This is an easy way to obtain a lot of trillium (and living steel).
On a gatherer, set your hearthstone to your faction’s Pandaria capital city.
Fly around and gather (gathering resets the nodes in the area) until you find a golden lotus node. Harvest – note the buff it gives you! For 15 minutes, anything you kill has a chance to drop a treasure chest, which has a high chance of containing ghost iron, black/white trillium and spirits of harmony.
Head to Loremasters and queue for LFR. Clear trash up to first boss. Leave raid, reset, rinse and repeat. The large packs mean you will get tons of treasure chests.
Smelt trillium and ghost iron, send that + spirits of harmony to your alchemist with transmute spec (for extra procs). Turn ghost iron into trillium, turn trillium + SoH into living steel using riddle of steel (or do this every now and then and always have a nice stockpile for daily transmute).
This is infinitely repeatable as long as you don’t kill any bosses in HoF – with LFR, you will hit a limit of number of times you can enter. The biggest bottleneck is finding golden lotus nodes. Augment it with the Halfhill farm for easy daily trillium and/or SoH. I usually do a lap after doing my farm – the monkey village, bamboo forest west of halfhill and Kun Lai summit are all node rich and this path will let you get a kill in on Sha of Fear as well as some rare kills. You’ll also get a ton of lesser charms which you can convert into bonus rolls.
Bonus optimisation options:
– Darkmoon fire-water for increased gathering speed – Pandaria herb gathering speed bonus gloves (chance to drop from rares). I am pretty sure this stacks with fire-water, but haven’t properly tested, I just know it’s hella fast with both. Edit: these do NOT stack – Mist-veiled goggles (MoP engineering craft) to see extra nodes – Ancient Pandaren mining pick (from Jade forest mine) for free gems when hitting ore nodes (unsure if this is still obtainable) – +speed gear set + bear tartare + druid for movement speed to make trash farming faster
If you just want ghost iron, head west of Shrine of Two Moons until you find the area where quillian spawn in an endless swarm. Kill them, mine them. You don’t need to move, just lay down aoe and mine. I prefer a paladin for this as consecration basically instakills everything running by.
Any other good tips?
Update Sept 2022:
– Make sure to harvest herbs as you go. Harvesting a herb clears it out so golden lotus can spawn – golden lotus has a random chance to appear when each node repopulates. DE-populating the nodes by harvesting them forces them to repopulate. If you don’t harvest, then you are just hunting for existing ones, which are much more rare.
– If you have multiple accounts, you can fly around together (eg vial of sands mount) and both harvest the nodes, which makes golden lotus spawn 2x, 3x (X = characters) as fast. Logging out preserves the buff!
– You can use LFR for trash. I don’t know if the raid/LFR is quicker.
Hiya, here’s an easy guide to setting up selling pets on multiple servers!
1. Optional: Make a vulpera. This isn’t mandatory, but it makes it SO much easier. They spawn with some gold to cover listing fees and they have extra bag space. They also spawn at the back of Org, close to AH and bank.
2. Optional: when spawned, run to the Tauren AH area (nice close bank/AH). Stop at the enchanting trainer and learn enchanting and buy the strange dust/lesser magic essence from the mats merchant. These can be sold for seed money.
3. Cage extra pets. Useful macros, can run these as moving to Ah area (they won’t dismount you):
Cage for sale (this macro cages any pets you have 3 of, leaving 2 behind. You can tweak it to your preference, eg sub 2 for 1 to cage any pets above 1): /run local t,p,j={},{},C_PetJournal for i=1,j.GetNumPets() do p={j.GetPetInfoByIndex(i)} t[p[2]]=(t[p[2]] or 0)+1 if t[p[2]]>2 and p[16] and p[1] then j.CagePetByID(p[1]) return end end
Add to journal (this will fail if it hits journal full for a pet, so put extra pets at the very bottom on your inventory) : /use pet cage
TSM: Use TUJGlobalMean to price pets based on overall region prices. This lets you buy pets cheaply on one region and sell them for a profit on other regions. You will need the undermine journal addon for this price source.
Seed money tips:
– Use TSM “vendor” search to buy/sell items listed lower than vendor price – Sell enchanting mats from vendor – Buy and DE cheapo greens and sell mats – Buy/smelt ores and sell bars – Mail guild tabard: buy cost is 250g, sell cost is around 60g. You eat a loss but can essentially transfer money to another server to finance posting auctions.
Strategy:
– Buy pets listed heavily below regional prices and relist on other servers. You’ll begin to notice patterns, such as farmers flooding a server market and listing a ton of the same pet for cheap or timewalking driving down the cost of pets associated with turnin area (example: Bemax during Pandaria timewalking, price will tank and then slowly rise once Timeless Isle is less common to visit). – Augment with pets you create via crafting. – Keep an ear out for content creators sharing farming tips. These pets will tank in price as people jump on the bandwagon and will go up in value once a new farm becomes popular. – Learn which pets are bought from vendors and avoid these. As the supply is constant, their price will not fluctuate as much and one dedicated idiot can keep the price low. Place an alt at vendors to easily keep them supplied for yourself. – Buy FOMO and timegated pets during events which make them common, eg holidays or Darkmoon Faire. Resell later when they are temporarily unobtainable and price has gone up. – Create a pet dungeon alt to farm rare pets for resale. Legion petshop in Dalaran will let you easily teleport alts to pet dungeons if you’ve already cleared them, just talk to the NPC in the pet shop for a teleport. This will let you easily set up an alt at each pet dungeon entrance (pick Legion for Chromie time and do the intro quests/scenario). These are some of the most expensive pets, but will have lower sale rates so spreading them among multiple servers is really useful.
As a crafting middleman, you basically are supplying other crafters with what they need. You’re the dude making sure there are enchanting mats on the AH or the gal offering end results of annoying assemblies.
Your goal in this role is to basically turn raw mats and items into stuff people want to pay for.
For example, for enchanting, search for weapon or armor and sort by price. Buy anything under 1-5g, as a rule of thumb – the expansion the item sources from will affect value. Cataclysm breakdowns, for example, are more rare while nobody wants spirit dust from Pandaria. You can almost always disenchant the mats for a profit or snag some transmog to flip. You can do this with the base AH UI very quickly (TSM chugs too hard on my computer for searches as big as this).
(Side note: The next step to making this loop self sustainable is using your own production skill to produce the things to DE, eg making a bunch of bracers with a tailor to DE for dust. This is what’s known as a shuffle)
You can apply this same concept to ores: you’re taking one thing and crafting it to add value. Buy cheap ores, smelt them to sell more expensive bars.
With tailoring, you have stuff like enchanted frostweave, soulcloth, basically turning mats into more valuable mats. Leatherworking lets you upgrade hides. Enchanting + Shadowlands legendaries is a great example of this middle market.
Herb fragments, leather scraps, ore nuggets, shattering enchanting mats, etc can all work with this concept – you can often sell or use them, once transformed. Do the math – sometimes things sell for very inflated values.
Be aware that there is a limit to when the crafting middle market mats stops becoming profitable. For some things, people won’t pay a middleman for – they might make those mats themselves as part of the end goal of their crafting or the process to make it is so easy that it’s not worth your time.
Also learn which mats help boost this sort of crafter. For example, a bunch of frozen orbs cheap on the AH means you get to make a ton of different cloth. Someone dumping a ton of crystals means DE profit. Timewalking dungeons means X ore, cloth, elemental is super common atm. Etc.
In addition to making money, playing this role will teach you about the flow of mats from raw to crafted, which are very important concepts to understand if you want to tackle goldmaking on a larger scale.
This will not make you tons of gold, but it will make you consistent gold.
So big bear butt’s latest post about the recent node spawn rate has…err…spawned a lively discussion about how exactly changes to collection affect the game at large. From my experience in MUDs, changes like these are actually far more wide-reaching than a simple rise in ore costs; they can have (or be a result of) much larger ripple effects in the economy.
Let me share a few examples from MUDs, and then I’ll address these changes in WoW.
– In the very first mud I played, Avalon, the rogue-class equivalent (Thieves) and hunter-class (Rangers) each had the ability to harvest their own poisons for use in combat. Other classes, like warriors, could also use their poisons on their weapons, and other players could sell/distribute these poisons to others, but every single poison use was a direct 1:1 ratio of player harvested to use. I picked one resik, I got to disarm someone once, and then that poison was used up.
Each poison grew in its own environment type and grew at a modest rate. You could have 60 poisons max growing in each node at a time, and it took about 1.5 seconds to harvest a single poison. So, there was a time factor (several minutes for one fight’s worth of poisons) plus a rarity factor (some locations would only have a few poisons available to pick, and locations were limited by the game’s world size. The hardcap on possible growth also put a ceiling on the total amount of poisons possible in the game).
My solution to this was to begin building a vast network of cottages, squirrelled away behind the walls of my guildhall. These private gardens basically gave me infinite poisons for certain environment types. Now the first result was a good one: I was able to spread the wealth and give newbies tons of nice stuff to use in combat. However, as the idea became popular, other players began to do it as well, and we saw a permeation of poisons, to the point of ALL classes eventually using them.
Coupled with this player-based proliferation, the admin also decided to change the environment types of one of the very rare poisons. I was the class liaison at the time and, admittedly, naive. I pushed for this, not having the full view that I have in retrospect. The result was that we suddenly began to see a much larger influx of certain poisons being used, again by all classes.
These small changes reshaped combat, from the player level. The game wasn’t balanced to have heavy-hitters like warriors able to afflict like thieves. Affliction-based users began to get more sloppy, throwing expensive affliction after expensive affliction at their foes. Classes had to go through rebalancing. Thieves and rangers had to be given more buffs to balance out the fact that everyone had access to their affliction potential. In addition to this, the economy was completely tweaked. Poisons dropped in value, while the potion and herb market shot up, as people began to need to chew through TONS more curatives each fight.
In short, huge changes happened because of spawn rate changes. Some, like having more new players able to dive into combat, were great for the game. Some, such as the class unbalances, were severely problematic.
This is what happens when everyone can harvest herbs. 😦
– In another MUD I played, Aetolia, there was a similar herb harvesting system. Each room could potentially contain a specific number of herbs, and players had to visit each room, picking a few here and there. Only two classes in the game, Druids and Sentinels (similar to hunters) could pick plants.
As the factions split into various city alignments, it became clear that the “evil” side of the game was facing a much harder struggle to get herbs, as both Druids and Sentinels were members of the “good” faction. Herbalism/Alchemy was turned into a general skill that all players had access to. The only limit? You couldn’t be a blacksmith (had to pick one or the other). And blacksmithing really wasn’t that fun or profitable. Once you had a weapon, you kept it for real life MONTHS, so barely anyone had interest in that profession.
In conjunction with this change, harvesting turned to PERSONAL limits, with each player limited to a certain number of herbs picked per day, instead of the prior overall world limits on plant spawns. The result was expectedly catatrosphic: with no upper ceiling on the total number of plants in the WORLD, every player went out each day and harvested their max. There was no competition for specific plants, no rarity for plant spawns, and so EVERYONE had the same amount of plants available for sale each day.
Within a month, plants bottomed out at one gold each (the lowest possible price, about the equivalent of one copper in WoW), whereas before they had cost dozens of gold. They pretty much never recovered from plummet, and harvesting plants became basically a profession where you were paid for your time/you did it for the convenience.
Some of us keep it big pimpin’ no matter what, though.
The moral of these examples is that what may seem like small changes can have potentially large ripple effects. WoW is obviously a bit different (we don’t consume multiple stacks of plants each fight!), but there are some similarities here. At its very core, the gathering side of an economy has a chunk of its value based in TIME. How much money are you getting for your efforts? Consider, also, that the rewards for all those freaking dailies had gone up in Mists, so there’s a fairly direct comparison for gatherers in the amount of money they could snag with a basic time investment.
At the start of MoP, the value side of the gathering economy became very low due to the high node spawn rates. On larger servers, this might not have been as noticable, as there are ALWAYS players who will gather, even if they are getting only pennies for their efforts. Players may have only seen a relatively low cost for crafted goods, since mats were cheap. However, on smaller population servers, this contingent of die-hard gatherers is smaller, so the result has actually been a weird one: prices got stupid. And not just stupid high or stupid low, but stupid all over the place. The initial influx from the high amount of nodes drove the prices down super low…and those low prices discouraged many people from gathering. Materials became harder to get, so prices would shoot back up…and then the market would get flooded again, and prices would plummet.
Imma get ALL THE ORES
Crafters, however, would be purchasing mats at a fairly regular rate, and (the smart ones, at least) would base their prices off how much they were spending and/or the market value of the commodities. Crafted items also, on the whole, take longer to sell…or rather, they sell at a smoother rate – raw mats are purchased in bulk, crafters turn them into a bunch of items, and the items are bought as needed. The end result of this is that the cost for raw materials was fluctuating wildly from day to day, but the market for crafted items wanted to stay stable. Players themselves were a big factor in this, as crafters had prices they wanted to sell at, and buyers had ideas of how much things were worth (and neither of these may actually be the market value!). We ended up seeing tons of items selling at less than cost. For example, some alchemists were only profiting based on spec procs.
Was the nerf needed? Maybe. I view it as an attempt by Blizzard to rectify the too-high gathering rates from early in the expansion. They wanted to avoid the huge price inflations that we saw at the start of Cata, but they went too far in the other direction. This could potentially normalize it and make gathering attractive again…except there is the tricky aspect of us players ourselves. The market had already settled down (albeit into a slightly lower level than many would like). We have all picked up an internal “cost” calculation. This change was ABSOLUTELY needed several weeks ago. Now? It might very well throw a big wrench into things and require the market to readjust, again. Then again, it might be a very useful one that encourages more gatherers to get back out there grabbing items, which can ripple profit upwards along the crafting chain. Or it could just make things even less profitable to craft. I, personally, am going to be keeping my eye on things for a bit before I craft/post large amounts of items created from herbs/ore, unless I see a huge profit from it.
a little bit of everything all of the time 