Getting Ready for MoP: An Overview

This post is a part of Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival, hosted by Cold of Cold's Gold Factory. 

The World of Warcraft is all abuzz lately with news of the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that a lot of Annual Pass subscribers already have access to a (rather unfinished) beta. Speculation about the release date is rampant. I won't speculate, because I'm terrible at evaluating the situation objectively; I just want MoP to come out this summer because Dragon Soul is a drag. I'm ready for new content.

Since I'm new to goldmaking, I've never before prepared for an expansion in terms of anticipated profit. I don't necessarily recommend following any of the strategies I'm using, but I'll give a quick rundown of each tactic and my reasoning for it. I'll continue to make posts as we learn more and my strategies change.

Companion (Non-Combat) Pets
Since the announcement of the Pet Battle System, I've been keeping an eye out for somewhat unique BoE pets. Vendor pets don't qualify (unless they state that some of them will go away) since they're easy to acquire and would just take up valuable bank and bag space. It's a fairly popular theory among goldmakers that pets will rise in value as players get involved with pet battles. There are a few things that might affect this value; for example, if Blizzard makes your pets account-wide the market will be smaller. And there's the question of whether we'll be able to sell pre-leveled pets -- frankly, I have no idea what will happen with that. I'm not going to fill an entire guild bank, but I am trying to get one or two tabs' worth. Word on the street is that Cataclysm drop pets like Elementium Geode will be less prevalent once folks aren't grinding in Cataclysm zones anymore. That's code for "buy them now when they're cheap and sell them later when they're not." That's just one example of what I'm looking for in pets.

Leather Transmog Gear
I hate the transmog market; it doesn't seem to do well on my server, and I find it tedious and frustrating. However, I'm collecting another one or two guild bank tabs' worth of leather gear I think monks will find appealing. Jim at Power Word: Gold has a good post on transmog gear that might appeal to monks; I agree with some of his conclusions but am also trying to draw my own based on what I like.

Profession Leveling Mats
Specifically, TBC, Wrath and Cataclysm mats. If you've ever leveled a profession, you know there are chokepoints -- materials you really need but which are in short supply because nobody's farming them anymore. Most of what I'm stockpiling are the Cataclysm mats. For example, I'm keeping a lot of my Hypnotic Dust which is almost always below 1g right now on my server. But the dust from Wrath goes for about 8 times that much, since you need a ton of it to level, and you don't get nearly enough just leveling through the zones. I'm also keeping gems, elementals, etc. This is a long long term investment; I anticipate that at the beginning of MoP, everyone will be unloading their excess Cataclysm mats and the market will be saturated. However, three to six months in, the prices should rise.

Getting Professions Ready
I have three alts at 85 and one at 80, all with maxed professions: JC x2, Alchemy x2, Enchanting, Inscription, Herbalism, and Leatherworking. I'm working on leveling my alts and maxing their professions so they're ready to go when the expansion hits. As far as I know, we don't know yet what the level requirement will be to train max professions, so I'm going to try to just get them all to 85 anyway. My plan once MoP is actually here is to spend a few weeks gathering, since mats should go for high prices initially. I also plan to level my Inscription as soon as possible. The other crafting professions will wait, since their items tend to be more important once players have reached the endgame (flasks, cut gems, crafted gear, belt buckles, enchanting scrolls, and so on).

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So those are my strategies as they stand now. What do you think? What are you doing to prepare?

Darkmoon Deck Experiment: Part Two

I kind of let this project slide over the weekend because I really wanted to get my mage from 51 to 65, which I have now accomplished. (Now I just have to come up with a metric asston of Frostweave Cloth and switch her alchemy to engineering, since I don't really want a third alchemist just at the moment.) This afternoon, I got back to it. So here's what's going on.

First, you may recall that earlier I made 8 Rogues Decks and traded them in for 3 Darkmoon Vests, 2 Darkmoon Chain Shirts, and one Darkmoon Robe. I posted all those on the AH at 100g per, and also posted one deck. (I kept one for later.) I really like the purple Darkmoon Vest look for leather, and I was hoping someone else would too. I sold one Darkmoon Vest and the deck I posted, for a total of 123g 43s 66c after the AH cut. The vest that sold was of the Monkey, so I think whoever bought it did so for the stats and not the look. The other two I have are of Power and have yet to sell.

This afternoon I made 25 Strange Tarot, resulting in only 5 complete Swords Decks. I turned these in for 2 Azure Shoulderguards, 1 Cloaked Shoulderpads, and 2 Darkcloth Shoulders. I thought the mail Azure Shoulderguards might look good for those trying to create a mail version of the SW Guard type look; the Cloaked are just generally nice for low level rogue mogging; and the Darkcloth are small, low-profile cloth which I think is always appealing. I'm going to list those up at 200g each and see how it goes.

I also made 20 Arcane Tarot, resulting in 3 complete Mages Decks. I turned these in for 2 Darkmoon Pendants and 1 Darkmoon Necklace. Obviously I'll be selling these for stats, not mogging. I got two of the pendants because if they don't sell I'm going to give one to my rogue as an upgrade. Market average for both of these on my server is 89g but since none are posted right now I'm going to try them at 100g.

I've still got other decks to make and turn in, but for now I'm going back to my mage for a little while.

Darkmoon Deck Experiment: The Beginning

So I'm a little bored today, and I have a whole lot of uncommon quality inks of the lower ranks. I've already got several of each offhand made from them, so I thought instead I'd try a little experiment.

Because of Argo (@EpicPennyPouch on Twitter), I already used a Swords Deck to get some decent looking leather shoulders for my rogue. (See Argo's post here.) The low-level decks themselves don't move particularly well on my server, and I don't have a lot of luck in the mog market yet, so this is a total "just for fun" experiment. I'm making all the low-level decks, trading them in for the gear, and posting that on the AH. There aren't a lot of options at really low levels for transmog -- at least, not options I like -- but at least a few of these items aren't hideous. I won't be able to track the ink costs well because these have just been sitting in my bags for a while; we'll just see how sales go.

Starting at the bottom, I made 29 Mysterious Tarot cards, and got 9 Aces, 12 Twos, and 8 Threes -- 8 Rogues Decks overall, plus some extra cards. Here's what I'm going to do with them:

• List one Rogues Deck on the AH.
• Turn in three decks for Darkmoon Vest.
• Turn in two decks for Darkmoon Chain Shirt.
• Turn in one deck for Darkmoon Robe.
• Keep one for later.

I've posted the gear at 100g to start with. We'll see where it goes, shall we?

My WoW client just crashed but I'm going to do this with more of the decks and will update this post with the initial information, then make a new post later with any sales or lack thereof.

UPDATE: Within three hours, I sold one of the Darkmoon Vests and the Rogues Deck. Whee! I'm leveling my mage to try to get rid of some of this cloth I have sitting around (she's my tailor) but I will continue with this later.

TSM Categories for Transmog Gear

Yesterday I was watching one of Jim's amazing livestreams and I noticed that his TSM auctioning categories for Cata greens and mog gear were very different to mine. I didn't take screenshots of my old categories, and until the servers come back up I can't show you the new ones. But adopting the method he uses (and probably many other folks -- sorry I can't name everyone, this was just the first place I saw it!) made everything much simpler and made me way more inclined to continue selling this stuff.

Previously, I had a categories called, for example, gear - xmog - plate - 1000. Within that category I had groups for every individual stinking piece of armor that went into it. This got really messy and confusing really fast.

What I have now is a single main category, just called gear - xmog. (I'll post screenshots of how this is set up after maintenance.) Inside that category I have groups named after the price brackets, so 500, 750, 1000, 2000, 5000 -- at least for now. Here you can see one of the groups, my 500g group (which doesn't have many items in it yet; I'm still setting these up) inside the gear - xmog category. Please ignore the general mess that is my TSM categorization. I'm working on cleaning it up, and this is part of it.

In the group settings for transmog items, I checked the box to add by item ID, since stats are not important, and set up the threshold and fallback according to the price bracket. Here you can see my threshold and fallback for my 500g group. I forgot to get a SS of the "by item ID" checkbox, but it's at the very top in the group overrides tab.

In the category settings, I set the post cap to 1, post time to 48 hours, and the behavior to post at fallback when the market goes below my threshold. (I may change that to not post at all for a little while until I get a better handle on the pricing structure; it's easier for me to pick them out when the text in the auction log is orange.) Here are the category settings:

As I collect new items, I simply add them to the appropriate price group, rather than having to create an entire new group for them. This has already saved me so much time, and it's so much tidier. I'm following a similar method for my Cata greens, except I have those priced by level. (I bumped my prices on those up yesterday and already had a sale at the higher price, so woo!) I haven't had any mog sales yet, but it's midweek and I didn't get much posted before maintenance.

This post probably makes almost zero sense without pictures if you don't see TSM in your sleep, so I'll add screenshots soon.

Edit: I added screenshots but I'm not sure they're actually big enough to be useful. Still getting used to Blogger so I will revisit this sometime when my Internet connection is better.

Today's Transmogs: Night Elf Hunter Kilt

I've been working on putting this outfit together for my hunter for about a month now. It's taken a while to gather up all the pieces. As I mentioned previously, I really, really like kilts in-game, and I thought it would be an unusual look for a hunter. Aqualaeta is definitely a Night Elf through and through, so I wanted something that matched the green and purple night elf colors. I also wanted fairly low-profile and streamlined, as "natural" looking as possible. I've had gigantic shoulders forever and ever but I thought with something less conspicuous, she could have more of a ranger look. So here it is; these aren't really the best screenshots but I'll try to get better ones soon. Please enjoy the Little Fawn, one of my favorite vanity pets.

I also took a shot at an action shot to show off the bow, although it was really hard to catch it since I wanted a wooded background and most of the mobs in Hyjal die in 1-2 shots. But there's a sprite darter!

Here are the items involved. This outfit started with the legs and the bow and went from there. I love this bow because it looks so foresty and perfect for a nelf hunter.

• Helm: Netherstorm Helm -- I like this because it's spiky, with my pointy ears and pointy eyebrows, and it's not overly showy and doesn't cover too much of my head. (BoE green)
• Shoulders: Spaulders of Sealing -- these have a great low profile without looking too much like turtle shells. I could do without the rivets, but overall good. (Quest reward from Desolace, both factions)
• Cloak: None (I almost never display cloaks, especially not with this chest piece)
• Chest: Ancient Chestpiece -- the color on this doesn't exactly match but it tends towards green and picks up some of the colors in the kilt. I love the open back design too much to go with my other option, which was the Skettis Chestpiece. (BoE green)
• Wrist: None (doesn't show under the gloves)
• Hands: Curse Lifter's Gloves -- again, I could've gone with a Skettis piece, but I wanted more green represented. I think these make a nice transition from the chest to the kilt and bow. (Alliance quest reward in Wetlands)
• Waist: Outrunner's Cord -- Looks fine, I think. I may go for the belt that actually matches the kilt at some point, but I like this for now. (BoE green)
• Legs: Oceansong Kilt -- obviously I like this since it was one of the main inspirations for the set. The colors are perfect. I'm not in love with the chain detail but I can overlook it. (BoP drop from the last boss in H-Ramps)
• Feet: Outrunner's Slippers -- I wanted it to basically look like I wasn't wearing shoes. I don't like that they're bright blue, though. (BoE green)
• Staff: Dreamer's Dragonstaff -- I like this because it's kind of woodsy and gnarly looking. Unfortunately the enchant glow kind of ruins the whole "simple" thing. At least it's a green glow, I guess. (BoP drop from Thorngrin the Tender in the Botanica)
• Bow: Honorable Longbow -- I can't say enough about this bow. It's got wood, it's got vines, it's got leaves. It's not overly flashy but it has just enough detail to be really attractive.  This shares a model and colors with the Dutiful Longbow (both of them being BoE greens) as well as the Wyrmstalker's Bow. The last is a quest reward from Icecrown that I sadly vendored  before I knew transmog was coming.

I really love this outfit and it makes me super happy to have finally gotten the kilt today and been able to finish it out and actually do the mog. The only things I'd really like to change are the color of the chest (wish it were a little bit greener), the enchant glow (turn it off! ee!), and the color of the shoes. I know there are other versions of the shoes in different colors but the blue seemed like the best option out of what was available.

Today's Transmogs: Night Elf DK in a Purple Kilt

I love transmogging. I need to do it more. I spent a little while today coming up with an outfit idea for my DK, who actually doesn't get played much except to do inscription stuff. (I am hoping to get her to 85 before MoP hits, though.) But hey, you should look good standing around milling in Stormwind, amirite?

Here's the idea I came up with:

What I really wanted was a frosty blue and white look, but I wasn't finding anything that called out to me. Kilts have always been my favorite legs in the game (possibly because of my druid addiction) and as I surfed through the options in MogIt -- great addon, by the way, whether you're mogging for yourself or looking for stuff to sell -- the kilt really appealed to me. The image itself is a screenshot from MogIt's preview pane. I think the overall purple color works since Snorgles is a Night Elf, although I still wish there were a blue option. I'm going to keep looking. These are the items:

• Helm: None (turn off display -- I like her hair too much!)
• Shoulders: Replica Soulforge Shoulders (these come from DMF tokens)
• Cloak: None (I almost never display cloaks)
• Chest: Saltstone Surcoat (BoE green)
• Wrist: None (doesn't show under the gloves)
• Hands: Fists of the Pack (Alliance quest reward in Felwood)
• Waist: Acherus Knight's Girdle (Vendor item: because it's INVISIBLE)
• Legs: Cassock of the Loyal (BoP drop from Hungarfen in H-Underbog)
• Feet: Greaves of the Slaughter (because I already have them, you can't see much of them, and they kinda match)
• Weapon: Swiftwind Blade x2 (Alliance quest reward in Loch Modan; I don't love the gold on this so I'm still on the lookout)

Overall I like this outfit pretty well; I'll probably grab the shoulders at this month's DMF and start picking up the rest of the items as I go.