Economy Insights: Mettle Disposal, Collectors Markets & Flipping - A Weekly Summary by Wowhead (Issue 311)

Hello! Welcome to the 311th edition of the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up! This week we take a look at uses for spare Artisan's Mettle and why Transmog and Cosmetics are great markets to get into now. We also look at the basics of finding items to flip and how to make gold without Dragonflight! My name is WowCarry and I'll be your guide through the World of Gold Making!

Mettle Dumps

We are at the tail end of an expansion where many people have accumulated currency and have not had a use for it. Artisan's Mettle being a prime example. The premise here being that you can use 50 Artisan's Mettle to create an Illustrious Insight and with that extra 30 skill, it may be enough for you to guarantee a Rank 3 craft which usually has a higher price. u/Youaintmyrealdad has put together a handy list of things to use your spare Artisan's Mettle on.

Not going to spoonfeed everything. If you're the type of person who complains you have max inspiration + tons of mettle, but can't make a profit with dracothyst I can't help you. All I'll say is look at the stats on the right when you have the craft selected, and make the relevant numbers go up to max (maybe someone else can comment on what the max stats are).

• Mettle Dumps for Each Crafting profession

List is not in order of relevance/profit/sale rate. Mettle goes the furthest if using it to fill work orders, if you aren't interested in that then:

• Alchemy - Primal Convergent, Omnium Draconis, any Phial/Potion that needs insight to R3 with T3 mats (go down the list) e.g. Iced Phial of Corrupting Rage, Phial of Glacial Fury, EPP.
• Blacksmithing - Alloys, Shadowed Belt Clasp (xD)
• Enchanting - Graceful Avoidance, Homebound Speed, Regenerative Leech, Accelerated Agility, Reserve of Intellect, Sustained Strength, Devotion of Avoidance/Leech/Speed/Critical Strike/Haste/Mastery/Versatility, Plainsrunner's Breeze, Watcher's Loam, Burning/Earthen/Frozen/Sophic/Wafting Devotion, Shadowflame Wreathe, Spore Tender, Draconic Deftness/Finesse/Inspiration/Perception/Resourcefulness.
• Engineering - Arclight Capacitor, Overcharged Overclocker, Calibrated Safety Switch, Critical Failure Prevention Unit, Magazine of Healing Darts, Spring-Loaded Capacitor, Tinker: Arclight Vital Correctors, Tinker: Shadowflame Rockets.
• Herbalism - not a crafting profession
• Inscription - Cosmic Ink, Runed Writhebark, Chilled Rune, Vantus Rune
• Jewelcrafting - Tiered Medallion Setting
• Leatherworking - Hides/Scales, Armor Kits, Shadowflame Patches
• Mining - not a crafting profession
• Skinning - not a crafting profession
• Tailoring - Blue Silken Lining, Spellthreads, Banners, Azure/Chronoweave bolts (xD)

It's a great list to get started and work out if it's worth spending the extra mettle for greater profit effectively giving you a price for your mettle. I just used advanced phial experimentation to go through 6000 mettle on my main, made 150k. It's mindless and easy to get the skill points on every toon you have mettle on for the advanced phial-making tree. Takes maybe an hour set up for each toon. The market was higher a few months ago, but now that everybody is in the same predicament of no more new content and mettle to spend. It's afk and free so I'm going to take the free gold where I can.

Now is the Time for Transmog & Cosmetics

Another thing that players tend to do now that we are in the later phase of an expansion is start collecting pets, mounts, transmog. All the things they never made the time for before. This is where we come in as gold makers providing such a service of craftable transmog, mounts and pets at a convenient price. The Lazy Goldmaker has all the details here...

The final season of Dragonflight is on the horizon and it’s actually time to start looking ahead. With the slowdown in max level content we can expect activity to drop, but profits are still going to be there! All of these markets will usually hold long term value well. Cosmetics never truly go out of style, but of course, any one cosmetic will have fewer and fewer customers as time goes by. Luckily we also have players coming into the game to keep demand rolling. Time to revisit old areas and invest in crafting those things that are less commonplace now that the game has moved on.

300k Without Dragonflight

Not everyone has the latest expansion. Returning players may want to dust off their old accounts and get back into the game. Many will turn to gold making as a way to either fund their gametime or save up enough balance to buy the new expansion. Everyone's situation is different, not everyone can (or might want to) "work an extra hour" to buy gold with real money. Some find the challenge in itself fun.

So, I stopped playing at the end of BfA. Is it possible without the current expac, providing that I'm not ready to spend more than 10 hours a week? If it were you, how would you go about it? If it matters, I am a leatherworker (though I'm pretty sure it won't help, yeah)

Honestly, you could do the ore farm in Drustvar. You can average 14-18k per hour getting storm silver and monelite ore deposits. This takes a bit of prep time to get max level on the professions, but it’s easy, and there are tons of guides. It still sells really well and nets you a nice profit. I know that only averages to about 150k, but it is a possible start as you begin and get better at the routes. If you get the addon worthit, this is the best GPH you can get out of a material farm. Even less set up is the dark rune farm in EPL, and I can manage 16-18k per hour after perfecting my own route. Again, a lot of guides on routes and so on are online, and I believe I got the idea from comments about dark runes on Wowhead. Farming specific, old-world materials is honestly a good, consistent way to get gold, but it does not necessarily make you millions- it is just consistent.

Like the other comment said, you could do mogs and pets and stuff, but I find that the sell rate is absolutely abysmal. You can get lucky and can pull good old-world patterns and mogs, but again, it is not necessarily consistent. I like to farm transmogs and other items to sell once or twice a week and rotate what I put up. These take multiple reposts and patience. They might sell eventually, and you just have to stick with it. It feels great to sell that one item for 40k that you have had for some time.

If you have alts you can begin to do other farms and utilize different strategies. For example, farming materials for engineer mounts and sell those, but it becomes more worth it on multiple characters. Making gold in WoW is somewhat of a process, and there are a lot of niche markets. The one thing to consider is that 300k is fairly close to a token price. I always judge what I farm by my real-time investment. This is a game, and it’s nice to make gold, but could you work an extra hour and buy a token instead of farming for 10? That is up to you of course, but I like to judge what I farm based on that real-time investment too. As always, good luck!

New to Flipping

To expand a little on the comment above of "buy low, sell high" or flipping as it is known in gold making terms. u/glaeirs asks more about what do you flip?

Hello! I recently started dipping my feet into realm flipping and since this is still extremely new to me, I'd love some help. So: what do you flip that makes you money? Transmog, battle pets, mounts, current BOEs, or just snipe deals? Thank you!

Made 30 mil in 2 months from flipping, it's definitely the best way to make gold if you have 2 accounts for cross-realm trading. I flip a mix of BOEs, rare transmogs, mounts, recipes, unobtainable items, etc. You can flip using undermine exchange and send cheaper items to different servers. The best way to make gold, however, is cross-realm sniping in addition to flipping. But most people find it tedious since you have to make your own sniping list since people aren't going to share their own unless you buy it from them.

As suggested above, using undermine.exchange is great for looking for things and comparing prices across servers. You can do a generic search for everything and then start picking out expensive items and see what looks interesting. Once you find something, you can then see how it's spread over several servers and buy from the cheaper ones and list on the ones more expensive with fewer of them on. There are also other sites that give you insight into markets to look out for such as saddlebagexchange. Use this to search for some high-value items to consider flipping: https://saddlebagexchange.com/wow/marketshare

From here, you can get an interesting list of items depending on your server selection and can order it by price, market state, or any other metric you choose. Of course, you don't have to just flip over servers. If you only have one account, you can flip on your own server non-commodities or if you are feeling really brave and have the cash, you can try flipping commodities!

I saw an opportunity a while back. Took the risk and it worked. When cloth is extremely cheap I buy a lot of it, it eventually sells. Sometimes the entire stack sells in a few weeks, others in a day. The main problem is to store the cloth, I have a spreadsheet for the cloth stored in the mail and the expiration date. If needed I set up a TSM mail operation to move between chars. I don't YOLO sell all of it at once since it costs 5s to deposit for 12 hours each piece. And when I see the market raising, many times a reset in the price happens, that's when I take the major risk and spread a few hundred thousand in the market since that gives me a lot of profit, usually between 1.8 and 2.8g a piece. Right now, probably because there are a LOT of bots hyperspawning mobs, the market is overflowed and got like 3.5 million cloth bought at around 71s stored waiting for a better time. Last time I checked I had around 61s profit on average (a good amount came from Early in DF). It is a lot of gold and I don't recommend doing it to anyone because it is extremely time-consuming. Whatever you choose to do, it's an interesting market to learn. Of course, please don't invest more gold than you can afford to lose! Prices and sales are never guaranteed!

Now is the time to conquer the content that came with the Guardians of the Dream update! From running  Mythic+ dungeons to slaughtering the mighty new bosses of the fresh Amirdrassil raid - all of that and beyond is one click away with WowCarry and its team of pro-players that will carry you through your journey!