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.

That being said, I know of one guy who makes a little with the following strategy.

Buy:

1x [Eternal Earth] 5-8g
1x [Eternal Water] 4-6g
1x [Eternal Shadow] 4-6g
4x [Saronite Bar] 1.5-2g (total 6-8g)

= [Eternal Belt Buckle]

you buy mats for 19-28g and the buckle sells for a minimum of 50g going up to 100g on weekends.

Thats up to 81g (-auction fee) profit per buckle.

Here´s another one, buy:

7x [Saronite Bar] 1.5-2g (total 10.5-14g)
2x [Crystallized Air] 0.5g (total 1g)

= [Deadly Saronite Dirk]

disenchanting this gets you 1x [Dream Shard]

you invest like 11.5-15g and the [Dream Shard] goes for like 19-29g on my server

So, typically Blacksmithing and Enchanting are horrible for gold-making, but this tip might at least help you make a little with it.

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

Can someone confirm?

I’m thinking that for a Skinner this might be a decent place…doubly so for Skinner/Miners if the cave has ore.

When you mine a deposit, you’ll get all of your ores and any crystallized elements in a single hit.  ‘Normal’ deposits seem to provide a minimum of 2 ores and a maximum of 4.  As the notes say, overall ore from a single point should be about the same as previously.  (It can be assumed that ‘Rich’ deposits will provide 5-8 ores.)

In my experience Mining was slightly ahead of Herbalism in terms of gold per hour due to the presence of blue gems. But one of the thing that Herbalism had in its favor was that you only had to ‘pick’ the herbs one time (and would get multiple herbs)…Mining required you to swing 2 – 8 times per node and get one ore per swing.

In theory this should speed up Mining, pushing its advantage over Herbalism slightly higher.

But something piqued my curiosity today, and I can’t wait to get home from work and try it out!

I was back in Sholazar Basin to help out a guildie the other night, and noticed how frequently I was coming across mining nodes, and of course, herbs.  Now, normally, I assume that the highest-level zone produces the most amount of gold.  But it sure seemed like Sholazar had a disproportionate number of nodes to harvest.

So, a little digging on Wowhead turned up something interesting.  I searched Titanium Node, and Icecrown had 342, Sholazar had 308, and Storm Peaks had 198.  That surprised me…that Sholazar had so many more than Storm Peaks (also a high-level zone)…and almost as many as Icecrown.  So I searched Rich Saronite and Saronite nodes and discovered a similar pattern.

I’m making an assumption that the conclusion is that Sholazar would be a better place to farm.  Lower level mobs mean easier killing when you have to kill to get to a node.  Also, Icecrown has some nodes that are a real pain to get to due to the Elites that are present, or that stupid area that puts you into combat the second you touch down, even if no mobs are around (making it difficult to remount to continue flying the route).

On the down side, the herbs in Sholazar are not the highest-end herbs.  Depending on the herb market on your server, you might want to check the prices of Adder’s Tongue vs. Icethorn and Lichbloom.  According to WoWEcon.com, for my server Lichbloom is 3.75, Icethorn is 2.61, and Adder’s Tongue is 1.90 (g.s).  Oh, and Talandra’s Rose is 3g. But, the herb nodes are a lot more packed in Sholazar, so the quantity of Adder’s Tongueand Talandra’s Rose might actually make up for the lower prices of the Icecrown herbs.

I will test-run some routes of Sholazar, both mining only and mining/herbing and post the results here.  Unfortunately my schedule is pretty busy for the next day or so.  If someone else gets to run some tests, feel free to post a comment.  Essentially, create a mining-only route for both Icecrown and for Sholazar.  Using a clock, fly a route for at least 30 minutes…preferably a full hour.  Quantify the ore and gems retrieved in that time slot for each of the zones, and use the AH prices (preferably from your Auctioneer addon) to determine how much you made in the time.  Repeat for the other zone and compare.  Then repeat the whole process with routes including both herbs and mining.

Once I run a few tests, I’ll post the results here.

UPDATE #1:  I did a quick mining-only run through Sholazar today compared to a mining/herb route in Icecrown.  Exactly 30 minutes for each route.  If you had seen the 1000 Gold Per Hour post,  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.   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.  The 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!  I’ll probably do one more test in Sholazar with mining/herb to be fair…but the value of the herbs in Sholazar don’t compare to the ones in Icecrown.

I’m guessing that just because the number of nodes is similar doesn’t mean that the number of available spawnpoints is the same.  It could be programmed to have, out of the potential 300 nodes, 50 spawned in one zone, and 30 spawned in another.  There’s no way to know that.  The other factor is competition.  Sholazar is a smaller zone, and I had lots of competition.  I hardly see anyone in Icecrown.

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!)

How would you like an addon that:

1. Put EVERY known spawn point of every type of ore/herb on your map? (not just ones you’ve gathered)

2. Put a tiny ore/herb indicator on your minimap which showed what type of ore/herb it is?

3. Had the minimap indicator turn into an empty circle when you’re close enough to see if there’s a spawn there or not?

AND

4. Drew a route on your map and minimap that most efficiently took you to visit every spawn point?

Welcome to Routes!

Move over ‘Gatherer Addon’….there’s a new mod which will do more than replace Gatherer. It reduces the time it takes to find ore/herbs.

Here’s what to do:

1. Go to curse.com and get the ‘Curse Client’

2. Once you’ve installed it, you can choose which addons you want. Choose and install:

* GatherMate
* GatherMate_Data
* Routes – NOTE:  NOT ‘Cartographer Routes’…that is old.  There’s a new one called just ‘Routes’.

3. Once in the game, with the addons installed (you’ll have to load out-of-date addons for the Herbalism and Mining to show up), type /routes.

4. You can add a new Route for each zone.  Basically, stick with the default settings, checking on all of the spawn points (herbs and ore) you want plotted.  This will create a really ugly non-functional route.

5. Once the route is created, find it in your list of routes on the left, and modify it.

6. Under the Optimize tab, you’ll see an option to CLUSTER.  Absolutely do that.  Basically what that does is combines spawnpoints into one ‘point’ if they are within 60 yards (by default).  That creates many fewer points to route out, and 80 yards is the distance for detecting the presence of an herb or ore.

7. Then click either Foreground (my preference) or Background and it will create a single route.

8. If you have the route enabled it creates a white line path around the map.  If you fly that route, it will take you the shortest route possible within detection range of each spawn point you chose to display.  On your minimap, spawnpoints out of range will display with a small icon representing the type of spawn it is (adamantite ore, felweed, etc.).  Once within range, that mini icon will turn into an empty red or green circle (red for ore, green for herbs).  If the circle is empty, there’s no spawn…else it will have the normal yellow dot in it.

TA-DA! You should have the most efficient (shortest) route that will circuit the map and hit every spawn point along the way!

Now you can just fly along this route (you don’t have to stick exactly to it), and you will fly over every point on a given zone.

The other thing you can do is create shorter routes based on fewer spawn points. Don’t choose EVERY type of data, but instead choose just one, such as Titanium. Let the route be built on Titanium only. Maybe you’re only interested in Titanium because it sells better on your server than other ore. You can shorten your route a bit…and you can still see other ore if you happen to fly over it. You just won’t go out of your way to check a single spawn point.

Here’s a video I made of me setting it up. I’ve gotten as much as 600g in 30 minutes using this route, and I consistenly get 500g in 30 minutes.

If you need help getting your Herbalism or Mining professions maxed out quickly, the best speed-leveling guide for professions I’ve found is Penn’s.

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:

I must say… loving the fact that that epic gem market is still flourishing on my server.

I don’t do any dailies/farming/AH re listing at all anymore…. I just take my badges from weekly raiding and trade them in for epic gems and sell those.

Its still 300g for a Crimson Spinel… so with a kara run + regular MH/BT I can get 2 or 3 epic gems a week…. or 600-900g a week by doing absolutely nothing.

Thats enough for me to pay for raid consumables AND save up for my epic flyer (yes, no epic flyer yet).

So far I’ve gone from ~200g to 2400g since the epic gem vendor has been released.

So if you haven’t tried it yet, and you’re raiding regularly where the badges are, you can convert your badges to gems and sell the gems at the Auction House.

Is it just me, or have Netherweave cloth prices taken a dip lately?

The funny thing is that lately the price of Netherweave Cloth on the AH has been lower than the sale price of Heavy Netherweave Bandages.  A 20-stack of bandages sells to a vendor for 6g.  It takes 2 20-stacks of Netherweave Cloth to make the bandages.  Ergo, if you see Netherweave Cloth for sale under 3g per stack, snatch it up, and push ‘Make All’, and walk away.

If you can pick up the cloth for 2g 50s per 20-stack, you’re making 1g per full stack of bandages.  This isn’t huge amounts of gold, but hey…I don’t step over a dollar laying on the sidewalk if I see one!

Oh, sure, there’s changes to some recipes. And WOOT! for shortened cooldowns…from 24 to 20 hours. El Oh El. So helpful. Not.

2.4 was the major change, but 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 are minor tweaks with no real impact to the gold making effort.

You can check out the current patch notes here.

First, there are changes to Enchanting that will allow Void Crystals to be converted to 2 Large Prismatic Shards. I’m not sure yet how that will impact the market, but I’m willing to bet that the LPS price will drop dramatically, depending on your server. I know, for example, on raiding servers that the number of Void Crystals sitting in the guild banks is pretty high, with nothing to do with them. So LPSs won’t be quite as rare.

Other changes include raising the cap of Daily Quests from 10 to 25 per day. And there will be new daily quests. There will be a new Daily Fishing Quest, as well as some new dailies on Sunwell Isle. As I learn of which are the most efficient, fastest, easiest, etc., you can be sure I’ll post the info here.

Edit (Mar 10) — Latest patch notes denote that Jewelcrafters will be able to combine green gems into a random blue gem. The exact wording is:

Jewelcrafting

• • A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers.

So…hang onto your green gems for now. They sell for next to nothing these days, and I’m betting the price will go up slightly since they will finally become worth something.

Edit: You may want to start collecting ‘Wind Scales’.  Check out Wowhead to see who drops them.  Used in many of the recipes post-2.4.

Edit: Remember to use Thottbot.com’s ‘Test’  site…instead of ‘Live’…to identify new and upcoming items, and items that might be in demand right after the patch.

The general concept is to provide one-stop for your server where you can post ads for your wares, search for buyers, search for sellers, etc. For example, if you’re an Alchemist, you might advertise that you’re looking for certain herbs on a consistent basis, and are willing to pay C.O.D. for them. That keeps you supplied, keeps your cost fixed, and avoids the Auction House and its fees.

It’s an interesting concept that I’ve heard discussed from several sources as being needed. Something beyond the Trade channel in-game.

It’s basically setup like a forum…you register, then you make posts in your Server (Realm) forum. And you can search easily, just like a normal forum.

It is in the early stages of release, so there’s not a lot of users yet. Hopefully readers here will go register there and increasing the user base…the more that use it, the more useful it becomes, but somebody has to be the first signups. Gold-making experts like you make the most sense!

Couple of other thoughts: It’s free. It’s got a built in feedback tool (called Karma), which acts like eBay feedback, which can help avoid scams and build reputation. But one of the things that I like is that by doing this you can advertise across factions…let someone on the Alliance side know what epic drop your Horde toon has, and double your potential customer base!

Go to http://www.WarcraftTrade.com to check it out and learn more about it.

3x[Aquamarine] (1.5g each, 4.5g total on my server)
4x[Flask of Mojo] (25s each, 1g total on my server)

Yields an [Aquamarine Signet] which DEs into [Small Radiant Shard]. Total mat cost runs around 5.5g, give or take. Small Radiants seem to be running around 9-10g on my server. If you buy in bulk, and sell when the AH is empty, 5g profit isn’t hard. Also, since Small Radiants are used in Fiery enchants, the volume isn’t huge, but people are using them every day.

If that doesn’t work for your server, just keep an eye out for crappy Signets that are cheap so you can snatch them up and get them DE’d.