Use Lil Sparky's Workshop, Auctioneer and Ackis Recipee List (see the setup post in this "whatprof" series) to work out what will sell.
Advantages
- Potentially higher gold/hour than farming
- Nice clothes
- Different approaches to gold making - basic and advanced
- High cost items can be difficult to sell. These professions have some of the highest cost items.
- Gear Obsolescence even at maximum level.
- Competition often works for tips (which is better than being in competition with bots)
The levelling toon has difficulties making money, but it is still possible. Make a mix of items and slowly feed them into the market.
There are types of items that can sell well, however they will be pointed out by Lil Sparky
- Quest Items(e.g. Hillman's cloak)
- Starter gear like level 20 hats, lv 40 chain/plate, or tanking gear because a player is looking to fill a specific slot.
- Items in a levelling guide. Everyone else is makeing them and not enough toons buying. These generally have the 'fewest mats'
- Chest and shoulders sell poorly because many many levelling toons have BOA gear for the XP bonus.
- leg enchants (tailors and leatherworkers)
- belt buckles (blacksmiths)
- various bags (primarily tailors)
- Improved cloth - making bolts, imbued bolts, extra special bolts (mooncloth, spellweave etc). Many players seeking cut price tailors (eg guildies) will buy the immediate previous step and will pay for the cloth.
- Cloth cooldowns - the best cloths will have a cooldown to make. This makes for scarcity, and will guarantee an income (at least untill the cooldown gets removed)
- Improved leather (think heavy borean leather)
- Armor kits (leatherworkers) (depending on your server)
- Enchanters rods (blacksmiths)
- Sheild spikes and weapon chains (blacksmiths)
- PVP gear. Even at the end of Wrath, basic PVP gear still sold at a profit. I have read that "last season's" PVP gear will be craftable.
- Starter tank gear (mostly blacksmiths) as historically starter tanks need more gear than any other class
- The latest pattern - Every raid seems to create new patterns to learn and make that many part time crafters won't make.
Posts
My experience has been that these crafting professions are only profitable when the crafter has a rare pattern, or when there are specialties.
ReplyDeleteCat may be different, but I earn a small tip for crafting gear for people with mats. The gear itself doesn't sell that well. Re-listing a 150g blue vest will kill you on listing fees when it doesn't sell and you have to re-list again. And again.
Just my experience but I've found more profit in the gathering side of these professions--mining, skinning, farming humanoids for cloth--and selling the raw mats.
I'll give it a go again in Cat and see. There is certainly a market window, where having one of the first few on the server to hit LXXX patterns will be good gold making opportunities. After some time, that window will close but the gathering will continue to be profitable I think.
Every equipment-crafting profession also has some recipes which are mostly unknown or seldom crafted (for reasons of rarity, inconvenience or vast material requirements).
ReplyDeleteThese are not necessarily the highlevel recipes, but more often than not lowlevel ones. They will sell, as soon as players see them on the Auction House, thinking: "Oh, what's that? Never seen it before"
Profit margins of 100-300% are easily possible with them, though demand is not too high. Upcoming changes in Cataclysm will increase the number for these as revamped items are becoming more useful.
I made gold levelling Leatherworking 375-450 in May 2010 and Blacksmithing 375-450 in June 2010. These professions at this point were generally considered to be nothing but a gold sink.
ReplyDeleteThere is gold to be made in these professions, and at a higher rate than pure gathering.
I agree that the out of the way recipees sell better than vendor taught recipees.
Again I recommend reading the setup post, and getting the three mentioned addons to help you find what is profitable.