Current Gold Total: 2,500g
Working on: Paladin leveling (73), JC/DEand Crafting Spreadsheet

Whopse I forgot to post my progress last night. Well almost all of my time yesterday was spent on the Crafting Spreadsheet and I did not manage to get my two levels yesterday on the paladin due to someone corpse camping me.

Yay for level 80 death knights in greens – Every single gank/corpse camp I’ve had so far was a DK who vastly out leveled me.

Still not one to complain too much, I spent my time on JC/DE via prospecting Saronite Ore and Cobalt Ore and making in to rings to disenchant. As I’m still very new to the whole market, I think I sold myself short selling Infinite Dust on a Tuesday night, what with raid resets / arena points being given out today (Wednesday) so the prices will probably end up being higher later on.

With any luck I’ll be able to make another post later this evening, although just in case I can’t I will be away from tomorrow (Thursday) till most likely Saturday. With any luck there will be a computer for me to write some quick posts on, but there won’t be any ‘solid’ posts until Sunday.

Talking of solid posts, I’ve begun work on a quick video to show how to properly use the Crafting Spreadsheet. It is scary just how long these videos actually take to make, creating them takes at least 2 hours each!

Anyway, I’ll do a quick post again in a bit about the Crafting Spreadsheet, as I am really trying to plug it and get people using it.

If any blogger out there makes a post about it, and links back to either the next post or the Crafting Spreadsheet page then I’ll do a review of your site during next week’s posts. This will most likely be as an additional post to the daily post, depending on how many of you jump on the chance!

Happy Whoring! …of the AH variety ;)

Well, I said that there was a prospecting/craft to DE spreadsheet in the works and here it is!

I’m finally happy to launch it, although it is in a very early alpha – so there’s probably errors and bugs in it right now – so don’t blame me if you lose money from it, you have been warned!

The latest version will always be available on the Crafting Spreadsheet page, but please comment on each release on it’s blog post (so here for version 0.1.0 and 0.1.0)

Let me know what you think, and if you spot anything that needs correcting, could be improved or needs to be added.

Current Gold Total: 2,500g
Working on: Paladin leveling (72)

Yesterdays video has been re-uploaded with a voiceover! On to the actual post…

So we all know that disenchanting, prospecting and milling take a considerable amount of time – and can’t be automated like creating Frostweave Bolts or smeling Saronite Bars can.

Yet there is a way to cut out at least some of the work. This quick video shows you how.

If you need the commands or macros used, you can find them below the video

To bring up the Enchantrix configuration type
/enchantrix config

The macro you can make to auto click yes type
/click AutoDEPromptYes

This same macro works for disenchanting, prospecting and milling – even though it says DE. There is no seperate macros for each one!

Hope you found this useful, if so please leave comments either here or on YouTube – I will cross post comments on YouTube here if I feel that is required.

Okay well there wasn’t going to be a post today, what with the new site taking a lot of my time to setup. Yet I thought you guys had to see this…

Which is (if my maths hasn’t given up on me) 51,953.57%~ profit!

Thought I’d submit this to Greedy Goblin too, but you deserved to see it here first ;)

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Away from home

Auctioneer is a great addon, and some would call it near essential for anyone seriously trying to compete on the AH now. While you can get by using no addons at all, it certainly does make things a lot easier if you do!

One of the brilliant features of Auctioneer over other AH addons is it has “Searchers” which are predesigned to find specific items for certain uses. This sounds broad, but that’s because there are a whole host of available searches. The one we will be focusing on today is the Disenchant Search, although I will be using DE instead of disenchant throughout this post.

What is the Disenchant Search?

The disenchant search checks through your latest scan data* to find items that can be DE’d for profit.

Now that is still rather broad – what is scan data? How much of a profit? What if I don’t have the ability to DE high level items or don’t want to deal with low level enchanting mats? How do I actually do it!?

Scan Data?
Auctioneer, as well as other addons, have the ability to ‘scan’ all of the items on the AH and add them to a database. This allows them to do lots of complex things with them, but most importantly it allows them to keep average prices of all items seen for sale on there.

There is an additional bonus post before this one which details exactly how to scan the auction house using Auctioneer, so if you don’t understand this part, worry not – check out Scanning the Auction House!

It is important to remember however that scan data is not necessarily what is in the auction house. For example if you haven’t scanned for a day, the data Auctioneer searches through will be a day old! As such, anytime you are going to do any kind of search on Auctioneer it is advisable to scan first.

How much profit?

Auctioneer gives you the ability to set price limits on the search. For example the default is to only show items which will give you 50% profit, provided they sell for full price once you have DE’d them.

This can be adjusted fully, so you can either set this lower if you don’t mind spending time for less of a profit, which is great if you have spare time on your hands, or if there is little on the AH that will make such a massive profit.

I don’t have max Enchanting skill / I don’t want to deal with low level enchanting mats!

You can customise Auctioneer so that it will only show you items from a certain level of enchanting skill needed to disenchant them.

This might sound more confusing than it really is. Say for example you are fairly new to enchanting and only have 100 skill. Simply change the defaults to only show items that require a maximum of 100 skill to disenchant, and then that is all it will search for.

If you don’t want to deal with lower level items, then simply adjust the minimum to a higher number so that they don’t show up. If you set your minimum to 325 skill then you will see only items that disenchant in to Northrend enchanting materials (needs to be tested in game, fairly certain however!).

How do I actually do it!?

It’s a fairly simple process in reality, especially once you have adjusted all your settings for the first time. I will post a quick video on how to do this, however for now the process is a simple seven step system

1. Scan the auction house
2. Switch to the Search Tab
3. Click ‘Disenchant’
4. Click ‘Search’ and then wait
5. Buy the items using the Purchase Button
6. Go collect the items from your mail box and disenchant them
7. Sell them!

So essentially Auctioneer allows you to search for great deals on BoE items which you can buy, disenchant and then resell the enchanting mats at a profit. It is all very customizable to make sure you are getting the ROI you are after, and is fairly simple to use once it is setup.

Now we know how to Use Auctioneer to Search for BoE’s to DE and yesterday we learnt about Disenchanting Crafted Items for Profit. What comes next?

Now we learn how to disenchant hundreds of items with even less effort! Look forward to that post tomorrow.

P.S. As mentioned there is a bonus post, before this one, that explains about scanning the AH – it is a really basic primer for people who have never used Auctioneer before, so check it out if you don’t know what scanning is!

Bonus Post – Please note that today’s real post will be after this one. Sorry they are being posted rather late in the evening – didn’t get home until recently from the hospital.

This is just a quick and simple guide on using Auctioneer to scan the auction house, explaining…

• What the term ‘Scan the Auction House’ even means
• Why you would want to scan
• How often you should do it
• How you actually go about doing it

If you already feel like you know all of this, or don’t need quite so much in depth information feel free to skip to the end of this post and just watch the video.
For the rest of us, let’s get started.

Scan the Auction House, what’s that?

A whole bunch of addons are able to pull all the data from the auction house and store them in a database.

This database contains information on every single item seen in the AH, including how many have been seen, who’s selling them, how much they sell for* and a whole host of other things depending on the addon – we’ll be using Auctioneer which you can download from their official site here, from Curse Gaming here or from WoWInterface here. If you don’t know which to pick, just use the official link!

By ‘scanning’ the auction house Auctioneer gets all the information on the items currently in the Auction House at that moment in time. The last part is important – it can only collect data from items in the AH when you actually scan it. As such you should scan regularly, preferably at least once every single day, so that your data is up to date.

*Auctioneer is probably the most detailed in it’s information, all together allowing you to see a tone of different information on the data, from the average price over the past 3 days to the standard deviation in price, complete histograms on items and so on. This is in some part Auctioneers curse – it is TOO good. It floods the average user with so much information that they probably don’t fully understand, let alone care about.

Why would I want to spend time Scanning the Auction House?

Nothing is worse than buying a whole bunch of items that looked like a bargin, and then finding out your data was innacurrate and you just paid 800% the normal price!

As such you should try to have scan data that you have been collecting for at least a week, if not longer, before you start really buying or selling on the auction house. The longer your data collection is, the more accurate it will be.

If you use the GetAll scan (described below and in the video) it is also pretty quick, taking only a couple of minutes on most computers.
A great way to remember to scan is to do it as soon as you login, before you start doing anything else.

How often should I scan? Does the data get tainted if I scan too often?

Aucitoneer is able to detect duplicate auctions from different scans – as such there is no possible way to scan too often and mess up your data. You can scan as often as you like without worrying!

However, Blizzard has put in place a limitation on what addons can do, and so Auctioneer can only do a GetAll scan once every 15 minutes. Truth be told you are probably wasting your time if you are scanning every 15 minutes, but it can be helpful if you are doing a scan before doing a Search (like we did in today’s real post on Using Auctioneer to Buy BoE’s to DE)

If you really do need to scan more often than that, you can do the standard scan. This however can take a very long time, depending on how many items are in the auction house at the time. Even on a fairly medium population server it can take 10, 20 or even 30 minutes or more. Worse it stops you from doing anything on that character other than chatting really. As such, I wouldn’t recommend doing a standard search unless your internet connection or computer can’t handle doing a GetAll scan (detailed bellow)

So how do I actually go about scanning?

Okay, so now we know what scanning is, why we should do it and how often – now how do we actually go about doing it?

With Auctioneer it is surprisingly simple to scan the auction house. This is a lot easier to see in game than to describe, so refer to the video below! It has a rather basic recap of the above too, so you can just refer to the video from now on, unless you need the in depth information listed in this post.

There you go, it’s as simple as that!

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Away from home

As mentioned in the previous post, this is all about crafting items to disenchant (DE) for profit.

Tella from Hit The Cap! posted a great post on this, and this is not meant to steal his/her thunder, it is just something I want to fully expand upon due to it being my primary method of making money on my yet to be transfered warrior in the past. So definitely check out Hit the Cap! too.

This is not a new idea, or even a ‘secret’. It is a well known and used money making method used by countless people, and you can guarantee there are others on even the lowest population server doing the same thing.

That does not make it useless!

One of the greatest things about enchanting mats is that they are always in very high demand, so much so that even with others doing the same thing you can nearly always turn a profit from this method.

So how does it work? (Beginner primer)

Essentially disenchanting is used to turn a green, blue or epic item in to trade goods which are used to make enchants as well as a few other things. This is done by the wide public via BoE items that drop while they quest, or items that nobody needs during an instance run.

However, a lot of crafting professions have the ability to make items that can be DE’d, which if the materials cost is low enough and the enchanting mats cost high enough allows you to make money just by crafting an item and installing DE’ing it then reselling the goods.

Alchemy, Enchanting, Engineering and Inscription do not have the ability to do this – either at all, or never at a profit.

To fully break it down, the steps are;

1. Get mats, either ones you have stockpiled or purchased from the AH or trade
2. Craft disenchantable items via these mats
3. Disenchant these items
4. Sell the enchanting mats you get from them

You do however need to know what you are crafting, so that you buy the right resources.
You also need to know the cost per craft, and the profit you stand to make from the enchanting materials you will sell.

Very Soon(tm) I am making a spreadsheet to cut out the need to manually work out the cost per craft and profit you stand to make.

Okay so I understand how the system works…but what should I make?

As mentioned before, a few of the crafting professions each have items you can craft to DE for profit, although not all of these will be profitable at any given time depending on the state of your server.

As such the below list of possible crafts does not mean you should make these items no matter what. Take a look at your servers prices, in some case you might be better off waiting for cheaper mats prices or higher enchant mat prices, or just selling the mats you have for a better profit.

Due to a greater amount of people doing heroics, the price of Dream Shards and Abyss Crystals fell on every server – as such the best items to craft are normally those that DE in to infinite dust and cosmic essences.

Blacksmithing : Horned Cobalt Helm (Ensure you also check prospect prices, often more profitable to do that and craft the Jewelcrafting items below)
Jewelcrafting : Crystal Chalcedony Amulet, Crystal Citrine Necklace, Sun Rock Ring and Bloodstone Band
Leatherworking : Arctic Boots
Tailoring : Duskweave Belt

Just ensure that your crafting cost is less than the value of the possible enchanting materials you will get. To do this check the Created By tab for the mats and work out your total cost, including AH cut, and then compare this to the average DE under the Disenchant tab.

This very simple calculation will let you work out if an item is profitable

a * 1.05 – b = c

a = Mats cost
b = Sell value of enchanting mats
c = Profit
The 1.05 is adding the 5% AH cut.

To recap the above

You can craft items using Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking and Tailoring – which can then be disenchant and the enchanting mats sold at a profit. Always ensure your mats cost and AH fee is lower than the sale value of the enchanting mats you will get from doing this however.

If anyone knows of better items to use, for any profession please leave a comment here, and I hope this post has been useful.

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Paladin leveling (70)

Well it’s just gone 02:00 as I right this and I’m level 70. Ended up working from 18:00-23:00 in additon to the morning so it has taken me till now to get the 2 levels for today!

Due to being away at least one day this weekend, and anything else that might crop up, I have decieded to stay up tonight and keep leveling and see how high it can take me.

Anyway, enough about me – how about something for you guys?

How I reduced my latency by 80% in 2 minutes.

Whopse, I typed 90% by mistake in to the title… it’s 80% – still a major major reduction though!

Simply download Leatrix Latency Fix from WoWInterface, extract the zip file and double click Install.vbs and then restart your computer.

Now for the hard part…

Or not! There is no hard part – that was it!

Doing so reduced my latency from 120ms to just 25ms instantly, which is just remarkable. And it isn’t just some fancy number change, it really is that low – consistantly. It’s a joy to be playing at this time of night with 19ms, and you can only wonder how helpful this will be in arenas or raiding where latency really matters most.

Now there are some caveats, so you should read through the documentation on WoWInterface carefully. Most notably it only works on the follow operating systems.

• Windows XP (SP2 or higher)
• Windows Vista (SP1 or higher)
• Windows 7

So it looks like Mac/Linux/other users are out of luck… or are very lucky to not be using Windows, depending how you look at it ;)

Well as promised here is my post on “The Challenge” I am setting myself.

This challenge is to reach level 80 on my paladin main before the 1st of October, the night of the 30th. That gives me exactly 7 days from today (the 23rd of September).

My current level is 68, which means to achieve my goal on time it will require getting 1.7~ levels per day. Going to call this 2 however, so that there’s a buffer in case anything comes up!

While this isn’t exactly a small task, it isn’t impossible either. Truth be told if I played 15 hours a day I could easily do it in half the time, and being self employed it is possible – yet money needs to be made too!

Still, patch 3.2.2 hit today/now and so the servers are down, fingers crossed there will be no server issues and doing my 2 levels tomorrow shouldn’t be a problem.

Wish me luck!

Current Gold Total: 2,000g
Working on: Paladin levelling (68) and passive mining (375)

Today is all about levelling! It’s split in to two parts, this post which describes what’s happened today – and then the next post which describes the ‘Challenge’ I have set myself which is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

As for today’s news, I did 4 levels today alone, all following James excellent horde levelling guide (Alliance version is also available) With the only downside being it is apparently no longer maintained and has no guide for 77-80. I’ve done 60-68 without a single error however.

The greatest part is – it is 100% free. No need to even sign up for website or mailing list.

Having used the text version of his guides before, back in TBC it was great to use his addon version. It is amazing how easy it makes it to know exactly where you are meant to be and what you are meant to be doing.

Up until now I have been using Questhelper, which in itself is a fantastic addon – however it gives you no real direction or purpose, it just tells you the quickest way to do the quests you already have. James addon on the other hand tells you exactly what you are doing, why, in what order (not just because it’s the quickest path) and where to go next. It even has little helpful tips, which can be a godsend on a tricky quest which might not be explicit in what you have to do.

This makes levelling even easier than before – you literally can no brain it and just follow the guide. It probably falls apart slightly if you have heirloom chest/shoulders, due to you levelling faster than expected. Still, it’s not an issue really – especially as I have no heirloom items on this server yet!

Talking about transferring heirloom items, it seems bringing Sarainy over *might* take longer than planned. After having to buy a brand new computer my money is a bit low at the moment.

Also managed to double my money, just through selling all the items acquired while levelling. This also includes everything mined – ore for JC will be brought upon reaching level 80.

To find out when that should will be, read the next post!