The Moderately More Human Edition

The best thing about the flu?  Ideally it’s not to catch it.  Failing that, it’s the part when you start feeling like yourself again.  I’m not quite at the latter stage, but at least I’m no longer feeling like I have a murloc in my throat.

I’ve finally got some numbers together from my glyph business, and it makes for quite satisfying reading.

For the seven days from 21st June – 28th June:
Total glyphs sold: 622
Average price per glyph: 9.74g
Average sales per day: 865.86g
Total income from the AH: 6061g

Most of my profits over that period have gone back into books of glyph mastery in order to learn those glyphs and Mingle now knows all 57 new glyphs, which just leaves the other glyphs to be learnt from Minor and Northrend Inscription Research.  (I also misjudged the number of books Mingle needed, and now have 9 surplus that I’ll re-list when the price goes back up – I picked them up for 50g-60g each, and prices last week peaked at 100g, so I should be able to make my money back on them pretty safely)

As Bingle is struggling to manage the glyphs she currently holds, I’m going to limit my inventory to the eight 32-slot bags she carries.  That gives me 256 different glyphs I can work with, from the 340 in-game, with 41 remaining for Mingle to learn.  Now it’s a matter of winnowing out the less profitable glyphs so I can replace them with new discoveries.

I’ve also burnt through half of my stockpile of Snowfall Ink, and made 40 Darkmoon cards.  All I need now is a six of nobles, and I have a nobles deck ready to go when the Faire is back in town.  I also managed to get a complete Undeath deck (plus I’m only two cards short of a second deck, to boot), and purchased three cards on the AH to complete a Prisms deck and Chaos deck.

I’m going to use the returns from my glyph sales for the next week to purchase the other six stacks of eternal life I need to turn the rest of my snowfall inks into darkmoon cards, and then it’ll be time to see how the pre-Faire market treats me.

For now, though, I have a part-guild Alts Naxx10 run to tank.

/wave

The One In Which Our Hero Falls Ill

Well, it took a while, but I’ve finally come down with the flu – I guess I can cross that off my list for the RL wintertime achievement (yes, it is winter where I live).  Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be playing that much for a few days, and my blogging will be even less frequent.  (I’ll keep on with the glyphs, as I’m kind of getting into my groove with that, but probably won’t do much else)

/cough

Still Selling

Still making glyphs, still selling them, but now I’m trying not to undercut everyone else out of the market.  (Gevlon wouldn’t approve.)

I’ve been reconsidering my approach (sell often, sell cheap), and will continue in a mostly similar vein, but with a higher limit to my prices.  After reading Gevlon’s old post on his routine, I’m also going to reduce my inventory even further, and I’ve managed to make some sense of the batch-posting system built into Auctioneer which should cut down the workload even further.  A Just-in-Time system will be more efficient, given a sufficient stock of ink.

I’ve spent a little time (and a little gold – a level 30-ish character shouldn’t be wearing gear in to low 20s) on Tingle, and she finally went up from 30 to 31 yesterday.  I think her new gear will make a difference with the upcoming levels.

Dingle had another 10-man Naxx run, and we may get into the other 10-man instances this afternoon – maybe not Ulduar, perhaps, but certainly Archavon, Malygos and Sartharion.  (She won Thane’s Tainted Greathelm, which was one of the few upgrades left for her outside of Ulduar).

Before I go, some other links that were food for thought about my growing glyph industry:
From QQ pwn more; My Goal: 100k Gold
A guest post on Warcraft Econ; Inscription & Glyph Market II

Time to check my mail (here’s hoping I can afford to splash out on another ten Books of Glyph Mastery – Mingle is getting closer and closer to having the entire range of glyphs available to make!) before getting dailies done.

Oh, and don’t forget that it’s the Midsummer Fire Festival!  Easy xp (and exploration, and flightpoints) for low-level characters!

/wave

Making Friends And Irritating People

My Inscription business is beginning to come together – I made a tad over 900g in sales yesterday, and as I type this I’m in the middle of clearing my auctions in preparation for re-stocking and re-listing.

Opening balance: 62g88s.
Closing balance: 540g31s
Total sales: 477g36s  (yay!)

I’ve re-thought my stock levels and will probably settle at around 15, which will allow a little leeway to pick up any very-underpriced glyphs people may list.  I’ve stocked up on the first six classes, but ran low on inks yesterday so the last four (Rogue, Shaman, Warrior, Warlock) will need a bit of extra restocking today.

I also had my first in-game feedback on my endeavours, a mail from someone who called me an impolite name and told me I’d make more money farming than from destroying the very profitable glyph market.  I’m not used to being the recipient of such…  irritation…  But I’m making a profit without the need to fly around in circles for hours, so I’m not in any rush to let him have his market share back.  (In hindsight, it’s a pity I deleted the letter, as it would have made an interesting image to accompany this post) 

In non-inscription news, I’ve been following the exploits of (and helping out) a friend of a guildmate who’s rejoining the game after giving it up a while back (and giving away his account at the time) who is currently leveling a new priest with the assistance of his friend and Recruit A Friend.  Last night he was level 47, which is pretty good for under a week of play.  (He wants to be raid-ready before Icecrown, which should give him quite a bit of leeway to reach 80 and get geared up)

I helped out with a bunch of runs through Stockades and a clear of all the Scarlet Monastery wings on my warrior – Stockades was actually quite entertaining (not to mention very easy to drag people through), and we ran into the 5-instances-per-hour limit twice.  SM was more tedious though, probably thanks to it being near 3am at the time.  (That’s the biggest downside of being 2 hours ahead of the majority of my guildmates, especially when they want to do things after raid)

Raiding is…  Well, it’s Raiding.  We’re working on Yogg this week in 25-man, and with luck (and attendance) we’ll have a 10-man Naxx run on the weekend that I’ll be tanking (which might extend into Ulduar10 if we get through Naxx quickly enough).

Now, though?  I have a spreadsheet to put together – I want to keep an eye on what I’m selling with a little more accuracy, as my book-keeping so far is pretty shoddy.

/wave

A Merchant’s Work Is Never Done

Inscription is proving to be surprisingly time-intensive, but the semi-steady income makes up for it to a surprising degree.  But does it really need to take an hour to price-check and list the 580-odd glyphs I put up last night?  Well, at least I had 10-man Naxx to distract myself with.

Not bad for an off-the-cuff group of ex-guildies, alts, and bored mains is it?  (We killed Patchwerk in 2:50, and cleared the entire instance in just over five hours)  Dingle picked up that rarest of the rares, a tanking trinket, but there wasn’t anything else worth rolling on.  Maybe next time we’ll go explore Ulduar.  (Incidentally it was surprisingly profitable; Dingle was 257G better off from gold looted)

The latest Ulduar nerfs have meant the unofficial guild 10-man progression raid downed Yogg on Friday night (I sat out this week), and we’re quietly optimistic about our chances in 25-man tonight and tomorrow

Back to the subject of Glyphs, the exercise is slowing coming together – Bingle listed a substantial number last night which I’m dreading checking today, and yesterday’s goal was to have 10 each of the saleable DK, Druid and Hunter glyphs before I started re-listing.  If I’ve made enough sales today, I’m looking at increasing my pre-sale stocks of the remaining class glyphs from 6 to 8.  (It’d be nice if my nobles deck was to sell, but I may have missed the rush at the start of the faire – time will tell on that one)

But for now, time to do stuff!  (I suspect ‘stuff’ will be ‘Fallout 3’)

/wave

Glyphing It Up

With things still going slow when I’m not raiding (which is most of the time), I’ve spent some time (and gold – oh, so much gold) to break into the glyph market, as inspired by a post by the Greedy Goblin.

Despite the poorly thought-through method I’ve used to start working on it, I think it’s going pretty well (all things considered).  Never mind that I’ve been milling herbs in my dreams – that’s perfectly normal, isn’t it?  (Although, I have to admit, I found the Gameboy Tetris dreams from my youth to be much more entertaining)

I’ve turned Bingle into my AH mule, and she’s been equipped with enough inscription bags to hold the myriad of glyphs that Mingle has been making – it’s getting closer to the one-bag-per-class level than I’d like, and I’ve only learnt 5 of the Book of Glyph Mastery glyphs so far.

One handy side-effect from all the northrend herbs I’ve milled, is having enough Snowfall Inks to make many Darkmoon Cards of the North – Pringle (who’s acting as my Darkmoon-card and general AH mule) currently has 6 different cards towards the Nobles Deck, which is used to get the very desirable (and profitable) Greatness card.  Two more cards, and that could well be an extra 5k gold in my greedy little hands, thanks to Darkmoon Faire being in town.

The downside to this, at least of my current efforts, is the time-consuming aspect of it.  I think it’s time to work out how to use Auctioneer more effectively (or at least, to use it smarter).

/wave

One More Goal Down

Mingle is now fully T8 geared, which is…  well…  Actually, it’s not that much of an achievement, as it’s only the Valorous piece and anything over 4 pieces is of negligible value…  But it’s nice to have completed the set.  Well, kind of completed.  Completed enough?

The last item I needed for the set was the shoulders from 10-man Thorim, the Valorous Mantle of Sanctification.  Sure I’d prefer the Conqueror equivalent, but I don’t think we’re going to be downing 25-man Yogg-Saron any time soon.  (It’s not totally beyond the realm of possibility, especially with our talented now raiders, I just don’t think it’ll be happening without a lot of effort and substantial expenditure of time)

Other than this?  Well, it’s just more grind.  10-man progression is slowly coming along, with some success against Yogg-Saron last night.  25-man progression is…  Unexciting, on the whole.  We should be able to get General down tonight and spend time with 25-man Yogg-Saron.  If nothing else, we’ll get some solid experience getting out of the clouds.  And into the clouds.  And avoiding shadow-crashes.

But Fallout 3 is a great distraction.

/wave

But Vacations Don’t Last Forever

Well, maybe I’m not taking as much time off from 25-mans as I expected.  Due to an unexpected reduction in raider numbers (and another unexpected increase in raiding numbers after another Dath’remar raiding guild stopped raiding, and we picked up a few new faces) I’ve decided to get back into the game.

I have to admit, after just a couple of nights off I’m happy to get back to it (and the possibility that the new raiders will stand in the fire less than some of the old ones is appealing as well).  I might take the occasional night off in future (raid numbers willing), but for now the vacation’s over.  (It was kind of novel while it lasted, brief though it may have been)

We had a less than optimal run last night, thanks to low numbers (as well as some undergeared new raiders), but we managed to get Ignis, XT, Kologarn, Iron Council and Auriaya down anyway (even though our lower-than-normal dps meant we actually hit Auriaya’s enrage timer, which was kind of embarrassing).  Still, considering we were also 24-manning a lot of it, we pulled through better than we could have.  Next week’s raiding could be very interesting.

I’ve put a couple more levels onto Snowfall, but she’s just not as enjoyable to level as my dwarf army has been.  I’m not sure if it’s the blood elf aesthetic, or just the complete lack of friendly guild chat (which is to be expected, not having a guild horde-side).  It’s an unusual experience though, to be leveling somewhere completely new (as I haven’t leveled a horde-side character since pre-TBC).  I guess I’ll see it goes.  (I could just go back to my nelf druid, and see if playing her has jelled any more for me, but my enthusiasm is fleeting)

The last couple of days have been largely non-fishing ones, due to the fishing daily being in Wintergrasp – nothing kills the mood quite like PvP getting in the way of your otherwise solitary and enjoyable past-time.

Ah well, time to publish and then pretend to be productive.

/wave