Revisiting the Auction House

Remember about a month and a half ago when I made that flowchart on how to make money from the auction house? Turns out I still don't have a clue about what I'm doing.

I say this because since I made that flowchart I've made approximately 500 gold in game. That seems like a good chunk of change until I started comparing income with some other classmates. The amount of money they currently have is around 4,000 gold.

So much for my technique huh?

So our in-game assignment for the past week or so has been to manipulate the auction house and try and earn some money. I decided to take advantage of this project by experimenting with my selling style. I started out by buy some wool cloth from the auction house and selling it back at a higher price. Wool cloth was a safe investment because it's always in demand. This is because the cloth can be used to gain reputation with a faction, which allows players to buy and sell items at better prices as well as give them access to special faction specific items. So naturally, I made a decent earning from the cloth I sold. However, I was still unsatisfied with the profit I was making. So I tried something else.

My mage currently holds the professions of herbalism and alchemy. For those who don't know professions are skills characters can learn that allow them to make and sell special items using specific "ingredients." And sometimes these ingredients will sell for larges piles of money at the auction house. Since I had a surplus of herbs that I had yet to use, I tried selling some of those. Within a matter of minutes, a player had bought about 70 gold worth of herbs, which was about 3 times the amount I earned with buying and reselling wool. I immediately began farming some more herbs and made even more money. As for my alchemy profession, I tried selling the potions I had in my repertoire. Let's just say the results left something to be desired.

My experiments with the auction house have left me with a few questions. It was obvious to me that I should keep my herbalism profession because it seems to be making me a decent amount of money. But I'm not sure what to do about alchemy. The reason I picked it was because of how well it works with herbalism in terms of making potions, and supposedly the two professions become vital for mages once they start raiding full-time. But I'm nowhere near raiding level yet with this character, nor do I really plan on raiding for a while (that all really depends on how many people continue playing WoW on the ICAM server after this class is over). Therefore, taking on a more lucrative profession might be better for me.

But what about Lizezul, my main character? He has the same professions, and I plan on raiding a lot with him. And yet, he has less money right now than my ICAM character (although I did spend about 260 gold for Lizezul's flying mount). I'd like to at least say my main has more money than my alt, but leveling another profession at that level would take forever. Something tells me I still have a lot of experimenting to do in the auction house.

And yes, I still hate you Rachel. :p