Recently, Pockie being the alt-aholic that he is, started a new character on a pvp realm. So far, we’ve only been on carebear servers. So there he is penniless, no friends, no bags and one time was so poor he didn’t have the 30c to send things to his auction house alt. And there began our new project to enrich the life of this poor orc warrior with material things. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten into money making mode that it was kinda fun.

1. Starter funds.

He picked up not 1 but 2 gathering professions – herbalism to supply the insatiable herb-lust of inscription and alchemy; and mining which supports blacksmithing, jewelcrafting and engineering. He then sends the raw materials to his AH mule who then lists them on the Auction house.

2. AH Investment Opportunities

Now with a small pool of gold from selling the herbs and ores. He currently has 35g. So now to look for things you can buy and then flip for a decent margin. I go through my usual list.

• Popular raw materials – The key to making the most of this flipping is to know your customer. Some items are more commonly used in 5s (i.e herbs for milling) or singly (i.e glyphs) or full stacks (i.e herbs for alchemy, cloth). Find out the characteristic of the buyers and put up in quantities that suit them. Even if your stack of 2 glyphs of mind flay is the cheapest per unit, many buyers are willing to a premium to buy the one listed singly, to avoid the hassle of selling the extra. What you can do is buy up the items that are in odd quantities that sell at a discount and relist them in more suitable stack sizes for a profit.
• Arbitrage for Enchanting materials – Some enchanting mats can be split from greater to lesser versions i.e greater magic essence (GME) = 3 lesser magic essence (LME). If price of GME = 90s and LME sells for more than 30s each. You can buy the GME and sell LMEs for a profit. At this point in the game, the profits are usually too small for big traders to bother with so a low level can fulfill that niche. At higher levels, you can do the same with large and small prismatic shards. Or even void crystals though there is a little more risk because the conversion is irreversible. The best part about enchanting mats is that there is no listing fee. So if it doesn’t sell today, you can still sell it tomorrow.
• Vendor bought recipe/pets – People will pay a premium for the legwork to bring the recipes or pets from the vendor, even if these are not limited supply.

3. Invest in yourself

With the new bit of money, we can now afford to spend abt 6g getting a 16-slot bag. This will help increase the amt of vendor trash and raw materials the little orc can carry before he has to make a trip back to town. We also hunt the auction house for cheap gear that can help him level more painlessly. The thing is to plan ahead and know what you need in advance and start shopping early. So at level 10, I’ll start looking at L15-21 gear that he might use and pick it up at a reasonable price since this guy won’t have a big brother to run him through instances to gear up.

These are the basics of making money that I will still go by in wotlk. The starter fund portion is already in place. So what’s next is to observe the market and see if there is a niche that you can fill. Just like how I used to fill this niche for dark silk shirts. The recipe is a limited supply recipe from a vendor and I use it to level my tailoring. For some reason people really like these shirts. So even when the recipe is grey, I still make these dark silk shirts instead of selling the silk cloth. It’s not big money but every little bit adds up. Plus I really need to clear out those stacks of silk cloth gathered from *someone’s* altaholic journeys.