Gold making for Casuals is a series of gold making tips for World of Warcraft players that want to make some extra gold but don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it. These tips will be things that you can quickly and easily and won’t take too much time and effort out of your regular play. But will help net you a bit of extra gold on the side to save towards those ever spiking token costs. You can catch up with the full index list of posts here Gold Making For Casuals Series Index
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What is Crafting?
Crafting is the process of taking raw materials like metals, herbs, and clothes and turning them into usable items, like potions, clothes, and gems. It is one of the main ways and means of making gold in World of Warcraft. And with TSM’s crafting module it is made super easy. We will be going over how to use it in a future post. Today I just wanted to gather up the results and conclusions of my week of kick-starting crafting.
The Crafting Breakdown
So I haven’t crafted anything in forever, in fact, I am terrible at crafting regularly in general. Normally I just make the odd thing here and there if I see them selling well. But with the price of tokens not getting any lower anytime soon and the fact that I have grown rather attached to my second account; I need to ramp up the gold making a bit to make back the gold I spent on that spider. So I took a look at crafting. My aim was to inject a bit of cash into each profession and see what I could do with it. See what profits I could make with it. My hope was that if I could make a profit on that injection I could use that to keep those characters crafting going forwards. Turn them into self-supplying crafting wheels.
I also wanted to use this to see which professions were most valuable and worth my time. My methods of gold making are always on the minimal efforts for maximum gain preference. So I want to know which ones are worth my time and which are now. And a few things play into that decision but I have gone into that in depth more below. I tried to do one profession a day, but real life got in the way. I did, however, get them all done over the course of a week. And I have included a selection of sales shots and AH value shots for the stuff that sold and the stuff still posted now two weeks later.
Jewelcrafting And Enchanting
These two are together as I was crafting these on the same character, and they may be my two favorites. It should be said; that I did go into this with a reagents bank stuffed to the brim with random materials for both professions which no doubt cut the costs for me. I got a good way down the list before I had to buy anything.
This is mostly due to the fact that any greens worth less than 100g; I send to my Enchanter to DE and I stockpile the materials. Likewise with surplus ore although that is far less common. So I had a stash of materials ready to go when I started crafting these too, and I injected about 30,000g extra into each too to buy extra bits. In the end, I only spent about 55k including deposits.
The sales above all added up to come out at 97,3666g. Which is over
Now whether or not they sell for that or at all is not a sure thing. But it stands to reason that they will eventually sell for something and however shy of that make they call it’s still all additional profits. So I am very very pleased with how these two turned out. And I enjoyed it, I like enchanting in particular. Calling this one a win.
Tailoring and Blacksmithing
I spent about 23k on Tailoring and I think about 20k on Blacksmithing too but I forgot to record it. Derp. Tailoring is usually one of my go-to crafting professions I admit and I had a lot of mats for it stashed up too. Not so many for Blacksmithing but we worked with that we could get for our 20k gold injection. So we put about 43k into Tailoring and Blacksmithing and I found the sales there a lot slower. I also did these two at the end of the week so they did have less time to sell than the rest. And also I imagine gear sells slower than Enchants and Gems as a rule.
I’m hoping with the Trial of Style coming up this stuff might move a little quicker. As people will hopefully be filling up wardrobes in a rush. But until then here are some sales and the current AH value. The mailboxes add up to 61,579g which is almost 20k profit. Not just as good but it also sits with 324k worth of goods still on the AH. So fingers crossed.
Alchemy
I spent a whopping 28k into getting my alchemy posted up. That is on top of the materials I had sitting around collecting dust as well. I should also note here that with this profession and all the others; I used what I had on hand and whatever I could afford for the set-aside amount. This means that often while I was running the TSM buying scan I would run out of gold at a certain point and have to stop. Sometimes this meant that I would have bought maybe 2/5 materials for a certain craft but couldn’t afford the rest to actually make it. So a portion of the cost spent on these experiments went on mats still sitting in my bags. Just bear that in mind.
My plan is to use the profits from these sales to buy more of them and so on and so forth. And some materials were simply not available and I did zero farming for this project. I think those factors hindered Alchemy somewhat with the transmutes. As I couldn’t get all the mats for a lot of things. So when it came down to it as seen in the shots below I spent 28k and came out with around 19k. Which is in a deficit. But….but. silver lining. I still have 82k of AH value to sell.
The conclusion is I think Alchemy depends on a lot more on you being able to provide a lot of your mats. And maybe be willing to do some farming for them for the pricier selling items. For example, no Vials were made in this session due to mat cost and no farming and that can be 100k by itself.
Inscription
I spent 20k on Inscription as well and it is one of the ones I know very little about in truth. So I just blindly fumbled through the list with a very we’ll-see-what-happens attitude. Honestly, I didn’t find this one very profitable or worth my while with all the million and running around involved. I made about 20k on this as seen in the shots below and a few extra bits for a couple of hundred each that I didn’t screencap.
So I broke even and
Engineering
I spent about crafting Engineering items and this one was one that worried me. I have never really enjoyed engineering as a profession. And I have never, ever found it worthwhile in terms of gold making. I know it can be for some folks. But I have never been able to make it work for me.
The shots below total up at 27k sales and after 20k spent that is just under 10 profit with a further 8k of items on the AH. Broke even and made a little bit of profit. But not one I will be doing very often in the future I don’t think. I think Blacksmithing and gems are a better use of the ore.
Leatherworking
I spent 19k on crafting Leatherworking, and this was another market I know nothing about. So I was flying by the seat of my pants with it entirely. As you can see from the screenshots below I made back 22k and I have 307k sitting on the AH still to sell. I’m hoping these items will sell when Trial of Style rolls around. And the value of them shocked me, so I think I might look into crafting leatherworking a little more in the future.
I found a lot of the cost of this was in rare leathers and scales. So I think even if these don’t sell I could maybe improve the math a lot of I put in an hour farming up some of those scales. Would you be interested in a summary post of where to find and farm all the non-leather materials for leatherworking? Be it for crafting or selling for pure profit. If you are, then comment below and let me know!
Conclusions
All in all, I needed to do this to get myself rolling again with crafting and gold making. But I also wanted to be sure I was not funneling gold into things that were not supporting themselves which is why I set them each a pre-set amount to start with.
Those that made more profits will have more to add to their input next time and so on. I also think things like Inscription and Engineering I might do a little less often than the others. Purely because I didn’t enjoy them as much and they didn’t make it worth my time either.
Do you have a favorite crafting profession? What is it and how to do you use it?
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