Oh Zul'jin.... What takes you so long?

Zul'jin is just about the last realm to come up after every Tuesday Maintenance. Now this is purely anecdotal, and I've only been on the realm for a couple months, but it's always last to come up. I gotta get on and post my auctions again! ^_^

Real life has been kicking my ass lately, what with four wondrous days of intense jaw pain with an infected tooth, starting right at the beginning of the weekend, the sleepless nights of pain and ice, and the lack of antibiotics until Monday to get it cleared up. Thankfully I've got a dentist appointment this afternoon so I'll be able to get the offending tooth back on to the road to recovery, but man what a pain...

Also, it's finally winter here, after months of next to no snow, we get dumped on (sort of) with lots of heavy, wet snow.

Blech...

But on to happier things in game. I'm up to about 35k in liquid gold with my typical stock floating around. My "less time posting glyphs" plan hasn't really cut in to my glyph profit, which is kinda weird, but I guess not really since I'm doubling up my glyph posts so I have a better chance of moving two of the same type in the time periods.

Enchanting scrolls are positively a gold mine, with lots of movement and never enough to stock anything. Pretty much any time I make some, it's just the best profit margin scrolls and within a week they're all gone and I'm scrounging to get more mats for new scrolls. I guess I really should up my prices and work off mats on the AH rather than try to process materials myself. Less profits, probably, but less work.

Other markets are pretty much as they were, rare gems are still moving, bags go like crazy, prism green gems are great, inscription off-hands are moving well, and now some elixirs used to level are moving well too. Overall lots of little transactions pay off well. ^_^

On the character front I've got my Priest and Druid up to 70 now, at least I think my Druid is 70, or at least 69, and my Death Knight is 72. Ironically enough I'm getting lots of complaints when tanking on my Druid or Death Knight, mostly for waiting for people to catch up to the group, or "not holding agro" against people who start AoEing right off the start, as in before mobs even get to me... I'm not sure what I can do about that on my Druid, but I'm thinking of front-loading threat more on my Death Knight by forgoing disease application and instead going straight to a Howling Blast/Blood Boil/Blood Boil opening. I saw sort of that suggestion on MMO Champion's forums, and I'm thinking of looking in to it more to satisfy the "gogogogo" DPS crowd.

I know I'll mostly be enabling their stupid behaviour, but if it works, then it works. Also still think a "Boss Fight Explanation" mod would be awesome. Gotta look to see if there's something like that out there or how hard it would be to make one...

All the other servers are up, but Zul'jin's still down...

-LaFollet

Little later than usual

So I broke, then unbroke (and probably will re-break) 30k this week. The glyph marked has contributed probably about 22k of that cash (and more of the profit since I spent 2k on two copies of Cold Weather Flying for my Priest and Druid), with the rest most likely coming majorly from Enchanting and a minor part of Jewelcrafting and Tailoring (bags). I'm looking to get one of my Alchemists up and running tonight, or by the weekend at the latest, sitting at 350 so all I have to do is level up to the Transmutes I want to consider that "done". That will probably get done tonight if I buy the mats, on the weekend if I feel frisky enough to farm them up myself.

Really I'm mostly just finding that I don't have enough time to get everything that I want done finished up. I'm usually cancel/posting on my Glyph posters two or three times a day, dealing with Saronite Ore (and soon Titanium Ore) on my Jewelcrafter, or just doing a Daily Dungeon/Weekly Raid on my Paladin. It's been really quite hard to get the time to keep everything going and smack around on an alt in some Random Dungeons, although I did get several done last weekend in-spite of how busy I ended up being.

The real time killer has been the Saronite Shuffle though. Prospecting all that ore (did 4500 ore last night...) then processing the gems in to disenchantables just takes a lot of time. So I've started scoping out the raw gem market to supply my Rare Gems and the Enchanting market to supply enchanting mats. I may have to raise my thresholds a little to ensure I don't spend more than I make for the enchanting stuff, but by carrying more enchants at once it really should balance out the load/demand of the whole thing. What it really means though is carrying a larger burden of stock in supplies or not-currently-sell able goods.

Overall though, the automation that I've been able to bring in has improved my efficiency by a huge margin, it's just I'm still pushing myself to expand in to as many markets as I can and the expansion in learning/supplying myself is starting to be a little tiring. I should just stop things for a day or two every week just to do other things in game that I want to do, like continue leveling my Death Knight who has stayed at 71 for a couple weeks now (at least a week...)

But such is the toil of an Auction House Mogul in the making, but do I really want to be that or just a supplier of stuff? We'll see what the time/reward works out to be in the end.

-LaFollet

Money, and nothing much else...

So my progress basically comes down to breaking 20k gold on my account, a few instance runs here and there, and the Valentines Day achievements (minus Fool for Love, but I have the Love Fools for it, just gotta do the leg work). Mostly my time has been very fractured as I'm nursing my poor wife through the flu right now, hopefully I'll be able to dodge that bullet myself though.

I find myself being very obsessive about the glyph market, as in I'll do some crazy things like just switch between my two Glyph Posters cancel/posting until people stop undercutting me. Which is what's been eating up most of my time, but it can also be done while I do "other things." I think people have become less inclined to fight me while I'm doing that, and more likely just to wait me out, then post their things. Since I'm still trying to establish my glyph business I'm pouring a large amount of time in to it over other things like the Enchanting Scrolls market and the Gem market, but I have been dabbling in other things to keep a diversified income source.

Which reminds me that I have to make more bags...

Over all though, I'm just really annoyed that the realms are down, since I've been logging in for AH stuff over my lunches at work, I'd really like to get things going some more, pick up some more Cloth, Herbs, and Ore, not in that order, and start converting my excess Snowfall Ink in to the epic off-hands to shard for Abyss Crystals, since they still go for about 30g-40g on my server. Someone is obviously scooping major amounts of crystals for some purpose, probably shattering them, so I need to find an alternate source. I've seen a few people advertising in trade to purchase them, so I might start doing that, see how it goes, especially since it's usually a "CoD them to me for Xg per" so it's little work for me if that works out.

I think something wonkey is going on in the Enchanting market though. I've got a snatch list set up to grab a few things here and there when prices are low, but very VERY rarely now does dust or essences show up, might have to look into adjusting my snatch/sell prices for enchanting stuff. I'll have to watch that when I start to get back in to the scroll market in earnest.

My Priest is really close to maxing Tailoring, and really needs to hit 68 to get Cold Weather Flying for cloth cooldowns, and is getting quite close to Outland level Alchemy (or might have hit 300 already, can't remember, haven't had a lot of time for her). Overall though, like I said, haven't had time to do much leveling of anything except my gold pile. Hopefully I'll be able to shake some time away from the Glyph Market (my own obsessiveness there...) so I can obsess over other things....

Joy.... ^_^

And I still have to decide about Blacksmithing, now or wait for Cataclysm...

-LaFollet

Quick Update

The Glyph market is a thing of wonder, that with my little bit of Enchanting Scrolls are pushing me up in gold quite quickly. Probably doubled my liquid assets so far this week alone. Gonna have to start keeping track of that like some other blogs... Somehow, not right now though. Much happiness even though there's some rough happenings in real life right now. Overall a very exciting time, in the Chinese proverb sense of "interesting times."

-LaFollet

Progress is.... Steady.

So my DK is about half-way through 70 just from tanking instances. I've mostly just been doing one a day to get the Emblems of Triumph, and only once have I come across a healer that couldn't keep me up. I'm not the best at Death Knight tanking, but I'm getting a lot better at popping cooldowns when appropriate, and holding agro isn't an issue at all. The issue in question was the double boss in Utgarde Keep that has a high random damage component. The healer couldn't/didn't/wasn't able to keep up with all the damage, which was weird as a Tree Druid, but the group ended up switching around tanks and worked it out. I have to say though that really peeved me off since the general consensus of the group was that it was my fault, except of course the guy that took over tanking, he didn't think it was my fault. Personally, I know all sides of that encounter (as if it's something huge and important! ^_^ ) and I'd chock it up as Healer-Tunnel Vision, something I suffer from a lot as a healer. Sometimes it's just plain hard to keep an eye on your own health when so much is going on!

I've slightly broke in to the Glyph market, which, on my server, seems to be very atypical to what I read about on other people's blogs. There's many points where Glyphs are going for 30g+ each, and it seems to cycle through a lot of the different glyphs as people undercut each other down. What I've basically done is set up one group in QA3 for my Glyphs with a Threshold of 10g and a Fallback of 60g, and from there it's cancel/post until things sell. Which has been working out well, minus the fact that I've been buying a lot of raw materials for Jewelcrafting and Enchanting... Not to mention the things I've purchased to subsidize leveling Alchemy on two different characters at once. ^_^

Overall my liquid funds are still around 5k - 10k across my characters, but my stocks of things are way up. At one point I had about 600 Infinite Dust, and I've gone through about 250 of each type of green gem since I started (almost 1500 Saronite Ore Prospects), obviously I've been rolling these mats over in to Gems, Cloth, Glyphs, and whatever else I can thing of to produce, which has resulted in a huge amount of gold flowing through me. Unfortunately it's all flowing through right now and I haven't really got a backlog of stuff that I can keep selling without producing more to just build up my gold. I know that'll happen, but it's a little discouraging to stay at the "same gold amount" after working this for a couple weeks, which is why I'm keeping track of a few things like my Saronite Prospecting. When I start to feel emo about my AHing skills, I can just look at how much product I've processed/moved through the totals I've created and know that I'm spending things to build a better business and that I'm making gold to cover all of those expenditures.

Of course if I was keeping track of my large expenditures than I'd know where it was going...

Too many things to keep track of!

-LaFollet