in the bank and craft them in bulk and let my AH toons do the posting... but I'm getting distracted.

Next up are the Haris Pilton bags, [Portable Hole] and ["Gigantique" Bag]. I was a little surprised that there wasn't an achievement for equipping her hole after they acknowledged my sack. Oh well.

I have chronic bag space issues on Borgthor, who keeps a lot of BoP stuff with largely sentimental value. I'm not sure if I'm mentioned my shield collection on the blog before, which I sometimes am tempted to prune. Jondy won't let me throw away my imperial plate set (which dresses me up like a Stormwind guard), and the festival stuff... oh the festival stuff. Then of course, there's tons and tons and tons of gear. I'm adverse to throwing anything away that I could possibly need in the future... although with the constant gear resets and reforging, it is much less of an issue these days.

So to the sad news, Blizzard took away one of my favourite bags, the [Supply Bag], which was associated with the Argent Dawn (revered if I recall correctly). I remember so vividly, leveling my first toon and deciding that I just had to have this huge massive bag. I had assumed that I vendored it until I looked it up and realised that it probably disappeared when classic quests were redesigned for Cataclysm.

DOUBLE STOP PRESS.

What can only be described as a completely rambling post... I'm coming full circle. The [Supply Bag] is no longer available, but I still have mine! I equipped it in the bank when I decided that a mining bag for the bank AND my bags was overkill. I sent all more old ore / bars to alts to streamline my storage and threw my PvP gear in this bag in the bank. /Phew.

Rounding out my collection are [Enlarged Onyxia Hide Backpack], [Dragon Hide Bag], and more [Glacial Bag] and [Embersilk Bag]s than you can poke a stick at. I think I vendored the [Halaani Bag] quite early on since for some reason I wasn't too attached to it. Oh, and don't forget the ubiqutous [Abyssal Bag] that is a mainstay of my alts since soulshards were removed from the game.

Well, that's quite a trip down memory lane. Bags are awesome.

Working as a Team

<Fidelity> recently completed Working as a Team, with inscription being last cab off the rank. I leveled Zenborg's enchanting to 525 reasonably quickly, and then realised that I didn't have the reputation required to contribute to the achievement. Shortly after that followed at least a week of ranting to my guild mates, real ID friends and IRL loved ones about how, "GAH! I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO QUEST ON MY ALTS". So after drowning my sorrows at the conveniently located Dwarven pub (so close to the auction house!), I got Zenborg into the Deepholm series of quests, Therazane dailies and finally just blowing through Mt. Hyjal for kicks (and the head glyph). After all that, I'd bagged us a tick for Enchanting (Blacksmithing and Mining were no-brainers) and manged to secure the shoulder and helm enhancements while I was at it.

I like the design of the [Banner of Cooperation], and how different it is to the battle standard for completing the Heroic dungeons as a guild. I'm wondering when Bliz will add a carpenter profession.

While the guild roster has been in a state of flux, we've got some momentum going for raiding and are at 5/12 and having a blast. As always for guild news, check out the blog.

Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake

Hi, my name is Twitchie and I'll be taking over the Time is Money segments of this blog. I'm the glyph making powerhouse that revs up the coin generating machinery of the Borgthor empire.

No, I haven't (yet) had a psychotic break, but I thought I'd let some of my toons speak for themselves, since they have various different interests, and it's a nice way to organise the posts for the blog.

More on the coin front later, but first up... Mounts! I was lucky enough to have the [Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake] drop in normal Stonecore the other day and snap it up.


Twilight Highlands was the ideal place to get a great picture of where you 'dangle' as opposed to 'riding' the mount. I decided to open up the Twilight Highlands portal, since my favourite place to farm leather is from the Untamed Gryphon, who also drop [Delicate Wing], a key ingredient for [Broiled Dragon Feast]. The graphic alone is a great reason to make this feast for your friends.

It was very satisfying to win the mount shortly after upgrading to Master Riding on my first toon to pay for the privilege, and I'm looking forward to collecting many more of the new mounts on other toons.

New Expansion, New Beginning.

New Year! I’ve been having a ball with Cataclysm, but the last month has been completely flat out for work, so a few things have taken a back seat. With the new expansion and new year, it’s a great time to write about a new beginning.

For Cataclysm I founded a new guild called <Fidelity>, and left <The Ancients> where I had been GM for a couple of years. It was a very difficult decision, but the move was an important one to make, at the right time.

<The Ancients> is a fantastic guild, but as a large, social, raiding guild I could not see myself keeping up the commitment to the schedule I had been running. Also, with the change to the flexible raid lockout system, the niche of running a normal mode 25 man team and a hard mode 10 man team wasn’t going to exist even if I did have the time to continue running it. So we left the guild in good hands, and still keep in touch with many of the players we had enjoyed both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King with.

<Fidelity> is designed as a small guild, raiding less nights per week, with only a single 10 man team. In order to focus on many of the other things life has to offer, we have reduced our scheduled game time so we can have some more flexibility, and avoid burnout from a sense of obligation and time pressure.

I was a little overwhelmed with the support I got for the decision to create a new guild with a different focus, and pleasantly surprised that a lot of my close in game friends shared a similar vision for Cataclysm. So with a number of keen raiders, and some friends and family in game, the guild has grown to a total of 13 players, and we’re having a fantastic time. Rather than repeat the tales, I’ll let the guild speak for itself... so if you’re interested head over to our blog, forum and website and take a peek.

<Fidelity> is shortly due to begin our raid schedule, as the holiday period winds down. We’re still looking for our last healer, and a couple of people to fill our locum rank so we’re excited to meet some new people from Dath’remar and beyond. If you’re interested in joining <Fidelity>, please check out our recruitment page.