WoW Confidential

I am very happy to announce that I’ve finally hit 10,000g with the Death Knight alt I made back on February 18, 2010.

For those unfamilar with the project, the purpose was to find out how fast I could make 10,000g profit on a new server by starting up a Death Knight from scratch, zero gold with no outside capital or help.

Steps To Making 10k Gold

Here’s a summary of how the whole project went along:

1. Leveled the DK from 55 – 65, you need to be at least level 65 to get max profession level.

2. Along the way I picked up Herbalism and Mining. I needed to get a fast influx of gold to save up to powerlevel jewelcrafting and also afford a few gem recipes. I balanced this out with gathering up rested experience while I slept, leveled when I accumilated a lot then went back mining/herbing when I was low to hopefully have 2,000g by the time I hit 65.

3. I realized once I hit level 65 how much gold it’d cost me to start getting recipes, titanium powder was selling for 26g each and you need 10 of them for 1 token. 3 tokens for a rare recipe and 4 tokens for an epic, that’s 780g and 1,040g! I then made the decision that I would need to start doing the Jewelcrafting dailies to speed up the process or else I’d be out spending a lot of time mining (since I dropped herbalism for JC)

4. I was a little worried that I’d need to be at least level 72 to take on the mobs required for the quest, prolonging the time needed (level 73 dwarfs were the highest level I had to worry about) but thankfully I could handle these mobs at level 66.

5. I then got into a routine of doing my JC daily (missed a few days) prospected ores from the AH when I saw auctioneer search say they were profitable, did the green gem vendor shuffle, and did a lot of mining early on to afford my recipes.

6. With my snatch list full of gems I was set on buying under a certain price I started to accumulate a very large inventory of cheap gems. It came to a point where I realized if I wanted to hit 10k I needed to stop building up so much and focus on liquidating everything, especially since we all predicted that epic gems would drop in price with the new spike in Battleground activity (meaning more supply of raw epic gems)

7. Routine became login in before peak time, collect mail, craft gems using KTQ and Skillet, post gems with Quick auctions 3. Login an hour later and cancel/repost, then login another 2 hours later and cancel repost. The cancel/repost cycle is much faster to do than with inscription and if you post 12h auctions with limited supply up you’ll not spend too much in AH deposit fees.

You can go back and read each update in detail if you wish:

The Beginning – Day 1 – Feb 18, 2010

Update #1 – 1500g – Feb 23, 2010

Update #2 – hit level 65 and 450 JC skill – March 8

Update #3 – 75 hrs played, 4200g worth March 17

Update #4 – 100hrs played 12000g worth March 29

Best Selling Gems

Here are the items that contributed the most towards hitting 10,000g:

This chart can be a little misleading since the highest priced gems are at the top but the profit margin may have been less, here’s a chart with total profit gained considering mat costs:

Gem Cut	# Sold	Total Sales	Raw Gem Cost	Total Profit Gained
Delicate Cardinal Ruby	29	5,476g	4,350g	1,126g
Solid Majestic Zircon	20	3,410g	2,900g	510g
Bold Scarlet Ruby	27	1,629g	1,080g	549g
Glowing Dreadstone	9	1,574g	1,053g	521g
Relentless Earthsiege Diamond	20	1,424g	640g	784g
Solid Sky Sapphire	45	1,395g	352g	1,043g
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond	16	980g	512g	468g
Bright Scarlet Ruby	10	605g	400g	205g
Brilliant Autumn’s Glow	21	510g	260g	250g
Rigid Autumn’s Glow	18	500g	223g	277g
			Total:	5,730g

There is a lot of data missing from these numbers, it seems my beancounter has only been recording the 1st mail everytime I check the auction house. I’ve fixed the problem (I found out it was a compatibility issue with Altoholic, had to turn off “Scan Mail Body” option in the config menu > datastore > DateStore_Mails. For example I know I’ve made a lot of sales of Reckless Ametrine but they haven’t been captured at all, this problem looks like it cut off any sales I made after April 2nd (around the same time patch 3.3.3 hit).

Time Spent and How Much Gold I Have Total

During the course of the DK project I’ve tried to keep my AFK time to a minimum so that I could rely on the /played number, that didn’t work out though when you are multi tasking, cooking, forgetting you left the computer on and didn’t log out etc, but I’ve come up with a pretty good estimate of the total time it took me.

That is a total of 151 hours played. Minus from that 15 hours which I stated in the last gold updated, and minus another 5 hours and you have 131 hours played.

In that amount of time I gained the following:

• 10,000g liquid
• 21,505g total (inventory + liquid gold)
• Bought Flying mount/training = 300g
• Learned 9 new recipes
  • Rigid Autumn’s Glow = 3x Dalaran tokens
  • Bold Scarlet Ruby = 3x Dalaran tokens
  • Delicate Cardinal Ruby = 4x Dalaran tokens
  • Solid Majestic Zircon = 4x Dalaran tokens
  • Relentless Earthsiege Diamond = 5x Dalaran tokens
  • Solid Sky Sapphire = 3x Dalaran tokens
  • Chaotic Skyflare Diamond = 5x Dalaran tokens
  • Reckless Ametrine = 4x Dalaran tokens
  • Glowing Dreadstone = 4x Dalaran tokens

I started doing the JC daily on March 10th, I missed a couple days doing the daily and was also on vacation for 7 days, but roughly I did the daily 25 times. I used 35 tokens up in recipes which means I bought 10 tokens = 260g per token = 2,600g spent on tokens.

In total I gained 30,905g. Which includes opportunity cost of getting the dalaran tokens from the daily.

Plans Going Forward

I am excited to now have Jewelcrafting to add into my gold making routine, it was quite the hassle to get the recipes when I didn’t have any gold to invest into it (even though my main had 200,000g sitting on him) but it really goes to show how tough it can be for someone just picking up the game and trying to get a profitable crafting profession going, it took me a good 2 months to get inscription fully operational (Even though you learn 2 free recipes each day!)

The other profession slot I have is mining, which I haven’t used in forever, I’m going to drop that and powerlevel enchanting. Now that the project is done all barriers are down regarding sending capital to my DK so I can give him 50k from my main to buy up a bunch of recipes and invest around 5k into Powerleveling enchanting pretty much instantly.

I will focus on really squeezing as much from JCing as I can to incorporate it with my Inscription business and get enchanting fully operational, I will continue to give you detailed reports on how all the professions profit in my gold progress updates and we’ll see how much more I can pull in a day with 3 big professions instead of only inscription (which has consistently pulled in 3,200g/day).

Was JCing the Fastest Way to 10K?

Hells no! but I can say it was really fun delving into a new market, I’ve learned so much that I feel comfortable giving advice on this market now and while mining/herbing the whole way to 10,000g would of been the fastest (average 500g/hour = 20 hours played opposed to 131 hours) Jewelcrafting is much better in the long run, the opportunity cost or gold/hour I can earn from JCing now that I have a few good recipes is much more efficient, I can spend 15 minutes buying raws and selling cuts for 1200g profit each day now rather than going out to mine for 2 1/2 hours.