Fishing for World of Warcraft Gold
Fishing is one of those secondary professions in World of Warcraft that players either love or hate (rather like Archeology). After all, why would anyone stand idly by watching their bobber – well bob? But learning to fish is a great way to earn a little extra gold and provides players with an extra gathering opportunity for a wide variety of valuable mats – not just fish.
Now, the Horde have a saying ‘It takes a big one to catch a big one‘.
The meaning of this has become lost over time, but the Alliance have always taken it to mean that, when it comes to the secondary profession of fishing, the size of ones pole really does matter. So, listen to the Horde in this matter and equip the biggest fishing pole you can lay your hands on as this will increase your skill and improve your success rate when fishing. Most fishing vendors now stock a ‘Strong Fishing Pole‘ in addition to the standard fishing pole which will boost your skill by +5. For the Horde the preference is still the Big Iron Pole which can be farmed from the shellfish crates off the horde village in Desolace and that adds a +20 buff.
If you can’t get you hands on a decent pole then the next best thing is to add an enhanced lure or bait to your pole. Examples include:
- Shiny Bauble +25 for 10 minutes
- Nightcrawlers +50 for 10 minutes
- Bright Baubles +75 for 10 minutes
- Flesh Eating Worm +75 for 10 minutes
- Aquadynamic Fish Attractor +100 for 5 minutes
- Heat Treated Lure +150 for 15 minutes
Now the products of fishing are – well fish!  But not always, for as your skill advances your chances of catching the odd loot locker increases along with other items of value such as gems and pearls. Watch for nodes of floating wreckage which yield catches of valuable mats. These are common all along the seashore.
Selling Fish in the Auction House
Fish are a class of Meat and are thus a valuable commodity to trade on the Auction House. Browse the Auction House under the general category of Trade Goods->Meat and you’ll see the types of fish that are commonly traded and the prices they fetch. You’ll be surprised at how much gold can be made from the trading of common types of fish, providing players at all levels with an additional income stream. This is because fish are used in a wide variety of cooking recipes, thus keeping them in demand.
Where to Fish
The best place to fish are the frequent animated ‘pools’ found in most bodies of water. Depending on your location these will yield valuable types fish and a wide variety of valuable mats including Elemental mats such as Elemental Water, Motes of Water, Crystallized Water and Volatile Water, depending on which expansion you are playing. A nice area to fish for Volatile Water is Uldum from the many pools of Blackbelly Mudfish found along the delta. It’s also possible to fish the laval pools for Volatile Fire in the Cannon’s Inferno of the Twilight Highlands.
In summary, fishing can be a valuable addition to your arsenal of gold making professions in the World of Warcraft. By selecting a good pole from the start, enhanced with bait, a players fishing skill can be raised allowing a wide variety of locations to be fished even during the early levels. As well as providing players with a variety of valuable fish to trade on the Auction House, the secondary profession of fishing can be used to farm valuable Elemental material across all the expansions of the game.
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Marcus Ty
Marcus Ty writes on all aspects of gold making in the World of Warcraft. His latest Gold Making Blog chronicles his trials at making gold and is part of his Journal of Marcus Ty series of books and articles. You can follow Marcus on Twitter @MarcusTy
[Try my guide to catching expensive fish here – The Gold Queen]
What is inflation?
“a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency”
The major ways in which gold comes into the economy are as follows:
- Looting it directly from a mob
- Receiving it as a reward from a quest
- Selling an item to a vendor
- Indirectly through looting as a result of the Cash Flow guild perk
On the other side of the equation, gold leaves the economy primarily in these ways:
- Purchasing an item from a vendor
- AH fees (expired posting fees, AH cut)
- A character is deleted while still possessing some gold
- Item repairs, learning skills, essentially – any NPC interaction that costs gold.
Meanwhile, the following things really have no impact on inflation:
- Buying/selling items directly between players.
- Ghostcrawler nerfing your class to the ground (just making sure you’re still paying attention…)
Why should I care about inflation?
That’s all fine and good, but how does inflation affect us? Simply put, inflation plays a huge role in establishing value, which is something that is obviously quite a big deal for us, as gold-makers. It impact everything from the value of our gold to the value of the junk in your bank that you’ve been meaning to clear out. The biggest reason, in my opinion, though is the role that inflation will play in major investment decisions. Let’s use flipping TCG mounts as an example.
If we are looking to purchase an undervalued TCG mount for 50k, we need to consider both the amount of our return AND the rate of our return, while factoring in inflation in order to make a meaningful decision. Let’s say we post our mount for 100k. That’s a 50k profit, and double our – sweet deal, right? Well, it depends on the amount of time it takes us to sell and inflation. Let’s say that it takes us 5 months to sell the mount. If we calculate an inflation rate of 1% per month, then our 50k cost would carry an effective value of 52.5k gold, 5 months later. That would mean our investment would really only be worth 47.5k profit.If for some bizarre reason, we were looking at an inflation rate of 20% per month, than all of a sudden, our 50k investment will be effectively only be break-even 5 months later.
Granted, these examples are really oversimplifying and exaggerating the role that inflation plays – but the point is to help you realize that being able to accurately measure inflation can help you to more effectively value your goods and make better investment decisions.
What can we do about Inflation?
The most important way to handle inflation is to first of all be able to accurately measure it. I’ve recently started a little project with the aim of accomplishing just that. To participate in the discussion, or to get involved with the project, check out The Consortium Thread and share your thoughts or questions. Once we can effectively calculate it, I believe there will be a number of great opportunities to use this information to take gold-making to the next level. Imagine being able to make even more informed purchasing decisions, or being able to to better leverage your investment power through predicting economic trends long before they even happen. Goblineering at its finest!
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Kathroman
Oops I had a little accident with my gold
I remember posting my fel iron bolts up on the AH, along with a whole bunch of other engineering stuff that I no longer needed. Â I don’t remember how much I posted it for, it was one of my “just get rid of it” undercutting items. Â However messy my home is, I like to keep my handbag clean and tidy, so I was just putting up extra items in the hope of making more gold than vendoring them. Â Undercut the nearest seller, move on to the next item asap, time is money friend.
I didn’t expect it to sell.
I didn’t expect it to sell for nearly a thousand gold.
10 days later, I logged on my neglected engineer.  I only log her occasionally to make some Engineering Pets to supply my Pet Shop AH alt. And there it was, a sale.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I guess this is karmic payback for when I accidently posted my Chelley’s Staff for 1.8k instead of 18k.  I’ve left the name of the buyer on the image so you can see it’s not me buying it from myself with a different account, or some gold seller or something.
Thank you, happy accident.
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ps coming soon: Guest Post by the famous and wonderful Mageshadow from JMTC and Gnomish Coin. Â Excited!
Frostweave Cloth for 4.3
With the attention of gold bloggers, and patch watchers 100% focused on the release of patch 4.3 I’m going to employ a “While the Cat’s Away, The Mice Will Play” strategy and look backwards but not too far backwards to frostweave cloth.
Frostweave Cloth works as a selling item because of the two different ways of selling. First is the well known method of farming, the second is the less well known pipeline method.
Farming Frostweave Cloth
I recently investigated several different places and ways to farm frostweave cloth for an upcoming World of Warcraft gold guide (yes, that’s why I’ve been so quiet!), which will be my entire gold making experience rolled into one single guide. I found a surprising farming spot in Zul Drak at the Argent Strand, which I don’t want to go into in too much detail now that I know Blizzard employees are readers of The Gold Queen (hello!). We don’t want it nerfed before it’s even public! But naturally the most famous and public frostweave cloth farming location in Icecrown Glacier stayed as the highest cloth-per-hour if you decide to farm Frostweave. The actual mobs to farm are the packs of 10-ish converted heroes which can also double up as Argent Tournament daily quest mobs. Follow my multi-tasking method and make sure your mobs do double duty. Gold from mobs, gold from cloth, gold from quest rewards – yum.
Before anyone gets too excited and googles Frostweave Cloth and finds JMTC old movie about grinding at the Conflagration in Scholazar Basin for frost weave, sorry, it’s nerfed. Ignore.
Frostweave Cloth Pipeline
The other way of making a lot of gold, and I do still mean a lot of gold, is working Frostweave Cloth as a pipeline item, following Massive Gold Blueprint’s pipeline methods. A pipeline isn’t a difficult method to master. Basically it is an item which you are able to buy at a low price and then resell at a much higher price than expected. Far from 20k Leveling’s idea of “Buy low, sell normal”, a pipeline item takes a double check on the normal price, and discovers that the maximum price can be much higher than undercutting your lowest competitor. Using a “Buy low, sell very high” method, you can take advantage of price volatility over time, and take your prices up to double the price of Embersilk Cloth.
Compared to Embersilk Cloth which is a constantly available Catactlysm commodity, stockpiles of Frostweave Cloth from WOTLK are now all depleted, and new quantities must be farmed. We’ll be using this limited supply to our advantage. Patch 4.3 increases the leveling speed in Northrend. Â Players will be going through there even faster. Will that mean even less frostweave available on the AH?
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Affiliate links for the two guides I mentioned: 20k Leveling and Massive Gold Blueprint
7am curse at alarm on Smart Phone. Dozily browse through twitter and email from overnight. Feed fake fish in fake aquarium. Grope around floor for Master of Puppets hoody.
8am Make lunch for children and chat to them about their plans for the day and mine. I’m fairly excitable by now.
8.30 Coffee is in cup. Postman delivers cd from amazon that I bought for my son. I open and put it in my pc. Spend ten minutes thrashing my hair around to rage against the machine and pretending I’m 21 again. Feel a bit ill so I package the cd back again and drink coffee. Decide to avoid washing last night’s dinner plates until later.
9.00 I’m compiling videos and editing articles for a joint venture with another guide writer who jokes, calling himself the gold king. I’m really excited about the project, not for the income opportunity, but because I feel very creative today. I love seeing the website filling up with content and arranging it all in the right way. I know that a lot of people are going to make a lot of gold from my work but also really enjoy working through the actual guide. Feel very pleased and proud of self. Make lots and lots of notes on pieces of paper which I will never find again.
11:00 Friend drags himself out of bed and logs on.We chat on Skype a while. He mentions that the EU servers have come up out of maintenance and I curse and scramble for the piece of paper on my desk where I have a half-written note about Coren Direbrew dropping 20g per person in a repeatable kill. The previous day, I had been farming him for a short while with 4 guild mates. Taking 30 seconds to kill, and adding another 30s for looting and re-queuing together, I work out we could make 12,000g per hour. After maintenance, though, he now drops 1g each, so I screw the paper up and throw it in / at the bin. I wonder what I should write about instead, and how many readers would roll their eyes and yawn if I wrote yet another guide to 4.3 transmogrification gold. Instead, I write maelstrom crystal shatter???? on a scrap of paper, which gets lost immediately in the Must Do Today pile, along with mail from TV Licensing and HM Revenue & Customs.
13:00 Realise that it’s 1pm and I haven’t done any work on the gold guide. Log on to Warcraft instead.
- Repost glyphs
- Cut gems. Buy an amberjewel from AH for 2 copper and boast about it to s-o-bf
- Do cooking, JC and Molten Front dailies with main
- Repost enchant scrolls
- Repost pets. Get into discussion with guild member about Argent Tournament pet prices.
- Count money and cackle to self in utter greed.
- Stare at Spectral Tiger on AH for 700,000g and swear at the person who posted it. Refuse to pay 700,000g
14:59 Realise that I haven’t done any work on the gold guide and log off WoW in horror.
15:00 Run to school to pick up children. Whine at children about being bored, and drag them to town on the bus. Drag them around book shops, then feel bad and buy them toys to make up for it.
I notice a stall selling handbags that I like, then realise that they are the same hangbags that I had seen for sale at a wholesalers at 1 / 4 of the price. Wonder whether to get involved in some real-life “limited supply item flippingâ€, ie buying the bags wholesale and reselling them on ebay. Decide against doing so as I hate ebay, and am too lazy to package 100s of handbags and take them to the post office.
18:00 McDonalds. Healthy -.-
19:00 Get home, log on to WoW and pick up more gold. Bounce at guild mates. They complain that their main tank disappeared after tanking trash, because he got perma-banned by Blizzard for gold trading, despite protesting his innocence. I get very worried, because this guy doesn’t have half the amount of gold I do. Perhaps he really was trading gold for real money? Feel a tiny stab of envy that he had the balls to do it, and make up for this by loudly rebuking chinese gold farmers, and feel a bit better. They ask me to tank for them instead but I turn them down, as I have scheduled a meeting with the “Gold King†to talk about today’s progress with the new gold guide.
Their main tank logs back on after about half an hour, having had a discussion with Blizzard which involved him showing them his TSM Accounting logs to prove he wasn’t a gold farmer. Feel really guilty for suspecting him.
20:00 ish Force children to go to bed. Confiscate one Nintendo DS. Pick up one Rage Against the Machine CD from floor.
21:00 ish Realise I’m half an hour late for meeting with Gold King and log off WoW and start the conference software. Discover that he has had to leave, and feel really bad. Write him an apology and promise myself to work more on the gold guide tonight. Notice some emails saying one pet shop guide has sold, and I check that the guy has automatically received the guide. He has. He must like it, because he’s back soon afterwards to buy the Teen Guide. Feel super proud of myself until I remember that I missed the meeting. Make myself a coffee to cheer myself up.
22:00 Get REALLY worried about mailing my extra gold (I’m capped on main) over to a bank character, in case Blizzard want to perma-ban me too by accident. Distract myself by sending filthy messages to s-o-bf and become rather flustered.
00:00 Count more gold on WoW. Repost gems. Inferno rubies are selling like hot cakes because it’s after-raid time, on post-maintenance raid-nerf. Everyone has been raiding, except for me, and they all want gems and enchants. Roll around in gold coins in happiness.
01:00 Do Molten Front Dailies with alt. Queue for Coren Direbrew with alt. Sulk that I only get 1g from the kill. Check twitter and email. Feed fake fish on smart phone.
02:00 Realise the Auction House sales have slowed, and take my main for a flight around Eastern Kingdoms to do some Archaeology.
03:00 Take mobile phone to bed, read email. Hypocritically chastise Gimp on twitter for staying awake late and not going to bed. Chat with s-o-bf. Promise myself I’ll work harder on the blog and guide tomorrow.
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Forgotten and unthought-of items or Pure Speed running!
Hey Guys today I have done something different and exchanged posts with a few of my fellow bloggers as part of “Gimp’s Golden Circle”, and Gimp has brought us a post from his blog over at Gimp’s Gold. If you wish to read my post for today, you can check it out over on Flux’s Blog over at Power Word: Gold
Hey Guys I’m Gimp from www.GimpsGold.com and today I wanna talk to you all about making gold by running your favourite dungeons. I have recorded a video of me speed running some of my favourite dungeons as an example
Often when we think of dungeons from a gold perspective we think of farming greens or cloth, or even boosting people for gold in some cases. However many dungeons in game have items players have completely neglected or just don’t think of anymore. I decided to speed run a few dungeons to look at some old and forgotten items, or ways to speed through REALLY fast. During the runs I intentionally went for speed, so didn’t necessarily kill every single mob or boss but the dungeons can also be run slowly for more loot per run, but I personally like doing dungeons fast!
Hellfire Ramparts
Hellfire Ramparts
Loot after Hellfire Ramparts Run CLICK FOR LARGER
Hellfire Ramparts is a great instance for Runecloth and Netherweave cloth, as well as level 60-73 greens, but the best part of Ramparts is the speed in which you can run it.
Loot after an average run.
I averaged 4 mins per run and after 5 runs had 180 Runecloth, 60 Netherweave cloth, 27 Green Items and 1 BOE Rare.
Gnomeregan
Gnomeregan
Gnomeregan is probably known as a rather long and sometimes annoying instance. However if you split it into a couple of pulls like I do, it allows for a faster more simplex run.
The items that make me run Gnomeregan the most are the Fused Wiring that many of the mechanical mobs drop. However Gnomeregan’s true calling for forgotten and unthought-of items is its vast array of great Engineering Recipes.
Some of the recipes available are 100% exclusive to the dungeon:
Some are available as drops but can be found outside of Gnomeregan also:
- Schematic: Craftman’s Monocle
- Schematic: EZ-Thro Dynamite
- Schematic: Flash Bomb (Quest)
- Schematic: Gnomish Cloaking Device (Vendor)
- Schematic: Gnomish Universal Remote (Vendor)
- Schematic: Goblin Jumper Cables (Vendor)
- Schematic: Goblin Land Mine
- Schematic: Large Seaforium Charge
- Schematic: Mechanical Squirrel Box
- Schematic: Moonsight Rifle
- Schematic: Portable Bronze Mortar
- Schematic: Shadow Goggles
- Schematic: Small Seaforium Charge
Some are also dropped by Mekgineer Thermaplugg
- Schematic: Discombobulator Ray (Matrix Punchograph 3005-D)
- Schematic: Flame Deflector
Loot from Gnomeregan Speed Run CLICK FOR LARGER
Although most of the schematics themselves are not BOE the items they create are often very desirable and worth obtaining the means of creating.
Lil’ Smokey, Pet Bombling and Mechanical Squirrel Boxes being incredibly profitable items to sell to pet collectors, and Craftsman’s Monocles are great for selling to vanity players.
Loot from a single Speed run
Scarlet Monastery & Cathedral
Scarlet Monastry
Scarlet Monastery is an amazing dungeon with a ton of cloth dropping Humanoids. The biggest plus to SM however is the speed in which you can complete its highest level area the Cathedral.
A full cathedral clear can take from 2-5 mins with only the need to hit 1 mob to agro the entire instance!
With mogging around the corner [“Transmogrification/Mogging” – the Gold Queen] SM has gained a new plus for gold making other than pure speed running for cloth and that is the Chain of The Scarlet Crusade set, which comprises of:
Scarlet Crusade Set
Scarlet Leggings: BoP
With all parts of the set apart from the leggings being bind on equip the potential for sales once Mogging is released could be incredibly high. (Watch for these also cheap on the AH)
Scarlet Monastry Cathedral Loot CLICK FOR LARGER
Loot from a 3 min run!
Stratholme Human Side (Scarlet Side)
Stratholme Scarlet Human Side
Stratholme is the ultimate speed dungeon, with tons of mobs, tons of cloth and my favourite items for selling in any old world dungeon!
Righteous Orb
For those who don’t know Righteous Orbs are used as part of the Crusader Enchant which is incredibly popular for heirloom weapons, especially for Warriors and therefore profitable!
During my run I obtained 4 of these orbs each netting me 100g on my server!
Combine this with 111 Mageweave and a very fast run can become very profitable!
On a non-gold related side note I also obtained the Cannonball Runner which is great fun
Stratholme Scarlet Human Side Speed Run Loot CLICK FOR LARGER
1 Speed runs loot
So I have listed a Super-fast fun dungeon (Hellfire Ramparts), an Engineers haven for recipes (Gnomeregan), a Mogging potential dungeon (Scarlet Monastery), and a dungeon run hunting for specific materials (Straholme). But Azeroth has many many other dungeons with potential items and reason to run them for gold, have a look at your favourite dungeon and see if you can find an item people would think of when they think gold making!
So take care Guys and Gals and keep an eye out for more dungeon run videos coming soon!
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Gimp of Gimp’s Gold