I can definitely say there will be some multiple crash courses involving PvP as it is one of my favorite things to do in WoW. Beyond that, expect some PvE crash courses involving how to run certain raids if you never have, how to maximize your DPS no matter what class you are, raid ettiquite, and even how to raid without angering your significant other (it is possible!). Once I’ve covered all of that, I’ll have to sit down and have a thinking session with my dog who also serves as my muse, Gusto. After he and I have collaborated you all will be the first to know what else to expect!

The Auction House

Let’s begin with something you will need for nearly any method of money making: the auction house. To some, it is a great mystery, much like a woman! Thankfully, much unlike a woman you can download addons to wash away the mystery. Even if you don’t read a word beyond this sentence, I’m confident you will make more money than you are now by downloading Auctioneer and Auctionlite from www.curse.com. If you don’t want to clog up your addons, simply downloading Auctionlite will work just as well. Auctioneer is a little more complicated and bulky, but handy for keeping track of an item’s historical price.

Useful Addons

For the wise few that are still with me, let me fill you in on some ways you can use the auction house and these addons to your advantage. If you don’t already know this, you should never sell green BoE items to a merchant untill you have tried to sell it on the auction house at least twice. Even if the stats are terrible, enchanters will buy them from time to time to disenchant. Using Auctionlite saves those who are lazy like me the trouble of using our brains during this process. It will automatically determine a good selling price by comparing current items of the same type for sale or marking up what a merchant would pay if no other items of the same type are currently for sale.

Playing the Market: Technique #1

Auctioning greens is just chump change though, the real money is in playing the market. The very idea of playing the market always seemed intimidating to me but trust me, it actually works and isn’t as complicated as it may seem. What do I mean by playing the market?  What I’m talking about is simply browsing the auction house for some popular materials such as cut/uncut gems, enchanting materials, leatherworking materials, ore, titansteel bars, or cloths. What you are looking for is items that have a wide price range. For example, you may see 12 titansteel bars on the auction house with a price spread like this:

3 Titansteel bars for 125g each, 4 Titansteel bars for 135g each, and 5 for 165g   (notice how the cheapest bars are a 40g difference from the most expensive, in other words, you can make 40g profit per bar)

Titansteel sells very quickly so this would be a low risk high reward opportunity. Simply buy the cheaper portion of bars, so you may invest 935 gold to buy the group of bars for 125 and 135 gold. Once you’ve done that you place them back up for sale maybe only 50 silver or so below the higher priced bars. This would be a 935 gold investment that takes about 2 minutes to execute and will make you about 200 gold in profit after the price of listing them/auction house cuts. This may be more gold than some have to invest, but the same concept can be applied to items of any price range.

Playing the Market: Technique #2

The second type of situation to look for is a situation in which a small number of a popular item are being sold. This indicates that there is a high demand for the item and people are actively buying at the moment. You can recognize this sort of situation when you see maybe only 3 titansteel bars for sale for 155g each (the price will usually be high because people were less willing to buy the highest priced of the bunch). The way to profit from this situation is to buy up all the items in the small market such as this, and simply put them back up for sale for whatever you think you can get away with. Try not to be too greedy or you may end up wasting the fee for listing the items. In this situation I may just list them for 175 to 190 gold each for a modest profit of 60 to 105 gold. It may not seem like a lot but when you consider it takes about one minute to recognize a situation like this and put the items up for sale it’s not bad at all. It’s also a good idea to use this technique if you have farmed something yourself and want to raise the market price before listing your own items.

For both techniques I would recommend a small familiarity with the item you’re trying to buy/sell before investing too much money into it.  Also take note of the time of day/ day of the week you are selling items to gauge how fast or slow you can expect items to sell. usually around 8pm and 11/12pm are when you should see the most sales going through if you are selling enchanting/jewelcrafting mats because people are gemming up and enchanting at the last minute before raids or enchanting and gemming their new gear after they are done with raids.

Non-Jewelcrafters can use Gems to Make Money

Before I go on to how jewelcrafters and other crafters can make money, I’ll explain how you can make money from jewelcrafters. Unfortunately there are likely some servers where the market isn’t quite as good for the following technique. However, based on how markets work in general I would be really suprised if I heard that you could not make any gold from this technique on any server. It’s really simple, many people are lazy or uninformed and sell uncut epic and rare gems. Fortunately for you, many people buy cut gems, sometimes nearly for double the price of uncut gems. From what I have seen most jewelcrafters charge about 5-10g to cut epic gems and 2-5g to cut rare gems. That being said, if you can buy uncut gems for at least 30 gold or so less than what the cut version is selling for you can profit. For example, use the AuctionLite buy tab and search for each type of epic gem, sort it by price and it will be easy to see if there is any profit to be made. Often you can buy an uncut gem for 70-100 gold cheaper than the cut version.

Advertising in trade to buy uncut gems for even cheaper prices is a good idea as well. So once you have stocked up on some uncut epic gems, find yourself a jewelcrafter offering his services, check his gems to see which cuts are selling for the most and pay him to cut your gems. I once bought 20 uncut gems for around 100-120 g each and had them all cut by another jewelcrafter, and sold all of them within two days for a 1800 gold profit. It only took me about 10 or 15 minutes of browsing prices and finding a jewelcrafter with the cuts I wanted. Even if the market isn’t as good on your server, making even one fourth of that with 15 mins invested for 450 gold is a great use of time. You can maximize your profits by sitting on the gems when you get them cheap and waiting if you think the epic cut prices will rise as well. Also feel free to use this technique in combination with the above techniques to further increase profits.

So I’ve covered a lot so far, and I want to add a couple over-arching tips to help guide you in the process.

1) Try to focus your efforts on items that sell quickly such as crafting materials.

2) Don’t attempt either technique when the market is flooded. If there are 105 stacks of saronite ore for sale that should be an indication that these items would not sell quickly, giving people time to undercut you. Furthermore, be careful not to flood the market yourself. What do I mean, and why not? If you have 20 Runed Cardinal Rubies, only put five or so up for auction at a time. The reason is if you put all 20 up for say 199 gold, here is what will happen. Maybe you will sell a couple, but before you sell 20 I’ll guarantee that within a couple hours three or four different people will have undercut you. And a couple hours after that three or four people will have undercut them, meaning you end up with 17 Runed Cardinal Rubies for sale at 199g and there are 8 people selling them for 160-185g. By flooding the market you will cause the prices to plummit.

3) Be vaguely familiar with average prices (this is where performing regular Auctioneer scans comes in handy). You want to be able to recognize if an item is already priced near the limit of what people are likely to pay. As a guideline try to avoid marking an item up more than 50% of its historical value unless it’s a highly desired item or you have a monopoly on the market.

4) Don’t be too timid. While it may seem like you are gambling by putting 900g on the line, in reality you are generally only risking 5-10% of the amount you spend. As long as you are buying remotely desirable items from markets that are not already flooded, they will eventually sell. So even if you do buy out the lower end of the titansteel market for 900g and none of them sell at your marked up price; the worst situation you may face is lowering your prices back to around what you paid and losing the 2 gold per bar you paid to put them up for auction.

Using your Professions to Make Gold

If you have a high level profession, you can use the auction house to make even more money with even less effort. Jewelcrafting is one great example that I have the most familiarity with. First of all, if you are a jewelcrafter make sure you are doing the daily as close to every day as you can manage. It takes four jewelcrafting token turn ins to get an epic gem recipe. The best way to choose the first recipe to pick is to look at the auction house, if you have AuctionLite like I hope you do, go to the AuctionLite Buy tab. Once there, start searching all the different types of epic gems. What you are looking for is the gem that has the biggest price difference between the uncut price and cut price. For example, on my server Cardinal Rubies uncut are generally around 100-130 gold uncut; however, if I cut them into a runed cardinal ruby they can sell for anywhere from 199-210. That being said, making money can be as simple as buying any uncut epic gem on your server that is worth more cut than uncut by at least 20 or 30 gold to make it worth your time.

You would also be surprised how many people are generally willing to sell you uncut gems for much cheaper than auction house prices. So advertising in trade chat is always a good idea. As a jewelcrafter I try to make it a daily routine, I check the AH and see if uncut gems are selling low and if the cuts I have are selling high. If both the uncut and cut versions are selling low it’s not a bad idea to go ahead and buy the uncut gems anyway and sit on them. Taking all the uncut gems off the market will raise the prices of uncut gems, which will raise the price of the cut gems in as little as a couple hours. Once the price has gone back up go ahead and cut the gems and put them up for auction.

It Takes Money to Make Money

Unfortunately, just like in the real world it does seem to take money to money. As such, it is a good idea to know a few quick ways to get some starting money to invest in the above techniques. You generally have three options for standard farming techniques; killing monsters with valuable drops, doing daily or regular quests, and gathering.

Killin’ for Cash

One of the best places to kill monsters for loot is east of Dun Niffelem in the Storm Peaks at 75, 63. The Flame Revenants there pretty reliably drop a Relic of Ulduar every kill and some grey trash that sells for about 3g 70s per stack. Relics of Ulduar can be turned in for reputation with the Sons of Hodir, so people pay about 1g per if you sell them on the auction house. And then on top of that they drop crystallized fire which usually goes for around 25-40 gold for 10 depending on your server. If this location is camped you can try farming elementals all over Northrend, like in Wintergrasp when the battle isn’t currently going, or several other locations.

Questing for Cash

If killing monsters is not your style, you can always do dailies. The Knights of the Ebon Blade dailies at the Shadow Vault in Icecrown and on the sheer face of the cliff to the east of the Onslaught Harbor are a good place to start. You can knock out the 6 of these for about 80g in maybe 30-40 minutes. I wouldn’t recommend the Argent Tournament dailies unless you already have an epic flying mount because they send you so far that you would be much better off farming for money. I personally prefer farming over daily quests because I feel that you can make more money farming if you know a good spot.

Gathering for Cash

And finally if you are a gatherer you can make some nice money from this as well. The real money is in the rare finds. Titanium ore for miners and Frost lotuses for herbalists are great cash. If you don’t have an epic flying mount I would not recommend flying around searching for materials over farming. What I would recommend is downloading Gatherer or Gathermate and making sure that you vary your travel paths over high volume material locations while traveling. You can find a surprisingly nice amount of materials if you just incorporate it into your routes when traveling around the world. Also note, if you are a miner, sell your titansteel CD or buy 3 titanium bars off the AH and you should have the other mats from mining. Titansteel bars are usually a 40g profit per craft on my server and they tend to sell within 30 minutes. Just make sure you’ll be profiting before you buy the bars.

Well, that finally does it. This came out a bit longer and more complicated than I had expected. I hope it will still be helpful to some. And if you have any questions please feel free to comment and I’ll definitely get back to you. Thanks for reading!