Market resets is a tactic that gets a lot of focus from people who want to get into Auction House PvP. It can be supremely profitable, but it is also a massive potential pitfall. There are several people that have gotten burned. Today we will look at how and when you can reset a market.
Disclaimer
Before we start I need to emphasize that resetting is a very risky endeavour. As evidenced by posts like this on r/woweconomy. Markets resets seem especially alluring for newer goblins. Generally I would stay completely away from them unless you have at least 1 million gold and feel very comfortable making gold with stable methods.
What is resetting?
Resetting is very simple. You buyout all the auctions for a particular item and post it back on the auction house at a higher price. You can also do a partial reset by buying everything up to a threshold and reposting above (this is how my Legion material flipping operations work).
So we will look at some general ideas about which types of items are good for resets and which are bad as well as what specific conditions should be like for a reset to be succesful
Which markets are good for resetting
On a general level you want to look for items that have some of the following criteria:
- Limited in supply
- Can’t be effectively farmed
- You can control the input materials (If it’s a crafted item)
- Demand is high so people will be willing to pay a premium ( “I need it now”-mentality)
In addition to this resetting is generally better and more effective on smaller realms. The lower population means that you need to buyout less and there are fewer people that can undercut you or meddle in other ways.
Some good items based on these criteria are:
- Primal Obliterum (limited by Primal Sargerite)
- Saber’s eye (limited by Blood of Sargeras)
- Chaos Crystals (can’t be easily farmed)
- Vial of the Sands (Especially if you can control the Volatile or Pyrium markets)
- Panthers (Especially if you can control Ghost Iron or Gems)
- Azshara’s veil (extremely annoying to farm old world material)
There are obviously more candidates, but this should be enough to help you figure out what markets have potential.
When is resetting a good idea?
Now that we have the general conditions nailed down we need to figure out when it is a good idea to reset a market. You are looking for a time when there are relatively few items posted on the Auction house. If the current supply is limited it is easy to buy it all out and you can expect prices to stay decently high for a while.
For partial resets you want to look for markets where there is a marked gap in the pricing somewhere. As an example you can see the gaps from 1500 to 1650 and 1650 to 1949 in the screenshot below.
TSM
TSM has a reset scan option. It is found under the auctioning operation. You can enable reset scans for a group and set a maximum quantity to buy, max inventory quantity as well as maximum total cost, max cost per item and a minimum profit per item. It will look for various price points you can reset to by analyzing the current market. I have personally not used this much and I expect you would have to make some very specific operations for this to work optimally. As such I do not have any specific advise on how to set it up. The resetting scan results will show you the total cost for various amounts you can buy out as well as the target price based on that amount.
As we can see from my hastily set up operation I can potentially reset Legion materials for a 85k profit. My total cost is well above that as you can see from the total cost columns, so this is likely not worth it at these price levels.
Markets to avoid
The most important thing when considering resetting is to avoid the worst markets, as they are very risky. Most of the Legion material markets fall squarely in the “avoid” bucket. They can all be easily farmed and big time farmers will often have large stockpiles they can undercut you with. I would for the most part stay away from hard resets here, stick to flipping by buying well below market value. In general I would not expect to sell any substantial amount of Legion materials above 110% dbmarket.
Happy hunting guys!
Got any good reset stories, fails or wins? Share them with me in the comments!
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