In case you missed the original video, I show how to use the addons to create the SHORTEST PATH between all known spawn points.

The original video was a bit grainy. I’ve used a better video capture program this time, and added a few steps that (hopefully) will answer many of the questions that I received about it.

Here’s the video.

Note: If you like it or find it useful, please consider Sharing this video via Digg, Twitter, etc. Let’s get the word out…people will thank you for sharing what is probably one of the most powerful gold-making strategies in the game.

It calculates cost of materials based on either Auction House or Vendor prices (or can pick the best of the two).  It adds up the cost of all the materials and then compares it to the Auction House sale value of the crafted item.  It flags items that can be crafted and sold for a profit.

Obviously this requires that you also have an auction house mod that captures average prices.  It can use the AH prices from Auctioneer, AuctionLite, AuctionMaster or Auctionator.  As long as you have one of those, it can correctly identify profitable recipes.

You can download the addon at curse.com: Lil Sparky’s Workshop

The advantage of daily quests is three-fold:

1) completing them earns faction reputation, which usually provides high-level rewards,

2) they are a consistent way of earning a known amount of gold (and the gold earned is usually at a higher rate for the time invested in it),  and

3) they are repeatable (obviously), so you can master the techniques needed to complete the quest quickly, and earn good gold (and rep rewards) over and over.

Technically there is a fourth advantage:  many of the quests can be lumped together and done at the same time.  This REALLY ups your gold-per-hour rate.

There is a new Daily Quest addon that tells you exactly how to complete each quest.  It provides map waypoints to point you in the right direction, and it teaches you how to group the quests so you can run them concurrently.

If you find yourself either needing to farm up some reputation for a reward you’re after, or you just need good, consistent gold at level 80, you need this addon.

It literally puts a waypoint arrow on your screen when you select the dailies for a given zone (or for a given faction), and you simply follow the on-screen instructions.  It is as close to automatic gold as you can get without using a bot (and getting kicked out of wow!).

Here’s the Daily Quest Guide/Addon download link.

You can find the details about the addons here on the site, but here’s exactly what I do:

• I have installed Routes addon from Curse.com.
• I have installed Gatherer and Gathermate and Cartographer Mining and Herbalism addons.
• (UPDATE: use Gathermate_data addon as well to add the spawnpoints to your mods)
• I am level 80 and have an epic flyer.  (You can do it with a non-epic flyer, but might be a tad slower, obviously.)
• I have Mining and Herbalism maxed out.
• I go to Icecrown and use the Routes addon to create a route in Icecrown.  I add all the herbalism and mining waypoints from all of the addons that it can use (Gatherer, Gathermate, Cartographer).
• I ‘cluster’ the waypoints with the default setting of 60 yards.  That creates fewer waypoints for the route.  It will fly close enough to a mineral or herb spawn point without making me travel exactly from point to point.
• I use the Extra Optimization option from the Routes addon.  This makes the route as short as possible.
• I then simply fly around the route.  I’ll skip nodes that are in really dangerous spots, like the one next to the Elites or the cluster of evil paladins…it’s too much work to kill them just for some ore.
• Note:  I have both Herbalism and Mining.  So I use a simple ‘castsequence’ macro that’s bound to my Z key that toggles Find Minerals and Find Herbs back and forth.
• Note 2: I have a route that includes both herbs and ore which is long, and I can toggle back and forth.  I also have a route that is only for ore, and I stick with mining only for that one.  BOTH have produced 1000g per hour.

To calculate how much I’m making, I use the Auctioneer addon, with all the details in the tooltips added.  I use Appraiser when I’m at the auction house (that’s a tab available when you have Auctioneer installed).  I have customized my minimum settings so that I will almost always undercut the competition.  I don’t care.  I’m all about volume.  I’m not trying to squeeze every last copper out of each transaction.  That’s too much like work.  I’m in, I post my auctions, I’m out.  Movin’ on.  Yah…I’m sure some folks hate me for undercutting them all the time.  They’ll deal.  The market goes up and down, and somebody is happy because they were able to buy cheap goods.  I’m the WalMart of the Auction House…small business hate me, but the customers love me.  (And if crafters were smart they would contact me and work a deal where I provide for them.)

Anyway, when I’m at the Auction House, I open Appraiser, and just hit ‘Refresh’ on each item I’m about to post so it scans just that item.   No more long Auction House full-scans.  Just one item name at a time.  I use the Histograph as the calculation for the price, and the ‘Beat Competition’ box (or whatever it’s called) checked.  That makes me, almost always, the lowest priced items out there.

EVEN WITH UNDERCUTTING EVERYONE I AM MAKING 1000G PER HOUR.

It seems that, regardless of whether I’m just getting Ore, or both Herbs and Ore, the value of what I pull is pretty consistent.  I’ve noticed that no matter how many times I repeat the circuit, no matter what time of day, etc., I am getting a consistent average of Titanium ore, blue uncut gems, Frost Lotus, Crystallized Life and Fire, etc.

The exact way I calculate it is to empty my bags, go to Icecrown and trigger a self-buff that lasts 30 minutes.  Then I fly the route until the buff expires.  Then I mouse over each stack or item that I’ve gathered and look at the Undercut price in the tooltip, and add it up.  It’s always been a little over 500g after 30 minutes.  And it’s repeatable…I’ve done so many times to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.

If I wanted to make it even faster, I’d take advantage of the ‘Taboo’ feature of Routes, which blocks off certain areas.  This would be nice to avoid those sections where the Elites make it too tough to get to the nodes.  But I’m too lazy and am making too much gold just flying around as it is.

I usually just log on and chat with guildies while flying around waiting for an opening in a dungeon run or battleground.  There’s not much left for me to buy in the game, so I don’t farm ‘hard’…mostly I just do it for fun to see how much I can make, and to be able to splurge if I want to power-level a different profession on one of my other toons.

I hope this helps!

UPDATE:  I thought that after a few weeks the prices on everything would steadily decline, and that it wouldn’t truly be 1000 gph any more.  Well, I just finished a test run in Icecrown again, to compare to Sholazar Basin Mining.  I did exactly a 30-minute route around Icecrown, starting with empty bags, and went straight to the AH afterwards.  I refreshed all of my AH data so that I would be undercutting everyone…and posted 638 GOLD worth of auctions!!!  That is over 1200 gold per hour!  So this process still works.  (By the way, my mining route around Sholazar only netted me about 415 gold in 30 minutes, or just over 800 gold per hour.  I’m sticking with Icecrown, tyvm!)

However, in combination with the Routes, GatherMate and GatherMate_Data, Herb/Mining becomes more viable.

Aside from the super-nice routing feature (see the other post on that!), it also displays spawn points on your mini-map. You can filter which spawn points you want to see, and you can scale how big they appear on the mini-map. The way it works is that when they are outside of the range that you could detect it, the mini-map displays an icon that represents the specific herb/ore. Once it’s in range, it turns into an empty circle, IF you are detecting that type of spawn…in other words if you have Find Herbs on, ore spawn points will always display the ore pictures, but herb pictures will turn into empty circles when you’re in range to detect the yellow dot. If you see empty circles, and they stay empty for a split second, then you know that nothing is there and you can move on.

So here’s what I do now (now that I dropped Tailoring and re-leveled Herbalism to go with my mining)…

I have a macro:

/castsequence Find Herbs, Find Minerals

I have that bound to a key. Clicking that key will toggle tracking herbs and ore every time I click it. (There is a global cooldown of 1 second, but that’s ok.)

Next, I setup my route to track the most-valuable herb and the most-valuable ore in a given zone. For example, in Shadowmoon Valley, I make a route for Nightmare Vine and Adamantite Ore. This path will cover most of the map. If I miss a few spawnpoints of Felweed or Fel Iron Ore, I’ll live. The route will go near enough to many of them anyway for me to track them.

As I’m flying around following the route, I look on my minimap to see what kind of spawn points are around. Then I hit my macro key to switch the tracking back and forth between ore and herbs. But because of Cartographer I know WHICH one I should be tracking. For example, if there’s a stretch of route that has herbs and no ore, I can tell because of what is being displayed in the minimap, and I don’t need to switch. If I’m coming to a cluster of spawn points that has both, I’ll keep one on (Herbs, for example), and when I enter that cluster, the herbs turn to circles…THEN I’ll click the macro and switch to Ore, and check those empty circles.

It’s tough to describe, but if you have either Herbalism or Mining and use Routes you’ll see what I mean.

If you need help getting your Herbalism or Mining profession up to speed quickly, probably the best guide I’ve seen for speed leveling is Penn’s.

Here’s a video tutorial I created to show how to setup Routes:

If you are sitting at a Neutral Auction House with Bottom Scanner running, you will see the item as soon as it’s listed and buy it at the discount right away.

Here are some thoughts about this tactic:

1. You have to be paying attention to your toon. Any time you are online doing the same action for long periods of time, a GM might contact you to see if you respond. Cheaters that use ‘bots’ (programs that make their toon act), get caught like this and have their accounts banned. So just make sure that even though you’re watching a movie listening for BottomScanner to go ‘ding’, you keep an eye on your chat log from time to time.

2. You may want to have an alt toon do this for you, considering that you will become HATED by whomever was trying to move that item. True, they took the risk by putting it up on the Auction House so cheaply, but with some of the immature players out there, logic will not prevail. If you sniped something with your main toon, you may be subject to some griefing by the player who lost their item.

3. It’s not illegal or unethical. You’re not violating any rules of the game. True, it’s not very NICE to take advantage of someone like this, but they took the risk by putting it up on the Neutral AH.

Anyway, it’s not something I would do all the time, but if you find yourself in a situation where you can’t really play your toon but you can pay attention to it enough to listen for the ‘ding’ and avoid being suspected of botting, you could find some really good deals.

There is something that can slow down the dailies: competition. You’re trying to bomb eggs in Skettis, banish demons in Ogri’La, or kill Ravagers in Nethwering, and so is everyone else.

So group up! Don’t be shy! Any Daily that involves a ‘kill count’ (including ‘killing’ eggs or cannonballs by bombing them) can be done in a party, with credit going to everyone in the party! Even wrangling rays is something that everyone gets credit for.

If you compete, you’ll get frustrated, and you’ll be taking enough time to do the quest that it reduces the gold-making efficiency. Especially if you’re a low-dps class, or don’t have your epic mount.

Create the following macro and bind it to a place where you can get to it easily:

/invite target
/script SendChatMessage(“Would you like to group up so we aren’t competing? We can share the count.”,”WHISPER”,”common”,UnitName(“target”));

If you are doing one of you quests and you see someone of the same faction, target them and hit this macro.

Of special note is the Route plugin to Cartographer. You can use that to plot the shortest route around all the spawn points. See the Professions category for details.

UPDATE! – Cartographer Routes no longer exists, but there is an addon called Routes.  See this post: Routes Addon Tutorial.  It has a video that explains where to get it and how to use it.

1. It’s a great stand-alone site for looking up items to find their prices.
2. It’s got a free User Interface (UI) that does some very powerful things for you, in addition to the tooltips displaying useful price information in-game.
3. It provides information on what an item is worth when it’s disenchanted!
4. With the susbcription side (currently $3.33 per month), it will provide you with alerts for items that you are searching for (even emailed to you!) and many detailed graphs and features.
5. Most importantly, the price is based on auctions SOLD, not just the list price, like Auctioneer. So if somebody decides to list the Sageblade for 1500g, and they keep relisting it, the median price on Auctioneer would be 1500g. But if no one buys it until they reduce the price to 600g, THEN wowecon will show the price of 600g.

As best I can tell, it searches the in-game mail messages for information on auctions, stores it, then uploads it to the central site when you log out. You can then ‘download’ updates every day. They will track the data by faction and by server, with a rolling average, so you don’t get stuck with old data.

Note: there are upsides and downsides. The upsides are that it is already giving the vendor prices for the new reward items. Many of the rewards from the quests in the Outlands aren’t things I’ll use, but I’ve seen as much as a 6g difference in the vendor prices from the same quest. With wowecon showing the vendor price when I mouse over the items, it allows me to choose which item I will take to sell. The other main upside is that as crazy as the market is right now so early into the Burning Crusade, Auctioneer prices tend to be a little inflated on new items. Wowecon only shows what someone has actually SOLD or PAID for, not just listed. The biggest downside is that you need other folks on your server to use it. Chances are they are there, and the more that use it, the better the info. Not a huge downside, but you could end up with no Server price for a particular item.

Note: some people worry about wowecon because it auto-launches WoW. That’s a method that some keyloggers use to capture your login information. To get around that, run the WoWEcon update, and after the data update is complete, it counts down to launching WoW. Just close the updater and open WoW from your normal executable or shortcut.

One final thought: WoWEcon.com is a MEMORY HOG! Disable it if you are having low FPS (frames per second). I have plenty of FPS and memory, but I still leave it off unless I’m in the AH and need to know values of things.

Gatherer can be found at http://www.gathereraddon.com. It also records things like chests that you find, so, again, you can know where to take a detour off the main trail to see if free money or loot is sitting there waiting for you. It can plot the items on your main map as well as your minimap. And, by default it shares the data from other Gatherer users in your guild! That means you can add spawnpoints to your map without even having to harvest the herb/ore there. You can even do a data dump from one user to the rest of the guild to share all your spawnpoints at once.

/enchantrix percentless (percent)

and/or

/enchantrix bidbroker (silver)

The (percent) is the percentage of the discount…in other words the percentage you can save by buying out this item now. The (silver) is the amount in silver you want to profit from your bid. So, percentless is for buyouts, bidbroker is for bids. As an example: /enchantrix percentless 70 will return items that DE into an average value of 1g, but the items currently have a 29s buyout. Buy the item, DE it, and sell the mats. For another example: /enchantrix bidbroker 200 will return items that DE into mats worth 2g more than what the bid is. You may get outbid on some things but you might also win some!

The GREAT thing about this is that it takes far less capital to start accumulating than Auctioneer does. I’ve been doing this on a low-level (11) toon to test it out. He’s been buying items for 6-10s and turning them into mats that sell for 25-95s. I don’t know about you, but for a low level toon, that’s a fast way to acquire enough silver to become several gold! Do this a few times, and you’ll have a bankroll big enough to start bidding on the more expensive and profitable items in the AH!

Because it requires that you sit at the AH to run, it is only useful in certain situations. Here’s how I use it: At times when I’m around the house, but NOT playing WoW or on the computer, I’ll login, talk to an Auctioneer and activate Bottom Scanner. I turn the volume up very loud, and walk away. When an item is listed that meets my profitability criteria (meaning it’s cheap enough that if I buy it and resell it I will make a decent profit), it pops up a window asking if I want to buy the item, and makes a ‘ding-dong’ doorbell sound. It’s rather pleasant, actually. So, I’m in the other room watching the Discovery Channel and ‘ding-dong’…the alert goes off. I hit Pause on my TiVo, jump to the other room, either buy or pass on the item, and go back to my show. You get the idea. The good thing about it is that you are very likely to find the good deals and actually GET them, since you are checking for them in ‘real time’ (or at least every few seconds). The listings aren’t out there long enough for other people to snatch them up.

You will need to do some configuring for Bottom Scanner once you download it. Use /btm help for a list of commands, and then use those commands to configure things like how much profit is the minimum you are willing to make, what percentage profit do you require, what price limit do you want, etc. The most complicated thing to configure is the calculation to determine the median price, called the ‘Base Rule’. Bottom Scanner comes loaded with default values from cross-realm medians. I don’t like that, since I’m on an older, well-established server where the median prices tend to be lower than most realms. I want it to use my Auctioneer scan data. I went to this page: http://norganna.org/wiki/BottomScanner/BaseRule and used the biggest rule displayed on that page. All you have to do is select the code that’s in the gray box (I recommend you read the article to understand it), copy it, and then in WoW use the /btm baserule command. It will open a dialogue box, and you can paste the lua code into it and close. It will then use your Auctioneer scan data by default. For more information about Bottom Scanner, visit http://norganna.org/wiki/BottomScanner.