Illidan: The First Days

Note: Videos and podcasts will return early June when I have access to my University's super fast internet for uploading.

Rerolling on a new server isn't entirely new to me. I originally played Horde on Daggerspine, a server I chose because that's where all my local friends played. Eventually they all left and I felt lonely and quit the game. When I came back all my new, local friends were playing Alliance on Argent Dawn and so I did as well.

This is, however, the first time I really left something behind: My gold-making factory. It would cost around five hundred dollars (#holycrapblizzletuspayingold) to move and faction change even half my characters. So I decided I would take the bare minimum with me. 

I chose my favorite (and sexiest) Horde character so I wouldn't have to pay for a faction change as well and I loaded him up with 80% of my heirlooms. I'm an heirloom junkie so it's not leaving my AD toons shafted if I ever go back. That's how Andawe left Argent Dawn and found his way to Illidan under a new name.

The Artist Formerly Known as Andawe  was a great choice, having maxxed inscription and enchanting with every glyph already learned, which made him an incredibly valuable toon for the move. This also allowed me to start making some gold right away, getting a feel for markets. I only brought the 50k allotted during the transfer and the heirlooms. I could've spent time researching what would make the move most profitable, turning gold into items to bring with me, etc. but I decided I wanted to try and build my gold up there from the 50k.

And so I set out to get the hang of Illidan-flavored gold-making.

Intitial Observations

With great population comes great scan times. The Illidan AH currently has, no joking, thirteen pages of auctions for Wool Cloth. Thirteen. I've seen servers without thirteen pages to their entire Auction House!  Scans have taken so long that I've started using the TSM App to handle my AuctionDB updates. It works great and always has, I just never needed it on Argent Dawn. Now that I'm on a server that can take 30+ minutes to scan the AH I can really see the value of the application.

That's not the only thing that takes time, though. Crafting, cancelling, and reposting take up a much larger chunk of my time than they would on Argent Dawn. The only thing that doesn't take much time is actually getting a sale. With so many players my glyphs and enchants are flying off the shelves faster than I can craft them and so I find much more time being spent crafting. Once they're made it takes so long just to post them (and I'm only crafting the most profitable ~100 or so glyphs, not even a full load like I did on AD) that I feel like I"m getting next to nothing done.

Granted, in the time it takes me to do one post scan I've usually sold ~40 glyphs, but it's got me thinking about the value of time. On Argent Dawn I might spend two hours once a month crafting 10x every glyph and those glyphs would last me the entire month and so, even if a certain glyph only gave me 10g profit or so, it's not like it took much to make it and keep it in stock.

The demand is so much greater than what I am able to supply on Illidan though. It's glorious since it means even with an active, competitive glyph market everyone still makes a boatload of cash. (I've made about 30k since yesterday afternoon.)  But it has me looking at 10g glyphs. To keep in stock of low profit glyphs I would have to craft all day every day for that 10g sale. I'd sell all of them, for sure, but that doesn't mean it's a wise use of my time when there are likely more profitable items to craft and keep in stock.

And so I believe I'm going to transition from a "craft and sell everything you can" to only selling the most profitable of items. On a server like Argent Dawn if you were to pick and choose only the most profitable items the sales may be profitable but they also would be sparse and so you'd use the time in between to sell the less profitable items as well.

On Illidan, a server where your high profit items can sell out before you can even think "Should I craft other things?" I have a feeling time management will come to the forefront of my gold-making strategies.

So far I'm really enjoying Illidan. Though I could do without the lag, of course.

A New Beginning

I've been pretty scarce around these parts the past couple months. I know y'all don't come here for updates on my personal life so I won't go into everything that's kept me away but a brief TL;DR version is Eluniar and I split up (amicably, though I was still screwed up for a good while) and I moved home, I got sick, had surgery, recovered from said surgery, and am now much better. While some crappy stuff happened now that I've come through it all I'm in a much better place than I've been in a long time, so despite what it sounds like, this was all good news!

I sat for a time, wondering how I was going to keep playing WoW. Eluniar's quit WoW and I've been out of raiding since December so there wasn't much left in WoW for me. The game was fun still, but logging on always reminded me of the people I no longer raided with, the friends who had quit playing, etc. It was just kind of a bummer.

But there's a silver lining to everyone being gone! You see, now I have nothing tying me to Argent Dawn and the filthy, dumb Alliance. (Just kidding, no hate on Alliance here, though I personally prefer Horde very much.) Argent Dawn was a slowly dying server and I wanted to feel like my server was full of life.

And so I've set out on a new WoW adventure on a new server. A secret, mysterious server, one shrouded in mist that you can only guess at. Okay, it's Illidan. I wanted lots of Horde players and so I went big and rerolled on Illidan. I'm not made of money so I only transferred on character, a 82-or-so Belf Paladin. I couldn't afford to both faction and server transfer a character so I just picked my most valuable Horde character (Holy/Prot for fast queues, max Inscription and Enchanting with every glyph learned) and gave him 50k gold and a good round of heirlooms to assist in leveling more characters later.

I considered spending some time transferring as much wealth as possible with me; turning gold into items to bring along for the ride. In the end I decided that I wanted something closer to a real re-roll experience. Hell, if I hadn't been dying for heirlooms I wouldn't have transferred him at all. I just need that experience boost!

I haven't abandoned AD, just kind of put that on a shelf for the time being. I'm very excited about this. It feels great to be Horde again, and it'll be like starting anew. A new chapter, if you will. And I look forward to writing about gold-making from a new perspective I'll have as a reroller.