Dragonflight launch has been a wild ride, with things shaking out very differently, as expected.
Does goldmaking suck now?
I know many of you had a rough first couple of days. The overall system changes has changed goldmaking very significantly, and many typical early strategies have been edged out. In particular the first craft bonuses ensure a huge supply of almost every item in the game, particularly at lower qualities. This has lead to a huge influx of crafted items and much lower prices than we’re used to.
The solution is simple though, if you’re ahead of the pack in quality or recipe access, there’s still a lot of gold to be made.
Winners and losers
For me the biggest winner has been engineering, and the worst professions have been enchanting, alchemy and inscription. JC, blacksmithing, tailoring and leatherworking have all been fine. Now alchemy is not really fully online until raids, and enchanting could actually be incredible with the right build, I just didnt put my points in the absolutely optimal way, so I still can’t hit any q3 enchants. Inscription I have personally only really used for treatises for myself. With the prices I’m seeing I’d expect a great build to do well here too, either focusing on the weapons for high quality orders or missives and contracts.
You need to be ahead
You need to be ahead of the curve in some way to make a lot of gold this time. The more degenerate the better. More recipes = more knowledge = more skill. At the same time alts are wildly useful as you can very quickly get to a baseline of knowledge, but you absolutely cannot underestimate the value of going very hard. Rep in particular can get you a huge advantage.
My overall results
My top sellers have been the Quick Ysemerald and the Zapthrottle Soul inhaler. The gem is obvious, I eventually reached Q3 with inspiration now about 5 days in. This is behind the bleeding edge, but still profitable. I also took a big risk and bought out the AH on Sunday to reset, which worked out OK. The soul inhaler was very interesting. Someone on discord mentioned buying it for 30k to farm souls, and I decided to just go for it on my engineer. Almost no one has the recipe and they are selling surprisingly fast.
Other markets
Other markets I’ve made gold in are crimson combatant gear (although it’s going to be a long time until I make back my recipe costs, q5 of the various uncommon profession gear pieces, selling engineering intermediate materials and some chronocloth.
I have a lot of alts, but none of them are super far along in either rep or knowledge, which has hampered me quite a bit. I’ll probably try to get a gear crafter online so I can really start taking advantage of work orders.
Markets to discover
Keep in mind that the full expansion is not yet out. With raids, m+ and real end game demand still to come there are tons of niches to fill. Q3 intermediate materials will be used in huge quantities when players start going for q5 mythic infused gear with top enchants, and the same will be true for max quality profession gear, which will matter.
Hey, where I can find a string to copy to use on my TSM?
Nothing in this post, but there are imports for patrons as well as in my recent JC and combatant gear posts.