I did it! My second attempt at the 30 days to a token challenge is done. This time around I only needed 20 days to do it, rather than the full 30 like I did last time. I did spend quite a bit more time in game this time around however, but I still think you could do it with even less time if you truly wanted to.
What did i do?
The first week I chose my professions. I started out with mining and inscription. I sold some war-scrolls from leveling inscription, and a bit of ore. Within the first 9 days I had leveled both inscription and cooking to maximum, i also realized that fishing was the way to go for farming without BfA flying. I mostly fished schools in Uldum and I got some pets that sold this week for 9 000 gold total.
I swapped out mining for tailoring so I could craft expulosm. I actually got my first Compenium sales this week, but I had not gotten much sales in cooking yet. After the first week I really started raking in sales, with about 10 compendium sales the next week and continued sales of vantus runes and buff food. From that point on it really was just restocking up to 50 of each vision food, 1 of each compendium, and 1 Glyph of the Humble Flyer and keep posting. My sales and profit margins were clearly good enough, so I just needed to keep doing it until I hit the token goal!
Time Spent
I ended up with exactly 3 days /played on level 120. So that’s about 3.5 hours per day on average. Overall I’d say this is significantly more than true casuals and this definitely helped speed it up. I spent more time by day 20 this time than I did on the entire challenge last time.
I clearly proved that more time helps. That being said I still spent a lot of time doing suboptimal things like LFR, mythic dungeons, old raids and just semi-afk farming while raiding MC on my classic account. If I had just done effective gold making, I’m sure I could have reached a similar result with 2 hours of /played per day, so maybe I should restrict myself here next time I do this, we’ll see.
My crafting routine was just 15-20 minutes per day at the end, so I could have really chilled the last week and still made it with several days to go even with less play time, but I quite enjoyed playing BfA again, so I ended up putting in more time.
The 8.3 AH
The 8.3 AH is much more buyer friendly than it was before the patch. It can be very hard to get the sale for certain items, and reposting is now much better than it used to be, as you can no longer abuse stack sizing to make better deals for your buyers. I reposted as often as I could, and I think this helped quite a bit.
Large undercuts work really well though! Uncanny offhands were priced at 16k on my realm, but I never sold any, and competition was obviously fairly high, with people constantly canceling and reposting. I started driving the price down to make it mor eattractive to buy. I just added a generic 5% crafting undercut, and this worked really well. Once the price went down low enough I got way more sales, and I was still making 50-100% in profit margin over the materials.
Looking at sales and purchases
This time around i pretty much did not do any flipping, with just a smattering of materials I both bought and sold. Overall that part of the game is almost unreachable for new players and I suggest other markets.
The biggest sellers by far as a group were the new 8.3 buff foods for isions. Baked Voidfin was by far the biggest one, bringing 95k by itself. That alone could cover all the materials I bought for all of the buff foods I crafted and still leave a profit at the end. I did farm a little bit of materials as well, and I sold some of this early on to raise gold, but then I stuck to crafting.
Inscription was the other big seller, with most of the gold coming from Compendiums. I also sold two uncanny pieces. In both cases I brought the price down heavily to increase sale rates and it really worked. I also sold a bunch of random inscription crafts including glyphs, vantus runes, contracts and war-scrolls. I did not sell much from tailoring as I stopped at 151, with one embroidered deep sea bag pretty much being it. If I had not been focused on ending the challenge I would have leveled it to 175 and gone heavily into uncanny gear crafting. At the end of the day I just used it for expulsom.
Evolution in gold and AH value
The graph below shows the evolution in AH value. It went up quickly after the first week. This was when I had gotten enough gold from farming to level cooking and inscription. From that point it slowly trended downwards as I started driving prices down. At the end I also stopped recrafting as I just wanted to coast in and finish the challenge. You could have easily kept the graph rising by adding more uncanny gear, particularly from tailoring.
The liquid gold graph was yet again flat for the first 11ish days. This time around it just went off though. Sales started rolling in and my liquid gold just accelerated into the top. Last time around I didn’t hit the exponential growth until the very end. It REALLY helped to farm early, it probably also helped that I played way more this time around though.
My daily sales went up much faster this time around as well, not surprisingly. The last time I didn’t manage to grow them after the first peak, but here we just kept going. It tapered off at the end as I stopped re-crafting as diligently. I was still getting some quite healthy mailboxes so overall this was a blast.
Conclusion
Farming early really helps. Getting your professions, and getting to about 30-50k in total value where you can start crafting some of the more in demand expensive items is really key. Cooking is particularly good right now, and it is EXTREMELY easy to unlock the recipes. You just need to do the 8.3 quests until a certain point, and then you can get the recipes in any corrupted zones. With no skill requirements I’m honestly shocked there isn’t more competition.
Mining and herbalism at this point only seems worth it with flying. I spent some time leveling mining and the GPH was always very subpar, but I didnt ever get rank 3. That being said it still felt really bad, so I stuck to fishing for farming, alongside some old raids.