Meet Ohnekase: Profession Series, Part Two. Mining.

Meet Ohnekase.

Kel'Thuzad, US

So, in an alternate dimension, Ohnekase was killed in a glorious battle.  However, he is now going to be resurrected by the Forsaken and be added to their ranks.  Now, he serves the dark lady, and is interested in having some gold.

Today, he is going to help us talk about mining.  Mining is a great way to make money, especially because you can sell it as ore and ars and they usually go for a larger sum than the leather that we were getting.  However, unlike Skinning, we kinda have to keep an eye out for them.

Lets get started, shall we.

The Mining Profession


Mining is a gathering profession that allows us to wander the lands in search of Ore nodes, and can be trained at Level 5.  With a mining pick, you can get Ore and Stone from the nodes.  The ore can be used by Jewelcrafters to make gems.  The ore can also be made into bars, which is used by Blacksmiths, Jewelcrafters, and Engineers to create all of their nifty items.

One thing that I should also mention is that each node you mine now gives you Exp.  So, if you wanted to, you could level using just Mining.

TIP:  You need a mining pick to be able mine nodes.  Make sure to buy one.

What this means for those of us who are trying to make money is that we have 2 ways to do it with.  Let's take a look at the Undermine Journal prices for Copper Ore and Copper Bars (the low level ore), as well as the Rough Stone.

Ok, so it looks promising.  55 Silver a piece for Copper Ore and 1 Gold a piece for Copper Bars.  Not bad. The Rough Stone is only 5 silver a piece, but lets see what happens.  Lets see what Ohnekase can do with these.

Bring out yer dead...


First, Ohnekase needs to be level 5.  Lets get on it...

Ok, so I am not dead anymore, you fixed that.
I guess I can live with that.....wait.

Stop the Zombie Apocalypse.  I can do that.

Hey C'mon.  It isn't so bad.  Now you can make all the
Zombie jokes you want and not seem racist.

Excellent, I just hit 5, lets go to Brill and train my Mining.  Or not, there is no Mining Trainer in Brill, onto Undercity (Trained by Brom Killian in the War Quarter)

Hi.  I like to hit stuff.  Can you teach me to Hit big rocks and break them?

Ok, so we have learned our mining.  We also learned a new skill called "Find Minerals"  This will give us a yellow dot on our minimap when we are near a mine.  Let me show you where to turn it on and what it looks like.

Just Click on the Magnifying Glass
and select it from the menu.

Now, when you are close, it will tell you
where an Ore node is.  Very handy.

I double checked to make sure we have a mining pick, now lets go run around Tirisfal Glades and mine for a bit and see where we get to.  Lets set the clock for 30 minutes.

Note:  Usually, most mining nodes are found along rocky surfaces or mountains.  If you wander around those, you should get quite a few nodes.

You are in the way of my Mining node, you fiend.

Aw, crap.  I died....again.  Wait, how does that even work.

Back alive.....sort of, and mining.

Ah, he is bigger than me, run away! 

Woot, not as much of a Pansy anymore.  Not quite as much anyway. 

Ok, I stand correct.  Oh well, looks like time is up.

This was the route I took, cause I know there was Ore there.

Ok, so after 30 minutes of running around (or just shy of them).  I ended up with 42 Copper Ore, 48 Rough Stone, 4 Linen Cloth (from kills), some Stringy Wolf Meat (Cooking item), 2 Shadowgems (used in Jewelcrafting) and 1 Tigerseye (used in Engineering and Jewelcrafting).  Not too bad for 1/2 hour.

Now, we looked and found that the Copper Bars seem to sell higher than the Copper Ore.  If you look below, you will notice that 1 Copper Ore can be turned into 1 Copper Bar (this is not the case for higher level Bars).  So, lets go ahead and Smelt it all.

I know how to use a Forge.

Excellent, that is done, now lets go to the Auction House and see what we can sell.

95 Silver x 42 Copper Bars = a Good Chunk of Money.

80 Silver.  Nice, lets see what we can do.

So those are up on the AH great, however, I realized something.

Ok, so that is good, lets put it up.  Oh wait, I don't have any money to post another.
Crap.

Ok, so right now, we don't have enough to post them all. That kinda suck.  However, I will keep track of these auctions, and post new ones if the old ones sell.  I will let you know.

Later...

20 Copper Bars sold for 18ish gold.

Another 20 Copper Bars sold for the same amount.

The Shadowgem also for 75ish silver.

So, the three things I put up that I had money for sold.  My gold now is sitting just shy of 37 gold.  And I am still level six.  This means that, if I made no extra money, I would be fine for money up until level 40.  But I still have mining, and we have seen what even 1/2 hour can do (1/2 hour with me dying......a lot).  So, it looks like Mining can be a very lucrative profession indeed.  And I didn't even put any of the other things I have up.

Conclusion...


So, even in death, Ohnekase has found a good way to make money.  That is awesome.  Mining is a great way to make money when you are starting out.  The Mining nodes are not hard to find, they are plentiful, they give you experience, and you will likely find several as you are just doing your questing.  Personally, when I am questing and having mining, I will often find myself running to a mob or another locale and then completely hop of the rails to go get a node that popped up on my minimap.

So, join us next time, when we will talk about another great Primary Profession:  Herbalism.

See ya next time...

Meet Ohnekase: Professions Series, Part One. Skinning.

Meet Ohnekase

Deathwing US

So, we have met him on a number of occasions.  He helped teach us the some of the basics of Gold Making:  Looting, maximizing gold, and using external sites and addons.  Today, he is going to help us learn a profession and use it to make money.  Today, we are talking about Skinning.

Professions

Before we get into making ourselves some money, lets talk about what a profession is briefly.  Professions are  extra skills that you can train to allow your character to gather materials as he/she is out doing things, or they can be used to get materials to make items.  They are two kinds of professions:  Primary professions, which are restricted to two of these professions; and Secondary professions, which every character can pick up.  The reason that these interest us for this article is that every single profession (with the possible exception of First aid) can be used to make us money.  So, lets talk about the Primary and Secondary professions, then we will get into Skinning.

Primary:  These professions are also split into two types:  Gathering professions and Crafting professions.  Gathering professions are the professions that help you get materials that can help you or others to craft their items.  Crafting professions take those items and make other items that usually have a more direct use in the game.  An example would be that a gathering professions would gather something like Ore, and a crafting professions would use that ore to make armor and weapons.  The Gathering professions are Skinning, Mining, Herbalism, Enchanting, and Tailoring.  The Crafting Professions are Blacksmithing, Engineering, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting, Inscription, Enchanting, and Tailoring (yes Enchanting and Tailoring are both gathering and crafting professions).

Secondary:  There are four secondary professions:  Cooking, Fishing, First Aid, and Archaeology.  These professions are extra things that you can do and can give you an edge while you are playing the game.  The food you cook can up your stats for a time, Fishing can find neat items and can be used in cooking, First Aid gives you a heal for a good chunk of your health, and Archeology can help you find items, pets, and mounts that are useful.  For gold making, you can definitely make some good money using Cooking and Fishing, and Archaeology does give you money for the things you find.  We will likely talk about Fishing and Cooking later.

To learn a profession, simply ask a guard where you can find a profession trainer (or, if you are at the first town, there is usually someone who can train you in any of the basic professions), then go to the trainer and pay them some gold to learn it.

So, lets talk Skinning

Skinning is a great professions.  Simply put, Skinning allows us to get extra materials from the corpses of animals.  I personally like this cause it allows us to make some good money while we are out and about.  In addition, as we go along, it will give us another benefit of a small bump to our critical strike chance.  If we wanted to, we can use the leather and hide we get for other professions, mainly leatherworking.  However,  because there are other people who also want leather and hide, we can sell it on the auction house for a good chunk of money.

Lets take a look at theunderminejournal.com to see how much the materials we can get will make us.

So, you may remember in the last article that I told you that the Undermine Journal had some information already set aside so we can look at it.  Well, once you get onto the site and look at your server, check out the "Consumables" Tab and notice the sub-tab "Skinning".  That should give us some information on pricing for what we are going for. 

I grabbed the classic Leather prices because these are what we will really find before level 60.  The first thing we will find is Light Leather, and lets look at that Price and Mean Price.  For one piece of leather (which will probably be gotten while we are our questing and such anyway), we can get probably somewhere between 50 silver and 75 silver from it.  That goes up to 10 gold for 20 of them (not hard to get).  So, for starting out, there is a nice little bit of money to be made on these, all for just taking one extra step after we kill monsters.

So, lets try this out in game.

Ohnekase is learnin good...

So, first, lets ask a guard where to go to learn this.

Excuse, Mr Guard.  I am looking to learn to skin dead animals, can you help?

OK, in Old Town.  Excellent.

Sweet, now I can skin things

Ok, so now we know Skinning, lets grab a Skinning Knife (bought from the leatherworking supply vendor), and head back to Goldshire to see what this can do for us.

Tip:  Don't forget to get your Skinning Knife.  I have done it, it is irritating.

Let's Get Skinning


So, to skin things, it is very easy.  Once you have your skinning knife, simply go kill an (in our case, we want the wolves, bears, and boars around Goldshire), then loot them.

Woot, Stuff.

You will see a new Icon over them and the tooltip will tell you you can skin them.

Click on them again (as though you are looting them again), it will give you a bar and you will get some loot for them.

Leather Scraps.....nice, I think.

So, that is the basics of Skinning.  I am going to take 15 minutes and run around a kill Boars and Bears and such.  That way, we can see what you can get in a short time (or offhand while you are questing and leveling and such).

Watch out, its coming right for us!

We can't use the line "Watch out, its coming right for us."
We can however, "thin out the numbers".

Join us later, where we will "Thin out the numbers" of some
endangered species.

NOTE: Ohnekase nor the writer do not condone killing endangered species.
Please take humor in these South Park references.

15 Minutes later...(ish)

Ok, so after 15 minutes, what did I get, all in all.

14 Light Leather, 20 Ruined Leather Scraps
10 Chunks of Boar Meat, and 1 Malachite

So, in terms of leather, we got Light Leather and Ruined Leather Scraps.  In terms of other stuff that I think I can sell, I got some more Chunks of Boar Meat and a got a green quality item, Malachite.  Lets check them on theunderminejournal

Alright, so looking these over it looks like I can get quite a bit of gold for them.  They all sell for a reasonable price.

So, lets fly to Stormwind and try and sell them.

Hi, I have a bunch of stuff I don't need.  Know anyone that wants them?

Lets See what the AH looks for each of them and how much I want to put them up for

Ok, so the Light Leather is first.  It looks like someone put several up for really cheap (10 silver for that stack), but I think I can get more from that (especially because the mean price we have seen is 50 silver).  So lets undercut the second one.

The Ruined Leather Scraps don't have any large variance, and I don't know how well these will sell, so i am just going to undercut the bottom one and see what happens.

Ok, so here is some more Chunks of Boar Meat.  It looks like my original one got undercut again, but I will try to put the stack up for just under the lowest bid (each).

Again, the Malachite I don't know a lot about, but I dont see a problem with putting it up for 50 silver.  In my experience, that seems reasonable.


We have put a bunch of stuff up, lets see how they sell later.  I am going to come back to them and I will post more then...

Later...

Looks like our Strange Dust we bought from last week sold.  That is pretty cool.

Nice, everything sold.

So it looks like almost everything sold.  Lets go ahead and take a look at what we ended up with.

Nice.  So we have enough for our first mount and other stuff.

Not a bad start.  And that is really with very little work.  I would think that even just keeping this up, and skinning where we can and selling, we could get enough to have all of our mounts just as we level (20, 40, etc)  Not too shabby.

Conclusion

I really like Skinning as a profession.  Not as many people do it, so you get to double dip on skinning your own mobs, and any other skinnable mobs that happen to be dead and looted.  And, as we have seen, even a few of those sell pretty well.  I would recommend it to use while you are leveling up.

Thank you for reading and....

See ya next time....

Meet Ohnekase: The Basics, Part 3. Knowledge is Power.

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
- Benjamin Franklin


Meet Ohnekase.

We have met him before, on two occasions.  He is our level 6 Hunter, who is less poor, but still not overly wealth (but I would say that a gold before level 10 is doing well).


Last week, we talked about the basics of finding the items that might sell, and using the Auction House to sell them.  The Auction House will be the number one way we make our money.  The reason is that, while there is money to had from other sources, the Auction House is player driven.  Vendors will always give you the same amount for your item, regardless of how much of it is around.  They don't really care whether you are selling it or not.  But Players do care.  They need what you are selling.


However, this week, we are going to talk about a skill that will help you no matter what character you have and no matter what you are trying to do with your character.  Today, we are going to be talking about Knowledge.  If you are trying to make money, knowledge can help you decide who and where to try it.  If you are trying to level quickly, there are a lot of tips and tricks out there that WoW doesn't tell you.   That is kind of the reason I am doing these articles.  


Ultimately, whatever I do with this podcast, my goal is to show you how to make gold.  It is also the reason I picked a fresh character on a new server.  The idea of a new character is that it is someone who has nothing to their name.  I want to effectively have this character live the American (or Azerothian, in this case) Dream.  It is possible, and it isn't terribly difficult to make money.


So, now that I am off of  the soapbox, lets get into what exactly I would like to talk about.  Today, I would like to tell you about 2 websites that have a treasure trove of information:  WoWHead and The Undermine Journal.  Then, I would like to touch on the subjects of Addons and one addon in particular which I think can help you as you are trying to make gold:  Auctionator.


Using knowledge


Ok, so let's start with an example of I used the knowledge I had to try and sell something on Ohnekase.


So, to be honest, I tried to sell the Chunk of Boar Meat again and it didn't sell (trust me, items not selling is very common).  That is ok, cause I still got that Linen Cloth I had and sold quite it for a good chunk.  But, when I am out question, how would I have known that Linen would have been worth selling on the AH and not the another item to sell to a vendor (and there are items that are probably more worth it to sell to a vendor)?

Don't Ask Me?  Its the person writing the column
who is talking right now?

So, when I found the Linen Cloth, I can go to www.wowhead.com .  There, I looked up Linen Cloth and looked at what it is used for?  It is used for Tailoring and First Aid, so I can try and keep and look at the Auction House later.

If I wanted to see if it is useful on the Auction House, The Undermine Journal can show me the prices and the average price of the item, as well as what is on the Auction House.  And I didn't even have to go look it up myself.

So, lets take a look at each piece specifically.

Using WoWhead.

Well, seeing as how Ohnekase is in Stormwind (you can do similar things in Orgrimmar too), let's take a stroll around and see if there is anything that players could use that we can get here.

First off, why don't we head west, out of the trade district and across the bridge.

Huh, Cordellls Enchanting.  I suppose they are as good as any other

We will try this store first and see what they have.  This is the enchanting trainer and supplier.  Let's see what they have.

Ok, so... what does all this do?

Ok, so now we have a list of items that are sold by the merchant, and a few of them are even only sold in small quantities.  Why don't we check out a few of these items on WoWhead first and lets see what they do.

So, first things first, let's go to www.wowhead.com

www.wowhead.com

Ok, so right now, I have 2 things.  One, I can see some information below on new information about the next upcoming patch (which also is good information, but you can look into that later).  Above, though, it has a text field that I can put anything in there I want and it can tell me about it.  So lets put in "Strange Dust" into the text box and....

Well, it knows what we want, so lets click into it:

It gives us all of the information on the Strange Dust.  It will tell us who sells in (in case it works well for us), what it disenchant's from (which is a product of "Enchanting), What it is a "Reagent" for (what is it used in making) and any other comments that the readers of the site have to offer.  In addition, a newer feature is that it also has a "Buyout Price" listed for it in the top-right corner.  The average buyout price there is the Average of what it estimates it will go for on the Auction House.

One other nice feature is that nearly everything here is clickable.  Want to find the First guy on the list that sells it, click on his name and it can take you to his page, with information on him.  It is also not restricted to silly little things like items and people.  Need quest help, you can type in the quest and it will have some information on it.

This site is amazing.  I could go on and on and on about this site and its uses.  However, let's get back to items.  This item we know is used for something, and if we believe this "Buyout Price" thing it has, the 7 silver, 60 copper price they want us to pay for these, seems less than the 50 silver that we might be able to get it.  So lets buy that, and while we are at it, lets look at this other item "Lesser Magic Essence"

So, looking at this site, it looks like Lesser Magic Essence is also used in Enchanting.  Also, it looks like the 80 silver price they are telling us is better than the 7 Silver we can buy it for.  So let's buy that too.

I just spent 30 Silver, but any one of these items sells for close to the wowhead site is telling us, we can make a profit.

The Undermine Journal

So, Wowhead has that field that tells us a relative buyout price on the Auction House, but that only gives us a ballpark figure.  We don't know exactly what it is selling for on our server's Auction House.  But theunderminejournal.com does (within about an hour).

Theunderminejournal.com

This site contains auction information on every single US Realm Site (And some EU Realms).  This particular site can give you a treasure trove of economic information on any item you want to know about.  Is it helpful for questing?  Probably not.  Is it helpful for selling items?  Absolutely.

So, lets use the items have and get some information about them on our server specifically.

So, first, lets select our server.

For Ohnekase, it is Deathwing Alliance Side

Ok, so this is what we should be looking at.  Below are some articles from various gold-making blog sites.  Again, these are great tools and I would highly recommend them.  However, one thing that isn't always great about them is a lot of them are written as though you are 85, which we are trying not to be.

However, what we are interested in is the top part.  Above it has 2 neat things.  First is that it has an Item/Seller search.  This is nice if you want to find out specific information about an item.  I can also help us later out if we run into some competition from someone and we want to take a look at what they are selling as well.  Very handy indeed.

The second feature it has, is in its automatic lists.  It will tell you about specific profession items, companion pets, and various other helpful things.  Clicking on on of these sub-tabs will give us some information about specific items with all the basic information on each (price, average cost, etc.)

However, while the automatic lists are cool, lets take a look at just a basic item search, so we can get an idea of how to use it.

So, to get information about our Strange Dust we have, lets go ahead and type "Strange dust" into the Item search text box.

Ok, so I posted all three of these screen to show you the massive amount of information on something as simple as this item.  Just this one item we have basic stats, we have a graph showing its price rises and falls, we have information on when it is posted, we have a graph of the comparisons between this and other servers, and we even have what is posted at the moment, and by whom.  And remember, that is just one item, we can do this with any item.


Sorry, I just can't gush enough about this site, cause it really is very handy.  It gets even better if you register a name on here (using a gmail or twitter or whatnot), cause you can sign up (I believe you will have to pay for it soon) for notification on when an item is below a certain price, or when someone posts, or you can set it up to *mostly* tell you when you what has actually sold (which is a nice feature).


So, lets use the information to see if our Strange Dust is worth selling and what it sells for.

It looks like it is lowest selling for 48 silver and 50 copper.,  the next one up 48 silver 75 copper.  So lets try posting something up for that

So, that is up too, notice that my Chunk of Boar Meat is still up.  :(. 


Addons and Auctionator


Ok, so we have information that we can get information from another site.  But while we are leveling and into our grove, we dont want to go check these other sites.  They might be great just before we are going to put it up on the Auction House, but really...

Addons are amazing tools to help with this (and just about anything else you would like them to do, just short of playing the game for you).  So, I would like to get an addon to help me know about what items will go for so I can find out information about an item without having to leave the game.


Auctionator can do just that.  Plus it can help make our Auction House a little more managable to use (in my opinion).


To install an Addon, here is how you do it.


1) Go to an addon site (I personally use www.curse.com)
2) On Curse, click WoW Addons
3) Type in the name of the Addon are looking for.
4) Make sure it supports the version you are looking at, and make sure it doesn't have weird installation instructions (Auctionator should not)
5) If not, go ahead and Download it (Click the Download button, than the "Manual Installation"
6) Unzip the folder and make sure you put it into the World of Warcraft Folder (specifically, in World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons folder)
7) When you log in, it should automatically be enabled.  You can double check this with the "Addons" button in the character selection screen.


So, theoritically, you have the addon installed, so lets go ahead an enable Auctionator on my system.


Done, now lets look at the auction screen and see what is different.

Ok, so the first thing I like about Auctionator is that it doesn't actually change the Base Auction House Interface.  So (for me if it rare, but...) if you want to actually look at something in the base Auction House, you can.


What it does do, is adds 3 more tabs that can give you extra information.  Lets check the Buy, Sell, and More... Tab.


Buy Tab

OK, so what does the buy tab do?  Simply put, it has a better organization for items if you are looking at buying them.  Rather than showing you just a list of the individual items and such, it stacks them up, so it can give you more information.


For an example, lets say we wanted to buy some Linen Cloth and search them both ways.

Basic UI Time

Auctionator Buy Tab 1

Auctionator Buy Tab 2

Ok, so the Basic search tab gives me both "Bolts of Linen Cloth" and "Linen Cloth" on it, and it has just one individual item.  The "Buy" Tab of Auctionator does this differently.  First, it gives us a choice of what item we are looking for (screen 1).  Then, when we click into Linen Cloth (Screen 2) it will show us the Linen.  But, rather than individual listings, it shows us them in a stacked manner.  I can now see everything that is on the Auction house, and I can see how much they are going for per item.  So if I am buying in some form of bulk, I can buy it as cheap as I need to.

Sell Tab

So, what I like about the sell tab of Auctionator, more than the Default UI is that the Sell tab will give us information about what is already up, and it will help undercut auctions automatically (if you want it to).

So, lets go ahead and post the "Lesser Cosmic Essence" that we bought.

TIP:  To put it up to post, you can either click the item, then click the Auctionator window, or you can ALT+Click on the item.

So, this will give us what is already up on the Auction House.  In this case, there isn't much, so its information may not be good.  However, notice that what is selected, it automatically undercuts by a small amount.  If I wanted to just be quick and just post it, it has already undercut the lowest bid (or any other bid I select) and I can just post it.  I can also change the stack size and the number of stacks, like the default UI, and I can change the duration.  This would be why I likes these a lot.

Full Scan and information from it...

So, if you look at the top right, there are two buttons:  "Full Scan" and "Options".  Options should be fairly obvious what it does, but honestly, I haven't needed to mess with the options much., which is kinda nice.

The "Full Scan"  Button will scan the auction house and store it for you, so you can get the information automatically on your items.

Lets check it out on a before and after.

First, I am going to go grab an item.  Maria Lumere has some Herbs that is used in Herbalism (Check Wowhead to find out where she is and what else she has ;).  So, we bought a Mageroyal.

Here is what the Full Scan adds to the tooltip.

Before

The Scan

After the Scan

So, now I have an easy update to my tooltip which can make searching through stuff easier.

If you would like more information about Auctionator (cause there is quite a bit more information, i just gave you the basics), search around in google, or you can check out http://www.powerwordgold.net/2011/08/auction-basics-auctionator-and.html

Gold Blogs

So, you can call this self-serving if you want, but I thought I should at least mention blogs as a great way to get knowledge.  The reason is simple:  Gold Blogs are an example of people who are sharing the knowledge that they have gained.  Personally, I know that I have used gold blogs a lot to gain some of the knowledge of gold making.

The few I have attached to my site are well written and interesting gold blogging sites.  They may not have only low level tips, but the tips are still nice.  In addition, I know that there is some discussion on other gold making addons.  They are definintely worth checking out.

You are learning, young grasshopper

So, all of these tools are just that:  tools.  They cannot immediately make 1 million gold.  But they can make it a lot easier.  Play around with these sites and mods.  Learn what they can do.  I have been playing this game fairly consistently since the game came out, and I reference these sites and read the gold blogs quite often.  They have helped too.

So, now I feel like a few of the basics have been covered, which is good.  So, next week, we will start looking into using professions to make us some money while we are actually playing the game.  Specifically, next, we will start with the Skinning profession and see what it can do for us.

Thank you for reading and...

See ya next time....


PS:  So, I did sell my Lesser Magic Essence.  Which means that I am now rocking 4 gold.