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.