Yesterday in the podcast I talked about competition and how I generally deal with it by just ignoring them and adding more markets to my empire. So to follow up on that I’m going to give my recommendations for markets that I think are good right now. This post will give a rundown of which markets I like and in which order you could enter them if you are fairly new. I’ll also add some comments in how I think they may be impacted by 8.1 (which is coming next week!).
Starting out: Material flipping
This is one of the most stable markets in the game and it does not really rely on any gimmicks. This has been good pretty much forever. This is a great market for learning the Auction house. As I have outlined before I generally suggest starting out with one or two materials and then branching out into all of them. Eventually you will have so much gold that you can’t spend it all on cheap materials and it’s time to graduate.
My Crafting Favorite: Blacksmithing
Blacksmithing has been my favorite crafting profession overall so far in BfA. At this point you should not be crafting the honorable combatant gear, but go farm some marks of honor so you can get rank 3 recipes for the new Sinister Combatant gear coming in patch 8.1. The gear has sold really well for me so far, and I expect the increased item level gear to be even better.
Blacksmithing is also quite simple to get into as the recipes are not overly expensive and the turn around time is generally extremely fast.
Crafting for the rich: Inscription
Inscription has probably been the most profitable profession for me this expansion, solely due to the darkmoon decks. Demand might fall for these with the new gearing options coming in 8.1, so entering may be a bit risky. This market is also really annoying to deal with it as you require a ludicrous amount of expulsom and lots of herbs and inks to craft all the cards.
The capital requirement means that this is not something for complete newbies, but once you have material flipping and blacksmithing down it’s time to move on. I would also suggest waiting until we see how 8.1 shakes out before going all-in on crafting decks as you will have to craft a REALLY large number of cards.
More armor: Leatherworking and Tailoring
I think both of these will be great in 8.1 for the same reason I believe Blacksmithing will be good. I don’t have either at BfA levels yet, but item level 340 gear will be very useful for players and I expect it to sell well for all armor types.
As with Blacksmithing the main tip is to just farm up as many marks of honor as possible.
Consumables: Alchemy, enchanting and jewelcrafting
At this point these three are less interesting than the armor professions. None of these are getting anything remotely interesting in 8.1. The biggest change for alchemy is a reduction in herb costs which will drive prices down, so try to move your stock before 8.1 launches if you can. Jewelcrafting and enchanting will pretty much be completely untouched by the patch and will continue their downwards trend until the new raid opens in January.
The End-Game: BoE Flipping
This has been the best market in the game by far for me this expansion. That being said it requires a ton of gold, the ability to tune your own TSM settings and a healthy risk appetite to succeed in. As 8.1 will shake up the game quite a bit in terms of itemization I suggest staying out of this market for the time being, unless you’re already in.
Summing it up
As you can see I generally prefer material flipping and armor professions. I think these are in the best spot right now with the changes we know are coming in 8.1. Long term you should aim to be in all of these markets as more markets will generally always get you more gold.
Good luck!
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Notice you don’t mention cooking – what are you feelings about the feast mats going into 8.1? (obviously minus Midnight salmon)
I completely forgot about cooking. Midnight salmon will obviously go down, and I doubt we see a big change on the other materials, depends how popular the new feast becomes.
I haven’t played since October 10th. Hurricane Michael wiped out my city. Took Comcast 2 months to get internet back up and running. I was making gold with food, enchants, bags and epic rings. Are these still doing well? I assume the market for rings has crashed with 8.1 launching. I’m not sure if I even want to keep JCing anymore.
Epic rings are probably not too good. Prospecting and cut gems is the main way I make gold from jewelcrafting. Bags, enchants and food should all still work well, especially with the next raid tier approaching in January.
I bought a stack of platinum ore to try and make the Sinister Staff, according to TSM it’s a 10k gold profit for me. Sadly, no owlseye on the ah, so I tried to prospect for it. Spent 7k on the ore, no owlseye but got 9k back in Kraken’s eye that sold as an Int cut, other wouldn’t make a profit. On my realm, even when the raid first came out all cuts of gems sold for less than the uncut, except haste. That’s the only thing I’ve been able to sell, haste gems, haste enchants, haste food.
How ever, the sinister gear from tailoring did sell. I made just the boots so far, but I have rank 3 of it all. Only problem is getting expulsom on my alt. As usual my mains Alchemy isn’t doing squat, but I can’t get rid of it cause I have the Vial of the Sands recipe.
If you have tailoring it is fairly straightforward to get more expulsom. Just craft and scrap a ton of Tidespray linen Bracers. Takes a while though.
For jewelcrafting I generally just compare the uncut gems to the ore cost or the cut gems to the ore cost to see if prospecting is profitable, just cutting is generally razor thin in terms of margins.
Yeah, I gotta figure out how much it is to make Expulsom with the bracers atm. I only got 280k gold atm
Well the only gem that sells worth a damn is Owlseye, so anything I get other than that is a loss, but the Krakens sell for a decent amount if I get them. Then there’s the dumpster fire of Alchemy. I just spent 31k to make potions, 21k back, lost 10k gold.
Alchemy has been terrible this expansion. For prospecting the main thing is to make sure you are making a profit on average, as you’ll get good and bad batches. It’s generally profitable on most realms though.
The expulsom cost is roughly the cost of 6 bracers (15% chance of expulsom, but you get some materials back.)
What sucks is that I don’t want to get rid of it cause I have the Vial of the Sands recipe, even though that’s making no gold either, plus I don’t know what else to give my main.
The problem with prospecting is all the gems are selling for a loss in TSM. I know prospecting them would make profits. But it’s hard to figure that out. I guess I should just sink some gold into the ore and see what profits I make. That’s generally how I do it. What do I do with the red and green gems though?
Thanks. I couldn’t figure out how many bracers it was to roughly.
For prospecting you want to compare the value of the cut gems to the value of the ore to figure out if it’s worth it. Just buying and cutting gems is pretty much never worth it. Red and green gems are just a loss, try selling them uncut if you can.
That’s what I’ve done in the past and it’s typically worked out.
I’m working on selling the sinister gear for tailoring. Is there a special formula for doing it? Cause all the materials for the gear uses the same materials to craft them, plus the linen needed to make the bracers to get expulsom. I bought 3k Deep Sea Satin and 5k Tidespray Linen. I’ve mainly been making the gloves, belt, and cloak. I made roughly 30 of them total and still have 500 deep sea satin and 1500 tidespray linen left. But it looks like if they all sell, it’s gonna be a loss in gold. So I obviously messed it up somewhere.
I also made some Amberblaze loops to scrap for expulsom cause they scrap into more ore and gems. I noticed they all crafted 310, idk if that was a change or I got super lucky. Figured I’d try selling them, and they are selling quick. I made 14 and I’m now down to 4.
Hi, I,m really interested in going into the BFa Raw mats flipping market but the TSM import string linked in your septembre article is not working with the current TSM4 update. Is there any way you could update it so the import works ? 🙂 Thanks a lot love your articles!
I literally updated it earlier today, so that’s very strange. What’s the issue?
hey thanks for the quick answer 🙂 and just a blank error message, the groups are carrying over but not the operations !