Just a quick note that The Golden Crusade Shuffler has been updated to V1.0.1

Changes in this update include:

• Fixed Sparkling Shards not counting Trillium Ore
• Added the new Primal Diamond transmute to Spirit of Harmony Optimizer

If you find yourself using these features please consider updating.

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What is a barrier to entry? Well, Wikipedia defines Barrier(s) to Entry as:

In theories of competition in economics, barriers to entry, also known as barrier to entry, are obstacles that make it difficult to enter a given market. The term can refer to hindrances a firm faces in trying to enter a market or industry – such as government regulation, or a large, established firm taking advantage of economies of scale – or those an individual faces in trying to gain entrance to a profession – such as education or licensing requirements.

As an entrenched gold maker barrier to entry will be your best friend. They’re what keep the unwashed masses out of our markets. Well, in theory at least. In practice, they’re not the most difficult barriers to over come. The real barrier to entry in most cases is a player’s laziness, how much effort they put into professions. But, none the less, those barriers are there. Let’s see what barriers to entry gold makers face shall we?

Reputation Rewards

Professions famous for this:

• Blacksmithing
• Leatherworking
• Tailoring
• Enchanting

In my opinion this is one of the most annoying things about these professions, if you want to use them effectively on alts you need to play these alts. I know why Blizzard does it, but regardless it still annoys me, especially since they’re not the best gold makers to begin with. Professions like this that require reputation with certain factions to create most of their top recipes are best suited on characters that you play frequently. If you place them on an alt that sits derelict in a city getting no attention except to craft, you’re not going to get much use out of them. At least, not as much use as a player who has them on a main character would.

Raid/Random Drops

Professions famous for this:

• Blacksmithing
• Leatherworking
• Tailoring

Again, it’s always the crafting professions that seem to be penalized for not being places on main characters. Sometimes these patterns are BoE, but other times you’re out of luck if you’re not in end-game content with the characters you have these professions on. Again, the advantage goes to the player that has these on their main character(s).

Daily Research/Discoveries

Professions famous for this:

• Inscription
• Blacksmithing
• Alchemy

Ahh Inscription, the profession that has quickly become the bane of my gold making existence. Right now in, according to WoWhead, there are 406 glyphs in-game. Of those 406 glyphs, only 166 (or 41%) are taught by a trainer, the rest are daily researches or the like. 37 glyphs are taught by the Scroll of Wisdom research, 54 are taught by Book of Glyph Mastery, 63 are taught by the Minor Inscription Research, and 75 are taught by Northrend Inscription research. What this means is it takes 75 days of doing your research to learn every glyph available. Blacksmiths have it a bit better, they only need to create Lightning Steel Ingot once per day for 38 days to get their full suite of craftable items. And alchemists have it best, most of their recipes are learned by discoveries you get when crafting other items, they’re not even on a daily cooldown. The only reprieve scribes (and alchemists I guess) get is that they don’t need to be on a main character to be used effectively.

How You Can Take Advantage of This

Don’t be lazy. Yup, that’s pretty much it. These barriers to entry aren’t particularly difficult, you just have to remember to do them. Once you’ve done these, especially the daily research ones, you’ve got an advantage over any player just entering the market.

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Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these. Are people still even doing these? I think everyone’s finished theirs already. Oh well.

There really aren’t a whole lot of add-ons I use for gold making anymore, TradeSkillMaster does so much you don’t really need any others. Regardless, here are the three gold making add-ons I use:

• TradeSkillMaster
• Postal
• Auctioneer

If I wanted I could get rid of the last two, I’m pretty sure TSM does all the things I’m using those two four, if only I took a few moments to figure it out.

Other add-ons I use that I find helpful include:

• Bank stack
• Altoholic

Well that was a pretty pathetic list wasn’t it? Again I’m pretty sure what I use by Altoholic for can be done on TSM, but I don’t think TradeSkillMaster has anything like Bank Stack under it’s hood.

This post was part of Nev’s 20 Days of Gold Making blog challenge. Find all my entries in the 20 Days of Gold Making and 20 Days of WoW Blogging

The post 20 Days of Gold Making: Day 11–Are there any other lesser known gold making add-ons you use? appeared first on The Golden Crusade.

To that end I’m building a list of gold tweeters, which you can find here: https://twitter.com/Xsinthis/wow-gold-tweeters

If you’re not on this list and think you should be, or have suggestions on who to add, let me know either in the comments of this post or on twitter.

Thanks a bunch!

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I’m finding myself in this predicament right now. My new guild wants me to push to get my brand spanking new monk ready to raid as soon as possible, and towards the end I coughed up the gold for, among other things, the 522 crafted healing leather helm. It brought me down below 500k gold for the first time in, well, since I first hit 500k gold I think.

It’s not the first time I’ve brought myself down below a bench mark. After I reached one million gold I peaked at about 1.2 million gold before various purchases and poor investments brought me down to around the 600k gold mark. Since Mists of Pandaria launched I’ve been hovering around the 600k – 700k gold range, making gold steadily but also spending fair amounts of it (the new JC mounts anyone?).

It think the biggest issue lately has been apathy (something I’ve mentioned a lot in this blog it seems), since last January or so I’ve just been coasting, not really doing much in World of Warcraft. I really need to start working properly on gold making now that I’m playing again, but I just haven’t had time in the last few weeks. After Friday though I’m done my placement so will have loads of time, I’ll hopefully be able to pay more attention to gold making.

The post Being Broke and Rich at the Same Time appeared first on The Golden Crusade.

I saw an ever so slight jump in Ghost Iron Ore prices after the patch, though nothing ground breaking. Most of the bump in demand can be attributed to regular patch shenanigans, new gear means more people need to get gear gemmed and enchanted.

Anyways, so after my realm got the Thunder Forge I decided to check out what the hype was all about.

I was disappointed.

The way it works is there are three tiers of weapons, each successive tier requiring the previous tier as an upgrade. It’s like upgrading the weapons, but since they’re Bind on Equip you’ll need to buy a new one if you equip it.  They also take a crap ton of resources (a metric crap ton for those asking). Here’s the mats for each tier of weapon, along with their item level

The 502 number comes from the Dragonstrike, Reborn data on WoWHead. Also according to that information, these will be upgradable under the new upgrade system for Patch 5.3 meaning they could be brought up to an item level of 510 for a 500 Valor. While by no means top of the line, they will be the highest item level weapon you will be able to buy with gold.

It seems that most people are drooling over these for their models, as their remakes of, apparently, classic weapons from WoW’s past that are no longer available. I’m not much into transmogrification, nor have I been playing long enough to have seen the original weapons, so I just have to take other peoples word on this that these are cool weapons.

I am not too sure what will happen with these weapons. I think these weapons, specifically the final weapons in the chain, will be incredibly valuable, both for their item levels and for their looks, the cool factor if you will. But, with the amount of time and resources it takes to make these weapons, I really doubt the market will be there to make these profitable. I see these weapons mostly going to the cutting edge raiders who are down on their luck with weapon drops, and deep pocket people who likewise haven’t been very lucky with weapon drops, or want their characters too look as good as possible (assuming these weapons have transmog value).

Am I going to be making one? Most likely. I’m currently sporting a 476 staff on my main, so assuming I can find an offhand to go with it by the time I can craft the final weapon I’ll be using it. I might even keep it afterwards for transmog. But in terms of profit, I highly doubt it will be worth my time to sell it. All in all I am very disappointed with the results of all this hype.

The post What’s Up With Lightning Steel Ingot? appeared first on The Golden Crusade.

As the title suggest, I don’t have much of a weekend. I spent several hours today at the college helping out with the college’s preview day, and am going to be most of the day studying or working on projects tomorrow. Basically prospective students (their family for younger students) came in to check out the college, ask questions, and speak to faculty and current students.

I’m not exactly sure why I sacrificed my Saturday afternoon to this venture (alright, there might have been a girl involved…shut up) but it turned out pretty well considering I slept in and got there an hour later than I intended too. Everyone was supposed to help with general college tours as well as help out with their specific program (I’m in Civil Engineering Technology for those unaware) but me and the rest of the people helping out our coordinator neatly avoided having to do that (we just simply didn’t, we hid in the Civil labs).

The presentations ended up lasting about an hour each (there was two) but things like question period and lab tours extended each session by about 30-45 minutes. One of the potential students (it was an older guy, mature student) asked me, specifically me, how much time I put into the course outside of schedule class (and of course the whole group turned to pay attention to me to listen to my answer). I felt pretty awkward because, well, frankly I put very little effort into the program outside of class time. The Lab Tech came to my rescue though and explained how it varies from student and student.

I also enjoyed it because it let me reflect on the past three years of my life, all the time I spent at the college. Talking to prospective students made me realize just how much I’ve learned in my relatively short stay at the college. In the three years I’ve realized how much I don’t know still and how much I’ve yet to learn, but it was nice to realize how far my education has come already.

What’s Next?

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this on my Twitter or my Google+ but I decided to apply to Lakehead University to get my degree in Civil Engineering. The university takes students take people with 3.0 GPAs in their final year of a diploma program (and have obviously completed their diploma) and after two months of summer courses they get put into third year of the degree program. So basically Diploma + 2 months + 4 semesters = Degree.

Have you ever had a moment in your life when something seemingly insignificant completely changes your life? Have you ever felt your life *shift* from said event? It’s weird, I’ll tell you.

To get my diploma I have to do a four week placement somewhere in the Civil field. The placement has to be full time work (150 hours over four weeks) and starts what would be week 12 of the second semester of third year (so we only have an eleven week semester). Back in first semester of my second year we had a pretty cool professor who taught us Transportation Planning (I think that’s what it was called, though a more appropriate name would be Traffic Planning) and several of us ended up adding her on Facebook (that may sound weird, but the program is small enough that all the faculty and students are pretty friendly). So way back in September of this (school) year I asked her if I could do my placement in her department, and she pulled some strings and got me and my friend placements in her department. Having my placement months ahead of time was a huge relief, I know people who only got theirs last week, that must have been stressful.

So fast forward to January of this year and I have to go in to get some paperwork signed for the placement. I was in no particular rush so we ended up chatting and the conversation inevitably turned to my plans for life after college. At that point I had been planning on jumping right into a job (well, hopefully) and possibly my own apartment (depending on how quickly my mother sold the house). Talking to her though I realized that’s not what I wanted to do. I realized I wanted to go on and get my degree, my Iron Ring, and, after the required work experience, my P.Eng.

Walking out of that office I could feel my life shift, completely change direction. It was a weird feeling, but by the time I got home I was resolved, and I had a completely different life plan than when I woke up that morning.

An Unconventional Segway

I’ve talked about this a bit I think already, but the past couple of months I’ve had this huge surge in self improvement energy, for lack of a better term. Writing this post, and double checking some logs, I realized it started after that meeting. I guess making that decision had an immediate domino effect on other aspects of my life.

That weekend I restarted the 100 Push Up Challenge on the Consortium forums that I originally committed to way back in January of 2012. It took me a while because I had to repeat several weeks, but I finally finished Week 6:

The dips in the graph are where I had to restart weeks for various reasons, and the final dip on that graph is me starting Level 2 (at Week 4). I’m going to keep this up until I can work up the confidence to go to a proper gym and start working out properly. To that end, I also did the 200 Sit Up Challenge offered by the same people, and I just finished Week 6 in that program too:

As you can see that went a bit more smoothly.

Around the same time I also started watching my weight a bit because even though I wasn’t “fat”, with a BMI of 23.7 I wasn’t exactly skinny either. So I started small, I started walking my dog every day again and increased the lengths of our walks. I also improved my eating a bit, I stopped buying chips and majorly cut down on how much food I was buying at the Tim Hortons on campus (that was great for the ol’ wallet too). I don’t know how much effect it’s had though since the scale has mysteriously since vanished from the house. Maybe it’ll turn up and I can check up on how things are going and if I need to step it up a bit, because I haven’t seen and noticeable improvement yet. I should probably step it up a bit. Or a lot.

I also have started working to improve my hand writing (both cursive and block letters, it’s over all horrid) and I’ve also started to learn Dutch. Both have been going slower than I’d like, I’ve always had trouble with writing ever since I was a kid, but I thought that since I grew up with Dutch being spoken around me I’d pick up on it quicker. I should probably spend more time on Rosetta Stone.

So that’s pretty much it. I’ve only got 4 days left of class, and then I’ve got my four week placement, and then I’ll be done my diploma. After that it’s pretty much just waiting to hear back from Lakehead (they won’t send an acceptance until they have my final marks) so waiting for that letter will be nerve wracking. Should be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of months.

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It always has just seemed like too much work, and usually for too little reward. It’s not just in gold making I have this issue either, anything that might be considered farming I hate. Like dailies, especially the original batch of Mists of Pandaria dailies. Hate them.

I haven’t run the numbers this expansion, but there’s usually better ways to make gold than any kind of farming. While I’ve discussed before how Gold per Hour is hard to quantify for anything other than farming, it’s safe to say that farming yields the lowest gold for your effort.

That being said, I have been using the actual farm in game, Sunsong Ranch that is. As I mentioned a little while ago I’ve been slacking this expansion, I don’t even have one raid ready character. So to catch up on things like reputations I’ve been doing the work orders at Sunsong Ranch. Once I’ve caught up with my reputations I’ll just be planting Songbell Seeds to get as many Spirit of Harmony as possible. Even though it’s at a farm it’s not really farming, but I thought I’d mention it anyways.

This post was part of Nev’s 20 Days of Gold Making blog challenge. Find all my entries in the 20 Days of Gold Making and 20 Days of WoW Blogging

The post 20 Days of Gold Making: Day 10–Do You Farm Materials? Why? Why Not? And Which Ones, Where? appeared first on The Golden Crusade.

Here was my entry:

With version 1.6 of TradeSkillMaster The Functional Gold Maker is now a preset theme, so go update your addons and check out my theme!

The post Check Out The New TSM Theme I Designed – The Functional Gold Maker appeared first on The Golden Crusade.

• Archeology

• Mantid Archaeology has been added. Players will be able to uncover common and rare Mantid artifacts.

• Players can purchase a Mantid Artifact Sonic Locator to focus exclusively on Mantid digsites.

• The Lorewalker’s Map now randomizes all digsites in Pandaria, rather than just 1.

• Updates have been made to the “museum” at the Seat of Knowledge.

• Blacksmithing

• New raid and PvP blacksmithing recipes have been added, and can be acquired through daily research of Lightning Steel Ingots.

• Seasoned Blacksmiths will be able to find a way to create Lightning Steel Ingots once their realm has unlocked the Thunderforges on the Isle of Thunder. These ingots will allow blacksmiths to recreate powerful weapons from the past, updated for Mists of Pandaria.  These power weapons will be bind-on-equip and making them will take a significant amount of dedication.

• For blacksmiths who have lapsed in their trade (i.e., haven’t practiced blacksmithing since the Burning Crusade), there is a (not necessarily cost efficient) way to catch-up. Blacksmiths at your faction’s shrines in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms will be able to teach you training plans for crafting common household items using Ghost Iron.

• Fishing

• The chance to fish up Flying Tiger Gourami, Spinefish Alpha and Mimic Octopus has been increased.

• Reputation gains from bringing rare Pandarian fish for Nat Pagle to examine has been increased.

• Players with a high fishing skill have a chance to fish up new pets. The Pet Journal has clues on where these elusive pets could be found.

• Fish of the Day: On any given day, there is a location in Pandaria teeming with a type of Pandaren fishing pool.

• Ben of the Booming Voice, located near the Halfhill Market area will inform players what the “Fish of the Day” is and mark the location on their map.

• Jewelcrafting

• Jewelcrafters may find the designs for Serpent’s Heart and uncut Primal Diamonds during the course of their adventures (world drops).

• Serpent’s Heart is a daily cooldown that consumes several Serpent’s Eyes to create a random rare quality Pandaren gem.  In addition, there is a small chance that a player will discover the design for the Sapphire Cub or Jade Owl.

• The design for uncut Primal Diamonds requires Spirits of Harmony and large quantities of uncommon gems.

• Leatherworking

• Patterns for Magnificence of Leather and Magnificence of Scales could be found via world drops. These patterns allow the leatherworker to create Magnificent Hides more economically and share a daily cooldown. In addition to producing a Magnificent Hide, the leatherworker will learn a new 5.2 raid or PvP pattern.

• A new 36 slot leather bag (Magnificent Hide Pack) can now be created through Leatherworking.

• Tailoring

• New raid and PvP recipes have been added, and tailors can acquire these new recipes via the daily Imperial Silk cooldown.

Blacksmithing Changes

One of the most talked about changes is the changes to Blacksmith levelling. We will not be able to level up Blacksmithing Ghost Iron Bars, but according to these patch notes you will only be able to use Ghost Iron for the Wrath of the Lich King content through Mists of Pandaria. This means you will still need old world and Burning Crusade materials to bring your Blacksmithing up to 375, but once you finishing the Burning Crusade stretch you’re home free with Ghost Iron Ore

There seems to be a few caveats though with this new levelling method:

1. You will need access to your faction’s shrine, so to take advantage of this on any alts they will have clear their way to the appropriate shrine.
2. This new method won’t necessarily be cost efficient
3. You will be crafting common household items

The first point is relatively minor, unless they level restrict the vendor selling these patterns, you can have access to the shrines before level 85 even if you get someone to port you there. The next two points are much more important however.

Blizzard is saying that this new levelling route is meant for convenience, its’ meant to alleviate reliance on older materials for levelling. Those infamous choke points in the profession levelling process should now be a non-issue when levelling new professions. Blizzard is clear that this isn’t meant to be a cheaper route, though their wording covers them if it does end up being cheaper. Their point is it’s meant to be a convenience, not a cost saving measure. Finally, Blizzard mentions that these recipes will create common household items. What does that mean? Vendor trash, likely.

Fishing Changes

Not a whole lot in the gold making department, I don’t know anyone who fishes purely to make gold, but there are several changes to fishing coming up in Patch 5.2. The catch chance for several fish have been increased, and the reputation you get for bringing rare fish to Nat Paggle has been increased as well, both welcome changes. There’s also going to be new pets for players with high skill in fishing (I’m assuming that means open water catches for these pets).

El of El’s Extreme Anglin’ has already done an excellent write-up on the new Fish of the Day event you should all read.

New Recipes

Of course no major content patch would be complete without new recipes. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking,Tailoring, and Jewelcrafting are all getting new recipes, and all through daily cooldowns (either existing or ones being added in patch 5.2.).

One last thing of note is that they’re adding new designs for Serpent’s Heart and uncut Primal Diamonds (implying they’re not just new Primal Diamond cuts). Getting your hands on one of these early on could net you a handsome sum of gold, but with the price tags these will command (assuming you’ll be able to put them on the AH) probably means it won’t be worth it to buy them off the Auction House.

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