New to Stormwind? Just how does a goblin get started?

 

I recently got a mail on my horde toon. The evening before I'd picked up 100 volatile life for 8g, and a mail was in my inbox with a very polite request. It was from the seller of the volatile life who had, of course, meant to post the VLs for 8g each not 8g per 100.

Due solely to the polite request I sent him 500g. The next day I had a thank you mail and thought nothing more about it.

A few days later the same person posted a comment here thanking me. Alas it was against the post which is no longer exists, but around the same time I received an in-game whisper from a level one alliance toon. It turns out to be the same person.
Its a common story - he's a raider (horde side) who doesn't have a wealth of gold to feel comfortable. He hates farming (who doesnt) and having come across this blog (amongst others) was keen to know whether there was any advice I was willing to share.

Its an interesting conundrum. He'd taken the right first moves. He'd rolled two toons, sending one to Stormwind and corpse run a second toon to Booty Bay. With the Alliance AH/Neutral AH link made there is gold just waiting to be made. However with that set up there is very little variety in what can be achieved. Your only option is buying items on Alliance which sell for more on the Horde side. Or vice versa. And without capital Alliance side you are in a tricky situation.

I have resolved this latter issue for now. A 500g donation is a massive amount to start up. When I start afresh on a server I have the clothes on my back and not a lot else. You have to turn one silver into 10. 10 silver into a gold. One gold into five gold. Its slow but your pot of gold grows exponentially until there is enough to have the freedom to do whatever you want.

I wrote a series of posts about 18 months ago called 'Rags to Riches' which covers this period of being new to a server. It gets you to about a thousand gold fairly quickly by which time you are ready to push on. But part of the Rags to Riches series is that you shouldnt ignore professions even at low levels.

Although getting a level one toon to Stormwind and Booty Bay is quickly done, if they are your only toons on a particular faction of a server, I personally feel you are missing a massive potential for making gold. You can pick up two primary professions at level 5 and max them at skill 75. At level 10 you can push through to skill level 150. At level 20 you can get to 225.

As we all know professions now max out at 525. So having a skill of 225 doesnt sound like its going to be particularly useful. But I beg to differ.

Enchanting is a perfect example. At skill level 225 you can disenchant items in the ilvl 61-99 range. That means you can DE every item Pre-BC and the lower items from Outlands. That means Greater Eternal Essences, Illusion Dust, Large Brilliant Shards, Arcane Dust and Lesser Planar Essences can be created from items at level 20. Currently there is huge profit to be made in these items

And its not as though level 20 is particularly hard to get to. Two, possibly three hours and its done.

But what professions? Well gathering professions are always a good source of early gold. Mining especially as copper ore generally sells well on whatever server you pick. But if you have no intention of levelling a toon past level 20 then drop the gathering profession as soon as you are ready to just have an AH toon who never leaves the city walls. Trust me, there are no herb/ore nodes in any of the major cities.

I would always take enchanting - for me its a no brainer. Even at skill level one, a robust auctioneer database and a disenchant for profit search will allow you to make gold and gain the first 75 skill points at the same time. Unfortunately past skill 75 you cant gain skill ups from disenchanting but its a nice free start.

That leaves the manufacturing profs. JCing can be painfully expensive to level. My experiences on Frostmourne have proved that. If the ores are expensive, the gems are expensive. And it hard to avoid gems when making low level JC items. Tailoring is a nice option proving cloth is readily available. You can make a lot of items and DE them to recoup your costs. Unfortunately 225 skill level tailoring only produces items which DE into Lesser Nether Essence and Vision Dust, but these have risen in price on many servers so may be profitable.

LWing is generally more expensive than tailoring due to the price of raw mats. The same goes for blacksmithing. Engineering is probably best avoided, at its expensive and produces little which are profitable by any means.

Alchemy is interesting to level but I personally have had little success with it at low levels. With BoAs on most levelling toons, buff pots aren't as popular as they used to be. I cant remember the last time I ran out of mana on a low level toon and with the increased health pool BoAs bring, both health and mana pots are generally available at very cheap prices on the AH.


Which brings us to inscription. I mentioned Tuvee a couple of weeks ago. She's a level 26 forsaken priest on Rexxar. She's a 225 scribe enchanter and has only learnt the research glyphs, levelling inscription without learning trainer taught glyphs at all. She makes 500g a day selling minor glyphs, darkmoon decks and rare inks. But it did take nearly two months to learn all those glyphs so this is a longer term strategy. But what goblin doesn't think longer term if they truly want to get their wealth up?

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Now of course the point of making gold alliance is to get the wealth to horde. People still have concerns about the Neutral AH - so I'll take this opportunity to relist a few posts I've written previously:

Neutral AH Fundementals

Neutral AH - No its not illegal

The Neutral AH Scalper - A guest post

I hope this review session has been of some use... not least to the person who inspired this post.

Comments and questions welcomed.