Lately I have been generally advising people against entering the sinister combatant gear market as we are getting so close to 8.2. The new notorious combatant gear will blow the sinister gear out of the water making them virtually useless.
I have not taken my own advice however as I have done a LOT of sinister combatant crafting in my 30 days challenge.
Risk attitude
When it comes to gold making I have developed a very aggressive approach to risk. I have supreme confidence in my ability to make gold, so even the prospect of getting wiped out on a realm does not bother me. So I will take any reasonable risk to speed up my challenge. Worst case I lose 30k or some equally meaningless sum, the actual worst case scenario is of course that I fail my challenge, which would suck.
Calculating my decision
Let’s take a little deeper look into why I made my decision. The first part was of course the realization that there were no crafting markets that looked as attractive as the sinister combatant market right now. I won’t have time to get any meaningful rank 3 recipes so I have to rely on rank 1s when available.
As the sinister combatant gear will be strictly worse than the notorious cambatant gear demand will be pretty much non-existant after the patch. Until that point however it remains by far the fastest way of gearing a fresh level 120. So unless you are willing to wait a week or more to gear your fresh 120 you ar ebetter off buying the sinister combatant gear now.
So I expect the sinister combatant gear to sell all the way up to 1-2 days before 8.2 hits.
Some scenarios on release dates
Obviously we don’t know exactly when the patch hits, but in any scenario doing sinister combatant gear is likely optimal. If the patch does not come out until after I have finished the challenge then it is obviously a good idea, as there are few other markets. If the patch comes out early then I will have time to craft notorious combatant gear, which is likely going to be MUCH more profitable and I will still finish the challenge.
The worst case would be a release a week before I finish, which might not give me enough time to make gold from the new gear, but we can cross that bridge when we get there.
Why did I take the risk?
The main one is that I calculated that I could afford the losses. Not mathematically, but just by considering potential launch dates there were no scenarios I could envision where I would end up with losses that I could not recover from. The only scenario that would screw me would have been if the patch dropped the first week, but even that would leave me plenty of time with the new shiny notorious combatant recipes.
I also like taking risk, which certainly helped propel me over the top. The only way to really learn is to risk losses as you can only find the limits by crossing them, preferably in a controlled manner.
You will have to find your own balance, but I always suggest taking at least some risk.
This is the first major patch since I started on the gold making journey and I opted to exit both the sinister gear market and high end BoE market well in advance to avoid sitting on a large inventory when it tanks in value. My daily sales have plummeted from several hundred thousand or more to a tiny fraction of that now that the bulk of my inventory has sold – I’ve avoided a “loss” but the opportunity cost of being effectively sidelined waiting for the patch probably cost me at least as much and is way more boring.
There’s risk both ways but next patch I’ll be staying active right til the end and accepting the loss, the waiting is more painful!