WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-Up: 8.1.5 PTR Data Mining, Managing Transmog plus Valuing Expulsom & Mass-Prospecting!

Wowhead Posted 2019/01/12 at 1:04 PM by Gumdrops

check out the previous articles right here on cuckhead.comGumdrops/r/woweconomy subredditDiscord serverTradeSkillMasterMethodPatch 8.1.5 PTR Data MiningWowhead.com has a big run down of quests and flavour surrounding the itemsSilas' Sphere of TransmutationRecipe: Silas' Sphere of TransmutationKhaz'gorian Smithing HammerIwen's Enchanting RodEnchant Tide WatcherEnchant Voodoo MaskThe Ub3r-Spanner

Ub3r-Improved Target Dummy

Boom Bots

Ub3r S3ntry Mk. X8.0

Sanguine Feather Quill of Lana'thel

Blood Contract: Bloodguard

Blood Contract: Bloodshed

Blood Contract: Oblivion

Jewelhammer's FocusRE-USE MESynchronous Threadcovered a couple of months ago now/u/Zapph sums up a lengthy review of these items that I'd recommend checking out

Professions are in a pretty dire state in BFA, these could have been a great opportunity to introduce stuff that makes professions actually worthwhile. They could make them cheaper, or always have a good revenue source/QoL/useful. E.g. BS repairing all your gear, LWs getting an improved saddle that's permanent +20% mountspeed and no daze, Tailors getting a saleable thread that Titanforges/+Leech to a cloak, another Reaves construct for Engi that has a combat assist mode etc... The current ones just generally seem disappointing and uninspired.

Which professions do you think need the biggest improvements? What kind of complexities do you want to see added to the crafting mechanic?Managing Transmog/u/winter2g spent some time this week to highlight a more appropriate way to manage your transmog and what to expect from it

Transmog farming can be an extremely lucrative business in WoW. We've all seen Studen rake in hundreds of thousands of gold from farmed and crafted transmogs alone, and wondered "How can I get a piece of that cake?".

The truth is that for the majority of players, pulling in that much gold per week through transmog is almost impossible, even if you were to camp the auction house day in, day out, undercutting every would be competitor on your server. A successful transmog goldmaker like Studen farms for three hours a day on most days. They're on a near perfect server for their market, with a large number of active players with a decent amount of interest in transmog. They have thousands of unique, high value items on the auction house at any given time. To top it off, they find great enjoyment in the grind. If you can find the time, and enjoyment in farming hundreds of items from low-level dungeons each and every day, you might just be the next Studen.

The majority of you (myself included) don't find farming fun. You don't have 20+ hours to burn each week on an activity that you find dull and mindless. Because of these things alone, you may try but you'll never be able to commit to doing this week in, week out, and this is why you'll fail. Repost after repost, without seeing success, you'll simply call it, and be just another guy who saw a transmog youtuber, tried to get into the transmog business, and quit after a day/week/month. Simply put, its about expectations. Transmog is not a get rich quick scheme. You won't wake up the next day to a mailbox full of gold on day one, two or three. For most of us, it will take months to get to a point where we have to refresh our mailbox to get to the rest of the gold. Our expectations are high, and the initial results are rarely ever in the same ballpark. A few days or weeks of less than stellar results and we give up, because we lack patience. If you want/need gold now, transmog is not the solution.

I like to spend as little time as possible on transmog. 1-3 hours of farming a week is about all I can stomach, and I can stomach even less of it on the auction house. When you've got a thousand items listed, cancel scans get ridiculous. As transmog is best taken as a method of making passive gold over time, with little pockets of effort thrown in, do not waste your time undercutting constantly. Instead, adopt an approach that allows you to just post once or twice a day.

I like to post twice a day, listing all auctions for 12 hours. One of my postings occur when I wake up at around 5:30 AM, and the other occurs when they expire, at around 5:30 PM. This allows me to always have my auctions up, and I am the cheapest for a short period of my server's peak. If you are unable to do this, a 24 hour listing, posted during your server's peak period will do just as well. Following this strategy allows me to keep my input minimal, at about 10-15 minutes per day.

For the purposes of testing this strategy, I started on a new server (High Pop), and the results have been very reasonable after only 3 weeks. I spent 3 hours farming ZF, 3 hours farming RFK, and then 1.5 hours average in WC the following 2 weeks. I currently have about 250 items up for sale, and have made an average of 20k per day over 21 days. Thats 420K gold over 3 weeks, for about 9 hours of work.

Its hardly a killing when compared to other gold making methods, but from a side-hustle that you're investing little time into (ignoring the initial upfront time investment), the amount of gold you'll make will be well worth it, especially if you keep at it. On my main server, which I've been operating in the manner above for around 5 months, I have around 1100 items, and bring in approximately 50k per day from transmogs alone. If you're willing to pump extra hours into consistently farming for transmog, this figure could be bumped up significantly.

Treating your transmog business in this way does not maximise its potential, but it does create a steady stream of gold that will keep on trickling through, even after you've stopped actively farming old dungeons for a while. It also allows you time to work on other gold making methods, or to just play how you'd like to play.

This is by no means a complete strategy, just a bit of insight into how I believe many approach transmog incorrectly and burn themselves out on it before they can succeed. There are better ways to do this, and you're free to pump as much time as you'd like into it to try and improve the results. Whatever the case, just make sure you're enjoying yourself, because it is that much easier to stick to when it's fun.

How much of your revenue is from transmog? Do you prefer to farm or buy your transmog? How much time do you spend reposting?Valuing Expulsom & Mass ProspectingExpulsom/u/BlueSky1877 prompted discussions about valuing Expulsom this week

I make the Sinister Combatant's Intuitive Staff for 20,000g and the materials are 13,000g or less. This makes a single Expulsom worth 7,000g, plus or minus a few hundred due to the staff's deposit, AH cut, returns, and variance in materials. It still remains well above 5,000g and I think some people buy and resell my staves because the secondary stats matter.

This would make the Supplies Needed: <ITEM> quest reward of five Expulsom worth 35,000g to 49,000g total, correct? I'm not sure this is the most efficient use of the material but I feel the fastest and cheapest way to get Expulsom is through the daily WQ. Questions: Are there other Expulsom recipes that have better profit margins? Are there cheaper ways to get the Expulsom?

Expulsom/u/Ahoy_CapnCookie explains

Like these other guys have already stated, you should value your Expulsom at "cost to produce" instead of "how much I can make based off of x item," because the cost to produce your Expulsom is going to waver much less than any other value you might put in. Typically the cheapest way on servers is to buy out Tidespray Linen and make bracers, DE the blues, and scrap all of the greens. I have an entire post about scrap return and DE rates for the bracers. I also use this string in my TSM to determine the cost of crafting Expulsom at any given point:

(60*dbmarket(i:152576))+(30*vendorBuy(i:159959))

All it basically says is "the cost to craft Expulsom is (60*market value of Tidespray Linen)+(30*the cost to buy Nylon Thread)."

Right now it has it at 207g for me because the market value is at a little over 3g, but I know that I only buy mine around 2g so it actually only costs me about 135-150g per.

/u/Ahoy_CapnCookie continues to answer the original questions and echoes the benefit of diversifying

Are there other Expulsom recipes that have better profit margins? Don't worry yourself about large margins. You're selling that staff for a *rough* profit of around 5k gold, right? Well how many are you selling on a daily, or weekly, average? Probably only a handful, and the margin is around 38%. If you were to take a craftable item that sells hundreds daily, but only has a 10% profit margin after AH cut, you could probably make way more.

Are there cheaper ways to get the Expulsom? Look above at the link I posted. It explains the primary method of gaining Expulsom, and is *usually* the cheapest method.

Monelite OreStorm Silver OrePlatinum Ore

Gem

Monelite Ore x 64,620

Platinum Ore x 4,000

361

549

512

602

521

535

527

3,596

258

Kubiline

3,462

269

Golden Beryl

3,453

250

Solstone

3,622

261

Viridium

3,661

238

Kyanite

3,523

266

/u/jamphat/u/SpellNinjaHave you mass-prospected any of your ores? How much is Expulsom worth and how do you obtain it?Further Reading/r/woweconomy subredditDiscord serverstreaming live on Twitch@GumdropsEU

Comment by SithDiWhich professions do you think need the biggest improvements? What kind of complexities do you want to see added to the crafting mechanic?

Inscription - I feel it's viability after the darkmoon card surge is over isn't very good.
Alchemy suffers from the fact that flasks sell for barely over mat cost on may servers.

Hard to get Recipes - By gating recipes and making folks have to work for them, it increases the value of the items made by it.

Have you mass-prospected any of your ores? How much is Expulsom worth and how do you obtain it?
No way; generally I feel the ore is worth more than the gems that come out of it at this point.Comment by MagnognomusWhich professions do you think need the biggest improvements?
- All of them. The whole economy is down the drain. Crafting gear? You can farm the whole set of 340 from warfront in one day, no one cares about it. One sale here/there. Gem? With 1-2 socket on 16 pieces... lol. I understand activision wants more money and nerfed the whole gold making possibilities. But I nerfed their income to show my appreciation and unsubbed. Still have few months left to check on the new content but I'll freeze my acc. because of hyper boring profession/economy in this expack. Will check on next.

Btw as folks running out of gold will all the "why not?" market shrink > rare old recipies, transmog all will be far less worthy to deal with. The worst xpack ever profession wise, this is nightmare. (Beautiful zones, cool quest lines, slow motion GCD fights, time sinking mindless grindings this is what Beta for Azeroth for me)Comment by DarkAviatorSince I have only engineering and the 3 gathering profs at max currently, expulsom is worthless. (As are hydrocores) The 340 weapons are hard to sell, and without a dedicated group to farm the dungeon stuff, you can't even profit from the mount.Comment by nmb3000Professions are in a bad state, but this is hardly new. Blizzard seems to find new and obvious ways to screw them up in every expansion. A few of the problems that stand out:

* Profession ranks. These are a horrible idea which does nothing except punish people who don't have rank 3 on everything. Plus, gating higher ranks behind reputation is terrible.

* Mindless material inflation. Requiring 20 of a material to craft something invalidates the increased material stack size added a few years ago. There also seems to be no balance between things like herbalism and alchemy, where it may take 7-10 herb nodes (!) to craft a single flask.

* BoP materials need to stop. Having one or maybe two over the course of the expansion as a way to limit crafting or encourage playing is probably fine, but it's gotten to absurd levels already and appears that it's only going to get worse over the following patches.Comment by hotaru251Which professions do you think need the biggest improvements?Comment by DonnictonThe value of Expulsom for me? Right now zero, because Blizzard didn't see fit to give Inscription/Enchanting any sort of use for Expulsom or Sanguicell. I only now have a use for Sanguicell by way of the new cooking recipes.

I really wish Blizzard would have considered profession balance more, but this is an overall issue with BfA anyway.Comment by KilledByVenBlacksmithing one seems garbage. Earlier datamined 4hr cd to repair all gear? Nice. ONE piece with 1hr cd? Useless.Comment by ValkylOn my server I make a killing selling crafted 340 gear, getting 3k-7k per expulsom depending on what armor and weapon type. Blacksmithing is by far the most profitable, with shields, 1h weapon strength or agility, and plate armor being the top sellers. So crafting is not dead for every server.Comment by baldie80Transmog is a very side market for me. Mostly I buy stuff than is way under priced (roughly under 10g for items that should be worth 2000g) but I have also crafted a few rare items from past expansions that are harder to make. For example I had plenty of Blood of Sargeras stored up from Legion, and some ore as well. A couple of quick purchases on the AH to top up what I needed, and a Steelbound Harness was relatively inexpensive to create. I also went back and made a Drakefist Hammer, Reborn, mostly with mats that I had sitting around anyways. I had to do some daily cooldowns for Lighting Steel Ingots and farm my Pandaria Farm a bit for Motes of Harmony, but again not a huge time or cash sink.

The Harness sold pretty fast, but the Hammer was months (and months!) but I finally found a buyer last week. The Hammer and a few other really rare older items I have been mentioning in Trade Chat whenever I go to do reposts. Occasionally someone would ask, but mostly it gets people thinking about Transmog and then if they go look on the AH they find my postings :)

Transmog is still more a hobby than a main source of income, but even with less than a hundred items up at any given time I have been doing about 50k/month for very minimal effort.Comment by ThoorinThe proper way to put value on expulsom is right there - it's same as mats to make whatever 12 items for the scrapper. Cloth is usually cheapest, but if you ain't got a tailor... then whatever you use.

And transmog... no, I absolutely hate the market. The need to preinvest into weeks of listing is annoying, and actually knowing what will sell depends on you knowing what people want for looks, as well as what is actually hard to farm out. I know one or two people who dabble, but they are in RP guilds, and they are in on the ins and outs of what's being played and needed for the part. If I get something that looks nice, I will usually rather poke them and ask, than try selling myself.Comment by GothyAll I know for sure is that gems are absolutely worthless on my server aside from rare haste and epics. Half the others are going for vendor price or 2x vendor. When I buy them out and relist more people come and post them for pitiful amounts.
I'm not sure what I'll do with the cut gems but the raw I occasionally sell a stack of 20 for a decent amount.
Medium population server listed as high. lol.

Has anyone else noticed trade chat being dead lately?Comment by sinangelusAll I know for sure is that gems are absolutely worthless on my server aside from rare haste and epics. Half the others are going for vendor price or 2x vendor. When I buy them out and relist more people come and post them for pitiful amounts.Has anyone else noticed trade chat being dead lately?Comment by FixiWell I did get excited to try out Tailoring for gold making due to this article, but found that the 2g-3g per linen that is used as the baseline in here is more like 8g-10g on my server. So that entire theory is gutted and I go back to skinning/LW, which is consistent and much more profitable.