Ky’s AH Process: Step 5 – Resetting

Step 5: Resetting

Resetting refers to taking a low priced item on the AH and setting it at a high price. This can be difficult sometimes, but with a little luck and patience it’s easy to do. The primary tool you need here is again AuctioneerSuite.

Click on the Configure button at the top.

Select BeanCount on the side. Uncheck the Enable Auc-Match-BeanCount option. In a nutshell this uses Bean Counter to adjust your sales pricing. I don’t like it. The idea is that if something sells, you’ll raise your price. If it does not, then you’ll lower it until you find the balance or true market price. For some items this might work and might work well, but glyphs sell for whatever they’re posted at because gold is plentiful and people want their glyphs now. Besides, this post is about resetting the market price. So turn it off.

Now select the Undercut option and make it the same as mine if you like. The Enable Auc-Match-Undercut is how you quickly undercut using Auctioneer instead of QA2. But again, it doesn’t work the way I want it to and so I don’t like Auctioneer for glyphs due to the limitations it tries to place, but what I’m about to show you is the easiest way I know to reset glyphs. Anyway, here’s a general breakdown of what’s selected above.

• Max under market price (markdown) – This percentage controls how much lower than market price an existing auction can be before you undercut it. Basically I like it at -100% to include everything.
• Max over market price (markup) – This percentage is why I don’t like it. It controls the price before you’ll undercut accordingly. Let’s say you don’t have a lot of auction scan data saved. Your addon believes the market price of a glyph is 10g, but the cheapest price currently on the AH is 50g. Well 100% over the 10g is 20g. Since 50g is higher than that your addon believes the item is so overpriced that no one will buy it and tries to be smart by forcing you to post then at 20g instead of undercutting as you specify.
• Undercut % – Unless you plan on undercutting by more than a few coppers, use the Undercut %. I would recommend this option for those that selected Massive Undercutting as their strategy otherwise use Undercut Amount.
• Undercut Amount – Select this option and specify the amount to undercut. In this case, I’m using 1c as I would with QA2.

Once you have all this set up, you’re ready to start resetting glyphs.

Go to the Appraiser tab at the Auction House. Notice Glyph of Entangling Roots. There are 3 numbers off to the left: 4 /1 /1. Ironically the 411 of 4 / 1 / 1 is the number of current auctions posted at a percentage of your calculated market price. This doesn’t really mean a whole lot, but it can be a quick way to count how many of a particular glyph are posted. In this case there are 6.

These are the glyphs you want to look for. The fewer the better because it’s easier to buy them all up, but don’t discount some glyphs. I’ve bought up a dozen or more glyphs at less than 1g /ea to reset before. Ultimately it’s more about how much is it going to cost you to reset. If there’s only two glyphs posted, but they’re posted at 7g /ea you will have to decide if it’s worth the 14g to reset to something like 50g. If you can sell at least one glyph before it drops again, then yes definitely it is and therein lies the risk.

As you can see I have 11 Glyph of Entangling Roots available to post, but at 1-2g/ea I’m not all that inclined to sell them. Since I notice that there are only 6 glyphs and it won’t cost me a whole lot to buy them all up I’m going to reset this glyph and post 2 glyphs at 50g/ea.

Here’s the risk. A lot of your competition might be using Auctioneer to post glyphs. As such, they may not have it set up correctly or have wildly different market values than you do. So although you post at 50g, they may come right back and post around 2g again because they didn’t actually look at what’s there, they relied on Auctioneer to do it for them. Their Auctioneer decided you were wildly out of whack and ignored your price when undercutting. See why I hate Auctioneer for glyphs?

Although this next example isn’t one I’ll reset, I want to show you something. Select a glyph, set the stack size to 1, the number of stacks to whatever your limit is, and check the Only box. This will prevent you from ever posting more than that number of glyphs. If I have 1 on the auction house and hit Post Items in the bottom right corner, I’ll post 1 more glyph, but not 2. I have Enable Price Matching selected. Based on my setup this should automatically default to 8g 89s 97c, but it doesn’t because of other parameters messing things up and I don’t understand all of it. But if you click Enable Batch Posting and have all your glyphs set up, you can use Batch Posting*, but I’d only do this if you are using the massive undercutting strategy. Use QA2 otherwise.

So basically what I do while resetting is run a QuickScan** of the auction house, look at each glyph and determine whether I want to buy up the glyphs. If I do, I’ll set it up as shown above except change the unit pricing to 50g for bid and buyout, then click Post Items. After which I will then click Enable Price Matching since it should now go off my current price. If I selected my Max over market price (markup) in the Undercut Options at 100%, then my match price should show 100g since mine are now the only ones listed.

I only do this once a week. It can be time consuming, but I will do it because selling glyphs at 2g is never as nice as selling it for 50g.

*If you really want to know about Batch Posting, please comment here and I’ll do another post about it. But ultimately QA2 is much faster and easier and I do not recommend it unless you’re trying massive undercutting at which point it’s arguable that Auctioneer is better than QA2.

**To run a QuickScan of the AH go to Auctioneer’s Browse tab. At the top should be some scan buttons. One will look like a fast-foward button and unless you’ve changed the settings will appear bright blue before your first click.

Final Words

I hope all of these posts help. My wife says I should have sold you this information as it took a long time to write and a few months of trial and error. But I’ve got a system that works for me and I think will work for most people so I’m more than willing to share. All I can hope for is that players on Azgalor don’t read this and I’ll be set! Either way, it’s just a game and I can still make more than enough to pay for repairs and other items I need in game.

Given the right timing and on the right servers, you yourself can expect to pull in a minimum of 1000g / day when you’re setup with the majority of glyphs available. You can pull in more depending on how much time you’re willing to dedicate. Even still, tell me what other activity you can do in a few minutes each day and still bring in 1000g?

I would love to hear about your attempts and what here may have helped, what you adapted, and what you do differently. Feel free to e-mail me your stories, questions, comments, etc. I’d love to also post your stories for others to read about, so if you have an itch to be a guest blogger on this site, please e-mail me. We can keep your names, servers, etc. all confidential. In fact you don’t even need to tell me what they are.

Thank you all for reading and good luck!

Ky’s AH Process: Step 4 – Posting & Canceling Auctions

Step 4: Posting & Canceling Auctions

Remember about 4 hours ago you were reading about strategies up above? (I warned you this was long! )Well if you chose the minimal undercutting strategy, it’s time for you to download Quick Auctions 2. Words cannot express how awesome this addon is! So here’s a movie.

OK, you can use the massive undercutting strategy with this addon too, but there’s a few things you need to make sure you do so as not to screw yourself. But first how do you set this bugger up?

You’ll notice the General tab here. Whatever you setup here will carry over to your Item groups unless you override it. To setup a category select Item groups, give your category a name and select Okay. Then select the category you created. As you can see here, I’ve selected Glyphs.

The General Tab is where you set up all of the parameters for your auction. If you do not select the Override option in each category QA2 will use what you entered under the General tab.

• Undercut – The price you will undercut the lowest priced glyph by. If you have the lowest price glyph already posted, it will match your current price.
• Threshold – The maximum lowest price you will post a glyph for. Mine is set to 6g meaning any glyph listed for less I will not undercut. I also will not cancel since my posted glyphs since I have Smart Canceling selected on the General tab.
• Fallback – If no glyph is currently listed on the AH, I will automatically post the glyph for my fallback price. In my case, this is 50g.
• Fallback After – If a glyph is posted higher than whatever your Fallback After percentage is set at, you will post at your Fallback price and not undercut according to your undercut. For example, mine is set at 100% and my fallback is 50g. This means if a glyph posts for higher than 100g, which is 100% higher than my fallback price, I will post my glyph at 50g. If a glyph posts at 90g, which is less than 100% of my fallback price, I will post at 89g 99s 99c.
• Bid Percent – The percent your bid price will be based on your buyout price. I always use 100% to keep them the same.
• Post Cap – The maximum number of auctions of any particular item to have on the AH. This is not the maximum number, but the maximum stacks.
• Per Auction – The number of items per stack to post. For glyphs this should always be 1.
• Post Time – Standard 12h, 24h, and 48h posts. I always use 48h since there are a few glyphs that don’t sell often and don’t get undercut. Up to you on what you want to do.

On the Add Items tab you’ll notice a couple of ways to add your glyphs. If you have a lot of them and are setting this up for the first time, the fastest way to add all your glyphs is to type glyph of as shown and then click Okay. The other way to do it is to actually click the item as shown. None are shown on mine, but if I really wanted to I could add Nether Pigment by clicking on it. Make sure when you create new glyphs to add them to this list. If you don’t, QA2 will not scan and post them. It’s easy to forget. I missed several days worth of glyphs because I forgot once.

If you accidentally added something you shouldn’t have, go to the Remove Items tab and click on the item to remove it.

Once you’ve got it set up the actual posting and canceling of auctions is really easy. Just hit the Cancel or Post buttons as shown below.

If you get to a point where you just need to cancel all your glyphs you can use the following macro:

/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo(“owner”,i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,”^Glyph of”) then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

I will often use this macro Monday evenings. The last thing I want to do is have auctions expire in the middle of maintenance. I want all of my auctions up and available as soon as the server comes back online. I don’t get home for a few hours later and never want auctions down. Being undercut is one thing since I can’t do anything about it. Having no auctions is not acceptable.

Ky’s AH Process: Step 3 – Crafting

Step 3: Crafting

If there’s one thing I’d really like to complain about in the whole process it’s the way crafting is handled. Come on Blizz! Forget stuff like class/race changes, faction changes, etc. Just make crafting a little easier.

Why can I use an addon like Advanced Trade Skill Window to craft 1,000 flasks given enough mats and bag space with a click of a button, but I have to mill 1,000 herbs clicking 200 times?!!! Seriously, milling and prospecting really got the shaft here!

Milling Macro

That said, I did make milling just a bit easier with the use of a macro (please note the same thing can be done with prospecting):

/cast Milling
/use Goldclover
/use Deadnettle
/use Firethorn
/use Talandra’s Rose
/use Tiger Lily
/use Adder’s Tongue
/use Icethorn
/use Lichbloom

This will make things a little bit easier, but you still need to make sure your stacks are in units of 5 and that no non-millable stack is present anywhere in your bags before moving on to the next herb. The milling order is whatever order you put in your macro and searches for herbs starting in your backpack and moving through your bags, much the same way your loot is distributed when picked up. So if a non-millable stack is at the very end you’re good until you get to that point. If it’s sooner, it’ll stop you from milling.

Now that the hard part is over, just craft your inks and walk away. I personally like Advanced Trade Skill Window, but feel free to use whatever addon you want.

Altoholic & Your Trade Skill Window

If you’re like me, it’s pretty hard to keep track of what needs to be crafted and an addon is an absolute must. Hell, can you tell me how many I have of each glyph and if all my known glyphs are crafted based on this?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. After cancelling and posting so many auctions my glyphs get a little unorganized. I’ll bet at least one or two of those glyph stacks could be combined if I clicked back and forth enough times. And that’s something I do about once a week. But there’s an addon that makes it easier to see.

Ironically, I only found out about this addon a week ago and I wish I’d known about it sooner. I have been using WhoHas and Possessions to help me out, but since the most recent patch hit they’ve really bugged out and for over a week I hadn’t been crafting certain glyphs because my addons told me I had plenty when in fact I had ZERO!!! My sales had dropped to 1500g/day and I couldn’t figure out why. Enter Altoholic. Once I opened this addon and recrafted glyphs I was missing the next day I brought in 3500g. So far I’m loving this addon!

So how do I use it?

First I open up Altoholic.

Then I open up Advanced Trade Skill Window.

The nice thing about Altoholic is it’s set up like the auction house. So in this case I searched for Rogue glyphs that I have. Then I opened up ATSW next to it and searched for Rogue glyphs that I know. Moving down the list in ATSW, I look to see if I still have the glyph. If I don’t, I craft 10. If I have 7 or less, I craft up to 10. If I have more than 8 I usually wait until the next time to craft any more.

Simple. Unfortunately this still takes a fair amount of time, but so far Altoholic hasn’t glitched out on me by telling me I have twice the inventory I actually have or telling me I have 20 of something when I have zero. (A week’s worth of income lost…)

Warning: It’s really easy to just look at Altoholic and say “Oops I only have 5 Glyph of Blurred Speed so I need to craft 5 more.” Make sure to PAY ATTENTION!!! See how it says I have 5 in the bank and 5 in the mail? I’ve set my current inventory limits at 10 so I don’t really want to craft any more of those.

Altoholic does a lot of other fun things and this is a much cleaner and better addon for inventory than WhoHas and Possessions are.

LilSparky’s Workshop

Here’s another addon some of you may want to consider, but to be honest I’m going to get rid of it now as it isn’t all that useful for glyphs, but isn’t bad for other items. I’ve only kept it this long to screenshot it for you, make you aware of it, and post about it.

LilSparky’s Workshop adds some nice information to your Trade Skill Window. Based on my last scan of the auction house, the lowest price of any particular glyph is shown in the column in the center (see red arrow). The cost to create the glyph is shown on the right (see Oliver Queen Wow, you guys are a tough crowd…

When it comes to glyphs, the cost information isn’t all that accurate as it’s pulling information from the auction house and in several cases can’t find anything, which is why you see a bunch of zeroes. But since I already pretty much know that all glyphs cost about the same and the two ink glyphs all cost just a little more, the cost information isn’t a concern. Just make sure you are always aware that it’s possible to get false cost information from this addon.

I bring this to your attention because if nothing else, it is a pretty good addon to help you get started. Look at the most expensive glyphs and make sure to craft some of those. There’s no accounting for what glyphs will be bought because not everyone goes for the cookie cutter specs and glyphs. So some high priced glyphs are high priced because no one posts them or buys them. Others are high priced because everyone buys them. When you’re starting out, some of the lower end glyphs aren’t worth it because you’re trying to build your gold reserve as fast as possible with limited resources, so you’ll want to avoid the really cheap glyphs and this addon helps. But later on the lower selling glyphs in bulk will make up a good majority of your income so don’t neglect them!

I’ve personally reached a point where I want 10 of each glyph regardless if it sells or not. So this addon does nothing for me in the glyph arena. I’ll explain more about why I want 10 of each later on, but it’s all about resetting the market.

Ky’s AH Process: Step 2 – Farming

Step 2: Farming

So how many of you farm your own mats? Well, unless you enjoy flying around looking for herbs, ores, and/or things to kill, STOP IT!!! I used to be of the opinion why pay someone else to farm something I’m perfectly capable of doing? The answer? Because I’d rather spend 3 hours leveling an alt, running heroics, or raiding than spending 3 hours flying around Sholozar Basin. But if you think you can get away without farming, you’re wrong. You just need to change where you farm and that place is the auction house.

Example: Farming The Right Herbs

I’m going to use Inscription as an example here since the majority of my income revolves around glyphs. So my farming revolves solely around herbs. So let’s take a look at what herbs to farm:

Goldclover, Deadnettle, Firethorn, Talandra’s Rose, and Tiger Lily – I use the estimate of acquiring 4 Ink of the Sea and 0.5 Snowfall Inks per stack milled. Often selling for 20-25g/stack on my server, but will get as low as 15g/stack on the weekends.

Adder’s Tongue, Lichbloom, and Icethorn – I use the estimate of acquiring 6 Ink of the Sea and 1 Snowfall Ink per stack milled. Often sells for 25-35g/stack, but will get as low as 20g/stack.

Now remember these are estimates on the low end, but I tend to plan for worst case scenarios. The added benefit of the 2nd group is not only more Ink of the Sea, but a higher proc chance for Icy Pigment to create Snowfall Inks. I’ve only ever gotten one Icy Pigment from milling herbs of the 1st group, but often get procs yielding 2 or 3 Icy Pigments from the 2nd group which then yield more ink.

So depending on the prices on your server you may feel that buying herbs from the first group is the way to go and based on Ink of the Sea yields, it may very well appear that way. But I propose that buying from the 2nd group is what you should do whenever you can. It yields a little more Ink of the Sea sometimes resulting in a slightly lower cost per ink, but the big bonus is the Icy Pigments.

Evaluating Ink Costs

Snowfall Ink on my server goes for 20-30g/ea depending on how flooded it gets. When it gets to 20g/ea someone always pulls their stuff off and it gets reset to 30g. I’ve got so much right now that I actually posted it for as low as 14g 80s the other day to try and recoup some of my costs. 

Let’s say I paid as high as 35g/stack for herbs. Let’s assume that I yielded 6 Ink of the Sea and 1 Snowfall Ink. I sell the Snowfall Ink for 15g because it’s low right now and avoids a best case scenario. Given that I’m crafting single ink glyphs, I now have 6 glyphs I need to sell for 23g to break even.

Wait! 35g minus 15g is 20g, not 23g…

Yes, but assuming that I’m spending 0.5g for the parchment on each glyph I’ve got an added 3g cost for the 6 glyphs. So each glyph must sell for about 4g each (23g divided by 6) to break even.

Let’s relook at this buying herbs from the first group and spending 25g/stack. I get 4 Ink of the Sea and 0.5 Snowfall Ink. That Icy Pigment is worth 7.5 gold (half of 15g). So my costs are 17.5 gold plus 2g for parchments totalling 19.5 gold. That’s 4.87g per glyph. That’s more expensive than the other ones…

Go ahead and do all the math for yourself. There’s a breaking point which makes the lower-end herbs the better choice, but generally no one sells them for that. So I ultimately recommend sticking with the higher-end herbs whenever available. Use the others when not.

But why these herbs? What about all the other inks I need to make glyphs? For those of you in the know, don’t laugh. I ran into a guy that didn’t know you could trade in Ink of the Sea for other inks on a 1:1 basis in Dalaran. He’s not yet 80 and hasn’t played the game since vanilla WoW. So not everyone is aware that for glyph purposes you should only ever buy Northrend herbs unless you can get them for dirt cheap and I mean almost free once you account for selling Snowfall Inks. The difference you get from Snowfall Ink makes buying any other herb more expensive period.

Auction House Farming Made Easy

As if buying herbs on the auction house wasn’t easy enough, they make an addon that can help you buy 100 stacks in about 20 secs. OK, that might be an exaggeration, I’ve never timed it, but I do know I’ve spent 3000g on herbs in less than a minute.

In order to do this, you need to have the complete AuctioneerSuite as far as I know. I haven’t used the basic setup for quite some time, but if you want to play with the different versions or turn off the additional addons Suite provides and you find what works feel free to let me know. As it stands, I’m too lazy to figure it out myself and just leave all the addons turned on.

Go to the Auction House and select the Search tab. Underneath the Searchers options on the left, you should see a Snatch option. Click that and you should see something like this.

Place your item in the slot above and enter the maximum unit price you want to pay for the item. In this case, I have selected Adder’s Tongue and a unit price of 1g. I have also included Lichbloom and Icethorn and saved this search as High End Herbs. At any time I can select High End Herbs, press the Load button, and then press the Search button in the lower left corner. I do not have Allow Bids selected because I’m only interested in buying the item now.

Before you start your Search, it’s a good idea to run a scan of the AH prior to this. If you don’t, it isn’t a big deal, but your scan will be based off your last AH scan and probably throw up a few false items as they no longer exist.

Once you start your search though, you’ll see a progress bar move across your AH window. When it’s done you’ll see something like this:

Note that you can sort all of those columns by clicking on the headers. You can then select which items you want to buy and Purchase them using the appropriate button. But I said this was easy, didn’t I?

Press and hold the Shift, Alt, and Ctrl keys. Notice anything different? Look at the next screenshot. Your Purchase button has now become a Purchase All button.

Now if you select Purchase All the following appears.

Now you can’t see this, but I actually sorted this from lowest to highest before pressing the Purchase All button. The cheapest stack was 18g, but the 20g stack has just popped up. For some reason it doesn’t seem to want to buy the cheapest first, at least not all the time. There may be a way to make it happen all the time, but I don’t know how so if I want to buy the cheapest first, I change the unit pricing of the search. As you can see I have it selected for 1g/ea right now, but I’ll generally go as high as 1g 75s depending on how much there is.

Look at the bottom left corner. I have some numbers circled. Based on my current search and what is available on the AH those numbers are telling me there are 16 auctions available. This doesn’t mean 16 full stacks, just 16 individual auctions. Aside from the 20 stack that popped up prompting me to purchase, as far as I know all the others could be single stacks. The second number is the total cost I will pay if I buy all the auctions. In this case 306g. This way I know right away how many auctions I’m going to buy and how much I’m going to spend.

If I decide I want to buy these, I will click on the Yes button. Another one will pop up. I will click Yes again, and again, and again… You get the picture. Each time I click Yes or No, the counter will decrease and the total price will decrease. Since I’m willing to pay 306g for whatever is there, regardless if they are full stacks, I know I will buy them all so I’m going to click really fast on all of them. I can buy all 16 in about 4 seconds given that the window pops up fast enough. Can you do that the normal way? (FYI, press that little stop button next to the 16 if you want to cancel the search or you’ll have to click Cancel a lot.)

Now I’m going to go back and change my unit parameters because I know I want more than 16 stacks. So I click on Snatch again. That will get rid of this little search window. Then I’m going to select Adder’s Tongue, change the unit price, and hit Add Item. I’ll do this for Lichbloom and Icethorn as well. If I want to save that unit pricing, I’ll go ahead and select Save up top where High End Herbs is selected. If I don’t, it’ll default back to my 1g price the next time I open up the AH window. I recommend leaving it saved to your lowest price so you’re always searching for the cheap stuff first, but that’s up to you.

As you can see I’ve changed all 3 to 1g 50s. Performing my search under new parameters we see:

LMAO! As I’m writing and screenshotting this one of my competitors bought up everything, including the 16 I just showed you! Hopefully you get the idea though and normally you’d be able to hone in and determine how much you’re willing to spend on herbs and clicking fast to snag them all up. Just to let you know I don’t usually jump from 1g to 1g 50s, but go in increments of 10s or 25s depending on how much is currently available.

I also have a Low End Herbs search saved. In order to get it set up without screwing up your current saved search, add a couple of other items and their units prices, then select the ones you want removed and select Remove Item. DO NOT HIT THE DELETE BUTTON ABOVE!!! I did that once and it deleted my saved search. Then whenever you want to switch back and forth, use the drop down menu and select Load. I also did this for Saronite and Titanium Ore.

Analyzing Farming Costs

Remember, you can always farm the hard way by flying around and collecting the materials you need. If you enjoy that and it’s a part of the game you like, feel free to do it that way. There are people that will argue that you get more profit from farming your own mats and not paying for them. This is true after a fashion because your actual gold costs are almost zero so you will get more gold, but not on a per hour basis.

Just because it takes 10 minutes to post glyphs on the AH and you make 1000g before reposting doesn’t mean you’re making 6000g/hr. How much time did it take to craft those glyphs? How much time did it take to craft the inks? How much time did it take to mill the herbs? How much time did it take to farm the herbs? Add all of that up and your per hour take starts dwindling exponentially.

I believe most people would rather farm the AH, still make gold, and do other things in the game and this is easiest way I know how.