Professions and those who make money

Community General Discussion
1

So I’ve been back to BFA for a few months now. After watching several videos on how to make money with professions, I decided to level up enchanting. Needless to say, about 100,000 gold later I had enchanting up to 120 ish, and had literally 100 enchants to sell.

So I spent 3-4 weeks with all of them on sale on the AH. Started off selling for a profit and when none sold, I lowered prices to barely break even. When they didn’t sell then, I lowered them again to at least make something back. Still didn’t sell.

I also noticed, if course, as soon as you put up items all competitors lower theirs under yours. So unless you wanna stay at the AH as a full time job while playing WoW to change your prices constantly, it seems crafted items are a hard sell.

But I see videos/comments of people on here or YouTube who claim to be hitting gold caps and making hundreds of thousands of gold a week, some per day, by selling mats or selling enchants/potions etc. And this isn’t at launch, it’s people now still claiming this.

To all of you out there who make good money from professions/AH; what’s the key to your success? Do you have to put stuff for sale for like months to sell anything? Or do you just spend all of your time playing the AH, farming your own mats and what not??

I’m just curious to know how people make the amounts of gold they say they do!

2

Level a healer/tank, farm mats for 'chanting and AH those on Thursday or Tuesday.

3

By farming mats, you mean from WQs and dungeons and the like? I mean even questing gives a lot of greens, but I thought to get veiled crystal you had to DE blues?
Maybe I’m wrong!

4

Hit heroics, clear out your LFR and WQs as well.

Price your mats for 10% less than the lowest competition.

But heroics are your best, quickest money makers.

5

Ok sounds great. Thanks for the advice!

6

I would guess my biggest observation over the years has a huge seed of truth in it: Your AH experience will vary from server to server.

So I will say: ON MY SERVER, what I’ve noticed are these few things:

1> MOST people seem to raid Tues and Thurs, 8pm. And so 7:30 - 8:15 is a clutch window. If you want to make money, you need to be online during these 45mins, watching your items like a hawk and adjusting as needed. Down… OR EVEN UP sometimes.

2> Pets never sell during the week. I can put an ultra-rare pet for 1k g up on a Weds, and it’ll never sell. I put that same pet for 100k on a Sat, and it sells in 3 hours.

3> Gear etc sells GREAT from midnight to 6am. Is this like the infomercial/ television evangelist syndrome at play? I always think of WoW’s demo as people in their mid-to-late 30s, working normal jobs etc. Who the hell in THAT demo is up from midnight to 6am??? I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but if I list something at 6pm… I go to bed at midnight and nothing has sold. I wake up the next morning and check my auctions… EVERYTHING is gone.

I may not understand WHY it happens, but my bank account knows it DOES happen.

4> Biggest thing atm is that pretty much NOTHING is selling. The next raid will help with SOME consumables, but at this point in BfA’s life-cycle, people have stocked so many mats, you’re only making 5-10k a week AT MOST. And in the economy-that-WoD ruined, 10k a week is a pittance. I don’t even bother with it anymore. It takes less time to run alts through the 2k g Emissary when it pops.

The economy (again: at least on MY server) is utterly dead. ;(

2 Likes
7

In all my years of playing I’ve found one thing to be a constant - raw mats will always sell much better than whatever you crafted with them. The only exception being high end crafted raid gear (when it isn’t BoP).

I always figured people wanted to work their own professions up so they buy raw mats like crazy.

3 Likes
8

That was my mistake with enchanting. I figured “well since mats are for sale for x price, I’ll sell my enchants for this price!”.

Issue is I wasn’t counting on everyone being so cheap. Then again, this was on Cenarion Circle which is a very low pop server, with like 5 people at the Stormwind AH on a weekday night.

I just moved this guy over to doomhammer which is way more populated, so I’m hoping to have more success there with an active AH. The few times I’ve put mats like ore and herbs for sale, they’ve all sold in less than 12 hours and for pretty competitive prices (2000-3000 for a stack of monelite for example). Herbs actually sold for more, i was surprised.

9

Herbs & ore are what I always tell people to go for. Every server’s economy is different (and I really have been on Silvermoon for 15 years so I don’t know how others go) but herbs and ore go into more crafting professions than other mats. Blacksmiths, engineeers and jewelers will all happily gobble up the ore while the alchemists and scribes want those herbs.

I’ve heard a lot of people saying skinning makes bank on their servers - it doesn’t move well on mine from my experience. Enchanting mats have always been expensive until about the last quarter of an expansion. By then there isn’t much people will need new enchants for unless they just got alt fever. Right now you can get dust and umbra shards super cheap on my server but the epic crystals are insanely expensive.

10

As a rule, Skinning only makes money the first month or so an xpac releases. After that, all you have to do is camp a “Gather 15 Bear Livers” quest, and all the work is done for you. You just skin, skin, skin, skin, skin. Skinning, as a profession, is a fakking joke. All it takes is JUST ONE dedicated person to totally crash a skinning market. It’s absurd how easy it is to skin.

11

You know, I can see that. I wanted to go out and farm some leather up to finish working up leatherworking so I took my hunter out to that little farm in Drustvar and that quillboar WQ just happened to be up. I’d kill/skin for about 30-45 minutes with near instant respawns. Took me about 3 farming sessions to hit 2k leather and I was mostly skinning my own kills in one small area.

12

6 toons at 120. 4 more close. All are gathers and a couple enchanters. Gathers: miners, skinners, and herbs. I keep the enchanters around for DE items. I sell nothing but mats and Im never broke. I get bored of AH so I stock pile. Guild bank is stuffed. Sell early on the weekends. Take risks, people selling stuff too low buy it all out and make a price. Leave some room cause people will under cut you. Buy them, if its a hot item you will sell. Its a game you have to be on. Anyway…good luck.

13

It’s funny you say that wod ruined the economy but then say that this expansion economy is dead. Inflation is bad for savings but it,s great to make the economy more active. They need for me to make always new expansion more profitable than the last ones to keep players interest into playing the actual game. Why would I play BFA when I’m pretty much making less than half of what I made in WOD for ten times the effort? Better just save up my gold as much as I can and wait to see if next expansion will have decent gold making.

14

If it wasn’t clear, I meant that to be two distinct things.

WoD ruined our economy in that, up until then, we had a very gradual, very NORMAL sense of inflation. It spiked a little in MoP, but it was still ok.

For comparison, let’s say every xpac we saw 10% inflation, in MoP we saw 16% inflation … but in WoD we saw 220% inflation. It really was THAT insane.

And if you didn’t get on that “farm 20+ alts with Gold-bonus missions” you’re almost certainly broke now compared to the people that did. And that’s a TRAVESTY. And worse than that-- it will NEVER be fixed.

My issue with BfA is that we’ve had such a mass exodus of players, the “critical mass” needed for healthy markets is evaporating more and more each day. You need buyers and you need sellers. It seems all we have now are ARMIES of sellers and very, very few buyers. It’s not healthy.

So WoD and BfA both show economic problems in our virtual world, but I meant to highlight them as different problems.

15

Back in the day JCs were making it, now with sockets to few in between its been rough.

1 Like
16

Right now nothing is really selling on the AH, but do not despair, the next patch starts next week, so people will begin playing again. I would wait a week and try to sell them after the patch.

In the meantime, try clearing old raids and look for good WQs for gold. Emissary boxes reward 3500-4000 gold, if you do the IE weekly you might get a mission for 5k gold.

My running of old raids for mounts gets me about 30k gold per week. The pre-draenor raids give great gold from mobs, Draenor gives great gold rewards off of bosses, and all of them will give tons of gear to vendor.

17

I can still make money off of crafting professions, but not by making anything from the BfA series of items. Instead it is from selling a few select items from prior expansions that will still sell for a decent amount, although it is by no means fast and I have to either buy older mats off the AH or farm them up myself with my alts usually.

Every once in a while, I go through crafting profs on alts, look at prior expansions, see what I can make with mats on hand, and check them through the AH to see what is for sale and for how much. Then if I find a promising candidate, I’ll make one or two to see if the sell, and if so, for how much, because just because someone lists something for 10k on the AH doesn’t mean it will actually get bought for 10k.

From those prospecting sales, I can often find a few that will actually sell in a few days or a week, on average, for a price that is reasonable given the cost of mats/effort to farm the, and that are in a market that isn’t flooded with a ton of competition so I don’t have to worry as much about being instantly undercut by someone aggressively playing the AH with their addons.

All that said, the market in general has greatly softened up during BfA across the board on my server, and except for the first three or four months of BfA, things are selling for way less and taking much longer to sell. Maybe with 8.2 coming up next week, we’ll see a return of players to the game and things will pick up, but I’ve hoped that would happen in the past as new content during BfA has been released and it never really materialized to a significant degree.

If someone was starting out trying to make some gold today via professions, I’d recommend having toons with double gathering, mining and herbalism, as you level them up, whether through BfA alone or earlier expansions. Every item that drops or you get from anywhere, don’t use it - sell it. But for gear only think about trying to sell stuff if is a blue or purple BOE, even if you could use it (unless it was a huge upgrade for the toon and unlikely to be replaced anytime soon).

Any green gear should generally be vendored or DE’d on an enchanting toon so you can sell the mats, unless you know for sure it’s a desirable transmog item. But beware of gear deposit prices since those can eat up profits as transmog gear can take time to sell, so be sure you know what you are doing when trying to sell it for transmog. Even for blues and purples for gear, be careful of potential profits being sucked up by gear deposits when you have to repeatedly relist them.

/moo :cow:

18

Buy them out and then buy the mats on the AH so they can’t compete with you.

Some of these people have TSM and use that to track what’s selling in their server right now and what they should skip.

Some things perhaps, but each time you put something up that’s gold you pay for a deposit that you don’t get back. Then there’s the gold cost of the sale they take into account for the AH cut. If you want to play the AH game you need to get more cutting edge with how you approach the market or people who do their research on that server will win out.

19

I have made gold in the past, but professions are too reliant on formula drops now.

Prices are rediculus on my server, but no one seems to look at bid prices.

I had to shred or DE the 310 gear I made. The 340 gear is on auction, but too high in my opinion. If it has buyout of 13,333 I’ll undercut then put the bid at 3,333 and it still doesn’t usually sell on bid. If I put the buyout that low it would probably sell, but don’t want to reduce others profits that much. And those with auctioneer can see the average price, so know when they see a deal.