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.