Project Lore

The heart of World of Warcraft's economy is the auction house. It doesn't matter what server you're on or what side of the conflict you've picked. We all deal through the auction house. If you're a blacksmith, enchanter, seamstress or in my case a scribe (inscription) it's your livelihood for gold. Now I don't know how the rest of the professions fair, so I can only speak for myself and for my realm of Kargath’s economy, but I'm hoping you all will pitch in your thoughts and comments. When inscription was introduced I jumped on it. I wasn't into doing professions before, and I had two open profession slots so I picked up herbalism and inscription. I leveled my skill up rather quickly. All was well. Then WotLK dropped. It gave us scribes new glyphs, scrolls, books and what would becomes my money maker (till recently) - Darkmoon cards. Any scribe will tell you that when the expansion was released selling glyphs was profitable. I remember selling the Glyph of Vigor to rogues for over 150g. I was making great money. Then people realized how easy it was to level up inscription. Prices dropped gradually and now you're lucky if you can sell any glyph for over 50g. The real value of inscription has yet to come, as we've seen how many new glyphs will be purchased when dual specs are unveiled in 3.1. Right now the only way to make real money is Darkmoon cards, more specifically, Nobles cards. When the Ace through Eight of Nobles are combined, a Nobles Deck is created. This rewards a Darkmoon Card: Greatness. About two months ago I had 10,000g. I was buying Adder's Tongue in the auction house for about 20g a stack and selling Chaos, Undeath, and Prisms cards for 500g or more. The complete Nobles deck was selling for 20k and each card for 2500g. Ah, good times. Now you’re lucky to get 50g for some cards. Some won't even sell for 25g. The auctions will just expire over and over. The nobles are holding some value but not as much as they used too. Decks now go for around 12k, so they've dropped too. What caused this to happen? I'm sure a lot of you have been victim to this crime of Auction House Etiquette.  This rule of etiquette is often broken or just plain ignored. Let's take an item like, say, the Ace of Undeath. This item used to sell for 500g or more but for this example we'll just say 500g. After selling a few of these I know the price. So I go to the auction house and lucky me there are no competitors, so I start the bid at 475g and buyout at 500g. Now, as expected, someone else gets the card, they see my listing and naturally want to beat that price so his item sells. So you'll see someone beat my previous listing for something like 470g for bid and buyout at 495g. We might go back and forth by 5g or less just to be listed as the cheapest. Then someone comes in and just decides he wants to just sell the item for a quick buck and decides to kill both of our chances at making some nice gold and lists his for 200g buyout. Seeing this travesty my competitor and I are now forced to lower our price to beat his rediculous price. It's called etiquette or common courtesy to respect other people's auctions so we can all make money. Why does someone do this? I know this can't be just happening to scribes of inscription. So have any of you out there seen this happen? Have you logged into the game to check your auctions, only to find that your stuff hasn't sold because some jerk has out priced you by several hundred or even thousands gold for a quick sale? Because this is happening to all of us on all servers, it's killing the professions economy. I know there is always going to be competition, and I know we are always going to be fighting for the lowest price. Let's just be a little more cautious when we do so that we can all make money.

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Ever feel like your career choice is going nowhere? You’ve put in your time, and invested a lot in your job, but in the end you are just not getting enough out of it to make it worthwhile? You feel like you should stay out of loyalty, but in the end you just know you would be far happier doing something else?

Well I am at that point in life. While I have certainly served my tenure, I just see no reason to stay an engineer. Yes I’m talking about my WoW profession, what did you think I was talking about?

I have been an enchanter/engineer for as long as I can remember. I have been a perfectly happy enchanter, I get a nice boost from the ring enchants, and I feel like I am providing a valuable service to my guild (although I wish I could get a few more shards). Engineering on the other hand, has always been about one thing for me. The goggles. In TBC they were the first epic I acquired at 70 and I wore it all the way until I was leveling again. I loved the goggles, and they were worth the entire profession. Now things have been a bit different. I excitedly leveled my engineering again in Wrath, and crafted the goggles as soon as I could.

Then I ran Naxx 10, and found that that T7 helm would replace them for me. That’s right - the item that lasted me all the way into the Black Temple in TBC was replaced by an item from the first 10 man dungeon in Wrath.

So after spending thousands of gold and tons of time leveling engineering in Wrath I am seriously considering just dropping it all together. I’ve never been one to change my professions, and I’ve taken pride in the fact that I’ve had the ones I do for so long, but I just don’t really see the point anymore.

My thought is it may be time to pick up jewelcrafting. The stat bonuses seem much greater, as does the money making potential. I understand this will be an expensive prospect, but I think in the long run it will be worth it. I could really use a more profitable profession, and those special gems and trinkets look just awesome to me.

So what do you think loyal readers? I am asking for some advice here. Should I stick with engineering until 3.1 with hopes of some new patterns? Or should I drop it right away and stat my new career as a JC? Perhaps there is even another career choice I should consider? What do you think? I am in need of career counseling.

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Sometimes I have to stop and think that I made the wrong choice as far as my professions go. Being a tank I have grown accustomed to always being out of gold due to massive repair bills, but if I had made the smart choice I would have picked a profession to help balance that out. I didn’t. I am an enchanter/engineer, so I have two crafting professions. This means I don’t gather up mats, I have to buy them to level my professions. So it is safe to say I have spent a fair bit of time trolling the auction house looking for good deals. With the expansion being so new, there are lots of spikes and valleys as the market settles on a price for these new materials, but there is one trend that holds true no matter what. You gatherers are making a killing selling your mats! Prices on some of the more sought after mats have been just mind blowing. I know prices vary highly from server to server. But I am guessing we are all seeing the same trends. Being an engineer I’ve had to buy up lots of cobalt, saronite, and titanium bars to level up high enough to craft my goggles. This was an expensive process for me. The prices were just sky high, early on I saw stacks of lower level bars going for hundreds of gold each. Prices for herbs and leather haven’t been particularly low themselves. I imagine that those that are supplying these mats are getting very wealthy from them. I have several gathering friends that have straight up told me they have more gold then they know what to do with. That sounds like a good problem to have? I am pretty jealous of you guys that have built in income everyday from smelting titansteel. I’m fully aware that enchanters don’t have it so bad, and that enchanting mats are fetching a small fortune as well. My priority was leveling enchanting with those mats. Perhaps now that I am at 450 I can start to get some money back there. As far as my engineering goes, I am looking for clouds and gathering eternals… but these income methods seem to pail in comparison to the true gathering professions. It’s clear that there is gold to be had in Northrend if you know how to do it. So how are you doing? Are you gathering up a small fortune? Or are you the one lining the gatherers pockets?

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So you have finally hit level 70 on your alt, or perhaps it is your main.  As you begin to run the 5-man content while trying to get into Karazhan and doing PvP in between it dawns on you that most of your gear lacks enchantments.  Whatever shall you do? Most players will quickly look-up what materials are required for class-appropriate enchantments, only to be shocked or annoyed at how much the enchantments will cost them.  For this discussion we will focus on weapon enchants, generally the most expensive and often the most important. Being a melee class character - a Rogue to be exact - Mongoose is the best enchantment, its tooltip reads "to occasionally increase Agility by 120 and attack speed slightly."  Yum.  But here's the catch, the materials are expensive, costing:

• 6 x Void Crystal
• 10 x Large Prismatic Shard
• 8 x Greater Planar Essence
• 40 x Arcane Dust

Not to mention the fact that you have to find someone to do this for you, which may cost you a little extra. Well maybe Mongoose is a bit nuts, after all you did just hit 70 and are likely to replace your gear soon.  So how about Executioner which will allow you "to occasionally ignore 840 of your enemy's armor."  Not to shabby in this day where bear tanks easily have over 16,000 armor.  Materials for this one?  Not much different:

• 6 x Void Crystal
• 10 x Large Prismatic Shard
• 6 x Greater Planar Essence ( - 2 GPE)
• 30 x Arcane Dust (-10 AD)
• 3 x Elixir of Major Strength (+3 Elixirs)

This begs the question, to enchant or not to enchant? The benefits of such should be readily obvious, you get a boost in selected stats but at what cost?  A character in my predicament, just hit 70 with some basic Karazhan and PvP gear, will easily replace much of their gear in a the coming weeks.  So should they waste all of those mats on a high end enchant?  Probably not and the drawbacks aren't horrible. Lower stats mean lower DPS in my case, or lower healing or crappier tanking in other cases, but not matter what the reduction is by an incredibly small percentage.  Of course, we cannot forget the endless ridicule that may ensue fromguildmates or persons in your party.  Avoiding the constant teasing could make the decision for you. There is one other route, a compromise of sorts.  Instead of getting a high end enchant like Mongoose or Executioner on my Emerald Ripper - an item easily replaced - I will get a medium grade enchant.  Therefore I have SOMETHING which will help me avoid some ridicule while gaining SOME stats but not "wasting" obtuse amounts of gold on mats.  One could argue that I should just save that gold to put into the high end enchant later, but then we get into a vicious cycle and I hate those.  As for my Merciless Gladiator's Shiv?  Well, it won't be replaced nearly as quickly as the Ripper, so Executioner it is. This was my first post here at ProjectLore.com.  Was it good for you?

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How do you choose your professions? If you just want to make money, clearly there is a general consensus that taking a couple of gathering professions such as mining and skinning would be best. Just head out for a little while, gather up some materials, and sell them. No sinking money into leveling, no rare recipes to find, no investing in mats to make something and hoping it sells. However, if you want to make your character as effective as possible in battles, it will probably cost you a bit of cash. All of the crafting professions have a few items that can only be used by characters with the right profession, but some are better than others. A couple of the nice ones are engineering for goggles, leatherworking for drums, enchanting for ring enchants, and alchemy and jewelcrafting for trinkets. Let's say you decide ring enchants and drums are best to make your character top the dps charts. How are you going to make that profit? Doing enchants and making armor kits will only make you so much money, especially if you have to buy mats. So, now you have to make an alt in order to provide mats and make a little more money. But don't you want to make your alt as uber as your main? I guess that's just something you'll have to decide for yourself.

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