Best Dailies to do For Gold and Rep?Posted by xenith on May 28th, 2009

Daily quests can definitely make you some gold if you do the right ones, at the same time as earning reputation for gear and other unique items, like mounts. But are you doing the right ones everyday or just spinning your wheels and wasting your time?

I hear this question a lot. And my best answer really is: there isn’t an answer!

Not the quick, easy quest list you wanted I imagine. I could list out which quests have have the highest absolute gold reward, but that doesn’t take into account how long it will take you to do the quest. What you really want when you are figuring out how to make gold in WoW, is the most gold per hour. The other problem is, that as a pure gold making technique, dailies aren’t the best. Auctioneering and professions are both more lucrative.

If you are looking for other ways to make gold, check out  the WoW Gold Stimulus plan for another guide that covers multiple fast and easy ways to make gold, other than grinding out dailies!

Of course, there are other reasons to do dailies, so combine these with gold making and you have pretty good reasons to do them. But pick the dailies that reward you with faction that is actually useful to you over dailies that have the highest gold rewards and you will be making the best use of your time. I’m going to go out on a limb and pick  ‘Sons of Hodir‘ and ‘Oracles‘ as my recommendations.

Sons of Hodir

Sons of Hodir quests reward 7 gold and change under 80 and 13 gold and change at 80. They are easy to complete so you won’t spend too much time on them. Also you can get faction for the shoulder enchant which becomes available at Exalted. The Oracles quests have a similar gold reward and can also be knocked out pretty fast. You will need to choose them over Frenzyheart during the quest where you have to kill Artruis the Heartless. During the final quest ‘A Hero’s Burden‘, you will need to select which prisoner to save, the Frenzyheart or the Oracle.

Artruis the Heartless

Save the Oracle to do dailies for that faction. If you want to switch factions, simply kill Artruis the Heartless again and save the other prisoner. There is an achievement, ‘Mercenary of Sholazar’, available for reaching Exalted with both Oracles and Frenzyhearts. The main reason for Oracles faction is the Green Proto Drake epic flying mount which is a rare drop from the Mysterious Egg, available from Oracles at Revered. You can also get some tradeable non-combat pets from the egg, which can sell quite well.

A great way to figure out how to make the most out of your daily questing is to use this daily quest guide. This is an in-game guide designed to help you select the best quests to do. It will then show you exactly where to go, what to do and what to kill to complete your quests. This guide includes a fully optimized questing route to earn the max 300g per day (from dailies) in just over an hour. It lists every step in order and clears the previous one automatically when you complete a step. There is also a ‘TomTom’ style hud with waypoints to show you where to go for your next objective for any quest on the list. It will really save you a ton of frustration, figuring out what quests to do and how to do them. You will really cut back on the amount of time you are having to spend doing dailies.

Heads Up! The full guide is a paid guide (and worth every penny). But there is a free trial on the site that you can check out too.

Dalaran Cooking Daily Quests GuidePosted by xenith on May 26th, 2009

UPDATE: Zygor, of leveling guide fame, is about to release an awesome new in-game daily quest and events guide. Check out the announcement video for all the details or see my post about it here!

If you are one of those people who thought that cooking is not for tough guys like you, you are missing out on a ton of gold. The Dalaran Cooking Dailies are your gateway to becoming a famous (and not to mention wealthy!) chef. These quests are the only way to get the highest level recipes and Northern Spices that you need to make them. And you want those recipes because some of those high level food items can really rake in the gold. As an added bonus, you also get some gold and Kirin Tor rep for completing these quests.

You will need to save up your cooking rewards to spend on the high level recipes. Some of the recipes are more *fun* than useful. Go for the useful ones that you can sell to raiders trying to eek out a few more DPS points. These people are desperate buyers! Spellpower food like Tender Shoveltusk Steak or Attack Power food like Mega Mammoth Meal are good ones. If you fish, some of the fish recipes sell very well too, like Dragonfin Filet.

You will make life easier for yourself if you keep a few stacks of Chilled Meat (from any Northrend beast) and Rhino Dogs (cooked from Rhino Meat from rhinos in Borean Tundra and recipe from any Grand Master Cooking trainer) in your bank to use for cooking dailies.

Cooking daily quests are given by Katherine Lee (Alliance) and Awilo Lon’gomba (Horde). Both are in their respective faction’s Inn. They will each give you one of five different quests:

Cheese For Glowergold

Aged Dalaran Limberger

I groan whenever I see this one pop up as the cooking daily. Its not difficult but its a real pain in the ass. Thats because there can be a lot of competition for those half full glasses on wine. Get you trigger finger ready so you beat the 6 other people camping out in the Inn for wine glass spawns. Its so competitive because, even though the quest text suggests they are all over the city, in fact there are really only four main buildings where you can get them; those are your faction’s main Inn and the Legerdemain Lounge bar (on the corner opposite the cheese shop). There are a few in the Violet Hold area (62,66) and also in the Cheese Shop itself (55,34). Check both floors for both these buildings. The cheese spawns one of the tables inside the shop on the ground floor. I have seen it on the one straight in front of you as you enter and on the one to the rightof the door. Just look for sparklies. Once done, use the item the quest giver gave you, and then take it to Ranid Glowergold in the Legendary Leathers shop in the  Magus Commerce Exchange area (37,29).

Infused Mushroom Meatloaf

Infused Mushrrom

Here is where you will be happy if you followed my Chilled Meat in the bank advice. Grab two of them then head down into the sewers for the mushrooms. There are plenty of spawns, especially in the Arena area so you shouldn’t have much trouble. Combine them in the Meatloaf Pan given to you by the quest giver then turn it in to Orton Bennet in Curiosities & Moore (52, 55).

This is a nice easy cooking daily quest unless you have to go out to kill beasts for Chilled Meats. But thats what you get for not being prepared!

Convention at the Legerdemain

Another easy one if you have Chilled Meats in the bank. Grab four of them and whip up 4 tasty Northern Stews using your cooking skill. This recipe is a quest reward for the quest Northern Cooking (linked quest is from Valgarde but it is also available in Valiance Keep, Vengeance Landing and Warsong Hold). Head to the Cheese Shop (55,34) and pick up a jug of wine off the table (look for sparklies). Then just hike across the street and hand it over to to Arille Azuregaze at the Legerdemain Lounge(49,38).

Mustard Dogs

Mustard Plant

This one is easy if you have Rhino Dogs or at least the meats to make them available. Otherwise its pretty annoying since you will either need to go kill rhinos or else port to an old world city and buy some on the AH. If you do need to go farm up some Rhino, try Borean Tundra around (47,40). The Wild Mustard plants grow in Dalaran in any grassy areas. Try Runeweaver Square(50,48) or around Krasus Landing(69,44) (convenient because that is where the turn in is).

Combine the items in the Picnic Basket given to you by the quest giver and hand it over to Archmage Pentarus at Krasus Landing. This is a nice Dalaran cooking daily quest to get because it gives two rewards instead of one. Its the only cooking daily quest that does this.

Sewer Stew

Crystalsong Carrot

Once again, you will need Chilled Meats, four of them in fact (didn’t I mention you should keep chilled meats in the bank?). And you will also need to port down to Crystalsong Forest to hunt for Crystalsong Carrots. This is the only quest that requires you to leave the city so its at iny but annoying. Just use the Portal Chamber in Runeweaver square as instructed by the quest text (cause I know you all read every word of that!) to get down, then use the crystal to get back up once you have your veggies. Finding the carrots is easy enough. They are on both sides of the river at the port in spot and are usually located near a tree. They are pretty small though so keep an eye out for

Once you have all your items, combine them in the provided Stew Cookpot then head down to the sewers and give them to Ajay Green at the inn down there (36,58).

And that’s it for our guide to Dalaran Cooking Daily Quests.

If you want the easiest possible way to do your dailies and earn maximum rewards, Check out Zygor’s daily quest guide!. It includes a full in-game, step-by-step guide to earning the Crusader title in the fastest possible time.

Heads Up! The full guide is a paid guide (and worth every penny). But there is a free trial of the daily quest guide on that site that you can check out too

Best Way to Do Dailies for Gold and FactionPosted by xenith on May 21st, 2009

For most players, daily quests have become a major part of the game for your level 80 characters. They are a good way to earn some gold and to start equipping you characters with some epic items ready for heroics and raiding. Rep items are one way to break out of  the ‘Viscious Armory Check Circle’ (you know, you don’t have the gear to get into Heroic PUGs, but you need Heroic PUGS to get the gear in the first place…). There are some nice purple rewards to be had from exalted rep.

The Daily Grind

Daily questing is a grind, just like leveling from 1 to 80, so the same rules apply when it comes to getting the most bang for your questing buck. You want to be able to knock out the 25 daily quest that you are allowed to complete each day in the least amount of time and you want to do the quests that will get you the best rewards for time spent. Its not just a case of doing whichever quests give the highest rewards. You need to have a plan.

A great way to do this is to use this daily quest guide. This is an in-game guide designed to help you select the best quests to do. It will then show you exactly where to go, what to do and what to kill to complete your quests. You can list quests by level, zone and reputation earned, then see a ‘TomTom’ style hud with waypoints to show you where to go for your next objective for any quest on the list. The guide will also show you which quest chains you need to complete to unlock each daily quest and how to complete it. It will really save you a ton of frustration, figuring out what quests to do and how to do them. You will really cut back on the amount of time you are having to spend doing dailies.

I already made a post about the best daily quests to do for gold. In that post I explained that there are much better ways to make gold in the game, so if that is your only reason for doing dailies, you might want to take a look at my Auctioneer tutorial or the Auction House Mastery video series. The Auction House method is the fastest way to make gold at any level.

But if you are looking to grind reputation and make gold, dailies are your only option. Your first step is to figure out what reputations you need. For most classes, these reputations are worth pursuing for gear:

• Argent Dawn
• Ebon Blade
• Wyrmrest Accord
• Kirin Tor

Kirin Tor Tabard

Unfortunately, the only daily quests for Kirin Tor reputation are the cooking and fishing dailies. If you have the skill, these are dailies you should do .. err  …daily! You get the rep, some gold and you get tokens for high level recipes. I’ve found that selling high level food with good raiding stats on the AH is pretty lucrative. The fishing daily can reward you with treasure items worth up to 100 gold.

The other factions have plenty of dailies available and the level 80 daily quests for these are also the ones with the highest gold rewards. You need to pick the quests that are easiest and quickest to complete so that you can get your quota of 25 quests completed in a couple of hours. Plan your questing so that you can be working on several quests at once by picking a few that are completed in the same general area. Most daily quests will require you to complete a regular quest chain before they become available. Use this daily quest guide to make all this really easy.

How to Make Gold in WoW While LevelingPosted by xenith on May 15th, 2009

Its true that a lot of gold secrets of World of Warcraft aren’t much use while you rleveling. Either because you have to be high level to do them or because they take too much time that you really don’t want to waste while your leveling up.

So what players who are leveling really need is a strategy that will show them how to make gold at any level and that will not force them to take tons of time away from leveling and questing.

The absolute best way to do this is to use gathering professions. I advise that you take mining and skinning. Mining is the real money maker, so you need to take that one. Now Herbalism may be more profitable than skinning (maybe) but there are a couple reasons to take it. The first is that you will not need to go out of your way to gather, because you will be killing beasts anyway. Secondly, you can only have one ‘detect’ spell up at once, so you cannot be detecting minerals and detecting herbs at the same time.

With mining, you can make money off the raw ore and the smelted bars. High levels who want to powerlevel mining will pay well for raw ore, especially lower level ores. Use Auctioneer to determine whether bars or ore will make you more gold. Using Auctioneer to price your good is something you must learn if you want to see how to make gold in WoW.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Search for Resale ItemsPosted by xenith on May 5th, 2009

The SearchUI module in Auctioneer is where things really start to get fun and where you can really start to learn how to make gold in WoW without grinding or farming.

The SearchUI module is the main module that you will use to implement the Auctioneer method to make fast gold without farming. This module doesn’t just let you search for items that are being sold at a low price, it lets you search for items that can be disenchanted, prospected or otherwise converted into other items that will sell for more and make you a profit. You can also have it automatically buy certain items if it finds them listed below a certain price.

In this part of Auctioneer 101, I am going to show you how to make gold in WoW by searching for Resale items. Head to the Auction House and click the Search tab to get started. From the Searchers list on the left (you might need to expand it), click Resale.

Auctioneer Search for Resale

Your first task is to decide how much profit you want to make on an item for it to show in the list. Profit is figured by taking the value of the item and subtracting the price it is listed at. The value is determined using the Price Valuation Method that you choose,  which we will discuss later. You will make the listed profit if you manage to resell the item for the listed value.

The minimum profit you want to make on an item to see it in your search is really up to you, but is related to how much gold you have to invest. If you only have a small amount, you will need to use a low value here to find items you can afford. If you have plenty of gold, you can set it higher to avoid wasting time on items that only make a few coppers.

You can also set what percentage of market price the item price has to be below using Min Discount. By default, only items that cost 50% or less of the full valued price of the item ( the value is determined using the Price Valuation Method that you select. I’ll talk about that in a bit). Leave it at 50% unless you have really slim pickings at that setting, then you can raise it a little if you need to. The higher this percentage is, the less profit you will make on items.

Next, you need to decide if you want to list Bid or Buyout items or both. Basically, if you select to Allow Bids, you will see all items that you can resell at a profit if you win them at their current bid price. This can be a very profitable strategy for the patient player. You will need to monitor your bids though, or you will be outbid often and lose the deal. If that sounds like hard work, you can still make great profits by only listing items that you can profit on if you purchase at the buy out price and resell. To do this, select Show Buyouts but not Show Bids.

Check Seen Count is an important option. This sets how often Auctioneer needs to have ’seen’ this item at auction before it will list it in the search. This helps to make sure that the data is accurate before Auctioneer will tell you that you can make a profit. Its also very important that you have a good weeks worth of recent, full scans before you start to use Search or your valuations will be wrong and your profits wont be what you expect. Use a Check Seen Count of at least 10.

Check the Enable individual maximum price option and then enter a maximum price for items you want to see in the search. Its no use listing 1000 gp items if you only have 100 gp to spend.

Price Valuation Method sets how the value of an item is determined. The value is used to figure out how much profit you will make. They work in pretty much the same way as their equivalents in Appraiser.

Setting it to Stats: Appraiser will automatically use the same method as the current pricing model selected in Appraiser. As with Appraiser, Market Value works for most situations and this is the one that I use. Unless you are very good at statistical math, you probably won’t use the others. Do not use VendMarkup for the Resale searcher. There is a separate Searcher that you can use to find items that you can sell to an NPC Vendor at a profit.

You should always leave the option to subtract AH fees and deposit from your profits enabled. You can select the auction duration that you usually use and the average number of times you re-list items to make sure the correct amount is subtracted.  if you select 48hr and 3x for these, Auctioneer will subtract the 48hr listing fee plus deposit multiplied by 3 from your estimated profit in the search result.

Now you can go ahead and click Search and see what items you can buy low and sell high. To bid or buyout an item, just select it an click Purchase. Auctioneer will buyout or bid based on the reason for listing it that is shown in the ‘Reason’ column.

CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + click Purchase will purchase all the listed auctions. Use with caution! Not Now can be used to remove items from the list for this session only. If you close and reopen Auctioneer, the item will be listed again in new searches. Ignore Price will permanently ignore items at that price and Ignore will permanently ignore all items of that type permanently.

You can also use Clear to empty the list completely. Use the tiny + button to show the full options window again and then use the tiny – button to  show the search results list again.

Now you can collect any item you bought out from the mailbox and use Appraiser to post them at a profit. Here is where using Stat: Appraiser will work out for you because you will be able to list the items at the same price the Search valued the item at,  so you will get the profit you expect.

This should give you a basic idea of how to use the Resale searcher. Other searchers work in a similar way but help you to figure out items that you can buy then disenchant and resell, prospect and resell, sell to a vendor etc. The filters help you limit the search results that you get back. We’ll see how to make gold in WoW with these in the next chapter.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Advanced AppraiserPosted by xenith on May 4th, 2009

Now i’m going to show you how to make gold in WoW faster using Batch Posting in Appraiser. I’ll also go into details on configuring undercutting to make the most gold while still ensuring your stuff sells and finally I’ll show you how to set up your inventory list so that the whole selling process is easier and faster.

Batch posting is the biggest time-saver on the Appraiser tab and is great for crafters and gatherers or anyone who is selling the same items over and over.  The batch post feature will remember your settings and post all marked items with a single click.

To use this feature, select an item in the Appraiser tab and set the stack size, pricing model and other options. Now select the Enable Batch Posting option. Do this for all items that you want to batch post. Now, shift+alt+ctrl click on the Batch Post button to post all the items that you marked. Next time you visit the AH, shift+alt+ctrl click the Batch Post button again to post any of those items again using the same settings. You can also alt click the Batch Post button to refresh the pricing of all marked items or shift click to list the exact prices that marked items will be listed at.

In the last chapter, we talked a little bit about undercutting. As well as enabling or disabling undercutting for an item, you can also configure how price matching is performed. It’s important to refine the price matching model that you are using if you want to make gold in WoW. If you price match items that are priced outrageously low, then you are going to be charging stupidly low prices yourself and eventually push the price down for the item, which is bad for you if you sell a lot of that item. (Tip: Buy the outrageously low priced items and resell them instead!). To avoid this, the price matching module only undercuts the market price by a certain percentage. By default this is 20% but you can change it.

Auctioneer Undercut Options

Click the Configure button at the top right of the Auctioneer frame then expand Match Modules on the left side and select Undercut.

The top slider allows you to change the maximum undercut percentage of market value. You can also set the undercut amount as a percentage. By default it will undercut the lowest price by 1% (as long as the maximum percentage below market is not exceeded). You can increase this if you want but there really isn’t much reason to.

You can also set the undercut to a fixed coin value, i.e always undercut the lowest price by 5 silvers etc. If you do this, you will probably make more money on expensive items but you will lose money on cheaper items. On the whole, I think the percentage is the best way to go.

The last feature of Appraiser we are going to look at is the ability to hide items in your inventory list if you don’t ever want to post them. This helps avoid accidentally auctioning items that you really don’t want to sell. Believe me, once you get Auctioneer set up the way you like, its really easy to get click happy and sell items you didn’t mean to. Just select the item and click Hide this item.

If you want to see them again, select the Show Hidden option above the inventory list.

You can also click Show Auctions to show items that you have already posted in the inventory list again.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.