Price crashes - so what now?

So you are happily making gold from one item or another when suddenly the market changes... prices drop and you have stockpiles of something thats no longer selling... what do you do?

As a scribe I have all the Northrend herbs on my snatch feature of Auctioneer

Herbs from Northrend (in terms of milling) split into two distinct groups:

Milling five herbs gives 250% chance of azure pigment and 25% chance of icy pigment.
These herbs are Tiger Lily, Fire Leaf, Fire Seed, Deadnettle,Talandra's Rose and Goldglover

Milling five herbs gives 300% chance of azure pigment and 50% chance of icy pigment.
These herbs are Adder's Tongue, Lichbloom, Icethorn

So to extrapolate this data - milling two stacks of Tiger Lily will result in (on average) 10 Ink of the Sea and 1 Snowfall Ink. Milling two stacks of Ice Thorn will result in (on average) 12 Ink of the Sea and 2 Snowfall Ink.

Ink of the Sea and Snowfall Ink are two very different beasts in terms of inscription. IotS can be used to make each and every glyph in the game, whilst Snowfall Inks are used to make some rather specifc items including fortitude scrolls, off hands and Northrend Cards.

Snowfall inks were always key to anyone making gold from glyphs. If you sold your snowfalls for the price you paid for the herbs, then your IotSs were cost free and a glyph just cost the price of the parchment.

However, over the past few months the prices of  Snowfall Inks have crashed. Whereas in October they would fly out at 15g a pop, you are lucky to get 6g for them now. Also the rate that they sell has slowed. With fewer Northrend cards being made (due to more readily accessible trinkets available etc), the market demand for Snowfall has diminished dramatically.

I dont believe this is just happening on my realm - my observations show that this is happening on the vast majority of well populated realms.

The result? 500 Snowfall Ink sat going nowhere. And as I am still constantly using IotS to create glyphs, so my Snowfalls stocks continue to grow.

There are of course other items that have stockpiled over recent times. Since the introduction of random LFGs and need/greed/DE - dream shards have also stockpiled.

The question is - what do you do with them all?

Whenever I find myself in this situation - I take a step back and take the time to review the item.

There are a whole range of resources just a mouseclick away. Wowhead is on of my favourites just because I personally like the simplicity to find what I need.

Take Dreamshards for instance - looking at it on wowhead you get to this page. Not overly useful - but clicking on the 'Reagent For' tab and you get this page

How this is paydirt. This shows you all 29 possible uses for dreamshards - most of these are of course enchants. But I am sure that there are a few you won't have remembered. For instance - with the availability of crusader orbs these days - the only real expense in creating Merlin's Robe is the cloth itself. However there is definately a lot of gold to be made in this ilvl 245 item and it clears bank space as you throw 8 dream shards at each one

Snowfall ink's is a reagent for just four items. I am still sinking inks into  Runescrolls of Fortitude and  Faces of Doom (to a lesser extent). The runescrolls are still selling for 80g a stack on my server. 20 resilient parchment cost 8g - which means I getting 18g per ink.

I guess that I am saying it that there are always opportunities out there - but that sometimes we get blinkered into one avenue of the market. Giving yourself a few minutes every now and then can open your eyes to other new possibilities to make gold.

Now how about frozen orbs? Runed Orbs? Crusader Orbs?