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Contents Farming Gold - Part 2: Fair TradeTrade is the key to getting decent money from your labours. Here you can tap not only into the resources you gather yourself, but into the gold that others have. The points here are vital to the understanding of the auction house, and the ability to make money from it. Ultimately this can be divided into two parts:
Trading goodsThere is a reasonable amount of money to be made by simply using a manufacturing tradeskill - the most obvious things here are the ubiquitous enchanter in the towns. The fact is, that as a player with a skill you have things that other people want, and you shouldn't be afraid to make them and try to sell them. The most obvious type of selling is probably the making of consumables; things like healing potions, armour patches and sharpening stones. Unfortunately, these generally don't really sell well. The fact is that most players can do without most of the consumables, and unless they make them themselves, they just don't bother. Later on in the game, when they are perhaps more useful, a player will generally have a network of contacts or a guild, and will simply ask a friend to make these things. In addition, the ingredients become expensive in the first place, and it's hard to sell at a reasonable price and make a decent profit; in fact for alchemy it is frequently better value to sell the herbs rather than the potions. You can sell healing potions a little, but they're not very profitable. Slightly less obvious is the selling of equippable items. Of all these, bags are the simplest and genuinely make money; you can often actually buy the cloth from the auction house, buy the leather if needed, make the bag, and sell at a decent profit. Certain items also sell well, but beware of flooding a market; armour and weapons may well sell, but it's very unlikely you'll sell ten of them in a day, since there just aren't that many people who will want it; its just a waste of money, and this is a common mistake made by people. Selling large stocks of items takes patience! The thing to consider when selling equipment in the auction house is the relative value of your sales. Although there may not be a direct comparison, you will be able to find similar items in the auction house and price your items accordingly. It's also worth bearing in mind how useful the item is in the first place; if you were a cloth wearer, would you really want to use the runecloth gloves? From your experience, is it easy to get a decent quest reward at that level, or a common drop that's better? A lot of the items made are really not that great and are unlikely to sell. The other major factor to take into account when selling equipment is the value of the raw materials; most of the items that are really worth making have fairly convoluted requirements, and it is always worth thinking about whether the value of the items you are using to make your product are actually worth more than the product itself! Making items for sale is a difficult business. As hinted earlier, the other method of selling is that of services. Enchantments are the most obvious, but other professions have similar restrictions; shield spikes and spurs from blacksmiths, for example. Some of the items that are perhaps a little more difficult to make and more specialist are also worth selling as services, for instance high end potions are expensive and unlikely to sell directly at auction due to the variations in requirements, but offering services as a potion maker may well get a customer to you, and all without the fees! From a perspective of making money, the biggest gains tend to be from the service orientated sales pitches. Although they take a little more courage to do, the markup on the prices can be very large; making ten or twenty gold from a single transaction is reasonably easy, and you can also sell stocks of supplies at a small markup, especially if you make or collect those supplies yourself. The hardest part of offering these services, however, is getting to the point of being able to offer them in the first place. Enchanting in particular is notoriously expensive to level up, and you may not recuperate your initial investment for some time! Farming itemsWhile in trading goods above, a player will use their tradeskills to increase the value of items sourced either by drops or by the auction house, farming items is the idea of searching for items that will be of use to other people who wish to do the same thing. For example, a farmer may spend some time amassing runecloth from the Plaguelands, or may look for a more specific item with a low drop rate, such as finding essence of air from Silithus. As with most farming activities, it is worth considering the value of your kills. If you are only in this for the gold, then spending 20 minutes to kill one a load of elementals for one essence of air worth 20 gold can be more productive than spending 20 minutes to kill a load of skeletons that give you 10 gold worth of runecloth. On the other hand, 20 minutes of killing skeletons will definitely give you runecloth, 20 minutes of elementals may give you nothing. In addition, you should always check the value of items before farming them; at certain times there is a higher demand on some items, particularly if there has been a patch recently. The biggest advantage behind farming items is that it can be done during normal play, in particular when grinding for reputation. Killing furbolgs for runecloth gives free timbermaw repuation. Vice versa, when grinding, keep a few slots in your bags free for these regular drops! Selling dropsDuring normal play, there is a constant stream of random green items being dropped. These can be utterly worthless, but can also be a stream of useful money. The trick to making money from these items is to consider their implicit value. For example, almost no item "of the whale" is useful; the classes that need spirit (casters) have no real need for stamina, and those that need stamina (tanks) will not be out of combat, so will not regenerate, so do not need spirit. Only a paladin may need this, for the mana regeneration, but it is not hugely useful. Hence there are many simple items which will outclass an "of the whale" item. Items like this should be sold to a vendor, or disenchanted for materials. Hence, before thinking about paying that all important deposit on an item, consider if anyone will actually want it. If you're not sure, it's probably not worth it. Even if you are sure, don't overprice! Green items have little value; it's not too hard to get decent items of your own. It's only the really good items that will sell for quantities of gold. Farming item drops can also be done by killing relatively easy creatures for items of use to players of a lower level; it's done by higher level people mostly, in instances in particular. It's generally not massively good value for money, but it is entertaining, as a test of personal skill. One particular thing to bear in mind here is to value items sensibly. An item suitable for a level 23 player is unlikely to sell for more than a gold; people do have money at that level, but not that much. Weapons are particularly difficult; it is very easy to find blue weapons, and green weapons have a very large deposit. Also of interest at this point is to think about which trade items are of use; for example farming Wailing Caverns results in perfect deviate scales, which have a reasonable value. The Scarlet Monestary will provide a large amount of silk. If you're doing this for money explicitly, it's vitally important to consider the potential for this style of item drop, since coming back with a load of useful items can vastly improve the value of the run.
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