While I haven’t blogged a lot recently, that day has finally come! I was astounded when I sold [Ikfirus’ Sack of Wonder] on behalf of the guild for 25k, more than I had ever owned between all my toons soon after ICC was released. I had heard about players with over 100k, and after some googling... players who were “gold capped” (214748g36s47c is the maximum gold on a single toon (since gold is stored as an unsigned 32 bit integer)) and even bloggers that have marched onto 1 million gold.
So I started to set my sights a little higher. The first thing I did was to expand my craftables spreadsheet with the usual high volume markets. Leg patches, drums, meta gems, spellthread, vellums and fort scrolls. I also resurrected my inscription trade, thanks to a fantastic addon Quick Auctions 3 which deals with the glyph market very well.
The next job was identifying toons that could cover the professions that I hadn’t leveled yet. Jondayla has a leatherworker, so I immediately put her to work. The volume of regular borean leather she has schmunched into heavy leather over the last few months is epic. Thanks to Moonspirit for her Moonshroud specialty and Therepoman for his Spellweave (Zenborg gets double Ebonweave). Other than that I had all the crafting professions covered (now with a Gnomish AND a Goblin Engineer).
I almost forgot! A special mention to Jondayla for transmuting gems and titanium for me for ages! I forgot about it until I sent the mats for 60 meta gems (edit: which came back as 66 meta gems) just now.
Then I got to work. I had already set up thresholds to watch for flask, potion and belt buckle materials for the guild bank. So it wasn’t a lot extra to add to my morning AH scan to grab the rest. I was already used to spending between 20 - 30k per month for the guild, so I relished the opportunity to start buying in larger volumes for myself as well. I did need to grab a couple of quick macros so that I could buy 4k gold worth of leather in a single sitting without boring myself too much.
Then the coin came rolling in. The high volume items (including bullets) have just kept on trucking, with the ICC craftables providing some excitement [like when cloth pants sell for 2.5k profit even while prices are deteriorating].
I think my attraction to coin generation is primarily that it is something that I can do on my own. While I have a fantastic group of crafters who help out, I can mail them mats and have stuff crafted whenever it suits them... you can’t mail a raid ID and have someone’s return combo DPS / fire avoidance returned to you later on. I’m not a big quester, I only like to level in bursts... and rep grinds are mostly painful at best. While farming I can’t keep from keeping muttering the mantra, “Time is money, friend”. So while coin making is one of those necessities, it’s the most fun solo aspect of the game for me. The other bonus is that it can be done in small time slices, and I can queue up smelting 10 minutes worth of saronite and just go AFK. Having a spreadsheet to track profitability great fun too!
So now I’m all cashed up for Cataclysm, but I haven’t quite decided on a coin strategy yet. I could blow it all trying for a realm first profession, but if people in the US get to log in hours in advance it might be a no go. The summer months are very busy real life months for me, so Wrath might repeat itself and the coin dwindles away as outside of raiding and the odd daily there isn’t a lot of time for much else.
To celebrate I made Borgelmir a pair of [Boots of Kingly Upheaval] since he is generally tanking these days and ArP on all the T10 Death Knight makes a unholy DK want to cry.
